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 writer1. 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 ethics1. 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 least3 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
authority1, 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- 384-390-
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
lawlessness2.' 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 below3. 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 form1.' 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 scholars2. 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/enbarung8beffiiffd€8A.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 Hebrew1.'
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 discussion2,
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 Old1. 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
literature2, 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 volume1.
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- 329> n°te 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 Semites1, 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. John1, 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-
viously4, 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 allegorical1.' 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-
able2.
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 'Moses1,' 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 writes3, ' 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 men1? 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 Bible1?' 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 New1?' 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 9I-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 3°3-3°4
(2) But by faith which accepts it and recognises
its justice 3°4-3°5
(3) And by following Him in obedience through
suffering 3°S-3°7
III. Consideration of certain erroneous statements of the doc-
trine 3°7
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-332
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 . 349-351
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 372~375
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 expect1? Where is the blitheness of
faith 1 Where is its unshaken conviction ? Where is its
invincible simplicity1? 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 situation1? 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 itself1. 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 point1.
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 believe1?' 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, wTe 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
wraits 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. WTe 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 treatment1?
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 wTorlds. 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.
NOTE. — 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 them1,' 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 sides1." 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-
ciliation1.' 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 kind1, 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 air4.' '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 depend1. 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 sees1, 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 strife3. 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 result1?
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.
Gra«c., 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 man1.' 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 morals1' 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 S«e 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
belief1? 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 eirenicon1. 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 God6.' 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 Christianity1.' 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 it1.' '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 Father3.' 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
Father4.' 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 truth6 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 together1. 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
view6. Only there is this marked difference, — Nature has
the principle of growth within herself, while the artist is
external to his materials7. 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. 455bi7- 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: 4T5bl7: 73i"24-
4 Plat. Phaed. 98 B. Arist. Met. 7 p. 1070*7, !O33b8, 753a3-
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 lately2, '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 in2.'
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
belief1.
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 church2.' 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 God3. 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 demonstrate1 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 various2.' 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 Scripture2.' 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 future1? 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 sin1.
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 fulfil1.' 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
nations1.' 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 working1? 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 context1. 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 says1, 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 Zeller2 '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 Christianity1.
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 Jewish1. 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 contradiction1.' 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 contempt2.' 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' synagogue2. 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 era1? 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
irony1. 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. Kuenen2, 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 felt1) 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 first1.'
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
wisdom1.' 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 observation2,' 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
them1? 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 knowledge2.' '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-
mination3.' '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 morally3.'
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 contributed to revive among us an important
aspect of the Theology of the Word.
The next point upon which the theory of evolution came in
contact with received opinion, was its account of the origin of
man. Man, it was maintained, in certain quarters, was only
the latest and most complex product of a purely material process
of development. His reason, with all its functions of imagi-
nation, conscience, will, was only a result of his sensibility, and
that of his nervous tissue, and that again of matter less and less
finely organized, till at last a primitive protoplasm was reached;
while what had been called his fall was in reality his rise,
being due to the fact that with the birth of reason came self-
consciousness ; or the feeling of a distinction between self and
the outer world, ripening into a sense, and strictly speaking
an illusory sense of discord between the two.
Theologians first thought it necessary to contest every
detail of this development, beginning with the antiquity of
man ; and some are still inclined to intrench themselves in
one or two positions which they think impregnable, such as
the essential difference in kind between organized and in-
O
organic matter, or again between animal instinct and the
self-conscious reason of man : while others are content to
assume a sceptical attitude and point to the disagreement
between the men of science themselves, as sufficient evidence
of their untruth. But none of these views are theologically
needed. The first is certainly, the second possibly unsound,
and the third, to say the least of it, unkind. It is quite true
that the evolution of man is at present nothing more than an
hypothesis, and an hypothesis open to very grave scientific
objections. The attempts to analyse reason and conscience
back into unconscious and unmoral elements, for all their
unquestioned ingenuity, are still far from being conclusive ;
O
194 The Religion of the Incarnation.
and then there is the geological admissibility of the time
which it would require, and that is still a matter of hopeless
controversy between scientific experts. And even if these
and numerous kindred difficulties were to be removed in time
to come, the hypothesis would still be no nearer demonstra-
tion ; for the only evidence we can possibly obtain of pre-
historic man is his handiwork of one kind or another, his
implements or pictures, things implying the use of reason. In
other words, we can only prove his existence through his
rationality ; through his having been, on the point in ques-
tion, identical in kind with what now he is. And suspense
of judgment therefore upon the whole controversy is, at
present, the only scientific state of mind.
But there are facts upon the other side ; the undoubted an-
tiquity of the human race ; the gradual growth which can be
scientifically traced, in our thought and language and morality,
and therefore, to the extent that functions react upon their
faculties, even in our conscience and our reason too ; and then
the immense presumption from the gathering proofs of all other
development, that man will be no exception to the universal
law. All these positive indications at least suggest the
possibility that the difficulties of the theory may one day
vanish, and its widest chasms close. And we cannot there-
fore be too emphatic in asserting that theology would have
nothing whatever to fear from such a result. When we see
energy and atoms building up an harmonious order, we feel
there is an inner secret in the energy and atoms, which we
cannot hope to penetrate by merely watching them at work.
And so, when we see human minds and wills weaving a veil
over the universe, of thought and love and holiness, and are
told that all these things are but higher modes of material
nature, we only feel that the inner secret of material nature
must be yet more wonderful than we supposed. But though
our wonder may increase, our difficulties will not. If we
believe, as we have seen that Christian Theology has always
believed, in a Divine Creator not only present behind the
beginning of matter but immanent in its every phase, and
co-operating with its every phenomenon, the method of His
v. The Incarnation and Development. 195
working, though full of speculative interest, will be of no
controversial importance. Time was when the different kinds
of created things were thought to be severed by impassable
barriers. But many of these barriers have already given way
before science, and species are seen to be no more inde-
pendent than the individuals that compose them. If the
remaining barriers between unreason and reason, or between
lifelessness and life should in like manner one day vanish,
we shall need to readjust the focus of our spiritual eye to the
enlarged vision, but nothing more. Our Creator will be
known to have worked otherwise indeed than we had
thought, but in a way quite as conceivable, and to the
imagination more magnificent. And all is alike covered by
the words ' without Him was not anything made that was
made : and in Him was life.' In fact the evolutionary origin
of man is afar less serious question than the attack upon final
causes. Its biblical aspect has grown insignificant in pro-
portion as we have learned to regard the Hebrew cosmology
in a true light. And the popular outcry which it raised was
largely due to sentiment, and sentiment not altogether un-
tinged by human pride.
We may pass on therefore from the evolution of man and his
mind in general, to his various modes of mental activity in
science and philosophy and art. Here the Christian doctrine
is twofold : first, that all the objects of our thought, mathe-
matical relations, scientific laws, social systems, ideals of art,
are ideas of the Divine Wisdom, the Logos, written upon the
pages of the world ; and secondly, that our power of reading
them, our thinking faculty acts and only can act rightly by
Divine assistance ; that the same ' motion and power that
impels' 'all objects of all thought' impels also ' all thinking
things.' And both these statements are met by objection.
In the first place, it is urged, there is no fixity in the universe,
and it cannot therefore be the embodiment of Divine ideas.
All things live and move under our eyes. Species bear no
evidence of having been created in their completeness ; on the
contrary they are perpetually undergoing transmutation, and
cannot therefore represent ideas, cannot have been created on
o 2
196 The Religion of the Incarnation.
a plan. For ideas, in proportion to their perfection, must be
definite, clean-cut, clear. The answer to this objection is
contained in what has been already said upon the subject
of organic teleology. But an analogy drawn from human
thinking may illustrate it further. It is in reality the ideas
which our mind has done with, its dead ideas which are clean-
cut and definite and fixed. The ideas which at any moment
go to form our mental life are quick and active and full of
movement, and melt into each other and are ever developing
anew. A book is no sooner finished and done with, than it strikes
its author as inadequate. It becomes antiquated as soon as its
ideas have been assimilated by the public mind. And that
because the thought of author and public alike is alive, and
ever moving onward ; incapable of being chained to any one
mode of expression ; incapable of being stereotyped. The
highest notion we can frame therefore of a mind greater than
O a
our own is of one that has no dead ideas, no abstract or
antiquated formulae, but whose whole content is entirely,
essentially alive. And the perpetual development which we
are learning to trace throughout the universe around us would
be the natural expression therefore of that Logos Who is the
Life.
But when we turn from the objective to the subjective side
of knowledge, we are met with a second objection. The
doctrine that the Divine Logos co-operates with the human
reason, is supposed to be inconsistent with the undoubted fact
that many earnest and successful thinkers have been if not
atheistic, at least agnostic ; unable, that is, to attain to the
very knowledge to which, as it would seem on the Christian
hypothesis, all intellectual effort should inevitably lead. But
this difficulty is only superficial. When we say that the
Divine reason assists, we do not mean that it supersedes the
human. An initiative still lies with man ; and he must
choose of his own accord the particular field of his intel-
lectual pursuit. When he has chosen his line of study, and
followed it with the requisite devotion, he will arrive at the
kind of truth to which that particular study leads, the physi-
cist at laws of nature, the philosopher at laws of thought,
v. The Incarnation and Development, 197
the artist at ideal beauty, the moralist at ethical truth ; and
in each case, as we believe, by Divine assistance, his discoveries
being in fact revelations. But the method, the education, the
experience involved in different studies are so distinct, that few
in a lifetime can reach the eminence that teaches with autho-
rity, or even the intelligence that thoroughly appreciates, more
than one department of the complex world of thought. And
if a man wanders from his own province into unfamiliar
regions, he naturally meets with failure in proportion to
his hardihood. In the case of the special sciences this is
universally recognised. No astronomer would think of dog-
matizing on a question of geology, nor a biologist on the
details of chemistry or physics. But when it is a question
between science and philosophy, the rule is often forgotten ;
and the spectacle of scientific specialists blundering about in
metaphysics is painfully common in the present day : while
strange to say, in the case of theology this forgetfulness reaches
a climax, and men claim casually to have an opinion upon
transcendent mysteries, without any of the preparation which
they would be the first to declare needful for success in the
smallest subsection of any one of the branches of science.
Nor is preparation all that is wanted. Science is impossible
without experiment, and experiment is the lower analogue of
what in religion is called experience. As experiment alone gives
certainty in the one case, so does experience alone in the other.
And it is only the man who has undergone such experience,
with all its imperative demands upon his whole character and
life, that can justly expect satisfaction of his religious doubts
and needs ; while < nly those who, like S. Paul or S. Augustine,
have experienced it in an exceptional degree, are entitled to
speak with authority upon the things to which it leads.
Here again a human analogy may help us. For in studying a
human character there are different planes upon which we may
approach it. There are the external aspects of the man, the
fashion of his garments, the routine of his life, the regulation
of his time, his official habits ; all which, it may be noted
in passing, in the case of a great character, are uniform, not
because thev were not once the free creation of his will, but
198 The Religion of the Incarnation.
because he knows the practical value of uniformity in all such
things ; and all these externals are open to the observation even
of a stranger. Then there are the man's thoughts, which
may be withheld or revealed at his pleasure ; and these can
only be understood by kindred minds, who have been trained
to understand them. Lastly, there are his will and affections,
the region of his motives, the secret chamber in which his real
personality resides ; and these are only known to those in-
timate friends and associates whose intuition is quickened by
the sympathy of love. Now all these stages are gone through
in the formation of a friendship. First we are struck by a
man's appearance, and so led to listen to his conversation, and
thence to make his acquaintance, and at last to become his
friend. And so with the knowledge of God. The man of
science, as such, can discover the uniformities of His action in
external nature. The moral philosopher will further see that
these actions ' make for righteousness ' and that there is a
moral law. But it is only to the spiritual yearning of our
whole personality that He reveals Himself as a person. This
analogy will make the Christian position intelligible ; but for
Christians it is more than an analogy. It is simply a state-
ment of facts. For, to Christians, the Incarnation is the final
sanction of ' anthropomorphism,' revealing the Eternal Word as
strictly a Person, in the ordinary sense and with all the
attributes which we commonly attach to the name *.
Consequently, upon all this we are quite consistent in
maintaining that all great teachers of whatever kind are
vehicles of revelation, each in his proper sphere, and in
accepting their verified conclusions as Divinely true ; while
we reject them the moment they transgress their limits,
as thereby convicted of unsound thinking, and therefore de-
prived of the Divine assistance which was the secret of their
previous success. And though such transgression may in many
cases involve a minimum of moral error, there are abundant
instances in the history of thought that it is not always so.
Francis Bacon, and the penitent, pardoned Abelard are typical,
in different degrees, of a countless multitude of lesser men.
1 Cp. p. 64.
v. The Incarnation and Development. 199
* For our knowledge of first principles,' says S. Augustine,
' we have recourse to that inner troth that presides over
the mind. And that indwelling teacher of the mind is
Christ, the changeless virtue and eternal wisdom of God,
to which every rational soul has recourse. But so much
only is revealed to each as his own good or evil will
enables him to receive1.'
' Nor is it the fault of the Word,' adds S. Thomas, ' that
all men do not attain to the knowledge of the truth, but
some remain in darkness. It is- the fault of men who do
not turn to the Word and so cannot fully receive Him.
Whence there is still more or less darkness remaining among
men, in proportion to the lesser or greater degree in which
they turn to the Word and receive Him. And so John, to
preclude any thought of deficiency in the illuminating power
of the Word, after saying " that life was the light of men,"
adds " the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness com-
prehended it not." The darkness is not because the Word does
not shine, but because some do not receive the light of
the Word ; as while the light of the material sun is shining
over the world, it is only dark to those whose eyes are
closed or feeble2.'
It has been necessary to dwell upon this doctrine because
it has an important bearing upon two further questions,
which the philosophy of evolution has broiight into new
prominence, the relation of Christianity to previous philoso-
phy and other religions. It was the fashion, not long ago,
to give an undue value to the part played by environment
or surrounding circumstances in the creation of characters
and institutions and creeds, to the exclusion of all elements
of native originality. And the attempt was made accordingly,
in various ways, to represent Christianity as the natural
product of the different religions and philosophies which
were current in the world at the time of its appearing.
But the further study of evolution has qualified this whole
mode of thought by the way in which, as we have seen
above, it has led us to look at things as organisms rather
1 S. Aug. deMagist. 38. t. i. p. 916. a S. Thorn. Aq. cont. Gent. iv. 13.
2OO The Religion of the Incarnation.
than machines. A machine has no internal principle of
unity. Its unity is impressed upon it from without. And
it may be granted therefore, for the sake of argument, that
we might conceive a machine or number of machines as
formed like the patterns in a caleidoscope by a happy coin-
cidence of atoms ; and man, if he were only a machine, as
strictly the creature of circumstance. But an organism is
a different thing. Dependent as it is upon its environment
in an hundred various ways, it is yet more dependent upon
its own selective and assimilative capacity, in other words
upon its own individuality, its self. And so the notions
of individuality, . originality, personal identity have been
restored to their place in the world of thought. The
old error lingers on, and is sometimes crudely re-asserted,
especially in its anti-Christian bearing ; but it has been
discredited by science, and is in fact a thing of the past.
And in consequence of this, the attempt can no longer be
plausibly made to account for Christianity apart from the
personality of Jesus Christ. The mythical theories have
had their day. And it is recognised on all hands that mere
aspiration can no more create a religion than appetite can
create food. A foundation needs a founder.
But the attack thus diverted from our religion glances off on
our theology. The Christian religion, it is granted, was founded
by Jesus Christ ; but its theological interpretation is viewed
as a misinterpretation, a malign legacy from the dying philo-
sophies of Greece. This objection is as old as the second cen-
tury, and has been revived at intervals in various forms, and
with varying degrees of success. Modern historical criticism
has only fortified it with fresh instances. But it has no
force whatever if we believe that the Divine Word was for
ever working in the world in co-operation with human
reason; inspiring the higher minds among the Jews with
their thirst for holiness, and so making ready for the coming
of the Holy One in Jewish flesh: but inspiring the Greeks
also with their intellectual eagerness, and preparing them
to recognise Him as the Eternal Reason, the Word, the Truth ;
and to define and defend, and demonstrate that Truth to the
v. The Incarnation and Development, 201
outer world. The fact that Greek philosophy had passed its
zenith and was declining did not make its influence upon
Christianity an evil one, a corruption of the living by the
dead. It was only dying to be incorporated in a larger life.
The food that supports our existence owes its power of nu-
trition to the fact, that it too once lived with an inferior
life of its own. And so the Greek philosophy was capable
of assimilation by the Christian organism, from the fact
that it too had once been vitally inspired by the life that is
the light of men. And the true successors of Plato and Aris-
totle were the men of progress who realized this fact ; not
Celsus, Lucian, Porphyry, but the Fathers of the Church.
Clement and Origen, Athanasius and Augustine, the Grego-
ries and Basil understood Greek philosophy as clearly as
S. Paul understood Judaism, and recognised its completion
as plainly in the Incarnation of the Word. Nor was this
view of the Incarnation in the one case, any more than in
the other, assumed for a merely apologetic purpose. These
men were essentially philosophers, among the foremost of
their age. They knew and have testified what philosophy
had clone for their souls, and what it could not do ; how
far it had led them forward; and of what longings it had
left them full. True, philosophy had as little expected Wis-
dom to become incarnate, and that amongst the barbarians, the
outcast and the poor, as Judaism had expected Messiah to
suffer, and to suffer at the hand of Jews. But no sooner
was the Incarnation accomplished, than it flooded the whole
past of Greece no less than Judaea with a new light. This
was what it all meant ; this was what it unwittingly aimed
at ; the long process of dialectic and prophecy were here
united in their goal.
' Those who lived under the guidance of the Eternal Reason
(p.fTa Ao'you /Stwo-ayres) as Socrates, Heraclitus, and such-like
men, are Christians/ run the well-known words of Justin
Martyr, ' even though they were reckoned to be atheists in
their day.' (Ap. i. 46.) Different minds have always differed,
and will continue to differ widely as to the degree in which
Greek thought contributed to the doctrines of the Trinity and
2O2 The Religion of the Incarnation.
the Incarnation. It is a difficult and delicate question for
historical criticism to decide. But the essential thing to bear
in mind is that the Christian doctrine of the Logos amply
covers any possible view which criticism may establish upon
the point. For, in the light of that doctrine, it is merely
a question of the degree in which the Eternal Word chose
to reveal Himself through one agency rather than another.
Any attack, therefore, upon our theology for its connection
with Greek thought, is powerless to disturb us ; since we
accept the fact but give it another, a deeper interpretation :
while we rejoice in every fresh proof that the great thoughts
of the Greek mind were guided by a higher power, and
consecrated to a nobler end than ever their authors dreamed
of; and that the true classic culture is no alien element but a
legitimate ingredient in Catholic, complete Christianity.
And the same line of thought gives us a clue to the
history of religious development, the latest field to which the
philosophy of evolution has been extended. For though a
superficial comparison of religions, with a more or less
sceptical result, has often been attempted before, as for
instance in the thirteenth century with its well-known story of
the three impostors ; anything like a scientific study of them
has been impossible till now. For now for the first time we
are beginning to have the facts before us ; the facts consisting
in the original documents of the various historic creeds, and
accumulated observations on the religious ideas of uncivilized
races. In both these fields very much remains to be done ;
but still there is enough done already to justify a few general-
izations. But the subject is intensely complex, and there has
been far too great a tendency, as in all new sciences, to rush
to premature conclusions. For example, there is the shallow
scepticism which seizes upon facts, like the many parallelisms
between the moral precepts of earlier religions and the sermon
on the Mount, as a convincing proof that Christianity contains
nothing that is new. No serious student of comparative
religions would justify such an inference; but it is a very
common and mischievous fallacy in the half-culture of the
day. Then there is the rash orthodoxy, that is over eager to
v. The Incarnation and Development. 203
accept any result that tallies with its own preconceived
opinions as, for instance, the belief in a primitive monotheism.
No doubt several very competent authorities think that the
present evidence points in that direction. But a majority of
critics equally competent think otherwise. And meanwhile,
there is a mass of evidence still waiting collection and inter-
pretation, which may one day throw further light upon the
point. Under such circumstances, therefore, it is as impolitic
as it is unscientific to identify Christian apology with a
position which may one day prove untenable. Attention has
already been called to a similar imprudence in connection
with Biogenesis, and the history of past apology is full of
warnings against such conduct. Then, again, there is the
converse view which is often as glibly stated as if it were al-
ready a scientific truism ; the view that religion was evolved
out of non-religious elements, such as the appearance of dead
ancestors in dreams. This rests, to begin with, on the sup-
position that the opinions of uncivilized man, as we now find
him, are the nearest to those of man in his primitive
condition ; which, considering that degradation is a re-
cognised factor in history, and that degradation acts more
powerfully in religion than in any other region, is a very
considerable assumption. But even granting this, the psy-
chological possibility of the process in question, as well as
the lapse of time sufficient for its operation, are both as yet
unproved. It is an hypothetical process, happening in
an hypothetical period ; but, logically considered, nothing
more.
All this should make us cautious in approaching the com-
parative study of religions. Still, even in its present stage, it
has reached some general results. In the first place, the
universality of religion is established as an empirical fact.
Man, with a few insignificant exceptions which may fairly
be put down to degradation, within the limits of our observa-
tion, is everywhere religious. The notion that religion was
an invention of interested priestcraft has vanished, like many
other eighteenth century fictions, before nineteenth century
science. Even in the savage races, where priestcraft is most
204 The Religion of the Incarnation.
conspicuous, the priest has never created the religion, but al-
ways the religion the priest. Beyond this fact it is unsafe to
dogmatize. There is abundant evidence of early nature-wor-
ship in very various forms, but whether this was the degraded
offspring of purer conceptions, or as is more generally supposed
the primitive parent from which those conceptions sprang, is
still an open question. The universality of the fact is all
that is certain.
Again, there is a progressive tendency observable in the
religions of the world ; but the progress is of a particular kind,
and largely counteracted by degeneracy. Individuals elevate,
masses degrade religion. There is no progress by insensible
modifications ; no improvement of a religion in committee.
Councils like those of Asoka or Chosroes can only sift and
popularise and publish what it needed a Buddha or Zara-
thustra to create. And so religion is handed on, from one
great teacher to another, never rising above the level of its
founder or last reformer, till another founder or reformer
comes ; while in the interval it is materialized, vulgarized,
degraded.
And from the nature of this progress, as the work of great
individuals, another consequence has historically followed ; viz.
that all the pre-Christian religions have been partial, have
emphasized, that is to say, unduly if not exclusively one re-
quirement or another of the religious consciousness, but never
its complex whole. For the individual teacher, however great,
cannot proclaim with prophetic intensity more than one aspect
of a truth ; and his followers invariably tend to isolate and
exaggerate this aspect, while any who attempt to supply its
complement are regarded with suspicion. Hence the parties
and sects and heresies of which religious history is full. The
simplest illustration of this is the fundamental distinction
between Theism and Pantheism, or the transcendence and
immanence of God ; the one often said to be a Semitic, the
other an Aryan tendency of thought. But however this may
be, both these principles must be represented in any system
which would really satisfy the whole of our religious instincts ;
while, as a matter of fact, they were separated by all the pro-
v. The Incarnation and Development. 205
Christian religions, and are separated by Mahometanism and
Buddhism, the only two religious systems which compete with
Christianity to-day.
These, then, are a few broad results of our comparative survey
of religions. That religion, however humble the mode of its
first appearing, is yet universal to man. That it progresses
through the agency of the great individual, the unique person-
ality, the spiritual genius ; while popular influence is a counter-
agent and makes for its decay. That its various develop-
ments have all been partial, and therefore needed completion,
if the cravings of the human spirit were ever to be set at rest.
And all this is in perfect harmony with our Christian
belief in a God Who, from the day of man's first appearance
in the dim twilight of the world, left not Himself without
witness in sun and moon, and rain and storm-cloud, and the
courses of the stars, and the promptings of conscience, and the
love of kin : and Who the while was lighting every man that
cometh into the world, the primaeval hunter, the shepherd
chieftain, the poets of the Vedas and the Gathas, the Chaldaean
astronomer, the Egyptian priest, each, at least in a measure,
to spell that witness out aright ; ever and anon when a heart
was ready revealing Himself with greater clearness, to one or
another chosen spirit, and by their means to other men ; till
at length, in the fulness of time, when Jews were yearning
for one in whom righteousness should triumph visibly ; and
Greeks sighing over the divorce between truth and power,
and wondering whether the wise man ever would indeed be
king ; and artists and ascetics wandering equally astray, in
vain attempt to solve the problem of the spirit and the flesh ;
' the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace
and truth.' The pre-Christian religions were the age-long
prayer. The Incarnation was the answer. Nor are we tied
to any particular view of the prehistoric stages of this develop-
ment. We only postulate that whenever and however man
became truly man, he was from that moment religious, or
capable of religion ; and this postulate deals with the region
that lies beyond the reach of science, though all scientific
observation is, as we have seen, directly in its favour.
206 The Religion of the Incarnation.
In short, the history of the pre-Christian religion is like
that of pre-Christian philosophy, a long preparation for the
Gospel. We are familiar enough with this thought in its
Jewish application from the teaching of the Epistle to the
Hebrews. But it seems to be often forgotten that the princi-
ples laid down in that Epistle admit of no limitation to any
single race of men. They are naturally illustrated from
Hebrew history in a writing addressed to Hebrews. But
their scope is universal. They compel their own application
to every religious history, which the growth of our knowledge
brings to light. And from this point of view the many pagan
adumbrations of Christian doctrine, similarities of practice,
coincidences of ritual, analogies of phrase and symbol, fall
naturally into place. The fathers and early missionaries
were often perplexed by these phenomena, and did not
scruple to attribute them to diabolic imitation. And even
in the present day they are capable of disturbing timid
minds, when unexpectedly presented before them. But all
this is unphilosophical, for in the light of evolution the
occurrence of such analogies is a thing to be expected ; while
to the eye of faith they do but emphasize the claim of
Christianity to be universal, by shewing that it contains
in spiritual summary the religious thoughts and practices and
ways of prayer and worship, not of one people only, but of all
the races of men.
' In the whole of our Christian faith,' says Thomassin, ' there
is nothing which does not in the highest degree harmonize
with that natural philosophy which Wisdom, who made all
things, infused into every created mind, and wrote upon the
very marrow of the reason ; so that, however obscured by the
foul pleasures of the senses, it never can be wholly done
away. It was this hidden and intimate love of the human
mind, however marred, for the incorruptible truth, which
won the whole world over to the gospel of Christ, when once
that Gospel was proclaimed V
But when all this has been said, there is a lingering sus-
picion in many minds, that even if the details of the doctrine
1 Thomassin, Incarn. L 15.
v. The Incarnation and Development. 207
of development are not inconsistent with Christianity, its
whole drift is incompatible with any system of opinion which
claims to possess finality. And if Christianity were only a
system of opinion, the objection might be plausible enough.
But its claim to possess finality rests upon its further claim
to be much more than a system of opinion. The doctrine of
development or evolution, we must remember, is not a doc-
trine of limitless change, like the old Greek notion of per-
petual flux. Species once developed are seen to be persistent,
in proportion to their versatility, their power, i. e. of adapting
themselves to the changes of the world around them. And
because man, through his mental capacity, possesses this
power to an almost unlimited extent, the human species is
virtually permanent. Now in scientific language, the In-
carnation may be said to have introduced a new species into
the world — a Divine man transcending past humanity, as
humanity transcended the rest of the animal creation, and
communicating His vital energy by a spiritual process to
subsequent generations of men. And thus viewed, there is
nothing unreasonable in the claim of Christianity to be at
least as permanent as the race which it has raised to a higher
power, and endued with a novel strength.
III. But in saying this we touch new ground. As long as
we confine ourselves to speaking of the Eternal Word as ope-
rating in the mysterious region which lies behind phenomena,
we are safe it may be said from refutation, because we are
dealing with the unknown. But when we go on to assert
that He has flashed through our atmosphere, and been seen
of men, scintillating signs and wonders in His path, we are
at once open to critical attack. And this brings us to the
real point at issue between Christianity and its modern
opponents. It is not the substantive body of our knowledge,
but the critical faculty which has been sharpened in its ac-
quisition that really comes in conflict with our creed. As-
suming Christianity to be true, there is, as we have seen,
nothing in it inconsistent with any ascertained scientific fact.
But what is called the negative criticism assumes that it can-
not be true, because the miraculous element in it contradicts
208 The Religion of the Incarnation.
experience. Still criticism is a very different thing from
science, a subjective thing into which imagination and per-
sonal idiosyncrasy enter largely, and which needs therefore
in its turn to be rigorously criticised. And the statement
that Christianity contradicts experience suggests two re-
flections, in Hmine.
In the first place the origin of all things is mysterious,
the origin of matter, the origin of energy, the origin of
life, the origin of thought. And present experience is no
criterion of any of these things. What were their birth
throes, what were their accompanying signs and wonders,
when the morning stars sang together in the dawn of their
appearing, we do not and cannot know. If therefore the
Incarnation was, as Christians believe, another instance of a
new beginning, present experience will neither enable us to
assert ©r deny, what its attendant circumstances may or may
not have been. The logical impossibility of proving a nega-
tive is proverbial. And on a subject, whose conditions are
unknown to us, the very attempt becomes ridiculous. And
secondly, it is a mistake to suppose that as a matter of strict
evidence, the Christian Church has ever rested its claims
upon its miracles. A confirmatory factor indeed, in a compli-
cation of converging arguments, they have been, and still are
to many minds. But to others, who in the present day are
probably the larger class, it is not so easy to believe Chris-
tianity on account of miracles, as miracles on account of
Christianity. For now, as ever, the real burden of the proof
of Christianity is to be sought in our present experience.
There is a fact of experience as old as history, as widely
spread as is the human race, and more intensely, irresistibly,
importunately real than all the gathered experience of art
and policy and science, — the fact which philosophers call
moral evil, and Christians sin. It rests upon no questionable
interpretation of an Eastern allegory. We breathe it, we
feel it, we commit it, we see its havoc all around us. It is no
dogma, but a sad, solemn, inevitable fact. The animal
creation has a law of its being, a condition of its perfection,
which it instinctively and invariably pursues. Man has a
v. The Incarnation and Development. 209
law of his being, a condition of his perfection, which he
instinctively tends to disobey. And what he does to-day,
he has been doing from the first record of his existence.
Video meliora proboque,
Deteriora sequor.
Philosophers have from time to time attempted to explain
this dark experience away, and here and there men of happy
temperament, living among calm surroundings, have been
comparatively unconscious of the evil in the world. But the
common conscience is alike unaffected by the ingenuity of
the one class, or the apathy of the other ; while it thrills to
the voices of men like S. Paul or S. Augustine, Dante or John
Bunyan, Loyola or Luther; recognising in their sighs and
tears and lamentations, the echo of its own unutterable
sorrow made articulate. Nor is sin confined to one depart-
ment of our being. It poisons the very springs of life, and
taints its every action. It corrupts art ; it hampers science ;
it paralyses the efforts of the politician and the patriot ; and
diseased bodies, and broken hearts, and mental and spiritual
agony, are amongst its daily, its hourly results. It would
seem indeed superfluous to insist upon these things, if their
importance were not so often ignored in the course of anti-
Christian argument. But when we are met by an appeal to
experience, it is necessary to insist that no element of ex-
perience be left out.
And moral evil, independently of any theory of its nature
or its origin, is a plain palpable fact, and a fact of such stu-
pendous magnitude as to constitute by far the most serious
problem of our life.
Now it is also a fact of present experience that there are
scattered throughout Christendom, men of every age, tem-
perament, character, and antecedents, for whom this problem
is practically solved: men who have a personal conviction
that their own past sins are done away with, and the whole
grasp of evil upon them loosened, and who in consequence
rise to heights of character and conduct, which they know
that they would never have otherwise attained. And all this
they agree to attribute, in however varying phrases, to the
P
2io The Religion of the Incarnation.
personal influence upon them of Jesus Christ. Further, these
men had a spiritual ancestry. Others in the last generation
believed and felt, and acted as they now act and feel and
believe. And so their lineage can be traced backward, age
by age, swelling into a great multitude whom no man can
number, till we come to the historic records of Him whom
they all look back to, and find that He claimed the power on
earth to forgive sins. And there the phenomenon ceases.
Pre-Christian antiquity contains nothing analogous to it.
Consciousness of sin, and prayers for pardon, and purgatorial
penances, and sacrifices, and incantations, and magic formulae
are there in abundance ; and hopes, among certain races, of
the coming of a great deliverer. But never the same sense of
sin forgiven, nor the consequent rebound of the enfranchised
soul. Yet neither a code of morality which was not essen-
tially new, nor the example of a life receding with every age
into a dimmer past, would have been adequate to produce this
result. It has all the appearance of being, what it historically
has claimed to be, the entrance of an essentially new life into
the world, quickening its palsied energies, as with an electric
touch. And the more we realize in the bitterness of our own
experience, or that of others, the essential malignity of moral
evil, the more strictly supernatural does this energy appear.
When, therefore, we are told that miracles contradict expe-
rience, we point to the daily occurrence of this spiritual
miracle and ask ' whether is it easier to say thy sins be forgiven
thee, or to say arise and walk ? ' We meet experience with
experience, the negative experience that miracles have not
happened with the positive experience that they are hap-
pening now : an old argument, which so far from weakening,
modern science has immensely strengthened, by its insistence
on the intimate union between material and spiritual things.
For spirit and matter, as we call them, are now known to in-
termingle, and blend, and fringe off, and fade into each other,
in a way that daily justifies us more in our belief that
the possessor of the key to one must be the possessor of the
key to both, and that He who can save the soul can raise the
dead.
v. The Incarnation and Development. 2 1 1
Here then is our answer to the negative criticism, or rather
to the negative hypothesis, by which many critics are misled.
Of course we do not expect for it unanimous assent. It is
founded on a specific experience ; and strangers to that ex-
perience are naturally unable to appreciate its force. But
neither should they claim to judge it. For the critic of an
experience must be its expert. And the accumulated verdict
of the spiritual experts of all ages, should at least meet with
grave respect from the very men who are most familiar with
the importance of the maxim, ' Cuique in suaarte credendum.'
Christianity distinctly declines to be proved first, and
practised afterwards. Its practice and its proof go hand in
hand. And its real evidence is its power.
We now see why the Atonement has often assumed such
exclusive prominence in the minds of Christian men. They
have felt that it was the secret of their own regenerate life,
G
their best intellectual apology, their most attractive mission-
ary appeal ; and so have come to think that the other aspects
of the Incarnation might be banished from the pulpit and the
market-place, to the seclusion of the schools. But this has
proved to be a fatal mistake. Truth cannot be mutilated with
impunity. And this gradual substitution of a detached doc-
trine for a catholic creed, has led directly to the charge which
is now so common, that Christianity is inadequate to life ;
with no message to ordinary men, in their ordinary moments,
no bearing upon the aims, occupations, interests, enthusiasms,
amusements, which are human nature's daily food.
But we have already seen what a misconception this im-
plies of the Incarnation. The Incarnation opened heaven, for
it was the revelation of the Word ; but it also reconsecrated
earth, for the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us.
And it is impossible to read history without feeling how pro-
foundly the religion of the Incarnation has been a religion
of humanity. The human body itself, which heathendom
had so degraded, that noble minds could only view it as the
enemy and prison of the soul, acquired a new meaning, ex-
hibited new graces, shone with a new lustre in the light of
the Word made Flesh; and thence, in widening circles, the
P a
212 The Religion of the Incarnation.
family, society, the state, felt in their turn the impulse of the
Christian spirit, with its
touches of things common,
Till they rose to touch the spheres.
Literature revived ; art flamed into fuller life ; even science
in its early days owed more than men often think, to the
Christian temper and the Christian reverence for things once
called common or unclean. While the optimism, the belief in
the future, the atmosphere of hopefulness, which has made
our progress and achievements possible, and which, when all
counter currents have been allowed for, so deeply differentiates
the modern from the ancient world, dates, as a fact of history,
from those buoyant days of the early church, when the creed
of suicide was vanquished before the creed of martyrdom,
Seneca before S. Paul. It is true that secular civilization has
co-operated with Christianity to produce the modern world.
But secular civilization is, as we have seen, in the Christian
view, nothing less than the providential correlative and
counterpart of the Incarnation. For the Word did not desert
the rest of His creation to become Incarnate. Natural religion,
and natural morality, and the natural play of intellect have
their function in the Christian as they had in the pre-Christian
ages ; and are still kindled by the light that lighteth every
man coming into the world. And hence it is that secular
thought has so often corrected and counteracted the evil of a
Christianity grown professional, and false, and foul.
Still, when all allowance for other influence has been made ;
and all the ill done in its name admitted to the full ; Chris-
tianity remains, the only power which has regenerated
personal life, and that beyond the circle even of its professed
adherents, the light of it far outshining the lamp which has
held its flame. And personal life is after all the battle-ground,
on which the progress of the race must be decided. Nor ever
indeed should this be more apparent than in the present day.
For materialism, that old enemy alike of the Christian and the
human cause, has passed from the study to the street. No one
indeed may regret this more than the high-souled scientific
v. The Incarnation and Development. 213
thinker, whose life belies the inevitable consequences of his
creed. But the ruthless logic of human passion is drawing
those consequences fiercely ; and the luxury of the rich, and
the communistic cry of the poor, and the desecration of
marriage, and the disintegration of society, and selfishness in
policy, and earthliness in art, are plausibly pleading science in
their favour. And with all this Christianity claims, as of old,
to cope, because it is the religion of the Incarnation. For the
real strength of materialism lies in the justice which it does to
the material side of nature — the loveliness of earth and sea
and sky and sun and star ; the wonder of the mechanism which
controls alike the rushing comet and the falling leaf ; the human
body crowning both, at once earth's fairest flower and most
marvellous machine. And Christianity is the only religion
which does equal justice to this truth, while precluding its
illegitimate perversion. It includes the truth, by the essential
importance which it assigns to the human body, and therefore
to the whole material order, with which that body is so
intimately one ; while it excludes its perversion, by shewing
the cause of that importance to lie in its connection, communion,
union with the spirit, and consequent capacity for endless
degrees of glory.
And though its own first vocation is to seek and save souls
one by one, it consecrates in passing every field of thought and
action, wherein the quickened energies of souls may find their
scope. It welcomes the discoveries of science, as ultimately
due to Divine revelation, and part of the providential educa-
tion of the world. It recalls to art the days when, in catacomb
and cloister, she learned her noblest mission to be the service
of the Word made Flesh. It appeals to democracy as the
religion of the fishermen who gathered round the carpenter's
Son. It points the social reformer to the pattern of a perfect
man, laying down His life alike for enemy and friend. While
it crowns all earthly aims with a hope full of immortality, as
prophetic of eternal occupations otherwhere. And however
many a new meaning may yet be found in the Incarnation,
however many a misconception of it fade before fuller light ;
we can conceive no phase of progress which has not the
214 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Incarnation for its guiding star ; no age which cannot make
the prayer of the fifth century its own —
'O God of unchangeable power and eternal light, look
favourably on Thy whole Church, that wonderful and sacred
mystery; and by the tranquil operation of Thy perpetual
Providence, carry out the work of man's salvation ; and let
the whole world feel and see that things which were cast down
are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being
made new, and all things are returning to perfection through
Him, from whom they took their origin, even through our
Lord Jesus Christ V
1 Gelasian, quoted by Bright, Ancient Collects, p. 98.
VL
THE INCARNATION AS THE
BASIS OF DOGMA.
E. C. MOBERLY.
VI.
THE INCARNATION AS TEE BASIS OF
DOGMA.
I. MANY years ago, in undergraduate days, I was speaking
once to a friend of my hope of beginning some little acquaint-
ance with Theology. I well remember the air of nicely
mingled civility and conternptuousness, with which my friend,
wishing to sympathize, at once drew a distinction for me
between speculative and dogmatic Theology, and assumed that
I could not mean that the mere study of dogmatic Theology
could have any sort of attractiveness. I do not think that I
accepted his kindly overture ; but it certainly made me
consider more than once afterwards, whether the ' mere study
of dogmatic Theology' could after all be so slavish and pro-
fitless an employment as had been implied. On the whole,
however, I settled with myself that his condemnation, however
obviously candid and even impressive, must nevertheless re-
main, so far as I was concerned, a surprise and an enigma.
For what, after all, did the study of dogmatic Theology mean,
but the study of those truths which the mind of Christ's
Church upon earth has believed to be at once the most certain
and the most important truths of man's history, nature and
destiny, in this world and for ever ?
It is impossible, however, not to feel that my friend, in his
objection, represented what was, and is, a very widespread
instinct against the study of dogma. Some think, for instance,
that to practical men exactnesses of doctrinal statement, even
if true, are immaterial. Others think that any exactness of
doctrinal statement is convicted, by its mere exactness, of
untruth ; for that knowledge about things unseen can only
2 1 8 The Religion of the Incarnation.
be indefinite in character. If, indeed, religious knowledge is
a process of evolution simply, if it means only a gradual
development towards ever-increasing definiteness of religious
supposition, then no doubt its exactness may be the condem-
nation of dogma. But then, no doubt, to make room for
such a view, the whole fact of historical Christianity must
be first displaced.
Is it put as an impossibility, that there cannot be any
definite or certain Theology 1 Can there, then, be a Revelation ?
Can there be an Incarnation ? Those only are consistent, who
assert that all three are impossible, and who understand that
in so doing they are limiting the possibilities, and therefore
pro tanto questioning the reality of a Personal God. But if
there be a Personal God, what are the adequate grounds on
which it is nevertheless laid down that He cannot directly
reveal Himself? Or, if He can reveal Himself, on what
ground can the d priori assertion rest, that theological truth
must be uncertain or indefinite ? The Christian Church claims
to have both definite and certain knowledge. These claims
can never be met by any a priori judgment that such know-
ledge is impossible. Such a judgment is too slenderly based
to bear the weight of argument. To argue from it would
be to commit the very fault so often imputed to the dogmatist.
It would be a flagrant instance of dogmatic assertion (and that
for the most important of argumentative purposes) of what
we could not possibly know.
The claim of the Church to knowledge through the Incar-
nation can only be rationally met, and only really answered,
when the claim itself, and its evidence, are seriously examined.
Herein lies, and will always lie, the heart of the struggle for
or against the dogmatic character of the Church. Anything
else is only the fringe of the matter. Any rebutting of a
priori presumptions against dogma is a mere clearing of the
way for battle. Thus it is said, perhaps, that the objection is
to the degree of definiteness, or to the tone of authority. It
is fancied that dogma in its very nature, quite apart from its
contents, is a curtailment of the rights, and a limitation of the
powers, of mind. Is dogma, the most definite and authori-
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 2 1 9
tative, fettering to the freedom of intellect ? We can see in a
moment the entire unreality of the objection, by simply
substituting for it another question. Is truth fettering to
intellect ? Does the utmost certitude of truth limit freedom of
mind1? Because, if not, dogma, so far as it coincides with
truth, cannot fetter either. If perfect knowledge of truth
could paralyse the intellect, what (it is worth while to ask)
do we mean by intellect ? Do we mean something which
must for ever be struggling with difficulties which it cannot
overcome ? Is it necessary for the idea of mind that it should
be baffled "? Is it a creature only of the tangle and the fog ?
And if ever the day should come, when after struggling, more
or less ineffectually, with the tangle and the fog, man should
emerge at last in clear sunshine upon the mountain top, will
mind cease to have any faculty or place, because the know-
ledge of truth has come ? At least, if we understand this to
be the conception of mind, it need not frighten us quite so
much as it did, to be told that dogma interferes with mind.
But if, however different from our experience the employment
of mind would be in the presence of perfect knowledge, we
cannot so conceive of mind as to admit that truth could
possibly be its enemy or its destruction, then we may cer-
tainly insist that no amount of dogma, so far as it is true,
can limit or fetter the freedom of intellect. But then we are
at once thrown back upon the question ; is the dogmatic
teaching of the Church true ? No statement which absolutely
coincides with truth can hurt the freedom of mind. But
mistaken presumption of truth can, and does, limit it ; and
so does authority, if it prevents the examination of truth.
Dogma, then, is, as dogma, a wrong to mind, just so far as it
can be convicted of either of these things ; so far as it forbids
examination, or so far as it asserts what is not strictly true.
As to the first of these two suggestions against dogma, it is
quite enough simply to deny it. The Church, as a teacher of
dogmatic truth, does not forbid the freest and completest
inquiry into the truths which she enunciates. The question
is not whether dogmatic theologians have ever dreaded in-
quiry into truth ; but whether the dogmatic Church, as such,
22O The Religion of the Incarnation.
precludes or forbids it. True, she enunciates some truths as
true ; and holds those, in different measures, unwise and
wrong, who contradict her truths. But she does not. therefore,
forbid the fullest exercise of intellect upon them ; nor tremble
lest intellect, rightly wielded, should contradict them. Indeed
for eighteen centuries she has been engaged, and will be
engaged to the end, in examining with a power and discipline
of intellect, which she alone ever has, or could have, evoked,
into the meaning and exactness of her own knowledge. But
o o
she does warn inquirers that successful inquiry into her truths
is no work of merely ingenious disputation, but needs the
exactest discipline and balance of all the faculties of our
human nature.
We return, then, to the second suggestion ; and I repeat
that the question has for us become, not whether dogma in
the abstract is desirable or undesirable, but whether the
dogmas of the Christian Church are true or not true. Dogma
that is true can only be undesirable in so far as truth is un-
desirable.
Whether the dogmas of the Church are true or not true, is
itself a question of evidence.
Before, however, making any remark upon the nature of
this evidence in the case of religion, we may remember that
the possession of dogma is in no way peculiar to religion.
There is no region of research or knowledge which does not
present to the student its own ' dogmata,' or truths ascertained
and agreed upon ; nor does any one, in the name of freedom of
intellect, persist in treating these always as open questions.
But perhaps if we venture thus to claim the ascertained
truths of any science as dogmas, the scientific answer will be
ready. They differ, it will be felt, from the nature of religious
dogmas, in two important respects. The first difference is,
that they are offered for acceptance with their full proofs, from
the first moment that they are offered at all. The student
could not, it may be, have discovered for himself the law of
gravitation, or the circulation of the blood; but he can, when
these discoveries are once set before him by another, see forth-
with not only the coherency of the principles, but the cogency
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 221
of their proof. The second difference is, that when they have
been accepted by the student, proof and all, they still claim
no allegiance beyond what his intelligence cannot but freely
give ; he is still free to supersede or upset them, if he can.
He accepts them indeed provisionally, as identical with the
truth so far as the truth on the subject is yet known ; yet not
necessarily as final truth. He accepts them as truths which
all his further study will comment upon ; presumably indeed
in the way of continual illustration and corroboration, — so
that what he accepts for study will be more and more cer-
tainly proved by the study — but also, if you please, in the
way of correction ; for if his study can supersede, or even
in any measure correct or alter them, — why, so much the
better both for science and for him ! Why should not this be
equally true of Theology1? Why should religious dogmas be
received without these conditions, as certainly and finally
true 1
To begin with, then, some exception may be taken to the
statement that the student who accepts a scientific doctrine,
has the full evidence before him from the beginning. That it
is not altogether so is evident from the simple consideration,
just mentioned, that his work is a progressive one ; and that
the whole course of his experience tends, and will tend, to
deepen the certainty of his first principles. But in so far as
the proof of any leading principle is being deepened and
strengthened by the student's daily work, so far it is clear
that the amount of certainty about his principles with which
at first he began, must be less than that with which he ends
o *
at last ; and therefore that the proof presented to him at the
beginning, however much it may have been adequate to the
purpose, (even though it may have been the completest proof
capable of being presented in the way of exposition from the
lip to the ear) was nevertheless most incomplete in comparison
with the fulness of attainable proof. And further, it may
certainly be said also, that in the convincingness of this
evidence as at first presented, authority, whether more or
less, had an undoubted part. At the very least it had a
negative place, as a guarantee to the young mind rejoicing
222 The Religion of the Incarnation.
in the ingenuity of the apparent demonstration, that the
apparent demonstration was not vitiated by some unseen
fallacy, or that there was not a series of other consider-
ations behind, which would rob the lesson just learnt
of its practical usefulness. Often, indeed, the degree of
authority in the first scientific convictions would be very
much higher. Often, however helpful the arguments or
illustrations of a principle may seem, the really overruling
consideration will at first be this, that the whole scientific
world has absolutely accepted the principle as truth. So much
is this the case, that if an average student should find himself
unable in any point to receive the ascertained truths of his
science with intelligent agreement, he would not hesitate to
assume that the whole fault lay with himself; he would really
be convinced in his soul that the dicta of his scientific teachers
were right, and that he himself would see the certainty of
them by and by.
Now in both these two respects the acceptance of religious
dogma is not essentially in contrast, but rather is parallel, with
that of scientific principles. For religious truth is neither in
its first acceptance a mere matter of blind submission to
authority, nor is it stagnant and unprogressive after it is
accepted. However different in other ways the leading truths
of the Creed may be from scientific principles ; in this respect
at least they are not different, — that not one of them is ever
brought for the acceptance of men without some really in-
telligent evidence and ground for acceptance. If any man is
asked to accept them, without any intelligent ground for the
acceptance, we may be bold perhaps to assert that it would be
his duty to refuse. Of course, however, authority will itself
be a large part of his intelligent ground ; a larger part or a
smaller according to circumstances. But then there is no
proper antithesis between believing in deference to authority,
and believing in deference to reason, unless it is understood
that the authority believed in was accepted at first as authority
'without reason, or maintained in spite of the subsequent re-
fusal of reason to give confirmatory witness to its assertions.
Even in the cases in which there seems to be least use of
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 223
reason, the case of a young child learning at his mother's knee,
or of a man whose spirit has suffered and been broken, and
who gives himself up at last to the mere guidance of a friend
or a teacher, the authority, when accepted at all, is accepted
on grounds essentially reasonable. The child's reasoning may
differ in quality from the prodigal's ; but the child trusts
father or mother on grounds which are wholly, if uncon-
sciously, a product of the strictest reason ; and the prodigal
has felt in his inmost soul alike the deadness of his own
spiritual being, and the power and the beauty which are in
the life of the teacher upon whom he throws himself. And
this is not the only point ; for the reasonable mind in one is
not a thing different in nature from the reasonable mind in
another, or from the eternal reason which is in God. The
truths, therefore, which we are taught about God, and man,
and Christ, about sin, and redemption from sin, and the heaven
of holiness, and which seem to be accepted as a mere act of
not unreasonable dutifulness, do reasonably withal commend
themselves, in some shape or measure, even to the callow
mind from its earliest immaturity. There is that in the very
consciousness of child, or of criminal, with which they are in
essential harmony. That in him with which they are in
essential correspondence bears witness of them. Nor is any-
one, in his acceptance of them, wholly insensible of this
witness to their truth, which is, in fact, engraven upon his
own conscious being.
To ' take religion on trust,' then, as it is sometimes de-
risively called, is not really to act in defiance of, or apart from,
reason. It is an exercise of reason up to a certain point, —
just so, and so far as, the experience of the person warrants.
He sees what to trust, and why. He sees where understanding
and experience which transcend his own would point. And
he seeks for the rational test of further experience in the only
way in which it can be had. He defers to the voice of ex-
perience, in faith that his own experience will by and by
prove its truthfulness. On a medical question, men would
not dispute, they would loudly proclaim, the reasonableness
and wisdom of such a course. Yet there are those who sup-
224 The Religion of the Incarnation.
pose that the truths of religion are to admit of a complete
preliminary intellectual verification, a verification apart from
special training and experience, such as they might more
reasonably expect in any other subject-matter than religion,
but such as, in fact, they hardly expect elsewhere.
The doctrines of the Church, then, accepted at first on
reasonable evidence, which in a greater or less degree, but per-
haps never wholly, consists in authority reasonably accepted as
authority, are then in all the experience of spiritual life re-
ceiving continual comment, explanation, corroboration. The
whole experience of Christian life must be a growth in the
apprehension and certainty of Christian truth. A Christian
neophyte may believe every word of his Creed, and believe
neither ignorantly nor unintelligently. But the veteran
Christian of four-score will transcend the child at least as
much in the degree of certainty, with which the doctrines of
the Church are to his entire faculties mental, moral, and
spiritual, proved and known to be true, as he can possibly do
in his merely intellectual apprehension of the history or
meaning of the words. We may say, indeed, that the life of a
professing Christian which is not a life of growth in the ap-
prehension of doctrinal truth, must necessarily be a retro-
gression; just as the life of so-called scientific study, which is
not continually illuminating afresh, and deepening the cer-
tainty of its own scientific principles, must gradually come to
hold even its own scientific principles less and less certainly,
and to mean by them less and less.
But even if it may be shewn that there is not quite so
essential a contrast as there seemed to be, between the charac-
ter of theological and scientific dogmas, by reason of the proofs
which are offered, along with his principles, to the student of
any science ; yet still it will be felt that they differ essentially
in the tone and manner with which they respectively speak to
intellect. The truths of the one claim at once to possess an
intellectual finality, and to command a moral allegiance, which
the truths of the other do not.
It may be worth while to say in reply, first of all, that there
cannot be a real contrast of finality between them, so far as
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 225
they are both really true. What is really true is really true.
Neither ' absolutely,' ' finally,' nor any other adverb in the
language will make the statement a stronger one. What we
call scientific truths are not in fact liable to correction, except
in so far as they may perhaps, after all, not be quite scientific
truths, except (that is) in respect of such admixture of
erroneous supposition, as still has clung to them after general
acceptance. And on the other hand, so far as any mistaken
assumptions are mixed up with our apprehension of religious
truths, so far these too are liable to receive, and in the history
of Church doctrine are continually receiving, correction. It
is, after all, a truism. In either sphere the truths, so far as
they really are truths, are true absolutely : but are corrigible
in so far as our statement of them still contains anything that
is other than truth. We may put it, perhaps, in another way
still. If, to assume an impossible hypothesis, any one could
really prove, not merely that there were some exaggerations
or misconceptions in the traditional mode of statement of some
doctrinal truths, but that our really essential Faith was wrong,
we may grant hypothetically (seeing that truth is supreme)
that he would do us all a mighty service, at however tre-
mendous a cost. Similarly of course it must be owned, that
if any one could prove the earth to be flat and stationary, and
the law of gravitation to be the precise contradictory of truth,
he would do immense service to science. But none the less,
the scientific certainty on these points is so complete, that if
anyone seriously assailed them, it would be felt that he
could only be dealing with the evidence in a way which
tended to compromise the credit of his own reason ; and he
would therefore be reasonably held to be, as it is roughly
phrased, a fool or a madman. And we must claim that for us
the certainty of some theological propositions is so complete,
that when anyone assails them, we are no less reasonable in
regarding him with concern, rather for his own truth's sake
than for the truth of our religion ; and that, if miracles or ' an
angel from heaven ' should seem to bear witness for him, it
would still be no bigotry, but in the strictest sense our
reasonable course, to refuse the witness, and to treat it as
Q
226 The Religion of the Incarnation.
merely an attempt to ensnare us into falsehood to the real
requirements of our reason and conscience.
Is the conclusion, then, that there is after all no difference
at all between the truths of Theology and of Science, in respect
of their claim to authority 1 On the contrary, there remains
a perfectly real contrast of authority between them ; only it
is to be looked for elsewhere than among the conditions upon
which our belief in them respectively is based.
There are two distinct senses in which the doctrines of the
Creed may be said to be authoritative. It may be meant that
the authoritativeness is in the manner in which they are pre-
sented to us ; that is to say, that (whatever their content may
be) they are statements which we believe, and are to believe,
on the sole ground that we are told to do so, without any
appeal to reason of our own ; or it may be meant that they are
statements whose content is of such nature and inherent im-
portance, that we cannot, in fact, believe them, without thereby
necessarily being involved in a train of consequential obliga-
tions of thought and life. In this latter case the authori-
tativeness lies not in the manner of their presentation to us
or our acceptance of them, but in that which is involved in
the nature of the truths themselves, if and when they are be-
lieved.
Is it true to say of the Creeds that they are ' authoritative '
in the former sense? that is to say that they challenge our
allegiance, and we are bound to believe them, because we are
told that they are true, without examination on our part, and
without reason? It has indeed been stated already that, as
between pupils and teachers, there is in religious learning, as
there is in all human learning whatever, scientific or otherwise,
a certain legitimate and important field for authority reason-
ably accepted as authority, that is, the authority of men more
learned and experienced than ourselves. Even this, of course,
means that the pupil believes the things taught to be strictly
rational to the teacher, though they be not so, as yet, to him-
self. But is it true, in speaking of religion, to carry this one
step further ; and to say that in this sphere our whole belief,
and duty of belief, rests upon authority as its ultimate found-
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 227
ation, the authority not of man's experience, but of God's
command ? It must, no doubt, be freely owned on all sides,
that if there be a creed commanded of God, we certainly are
bound to believe it. But is there ? or when, or how, was it
commanded ? Does anyone answer, through our Lord Jesus
Christ ? or through His Church ? or through the Bible ? But
who is He ? or what is the Bible ? or how do we know ? To
accept doctrines, which we otherwise should not accept, be-
cause we are told to do so, without knowing first who told us,
or why we should believe him, is simply not a reasonable
possibility. But to ask these questions and to have answers
to them, and believe because we are satisfied in some way as
to the answers to them, is certainly not to rest the act of be-
lieving on a foundation of mere authority : essentially rather
it is, to go over part of the ground of the Creed first, and be
satisfied as to the correctness of its main substance, and there-
fore to believe it. A Christian will not deny that the doctrines
of the Creed are entitled in fact to be held as authoritative, in
both of the senses distinguished above. But we cannot be-
lieve them on God's authority till we have first believed in
the authority of God. And, therefore, their authoritativeness
in what we have called the first sense is not really the ultimate
ground of our accepting them : for it is not itself accepted and
apprehended by us, except as a consequence of our first be-
lieving that which is the main substance of the Creed. It may
be the warrant to us of this or that detail considered apart :
but it is not, and cannot ever be, the original and sufficient
cause of our believing the whole. Credo ut intelligam may
be the most true and most reasonable motto of the large part
of Christian faith and life : but it is not inconsistent with — it
is founded upon — an ultimate underlying intellexi ut crederem.
There is, then, a real and abiding difference between theo-
logical and scientific dogmas, in respect of the authority
with which they speak to us. But the difference is one
which does not affect at all the method or grounds of our
original belief in them respectively: it is to be found ex-
clusively in the different subject-matter of the two when
believed.
Q2
228 The Religion of the Incarnation.
And herein, also, it is that we find the real answer to the
other form of question, viz., why should Theology claim to
be so much more final than science ? Much as science has
conquered of the realm of truth, it does not profess to have
conquered more than a little. Of the vast residuum it
says nothing. It has no idea how small a proportion
its present knowledge may bear to that which will one day
be known. Nay, the further it advances in knowledge of
truth, so much the smaller a proportion does its realized
truth seem to it to bear to that which remains unexplored.
Why should the theologian be less patient of additions to
theological knowledge, such as may some day throw all his
present creeds into comparative obscurity 1 Why should the
Christian Creed be fixed and inexpansive "? The question is
formidable only in an abstract form. The reasonable answer
to it confronts us the moment we consider what is the subject-
matter of the Creed. Scientific principles are in their very
nature fragments of a truth which is practically infinite. But
the Christian Creed, if true at all, cannot possibly be a fragment
of truth. For the Christian Creed does not simply enunciate
so many abstract principles of natural or supernatural life
or governance. It introduces us straight to a supreme Person,
Himself the beginning and end, the author and upholder of
all. Such a doctrine may be false ; but it cannot be a frag-
ment. The child who believes in God, believes in every-
thing, though he knows hardly anything. He has infinitely
more yet to learn, as to what his own belief means. But he
has nothing to add to it. The perfect knowledge of the
universe would not add to it, but would only explain it.
It is, then, by virtue of his personal relation to a Personality
which is Itself supreme and all inclusive, that he is guilty of
no presumption, even though in the face of the modest dis-
avowals of scientific men, he must maintain that his own
creed is, in its proper nature, even when all admissions have
been made, rather a complete and conclusive, than a partial or
a tentative, statement of truth. But this difference between
him and them is the result neither of any arrogance in his
temper, nor any lack in his logic, but it follows necessarily
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 229
from the nature of the subject-matter of his creed, if and
when it is believed.
But still this fact that, if true, they are truths which by
the obvious necessity of their subject-matter speak to our
intellects and consciences with a tone of such Divinely com-
manding authority, ought not to make me or anyone accept
them as true, unless the evidence for them is adequate. The
question is not how authoritative they would be, if true ;
nor how important or inclusive they would be, if true ; nor
is any amount of contingent importance or authority adequate
evidence for their truth, but only a motive for inquiring into
its evidence. The question is, are they true 1 or are they not
true ? and the question is a question of evidence.
II. And now, in recurring once more to the subject of the
evidence by which the dogmas of religion are proved, from
which we diverged just now, we find, in respect of it, a
second reality of contrast between theological truths and the
truths of material science. For whilst in both cases equally
we depend upon evidence, and evidence that is adequate ; it
does not follow that the evidence for both is in all points
similar in kind. In great part indeed it is so ; but it is
certainly not so altogether. For when we speak of the
evidence of religious truths, it is to be remembered that the
full evidence by which our consciences are wholly convinced
of them, is not of one kind only, but of all kinds. The facts
of religion address themselves to the whole nature of man ;
and it is only by the whole nature of man that they can
ever be fully apprehended. Man is not a being of intel-
lectual conceptions or faculties only. And because he is not
so, therefore no set of principles which could be apprehended
by the intellect alone (as the theorems of Euclid may appear
to be), and which make for their acceptance no demand at
all upon the qualities of his moral or spiritual being, could
really present, as religion professes to present, a system of
truth and life which would be adequate to the scope of his
whole nature. It is undoubtedly the case that just as the
truths of religion account for, and appeal to, his whole being,
so the evidence for them appeals to his whole being also^
230 The Religion of the Incarnation.
For its complete appreciation there are requirements other
than intellectual. There must be not only certain endow-
ments of mind, but the life of a moral being. There must
be moral affections, moral perceptions, spiritual affinities and
•satisfactions. Even if the primary conviction of his reason
may be apart from these, yet of the fully developed evidence,
which is the real possession of the Christian believer, these
are a most important and necessary part. Without these,
his certainty, adequate though it might be, would be far less
profound than it is. These are to him essential ingredients
in the richness and the fulness of the evidence which to him
is everywhere. Now for this necessary width of the full
confirmatory evidence of religion, it is impossible for the
religious man, with the utmost desire to make every allow-
ance and apology that is possible, to offer any apology at all.
So far from being a mark of inconsistency or feebleness, it is
a necessary note of the completeness of religion. Religion
professes to have for its subject-matter, and in a measure
incomplete, but relatively adequate, to include, to account
for, and to direct, the whole range of all man's history, all
man's capacities, explored or unexplored, all man's destiny
now and for ever. If its truths and their evidence were
found to address themselves exclusively to the intellect, in
isolation from the other qualities and experiences of man's
nature, it would be self-convicted of inadequacy. If men
full of worldliness of heart and self-indulgence could be
capable of understanding the revelation of religious truth
as accurately, of embracing it as completely, of apprehending
the depth and the width of the evidence for it (with which
all human nature really is saturated) as thoroughly as the
prayerful and the penitent, this would not mean that religion
or religious evidence had been lifted up, on to a higher and
more properly scientific level, but rather that it had shrunk
down into correspondence merely with a part, and not the
noblest part, of man's present nature.
It would be far beyond the scope of this paper to discuss
kinds of evidence, or argue in defence of the position that
there is real evidence for religious truth, which is none the
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 231
less properly evidence, because it is different in kind from
the evidence for the propositions of material science : but it
may be permissible, at least, in passing to record the claim,
and to insist that religious men, in confining themselves to
strictly historical or logical arguments, are necessarily omit-
ting much which is nevertheless, to them, real ground. There
are evidences which can speak to the heart, the imagination,
the conscience, as well as the intelligence. Or, perhaps, we
shall come nearer to an exact expression of the truth, by
saying that the intelligence, which can apprehend and pro-
nounce upon the evidence of truths of spiritual conscious-
ness, is an intelligence identical in name, but not identical
in nature, with that which can well weigh and judge purely
logical — or even that which can pronounce upon moral —
problems. The intelligence of a moral character, or of a
spiritual personality, differs not in range only, but in quality,
from that of a merely ' rational animal.' If the moral and
the spiritual intelligence did not contain quite other elements,
drawn from quite other experiences and possibilities, they
could not work upon their higher subject-matter at all. To
the religious man, therefore, it must seem strictly unreason-
able, in the examination of truths which professedly corre-
spond to man's whole nature, and need his whole nature
and experience for the interpretation of them, to begin by
shutting out, as irrelevant, what we will modestly call the
half of man's nature ; and to demand that the truths shall
be so stated and so proved, as that the statements and proofs
shall correspond exclusively with the other half, and find in
that other half their whole interpretation, and their whole
evidence.
It may, indeed, be desirable to guard against a miscon-
ception, by the express admission that there is some neces-
sary ambiguity in the terms employed. We may seem to
have unduly extended both the verbal meaning, and the
sphere of importance, of ' evidence ' and ' proof.' Undoubtedly
there is a sense in which it would be, not merely true to
admit, but important to insist, that in the acceptance of
religious truth, Faith neither is, nor ever can be, displaced,
232 The Religion of the Incarnation.
in order that Demonstration may be enthroned in her place.
But then Demonstration is a word which belongs to strictly
logical nomenclature. And the very point here insisted on
is that the strictly logical presentment of religion is, in refer-
ence to the real presentment of religion, most inadequate.
Undoubtedly, if everything else is shorn away, and religion
remains solely and only in the form of strict logic, without
sentiment, without imagination, without experience of duty,
or sin, or right, or aspiration, or anything else which belongs
to the spiritual consciousness of human personalities, the logic
of it is, and must be, imperfectly conclusive.
Now words such as ' evidence,' ' proof,' ' intelligence,' are no
doubt often used in connection with processes of the intellect
taken apart — the intellect of a being merely rational. In
insisting, therefore, that the word evidence, when used in
reference to religious subject-matter, must include data which,
to the observer of physical phenomena, would seem vague
and impalpable ; and that intelligence, as adequately trained
to apprehend and give judgment upon religious evidence, is
in some respects other, and more, than that intelligence which
can deal with evidence into which no element of spiritual con-
sciousness enters; we differ, perhaps, at the most, more in
form than reality, from those who simply deprecate the appeal
to ' evidence ' or ' proof ' in matters of faith.
To the religious man, then, the fulness of Christian evidence
is as many-sided as human life. There is historical evidence,
— itself of at least a dozen different kinds, — literary evidence,
metaphysical evidence, moral evidence, evidence of sorrow
and joy, of goodness and of evil, of sin and of pardon, of
despair and of hope, of life and of death ; evidence which
defies enumerating ; into this the whole gradual life of the
Christian grows ; and there is no part nor element of life
which does not to him perpetually elucidate and confirm the
knowledge which has been given him. Everything that is
or has been, every consciousness, every possibility, even every
doubt or wavering, becomes to the Christian a part of the
certainty — an element in the absorbing reality — of his Creed.
But this is rather the end than the beginning. Certainly it
Vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 233
is not thus that the Creed of the Church can present itself
to those whose life is still independent of the Creed.
Let us consider, then, how the truths of the Creed did first,
in fact, introduce themselves to human consciousness. There
are three several stages of its presentment in history, of which
the central one is so overmastering in importance, that it
alone gives their character to the other two. They are, first,
the leading up, in the world's history and consciousness, to
the life of Jesus Christ ; secondly, the life and death of Jesus
Christ; thirdly, the results, in history and consciousness, of
the life and death of Jesus Christ. We may say. perhaps,
that of the first of these the main outcome was belief in God ;
and such a God, that belief in Him carried with it the two
corollaries of aspiration after righteousness, and conviction of
sin. We may say that the third of these means the establish-
ment of the Church upon earth, and the articulating of her
consciousness according to the Creeds. But in any case all
the three are plainly historical, matters of historical inquiry,
of historical evidence ; and all plainly depend entirely upon
the intermediate one, the history of a certain human life
which purports to be — which either is, or is not — the hinge-
point of all history whatever.
All turns, then, upon a certain passage of history. Is the
history, as believed by Christians, true or false? The Chris-
tian record of that history is the New Testament. Indeed, of
that history, the New Testament is the only record. Is, then,
the history of the teaching and the work, the life and the
death, of Jesus Christ, presented to us in the New Testament
as a chapter of historical fact, — is it historical fact, or is it
not ? The Incarnation is either a fact, or a fiction. The In-
carnation means also for Christians the Atonement. For our
present purpose, the Incarnation may be taken as necessarily
including the Atonement. But still of this complex fact the
dilemma stands. If it is not true, it is false. There is no
middle term. If it is not true, then, whether dogma in itself
is, or is not, desirable, at least all the dogma of the Christian
Church is false.
234 The Religion of the Incarnation.
The Incarnation and the Atonement together are not pre-
sented in the New Testament as, by their own mere state-
ment, guaranteeing themselves. On the contrary, there is one
single, definite, historical fact, which is represented there as
the central heart and core of the evidence upon which the
conviction of their truth depends. This fact is the resur-
rection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Though this is not
the whole of the Christian Creed, yet this, according to
S. Paul, is, to the whole of the Christian Creed, crucial.
' If there be no resurrection from the dead, then is Christ
not risen ; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preach-
ing vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are
found false witnesses of God ; because we have testified of
God, that he raised up Christ ; whom He raised not up, if so
be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is
not Christ raised ; and if Christ be not raised, your faith is
vain, ye are yet in your sins.' To be direct personal evidence
of a certain fact, and that fact the resurrection ; — this was, in
the view of S. Peter and the Apostles, the first qualification,
and the central meaning, of Apostleship : ' must one be or-
dained to lie a witness with us of His resurrection ; ' ' this
Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.'1
Upon the historical truth or falsehood, then, of the resurrec-
tion, hangs the whole question of the nature and work of Jesus
Christ, the whole doctrine of Incarnation and Atonement.
But in saying this, it is necessary to guard our proper
meaning. If we admit the fact of the Resurrection to be
cardinal, what is the fact of the Resurrection which is in
question 1 It is as far as possible from being simply a ques-
tion whether ' a man ' could or could not, did or did not, re-
appear, after death, in life. When we speak of the historical
fact, we must mean at least the whole fact with all that it
was and meant, complex as it was and many-sided ; not with
its meaning or its proof isolated upon a single page of the
book of history, but having far-reaching affinities, parts es-
sentially of its interpretation and of its evidence, entwined in
the depths of the whole constitution of our nature, and the
whole drama of history from the first moment to the last.
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma- 235
However much Christians may have at times to argue about
the simple evidence for the ' yes or ' no ' of the Resurrection
of Jesus, as if it were the alleged resurrection of any other
man that was in question, neither the question itself, nor the
evidence about it, can possibly be, in fact, of the same nature
or upon the same level, as the evidence about another. No
amount of conviction of the reappearance in life of any other
man, would have any similar meaning, or carry any similar
consequences. The inherent character of Him who rose, and
the necessary connection between what He was, and had said
and claimed for Himself, on the one hand, and on the other
His rising out of death ; this is an essential part of that fact
of the resurrection, which comes up for proof or disproof.
The fact that Jesus Christ, being what He was, the climax
and fulfilment of a thousand converging lines — nay, of all
the antecedent history of mankind — rose from the dead, and
by that fact of resurrection (solemnly fore-announced, yet none
the less totally unlooked for) illuminated and explained for
the first time all that before had seemed enigmatical or
contradictory in what He was, — and indeed in all humanity ;
this is the real fact of the resurrection which confronts us.
It is this vast fact which is either true or false. The resur-
rection of the crucified Jesus cannot possibly be a bare or
simple fact. When viewed as a material manifestation of the
moment only, it is at least misunderstood ; it may be unin-
telligible. It is, no doubt, an event in history ; and yet it
confronts us, even there in its place and witness in history,
not simply as a finite historical event, but as an eternal
counsel and infinite act of God.
Yet there are times when we must consent to leave much
of all this, for the moment, on one side. Whatever else the
event in history may carry with it, of course it must stand
its ground as a mere historical event. The mere fact may
be but a part of it ; yet all will be overthrown if the fact be
not fact. And so, though the truths of the Christian religion,
and the evidence for them, be at least as wide as was repre-
sented above, yet they present themselves to our minds still,
as they presented themselves at first to the minds of men,
236 The Religion of the Incarnation.
within the sphere and the rules of ordinary human history
and historical evidence. Here are events written on the
page of history. Examine them. Are they historically false
or true ? If they be not false, what do they mean and in-
volve ? This is the modest way in which they present them-
selves.
No one will now dispute that Jesus died upon the Cross.
If He did not, on the third day, rise again from that death to
life ; — cadit quaestio — all Christian dogma, all Christian faith,
is at an end. Something might still be true which might be
of interest ; something, even, which for sheer want of a better,
might be still the most interesting fact in the world's long
history ; but something which, from the first line to the last,
would be essentially different from the Catholic faith. But,
on the other hand, if He did so rise again, then the fact of
His resurrection necessarily raises further questions as to His
nature and being, — necessarily requires the understanding of
further truths for its own intelligent explanation. Now the
present paper is not an evidential treatise. It is no part of
our task to attempt to prove the historical reality of the
resurrection. What it does concern us to notice is the way in
which the determination of all Christian truth hinges upon it.
If it falls, all the rest will drift away, anchorless and unsub-
stantial, into the region of a merely beautiful dreamland. As
dreamland, indeed, it may still captivate and inspire ; but
anchor of sure fact there will be none. It will only be a
beautiful imagination, — a false mirage reflected from, based
upon, falsehood. No doubt imagination is sovereign in the
lives of men. But then imagination means the vivifying of
truth, not the spectral embodiment of a lie.
On the other hand, if the fact of the resurrection stands,
then it cannot stand alone. If Jesus Christ so lived and
taught as even the most indefinite believers concede that He
lived and taught, if He then died on the Cross, and rose again
the third day from, the dead, you have indeed already the
foundation dogma of the Creed ; and having that, you cannot
possibly rest in it: that foundation fact will absolutely
compel you to ask and to answer certain further necessary
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 237
questions ; and whatever intelligible answer you may choose
to give to them will be essentially a dogmatic definition.
Who or what was this man who thus lived, thus spoke, thus
died, and thus rose from the dead ? As a matter of fact, the
whole Church of Christ in history (including the men who
had been His own companions, trained and inspired by Him-
self,) taught and believed, without shadow of hesitation, that
He was very God. Very gradually, indeed, had they advanced
to this ; step by step, through their growing intimacy with a
character whose very excellences were only enigmatical and
confounding, so long as the master-truth, which lay behind
them, was ignored. And very tentative, on His side, was the
method of His self-revelation ; through qualities, through in-
herent powers, through explicit teachings, slowly felt, slowly
recognised, as transcendent, as impossible, except in relation
to a truth which, after long misconceptions and perplexities,
is seen by them at last not only to be true, but to be the
essential truth which He Himself requires of them. For, be
the method as gradual and as tentative as you please, these
witnesses, who are, in fact, the only witnesses the world ever
has had, or can have, of His inner life and teaching, testify
unhesitatingly not only that all true acceptance of Him was,
in their judgment, acceptance of Him as God, but that His
life and death were penetrated by the consciousness of His
own Godhead ; and by the deliberate purpose (through what-
ever unexpected patience of method) of convincing the whole
world in the end of His Godhead, and receiving universal belief,
and universal worship, as God.
Now no one to-day disputes that He was truly man. Is it
true that He was very God ? It is either true or false. As
to the fact there are only the two alternatives. And between
the two the gulf is impassable. If it is not false, it is true.
If it is not absolutely true, it is absolutely false. According
to the faith of the Catholic Church it is absolutely true. Ac-
cording to the highest form of Arianism, not less than accord-
ing to the barest Socinianism, it is (however you may try to
gloss it over) absolutely false.
Once more, it is quite beyond our province to marshal or
238 The Religion of the Incarnation.
press argumentatively the proofs that He was indeed God.
But it is necessary to see with perfect clearness, how the
question must have been raised, and being raised must have
been answered. The very life of the Church was belief in
Him ; and she could not remain fundamentally uncertain as
to who or what He was in whom she believed. This was
the one thing which had never been allowed to those who
drew near Christ. All through His ministry those who came
near Him, and felt the spell of His presence, His holiness, His
power, were undergoing a training and a sifting. Moment
by moment, step by step, the accumulating evidence of His
transcendently perfect humanity kept forcing more and more
upon them all the question which He would never let them
escape, the question by which they were to be tested and
judged; ' What think ye of Christ ? ' ' If ye believe not that
I am He, ye shall die in your sins.'
If there is a true historical sense in which the clear defini-
tion of the doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus Christ must be
assigned to the Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, yet
it would be a great historical blunder to state or imagine, as
inference, that till then the doctrine was only held partially
or with imperfect consciousness in the Catholic Church.
The Church did not, as a result of those controversies, de-
velop the consciousness of any new doctrine: the develop-
ment of her consciousness was rather in respect of the shallow
but tempting logic which would deform, or the delusions which
might counterfeit, her doctrine, and of the perils to which
these must lead. It may be a question, indeed, how far the
words implicit and explicit do, or do not, represent the distinc-
tion between the dogmatic consciousness of the Apostolic and
the Conciliar ages. The difficulty in determining depends
solely on this, that the words themselves are used with
different meanings. Thus, sometimes men are said to hold
implicitly what they never perhaps suspected themselves of
holding, if it can be shewn to be a more or less legitimate
outcome, or logical development, of their belief. If such men
advance inferentially from point to point, their explicit belief
at a later time may be, in many particulars, materially
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 239
different from what it had been at an earlier ; even though it
might be logically shewn that the earlier thought was, more
or less directly, the parent of the later. Now in any such
sense as this we shall stoutly maintain that, from the
beginning, the Church held dogmatic truths not implicitly,
but explicitly and positively. They who baptized into the
threefold Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Ghost ; whose blessing was ' The grace of the Lord
Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of
the Holy Ghost ; ' who, living in the Spirit, lived in Christ ;
whose highest worship was the Communion of the Body and
the Blood of Christ, and whose perfectness of life was Christ ;
they, so living and worshipping, did not hold the Godhead of
Jesus Christ implicitly ; they did not hold something out of
which the doctrine of the Trinity might come to be unfolded.
On the other hand, you may use the same contrast of words,
meaning merely that you have, through cross-questioning or
otherwise, obtained a power which you did not possess, of
defining, in thought and in words, the limits of your belief,
and distinguishing it precisely from whatever does not belong
to it. You hold still what you always meant to hold. You
say still what you always meant to say. But it is your
intellectual mastery over your own meaning which is altered.
Like a person fresh from the encounter of a keen cross-exami-
nation, you are furnished now, as you were not before, with
distinctions and comparisons, with definitions and measure-
ments,— in a word, with all that intellectual equipment, that
furniture of alert perception and exact language, by which you
are able to realize for yourself, as well as to define to others,
what that meaning exactly is, and what it is not, which itself
was before, as truly as it is now, the very thing that you
meant.
In this sense, no doubt, the definitions of councils did make
Christian consciousness more explicit in relation to positive
truth. They acquired, indeed, no new truth. Primarily they
were rather, on this side or on that, a blocking off of such
false forms of thought or avenues of unbalanced inference, as
forced themselves forward, one by one, amidst the intellectual
240 The Religion of the Incarnation.
efforts of the time, to challenge the acceptance of Christian
people. Primarily they are not the Church saying ' yes ' to
fresh truths, or developments, or forms of consciousness ; but
rather saying ' no ' to untrue and misleading modes of shaping
and stating her truth. Only indirectly, in that effort, the
Church acquires through them a new definiteness of mastery
for the intellect in reference to the exactness of her own
meaning.
It is comparatively easy for those who are convinced of a
truth to struggle against its open contradiction. But false
modes of stating their truth, and unbalanced inferences from
their truth, are often staggering to minds which would be
unperplexed by any less insidious form of error. It may be
that, in all ages of the Church, even those who are born and
o
bred in undoubting faith in the Person of Jesus, have to pass,
more or less explicitly, through their own experience of
hesitation and exaggeration, of reaction and counter-reaction,
before they are quite in a position to define, or maintain by
argument in the face of insidious alternatives, the exact pro-
portion of their own Catholic belief.
Not unsuggestively, indeed, nor indirectly, do the oscilla-
tions of the public consciousness in the era of the councils, as
to the due expression of Catholic belief, reproduce on a larger
scale, and therefore with more magnified clumsiness, the
alternating exaggerations of such a single struggling mind.
The natural thought begins, as a matter of course, as Apostles
had begun of old, with the perfect and obvious certainty that
Jesus was a man. Then comes the mighty crisis to natural
thought. With infinite heavings and stragglings, and every
conceivable expedient of evasion, it strains to avoid the im-
mense conclusion which challenges it, catching eagerly at
< -very refinement, if so be it may be possible to stop short of
full acceptance of a truth so staggering (when it comes to
be measured intellectually) as that the Man Jesus was
Himself the Eternal God. Now however grossly unjust it
might be to think of Arianism as if it ever meant, or
held, Jesus Christ to be merely a man ; yet it is true that
in respect of the one great question which is at the root
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 241
of Christian faith, — is He God, or is He not?— it stands
as offering alternatives and expedients, by which the plain
answer ' yes ' may be avoided ; by which therefore the
answer ' no ' is in effect maintained ; for between ' God ' and
'not God' the distinction cannot be bridged. This, then,
is the real hinge-point of the Catholic faith. But when this,
the greatest of all battles of belief, is won at last, in spite of
every variety of Arian and semi-Arian refining ; forthwith the
undisciplined mind, always ready to exaggerate, always difficult
of balance, begins so to run into ardour of expression of its
truth, as in effect to make unreal the other half of the doc-
trine of the Incarnation. The first great wonder once grasped,
it is so natural, in fervour of insistance on the very Godhead,
to forget or deny the simple completeness of the very Man-
hood! It seems so hard, — almost wanting in reverence, —
still to conceive of Him then as perfectly human, — human
body and human soul ! What more obvious reaction in the
mind of any pupil not yet perfectly steadied and balanced ?
Yet these few short sentences represent not untruly the real
process of education, painfully accomplished by those intel-
lectual struggles which culminated in the councils of Nicaea
and Constantinople, in 325 and 381 respectively. And when
the pupil is steadied from this second excess, and the Godhead
and the Manhood are both grasped, each severally, each com-
pletely, there follows again a perfectly natural result in a
new uncertainty about the union of the two in Jesus. Ao-ain
. 9
it seems an instinct of reverence which shrinks from the truth.
For the Manhood, it is urged, though complete, body, soul,
and spirit, must yet remain, in Him, a thing separable and
separate from His own original Divine personality. But
if the human nature was not verily His own nature, if it was
animated by any consciousness which was not absolutely His
own consciousness, the consciousness of His one undivided
personality, — what or whence in Him was this other than
His own individual consciousness ? Is it so, then, the mind
begins necessarily to ask itself, that the mystery of the Incar-
nate Life was the mystery of a double consciousness, a double
personality 1 two distinguishable existences, two selves, two
B
242 The Religion of the Incarnation.
identities, side by side, harmonious, allied, yet nowhere really
meeting in any one underlying principle of unity ? It was
necessary that the doubt should be raised, that its meaning
and results might be measured. But it is this which becomes
the Nestorianism against which the council of Ephesus in 431
set the seal of Catholic belief. Once more, the natural re-
action from Nestorianism, when the believer is keenly alert
against its danger, is so to insist upon the indivisible Per-
sonal unity, as to shrink from the admission of any distin-
guishableness in Him, actual or possible, between the two
natures or characters which He united, between the human
and the Divine elements in His one consciousness. But this
is either once more to curtail the true completeness of the
human nature, or to fuse it with the Divine into some new
thing not truly identical with either. And this is the Mono-
physitism of 451, the subject-matter of the fourth great general
council at Chalcedon.
It is said, indeed, that the ages of councils were uncritical
ages ; and that their decisions are therefore not to be accepted
as authoritative on questions of minute theological criticism,
for which their uncritical spirit made them specially unfit.
The assertion is perhaps a little beside the mark. You have
not to plead that they were likely to be uncritical, but to
shew that they were in fact wrong. It is clear that they
were not specially unfit either to arrive at a definiteness of
meaning, or to express what they meant. They were sure
what they meant ; and have expressed it with perfect clear-
ness. The question is not how critical they were likely to be,
but whether their meaning — which is clear — is right or wrong.
Whatever antecedent probability there may be either in the
minds of nineteenth century critics against their correct-
ness, or in the minds of Churchmen accustomed to defer to
them in favour of it ; it is certain that no one who is really
doubtful about the truth of Christianity, will be called upon
to accept it in deference to the mere authority of the Councils.
However much more they may be to ourselves, to such an one
as this they must stand at least as witnesses of what the con-
sciousness of the Christian community set its seal to, in the
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 243
way of interpretation of its own original deposit of belief.
We do not much care to argue whether they belonged to an
age of criticism or not. Yet we must needs be ready to listen
to anyone who can prove that their determinations were wrong.
Councils, we admit, and Creeds, cannot go behind, but must
wholly rest upon the history of our Lord Jesus Christ. If
anyone could seriously convict the Creeds of being unscrip-
tural, we must listen to him and bow, — as scientific men
would have to bow to anyone who really could prove the
fundamental propositions of their science to be wrong. But
meanwhile, so complete is the historical acceptance of the
Creeds, and their consecration in the consciousness of the
Church ; that there is at least as clear a presumption that we
are uncatholic in differing from them, as there would be that
we were unscientific if we dissented from the most universally
accepted faiths of science.
Now even this, the most commonplace statement of the
growth of Christian definitions, will serve to mark what the
nature of dogma is. So far from faith without it being a
thing more spiritual or pure, faith without it is a thing ir-
rational. Faith in what ? I cannot have faith without an
object. Faith in Jesus Christ1? But who is Jesus Christ1?
Is He a dead man ? Is He, as a dead man, no longer in any
existence ? Or am I, at least, necessarily ignorant as to
whether He and other dead men have any existence, actual
or probable ? Or is He a man indeed, — no more ; and dead
indeed ; but, as other good men, alive after death somehow in
the blessedness of God ? And what then did His life mean ?
or His strange deliberate dying? or what connection have
they of meaning or power with me ? And this God that you
speak of; do I know anything of Him? or what? or how?
Or again, is Jesus Himself the living God? And are the
things true which are handed down to me in the Church as
taught by Himself about the relations of God ? Is He my
living Master ; my very Kedeemer by the Cross ; my eternal
Judge? and where and how have I contact in life or soul
with the benefits of His Cross, or the power of His help ? If
indeed I have nothing to do with Him, and no interest in His
B 2
244 The Religion of the Incarnation.
history, it is possible for me to go on without caring to answer
such questions. But faith in Him can have no meaning
while these are ignored. The question whether He is or is
not God, is one which cannot but be asked and answered.
And either answer to the question is alike dogmatic. The
Arian is no less dogmatic than the Catholic. A dogmatic
faith is only a definite faith ; and that upon questions upon
which it has become irrational to remain indefinite, after
I have once been brought to a certain point of acquaintance
with them. The question between the Catholic and the
Arian is, not whose doctrine evades definiteness of determi-
nation, but whose dogma is in accord with the truth and
its evidence. The negative answer to the question proposed
would only be unjudicial, not undogmatic. Meanwhile, the
affirmative answer would be so complete a concession of the
whole position, that if it has once been made, as much has
really been admitted, so far as any battle about dogma goes,
as if the whole formal statement of the Athanasian Creed
had been expressly, as it will have been implicitly, included.
There is nothing, then, really to fight against in these words,
' The rio-ht faith is, that we believe and confess that our
O
Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man ; God,
of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds:
and Man, of the substance of His mother, born in the world ;
perfect God, and perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and
human flesh subsisting; equal to the Father, as touching
His Godhead ; and inferior to the Father, as touching His
Manhood. Who although He be God and Man : yet He is
not two, but one Christ ; One ; not by conversion of the
Godhead into flesh ; but by taking of the Manhood into God ;
One altogether ; not by confusion of substance, but by unity
of Person.'
Another thing which perhaps the same commonplace state-
ment may illustrate as to the character of Christian dogma,
is its largeness and equity. It is harmony ; it is proportion ;
it is the protest of balanced completeness against all that
partiality, which, by exaggerating something that is true,
distorts the proportion and simplicity of truth. Every several
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 245
form of error, — we admit it willingly, — grew out of, and re-
presented, a truth. Catholic doctrine alone preserves the
proportion of truth. To work and to think within the lines
of dogmatic faith, is to work and to think upon the true
and harmonious conception of the Person of Jesus Christ —
' Quern nosse vivere, Cui servire regnare.' In this knowledge
certainly there is no limitedness, and in this subordination
no slavery.
The meaning of Christian dogma, then, so far as we have
at present had anything to do with it, is simply this. It is
the self-realizing of the consciousness of the Christian com-
munity in respect of the answer to be given to that one
great question, fundamental and inevitable, with which all
in all times who would approach Christ must be met, —
' Whom say ye that I am 1 '
But, it will be felt, it is all very well to insist so much
upon this one point, which it is comparatively easy to repre-
sent as the necessary answer of a truthful conscience to a
question which is forced upon it by the plainest evidence ; —
but are there not a great many Christian doctrines besides1?
What of the rest of them, — 'all the articles of the Christian
faith,' as the Catechism says ? I have ventured to speak at
length upon this one, not because it is easier to handle con-
veniently than the others, but because it directly carries, if
it does not contain, everything. It is not only that this is
in itself so tremendous a dogma, that no one who affirms this
can possibly quarrel any longer with the principle of dogmatic
definition, but that this so inevitably involves all the other
propositions of the Creed, that no one, whose conscience has
accepted this, will find it easy to separate between it and
the whole Christian faith.
The Christian Creed consists of three parts only ; and all
three are, ' Belief in God.' ' I believe in God, the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Ghost ' is. in brief, the whole Christian
Creed. Its shortest expression is in three words (which three
words are but one), ' Holy, Holy, Holy.' The definitions of
the Apostles', of the Nicene, and of the Athanasian Creeds,
none of them really travel outside of this. Take, for example,
246 The Religion of the Incarnation.
the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Intellectually it is, of
course, antecedent to the doctrine of the Incarnation and the
Atonement. But it will be observed that it is made known
to us not antecedently, but as a consequence of our previous
conviction of the Incarnation. Moreover, when it is made
known, it is made known rather incidentally than directly.
Even though it is, when revealed and apprehended, the in-
clusive sum of our faith, yet there is, in the revelation, no
formal unfolding of it, as of a mysterious truth set to chal-
lenge our express contemplation and worship. There is
nothing here to be found in the least corresponding with the
explicit challenge, ' Whom say ye that I am ? ' or ' On this
rock will I build My Church ; ' but rather indirectly, so far
as our contemplation of the Incarnation, and its abiding con-
sequences, requires for its own necessary interpretation to our
understanding, that we should have some insight into the
mystery of the distinction of Persons in the Godhead, so far,
and in reference to that purpose, the mystery of the Holy
Trinity grows gradually into clearness of revelation to our
consciousness. It is clear that any distinctness of conception
whatever as to the meaning of Incarnation would be im-
possible, without some revelation of mutual relations between
the Sender and the Sent, the Immutable and the Incarnate,
the Father and the Son. If it is less clear from the first, it
is surely not less certain, that any conception we may have
of the relation so revealed between the Father and the Son,
would be fainter by far, and less intelligible than it is, if it
were not for that which our Lord Jesus Christ has told us
as to the office and nature of the Holy Spirit ; if with our
growing conception of distinctness and relation as between
the Sender and the Sent, we had not also some added con-
ception of that Blessed Spirit of Holiness, Who, emanating
from both, is the Spirit of both alike, and is thereby also the
very bond of perfectness of Love whereby both are united in
One ; and whereby, further, all spirits in whom God's presence
dwells, are united, so far, in a real oneness of spirit with one
another and with God. And it is quite certain, that whether
we seem to anyone to be right or no in treating this reve-
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. ,247
lation of the Holy Ghost as a necessary, if incidental, part of
what we had need to be taught of the revelation of the
Father and the Son, in order to make Incarnation properly
intelligible ; it is altogether essential for that other purpose,
in connection with which the revelation is more immediately
made, that is, for any understanding on our part of the abiding
work of God in His Church, after the Resurrection and Ascen-
sion. ' The holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints,
the Forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and
the life everlasting ; ' these are not miscellaneous items thrown
in at the end of the Creed after the doctrine of the Holy
Trinity is finished, but they are essential parts of the under-
standing of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost : and on the other
hand, without the revelation of the Person and work of the
Holy Ghost, these doctrines, practical though they be, and
vital for practice, — no less indeed than the very essence and
meaning of the work of the Incarnation from the day of
Ascension forwards, that is to say the whole historical effect
and fruit of the Incarnation, — would be evacuated of all living
meaning, and would become for us only the empty phrases
of a far-away baseless yearning, which even now (apart from
the life of the Holy Spirit informing us) they are ever too
ready to become.
It is hoped that even such brief statements may at least
serve to indicate how it is true that the whole of our Chris-
tian creed, even those parts which seem most separable from
it, or antecedent to it, are for us really contained in the one
crucial doctrine of the Incarnation, that is, of the eternal
Godhead of the Man Christ Jesus. And this will compel us
once more to recognise the simplicity of Christian dogma.
It does not mean a complicated system of arbitrary definitions
upon a great variety of subjects of religious speculation, for-
mulated one after another by human ingenuity, and imposed
by human despotism upon the consciences of the unthinking
or the submissive ; it means rather the simple expression
(guarded according to experience of misconception) of the
fundamental fact of the Incarnation, together with such reve-
lation as to the relations of the Divine Being, and the wonder
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
248 The Religion of the Incarnation.
of His work amongst men, as is clearly lit up by the event
of the Incarnation itself, and is required for such apprehen-
sion of the meaning and effects of the Incarnation, as Jesus
Christ held to be meet and necessary for us.
And so it is with all parts of Christian doctrine. If they
would be found to be necessarily contained in a full un-
folding of the great truth which the Creed so briefly and
simply declares, then they really are parts of our faith,
because they are really involved in the understanding of
the threefold revelation to man of the Name of God, which
is the sum total of our faith. But if the Name of our God
does not contain them, they are not in our creed or our faith.
Is there, for example, a visible Church ? Is there an Apostolic
Ministry ? The answer depends on the inquiry as to what
is revealed, first in Scripture, and then in history, as to the
method of the working of the Spirit of Christ in the world.
Did the Old Testament prefigure, in action and in utterance,
did the Incarnation require, did the Gospels interpret or com-
ment upon, did the Apostles organize or govern, any definitely
articulated society, with ceremonies or officers, rules or dis-
cipline, of its own 1 Was this, the method of association and
membership, or was some other, the mode of the working of
the Spirit of the Christ among men ? Is the work of Christ,
in redeeming and reconciling to God, is His present relation
to the world, properly intelligible, or not,— apart from the
Church 1 Is the ministry of the Church, or are the sacraments
of the Church, to those who thoughtfully read Scripture and
history, a demonstrable part, or normal condition, of the
working of the Holy Ghost in the Church ? If so, belief in them
is contained in my words, not only when I say, ' I believe in
the holy Catholic Church,' but also, though less plainly, when
I say, ' I believe in the Holy Ghost.' But if not, it is not
contained. If they are really separable from the Catholic
Church, truly understood, or from the understanding of the
Holy Spirit and His work, then they are no part of what
any Christian need believe. But so far as the holy Catholic
Church,— so far as the orderly, covenanted work of the Holy
Spirit in the world,— involves and contains the idea of the
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 249
ministry or the sacraments, so far every Christian will know,
just in proportion as he knows the true meaning of his creed,
that he is bound to them. It is no part of my business to
pursue the question of the sacraments or the ministry further
here.
It may be observed, perhaps, that the Creed contains no
proposition expressly about ourselves, — about the fall, for
instance, or about sin. Yet in and from the first word of the
Creed, I of course am present there : and as to formal propo-
sitions about myself, it may be that they are not so much
articles of belief, as, rather, conditions of mind antecedent to
belief, conditions of self-consciousness to which belief fits and
responds, and without which the Creed itself would be un-
intelligible. But what is thus necessarily implied and in-
volved in the terms of the Creed, is after all substantially
contained in that Creed to which it is a condition of intelligible-
ness. Of course my creed necessarily presupposes myself. I
cannot believe at all, except I am, and have a certain history
and faculties. I cannot believe in God as Father, as Almighty,
as Creator, without implying and including within that
belief the fundamental facts of my nature and relation to
Him. I cannot believe in the Incarnation and the Redemp-
tion, their meaning or their consequences, I cannot believe
in the Holy Spirit, or have any intelligent apprehension of
His working, except there be implied, as conditions of my
consciousness necessary to that intelligence, some apprehen-
sion of that which is meant by the fall, some inalienable sense
of evil, of sin, of the banishment from God which is the fruit
of sin, of the inherent contradiction to my nature, the un-
natural penalty and horror, which the banishment of sin
involves. So probation, judgment, heaven, hell, are beliefs
which grow by inevitable consequence out of the apprehen-
sion, once grasped, of the nature and distinction of good and
evil ; they are necessary corollaries from the full perception of
the eternal Tightness of right, the eternal wrongness of wrong,
the eternal separation and contrast between right and wrong ;
in a word, from belief in God on the part of man.
, Perhaps this illustration may serve to shew how much,
250 The Religion of the Incarnation.
that is not obvious in the letter, may nevertheless be really
contained in man's utterance of the Name of God.
III. But while the doctrines of the Church which her Creeds
express are thus as simple as they are profound, it is
no doubt true that there has grown up round about them
a considerable body of theological teaching, more or less com-
plicated, which is really of the nature of comment upon them,
or explication of their nature and meaning. When we speak
of the dogmas of Christianity, it is right to distinguish, with
the clearest possible line of demarcation, between all this
mass of explanatory teaching (more or less authoritative as it
may from time to time appear to be) and the central truths
themselves, which are our real certainties. The doctrine itself
is one thing : the theories explicative of the doctrine are
another. They may be of the highest value in their own
time and place ; but they are not the immutable principles of
Church truth. To say this is not really to depreciate the work
of theological writers and teachers of different ages ; but it is
to assign to their work its true position. The current mode
of explaining a doctrine in one age, and bringing it home by
illustrations to the imagination of men, may be discredited
and superseded in another. When the current mode of state-
ment or illustration begins to be more or less discredited, the
minds of quiet people are apt to be distressed. This is
because very few of us can distinguish between the truths
themselves which we hold, and the (often mistaken) modes of
expression by which we seem to explain our truths to our-
selves. Even when our explanation is substantially true, the
doctrine is still a different thing from our explanation of it ;
and if any imperfection is detected in our explanation of it, it
is not truth which suffers ; it is only that truth is being dis-
tinguished from our imperfect and unconscious glosses ; and
thereby in the end the truth can only be served. Perhaps no
illustration of this can be more convincing than that which
the history of the doctrine of Atonement supplies. That
Christ died upon the cross for us, that He offered Himself as
a sacrifice, and that we are redeemed through His blood, this
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 251
is a belief fundamental to Christianity; nor has the Church
ever wavered for an instant in her strong faith in this. But
when we go further, and come to the different illustrations
that have been given to make the precise nature of Atonement
clear to human logic, when in fact we enter upon the domain
of explicative theories, we have not only left the sure ground
of the Creeds, and embarked upon views which may or may
not be correct, but we find, as a fact, that the modes of
thought which seemed adequately to explain the doctrine to
the conscience of some ages, have not only failed to satisfy,
but have actually shocked and offended, others. The teaching
that God was angry, but that Jesus, as a result of gentler
mercy, and through His innocent blood, appeased, by satisfy-
ing, the wrath of the Father, and so reconciled God to us ;
the teaching that Satan had obtained a right over man, but
that Jesus, by giving up Himself, paid a splendid ransom
into the hands of Satan ; the teaching that a debt was due
from humanity to God, and that Jesus, clothed as man, alone
could deliver man by discharging God's debt : these — be they
popular blunderings, or genuine efforts of Theology — may,
in their times, have both helped and wounded consciences;
but whether they be to us as helps or hindrances, it is of
the utmost importance that we should discriminate them,
or others which may have succeeded to them as theories ex-
planatory of the Atonement, from our cardinal belief in the
Atonement itself. We may have rightly seen what is vicious
in these statements, and we may have greatly improved upon
them, but however much more helpful our modes of exposi-
tion may prove themselves to our own minds or those of our
hearers, we may only be repeating the old error, and leading
the way to fresh distresses in the future, if we confound our
mode of explanatory comment with the truth of the doctrine
itself, and claim that the mysterious fact of the Atonement
means exactly that which is our own best approach to a
statement, in illustrative words, of what it expresses to us.
But it may be asked, Are you not saying too much?
Does not this seem to mean that the doctrines themselves
are little better than unintelligible symbols, which need not
252 The Religion of the Incarnation.
indeed be changed for the simple reason that they can be
made to mean whatever is necessary to suit the times ? No,
the truth of them does not change ; and even the changeful
modes of presenting them are less changeful, after all, than
they seem. They cannot indefinitely vary ; there is one
thing which unites them all, and that is the truth itself which
lies behind them all. The Atonement is a fact, whether I
can adequately expound it or no. The Atonement is a fact,
which my attempted expositions do indeed represent, more or
less correctly, more or less clumsily, even when I seem most
to have failed. Much as they may seem to differ, and in-
consistent as they may appear with each other, yet not one
of them really represents untruth but truth. Imperfect
images they may be, and in respect of their imperfections,
diverse and distorting ; yet there is not one of the theories of
Atonement referred to above— not even such as are now seen to
contain most error — which did not, as seriously held, represent
and convey some real image of the truth. It may be that
the truth which they represented was conveyed in an inexact
way ; and that afterwards, when attention was concentrated
on the points of inexactness, the statement became, and
would have become, more and more misleading; it was no
longer then a possible vehicle of truth ; but what it had
really conveyed to those to whom it was living, was a real
soul-enlightening image of the truth of the Atonement. It
was an imperfect image ; it was even in part a distorted
image, — as everything that I see through my window is in
part distorted. But it was a real image of the real truth
none the less.
Local and popular modes of exposition then are often
as the medium through which dogmatic truth is seen and
apprehended, — not always, certainly, without distortion.
But the more catholic the truth, the more it retains its
identity of form, however remote from each other, in place
or time, the diverse types of mind which view and teach it,
so much the purer must it be from accidental or temporary
conditionings ; so much the nearer, in rank, to a fundamental
doctrine of the Catholic Church.
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 253
We do not, of course, distinguish Catholic dogma from
theological literature, as though the one were bare facts, and
the other all explanations of the facts. But we may rightly
confine the use of the word ' dogma ' to the fundamental facts,
together with such explanation of them as the Church has
agreed, by universal instinct, or by dogmatic decree en-
dorsed through ecumenical acceptance, to be essential to a
reasonable apprehension of the facts.
It is the more important to guard with unfaltering clearness
this distinction between dogma on the one hand, and theo-
logical literature on the other, because it is, no doubt, in the
sphere of explanatory theories and expressions, that most of
those controversies find their place, which distress quiet minds,
and rouse hot battles of orthodoxy between sincere Christian
combatants. If it could be recognised at the time how far the
apparent innovators of successive generations were really ques-
tioning not the doctrines themselves, but certain traditional
modes of thought and teaching which have wrongly ad-
hered to the doctrines, there would be fewer accusations of
heterodoxy, and less distress and perplexity amongst the
orthodox. But it is natural enough that this should not be
perceived by the defenders, when the innovators themselves
are so often both blind and indifferent to it. And it is just
herein that the different innovators are apt to make them-
selves indefensible. Too often they think that they are
making real advance upon the doctrines of the Church and
her Creeds, and they are elated, instead of being ashamed, at
the thought. They make light of loyalty, they despise the
birthright of their Churchmanship, and find their own self-
exaltation in the very consciousness of offending their
brethren. This, whether done under provocation or no, is to
depart from the spirit of the Church of Christ, in temper and
meaning at least. — even though their work in the long run
should prove (as it must so far as there is truth in it) only to
serve the interest and work of the Church.
It is easier to see this in retrospect than in struggle. But
perhaps those who look back upon the struggles of the last
generation within the Church, will recognise that the orthodox
254 The Religion of the Incarnation.
thought of the present day has been not a little cleared and
served, not merely by the work of orthodox defence, but in no
small part by the work of the ' liberalizers ' also. To say
this, is by no means necessarily to acquit the liberalizers, or to
cast a slur upon those who fought against them. Such con-
demnations or acquittals depend upon other considerations,
which do not concern us here. But putting wholly aside as
irrelevant all condemnation or acquittal of individuals, we
may yet acknowledge that the work done has in the end
served the cause of the truth and the Church. This is
said, of course, of its real intellectual outcome ; certainly
not of the unsettling of souls by the way. And it is
also to be noted that even when the fruit of their work has
been in a real sense, after all, accepted and incorporated, it is
hardly ever in the sense, and never quite with the results,
which they, so far as they had allowed themselves to be mal-
contents, had supposed. But if whatever is good and true in
their work becomes, after all, an element in the conscious-
ness of the Church, might not the work itself have been
done, all along, in perfect Church loyalty ? In so far as
different earnest writers of a generation ago, or of to-day,
are really, whether consciously or not, making a contribution
to one of the great theological tasks of our time, in so far (that
is) as they are helping towards the correction of erroneous
fancies of popular theology, — helping, for instance, to modify
that superstitious over-statement about 'justification' which
would really leave no meaning in ' righteousness ; ' or to limit
the grossness of the theory often represented by the word
' imputation ; ' or to rebuke the nervous selfishness of reli-
gionists whose one idea of the meaning of religion was ' to be
saved ;' or to qualify the materialism or superstition of ignorant
sacramentalists ; or to banish dogmatic realisms about hell, or
explications of atonement which malign God's Fatherhood ;
or the freezing chill and paralysis of all life supposed before
now to be necessarily involved in the Apostolic words 'pre-
destination' and 'election;' so far they are really, though it
may be from the outside and very indirectly, doing the work
of the Church. But the pity of it is that the men who do
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 255
this kind of service are so apt to spoil it, by overvaluing
themselves and forgetting the loveliness and the power of
perfect subordination to the Church. We may own that Church
people and Church rulers have too often been the stumbling-
block. It is they who again and again have seemed to fight
against everything, and by intellectual apathy, and stern moral
proscription of every form of mental difficulty (wherein often-
times are the birth-throes of enlightenment) to drive living
and growing intelligence out of the Church. It is true that
o o o
the greatest of Churchmen would, if the badge of their work
were submissiveness, have sometimes to wait awhile, and bear
delay, and wrong from inferior minds, with the patience of
humility. Yes ; but that work of theirs, if it once were
stamped with this seal of patient submissiveness, would be a
glory to the Church for ever, like the work of her quiet
confessors, the work of a Scupoli, a Ken, or a Fenelon ;
instead of being, as it more often seems to be, a great
offending and perplexing of thousands of the very consciences
which deserve to be treated most tenderly, and therefore also
a wrong and a loss to the conscience and character of the
writer.
Are statements like these a concession to the antidogmatist ?
If so, they are one to which, in the name of truth, he is
heartily welcome. And perhaps, under the same high sanc-
tion we may add what will look, to some minds, like another.
We claimed some time since that the Creed must be, to
Christians, rather a complete and conclusive than a partial or
a tentative statement of truth. Yet there is one sense in
which we may own that even the definitions of the Creeds may
themselves be called relative and temporary. For we must
not claim for phrases of earthly coinage a more than earthly
and relative completeness. The Creeds are temporary, in that
they are a complete and sufficient statement of truth only
for time. And therefore they are only quite perfectly adequate
to express those truths which have their place in time. But
we, in respect of truths which transcend time, if we cannot
as yet be freed from the trammels and limits of earthly
thought and expression, yet can recognise at least the fact,
256 The Religion of the Incarnation.
that we are, even in our Creeds, still labouring within those
trammels. We may have ground for believing the Creeds of
the Church to be the most perfectly balanced and harmonious
expression of the truth whereof our earthly knowledge is, or
will be, capable. Yet when we struggle, as in the lano-uao-e
OO O O
of the Athanasian Creed, to express the relations which
have been exhibited to us in the eternal Godhead through
the use of the words ' Person ' and ' Substance,' or imoirraa-ts
and owlet ; or when we thus profess our belief in the Person
of the Holy Ghost, ' The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of
the Son : neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but pro-
ceeding,' need we fear to own that the instruments which,
perforce, we make use of upon earth, even in the Creeds of
the Church, are necessarily imperfect instruments ; the power
of conception imperfect; the power of phrase and imagery
imperfect also ; and that their sufficiency of truth (though
not their correctness meanwhile) is so far temporary that it
is limited to earth and to time ; and that, in the perfect light
and knowledge of the presence of God, the perfectest know-
ledge represented by them will be superseded and absorbed,
while the glosses and materialisms with which, in various
ways, we may have been unconsciously clothing them to our
own imaginations, will be — not superseded only but corrected,
and, it may be, reproved ? Moreover, if the truths represented
in the Creeds are wider and deeper than our conceptions of
them, we can admit that there may possibly be particulars
in which, even now, the experience of spiritual life may
deepen and enlarge the meaning, to us, of our Creeds ; as, for
instance, the words heaven and hell may present to us ideas
differing, in the direction of more correctness, from those
which they presented to some of our forefathers. It is not
that the Creeds will be some day corrected. It is not
that we shall see hereafter how false they were, but how
far the best conceptions which they opened to us, — the
best, that is, that our earthly faculties were capable
of, lagged in their clumsiness behind the perfect apprehen-
sion of the truths which they had, nevertheless, not untruly
represented ; but which we then shall have power to see and
vi. The Incarnation . as the basis of Dogma. 257
know as they are. The truth which is dimly imaged for us
in the Creeds, will never belie, but will infinitely transcend,
what their words represented on earth.
But it will very naturally be asked by what right we speak
thus of the Creeds. In the very moment of admitting, in
one sense, their incompleteness and want of finality, by what
right do we lay down still that they are final and complete
to the end of time ; that is, perhaps, through ages of human
advance, of which we may have now no conception at all ?
Such a question does not apply to the strictly historical state-
ments which constitute the foundation of our creed, but to
those interpretations of historical fact, and to those assertions
about the Divine Being and its relations, which necessarily
transcend time and experience. And after all, perhaps, the
answer is not difficult. We have to consider, first, that for
the very reason that these beliefs do absolutely transcend
time and experience, therefore no human development which
belongs merely to time and experience, can, in itself, displace
or improve upon them ; and secondly, that our knowledge
of these truths is really derived from a Divine revelation,
which took place, as we believe, within time and experience.
We may say, indeed, that the statements of this Divine reve-
lation are corroborated to us, by such elements of thought as
our reason (which we believe to be also in its reality Divine)
is able to supply. It remains, however, that they can only
really be proved or disproved, by arguments which go to
prove or disprove the truth of the historical Incarnation, and
of the revelations which it contains.
It follows from hence that we have a valid right to hold
them not only true, but final in their statement of truth for
this present world, exactly so far as we have a right to
believe that our historical revelation is, for time, a final
one. Should there, indeed, be a wholly fresh revelation, the
amount of truth hitherto revealed might be superseded ; but
nothing short of a revelation can supersede it. The idea that
any advance of human reason could be inconsistent with it,
involves for the Christian who believes human reason to be
divinely reflected and divinely implanted, nothing less than
8
258 The Religion of the Incarnation.
an unthinkable contradiction. We may therefore believe it
in any case to be final, till the coming of a further revelation :
and so far as there is anything in the truth already revealed
to us, which may warrant us in feeling confident that
there is no fresh revelation in store, within the limits of
time, by which the revelation of Jesus Christ will be super-
seded, just so far and no further are we justified in claim-
ing for those clauses in the Creed, whose subject-matter
transcends time and experience, that they are the com-
pletest expressions of their truths which can be reached in
time.
IV. It may, perhaps, be a matter of prudence to refer for a
moment to what are called the ' damnatory clauses ' of the
Athanasian Creed ; though it would not be necessary to do
so for the purpose of any positive statement or explanation
of Christian doctrine. These clauses, however, to the positive
statement add a negative. It is easy to misunderstand them,
and even, by misrepresenting, to make them appear gro-
tesque. But if the question be as to what they really mean,
they are, after all, to the Christian, an obvious and necessary
corollary of the Creed which is his life. There is but One
God, and One Heaven, and One Salvation ; not a choice of alter-
native salvations, or heavens, or gods. There is One Incar-
nation, One Cross, One Divine restoring and exalting of
humanity. There is One Spirit of God, One Church — the
fabric and the method of the working of the Spirit, — One
Spiritual Covenant with man. Man must have part in this
One, or he has part in none ; for there is no other. Man must
have knowledge of this One, belief in this One ; or there is
none for him to believe in or to know. God's covenant is
with His Church on earth ; and the statements of the Creed
are the representation in words of that knowledge of the
truth which the Church possesses, the possession of which is
her life. The Athanasian Creed is not addressed to outsiders,
but to those who are within the Church. For encouragement,
or (if necessary) for warning, it insists to them on the uniqueness
of their faith. To have hold on God is to have hold on Life.
To revolt from God is to revolt from Life. This is so, to
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 259
those who have or ought to have learnt that it is so, both in
fact and in thought. Thus, in fact, to drop out of communion
with the Incarnation of Christ, is to drop out of communion
with the inner realities and possibilities of humanity. But
the mind, and its convictions and meanings, cannot wholly be
separated from the facts of the life. There comes, at least in
most lives, a time when the man's own allegiance to the facts
is a necessary condition of his identification with them. ' If
ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.'
There comes a point at which the mind's refusal of the doc-
trines of religion is the man's revolt from the facts ; and such
a revolt is repudiation of the One revelation of God, the One
Incarnation, the One Salvation, the One Church or Covenant.
This must be broadly true, true in the abstract, as principle,
unless truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are fundamentally
false distinctions, and every man is to be equally good, and
equally compelled to heaven. At what point any individual
p:vson, or class of persons, does, or does not, in the sight of
the Judge who knows the whole inward history, and tries
the most secret motive, fall within the scope of this principle,
and incur the final condemnation of rebellion against the one
light and hope of all humanity, is another question altogether.
Any such application of the principle to the case of individuals
belongs only to God the Judge, and would be an arrogant im-
piety in any man. Even when such a question may have to
be determined ecclesiastically, the ecclesiastical condemnation
and sentence, though expressly representing in shadow the
eternal sentence, is none the less quite distinct, and indeed
in its ultimate motive even contrasted with it. But however
unchristian it may be to say that A or B will perish ever-
lastingly, the principle nevertheless is true, that the truth
which the Creed embodies, the truth of which Christ's In-
carnation is the pivot and centre, is the only deliverance from
everlasting perishing ; and that whole-hearted union and
communion with this truth, is that true state of Church life
which alone has the certain seal of the covenant of God.
This broad truth it is, the necessary complement of any hold-
ing of the Christian creed as true, which these clauses affirm.
s 2,
260 The Religion of the Incarnation.
If it be said, ' your Athanasian Creed is simple and tren-
chant ; it has no qualifications such as you admit ' ; our reply
would be threefold. First, the Creed is part of our heritage
from the past, and its phraseology is not our handiwork ;
but we know that the necessary qualifications with which
we understand its phraseology have been generally recognised
by the Church from which we inherit it. Secondly, the
Quicunque vult is, strictly, not so much a creed as a canticle ;
it has never been used as a test of Church communion ; and
it speaks, on a point like this, as the Te Deum would speak,
in the language not of judicial award but of devotional
loyalty. Thirdly, the qualifications with which we say that
any generalisation about man's responsibility for belief,
whether in this ' canticle ' or in scripture, must necessarily
be understood, are only such as all men apply to any similar
generalisation about responsibility for conduct. ' If ye be-
lieve not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins,' is paralleled
by ' They which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom
of God.' We claim only to interpret the one as rationally as
all men understand the other.
It has seemed to be desirable, while insisting upon the
claims of dogma, not indeed in the name of allegiance to
imposed authority, but in the name of truth, and on the ground
of its simple identity with truth, to try to state, with the utmost
possible plainness, whatever could be truly admitted in the
way of apparent qualification of those claims. Truth is
supreme, and eternal ; and dogma, so far as it coincides with
truth, is, of course, all that truth is. For the dogmatic posi-
tion of the Church and her Creeds, we claim that it is the
true and simple expression upon earth of the highest truth
that is, or can be, known. But dogmatic theologians are not
infallible, and so far as the name of dogma has been claimed
for mistaken presumption or misleading statement of truth,
so far may dogma have seemed to fight against truth. The
words, indeed, 'dogmatic' and ' dogmatism' have acquired a bad
reputation. But this is not the fault of dogma. A dogmatist,
in the invidious sense of the word, does not mean one who
studies dogma, but rather one who foolishly utters what are
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 261
not dogmas as if they were. The dogmatic temper is the
temper of one who is imperiously confident that he is right
when he is not. That is to say, the words dogma, dogmatic,
dogmatize, etc., are commonly used of something which is the
mere abuse and travesty of 'their proper meaning. It is hard
that dogma itself should be prejudiced by this caricaturing
misuse of its name.
Meanwhile, if real charges be brought against any part of
our dogmatic creed, we are willing most honestly to examine
into them. In so far as they are made against current
suppositions, which are separable from our essential belief, —
separable as, for example, we now see various details of tradi-
tional belief about the first chapter of Genesis to be separable
— we join our critics in the examination with a mind as open
as they could desire. And it must, in simple candour, be
admitted further, that upon the appearance of any new form
of thought, Churchmen have not generally been quick of mind
to discriminate the essential from the non-essential, so as to
receive at first, with any openness of mind, what they had
afterwards to admit that they might have received from the
first. But not even this admission must prevent us from
claiming, that when that to which exception is taken does
really belong to the essential truths of our creed, which to us
are more absolutely established certainties than anything in
heaven and earth besides, they must pardon us if, while we
are still willing to give the most candid hearing possible to
everything that they have to urge, we yet cannot, if we
would, divest ourselves of the deepest certainties of our exist-
ence ; — cannot therefore pretend to argue with more openness
of mind than would scientific professors — say with a cham-
pion who undertook to prove that the globe was flat, or that
the sun went round the earth. We are ready to listen to
everything. We are fully prepared to find that the champion
may produce in evidence some phenomena which we shall be
unable to account for. We have found it before ; we are
not unaccustomed to finding it (though, in good time, the
perplexity always unravels itself) ; and we shall be in no way
disconcerted if we find it again. But we cannot pretend
262 The Religion of the Incarnation.
meanwhile to hold all the truth which our consciences have
known in suspense.
V. What was said just now about the Creeds will not, it is
hoped, appear to any minds to fail in the entire respect which
if due to them. Yet it makes it, perhaps, the more incum-
bent upon us to take notice of another form of attack upon
dogma, which connects itself with an attitude about the
O "
Creeds, such as may seem at first sight to be not wholly
dissimilar ; though presently all the foundations of dogma
are dissolved by it. But in point of fact, if we admit that
what the Creeds mean on earth, is less than what the same
truths will mean in heaven, or that there may be, even
here, a clumsier, and a completer, understanding of them ;
this is a position essentially different from maintaining
that what the Creeds both say and mean, is not only
less than, but (if strictly taken) inconsistent with, the
real truth ; and that not in any transcendent sense, as
celestial beings, with wholly other faculties, may conceiv-
ably have power of apprehending it in heaven, but as the
more intelligent among us may, and do, see it now. This
is not only to admit that the Creeds are built up, perforce, of
materials which belong to this earth ; but to treat them as
mere serviceable fictions for the teaching of the uncivilized
or the young. The deliberate unbeliever, indeed, assumes
that the Creeds mean what they say, and that the Church
understands the Creeds. Assuming this, he parts company
with the Church, because he holds that the statements of her
Creeds are, in fact, fictitious. But it may surprise us to find
that there is another form of this view of the fictitiousness of
Creeds, and that here the critic speaks, not at all in the
character of an unbeliever, but rather in that of an enlight-
ened Churchman. All Christian truth, he says, is true. Even
the Creeds in a real sense represent the truth. But the
Church's understanding and expression of Christian truth in
the Creeds, is, none the less, strictly, a misrepresentation of the
truth. Though the truth of Christ lies behind the Church's
Creeds, yet they have so overlaid, and thereby, in strict speech,
misstated it, that it is only the patience of criticism, which
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 263
cutting bravely adrift from the authority of traditional in-
terpretation, has succeeded in discriminating between the
Creeds and the meaning of the Creeds, and behind what are
practically the fictions of dogmatic Christianity, has re-dis-
covered the germs of Christian truth. Neither the facts of
the life of Jesus Christ, nor His teaching, nor His consciousness
in regard of Himself, were as we have been taught, but were
something different. He never thought nor taught of Himself
as personally God, nor did He perform any miracles, nor did
He rise on the third day from the dead. Whatever scrip-
tures state these things explicitly, are proved by that very
fact to be glosses or errors. And yet, all the while, every-
thing is true spiritually. The record of the Incarnate Life is
true literally, it may be, at comparatively few points ; cer-
tainly not the story of the Birth ; certainly not the story of
the Resurrection ; certainly not any incident which involves,
or any expression which implies, miracle. But the Birth, the
Resurrection, the miracles, every one of them, represent, in
the most splendid of imaginative language and portraiture,
essential spiritual truths. They are fictions, but vivid repre-
sentations, in fiction, of fact; splendid truths, therefore, so
long as they are understood to be literally fictitious, but per-
versions of truth, if taken for truth of fact.
It is this conception which was set forth not long ago with
a singular power and persuasiveness by the author of The
Kernel and the Husk. The lofty level of thought, the
restraint and felicity of language, above all the deeply religious
spirit of the author, invest his arguments with a charm of
unusual attractiveness. The arguments are not such as it is
wholly pleasant to see thus recommended. He deals in
detail, in the course of the volume, with much of the narra-
tive of Scripture, with the purpose of shewing how one by
one the various records, including of course the Birth and
Resurrection, have grown to their present form out of realities
which contained no miracle, and which therefore differed
essentially from the historical scriptures and faith of the
Church.
It is no part of our task to enter upon such details. Nor
264 The Religion of the Incarnation.
is it necessary. The struggle against such a theory of Chris-
tianity will not be fought out on details. It may be conceded
that many of the miracles, taken singly, can easily be made
to fall in with conjectural theories as to a mythical origin, if
only the antecedent conviction against their reality as miracles
be cogent enough really to require that the necessary force
should be put upon the evidence. Some indeed may lend
themselves to the process with a facility which fairly surprises
us. Others seem still to be very obstinate, and force the
rationalizer into strange hypotheses. But after all, the real
question, through one and all, is not how easily this or that
miracle can be made, by squeezing of evidence, to square with
a rationalizing hypothesis ; but what is the strength of the
argument for the rationalizing hypothesis itself, which is the
warrant for squeezing the evidence at all.
The Evangelists say that Jesus taught in the synagogue at
Capernaum. Our author takes for granted that He did so.
The Evangelists say that Jesus miraculously multiplied loaves
and fishes in the wilderness. Our author takes for granted
that He did not so. Now why this contrast1? Incidentally,
indeed, it may be remarked that on the author's own general
method, this multiplication of loaves ought to be one of the
most certain facts in the life of Christ, as it is emphasized in
every Gospel. But this is by the way. The real ground of
the contrast in the treatment of the same evidence is a certain
prior conviction with which the evidence is approached.
Now we are not contending that any such sifting of evidence
in the light of prior tests is inadmissible. On the contrary,
there is hardly anyone who does not, on a similar principle,
explain the differences (for example) in the accounts of the
title upon the Cross, or the difficulty as to whether Jesus
healed one blind man or two, on the way into, or out from,
Jericho ; but we do say that the admissibleness of such
a method of interpreting absolutely depends upon the cer-
tainty of the correctness of the prior conviction itself.
The various details of ingenuity, then, with which he
explains away particular incidents, are to us of quite sub-
ordinate interest. Everything depends upon the cogency of
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 265
the grounds for explaining away at all. A large part of the
book is occupied in explaining away the facts of Christianity,
as the Christian Church has hitherto understood them ; an
explaining away which may be more or less necessary, more
or less satisfactory, if the premisses which require it are once
admitted ; but which certainly is wholly unnecessary, and
wholly unsatisfactory, if those premisses are denied.
The prior conviction in the book in question is that miracles
neither do, nor did, happen in fact, and therefore that any
narrative which involves them is incredible. All the ingenui-
ties of conjecture on individual points become relevant subse-
quently to, and in reliance upon, this underlying principle.
Admit this, and they are forthwith interesting and valuable.
Deny this, and they lose their importance at once. It is the
pressure of this prior conviction which seems to give life and
force to a number of suggestions, about other stories, and
particularly about that of the Resurrection, which, apart from
this animating conviction, would be felt to be very lifeless ;
and to a total experiment of subjective reconstruction, which,
but for the strength of the antecedent conviction, would have
been impossible to men of reverent thought and modest
utterance. The teaching of the book will therefore really be
accepted or the reverse, precisely according as the minds of
its readers do, or do not, incline to admit the hypothesis upon
which it depends.
It is probable, indeed, that the author would demur to this
statement, at least when put so simply ; on the ground that,
though he avows the conviction, yet he has reached the con-
viction itself by no a priori road, but as the result of wide
observation and unprejudiced scrutiny of evidence. Now it
is not at all meant to be asserted that the conviction against
miracle is itself reached merely by an a priori method. No
doubt it has, in fact, been arrived at, in those minds which
have fully arrived at it, not a priori, but as the result of
a great induction from experience ; practically indeed, as it
seems to them, from experience as good as universal. The
weight of the evidence in this direction is neither denied nor
forgotten. Yet even when it most impresses us, of course it
266 The Religion of the Incarnation.
is obvious still to reply to ourselves that however powerful
this array of experience may appear so long as there are no
instances to the contrary, yet any one contrary instance will
break at once the cogency of the induction. The case of
Jesus Christ is put forward as being unique. Its uniqueness
is not really qualified by the fact that some others, among
those nearest to Himself, were by Him enabled — avowedly in
His power, not their own, — to do acts which were impossible
to other men. This is only a wider extension of His unique
power, not a qualification of it. Against such a case, put for-
ward on evidence definite and multiform, and put forward as
essentially unique, an argument from induction is no argu-
ment at all. It is a misnomer to call the induction an argu-
ment. The induction, in fact, is merely an observation that
other persons did not perform similar miracles ; and that, if
Jesus Christ did so, He was unique. But this is no answer
to the Christian position. It is part of the position itself.
And so the matter must be referred for settlement to the
evidence that is actually forthcoming about Jesus Christ. But
it is plain that the inductive presumption against miracle,
derived from experience of other men, must not come in to
warp or rule this evidence. It may be present indeed as
a sort of cross-examining counsel, as a consideration requiring
that the evidence should be most minutely scrutinized, and
suggesting all sorts of questions with a view to this. But
into the evidence itself, it cannot be permitted to intrude.
Now, it is part of our complaint against such writers as the
author of The Kernel and the Husk, that however much
their general presumption against miracle may have been
inductively and patiently reached ; yet when they come to
deal with the evidence about Jesus Christ, this conviction
(which ought to stand on one side inquiringly) becomes
to them an underlying postulate ; it is settled beforehand ;
it is present with them in their exegesis, not simply as a
motive for sifting the evidence carefully, but as a touchstone
of truth by which it may all be tried. Probably the author
would believe that he has reached his conviction against the
miracles of Jesus of Nazareth, not merely from a general
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 267
induction as to the absence of miracle in the lives of others,
but also from an unprejudiced scrutiny of the evidence of the
life of Jesus Christ Himself. But this is just what we are
not at all prepared to concede. On the contrary, we main-
tain that his scrutiny is wholly prejudiced. Examine the
evidence with a bias sufficiently powerful against belief in
miracle ; and you may end in the result which this author
reaches. Examine it without such a bias ; and you will find
yourself at every turn protesting against his mode of treating
the evidence. It is a scrutiny of the evidence on the basis of
the inadmissibleness of miracles, which gives him that coherent
theory about the growth of the Christian tradition, and those
consequent principles of interpretation of the text of the
Gospels, which he appears to regard as the simple result of
the evidence itself.
We shall very likely be surprised to find that, after all, the
abstract impossibility of miracle is not laid down, — nay, is
expressly disclaimed, — by him. Miracle (if we rightly under-
stand) is not impossible absolutely, — not even, he adds, a
priori improbable ; yet it is equivalent to an impossibility,
because the will of the Father indwelt wholly in Jesus, and
because the perfect uniformity of natural processes as we
have experienced them, is, in fact, and with no exceptions,
the will of the Father1. No general reflections upon our
dependence, in ordinary life, on the good faith of an uni-
form nature, ought to blind us to the fact that this last
position neither has, nor can have, any adequate ground at
all. It is surprising that with so weak a statement of the
impossibility of miracle, the principle of the impossibility of
miracle should have to bear the extraordinary weight that
is put upon it. Nothing short of a demonstration of this
impossibility would fully justify the critical position that is
adopted. For it is, in fact, upon this impossibility that the
whole re-reading of the history is based.
It is probably true that if once the hypothesis of the im-
possibility of miracle be accepted as practically certain, an
earnest mind, penetrated with this as its overruling principle,
1 See especially the concluding paragraphs of letter xix.
268 The Religion of the Incarnation.
and dwelling upon the Gospels always and only in the light
of this, will be compelled gradually to re-read in one place
and re-interpret in another, until the whole has been, by
steps that upon the hypothesis were irresistible, metamor-
phosed into a form as unlike as possible, indeed, to what it
wore at first, but still one which can be felt to be precious
and beautiful. But we are entitled to point out how abso-
lutely this re-reading of the evidence depends upon the truth
of the principle which underlies it. For the sake of this,
all sorts of violence has to be done to what would otherwise
be, in one incident after another, the obvious meaning of
words, the obvious outcome of evidence. Without the cer-
tainty of this, the new method of reading must be critically
condemned as baseless and arbitrary. This alone makes it
rationally possible. Without the strong cogency of this it
falls instantly to pieces.
Now orthodox Christians are sometimes accused of reading
their historical evidence in the light of a preconception. They
begin with the doctrine of the Creed, and read all records
of fact with the conviction of that doctrine in their hearts
and consciences. We need not be altogether concerned to
combat this statement. Perhaps few records are read, or
would ever be read intelligently, except in the light of the
reader's preconceptions. But our point is to see clearly that
at all events the new reading of the Gospel history is itself
so entirely the outcome and creature of its antecedent prin-
ciple, that it cannot without that hold together for an instant.
Let us be content, for the moment, to view the orthodox
Christian and the new rationalist as both alike really reading
the Gospel narrative in the light of a preconceived principle ;
the one viewing everything on the basis of the perfect
Divinity of the historical Jesus Christ (with the corollary
that it is impossible for us to determine d priori what power
His perfect Humanity — for which we have no precedent —
would, or would not. naturally and necessarily exhibit) ; the
other viewing everything on the basis of the absolute im-
possibility, or at least the incredibleness, of miracle. We
might point out that the former in his hypothesis has a
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 269
principle which absolutely fits and perfectly accounts for
every part of the evidence which confronts him ; while the
latter is compelled, by the cogency of his principle, to recon-
struct for himself almost every chapter of the evidence. And
if we go one step further back, and ask, what is the antecedent
reasonableness of the one hypothesis, or of the other1? from
what source is each derived1? We must claim it as simple
fact, that the former hypothesis is itself the direct outcome
of the evidence, — the inevitable outcome, indeed, so long as
the evidence stands: while the other is, at bottom, an as-
sumption, held absolutely in the teeth of the evidence actually
existing in respect of the life and consciousness of Jesus of
Nazareth, and itself on other grounds not merely unproved,
but essentially incapable of proof l.
But if our hypothesis is itself the outcome of the evidence,
and fits with perfect exactness into all its intricacies, then
we yield far too much if we treat it as on the level of a mere
preconception. To persist in reading the New Testament by
the light of the preconception of the dogma of Christ's God-
head (with the corollary that no miracle is incredible as
miracle), is to be prejudiced only in the same sense in which
the scientist is prejudiced who persists in studying the
records of astronomy in the light of certain preconceptions
as to the parabola or the law of gravitation.
But what is the case with the other hypothesis? By it
the historical Jesus Christ is swept away ; and another per-
sonality, which does not exist in the history at all, but which
the history has suggested to certain earnest-minded critics of
our own day, is substituted in His place. All those who
witnessed of His words and deeds to the Church, all those
whose witness the Church has accepted and sealed, are
thoroughly mistaken, mistaken in the very points which to
them were fundamental. However honest they may have been
in their superstitious ignorance, they certainly bore to the world
what was, in fact, false testimony. It is impressive, with a
1 'The question of miracles seeing fessor Huxley as of the Duke of
now to be admitted on all hands to Argyll. Nineteenth Century, April 1887,
be simply a question of evidence.' p. 483: cp. Feb. 1887, pp. 201, etc.
These are the words as much of Pro-
270 The Religion of the Incarnation.
strange impressiveness, to follow this hypothesis through the
story of Christ's life ; and see with what ingenuity, often
plausible, often pathetic, the old facts are refashioned to meet
the new principle.
Cardinal, of course, in difficulty as in importance, is the
narrative of the Resurrection ; that plain statement of fact,
to testify whereto was the primary qualification, and primary
function, of Apostleship ; and which, from S. Peter and
S. Paul downwards, has always been recognised as cardinal
to the faith of the Church.
Now given ; first, the certain conviction that no miracle
occurred ; and secondly, a working hypothesis as to the
growth of the Christian Scriptures, which not only enables,
but requires, you to set aside, on grounds of subjective
criticism, all such evidence as seems to you to be improbable ;
and it follows that, if you are still of a very religious mind,
you will probably have to take refuge in what may yet be
to you the beautiful story of a Resurrection exclusively
spiritual.
You must, of course, deal very violently with the direct
evidence. But that is already covered by the general theory
you have reached as to the historical genesis and value (or
lack of value) of the books of the New Testament. And, of
course, in adopting such a view of the books of the New
Testament, you are reducing to a phantasm the reality of
your belief in the Holy Catholic Church, which has enshrined
and consecrated, as perfectest truth, what are really at best
only fables, — capable, indeed, of clumsily representing the
truth to the childish or the stupid, but beginning to be abso-
lutely pernicious to minds which have reached a certain point
of intelligent education.
Tolerating these things, however, you may admit the truth
of the Resurrection (as you may admit every proposition of
the Creed) in words ; only in a sense so refined, so exclu-
sively spiritual, that no bodily reality of resurrection is left.
There is no resurrection in y^our creed correlative to the
dying. There is no resurrection more, or more demonstrable,
than what we believe to be true of men in general. There
vi. The Incarnation as the basis of Dogma. 271
is no resurrection which enters within the ordinary sphere
of human history, or admits any direct contact with the
normal methods of human evidence or human proof. The
question raised is not whether current imaginations of the
Resurrection may possibly be more or less exaggerated in
the way of materialism, but whether there was any corporeal
reality of resurrection at all. And the question is settled in
the negative. The foundation fact of the Creed is etherealized
away ; and all the rest, with it, becomes together impalpable
and subjective.
We do not say that there is not a large element which is
true, in the thought of such a writer as we have been con-
sidering. Where the mind is so devoutly in earnest, it is no
hard task to believe that it too must be animated originally
by truth. We need not say, therefore, that the work of this
earnestness may not serve us all, and contribute to the
thought of us all. It may well be true that in our bald
understanding of the doctrine of the Resurrection, — or indeed
of the whole Incarnation, from beginning to end. — we have,
many of us, too little imagined the scope and depth of its
spiritual import. If our orthodoxy has been so well content
with insisting mechanically upon the literal fact, as not only
to forget, but to disdain or disown in any measure, the vast
spiritual realities which it ought to express to us ; then our
stupidity, or narrowness, in orthodoxy, is in part to blame,
for the distaste which they have created towards orthodoxy
in some natures more sensitive than our own. In so far as
they can, in this respect, return good for evil, we will not
be slow to acknowledge our debt to them. We will be grate-
ful for any new suggestion they can discover, as to the moral
beauty or import of the Resurrection, or of the Incarnation,
or of any or every other miracle, considered upon its moral
side as allegory. Some ways at least there may be, in which
their insistance may tend to deepen for us our understanding
of truths, whose more spiritual aspects we had dwelt upon
perhaps, in some cases, — perhaps had even imagined, — far
too little. But doubtless that true element of their work,
which the mind of the Catholic Church will assimilate, will
272 The Religion of the Incarnation.
be greatly modified from the form in which it now presents
itself — to them as to others. It will, to say the least, be
positive rather than negative ; stimulating spiritual sensi-
bilities, but not by explaining away the facts of the body ;
widening (it may be) our insight into the divineness of history,
and the depth of the meaning of certain events which hap-
pened in it, — but not shattering both it and them, by dis-
solving their historical truth.
Meanwhile of the one-sided aspect we can but say that no
doubt transcendental spiritualism has a great attractiveness.
The Magian aspiration always was fascinating. Individuals,
indeed, of enthusiastic sympathies, trained themselves in dog-
matic truth, and indulging their freest speculations always on
a background of inveterate dogmatic instinct, may fancy the
' spiritualized Christianity ' to be in itself a stable and a
living completeness ; but as a system, it will neither produce
life nor perpetuate it. It is an attempt to improve upon the
Church of Christ, upon the conditions of human nature, upon
the facts of history. The Church of Christ is not so. The
Church of Christ does not ignore the fundamental conditions
of human experience. The Church of Christ is balanced,
harmonious, all-embracing, all-adjusting. The Incarnation
was the sanctifying of both parts of human nature, not the
abolition of either. The Church, the Sacraments, human
nature, Jesus Christ Himself, all are twofold ; all are earthly
objective, as well as transcendental spiritual. And so long
as this world is real as well as the next ; so long as man is
body as well as soul ; so long all attempts to evaporate the
body and its realities are foredoomed to a necessary and a
salutary failure. The religion, which attempts to be rid of
the bodily side of things spiritual, sooner or later loses hold
of all reality. Pure spiritualism, however noble the aspira-
tion, however living the energy with which it starts, always
has ended at last, and will always end, in evanescence.
VII.
THE ATONEMENT.
ARTHUR LYTTELTON.
VII.
THE ATONEMENT.
I. THEOLOGICAL doctrine, describing, as it professes to do,
the dealings of an all-wise Person with the human race, must
be a consistent whole, each part of which reflects the oneness
of the will on which it is based. What we call particular
doctrines are in reality only various applications to various
human conditions of one great uniform method of Divine
government, which is the expression in human affairs of one
Divine will. The theological statement of any part of this
method ought to bear on its face the marks of the whole from
which it is temporarily separated ; for though it may be neces-
sary to make now this, now that doctrine prominent, to isolate
it and lay stress on it, this should be done in such a way that
in each special truth the whole should, in a manner, be con-
tained. We must be able to trace out in each the lines of the
Divine action which is only fully displayed in the whole.
Neglect of this not only makes our faith as a whole weak
and incoherent, but deprives the doctrines themselves of the
illumination and strength which are afforded by the discovery
in them of mutual likeness and harmony. They become first
unintelligible and then inconceivable, and the revelation of the
character of God, which should be perceived in every part ot
His dealings with men, becomes confused and dim to us.
This has been especially the case with the Atonement. In
the course of religious controversy this doctrine has become
separated from the rest, at one time neglected, at another over
emphasized, till in its isolation it has been so stated as to be
almost incredible. Men could not indeed be brought to dis-
believe in forgiveness, however attained, and the conviction of
remission of sins through and in the Blood of Christ has sur-
T 2
276 The Religion of the Incarnation.
vived all the theories which have been framed to account for
it ; but nevertheless, the unreality of these theories has been a
disaster to the Christian faith. Some of them have strained
our belief in the moral attributes of God, others have given
men easy thoughts of sin and its consequences. This has been
so because they have treated the Atonement apart from the
whole body of facts which make up the Christian conception
of God and His dealings with men. In this essay the attempt
will be made to present the doctrine in its relation to the
other great Christian truths : to the doctrines, that is, of God,
of the Incarnation, of sin.
(i) On the human side the fact with which we have to deal
is the fact of sin. Of this conception the Bible, the most com-
plete record of the religious history of man, is full from the
first page to the last. Throughout the whole course of Jewish
development, the idea that man has offended the justice of
God was one of the abiding elements in the religious conscious-
ness of the race. But it was by no means confined to the Jews.
They have been truly called the conservators of the idea of
sin ; but it has never been permanently absent, in some form
or other, from the human mind, although we learn most about
it, and can see it in its clearest, most intense form, in the
Hebrew religion. Now this conception of sin in its effect on
the human soul is of a twofold character. Sin is felt to be
alienation from God, Who is the source of life, and strength,
and peace, and in consequence of that alienation the whole
nature is weakened and corrupted. In this aspect sin is
a state in which the will is separated from the Divine will,
the life is cut off from the life of God which He designed us
to share. When men come to realize what is meant by union
with God, and to feel the awful consequences of separation,
there arises at once the longing for a return, a reconcilia-
tion ; but this longing has by itself no power to effect so great
a change. To pass from alienation to union is to pass from
darkness to light, from evil to good, and can only be accom-
plished by that very power, the power of a life united to God,
which has been forfeited by sin. Only in union with God
can man accomplish anything that is good ; and, therefore, so
vii. The Atonement. 277
long as he is alienated from God, he can only long for, he can-
not obtain, his reunion with the Divine life. Sin therefore,
thus considered, is not only wickedness ; it is also misery and
hopelessness. Sinners are ' without God in the world,' and
for that reason they ' have no hope.'
This is the aspect of sin as a state of the sinful soul, and
as affecting the present relation between man and God. It
has destroyed the union, has broken down even the sacrificial
bridge, for it has made all acceptable offerings impossible.
Man's will is weakened, therefore he has not strength to offer
himself completely and unreservedly to God ; his nature is
corrupted and stained, therefore his offering, could he make
it, could not be accepted. Sin is a hopeless state of weak-
ness and uncleanness. But there is another, in one sense an
earlier, more fundamental aspect of sin. The sins of the past
have produced not merely weakness and corruption, but also
guilt. The sinner feels himself guilty before God. If we
examine the idea of guilt, as realized by the conscience, it
will be seen to contain the belief in an external power, or
law, or person against whom the offence has been committed,
and also an internal feeling, the acknowledgment of ill-desert,
a sense of being under sentence, and that justly. Whether
the punishment which is felt to be the due reward of the
offence has been borne or not, the conception of punishment,
when the offence has been committed, cannot be avoided,
and it brings with it a conviction of its justice. These
two elements, the external and the internal element, seem
to be necessary to the full conception of guilt. The common
fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his
own would, were it true, involve the further inference that
such a sinner would not feel himself guilty. But it is pre-
cisely because the consciousness of sin does not and cannot
stop here that, over and above any injury to self, any weak-
ness or even corruption produced by sin, we speak of its guilt.
' Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which
is evil in Thy sight.' This belief in an external power, whose
condemnation has been incurred by sin, may take various
forms ; for the power may be represented as impersonal or as
278 The Religion of the Incarnation.
personal, as law or as God. For our present purposes, how-
ever, the distinction is immaterial : the essential point is that
it is something external to ourselves, not merely the echo of
the sinner's own self-inflicted pain and injury. We cannot,
however, limit it to this. For it is not merely an external
power, it is also a just power that is presented to the sense
of guilt. Before bare power, unrighteous or non-moral, an
offender may be compelled to submit, but he will not feel
guilt. The state of mind expressed by Mill's well-known
defiance is his who has offended a superior power which he
cannot believe to be just, and it is very far removed from the
feeling of guiltiness *. The sense of guilt implies the right-
eousness as well as the power of that against which we have
offended ; it is a moral conviction. Guiltiness, then, regarded
in one aspect is the sense of sin, in another it is the recogni-
tion of the law of righteousness, or, if we may now assume
the religious point of view, it is the conviction of the wrath
of God against sin.
It is plain, if we will only scrutinise closely and candidly
the conception of sin and guilt, that no merely ' subjective'
explanation will account for the facts revealed by our con-
sciousness. Even if we had no scriptural evidence to guide
us, the evidence, that is, to take it at the lowest, of a series
of specially qualified witnesses to religious phenomena, our
own hearts would tell us of the wrath of God against sin.
It is irresistibly felt that there is a Power hostile to sin, and
that this Power has decreed a righteous punishment for the
offences which are the external signs and results of the sinful
state. Whatever the punishment may be, a question we need
not now discuss, the sinner's conscience warns him of it. He
may apparently, or for a time, escape it; but it is none the
less felt to be the fitting expression of Divine wrath, the
righteous manifestation of the hostility of God's nature to
sin and all its consequences. Guilt, then, like sin, has its
twofold character. It is the belief in an external hostility to
1 Mill, Examination of Sir W. epithet to my fellow-creatures ; and
Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 103. 'I if such a being can sentence me to
will call no being good, who is not hell for not so calling him, to hell
what I mean when I apply that I will go.'
vii. The Atonement. 279
sin expressing itself in punishment, and also the conviction
that such punishment is righteous and just. Thus, when once
God is recognised as the offended Person, the acknowledgment
of the righteousness of His judgment follows. ' Against Thee,
Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy
sight ; that Thou mightest be justified when Thou speakest,
and be clear when Thou judgest.'
(2) Corresponding to the sense of sin in its twofold aspect
we find, not only in the Mosaic system or in the scriptural
history, but almost universally established, the system of
sacrifice. It is not necessary to maintain that sacrifice, in
its essential idea, was intended to express the consciousness
of sin. Rather, it seems to be, essentially, the expression
of the very opposite of sin, of that relation of man to
God which sin destroyed l. It is sometimes said that sacri-
fice is the recognition of God's sovereignty, the tribute paid
by His subjects. This is, of course, a necessary element
in the conception of sacrifice, for God is our King ; but it
does not satisfy the whole consciousness which man has of
his original relation to God. That is a relation, not of sub-
jection only, but of union at least as close as that of sons
to a Father, a union whereby we derive life from His life,
and render back absolute unquestioning love to Him. Sacri-
fice is, in its highest, original meaning, the outward expres-
sion of this love. As human love naturally takes outward
form in gifts, and the closer, the more fervent it is, makes
those gifts more and more personal, till at last it wholly
gives itself ; so sacrifice should be the recognition of our
union with God, an expression of our love for Him, giving
Him all that we have and all that we are. Submission,
reverence, love are the original feelings which sacrifice
was intended to represent ; and it may be called, therefore,
the expression of man's relations to God in their purest form,
unmarred and unbroken by sin. But this is only the original,
ideal meaning, for with the intrusion of sin another element
appears in sacrifice ; and men attempt, by their offerings, to
expiate their offences, to cover their sins, to wipe out their
1 Cf. Holland, Logic and Life, pp. 107, 108.
280 The Religion of the Incarnation.
guilt, to propitiate Divine wrath. But though this new ele-
ment is introduced, the original intention is not altogether
lost. The union has been destroyed by sin, but even in the
sin-offerings under the Law there was expressed the endeavour
to regain it, to enter once more into living relations with
God: while the normal sacrifices of the congregation went
beyond this, and represented the exercise of a right based
on union with God, the presentation of the people before
Him. Thus we must recognise in the Mosaic sacrifices — the
most complete and typical form of the sacrificial idea — the
twofold aspect which corresponds to the twofold effect of
sin on the human race. There is the offering, sometimes the
bloodless offering, by which was typified simply man's de-
pendence on God, his submission to Him, his life derived
from Him and therefore rendered back to Him. From this
point of view the sacrifice culminated, not in the slaying and
offering of the victim, but in the sprinkling of the blood,
the ' principle of life,' upon the altar. The priestly mediators
brought the blood, which 'maketh atonement by reason of
the life,' before God, and sprinkled it upon the altar, in order
that the lost union with God in the covenant might be re-
stored, and life once more derived from God as it had been
offered to Him. The whole system was indeed only partial,
temporary, external. The Mosaic sacrifices ' sanctified unto
the cleanness of the flesh,' they did not ' cleanse the conscience
from dead works to serve the living God.' So the restoration
which the special sin-offerings accomplished was merely ex-
ternal and temporary, the reunion of the offender with the
congregation of Israel from which his fault had separated
him. But as this excommunication symbolised the loss,
brought about by sin, of life with God, so the reunion with
the congregation typified the reunion of the sinner with
God. As a system, then, the Mosaic sacrifices both corres-
ponded to a deep desire of the human heart, the desire to
recover the lost relation to the Divine life, and also by their
imperfection pointed forward to a time when, by means of
a more perfect offering, that restoration should be complete,
accomplished once for all, and eternal. This is one aspect of
vii. The Atonement. 281
the sacrificial system. But before this typical restoration of
life, there came the mysterious act which corresponded to the
sense of guilt. Leaving aside the lesser offerings of the shew-
bread and the incense, it may be said generally that in every
sacrifice the slaying of a victim was a necessary element.
And there is deep significance in the manner in which the
slaying was performed. The hands of the offerer laid upon
the victim's head denoted, according to the unvarying use of
the Old Testament, the representative character of the animal
offered, and thus the victim was, so to speak, laden with the
guilt of him who sought for pardon and reconciliation. The
victim was then slain by the offerer himself, and the death
thus became an acknowledgment of the justice of God's
punishments for sin : it was as if the offerer declared, ' This
representative of my guilt I here, by my own act, doom to
death, in satisfaction of the righteous law of vengeance
against sin, for " the soul that sinneth it shall die." ] It was
not, therefore, till the sense of personal guilt had been ex-
pressed by the act which constituted the victim a repre-
sentative of the offerer, and by the slaying which typified
the need of expiation by suffering for sin, that the sacrifice
was fit to be presented before God by the mediation of the
priest, and the blood, 'the life which had willingly passed
through death1/ could be sprinkled as a token of restored
life in God. A careful study of the Mosaic sacrifices will
shew the twofold character impressed upon them. Both
aspects are necessary, they may even be described as two
sides of the same fact. Before God can be approached by
a sinner he must expiate his sin by suffering, must perfectly
satisfy the demands of the law, must atone for the past which
has loaded him with guilt : and then, as part of the same
series of acts, the life so sacrificed, so purified by the expiatory
death, is accepted by God, and being restored from Him, be-
comes the symbol and the means of union with Him. For-
giveness for the past, cleansing in the present, hope for the
future, are thus united in one great symbolic ceremony.
The Mosaic system was only external, ' sanctifying unto the
1 Milligan, TJie Resurrection, p. 278.
282 The Religion of the Incarnation.
cleanness of the flesh ' ; partial, for it provided no expiation for
the graver moral transgressions ; temporary, for the sacrifices
had to be repeated ' day by day ' ; provisional, for ' if there was
perfection through the Levitical priesthood . . . what further
need was there that another priest should arise after the order
of Melchizedek 1 ' In spite, however, of these obvious defects
and limitations in the Mosaic system, there was a constant
tendency among the Jews to rest content with it, to rely upon
the efficacy of these external sacrifices and ceremonies for
their whole religion, to believe that ' the blood of bulls and
goats ' could ' put away sin,' and that no inner spiritual re-
pentance or renovation was required. And the highest minds
of the nation, represented by the prophets, were keenly alive
to this danger : their rebukes and remonstrances shew how
strongly they felt the imperfection of the sacrificial system,
how it failed to satisfy the really religious cravings of spiritual
minds. Yet there it was, divinely ordained, clearly necessary
as the expression of the national religious life, profoundly
significant. It could not be dispensed with, yet it could not
satisfy : in its incompleteness, as well as in its symbolism, it
pointed forward, and foreshadowed a perfect expiation.
(3) This examination of the sacrificial system of the Old Tes-
tament is necessary in a discussion of the doctrine of the Atone-
ment, for several reasons. The institutions of the Law were,
in the first place, ordained by God, and therefore intended to
reveal in some degree His purposes, His mind towards man.
We thus find in them traces of the fuller revelation which
came afterwards, and the two dispensations throw light on
each other. Then again, it was from the Law that the Jews
derived their religious language : their conceptions of sacrifice,
of atonement, of the effects of sin, were moulded by the in-
fluence of the Mosaic ceremonies. For this reason the apostolic
doctrine of the Atonement must be looked at in connection
with the ideas inspired by the Law, although, of course, the life
and work of our Lord so enlarged the religious conceptions of the
Apostles as to constitute a fresh revelation. But it was a revela-
tion on the lines, so to speak, of the old ; it took up and con-
tinued the ideas implanted by the Mosaic religion, and displayed
vii. The Atonement. 283
the fulfilment of the earlier promises and forecasts. It is,
therefore, from the Old Testament that we have to learn the
vocabulary of the apostolic writings. As the Messianic hopes
and phraseology throw light upon the apostolic conception
of the Kingdom of Christ, so the sacrificial ceremonies and
language of the Law throw light upon the apostolic con-
ception of the Sacrifice, the Atonement of Christ. But this
is not all. The Mosaic institutions, in their general outlines,
were no arbitrary and artificial symbols, but corresponded to
religious feelings, needs, aspirations that may truly be called
natural and universal. This conception of sin in its twofold
aspect of alienation and of guilt, and this idea of sacrifice as
effecting man's restoration to union with God, and also as
expiating his guilt by suffering, correspond to what the human
conscience, when deeply and sincerely investigated, declares to
be its inmost secret. Every man who has once realized sin,
can also realize the feelings of the Jew who longed to make an
expiation for the guilt of the past, to suffer some loss, some
penalty that would cover his sin, and who therefore brought
his offering before God, made the unconscious victim his re-
presentative, the bearer of his guilt, and by slaying it strove
to make atonement. We feel the same need, the same longing.
This load of guilt has to be laid down somehow : this past
sinfulness must meet with a punishment which will make ex-
piation for it : before this lost union with God can be restored
we must be assured of pardon, must know that the wrath of
God no longer abides on us, but has been turned away, and
finds no longer in us the sin which is the one obstacle to the
free course of Divine love. And then we know further that
bitter truth which came to the loftiest minds among the Jews,
that no sacrifice of ours can have atoning value, for God
demands the offering of ourselves, and we are so weakened by
sin that we cannot give ourselves up to Him, so polluted by
sin that we cannot be well-pleasing in His eyes. In order to
atone, sacrifice must be no outward ceremony, the offering of
this or that possession, the fulfilment of this or that externally-
imposed ordinance, but the entire surrender of self to God, and
to His law, a surrender dictated from within by the free
284 The Religion of the Incarnation.
impulse of the will. Therefore, just as the spiritually-minded
Jew felt the continual discrepancy between the external
ceremonies which he was bound to fulfil, and the complete
submission to the will of God which they could not effect,
and without which they were wholly inadequate, so every
awakened conscience must feel the fruitlessness of any out-
ward expression of devotion and obedience so long as there
is no complete sacrifice of self.
These, then, seem to be the conditions which must be
satisfied before an atonement can meet the needs of the
human heart and conscience, whether these are inferred from
an examination of the Hebrew religious institutions or are
gathered from our own knowledge of ourselves and of others.
There is, first of all, the consciousness of guilt, of an offended
God, of a law transgressed, of punishment impending, to
expiate which some sacrifice is necessary, but no sacrifice
adequate to which can be offered by us as we are. Pro-
pitiation is the first demand of the law, and we cannot,
of ourselves, propitiate Him whose anger we have righteously
incurred. Secondly, we long for an abiding union with
Him, and for the full bestowal of the Divine life which
results from that union alone. Propitiation is not enough
by itself, though propitiation is the necessary first step in
the process of reconciliation. Aliens, by our own sinful acts,
and by the sin of our forefathers, from the life of God, we
yet long to return and to live once more in Him. But this is
equally impossible for us to accomplish of ourselves. By sin
we have exiled ourselves, but we cannot return by mere force of
will. Both as propitiation, therefore, and as reunion, the Atone-
ment must come from without and cannot be accomplished
by those who themselves have need of it. But there is a
third condition, apparently irreconcileable with the other two.
This same consciousness of guilt which demands an expiation
demands that it shall be personal, the satisfaction of the sense
of personal responsibility, and of the unconquerable conviction
of our own freedom. The propitiatory sacrifice which is to
effect our reunion must, for we are powerless to offer it, come
from without : but at the same time we cannot but feel that
vii. The Atonement. 285
it must come into contact with the will, it must be the inward
sacrifice, the freewill offering of the whole nature that has
sinned.
II. If the redemptive work of Christ satisfies these conditions
it is evident that it is not a simple, but a very complex fact.
The fault of many of the theories of the Atonement has been that,
though none of them failed to be partially true, they were
limited to one or other of the various aspects which that
mysterious fact presents. It is certain, again, that of this com-
plex fact no adequate explanation can be given. At every
stage in the process which is generally summed up in the one
word Atonement we are in presence of forces which issue from
infinity and pass out of our sight even while we are contem-
plating their effects. And even if the Atonement could be
altogether reduced, so to speak, to terms of human experience,
it will be shewn that man's forgiveness, the nearest analogy
of which we have any knowledge, is an experience of which
no logical explanation can be given, which seems to share,
indeed, something of the mystery of its Divine antitype.
But though it is almost blasphemous to pretend to fathom
the depth of the Atonement, to lay out the whole truth so as
to satisfy the formulae of human reason, it is necessary so to
understand it as to discern its response to the imperative
demands of the sense of sin and the desire for forgiveness.
Whatever the ultimate mysteries of the death of Christ may
be, it is certain that it has had power to convince men of
forgiveness and to give them a new life. It must therefore in
some way satisfy the conditions which, as we have seen, are
laid down by human consciousness and experience. It is
under the threefold aspect required by those conditions that
the doctrine of the Atonement will be here presented.
i. The death of Christ is, in the first place, to be regarded
as propitiatory. On the one hand there is man's desire,
natural and almost instinctive, to make expiation for his
guilt : on the other there is the tremendous fact of the wrath
of God against sin. The death of Christ is the expiation for
those past sins which have laid the burden of guilt upon the
human soul, and it is also the propitiation of the wrath of
286 The Religion of the Incarnation.
God. As we have seen, over against the sense of sin and of
liability to the Divine wrath there has always existed the
idea of sacrifice by which that wrath might be averted. Man
could not offer an acceptable sacrifice : it has been offered for
him by Christ. That is the simplest, and it would seem the
most scriptural way of stating the central truth, which is also
the deepest mystery, of the Atonement, and it seems to sum
up and include the various other metaphors and descriptions
of the redemptive work of Christ. But its mere statement at
once suggests questions, the consideration of which will lead
to a fuller understanding of the doctrine. Thus we have to ask,
What is it which is propitiated by Christ's death ? In other
words, What is meant by the wrath of God against sin "?
(a) It should be remembered that though there is great danger
in anthropomorphism, and though most of the superstition
which has ever been the shadow cast by religion on the
world has arisen from an exaggerated conception of the like-
ness of God to ourselves, yet there is, after all, no other way
of knowing God than by representing Him under conceptions
formed by our own consciousness and experience, and this
method is pre-eminently incumbent upon us who believe
that man is made ' in the image of God.' We are certain,
for instance, that love, pity, justice, are affections which,
however imperfectly they may be found in us, do make for
goodness, and if we may not ascribe these same affections,
infinitely raised and purified, to God, we have no means of
conceiving His character, of knowing ' with whom we have
to deal.'
Our knowledge, even of ourselves, is after all frag-
mentary1, and thus truths of whose certainty we are con-
vinced may seem irreconcileably opposed to each other.
Our conception of love, for example, is a fragment, and
we cannot trace it up to the meeting-point at which it is
reconciled with justice, so that in our moral judgments we
1 Cf. Mozley, University Sermons, p. indeed are they but great vistas and
177 (2nd ed.) : 'Justice is a fragment, openings into an invisible world in
mercy is a fragment, mediation is a which is the point of view which
fragment ; justice, mercy, mediation brings them all together ? '
as a reason of mercy — all three ; what
vn. The Atonement. 287
are continually oscillating, as it were, between the two.
But this fact should not hinder us from ascribing to God
in their fullest degree both love and justice, confident that in
Him they are harmonized because we are confident from the
verdict of our own consciences that both are good, and
because even in such imperfect reflections of His image as, for
instance, parental love, we see at least a partial harmony of them.
When then a doubt arises as to the literal explanation of the
phrase ' the wrath of God,' the difficulty must not be met by
the simple assertion that we cannot reconcile the idea of
wrath with that of the love of God: we must ask whether
wrath, as it exists in us, is a good and righteous affection, or
whether it is always and entirely evil. To this question
there can be but one answer. We are conscious of a righteous
anger, of an affection of displeasure that a good man ought to
feel against sin and evil, and this is amply justified by the
scriptural references to righteous anger, and by the accounts
of our Lord's displays of indignation against evil. But though
we are thus compelled to find room, so to speak, for anger in
our conception of God's character, it is not therefore necessary
to ascribe to Him that disturbance of the spiritual nature, or
that change in the direction of the will, which are almost
invariable accompaniments of human anger. These are the
defects of the human affection, from which arises the sinful
tendency in our anger, and which cannot be thought of in
connection with the all-holy and all-wise God. On the
other hand, it is not possible to limit the conception of the
' wrath of God ' to the acts whereby sin is or will be punished,
which was the explanation of some of the Fathers, or to think
of it as in the future only, to come into existence only on
the day of judgment, as has been attempted by some modern
theologians. The scriptural expressions, including as we
must the passages which speak of our Lord's anger, cannot
be so weakened. ' The wrath of God ' seems to denote no
changeful impulse or passing feeling, but the fixed and
necessary hostility of the Divine Nature to sin ; and the
idea must further include the manifestation of that hostility,
whenever sin comes before God, in external acts of vengeance,
288 The Religion of the Incarnation.
punishment and destruction. God's anger is not only the
displeasure of an offended Person : it is possible that this is
altogether a wrong conception of it : it must be further the
expression of justice, which not only hates but punishes
The relation of the Divine Nature to sin is thus twofold : it
is the personal hostility, if we may call it so, of holiness
to sin, and it is also the righteousness which punishes sin
because it is lawless. The two ideas are intimately con-
nected, and not unfrequently, when we should have expected
to find in the Bible the wrath of God spoken of, the language
of judgment and righteousness is substituted for it. Sin is
necessarily hateful to the holiness of God, but also, because
sin is lawlessness, it is judged, condemned, and punished by
Him in accordance with the immutable law of righteousness,
which is the law of His own Nature. Therefore, to turn
from God's wrath against sin to the mode in which that
wrath may be averted, it results that the sacrifice offered for
sin must be both a propitiation and a satisfaction. Anger,
so we think, is but a feeling, and may be ousted by another
feeling ; love can strive against wrath and overcome it ; the
Divine hatred of sin need raise no obstacle to the free forgive-
ness of the sinner. So we might think ; but a true ethical
insight shews us that this affection of anger, of hatred, is in
reality the expression of justice, and derives from the law of
righteousness, which is not above God, nor is it dependent on
His Will, for it is Himself. ' He cannot deny Himself ' ; He
cannot put away His wrath, until the demands of Law have
been satisfied, until the sacrifice has been offered to expiate, to
cover, to atone for the sins of the world. The reconciliation
to be effected is not merely the reconciliation of man to God
by the change wrought in man's rebellious nature, but it is
also the propitiation of God Himself, whose wrath unappeased
and whose justice unsatisfied are the barriers thrown across
the sinner's path to restoration.
(6) But how, we ask further, was this propitiation made by
the Sacrifice on the Cross ? Or, to put the question rather
differently, what was it that gave to the death of Christ its
propitiatory value ? In attempting to suggest an answer to
vii. The Atonement. 289
this question, it is necessary to bear in mind the distinction
between the actual event, or series of events, which consti-
tuted the Propitiatory Sacrifice, and that inner element which
was thereby manifested, and which gave to the actual event
its worth. S. Bernard expressed the distinction in the well-
known words ' Not His death, but His willing acceptance of
death, was pleasing to God/ and there can be no doubt that
throughout the New Testament special stress is laid upon the
perfect obedience manifested in the life and death of Christ,
upon the accomplishment of His Father's will which He ever
kept in view, and upon the contrast thus marked between the
Mosaic sacrifices and the one atoning offering. ' Sacrifices
and offerings and whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin
Thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein . . . then
hath He said, Lo, I am come to do Thy will.'
That the perfect obedience displayed in the passion and
death of our Lord was the element which gave to the sacrifice
its propitiatory value will be more readily understood when it
is remembered that the essence of man's sin was from the first
disobedience, the rebellion of the human will against the
commands of God. The perfect sacrifice was offered by One
Who, being man with all man's liability to temptation, that is
with all the instruments of sin at His disposal 1, and exposed
to every suggestion to set up His will against that of the
Father, yet throughout His life continued unswervingly bent
on doing ' not His own will, but the will of the Father Who
sent Him,' and Who thus displayed the original perfection of
human nature, the unbroken union with the life of God.
On the cross the final struggle, the supreme temptation took
place. The obedience shewn throughout His life was there
manifested in death. ' He became obedient unto death, even
the death of the cross.' At any moment of the passion
a single acquiescence in evil, a single submission to the
law of unrighteousness, a single swerving of His will from
its choice of absolute obedience, would, we may believe, have
1 Cf. Ch. Quarterly Review, xvi. p. 289 of human nature, everything that
on ' Our Lord's Human Example.' man sins with, and therefore every
' Christ, of course, had every faculty instrument or faculty of sin.'
290 The Religion of the Incarnation.
ended all the shame and torture. And therefore there was
needed at every moment a real effort of His human will
to keep itself in union with the will of God x ; it was not a
mere submission at the outset once for all, but a con-
tinuous series of voluntary acts of resignation and obedience.
Here then is the spirit of sacrifice which God demands,
and which could not be found in the sacrifices of the
Mosaic law, or in any offering of sinful man. The essence
of the Atonement was the mind of Christ therein displayed,
the obedience gradually learnt and therein perfected, the will
of Christ therein proved to be one with the Father's will.
But we may discern a further element of propitiation in
the death of our Lord. The law of righteousness, the justice
of God, demands not only obedience in the present, but
retribution for the past. ' The sins done aforetime ' had been
' passed over in the forbearance of God ' for His own pur-
poses, which are not revealed to us : this ' passing over ' had
obscured the true nature of sin and of the Divine justice.
Men had come to have easy thoughts of sin and its con-
sequences ; the heathen felt but vaguely the burden of guilt,
the Jew trusted in the mere external works of the law. In
the death of Christ a manifestation was made of the right-
eousness of God, of His wrath, the absolute hostility of His
nature to sin. ' God set Him forth to be a propitiation,
through faith, by His blood, to shew His righteousness,
because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the
forbearance of God.' But this manifestation of Divine justice
might have been made by mere punishment: it became a
propitiation, in that He, the self-chosen victim, by His
acceptance of it, recognised the righteousness of the law
which was vindicated on the cross. Men had refused to
acknowledge God's justice in the consequences of sin ; nothing
1 In the last two sentences a slight which could be amply justified by
change has been made in conse- such a passage as e. g. S. Anselm, Cur
quence of a criticism which showed Deus Homo, ii. 10, ' Possumus igitur
that it was possible to misunderstand dicere de Christo quia potuit mentiri,
the language originally employed, si subaudiatur, si vellet.' Cf. also
which however was intended to con- [Boetius] c. Eutychen at Nestor turn, c. viii.
vey precisely the same meaning, and (Opuscula Sacra, ed. Peifer, pp. 214 ff.)
vii. The Atonement. 291
but the willing acceptance of suffering, as the due portion of
the human nature in which the sin was wrought, could have
O *
so declared the justice of God's law as to be a propitiation of
Divine wrath. The cross was, on the one hand, the procla-
mation of God's ordinance against sin, on the other it was
the response of man at length acknowledging the righteous-
ness of the condemnation 1.
But on looking more closely into the matter, it is obvious
that these explanations are not by themselves enough to
account for the scriptural facts which we call the Atonement.
We cannot ignore that, whether we consider the Old Testa-
ment anticipations, or the New Testament narrative of our
Lord's work, His death, apart from the obedience manifested
in it, occupies a unique place, and that stress is laid on it
which would be unaccountable were it only the extreme trial
of His obedience. The frequent declaration that it was
necessary, that ' it behoved Christ to die,' seems to point to
something exceptional in it, something more than the mere
close of His spotless life. So again the mysterious dread and
horror with which He looked forward to it testify to some-
thing in it which goes far beyond any human experience of
death2. And what we gather from the New Testament must
be combined with the Old Testament premonitions of Christ's
death, as typified by the Mosaic sacrifices. There can be no
question that death was, speaking generally, an integral part
of the idea of sacrifice for sin, and that the distinguishing
ceremonial of the slaying of the victim points to a special
significance in death as connected with expiation and
propitiation. Therefore, although we may still recognise
that it was the spirit of obedience and voluntary submission
1 Cf. McLeod Campbell, The Nature humanity to the judgment of God on the
of the Atonement, pp. 117, 118, 119, 127, sin of man.' 'In Christ tasting death
347 : ' That oneness of mind with the fas] the wages of sin . . . was a per-
Father, which towards man took the fecting of the Divine response in
form of condemnation of sin, would humanity to the Divine condemna-
in the Son's dealing with the Father tion of sin.'
in relation to our sins, take the form 2 See Dale, Atonement, pp. 49 if. ;
of a perfect confession of our sins. Schmidt in Herzog's Heal. Encykl. xvi.
This confession, as to its own nature, 403.
must have been a perfect Amen in
U 2
292 The Religion of the Incarnation.
which gave atoning value to the death of Christ, we cannot
ignore the necessity of death as the appointed form which
the obedience took. Had He not obeyed, He would not
have atoned ; but had He noi> died, the obedience would
have lacked just that element which made it an atonement
for sin. The obedience was intended to issue in death.
S. Bernard's saying, though true as he meant it, is, if taken
quite literally, too sharp an antithesis. There is nothing well-
pleasing to God in death alone, it is true ; but there is, so He
has revealed it, something well-pleasing to His righteous-
ness, something propitiatory in death, if as a further condition
the perfect obedience of the victim is thereby displayed.
We are driven to the same conclusion by the second
explanation of our Lord's sacrifice given above. It is not
enough to say that He died in order to manifest God's
righteous judgment against sin, for the question remains,
Why is death the requisite manifestation of judgment1? If
He endured it because it is the only fitting punishment,
why is it in such a signal manner the penalty of sin ? We
can point indeed to the Divine principle, ' The soul that
sinneth, it shall die,' as we can point to God's declared will
that expiation shall be made by means of death, but in
neither case, whether death be looked upon as the punish-
ment or as the expiation of sin, is there any explanation of its
unique position. It may well be that here we are confronted
by the final mystery, and that the propitiatory virtue of
Christ's death, typified by the slaying of animal victims
under the law, foreshadowed by the almost universal belief in
the expiation of blood, acknowledged with wondering grati-
tude by the human heart, depends upon the unsearchable will
and hidden purposes of God, except in so far as we can see in it
the manifestation at once of Christ's perfect obedience and of the
righteousness of Divine judgment. If an attempt is made to
penetrate further into the mystery of Redemption, it can be
but a speculation, but it will be saved from overboldness if it
follows the general lines of God's action as revealed in His
Word.
Some light may be thrown upon the mystery of Christ's
vii. The Atonement. 293
death by considering the scriptural view of death in general
as the penalty of sin. It is not the mere physical act of
dying, for that, as S. Athanasius says, is natural to man l, and
can be traced in the animal world in the ages before man
existed. Besides, our Lord is said to have delivered us from
death, and this clearly cannot mean physical death, since to
this all men are still subject, but rather spiritual death ; and the
death which is spoken of as the penalty of sin must therefore
also be spiritual. In this sense death can be no other than the
final removal from us of God's presence, the completion of the
alienation from the Divine life which sin began. But, con-
sidering the close connection, throughout the Bible, of physical
and spiritual death, may it not be that the former is more than
the symbol and type of the latter, that it is actually its consum-
mation ? If, again, death be truly represented by the Chris-
tian consciousness as the close of man's probation, does not
this also point to its being the moment when the light of
God's presence, the strength of His life, is finally withdrawn
from the impenitent sinner, and the spiritual death, which is
the one essential punishment of sin, falls upon him? The
sentence of death, then, under which the whole world lay
apart from the Atonement 2, was the declaration that every man
who by inheritance and by his own act shared in Adam's sin,
should at the moment of physical death experience also the
full measure of spiritual death. The common lot of death
thus involved the consciousness of separation from the
life of God, and when we so regard it, we can under-
stand something of the horror which its anticipation brought
upon the soul of the Son of God 3. He must pass through
this last and most awful human experience ; not only
because it was human, but because by the victorious endurance
1 De Incarn. VerU 4, ' Man is by 2 It should be remembered that
nature mortal.' S. Athanasius held, the Church has always regarded the
however, that this ' natural corrup- Atonement as having a retrospective ef-
tion ' would have been suspended, feet, extending back to the first repre-
but for the Fall, by the help of the sentatives of the human race.
Logos empowering man to live the 3 Cf. Schmidt in Herzog's Real.
Divine life. See on the whole sub- Encykl., Art. Versonung, vol. xvi. p.
ject, The Christian Doctrine of Sin, App. 403.
ii. p. 536.
294 The Religion of the Incarnation.
of it alone could the propitiation be accomplished. The
thought throws light upon the prominence given to the death
of Christ, upon His dread of it, upon His mysterious cry of
dereliction upon the cross. It shews us how, though the
experience was common to man, yet in Him it was in a two-
fold manner unique. The withdrawal of God's presence,
awful as it is to the sin-hardened nature of man, must have
been immeasurably more bitter to Him Who was One with
the Father, whose ' meat was to do the will of His Father.'
Just as we may believe the tortures of the cross to have been
specially grievous to the perfect body which was unstained
by sin, though other men have endured them, so, though all
have to pass through death with its accompanying terror of
the loss of God's presence, none can realize what that ex-
perience was to Him, because He was the Son of God. The
death of Christ was therefore unique because of the nature of
Him Who underwent it. But it was also unique in its results.
No other death had been a propitiation for sin, for in no other
death had this overwhelming consciousness of dereliction been
endured victoriously, with no failure of perfect obedience, no
shrinking of the will from the ordained task. In this final
experience the offering was complete, the essence of the pro-
pitiation was secured, for the actual result of all human sin
was herein made the very revelation of holiness itself, the
means whereby the union with the will of God, so far from
being finally broken, was finally perfected. The propitiatory
value, therefore, of the sacrifice of Christ lay in His absolute
obedience, in His willing acceptance of suffering which was
thereby acknowledged as the due reward of sin, and in the
death which was the essential form of both, for death is the
culminating point of the alienation from God, which is both
sin and its punishment. He alone endured it victoriously and
without sin ; He alone, therefore, transformed it from the sign
and occasion of God's wrath into a well-pleasing offering ; He
took the punishment and made it a propitiation. ' The chas-
tisement of our peace was upon Him ; and with His stripes we
are healed.'
(c) So far we have considered the sacrifice of Christ in its
vii. The Atonement. 295
aspect God wards: we have tried to find an answer to the
question, How did the death of Christ propitiate the wrath
of God 1 There remains the further question, How was it a
sacrifice for us 1 It was, we can see, a perfect offering accept-
able to God : but how has it availed ' for us men ' ? The mind
shrinks from a purely external Atonement, and part of the
imperfection of the Mosaic sacrifices consisted in the merely
artificial relation between the offender and the victim. In
the perfect sacrifice this relation must be real; and we are
thus led to the truth, so often overlooked, but impressed on
every page of the New Testament, that He who died for our
sins was our true representative in that He was truly man.
Without for the present going into the more mystical doctrine
of Christ as the second Adam, the spiritual head of our race,
what is here emphasized is the reality and perfection of His
human nature, which gave Him the right to offer a representa-
tive sacrifice1. 'For verily not of angels doth He take hold,
but He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham. Wherefore it
behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren,
that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things
pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the
people.' Being thus ' taken from among men,' He was 'ap-
pointed for — or, on behalf of — men' and the justification of
His Priesthood is the complete reality of His humanity, which,
if we may so speak, overlay and hid His Divinity, so that
' though He was a Son,' unchangeably ' in the form of God,'
'yet learnt He obedience by the things which He suffered/
and thus became for us a perfect Priest. The sinless perfection
of Christ, far from removing Him out of the sphere of our
sinful lives, made Him perfectly representative ; for He not
only possessed in their greatest perfection all the powers and
capacities which are the instruments of sin, but in the strength
of His sinlessness and of His love He could feel for all men
1 Irenaeus is full of this thought, also Athanasius, de Tncarn. Verbi 9, in
though it is not disentangled from which he suggests that it was the
other explanations of the death of Divine power of the Logos in the
Christ. Cf. especially V. xxiii. 2 : bodily nature of Christ that made
' Recapitulans enim universum homi- His sacrifice representative, as well
nem in se ab initio usque ad finem, as His death victorious over death,
recapitulatus et mortem ejus.' Cf.
296 The Religion of the Incarnation.
and accept them as His brethren, though they were sinners.
Our High Priest ' hath been in all points like as we are, yet
without sin.' The holiest man has some part of his nature
stunted and repressed by sin, and is so far incomplete, unre-
presentative : but He, unweakened and unmarred in any point
by sin, can without .holding anything back represent human
nature in its perfection and entirety.
The representative character of Christ is manifested in a
different aspect, according as He is regarded as the victim or
as the priest offering the sacrifice. As the victim He must
be the sin-bearer, for the transfer of guilt — which under the
Mosaic system was merely symbolised by the act of laying
hands on the victim's head — must for a true propitiatory
sacrifice be more than external and artificial. That is to say,
there must be a real meaning in S. Paul's tremendous words,
' Him Who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf,' in
the passages in which He is described as bearing our sins 1, in
the great prophecy which told that ' the Lord hath laid on
Him the iniquity of us all.' How can we find an explanation
of the paradox so boldly stated by S. Paul, that He who knew
no sin was yet made sin1? We may not surely take all these
plain phrases to me.an that He bore the punishment of our
sins : it would have been easy to say that had it been meant.
No, the relation typified by the Mosaic offerings must be real,
and yet the expression ' He made Him to be sin ' cannot
without blasphemy be understood to mean that God the
Father actually made His Son to sin. The solution of the
difficulty can only be found in the truth of the Incarnation.
In order that the sacrifice might be representative. He took
upon Him the whole of our human nature, and became flesh,
conditioned though that fleshly nature was throughout by
sin 2. It was not only in His death that we contemplate
Him as the sin-bearer, but throughout His life He was, as
it were, conditioned by the sinfulness of those with whom His
1 See especially Heb. ix. 28, which ' Hominem sine peccato, non sine
is an echo of the LXX. of Is. liii. 12. peccatoris conditione suscepit. Nam
3 Athan. c. Ar. i. 43 : ' He put on et nasci humanitus, et pati et mori
the flesh which was enslaved to sin.' voluit.' I owe this reference to
Cf. also Augustine, de Musica VI. iv : Norris, Rudiments of Theology, p. 61 n.
vii. The Atonement. 297
human nature brought Him into close and manifold relations.
The Crucifixion does not come as the unexpectedly shame-
ful end of a glorious and untroubled life, though it was
undoubtedly in a special sense the manifestation of the
'curse' under which He laid Himself. We cannot say
that at a given moment in His life, as when the sinner's
hands were laid upon the victim's head and his guilt
was transferred, He began to bear our iniquity, for the very
nature which He took, freed though it was in Him from here-
ditary guilt, was in itself, by its necessary human relations, sin-
bearing. Nor did His personal sinlessness make this impossible
or unreal ; rather it intensified it. As S. Matthew tells us, even
in relation to bodily sickness and infirmity, that He bore
what He took away — ' Himself took our infirmities, and bare
our diseases ' — so it was with our redemption from sin. In
taking it away, He had to bear its weight, intensified by
reason of that very self-sacrificing love which made Him
realize with more than human keenness the sinfulness of the
human nature into which He had come. There is thus no-
thing artificial or external in His sin-bearing, for His human
nature was so real and so perfect that He was involved, so to
speak, in all the consequences of the sin which is so tremendous
a factor in human life, even to the enduring of the very suf-
ferings and death which in us are the penal results and final
outcome of sin, but in Him were the means of His free self-
sacrifice.
Once more He was our representative as the Priest who
offered the sacrifice. The requisite conditions of such an office
are stated, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to be complete
human sympathy, and yet such separateness from sin, and
from all limitations of incompleteness, as can only be Divine.
'It behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His
brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful high
priest ; ' ' but He, because He abideth for ever, hath His
priesthood unchangeable . . . for such a high priest became us,
holy, harmless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made
higher than the heavens ; ' ' for the law appointeth men high
priests, having infirmity ; but the word of the oath, which
298 The Religion of the Incarnation.
was after the Jaw, appointeth a Son, perfected for evermore V
In these and similar passages the doctrine of the Priesthood
of Christ is developed, and it is obvious that quite as much
stress is laid on His unlikeness, as on His likeness to us 2.
He is our representative as Priest, because He is both man and
more than man, and can therefore perform for us what we could
not and cannot perform for ourselves, in offering the perfect
propitiatory sacrifice. Here is the true vicariousness of the
Atonement, which consisted, not, as we shall see later, in the
substitution of His punishment for ours, but in His offering
the sacrifice which man had neither purity nor power to offer.
From out of the very heart and centre of the human nature
which was so enslaved and corrupted by sin that no human
offering was acceptable to God there is raised the sinless
sacrifice of perfect humanity by the God-Man, our great
High Priest: human in the completeness of His sympathy,
Divine in the unique power of His Priesthood. So is the
condition of the law of righteousness fulfilled, and the sacri-
fice of obedience unto death is offered by His submission to
all that constitutes in sinners the consummation and the
punishment of their sin, which He transformed into the
occasion and the manifestation of His perfect holiness. And
it is a representative sacrifice, for unique though it is, it con-
sists of no unheard-of experience, of no merely symbolical
ceremony, unrelated and unmeaning to us ; but of just those
universal incidents of suffering which, though He must have
felt them with a bitterness unknown to us, are intensely
human — poverty, misunderstanding, failure, treachery, re-
jection, bodily anguish, spiritual desolation, death. 'Surely
He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows . . . The
chastisement of our peace was upon Him,' and therefore ' by
His stripes we are healed.'
2. It is not enough to consider the death of Christ only as
propitiatory, or as standing alone in relation to our redemp-
1 Heb. ii. 17; vii. 24, 26, 28: cf. Man, by taking created flesh; that,
ix. 13, 14, 24, 25, 26; x. n, 12, 13, since all were under sentence of
14- death, He, being other than them oW,
- Cf. Athan. c. Ar. ii. 69: 'He sends might Himself for all offer to death
His own Son, and He becomes Son of His own body.'
vii. The Atonement. 299
tion. We have seen how it secured our propitiation, and in
what sense it has a unique place in relation both to our Lord
Himself and to man. There remains the further aspect of
His redemptive work, in which it is regarded as effecting our
reunion with God by delivering us from the power of sin,
and by filling us with the Divine gift of life. This, it should
be noticed, is the conception of our Lord's work which was
chiefly in the minds of the early Christian writers, though in
almost all it was combined with the acknowledgment of His
deliverance of man from guilt and from the wrath of God by
His representative propitiation1. But to their consciousness
the power of sin and of the spiritual forces with which man
is surrounded was so continually present, that they were
naturally inclined to look mainly at that side of the Atone-
ment which represents it as the victory over sin and Satan
and the restoration of man to the life of God. And this view,
though by no means to the exclusion of the propitiatory
aspect, is amply justified by the Bible. Considered as re-
storation, there seem to be three grades or stages of redemp-
tion indicated in the New Testament. First, there is the
unanimous declaration that the object of our Lord's life and
death was to free us from sin. In the most sacrificial de-
scriptions of His work this further result of the Atonement is
implied. The 'Lamb of God' is to 'take away the sin of
the world ' ; His Blood was to be ' shed for the remission of
sins ' ; by ' the precious Blood of Jesus Christ as of a Lamb
without blemish ' men were ' redeemed from their vain con-
versation ' ; He ' gave Himself for us, that He might redeem
us from all iniquity.' In the next place, this deliverance
from sin is identified with the gift of life, which is repeat-
edly connected with our Lord's life and death. ' I am come
that they might have life ' ; for ' I will give My flesh for the
life of the world.' ' He died for all, that they which live
1 The two aspects of the Atone- fresh beginning of life, in that He
ment are frequently presented by S. bestowed on us the hope of ivsur-
Athanasius, delncarn. VerW. Thus (ch. rection.' Cf. also chs. 8 and 9. Again
10) 'By the sacrifice of His own (ch. 25), 'As He offered His Body
Body He both put an end to the law unto death for all ; so by it He again
which was against us, and gave us a threw open the way to heaven.'
300 The Religion of the Incarnation.
should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him
who died for them and rose again.' He ' bare our sins in His
own body on the tree, that we being dead to sins might live
unto righteousness.' Lastly, this new life is to issue in union
with the life of God in Christ. ' Christ suffered for sins, the
just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.' ' In
Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the
Blood of Christ.' In such passages the Apostles are only
drawing out the meaning of our Lord's own declaration, ' I,
if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.'
Our Lord's death is thus intimately connected by the New
Testament writers with the restoration of man to union with
God by means of the gift of life ; but it should be noticed that,
unique and necessary as His death was, it is continually
spoken of in close connection with the Resurrection or the
Ascension, for in these, as was foreshadowed by the typical
ceremonies of the Law, the sacrifice culminated by the pre-
sentation of the 'life which had willingly passed through
death' before the altar of God's presence. The reason is clear.
Pardon for the past, deliverance from guilt, propitiation of
the just wrath of God, are necessary and all-important; but
they cannot stand alone. They must, for man is helpless
and weak, be succeeded by the gift of life, and for this we
must look to those mighty acts in which the One Sacrifice
reached its full consummation. Thus our Lord Himself
declares that He died in order to rise again ; ' I lay down
My life that [in order that] I may take it again.' So to
S. Paul the Resurrection is the necessary completion of the
process which was begun by the death. ' He was delivered
for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.'
' If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through
the death of His Son, much more being reconciled, shall we
be saved through [in] His life.' ' We were buried with Him
through baptism unto death ; that [in order that] like as
Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the
Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.' Even the
passages which speak of our salvation as effected by virtue of
Christ's Blood, refer, according to the Jewish conception of
vii. The Atonement. 301
the { blood which is the life,' not only, or even chiefly, to the
bloodshedding in death, but to the heavenly ' sprinkling ' of
the principle of life, its presentation in heaven by means of the
Resurrection and Ascension. The whole process is described
in what may be called the central core of S. Paul's theology,
the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. ' It is Christ
Jesus that died, yea rather, that was raised from the dead, who
is at the Right Hand of God, who also maketh intercession for
us.' It has been the fault of much popular theology to think
only of our deliverance from wrath by the sacrificial death of
Christ, and to neglect the infinitely important continuation
of the process thus begun. The Gospel is a religion of life,
the call to a life of union with God by means of the grace
which flows from the mediation of the risen and ascended
Saviour. We need not discuss the comparative importance
of the two aspects of the work of Atonement, for propitiation
and reunion, pardon and life are alike necessary elements in
salvation, and by the love of God in Christ are united in the
sacrifice which was begun on Calvary, and is for ever presented
for our redemption before the throne of God in heaven.
3. So far we have been considering the Atonement as
our Lord's work on behalf of men : we have now to consider
it as meeting the inevitable demand of the human conscience
that this vicarious sacrifice shall in some way satisfy man's
sense of personal responsibility ; that by means of the Atone-
ment man shall, so far as he can, make amends for his own
sin. The charge of injustice, as it is generally urged against
the doctrine of the Atonement, rests, as will be shewn, upon
a fundamental misconception as to the nature of Christ's
work for us ; but it is also commonly assumed that by the
death of Christ all was done for man, and nothing in man,
so that we are thereby relieved of all responsibility for our
own wilful acts. It is this notion that we have now to
investigate. First, however, we must acknowledge the truth
contained in it. The Atonement is, after all, God's forgive-
ness of us in Christ, and no forgiveness is conceivable which
does not in some degree relieve the offender of the conse-
quences of his offence. Human forgiveness, though it may
302 The Religion of the Incarnation.
in some cases, perhaps, remit no part of the external penalty
due to wrong-doing, must, in the very act of forgiving, put
away and abolish the anger of the offended person, the alien-
ation which the offence has caused, and which is certainly
part, sometimes the greatest part, of the penal consequences
of an offence. Human forgiveness, therefore, necessarily
transgresses the strict law of retribution : yet no one can
seriously contend that forgiveness is either impossible or
immoral. And more than this, there is even in our imper-
fect forgiveness a power to blot out guilt, and to restore
the offender to new life. Inexplicable though the fact
may be, experience tells us that forgiveness avails to lift
the load of guilt that presses upon an offender. A change
passes over him that can only be described as regenerative,
life-giving ; and thus the assurance of pardon, however con-
veyed, may be said to obliterate in some degree the conse-
quences of the past 1. It is true that this result of forgiveness
cannot be explained logically so as to satisfy the reason, but
the possibility and the power of pardon are nevertheless facts
of human experience. The Atonement is undoubtedly a
mystery, but all forgiveness is a mystery. The Atonement
undoubtedly transgresses the strict law of exact retribution,
but all forgiveness transgresses it. And we may believe that
human forgiveness is, in spite of all its imperfection, like that
of God, for this is surely the lesson of the Lord's Prayer,
' Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass
against us.' Experience and conscience, therefore, lead us to
expect that the Divine method of forgiveness will both dis-
prove the exaggerated idea of personal responsibility, which
is based on a false estimate of man's power, and will also
transcend reason by rising into a region of mystery and of
miracle2. We have to deal in this sphere of pardon with
a God Who ' declares His almighty power most chiefly in
showing mercy and pity.'
1 Cf. Westcott, Historic Faith, p. 133. ment of sin (cf. against this Dale,
2 Cf. Magee, The Gospel and the Age, The Atomment, Lect. viii) and to over-
pp. 270 ff. Bishop Magee, however, look the force of the analogy from
seems to exaggerate the certainty and human experience of forgiveness,
relentlessness of the temporal punish-
vii. The Atonement. 303
One aspect of this mystery is to be found in the truth,
stamped on every page of the New Testament, of the mystical
union between Christ and His people. By virtue of this union
His acts are ascribed to us ; and thus, according to S. Paul, we
died in Him, we are raised in Him, and the sacrifice which
He offered, we have also offered, as in Him. The doctrine of
the Second Adam, of the spiritual headship of Christ, would not
indeed if it stood alone satisfy the demands of the conscience ;
but when taken in connection with the practical sacramental
teaching which is based upon it, it points to the solution of the
problem. By the Incarnation we are taken up into Him, and
therefore the acts that in His human nature He performed are
our acts, by virtue of that union which is described by Him as
the union of a vine with its branches, by S. Paul as that of the
head with the members of a body. But in considering the
results of this union, the reciprocal communication of the
weakness of our bodily nature to Him, of His victorious deeds
in the body to us, a distinction must be drawn between that
part of His work which can, and that which cannot be shared
by us. Of one part of His work, of the sacrifice which He
offered for man's guilt, the essence was its vicariousness. Man
could not and never can offer a sacrifice which can avail to pro-
pitiate for the sins of the past. It is only in virtue of that one
final and perfect propitiation that we can draw nigh to God, can
accomplish anything good, can recognise that we are delivered
from wrath. The sins of the past are cancelled, the guilt is
wiped out : in this respect all was accomplished by Him for
us who are in Him, and nothing remains for us to do. He as
our Representative, because He shares our nature, can offer
for us a prevailing sacrifice ; only as His brethren, because He
has united us to Him, are we enabled to plead the sacrifice which
He offered. It is indeed offered for us, for it was utterly im-
possible that we could offer it for ourselves ; it was the neces-
sary initial step, which man could not take, towards union
with the righteous Father. As our spiritual head, the second
Adam, the captain of our salvation, He had the right of offer-
ing on our behalf ; as in Him by virtue of the Incarnation we
are empowered to claim the infinite blessings of the redemption
304 The Religion of the Incarnation.
so obtained x. If this is mysterious, irrational, transcendental,
so is all morality ; for at the root of all morality lies the power
of self-sacrifice, which is nothing but the impulse of love to
make a vicarious offering for its fellows, and the virtue of such
an offering to restore and to quicken 2. The righteousness of
God required from the human nature which had sinned the
sacrifice of a perfect obedience manifested in and through
death : that is the unique and unapproachable mystery of the
Atonement ; but that the sacrifice should be offered by a sin-
less Man, and that we should be accepted by God in virtue of
His propitiation and because of our union with Him, that,
though mysterious enough, as human reason counts mystery,
is prefigured and illustrated and explained by all the deepest
experiences of the race, by all that is most human, though it
most evades logical analysis, in our moral consciousness 3.
There is then no additional propitiation demanded from
us. The Atonement, in this aspect, requires nothing from
us, for the forgiveness is there, bestowed upon us by God
in consequence of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But like
the gifts of grace which come after forgiveness, the forgive-
ness itself has to be personally accepted by us ; it must be
brought into contact with each man's will. So regarded, the
Atonement, though the great gift of reconciliation is absolutely
free, the product of the spontaneous love of God, does lay
upon us an obligation. On our part faith is demanded that
we may realize, and appropriate, and associate ourselves with
the pardon which is ours in Christ. This is not the place for
a full discussion of justifying faith : it is enough to indicate
what seems to be its relation to the Atonement, as being man's
share in the propitiatory work of Christ. It is often said that
the faith which justifies is simply trust 4, but it must surely
be a more complex moral act than this. If faith is the
1 Cf. Ath. c. Ar. iii. 34. 'As the see Holland, Creed and Character, pp.
Lord in putting on the body, became 212 ff.
Man, so we men are made gods by 3 On the truth of the solidarity of
the Word, being taken into Him all men in Christ, see Westcott, The
through His Flesh, and from hence- Victory of the Cross, pp. 6-53.
forth inherit life eternal.' * See e.g. Moule, Outlines ofCliristian
3 For this thought fully drawn out, Doctrine, p. 185.
vii. The Atonement. 305
acceptance of Christ's propitiation, it must contain, in the first
place, that longing for reconciliation which springs from the
personal consciousness of sin as alienation from God, and
from horror of its guilt and power. There must then ensue
the recognition of man's complete powerlessness to free him-
self from sin, and a deeply humble sense of dependence on
God's mercy ; but this mere trust in His mercy is not enough,
for it would not satisfy the sense of sin. The sinner has to
own that God is not merely benevolent, and that sin must be
punished. Therefore faith must contain the recognition of
the justice of the Divine law against sin, manifested in the
death of Christ. Faith, in short, starts from the longing for a
representative to atone for us, and it ends with the recognition
of Christ as our representative, of His Atonement as sufficient,
and of His death as displaying the due reward of sin. For
the Atonement cannot be a mere external act. If Christ is
our representative, He must be acknowledged by those whom
He represents : otherwise His endurance of suffering would
avail nothing for them, for God will not be satisfied with the
mere infliction of punishment. But if the result of His death
is that men are brought, one by one, age after age, to acknow-
ledge the righteousness of the law for which He suffered, to
recognise the result of sin to which sin has blinded them, then
there has been made on their part the first step towards the
great reconciliation. Faith identifies the individual with the
sacrifice which has been offered for him, and therefore with
Christ's attitude towards God and towards sin, and though it
is but the first step, yet it is emphatically that by reason of
which we are justified. For since we are thus identified with
the sacrifice, God accepts the first step for the whole course, of
which it is the pledge and anticipation. We are justified be-
cause we believe in God, but also because God believes in us1.
Faith, being what it is, a complex moral act whereby Christ's
propitiation is accepted by man, implies an attitude of mind
towards sin so right that, though it is but the first movement
1 Cf. Aug. de Trin. i. 10 : ' Tales nos amat Deus, quales futuri sumus, non
quales sumus.'
LIBRARY ST. MARY S COLLEGE
306 The Religion of the Incarnation.
of the soul in Christ, God takes it for the whole, sees us as
wholly in Him, reckons it to us as righteousness. But only
because it is as a matter of fact the first, the hardest, perhaps,
and the most necessary, but still only the first step towards com-
plete sanctification. And, if we now ask what is the further
course of sanctification, the answer will shew the full relation
of the sacrifice of Christ to man's will and conscience. For
the life of sanctification is nothing else but the ' imitation of
Christ ' in that task of ' learning obedience ' to which His life
was devoted, and which His death completed. In us, too, as
in Him, that task has to be accomplished by suffering. ' He
learnt obedience by the things which He suffered.' ' It be-
came Him ... in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the
Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.' That
same path towards perfection lies before all who are justified
by faith in His atoning sacrifice. For justification is a spiritual
act answering to the spiritual act of faith. The spiritual germ
of vitality thus implanted in us has to be developed in the
sphere in which the consequences of sin naturally and inevit-
ably work themselves out, in the bodily nature of man. ' Even
we,' says S. Paul, ' which have the firstfruits of the Spirit,'
even we are waiting for the further process, for ' the adoption,
to wit, the redemption of our body.' And the process consists
in so following ' the Captain of our salvation ' that, like Him,
we accept every one of those sufferings which are the conse-
quences of sin, but accept them not as punishment imposed
from without upon unwilling offenders, but as the material of
our freewill sacrifice. From no one pang or trial of our
nature has He delivered us, indeed, He has rather laid them
upon us more unsparingly, more inevitably. But the suffer-
ings from which He would not deliver us He has transformed
for us. They are no longer penal, but remedial and peniten-
tial. Pain has become the chastisement of a Father who
loves us, and death the passage into His very presence. And
this He has done for us by the bestowal upon us of spiritual
vitality. The germ is implanted by the act of forgiveness
which removes the wrath and the impending death, and this
germ of life, cherished and developed by the gifts which flow
vii. The Atonement. 307
from His mediation and intercession, by the Holy Spirit
Whom He sends to dwell in us, works on all the penalties of
sin, and makes them the sacrifice which we offer in Him.
This is the ' law of the Spirit of life.' ' If Christ be in you,
the body is dead because of sin ; but the Spirit is life because
of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him that raised up
Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ
from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His
Spirit that dwelleth in you.'
Our personal share then in the Atonement is not mere
passivity. It consists, first, in the acceptance of God's for-
giveness in Christ, our self-identification with Christ's atoning
attitude, and then in working out, by the power of the life
bestowed upon us, all the consequences of forgiveness, the
transformation of punishment into sacrifice, the imitation of
Christ in His perfect obedience to the law of righteousness, the
gradual sanctification of body, soul and spirit by the grace
which enables us to ' suffer with Him.'
III. The doctrine of Atonement, more than any of the great
truths of Christianity, has been misconceived and misrepre-
sented, and has therefore not only been rejected itself, but has
sometimes been the cause of the rejection of the whole Chris-
tian system. The truth of the vicarious sacrifice has been iso-
lated till it has almost become untrue, and, mysterious as it un-
doubtedly is, it has been so stated as to be not only mysterious,
but contrary to reason and even to conscience. One most
terrible misconception it is hardly necessary to do more than
mention. The truth of the wrath of God against sin and of
the love of Christ by which that wrath was removed, has been
perverted into a belief in a divergence of will between God
the Father and God the Son, as if it was the Father's will
that sinners should perish, the Son's will that they should be
saved ; as if the Atonement consisted in the propitiation of
the wrathful God by the substituted punishment of the inno-
cent for the guilty. It will be seen that while this statement
seems to represent the Catholic doctrine, in reality it intro-
duces a most vital difference. There can be no divergence of
will between the Persons of the Blessed Trinity ; and, in regard
308 The Religion of the Incarnation.
to this special dealing with man, we have the clearest testimony
of Revelation that the whole Godhead shared in the work.
Here, as always, God the Father is revealed as the source and
origin of all good. ' God so loved the world that He gave
His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him
should not perish, but have everlasting life.' ' God was in
Christ reconciling the world to Himself.' The beginning and
the end of the Atonement is the love of God : the death of Christ
was not the cause, but the revelation of that love 1. That it
was the second Person of the Trinity who was actually the
means of our redemption may be ascribed to that original
relation of the Logos to the human race, by which He was
both its Creator and its perfect exemplar 2. But nothing can
be further from the truth than to imagine that His was all the
love which saved us, the Father's all the wrath which con-
demned us. If the death of Christ was necessary to propitiate
the wrath of the Father, it was necessary to propitiate His
own wrath also ; if it manifested His love, it manifested the
Father's love also. The absolute, unbroken, unity of will
between the Father and the Son is the secret of the atonin;
sacrifice.
Again, the isolation of the truth of the Atonement from
other parts of Christian doctrine has led to a mode of stating
it which deprives us of all motive to action, of all responsi-
bility for our own salvation. Just as the misconception notice
above arose from a failure to grasp the whole truth of ou
Lord's Divinity, so this error springs from ignoring His per-
fect Humanity. Christ is regarded as having no vital or re
relation to us, and His work is therefore wholly external,
mere gift from above. But what has already been said
shew that from the first the Atonement has been taught
the offering of our spiritual Head, in Whom we are redeeme
and whose example we are able to follow as having Him i
1 This is well stated by McLeod that the world should honour anj
Campbell, 1. c. p. 16. other as the Saviour but Him Whor
'* Cf. Athan. de Inc. passim, esp. it honoureth as the Creator of the
chs. 20 and 42. Hooker, Eccles. Pol. V. world.'
li. 3, 'Itseemeth a thing un consonant
vii. The Atonement. 309
us. Salvation is thus given to us indeed, but it is given to
us because we are in Christ, and we have to work out our
share in it because of the responsibility, the call to sacrifice
which that union with Him lays upon us. ' Work out your
own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which
worketh in you both to will and to do.' It is all from God
and of God ; but God has come into our life, and taken us up
into Him, and called upon us to follow Him in the way of the
cross.
And this leads us to consider another error, or rather an-
other form of the same error. Nothing is more common than
O ^
to hear the doctrine of Atonement stated as if the work of
Christ consisted in His endurance of our punishment in order
that we might not endure it. This view of the doctrine leads
to the objections — perhaps the commonest of all the difficulties
found in what men take for Christianity — that the punish-
ment of the innocent instead of the guilty is unjust, and that
punishment cannot be borne by anyone but the sinner. We
have seen that the real vicariousness of our Lord's work lay
in the offering of the perfect sacrifice : the theory we are now
considering holds, on the contrary, that it lay in the substi-
tution of His punishment for ours. A partial truth is con-
tained in this theory ; for our Lord did endure sufferings, and,
as has been already said, they were the very sufferings which
are, in sinners, the penalties of sin. But as a simple matter
of fact and experience, the sufferings and the pains of death
which He endured have not been remitted to us ; and that
which is remitted, the eternal penalty of alienation from God,
was not, could not be endured by Him. For alienation from
God is, essentially, a state of sin ; it is sin, regarded both in
its origin and in its necessary result. It could not, therefore,
be borne by Christ, ' in Whom was no sin,' between Whom and
the Father was no alienation. Attempts have been made to
establish a quantitative relation between our Lord's sufferings
and the punishment which is thereby remitted to us, to prove
that the eternal nature of the Sufferer made His death equi-
valent to eternal punishment. But even if such attempts, in
so mysterious a region, could succeed, it would be vain to
310 The Religion of the Incarnation.
establish a quantitative equivalence where there is no quali-
tative relation. Eternal punishment is ' eternal sin Y and as
such could never be endured by the sinless Son of God.
But we have to face the question which naturally follows.
What, then, did His sufferings and death mean 1 Why did
He endure what are to us the temporal penalties, the diverse
consequences of sin ? And if He endured them, why are
they not remitted to us ? It is true, as has been shewn, that
He bore just those sufferings which are the results and
penalties of sin, even to that tremendous final experience
in which man loses sight of God as he enters the valley of
the shadow of death ; but He bore them, not that we might
be freed from them, for we have deserved them, but that
we might be enabled to bear them, as He did, victoriously
and in unbroken union with God. He, the Innocent, suffered,
but the guilty do not 'go free ;' for the very end and object
of all the obedience that He learnt was, that He might lead
man along the same path of suffering, not ' free,' but gladly
submissive to the pains, which, but for Him, would be the
overwhelming penalties of our sins. It may be true that
' punishment cannot be borne by anyone but the sinner 2,'
and therefore it may be right not to call Christ's sufferings
punishment, especially as the expression is significantly
avoided in the New Testament. But it is certainly not true
that the sufferings which result from sin cannot be borne by
anyone but the sinner: every day demonstrates the falsity
of such an assertion. Sufferings borne in the wrong spirit,
unsubmissively or without recognition of their justice, are
penal ; but the spirit of humility and obedience makes them
remedial and purgatorial. Christ, by so bearing the pains
which sin brought upon human nature, and which the special
sin of His enemies heaped upon Him, has not only offered
the one perfect sacrifice, but has also given us strength to
make the same submission, to learn the same obedience and to
share the same sacrifice.
IV. There are many topics connected with the Atonement
1 Cf. the true reading of S. Mark iii. 29, R. V. 2 W. R. Greg.
vii. The Atonement. 311
which it is impossible here to discuss, but which seem to fall
into their right place and proportion if those aspects of
Christ's redeeming work which have been dwelt upon are
kept firmly in mind. The central mystery of the cross,
the forgiveness, the removal of wrath, thereby freely bestowed
upon us, remains a mystery, and must always be an insuper-
able difficulty to those who depend wholly on reason, or who
trust wholly in man's power to extricate himself from the
destruction wrought by his sin, as it was an offence to the
Jew, and foolishness to the Greek. But mystery though it is
to the intellect, there is a moral fitness l in the bestowal of
forgiveness because of the obedience of Christ shewn in His
o
sacrificial death, which appeals irresistibly to the moral con-
sciousness of mankind. The witness of this is the trustful
gratitude with which the doctrine of Christ crucified has been
accepted by Christians, learned and unlearned, from the age
of its first preaching. The human heart accepts it, and by
the cross is assured of forgiveness : ' to them which are
called ' it is ' Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of
God.'
But if we may appeal to experience in support of this
mysterious truth, much more may we claim the same support
for the plainer, more human aspect of the Atonement. As
S. Athanasius in his day 2, so we in ours may appeal for the
practical and visible proof of the Atonement, to the complete
change in man's relation to sorrow and suffering, and in the
Christian view of death3. This is no small matter. When
we realize what suffering is in human life, the vast place
which it has in our experience, its power of absorbing the
mind, its culmination in the final pangs of death, and when
1 It should be noticed that the 3 Cf. Carlyle's apostrophe to Marie
Greek Fathers and the English divines Antoinette on her way to the scaffold :
for the most part confine themselves ' Think of Him Whom thou wor-
to shewing this moral fitness and shippest, the Crucified, — Who also
consonance with God's moral nature treading the winepress alone, fronted
in the Atonement, and do not attempt sorrow still deeper ; and triumphed
to prove its absolute necessity. Cf. over it, and made it Holy, and built
Athanasius, de Incarn. Verbi, ch. 6; of it a " Sanctuary of Sorrow " for thee
Hooker, Ecdes. Pol. V. li. 3 ; Butler, and all the wretched.' Miscellaneous
Analogy, pt. ii. c. 5. Essays, vol. v. p. 165 (ed. 1872).
2 Cf. De Incarn. Verbi, chs. 27, 28, 29.
3 1 2 The Religion of the Incarnation.
we see the transformation, however gradual and imperfect it
may be, of all this into the means and material of the sacrifice
which the follower of Christ is gladly willing to offer to the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we realize the full force of
the great words telling of the destruction ' through death of
him that had the power of death, that is the devil,' and of the
deliverance of ' them who through fear of death were all their
lifetime subject to bondage.' And the transformation, the
destruction, the deliverance, consist in this that from these
sufferings His sacrifice has removed the element of rebellion,
the hopelessness of alienation, the sting of sin. They are ours,
because they were His ; but they are ours as they were His,
purified and perfected by obedience, by the offering of a holy
Will ; ' by the which Will we are sanctified through the
offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.'
VIII.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND
INSPIRA TION.
CHARLES GORE.
VIII.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND INSPIRATION.
I. THE appeal to ' experience ' in religion, whether personal
or general, brings before the mind so many associations of
ungoverned enthusiasm and untrustworthy fanaticism, that it
does not easily commend itself to those of us who are most
concerned to be reasonable. And yet, in one form or another,
it is an essential part of the appeal which Christianity makes
on its own behalf since the day when Jesus Christ met the
question 'Art thou He that should come, or do we look for
another ? ' by pointing to the transforming effect of His
work ; ' The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk ;
the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear ; the dead are
raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to
them.'
The fact is that in current appeals to experience the
fault, where there is a fault, lies not in the appeal but in
the nature of the experience appealed to. What is meant
by the term is often an excited state of feeling, rather than
a permanent transformation of the whole moral, intellectual,
and physical being of man. Or it is something which seems
individual and eccentric, or something confined to a particular
class of persons under special conditions of education or of
ignorance, or something which other religions besides Chris-
tianity have been conspicuous for producing. When a mean-
ing broad and full, and at the same time exact enough, has
been given to experience the appeal is essential to Chris-
tianity, because Christianity professes to be not a mere
record of the past, but a present life, and there is no life
where there is no experience.
316 The Religion of the Incarnation.
It will be worth while, then, to bear in mind how freely
the original defenders of the Christian Church appealed, like
their Master, to facts of experience. Thus we find an in-
dividual, like S. Cyprian, recalling the time of his baptism,
and the personal experience of illumination and power which
it brought with it : —
' Such were my frequent musings : for whereas I was en-
cumbered with the many sins of my past life, which it seemed
impossible to be rid of, so I had used myself to give way to
my clinging infirmities, and, from despair of better things,
to humour the evils of my heart, as slaves born in my house,
and my proper offspring. But after that life-giving water
succoured me, washing away the stain of former years, and
pouring into my cleansed and hallowed breast the light
which comes from heaven, after that I drank in the Heavenly
Spirit, and was created into a new man by a second birth, —
then marvellously what before was doubtful became plain to
me, what was hidden was revealed, what was dark began
to shine, what was before difficult, now had a way and
a means, what had seemed impossible, now could be achieved,
what was in me of the guilty flesh, now confessed that it
was earthy, what was quickened in me by the Holy Ghost,
now had a growth according to God V
Again, we find an apologist like S. Athanasius, resting the
stress of his argument on behalf of Christ upon what He
has done in the world, and specially on the spiritual force
He exercises on masses of men, ' drawing them to religion,
persuading them to virtue, teaching them immortality, lead-
ing them to the desire of heavenly things, revealing the
knowledge of the Father, inspiring power over death, shewing
each man to himself, abolishing the godlessness of idolatry V
The Fathers of the Christian Church appealed in this way
to experience, because Christianity, as they knew, is essen-
tially not a past event, but a present life, a life first manifested
in Christ and then perpetuated in His Church. Christianity
is a manifested life, — a thing, therefore, like all other forms
1 Cyprian, ad Donatum 3. Trans, in Library of the Fathers, iii. p. 3.
2 Athanasius, de Incarnatione, 31, 48-52.
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 317
of life, known not in itself but in its effects, its fruits, its
results. Christianity is a manifested life, and it is this
because it is the sphere in which the Spirit, the Life-giver,
finds His freeest and most unhindered activity. The Chris-
tian Church is the scene of the intensest, the most vigorous,
the richest, the most ' abundant ' life that the universe
knows, because in a preeminent sense it is the ' Spirit-bearing
body.' The Spirit is life ; that is His chief characteristic.
We may indeed elucidate the idea of spirit by negations ; by
negation of materiality, of circumscription, of limitation ; but
the positive conception we are to attach to spirit is the con-
ception of life ; and where life is most penetrating, profound,
invincible, rational, conscious of God, there in fullest freedom
of operation is the Holy Spirit 1.
Thus, obviously enough, the doctrine of the Spirit is no
remote or esoteric thing ; it is no mere ultimate object of the
rapt contemplation of the mystic ; it is the doctrine of that
wherein God touches man most nearly, most familiarly, in
common life. Last in the eternal order of the Divine Being,
' proceeding from the Father and the Son,' the Holy Spirit
is the first point of contact with God in the order of human
experience 2.
' I believe in the Holy Ghost, the giver of life.' All life is
His operation. ' Wherever the Holy Spirit is, there is also
life ; and wherever life is, there is also the Holy Spirit V Thus
if creation takes its rise in the will of the Father, if it finds its
law in the being of the Word or Son, yet the effective instru-
ment of creation, the ' finger of God,' the moving principle
1 See S. Basil's fine definition of the with the Distributor ; then we come to
term in his treatise on the Holy Spirit, consider the Sender ; then we carry
ix. 22. This treatise has been trans- back our thought to the Fount and
lated by the Rev. G. Lewis for the Cause of the good things.' Cf. xviii.
' Religious Tract Society.' 47 : < The way of the knowledge of
3 See Basil, as above, xvi. 37 : ' We God is from one Spirit, by the one
must not suppose because the Apostle Son, to the one Father: and reversely,
(i Cor. xii. 4) mentions the Spirit first, the natural goodness of God, His
and the Son second, and God the holiness of nature, His royal rank
Father third, that the order at the taking their rise from the Father,
present day has been quite reversed. reach the Spirit though the Only-
For he made his beginning from our begotten,'
end of the relation: for it is by receiv- 3 Ambrose, de Spiritit Sancto, i. 15,
ing the gifts, that we come in contact 172.
3 1 8 The Religion of the Incarnation.
of vitalization is the Holy Spirit, ' the divider and distributor
of the gifts of life V
Nature is one great body, and there is breath in the body ;
but this breath is not self-originated life, it is the influence
of the Divine Spirit. 'By the word of the Lord were the
heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of
His mouth.' The Spirit, the breath of God, was brooding
upon the face of the waters of chaos ere life and order were.
It is the sending forth of the breath of God, which is the
giving to things of the gift of life ; it is the withdrawal of
that breath which is their annihilation2. So keenly indeed
were the Christians of the early period conscious of the one
life of nature as the universal evidence of the one Spirit,
that it was a point of the charge against Origen that his
language seemed to involve an exclusion of the Holy Spirit
from nature, and a limitation of His activity to the Church 3.
The whole of life is certainly His. And yet, because His
special attribute is holiness, it is in rational natures, which
alone are capable of holiness, that He exerts His special
influence. A special in-breathing of the Divine Spirit gave
to man his proper being4. In humanity, made after the
Divine Image, it was the original intention of God that the
Spirit should find His chiefest joy, building the edifice of a
social life in which nature was to find its crown and justi-
fication : a life of conscious and free sonship, in which the
gifts of God should be not only received, but recognised as
His, and consciously used in willing and glad homage to
the Divine Giver, in reverent execution of the law of
development impressed by the Divine Reason, in the realized
fellowship of the Blessed Spirit of knowledge and love.
The history of humanity has in fact been a development, but
a development the continuity of which is most apparent in
that department in which man appears simply as the child of
nature, the most perfect and interesting of her products, con-
1 So Irenaeus, Cyril of Jerusalem, 29, 30.
Athanasius, Basil, Didymus, Victori- 3 Huet. Origeniana, L. ii. Qu. 2.
mis, express the relation of the Divine c. xxvii. Cf. Athan. Epp. ad Sera-
Persons in Creation. pion. i. 23-31 ; iv. 9-12.
2 Ps. xxxiii. 6 ; Gen. i. 2 ; Ps. civ. * Gen. ii. 7.
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 319
sciously adapting himself to his environment and moulded by
it. This indeed has been so much the case that the facts of
the history of civilization have been used, at least plausibly,
as an argument against our race really possessing moral
freedom at all. Such a use of the facts is, we recognise, not
justifiable. It leaves out of consideration some of the most
striking elements in human history, and some of the most
certain facts of human consciousness. But the very plausible-
ness of the argument is suggestive. It means that compara-
tively very few men have been at pains to realize their true
freedom ; that men in masses have been dominated by the
mere forces of nature ; or, in other words, that human history
presents broadly the record of a one-sided, a distorted develop-
ment. For man was not meant for merely natural evolution,
mere self-adaptation to the ' things that are seen.' The con-
sciousness that he was meant for something higher has tinged
his most brilliant physical successes, his greatest triumphs of
civilization and art, with the bitterness of remorse, the misery
of conscious lawlessness.
Our race was created for conscious fellowship with God,
for sonship, for the life of spirit. And it is just in this depart-
ment that its failure has been most conspicuous. It is here
that the Divine Spirit has found His chiefest disappointment.
Everywhere He has found rebellion — not everywhere without
exception, for ' in every age entering into holy souls, He has
made them sons of God and prophets ' : hut everywhere in
such a general sense that sin in fact and in its consequences
covers the whole region of humanity. In the highest depart-
ment of created life, where alone lawlessness was possible,
because what was asked for was the co-operation of free
service to cany out a freely accepted ideal1, — there alone is
the record of lawlessness, the record of the Spirit striving- with
man, but resisted, rejected, ignored, quenched. Thus the
word, which in fact most forcibly characterizes man's spiritual
history, so far as it has been according to the mind of God, is
not progress, but recovery, or redemption. It is not natural
but supernatural — supernatural, that is, in view of the
1 Athan. de Incarn. xliii. 3.
320 The Religion of the Incarnation.
false nature which man made for himself by excluding God.
Otherwise the work of redemption is only the reconstitution
of the nature which God designed. It is the recovery within
the limits of a chosen race and by a deliberate process of
limitation, of a state of things which had been intended to be
universal J. The ' elect ' represent not the special purpose of
God for a few, but the universal purpose which under the
circumstances can only be realized through a few. The
hedging in of the few, the drawing of the lines so close, the
method of exclusion again and again renewed all down the
history of redemption, represents the love of the Divine
Spirit ever baffled in the mass, preserving the truth of God in
a ' remnant,' an elect body ; who themselves escaping- the
corruption which is in the world, become in their turn a
fresh centre from which the restorative influence can flow out
upon mankind. Rejected in the world, He secures for
Himself a sphere of operations in the Jews, isolating
Abraham, giving the law for a hedge, keeping alive in the
nation the sense of its vocation by the inspiration of
prophets. Again and again baffled in the body of the
Jewish nation, He falls back upon the faithful remnant, and
keeps alive in them that prospective sonship which was
meant to be the vocation of the whole nation : sometimes in
narrower, sometimes in broader channels, the purpose of love
moves on till the Spirit finds in the Son of Man, the
Anointed One, the perfect realization of the destiny of man,
the manhood in which He can freely and fully work : ' He
came down upon the Son of God, made son of man,
accustoming Himself in His case to dwell in the human race,
and to repose in man, and to dwell in God's creatures, working
out in them the will of the Father, and recovering them
from their old nature into the newness of Christ V
In Christ humanity is perfect, because in Him it retains no
part of that false independence which, in all its manifold
forms, is the secret of sin. In Christ humanity is perfect and
complete, in ungrudging and unimpaired obedience to the
movement of the Divine Spirit, Whose creation it was, Whose
1 Athan. I.e. xii. 5, xliii. 4. y Iren. c. Har. iii. 17, i.
•viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 321
organ it gave itself to be. The Spirit anoints Him ; the
Spirit drives Him into the wilderness ; the Spirit gives Him
the law of His mission ; in the power of the Spirit He
works His miracles ; in the Holy Spirit He lifts up the voice
of human thankfulness to the Divine Father; in the Spirit
He offers Himself without spot to God ; in the power of the
Spirit He is raised from the dead 1. All that perfect human
life had been a life of obedience, of progressive obedience, a
gradual learning in each stage of experience what obedience
meant 2 ; it had been a life of obedience which became pro-
pitiatory as it bore loyally, submissively, lovingly, all the
heritage of pain and misery in which sin in its long history
had involved our manhood, all the agony of that insult and
rejection in which sin revealed itself by antagonism to Him —
bore it, and by bearing it turned it into the material of His
accepted sacrifice. He was obedient unto death. And be-
cause He thus made our human nature the organ of a life of
perfect obedience, therefore He can go on to make that same
humanity, freed from all the limitations of this lower world
and glorified in the Spirit at the right hand of God, at once
the organ of Divine supremacy over the universe of created
things, and (itself become quickening Spirit 3) the fount to all
the sons of obedience and faith of its own life. Christ is the
second Adam, who having 'recapitulated the long develop-
ment of humanity into Himself4,' taken it up into Himself,
that is, and healed its wounds and fructified its barrenness,
gives it a fresh start by a new birth from Him. The Spirit
coming forth at Pentecost out of His uplifted manhood, as
from a glorious fountain of new life5, perpetuates all its
richness, its power, its fulness in the organized society which
He prepared and built for the Spirit's habitation. The
Church, His Spirit-bearing body, comes forth into the world,
not as the exclusive sphere of the Spirit's operations, for ' that
1 S. Mark i. 10, 12. S. Luke iv. 3 i Cor. xv. 45, 'The last Adam
i, 1 8 ; x. 21. S. Matt. xii. 28. Heb. ix. became a life-giving Spirit.' S. John
14. Kom. viii. u. (These two last vi. (13, 'Spirit and Life.'
passages at least imply the action of * Iren. iii. 18, i, and frequently
the Holy Spirit in the Sacrifice and elsewhere.
Resurrection of Christ.) » Iren. iii. 24, i. Cf. H. C. G.IMoule's
Heb. v. 7-10. Phil. ii. 8. Veni Creator, pp. 39-40.
322 The Religion of the Incarnation.
breath bloweth where it listeth1;' but as the special and
covenanted sphere of His regular and uniform operation, the
place where He is pledged to dwell and to work ; the centre
marked out and hedged in, whence ever and again proceeds
forth anew the work of human recovery ; the home where, in
spite of sin and imperfection, is ever kept alive the picture of
what the Christian life is, that is, of what common human
life is meant to be and can become.
Of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church we may note
four characteristics.
i . It is social. It treats man as a ' social being,' who
cannot realize himself in isolation. For no other reason
than because grace is the restoration of nature 2, the true,
the redeemed humanity, is presented to us as a society or
Church. This is apparent with reference to either of the
gifts which summarize the essence of the Church's life, grace,
or truth. Sacraments are the ordained instruments of grace,
and sacraments are in one of their aspects social ceremonies
— of incorporation, or restoration, or bestowal of authority, or
fraternal sharing of the bread of life. They presuppose a
social organization. Those who have attempted to explain
why there should be in the Church an apostolic succession
of ministers, have seen the grounds of such appointment in the
necessity for preserving in a catholic society, which lacks the
natural links of race or language or common habitation, a
visible and obligatory bond of association 3.
The same fact appears in reference to the truth, the
knowledge of God and of the true nature and needs of man,
which constitutes one main part of the Christian life. That
too is no mere individual illumination. It is 'a rule of
faith,' an ' apostolic tradition,' ' a pattern of sound words,'
embodied in Holy Scripture and perpetuated in a teaching
Church, within the scope of which each individual is to be
brought to have his mind and conscience fashioned by it,
1 S. John iii. 4. The intention of ' Grace is not the negation of nature,
this passage is to express not that the but its restoration.'
Spirit is lawless in His operations, but 3 Raymund of Sabunde, Then!.
that He is beyond our control. tit. 303.
3 Aug. de Spiritu et Litlera, xxvii. 47,
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 323
normally from earliest years. It would be going beyond the
province of this essay to stop to prove that from the
beginnings of the Christian life, a man was understood to
become a Christian and receive the benefits of redemption,
by no other means than incorporation into the Christian
society.
2. But none the less on account of this social method the
S2nrit nourishes individuality. The very idea of the Spirit's
gift is that of an intenser life. Intenser life is more
individualized life, for our life becomes richer and fuller only
by the intensification of personality and character. Thus
Christianity has always trusted to strongly marked character
as the means by which religion is propagated. It does not
advance as an abstract doctrine, but by the subtle, penetrating
influences of personality. It is the illuminated man who
becomes a centre of illumination. 'As clear transparent
bodies if a ray of light fall on them become radiant them-
selves and diffuse their splendour all around, so souls
illuminated by the indwelling Spirit are rendered spiritual
themselves and impart their grace to others V Thus, from the
first, Christianity has tended to intensify individual life in a
thousand ways, and has gloried in the varieties of disposition
and character which the full life of the Spirit develops. The
Church expects to see the same variety of life in herself as
she witnesses in Nature.
' One and the same rain,' says S. Cyril of Jerusalem to his
catechumens, ' comes down upon all the world, yet it becomes
white in the lily, and red in the rose, and purple in the
violets and pansies, and different and various in all the
several kinds ; it is one thing in the palm tree and another in
the vine, and all in all things. In itself, indeed, it is uniform
and changes not, but by adapting itself to the nature of each
thing that receives it, it becomes what is appropriate to each.
Thus also the Holy Ghost, one and uniform and undivided in
Himself, distributes His grace to every man as He wills. He
employs the tongue of one man for wisdom ; the soul of
Basil, de Kpirilu Sancto ix. 23 Univ. Sermons, 'Personal Influence
(Lewis' translation). Cf. Newman's the means of propagating the truth.'
Y 2
324 The Religion of the Incarnation.
another He enlightens by prophecy ; to another He gives
power to drive away devils ; to another He gives to
interpret the Divine Scriptures ; He invigorates one man's self-
command ; He teaches another the way to give alms ; another
He teaches to fast and train himself ; another He trains for
martyrdom ; diverse to different men, yet not diverse from
Himself1.'
Nor was this belief in the differences of the Spirit's work
a mere abstract theory. In fact the Church life of the early
centuries did present an aspect of great variety : not only
in the dispositions of individuals, for that will always be
observable where human nature is allowed to subsist, but in
the types of life and thought cultivated in different parts of
the Church. Early in the life of Christianity did something
like the Roman type of Catholicism shew itself, but it
shewed itself as one among several types of ecclesiasticism,
easily distinguishable from what Alexandria or Africa or
Antioch nourished and produced.
And what is true in the life of religion as a whole is true
in the department of the intellect. Here again the authority
of the collective society, the ' rule of faith,' is meant to
nourish and quicken, not to crush, individuality. Each
individual Christian owes the profoundest deference to the
common tradition. Thus to ' keep the traditions ' is at all
times, and not least in Scripture, a common Christian ex-
hortation. But this common tradition is not meant to be a
merely external law. It is meant to pass by the ordinary
processes of education into the individual consciousness, and
there, because it represents truth, to impart freedom. Thus
S. Paul speaks of the developed Christian, ' the man who is
spiritual,' as 'judging all things and himself judged of none.'
And S. John makes the ground of Christian certainty to
lie not in an external authority, but in a personal gift: 'ye
have an unction from the Holy One and ye know all things ; '
1 Cyril, Catech. xvi. 1 2. The atten- Monast. 4. Also in the writings of
tion to the differences of individual Gregory of Nazianzus, Chrysostom,
character is very noticeable in S. and Gregory the Great on the Pastoral
Basil's monastic rule : see the Rcgulae Office,
fusius tractatae, resp. 1 9, and the Constit.
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 325
' ye need not that any one teach you V There is then an
individual 'inspiration2,' as well as an inspiration of the
whole body, only this inspiration is not barely individual
or separatist. As it proceeds out of the society, so it ends
in it. It ends by making each person more individualized,
more developed in personal characteristics, but for that very
reason more conscious of his own incompleteness, more ready
to recognise himself as only one member of the perfect
Manhood.
The idea of authority is in fact a perfectly simple one. It
never received better expression than by Plato when he
describes it as the function of the society by a carefully
regulated education to implant right instincts, right affections
and antipathies, in the growing mind of the child, at a time
when he cannot know the reason of things : in order that as
the mind develops it may recognise the right reason of things
by a certain inner kinship, and welcome truth as a friend 3.
Authority, according to such a view of it, is a necessary school-
ing of the individual temperament. Thus, we are told that
in the judgment of the philosopher Hegel, ' The basis of sound
education was . . . the submission of the mind to an external
lesson, which must be learnt by every one, and even learnt by
rote, with utter disregard of individual tastes and desires ;
only out of this self-abnegation, and submission to be guided
and taught, could any originality spring which was worth
preserving4.' In fact, we all recognise the necessity for such
external discipline in all departments. Few people like good
art, for instance, at first. Probably they are attracted by
what is weak but arrests attention by obvious and superficial
merits. The standards which artistic authority has erected,
the accepted canons of good taste and judgment, do not com-
mend themselves at first as right or natural. But modest and
well-disposed people take it for granted at starting that the
orthodox judgment will turn out to be right ; and they set
themselves to school to learn why the artists and poets of
1 i Cor. ii. 15. i S. John ii. 20- 3 Republic, 401 D, 402 A.
27. * Caird's Hegel (^Blackwood's Philo-
2 Clement Alex. Strom, v. 13. 88. sophical Classics), p. 72.
326 The Religion of the Incarnation.
great name are great, till their own judgment becomes en-
lightened, and they understand what at first they took on
trust. It was the instinctive perception of this function of
authority which made the Church insist so much on the
principle ' credo ut intelligam.' The Creed represents the
catholic judgment, the highest knowledge of God and the
spiritual life granted to man by the Divine Revelation. Let
a man put himself to school in the Church with reverence and
godly fear, and his own judgment will become enlightened.
He will come to say with S. Anselm, ' I give thee thanks, good
Lord ; because what first I believed by Thy gift, I now under-
stand by Thy illumination V
Such an idea of authority leaves much for the individual to
do. It is the reaction of the individual on the society which
is to keep the common tradition pure and unnarrowed. The
Church has in Holy Scripture the highest expression of
the mind of Christ. The familiarity of all its members with
this flawless and catholic image is to ward off in each genera-
tion that tendency to deteriorate and to become materialised
which belongs to all ' traditions.' The individual illumination
is thus to react as a purifying force upon the common mind of
the Christian society. The individual Christian is to pay the
debt of his education, by himself ' testing all things and hold-
ing fast that which is good.' Specially gifted individuals
from time to time will be needed to effect more or less sudden
' reversions to type,' to the undying type of apostolic teaching2.
But such a true reformer is quite distinct in idea from the
heretic. He reforms ; he does not innovate. His note is to
restore ; not to reject. And the absence of necessity for funda-
1 Anselm. Proslog. 4 ; he adds, 'So assign to having such an authoritative
that even if I were unwilling to believe standard of the right time does not
that Thou art, I could not cease to prevent our recognising the import-
understand it.' But the whole rela- ance of having it regulated. 'And if
tion of authority and reason is most we desired to remove an error which
completely grasped and stated by had accumulated during a long season
S. Augustine : see Cunningham, of neglect, it would be very unfair to
S. Austin (Cambridge Univ. Press, represent us as wishing to silence the
1886), pp. 9, 157 S. clock, or else as wishing to allow every
2 Dr. Salmon, Infallibility, p. 115, townsman to get up and push the
has a clever comparison of the hands backwards and forwards as he
authority of the Church to that pleased.'
of the town clock. The value we
viu. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 327
mental rejection comes from this simple fact, that the Christian
Creed is rational and true. If any man comes to us and says
that he has studied and assimilated the Christian Creed with
all the care and reverence in his ability, and has rejected it be-
cause he finds it irrational and false, we cannot complain of him 1.
We cannot ask him to accept it though he thinks it false.
We do not at all complain of his having inquired and thought
freely — only we venture to assure him, with a confidence
which can hardly fail to be irritating, because it is confident,
that he is mistaken, that he has thought not only freely, but
erroneously. When Christianity adopts, as in the modern
Romanist system, a different tone, proscribing free inquiry as
' rationalistic,' and making the appeal to antiquity, in order to
test the present teaching of the Church, a 'treason and a
heresy2,' it is abjuring its own rational heritage, and adopt-
ing a method which Charles Kingsley had good reason to call
Manichaean. It is the test of the Church's legitimate tenure
that she can encourage free inquiry into her title-deeds.
3. Thirdly, the Spirit claims for His own, and consecrates the
whole of nature. One Spirit was the original author of all
that is ; and all that exists is in its essence very good. It is
only sin which has produced the appearance of antagonism
between the Divine operation and human freedom, or between
the spiritual and the material. Thus the humanity of Christ,
which is the Spirit's perfect work, exhibits in its perfection
how every faculty of human nature, spiritual and physical, is
enriched and vitalized, not annihilated, by the closest con-
ceivable interaction of the Divine Energy. This principle, as
carried out in the Church, occupies a prominent place in the
earliest theology ; in part because Montanism, with its pagan
idea of inspiration, as an ecstasy which deprived its subject of
reason, gave the Church an opportunity of emphasizing that
the fullest action of the Spirit, in the case of her inspired men,
intensified and did not supersede their own thought, judgment,
and individuality ; still more because Gnostic dualism, turning
every antithesis of nature and grace, of spirit and flesh, of
1 But cf. pp. 196-8, 229-232, 258-260.
2 Manning, Temporal Mission of the Holy GJiost, third edit. pp. 9, 29, 238-240.
328 The Religion of the Incarnation.
natural and supernatural, into an antagonism, forced upon the
Church the assertion of her own true and comprehensive
Creed. That everything in Christianity is realized ' in flesh as
in spirit ' is the constantly reiterated cry of S. Ignatius, who of
all men was most ' spiritual.' That the spiritual is not the
immaterial, that we become spiritual not by any change or
curtailment of nature, not by any depreciation or ignoring of
the body, is the constantly asserted principle of S. Irenaeus *.
And the earliest writers in general emphasize the visible
organization of the Church, and the institution of external
sacraments, as negations of the false principle which would
sunder nature from God, and repudiate the unity of the
material and the spiritual which the Word had been made
Flesh in order to reveal and to perpetuate.
4. But the unity of the spirit and the flesh, of faith and ex-
perience, of God and the world, is certainly not an accomplished
fact. On the contrary, dualism is always making appeals
which strike home to our present experience. Thus if the
Church was to maintain the unity of all things, it could only
be by laying great stress upon the ravages which sin had
wrought, and upon the gradualness of the Spirit's method in
recovery. The Old Testament, for example, presented a
most unspiritual appearance. Its material sacrifices, its low
standard of morals, its worldliness, were constantly being
objected to by the Gnostic and Manichaean sects, who could
not tolerate the Old Testament canon. ' But you are ignor-
ing,' the Church replied, ' the gradualness of the Spirit's
method.' He lifts man by little and little, He condescends to
man's infirmity : He puts up with him as he is, if only He can
at the last bring him back to God.
1 See, for instance, c. Haer. v. 10, 2. proved condition, and is no longer
'The wild olive does not change its described as flesh and blood, but as
substance [when it is grafted in, see a spiritual man.' So also v. 6, i,
Rom. xi. 17], but only the quality of 'whom the apostle calls ''spiritual"
its fruit, and takes a new name, no because they have the Spirit, not be-
longer being called an oleaster but an cause they have been robbed of the
olive ; so also man when he is by faith flesh and become bare spirit.' It is
grafted in, and receives the Spirit of the recognition of this principle that
God, does not lose his fleshly sub- makes most of the language of the
stance, but changes the quality of the Fathers on fasting so healthy and
works which are his fruits, and takes sensible. The end of fasting is not to
another name indicating his im- destroy the flesh, but to free the spirit.
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 329
It is of the essence of the New Testament, as the religion
of the Incarnation, to be final and catholic : on the other hand,
it is of the essence of the Old Testament to be imperfect
because it represents a gradual process of education by which
man was lifted out of depths of sin and ignorance. That this is
the case, and that in consequence the justification of the Old
Testament method lies not in itself at any particular stage, but
in its result taken as a whole, is a thought very familiar to
modern Christians \ But it is important to make plain that it
was a thought equally familiar to the Fathers of the Christian
Church. Thus S. Gregory of Nazianzus, speaking of God's
dealings with the Jews of old, describes how, in order to gain
the co-operation of man's good will in working for his recovery,
He dealt ' after the manner of a schoolmaster or a physician,
and while curtailing part of their ancestral customs, tolerated
the rest, making some concession to their tastes, just as
physicians make their medicines palatable that they may be
taken by their patients. For men do not easily abandon
what long custom has consecrated. Thus the first law, while
it abolished their idols, tolerated their sacrifices ; the second,
while it abolished their sacrifices, allowed them to be circum-
cised : then when once they had accepted the removal of what
was taken from them, the}7 went further and gave up what
had been conceded to them — in the first case their sacrifices,
in the second their practice of circumcision — and they became
instead of heathens, Jews, instead of Jews, Christians, being
betrayed as it were by gradual changes into acceptance of the
Gospel 2.' Again, S. Chrysostom explains how it is the very
merit of the Old Testament that it has taught us to think
things intolerable, which under it were tolerated. ' Do not
ask,' he says, ' how these (Old Testament precepts) can be good,
1 See especially Mozley's Lectures on tion of the Ten Commandments was
the Old Testament, x. : 'The end the too spiritual : so Jerome in I*ai. 1,12,
test of progressive revelation.' In Jer. vii. 21. Cf. Justin, Trypho 19.
2 Greg. Naz. Omt. xxxi. 25. Many Chrys. adv. Jud. iv. 6. Epiphan. Ilaer.
of the greatest of the ancient Christian Ixvi. 71. Constt. ap. i. 6; vi. 20.
writers depreciate the sacrificial law This method of interpretation is
as A mere concession, made to avoid perhaps derived from the Epistle of
worse things, when the incident of Barnabas, 2-4.
the calf shewed that the first legisla-
33O The Religion of the Incarnation.
now when the need for them is past : ask how they were good
when the period required them. Or rather, if you wish, do
inquire into their merit even now. It is still conspicuous, and
lies in nothing so much as what now enables us to find fault
with them. Their highest praise is that we now see them to
be defective. If they had not trained us well, so that we
became susceptible of higher things, we should not have now
seen their deficiency.' Then he shews how under the old law
swearing by the true God was allowed to avoid swearing by
idols, the worse ill. ' But is not swearing at all of the evil
one ? ' he asks. ' Undoubtedly, now, after this long course of
training, but then not. And how can the same thing be good
at one time and bad at another ? I ask rather, how should it
not be so, when we have regard to the plain teaching of the
fact of growth in all things, fruits of the earth or acquirements
of man? Look at man's own nature; the food, the occupations
which suit his infancy, are repulsive to his manhood. Or
consider facts of history. All agree that murder is an inven-
tion of Satan, yet this very act at a suitable time made Phineas
to be honoured with the high priesthood. Phineas' murder
" was reckoned to him for righteousness." Just in the same
way Abraham obtained an even higher honour for being not
a murderer only but what was much worse, a child-murderer.
We must not then look at the facts in themselves only, but in-
vestigate with attention the period also, the cause, the motive,
the difference of persons, and all the attendant circumstances :
so only can one get at the truth V
Once more S. Basil : ' Surely it is absolutely infantile and
worthy of a child who must be really fed on milk, to be ignor-
ant of the great mystery of our salvation — that just as we
received our earliest instruction, so, in exercising unto god-
liness and going on unto perfection, we were first trained by
lessons easy to apprehend and suited to our intelligence. He
Who regulates our lives deals with us as those who have been
reared in darkness, and gradually accustoms our eyes to the
light of truth. For He spares our weakness, and in the depth
1 Chrys. in Matfh. Homil. xvii. 5-6 Faustin. et Marcellin. in Bibl. Vet. Patrum.
(slightly abbreviated). Cf. Libell. torn. v. 657 d.
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 331
of the riches of His wisdom and the unsearchable judgments of
His understanding adopts this gentle treatment, so well adapted
to our needs, accustoming us first to see the shadow of objects,
and to look at the sun's reflection in water, so that we may not
be suddenly blinded by the exposure to the pure light. By
parity of reasoning, the law being a shadow of things to come,
and the typical teaching of the prophets, which is the truth
darkly, have been devised as exercises for the eyes of the
heart, inasmuch as it will be easy for us to pass from these to
wisdom hidden in mystery V
In the same spirit was the Church's answer to the difficulties
which facts of personal experience were constantly putting in
the way of her claims. Churchmen were frequently seen to
be vulgar, ignorant, imperfect, sinful. If, in spite of manifold
evils existing within her, the Church could still appeal to her
fruits, it must be by comparison with what was to be found
elsewhere, or by taking in a large area for comparison, or by
appealing to her special grounds of hope. In fact, what she
represented was a hope, not a realization ; a tendency, not a
result ; a life in process, not a ripened fruit. But then she
claimed that this was God's way. ' He loves us not as we are,
but as we are becoming 2.' Let but a man once lay hold of
the life-giving principle of faith, and God sets a value on him,
life has a promise for him, altogether out of proportion to
present attainments. For God estimates him, in view of all
the forces of a new life which are set loose to work upon him,
and he can assure himself that the movement of recovery which
he has begun to feel stirring within him will carry him on
through eternal ages, beyond what he can ask or think.
It is because of this gradualness of the Spirit's method that
it lays so great a strain on human patience. The spiritually-
minded of all ages have tended to find the visible Church a
very troubled and imperfect home. Most startling disclo-
sures of the actual state of ecclesiastical disorder and moral
1 On the Holy Spirit, xiv. 33 (Lewis' trine of ' imputation ' so far as it is
trans.). true. God deals with us, e.g. in
2 Aug. de Trin. i. 10, 21. This prin- absolution, by anticipation of what is
ciple alone gives a basis for the doc- to come about in us, in Christ,
332 The Religion of the Incarnation.
collapse, may be gathered out of the Christian Fathers. Thus
to found a ' pure Church ' has been the instinct of impatient
zeal since Tertullian's day. But the instinct has to be re-
strained, the visible Church has to be borne with, because it
is the Spirit's purpose to provide a home for the training and
improvement of the imperfect. ' Let both grow together
unto the harvest.' ' A bruised reed will He not break, and
smoking flax will He not quench.' The Church must have
her terms of communion, moral and intellectual : this is es-
sential to keep her fundamental principles intact, and to pre-
vent her betraying her secret springs of strength and recovery.
But short of this necessity she is tolerant. It is her note to
be tolerant, morally and theologically. She is the mother, not
the magistrate. No doubt her balanced duty is one difficult
to fulfil. At times she has been puritanical, at others morally
lax ; at times doctrinally lax, at others rigid. But however
well or ill she has fulfilled the obligations laid on her, this is
her ideal. She is the guardian, the depository of a great gift,
a mighty presence, which in its essence is unchanging and
perfect, but is realized very imperfectly in her experience and
manifested life. This is what S. Thomas Aquinas means
when he says ' that to believe in the Church is only possible
if we mean by it to believe in the Spirit vivifying the Church1/
The true self of the Church is the Holy Spirit, but a great
deal in the Church at any date does not belong to her true
self, and is obscuring the Spirit's mind. Thus the treasure is
in earthen vessels, it is sometimes a light hid under a bushel ;
and the Church is the probation of faith, as well as its en-
couragement.
It will not be out of place to conclude this review of the
Spirit's method in the Church by calling attention to the
emphasis which, from the first, Christians laid upon the fact
that the animating principle both of their individual lives
and of their society as a whole, was nothing less than the
Holy Spirit Himself. To know Him was (as against all the
philosophical schools, and in a sense in which the same could
not be said even of the Divine Word) their peculiar privilege, to
1 Thorn. Aq. Summa Theol. pars sec. sec. Qu. i. Art. ix.
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 333
possess Him their summary characteristic. Under the old cove-
nant, and in all the various avenues of approach to the Church,
men could be the subjects of the Spirit's guidance and could
be receiving gifts from Him ; but the ' initiated ' Christian,
baptized and confirmed, possessed not merely His gifts but
Himself. He is in the Church, as the ' Vicar of Christ,' in
Whose presence Christ Himself is with them. He is the
consecrator of every sacrament, and the substance of His
own sacramental gifts. The services of ordained men indeed
are required for the administration of sacraments, but as
ministers simply of a Power higher than themselves, of a
Personal Spirit Who indeed is invoked by their ministry,
and pledges Himself to respond to their invocations, but
never subjects Himself to their power. Therefore the un-
worthiness of the minister diminishes in no way the efficacy
of the sacrament, or the reality of the gift given, because the
ministry of men neither creates the gift nor adds to or
diminishes its force. He is the giver of the gift, and the
gift He gives is the same to all. Only the meagreness of
human faith and love restrains the largeness of His bounty
and conditions the Thing received by the narrowness and
variability of the faculty which receives it. According to our
faith is it done to us, and where there is no faith and no love
there the grace is equally, in S. Augustine's phrase, present
and profitless J.
II. In something of this way the early Christian writers —
and it has seemed better to let them speak for us — teach the
doctrine of the Holy Spirit. What they teach is grounded
1 The above paragraph is a summary the gift of Himself. Ep. cxciv. : ' aliter
of expressions constantly met with in adiuvat nondum inhabitans, aliter
the Fathers. It is S. Ambrose who inhabitans : nam nondum inhabitans
protests against the idea that the priest adiuvat ut sint fideles, iiihabitans
can be spoken of as having power over adiuvat iam fideles.' Didymus, de
the Divine Things which he ministers, Spiritu Sancto 15, calls attention to the
see De Spiritu Sancto, praef. 18, lib. i. distinction in the New Testament
ii, 118: ' nostra sunt servitia sed tua between irvtv^a (without the article)
sacrann iita. Xeque enim humanae i.e. ' a spiritual gift,' and TO -nvev^a,
opis est divina conferre.' S. Augus- i.e. the Spirit Himself: cf. Westcott
tine, among others, draws the distinc- on S. John vii. 39.
tioii between gifts from the Spirit and
334 The Religion of the Incarnation.
in part on actual experience, in part on the revelation of the
being and action of God made once for all in the Person of
Jesus Christ and recorded in the New Testament. On this
mingled basis of experience and Holy Scripture they passed
back from the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as He is operative
in the world, to the Theology of His Person. They passed
back but slowly, with great hesitation, even unwillingness.
Nothing, we may say, was further removed from the Fathers
than the easy-going assumption that because we are the
subjects of a revelation, therefore we are able to speculate
with tolerably complete information about the mysteries
which lie beyond experience. The truth that ' we know in
part,' we see ' in a glass darkly,' was profoundly impressed
upon their minds. God manifested Himself, S. Gregory of
Nazianzus tells, in such a way as to escape the nets of our
syllogisms, and to shew Himself superior to our logical dis-
tinctions. If we expect to find our logic equal to express
Him, we shew only our mad presumption, ' we who are not
able even to know what lies at our feet, or to count the waves
of the sea, or the drops of rain, or the days of the world,
much less to fathom the depths of God, and give account of
His nature which transcends alike our reason and our power
of expression V Besides this, the early theologians realized
the obligation of keeping to Holy Scripture — of not being
wise ' above that which is written ' — and they were conscious
of the danger of building on isolated texts of Scripture or of
treating its ' simple and untechnical ' language as if it was the
language of a formal treatise 2.
For these reasons they were cautious in theological specula-
tion. Yet the facts and relationships introduced into the world
of experience by the revelation of the Son represent eternal
realities, if under great limitations yet still truly, and thus
make possible a real security up to a certain point on what
lies beyond the unassisted human knowledge. Thus, first,
when the Arian movement passed from the denial of the true
1 Greg. Naz. Orat. xxxi. 8. v. 13, 2. Basil, de Spiritu Sancto,
8 See Athim. Epp ad Serapion. i. iii. 5.
17. Cyril Hieros. Cat. xvi. 24. Iren.
viu. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 335
Godhead of Christ to a similar position with reference to the
Holy Spirit, the Christian Church felt itself fully justified
alike by its past traditions *, and by its Scriptures, in empha-
sizing the personal distinctness and the true Godhead of the
Holy Spirit. Unless all Christ's language was an illusion,
the Holy Spirit was really personal and really distinct from
Himself and the Father ; nor could One who was associated
with the Father and the Son in all the essentially Divine
operations of nature and grace, be less than truly and really
God, an essential element in the Eternal Being. The Arian
controversy in its earlier stages had disposed of the notion that
Christian theology could at any cost admit the conception of
a created personality, clothed with Divine attributes and
exercising Divine functions.
Secondly, the consideration that the relations manifested in
the Incarnation in terms of our experience between the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, express transcendent
and eternal relations, led the Church to speak of the Holy
Ghost as proceeding from the Father, as the unique fount of
Godhead, through the Son : or in somewhat less nicely dis-
criminated language ' from the Father and the Son V In the
fifth century there is a tendency to use in the East the former,
in the West the latter mode of expression, but without any
essential difference. Nor can it be said that the causes which
were at work later to divide the Eastern and the Western
Churches on the subject of the procession of the Holy Ghost,
were so much really theological as ecclesiastical and
political.
Thirdly, the accurate consideration of the language in
which is expressed the relation of Christ to the Holy Spirit,
helped the Church to guard the doctrine of the Trinity from
the associations of Tritheism. For the coming of the Holy
Spirit is clearly spoken of in Holy Scripture as coincident
with and involving the coming of Christ. ' While we are
illuminated by the Holy Spirit, it is Christ who illuminates
1 The Diet, of Clir. Biog., Art. HOLY subject.
GHOST (by Dr. Swete\ has an admir- 2 See Godet on S. John xv. 26, 27.
able summary of the theology of the
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
336 The Religion of the Incarnation.
us : when we drink in the Spirit, it is Christ we drink.' The
Spirit is distinct from Christ — ' another Paraclete ' — yet in
His coming. Christ comes : in His indwelling is the indwelling
of the Father and the Son l. How can this be ? Because the
' Persons ' of the Holy Trinity are not to be thought of as dis-
tinct individuals, as three Gods. No doubt in our ordinary
language, persons are understood to be separate, and mutually
exclusive beings. Even in regard to ourselves deeper reflection
shews us that our personalities are very far from being as
separate as they appear to be on the surface : and with
regard to God, it was only with an expressed apology for the
imperfection of human language that the Church spoke of the
Divine Three, as Three Persons at all. But ; we have no celestial
language,' and the word is the only one which will express
what Christ's language implies about Himself, the Father,
and the Spirit. Only while we use it, it must be understood
to express mutual inclusion, not mutual exclusion.
Wherever the Father works, He works essentially and
inevitably through the Son and the Spirit ; whenever the Son
acts, He acts from the Father by the Holy Spirit ; whenever
the Holy Spirit comes, He brings with Him in His coming
the Son and the Father. Thus when an image was necessary
to interpret in part the Divine relationships, the Fathers
sought it nowhere so much as in the three distinct yet
inseparable elements of man's spiritual nature ; the triune
character of which Plato had already brought into notice, and
which is in fact an earthly image, however inadequate, of the
Triune God 2.
1 Athan. Epp. ad Scrap, i. 19. S. upon Himself,' 'the bond of the
John xiv. 1 6, 18, 23. Father and the Son.' This eternal
2 Plato's human trinity is made up function would interpret His tem-
of reason, spirit [0vfj.6s], and desire : S. poral mission to bring all creatures
Augustine's of memory (i. e. personal back into union with God. Not very
identity), reason, and will ; or mind, differently S. Augustine speaks of
knowledge, and love. Nothing has Him as the Love of the Father and
been said in the text of Patristic and the Son : ' Vides Trinitatem si cari-
more recent attempts to express the tatem vides. Ecce tria sunt ; amans
function of the Holy Spirit in the et quod amatur et amor.' And
inner relations of the Trinity. Some this Love is itself personal and co-
of the Fathers speak of the Holy ordinate : ' commune aliquid est
Spirit as completing the circle of the Patris et Filii ; at ipsa communio
Divine Life, or as ' the return of God consubstantialis et coaeterna.' But
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 337
III. Hitherto nothing has been said about that part of
the Holy Spirit's work which is called the inspiration of
Scripture. It has been kept to the last because of the great
importance of putting it in context with less familiar truths.
The Scriptures have, it is a commonplace to say, suffered
greatly from being isolated. This is as true whether we are
considering them as a source of evidence or as the sphere of
inspiration.
As a source of evidence they contain the record of historical
facts with some of which at any rate the Creed of Christendom
is inseparably interwoven. Thus it is impossible for Christians
who know what they are about, to depreciate the import-
ance of the historical evidence for those facts at least of
which the Creed contains a summary. But the tendency with
books of historical evidence has been, at least till recently, to
exaggerate the extent to which the mere evidence of remote
facts can compel belief. What we should make of the New
Testament record, what estimate we should be able to form
of the Person of Jesus Christ and the meaning of His life and
work, if it was contained simply in some old manuscripts, or
unearthed in some way by antiquaries out of the Syrian
sand, it is impossible to say. In order to have grounds for
believing the facts, in order to be susceptible of their evidence,
we require an antecedent state of conception and expecta-
tion. A whole set of presuppositions about God, about the
slavery of sin, about the reasonableness of redemption, must
in such speculation they allow them-
selves with ' much reserve and ex-
pression of unwillingness.
In fact it is easy to see that an
eternally living God, knowing and
loving, must be a God Whose Being
involves eternal relationships. Know-
ledge involves a relation of subject
and object : to make love possible
there must be a lover and a loved.
It is more difficult to see how a
perfect relationship must be three-
fold ; but there are true lines of
thought which lead up to this, such,
for instance, as make us see first in the
family, the type of complete life.
Love which is only a relation of two,
is selfish or unsatisfied : it demands
an object and a product of mutual love.
See especially Richard of S. Victor,
de Trin. Pars i. lib. iii. cc. 14, 15 :
'Communio amoris non potest esse
omnino minus quam in tribus perso-
nis. Nihil autem (ut dictum est) glori-
osius,nihil magnificentius,quam quic-
quid babes utile et dulce in cnnunniii'
</' '/i/i'i'i-e: . . . . hujusmodi dulcedinis
delicias solus non possidet qui in
exhibita sibi dilectione socium et con-
dileclum non habet ; quamdiu con-
diledum non habet, praecipui gaudii
communione caret.' See also Sarto-
rius, Doctrine of Divine Love (Clark's
Foreign Theol. Libr.), p. 16.
338 The Religion of the Incarnation.
be present with us. So only can the facts presented to us in
the Gospel come to us as credible things, or as parts of an
intelligible universe, correlated elements in a rational whole.
Now the work of the Spirit in the Church has been to keep
alive and real these presuppositions, this frame of mind. He
convinces of sin, of righteousness, of judgment. He does this
not merely in isolated individuals however numerous, but in
an organized continuous society. The spiritual life of the
Church assures me that in desiring union with God, in
feeling the burden of sin, in hungering for redemption, I am
not doing an eccentric, abnormal thing. I am doing only
what belongs to the best and richest movement of humanity.
More than this, it assures me that assent to the claims and
promises of Jesus Christ satisfies these spiritual needs in such
a way as to produce the strongest, the most lasting, the most
catholic sort of human character. The historical life of the
Church thus in every age ' setting to its seal ' that God's offer
in Christ is true, reproduces the original ' witness,' commends
it to conscience and reason, spans the gulf of the ages, and
brings down remote and alien incidents into close and in-
telligible familiarity. Lotze speaks of revelation as ' either
contained in some divine act of historic occurrence, or con-
tinually repeated in men's hearts1.' But in fact the antithesis
is not an alternative. The strength of the Christian Creed is
that it is both. It is a revelation continuously renewed in
men's hearts by an organized and systematic operation of the
Spirit in the Church, while at the same time it finds its
guarantee and security in certain Divine acts of historic
occurrence.
Once more, the belief in the Holy Scriptures as inspired re-
quires to be held in context by the belief in the general action
of the Holy Spirit upon the Christian society and the individual
soul. It is, we may perhaps say, becoming more and more
difficult to believe in the Bible without believing in the
Church. The Apostles, indeed, — and the New Testament
canon consists largely of the words of Apostles — have an
authority which, reasonably considered, is unique, and stands
1 Microcosmus, B. ix. C. iv. (E. T. vol. ii. p. 660.)
vni. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 339
by itself as that of the accredited witnesses of Christ ; but when
we find them appealing to members of the Church, they
appeal not as the possessors of an absolute authority or of a
Spirit in which others do not share. They are the ministers
of a ' tradition ' to which they themselves are subject, a tradition
' once for all delivered1:' they appeal to those who hear them
as men ' who have an unction from the Holy One and know
all things.' The tone in fact of the apostolic writers forces
us to regard the spirit in which the Church lives, as co-operat-
ing with, and in a real sense limiting, the spirit in which they
themselves speak and write. Thus in fact the apostolic
writings were written as occasion required, within the Church,
and for the Church. They presuppose membership in it
and familiarity with its tradition. They are secondary, not
primary, instructors ; for edification, not for initiation. Nor,
in fact, can a hard and fast line be drawn between what lies
within and what lies without the canon. For example,
Protestantism of an unecclesiastical sort has built upon the
Epistle to the Hebrews as much as upon any book of the
New Testament. This book is of unknown authorship. If
' Pauline ' it is pretty certainly not S. Paul's. In large part it
is the judgment of the Church which enables us to draw a
line between it and S. Clement's ' scripture.' The line indeed
our own judgment approves. The Epistle to the Hebrews
and S. Clement's letter are closely linked together, but the
latter depends on the former : it is secondary and the other
is primary. Yet how narrow is the historical interval between
them. How impossible to tear the one from the other. How
seemingly irrational to attribute absolute authority to the
anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews which represents apostolic
teaching at second hand 2, and then to interpret it in a sense
hostile to the Epistle of Clement, which represents exactly
the same stream of apostolic teaching only one short stage
lower down. For Clement interprets the high priesthood of
Christ in a sense which, instead of excluding, makes it the
basis of, the ministerial hierarchy of the Church. Or to put
the matter more broadly, how irrational it is, considering
1 See especially Gal. i. 8, 9. 2 Heb. ii. 3.
/< 2,
340 The Religion of the Incarnation.
the intimate links by which the New Testament canon
is bound up with the historic Church, not to accept the
mind of the Church, especially when we have its consent
down independent lines of tradition, as interpreting the
mind of the apostolic writers. Most rational surely is
the attitude of the early Church towards Scripture. The
Scripture was regarded as the highest utterance of the Spirit,
the unique and constant test of the Church's life and teaching.
But the Spirit in the Church interpreted the meaning of
Scripture. Thus the Church taught and the Scripture tested
and verified or corrected her teaching : and this because all
was of one piece, the life of the Church including the Scrip-
tures, the inspired writers themselves appealing to the Spirit
in the Churches1.
And now, what is to be said about this, at present, much
controverted subject of the inspiration of Holy Scripture?
What does the doctrine imply, and what attitude does belief
in it involve towards the modern critical treatment of the
inspired literature 1
i. Let us bear carefully in mind the place which the
doctrine holds in the building up of a Christian faith. It is
in fact an important part of the superstructure, but it is not
among the bases of the Christian belief. The Christian creed
asserts the reality of certain historical facts. To these facts,
in the Church's name, we claim assent : but we do so on
grounds which, so far, are quite independent of the inspiration
of the evangelic records. All that we claim to shew at this
stage is that they are historical : not historical so as to be
absolutely without error, but historical in the general sense,
so as to be trustworthy. All that is necessary for faith in
Christ is to be found in the moral dispositions which pre-
dispose to belief, and make intelligible and credible the thing
to be believed : coupled with such acceptance of the generally
historical character of the Gospels, and of the trustworthiness
1 See further on the fatal results 118; or quoted by Hare, Mission of the
of separating tho Spirit's work in Comforter, Note H. vol. ii. pp. 468,
Scripture, from His work in the 474.
Church, Coleridge, Remains iii. 93, iv.
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 341
of the other apostolic documents, as justifies belief that our
Lord was actually born of the Virgin Mary, manifested as
the Son of God ' with power according to a spirit of holiness,'
crucified, raised again the third day from the dead, exalted to
the right hand of the Father, the founder of the Church and
the source to it of the informing Spirit.
In all this no claim is made for any special belief as to the
method of the Spirit's work in the Scripture or in the Church.
Logically such belief follows, does not precede, belief in Christ.
Indeed, in the past, Christian apologists have made a great
mistake in allowing opponents to advance as objections
against the historical character of the Gospel narrative, what
are really objections not against its historical character — not
such as could tell against the substantially historical character
of secular documents — but against a certain view of the mean-
ing of inspiration. Let it be laid down then that Christianity
brings with it indeed a doctrine of the inspiration of Holy
Scriptures, but is not based upon it 1.
2. But such a doctrine it does bring with it. Our Lord and
His Apostles are clearly found to believe and to teach that the
Scriptures of the Old Testament were given by inspiration of
God ; and the Christian Church from the earliest days postu-
lated the same belief about the Scriptures of the New Testa-
ment. To disbelieve that ' the Scriptures were spoken by the
Holy Ghost,' was equivalent to being ' an unbeliever2.'
Thus, when once a man finds himself a believer in Christ,
he will find himself in a position where alike the authority of
his Master and the ' communis sensus ' of the society he belongs
to, give into his hand certain documents and declare them
inspired.
3. What in its general idea does this mean ?
S. Athanasius expresses the function of the Jews in the world
in a luminous phrase, when he describes them as having been
the ' sacred school for all the world of the knowledge of God
and of the spiritual life •''.' Every race has its special vocation,
1 This distinction was drawn by H. E. v. 28.
Bishop Clifford, Fortnightly Review, 3 Athan. de Incarn. 12. Cf. Ewald's
Jan. 1887, p. 145. preface to his History of Israel.
2 Cf. the quotation in Eusebius,
342 The Religion of the Incarnation.
and we recognise in the great writers of each race the inter-
preters of that vocation. They are specially gifted individuals,
but not merely individuals. The race speaks in them : Rome
is interpreted by Virgil, and Greece by Aeschylus or Plato.
Now every believer in God must see in these special missions
of races, a Divine inspiration. If we can once get down to the
bottom of human life, below its pride, its wilfulness, its pre-
tentiousness, down to its essence, we get to God and to a move-
ment of His Spirit x. Thus every race has its inspiration and
its prophets.
But the inspiration of the Jews was supernatural. What
does this mean ? That the Jews were selected — not to be
the school for humanity in any of the arts and sciences which
involve the thought of God only indirectly, and can therefore
be carried on without a fundamental restoration of man into
that relation to God which sin had clouded or broken, — but to
be the school of that fundamental restoration itself. There-
fore, in the case of the Jews the inspiration is both in itself
more direct and more intense, and also involves a direct con-
sciousness on the part of its subjects. In the race, indeed, the
consciousness might be dim ; but the consciousness, as the
prophets all assure us, did belong to the race, and not merely
to its individual interpreters. They speak as recalling the
people to something which they know, or ought to know,
not as preachers of a new religion. They were ' the con-
science of the state 2.' But special men, prophets, psalmists,
moralists, historians, were thus the inspired interpreters of the
Divine message to and in the race : and their inspiration lies
in this, that they were the subjects of a movement of the Holy
Ghost, so shaping, controlling, quickening their minds and
thoughts and aspirations, as to make them the instruments
through which was imparted 'the knowledge of God and of the
spiritual life.'
Various are the degrees of this inspiration : the inspiration
of the prophet is direct, continuous, absorbing. The inspiration
1 See Gratry, Henri Perreyve, pp. 162, tion, p. 106. Cf. Prof. Robeiison Smith,
163. Prophets of Israel, p. 108.
- Delitzsch, 0. T. History of Redemp-
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 343
of the writer of Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, is such as to
lead him to ponder on all the phases of a worldly experience,
passing through many a false conclusion, and cynical denial,
till at the last his thought is led to unite itself to the great
stream of Divine movement by finding the only possible solu-
tion of the problems of life in the recognition of God, and in
obedience to Him.
Various also are the sorts of literature inspired : for the
supernatural fertilizes and does not annihilate the natural.
The Church repudiated the Montanist conception of inspira-
tion, according to which the inspired man speaks in ecstasy,
as the passive unconscious instrument of the Spirit ; and the
metaphors which would describe the Holy Spirit as acting
upon a man ' like a flute player breathing into his flute,' or
' a plectrum striking a lyre,' have always a suspicion of heresy
attaching to their use 1. As the humanity of Christ is none
the less a true humanity for being conditioned by absolute one-
ness with God, so the human activity is none the less free,
conscious, rational, because the Spirit inspires it. The poet is
a poet, the philosopher a philosopher, the historian an his-
torian, each with his own idiosyncrasies, ways, and methods,
to be interpreted each by the laws of his own literature. And
just as truly as physiology, in telling us more and more
about the human body, is telling us about the body which the
Son of God assumed, so with the growth of our knowledge
about the kinds and sequences of human literature, shall we
know more and more about the literature of the Jews which
the Holy Spirit inspired.
What then is meant by the inspiration of Holy Scripture 1
If we begin our inquiry with the account of creation with
which the Bible opens, we may take note of its affinities
in general substance with the Babylonian and Phoenician
cosmogonies ; but we are much more struck with its differ-
ences, and it is in these we shall look for its inspiration. We
observe that it has for its motive and impulse not the
satisfaction of a fantastic curiosity, or the later interest of
1 See Epiphan. Haer. xlviii. 4. West- App. B, sect. ii. 4, sect. iv. 4. Mason,
cott, Introd. to the Study of the Gospels, Faith of the Gospel, p. 255.
344 The Religion of the Incarnation.
scientific discovery, but to reveal certain fundamental reli-
gious principles : that everything as we see it was made by
God : that it has no being in itself but at God's will : on the
other hand, that everything is in its essence good, as the pro-
duct of the good God : that man, besides sharing the physical
nature of all creation, has a special relation to God, as made
in God's image, to be God's vice-gerent : that sin, and all that
sin brings with it of misery and death, came not of man's
nature but of his disobedience to God and rejection of the
limitations under which He put him : that in spite of all that
sin brought about, God has not left man to himself, that there
is a hope and a promise. These are the fundamental principles
of true religion and progressive morality, and in these lies the
supernatural inspiration of the Bible account of creation 1.
As we pass on down the record of Genesis, we do not find
ourselves in any doubt as to the primary and certain meaning
of its inspiration. The first traditions of the race are all
given there from a special point of view. In that point of
view lies the inspiration. It is that everything is presented
to us as illustrating God's dealings with man— God's judg-
ment on sin : His call of a single man to work out a uni-
versal mission : His gradual delimitation of a chosen race :
His care for the race : His over-ruling of evil to work out His
purpose. The narrative of Genesis has all the fullest wealth
of human interest, but it is in the unveiling of the hand of God
that its special characteristic lies. As we go on into the
history, we find the recorders acting like the recorders of
other nations, collecting, sorting, adapting, combining their
materials, but in this inspired — that the animating motive
of their work is not to bring out the national glory or to
flatter the national vanity, nor, like the motive of a modern
historian, the mere interest in fact, but to keep before the
chosen people the record of how God has dealt with them.
This, as we perceive, gives them a special sense of the value
of fact-. They record what God has done, how God did in
1 See Professor Driver's admirable 2 Professor Cheyne, speaking of
article on ' the cosmogony of Gene- such narratives of Scriptures as the
sis.' Expositor, Jan. 1886. record of Elijah, protests against the
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 345
such and such ways take action on behalf of His peculiar
people, delivering them, punishing them, teaching them, keep-
ing them, disciplining them for higher ends. And none who
have eyes to see God's spiritual purposes can doubt that those
historians read aright the chronicles of the kings of Israel.
The spiritual significance which they see is the true signi-
ficance. God's special purpose was on Israel.
It is not necessary to emphasize in what consists the special
inspiration of psalmists or of prophets. The psalmists take
some of the highest places among the poets of all nations, but
the poetic faculty is directed to one great end, to reveal the
soul in its relation to God, in its exultations and in its self-
abasements. ' Where . . . did they come from, those piercing
lightning-like gleams of strange spiritual truth, those magni-
ficent out-looks upon the kingdom of God, those raptures at
His presence and His glory, those wonderful disclosures of
self-knowledge, those pure out-pourings of the love of God ?
Surely here is something more than the mere working of the
mind of man. Surely . . . they repeat the whispers of the
Spirit of God, they reflect the very light of the Eternal
Wisdom V
In the case of prophets once more we get the most obvious
and typical instances of inspiration 2. The prophets make a
supposition that they are ' true to question, in what does the inspiration
fact.' ' True to fact ! Who goes to the of the Old Testament consist,
artist for hard dry facts? Why even 2 Cf. pp. 161-167. In view of criti-
the historians of antiquity thought it cisms it may be explained that in the
no part of their duty to give the mere account of the prophet given above
prose of life. How much less can only that view of his inspiration is
the unconscious artists of the imagi- taken into consideration which ap-
native East have described their peals first to the enquirer (cf. the
heroes with relentless photographic words in the next paragraph ' in this
accuracy ! ' (The Hallowing of Criticism, general sense at least '). When once
p. 5.) But it seems to me that such this primary assurance of inspiration
a passage, by treating the recorders of is gained the evidence of detailed
the Old Testament as 'artists,' ignores prophecies will be found cogent. As
their obvious intention to lay stress we compare the anticipations of the
on what God has actually done, the Messiah or of the ' Righteous Servant '
deliverances He has actually wrought. in such passages as Ps. xxii., Is. liii.,
They, at least, like the Greek historical vii. 14, or ix. 6, 7, with their fulfil-
' artist' of the defeat of Persia, would ment in Jesus Christ, we recognise a
have laid great stress on the facts special action of the Holy Ghost,
having happened. marking even in details the continuity
1 Church, Discipline of the Christian of His method. Cf. p. 167 referred to
Character, p. 57. This work seems to above,
me the best existing answer to the
346 The Religion of the Incarnation.
direct claim to be the instruments of the Divine Spirit. Not
that the Divine Spirit supersedes their human faculties, but
He intensifies them. They see deeper under the surface of life
what God is doing, and therefore further into the future what
He will do. No doubt their predictive knowledge is general,
it is of the issue to which things tend. It is not at least
usually a knowledge ' of times and of seasons which the
Father hath put in His own power.' Thus at times they
foreshorten the distance, and place the great deliverance and
the ' day of Jehovah ' in the too immediate foreground 1.
The prophetic inspiration is thus consistent with erroneous
anticipations as to the circumstances and the opportunity of
God's self-revelation, just as the apostolic inspiration admitted
of S. Paul expecting the second coming of Christ within his
own life-time. But the prophets claim to be directly and
really inspired to teach and interpret what God is doing
and commanding in their own age, and to forecast what in
judgment and redemptive mercy God means to do and must
do in the Divine event. The figure of the king Messiah dawns
upon their horizon with increasing definiteness of outline and
characteristic, and we, with the experience of history between
us and them, are sure that the correspondence of prophecy
and fulfilment can be due to no other cause than that they
spoke in fact the ' word of the Lord.'
Thus there is built up for us in the literature of a nation,
marked by an unparalleled unity of purpose and character, a
spiritual fabric, which in its result we cannot but recog-
nise as the action of the Divine Spirit. A knowledge of God
and of the spiritual life gradually appears, not as the product of
human ingenuity, but as the result of Divine communication :
and the outcome of this communication is to produce an or-
ganic whole which postulates a climax not yet reached, a
redemption not yet given, a hope not yet satisfied. In this
general sense at least no Christian ought to feel a difficulty in
believing, and believing with joy, in the inspiration of the Old
1 See for instance Micah v. 2-6. On ject of prophecy, let me refer to Dr.
the subject of the limitations of pro- Ed. Ttiehm, Messianic Prophecy (Clark's
photic foresight, as on the whole sub- trans.) pp. 79, 86 if., 114, 157-162.
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 347
Testament : nor can he feel that he is left without a standard
by which to judge what it means. Christ, the goal of Old
Testament development, stands forth as the test and measure
of its inspiration.
The New Testament consists of writings of Apostles or of
men of sub-apostolic rank, like S. Luke and probably the
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. There is not, except
perhaps in the case of the Apocalypse, any sign of an inspira-
tion to write, other than the inspiration which gave power to
teach. What then is, whether for writing or for teaching, the
inspiration of an Apostle 1
If Jesus Christ both was, and knew Himself to be, the
Revealer of the Father, it almost stands to reason that He
must have secured that His revelation should be, without
material alloy, communicated to the Church which was to
enshrine and perpetuate it. Thus, in fact, we find that He
spent His chief pains on the training of His apostolic wit-
nesses. And all the training which He gave them while He
was present among them was only to prepare them to receive
the Holy Ghost Who, after He was gone, was to be poured out
upon them to qualify them to bear His witness among men.
' Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon
you, and ye shall be My witnesses : ' ' These things have I
spoken unto you while yet abiding with you. And the Com-
forter, even the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in My
name, He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remem-
brance all that I said unto you.' ' I have yet many things to
say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when
He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all the
truth V
Thus the Church sees in the Apostles men specially and
deliberately qualified to interpret Christ to the world. It
understands by their inspiration an endowment which enables
men of all ages to take their teaching as representing, and
not misrepresenting, His teaching and Himself. In S. John's
Gospel, for example, we have an account of our Lord which
has obviously passed through the medium of a most remark -
1 Acts i. 8. S. John xiv. 25, 26 ; xvi. 12, 13.
348 The Religion of the Incarnation.
able personality. We have the outcome of the meditation, as
well as the recollection, of the Apostle. But, as the evidence
assures us that the Gospel is really S. John's, so the Church
unhesitatingly accepts S. John's strong and repeated assevera-
tion that he is interpreting and not distorting the record,
the personality, the claims of Jesus Christ. ' He bears record,
and his record is true 1.'
This assurance is indeed not without verification : it is
verified by the unity of testimony which, under all differ-
ences of character and circumstance, we find among the
apostolic witnesses. The accepted doctrine of the Church
when S. Paul wrote his 'undoubted Epistles,' — the points of
agreement amidst all differences between him and the Judaizers
— gives us substantially the same conception of the Person of
the Incarnate Son of God as we find in S. John 2. The same
conception of what He was, is required to interpret the record
of what He did and said in the Synoptic Gospels. Further,
the witness of the Apostles, though it receives its final
guarantee through the belief in their inspiration, has its
natural basis in the prolonged training by which — ' company-
ing with them all the time that He went in and out among
them, beginning from the baptism of John, until the day that
He was received up,' — they were prepared to be His witnesses.
Thus if an act of faith is asked of us in the apostolic inspira-
tion, it is a reasonable act of faith.
If we pass from the writings properly apostolic to those like
S. Luke's records, which represent apostolic teaching at
second hand, we do not find that the inspiration of their
writers was of such sort as enabled them to dispense with the
ordinary means or guarantees of accuracy. The simple claim
of S. Luke's preface to have had the best means of informa-
tion and to have taken the greatest care in the use of them,
is on this score most instructive. We should suppose that
their inspiration was part of the whole spiritual endowment
of their life which made them the trusted friends of the
1 S. John xix. 35 ; xxi. 24. i S. John Christians thought about Christ. (Oxford
i. 1-3. House Papers : Eivington.)
2 See Prof. Sanday's What the first
vin. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 349
Apostles, and qualified them to be the chosen instruments to
record their teaching, in the midst of a Church whose quick
and eager memory of ' the tradition ' would have acted as a
check to prevent any material error creeping into the record.
4. It will be remembered that when inspiration is spoken
of by S. Paul, he mentions it as a positive endowment which
qualifies the writings of those who were its subjects, to be
permanent sources of spiritual instruction. ' Every Scripture
inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof,
for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness1.'
Following out this idea of Holy Scripture then, we are led to
think of the belief in inspiration as having this primary
practical result : that we submit ourselves to the teaching of
every book which is given to us as inspired. We are to put
ourselves to school with each in turn of the inspired writers ;
with S. James, for example, in the New Testament, as well
as with S. John and S. Paul ; with S. Luke as well as with
S. Matthew ; with the Pastoral Epistles as well as with the
Epistle to the Galatians 2. At starting each of us, according
to his predisposition, is conscious of liking some books of
Scripture better than others. This, however, should lead us to
recognise that in some way we specially need the teaching
which is less attractive to us. We should set ourselves to
study what we like less, till that too has had its proper effect
in moulding our conscience and character. It is hardly
possible to estimate how much division would have been
avoided in the Church if those, for example, who were most
ecclesiastically disposed had been at pains to assimilate the
teaching of the Epistle to the Romans, and those who most
valued ' the freedom of the Gospel ' had recognised a special
obligation to deepen their hold on the Epistles to the Corin-
thians and the Pastoral Epistles and the Epistle of S. James.
To believe in the inspiration of Holy Scripture is to put
ourselves to school with every part of the Old Testament, as of
the New. True, the Old Testament is imperfect, but for that
1 2 Tim. iii. 16. in this quality of impartial regard to
2 Mr. Horton's book on Inspiration inspired books.
and the Bible is almost naively lacking
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
350 The Religion of the Incarnation.
very reason has a special value. ' The real use of the earlier
record is not to add something to the things revealed in
Christ, but to give us that clear and all-sided insight into the
meaning and practical worth of the perfect scheme of Divine
grace which can only be attained by tracing its growth1.'
We see in the Old Testament the elements, each in separation,
which went to make up the perfect whole, and which must
still lie at the basis of all rightly formed life of individuals
and societies.
Thus to believe, for instance, in the inspiration of the Old
Testament forces us to recognise a real element of the Divine
education in the imprecatory Psalms. They are not the
utterances of selfish spite 2 : they are the claim which
righteous Israel makes upon God that He should vindicate
Himself, and let their eyes see how 'righteousness turns again
unto judgment.' The claim is made in a form which belongs
to an early stage of spiritual education ; to a time when this life
was regarded as the scene in which God must finally vindicate
Himself, and when the large powers and possibilities of the
Divine compassion were very imperfectly recognised. But
behind these limitations, which characterize the greater part
of the Old Testament, the claim of these Psalms still remains
a necessary part of the claim of the Christian soul. We must
not only recognise the reality of Divine judgments in time
and eternity, bodily and spiritual ; we must not only
acquiesce in them because they are God's ; we must go on to
claim of God the manifestation of His just judgment, so that
holiness and joy, sin and failure, shall be seen to coincide.
To recognise then the inspiration of the Bible is to put
ourselves to school in every part of it, and everywhere to bear in
mind the admonition of the Delmitatione 'that every Scripture
must be read in the same spirit in which it was written.' So
far it will not be a point in dispute among Christians what
inspiration means, or what its purpose is. ' The Councils of
Trent and the Vatican,' writes Cardinal Newman, ' tell us
1 Prof. Robertson Smith, Prophets of vii. p. 207 : ' Another point in which
Israel, p. 6. criticism removes a serious difficulty
2 C'f. Prof. Robertson Smith, The is the interpretation of the impreca-
Old Testament in the Jewish Church, Lect. tory psalms.'
vin. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 351
distinctly the object and the promise of Scriptural inspiration.
They specify " faith and moral conduct " as the drift of that
teaching which has the guarantee of inspiration V Nor can
it be denied that the more Holy Scripture is read from this
point of view, the more confidently it is treated as the in-
spired guide of faith and conduct, no less in the types of
character which it sets before us than in its direct instruction,
the more the experience and appreciation of its inspiration
grows upon us, so that to deny or to doubt it comes to mean
to deny or to doubt a matter plain to the senses. Indeed
what has been said under this head will probably appear to
those practised in the spiritual use of Holy Scripture as an
understatement, perhaps not easy to justify, of the sense in
which the Scripture is the Word of God, and the spiritual
food of the soul2.
5. But here certain important questions arise, (a) The re-
velation of God was made in a historical process. Its record
is in large part the record of a national life : it is historical.
Now the inspiration of the recorder lies, as we have seen,
primarily in this, that he sees the hand of God in the history
and interprets His purpose. Further, we must add, his
sense of the working of God in history, increases his realiza-
tion of the importance of historical fact. Thus there is a
profound air of historical truthfulness pervading the Old
Testament record from Abraham downward. The weaknesses,
the sins, of Israel's heroes are not spared. Their sin and its
punishment is always before us. There is no flattering of
national pride, no giving the reins to boastfulness. In all
this the Old Testament appears to be in marked contrast, as
to contemporary Assyrian monuments, so also to a good deal
of much later ecclesiastical history. But does the inspiration
of the recorder guarantee the exact historical truth of what he
records'? And in matter of fact can the record, with due
1 See Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1884, to anyone of you, at once the voice
p. 189. of exultation and thankfulness for
2 'When from time to time,' says the nourishment of spiritual food
S. Bernard to his monks, ' anything that has been received, must rise as
that was hidden or obscure in the from a banquet to delight the ears of
Scriptures has come out into the light God.'
352 The Religion of the Incarnation.
regard to legitimate historical criticism, be pronounced true ?
Now, to the latter of these two questions (and they are
quite distinct questions), we may reply that there is nothing
to prevent our believing, as our faith certainly strongly dis-
poses us to believe, that the record from Abraham downward
is in substance in the strict sense historical. Of course the
battle of historical truth cannot be fought on the field of the
Old Testament, as it can on that of the New, because it is so
vast and indecisive, and because (however certainly ancient is
such a narrative as that contained in Genesis xiv.) very little
of the early record can be securely traced to a period near the
events. Thus the Church cannot insist upon the historical
character of the earliest records of the ancient Church in detail,
as she can on the historical character of the Gospels or the Acts
of the Apostles. On the other hand, as it seems the more
probable opinion that the Hebrews must have been acquainted
with the art of writing in some form long before the Exodus,
there is no reason to doubt the existence of some written
records among them from very early days1. Internal evi-
dence again certainly commends to our acceptance the history
of the patriarchs, of the Egyptian bondage, of the great
redemption, of the wanderings, as well as of the later
period as to which there would be less dispute. In a word
we are, we believe, not wrong in anticipating that the Church
will continue to believe and to teach that the Old Testament
from Abraham downwards is really historical, and that there
will be nothing to make such belief and teaching unreasonable
or wilful. But within the limits of what is substantially his-
torical, there is still room for an admixture of what, though
marked by spiritual purpose, is yet not strictly historical — for
instance, for a feature which characterizes all early history,
1 See the Annual Address (1889) states of Palestine . . . This inter-
delivered at the Victoria Institute by course was carried on by means of
Prof. Sayce, on the cuneiform tablets the Babylonian language and the
of Tel el-amarna, pp. 4, 14 f. ; 'We complicated Babylonian script. How
learn that in the fifteenth century educated the old world was, we are
before our era — a century before the but just beginning to learn. But we
Exodus — active literary intercourse have already learnt enough to discover
was going on throughout the civilized how important a bearing it has on the
world of Western Asia, between criticism of the Old Testament.'
Babylonia and Egypt and the smaller
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 353
the attribution to first founders of what is really the remoter
result of their institutions. Now historical criticism * assures
us that this process has been largely at work in the Pentateuch.
By an analysis, for instance, the force of which is very great, it
distinguishes distinct stages in the growth of the law of worship :
at least an early stage such as is represented in ' the Book of
the Covenant2,' a second stage in the Book of Deuteronomy,
a last stage in ' the Priestly Code.' What we may suppose to
have happened is that Moses himself established a certain
germ of ceremonial enactment in connection with the ark and
its sacred tent, and with the ' ten words ' ; and that this developed
always as ' the law of Moses,' the whole result being constantly
attributed, probably unconsciously and certainly not from any
intention to deceive, to the original founder. This view
would certainly imply that the recorders of Israel's history
were subject to the ordinary laws in the estimate of evidence,
that their inspiration did not consist in a miraculous com-
munication to them of facts as they originally happened : but
if we believe that the law, as it grew, really did represent the
Divine intention for the Jews, gradually worked out upon the
basis of a Mosaic institution, there is nothing materially un-
truthful, though there is something uncritical, in attributing
the whole legislation to Moses acting under the Divine
command. It would be only of a piece with the attribution
of the collection of Psalms to David and of Proverbs to
Solomon. Nor does the supposition that the law was of
gradual growth interfere in any way with the symbolical and
typical value of its various ordinances.
Once again, the same school of criticism would assure us
that the Books of Chronicles represent a later and less
historical version of Israel's history than that given in Samuel
and Kings3: they represent, according to this view, the ver-
sion of that history which had become current in the priestly
schools. What we are asked to admit is not conscious
perversion, but unconscious idealizing of history, the reading
Driver. Crit. notes on Sunday 3 The Books of Kings seem to be
-i-ilincr : X. -\v York). compiled from the point of view of the
Ex. xx. xxii-xxiii. xxxiii. Deuteronomist.
A a
354 The Religion of the Incarnation.
back into past records of a ritual development which was
really later. Now inspiration excludes conscious deception
or pious fraud, but it appears to be quite consistent with this
sort of idealizing ; always supposing that the result read back
into the earlier history does represent the real purpose of God
and only anticipates its realization.
Here then is one great question. Inspiration certainly
means the illumination of the judgment of the recorder. ' By
the contact of the Holy Spirit,' says Origen, ' they became
clearer in their mental perceptions, and their souls were filled
with a brighter light V But have we any reason to believe
that it means, over and above this, the miraculous communi-
cation of facts not otherwise to be known, a miraculous com-
munication such as would make the recorder independent of
the ordinary processes of historical tradition ? Certainly neither
S. Luke's preface to his Gospel, nor the evidence of any
inspired record, justifies us in this assumption. Nor would it
appear that spiritual illumination, even in the highest degree,
has any tendency to lift men out of the natural conditions of
knowledge which belong to their time. Certainly in the
similar case of exegesis, it would appear that S. Paul is
left to the method of his time, though he uses it with inspired
insight into the function and meaning of law and of prophecy
as a whole. Thus, without pronouncing an opinion, where we
have no right to do so, on the critical questions at present under
discussion, we may maintain with considerable assurance that
there is nothing in the doctrine of inspiration to prevent our
recognising a considerable idealizing element in the Old Tes-
tament history. The reason is of course obvious enough why
what can be admitted in the Old Testament, could not without
results disastrous to the Christian Creed, be admitted in the
New.. It is because the Old Testament is the record of how
God produced a need, or anticipation, or ideal, while the New
Testament records how in fact He satisfied it. The absolute
coincidence of idea and fact is vital in the realization, not in
the preparation for it. It is equally obvious, too, that where
fact is of supreme importance, as in the New Testament, the
1 Origen, c. Cels. vii. 4.
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 355
evidence has none of the ambiguity or remoteness which
belongs to much of the record of the preparation.
(6) But once again ; we find all sorts of literature in the
inspired volume : men can be inspired to think and to write
for God under all the forms of natural genius. Now one
form of genius is the dramatic : its essence is to make cha-
racters, real or imaginary, the vehicles for an ideal presenta-
tion. It presents embodied ideas. Now the Song of Solomon
is of the nature of a drama. The Book of Job, although it
works on an historical basis, is, it can hardly be denied,
mainly dramatic. The Book of Wisdom, which with us is
among the books of the Bible, though in the second rank out-
side the canon, and which is inside the canon of the Roman
Church, professes to be written by Solomon ^ but is certainly
written not by him, but in his person by another author.
We may then conceive the same to be true of Ecclesiastes,
and of Deuteronomy ; i. e. we may suppose Deuteronomy to
be a republication of the law ' in the spirit and power ' of Moses
put dramatically into his mouth. Criticism goes further, and
asks us to regard Jonah and Daniel, among the prophetic
books, as dramatic compositions worked up on a basis of his-
tory. The discussion of these books has often been approached
from a point of view from which the miraculous is neces-
sarily unhistorical. With such a point of view we are not
concerned. The possibility and reality of miracles has to be
vindicated first of all in the field of the New Testament ; and
one who admits them there, cannot reasonably exclude their
possibility in the earlier history. The question must be treated
simply on literary and evidential grounds 2. But we would
contend that if criticism should shew these books to be probably
dramatic, that would be no hindrance to their performing 'an
important canonical function,' or to their being inspired.
1 E. g. chs. vii. ix. The Roman admitted into the canon a book the
Church admits that it is, to use literary method of which is thus
Newman's phrase, 'a prosopopeia ' ; confessedly dramatic. Newman makes
'our Bibles say, "it is written in the this the ground for. saying that the
person of Solomon " and "it is un- same may be true of Ecclesiastes.
certain who was the writer,"' I.e. 2 On the evidence of 0. T. miracles
p. 197. It is important to bear in I may refer to Mr. Samuel Cox's
mind that the Western Church in Essay : Miracles, an Argument and a
general has, since S. Augustine's day, Challenge. (Kegan Paul, 1884.)
A a 2
356 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Dramatic composition has played an immense part in training
the human mind. It is as far removed as possible from a
violation of truth, though in an uncritical age its results may
very soon pass for history. It admits of being inspired as
much as poetry, or history, and indeed there are few who
could feel a difficulty in recognising as inspired the teaching
of the books of Jonah and Daniel 1. It is maintained then
that the Church leaves open to literary criticism the question
whether several of the writings of the Old Testament are
or are not dramatic. Certainly the fact that they have
not commonly been taken to be so in the past will be no
evidence to the contrary, unless it can be denied that a
literary criticism is being developed, which is as really new
an intellectual product as the scientific development, and
as such, certain to reverse a good many of the literary judg-
ments of previous ages. We are being asked to make con-
siderable changes in our literary conception of the Scriptures,
but not greater changes than were involved in the accept-
ance of the heliocentric astronomy.
(c) Once again : an enlarged study of comparative history
has led to our perceiving that the various sorts of mental or
literary activity develop in their different lines out of an
earlier condition in which they lie fused and undifferentiated.
This we can vaguely call the mythical stage of mental evolu-
tion. A myth is not a falsehood ; it is a product of mental
activity, as instructive and rich as any later product, but its
characteristic is that it is not yet distinguished into history,
and poetry, and philosophy. It is all of these in the germ, as
dream and imagination, and thought and experience, are fused
in the mental furniture of a child's mind. ' These myths or
current stories,' says Grote writing of Greek history, 'the
spontaneous and earliest growth of the Greek mind, consti-
tuted at the same time the entire intellectual stock of the age to
which they belonged. They are the common root of all those
1 Of course the distinction must be will probably solve the special diffi-
maintained in the case of the book of culty which on the critical hypotli'
Daniel between a ' pious fraud ' which attaches to the book of Daniel from
cannot be inspired, and an idealizing this point of view : see Stanton,
personification which, as a normal Jewish and Christian Messiah, p. 109,
type of literature, can. Further study note i.
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 357
different ramifications into which the mental activity of the
Greeks subsequently diverged ; containing as it were the
preface and germ of the positive history and philosophy, the
dogmatic theology and the professed romance, which we shall
hereafter trace, each in its separate development.' Now has
the Jewish history such earlier stage : does it pass back out of
history into myth ? In particular, are not its earlier narratives,
before the call of Abraham, of the nature of myth, in which we
cannot distinguish the historical germ, though we do not at all
deny that it exists ? The inspiration of these narratives is as
conspicuous as that of any part of Scripture, but is there any-
thing to prevent our regarding these great inspirations about
the origin of all things, — the nature of sin, the judgment of
God on sin, and the alienation among men which follows
their alienation from God, — as conveyed to us in that form of
myth or allegorical picture, which is the earliest mode in
which the mind of man apprehended truth ?
6. In spite of the arbitrariness and the irreligion which have
often been associated with the modern development of histo-
rical criticism in its application to the Old Testament, the
present writer believes that it represents none the less a real
advance in literary analysis, and is reaching results as sure,
where it is fairly used, as scientific inquiry, though the results
in the one case as in the other are often hard to disentangle
from their less permanent accompaniments. Believing this,
and feeling in consequence that the warning which the name
of Galileo must ever bring before the memory of churchmen, is
not unneeded now, he believes also that the Church is in no
way restrained from admitting the modifications just hinted at,
in what has latterly been the current idea of inspiration.
The Church is not restrained, in the first place, by having
committed herself to any dogmatic definitions of the meaning
of inspiration J. It is remarkable indeed that Origen's almost
reckless mysticism, and his accompanying repudiation of the
historical character of large parts of the narrative of the Old
1 This is certainly true of the Roman Church, see Newman in the
Church as a whole. For the most that article above cited,
can be said in the same sense of the
358 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Testament, and of some parts of the New 1, though it did not
gain acceptance, and indeed had no right to it (for it had no
sound basis), on the other hand never roused the Church to
contrary definitions. Nor is it only Origen who disputed the
historical character of parts of the narrative of Holy Scripture.
Clement before him in Alexandria, and the mediaeval Anselm in
the West, treat the seven days' creation as allegory and not his-
tory. Athanasius speaks of paradise as a ' figure.' A mediaeval
Greek writer, who had more of Irenaeus than remains to us, de-
clared that 'he did not know how those -who kept to the letter
and took the account of the temptation historically rather than
allegorically, could meet the arguments of Irenaeus against
them.' Further than this, it cannot be denied that the mystical
method, as a whole, tended to the depreciation of the historical
sense, in comparison with the spiritual teaching which it con-
veyed 2. In a different line, Chrysostom, of the literal school
of interpreters, explains quite in the tone of a modern apologist,
how the discrepancies in detail between the different Gospels,
assure us of the independence of the witnesses, and do not
touch the facts of importance, in which all agree.
The Church is not tied then by any existing definitions.
We cannot make any exact claim upon any one's belief in
regard to inspiration, simply because we have no authoritative
definition to bring to bear upon him. Those of us who believe
most in the inspiration of the Church, will see a Divine
Providence in this absence of dogma, because we shall perceive
that only now is the state of knowledge such as admits of the
question being legitimately raised.
Nor does it seem that the use which our Lord made of the
Old Testament is an argument against the proposed concessions.
Our Lord, in His use of the Old Testament, does indeed endorse
1 De Principiis, iv. 15, 16, 17. His reader may notice . . . innumerable
point is that incidents which could other passages, like these, so that he
not have occurred in fact, or at least will be convinced that in the histories
did not occur, are inserted in the that are literally recorded, circum-
narrative of the Old and New Testa- stances are inserted that did not
ments, that their very historical im- occur.' Cf. Bigg, Christian Platonists,
possibility or improbability may drive pp. 137-8.
us to the consideration of their 2 Cf. Jerome, ad Nepotian. ep. lii. 2.
spiritual significance. ' The attentive
vin. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 359
with the utmost emphasis the Jewish view of their own history.
He does thus imply, on the one hand, the real inspiration of
their canon in its completeness, and, on the other hand, that He
Himself was the goal of that inspired leading and the standard
of that inspiration. ' Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My
day : ' ' I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' This, and it is
the important matter for all that concerns our spiritual educa-
tion, is not in dispute. What is questioned is that our Lord's
words foreclose certain critical positions as to the character of
Old Testament literature. For example, does His use of Jonah's
resurrection, as a type of His own, depend in any real degree
upon whether it is historical fact or allegory1? It is of the
essence of a type to suggest an idea, as of the antitype to
realize it. The narrative of Jonah suggested certainly the
idea of resurrection after three days, of triumph over death,
and by suggesting this gave our Lord what His discourse re-
quired. Once more, our Lord uses the time before the flood2
to illustrate the carelessness of men before His own coming.
He is using the flood here as a typical judgment, as else-
where He uses other contemporary visitations for a like pur-
pose. In referring to the flood He certainly suggests that He is
treating it as typical, for He introduces circumstances — 'eating
and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage ' — which have
no counterpart in the original narrative. Nothing in His use
of it depends on its being more than a typical instance. Once
more, He argues with the Pharisees on the assumption of the
Davidic authorship of Psalm ex 3. But it must be noticed
that He is asking a question rather than making a state-
ment— a question, moreover, which does not admit of being
turned into a statement without suggesting the conclusion,
of which rationalistic critics have not hesitated to avail
themselves, that David's Lord could not be David's son.
There are, we notice, other occasions when our Lord asked
questions which cannot be made the basis of positive proposi-
tions4. It was in fact part of His method to lead men
1 S. Matt. xii. 40. * See especially S. Mark x. 17-18
2 8. Matt. xxiv. 37-39. (and parallel passages ', where our
3 S. Matt. xxii. 41-46. Lord s question, if converted into a
360 The Religion of the Incarnation.
to examine their own principles without at the time sug-
gesting any positive conclusion at all.
It may also fairly be represented, on a review of our Lord's
teaching as a whole, that if He had intended to convey in-
struction to us on critical and literary questions, He would
have made His purpose plainer. It is contrary to His whole
method to reveal His Godhead by any anticipations of natural
knowledge. The Incarnation was a self-emptying of God to
reveal Himself under conditions of human nature and from the
human point of view. We are able to draw a distinction be-
tween what He revealed and what He used. He revealed
God, His mind, His character, His claim, within certain limits
His Threefold Being : He revealed man, his sinfulness, his
need, his capacity : He revealed His purpose of redemption,
and founded His Church as a home in which man was to be
through all the ages reconciled to God in knowledge and love.
All this He revealed, but through, and under conditions of, a
true human nature. Thus He used human nature, its relation
to God, its conditions of experience, its growth in knowledge,
its limitation of knowledge J. He feels as we men ought to
feel : he sees as we ought to see. We can thus distinguish more
or less between the Divine truth which He reveals, and the
human nature which He uses. Now when He speaks of the ' sun
rising ' He is using ordinary human knowledge. He willed
so to restrain the beams of Deity as to observe the limits of
the science of His age, and He puts Himself in the same
relation to its historical knowledge. Thus He does not reveal
His eternity by statements as to what had happened in the
past, or was to happen in the future, outside the ken of exist-
ing history2. He made His Godhead gradually manifest by
positive proposition, suggests a repu- Christ to take it upon Himself,
diation of personal goodness. Cf. '2 Of course He gave prophetic indi-
also the question in S. John x. 34-36 cations of the coming judgment, but
where, though the argument is a on the analogy of inspired prophecy.
fortiori, still the true character of our He did not reveal 'times and seasons,'
Lord's sonship is hardly suggested. and declared that it was not with in the
1 This limitation of knowledge scope of His mission to do so. Seeesp.
must not be confused with fallibility S. Mark xiii. 32. He exhibits super-
or liability to human delusion, because natural insight into men's characters
it was doubtless guarded by the and lives. But He never exhibits the
Divine purpose which led Jesus omniscience of bare Godhead in the
viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 361
His attitude towards men and things about Him, by His
moral and spiritual claims, by His expressed relation to His
Father, not by any miraculous exemptions of Himself from the
conditions of natural knowledge in its own proper province.
Thus the utterances of Christ about the Old Testament do
not seem to be nearly definite or clear enough to allow of
our supposing that in this case He is departing from the
general method of the Incarnation, by bringing to bear the
unveiled omniscience of the Godhead, to anticipate or fore-
close a development of natural knowledge.
But if we thus plead that theology may leave the field
open for free discussion of these questions which Biblical
criticism has recently been raising, we shall probably be bidden
to ' remember Tubingen,' and not be over-trustful of a criticism
which at least exhibits in some of its most prominent repre-
sentatives a great deal of arbitrariness, of love of ' new views '
for their own sake, and a great lack of that reverence and
spiritual insight which is at least as much needed for under-
standing the books of the Bible, as accurate knowledge and fair
investigation. To this the present writer would be disposed
to reply that, if the Christian Church has been enabled to
defeat the critical attack, so far as it threatened destruction to
the historical basis of the New Testament, it has not been by
foreclosing the question with an appeal to dogma, but by facing
in fair and frank discussion the problems raised. A similar
treatment of Old Testament problems will enable us to dis-
tinguish between what is reasonable and reverent, and what
is high-handed and irreligious in contemporary criticism
whether German, French, or English. Even in regard to
what makes prima facie a reasonable claim, we do not
prejudice the decision by declaring the field open : in all
probability there will always remain more than one school of
realm of natural knowledge ; such as 2 Cor. viii. 9 arid Phil. ii. 7. Indeed
would be required to anticipate the God 'declares His almighty power
results of modern science or criticism. most chiefly ' in this condescension,
This 'self-emptying' of God in the whereby He 'beggared Himself of
Incarnation is, we must always re- Divine prerogatives, to put Himself
member, no failure of power, but a in our place,
continuous act of Self-sacrifice : cf.
362 The Religion of the Incarnation.
legitimate opinion on the subject: indeed the purpose of the
latter part of this essay has not been to inquire how much we
can without irrationality believe inspiration to involve ; but
rather, how much may legitimately and without real loss be
conceded. For, without doubt, if consistently with entire
loyalty to our Lord and His Church, we can regard as open the
questions specified above, we are removing great obstacles from
the path to belief of many who certainly wish to believe, and
do not exhibit any undue scepticism. Nor does there appear
to be any real danger that the criticism of the Old Testament
will ultimately diminish our reverence for it. In the case of
the New Testament certainly we are justified in feeling that
modern investigation has resulted in immensely augmenting
our understanding of the different books, and has distinctly
fortified and enriched our sense of their inspiration. Why
then should we hesitate to believe that the similar investiga-
tion of the Old Testament will in its result similarly enrich
our sense that 'God in divers portions and divers manners
spake of old times unto the fathers,' and that the Inspiration
of Holy Scriptures will always be recognised as the most
conspicuous of the modes in which the Holy Spirit has
mercifully wrought for the illumination and encouragement
of our race ?
' For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written
for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the
Scriptures might have hope/
IX.
THE CHURCH.
WALTER LOCK.
IX.
THE CHURCH.
CHRISTIANITY claims to be at once a life, a truth, and
a worship ; and, on all these accounts, it needs must find
expression in a church. For, in the first place, the life of an
individual remains dwarfed and stunted as long as it is lived
in isolation ; it is in its origin the outcome of other lives ; it
is at every moment of its existence dependent upon others ; it
reaches perfection only when it arrives at a conscious sense of
its own deficiencies and limitations, and, therefore, of its
dependence, and through such a sense realizes with thankful-
ness its true relation to the rest of life around it. Again, the
knowledge of truth comes to the individual first through the
mediation of others, of his parents and teachers ; as he grows.
and his own intellect works more freely, yet its results only
gain consistency, security, width, when tested by the results of
other workers ; and directly we wish to propagate these
results, they must be embodied in the lives of others, in
societies, in organizations. Without these, ideas remain in the
air, abstract, intangible, appealing perhaps to the philosophic
few, but high above the reach of the many, the simple. ' All
human society is the receptacle, nursery, and dwelling-place of
ideas, shaped and limited according to the nature of the
society — ideas which live and act on it and in it ; which are
preserved, passed on, and transmitted from one portion of it
to another, from one generation to another ; which would be
merely abstractions or individual opinions if they were not
366 The Religion of the Incarnation.
endowed with the common life which their reception in
a society gives them1.'
These two principles are, obviously, not confined to religious
questions. They apply to morality, to society, to politics.
They are assumed in all ethical and political treatises. The
need of co-operation for common life underlies the whole
structure of the Republic of Plato ; it is implied in Aristotle's
definition of man as a social animal, and in his close asso-
ciation of Ethics with Politics : it has created the family, the
tribe, the state ; each fresh assertion of the principle, each
breaking down of the barriers which separate family from
family, tribe from tribe, nation from nation, has been a step
forward in civilization. The strength of co-operation for the
propagation of ideas is seen in the persistence with which
certain nations retain hold on political theories or peculiar
features of character ; it is seen in the recurring formation
of philosophic schools or religious sects or guilds, as soon as
any new truth, intellectual or religious, has been discovered,
or any moral quality, such as temperance or purity, has
needed to be emphasized. The most individualistic of Chris-
tian sects have found themselves forced to be ecclesiastical, to
define their creeds and to perfect their organization, as soon
as they have begun to be missionary.
These principles are as wide as society ; but religion takes
them up and applies them on the highest level. Religion is,
almost universally, the link which binds man to man, no
less than that which binds man to a Power above him. So
in the Christian Church — if we may anticipate, for a moment,
our special application of the principle — the new-born child is
taken at once and incorporated into a body of believers ; from
the first it draws its life from God through the body ; it is
taught that throughout life it must keep in touch with the
body ; it must be in a right relation to the other members ; it
must draw life from them ; it must contribute life to them.
And, further, this body has existed always and exists still as
1 The Dean of S. Paul's on The cellently worked out and applied to
Oiristi«n C//K rrli. Oxford House Papers, the Church.
No. xvii. where this truth is ex-
ix. The Church. 367
the home of certain ideas., ideas about God and about human
life, which were revealed in Jesus Christ, and which it has to
attest in its teaching and embody in its life. It is to be
a body of visible persons, themselves the light of the world,
expressing so that others can see the manifold wisdom of God,
winning others to belief in the unity of God, by the sight of
their own one-ness. The first principle might be expressed in
the words of Festus to Paracelsus, when the latter had claimed
to be God's special instrument in the world ;
Were I elect like you,
I would encircle me with love, and raise
A rampart of my fellows : it should seem
Impossible for me to fail, so watched
By gentle friends who made their cause my own.
They should ward off fate's envy : — the great gift,
Extravagant when claimed by me alone,
Being so a gift to them as well as me l :
the second principle by lines applied originally to the In-
carnation, but which we may legitimately transfer to the
Church, which continues the work of the Incarnation,
And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the Creed of Creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought 2.
But, further, religion adds a third application of its own to
this principle of co-operation : for a church grows also out of
the necessities of worship. The ritual needed for the offering
of sacrifice almost necessitates of itself a number of persons
for its performance. No doubt, an individual can worship
God in private, but so his worship tends to be self-centred
and narrow : for the full expression of his religious relation
to others, for expiating a wrong done by him to his neigh-
bours or to the whole community, for expressing gratitude for
mercies which have come to him through others, there must
be the common meeting : and the community as a whole has
its great victories for which to thank God, its national
dangers for which to pray, its national sins for which to offer
1 Browning, Paracelsus, ii. p. 30, ed. 2 Tennyson, In Memortam, xxxvi.
1888.
368 The Religion of the Incarnation.
expiation ; and hence, common religious acts have been the
universal accompaniment of national life, and have in their
turn reacted upon it.
The idea of a Church, then, as conceived in its most
general form, and without especial reference to the Christian
Church, is this, that it widens life by deepening the sense of
brotherhood; that it teaches, strengthens, and propagates
ideas by enshrining truth in living witnesses, by checking
the results of isolated thinkers by contact with other thinkers,
and by securing permanency for the ideas ; and that it ex-
pands and deepens worship by eliminating all that is selfish
and narrow, and giving expression to common aims and feel-
ings.
We pass from such d priori ideas to the evidence of the
Bible. There we find that these principles were embodied
first in Judaism. There the whole nation was the Church.
The Jew entered into the religious privileges of his life, not
by any conscious act of his own, but by being born of Jewish
parents ; he retained his true life by remaining in contact
with his nation. The union of the different members of the
nation with each other is so intimate that the whole nation is
spoken of as a personal unit. It is called ' God's Son,' His
' first-born Son,' ' Jehovah's servant.' The ideal of prophecy
is essentially that of a restored nation rejoicing in the rule
of national righteousness. Again, the nation was chosen out
specially to bear witness to truth, truth about the nature of
God, the Almighty, the Eternal, the Holy ; truth embodied in
the facts of history, and deepened in the revelations of
prophecy ; truths which the fathers teach their children, ' that
they should not hide them from the children of the generations
to come1.' In the striking phrase of S. Athanasius, the law
and the prophets were 'a sacred school of the knowledge of
God and of spiritual life for the whole world V Their worship,
too, was essentially social and national. From the first it
centred round great national events, the fortunes of the
harvest, or the crises of national history : the individual was
1 Ps. Ixxviii. 3, 4. 2 De Inc. 1 2.
ix. The Church. 369
purified from sin that he might be worthy to take part in the
national service ; the events of the nation's history were
celebrated in religious hymns ; the capital of the nation
became the one and only recognised centre for the highest
worship.
But Judaism adds to these principles a further principle of
its own. It claims that such privileges as were granted to it,
were not granted to it for its own sake, but that it might be
a source of blessing to all nations : it assumes that they are on
a lower religious level than itself; that instead of each nation
progressing equally along the line of religious life, truth, and
worship, other nations have fallen backward and the Jew has
been chosen out for a special privilege. It is the principle
that God works by ' limitation,' by apparent ' exclusiveness,'
by that which is in its essence ' sacerdotalism ' ; the principle
that God does not give His gifts equally to all, but specially
to a few, that they may use them for the good of the whole.
This principle seems at first sight to offend some modern
abstract ideas of justice and equality ; but the moment we
examine the facts of life, we find it prevailing universally.
Each nation has its peculiar gift: the Greek makes his
parallel claim to be specially gifted with the love of knowledge
and the power of artistic expression; the Roman with the
power of rule and the belief in law. Or, again, within
a single nation, it is the artist who enables us to see the
beauty of a face or a landscape which had escaped us before :
Art was given for that,
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.
It is the poet who interprets our inner nature or the magic of
the external world, and becomes
A priest to us all
Of the wonder and bloom of the world,
Which we see with his eyes and are glad :
he sings
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not1.
And this principle does not stop short of religious influences
1 Browning, Fra Lippo Lippi : M. Arnold, The Youth of Nature : Shelley,
The Skylark.
Bb
37° The Religion of the Incarnation.
Conscience is itself a witness to it, as it implies that all parts
of our nature are not sufficient guides to themselves, but that
God has gifted one special faculty with power to control the rest.
' Men of character,' it has been said, ' are the conscience of the
society to which they belong.' In the Jewish nation itself,
the prophets were the circle of Jehovah's friends ; they knew
His secrets, they kept alive the ideal of the nation. ' What
the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world ' was
the parallel claim of an early apologist1. Analogies crowd in,
then, on every side, to shew how rational is this claim on the
part of Judaism.
Revelation only accepts this fact, and adds to it the asser-
tion that it is no accident but a part of the Divine Purpose.
It is the result of God's election. The Jewish nation, and
subsequently the Christian Church, is not only a blessing to
the rest of the world, but it is conscious that it is a blessing.
This truth has been revealed to it partly to keep it ever
mindful of its sense of dependence upon the Giver of all good
gifts, partly to give it tenacity and courage to cling to a gift
which it knows to be of inestimable value for all mankind.
' The election was simply a method of procedure adopted by
God in His wisdom by which He designed to fit the few for
blessing the many, one for blessing all V
It must be from considerations such as these that we
approach the foundation of the Christian Church and the
Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ on which it rests. We
approach it with the expectation that we shall find these
principles embodied in it, for Christianity sprang directly out
of Judaism, and so would naturally inherit its principles : and
to go deeper still, the very essence of the Incarnation lies in
the consecration of human life and human means. He who
before had been acting invisibly upon the world as the Word.
implanting life and light in man, now entered visibly into
human flesh. All tendencies which made for the fulness of
life and truth before His coming, all that tended to enlighten,
elevate, combine men, had been His unknown working : now
1 Ep. ad Diogn. vi.
2 Bruce, The Chief End of Revelation, p. 116.
ix. The Church. 371
they are known to be His. The Infinite appears in finite
form ; the spiritual takes the material in which to express
itself; human media are consecrated to deeper ends, and
charged with a fuller meaning than before : so that, in
Hooker's words, ' We cannot now conceive how God should,
without man, exercise Divine power or receive the glory of
Divine praise1.' ' What you do now even after the flesh, that
is spiritual ' is the bold paradox of S. Ignatius ; and he adds
the reason, 'for you do all in Christ Jesus2.' Thus —
In this twofold sphere, the twofold man
Holds firmly to the natural, to reach
The spiritual beyond it
The whole temporal show related royally
And built up to eterne significance
Through the open arms of God 3.
The Incarnation, then, takes up all the three principles of
which we have spoken : but, from the very finality which it
claims for itself, it puts a mark of finality upon each of them,
and so, in this respect, marks off the application of them in
the Christian Church from all other applications of the same
principles. The principle of co-operation for spiritual life is
taken up ; the Jewish nation is expanded into an universal
brotherhood ; this includes all men, without any distinction
of race ; it includes the quick and the dead ; it aims at the
highest spiritual perfection. It is final in this sense, that
nothing can be wider in extent or deeper in aim ; but it is
final also in the sense that the life has been manifested.
Christians do not combine to work up to some unsuspected
ideal: they combine to draw out and express in their com-
mon life the perfection that was in Christ. The principle of
association for the propagation of ideas is taken up, but they
are truths about God and His relation to human nature : they
are truths which have been revealed, which have been once
for all delivered to the saints. Finally, the principle of asso-
ciation for worship is taken up ; the worship is made as wide
1 Ecd. Pol. v. 54. Cf. Iren. adv. Haer. 2 Ign. ad Eph. viii. a 8e KO.I Kara
iii. 20: 'Gloria enim hominis Deus ; adp/ta irpaaaere, ravra irvfVftaTtica. ianv
operationis vero Dei et omnis sapi- tv 'Irjffov yap yLpiarai -navra irp
entiae Ejus et virtutis receptaculum 3 Aurora Leigh, v'ii. p. 302.
homo.'
B b 2
372 The Religion of the Incarnation.
as humanity ; it is to be as spiritual as God ; but it, too, rests
on final facts, on the facts of creation and redemption: it
centres round the one complete sacrifice for sin.
Let us consider each of these points more in detail.
I. The Church is an organization for the purpose of
spiritual life ; an universal brotherhood knit together to
build up each of its members into holiness ; ' the only great
school of virtue existing.' But if this is so, if it is universal,
is the principle of ' limitation,' of ' exclusiveness,' gone ? Cer-
tainly not. It is there, and it is most instructive to notice
how it arises *. Christ chose a small body of disciples to be
in close contact with Himself, to share His work, and to
receive His deeper teaching. This will not surprise us after
the analogies of the prophets, the poets, the artists of the
world. The saints too may be few, and God may lend their
spirits out for the good of others. But, moreover, in the
first formation of the Church we are able to watch the
process of limitation, as historically worked out ; and we see
that it arises not from any narrowness, any grudging of
His blessings, on the part of Christ, but from the narrow-
ness, the limitations in man. Man is ' straitened ' not in
God, not in Christ, but in his own affections. God willed
all men to be saved : Christ went about doing good and
calling all to a change of heart, to a share in the king-
dom of Heaven : but such a call made demands upon His
hearers ; it required that they should give up old prejudices
about the Messianic kingdom, that they should be willing to
leave father and mother and houses and lands for the truth's
sake, that they should lay aside all the things that defile a
man, that they should aim at being perfect, that they should
not only hear but understand the word, that they should
trust Him even when His sayings were hard. And these
demands produced the limitations. The Pharisees preferred
the glory of men to the glory which came from God ; the
masses in Galilee cared only for the bread that perisheth;
many of the disciples turned back ; and so He could not
commit Himself unto them, because He knew what was in
1 Cp. H. S. Holland, Creed and Character, Sermons III — VIII.
ix. The Church. 373
man. Not to them, not to any chance person, but to the
Twelve, to those who had stood these tests, to those who had,
in spite of all perplexity, seen in Him the Son of the Living
God, to them He could commit Himself, they could share His
secrets ; they could be taught clearly the certainty and the
meaning of His coming death, for they had begun to learn
what self-sacrifice meant ; they could do His work and or-
ganize His Church ; they could bind and loose in His Name ;
they could represent Him when He was gone. These are the
elect ; they who had the will to listen to the call l ; they who
were ' magnanimous to correspond with heaven ' ; to them He
gave at Pentecost the full conscious gift of the Holy Spirit,
and so at last formed them into the Church, the Church which
was to continue His work, which was to convey His grace,
which was to go into the whole world, holding this life as a
treasure for the sake of the whole world, praying and giving
thanks for all men, because the unity of God and the unity of
the mediation of Christ inspires them with hope that all may
be one in Him2.
The day of Pentecost was thus the birthday of the Church.
Before there were followers of the Lord ; now there was the
Church : and this as the result of a new act, for which all that
preceded had been but preparation : now the Church was born
in becoming the possessor of a common corporate life. The
Spirit was given to the whole body of Christians together : it
was not given to an individual here and there in such a way
that such Spirit-bearing individuals could then come together
and form a Church. It was given corporately, so that they
who received the Spirit realized at once a unity which pre-
ceded any individual action of their own. So the Church
has gone forth offering its message freely to all ; in Christ
Jesus there is neither Jew nor Gentile ; the message is given
f O O
openly, ' without any veil,' to all ; all are accepted who will
submit themselves to Baptism, i. e. all who recognise the ele-
ment of evil and of weakness in their own life, who are willing
to die to it and receive fresh life and strength from the Risen
1 H.O.VTQJV TOivvv avOpwirow Kerch-rjutvcav, ol vna/coiffat &ov\r]6evT(s, K\.r]rol uvofta-
, Clem. Alex. Strom. I. xviii. 89. 2 Cp. i Tim. ii. 1-6.
374 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Lord, and to submit their life to His discipline. That is the
Church as presented to us in the New Testament. Metaphor
after metaphor is lavished upon it by our Lord and by S. Paul
in order to make clear the conception of it. He is the Vine.
His disciples are the branches ; they draw all their life from
Him : apart from Him they can do nothing ; if in union with
Him, they bear fruit. The Church is a household, a scene of
active work, of ' skilled and trained activity ' : each member
with his own work, some as mere members of the household,
others as rulers set over the household to give them meat in
due season, each with talents to be used faithfully for the
Master. It is a family, in which ' all ye are brethren,' laying
obligations of love between brother and brother, calling out
self-sacrifice for the good of others, deepening in each the
sense of the value of the lives of others. It is the Body of
Christ, that which grows stronger and stronger, that which
draws its life from the Head and must hold to Him, that in
which Christian is linked to Christian in sympathy and com-
plete interdependence, that without which the Head would be
incomplete, the necessary organ for completing Christ's work
on earth, that which the Spirit takes as its channel for mani-
festing to the world the very ' life of God.' It is God's
Temple ; visible, made up of parts, which are fitted in to one
another in symmetry ; beautiful with a spiritual beauty ; for
there a li ving God is present ; there He speaks to His own ;
there they offer to Him a rational service J. It is the Bride of
Christ, the dearest object of Christ's love, which gives herself
to Him for His service, which for His sake keeps herself
pure in life and doctrine ; which receives from Him all the
treasures of His love, so that as He had received the
fulness of God, ' the aggregate of the Divine attributes,
virtues, and energies ' from the Father, the Church receives
all this from Him and manifests it forth to the world of
men and of angels.
But this picture, it will be urged, is only a prophecy of the
future ; the evidence of S. Paul's Epistles will also shew us
1 For the whole of this last paragraph cf. H. S. Holland, On behalf of Belief ,
Sermons VI and VII.
ix. The Church. 375
a very different scene in real life, a body with tendencies to
divisions, to selfishness, to sin. This is quite true, but the
ideal is never thought of as something different from the real ;
the ideal is not simply in heaven nor the real simply on
earth ; the real is the ideal, though not yet completely de-
veloped ; the ideal is the actual basis of the real as much as
the goal to which the real is tending. The members of the
Church have been consecrated ; they are holy ; they are
'unleavened'; they have put on Christ; they have by their
self-committal to Him received a righteousness which they
can work out into perfection. Again, they are brothers ;
they have been made children of God by adoption : as they
have realized the sense of sonship, they realize also the close-
ness of the tie between themselves and the other sons, their
common sympathies, hopes and aims. True, they are not yet
perfect either in holiness or in love : the very purpose of the
Church is to make them perfect. It takes the individual at
his birth, it incorporates him into its own life, it watches over
him from beginning to end, it feeds him with spiritual food,
it disciplines him by spiritual laws, it blesses him at all the
chief moments of life, it takes him away from his own isola-
tion, trains him in social aims and social duties by social sacra-
ments, finaEy, gives him back to God with its benediction.
Such a conception of the Church as a nursery, a school, a
home, implies of necessity that it should be visible, and that
it should be one. It is a visible body, because it has in some
sense to represent the Incarnate Lord. In the Incarnation
spirit took material form and expressed itself thereby ; in the
risen Lord — and it is the risen Lord who gives the Spirit to
the Church— there was still a spiritual body. This is not to
deny the invisible reality of spiritual unity which underlies
the external visible unity. It is only to say that complete-
ness means both. In the language of S. Ignatius, as Christ
Jesus was at once material and spiritual, so, the unity of the
Church should be at once material and spiritual l.
The idea of an invisible Church to express the body of true
1 S. Ignatius, ad Eph. vii. els larpos fffri, aaptciKos Kal irvtviMTticbs, as compared
with ad Magn. xiii. iva tvcazis y aapKiKrj re KCU irvtvuajiicrj.
376 The Religion of the Incarnation.
believers, who alone are the Church, to whatever community
they belong, so that the visible Church becomes an unimportant
thing, is an idea entirely at variance with Scripture and all
pre-reformation teaching. The phrase is first found in almost
contemporary writings of Luther and of Zwingli ; it is akin
to the teaching of Hus and of Wiclif ; and, no doubt, there are
thoughts and phrases in earlier writers that are more or less
akin to it. From the first there was obviously a distinction
between the true and untrue Christian, between the spiritual
and the fleshly, between the vessels to honour and the vessels
to dishonour, and the first of these classes, those who persevere
to the end, whom man cannot know and God only knows,
those who, if thought of in the light of God's eternal pur-
poses, are the predestined, these were treated and spoken of
as ' the Church properly so called,' ' the true body of Christ.'
Christians ' who do the will of the Father will belong to the
first Church, the spiritual Church founded before the sun and
moon.' Those who have li ved in perfect righteousness accord-
ing to the Gospel ' will rest in the holy hill of God, in the
highest Church, in which are gathered the philosophers of
God1.'
Again, the Church on earth is regarded as ' a copy of the
Church in heaven in which God's will is done ' : but in each
case there is no contrast between the visible and the invisible
Church. The invisible Church is in these cases either the
ideal of the visible ; or that part of the visible organized
Church which has remained true to its aims. So too with
regard to those who are not conscious believers ; the possibility
of their salvation, in a qualified way, is heartily recognised,
but the confusion is not made of calling them members of
the Church.
The fatal danger is when the belief in the invisible
Church is used to discredit the visible Church and the im-
portance of belonging to it. It is scarcely too much to
say, that all stress laid upon the invisible Church tends to
1 Pseudo-Clem. Rom. Ep. ii. 14; Begriff der chrisilichen Kirche (Erlangen,
Clem. Alex. Str. vi. 14; iv. 8. For these 1885), cap. i; and Gore, Church and tha
and other illustrations cf. Seeberg, Der Ministry, ed. i. pp. 19, 28, 136.
ix. The Church. 377
lower the demands of holiness and brotherhood. It is a
visible Church, and such a Church as can attract outsiders,
which calls out the fruits of faith into active energy ; it is a
visible Church such as can combine Christians in active work,
which tests brotherhood, which rubs away idiosyncrasy, which
destroys vanity and jealousy, which restrains personal ambi-
tion, which trains in the power of common work, which, as
our own powers fail, or are proved inadequate, for some task
on which our heart had been set, still fills us with hope that
God will work through others that which it is clear He will
not work through us. It is a visible Church alone which is
' the home of the lonely.' Encompassed as we are now from
our birth by Christian friends and associations, we tend to
forget how much we depend on the spiritual help and sym-
pathy of others. The greatness of our blessings blinds us to
their presence, and we seem to stand in our own strength
while we are leaning upon others. The relation of the soul
to God is a tender thing ; personal religion, which seems so
strong, while in a Christian atmosphere, tends to grow
weak, to totter, to fall, as we stand alone in some distant
country, amid low moral standards and heathen faiths. Such
solitude does indeed often, in those who are strong, deepen, in
a marvellous way, the invisible communion with God and the
ties that knit us with the absent ; but the result is often fatal
to the weak. It throws both strong and weak alike into
closer sympathy with those who share a common faith. It is
a visible Church which supplies this sympathy, which gives
the assurance that each soul, as it is drawn to God, shall not
stand alone ; but that it shall find around it strengthening
hands and sympathetic hearts, which shall train it till, as in
the quiet confidence of a home, it shall blossom into the full
Christian life.
The principle of the unity of the Church is very similar.
That, again, is primarily and essentially a spiritual unity.
The ultimate source is, according to the Lord's own teaching,
the unity of the Godhead : ' that they may be one, even as we
are one.' The effect of the outpouring of the Spirit is to
make the multitude of them that believed ' of one heart and
378 The Religion of the Incarnation.
one soul.' Baptism becomes the source of unity, ' In one
Spirit were we all baptized into one body : ' the ' one bread '
becomes the security of union. ' We who are many are one
bread, one body, for we all partake of the one bread.' More
fully still is the unity drawn out in the Epistle to the Ephe-
sians. ' There is one body and one Spirit, even as ye are
called in one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one
baptism, one God and Father of all.' The unity starts with
being spiritual ; it is the power of the One God drawing men
together by His action upon their spirits ; uniting them in the
service of one Lord who has redeemed them, but it issues in
'one body.' Nothing can be stronger than the assertion of
such unity. But in what does this unity lie, and what is to
be the safeguard of it? No one answer is possible to this
question. Clearly, one part of the answer is, a unity of
spiritual aim, ' one hope of your calling : ' another answer is,
a common basis of belief, common trust in the same Lord,
' one faith ; ' a further answer is, common social sacraments,
' one baptism,' ' one bread.' All these lie on the face of these
passages of S. Paul. Are we to add to them ' a common
government,' ' an apostolical succession ? ' Was this of the
essence or a late addition, a result of subsequent confederation
intended to guarantee the permanence of dogma ? No doubt,
the circumstances of subsequent history moulded the exact
form of the ministry, and emphasized the importance of ex-
ternal organization under particular circumstances ; but this
is no less true of the other points of unity ; the unity of
spiritual life was worked out in one way in the times of
public discipline and penance, in another way when these fell
into disuse : the unity of faith was brought into prominence in
the times of the formulating of the Creeds. So the unity of
external organization was emphasized when it was threatened
by the Gnostic, Novatian, and Donatist controversies. But
the germ of it is there from the first, and it was no later
addition. The spiritual unity derived from the Lord is
imparted through Sacraments ; but this at once links the
inward life and spiritual unity with some form of ex-
ternal organization. And so the writer of the Epistle
ix. The Church. 379
to the Ephesians after his great description of Christian unity,
goes on at once to speak of the ministry. The apostles,
prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, these are special gifts
of the ascended Lord to the Church ; and they are given for
the very purpose of securing unity, ' for the perfecting of the
saints unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of
the body of Christ, till we all attain unto the unity of the
faith.' No less significantly, when S. Paul is applying to the
Church the metaphor of the body and its members in order
to emphasize the unity of the whole, does he rank apostles,
prophets, teachers, as the most important members of the
body l.
The history of the early Church, so far as it can be traced,
points the same way. The Lord appointed His body of
twelve : He gave them the power to bind and to loose, the
power to exercise discipline over offending members of the
Church. At first, the Christian Church is a purely Jewish
body ; it continues in the Apostles' fellowship as well as doc-
trine ; they distribute its alms ; they punish unworthy mem-
bers ; they arrange its differences ; they appoint subordinate
officers ; they ratify their actions, and sanction the admis-
sion of Samaritans and proselytes to the Church ; but the
various members throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, are
embraced in the single conception of one Church 2. Then
under the guidance of Paul and Barnabas, the Gentiles are
brought in and formed into churches ; the danger to unity
becomes acute. According to the Acts of the Apostles, it is
surmounted by reference to the Church at Jerusalem; the
Apostles and Elders there decide the question, and the Gentile
Churches are thus kept in communion with it. S. Paul's
letters, with all the difficulty there is of reconciling every detail
with the historian's account, present us with essentially the
same picture. In dealing with his own Churches, he claims
absolute right, as apostle, to hand on and lay down traditions,
to punish, to forgive, to govern: he leaves some class of
ministers in every Church under his guidance ; each Church
1 I Cor. xii. 28. 0X779 rfjs 'lovScu'as teal FaXiXams «ai 2a-
2 Cp. Acts ix. 31 ^ fKK\ijata ica.0' fiapdas.
380 The Religion of the Incarnation.
is to administer discipline over unworthy members. But the
Churches cannot act independently : the Church at Corinth is
not to act as though it were the fountain head of Christianity,
or the only Gentile Church ; it is to remember the customs in
other Churches. Further than this, above ' all the Churches,'
appears already as one body ' the Church,' in which God has
set apostles * ; within it there are separate spheres of work,
Paul and Barnabas are to go to the Gentiles, the leading
Jewish apostles to the Jews ; S. Paul will not intrude beyond
the province assigned to him ; he makes his Gentile Churches
to contribute to the needs of the Jewish Church, and realize
the debt which they owe to them. Any divisions in a local
Church cannot be tolerated, as being inconsistent with the
unity of Christ, with His cross, and with the significance of
baptism. Peter stands condemned when he wishes to separate
himself and so causes division between Jew and Gentile.
The importance attached to external organization is surely
implied in all of this, and the circumstances of the second
century forced out into clearness what was so implied.
Gnosticism, Montanism, Novatianism all tended to found new
bodies, which claimed to be the true Church. How was the
individual Christian to test their claims ? It was in the face
of this question that Church writers, notably S. Cyprian and
S. Irenaeus, emphasized the importance of historical continuity
in the Church as secured by the apostolical succession of the
episcopate. The unity of the Church came primarily, they
urged, from God, from heaven, from the Father ; it was secured
by the foundation of the Church upon the Apostles ; the
bishops have succeeded to the Apostles and so become the
guardians of the unity of the Church. As soon then as we
find the Christian episcopate universally organized, we find it
treated as an institution received from the Apostles and as
carrying with it the principle of historic continuity. So it
has remained ever since, side by side with the other safeguards
of unity, the sacraments and the common faith. The Roman
Church has added to it what seemed a further safeguard of
O
1 i Cor. xii. 28, xv. 9 ; Gal. i. 13 ; Phil. iii. 6 ; Eph. i. 22, iii. 10, 21 ; Col. i.
1 8, 24 ; i Tim. iii. 15.
ix. The Church. 381
unity, the test of communion with itself ; but this was a later
claim, a claim which was persistently resented, and which was
urged with disastrous results. The Reformed Churches of the
Continent, in their protest against that additional test, have
rejected the whole principle of historic continuity ; they have
remained satisfied with the bond of a common faith and of
common sacraments: but the result can scarcely be said to
be as yet a securer unity. Even an Unitarian historian
recognises heartily that the characteristic of the Church in
England is this continuity. ' There is no point,' urges Mr.
Beard1, 'at which it can be said, here the old Church ends,
here the new begins. . . . The retention of the Episcopate by
the English Reformers at once helped to preserve this con-
tinuity and marked it in the distinctest way. ... It is an
obvious historical fact that Parker was the successor of
Augustine, just as clearly as Lanfranc and Becket.'
This, then, is what the Church claims to be as the home of
grace, the channel of spiritual life. It claims to be a body of
living persons who have given themselves up to the call of
Christ to carry on His work in the world ; a body which was
organized by Himself thus far that the Apostles were put in
sole authority over it ; a body which received the Spirit to
dwell within it at Pentecost ; a body which propagated itself
by spiritual birth ; a body in which the ministerial power
was handed on by the Apostles to their successors, which has
remained so organized till the present day, and has moved on
through the world, sometimes allied with, sometimes in sepa-
ration from the State, always independent of it ; a body which
lays on each of its members the duty of holiness, and the
obligation of love, and trains them in both.
But two objections arise here, which must be dealt with
shortly. It is urged first, this is an unworthy limitation : we
ought to love all men ; to treat all men as brothers ; why
limit this love, this feeling of brotherhood to the baptized, to
the Church 1 True, we ought to love and honour all men, to
do good to all men. The love of the Christian, like the love
of Christ, knows no limits ; but the limitations are in man
1 Hibbert Lectures, 1883, p. 311.
382 The Religion of the Incarnation.
himself. All human nature is not lovable: all men are not
love-worthy. Love must, at least, mean a different thing ;
it must weaken its connotation if applied to all men ; there
may be pity, there may be faith, there may be a prophetic
anticipating love for the sinner and the criminal, as we recall
their origin and forecast the possibilities of their future ; but
love in the highest sense, love that delights in and admires its
object, love that is sure of a response, the sense of brotherhood
which knows that it can trust a brother — these are not pos-
sible with the wanton, the selfish, the hypocrite. Though man
has social instincts which draw him into co-operation with
others ; he has also tendencies to selfishness and impurity
which work against the spirit of brotherhood and make it
impossible. Not till we have some security that the man's
real self is on the side of unselfishness, can we trust him ; and
baptism with its gifts of grace, baptism with its death to the
selfish nature, baptism with its profession of allegiance to the
leadership of Christ, this, at least, gives us some security.
Even Comte, with his longing for brotherhood, tells us that in
forming our conception of humanity we must not take in all
men, but those only who are really assimilable, in virtue of a
real co-operation towards the common existence, and Mr.
Cotter Morison would eliminate and suppress those who have
no altruistic affection. We limit, then, only so far as seems
necessary to gain reality ; we train men in the narrower circle
of brotherhood, that they may become enthusiasts for it, and go
forth as missionaries to raise others to their own level. As for
those who lie outside Christianity, the Church, like our Lord
Himself in the parable of the sheep and the goats, like S. Paul
in his anticipation of the judgment day, recognises all the good
there is in them ; like Justin Martyr and many of the early
Fathers, it traces in them the work of the Divine Word ; and
yet none the less did these writers claim and does the Church
still claim for itself the conscious gift of spiritual life, in a
sense higher than anything that lies outside itself.
But many, who would follow thus far, would draw another
line, and would include within the Church all the baptized,
whether professing churchmen or not. Once more, so far as
ix. The Chiirch. 383
we draw any distinction within the limits of the baptized, it
is for the sake of reality. We recognise that every atom of
their faith is genuine, that so far as they have one Lord, one
faith, one baptism, they are true members of the Church ; that
so far as they have banded themselves together into a society,
they have something akin to the reality of the Church, and
gain some of its social blessings. But then it is they who have
banded themselves together into a society : and that means
they have done it at their own risk. We rest upon the
validity of our sacraments, because they were founded by
the Lord Himself, because they have His special promises,
because they have been handed down in regular and valid
channels to us. Have they equal security that their sacra-
ments are valid? Again, we must hold that schism means
something of evil : that it causes weakness : that it thus
prevents the full work of brotherhood, of knitting Christian
with Christian in common worship: that so it prevents
the complete witness of the Church in the world ; that in so
far as such Christians are schismatic, they are untrue and
harmful members of the Church. The full complete claim of
the Church is that it is a body visibly meeting together in a
common life, and forming by historical continuity a part of
the actual body founded by our Lord Himself. It would be
unreal to apply this conception of a complete historic brother-
hood to those who have separated themselves from the Church's
worship, and whose boast is that they were founded by Wesley,
or Luther, or Calvin. A Church so founded is not historically
founded by Christ. It may have been founded to carry on
the work of Christ, it may have been founded in imitation of
Him, and with the sincerest loyalty to His person, but it
cannot be said to have been founded by Him. Even if cir-
cumstances have justified it, it is at any rate not the ideal ;
and whatever confessions the historic Church may have to
make of its own shortcomings, it still must witness to the
ideal of a visible unity and historical continuity. Amid the
divisions of Christendom, and in face of her own shortcomings,
the Church of England does not claim to be the full complete
representation of the Church of Christ. She is only one
384 The Religion of the Incarnation.
national expression of the Catholic Church : she feels that
' it is safer for us to widen the pale of the kingdom of God,
than to deny the fruits of the Spirit 1 ; ' she has ever on her
lips the prayer, ' Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the
offences of our forefathers, neither take vengeance of our sins,'
and yet she must make her claim boldly and fearlessly to
have retained the true ideal of the Church ; to be loyal to the
essential principle that her life comes historically from Christ
and not from man.
II. But the Church is the school of truth as well as the
school of virtue. Its ministers form a priesthood of truth as
well as a priesthood of sacrifice. Its priests' lips have ' to
keep knowledge.' Christianity is, as the School of Alexandria
loved to represent it, a Divine philosophy, and the Church its
school.
This conception of the Church starts from our Lord's own
words. His Apostles are to be as scribes instructed unto the
kingdom of Heaven ; they are to have the scribes' power to
decide what is and what is not binding in the kingdom ; the
Spirit is to lead them into all truth ; they are to make dis-
ciples of all the nations, ' teaching them to observe all things
whatsoever I commanded you.' The function of the Church
then with regard to truth is primarily to bear witness to that
which has been revealed. It does not primarily reveal, it tells
of the truths which have been embodied in the historic life
of Jesus Christ or explained in His teaching. ' One is its
teacher ; One is its master, even the Christ.' It holds a ' faith
once delivered to the saints.' Hence, from the first, there grew
up some quasi-authoritative formula, in which we can see the
germ of the later Creeds, which each Christian Missionary
would teach to his converts. S. Paul himself received from
others and handed on to the Corinthians, as his first message
to them, some such half-stereotyped Creed, narrating the
central facts of the Death and Resurrection of the Lord ; his
teaching was as a mould which shaped the lives of the
converts as they were poured, like so much molten metal,
into it. It was authoritative, not even an angel from
1 Bp. Forbes, Explanation of the Nicene Creed, p. 290.
ix. The Church. 385
heaven could preach another gospel. As time went on
and false teaching spread, this side of the Church's work
is emphasized more and more. The Church is to be the
pillar and ground-work of the truth. Timothy and Titus
are to hold fast the deposit, to prevent false teaching, to
secure wholesomeness of doctrine no less than sobriety of life.
The contests of the next centuries bring out this idea of
witness into clearer prominence, and the Episcopate, as it had
been the guarantee of unity, becomes now the guarantee of
truth. Thus, S. Ignatius is face to face with Docetic and
Gnostic teaching ; with him the bishops are ' in the mind of
Jesus Christ ; ' they are to be treated ' as the Lord ; ' to avoid
heresy, it is necessary to avoid ' separation from the God of Jesus
Christ, from the Bishop and the ordinances of the Apostles ; '
the one bishop is ranked with the one Eucharist, the one flesh of
Jesus Christ, the one cup, the one altar, as the source of unity ;
submission to the Bishop and the Presbyters is a means towards
holiness, towards spiritual strength and spiritual joy1. These
are incidental expressions in letters written at a moment of
spiritual excitement : but the same appeal reappears in calmer
controversial treatises. S. Irenaeus argues against Gnosticism
on exactly the same grounds. Truth is essentially a thing
received ; it was received by the Apostles from Christ. He
was the truth Himself; He revealed it to His Apostles ; they
embodied it in their writings and handed it on to the Bishops
and Presbyters who succeeded them ; hence the test of truth is
to be sought in Holy Scripture and in the teaching of those
Churches which were founded directly by the Apostles2.
With equal strength Tertullian urges that the truth was
received by the churches from the Apostles, by the Apostles
from Christ, by Christ from God ; it is therefore independent
of individuals : it must be sought for in Holy Scripture, but
as the canon of that is not fixed, and its interpretation is at
times doubtful, it must be supplemented by the evidence of
the apostolic Churches ; and he challenges the heretics to pro-
1 ad Eph. ii. iii. vi. xx ; ad Trail. 2 Irenaeus, adv. Haer., cp. esp. 1. 10,
vii. xiii ; ad Phil iv. vii; ad Smyrn. II. 9, III. i, 2, 3, 5, 12, 24.
viii. ix.
C C
386 The Religion of the Incarnation.
duce the origin of their churches and shew that the series of
bishops runs back to some Apostle or apostolic man 1.
The Church is thus primarily a witness : the strength of its
authority lies in the many sides from which the witness comes ;
but the exigencies of controversy, and indeed of thought even
apart from controversy, rendered necessary another function in
respect to truth. The Church was compelled to formulate, to
express its witness in relation to the intellectual difficulties
of the time. Christianity is indeed essentially a matter not
of the intellect, but of the will, a personal relation of trust
in a personal God. Its first instinct is, as the first instinct
of friendship would be, to resent intellectual analysis and
dogmatic definition. But as the need of telling others about
a friend, or defending him against slander, would compel us to
analyse his qualities and define his attractiveness ; so it was
with the Church's relation to the Lord. It bore witness to
the impression which His life had made upon His followers
that He was Divine; it bore witness to the facts of the life
that attested it and to His own statements. But the claim
was denied ; it needed justifying ; it needed to be shewn to
be consistent with other truths, such as the unity of God, and
the reality of His own human nature, and so definition was
forced upon the Church. The germ of such definitions is
found in the New Testament ; the deeper Christological teach-
ing of the Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians, and
of the prologue of S. John are instances of such intellectual
analysis and formulation, and were evidently written in the
face of controversy. The technical decisions of the great
councils of the fourth and fifth centuries and their expression
in the Nicene and 'Athanasian' Creeds are the outcome
of the same tendency. Yet even in them, the Church acts,
in a sense, as a witness ; the Scriptures are appealed to as
the ultimate authority ; the Creed is the summary of its
chief doctrines : the one aim is to secure and express the truth
witnessed to by churches throughout the world, to eliminate
novelty and caprice ; the new definitions are accepted, because
they alone are felt to express the instinct of the Church's
1 Praescript. adv. Haereticos ; cp. esp. 3, 6, 15-21.
ix. The Church. 387
worship. By this time the canon of Holy Scripture was
fixed. It becomes thenceforth an undying fountain of life
from which the water of pure doctrine can be drawn. Tradi-
tion and development can always be checked by that.
In the truths then which the Church teaches we may dis-
tinguish two classes. First, there are the central truths to
which it bears absolute witness ; such as the Fatherhood of
God, the Person and work of Jesus Christ, the Redemption of
all mankind, the origin and purpose of human life. These it
teaches authoritatively. Its conduct is exactly analogous to
that of a parent teaching the moral law to his children ; teach-
ing the commandments authoritatively at first, till the child
can be educated to understand the reason of them. So the
Church says to her children, or to those who are seeking after
truth ' there is an absolute truth in religion as well as in
morality : we have tested it ; generations of the saints have
found it true. It is a truth independent of individual
teachers ; independent of the shifting moods of opinion at any
particular period ; and you must accept it on our authority
first. Further, these are truths which affect life, therefore they
cannot be apprehended merely by the intellect. You must
commit yourself to them ; act upon them ; there is a time
when the seeker after truth sees where it lies ; then it must
cease to be an open question. " You must seek till you find,
but when you have once found truth, you must commit your-
self to it 1." You must believe that you may understand ; but
it is that you may understand.' The dogma is authoritatively
taught, that the individual may be kept safe from mere indivi-
dual caprice and fancifulness, but also that he himself may
come to a rational understanding of his belief. No doubt the
truth is so wide that to the end of our lives we shall still feel
the need of guidance and of teaching. ' As long as we live,'
said Calvin, ' our weakness will not allow us to be discharged
from school.' Like S. Ignatius on his way to martyrdom, the
Christian may feel at his dying day, ' Now I begin to be a
disciple ;' but the aim of the Church is to make each member
1 Tertullian. Praescr. g : ' Quaerendum est donee invenias, et credendum
ubi inveneris.'
C C 2
388 The Religion of the Incarnation.
have a rational hold upon his faith. When we are young
we accept a doctrine because the Church teaches it to
us ; when we are grown up, we love the Church because it
taught us the doctrine. ' The Churchman never surrenders
his individual responsibility. But he may and must sur-
render some portion at least of his independence, and he
benefits greatly by the surrender V ' Submission to the
authority of the Church is the merging of our mere indivi-
dualism in the whole historic life of the great Christian
brotherhood ; it is making ourselves at one with the one
religion in its most permanent and least merely local form. It
is surrendering our individuality only to empty it of its
narrowness V
Secondly, there are other truths, which are rather deductions
from these central points or statements of them in accordance
with the needs of the age ; such as the mode of the relation of
the Divine and human natures in Christ, of free-will to pre-
destination, or the method of the Atonement, or the nature of
the Inspiration of Holy Scripture. If, in any case, a point of
this kind has consciously come before the whole Church and
been reasoned out and been decided upon, such a decision
raises it into the higher class of truths, which are taught
authoritatively; but if this is not so, the matter remains
an open question. It remains a question for the theologians ;
it is not imposed on individual Christians ; though it may at
any time become ripe for decision. The very fixity of the
great central doctrines allows the Church to give a remark-
able freedom to individual opinion on all other points.
Practically, how much wider is the summary of the rule
of faith as given in Irenaeus (III. 4), or Tertullian (Praescr.
13), or Origen (De Principiis), or in the Apostles' or Nicene
Creed, than the tests of orthodoxy that would be imposed
in a modern religious, or scientific circle ! S. Vincent
of Lerins is the great champion of antiquity as the test of truth ;
yet he who lays it down that ' to declare any new truth to
Catholic Christians over and above that which they have re-
1 Hawkins' Sermons on the Church, * Rev. C. Gore, Roman Catholic
p. 77. Claims, p. 51.
ix. The Church. 389
ceived never was allowed, nowhere is allowed, and never will
be allowed,' also insists on the duty of development, of growth,
within the true lines of the central truths. ' Is there,' he
assumes an objector to urge, ' to be no growth within the
Church ? Nay, let there be growth to the greatest extent ;
who would be so grudging to man, such an enemy to God, as to
attempt to prevent it ; but yet let it be such that it be growth,
not change of the faith As time goes on, it is right
that the old truths should be elaborated, polished, filed down ;
it is wrong that they should be changed, maimed or mutilated.
They should be made clear, have light thrown on them, be
marked off from each other ; but they must not lose their ful-
ness, their entirety, their essential character1.' So it has
happened in the course of the Christian history ; doctrines
like that of the Atonement have been restated afresh to meet
the needs of the age. So it is happening still ; doctrines like
that of the method of creation or of the limits of inspiration
are still before the Church. The Church is slow to decide, to
formulate : it stands aside, it reiterates its central truths, it says
that whatever claims to be discovered must ultimately fit in
with the central truths ; creation must remain God's work ; the
Bible must remain God's revelation of Himself; but for a time
it is content to wait, loyal to fact from whatever side it comes ;
confident alike in the many-sidedness and in the unity of
truth. While he accepts and while he searches, the Church-
man can enjoy alike the inquiry of truth which is the love-
making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth which is the
presence of it, and the belief of truth which is the enjoying of
it, and all these together, says Lord Bacon, are the sovereign
good of human nature 2.
Thus far we have in this part considered the Church's func-
tion with regard to truth from the point of view of those
whom it has to teach. Its function is no less important from
the point of view of the truth itself. As spiritual life is a
tender plant that needs care and training ; so spiritual truth is
a precious gem, that may easily be lost and therefore needs
careful guarding. 'The gem requires a casket, the casket a
1 Commonitwium ix. and xxiii. 2 Bacon, Essay on Truth.
39° The Religion of the Incarnation.
keeper.' Truth is indeed great and will prevail, but not apart
from the action of men: not unless there are those who believe
in it, take pains about it and propagate it. This is the case
even with scientific truths ; a fortiori therefore, with moral and
religious truths which affect life and need to be translated into
life before they can be really understood. The comparative
study of religions is shewing us more and more how much of
deep spiritual truth there is in heathen religions, but it is
shewing us equally how little power this truth had to hold its
own, how it was overlaid, crushed out, stifled. The truth of
the unity of God underlies much of the polytheism of India,
Greece, and Rome ; but it is only the philosopher and the
scholar that can find it there. It is only in the Jewish
Church, the nation which stood alone from other nations as a
witness to the truth, that it retained its hold as a permanent
force. The Fatherhood of God is implied in the very names
and titles of most of the chief heathen gods ; but what a
difference in its meaning and force since the time of Jesus
Christ! It is not only that He expanded and deepened its
meaning, so that it implied the fatherhood of all men alike,
and a communication of a spiritual nature to all ; it is also, and
much more, that He committed the truth as a sacred deposit to
a Church, each member of which aimed at shewing himself as
the son of a perfect Father, and which witnessed to the uni-
versal Fatherhood by the fact of an universal brotherhood.
The very truths of natural religion, which heathenism tended
to degrade, found a safe home within the Church ; the know-
ledge of the Creator, His eternal power and Godhead, which
the nations had known but lost, because they glorified Him not
as God, neither were thankful, has been kept alive in the
Eucharistic services of the Church, repeating through the ages
its praise of the Creator : ' We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we
worship Thee, we give thanks to Thee, for Thy great glory, O
Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty.'
III. We pass naturally to the third point : the Church is
the home of worship. It is the Temple of the Lord. As a
teaching body, it had carried on and spiritualized the work of
the Jewish Synagogue : it also took up and spiritualized the
ix. The Church. 391
conceptions of prayer and praise and sacrifice which clustered
round the Jewish Temple. The Body of Christ was to take
the place of the Temple when the Jews destroyed it l. And
here, as in all other respects, the body is the organ and repre-
sentative of the risen Lord. He, when on earth, had been a
priest in the deepest sense of the word : He, as the repre-
sentative of the Father, had mediated the Father's blessings to
man : He, as one with man, had become a merciful and faith-
ful high-priest for man ; He had offered His whole life to God
for the service of man ; He had by the offering of His pure
will made purification of sins : He lives still, a priest for ever,
pleading, interceding for mankind.
And so the Church, His body, carries on this priestly work
on earth. ' Sacerdotalism, priestliness, is the prime element
of her being V She is the source of blessing to mankind ;
she pleads and intercedes and gives herself for all mankind.
Christians, as a body, are ' a royal priesthood.' Christ made
them ' priests unto His God and Father,' they can ' enter in
into the holy place,' like priests, ' with hearts sprinkled from
an evil conscience and bodies washed with pure water.' They
are ' the genuine high-priestly race of God : ' ' every righteous
man ranks as a priest : ' ' to the whole Church is a priesthood
given 3.' This priesthood is exercised throughout life, as each
Christian gives his life to God's service, and the whole Church
devotes itself for the good of the whole world. But it finds
its expression in worship, for worship is the Godward aspect
of life. It expresses, it emphasizes, it helps to make perma-
nent the feelings that mould life. It is the recognition that
our life comes from God : that it has been redeemed by God ;
it is the quiet joyous resting upon the facts of His love ; it is
the conscious spiritual offering of our life to God ; it is the
adoration of His majesty. This worship the Church leads and
organizes. ' In the Church and in Christ Jesus ' is to le given
' the glory to God unto all generations for ever and ever.' In
1 S. John ii. 19-21. 19. Justin Martyr, Dialog, c. Tryph.
1 From a striking and bold article 116 ; Irenaeus iv. 8 ; Origen, Horn. vi.
by Prof. Milligan, in the Expositor, in Lev. 5. For other instances, cp.
March, 1889. Seeberg, ubi supra, or Gore, Church and
3 i S. Peter ii. 9 ; Rev. i. 6 ; Heb. x. the Ministry, pp. 87-90.
392 The Religion of the Incarnation.
the Apocalypse, it is pictured as praising God alike for His
work in Creation and in Redemption. In the Eucharist the
Church shews forth the Lord's Death till He come1. Hence
this act of Eucharistic worship, above all others, has become
the centre of unity. In it the Church has offered its best to
God : all the more external gifts of art, such as architecture,
painting, and music, have been consecrated in worship: but
deeper still, in it each Christian has taken up his own life, his
body and soul, and offered it as a holy, lively, and reasonable
sacrifice unto God, a service in spirit and in truth : and deeper
still, he recognises that his life does not stand alone ; through
the common ties of humanity in Christ he is linked on by a
strange solidarity with all mankind ; his life depends on
theirs and theirs on his, and so he offers it not for himself only
but for all ; in the power of Christ he intercedes for all man-
kind : and deeper still, he feels in the presence of the Holiness
of God how unworthy his own offering and his own prayers
are, and he pleads, he recalls before the Father, as the source
of his own hope and his own power of self-sacrifice, the one
complete offering made for all mankind.
So the Church performs its universal priesthood 2 ; so it leads
a worship, bright, joyous, amidst all the trials and perplexities
of the world, for it tells of suffering vanquished ; simple in its
essence, so that poor as well as rich can rally round it ; yet deep
and profound in its mysteries, so that the most intellectual can-
not fathom it. It is an universal priesthood, for it needs the
consecration of every life : and yet this function too of the
Church naturally has its organs, whose task it is to make its
offerings and to stand before it as the types of self-consecration.
The Church has from the first special persons who perform its
liturgy, its public ministering to the Lord3. It is in connection
1 Eph. iii. 21 (R.V.) ; Eev. iv. n, seipsumobtulitinpassionepronobis,
v. 11-14 ; i Cor. xi. 26. ut tanti capitis corpus essemus . . .
2 Cf. the striking account of the Hoc est sacrificium Christianorum,
true Christian sacrifice in S. Aug. multi unum corpus in Christo. Quod
De Civ. Dei, x. 6 : ' Profecto efficitur etiam sacramento altaris fidelibus
ut tota ipsa redempta civitas, hoc est noto frequentat ecclesia, ut ei de-
congregatio societasque sanctorum monstretur, quod in ea re, quam
universale sacrificium ofieratur Deo offert, ipsa offeratur.'
per sacerdotem magnum, qui etiam a Acts xiii. i .
ix. The Church. 393
with worship, and the meetings of the Church that S. Paul
emphasizes the need of unity and subordination, and dwells
upon God's special setting of Apostles, Prophets and Teachers
in the Church1. The Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians
may be open to difficult questions of interpretation in its
language about the ministry, but this at least is clear that
order and subordination are treated as the necessary outcome
of love, which is of the essence of the Church ; that this order
and subordination is specially needed in all details of worship ;
that it had been so in Judaism, and must be so, cb fortiori, in
the Christian Church ; that as Christ came from God, so the
Apostles from Christ, and their successors from them ; and
therefore it must be wrong to throw off subordination to those
who were so appointed and who have blamelessly offered the
gifts2. 'The Church,' said S. Augustine, 'from the time of
the Apostles, through most undoubted succession of the
bishops, perseveres till the present moment, and offers to God
in the Body of Christ the sacrifice of praise 3.' As the teaching
function of the whole Church does not militate against the
special order of teachers, so the priestly function of the whole
does not militate against a special order of priests. We can-
not speak of those who are ordained as 'going into the
Church ' — and it is hard to estimate the harm done by that
fatal phrase — for that implies that the laity are not of the
Church, but we can call them priests in a special sense ; for
they give themselves up in a deeper way to the service of
God ; they are specially trained and purified for His service ;
they are put as representatives of the whole Church in a way
in which no other is, able to know and to sympathize with its
wants, its joys, its failings ; able therefore to intercede for
it with God and to bring His blessings to it. As the Church
stands in relation to the world, so they stand to the Church ;
they fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in
their flesh for His body's sake which is the Church, whereof
they are made ministers; they convey spiritual gifts and
benediction to the Church.
1 i Cor. xi-xiv. ; cp. i Tim. ii. 2 Clem, ad Cor. i. esp. 40-45.
3 Contra Adv. Leg. et Proph. xx. 39.
UBRARY ST. MARY S COLLEGE
394 The Religion of the Incarnation.
To complete the conception of the Church, it would be
necessary to add the thought of the Church expectant and
triumphant, the presence of the blessed dead. For they too
strengthen and complete each aspect of the Church's work.
The great cloud of witnesses, the heroes of faith, who watch
their brethren on earth, they, by their example, aid the
spiritual life and strengthen us to lay aside every weight
and the sin that doth so easily beset us : their virtues reflect
parts of the manifold glory of the Son of Man. With their
heirs noblesse oblige ; each Christian born of such ancestry is
able to be like the Athenian Lycurgus, independent of the
world, bold and outspoken, because of his noble birth 1. The
record of their writings strengthens the witness to the faith
once delivered to the saints, and binds us to loyalty to that
which has stood the test of ages. They, ' the general assembly
and church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven,' themselves,
we believe, worship God with a purer worship than ours ;
the thought of their presence in worship, as we join with
angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, lifts our
hearts to a wider, more spiritual adoration.
But for our present purpose it is with the Church militant
we have to deal : the Church on earth, the visible organ of the
risen Lord, the organ of redemption, of revelation, of wor-
ship ; the chief instrument designed by the Lord for the
establishment of the kingdom of Heaven upon earth. That is
our ideal of it. But what of the reality? of the historical
facts? Has not the Church crushed out individual life and
freedom ? has it not thrown its shield over laxity 1 has it not
repressed zeal and so driven piety into nonconformity ? has it
not tried to check scientific truth and condemned a Galileo ?
has it not made worship a matter of form and reduced it to
externalism ? So its opponents ask, and its defenders admit
that there is much of truth in these charges. They admit
that it has looked very different from its ideal. ' It has
looked like an obscure and unpopular sect ; it has looked like
a wonderful human institution vying with the greatest in age
and power ; it has looked like a great usurpation ; it has
ffTfis Sid rr/v tvyiveiav, Plutarch. Vitae x Orat. 7.
ix. The Church. 395
looked like an overgrown and worn-out system ; it has been
obscured by the outward accidents of splendour or disaster ;
it has been enriched, it has been plundered ; at one time
throned above emperors, at another under the heel of the
vilest ; it has been dishonoured by the crimes of its governors,
by truckling to the world, by the idolatry of power, by greed
and selfishness, by their unbelief in their own mission, by the
deep stain of profligacy, by the deep stain of blood1.' The
Church has, indeed, many confessions to make, of its failure
to be true to its ideal. But there are several considerations
which must be borne in mind when we pass judgment
upon it.
In the first place, it was committed to human hands, ' the
treasure is in earthen vessels ; ' and while it gains thus in
reality, in human sympathy, in touching the facts of every-
day life, it is exposed to all the risks of imperfection, mistake,
perversion. But further, as S. Augustine said, we still can
say, ' Non adhuc regnat hoc regnum.' The Church has never
had free play ; it has never been in a position to carry out its
ideal. At first, a persecuted sect, it had not the power ; then,
when it became established and gained the power, there burst
into- it an influx of half-Christianized converts who lowered
its moral level or misunderstood its doctrines ; then, with the
break up of the Roman Empire, it had to tame and civilize
the new races of Europe ; and finally, the divisions of the
Reformation have weakened its witness in the world. But,
more important still, the very greatness of the ideal has
caused the difficulty of its realization, and has exposed itself
to caricature and to one-sidedness. The richer, the more
many-sided, the more complete an ideal is, the less possible is
it for any one generation to express it completely, the more
likely is it that one side of truth will be pressed to the exclu-
sion of some, if not of all the rest.
This may be tested in each of the points which we have con-
sidered. The Church is an organization for spiritual life, for
holiness. It makes the bold claim to be the society of saints ;
but at once there arises the conflict between the ideal and the
1 The Dean of S. Paul's, Advent Sermons, p. 73.
396 The Religion of the Incarnation.
actual state of men. Press the ideal, and you will narrow
the Church to those who are externally leading good lives or
who are conscious of conversion to Christ. This was the line
taken by the Novatians, by the Donatists, by the Puritans,
by the Baptists, and the Church was thereby narrowed. On
the other hand, dwell only on the actual state, the weakness,
the failures of human nature, and you acquiesce in a low
level of morality. The Church aims at being true to both ;
it will not exclude any from its embrace who are willing to
submit to its laws ; it takes children and trains them ; it takes
the imperfect and disciplines them ; it rejects none, save such
as rejoice in their iniquity and deliberately refuse to submit to
discipline.
But again, this suggests another class of difficulties, all those
which are associated with the relation of the individual to the
society, difficulties which are parallel to the difficulties in
politics, which are not yet solved there, and which are always
needing readjustment. Here again it is possible to overpress
either side: the claims of the society may be urged to the
detriment of the individual, the central organization may
crush out national life and give no scope for individual
development, and so there arises the imperial absolutism of
the mediaeval Church. On the other hand, it is equally
possible to exaggerate the claims of individualism, of in-
dependence, of freedom, and the result is division and disaster
to the whole society ; the individual is only anxious to save
his own soul, and religion is claimed to be only a thing
between a man and his God ; common Church life becomes
impossible, and the witness of the Church to the world, and
thereby its power for missionary work, becomes weakened.
As before, the Church ideal strives to combine both sides of
the truth. It values, it insists on, the rights of each individual
soul ; its mission is to convey the Spirit to it, that is to say,
to waken it up to a consciousness of its own individual relation
to God, its own personal responsibility in God's sight ; it does
bid each individual save his own soul. But it keeps also
before him the claims of the society ; it says to him that in
saving his soul he must lose it in service for others ; when his
ix. The Church. 397
soul is saved, it must be used for active service with others in
joint work. It does say that the society is more important
for the world than any one individual member of it, and that
each individual gets real strength when he speaks and acts
not for himself but as representing the society behind him.
It is possible to think of the Church as an organization exist-
ing for the spiritual good of the individual ; but it is possible
also, and it is a deeper view, to think of the individual as
existing for the good of the Church, like a singer training
himself not to display his own voice but to strengthen the
general effect of the whole choir. That is the ideal of the
Church, a body which quickens the individual into full
conscious life, that the individual may devote his life to the
service of the whole. Its life is like that of a great moving
flight of birds, each with its own life, yet swaying and rising
and turning as by a common impulse,
Their jubilant activity evolves
Hundreds of curves and* circlets, to and fro,
Upwards and downwards ; progress intricate
Yet unperplexed, as if one spirit swayed
Their indefatigable flight l.
The Church, again, is the teacher of truth ; but in the acqui-
sition of truth there are always two elements. There are the
fixed facts of life, with which theory deals, and the accumulation
of past thought upon the facts ; there is also the creative spirit
which plays upon these, which re-adapts, combines, discovers.
The teacher of any science has to convey to his pupil the
accumulated theories of the past and to quicken in him fresh
power of thinking : he speaks first with authority, though of
course with assurance that his authority is rational, and that
the pupil will understand it ultimately. The teacher of
morality, the parent, teaches even more strongly with au-
thority, though he too trusts that the child will ultimately
accept the law on rational grounds. The pupil needs at once
a receptive and a critical faculty. The absence or exaggera-
tion of either is equally fatal. Here again the Church ideal
tries to combine both sides and to insist upon the real unity
1 Wordsworth, The Recluse.
398 The Religion of the Incarnation.
of all truth, and this makes its task so difficult. At times the
whole stress has been laid on the permanent elements in the
faith, and the result has been, as often in the Oriental Church,
a tendency to intellectual stagnation: at other times the
present speaking voice of the Church has been emphasized,
and any theory has been hastily adopted as absolutely true,
without due consideration of its relation to other truths. At
times authority has been over-emphasized, and the acceptance
of dogma has seemed to be made the equivalent of a living
trust in a personal God : at others the duty of individual
search after truth, of individual conviction has been pressed ;
the traditions of the past have been ignored ; nothing has been
of value except that which has commended itself to the indi-
vidual reason, and the result has been confusion, uncertainty,
the denial of the greatness and the mystery and the width of
truth, and too often a moral and spiritual paralysis. Mean-
while the Church has tried to hold to both sides: it has
insisted on the ultimate unity of all knowledge : starting from
the axiom that One is our teacher, even Christ, and believing
that all truth comes from His inspiration as the Word of God,
it has refused to acquiesce in intellectual contradiction ; it has
ever held, with King Lear, ' that "ay" and "no" too is no good
divinity.' The truths of philosophy and religion must be one :
the truths of science and religion must be one x. In the desire
to see this, the Church has been hasty, it has rejected scientific
truth, because it did not fall in with its interpretation of the
Bible. It has made its mistakes, but it has done so out of a
noble principle. It would be easy to gain consistency by
sacrificing either side ; it is hard to combine the two : and
this is what the Church has tried to do : it has upheld the
belief of the ultimate synthesis of all knowledge. In exactly
the same way, the sects have often gained force, popularity,
effectiveness for the moment by the emphasis laid on some one
truth ; the Church has gained strength, solidity, permanence,
by its witness to the whole body of truth.
1 Cp. Socrates iii. 16 To yap «a\oi/, bonus verusqueChristianusest, Domini
evOa &v fi, iStov rfjs d\r)0eias kariv. S. sui esse intellegat ubique invenerit
Aug. de doctr. Chr. ii. 18: ' quisquis veritatem.'
ix. The Church. 399
The same tendency may be shortly illustrated with regard
to the function of worship. That too is a complex act ; in that
there should be the free conscious act of the individual, wor-
shipping in spirit and in truth a God whom he knows as a
personal God ; but clearly this is not all ; the whole society
must express its corporate life in corporate worship. Its in-
fluence is something over and above the influence of its
individual members, and that influence must be exercised on
the side of God ; it must be recognised as coming from God ;
it must be solemnly consecrated to God's service. The society
has a right then to call upon its individual members to join
in this corporate action. On the one hand lies the danger of the
overpressure of the society, where the service of the individual
is unwilling or apathetic: on the other hand the danger of
individualism and sectarianism, in which the whole conception
of public worship is lowered and the individual is never
trained in religious matters to feel the kindling power of a
common enthusiasm, to be lifted above himself in the wave of
a common joy. The Church has aimed at combining both ;
by the insistance on confession and absolution it has tried to
train the individual to a sense of personal penitence and
personal gratitude : but these have only prepared him to
share in the common worship of the society.
But the Church has had to do even more than this. Not
only has it aimed at keeping in due proportion the conflicting
elements in life, in truth, and in worship ; it has also had to
keep alive the three sides at once, and to keep them in their
true relation to each other. To be at one and the same time
the home of life and truth and worship, this belongs to its
ideal and this adds new difficulties. Sometimes one element
has preponderated, sometimes another : but its aim is always
to preserve the three. It has historically preserved the
synthesis of the three more than any other Christian
body. It has moved through the ages doing its work, how-
ever imperfectly. It has kept historic continuity with the
past : it has disciplined life and raised the standard of
morality and united the nations of the world. It has been a
witness to a spiritual world, to the fact that men have
400 The Religion of the Incarnation.
interests above material things, and that these deeper spiritual
interests can combine them with the strongest links. It has
gone out as a Catholic Church, knowing that it contains in its
message truths that can win their way to every nation ; and
therefore it has never ceased to be a Missionary Church, as it
needs that each nation should draw out into prominence
some aspect of its truth, and reveal in life some side of its
virtue. It has enshrined, protected, witnessed to the truth ; both
as an ' authoritative republication of natural religion,' keeping
alive the knowledge of God, and of His moral government of
the world 1, and as a revelation of redemption. It has drawn
up the canon of Holy Scripture and formulated its Creeds:
it still witnesses to the unity of knowledge : it has held up
before the world an ideal of worship, at once social and indi-
vidual. Its truths have indeed spread beyond itself, so that
. men find them now in bodies opposed to it ; and therefore are
perplexed and do not know where their allegiance is really
due. It has indeed been itself often untrue to its mission ;
but ever and again it has re-asserted itself with a strange recu-
perative power, for, as the fountain of its life, there is ever
the power of the Holy Spirit, sent by the risen Lord ; to check
temporary failures or accretions of teachings, there has been
the perpetual re-appeal to Holy Scripture and the Creeds ; to
control idiosyncrasies of worship, there has been the perma-
nent element of its Liturgies. Its very failures have come
from its inherent greatness ; they are the proof of great
capacities, the omen of a greater future. Like S. Paul, it
holds on its way ' by glory and dishonour, by evil report and
good report, as deceiving and yet true, as unknown and yet
well-known ; as dying and behold it lives ; as. chastened and
not killed; as sorrowful yet always rejoicing; as poor and
yet making many rich ; as having nothing and yet possessing
all things.'
Does the world need the witness of the Church's life less
now than in past ages ? Less ? nay, for many reasons more.
The widening opportunities of intercourse are opening up new
nations, whose existence had only been suspected before ; they
1 Butler's Analogy, Pt. ii. ch. i.
ix. The Church. 401
are bringing the various parts of human kind into a closer
touch with each other. The problems of civilization are more
complex ; and the more complicated a piece of machinery is,
the more difficult it is to keep it in order ; so small a defect
may throw the whole out of gear. The wider our knowledge
of humanity, the greater need of a Catholic Church, which
shall raise its voice above the din of conquest and the bustle
of commerce, and insist that all races shall be treated
with justice and tenderness as made of one blood ; which
shall welcome all men freely into its own brotherhood, and
conveying to them the gifts of the Spirit, shall* help them
to shew forth in their lives fresh beauties of the richly-
variegated wisdom of God. The growth of our huge towns,
' where numbers overwhelm humanity,' and the accumulation
of wealth bring the danger nearer home : amidst social up-
heavings and the striving of class with class, there is need of a
Church to rise above rich and poor alike, which shall embrace
both ; which shall teach both a real visible brotherhood amid
all external inequalities ; which shall teach the poor the
dignity of labour wrought for the good of the whole society,
and teach the rich the duty and the blessing of the consecra-
tion of their wealth. With the wider use of machinery and
the restless rush of money-getting, it is important that there
should be the appeal of the Church that no man or woman
shall be degraded into being a mere machine ; because each is
a living soul, capable of personal responsibility, capable of a
pure life, capable of a knowledge of God.
Amid the increasing specialization of studies, amid all the
new discoveries of science and historical criticism, with all
the perplexities that arise as to the interpretation and inspira-
tion of the Bible, now, if ever, there is need of a Church,
which conscious of its own spiritual life, knowing that its
spiritual truths have stood the test of centuries, has patience
and courage to face all these new facts and see their bearing
and take their measure ; which all the while shall go on teach-
ing to its children with an absolute but rational authority the
central facts of the spiritual life, and shall never doubt the
ultimate unity of all truth.
Dd
UBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
402 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Amid the uncertainties of individualism, the fantastic ser-
vices of those who tend to reduce worship to a mere matter of
emotion, amid the sorrows and perplexities of modern life, the
world needs the witness of a rational and corporate worship,
which recognises the deepest sufferings of human nature en-
shrined in its very heart, yet recognises also the way in which
suffering when accepted freely, is blessed of God ; which
worships at once a crucified and a risen Lord. Over against
the divisions of race and continent the Church raises still its
witness to the possibility of an universal brotherhood: over
against despair and dispersion it speaks of faith and the unity
of knowledge : over against pessimism it lifts up a perpetual
Eucharist.
SACRAMENTS.
FKANCIS PAGET.
D d 2
X.
SACRAMENTS.
IT is the characteristic distinction of some men's work that
they are resolute to take into just account all the elements and
conditions of the matter with which they deal. They will not
purchase simplicity at the expense of facts ; they will not, by
any act of arbitrary exclusion or unreal abstraction, give up
even the most distant hope of some real attainment for the
sake of securing a present appearance of completeness. They
recognise and insist upon all the complexity of that at which
they look ; they may see many traits in it to which they can
assign no definite place or meaning, but they will not ignore
or disparage these ; they will not forget them, even though for
a while they may have to defer the closer study of them ;
they will dutifully bear them in mind, and carry them along
through all their work ; they will let them tell with full
weight in qualifying, deferring, or precluding the formation
of any theory about that of which these traits, trivial or im-
portant, explained or unexplained, are a genuine part. It is
difficult to find a name for this rare and distinctive excellence.
But it is that which more than any other quality gives per-
manence and fruitfulness to work : for even the fragmentary
and loosely ordered outcome of such thought is wont to
prove germinant and quickening as time goes on. Patience,
honesty, reverence, and unselfishness, are virtues which
appear congenial with such a character of mind ; and the high,
406 The Religion of the Incarnation.
undaunted faith which is the secret of its strength and the
assurance of its great reward has been told by Mr. Browning
in A Grammarians Funeral : —
Was it not great? did not he throw on God
(He loves the burthen) —
God's task to make the heavenly period
Perfect the earthen ' ?
It will be the chief aim of this essay to shew that in the
embodiment and presentation of Christianity by the Church
of Christ there may be seen an excellence analogous, at least,
to this distinctive characteristic of the work that all approve
as best and truest upon earth ; that in contrast with many
religious systems, attaining a high degree of moral beauty
and spiritual fervour, the historic Church meets human life in
full front ; that it has been taught and enabled, in its ministry
of Sacraments, to deal with the entirety of man's nature, not
slighting, or excluding, or despairing of any true part of his
being. But it is necessary at the outset to define, in general
and provisional terms, the nature and the principle of that
element in the Church's faith and life which is here under
consideration, and in which especially this amplitude and
catholicity of dealing with human nature is to be sought.
By the Sacramental system, then, is meant the regular use of
sensible objects, agents, and acts as being the means or instru-
ments of Divine energies, ' the vehicles of saving and sanctify-
ing power 2.' The underlying belief, the basal and character-
istic principle of this system, may be thus stated. As the
1 In Rabbi Ben Ewa the true measure of such work's beneficence is
shewn : —
Not on the vulgar mass
Called 'work,' must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price ;
O'er which, from level stand,
. The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice :
But all the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account ;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount.
2 Cf. A. Knox, Remains, ii. 138.
x. Sacraments. 407
inmost being of man rises to the realization of its true life, to
the knowledge and apprehension of God and of itself, in the
act of faith, and as He whose Spirit quickened it for that act,
greets its venture with fresh gifts of light and strength, it is
His will that these gifts should be conveyed by means or
organs taken from this world, and addressed to human senses.
His Holy Spirit bears into the faithful soul the communication
of its risen Lord's renewing manhood; and for the convey-
ance of that unseen gift He takes things and acts that can be
seen, and words that can be heard ; His way is viewless as
the wind ; but He comes and works by means of which the
senses are aware ; and His hidden energy accepts a visible
order and outward implements for the achievement of its
purpose.
The limits of this essay preclude the discussion of the
larger questions which beset the terms of these definitions.
Previous essays have dealt with those truths which are ne-
cessarily involved in any declaration of belief about the
Christian Sacraments. The Being of God, the Incarnation of
the Eternal Word, the Atonement, the Resurrection and As-
cension of Christ, the Person and Mission of the Holy Ghost,
these are indeed implied in the Sacramental system of the
Church, not simply as component and essential parts of the
same building, nor as mere logical data, but rather as the
activities of the bodily life are pre-supposed in the exertion
of the body's strength. But these cannot here be spoken of :
it is from preceding pages of this book that thoughts and con-
victions must be gathered, without which much that is here
said will seem either unsubstantial, or merely technical. It
must be owned that the severance of any subject from its
context entails not only incompleteness, but also a certain
disproportion and obscurity in its treatment ; since the lines
of thought which run out into the context are lines down
which light comes, light that is lost if they are closed. Indeed
anything like a full presentation or a formal defence of a
detached part of Christian teaching and practice seems
intrinsically very difficult, and within the limits of an essay
impossible. There are, however, two questions which must be
408 The Religion of the Incarnation.
asked concerning each several part of the whole structure,
and in regard to which something may here be said. The
first is : Does this part match with its surroundings in Chris-
tianity ; is it a harmonious and congenial element in the
whole order, in the great body of doctrine to which it claims
to belong 1 The second is : Does it match with the surround-
ings on which it claims to act, with its environment in human
life ; is it apt for the purpose to which it is addressed and
the conditions among which it comes ? It is here proposed, as
has been said, to consider in regard to the Sacramental system
the second especially of these two questions : but its consider-
ation will involve some thoughts which may perhaps be a
sufficient answer to the first. And thus something may also
be gained beyond the range of the present inquiry ; for it
seems fair to hold that any part of Christian teaching in
regard to which both these questions can be answered in the
affirmative, has a strong tendency at all events to commend the
claim of the whole scheme with which it is inwoven and
essentially continuous. For the perfection of inner coherence
in a structure whose main lines, at least, were projected in
the world under circumstances which preclude the thought of
scientific or artificial elaboration, and the perfection of adapta-
tion, not to the wishes and tastes of men, nor to the arrange-
ments of society, but to the deepest, fullest, surest truth of
humanity ; these are characteristics which we should expect
to find in a revelation from God to man, and be surprised to
find elsewhere.
I. Probably there come to most men who have got beyond
the happy confidence of youth, and the unhappy confidence of
self-satisfaction, times at which they seem to themselves to be
living in a somewhat perplexed and dimly lighted world, with
tasks for which their strength is insufficient, among problems
which they cannot solve. And Christianity is held out to
them, or has been received by them, as a way of life under
these circumstances, as a method and a means of living rightly ;
a system which does not indeed take all the perplexity out of
the world, or all the difficulties out of their course, but which
will give them light and strength enough to keep in the right
x. Sacraments. 409
track, to use their time well, to take their proper place, and
do their proper work, and so to move towards the realization
of all the many parts and possibilities of their nature ; a goal
which may seem to grow both larger and more distant the
more one thinks about it. Christianity professes to be that
Divine word, which was faintly surmised of old 1, and in due
time was sent forth to bear men wisely and surely through
this world. Plainly one of the first and fairest questions which
may be asked in regard to it is, whether it shews a perfect
understanding of the nature with which it claims to deal, and
the life which it claims to guide.
Now when we set ourselves to think what we are for whom
a possible and satisfactory way of life is sought, what that
nature is, whose right principles and conditions of develop-
ment are to be determined, one of the first things which we
discern is an apparently invincible complexity. The life we
have to order is a twofold life, it moves through a twofold
course of experience: the facts, the activities in which we are
conscious of it, are of two kinds ; and men ordinarily distin-
guish them as bodily and spiritual. Some such distinction
is recognised and understood by the simplest of us: it is
imbedded beyond possibility of expulsion in all language :
stubbornly and successfully it resists all efforts to abolish
it. We know for ourselves that either of the two groups
of facts may stand out in clearer light, in keener conscious-
ness, at certain times : we may even for a while, a little
while, lose sight of either of them and seem to be wholly
occupied with the other: but presently the neglected facts
will re-assert their rights: neither the one group nor the
other may long be set aside without risk of the Nemesis which
avenges slighted truths : — the Nemesis of disproportion and
disease. We may confuse our sense of the distinction; we
may shift or blur or bend whatever line had seemed to mark
it : we may insist on the qualifying phenomena which forbid
us to think of any barrier as impenetrable ; but we cannot so
exalt or push forward either realm as utterly to extrude, ab-
sorb, or annihilate the other : we cannot, with consistency or
1 Cf. Plato, Phaedo, 85 C, D.
4io The Religion of the Incarnation.
sanity, live as though our life were merely spiritual or merely
bodily. It is as impossible steadily to regard the spirit as a
mere function or product of the body, as it is to treat the body
with entire indifference, as a casually adjacent fragment of the
external world. But further, as the distinction of the two
elements in our being seems insuperable, so does their union
seem essential to the integrity of our life. Any abstraction
of one element, as though it could detach itself from the
other and live on its own resources, is felt to be unreal and
destructive of our proper nature. So it has been finely said,
' Materialism itself has here done valuable service in correct-
ing the exaggeration of a one-sided spiritualism. It is
common, but erroneous, to speak of man's body as being
related to his spirit only as is the casket to the jewel
which it contains. But, as a matter of fact, the personal spirit
of man strikes its roots far and deep into the encompassing
frame of sense, with which, from the first moment of its
existence, it has been so intimately associated The spirit
can indeed exist independently of the body, but this inde-
pendent existence is not its emancipation from a prison-house
of matter and sense ; it is a temporary and abnormal divorce
from the companion whose presence is needed to complete its
life V If we try to imagine our life in abstraction from the
body we can only think of it as incomplete and isolated ; as
impoverished, deficient, and expectant. And certainly in our
present state, in the interval between what we call birth and
death, the severance of the two elements is inconceivable :
they are knit together in incessant and indissoluble commu-
nion. In no activity, no experience of either, can the other
be utterly discarded : ' for each action and reaction passing
between them is a fibre of that which forms their mutual
bond2.' Even into those energies of which men speak as
purely spiritual, the bodily life will find its way, will send its
help or hindrance : sickness, hunger, weariness, and desire :
these are but some of its messengers to the spirit, messengers
1 H. P. Liddon, Some Elements of Re- of life, in the Dream of Geronlim : and
Hfjion, pp. 1 16, 117. Cf. the wonderful also in Battle and After, by K. St. John
venture towards a conception of the Tyrwhitt, p. 7.
disembodied soul and of its manner 2 Lotze, Microcosmus, Bk. III. c. i. § 2.
x. Sacraments. 4 1 1
who will not always be denied. And in every conscious
action of the bodily life the presence of the spirit is to be
discerned. The merely animal fulfilment of merely animal
demands, devoid of moral quality, is only possible within that
dark tract of instinct which lies below the range of our con-
sciousness. When once desire is consciously directed to its
object, (wherever the desire has originated and whatever be the
nature of the object,) a moral quality appears, a moral issue
is determined : and the act of the body becomes an event in
the life of the spirit1. The blind life of brute creatures is
as far out of our reach as is the pure energy of angels : we
can never let the body simply go its own way ; for in the
essential complexity of our being, another sense is ever waiting
upon the conscious exercise of those five senses that we share
with lower animals : — the sense of duty and of sin.
Thus complex are we, — we who crave more light and
strength, who want to find the conditions of our health and
growth, who lift up our eyes unto the hills from whence
cometh our help. It would be interesting to consider from
how many different points of view the complexity has been
recognised, resented, slandered, or ignored ; and how steadily
it has held its own. It may need some exercise of faith (that
is to say, of reasonable patience amidst half-lights and frag-
ments) to keep the truth before one, and to allow it its just
bearing upon thought and conduct, without exaggeration, or
self-deception, or one-sidedness ; but there is neither health of
body nor peace of mind in trifling with it.
To us, then, being thus complex, Christianity presents a
plan, a principle, a rule of life. And that primary and in-
evitable question which has been already indicated may there-
fore take this definite form : — Does the scheme proposed to us
acknowledge this our complexity 1 does it provide for us in
the entirety of our nature, with all that we feel to be essential
to our completeness ? or must a part of our being be huddled
out of sight as we enter the precinct of the Church ?
II. (i) Certainly the whole history and character of the
Christian Revelation would encourage us to hope that its
1 Cf. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, Bk. II. ch. ii. §§ 125, 126.
4 1 2 The Religion of the Incarnation.
bearing upon life would be as broad as the whole of human
nature ; and that no true part of our being would be excluded
from its light, refused its welcome, or driven from its feast.
When we consider how Christianity came into the world, it
would seem strange and disappointing if its hold on human
life were partial and not inclusive : if, for instance, the body
found no place prepared, no help or hope provided for it.
This was excellently said by Alexander Knox : ' The gospel
commenced in an accommodation to man's animal exigencies
which was as admirable as it was gracious ; and which the
hosts of heaven contemplated with delight and wonder.
The Incarnation of the co-eternal Son, through which S.
John was enabled to declare what he and his fellow Apostles
" had seen with their eyes, what they had looked upon, and
their hands had handled, of the Word of Life," was in the
first instance, so to consult human nature in its animal and
sensitive capacity, as to give the strongest pledge that a dis-
pensation thus introduced would, in every subordinate
provision, manifest the same spirit and operate on the same
principle. For could it be thought that the first wonderful
accommodation of Godhead to the sensitive apprehensions of
man should be wholly temporary1? and that though that
mystery of godliness was ever to be regarded as the vital
source of all spiritual benefits and blessings, no continuance
of this wise and gracious condescension should be manifested
in the means, whereby its results were to be perpetuated, and
made effectual x 1 ' It would be possible to follow this mode of
thought to a remoter point, and to mark in the revealed
relation of the Eternal Word to the whole creation a sure
ground for believing that whensoever, in the fulness of time,
God should be pleased to bring the world, through its highest
type, into union with Himself, the access to that union would
be as wide as the fulness of the nature in which He made
man at the beginning : that the attractive and uplifting bands
of love would hold and draw to Him every true element of
1 A. Knox, Remains, vol. ii. pp. 228, help he has found in the remarkable
229. The writer of this essay desires treatise here referred to.
to acknowledge with gratitude the
x. Sacraments. 413
that nature. But it is enough for our present purpose to look
steadily at the Advent and the Life of Christ: to see how
carefully and tenderly every fragment of the form He takes is
disentangled from the deforming evil which He could not take :
how perfect are the lineaments of the humanity He wears,
how freely and clearly all that is characteristic of our nature
is displayed in His most holy life ; where ' the hiding of His
power,' the restraining of the beams of Deity1 leaves room for
the disclosure in Him of whatever weakness and limitation
properly belongs to us. Surely it would be strange if the
grace and truth which came among us thus, proved partial or
restricted in their later dealing with our manhood: if any
tract of our life were unvisited by their light and blessing : if
anything which He took were slighted in His kingdom, for-
gotten in His ministry, precluded from His worship. The
Incarnation was indeed in itself a great earnest of the recog-
nition which would be accorded in the Christian life to the
whole of our complex nature. But there are, more particu-
larly, two points in the coming and work of our Lord which
seem peculiarly intended to foreshow some abiding elevation
of the material and visible to share the honour of the spiritual
element in our life. They are so familiar to us that it may
not be easy to do full justice to their significance.
(2) For it does seem deeply significant that when the Word
was made flesh and dwelt among us, He took up the lines
of a history replete with forecasts of the consecration of
material things: He met the truest aspirations of a people
trained to unhesitating exultation in a visible worship, en-
couraged by manifold experience to look for the blessings
of Divine goodness through sensible means, accustomed and
commanded to seek for God's especial presence in an ap-
pointed place and amidst sights on which their eyes would
rest with thankful confidence. That Church and nation
' of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came,' must have
seemed indeed irrevocably and essentially committed to the
principle that when man is brought near to God it is with the
entirety of his manhood : that God is to be glorified alike in
1 Cf. Hooker, V. liv. 6.
414 The Religion of the Incarnation.
the body and in the spirit : and that His mercy really is over
all His works. Doubtless barriers were to be broken down,
when the time of prophecy and training passed on into the
freedom of realization: limitations were to be taken away,
distinctions abrogated by Him in Whom is neither Jew nor
Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female : but
religion would surely have grown in reality narrower and not
wider, if the body had been dismissed from its duty and
gladness in the light of God's countenance, if the spirit alone
had been bidden to draw near, to worship, to taste and see
how gracious the Lord is. Through all the amplitude of the
Christian dispensation, there would have been a sense of loss,
of impoverishment, of expectation encouraged and unsatisfied,
had this been so ; for in the preparatory system of Judaism,
whatever had been lacking, still the whole nature of man had
felt the Hand of God and heard His Voice. It would have
seemed strange if with the wider extension of God's light to
all the world there had been a narrowing of its range in the
life of each several man *.
(3) And then, again, it is to be marked that our Lord Him-
self by repeated acts sustained and emphasized this acceptance
of the visible as the organ or vehicle of the Divine. His
blessing was given by the visible laying on of hands, and His
miracles were wrought not by the bare silent energy of His
Almighty will, not even in many cases by the mere utterance
of His word, but through the employment of acts or objects,
impressive to the bodily element in man, and declaring the
consecration of the material for the work of God. Alike in the
blessings bestowed and in the manner of their bestowal men
must have felt that there was with Him no disparagement of
the body, no forgetfulness of its need, no lack of care for its
welfare, its honour, or its hope. Perhaps it may even be that
had we watched the scene in the Galilean town as the sun
was setting, and in the cool of the evening they that had any
sick with divers diseases brought them unto Him ; as He
moved about among those wasted, suffering forms, and on
one after another laid His hands and healed them; it may
1 Cf. A. Knox, ii. 210.
x. Sacraments. 415
even be that what would have struck us first of all would
have been the bringing in of a better hope for the bodily life
of man and the replenishing of a familiar act, a common
gesture, with a grace and power that it had but vaguely hinted
at before.
We have, then, (i) in the Incarnation of the Son of God,
(2) in the essential character of the history ordered as an
especial preparation for His coming, and (3) in certain con-
spicuous features of His ministry on earth, a strong encourage-
ment to expect that in the life thus brought into the world,
in the way thus opened out, there would be evinced a large-
hearted care for the whole nature of men : that no unreal
abstraction would be demanded, and no part of humanity be
disinherited: that in the choice of its means, in the scope
of its beneficence, and in the delineation of its aim, Christianity
would deal with us as we are, and prove that God has not
made us thus for nought. An endeavour will be made to
shew how this great hope is greeted in the Sacramental system,
and uplifted and led on towards the end of all true hope.
But it seems necessary first to adduce the grounds for saying
that that system has been from the beginning an integral part
of Christianity.
HI. When we turn to look at the presentation of the
Sacramental principle in the Gospels, our first impression may
be that the place it holds there is less than that which is
given to it in the teaching and practice of the Church : that it
is by a disproportionate growth that the doctrine of Sacra-
ments has gained so much space and so great prominence in
Catholic theology. But the impression certainly ought not
to be lasting. For it is due to our forgetfulness of the con-
ditions under which Christianity came into the world : the
characteristics and habits of religious thought with which it
had to deal. We can draw no reasonable inference from the
brevity or length with which a truth is enunciated in the
Gospels until we have inquired what were the previous con-
victions of those to whom our Lord spoke : what preparation
had in that particular regard been made for His teaching. We
ought to look for some difference in the manner of revelation
4i 6 The Religion of the Incarnation.
corresponding to the difference of need when a wholly new
principle of thought has to be borne into unready minds,
and when a fresh direction has to be given to an expectation
already alert and confident, a new light to be thrown on the
true worth and meaning of an existing belief about God's ways
towards men. Amplitude and iteration would indeed have
been necessary for any teaching which was to dislodge the
Sacramental principle out of the minds of those among whom
our Lord came — to preclude them from seeking the mercy of
God through visible means. But if the Divine purpose was
not to destroy but to fulfil ; not to discredit as mere misappre-
hensions the convictions men had received, but to raise and
purify them by disclosing the response which God had pre-
pared for them : to disengage them from that which had been
partial, preparatory, transient, and to fasten them on their true
satisfaction : then we might reverently expect that the method
of this teaching would probably be such as in the New Testa-
ment is shewn to us in regard to the doctrine of Sacraments.
(i) For, in the first place, we find abundant and pervading
signs that the general principle is taken up into Christianity
and carried on as a characteristic note of its plan and work.
The regular communication of its prerogative and character-
istic gift through outward means : the embodiment of grace
in ordinances: the designation of visible agents, acts, and
substances, to be the instruments and vehicles of Divine
virtue : — this principle is so intimately and essentially woven
into the texture of Christianity that it cannot be got out with-
out destroying the whole fabric. As our Saviour gradually
sets forth the outlines of His design for the redemption of the
world, at point after point the Sacramental principle is
affirmed, and material instruments are designated for the
achievement of His work. ' He proclaims Himself the Founder
of a world-wide and imperishable Society,' ' the Kingdom of
Heaven' or 'the Kingdom of God1;' and while the claims and
energies of this kingdom penetrate the hidden depths of life,
so that it is indeed ' a moral empire,' and ' a realm of souls,'
yet none the less is it openly to take its place in human
1 H. P. Liddon, Bampton Lectures, pp. 101-105.
x. Sacraments. 417
history. It is not an unsubstantial haze of vague spirituality,
precarious and indistinct, hovering or said to hover half way
between earth and sky, with no precise attachment to either.
At once, it is the. kingdom of Heaven, and it is to have all the
apparel of a visible society : it touches this earth with a
definite and inclusive hold ; it ennobles material conditions
by a frank acceptance. As in the Incarnation, so also in the
preparation of the Church to be the ever-present witness to
Christ, the guardian of His truth, and the home of His people,
the principle was sustained that, in the redemption of the
world, God would be pleased to take the instruments of His
work out of that world which He was renewing: that the
quickening Spirit would not repel or destroy the material
order, but would assume, pervade, and use it.
(3) And, in the second place, the particular expressions of
the general principle thus reaffirmed were authoritatively ap-
pointed: the approved anticipation of men was left in no
uncertainty as to its response and sanction : men were told
plainly what were the outward and visible signs which God
had chosen in this world to be the means whereby His inward
and spiritual grace should be received. It is difficult indeed to
imagine any way in which more weight and incisiveness could
have been given to the appointment of the two great Sacra-
ments than in the way which Christ was pleased to use : —
any way in which Baptism and the Eucharist could have been
more firmly and impressively designated as the vital and
distinctive acts of the Christian Church. We can hardly
wonder at their pre-eminence in Christian thought and life
when we remember how they were fastened upon the con-
sciousness of the Church. Their antecedents lay in that long
mysterious course of history which Almighty God had led on
through the strange discipline of the changeful centuries to
the coming of Christ. And then, there had been in Christ's
teaching certain utterances which seemed to have a peculiar
character : which were plainly of essential importance, con-
cerning things necessary for all His disciples, bearing on the
primary conditions of their life : and yet utterances which
were left unexplained, however men might be troubled,
E e
4i 8 The Religion of the Incarnation.
offended, overstrained, discouraged by them : left as though
their explanation was impossible, until the occurrence of
events which could not be forestalled x. But such utterances,
if they could not be understood, could still less be forgotten :
they lived in the memory, they haunted the imagination, they
sustained expectancy : they were as a prophetic conviction in
the mind, strong, deep, fragmentary, and unsatisfied. Who
can measure the consilient force with which, in moments of
intensest thought and feeling, moments when all the besetting
conditions seemed quick with some imminent disclosure, the
Divine commands, meeting, illuminating, establishing those
former utterances, would be riveted upon the hearts of men
and clenched for ever into the faith and practice of the
Church, with a dominance never to be forgotten or infringed,
as a very primal law of life ? In the unique, controlling awe
of His impending agony and crucifixion: — in the heralded
majesty of His appearance to the disciples upon the mountain
where He had appointed them, and with the proclamation of
the absolute authority given to Him in heaven and in earth :
so did our Lord enact the ordinances to which His earlier
words had pointed, and in which at length their meaning was
made clear : so did He institute His two great Sacraments :
so did He disentangle the Sacramental principle from all that
had been temporary, accidental, disciplinary, accommodated,
in its past embodiment, and determine what should be the
form of its two main expressions, for all ages and for all men
in His Church ' until His coming again,' ' even unto the end
of the world.'
It may be in place here briefly to suggest a few thoughts
with regard to that which was secured by this authoritative
designation of the outward sign in each great Sacrament,
beyond all that could have been attained by the general
enunciation of the Sacramental principle.
Much might be said— and much more, doubtless, be still
left unsaid — about the especial fitness of the very elements
thus chosen from the material world to be the vehicles of
saving grace : — for the water and the bread and wine are
1 Cf. S. John iii. 3-13 ; vi. 51-67.
x. Sacraments. 4 1 9
called to their place in the Divine work with deep and far-
reaching associations already belonging to them. Again, the
very simplicity and commonness of the elements taken into
God's nearest service may have been a part of the reason why
they were appointed : for in no other way could the minds of
men have been more surely and permanently hindered from
many of the mistakes to which in the past they had been
prone : in no other way could the Sacramental principle have
been more perfectly disengaged from the misconceptions which
had confused its purity: in no other way could men have
been more plainly taught that in no expense of this world's
goods, in no labour of their own hands, in no virtue of the
material elements, but only in the sustained energy of His
will, who took and penetrated and employed them, lay the
efficacy of the Sacrament. The very plainness of the element
hallowed in the Sacrament was to urge up men's thoughts
from it to Him. But, above all, the decisive appointment of
particular signs and acts may seem to have been necessary
in order that the Sacraments might take their places as acts
emanating from, upheld by, and characteristic of the Church's
corporate life, and not merely concerned with the spiritual
welfare of the individual. So S. Paul appeals to Baptism
and to the Eucharist as both effecting and involving the
communion of saints l. By Sacraments men are to be taken
out of the narrowness and isolation of their own lives, out
of all engrossing preoccupation with their own state, into the
ample air, the generous gladness, the unselfish hope of the
City of God : they are to escape from all daily pettiness,
all morbid self-interest, all preposterous conviction of their
own importance, into a fellowship which spans all ages and
all lands. By Baptism and the Eucharist the communion of
saints is extended and sustained : they are the distinctive
acts of the Body of Christ : and as such He designated their
essential form, to abide unaltered through all that changed
around them. And even those who stand aloof from them
and from the faith on which they rest, may feel the unmatched
greatness of an act that has held its place in human life
1 i Cor. x. 17 ; Gal. iii. 27, 28 ; Eph. iv. 5.
E 6 2
420 The Religion of the Incarnation.
through all the revolutions of more than 1 800 years : an act
that in its essential characteristics is to-day what it was when
imperial Rome was venerated as eternal : an act that is every
day renewed, with some measure, at least, of the same faith
and hope and love, in every land where Christ is owned.
(3) The Sacramental principle had been most plainly
adopted by our Lord: the spiritual forces with which He
would renew the face of the earth were to be exerted through
material instruments : and He Himself had secured the prin-
ciple from uncertainty or vagueness or individualism in its
expression by appointing, with the utmost weight and pene-
tration of His authority, the definite form of two great ordin-
ances, which were to begin and to advance the supernatural life
of His members, to extend the range of His Church, and to
maintain its unity. In the acts and letters of His apostles
we see how His teaching and bidding had been understood :
how promptly and decisively His Church declared its life, its
work, its mission, to be Sacramental. The meaning and em-
phasis of His commandment appear in the obedience of those
to whom it was given: in the first words of authoritative
counsel uttered by an apostle : in the first act of the Spirit-
bearing Body : and thenceforward in the characteristic habits
of the Christian life 1.
From the first the prominence of Sacraments and Sacra-
mental rites is constant. In the teaching of later ages their
prominence may have been relatively greater, in contrast
with the poverty of faith and life in those who insisted on
their power while they forgot their meaning ; but absolutely
it would be hard to devise a higher place for them than
that which they hold in S. Paul's Epistles. To be living a
life received, nourished, and characterised by Baptism and by
the Eucharist — this is the distinctive note of a Christian —
thus does he differ from other men. The Sacrament by which
he became a member of Christ's body must determine
throughout the two distinctive qualities of his inner life : its
severance from all forms of worldliness, all dependence on
natural advantages, or natural strength, all confidence in the
1 Acts ii. 38, 41, 42.
x. Sacraments. 421
satisfaction of external rules ; and its unfailing newness, as
issuing from Him who, being raised from the dead, dieth
no more, and as carrying through all its activities the air
and light of heaven l. And the Sacrament which continually
renews in him the presence of his Lord, meeting with un-
stinted wealth the demands of work and growth, assuring
and advancing the dominance of the new manhood in him :
this in like manner must determine the sustained simplicity
of his bearing towards those who with him are members
of the one Body, quickened and informed by the one Life 2.
That men may receive eternal life through Jesus Christ :
this is the end of all labours in His name : to this all else
is tributary and conducive : and there is no hesitation as to
the visible means by which God will effect this end in all those
who have 'faith to be healed.' And in this sense it may
perhaps be said that in Christianity even doctrine holds not
indeed a subordinate but (that which involves nothing but
dignity) a subservient place ; since it is the strength and glory
of Christian doctrine that it essentially 'leads on to some-
thing higher — to the sacramental participation in the atoning
sacrifice of Christ 3.'
IV. Thus then there appears at the beginning the domin-
ance of that note which has sounded on through all succeed-
ing ages; thus may we trace from the first days the
dispensation of Divine energy through agents and acts and
efficacious symbols gathered out of this visible world. It
remains to be shewn with what reason it can be alleged that
herein the Church evinces its recognition of the complexity of
human nature, and guards the truth, that in the entirety of
his being man has to do with God, the Creator, Redeemer,
Sanctifier of his soul and body. Along three lines of thought
this may in some degree appear ; and if the evidence that
can be indicated is recognised as in any measure real, it would
be unphilosophic to set it aside because it may be fragmentary
and inconclusive: since fragments are all that in such a
matter we are likely as yet to see.
1 Cf. Horn. vi. 3, 4 ; Gal. iii. 27, 28 ; 3 W. Shirley, The Church in the Apos-
Col. ii. 12, 20-23. toiic -A9ei P- I03-
2 Cf. I Cor. x. 17, xii. 25, 26.
422 The Religion of the Incarnation.
(i) First, then, there is a profound far-reaching import in
the bare fact that material and visible means are thus hal-
lowed to effect the work of God, to bear His unseen grace.
For it must not be thought that in this Sacramental union of
the visible and the invisible we have only an interesting
parallel to the twofold nature of man, a neat and curious
symmetry, a striking bit of symbolism or accommodation.
Nor is the deepest significance of the Sacramental principle
brought out when it is said quite truly that ' it has pleased
God to bind His invisible operations to outward and visible
methods,' 'lest that which is thus invisible should for that
reason be disbelieved or counterfeited or in any of the various
ways in which human incredulity or human enthusiasm might
do it wrong, abused to the injury of man V We may see in this
aspect of the system that it has indeed secondary advantages
of the highest worth ; but its surpassing glory is in its primary
and essential character, as the regular employment of visible
means for the achievement of Divine mysteries. For thus our
whole estimate of this world is affected. Its simplest objects
have their kindred, as it were, in the court, in the very
presence chamber of the Most High ; and actions such as we
see in it day after day have been advanced to a supreme
distinction.
And so through Sacramental elements and acts Christianity
maintains its strong inclusive hold upon the whole of life.
The consecration of material elements to be the vehicles of
Divine grace keeps up on earth that vindication and defence of
the material against the insults of sham spiritualism which
was achieved for ever by the Incarnation and Ascension of
Jesus Christ. We seem to see the material world rising from
height to height ; pierced, indeed, and, as it were, surprised at
every stage by strange hints of a destiny beyond all likeli-
hood ; yet only gradually laying aside the inertness of its
lower forms, gradually seeming to yield itself, not merely to
the external fashioning of spirit, but also to its inner and
transforming occupation: till in humanity it comes within
sight of that which God has been preparing for it, even the
1 Moberly's Bampton Lectures, pp. 29, 30.
x. Sacraments. 423
reception of His own image and likeness. And yet this is
but the beginning : and though sin delays the end, and holds
back the crown of all, it is but for a time ; in due season
there is made known that absolutely highest honour to which
God has been leading on the work of His hands, even that in
its highest type it should be taken into God ; that the Eternal
Word should be made man, and from a human mother receive
our nature, so that a material body should be His body ; His
in birth, and growth, and death ; His in all its relations with
the visible world; His for suffering, for weariness, for tears,
for hunger ; His upon the cross and in the tomb ; His to rise
with ; and, at length, His at the right hand of God. Thus
was the visible received up into glory ; thus was the forecast
of spiritual capacity in the material perfectly realized; and
by the body of the ascended Saviour, an entrance for the
whole being of man into the realm of spirit is assured.
' There is a spiritual body1:' no part of the material order can
be quite untouched by the light that issues from those
astounding words, and from the triumph they record. And
that truth, that triumph, that possibility of unhindered inter-
penetration between the spiritual and the material is pre-
eminently attested upon earth by the two great Sacraments
of the Christian Church. In those mysteries where water is
sanctified to the washing away of sin, and where material
substances are made spiritual food, there is a continual
witness of the victory that has been won, a real earnest of
that which shall hereafter be achieved, a vivid declaration
that the barrier between the spiritual and the material is not
absolute or eternal.
Nor is this deep truth without practical and far-reaching
consequences in human life. For immediately it thus appears
that the unreal spirituality which consists in a barren and
boastful disparagement of ritual observance or of outward
acts2, of earthly relationships or of secular life, of natural
feelings or of bodily health, clashes with Christian teaching
as sharply as it does with human nature and with common
1 I Cor. xv. 44.
2 Cf. Professor Milligan, The Resiuredion of Our Lord, Lect.'vi. Ft. i. § c.
424 The Religion of the Incarnation.
sense. And then, in perfect accordance with this principle,
the spiritual energy of the Church is sacramentally conveyed
for the hallowing of stage after stage in the due order of a
human life, as body, soul, and spirit are advanced towards the
end for which they were created. Not only in the initial act
whereby all are bidden to enter into the kingdom of God,
and, at the dawn of consciousness, the onset of evil is fore-
stalled by the cleansing and regenerating work of God the
Holy Ghost — not only in the ever-needed, ever-ready mystery
of glory whereby, amidst the stains and sorrows of the world,
all may again and again be ' filled with the very essence of
restoration and of life1;' but at other moments too, when the
soul of man rises up towards God in the divinely-quickened
venture of faith, the strength of the Most High is perfected
in human weakness, and in Sacramental acts the things that
are not seen enter into the history of the things that are
seen. It is most unfortunate that the associations of con-
troversy should hinder men from frankly and thankfully
recognising the wide range of Sacramental action in Chris-
tian life. The dispute as to the number of the Sacraments
is indeed ' a question of a name 2 : ' and it ought to have been
acknowledged all along that the name was being used with
different and shifting meanings. That men knew that it did
not designate an essentially distinct class of exactly equiva-
lent units is shewn on all sides ; S. Thomas Aquinas seems to
doubt, at least, whether there are not more than seven Sacra-
ments, divides the seven into groups with very important
notes of difference, and decides that the Eucharist is ' Sacra-
mentorum omnium potissimum 3 : ' Calvin was not unwilling
that the laying on of hands should be called a Sacrament,
though he would not reckon it 'inter ordinaria Sacramenta4;'
the Council of Trent has an anathema for anyone who says
that the seven Sacraments are so equal that none is more
worthy than another 5 : Richard Baxter distinguishes between
' three sorts of Sacraments ; ' in the second sense of the name,
1 Bright's Ancient Collects, p. 152. 3 S. Th. iii. Qu. LXV. Art. 1,4, 3.
2 C. Gore, Roman Catholic Claims, * Calv. Inst. IV. xiv. 20.
p. 1 70. 5 Cone. Trident. Sess. VII. Can. iii.
x. Sacraments. 425
in which it is taken to mean 'any solemn Investiture of a
person by ministerial delivery, in a state of Church -privileges,
or some special gospel-mercy,' he grants ' that there are five
Sacraments— Baptism, Confirmation, Absolution, the Lord's
Supper and Ordination;' and elsewhere he declares that
' they that peremptorily say without distinguishing that there
are but two Sacraments in all, do but harden them (the
Papists) by the unwarrantable narrowing of the word V There
is indeed no reason why anyone should hesitate to mark the
Love of God meeting in Sacramental ordinances the need of
man at point after point in the course of his probation.
Differences in the manner of appointment or in the range of
application may involve no difference at all in the reality of
the power exercised and the grace conveyed. And so we
may see the Spirit-bearing Church, with whole-hearted recog-
nition of all the elements and wants of human life, proffering
to men through visible means the manifold gifts of grace
needed for their progress and welfare in the way until they
reach the Country. As temptation grows more complex and
severe, and the soul begins to realize the warfare that it has
to wage, the Personal indwelling of the Holy Ghost, vouch-
safed by the laying on of hands, completes the preparation of
Christ's soldier : as the desolating sense of failure threatens
to unnerve the will and to take such hold upon the soul that
it is not able to look up, the authoritative message of for-
giveness brings again the strength of purity and the light of
hope, and recalls the scattered forces of the inner life to expel
the encroaching evil and to regain whatever had been lost.
For special vocations there are special means of grace ; by
ordination God vouchsafes to guilty men the glory of the
priesthood: and in Christian marriage He confers the grace
that hallows human love to be the brightness and the safe-
guard of an earthly home, and the earnest of the home in
He-oven. And thus in the manifold employment of the
Sacramental principle there again appears that characteristic
1 Eichard Baxter, Confirmation and Pollock, Richard Baxter on the Sacra-
Restauration, pp. 88, 89 ; Ecclesiastical merits, § 58.
Cases of Conscience, Qu. 99. Cf. J. S.
426 The Religion of the Incarnation.
excellence of Christianity which is secured in the very nature
of Sacraments : namely, its recognition of the whole problem
with which it claims to deal. It speaks to us as we are:
there is no true need of which it will not take account : it
will lead us without loss to the realization of our entire being.
(2) Secondly, Sacraments are a constant witness against
our readiness to forget, to ignore, or to explain away the
claim of Christianity to penetrate the bodily life, and to affect
the body itself, replenishing it here with powers which are
strange to it, lifting it out of the reach or mastery of passions
which falsely boast that they are congenial with it, leading it
on towards its everlasting rest, beyond all weakness and
dishonour, in the glory of God. This claim, with the deeply
mysterious but wholly reasonable hope which it engenders,
has been set forth by Hooker, with his unfaltering strength of
thought and words : ' Doth any man doubt that even from
the flesh of Christ our very bodies do receive that life which
shall make them glorious at the latter day, and for which they
are already accounted parts of His blessed body? Our
corruptible bodies could never live the life they shall live,
were it not that here they are joined with His body, which is
incorruptible, and that His is in ours as a cause of immor-
tality, a cause by removing, through the death and merit of
His own flesh, that which hindered the life of ours. Christ is
therefore, both as God and as man, that true Vine whereof we
both spiritually and corporally are branches. The mixture of
His bodily substance with ours is a thing which the ancient
Fathers disclaim. Yet the mixture of His flesh with ours
they speak of, to signify what our very bodies through
mystical conjunction receive from that vital efficacy which we
know to be in His : and from bodily mixtures they borrow
divers similitudes rather to declare the truth, than the manner
of coherence between His sacred and the sanctified bodies of
saints1.' The body, as well as the spirit, is accessible to
1 Hooker V. Ivi. 9 : cf. E. B. Pusey, flesh into Himself, as t<> impart to it
J/hmr.s//// Xi'i'nions, p. u, 'This is (if His own inherent life; so then wo
we may reverently so speak) the order partaking of it, that life is trans-
of the mystery of the Incarnation, mitted on to us also, and not to our
that the Eternal Word so took our souls only, but our bodies also, since
x. Sacraments. 427
the Divine life : there are avenues by which the energy
of Christ's perfect and glorified manhood can penetrate, in-
form, affect, transfigure our whole being, bodily and spiritual.
His prevalence in the life of the body and the change He
works in it, may be very gradual, discerned in incoherent
fragments, interrupted by surprising disappointments, ham-
pered by limitations which it would be unlike Him now to
overbear : but the change is real. The body is not left inert
and brutish and uncheered, while the spirit is being carried
on from strength to strength, with growing light and freedom
and majesty: it also rises at its Saviour's touch, and finds
from Him the earnest of its liberation and advancement.
The work of grace upon the bodily nature of man may
indeed be a matter of which we ought not to think save very
humbly and tentatively: it is easy and perilous to over-
state or to mis-read the evidence : but there is peril also in
ignoring it. The language of our Blessed Lord ; the clear
conviction of His apostles; the intrepid quietude of His
martyrs ; the patience of the saints ; their splendid and un-
rivalled endurance in His service ; the change that may be
marked in the looks and voices and instinctive acts of some
who seem to be most nearly His : — here is such guidance for
thought and hope as we ought not to dismiss because we
cannot make up a theory about it. There are real facts—
though they may be fragmentary, and require very careful
handling — to warrant us in praying that our sinful bodies
may be made clean by His body, as well as that our souls
may be washed by His most precious blood.
It is this truth, with the higher aspirations, the more ven-
turous hopes and efforts which it suggests, that the Sacra-
mental system of the Church keeps in its clue prominence.
It is at all events not incongruous to think that the spiritual
grace which is conveyed by visible means may pass through
we become flesh of His flesh, and circling and vivifying our whole un-
bone of His bone, and He who is ture, and then, through that bivad
wholly life, is imparted to us wholly, which is His flesh, finding an cn-
Tlie Life which He is, spreads around. trance to us individually, penetrating
first giving its own vitality to that us, soul and body and spirit, and
sinless flesh which He united indis- irradiating and transforming us into
solubly with Himself, and in it en- His own light and life.'
428 The Religion of the Incarnation.
our spiritual nature to tell upon that which is visible. He
who comes spiritually under a visible form may well be be-
lieved to work spiritually upon a visible nature. It is not, of
course, to be thought for a moment that our bodies can at all
after their own manner receive that Food which is wholly
spiritual : nor that the visible element in a Sacrament gives to
our bodies any hold upon the invisible grace, any power to
appropriate to themselves by their own proper energies that
which is incorporeal and supra-sensuous.. ' Only the soul or
spirit of man can take in and feed upon a spiritual nutriment1 : '
it is only (so far as our thoughts can go) through the avenue,
by the medium of the faithful soul that the spiritual force of
the Sacrament can penetrate to the body. But the fact that
the spiritual virtue comes to us under a form of which our
bodily senses take cognizance is at least a pledge that the
body is not forgotten in the work of sanctification. And
it is something more than this : — it is an assurance of that
invasion and penetration of the material by the spiritual
which is the very ground of all our hope for the redemp-
tion of the body. There is in the very nature of a Sacra-
ment the forecast of some such hope as this : — that He who
said of the material bread ' This is My Body,' may, in His
own time, through changes which we cannot imagine, take
to Himself and lift into the transfiguring realm of spirit our
material bodies as well as our souls ; seizing, disclosing, per-
fecting capacities which under their present conditions we
hardly suspect in them. And, perhaps, yet more than this may
be said : for there would seem to be warrant for trusting that,
in spite of all hindrance and delay, His word of power even
now goes forth towards this work, and in the holy Eucharist
has its efficacy throughout our whole nature. It is the thought
to which Hooker points in words of endless import : ' there
ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us, a true change both
of soul and body, an alteration from death to life ; ' words
which rest on those of S. Irenaeus : ' As bread from the earth
receiving the invocation of God is no longer common bread
but the Eucharist, consisting of two things, an earthly and a
1 J. B. Mozley, Lectures and other Theological Papers, p. 204.
x. Sacraments. 429
heavenly ; so our bodies also receiving the Eucharist are no
longer corruptible, having the hope of the Resurrection V
Alike in us and in the Sacrament the powers of the world to
come invade the present, and already move towards the victory
which shall be hereafter.
(3) And thus, in the third place, the ministry of Sacraments is
a perpetual prophecy of the glory that shall be revealed in us ;
the glory that shall pervade and transfigure our whole being.
' Till He come ; ' ' until His coming again ; ' that note of ex-
pectancy, of looking towards the east and watching for the
return of a great light, discloses a deep truth about the Christian
Sacraments. They sanction and confirm, as ever-present wit-
nesses of a Divine assent, certain thoughts which will not let
men rest in any low contentment with the things of time—
with the approval, the success, the gratification, or the systems
of this world. They declare with a perpetual insistance the
mysteriousness of our present being : they have a certain
fellowship with those strange flashes and pulsations we have
felt of a life which seems astray and alien here, which yet
somehow suggests the thought that could we commit ourselves
wholly to its guidance, could we be replenished with its
power, we should not walk in darkness, but rather, even in
this world, be as the children of light : — and so they take the side
of faith and patience against the attractions of completeness and
security and achievement and repose. For they offer to guide
into the way of peace, to welcome into an ordered, hallowed,
course of loving service and of steady growth, those passing
thrills of an intenser life, which if they be forgotten, denied,
misunderstood, or surrendered to the abuse of wilfulness and
vanity, may so subtly and terribly be unto us an occasion of
falling.
It is given sometimes to a poet to sink a shaft, as it were,
into the very depths of the inner life : to penetrate its secret
treasuries, and to return, Prometheus-like, with a gift of fire
and of light to men. The venturesome words that record such
a moment of penetration and insight never lose their power :
they seem to have caught something of the everlasting fresh-
1 Hooker V. Ixvii. n : S. Irenaeus iv. 18.
430 The Religion of the Incarnation.
ness of that world of which they speak : and one man after
another may find in them, at some time of need or gladness
or awakening, the utterance of thoughts which else he might
have been too shy or too faint-hearted to acknowledge even to
himself. There is such a splendid venture of courage for the
truth's sake in those lines of Wordsworth which surely no
familiarity can deprive of their claim to reverence and grati-
tude ; the lines in which he tells his thankfulness,
For those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings ;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprized :
Those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing ;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence.
It may be doubted whether any life is left wholly un-
visited by some misgiving, some dim, faltering instinct, some
pulse of hope or sorrow, which is akin to that which these
words disclose ; and the moments of such visitation are the
supreme opportunities of a human soul, the crises of its
tragedy. Then the things that belong to its peace are being
proffered to it ; then the Sibyl stands before it with the trea-
sures of unimagined wisdom. We rise, and we live and grow
and see by the right understanding and employment of such
moments; by the fresh acts of self-committal which they
render possible : and in all the infinite pathos of this world
there is no misery comparable with this — that they should
cease to trouble us. Whatever a man may believe or dis-
believe, he will do well to trust these moments when they
come : and, perhaps, if he has grace to know and use them, he
may be nearer to the kingdom of God than he at all suspects.
But Christianity does not leave such ' shoots of everlasting-
ness ' wholly unexplained or unprovided for.
x. Sacraments. 431
They are in truth the fountain light of all our seeing,
for they are the disclosure, the assertion, the stepping forward
of His presence who alone sustains our life, our thought, our
love. And, being this, they are therefore also the tokens, the
emerging witness of a work that has begun in us, a life that
is astir, a process of change that may be carried forward to an
issue which, even faintly surmised, might make all other
desire die away in us.
That we should be perfectly set free from sin ; that God
should so dwell in us and pervade our whole being that no
part should lag behind the other ; that whatsoever weakness or
reluctance or coarseness may have clung about the body here
should utterly pass away, being driven back by the victorious
onset of the Spirit of God, claiming us wholly, body, soul, and
spirit for His own; that whatsoever pure and true delight
has here engaged us should be found, faultless and unwearied,
in that energy which shall be at once our work and our rest
for ever ; — this is how Christianity represents to us the end
of our development : and if indeed the powers which are to
achieve so vast a change are already setting about their work
in us, it is not strange that we should be disturbed now and
then with some suspicion of it. We may understand alike
the severity of external discipline, and the sharp disturbance
and upheaval of anything like complacency, in a nature that
is being here led on towards so splendid and inconceivable a
transfiguration.
But Christianity does not merely declare to us the origin
and meaning of these strange invasions of our ordinary life ;
these emergings, as it were, of that which is behind our normal
activity, when the light, the strength, the love in which alone
we live seems to push aside the curtain on which the back-
ground of our daily life is painted, and to appear unveiled
among the things of time. He who telleth the number of the
stars and calleth them all by their names, He who sendeth the
springs into the valleys, and sweetly and mightily ordereth all
things ; He would not have these moments of intenser life, of
keener consciousness, of quicker and more excellent growth, to
be precarious and unaccountable, to be abrupt and arbitrary
432 The Religion of the Incarnation.
as the rush of the meteor which is gone before the eye has
clearly seen it, or could use its light. They come from Him ;
they are the moments in which He makes His power to be
known ; in which His hand is felt, and His voice pervades the
soul ; the moments when His presence advances, as it were,
and bends over us, and we know that it is He, Himself. And
must we merely wait in blank and idle helplessness for that
which we so greatly need ; for that which is our only source
of strength and growth ? Must we wait, flagging and fruitless,
with just a vague hope that the quickening presence may
chance to visit us again, lighting on us with arbitrary bene-
ficence, as the insect lights upon the plant, that it may bring
forth fruit in due season? Must we wonder through days
and months, yes, and through years perhaps of dim and de-
solate bewilderment, whether it was a real presence that came
to us ; with nothing but the fading memory of an individual
and unconfirmed impression to sustain our hope, to keep the
door against the gathering forces of doubt and worldliness
and despair? Must we find our way as best we can, by
guidance given long ago, imperfectly realized even then, and
more and more hazily remembered, more drearily inadequate
as time goes on, and the path grows rougher and less clear ?
Is the greatest effort to be demanded of us just when our
strength is least and our light lowest * ? Surely it is not His
way to be thus arbitrary in compassion, thus desultory and
precarious in shewing mercy. Surely He would not have
us stray and faint and suffer thus. No, His compassions fail
not ; and, with the orderliness of a father's love, He has made
us sure of all we need ; and the historic Church and the
triumphs of His saints declare that He is true. He has,
with the certainty of His own unchanging word, promised
that the unseen gift, which is the power of saintliness in sinful
man, shall be given to all faithful, humble souls by ordered
means through appointed acts. We need not vaguely hope
that we may somehow receive His grace ; for He has told us
where and how we are to find it, and what are the conditions
of its unhindered entrance into our souls. We need not be
1 Cf. A. Knox, ii. 234-6.
x. Sacraments. 433
always going back to wonder whether our sins have been
forgiven, or laboriously stirring up the glow of a past con-
viction ; for there is a ministry which He has empowered to
convey to us that cleansing glory which is ever ready to
transfigure penitence into peace and thanksgiving. We need
not live an utterly unequal life, stumbling to and fro be-
tween our ideal and our caricature l ; for He has prepared
for us a way which leads from strength to strength ; and we
know where He is ready to meet us and to replenish us with
life and light. There is a glory that shall be revealed in us ;
and here on earth we may so draw near and take it to our-
selves that its quiet incoming tide may more and more per-
vade our being ; with radiance ever steadier and more trans-
forming; till, in this world and beyond it, He has made a
perfect work : till we are wholly ruled and gladdened by His
presence, and wholly wrought into His image. For not by vague
waves of feeling or by moments of experience which admit
no certain measure, no unvarying test, no objective verification,
but by an actual change, a cleansing and renewal of our man-
hood, a transformation which we can mark in human lives
and human faces, or trace in that strange trait of saintliness
which Christianity has wrought into the rough fabric of
human history, may the reality of Sacramental grace be known
on earth; known clearly enough, at all events, to make us
hopeful about its perfect work in those who shall hereafter
be presented faultless in body, soul and spirit before the throne
of God.
1 Cf. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, p. 182.
Ff
XI.
CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS.
W. J. H. CAMPION.
F I 2
XI.
CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS.
THE aim of this essay is to investigate some of the relations
of Christianity to human society, and to point out some of
the main lines of influence which the Christian Church brings
to bear on the organized centres of social life.
We are met at the outset by two widely-differing con-
ceptions of the mode and direction in which Christianity acts
as a regenerating influence on the life of mankind. On the
one side, Christianity is identified with civilization, and the
function of the Church is regarded as simply the gathering up,
from age to age, of the higher aspirations of mankind: her
call is to enter into, to sympathize with, and to perpetuate
whatever is pure, noble, and of good report, in laws and insti-
tutions, in art, music, and poetry, in industry and commerce,
as well as in the moral and religious usages and beliefs of
mankind. Christianity is thus not a higher order, standing
over against and correcting a lower, but is itself the product
or rather the natural outgrowth of the progressive moral con-
sciousness of mankind. The value of this mode of thought is
in emphasizing the sacredness of secular interests and duties,
and in its protest against dividing the field of conscience, and
assigning to the one part a greater sanctity than to the other.
' As our salvation depends as certainly upon our behaviour in
things relating to civil life, as in things relating to the service
of God, it follows that they are both equally matters of
conscience and salvation1.' Its weakness lies in its not
1 Law, Third letter to the Bishop of Bangor, second edition, 1762, p. 66.
438 The Religion of the Incarnation.
sufficiently recognising one decisive fact of human nature, the
fact of sin. No one, as it seems to us, looking at human
nature, in himself or others, with clear, open, unprejudiced
eyes, can doubt the existence of sin, its corrupting influence
on the whole nature, and yet its fundamental unnaturalness.
But if states and societies are as the individuals who compose
them, then any theory of society must rest on a theory of
man ; and the theory of man is imperfect unless it recognises
the fact of sin.
On the other hand., the recoil from secularism, or the over-
whelming sense of the power and destructiveness of sin in the
lives of men and of societies, leads others to draw sharp the
distinction between things sacred and things secular. The
order of things, it is said, of which the Incarnation is the
starting-point, is admittedly higher than that secular order
which existed before it, and which even now surrounds it as
darkness encompasses light. Let us put on one side political
life, local and national interests, all that sphere of mixed
social relations, which is so imperfect, so full of fierce passions,
of strife, envy, and ambition, so productive of distractions and
entanglements. Let us concentrate our own thoughts on sin,
and devote our own lives to its remedy. Let us at least
keep our own hands clean, and use for our own discipline
that narrower sphere which is sufficient. No doubt indi-
viduals will find their vocation in some such attitude as this :
and for some it may be wise to abstain from political and
social interests, in order thus to strengthen their influence in
other directions. But we are not now considering the call of
individual Christians, but the attitude of the Christian Church
as a whole : and it would be easy to accumulate references to
shew that the leading minds of Christendom have declined to
recognise, except in cases of special vocation, as the duty of
Christians, the abdication of responsibility for the problems,
the entanglements, the more or less secular issues of the
ordinary social life of mankind. Christianity, in the words of
a modern writer, has both to deliver humanity from its
limitations, and to bring it to a true knowledge of itself1.
1 Martensen, Christian Ethics, special part, second division, Eng. Transl. p. 98.
xi. Christianity and Politics. 439
These two conceptions of the relation of the Christian
society to the issues and interests of the life amid which it
moves, correspond to two aspects of the Incarnation, which
the deepest Christian thought holds in solution. On the one
side, the human life of the Word of God may be regarded as
a fulfilment, the restoration of an order, marred, indeed, and
broken, but never completely lost, the binding together of all
truth, all goodness, all beauty, into one perfect life ; on the
other, it is a reversal, the beginning of a new order, the
undoing of a great wrong which has eaten deep into human
nature, the lifting up of mankind out of the helpless slavery
of sin into the freedom of righteousness. These two aspects
of the Incarnation are not contradictory but complementary.
However difficult it may be for us to find their unity in
thought, they had their unity in a life.
In the same way, the problem with which Christianity has
to deal in its relations to human society has two sides. It
cannot hold itself aloof from the great currents and move-
ments of that ever-flowing and ebbing human life, in which it
shares, which it has to redeem, to purify, and to quicken.
' In the great sea of human society, part of it, yet distinguish-
able from it, is the stream of the existence of the Church1.'
And yet it has to maintain, as a debt it owes to future
generations as well as the present, the purity of its own moral
standard, the independence of its own deepest life.
To spiritualize life without ceasing to be spiritual, to
maintain a high morality while at the same time inter-
penetrating a non-Christian or very imperfectly Christianized
society with its own moral habits and manners, is a task
which presupposes great cohesion and tenacity on the part of
the Christian Church. And it is for that reason that in
speaking of the Church we shall have mainly in view that
solid, highly articulated, permanent core of Christendom2,
which, however broken into fragments, and weakened by its
own divisions, maintains a clearly-marked type, on the side
of doctrine in its creeds and sacred writings, on the side of
1 Church, Oxford House Papers, * Holland, Creed and Character, first
No. xvii, The Christian Church, p. 10. edition, 1887, p. 156.
44-Q The Religion of the Incarnation.
worship in its sacraments and traditional liturgies, on the side
of organization in its ministry, as well as holding the life of
Christ its standard of perfect living. Those Christian bodies
which float, more or less closely knit together, around the
central core of the Church, have often rendered great services
in advancing on special points the standard of social and
personal morality, and they are more flexible, and able rapidly
to throw themselves into new crusades ; but it may well be
doubted if their work could have been done at all without the
more rigid and stable body behind them, with its slow move-
ments, but greater Catholicity of aim and sympathy; and
certainly it would in the long run have been better done, if,
like the great monastic bodies, they had remained as distinct
organizations within the Church.
What, then, is the attitude of the Church towards human
society, and especially towards human society as gathered up
and concentrated in States? What duties does it recognise
towards nations, towards human society as a whole ?
I. There is a certain order of debated questions, on which
it cannot be said that the Christian Church is pledged to one
side or the other — she leaves them open. Individual Christians
take one side or the other. The Christian society recognises
that the differences are due to diversities of temperament and
national character, and to the varying conditions under which
human societies live, and therefore that they may be best left
to human experience to solve.
In this class of questions would come the problem debated
since the time of Herodotus, but to which no general answer
is really possible, What is the best form of government ? On
this problem the Church is, so to speak, frankly opportunist.
Here we may quote the view of S. Augustine, as stated in
the De Civitate Dei * : ' The Heavenly City, in its wanderings
on earth, summons its citizens from among all nations ....
being itself indifferent to whatever differences there may be
in the customs, laws, and institutions by which earthly peace
is sought after or preserved, not rescinding or destroying any
of them, but rather keeping and following after them as
xi. Christianity and Politics. 441
different means adopted by different races for obtaining the
one common end of earthly peace, provided only they are no
obstacle to the religion by which men are taught the worship
of the one supreme and true God.' In the same spirit, in his
dialogue De libero Arbitrio1, he dwells on the mutable
character of human law. That law is temporal, which,
'though just, may yet be justly changed from time to time,'
i.e. as the conditions change. Thus, a Democracy is best
adapted to a grave and temperate people, public-spirited and
willing to make sacrifices for the common good ; while it is'
better for a more corrupt, more easily flattered people, greedy
of private gain, to be under an Aristocracy or a Monarchy.
Or if we wish for a more modern statement of the traditional
view of the Christian Church, we shall find it in an encyclical
letter2 of Leo XIII : ' The right of sovereignty in itself is not
necessarily united with any particular form of government:
it can rightly assume, now one form, now another, provided
only that each of these forms does in very deed secure useful
results and the common good.' It will be noticed that two
qualifications are introduced, the one by S. Augustine, the
other by Pope Leo, limiting their acceptance of all forms of
government. It is possible for Christian citizens to take an
active part in every de facto government which ( i ) does not
hinder the free and peaceable practice of the Christian re-
ligion, and (2) whose real aim is the common good, and which
does, in fact, work for the advantage of its sulyects. Not all
governments, even in the nineteenth century, satisfy these
tests.
In the same way, there have been the widest differences
between Christian thinkers on the most important questions,
in which autocratic and democratic leanings shew themselves,
such, for instance, as that of the origin of sovereignty, i.e. of
that rule of man over man, which is the foundation of civil
society. The view indicated, though not worked out by
S. Augustine3, that the rule of man over man had its origin
in the Fall, and was therefore part of the secondary, not the
primary condition of mankind, is used by Gregory VII as
1 i. 6. '2 Immortale Dei. 3 Aug. De Civ. Dei, xix. 14, 15.
44 2 The Religion of the Incarnation.
a weapon of assault on the temporal power, by Eossuet as
a safe ground on which to rest the duty of obedience to an
absolute Monarchy. The other side is taken by S. Thomas
Aquinas. He finds the origin of temporal rule in the social
nature of man, accepting and making his own the Aristotelian
account of man as by nature a being fitted for a common
life. Thus, in a state of innocence, there would have been no
slavery indeed, but government, with its recognition of the
differences in ability and knowledge among men, and of the
consequent duty incumbent on the wise and experienced of
using their faculties for the common good. Political rule
would thus be, not a consequence of sin, but a result of
man's inherently social nature.
Differences such as these among those who equally start from
fundamentally Christian presuppositions can only be taken
to shew that we are wrong in supposing that the Christian
Church is bound up with either of the two great political
leanings which have appeared in civil communities in all ages
of the world, and which have their ground in human nature
itself. ' In every country of civilized man, acknowledging
the rights of property, and by means of determined bound-
aries and common laws, united into one people or nation, the
two antagonist powers or opposite interests of the State . . .
are those of permanence and of progression V The Church re-
cognises these diverse powers or interests as natural, and
therefore accepts the fact of their existence, without identify-
ing herself with either of them.
II. But it would surely be a mistake to suppose that
because the Church is neutral on certain questions of Politics,
that therefore she has no direct teaching to give on the vital
questions which arise with regard to the organized common
life of mankind. In the rebound from the minimizing views
of the function of the State, which were associated in England
with the Eicardian School of Economics and the philosophic
Radicalism of J. S. Mill, men are ready to go all lengths in
exalting the position of the State as the moral guide of
social life. The tendency is to assign the whole sphere of
1 S. T. Coleridge, Church and State, edited by H. N. Coleridge, 1839, P- 24-
xi. Christianity and Politics. 443
public morals to the State, and 'private' morals to the in-
dividual, acting, if he pleases, under the guidance of one or
other of the Christian bodies. However much we may welcome
the freer recognition of corporate responsibility, and the nobler
conception of the State as having a moral end ; yet we cannot
help perceiving that certain limitations are, as by a self-acting
law, imposed on its moral influence.
(i) The State has been called the 'armed conscience of the
community V Looked at on the moral side, as a guide of the
conscience of individuals, its arms are its defect. But that
defect is not remediable : it is inevitable. For the State has
to deal with various grades of character, responding to a vast
complexity of motives, which may be roughly classified under
three heads, those of duty, self-interest, fear of punishment.
To some ' you ought ' is a sufficient appeal, to others ' you
had better,' while to a third class the only effective appeal is
'you must.' Now the State in order to perform its most
elementary business, that of securing the conditions of an
ordered and civilized life, has to deal first of all with those
who are only susceptible of the lowest motive, the dread of
punishment. And in dealing with them, it must of necessity
use coercive force2. But the force-associations which thus
grow up around all State-action weaken and enervate its
appeal to the higher motives, those of duty and rational self-
interest. The very suspicion of compulsion taints the act
done from duty.
Again, there can be little doubt of the vast influence
exercised on morals by human law and institutions. It is
well known to those who are at all acquainted with the life
of the poor in large towns, that in many cases conscience is
mainly informed by positive law. But all that human law
can do is to secure a minimum of morality 3. No doubt it is
true that indirectly positive law can do something more than
this, because good citizens will abstain from all actions which,
in however remote a degree, are likely to bring them into
1 A. C. Bradley, ' Aristotle's Concep- 2 ' Metu coercet,' Aug. De lib. Arb.
tion of the State,' in Hellenica, 1880, i. 15.
p. 243. 3 Compare Aug. De lib. Arb. i. 5.
444 The Religion of the Incarnation.
collision with the law. But in the main it is true to say that
what law can secure is the observance on pain of punishment
of a minimum moral standard, which itself shifts with the
public opinion of society, rising as it rises, falling as it falls.
Certainly the State is sacred : it is ' of God ' : it is no ne-
cessary evil : but a noble organ of good living. But yet there
are these natural limitations to the effective exercise of its
functions, as a moral guide. Firstly, it has to use force,
and, therefore, its appeal to the higher motive is weakened.
Secondly, it can only secure a minimum of morality, shifting
with the general morality of the community.
Now it is exactly at these points that the Church steps in
to supplement the moral action of the State, not as one part
supplements another part of a single whole, but rather as a
higher supplements a lower order.
It is in its appeal to the higher motives that the State is
weak: it is in its appeal to the higher motives that the
Church is strong. If there have been times when the Church
has allowed herself to claim or to assume temporal power, or
without assuming it, to be so closely implicated with the
secular authority that Church and State appeared to men as
one body interested in and maintaining the existing order, if
she has used the weapons of persecution, or handed men over
to the secular arm, then has she so far weakened and loosened
her own hold on the higher motives which move men to action.
She may have become apparently more powerful, but it has
always been at the cost, perhaps unperceived at the time, of
some sacrifice of her own spirituality, and of the loftiness of
that moral appeal in which her true strength lies. ' There is
something in the very spirit of the Christian Church which
revolts from the application of coercive force V
And so, alongside of the moral minima of the secular lawr
the Christian Church maintains moral maxima, moral ideals,
or rather a moral ideal, ' Be ye therefore perfect, even as your
Father which is in heaven is perfect2.' 'Till we all come
unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the
1 Art. on < Future Retribution,' Church Quarterly, July, 1888.
3 S. Matt. v. 48.
xi. Christianity and Politics. 445
fulness of Christ1.' It is not that the law is undervalued, or
contemned, but that Christians are urged to bring their con-
duct under principles which will carry them far beyond the
mere obedience to law. It is sufficient to quote from the
Sermon on the Mount, ' Blessed are the meek . . . Blessed are
ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all
manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake ... I say unto
you, that ye resist not evil : but whosoever shall smite thee
on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any
man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let
him have thy cloke also V
The law and institutions of a people rest upon and give
expression to a group of moral principles and ideals : they are
not the only realization of those principles and ideals, but
one ; art and literature would be others ; further, they realize
them mainly on the negative side, in the mode of prohibition.
As that group of principles and ideals changes, they change,
sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. At first
sight it seems as if there was no essential difference in this
respect between the laws and institutions of a nation, and the
manners and institutions of the Christian Church, except that
the one gives a more positive and constructive expression to
the moral standard of the time than the other. But there is
this difference, that the Christian Church has its moral
standard in the past, in the life of the Son of Man ; it too
recognises change, as age succeeds age, but the new duties are
regarded not as new, but as newly brought forth out of an
already existing treasure, as the completer manifestation under
new conditions of the meaning of the life of Christ. On the
threshold of Christian morality there lies that by which all
its subsequent stages may be tested, and which is the measure
of advance or retrogression. It is this permanent element,
preceding the element of change and of development, in
Christian morality, which gives it its authority as against the
moral product of one nation or one age.
It is exactly this authority which has enabled the Church
to appeal with such force to duty as precedent to right, and
1 Eph. iv. 13. 2 S. Matt. v. 5, 11, 39, 40.
446 The Religion of the Incarnation,
to love as higher than justice. We can best illustrate this
steady appeal to higher motives by tracing the steps by
which Christian teachers have brought out, one by one, the
different aspects -of the relations of governors and governed
looked at in the light of Christian anthropology and Chris-
tian sociology. The first principles governing the attitude of
individual Christians towards the various organizations of
human society are laid down in the words of Christ, ' Kender
unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the
things that are God's V The command, taken in connection
with its context, involves two principles, first, the recogni-
tion of the claims of civil society, and, secondly, their limi-
tation by a higher order of claims, where they come into
conflict with the first. The passage in the Epistle to the
Romans 2, in which S. Paul deals with the duties of Christians
towards ' the powers that be,' is a commentary on his Master's
teaching. It shews the connection of the first of these prin-
ciples with the second, by tracing it back to its ground in
the will -of God. It brings it into relation to love, the central
motive of the Christian character. Briefly summarized, the
stages of S. Paul's argument are as follows: (i) he shews
that all power is of Divine origin : ' there is no power but of
God.' Thus those who wield secular power are ministers
of God. (2) The administration of earthly rewards and
punishments by the secular power makes for good, and for
this reason God uses it in His governance of the world.
Therefore temporal authority is to be obeyed 'not only for
wrath, but also for conscience sake,' i. e. not merely to avoid
earthly punishment, but as a duty. (3) This -duty may be
regarded as one application of the general maxim of justice,
' Render to all their dues.' But (4) all these scattered dues
are to a Christian summed up under one vast debt, always in
process of payment, but never completely paid. ' Owe no man
anything, but to love one another.' ' Love is the fulfilling of
the law.' These passages of the New Testament put in the
clearest light the duty of obedience to civil authority. They
1 S. Matt. xxii. 21.
8 Kom. xiii. i-io. Compare S. Peter's teaching in i S. Pet. ii. 13-17.
xi. Christianity and Politics. 447
lay down its theological ground in the derivation of all power
from God ; and its moral ground by shewing that such obedience
is one form of justice, and justice itself one aspect of love.
They thus give to the commands of those wielding authority
in human society the firmest sanctions. If on the one side
Christianity seems to set up conscience, as the guardian of the
things of God, against positive law, it gives on the other a
Divine sanction and consecration to the whole order of things
connected with the State by shewing its ministerial relation to,
its defined place and function in, God's ordering of the world.
This was the side of our Lord's saying which needed en-
forcing on the Christians of S. Paul's time. The civil
authority was the Roman Empire with its overwhelming
force and its almost entire externality to Christianity. The
danger, then, was the spirit of passionate revolt against the
secular power. Men who were filled with the new wine of
the Spirit, who were turning the world upside down, found it
hard to submit to the decrees of an alien power, wielded by
heathen : they pleaded their Christian liberty ; they could not
understand that such a power was 'ordained of God.' The
early Christian Fathers found it sufficient, even when the
Roman Empire was gradually becoming Christian, to bring
home to consciences the teaching of S. Paul. There was no
need then to emphasize in words the other side of our Lord's
saying. There was little danger of undue subservience to the
civil power being regarded with anything but disapproval:
the danger was of men not giving it the obedience which was
its due. 'We honour the Emperor,' says Tertullian1, 'so far
as we may, and so far as honour is due to him, as the first
after God .... as one who has only God for his superior.'
' If the Emperor demands tribute,' says Ambrose 2, ' we do not
refuse it : the lands of the Church pay tribute ; if the Emperor
wishes for our lands, he has the power to take them — none of
us will resist him .... we render to Caesar what is Caesar's.'
S. Augustine, with his Stoical leaning and his Roman sense
of order, was little inclined to encourage men to resist, in any
case, established powers. ' What matters it under whose rule
1 Ad Scap. II. a Oratio in Auxentium de basilicis Iradendis.
448 The Religion of the Incarnation.
a man lives who is to die, provided only his rulers do not
force him to do impious and unjust things1?' Only in one
passage of S. Chrysostom2, among the writers of the first four
centuries, is a gloss given to S. Paul's words, ' There is no
power but of God,' which distinguishes the delegation of
power in general from God, and the delegation of power by
God to any particular ruler, and so suggests the possibility of
a de facto ruler to whom obedience was not due.
But this attitude of the early Christian teachers was a very
different thing from that attitude of the English Caroline
divines, which gave so fatal a bent to the teaching of the
English Church of the seventeenth century in the sphere
which lies on the borderland of Theology and Politics. What
the early Fathers taught their Christian followers was that it
was their duty to obey in secular matters the powers lawfully
set over them. What the English divines taught was the
Divine right of princes and the subjects' duty of non-resist-
ance. In the great battle which was being fought out in
England between arbitrary power and freedom, they threw
the whole weight of the English Church on the side of the
former. It was a fatal error as a matter of policy, for it was
the losing side. But, what is hardly sufficiently realized, it
was most untrue to the tradition of the Church, and of the
Church in England.
It was contrary to the tradition of the Church. For after
the rise of Christianity to the high places of the world,
followed by the break-up of the Koman Empire, and the
formation of the mediaeval States, weakly knit together by
personal ties, and with uncertain claims on the allegiance of
their subjects, two new aspects of the relations of governors
and governed had been brought out in Christian teaching.
First, stress was laid on the duty of those holding power.
Emperors and kings, magistrates and officers, who were
Christians, had a claim for guidance and instruction in the
exercise of their various functions. The claim was met by
1 Aug. De Civ. Dei, v. 17, but cp. legitimate power.
DC bono Conj. 16, for a recognition of * Horn, xxiii. on Rom. xiii. i.
the possibility of the unjust use of
xi. Christianity and Politics. 449
shewing them that, whatever the earthly source of authority
may be, all just power is of God, and therefore must be
regarded, not as a privilege, nor as a personal right, but as
a trust to be undertaken for the good of others, and as
a ministry for God and man. Thus a government which has
for its aim anything else than the common good is, properly
speaking, not a government at all. Whether its form is
monarchical or not, it is simply a tyranny1. Secondly, the
Middle Age theologians supplemented S. Paul's teaching by
shewing the possible right of resistance to an unlawful
government, or to one that failed to perform its duties. Such
right of resistance might arise in two cases : (i) that of unjust
acquisition of power, (2) that of its unjust use. Unjust
acquisition might take place in two ways : (a) when an un-
worthy person acquired power, but by legitimate means : in
this case it was the duty of subjects to submit, because the
form of power came from God ; (6) when power was acquired
by force or fraud : in this case, subjects had the right to depose
the ruler, if they had the power, supposing, however, that the
illegitimate assumption of power had not been legitimated by
subsequent consent. Unjust use might also take place in two
ways : (a) when the ruler commanded something contrary to
virtue, in which case it was a duty to disobey ; or (6) when he
went outside his rights, in which case subjects were not bound
to obey, but it was not necessarily their duty to disobey. And
so cases might arise in which it was lawful to enfranchise one-
self, even from a legitimate power. ' Some who have received
power from God, yet if they abuse it, deserve to have it
taken from them. Both the one and the other come of
God2.'
Nor was the political teaching of the Caroline divines in
agreement with the tradition of the Church in England. It is
not necessary to go back to the great Archbishops who led, in
1 Tyrannicide was defended by some the sounder judgment of Aquinas
of the more extreme opponents of the (He Reg. Princ. I. 6, ' Hoc apostolicae
temporal power, like John of Salis- doctrinae non congruit').
bury, the secretary of Thomas Becket 2 Thomas Aquinas, Comm. Sent.
(Policraticus'VIII. 17, ' Tyrannus pravi- XLIV. q. 2 a. 2 ; q. i a. 2. In Comm.
tatis imago ; plerumque etiam occi- Pol. v. i § 2 he goes so far as to make
dendus'). But it was condemned by Insurrection in certain cases a duty.
G 2
450 The Religion of the Incarnation.
earlier days, the struggle for English freedom. It is sufficient
to recur to the teaching of the greatest of English post-
Reformation theologians, at once soaked through and through
with the spirit of Catholic antiquity, and in complete agree-
ment with the English Reformation settlement. Richard
Hooker had no sympathy with that doctrine of Divine right
which his mediaeval masters looked upon as a quasi-heretical
doctrine1. He found the first origin of government in the
consent of the governed, and he anticipates Hobbes and Locke
in his account of the ' first original conveyance, when power
was derived from the whole into one2.' Further, he points
out that the king's power is strictly limited (except in the
case of conquest or of special appointment by God), not only
by the original compact, but also by after-agreement made
with the king's consent or silent allowance3. And men are
not bound in conscience to obey such usurpers ' as in the ex-
ercise of their power do more than they have been authorized
to do4.' But on the other hand, he maintains strongly, as
against those who thought that human laws could in no sort
touch the conscience, the duty of civil obedience in agreement
with the law of God, and the sacredness, the ' Divine institu-
tion,' of duly-constituted authority, whether ' God Himself doth
deliver, or men by light of nature find out the kind thereof.'
Thus, the main points which have been brought out by
Christian teaching as to the relation of Christian citizens to
the civil authority are: (i) first and foremost, the duty of
obedience for conscience' sake, a duty which stands on the
same level, and is invested with the same sanctions as the
most sacred claims ; (2) the duty, in case of the civil authority
issuing commands contrary to virtue or religion, of dis-
obedience on the same grounds as those which lead to obedi-
ence in the former case ; (3) the duty of those wielding
authority to use it for the common good, and so as not to
hinder, if they cannot promote, the Christian religion ; (4) the
right, which may be said in certain extreme cases to rise
1 Janet, Histoire de la Science polilique, 3 Ecd. Pol. VIII. ii. u.
third edition, 1887, vol. i. p. 330. * Ecd. Pol. VIII. App. No. I. (ed.
2 Hooker, Ecd. Pol. VIII. ii. 5, 9. Keble.) Cp. I. x. 8.
Cp. I. x. 4.
XL Christianity and Politics. 451
almost to a duty, of resistance to the arbitrary or unconsti-
tutional extension of authority to cases outside its province.
The same emphasis on higher motives is characteristic of
Christian treatment of the questions connected with property.
Christianity is certainly not pledged to uphold any particular
form of property as such. Whether property had better be
held by individuals, or by small groups, as in the case of the
primitive Teutonic villages, or of the modern Kussian or
Indian village communities, or again by the State, as is the
proposal of Socialists, is a matter for experience and com-
mon sense to decide. But where Christian ethics steps in is,
firstly, to shew that property is secondary not primary,
a means and not an end. Thus, in so far as Socialism looks
to the moral regeneration of society by a merely mechanical
alteration of the distribution of the products of industry or of
the mode of holding property, it has to be reminded that a
change of heart and will is the only true starting-point of
moral improvement. On the other hand, it cannot be too
often asserted that the accumulation of riches is not in itself
a good at all. Neither riches nor poverty make men better in
themselves. Their effect on character depends on the use
made of them, though no doubt the responsibility of those
who have property is greater, because they have one instru-
ment the more for the purposes of life. And so, secondly,
Christianity urges that if there is private property, its true
character as a trust shall be recognised, its rights respected
and its attendant duties performed. These truths it keeps
steadily before men's eyes by the perpetual object-lesson of
the life of the early Church of Jerusalem, in which those who
had property sold it, and brought the proceeds and laid them
at the Apostles' feet, and distribution was made unto every
man according to his needs1, an object-lesson enforced and
renewed by the example of the monastic communities, with
their vow of voluntary poverty, and their common purse. So
strongly did the early Fathers insist on the duty, almost the
debt, of the rich to the poor, that isolated passages may
be quoted which read like a condemnation of all private
1 Acts iv. 34, 35.
Gg2
452 The Religion of the Incarnation.
property1, but this was not their real drift. The obligation
which they urged was the obligation of charity.
(2) So far we have considered the way in which Christianity
has strengthened and defined on the side of duty, which
itself is one form of charity or love, the motives which make
men good citizens, good property-holders, and so has supple-
mented the moral forces of the State, by raising the common
standard of opinion and conviction on which ultimately all
possibility of State-action rests. But the word charity is used
not only in the wider, but also in a narrower sense, of one
special form of love, the love of the strong who stoops to
help the weak.
It is admitted on all hands that charity in this sense has
been a mark of the Christian type of character, but the
uniqueness of Christian charity has probably been exaggerated.
The better Stoics recognised the active service of mankind, and
especially of the poor and miserable, as part of the ideal of a
perfect life. Their severity was crossed by pity. As Seneca
puts it in one pregnant phrase, they held that ' wherever a
man is, there is room for doing good2.' And so Stoicism
had its alimentationes, or homes for orphan children, its
distributions of grain, its provisions for the sick and for
strangers 3. Christianity and Stoicism, it may seem, were
walking along the same road ; but the difference was this,
' what pagan charity was doing tardily, and as it were with
the painful calculation of old age, the Church was doing,
almost without thinking about it, in the plenary masterfulness
of youth, because it was her very being thus to do V She
did it with all the ease and grace of perfect naturalness, not
as valuing charity without love, for ' if I bestow all my goods
to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but
have not love, it profiteth me nothing5,' but because love forth-
1 Especially in S. Ambrose ; the 2 Sen. De vita beata, 24.
passages are collected in Dubief, Essai 3 Uhlhorn, Christian Charity in the
sur les idees pohtiques de S. Augustin, Ancient Church, Eng. Transl. 1883, Bk.
1859, ch. vi. S. Augustine himself I. ch. i. pp. 18-21, 41, 42.
opposed the obligatory Communism, * Pater, Marius the Epicurean, Vol.
advocated by Pelagianism ; cp. Ep. II. ch. xxii. p. 127.
1.^7 Ed. Bened.) to Hilary, quoted by 5 i Cor. xiii. 3 (R.V.).
Dubief.
xi. Christianity and Politics. 453
with blossomed forth into charity. ' And the disciples were
called Christians first in Antioch. And in these days came
prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch. And there stood up
one of them named Agabus, and signified by the spirit that
there should be great dearth throughout all the world . . .
Then the disciples, every man according to his ability, deter-
mined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judsea1.'
And so it became the recognised and traditional duty of the
Church to maintain the cause of the weak against the strong,
O o"
of the poor against the rich, of the oppressed against the
oppressors. The Bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries
exercised 'a kind of religious tribunate2.' In the Middle
Ages, the Church urged on those in public and private
stations the duties of charity, pity, humanity. The author
of the latter part of the De Regimine Principum* ascribed
to S. Thomas Aquinas lays down as one of the chief duties
of a king, the care of the weak and the succour of the
miserable. Nor did the Church in England in pre-Reforma-
tion times fail in her duty in this respect. She pleaded
for the manumission or at least the humane usage of the
serfs. She undertook through her monasteries the relief
of the poor. Her prohibition of usury, however mistaken it
may seem to us, was a real protection to debtors against one
of the worst forms of tyranny, that of the unscrupulous
creditor. Since the Reformation her record has not been so
clean. The shock of the Reformation left her weak. The
traditional sanctions of her authority were shaken. In the
long struggle of the seventeenth century her close association
with the Stuart cause left her powerless to touch the stronger
half of the nation. She was not independent enough to act
as arbiter, and in committing herself without reserve to oppo-
sition .to the national claim for freedom she was untrue to
her earlier and better traditions. At the same time allow-
ance must be made for the licence, the disorder, and the
recklessness with which the claims of liberty were associated,
and for the identification of the popular party with views of
1 Acts xi. 26-29; CP- also Acts iv. 2 Dubief, p. n.
34> 35. quoted above. 3 II. 15.
454 The Religion of the Incarnation.
religion, which, whatever else may be said for them, are not
those of the Church. The leading churchmen believed that
its triumph meant the disappearance of that historical Church,
which they rightly regarded as the only effective safeguard of
English Christianity. After the Restoration the Church was
stronger, and the increase of strength shews itself on the one
side in greater independence of the Crown, and on the other
in the outburst of numerous religious and charitable societies
and foundations. Queen Anne's Bounty is an instance of the
charity, if it be not rather the justice, of one distinguished
daughter of the Church. The ' Religious Societies ' which in
a quiet and unassuming way were a great influence in
social life, had among their objects the visiting and relief of
the poor, the apprenticing of the young, the maintenance of
poor scholars at the University. Charity schools were estab-
lished throughout the country : hospitals and parochial libraries
founded, while societies like the Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge date back to the last years of the seven-
teenth and the first of the eighteenth centuries J. Then as the
Georgian period begins, all this vigorous life seems for a long
period to die down, or only to find vent in the great Wesleyan
movement which, beginning within the Church, passes out
beyond it, and ultimately becomes stereotyped in more or less
pronounced separation from her communion. It was the
policy of the ruling Whig oligarchy to keep down the Church,
and they succeeded — to the grave loss of English morality.
If in some degree the Church in England at the present time
is speaking with firmer accent on questions of personal and
class morality, and giving more effective witness against the
luxury and neglect of their work-people, which are the be-
setting sins of the great English manufacturing classes, it is
due partly to the revival in England of the true idea of the
Church as a great spiritual society, and partly to the fact that
English statesmen, from sheer inability owing to the conditions
of political life to do otherwise, have left her more free to
manage her own business and to develop her mission to
1 Overton, Life in the English Chunk, 1660-1714, Ch. v.
xi. Christianity and Politics. 455
the English people in accordance with the laws and aspirations
of her own inner life.
It is especially necessary in a great industrial society such
as that of modern England that the Christian law of self-
sacrifice, which crosses and modifies the purely competitive
tendency leading each individual to seek his own interest
and that of his family, should be strongly and effectively
presented. No doubt it is true that the increased knowledge
of the structure and laws of social life which we possess, have
made charity more difficult than in the Middle Ages : they
have not made it less necessary, or a less essential feature of
the Christian character. And so, in a democratic age, the
protection of the weak and the oppressed will take a different
colour. Whether supreme control is in the hands of one or
many, it may be used tyrannically. And the most effective
exercise of the tribunate of the Church will lie in guarding
the rights of conscience and the great national interest of
religion against hasty and unfair pressure. And this brings us
to our next point.
(3) The drift of the argument has been to shew the incom-
pleteness and inevitable limitations of the State, considered
as a moral guide of the social life of mankind. But that
incompleteness rises to its maximum, those limitations press
most closely when we pass from morality to religion. If
it is the highest duty of the State to maintain true and
vital religion1, it is a duty which of itself it is altogether
incompetent to perform. If the experience of the Middle
Ages shewed conclusively that the subordination of the State
to the Church did not tend either to good government, or to
the maintenance, pure and undefiled, of the Christian religion,
the experience of English post-Reformation history has as
conclusively shewn that the subordination of the Church to
the State leads on the one hand to the secularization of the
Church, and on the other to a grave danger to national life,
through the loss of a spiritual authority strong enough, as well
1 Hooker, Eccl. Pol. VIII. i. 4. In for. And of things spiritual, the
all commonwealths, things spiritual chiefest is religion. Cp. V. i. 2.
ought above temporal to be provided
456 The Religion of the Incarnation.
as vigilant and independent enough, to reprove social sins and
to call to account large and influential classes. The conditions
under which the Tudor idea of a Christian commonwealth
was possible have passed away, and there seem to remain two
possible conclusions from the premises.
The first is that it is expedient in the interests of both that
Church and State should be separate from one another, as e.g.
in America, and left free to develop, each on its own lines,
their respective missions in the national service — ' a free
Church in a free State.' The current of opinion in England
in favour of disestablishment, undoubtedly a strong, though
probably not at the present time an increasing one, is
fed from many smaller streams. There are Agnostics who
believe that religion is the enemy of progress, and that
Christianity especially shackles free thought, and hinders the
advance of social reformation, and to whom therefore it seems
a clear duty to undermine by every means open to them the
hold of Christianity on the centres of social and intellectual
life, on schools and universities, families and states. They
favour disestablishment as one means to this end. Two
principal causes seem to move those who are primarily states-
men in the direction of disestablishment. One is the con-
ception of the State as the great controlling and guiding
organization of human life \ supreme over all partial societies
and voluntary associations formed to guard parts or sides of
life, and the attempt to mould national life by this guiding
idea and its logical consequences. This attempt is encouraged
by the extreme simplicity of the English Constitution in its
actual working, and by the legally unlimited power of
Parliament2. The other is their practical experience that in
view of the divided condition of English Christianity, the
most stubborn and intractable difficulties in legislation arise
1 We have already shewn reasons sovereignty means neither more nor
for thinking that though no doubt the less than this, namely, that Parlia-
State has a great co-ordinating and ment thus defined has, under the
regulative function in regard to English Constitution, the right to
human life, it is not fitted for the make or unmake any law whatever ;
part of the moral guide of mankind. and, further, that no person or body is
2 Dicey, Law of the Constitution, recognised by the law of England ;is
second edition, 1886, lecture ii. p. 36, having a right to override or set aside
' The principle of Parliamentary the legislation of Parliament.'
xi. Christianity and Politics. 457
from, or are aggravated by, religious differences. They sup-
pose that these would be lessened if the State took the
position of impartial arbiter between rival denominations.
Among Nonconformists there are no doubt some who. look-
ing at the Church as the natural rival of their own society,
think to weaken her by disestablishment, but there are also
many who believe that disestablishment would be a gain to
English religion, and that the life of the Church would be
more real, more pure, more governed by the highest motives,
if she were freed from all direct connection with the State.
Lastly, there is no doubt that the idea of the return to the
looser relations between Church and State which prevailed in
the earliest Christian centuries, has a great attraction for a
considerable body of churchmen. They would perhaps have
been willing enough to accept the royal supremacy under a
religious sovereign in thorough harmony with the beliefs and
modes of working of the Church, but the revolution by which
the House of Commons has risen to supreme power in
England, has given it, not in the theory, but in the actual
working of the constitution, the ultimate control over matters
ecclesiastical as well as civil, and they hold that by stifling
the free utterance of the voice of the Church the House of
Commons is doing an injury to religion compared to which
disestablishment would be a lesser evil.
On the other hand, if we look beyond our own country, we
have the opinion of the venerable Dr. Dbllinger, reported by
Dr. Liddon, that the disestablishment of the Church in England
would be an injury to the cause of religion throughout Europe.
And so weighty an opinion may well make us carefully scru-
tinize those difficulties and tendencies which make for dis-
establishment. It is no doubt true that from one point of
view the idea of the Church as a great spiritual society seems
to require her entire freedom to control her own development,
and therefore the absence of all formal connection with the State.
But there is nothing more deeply illogical and irrational, in
any sense of logic in which it is near to life and therefore true,
than the attempt to solve a great problem, spiritual, moral,
political, social, by neglecting all its factors but one, even if it
458 The Religion of the Incarnation.
be the most important one. Nor does it follow that, because
we recognise that in a certain condition of things, more harm
than good will be done by a particular application of a truth
which we accept, therefore we have ceased to hold that truth.
It only shews that our ideal is complex.
And so from another point of view the most perfect order-
ing of things would seem to be one in which Church and
State were two parts of one whole, recognising one another's
functions and limits, and mutually supporting one another,
Thus religion would be put in its true place as at once the
foundation and the coping stone of national life. And the
State with all its administration would be given a distinctly
Christian character. The difficulty in England is to maintain
this point of view in connection with the increasingly non-
religious (not necessarily anti-religious) colouring of the State,
and of the fierce struggles of party government which destroy
the reverence which might otherwise attach to the State and its
organs. As the State has become increasingly lay, its moral
weight has sunk, its hold on consciences become less. But
the truth remains that religion is an element in the highest
national life. 'A national Church alone can consecrate the
whole life of a people7.' And a national Church can only
mean an established Church, and a Church which either has
great inherited wealth of its own, or is supported in part by
national funds. ' Of all parts of this subject,' says Mr. Glad-
stone 2, ' probably none have been so thoroughly wrought out
as the insufficiency of the voluntary principle.' It is in-
sufficient (i.e. for maintaining national religion), first, because
after a certain level of moral deterioration has been reached
by individuals or masses of people, the demand for religion is
least where the want is greatest ; and secondly, because in
consequence of the structure of social life there are always
large classes of the community who, while just provided
with the bare necessaries of life, have not sufficient means
to enable them to sustain the expense of the organs of the
higher life in any form. We recognise this in the case of
1 Westcott, Social Aspects of Chris- 2 The State in Us relations with the
tianitij, ch. v. p. 76. Church, p. 41.
xi. Christianity and Politics. 459
education ; we can hardly refuse to recognise it in the case of
religion.
For these reasons we are thrown back on the second possible
conclusion from the data, viz. that it is desirable that there
should be some definite and permanent connection between
Church and State, but not such connection as will either sub-
ordinate the State to the Church or the Church to the State.
And such a result would seem to be best attainable by some
such system of relations as that between the Established
Church and the State in Scotland, or the Roman Catholic
Church and the State in France. Thus in Scotland, on the
critical point of jurisdiction, the position is this. The Church
Courts are final : there is no appeal to a Civil Court except on
the ground of excess of jurisdiction. And the judgment of
the Church Courts, so far as it involves civil consequences,
may be enforced by application to the Civil Courts 1. In
France we have to distinguish the relations of Church and
State as constitutionally defined from those relations in their
actual working. No constitutional relations, however admir-
able, can work when the State constantly encroaches, and
where its whole attitude is one of hostility to the Church. In
theory, however, the position in France is, except on one point,
much the same as in Scotland. There is a complete system of
ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Eoman Catholic Church based
on the Canon Law and administered by the bishops acting
as judges. From their decisions there is no appeal to the Civil
Courts except on the ground of abuse (appel d'abus). On the
other hand, the Ecclesiastical Courts have no coercive juris-
1 Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Com- the Civil Court entertain an appeal
wixxinn, Vol. II. p. 601. Answers from a judgment of an Ecclesiastical
to questions, — Scotland, Established Court on a question of doctrine, or
Church. enter on an examination of the sound-
' No appeal lies to a Civil Court in ness of such a judgment before en-
matters of discipline or on the ground forcing its civil consequences.
of excess of punishment. But if 'Any questions which have arisen on
under the form of discipline the points of ritual .... have hitherto
Church Courts were to inflict Church been decided exclusively by the Church
censures^involvingcivil consequences) Courts.' (A qualifying sentence follows
on a minister for e.g. obeying the law as to possible extreme cases justifying,
of the land, a question .... might on the failure to obtain redress from
In- lirought before the Civil Court on the General Assembly, an appeal to the
the ground of excess of jurisdiction. Civil Court.)
It is believed that in no case would
460 The Religion of the Incarnation.
diction, nor are their sentences carried out by the Civil
Courts 1. They bind, therefore, only in foro conscientiae and
this is found sufficient. There is one point worthy of special
notice in the French system, that while the relations of the
State to the Roman Catholic (once the Gallican) Church are
regulated by a special Concordat, two leading Protestant bodies,
the French Reformed Church, and the Church of the Augsburg
Confession, as well as the Jewish body, are also endowed.
Alongside of a system by which the Church is established
there is a concurrent endowment of other Christian and even
non-Christian denominations.
In Scotland the relations of Church and State rest on the
Act of Union, in France on the Concordat made by Napoleon
with the Pope in 1801. In England there is no definite
formulated agreement ; and any such agreement would be
entirely contrary to the English genius. But in a deeper
sense, there is a contract, which is the product of 1200 years
of history, of which the terms vary from generation to gene-
ration, and which is commended by each age to the forbear-
ance and the statesmanship of its successors. The terms of
that contract are in the main fixed by the State. In any
case, whether the Church remains established or not, the State
has ultimate power over her temporal possessions, as over all
temporal possessions held within its territory. But, if the
Church is to remain connected with the State, perpetual dif-
ficulties must arise, unless means are found to leave the
Church free, in matters as well of doctrine as of ritual, both to
legislate through her own organs, and to exercise an inde-
pendent spiritual jurisdiction. It is for the interest of the
State that the Church should be allowed to make her service
1 Report of Eccl. Courts Commission, repress abuses and annul the acts of
Vol. II. p. 605. Answers to ques- abuse (actes d'abus) on the part of the
tions, — France. clergy.
' The State remains lay, and does not ' To recapitulate, the minister, as
interpose, except when the acts of the citizen, has to submit to the Common
clergy are offences at Common Law, Law ; as priest, he belongs entirely to
or when there is a cas d'abus in which the jurisdiction of the Church, with
either the public order or individual which the State does not interfere, and
interests are injured. In which case with which it has not to interfere,
the Council of State is summoned at for it is solely in the domain of con-
the instance of the Government, or science.'
on the complaint of the citizens, to
xi. Christianity and Politics, 461
for the English nation as fruitful, as powerful, and as little a
hindrance to her own spirituality as possible.
III. Lastly we may consider the way in which the Church,
quite irrespective of any direct connection with the State, as
a natural consequence of its position as a spiritual society and
of its teaching as to fundamental moral and spiritual truths,
acts as a purifying and elevating agent on the general social
life of mankind, on all its manifestations and organs.
If man is ' metaphysical nolens volens,' it is equally true that
he is metapolitical, to use Martensen's happy word, nolens
volens. And metapolitic means 'that which precedes the
political as its presupposition, that which lies outside and be-
yond it as its aim and object, and by which the political element
is to be pervaded as by its soul, its intellectually vivifying
principle1.' Every statesman, every real leader of men, has
consciously or unconsciously, such a metapolitic ; he holds,
that is, certain views as to man's place in the world, as to the
meaning and possibility of progress, as to the aims as distinct
from the machinery of government, as to the relations of
nations to one another and to humanity, which determine his
general attitude towards all kinds of questions with which he
has to deal. It is clear, for instance, that the groups of ideas
which govern the fatalist, the pessimist, and the humanitarian,
are widely different.
Now the Church is the home and dwelling-place of certain
great regulative ideas as to man's destiny and function, and
his relation to God and other men, the treasure-house to
which they were committed, or the soil in which they germi-
nated. These ideas, if accepted and acted on, or so far as ac-
cepted and acted on, must transform and remodel, not only the
inward life, but also the whole outward life in all its spheres.
Thus S. Paul deduces from the Christian conception of man,
the duties of husbands, wives, fathers, children, masters, ser-
vants, subjects, rich persons, old men, old women, young men,
young women. And so, now rapidly, now slowly, according
to the vigour and purity at successive periods of the Christian
1 Martensen, Christian Ethics, special part, second division, English Trans-
lation, p. 100.
462 The Religion of the Incarnation.
society, now thrown inwards by periods of persecution or by
the rising tide of evil, now borne outwards in periods of rapid
expansion and missionary enterprise, now brought to bear on
new conditions of life and new social groupings, now traced
back to their source, and tested by the life and words of the
Word of God, the Christian ideas of man, and of his relation
to God radiate through the life of mankind, at once sustaining
and correcting its aspirations, and its ideals of righteousness.
The root ideas of this Christian anthropology rest on the
Christian conception of God as one yet threefold. Thus on
the one side, Christianity attaches to the individual per-
sonality a supreme and infinite value as the inmost nature of
one made in the image of God, redeemed by the self-sacrifice
of Christ, and indwelt by the Spirit of God. And thus it
develops the sense of separate personal responsibility. It is
on this basis that what is true in humanitarianism rests. Be-
hind all class and social differences lies the human personality
in virtue of which all men are equal *. But on the other side
it frankly recognises man's inherently social nature. It is
not good for man to be alone. And family, State, and the
Church on earth are training places for a perfected common
life in the City of God.
The effect of this conception of man and his destiny is to
place the State and its associations in their true position as
not ultimate but secondary, as means and not ends. Along-
side of the earthly kingdom, with its wealth, its honours, its
ambitions, its wide and far-reaching influence, it sets another
kingdom, the City of God, with its own standards, its own
principles, its own glory, its own blessedness, as the end of
mankind, the goal of history. ' The nations shall walk amidst
the light thereof, and the kings of the earth do bring their
glory into it2.' And, in so doing, it judges and corrects the
splendour of earthly States.
In thus contrasting the earthly State with the City of God,
Christianity is no doubt exposed to the old accusation, that it
1 Cp. Aug. De Civ. Dei, v. 24, of Christian Emperors, ' we think them
happy if they remember themselves to be men.'
2 Rev. xxi. 24
xi. Christianity and Politics. 463
makes men bad citizens. And the old answer is still true, ' let
those who think that the doctrine of Jesus Christ cannot con-
tribute to the happiness of the State, give us soldiers and officers
such as it bids them to be, subjects and citizens as faithful as
Jesus Christ commands, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers,
children, masters, servants, kings, judges, living according to
the laws of religion, men as punctual in their payment of
taxes, as pure in their handling of public funds as are the true
Christians : they will be soon forced to admit that the maxims
of the Gospel when practised cannot but give a State great
happiness and great prosperity1.' It is not too much but
too little Christianity which destroys States ; for passion and
wilfulness are the great disintegrating forces of the world,
and everything which strengthens individuals to resist them,
so far strengthens the bonds of social union. But the service
which Christianity renders to States goes far beyond this
negative result. If the true meaning of progress be moral,
and not material, there can be no greater contribution to the
well-being of society than that of maintaining the Christian
type of character with its humility, its purity, its sincerity, and
again its strong and beneficent activity.
In the present discussion the State has been put first and
the Church second. In order of time the State is first. And
what has been attempted has been to shew how starting with
the State and its institutions, the higher order which was
initiated by the historical Incarnation (though not without
preparatory and imperfect anticipations in earlier and espe-
cially in Jewish history), comes in to mould, to purify, and to
supplement. But these words only express partial aspects of
the whole process by which a higher order acts on a lower.
It interpenetrates far more deeply than can be expressed in
any classification of the modes of its operation. The Chris-
tian religion has been acting on the group of States which we
call Christendom from the first days when stable organiza-
tions formed themselves after the entrance of the new life of
the Germanic races into the remains of the dying Roman
Empire. It has been the strongest of all the influences that
1 Aug. Ep. ad Marcellinum, 138, 15.
464 The Religion of the Incarnation.
have moulded them throughout their history. It has pierced
and penetrated the life of individuals, the life of families, the
life of guilds, as well as the laws and institutions, the* writings
and works of art in which they have embodied their thoughts
and hopes. They are in a sense its children. It is impos-
sible to regard them as S. Augustine regarded pagan Rome.
But deep and penetrating as has been her influence and mani-
fold her consequent implications with the existing national and
social life of mankind, the Church is essentially Catholic, and
only incidentally national. It is their Catholic character so
far as it remains, at least their Catholic ideal, which gives to
the different fragments of the Church their strength and power.
The 'Church of England' is a peculiarly misleading term.
The Church of Christ in England is, as Coleridge pointed
out, the safer and truer phrase. And this fundamental
Catholicism, this correspondence not to one or another nation,
but to humanity, rests on the appeal to deeper and more
permanent needs than those on which the State rests. It is
thus that the true type of the Church is rather in the family
than in the State, because the family is the primitive unit of
organized social life. Not in the order of time, but in the
order of reason, the Church is prior to the State, for man is
at once inherently social and inherently religious. And there-
fore it is only in the Church that he can be all that it is his
true nature to be.
XII.
CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
ROBERT OTTLEY.
II h
XII.
CHRISTIAN ETHICS.
THE study of early Church History suggests the conclusion
that the Christian religion was recognised as a rule, or
fashion of life, before it was discovered to be a philosophy
and a creed. To be complete, therefore, any account of
Christianity must include the presentation of it as a Divine
' way of life ' — a coherent system of practical ethics, marked
by characteristic conceptions of freedom, duty, the moral
standard, the highest end of life, and the conditions of human
perfection. Such is the task we are about to attempt. To
the necessary limitations of a sketch in outline, the reader
may ascribe a general avoidance of controversial, and a pre-
ference for positive, statements ; as also the fact that some
large and interesting branches of the subject are dismissed
with no more than a passing allusion.
It may be admitted, at the outset, that non-religious ethical
speculation has in a measure paved the way for a re-state-
ment of the Christian theory, by its inquiries into the source
and nature — the rational basis and binding force — of moral
obligation. For it may be maintained that in Christianity,
rightly understood, is to be found an adequate answer to the
question which all schools of thought agree in regarding as
fundamental — the question ' Why must I do right "? '
On the other hand, the Christian Church claims to meet the
plain needs of average human nature by her answer to the
question, ' How am I to do right1?' She claims to have at
command practical means of solving a problem which is
admittedly abandoned as hopeless by the ethics of naturalism.
H h a
468 The Religion of the Incarnation.
If Jesus Christ gave profound extension to the ideas of duty
and obligation, He was also the first who pointed humanity
to the unfailing source of moral power. In this respect
Christianity presents a favourable contrast to other systems,
the tendency of which is to be so concerned with the Ideal as
to underrate the importance and pressure of the Actual.
Christianity claims to be in contact with facts ; such facts as
sin, moral impotence, perverted will, the tyranny of habit.
And while she is large-hearted and eagle-spirited in her
scope — dealing with all possible relationships in which a
human being may stand, whether to God above him, his
fellow-men about him, or the sum of physical life below him ;
the Church is none the less definite and practical in method
and aim ; witness the importance she attaches to the indi-
vidual character, the recreation of which is at least a step
towards a regeneration of society.
The chief point of distinction, however, between Christian
and non- Christian ethics is to be found in a difference of
view as to the relation existing between morality and
religion. A system which so closely connects the idea of
Good with the doctrine of God, must needs at every point
present conduct as inseparably related to truth, and cha-
racter to creed. It has been noticed indeed that Pliny's
letter to Trajan — the earliest record we possess of the im-
pression produced on an intelligent Pagan by the new religion
— testifies to the intimate connection of morals with dogma
and worship. What the Christian consciousness accepted as
truth for the intellect, it embraced also as law for the will.
Whether then we have regard to the practical purpose, or
the wide outlook of the Christian system, we shall feel the
difficulty of giving even a fail* outline of so vast a subject
in so limited a space. If the idea of Good corresponds in
any sense to the conception of God, that idea must have an
infinite depth of significance, and range of application. If
the recreation of human nature be a practicable aim, no
department of anthropology or psychology can be without its
interest for ethics. It must suffice to indicate, rather than
unfold, the points which seem to be of primary importance. .
xii. Christian Ethics. 469
Christian Morals are based on dogmatic postulates. The
foundation of our science is laid, not merely in the study of
man's nature, his functions and capacities, but in revealed
truths as to the nature and character of God, His creative
purpose, His requirement of His creatures. We believe that
Christ came to liberate human thought from systems of
morality having their centre or source in man l.
Man is not God, but hath God's end to serve ;
A Master to obey, a course to take,
Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become . . .
How could man have progression otherwise?
The postulates may conveniently be distributed under three
main heads : the doctrine of God, of Man, of Christ.
For the purpose of ethics, two simple truths as to the
Being of God require attention.
God is an Infinite, but Personal Being ; existing from
eternity in the completeness of His own blessedness, yet
willing to become the centre of a realm of personalities.
To this end He called into existence a world of personal
beings, in a sense independent of Himself, but destined, in
communion and intercourse with Himself, to find and fulfil
the law of their creaturely perfection. To these free and
rational beings, Almighty God deigns to stand in self-imposed
relations.
Again, God is an Ethical Being : He is essentially Holy and
Loving.
He is Holy ; and appoints that for the entire realm of
personality, as for Himself, holiness should be the absolute
law. He alone can communicate to His creatures the idea of
holiness ; of a supreme, eternal, ethical Good. The Good
exists only in Him ; is the essential expression of His Nature,
the reflected light of His Personality. The idea of ethical
Good is not therefore due to a natural process by which the
accumulated social traditions of our race are invested with
the name, and sanction, of moral Law. The idea is com-
municated, derived from the living Source of Good freely
acting on the faculties of intelligent creatures who are
1 I S. Pet. i. 21 SiffTf rf)v irianv vp.wv teal f\niSa eivat eh 0e6v.
UMARY ST. MARY S COLLEGE
470 The Religion of the Incarnation.
capable of receiving such communications 'in divers parts
and in divers manners V
The apprehension of moral Law thus appears to correspond
with a progressive apprehension of God. Along with the idea
of the unity and absoluteness of God, heathendom lost the
sense of an absolute moral Law2; and conversely, in pro-
portion as the Divine Nature manifests Itself more fully to
human intelligence, the idea of moral Good gains expansion
and depth.
God is also Love : a truth which as it helps our thought to
a more profound and consistent view of His mysterious Being,
so implies that God must needs will His rational creature to
be what He Himself is, ' holy and blameless before Him 3 ; '
to engage itself in activities resembling His own ; to be free
with His Freedom ; enlightened by His Light 4. Nor can
we think that Divine Love is content with a bare revelation
of moral requirement. We believe that what God requires,
He is ready and able to impart; He will empower man to
render what His righteousness exacts. Finally, if His
purpose for man be interrupted or thwarted, He will ' devise
means ' for its final and victorious fulfilment. He, the Author
of Creation, will in due time provide for a recreation, not less
potent and complete in its effects than the evil power which
has invaded and marred the first creation5. For we can form
no idea of Love other than that of an active, energizing
principle by which a personal Being reveals Himself; a Being
tenacious of His purpose, multiform in His expedients,
supremely patient in His beneficent activity. The God pre-
supposed in Christian Ethics is One who displays holiness
combined with power, love controlled by wisdom : in a word,
He is the God of redemptive history. Thus morality finds
its starting-point in theology6.
The Christian account of Man next engages attention. We
1 Heb. i. i. 6 Clem. Alex. QMS Dives, etc. vii.
2 See Dorner, Stjst. of Christian Ethics, OLp\rj «« icprjms farjs, eiriuTrmr) 0(ov, TOW
§ 35. ovrcas OVTOS ... 77 fitv yap TOVTOV dyvoia
3 Eph. I. 4. 00KITOS tOTlV, fj 5% iiri~fVQjaiS O.VTOV K(U
* Cp. Plato, Tim. xxix. E. olxdcaais, KCU irpos O.VTOV dydirr] nal
5 Athan. de Incarn. x. t£o/j.oiajais, \MVI\ far).
xii. Christian Ethics. 471
confine ourselves to an inquiry into three points : what is
man's essential nature, his ideal destiny, his present con-
dition ?
We have already observed that in Christian Ethics man is
not the central object of study. The moral universe tends
towards a more comprehensive end than the perfection of
humanity. Nevertheless Christianity is specially marked
by a particular conception of man. Regarding him as a
being destined for union with, capable of likeness to God,
she offers an account of man's failure to fulfil his true
destiny, and witnesses to a Divine remedy for his present
condition. The familiar contrast between humanity as it
might become, and as it is, gives significance to the peculiarly
Christian doctrine of sin. It is the dignity of the sufferer
that makes the mischief so ruinous ; it is the greatness of the
issue at stake that makes a Divine movement towards man
for his recovery at once credible, and worthy of God1.
First, then, we' presuppose a certain view of man's nature.'
Christianity lays stress on the principle of personality, with
its determining elements, will and self-consciousness. It is
for psychology to accurately define personality. For ethics
it is simply an ultimate, all-important fact. It is that
element in man which makes him morally akin to God, and
capable of holding communion with Him ; that which places
him in conscious relation to Law ; gives him a representative
character as God's vice-gerent on earth, and conveys the right
to dominion over physical nature. If religion consists in
personal relations between man and God, religious ethics must
be concerned with the right culture and development of per-
sonality.
But in virtue of his creaturely position, man's personality
cannot be an end to itself2. The tendency of Greek thought
was to regard man as a self-centred being; to look for the
springs of moral action, and the power of progress, within
human nature itself. Thus Aristotle's ideal is the self-
1 Aug. de moribus Ecd. xii. ning in ' self-contemplation ' (tavrovs
'2 Athan. cont. Gentes,iii. describes the xaravofiv 7/pfai/To).
aversion of man from God as begin-
472 The Religion of the Incarnation.
development of the individual under the guidance of reason,
and in accordance with the law of his being. The question is,
what is this law, and what the ground of its obligation?
Personality, we answer, marked man from the first as a being
destined for communion with, and free imitation of God1.
Personality enables man to be receptive of a message and
a call from God. It confers on each possessor of it an
absolute dignity and worth. Personality — here is our crucial
fact ; enabling us to take a just measure of man, and of our
duty towards him. One of the deepest truths brought to
light by the Gospel was the value of the personal life, of the
single soul, in God's sight. Man is great, not merely because
he thinks, and can recognise moral relationships and obliga-
tions ; but chiefly because he was created for union with God ;
and was destined to find blessedness and perfection in Him
alone. Christianity therefore rates highly the worth of the
individual ; and her task is to develop each human person-
ality — to bring each into contact with the Personality of God2.
For, secondly, man has an ideal destiny3 — life in union
with God, a destiny which, as it cannot be realized under
present conditions of existence, postulates the further truth of
personal immortality4. Man is capable of progressive assimi-
lation to God, of ever deeper spiritual affinity to Him5. Such
must be the ideal end of a being of whom it is revealed that
he was made ' in the image of God.'
But the thought of the 'Divine image' leads us a step
further. Whatever be the precise import of the expression, it
at least implies that the Good, which is the essence of the
Divine, is also a vital element in the perfection of Human
nature. It remains to indicate the way in which man is
capable of recognising Good as the law of his being, and
embodying it in a character. Christianity, as a moral system,
offers an account of conscience and of freedom.
Ath. c. Gent. ii. vita praesens et corporalis beata esse
Wace, Boyle Lectures, ser. i, Lect. non potest, quia malis est subjecta
vii. Cp. Col. i. 28. per corpus ... Si cadit beatitudo, ergo
4> 5 ° Ka.Ttp-ya.ffdfj.fvos et immortalitas cadit in hominem, quae
- ,,
^as (is avro TOVTO Oeos. beata est.'
4 Lactant. Div. Inst. iii. 12, 'Haec 5 Eph. v. i. Ep. ad Diog. x.
xii. Christian Ethics. 473
The Scriptural doctrine of conscience represents it as the
faculty which places man in conscious relation to moral Law,
as the expression of the Divine nature and requirement. In
a brief sketch it is enough to lay stress on two points.
1. Conscience appears to be an original and constant
principle in human nature. To assign to it a merely empirical
origin — to derive it from social evolution, from the circum-
stances, prevalent beliefs, traditional customs of a human
community, is inadequate, inasmuch as no such supposed
origin will satisfactorily account for the authoritativeness,
the spontaneity, the ' categorical imperative ' of conscience 1.
Further, the functions attributed to this faculty in Scripture,
e.g. 'judging,' 'accusing,' 'witnessing,' 'legislating' — all
convey the idea that man stands in relation to moral Law as
something outside and independent of himself, yet laying an
unconditional claim on his will. In the Christian system the
existence of conscience in some form is regarded as a primary
and universal fact. Its permanent character is everywhere
the same ; its function, that of persistently witnessing to man
that he stands in necessary relation to ethical Good.
2. The language of the Bible throughout implies that
conscience in its earliest stage is an imperfect organ, capable
like other faculties of being cultivated and developed. Our
Lord's reference to the inward ' eye ' (S. Matt. vi. 22) suggests
a fruitful analogy in studying the growth of conscience. In
its germ, conscience is like an untrained sense, exercising
itself on variable object-matter, and hence not uniform in the
quality of its dictates. It is enough to point out that this
fact is amply recognised by New Testament writers. S. Paul
speaks more than once of progress in knowledge and per-
ception as a feature of the Christian mind, and the faculty of
discerning the Good is said to grow by exercising itself on
concrete material 2. S > again, the moral faculty is impaired
by unfaithfulness to its direction ; the moral chaos in which
the heathen world was finally plunged resulted from such
1 Bp. Butler's sermons emphasize lect. vii.
this side of the doctrine of conscience, * See Phil. i. 9, and Heb. v. 14 (the
esp. the Preface. Cp. Flint, Theism, Greek).
474 The Religion of the Incarnation.
unfaithfulness on a wide scale. The Gentiles knew God, but
did not act on their knowledge. They 'became darkened;'
they lost the power of moral perception1.
To enlarge on this subject forms no part of our present
plan. It is fair, however, to cordially acknowledge that
Christian thought is indebted to psychological research for
deeper and more accurate conceptions of the moral faculty ;
and the possibility of large variation both in the dictates of
conscience, and the certainty of its guidance, may be freely
admitted. And yet it has been justly observed that the
question of the origin of this faculty is not one with which
ethics are primarily concerned. That inquiry is wholly
distinct from the question of its capacities and functions
when in a developed state 2. The unconditional claim of
conscience — this is the constant factor which meets us amid
all variations of standard and condition. It is enough that
O
conscience is that organ of the soul by which it apprehends
moral truth, and is laid under obligation to fulfil it. A
Christian is content to describe it as God's voice ; or, in a
poet's words,
God's most intimate presence in the soul
And His most perfect image in the world.
For Conscience, while making an absolute claim on man's
will, appeals to him as a being endowed with a power of
choice : and thus we pass to the subject of freedom. What
is freedom, in the Christian sense"? In the New Testament
freedom is connected with truth. ' The truth,' it is said,
' shall make you free.' If man stands in a real relation to
the Good, his true freedom can only mean freedom to corre-
spond with, and fulfil the law of his nature 3. The formal
power of choice with which man is born — a power which in
fact is seen to be extremely limited 4 — is only the rudimentary
stage of freedom. Will is as yet subject to numberless re-
strictions, such that they seem utterly to preclude an un-
fettered choice. It is limited, for example, by the influence
1 Rom. i. 21. Athan. cont. Gentes, iii- ' Libertas non est nisi ad hoc quod
xi. expedit aut quod decet.'
2 Wace, Boyle Led., ser. i, Lect. * See Martineau, Types of Eth. Theory,
II. vol. i. 93 ; ii. 39 [Ed. 2]. Holland,
3 Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, I. xii. Creed and Character, Serm. X.
xii. Christian Ethics. 475
of heredity to an extent which often appears to determine
unconditionally the choice between different courses of action.
' Determinism ' has at least liberated our thinking from the
crude idea of freedom as man's power ' to do as he likes.'
True liberty can only mean freedom from false dependence,
emancipation of the will from the undue pressure of external
forces, or inherited tendencies. The condition of 'perfect free-
dom ' is that in which man yields an unforced accord to the
Good — his correspondence with it as the law of life. And
as his formal power of choice becomes by habit more and
more determined towards a fixed adherence to the Good, he
begins to taste the ' glorious liberty ' of a right relation to God
and His Law. He becomes free with the liberty which is
' freedom not to sin,' he finds himself ' under the sole rule of
God most free V
Lastly, Christianity as a moral system is distinguished by
her view of man's present condition. His upward deve-
lopment has been interrupted. In theological language he
is a ' fallen ' being, and the path of ethical progress is a way
of recovery2. Man's capacity of corresponding with the
ideal, of free self-conformity to it, though not destroyed, is at
least seriously impaired. His spiritual capacities are not
what they were once in a fair way to be ; they are weakened
and depraved, and man's advance towards a free power of
self-determination is in fact hindered by a radical defect of
will — in Christian language by the principle of Sin. The
Bible gives an account of sin, its first cause, its consequences
in human history. Christian Ethics make allowance for this
factor ; systems which overlook it or minimize it inevitably
lose contact with the actual problem to be solved, with life
as it is. Their tendency at best is to treat moral, as on a
level with physical, evil : as an obstruction, a hindrance,
but not a vital defect inherent in human nature. Not
such is the Christian view of sin. For sin conditions the
1 Aug. de mor. Ecd. xxi. ' [Deo] solo x. 23). Cp. Pet. Lomb. Sent. ii. xxv. 7.
dominante liberrimus.' Observe that 2 Cyp. de op. et eleem. i. 'Pater Filium
as freedom grows, the choice becomes misit ut repamre nos posset.' Such
more restricted by the law •navra. language is usual with the Fathers.
e£eonv, uAA' ov iravra avpipfpet (i Cor.
476 The Religion of the Incarnation.
work of the Incarnate Son Himself. Not only does Christ
set Himself to re-erect the true standard of character. He
devotes Himself also to dealing with the actual ravages of
moral evil. He teaches its intrinsic nature, its source in
the will, the inviolable law of its retribution ; He reveals the
destructive potency of its effects ; He labours as the Good
Physician to remove its temporal penalties ; He provides, in
His atoning Sacrifice of Himself, the one and only counter-
vailing remedy 1.
Such postulates respecting the Nature of God and of Man
find their complement and point of contact in the Catholic
doctrine of the Incarnation. As to the Person of Christ, it is
enough to premise that the Christian system of ethics is in-
telligible only on the basis of a complete recognition of all
that our Lord claimed to be. He came to reveal among men
the nature, the ways, the will of the All-Holy ; to present
the true pattern of human goodness ; to be the perfect repre-
sentative of man before God 2. He is the Revealer of God, as
being Himself in the fullest sense One with God ; He is the
pattern of humanity, in virtue of His sinless manhood ; the
representative, through His organic union with our race.
His Resurrection and Ascension together are the condition of
His recreative action as a quickening Spirit on the entire
nature of man. In a word His Person, His work, His cha-
racter form the central point of ethical inquiry and con-
templation 3. To arrive at the true differentiae of Christian
morals we need to study more profoundly the character and
purpose of Jesus Christ.
I. Christ's Revelation of the Highest Good.
To the Christian moralist the entire universe presents itself
in the light of a revealed purpose as capable of receiving a
1 The whole subject of sin, guilt, avvajajtw, «at 0e<j) p\v irapaarijaai rbv
punishment is germane to our sub- dvOpca-irov, avOpoairots 8% -yvcupicrai TOV
ject, but for present purposes must 0f6v.
be left on one side. 3 Heb. iii. i. Cyp. <1? i<l»l. ran. xi.
2 Iren. iii. 18. 7 [Stieren] «5«i jap ' Quod homo est, esse Christus voluit,
rov fj.efftTT)i> Ofov rt KOI dvdpwirojv Sid ut et homo possit esse quod Christus
Tt}y ISias npos t/carepovs ouceiorrjTcs «<s est. '
<pi\iav Kal d^ovoiav TOVS df^portpovs
xii. Christian Ethics. 477
spiritual impress, and as moving towards an ethical con-
summation. For although man is the crown of the physical
creation, he cannot be independent of it in his advance towards
the proper perfection of his being. The destiny of nature is
bound up with that of humanity, in so far as nature tends
towards some form of ethical consciousness, presents the
material conditions of moral action, is capable of being ap-
propriated or modified by moral forces — will and personality.
Thus an inquiry into the Highest Good for man gives to
ethics a natural point of contact with metaphysics1.
Christ Himself points our thought to this ideal region by
presenting to us as the Highest Good, as the ultimate object
of moral effort, the kingdom of God'2. A precise definition
of this expression may be left to a formal treatise ; but a
certain complexity in the idea may be briefly elucidated.
In the first instance the kingdom of God is spoken of by
our Lord as a Good to be appropriated by man, through con-
scious and disciplined moral effort. In this sense the kingdom
is already ' within ' men 3, though not in its mature, or per-
fected stage. It is an actual state, spiritual and moral ; an
inward process or movement ; a present possession. The
attainment of this state involves ' Blessedness ' — a word the
true meaning of which is open to misconception. ' Blessed-
ness ' is not ' a mere future existence of imaginary beatitude 4 ; '
not a bare independence of natural necessities ; nor is it iden-
tical with, though it may include, ' happiness.' The instinct
in human nature to which Christ appealed is more funda-
mental than the desire of ' happiness.' The word employed
by Him to convey His meaning had by ancient usage been
connected with supposed conditions and modes of the Divine
existence. ' Blessedness ' in fact consists in a living relation
to God, in a progressive likeness to Him ; in its final stage it
1 Bern, de consid. v. i, 'Quid quod 2 S. Matt. vi. 33.
et inferioribus eges ? . . Nonne prae- 3 S. Luke xvii. 2 1 ; S. Matt. xiii. 45
posterum hoc et indignum ? Plane foil. (Parable of the Pearl). Cp. Rom.
superiorum quaedam injuria est in- xiv. 1 7 17 (iaai\eia TOV Otov . . tanv . .
feriorum operam desiderare : a qua Siicaioawr] tcai (Iprjvr) nal x«pa 1 1/ TrveiJ/iart
injuria nemo hominum perfecte 07/0;.
vindicabitur nisi cum quisque eva- * Wace, ubi sup. Lect. VIII. Ambr.
serit in libertatem filiorum Dei.' de off. min. ii. 3, 4.
478 The Religion of the Incarnation.
is nothing less than the possession of God. God is the
Highest Good a.
The kingdom of God is also to be conceived as the goal of
the entire movement of the universe : but while nature tends
blindly towards some ideal end, the history of mankind is the
record of a Divinely-directed movement carried on through
free human agency2. For an ethical world two factors are
required ; physical nature, the sphere of force and necessity ;
rational personality, conscious of freedom and of the claim of
authority. The goal of the universe is therefore a kingdom
in which each element, physical nature and personality, finds
its appropriate sphere, the one subordinate, the other domi-
nant. We discern a prophecy of this result in Bacon's great
conception of a ' regnum hominis ' attainable by intelligent
obedience to nature. The Bible is full of a greater thought.
It foresees a kingdom of intelligent beings whose law is the
service of God ; a state in which the inner harmony of man's
restored nature will be reflected in a worthy outward environ-
ment. This ideal kingdom, however, has its preparatory stage
on earth. Though the present condition of it only faintly
foreshadows the promised glory of the future, it has never-
theless been in fact set up among men, 'not in word, but in
power.' For the main factor that makes such a kingdom
ideally possible, already operates — namely, creaturely life
realizing its true dependence on God, human will and human
character responding to the will and purpose of God 3.
Such is the kingdom for which we look, and its Centre and
Head is the living Christ 4. He is the type after which the
new personality is to be fashioned. He who unveils this
world of spiritual beings and powers, is Himself the source
1 Aug. de »w. Ecd. xiii. ' Bonorum naturalem inclinationem quasi ab
summa Deus nobis est ; Deus est alio mota, non autem a seipsis, cum
nobis summum bonum.' Ib. xviii. non cognoscant rationem finis ; et
' Secutio Dei, beatitatis appetitus est ; ideo nihil in finem ordinare possunt,
consecutio, ipsa beatitas.' sed solum in finem ab alio ordinan-
a Thorn. Aquin. Summa, i. iittn. Qu. i. tur.'
2, ' Ilia quae rationem habent seipsa 3 See Godet, Comm. on i Corinthians
movent ad finem, quia habent domi- [Clark], vol. i. p. 236.
nium suorum actuum per liberum * S. Matt. xix. 28 ; S. Luke xxii.
arbitrium . . . Ilia vero quae ratione 30.
carent tendunt in finem propter
xii. Christian Ethics. 479
of its movement, the centre of its attraction, the surety of its
final triumph.
There cannot but result from this hope a particular view of
the present world. It is characteristic of the Christian spirit
frankly to recognise the natural world in its due subordina-
tion to personality, in its subserviency to ethical ends. An
absolute idealism is not less alien to this standpoint than
a crude materialism. The Christian is not blind to the
tokens of interdependence between the worlds of matter and
spirit ; the fact indeed of such relation gives peculiar colour
to the Christian regard for nature. Nature is precious as the
sphere in which a Divine Life is manifested, as the object of
Divine Love *. And yet, in the light of revelation, the uni-
verse cannot be contemplated without mingled emotions. The
Christian knows something of the pain, and of the satisfaction
which in their unchastened form we call Pessimism and
Optimism. For there must be sorrow in the recollection of
the causal link that unites physical to moral evil. Though
pain has value as the condition of nobler phases of life, and
heightened spirituality of character, it is nevertheless an evil
producing in a healthy nature something more than a tran-
sient disturbance. Pain is the sensible, even if remote, out-
come of moral perversity, of misdirected desire. It pervades
impartially the physical universe, but seems in manifold
instances to point beyond itself to its source in human sin.
And yet there is a Christian optimism — a thankful joy
even amid present conditions. There is the joy of at least
a rudimentary realization of the chief Good ; the joy of setting
a seal, as it were, to the truth of God 2. The ' powers of the
world to come ' are already within reach ; they can be set in
motion, felt, tested, enjoyed. There is a known end of
creation by the light of which all forms and products of
human enterprize can be judged. Thus even the growth and
organized strength of evil does not dismay the Christian ;
for he knows that the advance of the kingdom is certain,
whatever be the hindrances opposed to it, and that God's
1 S. John iii. 16.
a S. John iii. 33. See Corner's System of Ethics [Clark], § 47.
480 The Religion of the Incarnation.
invincible will controls and overrules all that seems most
lawless, and hostile to His purpose. ' The city of God,' says
S. Augustine, 'is a pilgrim sojourning by faith among evil
men, abiding patiently the day when righteousness shall turn
to judgment, and victory bring peace.' In his assurance that
' all things work together for good to them that love God,'
that the end is certain, and human fears are blind, the Chris-
tian can be free from illusions or extravagant hopes, yet not
cast down, 'sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing,' 'perplexed, but
not in despair V
II. Christ's Revelation of the Moral Law, its authority,
sanctions, and content.
On the place and meaning of freedom in Christian Ethics
we have already touched. Our formal freedom is the ground
of moral responsibility — that element in us to which Law
makes its authoritative appeal. From the thought of freedom
in relation to a moral universe we pass naturally to that of
Law.
And first, it is convenient to inquire what is the revealed
basis of obligation in general ?
The most conspicuous feature of the Sermon on the Mount
— that first great outline of Christian morality — is its authori-
tative tone. We instinctively turn to it in searching for a
fundamental principle of obligation, a ground of authority
for Law. Nor are we disappointed, for our question is met
by the consideration that this great discourse is primarily a
revelation of the personal God in His holy relation to man-
kind. It is with this personal relationship that the claim of
moral Good on man's will is seen to be uniformly connected.
The Good in fact presents itself to man in the shape of a
personal appeal : ' Be ye holy, for I am holy.' Morality
appears as God's exhortation to man to embrace and fulfil
the true law of his nature. ' Be ye perfect,' it is said, ' even
as your Father which is in heaven is perfect -.' The Good is
1 2 Cor. iv. 8; vi. 10. Cp. Rom. its being the Law of your nature . . .
viii. 28. ... The correspondence of actions
2 S. Matt. v. 48. Butler, Serm. 3 to the nature of the agent renders
' Your obligation to obey this Law is them natural.'
xii. Christian Ethics. 481
thus at once the explicit declaration of the Divine will, and
the condition of human perfection. Already the coldness of
abstract Law begins to disappear. Law is seen to be not an
abstraction merely, but inseparably connected with the living
Personality behind it. It is the self-revelation of a loving
Being, appealing to the object of His Love, and seeking its
highest welfare. Obligation is transformed, and is seen to
be the tie of vital relationship between persons l.
Further, it must be borne in mind that Christ's teaching as
to obligation was accompanied by the promise of a super-
natural gift — the gift of a new capacity to fulfil the Law.
The Good had hitherto been known, howsoever imperfectly,
as requirement. Ethical progress before Christ's coming
could only tend to deepen this knowledge. We know indeed
what was the object of that long providential discipline of
humanity which culminated in the Incarnation : how it ended
by driving man to look and long for a condition of things
which should no longer be marked by hopeless severance of
the actual from the obligatory. With the advent of the
Redeemer, a new joy dawned on the world — the possibility of
goodness.
We learn then that the ground of obligation is God's will
for the perfection of His creatures — His desire that they
should be like Himself2. The sense of obligation is indeed
never absent from the consciousness of Christ Himself. ' We
must work,' He says, ' the works of Him that sent Me while
it is day.' ' My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me,
and to finish His work 3 :' — in which utterances we discern
the principle we need. Only when duty presents itself in
the form of personal appeal, only when obedience is kindled
and enriched by feeling, can law become a bond, not of
constraint, but of love.
It follows that obligation, thus founded on personal relation-
ship to God, is absolute and independent of variation in the
specific demands of Law. Human goodness will consist in
1 Cp. Bp. Ellicott, The Being of God, God's will, he knows his duty.
p. 1 20. 3 S. John ix. 4 ; iv. 34. Cp. vi. 40 ;
2 Rom. ii. 1 8 (yivajoictK rb 6t\ijna) S. Luke iv. 43. See also Rom. xii. a;
implies that when a man knows Eph. v. 17, etc.
I i
482 The Religion of the Incarnation.
correspondence to the will of God, and the degree of clearness
with which a man apprehends that will is the measure of
his obligation. This principle seems to preclude any idea
of ' supererogatory works,' and tends to neutralise for the in-
dividual conscience the distinction between ' commands ' and
' counsels of perfection,' the spirit in which Law is ideally
fulfilled being that of sonship, eager, loyal, and generous \
The universal obligation of moral Law is by Christ con-
nected for practical purposes with a system of sanctions. As
to the Christian doctrine of rewards and punishments it is
only necessary to observe, that any ethical system which has
regard to the condition of man as he is, finds itself constrained,
for disciplinary ends, to lay a certain stress on this point.
Further, it should be noticed that the nature of these sanc-
tions is seldom clearly understood. They occupy a place in
Christ's teaching, because it is His wont to deal with human
nature as He finds it : He points, however, not so much to a
future state, as to a present spiritual sphere in which con-
duct is indissolubly linked to consequence, and there operate
' the searching laws of a spiritual kingdom 2.' The sanctions
with which Christ enforces His doctrine may thus be regarded
as pointing to a reign of Law in the spiritual realm which
He reveals to mankind. He seems indeed to recognise the
occasional need of appeals to fear, as likely to rouse the con-
science and will. He sets before us the prospect of spiritual
judgments acting, at least partially, in the sphere of the
present life. His more frequent appeal, however, is to what
may be called the enlightened self-interest of men. Their
true life, He tells them, is to be found or acquired in a con-
secration, a sacrifice of the natural life to the claims and calls
of the Divine kingdom3. Such sacrifice, such co-operation
with God, is its own ineffable reward.
1 The case of the young man 2 Wace, Lect. II.
(S. Matt. xix. 21) shews how obliga- a S. Matt. xvi. 25, 26. The dis-
tion is extended by contact with cussion of ' Christian consolations,'
Christ, i. e. by closer relation to God. by Mr. Cotter Morison, Service of Man
The general principle is that each is overlooks the fact that Christ's objec
bound to follow the law of his per- was not to ' console ' men, but to set
sonal perfection as it unveils itself before them the truth, and the law
to him. See Bengel in loc. and cp. of their own perfection. The ' con-
S. Luke xvii. 10. solations ' of Christianity can be won
xii. Christian Ethics. 483
What then, it may be asked, are the motives, the induce-
ments to action, appealed to by Christianity? how far are
imperfect motives recognised? and in view of the fact that
no mere sense of relation to Law is in general likely to move
the human will, where does the Gospel find its ' moral dy-
namic ' — its highest motive ?
We have seen that Christianity in a peculiar degree com-
bines the presentation of duty with an appeal to feeling. In
the same way by connecting obligation to obey God with a
revelation of His Love, Jesus Christ solves the most difficult
problem of ethics. The highest motive is Love to God,
kindled not only by the contemplation of His Perfections, but
also by a passionate sense of what He has wrought in order
to make possible the fulfilment of His Law. ' We love Him,'
says S. John, ' because He first loved us.' We do not, however,
expect the motive of actions to be in all cases identical, or
uniformly praiseworthy. A practical system must recognise
very different stages of maturity in character ; and the possi-
bility of imperfect or mixed motives is frankly allowed by
Christian thinkers, and seems to be sanctioned by our Lord
Himself1. It may be said on the whole that while the
Gospel ever appeals to man's desire for his own good, it
adapts itself and condescends to widely varying forms and
degrees of that desire, by way of educating it to greater dis-
interestedness and purity 2. We may fittingly speak of ' a
hierarchy of motives,' and can view with equanimity those
attacks on Christianity which represent it as a thinly-dis-
guised appeal to selfishness. For the reward promised to
man is one which will only appeal to him in so far as he
has parted with his old self, and has made the Divine purpose
his own. The reward is joy — the 'joy of the Lord ; ' the
only if they are never made the object marks on this point. ' The parabolic
of life. They are a reward, but never, form of instruction does not afford
in the higher forms of Christian con- scope for the play of the highest class
sciousness, an aim. See Church Quart. of motives. It is essentially popular
Rev., Jan. 1888, p. 268. wisdom, and it is the way of that
1 Witness the discussions on fear which aims at teaching the million,
commonly found in mediaeval theo- to make action spring from homely motmy.'
logy. Bruce, Parabolic teaching of 2 Butler, Analogy, i. 5.
Christ, p. 359 foil., has some good re-
I 1 2
484 The Religion of the Incarnation.
joy of a worthy cause embraced and advanced ; of a task
achieved, of labour crowned by nobler and wider service.
Such joy could only be an inspiring motive to self- forgetful
love, which finds the fulfilment of every aspiration, the satis-
faction of every desire in God and in His work 1.
Christian duty, the content of the Law. demands somewhat
larger treatment. It has been suggested that the conception
of morality as a Divine code, as ' the positive law of a theo-
cratic community,' which seems characteristic of early Christian
writings on morals — is a legacy from Judaism 2. Be this as
it may — the distinctive feature of Christianity is that hence-
forth the Law is not contemplated apart from the Personality
of God. The Law is 'holy, just, and good,' because it reflects
His character. Obedience to it is acknowledged 'to be the in-
dispensable condition of true union between God and His
creatures. For Jesus Christ teaches us to discern in the Law
the self-unveiling of a Being whose holiness and love it re-
flects, as well as His purpose for man.
The revealed Law is comprised in the Decalogue. It seems
needless to vindicate at length the paramount place which
this fundamental code occupies in Christian thought 3. Suffice
it to say that in broad outline it defines the conditions of a
right relation to God, and to all that He has made. And
the Law is ' spiritual V Though for educative purposes
primarily concerned with action, it makes reference to in-
ward disposition, and thereby anticipates the main character-
istic of Christian goodness. It also recalls the great land-
marks of God's redemptive action ; it sets forth His gracious
acts, partly as an incentive to gratitude, partly as a ground
of obligation.
In our Lord's teaching we find two truths implied:
1 See H. S. Holland, Creed and ideofverba] similiter permanent apud
Character, Serm. XVIII. Cp. S. Matt. nos, extensionem et augmentum sed
xxv. 21, Heb. xii. 2. Thorn. Aquin. non dissolutionem accipientia per
Summa, ii. iifte, xxviii. carnalem Eius adventum.' Thorn.
2 Sidgwick, Outlines of the Hist, of Aquin. Summa, i. iiae. Qu. c. Art. 3,
Ethics, chap. 3. ' Omnia praecepta [moralia] legis
3 Iren. iv. 16, § 3 [Stieren]. God sunt quaedam partes praeceptorum
appears in the decalogue ' praestruens decalogi.'
hominem in suam amicitiam . . . et 4 Rom. vii. 14.
xii. Christian Ethics. 485
(i) The absolute priority and permanence of the Decalogue
in relation to all other precepts of the Jewish Law. (2) Its
essential unity viewed as a Law of love. This latter aspect
is anticipated in the book of Deuteronomy, and is explicitly
set forth by our Lord. There are, He tells us, two command-
ments : the first and greatest, love to God ; the second ' like
unto it,' love to man, with the limitation annexed, ' Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'
Thus guided by precedent, a Christian, in examining the
Law's content, may take the Decalogue as a natural basis of
division. It may be shortly analysed as embracing a com-
prehensive outline of man's duty towards (i) God, (ii) his
fellow-men, and implicitly towards himself and non-personal
creatures.
First stand duties towards God, resulting directly from the
personal contact assumed to be possible between God and
man. The all-embracing command which involves the ful-
filling of the Law is contained in the words, ' Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind 1.' In this 'great commandment'
we find the widest point of divergence from Pagan ethics.
Man's true centre is God. His perfection is to be sought in
creaturely subjection and free conformity to the Divine
purpose2. The general sphere of God-ward duty is defined
in the first four commandments, which are seen to give moral
sanction, not only to the outward expression, but to the actual
substance of belief; the distinctive duties enjoined therein
have been summarily described as faith, reverence, service3.
The fourth precept lays down the principle that man is bound
to honour God by consecrating a definite portion of time to
His worship, and by providing space for the due recreation
of that human nature which by creative right is God's, and
is destined for union with Him.
The duty of love to our fellow-men follows upon that of
1 S. Matt. xxii. 37. Cp. Aug. de 3 Thorn. Aquin. Summa, i. iiae. c. 5,
mor. Eccl. xviii-xx ; de doc. Christ, i. 29. ' Principi communitatis tria debet
2 Aug. I.e. ' Maxime Ei propinquat homo, fidelitatem, reverentiam, famu-
[homo] subjectione ista qua similis latum.' Cp. Butler, Analogy, pt. ii. i.
fit.'
486 The Religion of the Incarnation.
love to God. Every man's personality gives him absolute
and equal worth in God's sight, and therefore lays us under
obligation towards him. Heathen moralists confined the
sphere of obligation to a few simple relationships, e. g. family-
life, friendship, civic duty. But the revealed law of love to
man embraces every relationship. ' Every man is neighbour
to every man V It is clear that any adequate outline of this
precept involves the whole treatment of social duty. Men
have their rights, i. e. lay us under obligation, both indivi-
dually and collectively. The individual has his ' duty ' to
fulfil to the family, the association, the class, the city, the
state, the Church which claims him. The immense field of
our possible duties towards society, and towards each indivi-
dual, so far as he comes in contact with us, may be regarded
as embraced in the aecond table of the Decalogue. Thus the
fifth commandment lends important sanction not only to the
parental claim, but also to the authority of fundamental moral
communities — the family, the state, the Church. The fol-
lowing precepts regulate the security of life and personality,
of marriage and sexual distinctions, of property, honour, and
good name. The tenth commandment anticipates that ' in-
wardness ' which constitutes the special feature of Christian
morality. 'It is the commandment,' says an ethical writer,
' which perhaps beyond any of the rest was likely to deepen
in the hearts of devout and thoughtful men in the old Jewish
times, that sense of their inability to do the will of God, and
to fulfil the Divine idea of what human life ought to be,
which is indispensable to the surrender of the soul to God 2.'
But according to the Christian theory there are duties to
self, which seem to follow from the relation in which man
stands to God, and form the true measure of his regard
for others : ' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'
There is a right self-love, a right care of the personality
as being itself an object of God's Love, and so included in
the category of things ethically good. What the Christian
1 Aug. de disc. Christ, iii. ' Proximus p. 241. Cp. Thorn. Aquin. Summa, i.
est omni homini omnis homo/ etc. iiae. c. 6 ; Martineau, Types, etc. , ii.
a R W. Dale, The Ten Commandments, 26.
xii. Christian Ethics. 487
ought to love, however, is not the old natural self, but the
'new man,' the true image of himself which has absolute
worth 1. A moral complexion is thus given to all that con-
cerns the personal life — the care of health, the culture of
faculties, the occasions of self-assertion. Every moment of
conscious existence, and every movement of will, — all in fact,
that relates to the personality — is brought within the domain
of Law. Christianity ' claims to rule the whole man, and
leave no part of his life out of the range of its regulating
and transforming influence V For in every situation, trans-
action, or display of feeling, will is required to declare itself:
moral activity takes place. Duties to self, as loved by God,
are thus implied in the ' great commandment.' For God
therein requires of man a consecration of the entire self, an
inward self-devotion, a reasonable, heartfelt service : He asks
for love. From this point of view, sin — the false claim to
independence — is simply wrong self-love.
Some would even class all shapes of sin as falling under
two main forms of self-assertion, arrogance and sensuality.
And S. Augustine suggests a profound view of the develop-
ment of the true, as compared with the false society, when he
says : ' The two cities owe their being to two forms of love ;
the earthly, to self-love ; the heavenly, to the love of God 3.'
It remains to extend the principle of love to the non-
personal sphere with which man is in contact. We have
seen that absolute worth belongs only to personality. But
man's relation to the creatures below him in the scale of
development, implies a field of duties of which ethics must
take cognizance. The non-personal part of nature is ordained
for subjugation by man. It is included in his dominion:
terram dedit filiis hominum. Yet even in the Mosaic Law
we find respect enjoined for certain distinctions of nature,
which are not to be overridden or confounded. The physical
1 Summa, i. iiae. c. 5, ' Dilectio sui Dei.' Pascal, Pensees, Art. xviii. 15,
ipsius includitur in dilectione Dei et ' Que I'homme s'aime, car il a en lui
proximi ; in hoc enim homo vere se une nature capable de bien.' Cp.
diligit quod se ordinat in Deum.' Ib. Butler, Serm. i. etc.
ii. iiae. xix. 6, 'Homo sepropter Deum, a Sidgwick, Outlines etc., p. 108. Cp.
et in Deo diligit.' Aug. Serm., ccxvi. 8, Dorner, System, etc., p. 459 [Clark].
'Amate quod eritis : eritis enim filii 3 Aug. de Civ. Dei, xiv. 28.
488 The Religion of the Incarnation.
order, like the moral, was to be regarded as sacred 1. Duties,
then, of this kind exist : and they are apparently compre-
hended in the fourth commandment, which expresses God's
creative claim on typical orders of living creatures, ordaining
that ' cattle ' are to share the benefit of the Sabbath rest.
The sixth and eighth commandments again imply the sanctity
of physical life, and of personal property. And if we pass
behind the decalogue, we find animals included in a sense
within God's original and irreversible covenant 2. The control
therefore of human will over nature, animate and inanimate,
though comparatively absolute, is yet subject to the restric-
tions which love suggests. For the natural world also dis-
plays the omnipresent control, and watchful providence of a
Being ' Whose mercy is over all His works.' Physical life in
this sphere may be treated as a means ; but it must also be
dealt with ' in harmony with the creative Thought V
In quitting the subject of duty, we do well to mark the
infinite extension given to the idea by the treatment of it in
connection with the doctrine of an Infinite and Holy God.
Our Lord, illustrating His exposition of the ancient Law
by a few significant examples, not only opened to His hearers
the possibility of a spiritual, transcendent morality, but also
laid down a far-reaching principle of obligation. The self-
unveiling of the Infinite Being evidently makes an infinite
claim on the will and affection of intelligent creatures.
With this extension of morality we might compare a some-
what parallel feature in the aesthetic sphere.
Into the arts also, notably into architecture and music,
the Christian spirit introduced the element of mystery, and
found expression in them for the idea of infinity — an idea so
alien to the Greek genius, which had ever contemplated
beauty, and therefore ethical Good, as something essentially
limited, measurable, symmetrical, exact4. Such a thought
1 See Ex. xxi. 33 foil. ; Deut. xxii. 9 viii. I ; Prov. xii. 10, etc.
foil. ; Levit. xix. etc. Summa, i. ii"e. 3 Martensen, Special Ethics (Indw.\
i. 2, ' Tota irrationalis natura com- p. 278 [Clark].
paratur ad Deum sicut instrumentum 4 See Trench, Mediaeval Church History,
ad agens principale.' Lect. XXYII. Cp. Plato, Phileb. 64 E
3 Consider Gen. ix. 10. Cp. Gen. foil.
xii. Christian Ethics. 489
might suggest a line of abstract discussion ; but practical
needs remind us that the true range of obligation is best in-
terpreted to us by a living ideal. As the writer of Ecce
Homo remarks, ' The law which Christ gave was not only
illustrated, but infinitely enlarged, by His deeds. For every
deed was itself a precedent to be followed, and therefore to
discuss the legislation of Christ is to discuss His character ;
for it may be justly said that Christ Himself is the Christian
Law V
The transition from the discussion of moral Law to that
of Christian character seems at this point natural and simple.
III. Christ the Pattern of Character.
The stress which in Christian Ethics is laid upon person-
ality scarcely requires further illustration. The principle of
personality underlies our fundamental assumption that man
is capable of free communion with, and imitation of, God.
We believe that the union between God and man was con-
summated in and through a Person. Further, the spirit in
which fulfilment of the Law is possible — the spirit of filial
love— can only exist in personal relations. It corresponds
with this general prominence of personality that Christianity
presents the ideal standard of human character in a Person.
In passing may be noted the fact that this principle to
some extent emerges in ancient systems. Aristotle's definition
of virtue naturally occurs to us as admitting the function of
an ' expert ' (6 Qpovipos, 6 airovbalos), in the right estimation of
moral action. The Stoic again seeks or invents a trustworthy
standard in his ideal conception of the ' wise man.' It seems
possible that modern non-Christian ethics will ultimately
substitute for the cultivated sense of mankind some form of
personal ideal 2. For ' the Law attains its lovable form, its
beauty, only when it becomes personal 3 ; ' and it might be
said with truth that no idea can be formed of virtues in the
harmony of their combination, until they are seen embodied
1 Ecce Homo, c. x. Cp. S. John cusses personal types of Christian
xx i. 25. saintliness.
2 It is significant that Mr. Cotter s Corner, System, etc., p. 377.
Morison in his Service of Man dis-
490 The Religion of the Incarnation.
in a person. Just as theology has in the study of Divine
truth concentrated her gaze on the Person of Jesus Christ as
a revelation of God ; so ethics, in the effort to formulate the
law of moral perfection, must study the same Divine Person
as a type of character.
It is necessary therefore at the outset to recall some salient
features of the great Example.
The character of Jesus Christ has been a subject of study
to thinkers of every period in Christian history, and of in-
finitely varied qualifications for the task. Some have in the
supposed interest of morality been tempted to lay dispro-
portionate stress on the fact of our Lord's manhood. They
ask how Christ can be an example to humanity, unless he be
a Man like other men * ? From a Christian standpoint, how-
ever, it is clear that the efficacy of that Example depends
on Christ's being a Man unlike other men — unlike them in
His relation to the Divine requirement, unlike them in His
power of contact with the entire race. Thus we find our-
selves in correspondence with dogmatic truth. The mystery
of atonement necessitates a sinless Victim ; the Christian
conception of human life requires a sinless Example. The
perfect pattern of mankind must in one material respect be
as far as possible isolated and removed from the race He
came to redeem : for sinlessness is a part of the Divine
thought concerning human nature.
If again we take into account the scope and significance of
His redemptive work, it is vain to compare Christ with
' other great men.' He came not merely as the Example, but
as the Redeemer and Saviour of humanity. Were He merely
the Example, His departure would have left mankind in
even deeper anguish and helplessness than before His coming.
Man would have seen the Light, and felt its attraction, only
to find himself powerless to follow.
And thus, because Christ is a Man unlike all other men, we
need in contemplating His character the caution that ' the
1 See some remarks on this tendency 1883, on 'Our Lord's Human Ex-
in Liddon, Hampton Lectures, viii ; and ample.' For what follows, cp. Mar-
an Art. in the Church Quart. Rev., July, tensen, Ethics (General), pp. 242, 256.
xii. Christian Ethics. 491
Divine Reality is apart from, and even greater than what the
greatest have thought of it and said of it1.' The ideal con-
ception of character presented either in Pagan thought, or
even in the volume of Messianic prophecy, has been in-
definitely enriched, and illuminated by the LIFE which had
before been only dimly foreshadowed, or at the best darkly
understood.
Now it may be said, with no violation of the proportion of
truth, that the most important part of the Gospel revelation
concerned man's true relation to God. In the forefront of
Christ's teaching is set the doctrine of the Divine Father-
hood. He impressed this truth on men not more by His ex-
press utterances, than by the example of His own habitual
attitude towards God. It may be justly allowed that our
Lord taught, and displayed among men ' a new type of
goodness, the filial and dependent/ In Him we see the
activity of ' a perfectly filial will V
It will be useful to expand this suggestive thought some-
what more fully.
First, then, we see in Christ the perfect example of filial
dependence on God 3. This dependence is not mere passivity
of will — such as the record of the Temptation exhibits ;
not simply a confiding trust in the providence and sustain-
ing power of God. We rather see in Christ's spirit of de-
pendence a motive which impels Him to fearless, unfettered
activity, and supports Him under the keenest stress of trial
and suffering. He speaks and acts ever as One who, in each
situation, is aware of the controlling hand of infinite Wisdom
and Love. He has that entire security in the certainty of
Divine guidance, to which no emergency comes as a surprise,
no call for action brings disturbance. He knows that ' the
works ' which tax His human faculties, and weary His bodily
1 Dean Church, Serm. on Christ's s See Trench, Syn. of the N. T. § 42
Example [Gifts of Civilisation, Serm. III]. (on Tairetvo<ppoavi>r)*), ' In His Human
2 R. H. Hutton, Essay on the Incar- Nature [Christ] must be the pattern
nation and Principles of Evidence. Cp. of all humility, of all creaturely de-
the remarkable definition of Lactan- pendence . . . He evermore, as Man,
tius, Div. Inst. iii. 9, ' Pietas nihil took the place which beseemed the
aliudest quam Dei parentis agnitio.' Ib. creature in the presence of its Crea-
10, ' Efficitur ut is agnoscat Deum, tor.'
qui unde ortus sit, quasi recordetur.'
49 2 The Religion of the Incarnation.
frame, are such as the Father ' has given Him to perfect.' A
filial trustfulness is thus the secret at once of His energy and
His repose ; His promptness in action and His calmness in
awaiting the suitable moment for it ; His unbroken heavenly-
mindedness and His self-spending devotion in ministry and
works of love. It makes possible the majestic serenity which
never deserts Him during the scenes of His Passion. ' I am
not alone,' He says, ' because the Father is with Me V
In such a spirit of dependence may be recognised the
true law of creaturely life ; and there is nothing in that
spirit which degrades or impairs the true dignity of human
nature. Nay, there is something in this dependence of a
filial heart which seems to chasten and exalt the character,
while it quickens the intelligence of man. For in fulfilling
his own true law, and responding to the will of his Maker,
man finds himself admitted to the secret of the universe ; he
is in harmony with the purpose that underlies and guides
its entire movement. So also, we venture to say, it is with
the Ideal Man. ' Everywhere He sees the Divine unity of
thought which permeates, embraces, and binds all things
together, the spiritual and the material, the visible and the
invisible, the earthly and the heavenly, in one vast eco-
nomy V To Him the promise seems fulfilled, ' Thou shalt be
in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the
field shall be at peace with thee.' To Him the world of
humanity, and the world of physical nature disclose their
inner law ; He knows what is in them ; He intuitively reads
their secret ; He can trace beneath the apparent discords of
the universe the outlines of a broken, but recoverable, har-
mony. And thus the attitude of filial dependence on God is
found to be the condition of a right relation to all that He
has made ; it opens the way to a true understanding of God's
ways, and of that living principle of Love which binds all
things in one — binds them indeed
by gold chains about the feet of God.
Next, we may contemplate Christ's character as the type
1 S. John xvi. 32.
2 Martensen, Ethics (General), p. 255. Cp. Job v. 23.
xii. Christian Ethics. 493
of filial obedience *, — of a complete harmony between human
will and the law of holiness. In Christ the ideal of free
will is realized 2. We are not now concerned with the vast
issues of that sinless obedience. It is enough to study it as
embodying a principle of purely human perfection, enjoined
indeed repeatedly in the Old Testament as the one condition
of covenantal union with God, but once only in history
adequately fulfilled in a human life. Obedience, based on
absolute trust in the character and purpose of God ; an
' obedience of faith,' yet in its essence the obedience not of
a servant, but of a son ; an obedience that refuses nothing,
shrinks from nothing, questions nothing that presents itself
as Divine requirement : such is seen to be the law of Christ's
Life, the law to Him of action and of endurance, the rule of
prayer, the principle of sacrifice, the motive of service, the
well-spring of thanksgiving and joy. If the entire complete-
ness of this obedience becomes One who wears ' the form of a
servant ; ' the willingness of it marks the glad service of a
Son. And because the fulfilment by Jesus of the Father's
will is spontaneous, free, whole-hearted, sacrificial, it wins
acceptance as the offering of One ' well-pleasing ' and ' be-
loved.' Perfected by submission to suffering and death, the
obedience of Jesus is stamped with the token of Divine
satisfaction by His rising from the dead.
And finally, Christ is the perfect pattern of filial love.
He taught the human heart that the All-Holy God can be
the object of its highest affection, its purest passion, its deepest
joy. In Christ we see the filial character consummated ; in
Him we find the union of serene repose with consuming zeal,
unwavering loyalty, and sympathetic self-devotion to the
Father's work ; in other words we find creaturely perfection,
combined with the spirit of sonship. In many and mysterious
ways indeed, does this filial love of the true Son display itself:
in a hunger and thirst after righteousness ; in a patience
1 Christ's earthly life and work are in Illo non libera voluntas erat, ac
described summarily as viraKorj, Rom. non tanto magis erat, quanto magis
v. 19. Cp. Phil. ii. 8. peccare non poterat?' Quoted by
2 Aug. de Praed. Sanct, xxx. ' An . . Liddon, Bampt. Led. [ed. n], note c.
494 The Religion of the Incarnation.
which can bide the time, and endure the chastisements, of
God ; in an overflowing tenderness towards all God-created
beings because they are His and in their measure bear witness
of Him ; in a faith which ' hopeth all things ' and labours to
make all things perfect. Such is the spirit of the Son: and
we ' learn of Him ' the loftiness of the height to which a
filial love of God may raise human character, the tenacious
strength it may impart to human will, the peace it may shed
on a human heart. Love is ' the bond of perfectness,' and to
wear the image of the Son is to be conformed through Love
to the likeness of the Father Himself1.
The example of virtue is thus seen in a character, of which
some aspects have been just considered : and we may pause
at this point, in order to form some conclusion as to the
factors of virtuous action judged from the Christian stand-
point.
To have moral worth, an action must be the outcome of an
entire bent, or disposition of the agent. Good fruit is to be
expected only from a good tree2. In the virtuous act the
agent's personality is engaged as a whole ; his whole nature
is directed towards a single object. This inward unity is
perhaps what we really mean by ' simplicity.' In such action,
the human being most nearly approaches the concentrated
and harmonious energy of the Divine Life 3. The person acts
as an undivided whole, each part of his nature is for the time
directed aright.
But we are here reminded that man's nature is disordered :
it can produce nothing truly good, except in so far as it is
restored to harmony by Divine power. God, says Thomas
Aquinas, calls us to a supernatural end, which by his natural
powers man could not attain. God Himself must therefore
impart the supernatural principle necessary to aid man in
responding to the call4. No act, in short, can be strictly
1 Aug. de mor. Ecd. xxiii. ' Fit ergo (dwA^), adding tirt J, et rov rj <pvais dir^rj
per caritatem ut conformemur Deo.' en? cUt j) OUT?) irpdgts qSiffrr) torai. Ato
'* Dorner, pp. 336, 388. Cp. Ecce 6 Otos del piav nal dir\rjv \aipfi f/5ovr)V,
Homo, p. 136. K.T.X. Cp. Bk. x. cc. 4. § 9, and 7. § 8.
3 Arist. Eth. vii. 14. 8 remarks * Summa, i. iiae. Qu. Ixii. Art. I. Cp.
that human nature is not simple S. Matt. xix. 17.
xii. Christian Ethics. 495
called ' good ' which is dissociated from the direct action of
God : for ' there is none good but One, that is God : '
0 work thy works in God ; He can rejoice in nought
Save only in Himself, and what Himself has wrought '.
We conclude that in a good action there is a true harmony
of the different elements in personality — intelligence, affection,
will ; and further that such harmony presupposes the action
of supernatural power on man's nature. It agrees with this
that Christian moralists give to the chief principles of virtu-
ous action the name of ' theological virtues,' and regard them
as supernaturally imparted.
A good action, then, implies right intelligence. There must
be an exercise of faith, which is a principle of knowledge —
a correspondence between human faculties and an unseen
object. Faith accepts the good as the proper element of
man's perfection ; takes God at His word, and aims at
pleasing Him. 'Without faith it is impossible to please
Him2.' Next, will asserts itself. Will is directed towards
an end desirable and attainable by effort: and thus is in-
spired by Hope. A study of Christ's example suggests that
the highest object of hope for man is the perfection of his
nature through the means appointed by God 3. We see in
Christ something of the desire, and the joy of moral achieve-
ment. When He said that 'the workman is worthy of his
reward,' He pointed to the possibility of a true, unselfish
pleasure in good work as such : of that thirst for perfection
and self-dissatisfaction which distinguishes the true artist
from common men.
Lastly, there remains that which is the dominant factor in
Christian goodness, Love. There is an element of passion in
1 Abp. Trench. caritatem.'
2 Heb. xi. 6. Cp. I S. John iv. 16 ; 3 S. John iv. 34 ; v. 36 ; xvii. 4. Cp.
Rom. xiv. 23. Summa, i. iiae. Qu. Ixii. H. S. Holland, Serm. on ' The Energy
art. 3, 'Quantum ad intelledum ad- of Unselfishness.' With regard to
duntur homini quaedam principia the relation of Pleasure to action, we
supernaturalia, quae divino lumine may observe that pleasure is insepar-
capiuntur ; et haec sunt credibilia de able from the right and effective
quibus est fides.' Ib. art. 4, ' Per fidem exercise of any faculty ; and there f. -n •
apprehendit intellectus ea quae sperat accompanies virtuous activity, but can
et amat. Unde opportet quod ordine never be the moral end of action. Cp.
generations fides praecedat spem et Arist. Eth. vii. 12. § 3, etc.
496 The Religion of the Incarnation.
Christlike holiness, which differentiates it from philosophic
conceptions of virtue as a tranquil, balanced state 1. Love
gives worth to the fulfilment of duty ; embraces, in union
with God, the Divine aim of creation ; and manifests itself
in spontaneity and inventive activity, transforming the ful-
filment of obligation into an occasion of joyous and delightful
service. Our Lord represents this ' ardent, passionate, devoted
state ' of heart as the real root of virtue. Without it the
most punctilious obedience is nothing ; for not to love is
not to live 2.
Having thus indicated the place of intelligence, will, and
affection in virtuous activity, we are free to study the Chris-
tian character, and perhaps ascertain its permanent features
— those elements in it which have survived the test of such
wide variety of historical conditions. We have to inquire
what is common to the types of Christian life which different
ages, states of civilization, and forms of nationality have pro-
duced ? For character is that which is capable of develop-
ment in varied situations, of free and spontaneous self-
adaptation to every change of environment. Circumstance
proves its quality, offers it a field of exercise, and ministers
to its growth.
Our task is rather to sketch a character than to classify
virtues. ' The earliest Christians,' says the writer of Ecce
Homo, ' felt a natural repugnance to describe the goodness
at which they aimed by the name of Virtue.' Within limits
indeed such a classification is possible : and a principle of
division may be applied even to a thing so mysterious, so
subtle in its shapes and gradations, so fruitful in surprises, as
character. We may, for instance, take as a basis the prin-
ciple of personality, and consider the Christian personality in
its threefold relationship : to God, to itself, to its neighbour,
and in contact with the hindrances, moral and physical, pre-
sented by its environment3.
1 See Ecce Homo, c. xiii. 3 Such classification, corresponding
2 Aug. de mor. Eccl. xix. ' Id ipsum to three cardinal virtues, seems to be
quo diligimus Deum mori non potest, implied in S. Paul's words, Tit. ii. 1 2
nisi dum non diligit Deum : cum 'Iva . . . <ra}<pp6vus, KCU. SiKaiois /ecu
mors ipsa sit non diligere Deum.'
Cp. Cyp. de Unit. xiv.
xii. Christian Ethics. 497
I. The Christian personality in relation to God.
The distinctive feature of Christian character consists in
consciousness of that filial relation to God which Grace
restores ; of the spiritual bond that exists between the human
soul and ' Him who is invisible.' Hence the goodness at
which the Christian aims is that which will bear the search-
ing light of the Divine eye. ' He chose us out of the world,'
says S. Paul, ' that we might be holy and blameless before
Him' Thus in its essence Christian character is based on a
peculiar sense of relationship to God ; there underlies it a
constant desire of union with God, a temper of loyalty, a
spirit of thankful dependence, a feeling of nearness to the
Divine presence. Were it true, as has been said, that ' the
Divine service ' had ' become human service Y Christian cha-
racter as a distinct type would have ceased to be.
From this attitude of mind and will two results follow :
first, singleness of aim, — the ' single eye.' The sense of personal
relation to God gives directness, truthfulness, simplicity to
speech, action, and thought. So far as he is true to his pro-
fession a Christian is independent of the current opinions of
his age, or community, seeking only to live ' in all good con-
science ' towards God. The conviction of an unseen Presence
guides his actions ; an unseen Witness penetrates his thought ;
an unseen Master holds him accountable. Indeed, S. Paul
seems to regard holy living as consisting simply in the
endeavour to ' please God V
And a second characteristic of the Christian is his view of
life in the world, of nature, of humanity itself. He observes,
judges, estimates all things from the standpoint of the spiritual
mind. He aims at bringing his own thoughts and desires
into harmony with the Divine will and purpose. He looks
out on the world, with its complex social order, its fascinating
interest, its appealing needs, as a sphere in which for a while
he is called to move, and to labour. Into the varied tasks
1 J. Cotter Morison, The Service of i Thess. iv. I. An instructive contrast
Man, p. 194 [ed. 3]. See Eph. i. 4 ; might be drawn between the Pagan
Col. i. 22 ; S. Luke i. 75. and Christian use of the word
3 Horn. viii. 8 ; i Cor. vii. 32 ; aptaKfia.
Kk
498 The Religion of the Incarnation.
and interests of life he can throw himself with large-hearted
sympathy, and with the greater fervour because the time is
short, and the need of self-forgetful activity urgent. ' Once a
real Christian,' writes Lacordaire, ' the world did not vanish
before my eyes ; it rather assumed nobler proportions as I
myself did. I began to see therein a noble sufferer needing
help. I could imagine nothing comparable to the happiness
of ministering to it under the eye of God, with the help of
the Cross, and the Gospel of Christ V
But the world is not the Christian's ' abiding city.' He
walks in it, and passes through it in pilgrim fashion, with
heart detached from it and all that it can give. He cannot
commit himself to the world, nor identify himself with it. He
has the internal freedom of a heart that has found its true
centre ; he is able to estimate visible things at their real
worth, and
To stand in freedom loosened from this world2.
Thus to have the ' mind of Christ ' is to judge of life and
the things of time with His j udgment, to see with His eyes,
to be inspired by His Wisdom. So we find ourselves in natural
contact with the division of character by ' cardinal virtues.'
' Prudence ' or ' Wisdom ' is the outcome of a right relation to
God. God only, S. Augustine says, is to be loved ; this world,
and all sensible things, are to be used. Prudence is love dis-
cerning between the things which bring it nearer to God, and
those which hinder it from approaching Him 3.
II. In relation to humanity, and creaturely life in general,
the Christian finds scope for ' active morality 4,' for minister-
ing love. The life of union with God inspires and prompts
the life of service to mankind. The infinitely varied rela-
tionships of life constitute so many forms of moral obligation.
Christian Justice means nothing less than rendering to all
their due. The desire to imitate God is at once the motive
1 Lacordaire, a biographical sketch, civil virtues. Martensen, Ethics (Social"),
H. S. Lear, p. 34. § 82.
2 Wordsworth, The Excursion. Ep. 3 De mor. Eccl. xxxvii and xxv. Cp.
ad Diog. v. irdffa ^ivrj irarpis tanv avruiv, Bern, de Consid. v. I.
*ai iraaa irarpls £evr). This spirit does 4 See the chap, with this title in
not exclude a true patriotism, and other Ecce Homo.
xii. Christian Ethics. 499
and the rule of Christian activity 1. And this desire finds
expression in two distinctively Christian graces: the spirit
of forgiveness and the spirit of compassion.
The inculcation of forgiveness is ' the most striking innova-
tion ' in the ethics of the Gospel 2. Greek thought on the sub-
ject presents a remarkable contrast. Aristotle is inclined to
regard forgiveness as a form of weakness, but allied to virtue
in so far as it involves resistance to passion. The ground of
Christian forgiveness is very different. The duty of it follows
partly of course from a consideration of the common human
nature which the offender shares with the injured ; partly
also from a dispassionate view of the injury inflicted. In
exercising forgiveness we suppress that false self-love or par-
tiality which magnifies a private injury. The Christian loves
himself not more than he loves his neighbour. He can put
himself in the offender's place, and consider what is for his
highest good. He will not allow the sense of injury to inter-
fere with, or override the exercise of good- will even towards
enemies. Certainly, the sense of his own moral frailty, and of
his indebtedness to Divine mercy, will restrain the Christian
from vindictiveness or harshness in regard to the faults of
others ; while the fact of the equality of men in relation to
their common Father, invests even the anti-social sinner with
the dignity of brotherhood 3. But forgiving love is no mere
expression of self-distrust. It is fired by something of the
generous hopefulness, the quickness to detect latent capacities
of nobleness even in the worst, which is the glory of the Divine
forgiveness. It 'rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth with
the truth; ' ' believeth all things, hopeth all things.' The Greek
indeed had his idea of forbearance ; to him it meant some-
thing less than strict justice; it was a virtue difficult to
place or estimate. Logically, it was scarcely to be praised.
1 S. Matt. v. 44 foil. Leo, Serm. in 2 Ecce Homo, c. xxii. Cp. Butler,
Quad. vii. ' Forma conversationis Serm. ix. etc.
fidelium ab exemplo venit operum 3 Leo, Serm. in Quad, passim, esp.
divinorumetmeritoDeusimitationem v, vi, ix. Ecce Homo, c. xxiii. For
Sui ab eis exigit, quos ad imaginem what follows, see Arist. Eth. v. 10. Cp.
et similitudinem suam fecit. Cp. Eph. iv. 32.
Iren. iv. 13. 3.
K k 2
500 The Religion of the Incarnation.
At the best it would never have implied the habitual duty of
active forgiveness.
Not less distinctive of the Christian character is compassion1,
and the active beneficence which results from it. Humanity,
by Jesus Christ, was transformed : it was ' changed (to adopt
a celebrated phrase) from a restraint to a motive.' Compas-
sion may display itself in readiness both to relieve the
physical needs of another, and to edify his character. To love
one's fellow-man as one's self implies willingness to benefit him
in body and estate by every means ; but it is also incom-
patible with unconcern or apathy as to his spiritual and
moral welfare. Love is communicative, and will not with-
hold its best treasure. Hence compassion prompts mis-
sionary activity, and zeal for moral and social reforms. Nor
has 'humanity' ceased to be a restraint by becoming a
motive. Christian justice contains the principle of ' inno-
centia ' as well as of ' benevolentia' ' Love worketh no ill to
his neighbour ; ' it can inflict no wrong, it can withhold no
good ; ' therefore love is the fulfilling of the Law V
Active morality has many departments. Duty to the
' powers that be ' — the order of society, human law, the state,
the Church : all this, into which the science of politics in-
quires, forms part of the obligation involved in love to man.
How comprehensive is the reply of an early Apologist
to the charge of disloyalty, ' we behave towards Emperors
exactly as we do towards our neighbours. To wish, or
to do, or to think evil is equally forbidden to us in any
case V ' Thou/ cries S. Augustine, apostrophizing the Church,
— ' Thou bringest within the bond of mutual love every
relationship of kindred, every alliance of affinity; Thou
1 Mozley, Univ. Serm. ix. ' Ancient eis, ad unum ilium finem refer-
philosophy never opened the mine of endum est . . . Hinc efficitur ut ini-
happiness which lay in this principle. micos etiain nostros diligamus. . .
It was a discovery, like that of a new Misereamur, quia tanto magis nos
scientific principle, when it was made; oderunt, quanto ab illo quern diligi-
and Christianity made it.' mus separati sunt.' Cp. de disc. Chr.
2 Rom. xiii. 10. Note the follow- v. ' Necesse est ut quern diligis tan-
ing words of S. Aug. (de doct. Christ. quam te ipsum, illuc ilium trahas ad
i. 29) : 'Velle debemus, ut omnes quod et tu amas.' Ecce Homo, cc. xvii,
nobiscum diligant Deum, et totum quod xviii.
vel eos adjuvamus vel adjuvamur 3 Tert. Apol. 36.
xii. Christian Ethics. 501
unitest citizen to citizen, nation to nation, man to man, not
only in society, but in fraternity. Thou teachest kings to
seek the welfare of their peoples, and peoples to be subject to
kings . . . Thou shewest how to all love is due, and injury to
none l ! '
III. In the life of active beneficence, self-sacrifice is no
' occasional heroism,' but an ' habitual mood2.' And yet from
the very nature of Christian love it follows that there is
a right self-regard, a zeal for God's kingdom in the soul,
a desire for the highest welfare of the personality as an
object of worth in itself, and destined to find its perfection in
God.
Love to self becomes Temperance, that is, the spirit of
purifying discipline. Thus, a mark of Christian character is
the passion for holiness: i.e. the desire to combine inward
purity of thought, desire, and motive, with the external fulfil-
ment of duty.
This process of self-purification is both mental and moral.
It includes the culture of imagination not less than the
control of appetite; 'sobriety' not less in judgment and
reflection than in the indulgence of desire ; humility in self-
estimate, not less than restraint of passion3. The dominant
feature of Christian character in this connection is a peculiar
self-severity, a deep sense of the ideal as something not yet
attained, a strict fidelity to known truth and the claim of
moral law, sensitiveness to moral evil, and watchfulness
against even its distant approach ; in a word, disciplined rule
in the affections, intellect, and will. For as the Hellenist
sage says of Wisdom, ' The very true beginning of Her is the
desire of discipline, and the beginning of discipline is love V
Temperance includes that reverent care of the body which
receives so high a sanction in the New Testament ; indeed,
respect for the sanctity of the body may be viewed as
1 De mor. Eccl. Ixiii. [Clark] 06s. Lamps of Architecture, vi. § 9.
There are duties imposed by our re- 2 Dean Church, Disc, of the Christian
lationship even to the dead, to posterity, Character, p. 101. Cp. Ecce Homo [ed.
and of course to the impersonal creature. 13], p. 178.
See Martensen, Ethics (Indiv.'), §§ 116- 3 See Rom. xii. 3 ; 2 Cor. x. 5.
1 1 8. On duties to posterity, see a * Wisdom vi. 17.
beautiful passage in Ruskin, Seven
502 The Religion of the Incarnation.
reverence for the presence of God Himself, and for the place
of His abode1.
IV. Finally, in relation to the hindrances which Virtue
encounters — the stress of circumstance, the pressure of mis-
fortune, persecution, loss, temptation, and the like — Love
displays itself as Fortitude^ and finds both a passive and
active sphere of exercise.
As a passive virtue fortitude is the ' world-resisting '
element in character. The hostility of the world to virtue is
only one form of its hostility to God2. Fortitude is thus
essentially the same in all stages of social development.
When the world-principle was embodied in a concrete form,
and became in the imperial power of Rome a definite force
hostile to the Church 3, fortitude displayed itself for the most
part as patience under persecution (S. Augustine in his
treatment of this virtue naturally contemplates it under this
aspect) ; but the precise form of influence to be resisted will
obviously vary from age to age, while the element of resistance
in Christian character remains constant.
The name of ' fortitude,' however, must not be restricted to
passive endurance, prominent as this virtue is in Christ's
teaching. Fortitude embraces spheres of action, and will
display itself on occasion as resentment. Righteous anger
has its source in the temper exactly opposed to Stoic apathy
respecting sin — that ' loveless view ' of mankind which said
' Trouble not thyself ; thy neighbour sins, but he sins for
himself4.' There can be no true love of good without a just
abhorrence of evil. Hence it sometimes occurs that love takes
the form of indignation and holy zeal — when directed, for
example, against oppression, cruelty, ingratitude, deceit,
selfishness. Such resentment is a natural and generous
emotion, born of sympathy with God Himself. Comparing
with the Christian conception of resentment Aristotle's
1 i Cor. vi. 19. S. John's Epp.].
3 Ep. ad Dioy. vi. piati Xpiandvovs * Trench, Syn. of N. T. § xxxvii.
6 it6fffios nr)8tv doucovntvos, on rafs On ' Resentment ' see Ecce Homo, c.
ffoovcus dvTtTaaaovTcu. xxi ; Butler, Serrn. viii. Cp. Arist. Eth.
3 See Westcott, Essay on The iv. 5. See also Dale, The Atonement,
Church and the World [in his ed. of Lect. VIII.
xii. Christian Ethics. 503
discussion of anger, we find that Christian teachers lay stress
on the social end of resentment. What the good Christian
resents is not a personal hurt, but injury and wrong-doing
viewed as injurious to his neighbour or the community ; such
resentment is distinguished by purity of motive ; in certain
circumstances it is not unwilling to inflict pain.
Moral courage, again, is the form which fortitude assumes
under other circumstances, too numerous to be specified.
Generally it is displayed on occasions when the Christian is
bearing witness to the cause of truth or righteousness before
men. No Christian can rid himself of his share in the
function of witness, committed to His followers by Christ.
And fortitude, or manliness, is the virtue of a witness — of the
solitary champion of a good cause confronting opposition in
any of its forms. The name ' athlete,' which we find applied
to martyrs in early times, may remind us that the task which
beyond others must needs test a man's power to endure, and
to stand alone, is that of witnessing stedfastly for righteous-
ness and truth. Yet the call to bear witness comes in ways
unexpected, and difficult to define or classify: it may, for
example, be a man's difficult duty to withstand not opponents,
but adherents and friends ; to hold his own not against ' the
sneers and opposition of the bad, but the opinion and authority
of the good V With this passing remark we quit the subject.
In the above sketch of Christian character we have confined
ourselves to some salient features. We have said nothing of
the gracious union it presents of delicacy with strength, of
communicativeness with reserve, of energy with restfulness,
of passion with tenderness. It is difficult to delineate
character without giving a look of formality to what is
essentially a mysterious, albeit well-marked, product. In
Christian goodness we see the handiwork of the Spirit of
God, and where He is, there is liberty.
It is indeed objected that this type of character is too rare,
too exalted for the majority of mankind. It is said that a
standard of perfection is set before them which it is hopeless
1 Dean Church, Gifts of Civilization, p. 323. Cp. Martineau, Types of Eth.
Theory, vol. ii, pp. 200-202.
IIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
504 The Religion of the Incarnation.
to think of attaining ; that men are disheartened ; that
Christian teachers ' ask for the impossible,' and undermine
belief in the possibility of virtue. It is further suggested that
the rarity of the type proves that the saint 'is born, not
made ; ' and that radical change of character and disposition
is impossible1.
The last point may be noticed in another connection. At
present we may suggest, in reply to these reflections, one
consideration. The objector forgets that Christianity does
not merely present a moral standard to men ; it provides
them with an entire system of moral education. The Church
recognises different degrees of maturity and attainment in her
children. It is no part of her method, though possibly an
accident of a particular age or set of conditions, that she
sets strong meat before babes, and appeals to children as if
they were grown men. That very ' individual treatment '
of characters on which the writer of the Service of Man
insists, is a fundamental principle of the Christian system2.
IV. Christ the Source of the Recreation of Character.
The subject which we now approach is, taken as a whole,
peculiar to Christian Ethics. For it will be admitted that
Christianity alone offers a solution of the practical problem,
how is the ideal of virtue to be translated into life and
practice ? ' It is the essential weakness,' says a living writer,
1 of all mere systems of morality, and of most, if not all, other
religions, that they confine themselves to pointing out what
the facts of life ought to be, and make no provision whatever
for dealing with facts as they are. ... It is their main defect,
not that they conflict with Christianity, but that they fail to
touch the problem with which it most directly deals 3.' Of
course, in advancing this claim for Christianity, we imply
1 See Service of Man, cc. vii and non corporis tantum, sed et animi
ix. These objections have been often aetas est, exerces ac doces etc.' Cp.
met. See Dean Church, Serm. on Amb. de Off. Min. i. 17.
' Christ's Example.' Liddon, Bampt. 3 Wace, Boyle Led. (ser. i) v. Cp.
Led. [ed. n] p. 130. Ecce Homo, c. ix. We may consider
" Aug. de mor. Eccl. Ixiii. ' Tu how Christ gives a practical turn to
[Ecclesia] pueriliter pueros, fortiter speculative inquiries. S. Luke xiii.
juvenes, quiete senes prout cuiusque 23, 24 ; S. John xxi. 21 foil.
xii. Christian Ethics. 505
that it is something vastly greater than a system of morals.
It is a Divine way of salvation, that is, of deliverance from
sin, as well as from its effects ; the process by which the
ideal becomes actual in life and character is also, as we have
seen, a process of restoration. Christianity, in fact, professes
to be a Divinely-provided remedy for disorder and disease ;
strictly speaking, therefore, a treatise on ethics must in-
vestigate the pathology of sin, regarded as the violation of
moral order, and the fatal misdirection of desire. This aspect
of the Gospel has been too much disregarded, even by
Christian thinkers1. It follows, however, from the Scriptural
account of man that he has lost something which can only be
supernaturally restored : and it is the practical task of ethics
to point out the means of renewal, which Divine Wisdom has
provided.
The mysterious facts which lie at the root of the recreative
process must be briefly noticed. Christian holiness is the
reproduction in the individual of the life of the Incarnate
Son of God. That this might be possible, there took place
that series of events which S. John describes as the glorifi-
cation of Jesus Christ. The life, perfectly well-pleasing to
God, and therefore the supreme standard of holiness, passes
through the stage of death. The Sacrifice on Calvary removes
the barrier raised between the Creator and His creatures by
sin. The Resurrection is, on the one hand, the seal of God's
acceptance stamped upon His Son's atoning work ; on the
other, marks the final stage in that process by which Christ's
human nature is 'perfected2.' For by the Resurrection that
Nature is spiritualized, is released from earthly limitations,
and becomes available as a recreative force. The Ascension
is the condition of Christ's manifestation as 'a quickening
Spirit,' as the ' power of God.' By sacramental channels He
communicates to our entire nature His life-giving humanity,
as the means of our recreation after the image of God. Thus
the life of the Incarnate is extended in the life of the
1 E. g. Clem, of Alexandria. See Cp. i Cor. xv. 45 ; and see Gal. ii. 20,
Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexan- iv. 19. Also an Art. in Ch. Qu. Eev.
dria, p. 80. No. xxxii, on ' Our Lord's Human Ex-
2 S. Luke xiii. 32 ; Heb. ii. 10, v. 9. ample.'
506 The Religion of the Incarnation.
redeemed, and by a natural and orderly growth, the character
of Christ is reproduced in His members through the con-
tinuous operation of the Spirit, whose office it is to ' take of
the things of Christ and shew them unto ' men. He who is
outwardly our example thus becomes an inward principle of
life.
We now are in a position to estimate the extent to which
Christian morality depends on dogmatic truths. Apart from
Jesus Christ there can be no true life. The secret of holiness
lies in a permanent relation to a living Christ. He, by His
life and death, ' became unto us Wisdom, Righteousness,
Sanctification, Redemption1.' The example was not upheld
in vain ; for Christ placed within our reach the spiritual
forces by which alone the pattern can be reproduced in
human life. ' Sanctification ' means the progressive appro-
priation by man of the life of the Son of God ; the formation
in him, by successive stages, of the very image of Christ.
The objective aspect of Sanctification is clearly presented in
the Old Testament ; holiness there implies consecration, and
is thought of chiefly as an objective work of God. In the
New Testament, the idea of holiness passes from the sphere of
worship to that of morality. But the Old Testament con-
ception is not lost ; it is expanded. Holiness, according to
the Christian view, results not from the efforts of man, but
from the outflow and operation of a Divine Life. Holiness is
spoken of as ' the righteousness of God,' as a ' free gift '
imparted to man ; and in the first instance requires receptivity
rather than activity on the part of the human soul.
The ethical significance of baptism is thus intelligible.
By baptism the individual is brought into vital contact with
the Source of the new life, and enters the sphere within
which radiate the spiritual forces that flow from the glorified
humanity of Christ ; the germ of a new personality is im-
parted ; the kingdom of God is entered. But in this new
birth the work is only begun ; for the ' Grace of God that
bringeth salvation' has an abiding home among men. It is
1 i Cor. i. 30. Cp. Rom. viii. 29. Bruce on Heb. ii. 11-18 in Expositor,
For the thought that follows, see Prof. No. 50.
xii. Christian Ethics. 507
misleading to speak of Grace as ' an unknown factor.' Still
more so to assert that ' Theology has always been celebrating
the power of Grace to the depreciation of Ethics1.' Grace
has its fixed channels and methods, its orderly movement and
outflow, its certain conditions, its appointed places and
seasons, its definite, though mysterious, laws of operation2.
Grace is, so to speak, stored and dispensed within the
mediatorial kingdom which Christ founded in His Church.
O
From an ethical standpoint the Church of God is before all
else a school of character 3, the Divinely-appointed sphere in
which, normally, the recreation of personality proceeds, in
which men are sanctified by being kept in living union and
contact with Jesus Christ Himself.
To enumerate the several ' means of grace ' committed to
the stewardship of the Church is the task of theology,
as also to explain the conditions of fruitfully using them.
On one point only it may be worth while to make a few
remarks.
To Christianity, as we have seen, each individual personality
is an end in itself. Each has a right to moral education ; each
was called into being that it might embody a particular
thought of God, that it might fulfil good works prepared
specially for it, and correspond with its own separate ideal4.
Hence, true to the spirit of Him who was a Physician of the
sick, Christianity offers her Divine remedies to the worst and
most hardened natures. She believes in her power to renew
and transfigure them, to achieve in them a moral miracle.
O
Nobler natures, again, she endeavours to train up to the full
stature of Christ-like character, sanctifying, consecrating, and
elevating the innate capacities of each. Her healing mission
extends to all men. She knows nothing of the aristocratic
temper of ancient ethics, which would confine the very
possibility of a moral life to the few. She rejoices in the
1 Service of Man, pp. 84, 85. iratfavovaa jy/wij. S. Matt, xxviii. 19,
2 Chrys. in Joh. horn. x. 2 apa 8« 20. Aug. de disc. Chr. i. ' DiscqAin<u;
teal hSfifaadat ftovKtrtu on oux airXws domus est Ecclesia Christi.' Butler,
ov8f 77 \apis tTTtiffiv, d\\oL rots @ov\o- Analogy, pt. ii. c. i.
fjiivoi's Kol io-novSaKocri, K.T.\. * Consider Col. i. 28; Eph. ii. 10.
3 See Tit. ii. ii, 12 17 x<V(S • • •
508 The Religion of the Incarnation.
infinite variety of typical forms which character may assume.
A Christian poet has said —
There is not on the earth a soul so base
But may obtain a place,
In covenanted grace ;
So that his feeble prayer of faith obtains
Some loosening of his chains
And earnests of the great release, which rise
From gift to gift, and reach at length the eternal prize.
All may save self; — but minds that heavenward tower
Aim at a wider power,
Gifts on the world to shower.
And this is not at once ; by fastings gained
And trials well sustained ;
By pureness, righteous deeds, and toils of love,
Abidance in the truth, and zeal for God above1.
Now this idea of individual perfection, so characteristic of
Christianity, is in the New Testament not dissociated from
the idea of a society, family, or household of God, in
which alone the full development of Christian character can
be achieved. Corporate life, with its network of relation-
ships, its mutual services, its common worship, its visible
pledges of brotherhood — this is God's great instrument in
the edification of character. So far, indeed, as the body is
divided or weakened, the pressure it exerts on the individual
is hindered, and the free play of its forces diminished2.
In the Church, then, we have the true school of character,
the true ' home of individuality,' and sphere of spiritual
edification. The normal course of spiritual growth is one of
widely varied experiences: it passes through the stage of
repentance with its appropriate works ; it is schooled by the
chastening discipline of common life3; it is marked by pro-
gressive power of submission to the leadings of grace. This
1 LyraApostolica, No. xxxvii [signed 5]. 'God's paternal discipline, our own
2 Consider Phil. ii. 2, where the de- self-effort, Christ's example, priestly
scription of the Christian example influence and sympathy, all contri-
and character is prefaced by an im- bute to the same end, persistency and
pressive appeal for Unity. The moral progress in the Christian life.' It is
guilt of heresy partly lies in its being specially instructive to contrast the
a principle of disunion. Cyp. de Christian with the Pagan estimation
Unit. xxvi. complains of particular of Labour, as a factor in the formation
ways in which disunion injures Chris- of character. See Martensen, Ethics
tian character. (Soct'aZ), p. 129.
3 Bruce (Expositor, No. 50, p. 84).
xii. Christian Ethics. 509
would suggest an interesting line of study, and one suitable
for ethical treatment, but must not now detain us. It is
advisable, however, in this connection not to overlook the
subject of Christian ascetics : a word which has often excited
unjust suspicion and contempt, and thereby been robbed of
the noble associations which rightfully belong to it.
The name ' ascetics ' is suitably applied to those Divinely-
sanctioned exercises which, by precept and example, Christ
commended as aids to holiness — Prayer, Almsgiving, and
Fasting. Reflection, indeed, shews that these ordinances
occupy a conspicuous place in the Gospel, because they have
a natural connection with the three principal spheres of
Christian duty, — duty towards God, towards man, towards
self. They are ways in which devotion to God, love to
man, discipline of self, find each an appropriate expression.
Reason and experience alike suggest that the Christian
character, with its harmonious beauty and delicate strength,
can only be the product of continuous spiritual discipline,
wise restraint, and regulated effort. A feature, therefore, of
Christ's practical teaching is His provision for what is, to
average human nature, at least a moral necessity. Presenting
Himself as the supreme example of the freedom which can
control and use circumstances for a spiritual end, He lays
down the threefold rule of Christian ascetics, to guide the
wills and affections of those whom He calls to follow His
steps.
The end of discipline is, of course, freedom : that is, the
perfect dominion of the Spirit in man. Aiming at this liberty
the Christian looks on the threefold ordinance of prayer,
almsgiving, and fasting as a help to his development ; it
is to him no mere arbitrary direction imposed by authority,
no vexatious restraint on lawful pleasure ; but an efficacious
aid to Christ-like holiness commended by the practice, and
proved by the experience, of holy men in every age, and
expressly enjoined by our Lord Himself1.
It may surprise us somewhat to find Prayer included
1 For what follows, see especially a very useful book by Canon Furse,
the Lenten sermons of S. Leo. Algo Helps to Holiness.
5io The Religion of the Incarnation.
among ascetic exercises. For prayer is the ordinary activity
of the human spirit in relation to God : man's natural expres-
sion of self-dedication : his effort to embrace God's Will
as his choice, God's Law as his rule, God's Perfection as
his pattern. Yet because prayer implies regularity, discipline,
persevering effort ; because it has its different parts, its proper
occasions, and methods ; because it is the exercise of a distinct
faculty ; in short, because it is an arduous work, it finds
a place among exercises which seem at first sight to be of a
more formal character.
This will appear more clearly on consideration of the
different parts of prayer. Thus prayer is in part to be
viewed as humble acknowledgment of an ideal unattained,
and consequent renewal of desire in that direction. As con-
taining, therefore, an element of self-purification, of striving
after deeper self-knowledge, prayer includes the practice of
self-examination and confession of sin. Regarded, again, as
an exercise of affection and intellect, prayer takes the form
of contemplation, and communion with God, as the supreme
object of reverence and love. Thus it is evident that prayer
is a real exercise, well fitted to be an education of the
soul, and arduous because it implies an intense activity of
the entire personality. Even the body has its share in this
exercise. It is the appointed instrument of man's spiritual
self-oblation ; and prayer is the acknowledgment not only
that God is the ' Father of spirits,' but that the body also ' is
for the Lord V
Almsgiving is placed by Christ among known and admitted
forms of devotion. Viewed simply as an action, it is an
obvious outlet of Christian love to man2. But almsgiving
has another aspect, on which early writers insist with some
fullness. It is a means of grace, a purifying element in the
spiritual life of the agent. It is not often, perhaps, that this
1 i Cor. vi. 1 3. See Cyp. de orat. Dom. out the way in which the Christian
iv, on the part of the body in prayer. spirit is likely to regard social pro-
2 The particular shape which Alms- blems. Cp. Martensen, .KMcs (Social},
giving will assume is obviously to be p. 132. This point seems completely
' suggested by the special conditions ' overlooked in the Service of Man, c.
of the age. See a noble passage in vii.
Ecce Homo [ed. 13], p. 184, pointing
xii. Christian Ethics. 511
side of the duty is adequately taught. The danger of ' charity '
becoming reckless or ill-directed is real, and may cause
Christian teachers to be reticent on the subject. Yet this
aspect of the truth must not be suppressed. And after all,
almsgiving seems to be specially mentioned by our Lord as
a type of all works of mercy1. Love, in its effort to imitate
God, need not be" less discriminating than communicative.
The Fatherly providence of God is in fact the Christian's
inspiration and his model : and we interpret the scope of our
Lord's commandment by study of His life who ' for our
sakes, though rich, became poor,' and 'went about doing
good,' and who taught us in one pregnant sentence the
mysterious efficacy of almsgiving2. It need not be added
that true Christian charity is ever controlled by a due sense
of the dignity of human nature, and of the moral bond that
unites giver and receiver.
Each of the three exercises under consideration is con-
ditioned and aided by the other two. There is a specially
close connection, however, between prayer and fasting. As
a means of self-discipline, fasting has been strangely neglected.
Some regard it as a burdensome restraint on the will ; others
as ' unsuited to a spiritual religion ; ' others as unduly inter-
fering with Christian liberty. Chiefly, perhaps, the neglect of
fasting is due to inexperience of its value as a condition of
spiritual power, and forgetfulness of the place assigned to it
in the teaching of our Lord and of the early Church. It is
thus right to insist, first, on its claim to be a Divine ordi-
nance3. There can be nothing superfluous or incongruous in
a practice which Christ is so careful to regulate, and which
He commends by His own example. But the practice of
fasting justifies itself as a point of simple wisdom in the care
of the personal life. Christian holiness requires, as we have
seen, an inward unity of the personality, in which no one
1 Aug. Enchir. Ixxii. 'Multa sunt some striking remarks,
genera eleemosynarum, quae cum 2 S. Luke xi. 41.
facimus adjuvamur.' See also Cyp. de 3 Leo, in Quad. xii. 2, 'In caelesti-
op. et deem. xxv. Leo, in Quad. v. 4 ; de bus Ecclesiae disciplinis, multum
Res. i. i ; de Pent. i. 6, etc. Bruce, Para- utilitatis adferunt divinitus instituta
bolic Teaching, etc., pp. 371-375, has jejunia.' Cp. Hooker, Bk. v. § 72.
512 The Religion of the Incarnation.
element has undue predominance. Bodily instincts and
passions, the powers of thought and imagination, the bias of
temperament — all have to be brought into subjection to the
controlling will. And the result is a character exhibiting
a due balance of different elements: a chastened spirit of
dependence, spiritualized affections, subdued thoughts, sober
judgment, a purified heart, a sensitive conscience, a just fear
of unbridled appetite, a true simplicity. Such is Christ-like
holiness ; and one great condition of its attainment is fasting,
chiefly in its literal sense of regular abstinence from food1,
though its forms may be as varied as are the avenues of
sense-impressions. The motive of fasting may not be always
the same : sometimes it is the expression of penitential sorrow
for sin, or of the passion for inward purity ; sometimes it is
used as a special aid to prayer ; sometimes, again, it is the
sign of wearisome conflict with the lower nature ; in any case
it should be an exercise of love. Thus we regard fasting, not
as mere soulless, joyless abstinence; but as a needful con-
dition of purity, energy, vigour of will, clearness of moral
insight, and capacity to impart spiritual gifts to our fellow-
men. ' Wise souls,' says S. Leo, ' mortify their bodies and
crucify their senses ; and therein set before themselves God's
will, loving themselves the more, in proportion as for the love
of God they love not themselves V
Our apology for touching on topics so homely might well
be that the practical aim of ethics gives such points im-
portance. There can be no excuse needed, however, in days
of wide-spread luxury, and of much needlessly imperfect
Christianity, for recalling and re-asserting the necessity of
the discipline, as well as of the moral precepts, of the Sermon
on the Mount.
V. Christ's teaching as to the Consummation of God's
Kingdom.
An outline of Christian Ethics would be incomplete without
some reference to those eschatological truths which occupy so
1 Ep. ad Diogn. vi. icaKovpyovufv-q sen, Ethics (Indiv.\ p. 160 ; Martineau,
airiois KOI irorots TI \fjv\t) /3eA.T«ovTcu. Types, etc., vol. ii. 381.
2 Serm. de Pass. xix. 5. Cp. Marten-
xii. Christian Ethics. 513
large a place in theology, and have so direct a bearing on
morals. We have already touched on them in connection
with the Christian doctrine of the Chief Good. It remains to
consider them in relation to the perfection of man's nature.
The word ' perfection ' reminds us that there is a goal of
the moral process exhibited in history. The visible order of
the universe and the history of mankind, are verging towards
a consummation, a catastrophe, which relatively to us must
be regarded as an end.
It is no part of our task to discuss the intermediate stage
through which the kingdom of God is destined to pass : that
stage in which there is to be a supreme manifestation of moral
evil, a culmination of those tendencies and an outburst of
those forces which already seem to threaten not the frame-
work merely, but the foundations of society. The decay of
Christian Churches, the profound corruption of social life, the
tyranny of materialistic lawlessness — these seem to be plainly
foretold in Scripture, and with a purpose : that of shielding
men from a moral despair which might paralyse their efforts,
or undermine their patience, as they witness the beginnings
of these ' birth-pangs ' ' of a new order. The Christian will
ever guard against such a temper of alienation, or self-
isolation, from the world, as will lead him to depreciate the
national, political, or civil movements of his time. For
civilization is appointed to reach, through whatever con-
vulsions, an ethical consummation, the prospect of which
must inspire strength to labour, and patience to endure.
The last stage of the kingdom of God is one of glory, to
be exhibited in the perfection of the moral community. It is
for this that creation waits: to this, as the goal of history,
that inspired prophecy points. Two revealed truths are
intended to guide our conception of this prospect.
In the first place, the kingdom of God is to be finally
manifested in its true character2: an event which must
involve momentous consequences for the physical creation.
Scripture sometimes speaks as if beneath the outer semblance
of visible nature there lay concealed an inner glory, destined,
1 S. Matt. xxiv. 8 apxn uSivwv. 2 Rom. viii. 19.
Ll
514 The Religion of the Incarnation.
when the semblance passes, to shine forth in full radiance and
splendour1. The truth is thus symbolically conveyed that
since man is the crown and lord of the physical universe, his
final emancipation will carry with it a corresponding change
in his outward environment. But this consummation, no less
than the progressive movement of mankind towards it, is due
to the deliberate working and intervention in history of God
Himself. Naturalism points to a precarious prospect of
human happiness in the future, as contingent upon ' a perfect
adjustment of society V Christianity does not look to any
improvement in material conditions, nor to any social process,
as likely to bring about an ideal state of humanity. Neither
the physical universe, nor man himself, can attain to the goal
of their development, or to the perfection of their nature,
apart from God 3.
Again, the kingdom of God is to be purified through
judgment. The exact nature of this judgment it is im-
possible for thought to anticipate. But the teaching of
revelation is at least so explicit as to discredit any conception
of the judgment which would confine its operation to this
present scene, or restrict its meaning to any merely natural
process. The judgment is, in fact, appointed for a definite
hour, and is prefigured in definite historical catastrophes. It
will be parallel to, but transcending, those manifestations of
Divine power in history which mankind has already ex-
perienced. And the effect of this final intervention will be to
put an end to that mixed condition of human things which
it is our tendency to accept and assume as inevitable and
perpetual. Out of God's kingdom will be gathered 'all
things that offend ; ' and the collective mass of humanity will
be, with whatever gradations in the stage of perfection
attained by each individual, a ' congregation of saints V The
principle of Good will so achieve its final triumph.
When we further inquire, as we are impelled to do, what
will be the extent of this final triumph, we are met by the
1 I Cor. vii. 31 ; I S. John ii. 17, Belfort Bax. p. 19.
etc. 3 Cp. Bern, de consid. v. n.
* Cp. The Ethics of Socialism, by E. * Ps. cxlix. i.
xii. Christian Ethics. 515
fact of our own ignorance, and of Christ's reserve. His
simple, severe statements seem intended to discourage fruit-
less speculation. We are thrown back in this as in other per-
plexities, on our unfailing assurance of God's character, and
on the faint analogies furnished by the present order of things.
The Gospel speaks of a righteous dominion, the sphere of
which is to be without limit. We read of a gathering into
the kingdom of all that is in true harmony with its purpose.
We find warrant for the belief in an intermediate state in
which imperfect character may be developed, ignorance en-
lightened, sin chastened, desire purified. And yet we are
assured that the consequences of action and choice abide, and
are eternal in their issue ; and we know that impenitence
must finally, and under awful conditions, separate the soul
from God. But we have not enough for a coherent system.
All that we can affirm is that the victory of Good seems to
demand the preservation of all that has not wilfully set itself
in antagonism to Divine Love, Holiness, and Power. We
cannot think that helpless ignorance, or inevitable poverty of
character will finally sever a human soul from God. Analogy
suggests that there will be scope in a future dispensation for
the healing ministries, and inventive service of Love. So again,
Scripture does not expressly teach that the lost will for ever
be in a state of defiance and rebellion. Even in the awful
state of final severance from the Divine presence there is room
for assent, order, acceptance of penalty ; and so far, evil, in
the sense of the will antagonistic to God's righteous Law-
may have ceased to exist. Truth will have prevailed ; and all
orders of intelligent creatures will render it homage. The final
issue will be seen, and the justice confessed, of all those ' ways '
of God which are ' unsearchable and past finding out.' In a
word, there will be a complete manifestation of supreme Holi-
ness and Love : of Him, whose ' mercy is over all His works,'
and who will continue to stand in direct relation to every
soul that He has made, revealing Himself to each either as
loving Father or as righteous Judge 1.
1 See the Bp. of Exeter's Primary tion ' see an impressive passage in
CMrge on this subject. On the prin- Martineau, Types, etc., ii. 65-69.
ciple involved in this ' dual classifica-
L 1 2
5 1 6 The Religion of the Incarnation.
It must however be added that what is called 'Universalism'
finds no support either in the solemn statements of Jesus
Christ, or in the analogy of nature. Man's very power of choice
implies the possibility of a sinful state admitting neither of
repentance nor of remedy ; not of repentance — for character,
growing by separate acts of choice, may become fixed and
hardened in its persistent refusal of the good ; not of remedy
— for, as even the Greek moralist, with all his belief in the
moulding power of law, confesses, there is a degree of moral
perversion 'incurable' — that namely which ensues when sin
has finally destroyed the faculties to which moral appeal is
possible — desire, fear, hope, affection, the sense of shame.
With the end of history corresponds that of the indi-
vidual man. The ultimate perfection of human character
is not only regarded as possible in Scripture — but is sug-
gested by analogy * : and of the conditions of perfected human
nature, we are enabled to form some idea partly by our
knowledge of angelic beings, partly by a study of our Lord's
Humanity in its risen state 2.
i. Thus human personality, in its perfected form, implies a
state of harmony. As each element in human nature will
be preserved in its appropriate condition, so each will fulfil
its rightful function 3. The relation between body and spirit
will be that which is ethically the highest conceivable. In
man will be represented, as in a microcosm, a state of being
in which the first creation has been appropriated by, and made
the organ of the Divine Spirit4. The material body will be-
come one perfectly subservient to, and expressive of, the free
movements of a purified spirit5. And to this state of per-
sonality will belong a final harmony between moral law
and freedom. Human beings will have become ' partakers
1 2 Cor. v. 5 ; Col. i. 28 ; Butler, differentia permanebit.'
Analogy, i. c. 5. * Dorner, System, etc., § 2.
* S. Luke xx. 36 lffdf"ff\ot . . . KOI 5 Aug. de Fid. et Symb. xiii. ' Spirit-
vloi flfftv Ofov rrj's dvaardcrtus viol ovrfs. uale corpus intelligitur quod ita
Cp. Leo Magn. Serin, in Res. Dom. i. spiritui subditum est, ut caelesti habi-
c. 4. tationi conveniat.' The Resurrection
3 Vine. Lirin. Common, c. xiii. 'Uno- of the flesh is thus seen to have
quoque horninum sine tine victuro, vital relation to the idea of moral
in unoquoque hominum sine fine perfection. Cp. Thorn. Aquin. Summa,
necessario utriusque substantiae i. ii"e. Qu. iv. Art. 6-8.
xii. Christian Ethics. 517
of the Divine Nature,' so far as to experience in themselves
the union of liberty, holiness, and love :
Indulging every instinct of the soul
There where law, life, joy, impulse, are one thing1.
ii. Perfection further implies a state of glory • a word
which, whether used of Christ Himself or of His followers,
seems in the New Testament to mean the outward manifesta-
tion of a holy character. The gradual assimilation to God.
which is the law of true human development on earth, is
the law of an unending progress. But in the perfect state,
character will find due splendour of outward expression.
Man's bodily frame will pass through successive stages ' from
glory to glory,' to a semblance faithfully reflecting the in-
ward supernatural life 2. And in the marvellous union of out-
ward with inward recreation consists the 'glory,' of which
human nature is capable.
iii. Perfection is consummated by blessedness. The concep-
tion of bliss as transcending happiness (evdatjuovta) is peculiar
to Christian Ethics. Happiness is a word of earth, and
represents a good which may be attained independently of
life in God. Bliss is inseparable from a living relation to
God. It implies union with God.
But though it is true that ' man possesses the plenitude of
his perfection in God,' the analogy of the present dispensation
points to a further element in ' blessedness,' namely, that of
fellowship in a moral community : the redeemed ' have
fellowship one with another,' in an ' indissoluble life V In
fact the perfection of the individual, according to God's sepa-
rate ideal for each, demands that of the moral community.
Blessedness thus means that state wherein, by a society of
renewed personal beings, ' the Highest Good is loved and en-
joyed V
This community of free and perfected beings, with God as
1 Iren. iv. 28. 2, ' Hi semper per- i S. John iii. 2.
cipiunt regnum, et proficiunt.' Pet. 3 i S. John i. 3-7 ; Heb. vii. 16 ;
Lomb. Sent. ii. xxv. 7, ' Post confirma- Westcott, Hist. Faith, p. 147.
tionem vero . . . nee vinci poteritnec * Aug. de mor. Ecd. iv. ['Beatavita,]
premi [homo] : et tune habebit non cum id quod est hominis optimum,
posse peccare.' amatur et habetur.'
2 S. Matt. xiii. 43 ; 2 Cor. iii. 1 8 ;
5 1 8 The Religion of the Incarnation.
its Centre, is the revealed ethical consummation of our race.
And as the manifestation of God's kingdom is to Christians
the supreme object of aspiration, and the highest matter of
prayer, so the effort to advance and extend its sphere is the
worthiest task that can be embraced by the will. The con-
ception of such a kingdom, to be made actual through the
exertion of human faculties co-operating with the invincible
energy of the Divine will, is the greatest thought that ever
enriched mankind. In the attempt to further the limits, or
promote the welfare of this kingdom, man finds his truest
happiness, and his noblest field of activity. For he is engaged
in the same work as God Himself1 : he has the same interest
in its accomplishment. He has found the absolutely good
sphere of effort and desire ; all else in which men busy them-
selves can only be ethically good in proportion as it bears on,
or hastens the approach of, that ' one far off Divine event.'
VI. Conclusion.
It is our Lord's method to present to men an ideal, before
He descends to the requirements of practical life. The Sermon
on the Mount describes the life of ' blessedness ' before it
treats of duty ; and from duty, passes to the means of holi-
ness. Such an example suggests one or two concluding
reflections.
First we may recall the true bearing of a methodical in-
quiry into Christian Ethics. The kingdom of God stands in
contrast with, but in special relation to, all modes and
products of social activity. It makes use of all the material
which human life offers, or human faculties supply, so far as
it is capable of serving a Divine purpose, or revealing any
aspect of the Divine Life. For that Life having once for all
intervened in history, continues ever to appropriate and
hallow all that comes within the wide range of Its outflow ;
Education, Criticism, Science, Art ; Industry, Wealth ; Law,
Polity — all these are capable of becoming ethical forces, of
ministering to man's true end, of contributing something to
eov, S. John vi. 28. Cp. S. Matt. vi. 33.
xii. Christian Ethics. 519
the highest life. Into the Holy City the kings of the earth
bring their glory and honour : and to a Christian Church are
addressed the far-reaching words, ' All things are yours V
There is in fact a ' world-appropriating ' element in Chris-
tianity, as the ethical religion ; and it is essential that the
significance of this fact should be grasped, if Christian
morality is to be rightly apprehended, or fairly presented in
systematic form.
Further, in advancing a claim to mould and regenerate
human society, the Christian Church can only continue to
rely on her traditional instrument, — the recreation of indi-
vidual character. The social movements which an en-
lightened Christian judgment approves, are those gradual
and irresistible changes which result from the slowly-reached
apprehension of some neglected moral truth, as it gradually
commends itself to individual consciences. And such move-
ments are to be judged as they display, or bear upon character.
If for example a Christian mistrusts the extravagant schemes
of some forms of Socialism, — it is not because he is insensible
to the wrongs and miseries which suggest a violent remedy,
but because all such sweeping proposals would merge the
individual life, would repress and mar the fulness of that
organized social life which gains elements of richness and
diversity from the free play of individuality.
The study of ideals will also have suggested the relation
which the Church bears to modern life. The Church, we
have seen, is the school of human character ; the nurse, there-
fore, of such civil and social virtues as give stability to human
institutions. In her midst, Divine forces are really and
manifestly at work, tending to bring about the regeneration
of mankind. And in connection with this view of the Church,
we need to observe the power of character ; the practical
' supremacy of goodness,' or at least its tendency to be
supreme ; its capacity to control and modify the pressure of
circumstance. A condition of all true thinking about the
social future will surely be a just estimate of character as a
social and industrial force ; it is a growing sense of this
1 i Cor. iii. 22.
520 The Religion of the Incarnation.
truth that is doing much to revolutionize our economic theories.
We are learning perhaps that rnanfulness, mercy, self-control,
pity are among the forces which must be taken into account
by social science.
And if the Church is a gift of God to mankind, and there
be but one end of all His gifts, namely, the restoration of His
image in man, we must believe that the fairest fruits of
Christianity, and the many-sided fulness of Christlike cha-
racter, can appear only in those who live loyal to the moral
discipline of the Church, who are ruled by her wisdom,
chastened by awe of her beauty, penetrated by her spirit.
The kingdom of God is more — infinitely more — than an ideal
condition of human society ; but we know that the kingdom,
even in this limited sense of the word, will be the heritage
only of a nation ' bringing forth the fruits thereof.'
APPENDIX I.
ON SOME ASPECTS OF CHRISTIAN DUTY.
THE conception of morality as a system of positive Divine Law.
and the 'juridical method ' which is said to mark early Christian
writers on ethics1, is perhaps attributable to the growth of an
imperial spirit in the Church when she found herself confronted
with the task of reducing to order the social chaos into which the
fall of the Empire plunged Europe. S. Leo may be said to em-
body this spirit in a majestic personal form. The mark of Roman
authority rests on the ordinances of the Church of this period.
It may be that her rules of duty wear something of the aspect of
a fixed, unvarying code. The moral problems with which she
has to deal are comparatively simple ; they admit of clear, concise
treatment, in accordance with a fixed system of discipline ; sharp
distinctions are possible : and the Gospel thus presents to the
world the features of an external Law.
Be this as it may, widely different conditions seem now to
demand a definite system of Christian duty, — a study of ' special '
or ' applied ethics.' The main feature of modern life is not social
disorganization, but complexity of relationships ; and although in
the abstract no such thing is possible as a ' conflict of duties ; '
yet it is clear that duty is not always simple, or obvious. We
need in fact something like a system of casuistry ; of ethics ap-
plied to novel spheres, and special points of obligation. It is in-
deed reasonable to expect that as civilization advances, and new
realms open up which the Christian spirit must appropriate, the
Law of duty will be enriched ; there will be expansion of its con-
tent : e. g. the development of Industry makes desirable the for-
mulation of the ' Ethics of Labour ; ' the rise of a special class
may raise the question whether ' class virtues ' are to be recog-
nised, and how they are to be estimated, by Ethics 2.
In this appendix some purpose may be served by noticing a
few pressing moral problems of our time ; some spheres of
duty as to which guidance or development of principles seems
called for.
1 Sidgwick, Outlines, etc., p. 108.
2 These are perhaps implied in S. Luke iii. 10-14.
522 The Religion of the Incarnation.
i. In the sphere of self-regarding duty a point which needs
attention is the truth of personal responsibility. There are in-
fluences at work which threaten the sense of accountability, whether
for conduct or belief. There are of course speculative difficulties
surrounding the question of freedom ; there is wide misconception
of its true meaning ; but it needs to be clearly taught, that
granted all limitations of the power of choice, moral responsibility
remains for the use of the character, as of the property, which a
man inherits1. A man's moral constitution, rigidly denned
though it be by heredity, is yet his 'heritage,' his natural en-
dowment, for the right direction of which he is responsible. The
weak sense of this plain fact is noticeable in the lax and indulgent
tone often used respecting criminals. ' To some of us,' it has been
justly said, ' the individual is always innocent and society always
guilty2.' The degree of guilt, however, may be minimized (e. g.
by the plea of ignorance), while the fact of it remains.
In this connection statistics of crime have a value which needs
to be estimated. Do they point to conditions of society which
must be faced as unalterable ? or do they not rather usefully
indicate the proper channels into which the stream of social
energy should be directed ?
Again, in the matter of personal belief, it is often assumed that
there is no responsibility. The question, however, for each indi-
vidual, if rightly stated, is simply this, ' What has been my atti-
tude towards that which has presented itself to me as truth ;i ? '
Another point of importance is the moral culture of Imagina-
tion, in relation chiefly to aesthetic recreation in its different
forms, the Theatre, the pursuit of Art, the reading of Fiction.
We are learning by serious experience the enormous power of
fancy to kindle passion, and to colour human actions. In view
of the spread of depraving literature, energetic assertion of duty
towards this department of personality is needed. Such duty
seems to be recognised in Phil. iv. 8.
ii. Passing to the sphere of family obligations, it is natural to
remark on the break-up of family life which is so common a con-
sequence of highly-developed industry. The employment of
women in factories, etc.. tends to make them unfit for domestic
duties ; while that of children encourages a spirit of independence
which is not without social danger ; thus not only the sense of
1 Cp. Mr. Cotter Morison, Service of Consider S. Luke xxiii. 34.
Man, p. 214. 3 See Dean Church, Human Life and
2 R. W. Dale, Cont. Bee., May, 1889. its Conditions, Serm. III. init.
Appendix L 523
parental duty, but the respect for parental authority, is impaired.
Christians are bound to discountenance, or at least to counteract,
this state of things so far as it interferes with the rudiments of
moral discipline.
The pressing need of our day, however, would appear to be
some clear teaching on the subject of marriage. There are dif-
ferent aspects of the marriage contract recognised in Scripture.
But Christianity can make no terms with those theories which
have borne fruit in lax legislation on divorce, with all its mis-
chievous results. Marriage, according to the Christian view, is a
serious vocation, with its own sacred duties, and special consecra-
tion. Improvident mai*riage is as immoral from a Christian as
from an anti-Christian point of view1. Ethical considerations
ought to guide or restrict the intention to marry ; and with re-
gard to the question of population, Christianity condemns any
theory which offers a substitute for rational self-restraint. The
true end of marriage, again, is something higher than ' happiness ' ;
it is appointed for the mutual enrichment of personality, mutual
freedom to fulfil the true ideal of human life. The whole subject
has indeed become involved in difficulties which cannot be en-
countered by any mere statement of principles. There is no doubt,
however, of the end which the Christian treatment of this point
must keep in view.
iii. As to the social sphere generally, we begin by remarking
that, from the Christian standpoint, every transaction between
man and man is to be regarded as personal, and therefore ethical.
The most significant fact perhaps of our time is the process of
transition from (so-called) political to ethical economics. To
reason rightly on social problems we must ever have regard to
jK'rxonality. For ethical purposes the abstract terms Capital, Labour,
Production, Wealth, etc., must be replaced by personal terms, Em-
ployer, Employe, Producer, Man of Wealth, etc. Our problem is
how to supersede the technical and legal relation by the personal '•'.
This being our fundamental point of view, we find that ethics
will treat equally of rights and duties. A Christian theory of
rights is required. The prevailing view of them is individualistic.
It is forgotten that the rights of one man have their ground in the
1 See Service of Man, pref. xxv. foil. economists are led to leave out of
1 See Ingrain, Pres. Condition and account some of the considerations
Prospects of Pol. Economy, p. 18 : 'By which most seriously affect the con-
habitually regarding labour from the dition of the working man,' etc. Cp.
abstract point of view, and overlook- Carlyle, Past and Present, the last book,
ing the personality of the labourer,
524 The Religion of the Incarnation.
obligations of another ; they are limited by the claims of other
personalities on our own ; ' right ' is, in fact, a condition making
possible the fulfilment of duty. It is thus a matter of Christian
concern (to suggest mere examples) that workers should attain to
the possibility of free self -development : healthy conditions of
work, the enjoyment of domestic life, security of maintenance,
perhaps permanence of contract, opportunities of recreation and
culture, — every thing, in fact, which will give them fair chance of
healthful and worthy human life. Christianity can be content
with nothing short of this.
On the other hand duties call for notice. Modern capitalists
form a class whose responsibilities it is difficult adequately to
measure. The general principle, however, is easily repeated : that
it is the duty of the wealthy, or those who employ workers, to
respect the personality of their employes, to treat them not as
machines, but as men. Thomas Carlyle well describes the aim
that should guide this influential class : 'to be a noble master
among noble workers, the first ambition : to be a rich master,
only the second.'
Industrial development indeed brings into prominence many
questions of duty and right, which can be solved only by deeper
apprehension of the Christian standpoint : and of ' morality as an
industrial force a : ' for the ties which bind men in the relation of
brotherhood and sonhood are the noblest and strongest.
The duties of a state are matters of controversy, and open a field
not lightly to be entered. It is clear, however, that adequate
pressure can only be brought to bear on governing classes by an
educated public opinion, rather we should say an enlightened moral
sense, in the community. It is impossible to foresee the results
that might ensue from the growth of moral opinion on such
points as the state regulation of vice, the just causes of war, the
restriction of the hours of labour, the treatment of semi-civilized
dependencies, the true lines to be followed by education. It is
this tremendous potency of public opinion that points to the great
need of modern democracy : the education, namely, of feeling
and character ; the cultivation of reverence and the faculty of ad-
miration, of self-control and sobriety in judgment and thought.
How far a merely intellectual training will produce this character
can scarcely be a matter of controversy. A vast field of inquiry
and study is thus evidently open to economic moralists : and it
1 See the chapter with this title in T. E. Brown, Studies in Modern Socialism
and Labour Problems, c. xii.
Appendix /. 525
has been opportunely suggested that the effort to study, ' in the
light of the revealed will of God, the intricate problems of society,'
might be a common bond between different sections of Christen-
dom, and might promote that unity of God's Church, which is the
true condition of effectual social reform \
iv. In the Church, or moral community which embraces and
leavens the state, special points of duty arise : e. g. respecting the
limits of the Church's self- adaptation to the tendencies of the age,
and her relation to the anti- Christian principle in society. Hence
arise difficult questions as to the true bases of Toleration, and of
submission to the civil power. We may be sure that principles
of action and thought can be reached only by closer study of
Christ's words in relation to modern life 2, as the practical in-
stinct of the Church has interpreted them. A similar problem is
raised by the advance of Science and Criticism. Christians are
charged with being behind scientific men in their apprehension of
'the morals of assent3.' Whatever truth there is in such a re-
proach, it at least utters a note of warning.
v. Once more, if we consider the non-personal realm with
which man is brought in contact, we must face the problem of
duties towards the lower animals. We have seen that such duties
have a ground in reason : but their nature and extent are not well
defined. It is important to study our Lord's attitude towards
nature, for which He uniformly exhibits, especially in His parables
and miracles, such feeling and love. The practice of vivisection,
for example, raises a question as to the limits of the dominium
naturae committed to man ; and his right to employ creaturely
life as a means. There is of course a practice of vivisection which
is utterly immoral : as when it is prompted by mere pleasure in
experimenting, or by idle curiosity ; or is carried on without strict
intention and reasonable prospect of meeting a particular need.
Within the limits of an essay it would be presumptuous to do
more than raise such questions as the foregoing ; we perhaps best
display a sense of their gravity by leaving them as suggestions
for systematic discussion. For it has been justly observed with
regard to ethical problems that ' the actual solution is itself an
art, a gift which cannot be taught.'
1 See an Article on ' Christian Dean Church, Gifts of Civilisation,
Union,' by Earl Nelson, Cont. Rev., Serm. II.
Feb. 1889. 3 Mr. Huxley in Nineteenth Century
2 See Martensen, Ethics (Ind.~), § 93. for Nov. 1887.
APPENDIX II.
ON THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF SIN1.
' Jesus did not commit Himself unto them, because He knew all men,
and needed not that any should testify of man : for He knew what was in
man.' — S. John ii. 24, 25.
' Sin is lawlessness ' — i S. John iii. 4. [R.V.]
1 He knew what was in man.' The words describe our Lord
in presence of a fact universally recognized — man's moral un-
satisfactoriness. He looks steadily at man's first offer of service,
at man's first enthusiasm, when ' many believed in His name,'
and He discerns behind it a disqualifying cause ; something which
prevents Him from trusting man as he is, and from committing
to him the great work of His kingdom. He sees sin in man and
all that sin involves of moral failure, of refusal to endure, of
spiritual blindness, of lawless self-assertion, of passion, of selfish-
ness, of self-will. That there is in human nature this disqualify-
ing taint of sin is, we may say, a fact universally recognized. It
is the fact which in slow embittering experience has turned
philanthropists into cynics and saddened the wisest. But to our
Lord it was a fact present from the first. ' He needed not that
any should testify of man.' He reckoned with sin to start with.
Therefore He could not use mankind, as it offered itself, for His
purposes. It needed a fresh start, a vital re-creation, to fit it
for such high ends. ' Except ye be converted and become as
little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.'
* Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of
God.'
Christ recognizes the fact of sin. All men more or less come
1 A sermon preached before the introduction of a Sermon into a
University of Cambridge, at Great volume of Essays. But it was felt i )
St. Mary's Church, on Sunday, March that there was under the circum-
17, 1889, by the Rev. Charles Gore, stances an advantage in producing
and printed in the Guardian, March what was not written in view of the
27. A paragraph of practical exhor- criticisms on Lux Mundi ; (2) that the
tation is omitted at the end. Some sermon was not specially homiletic.
apology is no doubt needed for the
APP. ii.] On the Christian Doctrine of Sin. 527
to recognize it within them and without. But yet there have
been very different ways of explaining it.
For upon the surface it is tempting to interpret the struggle
between good and evil, as we know it so sadly well in our narrow
experience, as representing a universal conflict between opposite
principles. The world is a composite thing, men have supposed,
the result of the antagonism of two Principles, two kingdoms,
two Gods, one good and the other evil ; or they have explained
the world as representing the action of a good God upon an
intractable material, eternal as Himself, which limits His power
and restrains His hand. On either of these cognate theories1
the soul of man is naturally represented as a creation of the
good Principle or a particle of it, embedded in a vile body of
material evil which clogs and hinders and impedes it, which is
the seat of lusts and passions, defiling the purity of the spiritual
element. The spirit is good and the body is evil. This is the
theory upon which so much of Oriental asceticism has proceeded.
The object of such asceticism is to liberate the pure spirit from
the trammels of the corrupting and imprisoning body. That is
most spiritual which is least material. Purification is abstrac-
tion from the body. The spirit is akin to God, and will one day
win its way up to be re-absorbed in God. The body is material
and evil, the seat of sin, and to be dealt with as such. Hence
the remorseless persecution of the body which has been ex-
hibited by the devotees of Gnosticism or Brahmanism— the de-
nunciation of marriage, of animal flesh and wine. Hence, on
the other hand, the wild rebound into licentiousness which has
sometimes characterized Gnostic or Manichaean sects. For, after
all, when asceticism has done its utmost we are still in the body.
If connection with the body is sin, eating and drinking at all is
as sinful as excess ; marriage the same as licence. Outward acts
become indifferent — indifferently bad. This principle explains
the reaction from extreme mortification to extreme licence which
characterizes Orientalism.
Once more, in modern times, from a different point of view,
materialism has again interpreted sin as an essential part of
nature. Ignoring the distinction of what is moral and what is
1 The first is that of the Manichaeans among Orientals and in Europe,
and some Gnostics. The second that Recently John Stuart Mill was dis-
of the Platonists and other Gnostics. posed to embrace the latter theory :
But both the theories represent ten- see Three Essays on Religion, 3rd edition,
dencies very commonly at work both London, 1874, pp. 58, 243.
528 The Religion of the Incarnation. [APP. n.
physical, the materialistic Positivism, for instance, of Mr. Cotter
Morison represents goodness and badness in men as the simple
product of natural forces like goodness and badness in fruits of
the earth, each class of good and bad men being essentially and
inevitably what it shows itself to be. 'Nothing is gained,' he
says, ' by disguising the fact that there is no remedy for a bad
heart and no substitute for a good one V
It is common to all the anti-Christian views of sin that at the
last resort they make sin natural, a part of nature. It is cha-
racteristic of Christ's view of sin — of the Scriptural view of it —
that it makes it unnatural. It is characteristic, again, of the
non-Christian view that it makes the body, the material, the
seat of sin. It is essential to the Christian view to find its seat
and only source in the will 2.
Take the vilest crime, and Christianity assures you that
throughout the transaction, as you may observe it, there is
nothing evil in the natural material which is employed, there is
only the lawless misuse of material which is in itself good. The
worst passions are but the disorderly exercise of feelings and
faculties in themselves good and capable of redemption. Lust is
only love uncontrolled by the will, and. therefore, lawless.
Take the lowest criminal, and Christianity assures you that,
however habituated all his nature to run to evil, if you can once
get his will — what Scripture calls his 'heart' — set right and
given to God, that right direction of the will, the heart, will after
long battle at last carry with it all the nature ; the forces of
grace are set free to act when the obstacle of the will's rebellion
or apathy is removed, and (though it takes ages beyond this
mortal life) at last the whole being will be purified, and what
began in the surrender of the will will take effect in the illumina-
tion of the intellect and the purifying of the affections. Thus it
is that Christianity can represent God as justifying the sinner in
virtue of faith. Faith is the first movement of the will and
heart by which the sinner, from the far-off country of his exile,
seeks his true home, from the depth of his sin, claims Christ as
his own. At this first movement God welcomes him. He
meets him with His acceptance. He claims him as His true
1 The Service of Man, London, 1887, idea of moral responsibility is got rid
p. 295. Cf. p. 293, 'It will perhaps of, the better it will be for society
1»> said that this view does away with and moral education.'
moral responsibility .... To which k See, for instance, Tertullian, elf
the answer is, that the sooner the pacnit. 3 ; Anselm, Cur DeusHomo, L u.
APP. ii.] On the Christian Doctrine of Sin. 529
son, because in that first movement of the moral being God sees
the pledge of all that is to come. He sees the forces let loose
which will bring the final victory. He deals with the sinner by
a Divine anticipation, not as he is, but as he is on the way to
become J. ' His faith is reckoned for righteousness.'
Let us dwell on the Christian view of sin, in its essence, in its
appeal, in its practical justification, in its anthropological results.
(i) In its essence. It is expressed by S. John, 'Sin is law-
lessness :' 17 d^apr/a (<rriv 17 ovo/uin. The two terms are coincident.
For God, and God only, made the world, and there is no other
Creator, no other creation. He made it, and pronounced it very
good in its completeness. The universe, in all its sum of forces
and existences, is good, and of God. The very existence of any-
thing is a pledge of its natural goodness. It exists only because
God created it and sustains it and dwells in it. It must cease to
exist, S. Augustine tells us, if it were simply evil 2. Positive
existence is always, so far, good.
What then is sin in men or in devils ? In one word, lawless-
ness— the violation of nature, the misuse of good by rebellion of
the will. Physical decay, death, dissolution, change, these are of
nature ; sin, on the other hand, is contrary to nature. It is
simply misuse, disorder. It has no positive substance. A sinful
man is not the man as God made him with something else intro-
duced called sin. He is simply the man as God made him,
disordered by ignoring God, by claiming independence of God,
by lawlessness. The same act may constitute either the sin of
murder or the heroism of a soldier fighting in his country's
defence ; either the sin of adultery or Christian marriage, because
in the one case the act is done in accordance with the God-given
law of our being ; in the other case in defiance of it. The
humanity of Christ and the humanity of the greatest criminal
are consubstantial the one with the other. All that the criminal
sins with belongs to Christ's nature ; He has all the faculties that
are used for sin. ' He could sin if He could will to sin,' the
Fathers tell us, ' but God forbid that we should think of His
willing it3.' What is disordered, ungoverned in the criminal is
in Christ perfectly subordinated to a will, itself controlled in
1 Augustine, de Trin. i. 10. 21. malum nisi in aliquobono ; quianon
2 Aug. de mor. Man. ii. 3, ' Ut ab potest esse nisi in aliqua natura ;
essentia deficiant et ad non esse ten- omnis autem natura, in quantum
dant ? quod malum generale esse natura est, bonum est.'
clamat verissima ratio.' Op. imp. c. 3 For references, see p. 290, note.
Jul. i. 1 14, ' Nonenim potest esseullum
M m
530 The Religion of the Incarnation. [APP. n.
loving harmony by the Divine Spirit. If it sounds preposterous
to say that the nature of the criminal is not of itself sinful, to
make the statement reasonable and true we have only to bear in
mind the results of sin which have taken slow effect upon his
nature in the sequence of generations of bad habit. The body
may have become so accustomed to sin, so moulded to sin by
forces within and without as to justify S. Paul calling it a
'body of sin1,' but only in the sense in which our Lord calls
money or mammon 'the mammon of unrighteousness2.' Money,
our Lord meant, has become so accustomed, so to speak, to lend
itself to the purposes of unrighteousness that it requires attention
as alert, wisdom as far-sighted, as that of the unjust steward, in
the children of light, to divert it again to its true uses. The body
in the same way has been so moulded to sin, accustomed to sin,
that it requires the strong hand of an asceticism, rightly motived,
to 'keep it under,' to lead it as a slave, to wrest it to good uses.
It requires the cutting off of the right hand or the plucking out
of the right eye — the disuse for a time, that is, by doing violence
to oneself of what has become so misused, so lawless. The bow
must be bent violently back, if it is to be made straight. But
the end of all this Christian asceticism is the restoration of our
whole nature to its true law. We mortify our bodies only to
offer them at last a living sacrifice of rational service. At last all
the impulses and passions and parts of even the criminal nature
shall be subjugated again to the law of the Spirit. Christ shall
purify the impure and harmonise the disorderly. Thus down
the vista of an endless future Christianity forces us to see the
nature of the criminal, if he will but turn Godwards, only recon-
stituted, not substantially changed, one with Christ in glory.
This is the Christian doctrine of sin, the doctrine that Athanasius
and Augustine and Anselm, the Christian Fathers as a whole,
repeat and reiterate ; that sin has no substance ; that there is
no positively sinful nature ; that sin lies not in things, but in
our relation to things ; that the introduction of sin is simply the
privation of order ; that moral recovery waits for nothing but the
conversion of will 3.
1 Rom. v. 6 : see Godet's Commen- index to S. Augustine s. v. malum.
lary in loc. Clark's Foreign Theol. Libr. So far, however, as each individual
i. p. 416 ; and cf. Col. ii. n, TO aaj^a identifies himself with sin, it becomes
rrjs aapfc6s. ' his nature ' : a false nature, obscur-
2 S. Luke xvi. 9. ing the true, but never annihilating
3 See Origen, C. Cels. iv. 65-66; it ; cf. Tertulliaii, de An. 41, ' Naturae
Athan. C. Gentes, 6-7 ; and cf. the corruptio alia natura est,' etc. ; and
Apr. IL] On the Christian Doctrine of Sin. 531
(2) This is the Christian doctrine, and its appeal is to moral
experience. Looking at the world from the point of view of
physical science, it may appear as if goodness and badness were
like good and bad fruit ; but to suppose this is to leave out of
sight the whole witness of moral experience. It was not
Christian belief but inextinguishable consciousness that made
Byron cry —
' Our life is a false nature — 'tis not in
The harmony of things.'
Or Shelley : —
'The universe
In Nature's silent eloquence declares
That all fulfil the works of love and joy,
All but the outcast man1.'
In proportion as the moral consciousness is keen and active, in
that proportion men know that sin is not nature, but its viola-
tion ; that they are not what they are meant to be in sinning ;
that sin has no analogy in the failures of nature, because it is
what they are not, avoidable and morally wrong ; that it violates
what they fulfil, the law of the world. Natural failure is part of
the world's fruitfulness. The seeds that fail supply material for
the seeds that grow. Moral failure — sin, that is, as distinguished
from mere imperfection — is never fruitful. Sins are always the
' unfruitful works of darkness2.'
(3) And the justification of this Christian theory lies in its
success. The moral triumphs of the Church depend upon it.
Mr. Herbert Spencer constantly assures us that the fundamental
postulates of human experience are assumptions or hypotheses
at the bottom, which are continuously verified and justified by
the correspondence of the results reached. That is true of the
Christian postulate of sin. The hypothesis that sin is not nature,
but lack of will, is verified by the victory which follows action
upon it. 'According to thy faith be it done to thee ' — that
is Christ's challenge. Man after man sick of moral paralysis
lies at Christ's feet explaining why he cannot get up. ' Take
up thy bed and walk,' 'According to thy faith be it unto thee,'
is the word of Christ. Claim for your own the morally best.
Act on Christ's promise as if it were true and you find it is.
This is faith — to act on what transcends experience, to act on
Bernard, in Cant. Serin. 82. 2, — ad- 159.
mirable passages. 2 Cf. in explanation of this, the
J See in Mozley, Lectures, etc., x. p. Preface, p. xviii.
M m 2
532 The Religion of the Incarnation. [APP. n.
what you do not feel possible, to act in faith on a promised
strength, and to find it really given only in the using. Faith
involves the recognition of our own weakness, the surrender of
our own independence into the hands of God ; it gains as its
reward the promised help ; it sets free the ' virtue which goes
out' of Christ. Eeason can only analyse and rationalise what
it already experiences. Faith can do what reason, what under-
standing, at any rate, cannot do — it can yield life up to higher
forces than it has yet known. Only when the forces have be-
come in experience thoroughly familiar can they be subjected
to the analysis of reason. Credo ut intelligam. The justification
of the Christian view of sin as something which is not nature,
but failure or disorder of will — something therefore which faith,
that is the right direction and use of will, can overcome, or put
in the way to be overcome — the justification of this view is,
I say, to be found in experience. Act against sin, in Christ's
name, as if you had strength, and you will find you have.
Expect and you receive. It finds its justification not in the
recovery of our own lives only, but in that of others. The
Christian lifts others by believing in them. He sees in each
the subject of redemption. Behind heaps of sin, ingrained
habits of sin, he sees a man's true self, true nature, as God made
it and intended it to grow, and to this he appeals. ' According
to thy faith be it unto thee ' means not only ' You can be saved,
if you believe ; ' it means also ' You can save others ' — save them
by believing in them and in God, save them, not according to
your own foolish desires, but in accordance with God's intention
for them, with the original law of their being. The best modern
novel literature is full of this truth. What are the moral re-
coveries of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, and of Sidney Carton
in the Tale of Two Cities, and of the selfish old peer in the child
story of the Little Lord Fauntleroy, but so many instances of the
redemptive power of Christian love because it ' believeth all
things, hopeth all things,' believes past belief, hopes beyond
hope. The justification of the Christian view of sin lies, then,
in its success ; partly in the results it actually produces, partly
in the larger promise which it opens out beyond the horizon of
what we see. ' There is no remedy for a bad character and no
substitute for a good one' — that is the only outcome of the
physical view of sin. 'According to thy faith, be it unto
thee ' — that is the Christian answer ; there is for thyself no
limit to what thou mayest become, on the lines, that is to say,
APP. ii.] On the Christian Doctrine of Sin. 533
not of thine own ambition, but of God's purpose, except what thou
settest by thine own want of faith, thine own failure of moral
appetite ; there is in the case of others no limit to what thou
mayest help them to become, on the lines, once again, of their
fundamental nature — except the limits of their faith and thine.
(4) This Christian view of sin determines in part its whole an-
thropology. What sin is in us, and now, and in recorded history,
sin is also in the whole of humanity. Sin actual is of a piece
with sin historical, with sin original. Each man does not start
afresh. He inherits the moral conditions from which his life
starts. I am aware that a modern school of biologists, headed
by Professor Weissmann, is modifying the current doctrine of
heredity so far as to deny that acquired character can be trans-
mitted, so far as to deny that the acts or habits of men can
physically modify the organisation of their descendants. It is
not yet clear that this view, in its extreme form, is at all likely
to gain acceptance. But I suppose Christianity can await the
result with patience. It may not be in any region to which
scientific analysis or investigation can penetrate, but at least in
the inner region of man's personality Christianity must main-
tain that the individual does not start afresh. He starts the
subject of sinful tendencies which he did not originate, but
which those who went before him did, if not originate, at least
let loose from restraint, and so make sinful. Sin is in the race
as well as in the individual ; stayed more or less by moral effort
and resistance here ; let loose by self-indulgence or luxury there :
in varying force and alterable sway therefore, but everywhere
more or less present, everywhere making a man conscious not
merely of imperfection, but of inward taint, everywhere needing
re-creation, recoveiy, redemption. And everywhere sin is of a
piece. My sins are only fresh specimens of what has been going
on all along. They work just the same result upon humanity
as a whole as the sins of my predecessors, as the first sin : I am
driven logically as well as theologically to extend my theory of
sin and to generalise it beyond present experience. Sin, not in
the individual, as I know him merely, but in the whole of
humanity from the first, has been always rebellion, not nature.
At the beginning of human life, properly so called, when first
a being truly called a man woke up to consciousness of his
relation to God, to nature, to himself, he did not find sin part
of hi« being ; he might have obeyed the movement of the
Spirit of God and realised his true sonship by keeping his
534 The Religion of the Incarnation. [APP. n.
animal nature under the control of the spirit : so he would have
fulfilled the law of his destined manhood. Sin at the origin
of our human life, as through all its history, was treason to our
higher capacity, which made man the slave of the flesh. The
'slave of the flesh,' because he was not meant to be an animal :
he was meant to be a spiritual being. And it was the capacity
for the higher life which turned to sin his choice of a lower;
which tinged it with the colour of ' remorse, ' with the bitterness
of ' self-contempt V
As the essential Christian doctrine of sin finds the guarantee
of its permanence in the moral consciousness, so it would not
appear to involve any conflict with the disclosures of science.
Yet it has been sufficiently distorted in statement for a conflict
to have arisen. And the points at issue are briefly three.
(a) Broadly, it is said, the Christian religion represents man
as starting in a state of perfection and gradually degrading.
Science, with all the evidences on its side, represents man as
starting in a state of savagery and gradually rising.
This is a most delusive antithesis. It is certainly true that
progress has not been uniform. There is such a thing as moral
deterioration. A history of the progress of sin from will to
intellect, from intellect to heart, till it penetrates the whole
nature and plunges it into the lowest depths of denaturalisation
represents what has been a fact both in the individual and in
society. Such a record of one element in human experience
S. Paul gives us in Romans i2. Its truth cannot be denied.
But so far is this from representing the Christian view of
human history as a whole that, on the contrary, the Scriptures
stand alone among ancient literatures in presenting the idea of
gradual progress, gradual education, movement onwards to a
climax. The Bible is the book of development. 'God Who
in many parts and many manners spoke of old time ....
1 There is a fundamental mistake If he tries to act as a mere animal he
in the popular excuse for sensual becomes sinful. The evidence of this
sin — that it is ' natural.' The mistake lies in the fact that while the physical
lies in the idea that man's animal nature of animals contains within
and spiritual natures are separable, itself the check on sensual indul-
that he can live as pure animal in gence, the check in man's case lies
one part of his life, and pure spirit in in his spiritual faculties. You can
another. But as a fact man's life is have a ' dissipated ' man, i. e. a man
only lived ' according to nature,' whose bodily impulses are uncon-
where every part of it is lived ' in trolled by will or spirit ; you cannot
flesh and in spirit ' : the spiritual have a ' dissipated ' animal,
motive must control the bodily organ. 3 It is not intended as a complete
Only so are his acts really human. account, cf. Kom. ii. 14-15.
APP. ii.] On the Christian Doctrine of Sin. 535
hath in the end of these days spoken by His Son ; ' and still
we 'move on in the realisation and appropriation of all that is
revealed and given in Christ 'till we all come .... unto the
perfect man.' Nor is it the least true to say that this develop-
ment is only the attempt to regain the platform on which man was
first placed. The idea of the first man as a being of developed
intellectual and spiritual capacity, perfect in all the range of his
faculties — the idea which would admit of our saying with Eobert
South that 'an Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and
Athens but the rudiments of Paradise ' — may be, indeed has been,
found in theologians, it may have passed into the imagination of
the English nation as part of the debt, theologically very largely
a debt of evil, which we owe to the great poem of Milton ; but it
is not Scriptural, it is not Christian theology at its best 1. All the
fabric of civilisation the Bible represents as being gradually built
up, whether by Jabal, ' who was the father of such as dwell in
tents and have cattle/ or by Jubal, ' who was the father of all such
as handle the harp and organ,' or by Tubal Cain, 'who was the
instructor of every artificer of brass and iron.' There is no im-
pression given us that any of the arts or the knowledge of
civilisation existed before. All that we are led to believe is that
the historical development of man has not been the development
simply as God meant it. It has been tainted through its whole
fabric by an element of moral disorder, of human wilfulness.
We cannot draw a picture of how human nature was intended to
fight the battle of progress. We cannot relate the state of the
savage to the intention of God, any more than we can relate the
present state of our great cities to that intention 2. All we can
say is that the state of things as they were in days of savagery,
or as they are in days of civilisation, represents a parody of the
Divine intention for the childhood and manhood of the race.
Man was made to grow by gradual effort in range and exercise of
every faculty of his being. But all this gradual growth might
have been conditioned by a conscious fellowship with God, which
would have introduced into it an element of nobility and stability
which in fact it has lacked. For the historical development of
1 In answer to the question whether Iren. .c. haer. iv. 38.
Adam was formed perfect or imperfect 2 But we can recognize that before
[rtAetos fi dreAjjs], Clement replies: civilisation had developed the checks
' They shall learn from us that he was which society supplies against abrupt
not perfect [i. e. complete in develop- deterioration, collapse into savagery
ment, TtA.€<os] in respect of his creation, would have been much more rapid
but in a fit condition to receive virtue.' than it can be in a more developed
Clem. Alex. Strom, vi. 12. 96. Cp. state.
536 The Religion of the Incarnation. [APP. n.
man has been a development with God only too often left out,
the development under conditions of merely physical laws of a
being meant to be spiritual *.
(6) 'But no,' the biologist rejoins; 'you will not get off thus
easily. Christianity regards even so absolutely natural a fact as
death, a fact so inextricably interwoven into the structural
growth of the world, as a mere consequence of sin. Christianity
is refuted by every evidence of death being a law of physical
nature.' So far from this being true, it is the case that the early
Christian writers, S. Augustine as well as S. Athanasius,
emphasise the truth that death is the law of physical nature ; that
when man died he was undergoing what belonged to his animal
nature. 'Paul, 'says Augustine, 'describes man's body as dead,
not as mortal, because of sin. Mortal it was by nature, because,
as being animal, it was subject to death2.' In being left to
death, Athanasius teaches, man was only left to the law of his
physical being3. What, in fact, the Christian teachers hold is
not that death, but death as it has been known among men, is
the penalty of sin, because man's spiritual or supernatural life
would have blunted the forces of corruption and lifted him into
a higher immortal state. Man would not have died because he
would have been spiritual rather than animal. And even here,
if we are asked what this means, we must hesitate in our answer.
If sin is said to have brought human death, Christ is said to have
abolished it. ' This is the bread which cometh down from heaven
that a man may eat thereof and not die.' 'If any man eat of
this bread he shall live for ever.' 'Whosoever liveth and be-
lieveth on Me shall never die.' 'Christ Jesus .... abolished
death.' Sin, we may suppose, only introduced death in the sense
in which Christ abolished it4. Christ has not abolished the
physical transition, but it ceases to be what death implies : —
1 Cf. Aubrey Moore's Evolution and tual advance which man has made,
Christianity (Oxford House Papers), he is always and everywhere the
PP- 32-3- 'The change which took worse for the Fall. However great
place at the Fall was a change in the his development has been, it is still
moral region ; but it could not be a retarded development, a develop-
without its effect elsewhere. Even ment slower than it need have been,
the knowledge of nature becomes con- less regular and less sure than God
fused, without the governing truth of meant it to be.'
the relation of man to God. The " Aug. De gen. ad litt, vi. 36, ' Mor-
evolution which should have been talis erat conditione corporis ani-
the harmonious development of the malis.'
whole man, is checked and impeded 3 Athan. de Incarn. 4.
in one part, and that the highest part * Cf. Westcott's Ep. to the Hebrews,
of his nature. And therefore, in p. 54 (on Hebr. ii. 16).
spite of all the physical and intellec-
APP. IL] On the Christian Doctrine of Sin. 537
' Hencefoiih is death
But the gate of life immortal.'
Death as it has come upon sinful man has been the sad ending of
hopes, the rending of his heart-strings, the collapse of his plans,
the overshadowing fear, the horrible gulf, the black destruction.
In all that makes it death, it has been the result of sin, of the
misdirection of his aims and hopes. Had man not sinned there
might, indeed, have been a passage from one state to another,
a physical dissolution, a moral victory— but it would not have
been what men have known as 'death.'
If this be the right way of regarding the matter, as it is cer-
tainly permissible, we shall be able to echo in all its breadth
Athanasius's teaching, that sin did not directly alter tilings, but
only our attitude towards them '.
(c) But, once again, and for the last time, the opponent objects :
' All this theory of original sin is built simply on the supposition
that the early chapters of Genesis represent literal history. It falls
to the ground if they are myth and not history.' Once again, this
is not at all the case. The Christian doctrine of sin finds its
chief authorisation in Christ's attitude towards it. Sin (if Christ's
witness is true) is not nature; it does not represent God's
intention, but something that has baffled for a time God's in-
tention, something that Christ is come to conquer. Moreover,
this doctrine of sin is not a mere dogma enunciated on external
authority; it finds its verification in experience. The moral
experience of Christendom confirms it, and this experience of
eighteen centuries reflects itself inevitably on the whole of human
life. What interprets sin within this area interprets it through
the whole history. With this authority of Christ, verified in the
Christian experience, as his firm foundation, the Christian does
not hesitate to see in the early chapters of Genesis the action of
the inspiring Spirit. It was only the inspiring Spirit Which
could assure man that the whole universe was of God's making
and very good, that the state in which he found himself repre-
sented not his nature, as God meant it to be, but the result of his
rebellion, the result, moreover, which God meant to counter-
work, nay, which in gradual process He was counter-working.
In all the account then of the creation, of the nature of man,
1 Athan. C. Gentes 7 ; cf. Aug. on of sin ; but we may understand that
Gen. ni. 18 (De Gen. ad Utt. iii. 18, 28), they then first began to be obstacles to
where it is said that it is difficult to man in the cultivation of the ground •
suppose that ' thorns and thistles ' ' spinas et tribulos pariet tibi.'
were first produced on the occasion
N n
538 The Religion of the Incarnation. [APP. n.
of the origin of sin, the Christian sees an action of the inspiring
Spirit. He sees it all the more when he compares the record of
Genesis with those which are parallel to it in other races. But
if an Irenseus, a Clement, an Athanasius, an Anselm could treat
the record or part of it as rather allegorical than historical, we
can use the same liberty. This is not our present subject. All I
want to make clear is that the Christian doctrine of sin rests on
a far broader and far surer foundation than the belief that the
early chapters of Genesis belong to one form or stage of inspired
literature rather than to another. It rests on the strong founda-
tion of the authority of our Lord, accepted and verified by man's
moral consciousness.
,230.308 88406
G660
Gore, Charles
230.369 88406
G660
Gore, Charles
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