UBRARY
ST. MARY'S COLLE06
THE NEW THEOLOGY
AND
THE OLD RELIGION
THE NEW THEOLOGY
AND
THE OLD RELIGION
BEING EIGHT LECTURES, TOGETHER WITH FIVE
SERMONS
o
BISHOP OF BIRMINGHAM
BY CHARLES GORE, -D.D., D.C.L.
BISH
.308
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
91792
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1907
PRINTED BY
MAXELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
PREFACE
THIS volume consists mainly of the sub-
stance of lectures delivered in the Cathedral
of Birmingham at the midday services in
Lent of this year. The lectures were de-
livered only from notes, and were not com-
pletely reported. They have therefore been
written entirely afresh, with amplification
and rearrangement. They are now in
eight, instead of six, portions. But I have
still called them lectures, as they retain the
form and manner of lectures.
I have added some sermons preached on
other occasions. This involves in the case
of the first three sermons some repetition,
which I hope will be forgiven, as I thought
that the point of view of each of the ser-
mons was sufficiently different from that of
the lectures to justify its preservation ;
and they amplify and expand points of
importance.
VI PREFACE
I do not endeavour in these lectures or
sermons to discuss the great psychological
or metaphysical questions which occasion-
ally come near to the surface : e.g. the
psychological question of the manner in
which we are to suppose that the human
subject, the prophet or the common man,
becomes conscious of a divine communica-
tion ; or the metaphysical question of the
legitimacy of restating the substance of such
communications, believed to be divine, as
intellectual propositions, valid for the whole
area of human knowledge. But I am sure
that God, the Father of spirits, has really
conveyed true and coherent impressions of
Himself to the human spirit, through the
medium of the common conscience and of
specially susceptible individuals, called pro-
phets, who have been the enlighteners of
the common conscience ; and I am sure that
these impressions of God legitimately appear
in the intelligence of men as convictions of
truth : and therefore are legitimately ex-
pressed as propositions for the intellect which
have an equal claim to express reality with
propositions based upon the observation of
nature.
PREFACE Vll
I am sure also that the self-disclosure of
God which reached its culmination in Jesus
Christ is final, and that by the very neces-
sity of the case. That is to say, if Jesus
Christ is God incarnate, no fuller disclosure
of God in terms of manhood than is given
in His person is conceivable or possible. I
believe, therefore, that we need to hold fast
the distinction between the revelation as
once given through the prophets and in
Jesus Christ, and the dogma which protects
this revelation, or the theology which
elaborates and seeks to harmonize it with
the whole of knowledge. My object in
these lectures is mainly to make plain,
as against the assumptions of the New
Theology, the substance of the original
revelation as it touches the nature of God,
of sin, of Christ, &c.
I think the movement called the New
Theology is a highly important movement.
Mr. Campbell has fastened upon certain
tendencies of thought which have been long
at work amongst us, and brought them for-
ward into the arena of common and popular
discussion. I have tried to follow him into
this arena, and to show the fundamental
Vlll PREFACE
incongruity of his leading ideas with the
original Christian revelation, and the essen-
tial superiority of the ideas which the Chris-
tian revelation really contains.
C. BIRMINGHAM :
ST. LUKE'S DAY, 1907.
CONTENTS
LECTURES
PAGB
I. THE NEW THEOLOGY .... I
II. THE OLD RELIGION . . . . IQ
III. THE IMMANENCE OF GOD ... 42
IV. THE IDEA OF SIN 60
V. THE MEANING OF CHRIST'S DIVINITY 84
VI. MIRACLES IO9
VII. THE ATONEMENT AND THE INSPIRA-
TION OF SCRIPTURE . . .131
VIII. THE NEW THEOLOGY AND THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND . . .150
X CONTENTS
SERMONS
PAGE
I. THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE . . l8l
II. THE PERMANENT CREED . . . 2OS
III. THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN . 231
IV. SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS OF CHRIS-
TIANITY 251
V. THE CHURCH AND THE POOR . . 274
APPENDIX
REPORT ON THE MORAL WITNESS OF THE
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS . 297
LECTURES
LECTURE I
THE NEW THEOLOGY
THERE is no doubt that we are passing
through a period of unsettlement in reli-
gious beliefs. Some men are unsettled
because they have seriously tried to ' think
for themselves ' : that is, to grapple with
fundamental religious problems, philosophi-
cal or critical such problems as
Hover on the bounds of mortal ken,
And have perplexed, and will unto the end
Perplex the brains of men
such problems, I mean, as that of the
compatibility of human freedom with uni-
versal law or the divine foreknowledge. A
person of ordinary intelligence and ordinary
occupation can receive a creed, and test
its w r orking value in experience, and
satisfy himself, more or less fully, on its
historical grounds, and distinguish well
enough between what is reasonable and
i
2 THE NEW THEOLOGY
what is superstitious ; but it is very few
of us who can give ourselves up to the
impartial speculative consideration of ulti-
mate and fundamental problems in meta-
physics or in criticism with any other
result but mental bewilderment. The diffi-
culty of the subjects in themselves and the
variety of the opinions entertained upon
them by competent leaders of thought are
equally causes of this bewilderment.
It is not more than the plain truth to say
that, in the sense of really obtaining an
independent opinion worth having on the
fundamental questions of religion, very
few of us are qualified, by capacity or
training, to ' think for ourselves/
But also very few seriously attempt it.
And an Englishman who has possession of a
conviction which he thinks he holds on solid
practical grounds a good working creed
is not very easily disturbed by speculative
doubts. He is not easily ' afraid of any
evil tidings/ But there are a great many
people whose convictions on religious sub-
jects are very far from solid. They would
confess that they have very little religious
experience, or perhaps spiritual sensibility.
They do not read more on such subjects
THE NEW THEOLOGY 3
than a newspaper review or a magazine
article. Thus, when they hear of every
traditional belief being questioned by men
of apparent learning and integrity, their
convictions, such as they were, even on
quite fundamental subjects, are quite under-
mined. How shall they decide where
learned men disagree ?
Again, there are others and those a
great number who are disgusted by the un-
worthiness of the Christianity which they
see around them. They are alienated by
the divisions among us Christians, by our
bitterness or pettiness, or by the worldliness
of orthodox believers. The Christian
churches seem to them to make no serious
struggle against the forces which enslave
masses of men in social and moral degrada-
tion, and to exhibit no real likeness of Jesus
of Nazareth. A great many men, that
is to say, disbelieve in current Christianity
because they desire something more like
Jesus Christ.
And there are others who hold their reli-
gious convictions piously and fervently, and
who yet add to the prevailing scepticism :
for they are distressed because questions
are even raised about subjects of such
4 THE NEW THEOLOGY
sanctity. They resent altogether the atmo-
sphere of free inquiry, and by their nervous-
ness and apparent distrust of the power
of truth to prevail in the open field, the} 7
do more than they suspect to propagate
the opinion that the Christian religion is
an old-fashioned superstition which cannot
bear investigation.
In such an age of religious unsettlement
it is as well to remember that, after all, it
is to ages of such mental ferment as ours,
and not to ages of mental stagnation, that
we owe our great debts of gratitude for
the works of religious construction. It was
from an age of universal intellectual fer-
ment and unsettlement that there emerged
the solid structure of the catholic creeds ;
it was in an atmosphere of serious un-
settlement that Butler and others in the
eighteenth century relaid the intellectual
foundation on which Wesley and Simeon
and Pusey and Newman built their works
of spiritual recovery. If religion is ' the
pearl of great price ' we must not expect to
win it cheaply, and intellectual trouble is
no more to be resented than pain of body.
The reason of contemporary unsettle-
ment is not hard to find. Within the last
THE NEW THEOLOGY 5
century our ordinary intellectual categories
that means those large headings under
which we think of things,, those broad
assumptions which we carry into life to
enable us to hold together all our wide
and manifold experience those intellectual
categories have been changed. For in-
stance, the dominance of the conception
of evolution the conception, that is, of the
universe with all its forms of life and all
its mode of thought as being in a ceaseless
process of change and the opening out
of the almost infinite vistas of time in the
process of the world's development ; and
more recently the breaking up of the idea
of solid matter into something elusive
and unimaginable such new modes of
thought have had a profound effect upon
the human imagination, accustomed till
quite recently to regard the various kinds
of things as stable and fixed, created a few
thousand years ago to be what they have
been ever since. The change wrought in the
imaginations of men is as great as when they
first found out, three centuries ago, that this
world was not the centre of the universe,
that there was no heaven over our heads
and no hell under our feet. No one, in fact,
6 THE NEW THEOLOGY
can appreciate in any measure the change
in our conceptions of the physical universe
since Butler's day, since the day which
saw the rise of the Evangelical or even of
the Tractarian movement, without feeling
that a convulsion in the religious world
also must have taken place ; that it could
hardly have been possible for a religion
associated as ours was with the old ideas
of nature, to be detached from these and
readjusted to the new science without a
great deal of mental disturbance. And the
changes which have taken place in historical
criticism since, shall I say, Hume wrote
his History of England have hardly been
less considerable than the change in physical
science. I say, then, that a religion accus-
tomed to the old intellectual world could
not learn to be at home in the new without
very deep and wide religious unsettlement.
The task which we have got to accomplish
is that of going back upon our foundations,
of distinguishing what is essential and
permanent and really catholic in our religion
from what belongs only to some more or
less temporary phase of thought, or arrange-
ment of society, or some more or less local
association of belief and circumstance.
THE NEW THEOLOGY 7
These really essential and permanent and
catholic principles and institutions of the
Christian faith have to be detached from
the decaying order, or the mode of thought
which has become antiquated, and set to
work afresh to prove their vitality in the
new order, and to show their capacity to
make a new home for themselves in a
modern world of thought and life.
In doing this there are two classes of
persons who have to be resisted the one
conservative and the other revolutionary.
There are those who seem to think that
in dangerous days such as these our only
course is to hold fast, with an even blind
adhesion, to our religion as it was handed
down to us, unrevised and uncriticized.
They meet any demand for an abandonment
of an old-fashioned view, not by asking
whether the view was essential to our faith,
but by an appeal to us ' not to puzzle the
minds of the young/ or by the assertion
that what was good enough for their
fathers is good enough for them. To
allow mistakes in current teaching is stig-
matized as ' dangerous ' ; concession is
declared to be only a prelude to surrender,
and parleying to savour of treason.
8 THE NEW THEOLOGY
On the other hand, you have the people
who seem to think that every clever new
criticism is destined to triumph over an
established position. They forget that
the revolutionists of history are always
disappointed ; that counter reformations
follow reformations ; that old ideas have
a wonderfully recuperative power. They
forget also the very recent history of
biblical criticism. Let us listen to Dr.
Harnack's recent observations in his work
Luke the Physician. 1
This book must be subjected to a separate and
stringent examination so the critics demand ; but
this examination, so they say, is already completed,
and has led to the certain conclusion that tradition
is here in the wrong the Acts cannot have been
composed by a companion and fellow-worker of
St. Paul. . . . The indefensibility of the tradition
is regarded as being so clearly established that nowa-
days it is thought scarcely worth while to prove this
indefensibility afresh, or even to notice the arguments
of conservative opponents. Indeed, it seems that
there exists a disposition to ignore the fact that such
arguments still exist. Julicher feels compelled to
regard the ascription of the book to St. Luke as a
' romantic ideal/ So quickly does criticism forget
1 Luke the Physician (Engl. trans., Williams &
Norgate, 1907), pp. 6 f.
THE NEW THEOLOGY 9
its true function, with such bigoted obstinacy does
it cling to its hypotheses.
But in spite of this consensus of ' critical *
authority, Harnack, whom no one can
accuse of conservative prejudices, surveys
the evidence, and pronounces without hesi-
tation in favour of St. Luke's authorship of
the whole book of the Acts, as well as of
the third Gospel. And no doubt he repre-
sents the tendency of critical investigation,
at least in England. To be conservative
in criticism, then, is not always to be wrong.
What we need is frankness of mind. In
any settled period the permanent faith
becomes encrusted with more or less
temporary elements, the gold becomes
mixed with dross ; and when a turn of the
wheel of thought takes place we must have
the intellectual courage to seek to dissoci-
ate the permanent from the impermanent,
to draw distinctions between essential and
accidental, to make concessions and to
seek readjustment.
Is, then, the settlement proposed by ' the
New Theology ' the right one ? The New
Theology is a convenient name for a
current mode of thought which in its
teaching about God lays the greatest stress
IO THE NEW THEOLOGY
upon what is called the ' divine imma-
nence ' in nature and man, which regards
God, that is, not as the sovereign lord
and judge, but as the universal Spirit
manifesting Himself in all things and all
men ; which accepts most unreservedly the
idea of development in nature and human
history ; which assimilates Christ to other
men as being essentially the same, and only
the same, in nature ; which proposes a less
grave estimate of sin ; which disparages or
repudiates miracles in God's revelation of
Himself. I might point to many writers
as more or less representing this school ;
I must make special reference to its most
popular author, the Rev. R. J. Campbell. 1
But you will find no better exponent of this
tendency than Sir Oliver Lodge, and no
manual which exhibits it in so favourable
a light as his catechism The Substance of
Faith allied with Science?
The New Theology is one result of the
breakdown of the old materialism, and
the kind of agnosticism represented by
Mr. Herbert Spencer. For we are living in
a period of reaction from ' naturalism ' of all
1 The New Theology (Chapman & Hall, 1907).
8 Published by Methuen.
THE NEW THEOLOGY II
kinds. Science, it is now perceived that is,
the investigation of the facts, sequences, and
laws observable in nature is not complete
in itself, nor is it man's only method of
arriving at truth. It is not complete in
itself, for it starts from assumptions. It
assumes the universal order, with all its
forces at work, of the origin of which it can
give no account. And it is not our only
method for arriving at truth. Account
must be taken of other faculties : the
consciousness of self, the conscience of
right and wrong, the will, the heart, the
imagination, the spiritual faculties of man.
These too bear a valid testimony. They
are real means of access to reality. Thus
experimental science, by all its methods
of inquiry, may discern neither God, nor
freedom, nor immortality ; but they may
be realities, credible or certain, nevertheless.
It is enough that the deliberate and proved
verdicts of science should be accepted with
the reverence due to them, and given their
lofty place in the whole of human know-
ledge and belief.
But it is with the whole of human ex-
perience and knowledge and belief, and
not only with the conclusions of science,
12 THE NEW THEOLOGY
that philosophy and religion in different
ways are concerned. And the free and
comprehensive thought of philosophy ap-
pears in our day to be reverting very
generally to a spiritual interpretation of
the universe. This I believe to be the case
both in Europe and America. 1 In France
there is, I am informed, a noticeable revival
of the intellectual authority of Pascal, which
would mean a recognition of the strict
limitation of the sphere of science, properly
so called, and an open door for reasonable
faith. What is plain to see is that there
has in quite recent years been a remarkable
group of distinguished men of letters in
France Brunetiere, Huysmans, Bourget,
Coppee, Verlaine, Rette who have been
converted, and have proclaimed their con-
version, from extreme hostility to religion,
to enthusiastic and devoted membership
in the catholic church. This has arrested
the interest of Europe. 2 In England the
1 See G. Villa, Idealismo moderno (Turin, 1905), pp.
425 ff., and A. B. D. Alexander's History of Philosophy
(Maclehose, 1907), pp. 583-8.
2 ' Les futurs historiens de notre litterature a la fin
du xix. siecle seront forces de reconnaitre, par exemple,
que Brunetiere, le grand critique, le puissant dialecticien,
que Bourget, le penetrant romancier, 1'excellent peintre
THE NEW THEOLOGY 13
return to faith of the distinguished biologist
George Romanes on grounds which received
an incomplete but very interesting statement
in his fragmentary Thoughts on Religion^ has
been followed more recently by a simi-
lar return described by Mr. George Palmer,
in his Agnostic's Progress. 1 And I fancy
that the progress and recovery described
in these books is typical of a very general
tendency, so far at least as the acceptance
of a spiritual view of the world is concerned.
Sir Oliver Lodge's Substance of Faith allied
with Science is not of course in agreement
with the Apostles' Creed on all points, and
I am proposing to subject its phrases in
certain respects to criticism. Nor, again,
would its author claim to have any mandate
to speak for scientific men as a whole.
But it is a representative work. And we are
entitled to call out into clear light the
fact that a distinguished representative of
science can produce, as ' consistent with the
de la societe moderne, que Huysmans, le rare et precieux
artiste en style, que Verlaine, le poete delicieusement
naif, malgre ses egarements, furent des catholiques
et des catholiques qui, tous, sont revenus a la foi apres
1'avoir longtemps oubliee ou perdue ' (Francois Coppce,
in his preface to Adolphe Rette's Du Diable a Dieu).
1 Published by Longmans.
14 THE NEW THEOLOGY
teachings of science in its widest sense, as
well as with those of literature and philo-
sophy/ l so unhesitating a proclamation
of a spiritual creed, such strong affirmations
of God and immortality and freedom
and the value of prayer, and the real com-
munion of man with other spiritual beings
whom he cannot see but must believe to
exist. As Sir Oliver has allied himself with
the New Theology, and as I have the
intention of criticizing him, it is a pleasure
first of all to express admiration for the
beauty of temper, the reverence of spirit,
and the careful constructive skill of ex-
pression, which mark his work. And I
am venturing, at this point, to quote at
length his ' creed/ his definition of moral
freedom, and his plea for a right kind of
agnosticism in place of a wrong.
I believe in one infinite and eternal Being, a
guiding and loving Father, in whom all things consist.
I believe that the Divine Nature is specially re-
vealed to man through Jesus Christ our Lord, who
lived and taught and suffered in Palestine 1900 years
ago, and has since been worshipped by the Christian
Church as the immortal Son of God, the Saviour of
the world.
I believe that the Holy Spirit is ever ready to
1 The Substance of Faith allied with Sceince, p. 5.
THE NEW THEOLOGY 15
help us along the way towards goodness and truth ;
that prayer is a means of communion between man
and God ; and that it is our privilege, through
faithful service, to enter into the life eternal, the
communion of saints, and the peace of God. 1
For our present purpose we regard the sense of
conscience [in man] as the most important and
highest characteristic of all, the sense of responsi-
bility, the power of self-determination, the building up
of character, so that ultimately it becomes impossible
to be actuated by unworthy motives. Our actions
are now controlled not by external impulses only,
but largely by our own characters and wills. The
man who is the creature of impulse, or the slave of
his passions, cannot be said to be his own master,
or to be really free : he drifts hither and thither
according to the caprice or the temptation of the
moment ; he is untrustworthy, and without solidity
or dignity of character. The free man is he who can
control himself, who does not obey every idea as it
occurs to him, but weighs and determines for himself,
and is not at the mercy of external influences. This
is the real meaning of choice and free will. It does
not mean that actions are capricious and undeter-
mined ; but that they are determined by nothing
less than the totality of things. They are not deter-
mined by the external world alone, o that they can
be calculated and predicted from outside ; they are
determined by self and the external world together.
A free man is the master of his motives, and selects
that motive which he wills to obey. 2
1 ibid., p. 96. 2 ibid., p 27.
16 THE NEW THEOLOGY
We, insignificant creatures, with senses only just
open to the portentous meaning of the starry sky,
presume some of us to deny the existence of
higher powers and higher knowledge than our own.
We are accustomed to be careful as to what we assert ;
we are liable to be unscrupulous as to what we deny.
It is possible to find people who, knowing nothing
or next to nothing of the universe, are prepared to
limit existence to that of which they have had ex-
perience, and to measure the cosmos in terms of their
own understanding. Their confidence in themselves,
their shut minds and self-satisfied hearts, are things
to marvel at. The fact is that no glimmer of a con-
ception of the real magnitude and complexity of
existence can ever have illuminated their cosmic
view. 1
The position represented by the New
Theology is of course to be differently
estimated when it is proposed to us, or as it
is proposed to us in these extracts, from the
side of science, and when it is advocated,
in other terms, by ministers of the catholic
creed, or of Nonconformist bodies who
have been identified with the same
fundamental belief. In these latter cases
it represents an abandonment of specific
beliefs which it will be the business of these
pages to show to be really integral to the
1 The Substance of Faith, etc., p. 63.
THE NEW THEOLOGY 17
creed of Christendom. In these cases, I
say, it represents abandonment, and not pro-
gress. But, viewed as an advance from the
side of science, I desire at starting to give
the warmest welcome to so spiritual a creed.
The author of The Substance of Faith,
and those who think with him, are not infre-
quently quoted as authorities in virtue of
what they doubt or deny or are supposed
to doubt or deny whether it is the fall of
man, or the real occurrence of miracles, or
the deity of Christ. To those who are dis-
posed thus to quote them, I would suggest
this consideration.
The belief of most of us must be largely
influenced by authority. The authority
which ought to make the greatest and most
reasonable impression upon our minds is
the corporate and age-long authority of the
witnessing church. That represents the
widest and largest spiritual experience.
And, short of that, we must reasonably be
influenced by the authority of any indi-
vidual whose learning and character com-
mend his judgement as trustworthy. But
it is surely unworthy to defer to the autho-
rity of any one for what he denies, or is sup-
posed to deny, and to refuse it for what he
2
IcS THE NEW THEOLOGY
maintains. A man, in fact, is much more
likely to be mistaken in what he denies than
in what he affirms. What he affirms is what
he realizes. What he denies may be only
what he fails to realize.
To any doubter, then, whom I can
reach who is supposed to refer for his doubts
to the authority of the New Theology, I
would say first of all : You are rejecting
what these men reject, but are you be-
lieving what they believe ? After all, if
you hold and practise the creed which has
just been quoted, you will not be indeed
in the full stream of the church's belief, but
you will at least be within sight of the city
of God.
LECTURE II
THE OLD RELIGION 1
A LIVING theology must always in a sense
be a new theology. For theology, rightly
understood, is not the same thing as religion,
or as the revelation on which religion rests,
or the dogmas which it maintains. But it
is the attempt of the intellect of men to
express their religious belief in intellectual
forms and to bring it into harmony with
the thought of their time with all truth
so far as it is known. But the New
Theology which we are concerned with
is characterized (as I shall endeavour to
show) by a very inadequate respect for the
old religion which it seeks to reinterpret,
and indeed by a very inadequate apprecia-
tion of its principles and its history. It is
an attempt of the contemporary intellect
1 The subject of the chapter is dealt with again from
a somewhat different point of view in Sermons i and ii,
pp. 181, 205.
2O THE OLD RELIGION
to express the truth about God and man
as seems best to it, with very little regard
to the experience of the past. It has the
marks of the contemporary intellectual
workshop all over it.
But the speculative intellect of any epoch
is of itself very fallible, as experience has
shown ; and religious continuity is of ex-
treme importance. Thus the theology of
the time should, as it seems to me, start
from at least a serious and respectful con-
sideration of the old religion, the Christian
religion which claims to rest upon a real
revelation or self-disclosure of God, once for
all given in the person of Jesus Christ ; which
claims to be a catholic religion, for all men
and for all time.
I propose, then, having given some ac-
count of the New Theology, to proceed to
give some account of the idea and method
of the old religion. It is, of course, as you
would all recognize at once, the claim of
Christianity to proclaim a catholic faith
that means a religion for all men, which
will satisfy and embrace all men and all
kinds of men, and last for all time. The
first part of this description of catholicity,
that it is adequate for all races and kinds
THE OLD RELIGION 21
of men, introduces a very interesting sub-
ject, with which I do not at present propose
to deal. What I am concerned with is the
second part of that description, the perman-
ence which is claimed for the Christian
faith. ' Heaven and earth shall pass away,
but My words shall not pass away/ The
Christian church came out at once into the
world claiming to proclaim a message from
God, a self-disclosure of God, which had
been made in many parts and many man-
ners, slowly and gradually, and which in
the person of Jesus Christ had been made
in its final form as far as this world was
concerned ; so that there could be no
disclosure of God to man more perfect, or
adequate, and no disclosure of what was
possible for manhood in relation to God
more complete, than was given in the person
of Jesus Christ, Himself God and man.
Here, of course, at the very threshold of
our statement, you are confronted with a
surprising claim, which gives you occasion
to be critical. You naturally feel that this
is a very changing world. Things become
antiquated ; forms of thought pass and
change. How, then, can it be reasonable
to suppose that a revelation couched in
22 THE OLD RELIGION
human language, a revelation enshrined
in human formulas, can be permanent in
a world as changing as our world is ? Here,
then, arises an important question. Does
the whole of our human nature change,
even slowly ? or is it the case that under-
neath what is changing, underneath what
develops and grows, there is such a thing
as a permanent humanity, a humanity in
which the nineteenth century and the first
century are as one, which through the
changes of the ages remains in its wants and
capacities, speaking practically, constant
and unchanged ? You will remember how
the poet Wordsworth speaks of another
poet, Burns, and gives it as his merit that
he appeals to the general heart of man
Deep in the general heart of men
His power survives.
You will recognize that a great deal of
the pleasure which students find in ancient
literature lies in the recognition of this
common manhood ; so that we can shake
hands across the ages with some one who
lived long ago, under conditions socially
and intellectually altogether different from
our own. You find, for instance, some
THE OLD RELIGION 23
words of Homer come to you with a quite
fresh force and power of entrancing delight,
simply because they make you feel the
reality of that ' general heart of man '
which is something that under all changes
remains constant. And if it makes a really
catholic poetry possible, it may make also
a catholic religion possible, a religion that
will appeal to the same humanity in the
nineteenth century and in the first.
Let us look closer into the matter. Re-
ligion appeals to a certain set of spiritual
needs and faculties which undoubtedly exist
in human nature wherever you find it.
Any one examining human nature with
a merely scientific curiosity would see that
the soul of a man moves out in different
directions. It moves out towards nature
to appropriate its resources ; and it moves
out towards other men to knit together the
bonds of society. Herein lies the progress
of civilization. But there is another move-
ment which is also universal that is, the
movement out towards God, the feeling
after Him and finding Him. Of that move-
ment of human nature towards God what
are the characteristics ? It is at bottom
an aspiration towards God, a craving which
24 THE OLD RELIGION
exists in man for divine fellowship and
eternal life, a life which is beyond and
deeper than the changes and chances of
our own every- day life. This craving is
rooted in a profound sense of need, and of
the weakness, the transitoriness, the fragility
of human life. With this sense of need
there is the sense of sin, of the pollution,
the unworthiness, the rebellion, which pre-
vent this human nature of ours from
finding the free access towards God which
it desires. With this again there is the
desire for pardon and peace and recon-
ciliation. And, mingling with this instinct,
which is in effect the instinct of prayer
and communion with God, there is also
the sense of kinship and fellowship with
our fellow men with whom we desire to
enter into this communion with God, not
as individuals, but as members of the
human family. Now I ask Do not these
things belong precisely to that humanity
which is through all classes and in all
periods identical, so that we should find no
difficulty in looking for a classical and
perfect expression of these fundamental
religious wants far back across the ages ?
Where can we find it ? I reply, in the
THE OLD RELIGION 25
Psalms. I say to any one who will apply
his mind to think about this subject, Can
you conceive any better expression of those
fundamental human wants than you get
in the Psalms ? There are things in the
Psalms which are not at all of this permanent
and satisfying character. There are impre-
cations upon the enemies of Israel, or upon
the enemies of the individual friend of God,
which express something lower than a
Christian level of feeling. If the Church
of England were not so conservative of
doubtful and dangerous things as well as
of good things, I fancy it would not have
these imprecations, which require so much
explanation, recited in the public services.
But much more readily there come into
your minds passages of the Psalms expres-
sive of all the feelings I have enumerated ;
and I ask you, Is there anything in that
expression of those fundamental religious
wants which you feel could be better
which you feel is antiquated ? Do you not
simply find there the expression of exactly
what mankind everywhere, in the twentieth
century after Christ as much as in the
sixth century before Christ, feels, and
wants ?
26 THE OLD RELIGION
The Old Testament is confessedly imper-
fect. In the Old Testament we find human
nature gradually being trained to know
its own true wants, as well as to receive
the word of God which was gradually being
spoken to satisfy those wants. There are
then, I say, imperfections which we perceive
in the Psalms, as we look back upon them
in the light of Christ's perfection, as well
as obscurities, where the true sense cannot
be recovered. But the bulk of the Psalms
expresses the soul's fundamental search for
God in all its moods and phases of
triumph and depression, in all its exultant
joy and its profound misery. The twenty-
third psalm, ' The Lord is my Shepherd ' ;
the twenty-fifth, ' Unto Thee, O Lord,
will I lif t up my soul ' ; the twenty-seventh,
' The Lord is my light ' ; the thirtieth,
' I will magnify Thee, O Lord ' ; the thirty-
first, ' In Thee, O Lord, have I put my
trust ' ; the thirty-eighth, ' Put me not to
rebuke, O Lord ' these are only instances
which could be multiplied till almost all
the Psalms were named. Here, so far as
expression of the fundamental want is
concerned, is permanent religion. Here
is the humanity which underlies all develop-
THE OLD RELIGION 27
ments. Here is the explanation of a
catholic religion. For it is to this religious
consciousness, thus brought to full and
conscious expression, that the revelation
of Christ appeals : and it can be permanent
because it gives a full satisfaction to a
permanent want.
Now I get to my next point. The Chris-
tian revelation, which is, or claims to be,
the permanent response of God to the
permanent human need, quite certainly
appeals, not primarily to the intellect, but
primarily to what in the Scripture is called
the heart, which means not only the
emotions, but the personality : the whole
central self which moves out in action
and expresses itself in thought and feeling,
but which, as it were, lies below both in-
tellect and feeling and action. Our religion
appeals to the central self the heart of man.
I want to impress this upon you if I can.
You will remember that striking scene
where our Lord is represented as saying :
' I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven
and earth, because Thou hast hid these
things from the wise and prudent, and hast
revealed them unto babes/ l The meaning
1 Matt. xi. 25, Luke x. 21.
28 THE OLD RELIGION
of this saying becomes apparent if you
read the Gospels as a whole. The ' wise
and prudent ' among the Jews were the
rulers and rabbis and scribes; and the
great centre of their authority and their
traditional learning was in Jerusalem. If
you read the Gospel of St. John you will
find that our Lord gave the wise and
prudent in Jerusalem their chance, and
that they would not accept Him. They
were occupied with the traditions of their
schools and the pride of their order, and
this lay teacher, as He seemed to them,
was despised and rejected ; they would not
hear Him. Then the narrative of the
Synoptic Gospels, the narrative of our
Lord's teaching in Galilee, represents the
fresh start which He made in a new field.
Galilee was a great and crowded mercantile
district, with a population of very mixed
origin ' Galilee of the Gentiles.' It was
about twice the size of the diocese of
Birmingham, and Josephus ascribes to it
about four times its population. There
may be an exaggeration here such ex-
aggerations are common in ancient
chronicles ; but, at any rate, he must have
meant to describe a highly populous dis-
THE OLD RELIGION 2Q
trict. 1 There our Lord proclaimed Himself
to the miserable and diseased, in works of
mercy. But He found His real hearers and
chose His disciples among what we should
describe as the well-to-do artisan class,
men who were neither subject to the
temptations of luxury nor, on the other
hand, to the corrupting influences of pauper-
ism ; men who could pray, ' Give us day
by day our daily bread/ who depended
on their daily toil for their sustenance ;
but who were under no conditions such
as are corrupting and degrading. There,
among men who had no tradition of learning,
but were sensible, practical, whole-hearted
men, He found His hearers and chose His
disciples. These He here calls ' babes/
simple-minded men and women, by contrast
with the more sophisticated men who held
the chief places in the schools of learning.
Observe, He says : ' I thank thee, Father/
It is not merely that He puts up with an
inevitable condition, but He recognizes
that the strength of His religion lies in
the fact that it appeals to the average
man, with his average intelligence, with
1 Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah
(Longmans), ii. p. 224 (Bk. ii. cap. ix).
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
30 THE OLD RELIGION
his average human wants, and not pri-
marily to the intellect of the schools. St.
Paul found out and gloried in just the
same thing. He approached the learned
at Athens and he went away, as it seems,
in bitterness of spirit ; his visit produced
almost no result. Then he went to Corinth
with a determination that he would not
have any more of this method, that he
would appeal simply to the sense of sin
and the need of a saviour, that he would
know nothing among them save Jesus
Christ and Him crucified. And he describes
the result. He points out to the Corinthian
Christians how the people who make up
their young community are the people
whom the world reckons of no account,
and that the people of importance are
almost left out ; and he accepts it as being
the strength of Christianity that it was to
make its appeal not primarily to the
intellect, but to the needs of common life ;
and he anticipates, what happened in
fact, that ' the foolish things of the world '
would ' put to shame the things that are
wise/ 1
The method of the Christian church,
1 i Cor. i. 19 ff.
THE OLD RELIGION 31
then, is not to propound an argument and
say, ' Is not this a sound argument ? ' It
does not make its appeal primarily to the
intellect. It comes into the world pro-
claiming something which is by its very
nature authoritative a message from God.
And as God is to man, the Creator to the
creature, the Father to the child, so the
message claims to be accepted, not indeed
without inquiry, but still at the last resort
in faith. The idea is that of ( receiving the
word of God.' It is promised that this
message will satisfy your soul's felt and
experienced wants, will convince you of its
own divinity by its applicability to your
need, will prove itself at your heart so
that you will find the witness of its truth
in yourself, if you will receive it in faith.
It is anticipated also that as you set your
intellect to work, you will find that, in
virtue of your faith, you have a rational
account to give of the relations of God to
man, which will prove better by far, more
adequate, and completer than anything
else which you could have got by any other
way than this way of acceptance in faith.
Is this method of the old religion, this
initial claim upon faith the receptive
32 THE OLD RELIGION
attitude of faith something which we have
a right to resent as unreasonable ?
Surely not. For, first, it is the method
which, if God be our Father, best corre-
sponds to the real relation in which we all
equally, learned or unlearned, stand to Him.
Secondly, it is the method by which alone
(as far as we can see) men of all kinds
and grades of instruction could have been
combined or held together in one society.
And, thirdly, it is the method that has been
justified in experience. Christianity was
mocked at by the ' intellectuals* ' in its
beginnings as ' a religion for children and
women and fools/ But not then alone
in history the intellectuals were mistaken.
Christianity brought into the world a higher
knowledge of God and of man, a truer
philosophy on the deepest subjects, than
had yet existed. It represented a profound
advance, an infinitely fruitful movement
onward toward truth. And the advance
came not by way of intellectual speculation,
but through men accepting a divine message
in faith, and only afterwards, when they
had realized its divinity by its experienced
results, thinking about its intellectual mean-
ing. Men understood by first, in a measure,
THE OLD RELIGION 33
laying aside their criticism and simply
believing. I think that in many of the
great forward movements of human life it
is not the speculative intellect which has
been the real pioneer. It has been the
pressure of instinct, the felt need for ex-
pansion in the heart of man, which has
shown the way. I believe that psychology
is coming more and more to recognize that
the rationality of man lies not only or per-
haps chiefly in his self-conscious intellect,
but as much or more in his subconscious
self or soul, with its half-dumb instincts and
feelings, out of which his intelligence
springs.
I would venture to put this in a more
individual way to any Englishman who
shrinks, as most Englishmen do, from the
very idea of laying aside his critical faculty,
even for a time, and simply receiving a
message as divine.
What we Englishmen need, above other
men, is not merely ' honest thinking/ and
' obedience to our consciences/ but the
enrichment of our souls, so that we may have
both a larger basis for thinking and a deeper
and fuller vision of duty. Now it was just
this enrichment of soul of the whole basis
34 THE OLD RELIGION
of personality that seems to have resulted
in the first Christians from their simple
receptiveness. It was because their heart
and imagination had been thus enriched
that so vigorous an intellectual as well as
moral outgrowth was apparent. A similar
enrichment, with a similar outgrowth, would
always be, and would be for us to-day, the
result of a similar receptiveness.
I can imagine nothing so fertilizing to
the intellect of an Englishman (apart from
all other considerations) as for him to lay
aside his critical attitude for a time, and
simply put himself, as it were, to school to
receive and assimilate the message of the
faith from some adequate teacher, whether
by the written or spoken word. Thus he
would really appreciate and understand
the meaning of our religion from within. If
he should still find it inconsistent with what
on other grounds he knows to be true or
possible, his rejection of it, or doubt about
it, would be at least the rejection or the
doubtful holding of a faith which had
been appreciated, as it can only be appre-
ciated, from within. I am persuaded
that what renders our English race com-
paratively and generally unintellectual,
THE OLD RELIGION 35
is not too much credulity, but too little
receptiveness.
This is, then, what I meant by the method
of the old and catholic religion. It pro-
claims a message of God, a self-disclosure
of God in the person of Jesus Christ, ade-
quate to satisfy the religious needs of men
for all time ; which by all men alike must
first of all be received as the word of God,
in faith : so that all men, learned or un-
learned, are thus first of all put on a level,
as simple receivers in faith of the divine
response to human need. And I put this
method of the old religion in contrast to
the method of the new theology, which
approaches us as the best product of con-
temporary thought, trying to frame an
expression of religious ideas which shall be
most acceptable to the intellectual aspira-
tions of the moment.
I am occupied now in describing the
principle of the catholic religion, rather
than in giving its justification. But the
description I have given of the method of
religious revelation may suggest one par-
ticular objection which it may be well to
meet.
It may be suggested that this supposed
3# THE OLD RELIGION
' divine response ' is really nothing else
than the reflection of human desires. It
was because men felt the weakness and
bitterness of their lot, because they cried
out in pain to the God of their imagining,
' Wherefore hast thou made all men for
naught ? ' that, unable to bear the ' vanity '
of human life, they conceived false hopes,
and invested mere surmisings with the
dignity of divine oracles, and finally came
to find a revelation of God in what was no
more than a great and good man's life and
death. The supposed divine revelation is
no more than the echo of the human cry.
Now to this the reply is twofold : First,
that it is impossible to treat so vast an
aspiration and effort as the religious aspira-
tion and effort of man has been in human
history, as if it carried with it no ground for
a belief that it would be satisfied. On a
smaller scale, indeed, we can recognize * the
vanity of human wishes ' ; but the most
permanent and universal tendencies of
humanity represent man's fundamental
nature. Such a tendency in humanity is
the search after God the feeling after
Him, to find Him. It is, then, we must say,
man's nature to require God. He strives
THE OLD RELIGION 37
restlessly after Him. ' Unquiet is the heart
of man until he rest in Him/ He expends
infinite pains over long ages and in all lands
in the search for God. If, then, there is any
order or rational purpose in the world, we
cannot conceive of so fundamental and
universal a striving and straining without
some real object to stimulate and satisfy it.
In some such general sense as this, we can-
not help arguing from desire to satisfaction.
But this is the second part of my reply
the response to human need which claims
to be divine, the message of God, does not
for a moment allow of our supposing that
it is the reflection of human need. It has
indeed been such as to satisfy human need
at its best, but not by any means such as
men would have desired or imagined for
themselves. The prophets of the Old
Testament who are the organs of the word
of God, are plainly supplying not what
men actually wanted, but what they ought
to have wanted. When to the prophets
succeeded the Son, so little did the mass of
men want His message, that they rejected
and crucified Him. All the wide and per-
sistent degradations of which the religion
which we claim to have been revealed has
38 THE OLD RELIGION
been in history the subject, from Pharisaism
downwards, have been due to its being
accommodated to suit human instincts and
wants, just as they were, without causing
men too much trouble. And in virtue
of such accommodation the religion has lost
its moral power. This is one of the most
impressive features of the revealed religion.
It is indeed a profound response to the
experienced human need where it is deepest,
most genuine, and most disciplined ; but it
is very far from being the kind of response
which mankind, on the whole, would have
desired ; and it is, therefore, in vain to argue
that it can be the product of the human
imagination, which in fact it has had to meet
continually with rebuke and chastisement.
But to the human need of God, at its
best and deepest, the permanent divine
response was, we claim, given once for
all in the Son of God, Jesus Christ, in whom
God is revealed in manhood, and manhood
revealed in perfect union with Godhead.
Of this revelation, the best and most
authoritative summary statement is given
in the great catholic creeds, the Apostles'
THE OLD RELIGION 39
and Nicene Creeds, as they are commonly
called. The Apostles' Creed, in its earlier
form which does not differ in any import-
ant respect from its present form is the
expression given in the earlier part of the
second century to the faith of the Church,
for the instruction of those who were to con-
fess the faith in baptism. In the Nicene
Creed you have a similar baptismal creed,
somewhat expanded, especially by the in-
sertion of the famous clause which proclaims
Christ ' of one substance with the Father/
that is, really and truly divine. It happened
in the earlier part of the fourth century that
a prominent Alexandrian teacher, Arius, en-
deavoured to introduce into Christianity the
idea of a demi-god, an intermediate being
between God and His creatures. That is
to say, he represented Christ as ' divine/
as God's agent in creation and redemption,
and as a being to be worshipped, but as
Himself fundamentally a creature, and not
God. The Christian church determined
to protect itself against so fundamental
an outrage upon the faith which Christians
had entertained from the first about their
Redeemer, and from so manifest a relapse
into pagan ways of thinking, and it adopted
40 THE OLD RELIGION
this protective phrase, ' of one substance
with the Father/ into its creed.
These creeds, then, I propose to take as the
classical expression of the catholic religion,
having supreme authority among Christian
statements of our faith. When I say that
they have supreme authority to represent
the Christian church and Christianity I am
not speaking of the authority of councils,
or of ecclesiastical officers who may have
imposed them, but I am speaking of a
deeper and more fundamental sort of
authority the authority of the whole
Christian body. There is in those creeds
the whole mind of Christendom. Before
the Reformation and after there have been
various schools of thought in Christendom,
and great differences of opinion and sharp
controversies, and permanent divisions, but
I think we may say that practically what-
ever has been nobly suffered or worthily
done in the name of Christ throughout
the ages, has been done in the name of
that faith in God, three in one, and in the
incarnation of the eternal Son, which you
find confessed in the Apostles' and Nicene
Creeds. You know the famous phrase,
quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus
THE OLD RELIGION 41
that which has been held always, every-
where, and by all within Christendom. 1 If
that phrase applies to anything, it applies
to what is contained in those creeds ; and
I take them as my standards of faith in
the old or catholic religion.
1 As interpreted by its author, Vincent of Lerins, it
means what has been believed among Christians from
apostolic days, as opposed to what originated at a later
date ; and in all parts of the church, so that what did not
hold it fell away from the church or was excluded ; and
as the common faith, as opposed to the speculations of
individuals. So understood, the canon represents some-
thing most real and valuable.
LECTURE III
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD
Now I am to contrast the teaching of
the New Theology with the teaching of
the old religion in certain crucial points,
which were enumerated above, 1 and on which
the New Theology lays special stress. Of
these the first is the doctrine of the
immanence of God of God as disclosed
not otherwise than within nature and
within man.
God, says the New Theology, is 'the
self of the universe/ and He is ' my deeper
self and yours/ 2 ' God is the mysterious
power which is finding expression in the
universe and which is present in every
tiniest atom of the wondrous whole. I find
that this power is the one reality I cannot
get away from ; for, whatever else it may
be, it is myself/ 8 'The real God is the God
1 pp.9, 10. 2 The New Theology, p. 35. 3 ibid., p. 18.
42
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 43
expressed in the universe, and in yourself.' l
The higher self of each man, which is also
the higher self of all other men, the unity
of humanity, is ' in all probability a per-
fect and eternal spiritual being integral to
the being of God ' 2 There is no ' dividing
line between our being and God's.' 3 We
are of one substance with God. This
position is maintained more unreservedly
by Mr. Campbell than by Sir Oliver Lodge.
He too tells us that * we are a part of the
universe and the universe is a part of
God.' 4 He too speaks of ' the humanity
of God and the divinity of man ' ; he too
implies that each man should be able to
say, with Jesus, ' I and my Father are one.'
But he seems to leave more room than
Mr. Campbell does for the thought of God
as self-complete and beyond and above the
universe.
We may say, however, without any risk
of mistake, that the tendency of the New
Theology is to bring into exclusive emphasis
the idea of the immanent God, of God
in nature. Nature is one, and one uni-
1 ibid., p. 20. 2 ibid., p. 31. 8 ibid., p. 34.
4 Substance of Faith, p. 43, and Hibbert Journal, Apr.
1906, p. 53,
44 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD
versal Spirit pervades it : this is God.
Nature is His expression : and man's
soul is a conscious spark of the universal
God.
Now it is not too much to say that this is
not new theology, but very old theology.
When Christianity came into the world it
found the civilized world full of a religious
philosophy, in part Platonic, in part Stoic,
which held a doctrine substantially identical
with that of the New Theology. 1 We cannot
be at all acquainted with the thought of
the first and second centuries without
realizing that this was the current religious
belief of the educated world. For if modern
science has given us a much more exact
perception of the methods and laws of nature,
it can hardly give us a sense of the unity
of nature and of the all-pervading Spirit
more intense than the ancients had. This
Sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit that impels
1 See The New Stoicism, by Professor Sonnenshein
(Hibbert Journal, Apr. 1907).
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 45
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things
is in every age the fruit alike of philosophic
search and of mystical contemplation.
Moreover, leaving out of the question for
the moment the tendency to identify man's
spirit with this omnipresent God, the creed
of God's immanence in all things is true,
and, as we shall see, the Christian religion
identified itself with it and propagated
it. But for the Christian it was not the
first or most important part of his faith
in God.
For there came into the world where
this philosophic creed prevailed, amidst a
hundred lower forms of faith and worship,
another thought of God, due not to Greeks
but to Jews. And the result of our con-
sideration will, I hope, be to convince
us that ' salvation ' the saving and re-
deeming knowledge of God, 'is of the Jews/
To the Greeks was given the leadership
among men in the world of philosophy and
the pursuit of beauty, as to the Romans in
the world of government and law; but
the Jewish race was called to be, by its
prophets, ' the sacred school of the know-
46 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD
ledge of God and of the spiritual life for all
mankind/ *
Not by the way of philosophical con-
templation and inquiry, but by a way which
we call ' inspiration,' there was given to
the Jewish prophets, through their moral
conscience, the sense of God as the righteous
sovereign Lord. He was indeed the God
of nature, the creator and sustainer of
all that is, having all power and might ;
but, above all, they recognized Him as the
eternally Righteous One, who had made
men to serve Him in righteousness and
holiness, and sat supreme above them, their
maker and their judge. This doctrine of
1 The phrase is St. Athanasius's. A modern writer,
the great Ewald, in sketching the programme of his
History of Israel, observes how ancient nations devoted
themselves to special branches of human attainment ;
and how in Israel ' the aim is perfect religion. The aim
was lofty enough to concentrate the efforts of a whole
people for more than a thousand years, and however
much the mode of pursuit might vary, it was this single
object that was always pursued ; so that there is hardly
any history of equal compass that possesses in all its
phases and variations so much intrinsic unity, and is so
closely bound up to a single thought pertinaciously held,
but always developing itself to a higher purity.' The
Jew however was, throughout his history, conscious that
he was not discovering God by investigation, but re-
ceiving His disclosure of Himself.
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 47
the moral character of God His essential
righteousness is the central idea of the
Old Testament. The sense of it bowed
men down in utter humility, and made quite
impossible any identification of themselves
with God. It forced them to think of God
as the absolute creator, alone self-existent
alone the object of worship ; though they
knew that He loved the creatures whom
He had made, and admitted men, with
cleansed hearts and reverent minds, into
fellowship and communion with Himself.
This Jewish thought of God it was
which, in its perfect form, found expression
through the lips of Jesus Christ. All
modern critics of the New Testament
see in our Lord the inheritor of the Jewish
way of thinking about God, though in His
teaching the thought of God, as lord and
creator, finds its completion in the thought
of Him as father, and the idea of His
righteousness in the idea of His love.
The disciples of Christ did indeed, through
His life and teaching, come to believe that
in His person God had come to them in a
human nature, and they believed in Him as
God's eternal Son made man. But there
was not even the slightest tendency to
48 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD
transfer the thought of His deity to them-
selves, or any other man. No breath of
pantheistic identification of Godhead and
manhood is felt in the New Testament.
Once more, through Christ's teaching and
His promises, and through the performance
of His promises, they came to believe in the
Spirit of God, who was to come and take men
up into the most intimate fellowship with
God. But, again, there was not any real
tendency to confuse the divine Spirit with
the human nature. Rather the thought
of God, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
yet one God, helped the Christian church
to maintain the Jewish idea of God as per-
fect and complete in Himself as indeed
loving to create and to have fellowship with
His creatures, but as Himself in His own
being perfect, and dependent in nothing
upon the work of His hands.
This is simply an historical statement of
the religious heritage which we owe to the
Jews. Granted this belief in God, personal
and sovereign and complete in Himself, all
the truth of His immanence could be
accepted without risk of confusion between
the creator and the creature. Already in
the Psalms it is recognized that God is
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 49
active in nature, that His ' breath ' is the
life of nature. 1 And in St. Paul's teaching
there is the fullest recognition that ' in
God we (men) live, and move, and are/ and
that in him all things consist/ or 'have their
coherence/ And this idea of God's imman-
ence which, as we have seen, was prevalent
in the world into which Christianity came,
was taken up most fully into Christian
theology, and held its place both among the
Fathers and later among the Schoolmen. It
would be hard to exaggerate the constancy
with which they recognize God as active in
the world its beauty, its order, its system,
its ' persistent energy/ the force of nature,
and the light of conscience ; but never for
a moment so as to obliterate or obscure
the primary belief in God as alone self-
existent and independent and supreme,
the creator and lord and judge of all.
This perception of the absolute difference
between the creator and the creature came
into prominence through the Arian con-
troversy already briefly described. In
Arius's conception Christ was, as it were, a
demi-god : himself a creature, but supreme
over all other creatures, and indeed their
1 Ps. civ. 29, 30.
4
5<D THE IMMANENCE OF GOD
creator : a being, therefore, both creature
and creator. This conception the Christian
church absolutely refused. Absolutely, as
by an indomitable instinct, it refused to
worship or treat as God one who was him-
self created. The highest archangel, the
most exalted creature conceivable, the
Christian church felt would be no nearer
being God, than the meanest of men.
Between God, the self -existent, and any
created being, the difference was pro-
claimed to be absolute. And if Christ was
to be worshipped, as assuredly He was, it
was because He was, what no created
person could conceivably be, ' of one sub-
stance with God/ l
Of course the Christian conception of
God leaves us with many mysteries baffling
our eager scrutiny. The relation of God's
all-embracing being and personality to the
dependent and created personalities of
men remains profoundly mysterious. 2 It
1 See for instance, Athanasius, Or at. c. Arian. ii. 20, and
cf. Mozley's Theory of Development (Rivington, 1878),
pp. 74-81.
2 I cannot think that Dr. Rashdall's recent book
(Theory of Good and Evil, ii. 238) is on the true line of
solution. In some sense God's being must surely be
all-including, and identified with the Absolute.
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 51
is only one of many mysteries. The early
Christian church, living and struggling
to express and defend its doctrine, in an
age of keen intellectual and philosophical
speculation, felt the burden of the mystery,
and the inadequacy of human thought to
solve or words to express it. But what
they believed and relied upon was, they
felt, not a human speculation, but a real
intelligible self-disclosure of God, made in
many parts and manners, but made finally
in the person of His Son. His Name, the
Name of the Father and the Son and the
Holy Ghost, one God, creator, redeemer
and sanctifier, saviour and judge, was lifted
above all doubt and controversy : for He
had revealed it and they had accepted
it, and found its power in their whole
being.
To go back, then, from this Christian
heritage upon the mere idea of divine
immanence as the Stoics had conceived it,
is, I contend, to go backward, not forward.
The superiority of the Christian idea of
God may be stated in three ways.
First in its moral effect. The pantheistic
or philosophic conception of God as the
universal being of whose substance we all
52 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD
form a part, of whom we know nothing
except his expression of Himself in nature,
is destitute of moral power. It leads to
a kind of moral indifferency. Physical
nature is apparently altogether indifferent
to moral distinctions. It can be explained
indeed as the handiwork of the good God,
and as representing a stage in His self-
revealing and educative purpose, if once
we have got from somewhere beyond nature
the disclosure of His person and character.
But if we are left to draw conclusions from
nature we shall arrive at no clear conception
of divine righteousness ; and if we include
human nature, we shall still be bewildered
by the strange mixture of good and evil,
which seem to wage an uncertain struggle,
or, very often, a struggle in which the good
appears to be defeated. If manhood be
identical with godhead, we must ask, is God
more good than bad ? or is He becoming
better as the generations pass ? And if
the human spirit be only an element in the
All which is God, is it the element which
is dominant ? Or will it not rather be
swallowed up in the sea of non-moral
forces which is, to all appearance, so much
vaster than humanity ?
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 53
Till, I say, we have got our disclosure
from beyond nature, and beyond man,
we have got no ground for the worship of
an absolutely righteous God, or for the
sense of responsibility; or for the striving
after purity and love. In history, the
philosophic pantheism, such as prevailed
in the world into which Christianity came,
has shown itself, as we should indeed expect,
without the power to arouse and inspire
and maintain moral effort and moral enthu-
siasm in the mass of men. It leaves men
content to feel themselves as part of the
whole. The moral lift and enthusiasm and
hope which Christianity brought into the
Greek and Roman world came with the
Hebrew belief in the righteous God, who,
however much He loves men and however
closely He calls them into union with Him-
self, is yet in His own being independent
and supreme and unalterable ; our creator
and our judge ; our saviour also but a
saviour whose fellowship we can only
attain by purifying ourselves even as He
is pure. I can conceive nothing more
certain than that with us to-day the
morality of the future depends on our hold-
ing fast the Christian belief in God and
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
54 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD
refusing to relapse upon the philosophic
pantheism.
Secondly, the superiority of the Christian
belief in God lies in the method by which
it was received. There is a memorable
passage in the Phaedo of Plato, in which
Socrates is represented as expressing his dis-
satisfaction with the arguments by which
he and his friends had been endeavouring
to prove the immortality of the soul. f And
yet/ he says, ' I should deem him a coward
who did not prove what is said to the utter-
most. For he should persevere until he
has attained one of two things : either he
should discern or learn the truth ; or if
this is impossible, I would have him take
the best and most irrefragable of human
words (arguments), and let this be the raft
upon which he sails through life not with-
out risk, as I admit, if he cannot find some
word of God which will more safely and
surely carry him/
It is such a word of God, giving a
different kind of security to our religious
beliefs from that which speculation
could ever attain a security such as
attaches itself to our feelings of right
and wrong it is such a word of God
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 55
which we believe to have been really
uttered.
The Hebrew prophets knew themselves
to be its subjects and its organs. Through
many generations of inspired men, there
was impressed upon a whole nation a pro-
found belief that God had really disclosed
Himself and His character to them. This
faith received its fulfilment, and was
made universal, through J esus Christ . Thus
there has been communicated to men
a certain conception of God not due to
fallible speculation, but to God's own will
to reveal Himself. This message may,
nay must, become the subject for philo-
sophical speculation, and the intellect of
men must use the conception of God thus
received to interpret the world and har-
monize the whole of experience. But the
revelation itself is given in forms of human
speech, and, at least as truly, in forms of
human life, such as are intelligible to the
hearts of ordinary men. Thus it becomes,
not the doctrine of a school of thinkers,
but the creed of a catholic church, the
faith in the one God, the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Ghost. And if in any sense
there be a God whom we can rightly call
56 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD
our Father, and whose sons we are, then, I
say, this method of self-disclosure or reve-
lation corresponds to the idea of His
Fatherhood, and is of a piece with the
whole experience of mankind as to the
method by which moral and spiritual truth,
as opposed to the truth about nature, has
made itself known among men.
Lastly, the Christian idea of God justifies
itself to the intellect by its comprehensive-
ness ; by enabling us to make our own all
the truth of the divine immanence without
the moral disadvantages which belong to
the conception of God as the soul of nature,
when we have that and nothing more.
The Christian conception of God in fact
holds a middle point between Deism, against
which the New Theology is in somewhat
violent reaction, and Pantheism, into which
in its reaction it undoubtedly plunges.
The New Theology is in reaction against
what it describes as ' the old idea of God '
as if He were some great emperor who
sits somewhere outside and above the
world, who made it and set it going and
occasionally intervenes to set it right again.
This, which has been well called ' the
carpenter idea ' of God, is in fact not the
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 57
old idea, if by that is meant the orthodox
or scriptural idea. It is a gross distortion
of it. Deism, which is the best form in
which this one-sided conception of God took
shape, was a theory of a certain school of
thinkers in the eighteenth century, but cer-
tainly not the conception of Christian theo-
logy. For the Christian, God is in the world
in all its parts and at every moment, reveal-
ing Himself in varying degrees in all its
force, and order 4 and beauty, and truth,
and goodness. But the universe does not
exhaust Him or limit Him. Beyond the
universe and independent of it, He is in
Himself, limited by nothing outside Him-
self, 1 in the eternal fellowship of His own
being. He is in all, but also over all, supreme
and free. Thus it is not true that ' all is
God : ' for this is to identify His being
with that of His creatures, which our own
self-consciousness, to go no further, pro-
hibits. It is not true that ' God is all : '
for that is to suggest that he has no being
independent of and beyond the world. But
1 It is often said, and may be truly said, that God is
infinite, or * unlimited.' But it is more exact to say that
God is self -limited : limited by nothing except the
eternal law and character of His own being.
58 THE IMMANENCE OF GOD
it is true that ' from him ' and ' in him ' and
' unto him ' are all things ; that He is
the creator of all things, who has made man
especially in His own image ; and the
sustaining life of all things, who invites man
into most intimate communion and corre-
spondence with Himself ; and the end
towards whom all things tend, the moral
judge of all free and conscious beings.
I do not suppose that the teachers of the
New Theology who proclaim a ' human
God ' are in a position to object to the
doctrine of the creed as 'anthropomorphism/
that is, as imagining a God in the likeness
of man. The fact is that whatever man
thinks or imagines he must think or imagine
1 anthropomorphically/ for he can think
only human thoughts. It follows that if
human thoughts are necessarily limited and
imperfect, the highest thought that man can
think of God is inadequate to its subject.
The Christian Fathers, in deepest reverence,
were never weary of reiterating that we
but know God as in an inadequate reflection,
seeing ' as in a mirror, darkly/ But the
point is that human nature is at least a
truer image of God than mechanical forces
or merely animal life. For man pre-emi-
THE IMMANENCE OF GOD 59
nently is made ' in God's image. 1 If God
is not in man's image (anthropomorphic),
man, with his spiritual and free personality,
is in God's image (theomorphic). Thus in
Jesus Christ the best that we can know or
believe about God is revealed in a human
character ; and the human relationship
of father and son is the best image of the
eternal fellowship which is God's own being.
LECTURE IV
THE IDEA OF SIN 1
THE view of sin which the New Theology
presents follows from its idea of God.
God is the mysterious power which is finding
expression in the universe and in mankind
as part of the whole. And the process in
which God thus realizes Himself in the
universe is a process of gradual evolu-
tion or upward development. In this pro-
cess sin has appeared. Its existence in
forms of lust and greed and hatred and
cruelty and falsehood cannot be denied,
nor its ugliness and hatefulness. But is it,
we ask, voluntary and therefore culpable ?
There is no doubt that Sir Oliver Lodge
would say that it is, though he does not seem
to me to follow out this admission to its
consequences. And, with much less clear-
ness and emphasis, Mr. Campbell appears
1 This subject is treated, from a more hortatory point
of view, in Sermon iii, p. 231.
60
THE IDEA OF SIN 6l
to recognize that sin is in some measure
voluntary and culpable. We have, he
admits, to ' mourn over our own slowness
in getting into line with the cosmic purpose.'
Sin is being ' false to ourselves and our
divine origin.' l But though we have thus
a certain power to retard the process of
advance in ourselves and the world, we
cannot do more than retard it. It goes
forward inevitably. Sin is only a phase
which is being outgrown and left behind.
It is ' a mistake/ 2 akin to the mistakes we
make in every department of human pro-
gress. It is an ignorant quest for true life
and for God. 3 Through all our mistakes,
the upward process goes on. ' Slowly, very
slowly, the race is climbing the steep ascent/
And in every individual man the true life
must finally be realized/ 4
And what is sin ? Its essence is selfish-
ness, we are told. It is seeking our own
personal and separate interest or pleasure
instead of the whole. And the explanation
of this mistaken tendency lies in the animal
nature out of which we have been developed.
It is ' the tiger and the ape ' in us. Selfish-
1 The New Theology, pp. 66, 109. 2 ibid., p. 214.
8 ibid., pp. 52, 153!, i6off. * ibid., pp. 215-16.
62 THE IDEA OF SIN
ness, injustice, and cruelty are ' relics of
our brute ancestry ' which civilization is
slowly refining away. 1
Such a theory finds itself in conflict with
the common Christian idea of an original
fall of man. Thus the only real fall
which Mr. Campbell can recognize appears
on examination to be a fall, not of man, but
of God. ' The coming of a finite creature
into being is itself of the nature of a fall a
coming down from perfection to imperfec-
tion.' 2 The idea is that ' the universal
life ' that is God in order to realize
itself in the universe, must submit to limita-
tion in finite forms of life. This is, of course,
only ' a fall ' in the sense that the deep
humiliation of the incarnation, as St. Paul
conceives it, might be called a fall. It has
nothing to do with the Christian idea of a
fall of man by wilful disobedience. In man,
then, there was no original fall : unless we
can give this name to the passage from a
brute life, unconscious of moral distinctions,
to the spiritual consciousness of right and
wrong. In becoming conscious of moral
possibility and moral freedom man became
conscious of a lower self of animal impulse
1 The New Theology, pp. 61-2. 2 ibid., p. 66.
THE IDEA OF SIN 03
which had to be overcome ; and in this con-
sciousness of contrast between his gross
actual nature and actual habits, and the
idea of what he ought to be and may become,
originates, it is supposed, the idea of ' the
fall.' That is to say, the soul, conscious of
a divine parentage and destiny, finds the
unspiritual bodily nature a prison-house
and a degradation. But this fall was no
fault of man. ' The perception of evil is the
concomitant of your expanding finite con-
sciousness of good.' x It is indeed plainly
no real fall, but a step upwards. ' It has
no sinister antecedents. Its purpose is
good.' 2 It ' is but a statement of imper-
fection,' and thus ' is not man's fault but
God's will, and is a means towards a great
end.' From this way of conceiving ' the
fall ' and from all the accompanying view
of sin, it will follow naturally that Mr.
Campbell cannot tolerate the idea of God's
wrath upon sin, or of God punishing sin,
or indeed of God as the judge of men,
judging, as it were, from outside.
God is to be sought in myself. He is
realizing Himself through me. If mistakes
are made in this process of realizing God.
1 ibid., p. 45. 2 ibid., p. 66.
64 THE IDEA OF SIN
there is no other punishment than such as
a man thereby inevitably makes for him-
self, such as is involved in the process of
recovery, and there is no other wrath or
judgement than of his own self-condemna-
tion, the judgement of his own higher self
which is indeed divine, and which must
finally win the victory and realize itself in
every single life. 1
Now it may be questioned whether this
view of sin is clearly thought out ; whether,
in particular, the question of voluntari-
ness is really faced in the light of its
consequences. But in its general lines it
presents an intelligible attitude towards sin,
and one which we recognize as thoroughly
modern : it permeates, one may say, most
of the popular novel literature of the day.
At the same time we shall probably feel
that, as leading us to think of sin as a
weakness or an error, pitiable before it is,
and much more than it is, blameworthy,
and as leaving very little place for indigna-
tion against sin, and none for the con-
ception of sin as leading in the individual
to ultimate and irretrievable disorder, it falls
very far short of the teaching of the Bible.
1 The New Theology, pp. 213 fL
THE IDEA OF SIN 65
The Old Testament is quite full of the
idea of sin as rebellion. God, who made
man, made him, unlike His other creatures
in this world, capable of voluntary and
glad obedience ; and mankind has proved
rebellious ; and this rebellion merits the
righteous wrath of God, and brings down
His judgement on nations and individuals ;
and the true attitude of man, when he has
' come to himself/ is one of profound
penitence and earnest amendment and
willing acceptance of the divine punish-
ment, now truly remedial. This, beyond all
question, is the prevailing way of regarding
the actual state of man in the Old Testament,
And the essence of this view of sin is that
it lies, not in the bodily nature, but in
the will. It is rebellion, the rebellion
of the will of man against the righteous
God.
Certain limitations which are to be found
in the Old Testament doctrine disappear
in the New. In particular the area in which
God is thought of as dealing with man is
definitely and finally extended beyond this
present life, and the much fuller concep-
tion of the redemptive love of God gives a
different colour to the thought of God's
5
66 THE IDEA OF SIN
attitude towards sin. But in this, as in
other respects, it is upon the Old Testament
doctrine that the New Testament is built ;
and the idea of sin is the same. Our Lord
is indeed mainly occupied in directing the
minds of His disciples and hearers to positive
ideals. He is announcing the moral char-
acter of the kingdom of God. But His
first call to men reiterated John the Bap-
tist's claim for repentance. ' Repent ye '
that is the beginning. 1 And consistently
He deals with men as needing a fundamental
change and fundamental renewal : ' Except
ye turn, and become as little children, ye
shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of
heaven/ ' Except a man be born anew,
he cannot see the kingdom of God.' 2
Speaking to His disciples, and speaking
about man's natural goodness, He sees in
it the taint of sin : ' If ye then, being
evil, know how to give good gifts unto
your children, how much more shall your
heavenly Father . . . . ' 3 Quite uncompro-
misingly he warns men of the possibility
of eternal or irremediable punishment for
1 Matt. iv. 17 ; Mark i. 15.
2 Matt, xviii. 3, John iii. 3.
3 Matt. vii. n, Luke xi. 13, cf. xiii. i-S.
THE IDEA OF SIN 67
sin, coming from the divine righteousness, 1
and speaks of a certain act or state of wilful
sin itself as ' having never forgiveness/
and as eternal. 3 Certainly it is the case that
Jesus Christ gives no countenance at all
to views of sin which lead us to think of
it as a temporary error on the right way,
But probably the most noticeable point
about our Lord's attitude towards sin is
that His indignation, which is as fiery as
the indignation of the old prophets, is
mainly directed, not against sensual, but
against spiritual sin. It is against sin of
the kind which we should describe as least
bodily, and having least to do with our
animal ancestors, that He concentrates
His wrath. It is against pride, and calcu-
lated worldliness, and spiritual despotism,
and ambition, and love of power, against the
sins of respectable spiritual men, rather
than against the sins of ungoverned passion
and animal lust. With the utmost em-
phasis, therefore, we should say that the
teaching of Jesus Christ leaves us with
a profoundly deepened assurance that the
seat of sin lies in the will of man ; and that
1 Matt. x. 28, xxv. 46, Mark ix. 43, 48.
2 Mark iii. 29, Matt. xii. 32, Luke xii. 10.
68 THE IDEA OF SIN
we are, in any true view of human nature,
face to face with this awful possibility and
reality of the human will setting itself in
obstinate rebellion against the will of God.
Nor is it open to doubt that to our Lord's
spiritual perception (as to that of St. Paul
and St. John), the spectacle of human sin
was thrown upon the larger background of
an unseen world of spirits. Human rebel-
lion was a portion of a larger and wider
rebellion of ' principalities and powers/
the devil and his angels. As God is, and
remains, the only Lord, so the victory over
evil is sure. But meanwhile man's moral
trial is made all the more serious by the
opposition of unseen enemies, and his
rebellion all the more serious by his unseen
allies.
St. John formulates his theory of sin in
the words, ' Sin is lawlessness.' 1 He means
by lawlessness, not, as we might mean,
merely something anomalous : but simply
rebellion against the law of God. He means
that the two phrases are coincident : that
sin begins and ends with violation of God's
1 I John iii. 4 : ?; a^apria f<TT\v fj ai/o/it'a. The
use of the articles makes the two terms absolutely co-
extensive.
THE IDEA OF SIN 69
law, and that except in the rebellion of
created spirits there is no such thing as
violation of God's law. And in thus making
the will the seat of sin, and identifying
sin with rebellion, St. John is but formu-
lating the general view of the Bible. It is
also St. Paul's doctrine : ' The wrath of God
is revealed from heaven against all ungod-
liness and unrighteousness of men, who hold
down the truth in unrighteousness ' ; c upon
them that are factious, and obey not the
truth, but obey unrighteousness, shall be
wrath and indignation, tribulation and an-
guish, upon every soul of man that worketh
evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek ' ;
* who shall suffer punishment, even eternal
destruction from the face of the Lord and
from the glory of his might/ 1 It is needless
to go on multiplying quotations.
It has, however, been said that, for St.
Paul, the seat of sin is in the bodily nature,
' the flesh/ and that he regards it as almost
involuntary : ' I know that in me, that is,
in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing : for
to will is present with me, but to do that
which is good is not.' Thus ' it is no more
I that do the evil, but sin which dwelleth
1 Rom. i. 1 8, ii. 8, 9; 2 Thess. i. 9.
7O THE IDEA OF SIN
in me.' ' Not what I would that do I
practise ; but what I hate, that I do/ ' O
wretched man that I am, who shall deliver
me out of the body of this death ? ' 1 But
closer examination proves this not to be
the case. St. Paul perceives that the
misdirection of the human will has per-
verted the body, so that the body of man
has become accustomed to evil, impregnated
with evil. And even when the will has
become wholly right with God for that is
the case which he is here contemplating
there still remains an intractable nature
which the man's will cannot draw with
it or control, and which forces the man to
feel his need of divine grace to transform
him and purge him through and through.
This intractable nature is sin in the body
and bodily impulses ; but this is, in St.
Paul, the secondary and not the primary
meaning of sin. It comes into notice when
sin, in its primary meaning of rebellion of
the will, is over and gone. It is, in the
individual or in the race, a consequence of
this rebellion. And it remains true that the
real seat and origin of sin, according to
St. Paul, is the will ; and there is no bodily
1 Rom. vii. 15-24.
THE IDEA OF SIN 71
sin, however gross, which is ultimately
anything else than the misuse of a physical
nature essentially good by a perverted will.
And St. Paul's whole teaching emphasizes
the principle of justification by faith; and
this principle does indeed mean, at bottom,
nothing else than this : that when the will is
again set right and enlightened, and wholly
redirected towards God and open to God's
offer of love, then the whole nature will
be redressed and brought right. Redemp-
tion begun in the will, by faith in God and
Jesus Christ, draws with it the whole nature,
body, soul, and spirit, each to its really
natural order and harmony. 1
Christianity, indeed, if it be true to facts,
must recognize all that St. Paul says about
' sin in the members '; but the ultimate seat
of sin is not the body, but the will, and
sin is only really sinful so far as it is the
rebellion of the personal will against God.
This is the fundamental Christian doc-
trine. It is not stated in the creeds,
though it is implied in the phrases ' I believe
in the forgiveness of sins,' or ' in one baptism
1 I have dealt with this matter at greater length in my
Practical Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (Murray),
i. 66 ff., 245 fit"., 279.
72 THE IDEA OF SIN
for the remission of sins/ and ' who for our
salvation became man/ for these phrases
imply that every man lies in sin and needs
forgiveness and renewal. But it is found
throughout Scripture, and, speaking gener-
ally, throughout Christian theology. Ter-
tullian, who may be said to have been
the first Christian psychologist, is right
in fastening upon this as the distinctive
Christian principle of sin. 1 And if it be
true, it is obvious that sin is not anything
which civilization has a tendency to out-
grow. The exhibitions of sin are different
in different stages of civilization different
among barbarians and in highly advanced
races. But it is as much present in the
latter as the former. And throughout the
whole history of humanity it is in the same
sense destructive in its tendency. Huxley
speaks of ' that fixed order of nature which
sends social disorganization upon the track
of immorality, as surely as it sends physical
disease after physical trespasses/ and he
speaks of its being ' the high mission ' of
science ' to be the preacher of a firm and
living faith ' in that ( fixed moral order/ *
1 De paen. 3.
2 Evolution and Ethics (Macmillan), p. 146.
THE IDEA OF SIN 73
Substitute for the words ' fixed order '
some such phrase as ' the will of God, the
moral ruler of the world/ and you have
here the doctrine of the prophets about ( the
day of the Lord* the judgement of God
upon nations and individuals. History,
so far as it is able to pass a verdict upon the
causes of national disintegration, confirms
the prophets' teaching. As you look out
upon the extraordinarily chequered course
of human progress, you cannot resist the
impression that progress might have been
infinitely more continuous and more gene-
ral but for the persistent tendency in
men to follow their lusts and appetites
and selfish ambitions instead of conforming
themselves to the will of God, as they were
able to know it. The history of the race
is in fact only the history of the individual
' writ large/ and we know well enough what
sin is in ourselves and others ; how indis-
putable is the fact of wilfulness, and the
refusal of the divine law which claims
authority over us in our conscience, and
the degradation and misery which this
wilfulness works in us.
So far as we can trace the history of
man, from end to end of our knowledge,
74 THE IDEA OF SIN
sin is always there, in the form of man's
refusal to submit himself to his best lights ;
and it is there on the largest scale, and
always with the same ruinous results, in
the individual and in the race.
It is of course obvious, from any point of
view, that the individual man is, from his
birth and before it, deeply influenced by
the race. It is obvious that the individual
does not ' start fair ' that he is largely
what the circumstances of his birth and
nurture make him. Thus it is certainly
true in some sense that sin is in the race
before it is in the individual will, and that
every individual is born into an inheritance
of sin. Whether this inheritance of sin is
actually transmitted physically or whether
it is, in the deepest sense, the result of en-
vironment and the social influences which
are upon us from our infancy, we need not
now consider. The relation of the indivi-
dual man to humanity, and the manner
in which the effects of the individual's
action are transmitted in the race, is a very
obscure question. I am not now concerned
with it. In any case, whether by physical
transmission or by social influence, each
individual is born into a world of sin, and
THE IDEA OF SIN 75
finds his own nature more or less weakened
and tainted before his own personal re-
sponsibility begins. But it will be admitted
by all Christians, except a school of extreme
Calvinists which can hardly any longer be
said to exist, that this ' taint of nature '
does not reach to the point of annihilating
our moral freedom and responsibility ; and
that where the will is set right the whole
nature will ultimately follow.
All that I am now concerned to maintain
as the indisputably Christian principle, the
constant teaching of the Bible, is that the
whole strength and essence of sin lies in
the lawlessness of the will, and that it is
this, and nothing else than this, which has
weakened and depraved our humanity,
and been the main retarding and dis-
integrating force in human development.
Sin, then, as we know it by experience
in the individual, is always a fall, a loss and
not a gain. It is ' lawlessness,' and to
break the law of our being is never a gain.
The returned prodigal, for all the joy of his
recovery, can never do otherwise than
lament that he left his father's house. The
act of rebellion is always a step along the
road which leads to the state of which our
76 THE IDEA OF SIN
Lord said, ' Good were it for that man if
he had not been born' a step, though
mercifully not an irrecoverable step, along
the way to ruin. And when you look at
humanity in the large (so far as his origin
can be known or conjectured) from his
first beginnings of properly human con-
sciousness, sin has been always a fall, and
at every stage has made, as the individual, so
also the society to which he belongs, weaker
and poorer and less progressive than might
have been the case.
And this doctrine of sin is in no way
dependent upon our regarding the story
of Genesis iii. as an historical record. In
the early Christian centuries it was com-
monly regarded as giving us, not a literal
history, but, to use the illuminating
phrase of St. Gregory of Nyssa, ' ideas
(or ' doctrines ') in the form of a narra-
tive/ 1 The materials of the narrative
come from sources shared by the Jews with
the Babylonians and other races. But
amongst the Jews the story becomes the
vehicle for a teaching about the meaning of
1 OratiO Catechetica, 5: fv Siqyqo-ews ei'Sfi d6yp.ara fjplv
Trpm-tBcpevos. The phrase refers to the whole opening
narrative of the creation and the fall.
THE IDEA OF SIN 77
sin which, conveyed in a form intelligible to
children or childish races, is, in its moral
contents, for ever true and valuable. It
is, as a matter of fact, quite untrue to say
that the Old Testament doctrine of sin,
which the New Testament inherits, is built
upon this narrative. It has no appreciable
effect upon the rest of the Old Testament.
In fact the doctrine of sin was wrought out
in the moral experience of the Hebrews,
under the guidance of the prophetic spirit,
and the colouring given to the old story
was the result of their moral insight into the
meaning of sin, and not the source of it. 1
The great advantage of the Christian
view of sin lies in its moral effects. Let
all men know the love of God for them
individually, and the freedom of which
their nature is capable ; let them know
that only one thing keeps them back from
entering upon their glorious heritage, and
that is the false desire of independence,
the shrinking from God, the refusal of the
will to surrender itself to Him, and you
1 With St. Paul's doctrine of the fall, and of the unity
of humanity in Adam and Christ, and of the relation of
sin and death, I have dealt in the work referred to,
Romans L, 190 ff., and app. note E.
78 THE IDEA OF SIN
inspire men with a great hope. You have
an effective gospel. The most degraded
of men can be assured that, if he will only
surrender himself in faith to God, and
accept the divine promise as it is assured
to him in Christ, and open his heart to the
divine influence, he can break once for all
with the past ; his nature will be, there and
then, brought back upon the track of
recovery ; he will regain self-mastery. All
the effects of sin, in the habits of his own
body or the traditions of his family or class
or nation or race, will be at last overcome
by the power of the redemptive Spirit.
This may happen as the experience of
conversions has constantly shown with
amazing rapidity, or it may be a slow
process only begun in this life ; but the
victory, slow or rapid, lies in the will in
the act of faith by which the whole life is
brought again into subjection to God in
Christ.
On the other hand, the more you allow
men to believe that the fault lies in their
bodies in an animal ancestry, imperfectly
refined, the more certainly you encourage
in them (what is the root delusion) the
tendency to regard their sins as their mis-
THE IDEA OF SIN 79
fortunes, the inevitable result of their
circumstances and their natures. This is
no mere theory. It is rooted upon the
experience of the past. The tendency to
find the secret of sin in the defilements of
matter and animal life has prevailed in many
ages and many parts of the world. It was
the dominant idea when Christianity came
into the world. It has at times resulted
in an extreme asceticism which has had for
its motive the desire to live a spiritual life,
separate from the pollutions of the body.
But, after all, we cannot live separate from
the body ; and if the body is evil we cannot
help it. Thus the tendency to find the
secret of sin in the bodily nature has in
fact resulted in general in a moral apathy
an acquiescence in the life of passion and
impulse. A great part of the redemptive
power which Christianity confessedly exer-
cised, when it came into a world where this
false idea prevailed, lay in its giving men
the true secret of sin.
Again, the Christian teaching about sin,
as it appears in the New Testament and
in the Church generally, forces a man to feel
that there is no limit to the disaster which,
by his refusal of God and of duty, he may
8o THE IDEA OF SIN
bring upon himself. Without allowing
ourselves to close any possibly open ques-
tion, we may say with confidence that
the teaching of Christ holds over the man
who persists in rebellious self-will the
certainty of a ruin which may prove at
last final and irretrievable. I do not
think it is possible to doubt that Christ
did hold this ultimate possibility over men
in metaphorical words no doubt, but in its
unrelieved horror.
If we let man think, with the New Theo-
logy, that his nature is in an inevitable
progress to perfection, which his selfishness
may indeed retard, and in which his sins
may involve remedial pains, but which
none the less is certain of final attainment,
we cannot fail, human nature being what
in experience we know it to be, to strengthen
the tendency to let things take their course,
and to weaken the strength of the naked
appeal to the human will as the arbiter of
the man's destiny his heaven or his hell.
Once more, what applies to the individual
applies to the nation or the race. Chris-
tianity believes in a divine purpose of
progress, and finds the goal of human pro-
gress assured in ' Christ upon the throne/
THE IDEA OF SIN 8l
But it knows, in historical f act, that nation
after nation has fallen back ; that there
is such a thing as the decay and dissolution
of civilizations. We look back upon ' the
giant forms of empires on their way to
ruin/ And the prophets of God have in
every age carried the message of God
to their nation, that progress or catastrophe
depends on themselves, and depends at
bottom upon moral character ; that, though
a nation may subsist with much wickedness
in it, its subsistence depends upon the
maintenance of the core of righteousness
within it upon the vigorous force of a
resisting body of righteous men in whom
the nation will consent to recognize its
true self. Once more, then, the more you
strengthen the belief in a practically in-
evitable or necessary progress a belief
which indeed is flatly contradicted by experi-
ence the more you weaken the prophetic
appeal to the social conscience of men.
It will be said that in all this I am ap-
pealing only to what is edifying, not to
what is true. I am not afraid of this
argument. Christianity is a revelation
appealing to man's moral will, and saying
in effect, ' Try it, and so prove its truth/
6
LIBRARY ST. MARY y S COLLEGE
2 THE IDEA OF SIN
And if it be the case that the preaching of
the Christian doctrine in its purity does
as a matter of fact show itself in the fruits
of converted living and moral liberty re-
gained, I feel sure that the Christian
doctrine has been proved practically true.
It has shown that it possesses the secret of
life. That is what actually happened in
the first preaching of Christianity and in
every subsequent moral revival of its
power. This is an actual experience viewed
from outside in general history, and viewed
from inside in the record which great and
conspicuous Christians from St. Paul and
Justin Martyr and Cyprian and Augustine
downwards have given of their moral ex-
perience as seen from within. The better
the men, we notice in passing, the sterner
the view they have taken of the sinfulness
of their sins. This moral experience con-
stitutes the subject-matter for a philosophy
of sin, and for, what must go with that,
a philosophy of the relation in which the
soul of man stands to God, of the relation
of our dependent personalities to the
Absolute. We get here into a very obscure
subject. Certainly it has not been satis-
factorily solved hitherto. Perhaps it never
THE IDEA OF SIN 83
will be in this world. But Christianity
has made a vast contribution to the subject,
and the core of the Christian contribution
lies in the truth, proclaimed by God's
prophets, reaffirmed by His Son, confirmed
by all Christian experience, the secret of all
Christian progress in the individual and the
race, that sin lies in the rebellion of the
dependent or created will against the
will of the Father and the Creator. Sin is
lawlessness.
LECTURE V
THE MEANING OF CHRIST'S DIVINITY
THE mode of thought which is known
as the New Theology is connected in all its
parts. It concentrates its attention upon
God as the universal Spirit, manifesting
Himself and realizing Himself in the uni-
verse. Especially in the development of
man's nature upward from the animal to
the spiritual does it look for this revelation
of God. And, from the ethical point of
view, the highest point of achievement
hitherto attained is found in Christ. In
Him, as in no one else, we can really see
God incarnate : we can see, that is, that
humanity is really divine and God is really
human. And, in the light of that vision
we are to go forward to realize our divinity
or divinize our manhood. For what Christ
is, we are all in various degrees capable of
becoming. We are all potentially sons of
God, or Christs. However much hidden
CHRIST'S DIVINITY 85
or overlaid, the divine nature is in all of
us, and is capable, especially under the
influence of Christ, of being evoked into
active and effective life. So, as man ad-
vances, will God become more and more
incarnate in all humanity, or in other words
the real identity of Godhead and manhood
will become more and more evident. Thus
' the Incarnation doctrine is the glorification
of human effort/ 1
This way of conceiving the incarnation
doctrine finds a guarded expression in the
1 Substance of Faith, p. 88. For the whole paragraph
see pp. 85-90, and New Theol. pp. 68-1 1 1. One point to
be noticed is that Mr. Campbell conceives of the spirit,
or higher self of humanity, as prior to all individual men,
as having a real existence, and constituting ' a perfect and
eternal spiritual being, integral to the being of God '
(p. 31). This he elsewhere calls 'the Eternal Christ,'
' the archetypal eternal divine man.' It (or should I
say he ?) is ' an emanation of the Infinite, the Soul of the
universe,' or at any rate is one element of the ' infinitely
complex being of God ' (p. 89). This Eternal Christ it
is which is manifested in the historical Jesus, and is also
the higher self or fundamental being of every one of us.
This doctrine of the eternal divine man would not require
much restatement to be brought into harmony with the
Church doctrine of the Eternal Word or Son. But,
according to Mr. Campbell, we all are at bottom this
' Eternal Christ ' in the same sense as was Jesus. Thus
the ' Christ-man ' appears again and again in history
in different individuals (p. 107).
86 THE MEANING OF
section of Sir Oliver Lodge's catechism
from which I have just quoted one phrase.
Mr. Campbell does not shrink from the
plainest statement of the obvious conclu-
sions of this doctrine. Two quotations will
make this evident.
General Booth is divine in so far as love is the
governing principle of his life. Jesus was divine
simply and solely because His life was never gov-
erned by any other principle. We do not need to
talk of two natures in Him, or to think of a mysterious
dividing line on one side of which He was human and
on the other divine. In Him humanity was divinity
and divinity was humanity. 1
Traditional orthodoxy would restrict the descrip-
tion ' God manifest in the flesh ' to Jesus alone ; the
New Theology would extend it in a lesser degree to
all humanity, and would maintain that in the end it
will be as true of every individual soul as ever it was
of Jesus. Indeed it is this belief which gives value
and significance to the earthly mission of Jesus. He
came to show us what we potentially are. 3
It is plain that such an idea of the in-
carnation as is here presented, while it has
in it much that is very close to the biblical
idea, is at the root fundamentally different.
And the difference follows on from the
1 The New Theology, pp. 75-6. 2 ibid., pp. 83-4.
CHRIST'S DIVINITY 87
difference in the conception of God. If
divinity and humanity are fundamentally
identical, the same reality viewed from
above and from below, 1 or if ' whatever else
He may be, God is essentially man,' 2 the
doctrine of incarnation stated above is
the only one possible. On the other hand
the idea of the incarnation contained in the
New Testament and the creeds is based on
the assumption, which we find everywhere
in the Bible, that there is no difference so
fundamental as that between the creator
and the creature ; and that Jesus of
Nazareth, the Christ, is in His own proper
person God, the Son of God, ' integral to
the being of God/ in a sense in which no
other man can possibly be ; even though
the abundance of the divine love should
give to all men of goodwill such fellowship,
through Christ, in God, that we all become
in Him ' sons of God ' and ' partakers of
the divine nature/
That is my point. A doctrine which
says ' Christ is God ' and then goes on to
say ' all men are God ' is really, I fear,
1 The New Theology, p. 75.
2 ibid., p. 89. Mr. Campbell adds : ' Because He is the
fount of humanity ' i.e. there is no difference in essence.
55 THE MEANING OF
farther off the Bible and the creeds than the
old-fashioned Unitarianism which said that
Christ is not God. For the old-fashioned
Unitarianism, in its best exponents, had at
least a fundamental agreement with the
Christian church up to a certain point in
its doctrine of God, and of His relation to
the world and to mankind. But teaching
which fundamentally identifies Godhead
and manhood can never come near to being
really Christian or biblical.
The view which the Christian church has
taken of Christ's person, and His relation
to His fellow men, may be stated in outline
thus :
God made man for sonship to Himself,
that is, capable of communion with God,
and of intelligent correspondence with
God's purpose in His kingdom of this
world, where he was made vicegerent. He
must, we feel, have been destined, per-
haps by some process of orderly evolution,
for a fullness of union with God such as
has actually been revealed to us in Christ,
even if there had been no sin, and conse-
quently no need of redemption. This, how-
ever, must remain a matter of speculation.
What we know is only what has actually
CHRIST'S DIVINITY 89
taken place, and that is necessarily seen
on a background of human sin.
For mankind was disloyal. Men dis-
ordered their own natures by self-will, and
introduced the disorder of their lawlessness
into the world where they were set to
exercise their dominion. The evil of sin
is so radical in human nature, it goes so deep
to the heart and foundation of manhood,
that no remedy could be adequate save
what must be expressed in such words as
1 re-creation ' or ' regeneration/ That is
to say, in other words, that God who made
man must remake him. God was, all
along, ' in the world/ and in man, therefore,
as part of the world, sustaining him even
in the life which he was misusing. More-
over, He never left Himself without witness ;
He was always ' the light of men ' in
conscience, even amidst the darkness of
his errors, even when ' the darkness '
seemed to come near upon ' overcoming '
or overwhelming the light. And He was
always ' coming ' to man by His prophets
and messengers in fuller communications of
His will and character. Then at last ' he
came/ * He entered by a new and wonder-
1 John i. 1-14.
9O THE MEANING OF
ful manner of union into human nature to
redeem it from within. He was born-
taking a human nature of the substance of
a human mother true man but new man ;
in a perfect manhood, both to reveal all
that can be disclosed of God in manhood,
and to reveal our manhood in the highest
union with Godhead that can be even
imagined. Thus He lived very God, but
under conditions of manhood and human
experience, a true human life hiding not
Himself from his own flesh, but bearing all
the burden of a proper manhood in a world
of sin. He makes His life, what man's life
should be a free-will offering to God His
Father ; and when the sin of man rejected
Him and put Him to death, He was obedient,
with a perfect human obedience, unto
death, and thus sealed His sacrifice in blood.
And the Father spared not His Son, but
accepted His self-sacrifice, and, in Him,
accepted our manhood ; and when He died
and was buried, raised Him from the dead,
and glorified Him still in our manhood
and exalted Him to His own right hand,
there to become the head of the redeemed
race of mankind ; for by His Spirit, the spirit
of the Father and the Son, sent down into
CHRIST S DIVINITY QI
the hearts of men, He unites the sons of
faith together into the fellowship of His
manhood, in His society, the church, which
is His body.
That is the faith of the Church. 'I
believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-
begotten Son of God, very God of very
God, who for us men and for our salvation
came down from heaven and was incarnate
by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and
was made man/
There is no question that, though this
divine action reaches in its effects as far
as the sovereignty of God, backwards to
the beginning, and forwards to the end,
it is yet an historical event, occurring at a
certain point of time, when Jesus of Naza-
reth lived and died and rose again essen-
tially and necessarily unique. It is plain
also that in the sense in which Jesus Christ
is, in this creed, divine, no other of the
sons of men can conceivably be so. It is
plain, once more, that this view of the
incarnation of God in Christ as something
necessarily unique follows from the doctrine
of God which belongs to the Christian creed ;
just as the belief in the incarnation of God
in mankind generally, with Jesus only for
92 THE MEANING OF
the completest instance of what is really to
come about in every man, follows from the
belief in God as immanent in the world, and
not to be otherwise thought of or known.
Are we, then, to substitute the view of
the New Theology for the doctrine of Christ
in the creeds ? No doubt in part this
issue has been determined, so far as we
have determined to adhere to the faith of
the Church about the being of God and the
meaning of sin. But, looking at the doctrine
of Christ by itself, what are we to say ?
Mr. Campbell dismisses the doctrine of
the creed with a contempt which is not very
impressive on the ground that it ' puts an
impassable gulf at once between Jesus
and every other person.' * How is it, then,
with the experience of mankind since the
apostles taught them to believe the creed ?
Have they found an impassable gulf put
between them and the Son of Man ?
Has any of the sons of men who lived long
ago, and was man and nothing more, been
near to the men of later ages, in felt power
and influence, as Jesus of Nazareth, believed
to be indeed God incarnate, has been ? Has
any example been as close to men since He
1 The New Theology, p. 80.
CHRIST S DIVINITY 93
walked in Galilee, as His example ? Nay,
with the profoundest conviction I am sure
that the view which declares Christ to be
what we are, and essentially nothing more,
only the supreme specimen of manhood
it is this view which, should it prevail,
would be found to separate Him from us
by an impassable gulf. He would then be
separated from us, as men of other races
or remote times are separated; or, again,
He would be separated from us as the men
of supreme genius of any kind are separated
from ordinary men. If men came to think
of Jesus Christ as, in the world of moral
character, what a Dante or a Shakespeare
are in the world of poetry, the power of
His example would be as little effective for
us, as the power of the example of any other
unique and solitary genius. The more
perfect it is, the more totally outside our
range it seems. But the example of Jesus,
sinless and perfect as He was on earth,
is perpetually brought near to every child
of man. Because He who set them the
example of a perfect life, does also by His
Spirit ever work inwardly in the heart of
every one of His members, to mould them
inwardly into the likeness of the example
94 THE MEANING OF
which ever lives before their eyes outwardly.
Thus it is that Christ, through nineteen
centuries, has ever been brought near to
the humblest of the sons of men yes,
brought near to them as man to man and
His example has been made effective as
an inspiration and a power. But all this,
only because this Christ, who was and is very
man, was also and antecedently very God,
and the bestower of the life-giving Spirit,
and is able thus to give to His manhood a
universal applicability, a universal exten-
sion and access, which, if it had been only
the manhood of one man among many, it
could never have had.
Moreover, the idea which the catholic
creeds embody of a great recreative act
of God to restore from its foundations a
ruined manhood corresponds to the real
need of man, as the deepest-seeing men have
realized it. Philosophers, from Plato to
Carlyle, have been found scoffing at contem-
porary reformers because their proposed
reforms did not, and could not, go deep
enough to get at the root of the evil in
human society. 1 What is wanted, they have
1 See Carlyle, Past and Present, bk. i., c. 4, ' Morrison's
Pill,' and the argument of Plato's Republic.
CHRIST S DIVINITY 95
declared, is in some sense a fresh start for
humanity, and a new birth. So the moral
philosophers have reasoned in words. But
it is Jesus alone, and He only as believed in
by the church, who has in any adequate
sense translated this logical and moral
requirement into actual reality. In Him
we see moving among men a true man,
truly the Son of Man. But the perfection
of His manhood is found in its sinlessness
in that which separates Him from all other
men, in that which makes His moral
consciousness so profoundly different from
that of Isaiah or Jeremiah, or St. Peter,
or St. Paul, or any other of the greatest
and best of His disciples, who, the greater
and better they were, have felt only the
more profoundly their sinfulness and their
fallibility. It is true manhood we see in
the sinless Jesus, but new manhood : a
second Adam in diviner power to redress
the balance of the first. And by faith in Him
men of all times and races can obtain what
is the fundamental moral need of their
nature not only a standard of manhood,
but a new birth in spirit and power.
Now we have to ask the question whether
the conception of Christ which is pre-
96 THE MEANING OF
sented to us in the catholic creed is really
warranted by the facts, so far as historical
inquiry can present them to us, in the
records of the New Testament ; or whether,
on the other hand, we can find traces of
a merely human Christ gradually divinized
by the pious imagination of the church,
or of a Christ divine only as other men are
divine.
First, then, let us inquire what the first
Christians thought about Christ. We go
first to the epistles of St. Paul, and we find
there that St. Paul consistently and with-
out doubt interprets Christ's person in the
sense of the creeds.
He was God's ' own ' Son, before He
was ' sent forth, in the fullness of the time,
born of a woman, that he might redeem
us men, that we might receive the adoption
of sons/ l ' Existing originally in the form,
or essential characteristics, of God, he
thought not equality with God a prize to
be clutched at, but emptied himself, or im-
poverished himself, and took the form or
essential characteristics of a servant, and
was made in the likeness of men ; and
being found in fashion as a man, he
1 Gal. iv. 4 ; Rom. viii. 32.
CHRIST S DIVINITY 97
humbled Himself and became obedient,
unto death, even the death of the cross.
Wherefore God also exalted him (in the
human nature which He had assumed)
and bestowed upon him the name that is
above every name : that at the name of
Jesus every knee should bow, of things in
heaven, and things in earth, and things
under the earth ; and every tongue should
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord/ 1 Once
more : ' In him were all things created, in
the heavens and upon the earth, things
visible and things invisible, whether thrones
or dominions or principalities or powers ;
all things have been created through him
and unto him ; and he is before all
things, and in him all things consist/ :
It was only because He existed thus in His
eternal being and in the universe that,
when He was made man and glorified, it
could be the Father's pleasure ' that all
the fullness of the Godhead should dwell in
him bodily/ 3 and that He should be set
' far above all rule, and authority, and
power, and dominion, and every name that
is named, not only in this world, but also
Phil. ii. 6-1 1, 2 Cor. viii. 9. a Col. i. 16, 17.
3 Col. i. 19, ii. 9.
9 THE MEANING OF
in that which is to come ; and that all
things should be put in subjection under
his feet, who is the head over all things to
the church, which is his body/ l
This is not a full account of St. Paul's
doctrine of Christ, but it is sufficient to
show that what St. Paul believed about
Christ makes Him indeed ' integral to the
being of God/ and that he could not
possibly use such language about any
other. ' To us there is one God, the
Father, of whom are all things and we unto
him ; and one Lord Jesus Christ, through
whom are all things and we through him.' 2
Moreover, there does not appear to have
been any discussion in the church on the
matter of belief about Christ. St. Paul
was in controversy with the Christian Jews
of Jerusalem on many points ; but there
appears to have been no controversy with
regard to the interpretation to be given
to the person of Christ. The same doc-
trine of Christ the doctrine which makes
Him properly divine as well as human-
appears in the most Jewish of the New
Testament books, the Apocalypse, 3 as well
1 Eph. i. 21, 22. 2 i Cor. viii. 6.
3 See Swete's Apocalypse (Macmillan), pp. clvi. f.
CHRIST S DIVINITY 99
as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in
the Epistle of Peter, and in the Fourth
Gospel.
Was, then, this stupendous doctrine
about one who had been seen and touched
and heard as man among men, who had
eaten and drunken and died and been
buried as man in a human body was it
based upon His own witness, the witness
of His own human lips ?
Now, we have the strongest historical
grounds for asserting that the Fourth Gospel
was written in his old age by one who had
moved in the innermost circle of the dis-
ciples of Jesus in Judaea and Galilee, when
He was among them ; and also that he was
none other than John, the son of Zebedee.
So that we have in this Gospel a living
memory of ' the disciple whom Jesus
loved.' If this be so, as I certainly be-
lieve, we cannot doubt that our Lord Him-
self had, even if only rarely, confessed
in unmistakable terms His own divine
and eternal Sonship. ' I and my Father
are one/ ' He that hath seen me hath
seen the Father/ l But, without dwelling
1 John. x. 30, xiv. 9. It is impossible to maintain
that St. John would have tolerated the idea of such
IOO THE MEANING OF
upon this now, as you will know it to be
in dispute among critics, I prefer to rest
our case upon the first three Gospels, which
present us with the memorials of Christ
as they were treasured in the church of
the thirty or forty years after our Lord's
death, the church in which His apostles
lived and worked and taught.
Do we find there the humanitarian Christ,
a Christ divine possibly, but only as all
other men are divine ? Or do we find
there the Christ of the church's belief ?
I speak the honest truth, I can hardly
tell you how often, with the whole sincerity
of which I am capable, I have asked my-
self that question, and reinvestigated it
anew to the very utmost of my power, and
always with a renewed certainty of assur-
ance that the humanity of our Lord, as you
find it recorded in the pages of the Synoptic
phrases being put into the mouth of other men to
signify that manhood and Godhead are at bottom one
and the same thing. Thus he wholly differentiates
between John the Baptist, with his assuredly divine
mission, and Christ, with His divine origin (John iii.
28-36), or between the divine Sonship of Christ ' God
only begotten ' and the divine sonship, the title to
which He communicates to those who believe in Him or
are in Him new-born (John i. 1-18).
CHRIST S DIVINITY IOI
Gospels, is not capable of any other inter-
pretation, if you are fair to the evidence,
than that which the first Christian church
gave it. I admit, of course indeed, I do
more than admit that it was not suddenly
and all at once that the first Christians
leaped to the clear consciousness of what
was contained in their creed, as you find it
a little later in St. Paul and St. John. Im-
mediately after the resurrection they are
occupied solely with the thought of the
Messiahship of Christ, as foretold in Old
Testament prophecies. So great and over-
whelming a thought as that of the in-
carnation is not suddenly to be grasped
by men's minds, if it is to be grasped
healthily. But it was held by the Christian
church under the full influence of the
apostles, and if we ask whether the be-
lief was justified by what they had actually
seen in our Lord and heard from our Lord,
I say, with complete assurance, that it was.
I am now assuming that these Gospels
are substantially true. But I do not ask
any kind of exemption for any historical
document from free historical criticism. If
you reach the conclusion that the Gospels
are really historical, it is sometimes assumed,
IO2 THE MEANING OF
absurdly enough, that you are trying to
exempt them from criticism. If you recog-
nize that there are parts of the Old Testa-
ment which are not historical, though they
are written in an historical form, and
then go on to declare that you believe the
Gospels are strictly historical, people will
say that you are trying to allow criticism
of the Old Testament documents, and to
disallow it in the case of the New. That
is really quite meaningless. In every his-
tory of every nation you recognize that
there are different stages of historicity, in
proportion to the character and nearness
of the evidence. You do not say, because
you are doubtful about the history of King
Arthur, that therefore you cannot be cer-
tain about the history of King Alfred, or
of Richard the Second, or of George the
Fourth. The historical certainty depends
on the nature and closeness of the evidence.
I do not ask for any use of the Gospels
which is not in accordance with the strictest
requirements of historical evidence. I do
not make any claim for them except what
is made in St. Luke's preface namely, that
he has done his best to draw up the most
authentic narrative from first-hand evidence :
CHRIST S DIVINITY 103
Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw
up a narrative concerning those matters which have
been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered them
unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses
and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also,
having traced the course of all things accurately from
the first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent
Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty
concerning the things wherein thou wast in-
structed.
I believe that self -witness of St. Luke,
the Christian physician and companion of
St. Paul, to be exactly true. I believe that
in his Gospel, as also in St. Mark, and
in the first Gospel, you really have, written
down by honest recorders, the evidence of
those who had been with our Lord, eye-
witnesses of His life and works, as well as
ministers of the word.
Well, then, let us look at the picture.
And first, at Christ's sinlessness. What a
stupendous fact that is ! Read the Old
Testament, and hear how every prophet,
in proportion as he is holy, feels his sinful-
ness. Hear how St. Paul feels it, and cries
out under the pain of it ; how St. John
impugns any one who says that he is not
sinful : ' If we say that we have no sin, we
deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in
IO4 THE MEANING OF
us/ l See how the angelic messenger in
St. John is represented as jealous for the
divine glory of God, refusing all acts of
worship : ' See thou do it not ; I am a
fellowservant with thee, and with thy
brethren the prophets . . . worship God.' 2
And then think of Jesus of Nazareth as
He moved among men, conscious of sin-
lessness, never by word or deed giving any
indication of that sense of liability to
error and sin which has belonged to the
whole human race apart from Him, and
with deepening intensity in proportion as
men have been good and religious.
Think of the way in which He trained
men to trust in Him ; how deliberately
and gradually He trained His disciples to
believe in Him, to put their whole trust in
Him, as in one who was capable of pro-
viding for them in body and in spirit,
capable of supplying and satisfying all
their spiritual needs, as well as helping them
in all physical distresses, by His love and
power. By no single or sudden word, but
by the whole process of His training, He
brought them to regard Him as that
which God only can be for the soul of man
1 i John i. 8. - Rev. xxii. 8, 9.
CHRIST S DIVINITY IO5
its adequate repose : ' I will give you
rest.'
Think of the authority with which He
spoke ' No man knoweth the Son save
the Father, neither knoweth any man the
Father, save the Son, and he to whom-
soever the Son willeth to reveal him.' ]
Think of the authority with which He set
aside what lawgiver and prophet had said
of old ' It was said to them of old time . . .
but I say unto you.' 2 Think how, in the
parable, He distinguishes Himself, as the
Son, from God's earlier messengers, who are
the slaves. 3
Think, above all, of what it must have
been to those disciples to be constantly
with one who claimed to be the final judge
of men in their acts, and also in their secret
thoughts. ' Many shall come to me in
that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy
in thy name, and in thy name do many
wonderful works ? Then will I (discerning
their secret selves) profess unto them, I
never knew you ; depart from me.' 4 ' Before
1 Matt. xxi. 36-37, Mark xii. 6, Luke xx. 12-13.
Matt. v. 21-22, 27-28, 33-34, 38-39, 43-44-
3 Matt. xi. 27, Luke x. 22.
4 Matt. vii. 21-22.
IO6 THE MEANING OF
him shall be gathered all the nations, and
he shall separate them one from another,
as the shepherd separateth the sheep
from the goats.' 1 Think, I say, what it
would be to keep company with one who
in His innermost consciousness knew Him-
self, and declared Himself to be, the final
and infallible judge of all men, not in their
outward acts only, but in their secret
thoughts also. Such experience could lead
to one result only ; it did lead to that re-
sult that they came to believe Him to be
verily and indeed what the creed asserts
Him to be, what the unanimous consent of
Christendom has declared him to be God,
the very Son of God, made man.
I say read, and re-read, that record of
Christ in the Gospels, and ask yourselves
the question Is not the old dilemma true :
either He was God, or He was not a good
man ? There is, I suppose, no subtler, at
the same time there is no more tremendous,
sin than the sin of one stronger spiritual
nature asserting itself in ascendency over
others, and leading them to put in that
which is only a creature the reliance and
the faith which is due to the Creator. That
1 Matt. xxv. 32.
CHRIST S DIVINITY IO7
is the real heart of the worst kind of sacer-
dotal tyranny. Yet we cannot escape from
the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth did,
in His training of the disciples, deliberately
put Himself in that place in their hearts
which would have involved the supreme
usurpation, had it not been the only
legitimate place for Him who was really
both their brother and their God.
Must we not conclude, then, that the
Christian interpretation of the person of
Christ, the interpretation accepted by con-
sent in the time of St. Paul, is the inter-
pretation which the facts, when you scan
and scrutinize them, warrant the only
interpretation which is really compatible
with those facts ? If we accept this con-
clusion, we do indeed accept a belief in
Christ as divine in a sense in which no other
man is or could be divine ; but we are led on
by a safer route than that of the New
Theology, to an extension of the incarnation
of God to all humanity. For it was not for
Himself that the eternal Son took our man-
hood : it was that all other men, through
faith in Him and new birth into Him, might
become, in their measure, partakers of the
divine nature. The incarnation waits for
108 THE MEANING OF CHRIST'S DIVINITY
its fulfilment upon the completion of the
body of Christ, which is the church universal,
till God is manifested in the whole of the
redeemed humanity, in the new heaven and
the new earth wherein dwelleth righteous-
ness.
LECTURE VI
MIRACLES
THE next point on which we are to con-
trast the New Theology with the creed of
the old religion is in the matter of miracles.
It is plain enough that if we think of God
as the soul of the world, manifesting Him-
self only in the orderly development of
the universe ; and of Christ as only the
supreme instance of what all men in
principle are, or are becoming ; we cannot
but feel a sort of intellectual resentment in
face of the claim for certain abnormal and
unique events to be believed in the case of
Jesus Christ His birth of a virgin, for
instance, or the resurrection of His body
on the third day from the tomb, as well as
the miracles which He is recorded to have
wrought on others. For such events force
us to think of God as acting in or upon the
world independently of its normal order or
sequence. They are miracles supposed
109
iBRAHY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
110 MIRACLES
events which the order of the world and of
man cannot account for. Thus the tendency
of the New Theology is to depreciate the
spiritual value of the belief in miracles, to
criticize the evidence for them, and to deny
that they actually occurred. The teachers
of this school would indeed admit that the
minds or wills of certain more or less ex-
ceptional men may exercise exceptional
power over the body their own bodies or
those of other men. Such are the phe-
nomena of ' suggestion ' and ' faith healing.'
And modern critical writers have a ten-
dency to accept certain of the recorded
miracles of Jesus, and to explain them as
a form of ' mental therapeutics.'
' That He should have had power to cure
nervous diseases by words of power or by a
spiritual predominance is perfectly natural.'
So writes Prof. Gardner. 1 And Prof.
Harnack : 2 * In our present state of know-
ledge we have become more careful (than
earlier critics), more hesitating in our
judgement, in regard to the stories of the
miraculous which we have received from
antiquity. That the earth in its course
1 The Growth of Christianity (Black), p. 75.
2 What is Christianity ? (Williams & Norgate), p. 29.
MIRACLES III
stood still, that a she-ass spoke, that
a storm was quieted by a word, we do not
believe, and we shall never again believe ;
but that the lame walked, the blind saw,
and the deaf heard, will not be so summarily
dismissed as an illusion/
The miracles of healing are therefore, on
the whole, accepted as possible, and treated
as instances of the exceptional spiritual
power of Jesus over the bodies of other men
suffering from what are called ' functional
diseases of the nervous system ' instances,
that is, of what occurs in a whole class of
recognized events, which are popularly
grouped as cases of faith-healing. A
medical authority 1 has recently examined
this theory, and shown good reasons for
denying that our Lord's miracles of healing
can be accounted for on the neurotic theory.
But, besides this, it must be noticed that
the earliest record of the ministry of Christ
contains, side by side with the miracles
which it is proposed thus to explain,
nature miracles such as the feeding of the
multitudes, and the walking upon the
water, and the withering of the fig-tree, to
1 Dr. R. J. Ryle, in the Hibbert Journal, April, 1907,
' The Neurotic Theory of the Miracles of Healing.'
112 MIRACLES
which such an explanation is totally
inapplicable, but which rest on absolutely
the same basis of evidence. So that the
problem cannot be thus dealt with. And
miracles which resist any such neurotic
explanation, Prof. Harnack declares, ' We
do not believe, and we shall never again
believe/ I am thankful to recognize that
Mr. Campbell, in the case of our Lord's
physical resurrection, is not thus peremp-
tory. He is inclined to admit it. 1 But he
owns that his friends will not generally
agree with him. And the adherents of the
movement are unanimous in repudiating
the belief in the virgin birth.
On the other hand, those who hold to
the idea of God which finds expression in
the creed, believe that, though He is mani-
fested in the order of the world, He is not
limited by it. It is the expression of a
will which remains unexhausted and in-
dependent. Now it is doubtless true that
a perfect will must always so act as that
its action should not be arbitrary, but the
expression of perfect law. Thus the greatest
Christian thinkers have always seen that
miracles must express and not violate the
1 The 'New Theolgoy, pp. 220 ff.
MIRACLES 113
order of the world, in the deepest sense in
which the order of the world is the mind
of God. 1 But we recognize at the same
time that abnormal circumstances require
in a free being abnormal actions.
A man of high intelligence, though his
normal action will be methodical and
orderly, retains his liberty to deal with an
exceptional situation by some unusual and
striking mode of action. To be tied to
the normal and the habitual, when some-
thing exceptional is needed, is to be mecha-
nical and not rational.
It is the highest order of rational action,
as we know it in the world, which is our
best image of God's action, and not mere
mechanical uniformity. Thus the more
fully we recognize in God the supremely free
personality acting in the \vorld, the more
ready we shall be to accept the evidence
for exceptional or abnormal action on God's
part when the situation demands it.
The believer in the faith of the creed sees
in the circumstances of the incarnation a
situation essentially unique. Sin had dis-
turbed the order of the world. It had
1 See reff .' in my Bampton lectures, The Incarnation
of the Son of God (John Murray), p. 246.
8
114 MIRACLES
made the world, so far as man controls it,
a manifest disorder. Against this disorder
God is represented in the Old Testament
as in continual protest by the prophets.
He will not, however, even so, deal with
man so as to destroy his liberty. He deals
with him for the restoration of the lost
order, morally, by an appeal to his will and
heart and mind. The incarnation of the
Son is God's great act of redemption, or re-
creation, to restore a disordered world. It
is so unique a divine action, in so abnormal
a situation, that it cannot surprise us if it
requires something more than God's cus-
tomary action in nature.
In some such way as this we may argue
that the admission of the possibility of
miracle is bound up with any belief in God
as the supreme, and supremely free, person-
ality. But such abstract argument takes
us but a little way. We shall do better
to examine the records and see whether
there is real reason to suppose that the
miracles actually occurred, and what kind
of appeal they are intended to make to us.
I think we shall find the evidence of the
actual occurrence of miracles is in the highest
degree cogent, and at points overwhelming.
MIRACLES 115
We are not now concerned with miracles
reported from other ages, but with those of
the New Testament with those recorded
in connexion with the manifestation in
the world of the Christ of God. But we must
extend our view beyond the Gospels to
include also the records of the first pro-
clamation of Christ.
For we find St. Paul witnessing, more
than once, in the simplest and most inci-
dental way, to the ' power of signs and
wonders ' which accompanied his own
preaching l and which he regarded, not as
peculiar to himself, but as the signs of an
apostle. And this witness is borne out in
the narrative of the Acts.
St. Luke, the disciple of St. Paul, who
certainly wrote the Acts, and who was a
physician, accustomed to observe diseases
and their cures, records in the Acts of the
Apostles not only miracles of the earlier
period which were reported to him, but
also miracles wrought by St. Paul when he
was actually with the apostle, such as the
raising of Eutychus and the healing of
the father of Publius. 2
1 Rom. xv. 19, 2 Cor. xii. 12.
8 Acts xx. 7ff.,xxviii. 8,9. Notice the ' we' in each case.
Il6 MIRACLES
Then we go back upon the miracles
wrought by Christ, and we take note that
the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark,
which we have the best reason to believe
represents the preaching of Peter, is full of
these miraculous events, some of which,
as has already been said, are miracles of
power over nature, which can be in no way
explained by the influence of mind over
mind ; and it will be observed that these
miracles are no mere portents such as
Matthew Arnold ridiculed, when he asked
the question why he should be supposed to
make an improbable statement more pro-
bable if he could turn his pen into a pen-
wiper. The miracles of Christ are ' signs/
counterparts of His words, teaching the
same lesson in another sphere. In fact,
the teaching and the miracles are so in-
extricably interwoven, as web with woof
in the same substance, that any treatment
of the narrative which seeks to discredit
the miracles must discredit the teaching
also, and leave us, as the author of Ecce Homo
said long ago, ' a Christ as mythical as
Hercules.' If the teaching is certainly
authentic, so, we are bound to say, are ' the
works ' also.
MIRACLES 117
So natural do Christ's miracles His
' works/ as they are called seem in His
case that we are inclined to interpret them
simply as the laws of His nature. We find
that each higher grade of nature has modes
of action appropriate to it, which are ' super-
natural ' from the point of view of the
nature which lies below as animal life is
' supernatural ' to inanimate nature, and
human action to the nature that is merely
animal. So we may say that in Christ we
have a higher kind of nature which has its
own new laws of action. These are Christ's
natural works ; but to other men they are
miracles. 1
But, on the whole, this is not the way
in which the New Testament leads us to
think of them. They are more often
regarded as evidences of God working with
Him, evidences that the divine power
which rules nature was supporting Him and
witnessing to Him. 2
And now we turn to the miracles which
the Christian church fastened upon to
enshrine in its central creed as of the very
substance of its faith. ' I believe that
Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy
1 See Bampton Lectures, pp. 47-8. 2 Acts ii. 22.
Il8 MIRACLES
Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary . . . that He
rose again the third day from the dead and
ascended into heaven/
The resurrection of Christ occupies evi-
dentially in the New Testament a unique
place. ' He was declared to be the Son of
God with power, according to a spirit of
holiness, by the resurrection of the dead.' 1
' If Christ hath not been raised our preach-
ing is vain, your faith also is vain. 1 2 So
cries St. Paul. And St. Peter ' God begat
us again unto a living hope by the resur-
rection of Jesus Christ from the dead.' 3
It was, in fact, as the records show, and
as all men agree, by the confident belief
of the apostles that Christ had been re-
peatedly seen by them, risen from the dead,
and that His divine sonship and mission
was thus made evident by His triumph
over death, that the foundation of the
Christian church was made possible. There
is also no doubt that this was understood
to mean that in the same body in which He
died and was buried, only transmuted into
a higher state and power, he was raised
again. St. Paul's words imply this 4
1 Rom. i. 4. 2 i Cor. xv. 14. 3 i Pet. i. 3.
4 i Cor. xv. 3-4.
MIRACLES 119
' That he died, and that he was buried,
and that he hath been raised the third
day/ This phrase describes what can
only be a physical occurrence to the body
which had died and been buried, a physical
occurrence at a particular moment of time.
No apparition in another body would
satisfy this language. And there is no
event in the Gospel record which rests on
more certain ground of evidence than that
the women who came early to the sepulchre
on the Easter morning found the tomb
empty of the dead body.
The record of appearances is best given
in St. Paul's words. 1
Now I make known unto you, brethren, the gospel
which I preached unto you, which also ye received,
wherein also ye stand, by which also ye are saved ;
I make known, I say, in what words I preached it
to you, if ye hold it fast, except ye believed in vain.
For I delivered unto you first of all that which also I
received, how that Christ died for our sins according
to the Scriptures ; and that he was buried ; and
that he hath been raised on the third day according
to the Scriptures ; and that he appeared to Cephas ;
then to the twelve ; then he appeared to above five
hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part
remain until now, but some are fallen asleep ; then
he appeared to James ; then to all the apostles ; and
1 i Cor. xv. i-n.
I2O MIRACLES
last of all, as unto one born out of due time, he ap-
peared to me also. For I am the least of the apostles,
that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I
persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of
God I am what I am : and his grace which was be-
stowed upon me was not found vain ; but I laboured
more abundantly than they all : yet not I, but the
grace of God which was with me. Whether then it
be I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed.
St. Paul was writing the Epistle to the
Corinthians apparently in the spring of
A.D. 55. He records doubtless what he had
' delivered ' in all the churches he had
taught since he began his missionary life
some eight years before. And he is em-
phatic that the substance of this proclama-
tion was common to him with the other
apostles : ' Whether then it be I or they,
so we preach, and so ye believed/ This
record is nothing less than the title-deed
of the church the title-deed of a society
which based all its authority on witness,
the record of chosen witnesses to the life
and death and resurrection of Jesus.
Much is made of the discrepancies be-
tween the various narratives of our Lord's
appearances. I do not think that they are
greater than the discrepancies that will be
MIRACLES 121
found in the narratives of eye-witnesses of
many momentous events in history. The
matter must be examined in detail else-
where. 1 But the strength of the evidence
is much greater than can be measured
by the precise trustworthiness of each
particular record. There is no question
that the whole apostolic body were lifted
out of despair and disheartenment into
an absolute confidence of faith, within the
compass of a short period of days, by re-
peated visits, as they were assured, of their
Lord risen from the dead. If we may so
express it, their lives were driven round a
sharp corner, or set on a new basis.
They were men different in character,
but the impression made upon them was
the same. They were, as appears in the
Gospel narrative, all of them plain, un-
imaginative men, as unlike ' visionaries '
as possible : the impression was made on
them in spite of their being ' slow of faith.'
It was the kind of impression, therefore,
which only solid objective events can make
upon the senses and the mind.
1 Dr. Sanday's treatment (Outlines of the Life of Christ
(Clark, 1905), pp. 170 ff.) will be found, as usual,
singularly candid.
122 MIRACLES
This place of the resurrection in God's
revelation of His purpose and mind is
evident enough. It was the reversal of the
impression made by the Christ being left
to die. It made evident that the divine
power, the power which creates and sustains
the world, was on the side of Christ.
I want to emphasize this point. Nature
is, in its normal order, non-moral in appear-
ance. God maketh the sun to rise on the
evil and on the good, and, as certainly,
overwhelms in physical catastrophes evil
and good indiscriminately. At times no-
thing lays so great a strain on faith as
the totally mechanical or non-moral aspect
of nature. If nature can be so cruel, we
cry, can the God of nature care ? But at
the great central moment in the world's
moral history, in the case of Christ, we are
allowed to see that the God of nature and
the God of conscience are one. The real
meaning of the incarnation, of the Word
made flesh, requires, as we may say, that
in the case of Christ it should thus have been
made evident that there is only one lord-
ship in heaven and earth. And the faith
of all subsequent generations has rested
on that evidence, and been made strong.
MIRACLES 123
In Christ we see in summary the purpose
of God for mankind. In His resurrection
we see in summary that at the last the
material, as well as the spiritual order, is
to take its place in the kingdom of God,
in the new heaven and the new earth wherein
dwelleth righteousness.
The account of the physical state of the
risen Christ, given in the Gospel records,
taken together, is so remarkable and so
completely without precedent in Jewish
literature, that it is in itself a great witness
to its truth. Our Lord, in rising, is pro-
bably represented as having passed out of
the grave-clothes, leaving them to collapse. 1
He is certainly represented as having passed
out of the tomb before the stone was rolled
away to show that He was gone. He passed
into the apostolic assembly through the
closed doors. He appears and disappears,
and in ' a different form/ He is not repre-
sented as living in any one place, or as
passing by the modes of motion which He
had used, like other men, in His mortal
body, from place to place. He is in a
higher state of being. His body has been
1 John xx. 6, 7. See Latham's The Risen Master,
(Camb. 1904), pp. 26, 43-44, and note.
124 MIRACLES
so transmuted as to be no longer subject
to the laws which restrain the grosser
mortal body. He can manifest Himself
under those old, lower conditions, so as to
eat with His disciples. But He is no longer
subj ect to them. The body is now spiritual :
that is to say, it is the simple instrument of
spiritual purpose. It has lost all its gross
and hampering limitations. The idea of
the spiritual body, as St. Paul conceives of
it, in forecasting the destiny of all the re-
deemed, corresponds much more than is
generally supposed with the facts as re-
corded of our Lord's risen body in the
Gospels. All the acts of the risen Christ
are thus symbolic. They are done from
no natural necessity, as eating or sleeping
or moving was a necessity of His former
mortal state : they are simply exhibitions
in outward form of spiritual purpose.
Thus, when He rose before His disciples'
eyes and passed upwards in His ascension,
the act was symbolic. He was not obliged
to go that way to a heaven above the clouds,
any more than He was obliged to pass by
a particular road from Galilee to Jerusalem.
He is above all such limitations. Doubt-
less the apostles thought heaven was above
MIRACLES 125
their heads. And still, though we no longer
think so, we cannot help expressing our
ideas of what is heavenly by the physical
metaphor of ' above/ And, whatever
our astronomy, the record of our Lord's
rising before the apostles' eyes upwards,
expresses the spiritual truth of His ' exalta-
tion to the right hand of power ' as no
other motion could have done. The ascen-
sion, as an event in time, was the last of
the appearances of Jesus, the same in char-
acter with those that had gone before. It
comes to us only on the authority of St.
Luke ; but such an event, witnessed by the
apostles, is required to explain the unani-
mity with which the first church believed
that Christ was ' received up/ and c was
seated at the right hand of God/
The miracle of our Lord's virgin birth
rests on a different basis of evidence from
the rest of the record. It was not part of
the original apostolic testimony ; for the
church laid the greatest stress on testimony,
and the period of which the apostles were
witnesses extended only from the preaching
of John the Baptist till the time when
Jesus was taken up from them. 1 This
1 Acts i. 22.
126 MIRACLES
explains the limits of St. Mark's and St.
John's Gospels, which comprise simply the
apostolic witness.
Thus the virgin birth was not part of the
grounds on which belief in Jesus was asked
for. It was on the grounds of what Jesus
had said and done and suffered, on the
grounds of what God had done when He
raised Him from the dead, that belief was
asked for in His divine sonship.
But when men had first believed, and
come into the believing circle, they could
not but have inquired into the circum-
stances of Jesus' birth. Originally there
were but two chief witnesses of these cir-
cumstances, Joseph and Mary ; and Mary
was still alive in the first circle of believers.
When we look at the two narratives we
have got of our Lord's birth, they present
all the appearance of coming respectively
from Joseph and Mary. They are inde-
pendent, and certainly both of them purely
Jewish in origin. 1
In St. Matthew we have an account of
our Lord's birth wholly from the side of
Joseph his perplexities, his difficulties,
his reassurance, his protection of the mother
1 See Harnack, Luke the Physician, pp. 166-7.
MIRACLES 127
and the child. I believe the account in
St. Matthew to be based ultimately on the
witness of Joseph, very possibly left in
writing l with his family to protect the
character of the mother. On the other
hand, in the record in St. Luke, we have a
narrative which, if it is at all trustworthy,
must come from Mary, and no one else
Mary, who ' kept all these things, ponder-
ing them in her heart/ 2 As evidence of
its trustworthiness, besides its own con-
vincing character, we may point (i) to the
fact that it breathes the spirit of the Mes-
sianic hope, before it had received the rude
and crushing blow involved in the rejection
of the Messiah by His own people. The
Child is to ' reign over the house of Jacob
for ever/ ' God hath raised up a horn of
salvation for us in the house of his servant
David ; . . . salvation from our enemies, and
from the hand of all that hate us/ It is the
hope of ' the redemption of Jerusalem '
that is to be satisfied. 3 Such expressions
1 Zechariah could write (Luke i. 63), and therefore
presumably Joseph.
- Luke ii. 19.
3 Luke i. 33, 69, 71, ii. 38 : cf. Gvvatkin, Knowledge of
God (Clark, 1907) ii. p. 25. 'These intensely Jewish
128 MIRACLES
could hardly have originated when the real
event had been made plain.
(2) To the fact that the narrative is given
us by the careful and intelligent recorder
St. Luke, who grounds his claim to write
on his having ' traced the course of all
things accurately from the first/
There is good evidence, then, for the fact
that our Lord was born of a human mother
only, without a human father. The church
fastened upon this event, and from the
beginning of the second century it is en-
shrined in the early confessions of faith, as
something integral to the Christian re-
ligion. I believe this instinct was sound.
It seems to me that the moral miracle of
Christ's sinlessness is apt not to be duly
estimated. It did constitute Him, not less
properly human, but distinct from other
men by a distinction which goes down to
the depths of our nature. His sinlessness
agrees with the estimate which St. Paul
forms of Him as a new creation the ' last
Adam' a fresh start for humanity. I
think such a fresh start for humanity is
hymns must have been written by Jews, and at a time
before Israel had finally rejected Christ say before A.D.
62.'
MIRACLES 129
naturally associated with some physical
miracle. It is in itself strictly an inter-
ruption of the natural order or sequence.
The character of Christ's manhood involves
such an interruption. He was not a natural
product of the existing order. It is natural,
therefore, to believe that the divine action
which gave Him birth would be, in the
physical world also, exceptional. It is
natural to believe, further, that the birth of
the eternal Son in manhood should differ
in circumstances and conditions from the
production of a new human personality.
In fact, the agreement of the church's
belief about Christ's person with the accept-
ance of the miracle of His birth is so
intimate that in history the two have been
inseparable. There have been no believers
in the doctrine of the creeds who have
not been believers in the virgin birth,
and in recent years it has become in-
creasingly evident that those who disbelieve
in the virgin birth are in other respects
also adherents of the New Theology : they
mostly doubt the bodily resurrection ; and
give to the incarnation a different sense
from that in which the Creed proclaims it.
I think the tendencies of the present
9
130 MIRACLES
moment strongly confirm the position that
the acceptance of Christ's virgin birth is
in vital connexion with the whole of Chris-
tian belief.
LECTURE VII
THE ATONEMENT AND THE INSPIRATION OF
SCRIPTURE
ON the conceptions of God, of sin, and of
Christ, and on the credibility of miracles,
we have been able to present to ourselves
a more or less marked contrast between the
New Theology and the fundamental ideas
of the old religion. There are other doc-
trines of Christianity notably the doctrines
of the Atonement and the inspiration of
Scripture about which the New Theology
has a good deal to say, but on which the
contrast between the new and the old need
not, and indeed cannot, be brought to a
like issue, because the Christian society
has never given these doctrines a definite
form in any authoritative creed, and we
have therefore got no definite standard of
belief to refer to. I shall have occasion
later again to draw attention to this. It
will appear plainly that it was a true
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
132 THE ATONEMENT AND THE
instinct which caused the catholic church
to define its faith in terms of the doctrine
of God and the person of Christ, and to
leave the belief in Christ's atonement and
the inspiration of Scripture undefined.
On the subject of the atonement, Sir
Oliver Lodge is inadequate, yet reverent
and appreciative. 1 Mr. Campbell begins,
indeed, by giving a crude parody of the
' accepted belief ' on the subject, 2 but
afterwards goes as far in recognition of
Christ's vicarious sacrifice as any one can
go, who believes that in our various degrees
we are all fundamentally Christs. The
fact is that no theology which is based on
the principle that Godhead and manhood
are at bottom identical, and that what
Christ was all other men are, can really
come near to the New Testament idea of
atonement.
What I propose to do here is without
defining what has been left undefined, or
even seeking to determine anything that is
obscure to state the New Testament idea
of atonement in its main principle, so as
to guard it from abuse, and to show that
1 The Substance of Faith, pp. 98-100.
2 The New Theology, pp. 114-15.
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 133
it follows inevitably from the fundamental
doctrines which we have already considered,
of God and sin and Christ.
As regards the inspiration of Scripture,
it is again plain that a teaching which
diverges so far from the fundamental
teaching of the Bible about God and man
and Christ as the New Theology does, can
hold only a very attenuated doctrine of its
inspiration. 1 On this subject again I pro-
pose to content myself with showing that
there is a doctrine of inspiration, which has
the fullest spiritual and practical value, and
satisfies the whole requirement of the church,
which any one who accepts the Creed
can hardly hesitate to make his own.
THE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT
Christians, from the very first, saw in
Christ's death not only a crime on the part
of His murderers, but also on His part a
voluntary sacrifice, and a sacrifice by which
their redemption had been won. The
Gospels represent Him at the last supper
proclaiming the sacrificial nature of the
1 The New Theology, pp. 176 ff. The Substance of
Faith, p. 93, is much more reverent.
134 THE ATONEMENT AND THE
death which He was to undergo. His body
was being given, and His blood poured out,
for men and for the remission of sins. 1 One
of the earliest speeches in the Acts represents
the church as seeing in Christ's death and
resurrection the fulfilment of the great
prophecy of the Servant of Jehovah who
was to save his people by his vicarious
sufferings and death. 2 The heart of Chris-
tendom has gone out in welcome to this
teaching as to hardly anything else. The
' showing of the Lord's death/ as the
sacrifice of our redemption, has been from
the first the chief service of catholic Chris-
tendom, and the crucifix generally its most
popular symbol ; and the proclamation of
the glory of the atonement in hymns such
as ' Rock of Ages ' has been the central
theme of ' evangelical ' worship. But
while the heart has welcomed the doctrine,
the intellect has been baffled more con-
spicuously here than at other points in the
faith and worship of Christendom. There
have been deeply different theories as
Origen's and Anselm's, and Abelard's and
1 Mark xiv. 24, Matt. xxvi. 28, Luke xxii. 19, 20,
I Cor. xi. 24-6.
* Acts iii. 13, 261, cf. Is. lii.-iii,
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 135
Calvin's which we have all come to recog-
nize as in various ways inadequate. And
the church has never corporately faced the
question raised, or embodied its faith in any
formula, while all the time the doctrine is
liable very easily to be so isolated, and dis-
torted in popular belief, as to become a
dangerous and misleading error.
It is true to say that, as formalism has
been the besetting sin of catholic Christen-
dom, so the misuse of the doctrine of the
atonement has been for Protestant Chris-
tianity ; and in both cases with the same
result : that of weakening the effect of the
central lesson of the religion of the Bible
that salvation means deliverance from the
actual power of sin into a state of actual
righteousness, and that fellowship with
God is in no other way possible than by
becoming actually like God in moral char- ^
acter. This moralizing of religion is the
chief object, we may say, of the religion of
the Bible, both in the Old and in the New
Testament. The early church, under the
first inspiration of the Spirit, was pre-
eminently a body characterized by its lofty
and unworldly ethical tone. It was the
moral ' salt of the earth/ The peril under
136 THE ATONEMENT AND THE
Catholicism has been for the church, as it
became popular, to be satisfied with outward
conformity, and lose the strenuousness of
its moral appeal. The peril under Pro-
testantism has been for people to dwell
complacently upon ' the danger of thinking
to be saved by works, 1 and to take Christ's
' finished work ' as a substitute for their
own effort. And the idea of vicarious pun-
ishment Christ punished that we might
be ' let off ' has, more than anything else,
tended to alienate the best moral conscience
of mankind from Christian teaching.
Let us try, then, to grasp at least the
main principle of the atonement doctrine,
and, if we can, to make sure its safeguards.
In Christ we saw not the highest
achievement of human nature, but the
recreative act of God. It was the eternal
Son of God who ' for us men, and for our
salvation, came down from heaven, and
was incarnate and was made man. 1 That
is the starting-point of the Christian view
of Christ's work. ' God, in the person of
Christ, was reconciling the world unto
himself/ and undoing the evil of man's
. rebellion. Certainly, as will appear, He
will not redeem us without our co-operation.
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 137
Every faculty of our human nature will be
summoned to correspondence. It is within
us, and not apart from us, that our redemp-
tion is to be wrought. But, first of all,
the great act is accomplished for us and
independently of us. ' He trod the wine-
press alone, and of the people there was none
with him/ Alone He set the perfect
example of the sinless and flawless manhood.
Over against all our wilfulness and weak-
ness and selfishness and pride, He offered
before the Father a perfect obedience. And
when human sin laid upon Him the penalty
of failure and suffering and ignominy and
death, He did not refuse to ' learn obedience
from the things that he suffered/ He was
obedient ' unto death/ He sealed His
self-sacrifice in the shedding of His blood.
And this human sacrifice of obedience
perfected in death the Father accepted,
and ratified His acceptance by raising Christ
from the dead and exalting Him to the
heavenly glory. ' This is my beloved Son,
in whom I am well pleased/
Then out of that manhood, accepted and
glorified, proceeds forth the Holy Spirit,
who is to gather all the sons of faith, all
who will accept Christ for their master and
138 THE ATONEMENT AND THE
their saviour, into such intimate union
with Him, that they are to share His
character and His suffering and His glory.
This is ' Christ in us. 1 ' He shall see his seed
. . . and be satisfied/ It is the fruit of His
sacrifice. But up to this point it is all God's
act for us, God's redemption of his people,
in Christ. To it we contributed nothing.
We can but welcome and receive in faith
God's gift of our redemption in Christ. We
can but join the great company of the re-
deemed who cry, ' Worthy art thou ... for
thou wast slain, and didst purchase unto
God with thy blood men of every tribe and
tongue and people and nation, and madest
them to be unto our God a kingdom and
priests ; and they reign upon the earth/ l
' In none other is there salvation : for
neither is there any other name under
heaven, that is given among men, wherein
we must be saved.' 2
This is the real point of the church doc-
trine of the atonement. It is the recogni-
tion that our redemption is based upon
something done simply and altogether for
us by the self-sacrifice of Christ. It was
His obedience, unto the shedding of His
1 Rev. v. 9, 10, 2 Acts iv. 12.
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 139
blood, that won for man his new standing-
ground in the face of God his Father,
and his new power to put all evil under
his feet. What our sins had lost, Christ's
self-sacrifice has regained for us.
It is quite plain that in adhering to this
teaching we are in no peril of attributing
injustice to God. For it is God who, in
Christ, is reconciling the world to Himself.
It is divine self-sacrifice which is there at
work one will of love in Father and Son.
Moreover, there is strictly no justification
for speaking of the Father as punishing
the Son in our place. We have indeed here
the supreme example of what is the noblest
element in human history vicarious sacri-
fice ; but there is no evidence of vicarious
punishment. The Father * spares not ' His
Son, but suffers Him to bear, without miracu-
lous exemption, all that human sin laid
upon Him, all the failure and the desertion
and the death. But there is no part of all
that Christ bore that was not, in the natural
order of the world that He came into,
involved in His obedience. There is, so
far as we can see, no other ' punishment '
laid on Him by the Father than that bear-
ing of the consequences of other men's sins,
I4O THE ATONEMENT AND THE
which fell upon Him inevitably when He
came as man into a sinful world, and which
falls upon every man or woman, in measure,
who enters into the lot of humanity. Nor
does His suffering, His bearing the sin of
the world, exempt other men from what
can be more properly called punishment,
the punishment of their own sins. His
blood-shedding is indeed said to have been
propitiatory, and to have enabled the
Father to forgive us. A word shall be said
about that expression directly. It warrants
us in saying that Christ suffered in order
that we might be forgiven ; but we are not
warranted in saying that Christ suffered in
order that we might be exempted from
suffering.
The penalty of sin, as it is presented to
us in Scripture, may be said to be twofold,
It is in part the alienation from God which
lies in the sin itself, and is indistinguishable
from the state of sin : and that Christ did
not bear. In the case of each one of us it
ceases to exist as soon as ever the soul passes
from rebellion into surrender.
But besides this, which is purely personal,
there is the penalty which lies in the con-
sequences of sins, whether gur own sins or
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 141
the sins of others : the consequences in the
way of chastisement. And from these
Christ does not save us. They are turned
into our healing penance. ' Whom the
Lord loveth He chasteneth.' The record
of God's dealings with His saints is that
they are ' heard/ ' forgiven/ and ' pun-
ished.' l The idea that we are ' let off '
punishment because Christ suffered for us,
is, as far as we can see, entirely a figment,
except in the sense that Christ, by His self-
sacrifice, is the means of our redemption
from that alienation from God which is the
essence of sin and of hell. 2
We get back thus to that question which
the human mind seems to have found
especially perplexing the question why
Christ's sacrifice should have been, as
St. Paul and St. John seem to say it was, a
necessary condition of the Gospel of for-
giveness. There is only one passage in the
New Testament where this question seems
to occur, 3 and there St. Paul seems to
give an answer which can satisfy our con-
1 Ps. xcix. 8.
a I have argued this matter more at length in Romans,
ii.2i5f.
3 Rom. iii. 25. See the commentary of Sanday and
Headlam (Methuen), or my exposition in loco.
142 THE ATONEMENT AND THE
science and mind on the subject. There
he seems to say that it was necessary in
view of the moral government of the world :
because, after man's age-long lawlessness
and God's age-long forbearance, a mere
declaration of forgiveness, without an act of
reparation on man's part would have led to
a mistaking of the character of God. As it
is, the gift of divine forgivenesss in Christ is
bought at so costly a price, so splendid an
act of reparation on the part of Christ, the
representative head of the new humanity,
that we cannot misunderstand the divine
love in forgiving, as if it carried with it any
abandonment of moral requirement.
My last point is this : there is no shadow
of a doctrine of imputed righteousness in
the New Testament, such as will suffer us
to imagine that there can be any final recon-
ciliation of an individual man with God, on
any other basis than likeness of character.
It is through and through the teaching
of the Bible that it is only ultimately the
godlike who can see God. All the work
of Christ in setting us the perfect example,
and in providing for us the opportunity of
a fresh start, by the forgiveness of our
sins, is only the prelude to that which is
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 143
in the deepest sense the work of Christ in
us, the renewing by His spirit of heart and
life and character into the divine image.
Here, then, we get the root principle of
the atonement made for us in Christ.
Christ, the incarnate Son of God, is the
representative man. In Him our manhood
is reconstituted, and plays its perfect part,
and offers its perfect sacrifice, and wins its
perfect acceptance. Finally, each man is
accepted in the Beloved, only because he
has come to share His character through
the permeating influence of His Spirit.
But long before this there is an initial and
provisional acceptance. It is the great
principle of God's dealings with us, that He
deals with us, not as we are, but as we are
becoming. At the first moment when the
man turns, or as often as after repeated
falls he turns, from his rebellion to obedi-
ence, and welcomes the offer of God, he is
accepted and forgiven, and given his stand-
ing-ground in the Father's house, long
before he is, in his own character, fit for it,
because he has taken Christ for his master,
and is seen already in the character of his
elder brother. 1
1 That the first movement must be a movement of
144 THE ATONEMENT AND THE
My object in this discourse is attained if
I have made it plain that the Christian idea
of atonement is bound up with the idea of
Christ's redemptive work as, first of all, a
work done for us, without any co-operation
on our part ; but that, on the other hand,
the safeguarding of this doctrine from
moral abuse lies in the recognition that the
work of Christ for us is only the prelude
to His work in us : that it is Christ in us, the
immanent Christ, which is ' the hope of
glory/ And it will be apparent what a
safeguard for the holding together of these
two complementary half-truths the Christ
for us and the Christ in us is afforded by
the sacramental system. The sacraments as
a whole are the symbols and instruments of
the immanent Christ. The sacrament of
the Breaking of the Bread in particular is
obedience as well as acceptance is seen in the fact that
forgiveness is first of all associated with baptism, Acts ii,
38 : cf . 'I believe in one baptism for the remission of sins '
baptism involving the acceptance of the obedience of
Christ. And the same principle appears in each subse-
quent absolution.
The provisional character of all such initial accept-
ances is seen most clearly in the Parable of the Unmerci-
ful Servant, where the subsequent exhibition of a temper
incompatible with being forgiven, at once obliterates the
absolution already given.
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 145
the continual representation of the atoning
sacrifice, one, full, perfect and sufficient
but in the most intimate and inseparable
connexion with the communication to us
of the once-sacrificed life, the body and
blood of the living Christ, to be our spiritual
food.
THE INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE
The inspiration of Scripture, logically
considered, is not the ground on which be-
lief in Christ is to be asked for. The
proclamation of Christ was first made by
witnesses, and it was as witnesses that
were to be believed. St. Luke, in the
preface to his Gospel, makes no other claim
than that of producing a careful record of
the testimony of eye-witnesses of the Lord
Jesus. So far as historical events are con-
cerned, we must be content in our age to
appeal to authentic history. No doubt
historical testimony is not all that goes to
make belief. There must be the spiritual
disposition which makes acceptance pos-
sible. But the historical claim must be
supported by good historical testimony.
The Gospel records must make good their
10
146 THE ATONEMENT AND THE
claim to be such testimony. I believe, with
the profoundest conviction, that they can
do so. And that it is those who doubt or
deny, and not those who accept the witness
of the Gospel narratives, who do violence to
the evidence.
When a man has once believed that Jesus
is the Lord, the Christ of God, he will find
himself believing in the inspiration of the
Old Testament : that is to say, he will find
in the Old Testament the record of a pre-
paration for Christ. He will find in the
Jews a chosen people, ' the sacred school of
the knowledge of God and of the spiritual
life' which was destined thence to spread
to all mankind.
In other words, he will believe that the
prophets of the Old Testament made a
true claim when they claimed to speak ' the
word of the Lord/ That word or message
was communicated gradually, ' in many
parts and in many manners/ * In many
parts ; and thus the believer in Christ will
have no difficulty in accepting the fact that
the Old Testament gives us the record of a
gradual process of divine education ; and
that a very imperfect moral level was ac-
1 Heb. i. I.
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 147
cepted by God as a stage towards better
things. The ancient fathers of the Chris-
tian church had no hesitation in recog-
nizing that what we are to look for in the
Old Testament morality is not perfection,
especially in its earlier stages, but only a
right direction.
And the message of God was given ' in
many manners/ The Christian believer
need not hesitate to recognize in the early
chapters of Genesis narratives which are
not historical, but give us ' doctrines in the
form of a story/ He will not be shocked
to find in the Old Testament popular legend,
and poetical history, and stories narrated
for a moral purpose, as well as history more
strictly so called. For all these can be
vehicles of the spiritual instruction of a
nation. He will read the Hebrew docu-
ments like the documents of any other his-
tory, but he will find in them something
which he does not find in any other history,
to nearly the same extent a continuous
guidance in which he will recognize the in-
spiring influence of the Holy Spirit, training
and guiding a race to right thoughts about
God and man, to a right sense of sin, and a
right expectation of redemption. He will
148 THE ATONEMENT AND THE
find in every one of the books of the Old
Testament some element or aspect of this
gradual revelation.
Thus, while he makes no claim for the
Old Testament writers to be teachers of
science, or to be infallible in matters of
history, he will see in them, in their different
degrees and according to their different
literary methods and human idiosyncrasies,
organs of one Spirit working towards
one end, and that end the religion of
Christ.
In Christ he will see the full purpose of
that Spirit realized : and in the apostolic
writers he will recognize a full measure of
His inspiration. He will ' put himself to
school ' with each book of the New Testa-
ment in turn, to learn its lessons about
Christ and His will. He will find the best
reason for believing that the Holy Spirit
did guide the apostolic writers ' into all
the truth ' about Christ. He need not
believe that there are no mistakes or in-
accuracies in the New Testament narra-
tives ; but he will recognize that we have
there, when we judge the narratives simply
as historical documents, trustworthy his-
torical material ; and in the spirit which
INSPIRATION OF SCRIPTURE 149
animated the writers he will see the Spirit
of truth.
I do not think, then, that one who has
come to believe in Christ, on the grounds,
partly moral and spiritual and partly his-
torical, which lead to, and justify, such be-
lief I do not think that he will find any
difficulty in believing that the Scriptures,
both of the Old and New Testaments, are
' given by inspiration of God/ and, as
such, are ' profitable for teaching, for re-
proof, for correction, for instruction in
righteousness ; that the man of God may
be complete, furnished completely unto
every good work.' l
And the more he believes this, the more
thankful he may well become that the
church has given no definition of inspira-
tion, and that he is tied to no doctrine of
the infallibility of every statement of
Scripture.
1 2 Tim. iii. 16, 17.
LECTURE VIII
THE NEW THEOLOGY AND THE CHURCH OF
ENGLAND
THROUGHOUT these lectures I have been
endeavouring to vindicate the superiority
of the doctrine about God and nature and
man, which is expressed in summary in the
catholic creeds, over the ideas of the New
Theology. What, therefore, according to
my contention, we ought to do is by all
means in our power to bring men back to
the point of view of the creeds, or to the
mind of the church which formulated the
creeds.
For what has given the New Theology its
advantage is partly the fact that the type
of ' orthodoxy * which prevailed in Eng-
land the Protestant orthodoxy of the
earlier nineteenth century in certain im-
portant respects had given an expression
of Christian truth quite inferior to that of
the ancient church. Thus we have been
150
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 151
suffering from a largely legitimate reaction
against the defects of this Protestant or-
thodoxy, just as at the Reformation the
disastrous division of Christendom into
national or sectional ' churches ' was due
to a reaction again a largely legitimate
reaction against the excesses and perver-
sions of the mediaeval church.
In particular the Protestant orthodoxy
of the nineteenth century had three special
defects.
First, it was largely coloured by Deism in
its conception of God. It disposed men to
think of Him as the creator who made the
world, and the great emperor who rules it,
as from outside, and whose action was
exhibited in occasional ' interventions/
The evidence for the prevalence of this one-
sided conception is sufficiently to be found
in the fact that the New Theology, in em-
phasizing, again with a one-sided emphasis,
the counter truth of God's immanence in
nature, proclaims it as a new truth, 1 and is
even naively unconscious how familiar this
counter truth was in the original Christian
theology. This oversight which is in any
case strange after so much modern writing
1 See The Substance of Faith, p. i.
152 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
on the ancient lines has only been possible
because the aspect of truth expressed in
the divine immanence had been so largely
forgotten in current orthodoxy. However,
if it was not actually expressed in the
creeds, it was, as I have said, thoroughly
familiar in the church which formulated the
creeds. And it is a prominent idea in the
New Testament. It is expressed in such
phrases as ' In him all things consist/
which imply that God, the eternal Word,
is the immanent principle of order and
system of the world ; or again, ' In him
we live and move and are/ ' We are all his
offspring/ which imply that humanity
exists in God and is in the image of God, in
spite of the hindering or obscuring effect of
sin. Here we have the ground for all that
reverence for nature and natural law, and
all that regard for human nature, which the
New Theology found lacking in current
orthodoxy. All that proper reverence for
nature and for man, as the expression of
God, is present in the original Christian
theology, which at the same time keeps in
the forefront of its teaching that thought
of God which forms the substance of the
revelation on which it bases its claims to
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 153
teach the thought of God as independent
of the world and supreme over it, supreme-
ly free in His own moral personality and
power as the creator and the redeemer and
the judge.
Its tendency to Deism was, then, the first
defect of the Protestant orthodoxy of the
last century.
The second defect was that it rested its
system upon the infallibility of Scripture
as a record, so that no seemingly scientific or
historical statement of Scripture could be
otherwise than true. Now I do not think
that I am exaggerating when I say that
that position has been riddled by modern
science and historical criticism, and is no
longer reasonably tenable. It is cruelty
to young people to bring them up in the
belief that a statement in the Bible about
natural processes, or a statement in his-
torical form, is necessarily * true, because it
is in the Bible.' The Bible was not given
to teach us science, and its allusions to
natural facts and processes are expressed
in terms of the beliefs of its day ; though
doubtless there is remarkably little either in
the Old or the New Testament that is con-
trary to our present science. Again, the
154 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
Bible is a literature which, like the litera-
ture of every other nation, contains ' his-
tory ' of the most variable degrees of
accuracy. Inspiration, which we rightly
ascribe to the books, or, more strictly, to
the writers of the Bible, is not the same
thing as infallibility or inerrancy. It
means that the Spirit of God was ' speaking
by prophets/ and, especially through the
Jewish race, was guiding men to right in-
stead of wrong thoughts about God and
nature and man and sin and redemption.
This work of inspiration has its centre and
culmination in Christ, and it is in His
person, and the revelation of God involved
in His person, that the faith of the church
is centred. This is formulated in the
creeds. It rests upon the witness of the
apostles to the teaching of Jesus Christ and
to His acts, and to certain crucial events of
His life, especially His resurrection from
the dead. Facts thus become of the first
importance in our creed ; but where the
facts become of the first importance, the
historical evidence becomes also first-rate
evidence, which would be accepted as satis-
factory in other departments of history.
And it is upon the strength of the apostolic
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 155
witness, and not upon the infallibility of the
history given in the whole area of the litera-
ture of Scripture, that we rest the security
of our creed in matters of fact. We need
to return, then, to the point of view of the
creeds, and to be thankful that the only
affirmation there made about the inspira-
tion of Scripture is that the Holy Ghost
' spake by the prophets/
Thirdly, the Protestant orthodoxy cen-
tred itself upon the doctrine of the atone-
ment rather than of the incarnation, at the
same time as it tended to give that doctrine
an expression against which the moral
sense of the world revolted. As I have said,
you cannot well exaggerate the importance
of the doctrine of the atonement, or the
appeal which the divine sacrifice has made
to the heart of man. But it has been
formulated in no dogma, save so far as the
creed confesses that Christ suffered 'for
us/ Our faith is centred by the creeds
upon the person of Christ, and the revela-
tion of God given in Him, and upon the
crucial events of our Lord's life in the flesh,
by which our redemption was vindicated
and assured. 1
1 I am not concerned here to ask how far these same
156 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
Once again we need to return to the
point of view of the creeds.
I am well aware that there will be many
to tell me that it is mere 'obscurantism*
to maintain that the ideas of the creeds are
the best guides to ultimate truth which the
modern world possesses. I must leave to
others the metaphysical vindication of the
Christian idealism. 1 But I must say a
word to those who plead that to identify
Christianity with a doctrine of miracles is
to place it in inevitable opposition to the
intellectual spirit of our age. The really
cogent evidence of religion, it is urged,
must be found in facts of present spiritual
experience; not in past events of dis-
putable evidence, and of a kind which con-
flict with such a conception of the order of
the world as science is perpetually strength-
tendencies, or other tendencies as harmful, were prevalent
in the Catholic orthodoxy of the same period. I am
simply taking the fact that there was dominant in
England a certain orthodox Protestantism, and am con-
cerned with the defects of that alone, as it is against
that alone that the New Theology is in reaction.
1 I think that the work of Mr. Inge, Personal Idealism
and Mysticism (Longmans), and Mr. Illingworth's
Personality Human and Divine, will perhaps assist
the ordinary student to see his way better than any
other recent books.
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 157
ening, and which tends to make miracles
practically unbelievable.
I should, of course, be the first to agree that
the most cogent evidence of religion lies in
present spiritual experience ; for it is pre-
sent spiritual experience, our own and that
of others, which constitutes the present
witness of the Spirit. But the present
witness carries us back to Christ. And He,
we contend, cannot be otherwise legiti-
mately interpreted than as the church has
always interpreted Him. The Christian
church has believed in Him, not only as the
teacher of the truth, but as God incarnate,
who made evident, in one memorable
moment of history, by His power over nature
and by His resurrection from the dead, that
the moral will of the Father, the supremely
free will of love, is really the one power which
is over all and through all. The real enemies
of the Christian spirit are the naturalism
which denies the deadliness of sin and the
necessity for redemption in each single
man, and the pessimism which denies the
sovereignty of love in the world as a whole.
The victory of the Christian spirit over these
constant tendencies of thought and feeling
is bound up with its belief in God as He
158 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
has revealed Himself in Christ in God who
expresses Himself in nature, but is supreme
over nature ; and it is precisely this belief
which Christ's miracles have inspired and
confirmed.
There is the deepest reason to believe that
the actual power which Christianity has
exhibited in the world, its power to lift
human life and to create a new type of
civilization, is due to its fundamental and
distinctive ideas. In everyday experience
we see such evidences of inconsistency
between ideas and practice, between the
professed beliefs of men and their actual
conduct we see so often pagan practice
associated with nominal orthodoxy, and
Christian conduct in individuals associated
with more or less of unbelief in the Christian
creed that we are disposed to doubt
whether theological ideas have very much
real influence over life as a whole. But
history, on a broad view, corrects this ten-
dency. As we look at the long reaches of
history we see in fact, and indisputably,
that the practical character of a civilization
coheres with its ultimate theological prin-
ciples ; that the theology of the Buddha,
and of Jesus Christ, and of Mahomet, lies at
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 159
the root of a quite distinct civilization and
type of character, which, when you exa-
mine it, proves to be in the most intimate
connexion with its ideas of God. ' The
only really important changes in human
history, those from which new types of
civilization proceed, take place in the ideas,
the conceptions, and the beliefs of men.
The memorable events of history are the
effects of invisible changes in the thoughts
of men/ l It is the Christian idea of God
which has lain at the root of Christian
civilization and progress ; and the re-
covery and maintenance and diffusion to
new races of this civilization, and its
capacity for progress, depend at bottom
upon the maintenance of the fundamental
ideas of God which are summarized in the
catholic creeds, in which the real spirit of the
Christianity of history has expressd itself.
It is the strength of the Church of Eng-
land to stand upon the faith of these creeds,
and on the basis of this fundamental unity
to afford the greatest possible compre-
hensiveness. When Christianity came into
the world it took shape in a catholic society
which had three chief characteristics.
1 Gustav Le Bon, Psychologic des joules (Paris 1907), p. 2.
l6o THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
1. Its outward constitution as a coherent
society took shape universally in the suc-
cessions of the bishops, who with their
assistant officers were the ministers of the
word and of the sacraments of the church,
and who were in each local church the cen-
tres of unity, and also the links of unity
between the different congregations in all
nations and the maintainers of the con-
tinuous life of the whole church down the
generations.
2. The faith of the church expressed it-
self (in slightly different forms in different
places, but with substantial identity), in
the creeds.
3. The canon of Scripture that is, the col-
lection of the writings of the Old Testament,
and of the apostles and their companions
in the New Testament was formed, in order
that the church might be kept constantly
in touch with the original revelation, on
the maintenance of which its healthy life
depended.
These three elements of historical Chris-
tianity, beside which nothing else can, in
at all a like sense, claim catholicity, have
been preserved to the Church of England,
and, in spite of all her weaknesses and un-
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND l6l
faithfulnesses, give her a unique opportunity
and responsibility in the present Christian
world.
It is with the second of these elements
alone, the creeds, that we are now directly
concerned.
The fact that the Church of England
stands upon the creeds, and substantially
upon the creeds only, by way of doctrinal
requirement, constitutes her great oppor-
tunity.
When I speak of doctrinal requirements,
I am speaking chiefly of requirements upon
the officers of the church, the clergy. On
joining the church, indeed, in baptism, or
on receiving the full status of church mem-
bership in confirmation, the church claims
the assent of the layman, also, to the faith
of the Apostles' Creed. And the creeds are
recited in our services in the language of the
people, so that profession of faith is prac-
tically more prominent in our public ser-
vices than in those of any other part of the
church of Christ. But the responsibility
of joining in our services, and of approach-
ing the Communion, is left to the con-
science of the layman, with whatever
assistance or counsel he may like to
ii
l62 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
seek ; and I trust it may continue so to
be left.
On the clergy a more definite require-
ment is made. Day by day, and service by
service, the minister is required, as leader
of the congregation, to say ' I believe/
and to profess his faith thus solemnly and
constantly in the explicit and unmistakable
phrases of the creeds. Now I am sure that
it is quite necessary that we should main-
tain in the whole community the sense of
the moral obligation of the man, who thus
stands to profess his personal faith as
leader of the congregation, really to be-
lieve what he thus solemnly professes to
believe, in terms which are deliberately
unambiguous. The maintenance of this
principle of good faith is necessary, not only
for the sake of the Christian religion, but
in the general interests of professional
honesty. I have taken occasion before now
to make it evident that, as far as I can
secure it, I will admit no one into this
diocese, or into holy orders, to minister for
the congregation, who does not ex animo
believe the creeds.
I am supported in this resolution, I feel
sure, by the general mind of the church.
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 163
I know that I am supported by the bishops
of this province of the church. Twice re-
cently the bishops of the province of Can-
terbury have solemnly declared that they
are ' resolved to maintain unimpaired the
Catholic faith in the Holy Trinity and in the
Incarnation, as contained in the Apostles 1
and Nicene Creeds, and in the Quicunque
Vult, and regard the faith thus presented,
both in statements of doctrine and in
statements of fact, as the necessary
basis on which the teaching of the church
reposes. 1
We must be very gentle with scrupulous
and anxious consciences. We must be
very patient with men under the searching
and purifying trial of doubt. But when
a man has once arrived at the steady con-
viction that he cannot honestly affirm a
particular and unambiguous article of the
creed, in the sense which the church of which
he is a minister undoubtedly gives to it, the
public mind of the church must tell him
that he has a right to the freedom of his
own opinion, but that he can no longer,
consistently with public honour, hold the
office of the ministry. 1
1 With regard to the minatory clauses of the Quicunque
164 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
But if a real assent of heart and will and
intellect to the teaching of the creeds is re-
quired of the clergy, I think that substan-
tially nothing else of a doctrinal kind is
required of them. I mean that a man who
believes the Creed is not likely to be
troubled with any reasonable difficulty in
making the doctrinal assent required of
him when he is ordained, or when he accepts
any particular charge in the church. He is
required to profess that he ' assents to the
Thirty-nine Articles and to the Book of
Common Prayer, and to the Ordering of
bishops, priests, and deacons ; and that he
believes the doctrine of the Church of
England as therein set forth to be agreeable
to the Word of God ; and that in public
prayer and administration of the sacra-
ments he will use the form in the said book
prescribed and none other, except so far
as shall be ordered by lawful authority.'
Vttlt, the mind of the present church is practically
unanimous in the sense which it intends them to bear.
In reciting these clauses, with a large qualification which
is not expressed, I am certainly only doing what the
church which commissions me bids me to do. At the
same time I think this unexpressed qualification is so
considerable, and the fact that it is unexpressed leads
to so much misunderstanding and scandal, that the
clauses in question are unsuitable for public recitation
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 165
Time was when the clergy were required
to profess a very much stricter adherence
to the Articles. But the phraseology of the
declaration was in 1867, by the combined
authority of the Convocations and of Parlia-
ment, made much more general i.e. an
assent only to the doctrine as contained in
a series of documents as a whole ; and I do
not believe that any one who believes the
fundamental creeds, and is conscientiously
prepared to teach the Catechism, and to
use the services authorized for common
worship and the administration of the
sacraments, ought to have any reasonable
scruple in accepting the ministry in the
Church of England. 1
1 Of one more scruple, that arising out of the declara-
tion required by those who are to be ordained deacons,
as to faith in the Scriptures, I have spoken in my charge
on The Spiritual Efficiency of the Church (Murray, 1904),
pp. 70, 71: ' We are required, before we can be ad-
mitted to the order of deacons, to express our " unfeigned
belief in all the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments " ; but that expression of belief can be
fairly and justly made by any one who believes heartily
that the Bible as a whole records and contains the
message of God in all its stages of delivery, and that
each one of the books contains some element or aspect of
this revelation. In other words, I " unfeignedly believe
all the Scriptures," if I believe them to contain and
embody the Word of God. This definition of the mean-
166 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
We need to make the doctrinal position
of the Church of England, both as to its
central requirement upon its ministers, and
as to the differences of opinion which it
allows, much more explicit and clearly
understood than it is at present.
The Church of England requires its
ministers to mean what they say when, as
leaders of the congregation, they recite the
central creeds of Christendom, or say ' I
believe/
They are required to accept the position
of the Church of England as stated in its
formularies and services in general, and to
be able to use conscientiously the forms of
worship and administration of the sacra-
ments which are of authority, and to teach
the catechism.
They are required to give a special
ing of the question I have often repeated. I am de-
lighted to find that it agrees with the definition given
by one who was the weightiest opponent of what is
commonly called the Higher Criticism I mean the late
Bishop of Oxford. " That is the sum of the sense in
which you may interpret this question according to the
intentio imponentis : do you believe the Holy Scripture
as the Word of life, as containing in the Old and New
Testaments the revelation of the purpose and work of
Almighty God through Jesus Christ our Lord ? " See
Stubbs, Ordination Addresses (Longmans), pp. 404, I.
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 167
promise to teach out of the Scriptures, and
to lay nothing upon their hearers, as binding
upon their faith, except what is contained
in Scripture.
This gives us a sufficient basis for doc-
trinal unity, and gives room for different
* schools of thought/ such as have existed
and will exist, within the church ; but all
upon the basis of the great agreement,
which should be constantly made evident.
If these simple principles are, as I believe
they are, of general acceptance amongst us,
it would be an immense gain if they could
be explicitly and constantly declared, so
that it should be known throughout
Christendom what we really stand both to
require and to allow.
In the matter of ritual, we require each
of our clergy, whenever he undertakes a
public charge, to promise, in public prayers
and administration of the sacraments, to
use only the services of the Prayer Book,
except so far as lawful authority (which
must mean for him, at least the authority
of the bishop) allows some additional or
exceptional prayers. This is to secure that
in all our churches the same services shall
be rendered, and intelligently and Intel-
168 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
ligibly rendered ; and may be so inter-
preted as to admit of wide variety in the
ceremonial exhibition of the services, with
due regard to the feelings of congregations,
and due regard to such explicit directions,
as to the meaning of which there is no
doubt, as the Prayer Book contains.
Here again we need to make as explicit
as possible both our basis of unity and our
limits of comprehension. But we are con-
cerned now only with our standards of
doctrine.
It is a great advantage to stand simply on
the ancient creeds. If we look in the direc-
tion of the Nonconformists, we cannot fail
to see the difficulty in which they find them-
selves as regards standards of doctrine.
They have stood, in their origin and during
their past history, on the old Protestant
orthodoxy, of which the corner-stone was
the dogma of the infallibility and sole autho-
rity of Scripture. And it is precisely this
position which recent criticism has rendered
most untenable. Historical inquiry has
replaced the canon of Scripture in its con-
text as part of the same formative growth
with the creeds and the episcopal succes-
sions part of the same growth, and resting
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 169
upon the same authority. It has become
more and more difficult to maintain the
authority of the Bible, as a standard of
doctrine, apart from the authority of the
creeds and mind of the church. And still
more it has become impossible to maintain
the proposition of the infallibility of all the
statements of Scripture, simply because
they are in Scripture. During the recent
discussion of the New Theology there have
been signs of a wide-spread anxiety among
Nonconformists, who feel the perils of the
' down-grade ' movement, as to the standard
of doctrine. There is nothing which in
this respect can rival the ancient creeds.
On the other hand, we hold a position of
immense advantage, as compared to the
Roman Church, in being free from the en-
cumbrance of dogmas or doctrines which it
is not lawful to deny, but which are a
grievous offence to the critical spirit. For
instance, the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception of Mary is in the strictest sense
binding upon the faith of Roman Catholics.
It is, if true, an event in history ; but its
proclamation as a dogma rests on no sort
of historical evidence or even tradition,
on nothing except the flimsy foundation of
I7O THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
a logic of the a priori sort which is most
fallible, the sort of logic which seeks to
determine, apart from evidence, how things
must have happened. Again, the Roman
Church celebrates, on one of its festivals of
greatest solemnity and obligation, the as-
sumption of the body of Mary into heaven :
again a supposed event, which rests upon
nothing which can be called historical
evidence.
Once more, the central authority in the
Roman Church has repeatedly, of recent
years, sought to fasten upon those in its
communion the obligation to hold for true
every statement of Scripture to hold the
doctrine of verbal inspiration in its com-
pletest form. The late Pope, Leo XIII.,
in his Encyclical ' On the Study of Sacred
Scripture ' issued in 1893 wrote thus
with absolute decision and complete autho-
ritativeness of tone :
It is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to
narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy
Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has
erred. For the system of those who, in order to rid
themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to
concede that divine inspiration regards the things of
faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 171
they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or
falsehood of a passage, we should consider, not so
much what God has said, as the reason and purpose
which He had in mind in saying it this system cannot
be tolerated. For all the books which the Church
receives as sacred and canonical are written, wholly
and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the
Holy Ghost ; and so far is it from being possible
that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that
inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with
error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and
necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the
supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true.
Hence, because the Holy Ghost employs men as
His instruments, we cannot, therefore, say that it
was these inspired instruments who, perchance, have
fallen into error, and not the primary Author. For,
by supernatural power, He so moved and impelled
them to write He was so present to them that
the things which He ordered, and those only, they
first rightly understood, then willed faithfully to
write down, and finally expressed in apt words and
with infallible truth. Otherwise it could not be said
that He was the Author of the entire Scripture.
It follows that those who maintain that an error is
possible in any genuine passage of the sacred writings
either pervert the catholic notion of inspiration or
make God the author of such error.
And the recent decree Lamentabili sane
condemns, among a number of other pro-
172 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
positions, the proposition (xi.) that ' divine
inspiration is not so to be extended to the
whole of sacred Scripture as that it should
preserve from all mistake all and each of its
parts/ l
We have enough difficulties and short-
comings of our own in the Church of
England. We do well to be humble and
penitent. But we do well also to be thank-
ful that, while we have preserved our stand-
ing-ground upon the ancient and catholic
faith and system of the church, we are
exempt from dogmas and proclamations of
authority which offer such tremendous
obstacles to the critical judgement and the
freedom of historical inquiry.
What we need, then we of the Church
of England is to make clearer to our own
minds, and then to the minds of others, the
basis of solid agreement on which we stand,
on the ground of which we are able to allow,
and ought to be able to allow, without con-
fusion, a wide comprehension and freedom
of opinion.
If this could be more clearly defined and
realized we could for the most part let our
1 The recent encyclical of the present Pope re-empha-
sizes this position.
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 173
stale controversies drop for a while, and
set ourselves to our great practical tasks,
the task of witnessing for Christ abroad in
the great non-Christian world ; and, within
Christendom, here in our own country, the
task of moral witness.
We are passing through a great crisis.
The whole industrial and social fabric is in
process of change. The movement that is
becoming dominant is what is more or
less vaguely called socialist. At the heart
of it is a great cry for justice, for a more
equitable division of the proceeds of in-
dustry ; for a better life for the masses of
the people ; for a greater regard for each
individual life, and especially for those who
are too weak to help themselves. Now
this is a movement with which the Christian
Church ought to have at heart the pro-
foundest sympathy. The Bible is full of
the cry for justice, full of resentment at the
oppression of the poor. It cannot tolerate
the exploiting of the weak by the strong.
It is, indisputably, in the age-long struggle
of rich and poor, on the side of the poor. 1
But all its great social force its great
wealth of social teaching has been with-
1 In development of this phrase see Sermon v., p. 274.
174 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
drawn into the background. It has to be
brought to the fore again, and set to work
within every Christian conscience and in
every portion of the Christian church. It
is the witness of Christianity which is most
needed by the men of to-day.
What is wanted is not the alliance of
Christianity with a political party, nor the
judgement of Christianity on an economic
theory ; but the study by Christians of
their principles ; the preaching by Chris-
tians of the real moral meaning of their
brotherhood, with its sacraments of fellow-
ship ; the reassertion in a society which calls
itself Christian of the obligations of justice
and righteousness. 1
The doctrines of the creed which we have
been considering the doctrines of God and
of Christ, of human destiny and sin and re-
demption are precisely the sources from
which the Christian church derives its
insight and force to aid in social reconstruc-
1 In elucidation of these phrases I am venturing to
reprint (seep. 297) the recent report of the Committee of
the Southern Convocation and House of Laymen on
The Moral Witness of the Church on Economic Subjects,
as giving in some sense a corporate expression of the
church's mind, which is much more valuable than that
of an individual.
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 175
tion. The deficiencies and perils of the con-
temporary labour movement are sufficiently
conspicuous to those who look at it from
outside. If the church were only alive and
at work in the hearts of the people, with its
fundamental moral witness well to the fore,
it might supply, or it ought to supply, the
moral force and purity which the movement
for social redemption assuredly needs. It
can supply also, under all circumstances
tending to depression and despair, the con-
fidence of its certain hope.
Science, strictly so called it cannot be
too often reiterated has no gospel. It
affords us no assurance whatever against
the deterioration of our race, or its extinc-
tion. 1 It takes impartial cognizance of the
downward as well as the upward road.
' Science/ says a striking modern writer, 3
' has promised us the truth, or at least the
knowledge of such relations as our intelli-
gence can seize ; she has never promised us
either peace or happiness. Sovereignly in-
different to our feelings, she does not hear
our lamentations. We must try and live
1 See Huxley's emphatic declarations, cited below,
p. 240.
3 Le Bon, op. cit., p. 5.
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
176 THE NEW THEOLOGY AND
with her, since nothing can bring back the
illusions which she has banished.'
But ' science ' is not our only road to
truth. And if the faith in Jesus Christ is
grounded in truth and reason, as we may
be assured it is, we have in that faith the
supreme safeguard of human hopes ; in
Christ upon His throne, the ultimate se-
curity of human destiny. Beyond all the
decays of civilization, and all the shocks of
worlds, there is ' the far-off, divine event/
the establishment of the kingdom of Christ,
in which all the transitory disclosures of
truth and power and beauty in the world,
all the achievements and intimations of
human thought and human character, are
to be brought together and consummated
in the City of God, under the new heaven
and upon the new earth, where God is all
in all.
This security of human hopes is bound
up with the faith in God as Christ revealed
Him, and with the revelation of divine pur-
pose for nature and man which is given in
summary and prophetic form in His person
and life and resurrection and triumph.
' There shall never be one lost good/
There, where Christ is on the throne, is
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 177
the anchor of our hopes, and there is the
continual warning which hangs over our
individual lives and our civilization. All
that will allow itself to belong to Christ, all
that will admit His redemption, will be,
quickly or slowly, gathered under His feet,
and into His body all the real riches of
humanity, ' the glory and honour of all
nations/ The city of God is thus the
assured goal of humanity. The divine pur-
pose will surely effect itself. But how much
of the redeeming purpose can be carried out
in our lives and in our civilization depends
upon ourselves. Our share in the great
consummation, as individuals, or as a
nation, or as a church, depends upon our
faithfulness in allegiance to Christ.
I say, faithfulness in allegiance to Christ.
But we must include in allegiance to Christ,
the unconscious allegiance which is in the
heart of all those who are following the
best light they have. We Christians are
sure that all honest inquiry after the truth,
and all loyal following of what in our con-
sciences we know and feel to be the best, will
one day, if not in this life, yet beyond it,
be rewarded with the vision of God and the
knowledge of Christ. The refusal of the
12
178 THE NEW THEOLOGY
light, the declining from what we know to
be right, is common enough in human life.
That must separate us from Christ. But
nothing else can be under His condemna-
tion. He is the light that lighteneth every
man in conscience, even those who know
Him not, or who cannot bring themselves
to acknowledge Him, because He has been
misinterpreted to them. Thus He is the
goal of all the strivings after good in the
world. There is none other name given
among men whereby we must be saved,
than the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
SERMONS
179
SERMON I
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE l
In that hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit, and said, I
thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou
didst hide these things from the wise and understanding,
and didst reveal them unto babes : yea, Father, for so it was
well-pleasing in thy sight. St. Luke x. 21.
NOTHING is more instructive than to con-
sider the method of influencing men which
is exhibited in the coming of the Christ.
Any one who is, even in the vaguest and
most general sense, a Christian, must believe
that the divine providence is exhibited in
the conditions of His coming : that it was
' by a determinate counsel and foreknow-
ledge of God/ It is then, I say, most in-
structive to consider how the wisdom of
God set aside, in the circumstances of our
Lord's coming, all the opportunities and
methods of influencing men which the
1 A sermon preached at Great St. Mary's before the
University of Cambridge, on Oct. 21, 1906.
181
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
imagination of men would have suggested.
Thus Christ did not come so as to command
any of the instruments of secular greatness
as some great king or emperor or powerful
person. Again, he did not come as a
philosopher, or so as to have command of
the influences of learning. Once more, He
did not come so as to fulfil Plato's hope of
one who should combine both the accepted
means of influence that is, as a philosopher-
king. He was born in circumstances which
do not suggest any opportunities of wide
influence : in an outlying and despised dis-
trict of a subject-kingdom, just about to
become more subject. There was, indeed,
nothing squalid about His origin. He was
born in a family which nursed noble
memories and noble hopes ' of the seed
of David according to the flesh ' ; but in
the circle of labouring men. And in the
main it was in the same circle in the circle
of labouring people of the best and most
respectable kind that He found His dis-
ciples and His agents. He did, indeed
if we believe, as I am sure we ought to be-
lieve, the Fourth Gospel give the natural
rulers of His people the classes of Jews
who sat in the seats of authority at Jeru-
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 183
salem their opportunity of hearing and
accepting His message. But their refusal
compelled Him or (should we say ?) left Him
free to found His church in Galilee, where
the tradition of learning was weak, where
He could build upon the unsophisticated
basis of honest human nature in its simplest
form. And in doing this He knew what
He was doing, and knew that the divine
wisdom was in it. ' I thank Thee, Father,
Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou didst
hide these things from the wise and under-
standing, and reveal them unto babes : yea,
Father, for so it was well-pleasing in Thy
sight.' That is the thanksgiving of the
Son of Man, who recognizes that the real
influence upon the world must start not
from the traditions of learning, academic or
ecclesiastical, but from the religious con-
secration of the common life of labouring
people.
St. Paul, whose prejudices went in the
opposite direction, was brought to ac-
knowledge the same divine principle. 1 ' It
is written : I will destroy the wisdom of the
wise, and the prudence of the prudent will
I reject. Where is the wise ? Where is
1 i Cor. i. 19 ff.
184 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
the scribe ? Where is the disputer of the
world ? Hath not God made foolish the
wisdom of the world ? For seeing that in
the wisdom of God the world through its
wisdom knew not God, it was God's good
pleasure through the foolishness of the
preaching to save them that believe. Seeing
that Jews ask for signs and Greeks seek
after wisdom : but we preach Christ cruci-
fied, unto Jews a stumbling-block and unto
Greeks foolishness. . . . For the foolishness
of God is wiser than men.' Then he points,
in evidence of his exultant recognition of
the method of God, to the actual composi-
tion of the Corinthian church. The * im-
portant people ' were practically left out.
It was precisely to this that the hostile
critic of Christianity, Celsus the philosopher,
called attention more than a hundred
years later, when he says : ' Christians
must admit that they can only persuade
people destitute of sense, position, or in-
telligence, only slaves, women, and children,
to accept their faith/ He is only calling
attention to the method of the divine wis-
dom ; to the fact which was disclosed to
the world by Christianity, that the people
who are really important are the common
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 185
labouring people, who have neither time
nor means for much learning, and that the
true influence, the divine wisdom, must pro-
ceed from the basis of the common life re-
deemed or consecrated.
There is a close analogy between the
relation of Christ to learning and His
relation to political influence. He deliber-
ately repudiated the political method ; He
inculcated upon the poor and the oppressed
not rebellion or agitation, but obedience,
submission, indifference. He founded a
community which was reviled because it
conspicuously ' took no part in politics/
But it was a community of human love and
mutual help. Therefore it effected an im-
mense social change, and produced the
profoundest effect on the politics of the
world, as we may say, without intending it.
The meek possessed the earth.
So it was with learning. The schools and
the academies felt themselves, not unnatur-
ally, disparaged and repudiated by this new
community ; and they derided them ac-
cordingly in their natural confidence. But
this community was, after all, made up of
human beings ; they had intelligences and
talked the language of their time. They
l86 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
could not help explaining themselves to
themselves and to the world outside ex-
plaining themselves, and moreover defend-
ing against attacks the truth which was
their life. They must, in doing this, use
the intellectual weapons ready to their
hand, they must talk the language of their
time, the language of intellectual Greece.
So their ' love ' did marvellously, accord-
ing to St. Paul's prayer, ' abound in know-
ledge/ The devotion and ethical life and
religious faith of the earliest Christian
church worked out into a self-conscious
theology, which took up and used the in-
tellectual implements of Greece, just as the
church, in another region, used the political
organization of Rome. The process is
really unique in history, because it is so
corporate : so little due to any one man or
group of men. As an individual by being
cross-questioned about his instinctive
opinions Do you mean this ? Are you
prepared to accept this conclusion ? Can
you make terms with this proposal ? as
an individual by being so cross-questioned
gradually grows to know his own mind
exactly, so it was with the church. There
is not, I think, in the history of mankind
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 187
any like example of the practical spirit of
a whole community making for itself an
intellectual expression.
It was not the influence of any one man,
for instance St. Paul, imposing a philosophy
upon the church. St. Paul's most original
contribution to thought his theory of the
function of the law, and of the relation of
law to grace, of which we hear so much in
his Epistles produced surprisingly little
effect upon the church for fifteen centuries
after his death, in spite of Augustine's effort
to popularize it. It was the common mind,
the common devotion, that expressed itself
in the creeds and in the theology of the
church. What really defeated Arianism,
like the other heresies, was the clear and
enthusiastic Christian faith that the Lord
Christ was really God. A fathomless gulf
distinguishes the Creator from the creature,
God from man ; and they were sure that
Christ by His essential nature was Creator
and not creature. It has been recently
argued, as if it were a matter of great mo-
ment, that the Homoousios l dogma was
finally accepted at Constantinople in the
1 The dogma that the Son is of one substance with
the Father.
l88 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
sense of the Cappadocian divines, Basil and
the Gregories, and not in the sense of its first
champion Athanasius. As a matter of fact,
the argument seems to be very disputable ;
but what is of chief importance is to observe
that the church as a whole was occupied in
a practical task in affirming that it could
make no terms with anything that im-
pugned the true, proper Godhead of its
Lord, or of the Holy Spirit, or that in-
troduced the idea of more Gods than one.
It therefore maintained the Trinity of
co-equal Persons in the unity of the God-
head. So it found itself enthusiastically
confessing. But it had no independent
philosophical interest in the precise terms
used to defend its faith. And, as to the
differences between Athanasius and the
Cappadocians, they were more than covered
by the confession of all the wisest minds
in Christendom, that men could not define
God that their definitions would always
be baffled by His glory.
The use of dogmas was to hedge round
and protect the practical creed. They were
negative. That is to say, their first object
was to say ( No ' to what was repugnant
to the practical worship and to the common
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 189
mind of faith. And it follows that till men
lost the sense of the end in the pursuit of
means, they felt that the fewer dogmas they
laid down and the nearer they kept to Scrip-
ture terms the better. But, of course, just
as Christianity, having used secular organi-
zation became enslaved to it ; so, having
used terms and method of philosophy, it
came to misuse them as religious ends in
themselves, and was carried far away from
the purposes of Christian life and faith into
a region of dogmatic definitions which
' ministered questionings ' rather than
Christian faith and hope and love.
I return to my point. Christianity de-
voted itself to the consecration of the
common life of working people. This life,
to express and protect itself, must perforce
develop a theology, a learning, a wisdom.
But the strength of this early intellectual sys-
tem of Christianity lay in its unacademical
origin ; in its remaining in very close relation
to the common life of common people to
their simple worship, their moral wants and
satisfactions, their sorrows and joys and
labours. This is to say, in other words,
that the early dogmatic method of Chris-
tianity was scriptural and true to Scripture,
190 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
which is practical, moral and devotional,
not theoretical or academic.
Scholars sometimes contemplate the re-
vision of the ancient catholic creeds and
fundamental dogmas. They say are we
not endowed with all that our fathers were
endowed with ? Can we not, now that
philosophy has changed its terms and
methods, revise the ancient formulas, or do
over again, for our age, what they did so
well for theirs ? There is much to say with
regard to a proposition which sounds so
reasonable. But at least this may be said :
Can you suggest any other or better terms
to express the same things, or is it the case
that it is not the terms but the funda-
mental mind that you want altered ? If
the church is right in believing that Christ
is God, the Creator, who for our redemption
from the universal dominion of sin was
made man ; and did redeem a fallen world
by His life and passion and resurrection and
ascension ; and did by His Spirit, sent
down out of His glorified manhood at Pente-
cost, regenerate and unite to God in Him-
self the children of faith all over the world,
through the visible society of redeemed men
which He founded with its visible symbols
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
and sacraments of brotherhood, if this,
and nothing short of this, is what you want
to express, can you then, on this hypo-
thesis, suggest better terms to guard this
faith ? or can you show that such terms
have not served their purpose ? or are not
now needed ? or can you even show to be
unnecessary any one of those four defini-
tions which the church universal has made
binding ? x
I think the answer is No. For, whenever
I come to examine the intention of the
critics of the church's terminology, I seem
always to find that they want not to im-
prove the defences, but to abandon the
fortress. They want to allow the divinity of
Christ to mean something which would be
true in its measure of every other man :
whereas the very object of the church was
to maintain the divinity of Christ in a sense
in which it could not possibly be applied
to any created being. Or they want to
weaken the other absolutely vital element
1 ( i ) That Christ is of one substance with the Father ;
(2) that He was completely human ; (3) that His hu-
manity had no independent centre of personality in
itself; (4) but that in the unity of the one divine person
both Godhead and manhood remain, two natures in
one person.
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
in the common Christian faith and thought
viz. the belief in the universal corrup-
tion or disorder of human nature and the
fact that every single human being needs
not progress only, but recovery. I, for one,
believe with the profoundest conviction,
that the hopes of humanity are bound up
with the maintenance of the real Godhead
of Christ, the reality of our fallen state, and
the universal need for redemption. But at
least, whatever our religious opinions, let
us admit that the church, in choosing her
theological terms, was choosing terms to
guard exactly that line of demarcation
which it is now proposed to obliterate.
What is at stake is not an academic ques-
tion of terms, but a question which belongs
essentially to the common Christian life of
experience and worship. It is in practical
belief and worship that men adore Christ
as their creator, as well as redeemer ; and
in practical self-knowledge or penitence that
they know the doctrine of innate sin and
the need for the new birth.
i. Christianity, then, in matters of intel-
lect as in social influence generally, works
upwards from below. That is its essential
method. It does not lay its basis in learn-
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 193
ing, or make its start from the learned.
Where it attempts this it forsakes the
method of Christ. Rather, it exults to
recognize in the common life of labouring
people and their practical needs that which
is really most important, that which is the
chief pillar and ground of religious truth.
In the propagation of Christianity, then,
the Christian does not weep, but rather
exults, with St. Paul and Christ Himself,
if the learned of any community hold aloof
or reject, while the poor accept. It is what
we seem to be witnessing in India to-day.
I do not know what the witness of your
Cambridge Mission at Delhi would be at this
moment. The witness of our Oxford Mis-
sion is that the twenty-five years of its
experience coincides with a manifest
hardening of the educated Indian mind
against Christianity. The hopes enter-
tained of the coming to Christ of the In-
dians of caste and position have for the
present died down. There are almost no
conversions of educated natives. But
meanwhile, especially in the South of India,
a great and rapidly increasing Christian
community is forming itself chiefly from the
pariah population ; and these despised
13
194 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
classes are showing themselves capable of
an earnest devotion, of an education and
a progress, which Indian opinion con-
temptuously regarded as impossible for
them. And, if we are faithful to the antici-
pations of the apostolic age, we shall not be
surprised or apologetic. Rather, we shall
thank the Father and Lord of heaven and
earth, because He has hid these things
from the wise and prudent, and has revealed
them unto babes.
2. Again, however long the history of
Christianity had been in any country, it still
remains true that the strength of any
church lies in the common labouring life.
It is in being strong there with the manual
worker that any national church retains
the power to show its original spirit and the
power of recuperation and revival. In the
same way, in any settled Christian com-
munity, the strength of its theology and
Christian learning depends on its being in
the closest relations with popular piety and
religious life and the teaching needed for
common people. This was the case with
the Christian learning and theology of the
first five or six Christian centuries. It was
so closely in touch with popular devotion
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 195
that it was able to maintain a real control
over the superstition which always accom-
panies popular religion. It ceased to be
so with the scholasticism of the later Middle
Age. A loud cry arose in the fifteenth and
sixtenth centuries for a simplification of
theology for a return to what practically
mattered. The cry in part took effect in
the Reformation. But in England, in spite
of Hugh Latimer, the Reformation, as it
was expressed in the Prayer Book and
Articles, never succeeded in holding or win-
ning the popular heart. The Established
Church has always had this great weakness :
that it has worked downwards from above,
rather than upwards from below. It has
been so with our Anglican theology. In
our age theological and biblical learning
has mainly started from a critical, and there-
fore necessarily an academic, platform. It
has not had the popular devotion and faith
behind it. Popular piety has in fact com-
monly resented its conclusions. Where
it has not done this, it has been apt to
pursue its own course apart. As one who
has had to live in both worlds the world
of theological learning and that of practical
religious life may I bear my witness ?
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
There is a great world of practical religious
devotion, Catholic and Evangelical, in Eng-
land to-day, which expresses itself in oral
teaching, in catechism, manuals, prayers,
and hymns. But I feel painfully that it is
further off than it ought to be from our
theological or biblical science, as it is repre-
sented at our universities that the popular
pulpit use of the Bible in our communion
is still very generally based upon critical
instruments which might long ago have
been exchanged for better and truer, if the
learned world had been in closer touch with
the common religion. For in Christianity
it is the common religion which has the
prerogative place. Christian learning is
meant to react upon it only because it first
of all has experienced its meaning and
needs, and proceeded out from it. May
I respectfully say to those who are the repre-
sentatives of religious learning, that they
should set it before themselves as a de-
liberate aim to associate themselves as
deeply as possible with the common devo-
tional life of Christianity as it exists in the
church to-day ; so that they may learn to do,
more effectively than is being done to-day,
what is the real business of Christian learn-
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
ing viz. to help and guide the common
life, as they only can do who, besides their
critical learning, know and feel the su-
premacy of the soul's practical need, who
know what will shock it, what will help it,
what will hinder who know what it will
welcome, and before what it will fall back
distressed, perplexed, and scandalized.
May I give a single example ? From
countless pulpits there is still taught the
doctrine of the Fall of Man in a manner
which conflicts with what almost every
educated person believes to be the matter
of fairly certain science. On the other side
we have a scientific doctrine of human
development and a theory of ' sin ' which
is very often associated with a lamentable
ignorance of the most certain experiences
of Christian souls and of the Christian
church those experiences which (almost
more than anything else) have ministered
to man's moral progress. What we need is
men of learning who have first of all passed
through or sympathetically entered into the
Christian knowledge of sin, and felt its pro-
found relation to all that makes the Chris-
tian hope ; and who then, with this in their
minds, will study scientific facts and ethno-
198 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
logical data. No one who really studies
the original function of Christian ' wisdom '
can say that this is a task alien to it.
Moreover, criticism working by itself
teaches us, I think, its own limits. It was
necessary for the sake of intellectual liberty
that it should, to start with, work on its
own pure lines. By working on its own
pure lines it has (I must believe) recon-
structed, for instance, Old Testament
criticism and some departments of church
history. In these regions the task of the
mediator to-day is, so to study the religious
needs and feelings of common people as
gradually to accommodate the devout use
of the Bible to the standard of science.
But does not criticism by its own action
upon its own lines reach its limits ? Does
it not to many of us become constantly
more and more apparent, in dealing for
example with the miracles of the New
Testament, and in particular with those
singled out as corner-stones of faith in the
Apostles' Creed, that the determination of
truth cannot rest with the critical esti-
mate of evidence alone ? We have worked
very hard at it. We have sifted it very
thoroughly. Many of us would say that, on
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
the whole, it is those who deny or doubt the
occurrence of the miraculous facts who do
violence to the evidence. But short of such
a position, must not any one admit that the
state of the evidence, as based on historical
documents, is such that the question
whether Christ's body was really trans-
formed on the third day, and rose a spiri-
tualized body, leaving the tomb vacant,
does depend for each man on the question
of probability, and this is a question of
what the practical religious need, which
God was confessedly meeting, really re-
quired and requires ?
Again, the question of whether we have
reason justifying the church in teaching
that Christ was born of a virgin, depends,
even more, on considerations of what must,
or need not, be regarded as probable, in the
case of one recognized as incarnate Son of
God and sinless Son of Man. I feel that the
critic, merely as critic, ought to be at pains
to find out why I, a struggling human soul,
declare, with the profoundest conviction,
that the strength of the appeal of the Christ
to me is bound up, as with His character and
claim, so with His physical resurrection and
virgin birth. The world great nature
2OO THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
seems, day by day, so morally indifferent.
It is the hardest thing, in work-a-day life,
to believe that what is really supreme is the
moral will and the moral issue. The
human soul finds consolation, instinctively,
in a miracle because it makes plain that
the sovereign power in nature is really God
the Father that the moral will is really
supreme in and over nature. All over the
world, from the first, and still to-day, the
common consciousness of man cries out,
that the question of miracle at the great
crisis of redemption makes all the differ-
ence between a speculative hope and a
joyous confidence. And if God's provi-
dence had to do with Christ and His ap-
pearance, if God had a practical purpose,
then the need of the human soul must have
a real place in that estimate of probability,
which, in the peculiar setting of the evi-
dence, really becomes the determining
factor, or (as I should prefer to express it)
which is necessary to break down the bar-
riers which the critical mind, in its isolation
from common moral wants, erects against
the real force of the evidence. For the sake
of criticism and for the sake of common
religion, I plead for a reconsideration of
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 2OI
the original or true relation of Christian
knowledge to the common Christian life if
Christian worship and faith, on the one hand,
is not to become superstitious, and criticism,
on the other, barren. I plead with the
student to make it his business to study
with a more continuous sympathy the re-
ligion by the help of which common people
Christ's own special folk are worshipping
and bearing their troubles, gaining victories,
and obtaining relief.
3. Lastly, I would try to speak a word
to any young man who has come to Cam-
bridge with a strict faith, learned at home
and centred in the Bible, only to find after
a while that he cannot simply say, ' This
statement is true because it is in the Bible ' ;
and that he needs a more solid basis for his
faith than the Bible taken as a book by
itself can supply, and more authoritative
and consistent than the opinions of in-
dividual teachers. I would say to such an
one : You have got to reconstruct your
spiritual fabric ; you have got to use all
the helps you can. Amongst these is the
intellectual material. You must then trust
your intellect ; you must face the facts ;
you must try your best to use your mind.
2O2 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
Moreover, I cannot doubt that your wisdom
is to go back to the centre, to the question
of Christ, and, letting all else for the moment
go, ask yourself what you, with your own
best mind and judgement, give as your
answer to the question What thinkest
thou of Christ ? You are not infallible.
But, in the state in which you are, with the
conflicting voices around you, you are
responsible for using your own mind and
taking the intellectual trouble necessary
to making it up. So many young English-
men simply drift away from faith through
laziness, through shrinking from doing
their intellectual best. They do what
nothing can intellectually justify : that
is, they take their doubts on authority.
They doubt because other people doubt.
But intellectual inquiry is not all. I
have known many who, thank God, have
come back out of mental chaos into
clear faith ; and in the case of almost no
one of these have the intellectual con-
siderations been finally determining. It
has been love, or sorrow, which has opened
some window in their being or set some
spring aflow. Or it has been the humilia-
tion of a moral fall which has brought a
THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE 203
deeper self-knowledge. Or it has been the
experience of what they needed in order
to help others that has brought them to
know their own need. You cannot hurry
these experiences. But you can resolve
not to be a hypocrite never to let your
doubts excuse you from making the best
practical use of what religious conviction
you still possess. It is a great thing to
believe in God. Do not delay to be a
devout Theist while you are determining
whether you can be a good Christian. But
also keep it from the first in mind that it
is the strength and not the weakness of
Christianity it is the divine wisdom
which from the first has made it assign to
knowledge and the activity of the intellect
the second place and not the first, which
has made it say that the really powerful
thing in humanity for getting at religious
truth is the common human soul, as it sets
itself, not to be learned, but to struggle,
or live, or love. And your power of ap-
preciating Christianity, with the apprecia-
tion which is necessary for intellectual
sympathy, will depend upon the depth and
reality of your spiritual experience, will
depend upon your sense of sin and of the
2O4 THE CREED AND COMMON LIFE
need of pardon, your fellowship in the
desire to know and love God and obtain
purity of heart and divine communion.
Yes, and before your own spiritual ex-
perience is deep enough to be conscious of
its own needs, you can have clearly in mind
what it is that in St. Paul and St. John and
in millions of great and little Christians
since then, has made up the mind and heart
of Christendom ; what it is that has given
the motive to its faith and inspired its hope
and love ; and you can realize that the real
strength of Christianity lies in awaking
and satisfying the common needs of simple
people. ' I thank Thee, Father, Lord of
heaven and earth, that thou didst hide
these things from the wise and prudent, and
reveal them unto babes. 1
SERMON II
THE PERMANENT CREED 1
Whosoever goeth onward, and abideth not in the teaching
of Christ, hath not God : he that abideth in the teaching,
the same hath both the Father and the Son. 2 St. John 9.
THE time we live in is a time of wide-
spread religious unsettlement. It would,
indeed, be hard to exaggerate the un-
certainty of belief in many classes of
society. This is due in part to what is our
weakness that the faculty of criticism
far outruns the constructive faculty of our
minds ; and that in a period of diffused
education the materials of criticism are
presented to all kinds of minds, and are
sufficient to overturn positive beliefs
without leading on to any reconstruction.
But it is also due to what is a legitimate
matter for thankfulness namely, that
1 A sermon preached before the University of Oxford
on November 13, 1904, and previously published. It
was preached and published some years before the
activity of the New Theology began.
205
2O6 THE PERMANENT CREED
there has been a wide extension of
scientific and historical knowledge ; and
this widening of the intellectual horizon,
with the accompanying change in the
methods and categories of men's thought,
almost necessarily carries with it religious
unsettlement. The creed that had associ-
ated itself with the forms of thought of the
seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, must
have a difficulty in adjusting itself to the
history and science of the nineteenth
and the twentieth. We cannot evade
this difficulty. There are, indeed, those
who think the only proper way to meet
religious unsettlement and scepticism is
to hold fast by religious belief as we
have received it from our grandmother
Lois and our mother Eunice, without
concessions or readaptations. To allow
mistakes in the common teaching of the
church is said to be dangerous. Conces-
sion is regarded as only the first step to
surrender, and parleying is only the pre-
lude to treason. But, in fact, experience
shows us in the past that religion in a
settled age becomes encrusted with ideas
which do not properly belong to the per-
manent creed, but to the thought of the
THE PERMANENT CREED 2OJ
time ; and when a turn of the wheel of
thought takes place, those ideas associated
with the essential religion, but not of its
essence, have finally to be discarded, that
the religion may exercise its true strength
once more. We cannot reasonably deny
that permanent religion at every period is
associated with impermanent elements, the
gold with the dross, and we must have the
intellectual courage to seek to dissociate
the two, and to draw distinctions between
essential and unessential, and to make
concessions, and to seek readjustment.
On the other hand are the men who seem
to think that every clever new criticism is
destined to triumph over an established
idea ; and they need reminding that the
conservative tendencies of the human mind,
and the recuperative power of old truth
and old institutions, have disappointed
revolutionists at every period. We are
not, then, to refuse to reconsider, and to
abandon what is untenable, and to readjust
the old and the new, any more than we
are to abandon the old merely because
the new is clamorously asserting itself.
We have to consider frankly and estimate
carefully. The question is a real and
208 THE PERMANENT CREED
living one for us. Granted that in current
religion, in the common religious tradition,
there are permanent and impermanent
elements, there are essential and unessen-
tial factors, how are we to distinguish the
one from the other ? What tests have we
by which we can ascertain what is the real
and permanent Christian creed, what is
really revelation of God, truth permanent
and divine ?
Now, the test which is practically the
most convincing is also the least producible
in argument : it is what may be called the
mystical, or subjective, test. The religious
truth that we hold with most confidence
for permanent and divine is what, in
some sense, by inner spiritual experience
we feel we know. We know that our
conviction of right and wrong, of duty to
be done at whatever cost of pain to our-
selves, is far stronger than the intellectual
grounds by which we can justify it. Or,
again, we have from time to time felt the
presence of God in response to prayer,
or in blessing upon a difficult duty loyally
done, or in time of sorrow or joy. God is,
and we have felt Him. We know that
He is there, though all the proofs are
THE PERMANENT CREED 2OQ
ineffectual and inadequate. Or, again, the
question of Christ's Godhead is for me
beyond controversy. ' No man can say
Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Ghost ' ;
but there is such a thing as the movement
of the divine Spirit in the soul of man.
I have heard Christ's words, and have read
of His deeds in the Gospels, and my whole
soul acknowledges in Him perfect God in
perfect manhood. I have felt His presence
in Holy Communion. I know He died
for me. He has forgiven me. I am His
and He is mine. Argument is unsatisfying.
But I know by a conviction inseparable
from my own personality that this is the
Christ, the saviour of the world ; and that in
worshipping Him as God I am only doing
my rational duty ; and that He is with
us all the days, even unto the end of the
world. As to the miracles, I can see in
them but the most natural actions, or
accompaniments, of His person.
This is personal conviction. It is some-
thing far deeper than the intellectual
presentation which it can give of itself.
It is deep experience, which seems to render
argument needless. And we may truly
say that, whatever the means by which
14
2IO THE PERMANENT CREED
religious belief is generated whether autho-
rity, or evidence, or logical reasoning-
it never becomes belief worthy of the name
till it has become in some degree experience,
till the Spirit of God has wrought it into
the fibre of my personal consciousness,
and I feel and know that He is God. So
far as we have really believed in this deep
sense, the intellectual evidence for our faith
is rather the light it throws on the whole
of life and the whole of knowledge than
any light that it receives from other fields
of experience or investigation. It con-
vinces more and more by giving light,
rather than is proved by receiving it.
But this sort of inner conviction is bound,
if not for its own sake, then 'for that of
others, to give a reason for itself. In itself
it is not transmissible. It cannot be im-
parted. But it is a part of a great cor-
porate conviction which has belonged to the
whole Christian society, and it must strive
to give itself corporate expression. What
is it convinces me, apart from my own
incommunicable experience, or as the pre-
lude and way to such experience, or as the
result of it, that such and such a statement
is really part of the message of God to man ?
THE PERMANENT CREED 211
To return to our original question since
so many things have been taught as Chris-
tian truth, and afterwards proved false or
uncertain, how do I propose, by more or
less objective and producible tests, to dis-
tinguish essential Christianity from the vari-
able or uncertain or false accompaniments
of it ?
The first, and to some minds the most
obvious, test is that of authority in its
broadest sense. There has been a common,
a universal, faith of Christendom, which
has, most authoritatively, expressed itself
in the catholic creeds, the Apostles' and
the Nicene Creeds. There are, indeed,
features in the common faith, such as the
belief in the atonement, in sacramental
grace, in the inspiration of Scripture, which
are only slightly or by implication touched
on in these formulas of faith ; but at least
in what they contain they represent what
has been universal Christianity. Hardly
anything has been nobly or effectively done,
or bravely suffered, for the name of Christ,
that has not been done or suffered in the
212 THE PERMANENT CREED
profession of these creeds, or the profession
of the faith which preceded them. The
great movement of humanity which gives
glory to Christ as its redeemer, as it
traverses the ages and spreads over the
world, has confessed itself in these terms
almost without exception. Since the Re-
formation, differences have sundered the
visible Christian society into fragments ;
emphasis has been laid on one point in this
body and on another in that ; but Calvinist
and Lutheran, Anglican, Romanist, Greek,
and Russian have confessed the same faith
in the Holy Trinity, one God ; in Christ,
perfect God and perfect man ; in His birth
of a virgin and life and death for man, and
His resurrection and ascension ; in the
descent of the Spirit and the formation of
the church ; the fellowship of the saints ;
the forgiveness of sins ; in judgement to
come, and everlasting life. We pass back
behind the Reformation to the Middle
Ages, and behind the Middle Ages to the
centuries of the Councils, and back to the
earlier Fathers ; we note the differences of
Alexandria and Antioch and Rome and
Africa ; but they do not touch this com-
mon Creed. Even separated heretical
THE PERMANENT CREED 213
bodies, like the Nestorians, seem, so far as
the bulk of them is concerned, to have been
separated, not from the faith, but, by an
accident of mismanaged controversy, from a
misunderstood term of theology. And the
great Creed finds its justification in the
theology of the Epistles and its verification
in the words and deeds of Christ in the
Gospels. Criticism loves to dwell on differ-
ences ; but the real unity is unmistakable.
And it is a mistake, surely, if we never let
this broad and massive unity of the Chris-
tian faith make its proper impression upon
us. The modern student, in his desire to
dive below the surface, or in his passion for
original work, may bury himself prema-
turely in some forgotten corner of church
history, some study of apocryphal Acts or
anonymous and unpublished documents.
Let him first tread the broad highway.
Let him read the main texts first of all,
as they can be read in mass and with
rapidity, that the great general impression
may be made upon him. There is, after all,
a faith which has been held semper, ubique,
ab omnibus, in such sense that what frag-
ments of the Christian body have not held
it hardly count in the total effect. What
214 THE PERMANENT CREED
records we have of human life redeemed and
consecrated show it redeemed and con-
secrated in the profession of this faith ; and
what lies outside this profession can be
left out of reckoning, without the general
effect being altered, or the result for human
life appreciably affected. And this im-
pression of unity through all differences,
and permeating all divisions, is impressive
in a very high degree. It generates in the
mind a sense of indissoluble coherence a
feeling that this creed and Christianity are
one and the same thing ; or that they
stand to one another as root and fruit.
There may be great differences between
the Christian beliefs of the twentieth,
and the tenth, and the fourth, and the
second century, but the differences will
not touch the great central body of faith.
II
But this brings us to the second test.
This Creed professes to be based simply
upon a revelation given, or given in its
final form, through an historical person,
Jesus Christ. It is a Creed based on facts,
which are confessedly unique and, in part,
THE PERMANENT CREED 215
miraculous. As thus claiming an historical
basis, it enters the region of historical
criticism. It has always from the first
taken its stand on testimony. And testi-
mony must stand criticism. Moreover, for
us to-day there is no testimony worth con-
sidering which is not in the New Testa-
ment. I say that it is impossible in any
way to withdraw the historical basis of
Christianity from the freest and frankest
criticism. If there exist persons who say,
Let the Old Testament be frankly criti-
cized, for it is not so important, but not the
New Testament, for it is vital ; the claim
must be utterly repudiated. In proportion
to the important issues which hang upon
the New Testament records, must be the
frankness of the criticism to which they
are subjected. And the Creed has no other
line of defence behind the New Testa-
ment documents. It is sometimes sug-
gested that we can hold that destructive
criticism has done its work successfully
upon the Gospels, but can still go on pro-
claiming our faith in Christ born of a
virgin and risen from the dead, in Christ
as God in manhood, on the authority of the
church. I am sure this is not the case.
2l6 THE PERMANENT CREED
The authority of the church has always
professed to rest on the authority of the
apostles. It is rooted and based on their
witness their eye-witness. And the con-
tent of the apostolic witness ' as they de-
livered it unto us which from the beginning
were eye-witnesses and ministers of the
Word/ is to be found in its most authentic
form in the Gospels, and a few other his-
torical passages of the New Testament.
It is very difficult to conceive any critical
scholar supposing that, if the New Testa-
ment narratives are not sufficient to war-
rant us in believing that Jesus Christ was
really born of a virgin, and really fed the
five thousand with the five loaves, and was
really raised from the dead the third day,
there is any other witness which can support
the statements, considered as records of
actual events. Thus, as between M. Loisy
and Professor Harnack, I cannot doubt
that, if the critical results in which they
substantially agree are accepted as scien-
tific, we must go with Harnack and not
with Loisy in our attitude towards the
Creed.
Once again, the theology of the creed
of Nicaea is only the making more explicit
THE PERMANENT CREED 2IJ
what is already present in the theology of
St. Paul and St. John. But I cannot be-
lieve that the theology of St. Paul and
St. John could rank as more than a phase in
the history of thought, if it were found that
Christ Himself, as a matter of fact, made
no such divine claim as, in different de-
grees, but with equal certainty, the Gospels
record Him to have made. Thus we can-
not refuse to enter the region of free
criticism with our Gospels ; nor can we
pretend that the validity of our creeds is
independent of the issue of such criticism.
If the creeds stand, with their historical
and doctrinal statements, it must be be-
cause the Gospels stand. I do not want
a complete absence of inaccuracy or dis-
crepancy in the Gospel narratives. I want
only, if I am to believe the creeds, that the
Gospels should stand as, in the fullest
sense, trustworthy history.
Well, now, it is my conviction that no
fair historical criticism can dissolve the force
of the historical evidence we have to such
propositions as the following : that Jesus
Christ was, and knew Himself to be, sinless
in the midst of a sinful world of which He
came to be the saviour ; that, moreover,
2l8 THE PERMANENT CREED
He encouraged in His disciples towards
Himself, and claimed from them, the sort of
allegiance and faith which only God can
rightly claim, and which can only be ren-
dered without impiety to God ; that He
worked miracles which no reasoning can
allow us to ascribe to anything else than the
creative power of God working with Him
to authorize His teaching ; that after His
death and burial His tomb was found
empty on the third (or, as we should say,
the second) day, and His disciples were
raised from despondency and despair to a
sure faith and confident hope by repeated
manifestations of Himself risen, in a body
transformed and spiritualized, but the same.
I am quite sure that it is those who dis-
believe such propositions, and not those
who believe them, who do violence to the
evidence. Further, though the manner of
our Lord's birth falls outside the period of
His life of which the apostles were personal
witnesses, and was not, therefore, among
the grounds on which belief in Christ was
asked ; yet I see the best reasons for think-
ing that in the early circle of believers the
fact of our Lord's birth of a virgin was
believed on the evidence of the only first-
THE PERMANENT CREED 2IQ
hand witnesses, Joseph and Mary, and that
it is Joseph and Mary whose testimony is
embodied in the first and third Gospels.
I believe, therefore, that the faith of the
Creed is supported by free inquiry into his-
torical facts. And if I am asked how it
is that ' the critics ' reach a conclusion so
different, I reply : At least in England, the
strength of criticism its strength in bulk
and intellectual value is on the conserva-
tive side. Also, I reply, that in the great
majority of cases I seem to see most clearly
that the destructive critics reach the results
they reach, not from considerations pro-
perly historical, but because their mind is
occupied with a certain view of the world
which indisposes them to the conclusions
of the Creed ; just as, on the other hand,
I am conscious that my own mind is filled
with a certain belief in God, a certain view
of sin, a certain expectation of divine re-
demption, which makes the evidence of
the Gospels acceptable, which makes me
susceptible of belief. I seem to see clearly
enough that historical criticism, as applied
to the Gospels, can take us a certain way
without appealing to any presuppositions
except what are shared by almost all
22O THE PERMANENT CREED
sensible men : as that the matter of the
Synoptic Gospels dates almost entirely back
behind the destruction of Jerusalem ; or
that when St. Paul wrote his First Epistle
to the Corinthians (A.D. 55), and, after re-
minding them in detail of his original
teaching as to the resurrection of Jesus
Christ, speaks of his own relation to the
older apostles, and says, ' Wherefore,
whether it were I or they, so we preach
and so ye believed/ he could not have been
conscious of any difference between his
witness and theirs. I think, then, that we
might very well reach almost universal
agreement that the witness of the New
Testament can be shown to . have taken
shape so early that it may be strictly his-
torical that it falls within the conditions
which admit of good history. On the other
hand, there remain discrepancies, obscuri-
ties, difficulties ; there remain the large
gaps in the evidence, and the historical
possibility that conjectures or mistakes
might very rapidly have become imaginary
memories. Thus it seems as if the question
whether these recorded events actually
happened, miraculous and supernatural as
they are, will almost always be answered
THE PERMANENT CREED 221
in accordance with what a man's mind is
as to the probabilities of divine action
in accordance with what he thinks is really
credible or probable. We must all train
ourselves in the very rare quality of sub-
mission to good evidence, when it runs con-
trary to our prejudices at any point. This
quality is as rare among biblical critics as
among men of the world ; and as rare
among sceptics as among believers. To
train ourselves in it is a high intellectual
duty. But at the end we are left acknow-
ledging that a man's judgement, on the
weight to be assigned to historical testi-
mony, will be found in part depending on
his general view of what is probable in this
world, as he knows it.
Ill
And this brings me to my third test the
rational or logical by which I would try
to distinguish the essential or permanent
from the unessential or impermanent ele-
ments in Christianity. It is the test of
rational coherence.
There is a certain set of ideas, for ex-
ample, which naturally arise on the con-
sideration of the Christian religion in a
222 THE PERMANENT CREED
mind which views the world mainly under
the modern category of development,
which, however, has its ancient analogies.
Humanity is thought of as in gradual
progress of upward development from the
brute. Sin broadly appears as the remains
of the tiger and the ape-nature in us,
which is gradually being outgrown ; or,
where it is admitted to be more than that,
as the mistake or fault of the individual
choosing the lower instead of the higher,
which is the fault of his own will only,
and does not involve the race as a whole.
In this process of upward movement, viewed
spiritually, Christ is the highest point.
The language of incarnation, may be ac-
cepted. He may be declared Son of God,
or the phrase ( God in man ' may be used ;
but the idea is that humanity is God's son,
that God is, so to speak, incarnate or
becoming incarnate in humanity, and that
Christ is in the highest degree what every
man is in a measure because he has the
Word and Spirit of God in him. Now,
Christ's sinlessness, in an absolute sense, is
an encumbrance to this view. The virgin
birth is an offence. Miracles, as a whole,
including the physical resurrection, are an
THE PERMANENT CREED 223
encumbrance. What is wanted is a more
or less comprehensive view of a develop-
ment in which the divine sonship of man
is the climax, and Jesus Christ is the highest
specimen. This view is represented con-
sistently in many German and English
Unitarian Theists. In ancient language,
we should describe it as a Pelagian view
of man associated with a Nestorian view of
Christ, and leading to a Sabellian doctrine
of God. The cohesion of these ideas was
recognized in early times, and it is recog-
nizable enough in our day in modern forms.
Now, this sequence of ideas may be very
strongly criticized in itself. The idea of
sin as something which in the process of
civilization we show a tendency to outgrow,
is quite contrary to experience. The evi-
dence of the Gospels, too deeply engraved
into the record to admit of dislodgement,
postulates in Christ both a sinlessness and
a personal claim which force us to recognize
in Him something much more than this
highest development of our existing man-
hood. The historical witness to the
miracles, and pre-eminently to the physical
resurrection, is overwhelming. But I am
concerned now not to combat this set of
224 THE PERMANENT CREED
ideas, but to confront them with another
which, starting from the same fundamental
conception of God and man, 1 is distinguished
first of all by the severer view of sin. This
is the Bible view. Sin is so deep a taint,
so profound an evil, and so ingrained into
the whole stock of our humanity, that we
cry out and the best specimens of our
common manhood most strenuously for
something more than progress for re-
demption for a new birth : that is, a new
creative act which shall give our nature a
fresh start. This profound sense of sin
and need gives a welcome to the Catholic
and New Testament doctrine of a divine
act of redemption, led up to 3 indeed, in
the course of history, and prepared for by
the anticipations of prophecy, but in itself
single and unique ; an absolute act of God,
by which the Son of God, the eternal Son
of the Father, for us men and for our
salvation, came down from heaven, and
was incarnate and was made man. This
is a phrase which could not possibly be
1 This was written before the conception of the divine
immanence (in the exclusive sense) and the substantial
identity of Godhead and manhood, had become pro-
minent.
THE PERMANENT CREED 225
applied to any other event than one the
one incarnation, or to any other person
than one Jesus Christ, believed to be
personally God in manhood. This new
creative act of God brings into the world
a new manhood perfectly human, but
free from all the taint and weakness of
sin ; and the startling distinction between
Jesus Christ's conscious sinlessness and
the consciousness of other prophets and
saints suggests so manifest a moral miracle,
as makes the idea of the physical miracle
which accompanied His birth intellectually
welcome and congruous ; while it leads on
naturally to a human life such as the Gospels
describe.
But the divine Incarnation is the con-
summation of our human nature in union
with God, as well as its redemption. In
Christ our manhood is taken into God. He
is God in manhood. This both puts Christ
in a quite unique relation to all other men,
so that He can become in a complete sense
the head and fount of a new manhood by
spiritual regeneration ; and also gives
a reason of the most weighty kind for
His miracles and the resurrection. His
miracles are not portents ; they are the
15
226 THE PERMANENT CREED
physical counterparts of His moral teaching
and claim. They are the evidences such
as we feel in our deepest moments we
rationally need, that there is only one
lordship in the universe, and that the
material world, which commonly seems so
indifferent to moral distinctions, ultimately
and at the bottom is only the instrument
of the moral will of God. This is made
manifest by the miracles and the resur-
rection of Christ as it could be in no other
way. Christ presents to us in summary
an anticipation of the final victory of spirit
in matter ; and assures us of the glorious
future, which, through all failure and
disaster, awaits the manhood - which holds
fast by God. Meanwhile the whole relation
of the Son to the Father revealed in the
incarnation, and of the Spirit to both,
establishes the idea of the Trinity which
offers its profound solution of the ultimate
difficulties of divine personality by dis-
closing to us a social nature in the depth
of the one divine being.
All this is obvious. It means only that
the whole set of ideas about sin and re-
demption and the Incarnation and the
Trinity, which belong to the catholic creeds,
THE PERMANENT CREED 227
and are the commonplaces of historical
Christianity, cohere and are practically
indissoluble. It suggests, what I am sure
is true, that to abandon our maintenance
of miracles as an integral part of our creed ;
or in particular of one miracle, the
Lord's birth of a virgin as if the rest of
the fabric would be unimpaired is simply
due to lack of perception. In fact, the
writers who ask for the particular surrender
make it manifest enough, if their thought
is scrutinized, that what they are asking
for is something much more than a single
surrender ; it is the substitution of one
whole set of ideas for another. And if we
examine wherein lies the secret of the
difference between the Catholic and the
Unitarian set of ideas, we shall find it, I
am persuaded, not so much in any view
of historical evidence, as in the different
views of what sin is and what it needs.
The deeper, severer, view of sin is the clue
to the whole Catholic sequence of ideas.
And what a man thinks about sin is very
largely a matter of his own personal moral
consciousness.
I repeat : in current controversies as to
what Christian belief does or does not
228 THE PERMANENT CREED
necessarily involve, the language used by
different sides is, on the surface, largely
identical ; but what we are really concerned
with is a conflict between two funda-
mentally different cycles of ideas.
I have tried to face the question : In
an age of change and criticism and new
knowledge, what are we to regard as
permanent Christianity ? what are we to
regard as the permanent faith for which
we are to contend to death any ' advance '
out of which, to use St. John's phrase, is
only advance along a road which separates
from God and Christ ? I reply, first of
all, the faith summarized and expressed
in the catholic creeds that faith in God
and man, and man's destiny ; in the
incarnation and the person of Christ and
the accompanying miracles, and the eternal
triune being of God disclosed in Christ's
revelation. Beyond that, I am not now
inquiring whether there be anything more
of equal value. But that first of all, and
every part of it. And my reason is, because
in a remarkable manner it obeys all those
three tests which I may restate in a different
order. First, that this whole faith is
THE PERMANENT CREED 229
historically identified in all its parts with
historical Christianity. It comes to us
with the whole weight of Christian
authority. Secondly, this is not bare
authority. We discover in the articles
thus proposed by authority a most con-
vincing sequence of ideas. It is not a
number of isolated dogmas, but one view,
coherent and indissoluble. Thirdly, when
we approach the historical evidence we find
it (at the points material to our present
inquiry) cogent in a high degree. It sup-
ports and justifies our belief that the facts
on which our faith rests really occurred.
And if the mind is already furnished with
the ideas which render it susceptible of
the evidence, or, to put it in other words,
if it is free from the hostile prejudices
which belong to another set of ideas, it
will not fail to find the evidence con-
vincing.
I have ventured to suggest the considera-
tion and application of this threefold test,
because I feel that our scholars are mostly
applying the test of criticism, as if really
historical criticism were, what it is not, an
abstract instrument which could be de-
tached from the general furniture of the
230 THE PERMANENT CREED
mind. It is possible that the intellect of
the schools in our own age may become
so merely critical as to make it highly diffi-
cult for the professed student to be a
believer. The remedy for this lies, surely,
in the deliberate restoration of other modes
of approach to Christian truth. If the
educated intellect becomes purely critical,
we may feel sure that whatever restoration
or revival of religion is to be expected in
the future, will have to arise out of another
kind of soil out of something more broadly
human, more spiritually profound ; in a
word, more sympathetic with Christ's
own mind.
SERMON III
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 1
Repent ye : for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
St. Matt. iii. 2.
IT is my persuasion, which deepens with
every year of experience, that there will
be no revival of vital religion among us, on
any large scale, or with any adequate
results, except through a deepening of the
sense of sin : a return to the properly
Christian severity of view about the mean-
ing of sin and its consequences ; and that
this is needed equally in all classes of
society and among all kinds of men. There
is, in the Old Testament, a narrative of the
way in which the foolish king, Jehoiakim,
and his courtiers, received the solemn
warnings of Jeremiah, as Jehudi read them
from the roll of the book in which Jeremiah
had caused Baruch to write them. 2 ' And
1 A sermon preached before the University of Oxford
on December 13, 1903, and previously published.
2 Jer. xxxvi. 21 if.
231
232 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN
Jehudi read it in the ears of the king, and
in the ears of all the princes which stood
beside the king. Now the king sat in the
winter-house . . . and there was a fire in
the brazier burning before him. And it
came to pass, when Jehudi had read three
or four leaves, that the king cut it with the
pen-knife and cast it into the fire that was
in the brazier, until all the roll was con-
sumed in the fire that was in the brazier.
And they were not afraid, nor rent their
garments, neither the king nor any of his
servants that heard all these words/ ' They
were not afraid ' of the warnings of the
word of God on sin. That seems to
describe the attitude of all classes (I do
not say, by any means, of all individuals)
of our society to-day. The horror of sin
and the terror of its consequences have
come to be regarded as somewhat old-
fashioned. But this false fearlessness of
the king Jehoiakim was the ruin of himself
and his country. If there is any truth in
the Bible, it is this : that sin is not a stage
in upward evolution, a mere survival of
animal tendencies which is gradually being
outgrown ; nor a mere result of untoward
circumstances, or lack of education or
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 233
experience ; but a lawlessness of the human
will, a perpetually renewed rebellion against
God or neglect of God, which disorders
human nature by depriving it of the fellow-
ship of God, and ruins both the individual
and the social life, except so far as repent-
ance leads towards amendment, and opens
the way for that divine redemption which
God's love is ever offering.
It is quite a mistake to suppose that this
teaching about sin is dependent upon our
regarding the story of the Fall, in Genesis
iii., as historical. If the materials of that
story are derived from popular legends,
common to the Israelites and the Baby-
lonians, they have been used by a truly
inspired mind, and been turned into an
everlastingly true parable of what tempta-
tion and sin really are. Moreover, that
story has strangely little appreciable effect
on the rest of the Old Testament. The
Old Testament view of sin is simply the
result of the moral teaching about the
character of God and the nature of man
which constitutes the central feature of
the Old Testament revelation. In the Old
Testament, indeed, the view of sin and its
consequences is mainly confined to this
234 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN
life. Sin is ruin, here and now, to the
individual and the State. It is social ruin.
That is permanently true. Professor Hux-
ley speaks of ' that fixed order of nature
which sends social disorganization upon the
track of immorality, as surely as it sends
physical disease after physical trespasses/
and he speaks of its being ' the high mission '
of science ' to be the priestess of a firm and
lively faith ' in that fixed moral order. 1
Substitute for the words ' fixed order '
some such phrase as ' the will of God in
the government of the world/ and you
have the teaching of the prophets about
the ' day of the Lord ' the judgement of
God upon nations. That is permanently
true teaching. It admits of no advance.
It is given practically in its final form in
the Old Testament prophets. It simply
passes over from the Old Testament into
the New, and receives its reaffirmation
through the lips of Christ. And it is
verified, if we look below the surface, in
the history of the falls of nations and
governing classes.
But as to the consequences of sin to the
1 T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics (Macmillan,
1903), p. 146.
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 235
individual, the Old Testament teaching was
much more imperfect. ' The soul that
sinneth it shall die/ meant at first that
God's judgements on individuals accom-
plish themselves in this world. Sin is
punished by misfortune and death. Moral
experience broke down this simple faith
and forced the conscience of man forward
to see, in a wider area, and a course ex-
tending out beyond the limits of this life,
the fulfilment of the dealings of God with
the human soul. But the Christ, when He
came, with His full disclosure of divine
love and human destiny, did not mitigate,
nay, rather He intensified, the severity of
Old Testament teaching about the con-
sequences of sin to the individual soul.
He would have men still tremble till
perfect love should cast out fear under
the terror of the wrath of God. ' Yea, I
say unto you, fear him/ So long as the
fear of temporal disaster in this world is
an inevitable element in human nature,
an inevitable stimulus to avoid the disaster
that threatens, I cannot conceive why men
should endeavour to eliminate from our
ordinary human motives the fear of eternal
ruin. We may, indeed, regard hell as
236 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN
nothing else but the inevitable outcome, in
another world than this, of the process by
which, in this world, we have formed for
ourselves a character incompatible with
God. We may rid the doctrine of any
inequitable associations. We may recog-
nize to the full the compassion of God, the
love which binds Him to do the utmost
possible for every human soul which He
has created, and to be equitable with a
father's equity, in taking into account
ignorance, or hard circumstances, or lack
of opportunity. But there is such a thing
as self-willed independence of God ; as
lust which will not be controlled ; as
avarice or ambition which will not brook
restraints ; as malice which will not forgive.
There is the possibility that men may nay,
there is the experience that men do
harden themselves in persistent habit,
passing into indelible character, into a moral
state incompatible with the fellowship of
God. Death does not change us. It only
strips us bare, and transplants into a world
where only God is, and His judgements :
and the man there reaps the consequences
of what, in defiance or neglect of God, he
has become. If men are to be dealt with
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 237
in accordance with moral laws, God Himself
cannot alter those consequences. And,
unless we are prepared to play fast and
loose with language, we must admit that
those consequences, according to the teach-
ing of the New Testament, may have
become final and irreversible an eternal
sin an eternal perishing, a state of being
finally outcast and of knowing it, which is
the weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is
because the New Testament takes this
tremendous view of sin, and treats it as a
universal fact in human nature, that its
whole teaching about man treats him as
being the subject of redemption as needing
in each individual case to be bought back
out of a slavery in which he lies.
The divine method of this redemption
is, so to speak, from within the human race
itself. It is a new creative act of God
restoring in human nature a moral creation
which had been ruined. The Saviour is
man, but new man ; born, but virgin-born.
He moves out into experience and history
as ' in all points ' tried as we other men,
his brethren, are, but with one significant
exception He knew no sin. He was with-
out sin in Himself. He set the pattern of
238 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN
our manhood, not as we have made it, but
as God would have it be, and will (if we will
let Him) remake it. The sin which was
in the world marked the Saviour's steps
with blood and nailed Him to the cross.
But His willing obedience, unto death the
willingness of a manhood wholly in con-
formity with God turns the death which
a God-refusing world recklessly inflicted,
into a perfect offering of a perfect manhood
consecrated by self-sacrifice an offering
which brings back our wilful nature into
the fellowship with God which it had lost.
It was as our representative that He lived
our life, conscious of Himself as the Son of
Man. It was as our representative that
He offered for us and in our stead the
sacrifice that we had been withholding.
And living, risen and glorified through
death and beyond it, it is still as our repre-
sentative, the second Adam, the head of
a redeemed race, that He builds up a new
humanity, a temple on a secure basis, a
city that hath foundations, in which the
real divine purpose for man is to be realized,
even into an everlasting fulfilment. But
still for every individual, the sin which
taints every man and woman, aye, and
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 239
every child, makes it a moral necessity
that there should be a new birth, a fresh
incorporation upon a fresh stock, the stock
of the new man, Jesus the Christ : and this
incorporation upon the new stock, if it is
to be efficacious, must be a real personal
act of faith and repentance, a real ' turning '
of the will. ( Except ye be converted (or
' turn '), ye cannot enter into the kingdom
of God. And because sin is ingrained into
our nature, therefore the recovery of the
dominion of the spirit needs all through
life a continual ' mortification/ a putting
to death of the old man that the new may
grow a dying to live.
But do you say to the preacher, this
is all very commonplace and very old-
fashioned ? We have heard it very often.
But you do not seem to have been reading
modern literature. We have got a some-
what different version of these things. The
law of humanity is progress. The sphere
of progress is this world. We look before
and after, and find in the scientific doctrine
of development the guarantee of this
progress. This is the gospel of modern
science. What you call sin is a survival
of the animal propensities of a pre-human
240 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN
ancestry it is the tiger or the ape in us
which we are slowly out-growing in the
upward movement of the human race.
Nay, the preacher may make rejoinder:
This comfortable doctrine is not science,
nor based on science, properly so-called.
Professor Huxley, who was a scientific man,
when he came to Oxford to speak his
Romanes lecture many years ago, told us,
and it is as true to-day, that science has
got no gospel of progress at all. ' The
survival of the fittest ' means not the
survival of the best, but the survival of
those best suited to their surroundings.
The * survival of the fittest ' may mean,
and may come to mean, for all that science
can say to the contrary, ' the survival of
the worst/ * The theory of evolution/ 1
he went on, ' encourages no millennial
anticipations. If, for millions of years,
our globe has taken the upward road, yet,
some time, the summit will be reached and
the downward road will be commenced/
And science knows not when : neither in
the individual case, nor that of the nation,
nor that of the race. Science simply ob-
serves changes which are sometimes from
1 he. cit.y pp. 80, 85.
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 241
worse to better and sometimes from better
to worse, and she traces, when she can,
the conditions and the law of these changes :
but she indulges in no prophecies and
would have no reason at all, so far as she
is science, to be disappointed when an
epoch of change passes into an epoch of
deterioration.
Nay : science most certainly gives us
no message of necessary human progress.
How could she, in view of the facts of past
history ? Take a tour in imagination round
the Mediterranean Sea, beginning with
Morocco and ending with Spain. Examine
country after country, race after race, city
after city. One after another, almost with-
out exception, through the whole tour,
they yield the answer : Our contribution
to the sum of human knowledge, human
virtue, human progress, was made centuries
ago, millenniums ago. Our glories live in
the past. We are interesting mainly be-
cause of very remote memories or very
ancient history. And there is little hope
of recovery here, except, perhaps, through
the intrusion of some strange race to dis-
possess a fallen one. Nay, extend your
view. Take a map and go over the surface
16
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
242 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN
of the globe, and ascertain accurately of how
many races you can say that there is
evidence of progress, if you compare what
they are now, with what they were a thou-
sand years ago. You will be astonished
at the vast area of stagnation, the vast
area of retrogression and decay, as com-
pared to the line of progress. Nay, take
but the progressive races, and you will
find even more ambiguous the relation of
civilization to moral progress. Nations do
not always become better as they grow
more civilized. Sometimes you trace moral
progress, as history records it, and find it
passing into an age of general moral de-
terioration. We seem to be morally better
than we were a hundred years ago in
England. But what reasonable man but
owns that the moral condition of our
country is very precarious ? Who then
can reasonably say with his eyes on the
indisputable and widely-spread facts of
moral deterioration in races that sin is a
survival which men are seen to be out-
growing ? Science indeed ! Such an idea
is mere wilfulness.
And if you begin to examine individuals,
how utterly contrary to experience is any
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 243
idea of regular advance ! How many men
disappoint hopes ! how many deteriorate
grow worse, not better ! How many
men and women are wrecks the mere
ruins of what they might have been !
Have we no doctrine of human progress,
then ? Indeed we have : it is grounded
on the ineradicable consciousness of hope
which God, who made man, has inspired ;
it has been nourished by His prophets ; it is
confirmed and realized by our Lord, Son
of God and Son of Man. Yes, men, accord-
ing to Christian teaching, are meant for
progress. There is an assured goal. There
is to be a perfected humanity, a city of
God in which no good thing shall be lost,
into which all the gains of all mankind
shall be at last stored up and accumulated.
' They shall bring the glory and honour of
all nations into the city of God/ But this
perfection cannot be won by taking our-
selves as we are and languidly hoping for
the best, by treating sin as if we should
naturally outgrow it ; but by awakening
from sin ; by knowing it to be disease
which needs sharp remedies, for it is
mortal ; by conversion ; by confession ;
by bearing our penance ; by a new birth
244 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN
into a new manhood ; by a dying to the
old manhood to live in the new.
There is, of course, a theory or way of
conceiving of the world which is called
scientific, which is in the most direct conflict
with the Christian teaching about sin I
mean, the theory which refuses to see
anything in the world but the inevitable
sequence of physical phenomena, according
to physical law, which would have good
characters and bad characters to be merely
physical products, like good apples and
bad apples, and which refuses, accordingly,
to recognize the possibility of any actions
which ought not to have been done, and,
in fact, need not have been done. But
such a fatalism really ignores a whole class
of facts involved in our moral consciousness.
Confessedly it will not work ; that is, it
has to be repudiated in order to deal with
real life. You cannot dare to educate a
child in the belief that nothing he may do
could have been otherwise. All possibility
of moral progress is bound up with the
belief in moral freedom. You can give no
account on such a theory of the ineradicable
consciousness of guilt and shame which
belongs to a fairly good man when he has
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 245
done really wrong ' the self-contempt,
bitterer to drink than blood/ On the other
hand, the postulate of voluntary action,
the power, that is, to direct a certain
amount of force in the channel of one kind
of action or of another, does not result in
any conclusion incompatible with any ob-
served or observable facts of the physical
world. You may defy any one to show
you any observed or observable fact which
must have been otherwise if the postulate
of moral freedom were true. I think we
are not wrong in saying that the denial of
the fundamental axiom of moral responsi-
bility is due, not to any contrary facts, but
to an abstract refusal to recognize any
other class of facts than those which fall
under the purview of physical investigation.
May we not hope that in this region, at
least, a better relationship is already afoot
between religion and moral thought on the
one side, and physical science on the other ?
We have lost a really great man in Mr.
Herbert Spencer really great, because he
determined to view the sum of ascertainable
reality as a whole, and to deal with it as
a whole, and pursued this great ambition
with such indomitable industry. But may
246 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN
we not say that so far as his was an attempt
to bring all facts, including moral and
spiritual facts, under a single formula of
physical evolution, it belongs to a bygone
age, to the hot and arrogant youth of
science ; and that science, since Herbert
Spencer began to write, has become wonder-
fully more modest and conscious of its
limitations ; even as its old rival, theology,
has quite changed its attitude and become
wonderfully deferential and respectful to-
ward physical science even, perhaps, at
times too submissive to its more hasty or
conjectural utterances ?
We must be true both to physical reality
and to that which is moral- and spiritual,
and interpret each apart, and on its own
ground, and by its own methods, if we
are to attain more nearly to completeness
of knowledge and fullness of outlook.
But if you set aside a fatalist view of the
universe if the fact of moral choice and
moral responsibility is admitted then I
cannot understand how there is any stop-
ping on the way to the acceptance of the
Christian view of sin.
Let it be granted that the doctrine of
physical evolution has occupied the ground
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 247
of human thought, and permanently dis-
placed the idea of special creations let
it be granted, that is, that our race de-
veloped out of an animal ancestry ; let
it be granted that the early chapters of
Genesis give us in forms of the imagination
certain elemental spiritual truths about
God, and nature, and man, and human
sin that they most assuredly do but
no actual history of the origins of things ;
still the fact remains the development
of the human race has not been what it
might have been, what it ought to have
been, what in the purpose of God it was
intended to be. I know this for a fact,
because I know it in my own history. I
am not what I was meant to be. And
the reason of my miserable failure to be-
come what God meant me to be, is nothing
whatever but my sin, my faithlessness,
my wilfulness, my impatience, my lawless
lust my fault, my own fault, my own
great fault. I know this is true of myself,
if I like to think. I know it is true in
countless others. I see their wilfulness,
waywardness, selfishness spoiling homes,
ruining friendship, alienating love, corrupt-
ing life, on all sides. I work this out on
248 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN
the great scale, and see sin human law-
lessness retarding the divine purpose for
man's development all through, turning
into evil what was meant for good. I see
this sin in the individual writ large in
the race, and I know its true character
in my own heart. I go back in imagination
to the beginning, and I know that, however
and wherever and whenever the human
consciousness, the consciousness of self,
the consciousness of choice, the conscious-
ness of fellowship with the divine, dawned
in the animal organism, there, back in the
dim beginnings, under conditions which I
can but dimly realize, it must have been
the same thing in principle. What re-
tarded, impeded, destroyed at the begin-
ning, in the rude beginnings of our race, is
what retards, impedes, destroys now sin.
I am saying nothing about the tainting
of the stock of manhood and the inheritance
of sin, though I find it wholly impossible
to doubt that sin has weakened the race
by an inherited taint or disorder. And I
do not anticipate that careful biological
or psychological science is likely ultimately
to find itself in ascertained conflict with
this idea. I recall a remark of George
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN 249
Romanes that Weismann himself would,
he doubted not, be the first to allow that
his theory of heredity encounters greater
difficulties in the domain of ethics than
in any other unless, indeed, it were in
that of religion. 1 But I make no assump-
tion here of the quasi-physical transmission
of sin. I look now only to the universality
of actual sins in experience, and to the
light in which they reveal themselves in
the inner consciousness ; and I say, the
Bible is right. Sin is the great enemy.
There is no illusion so extraordinary as
the light -heartedness of men in view of
the mastery which sin manifestly has over
them and in them. And as the Christian
message is a message to men who feel the
burden and the guilt of sin, so true is it
that what we need to-day is some John
the Baptist to prepare the way of the
Lord by arousing us again in all classes,
and under all sorts of conditions in life,
to a wholesome and a godly fear of sin and
of its consequences.
The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
1 See Darwin and After Darwin (Longmans, 1895),
ii. p. 90.
250 THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN
There is no optimism so strong as the
optimism of the forecast for humanity
which our religion offers us, if only we will
set ourselves deliberately to face, and
recognize, and deal with the one great
obstacle, in the only way in which it can
be dealt with the obstacle of sin. We
must deal with it first in ourselves, and if
in ourselves we have realized something
of the joy and thankfulness which belong
to those who know themselves to be
redeemed men men in whom the divine
redemption is actually taking place then
and then only we can go out into the world
to do the work of evangelists, and make
men feel that the kingdom . of heaven is
among us and within.
SERMON IV
SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY l
Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he
hath, he cannot be my disciple. St. Luke xiv. 33.
THE genius of the Christian religion is
sacrifice. When our Lord began to pub-
lish the kingdom, He first of all accom-
panied His proclamation by revealing the
character of God in acts of compassion,
the compassion which had power in it to
heal and to lift ; and all this disclosure of
the powerful pity of God was made very
freely, and so as to involve very little
claim on the lives of the men who were the
objects of it. But when He proceeded to
build His spiritual kingdom, it was different.
Then we see Him standing, as it were,
over against the wills and hearts of men,
inviting, attracting to sacrifice, claiming
sacrifice, welcoming the sacrifice when it
1 The Commemoration Sermon, preached before the
University of Oxford, on June 17, 1906.
251
252 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS
is offered. He prepares the apostles by a
preliminary discipline, and then claims of
them the sacrifice of their profession and
its prospects by His ' Follow me/ So it
is with the fishermen ; so it is with the
tax collector. And these are no mere
episodes. They exhibit the principle which
our Lord loves to state in the most para-
doxical form. If a man ' forsake not
all that he hath ' ; if he ' hate not his
father, and mother, and wife, and children,
and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his
own life also, he cannot be my disciple/
The kingdom of heaven is a pearl of
great price, and a man must sell all that
he hath to buy it.
Our Lord educates His disciples to recog-
nize the justification of the sacrifice which
He demands. His dealings with them
are all directed to fostering in their minds
the sense that He Himself is absolutely
to be trusted in all emergencies, for all
the needs of body and spirit, in all the
critical moments of life and death that
He is all they need. When He had
fostered this sense, He draws from Peter,
as He had before drawn from him the
confession of His name, so now the pro-
OF CHRISTIANITY 253
fession of His service : ' Behold, we have
left all and followed thee.' And He meets
this profession with a like benediction :
' Verily, verily, I say unto you, that ye
which have followed me, and every one
that hath left houses, or brethren, or sisters
or father, or mother, or children, or lands,
for my name's sake, shall receive an
hundredfold, and shall inherit eternal life.'
And this welcoming of sacrifice is not
limited to any particular class. It is the
characteristic mark of all our Lord's deal-
ings with human souls. The rich man
Zacchaeus is blessed, because, when our
Lord had arrested his attention, and con-
verted his will, he stood out publicly, and
made public sacrifice, going far beyond
what could be said to be required of him.
'Behold, Lord, the half of all that I
possess I give to the poor, and I restore
fourfold any wrongful exaction which as
a tax-collector I have made/ And the
solemn benediction falls on him : ' This
day is salvation come to this house/
Just in the same spirit our Lord blesses
the woman who publicly showed her lavish
love by costly sacrifice, who poured the
cruse of exceeding precious ointment upon
254 SACRIFICE, THE GEXIUS
His head. Just in the same spirit
our Lord meets the rich young man who
wanted to know the way of perfection, and
claims of him the total sacrifice of his
worldly possessions, and when he would
not make it, lets him go away sorrowful.
Just in the same spirit He welcomes the
widow's mite, not because it cost her
nothing, but because it was ' all her living.'
This, I say, is the principle of our Lord's
dealing.
We rightly claim the Sermon on the
Mount as the moral law of the Christian
kingdom. But it is very unlike ordinary
legislation. It does not consist of pro-
hibitions ; nor does it en j oin- for the more
part such external actions as can be
required in a settled community of all its
citizens. But it deals with the motives
of the heart and of the will ; and when it
embodies its claims in characteristic actions,
they are actions which have, as it were,
the character of individual paradox the
paradox of self-sacrifice.
Against all this must be set the fact that
our Lord was preparing an organized
society, and solemnly and repeatedly im-
parted to the organized society the proper
OF CHRISTIANITY 255
legislative authority over the members
of the society which is essential for corpor-
ate life that is, the power to bind and
loose. The facts of the earliest Christian
church cannot be fairly interpreted except
on the supposition that Christ was the
conscious founder of a visible society, and
prepared the way for its corporate and
continuous life. In only one particular of
moral conduct did He Himself legislate,
in the spirit of the ordinary legislator,
and that was with regard to the sanctity
of marriage. But our Lord recognizes and
provides the conditions necessary for the
continuous life of any society the per-
manence of the social law in its ordinary
sense. This, however, is not the most
characteristic part of His method. Within
the area of what can be required of the
ordinary good man, He stands over
against the souls of men already pious and
God-fearing, over against those who would
turn from sin to God, inviting to sacrifice,
claiming sacrifice, encouraging and welcom-
ing sacrifice, meeting it with His supreme
benediction, as if it were in that alone
that the true relation of the soul to God is
exhibited and realized.
256 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS
And it is exactly the same principle that
we find in the Acts and in the apostolic
epistles. The church promptly shows her-
self a legislative body, binding and loosing,
that is, forbidding and allowing, prescribing
the necessary minimum for common and
corporate life. ' It seemed good to the
Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no
greater burden than these necessary things :
that ye abstain from things sacrificed to
idols, and from blood, and from things
strangled, and from fornication. From
which if you keep yourselves it shall be well
with you/ There is the binding and loos-
ing church, prescribing the minimum neces-
sary for corporate life ; but within the area
thus marked out, the life of the church
exhibits itself freely and delightfully in
voluntary sacrifice, so that the very dis-
tinctions of thine and mine are for the time
obliterated.
Again St. Paul shows, as much as any
man, the consciousness of what is required
of the church, if it is to be held together
as a continuous corporate society. There
must be the ordinary action of legislation.
St. Paul perceives that legislation consists
mainly in negatives, and that its object
OF CHRISTIANITY 257
is to keep down wickedness. ' Law is
not made for the righteous, but for the
ungodly/ And for all the strong contrast
that St. Paul draws between the charac-
teristic of the Old Covenant, which is law,
and the characteristic of the New Covenant,
which is grace, still from the first he
appears as the organizer and the legislator
of the churches and that without any
scruple or hesitation. He legislates with
regard to women's veils, and for the regula-
tion of prophecy and tongues, in his earlier
epistles to the Corinthians, quite as readily
as he legislates for the requirements of
the churches of Ephesus or Crete, through
his apostolic legates Timothy and Titus,
at the end of his life. But within the area
secured thus by legislation from the over-
flowings of wickedness, the positive and
characteristic spirit of Christianity has its
vantage-ground, and that is the spirit of
sacrifice.
St. Paul, in his conception of the sacrifice
of Christ which redeemed us, treats it in-
deed as a vicarious act, in that it is God's
pure gift to us, to which we contributed
nothing, and which was done of Christ's
own love and the Father's love for our
17
258 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS
sakes, and in our stead. But, also, St.
Paul's whole conception of this vicarious
sacrifice is that it stands over against
us, as a challenge or appeal to us to
do the like, and that as a matter of
course. It is something which rests on
the incontrovertible logic of the heart.
* Because we thus judge, that if one died
for all, therefore all died ' ; that is, in His
person, all who believed in Him were,
once for all, alienated, as by death, from
the world which had put Him to death ;
' and he died for all, that they which live
should no longer live unto themselves, but
unto him who for their sakes died and
lived again/ The sacrifice of Christ is,
to St. Paul, simply an appeal to us to go
and do likewise ; and in his own practice
he delights to recognize that he is doing
something over and above what anybody
can say is required of him. It is required
by his very vocation that he should preach
the Gospel ; and that, with all its attendant
risks and dangers, is what all men can claim
of him, as God claims it of him. But he
delights to offer a free-will offering over and
above this ; and the free-will offering is that
he should receive no pay, though he can
OF CHRISTIANITY 259
claim it if he would, for ' the labourer
is worthy of his hire/ by Christ's own
declaration.
We need not attribute to St. Paul a
doctrine of merit, against which his whole
theology is in revolt. Merit, we may say,
lives, for St. Paul, ' from man to man, and
not from man, O God, to Thee/ But the
evident truth is that St. Paul thought
it a characteristic exhibition of the Chris-
tian spirit that a man should offer a free
sacrifice, something over and above what
could be required or expected by one man
of another, over and above what could be
required by the church of all its members
or officers.
We shall find this same principle charac-
teristic of the other writers of the New
Testament. The characteristic of love in
St. John's Epistles is sacrifice : ' Hereby
know we love, because he laid down his
life for us, and we ought to lay down our
lives for the brethren ; ' that is, sacrifice
can only be met and responded to by like
sacrifice, the sacrifice of God by our self-
sacrifice. And in the Apocalypse the char-
acteristic Christian assemblages, the gather-
ings before the Throne, appear to be
LIBRARY ST. MARY'S COLLEGE
260 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS
gatherings of men who have made the
great sacrifices. They are martyrs and
virgins.
Thus the conception we are led to form
of the church in the New Testament sug-
gests a picture to which the facts of the
church correspond very generally in all
its best periods in history. It is the picture
of a society visibly organized in the world
with an ordinary legislation, keeping it
distinct from other societies and guarding its
necessary boundaries. But within the area
thus marked off, the characteristic life
of the society is found not merely in con-
formity to a normal rule, but in the exercise
of personal and voluntary sacrifice. The
characteristic spirit of the church is seen in
the martyrs, who are allowed to combine
in one act the necessary requirement upon
every one that he should not deny his
Lord with the highest ecstasy of voluntary
joy. I say the characteristic spirit of the
church is seen in her martyrs, her virgins,
her hermits, her missionaries, her evan-
gelists. These are characteristic, because
they exhibit the spirit in a striking form.
There is no need to say that they are better
than the fathers and mothers, and Christian
OF CHRISTIANITY 26l
men of business, and theologians, and
ordinary clergy, whose sacrifices are in-
conspicuous, ' who live faithfully hidden
lives/ But what it is necessary to say is
that where the true spirit of Christianity
is kept alive in the community, there it
will always be recognized that self-sacrifice
is the normal and characteristic thing ;
and it will be continually exhibiting itself
outwardly and visibly in special charac-
teristic acts, such as the abandonment of
wealth, or the abandonment of family life,
or the abandonment of home ; and if
the spirit is not finding expression in
these and the like ' evangelical counsels/
it must be reckoned in all probability
that the church is being unfaithful to her
true self.
Our minds naturally go back to the
English Christianity of the eighteenth
century, with its detestation of enthusiasm, 1
when a man like Bishop Butler could say
1 I do not deny that what Butler and his contem-
poraries meant by ' enthusiasm ' was something different
to what we mean by it, and that we ought to condemn
what they condemned as enthusiasm ; but I think that
this condemnation of enthusiasm in a bad sense, involved
a wonderful ignoring of the place in the Christian
character of enthusiasm in the right sense.
262 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS
of a man like George Whitefield : ' Sir,
the pretending to extraordinary revelation
and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid
thing, a very horrid thing/ The idea
then seems to have been that enthusiasm
was something contradictory to settled
organization and order, or to rational re-
ligion ; but this is the greatest possible
mistake. It is the function of the intellect
to appreciate the facts and motives and
conceptions of the Christian life, and to
bring them into relation with the whole
of human knowledge, and to bring out
clearly, for the enlightenment of the Chris-
tian spirit, what our religion really means,
and what intellectual propositions it must
necessarily maintain and contend for, if
it is to subsist in the world of thought
and controversy. As a matter of fact,
the enthusiasm of the first Christian church
could not have won the world, if the
theologians of the Christian church had
not been maintaining their intellectual
position in the face of the world's thought.
As a matter of fact, the great periods of
Christian enthusiasm have always been
in some close relation to the great
periods of intellectual revival. In the
OF CHRISTIANITY 263
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is
not easy to exaggerate how much the
revivals of religion, evangelical and catholic,
owed to the fact that the great apologists,
the Berkeleys, the Butlers, the Paleys, had
secured the intellectual standing-ground.
But to secure the intellectual platform is
one thing to mark out the area of Chris-
tion thought in its broad outline is one
thing and to live the life within the area
is another. The apologist of the eighteenth
century has been compared to a landlord
who accumulates the title-deeds of an
estate which he neglects to cultivate.
Once again, there is, or ought to be, no
kind of conflict between organization and
enthusiasm. That is to say, there is no
necessary conflict. And in fact the clearer
and more definite the recognition of the
authority of government in the church,
the easier the welcoming of enthusiasm.
It has been the clear recognition of au-
thority the clear action of organization
in the Roman Church which (as has been
very often recognized) has been the chief
advantage which the Roman Church has
had in welcoming and giving free play
to the enthusiasm of sacrifice. It has
264 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS
been because the idea of ecclesiastical
authority in the church of England has
been confused and mixed up with the
totally distinct idea of civil authority, that
the life of the church has been hampered.
The lines of what the church allows and
does not allow have been confused and
broken down ; and as a consequence we
have had such a frequent exhibition of the
conflict between enthusiasm and authority ;
not because the enthusiasm is necessarily
lawless, or the authority narrow, but be-
cause authority has not been free to lay
down the lines within which the fresh life
of the church can be allowed its heroic
ventures, and can feel the strong founda-
tion under its feet for enthusiastic devo-
tion.
This, then, is the point : The church
is a visible, continuous and organized body.
It must have its laws, therefore, positive
and negative. They are contemplated by
Christ, who gave the church divine autho-
rity to govern. ' Whatsoever ye shall
bind on earth shall be bound in heaven ;
and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth,
shall be loosed in heaven/ He made it
part of the obligation of discipleship to
OF CHRISTIANITY 265
hear the church. The church has thus
fulfilled her function rightly in laying down
necessary limits, doctrinal and practical.
In doing this there must be a minimum
prescribed. A man who does not do such
and such things ; who needlessly works on
the Lord's day ; or fails to attend the Lord's
service ; or does not observe such and such
requirements ; or repudiates such and
such a truth, must be excommunicated.
That is to say that his conduct or belief
is inconsistent with the fundamental re-
quirements of membership. It is the same
with the positive moral law. It must
subsist for the lawless, the unholy and pro-
fane ; to warn them off, to say ' Thou
shalt not ' ; to say, once and again :
' They that do such things shall not inherit
the kingdom of God ' ; to say, here and
now, that they cannot be allowed the
privilege of Christian fellowship. But it
is within the area secured thus from the
ravages of lawlessness ; within the area
where there are thus established certain
accepted principles of thinking and feeling
and living and worshipping, it is within
this area that the real Christian motive
can be brought freely into play. The
266 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS
drawing of the limits is, in every sense of
the word, the beginning and not the end.
It is the necessary condition of the life
itself. But the life itself means the up-
holding and keeping in conspicuous pro-
minence of the Lord's sacrifice, as that
which must appeal to men to meet like
with like, to give all for all.
I have tried to describe the place of
sacrifice in the Christian life ; the place
which it holds by relation to intellectual
effort and to organization ; the place it
holds by relation to the function of posi-
tive law. I have tried to draw this picture
of where law ends and sacrifice begins or
rather where law passes into love, for
it is all of the same moral substance and
the spirit of conformity passes into the
spirit of sacrifice. I have tried to do this,
because when we endeavour to attain to
quietness, and to take a comprehensive
view of the times we live in, we appear to
be running a great risk of missing the op-
portunity offered to our church, for no
other reason than because we fail to recog-
nize these necessary conditions of the life
of the Christian society. I mean that we
neither draw limits we neither exercise
OF CHRISTIANITY 267
the proper function of law ; nor do we give
its true place, or anything like its true
place, to the free spirit of sacrifice. We
resent law in religion. We dislike laying
down necessary conditions of orthodoxy.
We dislike saying that any positive dogma
is really a necessary limit for the exercise
of Christian communion, or even of the
Christian ministry. We resent the require-
ment of anything specific for instance,
the requirement of confirmation. We are
always finding individual excuses such as
seem to require us to dispense with the
Christian law of marriage in its strictness.
We seem to have lost the art of saying
positively ' No/ It seems to me, however,
self-evident that, though the specific re-
quirements of the church its positive
and necessary laws should be as simple
and as few as possible, yet some positive
limits, such as must be insisted upon, and
such as involve saying : ' If you will not
conform to this, you cannot share our
fellowship, and must be, from our point
of view, outside and not inside our body '
are necessary to the life of any society
which would call itself Christian. We
should lay on people no more than the most
268 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS
necessary things ; but this necessary mini-
mum we must lay on them, as a condition
of communion or as a condition of ministry.
It is not too much to say that what an
individual or what a society really means,
depends in the long run, at certain points,
on what he or it is definitely prepared to
exclude.
The Church of England has a vocation
to be broad. Let us praise God for it.
But breadth is quite consistent with know-
ing what our principles are and respecting
them. We suffer then from this point of
view from lack of definiteness. If we are
to play our part, we must be content as
a church to define our limits, to know
where we are bound to agree, as well as
w r here we are content to differ. What we
want is that it should be evident before
the eyes of our members, and before the
eyes of the world generally, that we stand
for a certain body of agreement, as well
as for a large toleration of indifference.
That is a quite intelligible standing-ground
to my mind the best and more Christian.
Granted that, we want not to make too
much of our dogmatic limits, but to treat
all these as simply affording the necessary
OF CHRISTIANITY 269
starting-point for what is the real life of
the church. I speak now only of the
church's spiritual life. But here, again,
we appear to be defective, almost as much
as we appear to be defective in the main-
tenance of positive law. The perilous
tendency among us is to appeal always
to averages or majorities ; to ask ourselves
what sort of religion we can induce men
in general, rich or poor, to accept and
welcome ; to make religion easy ; to
abstain from asking too much ; to accom-
modate the requirements of religion to
what we suppose men in general will be
ready to accept. Nothing could be so
directly contrary to the method of Christ.
He never will suffer the best to be sacrificed
to what may be supposed to be the average
requirement. He moves on His way re-
lentlessly, presenting the high and com-
plete claim, though it became more and
more evident that His people as a whole
would reject it. He never turns aside to
remodel His religion, and to accommodate
it to what would be found generally to
commend itself to each class, to Sadducee
or to Pharisee ; to accommodate it to what
would be found compatible with the politics
270 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS
of the one and the prejudices of the other ;
or to what the mass of the people might
be prepared to accept without too much
effort. Our Lord chose and sanctified
exactly the opposite method. He appealed
with the whole truth, for the whole of the
man's heart. In various ways He is con-
tinually saying : * If a man will not let
My appeal, the appeal of God, be a thing
altogether without competition in his heart,
and give all for all, he cannot be My dis-
ciple.' True, His appeal was welcome only
to the few. It was a little band that
gathered round Him. The wisdom of God
within Him perceived and saw that the
way to produce real moral results is through
the few who are the light of the world,
and the salt, and the city set on a hill.
There is a great claim, a claim over-
whelmingly great, made upon the church
to-day. Our colonies are crying out for
help ; our missions are so miserably under-
staffed that they are indisputably failing
to meet the obvious and unmistakable
requirements laid upon them. At home
there are men and women in multitudes
needed for the work of teaching, the work
of evangelization, the work of social re-
OF CHRISTIANITY 271
covery, in the great towns and villages of
our country. Great sins are flaunting
themselves in England, as in America,
stalking, as it seems, in almost unrebuked
insolence. Truly there is a work for us
to do ; and in this place to-day, we may
well be girding ourselves to do it. We are
the inheritors here of the great past. We
are thanking God for founders and bene-
factors who have bestowed so much upon
this incomparable place, who have made
this name of Oxford a name of irresistible
charm. We have entered into the labours
of other men ; the labours of schoolmen,
with their gigantic intellectual efforts ; the
labours of philosophers and early dis-
coverers, who prepared the materials and
opened the ways of knowledge ; the labours
of monks and friars, who established schools
and nourished the principle of education ;
the labours of preachers, and pastors, and
reformers, and professors ; the benefactions
of those who have endowed us with wealth ;
and of those, who are much more important,
who have entrusted to us the true riches
the things that make for the enlightenment
of mind, and the strengthening of con-
science, and the sanctifying of life. It is
272 SACRIFICE, THE GENIUS
a great heritage. And we may be quite
sure that if there is any one of us who has
joined the society of one of our delightful
colleges, and is bent on the whole to make
it a playground, a place of agreeable pastime
and social initiation into a comfortable
position in life, or to make it a place for
winning honours and seeking a name
among his fellows upon him there rests
the curse of barrenness and of remorse,
to be realized, we may hope, before it is
too late. The things that come easy to
our hand to-day are things, like our civil
and religious liberty, bought by the sweat
and blood of those who have lived before us.
And we may be sure that whatever is noble
and generous in us responds to this
appeal : that we, who have been allowed to
inherit these riches, material and spiritual,
should own that we must use them as a
trust from God. We have been allowed to
appropriate the great heritage to become
fat on what we did not earn only that
we may make the sacrifice of our own
lives full and complete, in the name of
Him who spent the glory of His own being
in making the idea of sacrifice beautiful
and acceptable to man's heart.
OF CHRISTIANITY 273
Over all our store of possessions, gathered
through the quiet and laborious and strug-
gling centuries ; over all our great fortunes
and vast gains ; over all our knowledge
of nature and man ; over all our elaborated
amusements ; over all our aesthetic subtle-
ties and our mechanical skill ; over all
that we call our own; within sight of the
still crying needs of corrupted and down-
trodden and feeble men and women and
the child-life squandered and perverted,
still there falls the claim of One who
pleads for abandonment, for sacrifice, if we
would live and work in His name and with
His blessing : ' Whosoever he be of you
that forsaketh not ... he cannot be my
disciple.'
18
SERMON V
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR l
And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his dis-
ciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the
kingdom of God ! And the disciples were amazed at his
words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them,
Children, how hard is it to enter into the kingdom of God !
It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a
rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. And they were
astonished exceedingly. St. Mark x. 23-26 (R.V. marg.).
THESE and the like words of our Lord
have stood over against the church in many
ages and many lands, convicting it of a
great unreality ; but over against no
church and in no age have they sounded a
more solemn protest than against our own
to-day. I shall need no apology if I ask
for a leading place in the thoughts of those
who have assembled in this Congress of
Churchmen for what ought to be, I believe,
our chief anxiety, our most anxious subject
of self-questioning : Are we of the Church
1 A sermon preached at the Church Congress, Oct. 2,
1906, in St. James's Church, Barrow-in-Furness.
274
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 275
of England to-day faithful, as a great body
of disciples should be, to our Master's
teaching about wealth ?
This teaching is not a matter of a few
words here and there. It is embodied in
His whole life and method. The purpose
of God expressed itself in the circumstances
of His earthly origin. As we may rever-
ently say, with all the possible human
careers open before Him, the Father chose
for Him, and He chose, to be born of poor
and humble parents ; not to become in-
carnate in some position of political power
or commanding influence ; not to have
natural control of the forces which make
up secular greatness ; nor, again, to appear
as a philosopher or to have command of
the natural instruments for intellectual
influence ; but to be born in circumstances
least calculated to suggest power of any
kind in a despised district of a subject
kingdom, just about to become still more
confessedly subject, remote from the centres
of political or intellectual influence, and in
the circle of labouring men. There is,
indeed, nothing about our Lord which
suggests any love of squalor, or any glori-
fication of what we may call the pauper
276 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
lot. He was born of the seed of David ;
that is, of a family with noble memories,
and haunted with noble hopes ; of a family
in the deepest sense respectable, but of
the class of artisans ; of the class that
ranked itself as the poor over against the
rich. The Magnificat of Mary already gives
expression to the purpose of God : ' He
hath put down the powerful off their
thrones, and exalted them of low degree ;
he hath filled the hungry with good things,
and sent away the rich empty.'
Our Lord, then, chose to belong to the
class of the honourable artisan ; and, on
the whole, He chose His apostles from
the same class. Again, there was nothing
squalid or disreputable about them or
their circumstances. He succoured the
miserable, while He chose His instruments
from among the morally excellent and the
respectable ; but from the class accustomed
to live hardly, and to depend for sustenance
upon daily labour. To this class He gave
the prerogative position in His church.
It is people of this kind who can pray most
naturally the prayer to God the Father,
1 Give us to-day the bread for the coming
day.' And going out into the world with
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 277
such associations and surroundings, He
made His deliberate intention more em-
phatic by associating blessedness with the lot
of poverty ' Blessed are ye poor/ If He
said also, ' Blessed are the poor in spirit *
that is, those who are detached from wealth
yet He claimed in general that the de-
tachment should be made actual and visible.
He seems to stand over against each
single human soul which comes before Him
to seek the position of the disciple, eliciting,
claiming, welcoming, and blessing the re-
nunciation of wealth. In various ways
and forms this appears ; in His calling of
the Twelve away from their professions ;
in the care and awful earnestness with
which He warned them off the first ap-
proaches to ecclesiastical wealth this, I
think, is the real meaning of the parable
of the unrighteous steward, and of other
plainer passages ; in the welcome He gave
to the public renunciation of Zaccheus,
and to the costly offering of Mary of
Bethany, and to the widow's sacrifice of
her meagre ' living ' ; in the claim made
on the rich young man who would move
onward in the way of perfection ' Go
and sell all that thou hast and give to the
278 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
poor ' ; and in the tremendous warning
which followed his withdrawal ' How
hardly shall they that have riches enter
into the kingdom of God/ a warning, we
must remember, from which the corrected
texts have removed the modification, ' How
hardly shall they that trust in riches. 1 It
is the possession of riches which remains
the almost insuperable obstacle.
The primitive church was, in its temper
and characteristics, just what we should
expect from all this teaching. In the ever-
lasting opposition of rich and poor, beyond
all possibility of question, it ranked among,
and spoke for, the poor. It did not so
much exalt the dignity of labour, as make
the obligation of labour positive and abso-
lute on all its members. ' If a man will
not work, neither let him eat.' Each man
is to labour ' with his own hands/ and so
' eat his own bread/ There is to be support
for those who cannot work, but not for
those who will not. The Christian is to
be content with the bare necessaries of
actual life ' having food and covering.'
What he earns over and above this he
should not accumulate for his own enjoy-
ment, but give away ' to him that needeth.'
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 279
The Lord's warnings are reiterated upon
those who seek to become rich men. They
can hardly escape perdition. 1
It is quite true that the New Testament
does not absolutely condemn the mere pos-
session of wealth. There is such a phrase
as St. Paul's, ' I know how to abound/
A rich man, retaining possession of his
wealth, might have lived unrebuked in
the churches of St. Paul, provided that he
was treating his superfluity as a stewardship
for the common good. But it is not too
much to say that, in spite of the moral
impartiality of the New Testament, in spite
of the equality of its moral claim, its regular
assumption is that God is on the side of
the poor against the rich. It does not,
indeed, encourage the oppressed poor to
resistance by direct methods. It em-
phasizes the blessedness of submission to
injury, while it supplies the most powerful
remedy for injustice that the world has
ever known, in the form of a brotherhood
of labour and prayer an immense or-
ganization for mutual help. But if it does
not stimulate to resistance, it associates
wealth with tyranny and wrong, and un-
1 i Tim. vi. 7.
280 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
veils the judgement of God upon the selfish
rich : ' Go to, ye rich men, weep and howl.'
' Hath not God chosen them that are poor ? '
The late Master of Balliol l used often to
say, in his detached way, that he was
afraid there was much more in the New
Testament against being rich and in favour
of being poor than we liked to recognize.
And all the teaching which I have tried to
summarize, as I believe without any ex-
aggeration, represents the permanent mind
of Him who is our Master. It suggests
universal principles, which belong to all
states of society. He is ' the same yester-
day, to-day, and for ever/ He is the head
of the church of our branch of the church.
He is still speaking to the angel of the
Church of England. We have won vic-
tories ; but they have proved barren. We
stand far stronger on the merely intellectual
or apologetic ground than we stood thirty
years ago. We have vindicated the liberty
of biblical criticism and have still the
weight of free New Testament scholarship
here in England, at least on the side of
our creed. We have practically won the
battle of the liberty of catholic ceremonial.
1 Dr. Jowett.
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 281
What is much more important, we have
had great revivals of spiritual life ; and,
if only there were more driving-power
behind our organizations, we should be on
the way to get rid of many old-standing
abuses. The idea of the church, free and
self-governing, with its great heritage of
truths, human and divine the truths of
the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man is awake and alive again. We
understand, again, our great mission in
the evangelization of the world. Above all,
we have laboured very hard for the poor
and amongst them. And yet and yet
it all hangs fire. ' We have been with
child, we have been in pain, we have, as it
were, brought forth wind ; we have not
wrought any deliverance in the earth,
neither have the inhabitants of the world
fallen/ ' Surely I have laboured in vain
and spent my strength for naught ! ' Such
a feeling is in the mind of very many of us
as we take stock of the powerlessness of
the church, in spite of even splendid ex-
ceptions in this or that parish, to produce
any broad, corporate effect, to make any
effective spiritual appeal by its own proper
influence, in the great democracy of England
282 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
to-day. We are not in touch with the
mass of the labouring people.
Is not the reason of this because we are
the church of the rich rather than of the
poor of Capital rather than of Labour ?
By this I mean that in the strata of society
the church works from above rather than
from below. The opinions and the pre-
judices that are associated with its ad-
ministration as a whole are the opinions
and the prejudices of the higher and upper-
middle classes, rather than of the wage-
earners. This becomes the more apparent
if you contrast the Church of England
in this respect with the Roman Catholic
Church in Ireland or with the Presbyterian
Churches of Scotland at least as they have
stood, up to the rise of the vast industrial
cities, like Glasgow or Dundee, where I
suppose that ' labour ' stands as much
aloof from any existing religious organiza-
tion as in our English cities.
But I return to the Church of England,
and to our confessed failure to be the
church of the people in an effective sense
in town or country. It is, I believe, the
chief test of the vitality of a church of
Christ in any country that it should repre-
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 283
sent the poor, the wage-earners, those who
live by manual labour ; that it should be
a community in which religion works up-
ward from below. There is our great
failure. In the older feudal constitution
of things in the country, or in the older
industrial period in the towns, when the
masters lived surrounded by their ( hands/
it might have been supposed possible for
a church specially identified with the point
of view of the then governing classes still
to be the church of the whole community.
But the state of things has passed away.
Capital and Labour are names now for great
class interests and organizations represent-
ing men in masses, and the church finds
itself in fact, and on the whole, moving in
the grooves which are precisely those from
which Christ warned us off ; it finds itself
expressing the point of view which is
precisely not that which Christ chose for
His church.
Can this be doubted ? Let us judge by
the officers of the church. The incomes
of the bishops range us, and are meant to
range us, in our manner of life, with the
wealthier classes, the squires or magnates
of the county, the great merchants of the
284 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
towns, with whom all our education has
accustomed us to associate and to feel.
Our incumbents and clergy, with their
wives and families, have their natural
friends among the gentry or professional
classes. It is quite rare to find an artisan
or his wife really at home with the clergy.
At every point we find ourselves depending
upon the support of the capitalist. Our
whole system of church charity expresses
a bounty administered out of benevolent
feeling, by a wealth which makes no apology
for enjoying itself, to a poverty which it
makes no pretence to share. Our church
meetings for counsel only rarely, even in
parishes, much more rarely in rural
deaneries, never in Houses of Laymen or
Church Congresses, discover or express the
point of view of the artisan, except by an
exceptional effort made for a particular
occasion. Committees of church ladies for
all sorts of purposes acquiesce in an attitude
of patronage towards the wife of the
artisan, even more markedly than com-
mittees of church laymen. The arrange-
ments of the great majority of our churches
in country and town, in spite of the quite
unmistakable language of St. James, and,
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 285
I must add, in startling contrast to the
churches of Roman Catholic Europe in
almost all parts give a marked preference
to the well-off.
I have said before that, with all this, we
have laboured very hard for the poor and
amongst them. At the hand of Him who
said, ' Inasmuch as ye have done it unto
one of the least of these my brethren, ye
have done it unto me/ there is laid up a
rich store of benediction for men and
women, priests and laymen innumerable,
whose unselfish, unremitting, unrequited
toil is really known only in the heart of our
Lord. That is our real comfort. We are
sure that all this labour will not be in vain.
It, as it were, authorizes us to claim illu-
mination and guidance in reversing the
great wrong and in averting the great
judgement, or rather it authorizes us to
claim strength to make the right use of
divine chastisements. But meanwhile the
facts are as I have stated them. I hardly
think the truth of what I have been saying
can be denied on the whole. The question
which ought to hold a prerogative place
in the interests of churchmen is, how we
are to return to a condition of things nearer
286 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
to the intention of Christ if it may be,
without violence or revolution, but, if not,
then anyhow to return.
But this suggestion of remedies is not
the first thing. The first thing is that we
should, in the whole bulk of the church,
feel and acknowledge, in deep penitence,
that we are on wrong lines, so that at
present our very victories must prove
barren. This sermon is only the cry of a
permanently troubled conscience which can-
not see its way. Certainly no one has a
right to speak with any degree of self-
satisfaction or contemptuously of others'
failures. The worst feature of the present
' catholic movement ' in the Church of
England is that its more prominent organs
and representatives seem to be so ready
to speak scornfully of others, and so little
conscious of the failure of the catholic
movement really, on any considerable scale,
to do the proper work of a Christian church
by becoming identified with the working
people. Meanwhile, we may trustfully feel
that the work which has been done so
zealously and faithfully for the poor gives
us the best ground for expecting an answer
to our penitent prayers.
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 287
I have no time to do more than barely
enumerate what seem to me to be some
lines of hopeful recovery.
i. First of all, I would say, the church
must set itself deliberately and of set
purpose, as far as possible, to get rid of
the administration of poor relief. We must
deliberately set ourselves to dissociate the
administration of relief from the ministry
of the word and sacraments, and to asso-
ciate it with the state, the municipality,
and voluntary organizations of citizens on
a purely secular basis. Our Lord's and His
apostles' miraculous ministries of help to
the sick and needy afford very little analogy
for our present methods. You know the
famous story of the Pope, luxuriating in
the wealth of his Jubilee-offering, and
saying to the saint by his side, ' Peter
cannot say now, " Silver and gold have I
none," ' and how the saint replied, ' No,
your Blessedness ; neither can he say now,
" In the name of Jesus Christ, rise up and
walk." The church can do its utmost to
relieve the poor in any way love can sug-
gest, if it be itself poor and of the poor.
But where the charity of the church is
understood to mean the patronage of the
288 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
rich, it can do nothing without disaster.
I am quite sure that our first and most
necessary step towards regaining our right-
ful place in the regard of labour is to take
the administration of relief-money almost
altogether out of the hands of our clergy
and church-workers,, and to let it be so
administered, and by such hands, as that
none may think they can either merit it or
lose it by attendance or failure to attend
at the services of the church. It is not
possible to exaggerate how alienating an
effect upon exactly that type of independent
labour on which our Lord most relied, is
exercised by our present system of ad-
ministering alms. Here, then, is one of
the first and most necessary steps of our
redemption, and till this is taken all else
will be in vain I mean, till it has ceased
to be a plausible taunt that a man or
woman goes to church for what can be got.
2. Secondly, we want to make the most
of what we have already. We have a
really considerable body of communicants
who are artisans ; but we need to give
them their true place and influence, and
to mass them, so that their corporate
effect shall tell. We must prevent the
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 289
parishioners of poor parishes being ousted,
or put into a secondary place, by those
who come from outside. We must dili-
gently consult their tastes and convenience
in respect of the services, hours, and
arrangements. We must do our utmost
to let them feel that the management of
church affairs is in their hands. In matters
not belonging to the church's essential
order, their mistakes are likely to be more
profitable than wiser judgements which are
not yet their own. We must take the most
serious pains to bring it about that they
shall be represented, in sufficient number
to make them feel at home, in ruridecanal
meetings, and then, gradually, in diocesan
assemblies and in the Houses of Laymen.
3. To do all this safely, we must act on
the basis of a true sacerdotalism. The
ministerial priesthood is in charge of the
word and sacraments. It is the duty of
the priesthood to maintain unflinchingly the
catholic heritage ; to suffer no tampering
with those things which catholic authority
has laid down, or the authority of our
own part of the church. But, after all,
many of our characteristic arrangements
stand, not by catholic authority, but by
19
2QO THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
the force of use and wont, and pure, un-
reasoning conservatism. And it is part of
a true sacerdotalism that the clergy should
help every confirmed person to claim his
or her place in the priestly body, and
should learn to act, or at least sincerely
desire to act (how far we are yet off that !)
on the apostolic pattern ' It is not meet
that we should leave the word of God to
serve tables. . . . We will give ourselves
to prayer and to the ministry of the word/
To be effective ministers of the word and
sacraments that is the special business of
the clergy. Here we have entrusted to
us the principles and the instruments of
the true socialism, and - the safeguards
against the false and misleading socialism
which ignores the fact of sin and the need
of personal redemption. Oh ! how differ-
ent would be the position of the church
if we clergy would sacrifice everything to
concentrate ourselves upon really bringing
out the social meaning of our sacraments,
upon really understanding and giving voice
to the spirit of Christian brotherhood,
upon really making ourselves the organs
for expressing social justice and uttering
effectively the divine wrath upon all that
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
degrades and crushes the weak and igno-
rant and poor ! Oh ! how different would
be our moral appeal if Christ's claim upon
wealth Christ's claim for great sacrifices,
great abandonments, as the normal ex-
hibitions of a converted heart were really
once again the claim of the actual church
upon the clergy and laity !
In all this I am only asking that we should,
in penitence and prayer, give ourselves to
teaching the faith and practice of Christen-
dom as it is in the Bible. How quickly, then,
would many of the questions which now
bulk biggest as f church questions ' take
a very subordinate place !
Truly we have protected the letter of
Scripture, while its spirit of judgement and
justice was being ignored ; we have con-
tended for ceremonial liberty, while the
fundamental meaning of our sacraments
of brotherhood was being parodied by
a miserable religious selfishness.
4. Once more, we must dissociate the
clergy from being identified with the
wealthier classes. We who know may say
much to palliate the scale of our episcopal
incomes. But nothing we can ever say
will obliterate the false impression which
2Q2 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
our present system makes upon the imagi-
nation of the classes of labour. It would
be an immense improvement if the bishop
received a very much smaller personal
salary, with allowances for official expenses,
and with a fund for diocesan objects put
at his disposal, of which he should give
public account.
With the mass of beneficed and un-
beneficed clergy there is at least no difficulty
from excess of income. What we want to
do is to gain, what we at present largely
lose, the moral advantages of small in-
comes. We need, and we are, thank God,
realizing the need, to lay open the way
to holy orders to promising young men
of every class. We must provide for their
receiving, fully and adequately, an educa-
tion liberal and theological. What we
want to secure is that, while we train
their minds and characters, we should
not suffer those of them who are sons of
working parents to lose in the process the
sympathies and tastes of the best of those
amongst whom they had their origin. We
want to secure, so far as we can, that
when they are ordained, their houses and
their tables shall be such that those of the
THE CHURCH AND THE POOR 293
class they come from should feel themselves
at home with them, as they do with the
clergy of some other countries. We want
utterly to rid ourselves, as of a shameful
thing, of the sense that a clergyman whose
original home was a workman's home
should desire to conceal it. There is no
reason in the world, if there were but more
of the Christian spirit among Churchmen,
why our clerical estate should not come to
be utterly freed from the association of
class. The real remedy for the evils sup-
posed to be incidental to such a state of
things lies in the requirement of an ade-
quate training before ordination.
' These things are difficult. Such funda-
mental social changes are hard to bring
about. We are an unimaginative and con-
servative people/ True, quite true. But
the beginnings are in prayer and penitence
and right desire, and in giving the first
place in our minds and counsels to the
matters that are really of first importance.
Meanwhile we must all continue to do our
best in the states of life into which it has
pleased, or shall please, God to call us.
When our Lord came into the world as
man He found the ecclesiastics of His time
294 THE CHURCH AND THE POOR
and the church parties of His time occupied
upon the wrong problems, intent upon the
wrong subjects of thought, or at least
putting them in the wrong order. They
were conservative of things as they were.
Their eyes were not open to fresh light.
Thus, seeking their own righteousness, they
refused to submit themselves to the right-
eousness of God.
May God give us grace, us who are the
representatives of the church of God in
this land to-day, not so to excuse ourselves,
by the pleas of natural conservatism and
natural disposition, as to miss His funda-
mental message for us in our time !
APPENDIX
MORAL WITNESS OF THE CHURCH
ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS
A REPORT PRESENTED TO THE HOUSES
OF CONVOCATION OF CANTERBURY BY
A JOINT COMMITTEE (April 16, 1907)
THE subject with which your Committee was specially
appointed to deal, viz. the moral witness which the
Church ought to bear against certain misuses of
money, seemed to us to require, as a preliminary,
some more general consideration of those positive
principles involved in the production, accumulation,
and distribution of wealth which are properly Christian
and in the light of which current practices must be
judged.
Accordingly, a Sub-Committee was appointed which
sought and received communications from a number
of students of Christian ethics and of current
economics, and from some business men and others
interested in social reform. Others allowed the
Sub-Committee to receive them and ask them ques-
tions. On the basis of these communications, written
and oral, the following report has been drawn up,
and is presented.
1 This Report must be taken as having the authority
only of the Committee by which it was prepared. (Sold
by S.P.C.K. and National Society.)
097
298 MORAL WITNESS OF THE
I. The Changes in the Economic View. There is
no doubt that the change which of recent years has
come over the attitude of economists towards ethical
questions gives the Christian Church a fresh oppor-
tunity. The old political economy thought it neces-
sary to isolate the study of the production and
distribution of wealth ; to deal with it as if no
motive were to be admitted into this economic region
except the selfish desire of the individual to enrich
himself. Abstract laws of supply and demand, in
combination with a certain theory of population
(Malthus), were supposed to rule out in the scientific
treatment of commerce and industry all questions
of justice and mercy to the wage- earners, and all
moral considerations in the relations between em-
ployers and employed. An economic world was
postulated in which there was nothing but individuals,
each free to pursue, and certain tp pursue, his own
interest. But, abstract and hypothetical as this
economic science professed to be, it ministered un-
doubtedly to the common human tendency to regard
commercial and economic dealings as outside the
control of morality and religion. And in spite of
the protests of some deep-seeing men (Carlyle,
Maurice, Ruskin), the Christian Church allowed itself
to be silenced by the terrors of supposed inexorable
laws.
But a great change has passed over economics,
most of all in Germany, but also in other countries,
including England. It has been found that the
abstract science was too abstract to be applicable
to facts. A man, though engaged in making his
living or his fortune, still remains a man, influenced
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 299
by manifold passions, prejudices, and feelings, which
in countless ways disturb the action of the purely
economic motive, or the desire to buy in the cheapest
and sell in the dearest market. Moreover, the
majority of men are found to be, not free to bargain,
or to pursue their own interests. They are too
weak and ignorant. They cannot move freely.
They are exploited by the strong. This very weak-
ness and ignorance is in itself an economic loss. The
* cheapest ' labour proves to be often the dearest.
For the truly cheapest labour (in the long run) is
the most efficient labour ; and experience is now
showing that, in far more cases than might be sup-
posed, the gain in the efficiency of the workman, which
follows upon such an improvement in his standard
of living as secures for him better food and more
wholesome surroundings, more than outweighs the
additional cost.
Wealth again is more clearly recognized by the
present generation of economists to be a means
rather than an end. Mere production of material
commodities is not considered as the matter of chief
importance. The real end of industrial organization
is to combine efficient production with such a dis-
tribution of the commodities produced, as will
enable the greatest number of people to find a full
opportunity of self-realization and joy. The true
riches of a nation are vigorous and happy men and
women, willingly and intelligently co-operating for
the good of the community.
II. Christian Principles of Society. An economic
science which exhibits this new tendency is no longer
an antagonist to Christian principles. Christianity
300 MORAL WITNESS OF THE
can breathe freely again in the atmosphere which it
generates. For what are the fundamental social
principles of Christianity ? We may state them as
follows : First of all, Christianity inherited from
the Old Testament certain social principles, in part
embodied in the Law and in part enforced by the
prophets and moralists. Thus we find in the Old
Testament a profound regard for the poor and help-
less (widows and orphans), 1 a reiterated denuncia-
tion of those who exact their labour without
paying them a sufficient wage. 2 'The Lord will
enter into judgement with the elders of his people,
and the princes thereof : It is ye that have eaten
up the vineyard ; the spoil of the poor is in your
houses. What mean ye that ye crush my people,
and grind the face of the poor ? saith the Lord, the
Lord of Hosts.' 3 The tendency of the legislation
was to raise the status of the Israelite slave to that
of the hired workman, who was to be treated as a
' brother.' *
We find a prohibition of usury between Israelite
and Israelite 5 ; and provision is taken against the
1 Amos v. 12 ; Isa. i. 17, 23, x. 2 ; Jer. vii. 3 f., xxii. 3 ;
Deut. x. 18, xxiv. 17!, xxvii. 19.
2 Deut. xxiv. 14 f.; Jer. xxii. 13; Lev. xix. 13;
Mai. iii. 5.
3 Isa. iii. 14, 15.
* Hastings' Diet. iv. 465 ; cf . Lev. xxv. 39 f.
6 Exod. xxii. 25 f. ; Lev. xxv. 35-37. This was in
the Old Testament a provision for the protection of the
poor. There is no reference to it in the New Testament,
nor need we enter into the later discussions on the
subject.
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 3OI
permanent alienation of the land * ; various enact-
ments protect labour e.g. the danger of falling from
a roof is to be averted by a railing. 2 The general
well-being is a supreme consideration, restricting
the selfish acquisition of wealth. Luxury is de-
nounced. 3 Manual labour is held in honour ; it is
the necessary basis of all society ; the labourers
' maintain the fabric of the age ; and in the handi-
work of their craft is their prayer ' i.e. for them
labor are est or are.*
Christianity did not take over the formal legisla-
tion of the Old Testament, but it did inherit its moral
principles, * which Jesus Christ deepened and uni-
versalized. The ' neighbour ' to whom we owe duty
is now not the fellow member of the Jewish race,
but it is every man who has need, though in a special
sense the fellow-Christian. The Christian is ' to
love his neighbour as himself ' ; that is, he is not to
regard any other person as an instrument for his own
advantage, but to consider his brother's interest and
weU-being, as he considers his own. This is the law
of love. Moreover, Christianity assigns to every
individual soul or life an absolute and infinite worth
which makes it once for all impossible to sanction
any one being treated as a mere means to another's
1 Lev. xxv. 10, 13 ; cf. Isa. v. 8, against the accumula-
tion of the land in a few hands.
2 Deut. xxii. 8. The regulation about sanitation in
the camp is interesting. Deut. xxiii. 12-14.
3 Amos iii. 15, vi. if.
* Ecclus. xxxviii. 24-34.
6 e.g. S. James takes up the language of the Old
Testament prophets about wealth and wages (v. 1-5).
3O2 MORAL WITNESS OF THE
end. The Christian society is a body in which the
interest of the whole and of every part is the governing
law for every member. The Christian ethic is thus
essentially social. And a special reverence is due to
the helpless and weak. They are the ' little ones '
whom we are not to offend. Christ died for the
weak, as for the strong ; and ' there is no respect of
persons with God.' Moreover, all the members of
the body, whether more or less important, depend
one on another, and the suffering of any member
of the body is the concern of all. 1 Thus the law of
the Christian's life is the service of the brethren. He
is set ' not to be ministered unto, but to minister/
His aim is to serve, not to get as much as he can for
himself. There lies upon each one the duty of work,
that he may ' eat his own bread.' a Indeed, St. Paul
states the law sharply : ' If a man will not work,
neither let him eat.' Moreover, work is regarded
as a means of co-operating with a divine purpose
of love. It is not to be a means for the selfish ac-
cumulation of wealth. The individual wants are
to be sternly restricted. Luxury is no more allowed
than idleness. Stern warnings are uttered regarding
the pursuit of riches. 3 Each is to work with his own
hands that he may support the weak, 4 or that he
may ' have to give to him that needeth.' 5
It is true that all this social conception regards
primarily the Christian body, ' the brethren.' But
there are indications in the New Testament itself that
it is to be extended to society at large. The Christian
1 i Cor. xii. 22-27. 4 Acts xx. 35.
2 2 Thess. iii. 10-13. 6 Eph. iv. 28.
3 i Tim. vi. 8-10.
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 303
is to ' honour all men,' as well as to ' love the
brotherhood ' ; the ' love of the brethren ' is to
extend itself into universal ' love.' x The State,
as well as the Church, is regarded as a divine
institution, even though Pagan 2 ; its ministers are
God's ministers ; and the idea of public spirit is
thus extended (so far as circumstances allow) from
the Church to the State.
We are persuaded that in the effective reassertion
of such Christian principles lies the present opportunity
of the Church and one of its chief duties as a witness
for Christ. We are persuaded that some of the
matters which have held, and still hold, the first place
in ecclesiastical or clerical interest are such as the
New Testament would lead us to believe to be of
quite minor importance. We are further persuaded
that the idea of individual salvation has been dis-
astrously isolated in Christian teaching and in
current Christian belief from the social idea of original
Christianity and the teaching of brotherhood. It
was largely because the Church appeared as a society
making the welfare of all its members its controlling
principle in the acquisition and distribution of wealth,
that it made the great progress which history records
in the world of the Roman Empire. 3 That at least
was one of the chief factors of the impression which
it made upon men's hearts and consciences. In our
day it appears that the re-enforcement of the obliga-
tions of brotherhood is what is needed to rekindle
1 i Pet. ii. 17 ; 2 Pet. i. 7.
2 Rom. xiii. ; i Tim. ii. i, 2 ; i Pet. ii. 13-17.
3 See, for instance, Harnack's Expansion of Christianity,
vol. i., pp. 183-249.
304 MORAL WITNESS OF THE
among the mass of the workers the perception of the
supreme worth of Christianity.
But apart altogether from such questions of present
opportunity, the Christian doctrines of the Father-
hood of God and of the Incarnation imply the teaching
of brotherhood with all its social consequences. The
Christian cannot fail to recognize that Christ, our
Master and our severe Judge, holds us responsible
for every one of His members whose life has been
wasted by our common neglect.
III. The Duty of the Christian as an Individual.
In view, then, of the economic change described above
and of the Christian principles of society which we
have endeavoured to indicate, what are the matters to
which the moral witness of the Church should be
specially directed at the present time ?
In part what is needed is that the Church should
teach the individual his duty to his neighbour more
completely, and with more reference to actual con-
ditions. We have heard too much of the rights of
property. We have heard enough of the duties of
property towards the Church in its narrower
sense. But we have heard too little (from the
authorized Christian teacher) of the fundamental
Christian principles in respect of ' getting ' and
* spending/
The duty of the Christian as an individual may
be considered in three ways ; he may be regarded
(i) as a worker, (2) as a capitalist and employer,
and (3) as a consumer.
(i) The Church should declare that the first duty
of the Christian, whatever may be his circumstances,
is that of work; for every man according to his
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 305
ability must contribute by his service to the common
well-being. Idleness, whether it is that of the rich
or the poor man, is an offence against God and man.
And by work we ought to mean the sincere applica-
tion of all the man's faculties to his business ' in
that state of life unto which it shall please God to
call him/ The shirker and the trifler in any class
of society are men who have failed to recognize the
claim of God upon them.
(2) The Church should teach that the Christian
who is an owner of property must recognize that,
vhether he has inherited or acquired it, he holds it
as a sacred trust. He has indeed, for good or evil, as
society is now organized, legal authority, within
certain limits, over the manner in which it is used,
but before God his authority is that of a trustee for
society, not of an absolute owner.
And especially, the owner of property as an em-
ployer must remember that he is responsible for the
conditions under which his business is carried on.
The Christian Church which holds that the individual
life is sacred, must teach that it is intolerable to it
that any part of our industry should be organized
upon the foundation of the misery and want of the
labourer. The fundamental Christian principle of
the remuneration of labour is that the first charge
upon any industry must be the proper maintenance
of the labourer an idea which it has been sought to
express in popular language by the phrase ' the
living wage.'
The Church should also urge upon its members the
moral, as distinct from the legal obligation, of pro-
viding and making efficient whatever in the way of
20
306 MORAL WITNESS OF THE
apparatus or arrangements is necessary to safeguard
the life and health of the worker.
(3) The Church should teach the moral responsibility
of the consumer ; that is, that no Christian has the
right to demand commodities at a price which he
knows, or can ascertain, to be incompatible with the
adequate remuneration of the workers and proper
conditions of industry ; or, again, by deferring pay-
ment, to render it more difficult to secure these objects.
But in carrying out such ideas of a man's duty the
individual by himself is no doubt hampered in a
thousand ways. The single employer or capitalist 5s
often almost as powerless to alter the system of which
he is a part as is a labourer. When ' the system '
makes it necessary for him to do what his conscience
condemns, he can of course, with whatever difficulty,
refuse to do it, and suffer the financial loss or ruin
involved. We have almost dropped out of our
current Christian teaching the idea that a Christian
may be called upon to make any great financial or
other sacrifice for conscience' sake. But it is doubtful
whether any more effective instrument of reform in
our industrial or financial system could be found than
the multiplication of such protests of the individual
conscience against wrong, which at present are made
but rarely. We believe that nothing would so effectu-
ally stir the common conscience as such examples of
splendid renunciation.
IV. The Duty of the Christian as Citizen. But
undoubtedly, as we have said, the individual by his
private action is able to do little to alter what is
amiss. The law must help that is the expressed
will and power of the whole community ; and all
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 307
serious students of society are at the present time
ready to recognize this. Hardly any one could be
found to advocate a return to the ' laissez faire '
policy of the days preceding the Factory Acts. Here
then we touch a new department of duty. The
individual Christian is also a citizen. As a citizen he
must inform himself on economic matters and take
his share in public service.
Thus (r) he must support the existing law in the
restrictions which it imposes upon the methods
actually pursued in the production of wealth.
At present we are, as a nation, much more jealous
for the maintenance of the laws which exist for the
protection of property than of those which exist for
the protection of the worker. These latter are at
present in many cases ignored or violated through
the fault both of employers and of the workers them-
selves. But they embody the attempt of our society
as a whole to protect its weak and ignorant members
against others and against themselves. They are thus
among the most important elements in our legislation,
and what is necessary is that society as a whole
should rally to their support, for in fact it is the
absence of a sufficient public opinion which often
makes them a dead letter. In this matter the
Church has the responsibility (which it has certainly
not realized hitherto) of teaching its members their
duty as individuals. And moreover it has at its
disposal a parochial machinery extending all over
the land which, valuable as it is at present, might
be made much more valuable if there were a wider
diffusion among its workers of necessary information.
The district visitors who are at work in almost all
308 MORAL WITNESS OF THE
parishes of our Church might, if properly instructed in
the rudiments of industrial and sanitary law, without
unwelcome interference, do a great deal to promote
its observance and to defend the poor against their
own carelessness and ignorance.
(2) But the maintenance of the existing law is
only one aspect of the Christian man's duty as a
citizen. It is time, we think, that the Christian
Church should make clear to itself the nature of the
demand for the reconstruction of society which is
at present urged upon us. Behind the more technical
(industrial and political) proposals, lies a fundamental
appeal for justice, which the Christian Church cannot
ignore. It is bound to make a much more thorough
endeavour than it has yet made to appreciate this
appeal in all its bearings, and to consider whether
the charge made against the present constitution
and principles of the industrial world, and the present
division of the profits of industry, is a just charge.
Certainly the Christian society is competent to deal
with the fundamental moral question, and is bound
to press upon its members the duty of facing it.
Then, in consequence of such deepened reflection
upon the fundamental moral issue, it is undoubtedly
the case that we shall need an advance in our present
law touching social and industrial problems. It
is time, we think, that the Christian conscience of the
country voted urgency among parliamentary and
municipal questions for all the group of problems
which concern the grossly unequal distribution of
wealth and well-being ; the waste of life and capacity
through lack of proper nourishment and training ;
the sweating of women's and children's labour ; the
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 309
deficiency, in the surroundings of so many, of those
things which are the ordinary essentials of physical
and moral well-being.
We do not desire that the Church as a body should
take a side with this or that political party ; nor,
again, that the Church should favour any one class.
We would have it apply its moral teaching to all
classes indifferently, to the labourer as to the employer.
There is as much need to teach the workman the
duty of conscientious and efficient work, as to teach
the employer his responsibility in dealing with his
workmen ; and there is perhaps quite as much
misuse of money at the present time among the poor
as among the rich, relatively to what they receive.
But with whatever class the Church is dealing, we
are convinced that it has a teaching which it ought
to give on all matters which concern the acquisition
and distribution of wealth, in its bearing on human
lives ; and that this teaching involves not only
private effort, but municipal and political reforms.
Thus we want the Church as a body to come forward
to the support of such legislation as embodies or
tends to render more practicable the Christian view
of the worth and meaning of human life, and the
belief in the divine principle of justice.
(3) It is no doubt the case that any industrial
readjustment may involve an increase in the financial
burden upon the community, temporary or permanent.
This is a complicated question. It will of course be
urged that a better industrial system will, in the
long run, increase and not dimmish the wealth of
the community. But this question we do not touch.
Only we are sure that for the Christian citizen there
3IO MORAL WITNESS OF THE
are public objects for the attainment of which public
expenditure is to be accepted voluntarily and not
grudgingly.
Thus we want every Christian to set himself against
the false but very prevalent view that the contribu-
tions from income which are required of every
citizen for public purposes are on the whole to be
regarded as burdens which it is natural to resent,
and even, where possible, to evade. The Christian
conscience ought surely to approve in principle of a
large public expenditure on objects which are cal-
culated to strengthen and enrich the common life.
We cannot leave this part of the subject without
urging that the Christian, and, we must add, more
particularly the Churchman, ought to be ready to
make the sacrifices of various kinds which are involved
in standing for, and holding, municipal and public
offices ; and whether as a voter, or himself an officer
of the community, we must look to him to maintain
the fundamentally Christian principle as to the
worth of human life, and as to the duty of the whole
community towards its weakest members.
(4) Finally, we feel that the existing methods by
which the Church relieves the poor that is, the
administration of ' charity ' by the Church, as by
Christian bodies generally has been shown in its
results to be singularly unproductive of permanent
good. ' As regards the poor, the results have not
proved satisfactory in the past, and neither response
nor result are greatly different now/ x On the other
1 Booth's Life and Labour, 3rd Series, vol. vii., pp. 406 if.
The agreement among men of experience on this subject
is very impressive.
CHURCH ON ECONOMIC SUBJECTS 311
hand the existing system is responsible for much
alienation from the Church, and from religious
worship, of self-respecting workers, who are afraid of
being supposed to come ' for what they can get.'
We think that such considerations as we have urged
above will tend, not indeed to make Christians dis-
parage or neglect the duty and privilege of almsgiving,
but to make them feel that something more is wanted
than improvements in our methods of administering
charitable relief. We have to go deeper to the
grounds of the existing misery and want and un-
employment ; and, while we do our best to deal
with the present distress, direct our chief attention
towards furthering the reorganization of society
on such principles of justice as will tend to reduce
poverty and misery in the future to more manageable
proportions.
Printed by Hazcll, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and A \lesbury.
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Gore, Charles
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