GIFT OF
MICHAEL REESE
THE ANGUS LECTURESHIP
VIII
THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION AND
ITS VERIFICATION
1912
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
LIFE AND LETTERS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY
THE CONFLICT OF RELIGIONS IN
THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE
VIRGIL
THE
CHRISTIAN TRADITION
AND
ITS VERIFICATION
BY
T. R. GLOVER
FELLOW OF ST JOHN'S COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY LECTURER IN ANCIENT HISTORY
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
01
First Published in 1913
PRELIMINARY NOTE
r I ^HE Angus Lectureship has its origin in a
-*- Fund raised as a Testimonial to the Rev.
Joseph Angus, M.A., D.D., as an expression of
the sense entertained by the subscribers of his
character and services as President of the
Baptist Theological College, formerly situated
at Stepney, and now at Regent's Park,
London. Dr. Angus having intimated his
desire that the Fund should be devoted to
the establishment of a permanent Lecture-
ship in connection with the College, a Trust
has been constituted for that purpose; its
income to be "administered and applied by
the College Committee for the establishment
and maintenance of a Lectureship, to be
called * The Angus Lectureship,' in connection
with the said College, for the delivery of
periodic Lectures on great questions con-
nected with Systematic, Practical, or Pastoral
v
285458
vi THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
Theology, or the Evidences and Study of the
Bible, or Christian Missions, or Church
History, or Kindred Subjects."
It is further provided that the College Com-
mittee, in conjunction with the Trustees, shall
once in two years, or oftener (should excep-
tional circumstances render it desirable),
"appoint and engage a Lecturer, who shall
ordinarily be a member of the Baptist denomi-
nation, but who may occasionally be a
member of any other body of Evangelical
Christians, to deliver a course of not more
than eight Lectures, on some subject of the
nature hereinbefore mentioned."
In accordance with these provisions, the
Rev. Dr. Angus delivered, at Regent's Park
College, in the year 1896, a Course of Six
Lectures on " Regeneration," afterwards
published.
The Eighth Course, delivered at Regent's
Park College in the year 1912, is contained
in the present volume.
NOTE. The sentences above marked as quotations are from
the Deed of Trust, executed March, 1896.
PREFACE
T N the first book of The Faerie Queene,
* Spenser's heroine is Una, who is Truth.
Her beauty is spiritual, and we see it tame
the lion and soften the " salvage-men " and
this at first sight. Yet it is not till the end of
the book that the Red Cross Knight realizes
her beauty. He forsakes her; he is entrapped
by Duessa, who is Falsehood ; he is imprisoned
in the Castle of Pride, and from this bondage
it is Una that rescues him. Despair would
have him kill himself; and she again rescues
him, and leads him to the house of Caelia
and on to Charissa, who is Grace, and thence
to the hill of Contemplation. Then at last
he is fit to slay the Dragon. The tenderness
and healing power of Truth have rarely been
so well drawn. On through repentance and
forgiveness to the heavenly vision, Truth has
brought her knight. Yet it is not till after
vii
viii THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
the desperate three days of battle with the
Dragon that the Red Cross Knight sees Una
without her veil.
The blazing brightnesse of her beauties bearne,
And glorious light of her sunshyny face,
To tell were as to strive against the streame :
My ragged rimes are all too rude and bace
Her heavenly lineaments for to enchace.
Ne wonder; for her own deare loved knight,
All were she daily with himselfe in place,
Did wonder much at her celestial sight.
Oft had he seen her faire, but never so fair dight.
" Our sage and serious poet " Spenser has
grasped the fact that, while Truth captures
us in the first instance by its beauty, we never
realize that beauty till we have learnt in ex-
perience how much Truth can do for us, and
how much we can do for Truth and can suffer
for Truth. And in the allegory Una is not
merely Truth, but the Christian Religion.
The old allegory stands; and it is a pity
that men and women do not read the wonder-
ful poem more than they do. There are those
who can decide about Truth at first glance,
or even without a first glance on a priori
grounds, but Spenser knew better.
PREFACE ix
The drift of this little book is briefly this.
In all modern study the emphasis falls on
verification on insistent reference to fact that
can be tested and relied on. No other method
is going to show the significance and value
of the Christian religion that greatest of all
our traditions. Experience alone will tell
us what it means. Here, I hope in a
scientific spirit, it is urged that we familiarize
ourselves with the mass of experience the
Church of Jesus Christ has had of Him;
and I believe that such a course will
lead us on to experiment, and that when
we, like the Red Cross Knight, have found
what life in Truth is, we too shall share his
wonder at the unsuspected beauty of the
fuller vision.
CONTENTS
PAGE
LECTURE I i
THE CHALLENGE TO VERIFICATION.
Modern thought and its factors, p. 3.
1. Natural Science p. 5.
(a) Its actual contributions to knowledge as
disturbances to Christian tradition, p. 6.
(b] Its effect upon our habits of thought viz.,
partial investigation, failure of imagina-
tion, and lack of philosophy; yet an
impetus given to verification, p. 12.
2. Social and Economic Science The study of
environments, p. 16.
3. History Race problems and world movements,
p. 19.
4. Comparative Study of Religion, p. 22
(a) Carlyle on Mohammad Zoroaster, Buddha,
the Bab.
(b) Folklore,?. 25.
5. Study of the origins of Christianity, p. 26.
6. The other knowledge of the Poet, p. 27.
The twofold call to feeling and verification, p. 31.
LECTURE II 33
THE USE OF TRADITION.
The challenge to verification is met by the question as to
the use of history, of tradition.
We have to study
1. The value and place of Tradition in sound thinking.
2. How to discriminate between Traditions, p. 35.
Discussion as to Dogma and Tradition in relation to
Religion, p. 36 with a caution as to the use of theory
the contrast between use made of theory in scientific work
and in the Church, p. 39.
xi
xii THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
PAGE
The strength of Tradition, p. 43.
The combination of Inherited Experience and Individual
Experiment is the key, p. 45 illustration from the boat-
builder, and its application to the sphere of Religion, p. 46.
The principles which may enable us to judge between
one set of Religious Traditions and another, p. 53.
The Christian Tradition to be considered with reference
(a) The world outside Christ, p. 60.
(b) The Christian Society, p. 64.
(c) The historical Jesus and His person and ideas,
p. 66.
LECTURE III 71
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHRISTIAN
CHURCH.
The problem of its growth, continuity and permanence,
p. 7 1 . The endeavour to discover the source of its strength,
p. 72 its weakness an index to unsuspected greatness, p. 74.
1. The way in which the Church holds its main doctrines
its intellectual right to do so, p. 78. The Sanity of the
Christian Church, p. 79
(a) Resting on the value of experience, p. 79.
(b) Tested by the criticism of the World, p. 81.
(c) And by the Church's attempts at compromise,
p. 83.
(d) The fact before the explanation, p. 87.
2. The conviction of the Church resulting from its
experience, p. 88
(a) The serious view of evil, p. 88.
(b) The inexorable character of law, p. 91.
(c) The high value of the human soul, p. 03.
(d) The significance of Jesus Christ, p. 90.
3. The application to life, p. 97
(a) The Church is the one body incapable of
despair, p. 97.
(b) Its clear method, p. 97. The three great types
* _-_ of religion, p. 98.
(c) Its reliance on the sufficiency of Jesus Christ,
p. 100.
4. Its justification in results, p. 101.
CONTENTS xiii
PAGE
LECTURE IV 103
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE EARLY CHURCH.
The early Christian literature and its demands upon the
student to understand it, p. 104.
1. The autobiographical element in early Christian
writings to be a guide for us to the experience behind
them, p. 105. Norden on St. Paul, p. 107
(a) St. Paul, p. 109.
(b) The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
p. 113.
(c) The author of the Fourth Gospel, p. 114.
(d) The first doxology of the Apocalypse, p. 1 16.
(e) The first " Harrowing of Hell," p. 122.
2. The experiences and convictions shared by all these
early Christian writers, p. 125
A. The New Life, p. 125.
(a) The contrast of the old life and the new, p. 125.
(b) " Photisthentes " the enlightenment, p. 126.
Clement to the Corinthians, p. 129.
(c) The " arrhabon," and the fruits of the Spirit,
p. 129.
B. The overcoming of national and social barriers,
p. 132
C. " Before the foundation of the World," p. 135.
LECTURE V 141
JESUS IN THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES.
The study of the Belief in Jesus as itself a historical
force
(a) The power of the name, p. 143. Daemons,
p. 144.
(b) Pro quo Christus mortuus est, p, 155.
(c) The progressive training of conscience and the A t J*-^.
new impulse, p. 162.
(d) The Great White Throne, and Christian self-
criticism, p. 168.
xiv THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
PAGE
The Love of Jesus in History, p. 172
(a) The victory over disorder, p. 172 the contri-
bution to sanity, p. 175 the place of prayer,
p. 176.
(b) The new attitude to pain, p. 177.
(c) The life of joy, p. 179 Richard Rolle, p. i Si-
Words worth on "The deep power of joy,"
p. 184 personal centre, p. 185.
(d) The sure hope, p. 187.
Fact and word ; if the facts of the Church be sure, and
the speech erroneous, can we find the right language ?
But we must not, in so doing, lose any of the facts, p. 190.
LECTURE VI 193
THE CRITICISM OF JESUS CHRIST.
All turns in the study of Christianity upon the central
figure, p. 193.
Why some judgment upon Christ is inevitable, p. 105.
His historicity is certain, p. 196 Contrast between Jesus
Christ and Zoroaster, Buddha, etc., p. 198.
What is the real value in it all ? The ethics or some-
thing else ? p. 200.
The contribution of Jewish criticism on this point, p. 201.
The necessity of some judgment upon Jesus Christ for
the serious student of history and society, p. 205.
The qualifications for such a judgment (with two pre-
liminary cautions as to the difficulty of criticism, and of
reconstructing a personality), p. 208.
1. Knowledge of the historical facts, p. 213.
2. The historical imagination, p. 217.
3. Sympathy with the fundamental ideas and feelings
of Jesus, p. 2i
(a) His passion for the redemption of men, p. 221.
(b) His attitude to God, p. 222.
The sense of insufficiency, p. 222.
e re-action of a profounder study upon the critic,
p. 227.
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THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
AND ITS VERIFICATION
LECTURE I
THE CHALLENGE TO VERIFICATION
IT is a very long time since it was first
pointed out that the Christian faith is
untenable. There it stands belief cast
into the form of dogma, implying a unified
view of the world, of all time, and all exist-
ence, and setting before men statements of
the most amazing scope with reference to God
and man and their relations to all eternity.
But, in some particulars, it is not satis-
factory, we are told; it goes outside what
man can in any case know, and it rests
on the preconceptions of a day that had
neither criticism nor science; its terminology
bears the stamp of its origin and proclaims
how obsolete it all is. We are so conscious
of the value of our own additions to know-
ledge, that a faith which seems to jar with them
THE -CHRISTIAN TRADITION
is at once untenable. But this is not peculiar
to us at all. We have only to go back to the
eighteenth century to what Gibbon in his
magnificent way called ''the reason and
humanity of the present age " to find the
same attitude to the Christian Church and its
creeds ; and yet what seemed then a sufficient
account of life to replace Christianity has by
to-day a starved look it seems a hard and
low-pulsed sort of gospel or philosophy for
any really human being.
A critic of some humour has suggested that
the authentic words spoken by Adam to Eve,
as they stepped through the gate of the
Garden in Eden, were: "We live in times
of transition." The habit has never been
lost; we still live in times of transition. We
have left the eighteenth century behind, and,
it is urged, the first century a great deal
further behind. The days are past when our
fathers and mothers, in their quiet, easy way,
could hold, unvexed by problems, the old
Christian faith. Of course, such talk is
frankly absurd. There never was a time
when the Christian faith was unchallenged.
By every sort of critic it has always been ques-
TRANSITION 3
tioned, and there never was a day when it was
easy to believe the Christian gospel* or to live
the Christian life. The contribution of the
Church to mankind would have been less if its
venture into the unseen had been limited by
the views of its critics.
We are still confronted in earnest with the
Christian faith, whether we accept it or reject
it. There are many who would welcome its
final disappearance; there are many more
who, while they think it may disappear, are
not eager to see it go till they know better
what is to take its place ; some believe there is
nothing to take its place at all, and deeply
dread its going. And again, there are those
who have not the least fear about the Church
remaining and becoming a still greater force
in human life.
But are we sure about the new factors
operative more and more to-day in human
thought? It is to these that I wish to give
my first lecture. In the next two we shall
discuss the place of tradition in sound think-
* My friend, Professor D. S. Cairns, quotes Principal Rainy's
remark in his presence : " God never meant it to be an easy thing
to believe." Life of Rainy, ii., 117.
4 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
ing, and the general sanity of the Church
in its methods of reaching truth and in its
principles of verification. Then we shall turn
to the actual experience of the Church, in
the endeavour to learn what it really has
been, to see what happened or happens still,
and what has been the effect for mankind of
the great tenets of the Church particularly
of its attitude to its Founder. The Founder
Himself will be in our thoughts throughout,
and in the last lecture an attempt will be made
to lay down the lines toward a sounder
realisation of His significance.
The Church never had a monopoly in
shaping the thoughts of men, however near
it may seem to have come to it in certain
ages. To-day it seems further from it than
ever. Into the great inherited body of thought
that makes the atmosphere in which we live
and move and think, and which conditions us
and our thoughts in ways past finding out,
new forces have come. There have been
changes of the most momentous kind in the
background of our thinking, in the nature of
our thoughts, and in the very minds with which
we think. The preconceptions with which we
CHANGES IN THOUGHT 5
start have been changed, and in a number of
different ways.
First of all there is Natural Science, which
has imposed its methods and its conclusions
upon us, and has had as large a share in the
new movements of our times and our fathers'
as anything else. There has been unsettle-
ment, uncertainty and fear. For there is a
type of scientific man not so common now,
perhaps, as formerly, certainly not in the front
ranks who has rather a loud way of speak-
ing, and speaks at times with insufficient
recognition of other branches of study; and
he has fairly done his part in emphasising,
not merely the difference between science
and religion, but his own strong opinion that
religion is obsolete. Long ago Plato spoke
of "a certain old quarrel between poetry and
philosophy,"* and this is another of the same
kind. The material to be studied is different,
and the methods are different, as is neces-
sarily the case when different aspects of
reality have to be investigated; and the con-
servative instinct in man is always impatient of
.* Republic, 607, B.
6 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
foreign method. The same intolerance, which
is sometimes shown by students of science
toward religion, is also shown, in measure,,
toward history, philosophy, and art, and it
means no more than unfamiliarity. But this
is not all; for, from time to time, great ac-
quisitions of knowledge have been made, and
securely made, which clash with particular
statements long maintained with great con-
fidence by the Church; and the question is
asked whether (to take a simile from the sea)
the Church's doctrine is in watertight com-
partments, and, even if so, whether enough of
them have not been injured so badly as to
sink her.
The first great change is associated with the
name of Copernicus. It was understood that
the Church was committed to the dogma of
a flat earth and seven or more spheres. They
had stood for twenty centuries, and Coper-
nicus did away with them. Milton's works
are, in English literature, a landmark of the
change. He speaks of his visit to Italy :
' There it was that I found, and visited the
famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the
Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy other-
THE STARS AND THE ROCKS 7
wise than the Franciscan and Dominican
licensers thought." In Paradise Lost he re-
curs several times to the problem, leaning to
the Copernican system, and leaving the
Ptolemaic to Satan, who uses it naturally. It
is clear that the Roman Church felt that some-
thing was at stake in spherical astronomy.
With it the Neo-Platonists had connected their
theory of the soul and its descent from God
to earth; and with it was still bound up the
destiny of the soul in a local heaven to which
Christ had ascended.
After this came the geological trouble
and the question as to whether Moses and his
Genesis squared with the testimony of the
rocks; and strange attempts were made to
reconcile them. If such attempts are no
longer made, it is because Christian thinkers
have become content to do without the recon-
ciliation.
But, serious as Copernicus and the geolo-
gists had seemed to orthodox thinkers, worse
was to follow when Darwin and Huxley taught
men to think in terms of evolution. A great
epoch was made; but, as happens at such
times, the great gains were misapplied because
8 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
of recklessness in their use. Everybody
talked evolution who had a fancy for being
enlightened or abreast of the times. Every-
thing was referred to evolution, whether it
had any relation with the sphere of Darwin's
investigations or not. Wherever a progress
could be observed, it was at once put down
to evolution. Great play was made with
heredity and environment and the rest of the
terminology. I have even heard a woman
explain that with modern girls tight-lacing
was practically involuntary, because it was
an inherited acquired instinct. What men of
scientific mind thought of all this reckless talk
we can guess. Nothing less scientific could be
imagined. Darwin, after long investigation
and thought, suggests a theory to explain
certain things in Biology; and a horde of
people seize it and apply it, without anything
approaching Darwin's care for truth, to the
most disparate matters in fields of study as
widely removed as could be from the
biological. Thought, morals, religion, were
all suddenly discovered to be products of an
evolution, apparently involuntary and in-
evitable. Developments could be observed in
EVOLUTION 9
these spheres of life, and that was enough.
How those developments came is, however,
a matter of history, to be studied with refer-
ence to the evidence ; and the virtual abolition
of effort, and, incidentally, of personality, was
precipitate.*
When, after a number of years, a sugges-
tion of the Bavarian abbe, Gregor Mendel,
was revived, and deliberate experiments were
made in the careful breeding of plants, birds,
and animals, in order to ascertain, by de-
finite and recorded steps, what changes are
possible in the development of species, there
were some further examples of swift thinking.
Roughly speaking, the experiments have
shown that the results obtained in breeding
are not, if a wide enough range be taken,
irregular or freakish, but may be more or less
accurately reduced to mathematics in short,
that what you put in, you get out, re-com-
bined variously, but symmetrically. You
* Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in his Club of Queer Trades, p. 236,
wittily sums the matter up in the sweeping- assertion that "the
Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except
that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they
now talk unscientifically about science."
io THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
cannot, perhaps, predict the character of the
offspring of a particular pair of mice, for some
may die or other unnoticed factors may come
in, but the general law seems roughly estab-
lished. From this point one conspicuous
exponent of Mendelism stepped by an appar-
ently easy transition to a sweeping re-assertion
of Determinism. So difficult it is to keep the
scientific outlook steady, even when a man's
work is so essentially a matter of close and
exact verification as that of the Mendelists.
Meanwhile, in Psychology a very brilliant
book caught the reading public, and we began
to learn a new language. " Uprushes " and
"the subliminal self" and "auto-suggestion"
became terms as familiar and as precise as
" justification " and " sanctification " had been
three centuries before. Religion was ex-
plained at once it was a matter of auto-
suggestion. Certain questions, however, may
be asked here, such as : How much is de-
finitely known as to auto-suggestion? or is it
really a splendid guess ? Can there be auto-
suggestion without reference to external facts
with which the mind of the person concerned
is more or less acquainted in other words,
THE VALE OF BEAVOR u
has the idea to be suggested to the autos, or
does the autos suggest it to itself which way
does evidence point? Why should auto-
suggestion, when it takes the form or direction
of the Christian religion, work so uniformly
toward sanity and morals : is there anything
significant in the uniformity? and, lastly,
What is autos one of the oldest of philo-
sophical difficulties? A solution of the pro-
blem of the nature of religion, which raises so
many other problems at the first breath, does
not take us very far.
All these new factors, however, are in the
air, and the combined effect of them is very
great. They make us feel once more and in
a new way the "great Cloud " that came over
George Fox in the Vale of Beavor, when " it
was said; All things come by Nature ; And,"
he adds, " the Elements and Stars came over
me." Some of us have to " sit still under it and
let it alone" a good deal longer than he had,
before " a living Hope " rises in us and " a true
Voice," to tell us ; " There is a living God, who
made all things." There are so many more
stars in three hundred years, and so many
more elements, and so much stranger ones;
12 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
space is more vast to-day than ever Fox
dreamed; and we are challenged more seri-
ously than ever on the fundamental question
as to whether man " comes by Nature/* and is
a mere product, or whether he has any
spiritual freedom at all.
But there is more to be said, for the chief
effect of the modern study of Natural Science
has not been so much to challenge us with
definite and established knowledge, or with
theories of high probability and great bril-
liance, as to affect our habits of mind and our
methods in thought. The scientific man is
occupied in an investigation which avowedly
affects only one small part of the area of
all knowledge ; his research is partial, he has a
special subject, and his affirmation on his own
subject is apt to be tentative and provisional;
indeed, as he grows to be a master in his own
department, it often happens that he is more
and more reluctant to hazard any statement of
scope or range concerning it without inter-
minable qualifications. This habit of mind has
passed over into other studies, and we have
in common the weaknesses that go with it.
The passion for accuracy is a noble one, but
REACTION OF SPECIALIST STUDIES 13
if it be cramped in a very small sphere, a
partial investigation, it results, unless a man
is on his guard against it, in a certain
failure of the imagination. This is not un-
common among specialists. The mind loses
powers by perpetually dwelling on one subject
"that way madness lies," as Lear said.
The atrophy of faculty does not make a man
more competent to speak in his own depart-
ment, still less of matters that lie outside it.
But we constantly find a type of specialist who
is contemptuous of studies and interests of
which he is ignorant. With the best men it is
very different.
Another weakness which we all share, as
knowledge grows from more to more, is a
lack of synthesis. One feature of Elizabethan
England, as of Periclean Athens, was what
has been called the "integrity " of the period.
The same man touched all knowledge and
all activity ; he could write a poem, sail a ship,
beat a Spaniard in fight or a Papist in argu-
ment the world had a unity for him. For
us the world is hardly a unity, except by logic ;
it is a series of bits, the relations of which
we do not readily grasp. There is lack of
14 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
knowledge and lack of intelligence ; in a word,
lack of philosophy. Now the philosopher, as
we know, is liable to err, and to err very
badly
An innocent mind, but far astray
he is liable to be very dogmatic, and to
domineer with a truculence little short of that
of the man of science at his worst. But to be
content to lack philosophy is surely to abdi-
cate manhood ; yet we do it. We do not frame
systems of thought for ourselves ; we avowedly
refrain from it; and yet, in a subtle and
insidious way, they frame themselves for us;
and such un-thought-out systems of thought
are very dangerous, especially if we are people
of books and laboratories, a little remote from
ordinary life. But religion implies a certain
amount of deliberate philosophy it involves
an ordered world, or a world getting moved
in the direction of order, and a God at the
top of it or in the heart of it, interested effec-
tively in it, somehow; and it further implies
a relation between this God and the man.
Even to such a rudimentary philosophy a
certain class of scientist is contemptuous again,
and again for the same reason. It lies out-
THE NEED OF PHILOSOPHY 15
side him, and it implies an energy of thought
for which he has not braced himself. It runs
counter to the presuppositions, the un-thought-
out system, into which he has slidden.
This is the experience of very many of us
we have lost the sense of the whole in the
fascination and interest of the part. Words-
worth, in his Ode on Intimations of Immor-
tality, gives a picture of some such auto-
biography : how the vision splendid fades into
the light of common day, as Earth, the homely
nurse, doth all she can to make her foster-
child forget the glories he hath known. And
then, in the great stanzas that follow, where
he speaks of "obstinate questionings of
sense and outward things," the poet touches
those experiences which challenge the narrow
dogmatism of common sense and partial
knowledge which we can almost abolish if
we give our minds to it, and the abolition of
which will ruin us. Yet plenty of men seem to
be imprisoned almost hopelessly in the zest of
interests that frankly cover the smallest arc of
the circle of life. The excuse is, of course,
the vast range and difficulty of scientific work
confession, in so many words, of failure.
16 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
On the other hand, there is a noble
contribution which the scientific mind is
making to the religious, a keen and quickened
sense of truth and a passion for verification.
And it is a curious situation when the man
of science says to the disciple of Jesus of
Nazareth: "Make sure; be sure that you
know; look to it for yourself; verify." It is
the method of Jesus Himself, and it will give
us again " the deep and firm sense of reality,"
which, as Matthew Arnold pointed out,*
characterises the thinking of Jesus; for
"theory," as Arnold elsewhere says, "Jesus
never touches, but bases Himself invariably
upon experience. "f If we are to do anything
with religion, the first thing is to be done with
preconceptions (as far as that is possible for
man) and to learn what can be from what has
been and what does occur. To this we shall
have to return in the next lecture.
Let us pass on to another branch of study
a study full of the enthusiasm of youth and
new methods Social Science, as it is called,
* Preface to God and the Bible.
f Literature and Dogma-i ch. 7.
SOCIAL SCIENCE 17
though the name is a large one, and perhaps
not yet quite vindicated. We have been
brought and it is a good thing that we have
been so brought face to face in a new way
with poverty. The poor we have always with
us, but we have not been earnest enough in
asking Why ; and that we are now being told
with vehemence, not unwarranted when men
are so slow to listen. This is not the first
generation, if it may be said with modesty,
that has felt the problem of poverty ; but men
are probing more deeply into causes and
factors, with a new alertness for evidence.
The mind of the social student dwells on en-
vironment as the scientific man's on heredity,
and the besetting sin of quick thinking, which
haunts science and theology, is not unknown
here. The problem of evil has taken on a new
form for the social researcher and the social
worker; and some of the evils they see are
so obvious, and yet so much ignored, that
their desperately quick remedies are intelli-
gible. Delay is at the cost of life and mind and
moral being ; and the suggestion of the Church
that, by the Soul
Only, the nations shall be great and free,
2
1 8 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
is scouted more fiercely than it deserves
to be. The moral evils of destitution are
familiar to the social worker; and, if
destitution were abolished, they would mostly
disappear, he believes. It means once more
that man is a product of heredity and
environment, the outcome of forces and
factors he cannot control; that the margin
of spiritual freedom is extraordinarily narrow.
That is very quick thinking. It is curious,
too, to find such an approximation between
the modern reformer and old Cephalos, in
Plato's Republic, who was glad that he had
been rich, because riches save a man from so
much sin. The Church has always had a
deeper view of sin than this.
Once again, the impression left on the mind
is that of an immense range of knowledge to
be explored and known. How many factors
are there in the problem of poverty ? how do
they work, and how are their workings inter-
woven, and how are they to be measured?
If History teaches anything here, it is the
imperative need of the closest and most accu-
rate thinking on the basis of the fullest know-
ledge that we must go slowly. Yes, say our
HISTORY 19
friends, History is far slower than death and
disease. Still, here again we are challenged
to verification. Is it possible that the Chris-
tian Church or its critics can have overlooked
factors of moment?
But we have invoked History, and History
also is touched with the scientific spirit if it
is not, as some severe students of it urge, a
science itself. The origins of the human race
and the growth of nations are being investi-
gated with more reference to facts than in
the old days when, as the severe say, History
flourished with Literature at her one elbow
and Moral Philosophy at the other. What is
race? Is Nature, after all, "so careful of the
type " ? In some quarters we are assailed with
large statements about tall fair men and little
dark men, dolichocephalous and brachy-
cephalous, breeds with great differences of
endowment; and we are warned that, if
eugenics be not carefully studied, that balance
between the ethnic varieties may be lost which
makes England what it is. It is not, however,
historians who talk in this way. History is a
very long story for them ; and they ask, quite
honestly, because they do not know ? whether
20 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
a race is a fixed type or a shifting type;
whether differences of climate and food over
long periods affect the cephalic index and the
varieties of endowment; whether Anglo-
Saxons were really Anglo-Saxons for many
millennia before Julius Cassar studied the
Germans ? and other questions. If every-
thing is a matter of race if temperament,
religion, morality, art, genius, and the rest,
all depend on race then let us be sure
we know something about it; for, at
present, unless brilliant guesses based on
evidence, that would be valuable if its relations
were understood, be knowledge, we know very
little about race.* It is another call to
verification.
Of course, in dealing with race, the historian
is defending himself against the popular
biologist, but he sometimes needs defence
against himself. There are the great world-
movements in historic times whole ages
dominated by certain types of thought, in
which, if a man appear who reaches too far
into the future, he is useless, however truly he
* A distinguished anthropologist tells me I should have said
that " nothing " is known about race,
HISTORY 21
may anticipate the actual developments of
thought and life in generations after his own.
At least, so it is said, and we do find men who
were, as we say, before their time, though
often, on closer investigation, it looks as if
their anticipations were made rather by long
jumps, and lacked the intermediate steps
which make for real progress. Why is it that
man moves so slowly, and is so desperately
in bondage to his own day ? One answer is that
he is not in fact nearly as much in bondage
to his day as he seems in retrospect. Yet
the historian observes a relation between
political and social conditions and thought
e.g., under the successors of Alexander the
Great and under the early Roman Empire,
under Turkish sultans and Indian rajahs,
philosophy leans to fatalism, as if the experi-
ence of arbitrary and incalculable government
took the initiative out of men's minds and
turned them toward submission without
action. We find something of the kind in
history, but we must be careful once more
about sweeping statements. Men and peoples
are under the influence of the old and middle-
aged more than we suppose, and move slowly,
22 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
but most of the talk about the unchanging
East (for example) is fortified by wide ignor-
ance of Eastern history. The East does
change, and man is no more the victim of
place than of race, much as both influence
him. The historian insists, like other serious
thinkers, on much more earnest standards of
verification than the journalist or the amateur.
A new factor in these generations is the
comparative study of religion. It offers a
most fascinating field of work. The great
religious systems of the world have been
studied with new sympathy and new know-
ledge, as their sacred books have become
known in the West. Carlyle's treatment of
Mahomet is a familiar landmark here "a
silent great soul; he was one of those who
cannot bat be in earnest; whom Nature her-
self has appointed to be sincere. While
others walk in formulas and hearsays, con-
tented enough to dwell there, this man could
not screen himself in formulas; he was alone
with his own soul and the reality of things.
The great Mystery of Existence glared in
upon him, with its terrors, with its splendours."
Zoroaster and Buddha have become more
STUDY OF RELIGIONS 23
familiar and intelligible figures ; we see what
they meant and how they came to mean it.
There is Hinduism, too, more intelligible in
its turn when we know something of its
history not unlike Neo-Platonism. We are
taught to realise the great elements in all
these systems. And among the great religious
teachers is Jesus of Nazareth but here one is
half tempted to quote Tertullian's sharp word :
" Here human curiosity ceases to be inquisi-
tive." It would not be strictly true, and yet
how many popular critics of religion have
troubled to give Him the full study that is
needed to understand Him?
The problems raised by this comparative
study of religions are many. Thus and thus,
again and again, the minds of men have
moved; monotheism and polytheism have
battled together; great teachers have risen
like Carlyle's Mahomet, and have been fol-
lowed by disciples, and after a period of
advance comes a decline. In one teacher and
another we find great resemblances : the high
faith, the ardent spirit, the tender and sym-
pathetic heart; and there is a great likeness
about their teaching in the sphere of conduct,
24 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
at least at first sight. We ask ourselves what
these resemblances mean? Would it be
possible for us to find truth by taking what
the Stoics called the consensus of mankind,
the "greatest common measure" (if that old
arithmetical term survives) of all the religions ?
Will it serve us best to take what is common
to all the great religious teachers, and to
eliminate the rest, and to ask whether there is
any difference between Buddha and Jesus
Christ and the Bab ? and, if there is, whether
it matters? This sort of question is being
asked, and a quick answer given. Yet, it is
possible to ask, also, whether it is not the
difference that chiefly signifies. Is Chris-
tianity made by what it shares with Buddhism,
however much that is ? As we get better
acquaintance with the two systems the
common element seems trifling in comparison
with the gulf between the two outlooks on
life and the world. Is what men have counted
the very gist and essence of Christianity a
mistake the faith for which men have fought
and died and been martyred?
We have here a fresh call to verification.
We need to know vastly more about
STUDY OF RELIGIONS 25
Buddhism, and above all about the influence
of Buddhism on life, about the actual teach-
ing of Buddha in relation to current
Buddhism, about the type of character that
Buddhism produces, not merely among its
ascetics, but among the people whom they
influence or do not influence, and a great
many more such matters.* Similarly, we must
give ourselves to a fuller historical study of
Christianity, not so much with controversy as
our object as intelligence.
Of later years, the study of religion has
reached another phase. We have been taken
back in the most fascinating way to origins,
and move with delight and interest among
golden boughs, and totems, and thunder-birds,
and divine kings, and heavenly twins. Many
familiar conceptions have had their pedigrees
traced back to very lowly spheres, and we
are told rather quickly that most of our
religious belief comes from magic and the like.
r It is not altogether proven that it is so, nor
* I should like to recommend here the book of Ekai Kawa-
guchi, a Japanese Buddhist monk, entitled Three Years in Tibet.
There is an English translation, and it is a most interesting and
illuminating work.
26 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
is it shown that, if a religious usage originated
in a magical practice, or if a religious belief
was at first no more than a superstition of the
grossest kind, no development is possible, but
that religion remains as it began, essentially
magical. We have to remember the innate
conservatism of our race, and how we love
to associate the new with the old as if they
were one. If the trellis is clearly magic, must
the vine be magic ? In ancient Italy the vine
grew up a living elm : is this our analogy
of religion and magic? Or is it safe to play
with analogies ? Is it certain that the ram's-
horn of Folklore (to borrow a simile from the
preface of a great work) will bring down the
picturesque and ivy-clad walls of the Jericho
we call religion? Is it not just possible that
something escapes the student of Folklore, and
that things are not so easy as the man of one
subject comes to think? Once again, a
challenge to verification.
But if we are to study origins, we shall have
to look again at Christian origins. It is
notorious that, for people who are in a hurry
about their thinking, the Higher Criticism,
as applied to the Old Testament, has shaken
RELIGIOUS ORIGINS 27
the Christian faith, whether they are pleased
with the result or unhappy about it. It will
be more serious when they learn what it is
doing with the New Testament. Yet the
general principles of the Higher Criticism
are sound and scientific, though this does not
imply that every result produced by those
who apply these principles to Old or New
Testament, is finally true, even if many critics
agree in affirming it. It is clear that wrong
results from sound principles will not survive
sound application of those principles. Here,
as elsewhere, the remedy for wrong thinking
is strong thinking, deeper thinking, and plenty
of it, with constant reference to fact.
So far we have been dealing with the)
criticism of the Christian religion from the
scientific side. The whole of it is open to
the suggestion that there is too much of the
laboratory and the study about it it is too
like Morphology as opposed to Biology; it
does not come near enough to life and the
living thing. Side by side with the man of
science lives another type of man altogether,
who does not understand him, and does
not very much wish to understand him.
28 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
He is not interested in Chemistry or
Geology
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
He knows the world in another way
altogether, and he cannot believe that anyone
knows it as well as he does, for no one enjoys
it so much.
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
He lives in the beauty of the world, and, when
you walk beside him and talk to him about
your system, economic or philosophic, he
listens in a way with the ear next you,
but he sees something quite different. The
grey willow against the copper beech he sees
these, and they both speak to him in voices too
strong, too clear, and too truthful to let him
care about anything else not even if it is
THE POET 29
a system of the universe that explains them.
He feels, and he cannot help feeling, the
beauty and the magic of a world of colour,
the movement and the life of it; and these
things come into his own life with a power
and an intensity of which you do not dream,
and yet you think you have them in your
system. He cannot reply to your questions;
he cannot give you a reasonable answer, or
argue with your tools: his major premiss is
something irreducible to formal logic, and his
conclusion reaches to infinity and leaves out
everything that you think should be in. As
for your system, of what service is a system
when a man only knows a dozen or two things
in the world, and they baffle him because,
however well he knows them, every now and
then they break out into new doxologies;
there is no end to their inexhaustible fertility
of meaning and joy. Which of you knows
the world? You with the system and the
pedestrian mind, or he in rapture ? He knows
it in all its joy
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises, and God made it all I
30 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
Your system is a Christian scheme of things,
perhaps, and he does not care about it; you
do not see into the heart and life of things,
he says ; they move dimly for you, in a mist ;
they burn for him, and blaze and are bright
yes, painful sometimes, but it is worth it.
You talk about shadows; and he handles
realities.
He too turns critic, and, like a splendid
pagan, is magnificent in denunciation of a
drab and lack-lustre Christianity, a Christian
Church that cramps and confines the spirit,
that deadens everything it touches, that is
afraid of this and of that, that dares not try
life, does not realise, and does not know. He
has reached the same point as the scientific
man, and makes the same reproach. Our
standards of truth and knowledge are too low
and too dull, they both tell us. "You must
go back to life," he cries, "until you know
it from within, till it lives and moves again
for you, if anything you say is ever to be
worth listening to." He has put the same
problem of verification before us in another
way, the vast, wide range of reality, the awful
wonderful complex of things which we
VERIFICATION 31
must discover by feeling them, by living in
them. Verification in earnest.
Attacked on two sides, by those who tell
him that he does not know and by those who
tell him that he does not feel, the Christian
turns ruefully to his Master to see what has
become of Him in all this. " We have be-
lieved what you told us; we have quoted it;
and they sweep it aside and tell us we neither
know nor feel ! " And I think that if we could
see His face, there would be something of a
smile upon it a suggestion of some kindly
amusement at such anxiety. "Did I not tell
you the same?" He asks, "That you must
search and know, and feel, and judge for
yourselves?" For Jesus Christ is not a
teacher to be quoted, I think. If we quote
Him, we use Him amiss. His words are
nothing till they come somehow out of our
own hearts again, as they did from Peter's
long ago; they are not dead; they live. Our
critics are bringing us back by their challenges
to know Him Whom we have believed. They
are bidding us test and examine and know
ourselves and Him, and get our lessons from
life and fact. It is His own method after all,
32 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
In the lectures that follow, that is to be our
task. Brokenly and strugglingly, we are to
try all the same to get some glimpse, some
idea, of what things are. Not results or
conclusions are to be our immediate aim, but
a method, an approach that will bring us into
the real and to the Master of it.
LECTURE II
THE USE OF TRADITION
IN the previous lecture we tried to face the
great challenge made to the Christian
community by modern thought and
modern learning. We saw that our religion is
challenged along many lines. The man of
science, the economist, the historian, the critic
of the Bible, the poet all bring against us
an accusation that we do not take pains
enough to verify what we tell them so easily
we believe. " How much of what you assert
do you know?" asks one school of critics.
"How much of it do you feel?" asks the
other. We are driven back upon a fresh
study of the facts.
What are the facts, then, upon which we
rest? What are the facts in religious ex-
perience ?
Whether there be truth in the Christian
religion or not, our first fact is a world-wide
society, with a history of nineteen centuries.
It touches every part of life, conditions and
j
34 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
suggests our thoughts, shapes us, and makes
a background for us and all this in ways
that are beyond our reckoning or our under-
standing so that we can hardly think of
ourselves apart from the fact of the Christian
Church and its influence. As we look at it,
we are challenged again with a series of
questions. Are we to dismiss all this ? Is
there nothing for us in the long story of the
Christian community ? Is it possible that nine-
teen centuries of human experience have
nothing to say to the heir of all the ages ?
The souls of now two thousand years
Have laid up here their toils and fears,
And all the earnings of their pain,
Ah, yet consider it again !
There the great fact of the Christian Church
stands, and we have to ask ourselves if we
know what it means. We shall not know
what it means till we have grasped how it
came into being, and what is the inmost sig-
nificance of its doctrines and its faith; till
we understand the mind of its great sons and
daughters, till we realise something of their
individuality, who they are that have held
the Christian faith, and how they have held
THE FACT OF THE CHURCH 35
it. We have to think out our attitude to the
Christian past, remembering that, if we decide
that it means nothing, the decision carries
with it extraordinary consequences. For it
will be hard to say what can mean anything
to us if nineteen centuries of the intensest
life of the most living part of the world are
to go for nothing. We have to study the
Church till we discover how the Christian
community has historically reached its present
position, and not only that, but how it still
can hold it as it does. Have Christian
thinkers after all never felt the improbability
the incredibility of what they say? What
is it that has brought men to this, and still
brings them? Why do men lean so to the
Gospel ? Why do they love it as they do ?
This means that we have to begin by
turning to the past and studying its contribu-
tion - - the inherited element in religious
thought. There are other religions beside
Christianity; and, if we are to be sure of our
results, we shall have to go further and con-
sider what canons we have for judging be-
tween one religion, or one body of religious
belief, and another.
36 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
The term "religion" is used with some
ambiguity of meaning. It may connote chiefly
ritual or cult; but with these we are not
primarily concerned for our present purpose.
It may, again, suggest a more or less ordered
body of belief ; or it may mean only and solely
the experience that men actually have of God
their contact with Him, direct or indirect,
and their consciousness of Him as a factor
in life. These two latter senses of the word
touch one another very closely. The Chris-
tian Church rests, deliberately and consciously,
upon its own experience of God in Christ, and
it has embodied this, so far as it could, in
its creeds and dogmas. And these, without
refinements in the ecclesiastical way, we may
group, at least for the present, as the Christian
tradition. The term, then, will be used in
this general and larger sense of the whole
body of essential Christian belief, as com-
monly held by all sections of the Christian
community, and pointing to the full volume
of Christian experience.
It is, of course, obvious that, here as else-
where, experience and the formulation, ex-
pression or explanation that it receives, are
EXPERIENCE AND THEORY 37
distinct things that is, however closely they
go together, we can think of them apart, and
it is also clear that one of them is more im-
portant than the other. The one is concerned
with action primarily with what a man does
in daily life, with the spirit in which he lives
and in which he prays, in which he manages
his dealings with man and God. The other is
more closely connected with speculation. Of
course, it is here as in other spheres; practice
and theory act and react on each other;
dogma and religion affect each other. What
a man believes conditions what he does ; what
he does conditions what he believes. Action
is impossible without some working theory,
and this very fact drives earnest men into
speculation. Even the man of science is
never without some kind of tentative working
hypothesis, even when, in the most dis-
interested and objective way, he is in-
vestigating fact; he is looking for something,
and that directs his search. We cannot take
the tradition of the Christian Church its
body of belief and dogma apart from its
experience, however distinct the two things
may be.
38 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
At the same time we have to remember that
the spheres of action and speculation are still
different. Very often in all the affairs of life
we find that the man who is master in the one
sphere is helpless in the other; and so it is
with religious life and thought. Many a man
has the power and has the life, who can give
no account of it, or who can only account
for it in borrowed terms, crammed with
metaphor terms more or less intelligible to
those who understand the metaphors, and
hopelessly dark for others. Similarly, men may
be adepts in the speculative treatment of
religion, and have little enough of the real
thing in the way of power or life. One part
of our task, then, will be to make sure of the
relation between the tradition and the ex-
perience behind it, for it may be that the
jChurch has not quite managed a perfect
account and explanation of its own life.
The Christian Church, in its history as in
all its daily transactions, is conscious of a
life related in a peculiar way to the historical
facts given in the Gospels. Of this life it has
to find some account; and this account must
be given \vith reference to its whole knowledge
DOGMA 39
of the world. Otherwise it remains more or
less unknown and unintelligible. This is the
common instinct of men. Speculation is
native to us "the un-examined life/' Plato
said, " is un-live-able for a human being."* We
are always seeking to bring the whole of our
experience into relation with itself, that we
may grasp the whole of life and the universe,
so far as they touch us, with some unity and
inward coherence ; and it is never a merely
academic task, the impulse of an idle curiosity.
It is intensely practical. The Church in its
dogma endeavours to formulate its experience
in the religious sphere in connection with its
general experience of life and the universe,
and of the laws of life and the universe, taken
as a whole, and it does this with the practical
aim of proceeding thereby to some larger
working theory of the divine order, on which
to base action.
In common life, however, there is a curious
tendency to be remarked here, in striking
contrast with the ways of the scientific world.
The man of science frames hypotheses to
* Apology, 38 A.
40 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
account for the facts he has observed, and
to enable him to proceed further; but he is
wedded to no hypothesis. When new facts
- or old ones better known - - falsify his
hypothesis, he abandons it for a new one,
which in turn will condition his work, give a
new direction to it, and call his attention
steadily to some group or type of facts. But
whatever theory he forms must be more or
less immediately verifiable by experiment.
Now, though the description may seem fanci-
ful, experiment, one might say, is essentially
listening to the voice of Nature sometimes
by long, still, and silent observation, by simple
watching, as the modern student of birds
watches them alive and at liberty ; while some-
times the experiment takes the form of putting
questions to Nature and then carefully catch-
ing the answer. It is a helpful thing here that
one may put the same question to Nature, as
often as one pleases; and, if it is the same
question, she will give the same answer. She
will not tire of giving the answer, as some-
times happens when you put the same question
to the same person an infinite number of
times. Thus it is possible to be sure of her
THE USE OF THEORY 41
answer; and, when a great many people put
to her the same question, it is possible to verify
it. Thus by repeated and intelligent listening
Science comes into possession of a body of
established facts.
The results of scientific experiment are
patent to sense. Of course, the values of
these results are not so patent. They require
sometimes a vastly higher power of intellect
to grasp them in their relation to one another,
and to the whole body of established fact, than
is required to make the experiments from
which they are gained. But in the main the
results of scientific experiment are patent and
clear, and they lead to the establishment of
facts which any competent person can verify.
In this field theories are theories admittedly-
working hypotheses to use or discard as serves
best. A clear distinction is drawn between
facts established by experiment and what are
avowedly theories; and that distinction per-
mits a considerable freedom in the use of
hard facts, and makes the progress of Science
possible in virtue of clear thinking.
But now let us turn to the other side and
look at religion. Here we step into a region
42 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
of great difficulty, for we have to do with the
innermost secrets of human nature. We
really know very little yet even of the familiar
five senses; still less can we claim any
satisfactory knowledge of the secrets of
psychology will, feeling, emotion, impulse,
perception, attention; and there are elements
in human nature still more perplexing and
still less explored. Of the great spiritual ex-
periences, such as love or sorrow, it is hard to
give even an approximately true account,
except perhaps in poetry. Somewhere, deep
among the innermost things of our being, is the
home of what we call religion in a region
where experiments seem hardly possible, and,
even when they are possible, the results are
peculiarly difficult to understand and to
relate to one another. Some measure of
experiment is, of course, possible here; but
here more than elsewhere we require the
intelligent working of independent witnesses,
independent investigators, correcting them-
selves and correcting one another, by inde-
pendent results taken over long periods and
wide areas, if we are to eliminate accident and
error. Yet precisely in this sphere we find
THE USE OF THEORY 43
sometimes the most careless use of theory and
fact as if they stood on the same footing.
There are those who freely use their own
theories in this way; and there are those who
lay an emphasis on the authority of the
Church, which seems as alien to scientific
thinking. To the former class we scarcely
need to attend, but we have to consider the
stress laid on Authority and to ask how far
it is legitimate.
One reason lies ready to hand. It is partly
because of the great difficulty of the problem
that lies before the individual because of
the vast issues bound up with it and the short
space within which it has to be solved
because he feels so acutely his limitations.
He stands in a world of many minds, none
of them quite rigid, however rigid they may
seem all of them in reality played upon by
shifting currents of thought and feeling, and
conditioned by sterner variations in ex-
perience. Nothing that he can see stands
immovable and immutable, and he asks for
something that is permanent. For he realises
that he is face to face with a practical problem.
He has a life to live which is hurrying past
44 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
him faster and faster a life which he would
like to call his own, but, as he thinks of it, he
seems to himself more and more to be a mere
spectator, so quickly life goes, and so little
does it leave. He is hindered from developing
his opportunities by failure within himself.
Evil round about him is challenging his
energies, but they are thwarted and deadened
by evil within; and meantime he is swept
down-stream, more and more conscious of
failure yes, and of ignorance of himself and
his own nature. How is he to use life, to
overcome the inner weakness that makes the
outward inefficiency in short, to be what he
feels dimly he should be, and might be,
somehow, if he only knew how?
The difficulty of life lies, after all, not so
much in the region of speculation as of action
that is, unless a man is content to drift
through his days and nights, eating, sleeping,
and thoughtlessly putting his hand to what
occurs, without purpose or outlook. There
may be perhaps an art or science of war
or perhaps Socrates would call it, like rhetoric
and cookery, a mere knack. In the last resort
many arts and sciences have a larger element
RECOURSE TO EXPERIENCE 45
of knack in them than human pride would
wish to recognise. However, if there is an art
or science of war, it is not to that that we
should liken life, but rather to the conduct
of a siege an affair of sore straits and
cramped means, spiritual, intellectual, and
moral, and the enemy always at the gates.
In all such cases a man has a tendency to
fall back on the experience of other men.
The instinct is a sound one. Whether one
consider the history of inventions, of art, of
literature, or of politics and freedom, the
inheritance at times seems everything. On
what background does a man work ? What
depth of leaf mould is there in which literature
may root itself and flower ? The answer often
determines the value in each case. In litera-
ture, for instance, Goethe said that " to make
an epoch in the world, two conditions are
notoriously essential a good head and a
good inheritance."* The man who will
emphasise himself and swing clear of the con-
ventions of the race is not so often the real
genius as the crank or the pretender. The
* Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, 2 May, 1824.
46 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
inherited experience of mankind, scarcely
formulated, and reduced to no very valid rules,
is invaluable to the real artist, who absorbs
it he cannot tell how or when. It saves him
from gratuitous mistakes, from waste of mind,
from eccentricity, from disastrous side-tracks,
and by its gentle pressure turns him in that
direction where, if he follow his genius, he
will instinctively know when to overstep con-
vention and so to extend the experience he
inherits, and to enlarge in a permanent and
true way the faculties of the race. In fact,
much as the individual is and at times he
in his turn seems to be everything he is
most when he realises and uses the solidarity
of human experience in that sphere in which
he has to work.
The experience of the race and the freedom
of the individual these, then, are the two
great things for the man who takes life
seriously in any sphere neither without the
other, but the combination of individual
experiment with inherited experience.
Let us take an easy illustration. Man's
struggle with Nature began far earlier than
any date to which historians can take us back ;
THE BOAT-BUILDER 47
and long after it began, and yet long before
we have anything we can call History, the
first boat was made. We have to use con-
jecture here, but we have some evidence. The
man who made it was one who watched
Nature. The tree trunk floated, he saw, while
the stone sank; and he took in these facts
and thought he might use them. But the
trunk had to be cleared of its branches, and
after a while it occurred to him that if it were
hollow he might convey himself and his
belongings human and other with more
safety and at least drier. So he thought out a
new application of fire that treasured dis-
covery of his race, so hard to get, so
important to keep; and then, after a long
series of failures perhaps, with fire and stone
he made his dug-out, and launched it with the
aid of his friends. And then, to their great
amusement, the tree trunk, afloat and free,
turned over and resolutely floated upside
down. But the man would not be beaten. He
hauled the wretched trunk out of the water,
and at last, by a heart-breaking course of
thought and experiment and disappointment,
achieved a new and a great thing a tree
48 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
trunk hollowed within and shaped without to
just those curves and just that build (to use a
later word) that would enable it to stay right
side up and hinder its own progress least.
Human life might depend upon both these
qualifications. So rose the most wonderful
and fascinating of human trades, to which
man was to owe some of his most amazing
victories over the world. The man who made
the first boat in any tribe was of the type
to which mankind owes most the listener to
the voice of God in fact and Nature. He was
done with anticipating; he would have the
fact, and he put himself to the pains of letting
the fact assert itself patient enough to ask
again and again till he understood what
Nature meant, and then using it gloriously.
Back to him and his boat we can trace the
story of shipbuilding, and from him again
downwards to our Mauretanias and Olympics ;
and at no stage has the past with its triumphs
been irrelevant nothing once gained was
lost, and it is only as men build their ships
true to the discoveries made all the way along
from the first dug-out that they build aright.
The past is superseded indeed ; the Mauretania
THE BOAT-BUILDER 49
is worth many dug-outs, but in her the dug-
out lives still in a more glorious life. It is
the combination of experience and experi-
ment.
So, too, when, at a later day, seas were to
be navigated, the sailor did the same thing.
The quiet man who would watch and listen
learned how to shape his course. Without
chart or compass, without even an anchor,
how was he to know where he was, to find
his way, to save his ship? He looked, and he
listened. The stars spoke to> him, and he
went to his journey's end and came back
again because he had the genius to listen to
them and to sea and winds and coastlines
and currents. The moods of the sea and the
face of the sky were never idle for him ; and
what he learned, he taught, and navigation
developed. "A new boat and old rocks,"
says the grim Highland proverb. The old
perils remain, but the sting is drawn from
them if you will use what your father told
you. Once more it is the experience of the
race and the experiment of the individual.
When we turn to the sphere of religion, it
is natural to expect that the same method will
4
50 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
still serve us best, for there is a certain unity
in our acquaintance with the universe. Life
is one, however many its aspects and faculties.
Nature will speak to us here also, if we will
listen. But we must be careful not to be
in a hurry. It is here that hurry seems most
natural to the human mind and most disas-
trous. How intricate are the relations of
experience and the formulation given to it,
we have seen. With the most earnest passion
for truth, men may misconceive it and mis-
represent it ; and in religion we may be misled
by the very highest tradition available to us.
Verification here is slow work and very hard ;
yet it is possible, if we are willing to avail
ourselves of the accumulated evidence of man-
kind, with all the care and sympathy needed
to understand it aright.
So far as we can trace the history of man's
conception of God, it has grown very slowly,
and in a very Dimple way. It would be a
wonderful thing to re-capture, if we could,
the very thoughts of those remote ancestors
of ours who first formulated their experience
of Something-Not-Themselves, and to trace
how, age by age, men re-shaped their ideas
THE GROWTH OF RELIGION 51
of the great Environing, as they watched how
thought re-acted on life, and life on thought.
The real progress has been made by attention
to fact. This and that, men said, their fathers
had told them, but quite other was the voice
of life ; God was not what was said, but what
He showed Himself to be, what He revealed
in the growth of moral and social ideas and
ideals. Thus in Homer the traditional gods
are clearly on a lower moral plane than the
heroes men made from their experience of
their fellow-men. It is plain to us in looking
back that Homer's gods were outgrown and
must yield their place sooner or later. The
attack made by Xenophanes, Euripides, and
Plato on traditional religion in the light of
new experience of righteousness is the great
instance in Classical literature and history of
the progress made by those who inherit and
examine and reflect. God was re-interpreted
in the light of life. Strange that what men
are is so often a better guide to the nature
of God than what they say about Him!
Progress in the spiritual region depends on
the result reached by the individual, when he
is not merely an individual but a joint-heir
52 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
of the race, and will use his inheritance with-
out losing his personality. Robinson Crusoe
on his island is hardly a type of the human
soul. We are too individualistic too apt to
forget that Robinson Crusoe had an axe and
a number of other fascinating things brought
from England, all of which implied humanity,
and the long history of civilisation. He had
also a Bible in English, we may remember,
which again implied a long history of
religion. The individual inherits all this
he is made by it; it is in him; and sound
thinking requires the recognition of this fact
also, as well as all other relevant facts, in the
fulness of its meaning. Without the religious
history of the race behind us, not one of us
is likely to achieve anything, either in his own
religious life or in his thinking. If he starts
afresh, he is most like an artist who begins
without perspective, and ignores all that has
been learned and felt of colour. Not even
genius could thrive on such a plan ; and it
is perhaps worth while remarking that one
of the most significant factors in genius, and
one of those least recognised, is its infinite
capacity for learning in patience and humility,
EXPERIENCE AND PROGRESS 53
however high it may soar afterwards its
power of combining docility with indepen-
dence. Independence without that docility is
the mark of the fool, though he does not
always recognise it. First-hand experience
of life, of course, we ask of poet and painter,
and of the man of religion, but in the first
instance within the limits of the inheritance.
When we speak of our religious and
spiritual inheritance, we must think not merely
of those who say they have the Voice of God,
but of some who make no such claim not
merely of one Church, but of many, and of
many that no Church at all will recognise. ,
The whole spiritual history of man is the '
background on which we have to work.
There are the great historic religions of the
world, and within Christendom the great
Churches and societies and movements and
none of all these is irrelevant. For, after all,
"the Church" is essentially the tradition, and
the tradition has to be transcended; while
to the man who is in earnest, every tradition
is of value, and none is finally binding.
Church or no Church, it is to the highest
experience in the sphere with which we are
54 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
concerned that we have to look, and it is
not till we have found that, that we may
dismiss anything as irrelevant, and even then
we must not dismiss it too abruptly. For
most of us to-day there is little question that it
is in the area of Christian thinking that the
highest results in thought and character are
to be observed; and, when we find these,
we are right indeed, we are bound to ask
how they have been developed. It is, of
course, true that this conclusion is questioned.
Other standards of morality, by which to
test character, are proposed, but they are
rarely as new as those who advocate them
imagine; often they are obsolete blind
alleys long since labelled and known to lead
nowhere.
To recapitulate the three points we have
reached, we have remarked, first, the soli-
darity of the race, and the dependence of the
present, and with it of the future, upon the
past and its experience. In the next place, we
have seen that progress depends upon the
right and wise use of the inherited experience
by the individual, conscious of his respon-
sibility at once to maintain and to advance
RECAPITULATION 55
what he has inherited ;* and, at the same time,
that in every sphere of human activity it is
the highest achievement that counts, and must
be our starting-place for further progress;
that, if to ignore experience is always folly,
it is still more folly to ignore the highest
experience available. In the third place,
embodied in the tradition of the Christian
Church or Churches, and in the teaching and
dogma of the non-Christian religions, we have
a mass of religious experience which may be
of the highest value to us, if we take the
pains to understand it; for here we touch
the life of the human race at its very highest
and most intense. The great religions express
the most earnest minds among those races
of man which are most endowed with
insight and most trained in variety of life.
They come not from the backward peoples,
but from the races with long histories, embody-
ing every interest that race or nation can
* The Church, wrote Principal Rainy in 1867, " is compelled to
submit afresh to the cross-questioning of the ever-changing, ever-
moving, Providence of God. She is obliged to let drop the mere
habits of her history, which suffice no longer. . . . The Church
of Christ has no liberty to become the slave even of its own his-
tory." (Life, i., pp. 176, 177.)
56 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
know, and in every one of the great religions
the signs are manifest which tell of roots deep
in the past. In each case the highest thought
of a gifted race has been turned upon what
supremely matters to every man. For those
who know it best who know it from within
the Christian faith stands apart from all other
religions in a place of its own, with a future
and a future which, we believe, will not
be a mere repetition of the past. The rest
of this lecture will be devoted to a short dis-
cussion of principles which may enable us
to judge between one set of religious traditions
and another, and (I hope) to see some ground
for the preference given to the Christian faith 1 .
There are three questions which we may
ask about any religion quite simple ques-
tions. What will it do for you? What will
it do to protect other people against you?
How far does it hold open the door for the
future ?
In answering such questions two ways may
be taken. We may go to sacred books, and
compare the precepts of the great religious
teachers and the proverbs bearing on moral
matters that are current among the various
THE STUDY OF RELIGIONS 57
peoples. Or we may go to the people them-
selves and study their lives and see how far
the religion is practically operative there
what it gives them, what it does to protect
the weak from them, what it does to safeguard
the future and with what force and power
it does these things. We shall find sometimes
that the popular proverb has more vitality
than the religious aphorism or principle, and
yet that even so a proverb has often enough
to do to maintain its own life, without dynamic
to spare to guide and quicken the lives of
men and women. We must keep always in
close contact with actual life, and work out
our problem with progressively intense study
of individual character, without neglecting,
on the other hand, the notes of the larger
or more organised society. We must make
it our concern to go slowly about our work
especially when we reach the stage of making
statements till we have grasped the fulness
of the fact. In religion a fact is extremely
hard to convey in its fulness by any words
available; and then we have to realise that
other people use the same words and mean
something very different. The content of the
58 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
word varies immensely. Even when we take
so simple and obvious a word as (let us say)
"blue," no one can tell what its exact value
is it makes all the difference whether it is
applied to a blue-bottle fly, the summer sky,
or a preparation for the laundry. The word
"Father "is applied to God in many religions,
and its compass varies as widely as "blue"
in the three instances I have suggested. It
is clear that we have to go beyond what people
say, and study what they mean, and how much
they mean it.
Some little time ago, Professor Gilbert
Murray, of Oxford, said that the great danger
in literature was reading " with a slack imagi-
nation." This is always the danger, whether
one is criticising a book or dealing with
human character in any form or race. Know-
ledge, to be anything at all beyond conceit and
delusion, must be a thing of passion and
intensity. It is not easy to understand any
man in his fulness character is so com-
plicated to begin with, and in the next place
it is never finally fixed. If we are to study an
author, there is only one way, and this Carlyle
summed up in writing of Novalis for an
THE TRUE WAY IN CRITICISM 59
English public very doubtful about such
foreigners :
" The most profitable employment any book
can give them is to study honestly some
earnest, deep-minded, truth-loving Man, to
work their way into his manner of thought,
till they see the world with his eyes, feel as he
felt and judge as he judged, neither believing
nor denying, till they can in some measure
so feel and judge."*
When we have taken such a course with
any religious teacher, our acceptance or re-
jection, our belief or denial, will at least be
defensible. Is it too much to suggest that
such measure is only seldom given to that
wonderful series of ''earnest, deep-minded,
truth-loving Men " who have made the
Christian Church, and handed down to us its
tradition the embodiment of the religious
experience of the peoples and of the men in
nineteen centuries who were best qualified
* Dr. Edward Caird, in a lecture on Carlyle, said much the
same thing : We must " let his way of thinking- [a great author's]
permeate into our minds, until it becomes part of their very sub-
stance " ; till then, our criticism " will be wanting in sympathy,
and it will rather tend to defend us against his spirit than enable
us to appreciate it."
60 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
for such experience, even if most conscious of
their own disqualifications?
Our task is the open-hearted study of the
Christian religion, with our three questions
in mind; and this lecture shall end with the
suggestion of some lines along which our
study may be carried out.
First of all, I would suggest the con-
sideration of the Christian tradition by refer-
ence to the world outside Christ and that is
not easy. Most of us have no idea at all what
the world is without Christ; He is so deeply
involved in every aspect of the world we know,
so interwoven with every fibre of its being.
Yet there are two regions where we can see
the world without Christ. There is the ancient
world, with the fascinating story of the Greek
and Roman civilisations in which our own
is rooted. And again there is the modern
world of Africa and Asia the pagan world
of to-day. To know either is the task of a
lifetime, it may sometimes seem to the weary
student, and yet certain things are plain
enough.
For example, deplorable as things are in
European and American society, they are bad,
SOCIETY WITHOUT CHRIST 61
nevertheless, with the continual correction of
a Christian background. There are men and
women leavening these societies in whom
burns a passionate devotion to the person of
Jesus Christ and His ideals for mankind and
for the individual. There is the public recog-
nition (whatever it is worth) of religion, and
there is in all educated persons some slight
knowledge very vague and inaccurate as it
may be of the principles of that religion
which touches their lives, if nowhere else,
in most of their weddings and funerals. But
imagine the background removed, and in-
dustrial enormities, flagrant cruelty, and open
uncleanness, continuing unchecked, and gain-
ing rather than losing in volume, as they
would. Even with the assistance of Leopold
II. and his Belgians, it will be hard for any-
one without special knowledge to imagine
what things were tolerated in ancient society
or are tolerated in India in civilised com-
munities, that is and in neither case with
much disapproval. Some things are ignored,
and others are defended; and that makes
an unspeakable difference. Good natures and
kind hearts there were in the ancient world.
62 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
but it is remarkable how little influence they
had.* Classical scholars and modern mission-
aries rarely tell all they know about pagan
society. Few ask about the condition of
slaves, for instance, in the mines of Attica
while Pericles was the chief man of the State ;
and the terrible want of mercy that caste
involves is not understood. If you know the
questions to ask of returned missionaries, they
will tell you. Sometimes they tell you things
without noticing that they are doing so, and
such evidence is always significant.
Then we must think about religion without
Christ. Here, of course, we meet people who
go at once to the Diary of Marcus Aurelius or
Sir Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia documents
of very different value. But there are sounder
works on Buddha, with less glamour, while
Marcus Aurelius was in any case an ex-
ceptional man. Plutarch's book On /sis and
Osiris is a much better guide to the real ideas
of ancient religion. Two features stand out
in most non-Christian religions the world's
quarrel with God, and the awful touch of
* Think of the gladiatorial shows and the kind and humane
men who gave them.
RELIGION WITHOUT CHRIST 63
superstition. Buddha and the Stoic both
knew the world was made amiss, and, recon-
ciliation being practically impossible, they
urged renouncing the world. The Stoic, of
course, with his love of paradox, simul-
taneously maintained the beauty and Tightness
of the world, but, none the less, did his utmost
to nerve himself to endure it. Buddha, it
might be said, beyond all religious teachers,
takes the worth out of life. If it is urged that
the mediaeval monk also said that "the world
is very evil,"* none the less, the hymn, in
which the phrase comes, ends with " Jerusalem
the Golden," while the Stoic ended with reso-
lution into elements and Buddha at best with
Nirvana. The plain fact is that, in the long
run, despair is at the heart of every religion
without Christ ; and if man or woman is to
get through the world at all, it must be by
the hardening or deadening of the more
sensitive parts of human nature. Marcus
Aurelius' Diary is a sort of breviary of despair.
Epicurus and Nietzsche have a different
story to tell, but their messages have the same
* To be fair to Bernard of Morlaix, he did not say this. Hora
nom$sima tempora pessima is rather different.
64 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
defects. They are not for people who outlive
youth, or who have it in them to love in any
passionate way; and as old age and love are
obvious elements in human life, it is a damag-
ing criticism upon a philosophy to say that
it does not cover them. Besides, Plato dealt
with Nietzsche long ago in the Gorgias, and
Epicurus really asks more self-discipline than
youth or voluptuary would wish to practise.
In the fifth lecture I shall have to deal with
another aspect of religion outside Christ with
polytheism in faith and cult and daily life
and to call your attention to its effects upon
human nature.
In the next place we have to study Christian
society to see what has been done for men by
Jesus Christ, and what is being done. We
will not blink the weakness and distractedness
of Christian society, but as weakness and dis-
tractedness are not features peculiar to it,
we will look elsewhere for the factors that
differentiate. Two lectures in this course will
be given to this.
Several things will be necessary. We shall
need to give a closer attention to Christian
phrase, neither surrendering to its appeal of
CHRISTIAN PHRASE 65
old association, nor rejecting it as merely
conventional. Here again we have to guard
against the slack imagination, and to wrestle
with the word, and with the man who uses it,
till we grasp what it is intended to express.
Over and over again we shall find that the
difficulty is that it was an endeavour to put
a wholly new experience into old phrase. Old
categories and old conceptions have received
a new content, far too great for them. The
Church has treated its words like Humpty-
Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking-Glass ;
the word has had its own associations and
preferences, and the Church forces it, in spite
of all these, to convey an idea it never meant
to suggest sometimes an idea of glowing joy.
And then, when the word has learned its new
work, dull folk use it till an impatient age
supposes it never meant anything but
flabby make-believe.* Really, if the words
are to be understood, our best plan is to
repeat the experience which called them forth.
We shall have to study the involuntary
convert a person to be found in many
* Perhaps one might instance such words as faith, love, sub*
Stitution, holy.
66 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
societies to-day, a man well worth our atten-
tion. He is of the type that does not mean
to be converted too candid to take things
without examination, too true to move quickly
and then, like the Pearl Merchant in the
parable, after all his experience of the beauti-
ful and true, he finds something that goes
beyond all he gets outside his own old
range, finds a new joy; and life, without his
intending it or expecting it, is a new thing.
But if we are to understand him, it will not
be with the slack imagination.
Above all, we shall have to consecrate our-
selves to a new and special study of Jesus
Christ His ideas and principles, and, what
is vastly more, Himself and His personality.
Is His a religion that closes the door to
the future ? Or does it not rather hold the
door open? In a great passage, St. Paul
speaks of 'Christ as being God's "Yes"
" however many," he says, "the promises of
God are, in Him is the Yes." The Christian
religion is a religion of Yes, and all other
religions, in last resort, are religions of No.
Paul sees in Him the fulfilment of all God's
promises promises written in the books of
"IN HIM WAS YES" 67
the prophets of Israel, no doubt, but promises
written before their day in the very nature of
the human heart, in its craving for some-
thing more, its hunger for love, its un-
developed capacities, and its growing demand
upon the universe. The Yes for all these
Paul sees in Christ.
We have to study Christ's effect in pro-
ducing and broadening sympathy, in enlarg-
ing outlook and developing faculty, in making
men more really men than they ever were
before larger, more humane, more gentle
and tender, more open to the world, and
stronger and more fit for new kinds of service
spiritual, social, and intellectual in short,
in a larger and fuller sense, more human. We
have to see how He has laid more emphasis
than any other religious teacher on the worth
of human life, the beauty of human relations,
the charm of the world about us sometimes
by direct teaching, sometimes by implication,
and most of all by His influence exercised on
those who love Him even when they are not
very conscious of being influenced by Him at
all. We have to realise that this has been the
continuous experience of the Church, and in
68 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
ever a larger and deeper measure. The nine-
teenth century, it was said, was nearer Christ
than the second was. Let us pray that the
twentieth come nearer still. "Where the
spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty," wrote
Paul; and there is indeed liberty there to go
about the Father's house and to see everything
belonging to the Father. The locked doors
are few and in some the keys stand waiting
till we learn to turn them, while, as to others
" Knock, arid it shall be opened to you." But,
in general, it is : " Behold, I have set before
you an opened door."
It is curious, too, to remark how, when a
man is really under the influence of Jesus
Christ, such influence does not, as between
man and man, narrow or limit, but broaden
him. The Holy Spirit, it is promised, is to
guide us into all truth. We find, wherever
Jesus Christ has been in reality, men have
conceived of everything in a progressively
larger arid nobler way have framed greater
ideals of personal, social, and national
righteousness, and achieved a new intellectual
freedom.
But eventually our subject of study is Christ
THE STUDY OF CHRIST 69
Himself. We must go back to the historical
Jesus to the great Teacher who bade men
go to the facts " Tell John the things you hear
and see " and Himself the great fact for us,
Who saves us at once from the hardening of
tradition, and from the danger of being lost
altogether in a world of theory and spindrift
fancy. As long as He stands, we build on the
Rock, we touch the actual and live in the real.
LECTURE III
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CHURCH AS WITNESS
OUR subject in this lecture is the Chris-
tian Church; and what other has so
many claims upon our interest and
our study ? Think of its long history, its per-
manence, its recuperative power, its force, its
solidarity, its place and part in all human
affairs; and, again, of the great succession
of significant men that have made it.
Whatever its origin and nature may be, the
part it has played and still plays in the story
of the race entitles it to a closer study than
most people give it. We do not realise what
it means; we take it for granted, in our idle
way, and hardly even wonder that it should
have lasted so long, or how it can have done
so, or how it began.
The problem of the rise of the Christian
Church in the Roman Empire in the face of
a great religious 3ystem, hallowed by every
emotion that the associations of family life
71
72 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
and national life, of literature and history, can
give* of a great imperial system hostile to
it from Nero's reign onward is one that may
call for every faculty of intelligence, sympathy,
and historical imagination and historical sense
that we possess. Gibbon dealt with it in his two
most famous chapters the least satisfactory
chapters of his masterpiece. We must be
more friendly than he was to the Christian
Church if we are to understand it friendly
as every historical student must be to the
subject of his researches. Sine ira et studio
is the phrase of Tacitus yes, without anger
and partisanship, but not without sympathy.
We must go quietly and slowly about our
work; hurry is fatal in historical study.
Then we have to ask what has kept the
Church together so long, and kept it one, in
spite of the gulfs of controversy that separate
Protestant and Catholic. We know quite well
that in the last resort we stand together and
* The volume of emotion and the variety of association
that made the strength of the old religion are to be seen
in Plutarch. Men, he says, were " in anguish and in fear
lest Delphi should lose its glory of three thousand years,"
and it had not lost it.
THE VITALITY OF THE CHURCH 73
believe in one another. When one thinks
of the great philosophic schools of the past-
how small their numbers have been in spite
of their great influence how they dis-
integrated and disappeared, as the Stoics, for
instance, did after the reign of Marcus
Aurelius one realises the contrast in the
Church. Its numbers have been vast they
are greater to-day than ever; its divisions
have been more acute and more cruel than
those of any philosophic school; and yet it
lives. We shall have to ask in virtue of what
it lives, and to see that we reach an adequate
answer. What is it that revives the Church
again and again? What is the meaning of
the great movements associated with such
names as Luther, Tyndale, and Wesley all
these, men of the academic habit, who studied
in Universities and read Greek not at all
our common idea of leaders of mass-move-
ments? There is no secret at all about these
men they were fallible like ourselves, liable
to the charges of anger and narrowness of
view and mistaken judgment, what you will-
but they have this also in common, that they
all lived in the power of a renewed realisation
74 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
of Jesus Christ. That is plain enough. We
have to ask ourselves why should this be
responsible for new eras in Christian life and
thought and again we have to look to it
carefully that we really answer our question.
To some critics the most conspicuous thing
about the Church is its weakness; and in a
certain sense they are right. The Christian
Church has many weaknesses some which
its critics see better than it does itself, and
some which it knows and they do not know.
Its record is disfigured with terrible errors
and follies ; and at times it has been guilty-
sections of it, at least, have been guilty of
what must be called crimes crimes against
its Founder, against the love of God, against
ordinary humanity. We need not play the
apologist, or seek to palliate such things, or
to explain that wrongdoing was right when
viewed from some peculiar standpoint or
other. We may take the thing on the showing
of the most hostile and the unfairest critic we
can find; and then we must still more reso-
lutely ask how it is that a body capable of
such weakness, of such error, of such betrayals
of its own ideals, can yet win and keep the
THE STRENGTH OF THE CHURCH 75
love and the loyalty of men and women, in
earnest with themselves and with truth, and
can affect through them the whole course of
human history we believe, for good; but,
if our critics will not let us say so at once,
we will ask only, To what does a body so
conspicuously worthless owe its influence ?
Let us take an illustration from ordinary
history Julius Caesar. We will read the
worst that is to be said about him; we will
draw him as Shakespeare drew him, from
North's Plutarch a man of conspicuous
errors and defects epileptic, deaf, ambitious,
vacillating, arrogant falling far short in some
matters of ordinary standards of conduct. Or
we will take Martin Luther, and, for the
moment, try to believe every foul calumny
that the meaner partisans of the Papacy and
of modern culture have heaped on him. And
then we have a problem indeed. We have
now to explain how such a Caesar and such
a Luther were capable of such great things
as they actually achieved. They changed the
course of human history. We will allow all
that sense will tolerate to tendencies of the
times, as people tell us to do to-day people,
76 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
it seems to me, who do not always penetrate
quite into the depths of things. We will make
every deduction that is historically possible;
and then, weighing the real effect of these
men, on a just survey of everything to be
considered, we will wrestle with the problem
before us. If they had been (as so many
suppose) great men and true men, the explana-
tion would have been easier ; but the traducer
has only effected this we realise now, when
we know at last the frightful deductions that
have to be made, how great the men were in
fact. The more weakness and vice we load
upon them, the more we magnify the great-
ness that enabled them to do what they
actually did, in spite of everything.
Similarly, the greater the errors of the
Christian Church, the worse its failures in con-
duct, insight, and sympathy, in grasp of truth
or sense of right and wrong the more we
have to explain. If the minus is so great,
how great is the plus? What is it that gives
the Church its power ? That it has power and
charm and influence, we can see at a glance,
in the love men have for the Church, and in
their hatred for it. Hate and love of such
THE STRENGTH OF THE CHURCH 77
force that carry men so far are never
waked by anything weak and trivial; and
there is no hatred and no love in human
history equal to those which the Church has
waked. Why? We have seen the weakness;
we have to see the strength.
It is a commonplace in criticism or it
should be so by now that the beginner is
quicker to see what is wrong than what is
right. The critics, as Disraeli said in a famous
passage, are the men who have failed; and
he is right the best of them are men who
would have created if they could would have
made the poem or painted the picture, but
they did not. The man who does, criticises in
another way with an incisiveness far beyond
theirs, and a tenderness and sensitiveness they
cannot reach. But, in the main, the task
of criticism for most of us at least, when we
are measuring ourselves against great things
in art, or literature, or history, and it is wiser
and kinder to leave the rest alone is to find
out what is right, how and why the thing
is right, and what makes it right what gives
it its appeal where its power lies. The critic
will be better trained in the National Gallery
78 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
than in the Royal Academy. So if we are
to criticise the Christian Church, to form a
real judgment upon it, to be sound critics, not
mere pickers of holes and triflers, we have
to find out first where its strength lies. That
is the vital question for Delilah and her Philis-
tines when they are dealing with Samson;
it is the vital question for the enemies of
the Church, and they can do nothing till they
solve it. And what it means for us who are
committed to the Church of Christ, I need not
tell you.
In this lecture I wish to concentrate atten-
tion upon three main points, from the con-
sideration of which we may be better able
to take some measure of the strength of the
Christian Church, and to see what it means
and what lies behind. First of all, I suggest
that we should study more closely the way
in which the Church holds its main doctrines,
how it has come to do so, and what is its
intellectual right to hold them; and incident-
ally we shall have to remark its inability not
to hold them, in view of its invariable decline
when it has loosened its grip upon them. In
the second place, we must examine what these
THE SANITY OF THE CHURCH 79
main tenets are; and, lastly, their place in the
actual life of the Church, their effect upon
the conduct and method of the Christian com-
munity, and the general character of the
results that have followed from their use and
application.
I begin, then, with what I may perhaps call
the Sanity of the Christian Church.
On this point, the first thing to be said
is that the Christian community has always
rested on the validity of human experience.
There are people, of course, who have main-
tained the doctrine that this is not a sound
basis, that there is, in fact, no sound basis at
all for knowledge, but that knowledge is im-
possible. How they can know this is not
explained. However, the Church has always
based itself on the belief that through ex-
perience you can learn, and that you can
definitely and quietly conclude that certain
things are true. There is reality in the ex-
perience of men, and knowledge is possible.
From the way in which things can be done,
and also from the ways in which they cannot
be done, the Christian Church believes that
it may learn something essential and vital.
8o THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
The story of mankind is not for it an idle
thing,
a Shadow-Show
Played in a box whose candle is the Sun
as empty and meaningless a sequence as a
series of smoke-rings blown by an idle man,
one after the other going away, and none
contributing to any before it or after it
a mere arbitrary succession of purpose-
less monotony.* On the contrary, Christian
thinkers have always held that there is some-
thing that the mind can grip and use in the
history of mankind something valid and real ;
and the more vital and real, the more a man
braces his mind to grapple with it and to
understand it in its fulness. The Christian
Church does not rest on what I have heard
called Perhapsology. Hence, when a certain
type of experience recurs again and again, it
is taken to be significant, and not accidental;
and, as a result, the Church calculates, in all
its dealings with men, upon the recurrence of
certain things. The human mind, with all
* This is unjust to the smoke-rings, every one of which,
as well as the whole series, will point to natural laws which
are not trifles.
SOME THINGS KNOWN 81
its triumphs over the material world, and all
its acquisitions of new knowledge, will con-
tinue to act in much the same way.* There
will be the same obstinate questionings age by
age now turned upon this aspect of life, now
upon the other phase of it; the same hesita-
tions between theories of good and evil, the
same wavering between the appeals of good
and evil, the same weakness, and the same
needs and cravings. And to meet these
needs and cravings the Church offers the
same Christ in the certainty that, though
the storms of criticism continue with greater
or less violence to beat upon this or that
element of the Christian faith, there still work
for it the same forces, the same movements
of the mind, that in ages past have taken and
still take men, often sorely against the lines
of their preference, into the same acceptance
of God in Christ. I have forestalled here one
of the great conclusions the Church draws,
but the immediate point is rather the way
in which it comes to draw it.
In the next place, I would urge you to
* " Mankind advances, but man remains the same," Goethe
said.
6
82 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
consider that the conclusions of the Church
have not gone unchallenged. The Christian
community has not gone, like Odysseus' men,
with wax in their ears, unable to hear the
Sirens. It has lived in the world and heard all
that the world has to say whether it wished
or not the world took care it should hear.
For it is rather curious to see how from the
very first the world has devoted itself to clear
the Christian mind of error. The Christian
faith has been demonstrated again and again
to be ridiculous by every argument that the
cleverest and wittiest of its opponents could
devise, from Celsus down to present-day
Members of Parliament. Just think of the
vast amount of wit that has been expended
upon Christian people in nineteen centuries,
from Lucian to Voltaire and onward and
the Christian faith has survived it. Or, again,
think of the serious argument that age by
age has been based upon the best learning and
science of each generation, to convince the
Christian that if, as he must grant, philosophy
was in possession of sound canons of reason,
his faith was hopelessly absurd, or, at least,
hopelessly misconceived by himself; not that
THE CHALLENGE 83
it was quite without elements of sense and
truth, but that these were entangled in a fabric
of myth and nonsense, from which it was
urgent that they should be cut away and set
free. And again, think of the pressure other
than intellectual that has been brought to
bear upon the Christian communities from
time to time in one land and another and
upon individuals every kind of persuasion,
from the crown of Henri IV. to the Vivicom-
burium which threatened Tertullian. Love
and hate have used all the arts of enticement
and terror to bring the Christian away from
his relations with Christ and Christ has per-
sistently been too strong for them all. If a
faith can be tested by what it has survived,
Christianity has been well tested.
But the Christian faith has been tested in
another and a father, subtler way. The
Church has always been sensitive to* philo-
sophic criticism, as we are ourselves to-day.
In every generation the sons of Christians
have received the best available education of
their day in those studies which, as St.
Augustine put it, "they call liberal and we
call secular" they have been steeped in
84 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
philosophy, and have turned eyes, enlightened
by their training, upon the faith of their
fathers. Again, the early Church, and not
it alone, has won men of the philosophic
temper, for whom it was essential to review
their Christian faith and their philosophic
principles side by side. Philosophy, however,
is one thing, and philosophic systems another.
Philosophy is a natural instinct of the human
mind, a passion for a co-ordinated view of
things, an inherent compulsion to speculation
in order to reach truth. But an instinct is a
very different thing from the habits or prin-
ciples of thought to which in a given case it
may lead. Yet men have always been apt to
identify the instinct with the system of
thought. It is essential for a complete man
to reflect as to the bearings of his Christian
faith upon the whole world of his experience
there must be Christian philosophy. But
men personify Philosophy as they do History
or Science, and will allege that Philosophy
teaches this or that principle. I do not think
that this is defensible, for I observe that age
by age there has been change in the principles
pf philosophers. Many of the most far-
THE TEST OF COMPROMISE 85
reaching postulates or preconceptions of the
age of St. Paul have by now long been mere
curiosities of the text-books. Yet their sway
was once enormous, and an educated man
dared not dispute them if he valued his repu-
tation for thought and culture.
In every age the Church has shown a
tendency to express the Christian faith in the
philosophic terms of that age a tendency
laudable but dangerous ; for the proper desire
to be intelligible, the natural instinct for
making a unity of one's thought, have de-
clined into compromise. Over and over again
Christians have been carried by a desire for
re-statement and accommodation to a point
at which it became evident to quieter people
that they had left the historic reality or the
eternal significance or both of Christ Him-
self far behind. In the early second century,
in deference to a philosophic dogma that God
and a Godlike man were immune from pain,
a school arose who taught that the death
of Jesus on the Cross was not real a phantom
was crucified, or, at best, a man's body not
Christ. Such a compromise, it was quickly
seen, emptied the Christian faith of all reality
86 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
and all value ; it palpably gave away the whole
essence of the faith. Who could turn for real
help to a Christ impassive of pain or die for a
Christ who vanished at the sight of the Cross ?
Again, the whole Arian controversy arose
from the desire to accommodate the Incarna-
tion to that method of conceiving God which
underlies Neo-Platonism, and has been called
the "deification of the word Not." Once
again the compromise was one that gave
everything away.
One thing has always stood out clearly
sooner or later. Whenever the Church at
large, or any Church in particular, has com-
mitted itself to any scheme of thought that
has lessened the significance of Jesus Christ,
it has declined. Error always tells; and the
error of over-estimating Jesus Christ ought
to have told by now, but the experience of the
Church so far suggests that it has no real
reason to dread any danger from over-
estimating Him, but rather that the danger
has always come from obscuring or abating
His significance. It is, I think, worth while
to reflect upon what this involves. The faith
has been tested in every compromise that
THE FACT GAINED 87
Christians have attempted, and if it is still
held, it is with some warrant.
A Christian philosophy there must be, but
it will not be reached by abandoning the
one fixed point we have attained. In the
meantime the Christian has had sometimes
to stand like St. Sebastian in the pictures
stripped of every rag of philosophic and in-
tellectual dignity, and exposed to the shafts of
every so-called philosopher who cared to shoot
and quite glad so to stand, conscious that
he had something for which it was worth
while to be stripped and shot at, and to go
through every kind of shame.
For, in the last place, the Church, with
Aristotle, sets the fact before the explanation.
The thing is not irrational, if it is true, even
if we cannot explain it yet.
So far we have tried to consider some of the
grounds on which the Christian community
claims to be entitled to hold certain views of
its own. These are some of the factors which
have worked for verification forces that have
acted together to keep the Church heading
for truth all the time.
We come now to some of the main
88 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
convictions which have been tested in this
way.
First of all, we may set here the serious
view that the Christian Church has always
taken of moral evil. There are those who
minimise evil, who see in it "good in the
making," and play with the idea that all the
evil that men do is, in a certain sense, the
outcome of some divinely-given instinct within
them. This is rather confused thinking. The
instinct and the use made of it are not the
same thing. It is nearer the fact to say, with
Principal Henderson, that "the horrible thing
about sin is that it is using God against God "
turning the gift in which He has given Him-
self against the giver, the gift which is equally
susceptible of another use. " It was," as
Milton says, "from out the rind of one apple
tasted that the knowledge of good and evil,
as two twins cleaving together, leap'd forth,
into the World. And perhaps this is that
doom which Adam fell into of knowing good
and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by
evil." But on the previous page he says:
" the Knowledge cannot defile . . . if the Will
and Conscience be not defil'd." The critic
MORAL EVIL 89
must look more closely into his psychology.
The Church, face to face with the ugly facts
of human life, such as depraved instincts and
conduct openly and flagrantly anti-social, has
advanced sound thinking by calling some
things categorically evil. Whatever the origin
of evil and Christian thinkers have turned
that over pretty often the Church knows by
now what evil is like and what its effects are,
and has set itself to combat evil and it is
hard to imagine a better way to the discovery
of what it really is.
I take two forms of evil to illustrate the
point. What does cruelty mean? It is a
subtle thing. Human nature, as those who
have read it best have seen most clearly, is
capable of more cruelty than we like to think.
Shylock and Lady Macbeth, as Shakespeare
saw, are not far from any one of us. But,
above all, we must weigh the Christian recog-
nition of the weakness of the human will.
Socrates held that, if a man really knew what
was good, he would do it; a view that may
be defended on the ground of some ambiguity
in the word know, but otherwise past defence.
The Stoics, the noblest teachers of mankind
QO THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
apart from Christ, staked all on the human
will, and lost. What chance in most of us
has the will against the imagination? "It
is so easy to make up one's mind/' the girl
says in Mr. Barrie's book; and the answer
her playmate gives is a true one: " It's easy
to you that has just one mind." St. Augus-
tine* and St. Paul knew how intricately the
mind can be divided against itself knew it
in virtue of struggles made by resolve, by
self-discipline, by self-government, to bring
the mind into unity with itself under a law
of righteousness. Men of this type, who have
done all to subdue themselves to right, for
whom the standards and ideals of thought
and conduct are progressively higher these
are the people who recognise most clearly
and most sadly how hopeless it is to try
to do anything with their own wills and
characters. Flabbiness and stubbornness
seem incompatible vices, and the human heart
* Confessions, viii., 9, 21. Imperat animus, ut velit animus,
nee alter est necfacit tamen . . . sed non ex toto vult, non
ergo ex toto imperat . . . non igitur monstrum partim velle,
partim nolle, sed aegritudo animi est . . . et ideo sunt duat
voluntates quia una earum tota non est. . . .
LAW 91
knows them for twins. It is worth noting as
we pass that in the experience of both St.
Paul and St. Augustine the recognition of
evil was the first step to the solution of their
intellectual problems. The moral problem,
they found, came first; and when they set
to work in earnest at that, and were willing
to avail themselves of the best means to solve
it, they found themselves nearer to a real
understanding of God and His nature.
In the second place, we may consider the
Christian conviction as to the inexorable char-
acter of law.* There the Stoic was before
the Christian, so that it is not exactly novel
when Mr. Bernard Shaw tells us that there
is no forgiveness. Certain sections of the
Church may have provoked him, for there
is a type of Christian teaching which suggests
that God is, after all, the arch-sentimentalist
of the universe, Who will let His laws work
off and on, like electric light in its early days,
and is willing to be the consenting victim of
certain conspicuous dodges. That teaching
is not in the New Testament, and it is as
*This point will recur in the fifth lecture.
92 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
well for us to recognise as soon as possible
the hard element in the Gospel.*
The Church, like its Master, has based itself
on fact and lived among facts, and it is by
now fairly well possessed of some truths ; and
the eternal connection of action and conse-
quence is one of them. The popular mind
finds this in the New Testament in the visions
of Judgment and the Great White Throne;
but behind these lay a profound experience
of life. In a series of vivid metaphors the
actual, obvious, and present effects of sin
are sketched by St. Paul and others. Men
become alienated from the life of God; God
gives them up to a reprobate mind a mind
that cannot discharge its proper functions,
a conscience cauterised or darkened untrue,
that is, in its estimates of life, unreliable; a
conscience stained. Here there is a parallel in
* Paul Wernle, The Beginning of Christianity (tr.), vol. i.
p. 286 : " For clear-thinking, ethical natures, such as those
of Jesus and St. Paul, it is a downright necessity to separate
heaven and hell as distinctly as possible. It is only ethically
worthless speculations that have always tried to minimise
this distinction. Carlyle is an instance in our own times of
how men, even to-day, once more enthusiastically welcome
the conception of hell as soon as the distinction between good
and bad becomes all-important to them."
LAW 93
the teaching of Marcus Aurelius " Of what-
ever colour are the thoughts you think often,
to that colour does your mind grow; for the
soul is dyed by its thoughts."* The idea
is of a conscience through which, as through
coloured glass, a man sees all life the colour
of his sin. The law is inexorable here; and
the Church knows it better than some of its
critics.
In the third place, we may set the high
value which the Christian community has
always placed on the soul. Plato said much
in this direction, and the Church says more.
No school of thought has ever treated the soul
so seriously. Bear in mind the utmost that
the Church has had to say about Christ-
waiving for the moment any discussion of
the Tightness or wrongness of that and then
realise that it has taught that this Christ,
of Whom it has believed the most incredible
things, died for the meanest of mean and
vile men. The Stoic had to let some men
go. But whether we accept or reject the
Christian teaching as to the soul, it is clear
* Marcus Aurelius, V., 16,
94 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
that higher value is not to be set on the soul,
its grandeur, its worth, and its dignity than
the Church set on it - - pro quo Chrlstas
mortuus est and this without slurring in any
way the evil it saw in the soul.
The Christian Church has always recognised
the infinite element in the soul of man. This
is partly expressed in the doctrine of its im-
mortality. The soul is built for immortality
and for God; it reaches into infinity, in the
conviction that it must have God in all His
fulness the heart crying out for the living
God, crying out against its own evil, dis-
satisfied till it has God, and rests in Him. Tu
nos fecisti ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum
donee requiescat in te* And here again the
Church rests on experience.
On one of the great trunk roads of India
a missionary saw a woman measuring herself
in prostrations along the ground a familiar
form of pilgrimage. Through dust and dirt
and heat she moved onward, lying down,
marking the farthest point her hand could
reach, and rising and starting again from that
* Augustine, Confessions, i., t.
THE SOUL'S VALUE 95
point to prostrate herself and reach forward
again. She must have made seven or eight
hundred prostrations to cover a mile. He
asked where she was going, and she named
a shrine in the Himalayas, where from some
cleft in a valley a burst of natural gas
would from time to time leap and take fire
in the air and vanish a fleeting manifestation
of God. It meant for her a journey of a
thousand miles. Why was she going? " Uski
darshan" she said two words and no more:
" Vision of him."*
li Vision of Him ! " The Church knows that
that is the cry of the human heart, and it
knows, too, what that cry involves at last
the acceptance of God on His own terms of
love and righteousness. That sense for God
can be deadened in a man, if he is shallow
enough; but for anyone for whom life is
real, shallow views are impossible, as men
find out in the misery of life without God.
The intellect, working in the abstract, may
persuade itself that there is no God none that
can be reached; and you have the strange
tearing of the nature in two, the heart crying
*TJris story was told me by Mr. C. F. An4rews, of Delhi,
96 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
out, and the intellect arguing it down, and
pretending not to hear. The heart is right;
for peace is never reached till the intellect
accepts what the heart has known all along.
Instinct and intuition may take us very far
astray so, too, may intellect. It is interesting
in this connection to remark how, as men
grow older, and grow into the meaning of
human relations, and the deepest feelings
bound up with them, they turn away, like the
poet Virgil, from even the most splendid
rationalism.
Lastly, for the present for we must return
to this in the lectures that follow we may
remind ourselves that while others have recog-
nised the reality of evil and the inexorable
character of law, the grandeur of the human
soul (to some extent) and its cry for God,
for the Church all these things point to Jesus
Christ. The central conviction the crowning
offence and error of the Church in the eyes
of all its critics from the beginning till now
is the belief that " God was in Christ recon-
ciling the world unto Himself " that Jesus
Christ is the same, yesterday, and to-day, and
forever.
NO DESPAIR IN THE CHURCH 97
To conclude, I come to the conduct and
method of the Church in view of its con-
victions.
First of all, then, the Christian Church is
the one body in all the world incapable of
despair. The Stoic did despair : " When a man
is hardened to stone, how shall we be able
to deal with him by argument?" There is
not, after all, very much to be done with some
people by argument on that we can agree.
But the Christian Church, conscious of its
own story the company of Christian men,
each conscious of a new life in One " Who
loved me and gave Himself for me" knows
quite well what to do. The envoy of Christ,
remembering Who sent him, never hesitates.
He will not compromise, nor blink facts, nor
abate (like the Unjust Steward) the figure
upon the bill; he will ask the highest from
the man dead as stone, for anything less
would be an abatement of the man's worth.
He will not play with cheap systems of sal-
vation, as men did in the Graeco-Roman
world in the early days of the Church, and
do still; but he will go with a simple and
clear-cut message, the outcome of his own
7
98 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
experience no mechanism, no dodge, be-
neath the dignity of the soul, but an offer of
forgiveness and power and new life in Christ.
The religious systems of the world may
be grouped under three classes not quite ex-
clusively, for some of them overlap two of the
classes, or even all three. There are the
religions of magic, found all over the heathen
world, and not there alone, perhaps schemes
of initiation, incantation, mystery, and, as the
Greek put it, "things done" Spo^o/a and
opyia for which in the early centuries of
our era a great apology was made in the name
of Philosophy by Plutarch and Apuleius and
the Neo-Platonists. To this we shall have
to return in another lecture. But a great step
forward had long before been made by Plato
himself, when, in his Republic, he made a clean
sweep of quacks and prophets and " sacrifices
and jollifications,"* and preached the religion
of Morals. In the Gorglas he proclaims that
there is no fear in the next world for the
man who spends his life " with his eye upon
truth " (rrjv aXijOetav OVCOTTWV) " for yOU will Suffer
* Republic, ii., 364 A 365 A.
MAGIC AND MERIT 99
nothing terrible, if you will really be
honourable and good, and practise virtue."*
That is a great religion, if it is followed in a
great and profound way, because, if a man
take it seriously, it will bring him into touch
with realities. But there he will learn its
limitations, for he will find, with St. Paul, how
desperately impossible are its conditions. If
he does not reach this point, there is a worse
peril, for, as our Lord taught about the
Pharisees, he will be liable to lose all sense
of reality altogether, and the religion will
decline into the pursuit of merit and " the
damnation of hell," as Jesus said. Yet this
old religion finds its advocates still, pleading
for self -culture and self -discipline which is
a higher thing than self-culture and the
service of men, too, (like the Stoics), even on
the basis of an unsatisfied heart.
But the Christian religion is quite other-
it is the religion of Grace, the only one. Its
faith is in the willingness of God to give all
that man needs in Christ, salvation from sin,
new and newer ideals of righteousness, a re-
* Gorgias, 527 D.
ioo THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
emancipated will, inward peace, and perpetual
joy. " Give what Thou biddest," prayed St.
Augustine, "and bid what Thou wilt."*
Whatever men may have to say about it, to
this the Church is committed. How impos-
sible the tasks are which lie before it, the
Christian community, after long experience,
knows better than anyone; and, as a result
of that long experience, there stands the faith
that God gives all and does all in Christ.
And here is our last point on this head.
Just as, when we dealt with the convictions
that make up the Christian faith, we found
all summed up in the sufficiency of Jesus
Christ, so here again, in the sphere of action,
we find Luther's words stand for the
experience of every Christian Nos niliil
sumus ; Christus solus est omnia. In the
centre of all, in life and work, the Church sets
the unexplored Jesus Christ, that historical
person who was nailed to the Cross, and who
still, in the faith of the Church, lives and
works and does all. We cannot tell you
all we want to know about Him; the Church
* Confessions^ x., 29, 40, da quod iubes et iube quod vis,
CHRISTUS SOLUS EST Q jiff? A 101
looks to eternity for some of that; there are
many things we cannot explain; but by
experience in life and work and faith, we have
found that all turns upon Him.
My last word for to-day is this. If we can
learn anything from history, if it has anything
certain to tell us, it is that, if any group of
beliefs, any body of doctrine, any faith, has
ever justified itself in human experience, it is
the Christian faith; or, if that seem too
sweeping a statement (I do not think it is), let
us say this that the results of the Church's
belief, and of its action upon those beliefs, are
such as to claim the very closest attention from
people who are in earnest with life. These
results are not to be lightly treated, but with a
full sense of the difficulties to be overcome
before they can be achieved, and of their sig-
nificance in the life of the man who knows
them. What, then, does the re-emancipation of
the will mean with its escape from the clutch
of habit, its triumph over the disastrous effects
of the stained conscience, and the hopeless-
ness and paralysis of sin ? Again, what is the
significance of the joy that has from the begin-
ning filled the Christian life, overflowing all
102 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
the obstacles, real enough, that militate
against peace ? What is to be said of Christian
joy as an index to the ultimate truth of
things?* And, lastly, what are we to say
of the power that goes with the Christian
life ? Criticism from without and self-criticism
from within, the consciousness of failure at
every turn, as the splendid ideals of Jesus
Christ shine more and more into the soul not-
withstanding all, the Christian Church has
been effective; it has been doing through
nineteen centuries what Jesus Christ pledged
Himself that it should do. I ask you, as
students of human nature and of history, Do
you realise at all in its fulness what that
means ? It is worth study.
*To this we shall have to return in the fifth lecture.
LECTURE IV
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE EARLY CHURCH
TO-DAY we have to consider the ex-
perience of the early Church to re-
capture, if we can, something of the
impulse and the happiness that made it the
joyous and powerful thing it was. But let
us first try to sum up the results we have so
far reached.
We have seen that our business in dealing
with the Christian tradition is verification
to get back to the facts and to know them in
their fulness, to win from them all their value
and significance.
In the second place, we have seen that we
must give a closer attention to experience as
embodied in the tradition of the Christian
community, and lay more stress upon the
probability of real truth being embodied in
some way in the main doctrines of the Church.
We may not accept, word for word, exactly,
what the Church has said as the final ex-
103
104 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
pression of truth, but we shall feel in it and
through it operative somehow in spite of
errors of statement some element of truth
that is real and vital.
Thirdly, we looked at the Church itself, and
recognised how it had been tested by the
criticism of the world, by self-criticism, by the
desire to compromise, and had so far estab-
lished its right to be heard as at least a serious
witness a witness, that is, who, however con-
fused in utterance, had truth to tell, and was
trying in all earnestness to tell it.
To-day we have to try, through the words
and literature of the early Church, to reach
what lies behind. The phrase of that day is
not ours, nor are the preconceptions; we
approach everything in a different way; but
we have to remember that none the less we
are dealing with human material, with a real
experience, and we must cultivate the imagina-
tion to penetrate an unfamiliar dialect if we
are to make anything at all of history.
There is a considerable body of early Chris-
tian literature, and perhaps no other literature
has ever had so strange a fate. One part of
it is familiar to every race of mankind, civilised
EARLY CHRISTIAN BOOKS 105
or uncivilised, beyond any books the world
has seen; and the rest of it in the Apostolic
Fathers, the Odes of Solomon, and the Apolo-
gists of the second century, is left to specialists
and ignored in general even by classical
scholars who study the Roman Empire. Yet
it cannot be denied that the instinct, or what-
ever it was, that made the New Testament
canon, was generally right both in choice and
in rejection. If we are really aiming at the
fact and truth of Christian experience, this
literature must be studied with the same
earnest enthusiasm as any other.
Mr. H. G. Wood has made a very telling
criticism upon one exponent of early Church
history, who has of late years taken pains to
be heard. " He has no theory of any early
Christian document; he does not explain how
it came to be written, by whom, or under
what impulse, or for what purpose. He never
explains a Pauline epistle as a document."
That is a most damaging criticism. What
sort of history can be written from un-
examined sources ? What is history without
what the Germans call Quellenkritik -
criticism of sources ? Has a historian, of all
io6 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
people, any right to use a book as an illiterate
person would ? A book is a book. But what
is a book ? That is a question worth thinking
about ; and classical study in this country has
declined for want of such reflection. How
does a book come into being? What is
its genesis? There is a fine passage in
Emerson's poem, The Problem, which answers
these questions :
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,
The canticles of love and woe.
Or, again, there are Carlyle's words, as he
gave the finished MS. of The French Revolu-
tion to his wife :* "I know not whether this
book is worth anything, nor what the world
will do with it, or misdo, or entirely forbear to
do, as is likeliest; but this I could tell the
world : You have not had for a hundred years
any book that comes more direct and
flamingly from the heart of a living man."
And again there are Goethe's lines :
* Carlyle's Life in London, i., p. 89.
LITERATURE AND LIFE 107
Denn es muss von Herzen gehen
Was auf Herzen wirken soil.
Literature is no mechanical product; it is,
when it is any good at all, the offspring of
passion " simple, sensuous, and passionate,"
are Milton's words to describe what a poem
should be; and prose is of the same family.
When a book reaches the heart of we will
not say a generation, for very often one
generation is not the best judge but of
several generations, and holds a place in the
thought and feeling of man for centuries
together, you must look well to it if you think
it did not come from a great human heart, but
was the mechanical product of ingenuity or
artifice. The ancient critic, Longinus, is right,
here as often, when he says that " sublimity
is the echo of a great soul."*
The German scholar Norden, in his book
entitled Kunstprosa, comes in due course to
the writings of Paul of Tarsus. " I find Paul
hard to understand," he says very honestly,
but he finds something in him that he
recognises. " So the language of the heart
Longinus 9, 2, vi^os fJ.eyaXo<t>po(rvvr)S
io8 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
was born again," says this critic; "since the
hymn of Cleanthes, nothing had been written
in the Greek language so full of feeling and at
the same time so splendid (nichts so Inniges
and zugleich so Grandioses) as the hymn of
Paul on love." Later on in his work he recurs
to this: "Both these hymns on love to God
and love to men (Romans 8, 31; i Cor. 13)
have given back to the Greek language, what
had been lost for centuries the feeling
(Innigkeit) and the enthusiasm of the Epopt
(the initiated) quickened by his union with
God. . . . How this speech of the heart must
have struck home into the souls of men accus-
tomed to listen to the silly verbosity of the
sophists ! In these passages the diction of the
Apostle rises to the height of Plato's in the
Phaedrus"*
One thing at least is clear to those who even
in a slight degree share Not den's knowledge
of the period that Paul thought infinitely less
about style than did the sophists, who thought
of nothing else, and at the same time he
achieved what they never reached. How did
* Norden, Kunstprosa II., pp. 499, 459, 509.
1 ' OTHERWISE THAN DISTRACTEDLY " 109
he manage it? The first thing in style is,
as Longinus put it, a great soul, and then
real thoughts and deep feeling. If a man will
be true to the depths of him, he will speak
well. Conversely, when we find life and
sunshine in the words of a poet or a religious
teacher when his style is strong and pure
with the simplicity and power of great music
when it takes us back into the very sanctuary
of a man's spirit, we shall expect to find there
things of eternal significance; and truth will
be one of them.
The rest of this lecture will be given to
the attempt to get behind the ink and paper
of the books of the early Church, to ask
not only what the writers say, but what they
mean and what they are, and how they came
to mean what they did mean, and to be what
they were. "Get first," wrote Carlyle, "into
the sphere of thought by which it is so much
as possible to judge of Luther, or of any
man like Luther, otherwise than distractedly;
we may then begin arguing with you."
First, then, let us study St. Paul for a little.
Autobiography is not the most cheerful of
words so many books with this label have
no THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
had neither Autos nor Bios in them; the
authors so often have not lived very much
nor been very much. But every real book is
in some sense autobiography. Dull as books
and lectures may be, they are apt to be
duller when they lack some autobiographic
element, tacit or explicit. However artfully
the writer of either may cloak the personal
element, Et quorum pars magna fui is in every
story.
Carlyle indicated as much when he wrote,
as we saw in a former lecture, of Novalis and
his books.* Paul, it might be said, never
wrote an autobiography, and yet never wrote
anything else. Imagine a formal auto-
biography by Paul: "I was born at Tarsus,
a city of Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city,"-
and what early influences played upon him,
and how he went to Jerusalem, and his first
impressions of it, and how he sat at the feet
of Gamaliel, till Gamaliel gave such an un-
certain note about the Christian movement
that the pupil saw it was time to take action
of his own and so on. No, if he had done it,
* See p. 59,
ST. PAUL in
there would have been all the usual trouble
about such works the delimitation of the
provinces of Dichtung and Wahrheit; and,
besides, a formal work of such a kind by Paul
would have been essentially false and non-
Pauline how could the real Paul ever have
spared the time, even in prison, for such in-
trospection? Erasmus called Paul's style
"pure flame," and there could hardly be an
autobiography that came half so flaming from
the heart of a man as that which Paul did
not write at all, but which escaped him when
he was dealing with other matters.
"O wretched man that I am! Who shall
deliver me from the body of this death ? . . .
There is therefore now no condemnation to
them that are in Christ Jesus; for the law of
the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me
free from the law of sin and death." A
passage like that is inexhaustibly full of the
man how are we to judge it, till we tingle
with the man's own passion for righteousness,
with his shame of failure, and the unspeak-
able joy he knows in the given life in Jesus
Christ? There is the story of his life in the
phrase at the head of several epistles, "the
H2 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
slave of Jesus Christ " in the clause, "Who
loved me and gave Himself for me " in the
simple utterance, '" The Lord stood by me
and put strength into me " in the after-
thought added, almost without intending it,
to the Galatian letter when it was finished:
" God forbid that I should glory save in the
Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the
world is crucified to me, and I to the world."*
Celsus, in his True Word, the first great
literary attack on the Church,f says that every
Christian, of whatever sect, quotes that
sentence. There may be many things in Paul
which, like Norden, we do not understand,
or to which, with Luther, we may say :
" Brother Paul, this argument does not stick,"
but our business is not with the word nor the
argument, but with the man. Can we explain
* An interesting and sympathetic account of Paul, as the
real interpreter of Jesus, is given by the Jewish scholar,
Moriz Friedlander, in the last chapter of his Religiose
Bewegungen innerhalb des Judentums im Zeitalter Jesu.
One of his phrases must serve here : " Paulus, der
geschworene Feind jeder Halbheit " is an excellent charac-
terisation.
t Written about 178 A.D.
HEBREWS 113
him, if we have never troubled to share or
to know his experience ?
Take another New Testament writer the
anonymous author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews, " the most cultured Greek of them
all," as his critics from Origen* to Norden and
Dr. J. H. Moulton agree, with his "masterly
handling " of " all the delicate shades of mean-
ing" of which the Greek literary language
of his time was capable a man who has given
to the whole Christian Church some of its
most moving language in relation to Jesus
Christ. There are, indeed, some who find little
in this epistle but old and obsolete metaphor,
awkward enough by now priest and altar,
sacrifice and temple to say nothing of Mel-
chizedek, and a touch of rhetoric which some
critics say they feel in it. But when one tries
to get an effective grip of the man and his
problem, his book or epistle comes home in
a new way. This is what he had to wrestle
through how can a man have a real religion,
capable of managing a genuine reconciliation
of the universe and experience, capable of
* Quoted by Eusebius, Eccl. Hist, vi., 25.
ii4 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
keeping him from temptation and carrying
him through martyrdom, if he cut himself
adrift from every means of grace of which Jew
or pagan had ever conceived, priest, sacrifice,
victim, blood, and the camp of Israel ? When
a man has fought his way to peace through
perplexities like these perplexities which we
can never understand till in some measure
we share them we may well be interested
in his conclusion; it will have the marks of
battle on it. When such a man speaks to us,
let us watch his tyle his words and their
order; he gives us a sentence, full and com-
plete, and then with a sudden leap of feeling
comes an after-thought, that tells us as much
again. " Jesus Christ yesterday and to-day
the same and for ever," he adds. Before
we criticise him, let us understand him.
The Fourth Gospel is in many ways one
of the most perplexing books in Christian
literature. If we study it on a level with the
other three, in order to an objective history
of Jesus, we are involved in the greatest diffi-
culties. For it is not so much a history of
Jesus as men knew Him in Galilee, as a record
of what Jesus had been, and had become.
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 115
to a man in the course of a long life. Our
problem here is to explore the experience and
the impulse from which the man writes. How
does a man come to write such sentences as :
" Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away
the sin of the world." Such a statement is
either rhetoric or autobiography. What is
the life so written? Have we touched it? Or
again: "God so loved the world that He
gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth on Him should not perish, but have
everlasting life " the words are too familiar,
and have been quoted too often, we feel,
Upon the topmost froth of thought;
but they were not so written. What has taken
the writer so triumphantly outside all national
barriers, Jew as he seems to have been ? What
has given him his conception of the love of
God taking shape in a story so shocking to
Jew and Gentile alike contact with the world,
with pain, with the damned? Or, again, what
does he mean by "everlasting life"? What
content beyond mere duration has the word
for him? What had he in mind in the way
of past experience when he wrote of the
promise of the Paraclete? If science bids
n6 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
us study the "life history" of plant and
animal, and make biology and not morphology
our aim, what of ideas ? Too often we study
them in the herbarium, as it were, or the
dissecting-room, and forget the soil and the
sky that made them and the life that was in
them. Is there an author who has suffered
more from this intellectual slackness on the
part of his readers than the writer of the
Fourth Gospel?
I turn now to the Apocalypse, and, as here
we reach more ordinary people, I propose to
linger rather longer over a crucial and most
informing passage. In doxology we come
nearer to fact than in dogma, for it is out of
doxology that historically dogma has grown.
The primitive Christian first went through
an experience; then he broke out in thanks-
giving and doxology for it; and finally he,
and other people, began to speculate on the
relation of the experience so stated to the
general sum of human experience and know-
ledge; and the result of this speculation was
called, in the language of the day, dogma.
For our present purpose we have to con-
centrate attention on the experience as the
THE APOCALYPSE 117
primary thing. The doxology then will bring
us nearer to this than the dogma.
The writer of the Apocalypse, whoever he
was, remains one of the most interesting
figures of the New Testament. He wrote
at a time when the Christian movement was
recognised for what it was by the Roman
Government and was treated accordingly ; the
sect was in a fair way to be stamped out
in blood. Yet his book is full of scenes and
songs of triumph "I heard the voice of
harpers harping with their harps: and they
sung as it were a new song."* He represents
a miserable handful of slaves and abjects;
he counts them by "thousands of thousands,"
and sees them glorified "these are they that
came out of the great tribulation. "f Behind
such vision lies experience. Like all prophets,
spiritual, political, or commercial, he reads the
future out of the present, and, from his picture
* As Wernle suggests, when one realises the clear call
the writer gives, and his note of triumph in Jesus, there is
little wonder that the martyrs " for the testimony of Jesus "
valued the book; and perhaps they did not like it less for
its borrowed imagery that too had associations.
f The omission of the definite article in the Authorised
Version obscures the situation.
u8 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
of the future, with care we can reconstruct his
experience in the present. And, in case we
cannot, he sums it up several times in his
doxologies.
The first of these will serve as a starting-
point. Like a Hebrew psalmist, he sets at
the beginning the keynote of the music he
has beaten out. " To Him that loved us and
washed us from our sins in His blood, and
made us kings and priests to God and His
Father, to Him be the glory and the power
for ever; Amen."
It has long been observed that the
Apocalypse depends more directly on books
than any other New Testament document,
and sometimes in a rather curious way. Here
the writer borrows a phrase from Exodus
(xix. fy: "Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of
priests and an holy nation." He knew well
enough that this ideal for Israel had not been
reached; Israel had set up a single man as
king and a separate tribe as priests, and had
abandoned the greater conception of a nation
in which every man was king and priest. The
race had abdicated. The Christian writers
claim the promise as their own it was
THE DOXOLOGY 119
certainly derelict. They maintain that the
followers of Jesus are in effect kings and
priests, set free from sin and standing in a
personal relation to God. The term employed
for " king " served also for the Roman
Emperor. But "king" and "priest" had
in antiquity a peculiar identity of suggestion.
King and priest, each belonged to some
guardian god, and shared his divine nature,
while each stood among men as a man set
apart and sacred each was tabu in short
the god's own, and guarded from common
touch by a divine sanctity and each again
had the mystical function of standing between
god and man, of mediating and bringing
them into effective relations. So much for
the new names given to the Christian by our
writer.
It is worth while to see to whom these
names are given. It was commonly remarked
for centuries that the Christians came from
the lowest classes. They were of the common
people "the most unlettered sort," as the
educated observed, and the hopelessly de-
praved, as more decent critics noticed with a
shudder. " Other cults call for those who are
120 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
holy, who are pure from all stain, and clean
of hands," said Celsus; but the Christian con-
stituency consisted of " sinners," precisely as
they said : " You mean the unjust, the thief, the
burglar, the prisoner, the robber of temple
and tomb ; whom else would a brigand invite
to join him?"* None of this criticism was
too strong. Roman slavery produced a class
of person unknown to us. " Far-seeing Zeus,"
said Homer, long before, " takes away half
a man's worth, when he brings the day of
slavery upon him."f Often in Roman days
slavery took the whole away everything that
made the man's arete, the essential group of
qualities and faculties that in combination
make him human. With the woman it
was perhaps worse. The " hired animalism "
of Tennyson's poem stood higher, for she
had a wage for her shame, and the slave-
woman had not. The female animal almost
stood higher, for while the slave had the same
sex she had not the beast's privilege of
bearing young. Man and woman, the slaves
acknowledged and accepted their degradation
* Quoted by Origen, Contra Celsum, iii., 59.
f Odyssey, xvii., 322.
THE SLAVE 121
and the lowest stage is reached when that
is done. Living on the basis of their own
worthlessness, what wonder if they justified
the free man's contempt for the slave? No
one had hope or help for them. " I thank
Thee/' prayed the Jew, " that I am a Jew and
not a Gentile, a man and not a woman, a
freeman and not a slave." The Stoic had
a gospel of self-help for men and women who
retained their will-power. There were, indeed,
slaves, as there were free men, equal to this
stern gospel there was Epictetus, at least
but such men were very few. This was one
of the things that wrecked the Roman Empire
the class acknowledged by themselves, as by
others, to be below redemption.
The first thing to be done was to bring
these hopeless people to another opinion about
themselves. The Christian went to the slave
and told him that the Son of God loved him,
and had died for him a ransom.* To a mind
philosophically trained the phrase was in those
* Cf. Matthew xx., 28. The many phrases and analogies
connected with " ransom " and " redemption " gain new
meaning for us when we think what a note they sounded for
the slave.
122 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
days as silly as it was repulsive. But the
Christian believed it, and in no ordinary way
he believed it with such effect that the slave
came to believe it too, and became a man
again. It was one of the features of the days
of persecution that slaves, men, women, and
girls, had found a new stamina, a new dignity.
They would face fire and torture and beast
without fear or flinching. In common life
they began to shed the servile vices; they
became honest and pure; they "received the
Holy Spirit," as Christians put it, and showed
an extraordinary gift for winning men by
sheer force and beauty of character. The
doxology in the Apocalypse answers word for
word to the facts. To find the ultimate
philosophic expression and account of what
happened, and of what made it happen, is a
secondary matter; the first thing is to realise
the fact in its wonder.
In the third century, a short but very re-
markable little book was written, by whom
we do not know. Later on it was appended
to a tedious production known as the Gospel
of Nicodemus, and there it is still to be read,
perhaps intact, wonderful in its contrast with
THE HARROWING OF HELL 123
its setting.* It is the oldest story of the
Harrowing of Hell. It tells how Christ, as
it is said in the Creed, "descended into hell,"
and set free its captives, and ascended with
them. One of these captives tells it in the
first person. It has the naive sincerity of a
true poet, and the large and honest imagina-
tion. The story begins in hell, and we over-
hear Satan and Hades talking with some
anxiety as to what may follow yet from the
Crucifixion of Jesus; for now "into the dark-
ness there dawned as it were the light of the
sun, and it shone, and we saw one another."
This sudden gleam of light, and especially
the imaginative use of it by the writer in the
last sentence, bring out for us the age-long
darkness of the grave with strange feeling.
A great voice like thunder is heard calling on
the everlasting gates to open that the King of
Glory may come in. Hades bids make fast
the gates of brass and defend them; but the
forefathers who had been with him from the
beginning mock him. Again the voice
* I think the English reader will find it most accessible
in Hone's Apocryphal New Testament.
I2 4 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
sounds, and Hades asks : " Who is this King of
Glory ? " The answer comes : "A Lord strong
and mighty, a Lord mighty in war," and at
the word the gate of brass and its bars of
iron are shattered, the dead are loosed from
their bonds, "and we with them," as Jesus
of Nazareth enters. The King of Glory
stretches forth his right hand and raises up
Adam, and "blesses him on the brow with
the sign of the cross"; and then, with
patriarchs, prophets, and martyrs, He " leaps
forth" from Hades. Still holding Adam by
the hand, He brings them all to Paradise,,
where Enoch and Elijah meet them, and then
a more interesting figure. To him the fathers
said: "Who art thou that hast the look of
a robber, and what is the cross thou bearest
on thy shoulders?" And the penitent thief
tells them his story, and how, when he came
to the gate of Eden, "when the fiery sword
saw the sign of the cross, it opened to me
and I came in." Aoid then the story ends,
simply enough: "All this we two brothers
saw and heard."
To choose a sentence or two from such a
piece is to do it some injustice, but a
THE NEW LIFE 125
sympathetic reader will feel that here we have
a great piece of imaginative literature, and
he will ask himself from what impulse it
came.* Surely some new and first-hand
experience of the real and eternal lies behind
every such creation, and we have again to
be sure, before we criticise, that we under-
stand whence came the impulse that stirred
the poet to such power and beauty. It is
no idle enquiry, for experience of our own
is involved in it.
We have now to go a step further and
touch upon some of the experiences and con-
victions that underlie all early Christian
literature, and I begin with the new life.
St. Paul writes to his friends and converts
with great frankness about the old life and
the new; he is as explicit as Celsus himself.
In his letter to the Corinthian church
(i Cor. vi. u) he runs over a series of horrible
and mean vices, and then says quite bluntly :
"And such were some of you; but ye are
*That it went to the heart of the Church is shown by the
frequency with which it was treated in poetry ; e.g., by
Prudentius, Synesius, and Ephrem the Syrian. The hymn of
Synesius upon it is translated by Mrs. Browning.
126 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are
justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and
by the Spirit of our God." He knew what
the streets of a great Hellenistic city and sea-
port were like "the great sinful streets of
Naples" and he and his converts knew
how bad the old life had been, " alienated
from God and without hope in the world."
Greek culture, as we know it in literature and
art, at its highest and most glorious, was not
the fruit of Hellenistic life in the Roman
Empire, nor is it representative of it. But
let us look rather at the new life.
One of the telling words used in the New
Testament to describe the change is " En-
lightened." The word to-day has lost its
charm and wonder. The great eighteenth-
century movement of Aufkldrung, or Illumina-
tion, had once, perhaps, hope in its very name ;
but that has died away into a very common
and dull day. The Christian, I think, took
the word from the Mysteries a symbol-word
of gladness. With eyes shut men went into
the holy place; there was a priest, the light-
bringer ; and in trance, perhaps, or in vision a
great light shone upon them as they drew
THE NEW LIFE 127
near to their god.* The Christian took the
word ; for him it was truer than for the Greek
and the Egyptian. He had lived in darkness
with the understanding darkened, and he
meant now that Christ, Himself the true
Photagogos,-\ had shone upon him and
brought him near to God; and now he lives
and moves in a new hope and joy, a hallowed
being. The New Testament word " Saint "
touches the same order of ideas ; it represents
a person set apart for a God fyos, sacer,
tabu the God's own, and immune from
unhallowed touch. It is good to linger over
the phrases, unstudied and spontaneous, in
which the Christian writers tell of the new
life "joy unspeakable and full of glory."
Familiarity tends to rob us of them, but at
a touch of the old experience they are alive
again.
In the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians
comes a description of Christian life even in
Corinth. "A profound and rich peace was
given to all, and an insatiable passion for
*The description depends on a passage at the end of
Apuleius' Golden Ass.
t Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, 120, j.
128 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
doing good; an abundant outpouring of the
Holy Spirit also fell upon all." Philanthropy,
I am afraid, is a dull word, like most long
words borrowed from the Greek and the Latin,
to describe in more dignified terms the
ordinary Christian virtues; and people who
value themselves to-day will have nothing to
do with "philanthropy" and "doing good."
They are almost technical terms, dulled by
use by uninspired people, like "oxide" and
" the subliminal self." But we must look at
words as they come first from the poet-souls
who make them, trailing clouds of glory, and
making the heart beat and the eye brighten.
One of the historian's tasks is to re-create the
past by means of worn-down watchwords, as
the numismatist will tell you the history of
a dynasty and a civilisation from a series of
battered coins. They are dull enough now;
but back to the beginning! There cannot
have been many people with " an insatiable
passion for doing good " in any Graeco-Roman
city; and what a Godsend even a Corinthian
Christian must have been with such a passion
for the wrecks and waste-products of a com-
mercial and pleasure-loving city that organised
THE NEW LIFE 129
its gains and its pleasures on the basis of
slavery ! Think of the change in such a man
the new dreams that haunt him of a char-
acter like Christ's, the new passion for service
of his Master, the new standards ! " Which is
ampler?" asks Tertullian,* " to say, Thou
shalt not kill ; or to teach, Be not even angry ?
Which is more perfect, to forbid adultery or
to bid refrain from a single lustful look?"
Think of the phrase in 2 Peter (ii. 14) describ-
ing a certain type of person " having eyes full
of adultery " and later Greek literature illus-
trates what numbers pf such persons there
were in a Greek town. " But ye are washed,"
says St. Paul. '
It is not merely that a change has been
effected, and a great one, but that it is to
continue; it is to be a progressive develop-
ment. Paul uses a number of commercial
terms when he writes to Corinth, and by
means of one of them illustrates his conception
of the Holy Spirit. It is the arrhabon^ or
* Apology, 45.
f2 Cor. i. 22; v. 5. The reference to sealing in the
first passage has suggestions worth study. The seal was
the one way of protecting property in a household of slaves
1 3 o THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
earnest, that God gives a man as a guarantee
that He will fulfil His promises to him. God
is going to do for the Christian something (as
Paul puts it) "exceeding abundant, above all
that we can ask or think," and meanwhile
gives him a token or pledge which binds God
and that is the Holy Spirit. So much has
been said amiss about the Holy Spirit, and
such difficult psychological problems are
connected with the whole matter, that state-
ments of this kind are received with hesitation.
But Paul is not talking theories, he is
speaking from experience ; and that experience
we have to re-capture before we are entitled
to dispute his phrase. In another passage
(Gal. v. 22, 23) he speaks of the fruits of the
Spirit as "love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, and self-
mastery," and he adds that they that are
Christ's have "crucified the flesh with the
passions and the lusts." The line of a second
century poet comes back to one's mind as
(cf. Clem. Alex., Paed., iii., 59), and it is a metaphor, I
think, already used in the Mysteries (cf. Clem. Alex, Protr.,
120).
THE NEW LIFE 131
one thinks of this glad new life which Paul
describes
Ver novum, ver jam canorum, ver renatus orbis est.
" New spring, singing spring, spring the world
re-born" that is the story of the Church.
Paul's list of fruits is very interesting. The
last, self-mastery, was a Stoic virtue; but the
rest did not ripen easily in the Hellenistic
world, and the rocky soil and Northern slope
of the Stoic garden were too hard for them.
But most people would have said they were
not virtues for men at all rather for women
and slaves, as Nietzsche and his followers
would say to-day. Yet how much would be
lost to life if these fruits of the Spirit were
taken away or ripened no more !
It is to be noted that, in so summing up
the fruits of the Spirit, Paul holds the same
outlook as Jesus. It was He who brought
these virtues into their new place and sig-
nificance, and it is to be remembered that
He is the centre of all this Christian move-
ment. Men in the second century were
reading the four Gospels day by day as a
part of Christian life and practice;* their life
* Justin, Apology -, i., 66, 67 ; Clem. Alex., Strom., vii., 49.
132 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
and their thought are Christocentric. Men
may theorise as they please about the necessity
of a historical base or a historical element
in religion; so far as we have got, experience
shows how much it does signify. It has been
said that in every age the condition of
religious progress is the return to the historical
Jesus. In every age we are apt to re-conceive
Him in the terms of our own day and our own
thought; but the next generation has other
thoughts and other ideals, and revolts against
those of its parents. So long as the Church
turns to the historical Jesus the real Jesus
of history it can face these changes. But a
Jesus with the date-mark of a particular school
of interpreters an eighteenth-century Jesus
or a mid-Victorian Jesus is not to be thought
of for a moment. The Gospel message is
" Come unto Me," and the function of the
Church is to bring men to Christ and to
leave them with Him to learn of Him for
themselves.
We may notice in the next place, among
the experiences of the early Church, that it
has triumphed over nationalist barriers.
" TJ}pu wast slain/' run trje words of the New
"EVERY KINDRED AND TONGUE" 133
Song, "and hast redeemed us to God by Thy
blood out of every kindred and tongue and
people and nation." Paul urges the same
thing in the Epistle to the Colossians when
he emphasises that it is Jesus Who has " made
peace" He is the great reconciler. It may
be the case that, as some critics say, Jesus
never spoke the words at the end of the First
Gospel, "Go ye into all the world"; but,
as Ignatius says: "He that truly has the
word of Jesus can hear His silence also,"*
and the Christians had heard it and had gone
into all the world before Matthew wrote. A
contemporary Greek writer remarks of the
philosophers that "some of them do not go
to the people, despairing, perhaps, of their
ability to make the many better. "f Socrates
* Ignatius, a d Eph. 1 S- It is worth remembering that
Ignatius was already on his way to martyrdom when he wrote
early in the second century.
tDio Chrysostom, Or., xxxii., 9 (to the Alexandrines):
Some, aTreyvwKores tcrws TO /JcAn'ovs av Trooyo-ai TOVS TroAAov?;
some, like the Cynics, degrade philosophy ; and it is rare to
get a man ready to face ridicule from goodwill and care
for others. Even if Dio is gently suggesting his own
virtues here, it is fair to say that he did frankly preach
morality to his audiences. On the unfriendly attitude of
Pharisaism to the conversion of Gentiles to Judaism, see
134 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
used to say that he was a " citizen of the
world," and the philosophic schools were
recruited from all races. Greek culture and
Roman rule were tending to weld the races
"preparing the way for Christ," as the poet
Prudentius wrote about 409 A.D. But the
union of men in the Church was a deeper
one, for in the Church there was a place for
the slave, as we have seen, but he left the
name of shame outside. It is said that the
word " slave " is not found among the in-
scriptions of the Catacombs. It was the
Christian doctrine that master and slave were
redeemed in the same way by the same
Saviour ; and it is a historical and still visible
fact that if you begin to care for the crucified
Jesus, everybody else who* cares for Him
stands in a new relation to you. There is no
bond like it. Master and slave met at the
Eucharist in the early Church, to com-
memorate the dying of their common Master,
Who " took upon Him the form of a slave," and
Moriz Friedlander, Die Religibsen Beiuegungen des Judentums
im Zeitalter Jesu, p. 31. Contrast St. Paul a friend of
mine has pointed out that Paul's emotion is very liable to
break up his grammar, when he thinks of his mission to
the Gentiles or of Jesus Christ.
SLAVE AND CASTE 135
died a slave's death; and a new force bound
them together in a new spirit. And when it
came to martyrdom, a story like that of
Felicitas and Perpetua shows how distinctions
of lady and slave fell away in shame and
suffering shared for the One name. There
have been many reformations of Hinduism,
but none strong enough to prevail in the long
run over caste. The love of Jesus did this
for the Church from the beginning, and does
it for India to-day. The ultimate God of the
Graeco-Roman world was the abstraction
summed up, as we have seen, as " the deifica-
tion of the word Not" beyond and above
being itself, and far from the contact of any
emotion a God without love. What a con-
trast to the Christian's Friend who chose the
Cross! What could such a negation do to
touch or help the world, even if philosophy
had allowed such a thought ?
We have to study this early Church till we
understand it. My last instance for to-day
shall be a phrase which of itself proclaims the
difference of outlook that the centuries have
made. In some ten passages of the New
Testament we find " the foundation of the
136 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
world/' in connection with things and events
dated before it, or contemporaneously with
it, by the writers or speakers. We are not
used to-day to vision of such range; and we
have in consequence to shed a whole vocabu-
lary, and perhaps " Providence " itself would
go with them if we fortunately were not apt
to be a little illogical.
But the difference of outlook is still more
marked when we notice what kind of things
the early Christian conceived "as reaching
through all history from "before the founda-
tion of the Cosmos " for he uses a technical
term of Greek philosophy. He speaks of
"names written in the book of the Lamb
slain, from the foundation of the world"
this comes twice in the Apocalypse, while in
the Epistle to the Ephesians the writer speaks
of himself and his friends as " chosen in Christ
before the foundation of the world." Finally
the writer of the Fourth Gospel represents
Christ as speaking of the glory which God had
given Him, "for Thou lovedst Me before the
foundation of the world."
Frankly, there is not a phrase among (all
these but comes with a shock, almost painful,
" THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD " 137
to a man bred in the thoughts of our day.
They are repugnant to "the reason of the
present age," nor to the reason of this age
alone, as St. Paul very well saw. He was
left in no manner of doubt as to the judgment
of rational and educated people upon what
he had to say he, a poor Jewish spermologos,
a journalist, as we might say to-day. It is per-
haps remarkable how rarely the theologians of
to-day deal with the conceptions we have
picked out from these first-century documents,
when one reflects that the Christians of most
ages would not have recognised their faith, if
stripped of them, for the same thing at all.
The early Christian conceived that to God
Jesus Christ was not accidental, nor yet the
unforeseen product of an evolution that might
have miscarried. He held that there is a
thread running through all history; that
nothing walks with aimless feet; that a long
progress intelligible to reason is also guided
by reason, and that to no random goal. He
held this because it was clear to him from what
he saw, and from what he experienced, that
Jesus Christ was lifting men to a new plane
of life and thought, with the prospect of a
138 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
boundless vista of future developments up-
ward. A religion is to be judged, not only by
what it achieves in the present, but by the
germinating forces it perpetually renews in the
human heart by its promise of power in the
progressive disruption of every exhausted con-
ception in favour of a higher. In Jesus the
early Christian found such a hope, and he
refused to believe Him to be accidental or
anything short of God's highest revelation of
Himself. And, in the clearest and most
definite terms he could find, he said so he
said that, before the world was, God saw the
end for which He worked, without accidents
and without after-thoughts.
He went further; for, grasping that the
essence of Christianity is the realisation by
each individual soul that it is the object of
God's individual love, he boldly carried this
to the furthest point of possible emphasis-
God knew His own before He ever set hand
to creation He fixed beforehand the day and
hour, and worked ahead for those He loved,
as a father (in the parable) starts working
to win the bread before the child is hungry,
and even before the child is born. God knew,
THE PURPOSEFUL LOVE OF GOD 139
he said, and God arranged, at once for the
great Cosmos and for the last and least of
those who were to find in the Good Shepherd a
new access to the heart of God. With one
metaphor and another a name written in a
book, the paschal Lamb, the laying-down of
the Cosmos with endless variety of phrase,
he tried to drive home to every man the
supreme fact of God's love of each man, His
long prevision of each and His long provi-
dence for each. He knew very well he was
using metaphor. " For want of His name,"
said Clement, "we use beautiful names, that
the mind may not wander at large, but may
rest on these."* At all hazards he would
make clear the great fact of God's love as
antecedent to all things of Christ as the em-
bodiment of purposeful love of the universe
itself in all its range as a Cosmos indeed,
inspired and achieved by love, and subservient
in its last detail to love. And he aimed at
doing this by use of the best language avail-
able to him, and very telling language it was.
Such thoughts may not commend them-
selves to us; we may be afraid of them, as
* Clem. Alex., Strom, ii., 74, 75.
140 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
too large, too sweeping, too bold. But two
things may be said. These beliefs have a
great history, as worthy to be studied as any
other history for we are bound to study the
past till we understand it, and absorb it, if
we are to make steady progress in the
present. And, further, a faith congenial to
"the reason and the humanity of the present
age " (as history can show in many a surprising
instance) is not always very sure of the respect
of the next age. "A man's reach should
exceed his grasp," as Browning said. We
need a faith larger than we can be quite easy
about, if it is to be of much real use to us.
I end with what I began with this : we
have to reckon, as serious people, with this
story of the Church; to criticise it, not from
without but from within; to understand how
men came to speak as they spoke, and to feel
as they felt. Criticism, to be just, must be
identification. That is the duty before us.
Before we decide as to the final truth of what
they said, we must know to the full, and from
within, the evidence from which they spoke,
and the experience which gave them their
premisses.
LECTURE V
JESUS IN THE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES
OUR subject in this lecture is Jesus Christ
in the Christian centuries. We shall
not for the moment deal with the truth
of the Christian religion, for our aim through-
out is to enlarge our basis of facts before we
embark upon opinion. We shall try to look
into what the jeligion, true or false, has
actually effected ; and we shall take the belief
in Jesus as itself a historical factor, in order,
first of all, by measuring it against the forces
with which it has had to contend, to reach
some approximate measure of its real power.
In doing this we ought to include some
inquiry as to the sort of men and women
affected people like ourselves, with every
variety of temperament and temptation.
For there is nothing externally that marks
the Church as a peculiar body of persons,
unless, indeed, we recognise, as we may, that
there is something unique in the range of
i 4 2 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
character and disposition to which it appeals,
in the variety of natures which it wins and
uses.* In the next place, we ought to ask
whether a factor that works so uniformly for
the good of mankind, and, with all deductions
made that should be made for mistakes and
wrong tempers incidental to all human nature,
has forwarded the growth and development
of the human race, is, after all, a mistake;
whether, as some burning spirits suggest, it
ought to be the main business of all illuminated
people to rid the world of the Christian'
religion. We might go on to ask ourselves
whether it could be dispensed with, and, if
so, by what it could be replaced by
philosophy or economic changes, or both
or something else. And then we ought to
ask whether there is not some test of truth
in the correspondence between the needs of
the human soul and the Christian Gospel.
It is very often better for a lecturer to ask
questions than to answer them; so, while my
own way of dealing with them may not
*A closer study of the great Christian biographies would
\>e a great reinforcement to the Churches to-day.
THE POWER OF THE NAME 143
escape notice, I will not attempt categoric
answers to these questions. What I urge,
however, is that everything turns on how
deeply we care to go into realities; and a
large part of the lecture will be a repeated
reminder that we need to go very deep
indeed, if we wish to understand a human soul.
Let us begin by examining a contribution
which the belief in Jesus has made to human
life, which is apt to be overlooked. It is what
we may call, in language not very readily in-
telligible to Anglo-Saxons of our day, but
instantly significant to men of other races and
other ages, the " Power of the Name." And
here we shall have to make a short excursion
into Folklore.
Herodotus, in a well-known passage, tells
us that the women of Miletus would never
call their husbands by name.* All over the
world we come on the same reluctance to
reveal names. We meet it in the story of
Lohengrin, in the English fairy-tale, most
readily identified by the refrain that is its gist :
Ninny, ninny, not,
Your name's Tot Tit Tot !
* Herodotus, i., 146.
144 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
and in the strange fact, which Macrobius tells
us, that the priests of ancient Rome had a
secret name for their city.* For man, in the
primitive stage, name and thing tend to be
one in essence. The name is not a mere
convention; in some deep, mysterious bond
of nature it is the thing; and if anyone knows
the name, he is master in some measure of the
thing. Thus, if he learns the name of his enemy
and has some familiar spirit (for instance)
whose name he also knows, he can link these
names in magic to his enemy's undoing.
In the early days of the Christian Church,
in the Mediterranean world, as to-day among
the animistic peoples, we find the minds of
men infested with a belief, which to us is
almost incomprehensible, in a whole world of
spiritual beings or daemons, as the Greeks
called them. Elaborate accounts of the
daemons and their nature are given by
Plutarch and Apuleius. They lived in the
air; they were of mixed nature something
* Saturnalia, Hi., 9, 5. Ipsius vero urbis nomen etiam doc-
tissimis ignoratum est, caventibus Remanis ne quod saepe
adversus urbes hostium fecisse se noverant ipsi quoque host Hi
evocations paterentur si tutelae suae nomen divulgaretur.
DEMONS 145
between gods and men, between whom they
might serve as intermediaries. But they had
many activities of their own good and bad;
and they were generally recognised as the
chief dangers of human life. Some of them
were beneficent guardian powers ; and, from
one point of view, even the human soul itself
might perhaps be a daemon. The Egyptians
assigned the human body, area by area, to
thirty-six daemons, whose aid would be in-
voked according to ,the part of the body
affected by disease. Perhaps every passion
was induced by some daemon. Mischief of
every kind was due to them every ill legend
of the gods was their work; every ugly, cruel,
or obscene type of worship or sacrifice was
inspired by them; and they were constantly
the authors of disease and insanity. Such
words as daemoniac, nympholept, enthusiasm,
obsessed, possessed, hag-ridden or bewitched
along with incantation, enchantment, and
charm tell, for those who can understand
them, a long story of human trouble.*
* It may be permissible to refer to an article of my own
in the Hibbert Journal, vol. xi., no. I (Oct. 1912), on "The
Daemon Environment of the Primitive Christians."
10
146 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
If a man, then, knew the names and
affinities of these daemon powers, he could
use them, for the Neo-Platonist philosopher
argued that the universe is a unity, all things
linked to all, but some things more subtly
connected; and therefore if, as a modern
chemist uses are-agent to act on some element
or compound, a man will take in his hand
a certain stone, and, pronouncing a certain
name, will add a set form of prescribed
words, he is also automatically bound to
control some daemon-power.* This, of course,
he can set to harry anyone whose name he
knows. This is the essence of all magic.
So far I have used the statements of
Classical and non-Christian writers. This is
supplemented by modern evidence. Under
the dominion of spirits, the animistic
heathen is "bound by three fetters fear,
demon-worship, and fate. . . . Even his own
soul is a hostile power against which he must
* Cf. Clem. Alex., Protr., 58. The Indian name for the
form of words is mantra. See C. F. Andrews' Renaissance in
India, Appendix V., for Mrs. Besant's catechism. " Q. Does
the order of the words matter? A. Yes. Q. Can a mantra
be translated? A. If it be translated it loses its use."
DEMONS 147
ever be on his guard. It is fond of leaving
him; it allows itself to be enticed away from
him; it refuses to accept benefits from him.
. . . Animism seems devised for purpose of
tormenting men and hindering them from
enjoying life. To that must be added fear of
the dead, of demons, of the thousand spirits
of earth, air, water, mountains, and trees."*
Hinduism has incorporated much from such
old beliefs, and has thirty crore of gods
of one kind and another three hundred
millions.
Muhammadanism and Buddhism alike have
failed to break the power of these spirits;
Mrs. Besant and the Theosophists in India
invoke modern science to defend the use of
* Warneck, Living Forces of the Gospel (tr.), pp. 108, 109.
See also the most interesting book of my friend, Mr. J. C.
Lawson : A ncient Greek Religion and Modern Greek Folk-
lore, on the survival into modern Greece of the belief in
nymphs and worse things. Mr. Lawson tells us (pp. 48, 131)
how he once saw a Nereid or at least something which his
guide knew to be one, and would not wait to allow Mr.
Lawson a closer investigation. Mr. Lawson says (p. 281)
that people born on Saturday are credited with the power to
see their guardian spirits, as well as second sight. His
remarks on the survival of paganism in the Greek Church
(p. 47) deserve study it is the outcome of compromise
centuries ago.
148 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
charms, spells, incantations, idolatry, and
caste; they are covered by the vague term
"hiagnetism." "The water of the Ganges
was sacred because it was magnetised by the
great rishis. Hindus bathed at the time of
the eclipse to wash off the bad magnetism.
Idols were to be worshipped because they
were ' centres of magnetism ' which is put
into them by highly spiritual persons, The
religious marks were worn on the forehead,
because the ' materials used have magnetic
properties.' "*
Evidence for all this belief in daemons was
found and is found in abundance in all
illnesses,f especially sudden ones and those
that affect the mind, in every unfamiliar occur-
rence, and in the oracles; and plenty was
no doubt supplied by men who had any
natural gifts for hypnotism and legerdemain.
But the main point is that, evidence or no
* Andrews' Renaissance in India, p. 149.
f Mr. John Howell, of the Baptist Missionary Society, tells
me that, on the Congo, natives stricken with sleeping-sickness
will change their names (with proper ceremony) to hide their
identity and so escape the spirits which have sent the
disease. To be called, even accidentally, by their former
names troubles them greatly.
DEMONS 149
evidence, the human mind was, and is, in
such systems utterly depressed and paralysed.
Traces of the daemon-belief, common to
Jews as well as Gentiles, abound in the New
Testament. The "prince of the power of the
air that now worketh in the sons of
disobedience" (Eph. ii. 2), the familiar "prin-
cipalities and powers," can be supplemented
freely, but two crucial passages will suffice.
This, says Paul, "none of the rulers of this
world knew; for, if they had known, they
would not have crucified the Lord of glory"
(i Cor. ii. 8). And, again, "we wrestle, not
against flesh and blood, but against princi-
palities, against powers,* against the world-
lords of this darkness, against spiritual beings
of evil in the sky above us; so take to
yourselves the panoply of God" (Eph. vi. 12).
When, then, from all this we turn to "the
name that is above every name," and read
that at it the knees shall bow of things in
the sky (Phil. ii. 10), the old phrase takes on a
* Cf. also Romans viii. 38, 39 : "I am persuaded that
. . . neither principalities nor powers . . . shall be able to
separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord."
150 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
new meaning.* The magician lets loose upon
us all his allies or they may come against us
on their own account evil daemons, deceiving
spirits, powers of darkness, disease,-and terror
but we have a Name that is above every
name. " Even the very name of Jesus is
terrible to the daemons," wrote Justin Martyr,
tenderest and most beautiful of philosophers. f
" This," wrote Tatian, speaking of the Gospel,
"ends our slavery in the world and rescues
us from rulers manifold and ten thousand
ty rants. "J " I was now taught," writes a
modern Japanese Christian, Utschimura by
name, "that there was only one God, and
not many over eight millions as I had
formerly believed. Christian monotheism
laid its axe at the root of my superstition.
. . . One God, not many that was a glad
message to my soul." "There used to be
fairies here," said an old woman in the High-
* I do not suggest that this is its only meaning.
t Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 30. Justin and Tatian
belong to the middle second century.
$ Tatian, 29.
Warneck, Living Forces of the Gospel, p. 211.
DEMONS 151
lands to a friend of mine, " but the Gospel
came and drove them away."
One of the worst effects of this subjuga-
tion to daemons is the hopeless fatalism it
induces. Every impulse is the work of a
daemon; no effort is of any use; a man is
a plaything of devil-powers, and his life is
governed by stars above him. " It kills man's
nobler nature, and degrades him to a piece
of mechanism. . . . The very will for freedom
is bound. . . . Exceptions to the average are
more rare than among civilised nations."*
"We," writes Tatian, on the other hand, "are
above Fate, and, instead of daemons that
deceive, we have learnt one Master that
deceiveth not," and he specially mentions
Astrology as one of the evils from which he
has been delivered.! It is a curious reflection
that Astrology was the earliest form of
scientific determinism.
Now let us sum up the matter. We shall
not be in a hurry to commit ourselves to the
* Warneck, Living Forces of the Gospel, p. 121.
f Tatian, 7, 8, 9. Compare a very interesting discussion
by Tacitus, Annals, vi., 56. See Franz Cumont, Astrology and
Religion among the Greeks and Romans (1912).
152 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
belief that there are such powers of evil about
us, though men who know Paganism at first
hand sometimes lean to the idea, and modern
science has no evidence that they do not exist,
and is indeed invoked (not very skilfully) to
explain them. But we shall note that, what-
ever the truth about daemons, where Jesus
Christ comes in any real way into the hearts
of men, He liberates them from all fears of
supernatural enemies. He takes the terror
out of life by making it possible indeed,
inevitable that men live in the sunshine and
warmth of God's love, "children of love," as
an early Christian writer puts it;* and there
is no other religion with anything like the
bright atmosphere of love that the Incarnation
makes. The terrors go like the night-fears of
children when the room is flooded with light,
and one they love stands by them. The mind
is relieved of an intolerable incubus, that has
militated more and more against its powers;
and morality is made possible. Where
animistic beliefs rule, all things are allowed
to the mighty man with a strong soul; other
* Barnabas, 9, 8.
DAEMONS 153
men are bound by custom; he is free to do
what will secure his strength a curious co-
incidence between the crudest heathenism and
the philosophy of Nietzsche. Where Christ
comes, morality is changed from custom into
the spontaneous overflow of love to Him.
Whatever our judgment upon Christ -
whether we count Christianity pure delusion
or half delusion it does not alter the fact that
by the belief in Him men are set free to
think in peace of mind, and are lifted out of
the slough of selfishness which superstition
always makes. It becomes possible to appeal
to conscience, and still more to a new love
for Jesus Christ, that carries men far in all
that makes for good. The savage eats his
enemy to make his own heart braver; the
Christian, if he takes Jesus seriously, identifies
himself with his enemy in quite another way.
The Cross teaches us a new spirit in which
to approach those who hate us.
One thing more has to be added on this
point. The religion of the Graeco-Roman
civilisation, in which St. Paul moved, like the
religion of civilised India to-day, had many
rites and ceremonies and sacred legends, full
154 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
of cruelty and obscenity. The purer spirits, like
Plutarch, regretted this, and tried to explain
that such things must be the work of evil
daemons gods could not wish them; and yet
it was possible, Plutarch clearly felt, that even
the obscene thing was a symbol of something
great and true. In fact, he could not break
with tradition. Perhaps human sacrifices no
longer continued in his day; the point is
doubtful; but the shrines of Aphrodite still
kept harlots, hierodules, whose service and
whose earnings supported the temple, and
whose life was therefore hardly sinful.* The
same thing still prevails in modern Hinduism.
The dedication of little children to such
temples for such purposes is revolting to the
*The temple of Aphrodite at Corinth, Strabo says (c.
378), had at one time more than a thousand hierodules,
" whom both men and women dedicated to the goddess " ;
the temple at Comana, in his own day, had six thousand
(Strabo, c. 535, cf. J. G. Frazer, Adonis, p. 23) ; in Judaism
they were prohibited (Deut. xxiii. 18), though the regular
Hebrew word for a harlot means " consecrated woman "
(q'deshah). For modern India, cf. Meredith Townsend,
Asia and Europe, pp. 17, 101 : "When, in Lord Dalhousie's
time, a Bill was drawn for the prevention of overt obscenity,
it was necessary to insert a clause that the Act should not
apply to any temple or religious emblem."
CLEAN RELIGION 155
better minds of India, but it is still religion.
We need not dwell on such things. Jesus
Christ finally lifted religion out of any region
in which cruelty or uncleanness can be
associated with it, and made the very word
inaccessible to such taints, associating it with
truth and peace and quietness, the service
of men and a spiritual love of God.
In all this, whatever our final decision as
to Christ, it is fairly clear for those who care
for verifiable fact that the belief in Jesus has
worked for the good of men, and especially
of women. The significance of this comes
out when we study modern Indian move-
ments, and realise how for the Vedantist, as
for Plutarch and the Neo-Platonist, there is
a refined esoteric teaching for the initiate,
while the crowd may go on as before with
the old wickedness, miscalled religion. The
Christian Gospel has the same implications
for all men, educated or uneducated, in every
relation of life, the same ideal of conduct and
of truth. "One is your Master."
As our next instance of the working of the
belief in Jesus, we may take the conviction
that each individual man, however insignifi-
156 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
cant, is one "for whom Christ died." The
phrase is Paul's. I will give three cases where
it has been quoted or paraphrased, to show
how it works.
About the year 412 A.D. a new governor
came from Constantinople to Tripoli, and
began to misuse the people he had to govern.
Synesius, the most charming figure of the
century, hunter and scholar and philosopher,
a lover of books and dogs, and now bishop
of the place all against his own inclination
and sense of fitness, wrote boldly to the
governor, and told him he was using men as
if they were cheap; but "precious among
creatures is man, precious in that for him
Christ was crucified."* Synesius had not been
quite sure in his own mind that he was
properly and fully Christian, but need brought
him to realise this aspect of the death of
Jesus.
When Kett led his rebellion in Norfolk,
some envoy of the Court came down to
negotiate with him, and spoke of Kett's
followers as " villeins." Kett's answer is worth
* Synesius, Epist. 57, 13880.
"FOR WHOM CHRIST DIED" 157
remembering: "Call no man villein who was
redeemed by the precious blood-shedding of
Jesus Christ."
The third instance is one, the source of
which I have lost. It comes from the
eighteenth century, I think. A man, injured
in some accident, was brought into a hospital,
very near death, it seemed. One of the
surgeons proposed some drastic treatment,
adding, fiat experimentum in corpore vili
the easy quotation we all know. From the
table, on which the injured man lay silent,
came a Latin answer : Non ita vile pro quo
Christ us mortuus est.
In an earlier lecture I suggested that one
of the tests we may apply to a religion is its
power to protect men against us. Here, in
this old belief, which embodies the very
central proposition of the Gospel, that Christ
died for every man, is, I think, the most
powerful safeguard that the poor, the
oppressed, the black man, and " ordinary
people" have ever had against the great,
whether kings or civil servants, experts
and specialists, parliaments or plutocrats.
Nothing so far in India has really shattered
158 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
caste except Christ. If Christ died for the
pariah, it cannot defile the rest of us to touch
one whom Christ loved.
A missionary has told me a tale from
Bengal, which illustrates the matter. Village
people, returning to their village, found a dead
woman at the road-side, a little child beside
her, alive and trying to wake her. No- one
would touch the woman or the child; they
were wanderers, of unknown caste; and
religion forbade, till some Christian converts
came along, whose religion knew no caste.
Even so sympathetic a student of Jesus
Christ as Wilhelm Bousset counts it some-
thing of a defect in orthodox Christianity
that its system has not room for Bismarck
" If we accept in its entirety this conception,
if, that is, we take from modern life its very
essence, and force it to self-renunciation, we
shall have absolutely to cast on one side such
complete and great figures as those of Goethe
and Bismarck." That may be so. The ideals
of Bismarck are not those associated with
the Cross; but which mean more for human
good and happiness, or for progress ? We
have to realise that where Christ has touched
TYNDALE 159
human character in earnest, the Bismarck
ideals have been challenged at once, and all
the school of Bismarck has always realised the
danger of a free Gospel. A tame-cat clergy,
with a gospel of a mailed fist, may be
tolerable; but men, in whom Christ lives,
and men prepared to champion their fellow-
men in Christ's spirit these are intolerable
in any community ruled by the ideals of
Bismarck, English, German, Russian, or
Roman.
Let us take an illustration. William
Tyndale, " further ripened in the knowledge of
God's Word " at Cambridge, went to be chap-
lain in the house of Sir John Walsh at Little
Sodbury; and there, in controversy with a
learned man at his employer's table, he broke
out with the words : "If God spare my life,
ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth
the plough shall know more of the Scripture
than thou doest." His life was spared, and
he printed that English Testament, which,
with corrections and revisions far less sig-
nificant than we think, we still use.* He was
* Cf. Demaus, William Tyndale (ed. 2), p. 234, on the reason
for this.
160 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
carried further, and wrote Of the Obedience
of a Christian Man, and other works, which
did not commend themselves to those in
authority.* Here is his conclusion: "The
Gospel hath another freedom with her than
the temporal regiment [i.e, government].
Though every man's body and goods be under
the king, do he right or wrong, yet is God's
word free and above the king; so that the
worst in the realm may tell the king, if he
do him wrong, that he doth naught, and other-
wise than God hath commanded him; and so
warn him to avoid the wrath of God." The
seventeenth century shows what direct
association with the Bible in English meant
in the planting of New England and the
Civil War.f "The worst in the realm may
tell the king," and they did, to some
effect; and the results of seventeenth-century
Puritanism in the history of the emancipa-
* The significance of Tyndale's work may be divined from
the extraordinary and violent attack made upon him by
Sir Thomas More, who devoted more than a thousand folio
pages to him.
fOn Bible-reading, see G. M. Trevelyan, England under
the Stuarts, p. 60.
CHRISTIAN FREEDOM 161
tion of mankind are still to receive additions.
Does not Germany itself owe to Luther, and
his resolve to make the Bible a people's book,*
more than to the Bismarck school ? If there
are those who do not see the relation between
the belief in Christ and human liberty, at
all events the dread felt by governments in
the last four hundred years for people who
take the Bible seriously should be evidence
enough whether these governments be
Spanish Courts or American Presidents and
Cabinets fearful of slave-holders. It is not only
that men possessed of the faith in Christ will
assert the manhood and the rights of others,
but their own, modestly it may be, but
doggedly. But we need not turn to former
centuries. What is the meaning of the dislike
felt, and put into word and action, by govern-
ment officials, traders, exploiters of native
races, and rubber-dealers reputable as well
as indefensible to the missionary, but simply
this ? That here is a man who, in his faith
that Christ died for the black man, is pre-
* " This book is to be written in the simplest language
that all may understand it "Luther, letter of 30 March,
1522.
162 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
pared to insist that the white man shall not
abuse him, whether his motive be private gain
or good government. Christ's servant will
be the friend of the people for whom Christ
died ; he may be misguided, and he will often
be very inconvenient; but it means that,
wherever the missionary is, there will be a
reference of everything trade, government,
and personal conduct to eternal standards
rather than to a local magistrate's sense of
expediency.
But we can go a good deal further, if we
will look a little more into men. For we have
to recognise that the belief in Jesus Christ
has not merely been a restraining influence
which has kept men from abusing their
powers, but a deeper stimulus, which has
worked in a progressive training of conscience
and a new attitude toward those who need
help and care. For instance, the late Dr.
Verrall said that the radical disease, of which,
more than of anything else, ancient civilisation
perished, was an imperfect ideal of woman.*
No one who is familiar with ancient literature
* Euripides the Rationalist, p. in, note,
CHRIST AND WOMAN 163
can deny this low estimate, which comes out
most clearly when speakers and writers deal
without emphasis with the ordinary ways of
life. It is the same in India: "Day and
night/' say the Laws of Manu, "must women
be kept in dependence by the male members
of the family; they are never fit for inde-
pendence; they are as impure as falsehood
itself; this is a fixed rule." It seems clear
that in the earliest Indian as in the earliest
Greek literature woman is given a higher
place than she had later. This is significant.
Why, as civilisation advanced, should the
belief in woman decline? In the story of
the Church it is the other way. From the
first Christians have tended to take their
Master's view of woman, and have held " there
is neither male nor female." Their methods
of carrying out His principles, consistently
with the standards of decency that have from
time to time prevailed around them, show
curious deflections, but it remains that the
Church has steadily recognised the dignity of
woman.
Nowhere in Classical literature perhaps
nowhere in non-Christian literature is there
164 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
a teacher of men who is recorded to have
taken the interest in children that Jesus did.
The exposure of riew-born children was
common in Greece, and Plato and Aristotle
tolerated it in their ideal Commonwealths.
The plots of plays and romances turn upon it
with wearisome iteration. So that it was not
idly that the early Christian apologists
emphasised the fact that Christians do not
abandon their own offspring to death or the
brothel, and keep parrots.* "The childless
man falls short of the perfection of nature/'
says Clement of Alexandria. f " Who are the
two or three gathering in the name of Christ,
among whom the Lord is in the midst? Does
He not mean man, wife, and child by the three,
seeing woman is made to match man by
God?"J We are apt to attribute a certain,
monopoly in some vices to Southern
Europeans, and it is startling to find in the
Icelandic Saga of the Burnt Njal such a
passage as this : " This is the beginning of our
* Clem. Alex., Paed., iii., 30.
fClem. Alex., Strom. , ii., 139, 5.
| Clem. Alex., Strom., iii., 68, i,
EXPOSURE OF CHILDREN 165
laws " (the Christian law-giver speaks), " that
all men shall be Christians here in the land
and believe in God, the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Ghost, but leave off all idol-worship,
not expose children to perish, and not eat
horseflesh."*
Again, there is slavery, deeply rooted in
ancient life, the gangrene at once of morality
and industry, and it lasted on into the nine-
teenth century. Here it is curious to note
how men, who theoretically believed in the
complete inspiration of the whole Bible,
brought a higher criticism to bear, and saw
at a glance that the "mysterious destiny"
assigned to Ham's descendants in virtue of
drunken Noah's foolish curse was not of equal
significance with Christ's death for the negro
slave.f
The belief in Jesus has given men a keener
insight and a warmer and quicker sympathy;
* The Burnt Njal, 101 (Dasent's translation).
f Is it worth while noting that they were not content
with " soothing and cheering the victims with hopes of
immense and inexpensive happiness in another world when
the process of working them to premature death in the
service of the rich is complete in this," as Mr. Bernard Shaw
suggests ?
1 66 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
it has waked the dedicated spirit and taught
new ways of service. Believing heart and
soul in Jesus' death for men, Christians have
given their lives to help their neighbours in
the obvious duties of neighbourliness (which,
as Jesus said, the publicans also do), to re-
lieve poverty and to study its prevention, and,
above all, to train the moral standards of
their fellow-men, and to bring into their lives
that experience of Christ to which they owe
all themselves. This sense of being able to
lead men to a living Christ who will do every-
thing for them -- the very keynote of all
Christian service stands or falls with the
belief in Christ. What other religion has such
a message of joy? Where are people, who
can keep it right into old age, poverty and
pain, apart from Christ? What other Gospel
is there than His ? Ethics are splendid
subjects for discussion ^nd for declamation;
Christian principles have won much admira-
tion; but where, apart from belief in Christ,
is the force that can make anything of them ?
Think how that has stimulated men to lives
like their Master's. " Christ," wrote WyclifTe,
" saith within us every day: This I suffered
THE IMPULSE TO SERVICE 167
for thee, what dost thou suffer for me?"*
Men, as we can see all over the world, are
sporadically capable of wonderful lives of
service and beauty; but when it comes to
the use of poor material, who will make saints
of that? Yet the belief in Christ has done
it and does it still, affording the motive that
makes the consecrated life a thing of increas-
ing power. Let us ask ourselves what is the
significance of the amount and quality of
impulse that makes men missionaries and
keeps them ? Life among a primitive race is
apt to be hateful, stripped of all the amenities
we most prize, and exposed to everything that
jars the nerves, from incessant vermin to inter-
mittent murder ;f what is it that takes men
* Christus dicit in nobis cotidie : Hoc passus sum pro te, quid
pateris pro me ? See Lechler, John Wycliffe and his English
Precursors (2nd edition, Engl. tr.), p. 273, n.
t Cf. Livingstone, Travels in South Africa^ chapter xii.
(end) : " During a nine weeks' tour I had been in closer
contact with heathens than I had ever been before; and
though all were as kind and attentive to me as possible,
yet to endure the dancing, roaring, and singing, the jesting,
grumbling, quarrelling, and murderings of these children of
nature, was the severest penance I had yet undergone in the
course of my missionary duties. I thence derived a more in-
tense disgust of paganism than I had hitherto felt, and
1 68 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
and women into it and keeps them there glad
and eager without books or friends, and
their children thousands of miles away ? This is
one of the effects of the Belief in Jesus Christ.
Plato, long before Jesus was born, spoke to
men of a last judgment, at which Minos,
naked, should with very soul contemplate the
very soul of each in turn immediately after
death, " alone, without a kinsman beside him,
all the trappings of his life left behind on
earth."* Other men wove apocalypses round
myths after Plato ; and no doubt it contributed
something to morality. But think of the con-
trast of these rnyths with the Christian
conviction of the Great White Throne no
myth, but a certainty.
Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulcra regionum
Co git omnes ante thronum.
Mors stupebit et natura,
Cum resurget creatura
Judicanti responsura.
formed a greatly elevated opinion of the effects of missions
in the south, among tribes which are reported to have been
as savage as the Makololo."
* Gorgias, 523 E.
THE GREAT WHITE THRONE 169
Look at these lines their strange simplicity
of language, so closely in touch with the awful
simplicity of the thought, their freedom from
artifice, their austere beauty no random
products of happy accident, nor the ingenious
work of artifice. The whole scene lives and
moves before the poet's eyes he does not
frame it, he can hardly be said even to imagine
it there it is; and in nine words he draws
it, with no syllable of comment or reflection.
Is there anywhere in human speech so much
in nine words? And then a new thought
burns with pain in the poet's heart for he
grasps that he is no mere spectator he stands
alone before the Throne; so far as he is
concerned, heaven and earth have fled away,
as in the great description in the Apocalypse ;
and he cries aloud:
Quid sum miser tune dicturus,
Quern patronum rogaturus,
Cum vix Justus sit securusl
What has this belief carried with it this
recognition that the world and the individual
are judged in the last resort by Jesus Christ,
that His standards prevail, that the last word
i;o THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
is the measure of the stature of the fulness
of Christ? That from the scene every
vindictive element is eliminated, makes all
more serious. Through the steady facing of
this ultimate judgment of all life by God, in
accordance with the standards set in the
holiness and tenderness of Jesus Christ, the
Christian community has achieved and kept
a new recognition of the responsibility of the
individual, with the result of added concentra-
tion on the training of the soul. Goethe
speaks of "what an inaccessible stronghold
that man possesses who is always in earnest
with himself and with the things around him."
How could a man be more in earnest with
himself and with the things around him than
by living as Christians have constantly done
in full view of the Great White Throne?
Think of the self-criticism induced of the
steady reference of everything to Christ's
standards from beginning to end of the
spiritual force there is for the individual
Christian in the consciousness of his nexus
with Christ, past, present, and eternal. It
is possible to measure something of what it
all means by remarking what happens when
THE GREAT WHITE THRONE 171
the belief disappears a lowering of tone and
a certain hardening. If Christian teaching
here be set against 'Stoic or Buddhist, the
contrast is illuminating. Which has laid most
stress on the seriousness of life, and on the
importance of the individual man, and done
it most effectively? And human progress
depends at once on the value set by all upon
the individual and the earnestness with which
he lives his life. In these matters there are
few things in history to match for significance
and worth the plain Gospel of the Christian
Church, that Christ died for the man, and
Christ will judge him.
But beside the historical effect of this
doctrine, we have to study its origin. How
came the Christian community, within one
generation of Calvary, to the conviction that
the historical Jesus, whom they had known,
with whom they had talked and travelled
a crucified provincial, and one of many such
was to sit upon the judgment-seat of the
universe? The cross and the throne were
surely incompatible ideas; and yet they are
linked deliberately and for the sake of a
man whom they had passed on the street.
172 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
What was the experience that led the fol-
lowers of Jesus to a faith like this ?
"The love of Christ constrains us," said
Paul. After all, if we wish to understand
Christianity, we must come closer in to it,
and consider, not merely what it has done to
safeguard and to develope society, but what
it is for those to whom it yields most of its
meaning. What has come from the sense
that the Christian has always had, clearly or
dimly of being the object of the love of
Christ, of having been sought by Him, and
found, and redeemed by Him, of being to
Christ not a mere item of humanity, but a
person and dear to Him? What has been
the effect of the peace and joy of belonging to
Him, of being His ? Here it may be objected
that this is just Christian folklore not a very
impressive criticism; but once more we will
look into the thing, and try to be sure that we
understand it, before we pronounce upon it.
Mr. Lowes Dickinson, in one of his essays,
suggests that to "most of the best men" the
whole conception of miserable sinners re-
deemed by Jesus Christ is "simply without
any meaning at all." So, too, it appears to
FORGIVENESS 173
animistic savages, who are mostly not very
conscious of any sinfulness or of much respon-
sibility. But with men who grapple with life
in earnest, and find how, when it is taken
seriously, it teems with problems of action
and responsibility, a more severe sense is
found of what is asked of them. 'The contest
with Evil, we feel, is the essence of our moral
life. But then, on the other hand, the contest,
our faith must suggest, is relevant to world-
issues, somehow essential to the whole. In
fighting for Good we are assisting something
real that is divine." These, again, are Mr.
Lowes Dickinson's words in the same essay;
they represent, apparently, his own view ; they
are certainly very like what a Christian would
have said. But a Christian would add:
Supposing that, in this contest relevant to
world-issues, where, in fighting for Good, I
ought to be assisting something real that is
divine, I have in point of fact failed fallen,
that is, below what, I see, was the ideal
conduct and was perhaps possible? Seneca,
the Stoic, felt .something of this, and used
to survey every night his day's failures and
successes: "I hide nothing from myelf; I
174 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
pass over nothing. For why should I be
afraid of any of my errors, when I can say :
4 See that you do it no more, now I forgive
you.' "* Seneca was a lovable man, but even
his friends have to own that other people,
rightly or wrongly, did not forgive him quite
so easily. At all events, there are many, and
these among the best of men, who cannot
forgive themselves and have not done it
men who feel in sober earnest that if they
are not to be burdened for ever with past
failure, if they are to be clear of old taints,
if they are to be relieved of the obstacles that,
as a result of the characters they have
developed, block their access to other men,
it must be by another, and that this other
is in plain fact Christ Himself. That is the
common Christian belief, shared by all the
Christian communities; and, if Mr. Lowes
Dickinson is right, "most of the best men"
must, ex hypothesi^ be outside those com-
munities. Each man must decide this for
himself; but our present concern is to see
what the love of Jesus is for those who find
* Seneca, de ira, Hi., 36, 3.
VICTORY IN CHRIST 1 75
most in Him, and one point, on which they
are all agreed, is this belief that in Him the
sin of the past is taken away. They certainly
live on the basis of being able, by His strength
daily given, to overcome the repeated impulse
of evil from without or from within, and of
being, in the New Testament phrase, "kept
by the power of God." "We are more than
conquerors through Him that loved us."
That is the Christian language, right or
wrong.
With this aspect of Christ as the giver of
the victory over disorder, as the one power
that can "keep our hearts and thoughts,"*
we may associate the contribution of the
historical Jesus and the permanent Christ to
sanity in the common business of life, to the
quiet mind, to sense in religion. Here is a
religion that is not trance or ecstasy, nor
ritual and ceremony, neither delirium nor
Spwpeva, "but righteousness and peace and
joy in the Holy Spirit"; and this works out
in the most ordinary affairs of human inter-
* Perhaps it is worth while to note that, Phil. iv. 7, St.
Paul wrote " thoughts," and a little study of his experience
of thoughts and their movements may explain what he meant-
176 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
course. Neither George Fox nor John Wesley
started with any idea of an immense develop-
ment of English industry and commerce, as
the result of his work very far from it. They
thought of eternal life. How, then, have the
societies they founded done so much in
English trade? When one reflects upon the
material on which Wesley, at any rate, had
to work, the wonder grows. It is evident
that conversion meant in hundreds of cases
what it means still a clearing of brain, and
a disentangling of faculty, which, quite apart
from spiritual things (if one may use so
careless a phrase), involve an extraordinarily
heightened effectiveness in the mundane
affairs of buying and selling, making and
planting, guiding and directing.
Have we studied enough the place of
prayer in the ordering of life and in the
development of character? What does its
perpetual reference of everything to the will
of Christ mean in self-criticism and self-
correction? Do we realise enough what
Christian people have gained in every way
from this constant reminder of the love of
Jesus, of His life and death, and the associa-
PRAYER AND PAIN 177
tion of the soul with its Saviour? There are
those who call all this delusion, auto-
suggestion, and the like. We may ask if
any other delusion, any other variety of auto-
suggestion, has done so much in making solid
character, sane, healthy, normal, and effec-
tive? Can we persuade ourselves that in a
rational universe delusion does better than
truth? Prayer, we must remember, for the
Christian is nothing without Jesus Christ. It
is worth while to weigh the effect of the love
of Jesus in this direction also.
With this we may connect the new attitude
to pain. Jesus Himself, we read, deliberately
associated Himself, His claims, and His
nature, with suffering. That fact the Church
could not forget, nor would its critics allow
it to forget it. He was " crucified in weak-
ness," and it was remarked that He refused
the anaesthetic draught. And a part of the
Christian life, for Paul, at least, was identifica-
tion with Christ on this side of His ex-
perience " the fellowship of His sufferings."
" With Stupidity and sound Digestion man
may front much," wrote Carlyle in Sartor,
but these are not the endowments with which
I?
178 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
the Christian faces pain he is sensitive to
it, and must be, if he is to do his work in.
the world. How else can he have sympathy
with people whose first need it is? What,
then, has it meant to men to realise the
first-hand knowledge of pain that Jesus Christ
had, pain of body and mind and heart to
know that He understands what He is to
heal?
I have been told by a missionary from
India that once, ill with fever, she lay groan-
ing, and, I suppose, scarcely knowing what
she said or why, she kept repeating "Ah!
me! ah! me!" Her ayah overheard her
and, mistaking the syllables, said: 'Yes,
Memsahib, that is it; Amen! Amen!" and
the white woman learned anew the lesson she
had come to teach. This is the effect of the
love of Jesus in making men and women
willing to bear pain as long as He chooses
they shall, in the faith that what His love
assigns or tolerates is not very much amiss.
It, too, must have contributed more to man-
kind than we remember. Think of Bunyan's
contentment to be in prison, " God . . .
satisfying of me that it wa His will and mind
THE LIFE OF JOY
that I should be there/' and his resolve after
twelve years of it to continue there on the
same terms " till the moss shall grow on
mine eyebrows."
On this follows naturally the new life of
joy that we find in the Christian Church the
new song, as it is called in the Apocalypse.
"A musical thought," says Carlyle,* "is one
spoken by a mind that has penetrated into
the inmost heart of the thing; detected the
inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that
lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of
coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists,
and has a right to be, here in this world. All
inmost things, we may say, are melodious;
naturally utter themselves in Song. . . . All
deep things are Song. It seems somehow the
very central essence of us, Song; . . . See
deep enough, and you see musically; the
heart of Nature being everywhere music, if
you can only reach it."
The early Christian did reach it. The Holy
Spirit, said Hermas, is a glad spirit.f Synesius
* Heroes and Hero Worship, Lecture III.
t Shepherd of Hermas, Mandates l 10, gj.
i8o THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
was told the same by old men when he was
depressed at becoming a bishop, and they also
told him that the Holy Spirit gladdens His
partakers.* Augustine found the Church
glad; and so it goes on through the ages.f
The hymn-book is a volume of Christian
evidences the product of generations of
thinking and living. Thought and feeling,
inherited experience and individual experi-
ment, all go to the making of a great hymn.
We do not give enough attention to what
lies behind, and lies in, our hymn-books.
How much man so to speak must there be
in a hymn, or any poem, if it is to last
a generation, and many generations, and still
express the deepest thought and experience of
God that men know? How much of life is
there in Jesa dulcis memoria? It has to be
remembered, too, that the hymn-book is in
the main a Christian product. Cleanthes
wrote a sort of hymn to Zeus or Fate; but
nobody sang it. The Christian hymn implies
the congregation an entire community shar-
* Synesius, Ep. 57, p. 1389, Migne.
t Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Paed., i., 22 : The Church
{he one body that remains rejoicing always and for ever.
THE HYMN 181
ing the same happiness; and Jesus Christ is
the "inmost thing" whence it all comes.
Thus, the biographer of Francis of Assisi
writes: "Drunken with the love and com-
passion of Christ, the blessed Francis did
at times make such songs, for the passing
sweet melody of the spirit within him, seething
over outwardly did oftentimes find utterance
in the French tongue, and the strain of
the divine whisper that his ear had caught
would break forth into a French song of
joyous exulting. At times he would pick up
a stick from the ground, and setting it upon
his left shoulder, would draw another stick
after the manner of a bow with his right hand
athwart the same, as athwart a viol or other
instrument, and, making befitting gestures,
would sing in French to the Lord Jesus
Christ."* Poetry, as Wordsworth put it, is
"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feel-
ings."t
I take one illustration only a hymn made
by the first English hymn-writer, the mystic
* Speculum Perfections, cap. xciii. The Mirror of Perfection,
tr. Sebastian Evans, p. 165.
t Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
1 82 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
Richard Rolle of Hampole (? 1290-1349),
a precursor in some ways of the Reformation,
e.g., in his emphasis on the love of Christ.
He marks three stages in his course, which
he calls calor, canor, and dale or ; and the
singing came to him by surprise, and after
that his experience is what he says quite
simply : Totiens glorior, quotiens nominis tui,
Jesu, recorder. His theory of the religious
life is in amore Dei canere et jubilare quasi
raptus super terrena, in se deficere et in Deum
pergere. Here are a few of his verses :*
I sytt & syng of lufe-langyng fat in my hert es bred :
Ihesu my keyng & my joyng, whyne 1 war I to f e led ?
Ful wele 1 wate in al my state, in joy I sulde be fed :
Ihesu me bryng til J>y wonyng, 3 for blode fat )>ou base
sched.
Demed he was to hyng, 3 fe faire aungels fode :
Ful sare fai gan hym swyng, 4 when fat he bunden*
stode,
His bak was in betyng, & spylt hys blissed blode,
pe thorn corond fe keyng, fat nayled was on fe rode. 6
* The Latin sentences will be found in Horstman's edition
of Rolle, vol. ii., Introduction, p. xiv. The verses are in
vol. i., p. 76.
1 Why not? 2 Dwelling. 3 Hang. "Beat. 5 Bound. 8 Cross.
RICHARD ROLLE 183
Whyte was his naked breste, & rede his blody syde,
Wan was his faire face, his woundes depe & wyde;
pe iewjns 7 wald not wande to pyne 8 hym in }>at tyde :
Als streme dose of )>e strande, his blode gan downe
glyde.
Blynded was his faire ene, his flesch blody for-bette;
His lufsum lyf was layde ful low & saryful vmbesette.
Dede 9 & lyf began to stryf whefer myght maystre
mare,
When aungels brede was dampned to dede 9 to safe
oure sauls sare.
Lyf was slayne & rase agayne, in faire-hede 1 ' may we
fare ;
And dede' es broght til litel or noght, & kasten in
endless kare.
On hym }>at }>e boght hafe al )>i thoght, & lede )>e in
his lare" ;
Gyf al )>i hert til Crist )>i qwert, 12 & lufe hym ever-mare.
If Art is the offspring of Joy, we have
also to remember Charles Lamb's emphasis
on the sanity of true genius. When, then, we
find in the Christian life the combination of
the deepest and intensest joy with sanity and
self-discipline, we have surely favourable con-
ditions for great Art. While Christ's teaching
7 Jews. Torment. 9 Death. lo Beauty. "Learning. 12 Joy.
184 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
seemed to some to suggest that all things
temporal are vain, to others it was as clear
that the historical Jesus did not live in
a vain show rather in a beautiful world,
the work of His Father. Historically, in
Christ Art found itself again, and pro-
duced great works of deeper significance.
The new value of life and of man was
bound to tell. This is one way in
which the joy associated with the belief in
Jesus Christ has affected mankind. It is a
large subject, and it would take us too far
and too wide in historical research to pursue
it; for the moment all we can do is to note
that the debt of Art to the Gospel is far
larger than people of the artistic temperament
sometimes recognise. Their quarrel is with
its control and control is yet the one thing
needful for such temperaments, if they are to
achieve Art.
Two points only I wish to suggest while
we are dealing with Joy. Most of us miss
a good deal of its value, because we contuse
it with more fugitive emotions, and come to
look on it as a mere idle flash, like summer
lightning that illumines nothing. That is
11 THE DEEP POWER OF JOY " 185
superficial criticism, as Wordsworth would tell
us:
With an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
A great poet is apt to be more of a
psychologist than we suppose, and a saying
like this, taken with Wordsworth's descrip-
tion of the poet as one " who looks at the
world in the spirit of love,"* should lead us
to a truer estimate of Joy and its significance.
With this in our minds we shall be less
disposed to undervalue Joy as an index to
fundamental Truth; and when we realise the
perennial joy that keeps breaking out in the
Christian community, with its "deep power"
of insight, work, and endurance, we shall be
better able to measure the meaning of the
love of Jesus.
For, in the next place, the joy that springs
from love, like love itself, points to a personal
centre. If Wordsworth's love of Nature and
joy in Nature ,seem to suggest that this is
wrong, the reply is that for Wordsworth
* Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
1 86 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
neither was Nature impersonal, nor were
animals, or even flowers and plants, incapable
of personal feelings.* It is the abstract noun
that is the most hopeless of all things, barren
of comfort and barren of power. That sort
of mistake the Christian Church has gener-
ally managed to avoid, and the reason lies
in the fact that the very source of everything
was for the Church a historic personality.
There have always been people for whom an
abstract proposition is invariably more con-
vincing than a fact; but most of us walk
better with at least one foot at a time on
earth. It has been the salvation of the Church
that Jesus was a person, and not a doctrine. No
one, as Dr. Rendel Harris once put it, can sing
How sweet the name of Logos sounds!
On the contrary, Giacopone dei Todi, the
friend of St. Francis, comes far nearer the
real thing in his hymn on the Nativity :f
Fac me vere congaudere
Jesulino cohaerere
Donee ego vixero.
Our last point in this long lecture shall
* See Lines written in Early Spring, 1 798.
t Cf. Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assist, p. 286.
CHRISTIAN HOPE 187
be to remind ourselves of the place of Hope
in Christian experience:
Hope, the paramount duty that Heaven lays,
For its own honour, on man's suffering heart.
Hope is not an easy virtue. There is death
to grapple with and all men's theories of
death extinction and the transmigration of
souls, "eternal re-dying " as it has been called.
Life, when one is young and forgets age and
death, is a gay thing for the pagan ; but every
pagan litany ends in a shriek of terror, or
the grim, set teeth and hard mouth of despair.
From the first, however, it has been noticed
that the inscriptions on Christian graves in the
catacombs and elsewhere have a different note
from those the pagan carved.* The belief
* Cf. Marucchi, Christian Epigraphy (Eng. tr.), No. 34:
IN NOMINE
QVIESCIT
and No. 84, a curious combination of Greek and Latin :
AHMHTPIC ET AEONTIA ^
CEIPIKE <I>EIAIE BENEMEREN
anchor
TI MNHC0HC IHCOYC fl
O KYPIOC TEKNON . dove
1 88 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
in immortality rested on Jesus Christ, and
there it still rests a faith that finds help in
several suggestions of value, but in the long
run rests on Him.* Men who believe in
Him will take the risk of there being no<
eternal life ; in any case they do not care much
about it apart from Him.
The Christian martyr deserves more
sympathetic study than he has had. There
were foolish and noisy martyrs, but their talk
need not obscure for us their action. Still,
in the main, the martyrs were quiet and com-
posed. " Miserablest mortals," writes Carlyle
when he reaches Louis XVI. on the scaffold,
" doomed for picking pockets, have a whole
five-act Tragedy in them, in that dumb pain,
as they go to the gallows, unregarded; they
consume the cup of trembling down to the
lees. For Kings and for Beggars, for the
justly doomed and the unjustly, it is a hard
thing to die." Yet, with a full sense of pain
and shame and popular execration, utterly
unhelped by human sympathy, men and
* Cf. Herrmann, Communion with God, p. 290 (Eng. tr.) :
" We cannot think of the personal life of Jesus as some-
thing that could ever be given over to annihilation."
THE CHRISTIAN MARTYR 189
women faced death, quite gladly, and quietly.*
It is easy to say: "Yes, they looked beyond,
and did it for eternal rewards." Eternal
rewards look poor on the other side of the
vivicomburium, the stake and the faggots.
The motive, however, was not the thought
of what Jesus Christ would do for them, but
a great consciousness of what He had done,
of what He was sheer gratitude and love.f
The same sure hope shows itself in work
and service. Marcus Aurelius' famous Diary
is surely the most desperately hopeless book
ever written. Omar and Ecclesiastes have a
clear enjoyment of their literary work;
Marcus had as little joy or hope as ever man
had who got through a life of work without
hanging himself. But the Christian did not
work without hope. " Christ lives," wrote
* Clement of Alexandria (Strom., ii., 125) quotes Zeno's
saying, that the sight of one Hindu enduring the flame was
better than all the declamations about pain, and he points,
not unjustly, to " the boundless fountains of martyrs daily
before our eyes, being burnt, impaled, and beheaded." On
martyrdom, perhaps the best things to read are Tertullian's
Scor place and On Flight in Persecution.
f See on this Clement of Alexandria, Strom., iv., 14, on
love to the Lord as the motive in martyrdom.
1 9 o THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
Luther, "and does not sit at the Emperor's
but at God's right hand, else we should have
been lost long ago."* The vision of the
triumphant Christ may seem to some a fancy;
yet what it has meant in constraining power
and in resultant victory it is not easy to com-
pute. It is the men who have believed in
the eventual supremacy of Christ who have
won Him what supremacy He yet has, though
they themselves justly enough would say
that it was He who did it through them. The
great note of Christian song is given in the
Apocalypse : " Thou wast slain and Thou hast
redeemed us. ... To the Lamb be blessing
and honour and glory and power for ever
and ever."
Throughout this lecture I have tried to set
out side by side what has been actually
achieved by the Christian Church and in the
Christian man, and what the Church the
community at large and the individual in
particular has said to explain how such
things were achieved. My task has been
history rather than philosophy; and if the
* Letter of 9 July, 1530, to Justus Jonas,
THE FACT AND ITS MEANING 191
Church's language has been dreadfully un-
philosophic in the judgment of some people,
still, it is the historian's business to remember
Othello's bidding:
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.
We shall not understand Church or saint,
republic or trust company, poet or warrior,
on the basis of a revised version toned down
to suit a priori judgments. We must have the
actual word and deed, however foolish; and
we must remember especially the historian
must remember that word and deed are
nothing till they glow with the light of the
whole personality behind them. This and
that the Church has done; this and that,
one Christian saint or another; and we know
it. Nothing in this lecture is unfamiliar 01
out of the way. It is all as common as can
be; not a street-corner crowd with a Salva-
tionist officer in its centre, but the story of
the Church in the centuries is there. My
task is to remind you of what you know, and
to ask if we understand it in all its wonder and
significance. Not till then can our opinion
THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
be final. It is a story of power. The language
of the Church and its explanations may be
all wrong; but it represents a real force. If
there is better language to express that force,
let us have it by all means;* but if the better
language leaves out, as sometimes happens
when tales are improved, the gist of the whole
story then the old language will be nearer
the fact. The Christian Church has tried
again and again to express what most it means
in other language, but it has not succeeded;
it can find no other account of love and power
than that they are bound up with Jesus Christ.
* Supposing the better language found, the first experi-
ment might be to substitute it for the familiar expressions of
the New Testament, and to see how the book read when
Jesus had been eliminated in favour of the more accurate
expression.
LECTURE VI
THE CRITICISM OF JESUS
SO far in the course, of which this is the
last lecture, our aim has been to dis-
cover along what lines we may reach
the actual experience of the Christian Church
setting fact, in the first place, before theory,
in the endeavour to understand what the
Church means before we pronounce upon it.
From the start we have realised that
experience is hard to grasp in its fulness in
any case, and is only to be known by such
an identification as will let the original
factors act upon the mind again, and, as far
as possible, in the original way. Point by
point, in our study of the Church and its
experience, we have been brought back to
Jesus Christ, for at each step we found
the Christian community at one in the con-
viction that everything depends upon Christ.
In every phase of its life the one thing that
decisively differentiates its experience from
13 m
I 9 4 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
that of the world around is its relation to Him.
He is the historical source of the whole move-
ment; He is the moving factor still; such,
rightly or wrongly, is the fixed belief of the
Christian Church, after a great deal of experi-
ment, both in trying to minimise the place
He must hold, and in trying to avail itself of
what it calls " the unsearchable riches of
Christ." Throughout, a tacit challenge is
offered to the critic : "Do you understand
Him? Do you see what it is that drives
the Church back on to Him in every age and
in every situation?" Great as the part has
been which the Christian communities have
played in human history, the whole, according
to the Christian, is, after all, a mere phase of
the activity of Jesus Christ. The statement
may sound preposterous or paradoxical, but
for the moment it does not concern us to
pronounce judgment upon it. Our business
as we have agreed so often is to realise
before we judge ; and, however odd the funda-
mental conviction of others may sound to us,
we have to see for ourselves what they really
mean, and what they are trying to express-
not least when this conviction is strongly held
THE JUDGMENT UPON CHRIST 195
by a community the thoughts and lives of
whose members have so profoundly affected
human history.
This lecture will be devoted to the con-
sideration of some methods of approach to
the pivotal question in every study of the
Christian movement viz., the personality
which is its centre. N o man, however possessed
of truth himself, can make up the mind of
another; Jesus Himself never attempted to
do that for anyone; but it is possible to put
evidence before men, or, better still, to suggest
ways in which they may apprehend it for
themselves by personal adventure.
Why must we undertake to form any
judgment upon Jesus Christ? Why is it im-
possible to let Him alone ? In the first place,
because we are confronted by the historical
Christian Church, and cannot get away from
it, however much some of us may wish to be
rid of it. The Christian Church is there;
the whole of Christian history is there, with
all the endless ramifications of influence it
has exerted upon mankind. To refuse to
consider such matters is to cut ourselves off
from humanity and its experience, to count
196 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
too much of it alien to us. It is only
possible to be human as one is open in heart
and mind to the life of all men; and to be
closed to what has meant so much is to be
half-men at best, to lack that sympathy and
intelligence for others which makes us men,
and by which alone we can hope to grow.
We cannot by our own choice cut ourselves
off from the deepest force mankind has
known a factor as powerful in the present
as in the past and keep our manhood
undiminished.
There the Christian Church stands, and in
the centre of all things for it is Jesus of
Nazareth. There are those who make des-
perate efforts to disprove His historicity, to
convince themselves that He never existed.
Such endeavours are quite intelligible ; if the
Christian Church has to be got rid of, Jesus,
the historical Jesus, must go* first; and every
attempt made to torture historical evidence
to suggest that He never taught and never was
crucified at all, is a recognition that for the
Church all depends on Him.
A religion, it is sometimes urged, is the
weaker for having an historical figure as its
THE HISTORICAL BASIS 197
centre and resting on an historical basis ; and
Christianity, accordingly, is doomed to share
the fortunes of the historical Jesus. Thus
the Swami Vivekananda, the great leader of
the Vedantic movement in modern India,*
urges that Hinduism alone can be the
universal religion for mankind, for " all the
other religions have been built round the life
of what they think an historical man, and
what they think their strength is really their
weakness, for smash the historicality of the
man and the whole building tumbles to the
ground. Half the lives," he continues, "of
these great centres of religion have been
broken into pieces, and the other half are
doubted very seriously. As such, every truth
that has its sanction only in their words
vanishes into air again." We need not discuss
the Swami 's principles, which bear the usual
marks of quick thinking, but we may accept
one of his sentences and apply it to Jesus
Christ, for whom he no doubt designed it:
" Smash the historicality of the man and the
whole building tumbles to the ground."
* See C. F. Andrews, The Renaissance in India, pp. 128-132,
158-159 ; Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, pp. 252-260.
198 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
Whether a religion needs a historical basis,
or is better without one, is another issue, and
is at best a rather abstract question. The
main issue here for us is the historicity of
Jesus. If the ordinary canons of history, used
in every other case, hold good in this case,
Jesus is undoubtedly an historical person. If
He is not an historical person, the only
alternative is that there is no such thing as
history at all it is delirium, nothing else;
and a rational being would be better em-
ployed in the collection of snuff-boxes. And if
history is impossible, so is all other knowledge.
Another line, however, is suggested, which
has the merit of sense, and has, moreover,
such support as some supposed historical
parallels will give. Jesus, it is conceded, is,
of course, historical, as Zoroaster, Buddha,
Socrates, and Muhammad are historical.
Each of these four gave mankind a great
impulse, and so did Jesus; and neither in
their case nor in His does the value of the
religion rest on the person of the teacher.
The suggestion is attractive, but one or two
things diminish its importance. In neither
of the four parallel cases can it be said, as
THE FOUNDERS OF RELIGION 199
in the case of Jesus, that the influence of the
teacher as a personality has not declined as
the generations have separated men from him.
The schools of Socrates and of Zoroaster are
practically extinct apart from two interest-
ing but small communities of Zoroastrians
in Yazd and Bombay.* Buddha's religion
or philosophy is not, in the form in which he
taught it,afaith that greatly moves the masses
of mankind. The religion of Islam bears on
it, indeed, the impress of Muhammad's per-
sonality a fatal inheritance, which keeps men
in a backwater wherever the religion of the
Quran really prevails. On the other hand,
no one can say that since the Reformation the
Christian nations have been retarding the
world's progress. We may lament that they
have had so many wars and been guilty of
so much wrong done against primitive
peoples, but we must recognise that these
defects they share with all mankind, while the
progress is their own. There is something
about Christianity, candid students of human
affairs will admit, that is of value. What is it ?
* On the Zoroastrians of Yazd, see E. G. Browne's delight-
ful Year among the Persians, chapters xiii. and xiv.
200 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
What is the real value of Christianity?
There are those who say at once: "Not its
theology." That, they urge, stands very much
on a level with similar constructions, as
fanciful and as unproven, which other re-
ligions can show; there is little choice in
Folklore, they tell us. But the ethics of
Christianity are sounder. Christians may not
actually manage to "love their neighbours
as themselves," indeed, some clever people
say it is better they should not quite succeed
at it but their average decent grasp of the
ideas of altruism and social service is a good
thing for society, and it would be a pity if it
were lost. On the other hand, it is somietimes
urged against the Gospel that it is essentially
in its ethics that it fails; that it teaches men
submission and contentment, to turn the other
cheek and to bear with oppression, confiscated
cloaks and commandeered miles; that it is,
in reality, by jiow, essentially an engine of
middle-class industrial tyranny.*
* Mr. Bernard Shaw, for instance, says: "Christianity, in
making a merit of such submission, has marked only that
depth in the abyss at which the very sense of shame is lost "
and so on. History is against him, if that counts.
THE REAL VALUE
Whatever has to be said of Jesus, no one
can read the Gospels with any intelligence
and suggest that He was the emissary of any
government or middle class, inculcating ideas
to secure their predominance. However much
may be uncertain, it is certain that He was
an original man earnest, quick, clear-
sighted, and fearless, no man's agent. If
oligarchies and despotisms have used the
Church that bears His name, and applied
parts of His teaching to their own ends, they
have had as often reason to regret it when
men caught His mind and studied His
thoughts un-garbled. His teaching, He would
have said, was never meant for second-hand
use. He, at all events, never aimed at being
a captain of echoes. It is not real criticism to
judge Him by echoes, nor by organisations
that have lived on echoes.
We turn, then, to His teaching to that
"sublime ethic" in which we are told to look
for the real value and here we find un-
expected allies. Modern Jewish students of
ancient Judaism tell us that there is very little
that is original in the teaching of Jesus, as
Christian scholars would see if they would
202 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
take the trouble to go to the original
documents instead of lazily depending on St.
Paul or the warped narratives of the Gospels.*
Even the so-called Golden Rule is found in a
negative form in one of the Jewish fathers. f
Jewish morality, it is said, has been steadily
written down; it has always been as good as
Christian, and the great Jewish moralists have
*For a thorough-going defence of Jew and Pharisee, see
Gerald Friedlander, The Jewish Sources of the Sermon on
the Mount (London, 1911). His view is that "the career of
Jesus as prophet and Messiah was an entire failure " (p. 6) ;
" the Lord's prayer is merely an adaptation of nine verses
of Ezekiel" (p. 165); "we have not seen any good reason
to prefer the teaching of Jesus to that of the Old Testament,
and of the Scribes and Pharisees " (p. 45). Mr. Friedlander's
polemic against Mr. Claude Montefiore is significant. A very
different view of Pharisaism is taken by another Jewish
scholar of the same name Moriz Friedlander " brought
up," as with real feeling he says in self-defence, " in
Pharisaism, which I learnt to know from its noblest and
deepest side, which I lived up to manhood."
f It is interesting to find the same kind of comment in Mr.
Yoshio Markino's book, When I was a Child (p. 93). " The
latter [the New Testament] was a great disappointment for
me. Of course, the Sermon on the Mountain is very high
ethic, but these were not new lessons to me. Many Oriental
philosophers have talked about the ethics equal to that
sermon long, long ages before." The book is full of in-
terest for anyone concerned in any way with the spreading
of Christianity in the non-Christian world.
JEWISH PARALLELS 203
a parallel for everything of worth in Chris-
tianity.
To this reasoning two replies have recently
been made. The Jewish scholar, Moriz Fried-
lander, frankly takes the line that Jesus
offered the Pharisees something higher than
they knew, and that they made a fatal mistake
in refusing it.* Wellhausen's famous reply
takes the Jewish attack more simply "Yes,
it is all in the Talmud and how much else ! "
We may, however, ask a further question.
Is it only because there is inferior matter in
the Talmud that Christ prevailed? Is the
world really so apt to be moved by moral
maxims ? By catchwords, yes men in groups
* Moriz Friedlander, Die Religiose Beiuegungen innerhalb
des Judentums im Zeitalter Jesu (Berlin, 1905) ; Synagoge
und Kirche in ihren Anfange (Berlin, 1908). He speaks
of Jesus " being like a meteor streaming in light across the
world, whose kindling and enlightening rays could never
again be extinguished "; " and if that light was veiled (verhullt)
by short-sighted and dark Pharisees and worldly priests, it
broke out and still breaks out " (S. u. K., p. 151). " Jesus
died a heroic champion for the truth and for the people's
redemption. He died because he tore the veil from the face
of the hypocritical Pharisees the ' coloured,' as the Talmud
calls them and showed the great masses their true nature "
(S. u. K., p. 155). " For this work of man's redemption,
Jesus lived and offered himself up" (R. B. t p. 339).
264 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
and communities are from time to time the prey
of catchwords, but not for long, as Abraham
Lincoln's well-quoted saying suggests. But
the world moved by maxims ?
Alas ! the great world goes its way !
It never did and it never would consider the
Rabbis or their maxims-
Far less consider them again!
Let them show how they anticipated Jesus
in every moral precept He gave what does it
matter ? Who cares ? It was Jesus, not Hillel,
that conquered the ancient world. EN TOYTOI
NlKAwas never thought or said of any Jewish
symbol. If Christianity were no more than
a heap of precepts, it might interest men
to-day as little as the Talmud. We need not
invoke the evidence of Paul, who had at least
as good a knowledge of first-century Judaism 1
as most of us have. Our Jewish critics have
cleared the air for us, and helped us most
materially. If the sublime ethic, the altruism,
and so forth, are all in Judaism, then the real
value is somewhere else. As Mr. J. M.
Robertson says : " The fundamental source of
error in this connection is the assumption that
mere moral doctrine can possibly regenerate
THE DIFFERENTIA 205
any society independently of a vital change
in social and intellectual conditions." We
may differ as to how this vital change is
to be produced, but the sentence as it stands
is sound. It is a vital change that is needed,
and the Christian Church has always known
it and said so. The differentia between the
Christian faith and all other religions is the
personality of Jesus Himself. "When one
loses Christ," said Luther, "all faiths (of the
Pope, the Jews, the Turks, the common
rabble) become one faith."*
We have come back to our problem again
the formation of some serious judgment
upon Jesus Christ Himself. Here is the force
that historically has transformed the thoughts
of men, their standards, and their life. The
old world to which He came has become
new; the Lamb of God has taken away
already much of the sin of the world. We
have to study how He has done it. He begins
with a group of a dozen or so men, living in
great intimacy with Him; and I am not clear
that there is anything in all Christian history
so full of wonder as the transformation of
* Quoted by Harnack, History of Dogma, vii. 199.
206 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
these men.* Again and again it has come
to me with surprise, even with embarrassment
how came the change in them ? What made
it ? Through them again He has forced Himself
upon the world quite quietly. The tide itself
could not come up so noiselessly. The world,
itself, in an oblique way, has accepted His
canons for the criticism of other people. It
has recognised Him, too, as its chief difficulty,
the very ground and foundation of the Church
of which it is so weary. He stands the
permanent life of that Church, which has
sacrificed so much and done it so gladly for
Him, and which only lives, it assures us, in
virtue of His perpetual presence.
Here we touch a theological problem, which
I am wishful to avoid at present. We have to
think at once of the historical Jesus and of
the permanent Christ, and if we plunge im-
mediately into the vexed question of their
relations, it will take us into an area where
it may not as yet be profitable to spend our
time. For this is, above all, a matter that is
not to be settled on a priori grounds, on the
basis of our preconceptions. It was precisely
* See p. 171.
DECISION AS TO CHRIST 207
to avoid this that throughout this course we
have gone to history first, to enlarge our range
of actual facts and to deepen our under-
standing of the facts we already have. For
the facts with which we have to deal are
not objective dead things like empty shells
among pebbles on a beach but living things,
like Luther's "truths with hands and feet";
not always intelligible at the first glance, but
always relevant.
Bearing in mind how much we have to
learn and to assimilate before we are ripe
for a judgment upon Jesus Christ, we have to
realise that such a judgment has to be made.
All day long, as Jesus hung on the cross, the
crowds passed Him; and each man's life was
affected by the judgment he made or did not
make. The priest or the Pharisee who
mocked the soldier who sat at the foot of
the Cross and diced the women who wept
the pious people who turned away their faces-
Simon who carried the cross each man's life
was conditioned for ever by his attitude that
day, whether he thought so or not. So,
through the centuries, the procession of man-
kind has moved past the Cross, judging, and
208 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
made or unmade by their judgments
upon it. You and I are face to face
with it now; some judgment upon it is
inevitable we cannot escape it. He is the
central figure in all human history, and on
our attitude to the centre all depends for us.
On our judgment rests in great measure our
use and place in society as we ignore or
admire, turn away or follow, hate or love,
Him who has meant and means most for all
mankind. How are we to judge Him?
In the rest of this lecture I want to offer,
not a judgment, but a method a caution and
a reminder of some qualifications that we must
have, if we are not to judge in a shallow way.*
First of all, let us recapitulate a few points.
We have to remind ourselves again and again
that we have to touch the fact independently
of preconception, to know it from within, and
to know it in its full significance and its true
perspective. A hundred years or so ago,
Tieck, writing of Novalis, said: "A spirit of
* Bengal's sentence at the beginning- of his Gnomon (Pref.
vi.) supplies a useful caution : Quisquis in Scriptura inter-
pretanda aliquid netware vult t se ipse explorare debet quo jure
id fad at.
THE DIFFICULTY OF CRITICISM 209
such originality must first be comprehended,
his will understood, and his loving intention
felt and replied to; so that not till his ideas
have taken root in other minds, and brought
forth new ideas, shall we see rightly, from the
historical sequence, what place he himself
occupied."* The words may surely be applied
to the more difficult task we have in hand, and
yet how often it is true that, as Bishop
Creighton wrote: "We are clear by missing
out half the elements involved."
We have further to remember that it is the
task of criticism to distinguish the highest
values, for these are the true ones. Anybody,
it is said, could write a set of verses as good
as such and such a poem of Wordsworth ; but
the question is, Who could equal him at
his best? "A line of Wordsworth's," wrote
Lamb, " is a lever to lift the immortal spirit. "f
And the illustration may suggest to us another
thing. Do we remember how, in every other
sphere, the critic has to be trained and is only
trained by association with the masterpiece?
that Wordsworth had to grow his own public,
* Quoted by Carlyle in his essay on Novalis.
t Letter to Barton, 15 May, 1824 (Lucas, No. 328),
H
210 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
because reading England knew only too well
that his poetry "would not do," for the simple
reason that they had never seen any poetry
like it before ? Who will say he is ripe enough
to judge Jesus Christ? How many of us have
judged Him from the Stoic or the Epicurean
standpoint after all ? We live in the twentieth
century, so far as journalism and electric
transit are concerned; and our minds have
learned from nineteen centuries not enough
to differentiate us from the Stoics and
Epicureans who laughed at Paul on the
Areopagus. Remember what Lamb said
about the men who talked literature at him in
the East India Company's office;* and let
us ask how far we are trained enough for the
judgment we have in hand. The acutest
minds can be singularly unintelligent. Jeffrey,
when he penned the opening sentences of his
famous review on Wordsworth, little thought
that, with all his brilliance and taste, he was
making his name a byword for ever for bad
criticism.
There is another caution of which we need
often to remind ourselves. We are to apply
* Letter of 18 February, 1818 (Lucas, No. 229).
PERSONALITY 211
ourselves to the task of judging Jesus Christ,
and to do it we have (as it is called) to re-
construct His personality. To those who
know anything about Him the very words will
be alarming enough. Anyone who has tried
to reconstruct a personality, however simple,
knows quite well knows acutely in proportion
to the pains he has given to the task how
difficult it is. Wordsworth tells us how to him
the lonely roads
Were open schools in which 1 daily read
With most delight the passions of mankind,
Whether by words, looks, sighs, or tears, revealed;
There saw into the depth of human souls,
Souls that appear to have no depth at all
To careless eyes.
It is the careless eye that does the mischief. The
mimic and the caricaturist represent a higher
stage a little higher. It is the essence of
their work the virtue and the defect of it
that they always give their subject from one
angle. Their representations convey character,
we say, but never completely. The sharp nose
or the squint in the cartoon suggests the man
at once, if it is only half-a-dozen strokes of
the pencil. But a personality is a rnore com-
212 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
plicated thing. Character is many-faceted. It
would be better, indeed, to drop such a
metaphor from a polished stone, and to try
another more living. Light and shade pass
over the long grass as the wind sways it this
way and that, now in and now out of the
shadow of the tree, tree and grass both
moving in the breeze, and the play of the
gleams upon the blades is infinite. There are
characters as various. Coleridge applied to
Shakespeare the Greek epithet "myriad-
minded," which he remembered or invented.
Let us think over the character and the per-
sonality, with which we have to deal in Jesus
Christ, rather more carefully. The general
teaching of the Gospel is intelligible and
simple; and it is amazing how, if you let
people alone with the Gospels, they will under-
stand Jesus Christ, if they are simple enough
and true enough. But we have for our
purpose to gain what Paul called " the measure
of the stature of the fulness of Christ."
There are four qualifications, if I may so
call them, that I would suggest for anyone
who proposes to make some judgment upon
Jesus Christ; and every one of them is so
KNOWLEDGE OF THE FACTS 213
very obvious that I feel reluctance in putting
them forward. But the carelessness of men and
women in forming and expressing opinions
is one of the astounding things in life ; it is so
general and it implies so much profound in-
difference to truth. It is of itself a negation of
God. It is no new thing. In the Gospels
we find our Lord remarking upon the in-
sensitiveness of men to fact, and challenging
them to face fact for themselves.
First of all, then, I set and I do it quite
simply and without irony the knowledge of
the plain facts of our Lord's life as recorded
in the Gospels, and of the facts of the
Church's history. This seems so obvious as-
not to need mention, but the Gospels do not
receive that study to which they are entitled.
People have a general impression of them at
best, and learn with surprise (to quote an
instance) that in the narrative of the Nativity
the Magi are in one Gospel and the Shepherds
in another. When I read Professor Lake's
book on the Resurrection, I realised with
some shame that I had never followed out
any single Gospel in its story of what
happened, but had in my mind a careless
214 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
conflate version, which had come to me I
did not know how. How many of us have any
clear idea of the characteristics of the four
writers of the Gospels to say nothing of Q
or the Logia ? How many of us have studied
the methods of Matthew and Luke in using
Mark and their other material? I will go
further, and, waiving all this detailed work
on our authorities elementary enough I
would ask if we know the events of our Lord's
life and His words ? One has not far to go
to meet extraordinary ignorance of these, and
it does not seem to stand in the way of sweep-
ing judgments upon Jesus Christ.*
I have spoken in a previous lecture of the
permanent value to us of the historical Jesus
as a safeguard against the complete evapora-
tion of the Gospel into theory no imaginary
danger, as the history of the Church can show.
I need say nothing at this point of the intense
relief it is at times to take refuge in the plain
tale of the life and teaching of the actual
Jesus and the whole of it, when we are
* Quam sapiens argumentatrix sibi videtur ignorantia
humana, is the caustic remark of Tertullian (De Sped. 2).
ON READING THE GOSPELS 2 1 5
bombarded with ingenuities and eschato-
logies. The beauty and the sanity and the
power of these plain books without adjectives
come full of healing to the soul; and one
recalls with sympathy how eighteen centuries
ago the plain style of the Christian's books
was one of the things that attracted Tatian to
Christianity.*
What happens when people yield to this
attraction? Here are a few words, not my own,
but those of one who was brought up quite
without religious training, but found under
some stress that life needs a base in God :
"And then I began to read the Bible. I was
always coming on bits of the New Testament
in books; and I tried to believe the appeal
lay in the style. But then I took my courage
* Tatian meant more particularly the prophets. In passing
it does seem worth while to ask how the writers of the
Gospel came to write as they did plain fact, no comment,
no word of admiration for Jesus or of condemnation for His
enemies. The same sort of reserve has won for Thucydides
a name, among modern scholars, for intellectual coldness and
aloofness as if it were impossible to convey real feeling
without saying so. Ancient critics, however, saw and felt the
power and pathos of Thucydides through the reserve; and
the quietness of the evangelists surely adds incalculably to
their story.
216 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
in both hands and read the New Testament
right through and saw there was no contact
(with God) except in Christ."
We may ask the man who criticises Jesus
Christ if he has honestly read that history
with the decent modicum of attention that
is due to a book which means so much to
men and women. With a great work, a single
reading is of little use ; it is only intimacy that
counts. One might ask, further, whether the
book has been read with any sense of that
aftergrowth of human association, which, in
the case of master-works, adds so much to
the value of what the writer had consciously
in mind, or, more truly, developes what he
felt from what he expressed. Such books
never yield their meaning to the hurried
reader, as much of the criticism of Euripides
(for example) will prove. It is something to
read a masterpiece in the copy some friend
has used and pencilled, and to follow that
friend along with the author, " reading where
the quiet hand points." The New Testament,
if one took the trouble to read it so, is full
of such marks. Think of that chapter which
Knox on his death-bed asked for, as the one
HISTORICAL IMAGINATION 217
"in which he had first cast anchor."* The
New Testament is not to be understood fully
without the community behind it, for which
it was written and which has lived with it
all the centuries, till (in more senses than
one) it knows it by heart.
All this brings me to what I may call the
second qualification the historical imagina-
tion. Once again let us recall Carlyle's words
on Novalis of the value of a book in introduc-
ing us to " some earnest, deep-minded, truth-
loving man " till we can follow the movement
of this thought. t Can we read the Gospels till
we penetrate the phrase and see the man on
the hillside among his friends, and catch the
gleam of his eye, and mark what he does
with his hands J how the casual word touches
some hidden spring, as it were, and from
the treasure of the heart comes the speech
and such speech ! Or have we a higher and
keener attention for Novalis? Is it fair, it
may be asked, to expect so much of ordinary
people? That is to beg the question. The
* John xvii. ; Hume Brown, Life of Knox, ii., p. 287.
t See p. 59.
I Cf. Mark x. 21 ; i. 41 ; and Acts xiii. 16; xxi. 40 ; xxvi. I (all
three of Paul speaking).
218 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
critic is not an ordinary person, if there are
any ordinary persons at all. We are all
capable of much more mental energy than
we care to exert; and when a man begins to
talk of ordinary people, it is generally a sign
of shuffling of some sort. In any case, those
of us who are in earnest about Jesus Christ,
who wish really to understand Him, may be
expected to have higher standards of know-
ledge and sympathy.
But these, after all, depend less on
intellectual than on moral character. It is
remarkable how Carlyle, in describing one
and another of the great men in his Essays,
says sooner or later the same thing about
each of them, even when they are so different
as Boswell and Burns and Voltaire that the
man had a great loving heart, and that was
how he could interpret men and speak to
men and win them. What degree of loving
insight have you? is Carlyle's question,* and
* Cf. the passage in the essay on Mirabeau : " The real
quantity of our insight, how justly and thoroughly we shall
comprehend the nature of a thing, especially of a human
thing, depends on our patience, our fairness, lovingness,
what strength soever we have : intellect comes from the whole
man, as it is the light that enlightens the whole man."
"ON HIS KNEES" 219
we may ask it of the student of the Gospels.
For anyone who loves the Gospels can under-
stand them and live himself into the scenes
they describe till he knows the company there
to some purpose. Sympathy is the highest
mode of intelligence. The word has suffered
from being used by dull people to cover their
coldness, and it is safer to counsel reading
with admiration. Goethe said that Schlegel,
if he was to criticise Euripides, ought to do
it "on his knees." If we tiy this plan with
a new author, we find often enough that after
a few pages we have unconsciously risen from
our knees; the man is not great enough or
true enough to keep us there. But, be it
sympathy or admiration, some such plan is
necessary if we are to get the full significance
of any great work or any great man, and be
liberated from the small attitude of the merely
clever person.
The third qualification is some natural or
cultivated sympathy with the fundamental
ideas and feelings of Jesus Christ, and it
follows from what we have just been consider-
ing. Does the critic stand near enough to
the man whom he criticises, in interests, in
220 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
tastes, in training ? Once more the emphasis
falls on the necessity of the critic being
trained. The criticism of the outsider is
everywhere recognised as worthless. Is a
critic of Jesus to be trusted who has no
essential sympathy with religion; who does
not see how native it is to man, like art and
music;* whose instincts for religion have
become atrophied? Is he not, rather, like a
colour-blind person, who has not studied
pictures, let loose in a picture-gallery ? What
can he say without giving himself away?
Jesus is, after all, the highest term in religion ;
and just as a child prefers a coloured picture-
postcard of some intelligible kitten or horse
to any Raphael or Botticelli, the man, for
whom religion is not a passion, who is not
intensely conscious of those needs which
religion alone can satisfy, cannot be expected
to care about Jesus. The savage often does
not; why should the Epicurean, or anybody
* Cf. John Watson, The Philosophical Basis of Religion,
p. 187: "Religion is not something accidental to man, but
something inseparable from his rational life. It is that un-
dying and inextinguishable faith in the divine, the denial
of which is ultimately the destruction of all other beliefs."
THE TRAINING OF THE CRITIC 221
else to whom, by his own choice in life or
by accident, Jesus is as yet unintelligible
in His greatness?
Let us take two aspects of what religion
meant to Jesus, and ask ourselves, first, how
far we understand His passion for the
redemption of men? That is quite a simple
and obvious thing to ask. "The Son of Man
came to seek and to save that which was lost."
Do we realise how much He implied by " lost,"
or to what point of salvation He meant to
bring those He found? We are all touched
to-day, more or less, by the social needs of
millions of our fellow-countrymen; but how
far are we prepared to go to save them, and
how high do we think of raising them ? Is our
maximum the spiritual heights of the middle
classes? Let us try to realise the intensity
and the passion with which Jesus gave Him-
self " a ransom for many " and ask ourselves
how much we are prepared to face for the sake
of the vulgar and the depraved ? If we share
His mind at all on this point, we shall be
able to understand Him growingly; and as
we do so, we shall realise more and more
the amount of redeeming which He saw men
222 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
need. Indeed, as men come into the mind
of Jesus, the more conscious they grow how
much they need Him.
Do we realise, again, in any vivid or true
way the extent and nature of Jesus' sense
of God? how He sees and apprehends God
in all things, not merely as a great item in
every situation, but as the one factor? how
alive He is for the fact of God? how full
all life is of God for Him? Have we any
sympathy with, or intelligence of, one whose
life is so filled with the power and the joy
of the real presence of God? All this is
obvious in the Gospels, if we are trained
enough in our business of observation to see
the flame in the burning bush. To put it
more directly, Have we any sense of needing
God, or do we crave at all for contact with
God ? If we do not, we shall not be interested
in Jesus.
The fourth qualification shall be the sense
of insufficiency. Plato spoke of philosophy
being the offspring of wonder;* and it was
* Theaetetus, I54E. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysica, i., 2, who
adds that the cessation of wonder is the end of all philosophy.
THE SENSE OF INSUFFICIENCY 223
a beautiful and illuminating thought. It is
wonder that makes the poet and the painter;
and it is only as they embody it in their
work that it appeals to men;* it is only as we
accept it that we can learn the meaning and
value of their art. When this faculty of
wonder dies out in us, we lose the world
and all it means of beauty and truth. There
is human nature, there is that morality which
is deeply implanted in man and without which
he can achieve nothing and cannot realise
himself who, as the old phrase goes, is
sufficient for these things ? There are men
always in every sphere who are masters of
everything that is to be known there, and
can inform us completely and we turn away
from them; they are weary, stale, flat, and
unprofitable. In religion it is the same; it
is only as we grasp its wonder that we can
begin to understand. In all these things, in
Nature, in art, in morality, in religion, the ,
infinite element is what appeals to the human
mind and soul. It is the experience of the
Church that in Jesus Christ is this same
* " If a poem is not wonderful," says a critic of our 9\yi}
day, " it is nothing."
224 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
quality, and that for His interpreter the same
aptitude for the infinite is essential. As men
study Him in earnest, they grow less satisfied
with their knowledge and their understanding
of Him; He goes beyond them, and they
follow here with the same sort of experience
that men have who take seriously any other
permanent aspect of God's manifestation of
Himself* the path is daily lit up with new
wonder, fresh surprises and new marvels
quicken the follower, as the exploration
extends.
The German Jew, Borne, said that Chris-
tianity is " the religion of all poor devils. "f
Jesus, in another vernacular, said much the
same thing. It is for the people who are
not satisfied, who know their need and feel
it progressively the tempted, the beaten, the
miserable. Christ is most theirs who need
Him most and know it; and He is best
learned through the sense of our own limita-
tions. It is the old story of the Church He
is known by acceptance. With Him, as in
* Cf. a striking sentence in Mark x. 32.
t Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature,
vol. vi., p. 97.
' TO KNOW CHRIST' 225
the case of every real interest, the secret of
knowledge is identification. " To know
Christ," said Melanchthon, " is to know His
benefits not to contemplate His natures or
the modes of His incarnation/'* Luther said
the same :
' The Sophists have described Christ how
He should be Man and God they count His
legs and arms, and combine His two natures
together wonderfully; and that is only a
sophistic knowledge of the Lord Christ. For
Christ is not called Christ for having two
natures. How does that touch me? But He
bears this lordly and comfortable name from
the office and work that He has taken upon
Him; that gives Him the name. That by
nature He is man and God, is His affair;
but that He uses His office and pours forth
His love and becomes my Saviour and
Redeemer, that is all to my comfort and
good."t
* Hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia ejus cognoscere, non
ejus naturas, modos incarnationis ejus contueri ; Intr. to his
Loci, ist edition, 1521 ; quoted by Harnack, History of Dogma
(tr.), vii. f p. 198, n.
t Quoted by Harnack, History of Dogma (tr.), vii., p. 2.
15
226 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION
As we saw before, it is in action that truth
is discovered and tested,* by the application
of individual experiment to inherited ex-
perience. Jesus Christ is best understood in
the strenuous life of love and service of men
in "battles with dulness and darkness," as
Carlyle called them in the failure of our
strength, when His power comes into play-
in the endeavour to meet the need of other
men, when our own springs of help are dry
and we turn to Him- in the wrestle with God
in the darkness, when He alone lets in the
light upon God for which we crave. " Doubt
of any sort cannot be removed except by
Action. "f It is in work of this sort alone
that the character can be trained, on which
depends the "loving insight" we need, and,
indeed, the mind with all its powers. " How
can we," asked Henry David Thoreau, "ex-
pect a harvest of thought who have not
* Falsehood, says Clement of Alexandria (Protr. 77), is not
got rid of by merely putting the true alongside of it, but
by using the truth.
t Christiani hominis est non de dogmatis magnifice loqui sed
cum deo ardua semper et magna facere. Zwingli, quoted by
Harnack, History of Dogma (tr.), vii. (end),
CONCLUSION 227
had a seed-time of character ? " How can we,
we in turn may ask, expect to understand such
a character, such a personality, as that of
Jesus Christ, if we have never grappled in
earnest with the powers of sin and misery,
over which He won the victory, " not without
dust and heat "?
The last word for to-day is this. When a
man sets about judging some masterpiece in
art or literature, as long as he knows little
about it, he is pleased with his power of
judgment. But if he consort in earnest with
the masterpiece, till he knows it, the positions
are reversed, and he finds that the master-
piece becomes his judge at last educates him
and tests him and shows him himself. Some
of us begin by judging Jesus Christ, and
find, as we come to know Him, that His
standards replace ours, that the very nature
of the case requires us, in the old phrase, to
learn of Him, and that where we started as
critics, we end as disciples and are glad
of it.
INDEX
Readers are reminded that the chief topics will be found in
the Table of Contents. They are, therefore, generally
omitted here.
Animistic peoples, 144, 147,
173
Apocalypse, 1 1 6 1 22
Aristotle, 87, 222
Arnold, Matthew, 16
Arrhabdn, 1 29
Astrology, 1 5 1
Astronomy, 6
Augustine, 83, 90, 94, 100,
1 80
Aurelius, Marcus, 62, 93, 189
Auto-suggestion, 10
Authority, 43
Bab, 24
Bengel, 208
Bernard of Morlaix, 63
Bernard, St., 180
Besant, Mrs., 146, 147
Bismarck, 158, 159
Boat-builder, 47 49
Borne, 224
Bousset, W., 158
Burnt Njal, 164
Buddhism, 22, 24, 25, 63,
i/i, 199
Bunyan, 178
Caesar, 75
Caste, 157, 158
Caird, E., 59
Carlyle, T., 22, 58, 59, 92,
106, 109, no, 177, 179,
188, 218, 226
Celsus, 112, 120, I2
Clement of Alexandria, 130,
139, 164, 226
Clement of Rome, 127
Clough, 34
Copernicus, 6
Daemons, 144 147
Darwin, 7, 8
Dei Todi, Giacopone, 186
Dickinson, G. L., 172, 173,
174
Dio Chrysotom, 133
Dogma, 39
Doxology, 116
Emerson, 106
Fatalism, 2 1
Fox, George, 11, 176
Francis of Assisi, 181
Friedlander, G., 202
Friedlander, M., 112, 134,
202, 203
Galileo, 6
Geology, 7
Gibbon, 2, 72
Gcethe, 45, 81, 106, 219
Harris, Rendel, 186
Hebrews, Epistle to, 113,
114
Hermas, 179
228
229
INDEX
Herodotus, 143
Hierodules, 154
Hinduism, 23, 135, 147, 148
History, 18, 19
Ignatius, 133
John, Gospel of, 114 116
Kawaguchi, 25
Kett, 156
Knox, 216, 217
Lamb, Charles, 183, 209,
210
Lawson, J. C., 147
Livingstone, 1 67
Longinus, 107
Luther, 73, 75, 100, 109, 161,
189, 203, 207, 225
Macrobius, 144
Markino, 202
Melanchthon, 225
Mendel, 9, 10
Milton, 6, 7, 88, 107
Muhammad, 22, 199
Mysteries, 126, 127
Name, power of the, 143
Neo-Platonism, 23, 86, 98,
155
Nereids, 147
Nicodemus, Gospel of, 122
Nietzsche, 63, 64, 131, 153
Norden, 107, 108
Novalis, 58, 208
Pagan world, 60 64
Paul, St., 66, 67, 68, 90,
98, 107, 113, 125, 130,
131, 134, 137
" Perhapsology," 80
Philanthropy, 128
Philosophy, 14, 8486
Pilgrim in India, 94, 95
Plato, 5, 1 8, 39, 51, 64, 93,
98, 1 68, 222
Plutarch, 62, 72, 98, 155
Poet, 2730
Race, 19, 20
Rainy, R., 3, 55
Ransom, 121
Robinson Crusoe, 52
Rolle, Richard, 181 183
Seneca, 173
Shakespeare, 75, 89
Shaw, G. B., 91, 165, 200
Slavery, 120, 129, 134, 165
Stoics, 63, 73, 89, 93, 97,
171
Synesius, 156, 179
Talmud, 203
Tatian, 150, 151, 215
Tertullian, 23, 83, 129, 189,
214
Theory, 39 42
Thomas of Celano, 168,
169
Thoreau, H. D., 226
Tyndale, W., 73, 159, 160
Watson, J., 220
Wernle, P., 92, 117
Wesley, J., 73, 176
Woman, 162, 163
Wordsworth, W., 15, 17, 28,
181, 185, 209, 211
Wycliffe, 1 66
Zoroaster, 199
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Watson (H. B. Marriott). ALISE OF
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THE BIG FISH. Third Edition. Cr. Bvo.
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Webling (Peggy). THE STORY OF
VIRGINIA PERFECT. Thitd Edition
Cr. Bvo. 6s.
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MAR 13 '67-8
LOAN DEPT.
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General Library
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GENERAL LIBRARY - U.C. BERKELEY
60008^4527
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
