NOV 231907
BR 121 .D67 1907
[Dougall, Lily] 1858-1923.
The Christ that is to be
THE CHRIST THAT IS TO BE
This book is published in Great Britain under the
TITLE "CHRISTUS FuTURUS."
THE CHRIST THAT IS
TO BE
BY THE AUTHOR OF
"PRO CHRISTO ET ECCLESIA"
The year is dying in the night ;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
******
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold ;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand ;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
— Tennyson, In Memoriam.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
I907
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1907,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1907.
Nortoooti $re8S
J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFACE
This book is only a series of successive efforts
to think what the gospel of Jesus really is. Each
line of thought is unfinished, and there is very
much in what is said that in a mature work
would be more carefully guarded from miscon-
struction. These fragments are only published in
the hope that those who have greater opportunity
may find in them something to refine and
complete.
CONTENTS
BOOK I
HIS THOUGHTS AND OUR THOUGHTS
CHAPTER I
PAG
Our Need of Reformation .....
Jesus meant his salvation to become universal. If the race pro-
gresses, that which will be its final satisfaction cannot have been
fully comprehended at the beginning.
An era of higher spiritual and physical life would enable us to
accept the standard of Jesus. To this end a higher level of
corporate faith is needed.
We cannot yet see our way to accept his standard, but our sin lies
in our determination to walk by sight.
CHAPTER II
The Vital Age
The converts of the first age of the Church had only such reports
of Jesus as a fair consensus of opinion among New Testament
critics now gives us.
We may find in it more vital inspiration than in the doctrinal
systems which in intervening centuries have perhaps made the
personal character of Jesus more difficult of access.
If these systems be true for us, we shall, in finding Jesus, return to
them.
Rediscovering the personal Jesus in the first reports of his ministry,
we may aspire to fill this age with as great a comparative advance
of the Church as the first century exhibited.
vii
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER III
PAGE
The Actions of Jesus ...... 20
If " for this world the word of God is Christ " the words the Christ
spoke can only be part of his message.
By obedience to his words we shall be justified or condemned, but
it was by his works that he asked us to judge of him.
By his actions, whose significance does not depend on their being
miraculous, Jesus teaches the power of his presence, and that the
will of God is directed against suffering as against sin.
CHAPTER IV
Faith . . . . . . . . .30
Faith is a true estimate of those qualities of personality which are
hidden from sense.
A man's faith depends, not only on his own qualities, but also on
the standard of corporate faith.
A man cannot measure his own faith or that of another.
The only test of faith is its result.
CHAPTER V
Corporate Faith ....... 44
The race is a corporate unity. The laws of corporate thought are
universal, and must govern the condition of the Church.
Church and world are alike affected by mental epidemics and popular
reform movements.
Therefore the Church can only be pure in the degree that she puri-
fies the world, be at peace as she pacifies the world, comprehend
truth as she teaches the world to comprehend it.
The degree of isolation proved desirable for any community does
not counteract the invisible influence of the world's thought
upon it.
CHAPTER VI
The Doctrine of Prayer ..... 56
Jesus sets forth his doctrine of prayer in his works.
He teaches a constant procession of life from God to the world.
This life gives physical and mental health, the knowledge of
forgiveness, and the desire to live and die for men.
CONTENTS ix
PAGE
God's action is invariable : the reception of his gifts depends on
man's faith. Man need never be uncertain as to God's will j
it is in man's will that uncertainty is found, and God will never
coerce the wills of men.
CHAPTER VII
The Place of the Kingdom in the Struggle to
Survive ....... 70
As a unit, or a part of a limited corporate unit, man survives by
fighting and getting.
But the potentially universal unit, called by Jesus the kingdom of
heaven, can only be formed by men who cultivate the faculties
of loving and giving to the atrophy of hate and greed.
Until this unit becomes universal the individualism and party
spirit of the world will oppose it. Therefore the children of
the kingdom — the Church — will suffer persecution 5 but it is
only as the suffering is incidental to loving and giving, and is
freed from all spirit of retaliation, that it goes to increase the
sway of the kingdom.
It is only by accepting this plan that the human race can survive in
a higher spiritual environment.
CHAPTER VIII
Salvation by Joy ....... 76
Suffering is incidental and temporary in the scheme of salvation that
Jesus taught ; joy is of its essence.
The Christian's suffering is that entailed by the opposition of the
world-spirit to love.
The Christian is never commanded to undergo suffering for the sake
of personal improvement.
x CONTENTS
BOOK II
THE FATHER'S HOUSE
CHAPTER I
PAGE
The Conflict of the Physical and the Moral . 95
With the growth of a sense of sin the early animal delight in mere
living vanished. We see in history that men who strove after
righteousness easily embraced physical evil as a means to that end.
But Jesus intended his salvation to end the opposition between
moral and physical welfare.
CHAPTER II
The Use of Sin . . . . . . .103
Sin is a schoolmaster driving men to God.
Because it exists we are bound to believe that it has its place in
God's purpose for man's development. But if we believe that
it is God's will that we should sin, we part with common sense
and all true religion.
CHAPTER III
The Use of Pain 108
Pain is a schoolmaster driving men to God.
But if we hold God responsible for pain in any other sense than
that in which he is responsible for sin, we part company with
common sense and the doctrine of Jesus.
If we believe that God deals punitive discipline to men we shall
do the same. As we are coming to see that the infliction of
suffering does not produce reformation, we shall be compelled
to dissociate it from the thought of God's will, and the war
against all suffering will become as sacred as the war against sin.
History shows that only those nations have progressed that have
distinguished between believing that God permits sin and believing
that he wills it.
We must now distinguish between the belief that God permits
suffering and the belief that it is God's will.
CONTENTS xi
CHAPTER IV
PAGE
Fatalism and Asceticism . . . . .119
The ascription of suffering to the will of God produces a fatalism
inconsistent with the true genius of Christianity.
It also produces an asceticism founded on the idea that the endur-
ance of suffering is to be sought as a means of mere personal
improvement ; whereas the only justification for self-denial, and
the ample field for effort, is the advance of the kingdom.
The essential difference between both fatalism and asceticism and
the doctrine of Jesus discussed.
CHAPTER V
Prophets and Apostles ......
Prophets and apostles were men of their age, whose inspiration is
seen in their lives, and may be gauged by the life they implanted
in others.
If Jesus was in any sense divine, his interpretation of God could
not have been conditioned by the mind of his age.
The divine authority and infallibility of Jesus is an intuitive assur-
ance of the Christian, but may be buttressed by reason.
Thus ( 1 ) the unique joy which was the early effect of his message
to the world goes to prove that he is himself unique.
(2) So does the fact that his message was transmitted by men
obviously incapable of completely understanding it, in a form
which meets the needs of successive generations and enables Jesus
himself to be increasingly understood.
Many of our conclusions are based on the assumption that the life
and words of Jesus have only an inspiration which the inter-
pretations of his forerunners and followers also possess. We
need to revise such conclusions, for we do not now believe that
the writers of the Bible either possessed the insight of Jesus or
were mechanically inspired.
CHAPTER VI
Irreverent Eclecticism ......
We do not use Scripture reverently if we base opinions on texts
contradicted in their context.
We find two contradictory theories running through the Old Testa-
ment and the Epistles concerning God's relation to physical evil.
The only consistent doctrine is in the words and acts of Jesus.
132
47
xii CONTENTS
CHAPTER VII
PAGE
Dreams of Justice . . . . . .152
We do not think laws just which condemn the innocent to suffer
with the guilty. But in life as we know it this must always be.
Thus our notion of ideal justice never appears to be even approxi-
mately realised in the world, and, further, the doctrine of Jesus
would seem to set it aside as negligible.
We must attribute justice to God, for without it there could not
be forgiveness, but we have no conception of what divine justice
may be, and therefore we cannot comprehend divine forgiveness
from the divine side.
BOOK III
GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
CHAPTER I
The Devil and his Angels . . . . .165
Jesus appears to express a belief in the existence of a separate Evil
Will, subordinate to God, immanent in man's sin and suffering.
The common argument that evil cannot be an active force because
that would involve an unthinkable dualism, is equally an argu-
ment against man's free will. Therefore, if we believe in free
will, it is not impossible to believe in the Evil One.
Whether Jesus, in speaking of the devil and demons, was using
words in their plain meaning, or speaking in a parable, we
cannot determine 5 if a parable, the truth set forth must have
been more, not less, terrible than the figure which conveyed it.
CHAPTER II
The Scorn of Superstition . . . .181
We think in this age we can finally distinguish truth from super-
stition ; but ancient thought often returns disguised as a newly
discovered truth.
CONTENTS xiii
PAGE
The ancient belief about disease-demons has suggestive points of
analogy with what we now know of intrusive disease-germs.
Although this does not afford any sufficient basis on which to
build the belief that diseases of the mind may be caused by the
intrusion of spiritual evil, it suffices to teach us that suspense
of judgment is the wiser attitude.
All things have their physical explanation, but that is not necessarily
an exhaustive explanation.
CHAPTER III
The permanent Need of "Exorcism" . . .197
The characteristic of "possession " is loss of self-control.
Mental compulsions with this characteristic have been common in
all times. This illustrated by mental epidemics and chronic
hysteria.
We are faced with these undefined evils, half physical, half moral,
before which the Church is helpless. Whatever be their cause,
the commission of Jesus clearly includes their cure.
CHAPTER IV
Mind and Disease . . . . . .215
Progressive medical thought tends more and more to recognise the
use of mind in curing the body.
It is now maintained that functional diseases may thus be cured,
but not organic. Further consideration leads to the belief that
this is not a final word in the matter.
The unity of nature points to the universal interaction of mind and
body.
CHAPTER V
Faith and the Doctors . . . . .226
The quarrel between the mind-healer and the doctor has no bearing
on the bodily salvation Jesus offers.
Jesus did not condemn any curative agent, and no good doctor can
condemn any genuine method of cure.
CHAPTER VI
The Will of God . . . . . .232
Jesus taught that health was God's will, that it was an inevitable
consequence of the right faith.
xiv CONTENTS
PAGE
This truth has been neglected, but we can neglect it no longer
when the advance of knowledge, by many voices, is telling us
that body and mind are not two, but one, and that health is
essential to the complete saint.
CHAPTER VII
History of Health by Faith .... 245
The early Church healed the sick.
Later the heathen idea that sin had its root in the flesh, which had
already influenced Judaism, triumphed over the doctrine of Jesus
that sin was spiritual. Faith in the salvation of the body was
lost j the physical nature was neglected ; and the war between
science and religion was the result.
At the time of Jesus the corporate mind easily received the doctrine
of health by faith.
To-day the corporate mind has to recover this doctrine, and till it
does so the individual, save in exceptional cases, cannot rise to it.
CHAPTER VIII
The Balance of Nature . . . . .256
When the growth of physical and spiritual power do not correspond,
man becomes ill-balanced.
A Church that persists in wailing that disease is the will of God is
no worthy successor of the apostles.
The only basis for the corporate faith that will bring us health is
the acknowledgment that God wills health for every man with-
out exception, just as he wills cleanliness and goodness.
CHAPTER IX
The Nature Marvels ...... 263
The "nature miracles'" are quite inexplicable, but cannot be
dissociated from the historic Christ.
They point to a development of the earthly kingdom to be realised
by future ages.
Careful consideration suggests that they will be found not to be
miraculous.
CONTENTS xv
CHAPTER X
PAGE
The Conditions of Physical Power . . .274
Examination of the conditions required for the "miracles," especially
the ' ' nature miracles, ' ' shows they are closely allied to the direc-
tions for successful prayer given by Jesus.
These conditions include perfect amity, individual and corporate, with
all mankind.
We cannot fairly draw conclusions from experience of the results
of prayer offered under militant conditions, or judge the doctrine
of Jesus by that experience.
BOOK IV
HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
CHAPTER I
Fasting and Temptation . . . . .291
There is record of two world-wide hopes — one, of a Deliverer
who would perfect man's earthly conditions} another, of a
Saviour who would deliver man from earth.
Whether earth was to be glorified or spurned was a question that
divided religious thinkers when Jesus came.
After the experience of his desert fast he never wavered in his
effort to improve man's physical condition.
He gave no encouragement to the ascetic principle, but gives
perfect satisfaction to the hope of the ascetic.
CHAPTER II
The Protest of the Parable . . . .301
The Jews were not ignorant of the beliefs and ideas of other nations
at the Christian era. Jesus saw that the attention of the religious
world was then fixed on arguments and systems of worship.
xvi CONTENTS
PAGE
In choosing to teach men only by parables Jesus said, in effect —
it is the life, not the form that is essential.
Yet form, precise and beautiful, is necessary to a parable, though
no one particular form is necessary.
CHAPTER III
The Fighting Spirit . . . . . .312
The endeavour to abolish war must begin in our own hearts. We
must not love invective. We must overcome party spirit.
Energy is better than mere inertness, for Jesus requires strength
of purpose. His purpose will utilise all a man's energies. The
result will be greater individuality, for the law of love gives full
play to all our powers.
CHAPTER IV
The Sword and the Muckrake . . . .326
Must war always exist ? The change in public opinion within the
last thirty years suggests hope that it may not.
Must greed always exist ? The question of a reform of business
principles is beset with difficulties, but here again individual
effort to live the business life on the plan of Jesus must precede
any corporate reformation, and commercial history shows that
change in the corporate ideal is possible for business men.
CHAPTER V
The Protestantism of Jesus . . . . • 335
Jesus taught that sins of the lower nature do not shut men out
from his salvation as do sins of the higher nature. Of these
he chiefly condemned the spiritual pride of men who held their
religious knowledge to be perfect and final.
As this is a permanent sin of the religious nature there must also
be a permanent protest of the reformer against existing religious
standards. This, in an ideal form, is found in the life of Jesus.
The abuses of Judaism in his time were very great, but Jesus only
protests against those evils already detected by the Jewish con-
science. He only treated with neglect doctrines and practices
which his positive teaching must eventually supersede.
This principle illustrated by contrasting Jesus and Luther.
By the prophecies of his unexpected return he taught that the
Church must be ready to welcome successive reformations.
CONTENTS
xvi 1
CHAPTER VI
The Power of His Death .....
In the midst of his gift of complete joy — spiritual, volitional, and
physical salvation — comes the death of Jesus, the supreme fact
of his ministry.
In his death he taught us an earthly thing — to endure all things
and forgive all things rather than break the law of love. We
have as yet only partly believed this, and can consequently only
receive glimpses of the heavenly things his death can teach.
It gave new reality to the hope of immortality ; for to feel the life-
giving power of Jesus is to know that death could be for him
only transition, and the state where his will is more perfectly
realised must be the state in which our life will be perfected if
we attain to it.
The visions of his resurrection-life show that character and purpose
pass unchanged through death. How shall we become fitted in
this life to survive in the environment of his fuller presence ?
He teaches that his own shall ever share his joy, but the manner
of his death precludes any doctrine of easy and universal bliss.
Concerning the lost, Jesus teaches that God suffers with all who
fail, and is always as kind to the evil as to the good.
The only salvation he offers us is the offer of himself — his own
character. How many of us can perceive its beauty ? how many
approximate to it ?
We do not yet know what divine justice and forgiveness are, hence
we cannot know what atonement for sin means. Yet we know
that it is the vision of the dying Christ, conquering sin and
death by love, that uplifts the sinner.
Human reason fails to hear what God says to us in the Crucifixion.
The Church strives to hear and to interpret. This must ever be
her function ; but until she has brought the world to be at one
with her and with Jesus she will not perfectly understand.
PAGE
349
Appendix A .
Appendix B .
Appendix C .
Appendix D .
375
376
378
381
BOOK I
HIS THOUGHTS AND OUR THOUGHTS
CHAPTER I
OUR NEED OF REFORMATION
It is now admitted by New Testament scholars
that those words of Jesus which appear to treat of
the society he founded as partial in extent, and
suggest that the kingdom of heaven would include
but a few out of the many, refer only to the period
of the kingdom's growth. From the general
tenor of his teaching and outlook we gather
that he thought, not only that he was providing
a salvation for the whole world, but that his sal-
vation must ultimately pervade the whole world ;
and further, that the principles of conduct he laid
down, the character he exemplified, and the faith
he revealed, if closely wrought into the lives of
his followers would most quickly and effectually
accomplish, not only their own enfranchisement,
but the enfranchisement of the race.
Meantime, the reception and transmission of his
message of deliverance did not depend upon its being
perfectly comprehended; and the great proof we
have of the truth of the earliest traditions concerning
him is that his followers passed on an ideal which
they only imperfectly understood. There can be
3
4 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
little doubt that his figure of coming in the clouds
with power and great glory meant to him the world-
wide acceptance of his ideals, which he rightly
judged to be so far above the ideals of the time
that ages would be required for their perfect com-
prehension by human thought. This is reason-
able; he could not be the Christ of all time were
it possible for any passing generation to understand
more than a portion of his ideal. We are com-
pelled, indeed, to choose between the standard of
a past age, which must decrease, as all its preachers
must, in the evolution of life and thought, and the
God-like standard of a Christ who, because he
must continually increase, must in every progres-
sive generation be imperfectly, but less imperfectly,
understood. But a teacher imperfectly understood
may be obeyed, and the first question of any who
would understand his doctrine must be concerning
the doing of his will.
Jesus came to a suffering and vicious world,
and proclaimed a God who required from every
man, whatever his heredity, whatever his
circumstance, not only the righteousness then
acknowledged, but a far more vigorous, more
perfect life; a goodness, not only in action but in
imagination, in desire and motive, in every chance
thought; an earnest purpose of love multiplied by
every possible opportunity of doing good.
Such a God asks the impossible. Good men
on all sides, then and ever since, have arisen to
welcome the beautiful ideal and explain that it was
meant to be impossible, — a star for moths to de-
sire, a morrow which humanity would never see,
ch. i OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 5
demanded of man by God only in order that his
creature might constantly strain himself here in
attempting what he could not perform, to the end
that he might be a little bigger and a little better
hereafter. And for nineteen centuries we have
been learning more and more clearly that man,
here and now, is, and since we have any history of
him always has been, so hampered by the imperfec-
tions of body and brain, the taint of his fathers'
fathers, the accidents of his infancy and the
limitations of his age, as to be quite unable to
fulfil the law of Christ in any rounded and adequate
way. Our Christian teachers drew a kindly line
between deadly and venial sin, until the psycho-
logists and physiologists told us that some of the
so-called deadly sins are those for which men are
least responsible; and now we are taught to
distinguish between infirmities which must take a
lifetime to spend their force and thus diminish,
and faults which can be, and therefore ought to
be, swiftly cured. More and more we learn that,
so far from the doom on children's children being
arbitrary, it is inevitable, so inevitable that the
man of science and the moralist are at variance
concerning the cause and nature and cure of crime.
But Jesus taught that the demand of God for
righteousness was inexorable. We go back to the
historic Christ, and we find that he who was more
tender over human frailty than any other showed
no recognition of disciples who refused to follow
where he led. Even after making every allowance
for the figurative nature of our Lord's sayings, we
all admit that he made the most stringent demands
6 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
for earnestness of purpose, an earnestness of which
the average man is physically incapable; for a
degree of self-devotion which most men's minds are
unable to admire, much less acquire; for love of
which most men cannot conceive, let alone feel.
And we are told that he said, " Every one that
heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them
not, shall be likened to a foolish man who built his
house upon the sand . . . and it fell, and great
was the fall of it."
Truly, indeed, great is the fall ! When we
examine the boasted civilisation of Christendom
with the searchlight of the precepts of Jesus Christ,
we see only broken walls upon the sands of com-
promise. If our faith in social evolution is
strengthened by the testimony of all history that
to-day's civilisation is on the whole better than
anything the world has yet seen, we must still
admit that it is not Christian, that it is perhaps
finding its most startling development in a nation
not even nominally Christian. We cannot for one
moment suppose that our institutions, or the aver-
age life of the nominal Christian, are so planned
that our house can be said to be built upon the
rock of obedience to the sayings of Christ.
There are three objections urged against the prac-
tice of Christ's precepts, — that they are meant only
to inculcate an inward temper of heart ; that they are
meant only for a certain class ; and that they are for
private, not public, exercise. Let us consider these.
Our Lord's ethical teaching presupposes civil,
domestic, and commercial life. We have the city,
the court, the officer, the judge, the house, the
ch. i OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 7
private room, the lamp, the loaf; or again, the
master, the servant, the bushel basket, the field,
the crop, the market. All these are a part of the
life to which his injunctions apply, and are used
as the pith of his illustrations. Those many
devotional writers who would remove and limit
the urgency of our Lord's teaching to the separate
life of the soul have there a sufficient refutation,
for in that inner chamber the machinery does not
exist with which the commands are to be worked
out. A man or bodv of men in any isolation,
actual or ideal, could no more obey the great
Sermon in St. Matthew than a celibate could dis-
charge a man's duties toward wife and child.
The peacemaker must live among those who are
at variance. The meek must have cause of affront.
The persecuted must face some organised tyranny,
armed only with the meekness of love. The
brother to whom exhaustless love is to be contin-
ually offered must be always at hand, a vain, silly,
and irritating person; and how is it possible to
obey the Christian rule toward such an one if
we do not obey it in the market, in the street,
in law court, and in religious assembly ? To sit
in any hermitage of fact or fancy and exercise a
heavenly temper is clearly futile, so far as obedience
to Jesus Christ is concerned; and as futile is the
more modern method of limiting the benevolent
energies by zeal in chosen channels, buying thus
an imaginary license to be good fighters and good
haters when our theology or liberty is called in
question.
Thus it is necessary, in order to live the religious
8 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
life as our Lord directs, that we be part of a
populace. What virtue is there in humility,
modesty, and private devotion if the push and press
of the world's opinions are not upon us ? Why
should we make a good toilet when we perform
our self-denials if no one is to be cheered by the
innocent imposture ? There could be no virtue
in having no anxiety about our support if we lived
without worldly responsibility. The "narrow
gate," the "house upon the rock" are clearly to
be found only in the busy haunts of men.
If it is wrong to regard the counsels of per-
fection as applying only to a temper of soul, it
is equally wrong to assume that they apply only
to some apostolic or saintly class. If there be
any class of Christians on whom these injunctions
were not laid, we should have to discover what
rule of life Jesus laid down for their guidance.
He would seem to have left them totally without
instruction. His own example cannot be their
rule, for he carried out to the uttermost his own
precepts. If there are those to whom it does
not belong to cast their material cares on God's
providence, to lend and give to all who ask,
to love their enemies, then neither is it their
part to let their light shine, to bring their gift
to the altar, or to love their neighbours. In the
whole gospel there is no indication that Jesus
offers any aid or reward to a partial obedience.
No man looking back, yielding only part of
himself, failing to take up the whole burden, is
fit for the kingdom. If there is a class to whom
these tests do not apply, there is no parable, or
ch. i OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 9
any teaching or action of his, indicating that his
companionship, his promise, his salvation, are
for that class.
Nor is it practical to suppose that the highest
teaching is intended to inculcate conduct which
men must imitate in their private capacity, but
not as members of a social or civic system.
Nothing could be more unpractical. In every-
day life a man is as he does. If in every relation
that binds him to the political and social order
he is to act at variance with the code of Christ he
will never be Christ-like. Let us ask how a man
can divide his private from his public life. We
are told that the commercial man or wage-earner
may give lavishly in private, but in the counting-
house, the workshop, and the field he must not
be lavish, or he will be endangering his own
solvency or underselling his neighbours. The
ordinary tradesman and working-man must, then,
give up attempting to realise the Christian temper,
because they have really so little scope for its
exercise; Sundays and evenings would be outdone
by the sordid six days of the week, when every-
thing must be weighed in a nice balance of selfish
thrift; character would be the outcome of the
working hours. Again, we are told that a
statesman may obey the law of love in private
life, but not in national or international relations.
But if he be a good statesman all his best thought
is given to the state, and in the process his
character develops; as he thinks and acts so he
becomes. So it is also with the ecclesiastical
ruler whose churchcraft is governed by the rules
io HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
that will bring the Church earthly success. In
the end his character will be forged in the heat
of his work, not in the quiet of his devotional
hours.
Perhaps no better illustration of the prevailing
temper of our Christianity can be had than in a
quotation from the words of one who is one of
the best of the Christians and scholars of our
generation.
"Christianity — the true Christianity — carries
no arms; it wins its way by lowly service, by
patience, by self-sacrifice. History shows that
there are no instruments of religious propaganda
comparable to these. It also shows that the type
of character connected with them is of the very
highest attractiveness and beauty. Is it a
complete type, a type to which we can apply the
Kantian maxim, 'So act as if your action was to
be a law for all human beings' ? This would
seem to be more than we ought to say. ... If
we are to say the truth we must admit that parts
of it would become impracticable if they were
transferred from the individual standing alone to
governments or individuals representing society" 1
(The italics are ours.)
If this is the highest degree of belief in the
common sense of Jesus which seems possible in
the cathedral close, in the most religious of our
great universities, can we wonder if we find that
1 Art. "Jesus Christ," by Dr. Sanday, Hastings's Dictionary of
the Bible, p. 621. In the same Art., p. 652, the writer disclaims
sufficiency for these remarks, and says they only represent such
insight as we at present have.
ch. i OUR NEED OF REFORMATION n
almost every Christian individual outside that pale
acts habitually as "representing society," and not
as "the individual standing alone" at the judg-
ment-seat of Christ ? Yet this pronouncement of
one of the most revered of Christian thinkers dif-
fers from the teaching of other Christian preachers
more in its Christ-like candour, its reverence for
fact, than in anything else.
Let each of us ask ourselves if we do not agree
with it. With our corporate faith in God such
as it is — a low average estimate of his power,
a melancholy estimate of his will; with our
corporate thought regarding God as the source
of all our diseases and disasters, requiring that
we shall look to science, not to religion, for their
cure; with our minds tainted with sin, appetite
and affection deranged, is it not an impossibility
to live up to the standards of Jesus, to endure
persecution with joy and meekness, to overcome
hate with love, not only in the centre of the
individual heart but also in the household, in
the state, and in the world ?
Here, then, we have contradictory ideals, — that
of Jesus, who maintains that his is the common-
sense method of saving the world, and that of
Christendom, which maintains that his laws are
impracticable.
What then ? Shall our civilisation crumble at
the word of Christ ? or shall Christ be rejected ?
That his way of life would mean the breaking
down of commerce, the dismemberment of empires,
the crumbling of law and order, is perhaps the
reasonable forecast concerning an untried method;
12 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
but its truth has yet to be proved. We have
no experience that goes to suggest it. No con-
siderable body of men have for any considerable
length of time attempted in the power of faith
to heal the sick, to restore self-control to the
hysteric, to turn the other cheek, to forgive the
criminal, to give the cloke after the coat, to
agree with an adversary at all cost in order to
avoid the tribunal of war. No large number of
Christian preachers have ever urged that social
and national life should be conducted in the spirit
of these injunctions. We face the teaching of
Jesus, as we stand at the end of the second
Christian millennium, an untried path leading
to an unknown region of human life. Now,
when the heart of Africa, the temples of Thibet,
the frozen seas, are yielding their last secrets
to us, and we are liable to feel that the world
has no more mysteries except in those ultimate
assumptions of knowledge on which the struc-
tures of science rest, we have not even grasped
the idea that the world's greatest genius, in
coming to save the world, pointed to a plan for
human life on this earth which, if Christianity
be of God, must mould the enterprise of the
future, and prove the path of discoveries more
exhilarating and of greater worth than any yet
unfolded to our eager eyes. Ever and anon in
the Christian centuries we witness a glimpse of
his ideal, illuminating the minds of certain men
and women, produce some great movement for-
ward, but it has always been quickly reabsorbed
by the common lower ideal when the saint whose
ch. i OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 13
inspiration lifted men for the hour had passed
away. Yet the plan of Jesus still lies before
the world, clearly expressed in human language,
clearly exemplified in his own ministry, and, as
he believed, made practical by the marvels of
corporate faith which he inaugurated as God's
will for man and the proper outfit of human
capacity.
Even if the precepts of Jesus only mark out
the path to the whole truth he came to impart, we
must at the same time remember that they mark
out the only path to that truth. It is also certain
that we have not accepted that path. It is not a
plain path; and when we hesitate to start under
clouds that bar our vision of the end, our difficulty
is real. The ablest theorists do not help us; and
our sin as Christians has lain in our conviction
that what is, reasonably speaking, impossible to
man is also impossible to God. Yet we know
that the deepest problems of life must be worked
out in action — not only individual but corporate
action; philosophy or theology is but a reasonable
account "after the event." We also know that
the greatest contributions to the working principles
of the race before they justified themselves in
practice were only stumbling-blocks to the theo-
logian and foolishness to the philosopher. Such
was monotheism when all the world was poly-
theistic; such was monogamy when all the world
practised polygamy; such was the education of
the serf; such was the freedom of the slave;
such, above all, was trust in the Cross. And to-
day, when we cannot see how the highest degree
i4 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
of self-realisation, personal or national, can be
reached by corporate obedience to the methods of
Jesus, our sin does not lie in our inability to see
the path, but in our determination to say we see,
and to walk by sight.
CHAPTER II
THE VITAL AGE
We know how joyful, how rapid, was the spread
of the influence of Jesus Christ in the first hundred
years after his death. In the teeth of cruel per-
secution, in spite of slow travel and slow transcrip-
tion, what Jesus called "the good news" lifted
the crippled civilisation of the Latin world, and
sent it forward leaping and walking and praising
God. There have been many explanations of that
first sudden growth and expansion of Christianity
and of its subsequent checks and periods of stagna-
tion. All these explanations have probably some
truth. It only concerns us here to observe that,
as regards the authority on which our faith rests,
we have much in common with the Christians of
that most vital period. Because the problems of
scholars have to-day escaped from the schools and
gone abroad, the authority of our sacred writings
has become very much what that of the oral and
written report was in that most ardent time. We,
like the early heathen inquirers, find a tradition of
the sayings and actions of "the Lord" which we
would fain believe to be historical. If historical,
1 6 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
we know that its accuracy may be impugned, and
we must be as careful to compare one account
with another as to probe each as far as may be to
the source. No other religious writings have
equal significance for us. We must pierce through
everything to the character and power of the
actual "Lord" they present. Because it is by
that character and power that we must test the
truth of the record, we are not to be stopped in
our longing look by the supposed sacredness of
any letter or by the interpretation of any school —
the one may be inaccurate, the other effete. Above
all, we will not be impeded by any doctrines about
God which Jesus himself does not teach, for, like
the early heathen converts, we know not apart
from him what God to believe in. Now, as at
first, if we would seek any help stronger than self-
help, if we feel any need for salvation, material or
spiritual, we must, for dear life's sake, seek to find
in the person of Jesus Christ a living and reliable
power, who can do for us something which we
cannot do for ourselves.
We turn to the Gospels and find that their
main theme is a "kingdom," both present and
eternal, to which Jesus calls all men, of which he
is the king. This implies that he still lives in an
invisible world of spirit, very near, still calls to us
to enter and enjoy the kingdom, to proclaim its
power and suffer for its sake. It is not enough
for us now that the Church or the Book repeats
the call. The edifice of the visible Church, ages
old, marvellous and majestic, seemed to cant over
some while ago, some part of the foundation
chap, ii THE VITAL AGE 17
sinking below the ground, the door hanging loose.
A better rock bottom may be touched; towers
and walls may be righted, the door set firm, we
hope, but in the meantime may not be sure.
Many have trooped in without right of entrance,
and have lived under the protection of the veil
that hangs before the inner presence-chamber
exquisitely wrought of holy scripture. But now
this veil has been rent in the midst by learning
which we cannot impugn. The glory of the
workmanship may be enhanced by the rending of
the poorer part, but we cannot now join the pieces
perfectly. We who would not trifle with life
have no choice but to run breathless into the
Holy Place, each asking, "Who art thou, Lord ?"
and "What wouldst thou have me to do?"
The two questions are one, for personality is
revealed in the demand it makes upon other
persons.
This condition of things is full of hope. If,
in the unsettlement of the hour, we are no worse
off than the early Christians, we may hope to be
what they were. If Jesus Christ was not his
own revelation, then the sacred canon of the
Book or Holy Church could never have come
rightly into being, built up as they were by men
who had no guide but his Spirit. If Jesus Christ
is his own revelation, now, as in the first Christian
ages before the first canon of Scripture was formed
or the voice of the Church unified, each man may
weigh all reports concerning him, find that personal
revelation for himself, and follow only in obedience
to the heavenly vision. Now we may see faith
c
18 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
in the Christ again glow and spread like living,
leaping flame. Church and Scripture, in so far as
they represent him, will be reinstated.
There is, indeed, already much evidence of this
purging and rapid fire of the living Christ in the
field of foreign missions. To one class of Christian
missionaries we would here draw particular atten-
tion, because they are in the condition of the
primitive Christians. They have existed in all
ages, but they are now very numerous, and give
abundant testimony. We refer to certain native
Christian teachers in heathen countries, who go
forward with the practice of the presence of Jesus
Christ as their only learning, their only means of
support, and their only reward.1 These men brave
the worst persecution, they teach their converts to
brave it, thinking it well worth while for the
benefit that is theirs. Some heal the sick, cast
out devils, and buy their daily bread with coins
minted in the bank of faith. If they are deluded
it is our duty to go and raise them above their
superstitions; if, on the other hand, they have
found a saner and more abundant life than we
experience, they have discovered its vital germs in
the small, uncommentaried translations of the
Gospels which they carry, on which they feed, a
source to which we have access, which may produce
as much for us if we come with a like simplicity.
1 See The Holy Spirit in Missions, by Dr. A. J. Gordon,
chap. iv. ; Story of the L.M.S., by C. S. Home, especially end
of chap. viii. ; the biography of Pastor Hsi, of the China Inland
Mission; also missionary reports of the "Christian Alliance for
Divine Healing and Foreign Missions," New York.
chap, ii THE VITAL AGE
i9
Is simplicity here a cant phrase ? We should
do well to be rid of all such ; but it is worth while
to observe that the attitude of mind to which alone
the truth of any department of life yields itself is
exactly the same in the disciplined intellect of the
greatest scholar and in the honest, earnest child or
ignorant learner. It is at once the earliest gift of
nature to the normal mind in its unfolding and
the highest result of the mental discipline of the
schools. We discount the evidence and theories
of a scientist or critic when we say, "He has a
theory to prove," "He can't get rid of a pre-
supposition," "He sees what he wants to see."
Such comments are a slur on scholarship in any
department of learning, and by them we mean to
suggest just what is meant by the words, "Except
ye become as little children ye shall not enter."
It is not ignorance, or the subordination of the
reason, that is required for faith. It is the highest
exercise of reason to seek truth with that reverence
which makes no forecast of the finding. It is the
result of the widest knowledge to believe that
unknown truth is, and is the rewarder of them
that seek it. This is the temper of all true faith.
CHAPTER III
THE ACTIONS OF JESUS
To know what that understanding of God was
that Jesus called "the faith that removes moun-
tains," and to be able to exercise it, would be to re-
cover the early joy of the gospel. No one can read
the Gospels and the Acts with candid, unbiassed
mind and not perceive the exuberance of delight, in
spite of "much tribulation," which the doctrine,
called, par excellence, "the good news," produced in
those who received it. Our great trouble is that it is
almost impossible to read whatis hackneyed without
reading into it whatever hackneyed gloss we chance
to be accustomed to. The individual may or may
not have the right of using his private judgment
in reading the Gospels, but it is certain that only
one man in a multitude has the power to use it.
The particular joy of those Gospels, and the faith
that produced it, have been almost blotted out by
the effort to read into the earthly life of Jesus the
most depressing convictions of the later Judaic
prophets and of the writers of the Epistles who still
joyfully followed their Master, and, with arbitrary
eclecticism, to relegate their promises of joy to
20
chap, in THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 21
a future state. The wailing psalms of Israel in
subjection to foreign powers, and the litanies of
the Christian Church in the Dark Ages, sing in
our ears whenever we listen to the good news of
Jesus. We look at his whole life as through church
windows stained with carnal crucifixions, and are
almost unconscious that the glass colours all that
we see.
All that Jesus said and did is an expression of
his insight into the character of God and into
God's attitude to men; and what he did must
have deeper significance than what he merely said.
Language is only coin minted in the heart of a
race; it can only express ideas that men have
already consciously thought in developing their
laws, their civilisations, the dicta of their schools.
If Jesus Christ was indeed a revelation of God,
his ministry, not his words, must be the chief part
of that revelation. As well say that God could
instruct the hosts of living creatures how to live
by the handbooks of the sciences, or form the
instincts of friendship in man by the laws of hu-
man governments, or reward spiritual attainments
by the coin of earthly treasuries, as say that the
words Jesus used contain the whole gospel. If
"for this world the word of God is Christ,', the
words Christ used could be but part of his message.
Although by obedience to his plain words we
must be judged, it is by his actions that he asked
to be justified or condemned. Instead of fixing
our attention first on those actions which the con-
sensus of the records certainly attribute to him,
the Church is wont to turn our attention from
22 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
them to give final teaching on certain aspects of
his pre-natal life and his resurrection to which it
is less certain that he gave the seal of his own
authority. The message of angels, the virgin
birth, the sacrificial suffering, the ascent into a
cloud in the sky — to deny the possibility of these
is to assume that we have conned the possibilities
of the universe, but who can say that Jesus asked
to be judged by these ? Yet it is from these alone
that we often try to make out the lineaments of
the Eternal Father. Even if we come back to
hold these as undoubted facts relating to his
departure from the Eternal and Invisible and his
return thither, he certainly did not set thern forth
as our first and chief lesson. If in his ways of
restoring men mind and body he has told us earthly
things and we believe not, how can we expect to
understand the more mysterious matters of the
hidden heaven which may have been seen in the
trailing glory of his advent and return ?
The truth that the early Church held to be most
important, the truth that in fact is most important
to every Christian who sets forth to battle in the
name of Jesus with the awful reality of sin and
pain, is the personal presence of Jesus. St. Paul,
giving a plain account of his own first trial, says,
"The Lord stood with me." It is this very
common experience which is the stronghold of the
Christian faith. It was certainly by his works of
might and love that Jesus impressed the power of
his person, the sense of his presence, upon the
Church, for he says very little about its importance ;
even in the Johannine discourses it is more often
chap, in THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 23
the indwelling of the Spirit that is emphasised.
From his words in the Synoptic Gospels it would
be difficult to prove that his continued grace to
the Church was to be more than the impress of his
name, i.e., his character. But the preponderance
of action over speech in that record makes his
personal power the one great reality of his
ministry; and the ways in which he evinced it
make it the one great necessity to the children of
his kingdom. The last words of St. Matthew's
Gospel had become, long before they were written,
the first law, as it were, of Christian thought.
Among the sayings of our Lord which appear
to have been committed to writing at a very early
date there are two which must form a most im-
portant clue to the understanding of his character
and ministry, because they give an estimate of it
in his own words. One is the passage in which
Jesus, with overcharged heart, upbraids the
favoured cities of Galilee; * the other is his own
epitome of his ministry sent in answer to the
Baptist's doubt.2
It was a moment of deep emotion that pro-
duced the reproachful apostrophe to Bethsaida
and Capernaum. In such a mood the deepest
convictions of the heart are shown. Jesus tells
us that his aim is to bring men to repentance,
and that his method is the performance of those
works of mercy whose character we know from
the adjoining records. He does not say, "If the
word that has been preached to you had been
1 St. Matt. xi. 21-24, and St. Luke x. 13-15.
2 St. Matt. xi. 2-6, and St. Luke vii. 19-23.
24 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
preached in Tyre and Sidon," etc., but here
distinctly claims to be judged by his works.
Here it is evident that he feels that his merciful
works speak louder than his words, and that the
ultimate sin was the hardness of heart which
rejected the proofs of such bountiful compassion
and power. From this passage it would appear
that when he said to John's disciples, "The blind
see, the lame walk," etc., he referred to physical,
not, as the modern mind is apt to suppose, to
spiritual, works of healing. For it is obvious that,
if the cures he is able to point out to the disciples
of the Baptist had been spiritual reformations, he
could never, either before or after, have condemned
the same neighbourhood for lack of faith ; he
could not have asserted, "The spiritually blind
see, the spiritually lame walk," and at another
time have complained that this was not the case,
nor would he have expected a careless majority to
be roused and convinced by the inward grace he
had implanted in the hearts of a few.
This answer to the Baptist is thus of the utmost
significance as containing Jesus' own estimate
of his mission. It is distinctly said that the
cause of the Baptist's doubt and inquiry was the
report of the works that Jesus did. We may
assume that their physical nature was his difficulty,
for John's mind was fixed upon a purely ethical
result. The tradition concerning him shows that
John had rejected the common belief in a merely
material salvation. National salvation consisted
for him in national and individual goodness of a
high order. John apparently supposed that such
chap, in THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 25
goodness was in the immediate power of the people
if they only would. He thought that all men
who were worth anything would prove themselves
by self-government to be good fruit-trees in God's
garden and pure grain on God's threshing-floor;
if not, they must be hewn down and burned. This
is the story concerning John, and it is true to the
type. The moralist is usually a man of well-
developed and well-balanced mental power. He
does not cry, as even St. Paul did, "O, wretched
that I am, who shall deliver me from the body
of this death"; and although the moralist of that
time was certainly inclined to believe the body to
be the seat of sin, and was therefore more or less
ascetic, he felt himself strong enough to control such
unruly desires as warred against his righteous will.
The true moralist also has humility in the presence
of what appears to him a greater purity than his
own. Such men usually recognise that harshness
is their besetting sin, although they do not see
how to avoid it without lowering the standard. It
is probable that John perceived that the lamb-like
gentleness of Jesus was a divine quality as long as
he could see that it was strictly subservient to the
severest ethical standards. But a reformer like
John, if he thinks earnestly at all about the
material welfare of the people, regards it as a
consequence of righteous living, something that
would come after reformation if at all. The fact
that it was the report of Jesus' healing works that
caused John to inquire whether he really was the
Christ, suggests that this whole business of spending
time and strength in easing all who asked of their
26 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
disabilities and pains appeared to John to be moral
trifling. To remove afflictions which he held to
be God's discipline,1 and that without putting the
recipients of relief to any probation of righteous-
ness, could hardly have appeared to a mind like
his to be true kindness, certainly not the most
direct way of evoking repentance and its fruits.
If, then, Jesus could have given an answer
suited to John's desire and mental temperament,
he surely would have done so. Which of us
would not pity a great reformer whose light was
darkened by dungeon walls and daily danger of
a cruel death, and whose lion-like spirit yet
reached out to desire the salvation of his nation
more than his own welfare ? If this situation
could touch our hearts, how much more the
tender heart of his contemporary, Jesus ! What
is the epitome of his ministry which Jesus gives to
this moralist ? Does he minimise his work for
men's bodies by showing that his cures were
the incidental overflow of compassion in cases
of extreme misery ? Does he say that to teach
righteousness is his main work, and the other
subsidiary ? No. He bids the messengers see
for themselves that the first result of his work
is that sick men have restored to them the use
of their bodily powers, and that the unfortunate
are comforted by good news of God. Jesus does
not even mention in his reply the casting out of
demons; which was, of all his benevolent acts,
1 One of the most characteristic notes of the more spiritual
literature of later Judaism was the interpretation of suffering as
a sign, not of God's hostility, but of his educative care.
chap, in THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 27
the one which would most have appealed to John
as having a possible ethical significance.
Since Jesus, in these two passages, claims to
have his ministry and character judged by his
wonderful works, it is of first importance that we
should discover what he considered their essential
characteristic. It has often been assumed that
this was their miraculous nature; but let us
inquire. In another case1 Jesus is asked by
religious men to perform a work of which the
essential feature shall be that it is miraculous and
beyond the power of common men. There is no
evidence that it was frivolity in those who asked
that made Jesus refuse their request. While it
is true that no marvel can prove the power of
God, because there are always two other possible
explanations, fraud or the devil, men often honestly
think, even in this day, that they would be con-
vinced of divine power if they saw a "miraculous
sign." Jesus calls his questioners hypocrites;
but we cannot think that if he had believed them
conscious of their hypocrisy, he would have taken
the trouble to tell them the underlying character
of the party spirit they displayed. The very
passion of his denunciation proves that he saw
they gave themselves credit for good intention;
and a Church which during long periods has
lauded the works of Jesus merely as signs of
supernatural power cannot condemn their demand.
It could not have been because of their personal
depravity that Jesus treated this request of the
scribes and Pharisees with contempt, because we
xSt. Matt. xii. 38, xvi. !; St. Mark via, H.
28 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
are told he rejected the desire of a mixed
multitude for the same aid to faith with the
same reproach.1 We should surely be justified
in learning from these incidents alone that it was
not any miraculous character of his works by
which Jesus asked to be judged, but by their
other qualities of personal power and unsparing
love.
There are other passages, belonging, according
to many critics, to the same original substratum
of the Christian evangel, which show that the
miraculous element was not in the mind of Jesus
a feature of his works and signs. In the com-
missions to the Twelve and the Seventy the
command to heal disease and to cast out devils
goes to prove that in respect to such powers
Jesus did not think of himself as unique. Of
like tenor is the passage in which he freely
concedes to the sons of the Jews a like power.2
But much stronger evidence on the point is the
fact that he required a certain psychical condition
in which to work — faith, individual and corporate.
This prevents us laying emphasis on the miraculous
nature of the work if we accept as the scientific
test of a miracle that laid down by J. S. Mill —
"Were there present in the case such external
conditions, such second causes, as we may call
them, that whenever these conditions and causes
reappear the event will be reproduced ? If there
were, it is not a miracle; if there were not, it
is." Jesus certainly taught that whenever the
1 St. Luke xi. 29.
2 St. Matt. xii. 27; St. Luke xi. 19.
chap, in THE ACTIONS OF JESUS 29
right faith was exercised the same marvels would
result.
Although critics differ as to the antiquity and
authenticity of some of the passages quoted in
this chapter it remains true that we have no
history of Jesus, even the earliest and most scanty,
that does not make his wonderful works an
essential part of the gospel. The most ample
tradition we have of him does not lay more
proportionate stress upon his benevolent marvels
than does the most meagre. If we would under-
stand the ministry of Jesus as he understood it
we must not minimise the importance of his
works, but study their significance, which does not
depend on the assumption that they are miraculous.
As the messenger of God Jesus went about
showing how God's will is to be done on earth
as in heaven. All hopes of heaven include these —
forgiveness, love, joy, self-control, and health;
Jesus spent himself showing how ready God was
to bestow these in response to faith. This great
revelation -— - that all wrath and misery were hostile
to God's will — was necessary to knit man's heart
to God; it was the outfit required for a new
start in God's service. It was, indeed, the defini-
tion of service, for it had for its negative side
the doctrine that all the penalties of sin — all
hatred, oppression, want, infirmity, and disease —
proceeded from a source of volitional evil at
enmity with God, and were to be vanquished and
cast out by the victory of faith.
CHAPTER IV
FAITH
Faith is the human equipment needed for life
in the kingdom which Jesus inaugurated. What
is faith ?
The simplest activities of the human heart
cannot be known except by experience. How is
it possible to teach the mind what love is when the
heart is self-centred, or explain hatred to a happy
child ? But as far as the character of faith can be
put into words, most of us would agree in saying
that faith largely consists in a true estimate of
those qualities of personality which, of their very
nature, are hidden from sense, and the exercise of
faith is any activity based on this estimate. Super-
stition, we may add, must involve a false estimate
of those same personal qualities. (In making such
"true estimate" it must not be forgotten that not
only intelligence but emotion and volition are
involved.)
Can we briefly consider this without being trite
on a well-worn subject ? Take an elementary
instance. A savage disabled in a solitary place
might put faith in his dog, sending him to fetch
chap, iv FAITH
3i
aid. If, however, the dog had been trained into
a mechanical habit of bringing aid, the reliance
placed in him by his master would not be faith,
but the sort of confidence we have in the properties
of inanimate things and mechanical laws. He
could only have faith in the dog's spontaneous
action in so far as it had evinced personal qualities,
and in so far as he could detect sagacity and good
will from its general conduct. Hope would rise
to faith if the dog had displayed these qualities
in a high degree, and more especially if the man
belonged to a tribe where all were in the habit
of trusting to the sagacity and affection of dogs
in emergencies.
Faith in the dog would involve observation,
memory, and an inference of reason from what the
man knew of this and other dogs. In the last
analysis his faith, true or false, would be his
estimate of such personal character as the dog
possessed. His exercise of faith would be activity
based on this estimate; and it would involve in
the man courage and purpose, for despondency
and lack of purpose produce a mental inactivity
which would eat into the truest faith.
In this simple case we see how the man who
could best gauge the qualities of his dog would
himself have those qualities which make men fittest
to survive, and that the faith that would sustain
such a man in such a period of waiting would be
most perfectly exercised when he had the best use
of all his mental powers.
In this case, however, the advantage of faith
would be purely subjective. It would hinder the
32 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
suffering man from sinking under despair, but
could have no effect upon the fidelity of the dog.
Imagine a fellow-man in the place of the dog. Faith
on the part of the sufferer would not be changed
in quality, although it might be in degree, but that
faith would have effect upon the messenger. If he
were good-hearted, the fact that his injured fellow
had faith in him would add a strong motive to
natural compassion. Such trust, however, could
not evoke in him qualities which were not there,
nor alter physical circumstance. What effect then,
other than subjective, would the exercise of faith
have ? It would, for the hour, knit the purpose
and desire of the two men into one. The more
unquestioning the faith of the injured, the more
responsive the messenger, the more absolute would
be their oneness — the courage, the purpose, the
hope and heart of the two acting as one against all
opposing forces, mental and physical. Here we
come on the first trace of the law governing
corporate life. This more than single strength of
a man at one with another is no fantastic notion,
but a commonplace of daily life. Which of us, as
a child, has not been toppling on some forbidden
height, unbalanced, about to fall, and been made
perfectly secure again by a cheerful word or the
mere touch of a kindly finger-tip ? Which of us
has not seen a futile man made effectual in pro-
fessional and public life by obtaining a good wife,
who vet never appears with him in the street, the
exchange, or assembly ? Which of us has not been
ready to give up an enterprise in which the odds
were against us, and been heartened to go on by
chap, iv FAITH 33
realising that we had the backing of one other
human will ?
Let us here note that in thinking men this
oneness produced by faith must for "the special
purpose extend to opinion. To return to our
illustration, it is evident that the sufferer must be
convinced, not only as to the ability and fidelity
of his friend, but as to his thoughts and theories
on the matter. The messenger might conceivably
believe lonely pain to be a moral benefit. In such
a case the sufferer could not have the same con-
fidence; resignation would take the place of hope.
Or suppose that the sufferer knew that his friend
would regard the succour as wholly desirable, but
would regard his case as of small proportionate
importance compared with other manifold claims
upon his attention and energy. Again he could
not feel the same confidence as if he knew that the
claim of his sad position would absorb his friend's
attention till succour was obtained.
The occasion of faith which we have been con-
sidering is the simplest, and must necessarily lie at
the beginning of all our education in faith. To
he in bodily helplessness and rely upon the aid of
love is the primary attitude of mind in the most
formative years of childhood. In further con-
sidering the nature of faith we must have regard to
the more complex occasions of faith between man
and man, and to the growth and culmination of
the life of faith between men — friendship. There
is, of course, in any human friendship much of that
reliance which is born of knowledge. We trust a
friend, in a multitude of instances, just as we trust
34 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
a stout stick or a strong rope, a ferry-man or a cab-
driver, knowing enough of the properties of each
to know that they will be all that we require in
certain circumstances. Over and above the pro-
perties of which we have knowledge there are
qualities in every man concerning which
We have but faith; we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see.
It is only that element in personality which appears
to act spontaneously in which we can have faith,
that element in whose actions we descry an inner
unity upon diverse occasions where outward unity
is impossible. In the story of Gethsemane, when
Jesus says to the sleeping three, "The spirit is
willing, but the flesh is weak," he evinces faith in
hidden elements of character, hidden in the past
under selfish rivalries and claims for reward, and
now under the desertion and denial he had him-
self prophesied as at hand. Yet by action based
on such estimate of his followers, he, humanly
speaking, conquered the civilised world. Or, to
take a widely different case, Leonidas and his
three hundred would have been as grass before the
wind had it not been for mutual faith. Every
Thermopylae the world has seen has been possible
because men did at times trust men to stand against
all the manifold claims of individual self-interest.
The best incidents in a life like that of the patriot
Hampden are the outcome of faith in the untried
capacity of his neighbours to rise to new responsi-
bilities. All measures of self-government by which
the race has advanced have been the result of man's
chap, iv FAITH
35
faith in man to become something more than he
has been. The best relations of life, on which the
fabric of our progress rests, are built of this faith.
It is that that makes the difference between the
Western home and the Eastern harem.
Further, we can easily perceive, in any friend-
ship that through a lifetime depends daily upon
another's good will unbiassed by selfish interests,
that as each year passes, and every energy is called
into play by communion, and each acquires a closer
understanding of the other, this life of faith, faith
of each in the other, while engaging all the faculties
men have, will at last be what it was at first, an
estimate — an estimate truer and often higher, but
of the same kind. And while such a friendship
commonly begins with prayer — need, request,
service, that only at first — at last it will not have
grown beyond the occasions of need and service,
even although it also means much more of mutual
communion beside. The elementary exercises of
faith — petition and response — will ever be more
frequent, more unconscious, more perfect, when
the friendship has permeated larger areas of the
mutual life. The estimate of another which is the
product of a lifetime of mutual understanding
will be more accurate; its superstitions will have
dropped off, its truth be established. It will also
be different in scope, and its assurance will have
permeated the whole nature, conscious and un-
conscious; but it will remain an estimate of the
unseen personal qualities of the friend.
It will, perhaps, be said that faith is not so
much an estimate of personal character as a high
36 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
estimate. But reflection shows that it requires
only to be a true estimate. If a character is
variable and unstable, an estimate that regards him
as reliable is superstitious. To believe in his
instability, if indeed he be unstable, is the only
basis of right dealing with such a person. If,
however, there be a degree of stability under the
instability, that also must be reckoned with in the
estimate. Or let us take the case of a character
wholly bad. An accurate estimate of his wicked-
ness is the faith required for dealing with him;
to question the wickedness, to act upon a hope
or supposition of something else, would be a false
faith. For example, when Jesus said that " Satan"
could not do good, he taught a faith in the uniform
nature of evil as well as of good. Had the Church
ceased to attribute physical goods to "the devil"
she would have gained much.
But, again, it will be said that we do speak of
faith as being great or little in quantity, whereas
we cannot quantify the mental vision we call an
estimate. But we can have vigour or feebleness
in any mental process, and in all the activities based
on that process. It is possible for a man to have
an estimate of another which is not false and yet
is shadowy compared with his estimate of himself
or of forces on which he must rely. And indeed
there are men who live through all the relations of
life and never realise personality sufficiently to deal
with persons in any other way than as they deal
with variable natural forces — such as wind and
weather, which a man may utilise but cannot count
upon. Such a man cannot be said to have a
chap, iv FAITH 37
superstitious estimate of the character of his fellows.
What he lacks is vigour of thought as applied
to character, vigour of observation in mustering
given data, vigour of desire for more than is seen,
vigour of that fine co-operation of all his powers
which fetches from the unseen something just
beyond the logical inference from given data. He
is a man not of false faith but of little faith. His
whole nature could be employed in forming a
greater faith, a more vigorous estimate, on which
he could not but act.
To take an example from our New Testament:
when Jesus said, " I have not seen so great faith,
no, not in Israel" he was speaking to a man who
had evidently exercised vigorous thought concern-
ing the power by which Jesus cured disease. He
argued that the power Jesus exercised over the
health and disease of those brought into his pres-
ence was not a physical but a spiritual power, and
therefore, he concluded, presence or absence could
make no difference. "Speak the word only and
my servant (who lies at a distance) shall be healed."
When Jesus repeatedly used his reproachful
formula, "Oh ye of little faith," he seems usually
to have been chiding, not so much a wrong
estimate of his own character or of the Father's, as
vagueness and inactivity of thought which allows
the attention to be diverted from the object of
faith to the causes of fear. It is clear, for example,
that in the story of Peter's walking on the water,
the disciple could not have altered his estimate of
our Lord's power because the waves were boisterous.
That estimate must have been one that inspired
38 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
absolute trust, or he would never have got out of
his ship. What happened was that the grasp of
his mind and will upon what he knew to be the
life-force of Jesus relaxed when he gave his atten-
tion to danger; the power that union of will and
thought with Jesus gave was lost because such
corporate union must be mutual.
There is one very important fact to be observed
concerning the quality of faith that a man exercises
in his fellow-creatures ; it is not determined merely
by his individual qualities; it rises or falls with the
standards of the community in which he lives.
Here, again, we learn a law of the corporate life.
For example, in a land where men habitually shut
up their women, it would be difficult, almost
impossible, for one man to set his women at large
and never feel the slightest suspicion concerning
their affections or behaviour, however trustworthy
they might be. Suspicious thoughts would intrude
at times, no matter how high he might at other
times rise above them, and we all admit that he
would be, not an average, but a remarkable man
to rise above them at all. Or again, in a com-
munity where men habitually doubted the honesty
of their fellows, a man who should place confidence
in a friend beyond the limit of mutual self-interest
would naturally be beset by inward suspicions.
To hold to such a course in defiance of suspicion
would perhaps be the highest degree of friendship
to which he could attain.
It is very natural that in matters of faith a
man should thus be greatly dependent on his
environment, for he is very dependent on it for
chap, iv FAITH 39
the degree in which he realises matters of fact
— fact either of sensuous experience or logical
inference. Fashions in taste and philosophy
change the face of the natural universe for man.
One generation does not see, much less notice, the
beauties of nature; in another generation, of the
same nation in the same climate, we find aesthetic
joy in nature common, even children and the un-
educated observing the earth's beauty. In the
ancient Roman world the only landscape that was
admirable was the flat and fertile plain, where
transit was easy and cultivation remunerative.
The mountains stood for hardship and peril, and
were merely ugly in their cruelty. Again, in each
generation we find men actually aware only of such
facts of life as fit into the philosophy of their age.
Eclecticism in observation and inference is one of
the most salient characteristics of the Zeitgeist.
Hence arises the difficulty of the historian who,
when he would depict a bygone age, finds that no
record of the time is impartial, either in the facts it
records or the inferences it makes. Nor can he be
sure of arriving at the whole truth by balancing
one chronicler against another, because the cor-
porate thought and corporate prejudices of the age
colour every source of information, and must, so
far as they can be ascertained, be allowed for.
Now if this be the case in the attempt to
observe plain matters of fact, how much more
must it be the case when man seeks to exercise
powers additional to those of sense and logic,
reaching out to the unseen self within his fellow-
man. Faith, like abstract reasoning, is a more
4o HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
recently developed power than the senses we have
in common with low forms of life and the sagacity
we share with intelligent brutes; for that reason
we are more uncertain in its exercise and more
dependent on the corporate atmosphere within
which we exercise it.
Another notable characteristic of faith is that
even when a man bases his ordinary actions upon
it he can seldom reckon up his own faith. We
are all conscious at times of being surprised, in
some sudden moment of insight, by finding that
we trust some individual more or less than we
supposed. In some crucial moment a man dis-
covers how little he has known his own mind with
regard to the comparative worth of neighbours or
friends. Most of us are sincerely under the im-
pression that we would trust all whom we have
admitted to the inner circle of friendship against
all appearances; but we are forced to admit that
in cases where serious accusation is made, and
supported by evidence to others convincing, he is
a rare man who does not know the agony of doubt.
When no such crucial hour of self-revelation occurs
in a man's life there is a fair presumption that he
may be, from first to last, unconscious of the
precise quality of the estimate he really makes of
his fellow-man.
Man's faith in God cannot be different in kind
from his faith in man. Since it is only personal
attributes that can evoke faith, faith in God is only
possible when man regards God's character as in
some sense "in the image" of his own. It follows
that in so far as man conceives God as force, or
chap, iv FAITH 41
substance, or anything other than personal, the
reliance he can place in him will be inferior to that
he places in a person; it will be the reliance he
places in law or in the properties of matter. We
are all aware that this sort of reliance is the peril
of any religious system that has the appearance
of mechanical working, as, for example, a system
involving the uniform inspiration of a literature, or
the uniform working of certain rites and privileges.
Although reliance in a salvation thus partly
mechanical certainly does not exclude the highest
faith, yet, as we all know, it is fatally easy to trust
to such an artificial religious theory as must be
composed by finding a favourite doctrine in every
book of the Bible, or to trust to the efficacy of
sacraments to ensure future salvation just as one
would trust a cab or a ferry-boat to land one at
the rio-ht destination.
But to return, our point is that man's faith in a
personal God is identical with the estimate he
forms of God's character by reaching beyond what
he can learn of God in creation. But the estimate
of faith is not independent of what we learn of
God in creation. On the contrary, just as the
simplest exercise of faith tov/ard a fellow-man is
based on all the data we have concerning his
thoughts, his emotions, and his will, so faith in God
must be based on all the data we have concerning
him in the universe, which is his visible action.
Even in a child, faith in God must be in part derived
from the notion he forms of the universe, includ-
ing of course the persons about him.
That estimate of God embodied in our faith is,
42 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
then, in part an inference of reason from what we
know of nature, especially human nature, and of
all the facts that bear on the religious life. But it
is, even at the outset, more than that, just as a
man's faith in the fidelity of a dog, or the love of
a life-long friend, is more than anything that can
be wrested by logical process from given data.
Man's faith in God not only involves his notion
of the whole of nature, but is the outcome of his
whole nature. For if all that he is and does goes
to make up and to modify his estimate of the
hidden personality in his brother, it must also
make and modify his estimate of the hidden
personality of supreme Love. It can never be
merely the exercise of an extra power. It is an
outcome of the whole man; it is the highest out-
come, requiring practice in mundane faith before
it can attain to God. The well-known axiom of
the Johannine epistle holds good — if a man does
not put faith in his brother whom he has seen, he
cannot, in any real, practical way, put faith in God
whom he has not seen. •
All that we have been saying is that faith is the
view of God taken by the mind's eye, which was
the figure used by Jesus. We may, with equal
truth of analogy, speak of the light of a house
being the window, or the condition in which the
window is kept, or the light that shines in at the
window. The light of the mind is the mind's
eye, or the correctness of the mental vision, or the
objective reality the mind is able to apprehend.
"If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be
full of light." The leper who accosted Jesus
chap, iv FAITH 43
saying, "If thou wilt thou canst make me clean,"
had a true and vigorous estimate of Jesus that was
only half the truth. Jesus went so far as to touch
him — unheard of mercy to a leper — in saying, "I
will." The touch, the word, made the leper's
estimate as to power and will complete; with
his mind's eye he saw one who had both power
and determination to cure him. The Syro-
phenician had evidently made a true estimate of
Jesus before she ignored his dismissal with her
memorable persistence. The Roman captain had
a definite belief concerning the authority of Jesus
in the world of unseen power. In the particular
in which these were seeking help their whole life
was full of light because their sight was true.
To sum up. Faith is the same in kind whether
exercised toward man or toward God, whether
exercised for an hour or for a lifetime. Our
power of faith is largely dependent on our human
environment. Our actual faith is usually not
prominent in consciousness, so that a man's notion
of his own faith is not worth very much. It is
probably greater or less than he supposes. Its
test must be its result. An estimate of God's love
and will for man which knits man's purpose to
the purpose of God, and knits the purpose of each
man to that of his fellows, is invincible strength —
is the supreme victory of mind over chaos — is
the kingdom of God.
CHAPTER V
CORPORATE FAITH
The kingdom of heaven implies the welding of
the faith of many into one. To understand what
condition is needed for the highest corporate faith
in God we must turn aside and consider the laws
of all corporate life.
It will be seen that in this chapter we are
not attempting to set forth the integrity of the
individual life — a truth that is in no danger of
being minimised by the modern temper. We
believe, indeed, that the only philosophic basis for
Christianity is the conception of personality as the
ultimate factor in human thought; the belief that
a personal intellect can alone interpret nature, as
a personal intelligence could alone create nature.
But just as we have no experience of mind except
under bodily conditions, so we have no experience
at all of individual mind except as influenced by
other minds. It is the bearing of this fact on the
Christian life which we now proceed to consider.
A race, a nation, a class, an orderly crowd, a
riotous mob — these are units in the same sense in
which the individual is a unit. A man's conscious
44
chap, v CORPORATE FAITH
45
self is made up of what appears to be many
selves — wills that conflict, thoughts that argue
among themselves except when the voice of the
leader, the stronger volition, wins a whole-hearted
response. The mind as an individual whole forms
a different object of study from its separate senti-
ments and volitions. In like manner a body of
men related to each other in any way form a unit
whose faculties are not the same as those of the
individuals that compose it. The psychology of
the corporate life is not that of the individual life.
No one kind-hearted man, for example, could
rejoice in the death of a stag in the way in which
a crowd of hunters will rejoice in it. It is well
known that very bad men in a crowded theatre
will involuntarily hiss a slight defection from vir-
tue on the part of a hero. It is not the aggregate
of their individual sentiments that such men ex-
press. As an aggregate they have different senti-
ments from those they possess as individuals. When
reflecting, they have different powers of thought
from those they have as individuals; when in action,
the combined action is not the mere sum of indi-
vidual actions, but something better or worse.
Yet although the individual life and the cor-
porate life may be shown to be different, they
always merge into and react on one another. This
chapter is concerned with the effect of the cor-
porate life on the individual. A man has not the
same mind when with one neighbour as when with
another. When with them both his mind undergoes
another modification. When he lives in a village
his mind is modified by the pull of the common
46 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
soul of that village. When he goes up to the town
the larger environment again affects him visibly
if not consciously. All this has been proved so
often that it needs repetition here only in order
to observe that a body of men forming a church
must come under the same psychological laws as
govern the same men in other aggregates.
Further, it is not necessary that men should
visibly herd together to experience the corporate
influence. There is abundant evidence that there
is a force which causes one man to think as his
neighbour thinks, divided though they be by the
walls of their separate houses or by miles of inter-
vening country, without conscious communication,
and without access to the same visible sources of
influence, — a force as invisible but as certainly
operative as gravitation. We know that every
stone lying on a tract of land many miles in extent
exercises a certain attraction for every other stone.
We do not dispute this physical law, even though
we only see the effect of its operation in certain ex-
aggerated conditions — as, for example, when near
a high mass of rock, the plumb-line hangs aslant.
The present writer knows a case of a woman who
very frequently awoke on Sunday morning repeat-
ing to herself certain formulas of prayer. They
were not familiar to her, and were never alike two
Sundays in succession. After some time she dis-
covered that they were scraps from the Anglican
collect for the day. It is true that she must have
heard the collects, though she had never studied
them; but she certainly had no knowledge at all
of their order in the Christian year. We cannot
chap, v CORPORATE FAITH 47
reasonably doubt that if the actual words of the
many could thus upon rare occasion press into the
consciousness of one without visible communica-
tion, the mental inclination of the many behind
the words would have a much commoner, if still
more subtle, effect upon the one.
The forces which govern man's corporate life
are those which work chiefly upon the latent
powers of his being.1 We are only beginning to
discern them. Take, for example, the fact that
it is easy to teach an ignorant child of ignorant
parents to-day some conception current in our
decade which the most brilliant men a century
ago only grasped with effort. Is telepathy the
cause of this ? contagion of thought or feeling ?
suggestibility ? These are words of which the
connotation is as yet imperfect, although by the
realities which they denote we all live. The
strength of a corporate movement among men
may be terrible for good or evil, but that strength
is commonly dissipated by the counter pull of
other corporate movements. Thus, a man who is
1 "What can be more complicated, more logical, more mar-
vellous than a language ? Yet whence can this admirably organ-
ised production have arisen, except it be the outcome of the
unconscious genius of crowds ? The most learned scholars, the
most esteemed grammarians can do no more than note down
the laws that govern languages; they would be utterly incapable
of creating them. Even with respect to the ideas of great men,
are we certain that they are exclusively the offspring of their
brains ? No doubt such ideas are always created by solitary
minds, but is it not the genius of crowds that has furnished the
thousands of grains of dust forming the soil in which they have
sprung up ?" — The Crowd, by Gustave Le Bon, p. 9.
48 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
a Freemason, a Churchman, a citizen, feels the pull
of each communion; and in so far as the interests
of each are different, he must not only be weaker
in each but must weaken each. It is only in so
far as the pull of each is good and identical with
the pull of the others, that the individual can
realise the whole strength of his personality, can
"possess his soul." The man we have instanced
cannot obey the counsels of perfection in the
Church unless he is also obeying them in the State
and in all other relationships. He cannot, as a
Christian, act in obedience to the Sermon on the
Mount, and at the same time, as a citizen, follow a
contradictory code. Moral obliquity, intellectual
dulness, is the inevitable result of the effort. The
laws which God has made to govern mind are as
certain in their operation as those he has made to
govern matter. A plumb-line will not hang true
plumb near a mountain; the attraction of the
mountain interferes with the attraction of the
earth. A man's Christian life cannot be true to
the demand of Jesus if, not only his own civic
life, but that of his fellows, is a deflecting mass.
We thus see that probably there is no such
thing as absolutely independent thought or feeling;
nor can we admit the recent theorv of some
psychologists that the more independent the
thought, the higher its level. Although the
diseases of the corporate life, i.e., mental epidemics,1
certainly show an abnormal dependence of one
1 The following list of such epidemics is given in The Psy-
chology of Suggestion by Boris Sidis : —
Pilgrimage epidemic, 1000-1095.
chap, v CORPORATE FAITH 49
mind on another as their most prominent symptom,
this does not prove the highest degree of mental
independence to be the highest degree of mental
health; as well say because men cannot live in
a tropical sun that they would have the best
health in the lowest temperature. The stern
moralist is perhaps the highest instance of in-
dependent thought; the genius is perhaps the
highest product of sympathy with the world-mind.
If there is an invisible bond of union between
thoughts of saint and sinner, of Church and world,
of class and class, of nation and nation, the Church
can only be saved in the degree in which she saves
the whole world. The whole race is corporate.
A mental epidemic does not strike the Christian
with one folly and the worldling with another.
Out they go together, Christian and worldling, to
dance the tarantella, to burn witches, to murder
Jews, to invest in financial bubbles, to march to
every war at the sound of trumpet and drum.
Crusade epidemic,
1 Eastern and Western crusades 1
Children's crusade J Vj / •
Flagellant epidemic, 1260-1348.
Anti-Semitic mania, following the Black Death, 1348.
{St. John's dance, 1374.
St. Vitus' dance, 1418.
Tarantism, 1470 to end of 15th century.
Demonophobia, or Witchcraft mania, 1488 to end of 17th
century.
{Tulipomania, 1634.
The Mississippi Scheme, 1717.
The South Sea Bubble, 1720 — and
business bubbles to our own times.
E
5o HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
Likewise, every good movement by which the
race has increased its power of compassion and
practice of justice has been corporate. Slowly,
surely, healthily, the racial mind has moved, per-
mitting the same ideas to be brought to birth
often at the same time in lands and societies visibly
separated one from another. Legislation — which
means public opinion — on behalf of the debtor,
the vanquished, the woman, the child, the slave,
the beast, has extended in ways that man's con-
scious political agitations only half explain. When
we compare the religions, the ethics, the art, and
science, of many and most diverse nations, beneath
the differences that arrest the shallow and lead the
reverent to look deeper, we find likenesses that
can hardly be explained except by the great fact
of corporate unity. Within Christendom pro-
gressive movements affect alike baptized and un-
baptized. Compassion for the oppressed, passion
to discover truth — these, whatever local and
temporary aspect they assume, infect mind after
mind without any distinction of creed. Therefore,
since every man is liable to the infection of his
neighbour's ideas, be they good or bad, wise or
mad, the Church can only have a perfect faith
when she has converted the world to a perfect
faith ; and her degree of faith in any place and
time will depend on the convictions she is evoking
in her environment. The "serious man" did not
say to Wesley, "You must not serve God alone";
he said, "You cannot"; and the psychology of
the corporate mind bears out the non possumus for
each one of us. Jesus strictly enjoined upon every
chap, v CORPORATE FAITH 5i
disciple resignation to such suffering as has a
directly saving effect upon the world — the bearing
of reproach and tyranny in the spirit of love. He
does not say that men who will not endure this
redemptive pain must not count themselves his
disciples; he says they cannot be his disciples.
It is not possible, even to God, to give salvation to
a man who is not ready in his degree to be a saviour.
All his plan for the kingdom shows that Jesus
knewthat individual faith is dependent on corporate
faith. He gave a glad, almost a surprised, wel-
come, to every sign of individual faith, without
criticism of its lack, and levelled constant reproach
against the nation, the generation, and the religious
classes of his time for lack of faith. If faith in
God is the highest exercise of personal power, all
history shows that the field of personal power is
the corporate life. When the corporate life is at
its highest, and the individual is most closely allied
to it, his individuality is at its strongest and his
personal powers performing their highest functions.
Thus we have seen that the faith of every
individual is dependent upon the faith of his
fellows, more dependent on the faith of those with
whom he is in more intimate relation, but also in
some degree dependent upon the corporate faith
of the whole environment. The question of how
far the human will is determined is not a question
simply of how the sequence of states is governed
in a man's own mind. If he could enter the arena
of life without an ancestry, with complete will
and intelligence, without a personal past, his mental
condition would still be determined each moment
52 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
more or less by the mental condition of every man
who treads the earth with him. We have seen
that the oftener a man herds with the same crowd,
the less he can resist its influence; but unless he
lives, sleeps, eats, and works with it, its influence
must be greatly modified by the pull of every
other relation of his life. The psychic law which
governs him is that even when he thinks he girds
himself and goes whither he will, another is always
girding him and carrying him whither he will not.
The laws of this involuntary brotherhood have,
of course, lent themselves to every organisation by
which men have thought to create brotherhood.
Unless the race were a unity, no monastic order,
no army, no family, no nation, no empire,
could hold together. The thrill of patriotism or
imperial spirit which passes from man to man, the
sense of kinship between children that have played
around one hearth, these have been evidences of
the inner brotherhood of men too strong to escape
notice, and are the forces that have been utilised
in every organisation. Such bodies as had any
particular object have used a partial sense of
brotherhood for a partial end, and attained success;
but organisations which have Christianity for their
nexus have an interest in which all men share, a
purpose which embraces every man. They have
appeared to fail; perhaps because they have not
sufficiently recognised that man's religious brother-
hood is essentially and intrinsically universal. It
is universal, whether he desires it or not, and a
limiting organisation must be more or less false to
the truth of this, and, although it gain its whole
chap, v CORPORATE FAITH 53
force from the brotherhood of man, must run
counter to its essential religious aspect.
If, for example, we have a certain sectional
community in a certain town, the sect adheres by
the natural laws which govern corporate life.
Usually every member holds the doctrines of the
sect more strongly the more he herds with its
other members, and the more he endeavours to
isolate himself from the larger interests of the
town. Unless the isolation is complete, unless he
live entirely with the brethren of the order, the
full influence of the sect unit on the individual
unit is not realised. Let us see to what this leads
us. If the sect taught the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth, if the ideal life could
be lived without relation to the outer world, its
organisation would then be the best training,
sphere, and home for the individual. But what is
the result in any organisation which has realised
such complete union in isolation as, for example,
some monastic orders ? We are all ready to
admit that the result is not the realisation by its
members of the whole truth or the ideal life. At
its best it may be admitted to be something which
has its niche in the larger brotherhood and the
more universal ideal, but nothing more. No one,
not even an advocate of such an order, will contend
that it is more than this at its best. At its worst,
it is a pest-house of mental freaks. Thus we see
that a limited union and isolation at their highest
in a religious body do not produce the best type
of religious brotherhood.
Let us inquire what light this throws on any
54 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
association involving some degree of union and of
isolation. It proves, at least, that some relations
with the outer world are necessary for religious
development. The general view of the Church is
that she must maintain relations with the world
if only because she must exert missionary and
charitable activities. She has not, however, evinced
much interest in learning from the larger sanity of
the greater number. She has conceived of her
relation toward the world as that of teacher only.
She has sought to restrict, as far as possible, her
sense of companionship with the world to a sense
of the world's need and the effort to supply it.
Christian literature, written for those who meet the
world in their various avocations, has gone to
emphasise this attitude. Here we have a theory
of life false to fact. The missioner, preaching to
congregations of heathen or worldlings, the monk
ministering to companies of vagrants, the devout
lady taking her dutiful part in court or ball-room,
all these return to their cloister or closet refreshed
and made free from their morbid tendencies, not
so much by their own activities as by mere contact
with a fresh and wide mental atmosphere. As
they stood face to face with men and women from
the boisterous outer world, deep answered unto
deep in their souls. Without volition, below
consciousness, the laws of the universal brother-
hood which God created and Jesus blessed worked
to give them as much as they could receive of the
strength of the universal mind.
That the lives of devout Christians are not
regulated by the desire to obtain all that the
chap, v CORPORATE FAITH 55
brotherhood of man has to give would appear to
be a matter of great moment, not only because
their theory puts the best of them as far as possible
out of reach of the benefit of the race-soul which
they ought constantly to receive, but because this
theory puts the Christian out of harmony with
the demand of Jesus, whose example and whose
precepts are in absolute accord with the universal
religious brotherhood of man.
To sum up. The laws of corporate life form
an invisible and universal bond, and complete
independence of individual faith is impossible;
complete independence of sectional religious life is
equally impossible. The corporate life of faith
must fall under the same laws as govern all
corporate life.
CHAPTER VI
THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER
It was in his activities for human relief that Jesus
exemplified the certain result of faithful prayer.
The belief about prayer almost universal in the
religious world, both Jewish and pagan, was that
when man had exercised repentance and obedience
and made his humble petition to heaven it still
rested with the divine will to give or to withhold.
This was a most natural belief so long as men
regarded the divine nature as free from what we
might call principles of conduct, or as possessing
only such laws of character as were and must
remain hidden from human understanding; but
Christian writers err who assume that Jesus set the
seal of his authority to it, prevalent as it was in
the world of his day. In the most ancient litur-
gies we find this belief — that uncertainty always
waited upon prayer — constantly expressed along
with beautiful aspirations of penitence and faith.
We have read the deciphered prayers of "Assyrian
kings who compose monotonous variations upon
the three themes of pride, flattery, and fear."
56
ch. vi THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 57
And this anxiety as to the result, the heaping up
of argument in anguish lest the prayer be rejected,
the much speaking in alternations of confidence
and solicitude, are also the characteristics of nearly
all the most exquisite expressions of faith in all
religions. In the Hebrew psalms we are so much
accustomed to this sort of prayer that we almost
fail to notice it, or the profound contrast between
this attitude of mind and that expressed in that
psalm whose parallelism with the thought of Jesus
is so striking.
The lord is my shepherd. Our father in heaven.
I shall not want. He leads Thy kingdom be within and
me in green pastures and by around us. Thy will be
waters of rest. done here as in heaven.
Give us our daily bread.
He restoreth my life. Forgive us as we forgive.
He leadeth in right paths. Lead us aside from temptation.
I will fear no evil. Deliver us from evil.
Goodness and mercy shall All things whatsoever ye pray
follow me always, every- and ask for, believe that ye
where, have received them, and ye
shall have them.
All ages have been familiar not only with the
ascription of arbitrariness to God by the religious,
but also with their reverent method of accounting
for it by assuming that the all-knowledge of God
compared with the ignorance of man would fre-
quently make God reject human petitions out of
kindness, even those for forgiveness and the mere
needs of life. In contrast to all this the supreme
originality of the religious genius of Jesus is
displayed in his insight into the uniformity
58 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
of law in the religious life. It is evident that
he had pondered deeply certain natural sequences
in material things on which the utility of man's
labour depended ; and he certainly grew to believe
in the uniformity of divine will in the whole
realm of personal action.
This was a new and startling conception, so
new that the darkness of man's unbelief on all
sides closed in on this ray of spiritual light, and
even now it often seems only to flash hither and
thither like a searchlight in a dark dawn. Yet it is
indeed no searchlight, but a sun destined to rise
in our sky. Jesus regarded faith as a cause which
had a uniform effect. He argues that where
the effect is the cause must be, and where the
effect is not the cause cannot be. His formula, so
often used, "Thy faith hath made thee whole," is
an argument from the effect to the cause, addressed
to the attention of all. He evidently thought it
of great importance that his hearers should observe
that the effect proved the cause. Such strong
teaching he deals out to learned and simple,
losing, it would seem, no opportunity to impress
his followers. "According to your faith be it
unto you." "O woman, great is thy faith (there-
fore) be it as thou wilt." "I have not seen such
faith . . . (therefore) go thy way, thy son liveth."
Again, he unhesitatingly asserts lack of faith to be
the reason why some desired effect was not pro-
duced. When the disciples tried to cure the
epileptic boy and failed, Jesus was not present.
They had before this been away from him on
missions of healing, and without his presence
ch. vi THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 59
had constant success. Why does he blame them
now for lack of faith of which they were not
conscious ? He is quite sure the cause is lacking
because the effect is not produced — " Because of
your unbelief." This was probably another of his
formulas; it was deeply impressed on the minds
of the evangelists as accounting for lack of benefit.
To these sayings we must add the words of advice
he gave to petitioners whose hope wavered, " Be
not afraid; only believe." "Believest thou? All
things are possible to him that believeth." Beside
these words let us lay the promises of Jesus — in-
discriminate, unmodified, unstinted, mad, as it
would seem, in their calm certainty — of God's
practical response to human confidence. He com-
mends faith as a sure remedy to those in trouble.
He gives positive promises of the divine gifts to all
who will ask in faith.
All this is something different indeed from
other religious thought. Here is certainly no
encouragement to love of the occasional and
marvellous, no enhancing of the uncommon to
prove a doctrine. Here is no suggestion that
heaven must be moved out of its usual course
by wailing liturgies and servile rituals. Still less
have we here the doctrine of resignation to all the
common ills of life as the highest form of worship
that could be offered to the divine will. All these
were varieties of religion that, in various extremes
and combinations, had been offered to Heaven
from every tribe and kindred since man first
prayed, and are still offered.
The natural sequences of sowing and growing,
60 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
of earning and gaining, of clouds and bad weather,
are favourite subjects in the discourse of Jesus,
but in dealing with them he constantly suggests,
what is well known, that the result depends on
many varying conditions. The same seed may
produce nothing, or little, or much; the nicest
calculations of gain, or of weather, may be dis-
appointed. But the sequence of man's personal
faith in God as a good Father and the personal
gift that is returned by God he speaks of always
as a law that works free from disturbance, as it
were with mechanical certainty. Can we, then,
for a moment suppose that he regarded personality
as mechanical ? Did he regard the tide of
spiritual life that flowed through him or through
his followers as coming from God according to
some psychical law which worked as it were
automatically ? This would be inconsistent with
his intense reverence for personality, divine and
human, and is on all grounds unthinkable. It is
evident rather that Jesus was convinced that
abundant life, volitional, mental, and physical,
proceeded from the Father's will always, toward
all human creatures; that this flood of life, falling
like sunshine, needed but the opening of the
window in man's understanding, the will to
estimate God aright, the will to pray, the will to
believe. Man can only shut God out; when
man's heart is open the influx of divine life is sure
according to the ever-active purpose of God.
The popular belief in the uncertainty of prayer
was, and is, eating like a maggot into human faith
everywhere. Jesus, contrary to popular belief,
ch. vi THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 61
taught dependence upon the absolute uniformity
of God's action. His doctrine of prayer, as
exemplified in his works, declares that certain of
man's needs God will supply unfailingly and
without delay — the gift of forgiveness, the gift
of the Holy Ghost, i.e., God's indwelling support
of joy and power, the gift of health, the gift
of sanity and self-control. Explaining God's
character in his own actions, teaching it by every
reasoning and figure that his people could under-
stand, he passed up and down the land for three
years, proclaiming the invariable nature of God's
will, encouraging by all that in him lay — character,
action, word — that estimate of God which was
the only human condition needed to ensure the
accomplishment of the will on earth as it is
accomplished in heaven.
How reasonable is this account of the divine
perfection ! A wicked man looking to God for
restoration of soul, a sick man looking to God
for health, asks for a boon which requires only
the condition of his own faith and the action of
God's spirit upon his own personality. Again,
to give a man power to make or find sufficient
for his daily material need only requires the
adjustment of a man's wisdom and powers to his
environment. So far, then, as God can act upon
a man's body and will and environment directly
through man's spirit, Jesus taught that he would
naturally fulfil man's needs with that certainty and
promptitude which is seen in all natural sequence.
Prayer in these matters ought, according to his
teaching, to have no element of resignation, for
62 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
here resignation would be distrust of God's kind-
ness. As to certain other contingent goods,
matters of the hour, about which man, however
great his sense of need, could not know that God
would bestow them, Jesus taught that the Father's
will was certain but the time of its accomplishment
unknown. To all temporary suffering occasioned
by delay there must be resignation. In these
cases we find on examination that the event is a
result, not only of God's action on man's in-
dividual affairs through the personal power of
one or more faithful souls, but of God's action on
various classes of men and public affairs, where
there is no unanimous human will. There is
nothing mysterious in this distinction, nor is there
any mystery in the fact that while a power of
choice, however limited, is granted to humanity,
any action of God upon large bodies of men and
different classes of men must be a matter of time,
pending the acquiescence and faith of multitudes.
In such action the processes are so complex that
no human vision could possibly calculate and
foresee results. We may take, as example, the
cessation of a national persecution. Will not
God avenge his own elect ? He will, and that
as quickly as his forbearance with the freedom
of the wicked will allow. That is the gist of our
Lord's teaching concerning those cases where the
prosperity of the faithful depends upon the
behaviour of communities and nations. There is
here no more element of uncertainty as to God's
intention toward man than in other cases; it
presents him as never withholding of his own
ch. vi THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 63
accord, never considering that it is better for the
suppliant to withhold a good thing, as always
willing to grant a reasonable prayer and accom-
plishing it as quickly as a uniform dependence
upon the necessary condition in mankind will
allow. The perfection of the Father is to exercise
his love for the unjust as certainly as for the just,
to patiently wait upon the perversity of the
ungodly until through, it may be, the suffering
of the godly and whatever other spiritual means
may be brought to bear upon their spirits, the
conditions of earthly things can, in the course of
nature, be ordered to the answering of prayer.
The good of those who pray could not be accom-
plished at the expense of those who do not pray —
God could not be God and act thus — but the
accomplishment of God's unvarying favour toward
all is contingent upon human faith; and when its
accomplishment depends, as it does depend in all
social things, upon the increase of faith in whole
classes of men, it is divine prescience alone that
can foresee the time that will be required.
Resignation as to the time of fulfilment is required
in the hearts of those who pray for such needful
things as depend upon the action of society, but
not because God ever withholds the boon. The
conception of God as torturing his children for
their better discipline is not part of the doctrine of
Jesus.
Where in the four Gospels is there any teaching
that disappointment in prayer is God's direct will
for any man, either in the sense of punishment or
of that prolonged discipline which figures so
64 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
largely in devotional literature ? Those who
enter the kingdom of God on earth are told to
pray daily that God's will be done, in perfect faith
that God wills for earth what is characteristic of
heaven. Jesus never minimises the element of
petition in prayer; he calls upon his followers to
pray, not only that their needs may be met, but that
their desires may be realised, knowing certainly
that all good will come the sooner and the better
for their asking; but when the petition passes
beyond the health of the individual, soul and body,
no man can foresee how long it will be ere the self-
government of the social order will render the
fulfilment of the desire possible.
The next great truth that is emphasised in
this record of marvels is that while God will always
restore to man the power and opportunity of self-
government, he will never use force. We learn
from the actions of Jesus that there is one thing
God will never do, even in answer to prayer — he
will never coerce the wills of men.
The ordinary Christian explanation of as much
of the problem of evil as we can reason about,
is that, for the sake of evolving creatures who
should have personality at once free and good,
God risks and endures all the evil that is intro-
duced into the universe by the gift of that power
of choice necessary to personality and to goodness.
Accepting this, the Christian explanation of the
moral purpose for which evil is allowed to exist, it
follows that such a modicum of free will as man
possesses is the most valuable thing, because the
most costly. God must value man's freedom
ch.vi THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 65
above all things, because without freedom his
goodness would have no higher attribute than the
goodness of a stone or a tree or a sheep. Just
as inanimate rightness is meaningless compared
with the rightness of anything that possesses vital
force, so the rightness of man with some power of
initiative must be an aim of God's system of
evolution higher than any other terrestrial aim.
The power to choose between good and evil is the
means of man's salvation, and the only means of
his salvation. In so far as he is coerced he is not
being saved. Salvation cannot consist in carrying
out God's will — all inanimate things carry out
God's will — but in doing this by choice. (We
mean here by "salvation" free righteousness and
nothing more.) We have no reason to suppose
that it is a worse thing for man freely to choose
evil than to have no power of choice. Sin, on the
Christian hypothesis, proves the possibility of good
in the sinner. Of the possibilities of the ultimate
salvationof amanwho persists in sin in this world we
know nothing, but we can clearly perceive that in the
loss of free will there is no possibility of salvation.
Thus we must perceive that the one thing God
will not do in answer to prayer is to encroach on
the limited domain in which he has left man free.
The value of every man's freedom may not appear
to us an adequate explanation of sin and suffering,
but it is the only explanation that we have any
conception of, and it is folly to hold it in any
sense an explanation and not perceive the greatness
and the fineness of its issues.
Where our first human records begin we find
66 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
man with that same belief in the advantage of
coercing his fellows that seems to possess the whole
animal world. When an animal, or a herd of
animals, disapprove any action of their fellows,
their efforts at coercion are prompt and violent;
and so it is in human history. It is only where
we find man beginning to reason from the failure
of high-handed violence that persuasion may be
temporarily necessary that he begins to use the
gentler method. From its success we find him
reasoning that it may occasionally be the more
efficacious course. Up all the long, long roads
by which our race has travelled from its beginnings
to modern civilisation, we see a slow and gradual
increase in the belief in gentler methods between
rulers and their subjects, victorious nations and
those they have conquered, between judges and
criminals, between parents and children. Although
this line of progress is so long, its advance so
meandering, so slow, it leaves the reflective mind
in no doubt as to the main direction in which it
moves, although to realise how little we have
advanced on the first human raiders, or the
trampling herds that crashed through forests that
fell before man rose, we have but to feel the pulse
of Christendom when war is bruited, and listen
to the voice of thousands of so-called Christians
fanning the flame of the martial spirit.
Corresponding with this slow advance, we find
in all progressive religion the higher strains of
inspired poetry attributing more and more the
character of gentleness to God. "Thy gentleness
hath made me great," was the epitome of the
ch. vi THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 67
highest religious experience before Christ came;
and when he taught that he himself was the
revelation of the divine will dealing with man,
when he told us that God was a Father, and
refused even in his moments of highest indigna-
tion, or in his hour of dire necessity, to use power,
he gave the lie to all that large religious mistake
by which man in all time has attributed his own
violence -— the violence of weakness, his own mis-
taken notions of justice — the justice of oppression,
to the god he worshipped. "The prince of
this world," "the kingdoms of this world," are
our Lord's synonyms for this spirit. As warfare
has been necessary for the evolution of the world,
we can only suppose that warfare must be necessary
for the salvation of mankind until man will listen
to the counsels of love and peace, just as the sins
of an individual must be necessary for his salvation
until he will choose the right, because in both
cases only the highest result could be worth so
terrible a price.
But if there is any growth in man's knowledge,
if there is any progress in his character, if he has
evolved any real wisdom out of his hours of
reflection, if the Spirit of God has guided him,
speaking with increasing clearness in the inner
temple of his soul, if there is any truth in the
doctrine of our Lord's divinity, man has learned
that by gentleness, and only by gentleness, man
can be made great.
This is the light which struggled in darkness
from the beginning, which in our Lord's time
was not comprehended by the darkness, nor is
68 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
yet; although we are all dimly aware that it is
only to those who receive him on this understand-
ing that he gives power to become sons of God.
But how many prayers of the pious are still
directed to the hope of the divine coercion over
human action ! The saints have asked that they
themselves may be coerced into goodness, and
that their persecutors may be coerced into justice
and mercy. They seem to think it most inexplic-
able that our Lord will not remake men so that
they will not sin. If when on earth he gave men
health, if he cast out their unclean spirits, if he
fed them and gave wine for their feasts, why did
he not do the one thing needful, and give them
hearts that would not sin and minds that would
not err ? It is these latter boons that we in our
folly desire of his power, and we do not see that
just these would deprive us of the salvation he
came to give.
These baffled expectations have left their legacy
of negative conclusions also; for if God, when
besieged by prayer, will not stay the hand of the
persecutor until, by God's long-suffering, the will
of the persecutor is altered; if God will not check
high-handed oppression of class over class, or
prevent the economic crimes that mean the suffer-
ing of thousands, and, what is more, if he will
not coerce his votaries into the goodness they so
passionately desire and do not feel able to achieve,
then disappointed suppliants think it follows that
the age of beneficent marvels is passed, that we
must find some other explanation of our Lord's
promises to prayer than a literal one, and regard
ch. vi THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER 69
his benevolent marvels as local and temporary.
The Church, having discovered that obedience, the
patient training of himself to obedience, is the
condition upon which the grace of virtue and
insight into divine wisdom is granted to a man,
has gone on to teach that this is the only
condition on which all prayer will be granted,
and also that all prayer for material benefits
must be made only in a spirit resigned to its
rejection. This was not the teaching of Jesus.
The graces of the spiritual life do depend, because
they must, upon man's free obedience to the whole
law of love: all such personal benefits as are
material and merely mundane, but will help him
toward that obedience, are freely offered to the
prayer, not of resignation, but of assurance. We
cannot doubt that it was to put man in the most
favourable position for receiving spiritual blessings
by making his power of choice more untrammelled,
as well as to persuade him that God was good —
so good that obedience to him was the greatest
happiness — that our Lord's ministry was char-
acterised from beginning to end by the free gift
of health and self-control and lavish means of a
simple life; faith in God's good will, the assurance
of faith, being the only condition. Although in
this day we may have a more general spiritual
insight, the corporate mind of that day was more
prone to the reception of the physical gifts Jesus
gave, so that this perfect assurance of faith was
possible to many. We need to recover this
corporate faith in the physical gifts of God.
CHAPTER VII
THE PLACE OF THE KINGDOM IN THE STRUGGLE
TO SURVIVE
The very nature of the struggle for survival
through long world-ages emphasises in every living
creature the characteristics of greed and hatred.
It is, and always has been, as the individual, brute
or man, fights, and as he gets, that he survives.
It is true that the principle of love has always
been concomitantly developed; for the individual
as a unit cannot survive long except in the larger
unit of family, tribe, and nation, and for the forma-
tion of these larger units love is necessary. But
the unit once formed, whether large or small,
survives, as compared with like units, by its
capacity for greed and hatred, so that these
qualities continue to be developed by exercise.
The aim of these combatants is always to claim
their rights or, as we say, justice. Fighting men
never agree with their opponents in the applica-
tion of these terms.
Jesus came to create a universal unit — man-
kind at one, therefore at one with God. This was
his "kingdom of heaven"; and he perceived that
70
cH.vii THE PLACE OF THE KINGDOM 71
for the formation and coherence of such a universal
unit the faculties of love must be developed at
the expense of hate and greed, to the atrophy of
hate and greed, in the whole race. We can well
imagine that this is man's necessary development
if he is not to pass, as all other forms of life have
passed, destroyed ultimately by his own fighting
qualities; for if a world-empire, or a church,
should become universal by these latter means
they must, grown lusty by exercise, be turned
within as soon as there is no scope for them with-
out — for character is formed by action and trans-
mitted to children's children. The doctrine of
Jesus was clear, that man would only be at one
with God as he was at one with all his fellows.
He taught that there was no atonement between
God and man without perfect atonement between
man and man. This was a conception of trans-
cendent genius.
The question which Jesus must have asked of
the light within him was, how this conception
could be realised, how love could triumph over
hatred and greed — love, with its desire to give
rather than to get, and to cast down every barrier
by forgiveness ?
Was it possible so to manifest to the world
the glorious joy of perfect love that hatred and
covetousness would pass before its light as dark-
ness before the sun ?
The first expression of his ministry was the
lavish gift of all that he had to give, together
with the ascription of perfect love to God and
the description of what would be perfect love in
72 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
BOOK I
man. God was good to the unthankful and the
evil, and man must be good to his enemy. No
eye but his own could see the glory of it. They
were all stumbling and carping, like fretful
children. "Lord, how oft shall my brother sin
against me and I forgive him?" was the highest
reception of his news; and the lowest, "He casts
out devils by the prince of the devils." In what
way could they learn what this conception of
universal love was ? He talked about the love
of God, free and tender as a father's to a child,
and found that the mind of the Church of his day
was full of the observance of the sabbath and
ablutions and tithings. He talked to them about
love of man to man, so great that it could resent
no injury, so sensitive that it could do no harm,
and his own disciples responded with rivalries as
to place and power.
Jesus regarded meekness under wrong as the
highest exercise of love toward a blind and per-
verse people, and advanced this as the most
undeniable argument for the power of love, an
argument which must arrest their dark minds
and enter their darkened hearts. To whom would
they listen ? Nominally, and to a certain degree
in truth, they listened to their dead prophets, who
had lifted up their voices and told the truth of
God as they saw it, to a gainsaying people. To
the profound insight of Jesus, gainsaying, contra-
diction, perversity, and faithlessness in those to
whom the message came was the essence of per-
secution. It gave pain to the heart of God's
messenger incomparably greater than any physical
ch. vii THE PLACE OF THE KINGDOM 73
pain. He always speaks of the prophets as suffer-
ing persecution, although many of them were not
the victims of tyranny. And when had they
been listened to ? Only when the patriotic motive
of their preaching had been proved by their
suffering of persecution. Here we come on the
place of suffering in the scheme of Jesus. No
one — materialistic Sadducee, law-worshipping
Pharisee, publican or sinner — no one now doubted
the inspiration or altruism of these dead prophets.
They had endured the contradiction of sinners;
they had been disbelieved by the perverse genera-
tion whom they would have saved; and the moral
result upon a nation of persecutors was reverence
for their character and word. Here, then, in the
loving endurance of persecution, was the way that
every one who would advance the kingdom must
pass, until the kingdom be universal. "Blessed
are ye when men shall persecute you. Rejoice
and be exceeding glad, for so persecuted they the
prophets." And therefore he said, "It must
needs be that I suffer." This does not prove that
there is anything divine in suffering; it proves
that love is divine; and only by suffering can
love deal with men who are animated by hatred
and tenacious of possession and power. The
remedial power of suffering endured willingly
because of the love borne to him who commits
the injury is obvious; but it is the man who
inflicts suffering that is saved by it, not he who
endures it. To endure willingly is the one proof
of love which even hatred cannot ignore. The
shepherd who gives his life for the sheep is good;
74 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book,
none can dispute his goodness. The man who
gives his life for his friends loves them so that all
men say that no love could be greater. It was
the antiseptic efficacy, the redemptive force, of
this proof of love to God and man, that caused
Jesus to put so high a value upon it. It was the
force of love and courage and benevolence involved
in meekness, and not mere meekness, that he
valued. There are few things more foreign to
the ideal of Jesus than resignation under injury
when inspired by any other motive than love to him
who injures. The mother, the wife, who endures
the cruelty of son or husband for love's sake,
shielding by patience, winning by a cheerful meek-
ness, has every man's reverence. But the same
meekness exercised in order to obtain mere peace,
or some form of favour, is universally despised.
When injury is accepted patiently because he who
injures is infinitely dear, a god-like peace is pro-
duced; to accept it for any other reason is to cry,
" Peace, peace" when there is no peace. This
affords a possible explanation of the text about
the two swords. When Jesus was leaving his
disciples, depriving them for the hour of his
leadership — a leading of which universal love was
the motive — when he knew that some little time
must elapse before they could so enter into the
meaning of his suffering, that his peace would be
theirs, and the spirit of his almighty love would
inspire them, he told them to provide themselves
with swords. He also said, "He that takes the
sword shall perish by the sword," as though he
had said, Better the sword of self-defence, even
ch.vii THE PLACE OF THE KINGDOM 75
though death be the issue, than for a man to allow
himself to be struck from any other motive than
that of love. Yet the spirit of the sword is dis-
loyal to the spirit of Jesus; after Peter's brave but
angry sword-thrust in the Garden of Gethsemane
he very quickly denied his Lord.
There is nothing more significant of our need
of Christian reformation than the fact that the only
words we have to express the most prominent ideas
of Jesus — love, meekness — are so degraded that
many of us have no verbal translation for these
ideas of his. To the Jew the lion-hearted Moses
was the great example of meekness. Jesus had no
use for men without a dominant purpose. It is
only to such men that the kingdom is open, and
only for such that its laws are operative. It is
worth noting that on the few occasions where Jesus
is recorded to have used the word "meek" it is in
close connection with the idea of personal dominion
— "The meek shall inherit the earth" 1 (an
almost literal transcription of Psalm xxxvii. 11);
again, "All things are delivered unto me of my
Father. . . . Come unto me ... for I am meek
and lowly of heart";2 lastly, where Jesus is re-
ported as applying the prophecy of Zechariah to
himself, " Behold, thy king cometh unto thee
meek." 3 While we still have Christian teachers
who use the word "love" as if it denoted either a
mawkish sentiment or an unreasoning passion, we
may well be appalled as we realise that such a use
proves that a large body of our people have never
even caught a glimpse of the Christian ideal.
1 St. Matt. v. 5. 2 St. Matt. xi. 27-29. 3 St. Matt. xxi. 5.
CHAPTER VIII
SALVATION BY JOY
The highest theory that the world's rarest and
best piety had arrived at before Christ came was
the idea of salvation by suffering. The end was
perfection; the way was pain. It is true that the
vision of the mystic had given glimpses of a higher
way, but this phase of insight was almost inarticu-
late. The seers themselves could not assimilate it
to the rest of their belief; it had given birth to
no creed, either in philosophy or religion. "As
far as the east is from the west so far hast thou
removed our transgressions from us" is the song
of a soul under the influence of this rare vision;
and in its light he hears the divine answer, "As
the heavens are high above the earth, so are my
ways higher than your ways, saith the Lord."
Man's way was the way of the moralist, therefore
the isolated rays of the mystic vision had to be put
under the horn lantern of a lower religious theory.
Whatever the full meaning of the teaching of
Jesus, it is certain that just so far as it was above
the thought of his time, and so far as it was to be
the light of all future generations, just so far it
76
chap, viii SALVATION BY JOY jj
must have been partially interpreted and darkened
by what seemed necessary to the world of his day.
How far he taught that the salvation of the
world must come by suffering is a most vital
question, nor does it seem to be difficult to answer.
The end he preached was perfection; but the way
was joy, not pain. If it be objected that joy as
we know it is but an incidental experience to him
who would attain perfection, it may be replied
that so is pain. Yet pain had been accepted as a
means, as a discipline; Jesus substituted the
discipline of joy. Further, for Jesus perfection
was to be realised in a state of universal love. Its
exemplar was the God who poured forth good
upon just and unjust alike. Salvation was to begin
and be accomplished in a kingdom of love; and
love, although the highest joy, involves costly
activities in the person who loves. He gives with-
out measure; he forgives without measure. So
far as this means suffering, the salvation of the
world comes by suffering — the suffering of
unrequited love. Suffering is incidental and
temporary, but joy is necessary to salvation and
to our idea of perfection.
Joy cannot be perfect till the whole world is
saved out of its separatism into the great at-one-
ment of the reign of universal love. There is
only one chance of winning the children of hate to
the side of the children of love — it is the vision of
hate in its worst colours and love in its best. This
vision is only open to the eyes of men when the
victim of ill-will suffers without resentment and in
entire charity. St. Paul was probably prepared
78 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
for his conversion by St. Stephen's martyrdom,
not because St. Stephen died for his faith, but
because in dying he manifested love and forgive-
ness for his tormentors. Long afterward St.
Paul, who must have seen many — not only
Christians but Jews and pagans — die for their
faith, wrote in a passage of great inspiration,
"Though I give my body to be burned and have
not love it profiteth me nothing." Nothing !
The kingdom of God gains nothing from any zeal
or any suffering which is not offered out of the
depths of love to God and man.
The Christian must drink so deeply of the
spirit of the Saviour that he will actually and
tenderly love his brothers, his neighbours, and his
enemies. All men come under one of these heads ;
there is no relation of life that is not covered by one
of them. There is no salvation recognised in the
Gospels that is not manifested by this income and
output of love. This love will be more or less re-
jected, and the consequent neglect or ills, petty and
great, that arise from the animus of persecution
are the only suffering which the Christian is
called on to endure. Neglect and contradiction
are inevitable to all men who are saved by loving,
and are saving the world by loving it; but love
remains the highest joy, whatever be its suffering.
Thus we see that suffering is never to be courted
for private ends. The individual can win his
life only by expending his love for the sake
of the corporate life, and whatever renunciation
Jesus called on a man to make was to be the
instrument of the world's salvation. "In your
chap, viii SALVATION BY JOY 79
patience ye shall possess your lives " follows close
upon "Ye shall be hated of all men for my sake."
Whatever is done for the sake of the King, done
as the King would do it, is done to advance the
kingdom. Whatever is demanded for the sake of
the Saviour of the world is demanded for the sake
of saving the world. We need not regard it as
a mysterious question whether suffering has a
redemptive efficacy; it is a fact that what love
suffers in its effort to save has a redemptive
efficacy, and there is no other suffering which the
Redeemer regarded as the will of God. When
Jesus fully perceived that there was no way of
meekness and love by which he could avoid the
utmost cruelty of his persecutors, no way except
that of coercion by superior force, it was then, and
only then, that he spoke of suffering as the
Father's will. It was only then that he found a
difference between his own desire and God's, and
resigned his own. The cup that the Father gave
him was submission to the malice of men. It was
of that hour he predicted, "I will draw all men
unto me;" he called it "the hour of darkness"
and "of the prince of this world." The cross
was the culminating expression of the suffering of
unrequited love. It was the symbol of the worst
evil that mankind could inflict upon man, the
extreme form of shame and pain; and it was to
be embraced in spirit every day because it was
pregnant with the world's redemption.
At the same time the Christian does not through
the pains of love suffer more than other men, and
he has love's joy. Greater is the inevitable suffering
So HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
of non-Christians, who go on under the law of a
lower stage of human development trying to save
themselves at the expense of others by individual
or corporate gain-getting and warfare. These do
not expend their lives for others and thus save
them ; they save their lives at the expense of others
and thus lose them. Such a life brings its own
inevitable loss, losing itself in the mere act of
getting and fighting, by the gradual shrinkage of
those powers of love by which man can enjoy
either himself or his fellows or God. The punish-
ment or destruction or loss of those men who
seek to survive in some limited unit of family,
class, or nation, is that they go on exercising those
powers by which alone their unit can rise in rela-
tion to other units. They are not to be pun-
ished— they are punishing themselves; they are
not to be cast out — they are outcast. This was
certainly the doctrine of Jesus — that to pass from
the restricted unit, which flourished temporarily by
hating and getting, to the universal union of God
and mankind, which flourishes now and eternally
only by loving and giving, was to pass from death
unto life. To say this is to say that light came
by the transcendent insight of Jesus. In order to
see that light clearly we need to untwist the many
strands of our conventional thought.
Let us take the various reasons why love must
be unrequited in the world.
Love is possessed by an unquenchable thirst for
perfection in her object. A man, if he be tenderly
attached to father, son, brother, or friend, cannot
allow in him any course of conduct inferior to the
chap, viii SALVATION BY JOY 81
best without endeavouring to change his course by
every means that promises success. Even when
love is pure and strong, and uses only good means,
the yoke of love will seem irksome to the object
who prefers an inferior course of action, and con-
sequently something less than love in his friend.
Natural affection, sympathy, appreciation, con-
fidence, delicacy of touch — these are the signs of
love in its outflow, but they may exist without
love. These signs of love without the core or
heart of love's intensity in them make less de-
mand, and they are therefore often preferred by
the indifferent, by whom love is seen as unlovely,
spurned, and put to shame. There is always
something akin to shame in the suffering of un-
requited love. This is what the Christian must
suffer from the indifferent.
It is in her natural outflow of affection,
sympathy, faith, and a sensitive taste, that love
suffers; therefore love that is weak out of
cowardice puts on foreign qualities, an armour not
her own — hardness, stupidity, distrust, pride, and
vulgarity. These have no affinity with love, but
weak love hides behind them. When strong love,
exercising its own qualities, comes in contact with
weak love, protecting herself by weak devices, the
contest between them is very grave. The weakest
love has a tenacity and intensity which indifference
can never have. It delights in, but fears, the
methods that strong love must use. Thus we get
the conflict between one right and another, and
we have the borderland where jarring missionary
effort almost merges itself into petty persecution.
82 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS book i
Here, again, the strong love must suffer most.
When, for example, the relatives of Jesus thought
that he was beside himself and desired to withdraw
him from publicity, their motive, no doubt, was
love. Love was St. Peter's motive when he spoke
the remonstrance against the forecast of the cross.
Love may have been Martha's motive when she
would have called her sister from the feet of Jesus.
The divergence of method between love weak and
fearful and love strong and brave is enough to
cause the endless division which our Lord foretells
where concord ought to reign — father against son,
mother against daughter, etc. ; and in this there is
no working of ill-will or the motive of positive
hate. Here, again, the more Christ-like the love,
the more it is repulsed and hampered; and this is
again an aspect of the Christian's cross.
But the worst ill-usage of love comes neither
from indifference nor from love's own weakness, but
from the outflow of the religious man's evil will,
and that cruelty in him that arises from hatred.
Impelled either by some evil power outside that
makes for unrighteousness, or by the brain ten-
dencies which he inherits from the long ages when
he subsisted by robbery and violence, religious
man has ever felt it right to interpret God's love
by his own harshness. Thus he comes to think
he does God service by despising or bullying or
slaying his religious opponents. We have a legion
of conventional Christian sophistries which insist
upon calling everything which is not love by that
sacred name, and speak of universal love in terms
of opprobrium.
chap, viii SALVATION BY JOY 83
It is unlikely that such confusion of thought
concerning Christian love could have been arrived
at had it not been for the ferocity with which the
Almighty was credited in attitude and action
toward non-Christians. The ultimate fate of the
non-Christian was painted by the early Church
as very black indeed. This was only natural.
For many centuries religion, both of Aryan and
Semitic source, had dealt with tribal and national
deities whose attitude toward the enemies of their
people was vindictive. All literature was full
of their triumphant cruelties. As soon as the
Christian Church had visible demarcation such
hereditary ideas fell into line with Christian
thought, especially when persecution presented a
sore temptation to reciprocal vindictive treatment.
The words in the Gospels which adumbrated
undefined notions concerning the region of de-
parted souls were interpreted with ignorant literal-
ness. When such a vast difference between
the immortal condition of the Christian and the
non-Christian (or more especially the pervert or
excommunicated person) had been definitely
established in common thought, it was necessary
to common sense to believe that all well-disposed
persons were Christians. If a man had a brother
or friend, or even an enemy, who had done nothing
particularly heinous, nor aroused the ire of ec-
clesiastics, it was uncomfortable and unintelligent
to suppose that God would put him to eternal
torture. The result of this was, not a larger
charity, but to degrade "Christian love" by mak-
ing it cover whatever attitude of mind average
84 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
Christian people evinced. It was well known that
Christian love was a necessary attribute of the
Christian. This knowledge was an abiding testi-
mony to the impression Jesus had made. Even
when the flame of this love died down and flickered
in the socket, when the smoke and stench of every
other sentiment went up from the Church, they
must all be called love. The inquisitor must be
thought to love his victim; the crusader must be
held to have charity for the man he so wantonly
slew; and every respectable form of crime must
be held to be compatible with Christian love.
We have, too, the very confusing fact that
these travesties of truth are not wholly untrue.
So near do hatred and love lie together in the
depth of our life that it is almost impossible to
distinguish the activities of the one from those of
the other by any merely moral test. Nor is it
possible for moralising man, calling both moral,
to fail to attribute both to God. That is why
the example that Jesus set of absolute love in very
life and deed is so needful. It is by neglect of
this guide that confusion has come about. In our
hearts we have what appears to be a common
source of missionary spirit and persecuting zeal,
bitter waters and sweet coming, as it were, from
the same fountain. But there is nothing of which
Jesus seems more sure than of his principle,
expressed in various ways, that when the fruit is
bad the root is bad; that good, so mixed with
evil in conduct, is separate from evil in the will.
Cruelty can never be the fruit of love. If we
let go this principle of Jesus, that the good will
chap, viii SALVATION BY JOY 85
brings forth only good, we are in a labyrinth that
none may thread, for persecution always derives its
greatest strength from a sense of right. The
persecutor not only believes that the man he
persecutes is wrong, but wrong in such a way that
it will be for his benefit to be annoyed or grieved,
if only it makes him change his course. "Whoso-
ever killeth you will think that he doeth God
service" states the very raison d'etre of religious
warfare. It may be truly said that no frivolous man
is a persecutor, and that there does not live on the
earth the conscientious man who would not, under
certain circumstances, be strongly tempted to
persecute.
Although, in a certain superficial modern view,
persecution has come to signify something so ill-
judged that it is supposed no reasonable person
could have recourse to it, we shall always have the
persecutor until the kingdom of love is universal;
and the children of the kingdom will suffer at his
hand. We often think of persecution as tending
merely to bring an undue odium on the persecutor
and an undue glory on the persecuted; we say
to-day that to suffer persecution amounts to being
willing, at the cost of some slight inconvenience,
to purchase undeserved notoriety and sympathy;
and we suppose that, as Christians,we have attained
to such a degree of civilisation that serious persecu-
tion of the righteous has become impossible. We
virtually assume that the blessing of Jesus on the
persecuted has no modern significance. Reflection
will show that human nature has not materially
altered since the first dramatic record we have of
86 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
the characters and actions of men and women. In
the earliest Semitic romances and legends, in the
Greek tragedies, in the poetry of the Dark Ages,
in the drama of the Renaissance, and in the modern
novel, we have substantially the same men and
women, loving and hating under different con-
ditions, but with the same practical result. The
outward exhibition of persecution must needs be
very different in different times; but as long as
men hate one another the licensed cruelty of
persecution will abound.
To-day, as a usual thing, we do not maltreat
our religious neighbours in any material fashion,
although place, power, and wealth, or the strength
of numbers, are sometimes used privately to penalise
an objectionable form of religion. Persecution is
thus outwardly softened, not because the spirit is
unwilling, but because the flesh, through a recent
acquisition of imaginative sympathy, is weak.
Probably, through that same increase of sensitive-
ness, good men suffer as much now as ever from
persecution. Our governments are now democratic.
To disturb the religious privileges of our neigh-
bours, or increase our own, we must have recourse
to the methods of the demagogue. The eager
imputation, public and private, of unworthy
motives, evil passions, despicable actions, to our
opponents; the stirring up of strife, for our own
religious ends, between two factions in a village,
between two neighbours in one terrace, between
two children in one school — who can tell the
lingering pain of wounded hearts and narrowed
lives that this entails ? If it does not produce
chap, viii SALVATION BY JOY 87
widespread spiritual suffering of the most acute
sort we are sunk low indeed, sunk lower than any-
thing that we can call Christianity. But, in truth,
the pain is terribly real to every heart inspired by
the love of God.
Although the suffering of persecution was
necessary to teach the world what the kingdom of
heaven really was, that kingdom was not presented
as dreary but as full of joy. Jesus said, " Blessed
are ye when men shall revile you, and cast you out
of the synagogue, and hold your name a synonym
for evil, because you exemplify my character which
is love." And love, whatever it suffer, is the
greatest source of joy. The child of the kingdom
was to be the recipient of all other joys. Jesus
does not say, "Blessed are ye when attacked by
disease, when bereaved of dear ones by premature
death, when fortune has deserted you, when you
are distracted by a thousand and one domestic
cares — some one's insanity, some one's folly, some
one's helplessness." All these forms of suffering
were to be cast out of the kingdom. In the
kingdom the mourner is to rejoice, the poor to be
rich, the rich to be poor; the heartless shall weep
for the sorrows of others ; the sick are to be healed ;
infirmities of will are to be cured; food and
clothing are to be secure.
If Jesus had taught that to mourn for any and
every cause in this world brought a special blessing
on character and special comfort in the next, his
own actions would have been quite inconsistent
with his teaching, for he turned mourning into glad-
ness in every case when the opportunity offered.
88 HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
If a sense of bereavement, caused by premature
death and immature faith, were desirable for the
strengthening of character — to make God and the
things of God dearer, why should he have given
Lazarus back to Mary, who had already drunk
so deeply of his own teaching, or restored to
Jairus his little daughter, or interfered, apparently
without any request, to dry the tears of the widow
of Nain ? If to be laid aside with sickness teaches
men lessons of virtue and a knowledge of God
which they can learn in no other way, or if sickness
in one member of a family brings out the highest
characteristics of pity and service in the others,
why did he abolish this means of blessing in a
thousand homes ? If the sight of a lost mind is
desirable to teach intellectual humility, if to bear
with the ill-balanced and uncontrolled is good for
the spirit of man, why did he spend so much time
and energy in the casting out of devils ? Nor can
we acquiesce for a moment in the doctrine that he
did these things to establish the fame of his divinity,
and not to exemplify the eternal attitude of God
toward man. For if he was indeed divine, these
things must exemplify the divine dealing with men,
and if he was not divine he could not wish to claim
divine power. If, again, it be argued that this
was his way of exalting his message, which did not
deal with material gifts, we must reply that nothing
can exalt a message that is not in absolute harmony
with it. If he had taught that there was a virtue
in mere poverty, in want as want, how could
his early followers have even imagined that he
would provide a lavish banquet for the wedding
chap, viii SALVATION BY JOY 89
feast, or spread so plentiful a meal in the
desert ?
The Holy Spirit, with whom the disciples of
Jesus were to be endowed as far as they had faith
to receive him, was to be manifested in a sense of
God's perfect forgiveness and blessing, in an over-
flow of wisdom and gentleness and good will, and
also of physical health — health sufficient to heal
others. How great would be their joy ! Health
is a keen relish to the varied feast of life. Perfect
health of body and mind is not only strength but
also temperance in every feeling and every pursuit.
If we accept the lesson the historic Christ taught,
we must perceive that this great physical joy
underlay the joy of the Spirit, the imparting of
which was the glory of his message.
The rejection of a vice, and of all that feeds
or tempts it, may be — often is, by a stretch of
language — called salvation by suffering; but in
the application of that term to it there is no sense
of proportion, no common sense; for continuance
in vice means greater suffering. For example, we
read to-day of thousands of Chinamen eagerly
curing themselves of the opium habit, destroying
costly pipes, and quantities of the drug itself, in
symbol of their complete conversion. Is their
relief from this craving, their return to a whole-
some life, a sorrow or a joy ? They themselves
answer, "Joy." Every drunkard, every slave of
any vice, who testifies to the sudden reformation
which the command of Jesus to cut off the offend-
ing member so exquisitely describes, echoes the
word "joy." Asceticism would have given a
9o HIS THOUGHTS AND OURS
different command. "If thy hand or thy foot
offend thee, punish or mortify it every day of thy
life." The faith of Jesus always leaped forward
to meet the joy on the other side of heroism, with
perfect confidence in the power and will of God
to make the promise good.
If in any case Jesus had intimated that mis-
fortune came from God, that sickness was more
desirable than health, or mental infirmity better
than the power of self-control, the whole gospel
would have been other than it is. He did not
regard depression of spirits, from any cause, as
salutary, for he promised to give his followers a
constant joy, and he commanded them to wear a
cheerful demeanour which would hearten others;
he commanded freedom from care. There are
indeed no griefs, no forms of pain, to which Jesus
calls men to resign themselves except those which
result from the hostility of men. Such pain is
to be embraced in joy because of its rich reward.
We have seen that in the doctrine of Jesus the
end to be attained was perfection, that perfection
to his mind was synonymous with love and also
synonymous with God. To be perfect was to be
like God ; to be like God was to be like a loving
father who comprehends the just and the unjust,
the good and gracious, the unthankful and evil in
his unceasing benevolence. Participation in the
joy of God, transcendent yet immanent in all
nature, is the dynamic force which alone can raise
the Christian to this altitude of love. Joy makes
a man magnanimous, gives him courage, gives
him hope, gives him the strongest motive for
chap, vm SALVATION BY JOY 91
imparting to another. The first real taste of the
joy of God comes as the wine of life, and lifts a
man above all littleness, all discouragement, all his
inheritance of dim animistic fear. In the concep-
tion of Jesus it appears that love, even under the
most extreme misery of rejection and persecution,
has in it more joy than sorrow. Just as the
soldier in dying may rejoice that he dies for the
sake of his country, so the Christian in suffering
torture and contumely for exercising love has more
joy than pain, because he suffers for God's sake.
But in the Christian's case there is another element
of joy which the soldier has not; the Christian
loves the enemy or persecutor who inflicts the
suffering, and is taught by Jesus to believe that
that love will not be wasted, but will be a force in
the remission of the persecutor's sin.
The cross which the Christian must take up
daily is the suffering of love. The life he must
lose, the denial of his own ends that he must
practice, are all included in the activities and
consequences of that love for men which he must
drink in with the Spirit of God. Other suffering
Jesus does not enjoin or bless. Other pains exist
as sin exists. From them, as from sin, Jesus
offers salvation. Further, the one form of suffer-
ing that he blesses, the suffering of unrequited
love, is not blessed because it is suffering — not at
all — but because it is the quickest way to bring
the whole world into the paths of love and joy
which lead to perfection.
BOOK II
THE FATHER'S HOUSE
93
CHAPTER I
THE CONFLICT OF THE PHYSICAL AND MORAL
Before we can realise how hard it was for the
high conception of salvation which Jesus taught
to obtain possession of the developing world-mind,
we must examine the history of the earlier idea
that man's salvation has to come by suffering.
After religious systems had been developed,
and before the Christian revelation, we can
trace two tendencies in the evolution of human
thought with regard to the unseen: the state
in which man, whenever he did not feel any dis-
union with the forces about him, had the sort of
happiness that the animal world evinces, and
whenever he suspected himself of being in need
of reconciliation with unseen power, used an easy
method of ceremonial reconciliation which set him
at ease; secondly, the state when man began to
doubt the efficacy of this method. These
tendencies of thought, representing two stages,
are still traceable in the religion of the civilised
individual to-day, and form a curious problem
for the psychologist. From the religious history
of the world, as far as we can read it now in the
95
96 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
traditions and writings that have been handed
down in all nations and in the unearthed records
deciphered in the last quarter of a century, it
seems clear that all different tribes and nations
did go through these transitions, although they
are indistinctly seen because the men of higher
insight in any nation are, in mere point of chrono-
logical development, ages ahead of the mass of
their fellows, and those in the rear are not less
prolific in religious expression. The first stage
may have given rise to the myth of early innocence
present in more than one legend of the dim past.
St. Paul seems to have been familiar with the same
sort of idea, to which the thinkers of his time
had come, not by history but by reasoning, viz.,
that before the inward moral law was perceived,
the race, like the child, must have felt itself
innocent.
We first meet our fellow-man conforming to
a series of enactments which gave him a very
large area of conscious obedience and a joyful
sense of his god's approval. These enactments
were for the most part non-moral; religion meant
that the god had made a covenant to approve and
aid man as long as man kept them; when they
were broken the question of motive did not
enter at all into the matter; the breaking might
have been inadvertent, it might have been un-
avoidable; but the guilt had to be atoned for
at once by certain ceremonies, or the quality of
guilt spread like physical infection to the inno-
cent family and race. All guilt was crime; but
crime was, on the whole, in early times some-
ch. i THE PHYSICAL AND MORAL 97
what recondite ; and whatever was not crime was
blissful innocence. Atonement was made by
simple ceremonies and a gift. Cain's sacrifice
was at one period amply sufficient; but, with a
deepening sense of the gulf between man and the
unseen powers, it became necessary to offer a life
— not a death, but a life. In the Semitic races
it became gradually established that the life was
in the blood, and blood was offered, but surely
with no idea of pain, as almost every sacrifice
involved a feast, and the idea of putting the
animal to death by torture to make the sacrifice
more acceptable was unknown.
Satisfaction in life is marred by the growth
of the sense of personal responsibility — the effort
after an ever-receding ethical ideal. On the first
suspicion any man anywhere has that he is morally,
not merely ceremonially unclean — actually, not
merely legally, a sinner — perfect joy in physical
strength and beauty is gone; art ceases to be
happy and loses its first perfection. He goes
on to realise that there is in his members a law
of sin and death — sin of his own deep essence, a
real "ought" within which he cannot satisfy by
obedience to any code, and which would not be
appeased by offering anything external to himself
to any deity who could accept such offering.
Then falls upon that man the shadow of conscious
sin. The sunshine of nature was darkened long
before the hour of Calvary. Blight comes with
lack of sunshine; the first blossom of naturalism
withers; efforts after beauty and harmony bear
less fruit; music is plaintive; every honest rep-
98 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
resentation of the awakened human life is satiric
or tragic. In this man, and with cumulative
strength in his children's children, two opposed
passions rise and grapple together, like Jacob and
the Angel of God, the material man demanding
material good, the moral man demanding the
unison of might and right — the legitimate demand
of the body upon a faithful Creator for the un-
alloyed delight of its every sense; the ever-
growing demand of conscience for moral perfection.
The existence of the body and its senses stands,
must always stand, for a real, if unrealised,
covenant of faithful creator with sentient creature.
The physical nature is not responsible for existence,
and claims, therefore, with unerring instinct the
right of realising every natural hope — a right
that no sophistries can diminish. The increasing
imperative of the moral nature demands harmony
between the real and the right, demands that the
material world, the body, the universe if need be,
shall be sacrificed to the "ought." We see these
two inappeasable passions strive together in the
long night wherever in the world man rises above
mere material joys and primitive ceremonial.
The Angel of the Lord grapples with Jacob and
sets him on his way halting. Everywhere, in
all nations, the moral standard rises, or the race
perishes; but as the moral standard rises, the
physical nature is lamed. The early delight in
mere living fails, leaving only a poetic tradition
of man's first paradise, his Golden Age — a source
of longing, an infinite regret.
There is no reason for regret. The non-
ch. i THE PHYSICAL AND MORAL 99
moral man who could eat, drink, and be merry
whenever he had no cause for fear, and who when
afraid could satisfy his gods perfectly by the very
ceremonies of eating, drinking, and being merry,
who was content to die on the morrow without
a thought of an after that was not fulfilled in the
life of his tribe — this man did not persist. The
halt creature, the moral man, was fitter to sur-
vive, did survive. Wailing out prayers, singing
penitential psalms, crying after a God who
desired righteousness, not of ceremony but of
the thoughts of the heart — this man grew and
multiplied, and built greater cities and framed
better laws; but physical beauty palled on his
taste; his arts reflected his grief; unaffected joy
was lost. In this transition the earlier Vedic
tribes add to the worship of their cheerful gods
the cult of the gloomy fakir; the golden calf of
the dancing Semite is given up for the ark of the
covenant which it is death to touch; the sunny
pantheon becomes the gloomy, if more beautiful,
Gothic sanctuary where the light of heaven may
only enter stained by carnal crucifixions and
bloody martyrdoms. Though the moral man
was stronger than the non-moral and superseded
him, he had plucked out an eye, he had cut off
the member that offended : halt, maimed, and with
one eye, he entered into life — otherwise he would
have passed, as all that is unfit passes. Before
man could dream of a further perfection he must
learn to prize virtue before all things.
Before he can attain that further perfection,
man must find out how to be good and whole-
ioo THE FATHER'S HOUSE
hearted at the same time. The body cannot be
filled with the fulness of the Lord until it resume
the physical perfection of unspoiled nature.
Even in the childlike symbol of primitive ritual,
nothing maimed, broken, or blind could be
offered to the Lord; how much less in any real
sense can the God of nature inspire with the
beginning of a perfect and progressive righteous-
ness a race that has lost half its power of enjoy-
ment, that corresponds with its environment so
imperfectly that the individual must always be
cherishing his soul at the expense of his body, or
his body at the expense of his soul.
When Jesus began his ministry the whole
religious world was practically divided into two
minds and two tempers. The poor in spirit and
the meek were busy crying, "Blessed is the man
whom God chasteneth;" while, on the other
hand, those in every nation who in mind and
temper were not poor in spirit, but yet were
concerned for salvation, still clung to legal devices
which became more and more elaborate. With
these latter the explanation of suffering was still
that it was the punishment of sin: "This mul-
titude that knoweth not the law are cursed,"
is the epitome of the moving sermon attributed
to Moses in Deuteronomy. The way to escape it
was to be sinless ; the way to be sinless was to con-
form to a legal code. As suffering was the direct
punishment of immediate sin, there was no need
for an uncomfortable degree of compassion for
those who suffered. To draw back the skirts
and pass on was legitimate to priest and lawyer;
ch. i THE PHYSICAL AND MORAL 101
and as long as personal suffering was escaped the
faithful legalist did not anticipate it: he thus got
rid of compassion, compunction, and apprehension;
he thanked God that he was not as other men;
he said that the people that knew not his law were
cursed. But, as we have noted, this was no
longer the only interpretation of suffering. The
idea of salvation by suffering had been welded
into the heart of the better sort of pious men
everywhere by the development of conscience that
rendered mere animal joy insufficient, by the
teaching of the prophets, and by the imperative
demand of human reason for a soul of good in
things evil. The refining result of suffering
upon the character of the sufferer is the first
benefit to be extracted from the mystery of pain.
This result is obvious, it has been noticed by
all people whenever a race has reached the stage
of moral reflection. Such a plan of salvation
was familiar to the Buddhist, to the Hindoo, to
the Persian, to the Alexandrine Greek, and, above
all, to the pious Jew of the Christian era; the
large use made of chastisement for the moral
interpretation of experience in the books of the
Apocrypha and the Apocalyptic literature is very
striking.
This distinction between the two classes of pie-
tists was very clear among the Jews at the time
of our Lord, and other Semitic religions were
going through the same phase. The two classes
of religious thinkers were like antiphonal choirs,
and their views were alternately contrasted and
confused in the national psalms that went up to
io2 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
God. We cannot doubt that the Father, pitying
his children, accepted the worship of both; we
cannot doubt that they who mourned for sin, the
meek and lowly, who looked to sorrow rather than
to law as a means of grace, were on a higher plane,
more blessed because more ripe for comfort, more
ready to inherit the earth and possess the kingdom
of heaven.
All the time, even through the long past in
which these different ideas of salvation had been
growing, apart from the fire and apart from the
whirlwind, there had been another voice, proclaim-
ing a God of greater power and more resource,
whose ways were higher than man's ways as the
heaven was higher than the earth, a voice so still
and small that it obtained little authority with men
till Jesus came to give it authority. This was his
news — that not by legal obedience, nor yet by grief,
could men learn to know God, but by the dynamic
power of his joy. To him the salient characteristic
of God's kingdom on earth was that they that
mourn should rejoice. He perceived, as others
did not, that a contradiction was involved in
crediting heaven with the fire that consumed the
sacrifice.
CHAPTER II
THE USE OF SIN
There is a large tendency of thought which,
in order to ensure God's omnipotence and moral
character, seeks to regard moral evil as a good
means to a good end. We are here assuming —
what was the belief of Jesus — that for any man to
choose the lower instead of the higher path is a
wrong to himself, to mankind, and to God. This,
however, is not to assert that the spirit of good
may not borrow some advantage from things evil.
But the idea of sin as a saviour is not satisfactory.
St. Paul says all that can be said as to the place of
sin in God's scheme of salvation : the moral law,
which makes sin, is a schoolmaster that brings
men to God. Without a law there is no sin;
without sin there is no knowledge of the eternal
demand for a course of right action to which men
cannot, of their own powers, attain. What is it
that drives most persons at first to any experience
of God's grace ? Is it not the burden of sin ?
Some saintly people there may be who enter the
kingdom and grow strong therein without such
transgression of the law of inward rectitude as
103
io4 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
drives them to demand of God some personal
assurance of forgiveness and help; but if there are
any such they are very few. The overwhelming
majority of the devout have found God at first,
and most constantly, and in some crisis have
experienced the deepest knowledge of his self-
revelation, because of their sins. As Julian of
Norwich shrewdly remarks, "For it needeth us to
fall, and it needeth us to see it. For if we never
fell, we should not know how feeble and how
wretched we are of our self, and also we should not
fully know the marvellous love of our Maker. . . .
And by the assay of this falling we shall have an
high, marvellous knowing of love in God, without
end." * We have many saintly authorities on this
gracious utility of sin; but we may turn to the
highest. When Jesus confronted the Pharisee with
the riddle of the two debtors, he virtually said,
"The greater a man's sin the greater his love to
God"; and if we would partly explain this away
by making consciousness of sin, and not its abun-
dance, the cause of man's love to God, we still
cannot get rid of the fact that Jesus in this parable
still speaks of sin as the root out of which this
sacred growth of worship springs. Or take the
inverse truth, which he taught most strongly, that
God's heart goes out after the sinner because of
his sin, and God's saving energy will not be baffled
in revealing itself to those who are lost, although
it may fail to save those who are a law unto them-
selves. It has not been the fashion in the Church
to dwell on the godly utility of sin ; if it were, we
1 Revelations of Divine Love, Chap. 6l.
chap, n THE USE OF SIN
05
should all be taking note of the enlightenment
which has come to our souls through our sins, and
writing of it in our memoirs.
Another consideration with regard to sin is that
in the concrete there is no clear line of distinction
between moral good and moral evil or between
moral and physical evil. That there is a vast differ-
ence between certain goods and certain evils does
not diminish the force of the fact that there is no
boundary-line except in thought. We are there-
fore bound to accept sin as a factor in the moral
progress of man. Take, for example, the case of
a primitive tribe of men whom we may suppose to
have risen above the sins of killing members of
their own tribe without due offence, and above
cannibalism. Some cataclysm of nature inflicts
famine upon them. They suffer evil acutely in
its three forms, — pain, the ugliness of physical ruin,
and the relapse into the brute. They fall to killing
and devouring one another, and by so doing they
survive and rise again in better times. Their
behaviour is that of a herd of beasts who, when
similarly put to it, would similarly preserve them-
selves. Can we say that if it is right for the beast
it is wrong for the savage ? If the savage has that
glimmer of moral light that makes it wrong, are
we sure that the animal has not ? It is wiser to
admit that we have no knowledge that warrants
such inference ? Again, can we say that when any
human society, visited by calamity, falls from better
to worse, there is no moral evil as part of the cause ?
Can we in such a case make any distinction between
the evil they do and the evil that is thrust upon
106 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
them ? Good and evil, physical and moral evil,
are here welded together. If we try to apply the
religious idea and ask where God's will is in
harmony with his creation and where it is violated,
we must perceive that many of our conventional
ideas have little basis. The position of the commu-
nity in our city slums ; the condition of every child
born and trained in their depraved atmosphere,
is analogous to that of the primitive tribe in point
of moral responsibility. The starving child who
steals a loaf and survives is probably fitter to
survive even for moral ends than one who shows
less resource and dies. In such cases our moralists
are wont to point out that the bad behaviour
thus thrust upon each generation was first the
behaviour of their ancestors. This, however, can-
not be urged of the primitive tribe we have cited ;
and the likeness between the childhood of the
race and that of each generation in respect of
moral behaviour is so close that there is a strong
presumption that a distinction not found to be
actual in the one is not actual in the other.
The religious mind which calls its God the
creator and sustainer of all, must face the fact that
in the extricable confusion of good and evil his
sustaining activity must be engaged. God's pur-
pose is, we believe, the advance of man toward a
positive good that will overcome evil. The mere
negation of wrong can have no value for him.
The man who sins is higher in the scale, more
approved of God, nearer to the divine nature, than
the vegetable or animal which obeys God's law
perfectly because it cannot do otherwise. How
chap, ii THE USE OF. SIN 107
beautiful to us, how fresh and strong, does this
dutiful aspect of nature appear ! Yet the man
who can choose between right and wrong, and
chooses, even if he choose wrong, is still above all
enforced good. In religious fact, as opposed to
religious theory, sin, although only a bad bye-
product of free will, is a stepping-stone to higher
things. It has a degree of good in it. It must
be, in some sense, God's will. It is used by God
as a means to work out his own purposes, as the
lives of the greatest and best men all show.
Can we, then, argue that God sends sin for our
salvation? to bring us to himself? "Shall we
continue in sin that grace may abound?" We
exalt the saving grace of pain in our religious
biographies; shall we exalt the saving grace of sin
also ? As a matter of fact, we lose hold of the
strong common sense of all true religion when we
do this; we cease to be pure in heart and cease to
see God.
This has nothing to do with the metaphysical
argument by which evil may be proved to have no
reality. We are not dealing with the problems of
metaphysics but with the facts of life, and such fair
inferences from them as may tend to correct our
conventional estimate of God.
We have seen that while there is a sense in
which sin is part of God's plan for man's salvation,
we refuse, and rightly, to regard it as God's will
that any man should sin. Have we any more
justification for regarding it as God's will that he
should suffer ?
CHAPTER III
THE USE OF PAIN
The grave difficulties attending any attempt to
reconcile belief in God's universal providence with
the almost universal existence of sin which we
believe he must abhor, remain unsolved; mean-
while it does not make the problem of evil simpler
to represent God, while hating sin, as actually
visiting pain and grief upon sentient creatures.
It would seem more reasonable to think of a good
God as abhorring suffering in men as he abhors
sin, and actually working with man always for joy
as he does for righteousness.
It is clearly necessary for the religious man to
regard a personal God in two aspects — as taking
the responsibility of omnipotence for everything
that takes place, and as, at the same time, exercis-
ing a preference and governing all things for the
advantage of what he prefers. For example, the
monotheist must regard sin as within God's will
for the world; and if he be also a moralist he must
also believe that God prefers righteousness, and
ordains all things for the advantage of his prefer-
ence.
108
chap, in THE USE OF PAIN 109
In other words, there is an aspect in which we
must believe, if we believe in an almighty God,
that he is responsible for every sin and folly in
creation; that, having an end in view which is
worth the price to be paid in sin and folly, he has
counted the cost and pays the price. In that same
sense pain and misery must, of course, be laid
directly at God's door. A father sending his son
into the school playground knows that many a cut
and bruise will befall him — a broken bone, perhaps,
or an infectious disease. The end in view is worth
the risk. But it would involve a very different
kind of father to give the child intentionally a cut
or bruise, or break one of his bones, or infect him
with a disease, and very much the kind of father
who would lead his son into vice. Looking back,
we find that it is a mere matter of history that the
nations who have affirmed God's willingness to
risk sin and denied his more direct will to bring it
about, have progressed, and the nations that have
not made that distinction have passed away or are
awaiting some new impulse of life. It behooves us,
then, to consider whether further progress does
not depend upon recognising God as the author
only of delight as he is the author only of righteous-
ness. Familiarity has led the modern religious
mind to assume an extraordinary discrepancy in
God's ways, to suppose that, while sin in man is
not of God but purely evil, pain, though the
consequence of sin, is God's will, and therefore
purely good. The belief that God can suffer but
cannot sin is not enough to justify this.1
1 See Appendix A.
no THE FATHER'S HOUSE
We are faced with the need for a new move-
ment forward : the temporary resting-place which
the religious mind gained by shutting off moral
evil only as contrary to the will of God is ours no
longer; moral and physical evil merge indis-
tinguishably into one another, and contradiction
must enter into our conception of God's character
as long as the religious mind makes him directly
responsible for the latter and not for the former.
In the sense in which God is responsible for moral
evil he is responsible for physical evil, and surely
in no other sense.
There are pressing reasons for rejecting the
idea that salvation comes by pain. We have seen
that the average Jew had learned to think, before
Jesus came, that God could do no wrong. Sadly
enough, the definiteness with which he believed
God to be always right depended upon his ability
to approve of the cruel judgments which his sacred
books attributed to God. (This is seen in the
varying outlooks of the authors of the latest books
of the Old Testament and the Apocryphal and
Apocalyptic literature.) Now here we see the
causal connection between attributing to God the
authorship of man's afflictions and supposing that
cruelty is at times a virtue. Why should we
return good for evil if God by direct intention
returns evil for evil ? Why should we deal out to
men only generosity and gentleness if God wields
the rod even in training his most obedient
children ? The theologian is apt to fancy that it
is possible to say that such a line of conduct is
right for God but not for us; but it is mere
chap, in THE USE OF PAIN m
matter of history that the religious man can never
practically say, "Vengeance is for God but not for
me." Jesus knew what was in man far better
when he urged a life of perfect gentleness and
unending generosity, by the argument that it was
God's perfection to bless the evil as well as the
good, and by the example of his own miracles,
which exemplified the doctrine. The effort to
copy God's perfection is of the essence of religion;
this desire to copy God is therefore quite irre-
sistible to the religious man. When he believes
that God wields the rod, he himself also wields it,
— in religious controversy, in civic and national
relations; and in so doing he fights with the
weapons of the enemy, and becomes a futile agent,
like a mad soldier striking wildly, now at the
enemy, now at his own leader.
As men believe God to be, so they are. As
long as the Hebrew believed in a national God
his charity had national limits. It was not until
the thinkers of the Roman hierarchy had arrived
at the idea that salvation could be had beyond
their own communion that their finer charity went
out to men of other religions. As a matter of
everyday fact, no good man who dwells upon
"God's use of the rod," and kindred forms of
religious phraseology, carries forgiveness to his
enemies or opponents very far. Long before the
"seventy times seven" is reached he lends himself
as an instrument to what he supposes to be the
divine wrath. The radical cause of this is
indicated by the fact that when the enmity is not
personal his anger is more unchecked ; forgiveness,
ii2 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
even in the first place, is not essayed because the
anger is supposed to be on behalf of God; an
attitude virtually insolent is at once almost un-
consciously assumed toward those thought to be
living in error. That many humble souls of finest
fibre rise above this coarseness of vision is due to
that continual florescence of a divine principle
which we recognise in the words, "His heart is
better than his creed ;" but that the average
Christian indulges himself in rancour and ill-temper
under cover of what he believes to be the punitive
disposition of Providence is attested by the re-
ligious polemics of Christendom.
If we turn to consider the development accord-
ing to experience of human theories of govern-
ment, we cannot but perceive that a very important
change has been going on. Man has long and
universally tried to abolish crime by the most
severe penalties ; and it is only after ages of legal
experiment that he has been convinced that what
appears to him the proper result of legal experiment
is not its result. Experience shows that the only
real deterrent is a higher moral standard; and the
sort of fear that terrorism produces is certainly
not moral fear. When the psalmist said to God,
"There is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest
be feared," he expressed a very deep psychological
law. If, then, we see that man in his attempts
to govern his fellow-man has made a universal
mistake, which was indeed hardly suspected till
yesterday,1 we shall be prepared to admit that his
1 See the reflection of popular opinion in the speech of King
Edward VII. in opening the new Central Criminal Court, Lon-
THE USE OF PAIN
IJ3
fallacious notions of human discipline may have
given him a fallacious notion of the divine meth-
ods; in which case we must alter our concep-
tion of the divine plan of government heretofore
supposed to be exhibited in such cases as the death
of Ananias and Sapphira, St. Paul's thorn in the
flesh, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the
innumerable misfortunes and diseases which for
two thousand years Christians have attributed to
the will of God.
There is now a large consensus of moral opinion
in favour of the view that legal penalties are
justified only in so far as they aim at the benefit
of the criminal, and that only by reforming the
criminal can society be adequately protected.
This stage in civic development corresponds to
the religious stage at which the idea of expiating
guilt by physical suffering is perceived to be
fallacious. The next belief of statesmen and
theologians appears to be that the infliction of
penalties by way of discipline is desirable. And
yet the reflective are aware that this is no logical
resting-place, that just in so far as penalties are
merely distressful to the criminal they fail to infect
him with that love for mankind which is the only
root of good behaviour. It is not pain that lifts
him, but other elements in punishment. We
dimly feel, even with regard to the most degraded
don: "The barbarous penal code which was deemed necessary
a hundred years ago has gradually been replaced, in the progress
toward a higher civilisation, by laws breathing a more humane
spirit and aiming at a nobler purpose. ... I look with con-
fidence to those who will administer justice in this building to
have continued regard to the hope of reform in the criminal."
ii4 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
criminal, that just as brutal punishments would
brutalise him further, so there is no infliction that
tends to his advancement; that as love is the only
force that inexorably compels to the highest
ethical achievement, so love is the only force that
can illuminate the lowest ethical depths. We
perceive, even in the matter of parental discipline,
that to talk of inflicting distress as a form of love
is in reality a confusion of thought, because
punitive discipline at best is the use of an inferior
instrument, implying a lack of resource in the
parent or state that wields it. It is not a form
of love, but a form of expediency; it is not
the expression of power, but the expression of
impotence. The most that can truly be said for
force used either in punishment or war is that
we find it necessary. Because we, even while
experiencing sentiments of affection, are still some-
times harassed by our limitations into the use of
an inferior method, are we therefore justified in
continuing to attribute to God what we know to
be an inferior method ? If the change that has
come over the civilised mind in the treatment of
criminals and children is a real reformation and
advance, it must be reflected in our ideas of God's
treatment of us, unless theology is to fall behind,
only to find its reformation by a long battle of
doubtful issue with sects which will vindicate
God's character in ways more or less partial and
extreme.
Therefore, since moral progress seems to be
along the line of dissociating the thought of suf-
fering from the thought of true purgation, and
chap, in THE USE OF PAIN 115
so from the thought of God's will, the fact that
many of us are so constituted as naturally to think
suffering salutary to the moral nature is no con-
clusive argument for it, because historically we
have seen that many convictions have held the
race until experience disproved them in most
unexpected ways.
There are two great powers that rule us, pain
and joy, and the greater of these is joy. But
humanity in one stage of its progress deeply
believes that pain is the greater. This belief has
by the storm and stress of the past been woven
into those tendencies of thought that we call
instinctive. We try to rule ourselves by pain;
we try to rule others by pain; the Church has
chiefly tried to guide men by insisting on the
power of pain. We go back to the records
of the gospel, and find that the Christ preached
joy, put forward joy, as the chief factor in the
redemption of the world. We cannot at once
analyse what this means, because we have believed
God to be the volitional source of our pain.
The supreme moral reason for rejecting this old
belief is that it has robbed the gospel of the joy
with which Jesus invested it. Religion is not now
the source of much joy. What Christian man is
there amongst us who does not rejoice more in a
medical consulting-room when told that he can be
cured of his disease, or in his lawyer's office when
told that he is heir to thousands, or in the pres-
ence of the woman he loves when his hand is ac-
cepted in marriage, than when he understands that
wisdom to know and take the right course, to his
u6 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
worldly detriment, will be given him in a difficulty ?
Indeed, how many are there among us who would
not rather hear of any success of his children in
the competition of life, of any rise in the stocks in
which he has invested, of any local victory of his
political party, than hear that a heathen province
has put on Christ ? It may be true that thousands
who feel quite naturally and simply that the chief
joys of life lie in matters unconnected with the
Christian hope would still rather relinquish all
else than that hope. "All that a man has will he
give for his life;" even, and chiefly, when that
life is one long grumble; and a Christian man
may esteem the faithfulness of Christ the first
necessity of life without having any faith that is
better than a grumble. Joy, with its dynamic
force, has gone out of our religion, whose total
force is thereby greatly diminished. We cannot
even conceive of the extent of our lack, because
what God would give to a fuller faith is beyond
human conception.
The Church would be transfigured if she could,
by a corporate faith, stand upon the mount of
God, and see him working here and now only for
the delight and joy of all his creatures. With new
dignity, which would invest her with raiment white
and glistering, she would then with authority teach
that man must love God with all his powers and
his neighbour as himself, and make no compromise
with the lower life of self or party interest. It is
open to every man to accept Adam's curse, to
sweat for mere bread, to set before himself material
pleasures as an end : it is within his power, by
chap, in THE USE OF PAIN 117
giving his chief effort to it, to create material
gains, to make bread even out of stones; again, it
is open to every man to live for personal ambition,
to live for the sake of possessing the kingdoms of
this world, however small or large his world may
be — a life so given is the worship of the prince of
the world. Or it is open to every man to attempt
an ascetic religion in defiance of the law that
body conditions soul, to attempt to transcend the
physical conditions of spiritual life under which
God has placed him; by so doing he will attain
to some eminence, some temple minaret, and fall
therefrom.
There will always be some extreme hour for
the true Christian when he will passionately pray
that the renunciation of self-interest so terrible to
him, and necessarily so painful to God, may in
some way be avoided without dishonour. No
man in the midst of the world can ever be assured
that, in the complex working of human hearts, it
may not be open to God to give a happy issue out
of menacing afflictions; yet — this is what all the
prophets have spoken — every true seer in the long
search of the race for God has said clearly that
when God does not make a way, man must make
none by compromise with the spirit of self-interest,
by withdrawing from the warfare. If an earthly
king, being evil, desires for every soldier under
his banners a painless and honourable path to the
joy of victory, how much more God ! Yet as the
most tender human heart will desire for its dearest,
peace only with honour, victory at whatever cost,
so must God.
n8 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
It will be said that the difference is recondite;
that if exhaustion and wounds and death are God's
will for the Christian in the same sense as they are
the will of a king for his soldiers; as long as there
must be in the crisis the clash between God's
desire and his servant's — as to time and method
if not as to end — the distinction between God's
infliction of suffering and his preference of suffer-
ing to moral defeat matters nothing.
Just so the ancient Israelite, as we see from his
literature, regarded as recondite the question
whether God was the author of all thought, will,
and spiritual activity — of fury as of love, of guile
as of truth — or only the author of good. Yet the
recognition of the difference marked the parting
of the ways for progress or decadence ; for man's
definition of God's character is his faith. We see
that just in so far as any ancient race found God
to be antagonistic to moral evil they rose above
all adversity, and reigned by giving laws to their
conquerors and ethical ideals to the future.
It is, therefore, not difficult to believe that, if
we accept the teaching of Christ that God seeks to
save all men from suffering as from sin, we shall
rise again in the scale. The war against all suffer-
ing will become as sacred as the war against sin.
While in the whole earth any man suffers wrong
from his fellows, or languishes for lack of scientific
light and human love and Christ's salvation, the
idea of planning life to attain personal fortune or
honour or excellence will be felt incompatible
with the Christian profession.
CHAPTER IV
FATALISM AND ASCETICISM
The following considerations will go to show that
the fatalistic belief that all suffering is God's will
is not only a relic of a past and lower stage of
thought, which indeed was brought to greatest
perfection in the fatalism of the Hindoo and the
Mahommedan, but that while we hold it we
cannot have the best inspiration that Christianity
can give; further, that the desire to suffer is not
necessary to resignation, nor is asceticism necessary
to the discipline of effort.
The following quotations from modern writers
give what we all recognise as the common notions
of Christendom concerning God's dealing with men.
"All the manifold trials with which God visits
us are with a view to this perfect purification of
the soul. Such trials are needful — for in no other
way can we cast aside self; but they are hard to
bear — unbearable, indeed, unless we give ourselves
up passively to God, who will sustain us. Such
trials are more profitable to God's glory and the
soul's salvation than the longest life of good works
and religious exercises. " x
1 From The Hidden Life of the Soul, adapted from the French
of Jean Nicolas Grou.
119
120 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
"Let the afflictions I meet with be in some
measure serviceable toward the appeasing of thy
wrath." x
"I know, O my God, Thou sendest this sick-
ness on me for my good, even to humble and
reform me; O grant it may work that saving
effect in me." 2
"When thou findest thyself visited with sick-
ness ... let thy first care be, to find out what
it is that provokes him to smite thee."3
"Whatever your sickness is, know you cer-
tainly that it is God's visitation." 4
This teaching represents the forces of God as
warring among themselves. Any young man
setting forth on a career of sport or athletics or
on some warlike expedition or scientific quest, has
a mind cheerfully attuned to the inevitable hard-
ships of his course. If his aim be scientific truth
he does not think of truth as making his way
arduous, or as being any the truer when attained
because of the pains of attainment; nor does a
man think of his wounds in warfare as inflicted by
the king he serves. Considering the difficulties
only as obstacles to be overcome, his attention is
not diverted or his force diminished by them.
Obstacles, as obstacles, are for the purpose in
hand purely evil; and to regard them thus is
necessary to the condition of mind typified by the
single eye, and necessary to the attainment of
1 Bishop Wilson, Sacra Privata, p. 64.
2 Bishop Ken, Manual (for Winchester boys), p. 120.
3 Whole Duty of Man (17th century), p. 447.
4 Exhortation to the Sick, Book of Common Prayer.
ch. iv FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 121
success, earthly or heavenly. Consider how the
force of a young warrior would be diminished in
the service of a king if he regarded all the trials
and misfortunes of his march and warfare as of
his king's planning or infliction. Consider how
doubtful a man would be of the advantage of
reaching scientific truth if he could personify
knowledge, and conceive her as guarding all
approach to her glorious precincts with a rod.
To most men an underlying inconsistency in
religious thought is the great deterrent, although
they may be unaware of the cause of repulsion.
The enthusiast easily leaps over it; the criminal is
sunk below any perception of it; but for the
mass of men, although the sense of inconsistency
is usually quite inarticulate, its baneful effect is
none the less there. It is when the deep under-
lying uneasiness finds words of protest that men
begin to struggle out from under the burden, and
their activities are set free even though their minds
are not able to cope adequately with the problem —
as, for instance, in the notable case of "Christian
Science." 1
So much emphasis has been laid on suffering as
a chief part of the "good news" of God as set
forth by "orthodoxy," that the message has little
attraction for the happy. Within the very limited
power of expression given to any human artist he
has the choice of two ways by which to make light
in his picture — by giving greater radiance to the
1 The writer has no first-hand acquaintance with "Christian
Science," and has seen only portions of its literature. See Ap-
pendix B.
122 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
lighter parts, or by intensifying the shadow. If
the shadows are made dark enough, a compara-
tively muddy and dingy colour can, by contrast with
them, be made to appear high light. This is very
much the way in which Christendom, in many times
and places, has endeavoured to set forth the attrac-
tions of the gospel. What has been preached has
not been a doctrine which the plain man would
recognise in his everyday life as the "good news"
of God; the effort to convert him to the belief
that it is "good news" has too often taken the
form of blackening the evil fate from which it
offers an escape. God's providence, the judg-
ment, and the hereafter, have been painted with a
brush dipped in a darkness which made itself felt.
Against this tendency there has always been the
quiet influence of our Lord's words, "If ye then,
being evil, know how ye would deal with your
children, how much better a father must God be
to you than you are to them." This leaven of
the kingdom has always worked, giving happier
views of God's providence in this world and the
next. A large response to these happier views in
the heart of the common man to-day, vague and
incoherent enough in itself, has undoubtedly
sufficed to turn him from Christianity as it is
commonly taught.
Does the fault lie with the men who thus turn
from the Church ? The depth of a man's character
and his mental grasp may be measured by the
strength of his conviction that he is evil, but not
by the belief that God will administer grief to
him. The first conviction is based on the failure
ch. iv FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 123
that attends his efforts to be good. What spoils
his success in being good he calls evil. The loftier
his ideal of good, the more earnest his desire to
attain it, the more clearly he sees that evil is
present with him; the remembrance of it in his
past is grievous; its present tyranny seems in-
tolerable. This is a rational attitude toward a
fact of which he has some knowledge. On the
other hand, it is only by faith that he can see
God; his belief concerning God's attitude toward
the evil in human nature must be only an inference
based on his faith about God; and to believe in
God's fatherhood and attribute to him actions
toward man in this life which we should call cruel
in a father does not appear to argue depth of
feeling or clearness of thought. Man's only hope
of happiness in the next life rests upon God's
character; if God's will for him in this life is
direful, hope is inconsistent.
If the gospel of Christ does not offer to the
common, happy man in the common, happy street
something that arouses his desire as soon as his
attention is fixed upon it, it cannot rightly be
called "the good news of God." Evil thoughts
may quickly dissipate the impression; the cares
either of poverty or riches may choke it ; his own
lack of persistence in desiring anything may wither
this desire ; yet if it be good news indeed it must
attract him naturally and simply, without any
dogmatist at his elbow to change the aspect of his
past and future life, of earth and hell and heaven,
before he recognises it as good. It is the goodness
of the news that must itself work the required
i24 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
change in him. He who, having heard of some-
thing he wants more than anything he has,
relinquishes his evil thoughts, his worldly ideas, or
overcomes his own shallowness, sufficiently to make
it his own, must make many discoveries as to the
inner nature of sin and self. The good fruit,
indeed, which is the result of his reception of the
news can only be borne at the expense of his sins,
by choking them at the root, a process which is
accompanied by a new knowledge of sin and
righteousness and judgment.
But at the first hearing the heart of the common
man, however indifferent to all things classed as
"religious," will answer to the delight of "good
news"; and the reason that he is, and has been,
so largely left without the gospel of Christ is that
what appears bright against the violent shadows
of the theologian is not bright in contrast to the
common sunshine of daily life. But even the
theologians begin to mistrust the shadows; the
common man frankly disowns them. That exal-
tation of suffering as the way of life which was
increasingly emphasised in the interpretation given
to Christianity by the world of the first Christian
centuries — an emphasis which culminated in the
mediaeval Church and has since decreased — will win
the world less and less as the conditions of life
improve by the very practice of Christianity.
The Pauline doctrine of chastisement emphasised in
the cloister, and in every puritan revival, to the
exclusion of natural joy, has laid upon the mass of
men a burden too heavy to be borne, — the service
of a God who wars against his own armies. God
ch. iv FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 125
is represented as the agent in every untoward
accident, disabling and dismembering those who
seek to do him the best service. What can be
expected of men but half-hearted service to such a
king ? Such actions on the part of God required
explanation, and all the sophistries of which
theology is capable have been required to explain
that God was indeed doing better for them in this
way than if his kingdom did not appear to be
divided against itself.
This explanation can only satisfy three classes;
first, those who, having hold of God's hand by the
direct simplicity and purity of their character,
receive direct from him a higher truth, so word-
less that it does not conflict with the letter of any
doctrine or concern itself with the letter of any;
secondly, those who are prepared to set aside the
whole physical aspect of life, and live in an
imaginative world that they think to be purely
spiritual; or thirdly, the large class of mind whose
mental (not physical) indolence and pious sentiment
finds its easiest outlet in fatalism.
The reason why fatalism is often credited with
a high character is because people attribute to it
the courage and patience and resolute activities of
the fatalist. That these are often dauntless is due
rather to the fact that fatalism numbs all reasonable
doubt, lifts religion into an unpractical sphere, and
sets man's activities free from the embarrassment
of scruple, as we see them for the most part free
in healthy childhood or unreflecting youth. What
reflection the fatalist does exercise is restful rather
than a drain upon his other activities of thought
i26 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
and body. He is naturally more successful in his
enterprise, or more patient under failure, than any
man who is trying to reconcile an active reason with
the inconsistencies of a religion which he believes
ought to be the motive and guide of every activity.
Nor is it necessary to believe that all suffering
is of God's direct intention in order to exalt the
great virtue of resignation. A man's fidelity to
God must be measured by his resignation to the
divine will in all things which conflict with his
own desire while they belong to God's scheme for
the building up of free virtue, just as he resigns
himself to the pains, privations, and fatigues of a
hard enterprise which he must pursue; but a
man's fidelity to God is not measured by resignation
to evil that conflicts both with his own desire and
also with God's will. If, for example, all the sick
folk mentioned in the Gospels had resigned them-
selves to their condition, had not clamoured for
the attention of Jesus, impeding his progress and
interrupting his teaching, Christians believe that
God's work would have been checked, the kingdom
retarded, not advanced. If, on the other hand,
every Christian throughout the ages, claiming the
gifts God offers to faith, had resigned himself to
that degree of wordly failure which uncompromis-
ing obedience to the ideal of Christ must involve,
the salt of the earth would not, so far, have lost its
saltness. "The devil" is probably a fatalist; he
certainly will advance his kingdom furthest by
persuading the saints to acquiesce in what is not
God's will, thus making them feel incapable of
doing what is.
ch. iv FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 127
The man who can regard God as living apart
in the region of necessity or fate; the man who
can regard this earth life as a factor which can be
set aside as almost negligible in his estimate of
existence; the man who sees God face to face, and
needs no reasonable account of the divine love —
these may thrive upon any doctrine of divine
providence. But they are few among the masses
whom Jesus came to save; and from under this
horrid incubus — the idea of a God who is for ever
afflicting those he loves best — we see the modern
spirit struggling out in several directions. There
is the great protest of pure materialism, "Better
no God than one who is worse than an earthly
father"; and this sets free natural activities which
perhaps are upborne by the divine mind more truly
than are the austerities of the enthusiast. There
is the great protest of agnosticism, "Better an
unknown God than one inconsistent with reason."
And this again sets free in the best men activities
of speculation and worship which are, perhaps,
emboldened by the vital force from the divine
heart as any theology coarsened by the world's
applause can never be. And there is the recent
doctrine of "Christian Science," a mad philosophy
but apparently a true worship, honouring certain
abstractions from the Christian idea, which are
false only because they are abstractions, and have
been abstracted from the concrete Christian faith
because a large part of the Church had previously
contented herself with other abstractions more false
and vain.
Further, to maintain that suffering has been
i28 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
exalted in religious thought to a false honour is
not to deny that pain, disappointment, and con-
tradiction are the only field in which we know
effort, and that the discipline of effort is salutary
in the moral as in the physical life. Every young
animal, in order to satisfy its hunger and thirst,
its curiosity and inborn activity, will clamber
painfully over the most difficult obstacles to attain
something it has in view; its falls, its quarrels
with its fellows, the disappointment of not reaching
what has attracted it, or finding it when reached,
less desirable than appeared — these are the evil
sufficient for the day which makes it more sturdy
and more wise on the morrow. The child that is
not seeking to do something a little beyond its
strength and wit, falling and failing, disputing
with men and circumstances its right to success, is
not — at six months or at twenty years — a growing
child; and furthermore, is not a happy child.
And when, after threescore years and ten, he
begins to cease all effort and turn aside from all
discussion, we sadly say, "He is ageing fast;"
and life is practically over as soon as the effort to
reach what is beyond reach, with the pains and
disappointments and contradictions necessary to
effort and uncertainty, have ceased. What we
need most carefully to mark is that with the
cessation of effort comes the cessation of joy.
This knowledge, that the discipline of effort is the
law of life as we know it, affects our idea of all
delight as much as our idea of pain, our idea of
heaven as well as of hell. We look forward in
another life, not to rest but to less friction, not to
ch. iv FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 129
any j°y in the feeling that there are no new worlds
to conquer, but to the joy of eternal conquest;
and the ideas of power without expenditure, of
movement without friction, are not now possible
to our reasoning powers, so that we regard the
discipline which attends effort as quite as much
necessary for delight as for development.
Many place a high value upon what they think
to be asceticism without taking pains to distinguish
it from other principles of action. To choose any
course which involves hardship and self-denial for
the sake of accomplishing some end which is
counted worth the cost, is not asceticism unless,
when the end is the development of a man's own
character, the hardship chosen be some form of
discipline which will keep the body in subjection.
For example, he who, for the sake of supporting
some relative, or in order to obtain a position, or
to be able to marry, chooses a meagre and toilsome
life, is not an ascetic. Neither is he an ascetic if
he choose the same life in the missionary spirit,
for the sake of bestowing spiritual wealth upon
others. A man who sells all he has to buy a pearl
or a field, or to further the interests of a kingdom
that claims his loyalty, is not an ascetic.
If, however, the man who sold all he had for
the sake of gaining something he desired more,
should think that the poverty or inconvenience
that he suffered was to be courted for the sake of
enhancing his own fitness to receive the treasure,
or because such suffering was pleasing to some
invisible power, the element of asceticism would
enter into what he did. A man who gives up
130 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
eating meat one day in the week because he thinks,
or those he chooses to obey think, that his body
will thereby become stronger, and on the whole,
more healthy and therefore more useful to himself
and to God, is not an ascetic. But if he fast on
Friday, believing that physical inconvenience is the
best method of bringing his body into subjection
to his will and so making it more useful to himself
and to God, he is an ascetic. Asceticism lies in
the belief that there is some moral advantage to
be gained by the mere endurance of suffering, and
in the habit of courting for that end suffering
which has no other end. Two men may act in
precisely the same way, one an ascetic, the other a
free man of the kingdom of Christ. The difference
does not depend on whether a man consider a
moral advantage worth purchasing at the cost of a
physical disadvantage; but on whether he consider
the courting of physical disadvantage the true way
to gain moral advantage.
There can surely be no doubt that Jesus taught
that his followers must choose all the self-denial
and loss that is involved for any man in making
the kingdom of heaven, its interests and its
benefits, the first object of desire and effort. The
end for each man is union with God; the means
to that end is union with man. The kingdom
was the aggregate of those who lived by this means
to this end. But the joy of the end and the
joy of the means was to swallow up all incidental
loss and pain. We are all familiar with that de-
scription of the life of Jesus, "who for the joy that
was set before him endured the cross, despising
ch. iv FATALISM AND ASCETICISM 131
the shame." The spirit in these words is very
different from the spirit that courts pain and
shame for the private benefit of character. In the
parables of the kingdom, in the precepts concern-
ing life in the kingdom, what is given or done to.
obtain the end in view is incidental, and the mind,
fixed on the joy of its motive, is filled with images
of gain and gladness rather than with images of
privation and pain. The glow of enterprise, the
flush of effort, the buoyancy of hope, and the
strenuous faith which grasps the substance hoped
for and tastes the delight of what is as yet unseen,
all combine to build up the moral character of the
child of the kingdom. It is true that he also
gains all the moral benefit that loss can give; but,
instead of seeking loss, he spurns with the sole of
his foot each hardship by which he rises. We can
see him on his mountain path, footsore, climbing
up from crag to crag; the sharp rocks are his
natural sorrows; the sweet air he breathes, the
sweet fruits on which he feeds, are his simple
earthly goods, and are as essential to his progress
as the rough road on which he treads. But his
mind, in harmony with his heavenly calling, dwells
on the beauty and comforts of the pathway
because they are the direct gifts of his God whose
love lures him on. He has no need to seek to
wound his feet; inspired by God, he takes the
quickest path, however rough, and hardly under-
stands that the blood upon the pathway is
his own.
CHAPTER V
PROPHETS AND APOSTLES
We may, by analogy, briefly outline the change
that has come over the minds of Christian thinkers
with regard to the authority of the lawgivers and
prophets of Israel, and also of the apostles.
It is not uncommon for young children to be
trained, by precept of mother and nurse, to regard
their father as an infallible authority and example.
Sturdy intelligent boys, pushing beyond the nursery,
are bound to perceive that their ideals of justice,
mercy, and common sense do not always tally with
the parental word and character. Here the father
said something that was not quite accurate, there
he showed temper; and such instances, even if
exceptional, are remembered when the father's
discipline is not to their taste. The first workings
of such observations do not, in fact cannot, over-
throw the dogma of the father's infallibility so
early, and perhaps wisely, implanted. The result
is rebellion against the infallible standard. Anarchy
reigns in the heart of the son, and in many a case
carries him beyond the influence of the domestic
circle into a world where, without guiding principle,
chap, v PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 133
he too often loses his way. But, perhaps in many
more cases, what happens is this : growing older,
going to school and returning, the boy forgets
the nursery dogma; his father appears to him as
a man among men; then how gladly does he
recognise all that is good in his father's heart,
all that is wise in his judgment, all that is true in
his principles ! We cannot stay here to inquire
how a boy obtains a standard by which to judge
what in his father is worthy of imitation and what
is not; it remains a fact that he does judge.
A boy may make mistakes, but the moral sense
within and the common sense of the community
without, make such judgment inevitable to a
growing intellect. The father now has a deeper
influence over the growing man than he could ever
have had if seen in a false light, even had the son
rendered unreasoning obedience all his life, because
the father's influence now extends beyond action
and mechanical thought to the springs of spon-
taneous thought and action.
Such is, in some sort, now the influence which
the lives and opinions of prophets and apostles
have over the thinking Christian, who says that
the Old Testament is not so much an inspired
record as a wonderfully candid record of the lives,
the opinions, and the worship, of men inspired by
that hunger and thirst for righteousness which
cannot fail of its desire, and with that purity of
heart which sees God. Their age was not infallible,
and they were men of their age. The same must
be said of the writers of the Gospels and Epistles ;
the test of the quality of their inspiration is the
i34 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
higher life and higher faith which they actually did
implant in the world.
Why, then, do we believe in the infallibility of
Jesus ? The assurance of that central Christian
faith rests upon the intuitive knowledge which his
servants daily have of him, and which is incom-
municable by argument. It is like the oil in the
lamp of the wedding guest, which cannot be
transferred to the lamp which another carries, and
can only be known to others by its light. We
cannot too clearly bear in mind that all on the
side of reason that is essential to the intuitive faith
of any Christian is that his own reason should not
contradict it; so that all strife of tongues concern-
ing Christian dogmas are, beyond that, irrelevant
to the central Christian belief. At the same time
this intuitive knowledge can be buttressed by any
argument that seems reasonable to its possessor.
If the possessor be a well-informed and thinking
person, what appears reasonable to him will have
a certain force with other thinking persons; and
with regard to the different position which Jesus
occupies in religious history compared with pro-
phets and apostles, we would note two lines of
thought and research which commend themselves.
The first is that, taking the world over and the
length of ages, all that we find of new life, new
thought, and new impulse in the early Christian
Church must be set down to a new cause, and in
so far as it corresponds with the life of Jesus told
in the Gospels it is only reasonable to regard his
inspiration as the cause. It is almost superfluous
now to remark that the religious thought and
chap, v PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 135
moral activities of the Gentile nations were, in the
ancient world, and are now, on a much higher
plane than Christian apologists used to suppose;
but granting all of good that can be ascribed to
them and to the pious Jews of the Christian era,
there is in the early Church, and in its effect upon
its environment, evidence of an impulse of joyful
love and a new estimate of God which can be
most reasonably accounted for by assuming the
substantial truth of the Gospel record. Joy was
the most novel feature of the new faith; no
adequate cause but the truth of the Gospel story
can be assumed for it.
The second consideration which makes it the
more reasonable to regard Jesus as holding some
unique place among mystics, among lawgivers,
among poets, and among practical reformers, as
having an inspiration which raised him above his
fellow-men in all these capacities, is that disciples,
obviously incapable of understanding all that
they transmitted, of grasping more than a small
part of the force of what they transmitted, did
none the less transmit it in a form such that every
progressive generation has been able to assimilate
from that form more and more of what is godlike.
To-day we find in the life of Jesus truths which
prove to be the solution of national and social
problems, and of the problems of every individual
heart. To say this is not to assert that the theology
of the Christian Church at any one period solves
these problems, still less that the conception of
Christianity in the minds of those who reject it is
a conception that helps to such solution. Christian
136 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
theology in every age has stood to the message
of Jesus as the partial conceptions of the first
disciples stood to it. The great Christian miracle
is that through this shifting but perennial mis-
conception a Christ is still seen, is, as we believe
the progress of the world proves, increasingly
understood, and can be grasped by faith which in
operation accomplishes the highest human ends.
This is a strong argument for a belief that does
not rest on argument.
But to return to the question of the relative
positions of Jesus and other teachers whose words
are recorded in Scripture. It seems, indeed, extra-
ordinary that the Church for many centuries has
taught that Jesus was "very God of very God,"
and yet held that his life and words did not hold
the mirror to the character of God the Father
more clearly than did the lives and words of his
own followers. We have now a theoretical know-
ledge of this mistake; we need to have the
application of this knowledge enforced. We are
still slothfully holding hard to many conclusions
arrived at by arguments of which the equal in-
spiration of all Scripture was the major premiss.
The premiss is lost; we have not revised our
conclusions.
The inspiration of a nation is seen in its life,
in its gallant struggle to know God and to do
righteousness : the inspiration of an apostle is
shown in the calibre of his missionary life, and in
the life he implants in others. If we were to
refuse to be content until the nation we represent
sought God as impetuously as did Israel under
chap, v PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 137
divine inspiration, until the inspiration of the
Apostles was imparted to us as individuals and our
lives bore the same abundant fruits, we should no
longer be in danger of confusing the inspiration of
the Master with that of some of his disciples ; and
should avoid the confusions of thought which have
arisen out of the belief that the doctrine of Jesus
must be modified and corrected until it correspond
with the interpretation of his forerunners and
followers.
If we examine the way in which Jesus treated
the prestige of the prophets and lawgivers of the
Old Testament we shall see that we have his own
authority for allowing each age to test the inspira-
tion of sacred books by the highest developments
of truth which the corporate mind may then grasp.
There is plain evidence in history that every law
or moral obligation that the race has seriously
adopted as a way of salvation must be worked out
with fear till its every requirement — each jot and
tittle — has been exhaustively tested, and found
either useful or useless in the attainment of the
highest ends. Yet when Jesus says that the law
shall not fail, that he himself came to fulfil the law,
and that the law is more enduring than heaven and
earth, it is clearly not the laws, or even the moral
obligations, of Semitic ceremonial and taboo, and
the crude ethics attached to them, to which he
refers; it is clearly the rightness of justice and
mercy, and their eternal synthesis of love, of which
he is speaking.
In speaking thus of the eternal right, what did
he mean to teach about all that mass of legal
138 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
enactments embedded in the canonical books of
the Old Testament, which the Jews from whom he
sprang, to whom he spoke, regarded as "the law" ?
If we read those long passages in the Pentateuch
which deal with the details of the clean and unclean
— regulations which were not of the Jahveh reli-
gion, but had come down from Semitic fathers of
the dim animistic past, like circumcision, which our
Lord himself says was not of Moses — we must
see that Jesus could have had no thought of set-
ting the seal of his authority upon all this. It
seems clear that he would teach that a great
part of the books of the Old Testament were
negligible, so certain to pass away in the hearts
and minds of those who entered into life through
his life that no argument concerning them was
necessary.
If the Christian Church, by upholding the
authority of all the canonical scriptures, has deter-
minedly put a new patch on an old garment, the
ever-increasing rent cannot be charged to Jesus.
He who would not in his lifetime pay heed to
ceremonial rules which clashed with any need of
human life, who even neglected useless ceremony
when no need required the neglect, could not have
regarded pages devoted to such regulations as
having ever been of divine inspiration. How
gentle was his protestantism ! He admits that the
new doctrine must be a store for the future, like
new wine hung up in new wine-skins to gain
value by time ; his gentle excuse for the way they
would for many generations cling to the old
doctrine is, "No man having drunk old wine
chap, v PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 139
desireth new, for he saith, The old is good."
"This ought ye to have done" as long as it seems
to you to have divine authority, but not to have
omitted the weightier matters of justice and mercy.
He was confident that he who follows the guiding
light of these virtues will soon become so absorbed
in the aspect of the divine character which they
unfold that he will cease to assume divine sanction
for anything trivial or banal.
Thus we see that the explanation of our Lord's
attitude toward the written law was that he did
not consider it worth while to publish destructive
criticism of what was necessarily transitory. His
own definite attitude toward their doctrine of the
infallibility of their past teachers flashes out after
a discussion with the theologians at Jerusalem,
when they had uttered again their oft-repeated
taunt, claiming the authority of their holy records
against his work — "Abraham is our father."
"We know that God spake unto Moses, as for
this fellow we know not from whence he is."
His reply is the parable of the false shepherds and
the true. "All that ever came before me were
thieves and robbers." There stand his words,
his own explanation of the parable, as valid as
any of the dear familiar words that follow. "I
am the good shepherd." "I am the door." I
alone ! It is all poetry, the expression not only
of a wounded heart but of a glowing imagination,
and we are forced to admit that if the passage
teaches that in comparison with all his forerunners,
the law and the prophets, Jesus is the one Saviour
of his people, it also teaches that in comparison
140 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
with his authority the authority of the law and
the prophets was as nothing.
Again, we have set up the authority of his
own disciples to modify and correct our under-
standing of the teaching of Jesus, in spite of our
knowledge that the greater a man is the more
difficult it is for him to win a full understanding
from other men. Let us begin with the case of
a man who is somewhat superior to his fellows in
power of thought and expression, and also in
moral character. He knows that his differing
aspects are understood by differing and ever-
widening circles of people. In one aspect he
will be best known by his brothers and sisters,
his wife and children. Whatever is personally
attractive in him will be dearest to the hearts of
those nearest to him; these are they who would
in the first place suffer most for his sake. But
such a man is perfectly conscious that members
of this inner circle rarely understand his thoughts :
whatever expression he gives to them goes out
into the world, and finds its best soil here and
there in the minds of comparative strangers, who
are better able to interpret his art or doctrine, or
whatever it be, than are his nearest relatives.
If, however, he is, as we say, "before his age,"
great enough to have grasped something which
his generation has failed to apprehend, then, the
more certain he is of the truth of his vision, the
more he is assured that it must wait to win a full
understanding from future generations. Kepler's
great foreword, that he could well be content
to wait for readers since God had waited so long
chap, v PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 141
for a discoverer, finds an echo in the heart of
every one who has in any way studied the
phenomena of human genius.
From all this it is evident that the more we
exalt the character and the message of Jesus
Christ, the more we must realise that what is
true of every man of petty distinction must have
been true in much greater measure of him.
To the inner circle of his disciples was revealed
the highest degree of lovableness in human
personality that the earth had seen. They loved,
and that was their inspiration — so great an in-
spiration that the whole busy world has been
forced to gaze at their master through the
description wrought by their personal affection.
But these men were not so well fitted to grasp
the message of Jesus in its depth of thought, its
international application, and its universal hope, as
were some of those who believed because of their
word. Of this first outer circle St. Paul is the
magnificent example; and that very many others
seized on the thoughts of Jesus and were seized by
them, is shown by the rapid spread of the Christian
doctrine in the best forms in which that age could
assimilate it. Their inspiration was devotion to
the mind of Christ to the utmost extent of their
power to understand and teach it.
If, however, we are to believe that the inter-
pretation of the message of Jesus given by St.
Paul and the author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews and other inspired writers, was an
infallible interpretation for all time, we must
believe, either that they were as great in spiritual
i42 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
and intellectual insight as Jesus, or were the
subjects of mechanical inspiration. Quite frankly,
very few of us believe either of these alternatives.
It is more reasonable to suppose that, bringing
as they did the limitations of their age to the
interpretation of the great doctrines of the Father
in heaven and the kingdom of heaven, they
veiled them with the clouds of God's wrath that,
for their eyes, hung in the empyrean. The
greatest marvel of the inspiration of the pen is
in the Gospel narratives, which, notwithstanding
the sombre beliefs of the writers, show us Jesus
looking up into a cloudless heaven.
All the parables of the seeds show how deeply
Jesus felt that what he had to impart could not
be imparted in the form in which it must develop.
Everything shows that he perceived that in
teaching his most devoted followers he was
speaking as an adult to little children, or rather,
that that simile dimly expressed the conditions
under which he laboured. It was only tran-
scendent faith in the purpose of God that gave
him the conviction that the seed would grow
and that quickly. It is worth while observing
that the seed to which he likens the kingdom,
or the seed of the husbandman to whose action
he likens the kingdom, is the seed of an annual
crop. There is no plant that in the glory of its
bloom is more ethereal, more obviously transient,
than the oriental mustard; there is nothing that
will so certainly be mown down as corn. There
were trees in Palestine that were symbols of what
was everlasting, which were as large in proportion
chap v PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 143
to the size of their seeds as any annual; but they
were not the figure chosen, because seed that
grew up into men must obviously blossom into
the ideas of one generation, which could never be
the precise ideas of the next; and yet, through
those vistas which he sketched, in which nation
shall rise against nation and the devotees of
false Christs shall fill the world with their preach-
ing, he saw the seed of the kingdom ever self-
sown and producing an ever-increasing harvest.
How swift and splendid was the first crop !
St. Paul stands out prominent. So small a seed
perhaps an earthly acquaintance, perhaps a second-
hand story — and how great a Christian, lifting
whole nations God-ward in the ardour of his heart !
Yet St. Paul was a Jew, believing that God had
required the slaughter of beasts; a Pharisee of the
Pharisees he was, steeped in the idea of an awful,
far-off, material God, and a cruel, fantastic, material
law by which came condemnation but no forgive-
ness; every tendency of his thought as a Pharisee
was darkness fighting with the light; a son of the
later Greeks was he; from them he had learned
that the unseen only was real; a citizen of Rome
was he, and in his mind the mailed hand was
the only stay of justice. These strains were the
threads of his thought; every image in his fancy
must be embroidered by them. Yet see how
splendid was the work of the salvation by joy in
him — the faith that levelled mountains of legalism ;
the love of God that overleaped his highest creed;
the glowing heart of friendship to man that he
bared to the world in the overflowing haste of his
i44 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
burning rhetoric ! We have done our best to
kill the living, loving marvel of a personality that
was given for our instruction, by worshipping the
letter of his word. This man would have been
no help to us as father or brother if he had been
a mere instrument of mechanical inspiration; he
would have been no man, but another Christ, if
he could have comprehended the revelation of the
Christ without mixing and tingeing it with the
darkness of his age.
What was St. Paul to Jesus ? A lost sheep,
on whose headstrong track he endured terrible
sorrow. What was St. Paul to Jesus ? The lost
coin which, had he not found it, would have lain
more useless than a mere ornament, a coin out of
currency, an absolute economic waste. Is this
reason for exalting St. Paul's opinions and ex-
periences into a standard to which his Lord's
teaching must be conformed ? The weight of St.
Paul's opinion is perhaps, on the whole, on the
side of the belief that suffering is God's chief
agent in man's salvation; and an arbitrary exalta-
tion of this, which was only one phase of his
thought, has gone far to obliterate the numerous
passages in which he glorifies the joy of the gos-
pel. Joy ! joy ! joy ! was his war-cry, although
he held hard by the saving power of pain which
was the thought of his age. We, holding to the
superstition of the past, have ceased to understand
his joy.
As with St. Paul, so it is with all that brother-
hood of love and power — St. Peter and St. James
and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, even
chap, v PROPHETS AND APOSTLES 145
St. John the Divine. They had all a far greater
share of the light than had the Baptist, in whom
culminated the antagonism between righteousness
and joy; but they were all necessarily burdened
with some phase of the asceticism that bound him
1 he bed-rock of their thought was made up, not
as we sometimes suppose, of the highest utter-
ances of the Old Testament prophets and the
psalmists, but of these mingled and overwhelmed
with the low standards of the Levitical and
Apocryphal books and the smaller ideas of a more
primitive age — the limitations of a national God
and a national charity. Under such limiting con-
ditions they had to interpret the Christ by whose
imparted life they became sons of God. They
carried the torch of the Light farther into the
surrounding darkness; but what they carried was
a torch lit at the Light, not the Light itself,
and the torch flared and smoked. Its Light was
glorious and eternal, but the smoke arose because
the very material of the torch was partly made up
of error. r
In any case it is obvious that whenever the
followers of Christ, professing to believe in the
stupendous fact of the Incarnation, put the words
and actions of their master Christ only on a level
with those of Christian teachers, they breed in the
intelligent onlooker contempt for their conception
of the Divine nature as shown forth in that brief
flash of perfect life. If we revise his actions and
opinions by the standard of any other man it is
clear that we lack either the power to realise any
meaning m the doctrine or fidelity to it. It is
146 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
needful to believe that the Divine Spirit remained
with them — remains with us for ever — to reflect
and illuminate and enlarge upon that one exquisite
creation of virtue's perfect proportion whose out-
ward form was so soon destroyed; but when we
ignore or deny any part of the teaching of that
perfect life and ministry, lower its standards,
diminish its force, or change its emphasis, because
his first followers did so, this is surely an actual
rejection of the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus
Christ — the most powerful of all rejections if it
come to the world with Christian authority.
CHAPTER VI
IRREVERENT ECLECTICISM
In view of what has been said in the preceding
chapter let us now consider what light is thrown
by the Jewish and Christian Scriptures on the
question of God's relation to suffering. It is a
remarkable fact that all down the Christian ages,
alike in times of ignorance and of light, we have
read those Scriptures with intense solemnity and
awe and, with that, have not scrupled to exercise
an eclecticism in our interpretation, the folly and
irreverence of which any child might perceive. As
long as we accepted the various witnesses in our
Bible as all infallible, we were indeed driven to
practically emphasising one and ignoring another
in order to get any coherent doctrine as to the
nature and effect of pain.
In the later books of the Old Testament, and
in the early Christian years, we find men struggling
to adjust their experience of good and bad fortune
to a progressive belief in God's universal provi-
dence. For them we can have only respect.
They were faced with conflicting ideas, and with
noble candour they wrote as they thought, now
one way, now another.
147
148 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
"As a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord
thy God chasteneth thee."1 These words occur
in a sermon (Deut. v.-xi.) which the authors of
Deuteronomy put into the mouth of Moses. In
the same sermon Israel is told that if he obey the
law every earthly pleasure shall be given as a
reward. He is also told to destroy utterly every
neighbouring nation. "Thou shalt smite them
and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no
covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them."2
If we are not prepared to believe that God incited
Israel to spend years in slaughtering the men,
women, children, and cattle of adjacent nations;
if we are not prepared to believe that had Israel
kept the laws given them, perfect prosperity and
immunity from all misfortune would have re-
sulted, then we must admit that any quotation
from this same sermon carries with it only the
authority given to it by our own instinctive sense
of truth, and that, with our imperfectly developed
power of spiritual insight, we do well to test any
favourite quotation by the Gospel story.
The same may be said of every passage in the
Old Testament that deals with God's punitive
actions toward men. The oft-quoted passage in
Proverbs, "My son, despise not the chastening
of the Lord, neither weary of his reproof, for whom
the Lord loveth he chasteneth," is preceded by
the statement that if we honour God with the
first-fruits of our substance we shall be given more
corn and wine than we know what to do with,3
and is followed by the statement that the wisdom
1 Deut. viii. 5. 2 Deut. vii. 2. 3 Prov. iii. 10.
CH. VI
IRREVERENT ECLECTICISM i49
produced by God's seventy will give us length of
days, honour, and riches.1 Both the idea that God
saves by suffering and the idea that the good are
to be happy in this life have equal countenance in
this passage; if we reject its validity as teaching
that the deserving will be happy in this world we
cannot urge its authority as teaching that suffer-
ing is a mark of God's favour. As a matter of
fact, the saying that God chastens those he loves
was accepted and emphasised by that higher class
of Jewish religious thinkers who looked to suffer-
ing for salvation, and was by them incorporated
into Christianity, just as the more popular idea
that earthly prosperity was the reward promised
for service was imported into Christianity by
the converts from legal Judaism.
There are not many more noble pieces of
literature in the world than the Epistle to the
Hebrews, very few from which so much of the
true spirit of Christianity can be learned; but there
are passages in it that we cannot incorporate into
our scheme of thought, nor can we, in these days,
think ourselves into the author's point of view on
many matters. Take, for example, the statement
in chap. vi. verses 4 to 6, that if a convert, having
understood the Christian doctrine and known
its power, should fall away, it is impossible
to renew such an one unto repentance. The
chapters that have been written to explain away
the plain meaning of this passage prove that the
common sense of the Church does not accept the
author in this matter. Or take the argument
1 Prov. iii. 16.
150 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
concerning the oath God sware to Abraham,1 or
the historical sketch of Melchisedec.2 Of these
we rightly say that unless the future throws further
light upon their meaning, they imply trains of
thought and imagery which mankind has out-
grown. When the same writer assures us that the
suffering of Jesus on earth wrought his purification,3
and quotes the Old Testament to show that God's
action to those he loves best is always punitive,4
his words cannot establish the doctrine for us.
Perplexity of ideas as to the method of God's
dealing with men and the origin of misfortunes is
also shown in the magnificent Apocalyptic poem
of the Revelation. The apostle puts into the
mouth of the risen Christ this quotation from the
Book of Proverbs. "As many as I love I rebuke
and chasten."5 Here Jesus himself is represented
as the source of pain. In the same vision he is
represented as saying, "The devil is about to cast
some of you into prison, where ye may have
tribulation ten days";6 "Antipas, my faithful one,
who was killed . . . where Satan dwelleth. " 7 In
these texts we seem to have the Evil One as the
source of human suffering. Again, in the same
vision the Lord says, "He that keepeth my works
unto the end, to him will I give authority over the
nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of iron,
as the vessels of the potter are broken to pieces." 8
Here we seem to have the spirits of just men made
1 Hebrews vi. 13. 5 Rev. iii. 19.
2 Ibid. vii. 1— 17. 6 Ibid. ii. 10.
3 Ibid. v. 8. 7 Ibid. ii. 13.
4 Ibid. xii. 5-12. * Ibid. ii. 26-27.
ch. vi IRREVERENT ECLECTICISM 151
perfect as a source of evil to wicked men upon
earth. From among many similar passages we
may take that salient one where St. Paul states
that his thorn in the flesh was the messenger of
Satan, and that yet he was taught to regard it as
the will of God. This is in harmony with the
Book of Job, and the idea underlies much of the
best literature of the intervening centuries. An
eclecticism which emphasises one of these two sets
of ideas and ignores the other, while claiming the
authority of Scripture for such proceeding, is self-
destructive.
We are forced, then, if we would find any
certain voice telling us the relation of God to
physical evil, to look for it only in the revelation
of Jesus.
CHAPTER VII
DREAMS OF JUSTICE
We are all imbued with the notion, not only that
under the rule of a good God justice must exist,
but that mankind has arrived at some idea of in
what that divine justice must consist. It seems
more likely that the human race is still in its
childhood, and that it has not grasped such a
notion of justice as approximates to divine justice.
In this connection it is a very interesting fact that
the doctrine of Jesus in some points sets aside the
human sense of justice as negligible.
Our modern notion of ideal justice has been
expressed as "the distribution of good and evil
according to desert."
"When we speak of the world as justly governed
by God, we seem to mean that, if we could know
the whole of human existence, we should find
that happiness is distributed among men according
to their deserts. . . . Common sense seems to
hold that a man who has done wrong ought to
suffer pain in return (even if no benefit result
either to him or to others from the pain), and that
justice requires this; although the individual
l52
chap, vii DREAMS OF JUSTICE 153
wronged ought not to seek or desire to inflict the
pain."1
This idea of justice has been applied among
religious men in formulating an objection to what
has been called the "substitutional" doctrine of
the death of Jesus; men will say that God could
not be so unjust as to punish one for another's sin,
that every man must bear the punishment of his
own sin, and so forth.
Theory apart, in the actual world around us
retributive justice, as man has conceived it and as
expressed in the above quotation, does not appear
to have any existence. We meet with rude
attempts toward it made by human civilisations
for their own protection, but these admittedly do
not realise the ideal. The idea, however, of the
Supreme Power as dealing to every man a punish-
ment exactly fitted to his misdoing rose with the
conception of individual responsibility, and is the
idea of justice upon which all penal codes are
founded. It was a strong force in Greek thought,
was certainly the strongest bulwark of Roman
civilisation, and lies perhaps as deep as any assur-
ance in the modern mind. This idea has been an
important factor in the education of the race; so
also were the communal ideas of justice which
preceded it, and which for a long period of transi-
tion were confused with it. When a man regarded
himself as only part of a tribe, when law-breaking
was conceived as producing in him a quality of
guilt which was infectious, and which would rapidly
spread to the innocent around him, men's idea of
1 The Methods of Ethics, by H. Sidgwick, Book III. Chap. V.
154 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
righteous dealing often involved the destruction
of a whole family or tribe or nation; even the
very cattle they possessed were also exterminated
if they came under the ban. This was a sense of
right which seems to have existed for more centuries
than has the more modern notion. It had in it
germs of truth that an extreme individualism is
apt to ignore; but it was not a true ideal. It
is impossible to think that it dwells as an ideal
in the heart of a personal God; yet it is the copy
and reflection of the justice which his laws of
matter mete out. The child that plays with fire
is burnt, but so also, if he have done enough
mischief, is the house containing him, and, as far
as natural law is concerned, the town in which he
lives and all in it.
The ideal of a retributive justice adjusted to
personal deserts must pass away, as did the older
ideal; because the very essence of it is that a man
must bear the punishment of his own sin and not
of another's sin, and such justice does not, and
can never, exist in life as we know it. A world
in which it exists may or may not be possible, but
we have not the slightest evidence of its possibility.
Each individual in such a world would need to be
so separated from all others as to bear to them
no relation of love or affection or protection or
dependence. In our actual world a man is
commonly loved more or less by father and mother,
sister and brother, wife and child, friend and fellow-
citizen. If he degrades himself by vice or crime,
some or all of these suffer more than he; and the
more really innocent they are of any inclination to
chap, vii DREAMS OF JUSTICE 155
his failings, the more sensitive they are to the suffer-
ing. If, as the Christian believes, God also loves this
wrongdoer with a love infinite and tender beyond
the sum of all earthly loves, and with a divine
innocence to which the thought of wrong is loath-
some, God also must suffer — and suffer with
divine intensity of passion — for the man's sin.
What justice can we conceive of here ? What
can requite the sinner's father and mother for the
heartbreak his sin has caused them ? or his wife,
who identifies herself with him, exercising for him
the passion of contrition of which he is wholly
incapable ? or his child for a blasted youth and
the taint of moral obliquity which he in his turn
may transmit to future generations ? or his fellows
for the degree in which the average level of virtue
has fallen ? above all, what can requite God for
his pain ? Can any suffering on the culprit's part
requite them ? Certainly not; it will only increase
their woe. As the suffering of the culprit is
increased by penalty, the suffering of all those
innocent ones who love him is increased, and
God's suffering is cumulatively increased. The
God in whom the Christian believes — immanent
in the spirits of men, transcending them in ever-
vigilant compassion — suffers in the sorrow of all
as well as in their sin; he suffers, therefore, in the
sorrow of parent and friend, wife and child, and
of the culprit also. How, then, can the endurance
of any punishment by the culprit, though richly
merited, set things right when every moment of
pain that he endures inflicts greater pain upon the
innocent ? It is, then, the utmost folly to talk of
156 THE FATHER'S HOUSE
a man appropriating the punishment of his own
sins, for even if we suppose him to be a member
of society unloved by any and worthless to all,
we must still be aware that his suffering and
degradation means suffering or degradation to all
who touch his existence at any point, and the
greater according to their goodness. Thus it is
clear that in any human existence which we can
understand, the innocent, both God and man,
suffer for the guilty, and any penalty inflicted on
guilt must increase their suffering.
This, to our minds, unjust retribution, which
involves the innocent suffering with the guilty
and suffering more than the guilty, may be
regarded in two ways, either of which suggest that
it may be a part of some higher justice beyond
our sight. It may be regarded as a deterrent to
other would-be sinners; it may be right that the
sinner, and every one else in his generation to some
degree, should suffer for the sin in order that
those who come after may be made afraid; but
we must allow that this, even as it affects the
sinner, is not consonant with the modern notion
of justice, which would refuse to punish a man
because other men's children will be frail and
peccable. Or, secondly, it may be that sin is not
an accident of this or that man's will, but the
manifestation of a vital power or evil personality
other than human, whose every activity is doomed
to self-destruction in which minor personalities
who admit his working must share to the degree
in which they admit it. On this theory pain,
according to the law of the kingdom of evil? might
chap, vii DREAMS OF JUSTICE 157
necessarily follow sin, being part of the process,
the working of the seeds of death. Taking this
view we do not conceive of the penalty as meted
out by the direct will of a righteous judge, but
merely as an evil and inevitable growth from the
germ of sin — sin and pain together being, as it
were, a cancer in the individual and the race which,
unless cured, must destroy its victim.
Such an explanation of the actual condition of
things may be the embodiment of a higher justice,
but it is a justice higher than we have conceived
or can now conceive. On such a view the penalty,
not being inflicted by a judge, could not be remitted
as a judge might remit a sentence he himself had
passed. Let us attempt a crude analogy. A man
might do another serious injury with an explosive,
but if the circumstances were such that the crimi-
nal could not avoid being shattered to pieces, the
injured man could not by the frankest forgiveness
remit the penalty. Similarly we may conceive that
the forgiveness of the divine judge could not
interfere with the action of laws he has ordained.
All that he could do would be to lift the culprit
out of the sphere in which those laws operated, if
there were such other sphere. In human affairs
we see what suggests this possibility. Many
diseases may be cured by lifting men from foul
surroundings to live in cleanliness and purer air.
Strong sunshine will kill those germs of disease
that make ravages in the dark.
We thus see that the idea of pain being re-
tributive may in two ways, not mutually exclusive,
be rendered possibly reasonable; but, in working,
158 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
retributive pain never embodies the ideal of
individual justice because of the greater measure of
innocent suffering which the infliction of penalty
always involves. The only way in which such
retributive pain can be conceived as realising
justice is by supposing that it can be so allotted to
the culprit as to raise his moral worth to such
extent that he will certainly be, after the experience,
the source of an amount of joy to his fellows and
to God that will exactly compensate their innocent
suffering on his account.
How far does experience suggest that the
suffering of penalty has a corresponding, or any,
reformatory effect upon the culprit ? Reviewing
the storm and stress of evolution, the moralist
inquires what part pain has played in the age-long
development of character, and it is not uncommon
to assume that in this aspect the uses of pain have
been all beneficial. Against this theory we have
to set the fact that pain has undoubtedly produced
such qualities as fear, cowardice, cunning, anger,
hatred, spite. These qualities are not evoked in
an individual or in a race by the joyful exercise of
the natural powers of life; therefore, if to the pain
and difficulty of existence we owe noble character-
istics — strength of will, fortitude, courage, com-
passion — we also derive our more malignant
qualities from the same source; and any argument
as to the value of pain which emphasises the virtues
it engenders and does not recognise the vices
derived from it, is fallacious. Indeed, it would
appear that we might go farther, for while, as our
knowledge stands at present, we have no reason at
chap, vii DREAMS OF JUSTICE 159
all to suppose that a creature whose ancestors had
never suffered privation or been hurt or robbed
would know anger, hatred, or envy, we have no
proof that the opposite virtues could not have been
developed with less racial suffering. For example,
a child who has never been threatened or hurt does
not, except by heredity, feel fear of its kind ; but
being possessed of a new plaything, it may feel
compassion for the child who has none, although
the fact of having no new toy would not of itself
necessitate positive suffering in the other. Again,
fortitude, strength of will, and courage are culti-
vated by strenuous pursuits which men rank as
pleasures, as well as by misfortune. It is therefore
more reasonable to suppose that human and
animal virtue might have been developed without
what appears to us pain and disorder than to
suppose that angry passions could have existed
without these irritating causes.
We thus conclude that the penalty of wrong-
doing is not, and cannot be, so distributed in this
social order as to realise man's ideal of justice;
and further, that there is no presumption — quite
the contrary — that the corrective influence of
penalty so far as borne by the culprit, is such as to
give the community by his reformation an advan-
tage that balances the suffering he has cost.
Further, if we are bound by the constitution of
our minds to believe that justice exists and to
attribute it to God, we must do so frankly, admit-
ting that we have no conception of what divine
justice must be.
This is an important point to realise in studying
160 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
the gospel of Jesus. To accept that gospel is to
believe that ideal justice exists, because without it
there could be no forgiveness. Because we cannot
comprehend God's justice we are forced to realise
that we can in no way comprehend his forgiveness.
Forgiveness from God to man, from man to man,
Jesus taught was a terrible reality. How terrible
to man the obligation to forgive his brother all
manner of wrong ! how terrible to know that God's
forgiveness depends upon this ! How terrible to a
man the joy of knowing himself forgiven by God !
And Jesus represents God's forgiveness as entirely
beyond and above human notions of desert; he
always represents God as maintaining toward man
an attitude of entire forgiveness and bestowing
upon man the consciousness of his forgiveness in
instant response to every heart-felt appeal to his
mercy. Further, he represents God as imposing
the same attitude on every faithful soul toward his
fellow-men ; if a man would continue conscious of
God's forgiveness he must maintain toward other
men the attitude God maintains toward him, an
attitude of perfect forgiveness which will be as
frankly expressed the moment the wrongdoer
desires its expression.
That such whole-hearted forgiveness should be
consistent with God's infliction of penalty on the
sinner is only possible under the conviction that the
penalty is good for the sinner. We have seen that
there is no evidence to uphold this very old
explanation of the problem of suffering; we must
now observe that Jesus did not give his authority
to it. He speaks of penalties and places of punish-
chap, vii DREAMS OF JUSTICE 161
ment as wholly bad, and urges their essential
harmfulness as one of the strongest motives to
righteousness. He speaks of forgiveness from
God to man, and from man to man, as an action of
supreme importance, and emphasises the suffering,
which is not penal, of those who, being persecuted,
must thus forgive. In his imagery the tyrant who
kills the body and casts the spirit into hell is not
God.
But more, there can be no doubt that Jesus
taught that God's forgiveness, when so bestowed as
to enter into man's consciousness, did include escape
from the penalty of sin; and the manner of escape
must be indicated by the conditions inseparable
from the bestowal of the gift. The appeal for
mercy, however instinctive, however little thought
out, involves an estimate of God's character as
love; it involves the recognition, though but
momentary, that the gift can only proceed from
pure love, cannot be merited either by virtue or
by tears; and from this — if the consciousness of
being forgiven is to be continuous — from this
momentary conception of God as love must pro-
ceed the same love to men, based, not upon their
deserts, but upon that love which in its essence
is feeling as our fellow feels, or community of life.
When Jesus spoke of this condition of heart —
the reception of God's gift of forgiveness, the out-
flow and passing on of that gift to the world — he
was not speaking of assent to a doctrine, or to a
theory of life, but of a new and joyful vision of
God as anointing man with his own spirit — a vision
which flesh and blood could not reveal but the
1 62 THE FATHER'S HOUSE book n
Father in heaven. The endowment of love was
to be a new and heavenly treasure within men of
very practical worth, a strength of love which
would save them, not only from sin's penalty, but
from their sins; a wisdom of love which would
teach them what to say to their persecutors when
they were set upon their defence; an insight of
love which would make them the light of the
world.
From this it seems that God's forgiveness lifts
man into a new relationship with his environment,
or we may say the intimate and personal convic-
tion of God's forgiveness only belongs to the man
who has been thus lifted. In this environment
there is nothing to fear. The Evil Power who
tempts to sin and punishes the sinner has here no
part. Again and again Jesus points out that fear
belongs to a lower region, and not to that in which
man estimates God as love, that fear only comes
where faith is not. But the penalty of sin he
always speaks of as an object of great fear; he
urges the fear of it upon men. Indeed he taught
that the penalty of sin, like the sin which involved
it, was evil.
Thus we conclude, in harmony with the thought
of all good men, that there must be a divine
justice, as there must be a divine mercy; but we
have reason to think the human mind has, as yet,
no conception of what this divine justice is.
The conclusion to which the gospel points is
undoubtedly that put forward by the Johannine
writings, which seek to express the divine justice
by the word "love."
BOOK III
GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
163
CHAPTER I
THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS
We have tried to show that the works of Jesus
must be the strongest and simplest expression of
the revelation he came to bring. In the following
chapters we shall be concerned with his works of
healing, and first with his treatment of "unclean
spirits," and with his doctrine concerning the
kingdom of evil as therein exemplified.
In the present flux of thought and historical
knowledge, suspense of judgment is the wisest
attitude toward the problems connected with the
ancient doctrines of good and bad spirits, and as
to the true significance of the teaching of Jesus
concerning them. At the same time, to ignore
or mimimise any prominent feature in the record
of Jesus, because we are still awaiting more light
in the matter, must be inimical to progress. Truth
has nothing to fear from the most searching ex-
amination of fact, and we are bound to make that
examination, although it does not follow that with
all the facts we are now able to muster we can
arrive at any certain conclusion. It will, moreover,
often be found that the hasty generalisations
165
1 66 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
of modern thought about ancient beliefs are of
less substantial stuff than the beliefs they would
supersede. Any belief that has held the world
for ages is likely to bear a close relation to fact,
even though the fact be wrongly interpreted.
The Christian thought of Europe from the
first has always exercised a curious choice in regard
to the teaching of Jesus about the unseen world,
forcing a literal meaning on certain figurative pas-
sages in that teaching, and admitting the wholly
figurative nature of others. This habit bears
witness to the difficulty of knowing, in many
cases, what he really meant — a difficulty, we may
remark in passing, that shows the need of accept-
ing his works as a clue to his words. In such a
passage as that in which Jesus bids his disciples
rejoice, not so much because spirits were in sub-
jection to them, but rather because their names
were written in the book of life, the scholarship
of the Church has for the most part understood
"the book of life" to be a figure of speech, while
accepting the "spirits" as objective entities. Is
this warranted ? There was in very ancient thought
an association between the casting out of demons
and the practice of keeping a private name in
some secret and sacred text. The mystic import-
ance of a name, its influence on the fate of its
bearer, the custom of writing the name in a
sacred book in order to secure safety from ill-
fortune — these notions are found in the most
ancient magical formulas. Later, among the Jews
we find the idea of an eternal book which was
kept before God, and later again, the doctrine
ch. i THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 167
that the whole history of men was written down
in the eternal books. This last form of the idea
was elaborated after Hellenism affected Jewish
thought. This "book of life" was certainly not
concrete; it was allied in nature rather to the
Platonic "ideas." If we assume, as contemporary
use seems to justify us in doing, that Jesus used
the phrase, "the book of life," figuratively, are
we justified in taking literally his words in the
same passage about the evil "spirits"? This
opens a large question on which modern science
and historic demonology throw a much less certain
light than the modern man often supposes.
We turn to consider the attitude of Jesus
toward human ills and their cause, and find that
he certainly appeared to give his authority to the
belief in a separate Evil Will, subordinate to God,
transcending man in evil power, and immanent
in all man's wrongdoings and diseases. Is this
view inconsistent with any knowledge we now
possess ? and if not, how far does it harmonise
with it ?
While we have no proof that all he said and
did in this connection may not have been simply
a parable teaching a higher truth, we are, by the
laws of interpretation, compelled first to consider
words and acts in their face meaning. Current
opinion is disposed to treat the Evil One as a
superstition, and to regard evil as only the negation
of good. If we agree that to believe in an evil
power outside ourselves that makes for unrighteous-
ness is absurd, we must assume that our Lord's
doctrine was a parable, unless it was a mistake.
1 68 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
Without coming to any dogmatic conclusion, let
us inquire what reason there is for joining those
who would cast out the Evil One and his agents
from the arena of sane ideas.
In the region in which human thought can be
confirmed by experience, we have to recognise the
existence, side by side, of a multiplicity of wills.
Experience also shows that those wills are not
all good. Let the conception of a metaphysical
dualism of good and evil be acknowleds;ed unten-
able; but so also to most minds is the conception
of a metaphysical multiplicity of wills; man's free
will perishes in the Absolute just as surely as the
devil perishes. Our point is that we cannot admit
the reality of free will in the domain of practical
reason and deny the reality of the evil will in the
same domain.1
The facts of the religious consciousness appear
to require a conception not only of a Supreme
Will that is good, but of evil as a positive voli-
tional force. The Christian's personal experience
will in this matter weigh with him more than
argument, and opinions will differ. We may take
one illustration out of many that would serve to
show the difficulty of considering evil as a mere
negation. Let us take any body of men who
certainly cherish what Dr. Gwatkin calls "the
vital spark of mysticism" — "the conviction, acted
on, that a true communion with the divine is given
to all that purify themselves with all the force of
heart and soul and mind." We must believe, as
the tenor of their lives is good, that God finds en-
1 See Appendix C.
ch. i THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS i6g
trance to their minds in the religion they practise.
We observe, however, that when some new move-
ment of the higher life begins to stir about them,
or, as we might put it, some new development of
the Christ-life finds expression in some part of the
public consciousness, it is this very class of religious
men who commonly offer it the most violent
opposition. It is not until the life of a generation
has proved that the new thing is of God that
they, or their successors, receive it. This seems to
suggest that the very susceptibility of their nature
to divine influence renders them also more open
than irreligious men to fiendish influence. What
they oppose is often a matter, not of belief, but
of mere humanity. The nature of their opposi-
tion, its force and pertinacity, certainly suggest
the work of a spiritual evil within their own
spirits.
If we reject the idea of an Evil Will, spiritual
and positive, are we prepared to support any
alternative theory ? Shall we say that moral evil
is not a reality ? that if a man tramples his child
or his mother to death, his action is relatively the
best that might be ? Or, granting the reality of
wrong, can we assume that in all this vast universe
of dreadful a thing as sin occurs only on this atom
of earth and only in the heart of man ? Or, if we
admit that the evil which is part of all things that
we know may also be a part of vaster regions of
life than we can conceive of, must we assume that
it is always, everywhere, sporadic, and lacks any
synthetic determination ? We find a final Source
and Centre of good to be a reasonable postulate
170 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
from the good we see everywhere; why, then, is
such a postulate from omnipresent evil unreason-
able ? All that seems to be required to preserve
the unity of nature is that the Evil Will should
act under some law of self-destruction which keeps
it subordinate to the Good Will which bringeth
forth life.
Let us briefly glance at the history of this idea
of an Evil Will in active antagonism to God, to
see how far it may thus be justified.
We have now recovered from the graves of
dead nations an account of the way in which the
Gentile world before Christ expressed its religious
passion, an account sufficiently clear for us to know
how far the world had then come in its search
after God. Voluminous liturgies, which date from
some four millenniums before Christ, show well-
established religious ideas, which were modified
and developed, but not radically changed, in the
succeeding centuries. From Babylonia and Assyria,
from Egypt, especially from Persia and Greece, we
gather elements that contributed to the religious
beliefs of Palestine at the Christian era. In the
forefront of all genuine, practical religion was the
belief that misfortunes had their source in the
unseen powers, and that relief from them must be
sought by prayer addressed either to the better
disposition of the very power which sent them, or
to some other unseen power of a better disposition.
In polytheistic religions there was a tendency to
attribute benefits to the higher deities and afflic-
tions to inferior powers; individual misfortunes,
especially bodily ills, came to be regarded as the
ch. i THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 171
work of minor deities, or, later, of mischievous
spirits of a low order.
But all progress in the unification of knowledge
seems to be dependent on the conception of a God
supreme and good. The One of the scientist, the
One of the philosopher, the One of the theologian,
is the only satisfaction of reason and the great
incitement to the search for truth. At the same
time the mere conception of God as One was not
sufficient for moral development; the One must
also be good. We scarcely realise how slowly the
need to think of God as moral has asserted itself
even among the Hebrews. Up to a comparatively
late date in Old Testament theology the conception
of God's oneness led to making his spirit the
immediate source and inspiration of all human
qualities, — alike of love and hatred, truth and
cunning, placability and anger, — just as the neces-
sity of believing God to be one leads men now to
suppose his will to be the direct source of all
human fortune — of joy and sorrow, health and
disease, scarcity and plenty. The later Jewish
prophets, however, and the writers of Deuteronomy
presented God as preferring justice and truth to
license and dishonesty. Thus the Hebrew religion
had the early distinction of attributing to God
only what they thought to be moral goodness;
and the most religious Jews before Christ came
reached the idea that God's will was always on
the side of moral right as they understood it.
We have already noted that among the heathen
misfortunes of all sorts had come to be regarded
either as the legitimate anger of good deities or as
172 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
the mischief inflicted by inferior powers. When
the Jews had arrived at some distinction between
moral good and moral evil, and realised that the
first only could be attributed to God, they naturally
thought of the source of moral evil as in opposition
to God. If God could not tempt man to dd evil,
temptation was naturally attributed to another
power. This power was not in any way co-equal
with God or able to act without his permission,
but still powerful in mundane affairs, as we see in
the prologue to the Book of Job.
Although there can be no doubt that a belief
in a malign spiritual kingdom or hierarchy came
into the Jewish religion from heathen sources,
chiefly those of the Babylonian stock, some
equivalent for "Satan" must have loomed on their
religious horizon in any case when their prophets
perceived with ever-growing clearness that the
inspiration of evil passions in the heart of man
could no longer be attributed to God. The fact
of its foreign source is not to the prejudice of the
belief, because the earlier Jewish religious concep-
tions — of God, of holiness, of transgression, etc.
— were originally from the same source, tapped, as
one might say, farther back. Wherever learnt,
the belief in a devil was bound to come. The
conception of man as the origin of that profound
principle which, opposed to good, appears to lie
at the heart of all things that we know, and to be
represented in some aspect of all things, was not
possible to the ancient world, and therefore the
conception of the Evil Will in the spiritual world
was to them a necessity of thought.
ch. i THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 173
Our question is whether we have outgrown
this necessity. The notion of an Evil Will
outside our own does not in the slightest degree
explain the origin of evil; but, granting that evil
exists and is permitted to run rampant for the
sake of personal moral freedom, there is no law
of reason which requires us to identify it with
ourselves. It thus does not appear to be more
superstitious to believe in the Evil One than to
believe that man in this earthly life — a tiny span
in the vast cycles of time — should have a mono-
poly in sin — the bye-product of personal free
will. If we believe, as the Christian must, that
God is omnipotent and good, and yet permits
moral disorder in man, there is no fresh difficulty
in holding to his goodness and omnipotence and
admitting that moral disorder exists in the whole
scheme of things as we know it, and beyond our
knowledge. If A, out of the wickedness of his
own heart, can do a cruel act to his neighbour,
and B can yet believe that "God's in his heaven;
all's right with the world," there is no fresh
difficulty for B in believing that the Evil Will,
out of the wickedness of his heart, has been at his
evil work from the foundation of all worlds, causing
all the cataclysms and cruelties of nature, while
yet God is good and omnipotent. It is merely
childish to say the one is tenable, the other
untenable.
The dilemma, "If God is, whence comes evil?
if he is not, whence comes good ?" must remain
the philosophic background to all religious specula-
tion. We here assume that God is, and that evil
174 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
is; and we are concerned with what appears to be
a confusion in the minds of us moderns, who
believe that God is the supreme personality, who
admit that there is evidence of moral disorder in
this world, and yet adopt the idea, common now-
adays, that to believe in the Evil One is super-
stitious. If we have no better reason than has
appeared for refusing to interpret the exorcism of
Jesus in its natural sense, we do not offer him the
respect which we pay to any modern teacher.
Further than this, it would appear that a belief
even in a multiplicity of devils is not unreasonable
if we believe in human immortality. It is not
unreasonable to suppose that among the spirits of
the dead there are moral differences similar to
those that exist in this life. Nor have we any
reason to assume that the Evil Will may not use
the worst of them to influence the affairs of this
earth, through that mysterious connection between
mind and brain of which we know nothing. As
long as we frankly confess that we can know
nothing about the influence of bad angels, and can
joyfully resign ourselves to God's protection, we
need not fear superstition. There is no more
need to refer to the difficulties of a philosophic
dualism in connection with the speculation about
societies or kingdoms of bad spirits, than in con-
nection with societies or kingdoms of bad men
whom we see. Much that must appear to us
grossly superstitious has been connected with such
a belief, but this need not condemn the belief
itself. Let us bear in mind that we are speaking
of spirit, not matter; we are not referring to the
ch. i THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 175
creatures of the spiritualist's imagination — crea-
tures as grossly material as a gas or a ray of light or
a sound. It was a superstition to believe that God
made the world in six days; but it does not follow
that it is a superstition to believe that God made
the world. If it is a gross superstition to believe
that any invisible spiritual being can have direct
influence upon matter as we know it, it does
not follow that spiritual intelligences around us
cannot affect our minds, and through our minds
our brains — the nature of the connection between
our own minds and our brains being quite un-
known; the fact of that connection being only an
object of faith and a postulate of reason. Because
we realise that outside the living organism spirit
cannot affect matter, because we do not believe
in poltergeists throwing stones, or in spirits making
noises, or in any objective incarnation of a devil,
such, for example, as that at which Luther aimed
his inkpot, it does not follow that it is impossible
to believe in evil spirits who might obtain posses-
sion of mind in man or brute.
Let us admit, then, that to believe in one
supreme Good as the source and sustainer of all
does not necessarily exclude a belief in an Evil
Will, and in evil spirits controlled by him, who
may, for all we know, work evil on our minds,
and diseases on our bodies through our minds, and
all sorts of pain and grief upon us through the
minds and actions of other men. Wicked or
diseased people on earth can do all this; why not
wicked spirits in the unseen ? But let it be noted
that such a belief limits the channel of evil in this
176 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
world to the human mind; as far as we have any
knowledge of moral evil, there only it enters into
our experience; as far as we have any practical
concern with it thence it proceeds. "Out of the
heart of man proceed evil thoughts."
If we believe in human selves as apart from
bodies, and in immortality, we by this belief have
already in the invisible world enormous multi-
tudes of human spirits. These are not all good;
they are not all in one stage of progress; the
degrees in which they are unrighteous, and the
degrees in which they may be evolving into higher
orders of being or degenerating, must be almost
infinitely various — for evolution as we know it
implies the progress of some and the degeneration
of others. Again, all that we know of human
spirits shows them to have not only individual but
collective life. By their very nature they are
forced to form themselves into larger psychological
units — crowds, societies, kingdoms, hierarchies.
The idea that at death the human soul, naked
and alone, may aspire to hold communion with
none but God, may be beautiful, but is foreign to
any reality we know. The psychic necessity of
loving the brother in order to love God probably
obtains even more perfectly in the spirit world.
We can hardly conceive of a humanity beyond
the grave and gate of death broken up into the
naked and desolate condition of separate units.
Our spirits must cease to be what we understand
as human when they cease to coalesce in certain
common aspects of existence. Thus we are driven,
either to deny human immortality, or to postulate
ch. i THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 177
a change at death so great that it would destroy
the continuity of human existence, or else to admit
the probability of spirits and organisations of spirits
bad enough and influential enough to be spoken
about in such terms as those in which Jesus spoke
of the kingdom of evil.
Lastly, as we look upon the vast universe, the
myriad ranks of heavenly bodies and the ordered
variety in vegetable and animal life, as our minds
attain in all things to the principle, natura non
facit saltum, it is not easy to conceive a world of
spirits in which there is nothing at all but the One
Supreme and Almighty and mankind. It is quite
true that man has no absolute moral need to cast
the net of his imagination over other beings and
fix them in his creeds; but he is forced to admit
the possibility of their existence, and of their
varying moral character.
We thus see that, so far from the belief in a
kingdom of evil being foolish, it is an inference
consistent with our knowledge of self and our
belief in God; and the belief in bad spirits is a
fair inference from the belief in human immortality.
If we get rid of the ancient belief in the Evil One,
as, since the Reformation, certain parts of the
world have got rid of the belief in demons, there
is some evidence that we shall find that, out of
our universities, out of the very heart of the latest
and most serious attempts to re-construct intelligent
belief upon what some thinkers conceive to be
the ruins of Christian orthodoxy, the devils will
issue again.
We have, in the region of pure metaphysic,
178 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
Dr. M'Taggart's suggestion of an eternal plurality
of minds. He states his theory thus : —
"To sum up — the self answers to the descrip-
tion of the fundamental differentiations of the
Absolute. Nothing else that we can know or
imagine does so. The idea of the self has certain
characteristics which can be explained if the self
is taken as one of the fundamental differentiations
but of which no explanation has been offered on
any other theory, except that of rejecting the idea
of the self altogether, and sinking into complete
scepticism. The self is so paradoxical that we
can find no explanation for it except its absolute
reality." 1
Prof. Gwatkin summarises Dr. M'Taggart's
ultimate theory in the words, "The universe may
be a harmonious system of persons with a tendency
to improvement." 2 If this be a fair interpreta-
tion of the theory it would seem quite possible
that, pending improvement, some of these eternal
wills, including our own and those of our neigh-
bours, may be devil-like rather than god-like.
We find the same suggestion of a plurality of
minds expressed in a concrete religious form by
Prof. James : —
"The only thing that religious experience
unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience
union with something larger than ourselves, and in
that union find our greatest peace. Philosophy
. . . and mysticism . . . identify the something
with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul
1 Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 26.
2 The Knowledge of God, preface, p. ix.
ch. i THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS 179
of the world. Popular opinion, respectful to
their authority, follows the example which they
set. Meanwhile ... all the facts require is that
the power should be other and larger than our
conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if
only it be large enough to trust for the next step.
It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary.
It might conceivably even be only a larger and
more godlike self, of which the present self would
then be but the mutilated expression, and the
universe might conceivably be a collection of such
selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with
no absolute unity realised in it at all. Thus would
a sort of polytheism return upon us." *
It will here occur to the reader that if men
with a genius for wickedness are, like men with
a genius for goodness, inspired by a larger power
which is a super-mundane self, that self, in their
case, is not a god but a devil. Indeed, this last
writer goes on to reply something of the sort: —
" Upholders of the monistic view will say to
such a polytheism that unless there be one all-
inclusive God, our guarantee of safety is left
imperfect. . . . Common sense is less sweeping in
its demands than philosophy or mysticism have
been wont to be, and can suffer the notion of this
world being partly saved and partly lost." 1
Thus it will be seen that the recent speculations
of men whom it is not the fashion to regard as
superstitious, postulate no universe in which there
is not ample space for evil personalities, transcend-
1 Varieties of Religious Experience, by Prof. W. James, pp.
525, 526.
180 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
ing human beings, yet immanent in them ; and
so from another side we are led to think that
there is nothing unreasonable or superstitious in
accepting such a belief in the existence and
working of an Evil World, and even of an evil
hierarchy, as the words and acts of Jesus, under-
stood in their plain sense, involve. If he did not
teach this he used the current doctrine of the devil
to teach a more terrible spiritual truth, a truth
which we can only learn by giving the utmost heed
to the parable.
CHAPTER II
THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION
There is a prevalent opinion that the modern
man, having before his eyes the triumph of the
scientific method, knows how to apply the word
"superstition." This is the opinion alike of the
militant materialist and the average God-fearing
man. How easily do we moderns class together
bygone theories of the possibilities of mind and
matter, — astrology, alchemy, magic, and the like,
— and whenever we find a supposed trace of them
in the common mind at present we call it
"superstition." In so doing we show a lack of
that necessary element of a good modern educa-
tion, the sense of the historic continuity and
oneness of the racial mind. This would show
us that we are only the product of our fathers,
made of the same matter and spirit as those who
peopled the plain of Edinu and chronicled in the
old story the passionate fear that the increase of
knowledge would cause a rupture with God.
Their knowledge was only comparative, so is
ours; their opinions were immature, so are ours.
We find in ourselves their religious antagonisms,
181
1 8z GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
faith calling knowledge demoniacal, and knowledge
calling the search after spirit in all things,
superstitious. We also inherit from those we
have called antediluvian the tendency to think
that we live in the end of time, that upon us the
ends of the world are come; by direct inheritance
from every generation of which we have any
record we come by the idea that we of the latest
half century have acquired the secret of the world !
The effort after the unknown, the search for
spiritual power, has always existed; we call the
earlier forms of it "superstition"; and the reason
why these earlier forms of faith appear to us more
absurd than they are is that we do not grasp
the reality in them. We find in old religious
liturgies many sorts of impetuous intellectual
effort combined — imagination, religion, the power
of reasoning and observation of fact, all confused.
To-day we have differentiated; we try to dis-
tinguish between the functions of poetry, priest-
hood, theology, and science. But in those high
civilisations that flourished before Israel became
a nation the man with a religious vocation must
needs be poet, scientist, theologian, medicine man,
and priest. As man of science he compiled
incantations which embodied his observations on
disease and misfortune; as priest he edited and
repeated liturgies; and we find the poetry, the
piety, the material knowledge of the time, con-
fused together.
Superstition often appears to differ from poetry
only by the degree in which those who speak
in figures perceive the difference between what
ch. ii THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 183
they speak of and the figure in which they clothe
it. Keeping this distinction in mind we shall
perceive that in many of its historic beliefs the
racial mind has expressed itself in figures by that
power of natural imagery which is the very mint
in which our words are coined, and then by
degrees has fallen to worshipping the letter
which kills, producing thus a gross superstition
which a little later it discards as ancestral folly,
and in the resulting effort to think for itself the
racial mind again finds its most ancient thought
returning in the disguise of a new discovery.
Taking, for example, man's idea of God, we
find that it has gone through such transitions.
God spoke; God stretched forth his hand; God
walked in the garden; God drew his bow; God
wielded his sword: God appeared in fire and
cloud. How far the first efforts of man to
express what he knew to be invisible, what he
felt to be transcendent, were literal or figurative
we cannot tell, for he himself had no distinction
between letter and figure; all his letters were
figures. But since he was aware that the sounds
by which he denoted earthly things denoted really
some name of his own conferred on the things,
and not the things themselves, — and the figurative
nature of the earliest language has been abundantly
proved to us, — we have little foundation for the
accusation that when he first coined phrases to
express invisible power he was deceived by them.
But as the letter became more and more sacred,
the common mind fell into the ruts of common
thought, and handed on from generation to
1 84 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
generation superstitions which the seer — prophet
or priest or poet — was for ever warring against
and never vanquishing. Perhaps the latest phase
of this long battle is its best illustration, because
it is the one most familiar to us. How necessary
and desirable in the course of last century was
the sceptical protest against a very small and
crude explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity,
and the "plan of salvation" then rife! The
most lovely and gracious figures of Hebrew
poetry, of the parables of Jesus, of the Christian
mystics, or Christian poets had become to the
common religious mind like the dolls or tin
soldiers of a nursery play-box, and were set out
and made to go through their paces in the
homilies of almost every Catholic and Protestant
divine. Science had opened up illimitable regions
never before discerned. We looked for the first
time down the immeasurable ages of our geological
past, and peered into a future measured only by
the slow cooling of the sun; we saw into the
depths of the universe as it floated across the
strongest telescope, measuring its space by the
transmission of light, and into the infinite grada-
tions of perfect organisms which the strongest
microscope disclosed. Was it any wonder that
the Power which could perfect the irides-
cence on the wing of an insect too small for
the natural eye, which could shepherd the whirl
of suns whose light when it reached us had left
them a century before, which had brought all
things into existence by the millennial processes
of evolution, — was it any wonder that such a
ch. ii THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 185
Power appeared to be most inadequately described
in a literal acceptance of the machinery of Dante
or Milton, by the theologies of Wesley or
Newman or Jonathan Edwards ? Even "the sin-
less years that breathed beneath the Syrian blue"
appeared to have but an unimportant connection
with the Creator and Sustainer of the new
immensities of creation. To the Unitarian the
idea of the infinite fostering love of a Creator
seemed belittled by the doctrine of the Incarnation;
to the scientist the idea of infinite force seemed
the most adequate to express ultimate reality;
and from both standpoints the minds of many
easily escaped into the idea that any suggestion
of personality was belittling to God, that it was
more reverent, as well as more appropriate, to
conceive God in terms of force, or by means of
infinite attributes, in so far as we conceived him
at all. These were large ideas; they carried
one generation of thinkers into an airy place
where they could turn and think with fine scorn
of all they called "anthropomorphic religion."
But soon came revulsion from that first boyish
materialism of scientific progress, and men of
science were carried back in the direction of
idealism, reverting to thought instead of sense
as the basis of knowledge; while the religious
thought of those who had never bowed the knee
to materialism, leaving those things that were
behind and pressing forward, as thought always
must in trying to discover wherein for man
reality consists, found it only within the self; and
with this general change of philosophic attitude
186 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
came a fresh reverence for the manifestation of
God as a Person.
The only reality which man cannot think away,
the only force which he cannot conceive in terms
of weight or measure, is personality. All else of
which we can think, such as matter, force, life, in
any sense in which we can conceive them, can,
now one, now another, in thought be measured
and eliminated at will; the thought that measures
and eliminates remains, an unmeasurable power.
The thought, its way of directing itself, its way
of impressing itself, is personality. The only
personality that comes within the range of reasoned
knowledge is human; the existence of God is an
inference of faith; and we attribute to him our
conception of this ultimate reality. Of infinity
and all its attributes we can have no conception,
although we image to ourselves the huge or the
interpenetrating or the irresistible; but it is a
dangerous business to bow down to mere images of
anything in heaven above or in the earth beneath,
even magnified by our conception of infinity.
Our only real choice lies between attributing to
God either one set of personal attributes or
another; and all who admit that in the character
of Jesus we have the ideal human personality
must attribute that character to God.
To sketch, even as slightly as in the foregoing
paragraph we have sketched, the history of the
notion of God, the many beliefs that have under-
gone similar transitions, would take too long; but
let us pass to that fantastic "superstition" with
which we are immediately concerned, which ascribed
ch. ii THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 187
all disease in men and animals to the intrusion and
indwelling of certain mischievous entities that
we call demons. We are all familiar with the
absurdities of demonology, and the magical rites
that were used as prevention and cure. When
we roam at large among all these strange fancies,
we find, among much that seems senseless, some
significant facts. The forefathers of our intellect,
they who made the alphabets of all our learning,
thought that the disease-demons frequented solitary
places and dry places — the solitudes of the Eastern
desert.1 Picture these places, — desert highways
often strewn with the slaughter of the sun which
strikes at mid-day, or waterless caverns, where the
beasts, seeking shade and hiding, lie down to die,
or stony rock-ledges of the mountains which men
chose for tombs. In such places, when the wind
raised the dust-cloud, it was dangerous to go far.
A demon passing in the air and striking against a
man had no choice but to enter in and multiply
within him.2 After being in such a place a man
must perform ablutions as well as say his prayers,
for the demons of dry places hated water.3 Or
1 "The plague demon in the desert like a cloud of dust makes
his way . . . though he hath neither hands nor feet, ever goes
round and round." Translation of magical text, Appendix III.,
Sayce's Hibbert Lectures, p. 477.
2 "The demons stumble upon their victims, as it were, and
strike whomsoever they happen to encounter." (From Maklu
series of tablets quoted by M. Jastrow Jr., in art. "Religion of
Babylonia"; see extra vol. of 'Hastings' 's Dictionary of the Bible.)
3 I have washed my hands, cleansed my body,
With the pure waters of a source that arises in Eridu.
Whatever is evil, whatever is not good,
That is lodged in my body, in my flesh, in my limbs. {Ibid.)
1 88 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
again, in deep shades of forests the disease-demons
were rife, especially at sunset or at dew-fall and
until the sunrise. Crowded market or inn was a
place of danger. These demons could enter into
a man with the air he breathed, with the water or
milk he drank, or with the meat he ate.1 One
human being could infect another with them by
breath, by spittle, or by the presence necessary for
a mere look.2 Especially wTas the embrace of the
harlot-witch dangerous, the wound of a bull's horn,
or the bite of an animal. The dog kind, the serpent
kind, or — let us note — the mosquito kind, were
more apt than others to convey the disease-
demon.
There were many full-blown fancies about the
monstrous appearance of these demons, such
fancies as always gather about the invisible; or
about their nature, as that they were the souls of
dead men; but from the sum of all the incanta-
tions against them we gather that these imaginative
additions to the doctrine had no general authority.
No shape or size is really attributed to disease-
demons, for they could dwell in hand or foot or
eye, nay, they could multiply and swarm in any
1 "All sickness was ascribed to demoniacal possession; the
demon had been eaten with the food and drunk with the water,
or breathed in with the air, and until he could be expelled there
was no chance of recovery." (Sayce's Hibbert Lectures, Lect.
IV., p. 310. See also Lect. V., p. 330.)
2 "The witch's spittle is poisonous, and can torture one on
whom it falls or whoever treads on it." (M. Jastrow in art.
"Religion of Babylonia," in extra vol. of Hastings's Dictionary
of the Bible.)
ch. ii THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 189
member of the body, and they could be drawn out
by way of the nose or the mouth.1
These beliefs concerning disease-demons seem
to have prevailed from all time; in the ages before
the patriarchs they were well developed. They
continued to be prevalent in Christendom till the
period of the Reformation, and then still prevailed
among the unlettered, knowing no distinction of
Protestant or Papist. Then, as we know, came
a period of great light, when among the learned
no superstition appeared so paltry as that attribut-
ing diseases to invisible living creatures which
could be inhaled with the air, or drunk or eaten,
which entered into men from the dry dust as it
rode on the wind, or from the bite of creatures
that fly or creep in the night. But Heaven did
not permit men a long interval of such dry light,
for the tale of the disease-demons soon issued
again from the very places whence it had first been
cast out with contumely — from the laboratory
and the library. We may further remark that
the popular imagination concerning the germs of
disease is still as remote from the actual facts
revealed by the microscope as if it still clothed
them in the anthropomorphic language of uncon-
scious poetry; nor is the scientist any nearer an
explanation of the mystery of the life which
animates them and us than were the framers of
the earliest magical incantations.
Yet how often we have heard of the happy
1 See Josephus, Antiquities, Book VIII., chap. ii. 5; and for
Jewish familiarity with Gentile demonology see Cheyne, Introd.
to Isaiah, p. 210.
1 90 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
relief from demonism that our modern enlighten-
ment gives to the mind ! Indeed, many are so
impressed with the importance of this relief that
they point to religion as the evil mania which fills
our atmosphere with terrors of the unseen. One
of their stock objections to the gospel is what they
call its "demonology"; yet, as we have just seen,
there was a great deal in the ancient belief as
to the causes of disease which has recently been
confirmed by the bacteriologist. Are we not now
afraid of the dust of dry places ? Do we not fear
the night of malarial districts, when the gnats and
beasts, infected by malaria, are abroad and seeking
prey ? How could we better describe the attitude
of man to the microbe than in these spirited lines,
an incantation to drive away the disease-demon,
from the fifth tablet of the Maklu series ? —
Away, away, far away, far away.
For shame, for shame, fly away, fly away.
Round about face, go away, far away.
Out of my body, away.
Out of my body, far away.
Out of my body, for shame.
Out of my body, fly away.
Out of my body, round about face.
Out of my body, go away.
Into my body do not return.
To my body draw not nigh.
To my body do not approach.
Into my body do not force your way.
My body torture not.1
1 Art. "Religion of Babylonia," by M. Jastrow Jr., in extra
vol. of Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible.
ch. ii THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 191
We do not believe in wizard or witch, but we
believe in infection and contagion, which obey
laws very similar to the supposed methods of
witchcraft. The ancients also arrived at the
conclusion that certain human beings had a
peculiar power of infecting their neighbours with
demons; just as to-day, if we had no idea of
the laws that govern infection and contagion,
we might suppose, after careful observation, that
people suffering from infectious or contagious
disease, and able to go about, were endowed with
a spiritual power of doing mischief to their neigh-
bours. Can we find a better description of one
going about in the last feverish stage of tubercular
disease than the following lines from the third
tablet of the same series ? —
Who art thou, witch,
Who carries the word of my misfortune in her heart,
Whose tongue brings about my destruction,
Through whose lips I am poisoned,
In whose footsteps death follows ? *
The whole theory of demoniacal possession was
historically a survival of primitive animism ; so is
our theory of God and of immortality, of justice
and of mercy. All these had their almost indis-
tinguishable beginnings in the earliest progressive
religion of which we can find any trace; all these
lie like unused, atrophied organs within the most
decadent religions we can investigate. That a
belief is a survival of animism does not prove it
1 Art. "Religion of Babylonia," by M. Jastrow Jr., in extra
vol. of Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible.
192 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
false; but the fancies of animism prove how prone
human nature is to invest any power that it does
not understand with fantastic attributes. Indeed,
at the present day there is a rapidly growing
imagination concerning the deadly nature of
disease germs, which makes them loom large out
of all proportion to other facts of life, and bids fair
to be a superstition as paralysing as any that
troubled the ancient world. The case of the
wretched city clerk who was starving because he
had dispensed with almost every article of diet,
fearful lest each in turn might be infected by
noxious germs, is not a worse instance of exagger-
ated fancies that amount to superstition than is
that of the millionaire who isolated his children
from all wholesome companionship for fear of
infection. To such men the microbe is a veritable
monster. Such terrors give rise to imaginary
shapes of undue proportion; stern truth can
make small headway against them when popular;
the best antidote is a rival imagery of quack
medicines and patent germicides, by exaggeration
equally false to fact.
Many superstitions may be effete, but we are
not yet able completely to distinguish between the
follies and the true insight of our ancestors.
Much that we have sometimes thought divine
revelation has proved with larger knowledge to be
puerile; 1 much that we think puerile may prove
our wisdom. Since we have found the equivalent
of disease-demons in the microcosms that cause so
many of our bodily ailments, we should do well to
1 E.g., Regulations concerning die Hebrew taboo.
ch. ii THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 193
realise that the glib statement that demoniacal
possession was a mere fancy, is not a sign of great
scholarship or great wisdom. Suspense of judg-
ment is the wiser attitude toward the belief, so
long held by the world-mind, that afflictions of
the spirit may be caused by some external spiritual
influence.
Let us not be misunderstood. All the facts
of experience — so-called material facts, so-called
mental facts — alike have to be accounted for in
the philosophy of every inquiring mind. Accord-
ing to a man's ultimate assumptions will be the
explanation that satisfies him. Naturalism, whose
postulate is that physical phenomena are our
primary facts, traces physical sequences of cause
and effect, and from its point of view any fact is
"explained" when its place is assigned in such a
sequence. The physicist seeks no further explana-
tion, for he has found all he started to find. The
psychologist, in the same scientific spirit, studies
the facts of mind; he perceives their strict
correlation with physical facts ; but he may decide,
as our leading English psychologist x does, that he
cannot resolve the sequence of mental facts into
the physical sequence, and regard the one as the
mere collateral product of the other. Then he is
driven to ask the question, "May it not be that
the physicist deals only with the utterances of
what we may call the insides of things ?" 2 Is
not the mechanical explanation of the world an
abstraction from the actual world in which we live
1 Dr. James Ward.
2 Naturalism and Agnosticism, by Dr. Ward3 vol. ii. p. 81.
o
i94 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
and struggle ? The inquirer who reaches this point
may proceed to postulate mind as the prior and
fundamental reality. Starting from that postu-
late he sees that "the material and mechanical
is not fundamental, but that the teleological and
spiritual underlie it and are pre-supposed by it." *
With his idealistic hypothesis he views the facts of
experience in another light. He does not deny
the physicist's knowledge so far as it goes, but he
starts with an assumption that enables him, as he
conceives, to understand the facts of experience
more completely, to give a deeper explanation
of them.
Let us suppose that speculative philosophy and
practical religion push a man to postulate, not
merely intelligence but a Supreme Intelligence, as
the only sufficient reason of creation; and suppose
him further to find that experience, the source of
all knowledge, points to the existence of an evil
principle, subordinate no doubt to the Supreme
Will, yet able to will, and to act on the human
mind, in contravention of the Supreme Will; such
hypothesis will give him a new standpoint from
which to view the facts of experience, but it will
not lead him to contradict or deny the physical
explanation of experience, or the other and ad-
ditional explanation offered by the philosopher who
insists on the prior reality of mind. Our inquirer
is unable to find any account of the facts of
existence satisfying to himself unless he postulate
something other than they can teach him as to the
nature of supreme reality. His difference with the
1 Ibid. p. 253.
ch. ii THE SCORN OF SUPERSTITION 195
mere physicist does not lead him to deny that the
physicist has any explanation to offer; there can
be no question that every fact of experience can
have its physical cause and consequence pointed
out. Much less does it lead him to deny the
idealist philosophy. The question for him is
whether these truths are the most satisfactory
explanation he can reach.
To return, what do we know about demoniacal
possession ? Body we know, and the disease-germs
of the body we know; functional disorders or
organic changes we know to be the concomitants
of all nervous or mental troubles. Mind apart
from body we do not know; we do not know
what influences of outer spirit may work upon
incarnate spirit, and be the cause of those so-called
hysterical disorders affecting the moral and spiritual
nature for which the religious mind hardly finds
adequate cause in brain or nerve. Our conten-
tion is that the hypothesis which Jesus seemed to
countenance in explanation has nothing incredible
in it.
We have certainly made progress in knowledge.
Every one who believes that good lies at the heart
of things must believe that this progress is real
and, even if chequered, will be continuous. At
the same time we know that at the beginning
and at the end of every known sequence of fact
or thought lies the unknown. Different epochs
produce different theories with regard to the
borderlands of knowledge ; farther off there is not
even theory to support thought. It is only those
who lack the power to learn from history who
196 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
think that the tendency of thought for one age,
although pointing for some time in one direction,
necessarily points to finality. Our progress is
rather to be observed in the ceaseless shifting of
opposing races and schools. The progress of our
knowledge is like an apocalyptic vision; always,
everywhere, we have doctrine warring against
doctrine and theory against theory, men's hearts
failing them because the very foundations of their
thought are shaken. In the gloom of each conflict
to some God seems gone from heaven; the periodic
pulse of things, by which order is held out of chaos,
beats low, and parts of knowledge that seemed as
steadfast as the stars in the firmament are lost.
That which emerges out of the din and darkness
is the wiser man, not with higher powers but with
wider opportunity. He knows that if he goes
backward he fails. He must press forward; yet,
as he goes, something in the creeds that he thinks
to be dead rises and meets him after many days,
like a child advancing from the dawn of the
morning.
CHAPTER III
THE PERMANENT NEED OF ' EXORCISM'
Jesus gave a large part of his ministry to the
restoration of free will in those to whom it was
lost. He chose to restore self-control to reputed
demoniacs, not as he healed those suffering from
other diseases, but by addressing, or appearing to
address, some extraneous spiritual entity within
them. They had lost self-control, and he could
not ask them for personal faith; but why should
he not have restored them to self-possession as he
restored the dead to life, without assuming the
position of the exorcist ? It is the apparent
assumption by Jesus of this role, his apparent
acceptance of the current belief that the indwelling
demons were living subjects of the kingdom of
evil, that marks off these marvels of healing as a
distinct class.
Several theories are advanced to account for
the action of Jesus. One theory would admit that
possession by demons was real in those times, but
would say it was local and temporary. We may
dismiss this view as intolerable. Whatever was
the cause of diseases affecting the volitional power
197
198 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
then must be the cause of them now. The forms
of our diseases change with our conditions — e.g.,
the Black Plague common in the past was a worse
scourge than influenza; but no such extraordinary
change has come over the race as that epidemics
might be caused by intrusive disease-germs at one
period in man's history, and be independent of any
disease-germ in another period. In the same
way, there is certainly no such radical difference
in human conditions as to make possible so extra-
ordinary and so enormous a change as this — that
control of the human will should in the first
century have been assumed at times by a foreign
and mischievous will belonging to some low form
of spirit life, and in the twentieth century men
should be liable to no such accidents.
Another theory is that God, having put on our
flesh and its attendant circumstance, also accepted
the ignorance and superstition of his age, and
believed in an arch-devil and in minor demons
because his neighbours did, and not because such
ideas represented truth. Whether Jesus accepted
the limitations of his age in mundane matters it is
of less importance for us to decide; but if he had
no higher degree of insight than others into the
unseen world we can only learn from him as from
any other great ethical teacher. All mystics claim
direct intuitive knowledge of the spirit world ; and
if Jesus has anything to impart to us which we
could not discover for ourselves from physical fact
and reasoned induction, he must have it by in-
tuitive cognisance of the conditions of our spiritual
life.
chap, in NEED OF 'EXORCISM' 199
Another view seems to be that Jesus addressed
the demon because that was the only method that
carried conviction of the cure to minds convinced
of the reality of demon possession. We take a
passage from Prof. Harnack's What is Christianity?
which countenances this view : —
"The notion of people being 'possessed' was
current everywhere ; nay, even the science of the
time looked upon a whole section of morbid
phenomena in this light. But the consequence of
these phenomena being explained as meaning that
some evil and invisible power had taken possession
of a man, was that mental affections took forms
which looked as if an alien being had really entered
into the soul. There is nothing paradoxical in
this. If modern science were to declare nervous
disease to consist, in great part, of 'possession,'
and the newspapers were to spread this announce-
ment amongst the public, the same thing would
recur. We should soon have numerous cases in
which nervous patients looked as if they were in
the grip of an evil spirit, and themselves believed
that they were so. . . . The best means of
encountering these forms of mental disease is
to-day, as it was formerly, the influence of a
strong personality. It is able to threaten and
subdue the 'devil,' and so heal the patient." 1
We would suggest that to make the belief of
the patient that he was possessed by an alien
spirit the essential characteristic of those cases
treated by Jesus as demoniacal, is untrue to the
record. Our Lord appears to have used a com-
1 What is Christianity? pp. 60, 61.
200 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
mand to the alien spirit as the means of cure in
cases of children and maniacs, where one cannot
suppose the patient to have been capable of hold-
ing any theory about his own affliction. When
Jesus said to the Syrophenician, "The devil is
gone out of thy daughter/' he did not use that
expression for the sake of impressing the daughter.
Further, to suppose an hallucination on the part
of the patient and his friends to lie at the root of
the question, and to be the only reason of the
method used by Jesus in treating hysterical dis-
orders, is, in the face of all we know of such
disorders, a superficial view. As a matter of fact,
we know that all through human history man has
been liable to all sorts of nervous or hysterical
compulsions, of which the essential characteristic
is loss of self-control, not, and most emphatically
not, his knowledge that self-control has been lost.
Jesus found in the men of his time many
beliefs concerning the spirit-world and man's
relation to it. To some of these beliefs he set
the seal of his authority; some he set aside as
negligible; some he denied. He certainly taught
much less concerning this adjacent world than
most people suppose. There are but two reverent
and rational explanations of his attitude to the
demonology of his time. Either he must have
wished to endorse as truth such part of the popular
belief as he incorporated into his own ministry, or
he must have used it as a parable to convey a truth
concerning the loss of volitional freedom that was
of the utmost importance for us to learn.
It is worth while to study carefully the belief
chap, in NEED OF ' EXORCISM' 201
in possession as countenanced by Jesus. His
belief in demoniacal possession has nothing in
common with the modern superstitions which
accrete themselves round such terms as "ghosts,"
"spirit control," "poltergeist," etc. We have no
need to think of shades hovering in the air. Two
salient features in the attitude of Jesus contrast
with many notions we have been accustomed to
associate with it. First, he seems to have attached
no moral blame to the condition of being demon-
ised ; his words concerning certain physical diseases
may possibly imply that they were brought on by
sin, but there is no suggestion of this in his
dealing with the poor wretches whom by exorcism
he set free as from a degrading servitude. The
second point is that he gives no colour to the idea
that the demons had human personality. It is
true that when he cured these cases he never
spoke to the sufferer; he commanded the demon;
so that, if his action is not a parable, there is
evidence that he thought he perceived an indwell-
ing spirit with so much of intelligence that it
could obey a command. But we can command
many animals by word or by mere presence; we
do not therefore suppose them to have the
attributes of human personality. That he re-
garded demons as impersonal must be obvious to
those who mark with what dignity our Lord
invested the human spirit, either saved or lost,
and what indignity he meted out to demons. All
that is necessarily implied in the method of Jesus
in these cases is that there are low forms of spirit-
life capable of some degree of intelligence and
202 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book in
volition, able to attack and injure the powers of
the human spirit, as a germ of physical disease
may, with or without their concomitance, attack
and injure the powers of the human body.
In the facts of life before us there is much that
appears to harmonise with such a belief. There is
an analogy between the infectious diseases of the
body and those nervous affections which impair
self-control but stop short of insanity proper. Just
as the bacterial germ passes from body to body,
spreading physical disease, so does a malign spirit
seem to pass from mind to mind and even from
animal to human mind. Nervous diseases are
always catching and often epidemic. They have
produced the wTorst epidemics the world has
known, just as bodily diseases are rife when
human beings live in close air, dirt, and want of
healthy exercise; so when they live in ignorance,
moral turpitude, and lack of intellectual interests,
do mental ailments prevail; and this is the effect
even when every physical advantage is possessed.
Let us cite a few of these mental epidemics.
There is what is called "The Children's
Crusade."
"In whole large districts of Europe young
children, who belonged to a generation born when
the population had been decimated by the Cru-
sades, rushed from the towns in troops, and, join-
ing others on the highways, marched day after day,
they knew not where or why, but, as they said,
bound for Jerusalem. They begged their food as
they passed, but would be controlled by no one.
The King of France issued a personal edict to the
chap, m NEED OF 'EXORCISM' 203
children, but neither in France nor Germany could
the epidemic be allayed. Persuasions, threats,
punishments, were as futile as the king's com-
mand. Bolts and bars could not hold the children.
If shut up, they broke through doors and windows,
and rushed to take their places in the processions
which they saw passing by. If the children were
detained so that escape was impossible they pined
away." 1
We know how far they went, and in what
numbers, and to what destruction. Neither the
physical nor psychological explanations, although
true as far as they go, seem to exhaust the
matter.
Take, again, the crusade against the Albigenses :
"According to Albert von Stade, a peculiar
religious mania broke out among women; thou-
sands of them, stark naked and in deep silence, as
if stricken with dumbness, ran frantically about the
streets. In Luttich many of them fell into con-
vulsions of ecstasy." 2
The epidemic which offers an apparent refuta-
tion of Professor Harnack's argument is the
mania of witchcraft, a mental fever which raged
in Europe for almost two centuries. In this
mania we see the sort of possession which
Professor Harnach has in mind — hundreds of
people of all ages and classes, accused of being
possessed with devils, usually coming to believe
that they were so possessed, confessing to
possession, and acting in accordance with the
1 The Psychology of Suggestion, by Boris Sidis, p. 324.
2 Ibid. p. 323.
204 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book hi
belief. But these victims of persecution were
few compared with the tens of thousands of other-
wise sane men and women who, not knowing
themselves possessed, were really under the mad
compulsion of bringing such accusations, of hunt-
ing out, torturing, and burning innocent victims.
"The terror of mysterious evil agencies fell on
the spirits of men. The demon of fear seemed
to have obsessed the mind of European humanity.
Continental Europe, especially France, Germany,
and Switzerland, suffered greatly from the
epidemic. . . . High and low were attacked by the
malady without any discrimination. In fact, the
more learned one was the stronger was the malady,
the more acute was the fear of inimical mysterious
agencies. One can hardly find in the records of
human crime anything more disgusting, more
infamous, than this insane systematic persecution
of feeble women and tender children. . . . The
spirit of persecution did not spare even the little
ones. The number of children on the list is
great. . . . On American ground we find, on the
accusation of a few hysterical girls, twenty
innocent persons condemned to death." *
In this instance we must perceive that the
persecutors had all the symptoms of lack of
self-possession, with no consciousness of being
possessed.
It would be easy to multiply instances and
shocking descriptions of such " possession." We
here cite but one more — a description of excite-
ment at American revivals in the last century : —
1 The Psychology of Suggestion, by Boris Sidis, pp. 339, 341, 342.
chap, in NEED OF 'EXORCISM' 205
"In many places the religious epidemic took
the form of laughing, dancing, and barking or
dog manias. Whole congregations were con-
vulsed with hysterical laughter during holy service.
In the wild delirium of religious frenzy people
took to dancing, and at last to barking like dogs.
They assumed the posture of dogs, moving about
on all fours, growling, snapping the teeth, and
barking with such an exactness of imitation as
to deceive any one whose eyes were not directed
to the spot. Nor were the people who suffered
so mortifying a transformation always of the
vulgar classes : persons of the highest rank in
society, men and women of cultivated minds and
polite manners found themselves by sympathy
reduced to this degrading situation." x
Lastly, take a description of a modern financial
crisis by an economic writer. After referring to the
extravagant projects afterward known as the South
Sea Bubble he says: "Every great crisis reveals
the excessive speculations of many houses which
commonly had not begun or had not carried very
far those speculations, till they were tempted by
the daily rise of prices and the surrounding fever.
At most periods of great commercial excitement
there is some admixture of the older kind of
investing mania. . . . The mania of 1825 and
the mania of 1866 were striking examples of this.
People speculate in bubble companies and in
worthless shares. Almost everything will be
believed for a little while. The counters in the
gambling mania, the shares in the companies
1 The Psychology of Suggestion, by Boris Sidis, p. 352.
2o6 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
created to feed the mania, are discovered to be
worthless when the reaction comes." 1
But indeed we do not need to go so far afield,
or into the excitement of great epidemics, to come
across afflictions of the human spirit which have
many symptoms in common with cases of "pos-
session," although not that one symptom desid-
erated by Professor Harnack, the belief in being
possessed. We all know the "unhappy member"
of the family, with whom self-consciousness and
emotional excitement form a disease, to whom all
passing events are distorted by uncontrolled
egotistical emotions, who, alas, from birth to
the hour of death is a burden and a perplexity to
relatives. Have we not here the same perplexing
phenomenon, modified by all that education,
medical science, and even religion, can do ?
Whether the causes of psychic phenomena are
automatic or spiritualistic, what is called the
"mediumistic temperament" is a fact, and prob-
ably there is no human being who does not at
some time experience the "mediumistic condition"
in greater or less degree. The condition can be
encouraged and emphasised, it can be ignored and
minimised, while the mind is still in control. It
has its uses as well as its abuses; but whether it
opens the windows of the human mind to other
tenants or not, is, so far as science goes, matter
only for presumption, negative or affirmative.
Alas, the borderland between self-control and the
want of it, is wide, and by our present science
dimly lit, full of the dread possibilities of mental
1 Lombard Street, by Walter Bagehot, chap. vi.
chap, in NEED OF 'EXORCISM' 207
diseases. The healthy and the superficial laugh
at these freaks; the wisest and most deeply
learned fear them, while at the same time they
know that fear itself is the worst and most deadly
enemy of health. The wise physician to-day
regards every habit, however trivial, that indicates
the failure of self-control, as a symptom which
may be prolific of greater evil than the microbe
of any organic disease; but he also knows, and
acts upon the knowledge, that the less the subject
of this symptom fears it, the more he ignores
or forgets it, the more likely he is to trample it
under foot.
There are several types of "hysteria" proper
with which most of us are familiar. (We use
the foolish word "hysteria" for want of a better.)
The first we may picture as the "demon" of
unrest. It is seen in the individual who has
been under some strain of work or emotion, and
has succumbed to it so far as to lose the power
of attention. He may be fidgety, irritable, and
in other ways annoying; but the chief symptom
is the fact that he cannot spend his leisure in the
repose he so much needs, or devote to his work
the continued, concentrated attention which would
produce the best in quantity and quality. The
next type is perhaps more common in women;
we may call it the "demon" of emotional vanity.
It is seen in an abnormal craving for sympathy
and admiration, or for novelty. If husband,
children, or friends remit for a day their acts of
obvious devotion, some misfortune occurs of
which the hysteric is the heroine, and in which
208 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
her pathetic or heroic behaviour recalls their
attention. If she meets with reproach, or even
with only calm civility, she suffers all the agony
of spirit that cruelty or insult might evoke. Men
there are like this, but such women are unfortu-
nately comparatively common. Again, there is
a type in which we may see the "demon" of
instability, apparent in the man or woman who
lacks either decision or resolution. Those who
lack the former are thrown into distress by being
asked to decide upon a reasonable plan of action
with which others can arrange their plans. They
change and change about with regard to what
they will do, and when and how they will do it,
till the nervous force of all concerned is exhausted,
and only emergency pushes them to action. The
other variety are as full of decisions as an egg is
full of meat. They are always embarking on some
course of action, and are deeply offended when
others will not join them; but they are not able
to adhere to any plan for more than a short time.
The worst of all, perhaps, is the "demon" of
jealousy, too well known to need description.
All these types can be seen in a more blatant but
more elemental form in the youth of both sexes :
we have the girl who is always ill when she
does not want to do something, and always
well when she does; the youth who is always
idle, yet always indulging large intentions of am-
bitious work, and many other varieties, including
those classified as melancholia, fanaticism, etc.,
nervous afflictions which are, if possible, more
afflicting to the onlookers than to the patient,
chap, in NEED OF ' EXORCISM' 209
and which have in common this, that they all
seem to be not diseases but faults, and faults that
would be corrected if the patient could only see
himself as others see him. The more carefully
we watch, however, the more we realise that,
whether or not there was an hour in the life of
each when the fault was under control of the will,
it has passed beyond that control, and become
uncontrollable in a sense in which faults due to
reasoned motives are not uncontrollable. For
example, a man may lose his temper a thousand
times on provocation, but if he constantly becomes
angry without provocation he has passed over
the border-line of normal self-control. Or a
woman may frequently tell lies in order to pro-
duce the desired impression, but when she
cannot describe any incident without displaying
herself as being admired, or suffering neglect,
there is something other than a moral fault to be
combated.
Good conditions have done much, have made
the modern hysteric a less violent, less convulsive,
less noticeable person than the hysteric of less
civilised conditions. Just as the most revolting
bodily diseases have given place to milder forms,
so the hysteric of to-day is more sedate, apparently
more rational, than even the person who indulged
in the fainting fits and shrieking fits described in
the literature of the eighteenth century. That
century in its turn displays a more moderate form
than is seen in the convulsions and manias of the
Dark Ages. But are these poor creatures nowa-
days less unhappy ? Do they create less un-
210 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
happiness ? Have we come any nearer than did
the ancients to understanding the cause of mental
compulsions, or as near to their cure ?
Whether Jesus believed in demoniacal possession,
or used it as a parable to teach a more profound
truth, is not essential. The lesson is plain. It is
medical science — all- honour to it — that is now
forcing the first elements of this lesson upon the
attention of the Church. The hysteric is not able
to cure himself. To oppose his actions is to
increase his unreasonable excitements; to yield to
his every whim is as harmful. His malady has a
moral element in it, but he is rarely to blame for
contracting it; he has more control over his will
than he exercises, but to treat him as a wilful
sinner is worse than useless. All such disorders
are accompanied by some abnormal physical change
in the body — the disorder of some nerve centre or
congestion of some portion of the brain — which
from the physician's point of view is their cause.
The doctor tries his medical treatment first.
When it is, as it most often is, in vain, most
doctors will admit that what they call the physical
cause can only be cured, if at all, by some
powerful and external stimulant to the patient's
mind. Cures by such means are rare, but are well
authenticated and not in any way miraculous.
The only hope, the doctors tell us, for the
majority of hysterical patients is that they may
come in contact with some strong mental alterative
— a commanding personality, an overpowering
emotion, or an urgent practical necessity, which
may compel them into reasoned and definite
chap, in NEED OF 'EXORCISM' 211
courses of action and in so doing restore to them
the power of self-direction. But alas, these same
doctors agree that for one case that is cured,
hundreds and thousands remain uncured, a source
of mischief in every society and of constant pain
in almost every domestic circle.
It is not — as some modern writers would assure
us — the belief that these most miserable maladies
are wrought by unseen powers of evil that makes
life gloomy, but the fact that such maladies exist,
and that they are common, and that medecine
knows no cure for them. By endorsing the popular
belief in demoniacal possession, or by using it as
a parable, Jesus taught — with the modern doctor —
that there was no use in wasting words with the
patient or in expecting faith and obedience from
the "possessed." He called to their relief the
family and the Church. He demanded faith first
from the interceding friend. "O woman, great is
thy faith; the demon is gone out of thy daughter."
And the same with the father of the epileptic boy.
He demanded most faith from the representatives
of his kingdom — the would-be exorcists of his
infant Church. From them he demanded great
faith and prayer. He said, by his own ministry
as an exorcist, "Here is a terrible evil, which is
directly opposed to God's will and man's welfare;
and it must be faced and abolished by men who
will lend themselves as instruments to God's will."
No magic was required; God's intention was
certain, his power indubitable, the result of fearless
faith invariable. Before any man — one of the
Twelve, one of the Seventy, one of the sons of the
212 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
Pharisees — before any man who lent himself to be
the finger of God for the purpose, this evil would
vanish.
One great part of the joy of Jesus' gospel is this,
that he offers for the loss of self-control prompt
restoration, the reception of which does not require
any curious knowledge as to the cause of the ill.
When man cannot manage himself, has indeed no
power to begin to free himself, Jesus by his whole
ministry proclaimed that it was the will of God to
set him free, not by any slow process of self-help
combined with the help of the divine spirit, — that
may be the way of salvation for those who have
the normal power of choice, — but at once and
unconditionally. When a man was not his own
master, Jesus, as representing God, set him free to
exercise that power of choice which, as we have
seen, being the only means of his salvation, is
worth all else to God. So large a part of the life
of Jesus consists in these acts of restoring volitional
power that to neglect his teaching concerning them
is an atrophy of faith.
Salvation means the direction of the whole
concrete life in accordance with the law of love to
God and man. Unfettered power of self-direction
by no means ensures this result, else would the
works of mental healing have been all that the
spirit of man required from the Saviour of the
world. But salvation can come only to a man
with a normal power of self-direction. Hence
this power was the primary gift of Jesus, as it is
the primary necessity of every individual. When-
ever men had will-power Jesus did not coerce it,
chap, in NEED OF 'EXORCISM' 213
even to prevent its worst abuse, but when they
had lost it he gave it back to them.
The joy and hope of the Christian revelation
concerning the slavery of the will has long been
so diminished as to be scarce recognisable; and
when here and there throughout the Christian ages
bursts of popular enthusiasm have occurred, in
which men have cast their chains behind them and
believed practically in the God who in the realm
of individual personality is always ready to make
all things new, they have, by the greater part of
the Church, been regarded with suspicion which
soon turned to disapproval. We cannot tell what
would have happened to the world if at any
time the mass of the Church had upheld by faith
and prayer those who were bold enough to touch
the garment of the risen Christ and be made
whole every whit. We have no means of con-
ceiving what a new earth would be like, for we
have never experienced the power of a corporate
faith in this revelation of Jesus; but to the logical
and non-Christian man there lies no choice between
believing simply and naturally in the powers
and privileges of Christian faith as taught and
exhibited in the earthly life of Jesus, and the belief
that the Gospels represent only a great ethical
teacher hampered by temporary and local su-
perstition.
To-day we are met on all sides by a ghastly
evil, partly moral, partly physical, to which science
has attached no certain cause, no probable cure.
The dictum of Tertullian, "If a man calls him-
self a Christian and cannot expel a demon, let him
214 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
be put to death on the spot," sounds perhaps a
trifle barbarous, but to the plain common sense
of an onlooker seems, on the whole, more in-
telligent than the attitude of the whole modern
Church, claiming to worship Jesus and standing
paralysed before the nameless misery caused by
the half-nervous, half-moral, disabilities which sap
the will-power of thousands of her children.
CHAPTER IV
MIND AND DISEASE
In spite of the enormous progress of medical
science in knowledge and skill, there is, in the
practical application of both to the bodies of men
or animals, little exact knowledge. Even the
veterinary surgeon finds that the personal or in-
dividual element in horse or dog baffles his forecast
of cause and effect; what ought to cure, occasionally
kills ; what ought to kill, may cure. And although
we may call these variations rare, yet when we
contrast their recurrence with the certain results
we can obtain when we work upon inanimate
things, we are forced to perceive that there is in
animal vitality a factor, or perhaps many factors,
of which we have no knowledge.
The spread of any disease for no apparent
reason than that it has taken hold on the popular
fancy ought to be a subject of much more serious
attention than it is. Physiology, bacteriology, have
nothing to say here, nothing more, at least, than
can be expressed by a shrug of the shoulders.
The psychologist speaks of the force of a corporate
idea in the neurotic origin of disease. Every one
215
216 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
concerned who has the power of reflection perceives
that we are here dealing with an unknown some-
thing which leaps from one man's nervous system
to another, quite as baleful in effect, and quite
as terrible, as any specific bacteria. To call it
"suggestion," to say that it works by unconscious
mind, explains little, and gives no remedy. If we
had not the safeguarding hopes aroused by quack
medicines, "Christian Science," and the like,
suggestion would soon prey upon the minds of
many in every community, a worse monster of
the invisible air than even bacteria or the demons
of old.
Not long ago the world of medical science was
moving on under the impression that the progress
of knowledge was tending all in one direction — to
show that health or ill-health in any part of the
body must produce corresponding results on the
brain and therefore on the mind. Mind as an
origin of bodily affections was disregarded. More
recently it has been admitted that, bodily harms
being of two sorts, functional and organic, the
former may be caused, and in some cases cured,
by mental agency. Now we have a few doctors
coming forward to claim a much larger power for
the mental agent. Dr. A. T. Schofield's books
make the drift of this school plain to the lay mind.
One quotation will show that in these matters no
finality is reached.
"We have seen that the powers of the un-
conscious mind over the body are well-nigh
immeasurable; and knowing, as we now do, that
our old division into functional and organic
chap, iv MIND AND DISEASE 217
diseases is merely the expression of our ignorance,
and that all diseases, even hysterical, involve or-
ganic disturbance somewhere, we are prepared to
believe that faith and other unorthodox cures,
putting into operation such a powerful agent as
the unconscious mind, or, if you prefer the formula,
' the forces of nature/ are not necessarily limited to
so-called functional diseases at all" 1
Let us quote Dr. Paul Dubois, of the University
of Berne, who appears to be a staunch materialist
and determinist, and writes about educating his
patients into a health-giving frame of mind, as one
might speak of training the tendrils of a vine or
the habits of a dog.
"I have been able, in the course of a rather
long medical career, to give up all physical and
drug measures. Undoubtedly this purely psycho-
therapeutic treatment is not easy. It takes an
immense amount of time and patience, on the
part of the patient especially, and as well on the
part of the physician. The practitioner some-
times grows weary of this work, and might be
tempted to take up the easier role of prescribing
drugs. But when one has reflected on these
subjects, when one has seen the patients recover
their robust health after years of suffering, and
regain their power to work, and become brave;
when one has seen them acting on their environ-
ment, and transmitting their optimism to it by the
force of contagion, then one takes courage and
goes on with one's task, which is always to bring
back patients to a healthy life from a triple point
1 The Forces of Mind, pp. 1 64-5.
218 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
of view — the psychic, the intellectual, and the
moral."1
But these doctors stand somewhat apart. The
point where the main body of advanced medical
men seem to part company with the historic Gospel
is in the distinction they make between the diseases,
mostly functional, which they admit it is possible to
cure by mental suggestion, and those which cause
organic disturbance in the body, and which are
therefore reckoned as quite beyond the reach of
mental influence. It is better here frankly to
recognise that there is a very great and pardonable
anxiety abroad, lest any person of weight should
make any public utterance which might lead those
suffering from a morbid growth to defer the surgical
operation, which, if promptly performed, would
prolong or save life. It is this anxiety which
has caused, and which partly excuses, some truly
curious statements made by religious leaders upon
the limited efficacy of prayer for the sick. But
the religious mind ought to admit that while it
may be foolish for any man to disobey his doctor
before he experiences the perfect cure of faith,
and while in the present low state of the corporate
Christian faith it may often be impossible to
obtain such cure, it ought, nevertheless, to be
possible to discuss calmly the serious question
whether diseases ought to be classed as curable
or not curable by faith.
There is a certain presumption against the
validity of this distinction between diseases, in the
mere fact that it has the aspect of embodying a
1 Les Psychoneuroses, p. 345 of American translation.
chap, iv MIND AND DISEASE 219
temporary truce between the medical materialism
rife everywhere a quarter of a century ago and the
extreme idealism of those who opposed it. The
place where two opposing schools halt for a time
and try to come to terms, may be mistaken for the
golden mean of truth, but it is seldom the same.
In almost every controversy the side which
possesses, on the whole, least truth, is always
making a stand behind some temporary earthwork,
admitting certain concessions, and saying, "Thus
far and no further"; then after a while retreating
again. Most of us remember that in the long
resistance made by certain religious dogmatists to
the doctrine of evolution, many such half-way
stands were made which did not at all represent
the mean of truth between two opposites. That
medical materialism has already abandoned one
class of ailments after another as admitting the
mid cure, is no proof that it will be forced to a
further retreat, but it affords a certain reasonable
expectation that it may be so.
Again, the absolute unity of mind and body in
which life, as far as we know consists, makes us
suspect the finality of the idea that, while functional
disorders may under the right conditions be cured
by a mental process, certain organic diseases can be
cured only by the surgeon's knife. Suppose some
malign germ to be at its evil work. If the blood
be very healthy, if it circulate freely in the part
affected, it may overcome the poisonous intruders.
But the composition of the blood by digestive
processes, its oxidisation, and its circulation, are
matters in which it is admitted that the mind or
M
220 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
unconscious mind, under right conditions, has large
control. Consider the difference between a limb
of the body as long as it remains part of the body
and the same limb amputated. As long as any
part of the body, however diseased, is alive it is
animated by the life-mind, to whose power we
are not in a position to put a final limit. Not
long ago The Lancet, in a leading article, warned
sufferers from cancer against wasting time in
experimenting with new treatments — violet leaves
and the like — till it was too late for the surgeon
to operate with hope of success. The moral was
pointed with the admission that, in certain cases of
indisputable cancer, cures had come about "for
some unknown reason'' without treatment, and it
was such unaccountable cases that lent a false
value to certain drugs that might have been
administered.1 Here, in the very fortress of
surgical assurance, is an admission that must cause
every one who reflects to perceive that if an organic
disease ever pass away without treatment, there
cannot be anything illogical and extravagant in the
presumption that such diseases, as well as func-
tional ones, may be under the control of the mind.
There is another argument against this distinc-
tion, arising out of the evidence that cures of
organic diseases by faith actually take place. We
are told, and rightly, by medical men, that there
is no scientific proof of organic diseases being
cured by faith. No cures of faith, whatever the
disease, can admit of scientific test. Even if no
doubt can attach to the diagnosis before or after
1 The Lancet, April 28, 1906.
chap, iv MIND AND DISEASE 221
the cure, it still always remains for the sceptic to
give as the cause of the rare event some other
condition that was coincident with the mental or
religious effort at cure, it being impossible to
eliminate all other conditions. But while there is
no proof forthcoming to convince a mind which
assumes that such cures are impossible, there is
much evidence for the candid and intelligent in
the personal character and impressions of people
composing such societies as, for example, the
Christian Alliance for faith-healing in New York.
Its doctrines are "orthodox," of the extreme
Evangelical cast; the writings it puts forward
evince that wilful ignorance of many things {e.g.,
Biblical criticism) which is usual with extremists
of this class; but this does not alter the fact that
its leaders and workers are sane, practical people.
Their only means of cure is the prayer of faith;
their only peculiar tenet, that with God all things
are possible. They are certainly under the im-
pression that diseases of every class are cured;
and these impressions, taken in connection with
their personal character, have evidential value.
The same may be said of other such societies.
They do not seem to seek notoriety for their works
of healing, presumably obeying the gospel injunc-
tions in this regard; but the present writer has
reason to believe that their work will yield to pains-
taking investigation such evidence as is possible in
psychical matters for the truth of their belief.
From the Christian point of view this matter
is serious. The earliest traditions embodied in
the Gospels present Jesus as curing all who came
222 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
to him, and commissioning his servants to do the
like. Here there is no distinction between diseases
that can and cannot be cured by God on the
condition of assured faith in the applicant. If
this is not part of the history of Jesus then we
have no authentic history. There is much more
difficulty in supposing these cures to be miraculous
(in the scientific sense of the word) than in sup-
posing them to be effected by a most benevolent
energy of personal influence which persuaded
faith and thus brought the will and thought and
emotion of the sufferer into that degree of
assurance which wrought health. Further, it
would appear most incredible that Jesus should
have given such a large part of his brief ministry
to the curing of disease if he did not mean health,
and the attainment of health by faith, to be an
abiding condition of the kingdom of God on
earth.
To sum up. It is more difficult to believe
that while many diseases may be cured by the
right mental conditions, there are others over
which such mental conditions have no influence,
than to believe that all diseases come under the
same natural laws, however powerless we may yet
be to apply these laws.
Setting aside the distinction sought to be drawn
between functional and organic diseases as respec-
tively curable and non-curable, we return to the
fact that no one who has been watching the trend
of medical thought can doubt that the importance
of mental therapeutics is more and more clearly
recognised by the vast majority of the profession.
chap, iv MIND AND DISEASE 223
It is almost universally acknowledged that where
the patient has healthy will-power it must be
called into exercise to choose healthy thoughts
and exclude unhealthy suggestion; and where the
will-power is feeble the most cheerful and healthy
environment frequently fails entirely to prevent
the patient dwelling upon the pains he has and
fearing worse. We quote Dr. Schofield in a
passage in which many of his fellow-doctors will
heartily agree with him. It is upon the power of
auto-suggestion.
"What the patient has to do is carefully and
systematically to saturate his brain by suggestion
with what he wishes to be or to become. This
can be done by speech, by thought, by sight, and
by hearing. Here are four brain-paths, all of
which tend to set the unconscious mind — the vis
— to work at the process of cure." 1
It is worth while to pause and reflect upon
these powers about which we are all learning
to talk so glibly — the unconscious mind or life-
mind which manages us and ours, and our
occasional power and frequent powerlessness to
direct it. Experience proves that by direct voli-
tion the conscious will can do something, but not
much, to arrest or assist the involuntary processes
of brain and body; but that by directing the
attention to this or that, the conscious will can
do very much to control the unconscious mind
for good or evil. We must, then, attribute to
the conscience an increased responsibility, not
only for the actions it can directly control, but
1 Nerves in Disorder, by Dr. Schofield, p. 123.
224 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
for the whole well-being and atmosphere in which
it places that far subtler and stronger power,
the life-mind. Devotional books have made us
familiar with this idea, but only as applied to the
abstraction of the soul. We frequently say it is
not what a man does but what he is, that is the
source of his power and influence; and what he
is, we are now taught, is the result of the way in
which he directs his attention to external sources
of suggestion. It thus becomes evident, not only
that the voluntary observance of religious acts
has a more far-reaching power over him who
performs them than he can be consciously aware
of, but that the beliefs and sentiments of which
he is aware may not express the set of his being
at any time; they can only express what he desires
it to be. The same is true of the outward
observance of any sentiment or principle, such as
happy acts, kindly acts, loyal acts, and acts of
faith in man or in God. His life-mind,1 accord-
ing to the doctrine we have just quoted, will
eventually become saturated with the sentiments
he acts up to, even i£ at first he experiences almost
nothing of the sentiment, and the unconscious
life thus acted upon will become a force much
greater than the conscious will, and will accomplish
what that could not accomplish. In faith, in
belief, in intention, what we suppose ourselves to
be may not coincide with what we are. We may
think we tacitly hold a faith which the whole set
of our unconscious life-mind disregards, and it
will disregard it until we put it into determined
1 We use this term in preference to "unconscious mind."
chap, iv MIND AND DISEASE 225
action. On this theory we can realise, even in
our present crippled and feeble condition of voli-
tion and body, that self-control would mean health,
happiness, and goodness of an order which we can
scarcely conceive, as we seldom meet the three
together in any perfection. We may and must
go on from this idea to the psychological result
that would accrue from the mere multiplication
of men of this sort, what the strength of their
unconscious corporate life would be, for that also
would become healthy, happy, and good, would
carry them, and those who approached them, on
in these paths with cumulative force.
It is curious to note that many faith-healers
imagine that they cannot recognise the direct
"finger of God" as the instrument of health un-
less they regard the cure as miraculous. If bodily
health, individual and corporate, should accrue
from the courage and joy of believing Jesus to be
to the Church now what he was when on earth,
such health would be as natural as the yearly
harvest — for which we pray, for which we give
thanks — as directly the work of the "finger of
God" as the conversion of a sinner or the death
of an aged saint.
CHAPTER V
FAITH AND THE DOCTORS
There is a large notion abroad that science and
faith-healing are opposed; but, in fact, the issue
between the "mind-healer" and the medical
profession has no more bearing upon the salvation
of the body offered by Christ than the quarrel
between the Church and Galileo had upon the
revolutions of the solar system. The doctrine
that medicine and surgery are injurious is not
any part of the gospel. Hygiene and medicine
must bear to the salvation of the body the same
relation that all education in right living, and the
machinery of law and justice, bear to the salvation
of the soul.
Thus, every Christian believes that sudden
moral reformation of character is, by God's grace,
possible and desirable; but he believes also that
every help to virtue is at the same time neces-
sary to the community. There is no antagonism
between the two methods; nay more, they are
recognised as complementary, God working in and
through every agency for moral health as truly
as in his more rapid work on more receptive souls.
226
chap, v FAITH AND THE DOCTORS 227
If the most spiritually minded priests or mission
preachers of our own day were to undertake the
uplifting of some degraded district, they would
believe and teach that God could and would make
a sudden reformation possible to the most degraded
man if he had the spiritual insight requisite to
conversion. But, no doubt, at the same time a
great part of their activity would be directed to
the establishment of institutions for the prevention
and more gradual cure of moral failure. The
spiritual director, the schoolmaster, the gymnast,
the librarian, the policeman, the judge, the master
of the reformatory, the jailer, would have their
place in the scheme of reformation. They would
be necessary, because the kingdom of God does
not come suddenly to a whole community. It
spreads like leaven, grows like a plant. It requires
human instruments for its establishment and
culture. These agents, as far as they educate and
help forward what is good, would be helpful even
in the lives of those men most suddenly and most
soundly converted; and in so far as they are
required to cure or suppress moral disorder, they
would be necessary because conversion depends
upon a degree of spiritual insight which every
man does not, perhaps cannot, exercise.
From the Gospels we gather that bodily welfare
likewise comes in both these ways. Whether we
can fit it into our theories or not, the fact remains
that human nature does not, except in a few
instances, avail itself of the best opportunities that
offer. People often prefer practically to refuse
both God's direct and indirect ways of giving
228 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
health. Man is like a household dog that for the
most part prefers the neighbour's garbage tub to
the most delicate morsels in the supplies of his
master's loving providence. We are told that
when Jesus lived on earth he healed all who came
or were brought to him ; but no one has ever
dreamed that all the sick in Palestine came to him.
We need to pause long in thought over that
simple statement of St. Mark that he could do no
mighty work in his own district; and the limita-
tion was not in him ! If we take his works of
healing, of which the details are given us, we
find every degree between the word spoken at a
distance from the patient to some intercessor full
of faith, and a somewhat elaborate process of
visible means. For this one the Master's presence
is enough, for another his touch, for another
merely the touch of his garment. From some the
burden of sins must first be removed by forgive-
ness, while others require the caution, "Sin no
more lest a worse thing come upon thee." Is it
not evident that even here, where so many received
health suddenly, there could have been no sudden
raising of the standard of national health ?
Further, there is no clash between the Master's
method and such methods of healing as were then
in vogue. Jesus did not denounce other physicians ;
on the contrary, he said that whatever good was
done was by God's power. The physician then
and now had no reason to find fault. Can we
suppose that the "many physicians" who had
tried and failed to heal a poor woman, could have
been so wicked as to refuse to be glad when she
chap, v FAITH AND THE DOCTORS 229
obtained health by approaching the Christ ? Nay,
if at the beginning she could have got it in that
way, would they have been so ruthless as to desire
that she should suffer many things at their hands,
and waste her substance, before she appealed to
him ? Certainly our brothers of the medical pro-
fession to-day are incapable of such cruelty. They
do not, most of them, believe that the sick can
obtain health by spiritual contact with Jesus Christ,
but they can have no objection to the experiment,
and its success must rejoice every physician worthy
of the name. They may fear precious time being
lost in a futile experiment; but we have no reason
to suppose that the operation of faith and the
healing grace of God requires time on the divine
side; and for every man its reception must be by
the grace of faith, which ought not to cover long
periods of indecision. The cases are very few
where medical aid and the exercise of faith need
be even for a day in opposition. If they are, it
is faith that is at fault, not science.
Every physician, however uncertain he may be
in all matters of faith, is quite certain that he can
only accomplish anything by co-operation with
what he calls "nature" or "vitality." All that he
can do is to evoke, encourage, and strengthen this
vital force. This has been a commonplace of all
schools of medicine since they existed. More
recent, but now as clearly acknowledged, is the
power of certain conscious mental tendencies to
help in raising the vitality or lowering it, — a
cheerful, hopeful, and serene frame of mind; an
enthusiastic desire for health; a firm purpose to
230 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
regain it, — all these are now freely admitted to be
the physician's best friends, and in many cases his
necessary allies. If religion, by a renewal of faith
in God, should bring strong reinforcements to the
innate vitality of the body, strong enough to keep
the body well, or to restore it without medical aid
when it is diseased, or to co-operate swiftly and
surely with recognised means, this would be a
result that every physician would hail with delight,
whether or not he agreed with the religious view
of the how and why of the increased vitality. It
is a conservative religious sentiment which has
made objection to the exercise of faith in regard
to health, never the true scientific spirit. What
every medical man desires for his patient is life,
more abundant life; and he knows far better than
a layman the limits of his power — the diseases
which he cannot cure, the disabilities which he
cannot remove.
Faith-healers must be wrong in pronouncing
any means that produce health of body or mind
to be evil. The principle is clearly laid down by
Jesus that evil can never produce good; that
wherever an evil thing is cast down, the human
agent, whatever his doctrine, is the instrument of
the finger of God. There is really no ambiguity
in the well-known passage in which our Lord
rebuts the charge of Satanic power, not by the
slightest counter-charge, but by laying down the
principle for all time that good is of God, and
of God only. Then, too, even an imperfect
acquaintance with the history of religious thought
in its connection with the application of a dawning
chap, v FAITH AND THE DOCTORS 231
knowledge of nature to man's welfare ought to
make it clear that no line can be drawn between
the application of scientific truth to the preserva-
tion of health (hygiene), and its application to the
restoration of health (medicine and surgery).
There is no boundary-line, the two merge; if
one is of God so is the other. As a good example
of the alliance of science and faith in the promo-
tion of health, we may remember that Christian
saints at one time believed in the sanctity of dirt,
that when one gleam of scientific light swept away
from Christendom the idea that cleanliness was
a sinful luxury, and when dirt also came to be
regarded as a sign rather of impurity than of
purity of soul, and the proverb "Cleanliness is
next to godliness " became a possibility, with dirt
disappeared from Christian civilisation the more
hideous forms of disease. The movement was
scientific; the Church assimilated it to her great
gain.
We conclude that there can be no real opposi-
tion between medical science and a salutary power
over the body gained by faith in divine healing.
CHAPTER VI1
THE WILL OF GOD
When Milton, in Samson Agonistes, makes his
hero say, speaking of physical strength —
God, when he gave me strength, to show withal
How slight the gift was, hung it in my hair —
he incidentally expresses a time-worn belief of the
Church that physical strength is unimportant.
Without regarding this as a Christian idea, we
agree that the whole value of physical health is
in its use. In these days, when there is a cult of
health and physical development, we are familiar
with people who live to preserve their health or to
restore it, fidgeting about the world for climates
and diets and exercises — people whose lives grow
more and more insignificant, until, should they
attain to the utmost physical perfection, they would
have reached only a condition which they would
share with almost all animals. Animal health,
which has no dignity as an end for human life, has
dignity and worth as an instrument of the mind,
and is its necessary instrument.
1 The substance of this and the following chapter appeared
as an article in the Hibbert Journal, April 1906.
232
chap, vi THE WILL OF GOD 233
If Jesus was the Saviour of the world, he
certainly began his salvation with the bodies of
men. After having endured in his own person
the pains of hardship and exhaustion, and the
special pressure of temptation upon physical weak-
ness, he began, as the Revised Version has it,
publicly to cure "all manner of disease and all
manner of sickness. And the report of him went
forth into all Syria : and they brought unto him all
that were sick, holden with divers diseases and
torments, possessed with devils, and epileptic, and
palsied, and he healed them." He gave physical
health, and cast out all such evil forces as were not
under the control of the human will. The first
manifestation of his glory, according to St. John's
Gospel, was at a marriage which he blessed by his
presence, and by the gift of an abundant supply
of the wine typical of that era of exalted physical
life which it was, as it seemed, his mission to
proclaim.
The necessity which underlay the bestowal of
this great gift of vitalising force for the body is
explained in the Johannine Gospel when Jesus
says that his works were one with the working of
the Father through all time. "The intention of
nature to heal," the preference of nature for health,
of which science speaks, are but paraphrases for the
law of God, the will of God, in the matter.
Jesus seems to have taken all the popular
beliefs of his era, as far as he thought they rep-
resented truth, and striven to bless and brake
them for the multitude. He took the common
belief in marvellous cures, and transmuted it into
234 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
a higher doctrine of the power of man and the
invariable will of God. He taught that such cures
were (i) the direct action of the finger of God;
(2) the natural sequence to a definite attitude in
the mind of man — not the mind of the healer, but
of the sufferer or those responsible for him. The
condition on which man could receive in his body
more of the overflowing vitality of God he freely
preached, which was simply the faith appertaining
to the cure.
Supposing the sort of cures Jesus worked to
have been, as has been so clamorously asserted,
actions on nature from beyond the region of nature,
nothing would be more remarkable than that the
condition he required should have been this, and
this only. He did not demand any moral standard,
or the forming of any moral purpose; he did not
ask for any loyalty to his kingdom. The body
was made whole in every case of manifest desire or
need, whether or not the desire extended to and
procured spiritual blessing, and without any
moralising on the uses of this form of adversity.
In several cases warnings were added which showed
all too clearly how little was to be expected for the
future of those who had been cured. Thus it
can hardly be supposed by the most didactically-
minded reader that any work of "spiritual" grace
was wrought on the lepers who never even gave
thanks. Where Jesus failed to evoke the psychic
condition required, as at Nazareth, he was the first
to proclaim that the law under which he worked
was unalterable. But the faith which conditioned
the action of God in merely curing the body seems
chap, vi THE WILL OF GOD 235
to have been so elementary that even in faithless
Nazareth he could cure a few sick folk.
The action of Jesus in devoting so large a part
of his short ministry to the healing of the body,
and his readiness to heal apartfrom any qualification
except the desire or need of the sufferer, contra-
dict two conventional Christian ideas, — that bodily
welfare is unimportant, and that bodily healing
was regarded by Jesus as merely the prelude to
moral reformation.
But, it will be said, surely pain is necessary and
salutary because it is the consequence and punish-
ment and cure of sin in the individual and in
the race; Jesus cannot have dissociated pain
and sin.
To this it may be replied that it seems
impossible to justify suffering as a cure for sin
when experience shows it is quite as often a cause
of sin. Further, we have to reckon with the
striking fact that Jesus plainly discountenanced the
doctrine that suffering was the consequence of sin
in the sufferer; and, in harmony with this, we
have the fact, noticed in a former chapter, that
suffering entailed by sin does not come to the
guilty only, or to them in proportion to their
guilt. But our contention here is not that sin and
suffering are by Jesus dissociated, or can be
dissociated, but rather that they are so closely
associated as to be reciprocal parts of one great
fact, and both to be warred against as offensive to
God and inimical to man.
The salvation of the inner life, which we
believe lasts beyond death, by union with the life
236 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
of God, is to the religious mind so much more
important than the salvation of the body that we
cannot believe that Jesus, who was, if nothing
more, the world's supreme religious genius, would
have given half his attention to the salvation of
this earthly body unless he had believed it to be
essential to the full salvation of the spirit. Every
Christian believes in one sense that health of body
is necessary to the perfection of spiritual life,
because he cannot think of a future salvation
without the idea of perfection in a body or the
equivalent of a body. It must be evident to the
open mind that there is very little in the teaching
of Jesus that can even suggest that he encouraged
men to hope for a future salvation except as
they experience it in this world; and the best
Christian thought of every age, more especially
of our own day, is eager to believe that salvation
of the spirit is offered to us in this life. But we
are in the throes of a transitional period, and we
have not yet widely realised that if some perfect
vehicle is necessary in the future to perfection of
the spirit, so a healthy body must be necessary
now to the highest degree of spiritual health
attainable in this life. V/e are endeavouring to per-
petuate false ideals of spiritual health, — ideals con-
sistent with bodily weakness and disease — because
high spiritual attainments were certainly reached
by the saints in a period when bodily strength was
ignorantly supposed to be a hindrance to spiritual
attainment. Our religious prejudices are still fed
by the eminent devotion that we find in the
memoirs of mediaeval ascetics, because we have
chap, vi THE WILL OF GOD 237
not realised that their spiritual life became lusty in
spite of, not because of, their neglect of the body.
A corporate prejudice is always the path of least
resistance for the individual mind; and yet, at the
door of our understanding the Christ would seem
to wait, in simplicity offering a perfectly natural,
because a perfectly divine, salvation. He has
summoned many messengers who call to us with
many voices to open and let this salvation in.
In the first place we have the voice of
philosophy, emphasising the essential oneness of
body and mind. Take the words of our leading
English psychologist:
"To regard mind as the collateral product of
its own external perceptions is simply to invert
the facts. One might as well say that reflections
produce their own mirror, or that houses evolve
architects. We are led, in a word, to doubt that
mind and matter can be dual realities, either
phenomenal or ontal." And again, "Since all
that we know and feel and do, all our facts and
theories, all our emotions and ideals and ends,
may be included in this one term — experience, it
is by raising this question as to the nature of
experience that, as I think, we shall see the
untenability of dualism." *
Next let us hear what medical science has to
say:
"My contention simply is that from the stand-
point of general pathology all normal and morbid
mental phenomena must be regarded merely as
1 Prof. James Ward, Sc.D., Naturalism and Agnosticism,
vol. ii. pp. 106, no.
238 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
the expression of the functional reaction of the
organ concerned." *
Next we come to the opinion of a physiologist.
"A reflex has already taken place when the
motor reaction of a cell is brought under the
influence of an irritant. . . . The gesture by
which we mechanically respond to the bow of
another person is a reflex, an almost unconscious
reflex when we bow abstractedly, a more complex
reflex when we rapidly take in by the mind's eye
the motives that prompted this act of politeness.
And always and everywhere, whether it is a case
of the action of the most humble organ or of
the most exalted workings of our mind, it is just
the same mechanism. ... A compliment tickles
our self-esteem and influences our determinations.
A cutting word excites our wrath and makes our
blood boil. The involuntary gesture is associated
with our mental reactions. . . . Physiology must
undertake the work of pursuing the study of these
reactions of the organism, whether they have to
do with nutrition and the ordinary reproduction
of all living beings, or with the simple psychic
facts that are observed in animals, or the marvellous
mechanism of the human mind in its highest
manifestations. . . .
"The simple idea of absolute or relative human
liberty leads us to establish an essential difference
between a fault of character and a mental malady.
This distinction, and I cannot repeat it too often,
is artificial and untenable. At what degree
1 From paper read before the British Medical Association,
1901, by W. Ford Robertson, M.D., pp. 67, 82-3.
chap, vi THE WILL OF GOD 239
do indecision, irritability, impressionability, and
emotional disturbances become sicknesses ? Are
sorrow and pessimism faults or illnesses ? In the
mental domain it is still more impossible to try
to make this distinction. It seems only to exist
when one is looking at the extremes. It seems
normal to us to be sad when we lose a friend, to
be discouraged in the presence of failure; but we
regard anybody as diseased who commits suicide
in order to escape the perplexities to which we
are all subjected. We all have our periods of
indecision, which often appear exaggerated to the
eyes of others; but we send a patient to a
physician when he passes hours in agonising
perplexity without being able to decide whether
he will change his shirt to-day or to-morrow. . . .
Properly speaking, then, psychology is only a
chapter of physiology, of biology/' *
Or let us listen to the cry of the practical
religious reformer. The Jesuit tells us that if he
has the custody of a child for its first seven years,
by God's help he will form its life; and he does
it. Who can hold a child morally responsible
for the environment of its earlier years ? The
revivalist cries, "Give me crowds, and music, and
power of speech by which to excite their sensi-
bilities, and God will snap the chains of habit
and education that hold many individuals in the
crowd, and start them on a new life from which
they will not revert;" and it is done. Yet the
hour and the music and the oratory are to men
thus converted mere physical accidents.
1 Dr. Paul Dubois, Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders*
24o GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
Mind, independent of brain, is an assumption
made because, on the whole, the functions of body
and brain account for the self less adequately than
does the assumption of mind. Mind, thought of
apart, is hypothetical just as God is hypothetical,
and we may add, just as free will is hypothetical.
All these conceptions are in the region of faith.
We believe in the freedom of our wills, though
determinism seems to be a fact of knowledge.
We believe that mind can separate from body,
but have no knowledge of the abstraction called
"the soul/'
We may be bewildered by the different stand-
points from which our modern schools are showing
us this mystery, asserting the oneness of spirit
and body in various connections, but we can no
longer set aside their many voices. One section
of them tells us that the criminal is a criminal
because of the defective bodily tissue that he has
inherited, and therefore it is cruelty to attribute to
him any personal moral failure, or punish him
as a delinquent. Another set are telling us that,
because parents will certainly transmit their own
sins in defective physique to their children, their
moral responsibility is heightened by that know-
ledge and extends, not only to the necessity of a
higher moral life, but to the need for the most
hygienic life, and that if they refuse to act up to
this responsibility they should be judged and
treated as criminals. Another set are telling us
that, because our every fault is the result of some
morbid functioning in the brain-cells, health
rather than spiritual life is the counsel of per-
chap, vi THE WILL OF GOD 241
fection; while another and ever-growing school
is declaring that most of our diseases proceed
from the morbid action of the brain, which is
caused by morbid thoughts under the control of
the will, and that, by calling in the aid of religion
or philosophy or morals, we can so exercise healthy
thoughts as to cure our bodies and keep them in
health. Who shall tell us the difference between
the spiritual and physical life ? It would take too
long to tell the innumerable aspects in which the
unity of mind and matter is forcing itself upon us.
The bearing of this unity upon the religious
theory of life is very close. If physical evil
produces moral evil we can no longer believe that
a God to whom moral evil is abhorrent is the
author of our physical afflictions. Either moral
evil must be within the scheme of God's special
providence for the soaring soul, or else physical
evil cannot be part of his providence. If we
ought, in the name of all that is holy, to resign
ourselves to bodily disease as his will, we ought to
resign ourselves to sinfulness for the same reasons.
If, on the other hand, he calls us, in his name and
by his strength, to resist sin because it is loathsome
to him, we must, for the same reason, resist disease.
If the salvation from sin is by faith and through
the energy of his supernatural life, we must, to
hold him consistent, believe that he offers the
same energy of supernatural life to be utilised by
our faith against what is only another aspect of
sin.
Nor can we, with any consistency, distinguish
between sin and the bodily results of sin by the
242 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
argument that it is his will that we suffer the
results because the race has sinned. Take, for
example, the case of a good man in the prime of
life, living well by all the laws of hygiene, morals,
and religion, who finds himself suddenly attacked
by some hideous organic disease that cannot be
attributed to his mode of life. The religious
theory is that God sends the disease in order to
do a work of grace in his soul which could not
otherwise be done. If the man be in a gracious
condition there is no doubt that he will be very
conscious of unique nearness to God in the
extremity of his need. Real, vital, as this ex-
perience in itself is, it proves nothing beyond
itself. These hours of unique consciousness of
God's presence — what are they ? Is a good man
really nearer to God at one time than at another ?
His consciousness of God's presence is due to
the intense attention that he devotes to knocking
at the door of God's own place, to seeking his
face, to asking for his grace. Was he incapable
in health of devoting this attention ? Is it
necessary to believe that God requires the whirl-
wind of emotion and the fire of pain in which to
speak, and that in the quiet monotony of health
and the normal exercise of benevolent activities
for the spread of the kingdom he cannot make
his still small voice heard ? In the meantime
the sick man's benevolent activities for the world
are stopped; the benevolent activities of his
household are withdrawn from the world and
centred upon him; the physical health of every
one closely connected with him is lowered by
chap, vi THE WILL OF GOD 243
contact with pain and disease; the subjects of
this contact are by such lowering made more
liable to such disease, even if no contagious
germs escape. Is the world so thoroughly saved
that it can be through any will of God or his
Christ that good men and women who are spend-
ing their lives for its salvation must concentrate
all their energies in enduring or curing or solacing
disease, in order that some vital hours of personal
communion with God may be attained ? Nor,
because such is the present order of things, ought
that mere fact to induce the Christian mind to
believe that the order is of God. "Whatever is,
is right" must apply to all vice if it is accepted
as a principle.
How often are we confronted with the saying
that it is the good and the lovely who die young,
the useful and the loving who are cut off in their
prime, while the useless and crabbed, the worse
than useless and worse than sour, live on. This
impression is, no doubt, a case of the fallacy of
positive instances; but it is only an over-state-
ment of the certain fact that death and misfortune
assail and disable those who are helping in every
good cause as often as those who are hindering
the progress of the race. How does this bear on
our faith in a God who wills and works for our
moral progress ? The record of every Christian
mission shows how large a proportion of the
workers, perhaps after long preparation, fall
prematurely on the field, or are rendered useless
by accidents or diseases which might occur any-
where or to men engaged in any enterprise —
244 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
misfortunes not necessarily involved in that
personal conflict with evil which constitutes some
degree of martyrdom, and which may be, even in
failure, a moral triumph. All political and com-
mercial records show how many are the forms of
disaster that dog the steps of every noble enterprise,
as well as the particular form of failure which its
nobility challenges. When we reflect on the
attribution of all this to the divine attention we
cannot but be vividly reminded of our Lord's
words, "Every kingdom divided against itself is
brought to desolation."
CHAPTER VII
HISTORY OF HEALTH BY FAITH
We have every evidence that the apostles believed
without question that all the children of the king-
dom, to whom they in their turn ministered, had
a right to this least part of the great salvation, the
initial blessing of bodily health ; and the last verses
of St. Mark's Gospel, with all other later additions
to the Gospels on the same topic, prove clearly the
general faith of the early Church,1 viz. that every
believer was to have health in a degree that would
render him immune from all poisons, and give him
the power of presence which can evoke self-govern-
ment in those who have lost mental or bodily
control of themselves.
1 The fathers and historians of the first five centuries clearly
testify to the power of the Church to heal by faith. From among
them take only two in addition to Tertullian, already quoted.
Irenaeus, second century, as quoted by Eusebius : "Far are
they, the Churches, from raising the dead in the manner the Lord
and his apostles did, by prayer, yet even among the brethren
frequently, in a case of necessity, when a whole church has
united in much fasting and prayer, the spirit has returned to
the exanimated body, and the man has been granted to the
prayers of the saints." And again: "Some most certainly and
truly cast out demons ... as others heal the sick by the im-
position of hands, and moreover, as we said above, even the dead
245
246 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
Yet we quickly discover that in many com-
munities the blessing was not realised; as, for
instance, in the Church of Corinth, where, not a
lifetime after the institution of the Lord's Supper,
many were weak and sickly and many died
prematurely. St. Paul reproaches the Corinthians
with this, and points out the cause (i Cor. xi.
29-30). If the touch of Christ's body in the
sacrament had always been accepted by faith to
the maintenance of the health that the body
needed to enable it to glorify him, the holiest as
well as the basest must have used the temple of
God more reverently, and could not have supposed
austerities to be for the welfare of the soul.
For centuries before the Christian era the doc-
trine that sin emanated from what was material
had been implied in the philosophies of India and
Greece, and had pressed into the Semitic religions
from both sides. It had had a large effect upon
the most progressive Judaic thinkers, and early
tainted the teaching of the Christian Church, which
it afterward permeated. As Dr. Bruce remarks,
Jesus did not teach this. "He is reported to have
have been raised and continued with us many years. ... As
the church has freely received she also freely ministers."
Eusebius, early in fourth century: "Who is he who knows
not how delightful it is to us that through the name of our
Saviour, coupled with prayers that are pure, we cast out every
kind of demon ? And thus the word of our Saviour, and the
doctrine which is from him, have made us all to be greatly su-
perior to the power which is invisible," etc. And he adds the
reason why these gifts had declined in the Church in his time —
namely, not that the heritage of miracle had ceased, but that
the Churches were "unworthy" of them.
chap, vii HEALTH BY FAITH 247
said to the priests and elders: 'The publicans and
the harlots shall go into the kingdom of God before
you.' The grounds of this comparative estimate
are obvious. The sins of the one class had their
seat and source in the flesh, leaving the inner man
to a certain extent untouched; the sins of the
Pharisees were vices of the spirit, sin had possessed
the whole spiritual nature. ... In the light of
this judgment of Christ, and its grounds, we see
how far he was from entertaining the view as to
the nature and origin of sin held by the Greeks
and by deists, that it has its seat in the flesh, and
makes its appearance in human conduct because
man is a being possessed of a material organisation
which exercises a misleading, disturbing influence
upon his rational nature. He rather believed that
sin appears only in mitigated form when it springs
out of bodily appetites and passions, and that it is
seen in its true malignity when it has its origin in
the soul, and reveals an evil will, a selfish heart,
and a perverted conscience." x
Had the Church maintained the view that
health was the heritage of the children of the
Lord, Christendom, as far as we can see, would
have been saved from the distress caused by the
supposed antagonism between the laws of nature
and the laws of grace. Had the children of the
light of faith accepted the teaching of Jesus that
all good is of God, the light which is their special
inheritance would have made them love all light.
They would not have stoned the prophets of
scientific light that God raised up time and again,
1 Apologetics, by A. B. Bruce, D.D., pp. 57-58.
248 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
even in dark ages; and the world would not have
waited for modern science before it learnt that
there is a distinct "intention" in nature towards
health — in other words, that the divine sustaining
force intends health. The source of the Church's
error and lack has always been unbelief; and
having, through unbelief, mislaid the gift of
health, she next pointed to her own experience to
prove that God had withdrawn it. But "kings
give, they do not lend"; and the gift, once given,
must be hers. Confidently holding to the full
salvation of her Saviour, she could never have
assimilated the belief that physical nature was in
some peculiar way the home of the devil, and half
her warfare would have been accomplished ere it
was begun. Her force would have been more
steadfastly directed against the real strongholds of
the enemy, which to-day still stand strong.
Disregard of bodily pain had no part in the
mind of Christ; but indifference to pain, even the
seeking of pain to develop fortitude, were aspects
of a virtue much esteemed by the heathen world.
It was, indeed, the tenderness of Jesus Christ
which, as much if not more than anything else,
made it difficult for the heathen world to accept
him as a hero; and it is the legacy of these
heathen sentiments that makes his precepts seem
impracticable to us to-day. Had Jesus pandered
in the least degree to that insensibility to suffering
which every savage and all ascetics seek after, and
to the belief in force, the earthly synonym for
government, he would to that degree have wor-
shipped the prince of this world and attained
worldly dominion more easily.
chap, vii HEALTH BY FAITH 249
Where he performed God's will perfectly the
Church failed, and soon depicted her Saviour as a
God so austere that a feminine object of adoration
was felt to be necessary. With a great and ever-
increasing number of heathen converts, indifference
to pain came early to be regarded as a Christian
virtue, and the infliction of pain a Christian
necessity : asceticism and persecution stalk hand
in hand across the fields of Christendom. The
same law of the power of mind over body which
at the beneficent command of Christ worked
health, began under different direction to produce
marvels of a different sort: the choice of horrid
austerities, visions, levitations, such phenomena as
that of the stigmata — all these became manifesta-
tions of the spiritual life which we do not now con-
sider wholesome. As they were supposed to be the
will of God quite as much as were marvels of heal-
ing, which still incidentally accompanied them, it
became necessary to suppose that God, who
worked these miracles, aimed, not at health or at
ill-health, but at marvels. Thus, when unhealthy
results of religious fervour came to be classed with
the normal benefits of faith, both kinds of evidence
of what was called supernatural power were con-
stantly simulated, fell into disrepute with the
thoughtful, and, except as temporary and localised
manifestations, gradually ceased. Although, in
dusty archives, the Church has preserved theoretic
belief in her power to heal the sick, she never
practically admits that it is her duty to heal them.
In this general gloom God's Spirit of truth
and blessing, always pressing to enter the heart
250 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
of humanity, is seen in those movements which
rose to assert the claim of nature to be instinct
with God and the claim of man's body to
reverence. Prophets of physical science appeared
who discerned unity under variety, order under
confusion, truth under all that was phenomenal
— conceptions ever denoting a supreme object
of faith. The Church refused to identify her
God with that underlying reason and power
which the inspired prophets of science, dimly
at first, discerned, and served with the faith
of martyrs. The reason of her refusal was
fear; the reason of her fear was lack of faith.
She was holding on to the Source of Faith with
only one hand; the other hung withered at her
side. In practice she had pushed aside the actual,
exquisite, marvellous temple of the Holy Ghost,
the individual body of flesh; she must, pursuing
this path, set aside the individual brain and mind,
the light of reason. Having lost reverence for
the individual body, her conception of the corpor-
ate body became artificial, including and excluding
too much; and, despising the individual mind, her
method of ascertaining the corporate mind became
ineffectual. The faith of individualism and the
faith of science joined forces throughout Christen-
dom, and fought against the cult of the withered
hand and all that want of faith which makes for
bondage and a partial salvation.
While the anguish of this war was and is, we
always find in secluded spots the recognition of
the revelation that would have hindered this
unnatural strife. A series of local communities
chap, vii HEALTH BY FAITH 251
arose which determinedly held the belief that the
health of the body was the will of Christ, and to
be claimed by prayer. Examining what records
there are of these in the light of those more
modern sects which exhibit faith-cures for our
inspection to-day, there cannot be, for the un-
prejudiced Christian, much doubt that wherever
this part of Christian faith has been exercised,
many mighty works of healing have taken place.
Let us, then, note carefully that when a number
of people who believed that health could be claimed
as the will of God gathered together, shut up to
their own society either by some separating
doctrine or by persecution, faith rose to an un-
wavering height, and was crowned by the divine
response. A shrine or relic that evoked the
necessary faith has always produced the same
results. As an example, take the miracles of
healing at the tomb of the Jansenist Abbe Paris
in the eighteenth century, said by Hume to have
been as well attested as the best evidence in a
learned age could make them. There is evidence
that the same thing happened among the early
Moravians and Quakers; and, here and there,
within or without sectarian communities, healers
arose who had the power of so convincing and
leading other men's minds and emotions that in
many cases they could produce in others the
certainty which they themselves possessed. Luther
himself, though like all the reformers prejudiced
against Popish "miracles," did by prayer cast out
demons and recover men from the point of death.
If any one will examine critically, yet reverently, the
252 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
life of the faith-healing communities of to-day, he
will find that the same circumstances are necessary
to bring about any fair proportion of such cures as
are variously called instances of "the divine heal-
ing," or "the faith-cure," or "the mind-cure."
Either the subject must enter into the community
and, by accepting its separating doctrines, close
eyes and ears to the larger Church without, or
he must be under the constant and prolonged
influence of some individual who holds the con-
viction with enthusiasm, or he must visit some
shrine, or be in a solitary place, as some missionaries
and travellers are, or be isolated by disposition,
circumstance, or infirmity. Yet, although there
are many successes, now, as formerly, the result of
what seems to be absolute faith is not always
health; and more baffling still to the honest
inquirer is the fact that it is not the highest type
of mind or character that most frequently receives
sudden or obvious accession of health.
From such a record very varying inferences
are drawn, even by those who realise keenly that
the Church has lost and is losing much by resisting
this part of the gospel of Christ. In attempting
an explanation, some have even endeavoured to
classify diseases as curable or non-curable by the
Almighty ! Others have thought to make the
acquisition of health, even in the present state of
the Church, the test of spiritual obedience, and in
other ways to make the available evidence prove
more or less than it does.
Let us be careful neither to add to nor subtract
from such records as we have. If we would draw
chap, vii HEALTH BY FAITH 253
a right inference we must first go back to where
the true faith sprang, where the Divine Man
grasped God with both hands, bringing together
into a unity within human ken the force which
animates and sustains matter and the voice which
speaks to the conscience of man.
We find that Jesus does not blame the
individual for lack of faith, while he constantly
reproves, upbraids, and reproaches his race, his
generation, and the religious classes in the nation,
for faithlessness. Only after his apostles had
lived exclusively in his companionship for some
time does he level the reproach at the little band;
and there is but one solitary instance in which,
before his death, he reproves an individual for the
sin of doubt. When our Lord upbraids the Jews
for lack of faith, he does it on the ground that
the national movements of the time, especially the
preaching of John, ought to have raised the
general level of faith. The paradox of individual
and corporate faith — it is only by the utmost effort
of individuals that the many can rise; it is only
by the rise of the many that any individual can
realise the fruit of his effort — is always just below
the surface of his discourse. Even while Jesus
upbraids his fellow-countrymen for unbelief, he
freely admits that their ears and eyes are closed
and their hearts hardened by the spirit of their
generation; he ceaselessly and hopefully exhorts
the individual to faith or praises him for possessing
it, he never blames him for want of faith ; he con-
stantly blames the collective soul for doubting,
but admits that his exhortation will be useless.
254 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
Here we come on the reality of the corporate
nature of religion, and knock against the limit of
individual responsibility and power. In religion,
the region in which the soul gains most in solitude
with God, it is seen to be most dependent on
the corporate soul. The individual or strongest
religious purpose cannot rise far above the average
level, and can outstrip by very little the nobler
characters of his time. This is not a matter for
argument, but a fact of history. All history
shows that the inspiration of the giants of faith is
conditioned by the mind of their age. That all
this, which our Lord recognised, is the current
thought of to-day is shown by the frequent use of
such phrases as " the spirit of the age," " telepathy/'
"the war fever," "esprit de corps."
It has before been remarked that the idea of
wonderful cures worked by those specially religious
was the common belief in Palestine and the sur-
rounding countries at the time of Christ. It was,
therefore, not more difficult then for the individual
to rise to the assured expectation of bodily health
which the person and teaching of Jesus evoked
than it is now for men to be patriotic when a
popular war makes patriotism rife, or to show
self-abnegation at a time when great calamity
is drawing out the more unselfish virtues of the
community. The case became different where a
Christian man or Christian community was sur-
rounded by a more sceptical heathen element, as,
for example, in the case of St. Paul himself, who
was often obliged to conduct his solitary warfare
surrounded by unbelievers, or in the case of the
chap, vii HEALTH BY FAITH 255
Church at Corinth, where " many were sick " ; or
later, in the case of all believers, when the Church
as a whole had practically repudiated any duty
with regard to the health of the body.
These considerations make it evident why
modern sects that preach the healing of the body
by faith find by experiment that the diseased
person must be surrounded by the faithful in a
community, or worked upon by a healer, or, in
one way or another, isolated from the common
unbelief of the mass. They also explain why
higher natures that have the widest intellectual
sympathy are seldom at present the subjects of
notable "cures" — such will always, by their power
of sympathy, be most subject to the woe of the
common mind. To-day, every individual who
reasonably accepts the salvation of the body is
dragged back by the collective soul of Christen-
dom; and men of the five talents, large in under-
standing and heart, are least able to brush aside
the race of which they are part. They do not
build towers upon which a few can appear to be
nearer heaven; rather they put down new pave-
ments in the city of God among men, thus raising
the whole slowly. Their faith, many times more
fervent than that of the bigot, produces a less
visible but much greater result. When the
corporate faith reaches a higher level, the gain
of the whole will show in them most richly, and
in them will find its culmination.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BALANCE OF NATURE
The ethical laws of the kingdom demand that a
moral miracle be worked within us. The physical
powers displayed by Jesus as characteristic features
of that kingdom are also beyond our natural reach,
although perhaps not so far beyond as its moral
requirements. We cannot doubt that Jesus meant
these two sorts of heavenly power — the power of
obedience to the law of love, and the power of
working the physical marvels of faith — to be
associated as a double revelation of God's will for
men, and to be brought into clear contrast with
human powerlessness. All that he preached
revealed man's moral imperfection in the strong
sunlight of God, as in spring sunshine an old coat
shows stains and rents and threadbare patches
that we had not suspected in the gloom of winter;
all that he did brought out man's powerlessness
to cope with the physical nature to which he was
bound.
The vision of physical power in the healing of
body and mind and in control over the things of
earth, was needed to enable the first disciples to
256
ch. viii THE BALANCE OF NATURE 257
trust to that invisible moral force which could so
change man's moral nature that the impossible
good should become possible. The good news
which Jesus set forth was that God was willing
and able to work with man and in man to pro-
duce, not only pure unhampered moral activity,
but also superior physical power to be its support
and maintain the true balance of human nature.
If physical power does not grow with the growth of
the spiritual nature, ill must result, and as a plain
matter of fact it does result. There is a truth
embedded in the contention of the materialistic
medical school that religion is detrimental to
health. It is not only in religious manias of
various sorts that it is illustrated. Is it not true
that the sanest family, if possessed by the true
religious enthusiasm, does not maintain itself in
physical vigour or increase in successive genera-
tions, but rather dwindles in numbers and in force ?
We see this phenomenon around us, and when we
hear the more spiritually-minded medical school
recommend religion as an aid to a healthy life
we are not surprised that they limit their recom-
mendation to religion of a moderate sort and
degree. They warn us against any religious
originality or depth of feeling or mystic vision.
We are bound to admit that the facts of our
present physical life bear out the warning.
Yet Professor Seeley's dictum, "No heart is
pure that is not passionate; no virtue is safe that
is not enthusiastic," l stands as a most noble
expression of the truth that to practise a nice
1 Ecce Homo, chap. i.
258 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
moderation in religion is to be something much
lower than irreligious. The excitement of the
religious crowd gives insight into the things of
God, gives the faith that accepts God's gift of
moral and physical health; ecstasy and agony in
private prayer have their uses in the most practical
life of religious benevolence; from their secret
is learnt the art of blessing the world openly.
What we need is, not to guard against religious
intensity, but to seek bodily reinforcement. If it
were true that either hunger and thirst for God or
bodily health and social well-being must be sacri-
ficed, we would defy the doctors and cast away
physical welfare without a sigh. If such is the
choice the ascetic is right. But such was not the
choice that Jesus offered. He came to unite the
forces which had been set at variance, to restore
the balance of human nature. It is this better
balance of which we now feel the need so sorely.
We want health and strength, more practical
friendliness with the laws of nature, and more
strenuous use of them for the welfare of the world.
With the energies of physical regeneration work-
ing in him and through him, man may exercise to
the full all his forces of prayer, in the strengthening
of which lies the only hope of individual and racial
salvation.
A Church which for insanity and hysteria,
disease and infirmity, can offer none but rare and
occasional remedy, which goes further and teaches
that these are God's will for the world, is unfit
to represent the Apostles or early Fathers, and
certainly does not represent the Christ. It cannot
ch. vin THE BALANCE OF NATURE 259
be honest, it cannot be pleasing to God, to laud
Jesus Christ as divine and at the same time teach
that God's will is to be descried and accepted in
those things which Jesus taught were the work of
the Evil One and to be abolished by Christian
faith. It matters nothing here whether in speak-
ing of the kingdom of Satan his words were
parabolic or had the meaning they bear on their
face; he certainly meant that all the ills that flesh
is heir to were against the will of God.
Let the Church seek for truth in the right way
and she will find the meaning of this parable, if
parable it is. When she accepts the authority of
Jesus and does his work, she will by degrees
know all the truth she needs regarding this terrible
fact of disease: she will never know it before.
Jesus pointed to the prayer of faith. How many
hours, by what multitudes of people, are spent
each week in Christendom, wailing out complaints
to God and repeating cries for his mercy in
temporal things, as if his lack of mercy was the
cause of all our privations ! How arrogant is the
assumption, how unfaithful, how sad ! When the
Church puts a stop to this insult to the divine
nature, and spends the same time in expressing
her humble, joyful trust that the power of Jesus
will be made operative in his kingdom, then, and
not till then, will she have taken his way.
The imitation of Jesus includes the healing of
the sick, the casting out of devils, the feeding of
the poor with enough and to spare, the turning
of the common water of the common life into
the wine of love. This imitation is obligatory,
26o GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
and requires from first to last something much
more than imitation. It requires a will divine in
its strength — as much stronger than that which
we have by nature as the will of Jesus was stronger
than ours, God's will within a human will, strong
enough to embrace the pain of the world and
vanquish death and all its powers, a resignation of
human fear and timidity to God's will which
works life, and more abundant life, for all. It is
not by reciting the creeds of the past and girding
at those who reject them, and certainly not by
rejecting them as the result of some transient
position of the schools, that the Church can ever
teach the world to believe. She must so rejoice
in God her Saviour as to communicate his health,
physical and moral, to the sick and sinful, until
they shall be compelled by experience to rise up
and call her blessed.
The result of much eclectic Christianity, which,
although it fights for the doctrine of the Incarna-
tion, chooses out of the revelation of Christ those
points of teaching and practice by which it will
abide, has been a fashion of taking from the story
all that is not consistent with a modern materialism.
This has formed a religion perfectly comprehen-
sible, but on all sides we see the children of those
who hold it seeking food for faith in the large
assumptions of a dogmatic pessimism or in the
more cheerful folly of preaching that there is
nothing real in sin or sorrow. Results so un-
expected ought surely to make it clear that we
are quite incapable of knowing what effect any
doctrine will have upon the nature within us that
ch. viii THE BALANCE OF NATURE 261
we so little understand, ought surely to make us
humble enough to accept the revelation of the
Incarnation in its entirety, if we accept it at all.
If health of body and volitional power is the
heritage of Christendom, it is waiting to be realised
by a corporate faith. If there is a Divine abhor-
rence of disease and all forms of nervous tyrannies
and mental aberrations, all such suffering is due,
not to necessity, but to the lack of faith in the
Church at large. Many of the noblest children
of the kingdom are to-day reasonably convinced
that the procession of the Spirit of God manwards
involves health of body and power of will, and
yet cannot appropriate the health because of the
faithlessness of the many. Here, then, is now
the first necessity of the higher life, the individual
and corporate faith which brings the significant
and sacred experience of increased bodily power,
a power that will make all spiritual verities more
real.
The only basis for such a faith is the acknow-
ledged will of God. We cannot hold it and
question whether it is God's will to cure one man
or another. No shadow cast upon the world
would be so terrible as that which would be cast
by variableness or turning about of the will which
is the source of all good and perfect gifts. There
have been times and places in which it was thought
to be a matter for the special providence of God
whether this or that man might be godly or not,
ought to be clean or not: we now believe boldly
that God's will is goodness, is cleanliness, for all.
Faith in divine healing as revealed in the Lord
262 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
jesus cannot for any length of time rest on any
narrower foundation than this. Until we class
together those awful realities, sin, disease, and
dirt, and realise that ill-health of any sort bears
to a man's body the same relation that dirt bears
to his house or sin to his soul, faith in the healing
touch of Christ will still tend to be associated with
inadequate theologies, to be local and ephemeral,
evinced by one section of Christians or another,
but rejected by the Church at large.
CHAPTER IX
THE NATURE MARVELS
While belief in the marvellous cures which Jesus
worked upon the bodies and minds of men has
become comparatively easy since we have gained
evidence that such cures, although still com-
paratively rare, are not out of the course of nature,
those of his works classed as "nature-miracles"
are still quite inexplicable to us.
When the learning of men is applied to
documents written by men and facts of human
history, there comes a point in historic and literary
criticism when all that need be known in order
to form a sound judgment is known. That the
Book of Daniel is not history ; that the writers of
the New Testament made mistakes in their inter-
pretation of the Old Testament, are statements
which can be proved by ample evidence. On the
other hand, in considering those Christian marvels
which appear to contradict the laws of nature we
must not seek an assurance inconsistent with the
fact that nature is so imperfectly known to us that
we can never be sure she has not some fresh
surprise in store.
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264 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
Some of the most impossible of them form
part of the history of Jesus after the most searching
literary tests have been applied to the record.
They stand as an abiding witness that we are only
beginning to understand what he gave us to learn,
that the full meaning of his earthly ministry, as it
relates to the duties and privileges of the kingdom
on earth, is for future generations — just as the
chiefest gains of science, the higher social life, and
the fruition of all our progress, is for future
generations. Yet there is something to be learnt
from them now.
Having seen that two out of the three classes
of our Lord's marvels may well be conceived as
within the province of nature, we have a strong
presumption, in turning to the nature-miracles,
that we shall find the same true of them.
In the first place, it is certain that the Gospels
lay no claim to record any miracle in the modern
sense — by which term we mean, any action of God
which, even if the same earthly conditions were
present, need not occur again. At the beginning
of the Christian era men had not tried to draw a
dividing line between the possible and impossible
in nature. Cataclysms which belong strictly to
the domain of nature, such as thunderbolts, earth-
quakes, and other prodigies, were called marvels,
in common with minor things which appeared to
contradict natural order. The wonderful works
which Jesus did were never catalogued as super-
natural by the mind of the time, because nature
herself was looked upon as the mother of marvels.
God and nature had never been dissociated : what
chap, ix THE NATURE MARVELS 265
God did nature did; what nature did God did;
or if the devil was supposed to be the agent, there
was no dissociation of his works from those of
nature, however extraordinary his actions might be.
When science had her first beginnings she was
bound to attempt to draw a line between the
possible and impossible; but in so doing she
scarcely took time to classify the Gospel marvels,
until a frightened and self-defensive Church took
upon her unbidden a quarrel with the knowledge
of nature that comes through science, and insisted
on claiming them as miracles in the scientific
sense.
Secondly, if the signs we are discussing were
' miraculous,' we are bound to admit that they fall
far short of what men might naturally expect, and
had been taught to expect, of the unconditioned
action of divine power. They did not realise the
conception which man in the ancient world had,
which man still popularly has, of power and glory.
The psalms, the prophetic writings of Israel, are
full of descriptions of more glorious acts of God's
power; and in the poetry of polytheistic religions
works of greater splendour are attributed to their
deities when they would manifest their presence
to men. The pillar of fire and cloud which
went before Israel in the wilderness; the thunders
of Jove; the flaming arrows of Apollo, and
the earthquakes of Poseidon, "shaker of the sea
and land" — all these suggest divine power by
their magnificence. Jewish expectation in the
time of Christ was moulded by such passages in
prophetic poetry as these: — "The child shall die
266 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
an hundred years old." "The wolf and the lamb
shall feed together; the lion shall eat straw like
the bullock. They shall not hurt nor destroy."
"The Lord will come with fire and with his
chariots, like a whirlwind." "Then shall thy
light break forth as the morning, and thine health
shall spring forth speedily, and thy righteousness
shall go before thee, and the glory of the Lord shall
be thy rearward." Or they had God's power
suggested by figures drawn from earthly power
and victory, such as, "I will gather all nations
against Jerusalem to battle . . . Then shall the
Lord go forth and fight against those nations."
Or they had the mysteries of the unseen requisi-
tioned in all those abnormal psychic phenomena
described by the prophet Joel and joyfully claimed
by St. Peter as fulfilled in the days of Pentecost.
We are familiar with the idea that the Jews
expected the Messiah to be an earthly king with
a temporal kingdom and were disappointed; but
we do not sufficiently dwell on the fact that,
whatever may have been the expectations of glory
raised by the figures in which the prophets foretold
outward manifestations of God's spiritual power,
they were no more realised in the marvels of
Jesus than was the expectation of temporal power
realised in the kingdom he established. We all
admit that there was an obvious reason why Jesus
did not establish an empire of this world : if our
Lord had had all the kingdoms of the world given
to him by some power external to those kingdoms,
either God or devil, he would, without the long
process of natural conversion, have had no hold
chap, ix THE NATURE MARVELS 267
upon them, unless that precious requisite of salva-
tion, their power of choice, had been taken from
them. Further, we admit that to perform miracles
which coerced man's reason would have been to
use a force as futile as that of armies which could
but coerce his outward acts of worship. But
although the best Christian thought disclaims the
idea that the Gospel miracles were designed to
coerce man's reason, we have to face the fact that
almost all notable Christian apologists have claimed
that they are miracles in the sense of being effects
for which no cause can be assigned except the
unconditioned fiat of the Almighty; and it is
further claimed that miracles in this sense are the
only proper attendants of the stupendous fact of
the Incarnation — necessary signs of divine glory
and power when God descended to dwell among
men. The nature-miracles are the last stronghold
of those who maintain this view, which must now
be briefly considered. Against it an important
difficulty is to be urged.
If, as our apologists have claimed, the miracles
wrought by Jesus were not conditioned by means,
why did they fall so far short of what they might
have been when all that was required by the
psychic law, "My kingdom is not of this world,"
was that they should not coerce man's reason ?
We seem compelled to ask why, if ten lepers
could be healed at a word, all the lepers in
Palestine were not quietly healed. If three
disciples might see the transfigured Christ, why
might not that vision have been vouchsafed to the
imprisoned Baptist, or the perplexed mother, or
268 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
the doubting Thomas ? If wine could be made
to flow freely at one wedding-feast, why not at
a multitude of feasts ? If a weary crowd could
be fed upon a mountain side, why not the poor of
the cities, left during those three years in their
habitual condition of disease and semi-starvation ?
Such benevolences as these might have persuaded
without compulsion.
There are only two possible answers to the
question, why the marvellous works of Jesus fell
so far short of what every one must expect of the
Manifestation of divine power. One — that there
was indeed here nothing but a holy man about
whose history grew a miraculous legend — is quite
inadequate; for had these marvels been legendary,
they would have been many times more glorious,
as well as more fantastic and paltry. The second
answer appears to be the only one that satisfies
reason; it is that they were as strictly conditioned
by the natural sequences of cause and effect as any
action of our own, the difference being that they
were conditioned by sequences of which we have
only the slightest knowledge. If the marvels
wrought by Jesus were strictly the result of natural
causes, psychical or physical, if he could only do
what he did by taking the utmost advantage of
the psychic and physical means that the strength
of his personality put within his control, we can
well understand why those works were so limited
in scope. Thus, in the strict limitation of the
range and outward glory of the wonders worked
by Jesus we have another strong presumption that
they were subject to conditions.
chap, ix THE NATURE MARVELS 269
Have we, then, in the works of Jesus nothing
unique, nothing that adequately testifies to a Pres-
ence on earth that compels the adoration of the
pure in heart, while it defies estimation by any
of the human standards by which men had before
him been obliged to measure the divine ?
We compare our Lord's miracles with the
natural expectation concerning phenomena that
would show forth divine glory, and they appear
poor and meagre. We compare them, again, with
the marvels that have their birth in local fancies
and their record in religious fiction, and we find
in them a dignity that in this comparison is
majestic, a tender utility and grave economy
which mark them as belonging to a higher and
purer level of thought. When we make a third
comparison, and set our Lord's power as displayed
in the nature-miracles beside human power with
which we are familiar, we are confounded by the
contrast of man's feebleness in the midst of natural
forces.
Compare the genius of the man Napoleon.
Perhaps no other man has shown such extraordi-
nary power in organising rough crowds into armies,
in compelling the wealth and the ingenuity of the
world for the sustenance and equipment of those
armies. What was it that foiled him in the zenith
of his power ? A desert place and a hungry
multitude ! In our late war in South Africa the
same direful circumstances were repeated many
a time on a smaller scale; they come home to us
because the sufferers were those of our own house-
hold. Once, upon the veldt, a little company,
270 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
some hundreds of men, after having ridden hard
since sunrise in pursuit of an elusive enemy, came
at night to the camping place where they were to
receive the first meal of the day. Some dry food
there was — not enough to go round; but the
scarcity was nothing compared with the lack of
water. A few gallons were made into dirty black
tea and served out to the first comers, and for
the rest there was nothing but burning thirst and
hunger for another night and day. More than
one of those strong men turned away sobbing with
disappointment when they found they could not
obtain a mouthful of tea. This is what the wealth
of England and modern military science could
accomplish ! Our compassion becomes almost
fever within us as we think of the shame and
pain of such suffering. We turn to an incident
in the life of Jesus for which there is as good
historical evidence as for any other, and watch
with what incomparable serenity he feeds to
fulness a weary multitude in a desert place. The
beautiful order of that feast, the lavish abundance,
the sober thrift, give it a character which even
now refreshes our minds and bodies when we think
of it. Among all that mixed crowd which sat
upon the grassy slope in expectant companies none
lacked the appetite of health; it was the health-
giver who gave them food. How powerless is
the modern physician to heal more than a few of
those who come to him; Jesus had healed all who
came — all ! *
It is needless to repeat that the means Jesus
1 St. Luke ix. 11-12; St. Matt. xiv. 14-15.
chap, ix THE NATURE MARVELS 271
employed in the nature-miracles are beyond our
knowledge or imagination, and, unlike the miracles
of healing, they are more marvellous to-day to us,
to whom the greater works of science are familiar,
than they were to the simple peasantry before
whom they took place. Are they incredible ?
Every candid mind, even the most sceptical, must
reply that they are not incredible, although they
are as yet inexplicable. Nothing is incredible,
even though inexplicable, as long as our know-
ledge about it is incomplete enough to leave room
for the discovery of its place in some sequence of
cause and effect now unknown. As an illustration
of a marvel to be credited only because we believe
it may be explicable we quote an article by M.
Gustave le Bon on the energy generated by the
activity of radium : —
"Parmi les assertions qui ont ete formulees
dans la discussion sur le radium auquel il a ete fait
allusion se trouve la suivante enoncee par M.
Soddy; 'L'emission de l'energie du radium reste
un mystere.'
"Ce mystere est evident avec les idees anciennes,
mais si on admet la theorie de l'energie intra-
atomique que je defends depuis si longtemps,
l'explication du mystere est en verite tres simple.
Tous les corps, le radium comme les autres,
representent un immense reservoir d'energie con-
centree sous un faible volume a l'epoque de leur
formation. Seule cette energie peut expliquer la
vitesse d'emission des particules radio-actives.
" Et si on demande comment une quantite tres
grande d'energie peut etre condensee sous un si
272 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
faible volume, on repondra que Implication est
tres simple encore. II suffit d'admettre que les
elements des atomes sont animes d'un mouvement
de rotation ayant la rapidite de remission des
rayons cathodiques, c'est-a-dire, une vitesse
moyenne egale au tiers de celle de la lumiere.
J'ai montre ailleurs qu'on pourrait imaginer une
petite machine pouvant etre enfermee dans le
chaton d'une bague, et composee uniquement
d'une sphere de la grosseur d'une tete d'epingle
tournant sur elle-meme dans le vide avec la vitesse
indiquee plus haut. Par le seul fait de sa rotation,
son energie cinetique serait de 203,873 millions
de kilogrammetres, soit le travail fourniraient en
une heure 15 10 locomotives d'une puissance
moyenne de 500 chevaux." 1
While science is able in these last days to
soberly suggest potentialities in 'dead matter'
which stagger our powers of comprehension and
belief, which of us is prepared to affirm of any of
the marvels of Jesus that in regard to them there
is no room left for the discovery of natural powers
and sequences which may account for them — that,
in fact, we know all there is to know about them ?
It may be that future generations will find the
nature-miracles so far explicable as this generation
begins to find the miracles of healing. Yet in
these miracles of Jesus, as they stand before us
to-day, there is a quality of exquisite friendliness
with nature, human and physical, which attracts
us as much as their inexplicable mystery repels.
We are enlightened by them, not as by the clear
1 The Athencsum, Nov. 17, 1906.
chap, ix THE NATURE MARVELS 273
shining of a heavenly light, but as by the glare of
sunshine breaking through a mist — a glare which
dazzles while it leaves us bewildered in the cloud.
At present all we can do with these nature-miracles
is to concern ourselves with what is of supreme
importance to us — the part they take in the reve-
lation Jesus gave through all his signs of God's
will for man, and the human conditions in which
that will can work.
CHAPTER X
THE CONDITIONS OF PHYSICAL POWER
There is nothing in the gospel narrative that
seems to set the ideal of the kingdom more apart
from the natural life, nothing that clashes more
rudely with the common sense of the world, than
the absolute promises Jesus gave that God would
provide for the personal needs, material as well as
spiritual, of the true child of the kingdom; and
the nature-miracles were the most emphatic part of
that body of teaching by which Jesus enforced the
duty of a disinterested life. When we examine
the conditions common to them all, we may find
that they also teach that God's providence in these
matters can only operate fully when the disinter-
ested life of faith becomes corporate.
The common characteristic of these nature-
miracles is that they were accomplished only in
those companies, small or great, which were for
the time presumably of one heart and way of
thought, strongly moved by some common innocent
desire. In the case of the desert feast a multitude
who, disregarding all other calls, had hung for days
upon the words of Jesus, had presumably been
274
chap. x PHYSICAL POWER 275
welded for the time into a psychic unit. Such as
were not enthralled by his voice must have turned
away before. We are told that love for his
teaching had drawn them on until bodily hunger
made the danger of fainting imminent. From
every heart, as from one heart, would arise un-
spoken blessings on him for the joy of his teaching,
and an unconscious cry for bread. Then came
the lavish multiplication of bread and fish. We
must be thankful that we are told clearly about
the multiplication of those few small fishes. The
detail for most minds excludes those transcendental
explanations which usually belittle what they try
to glorify. Here, in the solitude of the hills, as
the thoughts of hundreds of men bless God for
religious enlightenment, their bodies cry out for
common food, and the Christ, standing in the
midst, produces it abundantly, by means to us in-
visible, inexplicable, and experimentally incredible.
Take as another example the wedding-feast.
We know that it was the custom to shut the door
when the bidden guests had entered. Here, then,
was another company apart for the time, their
hearts filled with the simple emotions which the
occasion called forth. "Joy is the grace we sing
to God," and there is no occasion that calls forth
the joy of brotherhood more surely than such a
festival. Especially in simple peasant life is the
wedding-feast an hour of heightened emotion and
enjoyment. Not merely the desire of quenching
thirst or satisfying the pleasures of the palate would
make such a company feel solicitous when there
was a troubled halt among those that served; the
276 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book m
pain of the host, of the bridegroom and the friend
of the bridegroom, would come before their minds.
Poverty never really weeps till it is checked in an
act of generosity, never really suffers shame except
when ashamed to be unable to give. In the midst
of the common desire evoked by sympathy with
a generous poverty, the Christ turned water into
wine.
Again, let us consider the stilling of the storm, or
that scene upon the sea in the fourth watch of the
night when Jesus came to the little loyal band of
disciples toiling in rowing, distressed by the waves
and a contrary wind. Here again was the common
isolation, and one strong, simple desire for help
against the elements; the means by which he
commanded the elements, or the means of his
coming over the sea, are beyond our ken. We
have no reason to suppose that had there been no
isolation of storm and night, had the lake been
studded with boats of fishermen who had no
common interest, no conscious desire for his help
or his presence, he could have done these things;
just as we have no reason to suppose that he could
have given wine to the thirsty poor of the indis-
criminate streets, or bread to any promiscuous
crowd of beggars, or could, for a sign to the carping
and faithless theologians who asked for one, have
cast himself down from a pinnacle of the temple
without suffering bodily harm. These feats may
have been possible to his earthly conditions, but
there is much in the Gospel record against the
presumption.
In one case, when he brought back the dead to
chap.x PHYSICAL POWER
277
life, he shut out from the room all except five
souls, who must have been shaken with grief or
intense sympathy; in another he performed the
same marvel in the midst of "much people of the
city" who, according to the narrative, had come
out with the mother, moved, as the emphasis on the
size of the procession suggests, by the more than
common pathos of her bereavement. In the raising
of Lazarus, again, it is specially recorded that Jesus
waited upon the road until both sisters, and all
those who were weeping with them, came out to
him. These could have been no hired mourners,
for, we are told, their grief so moved our Lord
that he wept with them. Now, it was not until
this multitude went with him to the tomb and
stood around him, that he called Lazarus forth.
We are told that some of the mourners did not
believe on Jesus, although many of them did; but
it would appear from the narrative that, as in the
other cases, it was not a common belief in him,
but absorption in some emotion which they had
in common with him, that made his acts possible;
in this case there seems no doubt that the mourning
multitude about him were united in a genuine
grief — the man Lazarus was evidently bound to
a large number of his neighbours by ties of unusual
affection. These circumstances were not enough
without the faith Jesus exercised in the invariable
procession of power from God, but they seem to
have been required.
If we turn to our Lord's promises concerning
the marvels that God will do through men in
answer to prayer, we find that they postulate the
278 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
BOOK III
same conditions, and his words probably have
more strict application to the conditions required
for his own miracles than we have been accustomed
to perceive. The individual is to isolate himself
for the hour, or to be gathered with those who
seek the same end by the same faith; the eye is to
be single, for a double aim is fatal; the thoughts
are not to be taken up with thrifty foresight, nor
do the bodily needs even require expression, or
more than the merest expression, for the mere need
goes to God's heart as a prayer; the conscious
aim of him who prays is to be the "kingdom," i.e.,
the corporate well-being and well-doing. Above
all, in prayer, if it is to be true prayer, there must
be no sense of separation from other men; if
there is so much as a critical judgment, let alone a
wrong, separating brother from brother, neighbour
from neighbour, the breach of unity is first to be
healed : no offence is to be given to, or taken from,
the world, so that even the external antagonism of
all evil may be minimised in fact and obliterated
in thought. This is the epitome of the require-
ments demanded in the synoptic Gospels of him
who would seek from God the more abundant life
of the kingdom whose first law and chief traffic is
prayer. In St. John's Gospel the two conditions
of prayer chiefly insisted on are, friendship with
and invocation of the risen Christ, and love for
and communion with men, both essential to a
triumphant result. Here, as always, we have the
idea of a psychic coalition, produced by common
intense desire and the inspiration of the spirit of
the Master. That inspiration creates an assured
chap, x PHYSICAL POWER 279
expectation that the means will accomplish the end
because in harmony with the desire of God to give
what is asked. This assurance of the marvellous
result is put forth as sufficient motive to make
obedience to the law of love possible.
To sum up. If the marvels of Jesus required as
their condition a coalition of hearts attuned in some
sort with the heart of God in that they blessed what
he blessed, and mourned what excited his sorrow,
and were in no way perturbed by sense of earthly or
spiritual antagonism; if we also allow that the pre-
cepts and promises of the gospel point to some divine
necessity for the same human conditions in order
that men of any age may duly experience God's
inspiration and providence, we are faced with this
conclusion at least, that if we decide apart from
these considerations how far it may, or may not,
be wise or possible to obey the laws laid down for
the members of this corporate commonwealth, we
cannot blame the system of Jesus if our Christianity
appears to fail. If one man alone for an hour in
his closet has by prayer more strength to help God
to bless the world than the same man in an un-
friendly crowd; if in his closet he has strength
that is of use to God only in so far as he is at ease
in every relationship and in every respect except
the need of the hour; if his strength, even in
solitude, is multiplied by the consciousness of being
upborne by the mind of others; if two or three
men assembled in such communion of purpose
can intensify the power of each to draw on the
divine help in earthly things; if by the segregation
of such smaller associations of minds in a more
28o GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book hi
widespread unity of spirit and aim whose reality
and power does not depend on outward and visible
connection, though it may be expressed and
emphasised by it, God can actually do for earth
what he does for heaven, — if all this be indeed
true, then the unreserved and universal practice
of the law of love is not only obligatory, — the
exclusive obligation, — but as the obligation is
more recognised will become increasingly possible.
Having seen that even Jesus appeared to require
a certain psychic atmosphere in order to help the
needy by his own marvellous hold upon the eternal
attitude of giving in God, and that this atmosphere
appears to be such that it would be created in the
Church if the doctrines of the Sermon on the
Mount were looked upon as practical, let us again
consider why it is that we have believed these
precepts unpractical. We shall find ourselves in
the never-failing circle of reciprocal cause and
effect: we do not receive because we have not
believed; we cannot believe because we have no
experience of receiving. We suppose the com-
mands of Jesus to be beyond our obedience
because we think his gifts beyond our reach.
There must be faith in God's will to provide for
man's earthly needs in order to make it possible
for prudent men to be disinterested. It is right
that a man should count the cost and consider if
he is able to meet the enemy; and it is the
revelation of God's will which Jesus gives in his
marvellous works which shows that we have enough
money to build the tower, that we have sufficient
strength to meet the enemy. The religion that
chap, x PHYSICAL POWER 281
would save the world must solve the great practical
question, how to develop the resources of humanity
to the utmost without those hatreds between man
and man, that desire for material gain, which in
the struggle of evolution have been chief factors
of human development. Jesus recognised the
command against covetousness as the keystone
without which the moral arch must fall; he also
saw that there was a higher law, working even on
earth, accord with which made it possible to dis-
pense with covetousness. In the old Eden story
the curse upon man is not that he must work, —
Adam dressed and kept the fields of paradise, —
but that he must exhaust his powers in working
for his own living. Jesus offered salvation from
this curse. "Earthly things shall be given you"
is the promise that illuminates all his commands to
labour for the meat that endureth.
We need very seriously to consider what this
doctrine of Jesus does actually mean in practical life.
Are we to consider it as an exaggerated figure
standing for a meagre reality, the offer of only the
uncertain alms of such good luck as all may ex-
perience ? Or is it a material figure of spiritual
help only by which the common circumstances of
life may be bent to the Christian's purpose ? Does
it, in fact, mean only what would be consonant with
any reasonable forecast of the future which we
could base on our experience of the past ? Or does
it point to a far better state of things than we can
foresee — a state in which a Church truly meek
will inherit the earth, and a Church really poor in
spirit will establish thereon a heavenly civilisation ?
:8z GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH book
hi
If we think the latter view more worthy of the
Christian faith, are we to expect the established
processes of nature to be violated that an unnatural
end may be accomplished ? or is it more reasonable
to assume that the unity of nature and the common
sense of man may prove to be in harmony with an
order of things even yet a little beyond our pre-
vision ? The question really resolves itself into
this, Is it evidence of a sound mind to repeat the
Christian creeds and believe that Jesus, although
"very God of very God," spoke at times as an
unpractical visionary; that he who said, "Let your
communication be yea and nay, for whatsoever is
more than these is of the evil," launched into the
world wild promises which cannot in the nature of
things be fulfilled ? Or is it more reasonable to
suppose that he whom we worship may have had
more common sense than we have yet acquired ?
He said, "Resist not evil. Give to him that
asketh. If men take by force give them more
than they take. Love those who ill-use you.
Thus and thus only shall ye become the children
of the highest. Take no thought for the needs
of your bodily life. God provides. Make the
interests of the kingdom your supreme end. Thus
and thus only shall you attain to communion with
God."
The Christianity of Christ and that of
Christendom are in these respects divergent. The
sword and the muckrake are our earthly means of
existence. The Church has never laid down
either, nor insisted on universal friendship as the
only mode of Christian life. We continue to
chap, x PHYSICAL POWER 283
wield the sword because the command to love
universally appears to us foolish. We solemnly give
this command verbal deference; we repudiate it in
the name of patriotism, in the name of principle,
religious and political, in the name of common
sense, in the name of the Church, and even in the
name of Christ. Nor has the Church commended
abstinence from the acquisitive temper; she has
contented herself with licensing it. She has cried
that a man does well if, for his nation, his church,
his order, his family, he covet earnestly material
gain; and to this proclamation only a few con-
ditions concerning the laws of property and the
giving of alms are subjoined. The Church is
confident in contradicting her Lord because she
has never caught a glimpse of that inner harmony
between faith and nature which works to save
the disinterested man from a pauper's grave.
She has never held up the birds and the flowers as
examples for the practical, everyday life; she has
diligently commended the principle of storehouses
and barns, and the practice of pulling them down
and building greater.
The reason of all this is that, in defiance of the
gospel, the Church has never conceived of God as
commonly moving in man's material affairs except
as the cause of inexplicable disaster or merited
punishment. "Thy will be done" has been a
wail, instead of a shout of joyful expectation.
God has deserved better of us in nature, and a
thousand times better in the revelation of Christ;
and yet our saddest hymns, our most melancholy
moods, have for their refrain the sentiment, "God's
284 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
will be done"; and we regard "resignation" to
woe as the highest attainment of the soul before
God. This is true of the Church in the land of
Luther, the nation of Knox, the city of Calvin,
the continent of the Pilgrim Fathers, as it is
in those regions to which the Greek, Roman,
or Anglican Churches desire to give exclusive
light. In none of these branches of the Church does
the acceptance of God's will suggest any temporal
advantage; the sentiment that "the visitation of
God" is direful is writ large, not only in the
liturgies, but in the legal forms, of Christendom.
Although the faith of Jesus Christ in the laws
that govern the higher social and civil life has
surely found some response in every saintly heart,
the expression of such faith is vague and un-
practical compared with the large body of instruc-
tion which insists that it is only after every decent
form of money-grubbing has been resorted to
that the Christian may carelessly throw himself on
God's mercy for food and raiment; and that, while
we thank God for material goods, we are con-
vinced that they come from him in exact return
for so much toil and cleverness expended in their
acquisition and for the exercise of that thrift
which acts as a wholesome moderator of com-
passion. Thus the divided aim which Jesus
considered fatal to spiritual life is with us the
first necessity of Christian respectability, because
none of the works which he performed, none of
the promises which he gave to save us from it, have
obtained credence.
Failing completely, as we do, to see how the
chap, x PHYSICAL POWER 285
law of love and of carelessness can be made
practical, we consistently laud those who give the
greater emphasis of life's energy to the skilful
handling of the sword and the muckrake, if only
they also give some imaginative attention to the
angelic crown. Indeed, the muckrake and the
beggar's wallet are our emblems of civic and
religious duty; to use the one is the common
virtue, to carry the other is the counsel of perfec-
tion. In other words, a man must either make
more money than he needs, or, giving himself to
public or religious service, take their surplus from
those who make it. We insist upon taking thought
for the morrow because we do not believe that
God has any resources that we have left untried.
We are sure that the purpose of personal gain
is needed to develop character and enterprise;
we are sure, not only that "he that careth not
for his own is worse than an infidel," but that
no degree of affiance in God can make the
beatitudes true in commercial or military or
national affairs. The aphorisms of Christ only
apply, we are convinced, to the hidden and
mysterious life of the spirit which is to be lived
apart in the soul. Should this inner life wax so
strong as to burst forth into practice, then error,
confusion, the pauperism of the individual, and the
fall of empire, would result. We see all too
clearly that if the Jewish state of the Christian
era had loyally accepted Jesus as its ruler, he
could not possibly have administered its foreign
policy according to his altruistic principles unless
he had also been willing to make the stones bread
286 GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH
and to call for "more than twelve legions of
angels" for national defence. In domestic affairs
we are all assured that no adequate meal would
have been spread for Jesus and his disciples if
Martha, like Mary, had chosen the better part;
while there is nothing more self-evident to the
students of social order than that if the young
ruler had distributed his property among the poor
he would have done more harm than good.
These reasonable beliefs underlie the whole
civilisation of Christendom. Their influence is
perhaps most clearly exemplified in the latest
developments, commercial and political, of our
youngest nations, where unbridled covetousness in
the plutocracy and violence and tyranny in trade
organisations are reaching their culmination. Yet
these are only the natural flower of roots laid deep
in the earlier ages when the most respected saints
urged the Church on to temporal power, and
soldiers set out uncondemned to advance the
dominion of the Cross by slaying the Saracen or
the Christian heretic. These extreme examples
of the attempt to combine the principles of the
world with life in the kingdom differ from others
only in degree; the energy of Christian life is
yielded to fighting and getting and holding for one
purpose or another. Our Lord, who condemned
the standards of Jewish religion while teaching
that from its ideal the salvation of the world must
come, must condemn the militant and selfish
standards of Christendom, even though it is still
the custodian of his salvation.
We thus return perforce to the point with
PHYSICAL POWER 287
which this book began — that the church or the
individual is not to blame because it or he cannot
see how a kingdom with Jesus for its king, and
his principles as its laws, could exist upon earth.
It is not our part to see, but to believe and to do;
and to those who are unwilling to venture this,
Jesus holds out no other hope of illumination.
We must still hold in mind — what examination of
the Gospels makes clear — that every new venture
of individual faith in the Christ-life will end in
some apparent failure or martyrdom till the
corporate faith of the community makes the higher
success possible.
BOOK IV
HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
289
CHAPTER I
FASTING AND TEMPTATION
Everywhere in the records of the nations we
find historic proof of the widespread hope in a
time when wrong will cease, when the mad will
be sane, disease will be abolished, and peace and
plenty will reign everywhere on earth. The gifts
of righteousness — amity, prosperity, health, and
self-control — are the simplest tests of divine good-
will. The most prolonged and earnest reasoning
of the religious schools, which have taught that God
desires to wean men from the world rather than
to give earthly with spiritual blessing, can hardly
reason away the expectation ; and the belief that
such earthly gifts must accompany divine power
springs unbidden in the heart of the simple. The
prayer for a deliverer who should bring about
such conditions of life seems to have been the
prayer of the men of every nation as soon as they
were able to give their deepest hope any corporate
expression. The effort to express this prayer is
to be found in the magical rites of primitive
religions. It is painted in the gorgeous pageant
of the myths of Egypt, Greece, India, and Persia;
291
2Q2 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book
IV
it is woven into heroic legends which lie at the
beginning of each national history; it is the
unconquerable theme of triumphant prophecy.
There is a pre-Christian legend that when the
Buddha was born to bring the light of truth, the
blind saw, the lame walked, the sick were raised
up, the hungry were fed, and a universal peace
reigned. This only expresses in more detail than
we find in other nations a universal and deep-seated
optimism which included both earth and heaven,
spirit and matter, in its hope. If this deep-seated
sentiment is of God he who would be the Saviour
of the world must meet and complete it.
Side by side with this existed another hope, not
less universal, not less profound, and in outward
semblance more high and glorious — the hope of
attaining heaven by giving up earth, of exalting
spirit at the expense of matter. The universal
symbol of this hope was the practice of fasting for
some religious end. This widespread practice
affords historic proof of the existence of the
ascetic ideal in all nations. The ancient Hindoos
and Buddhists, Egyptians and Assyrians, Babylo-
nians, Persians and Jews, the Greeks and Romans,
held their public fasts, and in so far as they fasted
acknowledged asceticism to be an aid to the
religious life. If this hope of reaching heaven by
spurning earth was of God, he who would be the
Saviour of the world must conform to the practice
which was its universal symbol, and in his hours
of physical exhaustion see God most clearly and
reveal him most fully.
These two hopes are not in reality consistent
chap, i FASTING AND TEMPTATION 293
with one another, although they are seen side by
side in the same religions, the same literatures,
and are inextricably confused in the minds of
many. There is a deep, underlying opposition
between them. They have a common base in the
conviction of man's sin and his need of reforma-
tion, and their common end is man's perfection
and God's glory; but they hold opposing con-
ceptions of perfection and of God.
Between these two hopes, as they struggle
together in the heart of a nation or the heart of
a man, there is always a profound questioning.
The one asks whether it is possible to find the
Creator except in his creation, whether it is
possible to be in close communion with God
without being in close communion with man;
whether, indeed, man has any right to suppose
that a God whom he conceives as so far transcend-
ing his creation as to be indifferent to any of its
interests, and satisfied with the imperfection of
any aspect of his creatures, is real and not a mere
figment of human egotism. The other asks
whether the infinite God can be apprehended
through those phenomena which are conveyed to
us only by the medium of our fallible and tran-
sitory senses; whether it is not necessary to
diminish the power of the senses in order to be
able to ignore the things of sense, and thus lessen
their hold upon the mind so that it may attain
to God.
That Jesus, as he grew in wisdom, pondered
this great problem of religious hope, and faced it
fully in the silence of thirty years, we cannot
294 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book rv
doubt. Not only was the law in a measure ascetic,
but asceticism of a high and pure type held the
best religious mind of his people. The doctrine
and life of the Essenes must in some respects have
had his sympathy. The Baptist drew him by his
moral fearlessness and high moral standard. The
Messianic prophecies of his nation were varied,
some couched in the language of the earthly hope,
and some suggesting nothing but earthly sorrow.
It is possible that after the mystic experience of
new inspiration that came in the act of submitting
to John's baptism Jesus may have been in doubt
as to God's will concerning the physical side of
life. John did not seek to heal the body; and his
influence made for a higher asceticism almost as
strongly as for righteousness.
It is evident that the compassions of Jesus
were deeply stirred by the bodily and mental
weaknesses which were the common lot of his
people. With his perfect health, fasting was the
only means by which he could gain the experience
of the vital exhaustion which disease or privation
brings. The practice of fasting in a desert place
to attain mystic power was not uncommon. The
desire to probe physical suffering to its depths and
know its utmost value as a means of approaching
God may most naturally have been part, if not
the greater part, of that driving of the Spirit that
led him into the wilderness. There he made trial
of physical weakness.
We are told by one of the evangelists that the
devil tempted him all the time that he was
without food; and all of them agree that when
chap, i FASTING AND TEMPTATION 295
exhaustion was extreme, eventually bringing with
it, we may assume, weakened volition, lack of
control over the imagination — the delirium of
starvation, the devil's great opportunity came.
In that hour of intense trial, and in the relief of
victory when angels ministered to his bodily needs,
with the insight that comes in each strong crisis
of a seer's life, Jesus must have made his reckon-
ing once for all as to the part the flesh played in
man's salvation.
What evidence have we of the form his thought
took ? Never after his temptation did Jesus be-
tray any doubt as to what his "Father's business"
was with the bodies and minds of men. He gave
health and strength of body and mind to all who
would trust him, and unhesitatingly affirmed the
Father to be the giver of volitional and physical
completeness, and the devil to be the origin of
all that troubled it. After his temptation he
never fasted, or allowed his friends to go hungry
or thirsty. Very significant is the passage he
chose to cite from the Jewish scriptures when the
Pharisees challenged the right of his disciples to
pluck corn on the Sabbath day. His reply to
them was that the sacredness of the Sabbath, nay,
the sacredness of the Temple, ought to be violated
rather than the body weakened by fasting. The
thought of the sacredness of the body as com-
parable to the sacredness of the Temple is again
emphasised by Jesus when he refers to "the
temple of his body" — a figure which St. Paul
repeats. When, where, the Son of Man was
Lord his disciples should eat; when the hour of
296 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
the prince of this world had come, and he, the
prince of life, was taken from their sight, then —
with inevitable relapse into the pious practice of
an earnest age — his disciples would fast, but not
in his company. In the one sacred rite he
originated, in which he would carry over the joy
of the feast of atonement into his kingdom, the
form and symbolism he used grew, we cannot
doubt, out of the intensity with which he realised
that the unity of mind and body was as sacred as
the unity of God and man, and was intended to
guard against that last infirmity of earnest hearts,
the idea that communion with God may best be
attained by the disunion of man's physical and
spiritual interests. That his attitude on this
matter was impressed on his nearest friends is
proved by the fact that when to their vision he
returned from the gate of death they saw him
eat food or prepare food for them. If this vision
was subjective merely, it proves that such actions
were for them the most familiar associations of his
presence; if the vision was objective it more
powerfully proves the opposition of Jesus to the
principle that underlies asceticism.
How terrible to our Lord, when approaching
his death, was the remembrance of the time of
bodily weakness when the devil had been able to
use the imagery of his pure mind for malignant
purposes! His phrase "the prince of this world
cometh" must have been prompted by the re-
collection of the fallacious glory of the mountain
peak and the kingdoms of the earth. Jesus could
not fear those who could only kill the body, but
chap, i FASTING AND TEMPTATION 297
he had surely learned by fasting that, as the pulses
beat low and vital force ebbed, the Evil Will, even
when he had nothing in common with his own,
would still have power. When he spoke of that
"hour and power of darkness" he could not have
failed to remember the shadow of the deadly faint
of starvation and the force of the alluring com-
mands, "If thou be the Son of God, work, as other
men do, for thine own ends; use, as other men do,
thine own powers for thine own help." God is
seen by the pure in heart while mind retains its
normal power over brain and body; when this
control is falling away, then he who has power to
lead the passing soul to the gates of hell has his
best chance. It is when the blood ebbs from the
brain that hope in God is most apt to fail. As
we gaze upon the cross we hear the very details
of the first temptation repeat themselves: "If he
be the Son of God let him save himself." "If he
has cast himself on God, let him see if God will
hold him up." In his extremity he was led to
think that God had forsaken him; the full mean-
ing of this we do not know, but we see it to be in
harmony with the belief of Jesus that man's health
is a citadel of God in this earthly life.
We cannot believe that Jesus intended to
endorse, or in any way encourage, the effort to
increase the divine fire by cooling the embers of
every earthly hope. Your father in heaven
numbers the hairs of your head, knows your earthly
needs, will clothe you like the flowers, and feed
you as easily as the birds are fed. God so loved
the world that he gave his Son. All this was not
298 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
teaching to make earth appear unworthy of man's
love. Whoso gives up father or mother or houses
or lands for my sake shall receive a hundred-fold
in this present time. The meek shall inherit the
earth. The Son of Man who, as he himself said,
"came eating and drinking," gave man every
earthly gift except riches, entered by sympathy
into every earthly joy that was not vicious, offered
salvation from every earthly care except the care
of love for the life of men. He never spoke of
earth as being unfit to be the scene of God's
heavenly activities. What then ? If he came to
bring a salvation as truly earthly as it was purely
of heaven, did he not come also to fulfil the hope
of those who looked beyond the things of sense
for their only satisfaction — who felt that earth was
of no value to them except as a path to heaven ?
On the contrary it was out of this very doctrine
of God's care for the body that Jesus educed the
triumphant certainty of God's faithfulness to man's
immortal spirit. It is the "how much more" of
all his parabolic teaching which compels us to
glorify rather than vilify the lower factor in the
comparison. If God clothe the grass of the field
so splendidly, how much more shall he clothe man.
If his care is so great for the sparrow, how much
more for man. And the sequence of thought goes
on : if food is given for the body, how much more
will the life within be fed. The gift is sacred;
how much more the altar without whose spiritual
sanctity the gift would be nothing. Greater than
the temple is he that dwelleth in the temple. The
letter is nothing except as the expression of spirit.
chap, i FASTING AND TEMPTATION 299
Now clearly the whole force of this argument by
comparison depends on making the most of the
lesser thing in the comparison. The greatness of
God's care for the body is the evidence of his still
greater care for the soul. The inner life and the
life beyond the veil rise in value in proportion as
the outer life and the life here is seen to be valued
by God; and just in proportion to the stress laid
upon the glory of the spiritual it becomes safe and
necessary to emphasise the glory of the material.
In putting the supreme emphasis on the inner
and heavenly life Jesus emphasised its dangers as
they were never emphasised before. In proportion
as the spirit is more than the flesh the sins of the
spirit are worse than the sins of the flesh. There-
fore, though God intends man to have moral and
physical completeness, the Christian will be willing
to suffer physical ill if so he may rescue his fellow
from spiritual suffering which is so much worse
than any physical suffering. Thus it is that
human pain becomes a factor in the plan of
salvation. Jesus declares that in the supreme and
eternal aspect of his life man may sin most deeply,
may lose himself; and he holds up the picture of
this possibility before the eyes of the compassionate.
It is to the compassion and magnanimity of the
children of the kingdom that Jesus makes his
appeal when by his whole example, his every act
and word, he urges the missionary life on all.
There is no imitation of Jesus possible outside the
missionary life; in the exercise of whatever calling,
wherever he be, always, in speech or silence, in
action or passion, the child of the kingdom is
300 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
one "sent" to bring the world to God. As a
missionary a man will always come to hand-to-
hand grapple with all the forms of pain, for they
are the instruments of the forces of evil. It is
the acceptance of injustice and wrong by the
missionary which drives home his message at last
to the heart of the unthankful and unjust. Hence
pain has saving grace, not for him who suffers it,
but for him who inflicts it upon the innocent. It
is certainly the salvation of the persecutor that is
the reward of the persecuted. To be the salt of
the earth, to be the light of the world, is not a
personal honour, not a private reward; it is to
share in the joy and in the pain of God, who
works for the ultimate perfection of his whole
creation.
CHAPTER II
THE PROTEST OF THE PARABLE
To be universal a religion ought to be a living
plant, indigenous to humanity, its roots struck
far and wide into the heart of this nation and
that, drawing nourishment from all the ages that
are past, a thing old yet entirely new, containing
all that is essential and hampered with nothing
unessential; for only as it is an essential thing,
able to enter into the temperaments and necessi-
ties of every race in every time and place, a
thing without which nature remains incomplete
and human nature baffled and unsatisfied, can it
reach the whole world.
When the Hebrew tribes left Egypt and
settled themselves in Canaan, they were on the
ground where the advanced religions of Egypt
and Babylonia touched each other; it was also
the meeting-place of several less developed tribal
religions. It was bound, by geographical position,
to be a fighting ground for many nations, to be
for many centuries traversed continually by
religions, laws, and customs from Africa, Asia,
and Europe. The moral gains of the various
301
3o2 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
nations of Semitic and Aryan stock were brought
to Zion, not because of her greatness, not because
of her political strength, but in spite of her
insignificance and because of her political weak-
ness. The Hebrews had the genius for religion,
and "the heritage of the children of the Lord"
was a school of many nations, in which their
righteousness was developed, as all strong
righteousness is, by the choosing of the good
from all things and the eschewing of the evil.
If in the conflict of life the Israel of God, tossed
with tempest and taking no comfort, mistook her
strength and thought that to eschew the evil was
the primary duty, it only made the mistake that
the human heart, corporate or individual, always
makes till it meets with the great enlightenment
that transforms the moralist into saint or seer
and morality into a Gospel of God.
This mistake made the Jews, in their thoughts
and literature, assume a separatist position which
does not correspond with their actual history.
The Jewish religion — cradled in Egypt, schooled
in Babylon, its home a pathway of nations, its
adherents forced to learn the language of the
Greeks and to comprehend the laws of Rome —
was formed by God out of the dust of religious
battle. The "salvation" which was "of the
Jews" could have been no strong tower, no house
of peace, if it had not contained all the energies
of truth that worked for the development and
informed the progress of mankind. To be able
to understand colloquial Greek, to be ready to
talk with men and to understand what was in
chap, ii PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 303
them, and to be within reach of any great high-
road of the Roman Empire, were, in the days of
Jesus, conditions sufficient for acquiring, not an
intimate knowledge of foreign systems of thought,
but that fluent essence of each masterful theology
which passes from heart to heart in beautiful
imagery, in terse aphorism, and in unexpected
precept.
The ignorance of the European peasant has
been too suggestive in this connection; it has
often been claimed in our apologetic writings that
there was a like ignorance among the peasants of
Palestine when Jesus lived among them, which
ignorance is urged as a proof of our Lord's
inspiration. But the ways of God are more
natural. There could not have been any such
ignorance in the home at Nazareth. The know-
ledge Jesus shows of the Hebrew scriptures
evinces a mental discipline which we have every
reason to believe was the result of the usual local
instruction in the law and the prophets. This
mental discipline comes out in that incident where
the doctors in the temple at Jerusalem are startled
with the intellectual power evinced in the questions
of the child Jesus at the age when curiosity and
thought begin to develop. These doctors received
disciples from all parts of the civilised world.
They were quite able to judge of a boy's mental
calibre. We have, then, two facts that help us to
estimate what the mental equipment of Jesus would
be — the fact of his eager intelligent curiosity, and
the fact that Galilee, in which he lived, was not
dominated by that small Jewish school which
3o4 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
set itself to resist foreign influence. At this time
the Jews of the Dispersion from every known
land, proselytes from every nation, who seem to
have come chiefly from the intellectual classes, with
traders and political agents, were always travelling
through Galilee and Samaria to Jerusalem, espe-
cially to the great annual feast. From the age of
twelve to that of thirty Jesus travelled once a
year, making the same slow, pleasant journey on
this caravan road. We cannot suppose that, with
a mind full of eager questions concerning religion,
he would remain ignorant of such things as Gen-
tile pilgrims could teach. The honourable place
which he assigns to the Gentiles from east and
west and north and south in the kingdom of
God, the incidents in which he repeatedly held
up their faith as an example to the Jews, are
consonant, not only with his deep insight, but with
a knowledge of other nations and other religions.
Let us consider what the outlook upon the
world at this time must have been to a Jew
deeply impressed with the power and love of God.
In so far as men could worship God by prayer,
by praise, by offerings, by alms-giving and by
self-discipline, men did worship him. God could
not be unrighteous to forget their work and
labour of love — the holy ministry which in some
form every religion inculcated. A good God
must have imparted himself to the worshipping
millions of his children on earth to the extent
that they could learn of him, and yet they were
all disputing as to his name and nature and the
way in which he was to be approached. Again,
chap, ii PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 305
what the reason of man could do in approaching
God by the rules and abstractions of metaphysical
thought had been done. God being eager to
impart himself to man everywhere and always,
so far as man by thinking could then attain to
him he must already have attained; for a further
step toward God it was not more knowledge that
was wanted, but a fitter man. Had it been
possible to frame in human thought an unerring
presentation of God, a system of worship that
would be a perfect vehicle of approach to God,
it was certain that man had no words in which to
express it, no heart fitted to perceive its perfection.
It was not a new religion that was needed, but a
new man — new men better able to know them-
selves and their fellows, hence to understand the
simple secret of God.
There were sufficient data, from the Jewish
point of view, on which to form these conclusions.
The Jews in Palestine were only the centre of a
large and virile nation which had spread itself
into every place where the Greek or Latin
civilisation obtained. While the Jews of the
Dispersion kept themselves ceremonially separate
from the nations among whom they lived, they
were everywhere accreting to their religion pros-
elytes from the thoughtful classes of the heathen.
The best features of the Jewish religion were, to
the spiritually-minded, simple enough and pure
enough to be the means of a much higher national
life than the world had seen. But the ethics of a
nation are not to be estimated by the few written
pages that represent the highest development of
3o6 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
its moral genius so much as by the beliefs and
practices of the majority of its people. The
exaltation of Greek ethical thought was followed
by the swift decadence of the Greek race, and this
is an instance of what is characteristic of the
religious world at the Christian era. Its attention
was fixed on all those aspects of life that are
matter for argument. Philosophers were busy
trying to probe to the reality beneath appearance,
but the knowledge they gained was not widely
applied to life. The Jewish religion, which to
the spiritual few appeared to have such an un-
paralleled opportunity for healing the nations, was
wasting its strength upon fantastic excesses of
doctrine and ritual and casuistry. The dry rot of
the literalism and materialistic follies of the school
that repelled Hellenism were only a little worse
than the allegorical symbolism of the Hellenistic
Jews. Everywhere, in its pursuit of God, the
world was chiefly intent upon what could be spoken
and written and argued about. And this universal
disputation between different religions, and between
different sects within religions, had its worst shadow
in the proportionate bigotry and narrowness of
such small sections as agreed among themselves.
It would certainly seem, from the form his
ministry took, that Jesus regarded the world as
famine-stricken, trying to feed upon husks, fight-
ing with swords and with wTords concerning codes
and legends, ceremonies and doctrines, wasting its
strength in vain repetitions and much speaking,
and overlooking what would satisfy and unite.
Jesus made his great protest against the barren
chap, ii PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 307
strife of religious tongues by refusing to teach
except in parables. His very explanations of his
parables were still parables. When he quotes the
Old Testament he chooses its parables. He never
spoke of heaven except in figures of earth, or of
God except in terms of man. "Without a parable
spake he not." Parabolic teaching has this for its
very essence, that its form is not essential; all
that man can speak or write or argue about is
a dress, and only a dress, clothing an inner truth.
But the choice of parable as a method of conveying
truth, although it implies that no particular form
is essential, also implies that form is important.
There is no method of conveying thought by
speech which draws so much attention to the form.
The form is everything except essential. Another
form may convey the truth just as well, but to
convey it as well it must be as beautiful, as simple,
as true to the conditions of sense and as sugges-
tive of the spiritual lesson. Here, then, are two
requisites of the way in which the religion Jesus
sought to implant must be conveyed to the world
— it must have an outward form precise and
beautiful, but the form must never be considered
essential; there may be many forms.
We come then to the truth that was to be
conveyed by this message. It was a life. In the
ministry of Jesus we meet with nothing but the
concrete man in a concrete environment. He
maintained a profound silence upon those aspects
of religion that could not be brought to the test
of religious experience. God's forgiveness meant
the reception of that forgiveness in man's religious
3o8 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv
consciousness. God's providence was to be tested
by man exactly as man's providence was tested by
his child. Man's relation to God is to be appre-
hended, as he apprehends his relation to his fellow-
man, in apprehending Jesus.
Jesus came to men who were full of theories
and wasting their zeal. He said, in effect, it is
new life that is wanted — the life we now live fuller,
stronger, raised in all its aspects toward perfection.
It is more love that is wanted — natural, human
love, deeper, truer, and flowing into all channels.
This was not a new idea. It had been the
transient vision of the highest and lowliest of
mankind. What was new was the putting it into
practice, the gift of a perfect life and a perfect
love to the empty arms and aching heart of the
world.
The Christian believes that history vindicates
the method of Jesus. Just in so far as men have
partaken of his life by living it have they com-
muned with God and blessed the world; just in
so far as they have loved the Perfect Love they
have loved the world in deed and in truth and
given themselves to save it; just in so far as they
have done this they have attained to a wider
outlook and wider knowledge and seen a more
glorious vision of God. Wherever the Christian
has failed it has commonly been by reason of his
failure to trust the method of Jesus for himself and
for his own age.
The present age in religious matters is very
like the age of Jesus. How many different
religions we have ! How many sects within the
chap, ii PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 309
religions ! And those particular sects which claim
to be the only true sect feel the reaction of their
contest with the world most by its result upon
their inward attitude; a degree of bigotry and
ignorance is forced upon them by the intense
partisan feeling which is needed to maintain their
outward propaganda.
We do not need to turn our attention to a
better organisation, still less do we want to break
down such organisations as exist. We want the
intense realisation, based upon psychological fact,
based upon the highest inspiration of the prophets,
based upon the practice and preaching of Jesus,
that those who offer to God the same thoughts,
the same desires, the same adoration, have not to
hope for union with each other — they are in union
with each other; their union is not to become a
strength, but is a strength — a strength which no
outward organisation, having its own sort of
strength, can increase. We need to realise that
those who are thus united to one another in
purpose are at the same time at one with the
purposes of God, are members of an organism
whose health and growth are of God, and that the
consummation of his purposes is sure. There is
always the need of withdrawing temporarily from
the things of sense in order to find God. In the
matter of such union as Jesus taught, we need a
frequent withdrawal of attention from external
union. "Neither for these only do I pray, but
for them also that believe on me through their
word; that they may all be one; even as thou,
Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also
3io HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book rv
may be in us : that the world may believe that
thou didst send me. And the glory which thou
hast given me I have given unto them; that they
may be one, even as we are one; I in them, and
thou in me, that they may be perfected into one;
that the world may know that thou didst send me,
and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me."1 It
is here quite obvious that the union of Jesus with
God was not an outward union. The glory
which the Father gave him was an inner glory of
the heart which by the sympathetic could be
observed only in his gracious attitude and bene-
volent works, and which altogether escaped the
notice of the officious partisan or blinded devotee.
All that man can learn of God's truth, by pure
reason or practical philosophy, by religious systems,
by outward symbols or by their absence, it is
certain that man has learned and is learning.
There is no window of the human heart which
man opens Godward into which God himself does
not gladly come. And if in the midst of all these
we still faint for his fulness of life, we must realise
that all we can do to attain it is to seek some
more fundamental condition which evidently we
still lack. The great reformation of Jesus lay in
pointing out this fundamental condition and laying
the whole stress of man's search for God upon
realising it.
The supreme duty of fostering the fundamental
condition of a pure life and a strong determina-
tion to love will not be denied by the advocates
of any sane philosophy or any reasonable system
1 St. John xvii. 20-23.
chap, ii PROTEST OF THE PARABLE 311
of religion. It goes without saying that it is
necessary to man to give his adhesion at any given
time to such theory and practice as seem to him
most reasonable. The living of the Christ-life in
the spiritual and moral sphere ought not to come
into collision with the doctrinaires of any school,
any more than the acceptance of the doctrine of
bodily health by faith in God ought to come into
collision with the principles of medical science.
Just as no physician worthy of the name can do
aught but rejoice in the actual increase of health
and strength that any patient may obtain through
faith in God, so inward life in the spiritual sphere
by its increase and its greater activities of love
ought not to distress the most bigoted advocate
of any religious party. He may desire to divert
it into channels in which by its very nature it
cannot flow, but there are channels of love in
harmony with every Christian system into which
it can flow, for it is a missionary life, and its
message is to express God's love.
Surely, then, looking to the future, we need
not be deterred from venturing upon the life of
faith in full accordance with the life and teaching
of Jesus merely because our imagination fails when
we try to think in what outward organisation or
system of worship it could most fitly be embodied.
It is not matter that forms life, but life that forms
matter; it is not thought that forms life, but life
that takes the form of thought. Those who cry
that without finality in organisation or in thought,
we cannot have life are expecting the effect before
the cause.
CHAPTER III
THE FIGHTING SPIRIT
The life which Jesus taught begins its reform with
the nearest and smallest changes, and they, in their
turn, bring about the greater changes in ways that
we can neither see nor foresee. We invert the
order in our minds, and then cry that we cannot
accept his rule. For instance, we are faced with
the entire antagonism of Jesus to the fighting
spirit; but we do not see how it is possible for
man to give up fighting. We overlook the private
possibilities that lie to our hands, and exhibit the
largest and ultimate part of the problem, asking
how the world can be rid of international war.
What folly is this ! Let common sense come to
our aid, and we shall find it a wonderful echo of
what we have been calling the visionary ideal of
Jesus. What advantage is it to the cause of love
for a man to refuse to fight the enemies of his
country abroad and stay to fight his brother at
home ? Or if he refrain from striking his brother,
is peace the gainer if he nourish ill feeling and
repeat slanders, even though the ill feeling and
slander be only political or religious ? Are we
312
chap, in THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 313
in a position, individual or corporate, that would
make the cessation of international war a boon ?
This is the first question to ask. Let us begin at
home, and each man with his own heart and house-
hold. And first let us be straight in our thinking
and afterwards promote peace. The hypocrisy
only half unconscious, with which we talk about
our desire to be at peace with all mankind while
we hate our neighbour, is a tribute to the fact
that the Christian ideal does not admit of the
motives that lead to disputes, but is also a proof
of that loose, emotional thinking which is a worse
enemy to the cause of Jesus than free thinking.
What really makes it impossible at present to
realise the peace of the Christ-life is that we love
fighting, and that it seems to us exceedingly
wholesome. How else can we show that we are in
earnest about anything ? How else can we defend
the weak against the strong ? How else can we
ensure that the right shall prevail ? And when we
ask ourselves these questions we picture some
foreign enemy advancing ruthless against our own
defenceless hearths, some domestic tyrant oppress-
ing our defenceless neighbours, and the enemies of
God despoiling his church and setting up a lie in
the place of the truth, while we sit indolent, smiling
upon the transgressor; our blood boils at the
thought of any man advocating such a condition
of things, and we all feel ready to die in battle.
Let us be honest. What living sacrifices have
we made toward building up stronger conditions
in church and state and domestic life, in all those
ways in which we could have sacrificed our lives
3H HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book rv
for them without fighting ? If we have done little
in times of peace except to please ourselves, let us
realise that, in plunging into every contest, it is
not sacrifice for some great end, but battle that
we love. Let us admit that we love it because
it seems an effective weapon for good, while to
exercise our powers thus is a pleasurable activity.
Let us go further, and say that it is good. In
comparison with a life that is slack and pleasure-
loving, strife is good; in comparison with a life
that is only keen for what it can get, warfare in a
good cause is noble. The energies with which
nature has endowed man must be developed to
their utmost capacity. Religion that does not do
this is not in harmony with the laws of nature
and of God.
And the call of Jesus is for all the forces of
human heroism. He instituted a reformation
which was to begin in the individual heart. The
aggregate of such renovated hearts becomes an
organism which grows within any outward organ-
isation of state or nation. The problem of inter-
national war will only become practical when, in
respect of fighting, the ideal and practice of the
individual Christian is that of Jesus. What is the
sequence by which Jesus attains the reformation of
the individual heart ? Purpose must acquire a
divine strength; the determination to give must
dominate the desire to get; the ambition to serve
must regulate the necessity of being served; the
desire to receive honour from men must vanish in
the honour of being a friend of God; and, above
all, there must be no slovenly thinking, no
chap, in THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 315
hypocritical resting in words that do not represent
the heart truly. This is the beginning of his
reformation of the individual heart. The first step
in the Kingdom, nay, toward the entrance of the
Kingdom, is strong personal purpose. Something
has to be done, and all things that hinder are to be
put aside. When Jesus met the rich man whose
character had both moral and spiritual beauty, he
said to him, in effect, "What you lack is strength
of purpose, a purpose that counts nothing dear in
order to attain." It is a lack characteristic of
those who have all they want. The strength of
purpose which Jesus demanded is too strong a
vital force to be realised in any one simple maxim
of conduct, such as that all self-regarding action is
wrong, all unselfish action right. Hence much
talk about selfishness and unselfishness is loose and
misses the mark. In one of his letters the late
Prof. Sidgwick says, "There is nothing so selfish
as work;" and in this connection work is the
expression of purpose. Jesus said of his own
career, "For this cause came I into the world;"
the private claims of home and kindred were
subordinate to his purpose, and his purpose
dominates the ages. St. Paul's "This one thing
I do," turned the world upside down. A man
without a mastering purpose, an over-mastering
ambition, an unquenchable desire for true honour,
is a man whose life is not worth giving to God or
the world. He may as well keep it and make the
most of it for his own ends — the most will not be
much. A man who has this force of character and
uses it for his own ends is represented in the
3i6 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
imagery of Jesus as a better man than the weak
person who lives on good intentions, and as in that
respect a model for him. But undoubtedly the
great power that Christianity pre-eminently has
lies in its gift of joy which elicits overwhelming
strength of purpose and ambition and makes
heroism from such material as is ignored by other
moral movements. From the broken reed the
joy of Jesus evokes the noblest notes of heroic
music; from smoking flax his breath can bring the
fire that lights and warms the world. But the
music must be noble, the fire must reach to heaven.
The first great work of Jesus is to evoke purpose.
There must be ambition and unquenchable desire,
and passion that bends all things to its use.
Next in the order of Jesus comes the manifes-
tation of the purpose in life. A reformation that
begins by evoking the strong flood of positive
energies in the individual heart will surely break
through old standards and conventions; it must
emphasise individuality and produce originality.
The inevitable result will be that purpose and effort
will flow into new channels.
The relation between life and individual differ-
ence is so close that fuller life must always be
marked by more individual difference. We over-
look this partly because opinions formed without
adequate knowledge are the most annoying, and
therefore the most commonly observed, outcome
of the individual difference — opinions which the
individual vanity is apt to flaunt, like some eccentric
and absurd personal adornment. A personal
opinion which in any way controverts the common
chap, in THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 317
opinion is only justified by a more than common
knowledge of the facts concerned, a degree of
knowledge which is not within the reach of many.
Yet although ignorant opinions are the bad bye-
product of individual reflection, none the less is it
true that the most widely received truth is a dead
letter except so far as it receives the individual
impress.
The spirit that gives life only manifests itself
in individuality. This is seen in vegetable and
animal life; in human life the individual difference
is greatest. We are told that there are no two
germs, no two blades of grass, alike : this appalls
the mind and gives dignity to the dust. The use
and beauty of this minute diversity we cannot
comprehend; but we do know intuitively that
humanity would cease to be human, and God
cease to be God, if the mill of the universe could
turn out two men in mind and heart and will the
same. Two little children who built their toy
bricks always alike would destroy human hope.
Two idiots whose senseless habits were alike; two
men of genius who produced the same epic, the
same oratorio, the same philosophy; two vain
women who could make toys of men with the
same charm or tricks, would pronounce our final
doom. Gloom, endless gloom, would fall upon
our hearts if the human duplicate were seen.
It follows that the religion which begins by
exciting more intense life in purpose and ambition
will certainly be propagated by such original
thought and enterprise as will most fully express
each man. Hackneyed and conventional activities
318 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
will mark its temporary decline, never, as we are
apt to suppose, its increase. That Jesus did
make his appeal to force of will and ambition and
the desire for self-realisation and expression, there
can be no doubt. His cry was not for common
men and women but for heroes. He rejected
men who showed themselves distracted with other
interests, or slack, or fearful. He called men
from the hardy, adventurous class; he called for
men who would fear nothing, who would go
unhampered by possessions to the conquest of the
world. He set before them a task the magnitude
of which made its accomplishment appear quite
impossible. He left them to exercise their own
wit in their choice of methods, and he set before
them a reward which could only be attained by
faithfulness that reached to death. He held the
door of this splendid opportunity open, not only
to the gifted and the free, but to the slave, the
woman, and the child. The paths of intercession,
not the least heroic of Christian ways, start from
the scenes of humblest toil, offering to all the
forces and originality of the soul an entrance to
the highest heaven, an influence in the empire of
the world.
But further, while Jesus appealed to all that
was positive and active in the human heart, the
very formation of purpose, with all its outflow,
imposes a corresponding restraint. To press
toward a mark is not only to neglect, but to
reject, all that hinders. Here it is evident that
if a man's ambition soars to the salvation of a
race, he must have a very full knowledge of the
chap, in THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 319
complex conditions of life, or some simple guiding
principle which carries within it a separating force
by which to distinguish effective from ineffective
means. The most complete knowledge of magnetic
force can only lead men to utilise it by conform-
ing to its laws, and such knowledge will produce
magnificent results; but long before such know-
ledge was thought of, the use of the compass
enabled every mariner to cross the sea. The
example and teaching of Jesus is such a compass
for the man who is simple enough and wise
enough to accept it; and he from his experience
can prove that it answers the purpose. In the
matter of the fighting spirit, the compass has
not been accepted by corporate Christianity.
Instead of crossing the sea with the splendid
audacity of faith, we as a body have determined
our devious course by hugging the shores of ex-
pediency, and have suffered shipwreck.
This brings us to the crown and culmination
of the change of heart which Jesus works in those
who truly love him. When a man bends the
whole force of his nature upon the attainment of
Jesus, he has the intuitive vision of truth and love
always at one, never at variance, and with every
step he takes toward the realisation of the Christ-
life his vision grows clearer. Such a man knows
that he has always with him a force greater than
that of twelve legions of angels; but he does not
use his power to coerce or weaken his fellow-men.
Truth cannot suffer loss. As well slay men in
defence of the law of gravitation. Love is already
lost when we draw the sword in her defence. We
320 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv
cannot alter natural law or detract from natural
force; we cannot get away from their dominion.
By ignorance and disobedience we can suffer under
them, or lose their beneficent power. It is only
by making experiment of them that we can learn
from or honour them; it is only by implicit
obedience that we can win from them any blessing.
The salvation of Jesus in the heart of a man causes
him to realise that truth and love are one, and
that nothing man can do can alter their dominion
or gauge their force. It is only by experiment on
the lines of their force that he can learn or teach
Christianity; it is only by implicit obedience to
them that mankind can attain to any further
good.
In his earthly day Jesus came saying, "Turn
from what you are, and what you are doing, to a
better life, in which God will rule and defend and
bless you." To-day he comes with precisely the
same call, "Turn, for the kingdom of heaven is
at hand." If we have received some elements of
heaven on earth from our Christian fathers and
won some advantage for ourselves, we are still as
far from what is possible to us as was the world
when Jesus came. To think otherwise is to be
among the righteous and effeminate for whom
Jesus has no vocation.
Every one is needed for some part of the three-
fold enterprise on which the servants of Jesus are
sent. All that benefits the body, all that benefits
the mind, all that makes man one in purpose
and hope with God, is to be achieved by them.
What strength, what ambition, what talent, what
chap, in THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 321
honourable impulse, cannot find scope in such a
task ? Is there not for us, as there was for St.
Paul, enough to tax the strength and craft, the
courage and resource, that any man can use in
the task of saving men rather than destroying
them ? If the powers of all Christian men were
thus employed we should not hear of the needed
discipline of war. And with the progress of ages
the work to which Jesus sends his servants is seen
to be greater and more varied. Everywhere on
the fringes of empire there is constructive work
and helpful work to be done — a wrestle with the
forces of nature, a battle with the elements, de-
mand for the self-control that means also the con-
trol of untutored men. Everywhere there is an
army of defence wanted at home for the rescue
work of the slum. Everywhere companies of boys
and men, with a hero for a leader — a man who
can organise and command — can be lifted from
the degraded and criminal classes to be useful citi-
zens. There is danger, there is certain failure, for
men who have not high qualities of courage and
generalship; but the work is everywhere, and the
soul of every child born within our civilisation who
develops only to base uses cries to God against
the brother who turns his heroism and soldierly
abilities to a less useful end. In the commerce
of the world Christ calls everywhere for the spirit
of financial martyrdom, for commercial heroes
who, instead of seeking immoderate gain, will
create in commerce safe paths for the feet of the
poor and honest. In the present state of things
such men will almost certainly be crushed to the
322 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book
IV
wall, but their followers will profit by their loss.
In the journalism of the world Christ is calling
for men who at any cost will refuse to lend them-
selves as tools to party spirit, political or religious.
There is no learned profession, no path of humble
livelihood, where Christ is not seeking for the
pioneers and martyrs of a newer and better life.
How many among those who call themselves
Christian men are working like heroes in the
building of the City of God ? Perhaps, at a high
estimate, one man in five hundred. The least
we can do is to honour those who thus work;
yet, instead of that, it is these very men — be
they bishops or missionaries or Salvation Army
captains — whom we continually criticise, holding
them responsible for the low standards of which
we ourselves are the best advertisement.
But let us be quite sure of one thing — the vital
force that makes a hero is not mimetic. The
outward semblance of heroism and sainthood will
never be in a new age what it was in a former age.
One chief source of our lifelessness is that we all,
like the typical milliner's apprentice, want to
read and dream about some once manly type
of virtue and honour which by repetition has
become artificial and therefore vulgar. Sainthood
must be original or it is not sainthood. In other
paths of life we acknowledge the weakness of
imitation; how can we more effectually damn a
man for any worldly use than by saying, "He
has no originality, no individual resource"?
Why is it that to-day we have few great men
except in the field of science ? Largely because,
chap, in THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 323
except in the scientific field, we test greatness by
a conventional standard. If we could only realise
this we might perhaps be roused out of the vul-
garity of our religious conformities and class
prejudices and paltry expectations.
Consider St. Paul, whose inspiration as an
apostle can only be truly recognised by a Church
that trains all her sons to try to do as much for
God as he did. His work is still to be done at
home and abroad. In every heathen country the
dangers he encountered are still to be met; the
hardships he suffered are still to be endured; the
success of winning half a continent to Christ is
still open to men who have his pluck and his stay-
ing power, his enterprise and his lowly estimate of
his own righteousness. It is not indeed a great
store of Christian knowledge or love that is needed
to start with. If we read St. Paul's letters in the
order in which he wrote them we shall see how
his faith and knowledge grew by degrees and with
much labour. It was not at first but at last that
he wrote, " I know whom I have believed, and am
persuaded that he is able to keep that which I
have committed unto him against that day." !
It is private enterprise that Jesus calls for first,
and the reformation we so sorely need must
begin in the silence of the heart. When purpose
is strong, restraint will be as natural as outflow.
The crying need of the world is not legislation
but self-government, not the taking of cities but
the ruling of our own hearts. We are most of us
set within states and churches which are not
1 2 Tim. i. 12.
324 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
governed by the people in them; nor yet by wise
statesmen and ecclesiastics whom the people could
blindly trust; they are governed by the media
through which the people get their information
of men and things — the newspaper or dema-
gogue, political and religious. There is some
saving common sense within us about these mat-
ters, for we all profess to be a little above party
belligerence, and to think ill of the man or woman
who is always redolent of the partisan or sectarian
newspaper; but we are ourselves the more vulner-
able to the half-truths we are constantly hearing
and reading because, while we enjoy them, we feel
ourselves able to discount their influence. The
root of the matter is our liking. If we enjoy
party invective, however clever, however mod-
erately worded, against any set of men — Lib-
erals or Conservatives, Democrats or Republicans,
Socialists or Plutocrats, Romanists or Protestants,
Anglicans or Methodists, Englishmen or Ger-
mans, Irishmen or Americans — we are steadily
cutting ourselves off from the power of truth
and love. Every day we are less able to see
what is true, to know what is good, and more in-
capable of participation in the work of God. The
newspaper and the demagogue are our servants;
they are what we make them; that the best of
them fail to obtain support, that the majority of
them are what they are, is incontrovertible proof
of the anaemic nature of our Christianity. Hero-
ism of Christian purpose requires us to refuse to
support and refuse to applaud the half-truths and
invective that we are most ready, by our training
chap, in THE FIGHTING SPIRIT 325
and prejudices, to enjoy. Do we think that life
would be impossible and intolerable without it ?
that the State would fail and the Church crumble ?
Just so did the leaders in Jerusalem think when
they said that if Jesus continued to live the Romans
would come and take away their place and nation.
CHAPTER IV
THE SWORD AND THE MUCKRAKE
In the matter of international war the question
is not to be solved in the present state of affairs.
Our hope is that in a better state of affairs that
the future may bring a solution may be found;
and while we see men on all sides shaking their
heads and calling such a hope a poet's dream,
we may perhaps show that it is not an unreason-
able hope.
If we go back some thirty years, and find some
intelligent deliverance upon this same topic, it
will enable us to see how far and how fast public
sentiment has travelled. Take Dr. Mozley's
sermon on war.1 No man could be more clear-
headed. He finds war vindicated first by the
fact that patriotism is a duty, and that the man
who has a conscientious objection to fighting is
not a patriot. This last statement is made with
the assurance with which it is now echoed only
in the jingo journals and the schoolboy's debating
club. Even thinkers who advocate disarmament
are not now accused of being unpatriotic because
1 University Sermons by Canon Mozley, Sermon III.
326
ch.iv THE SWORD AND MUCKRAKE 327
they do not believe in war, the patriotism of the
apostles of peace having been amply proved.
Quite recently a French politician, M. Naquet,
wrote in the Nineteenth Century advocating dis-
armament for France, but the reviewers, though
they called him an 'amiable visionary,' did not
suggest any want of patriotism. Dr. Mozley
admits that Christianity denounces the motives
which lead to war — rapacity, selfish ambition,
tyranny, and vanity; but finds its second vindi-
cation in the fact that it is the only court in which
the disputes of nations can be tried and decided to
the satisfaction of both combatants. This part
of the sermon is as clear a presentation of the real
difficulty as can be found; but when he proceeds
to say that, because there never has been an in-
ternational tribunal to which all nations will
defer, there never will be such a court, we realise
that he is writing in the latest decade in which
a thinker could take it for granted that the future
must be like the past. The dynamite of the
theory of evolution had already blown up such a
position with regard to the future in every strong-
hold but that of morality and religion; a few
years later, and the power of the idea, which
opened the future to unlimited hope, had found
a place in the religious mind, and no man could
henceforth stand in a scholastic pulpit and measure
the possibilities of the future by the past. The
next argument is still more antiquated, viz., that
war must have been accepted by Jesus as a neces-
sity because it was a part of the regime of his time
and he says nothing against it ! Slavery, trial by
328 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
torture, imprisonment of debtors for life in vile
dungeons, barbarous forms of executing criminals,
such as stoning and crucifixion, arbitrary govern-
ment, and that abomination which has degraded
every Eastern nation, the farming of taxes — all
these have the same tacit permission to exist ! The
new life which Jesus brought into the world was
the axe which was laid to the root of those trees;
as they are cut at the root by the development
of the Christian life, so one by one in process of
time they wither away. This we all admit.
If in a quarter of a century such a change has
come over the mind of the religious world as
makes this sermon sound like a mere echo of the
past, if the necessity for war does not appear to
be so well established in the minds of men as it
was but a few decades ago, we must acknowledge
these are hopeful indications. We do not need
the calling of meetings, or much talking, or letters
in the newspapers; still less do we want the or-
ganisation of new societies. These may have
their place, but they are not essential. Each of
us must be resolute to form in his own heart a
purpose strong enough to mould his own life;
it is the only way of obtaining a corporate purpose
strong enough to mould the world.
We hear of the men of high ideals who in the
past put their best workmanship into the churches
and cathedrals they erected to the glory of God,
and sometimes people sigh pensively as if the age
of this virtue were past. We are right in feeling
that the house that we build for the Lord must
be "exceeding magnifical," but it is a living house,
ch. iv THE SWORD AND MUCKRAKE 329
built of thought and feeling, purpose and restraint,
such as, being handed on to the men of the future,
will make their lives more beautiful and more
instinct with the life of God. And the walls of
this living house are not, can never be, marred
by the hideous thoughts and emotions born of
partisan misrepresentations and national animos-
ities. These, should they touch the house, must be
burned by the inexorable fire of Love, who is the
master-builder.
As we allow ourselves to be deterred from
realising the kingdom of love on earth by the
difficulty of imagining how the governments of
earth can become inoffensive and forgiving toward
one another, so we allow ourselves to be deterred
from living the careless, disinterested life of the
kingdom by our inability to arrange the commerce
of the world on any other principle than that each
work to obtain the greatest material advantage
for himself. We do not, indeed, see how to
arrange the trade of our own town, or even our
neighbours' business, upon the lines laid down
by Jesus. But, after all, that is not what we are
asked to do. It is not our theories but our life
that Jesus offers to inspire with wisdom and
power; nor is it even the life of to-morrow, but
simply the life of to-day, which he offers to in-
spire. It is ours thus to obey, and to die if need
be, trusting to God, whose universal laws in their
working take account of every individual fact, and
give it its due influence in the final result. The
laws of social life, the facts of history, both tell
us that if any number of men in a community
330 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv
set themselves to think and to work by some new
plan or dynamic idea, the future of that community
is not the same as its past. The commerce of
the world to-day is more capable of moderation
and improvement because of every truly disinter-
ested life which has been lived; and it is by the
power of such lives that communities are so
changed that what appeared impossible to one
generation becomes, to a future generation, a
necessity of thought and action.
History shows that, within what we call Chris-
tian civilisation, the nature of business trans-
actions between men has undergone changes which
would have defied any human forecast, and
certainly tend to a more equal distribution of
opportunity than did earlier customs. In the
Middle Ages, to trust your neighbour with your
money that he might trade with it if you could
not, and so make a profit both for himself and
you, was a thing unknown. The man who had
money, if he could not himself employ it, hid it,
often in the ground, where it could benefit no
one. The constant local warfare, the lack of
any broad basis of trust between city and city
and nation and nation, made hoarding the only
method of storing wealth. There being no legiti-
mate use for borrowed capital, the honest man
never borrowed. The spendthrift was the only
borrower, and the risk attending the transaction
compelled the lender to charge a high rate of
interest, which brought him and his trade into
sometimes undeserved contempt. How impos-
sible would it have been for a man of that age
ch. iv THE SWORD AND MUCKRAKE 331
to conceive of a time when lending and borrowing
would be, not merely legitimate, but essential to
the welfare of the community ! A complexity of
causes brought about our complex modern credit
system; a system under which, on the whole, the
covetous life is productive of more widespread
harm, while a liberal life can be lived more liberally,
with wider results for good, and also reproduce
itself in more widespread benevolence. All that
is pointed out here is that so great a change proves
that progress is possible in what seem the most
settled ways of men.
All that is good in modern business conditions
must have come about by the action of the Divine
Mind upon the corporate mind of man, working
especially through those who had the laws of fair
dealing at heart. If, then, men in business life
should begin more and more to set their hearts upon
endowing the world with such new commercial
standards as shall make the acquisition of super-
fluous wealth a dishonour rather than an honour,
and all sharp dealing as much to be abhorred as
is usury now, there is every reason to expect a
greater difference between the commercial stand-
ards of to-day and those of a future century
than obtains between the present and the past.
Such pioneers would undoubtedly meet with com-
mercial persecution, and many would need to
face the loss of all and the worse sorrow of involv-
ing those who have trusted them. But if the
Christian hope be true, the right would gradually
prevail in the very market-place, and on the
exchange the worship of Mammon would be
332 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
dethroned. Money would become a blessing
rather than a curse, because the love of money
would have ceased to dominate the commercial
mind, and the command against covetousness
would be reverenced amongst all good men as
the command against stealing now is. Nothing
less than this can be the Christian's hope; but
it will not be attained easily, not by mere hoping
or pious aspiration. It will need men in increas-
ing numbers increasingly set on carrying the
purpose of Jesus into every form of commerce,
and ceaselessly presenting the desire for the ac-
complishment of God's will on earth. It is in
such matters as this that the parable of the unjust
judge is the stay of those who have the welfare
of the kingdom at heart.
The path does not open very far to our sight;
but there can be no question that there is a treas-
ure of heaven hid in the field of human com-
merce, and it is only by selling all that we have
that we shall be able to gain it. It is not ours to
dogmatise, yet, among the forecasts of those who
try to think how the commercial world is to be-
come the kingdom of our Lord, the extreme
Socialists seem to be trying to take a shorter cut
to the end than is the way of Jesus. Total ab-
stinence from any element in life not in itself a
vice, unless it be as a temporary and personal
expedient, seems to be a broad rather than a
narrow road. Once entered upon, it is easy,
fatally easy; it ignores some factor of life, instead
of moulding it to its purpose. If men are to
abstain wholly from personal possessions it is
CH. IV
THE SWORD AND MUCKRAKE 333
difficult to see how they can carry out the many-
sided activities of the Christian ideal. If, for
example, a man's earthly welfare is secured by the
laws of the community, how can he exercise the
virtue of taking no thought for the morrow ?
What faith is required to trust God for food and
raiment ? How can he give away all that he
possesses ? How, if his portion of goods, and that
of everybody else, is measured, can he give, or
take, the overflowing measure which one neigh-
bour ought to give into the bosom of another ?
It is commonly said that children brought up
in some dependent position, having no possessions
or privileges of their own to give away, are lack-
ing in the capacity for gratitude. Further in-
vestigation on this point is most desirable. If
gratitude, the choicest flower of the soul, only
blooms in the atmosphere of possession, rooted in
generosity rather than in receptivity, it would
seem that to deprive man of the control of pos-
sessions, even though it be to promote his material
and intellectual welfare, may be to tamper with
the very source of his highest life.
Whether Socialism be a mistake or not, it is
probably one of those phases through which we
shall go to the perfect life. History has shown
that many things "must needs come" and pass
away. There is, in the evolution of mankind,
apart from the life of the kingdom, something
swinging to and fro, like a vast pendulum in the
clock of the ages, brushing aside first one class of
men and then another with some appearance of
secular justice. The priest for generations tyran-
334 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
nises over the people, and the age comes when
the people tyrannise over the priest. The class
tyrannises over the mass, and in turn the mass
tyrannises over the class. The sword has emptied
the purse; the purse will sheathe the sword in rust.
Capital has abused its power; labour is scarcely
a human factor if it does not take its turn of
privilege and abuse of privilege. When the great
swing of the clock of time pushes us to the wall
it is useless to get angry, still more useless to
whine. The punishments will fall hardest on the
innocent, but the brave will learn the lessons they
teach.
There is always the refuge of the yoke of God,
the "more excellent way" which St. Paul found
so good, the way of giving up place and power
and riches for Jesus' sake before they are taken
from us. At the same time, it cannot be argued
that Jesus taught that a man should not have
possessions, for, although he told one rich man
to give away all that he had, to another, who
said to him, "The half of my goods I give to the
poor," he replied, "This day is salvation come to
thy house."
CHAPTER V
THE PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 1
Jesus undoubtedly taught that men prone to sins
of the lower nature, as violence and covetousness,
were not so degraded or so hardened against his
salvation as those — "perverse and stiff-necked"
— who obstinately adhered to outworn religious
beliefs. "Moses we know, but this man we do
not know," expresses a sin of the spiritual nature
that left those who entrenched themselves in it a
prey to deadly spiritual forces from which Jesus
could not save them. But let us first be clear as
to what quality it is that Jesus describes as being
perverse and deadly. It is not the humble caution
which will beware of false teachers: to that he
urges his servants, and he gives them a test. The
test is the good life of the teacher and the good
fruits of the doctrine; and this test must be
somewhat rigorously applied, for caution is not to
be put off its guard by the mere appearance of
goodness in a would-be reformer. This caution
and this test are, however, markedly different from
1 Much of this chapter was embodied in an article in the
Monthly Review, May, 1 901.
335
336 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
the spirit which rejects the noblest life and the
best ethical results of any body of teaching simply
because that teaching does not tally with the
authority of the past.
It is this spirit against which the wave of every
successive reformation must break, and the fact
that this deadly spiritual sin is a permanent ele-
ment in the religious nature leads us to suppose
that the protest against it involved in every re-
formation must be a permanent need in the
Church. The attitude of mind engendered by it
is the most unfavourable to any real revival or
reformation of religion. How does any true
reformation begin ? At first like some half-guilty
doubt, like a thief in the night, some clearer under-
standing of the Christ steals into one watchful,
yielding heart after another, until the fleet light
flashes over all. The recurring prophecy Jesus
made of that coming of his which would discover
his servants unprepared, unfit to receive him and
inevitably degraded by that unfitness, probably
refers to these hours of glorious opportunity. Such
an opportunity was his earthly life, and it be-
hoves us to learn from that what the protest of
each successive reformation ought to be.
The argument of this chapter is that Jesus
Christ expressed an ideal protestantism which must
be essential to the perfection of the Church; that
the nature of right protestantism, as distinguished
from wrong, can be discovered only by an analysis
of his attitude toward the sins and errors of the
religious system of his place and time.
It is but necessary to consider the Mishna, or
chap, v PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 337
any sketch of its contents, to see how soul-deaden-
ing was the legalism which at the Christian era
entered into every detail of the action of the devout
Jew of the Rabbinical school. The very fibre of
his religious performance was of such stuff that a
revived spiritual impulse could not long make
his rule of life its expression. The observance
of the Halakah, the traditional law, was the re-
ligion of all pious Jews. It has been a popular
idea that a section only, and they false religionists,
devoted themselves to legalism, while another
section, the faithful who were waiting for the
consolation of Israel, nourished their souls only
upon psalm and prophecy; but this is not true.
All religious Jews considered tithings and puri-
fications and sabbatical exactions as the law
of God. Deep down where the eye of God alone
sees the inner man, there was, no doubt, a clear
distinction then, as in the Church of all time,
between what may be called "the faithful remnant"
— the pure in heart, who always see God even
through the utmost formalism — and those who
may always be termed religious actors (vTroKpiTai),
because they are absorbed in accomplishments.
But as far as Judaism might be seen outwardly,
it was technical and gross; and if some humble
souls laid the greater stress upon the inspired
utterances of their religious poets, the flower of
the nation — its strength, its youth, its learning —
sat in the higher Rabbinical schools, where the
precepts of a literal law were painfully analysed
and split into more and more shocking puerilities.
Perhaps the most accessible information concern-
338 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv
ing this religion is in Edersheim's Life and Times
of Jesus. In vol. i. chap, viii., we read: "The
Halakah indicated, with the most minute and
painful punctiliousness, every legal ordinance as
to outward observances, and it explained every
bearing of the law of Moses, but beyond this it
left the inner man, the spring of actions, untouched.
What he was to believe, and what to feel, was
chiefly matter of the Haggadah." Edersheim
explains that the Halakah was considered of
supreme importance. Then he adds : " He (Jesus)
left the Halakah untouched, putting it, as it
were, on one side;" and again: "Except when
forced to comment upon some outstanding detail,
he left the traditional law untouched."
Let us be quite clear about this. Jesus pro-
tested against certain external actions of religious
Jews. These were not enjoined by the tradition,
and were condemned by the more thoughtful
leaders of the legalising party themselves. The
Pharisaic conscience was already vaguely feeling
for definition of precisely those vices which he,
graciously blowing upon its smoking flax, made
vividly clear. They had already feebly protested
against the taking of oaths; they had said some-
thing in favour of secret alms; they had spoken
of those among them who made a public nuisance
of their piety as the plague of their sect, and it
goes without saying that both priests and Rabbis
knew the illegality of the traffic in the temple
from which the former reaped so rich an income.
Now, as to the extremists, "the plague of their
sect," it may be remarked that there are in every
chap, v PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 339
section of the Church at all times men who, under
the influence of the religious idea, perform deeds
which to better-balanced minds, who hold the
same doctrine, appear obviously wrong. Such
men usually make stock-in-trade of some sort out
of their sensationalism, and yet would shrink in
penitence from their selfish motives if they were
capable of self-analysis. In truest kindness to the
fanatics themselves, Jesus held up such motives
to the light; such actions in tenderness for their
groping conscience he denounced. It is also very
noteworthy that the most objectionable usages
were condemned, not for what they were out-
wardly, nor for the doctrines they involved, but
because of their motive. Thus the chief criticism
which Jesus made of religious customs fell under
the second division of Jewish doctrine; it was
Haggadic; in which province even the most rigid
sect of the Jews allowed large option of theory.
This criticism is mingled with most earnest ex-
hortations not to break with the existing law, but
to add to it holiest motive, and with commands
not to judge others, to beware whom we accept
as religious reformers, making a good life the test,
to be more careful to clear our own vision than
that of our neighbour, to treat others as we would
wish to be treated, and not to be blatant concern-
ing our sacred things.
Thus this polemic of Jesus displays three char-
acteristics. First, he upbraids only in harmony
with the conscience of the party he criticises;
secondly, his criticism refers to motive, so that it
contradicts as little as may be the sacredness of
340 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
their code; and thirdly, he upholds the authority
both of code and codifier, conserving for the
moment the very law that he knows his teaching
must eventually supplant. We shall see that
these same features characterise his protestantism
to the end.
Toward the end, knowing that his word cannot
then save Judaism from dying in its sin, he again
lifts up his voice against their customs. But again
he gives the command to practise and lay to
heart all that the existing authorities teach, and
again shows that their teaching is not to be scorned
but to be improved upon in motive and in heart-
felt performance; and when he laments the woes
that will certainly befall the devotees of a mis-
taken religious zeal, and points out the faults
which will be the causes of these calamities, it is
evident that the accusations brought against the
leaders of the stricter party in the Jewish Church
are such as would have tended, if heeded, to
purify that party rather than to break it up. He
again accuses them of being artificial; and to this
is added the charge of spiritual pride and the
zeal that springs from it, the exaltation of small
distinctions and duties to the loss of the great
principles of goodness, care for the external life
where the springs of motives are false, and, last
and worst, the devotion to dead teachers while
those who are inspired with the living truth which
makes for growth are stoned. These warnings
can be launched effectively against many workers
in any section of the Church; they are, in fact,
taken severally and each set forth in its different
chap, v PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 341
aspects, the burden of warning breathed by every
faithful Christian shepherd to his flock. Jesus
first grouped them all together with consummate
skill, which displays what we call his religious
genius; and the fact that he was manifested
at the moment when the faults of the Church had
donned their most concrete dress proves, if we
believe in a divine plan for the religious devel-
opment of the race, that it was of first impor-
tance that true religion should be exhibited as
at enmity with the most natural faults of the re-
ligious. But it is impossible for any one con-
versant with the state of Jewish thought at the
time to suppose that Jesus intended to dispute the
general authority of the Judaic tradition for the
Jews of that generation. Against the supposed
righteousness of the Rabbinic Halakoth, which
embodied a most degrading mistake as to what
constituted obedience to the God of life and love
— concerning that Jesus says very little. Eder-
sheim says, "The worst blow he dealt it was that
of neglect."
When all polemic was over, when Jesus ad-
mitted that his message to Judaism as a Church
had been rejected, what did he do ? Did he
oppose himself openly to it, and in his last hours
with his followers commission them to break with
it ? We have no indication of such a spirit on
his part, and clear evidence to the contrary.
There is no record that the infant Church, even
when under the fullest inspiration of the descend-
ing Spirit, conceived of itself as standing upon
the ruins of Judaism. In this vital period the
342 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
Church exemplifies much that we ought to repeat,
but of iconoclasm, of the spirit that strikes at
traditional authority, there is not the slightest
trace. Even the leader of the apostles, the orator
of Pentecost, had no conception that he was at
liberty to neglect Judaic restrictions, or welcome
to Christian fellowship those who remained
in the environment of other customs. It needed
vision and voice from heaven repeated three times
to introduce these ideas; and when introduced,
long and painful controversies only developed
them slowly.
Such, then, was the character of the protestant
teaching of Jesus; and this protest was the push-
ing of the large divine goodness against the nar-
rowness of man's religion. The existing Church
said, "Obey the letter." He replied, by precept
and life, "The letter killeth;" and this phrase
really sums up the whole of his opposition. The
protestantism of Jesus was only a small, though
essential, part of his message. The larger share
of his time was given to preaching that "the
Spirit giveth life," and the effect of his protes-
tantism can only be fully understood when con-
sidered as a part of the total effect of his whole
teaching, as in the case of any other reformer.
Two things only as regards this completer view
can here be noted — that the extreme temperance
of his protestantism left the more room for his
constructive work, and that the substance of that
constructive work consisted in truths which, al-
though they must eventually break up a dead
letter, were on such a different level that they
chap, v PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 343
did not obviously clash with it. He hid in the
heart of Judaism a life principle which must
ultimately break the shell not only of its for-
mulae but of all successive formulae as they are
outgrown.
The result of the temperate protestantism of
Jesus as applied to the very unfavourable con-
dition of the existing Church was that the schism,
when it came, seems actually to have divided
between the wheat and the chaff, the fruit-bearing
and the dead trees, the sheep and the goats; this
cannot be said of any reformation since. The
Jewish Church, which persisted in antagonism to
Christianity after the second century, exhibited no
principle of self-development, which is the test of
life.
The form of Christianity resembled the form of
Judaism very closely at first, and changed from it
very gradually. The new was added to the old —
that was all, to begin with. The very apostle who
was fighting to gain for the Gentiles the same
freedom to exercise their Christian faith with as
little change of external custom as might be, took
upon himself a Pharisaic vow in the precincts
of the daily sacrifice. Had the spirit of the Church
remained true in all its progress to the example of
the divine reformer, we believe that all such forms
of Judaism and heathenism as were not desirable
would have slowly and gently separated themselves
and disappeared, as the sere blossom falls when the
fruit is formed. Instead of this, how has the
spirit of Judaism, as in this matter it contrasts
with the spirit of Christianity, triumphed ! The
344 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
persecution which Jesus foretold was perhaps as
much the result of the evil principle within the
Church as of the evil principle without her. It is
of the very essence of Judaic law to believe that
it is possible to translate God's truth so literally
into human forms or formulae that the converse of
those formulae must be false, and therefore that
God is to be served by the sword of controversy.
Let us consider, by way of example and con-
trast, the Reformation of Luther. If he upon his
awakening had said, "Calamity will certainly come
upon you, ye saints of the Church, who sell for
money the remission of sin's punishment," he
would have carried with him the great body of
the sober religious of that time. They did not,
of course, approve of the brutal sale of indulgences
any more than did Luther, and the closest analogy
may be observed between them and the pious
adherents of Judaism in the time of Christ. It
was that which mediaeval saints did soberly believe
concerning the rights vested in a visible authority
which made Tetzel possible; and without their
genuine goodness, their tears of true contrition,
their true self-denials and holy motives, the abuses
of such as Tetzel, and indeed every abuse that the
great Church harboured, would have been harm-
less, for men are too literally made in the image of
truth to lie long in the toils of an unmixed wrong.
Had Luther gone on to take every abuse toward
which the conscience of the saints of the Church
was pointing, were it ever so feebly, and to charge
it upon the whole Church with bitter cries of woe,
his protest would gradually have carried all true
chap.v PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 345
souls with him. They would have been the last
to disclaim their responsibility. Rising in the
might of true goodness that depends upon God,
they would have responded to his call, and so he
would have purged the temple. Internecine war
there might probably have been; the chaff sep-
arated from the grain by the winnowing fan
might have eddied and darkened the air; but
our point is that the fan in that case would ac-
tually have divided between those who chose the
grace of God and those who preferred the disgrace
of the carnal mind. Anything that might have
been left when a true reformation had been accom-
plished, would have been as dead spiritually as was
Judaism when Christianity had finally emerged
and separated from it — an ashen crust to show
where fire had been, a shell from which wings
had taken flight, a sloughed-off skin. The true
Church would have gone on in its continuous life
to fresh conquests of new truths. That victory,
once won, would have been won for ever.
Is it not clear that Luther's attempt to define
what he supposed to be the converse of the spiritual
truth which God had given him, and his determina-
tion to impose this definition upon the Church,
resulted in this, that when Christendom was split
by the wedge against which he was heaving such
heroic blows, the line of cleavage ran not between
good and evil, saint and sinner, but divided the
army of the saints pretty equally into two halves ?
And thus the truth, which is always first concrete,
a life — a word only in so far as word can be lived
— was divided also; and God could not be God
346 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
and give the moral victory to either party; the
wound could not "heal with the first intention,,,
nay, could be nothing but a running sore of battle.
Error ! If it was an error to conceive of God's
wrath as being appeased by money given to the
Church, we can at least conceive such action as
being an expression, if a mistaken one, of true
contrition; whereas we should be indeed lost to
Christian sentiment if we could find the expres-
sion of any God-given emotion in the rule for the
highest degree of Pharisaic punctiliousness. Or
again, what could be the error of calling the
motherly element in the divine nature by the
name of Mary as compared with the error of
conceiving the Almighty as wholly material, as
himself performing ablutions and wearing phylac-
teries, as causing the counsels of Heaven to wait
on the decisions of an earthly Sanhedrim ? If
it was a crime of the Church to essay the per-
suasion of heretics by fire and sword, how much
worse and more material was the — to us —
fiendish desire of the pious Jew to sweep the
nations before him from the face of earth and
hope of heaven, and feast for ever in celebra-
tion of their doom ! If monastic vows made
division between nature and holiness, the ideal of
life and worship which underlay them was at once
more pure and charitable than any conception of
holiness in the Jewish Halakah. Among fighting
men there is perhaps none much greater than
Luther, yet we cannot suppose that Jesus, who
left the whole false fabric of Judaic thought and
practice to perish by its own natural decay, would
chap, v PROTESTANTISM OF JESUS 347
under any provocation have struck, as at last did
Luther, at the authority to which all Christendom
then bowed, subjecting to a to-morrow of anarchy
millions of sheep who could not as yet comprehend
the call of a new shepherd. Jesus would surely
have denounced, as did Luther, the corruptions of
the Papal Court, which every honest Papist bitterly
deplored; would have spoken out more strongly
than did Luther or Erasmus, of enforced vows and
the utter shame of selling, not only spiritual gifts,
but mere legal justice, to the highest bidder; but
he could not have been less tolerant of the ecclesi-
astical authority of that day than he was of that of
the priests and teachers of his own time.
The positive illumination which Luther and his
followers brought to the Church was very great.
However mistaken they may have been in their
negations and destructive policy, their word con-
cerning God's immediate fatherhood for the
individual soul, his personal inspiration in it, his
fostering care of its truth, was a most true echo of
our Lord's essential doctrine, an application of it
so necessary to the spiritual growth of the race
that, resounding through the history of that time,
we hear the music of the promise, " Greater things
than these shall ye do."
Let us mark again, for it cannot be said too
often, that the attitude of the Church toward the
reformation always pertaining to her true life
ought to be that of an open mind, heedful only
to reject the immoral or insincere in thought, and
the works that tend to oppose the tender humanity
of Jesus. Take the great reformation of God's
348 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv
truth in physical science in the last century: if
the Church, seeing the high endeavour of such
inspired men as Darwin and Huxley, had held
open her mind from the first to such truth as they
had to impart, how great would have been her
gain ! and how great, too, would have been the
gain to science if such men as these had not left
the field of their own rich treasure to seek to
destroy the hidden treasure in the field of the
Church !
It is Jesus, not any other reformer, who is our
ideal. The true heirs of his gospel are those who
look to the future rather than to the past for the
perfect understanding of him; who are able to
work intensely, by prayer and by such form of
expression as is given to them, to show forth the
inexorable quality of the Christ-life. Such men
are, indeed, the true successors of the Jewish
prophets, of the apostles, of every true reformer
within the Church of Rome, in the ranks of his-
toric protestantism, or nominally outside any
branch of the Church.
CHAPTER VI
THE POWER OF HIS DEATH
The declaration of the gospel is this — that God,
who is life as manifested in love and joy, gives
himself to man here and now, in and by Jesus
Christ, who ever receives, ever bestows, what he
received, what he bestowed, in his brief visible
ministry.
The initial difficulty of the human mind in
accepting the religion of Jesus arises from the fact
that it seems impossible to us to value what we
would possess otherwise than by its cost to us.
We think that the race has had to pay for all its
gains. The dregs of the struggle of past evolution
are in our thought, and, using cost as our measure
— the very opposite of God's measure — we place
a fictitious value on all things. God makes a free
gift of the best, and sets a price only on the worst :
sin he permits to us by measure, because its cost is
so great. Our highest measure of that cost is
the death of Jesus; and all pain and sorrow
wrought by the Evil Will on men or by men, all
premature death, is part of the cost — God himself
suffering in all. Life and love and power God
gives without measure; it is his great joy to lavish
349
350 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv
them on all who hold out the hand of faith. Yet
faith itself is his gift. We are set in an endless
sequence; we receive because we believe, we be-
lieve because we have received. It would seem
that part of our greatest mistake has been to set the
simplest and lowest of God's gifts far off in a
region of miracle and heavenly glory, regarding
them as the results of the faith that enters the
higher life, not as Jesus gave them — as the prep-
aration for that faith. To receive those gifts
which fulfil our earthly need would be to receive a
better opportunity to believe that even the love of
Jesus in its depth will animate us. Yet the gifts
of God can only be received by a corporate faith.
One man, be he ever so faithful, cannot rise above
the faith of the race; he can only lift it higher.
One corporation, be it ever so pure, cannot hear
God's voice alone; it can only awaken the world
and teach mankind to listen. The gifts of God
are not to man, but to mankind. The Son of
Man while on earth only received from God what
he could give to men. The saint can only receive
from God the gifts he can persuade his brothers to
receive from him. According to the Johannine
Gospel the moral necessity for the departure of
Jesus — "It is needful for you that I go away" —
was that men could then receive no more from him.
The lesson of his love to men in forgiveness unto
death was necessary before they could begin to
assimilate all the earthly lesson of his life. Until
mankind believed the earthly things he told them,
how could they believe the heavenly things he
should afterwards impart by his Spirit ?
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 351
We see him on earth with the eyes of those
who loved him best. His court is so royal that
the kings of the world have ever craved its benefits
in vain. He offers to all suitors, as the first
and simplest rites of hospitality, the pleasures of
health, the dignities of self-control. To those
who enter his banqueting-house his presence
causes the life that is past to seem poor and dis-
honourable— its best as well as its worst; but
to the feast he spreads is added the appetite to
enjoy; with the banquet is given the temperance
that blesses its delight. He sets before men a
standard of service, material and spiritual, more
beautiful than any other; he points them to a
spiritual goal farther than any man may see, and
entrusts to them his great enterprise. He lifts
them out of all cause of depression; forgives their
sins freely; and offers to equip them with strength
that will make their service jubilant. All his gifts
are so bountiful that there is no limit to having
except lack of desire. The only gifts he denies are
those things whose value consists in their scarcity —
those things of which, if one man has more another
must have less, and of which if all had plenty none
would want any. They are of so sorry a nature
that they produce more pain than pleasure, the
love of them being the source of all that divides
men, causing them to enslave themselves and
offend their brothers in the mean ambition to
attain a trivial and transitory good.
Is there any spiritual joy so high as partnership
with the Source of love, a share in God's high
emprise ? — something divine to do, that claims
352 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
every power of thought; physical nature unob-
served to be rightly observed; a race beloved by
God to be won from the enslaving world-soul
whose breath is covetousness, whose gift is moral
obliquity, whose reward is spiritual death ?
Is there any moral pleasure like the sense of self
at unity — a unity in harmony with all good ? We
only know ourselves in anarchy, and cry, "Happy
are those who do not know — who yet live in the
outward look, or govern themselves by the destruc-
tion of the highest part, or drift only suspecting the
horror of the internal strife !" But to know one's
self, and to know all one's powers in harmony, not
through the destruction of any power but through
the common guidance of all — that were a salva-
tion indeed ! There are hours in which we have
partly attained to such self-control; it is only by
the sum of such hours that we can conceive of the
volitional salvation which Jesus offers.
Is there any material pleasure to compare
with the pleasure of health ? We have so far
missed the mark that we hardly know; but there
is an hour in the spring-time when we feel the
health of the great earth-mother pulsing in us to
the renewal of life; there are moments when
every organ in the body is touched into harmony
by joy; we look back to the relish of childhood
for life, and by the sum of all these experiences we
may try to grasp the bodily joy of the Christ's
salvation.
Thus we see the Christ and his salvation — the
gift of complete joy, of which our faith can yet only
realise a small part. In the midst of this gospel
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 353
of joy is set the death of Jesus, no mere incident
but the heart and crown of the message of life.
How large a part of each evangelist's story is this
death ! How clear and minute is the descrip-
tion of the trial, the torture, the burial, and the
resurrection ! How calm and wide is the spirit
of the narration, tender with love for Jesus, yet
without invective, without resentment towards his
tormentors, although these narrations were recited,
collected, and perfected in the very midst of the
fierce party conflict between Christians and Jews !
It is, above all else, in his death that the power of
Jesus to forgive is lifted up. As the supreme
fact of his ministry is his death, so his death shows
forth our supreme good — divine forgiveness.
Here only God and man meet. Jesus said,
"Father, forgive them for there is excuse for
them." We must say, "Father, forgive us as we
forgive those who torture us." We do not now
understand this atonement — even our faith grasps
only a little part of it. Some of us grasp one
part, some another; and the fragments do not
join at their edges, nor even indicate how great
and beautiful is the whole.
Yet let us rejoice in our gleanings ! It is
human death that has given us all the thoughts
we have of an immortal good. If all men were
yet alive, how indifferent must we be to any hope
higher than that of earth! It is love and love's
forgiveness that raise the standard of blessedness
on earth and therefore raise the standard of the
hope beyond earth. Misery makes heaven only a
place of relief. The nobler, the healthier man's
2A
354 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
life here, the nobler and healthier his hope of
heaven. The work of joy for earth which Jesus
wrought, seen close beside his death in the midst
of his life — this sight gave a new reality, a glow,
a warmth, to the world's hope of immortality.
To share this hope there is no need first to define
the divine nature. "We needs must love the
highest when we see it." Having seen him whom
we worship passing visibly beyond the grave, all
highest hope and warmest love is henceforth
centred there. To have seen the mind of Christ,
the way in which he could forgive, the motive
from which he served men, all the service he tried
to render; to have felt ever so slightly his healing
touch on the body; to have heard, even as in
sleep, his word that frees the will; to have felt
the comfort of his presence, is enough at least
for this — that henceforth the death that passed on
him is — can in the nature of things only be —
transition; and that a state where he could more
perfectly realise his will would have for us the
beauty of home because our will would be realised
there. This alone is no small thing. As the
painter compels the gaze of those who look upon
his picture to travel and focus where he will, so by
the intensity and fulness of his life, by the swift
pathos of his transient death, does Jesus compel
the hearts of those who love him to hoard their
greatest treasure beyond the gates of death.
The very pressing question rises, May we live
where he is ? There is, as far as we know or can
reasonably believe, one law of life in the universe,
— every living thing must be able to correspond
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 355
with its environment, otherwise life passes away.
How, then, should we be able to survive in the
spiritual environment of the fuller presence of Jesus?
How little we know concerning the next stage
of existence from the teaching of Jesus may be
vividly brought to mind by the reflection that he
gives not the slightest indication whether man's
spirit continues within the material universe for
an age, or for ages upon ages, endued with some
other kind of body, or whether its life is no longer
subject to conditions of time and space. It
is frequently assumed that none but a materially
minded man can think of the next life under con-
ditions of time and space : all that is true is that
we are compelled by the constitution of our minds
to believe that reality, the essential self, must tran-
scend those conditions. There is, however, no
reason to assume that the self can only exist either
in the present material body or in a purely spiritual
condition. There may be a thousand worlds, a
thousand intervening stages.1 Even if the universe
of sense be but a dream, it may have many un-
foldings. The belief that our spirits, after this life,
pass immediately out of time and space is neither
necessary to thought nor is it countenanced in the
Gospels. If the visions of the resurrection life
were objective the evidence, is all the other way.
The body of the resurrection was certainly as
material as is light or sound.
1 "The astronomer has set before us the infinite magnitude
of space, and the practical eternity of the duration of the uni-
verse." Huxley's Lay Sermons, p. 19. See also Appendix,
note D.
356 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv
What, then, may we gather from the Gospels
concerning that stage of existence in which Jesus
has promised to meet his own, and where his
kingdom, begun on earth, must be continued ?
In the life of Jesus we see that his strength of
desire, his intensity of purpose, his eagerness of
plan and intention, grew stronger as death ap-
proached; and we are permitted, according to the
four records, to see that after having passed
through death, there was, in this, no change. In
the visions of himself which he vouchsafed to his
friends he was still full of passionate desire to
pursue those ends which he had sought while he
lived among men, and it was only to those who
had devoted their all to furthering his ends that he
then gave his company. The great importance of
the resurrection-visions for us is their proof that
death brought no break or discontinuance in the
character and purpose of Jesus. If it did not
change him, we have no reason to suppose death
will, in these respects, change any man. Taking
up life after death with the same character we
have here, should we survive in his company ?
We turn to his words and ask, What does
Jesus teach about this ? The heaven, purgatory,
and hell which our fathers built so grandly in the
unseen, with splendid stones hewn from the literal
interpretation of parable, have faded from our view
as fade the glowing cloud-mountains of sunrise
in the increasing light of day. To replace them
with the imagery of " Paradise " and "Sheol"
and "Gehenna," taken from the literature in
circulation at the Christian era, would serve us
cH.vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 357
nothing. Jesus used these names to convey his
most serious teaching; the names themselves had no
one accepted definition; the literature of the time is
proof of this. In truth the highest religious emotion
is only awakened by terms which will be found to
defy definition. Thus the term "glory," except
when signifying human honour, has only rhetorical
value, as it is probable that no two men have the
same notion of transcendental glory. "The end of
the world," "the creation of the world," "the higher
life" are terms of the same sort. They can be
used to convey the most valuable and important
religious thought, while, at the same time, no
intelligent man could cavil at the particular prop-
ositions in which they occurred on any ground of
scientific inaccuracy. Words of such indetermi-
nate connotation are useful in turning the attention
to most vital ideas, which, while necessary to serious
thought, mark the limit of human knowledge, and
are the more useful because they mark that limit.
What, then, does Jesus teach ? The belief that
all men, in the process of natural evolution, will
in some far-ofF end attain to divine bliss, may or
may not be true; it is neither affirmed nor denied
in the gospel. The belief that all who reject
Christian rites and refuse to repeat creeds will fail
to attain to the joy of Jesus, has still less foundation
in his words and ministry. What Jesus does make
very distinct, what he does promise very assuredly,
is to lead his own for ever onward, to share with
them all his joy. All that Jesus taught of the
character of heaven was his own personal character.
All that he vouched of God was that he had
358 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
the same character. All that he promised for
the future was that his servants should dwell with
him. When we have gazed our fill at all the
rich imagery of the parables, and pondered all the
poetry of his teaching, we know nothing more
about the unseen than that the Father's house is
vaster than we can conceive, and the Father's love
greater than we can dream; but the great tender-
ness of Jesus, and the all-embracing love of the
Father which he constantly recites, do not in his
teaching justify an inference of universal salvation.
The death of Jesus, the manner of that death,
gives to any doctrine of easy and universal bliss
absolute denial. In the midst of all his teach-
ing concerning the Father's love and readiness
to do all physical and moral good to man that
man could desire in response to the faith that is
the condition requisite for his working — in the
midst of this teaching, and after expressing his
own most earnest prayer to escape premature
death, we see him suffering an early death in its
most terrible form. If God be the Father of whom
Jesus spoke, he would, if he could, have saved
this son who had served him pre-eminently.
Whatever else this mean, it means at least this,
that we are face to face with suffering which God's
love and power cannot prevent. We reason very
naturally when we say that God, being great and
good, could not punish man severely, because none
of us would carry our anger toward any one so
much weaker than ourselves to such a length;
but if suffering be not God's chastisement, it
is real and terrible, else were such a martyrdom
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 359
as that of Jesus impossible.1 In considering the
ministry and death of Jesus we are forced to turn
our attention to a destruction of life and beauty
which is inconsistent with any inference we strive to
make from the goodness of God to the nature of
his dealing with man. To the materialist all that
happened to Jesus is perfectly explained, and as
historic fact it has adequate explanation for us all;
but in the religious sphere man, regarding God
as absolute power and perfect love, cannot find
adequate explanation for it. The religious heart
has always demanded an explanation. Every ex-
planation that has been given may have shadowed
forth some part of the truth, but the mystery still
remains. No theory of vicarious suffering does
more than place the mystery one step farther back,
and that mystery teaches us this at least very
clearly, that we cannot argue from God's goodness
to any assurance of universal felicity.
One thing, at least, is surely made clear by a
study of the gospel — the pains Jesus bore must
have had a purpose quite other than that of satisfy-
ing God. It cannot have been physical pain or
physical death that Jesus regarded as a means of
lifting us to closer communion with God. Lest
we should think that, we are told that they crucified
with him two others, one on his right hand and
one on his left. These suffered, and from the
same cruel laws; their pain does not lift us nearer
God. Every page of the world's history is stained
with blood and vocal with the cries of the wretched,
and the world is not helped thereby. That Jesus
1 See Appendix, note D.
360 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
shared all this, and, while bearing it, could forgive
those who inflicted it, is for us the help and lesson
of his physical pain. What pain he bore and
forgave as a man is to be the measure of our love
to men; pain cannot be part of his service to God,
or of ours. In emphasising God's desire for
human pain the Christian Church was obeying a
pre-Christian, ascetic impulse; it was not part of
her Christian inspiration.
Jesus, who lived to show us an all-embracing
salvation, certainly showed us in his death how
terrible are the powers of cruelty which exist in this
world and, for aught we know, in other worlds.
In the death of Jesus the cause is clearly seen to be
the cruel will of men — men who stood for religion
and justice. They could have had no power at all
to do what they did if they had not acquired it by
virtue of religion and justice. Pilate in the name
of justice, the leaders of the Jewish Church in the
name of religion, did this thing. Nor were the
systems of religion and justice represented fraudu-
lent; they were great factors of good, and behind
them both stood the goodness of God. Only a
superficial sophistry can deny this, or deny that
cruel and wicked deeds were the frequent result of
both systems, and that men who lent their wills to
do these deeds were acting in direct opposition to
the goodness of God. There was nothing re-
markable in the way the agents of these systems
dealt with Jesus. Granted their beliefs and policy,
they would and must have dealt in the same way
with any other who came before them on such accu-
sation and without making defence. The name of
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 361
God, the goodness of God, partly expressed in the
systems which gave birth and character to the men
who killed Jesus, lent them authority. More than
that, the life of God created and sustained them.
It was in God that they lived and moved and had
their being while they did this dastardly thing.
This is the Christian faith; that God the Father
who forgives every returning sinner instantly,
freely, the Father who can so work on the bodies of
men that through their own faith the paralysed, the
leprous, the possessed and the vicious, can at his
word be made whole and free — this same Father,
having given his creatures part of his own freedom,
remains the passive upholder of that freedom in
its cruelty, while it wreaks destruction on that
which he loves most tenderly.
Standing before this awful fact, what reason
have we to suppose that the moment our souls
pass beyond this life they will, unless they have
attained to the kingdom of Jesus, pass beyond the
power of the cruel will of men ? The men who
caused the populace to howl and cry for the torture
and death of Jesus died in their sins — purpose,
character, beliefs unchanged. What reason have
we to suppose that such men in the next stage of
life are powerless to do evil, or are separated from
all whom they would persecute ? Further, we have
no reason to believe that human cruelty is the only
cruelty, or the most powerful. We have seen that
the cruel will in man gives a presumption that
there is a cruel will external to man. Human hope
has often conceived of this Evil Will as chained in
every state of being but this; but to this conceit
362 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
Jesus gave no authority. Lazarus was safe; but
Dives, who seems to have been a fairly well-
intentioned man with a care for his brothers, was
tormented — by whom ? and with what sort of
torment ? That flame is a figure, but even in
present worldly competition its heat may be seen
and felt.
'Tis the gradual furnace of the world,
In whose hot air our spirits are upcurl'd
Until they crumble, or else grow like steel —
Which kills in us the bloom, the youth, the spring —
Which leaves the fierce necessity to feel,
But takes away the power — this can avail,
By drying up our joy in everything,
To make our former pleasures all seem stale.
— M. Arnold, Tristram and Iseult.
Jesus teaches us the Father's love, and how much
he suffers with the suffering of all his creatures,
telling us that not a sparrow falls without God;
this is said in full face of a great slaughter of
sparrows for the market of Jerusalem ! Consider
the lilies, which God hath clothed better than
Solomon in all his glory, and yet on the morrow
they are to be cut down ! " How often would I have
gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth
her own brood under her wings," is one of his most
exquisite expressions of his love to men; and its
following word is, "Ye would not. Your house is
left unto you desolate until ye say, Blessed is he
that cometh in the name of the Lord." How
many generations would fall at Jerusalem before
that desolate city should arise and bless his name ?
Jesus distinctly states that he had good hope of
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 363
"saving" the sick, the poor, and the lost, but
small hope of reaching the whole, the rich, and
the righteous. There is joy in heaven over one
sinner that repenteth; but what about the ninety
and nine over whom heaven has no special cause
to rejoice — for we cannot conceive that God fails
to rejoice over moral beauty wherever he sees it ?
Who, then, are the whole, the rich, and the
righteous whom Jesus did not hope to save ? We
meet in his ministry three types of men who
would seem to be beyond his reach. First, there
are those who have consistently done what they
believed to be right, and are mildly desirous of
conforming to a higher rule of life if they can
find it. The young ruler, the scribe who asked
which was the first commandment, probably
Nicodemus, perhaps Simon to whom the parable
of the two debtors was told, are examples of this
class, and we know that a large number among
the scribes and Pharisees practised a life consistent
with their moral ideals. Secondly, there are those
who, finding in themselves a lack of virtue, seek
to supply the lack by teaching virtue to others.
They strive to enter into life, but their strivings
are not in harmony with what is best in their
own hearts, still less with the higher life that God
would base on these natural dispositions. Such
are those who strain at gnats, who ask for a
sign, who slay the prophets to do God service,
who say, "I go, sir," and go not. Such in the
concrete were those priests and lawyers who asked
Jesus to reprove the hosannas of the multitude,
who desired his disciples to fast and charged him
364 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
with the possession of a devil, who asked him by
what authority he cleansed the temple, who com-
passed his death. Thirdly, there are those who
break the laws of God and nature and will not
seek God's grace — such as Judas and the im-
penitent thief. In these three classes, as seen in
life around us, we find an aspect of God's provi-
dence, a psychological problem, that baffles our
understanding. We meet with men and women
of the first class who have rational and moral
beauty as far above that of the average person
as is the physical beauty of others. Yet in them
this perfection is not combined with those pas-
sionate and insatiable desires which cannot find
ultimate object except in God. They display a
lack of warmth even in human relationships. This
type of moral beauty is apt to content itself with
niceties of morals, refinements of taste, or specula-
tions about religion. Beginning on a very high
level, such persons do not grow greater. The
common sinner, if rising in the scale at all, makes
great progress. Both nature and the gospel show
us that God's love is not content with any stage
of perfection, but delights only in the perfect
rhythm of endless growth and regeneration which
constitutes progress. God must love moral beauty
— the heart of Jesus was drawn to those who had
kept the commandments. A mother must rejoice
in the beauty of her child — but if, as in some cases,
an early perfection of symmetry means that
her child must ever remain a dwarf, her rejoicing
is changed to agony. It is in just such cases of
apparent moral perfection that we realise that to
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 365
"need no repentance" is an actual human con-
dition which makes the higher life impossible,
except in the sense in which all things are ultimately
possible with God. In the second class we see
the fanatic, the bigot, the partisan. Domestic
gloom, ecclesiastical strife, political rancour, are
the marks of their presence, which spreads no
compensating sweetness. They, too, are obeying
their conscience, and we marvel at their obvious
virtues while we suffer from their ill-doing.
Thirdly, there are those whose egotism produces
real moral obliquity on a grosser plane. Criminal
psychology is proving that there are men who
literally can "find no place for repentance," be-
cause they actually think conduct right in them-
selves which would be wrong in another. Such
men are very often religious, and, as far as we can
see, incapable of seeking reformation. Jesus al-
ways depicts the "unsaved" as self-righteous, and
identifies repentance with faith. There is hope,
from the teaching of Jesus, that beyond this
world, in drear ages of unsafe and unhappy
life, unrepentant men may yet discover their
own need; Jesus always represents the regener-
ative activity of God as pouring itself into all
creation except when shut out by the free will
which refuses to acknowledge its own need. But
in this life such people appear to us, as to Jesus,
to be shut out from the higher life by a natural
incapacity to see and desire it. We are apt to
think that if we can say that they are not respon-
sible it is equivalent to saying that no evil will
befall them : not so did Jesus regard moral
366 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv
obliquity; he said that because men could not
hear and could not perceive they could not be
saved from wrath to come.
If we believe in Jesus we believe that he can
welcome his own after death to a condition of
immediate safety, that among his own there are
multitudes who do not expect his protection, that
he will prepare a place where their will, like his,
shall be accomplished by God; beyond that we
know nothing. All those who do not attain to
the heaven where God's will is perfectly done —
and in the teaching of Jesus they are represented
as at least as many as the saved — may remain, as
on earth, exposed to destructive forces within and
without themselves, for there is no ground in the
Gospels for the supposition that God's will is
perfectly done in "hell" any more than on earth.
What, then, are we forced to believe about
"the righteous" and any others whom Jesus did
not promise to save ? Certainly this, that not one
of them falls without the Father, that their failure
and pain, as long as it exists, must be greater pain
to him than to them, that he will be as kind to
them as to those who are saved. Whatever sun
may shine in the future stages of human life, the
almighty Father, by the very necessity of his nature,
must make it shine on the evil as well as on the
good. Those who are without the salvation will
remain for a time true to their own character.
Some will be lost in their self-refinements and
small attainments. Some will always be seeking
to save themselves at the expense of any who
may interfere with their rights or dispute their
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 367
religion or policy. Some will more and more be
devoured by the flames of hatred and covetous-
ness. Some will constantly wail to God to have
mercy upon them, when all that they need is to
be merciful to him by ceasing to put the life
by which he upholds them to lower uses. Is it
necessary that life should be put to its lowest use
for the user to be "lost" in the sense in which
Jesus used that word ? Surely not. Outside of
Jesus most men find their best strength by par-
ticipation in fighting and gaingetting. They win
much; they gain much; and there is a mixture
of good and evil in it all. The good often pre-
ponderates; and all good, even the most trivial
and transitory, is of God. For all we know,
men who seek to live for themselves on earth
may be taken after death to one and another
region of the universe where there is work suited
to their capacities and tastes; they may compete
for ages upon ages with other living things, as
the lower lives from which they sprang com-
peted in the storm of earthly development. Some,
by their very fitness for violence and sharp deal-
ing, may survive whole myriads of their kind,
and become — themselves slaves — monarchs of
destructive forces. Such lives are led on earth :
why not on vaster scale in other realms of soul or
in the pathways of the stars ?
There can be no doubt that the only salvation
Jesus offers is the offer of himself, his own charac-
ter, his own companionship, his own service of God,
as the supreme and perfect good. To love men as
he loved them, to serve them as he served them3 to
368 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
suffer loss at their hands without impatience as he
suffered, is the only test of his companionship and
of God's service in the individual life; and his
only plan for the ultimate salvation of the race upon
earth was by the multiplication of such individuals,
by the cumulative strength of their corporate life.
Outside the kingdom of heaven it is not the man
who most benefits the community in which he
lives who, in the course of evolution, is necessarily
fittest to survive, but he who can thrive best upon
the community. It is not the nation that gives
most richly to the world, but the nation that can,
by strength and skill, take most toll of other
nations, that becomes greatest and endures longest.
It is not the religious system which leads the
greatest number of men most quickly forward to
nobler ends and higher uses whose kingdom in
this world is most visible, but the system that can
most effectively coerce the human conscience to
enrich and to fight for its organisation. If the
kingdom Jesus founded were under the same laws
of development, in the same stage of evolution,
as the kingdoms of the world, his servants, as he
himself taught, would need to fight. But the
kingdom he founded is subject to a higher law of
development. It grows and spreads only by love
and service ; and when men would use the processes
of fighting and getting on its behalf it fades and
fails. In that way they may get much, they may
win much; but the kingdom for which they
thought to gain and to win is diminished, its in-
visible power is withdrawn, its strength is impaired,
its victory retarded. What is effected by such
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 369
methods is only the organisation of some temporary
army under a false Christ, the building of some
transient temple in whose inner sanctuary the God
of love is forgotten.
In his death Jesus teaches us first this earthly
thing; when we have understood it we may be
taught the heavenly meaning of that death. There
can be no question that had Jesus chosen to invoke
and play upon party spirit he had the ability to
save himself. The insight that could give an
unanswerable answer to every caviller, an adequate
reply to every questioner, the eloquence which
could draw the multitude, the indignation which
could quell the violent and overawe the super-
stitious — these would have enabled him to form,
of the noblest in the state, a powerful faction.
1 Which of us, leading a cause which he believed to
be the cause of truth against falsehood, of the
humble against the proud, of the poor against
oppression — which of us, leading such a cause,
and having it in his power to arouse a party in
the state and arm it with the strength of an in-
vincible enthusiasm, reinforcing it with the ever-
triumphant hosts of God, would choose to suffer
repulse, contumely, and the apparent extinc-
tion of the cause of which he was the champion,
rather than break the law of love and offer battle
to his brothers in thought or word or deed ? This
is the earthly side of the Atonement. It is only
by such a conception of duty that man can be
made at one with man. Most of us feel how
1 This passage, and some others scattered throughout the
book, were first written in letters to The Spectator.
2B
370 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS
powerless we are even to rise to such a conception
of duty; and to those who have the greatness to
perceive the strength and beauty of the law of
love, how far is it possible to fulfil it ?
Who, then, can be saved ? Which of us belong
to his kingdom, and live as he lived ? Which of
us in the historic Church of the past, which of
us to-day, have, or in the near future will have,
the fitness to survive in his presence ? Does
the death of Jesus in any way produce this fit-
ness in us who have no fitness ? Was his death
necessary to make even the most contrite heart
at one with God ? What did he mean by "giving
his soul a ransom for many," and shedding his
blood "unto the remission of sins" ?
We have seen that we do not know what God's
justice is because we have never seen or conceived
of any punishment of guilt which did not fall also
on the innocent; we do not call the punishment of
the innocent just; we are therefore forced to admit
that the divine justice is yet far beyond our sight.
If we do not know what God's justice is we cannot
comprehend his forgiveness; yet for this we have
a measure which, however inadequate, gives us a
little knowledge — "as we forgive them that tres-
pass against us." In the hour when we voluntarily
suffer rather than tempt men to sin, when we do
heartily forgive a great wrong which we might
punish, we realise, although we cannot explain,
some part of the forgiveness of God; we should
have realised more had we obeyed this law in our
corporate life, but we have not done so. If we
cannot explain God's justice or forgiveness, how
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH 371
can we understand God's conception of atonement
for sin, or the philosophy of the way by which the
sinner can come into communion with God ?
Yet when the Christian believes that the In-
carnation gives us a perfect earthly life, lived by
the Christ on earth only in that strength which
God will give to every man who looks to him
with a like faith, then he realises most deeply
that something external to his own endeavour
must be done to unite him to God as Jesus was
united to God. It is not prayers or tears or zeal
or self-loathing or love of man or the vision of
God in all things, that can do for him what he
needs. He hungers and thirsts for more life.
Faith — yes, faith, he knows — will bring this
life; but his faith fails. He holds out empty
hands to God and faints with intensity of desire.
That which lifts him up and satisfies him is not
the vision of the Christ in vigorous life here on
earth, or in the resurrection, but the vision of
the dying Christ, conquering even death with
love.
We do not understand how this is, or why.
All attempts to explain the Atonement may be
conceived as attempts to answer the defiance, more
or less conscious, which man's reason offers to
God. The wrath of man and the meekness of
God answer and re-answer one another in the
darkness that shadows Calvary. We cannot yet
hear clearly what God says; the Church tries to
hear and to interpret, and through the ages we
hear her in colloquy with Reason.
Reason cries, "If God were good he could not
372 HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS book iv
look upon the sin and misery of man and live; his
heart would break. "
The Church points to the Crucifixion and says,
"God's heart did break."
Reason cries, "Born and reared in sin and pain
as we are, how can we keep from sin ? It is the
Creator who is responsible; it is God who deserves
to be punished."
The Church kneels by the cross, and whispers,
"God takes the responsibility and bears the
punishment. "
Reason cries, "Who is God ? What is God ?
The name stands for the unknown. It is blas-
phemy to say we know him."
The Church kisses the feet of the dying Christ,
and says, "We must worship the majesty we see."
In very truth this is almost all the Church, as a
whole, has said; but within her there is a babel
of tongues, and much more has been said and
more feebly. Even what seems to be the essence
of the Church's belief cannot satisfy the intellect
if it be regarded as her whole, or her final, word.
In the belief and practice of the Christian
Church we find modifications of all the religious
efforts of which the most ancient history bears
record. If in estimating the sources whence the
Christian Church sprang we cannot afford to ignore
any religious effort the world has known, much
less can the Christian of to-day afford to ignore
such inspiration as any period of the Christian
Church manifests. The modern Christian who
should think to serve God or man by doing so
would be as mad as a statesman who should
ch. vi THE POWER OF HIS DEATH
373
propose to abolish existing laws and customs in
order to invent new ones. All that we can be or
do is the growth of the past. A flower, when it
comes, is a new thing; but without a plant there
could be no flower. This is true of each branch
of human thought; it is also true of the sum of
human ideas. If Christianity be true, the Chris-
tian Church must be the product of all thought.
Its roots are in the furthest beginnings of the race;
in the revelation of Jesus it came forth a tender
plant; all the flower and fruit of the future de-
pend upon the growth of the plant.
APPENDIX A1
No doubt the fact that we can conceive of, and Chris-
tianity reveals, a God who shares our suffering, though
not our sin, has caused the Christian Church to pic-
ture God's attitude towards the one as differing entirely
from his attitude towards the other. But that the divine
nature can share with man the results of sin is no proof
that those results are in harmony with the divine will,
but rather the reverse; for in any personality of which
we can conceive, what is in harmony with the will can
hardly be called suffering — the pain, at least, must
be greatly neutralised. We are forced, then, either
to the belief that when God shares our suffering, that
suffering at the same time in some way gives him the
pleasure of harmony, or else that he does not will the
pain which he is willing to share.
This argument in itself is not sufficient to prove that
God does not will suffering, but it does refute the com-
mon idea that because Jesus suffered his suffering —
and inferentially all suffering — must have been the will
of God.
1 See above, p. 109.
375
APPENDIX B1
The great strength of Christian Science seems to be
that it does not attribute suffering, any more than sin, to
God's will, and has in this respect an estimate of the
Father's character in harmony with that of Jesus. No
one can deny that when St. Peter said, "Thou art the
Christ, the Son of the living God," he said it of one
who, by word and act, day by day, had clearly proclaimed
that every bodily and mental disease was in opposition to
the Father's will, and would vanish with the right exer-
cise of human faith. It would seem that it was not the
ability to reason correctly, but a child-like faith in the
Father's tenderness and in his enmity to all ill, that Jesus
regarded as the first qualification for his service, and
this the Christian Scientist possesses. But the salvation
at which Jesus aimed was certainly the salvation of all
the powers of man, and the power of correct thinking
must be included in that salvation.
From the resume of Christian Science doctrine which
may be obtained from its more intelligible writers, it
would appear that they deny the reality of sin and pain
in the same sense in which man in his metaphysical
moments usually finds it necessary to deny reality to the
sensible universe. Even if it is true that we are bound
by the necessities of thought to conceive of reality as
only that which is beyond any condition of time and
space, this merely shows that the body and all its sensa-
1 See above, p. 1 21.
376
APPENDIX B 377
tions, pleasant or painful, must, with the physical uni-
verse, be regarded as unreal. Christian Science seems to
make a religious doctrine of half this assertion — viz.,
the assertion of the unreality of pain and sin. Chris-
tianity, taking account of the facts of the universe as we
know them, accepts the faith that health is to be dominant
and that every process of disease may and must be domi-
nated; but this does not give any colour to the belief that
in the degree in which the body is real, its diseases are not
as real as its health, its vices as its temperance. The
gospel of Jesus deals only with the spiritual in interaction
with the physical here and in "the life of the ages," wher-
ever and however "the life of the ages" may be spent, and
gives no colour to the belief that here, or in any part of
the soul's progression, sin and pain have not that degree
of reality with which other phenomena are credited.
What is clearly revealed in the gospel is that God, the
creator and sustainer of all, has a never-changing will
set against disease, infirmity, and sin, and will re-create
man in health, strength, and virtue whenever the faithful
recognition of this gives him entrance.
APPENDIX C1
A considerable weight of metaphysical authority tells
us that in ultimate reality evil cannot exist; and this
is taken by some modern theologians to indicate the
absurdity of believing in any positive evil. The greater
number of metaphysicians insist on the unity of the
Absolute; and this is held by such modern theologians
to prove the absurdity of belief in a personal devil.
They fail to note that exactly in the sense in which the
logical metaphysician holds evil to be unreal he holds
good to be unreal — both are relative, both incidental,
the one has no meaning without the other. Further,
the argument which proves to him that the Absolute
is one also removes human personality from the sphere
of the Absolute. Such theology as that above referred
to imitates Christian Science by helping itself to half
the metaphysical conclusion — the unreality of evil, and
ignoring the other half — the unreality of good. It goes
further and accepts the metaphysical negation of the evil
One while ignoring the metaphysical negation of the
human Many. This is absurd.
At present the conclusions of metaphysic and religion
do not seem to tally, and to some minds this is accounted
for by assuming that their methods are different although
their provinces are the same. This is a possible view,
and it implies that if both metaphysic and religion are
to be justified they must reach the same conclusions;
1 See above, p. 168.
378
APPENDIX C 379
but that we are forced to regard man's acquisition of
truth by each method as in process, because the develop-
ment of mankind and of all that pertains to life appears
to us to be in process. All that is required for sane
thought is to recognise that each method of seeking
truth, being necessary to man's life, must be healthy
and legitimate, and that while we may therefore expect
great gain from both, we cannot now know either in its
perfect stage. At any given time their conclusions may
be different.
On this view man, by the method of metaphysic, seeks
truth by discarding all that can reasonably be doubted,
and building upon what he cannot doubt only what can
be proved according to the acknowledged laws of thought.
As far as possible man addresses himself to this work
using reason alone. Reason thus employed ever hears
the voice of eternal truth bidding it —
carve out
Free space for every human doubt,
and to beware, above all things, of the assumptions of
faith. The conclusions of metaphysic are only justified
by the absence of any such assumption in the whole
process, while in religion, on the other hand, man begins
with the assumptions of faith. His first step here is
experiment, the experiment of personal dealing with the
object of his faith. In this experiment he uses his whole
nature. He makes no progress but by persistent experi-
ment. His conclusions are only justified or condemned
by the results of his experiments. Advancing thus, he
is lured on by the voice of eternal truth, crying —
I need thy faith, my child,
That I may draw thee from the seeming to the true,
Long hast thou been beguiled.
In any case the religious man must look upon meta-
physical methods of substantiating truths arrived at
380 APPENDIX C
by religion in another way, as a part of the religious life,
just as any other aptitude or capacity of man must be
included in the religious life, and just as, reciprocally, the
experiences of the religious life must be accounted for in
any satisfactory metaphysic. But he must be honest;
he must not allow his religious assurance to make his
metaphysic vague and illogical. As a matter of fact,
there is no consensus of metaphysical conclusion which
denies the underlying postulates of the Christian religion
— that God is a person, and that good is supreme and
must triumph — although it may be doubtful whether
any important philosophy gives metaphysical basis
for these postulates. Even to those metaphysicians
who accept the conception of reality which extinguishes
all that is phenomenal, that conception is not a resting-
place. It is the City of Unrest, or literally, the City
of Destruction, from which the pilgrim sets out to find
anew the City of Reality. On the lips of such pilgrims
the eternal question takes the form, May not person-
ality within that city dwell, with all its vivid sense of time
and change and pain and joy ? In other words, we
believe that if metaphysic is to be justified at all the physi-
cal universe is not outside its province; it must take
into account the facts of personality, the love and hate
which are the most vivid things we know; and appear-
ance cannot be mere appearance. That which appears
to be devilish must be related to reality, because that
which appears to be godlike must be so related. They
may not bear the same relation; but if one appearance
has in any sense reality, all appearance must have some
reality. It follows that evil is not to be described as
the mere negation of good.
APPENDIX D1
The popular belief that all men, or most men, after death
enter upon a condition beyond the reach of sin and sorrow
is probably a very great advance upon earlier doctrines,
which attributed the cruelty of the Eastern despot, who
figures so largely in Jesus' parables, to the heart of the
Father. The popular idea appears to rest upon two
arguments — the one, starting from the premiss that God
is love, argues that he will not inflict prolonged suffering
upon any of his creatures; and the other, starting from
the premiss that there is in man something which asserts
its entire independence of sense, argues gratuitously that
death will release all men from that connection with the
sensible which is now theirs, and further, that because
sin and suffering are imperfections inherent in the present
connection with sense, they are peculiar to that connec-
tion, and we must pass beyond them when we pass be-
yond sense.
As Christians we are bound to grant the premiss that
God is love, and secondly the premiss that the inner
nature of man asserts its independence of all but God,
and compels the belief that God and man have as their
essence that which transcends sense. A little serious
thought will show that neither of these propositions
justify the popular belief above referred to.
If suffering, here or hereafter, were inflicted by God,
we should certainly have reason to argue from the teach-
1 See above, pp. 355,359.
381
382 APPENDIX D
ing of Jesus concerning the Father that he would not
inflict prolonged suffering upon any of his creatures.
But to hold Christianity in any sense we must believe
that God permits, for some good end, sins that he does
not will; and if we assume that suffering is opposed to
his will as is sin, no argument from his kindness can
prove that there must be some particular term to sin and
suffering. Regarding suffering, like sin, as an incidental
consequence of men's moral freedom, we must assume, if
suffering is to end for all men at death, either that man
then has his will by some miracle suddenly made perfectly
consonant with God's will, or that he ceases to have
freedom. The latter alternative involves the old belief
in no further probation; the former has no support in
the teaching of Jesus nor in the processes of nature.
The second proposition the Christian is bound to
grant is that mind must transcend matter, and God and
man must transcend the material creation. This does
not give us any reason whatever to believe that the en-
tanglement of spirit with matter, the unity and absolute
interaction of mind and sense which is our only expe-
rience in this life, will for us cease with this life. Grant-
ing that a purely spiritual existence will ultimately be
ours, have we, from any analogy of nature, or any in-
spiration of religious genius, or from what we call reve-
lation, any ground for believing that the present is the
only life in which we shall be an integral part of the
physical universe ?
The analogy from what we know of progression in
nature is that whatever persists develops into something
higher or degenerates. This may afford a presumption
that man, having obviously risen from something we call
lower, will, if he persists, continue to develop those
powers — superior memory, reason, etc. — which differ-
entiate him from the lower creation and unite him with
that aspect of God which those powers represent, or that
APPENDIX D 383
by their atrophy he will degenerate, not into the primitive
type from which he came, inanimate or animate, but
into something with no power of further develop-
ment.
The theory of many successive lives of the one per-
sonality, all equally unconscious of the others, all lived
on this earth, belongs to an age of thought when the
Now was as much the centre of time as the Here was
the pivot of all space. This theory of recurring lives
without connecting memory cannot prolong itself in
generations imbued with the idea of the ascent of man.
Nor can we suppose that man returns again and again
to this little world, which we now know plays an in-
finitesimal and indifferent part in the vast ages of the
suns. What truth underlies this idea needs restating
to have validity, although as it stands it may by some
occasional fashion be galvanised into transient activity,
as in what calls itself "theosophy." While we have
no reason to suppose that man may not lead many
successive lives in the material universe our new sense of
proportion forbids us to assume that, having played his
part on this little stage, he must return to it. If we
have made any progress in knowledge of the visible
universe, such progress must be the best inspiration in
any presumption concerning the invisible life, about
which, let us repeat, we know nothing. By analogy
from what we know of development, therefore, we may
argue that man having acquired consciousness and
memory, these powers must belong to the higher reality
towards which he tends, and that in any normal future
state he will increase rather than lose them. But this
analogy leads us no farther.
The undoubted fact that when the change of death
passes upon the body the life passes from it in a medium
to us invisible, impalpable, and inaudible, is of course no
evidence that the life is not endued with a material body.
384 APPENDIX D
The universe is full of matter and energy, of which we
have no sensuous perception, the existence of which we
only infer from certain results of which we only have
knowledge from some incidental result. If we consider
all the time-worn analogies of the resurrection-life we
must perceive that the butterfly is as material as the
worm, the dawn as physical as the night, the flowers of
spring as gross as the black earth of winter. Tennyson's
suggestion in "In Memoriam" of the immortal soul of
his friend passing from star to star in the universe, finding
congenial work in each, — "so many worlds, so much to
do," — has quite as much justification as any other view
we may take of our future life, of which we know
nothing.
Man's inner mind, when contemplating reality, finds
nothing more inexplicable or, in a way, absurd, than all
the complex visible phenomena of his life on this earth;
it is not in any way more inexplicable or more absurd
that his spirit should go on leading a life as perfectly
entangled with other physical phenomena, of which he
has now no conception, in some other solar system, or
should continue to lead successive lives of increasing or
decreasing power, passing through every solar system in
the universe.
To return to the second fallacious conclusion drawn
from the premiss, that the reality in man must transcend
sense, viz., that sin and suffering are peculiar to our
present relation to sense, we must perceive that the
fact that man will ultimately be perfect gives no hint
as to how many stages of spiritual imperfection he may
pass through on his way, even if as a separate entity
he should persist to the end. By experience we learn
that the higher the nature the more deadly its evil.
There is no animal that can inflict so much injury upon
its kind, or on the world, as man, and none that can
suffer so much under injury. The more intelligent the
APPENDIX D 385
man, the more injury he can inflict and the more he
suffers. Comparing Satan and Adam in Milton's epic,
and Mephistopheles and Faust in Goethe's drama, we see
that the poet's insight bears this out, while all theology
declares that the pride which can uplift itself in stubborn
inward defiance of the tender influences of God, is a
more deadly and far-reaching evil than any sensuous vice.
It is quite conceivable that moral evil in its worst degree
may exist in a non-physical universe.
We must, then, admit that we have little ground for
the assumption we have been considering as to the ab-
sence of sin and sorrow in a future state.
THE END
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Professor of New Testament History and Interpretation in the
University of Chicago
THE CHURCH AND THE
CHANGING ORDER clofh> I2fno> ^ net
..." a most interesting and valuable contribution to the literature
of a subject that is growing in popular attention every day. While
among the deeply, really religious and genuinely scientific there is no
conflict or antagonism where even there is not accord, this unfortu-
nately is not commonly the case among the masses who have only
caught the forms of religious and scientific knowledge without their
spirit. This book is addressed much more it seems to the religious
than the scientific, possibly because the latter have the less need for
repentance. Those who are troubled in any way at the seeming con-
flict between the demands of faith, on the one hand, and the experiences
of their own reason and the problems of modern social and industrial
life will find here much sage, illuminating, and practical counsel."
— Evening Post.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
By R. J. CAMPBELL
Minister of the City Temple, London
THE NEW THEOLOGY
Cloth, crown 8vo, $1.50 net {postage jc)
" Mr. Campbell has not designed the book to meet the requirements
of scholars and theologians, but to convince plain laymen and per-
plexed workingmen that there is a great deal of dead wood which
must be cut away from the religion of the time before it can be
adapted to modern progress. . . . His opponents condemn the poli-
tics of the book as tarred with Mr. Hardie's Socialist brush. That is
a singular indictment to frame against a new treatise on theology."
— New York Tribune.
"... The book, therefore, is not to be regarded as a theological
treatise, but rather as an outline of what one man, in a London pulpit,
is doing towards interpreting the gospel in terms consistent with
modern science and historical criticism, and its appeal is not to scholars
so much as to the average man, especially the man who has lost faith in
the traditional creeds and in the organized religion of the day."
— Congregationalist.
"... And let me say the utterance of this one man has created a
literature of no mean dimensions equipped with all the grand saving
elements of the old doctrines and marked by earnest thought, genius,
and erudition. . . . All who know Mr. Campbell admit his goodness
and transparent sincerity. He has stirred the intellectual and religious
life of England as it has not been stirred for many years." — Chicago
Standard.
" From the ends of the earth come indications that Mr. Campbell's
crusade against the old views has indeed set the whole world discuss-
ing theology. From Australia and America come opinions upon the
New Theology, which has penetrated Roman Catholic, Anglican, and
Free Churches all over England. . . . The Jews claim that Mr.
Campbell is breaking down the barriers between Israelite and Gentile,
while one of the organs of the Society of Friends sees in Mr. Campbell
an exponent of Quakerism. Father Bernard Vaughan on one hand
and Dr. Emil Reich on another have discussed aspects of the New
Theology — the former seriously and the latter flippantly — and a
nursing paper has recognized that the controversy comes within even
its purview." — Christian World.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YOEK
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