Civilisation at the cross roads : four lectures delivered before Harvard University in the year 1911 on the William Belden Noble foundation

CIVILISATION
AT THE CROSS KOADS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE GOSPEL AND HUMAN NEEDS: being the
Hulsean Lectures, delivered before the University
of Cambridge, 1908-9, with additions. Sixth Im-
pression. Crown 8vo, $1.25 net.
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cents net.)

RELIGION AND ENGLISH SOCIETY. Two Ad-
dresses, delivered at a Conference in London, 1910.
Fourth Impression. Svo cloth, 70 cents net.

CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS. The
Noble Lectures delivered before the University of
Harvard. Crown Svo. $1.60 net.

CHURCHES IN THE MODERN STATE. Four
Lectures. Crown Svo. $1.35 net.

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

NEW YORK, LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA

CIVILISATION
AT THE CROSS ROADS

FOUR LECTURES

DELIVERED BEFORE HARVARD UNIVERSITY

IN THE YEAR 1911

ON THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE FOUNDATION

BY
JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS, Litt.D.

OF THE COMMUNITY OF THE RESURRECTION
HONOBABY FELLOW OF ST. CATHABINe's COLLEGE, CAMBBIDQB

New Impression

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO

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1913

All rights reserved

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

First Edition, September, 1912
Reprinted, November, 1913

THE INSTITUTE OF l^EDlAIVAL STUDIES

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TOF;C>yTO 6, CAi^iAOA,

DEC is 1931

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THB'PLIMPTON'PRBSS

[ W • D • O ]
NORWOOD'MASS-U'S'A

THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES

This Lectureship was constituted a perpetual foundation
in Harvard University in 1898, as a memorial to the late
William Belden Noble of Washington, D. C. (Harvard,
1885). The terms as revised by the founder and accepted
by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, Novem-
ber 26, 1906, provided that the lectures shall be dehvered
annually, and, if convenient, in the Philhps Brooks House
during the season of Advent. It is left with the Corpora-
tion to determine the number of lectures. Each lecturer
shall have ample notice of his appointment, and the publica-
tion of each course of lectures is required. The purpose of
the Lectureship will be further seen in the following citation
from the deed of gift by which it was established : —

"The object of the founder of the Lectures is to continue
the mission of William Belden Noble, whose supreme desire
it was to extend the influence of Jesus as the way, the truth,
and the life; to make known the meaning of the words of
Jesus, *I am come that they might have life, and that they
might have it more abundantly.' In accordance with the
large interpretation of the Influence of Jesus by the late
Phillips Brooks, with whose religious teaching he in whose
memory the Lectures are established and also the founder
of the Lectures were in deep sympathy, it is intended that
the scope of the Lectures shall be as wide as the highest inter-
ests of humanity. With this end in view, — the perfection
of the spiritual man and the consecration by the spirit of
Jesus of every department of human character, thought, and
activity, — the Lectures may include philosophy, literature,
art, poetry, the natural sciences, political economy, sociol-
ogy, ethics, history, both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as
theology and the more direct interests of the religious life.
Beyond a sympathy with the purpose of the Lectures, as
thus defined, no restriction is placed upon the lecturer."

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FRATRI MEO CARISSIMO

115
.C5f5

PREFACE

Mystical titles are not much in fashion. Yet
I have kept the alternative names of each
Lecture, because they suggest even more than
they express of the nature of the book. Their
apocalyptic associations may also serve to
guard against misconception. The title of the
whole course and certain criticisms in the first
Lecture might seem to imply that I desire to
controvert the main . thesis of the late Father
Tyrrell's famous work. This, however, is not
the case. Too greatly am I in debt to all the
writings of that arresting author and especially
to his posthumous work to have any such
thought. But I do desire to point out that
the problem can be studied from more stand-
points than one. Something is crumbling all
around us. That is clearer every moment. I
write this on the day of the introduction of the
Bill for a Minimum Wage. Is it Christianity
that is decaying, or civilisation in its existing
shape. ^ That conventional Christianity is going
or gone, no one will question. So much

X PREFACE

the better. But on the whole it seems to me,
that what is vanishing is not that pecuHar
kind of social life we call the Christian Church,
except certain accidental elements inextricably
bound up with the existing regime. Rather,
we are in the midst of a process not unlike that
of Western Europe in the Fifth Century, when
the world-organisation was on its deathbed,
and the Church alone remained unshaken. The
more I contemplate the face of things the more
does there come before me the vision of a whole
order changing. In a few years, we shall,
perhaps, be saying something like what Luther
said three centuries and a half ago about the
Holy Roman Empire: —

"Die Welt ist am Ende kommen, das romisch
Reich ist fast dahin und zerrissen." This
change is universal; but the Christian Church
will survive it, on the very ground that it pos-
sesses many elements incompatible with our
present system, and that its spirit is the scorn
of all that is fashionably enlightened. That
scorn will doubtless be the fortune of the present
volume. Indeed this must be the case with
any attempt to commend the traditional faith
in an age which finds interest in any and every
fantasy, but dismisses a priori the Catholic
creed. I am not however greatly disturbed by
this thought. The mental habit of oiir day.

PREFACE xi

like other of its qualities does not appear to me
so profound or lasting; and will undergo "a
sea-change into something rich and strange"
along with the other elements in our life. Thus
if it should seem that these lectures are so many
"Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen/' I should not
grieve. They may not fit with the prevailing
fashion among the "intellectuels." It is at
least not inconceivable that the ground of this
is that there is something imperfect in that
fashion. A thing is out of date, because it
looks to the future, no less than when it harks
back to the past.

After this course was delivered, there was pub-
lished in England a volume directly traversing
that view of the nature of the Christian experi-
ence which is set out in the fourth lecture.
Since the book appeared of some importance,
owing to the controversy which it evoked, I
have thought it well to devote an appendix to
the general historical question which it involves.
I suppose that no one who has watched the rise
and fall of the uncounted historical theories, all
plausible, which have appeared in regions far
removed from the fever spot of Christian origins,
is likely to be disturbed by Mr. Thompson's
hypothesis. Since, however, these topics are
oftentimes debated by persons whose acquaint-
ance with general historical investigation is

xii PREFACE

other than obvious, I have thought it well to
indicate some points a little more at large. In
that appendix I should like to have quoted
pages from the Chapter on "Causality and
Natural Law," in Professor Wendland's ad-
mirable book Miracles and the Christian
Church. But I read it too recently to make
that possible. I would also refer to some re-
marks of Professor James Ward in the earlier
part of his new series of Gifford Lectures —
Pluralism and Theism, which bear on the
relation of historical knowledge and real indi-
viduality to all theories of inevitable, unbroken
cosmic development, mechanically interpreted.
Here I would only repeat with emphasis my
persuasion that it is only after a judgment of
the total character of the Christian experience,
that we ever can (or ever do) profitably ap-
proach the investigation of its details. This
is true on both sides, and is shewn in the present
controversy. It is precisely this total super-
natural character, which I believe to be as
firmly established historically as anything of
that nature can ever be — and to be disbe-
lieved only on account of presuppositions in-
compatible with its truth. In this respect and
certain others these lectures may serve as a
sort of sequel to the earlier course delivered at
Cambridge on the foundation of Dr. *Hulse;

PREFACE xiii

and may correct certain misconceptions, es-
pecially in regard to the third.

With slight alterations these lectures are
printed substantially as they were delivered.
Never a member of that company which re-
gards a book as likely to promote the glory of
God in proportion as it is ill written, I have
taken pains to make it readable. But I cannot
pretend to be satisfied with the result. Further
delay, however, must not be thought of and
such as it is, the book must go forth.

The Rev. Alexander Wicksteed is deeply my
creditor. Owing to his kindness in reading the
proofs and verifying references, I trust that the
proportion of errors is less than has sometimes
been the case with writings of the author; or
than always would be without such aid.

Finally, I must tender my grateful thanks to
the authorities of Harvard University, who by
appointing me to this office of Noble Lecturer
are "the only begetters" of the ensuing pages:
I would hereby assure them that I would the
book were more worthy of its "domicile of
origin" and that I shall not soon forget the
days that I spent in the enjoyment of their
proverbial hospitality.

J. Neville Figgis.

House OP THE Resurrection,
March 21, 1912.

CONTENTS

I. Armageddon or the Intellectual Chaos . 3

II. Babylon or the Moral Crisis .... 65

III. Calvary or the Challenge of the Cross 121

IV. SioN OR the Christian Fact 179

Appendix. King Richard the Third and the

Reverend James Thompson 235

Notes 273

CIVILISATION
AT THE CKOSS ROADS

CIVILISATION AT
THE CROSS ROADS

LECTURE I

ARMAGEDDON OR THE INTELLECTUAL
CHAOS

Not long since a writer, who seemed to
wield flame rather than words, directed
all our thoughts to the topic of Christianity
at the Cross Roads. And indeed the tragedy
of Tyrrell's own life symbohsed that crisis
in thought of which the book was the
expression. More than any of his works
was his life an illustration of the momen-
tous problems urgent at this moment on
all reflecting men. How far can the new
wine of modern knowledge and changed
ways of thought be poured into the old
bottles of traditional religion .^^ Is the Chris-
tian Church (with whatever modifications)
still to remain the depositary of the spiritual
experience of the race, the dispenser of
the -gifts of grace, the home of the soul,
and the instrument of all redemption; or

2 3

4 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

shall that supernatural claim be rejected
as a phantom or transcended as a phase
of history now drawing to its close? Allied
to this topic there is another no less mo-
mentous,— that is, the condition, not of
the Church, but of civilisation. Tyrrell
appears to have thought that the knowl-
edge of our day and its theories were so
secure as to enable us from that standpoint
to sit in judgment on the strange events
which gave rise to the Christian Church,
and also that the gifts of twentieth century
civilisation were so strongly entrenched
behind the walls of physical science that
they could not be lost. Transferred they
might be, say, to the yellow races, Europe
reverting to another dark age; but lost,
like the culture of the ancient world before
the barbarian, that is not to be thought of.
Neither of these statements appears to
me to be justified. In the first place there
are so many aspects of life which our
present day civilisation either ignores or
depreciates that I fail to see how we can
take its principles for anything more than
a partial and abstract account o£ certain
elements of the world. These elements

ARMAGEDDON 5

indeed it enables us to control. And we
have achieved therein a success without
parallel in the past and with yet greater
promise for the future. But I do not
conceive the scientific or mathematical
temperament as in any way final. Large
elements of life, the artistic, the social, the
personal, it cannot handle, and when it tries
to do so it is apt to come to grief, and this
quite apart from religion. One side of sci-
ence indeed, its reverence for fact, is lead-
ing it to recognise an element best described
as supernatural in human life, and also to
confess its own impotence to offer any
interpretation of the world as a whole.
Yet the scientific temperament, in ordinary
speech, means more than this. It implies
an assumption that knowledge can be
arranged on a schematic basis, and that
all events can be viewed as the unalterable
issue of the past, because everything is
bound together by the nexus of cause and
effect mechanically interpreted, and there
are in life no new beginnings. This assump-
tion is opposed to any such scheme as the
Christian, which teaches not merely a
spiritual universe behind the natural, but

6 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

also the existence of a multitude of spirits
with a real, though limited, freedom and
shews us a world whose issues are unpre-
dictable, with as many loose ends as there
are individuals, instead of the rounded
system of the universe totus teres atque
rotundus, which, though far from being
demonstrated or demonstrable, is the un-
alterable dogma of many modern enquirers.
Dr. Bussell shews how fatal this notion is
to all belief in real individuality.^ "Such
theoretical doubt can never seriously im-
pair the vital impulse, the enjoyment of
the struggle and doubtful issue. Perhaps
a more urgent, serious danger lies in the
strange hybrid of philosophic and reli-
gious thought, the metaphysical mysticism
which disconcertingly alternates emotion
and logic. To this reference has been and
will be so frequent that it is needless to
enlarge upon the obvious defect it shares
with all previous and kindred systems.
It neither explains nor justifies the per-
sonal, which, whether by accident or
providence or by some inscrutable 5''et
purposive law, seems to have b^en the
goal of development on the earth. After

ARMAGEDDON 7

"the painful discovery of the self as the
"true seed of philosophy, practical ethics,
"religion, and political agitation, it is use-
" less to point out that the discovery is, after
"all, worthless. We are still left with an
"acute sense of its truth. But we can more
" easily shake off a scientific fatalism which
" momentary experience contradicts (at least
"so far as our feelings go) than the benumb-
"ing influence of Pantheism."

These assumptions of the scientific imagi-
nation are not incompatible with religion
of a sort. The prevalence of Pantheism is
easy to reconcile with the presuppositions
of the mechanical temperament, which are
dominant far beyond the limits of physical
enquiry, and indeed are chiefly dangerous
in that of morals and religion. ^ It is not
to science, but to "scientific fatalism," as
it has been well termed, that our difiiculties
are due. Only when sdence captures the
imagination and seeks to subdue history,
philosophy, and the individual life does
she conflict with our religion. It is on
these assumptions that popular objections
to the Christian faith are based. The
dislike of miracles, more particularly of the

8 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

Birth and Resurrection narratives, the
hostihty to the supernatural claims of
Christ, to the doctrines of redemption and
the sacramental gifts, in a word to the whole
theology of grace, all this, so far as most
men are concerned, has little basis beyond
the suspicion that science can find no place
for them and the assumption that science
covers the ground. True, indeed, the world
of fact, historical, artistic, personal, gives
it the lie, and the moment you stop reason-
ing and start to live, the difficulties dis-
appear. But it is just these facts that
men obsessed by the dominant categories
refuse to look at. There are on the one
hand the practical achievements of science,
denied by no one; results on the other side
are less apparent, and even if admitted are
supposed to be susceptible of explanation.
The greatest achievements of all, the
peace of God ruling in the heart of the
redeemed and the conversion of sinners,
cannot, owing to their very magnitude and
psychical nature, be represented to those
without. And so minds enchained to the
categories of continuity, of inevitable evo-
lution, the laws of cause and effect mechani-

ARMAGEDDON 9

cally understood, all different names of the
same notion, fall an easy prey to the deter-
minist theory of personal action and the
rationalistic projection of history. They
treat as anthropomorphic and antiquated
the world-old notions of sin and deliver-
ance and crave for a vision cosmic and
universal. So far as the mass of men
goes, this tendency is only beginning, but
if it be developed to the full it will
sweep away with it all that is of value
in our world. For Western civilisation,
inherited from the Christendom of the
Middle Ages, has been built on the faith in
personal values and the reality of freedom. ^
This faith is now menaced, and in many
places gone. It is largely lacking in the
more characteristic products of the present
day — all that seems most modern and
freest from the past. Thus it is true to
say that civilisation is at the cross roads.
There is a ceaseless conflict between ideals
which rest on the personal spiritual claims
of the Christian life and that rigid mechan-
ism to which many would reduce it; while,
eveii among those who retain or revive
their faith in freedom, some deny in toto the

10 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

Christian aim. So far as the Western mind
has been moving away from personal factors
(including of course those social unions in
which alone personality can thrive) it is
becoming more and more enslaved to
categories which make Christianity appear
not so much false as meaningless.^ I may
quote two instances. An agnostic friend
once wrote to me, "I have never been able
to make any meaning out of Revealed
Religion." Another friend, not agnostic,
once said, ''I am interested in the cosmic
and philosophical; you in the personal and
redemptive. All that I have to learn. I
hardly know what the words mean." That
is the condition which the Christian has
now to face — people who do not know what
the words mean.

Moreover, the civilisation which the
Western world inherits was erected on
the belief that human nature through
some act had fallen so low that it could
only be raised by some power from with-
out, and that redemption was brought by
Jesus Christ and mediated by the Church.
Such a doctrine of the fall, however quali-
fied, seems out of relation to ideas now

ARMAGEDDON 11

fashionable, and the notion of redemption
supernaturally achieved is quietly dropped.
Further, there is a deeper tendency at work.
This, while not denying God's existence,
would confine Him to this life, and resents
all claims that are fundamentally super-
natural. Religion is in this view an idyll
of human life, the uprising of the soul of
man, but God never entered the world,
never could enter it save as immanent in
the whole of its growth; there are no
violent breaks, no catastrophes, no unique
personalities, no really new events. All
goes on developing by a continuous process;
religion, like the world, will ultimately
destroy itself.

It is the aim of these lectures to traverse
this view, to give grounds for holding that
the world, as it now is, bears on the face
of it the marks which call for redemption;
that Christianity comes to us alone pro-
fessing to have this power from beyond,
and alone able to meet the universal need
of deliverance. If the civilised world, saved
by a remnant of faithful, accepts this
evangel, it may rise to heights undreamed
of. If, as many indications suggest, the

12 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

world at large rejects it, then civilisation
may proceed on its course of God-denial
for some generations or even centuries,
but it is doomed like the ancient world;
for no culture can go on existing with-
out faith, and the forces of materialism
already looming as a cloud will gather
volume, until the land of the spirit is over-
shadowed.

For all changes notwithstanding, and
with admitted modifications in details, the
Christian Church faces men today, not as
a theory but as a life, giving to many
amongst us a sense of supernatural vision
and redemptive peace to be gained nowhere
else — hardly even offered. There, as a
fact, is the spiritual home of many. Are
there good grounds for deserting this refuge .^^
Is the mental house of our life so compact
and guarded that we can trust to it apart
from this other .^ Does hfe, as we watch
or feel it, allow or repudiate the sense that
man needs deliverance.^ Is there among
all opposing theories any one so certain or
so comprehensive that it compels us to
reject these venerable claims — claims not
merely of the past, but effective now.^ To

ARMAGEDDON 13

these questions I shall seek to make some
reply in the following four lectures.

In the first, surveying the world of men's
reflections, I shall try to shew that the one
outstanding feature is an anarchy without
parallel, and that, in regard alike to funda-
mental beliefs or practical claims, however
loud or insistent be the voices which bid
us reject the Christian claim, they are in
no way so united or so well grounded as to
settle the matter a priori; they may not
assist, they do not inhibit the faith of the
Gospel. In the second lecture we shall
glance at some of the outward features of
the world, which indicate that human nature
needs to be redeemed and lacks the force
to effect deliverance for itself. Then, hav-
ing dealt with the present situation, I shall
in the third lecture endeavour to display
the gigantic nature of the Christian claim,
how the behef in the life beyond, in the
love of God, in the gifts of grace, must
change all our standards, so that Christians,
whether or no they are better, are amazingly
different from other folks ; while the attempt
to represent Christianity either as a sort of

14 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

decorated idealism or as a mere emotional
altruism must be foredoomed to failure.
Finally, in the fourth lecture, I shall dis-
cuss the alleged facts that lie at the bottom.
We shall see there that the facts of the
Ufe of Jesus are one with the history of
the Church and the experience of the indi-
vidual Christian, that the problem is con-
cerned with the nature of that experience.
Of that experience there are two interpre-
tations, the natural and the supernatural.
We shall see that the latter is that which
best correlates all the evidence, provided
we are not inhibited from holding it through
prepossessions derived from other sources.
We shall conclude that if we believe the
spiritual aspirations of mankind to be
rooted in reality, the Christian as a member
of the great Catholic, i.e., universal, society
is the person most closely in touch with
that reality; for he and he alone is at the
centre of the spiritual experience of the
race, and there in the Catholic Church he
drinks "within beneath a spring," which is
the fount and source of all redemption.

I said "in the Cathohc Church.'^' Here
and elsewhere in these lectures I shall use

ARMAGEDDON 15

phrases or make statements with which
some here will not agree. I cannot help it.
Indeed it had been my hope to exclude
such things; the more especially as I hold
most firmly that all those who have a
hold on the supernatural are being pressed
together (not always with their own good-
will) under the force of the attack. Of
course I am using the term Church in the
true sense, as the society of all the baptized,
leaving out all the questions of organisation,
of discipline, which divide men still further.
Still there is no use saying that all nominal
Christians are the same, when they are
obviously different, or that there is no dis-
tinction between a Christian and a moralist.
Moreover, a man's view of things is no mere
theory; it is a part of him and must colour
what he says. It is safer to avow it frankly
beforehand than to make a profession of
impartiality, which is always a delusion
and in nine cases out of ten an imposture.
If the Catholic principle be a matter of life
even more than theory, that life is bound
to shew itself in one who possesses or, to
be accurate, is possessed by it. Nor indeed
would I have dared to insult this great

16 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

University, which has given to me an oflSee
so honourable, by coming from Europe in
order to say not what I do mean, but what
I do not; or to omit integral elements in
what is the very life of my spirit. You do
not want in this place colourless nothings
or the enunciation of sentiments which
seem obvious because they are vital to no
man's faith. You want a man with a man's
hopes and doubts, his visions and his
failures — all that he most vitally is — not
a set of abstract theses, dialectically argued.
If, therefore, anything said here may
seem to wound or set at naught the con-
victions of some who value the Christian
name, or of some who do not, I can but
crave your pardon and beg you to beheve
that I have set down nothing in mahce,
that I speak to you, as a priest in the Church
of God, for that faith which lives in me.
May He grant that the words be not all
in vain.

In an arresting novel one of the most
remarkable men of the last century wrote
as follows: ** Progress to what and from

ARMAGEDDON 17

whence? Amid empires shrivelled into
deserts, amid the wrecks of great cities, a
single column or obelisk of which nations
import for the prime ornament of their
mud-built capitals; amid arts forgotten,
commerce annihilated, fragmentary litera-
tures, and populations destroyed, the Euro-
pean talks of progress, because by an
ingenious apphcation of some scientific
acquirements he has established a society
which has mistaken comfort for civilisation."
Perhaps not many now read Tancred,^
Yet that book is far more than mere
romance. It is evidence of the dissatis-
faction with modern civilisation, and its
parvenu vanity felt even at that time by
an acute observer. You know the theme;
how the young Enghsh lord, weary of the
intellectual and moral chaos of the West,
sought in the East for that spiritual force
which alone would raise Europe from her
degradation. As he puts it, "Excepting
those who still cling to your Arabian creeds,
Europe is without consolation"; or again,
"Amid the wreck of creeds, the crash of
Empires, French revolutions and Enghsh
reforms, Cathohcism in agony, Protes-

3

18 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

tantism in convulsions, Europe demands
the keynote which none can sound. If
Asia be in decay, Europe is in confusion.
Your repose may be death, but our hfe is
anarchy."

These passages, and still more the general
argument of the book, bring out the fact
that in the mind of an observer whose
allegiance to orthodox Christianity was
not otherwise conspicuous, the spectacle
of the Western world — for we must take
the whole West together — presented itself
in somewhat different colours from the rose
tints it took on in the imaginations of that
Manchester school which was then at the
height of its power; that civilisation in the
West, so far as we can separate its life and
culture from the Christian forces, on which
it still largely lives, is not in a state of which
we are to be hilariously proud ; that it needs
redemption, that redemption must come
from without and must take on a super-
natural, transcendent character, and cannot
come from a development of the principles
of the Exchanges. It will involve in some
degree those principles of asceticism and
other-worldliness popularly regarded as

ARMAGEDDON 19

specifically Oriental, and inextricably in-
volved in the Catholic religion as a spiritual
society.

We are not, be it observed, drawing a
Rousseauesque indictment against civilisa-
tion and exalting the noble savage quand
meme. For civilisation works hand in hand
with religion, in so far as it treats men as
ends not means, and by its ordered variety
of life gives freer place to development. It
is just these things, however, that are in
question today; there we are at the Cross
Roads. They are right who speak of the
"Gifts of Civilisation" as they see the
Church and culture marching hand in hand
in the warfare with barbarism and un-
ordered passion. Only, while civilisation
begins by ministering to man as a spiritual
being, by making freedom and all personal
values a reality and preserving space for
that leisure of spirit in which the peace of
God may reign, it by no means ends at
that point. Apart from a Godward out-
look it may tend to destroy these personal
values by permitting men to rest in the
"much goods laid up in store" and allow
the fortunate in a purely materialist ambi-

20 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

tion, while from its true benefits the masses
of mankind may become more and more
shut out. This has been its great vice in
past history. It looks a little as though it
were being repeated in the present. Do we
not see before us a world intoxicated with
material prosperity, reckless of the life of
the spirit, and callous to the misery of vast
masses of its fellow-men.^

We may look back to the age when these
spiritual ends of civilised life were partially
attained and all its treasures enjoyed as the
gift of God, but can the modern world
claim as its own the glories of the ages
which, so far from being dark, are still the
refuge of souls wearied with the squalid
fever of our time.^^ It cannot. We must
admit the profound difference between
the thoughts and feehngs of our own day
and those of the age which produced the
Sainte-Chapelle^ the frescoes of Giotto, and
the Divina Commedia. Nor would any
statistics about railroads and steamships
ever persuade me that a world of which
these things are the characteristic symbols
is inferior to that which flowers in the
factory town or the mammoth hotel.

ARMAGEDDON 21

Medieval civilisation was no flawless
crystal. Then as now many men gave
free play *'to the lust of the flesh, the lust
of the eyes, and the pride of life," but they
did not worship these things. In all ages
men have been bad. But the achievements
of the thirteenth century were owing pre-
cisely to the opposite of these elements
men most admire today. As a hostile
writer puts it, "they had one idee fixe,
rehgion." They may not have always
served God very well, but they knew that
He was '*the chief end of man." That
world presents neither the oleographic pic-
ture dear to sentimentalists, nor yet the
mere battle of kites and crows conceived
by Puritan and Renaissance pride. Yet its
most notable qualities — the things that
made it what it was — the cathedral, the
minster, the university (and each of us
here owes more to the University of the
Middle Ages than he is apt to imagine) , the
orders of chivalry, the hierarchy of society,
the communal life and all its pageantry,
that unity which outlasted so much con-
flict, all these things were what they were
because of men's faith in God and man

22 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

and the love which makes him free. None
of them could have been at all in the form
they took, had that faith not been present;
and hence Walter Pater, summing up the
qualities of the differing cultures of the
world, speaks in the famous passage on
Mona Lisa of "the reverie of the middle
age with its spiritual ambitions and im-
aginative souls" as contrasted with "the
animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the
return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias." Always rather by its ideals
than its achievements do we judge a nation
or epoch. These ideals can be seen re-
flected as in a mirror all through the hfe
of the Middle Ages, in the peace as of a
strange land which pervades the Historia
Ecclesiastica of the great Northumbrian
monk, the Venerable Bede, in the love and
universal reverence felt for S. Francis even
in his lifetime, in the mystery plays like
Everyman, in the almost autocratic influ-
ence of a mystic like S. Bernard, even indeed
in the strength of the Papacy (for it rested
not on material force, but on the faith of
men), above all in the most characteristic
of all its fruits — books such as The Imi-

ARMAGEDDON 23

tation of Christ, similar works like the
writings of Walter Hilton, or Richard Rolle,
or Dame Julian, the anchoress of Norwich.
All these are the natural fruit of the time;
they express its spirit. So far as we have
anything like them, it is rather as protests,
reactions, the work of those who repudiate
the prevalent ideals, unzeitgemdsse Betracht-
ungen, as Nietzsche would call them. No
one can deny the beauty of a work like
the Pathway of the Eternal Wisdom or
Tyrrell's Oil and Wine, but their distinction
consists in thus expressing a side of life far
from popular. The dominant feeling of
the age shrieks itself hoarse in the news-
papers and expresses itself artistically in
the New Machiavelli or L'lle des Pinguins,
and I cannot feel convinced that we have
gained by the exchange.

The world in the Middle Ages was far
enough from the practice of holiness, but
at least it did not question the ideal. What
are men's ideals today .^^ It would be hard
to tell. But so far as their main energies
are concerned and we can form any judg-
ment as to what animates the man in the
street, I cannot doubt that it is truer to say

24 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

that Christianity runs counter to our civil-
isation than that it fulfils it. In places
indeed it remains intact, but they are as a
rule those least touched by modern develop-
ments. The village church is the home of
an immemorial piety alike in Bavaria or
in Italy, in England or Ireland — I suppose
also here; though this statement must be
made with very large reserves, for there are
districts abroad of which the very opposite
is true, and I fancy that in some colonial
places there would be an equal lack. But
can that or anything like it be said either
of the most educated or the most modern
elements of society .^^ Is it not rather the
case, as one wrote to me of the business
world, "Christianity counts for nothing,
men simply leave it alone ".^ Or as another,
an educated woman, said of a sermon on
penitence, "It seemed to me all so unreal;
I wondered how many of the people in
that church had any inkling of what was
meant ".^^ That is the point; the ordinary
Christian doctrines of grace, and sin, and
pardon have become almost meaningless
to many, and require translation before
people will even listen to them. The phrases

ARMAGEDDON 25

of the New Testament seem to savour of
the Sunday School novelette and have lost
their vital force. Canon Carnegie, indeed,
seems to desire to take this condition as
a standard and to make the ordinary man's
dislike of such terms as hohness or sin a
reason for leaving the things out of our
message. In his preface to Churchmanship
and Character^ he writes that "Christians
to a large extent use a language which is
not understood by ordinary folk. The ordi-
nary normal healthy man understands what
is meant by goodness; he becomes restive
if we talk to him of righteousness. He
understands what is meant by duty; he
hardly listens if we talk to him of vocation.
He understands us when we speak of moral
depravity and regeneration and progress;
he pays small heed to statements about sin
and conversion and sanctification." The
author's implied view is not merely that
our language might be modernised, which
may possibly be a good thing, but that the
religion of healthy mindedness is practically
to be taken as identical with the faith of
redemption, and that the ideals which
dominate the Birmingham business man

26 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

only need a little furbishing to be seen
to be fundamentally Christian. Nothing
would seem to me more opposed to S.
Paul's doctrine; nor would his language
have seemed rational to Horace or Sue-
tonius. Christianity conquered by its dif-
ference from every other system. That is
not to deny our duty of commending the
faith by avoiding merely conventional or
cant phrases, but of all heresies that of the
rehgion of healthy mindedness seems to me
to go the deepest. I quote the words as
evidence of the existing condition, and also
giving a succinct expression to the view
against which these lectures are directed. If
the world is to be brought back to Christ, it
will not be by accepting its shibboleths and
seeing God's revelation through eyes pur-
blind with avarice or satisfied with the
things of this world, but rather by dwelling
on the strange new life He promises and
re-awakening that sense of sin which has
become unfashionable. A weightier wit-
ness is that of the great philosopher Rudolph
Eucken. In the Problem of Human Life
he speaks of "the severity of the conflict
with modern civilisation into which Chris-

ARMAGEDDON 27

tianity has fallen. In its rich unfolding of
life the modern world has brought an untold
wealth of things new and great, whose
influence no one can escape and whose
fruits we all enjoy. But with this incon-
testable gain there is closely interwoven a
characteristic tendency which is deeply in-
volved in doubt and conflict. Since the
beginning of the seventeenth century the
modern world has wrought out a new type
of Ufe, which departs widely from the
Christian. A powerful hfe-impulse forces
the thinking and the activity of man more
and more into the world which Christianity
regarded as a lower one; in this world
reason reigns, or wherever it is not yet
present the labour of men seeks to create
it; forces spring up ad infinitum, and the
increase of power becomes the highest and
all-sufficient goal of life. The greater the
strength and self-consciousness which this
new type acquires, the more evident it
becomes that it is incompatible with,
Christianity; in fact that the fundamental
tendencies of the two run directly counter
to each other. Their peaceable and friendly
co-operation, such as existed in earlier times.

28 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

becomes impossible; a clear understand-
ing is increasingly necessary; continually
harsher is the rejection of Christianity by
those who follow the specifically modern
tendency.''"^

Equally strong is the statement in another
work, Christianity and the New Idealism,
"The main tendency of our own age, with
its steadily growing spirit of independence,
has come into even sharper conflict with
Christianity. That it had a stronger
vitality, and made existence more depend-
ent on man's own activity, would not
necessarily have conduced to this result.
The irreparable breach was due to the fact
that for modern thought the activity and
the positive trend of life was conceived as
man's own immediate work, as the out-
come of his own natural strength; whereas
Christianity regarded them as emanating
from man's relation to God, through an
inward renewal of his being; its affirmation
of hfe is not direct, but is only reached
through negation and inward change. We
must beware of weakening in any way the
opposition between the Christian and the
modern points of view — an opposition so

ARMAGEDDON 29

strong as absolutely to preclude any pros-
pect of easy reconciliation." »

I quote these statements from a writer,
who is very far from being a defender of
ecclesiastical Christianity, as evidence that
the conflict is not one on the surface or
even about doctrine, but that it is a veri-
table Armageddon between the spirit of
Christ and that of antichrist. And indeed
those writers grossly err who argue as
though all wise men were agreed on the
fundamentals, that it was only in the
formularies fabricated by priests that diflS-
culty existed. The attitude of such a
writer as WilHam Scott Palmer, in the
Diary of a Modernist, that the Christian
ideal may be taken for granted and Nietz-
sche be ignored, may be true of certain
coteries of culture, but it is profoundly false
to the facts of life and ignores that deep
and growing chasm which separates the
aims of men. Speaking on the whole and
dismissing the natural bias for counting
on one's own side a majority, I should say
that there are no longer grounds for believ-
ing that the Western world is Christian
now in a sense in which it was not in the

30 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

period immediately preceding the peace of
the Church under Constantine the Great.
Of course Christian ideals still affect many
who repudiate the Christian name, such as
the Positivists. But does there seem much
more ground for saying that we hve in a
Christian world, beyond what might have
been said in the time of TertulUan? In
many ways there is less ground. In a
charming story of this country. Lady Balti-
more,^ the writer makes his society people
talk of having given up religion, as though
it were a recognised fact that even nominal
adhesion to it had ceased. Nor do the
statistics of church-going in England favour
a different view, while in Lutheran Ger-
many or what was until recently Catholic
France an even worse dry rot has set in.
So far as we can judge, Spain, Italy, and
Portugal are in like case, while in the last
the government has embarked on a definite
policy of persecution, and in many districts
of France it is said that the municipality
is refusing to repair the churches or even
to permit Catholics to do so at their own
charges. The atmosphere in literature and
art, in novels and dramas, in newspapers

ARMAGEDDON 31

and reviews is not only no longer Christian,
but is largely anti-Christian, even on the
ethical side. If you think of some of the
names most honoured of late, Thomas
Hardy, George Meredith, Mr. Arnold Ben-
nett, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. H. G. Wells,
or Mr. Henry James, however diflFerent
they may be in outlook, none of them can
be called Christian, while for some it seems
impossible to name the subject without a
sneer; and neither M. Anatole France nor
Ibsen can control their dislike of a religion
which is to them mere convention. If
further you enquired of the most highly
educated society in the West, whether it
is specifically Christian, I think the answer
is not doubtful. Would there be a very
large proportion of such at any meeting of
scholars or scientific men? Is there, in
any real sense, at the Universities? Doubt-
less the proportion would be better if you
substituted the Almanack de Gotha for
Minerva in your researches; for of those
whose names are in the former, a majority
would at least, for hereditary or social rea-
sons, profess allegiance to the faith of their
fathers. But frankly, even among the

32 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

general public, whether you take as your
standard the fortunate classes or the dis-
inherited, it is only by very narrowly
limiting your area that you can get even
an appearance of any general adhesion to
the ancient faith. I am not lamenting
this condition. It is partly the natural
fruit of liberty. With toleration ruling
alike in practice and theory it is clear that
many whose allegiance has been merely
nominal will drop away, and in some cases
hereditary influence is now on the other
side; while in those who remain there is a
growing intensity, which more than makes
up for the lack of extension.

Whether, however, we lament the fact or
welcome it we must face it. So far as num-
bers go, the Christian Church is no more
than a section of the modern world, one
among its many several developments.
People dislike calling it a sect or a denomi-
nation, but it can be nothing else, so long
as there are large numbers who repudiate
all part or lot in it and in many cases
detest its ideals. Civilisation in its states-
manship, its economic development, and
more and more in its social and intellectual

ARMAGEDDON 33

life, goes on its way, not indeed unaflFected
by so great a tradition, yet largely inde-
pendent of it. In fine, that secularisation of
life which began with the Renaissance and
was developed by the Reformation has now
gone much farther. Religion has become
almost entirely departmental, and it is more
feasible than it once was to treat of the life
and manners of the age apart from Chris-
tianity, and to leave it out of account in
estimating the lines of future development.
One observer definitely states that religion
may not be regarded as so much a private
affair, but that we need not reckon on its
influence in any general view of modern
society. Mr. Masterman, in the Condition
of England,^^ declares that " despite rallies,
the process continues. It continues without
violence, continuously, steadily as a kind of
impersonal motion of secular change. It is
the passing of a whole civilisation away from
the faith in which it was founded and out
of which it has been fashioned." Lord
Haldane declares that "the dominant ideals
of the average man of the middle class in
Scotland appear to him to be a sort of mild
agnosticism," ^^ and from what I am told of

4

34 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

this country and Canada the only difference
is that the schism between the Church and
civihsation is greater than in the old world.

And not only is the Church no longer the
religion of civilisation, but she is met by
many competing systems, and that even
on her own hypothesis that mankind needs
redemption. That is the point. They are
so many. We live in an age of unparalleled
anarchy both moral and intellectual. The
confusion of tongues is worse than in any
Babel of old. You have not exhausted the
prospect by describing the Christian Church
as only one among many competing agen-
cies. Nor can you get rid of her claims by
saying that she is the Church only of the
uneducated.

For what are the alternatives.^ In place
of this body which has stood the test of
experience, what is there offered to us.^^
What system is accepted by those reflecting
men of our day who deny the claims of the
Church of Christ.^ Surely by this time
we ought to have a clear answer if mere
reasoning could avail; for the problem of
life has been discussed by many acute
minds. There ought to be some body of

ARMAGEDDON 35

philosophic doctrine, the possession of all
educated men. Where is such a doctrine
to be found? If we are to give up our life
in a society, which has enshrined the
essence of all that is highest in the religious
experience of men, we ought at least to
learn what we are giving it up for. Besides,
if the exercise of our logical faculties were
all-sufficient, since they are common to all
men, we ought to know where we are by
this time. But we don't. That is the
long and the short of it. Outside the
Church, men don't know where they are.
On the one hand is the Church, still in
possession, still taking from her treasure
house things new and old, still consoling
and converting men; she has history on
her side and all the weight of tradition;
there breathes in her temples the aroma
of all the souls she has nourished and
still nourishes, and on the other hand
there is — what? Is there any other faith
or fancy which holds among educated men
anything like the predominant influence
of rationalism in the eighteenth century?
I grant you that the intellectual atmosphere
we breathe is no longer Christian; that if

36 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

I take up a volume of verse it is more than
likely that it is the work of an infidel; that
if I embark on a new philosopher (there
are plenty of them) ten to one he despises
the Christian faith so deeply that he has
never been at the pains even to think what
it means; that if I broach a scientific
historian his attitude to the founder of
Christianity will not improbably be one of
a supercihous patronage. I admit that the
pictures I see, the books I read, the music
I hear, the plays I witness are largely
the work of men outside the Church. All
this on the negative side I grant. But
what is there positive to set in its place .^^
This question remains without reply. Scien-
tific materialism is not held as a creed
except by few, is commonly declared not
to be one, although its presuppositions rule
men's minds to a larger extent than they
know. Beyond that all is chaos. Positivists,
agnostics, idealists, pessimists, optimists,
sceptics, theists, atheists jostle one another
and nobody knows what his next-door
neighbour thinks. And that even among re-
flecting and cultivated men, who are above
the mere vulgarities of money-making.

ARMAGEDDON 37

Twenty years ago one could not have
said this. In those days the reply would
have run as follows: "As to the vulgar,
whether learned or ignorant, we neither
know nor care, The only person entitled
to a judgment is the trained philosopher,
and from such the answer is not doubtful.
All who do not write themselves down as
incompetent are agreed upon some form of
idealism. Their attitude to religion varies.
Some are Christian and employ their philo-
sophic doctrines as a prop to orthodoxy.
Others are Christians with a difference and
use their faith to purge tradition of its
accretions. Others are theists and find in
their system the one irrefragable refutation
of materiahsm; others interpret the doc-
trine in an atheist sense or in one purely
sceptical. All, however, are agreed that
some form of the philosophy which was de-
veloped by Hegel out of Kant is the only
possible resting-place of thinking men.
They diflfer from the master in many ways,
or sometimes deny that they have one.
But they claim that the doctrine they hold
exphcitly is imphed in the faith of all; that
it combines the certitude of science with

38 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

the comfort of religion; that with the
progress of education it will become a
postulate of all culture. Whatever of the
Christian creed may be harmonised with
this system will endure; for these are the
fundamental ideas of religion; the rest will
vanish." That or something hke was the
view present to humble enquirers not many
years ago.

In the words of one of its authorities, ^^
"For many years adherents of this way of
thought have deeply interested the British
public by their writings. Almost more
important than their writings is the fact
that they have occupied philosophical chairs
in almost every University in the kingdom.
Even the professional critics of ideahsm
are for the most part ideahsts — after a
fashion. ... It follows from their position
of academic authority, were it from nothing
else, that idealism exercises an influence, not
easily measured, upon the youth of the
nation — upon those, that is, who from the
educational opportunities they enjoy may
naturally be expected to become the leaders
of the nation's thought and practice." Or
as a hostile critic says, "For thirty years

ARMAGEDDON 39

or more English thought has been subject,
not for the first time in its modern history,
to powerful influences from abroad. The
Rhine has flowed into the Thames, known
locally as the Isis, and from the Isis the
stream of German idealism has been dif-
fused over the academical world of Great
Britain."

It can hardly be questioned that this is
a correct account of the philosophic ortho-
doxy of the last generation, and perhaps
it may still be called orthodoxy. But is
it anything more.^^ Is it dominant among
students of philosophy in the same sense
as it was? You know that it is not. Speak-
ing in this place, which the memory of
William James would alone suflSce to render
illustrious, if all its other voices were silent,
I need not recall to you the philosophic
movement of which he was a leader.
Whether its trend is right or wrong, it is
not relevant here to enquire. Enough
for us that it exists, that it has won wide
acceptance, and that it is in sharp an-
tagonism with the whole anschauung
which a little while ago seemed so well
established.

40 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

M. Bergson, too, has won a fame at
least not inferior. Whatever his ultimate
place in the history of thought, there is
no doubt that he counts and will count
more and more as time goes on. As one
put it, "in future we may be pro-Bergso-
nians or anti-Bergsonians, but we shall all
be post-Bergsonians."i3 Things cannot be
as though he had not written. Yet the
whole argument of VEvolution Creatrice
and his other works is the direct antithesis
of the maxim of Hegel, that the hidden
secret of the universe must be penetrable
to thought. Like the man or woman in
the street, the lover, the soldier, the school-
boy, Bergson would place instinct or intui-
tion on a higher level in regard to our
insight into reality than pure intelligence.
He even goes so far as to pronounce the
intellect incapable of comprehending life
since it has been formed in the interests
of practical activity and never penetrates
beyond the outward aspect of things, and
even that it exaggerates.

If you go further and take up any philo-
sophical journal you will find hints of other
movements, all directed against orthodox

ARMAGEDDON 41

idealism. We have new realists like Mr.
Bertrand Russell and Mr. G. E. Moore, and
they are not alone, at least on the critical
side. Writers hke Mr. Prichard in his
criticism of Kant^* and Mr. Joseph are
at variance with what has been the main
tendency since Kant.^^ They are opposed
to the view that the esse of things is
percipi; while Mr. Galloway, writing from
a somewhat different angle, declares that
philosophy is moving towards some form
of ideal-reahsm, or, in other words, is
moving right away from the direction it
took with the 'Copernican Revolution.' ^«
All these tendencies are significant, and
the list is not exhaustive; Nietzsche is
exercising a great influence, and no one, I
suppose, would call him a successor of the
apostles of modern philosophy. I note
all these movements not in order to discuss
them, but rather to point out that there is
no such thing as philosophic authority at
present, nor any likelihood of our reaching
it; in other words, no body of principles
to which all students adhere, as they do in
the special sciences. There is no agree-
ment among those who reflect on these

42 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

topics, and so far then as experience goes,
we have no ground for trusting that the un-
illumined reflections of the human reason,
revolving on itself, are bringing us to a
knowledge of reality. I remember some
years ago asking a trained philosopher
whether he foresaw the prospect of any
main general conclusions on the part of
philosophers. He said No. At that time,
more or less obsessed with the fashionable
cult, I could hardly credit his words, but
now I see what he meant.

Thus, then, however you would account
for it, it would seem a simple fact of obser-
vation, that there is some "kink" in the
human logic which prevents man arriving
at the true knowledge of things by any
exercise of his rational faculties alone, and
that, though the power of drawing inferences
is universal. So far as we can observe
the history of these attempts, through its
whole progress there is but one conclusion,
and that is confirmed by the existing con-
dition of thought. It may be summed up
in the well known lines of Omar Khayyam :

ARMAGEDDON 43

"Up from earth's centre, through the seventh gate
I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate;

And many a knot unravelled by the road;
But not the master-knot of human fate.

"There was the Door to which I found no key;
There was the veil through which I might not see:

Some little talk awhile of me and thee
There was — and then no more of Thee and Me.

"Earth could not answer; nor the seas that mourn
In flowing purple, of their lord forlorn;

Nor rolling Heaven; with all His signs revealed
And hidden by the sleeve of night and morn."

However, it may be said that there is
general agreement to adopt a purely agnos-
tic standpoint. If we include the general
level of educated and half-educated people,
this would be nearer the truth. As a
purely philosophic doctrine agnosticism is,
of course, by no means incompatible with
theistic or even Christian belief, and may
make a very good basis for it. Instances
of this are numerous; one of the most
valuable is that of George Romanes, the
great man of science. His work, Thoughts
on Religion^ illustrates the progress of the
anima natUraliter Christiana from infidelity
to the faith, through making his agnosti-

44 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

cism "pure"; that is, purging it of pre-
possessions on either side. For agnosticism
need be no more than an assertion that
the intellect of itself is incapable of em-
bracing reality, with the corollary that all
our knowledge of God is figurative and
provisional. It may imply the belief that
the idealist account of things is open to
grave objection, and that all efforts of the
mind un-illuminated by revelation lead to
failure. This is very much the use put to
it by Mr. Arthur Balfour, who in his
Defence of Philosophic Doubt and the more
popular Foundations of Belief has given
us some admirable criticism both of the
naturalist and the idealist accounts, of the
world. It is obvious that with agnosticism
so "pure" as this, there is no ground against
— there may be very much reason for ac-
cepting the Christian claim that our knowl-
edge of God is mediated through His Son's
manifestation in human life and can be
reached in no other way. In this sense of
the term, not only great moderns, such as
"Newman" and "Pascal," but even the
greater schoolmen, all alike maintain that
the intellectual reason is not of itself ade-

ARMAGEDDON 45

quale, and that all our words and creeds
are but metaphor; that our knowledge is,
in a word, analogical.

Agnosticism, however, as commonly used
today, means more than this. It is a par-
ticular kind of gnosticism. Its practical
meaning is similar to naturahsm; while
theoretically it is a counsel of despair,
which cannot be maintained by beings
born to act. For they will not rest in the
beUef that reality is unknowable, alike to
the reason and every other faculty of the
soul, and that the world is all a maya of
illusion. That is the one real hope in the
West; men cannot in the last resort but
beUeve in some reality; I might add that,
even taking our hfe at its worst, it shews
such desire for free personaKty, even if
only for the few, that there is less danger
than appears of its being satisfied with the
opiates of Pantheism, At least we find
as a fact that, apart from those immersed
in immediate activity, reflecting men hold
less and less to a truly agnostic position.
It always tends to pass into its opposite
and to become a gnosticism, whether theistic
or the reverse. Herbert Spencer's own

46 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

system has been called semi-theism, and
he told us in his autobiography that as he
grew older he became less hostile to insti-
tutional religion. Sidgwick's agnosticism
verged on theistic faith, just as in others
it is tantamount to atheism. A better
instance is that of Mr. Lowes Dickinson.
Contemptuous as he is of all Christian
ideals, yet in his books on "Religion" he
develops a doctrine which may call itself
agnosticism, but is in reality a sort of
theism; and this is even more the case with
the dialogue on the Meaning of Good,

Of agnosticism, in the popular sense,
the strength has been and is not philosophic
thinking, but the prejudice from natural
science, the refusal of men like Huxley to
discern any ground for a spirit world beyond.
Even this attitude is changing. Science
tends more and more to recognise its pro-
visional and purely descriptive character;
further it is being driven to credit as
phenomena facts which make for a view
of the world as spiritual and personal, and
destroy the hope that, with a little more
knowledge, the universe could be summed
up in a series of differential equations; be-

ARMAGEDDON 47

cause all history has been fixed from the
outset, and at any moment the state of
the world might be mathematically deduced
from that just preceding. This fatalism is
the one and only postulate irreconcilable
with the Christian faith.

*' With earth's first clay thou didst the last man knead,
And then of the last harvest sow'd the seed:

Yea the first morning of Creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read."

Were this indeed the case, and it is the
assumption of all who disbelieve the mirac-
ulous, we need not discuss the Christian
faith, or indeed any other, which appeals
to spiritual freedom and treats the future
as not determined. Such a faith in that
case could have no meaning, neither would
human life, as we see and live it from day
to day. This prejudice, however, is break-
ing against the rock of fact. Natural
science is becoming in the true sense agnos-
tic, and recognises that it can speak but
of phenomena and their relations; of what
is behind it has no word to say, one way or
the other. In so far as observation in-
creases our sense of the cruelty of nature,
it may increase the difficulty of believing

48 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

in the Fatherhood of God. Probably the
supreme difficulty of theistic religion to
most minds does lie in this doctrine rather
more than in any of the other points. But
I do not know that this has been substan-
tially increased since the days when Tenny-
son made it classical in his indictment of
Nature "red in tooth and claw with ravin,"
and Mill ^Meveloped the same thesis in prose.
More and more, too, is science tending
to lay stress on the unique, the individual;
and more and more does that tend to remove
the antecedent objection to the Christian
revelation. And it cannot be too often
repeated that it is the antecedent objection
which weighs with most minds and is at
the bottom of three quarters of the destruc-
tive criticism. Dr. Karl Pearson's criti-
cism of the Law of Causation in the recent
edition of his Grammar of Science ought to
leave no doubt that those who are deterred
from admitting the force of the evidence
of the uniqueness of the events connected
with the Ufe of Jesus, because they seem
at variance with some imaginary law, are
merely frightened by a bogie. "As far
as our own experience goes, nothing in the

ARMAGEDDON 49

universe ever will exactly repeat itself;

the law of causation is a useful

conception, but in no sense a reality lying
as a bed rock below phenomena." ^^

But this is not all. The uprising of
psychology is teaching us many things.
Admitted facts like those of thought trans-
ference and the whole doctrine of the sub-
liminal self serve to shew that our personal
life reaches deeper than we suppose, and
give us hints of a universe whose elements
connect themselves in a way that is incom-
patible w^ith a materialistic hypothesis.
Mr. Gerald Balfour has recently shewn this
to be the case in regard to the admitted
cases of telepathy, quite apart from the
more doubtful alleged cases of *' cross-
correspondence." Dr. Jevons has further
developed the point that the facts of mind-
cure are not explained by giving them a
name, and that they remain unintelligible
except on a spiritual theory.

The new developments in regard to a
theory of matter, while they certainly do
not make religious belief more dijSicult, serve
on the one hand to favour the view that we
know very little about the constitution of

50 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

the material world, while all recent research
tends to shew us the depth of mystery that
surrounds the subject and the highly specu-
lative character of most theories in regard
to its nature.

From all these sides, the descriptive nature
of science, the electronic theory of matter,
the admitted emphasis on the unique and
individual, the strange occurrences now
known to the psychologist, men are slowly
moving away from that view which makes
the facts of Gospel appear incredible because
they seem to conflict with certain so-called
laws, which are never more than observed
uniformities and might always be subject
to exceptions.

As M. Bergson says, we cannot lay down
a priori the impossibility of any fact.
Indeed, in regard to the Gospel facts, it is
not scientific men, but "liberal" theologians
who take their science at second hand, who
tell us that the stories of the Virgin Birth
and the Resurrection body are certainly
false. Huxley, for instance, professed
himself quite ready to believe it, if he
had thought the evidence sufiicient. It
is literary critics or philosophers* rather

ARMAGEDDON 51

than men of science, who say before-
hand that the one or the other is plainly
impossible.

Thus the prevailing uncertainty in regard
to fundamental principles weakens the
force of any and all the systems which
compete with the Christian Church, while
the recent advances in scientific thought
have lessened the current objections. For
all that, the great obstacle to belief among
ordinary minds is the success of physical
science; the achievements in the practical
world that have issued from a method of
enquiry which postulates a uniformity
against which the Christian story and our
sense of freedom are alike in conflict. We
are learning that even in the simplest
facts there is ever a mystery at the last,
a point at which you can only say, '* Things
are so," "Blue is blue, and there's an end
of it." As men see this and as they see
also the mysteries involved in the scientific
projection of the world, and concentrate
attention on the actual facts of freedom
and the realm of values, and as they fur-
ther see the connection between the postu-
lates of human freedom and those of the

52 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

miraculous or the Divine freedom; so will
the mirage of natural uniformity vanish,
like the dream it is, and they will be able
to place themselves before the light, that
shone once over Bethlehem, and yield to
the great weight of evidence that points to
the invasion of this world by powers from
one beyond.

Apart from the Christian hope, we are
in a state of chaos, only the more appalling
that it seems to be hardly realised. The
chaos is all the greater that it applies not
only to fundamental doctrines, but to
practical ideals. For the anarchy of specu-
lative thought is almost a harmony com-
pared with the chaos of the moral ideals.

In the last century the world could still
retain Christian ideals, while giving up
that life in the Church which alone makes
them possible. That belief has been shat-
tered by facts, and writers of the older
school of rationalists, like Gold win Smith,
noted and lamented this. Here and there
you find a belated Positivist or an austere
agnostic holding to an ideal indistinguish-
able from the Christian, but for the most
part the non-Christian no longet even

ARMAGEDDON 53

aflFects to take Jesus as Master, but opposes,
with more or less of contempt for the
founder, the whole system of Christian
morals. I will not dwell on the great
movement of which Friedrich Nietzsche
was the mouthpiece, although I believe it
to be significant. Its glorification of pride,
its philosophy of cruelty and race antago-
nism are a shining expression of the spirit
of antichrist and of the practical ideals of
many men who would be shocked at the
language of Nietzsche. It is fair to say
that part of Nietzsche's individualism had
its origin in a wholesome reaction against
the pessimistic ethical socialism, derived
from Schopenhauer or the East, which
preaches altruism not because of the worth
of, but because of the (alleged) unreality
of the individual. Also from Nietzsche's
polemic against arid intellectualism there
is much to be learnt, and from his general
romantic attitude. At the same time his
whole contempt, not merely of the Christian
creed, but of Christian ethics, is undoubted
and cannot be lost sight of. Moreover it is,
in this respect, as incarnating a new philos-
ophy of pride and reviving ideas essentially

54 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

Pagan that he has his greatest vogue —
and it is in this respect that his disciples
would claim to be "immoralists," as
opposed to the whole notion of ethics which
has prevailed for two thousand years.
This is discerned to be the true inwardness
of the conflict between the ethics of Chris-
tianity and Nietzsche by a writer in a recent
number of the Hibbert Journal, Professor
Otto Julius Bierbaum,!^ in an interesting
article on Dostoieffsky and Nietzsche, from
which I make some extracts. It is indeed
the strongest presumption in favour of the
Divine and other-worldly character of the
Gospel that it should be seen to be dia-
metrically opposed in outlook, in motive,
and practical maxims to a scheme of things
avowedly Pagan, self-regarding, and this-
worldly. "I speak from the standpoint of
one to whom Nietzsche's doctrine of the
transvaluation of all values is something
more than an empty phrase, and I assume
that it indicates the direction in which the
most potent forces of Western culture are
moving today. . . .

"Even if it be conceded that the spirit
informing him is, for Russia, fit and salu-

ARMAGEDDON 55

"tary, it does not follow that it is the same
''for us. We to whom Dostoieffsky remains
" at bottom a stranger are not born to absorb it;
''to attempt this would be to deny Goethe and
''to regard Nietzsche as a disease. It is a
"divergent path that we are called to tread,
"Our wanderings in the Catacombs are over,

"Those by whom this doctrine is rejected
" (as it may be by men of great intellectual
"power) should welcome Dostoieffsky at
"once as a kindred spirit; for in him Christ
"speaks, and we must go back very far in
"the history of the Christian faith to find
"one in whom he speaks so forcibly as here.
"I for one should need to go back to S.
"Francis of Assisi. . . .

"On the one hand we have Nietzsche
"breaking in his Zarathustra the tables of
"the Mosaic Law; on the other Dostoieffsky
" raising up out of the depths of his Russian
"heart the primitive Christ."

If you take other non-Christian teachers,
like Mr. Lowes Dickinson, it is easy to see
how entirely they repudiate the Christian
ethic. An Oxford tutor, in his Religion of all
Good Men, while personally doing homage
to the teaching of Jesus, declares the whole

56 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

system to be obsolete, and would sub-
stitute the "Gothic" ideal, as he calls
chivalry — the ethical simplification of
"gentlemanly conduct." 20 Mr. H. G.
Wells, in his impressive study, First and
Last Things, has told us that the per-
sonality of Jesus does not appeal to him;
while of the book which has united Chris-
tians of every obedience, another teacher
from Oxford, Mr. Henry Sturt,^! writes
in the following elegant terms: "Of all the
terrible intellectual disasters of Europe
the Bible has been by far the greatest,
mitigated only partially by the wild ro-
mantic savagery of the Old Testament,
by the sweet natural beauty of the preach-
ing of Jesus, and, for us, by the old-time
nobility of our Jacobean translation. What
an irreparable injury to the intellectual
growth of England that week by week,
for centuries, the people have had pre-
sented to them 'lessons' from the records
of an Arabian tribe unapproachably distant
in culture, in national sentiment, and in,
spiritual aspirations. Who can estimate
the degree to which our poetry has been
stunted and starved, our national genius

ARMAGEDDON 57

crushed, our history cheapened and thrust
out of sight by this ahen oppression?
Scholars have sentimentaHsed over the
desolation of Hellas by the coarse, ignorant
tyranny of the Turks. Have they ever
thought of the ruin these ill-starred Jewish
scriptures have wrought to the mind of the
Teutonic nations? " It is not as though
there was any compensating agreement
about the fundamentals of morals. Chris-
tian chastity is condemned; Mr. Bernard
Shaw would make divorce ''as cheap, as
easy, and as secret as possible"; a great
novelist was for treating marriage as on
the system of a leasehold contract, termi-
nable at intervals, while reputable names
can be found defending vices which even
the Pagans condemned, and a recent his-
torical writer has set up Heliogabalus with
all his nameless vices as a mark of modern
admiration. 22 Of course many would hold
to an austere view of morals quite apart
from religion; others would recommend
no more than "manly" Hberality. But
whatever they may approve, they are at
variance with the Christian notion of
marriage, and our novels and plays and

58 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

popular agitations bear witness to a chaos
in moral ideals. This hopeless floundering
in all men's notions of right and wrong may
be partly due to the strange complexities
of our day, but it is more often the result
of the breaking down of all barriers to the
individual caprice and of the preaching of
a doctrine of "living one's own life," which
leaves a man or woman — for the evil is
largely there — with no stars in heaven to
steer by. For "God hath made man up-
right, but he hath found out many inven-
tions." A society which leaves God out
of the reckoning in all matters of family
and sexual intercourse is bound direct for
the rocks. At this moment indeed it is
the ethic of Christianity which is more
unpopular than the creed. It hinders the
free development of the individual in regard
to society, or it is disliked as ascetic
and unnatural in regard to the private life;
and in business relations it is rejected on
principle as mere sentimentalism.

This is all very natural. The firmest
believer in Christ finds his ideal so far be-
yond his practice that it is very unlikely
that an unbeliever should retain a^ thing

ARMAGEDDON 59

SO difficult; while the balance between
egoism and altruism is so hard to strike
in theory that the Christian Church is the
only society in which a fair mean can be
had, and apart from life therein we should
anticipate what we actually have, an oscil-
lation between capricious individualism, or
an altruism no less irrational.

So far as we Christians are concerned,
it is the ethical antagonism which is the
more important. Nietzsche with his in-
sight saw that here was the crux. So long
as men go on admiring Jesus and making
Him their ideal, no good will come from
disproving the Gospel history. Somehow
or other men will hold to a system funda-
mentally Christian and will adopt practi-
cally, if not theoretically, an attitude of
worship. They will act in a way which
logically implies the system which in theory
they have rejected. If they are finally to
be cut loose from the Christian Church,
they must be taught to trample on the
Christian ideal. And so Nietzsche set
himself to develop the taunt of the rejecting
Jews at our Lord, "He hath a devil."
Since many men, as a fact, live an anti-

60 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

Christian life, he only drew out what was
implied therein. That is one reason of his
influence. He made an idol of the deeds
of ** bloodthirsty and cruel men."

Perhaps I may seem to exaggerate the
chaos of existing beliefs. Rather I believe
that I underrate it. So far as concerns
that world called educated or specifically
modern, the anarchy is greater, not less,
than I portray. The fact is disguised from
us by the presence amongst us of classes
who ehng by instinct to the old faith.
What I am thinking of is the seething
cauldron of this modern world, not those
who, whether by fortune or choice, live in
a backwater. Barchesters still exist, but
we do not live there. In the world where
we do live, every kind of current and cross-
current is flowing at this moment, or as
one man put it, "the pavement is up in all
directions"; "for in those days there was
no king in Israel and every man did that
which was right in his own eyes."

I have been trying to shew that, while
as a fact the intellectual atmosphere of our
day is unfavourable to the Christian Church,

ARIMAGEDDON 61

yet this is merely a fact, the result of one-
sided development. It is no more decisive
than was the prejudice of the philosophic
schools of Rome or Alexandria in the first
century. The modern prejudice has been
created by the predominance of a single
method, triumphant in its own sphere, and
the attempt to carry it into regions where
it is powerless. This method has unduly
influenced certain critics and historians,
who have taken their science for granted;
unaware of the reserves made by the
greater physicists, they have treated as
rigid laws what are mere facts of normal
happening and have started to reconstruct
the New Testament or the history of the
Christian Church, with certain classes of
events ruled out a priori as incredible.
The same prejudices have operated to the
detriment of history, by creating a bias
in favour of arranging it all on a schematic
basis as the result of inevitable laws,
omitting all but a meagre reference to the
vast changes wrought by persons; that is,
by spiritual beings.

From many sides, however, these views
have been attacked. The limits of intel-

62 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

lectual reasoning have been analysed by-
writers like Bergson, certainly not from
any bias towards the Christian Faith.
There is no longer a united front or anything
like it on the part of the non-Christian
world. It is as variegated as the religions
of Asia. We are in the midst of Armaged-
don; we may keep the faith, but we must
fight for it. Sir Oliver Lodge is but one
of many scientific men who bid us remember
the limitations of all purely mechanical
interpretations 23; while another scientific
observer. Dr. McDougall, has just pub-
lished a volume. Mind and Soul, designed
to resuscitate once more the old-fashioned
belief in the individual soul which some had
told us had vanished forever from the world
of "enlightenment."

Neither in fundamental matters of
thought, nor in ideals of practice, is there
any body of principles accepted in the
main by reflecting men or any probability
of such arising. On the contrary we live
amid a greater intellectual and moral chaos
than has ever been known in history. This
cannot continue. ^^ A civilisation to endure
will have to mean something, and "projected

ARMAGEDDON 63

efficiency" will not satisfy any race which
considers its latter end. Against the disso-
lution which is otherwise in store for us,
there is nothing to stand but the life of the
Christian Church. The existing anarchy
renders it not less but more probable that
there alone can the needs of human nature
be satisfied. Hostility indeed is open and
contemptuous, yet there is nothing to
inhibit our faith. The Apollyons of modern
knowledge are only bogies. Neither from
the side of natural science, nor from phi-
losophy, nor from ethics is there any voice
so clear or authoritative as to bear any
weight beyond an individual appeal; while
there is nothing proved, no principle even
probable, which stands in the way of
Christian Faith. There is no a priori
obstacle to the faith, provided that it seem
on other grounds to be reasonable. Such
grounds are to be found in the New Testa-
ment experience, as solid with the life of
the Church and the inward witness of the
believer. For there she is, the Christian
Church seared with the sins of all the cen-
turies, bearing the memory not only of the
saints, a Saint Francis, a Father Damien, a

64 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

Fenelon, a Bishop Brent, but also of the
Renaissance Popes, the eighteenth century
prelates, the persecutors, the time-servers;
still she goes on. Here in our midst is the
society, which claims to have the gathered
experience of the race, still to keep the
flame burning, no philosopher's dream or
far-off hope, but a life with the scars no
less than the strength of reality; still she
comes before us and asks, Can you do with-
out me? Is this glad new life for which
all seek to be had within me, or must men
seek it elsewhere? " Art thou He that
should come or do we look for another?" 25

LECTURE II
BABYLON OR THE MORAL CRISIS

The Post-Impressionists have lately been
the theme of much talk. We are not here
to canvass the artistic merit of this strange
new school of painting. But the move-
ment means a good deal. By authorities
hke Mr. Roger Fry and Mr. C. J. Holmes
we have learnt something of its aims. We
are shewn how it witnesses partly to that
Oriental influence which has been pouring
in upon Western art ever since Japan was
discovered, and partly to that cult of the
primitive which has been growing every
year. Here is a deliberate effort to step
back into the child's view of the natural
world and to thrust away the he of the
photographic artist, which, rendering every
detail, obscures the whole truth and sacri-
fices colour and line to what is at bottom
mere mechanism. It represents a desire

6 65

66 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

to get away from our sophisticated world
to one simpler. No longer shall the artist
be controlled by the desire of accurate
presentation of detail; rather by sugges-
tion and subtle arrangement shall he call
up those impressions fitting avowedly the
scene, and wed his own imagination to that
of the spectator. Mr. Roger Fry, in an
illuminating article, describes the signifi-
cance of the movement as follows:

"Again and again have attempts been
made by artists to regain this freedom of
imaginative appeal, but the attempts have
been hitherto tainted by archaism. Now
at last artists can use with perfect sincerity
means of expression which have been denied
them ever since the Renaissance, And this
is no isolated phenomenon confined to the
Httle world of professional painters; it is
one of many expressions of a great change
in our attitude to life. We have passed
in our generation through what looks like
the crest of a long progression in human
thought, one in which the scientific or
mechanical view of the universe was ex-
ploited for all its possibilities. How vast
and on the whole how desirable those possi-

BABYLON 67

bilities are is undeniable, but this effort
has tended to blind our eyes to other
reahties — the reahties of our spiritual
nature and the justice of our demand for
its gratification. Art has suffered in this
process, since art, like religion, appeals to
the non-mechanical parts of our nature,
to what in us is mystic and vital. It seems
to me, therefore, impossible to exaggerate
the importance of this movement in art,
which is destined to make the sculptors' and
painters' endeavour once more contermi-
nous with the whole range of human aspi-
ration and desire."

I am not asking how far these men are
right or wrong ; the point is that they exist.
Here in one important sphere, with interests
quite other than religious, men are seen in
deliberate revolt against the mental habit
of the Western world, as it has developed
itself since the Renaissance. Elsewhere
we can also trace a similar sense of its
limitation. It is deliberately controverted
by an architectural genius like Mr. R. A.
Cram,i whom I need not in this place do
more than mention. In the Irish literary
movement, in the verse and criticism of

68 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

Mr. W. B. Yeats, in the plays of Lady
Gregory, above all in dramas like Synge's
Riders of the Sea and The Play Boy of the
Western World, the same spirit manifests
itself, and it finds conscious expression, in
regard to language in the latter's preface.
There he points out the evil that has been
done to the rich suggestiveness and sym-
bolism, in other words the "sacramental"
element in language, by the whole modern
mechanical method, which uses words like
the symbols of a typewriter. We can see
the tendency far back in "Tiger, tiger
burning bright" and the whole anschauung
of William Blake, and much that has been
written about the "Renascence of Wonder"
bears on it. All these movements start
from the assumption that the calculable,
mechanical aspects of life have been given
undue prominence in the West and that
poetic, if not ethical, salvation is to be
found by leaving it; in a word we are to
"repent and become as little children"
in the service of beauty, no less than in
that of God. For of course those move-
ments have nothing directly to do with the
Christian Faith. Their protagonist-s are

BABYLON 69

often its bitterest opponents. Yet all are
fighting the same battle with the vulgarities
and mechanical categories of commercialised
Europe; all are on the side of spirit and
freedom against Philistinism and mammon
worship. All in a sense are other-worldly
and despise the tokens of the day; all, if
triumphant, w^ll lead to a " transvaluation
of all values." People may be spiritually
akin, without knowing it or liking to
acknowledge the fact when they are told.
As was said by one of them:

"For thou art gone away from earth,
And place with those dost claim.
The children of the Second Birth,
Whom the world could not tame;

"And with that small transfigured band
Whom many a different way
Conducted to this common land.
Thou learn'st to think, as they.

"Christian or Pagan, King and slave,
Soldier and Anchorite,
Distinctions we esteem so grave.
Are nothing in their sight.

"They do not ask, who pined unseen.
Who was on action hurled
Whose one bond is, that all have been
Unspotted by the world." ^

70 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

All these things, like the romantic move-
ment in the early nineteenth century, are
evidences of a change of spirit which in-
cludes a religious aspect, but is in reality
wider. Our Lord's bidding to His friends
to take no thought of the morrow, to be
like children, and to consider the lilies
and to copy the birds, is curiously akin
to this latest utterance of a technique that
has swung full circle; only it reaches
further. Christianity is not less, but ten
thousand times more revolutionary than
people think. That jaded middle-aged so-
ciety of the Pagan Empire did well to see
in the Church its foe, and to persecute a
living spirit with the gift of Eternal youth.
Some tell us now that Jesus proclaimed a
social gospel. So He did. But it was
not that of Karl Marx or Henry George
or any legislator. He came to upset the
whole scale of values, and by changing men's
desires to inaugurate a new epoch. At this
moment there would be few wrongs in the
distribution of wealth if people ceased to
want more than is good for them. Jesus came
to alter men's wants. The real economic
reformer is not the man who alters the laws.

BABYLON 71

but he who changes the wants of a suffi-
ciently large number of people to affect the
markets. Consider how great a reformer
was Peter the Hermit. He made more
difference than many legislators. So does
any effective preacher of standards above
the common. There would be fewer harlots
if the great majority of men even tried to
live pure lives ; while the appalling inequali-
ties of our day would vanish as by magic if
a sufficient number of men were to leave off
"making haste to be rich" and a sufficient
number of women were to "set their affec-
tions on things above." The world improves
slowly, because nearly everyone overvalues
material goods. That is the main cause
of unjust laws, of economic wrong, and
nearly all tyranny — not the only cause,
but in our day the chief one, except sheer
stupidity. Any change of men's ideals in
this respect would at once lead to improve-
ment.

As I said in the first lecture, the world
of the Middle Ages was anything but an
ideal place, and those best off were with-
out our comforts. It was a rough and
cruel world of tumbling, quarrelsome.

72 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

naughty, joyous, and rather dirty children.
Its tears and its laughter, its hopes and
its solemnities, still live, not only in our
chroniclers or poets, but more universally
in those majestic piles, which not even the
throned scoundrel who destroyed the Abbeys
could quite avail to shatter. These places
witness to two things — men's faith alike
in God and in man. The two go together.
Either the whole world, seen no less than
unseen, is conceived as personal, spiritual,
alive, ever fresh so that

"New every morning is the Love
Our v/akening and uprising prove";

or else it is seen as mechanical, impersonal,
dead, with human history unrolling itself,
like a cinematograph. The one is the
world of Catholic Christianity, the other
that of Pagan philosophy or scientific
fatalism and its more spiritual or at least
decorative variety — Pantheism.

It is not doubtful that, if we were asked
to name a material symbol of the Middle
Ages, we should point to Rouen Cathedral
or Durham or to some great monastery
church, like Westminster or Selby or Peter-

BABYLON 73

borough. To many who know nothing else
about those days, these form the only
conscious link, the one legacy of the past.
As John Ruskin said in words which those
who have once read them find it hard to
forget:

"They are the only witnesses perhaps
that remain to us of the faith and fear of
nations. All else for which the builders
sacrificed has passed away — all their living
interests and aims and achievements. We
know not for what they laboured, and we
see no evidence of their reward. Victory,
wealth, authority, happiness — all have
departed, though bought by many a bitter
sacrifice. But of them and their life and
their toil upon the earth, one reward, one
evidence is left us in these grey heaps of
deep-wrought stone. They have taken with
them to the grave their powers, their hon-
ours, and their errors; but they have left
us their adoration." ^

There were, of course, many other sides
to medieval hfe. Then, as now, greed and
cruelty and lust claimed their victims. But
its distinctive note is the effort to treat all
human actions from the standpoint of the

74 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

other world. That was its standard of
value. Its unity is the unity of a band of
pilgrims strugghng hardly home; its tender-
ness and intimacy are the smiling tears of
a soul that is glad by a great forgiveness;
its humour is the wholesome universal play
of those who are untroubled by all the
storms and undismayed by bereavement,
because they know that a man may feel
that:

" Love is and was my king and lord
And shall be though as yet I keep
Within his courts on earth and sleep
Encompassed by his faithful guard,

"And hear at times the sentinel,

That moves about from place to place
And whispers through the worlds of space
In the deep night that all is well."

Even the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire
was the grandest ideal that men have set
before them in statecraft, and though it
was broken up under the passion and the
pride of man, we need not suppose that the
vast unity of all human and divine affairs
as seen in the vision of Dante is a thing to
be despised by a different age.

For it is different. Let us not forget

BABYLON 75

that. The statecraft, the economics, the
education, the hterature, the social and
family life of our day are organised on a
basis frankly secular. So far as these
things are concerned, we might almost say
that God does not count. Consequently
it is the symbols of material possession that
are alone striking in the world of today.
For that very reason there is less of monu-
mental expression, for men intent on money-
making erect buildings only for utilitarian
ends. If, however, any one such thing
could represent our world of today to
Macaulay's New Zealander I suppose it
would be the Stock Exchange. That is the
true centre of the interests of the vast
majority today, excepting small groups
apart from the main current. To many
others it would be the factory or the
mill.

To that end its universities and all its
education is more and more being directed.
Attacks of daily increasing virulence are
made directly on those studies which do
not lead directly to money-getting. Not
long since some business men went to the
Vice-Chancellor of a certain University

76 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

and asked him to guarantee that if they
sent their sons to take a certain course
on commercial topics they would become
wealthy men. Physical science is indeed
valued, but mainly because it is hoped to in-
crease the chances of money-making. Take
the Western world through, and what unity
can you find either in religion or thought
or practical ideals except the desire for
riches.^ I think I am not exaggerating.

Some one said to me here the other day,
"You cannot imagine the degree to which
we are materialized; every servant girl
cherishes hopes of being one day a society
queen." Of course the love of money is
not new, but the absorption in it of seventy-
five per cent of human energy is, I think,
new. More and more people are ill-con-
tent with a competence and are snatching
at the means of ostentation. What has
been euphemistically called the democrati-
sation of society has meant in practice the
crushing out of all standards save that of
wealth, so that people openly boast that
"they judge a man by his balance at the
bank"; and many more do so while hardly
aware of it. I heard a woman of historic

BABYLON 77

name, dwelling in a way that might seem
beyond the dreams of avarice, declare
that she had asked her agent, "Oh when
shall I be rich, Mr. Smith?" Every form
of luxury has increased, with the result that
those who have enough are always, like
Oliver Twist, "asking for more," while so
many people are living beyond their income
that the need of money is breaking down
still further the barriers of honour and
fair-dealing. It is the mad race for wealth
that is the real cause of men's dislike of
religion. For Christianity can in no way
be got to fit with such a scheme of life, and
hence it is left out. Driven by this whip,
men are abandoning all scruple, and meth-
ods grow daily in favour, which even half a
century ago would have seemed less than
honest. "The great god success" is de-
scribed in an American novel as the one
goal on which all are agreed, and some one
said to me the other day, when I demurred,
to his admiration of a set of people, that
they were scoundrels, "Ah, yes, but they
get there." This aim, whether you call it
avarice, or the love of power, or the pas-
sion for conquest, has always dominated

78 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

many. But it has not always been wor-
shipped without reserve. Since the days
of that majestic embodiment of human
pride, the Roman Empire, when S. John
bewailed ''the lust of the flesh, and the
lust of the eyes and the pride of life,"
material standards have never ruled with
such general acquiescence, as they do now.
The Middle Ages had ''their forestallers
and regraters," but they did not call them
"kings of finance." Even a Renaissance
despot, though he embodied a similar ideal,
had commonly either political genius or
artistic culture. If men did not copy, at
least they canonized S. Francis. Nowa-
days the police would lock him up for
sleeping in the open.

However, it is hard to say anything on
this topic without becoming either com-
monplace or exaggerated. Let me leave
it with one illustration.

There died last year a sovereign who,
though not a great statesman, has left
behind him a memory that will not die.
Leopold, king of the Belgians, had many of
the gifts of the Emperor Nero, without
his artistic taste. To the powers of the

BABYLON 79

efficient man of business he added habits
in moral matters which were overacted
rather than novel; while his notions of
family affection might have been learned
at the court of Herod the Great. He
developed the resources of his people (in-
cluding the casino of Ostend). At length
he persuaded the states of the West to
unite in a scheme which should carry to
a backward race the blessings of civilised
existence. What those blessings are can
be found in many official documents or
pictured for the casual reader by Stac-
poole's Pools of Silence. Recently I received
an invitation to invest money in some
Congo rubber company on the ground that
"the sensational fortune of King Leopold
had a meaning." It had. His decease,
so lamentable to that race to whom in his
own words he was teaching "the sanctity
of labour," was discussed at some length
by the press of that city, which has ever
regarded itself as the metropolis of modern
culture. They praised the dead monarch
and enlarged on his abilities, apparently
regarding as one ground of their admiration
his admitted lack of scruple. All this I

80 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

quote, not because I wish to add one more
curse to one who hears already the cries
of a murdered people, but because it illus-
trates the spirit of modern civilisation with
little infusion from earlier influences. The
combination of greed, lust, and success,
this is what moves the reverence of the
Parisian journalists in the year of our Lord
1910; this is the ideal held up to the enter-
prising citizens — who are not princes. Is it
for this and such like examples that we are
invited to treat the Bible as pernicious,
or gird at the epileptic ecstacies of S.
Paul.^ For remember that King Leopold
did not differ, except in fortune, from many
unknown makers of millions and many
more who would like to make them. It
was not that his morals were worse, but
that his success was greater, not that his
aims were low, but that his place was high,
that won for him a renown so fragrant.
Every man or woman who invests money
with the single aim of dividends, irrespec-
tive of means, is guilty potentially of the
same crimes. In a debate before the
introduction of Chinese labour, one mem-
ber of Parliament declared that there was

BABYLON 81

one paramount need, that of getting gold
out of the Rand. The moment such a
spirit rules, the horrors of the Congo are
bound to arise, given the conditions. In-
deed, if accounts be trustworthy, the same
is true of places like the Valle Nacional of
Mexico and of many systems of so-called
peonage; just as it was true in the factory
system of England before child labour was
regulated, in spite of a chorus of shrieks on
the part of the rich manufacturers, led by
John Bright. None of these things could
go on were it not for the morbid lust of
men to secure the utmost material gain at
the lowest cost and to set aside every
consideration of the workers' interests.
For the evil does not lie in the forced labour,
nor in the tutelage of the child races (both
probably necessary), but comes from thrust-
ing out all consideration for the labourer,
as a person, and treating him as a living
tool, in a worse condition than were slaves
in the Roman Empire. There is the root
of the matter. You may even have the
fullest political freedom and prohibit per-
sonal violence to an absurd degree, and yet
get results not radically dissimilar, provided

82 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

you make wealth your sole object and all
thought of means be set aside.

Dr. Bussell declares with truth this
point: "Emancipation on two continents
sacrificed the real welfare of the slave and
his intrinsic worth as a person, to the
impatient vanity of an immediate and
theatrical triumph." ^

So it is with our modern freedom and the
rights of the individual. No master would
venture nowadays to discipline an appren-
tice of sixteen years, as the rich pay for
their sons to be disciplined; for we have
carried freedom of the person to the point
of insanity, and daily witness irate parents
bringing ridiculous charges against ele-
mentary schoolmasters for employing in the
mildest way discipline that everyone who
has been through it at an English public
school admits to be wholesome. This is
one reason why a certain type of boy in
the slums can never be made anything of,
unless he be got into the navy. But on
the other hand any employe may be dis-
missed to starve in the streets at almost a
moment's notice. You remember the story
of Mr. Wells' Kipps; how a youth is thrown

BABYLON 83

upon the world, without a moment's hesi-
tation, for an offence which was certainly
not serious; and it is alleged that in some
of the larger stores the slightest complaint
leads to immediate dismissal. These in-
stances serve to illustrate the fact that it
is not for the sentimental pampering of
the negro or the labourer that I am plead-
ing. And they shew further what freedom
means to the economically helpless, the
liberty to be exploited in the interests of
other people, body and soul, with the risk
of being thrown on the scrapheap for the
smallest offence and very often for the
mere accident of being worked out. Em-
ployers' hability has to some degree miti-
gated this, but it is not universal and was
secured amid the frantic protests of the
plutocracy. Nor does this condition con-
cern the very poor alone. Everyone knows
how the middle classes, including even the
upper middle class, are suffering from the
same condition, and their precarious tenure
of their position is more and more recog-
nised. A sudden illness, a slight error of
judgment, a mere accident may destroy
the whole position of a small professional

84 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

man, his death reduce to beggary his
whole family, and take away all their
chances of a good education. But you are
familiar with many such cases. ^

Perhaps our civihsation is not worse than
others, but it is meaner and more insin-
cere; and in spite of all our knowledge, it
is fundamentally stupid in the enormous
waste of human capacity which it involves.

Nor can any of us escape the burden.
It is of no avail to cry. Am I my brother's
keeper.^ or for those who are placed as we
are, away from the stress of it all, to pride
ourselves on being considerate to depend-
ents, thinking that is all. We are all
part of the system. We cannot get away
from it even when we try, and we profit
by it when we least intend.

If you will pardon a few words, of neces-
sity autobiographical, I will relate an expe-
rience. Holding what was called a rich
living (as things go), I resigned it and
joined a community of men living in vol-
untary poverty; not the main, but one
motive, was the feeling that at least one
would be no more exploiting other classes,
and that one would be rid of responsibility

BABYLON 85

for an order, which such an act flouts.
But I have not found it so. Primarily
I am not interested in these topics and
prefer to be free of them to think of other
things. But the very means of such simpH-
fied Hving as is provided by this regime, and
every piece of bread I eat and every train
I travel by, and to some extent the possi-
biUty of such an "order" at all, so far as
it depends on anything but alms, all issue
out of the system which is so repellent. The
gains of the act are purely personal, and
one's relation to the economic system as a
whole alters but slightly, nor does the class-
support grow less for such a surrender, in
many ways it grows greater, save that
one is always a recipient, no longer a donor.
Certainly no man is justified in thinking
he is freed from all further responsibility
and may dismiss from his mind the economic
muddle of the world. He cannot be freed.
So long as he lives, it is in him; and writhe
as we may, we must bear the Nessus-shirt
of modern industrialism and still feel that,
as we have all our lives been sheltered
through the blood and tears of others and
ridden on the crest of the wave, so we do

86 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

still ; and ours will be the guilt if the chains
of injustice are made heavier. This was
always the case. But it is more trans-
parently so now than of yore. The de-
velopments of credit and transit have
united mankind more closely than at any
other time. We all share its evils and its
benefits. Mr. Bernard Shaw has earned
the thanks of all for burning into us this
truth. In Widowers' Houses and Mrs.
Warren's Profession he throws a lurid light,
not on the evils of our day, but rather on
all its ''pleasant pictures." He shews us
how the walled gardens of grace and virtue
which make the life of the few pleasant,
and it may be noble, are only possible
through a surrounding quagmire. The cul-
ture and virtue of the few are won through
a meanness and avarice which the dwellers
in the garden would fain forget. The whole
world of the sheltered classes, with their
high aims and cultivated tastes, and even
their very spiritual vision, is seen to be en-
joying its opportunities, unaware how they
are the fruit of a putrescent cruelty.

It is not inequality I am lamenting.
Inequality may be right or wrong, but it

BABYLON 87

has in it nothing revolting. There is more
apparent inequality between the incomes
of some of us in this room than between
our average income and that of the dis-
inherited classes. What is revolting is
the conditions which take from a large
mass of men the means of a worthy per-
sonal life, which breed child-criminals, pay
women "the wages of prostitution," and
even among those better off produce an
appalling insecurity. For thousands of peo-
ple live always on the edge of a precipice,
and many more are breaking down from
the overstrain of an age which lives in a
fever. For is it not true that at present
services are performed by ''private individ-
uals under competitive conditions, strug-
gling for life and death on the inclined plane
that leads to ruin, fighting always for more,
lest they should be obliged to take less, too
many of them everywhere competing for
one job, and the conditions of success not
only or even mainly merit and capacity,
still less honesty and rectitude, which may
be positive disqualifications, but that
peculiar and intrinsically contemptible art
we call 'push.^'"6

88 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

All this I notice not in order to suggest
a new scheme of social amelioration, but
to point the need of deliverance. I could
not omit it. The problem is haunting and
forbids one to think in quiet of the religious
and philosophical problems of life. The
doctrine of original sin forces itself in when
we would fain be quit of it and discuss high
themes at leisure. Each man is forced
to ask himself, Why is civilisation to me
so gracious a mistress and to others so hard
a stepmother? Even if we allow much to
the solidarity of the family, and say the
individual must share in the life of his
fathers, we hardly get a full solution. To
me and to you she gives the power to live,
not merely to drudge; to form plans and
win high delights. At our feet she pours
the treasured memories of the ages; she
opens the long corridor of history and the
palaces of all the courts. To us she permits
to rest by pleasant streams and grants the
glory of letters and the fellowship of men
gone by. Why should we have all this
almost without our will and others be
born to squalor and foul living? Poverty
is not the evil in the strict sense The

BABYLON 89

peasants' life, if well cared for, has noth-
ing in it ignoble. It is the daily grinding
care, the exposure to foul temptation,
the blighting of soul, the inferno of the
slum, and of things we cannot bear to
picture, that are the fortune of too many-
thousands to leave one a comfortable mind.
Somewhere there must be wrong, some
canker of soul among us, in a world which
keeps its chances for so few and for large
numbers reserves a slavery worse in many
ways than that of Pagan Rome.

"You and I, you must remember, belong
to the small section of society that has both
kinds of freedom; and I think it possible
that we really have on the balance more
liberty than we could easily secure under
other conditions, though to my mind the
value of the liberty is almost destroyed by
the knowledge of the price which others
have to pay for it. For these others, the
mass of men, what freedom really have
they? Can they effectively choose their
career, more than under the most bureau-
cratic socialism? Can they fix their hours
of work? Can they determine their wage?
Can they travel? Can they educate them-

90 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

selves? Can they select their society?
Can they assure their solitude?" ^

We may try to turn away from this
spectacle. We do not like it. It is dull.
It is so much pleasanter to dwell upon art
and letters, so much nicer to think of our
"Christian privileges," or (if you will), our
privileges as non-Christians. But there
they are. They will not let us be. That
haunting face of the beggar in the street,
the harlot at the gate, the unemployed,
the inheritors of disease. Nothing but
fortune prevents our being like that. "There
but for the grace of God goes John Brad-
ford," was said once at the sight of a con-
victed murderer going to his doom; and the
words cannot but echo in our ears at any
sight of a member of the disinherited class.

Idle it is, and waste of breath, to prate
of the triumphs of civilisation, or to quote
the figures of the national income, when at
its heart there is this festering sore, when
the proportion of those who really use the
fruits of our knowledge to those ground
beneath its car must be smaller than in
Pagan Rome, far smaller than in medieval
Europe. Something is wrong, and that

BABYLON 91

wrong has been growing with the growth
of our knowledge and its resulting wealth.
So much seems bare fact. "There is
death in the pot" of modern civilisation,
and it is not Uke to heal itself.

Let us turn to the other side and regard
the life of the triumphant classes, "the
conquerors" of Mr. Masterman's analysis.

Does that offer a cheerful spectacle .^^
The vulgarity and vices of the rich form a
theme for satire in all ages and I shall not
attempt to emulate it. We may talk of
the ennui and boredom of wealth, and there
is truth in this. But dull people are not
always dull to themselves. Jane Austen's
characters appear to us to have led a some-
what flat existence. Probably, however,
to them it was about as amusing as her
description of it is to us. Dr. Johnson
defined a fishing-rod as "a rod with a worm
at one end and a fool at the other." That
shews that the doctor was no fisherman, but
it proves nothing against angling. Freak
dinners and other tasteless caprices of

92 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

which we hear are probably the highest
amusements of which those who give them
are capable — may, indeed, be to them a
spiritual ascent.

Other sources of evidence there are, less
disputable. Despite the advance of hygi-
enics, is health among the richer classes so
much better than it used to be? Doubt-
less more weakly people are kept alive,
and the average length of life is longer. But
is there less worrying ill-health than of
old.f^ Judging by its interest as a topic of
conversation, and the universal fads about
diet, the proportion of people driven to
think about their health is much larger,
and even fads would not flourish if the
normal regimen were all that could be
desired. Doctors appear to think that
neurasthenia and all forms of brain exhaus-
tion are on the increase. Not long ago
we heard of an epidemic of suicide in Ger-
man schools due to over-pressure, and it
is said that lunacy is on the increase. In
setting against this the reduction of suffer-
ing through the use of anaesthetics we must
bear in mind that the subjective side of
ill-health is the most important and the

BABYLON 93

most disabling disease is probably a cause
of less real distress to the patient than
some form of nerve or brain depression
which leaves his organs sound. And it is
in all these regions, where it is felt most,
that the standard seems getting lower under
the pressure of modern life and its con-
tinual fever; and this is the case through
the whole range of society. An observer
by no means hostile says that it is true
even of children; we must not expect them
to be so healthy as those of a past genera-
tion. And he gives the ground in excite-
ment of modern life with all its rush. This
is the judgment of Mr. Cooper in his
Twentieth Century Child: ^

*'The normal healthy child of eight or
ten will do nothing quietly; and when you
put it to do modern lessons among people
who live on motor cars, conduct two thirds
of their correspondence by telegram, and
want to prosecute half the express trains
in the kingdom for loitering, in ten years'
time you will probably have to send it
to bed for a nerve-cure. Put a boy to
work full hours at a Board school, and
later on half-time at a factory, with plenty

94 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

of home work and worry besides, and
unwholesome food to compheate matters,
and the state of his physique will be below
modern army requirements. It would he
hard to say in which class of life the child
fays the higher price for his knowledge.
But unless we are prepared to face this
physical deterioration and to induce the
children to abandon their sixteen years of
undivided cricket and football for the
pursuit of knowledge, it is difficult to see
how any philosopher, statesman, or prophet
can save the supremacy of England."

If this is the case with the young, a little
enquiry at Homburg or Carlsbad would
reveal a worse state of things among their
elders ; while even in regard to the triumphs
of surgery, I have heard a brilliant doctor
maintain that anaesthetics had caused more
suffering than they had cured. At least
there is sufficient evidence that those on the
crest of the wave are in this respect in no
very enviable state, and are probably worse
rather than better off than their fathers
were. But this is not all. Nor is it the
main point. The test of a civilisation is
in its characteristic culture and^ in the

BABYLON 95

type of men and women who thrive best
in it.

As I said last time, amid the Babel of the
world's religions and moralities, it is not
possible to state what are the governing
ideals of the triumphant classes at the
moment, and it is ten to one that if you
met two dozen at dinner, you would hear a
dozen different faiths asserted, with all that
voluble enthusiasm that befits "the light
half -believers of our casual creeds." On
this point I said enough in my first lecture
and we need not go further. But if we judge
by their conduct, we may well ask with
Archbishop Benson, when he arrived in
London, "What do these people beheve.^"
We have, however, some better evidence
of the type of characters which thrive in
our age and may be regarded as its most
prominent fruit. It is rather the women
than the men of an epoch who accentuate
and express its dominant principles, because
they do so for the most part unconsciously.
It is not what people actually profess, but
what they habitually practice, that gives
the true note of an age. In the novels of
your distinguished compatriot, Mr. Henry

96 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

James, we have an accurate and subtle
portraiture of the manners and aims of
the fortunate classes; the more valuable
because it is drawn without reference at
all to a moral. There we find women in
plenty, whose speech and thought, more
subtly delineating itself than in any other
writer, live for us, as does the whole milieu
of their life. And what strikes one next
to the consummate, if a little over-con-
scious, skill of the artist is the almost com-
plete lack of any approach to noble aims
or even interesting characters. They are
interesting only through the wonderful
art of the novelist. I mean that they are
none of them people whom one would
care to meet twice, and even their immorali-
ties are only disgusting. What sort of an
age can it be which speaks in Kate Croy's
Sense of Honour or in the chivalrous friend-
ship of Charlotte in The Golden Bowl? If
you go further and take the crowd of
people who figure in the Awkward Age or
in What Maisie Knew or in the Sacred
Fount, no one can deny that you have the
picture of a society exclusive, outwardly
refined, and sheltered from all the wider

BABYLON 97

interests of men. Their life is essentially
a private one, and their amusements seem
never to reach beyond a flirtation that
suggests something more. Without (so far
as we can tell) intending or desiring to
do so, Mr. Henry James has allowed the
emptiness, the meanness, and the drab
morals of our day a hardly less perfect
monument than was given to the Renais-
sance women under the great Elizabeth.
Compare them with the heroines of George
Meredith; compare their whole life with
the sinners of Thackeray. Why, Becky
Sharp is worth the lot of them! She may
have been bad, but she was great; they share
her badness, but are little, eternally little;
and indeed the whole scene of morals sug-
gests that hero of Kipling's poem who had
no deeds that were not second-hand, and
only committed adultery because he read of
it in a French book. Screaming ever more
discordantly in the effort to reach beyond
the top-note, the men and women of our
latter day have achieved only a prevailing
flatness of spirit; all this mirrors itself
to perfection in the great writer I have
been discussing, and it does so the better

8

98 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

owing to the inwardness of his method,
which displays the soul from within and also
because the men and women he takes are
as a rule of no outstanding quality, but
such as may be met with in any drawing-
room.

What then are the outward products of
our existing system? What good things will
it leave to posterity to set by the monu-
ments of the past days? Si monumentum
quaeris circumspice. Walk down the streets
of any typically modern town, or take, if
you can, a bird's-eye view of a region, like
the Black country. These are the things
we have really made. We have no right
to claim as ours the great cathedrals, or
the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, any
more than the Hotel de Ville of Brussels or
the Rathhaus of Rothenburg an der Tauber.
It is the factories, the banks, the hotels,
and the streets and the structure of our
towns which display what the age cares
for. I do not say that all is bad, or even
that so far as street architecture goes there
has not been within the last twenty years
a great improvement. Here and there a
bank or a great shop, or a station Uke

BABYLON 99

the Pennsylvania Railway Station is a
decent bit of architecture. But taking
the multitude of our buildings alone, our
municipal buildings, our museums and
modern universities, our capitals, our in-
dustrial cities, our watering-places and
towns of pleasure, our suburbs, rich and
poor, what sort of impression will they
leave on a future age? One observer of
English life, after enlarging on the growth
of private ostentation, compares our age
with one or two others in terms hardly
extravagant.

"Dr. Dill 9 has shewn in the Roman
Peace, during the age of the Antonines
and after, the people of the Empire turning
with enthusiasm to great communal build-
ing, and every city setting itself to such
achievements as remain today the wonder
of the world. . . . What kind of building
will represent for the astonishment of
future ages the harvest of the super-wealth
of the British Peace .^ The signs are not
propitious. A Byzantine cathedral at West-
minster, a Gothic cathedral at Liverpool,
a few town-halls and libraries of sober
solidity, the white buildings which today

100 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

line Whitehall and fill the passing stranger
with bewilderment at a race *that thus
could build ' will be the chief legacies of this
present generation. The thirteenth century
gave us the cathedrals; the sixteenth gave
us the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge
and the noblest of English country houses.
This tiny England with populations in the
aggregate less than that of London today
and wealth incomparably smaller has
left us possessions which we can admire
but not equal. 'The work which we col-
lective children of God do,' complained
Matthew Arnold, 'our grand centre of life,
our city for us to dwell in, is London — Lon-
don with its unutterable external hideous-
ness, with its internal canker of publice
egestas privatim opulanter unequalled by
the world.' It was this contrast which
gave point to a question which otherwise
the plain man would put by as absurd.
'If England were swallowed up by the
sea tomorrow, which of the two, a hundred
years hence, would most excite the interest
and admiration of mankind, the England
of the last twenty years or the England of
EHzabeth.?'"

BABYLON 101

And truly the outward aspect of the world
in which we live is not such as to arouse
extravagant gratification, even though we
have tasteful drawing-rooms and pleasant
private gardens. If we leave out of it
all these legacies of a past age, like our
churches, or the immemorial beauty of
the English country side, and think of the
world so far as it is the work of the nine-
teenth century, can any man, however
much an optimist, be enthusiastic? Do
we not feel refreshed when we do the
bidding of Wilham Morris ^^ and

"Forget six counties overhung with smoke;
Forget the snorting steam and piston-stroke;
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London small, and white, and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by the gardens green;
Think that below bridge the keen sapping waves
Smite some few keels that bear Levantine staves,
And cloth of Bruges and hogsheads of Guienne,
While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer's

pen
Moves over bills of lading"?

William Cobbett was no dreamy senti-
mentalist, and he used to talk of London
"as a great wen," and I suppose that

102 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

while the centre may be improved, that if
the whole area be included, the prospect
would be more squalid now than when he
wrote. To set against medieval Florence
or Durham or Tewkesbury, all character-
istic and typical, what are our types?
The factory-town, acres of mean streets, the
slums of our cities — places of which one
very unromantic observer said, "The best
thing that could happen to them would
be to be burnt down." It is not that there
were no ugly or dirty or repulsive sights in
the past, but that their typical monu-
ments are beautiful, and ours are — what
we know. Nor can it be said that they
are greatly altered for the better by our
jubilee clock-towers, the piers of our water-
ing-places, or the frock-coated effigies of
municipal notabilities. In other matters
comparison is easier. One reason of the
delight in the old masters is that the world
which they depicted in costume and colour
was so much more beautiful. Compare
the colours and lines of a Fra Angelico or
Pinturicchio's Griselda with any to be
found in a modern street. It is the life
out of which these things grew that is so

BABYLON 103

much worthier than ours, or than, say, the
grand siecle with its pompous affectations.
For no one would deny the exceptional
beauties of our civilisation any more than
the rare glory of an artistic genius, like that
of Whistler who painted it; but its char-
acteristic drabness and prevailing squalor
make one long to cry out

"Oh Love! could'st thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,

Would we not shatter it to bits? And then
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire? "

For this ugliness is self -chosen. It is the
lie in the soul. We flatter ourselves by
supposing it incidental to an age of me-
chanical invention and much use of iron.
But iron girders may be beautiful and
marble palaces vulgar. As Mr. Wells
shewed in a New Utopia, a society with
peace at its heart could make use of all
and more than all our mechanical acquire-
ments and yet have its bridges, its rail-
roads, and its factories noble and serene,
ministers to the life of the spirit instead
of torments. No one, I suppose, would
deny the dignity of your Pennsylvania
Railway Station, and I could name at least

104 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

one famous Italian cathedral which is
in many ways repulsive. Nor is it for want
of money spent that our world is ugly.
One authority declares that there is more
spent on art in our schools in a single year
than there was in the whole fourteenth
century. 11

The lust of personal wealth and the pre-
vailing fever leave men with no eyes for
what is worthy or base in this civilisation.
Provided they can make their homes pleas-
ant and decorate them with a certain
measure of taste, they will contemplate
in comfort cities which have no single
public building worthy of the name and
populations squalid and ill-clothed. It is
not iron or engines, it is the unchecked
operation of greed that makes life so hid-
eous; and until the soul of man is weary
of his millions, we need hardly look for
much improvement. 12

This is the point. It is a new soul that
the world needs, not a scheme of reforms.
The only source of such new life is faith
of one kind or another. From many ob-
servers comes the cry for life, for deliver-
ance, for some uplifting power. Tie cry,

BABYLON 105

though little regarded as yet in the seats of
the mighty, will ere long be triumphant,
unless the world is to go the way of other
decadent civilisations and pass through
self-indulgence to ruin. The remedies sug-
gested often differ, but the sense of need
is wide-spread. Let us state some instances.
Rudolf Eucken of Jena, one of the weight-
iest of living philosophers, preaches strongly
this very need of redemption. He is no
upholder of evangelical tradition. Indeed
he has added one chapter to his work on
Christianity and the New Idealism to redeem
him from the stigma of orthodoxy. Yet it
is the fundamental idea of the evangelical
faith which animates him. He argues that
the Western civihsation is unable either
to effect man's salvation or to satisfy his
deepest needs. Alike from the intellectual
and the practical standpoint Eucken argues
the needs of those ideas of redemptive
grace and supernatural life which find their
expression in the Christian Church. Per-
haps I may be permitted to quote. ^^

"What do we see.^ Whirling complexity,
restless hurry and pursuit, a passionate
exaltation of self and an overweening

106 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

pushing of its claims against those of others ;
life occupied with alien interests rather
than its own; no inward problems or in-
ward motives; little pure enthusiasm or
genuine love; the fostering and furthering
of self ever the dominant note, despite all
boastful profession and even some really
honest work; man, with his likes and dis-
likes, the supreme arbiter of good and evil,
true and false, so that the main goal of
endeavour is to win social favour and
respect appearances. All this, however
much it may make profession of following
after ideal goals and being guided by ideal
sentiments, yet reveals in every part of it
an inner insincerity, a repellant unreality, a
spiritual tameness and hollo wness."

"To every thinking man the great alter-
native presents itself, the Either — Or.
Either there is something older and higher
than this "purely humanistic culture or life
ceases to have any meaning or value. ^^ ^^

And once more:

*'We may dismiss all hope of giving life
meaning and value by a mere further
development of this purely humanistic
culture. Such a culture, even if its goal

BABYLON 107

were obtainable, would not satisfy us.
It has blossomed out freely during our
modern period, and it has been successful
in diverting the stream of life into its own
channels. But the more independent and
exclusive it becomes, the more it repels
the intrusion of any influence and friendly
supplement from the long centuries of past
labour, the more clearly are its limitations
seen, the more certainly does it live out its
influence and bring about its own downfall.
"We are feeling that, at the present
moment, and with growing acuteness, a
weariness of the world and a deep dislike
to its limitations are becoming more and
more general. We feel that life must for-
feit all meaning and value if man may not
strive towards some lofty goal in depend-
ence on a Power that is higher than man
and as he reaches forward realize himself
more fully than he could ever do under
the conditions of sense and experience.
Cut off from the larger life of the universe
and shut up in a sphere of his own, he is
condemned to an unbearably narrow and
paltry existence, and the deeps of his own
nature are locked away from him. Thus

108 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

today we hear a great deal of the super-
human and the superman, but for all the
genuine longing such a movement may
embody it cannot but degenerate into mere
idle words if this superhuman be sought
within the world of sense-experience, within
the sphere of our immediate existence.
For man is far too closely bound by the
fetters of his nature and his destiny to be
renewed in life and being by the mere
magic of a word. Thus he must either break
with the realistic culture or renounce all
hope of inwardly raising humanity and
realizing the meaning of life. Only a shal-
low and trivial philosophy can deem any
third course possible." ^^

In other words, man is once more asking
the question, "What must I do to be
saved .^" And those who, like Nietzsche,
preach salvation by the superman are in
reality pointing to a world beyond, although
they eschew with scorn all notion of a
gospel from jenseits. Eucken, indeed, has
no doubt that our fundamental need is the
need of a redemptive religion and that it
can be met in no other fashion.

''Discontent with the world as it- is, till

BABYLON 109

at last such a world becomes unendurable,
is what drives the soul to religion.

"From religion we hope to gain that
which we cannot gain from the world, but
at the same time cannot do without.

'*Thus the question that presses itself
on us is the question where, and how it is,
that we are conscious of a defect, a disturb-
ance, a warping of existence, which will
not allow us to rest.

"In a word, it is the problem of evil that
is the winnowing fan for religions as well
as for persons, and it is their solution of
this problem which is the real test of their
pretensions.

"Here, more than anywhere else, life
is concentrated into one question and one
answer." ^^

Sir Oliver Lodge again, the distinguished
physicist, has declared his dissatisfaction
with some elements of traditional religion.
Yet he emphasizes the truth of a world of
supernatural agencies in contact with man,
and more than anyone else has he brought
into relief the difference between the view
of the world thus opened and the closed
system of rationalism. ^^

110 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

"This is the kernel of what I have to
say — that orthodox modern science shows
us a self-contained and self-sufficient uni-
verse, not in touch with anything beyond
or above itself; the general trend and
outline of it known; nothing supernat-
ural or miraculous, no intervention of
beings other than ourselves being conceived
possible.

"While religion, on the other hand,
requires us constantly and consciously to
be in touch — even affectionately in touch
— with a power, a mind, a being or beings,
entirely out of our sphere, entirely beyond
our scientific ken. The universe contem-
plated by religion is by no means self-
contained or self-sufficient, it is dependent
for its origin and maintenance, as we are
for daily bread and future hopes, upon the
power and good-will of a being or beings of
which science has no knowledge. Science
does not indeed always or consistently deny
the existence of such transcendent beings
nor does it make any effectual attempt to
limit their potential powers, but it definitely
disbelieves in their exerting any actual
influence on the progress of events, or in

BABYLON 111

their producing or modifying the simplest
physical phenomenon.

"For instance, it is now considered un-
scientific to pray for rain. ... It ought,
however, to be admitted by Natural Philos-
ophers that the unscientific character of
prayer for rain depends really not upon its
conflict w^ith any known physical law,
since it need involve no greater interference
with the order of nature than is implied in a
request to a gardener to water the garden —
it does not really depend upon the impossi-
bility of causing rain to fall, when other-
wise it might not — but upon the disbelief
of science in any power who can and will
attend and act.

"The root question of outstanding con-
troversy between science and faith rests
upon two distinct conceptions of the uni-
verse: the one, that of a self-contained and
self-sufficient universe with no outlook into
or links with anything beyond, uninfluenced
by any life or mind except such as is con-
nected with a visible and tangible material
body, and the other conception, that of a
universe lying open to all manner of spiritual
influences, permeated through and through

112 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

with a Divine spirit, guided and watched
by Uving minds, acting through the medium
of law indeed, but with intelhgence and
love behind the law, a universe by no means
self-sufEcient or self-contained, but with
sensitive tendencies groping with another
super-sensuous order of existence, where
reign laws hitherto unimagined by science,
but laws as real and as mighty as those by
which the material universe is governed.

"'For nothing is that errs from law.'
According to the one conception, faith is
childish and prayer absurd; the only in-
dividual immortality lies in the memory
of descendants; benevolence and cheerful
acquiescence in fate are the highest attri-
butes possible; and the future of the
human race is determined by the law of
gravitation and the circumstances of space.

"According to the other conception,
prayer may be mighty to the removal of
mountains, and by faith we may feel our-
selves citizens of an eternal and glorious
cosmogony of mutual help and coopera-
tion — advancing from lowly stages to ever
higher states of happy activity world with-
out end — and may catch in anticipation

BABYLON 113

some glimpse of that 'one far off divine
event to which the whole creation moves'.

"The whole controversy hinges, in one
sense, on a practical pivot, the efficacy of
prayer. Is prayer to hypothetical and
super-sensuous beings as senseless and use-
less as it is unscientific? Or does prayer
pierce through the husk and apparent
covering of the sensuous universe, and
reach something living, loving, and helpful
beyond?

"And in another sense the controversy
turns upon a question of fact. Do we live
in a universe permeated with life and mind,
life and mind independent of matter and
unlimited in individual duration? Or is
this Kfe hmited in space to the surface of
planetary masses, and in time to the dura-
tion of the material envelope essential to
its manifestation? The answer is given in
one way by orthodox modern science;
and in another way by Religion of all
times."

Huxley in his famous Romanes Lecture,
though I suppose he remained in his chosen
agnosticism, yet argued for an ethical
system very different from anything sug-

114 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

gested by rationalism; if the cosmic pro-
cess is to be thwarted by another, and if
as a fact human hfe has been ennobled by
such thwarting, it would seem that there
must be in the nature of man some deeps
which are not arrived at by any merely
mechanical evolution.

Nietzsche again, deliberately anti-Chris-
tian though he be, is equally emphatic in
condemnation of the present situation.
His system turns on the need for a new
race incarnating a new ideal. His doctrine
of human nature, as sunk in darkness until
the superman comes to redeem it, is curi-
ously akin to Christianity. I think also
that in his assertion of the worth of per-
sonality he is far less vitally opposed to
our faith than he is to that Eastern pessi-
mism, masquerading as altruism, for which
he partly mistook it. Though he does not
accept the Christian doctrine of the indi-
vidual, his attitude is nearer to it than the
rationalist scheme which he attacked; while
he has been called more than once funda-
mentally mystic. He is like Lucifer, son
of the morning, a spirit fallen from heaven;
and after all his eloquence, his supe^rman is

BABYLON 115

only a god from the machine, no redeemer
from above, but a new conquering aristoc-
racy, the ''splendid blonde beast." Like
Hegel's, his philosophy comes to the Kaiser
at last.

If we take writers more popular, we wit-
ness the same phenomenon. Mr. Bernard
Shaw in Man and Superman preaches a
similar doctrine — that the world is very
evil, that it needs redemption, and that
somehow is to come out of eugenics. In
that large class of books of which Mr.
Wells' New Utopia is a type, and the novels
of Mr. John Galsworthy are an element,
we find very much the same features. The
dominant ideals of commercialism are held
up to scorn and some kind of evangel is
proclaimed which is to free us from its
accumulated horrors.

The lyrical raptures of the Cobdenite
school are almost forgotten, except when
some stranded millionaire like Mr. Carnegie
declares that all is the best in the best of
possible worlds, and that in a very brief
space we shall reach perfection if things go
on as they are. Our world is fonder of
riches, perhaps, than ever it was, but I

116 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

think that it is ceasing to believe in its
idol. The danger is that it should cease to
have any belief at all. Wearied of its hope
of finding in material prosperity a satisfac-
tion for its insatiable desires, and robbed
through that hope of all spiritual ideals, it
may sink into a fatigued scepticism and
fall a prey to pessimism. This appears to
be discernible of many even now. It is
this process which needs to be arrested.
No order can endure of which the naturally
energetic elements are sceptical. Some
faith it must have or else it is doomed.
If the faith in worldly goods should go
and nothing take its place, ours will be
doomed, unless a spirit gives light from
beyond and help be found in the saving
remnant which have not bowed the knee
to Baal.

The crying need of the time is for some-
thing to shake men out of their compla-
cency. In the literal sense we need seers
— men who can see things as they are and
burn into men the facts of life in this twen-
tieth century. This work is actually being
done by a host of writers, many of them
non-Christian. It will be said daubtless.

BABYLON 117

by the practical man of wealth, that how-
ever they differ, they are all alike in
being dreamers. Thank God for that.
For a world sunk in material satisfaction,
a society throttled with comfort, it is only
when the old men see visions and the
young men dream dreams that there is
much hope of deliverance. For that is the
point. Deliverance is what they all cry
for. There is something wrong; as a man
of science (not a Christian) put it to me,
''this world has got appendicitis."

ReKgion is far from being the only
scheme of deliverance — our social schemes
are also that. Nor is the Christian the
only religion of redemption; that is also
the note of Buddhism. But it is something
to have it recognised that it is redemption
that is needful, and not mere continuance;
for progress in the sense of development
of existing principles will not suffice to
secure well-being. It is a change that is
needed, a revolution of the spirit; and if
this once be realized, the strength of the
claims of the Christian Church is in a
fair way to be felt. Of the social reformer
we may ask, " Where are you likely to get

118 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

the driving force to bring about those
tremendous changes unless you have a
rehgious faith, or something very hke it?
Change the economic system of society
without somehow changing the passion and
the pride of man and you will but change
the ways in which the strong will exploit
the weak. Without some change of heart,
some fresh orientation of the spirit, how are
your great social changes to be effected
or effectual?" If, on the other hand, we
admit so much and look to some system
like Buddhism for deliverance, I think the
chances in its favour are very small, and
that, even were it purged of all local asso-
ciations. I do not think that the West will
ever accept such a system, which, though
it indeed promises redemption, promises
it as a deliverance from life, (personality)
whereas the Christian redemption is a
deliverance from evil, from that canker
which impedes the upward spring of life.
In our age, with all its unregulated ideals,
with its fear of materialism and pathetic
unrest, there is one craving in which there
is hope — the cry for life, life, more life.
This is in various ways the secure and

BABYLON , 119

unassailable support of all those schemes
of reform which are rife among us. It
may mean the claim that even the humblest
shall share in the opportunities of living a
full and varied life; it may mean the cry
(not in itself illegitimate) for full develop-
ment of individuality; it may mean a cry
for something deeper, some ground on which
to rest, some home of the soul wherein
the spirit may spread its wings and slake
its thirst : so far as it does, (and at bottom
there is always something of this element
hidden) it can only drive men on to that
source of all life. He came not only that
our joy might be full, but that men "might
have life, and might have it more abun-
dantly." The need is for some scheme of
deliverance, some new hope. The choice
lies between schemes limited to this world,
or schemes which give redemption at the
cost of personal existence, and the Chris-
tian scheme, which "preaches peace to
them that are far off and to them that are
nigh," because it worships One who is
not only the Light, but is also the Life
of men, and not only their Life, but also
their Saviour.

120 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

It is the faith which accepts and trans-
forms pain, which admits and consecrates
freedom, which faces and conquers sin,
holding the truths of hfe not in dialectic con-
sistency, but in practical harmony, which
alone, amid the wrecks of systems and the
profound disillusion of men, has any hope
or prospect of winning them to peace.
That faith of the Cross it is that alone can
satisfy, and it is, while akin to the other
faiths, more unlike them than like, and while
in moral exhortation not unlike the nobler
philosophies, at bottom something differ-
ent from any, something more splendid,
more difficult, more unfathomable, because
its essence and its ground are other-worldly,
its God One who is also man, and its
supreme act the execution of a criminal.
Something of this uniqueness I shall hope
to discuss in our next lecture.

LECTURE III

CALVARY OR THE CHALLENGE OF
THE CROSS

Ian van Eyck in the Adoration of the Lamb
has given to the world what is often said
to be its greatest painting. All of you
know either by sight or reproduction that
glory of colour and composition. No one,
however far removed from that faith which
alone made such a picture possible, but
is at once awed by its presentment of the
Victim slain from before the foundation
of the world, and its exaltation of that
sacramental chalice in which the Blood is
made available for all ages and every con-
dition. For it is not the crowd of wor-
shippers in all their bravery of blue and
scarlet on which the eye rests, nor even the
far green distances with their castles, which
make the wonder of the picture, but the
figures in the centre, the altar with its

121

122 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

image of a Lamb and the chalice flowing
blood. There summed up in an image at
once bold and compelling, is the whole
notion of Evangelical Catholic Christianity,
stretching right through history, binding
together the ages in a unity of adoring love.
Saints and monks, emperors, kings, popes
and bishops and cardinals, and all the pro-
cession of knights and virgins uniting in one
supreme act of worship gaze upon the Lamb ;
so that as one looks, one almost hears the
words: "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain
to receive power and riches and wisdom and
strength and honour and glory and bless-
ing. And every creature which is in heaven,
and on the earth and under the earth, and
such as are in the sea, and all that are in
them, heard I saying. Blessing and honour
and glory and power be unto Him that
sitteth upon the throne and unto the,
Lamb for ever and ever."

That painting represents, with enduring
beauty, acts which are repeated in every
church and chapel of Christendom. For
whether a man hold high or low views of
the Sacrament of the Altar, all who hold
to historic Christianity would be at one

CALVARY 123

in admitting that in the act of communion
they had hold of God. I take the Eucharist
as a starting-point, since this act, even by
the admission of our adversaries, is treated
as the centre of the Christian cult, and be-
cause it takes to its highest point the idea
of worship; and in such a way that it can-
not be compared with some purely inward
process like meditation, which may be said
to have some efficacy, even though there
were no outside forces to pray to, no voice
nor any that answered. For what does the
Eucharist involve .^^ Even the simplest per-
son who receives it with faith implies cer-
tain beliefs by his act. His presence asserts
this at least: that God, the ultimate reality,
however much more than personal, is yet
so far personal that He can enter into inti-
macy with men; that man with his limited
freedom has used it wrongly and is through
that false independence in a state of misery,
from which he can not deliver himself;
that such deliverance has, however, taken
place by the very act of God, who has
made the most marvellous exercise of His
omnipotence by "emptying Himself and
taking the form of a servant" and dying

124 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

as a common criminal; that death, how-
ever, was not the end, but the beginning,
for it was succeeded by a rising again and
a continued hfe in the bosom of the Father,
that is in union with the sacred heart of all
reality; and that life communicates itself to
us through prayer and the sacramental gift.
It is fair to add that among those who
hold to Evangelical historic Christianity
the pure Zwinglians attach no value to the
sacramental gift, but even they would ad-
mit it to be the culmination of prayer and
the most distinctively Christian service.

What I want here to emphasize is the
astonishing audacity of these assumptions.
They are irreconcilable not only with
materialism, but with every non-miraculous
theory of religion. They involve a view
alike of this world and the other quite
alien from the closed circle contemplated
by the materialist philosopher, or even
the vague harmony of the Pantheistic
monist. They assert the supernatural
character of the events which led to the
founding of the Church, and the immor-
tality of the individual spirit. They are
not to be reconciled with any form of

CALVARY 125

Pantheism, though they of course admit
and to some extent involve a doctrine of
Divine Immanence. All Christians believe
in Pantheism — '*for in Him we live and
move and have our being." They are
opposed, hke the facts of our personal life,
to the notion that the course of things is
one of purely inevitable sequences; and
as against the modern tendency to deify
the undoubted fact of the continuity of life
and ignore the equally undoubted fact of
the uniqueness of single moments and the
creative activity of the self, they assert
the catastrophic, absolute newness of events
and individuals and the value of each man's
soul not as a means but as an end — some-
thing for itself. They do not, indeed,
assert man's entire independence. The
whole notion of the fall and redemption
means that our freedom, though real, is
partial and a goal toward which we strive.

''Man partly is and wholly hopes to be."

But they assert such independence as
is involved in the self-direction of our
acts, and the power to ignore God if we
will. Neither pure socialism nor abso-

126 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

lute individualism finds warrant in the
Gospel.

That appeals, indeed, to each man as such
and assures him of his eternal worth. He
is worth the life and death of Jesus Christ.
But again it does not appeal to man as a
mere unrelated unit, but as a member of
society. In this it is true not only to the
earliest, but also to the very latest social
and political reflection, as it is also to the
daily life of man in family, in school or
college, in club or union, in state or nation;
only it offers him his life in that one so-
ciety, whose raison d'etre lies in the other
world.

That is the point — the other-worldly
nature of the Christian claim. To return
to our symbol, the Eucharist involves that
claim in a form at once social and indi-
vidual and so startling and direct, as to
leave no doubt of the fact. Consequently
it is a stumbling block to many, who other-
wise accept that view of the Faith I am
putting forward. Indeed the sacramental
idea has been so closely bound up with
the life of the Church that it seems un-
reasonable to suppose that you Can cut

CALVARY 127

this out while preserving all the other super-
natural elements. As a fact, we see more
and more that along with this vanish all the
others, in course of time. In this, however,
the arresting challenge of the Sacraments
and the claim that therein God gives Him-
self to man, there is but an extension of
what is involved in every prayer to God
through the name of Jesus. For it is on
the uniqueness of Jesus that all depends.
Church and Sacraments exist only as the
expression of that life here, the extensions
of the Incarnation as they have been called.
It is this, the Cross of Christ, which is so
startling, "madness to the Greeks, to the
Jews offensive," and always will be. This
faith it is which defies those attempts, which
were they not pathetic would be ridiculous,
to assimilate the Christian "way" to any
of these humanist codes of morals or social
ethics or mere theism, which bear to it a
superficial resemblance. Let us avoid the-
ological language; but I think we can say
that so far as creed goes, a man is a Chris-
tian or a non-Christian so far as he can
enter into the spirit of the hymn "When I
survey the wondrous Cross." What a gulf

128 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

that makes, not of piety, but of outlook,
between the two.

The non-Christian may be the more
self -de voted, kinder, stronger, even the
more religious of the two; very likely he
has fewer skeletons in his cupboards, fewer
sins that are shames to cover up than I
have. Yet he is different, with a different
ideal of humility. He would probably
despise me for mine. I believe, as the
non-Christian does not, that my life is a
dialogue, lived in intimacy with One who
lived as man and died to restore the
peace broken by my act and deed. I
believe, and he does not, that in Jesus I
have a new life, and that the centre of that
life is not here. Those words "Ye are dead
and your life is hid with Christ in God"
are words of tremendous import and must
at least imply that the Christian as a son
of the Resurrection contemplates life from
a standpoint beyond, and finds his motive
force there. He is one, as it were, who has
come back, but only for a little while; the
Christian's life is a sharing of the great
forty days. Moreover, that life I believe
to be nourished by a gift as real, ^though

CALVARY 129

spiritual, as the physical bread which sup-
ports my animal life, and this gift implies
the frequent irruptions of the Divine into
this world. Also, and perhaps this point
is the most shining, this life, though not
to be shunned or despised, is but an epi-
sode in a career which knows no end to its
adventures

"With ever a new surprise
And clouds eternally new."

Now such beliefs create an almost unbridge-
able chasm between the Christian and other
men. As S. Paul said, "If Christ be not
risen, we are of all men most miserable."
If Jesus be no Saviour, and the other world
no home, then we labour under the most
lamentable of all delusions. So far as we
are really trying to live this Christian life,
we are directing all our actions on the
ghastliest of shams. We have staked all
for nothing — not even an off-chance. How
it is that our faith appears aught but sheer
lunacy to those who hold it not, I cannot
for the life of me imagine. I suppose it
is due to our positive faith being weak
and our actual worldliness so strong. There
is indeed no reason why Christians and

10

130 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

others should not unite for many things
which have to be done. In this world we
have to eat and drink and dress, whatever
comes after. But that men should treat
the distinction as unimportant or indif-
ferent, or still worse, that the Christian
should do so, and should suppose he can
reduce within narrow limits the difference
between himself and, say, a high-minded
idealist, is only to be explained by our
practical refusal to live as we pray. All
this is less true of those who believe in a
world of individual immortality. But as
a matter of fact, that belief is held so
little outside the Christian Church and
unguaranteed by the Resurrection, that we
need not seriously consider it. Despite
the prevalence of certain habits, we are no
longer living in the eighteenth century.

Let us consider two tempers of mind
both found alike among Christians and
non-Christians; the one I will call the
world-accepting and the other the world-
renouncing temper. We shall see that
they differ toto coelo according as they are
held by a Christian or by an unbeliever;
while their resemblance is superficial. Upon

CALVARY 131

every act and every art of human life, upon
its amusements, its purposes and all its
interests, the other-worldly reference sets
its stamp. If "Light be the only subject
of a picture," then the light that shines
from Calvary makes a new picture, and
though every outward object and every
isolated act of two men would be the same,
yet the total picture would differ, as much
as a landscape of lake and mountain seen
in the rose of a July dawn or the grey chill
of a November fog. Like S. Bernard, who,
passing the Lake of Geneva, did not notice
the water or the sky, so deeply was he
absorbed, the other-worldly person may
regard the glory of seas and skies, the
harmonies of home, and all its interests
as so many hindrances — things which get
in his way, keeping back the day when he
shall pierce behind the veil. To such an
one life seems but a waiting time till he
sees God face to face and is "satisfied."
As S. Paul put it, "having a desire to
depart and be with Christ, which is far
better." Life here in such a view is a pis
aller, a duty to be done, and delight comes
only by-and-bye. The mystics speak like

132 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

this, or many of them. It is clear that
what is said represents a real experience,
that they feel that the supreme cross of all
is life on earth, the sense of separation.
This life they fill with toil and sacrifice,
and the tortures of the martyrs are not to
be compared with the fire of the longing
that consumes them, the sense that "here
they have no continuing city." As they
wander in life's ways, to them it is all one
whether the path is smooth or rough; they
hardly feel the cutting stones, driven by
that irresistible desire within, the nostalgia
of the infinite. I am not saying that this
temper is a right one or that there is not a
higher stage, that set down by Dante in
the words

"In la sua volontade e nostra pace**

where the soul is so deeply possessed by
God that life or death is indifferent, and
there where it is at any moment is the
place nearest Him; just as in the perfect
Jesuit "La sancta obbedienza fa d'ogni
luogo Paradiso."

As a fact, however, the world-renouncing
temper exists. It may lead to a morbid

CALVARY 133

contempt of life or a cloistral detachment
from human activity. But that it forms
one element in the experience of many
Christians would appear evident from the
number and popularity of the hymns, dat-
ing from all ages, which express it. We
may decry these other-worldly aims, yet
there must be some instinct, deep seated in
human nature, which could unite men of
such varying ecclesiastical affinity as the
author of *' O Quanta Qualia" of the
twelfth century, or the "Urbs Beata " of the
thirteenth, "Jerusalem my happy home"
of the sixteenth, or "I'm but a stranger
here" of the nineteenth. Doubtless many
people enjoy singing them who are very far
from feeling "like poor exiles on Babylon's
strand" and would be no fonder of their
heavenly than they are of their earthly
home, except for singing purposes; but
there must be many to whom they appeal
or they would not continue to be sung.

Now let us consider the opposite stand-
point, the world-embracing temper, as seen
by a Christian. Just because of its other-
worldly reference, this life is seen as having
not less but more value. Our life now

134 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

and here is to us the revelation of the
Eternal. Here in a world of wonder and
ceaseless change we are set, and we are to
make the most of it all, like boys of school-
days. Just as the onward reference of
youth, so far from hindering rather en-
hances the zest and meaning of life during
training (unless by a calculating meanness
we ruin the present), so with the Christian
hope, for it shews us every act as having
an enduring as well as a transient worth.
The hues of the hills and the seas, every
scene or tone of beauty, is no butterfly
delight, but is a sacrament of the Love
behind. Art and all embodiments of im-
agery are not less but more valuable because
they are not in themselves perfect, but hints
and glimpses of the " altogether lovely."
This is the true difference between romantic
and classical art, illustrated by that be-
tween Gothic and Renaissance buildings,
of which the former has been called '' ap-
parent pictures of unapparent realities"
and the latter "simple representation."
The former is never quite so perfect and
rounded, because it is shot through with
hues of the eternal. It is never absolutely

CALVARY 135

itself, because its meaning is to be a symbol.
It is great more by what it suggests than by
what it states, and its profoundest beauty
leaves the spirit still athirst. It embodies,
whether in buildings or in verse or in
painting, the mystery of all creation; and
however irreligious the artist, the work
reminds us that the true home of the spirit
is "the land that is very far off," and yet
for that very reason can sound in echoes
on earth, in the dying fall of a melody, in
the haunting inscrutable beauty of a lyric,
or in some dream in stone, which makes
the spirit at once satisfied and overflowing,
so that the heart all but bursts from a joy
that is yet only the other side of pain. "I
saw thee and I sought for thee; I saw thee
and I wanted thee," says the mystic; and
that might be taken as the motto of all
the noblest art in every age, greatest always
in imperfection, conquering by failure;
and like the symbol of it all, the Cross
shining splendid out of the very stuff of
misery. But this world-embracing temper
does not stop here. It goes through all
things. The Christian may find in every
wholesome human relation not only more

136 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

delight but deeper meaning than anyone
else. Earthly fatherhood is a nobler thing,
because it is a shadow of the Divine, and
human love glows more brightly when seen
as a symbol of the joy that burns at the
heart of things. It is not to the mere
butterfly, but to the immortal spirit that
the treasure house, even of this world, is
open. He is a child in the stage of life,
playing about and learning till he reach
maturity. To him belongs the universe,
past and present and to come, in a way
that it cannot do to "the poor pensioner
on the bounty of an hour." If we are
not immortal, we may be possessed by
the world, we cannot possess it; we are
strangers, it is our enemy; we take a little
and then are gone. If we are to go on, we
can appropriate it, make it our own, so that
its beauty and its sorrow, all its mystery
and its splendid acts, become part of us
and shine for ever in a spirit that lives with
God. Even worldliness demands other-
worldliness to justify it. Only the im-
mortals have a right to feel at home in this
world. We are like a boy at school or
college who shares all his life, past, present,

CALVARY 137

and to come, and carries it on in the whole
course of his career; we are to carry out
the treasures of the spirit, for they are
part of us; and so of us, and us alone, is it
true, as S. Paul said, "All things are yours,
whether Paul or Apollos, or hfe or death,
or things present or things to come —
all are yours and ye are Christ's and
Christ is God's."

We have thus considered the contrasted
tempers, the Puritan and the Sacramental,
as exhibited among Christians; let us
compare them with the similar condition,
as seen in others. Compare the world-
renouncing attitude of some Christians
with that of the Buddhists, or the Western
pessimist who preaches a doctrine sub-
stantially the same and treats individuality
as evil. Such a Christian as the "exile
on Babylon's strand" is, it is true, the
stranger who laments "that earth is a
desert drear" and looks to "heaven as his
home." But he does all this not because
he wants less, but because he wants more
life, including his own. It is the imper-
fection of the world taken even at its best

138 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

that drives him to seek a "better country."
He is hke a child, who cannot play the
games which commonly delight him, be-
cause he is consumed with excitement over
the feast to which he is going. The good
has almost ceased to be a good because
he knows there is something better in a
short time; just as a thirsty man may
refuse lemonade, if he has been told that
champagne is on the way.

The pessimist on the other hand declares
life to be an evil quand meme and there
can be no deliverance till it be extinguished.
Hartmann and his followers can treat con-
sciousness as an evil and look to the day
when the universe, weary of its initial
error, will swallow its tail — and all be
done. The Christian says that life is a
good thing, but has been marred by sin;
and suffers also from the growing pains of
youth. The one is like the new boy dream-
ing of the day when he will bowl for the
eleven, and sustaining himself by the dream
when things are very unlike it. The other
is the type which at the first onset of diffi-
culty writes home and begs to be removed.
Both these look forward to death; the one

CALVARY 139

because he thinks it ''closes all," the other
because he knows it does not. The fault
of the one is impatience, petulance, the
refusal of the sensitive artist to produce
because he can never achieve his ideal;
he is the man who loses all interest in his
work as soon as he has planned his holiday.
The other believes that things in them-
selves are hopeless and the one goal anni-
hilation. If either went to the practical
extreme, the Christian would commit sui-
cide from an unbalanced hope, from a
desire to see the other side at once; the
non-Christian would do so from an un-
relieved despair, in order to be rid of an
existence found intolerable. Christian pessi-
mism is a pessimism secundum quid and
treats this world as a purgatory. True
pessimism is pessimism simplidter and
treats personal existence as hell.

The same is true of the practical maxims
that attach to the two types, the Christian
and the non-Christian. No greater error
has been made than that which confounds
the Christian and the non-Christian doc-
trine of self-sacrifice. Modern altruism
teaches what is really a denial of individu-

140 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

ality and tries to destroy "the will to live"
by substituting ''the will to love." The
Gospel declares that a man must die to
live, but it neither states nor implies the
destruction of the self. All false asceticism
finds its root in the non-Christian view of
self-sacrifice; all true asceticism in the
Christian. For it is the ground truth of
all education; it is the earliest lesson of
the schoolboy that pain must not only be
faced, but transmuted through courage
into joy and strength. It is the result of
the truth that self can only find itself in
love, and this involves surrender, giving,
cost. This, however, does not mean that
personality is annihilated, or that the
individual is to be lost in a higher unity.
On the contrary love, even in its most
sacrificial forms, exalts and develops indi-
viduality and strengthens the will. One
argument for immortality is the difficulty
of believing that certain characters aflame
with love can be as though they never were.
But it is not hard to hold such a creed about
a very selfish man.

I think that some of the animus displayed
by Nietzsche against Christian ethics was

CALVARY 141

due to an error of this sort. He mistook
Schopenhauer's doctrine of self-annihilation
for Christian sacrifice; in a word he con-
fused pessimistic with educational asceti-
cism, and most of his attack is vitiated by
this confusion. On the other hand it must
be allowed that Christians of all schools
have used and do use language about self-
sacrifice which leads to misconception.
Some apparently believe in a notion of
sacrifice which teaches not the develop-
ment of personality through self-giving,
but its annihilation; and this really treats
individuality as an evil. That at least
is the logical import of their words, and it
has led to disastrous consequences, harmful
not only to health, but to morals. I think
it is the fundamental error of the Jesuit
system, for it is obvious that if complete
sacrifice is demanded, the conscience must
go too.i

Let us take now the counter tendency,
the world -accepting, for that also exists
on a non-Christian no less than on a Chris-
tian foundation. Yet how different! By
the Christian the life is accepted as God's

142 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

will for him, a state of probation. This
world is in all its details a sacrament, the
outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual grace. The beauty of nature and
art, the acts of human work and play,
friendship and heroism and forgiveness,
all are noble, because they point beyond
and are caught up in the life of a spirit that
passes from earthly society to heavenly.
As I said just now, they are worthy, but
relatively and provisionally worthy, rather
because of what they hint than of what
they say. They are suggestions of eternity
in statements of time. To the non-Chris-
tian, however, they are all in all. He, to
whom no further life is promised, may
resolve to make the most of what there is,
just because he has nothing more. He
may accept the world as a place wherein
to be as happy as he may and echo the
Carpe diem philosophy of Horace and many
another.

"Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before ye too into the dust descend;

Dust unto dust, and under dust to lie
Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and — sans end!"

CALVARY 143

The pessimism which underhes the voluptu-
aries' philosophy patent in Omar is yet
more shining in the well known epilogue
of Walter Pater to the Renaissance,
"Every moment some form grows perfect
in hand or face; some tone on the hills
or the sea is choicer than the rest; some
mood of passion or insight or intellectual
excitement is irresistibly real and attrac-
tive for us, — for that moment only. Not
the fruit of experience, but experience
itself, is the end. A counted number of
pulses only is given to us of a variegated
dramatic life. How may we see in them
all that is to be seen in them by the finest
senses .f^ How shall we pass most quickly
from point to point, and be present always
at the focus where the greatest number of
vital forces unite in their purest energy.^ . ..
"While all melts under our feet, we may
well catch at any exquisite passion, or any
contribution to knowledge that seems by
a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for
a moment, or any stirring of the senses,
strange dyes, strange colours, and curious
odours, or work of the artist's hands, or
the face of one's friend. Not to discrimin-

144 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

ate every moment some passionate attitude
in those about us and in the brilhancy of
their gifts some tragic dividing of forces
on their ways is, on this short day of
frost and sun to sleep before evening. . . .

"We are all condamnes as Victor Hugo
says, we are all under sentence of death,
but with a sort of indefinite reprieve —
les hommes sont tout condamnes a mort mais
avec des sursis indefinis — we have an
interval and then our place knows us no
more. Some spend this interval in listless-
ness, some in high passions, the wisest, at
least among the children of this world,
in art and song. For our one chance lies
in expanding that interval, in getting as
many pulsations as possible into the given
time."

True, the world-accepting temper is not
tied to this Epicurean form. It may take
on the austere tone of the Stoics or their
modern imitators, the attitude familiar
to most of us in Matthew Arnold's poems.
Or again its votary may adopt the Positivist
humanitarian attitude, a position curiously
like one side of Christian ethics in the
enthusiasm for humanity and sense of

CALVARY 145

social ties, and also in some practical views,
such as those on marriage. At bottom,
however, it is quite different, and though
ennobled by high and earnest endeavour,
is without that vein of hope and gaiety
which clings to the Christian. With the
burdens of the human race it has sympathy
and enters into its toils and its sorrows,
but this burden is to it a burden and nothing
more. It has no Heavenly Father to trust
to, and when disinterested must spend
itself in a fever of activity in order to effect
its purposes. It can never rest, for it has
only itself to trust to.

The truth is this. The doctrine of a
world beyond, in which we ourselves shall
have part, may be looked at in various ways
and colours itself, according to our tempera-
ment; yet in any case it changes all our
values. Only the most superficial resem-
blance is left between those who are Chris-
tians and those who are not. Now at
last are men coming to see this. They
realize that whether the supernatural theory
of -the origin and nature of Church life be

true or false, it is terrific, and that in this
11

146 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

respect there can be little doubt as to the
belief of the earliest of Christians or the
consciousness of their Master. We may
indeed have to allow a good deal more for
the way in which the doctrine was developed
out of its seed, but of the supernatural,
other-worldly claims of Jesus of Nazareth
there can be no question. Indeed there
never need have been, but for a small
circle of pedants, who were anxious to
retain the name and prestige of Christian,
while rejecting every element that gave the
Faith its power. All they held was a mere
morality, but they wanted to dignify it
with the name of religion. They desired
the historic and traditional charm of the
Christian Church, while repudiating every
element which made that charm possible.
Now, however, this school is breaking up
under the pressure of mutual criticism, and
the issue is daily clearer between those who
accept Jesus Christ with His supernatural
claim and those who, since they are unable
to credit the claim, repudiate His leader-
ship. The half-way house of German liber-
alism is built on sands; the storm of the
apocalyptic problem is shaking it in ^pieces.

CALVARY 147

To many, of course, this recognition makes
belief harder; for they cannot delude
themselves any longer into imagining they
are Christians, when they are nothing of
the sort.

Dr. Schweitzer, in a memorable phrase,
has declared that if Jesus Christ came into
our modern world. He would come as a
stranger; that our characteristic categories
hold no place for Him; that the funda-
mentally other-worldly claim, the apoca-
lyptic vision of Jesus is opposed to the
presuppositions of the ordinary educated
man, formed as they are under the influence
of naturalism. I believe that Dr. Schweitzer
is right; that if Jesus came once more as an
individual He would come not to bring
peace but a sword, and that many who
for sentimental reasons cling to His name
would turn and cry "Crucify Him." I
believe also that He is doing this here and
now, through His body the Church, except
where she is false to her mission; and that
there is an irreconcilable conflict, not indeed
between science ^nd religion, but between
scientific fatalism and the postulates of the
Christian Faith. This conflict it is idle

148 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

to ignore. It meets us at every stage and
in every form. Idler yet is the attempt by
the promoters of ''reduced Christianity"
to transform the "great mystery of godh-
ness" into a decorated natural philosophy
or a sentimental altruism. For the essence
of the Faith is to be spiritual, personal,
supernatural, and it may not be reconciled
with any rationalistically designed scheme
of the universe. Yet it is congruous with
life as it is lived daily in this world; with
the dreams and "obstinate questions" of
the child; with the "long long thoughts"
of the youth; with the passion and adven-
ture of the man, and with all the incurably
social instincts of the race.

So far as I have understood him,
Dr. Schweitzer himself is convinced of the
adequacy of our modern categories and
thinks them a fit criterion whereby to
judge the Saviour of the world. Having
shewn that the Jesus of the Gospels is not
the Christ of modern Protestantism, and
descanted on His supernatural apocalyptic
claim, he turns away, treating Him as
mere man with a turn for vision. That,
at any rate, is one alternative (whether or

CALVARY 149

no it is that adopted by Dr. Schweitzer).
You may beheve that the apocalyptic Jesus
is nearer to the truth of history than any
other, and on that very ground you may
be unable to credit His claims, and are
therefore driven to decline all connection
with historical Christianity. George Tyrrell
has shewn how the apocalyptic theory
leads straight on to a transcendent view
of Jesus, and the situation has been well
summed up by a Cambridge scholar.

"Once more we are driven to ask. Who
is this mysterious Person of the irrecon-
cilable contrasts, who had not where to
lay His Head, and who claimed all power
in Heaven and earth? Who, we are told,
belonged so completely to His own age
that he is a stranger and enigma to our
time, and yet men think of Him, talk of
Him, worship Him, and find their truest
life in following Him.^ Who lived on earth,
they tell us, the life of a deluded visionary,
finding out His mistakes on a felon's cross,
and yet, the same writer tells us, 'a mighty
spiritual force streams forth from Him
and flows through our time also'.^^ Who,
as the same author goes on to declare,

150 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

*in the light of historical inquiry passes
our time and returns to His own'? And
yet the champion of this new attempt to
explain the mystery of His personality
has given up his life of teaching and study
at Strasburg to be trained as a medical
missionary for work on the Congo, and has
now been accepted by the French Mis-
sionary Society for that purpose, and is,
I believe, soon to go out, to fight, as he
puts it, *for the lordship and rule of Jesus
over this world.' Whatever judgment we
may pass on Dr. Schweitzer's book and
theories, let us make up our minds in the
light of these facts. Once more he has
forced upon us, by what he has written
and by what he wants to do, the question
of the Jerusalem crowd, Who is this.^ We
may learn part of the answer to the question
from the closing words of his book. 'Jesus
comes to us as One unknown, without a
name, as of old by the lakeside He came
to those who knew Him not; He speaks
to us the same words, "Follow Me," and
sets us the tasks which He has to fulfil for
our time. He commands. And to those
who obey Him, whether they be wise or

CALVARY 151

simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils,
the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall
pass through in His fellowship, and as an
ineffable mystery they shall learn in their
own experience who He is.'"

A movement somewhat similar is repre-
sented by men such as Professor Drews,
and in a less degree Professor Jensen,
abroad, and less important folk in England,
like Mr. J. M. Robertson and Mr. Roberts,
and in this country by Professor W. B.
Smith. These men 2 have all convinced
themselves a priori of the impossibility
of any supernatural events. At the same
time they reject the ''Liberal" view that
the miraculous and transcendental elements
in the story are of a later creation, and
that the figure of Jesus as a pure and dis-
interested social reformer can be disengaged
from this supernatural trapping and made
a mark, if not for faith, at least for admira-
tion. Such men see plainly that this is
impossible; the Gospel narratives, the
Epistles of S. Paul, which reflect the
earhest personal experience, the whole at-
mosphere of the early Church as displayed

152 CIVnJSATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

in the New Testament and in our earliest
independent knowledge, are saturated with
the miraculous. The supernatural is so
much an integral part of the picture that
it is vain to cut out all these elements as
unhistorical and treat what is left, after
this gigantic subtraction, as the fact. The
whole of the narratives must go by the
board if we may not believe in the irruption
of the Divine into this world at a definite
time. Consequently the whole evidence
does go by the board. They are devoting
their energies with much ingenuity to shew
that the whole story of Jesus, however
attenuated, has no warrant in fact; that
the person is simply the eponymous hero
of a cult which has gathered round the
Eucharistic meal. A mild expression of
this tendency can be seen in the words of
the Rev. Dr. Cheyne.

"That the God-man, whose cult in cer-
tain Jewish circles was probably pre-Chris-
tian was called by a name which underlies
Joshua, has become to me, on grounds of
my own, very possible, and it is to me
much more than merely possible that Jesus
of Nazareth was not betrayed or surren-

CALVARY 153

dered to the Jewish authorities, whether
by Judas or by anyone else. The 'Twelve
Apostles' too are to me (and I should
think to many critics) as unhistorical as
the seventy disciples." ^

Such speculations may seem sufficiently
absurd. But these words of ex-Canon
Cheyne shew that they are not to be
ignored by the most eminent critics, and
that the advanced school of learned criti-
cism has much affinity with such views.
It is very natural. Once grant the postu-
lates on which they rest — and most of
the German ''Liberals" do grant these
postulates — and the conclusions of Drews
are far less absurd than the attempt of the
normal Teutonic savant to reduce the life
of Jesus and the experience of the Church
to the level of the ordinary events of their
own machine-governed lives. All these peo-
ple seem destitute of one sense; they are
like the senior wrangler who asked what
'Paradise Lost' was written to prove.

The problem offered by the apocalyptic
school, led by Dr. Schweitzer, and by the
mythological school as led by men like
Professor Drews, has not been faced by

154 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

the advocates of the commonplace and

PhiKstine projection of the Gospel figure j

fashionable in circles of soi-disant enlight- i

enment and set forth in unadorned sterility \

by the Dean of Divinity at Magdalen ■
College, Oxford. The point is not whether , \
such views are true — they are obviously

nonsense — but whether they are not the ■

logical outcome of these same preposses- |
sions, which cause the excision of all
the wonderful features from the figure

of Christ and the history of the Church. |

*' Reduced Christianity," as it is called, i

is but a half-way house. You cannot rest I

in it, but must move either backward or I

forward. Either you must surrender any- ;

thing beyond the merest humanitarian j

notion of our Lord; in which case you will j
not improbably be driven further and
eventually, like the protagonist in the
"Jesus as Christ" controversy, give up all

belief even in His historicity; or at any '
rate you will find it more and more impos-
sible to maintain any real belief in His

uniqueness, \

Dr. Harnack, for instance, is for cutting \

away most of the transcendent elements, j

CALVARY 155

while still maintaining His unique relation
to the Father — a doctrine which really
surrenders the notion of history as a mere
continuing and makes miracles possible.
It admits a "creative evolution." It is
doubtful whether this view can be sustained.
The whole movement of the Christian
Church may be a delusion, and then we
are all in the dark, except that the dark-
ness has been made visible by the pathetic
splendour of Christianity. For, as men
are coming to see, the Liberal Protestant
view of our Lord really is a justification
of the Jewish people, who crucified Him
for His claims; and it is to that Judaistic
theism that those must return who are
so deeply wedded to the modern super-
stitions of law and continuity that the
exceptional, the unique, the really new
event or person is to them inconceivable.
If on the other hand you accept the lordship
of Jesus as a mysterious being, with some-
thing in Him more than human, you will
be carried, however reluctantly, to the
Christ of the Creeds and the New Testa-
ment and the whole supernatural faith in
a Church dispensing gifts of God's grace

156 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

and guided by a power not of this world.
This also you will do, unless you are so
deeply convinced of what can not happen
that you remain unmoved by the accumu-
lated weight of evidence, historic, social,
personal, which points to a transcendental
interpretation of these strange facts in the
world's experience.

What I want to emphasize is, that
here is the dividing line, and we must
make our choice. Christianity may be true
or false, but it makes claims subversive of
all the rationalist projections of life. It
rests on presuppositions which cannot by
any ingenuity be reconciled with any view
which denies the miraculous, the unique,
the individual. Its whole meaning comes
from a faith in a life of spirits behind the
veil. It cannot without hopeless error be
confused with those systems which deny
such a life or treat it as impersonal. You
cannot treat existence as a closed circle,
with every part predetermined, and at the
same time assert the reality of freedom and
the guilt of sin. You cannot place the same
value, as others do, upon human life on
earth, if you hold that life to be but an

CALVARY 157

episode in a career which passes far beyond
earth. This world is a different place
according as it be viewed from the Christian
or the non-Christian standpoint, and no
ethical or personal sympathy can bridge
the gulf.

A very cursory perusal of the New Testa-
ment ought soon to convince even the most
pronounced Liberal that, even allowing
for differences of date and expression, the
experience therein recorded is something
other than that contemplated by their
system. It is above all things of a "new
Ufe," a vast change, that the writers speak,
and it always has reference to the world
beyond. Take the most characteristic
phrases of S. Paul, such as that of being
"buried with Christ in baptism"; that
"Christians are dead and their life hid
with Christ in God"; that he is "crucified
with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I
but Christ liveth in me." These might
conceivably be paralleled in non-Christian
mystical writings, but that of itself points
to the other world and is far removed from
the drab Philistinism of the Liberal. Its
very meaning is the unity between the

158 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

individual and the all; the flight of "the
alone to the alone."

Or take the phrases about the peace pur-
chased with the blood of Christ. They
are quite as startling, or even vulgar some
might say, as hymns like Cowper's "There
is a fountain filled with blood." The cry
of an untaught Methodist, the "blood and
fire " of the Salvation Army, the best Eng-
lish form of devotion to the Sacred Heart,
are one and all nearer to the mind of the
New Testament writers, to S. Paul, and S.
Peter, and S. John, and above all to the
Epistles to the Hebrews, than are the
ethical commonplaces of Unitarian or semi-
Unitarian Christianity. I suppose this ele-
ment of strangeness and unorthodoxy would
be admitted in the writings attributed to
S. John, but discounted. As a matter of
fact it is of little importance for our purpose
here who wrote them. They certainly
represent a state of mind that existed in the
Church quite early. Of that transcen-
dental, other-worldly conception of Jesus
as existing in the Church they are first-
hand evidence, no less than the Epistles
to the Ephesians or the Colossians; Turn

CALVARY 159

the New Testament inside out, dissect it
as you may, and you cannot read it for
ten minutes without coming across flashes
of this sort side by side often with the most
matter-of-fact maxims for the conduct of
parents and children, wives and slaves and
citizens. One unique feature of the New
Testament is the interpenetration of the
plainest moral precepts with the most
exalted mystical ecstasy.

Finally is there not in the central figure
itself, despite all this simplicity, something
strange and elusive.^ There is, it might
almost be said, a certain absent-minded-
ness in the utterances of Jesus; and while
He Uves the life of a Jew, the words which
at one time caused many so much ponder-
ing would seem expressive of His habitual
way. It is not a character easy to be
described, and His life in the wider sense
could not be written. Impressionist por-
traiture was all that was possible, and
that is what we have. It is incomplete,
unchronological, unscientific, if you will;
but the impression is always the same,
the .weird mingling of the homely and
the far-off, the strange romantic tender-

160 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

ness for things human and httle, the
passion of faith; and the unbroken calm all
intertwined with that power to do things,
to make wonders, leaves us, as it left his
earliest friends, in suspense. "What man-
ner of man is this?" Stranger, as Dr.
Schweitzer calls him, to our age. He was
strange to His own, so strange that men
were driven either to crucify Him or else
to take up the Cross themselves.

I trust that these instances do not weary
you. For further confirmation I would refer
to the New Testament. I am convinced
that it is only because people insist on dis-
cussing religion, who are ignorant of the
Bible, that it is ever thought feasible to
present Christianity as a merely human
religion, while still maintaining it to be
Christianity. People will read philosophy,
theology, criticism, anything rather than the
Bible, and then they wonder why the system
of the Church is so unintelligible. I confess
it myself. It is only these last few years
that I have, as it were, rediscovered the
New Testament; and the more I study it,
not critically but devotionally, the more
does the choice it leaves seem clear to me.
Either this thing is a delusion the most

CALVARY 161

gigantic the world has known, or else it is
a revelation from beyond, a gift of grace,
something that we could not have done for
ourselves. Either it is what it claims, the
power of God able to save to the utter-
most and giving peace and freedom, or
it is a quack medicine; this conclusion is
vouched for alike by its earliest records,
by the history of the Church, and by the
experience of the individual Christian to-
day, from Papist to Plymouth brother. All
believe themselves to have hold of a new
supernatural life, to be sustained by forces
not their own, to be in touch with One,
of Whom however little we know, we know
enough to enter into communion with Him;
and that He can give us of Himself. This
He has done by the medium of His Son,
the very brightness of His glory, and that
Son not only shews us the Father, but
in some way beyond our ken has bought
for us deliverance from death by His
great act on the Cross; so that who-
soever believeth in Him shall not perish,
but have Eternal Life. In other words,
Christianity is supernatural, or it is a
sham.

12

162 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

But what do you mean by the super-
natural? And what right have you to
use the term? These are questions cer-
tain to be put. It has recently become
the fashion to deprecate the use of the
term supernatural; to declare that the
spiritual significance of nature is so real,
and the consecration of our ordinary life so
needful, that to use this term arouses
needless hostility and leads to a low view
of human duty. Carlyle used to declare,
"The natural is the supernatural." Do
not all Christians hold to the Omnipresence
of God? That means His Immanence in
all His works, and so far from honouring
God, we are profaning Him by shutting
Him off into one separate part called super-
natural. I think that this objection is
groundless, and that the disuse of the term
leads to grave dangers in the direction of
Pantheism, dangers which we have not
altogether escaped. It is partly, of course,
a matter of definition. If, as Huxley said
somewhere, nature is taken for simply the
universe of being, it is quite clear that the
natural is the supernatural; it is indeed a
truism. Nobody asserts that miracles are

CALVARY 163

against the nature of things; if by nature
we mean all that happens, as Mill put it,
of course they are natural events. Only
as a fact people do not mean that when
they speak of nature. They mean this
physical visible world. The question is not
whether this world has a spiritual significance^
hut whether it is all or only a part of the whole.
The least misleading way of asserting that
there is, in addition to this world, a larger
invisible world behind it, with other powers
than we possess, is, to my judgment, to
make use of this derided term supernatural.
But of course it must be remembered that,
taking the universe as a whole, events such
as the birth of Christ are natural, miracles
are normal, all is according to order; but
it is the nature, the law, and the order of
the whole, and of that whole we have here
but a tiny part.

On this point and on some others touched
on in this book, the reader will do well to
consult an admirable article by Miss Carta
Sturge in The Commonwealth for September,
1909. It is in the form of a review of Mr.
Dearmer's book on Body and Soul, but it
deals with topics of wider interest, I wish

164 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

that it could be reprinted. Failing that,
I quote the following.

"Nevertheless, perhaps, in his recogni-
tion of the essential Unity of Matter and
Mind, it is possible that the author some-
what loses sight of the difference of planes
in which the Creator manifests Himself
when he comes to the question of miracles.
He speaks, and in a sense rightly, of the
'naturalness of miracles.' If 'naturalness'
is held to be equivalent to processes carried
on in obedience to law, laws whether
spiritual, psychic, or physical, then the
expression is true. But as a matter of
fact we generally understand by natural
the workings of the laws of the physical
plane, which we call the world of Nature,
and which works according to laws of its
own, laws which we are learning to know
with great exactitude and on which we can
calculate with increasing certainty so long
as (there is the point) they are not inter-
fered with or counteracted by the higher
laws of another plane. But surely it is
the bringing into play of another order of
laws so to speak, laws which usually have
little touch with this plane, which constitutes

CALVARY 165

miracle. If miracles were natural in the
sense which we ordinarily understand by
the word, we should not have witnessed the
almost passionate effort on the part of
scientific men in the generation just passed
to get rid of them as things contrary to
nature and impossible. There must be
some very marked distinction between the
'works' and 'powers' spoken of as miracles
(amounting almost to a difference in kind)
and the ordinary facts of nature or they
would not have produced such intense
incredulity in scientific students of nature.
And in so far as they are not according to
the so-called laws of nature, even markedly
upsetting these, they can truly be spoken of
as supernatural, coming from a plane lying
deeper than our known world of natural
phenomena. And we shall have greatly
to alter the connotation of 'natural' if we
are to make it cover these laws of a more
mental or spiritual plane. It is true that
there is evidence that these higher laws are
likely in the future to play a far more
important part in our life on this plane,
and that by familiarity with them they may
cease to seem marvellous; yet there still

166 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

will be the two distinct sets of laws, distinct
from each other, the physical and the
superphysical, although related of course
in a Unity as all emanating from the
Creator. ... It is best to avoid confusion
and to recognise that we are so constituted
as to have, if we will live up to our inheri-
tance, more or less, the command of the
laws of at least two planes and possibly
more."^

Again, under the influence of idealism,
the natural has been alleged to be the super-
natural, in as much as its whole meaning,
its bulk, is spiritual. Such a view no Chris-
tian is concerned to deny; God is the
ground of the material universe and its
laws are His will. Yet again it seems to
me in its practical import misleading and
dangerous. For it almost irresistibly tends
to identify God with the world and to lead
right on to Pantheism. At least it favours
the view that God is not above, but im-
plicated in the course of nature; that He
cannot break the routine of a natural evo-
lution, operating in fixed ways known to
science.

Nature from this standpoint always tends

CALVARY 167

to mean ''nature as she appears to man
from a certain point of view — i.e., from
the standpoint of mechanical causation";
if this is not asserted it is always impKed.^
It leads further to the view that the whole
universe is one in such a way that, though
that oneness be spiritual, in it there can
be no true individuality, no freedom, and
nothing like the Gospel drama of the soul.
These things have a certain relative value,
but they cannot be the saving Truth men
used to think them. I do not say that
all who object to the term supernatural
hold this. But I think that the logical
implication of their thought is in this direc-
tion, and that many find therein the main
stumbling block to Faith. It is against
such views that supernatural is in its right
place, as the epithet distinctive of Chris-
tianity. No Christian need deny the
spiritual significance of matter or assert
that the physical world is to be explained
apart from God. Rather he asserts the
contrary. But he must assert that God is
very much more than the soul of the world;
it is His work, not merely His garment.
He IS as much and more beyond it as I,

168 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

in my personality, am beyond the body
which is the instrument of my Ufe here.
It is sometimes said that this distinction
between nature and the supernatural is
harmful because it secularises the greater
part of life. But, as a fact, to give up the
distinction tends in the long run to secu-
larise the whole of it. By saying that no
day is specially sacred, you will not make
the ordinary man keep all days as the
Lord's; rather he will more and more shut
God out of his life. Prayer is possible at
any time and at all occupations, but the
man who prays when he is cleaning his
boots is always likely to be the man who
has set apart times to keep up the habit.
It is so through all this range of distinctions,
those between sacred and secular, Sunday
and weekday, clergy and laity, the Church
and the world, venial and mortal sins. All
of them are relative, not absolute. To
press any to an extreme is dangerous. But
to leave them out is more dangerous still.
Human nature being what it is, you tend
to banish God altogether if you say that
because He is omnipresent there are to
be no sacred places or seasons. Wfiile if

CALVARY 169

you assert that all sins are equal, though
in one sense it is true, you will make the
ordinary man treat all sin as venial and
none as serious. A great deal of the
current laxity in regard to sin has come from
the omission to make use of a distinction
between mortal and venial sin, which is
only approximately true. We have fallen
in consequence into the worse error of
treating sin as unimportant.

The supreme danger, however, of this
dislike of the idea of the supernatural is
that in so far as it is not hostile to religion
it ministers to a fashionable Pantheism,
which in the long run condones the most
revolting acts, because somehow or other
they are part of God's world. In the past
generation men have given in a little too
much to this habit of thought. We have
passed through an age best termed Alex-
andrian, when men have been concerned to
shew the assimilations between Christian
and other systems and have almost forgot-
ten the difference in the process. So much
alive have they been to the human environ-
ment that they have neglected to emphasize
the divine origin of the Gospel. Now, it

170 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

seems, we need rather a Tertullianist or
Augustinian presentment of the faith insist-
ing more on its difference from, than its
approximation to, other systems; on the
vital change it brought, rather than on the
connection, however undoubted, with the
old; on the gift of a new life, that makes it
what it is. Both sides are true; what
might be roughly called the Greek, or the
Johannine view of things, and the Latin or
the Pauline ; at this moment it is the latter
that we need to bring into relief.

As I have tried to shew, it is these unique,
incommunicable, other-worldly elements
that make the beauty of the Christian
Faith, even though it be false. These it is
which give it its own aroma. To cut out
of it all miracle because it is improbable,
the doctrine of the Incarnation because it
is mysterious, the glory of sins forgiven
because it is hard to rationalise, all this
would be to cut out what is of real charm
in the Christian, as distinct from other
systems; while it seems to me that those
who are for this drastic treatment are
attaching a certainty and infallibility to
some modern habits of thought which 'they

CALVARY 171

do not possess even in regard to normal
human life, and are still less likely to pos-
sess in regard to any revelation from unseen
powers. The assumption at the basis of
George Tyrrell's Christianity at the Cross
Roads seems to be that wherever Christi-
anity conflicts with our modern mental
scheme, it must be trimmed to make the
two square. This view seems to be quite
without ground. Neither facts nor theory
justify our holding the dogma of the infalli-
bihty of the modern Western mind. Its
most acute representatives do not claim
this infallibility, and the intellectual an-
archy of our day reveals its inadequacy.
Most of all, however, is its limitation
displayed in the amazing lack of certain
elements of noble living, which are found
in civilisations whose spirit is different.
It lays stress on one set of qualities and
ignores others, and the result is mon-
strosity. It is precisely because the Chris-
tian Faith does involve these other elements,
because it demands a mental habit different
from that now popular, that it is at least
arresting. True or false, its sincere pro-
fession sets us free from the idols of our

172 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

modern cave and permits us to look at
God's universe with the eyes of the peni-
tent, the lover, and the child. To take
from the Christian Faith the elements that
make this possible is to destroy its inalien-
able charm and remove from it its main
source of attraction, as compared with
other schemes austere, imposing, and phil-
osophical though they be.

I think then that we do right in empha-
sizing the uniqueness of the Christian claim
and insisting on the wisdom of the use of
the word supernatural. But it is also true
that there is a very important sense, in
which the natural is the supernatural, and
that our whole problem turns on this truth.
The real question between Christianity and
its adversaries is concerned not with the
miracles of Jesus, but with the possibility
of human freedom. The antecedent diffi-
culty which keeps men from Christian
Faith is commonly understood to be this
problem of the miraculous. This is true,
but it is true only because miracles are a
part of the larger issue between freedom
and necessity. All along the line there is

CALVARY 173

one and only one fundamental difBculty,
that created by "scientific fatalism." It is
clear that without some doctrine of human
freedom the Christian scheme and the
whole theory of sin and redemption is
nonsense. What is less obvious is that
once it be established that the acts of men
are not all of them determined, the a priori
argument against miracles is gone. Suppos-
ing our wills be free, we are spirits who
choose and, acting frequently upon the
material of nature, alter and interfere with
its arrangements. We make that happen
which apart from our free act would not
happen. A miracle only asserts the same
about a being or beings also free and with
wider knowledge than ours. When God
employs the forces of nature without any
apparent interference, we call His act a
special providence; when He brings forces
into play which we cannot manipulate, we
call the act a miracle. Both are equally
involved in the conception of God's free-
dom, that is His personality. Both are
equally opposed to the mechanical theory
of the world and are apt to be laughed out
of court. If there be a spirit world besides

174 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

man at all, we can hardly suppose that the
beings within it are not possessed of wider
knowledge than ours, and they will produce
effects more startling. The whole problem
turns on the reality of freedom, for that
involves even in ourselves powers which
may well be called supernatural. It is
of course conceivable that there are no
higher beings in the universe than we are.
If that were so, of course miracles in the
ordinary sense could not happen. But
once grant that God is to be thought of as
the free Being who created and controlled
the world, then it is really less diflBcult to
credit His action than our own; for we
know very well that our life is dependent.
Once grant, however, that our acts are free,
or some of them, and the whole edifice of
a system of rigid mechanism falls to the
ground; and we must, at least, allow the pos-
sibility of such irruptions from the world
beyond sight as are best called miraculous.
On this matter of freedom it is needless
to dwell at length. The problem is as old
as thought. Moreover, one of the clearest
defences of human freedom has been jnade,
in this place, by William James. ^

CALVARY 175

This much, however, I would say. Free-
dom, not of all but of some actions, is to
me an immediate doctrine of consciousness,
a primary fact, the most real thing in life.
So much is it a part of my life that to deny
this fact reduces it to ruins. As Dr.
Pringle-Pattison says, ''Inexplicable in a
sense as man's personal agency is — the
one perpetual miracle — it is neverthe-
less our overt datum and our only clue to
the mystery of existence." ^ I find further
that in practice this belief is the foundation
of social hfe, is assumed in every personal
judgment; and however they may explain
it in theory, all men make it in practice
the presupposition of their mutual inter-
course. So far then as I am concerned,
if I had to choose, I would prefer the belief
that there is something radically inadequate
in human reasoning if, as apparently it
does, it leads to determinism; I should prefer
this alternative to the acceptance of deter-
minism. For there may be this error.
It is a pure act of faith that you can get a
rationalistically arranged scheme of things.
The facts of life are there, whether we can
harmonise them by reason or any other

176 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

faculty. We do direct and restrain our
actions. That we know, if we know any-
thing. And to substitute any intellec-
tuahst scheme, however apparently secure,
for what is to me the prius of all thinking,
the knowledge of freedom, seems to me to
put the cart before the horse and to be
denying facts in deference to a constructive
theory which may be false. Probably,
indeed, as Bergson says, this notion of
freedom is absolute and cannot be analyzed.
The moment you begin to argue about it,
you have really conceded the point to your
adversary. Freedom must be accepted as
a given fact, mysterious like the primary
facts of life. In all there is something
unfathomable, an "irreducible surd." Yet
so far as observation goes, it is true to say
that we live in a world of free beings
standing "free and doubtful as at the cross
roads in a forest." So far from the future
being predictable, the daily and hourly
experience of every man, woman, and child
alive is expressed in the maxim of William
the Waiter, "You never can tell. Sir, you
never can tell." Part of life may obviously
be made subject to calculation, and of

CALVARY 177

another part you can say what will probably
occur, and in much more you can state
that one of two things is more than probable.
More than that you cannot do. And every
attempt to do more breaks down in face of
the amazing uncertainty of life.

Once let the fact of freedom be granted,
and it may be said that we live, here and
now, a hfe which is truly described as
supernatural. For in that case we our-
selves are something more than parts of
nature. Moreover, if as a fact there are
a number of different centres of indeter-
mination, the whole intellectualist scheme
of the universe has broken down, because
it is only the projection into mental terms
of notions of mechanical necessity. Reality
is now seen to be of such a nature that you
cannot do more than predict what will
happen in the physical world, provided
certain disturbing causes, such as the free
will of spiritual beings, do not operate;
while the element of possible changes is
much greater if you postulate a God who
is free; i.e., personal and all-knowing.
The real battle then in regard to miracles
is that which ranges round the personality

13

178 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

of man and of God. Both hang together.
PersonaHsm — the doctrine of the universe
as a world of spirits — is the point at issue
in all the discussions. Pantheism is a
creed the very opposite of this; it begins
by denying human personality, it ends by
denying Divine. More and more is it be-
come clear that the battle of the future is
one between some form or other of cosmic
emotion which sacrifices all real distinctions
in the desire to attain an all-embracing
unity and Christianity with its insistence
on the reality of the individual life of men
and the personal being of God. Behef in
Christ is increasingly recognised by our
opponents as the great obstacle to the
prevalence of Pantheistic monism. The
reason is that the life of Jesus is the supreme
revelation of the personal love of God, while
His death and rising again are the assurance
to all men of their value in God's sight
and their participation not as means only,
but as ends in the Ufe of the world.

LECTURE IV

SIGN OR THE CHRISTIAN FACT

Last summer, if you met a casual acquaint-
ance come home from his hoHdays, what
was the scene he was most hkely to have
visited? One of those macadamized cities,
the flower of our civiHsation? I think not.
Perhaps he sought communion with nature
in quiet places and refreshed his mind by
rustic pursuits; or perhaps he climbed
peaks or emulated the toils of Ulysses.
One tribute, however, was paid by most of
those who had the means. Away from
the roar of wheels and heedless of our
pleasures, there Ues an obscure village in a
backward country off the highway of the
tourist. To Ober-Ammergau came men
and women of every faith, there to watch
in awe the drama of the Cross or weep at
the parting of Mary and her Son. Unlured
by luxuries they went on this quest, and

179

180 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

no star singer or artist attracted them. It
was just a few villagers trained from youth
up to this great act, but not otherwise
differing from Bavarian peasants.

What is the ground of this interest.'^ It
does not indeed prove so much as a pil-
grimage to Our Lady of Walsingham in
the Middle Ages, or that made memorable
by Chaucer to the shrine of the poor man's
Archbishop who dared to withstand a
monarch more powerful than the Kaiser.
For modern science has made the rough
places plain to the traveller, while the act
which formerly was one of devotion is now
largely due to curiosity. For all that, this
interest is worthy of remark in an age when,
according to Thomas Hardy, a settled
melancholy is coming over the educated
classes with the decline of the belief in a
beneficent power, and when by universal
agreement ideals essentially Pagan have
hold of numbers of educated people. How
is it that the story of the Passion holds
still so conquering a charm? You would
not have secured a tithe of that company
for the pictured presentment of the^ death
of any other religious teacher — not even

SIGN 181

Mrs. Baker Eddy. It is strange what an
attraction the Christian Church still pos-
sesses even for men who scorn her claims.
Privately people may reject and attack these
claims and in public laugh to scorn all
Christian ideals, yet the moment they
move one step in the pursuit of romance,
they are forced to acknowledge and even
to learn from her. It is curious to see in the
houses of people to whom the Catholic
Church is anathema copies of altar pieces
and madonnas. Even more amazing it is
to watch the struggles of non-Christian
artists and poets to get away from this
atmosphere. But the moment they drop
into romance, it comes back to them.
Agnostics will fill their holidays with visits
to S. Ambrogio or S. Mark's and wax learned
over the date or constitution of some
monastic house, while they would cut off
their right hand rather than give credence
to those things which alone made such
places possible. Human culture, so far as
it looks before and after and seeks to bring
men into the society of "the best that is
known and thought in the world," is inex-
tricably entangled with the Christian

182 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

tradition. In consequence you now find
intransigeants like John Davidson, the
poet, opposed to all culture, as the only
means of finally cutting off the entail of
religion. Others make what is perhaps a
worse error and confuse an aesthetic interest
in stained glass or Church embroidery with
a living faith.

Now what makes possible such a spectacle
as that at Ober-Ammergau.^ Not money.
MiUionaires all the world over might club
together, but they could not produce a
Passion-Play. It is no case of the demand
creating the supply. This thing so touch-
ing and wonderful could never have been
at all, and would long since have died but
for the faith of those who produce it. To
these poor peasants, so inferior to our en-
lightenment, this wonder is real. It belongs
to their life as Christians. Their act is
solid with that on Calvary.

There is the fact of which we seek the
interpretation — that tremendous event and
its continuing influence in the life of society
and the individual. We cannot separate
these things. If we are to arrive at any
satisfying estimate, we have to take all

SIGN 183

three as part of one great fact: the hfe,
death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth,
the society in which His spirit acts, and the
present reahty of His gifts in individual
experience. We must start from the actual
phenomenon of today, the individual Chris-
tian, who is what he is as sharer in the com-
mon Hfe of the Church; and this common
Ufe is continuous with the events of Calvary
and the first Easter and may not be compre-
hended apart from them; and vice versa.
Of any event the evidence is to be sought
in the effects which it produces (and this
is the case even with the testimony of eye-
witnesses). The Resurrection is no excep-
tion to this law. Part of its evidence is to
be sought in that collection of documents
we call the New Testament. But this is
only part. Other parts are the history
of the Church and its living power in the
experience of men and women today.

Of these facts all symbolised in the
Passion-Play there are, roughly speaking,
two interpretations and two only. Accord-
ing to the former, religion is a phenomenon
well-nigh universal. It breaks out in Pro-

184 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

tean forms, but all are purely human. To
such a view the emergence of the Christian
Faith, its victory, and its present efficacy
form merely the cardinal instance of this
universal phenomenon. It has no special
or unique value, owes much to local and
partial influences, and though possibly the
highest form which the religious instinct
has yet assumed, is not final and is likely to
be superseded — is, indeed, already vanish-
ing. Whatever substratum of fact under-
lies the Evangelical narrative, and it is
not large, there must have been enough to
arrest and stimulate the imagination of
mankind.

Moreover, as Gibbon long since pointed
out in his famous sixteenth chapter, there
were other circumstances peculiarly favour-
able to the growth of a society claiming
supernatural credentials and assuring to
any man a life beyond. Slowly and after
many conflicts that society gathered co-
hesion, and conquering all rivals such as
the cult of Mithra or Neoplatonism, came
at last to dominate the civilised world.
That predominance, more than half tem-
poral, was shattered by the Renaissance

SIGN 185

and the Reformation. True, the Christian
Church still hves on. But it is only a
Kving power in small groups. Some of
its apparent strength is due to its inherited
wealth and to the general lack of higher
education. All this, however, is but for
the moment. We are at the beginning of
the end. Either the Christian Church will
Hghten the ship of its Jonah burden of the
supernatural and live on as a frankly human
institution, or it will be superseded by some
fresh religious synthesis. Such a synthesis
would not repudiate the Divine, but would
rigidly exclude all notions of God, as dis-
tinct from the developing life of nature,
including men. Its horizons would be lim-
ited by this world. It would make a more
universal appeal than the Christian Faith,
because its claims would be less startling;
and no man who looks for the improvement
of the race would find himself excluded
from it.

The naturalistic theory of Christianity
takes on different colours with the tempera-
ment of the speaker. From the hysterical
contempt of Nietzsche, the hostihty of
writers like Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Sturt,

186 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

we may pass through almost every stage
of increasing admiration, with one great
proviso, that Jesus is not to be worshipped
as God. Even among those who adhere
to the Christian name there are some who
treat Him as Uttle more than the first of
human teachers, while the more extreme
modernists openly avow that it is only the
ideas of Christianity that matter, and that
it is of no importance whether any of the
alleged facts, supernatural or not, happened
at all. We are to rest in an "imaginary
portrait" and rejoice in an inherited cult,
heedless of aught but their existence today.
Others of them will stop short of this, yet
strip the central figure of every actual
quality that points beyond, and proclaim
a doctrine of the Divine Immanence little
removed from Pantheism. A recent expres-
sion to this view in its unrelieved crudity
has been given by Mr. Thompson, the Dean
of Divinity of Magdalen College, Oxford.
His work is not valuable except as evidence.
It shews the inwardness of much that in
other forms allures many minds. For in
that work the immanent logic of a great
deal of the critical movement is seen to

SION 187

develop itself into an assured repudiation
of all injauence from a world beyond.

What I want to emphasize is that within
this naturahstic interpretation every va-
riety of sentiment and moral ideal is
possible, from Pagan to Cathohc ethics.
All, however, unite to repudiate the idea
of a unique revelation and of supernat-
ural grace or facts; all are founded on
rejection of " supernaturahsm " in the usual
sense.

Now let us consider the opposing view.
That asserts that there is about this episode
something more than human, and that its
diflFerences from all other rehgions and
philosophies are more important than its
resemblances. It is to man the supreme
guarantee of a something more than the
visible world and its development, even if
that visible world be thought of as spiritual.
It marks the entrance into this life of
forces from a spirit world beyond, and in
this sense is nothing if not other-worldly.
Of course its human aspects are not to be
denied, and the chief perplexities arise
from the refusal of Christians to treat the

188 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

life of Jesus as a mere "theophany." As
Canon Simpson says^:

"The history of Christian doctrine
made it abundantly clear that men have
found it harder to represent to them-
selves the real manhood of the Son of
God than the perfect Godhead of the Son
of Man."

Nor need we suppose that there is any-
thing final in the efforts hitherto made to
express this double-faced fact. The recent
work of Dr. Sanday on Christologies Ancient
and Modern is alone evidence of this; for
here is a writer avowedly Nicene seeking the
explanation in the doctrine of the subHminal
self. How far the Church will go in this
direction one cannot at this stage predict,
but even the suggestion of it is a proof that
finality is not reached — nor indeed is it
likely to be. 2 Of a fact so essentially mys-
terious as the entrance into human life,
under human conditions, of that Life, which
always burns and is never extinguished, all
our statements must be so much below the
truth that now one side and now the other
will be emphasized. The belief is in the
supernatural character of this, that great

SION 189

mystery of godliness, of which S. Paul
spoke, "God manifest in the flesh."

The form of this belief may vary in differ-
ent ages, and as Dr. Sanday illustrates, take
on a different colour, even while the sym-
bolic expression remains unchanged; other-
wise the creeds would be something other
than symbols. All, however, who hold it
would agree in this — that in the story
told in the Gospels there is evidence of a
peculiar outbreak from the spirit world.
It is not merely an uprush of religious emo-
tion. This "irruption" of the Divine into
the world of phenomena guarantees the
nature of God as being Love; it destroys
the presuppositions of naturalism, in that
it assures to each of us a life hereafter and
delivers us from that strange disease of the
will we call "sin," restoring the broken
unity between the soul and God ; of Whom
it reveals so much as can be shewn in human
hfe.

In the former of these two views, even,
if we take it as it is nearest to the Nicene
faith, the Christian fact has much teaching
for man. But that teaching is of the highest
to which human love can aspire. It is a

190 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

doctrine of man. On the latter view the
teaching is of the depths to which God's
Love can descend. It is a doctrine of God.
He stooped to conquer. The unique note
of the Christian reUgion is the humility
of God, Further, the one interpretation
need never get beyond the Divine Imma-
nence. The other reveals the Divine Tran-
scendence. It preserves the distinctness of
man and God alike, while it asserts that
God is able so to limit Himself as to be-
come Incarnate. It is needless to develop
at length what this view involves. For it
has embodied itself in the Christian Church.
The whole Catholic Evangelical theology
of grace, of the Sacraments, of the Atone-
ment and the Incarnation, is but its expres-
sion; inadequate, it is true, and figurative,
but generated in the need of defending the
one supreme fact of the Divine and super-
natural character of the whole order against
interpretations which in the long run would
have destroyed it.

But we must not exaggerate. This view,
like its contrary, may be held with the
widest differences of detail. It is, as a fact,

SIGN 191

maintained by many whom a rigid ortho-
doxy would repudiate. It would include
such men as a historian who once said to me,
"I believe firmly in the Divinity of Christ
and the Atonement, but I don't beheve
in anything else, not the Church or the
Sacraments or the Holy Ghost." It would
include the semi-Arian, who worships Christ
as Lord and holds firmly to the Logos-
dodrine, but has difficulties about even the
simplest of the Creeds. It would include
those who adhered to the formula suggested
by Dr. Denny, "I believe in God through
Jesus Christ," provided that formula were
interpreted according to the previous argu-
ment of the writer. It would include some
who deny certain facts such as the Birth
Story or the Empty Tomb, which seem to
most of us integral to the supernatural
nature of the whole. That may be true.
For all that, it is not to be gainsaid that
Professor Burkitt,^ in his pamphlet on The
Failure of Liberal Christianity, while he re-
jects [those facts, argues most convincingly
that the evidence of the documents as a
whole compels the supernatural theory of
the origin of the Church and justifies the

192 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

Athanasian Creed, It is hardly too much to
describe this pamphlet as epoch-making, for
it marks the way in which a devout mind,
arguing from the critical basis, but unde-
terred by prepossessions against the super-
natural, is driven to a position which is
fundamentally that of the Church. A
somewhat similar view is that of Dr.
Forsyth in his work on The Person and
Place of Jesus Christ. I need hardly add
that this view of the fundamentally mys-
terious nature of the New Testament
experience is held by men owning every
kind of ecclesiastical allegiance. On the
other hand from this standpoint, there
would be excluded many of the ultra-
modernists, strong though they may be
in the sense of the value both of the Church
and Sacraments, and many "liberal" theo-
logians, who would rule out the "supra-
normal." Professor Denny, Professor Bur-
kitt, Dr. Forsyth, Dr. Garvie, Dr. Orr, Dr.
Seeberg, Dr. Knowling, Mr. Wilfrid Ward,
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, the Bishops of
Birmingham and Durham, Evangelical Dis-
senters and Ultramontanes may seem a
rather heterogeneous company. Doubtless

SION 193

many of them would condemn as woefully
inadequate the theology that contents the
other. Yet all have this in common. They
have crossed the Rubicon. All are on the
other side of the hue which divides the
natural from the supernatural theory of the
origin of Christianity. All are unable to
believe that the reduced Christianity dear
to the Teutonic savant comes at all close to
the facts; all are at one in their refusal
to surrender the supernatural in deference
to the naturalistic bias.

It is right to put the question in this
broad manner, as one which is concerned
with our view of the nature of the expe-
rience as a whole. We are putting the
cart before the horse, when we argue,
as though the question were first and fore-
most concerned with dogma. Dogma only
brings out the implications of the super-
natural view, and it cannot be arrived at
independently or argued about as consisting
of so many isolated propositions. The
Creeds are the intellectual expressions of
this faith, developed in the life of the
Church, and they guard its essential nature,

14

194 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

which is to be supernatural. It is this
supernatural character which is its differ-
entia. On this we have to make up our
mind before, not after, we consider the
Creeds. The enquirer must decide whether
or no these supernatural claims were made,
and then whether he can accept them.
Either you fit Jesus Christ into the normal
categories or He eludes them. The Chris-
tian Church is either one episode in the
natural development of mankind or it is
something superadded. That is the real
difficulty involved in the Incarnation and
in the higher view about Church and Sac-
raments. Whatever class you put them in,
you find it inadequate. Treat Jesus Christ
as purely human and you fail to explain
most of His characteristic deeds and words,
even if you give up the theory of fraud.
Treat Him as God, and His essential human
quality. His local temperament and hori-
zons, are hard to comprehend; though
indeed we never could say beforehand what
limitations of power and knowledge an
Incarnation does not involve. The Atha-
nasian Creed and all Catholic theology puts
the two sides together, but does not remove

SIGN 195

the difBculty. They are never altogether
harmonised; they never will be, till we
reach the beatific vision. But any simpler
creed is even harder. For it compels us
to give up the facts. -

Moreover, it leaves you without any
adequate explanation of the origin and
expansion of the Church. As Gibbon long
since discerned, the crucial difiiculty of
the enquirer is that of explaining the
existence of the Church. And indeed that
difiiculty is greater than he knew. The
Church needs explanation not merely as
a past, but as a present fact, stretching
back to the dawn of history and achieving
since Gibbon the most marvellous of all
its revivals. All this you must describe
as either part of the natural course of
human development or as something cat-
astrophic breaking the chain, invading
the sphere of the natural, a gift from
beyond.

As in the words of a writer I have quoted
more than once — Eucken ^ :

"In the case of Christianity it is man's
moral life which harbours this contradic-
tion. Christianity holds that, down to

196 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

the very roots of his moral nature, man is
especially estranged from what is right,
and therefore requires that he shall become
a new creature and Hve a new life. The
form which this conviction has taken in
concept and in doctrine is no doubt open
to attack on many sides, but so long as
the fundamental fact survived as an in-
spiration in human experience, it triumphed
over all the objections brought against
it. But the modern world, dazzled by
the splendour of its own achievements,
armed with its consciousness of power,
stimulated by its craving for a fuller and
a richer life, has thrust such experience into
the background and for a time forgotten
it. And now the problems and perplexities
of the nineteenth century and our own
have thrust it forward once more, and,
with growing insistence, are challenging
the old complacent belief in the work of
civilisation and the light-hearted enthusi-
asm for progress.

"It becomes increasingly difficult not
to recognise the sharp contradiction which
runs through the whole life of man and
comes to a head in his moral behaviour."

SIGN 197

And again, in Christianity and the New
Idealism, he says:

"Its presence attests the invasion of
our Hfe by a new order of reahty, involving
a breach in the causal order of nature,
tearing through the existing system of
connexions, rendering for ever impossible
a rational synthesis of reality within the
limits of sense-experience, and precluding
any monism of the world as we find it."

Decide this point one way or the other
and you have decided everything, and no
mere jettison of this or that detail will
bring you in line with the opponent theory.
In the same way that a very small dose
of free will means a complete breach with
the rationalist, so here accept the super-
natural in however small a degree and the
logic of it carries you right on to the Church
with the Creeds. Nothing but some acci-
dent of temper or training will hinder you
from being one with that great continuous
body, which enshrines this supernatural
life in all its fulness. Deny this supra-
human character, and however much you
may gild your unbelief with phrases of
reverence, and even emphasize devotion

198 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

to the Church of your fathers, and desire
to be part of the main stream of Christian
life, you are yet on the incHned plane
which leads far away from it. To scientific
fatalism in some form or other, if not the
individual (for he does not always develop
the logic of his position), at least the society,
which adopts such denial, will come at the
last.

The problem, then, is one as to the
transcendental or the normal character
of this experience or group of experiences;
the central facts as recorded in the New
Testament, the impression made by them
at the time, and the continuance of that
impression in the Church and its individual
members. Christian theology issues from
the attempt to guard this truth of the
supernatural character of this experience
against interpretations which explicitly or
implicitly involve its denial. Whether the
theology be coherent or well-expressed is
one thing. That its essence is this faith
in a mystery is unquestioned alike by
friend and foe.

I state the problem in this way because
it seems to me an error to treat the topic

SION 199

analytically; isolating this or that detail
and then either from the traditional stand-
point or its opposite building up a series
of conclusions. As a fact, we are dealing
not with a number of isolated events appar-
ently marvellous, each to be discussed in
vacuo, but with a great experience of human
life extending from the converted sinner of
today right back to "that strange man
upon the Cross" and all that He implies.
The question is, What does that experience
mean.^ Even in regard to the New Testa-
ment it is a mistake to adopt this purely
analytic method. It is not* the Virgin
Birth, or the Empty Tomb, or the Trans-
figuration, or the feeding of the five thou-
sand, or the walking on the water, or the
tremendous claims of Christ, or the stories
of the Apostles, or the experience of S.
Paul, or the theory of S. John; it is all these
things together. Or, to be accurate, it
is the atmosphere, the mental world, in
which all these things take place, that is
in question. Men would never have made
this error were it not for our habit of making
words and single events a screen which veils
life instead of revealing it, and discussing

200 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

not real experience, but the articulate ex-
pression of it, which never is complete and
can at best be no more than symbolic.

The first thing to decide is our view of
the total character of the narrative, taken
in unison with its living issues (as the title
of the Kaiser is part of the evidence for
the power of Julius Caesar). When we have
made up our minds as to what that character
is, and further, being what it is, whether we
can accept or reject it, then and then only
shall we be ready to discuss it in detail.

As a matter of fact, this is precisely
what is done. Half of the anti-Christian
criticism of the records, while it professes
to be an open enquiry, is in reality only an
examination of this or that detail with the
humanist interpretations of the narrative as
a whole taken for granted, though carefully
concealed. Too many writers on the ortho-
dox side have been content to examine
these theories, without considering the pre-
suppositions; thus tacitly offering a victory
to their adversaries.

But this is not all. If the problem be
primarily one about the total impression,

SION 201

it does not need a specialist to determine
its results. On the general character of
the alleged occurrences of the Gospel, or
the experience of the early Church, as
mirrored in S. Paul, in S. Peter, in S. John,
it needs no specialist nor any great knowl-
edge to come to a valid conclusion. In this
matter the appeal to the plain man and that
to the historic consciousness of Christen-
dom comes to the same thing. Such mat-
ters as the piecing together of the narratives,
the priority of S. Mark, or the nature of Q,
or the genuineness of S. Peter's and S. Jude's
Epistles, can only be argued by specialists.
But no expert is needed to pronounce on
the general character of the impression
created by the accounts of Jesus or the
experiences of S. Paul. Nothing is needed
but attentive reading, and the critics who
would cut all the extraordinary elements
and leave a caput mortuum of morality
touched with emotion (yet still to be called
Christianity) would never have won half
their vogue had not the reading of the New
Testament gone out of fashion. Their
strength comes from their appealing to a
world which has ceased to use the Bible

202 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

devotionally. It was a maxim of the
Reformers that the Scriptures bore their
meaning on their face, and that every
man could be his own interpreter. AppHed
to single texts this notion is contrary to
fact; for we need to go behind the New
Testament to the society which produced
it, just as we need to go behind Dante or
Homer to the civilisation which environed
them. The maxim resulted in a greater
variety of views among Christians than had
before seemed possible; each view basing
itself on the Bible. If, however, we take
the New Testament as a whole, the Re-
formers were not so far wrong. Whether
or no he believes it, the plain man who
reads the New Testament has little doubt
of the transcendent claim made by Jesus
Christ; nor does he deny that there was
an experience of redemption which believed
itself to be connected with the Cross, and
of a new life in unison with the Risen Lord.
How these things are to be harmonised
may be matters for the Church, and what
their theological implications exclude or
allow. How to get them into relation with
ordinary life is a problem still unsolved.

SIGN 203

But that this is their general character is
only to be denied by that class of mind that
asserts that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, or,
hke Samuel Butler, that the Odyssey was a
suffragist manifesto. The authority of the
Church, indeed, here as in other matters,
only operates to protect the ordinary man
against the excesses of one-sided talent, and
is indeed essentially democratic.

Still the point remains. What are we to
think of it all.^ To me it appears plain
that we have evidence of some invasion
from that world beyond, whose possibility
it would be rash to deny. So far as the
evidence goes, we have to do with a unique
experience, paralleled in mystical litera-
ture, but quite other than normal. All
seems to point to the gradual opening of
men's eyes to an element strange and
superhuman in the life of Jesus. Reluc-
tantly, with the slow-moving intelligence of
peasants, the Apostles began to ask, What
manner of man is this.^^ After long feeling
the attraction of His person, and treating
His healing miracles as a thing of course,
they began at last to see in Him something
more — the Christ, the Son of the Living

204 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

God. Then for a time all their hopes were
dashed by the tragedy of Calvary, to us so
splendid, to them so chill and drab. Again
on reluctant eyes there bursts the light of
Easter, and in its blinding glare the Church
has lived ever since. What wonder if the
accounts be confused, or if there are diffi-
culties in the theology which guards it.
The whole thing is difficult, like all ultimate
facts; for mystery is in the nature of things
and nothing real but shares it. There,
however, it is dazzling still, this poor un-
educated Galilean criminal, worshipped to-
day as God and starting a movement with
no real parallel in history. For neither
the Buddhists nor Mohammed can really
be compared. It is this, the total massive
impression of something unearthly, that
beats in upon the reader. In the long run
this impression carries evidence of its own
reality — to all who are not obsessed by
theories, which bar the door to it. Much
may be attributed to the mythopoeic faculty.
But here the simplicity of the writing, the
amazing beauty of the ideal, the patent
fact that the Epistles of S. Paul utter an
actual personal experience, seem to point

SION 205

against the view that all that is distinctive
in the events was created by vivid imagina-
tion. This is further strengthened by the
terrific after-results, including the life and
inward experience of today. It is really
on account of the impression of the whole
that we believe in the parts; and not vice
versa. This is, I take it, the significance
of the use of the term the Faith as a single
thing, as it is at the bottom of the appeal
to authority. There are these three strange
facts: myself with my failures and aspira-
tions,— many more like me: the amazing
vision of Jesus: and the new life that
came through Him and goes on still.
Apart from prepossessions, what is there
left me but to say, "Neither is there any
other name given under Heaven, whereby
men may be saved ".^ Or as a friend once
wrote to me, "Perhaps after all there is a
fact at the bottom of Christianity."

I do not say that all this can be proved,
but I do say that there is a cumulative
argument. On the personal, the social, and
the historic side considerations arise which
mutually support each other. On the actual
matter of historical enquiry about the cen-

206 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

tral figure, there is once more a cumulative
argument. No single detail is conclusive
by itself, but all together make a positive
unity which is not so readily found in the
alternative explanation. These other ex-
planations are not impossible, but they do
great violence to documents and the con-
sciousness of the Church and have all the
marks of a non-natural reconstruction,
adopted in obedience to a preconceived
theory. All that the traditional view needs
for its acceptance in its main features is the
removal of the presupposition that miracles
do not happen. There is, I think, in this
view a definite ground of assurance to those
whose craving is well described by Mr.
Hardy in The Gospel of Pain.^

"Men and women need something more
central than the emotions, more sane than
the wistful mood of aspiration. They do
not require 'demonstration' or 'logical
proof; they have reacted from 'schemes'
and 'systems'; but conviction they do
want. They want assurance on common-
sense grounds. Such grounds they have
in practical life, where no one pays a thought
to logic or waits a moment for demonstra-

SION 207

tion. Are they to be blamed for requiring
such in rehgion? Granted one conviction,
brought out of the facts of hfe, one clear
hint of order and purpose, and the spiritual
assurance of the ages of faith ' might again
inspire the world.' "

We are asked whether it is wise to accept
this Faith. We reply: it is the part of
wisdom to accept that account of things
which includes the relevant facts. Whether
or no we can coordinate the facts into a
coherent system, we know not. That is a
matter of faith. There will always be those
who value and those who dislike a clearly
articulated "diagrammatic" view. In any
case we have to get the facts in, however we
are to explain them. Now this Faith in-
cludes as nothing else does the facts of life
as it is lived. Avowedly it appeals to the
nature of man, as a being who chooses,
who loves, and who sins. The other sys-
tems all tend to ignore these facts in whole
or in part.

So far as the facts of human life are con-
cerned, no system has been developed for
deahng with them at all comparable to that

208 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

of the Christian Church. No view which re-
pudiates freedom but in the long run breaks
upon the rock of personaKty. Again no
system which is not social, no purely indi-
vidualist rehgion, but is false to the nature
of man; and sociality involves authority.
It is only owing to the high organisation
of modern life, and the support given to
each individual, that sheer individualism
is even conceivable.^

Religion without a Church is not really
possible, for not only is man a social animal,
but religion is essentially social. And more
and more is the comparative study of
religion making it clear that men are funda-
mentally religious. This is indeed one of
the main difficulties that face the apologist.
For while religion in general is seen to be a
necessary element in the make-up of human
life, the same observation by no means tells
in favour of any religion in particular; rather
it tends to an impartial patronage of all.
Taking it, however, as at last settled that
religion is a human property, we may well
proceed to ask ourselves whether the Catho-
lic Church does not enshrine the central
experience of the race, and whether any

SION 209

of the competing systems is seriously to be
compared with it. That does not mean
that they have nothing to teach us. Even
in our worship we have become too deeply
occidentalised, and we need once more to
drink at the Eastern springs. We are
indeed doing so; the growth of interest in
mysticism is evidence.

Speaking on the whole, can anyone seri-
ously maintain that any other religion is
likely to take the place of the Christian, or
that any other society can approach the
Christian Church in the production of the
highest characters .f^ All societies, even re-
ligious, are ultimately judged by the type
of character they tend to produce. For,
having settled the problem of freedom, it
remains to be seen what you will do
with it. Some of the most passionate
exponents of freedom at this moment are
in the anti-Christian camp; they despise
the Christian character. I do not mean the
character of Christians. It is not because
we fall short of our ideal (we all do more
or less) ; it is our ideal itself that wins this
scorn. So long as men are content to
admire Christ and the Christian character,

15

210 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

SO long will they find grounds good or bad
for adhering to the Church. Nietzsche,
indeed, as we saw last time, was aware
of this and directed his polemic on this very
point. If you dislike the Christian charac-
ter and consider that its virtues are vices,
there is no use arguing about the evidence
of the Faith. You will surely find grounds
for discarding it. If you admire the Chris-
tian and find in holiness "the beauty of
God," then you will in the long run sur-
render yourself to that society in which it
thrives, or at least you will desire to do so,
though you may be deterred either by the
intellectual difficulty or by the rarity with
which the ideal is realized. At least your
sympathies will be all on that side. The
question of every calHng, every school,
and every profession is not what it teaches,
but the kind of men it produces. A man's
own choice is determined in nine cases
out of ten by whether he likes the law or the
army or literature, and finds in it the kind
of men he cares to hve with. So with the
Christian Church. The supreme practical
question is what kind of people does she
make; all individuals are largely a product

SION 211

of their society. In so far as you are able
to compare Christians with non-Christians,
which type would you wish to be like?
Only, be it remembered, it is unfair to
compare the mere average Christian with
some "saint of rationalism" like John
Stuart Mill, or even to take the least
inspired moments of the saint and bid men
judge his inferiority. The Church must
be judged by its truly characteristic pro-
ducts no less than a school or college
or nation. I do not believe that in our
apologetic we have made enough use of the
saints. We should argue on a sounder
basis, if we talked a little more of the
martyrs. It would not in all things make
matters easier. For the modern world
tolerates sanctity rather than admires it,
and outside the Bible regards it as almost
wicked to believe in saints. Further, it has a
notion of what the saints are that is almost
entirely false to the facts, and before they
can be made an apologetic argument their
character, their variety, their enormous
practical influence, and their abilities need
to be better known. When, however, the
lay figure of a most unnatural being has

212 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

been replaced by the living reality, it will
be found that they were and are the most
persuasive of all arguments.

For it is this sharing in a great society, this
communion of saints, which is one great
charm of the Christian life. By it we enter
into the life of the striving sinners (the
best description of the saint) of all ages and
make their achievements ours. We are
united not only with the living, but with
the dead. There is truth in the anachro-
nisms of the Old Masters, who paint a S.
Augustine, a S. Francis, a S. Chrysostom
kneeling simultaneously at the foot of the
Cross. So with other things. There are
elements in the doctrine, in the devotion,
in the ritual, even in vestment and gesture,
which sway us with the accumulated force
of all the generations who have used them
and help us to share in "the long result of
time." All authority is social in its nature;
it is the life of the community, larger than
all its members, in which these things grow
to maturity and wherein all are welded to
harmony. In a thousand subtle and im-
perceptible ways this authority is all about
us, uniting in intimacy the present and the

SIGN 213

past, the near and the far. A man who
takes part in a high celebration of the
Eucharist is a witness and a sharer in the
unity of history. In this worship he is
carried far back through many ages, breath-
ing cHmates older than the Christian, and
he, a modern, is at one with primitive man
and also has the promise of the future.^
It is then, as gathering in itself the religious
experience of mankind, that the Christian
Church makes its appeal, and, as sharing
in the central stream of the Life, that the
Catholic would justify himself. For reasons,
not relevant to discuss here, I do not believe
the theory of Papal omnipotence to be
central. But facts appear to shew that
the further we go from what is Catholic,
the greater danger we are in of becoming,
in TyrrelFs phrase, *'pert and provincial";
even though our devotion to Jesus be real,
there is in such cases a narrowness and lack
of freedom, because so many of the treasures
of the past have been deliberately foregone.
In England in the past we have been too
"provincial," and we do well to lend all
honour to those who are striving to restore
in all their touching and immemorial beauty

214 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

certain age-long notes of Catholic faith,
notably those which have to do with the
Communion of Saints. All this may be
held with the widest allowance for dif-
ference in local custom and national feel-
ing, no less than for the individual
temperaments, which are not intended all
to emphasize the same aspects of faith
and worship.

All this, of course, may be denied. It
may be said that man needs no religion,
that it is but a passing phase nearly over,
and that we have at length entered on the
positive epoch, as described by Comte.
Comte, however, it must never be forgotten,
was driven to crystallize into a religious
system that enthusiasm for humanity which
he desiderated, making, as has been said,
a sort of parody of the Roman Church.
So far as can be judged by observation,
however, it seems improbable that either
the agnostic or the purely rationalist scheme
will satisfy the mass of men, but only a few
who live under conditions highly artificial
and many who do not reflect at all. Nor
do I deny the extreme difficulty of the

SIGN 215

fundamental faith of the Christian in Love,
as Lord of all things. The doctrine of the
Fatherhood of God, to which some would
fain reduce Christianity, in the hope of
making it easy and universal, is to me the
profoundest of all stumbling blocks. Look-
ing at the world of today, with its masses
of blighted lives and amazing wastefulness,
not only of happiness, but of character, it
is hard indeed to credit the saying that
there is a heavenly Father ''without whom
no sparrow falls to the ground." Plausible
grounds may be adduced for treating all
known existence, the history of the world
as we have it, as a mere effort of "the
will to power," blind and conscientious.
Nietzsche's doctrine is much more than the
ravings of a lunatic, and at times threatens
to overwhelm the strongest. At other
times the view of things propounded by
another philosopher, Mr. Bertrand Russell,
that it is mere purposeless vanity, seems
to come to me with a force well-nigh irre-
sistible. Certainly no one can prove it
false. Let me read the eloquent words in
which he proclaims it. It is from The
Religion of the Free Man.

216 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

"Such in outline, but even more purpose-
less, more void of meaning, is the world
which Science presents for our belief. Amid
such a world, if anywhere, our ideals hence-
forward must find a home. That Man is
the product of causes which had no previ-
sion of the end they were achieving; that
his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears,
his loves and his beliefs are but the out-
come of accidental collocations of atoms;
that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of
thought and feeling can preserve an in-
dividual life beyond the grave; that all the
labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the
inspiration, all the noonday brightness of
human genius are destined to extinction
in the vast death of the solar system, and
that the whole temple of Man's achieve-
ment must inevitably be buried beneath
the debris of a universe in ruins — all these
things, if not quite beyond dispute, are
yet so nearly certain that no philosophy
which rejects them can hope to stand.
Only within the scaffolding of these truths,
only on the firm foundation of unyielding
despair, can the 'soul' habitation hence-
forth be safely built."

SION 217

"How, in such an alien and inhuman
world, can so powerless a creature as Man
preserve his aspirations untarnished? A
strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipo-
tent but blind, in the revolutions of her
secular hurrying through the abysses of
space, has brought forth at last a child,
subject still to her power, but gifted with
sight, with knowledge of good and evil,
with the capacity of judging all the works
of his unthinking Mother. In spite of
Death the mark and seal of parental con-
trol, Man is yet free, during his brief
years, to examine, criticise, to know, and
in imagination to create. To him alone,
in the world with which he is acquainted,
this freedom belongs; and in this lies his
superiority to the resistless forces that
control his outward life."

"Brief and powerless is Man's life; on
him and all his race that slow, sure doom
falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and
evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent
matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man,
condemned today to lose his dearest, to-
morrow himself to pass through the gate of
darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere

218 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that
ennoble his little day; disdaining the
coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to
worship at the shrine that his own hands
have built; undismayed by the empire of
Chance, to preserve a mind free from the
wanton tyranny that rules his outward
life; proudly defiant of the irresistible
forces that tolerate, for a moment, his
knowledge and his condemnation, to sus-
tain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas,
the world that his own ideals have fashioned
despite the trampling march of unconscious
power."

Now what destroys such doctrines is not
demonstration. They cannot be demon-
strated to be false, or else why should Mr.
Russell believe them.^ Their true antago-
nist is always faith, the faith that, however
bad things may appear, reality cannot be
so hopeless as that would make it. Life
cannot be such a senseless tragedy as all
that. Just as the supreme argument for
immortality is the spectacle of some strong
and noble character, dying in early life —
for we feel that all cannot be over with it
— so against the sight of nature and all

SIGN 219

her cruelties, what is there to be said except
that human hearts will not acquiesce in a
world whose sole meaning is that it has
none? This is the final ground of all
religious behef, whether Christian or not.
As Mr. Bradley puts it in regard to his
philosophy:

"Is it after all a paradox that our con-
ceptions tend all more or less to be one-
sided, and that life as a whole is something
higher and something truer than those
fragmentary ideas, by which we seek to
express and formulate it.^ Is it after all
the man who is most consistent who on
the whole attains to greatest truth .^^ To
most, if not to all of us, I should have
thought that there came moments when it
seemed clear that the Universe is too much
everywhere for our understanding. Any
truth of ours, no matter what, fails to
contain the entirety of that which it tries
to embrace, and hence is falsified by the
reality. . . . // I were not convinced of
[this] on the ground of metaphysics, I should
still believe it upon instinct. And, though I
am willing to concede that my metaphysics
may be wrong, there is, I think, nothing

220 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

which could persuade me that my instinct is
not right.'' ^

"The immanence of the Absolute in finite
centres, and of finite centres in the Absolute,
I have always set down as inexplicable.
Those to whom philosophy has to explain
everything need therefore not trouble them-
selves with it." 8

This refusal is an act of faith. It cannot
be consciously justified to those who will
not make it. Yet, I think, it may be said
to be involved as a presupposition of all
purposeful activity. ^ , And it also will carry
us on to some view of ultimate reality,
which makes it at least analogically per-
sonal. We cannot rest in the belief that
the world as a whole is lacking in those
personal relations which are the reality of
life here, and without which the eternal
home is no home. We demand imperiously
the hope of intimacy with the secret
of all things; and intimacy means to
us communion, the mutual love of spirits,
and this intimacy between the derived
and the original Spirit is only another
way of expressing the Fatherhood of
God.

SION 221

I spoke of faith as the supreme argument
against the difficulty raised by the apparent
waste and cruelty of the world. There is
another — the authority of Jesus. His un-
broken trust in His Father gives us warrant
even stronger than that sense of which I
have been speaking. This authority is to
many of us a support when our own per-
suasion seems breaking. It is said that
this doctrine is the sum total of the Chris-
tian Faith; that as the teaching of Jesus,
it is sufiicient; that all the supernatural
elements may be omitted or relegated to a
secondary place. This it was His mission
to proclaim. This involves no difficulties
and no assertion of the miraculous. Yet
in that case, what is the use of it.'^ If the
doctrine of Jesus was a mere surmise, it is
no better than yours or mine, and can be
to us no support at times, when ''all melts
under our feet." Jesus' doctrine of the
Heavenly Father might be only one more
beautiful dream, were it not for that in
Jesus which enabled Him to speak securely.
If He were not raised above that conjectural
quagmire in which we "follow wandering
fires," why should we trust in what He

222 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

tells us? The difficulties of belief are at
times so tremendous that you cannot hold
the truth even of the Fatherhood of God
without a view of Jesus, as beyond man,
which leads right on to the Creeds. And
so the question at the last comes back to
the same point: Whom say ye that Jesus
is? What is the total impression of Jesus
on mankind? And how are we to set forth
our relation to it? Can we find any method
more adequate than the Faith adumbrated
in the Creeds and lived by the Church,
of which they are an element?

As we saw at the outset, it is altogether
a fallacious method to treat the question
as though it were all concerned with docu-
ments. There is no reason for studying
documents of this or any other matter
in vacuo. It is always something in our
life here and now that drives us to that
study. We shall never get right even
educationally till we begin history at the
right end, which is today; not 1066, or
476, or 753, or any other arbitrary date.
The ground for enquiry into the past must
be the present or the future. That is what
starts us off. Above all in regard ^to this

SIGN 223 ;

question of questions, I ask myself, How I

am I to interpret certain living facts, the i

Christian Church here, myself now speak- ]

ing, and the general philosophic chaos, j

which is only one aspect of the more uni- ;

versal human muddle? I am not as a J

Christian professing a belief in Christ as

one who once lived. It is no far-off memory |

of one who told of God, but the sharing in j

a new life, which is nourished by union

with one alive. Nor, on the other hand,

do I adhere solely to a present society, '

energising in His name. That society has \

its credentials, which are submitted to i

.... '
scrutiny. Nor again is it only in the figure

of Christ, nor in the Church as a community

for winning holiness, nor in its history as

authentic, nor in its miracles as facts, but j

because all these are a source of peace and

strength to me — me a loving, sinning, !

choosing being. Nor again is it because

there are no historical perplexities and no .

difiiculties for thought that I accept what I

I do, but I find that every other alter- \

native is even worse; that it either ignores !

material facts and pretends to escape diffi- !

culties, which in reahty it enhances; or 1

224 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

from having a lower ideal it preaches a
view of things too horrible to be endured,
save on a compulsion which it does not
prove; or that it frankly gives up the prob-
lem as hopeless. And none of these posi-
tions but seem to me on the whole less
tenable than the Christian. All these argu-
ments for faith, positive and negative alike,
come with an accumulated force, which
seems to me so tremendous that I incline
very strongly to accept them. Moreover,
the total character of the Christian story
seems to me so strongly to point to an
irruption into this world of powers from that
beyond, that short of compulsion I hesitate
to reject it.

And so the question must be put. Do
we know enough of reality to pronounce
a priori as incredible such a narrative as
that of the Gospels, supported as it is by
the statements of the Epistles, actualised
in the Church and the individual of today .^
On this point enough has already been said
and I need not labour it further.

No bigotry is more intense and less
amenable to evidence than that dogmatism
which, while proclaiming man's ignorance of

SIGN 225

the secret of things, asserts also that he
knows enough of that secret to declare that
it could not communicate itself through
Jesus Christ. I grant the difficulties in-
volved in the extreme views of God's power
to limit Himself, which the Incarnation im-
plies, but to deny that it was possible is
pure assumption and springs from a Pagan
view of God, as essentially proud. I grant
the difficulties of Christian theology, but
it does guard its supreme treasure, the
supernatural, and God's entry into human
life in Christ Jesus. Once satisfied of the
generally supra-normal character of the
Gospel narrative, I find it the part of wis-
dom to put myself into living union with
the society which makes that belief active.
By such admission we are in face of
stupendous mysteries. Nor can human
language ever be adequate to set them out.
The teaching of S. Paul on the Atonement
and the person of Christ, and of S. John
on the mystical union and the Sacraments,
and the whole atmosphere of the early
Church is crowded with mystery. So am
I. These things are congruous with our
sense of wonder in the world and in our

16

226 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

own life. That a world so strange as this
should have as its core a secret so marvel-
lous as that revealed in the Cross and
Passion and Rising again of Jesus, is to
me but natural. What does seem to me
false to that reality in which I live is the
clear daylight of naturalism, or the articu-
lated scheme of rationalist thought. All
views of the world end in mystery — and
an act of faith. In agnosticism there is
no light at all. Pantheism, with its pathetic
confidence in an ever incomprehensible
Absolute, its denial of true personality,
and its failure to explain the delusion of
it, seems to me, despite obvious attractions,
less credible and less true to the facts of
life, while even fuller of mystery. The
Christian Faith, with its teaching of God
as Love, and therefore as Father and
Saviour, and of human life as redeemable
and as seen through the Resurrection glory,
if it does not solve all mysteries, leaves us
more hopeful than any other. Theology,
so far as it errs, does so by over-rationalising
rather than by profaning its mysteries.
But it does its work so long as it preserves
the sense of the stupendous nature of those

SION 227

doings in Palestine and their refusal to be
classed in the ordinary categories.

Again we have admitted, and it was the
purpose of the last lecture to emphasize,
the fact of the vast differences between
the mental cUmate of the Christian Church
and that of our own day. Any acceptance
of the Faith as supernatural, even allowing
for much that is local and transitory in
form of expression, involves us in great
difficulties, for it invites us to breathe a
different atmosphere. It is this sense of
the difference of climate that forms to many
the insurmountable obstacle. But it is
not in reality such, except on the assump-
tion that ours is altogether superior and
that the other contains no valuable ingredi-
ents which we lack. On grounds stated in
the first part of our discussion I am driven
to reject these assumptions. Despite our
vaunted enlightenment, the mental habits
of our own day appear to me curiously
superficial. Whole tracts of the life of
the spirit are to them a terra incognita.
If certain dominant tendencies continue
unchecked, we should soon be even in
worse case, for these tendencies will stamp

228 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

out certain inherited counter-tendencies,
which Hnger on and have still some influence.
The point is, that the world needs and is
crying out for some way of escape from that
intellectual prison house which it has built
for itself. Such a way of escape is offered
by the Gospel of Christ, and that which
seems to outsiders its foolishness is in
reality the very wisdom for which they
are seeking. It holds the open sesame into
a larger world, the talisman of a life freer
and less sophisticated than that of the
atmosphere of present day intellectualism.
It lifts us from the dry bones of theory to
the abounding life of the Spirit. It is
indeed a magic which relieves our minds,
tired with the riddle of things, and intro-
duces us to a world where we are free.

For it is indeed mainly our own theories
of things that we have to reconcile with the
presuppositions of Christianity. The spec-
tacle of man as a free and sinful spirit,
and his inner knowledge of the tragedy of
himself, the picture of God as Father and
Saviour, the philosophy of suffering as
revealed in the Cross, the Sacramental
gift at once natural and supernatural —

SIGN 229

all this, if hard to reconcile with speculative
theories, is congruous with life as it is daily
lived. It is only when we set up our modern
categories, useful for certain aspects of life,
and put them between us and real experi-
ence, that we find the difficulties insuperable.
A child's laughter or a woman's tears make
short work of all such phantasms of the
spirit. The Gospel is the freshest and most
original thing in the world, while the tone of
modern intellectualism, with all its culture,
is at bottom commonplace and middle aged.
Of course these things are mere pre-
sumptions. They may lessen the diffi-
culties to faith in one who desires it. They
are not conclusive. Nothing is. No man
who is honest but echoes at times the reply
of Dr. Johnson to Boswell, who declared
there was quite enough evidence — " Sir, I
could wish for more." God leaves us free
to take what view of life we please. Against
our will we shall not be driven even "to
the truth as it is in Jesus." The argument
most nearly conclusive is the atmosphere
of the New Testament and its congruity
with our own experience. It is the constant
pouring in of that atmosphere upon the

230 CIVILISATION AT THE CROSS ROADS

mind of a man, persuaded alike of his own
failure and the world's need of redemption,
that is most likely to bring him to the foot
of the Cross. For that is where we all
have at last to come. Christ does not
reveal Himself to those who are satisfied.
Why should He.^^ They do not want Him.
It is only as a man is ready to cry, "What
must I do to be saved .f^" that the answer
will come, "Beheve on the Lord Jesus
Christ, and thou shalt be saved."

For that is what it all means. I have
spoken of the Church and her history, nor
could I set forth strongly enough my hope
that men would enter into that great
fellowship. I have spoken of her actual
power today in the social perplexities of to-
day, and I feel more and more the need of a
society that has an other-worldly reference,
whose very existence is a protest against
materialist ideals. I have spoken of the
appeal to the individual, his power to find
himself in the Church. This individual
reference must never be left out, the mys-
tic is the deepest of all apologists; and no
social authority can do away with the sense

SIGN 231

of the individual member. But all these
things have for the Christian no meaning
apart from Him from whom they took their
origin. Neither the history, nor the pres-
ent hfe of the Church, nor her Sacraments,
nor the individual's consciousness of grace
could stand for one moment, but for their
reference to Him. It is in Him, as He hangs
upon the Cross, "the dear dying Lamb"
in whom we see the human face of God.
He calls all men unto Him, lifted on that
tree of agony, which is His enduring throne.
The quest of any man is the quest of
reality. It may be more vigorous and
conscious at such times as this at college,
but it never ceases. Man is so made that
he cannot be satisfied with less than the
highest, and that he must be beaten down
before he can be raised up. The pursuit
of self cannot be carried on alone; it is self,
as at home in God, that we seek. We find
ourselves only in finding Him. There in
Him who bade men die to live is the crown
of all our striving; there is the Love that
redeems our tragic failure, the peace that
passeth all understanding — Jesus Christ, the
same yesterday, today, and for ever.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

King Richard the Third and the Reverend
James Thompson

Some fifteen years ago Sir Clements Markham
set himself to rehabilitate Richard Crookback.
His effort was not the first, for Horace Walpole a
century before had tried his hand at the same task.
The work was done so skilfully that any member
of the general public who had sufficient interest to
read the articles would easily have succumbed to
the advocate. Briefly, the case was as follows.
The writers who have made history were all of them
directly or indirectly subservient to Henry VII,
who needed for his stability to inculcate detesta-
tion of the man whom he had supplanted. This
bias animated historical writers consciously and
popular opinion unconsciously. For reasons of
this sort Fabyan is worthless. Polydore Vergil,
historiographer to Henry VII, was an Italian and
was not likely to tell any truth unpalatable to his
master even if he had known. The life of Richard
by Sir Thomas More has not really the weight of
his character behind, but was written or inspired

235

236 APPENDIX

by Cardinal Morton, the engineer of the Tudor
triumph, and implacably hostile to Richard.

After thus clearing the ground by destroying
the credit of the witnesses, the critic examined
the individual crimes attributed to Richard. He
laboured the inadequacy of the evidence for the
Duke's share in the murder of the young Prince of
Wales after Tewkesbury. For his supposed mur-
der of King Henry VI in the Tower, the course
advised by Mr. Weller was adopted and an alibi
set up. The story of the killing of "false, fleeting,
perjured Clarence" was dismissed as unworthy of
credence.

After this preliminary exculpation the accused
is led into court with clean hands and there tried
for his final and worst offences, the usurpation of
the Crown and the subsequent murder in the Tower
of the two princes. So far from being an educated
Renaissance villain, Richard is shewn as a rather
nice man, capable like others of crimes, but averse
from them. The whole moral atmosphere of that
time

" Which hovered between war and wantonness
And crownmgs and dethronements."

is conveniently ignored throughout the discussion.
The plea set up for the assumption of the Crown
is reviewed. It is alleged that Richard was no
usurper, but the true heir. He was shocked to find
from Bishop Stillington the evidence of an earlier
marriage of his brother, which reduced the little
princes into bastards. Thus Richard was hot the

APPENDIX 237

wicked uncle, but the lawful inheritor; i.e., if
Warwick was held to be barred by his father
Clarence's attainder.

But this is not all. Not only did Richard not
usurp the throne. He did not even make away with
his nephews. He left them alive. They were ijiur-
dered by Henry VII, or at least at his orders. For
it was his interest to marry the daughter of Eliza-
beth Woodville, and as this left the legitimacy of
the princes once more clear, it was needful to get
rid of them. Now the character of that rather
unattractive Machiavellian statesman is not such
as to make the story hard of belief. We should
have no difficulty about it if there were any tradition
or writing in its favour. Moreover, it is noteworthy
that the Act of Attainder passed against Richard
does not mention this assassination, and this is not
very easily accounted for, except by the hypothesis
that the little princes were still alive at the moment
the act was passed. Against all this there is, on
the one hand, the evidence of popular tradition and
all our writers, and on the other the testimony of
one witness who must have been disinterested.
The French Chancellor, at the States-General in
1484, with Richard still reigning, openly denounced
him as the murderer of his nephews and assumed
the widespread knowledge of the fact. This diffi-
culty was removed by Mr. Markham in the follow-
ing way. He pointed out that Morton was peculiarly
active in France and suggested that he had inspired
the Chancellor, not only with the belief that Richard

£38 APPENDIX

had murdered the children, but also with the belief
that there was in England a common rumour to
that effect, whereas, as a matter of fact, there was
nothing of the sort.

Despite the ingenuity of this argument — and
it is far more plausible than much of the critical
constructions of a non-miraculous Gospel — it has
failed to win acceptance. Dr. Gairdner, whose
knowledge of the sources was unrivalled, not only
refused to be persuaded, but declared that such
methods as those employed were "an end of all
history." So far as I am aware, no single historical
student has declared in favour of the new theory.

The controversy is, however, of great interest,
for it raises the whole question of normal historical
beliefs. Further, it serves to illustrate how woe-
fully we may go astray if we isolate each document
or fact and consider them apart from the total
picture and from popular tradition. For indeed
it is a strange chance, if Richard had been the
"plaister-saint" he becomes on the new theory,
how all evidence of such a character should have
vanished. It is also to be noted that this whole
series of crimes was attributed, not to different
people, but to the same individual, placed amid
alluring temptations and living in an age when
bloodshed was a daily occurrence and the influence
of the later Renaissance was operating to under-
mine the moral basis of society. In the time of
such flowers of the moral life as Tiptoft or Rodrigo
Borgia, such deeds are far from incredible for a

APPENDIX 239

prince in a position which has proved too strong
for many a more virtuous character. Nor can we
account for all these crimes as the creation of prej-
udice or ill-feeling, even though it may be that one
or two of the narratives have undergone appro-
priate development; nor is it really an argunpient
against the traditional story that it formed the
basis of a play of Shakespeare. The real difficulty
lies in the total impression and the universal tradi-
tion. Of course all this might be the fruit of Tudor
calumny; at least the contrary must be proved.
But to a mind not resolved a priori to discard the
common tradition such an explanation seems too
far fetched to be probable. Thus it can be seen
how, even in a case like this, any sound historical
judgment must take into account not only the
documents, but also the common tradition, while
it must treat not merely of the facts in isolation,
but the total picture, of which they are elements.

The same is the case with other characters, such
as the Emperor Tiberius or Pope Alexander VI.
Efforts have been made to destroy the belief in the
trustworthiness of the traditional view, but with-
out any real success, and with slight changes in
detail the portrait remains as it was.

Further, it is not to be doubted that even in
regard to the most thoroughly "documented" of
historical facts tradition plays a large part in our
belief. Creighton said somewhere that apart from
tradition there was not sufficient evidence to prove
that Julius Caesar ever lived, and the same fact is

240 APPENDIX

proved indirectly by the famous theory of Huet
in the seventeenth century. In the interests of
the Papacy, Huet argued that there never had taken
place any Councils before that of Trent; i.e., that
the whole of Church history was a fiction. In our
own day the same was contended from an opposite
standpoint by the late Mr. Johnson. He held
that the whole of history from 500 to 1500 was
imaginary, the deliberate creation of the monastic
orders, and to get over certain obvious difficulties
he presumed that, where there was other than
Christian authority, that was due to a similar
fiction on the part of Mohammedan monks. I quote
these cases, not for any value in the theories, but
as proof of the difficulties that face any enquirer
who is resolved to jettison tradition from all his-
torical beliefs.

II

This is the first impression made upon the reader
by Mr. Thompson's book on Miracles in the New
Testament.^ The age-long faith of Christendom
goes for nothing. In his view the consciousness
of the Church creates not even a presumption in
favour of any single interpretation — indeed the
presumption is rather the other way. Now it
might not be accurate to say that, critically speak-
ing, the Church tradition affords more than a pre-
sumption. But that it affords less is not so much a
surrender of any conception of Divine guidance in
the religious society, but it is false to ^the first

APPENDIX 241

principles of forming the most ordinary historical
judgments. In starting to write a life of Bossuet,
for instance, I cannot divest myself of those impres-
sions about the grand siecle that have lived them-
selves into the mind of cultivated Europe and have
been slowly infusing their meaning into me §ince
the days when I read Voltaire's history before I
went to a public school. I approach the topic
through a whole world of presuppositions, senti-
ments, and imaginings, which have built themselves
into a picture with very little of conscious con-
struction on my part. True, when the evidence
is mastered, in some respects the current tradition
will be modified and my appreciation of its mean-
ing will be deeper. But tradition is rarely at fault
in regard to the main lineaments of any character
who held the stage, and it ought always to be taken
into account even by a writer who desires to set
up a different view. As a matter of fact the
vast development of historical investigation in
the nineteenth century has not greatly altered our
judgments, though it has deepened our knowledge
and modified it in detail, in regard to any of the
great public men. Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth,
Charles I and his sons, Marlborough, Joseph II,
Richelieu, Frederic the Great, Maria Teresa do not
loom so very differently to us from what they did
to our grandfathers, however greatly we have
deepened our acquaintance with the social and
political conditions of their life.

However that may be, no historian ought to

17

242 APPENDIX

approach the study of any well known historical
personage without taking into account the tradi-
tional portrait and treating it as at least having a
very strong presumption in its favour. Or else how
did it arise? For this is where he begins. He
starts from that notion of the character which has
become universal, which is impressed upon the
mind rather by suggestion and feeling than by direct
statement and is a presupposition of the very motive
which drives him to criticise.

Now in regard to the miracles, and still more in
regard to those of them enshrined in the Creeds,
the tradition of the Christian Church affords at
least as valuable a help as does the popular judg-
ment of a king or a soldier. Yet from Mr. Thomp-
son's book one would scarcely know that it existed,
and might almost suppose that these narratives
were some newly constructed hypotheses which a
revolutionary school of theologians were trying to
bolster up by a non-natural use of the documents.
I do not say that the consciousness of the Church
in a matter of this kind is infallible; certainly it
cannot be assumed to be so beforehand. But I
do say, as Professor Denney said, that the very
institution of Sunday is a standing evidence, too
frequently ignored, of the fact that the Church
is built upon the faith that on the first day of
the week the Lord rose again leaving an empty
grave.

The question of our Lord's miracles cannot be
decided by discussing them in isolation. * First of

APPENDIX 243

all we must have some view of the narrative as a
whole. Now Mr. Thompson does not profess to
do this, although, as I shall indicate, he really does
write with his mind made up as to what cannot
have happened. At any rate he never discusses
the problem about the total character of the, im-
pression made upon us by the documents —
whether it does not present us with features that
are supernatural. As I have urged in the text,
the total massive impression of the New Testament
narratives seems to me so strong and so wonderful
that, unless I were hindered by irresistible prejudice,
I should say that we have here to do with events
in a high degree mysterious, with what has all the
marks of an irruption of influences from the spirit-
world into that of sense, producing, as might well
be anticipated, amazing disturbances. For if there
be a spirit-world behind this and it has relations
with ours — if even what Mr. Thompson somewhat
inconsistently admits be true, then that these
results of such a unique fact should be strange,
abnormal, miraculous is only natural.

I believe that this conclusion can be sustained
even if we take the Synoptics alone, or S. John, or
the Epistles of S. Paul; though on the grounds
stated I do not believe that this separation is legiti-
mate, or even that we have any real right to separate
the evidence of the New Testament from the con-
tinuing life of the Church and its power today in
the individual experience. For we must bear in
mind that one well-attested conversion or one

244 APPENDIX

specifically Christianised life outweighs as positive
evidence the existence of a thousand unbelievers or
Pagans, precisely as one well-authenticated ghost
story is positive evidence about a spirit-world,
which would not be destroyed by proving a hundred
other stories to be figments. Speaking as one who
has been concerned in historical studies for more
than twenty years, I say that it would take a great
deal more argument than any I have yet come
across to convince me of the untruth of the general
character of the New Testament. The impression,
which deepens on every reading, is quite plain —
like a flash of light — that I hold here the record
of a spiritual experience which speaks from the
world beyond and has produced profound and
unusual disturbance in the physical universe.
This seems to my apprehension the plain fact; a
fact made more patent by its after-results and to be
accepted, like other facts, whatever general scheme
of notions a man adheres to. It matters not for
this purpose whether a man be idealist, realist,
sceptic, intellectualist, pragmatist, here he has to
do with a genuine outbreak from the world beyond,
and he must harmonise the fact of that outbreak
with his system or change it as best he may.

Personally it seems to me that the Creeds and
the Church are but the expression of that fact, are
indeed part of it, and on grounds stated above, it
is the whole fact that is the real living thing; the
details are but abstractions, and it is to that whole
fact, as the expression of " God in Christ *reconcil-

APPENDIX 245

ing the world unto Himself," that my adhesion is
given and by which I obtain "the fellowship of
the mystery." ^

III

Let us, however, pass from this topic and con-
sider the treatment which Mr. Thompson gives to
the documents, how the first and most notable
feature of his treatment is that he nowhere gives
any serious reflection to the total impression created
by the documents as a whole. We shall never get
a true view either of a character, an epoch, or a
book if we seek first for the details and, adding up
our impressions, produce the result as a sort of
addition sum. Fancy judging a Keats* sonnet
by the first four lines or Esmond by three
chapters taken at random. It is the whole which
makes a work of life or of art. On that we must
have some provisional view before we proceed to
analysis of details. It is now recognised by psy-
chologists that this is the way in which the mind
works; it starts from a vaguely defined continuum
and proceeds to split it up into objects. So we have
to do with our historical judgments as with our
literary. First of all we must frame for ourselves
some general impression as to the man, the epoch,
or the book with which we are dealing, and then
proceed to deepen, to correct, and to define this
impression more precisely by a closer study of
detail. The whole comes before the parts in this
as in any living thing.

246 APPENDIX

Here it is the total fact that has the character
of miracle. It is there that we obtain that irresist-
ible impression of witnessing an invasion of this
world by powers from that beyond — a view which
is only inadmissible provided the world as we see
it be self-explanatory and complete. If this be not
so, we cannot rule out beforehand the supernatural
character of the Christian fact, and it is as parts
of this alleged supernatural fact that the miracles
are to be considered. They are not single and un-
related marvels, and yet that is the way in which
criticism of this sort habitually treats them.

Let us take two instances of this unbiassed
criticism. The narratives of the first two chapters
of S. Luke are well known, and their internal soli-
darity is the most obvious feature. Mr. Thompson,
however, will have none of this, and following Prof.
Kirsopp Lake, endeavours, by splitting them into
pieces, to shew that the story of the miraculous
birth forms no integral part. It is a later addition.
There is no ground in the MSS. for this assertion,
and hence its sole support is the prepossession of
the writer against any abnormal occurrence. I quote
his words:

"But probably the best solution of the diffi-
culties of the passage is to suppose that the four
words C7r€t avSpa ov yiyvwo-KO), without which there
would be no obscurity and no suggestion of
the Virgin Birth in the Gospel, are either a modi-
fication of S. Luke's source, introduced by the
Evangelist himself, as editor, or a later- addition

APPENDIX 247

to the text of Luke by some person or congrega-
tion who wished to make the miracle quite clear.
There is no textual authority for doubting the
words. But we know that editorial modifications
are a common feature of the Gospel. And we
have no reason, unfortunately, to suppose that
even the best texts which we possess are free from
interpolations." ^

It is not easy to treat this objection seriously —
it can obviously have no weight at all save to a
mind resolved beforehand to find some way out of
the clear testimony of the Gospel.

One more instance will witness to the sanity
and balance of this criticism. The narrative of
the feeding of the five thousand occurs in all four
Gospels. If the writer's view be sound that the
miracle of the four thousand is only a variant, this
only proves how widespread was the story. Clearly,
it formed part of the very earliest tradition. Nor
can it be dismissed by a manipulation of the MSS.
The author, however, finds no difficulty. Following
M. Loisy he pronounces it to be a Eucharistic
myth. It had better be given in his own words.

"But probably the most valuable clue to the
meaning of the narrative is supplied by the institu-
tion of the Eucharist in the Early Church. Sup-
pose an original incident, the exact nature of which
we cannot now determine, but which must have
been remarkable enough to impress itself upon the
memory of the apostles, to be compared with the
stories of the Old Testament prophets (I Kings

248 APPENDIX

xvii. 8-16; 2 Kings iv. 42-44), and to be regarded
at a comparatively early date as a miracle. This
incident may have been transformed, by the pious
imagination of a later generation, into the original
institution of the Agape and Eucharist. Then the
account of it would be assimilated to the actual
experience of Christian worship. At the Eucharist,
which might sometimes be held out of doors, and
at which the congregation would naturally be
arranged in groups, Jesus Himself was still
present among His friends; still, as Head of the
Family of the faithful, blessed and brake the
bread; still miraculously satisfied the utmost needs
of all who came. Further, it was natural to think
that, if He had performed this symbolic act once
in Jewish territory, He must have done it again
among the Gentiles; and thus the alternative
tradition of the Feeding of the Four Thousand
found ready admission to the Gospel.^

*'It is difficult to see why, unless there was some
such ecclesiastical motive for its preservation, the
story of this miracle should have appeared six times
in the Gospels, and always with such an amount
of detail. The fact that it is so often described is
not a sign that the Evangelists were particularly
sure that it happened, but rather that it was par-
ticularly appropriate to the needs of those for
whom they wrote."

Further argument is hardly needed with expla-
nations like this ready to hand. It would be
equally feasible to interpret the whole Gospel

APPENDIX 249

narrative, in the method once fashionable, as a
sun-myth. For no conceivable phenomenon, how-
ever unusual, but might be trimmed into normal
categories by methods so drastic and subjective.
Of course this exegesis can have no weight except
for those who are resolved beforehand to reject all
that is abnormal.

That is indeed the spirit of the book. True it
is that the writer refrains from denying the abstract
possibility of miracles, but this exception is purely
verbal. On page 5 we find him saying "To admit
a miracle is to commit intellectual suicide." When
an academic writer begins an unbiassed enquiry
with a dictum of that kind, we can predict pretty
readily what conclusions he will come to. More
significant even than this statement is the remark
in the course of his reply in The Guardian that "the
amount of evidence which exists for miracles is
itself the proof that they never happened." To
argue with a writer who takes up a position like this
is obviously out of the question. It is a case of
heads I win, tails you lose. If the evidence is slight
or a little confused we are to withhold our belief
because there is too little; if it be incontrovertible
we are still to withhold it because there is too
much. This truly amazing sentence is a reductio
ad ahsurdum of his whole argument.'* That argu-
ment, however, with the discussion which it has
aroused, will have served a good purpose if it
avails once more to bring out the well known
fact that the question of the abnormal in his-

250 APPENDIX

tory is at bottom philosophical or theological and
can never be decided by the documents alone.
It all depends on the attitude of mind with which
you approach it. One would have thought that
all this had been sufficiently established by the
classical work on Miracles (ignored by Mr. Thomp-
son), Mozley's Bampton Lectures. That all depends
on our previous attitude is demonstrated over and
over again by the writer, in spite of himself, in
phrases like those quoted, and others, and in his
preference of a vast quantity of ingenious theories
to the clear meaning of the New Testament and
the whole tradition of the Church. And indeed it
is very commonly recognised — by friend and foe
alike. A friend of mine once said to me, ''It is not
a question of evidence, it is a question of taste, and
the taste for miracle has gone out.'' That is the
modern attitude. Only I deny the statement.
True of the last generation it is less and less true
of our own. Recent knowledge of faith-healing,
thought-transference, and the well established cases
of "ecstatics'* and "levitation" are bringing back
once more that habit of mind which can approach
strange occurrences without ruling them out before-
hand by some appeal to laws of nature, or to what
is, or is not, conceivable. Mr. Thompson's remarks
about the "walking on the water" and the nature
miracles savour rather of the "brave days" of Pro-
fessor Tyndall than of anything we have now.
Thus it appears to me to be an entire mistake when
Mr. Thompson speaks of criticism as tjiough it

APPENDIX 251

were a purely independent science and could estab-
lish certain conclusions universally acceptable.
For the moment you pass beyond the range of
the normal, everything depends on your previous
attitude towards the supernatural. According as
your general view is favourable or unfavourable to
it, so must you approach the evidence. If you believe
or consider it probable that we are surrounded by
living spirits who may influence this world and know
more about it than we do, you cannot fail to approach
the evidence in a very different spirit from one who
believes such powers to be non-existent or so highly
improbable as to be practically negligible. This
distinction is seen daily in the different approach
made towards ghost-stories, and I suppose by some
even in regard to thought-transference or mind-
cure. Does anyone suppose that Prof. Ray Lan-
kester and Sir Oliver Lodge, both of them eminent
scientific enquirers, would be likely to agree as to
the results of a dozen meetings of the Society of
Psychical Research?

So in regard to the New Testament. Not all,
but a great deal of our view will depend on whether
we hold a belief in regard to the other world akin
to that of S. John or S. Paul or whether we start
by ruling out of court with M. Seignobos all miracu-
lous narratives because we think it a principle of
historical criticism that "miracles do not happen"!
The truth is that any hope of a general agreement
in regard to narratives dealing with events which on
the face of them are supra-normal is a chimera. It

252 APPENDIX

is as little likely to be realized as a universal theistic
belief based on the alleged irrefragable proofs. If
they are intellectually coercive, how is it that so
many reflecting persons are unconvinced by them?
In history, as in philosophy or theology, there
is no likelihood of a compulsive certainty based
on the documents alone and apart from faith.
The evidence may be enough to confirm a
waverer or puzzle a doubter, but it never was
and never will be enough of itself to convince a
determined unbeliever in the other world, and by
its very nature it cannot be, because it is always
possible for the sceptic to say, with Hume, that
some form of self-delusion is more probable than
the truth of the narrative.^

Now it is this general attitude towards the other
world that is the most startling feature of this book.
It comes out most clearly in the writer's attitude
towards the Fourth Gospel. It is well known that
even some Unitarian scholars hold to a belief in
Christ, as the Incarnate Logos, who are yet unable
to accept the miracles. But of this Mr. Thompson
will have none. He complains of the ** intellectual
inadequacy" of the Gospel and lays bare his feeling
in his attitude towards the prologue. He describes
its aim correctly enough, but only to reject it.

"The fourth Gospel begins with a supernatural-
istic account of the Incarnation. This it propounds
in the prologue, stating (with a deliberate parallel-
ism of expression to the opening of the Jewish Bible)
that the story of Jesus is the story of the entrance

APPENDIX 253

into the world under ordinary conditions of space
and time of the Eternal Word of God. Pre-existent
with God, He had been God's agent in the creation
of the world, which now He visited and revivified,
as the Source of all spiritual life and light." A
little further on he adds: "To sum up, the aim, of
the fourth Gospel is to place the timeless, spaceless
person of the Word of God into the narrow condi-
tions of time and place in which Jesus of Nazareth
lived and died. This can be done in faith without
damage to either side of the antinomy. It cannot
be done in history without a weakening either of
the humanity or of the divinity of Christ."

Thus, in Mr. Thompson's view, the whole doc-
trine of the Logos and any belief in the pre-existence
of our Lord is a product of superstition. Thus he
throws over with one wave of the hand the view of
one who understood the Gospel if any man ever did
(Bishop Westcott) "The Unchangeable sum of
Christianity is the message " — " The Word was God
and the Word became flesh," while it would reduce
to ruins the greater part of the confession of the
other great critic. Dr. Hort, as expressed in his
famous Hulsean Lectures on The Way, the Truth,
and the Life. It is not easy to see what remains
of the theology of the Incarnation if this view
be accepted, although it must be allowed that
at the close certain phrases not very consistent
with the writer's main position are introduced
implying that our Lord as the perfect result
of evolution is to be worshipped as God. This

254 APPENDIX

point is of importance because in most of the
discussion the significance of this part of the
work seems to have been overlooked. Certainly
it shews that the writer is far more at variance
with Christian theology than some of his defenders
have claimed.

Here in similar passages the true drift of the book
is revealed. It is the total mentality of the writer,
so far as it can be judged, that is far more repugnant
to me than any of his treatment of details. Except
in the form of a Pantheistic Nature-worship, I see
no real loophole for any belief in a supernatural
world.

IV

As I have said in the text, the question of miracles
is really the question of the existence of a transcen-
dent world. Does there exist behind the veil a
Being or beings of spiritual nature with knowledge
and powers more than human and able to influence
our life in the world of sense? To deny this exist-
ence is to surrender the last vestige of the Christian
doctrine of the other world. Yet if such beings
have any relation at all with this life they must
somehow or other cause that to happen which
otherwise would not; and vice versa. When such
events are normal in character we call them special
providences. When they are not we call them
miracles. In Balzac's story La Peau de Chagrin
both are illustrated. When the hero's wishes are
granted, so far as I recollect the form is never

APPENDIX ^55

miraculous. The result occurs by the providential
ordering of normal occurrences. On the other hand,
the shrinkage of the leather, which takes place
instantaneously with each new use of his power,
is definitely miraculous. It occurs as the direct
result of his words without any intermediary. Now
to suppose that there is beyond us a spiritual world,
and that it either has no relation to this, or that it
produces no effects other than normal, must be
either to deny its character as free and personal or
else to lay down that neither in knowledge nor
power can it exceed ourselves. But it may produce
effects of this kind; all recorded and, I think, all
conceivable miracles could be brought under this
category. I refuse to make the truly tremendous
assumption that they never happen and never have
happened — even apart from any of the stories
that they actually did happen.

The current dislike to the miraculous is due to
the marvellous triumphs of the mechanical method
and to the faith that it is the sole means of
knowledge. It is frequently due to a subtle form
of materialism which, by asserting the supernatural
significance of this world, conceives that it has
saved the spiritual sense, whereas it has merely
deified Nature. The whole point of our per-
plexities is not whether or no this life may have
a spiritual meaning, but whether it contains any
freedom or all is determined; and secondly
whether this face of things we see, commonly
called the natural world, is the whole of being,

^56 APPENDIX

or whether it be but a Httle bit and is sur-
rounded by a vaster invisible universe peopled
with personal spirits and functioning in ways
different to ours.

Christianity stands for the latter view and always
has stood for it, and when it be once admitted there
is no real difficulty in regard to miracle. Of course,
if we take Nature in the sense of Huxley or Mill,
as equivalent to all that happens, then miracles are
as natural as sparrows (both alike being mysterious).
No one supposes that a miracle is contrary to the
nature of things, and part of the ground for crediting
them is that they are congruous with a God who
created man and nature. The same is the case
with the rather wearisome controversy about law.
Miracles are not contrary to the law of the universe
— it is unthinkable; they may be regarded as
instances of a higher kind of life with its laws super-
vening upon a lower, just as man's free action by
the law — i.e., the order — of his being can stop
a cricket ball and "interfere" with the results of
gravitation. What we have experience of is the
different kinds of nature, the mechanical, then the
organic, the free activity of man, and finally there
are rarely recognised occurrences which indicate
beings of a higher order.

There is thus no objection to speak of miracles
as instances of a higher law. Personally I am dis-
posed to think the whole use of the term law is
misleading, but there is not the smallest ground
for any believer in miracles refusing lo use the

APPENDIX 257

term if he prefers it. Every fact that happens is
to some extent new and individual, and a miracle
is but an extreme instance of this. On the other
hand, every fact that happens takes its place in a
series — it is a bit of that great order of the world.
The question is whether that order is personal or
mechanical, for as M. Bergson so admirably shews,
the idea of mere non-order is unthinkable; the only
question is what kind of order we have to deal with.
If the ultimate basis of all order be a God who is
Love — i.e., who is personal and free — then such
events as the Resurrection are in the highest degree
natural, they are signs of that Eternal order; while
the more nearly anything approaches to the purely
mechanical, the more partial and abstract will it
be. As a fact, the moment you come to real life
you find mathematics gives but a very partial
account of it, and of the most apparently mechanical
facts, tells rather the tendency than the actual fact;
for in Nature, as some one put it, we never find that
1 is 1, and that is the assumption of logic and
mathematics. On this point I may refer to the
work quoted in the text. Dr. Karl Pearson's Gram-
mar of Science.

The contention of the Christian is that in the
last resort all the order of things is personal. More-
over, since on this view God has created a number
of free beings with a relative independence, there
is always uncertainty in the universe. The opposite
view is that, so far from this being the case, one
might (theoretically) and may by-and-bye practi-

18

258 APPENDIX

cally be able to predict the whole future of the
universe both in gross and detail, because every-
thing in it is mutually determined. At bottom this
view denies the reality of change and freedom and
treats the world as dead, i.e., given once for all,
and working out a formula like a calculating machine.
Between these two views there can never be any-
thing but conflict, and the various attempts to soften
determinism can none of them be pronounced
successful. It is the cardinal question of freedom
wherein lies the whole problem.

All this is left untouched by Mr. Thompson,
who does not seem to have ever considered the bear-
ing of his views on this topic. Others, however,
do not leave it here. The doctrine of special provi-
dences is almost more repugnant to the popular
sentiment even than that of miracles. For in the
nature of things the former are more numerous
and less unmistakable. Still more is this the case
with freedom. Disbelievers in miracles almost
invariably go on, as they logically ought, to a sheer
determinism. This is indeed needful if they want
one to get a clearly articulated scheme with the
state of the world at any one moment as the
mathematically deducible consequence of that pre-
ceding. It is because it conflicts with this that
freedom is discredited, and with freedom, of course,
the miraculous. That the two are bound up to-
gether is shewn by the following passage from Dr.
McDougall's new book on Body and Mind. Argu-
ing from a scientific standpoint for the existence of

APPENDIX 259

the individual soul, he puts the current objection
of what Sir Oliver Lodge would call "the orthodox
man of science." These are his words:

"Under these conditions the working hypotheses
of the natural sciences become confidently held
doctrines from which we feel ourselves able to
deduce the limits of the possible; and we seem able
to rule out from our scheme of the universe all that
confused crowd of obscure ideas which, under the
names of magic, occultism, and mysticism, have
been at war with science ever since it began to take
shape as a system of verifiable ideas inductively
established on an empirical basis. Once admit on
the one hand that psychical influences may interfere
with the course of physical nature and '*you don't
know where you are''; you no longer can serenely
affirm that miracles do not happen. They may happen
at any moment and falsify the most confident predic-
tions of physical science."

This book deserves to be widely known. It
shews what are the living tendencies among students
of natural science. At least some of the acutest
minds are seen to be moving away (at this very
moment, when Mr. Thompson develops an* attack
based on the notions of the last generation) from
that monism, whether materialist or spiritualist,
to which all events are mere changes in the one
Being and miracles or new happenings and free-
dom or the existence of individuals are equally out
of court. His work illustrates incidentally to the
careful reader how closely connected are all three

260 APPENDIX

notions: belief in God as a real personal agent, i.e.,
in a transcendent world; belief in miracle, i.e., in
the livingness of the universe (on the other view
it is merely a machine); belief in the true individ-
uality, i.e., the soul of men and women. The
publication of this book is a remarkable phenomenon.
The writer has (I should suppose) no bias towards
Christianity and he approaches the subject rather
as a scientijSc observer than as a philosopher and
shews the hopeless inadequacy of the popular
doctrines of epiphenomenalism or psycho-physical
parallelism to concatenate the actual facts of
psychic life.

This passage of Dr. McDougall suggests one
other element in that dislike of the miraculous which
is so prevalent, an element not indiscernible in
certain words of Mr. Thompson about the Sacra-
ments and involved in his views of S. John. Miracles
are corrupting to religion, for they imply a ''magical '*
view of the nature of God. Now so far as I can
see, this widespread objection has its roots in that
Gnostic and Manichsean view of the material
universe which regards it as something evil, and is
at the bottom of all false asceticism and much of
the Puritan view of life. It is the false spiritualism
which flies from all contact with the outward world,
which animates the Zwinglian attack on Sacramental
grace, and is at the root of nearly all doctrines
which deny the Incarnation. It is held to be some-

APPENDIX 261

how degrading to God to hold that the regenera-
tion of man should proceed partly by any means
dependent on the outward world. Religion is in-
wardness and nothing else, and every material
means is a bar. This is the basis of Zwinglianism;
it is seen in all attempts to minimise the Incarna-
tion, and it is now reaching its complete expression
in the dislike and contempt for miracle. But if we
look this difficulty in the face, we can at once see
how unreal it is and largely dependent for its force
on the unpleasant associations which many people
call up in connection with the word *' magic." If
we are a world of spirits surrounded by a cloud of
invisible witnesses, also spirits, and if these spirits
act on this world at all, then so far as their actions
produce results in the world of sense, they must
be magical.

Besides, to assert the contrary is to deny the
sacredness of outward things and to suppose that
redemption is concerned with a part, not with the
whole of life. I need not here labour the point
that Christ on any Christian view came to effect
redemption for the entire being of man — body
no less than soul and spirit — and that it is a false
abstraction to leave out one element. As Westcott
says: "The Resurrection teaches not the immor-
tality of the soul, but the immortality of the man."
Now the magical view of the Incarnation asserts no
more than that it is an Incarnation, the entrance into
the condition of human life of the Eternal spirit;
and how such an entrance is likely to be devoid of

262 APPENDIX

disturbances in the material order, I know not.
The magical view of the Sacraments merely asserts
that God communicates Himself to us by the con-
secration of the simplest means of common life and
emphasizes the *'givenness'* of grace in a way that
none of the subjective theories which claim a higher
spirituality can ever succeed in doing. The magical
view of the world involved in the miraculous is
simply the assertion that this life is not all; that it
is encompassed by a spirit world beyond, and that
that world can have influence over this, directly and
not merely indirectly. How any believer in the life
beyond can deny this, I cannot understand.

VI

Finally Mr. Thompson informs us, with that
confident dogmatism which is a note of all his writ-
ing, that the mental conditions in which miracles
were credible have vanished, and that they will never
return. On the contrary, so far as I can judge,
they very nearly did disappear in the last century,
but they are coming back now, as hard as they can
pelt. On all sides that hard crust of intellectualist
orthodoxy is breaking up. The mechanical account
of Nature is more and more seen to be abstract and
partial. We see on every hand the collapse of the
heroic efforts to force on to the Procrustean bed of
purely physical and mathematical method even those
branches of natural science which are concerned
with life; while the attempt to stretch human life,

APPENDIX 263

still more art and religion on this bed, is daily ex-
hibiting its futility; it always gives a plausible
explanation, but it does so by omitting the one
important element which makes the difference. It
is not with science, but with the mechanical
theory of the world, that the belief in miracles
conflicts — with that view which, treating causa-
tion as the category of identity applied to time,
finds nothing in the effects really new, and by
implication denies the life of things, the reality
of change. Prof. J. A. Thompson, whose scienti-
fic distinction is unquestioned, asks. Is there
one science of Nature? He argues that the
moment you come to the problem of life, you
pass beyond any possible mechanical explanation
and proceeds to quote very eminent authorities
on his side, such as Dr. J. S. Haldane, Driesch, and
Joly.

Sir Oliver Lodge, whom I quote in the text,
affords a further instance. In history we look back
with a smile on Buckle's attempt to force the whole
of human life into a formula of inevitable develop-
ment; and sometime back a protest justified by
the evidence was made on the danger of over-
emphasizing the element of continuity. But this
is not all. The moment you pass beyond the
normal you find a well established body of knowledge,
quite inexplicable by any mechanical means. Mr.
Thompson appears to think that those of our Lord's
miracles concerned with disease cease to be such
by calling them cases of mind-cure. But neither

264 APPENDIX

mind-cure nor thought-transference are really ex-
plicable on the mechanical theory. We now know
that mind-cures exist and have begun to classify
them, but they remain beyond interpretation, except
as the free exercise of psychic activity. The
method, in fact, by which Mr. Thompson gets rid
of many of his cases is quite illegitimate. The
now general belief in mind-cures, so far from render-
ing more difficult our faith in the other narratives,
makes it far easier, because it lays bare something
of the richness of psychical power; while it also
enormously strengthens the general sense of the
trustworthiness of the narrative. It is amazing
that these discoveries should be made use of against
the miraculous. Not only this, but the increase
of interest in mysticism and certain forms of Oriental
religion, while it may not always be Christian in
tendency, is sometimes even the direct opposite,
yet is evidence that men are growing wearied of
the intellectual way of looking at things and are
seeking for modes of knowledge more intimate and
spiritual, and also for powers that are beyond the
normal. I am not commending this tendency in
all its aspects, but its existence is evidence of a vast
movement of the human spirit which will sweep
away our Western incredulity and leave such argu-
ments as those of this book stranded with an earlier
attack on "Supernatural Religion." The belief
in freedom, which was rapidly vanishing a genera-
tion ago, is coming back with a rush, and though
that rush will produce, is producing, many results

APPENDIX 265

not favourable to the Christian Faith, it will at
least remove some of the antecedent objections to
considering its evidence.

More and more does it seem clear that we have
to do with a universe in which being exists on dif-
ferent levels. There is the mechanical level of the
physicists, or inorganic Nature; there is the sentient
life of the animal world; and the character-making,
active life of man; in the latter we discern alike in
ourselves and others many different levels — the
emotional, the intellectual, the spiritual. All are
interpenetrating and none (probably not even the
mechanism of Nature) exist in active isolation.
But it is, roughly speaking, convenient to divide
the world in this way. Now, just as there are cer-
tain powers dependent on the active use of the
intellect, so there are levels of knowledge and insight
that are beyond the reach of the intellect and only
very imperfectly to be expressed by its categories.
These levels alike of knowledge and of power are the
region in which events called miraculous properly
are to be expected — events, that is, not to be
brought about by the normal activities of the
physical world or by those of man's intellectual
scientific knowledge of it.

It is this fact in which we find the answer to that
very popular objection to miracles, that believers
in them only see God "in the gaps" of the natural
order, or, as Mr. Thompson puts it, the only way to
save the true supernatural is to deny the miraculous.
As has been said before, the only "supernatural'*

266 APPENDIX

which such a view can save is a Pantheism. Chris-
tians no more deny God*s presence in the world,
because they assert His action above and beyond it,
than a behever in the Sacramental presence denies
His presence in every time and place. On this
point I said something in the third lecture. What
we do deny is that God is no more than the world,
which is His work and not Himself. We refuse to
imprison God in Nature or to assert this immanence
in such a way as to deny His transcendence. The
ordinary working of natural laws, if we so phrase
it, may be called the indirect and the miracle the
direct act of spiritual power. I may be serving
God equally when I clean my boots as when I say
my prayers, but I am not serving Him the same
way — and miracles are no more than analogous;
they are to ordinary events what worship is to work.
It may be true that

" God is seen God
In the star, in the stone, in'the flesh, in the soul and the clod."

But He is seen to be God more fully in living beings
than in dead matter, in developing man than in
brute beasts, in the spiritual levels of life rather
than the animal or intellectual. So, though He
may be everywhere present in natural facts, there
may be some which set forth His presence and His
power over, not merely in, Nature by some startling
and unique effect, like the Resurrection; and thus
we are able to say with Westcott: *' Christianity
rests on the conviction that in the Life and Death

APPENDIX 267

and Resurrection of Christ something absolutely
new and unparalleled has been added to the experi-
ence of man, something new objectively and not
simply new as a combination or interpretation of
earlier or existing phenomena; that in Christ
heaven and earth have been historically united;
that in Him this union can be made real through
all time to each believer; that His Nature and
Person are such that in Him each man and all men
can find a complete and harmonious consumma-
tion in an external order. The Life of Christ is
something absolutely unique in the history of the
world — unique not in degree but in kind. It is
related to all else that is unfolded in time, as birth,
for example, is related to the development of the
individual." And thus, as he says elsewhere,
"miracles are more properly the substance than the
proof of revelation," and they are rightly needed
in any revelation of redemption that embraces
the whole of being and stops short at no partial
manifestation.

True, such acts must be rare from the nature
of the case. Yet that they occur in connection
with times or persons of special spiritual endow-
ment was (until recently) the common opinion.
For it seems to me beyond question that in the so-
called ecclesiastical miracles there is a greater sub-
stratum of fact than it is now fashionable to allow.
For instance, in regard to the cases mentioned by
Mr. Thompson, I find his reasoning quite uncon-

268 APPENDIX

vincing — whether in his minimising account of
the Franciscan story or of that related of Father
John of Cronstadt. It seems to me the purest
perversity to deny that the cure mentioned in the
latter was a direct answer to prayer. Indeed the
view which such an interpretation gives as to the
writer's notions of prayer is one more argument
against his whole position. I believe indeed that
stranger things have happened, and are now hap-
pening, than we can account for by any ordinary
means. But in our Western world we have become
so attuned to the mechanical method that we have
neither eyes nor ears for any other. This obsession,
which is a veritable superstition, is now passing.
There is an increasing recognition that at certain
levels of psychic experience powers may be tapped
which are abnormal. With this recognition there
will come once more the hope of approaching fairly
the remarkable galaxy of such events which we
contemplate in the New Testament.

VII

For one thing comes out more clearly than any-
thing else from Mr. Thompson's analysis, the volume
of the experiences. If the reader did not know the
fact before, he is hardly like to be unaware, after
reading Mr. Thompson's work, of the number and
variety of supra-normal occurrences which are
recorded — even if we grant, which I da not, that

APPENDIX 269

he can erase all the cures and treat them as ordinary.
It appears clearer than ever that the New Testa-
ment is soaked through and through with miracle.
The task of removing it is Sisyphean. As fast as
one is rolled away another appears. To effect his
object a mountain of critical ingenuity has to be
constructed. And it is. Theory is piled upon
theory, interpretation added to interpretation,
every possible aid is taken from textual criticism
and speculative mythology, every form of non-
natural explanation exhausted before the records
can be "purged of their offence." When they are,
the reader is left asking himself, Where will all this
end? If so much is taken, what is there that really
remains? If the narrative has to be so mutilated,
why not go the whole hog with the school of Drews
or Jensen? Even then he has this most difficult
problem before him: Are the facts, as trimmed and
fitted into normal categories, adequate to account
for the martyrs and the saints, for the history of
the Church, for modern missions and Augustine's
conversion? I do not say that they can be proved
to be inadequate if you choose to postulate enough
of the creative religious instinct, but to me it seems
a far more probable and reasonable course to accept
the story substantially as it stands; to admit that
we are here in face of some unique operation of
that Amor che move il sole, e V altre stelle, and to
accept that summary of the experience in the
society .which it created.

270 APPENDIX

True, this leaves us in presence of a mystery,
and no one can assert that there are no difficulties.
Yet what corner of life is without it? Is it not
most probable that some of our difficulties are due
to the very abnormality of the facts men tried to
recall? A religious account of the world without
mystery is not a religious account at all. As Dr.
Sanday said in his sermon on the book, printed in
The Guardian for May 12, 1911.

" Can we expect to make both ends absolutely
meet? Is there to be no margin that we are
obliged to leave open? Is there to be no element
of mystery in which we must needs acquiesce as
mystery, until we know even as we are known? If
that were so, the field of religious belief would be
different from all the rest of human life; it would
have in it less of mystery just at the point where
we should expect that it would have more. In
short, it would approximate more and more to
that type which the poet described as —

A reasoning self-sufficing thing.
An intellectual All-in- All!

" I do not think that that is exactly the type that
most Christians would wish to aspire to; and I do
not think that they are under any obligation to
aspire to it."

No one would deny the superficial plausibility
of this book any more than they would that of the
Jesus according to S. Mark. But both are in my
judgment fundamentally vicious historically, and

APPENDIX 271

the supercilious treatment of the Founder, "Jesus
was no theologian,*' does not commend the author's
thesis to a reverent mind. On the whole a perusal
of the books strengthens rather than weakens one's
hold on the miraculous and shews how much it is
an integral part of the Gospel; how bare and drab
is the view of things disclosed by unbelief. The
real question is whether there is anything beyond the
world. If there be such things as real change,
fresh experiences, creative evolution, then there is
no antecedent difficulty and the evidence for the
great Christian Fact seems to me to be irresistible.
If there is not, if we are tied to a mechanical theory
of nature, then of course we must find some way of
getting rid of the abnormal from these narratives.
But then also we must reject a God living and
active behind the phantasmagoria of sense; we
must give up our sense of a world of struggling and
choosing men, and then must set aside the hope of
a whole creation of redeemed spirits existing in a
risen life.

The question is not about law or no law in the
universe, but whether the law we normally see in
operation, or think we do, be a part or the whole;
whether there is any real freedom in the universe;
whether life is really the working out of purely
mechanical relations, all of whose problems might
ultimately be solved by some super-Babbage with
an improved calculating machine; or whether it is
wiser to think of it as existing on different levels
— the mechanical, the sentient, the animal, and

272 APPENDIX

intellectual, the spiritual — and admit that they
all interpenetrate to such an extent that the
irruptions of life at the last level produce great
and unpredictable disturbances in the world of
sense.

NOTES

NOTES
I

ARMAGEDDON OR THE INTELLECTUAL
CHAOS

(1) Bussell's (Dr. F. W.) Bampton Lectures, 1905
(Methuen & Co.), p. 225.i

(2) On this point see Bussell's Bampton Lectures. He
points out that it "is thought by some to be a philosophi-
cal achievement and an act of creditable daring to call
the sum of things God" and argues the futility of this
gilded atheism.

"It is no novelty to accuse modern Hegelianism and
ancient Stoicism of being indistinguishable from pure
Naturalism, of employing terms out of their current
usage, rather from habit and a desire for comprehension
than from any conscious wish to deceive. . . .

"The tendency to save the comfort of religious terms
without their meaning or object will always satisfy
many who cannot bear to lose at one blow the traditional
scheme of life. . . .

"It mitigates the horror of determinism, and if it bring
some vague solace to those who are able to entertain it,
it fulfils that standard of usefulness which is the sole ulti-
mate test of creeds as of institutions. Founded securely

^The passages from Bussell's Bampton Lectures here quoted
are printed by permission of Dr. Bussell and Messrs. Methuen
& Co., Ltd.

275

276 NOTES

on faith and sentiment (personal but incommunicable),
it can resolutely close the ears to outward remonstrance
on the part of pure Positivism or moralistic Religion." —
Bussell's (Dr. F. W.) Bampton Lectures, 1905, p. 113.

(3) "We shall grasp eagerly at any intimation that
God cares for us, has work for us to do; nay has need of
our help. It is on this secret or silent conviction that
Western life has been founded with its strange and anom-
alous features of self-repression and common action, wild
personal enterprise, and reverence for custom and tradi-
tion." — Bussell's Bampton Lectures, p. 133.

(4) Bergson gives an admirable account of the prevail-
ing tendency, which makes everything deducible from
the laws of matter and motion; a fact which, if it were
the case, would mean that we are all in a dead world,
working itself out like a machine.

"Les explications mecanistiques, disions nous, sont
valables pour les systemes que notre pensee detache
artificiellement du tout. Mais du tout lui-meme et des
systemes, qui dans ce tout, se constituent naturellement
a son image, on ne pent admettre a priori, qu'ils soient ex-
plicables mecaniquement, car alors le temps serait inutile,
et meme irreel. L'essence des explications mecaniques est
en effet de considerer I'avenir et le passe comme calculables
en fonction du present, et de pretendre ainsi que tout est
donnS." — Bergson's U Evolution CrSatrice, p. 40.
And then Du Reynaud.

"The time is passing when men can comfortably sup-
pose that Christian behaviour outlasts Christian dogma.'*
— Bussell's Bampton Lectures, p. 133.

(5) Tancred, by B. Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield
(Longmans, Green & Co.).

(6) Carnegie's (Canon W. H.) Churchmanship and
Character (John Murray), p. xiv.

NOTES 277

(7) Eucken's (Prof. R.) The Problem of Human Life
(T. Fisher Unwin), p. 297.

(8) Eucken's (Prof. R.) Christianity and the New Ideal-
ism (Harper & Brothers).

(9) Wister's (Owen) Lady Baltimore (Macmillan &
Co., Ltd.).

(10) Masterman's (C. F. G.) The Condition of England
(Methuen & Co., Ltd.).

(11) Haldane's (Lord) Universities and Public Life
(John Murray).

(12) James's (Prof. William) A Pluralistic Universe
(Longmans, Green & Co.).

(13) "B. D." in Pax.

(14) Prichard's (H. A.) Kant's Theory of Knowledge
(Clarendon Press, Oxford).

(15) Joseph in Mind, October, 1910.

(16) Galloway's (Dr. G.) Principles of Religious
Development (Macmillan & Co., Ltd.).

(17) Mill's (J. S.) Three Essays on Religion (Longmans,
Green & Co.), "On Nature," pp. 29, 30.

(18) Pearson's (Prof. Karl) The Grammar of Science,
3rd Edition (A. & C. Black), p. 153-4.

It is fair to say that the writer furnishes a mathemati-
cal proof, which in his view is conclusive, that "miracles
are incredible" (p. 142), and indeed he would appar-
ently be willing to persecute all believers in mystical or
ecstatic state as pernicious to social welfare (p. 138).
But it does not seem that this position is consistent with
that taken up in a later chapter on "Contingency and
Correlation." Mr. R. A. Bray, in an article in the
Daily News, called attention to the significance of Pro-
fessor Pearson's treatment of causation, and agreed that
his view leads right on to some such view of the world
as that outlined by M. Bergson. The point here to note

278 NOTES

is the insistence on the individuality of things and the
contingency in all events and the discarding of the idea
of absolute fixity. Certainly if the Christian view be
true that this world is encompassed by an invisible world
of spirits, then that this activity should be responsible
for that kind of variation we term miracle is natural
enough. He points out that *'all the universe provides
man is likeness in variations; he has thrust function into
it, because he desired to economise his limited intellectual
energy" (p. 167). No believer in the fact of miracles can
surely want more than this. "We have tried to get all
things under a perfectly inelastic category of cause and
effect. It has led to our disregarding the fundamental
truth that nothing in the universe repeats itself." The
writer of course disbelieves in will as a cause and refuses
to consider it as in any way different from other phenomena
of sequence. But he certainly shows how on the side of
science, if he accurately represents it, it is nonsense to talk
of the absurdity of such events as the Resurrection on
the hypothesis that this world is not all; an hypothesis
which is in no way ruled out by his own theory, which
is "purely" agnostic.

(19) Bierbaum's (Prof. Otto J.), Dostoieffsky and
Nietzsche, Hibbert Journal, July, 1911, pp. 827-8, 837.

(20) Garrod's (H. W.) The Religion of all Good Men
(Constable & Co., Ltd.).

(21) Sturt's (H.) The Idea of a Free Church (Mac-
millan & Co., Ltd.).

(22) Hay's (J. S.) The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus
(Macmillan & Co., Ltd.).

(23) In the Hibbert Journal, October, 1910. Cf. also
the following passage from Sir Oliver Lodge's The Chris-
tian Idea of God {Hibbert Journal, July, 1911, p. 704): —

NOTES 279

"The modern superstition about the universe is that,
being suffused with law and order, it contains nothing
personal, nothing indeterminate, nothing unforseen; that
there is no room for the free activity of intelligent beings,
that everything is mechanically determined, so that given
the velocity and acceleration and position of every atom
at any instant the whole future would be unravelled by
sufficient mathematical power. The doctrine of Chris-
tianity and Determinism is supposed to be based upon
experience. But experience includes experience of the
actions of human beings; and some of them certainly
appear to be of a capricious and undetermined character.
Or without considering human beings, watch the orbits
of a group of flies as they play; they are manifestly not
controlled completely by mechanical laws as are the mo-
tions of the planets. The simplest view of their activity
is that it is self-determined, that they are flying about
at their own will, and turning when and where they choose.
The conservation of energy has nothing to say against it.
Here we see free-will in its simplest form. To suppose
anything else in such a case; to suppose that every twist
could have been predicted through all eternity, is to intro-
duce preternatural complexity, and is quite unnecessary.
Why not assume what is manifestly the truth, that free-
will exists and has to be reckoned with, that the universe
is not a machine subject to outside forces, but a living
organism with initiations of its own; and that the laws
which govern it, though they include mechanical and
physical and chemical laws, are not limited to those, but
involve other and higher abstractions which may per-
haps some day be formulated for life and mind and
spirit? "

And' further on he continues (710) in reference to the
influence of departed spirits:

280 NOTES

"The region of the miraculous, it is called, and the bare
possibility of its existence has been hastily and illegiti-
mately denied. But so long as we do not imagine it to
be a region denuded of a Law and Order of its own, akin
to the law and order of the psychological realm, our denial
has no foundation. The existence of such a region may
be established by experience; its non-existence cannot be
established, for non-experience of it might merely mean
that, owing to deficiencies of our sense organs, it was
beyond our ken. In judging from what are called mira-
cles, we must be guided by historical evidence and liter-
ary criticism. We need not urge a priori objections
to them on scientific grounds. They need be no more
impossible, no more lawless than the interference of a
human being would seem to a colony of ants or bees."

(24) "It is time that attention was directed to the
forces, intellectual and social, which are slowly but surely
dissolving our Western civilisation." — Bussell's Bamp-
ton Lectures, p. 145.

(25) "There is a very large audience waiting, quite
free from a priori notions of the possibility of a reve-
lation, from any understanding of mere historic accu-
racy — waiting, I say, for an answer to this question,
which has recently gained in loudness and insistency: Can
we afford to do without Christ?" — Bussell, ihid.y p. 55.

n

BABYLON OR THE MODERN CRISIS

(1) Cram's (R. A.) The Gothic Quest (Gay & Hancock,
Ltd.).

"Can we as architects answer enthusiastically to the
call of men who desire a Christian Church "bringing to

NOTES 281

their assistance, not the considerations of a tradesman,
but the fire of an artist? . . . Can we come to look upon
architecture as a part of the vast language of art, the
exalted privilege of which is the expression of the emo-
tions, of the loftiest achievements of the soul of man, as
they can be expressed by no other human power?

"I believe we can. At all events we must if we Care
for our art at all except as a means of making, or trying
to make, a living. We shall have much to fight against.
We shall find opposing us a great civilisation that hates
religion, or scorns it; a civilisation made up very largely
of an un-Christian economic system, a sordid and un-
honoured society, venal and corrupt politics, rampant
commercialism, narrow ideals." — Cram, ibid.y pp. 200-1.

Cf. also the following passage from a very different
writer. Professor Babbitt, in The New Laokoon, writes:

"If the arts lack dignity, centrality, repose, it is because
the men of the present have no centre, no sense of anything
fixed and permanent either within or without themselves,
that they may oppose to the flux of phenomena and the
torrent of impressions. In a word, if confusion has crept
into the arts, it is merely a special aspect, of a more gen-
eral malady, of that excess of sentimental and scientific
naturalism from which, if my diagnosis be correct, the oc-
cidental world is now suffering. It remains therefore for
us to consider whether there is any means by which we
may react in just measure against this naturalism — by
which we may recover humanistic standards without
ceasing to be vital and spontaneous or in any way revert-
ing to formalism." — Babbitt's The New Laokooriy p. 185.

(2) Arnold's (Matthew) Stanzas in Memory of the
Author of Obermann (Macmillan & Co., Ltd.).

(3)-Ruskin's (John) Seven Lamps of Architecture (G.
Allen & Sons, Ltd.).

282 NOTES

(4) Bussell's (Dr. F. W.) "Christian Theology and
Social Progress " {Bampton Lectures) (Methuen & Co., Ltd.).

(5) Wells's (H. G.) New Worlds for Old (Constable &
Co., Ltd.) has an illuminating chapter on this topic.

(6) Dickinson's (G. Lowes) Justice and Liberty (Dent
& Sons, Ltd.), p. 71.

(7) Ibid., p. 129.

(8) Cooper's (E. H.) Twentieth Century Child (John
Lane).

(9) Masterman's (C. F. G.) The Condition of England.

(10) Morris's (William) The Earthly Paradise (Long-
mans, Green & Co.)

(11) Cram's (R. A.) The Gothic Quest (Gay and Han-
cock, Ltd.), pp. 81-2.

" It is no explanation of the hideousness of life and the
puerile mimicry of art which exist today to say that we
in this country [the United States] have no time for art
and the other amenities of life. On the contrary we all
know that art is not a scientific or economic product.
We know that it is a mental temper, a spiritual condition,
and we know that it is just as much an adjunct of whole-
some life as is bodily health. We have time enough for
art, much more than many peoples have possessed in the
past. Beauty takes no time. A good church can be built
as quickly as a bad church. It takes no longer to paint a
good than a poor picture — much less in fact. We spend
in a year more money on what we are pleased to call art
education than was spent in Italy during the whole four-
teenth century."

And again a little further on:

"If we are to possess a civilisation which is worth
expressing itself artistically, we must do something
besides establish art-lectureships; we must change the
conditions of life; the temper of the people" p" 93.

NOTES 283

(12) Cf. Bussell's "Christian Theology and Social
Progress" {Bampton Lectures), p. 319.

"Other religions start from a sublime idea of perfec-
tion and come down to average human level with reluc-
tance or condescension. But Christianity starts with
proposing to the sinner the spectacle of a suffering crim-
inal; and thus, by at once meeting the distressed and
the degraded on their own ground, raises on this basis a
theology which the wisest cannot exhaust.

"Other systems begin deductively, not with the vari-
ety and complexity of our life, but with the unity and
harmony of the whole; they are brought down, puzzled
and perplexed, to the 'principium individuationis ' (if I
may in this connection use the phrase) and to the * prob-
lem of Evil.* Christianity boldly confronts the difficulty
which they explain away with devious or plausible argu-
ment or else altogether avoid; it starts with the weakness
of God and the sin and sorrow of pain, and on this foun-
dation of fact, that may not be gainsaid, builds its edi-
fice of morals, of piety, and of hope.

"It is strange that this unvarying appeal to * faith,' a
belief in a reality so different to its 'appearances,' does not
prevent the message from being * understood ' even by the
humblest. Indeed, understanding that is to move men
to action and endeavour must always be of this charac-
ter; flawless knowledge, which mirrors unchanging veri-
ities, carries no such incentive or stimulus. 'To know
one's self as a perfect member of a perfect whole' is a
definition of religion which for most men would have
no meaning."

(13) Eucken's (R.) The Meaning and Value of Life
(A. & C. Black), p. 139.

(14) Eucken (R.), ibid., p. 140.

(15) Eucken (R.), ibid,y p. 57.

284 NOTES

(16) Eucken (R.), ibid., p. 72.

(17) Lodge's (Sir Oliver) Men and the Universe
(Methuen), pp. 6, 8, 22 L

III

CALVARY OR THE CHALLENGE OF THE
CROSS

(1) Russell's (Dr. F. W.) Bampton Lectures, 1905,
p. 121.

"The substance of my contention, as of every earnest
Christian and every genuine philosopher, is to assure the
one known reality of its sovereign importance and value,
not merely as a bye-product, an accidental epiphenome-
non, on the surface of an unending evolution, but as the
supreme centre of life, and being, and thought."
And again, ihid., p. 134:

"The Gospel transfers the interest from a secular or
cosmic process to the single life. If science can take
nothing into account but the fortunes of a solar system
or a sidereal universe, the gradual changes of a species,
the normal man, dismayed at these immensities, returns
to his own pressing needs.

"The individual claims (as we have seen) to be the
subject of a heavenly solicitude; and among religious be-
liefs must always prefer that system which assures to
him, spite of all seeming and present loss, a central place,
an ultimate victory. Now the Gospel appeals to him
because in its very essence it is a protest against Law;
it enlists its sympathy because Right is weak and not
powerful."

For the individualist basis of all true social feeling,
see the following:

NOTES 285

"The conception of life is only * social,' and devoted to
the common good, because it is primarily and profoundly
'individualistic'. Only the man assured of the lasting
worth and dignity of his own life, of the safety of his
happiness in the hands of God, can afford to sacrifice it
for the benefit of others, in whom he sees children of a
common father." — Ibid., p. 141.

(2) Professor Drews, in The Christ Myth, sets himself
to show that our Lord never had any historical existence
at all. The interesting point is that he does this avowedly
in the interests of religion of the Pantheistic type. He
declares that the belief in the historic personality of Jesus
is the great obstacle to the universal triumph of "Mon-
ism." Mr. J. M. Robertson has developed his views in
Pagan Christs, a work in which he endeavours to shew
that neither Jesus nor Buddha ever had an historical exist-
ence, and seems inclined to surrender other well known
historic persons like Montanus. Jensen claims that his
view is less radical; his point is not that Jesus had no
historical existence, but that the Jesus of the Gospel
never lived. See the pamphlet, P. Jensen, Hat der
Jesus der Evangelien wirklich gelebt? The whole is
developed in connection with a theory of the Gilgamesch
Epos, which is one of the wildest doctrines ever put for-
ward in good faith, and sweeps not only our Lord, but
Moses, S. Paul, and others all into one net, regarding them
as successive embodiments of the mythical hero-god.
The theory is wilder than the wildest exercises of super-
stition, and I cannot for the life of me imagine why the
medieval peasant, who believes some story which is prob-
ably no more than an exaggeration of a real experience,
and at least is spiritually edifying, is to be treated with
contempt, while a modern scholar, with all the resources
of civilisation at his back, who invents a doctrine so fan-

286 NOTES

tastic as this is only regarded as a little extreme. For
what is abundantly clear is that the whole foundation of
Jensen's theory is the belief which he shares with the
ordinary "liberal," like his opponent Julicher, that the
strange stories must be false. He says this himself in
his reply to Julicher: "Nun aber der Charakter schon des
vom altesten Evangelium, dem des Markus, Bezeugten.
Darin treffen wir bekanntlich auf eine ununterbrochene
Reihe von Dingen, die so nicht geschehen sein konnen,
Ich brauche nur zu erinnern an das sichtbare Herabkom-
men des Geistes Gottes, an die Stillung des Sturms, an die
erste und die zweite wunderbare Speisung u.s.w. oder an
so manche Heilungen durch Jesus, hinter die jeder Medi-
ziner ein *unmoglich' schreiben miisste. Das heisst:
bereits in der altesten fur uns konstruierbaren und der
altesten uns bekannten Gestalt der evangelischen Uber-
lieferung finden wir so zahllose mythologische Elemente,
dass sie allein schon eine hochst kritische Betrachtung
der ganzen Geschichte notwendig machen. Ohne jede
Frage konnte ihr deshalb doch ein sogar recht umfang-
reicher geschichthcher Kern zugrunde liegen" {Hat
der JestLS der Evangelien wirklich gelebt? pp. 17, 18).
And he then goes on to say that his theory of Moses,
Paul, and Jesus, each being embodiments of the Baby-
lonian, the God-Man Gilgamesch, supplies the necessary
historical foundation. If anyone wants any evidences of
the aberrations to which the refusal to allow the miracu-
lous can drive learned and intelligent men, he could not
do better than read the so-called arguments and parables
of the pamphlet Moses, Jesus, Paulus, Drei Varianten
des hahylonischen Gottmenschen Gilgamesch. This is all,
moreover, in the name of an "ernsten, wissenschaft-
lichen voraussetzungslosen folgerichtigen Kpitik" as
opposed to the "Fanatismus blossen Glaubens."

NOTES 287

(3) Cheyne (Dr. G. K.)» in Hihhert Journal, July,
1911. Cf. also the following passage from the same critic.

"The section which does appear to require immedi-
ately a fuller investigation is that of the Passion, i.e.,
from the Last Supper to the Death on the Cross. Is there
any historical nucleus? As the critical enquiry stands at
present, one may reasonably hold that an extraordinary
teacher and healer called Jesus, who began his career in
Galilee, incurred the displeasure of the Roman author-
ities, and suffered the extreme penalty as a rebellious and
unrecognised 'king of the Jews.' But is it not possible
that the statements of the Messianic claims of Jesus, and
consequently also of the intervention of the procurator
may be imaginary? . . . For my own part, I think that
the Barabbas story may be most simply explained from
a Babylonian source. As Zimmern has shewn, there
are traces of a primitive custom of decking out some
person of inferior rank as king, and finally putting him
to death in place of the real king. On the occasion of
what ceremony this took place does not appear, and it
seems plain that the author of the Barabbas story only
knew of a far-off reflection of the primitive custom in
the shape of a popular story. As for the name of Barab-
bas it is surely a corruption of Karabas, . . . which
probably indicates the Arabian origin of this supposed
fierce bandit. ... As the evidence now stands, I think
that Paul most probably knew a little about a great
teacher called Jesus, and that he identified him with the
pre-existing Christ from an intuition that only so could
the precious doctrine of the Christ be made a practical
power among mankind." — Hihhert Journal, April, 1911.

(4) The Commonwealth, Sept., 1909, p. 284.

(5)- Eucken's (Prof. R.) Meaning and Value of Life
(A. & C. Black), pp. 26-27.

288 NOTES

"As the solutions of Religion and Immanental Ideal-
ism have gradually lost their force, nature has come to
mean more and more to man, eventually constituting his
whole world and his whole being. We do not mean
Nature as she is in herself — for to modern thought the
thing in itself remains a dark and inscrutable mystery —
but Nature as she appears to man from a certain point
of view — i.e., from the standpoint of mechanical causa-
tion. Though natural science is very far from actually
maintaining the identity of the world with nature — this
being no scientific theory, but merely the creed of a
naturalistic philosophy — still the creed has its roots in
the discoveries of science, and there is today a growing
tendency to interpret science in a naturalistic spirit.
Our modern era began, at the Enlightenment, with the
sharp separation of nature from soul. The more insistent
the demand for a soulless nature, the more urgent the
claim that the soul should exist in its own right. But from
the very outset there was something far more imposing in
nature's illimitable vastness than in a number of dispersed
individualities; and, as nature's realm continued to expand,
it was inevitable that the soul should tend to be drawn
within it. Not only has its empirical existence been shown
even more and more clearly to be dependent on natural
conditions, but there has been an attempt to appropri-
ate its very essence, and eventually to fit it wholly into
the framework of an enlarged naturalistic scheme. There
has been a continually growing tendency to identify
science with natural science, and reality with nature.
If any difference were still felt to persist, it seemed to
vanish — together with the doubts this solution naturally
engendered — before the steady advance of a mechanical
doctrine of development. This doctrine claimed to assim-
ilate man entirely to nature — a nature destitute of all

NOTES 289

inner principle of cohesion, and possessing no spontaneity
of its own. Thus it was proper, and indeed inevitable,
that the attempt should be made to give a value to human
life when considered as a mere part of a natural process,
and to shew that it was really worth the living."

(6) In an Essay printed in James's (William) The
Will to Believe (Longmans, Green & Co.), p. 145.

The following passage from Eucken's Meaning and
Value of Life (A. & C. Black), pp. 94-95, is worthy of
note:

"Freedom is essential if life is to have a meaning. It
must be possible to give a personal stamp to our activity,
and press forward to a life that is autonomous. Other-
wise our life is not wholly our own, but rather something
assigned to us by nature or by destiny, something that
transpires within us, but is in no sense moulded by us.
A half-alien experience of this kind, a role imposed on us
from without, must ever leave us inwardly indifferent
to its claims, and our life would labour under a paralyzing
contradiction if that to which we were cold and indif-
ferent should succeed in winning our whole energy, and
becoming for us a matter of personal responsibility.

"But freedom, in the sense which concerns us here,
finds little favour with the modern mind. On all hands we
are told that the old problem is at last solved, that man
is nothing more than a piece of the cosmic mechanism,
and that only an inexact mind can discover in the machin-
ery any loophole whatsoever for freedom. Thus freedom
is roundly rejected, and the fact that life therewith loses
its self-sufficiency and intelligibility is either overlooked or
treated with scant regard to the importance of its effects.

"Since, however, we are insisting on the intelligibil-
ity of life, we cannot so lightly dispense with freedom,
and we are therefore bound to ask whether our proposed

290 NOTES

treatment of the Spiritual Life does not set the problem
of freedom in a more favourable light. Now, we hold
that it certainly does this, and does it in a twofold way —
partly through establishing truth on a new basis, and
partly through the distinctive content of reality which it
reveals.

*'The main reason why freedom's defenders seem to be
leading a forlorn hope is that science has presented us
with a picture of the world, a scheme of reality, in which
freedom is quite out of place. In particular, the mechan-
ico-causal conception of nature has been carried over
into human life and the experiences of the soul. That
such a conception leaves no room for freedom and initia-
tive cannot for one moment be doubted, but whether it
can justly be applied to the things of the soul is open to
very grave doubt indeed.

*'As a matter of fact, the true significance of the life-
process is not to be sought through any roundabout
reference to the external world. The decisive factors
are really the phenomena it exhibits and the demands it
makes in the course of its own development. If we
should find it displaying, at least on its highest levels, a
deep-rooted spontaneity and power of initiative, then we
should have to recognise this as a fundamental fact, and
relegate to a secondary position the further question how
to accommodate this fact with the chain of causes and
effects. Never should first things take the second place;
never should the experiences of the personal life be sacri-
ficed to the demands of some particular theory. We
need not trouble if our apprehension of reality is rendered
less smooth and simple. How can we be certain that the
world must be constituted in the exact way which happens
to be most convenient for our human thinking .'^ But this
at least is obvious, that whoever reduces the world to a

NOTES 291

mere chain of given phenomena, thereby depriving it
of its spontaneity, robs it forthwith of all self-possession
and all inwardness."
(7) Pringle-Pattison*s (Dr. Andrew Seth) Theism, p. 46.

IV
SIGN OR THE CHRISTIAN FACT

(1) Simpson's (Dr. J. G.) Christus Crucifixus (Hodder
& Stoughton), p. 266.

(2) There is a suggestive criticism of Dr. Sanday in
the appendix to Bishop Chandler's Faith and Experience,
The Bishop points out how Bergson's theory of the rela-
tion between intuition and reasoning provides a better
rationale of the problem than does the rather dubious
doctrine of the subliminal self.

(3) See Burkitt's (F. C.) The Failure of Liberal Christ-
ianity, The whole pamphlet is most valuable and should
be studied. I am not contending that the views of
either Professor Burkitt or some of the other scholars
mentioned are entirely satisfactory, only that they have
given up the materialistic theory of the meaning of the
Christian Church. In face of existing attempts to rush
us into the complete acceptance of that theory, I say that
this movement is remarkable, and should give even the
youngest academic person pause, before he surrenders
at discretion to a view which in the last resort drives us
to materialism, or at least Pantheism of a mechanical
type.

(4) Eucken's (Prof. R.) Christianity and the New
Idealism, pp. 26, 80.

"We must insist more strongly than ever that the
salvation which religion promises to man is a salvation

292 NOTES

not of his natural, but of his spiritual self, that imposes
on him a momentous choice and demands of him heavy
sacrifices. He who minimises the opposition that is
involved, and obscures the tremendous seriousness of
the issue, may easily let his religion, despite all respect
for outward form, degenerate into a refined Epicurean-
ism" (p. 26).

"Its unconditional advocacy of the claims of Spiritual
Life implies the most vigorous repudiation of all natural-
ism, whether of the crasser or more refined kind, and the
championing of freedom in the teeth of all attempts to
turn life into a merely natural process. Its conviction
of the wide gulf — nay, diametrical opposition — between
the condition of the world and the imperative require-
ments of the Spiritual Life, is in itself a most decisive
repudiation of Pantheism with its glorification of the
world, and at the same time a repudiation of all those
movements, such as Intellectualism, ^stheticism, and so
on, which ignore the necessity for an inward change.
Finally, its proclamation of a world-wide revolution
through spiritual might and redeeming love involves
the utter casting out of all embittered pessimism and
despairing scepticism. With its focussing of all its con-
viction into a Yes or a No, Christianity gives certitude
to the whole life, setting the work of thought on a safe
path, and assigning it a clearly marked goal." — Ihid.y
p. 86.

(5) Hardy's (Rev. T. J.) The Gospel of Pain (G.
Bell & Sons, Ltd.).

(6) On "Authority," see a very valuable new book
by Rev. J. H. Leckie, Authority in Religion (T. & T.
Clark).

(7) Cram's (R. A.) The Gothic Quest, p. 292.

"The established ceremonies of the High Mass take

NOTES 293

their place among the few supreme triumphs of art in
all time; in a way the great artistic composition takes
precedence of all in point of sheer beauty and poignant
significance. There is no single building, no picture, no
statue, no poem, that stands on the same level, even
Parsifal is a weak imitation and substitute. In the
ceremonial of the Mass art comes full tide."

(8) Bradley's (F. H.), Mind, No. 74, p. 171 and also
p. 154. Cf. also the following dicta of Dr. Bussell,
Bampton Lectures.

"All ultimate verdicts, where they are not tempera-
mental petulances, are ventures of faith or acts of faith.'*
— Bampton Lectures, p. 210.

"There is not the slightest warranty, in the history of
mankind or of thought, for supposing that we can ever
sum up the Universe as a whole except by an effort of
will or an effort of faith. . . .

"It is clear that to apply any summary title to a whole,
which can never be known in its totality or in its still
undetected possibilities, is either an impertinence or a
paradox, or — an act of faith, undertaken on account of
life's practical needs. Solvitur amhulando is still a suflS-
cient if unscientific solution." — Ihid., p. 256-7.

(9) Cf. the following words of M. Boutroux in his
valuable study Science et Religion.

"Chacun de mes actes, la moindre de mes paroles
ou de mes pensees signifie que j'attribue quelque realite,
quelque prix a son role dans le monde. De la valeur
objective de ce jugement je ne sais absolument rien, je
n'ai nul besoin qu'on me la demontre. Si par hasard
j'y reflechis, je trouve que cette opinion n'est sans doute
que I'expression de mon instinct, de mes habitudes, et
de mes prejuges, personnels ou ataviques. Conforme-
ment a ces prejudices, je me suggere de m'attribuer une

294 NOTES

tendance a perseverer dans raon etre propre, de me croire
capable de quelque chose, de considerer mes idees comma
serieuses, originales, utiles, de travailler a les repandre et k
les faire adopter. Rien de tout cela ne tiendrait devant
le moindre examen tant soit peu scientifique. Mais sans
ces illusions je ne pourrais vivre, du moins vivre en homme,'*
— Boutroux's Science et Religion, p. 360.

I quote some further words of M. Boutroux:

"L'amour fait de deux etres un etre en laissant a
chacun d'eux sa personnaUte, bien plus, en accroissant,
en realisant, dans toute sa puissance la personnalite de
I'un et de I'autre. L'amour n'est pas un bien exterieur,
tel qu'une association d'interets, ce n'est pas non plus
I'absorption d'une personnalite par une autre; c'est la
participation de I'etre a I'etre, et avec la creation d'un
etre commun, I'achevement de I'etre des individus qui
forment cette communaute." — Boutroux, ibid.y pp.
370-371.

*'La religion off re a I'homme une vie plus riche et
plus profonde que la vie simplement spontanee ou meme
intellectuelle, elle est une sort de synthese ou plutot
d'union intime, et spirituelle, de I'instinct et de I'intelli-
gence, dans laquelle chacun des deux fonde avec I'autre
et par la meme, transfigure et exalte, possede une pleni-
tude et une puissance creatrice qui lui echappe, quand 11
agit separement." — Boutroux, ibid., p. 371.

"Si la science positive est, a elle seule, la mesure du
vrai et du possible, I'homme est moins qu'il ne se croit.
Car I'individualite, la personnalite, la dignite, la valeur
morale, le role special, et la destinee superieure, qu'il
persiste a s'attrouper sont en contradiction, non seule-
ment avec les conclusions actuelles, mais, ce qui est plus
grave, avec les principes les methodes et I'esprit meme
de la science positive."

NOTES 295

"Naguere fascine par la clarte et I'utilite de la science,
et domine par elle, I'esprit humain tend aujourd'hui a
se ressouvenir qu'il est essentiellement vie, action, efiFort
vers le mieux, et a reintegrer la science dans cette vie
interieure dont, en realite, elle precede." — Boutroux,
Avant-propos, p. x, of Fr. trs. Eucken, Les Grands Cou-
rants de la Pensee Contemporaine, X.

*' [L'esprit philosophique] est raison, et en meme temps,
il est foi et risque: ein Suchen und Versuchen, ein Wetten
und Wagen. II faut savoir, il faut penser, et il faut
parler. II faut travailler pour Vincertain. , . . Les plus
grandes creations sont celles, qui provoquent le plus de
creations nouvelles.'* — Boutroux, ibid., XIII.

APPENDIX 297

APPENDIX

KING RICHARD THE THIRD AND THE
REVEREND JAMES THOMPSON

(1) Thompson's (Rev. J. M.) Miracles in the New
Testament (Edward Arnold).

(2) Cf. Loisy, Les Evangiles SynoptiqueSy i. 286-94.

(3) For this view vide Loisy, ibid., i. 937.

(4) On this point I should like to refer the reader to
Dr. Field's remarks in his admirable pamphlet "An
Open Letter to the Reverend James Thompson."

(5) See Langlois (Ch. V) and Seignobos (Ch.), Intro-
duction to Historical Studies. Translated by G. G.
Berry (Duckworth & Co.)

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