The disciplines of liberty; the faith and conduct of the Christian freeman

BR 121 . S6 5 1923
Sperry, Williard Learoyd,
1882-1954.

The disciplines of liberty

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

THE

DISCIPLINES OF

1927

THE FAITH AND CONDUCT OF
THE CHRISTIAN FREEMAN

BY

WILLARD L. SPERRY

MINISTER OF CENTRAL CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BOSTON
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PRACTICAL THEOLOGY,
ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY,

CAMBRIDGE

NEW HAVEN

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON • HUMPHREY MILFORD • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

MDCCCCXXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published, 1921.
Second printing, 1923.

TO THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER
WILLARD GARDNER SPERRY
HENRIETTA LEAROYD SPERRY

Preface.

THE idea of Liberty, in one form or another, dominates
the religious life of the present day. No matter how
troubled the waters, the Freeman’s spirit points true
to this magnetic pole. Given this initial loyalty a man may box
the compass of all other religious interests with an approximate
fidelity to contemporary fact. These chapters suggest some of the
outstanding points of the religious compass at the present time,
but the thought of freedom is both their point of departure and
their goal. The reader will make due allowance for the deviation
due to personal factors and will correct these deviations by his
own experience.

I am conscious of the fact that these pages may suggest the
cheap and easy device of “scissors and paste.” I have yielded, in
some measure, to the inevitable seduction of the other man’s effec¬
tive statement of the case half from choice and half from neces¬
sity: from deliberate choice, because as a reader of religious
literature I find that much of the value of any contemporary
book is drawn from the constant intimation of other significant
and rewarding books lying to one side or the other of the imme¬
diate highway; from necessity, because no man who is thinking
and writing to-day can deny the whole premise of his effort — the
noble communism of the modern religious mind.

In particular I wish to acknowledge my debt to those who have
directly contributed to the making of this book. I fully realize that
any freshness and conviction in these pages is very largely due to
the two parishes to which I have ministered. The preacher of
to-day is made or unmade, spiritually, by his people. They either
force him into innocuous conventionality or urge him on to the
exercise of his Christian freedom. The lines have fallen to me in
more than happy places in these last years, in that I have found
myself ministering to men and women who wished the man who
preached to them to speak his own mind, irrespective of ortho-

vii

PREFACE

doxies and heresies. Preaching, therefore, has become less and
less an exercise of pulpit rhetoric and more and more a certain
experimental thinking out loud. What the practice of preaching
may have lost as a formal art, under these conditions, it has gained
as the personal adventure both of preacher and hearer. If we
have indulged in few flights of perfervid oratory in praise of our
Christian Liberty, we have sought to think candidly and con¬
cretely about various aspects of that Liberty in faith and practice.
I must, therefore, acknowledge my indebtedness to a constant
sympathetic hearing in my present pastorate in the Central Con¬
gregational Church of Boston, and during a previous pastorate
in the First Church of Fall River.

I am further indebted to my friend of other days in Oxford,
and now my kinsman, Professor Charles A. Bennett of Yale
University, for many valuable suggestions as to the matter and
style of this particular volume, as for countless hours of comrade¬
ship in the common task of turning up the fallow ground of the
mind; to Mr. Wilson Follett of New Haven for final appraisal of
certain of these chapters; to Miss C. E. Howard, minister’s
assistant at Central Church, for patient and accurate help in the
preparation of the manuscript; to Miss Ruth M. Gordon of the
Old South Parsonage, Boston, for aid in reading the proofs; and to
Mr. Ellery Sedgwick for leave to reprint as Chapter VIII of this
volume a paper which appeared under another caption in the
Atlantic Monthly for January, 1921.

Willard L. Sperry.

Boston,

February 4, 1921.

vm

Contents.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. What is a Christian? . i

II. The Historical Jesus and the Problem of Religious

Authority . 21

III. Christian History and Dogma as Autobiography . . 42

IV. A Modern Doctrine of Original Sin . 59

V. Is Christianity Practicable? . 81

VI. The Counsels of Perfection . 101

VII. The Scientific Method and the Religious Spirit . . 112

VIII. The Liberty of the Parish Minister . 134

IX. The Validity of the Church . 146

X. The Work of the Church in the World of To-day . . 164

IX

CHAPTER I.

What Is a Christian?

THIS question was never more difficult and never more
imperative than it is to-day. The latter years have seen
radiant flashes of the Christian spirit, like broken lights
from the facets of a great gem, shining from the city slums,
battlefields, hospitals and prisons. But there are very few of us
who are so bold as to identify the total civilization of which we
are a part with that Kingdom of God, seen in prophetic vision,
to which Jesus gave himself in life and death. And there are very
many of us who doubt our moral right as individuals to that
bravest of all forms of self-designation — “Christian” — which was
first accepted by the disciples at Antioch.

Nothing is more characteristic of the present religious mood
than this new humility as to our world and ourselves, this reluc¬
tance to claim for ourselves identity with an idealism which never
seemed more absolute, and yet which never seemed more neces¬
sary. We are living in a world which has all but exhausted the
moral possibilities of the dogmas of enlightened self-interest, free
competition, paternalism and kindred nostrums; a world which
finds itself driven on by this process of moral elimination to the
religion of Jesus. The pilgrim soul of us moves on to Christianity
as a last resort, an ultimate recognition of that moral necessity
which a more discerning discipleship anticipated from the first,
“Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.”
Francis Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven” is not only the greatest
English lyric since the days of the Elizabethans, it is the spiritual
epic of contemporary Christendom which has “fled Him down the
arches of the years” in vain, only in the end to hear the voice of
Christ saying,

i

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!

Strange, piteous, futile thing!

v*' W *1*

Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He whom thou seekest!

This drift of the modern mind, this yearning of the deepest
heart of our age, is very far from being one more formal apolo¬
getic on the part of professional religionists. Since the days of
Job it has been hard for the bystander to believe that any man
serves God for nought. And even though a tolerant skepticism may
concede again and again the existence of the churchman or
theologian who has an unmercenary love of truth and a disinter¬
ested zeal for the Christian religion, still it scents the presence of
some system to which the professional religionist must adapt
himself and which he must defend. The world at large sees even
the most liberal and emancipated churchman struggling by the
devious and morally dubious means of mental reservation and
“spiritual” interpretation to conform to hereditary creeds and
liturgies. The nobler and freer such a man is, the more he excites
the sympathy of the unchurched idealism of the day, and the
more his inner efforts to interpret and substantiate his position
seem to that world lacking in the liberty and native integrity
which are a part of real religion.

“It is a singular infatuation,” writes Thoreau in his “Journal,”
“that leads men to become clergymen in regular or even in irregu¬
lar standing. In the clergymen of the most liberal sort I see no
perfectly independent human nucleus, but I seem to see some
indistinct scheme hovering about, to which he has lent himself,
to which he belongs. It is a very fine cobweb in the lower stratum
of air, which stronger wings do not discover.” This obsession of
the system is, patently, the greatest spiritual liability of the
professional religionist.

We have had in the past quarter of a century many efforts to
save the world by substituting a “New Theology” for the “Old
Theology.” These efforts have relieved here and there the theo¬
logical tension for scattered individuals, enabling them to conform
conscientiously, where conformity is considered the synonym for
religion. But no one can claim for these substitutionary doctrines
that they have been effective in saving the world. The net result

2

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

of all these revisions and restatements is the slowly maturing
conviction that in attempting to bring in the Kingdom by tinker¬
ing with the details of creeds and liturgies we have been working
at the wrong end of the problem. For, as those who have carried
this process to its logical conclusion have told us, what the modern
mind faces to-day is not the prospect of a critically emended and
rehabilitated creed, but a candid reexamination of the very word
“Credo”. Moreover, that classic manual of Christian faith, the
fourth gospel, specifies, not that those who have a credible system
may be assured of a vital religion, but rather that those who do
the will shall know the doctrine. The initial appeal of religion is
always to religious consciousness, not to that stage of religious
self-consciousness once removed from life, which is reflected in
our creeds, dogmas and liturgies. Canon Barnett, pioneering among
the poor of the East End of London, once complained that “the
sad thing in all crises is the way in which good people use their
strength in trying to restore the old.” In those words he passed
judgment not only on the political and economic temper of our
time, but on its religious temper also. For in so far as even the
most liberal and modern apologia for Christianity has about it
this suggestion of a system to be upheld rather than a life to be
communicated, every such apologia is once removed from the zest
of living. It is a detached discussion of life rather than a direct
communication of life.

But it is not the flood tide of familiar ecclesiastical apologetic
which interests serious-minded men and women to-day, no matter
whether they be inside or outside the Church. The significant signs
on the religious horizon are those clouds no bigger than a man’s
hand gathering in unecclesiastical quarters. It is still very hard for
the church mind to believe that any good can come out of these
Galilees and Nazareths. The theologian scents the minor heresy
of the novelist, the dramatist, the radical. He misses their major
passion for a new world. George Bernard Shaw is the last of the
moderns whom we should suspect of being enmeshed in the
cobwebs of a dogmatic system or committed to a professional
apologia for Christianity, yet this same heretical Irishman says:
“I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader;
and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas or Caiaphas;
and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the world and

3

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out of the
world’s misery but the way which would have been found by
Christ’s will, if he had undertaken the work of a modern practical
statesman.” Utterances of this sort — and they are multiplying
very fast to-day— are far more significant as signs of the religious
times than the cumuli of conventional apologetic always piled up
in the heavens by the trade winds of habitual ecclesiasticism.

The most notable fact in our present situation is this general
turning of the unchurched mind to the religion of Jesus. There is
a hopefulness and desire, even a resolute determination in this
mind, almost unparalleled in the twenty centuries of Christian
history. The effective exponent of the Christian religion to-day is
the free lance. H. G. Wells can number the readers of “Mr.
Britling” by the thousands where the preachers must count their
listeners by the tens, for the simple reason that Mr. Wells cannot
be suspected of any ulterior wish to buttress up existing churches
and churchmanship. This desire of the modern mind to see Jesus
has its origins in no academic or ecclesiastical interest, but in the
sorrows, the frustration, the perplexity of the present hour. All
of the self-contemplating idealisms which in one form or another
have been the driving force in the business, industry and politics
of the Anglo-Saxon world of the past half century have served us
very ill. Men turn to the gospel of Galilee with a renewed interest
because the gospel of Manchester has proved such a shabby sub¬
stitute. There is left with us as the net result of our experience
of enlightened egoism in the terms of mills and guns the deep
conviction, as Shaw puts it, that “though we crucified Christ on
a stick, he somehow managed to get hold of the right end of it,
and that if we were better men we might try his plan.” It is out
of such vague but deep and real convictions that the present need
for a redefinition of Christianity springs.

Any Christianity which is to win and hold the loyalty of the
present age and of the immediate future must have a substantial
body of intelligible idea. The religion of the last century has been
dominated, in the main, by Romanticism. The Romantic move¬
ment came into being a hundred and more years ago as the just
and inevitable revolt of the human heart against the arid precision
and pedantry of the eighteenth century. It is the perennial mood
in which

4

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers,

And through the music of the languid hours
They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

This recognition and release of the great ground swell of human
feeling and passion was in its own time a right and natural re¬
action. In theology it led to the redefinition of the religious life,
first as the feeling of dependence upon God and ultimately, in the
humanism of the mid-nineteenth century, to the definition of
religion as a generous fellow feeling for one’s human kind.

But no single thesis of life persists indefinitely in history incor¬
ruptible and unchallenged. There is a moment in the history of all
Romanticism when it begins to putrefy, and that putrefaction
ends in Ages of Decadence and Sentimentality. In due time, after
Cowper, Wordsworth and Byron, come Aubrey Beardsley and
Oscar Wilde. And then the wholesome prophetic spirit of man¬
kind reasserts itself. George Meredith dips his pen into the acid
of a fresh sincerit)^ and writes of his Diarist: “She would have us
away with sentimentalism. Sentimental people, in her phrase,
‘fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism.’ ” Leslie Stephen
in the cool detachment of his mature old age rebukes the senti¬
mentalism of our times as “Indulgence in emotion for its own
sake.” Shaw, half Puritan, half Philistine, takes up the cudgels in
behalf of a new intellectual and emotional austerity: “Romance
is the great heresy to be rooted out from art and life — the root of
modern pessimism and the bane of modern self-respect. . . .
When the country becomes thoroughly Romantic it will be un¬
bearable for realists. . . . When it comes to that, the force of
some strong-minded Bismarckian man of action, impatient of
humbug, will combine with the subtlety and spiritual energy of
the man of thought whom shams cannot illude or interest.” Of
these tempers all the challenging figures in modern life are the
signs and effects. Indeed, so remote are Romanticism and its
bastard child Sentimentalism from the dominant mood of the
present moment that the congenial spokesmen for the generation
now coming into its own in history are the rebel realists of life
and letters, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Tchekoff, Sassoon and their ilk,
all cubists, futurists and makers of free verse who are struggling

5

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

to escape from the enervating and fundamentally vicious influence
of a decadent Romanticism. They may find themselves forced
into strained and grotesque postures, like the figures of the
Laocoon. But no man who understands the deadly peril which they
sense to honest thinking, deep feeling and strong willing in the
coils of a sinister sentimentalism will think ungenerously of their
struggle.

If Sentimentality is bad in art it is even worse in religion. All of
the initial energy of emotion in the theology of Romanticism has
spent itself. We may no longer conjure with human feeling as the
single talisman of the spiritual life. The temper of the age in
which we live is that of a candid realism, suspicious of all vague
descriptions of religion as emotion barren of idea. We renounce all
heat of feeling which is not also a light for the mind. There is a
daring and splendid phrase from the sermons of John Tauler,
the mediaeval Dominican, which commands the respect of the
modern conscience, to the effect that all titillation of the religious
emotions for the sake of the immediate and passing gratification
of the nobler nature “shall be counted to a man for spiritual
unchastity.” The religion which is to command the respect and
response of this age must be free from all taint of religious senti¬
mentalism, it must be spiritually chaste.

Nor will the familiar and persistent efforts to define Christianity
as Practicality suffice. Modern psychology has glorified the hu¬
man will, and in the face of all doctrines of necessity and deter¬
minism, has exalted before every man’s eyes the major energy
which he controls. This modern worship of the will, leaving to one
side both thought and feeling, has been reflected in the popular
religion of our time as a passion for service. The rapture of the
mystic’s transcendent “twenty minutes of reality” and the mid¬
night oil of the thinker have been superseded by the cup of cold
water. But the modern world is in danger of forgetting that the
cup of cold water is a religious effect and not a religious cause.
It follows upon some clearly defined conception of our relation
to God and man. Of itself it cannot create the conviction which
must always sustain and inspire it. Organized altruism has not
plucked the heart out of the secret of perpetual moral motion, but
rests in the last analysis upon personal conviction.

The absence of this conviction imperils the whole present inter-

6

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

pretation of the Christian religion as social service. The sense of
vacuity and worthlessness already begins to attend the per¬
functory gestures of the servant who has no clear idea whom he
serves or why he serves. Ten years ago a B amp ton lecturer stood
up in St. Mary’s pulpit, Oxford, and pointed out with penetrating
insight the contradiction at the heart of the present situation.

“Sometimes a very high degree of practical unselfishness is
accompanied by an extreme sense of uselessness and failure. Such
external activity for good without conscious enthusiasm, almost
without interest, is remarkable; and the account which the actors
in the tragedy give of it when questioned is no less remarkable.
They explain their perseverance in right action and in the service
of others as due, partly to the force of habit, and partly to the im¬
perious need for escaping from brooding thoughts ; but stubbornly
deny that it has any moral value, either objectively or to their
own character. They maintain that their acts are isolated and
meaningless, not springing from any guiding principle within, and
in turn not producing that feeling of comfort and power which
follows on really moral action. ... I am convinced that the
thing is common — far more common, perhaps, than we are in¬
clined to suppose.”

Here, in substance, is the old dogma of salvation by works and
its consequent religious misery. Modern Protestantism is fast
getting back to the slough from which it first escaped through its
rediscovery of the central energy of all religion, the doctrine of
justification by faith. It matters not who sells the indulgences,
whether Tetzel or a modern philanthropy, the error of all doctrines
of justification by works lies in the failure to discern the truth of
Emerson’s dictum that “Little souls pay the world with what they
do, great souls with what they are.” The scarcity of great souls
in the Christianity of our time must be laid in part to the brood
of little souls, who are fretful unless they are “up and doing.”

We may well hesitate to disparage, altogether, the wholesome
ideal of service which has dominated the life of contemporary
Protestantism. This doctrine has saved any number of young men
and women from the vices of introspection and of aimless self-
indulgence. It has given an escape outward into a world of action
from what has been too often in other ages, “the isolated dungeon
of my self-consciousness where I rot away unheeded and alone.”

7

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

It has meant hope and help to hundreds of thousands of the
world’s neglected and forgotten. But of itself, and apart from the
conceptions of God and man which underlie it, this reduction of
the content of religion to the terms of social service offers no
prospect of permanent spiritual satisfaction. The religious value
of the cup of cold water lies not in itself but in all that it
symbolizes. It is the gesture of the believer in the fatherhood of
God and the brotherhood of man. Its permanent worth is meas¬
ured by the thirst of the human soul which it satisfies. No man,
therefore, can take the Christian religion to a fellow human being
unless he himself has some initial idea of what that religion is.
The small boy in school who ventured the tremendous observation
that “it is very difficult to express to other people ideas which one
has not oneself” unconsciously put his finger on the central weak¬
ness of much of the Christian “service” of our time. For, as
Tyrrell says: “When all are sufficiently fed, clothed, housed and
tended, the question still remains: What to do with life, a ques¬
tion which they cannot answer to whom philanthropy is the whole
of life.” And these persons bulk very large in our modern churches.
Their definition of Christianity, as Tyrrell pungently concludes,
is “Practicality. Circuibat benejaciendo : He went about doing
good. ‘Doing good’ seems to be the whole of the matter; more
especially that sort of good that involves ‘going about.’ ”

Because Sentimentality and Practicality of themselves, without
a central body of idea, cannot save the world in which we live,
our time must reconsecrate itself to the plain task of thinking
through the Christian religion once again. We have shirked this
task because sentimentalism in religion is pleasanter than hard
thought and practicality is easier. But we cannot effectively make
Christians of other men unless we know what Christianity is, and
we cannot create a Christian civilization unless we have some idea
of what its outstanding qualities and characteristics will be. Since
the days of Darwin we have consented listlessly and amiably to
the hope that a Christian order would evolve automatically out of
the immediate facts. The net result of that amiable mood was
Hell. In so far as the whole evolutionary theory has any religious
suggestion left, its pertinence lies in some conscious control of
evolution, wherein a clearly defined body of idea plays its major
part.

8

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

In one of his letters to Kingsley, Thomas Huxley once wrote:
“The longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most
sacred act of a man’s life is to say and to feel, T believe such and
such to be true.’ All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest
penalties of existence cling about that act.” Such, certainly, is the
sobered temper of our own age. The heavy penalties exacted of
our time in the latter years had their historical origin in a vicious,
semi-theological dogma about the state systematically taught to
a nation for fifty years. Without the actual creed of Treitschke
and the consenting opinion of a great body of heretical believers,
the thing which the world came to recognize as Prussianism would
have been neither possible nor dangerous. The years from 1914 to
1918 give the lie to the cheap current platitude that it does not
matter what a man believes. In history, as in character, what men
believe is almost the only thing that does matter. And the un-
happy consequences of wrong thinking and careless thinking
can be overcome only by hard and right thinking. The humble
petition of this time is certainly for a heart of flesh instead of the
heart of stone. Rut its sharper cry is also “More brains, O Lord,
more brains.” It is permanently true of the Christian that

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

The current definitions of Christianity have ranged all the way
from an arbitrary and absolute idealism to a nebulous sanction
of every native virtue. At the former extreme stands Nietzsche,
saying, “There was only one Christian and he died on the cross.”
At the other extreme stands Donald Hankey pleading for the
inarticulate Christianity of the average man. The normal religious
mind oscillates between these extremes.

At one moment we feel deeply the loneliness and uniqueness
of Jesus who must always say in history, “My time is not yet
come.” At the next moment we gladly admit the latent native
goodness of Christ’s unavowed, unrecognized disciples who are
not far from the Kingdom of God. The designation which at one
time we reserve for Jesus alone, at another time we confer without
a single reservation upon countless humble souls who in the ful¬
fillment of their duty go the extra moral mile by which human
society is uplifted and the Kingdom of God advanced. If the

9

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

world is yet in doubt as to what Christianity is, it never is in
doubt as to the characteristic Christian act or the distinctive
Christian word. Edith Cavell’s words in the moment of her death
ring true to the forgiving cry of Jesus from the cross, so that
qualitatively we sense the identity, and feel no anachronism in
defining them as an utterance of the mind of Christ. There is no
historical incongruity in this community of spirit. But to isolate
these patently Christian episodes and aspects of the life of our
time is a far simpler process than to attempt a working definition
of the Christian religion in something like its entirety.

In attempting to answer the question, “What is Christianity?”
it may well be that the best we can achieve is the simple sum of
those human situations, actions and reactions, where the dis¬
tinctive Christian hall-mark is plainly visible. Beyond this, pos¬
sibly, our definitions of Christianity should not and cannot aspire.
It is worth while remembering that Jesus was content with this
method. The mind of the East always moves in a circle. Its total
grasp of truth is the sum of impressions received from different
angles of vision. Jesus never defined Christianity in so many
words. He moved around his central conception, as in the gathered
parables of the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, and only sug¬
gested by glimpses of its contour the total majesty of his major
idea which he never reduced to any geodetic map of the theologian.

The Western mind has sought to improve on the method of the
Eastern mind in religion, by moving logically through an idea
from premise to conclusion, until the whole hangs together, not
as the traveler’s many views of the Alps which divide Switzerland
and Italy but as a trip through the Simplon tunnel between the
two. It is an open question which method casts more light on
the central fact! Certainly the pulpit could do no better service to
the Christian religion at the present moment than to identify and
to exalt in the common mind the countless scattered examples of
the Christian spirit which stand out clear and sharply defined in
the literature, the history, the biographical incident of modern
life. These parables from letters and life bear so clearly the im¬
press of the character of Christ that no one for a moment would
confuse them with those other strands which have been woven
into the total fabric of contemporary character. They plainly
belong to Galilee, not to Athens or to Rome or to Feudalism. Our

io

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

nearest and simplest answers to the question, “What is Chris¬
tianity?” might always well be cast in the more informal and less
logical pattern of Jesus’ teaching. Grant at Appomattox Court
House giving back to Lee his sword and to the southern cavalry¬
men their horses for the farms of the South, Lincoln tempering
military justice by the everlasting mercy, John Hay returning the
Boxer indemnity money to China, Father Damien among the
lepers of Molokai, Tolstoi writing “Where Love is there God is
also,” Francis Thompson singing, “The Kingdom of Heaven is
within You,” Edith Cavell standing in eternal granite in Trafalgar
Square while the captains and the kings depart — “What is Chris¬
tianity?” All that is Christianity.

But since our Western mind is as it is, it will never be wholly
content with this elusive and parabolic method of defining the
Christian idea. If Christianity is to capture the imagination of our
time it must be able to give some more coherent account of
itself. It must have its contemporary credo , even though it no
longer finds self-expression in the traditional creeds.

What the detailed substance of such a statement of the Chris¬
tian idea must be no one can foresee clearly. Plainly, however, the
form in which this idea is stated must be one which is in more or
less close accord with the general intellectual temper of the time.
The unfitness of the classical Christian creeds as a vehicle for the
statement of the idea stuff of contemporary Christianity lies not
in the difficulties which inhere in any controverted clauses, but
in the general mental temper which begot them.

For creeds are always the product of the reflective temper,
which spends its energy not in living but in thinking about life.
“Man,” writes Edward Caird, “is from the first self-conscious.
. . . Slow as may be the movement of his advance, the time must
at length come when he turns back in thought upon himself, to
measure and criticise, to select and to reject, to reconsider and
remould by reflexion the immediate products of his own religious
life.” While we cannot controvert this statement or question the
validity of the reflective processes of the religious self-conscious¬
ness, we may not identify theological reflection with religious
experience. Historically the creeds are simply an item of the theo¬
logical process as a whole. And theology is not in itself religion.
It is merely the science of religion. It bears the same relation to

r

ii

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

life and has the same validity in life that all other sciences have,
no less but no more.

The science of biology declares, for example, that protoplasm is
the physical basis of life. It goes a step farther and resolves proto¬
plasm into its constituent elements. Protoplasm is an unstable
compound of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. The pos¬
session of this knowledge, however, has not enabled any biologist
to achieve synthetic protoplasm in a laboratory. The best that
has been done is to persuade certain minute glycerin combinations
to simulate the movements of an amoeba. But these moving drops
of glycerin are not life, for they cannot assimilate food, nor can
they reproduce themselves. Biology has plucked away from life
all her mysteries but one — that central mystery, however, remains
unread, how to create life itself. Only life can beget life. The
science of theology stands in the same relation to the spiritual
life as does the science of biology to physical life. Each of these
sciences can describe its subject, neither of them can create the
life it describes.

So even the newest and most credible creed is still impotent to
create Christians. The burden which has been laid upon the creeds
in the past is a burden which neither they nor any other science
can be expected to bear. They serve to interpret and codify ex¬
perience. They do not create the Christian life. To expect the
simplest and on the whole the most satisfactory of the historic
creeds, the Apostles’ Creed, to generate the Christian idea of
itself is to misunderstand its relation to history. Whatever may be
said of its origins, that creed as we now know it is certainly the
result of reflection upon the whole religious experience of the
Apostolic and sub-Apostolic periods. It is an idea of an idea. And
to expect it to recreate the original idea automatically is to make
on it a demand which no science recognizes as valid. As certain
also of our own teachers has very pungently put it, we do not
repeat the creed of the Apostles that we may have the experience
of the Apostles, we seek the experience of the Apostles that we
may understand the creed of the Apostles.

Furthermore, most of the historic creeds were fashioned in
times when the faith was in peril of change, so far as its forms
were concerned, or in peril of death at the hand of the heretic.
The creed-making impulses flourish in the time of controversy.

12

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

Some of the creeds carry in their text their own anathemas. Most
of the creeds tacitly suggest the anathema hard by. It may well
be, as Tennyson once said, that in religion we have to choose be¬
tween bigotry and flabbiness. But if so that is the last option
which the modern mind will accept. The whole moral and intel¬
lectual discipline of modern life cuts in the other direction, to
the fashioning of a conviction which can be tolerant without
being spineless, which can put away intolerance without becoming
impotent.

This is the religious secret which the creed makers never under¬
stood. Of the creed maker it is written:

Indifferent cruel, thou dost blow the blaze
Round Ridley or Servetus; all thy days
Smell scorched.

And it is just this scorched odor of the credal stuff of our religion
which makes it offensive to the mind of to-day. For whatever else
may be true of the deeper religious mind of our time, it never
willingly lets go its hold upon the catholic idea. It has no vestige
of interest in the circles which hate has drawn in Christian his¬
tory to shut men out. Its only interest is in the circle which an
outwitting love draws to take men in. It develops its position
from the broad premise that whoever is not against us in this total
matter of Christianity is for us. All these considerations militate
against the use of the historic creeds even in revised forms as
ideal definitions of the content of the Christian idea.

But beyond these considerations lies an inherent difficulty in
the whole theological point of view, credal or systematic, which is
often vaguely felt but seldom definitely stated. The earliest at¬
tempt to give an account of the Christian religion is in many
respects the best — it was called by its first exponents “The Way.”
Whatever else the term may suggest it implies the idea of motion.
Now theology is always inert, it catches life on “The Way” at
some point in its progress and in some one posture, and then it
presents this snapshot of a life in action as being the substance
of that life. It is possible by taking these theological snapshots
often enough and then by flashing them in rapid succession before
the mind’s eye, moving picture wise, to create a certain spurious
impression of life itself. But the theological reel is at the best

i3

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

jerky and inadequate, because each credal picture of the religious
life is in itself a motionless thing. The inherent fallacy of the
creeds, and, indeed, of all theological systems, as definitions of
the Christian idea is the fallacy which is hidden in Zeno’s famous
puzzle about Achilles and the tortoise. The tortoise has the start
of Achilles, but Achilles never can overtake the tortoise, because
while Achilles is reaching the place where the tortoise started, the
tortoise itself has moved on and there is always the receding
margin for Achilles to make good. In other words, it is impossible
to define motion in the terms of rest. And that is just what
theology is always unconsciously attempting to do, to define an
experience of “The Way” in the terms of rest.

The Thirty-nine Articles served in the day which drew them
up as a fairly adequate account of the religious self-consciousness
of the Church of England. But the religious mind of Anglicanism
has not marked time at that point of the Way. “In the Church of
England,” says one of her latest members, “I see nothing but a
body of people bound together by a Prayer Book and an agree¬
ment to differ upon every important point of doctrine.” A little
over a century ago the fathers of Congregationalism moved up
onto Andover Hill to found an enduring theological City of God
for the American Churches. They prefaced their venture with a
creed, which in their haste they said should be “as permanent as
the sun and stars forever.” That creed lasted approximately
seventy-five years, and died with Professor Park, who found him¬
self at his latter end “the dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope.”
The longevity of any credal statement of religion varies inversely
with the vitality of the free religious spirit.

A thousand books have been written about Oxford. It boasts
its formal guidebooks by the hundred, its volumes of photo¬
graphs, its historical brochures without number. But it was left
for Thomas Hardy, when all has been said of Oxford that can be
said in the ways of formal description, to suggest the central idea
of Oxford. The lover of that dear, dear city must always turn in
the end to the truly moving definition of Oxford in the opening
pages of “Jude the Obscure.” The boy Jude stands on his own
Wessex hilltop and looks out to the northeast at twilight and sees
the distant halo of the lights of Christminster.

14

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

“ Tt is a city of light,’ he said to himself.

‘The tree of knowledge grows there,’ he added, a few steps
farther on.

‘It is a place that teachers of men spring from and go to.’

Tt is what you might call a castle, manned by scholarship and
religion.’

After this figure he was silent a long while, till he added,

Tt would just suit me.’ ”

Hardy understands the true method of life’s definition. He is
filled with unsuspected suggestions for the modern religionist. He
writes in the same spirit of Angel Clare and unhappy Tess:

“With all his attempted independence of judgment, this ad¬
vanced and well-meaning young man — a sample product of the
last twenty-five years — was yet the slave to custom and conven¬
tionality when surprised back into his early teachings. No prophet
had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that
essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the praise
of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same dis¬
like of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by achieve¬
ment but by tendency. ... In considering what Tess was not,
he overlooked what she was, and entirely forgot that the deficient
can be more than the entire. . . . The beauty or ugliness of a
character lay, not only in its achievements, but in its aims and
impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among
things willed.”

These words will bear almost direct translation into their reli¬
gious equivalent. The creeds are the record of things done. They
are never the statement of aspiration. Even the most emancipated
of contemporary theologians who propose a drastic revision of all
the creeds, is still more or less the slave to theological custom.
He is harking back to the countless efforts of theology to define
the vital motion of religion in the terms of intellectual arrest.
What we need in contemporary religion is some prophet to per¬
suade us that the Christian idea can never be so defined for more
than the passing instant, and that the true history of the Chris¬
tian idea lies among things sought, in tendency far more than in
achievement.

Every vital character defines itself in this way. The song that

IS

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

marked the turning of the tide of northern confidence during the
Civil War was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — the voice
of a purpose that was “marching on.” In years to come we shall
seek to recover the spirit which animated our country during the
Great War. A hundred definitions will suggest themselves. But
what will linger longest with the common mind is the memory of
a thousand boys crowded into a Y. M. C. A. hut rocking the
flimsy building with their songs. It was in their songs that they
bore testimony to the deepest facts of their nature and character.
They came from Maine and Florida, from East and West. And
how did they define themselves? Not by singing, “My country, ’tis
of thee,” not in “America, the beautiful,” not in “My Old
Kentucky Home.” It was when they started the roof from the
rafters with “Over there, over there” that they told us the most
significant truth about themselves. They defined themselves by
their goal rather than by their origin.

There is nothing that modern theology needs so much as the
courage to recast its definitions of the Christian life in this
prophetic form. The domination of religious thought by the back¬
ward look of science has all but suppressed the entirely logical
and defensible definition of being in the terms of its final cause
rather than its first cause.

So far from forgetting the things that are behind, modern
religion seems to be preoccupied with these things. It would reduce
all the agonies of conscience and all the aspiration of the human
soul to the various nervous states of our unstable selves. The
Freudian zealot exorcises the devil but substitutes the Oedipus
complex and the Electra complex. Religion is the by-product of a
suppressed sex neurosis. We sit under the “Golden Bough” and
are gradually disillusioned as to the validity of our whole religious
experience. And eventually our retroactive religion is seen as a
thing of untamed instincts from the jungle and superstitious
primitive tabus. This whole point of view, which would fashion
its definition of religion solely in the terms of its first cause,
“finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to
Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an
epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis
of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with
the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats

16

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle’s organ tones of
misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh.”

And the net value of this whole retrospective temper as it is
summed up in James’s courageous verdict, is simply this, “Origins
prove nothing.”

A wistful piety has tried to reach a working definition of the
religious life by negating the complexity of modern life and re¬
covering the lost simplicity of some Golden Age, in the case of
Christianity the Gospel Age. There is no initial error in religion
so grave as the assumption that one has been born too late. To
have to spend our days in a retroactive religious experience,
whether for worse with Freudians or for better with the pietists,
is a grievous penalty for living at all, and a poor substitute for
the zest of life abundant. But all of these liabilities of contem¬
porary Christianity have their origin in our docile subservience
to the scientific preoccupation with first causes and a pseudo¬
scientific wistfulness which is always dreaming of the better days
that were. We need not only the wholesome salt of the ancient
Preacher’s counsel, “Say not thou, What is the cause that the
former days were better than these? For thou dost not enquire
wisely concerning this.” We need even more the prophetic cour¬
age, which is good logic as it is good religion, to define our
common Christianity in the terms of its destination. The things
which a man aspires to be and is not yet may truly define him
as well as comfort him.

The Pilgrim Churches understood this truth. Its undeveloped
possibilities are still their noblest bequest to us. They fared forth
into the darkness believing that “more light was yet to break,”
they committed themselves to the ways of God “made known and
to be made known.” There is about their initial venture, temporal
and spiritual alike, the sense of vital motion, a definition of
experience in the terms of purpose which is deeply Christian.
They embodied their bond of Christian fellowship, their working
definition of the Christian idea, in covenants rather than creeds.
The distinction between the creed and the covenant is the abso¬
lutely vital distinction between achievement and purpose. The
temper of the covenant maker is essentially the early ardent
temper of pilgrims on the Way, who forget the things that are
behind to press on to the things that are before, who count not

i7

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

themselves to have apprehended, but who feel that they have
been apprehended by the character of Christ.

There is in the fourth gospel a working definition of Chris¬
tianity which our time would do well to ponder. It differs from
the conventional static definitions of the Christian idea in terms
of intellectual rest in that it seeks to define the Christian life in
the terms of motion. “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise
cast out/’ says Christ. Or as the original has it more accurately, in
the present participle, “Him that is coming to me I will in no wise
cast out.”

The Christian idea may submit to the theological snapshot
from time to time. These photographs of its infancy and imma¬
turity may be gathered into a history of dogma. They may even
be thrown before the mind’s eye as motion pictures of the Chris¬
tian life. But in themselves they are not that life itself. Each of
them is an inert representation once removed from life, and
impotent of itself to reproduce life.

If the vague religious consciousness of our time, groping after
some working definition of the Christian religion, is to find any
statement congenial to its own methods of thought and intelli¬
gible to a generation alive with the sense of movement, that
definition must take the form of the covenant rather than the
creed, an expression of an ultimate ideal to be realized in the
Way of discipline and discipleship, not by a guidebook account
of the halfway houses of Christian history.

Whatever may be said of the content of the creeds, the gen¬
eral outlines of the character of Christ are reasonably intelligible
and familiar. His moral courage, his patience, his sympathy, his
purity, his catholic love, are beyond all question of a doubt. The
individual life and the social order which contemplate these quali¬
ties and which are “on the way” to them, may safely be defined as
Christian, whatever the untraveled road that still lies between the
present fact and the ultimate ideal.

The only possible definition of the Christian religion which is
catholic enough to embrace all sorts and conditions of disciples,
and true enough to experience to serve as a vital principle of spirit¬
ual generation is some definition which is fashioned around the con¬
tagion of the person and character of Jesus. Harnack has pointed
out in his “History of Dogma” that despite our modern subordi-

18

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

nation of the Great Man to his social whole, no religion has en¬
dured permanently in history which has not reverenced some
historical individual as its founder, inspirer and rallying center.
The noblest and most adequate of these impersonal religions,
Neoplatonism, which sought to gather into itself all the deeper
and more permanent aspects of the religions of the classical world,
failed to capture and hold the mind of the third and fourth cen¬
turies primarily because it looked to no personal founder, and
could adduce no leader who could be plunged as a concrete center
for religious crystallization into the saturate solution of the ancient
world. Conversely the persistence of Christianity, Islam, Bud¬
dhism and Confucianism is somehow irrevocably bound up with
the historical facts of Jesus, Mohammed, Gautama and Confucius.

The distinction of Christianity, however, as against its great
competitors, lies in its definition of Jesus as a goal rather than a
point of departure. Christianity sees Jesus as the historical author
of our faith, but even more truly it sees the character of Christ
as the spiritual finisher of our faith. He is in Christian experience
the object of aspiration even more than of memory. And the wit¬
ness of life on the Way always has about it this prophetic quality
which theology as a severe science never voices.

“Son of Man,” writes George Matheson, “whenever I doubt of
life, I think of Thee. Nothing is so impossible as that Thou
shouldest be dead. I can imagine the hills to dissolve in vapor and
the stars to melt in smoke, and the rivers to empty themselves in
sheer exhaustion: but I feel no limit in Thee. Thou never growest
old to me. Last century is old, last year is an obsolete fashion, but
Thou art not obsolete. Thou art abreast of all the centuries. I have
never come up with Thee, modern as I am.”

Over the valley of Zermatt hangs the pyramid of the Matter¬
horn. No visitor to that valley is so lethargic that he is entirely
without the desire to make the ascent. Some men stifle those im¬
pulses from an inherent laziness or cowardice. Some struggle up
to the Hornli and then turn back. Others realize that to make
the climb means a preliminary discipline and spend their time in
making more modest and obvious ascents, postponing the real task
until some later time. And still the Matterhorn broods there cen¬
tury after century in perpetual challenge and summons.

In some such way the character of Jesus broods over the lower

i9

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

levels of human character and history. There is no halfway house
of achievement in the ascent of this ideal at which the ardent soul
may stop and lay claim to the designation “Christian.” “Chris¬
tianity” does not begin where the undergrowth of secular interest
stops, at some timber line of the ascent. Essential Christianity is
always a matter of orientation and movement. Wherever a man
may stand in the modern world, in whatever caste, class or race it
matters not, if he sets his face resolutely toward the Christ ideal
for human character and human society and begins to move in
that direction he has a valid claim upon the term “Christian” as
his most adequate form of self-designation. And in whatever half¬
way houses of motionless orthodoxy or piety a man may be, no
matter how far up the ascent, if he has come to rest there and re¬
mains content with his past achievement and his survey of the
slopes already ascended, he has sacrificed his right to this term
Christian.

The ultimate ideal is often shrouded in clouds, though the main,
bold outlines are again and again revealed. Of the character of
Christ the pilgrim of the Way can only say:

Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds

From the hid battlements of Eternity;

Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then

Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again,

But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen . . .

His name I know and what his trumpet saith.

20

CHAPTER II.

The Historical Jesus and the Problem of

Religious Authority.

HERE is a couplet in one of his sonnets on “Modern
Love” in which George Meredith says,

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life.

The great religions of authority have all attempted to meet
the demand of the human soul for certainty. But seen in retro¬
spect most of the claims made by these religions and many of the
certainties offered are dusty answers, at the best.

The history of Christianity constantly implies that there ought
to be and must be somewhere a sufficient seat of spiritual
authority. For nothing is so characteristic of real religion as its
inherent imperiousness. Behind the old Calvinistic doctrine of the
Irresistible Grace of God lies a universal fact in religious experi¬
ence, of which the successive centers of authority have been the
outward and visible symbol. This fact of experience is the aggres¬
sion of the spiritual order, of God and of conscience upon the
individual, and then of the religious individual upon his world.
From the days when Elijah fled from God into the wilderness,
through the days when God imperiously sought Augustine, down
to the days when the divine aggression conquered Tolstoi, this
fact is written plain in all religious biography and autobiography.
And as for the place and power of the religious man in history,
Kipling humorously remarks in one of his Indian stories that
there is only one thing more terrible in battle than a regiment of
desperadoes officered by a half dozen young daredevils, and that
is a company of Scotch Presbyterians who rise from their knees
and go into action convinced that they are about to do the will
of God.

21

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

Nothing is so much needed in contemporary Christianity as
the recovery of this central temper of historic religion. Modern
Christianity in its desire to be conciliatory and irenic has sup¬
pressed this mood of imperious aggression. Furthermore, it has
been thrown on the defensive by the onslaught of the natural
sciences, and by the wholesale criticism of a candid neopaganism.
The recovery of the ability to go into the field of history under
the leading of the legend “Deus Vult” is part of the task of con¬
temporary Christianity. Without this sense of certainties ac¬
credited by a sufficient authority, religion is always impotent and
at a strategic disadvantage.

There are not wanting signs of the times which point to the
recovery of this central temper of the religious consciousness.
Whatever may be said in criticism of Mr. Wells’s “Invisible
King,” this must be said in his favor, that he has something of the
quality of spiritual imperiousness about him and, as every student
knows, the strength of the elder orthodoxy lay in its doctrine of
the Sovereignty of God. This modern religion, we are told, no
longer tarries to argue, it relates. And its Captain goes through
our world like a fife and drum corps, as real as a bayonet thrust.
All this is very alien to the pacific liberalism of our time, but it
stands nearer the central mood of historic Christianity than do
the half-hearted and tentative hypotheses which pass for Christian
faith in our time.

“Religion, therefore, does not apologize for itself, does not
stand on the defensive, does not justify its presence in the world.
If theorists would vindicate Religion, they may do so; but Reli¬
gion comes forth in the majesty of silence, like a mountain amid
the lifting mists. All the strong things of the world are its chil¬
dren; and whatever strength is summoned to its support is the
strength which its own spirit has called into being. Religion never
excuses its attitude, and when at last a voice is lifted up it simply
chants the Faith, until the deaf ears are unstopped and the dead
in spirit come out of their graves to listen. There is nothing so
masterful; and it speaks as one who has a right to the mastery.
It is the major control of thought, to which all systems whatsoever
bear witness, either silent or confessed. Authority is not what it
requires but what it confers.

22

JESUS AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

. . . The great-heartedness of religion craves expression and
must be expressed. There is a moment in the act of worship when
neither the prayer of contrition nor the hymn of adoration will
satisfy, when the Will breaks the leash of constraint with which
the understanding has held it back, and launches itself in trium¬
phant affirmation, and with the full force of its argument within
it, against all that is irrational, dark, or terrible in the world.
The precautions of apology and self-defence are now abandoned;
the baggage train is emptied and left behind; the soul ceases to
parley with Principalities and Powers, and, in a joy that is free
from all fetters, lifts on high the battle-hymn of its faith with its
deep refrain, T believe.’ . . . Religion, no longer entrenched be¬
hind bulwarks, is now seen marching in the open like an army
with banners, the Ark of the Covenant in the midst, and the
trumpeters going on before. Isaiah and Jesus had no other con¬
ception of religion than this. They spake with authority and the
note of triumph was in their voices.”*

The moral exhilaration of such a spectacle cannot be denied.
No great or permanent achievement in Christian history has been
realized without this initial temper. How to recover this mood is
part of the problem of contemporary Christianity. And its re¬
covery is bound up with the answer to the persistent problem of
the seat of religious authority.

In the past, great churches have laid total claim to the pos¬
session of this authority. The temporal efficiency of these churches
has been demonstrated over and over again. But their spiritual
efficacy has been another matter. What halts the modern man in
his submission to any and all of these centers of ecclesiastical effi¬
ciency is the memory of the by-products of superstition and
intolerance which they have worked. When the Westminster
Assembly first met in London it was led in prayer by a self-
willed prelate whose petition ran, “Lord, we beseech thee that
thou wilt guide us aright, for we are very determined.” The peti¬
tioner undoubtedly identified his will with the Will of God. But
the student of history finds it hard to avoid the suspicion that as
a matter of moral fact the process was reversed.

Christian history has seen three outstanding efforts to establish

* “The Alchemy of Thought,” L. P. Jacks, pp. 314, 315, 318.

23

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

a sufficient arbitrary seat of external religious authority. The first
was the effort of the Roman Church to monopolize spiritual
authority for itself through its Councils and Pope. There is no
emancipated Protestant who is entirely free from the religious
appeal made by the Roman assumption of authority. One such
observer noticed in the military hospitals in France the difference
between the ministry of Catholic and Protestant chaplains to the
dying. The Roman priest entered, made the official gesture of reli¬
gion and proffered the certainties of absolution and salvation. The
Protestant chaplain entered, ventured a few tentative hypotheses
as to the probability of immortality and let the matter rest there.
It is no wonder, in those crucial moments when the human soul
craves certainty, or at least the note of certainty, and is not too
critical of the vehicle of that certainty, that it is tempted to turn
and make its submission to Rome.

And it is not to be wondered at, in a time when the trumpet of
liberalism gives forth an uncertain sound, that many who are tired
of the dusty muted answers of that liberalism turn as a last
resort to the sounding brass of Catholicism. The motives which
led Newman, Manning, Faber, Hugh Benson and many others
over into Catholicism are varied and complex. Newman says that
he could not explain the reasons for his conversion in a few words,
that he could hope to give an intelligible account of his course
only to those who were willing to pay the cost of living over
again with him all his troubled transition years.

But we shall not be far from the central fact if we attribute
to all such the hunger for certainty and security. Newman writes
in the “ Apologia ” of “The position of my mind since 1845” that
entering the Church of Rome “was like coming into port after a
rough sea.” The only difficulty is that for most of us this anchor¬
age under the lee of the great headlands of Catholic authority
seems no longer safe. The wind has hauled around and what was
once a shelter now becomes a mere inlet of the open sea. Hundreds
of devout spirits lying in this port have dragged anchor danger¬
ously. Catherine of Siena found poor anchorage for her soul in
the person of her pope. The author of “Piers Plowman” found
little moral stability in the ecclesiasticism of the fourteenth cen¬
tury. And as for the Modernists, their situation became so des¬
perate that rather than risk their souls longer in this port of

24

JESUS AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

refuge now invaded by the gale they put out to sea, preferring to
claw off to windward in the face of the storm of skepticism rather
than to run the risk of making shipwreck of their faith on the lee
shore of Romanism. Newman was a rare soul, but he does not
command the intellectual respect of free men, who prefer, in want
of some securer harbor of authoritative refuge, the risks of the
open ocean.

Shall we award

Less honor to the hull which, dogged
By storms, a mere wreck, waterlogged,

Masts by the board, her bulwarks gone
And stanchions going, still bears on?

There ought to be a Church like the Roman Catholic Church, but
that Church is not to be the permanent port of shelter that New¬
man hoped. Its moral holding ground has been found uncertain,
and it no longer offers an intellectual lee shore under which to lie.

The second great center of religious authority was the Protes¬
tant Bible. The curious thing about the first two generations of
Protestant Reformers was their lack of faith in their own method.
They were on the way to revise the whole conception of religious
authority, but they lacked the courage of their initial conviction.
They saw the naked and uncorrected individualism of their early
temper leading not only to Geneva but to Munster. And to pre¬
vent Munster from multiplying indefinitely they were compelled
to sacrifice the possibilities of Geneva. The latter years of
Luther’s life are sad reading. He began his independent religious
adventure with a great freedom of mind. No higher critic has
ever outdone Luther in the matter of a cavalier reediting of the
Bible. Luther played fast and loose with all parts of Scripture
which did not serve to buttress his own propositions. He read out
of the canon everything that savored of the strawlike religion of
Saint James. The Book of Esther he despised as a pagan story,
and as for the whole Apocalyptic literature, it troubled him so
deeply that he wished it were not there at all. But he feared in
other men the consequences of a temper which he trusted in
himself, and he sacrificed his own early intellectual liberty to save
his cause.

Calvin took up the case and carried it to its theological conclu¬
sion, where it rested for nearly three hundred years in Protestant

25

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

history. Religious authority is vested in the letter of the Bible.
The significant thing about Calvin’s argument, however, is the
fact that he fell into a vicious circle of logic of which he was
conscious, yet from which he saw no escape. He asks in the
“Institutes” how we know that the Bible is the word of God and
then he answers, By the testimony of the Spirit within our own
souls. But how are we to know, he continues, that the spirit within
us is the Holy Spirit of God? By checking this Spirit at the
standard of Scripture, is his answer. He naively remarks that
there is nothing repugnant in this circling proof. That may be so,
but to the unillumined there is nothing convincing about such
logic moving in a vicious circle. What Browning said of his
preacher in “Christmas Eve,” who dog-eared the Scriptures in his
effort to prove its authority, is equally true of Calvin. We sense
“the natural fog of the good man’s mind.” And as for the logic

Each method abundantly convincing,

As I say, to those convinced before,

But scarce to be swallowed without wincing
By the not-as-yet-convinced.

The Protestant effort to establish the Scripture as a seat of
religious authority represented a moral advance beyond the actual
authority of the Roman ecclesiastics. But it was no more per¬
manent than the Roman claim. It was doomed to go to pieces
before the advent of the historical and natural sciences. There are
few churches left which hold to the traditional Protestant con¬
ception of the authority of Scripture. What is significant in the
whole story is the part which subjective interpretation played
from the first. The Bible has never been beyond the need of inter¬
pretation and adaptation. Moreover the effort to prove it a moral
unit forced the conscience into situations so grotesque that they
were self-refuting. The Calvinist proposition that in his official
capacity God has done and has to do a great many things which
personally he would prefer not to do is an ethical absurdity. The
significant feature of such a statement is the intrusion of a private
moral judgment which really condemns a Jael and Sisera episode
even when it seems to approve it. *

In admitting that the consent of the indwelling Spirit is neces¬
sary to establish the authority of Scripture, Calvinism from the

26

JESUS AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

first recognized the inevitableness of the subjective factor.
Although it temporarily arrested the full fruition of the Protestant
principle, it did not permanently postpone it, and from the first
it had in it the latent principle which was to overthrow its own
standard of authority.

The third attempt to establish a seat of external authority is
found in the liberal Protestant preoccupation, during the nine¬
teenth century, with the person of the historical Jesus. The re¬
covery of the Jesus of history in something of his original in¬
tegrity will remain the outstanding achievement of the religious
mind of the last hundred years. We now have what all the inter¬
vening centuries have lacked, an adequate account of Jesus’ reli¬
gious backgrounds in historical Judaism. We have an intimate
knowledge of his wider social environment in the cosmopolitan
Roman Empire. Archaeology and geography have given us the
homely physical setting of his life and work. Secluded monasteries
have yielded up ancient and forgotten manuscripts with variant
gospel readings. The sands of Egypt have added their fragmentary
logia, until to-day there is almost nothing left to be done or more
to be hoped for in this direction. The task of collection, compari¬
son, codification of facts and texts is over, and the task of inter¬
pretation begins.

Royce has told us that historically Christianity has never ap¬
peared simply as the religion taught by the Master, it has always
been an interpretation of the Master and his religion in the light
of some subjective premise. The nineteenth century of liberal
Protestant theology began its work with the axiom that whatever
Christianity may have been in the past it ought now to be simply
the religion of the Master, free from this constant taint of sub¬
jectivity introduced by the interpreter. It set up the Jesus of
history in contrast to the Christ of the creeds, and cast its lot
with the former as against the latter figure. It announced the
simon-pure religion of Jesus in place of the confused and complex
religions about Jesus. This controversy has occupied the center of
religious interest for the past half century.

With it has gone the tacit and often the avowed claim that in
the person of the historical Jesus the Christian has found his final
seat of sufficient religious authority. The modern soul, still hot
for spiritual certainty, is bidden to turn from the dusty answers

27

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

alike of Romanism and of Calvinism to the single vital historical
figure of Jesus. There is no doubt that, in so far as any center of
external Christian authority is possible, the Jesus of history is
the most adequate and admirable that has been found or can
be found. And many a man has come to rest in this port who
found poor shelter in the prior anchorages of the soul. This cen¬
tral modem distinction between the religion about Jesus and the
religion of Jesus has solved for many their problem of authority.

How easily my neighbor chants his creed,

Kneeling beside me in the House of God.

His “I believe” he chants, and “I believe,”

With cheerful iteration and consent —

Watching meantime the white, slow sunbeam move

Across the aisle, or listening to the bird

Whose free, wild song sounds through the open door.

Thou God supreme, — I too, I too, believe!

But oh! forgive if this one human word,

Binding the deep and breathless thought of thee
And my own conscience with an iron band,

Stick in my throat. I cannot say it, thus —

This “I believe” that doth thyself obscure;

This rod to smite; this barrier; this blot
On thy most unimaginable face
And soul of majesty.

’Tis not man’s faith

In thee that he proclaims in echoed phrase,

But faith in man; faith not in thine own Christ,

But in another man’s dim thought of him.

Christ of Judea, look thou in my heart!

Do. I not love thee, look to thee, in thee
Alone have faith of all the sons of men —

Faith deepening with the weight and woe of years.*

That is the voice of nineteenth-century liberalism at its best. And
it carries conviction to the modern mind where the claims of
Catholicism and the devious ethics of the theory of a uniformly
inspired and authoritative Bible carry no conviction.

But the curious fact about this whole century of effort to en¬
throne Jesus as the world’s final external principle of religious
authority is that never in the appeal to any principle of authority

* “Credo,” Richard Watson Gilder.

28

JESUS AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

has the subjective factor been so prominent and apparently so
inevitable. The record of the hundred years’ “Quest of the His¬
torical Jesus” has been told once for all by Schweitzer. And the
net result of a comparison of the diverse results of this quest is the
plain conclusion, as Schweitzer tells us, that every man in writing
the life of Jesus writes even more truly the story of his own life.
It is not merely that a living personality is needed to call another
remote historical personality to life. It is far more than that, the
plain fact that the gospel does not admit of mechanical imitation
but demands vital interpretation.

This necessity is bound up in the very nature of the writing of
all history and biography. There is no escape from it in the
reconstruction of the life of any great man. James Anthony
Froude in his essay on “The Science of History” lays down an
axiom which every gospel reader must accept as the premise of
his quest for the person of Jesus.

“It often seems to me as if history was like a child’s box of
letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have
only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like,
and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose. . . .
To revert to my simile of the box of letters, you have to select
such facts as suit you, you have but to leave alone those which
do not suit you, and let your theory of history be what it will,
you can find no difficulty in providing facts to prove it. . . . In
any or all views, history will stand your friend. History in its
passive irony will make no objection. Like Jamo, in Goethe’s
novel, it will not condescend to argue with you, and will provide
you with abundant illustrations of the thing you wish to believe.
. . . ‘My friend,’ said Faust, to the student growing enthusiastic
about the spirit of the past ages, ‘my friend, the times which are
gone are a book with seven seals; and what you call the spirit of
past ages is but the spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in
whose mind those ages are reflected.’ ”

We can see the process at work within the limits of the four
gospels themselves. The first three synoptic gospels are photo¬
graphs of Jesus. The fourth gospel is candidly a portrait. But even
the three photographs are not identical. Mark’s gospel probably
comes the nearest to being an untouched original, but it is a per¬
fectly open question whether the practices of the Roman Church

29

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

in the first century have not entered into the making of that
gospel. As for the first and third gospels, the negative has ob¬
viously been retouched, in the first instance to make it conform
more closely to the Messianic expectation, in the latter case to
take away the more severely Jewish lines from the face of Christ
and to give that face a fuller cosmopolitanism.

As for the fourth gospel, all attempt at literary photography has
been abandoned, and we have instead a candid portrait, which
succeeds not only in emphasizing certain lineaments of the Christ,
but which also betrays the experience of the artist. The subjective
element is so strongly infused into the treatment of the theme
that again and again in the early part of the gospel we find a
chapter beginning with what profess to be the ipsissima verba of
Jesus and ending with the reflections of the evangelist. But the
whole chapter is of a single literary and spiritual texture, and it
is impossible to tell where the words of Jesus are supposed to end
and the meditations of the writer begin. Yet it is this quality of
the fourth gospel which gives it its perennial charm and power,
and which makes it what the synoptic gospels never can quite be,
the voice of Christian experience. We shall never recover the
original literary negative. Such negatives as we have have all been
retouched, and before we use them we shall retouch them still
farther. More than that, most of us in our study of the character
of Jesus are candidly Johannine, creative artists treating our
subject as free interpreters. It cannot be otherwise.

In his “History of European Morals,” Lecky describes in detail
the two temperaments which William James has roughly differen¬
tiated as the “tough” and the “tender” natures. He says:

“The first are by nature Stoics, and the second Epicureans, and
if they proceed to reason about the summum bonum of the affec¬
tions, it is more than probable that in each case their characters
will determine their theories ...” for there is a “predisposition
which leads men in their estimate of the comparative excellence
of different qualities to select for the highest eulogy those which
are most congruous to their own characters.”

This axiom, which underlies all historical writing, as well as all
ethics and philosophy, never had clearer exemplification than in
the so-called modern biographies of Jesus.

Recall for the moment some of the outstanding lives of Jesus of

30

JESUS AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

recent years. The subjective element of the interpreter is plainly
visible in them all. He who runs reads not so much the bare facts
about Jesus as the chronicle of the religious ideals of all sorts and
conditions of men who have been drawn to Jesus.

Renan’s “Life of Jesus” is patently three parts Renan and one
part Jesus. “It is Christian art in the worst sense of the word, the
art of the wax image. The gentle Jesus, the beautiful Mary, the
fair Galileans who formed the retinue of the amiable carpenter
might have been taken in a body from the shop window of an
ecclesiastical art emporium in the Place St. Sulpice.” Harnack
made a consistent and conscientious effort to give us a true and
credible picture of the Jesus of history, but of this effort Tyrrell
says, with swift ironic insight, “The Christ that Harnack sees
looking back through nineteen centuries of Christian dogma is
nothing but the reflection of a liberal Protestant face seen at the
bottom of a deep well.” To Voltaire Jesus was merely the greatest
of the moralists, and his picture of Jesus simply an item in the
rising humanitarian passion of a hundred odd years ago. Goethe
and the Romantic school found in Jesus an incarnation of their
deity, Genius. To Carlyle, Jesus was the greatest of heroes.
Strauss was a Hegelian, and his life of Jesus owes its whole form
and movement to Hegel rather than to the original gospels.
Matthew Arnold read into the gospels and then out of them the
mildness and sweet reasonableness of Balliol and Oxford. Tom
Hughes found a justification for his own virile pugnacity in a
“Manliness of Christ” which savors far more of the Philistine life
of an English public school than of the Mount of Beatitudes.
Wagner saw in Jesus the inspirer of his romantic dramas of love,
sin and redemption. Tolstoi’s familiar and arresting interpretation
of the gospel owes most of its potency to the temperamental
quietism of Russian Christianity. Wendell Phillips, facing the
stolid hostility of respectable Boston, was drawn to Jesus as “the
sedition of the streets.” Oscar Wilde in Reading jail read Jesus as
the artist at life, and found a sweetly melancholy satisfaction in
the thought that he might prove another such great artist and
actor. Shaw reads out of the gospels the tenets of economic com¬
munism to which he has long been committed. Bouck White finds
in Jesus the sanctions for his own radical socialism.

When we come to less distinguished but not less assured inter-

31

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

preters of Jesus in our own circles, the appeal to Jesus as a sanc¬
tion and authoritative pattern lapses often into the grotesque.
One polished young gentleman of our own time has been credited
with the profound critical observation that Jesus’ turning water
into wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee was inspired by his
wish to save his hostess from her temporary embarrassment —
Jesus was, in short; the perfect guest and the polished ladies’ man
at the hostess’s right hand by the tea table. Another and more
virile college boy, who brought home from France an army boxing
championship, has told us that whatever else might be true of
Jesus he certainly would take an interest in amateur boxing, and
would give good measure of time to the squared circle and the
gloves.

The subjective quality in the appeal to the authority of Jesus
which is not sensed in the case of the great scholars, and which is
usually entirely unsuspected in ourselves, becomes humorously
patent in the case of the ladies’ man and the boxing champion.
The whole record reveals one fact and one only, that the historical
figure of Jesus, his life and teaching, so far from being free from
the need of interpretation, seem to compel the introduction of this
whole subjective factor.

Schweitzer says of this century of effort to arrive at and to
establish a final center of Christian authority in the person of
Jesus that: “The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for
theology a school of honesty. The world has never seen before
and it will never see again a struggle for truth so full of pain and
renunciation as that of which the lives of Jesus of the last hundred
years contain the cryptic record.” But this quest was not a
struggle for truth in any dispassionate sense of the word. It was a
discipline in intellectual sincerity and moral courage. It was a test
of men’s creative spiritual resourcefulness rather than an occasion
for their imitative tendencies. For it is perfectly clear that there
never has been and never can be an “imitation” of Jesus, pure and
simple. Every relationship to him must take the form of a per¬
sonal experiment and adventure.

The nature of our problem and a clue as to the nature of its
answer is given us when we leave the field of criticism and appeal
directly to our own experience in the world of men. The figure of
Jesus is used to-day as a religious sanction for every conceivable

32

JESUS AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

type of thought and conduct. The facts of the gospel are too com¬
plex to lend themselves to any single type of character or society
to the exclusion of all other moral variants. Each man gathers
out of the record what is congenial to his own nature and cir¬
cumstance and then reconstructs a figure from whom he draws
authority for his own living. Only those facts live for us which
life has made probable and vital in advance. The Jesus of one man
is essentially a conservative, centered on the jot and the tittle.
The Jesus of another man is a radical, subjecting the Sabbath and
all other human institutions to his own transvaluation. The Jesus
of this man is a militarist behind the guns or urging the bayonet
home to its destination. The Jesus of another is a pacifist, serving
his time in Wormwood Scrubs or Leavenworth. The gospels
record both the scourge of small cords and the nonresistance of
the cross. It is hard to reconcile them and each man chooses what
bears out his own predisposition. The Jesus of one is a churchman,
who goes into the synagogue as is his custom. The Jesus of another
is a free lance, tilting at the whited sepulchers of ecclesiasticism.
To the family man Jesus is the hallower of marriage, to the priest
he is the pattern of celibacy. The total impression of the gospels
is that of a character too catholic and free, too deep and too broad,
to be monopolized by any of our narrow working categories of
creed or conduct, but lending himself in part to all.

What there is of authority in this figure comes not as a clear,
final, sufficient statement of the things men are to believe and
to do, but as a stimulus to freedom and a source of unfailing
spiritual energy. The drift of Christian experience has been
steadily and increasingly in the direction of the inner conviction,
away from the outward precept. That is what is significant about
the whole story. Our last center of authority, this person of the
historical Jesus, while promising more, seems as a matter of actual
fact to have achieved less than any of its predecessors in estab¬
lishing its claim to external sufficiency.

But it is for that very reason that the person of the historical
Jesus stands as the best the Christian mind has done to define its
conception of authority, not merely because its standard is higher
than that of ecclesiasticism and the total Bible, but because it
forces the soul seeking for assurance on to the only permanent
certainty which religion knows or ever can know, what Carlyle

33

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

has nobly called “the fixed indubitable certainty of experience.”
An English novelist writes: “A man’s religion is not something
without any definite connection with his own life. It is the answer
to the questions that have been put to him and not to other men.”
Not only so, but if a man’s religion is to be his own in any vital
sense, the answers to life’s questions, as well as the questions
themselves, must be his own.

The effort to get someone else to answer life’s problems for us,
whether that someone else be the Roman Curia or the author of
the Book of Judges or even Jesus himself, is an essentially irre¬
ligious effort. A man’s religion, of all his possessions, ought to be
his own. And what is wanting in the whole effort to establish a
seat of external authority is the willingness to learn of life itself,
which is the true hall-mark of a disciple. It would be very pleasant
and very easy if we might find some principle of authority which
should relieve us of the splendid and tragic necessity of having to
live our spiritual lives for ourselves. But that would be a sacrifice
of the central quality of all true religious experience, and it would
be a blindness to the cumulative witness drawn from the history
of the several tentative authorities in Christian history. For that
witness points only in one direction, to the steady increment of the
inner and subjective contribution to religion’s imperiousness.

George Tyrrell said all that can be said on this whole matter
when he said that life itself is the only schoolmaster that leads
us to Christ. There is no way of making spiritually good the claim
of Jesus to our devotion and discipleship other than the response
which has its origin in our own experience. The person of the his¬
torical Jesus is authoritative for us only in so far as it interprets
and reinforces the teaching and discipline of life. His authority
carried permanent weight in his own time only with those few
whose natures were fitted to respond to his call. He refused to sum¬
mon his legion of angels to make good that authority on some basis
other than the subjective basis. He left the problem of authority
where it must finally rest, with the character of the disciple, “He
that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” The Inquisition may torture
the heretic in the name of authority, Calvin may burn Servetus,
the Puritans may hang the Quakers on Boston Common, modern
states may sentence nonresisters to hard labor in the name of
the Jesus of the scourge of cords, departments of justice may

34

JESUS AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

prosecute Communists in the name of Jesus who had no property,
but these familiar and outworn resorts add nothing to the real
solution of the problem of religious authority; they are expedients
of the powers that be.

What finally strikes the student of the gospels is the fact that
Jesus withheld the pressure of all temporal argument and force
that he might let his authority rest from the first where at last it
must rest, in the response of the believing soul. One thing he was
not, he was not a rule maker. He was a contagion of enthusiasm,
a well of water springing up unto everlasting life — but what
ethical machinery the fires of his enthusiasm were to turn and
what viaducts were to be laid across history from the undying
springs of his character he did not specify. He seems only to have
feared lest in becoming an Example he cease to be an Inspirer.

And it is not far away to suppose, where Christians are still
mired in deep misunderstanding and recrimination, each claiming
the authority of Jesus for ways of thought and conduct mutually
exclusive, that he himself stands outside both, and in some meas¬
ure comprehending both. In so far as the nature of his Father was
his entire nature, the dayspring of his gospel still rises on all those
who are trying to conduct their moral affairs on the presumption
that our tentative distinctions between the just and the unjust
are ultimate moral realities. The final moral energy of Jesus lies,
in some measure, in that quality of him which is “beyond good
and evil,” at least beyond our imperfect and tentative measure of
good and evil. This is simply to say that Jesus belongs far more to
the world of religion than to the world of ethics.

We find ourselves thus driven by the comparative study of the
efforts to recover the historical Jesus, and by a simple glance at
the facts of our total Christian thought and conduct to-day, to
the conclusion that the forced option between the Jesus of history*
and the Christ of the creeds embodies a fallacy. For the two are
one. There never has been, there cannot be, a Jesus of history
apart from some Christ of the creeds, that is, some translation
of the one into the other. The case of Jesus must always rest upon
interpretation rather than upon imitation. This modern Christ
may not be the Christ of any historically recognizable creed, but
he will be none the less qualitatively identical. Richard Watson
Gilder cannot worship some other man’s dim thought of Christ.

35

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

But he cannot escape from his own thought of Christ to some
Jesus about whom he has no advance opinions and ideas. And were
he to find such a dispassionate, arbitrary and external authority,
in the very nature of the case he could not consent to it. For the
spiritual government of Jesus rests upon the consent of the
governed, and it is that consent which creates his authority.

We must grant, then, that the effort of a simple and devoted
piety in our time to define Christianity and to establish its au¬
thority as an answer to the question, “What would Jesus do?” is
doomed to failure. The plain answer to this question in nine out of
ten of life’s practical crises is, “We do not know what Jesus would
do.” We know what his principles are, we sense the outlines of his
character, but just what they mean in any single tangled and com¬
plex situation before us the gospels do not tell us.

Does Jesus stand for the forty-four-hour week in the mills as
against the forty-eight-hour week? If he stands for the former
does he stand for the candid demand for only a four- or five-hour
working day? Has he anything to say on the problem of interest?
What dividends may a Christian accept on his money investments?
Is a four per cent dividend Christian and a ten per cent dividend
unchristian? What would the attitude of Jesus be toward the
problem of modern citizenship and statesmanship? Could he align
himself with any party? If so, which party? And if with no party,
how would he relate himself to the Caesars of our day? Would he
preach, as Paul and Peter preached, the duty of obedience to the
powers that be, or would he preach, with Thoreau, the duty of
civil disobedience? What would be his attitude toward so simple a
question as that of Sunday observance? Would he be a defender
of the Puritan blue laws or a spokesman for the continental Sun¬
day? What about our amusements? Would he sanction the theater,
and if so where would he draw the moral line between his approval
and his disapproval? Would he be interested in the problem of
eugenics, and what would he have to say of the shifting concep¬
tions of the sex relationships?

These are the practical problems which the average Christian
faces to-day. His daily life brings them all to him as the raw
stuff out of which, by his choice, he is to fashion his Christian
character. And yet even the most simple and pious soul — the
“anima naturaliter Christiana ”■ — reads and rereads his gospels in

36

JESUS AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

vain for any authoritative utterance upon these concrete moral
options. He turns soberly away from the gospels with the mature
conviction that he must answer these questions for himself, that
the historical Jesus will not relieve him of the privileges and re¬
sponsibilities of his human freedom.

Perhaps Jesus never intended to relieve us of the great human
obligation of moral liberty. Perhaps the Apostolic Age was right
when it felt that it was never more free and more responsible than
in the moment of its inner experience of Christ. Perhaps Paul was
right when he said that God works in history only through those
who work out their own salvation with fear and trembling. If that
be so, then the whole quest for an external authority is based upon
a misconception of the religious life, and has about it the fears
which are born of inexperience and immaturity.

The nineteenth century not only dissipated the Christ of the
creeds, it did what it least intended to do, it overshot the Jesus
of history whom, in Schweitzer’s words, it hoped to bring direct
into our own time as a teacher and leader. It could not escape
from the logic of the quest for authority which increasingly has
led us home to present experience itself.

It may be expedient for our time, as it was expedient for
another remote generation, that our historical Jesus shall go away.
That may be the only way in which we can discover our true rela¬
tion to him. For the moment when we cease to use him as a pattern
to be woodenly imitated, or as a dictator to be blindly obeyed, is
the moment when we discover what he really means to us. The
simplest definition of Jesus which the world has ever known is
that which designates him as the Friend of Man. Men to whom
the title Messiah means nothing, men to whom the Logos Chris-
tology of the Greek fathers is a riddle, can still understand what
Jesus is as a Friend.

For what is the definition of a friend, and what is the function
of friendship? The relation between friends is not that between
a teacher and a pupil, between the pattern and the copy. It is in
some measure a relation of equals. And it is to such equality that
the mind of Jesus is always leading the disciple. “Henceforth I
call you not servants, but I have called you friends.”

There was gathered in Concord a half century and more ago,
a little group of men who had brought the sacrament of friendship

37

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

to a high point of perfection. What was characteristic of that
circle was the quickened individuality of each member. The sig¬
nificant thing about friendship to them was not its imitative ten¬
dencies, but the sting to sincerity and freedom which they found
in their high comradeship. “A friend,” says Emerson, “is a person
before whom I may be sincere.” “A friend,” adds Thoreau, taking
up the tale, “never descends to particulars but advises by his
whole behavior.”

The friendship of the disciple with his Master is not other in
kind than all our human friendships at their best. The initial fact
of every man’s relation to Jesus is the fact that when he thinks of
Jesus he not only may be sincere, he must be sincere. The central
compulsion which Jesus lays upon us is to be our deepest and
truest selves. The historical Jesus does npt suffer us to practice
the self-deceptions, the social conventions which pass as the coin
of common life. He is the world’s prover of the thoughts of many
hearts, history’s perpetual challenge to moral and intellectual
integrity. In his presence, as we read the gospels, we know our¬
selves, for better and for worse, as we truly are. Jesus is the
touchstone of the realities of character. He is the sting and spur
to inner truthfulness. The half-gods are content with less than
our true selves, and will accept the conventional time service
that we render. Jesus is the son of the whole- God who challenges
us perpetually to dare to be ourselves and to take the consequences
of that tremendous courage.

And then the modern disciple still draws direct from Jesus what
he draws from every real friend — that potent counsel which comes
from the whole character, rather than moral instruction given line
upon line. How often in our human perplexities do we go to some
friend with our burden of anxiety and indecision, hoping that he
will shrive us of the great liabilities of freedom, wishing him to
solve our problem for us. And yet in the moment of our going we
know that we go in vain. And when we leave the friend, if he be
a true friend, we bring away with us what our better selves
already had anticipated, not advice, but courage, hope, new
strength to live our own lives. Our friend serves us not by the
exercise of a vicarious wisdom, but by the subtler and more
potent ministry of sympathy which replenishes the reservoirs of
our own power.

38

JESUS AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

It is not otherwise with the great Friendship that the disciple
has with Jesus. What we draw from the thought of Jesus is
spiritual strength. And that is what we need. The central problem
of the religious life is the problem of power, not of moral ways
and means. Jesus stands in the history of religion to meet that
major need, not to arbitrate its minor difficulties. “Again and
again,5’ said Tyrrell, “I have been tempted to give up the struggle,
but always the figure of that strange man hanging on his cross
sends me back to my task again.” The gospels are not the place
where the free sons of God may resort to the Virgilian lot to settle
the practical problems which arise in the exercise of liberty. They
are the storehouse of that liberty, and the seat of Christian energy.
They stand there to emancipate us, not to coerce us. The felt
imperiousness of the historical character of Jesus lies in this
constant suggestion of a morally inexhaustible reservoir of spirit¬
ual energy upon which he who will may draw in the time of his
need. Out of weakness we become, in the comradeship of Jesus,
strong in ourselves. And that, the New Testament seems to say
from first to last, is what Jesus desired for us.

It will be perfectly apparent from such an interpretation of the
authority of Jesus that he stands in human imagination and devo¬
tion in an essentially mediatorial position. He points the human
soul beyond himself to God. All that has been said of the person
of Jesus as the Friend of Man may be said and must be said of
God. God is the ultimate Friend of Man and any Christianity
which stops short of this destiny of all true devotion fails to honor
Jesus and falls short of true religion.

Christian theology at its best has always had the courage of
this fearless conviction as to the final meanings of the character
of Christ. No false loyalty to the Jesus of history, no overjealous
doctrine of the Trinity has ever stayed the homing soul of man,
once come to itself and faced about to go unto its Father. Of the
finished work of Jesus in history, his earliest great interpreter
said, “Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the
Kingdom to God, even his Father . . . that God may be all in
all.” When Jesus shall have led his disciples to that mature
moment in which they realize their eternal friendship with God
his task is fulfilled in the mutual experience whereby our life “is
hid with Christ in God.”

39

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

Meantime, to us groping in the far countries of our perplexity
and wastrel sonship, Jesus is history’s best sign and pledge of the
character of God. “The Christian religion,” writes Josiah Royce,
“is, thus far, man’s most impressive vision of salvation and his
principal glimpse of the homeland of the spirit.” This vision is in
part the vision of the ultimate beloved community. But it is also
our prophetic intuition of the nature of him who keeps that home¬
land. Frederick W. H. Myers was once questioned, “If you could
ask the Sphinx one question, and only one, what would that ques¬
tion be?” And Myers replied, “If I could ask the Sphinx one ques¬
tion, and one only, and hope for an answer, I think the question
would be this, Is the Universe friendly?” In the midst of the
unfriendliness of nature and man’s inhumanity to man, this is
the problem which challenges all modern religion. The historical
figure of Jesus and the perennial power of the character of Christ
owe their appeal to the suggested answer to this question. Chris¬
tian theology has been, in its making, essentially inductive and
empirical in method. All perversions of this method to the con¬
trary, Christian thought does not start with a rigid premise as to
the nature of God, and force Jesus into some hard category of
divinity. Christian thought begins with the benevolences of
common life which no minor pessimism can deny, and advances
from them,

The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless,

Are scattered at the feet of Man — like flowers.

The generous inclination, the just rule,

Kind wishes and good actions, and pure thoughts —

No mystery is here! Here is no boon

For high nor yet for low; for proudly graced —

Yet not for meek of heart. The smoke ascends
To heaven as lightly from the cottage hearth
As from the haughtiest palace. He whose soul
Ponders this true equality, may walk
The fields of earth with gratitude and hope.

To these initial pledges of the ultimate friendliness of the
Mystery, Christianity in the fullness of human experience adds its
vision of the character of Jesus: “He that hath seen me hath
seen the Father.” No man, Jesus least of all men, stands apart
from the homeland of the human soul, whence we all come
and to which we all return. Our devotion to him is merely our

40

JESUS AND RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

consent to the clearest of all those earnests of nature and history
which give us courage to believe that the Universe is friendly, that
the Veiled Being is no passionless object of our unrequited desire,
but is in verv truth the Eternal Goodness. It is to all such
farther and final considerations that the authority of Jesus leads
the human mind on into the central energy of all religion, man’s
friendship with God.

It is expedient for us, therefore, that all centers of external
authority shall pass away. For only by their passing can we enter
into “the fixed indubitable certainty of experience” where the
power of religion is finally vested. There is no inherent reason why
the disciple who has been led onward to the Inner Light may not
evidence in his discipleship that authority which has been im¬
perfectly exercised by other claimants. He will make his errors,
for all truth is not given to him, or to his generation in advance.
But the constant testing of his sincerity of thought and purpose in
the presence of the Friend of Man, and the unfailing access of
counsel which comes from the total character of Christ will lead
him more and more into that truth where Jesus lives, the finisher
of our faith, as he was its historical author.

“He comes to us as one unknown without a name, as of old, by
the lake-side, He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks to
us the same word, ‘Follow thou me! ’ and sets us to the tasks which
He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who
obey Him, whether they be wise or 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.”*

* “The Quest of the Historical Jesus,” Schweitzer, p. 401.

41

CHAPTER III.

Christian History and Dogma
as Autobiography.

( (

HE human heart,” says John Calvin, “is a perpetual
forge of idols.” Our Western World cherishes a super¬
cilious contempt for the heathen who in his blindness
bows down to wood and stone. As Gibbon in Rome allowed him¬
self a furtive glance at her monuments of superstition, so the
tourist in Japan deigns a visit to the Buddha at Kamakura. But
in his heart of hearts he thanks God that he is not as those
idolaters.

If Calvin be right, however, idolatry cannot be so easily and
cheaply abjured. For wood and brass are not the only vehicles
through which an idolatrous spirit expresses itself. The idols of
the clan, the market place, the forum, and the pulpit may be as
potent as the graven images of the alleged heathen. The gospel
of “brass tacks” is as much an idolatry as the gospel of Gautama,
and a good deal more so. As a matter of simple aesthetic judg¬
ment, brass tacks are vastly inferior to jade Buddhas as an object
of veneration. And it is a fair question whether our commercial
materialism has really achieved any moral and spiritual advance
by substituting its brass tacks for the saints of yesterday and the
gods of the nations. In other words, a man does not have to bow
down to some image of an anthropomorphic deity to be an
idolatrous heathen. He needs only to worship at the sign of the
dollar, or any other crude material value, to set going again the
idol forge in the human soul.

There are two great idolatries in contemporary Christianity
from which the free man may pray to be emancipated. One is the
idolatry of fact. The other is the idolatry of system. These two
idols stand between the seeker and the Reality to obstruct his

42

HISTORY AND DOGMA

vision of Truth. Each of them has a certain validity as a symbol
of Reality. Yet the symbol has found such acceptance in the
modern mind that the Reality is in constant danger of being ob¬
scured and forgotten, while the symbol usurps for itself the
values and prerogatives of Reality. When this subtle but radical
change takes place, when fact and system thrust themselves into
the foreground as the objects of our worship, they make idolaters
of us. For a fact may be as wooden as a totem pole, and a system
as inhuman and impersonal as Moloch, and neither of them has
of itself any life-giving power.

The veneration of fact is a by-product of the scientific spirit.
At its best, modern science is essentially religious in its temper
and leadings. But in its uninspired, chronic form it may sink into
an idolatry pure and simple; a worship of information, of dates,
names and places. In this debased form its ark of the covenant is
a card catalogue, its holy of holies a reference library, its sacred
scriptures an encyclopaedia, its priests and Levites our modem
academic pedants.

Contemporary Christianity, invaded and overcome by the scien¬
tific spirit, has failed to sense what is essentially noble and deeply
religious in the major prophecies of science at its best, but has
accepted without question its minor prophecy of fact. In religion
this has meant the elevation of the historical method to a prestige
that for the moment is unchallenged. This method as it is now in
vogue is primarily a quest for the naked event, the uninterpreted
actuality.

In particular the Bible, and in general all religious history, have
been subjected to this process. In our Bible, as it stands, there
are two strands twisted so tightly as to give at first sight the im¬
pression of a single uniform stuff. One of these is the strand of
actual happening. The other is the strand of contemporaneous
interpretation. Prior to the advent of the historical sciences it
never occurred to the Bible reader to distinguish between the two.
He identified the two. The main contribution which the historical
study of the Bible has made to religious thought is its unremitted
effort to untwist the stuff of Scripture, to dissociate the event
from the interpretation placed upon the event, to revise or to
reject altogether the strand of interpretation, and to conserve and
stress the strand of fact.

43

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

There is the very first story on the opening page of Genesis,
the story of the Creation. The religious value of the story lies not
in the fact as it was then comprehended, but in the interpretation
of the fact. What were then held to be the facts were a matter of
universal knowledge in the ancient world. The superiority of the
Genesis narrative over the non-Biblical creation myths lies in the
interpretation of the fact implied from the first, “In the beginning
God.” Modern geology and astronomy have dug down through
the Genesis narrative to a deeper stratum of physical fact than
was at first suspected. But they have withheld spiritual interpre¬
tation. Tyrrell sits in judgment on the dispassionate reign of fact
over the modern mind when he says of the issues involved in any
theory of creation:

“If our astronomy has in some way enlarged it has also im¬
poverished our notion of the heavens. It has given us quantitative
mysteries in exchange for qualitative. The once mysterious planets,
and the sun itself, are but material orbs like our own; and as the
mind travels endlessly into space it meets only with more orbs
and systems of orbs in their millions, an infinite monotony of
matter and motion, but never does it strike against some boundary
wall of the universe, beyond which God keeps an eternal Sabbath
in a new order of existence, a mysterious world which eye has not
seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived. The heaven that lay
behind the blue curtain of the sky, whence night by night God
hung out his silver lamps to shine upon the earth, was a far deeper
symbol of the eternal home than the cold and shelterless deserts
of astronomical space.”

We moderns may be nearer the bare fact than the writer of the
Pentateuch. But the uninterpreted fact is even less potent reli¬
giously than the interpretation of the facts as imperfectly sensed
so long ago.

So again, there is no reason to doubt that the Hebrews fleeing
from Egypt availed themselves at the Red Sea of some abnormally
slack tide which laid bare a passage seldom open. That seems to
have been the fact. But we feel free to challenge the theory of
special providence which was used to interpret the fact in the light
of our general conception of the ways of God in nature. What the
'bare ground in the bed of the Red Sea, the bare fact of the low
tide, means, we hesitate to say. It remains for us, therefore, merely

44

HISTORY AND DOGMA

to venerate the primitive fact, uninterpreted, as though it were
of itself a suggestive and life-giving item of information.

Likewise, the most radical critic of the gospels does not hesi¬
tate to say that in the stories of the miracles, particularly the
healing of mental disorders, there is a solid core of actuality. But
he questions the theory of demoniacal possession by which the
fact was then interpreted. There is no reason to doubt that Jesus
quieted and restored to its normal poise the mind of the Gadarene
demoniac. But that he effected a transfer of malign personalities
from a man’s brain to the brain of the swine is a doubtful expla¬
nation of the actuality. Animals sense in strange ways the mental
and moral tension of human situations. Perhaps some such panic
invaded the poor beasts of Gadara. The interpretation of the
event is still an open question.

The severer historical methods would, indeed, reserve all judg¬
ments of interpretation, and would leave the naked uninterpreted
fact standing in its bare actuality, as the object of our interest and
veneration. Having restored to us the event as it was, the his¬
torian implies, usually, that he has done his perfect work. But no
mental discipline which is not an interpretation of life can hope
permanently to claim the loyalty of the human mind. The facts
which history restores to us, if uninterpreted, may become as life¬
less and morally impotent as the statues in the niches of the
cathedral. And the time must come when the cathedrals of modern
information, each with its reredos where fact is piled upon fact,
will be invaded by some Cromwellian impatience of the human
soul, which will demolish the arrogant fact with holy frenzy, will
whitewash the walls where the frescoes of systems have been
drawn, and will invite the human soul to a more direct worship of
Reality.

William Roscoe Thayer, writing of “History — Quick or Dead,”
asserts flatly that:

“Four fifths of the history written up to the present time has
been dead. . . . The worship of Fact, which must not be con¬
founded with Truth, does not lead us far. To know that Columbus
discovered America on October 12, 1492, or that the Declaration
of Independence was made on July 4, 1776, or that Napoleon lost
the battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, is interesting; but unless
these statements are reinforced by much matter of a different kind,

45

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

they are hardly more important for us than it would be to know
the number of leaves on a tree. And this is true though the facts be
indefinitely multiplied. I have read, for instance, an account of
the American Revolution in which the uncontroverted facts fol¬
lowed each other in as impeccably correct a sequence as the tele¬
graph poles which carry the wires over eight hundred and fifty
miles of the desert of Gobi. The paramount interest in this case
is not the number of poles but the purport of the telegrams flashed
along the wires. . . . The meaning of the sequent or scattered
events in any historical movement, be it of long duration, or
merely a fleeting episode — that alone can have significance for us.”

Martineau once paid his scant respects to those persons whom
he called “archaeological Christians. . . . There may, perhaps,
be logical devotees whose enthusiasm loves to reach their God by
long and painful pilgrimages of thought; but it would not be a
happy thing for natures of more direct and impatient affection to
be left thus dependent for knowledge of divine things on literary,
antiquarian, philological evidence, judicially balanced, analogous
to that which scholars cite in discussing the Homeric poems, or
the letters of Phalaris.” Yet that is the method which has domi¬
nated the religious efforts of the last two generations. In other
days Matthew, Mark and Luke and John were importuned to
“bless the bed that I lie on.” Nothing has been gained for religion
by transferring that humble office to the personage known in
gospel research as “Q — the Second Source.” The modern mind,
however, clings with a fanatic persistence to “the blessed Q,”
saying, “I will not let thee go except thou bless me,” but somehow
the blessing tarries.

For we have had now a full and fair half century in our liberal
churches of the working of the historical method in religion. Our
preaching and our teaching have aimed to establish correct in¬
formation as to the essential religious facts, and to relieve those
facts, wherever and whatever they were, of the liabilities of im¬
perfect interpretation by which their true outlines were obscured.
There has been in the scientific treatment of fact a kind of
deification of nakedness, and an impatience of the fantastic
fashions of thought superimposed by past interpreters.

Yet what has been accomplished by the deification of naked
fact, unclothed upon by any comment? The salvation of the world

46

HISTORY AND DOGMA

still tarries. In commenting upon the failure of our whole modern
system of religious education, revealed in the abysmal ignorance
of the average British soldier as to the simple gospel facts, the
members of the English symposium, who have issued a report on
“The Army and Religion,” do not hesitate to say that, “The nine¬
teenth century aimed too much at imparting fact. . . . The con¬
ception of education as an endeavor to pack the mind with morally
colorless facts has done untold damage. . . . The average boy gets
to detest the Bible at school or college, as its historical side only
is thrust upon him.”

What is needed in our whole contemporary use of the accredited
body of Christian fact is some more vital theory of the value and
use of history than that which has been in vogue among the
idolaters of fact. We need the prophetic impatience which always
struggles to get away from “The preposterous Then and There”
to the “Everlasting Here and Now.” The most significant facts
in our whole religious catena, the facts about Jesus, are impotent,
as we have seen, without the subjective contribution made by the
interpreter. For these facts about Jesus are spiritually impotent
and must remain so, if they are preached and taught merely as
events which happened two thousand years ago. Canon Barnett
trying to bring the gospel of Jesus to East London had only one
conviction, “Christ is a present Christ, and all of us are his
contemporaries.”

This doctrine of the contemporaneity of Christ has too often
been looked upon in our time as a dubious mood of mystical piety
which cannot be subjected to any serious critical examination.
But in reality, this characteristic doctrine of the Christian reli¬
gion that Christ is always present with the disciple, is founded
upon the only theory of history which really has any permanent
worth. It is the theory which Emerson has indicated and roughed
out in his “Essay on History.” Every man, Emerson tells us, must
realize that he can live all history in his own person. History is
significant not because it is the story of what happened far away
and long ago to men whose names have resounded far, but because
it is the story of what is happening to us here and now. A man
must realize that he lives through the great epochs and civiliza¬
tions of the past in his own life, that just as the human being in
the nine months’ darkness of the womb is said to review and

47

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

reincarnate the whole process of physical evolution, so the wakened
human mind and heart relive the past in present conscious ex¬
perience. The past becomes luminous and vital when it is a com¬
mentary upon the present. A man should realize that there is no
such thing as history, there is only biography, autobiography.
There is a certain touch of arrogance in the Emersonian attitude,
which more timid natures do not understand. The iron string of
Self-Reliance is set vibrating by every great historic fact. But,
nevertheless, the secret of a true reading of history lies with this
fearless autobiographical temper. “Life, evermore Life, is the im¬
perial theme for those who live.”

The academic mind takes us out onto the high places of his¬
torical vision and shows us its Valley of Dead Facts — “And lo,
they are very many and they are very dry!” Nothing short of the
prophetic touch of an autobiographical interpretation can clothe
them with flesh and breathe into them the breath of life and
meaning. The touchstone of all historical values is to be found in
this method and this method alone.

Critics of Wordsworth have observed that the so-called panthe¬
ism of the poet is not really a recognition of God in nature but
the discovery of self in nature. It is Wordsworth’s “homing in¬
stinct” in the presence of nature which gives to his poetry its
perennial power. So it is with history live as against history dead.
What gives to history its vitality is the fearless homing instinct of
the mind which does not hesitate to identify the past fact with
the present experience.

There is a half-whimsical, half-serious passage in one of Mark
Rutherford’s novels in which he presses this method to its limit.
He is writing of a little town in the English Midlands — “Cowfold”
— and of this town he says:

“The Garden of Eden, the murder of Cain, the deluge, the sal¬
vation of Noah, the exodus from Egypt, David and Bathsheba,
with the murder of Uriah, the Assyrian invasion, the Incarnation,
the Atonement, the Resurrection from the dead; to say nothing
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the tragedy of
Count Cenci, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the Inquisi¬
tion in Spain, and the revolt of the Netherlands, all happened in
Cowfold, as well as elsewhere, and were perhaps more interesting

48

HISTORY AND DOGMA

there because they could be studied in detail and the records were
authentic.”

It is only when the student of history has achieved the moral
courage to prophesy in his own name over the Valley of Dry
Bones which makes up the severely scientific presentation of his¬
torical fact that he stands in the right relation to those facts. He
may hesitate to overwork the hard driven dictum that history
repeats itself, but he will not fail to sense the eternal life of every
fact which is worth remembering an hour after it has been noted.

No false modesty, no self-disparagement, can blind us to the
truth that what gives the great man and the great fact power over
us is their strange gift to us of a better self-knowledge. The would-
be great man impresses us with his own claim to greatness. The
truly great man makes us feel our greatness. No historical char¬
acter or event, no classic in literature, can escape this drastic
autobiographical test to which subsequent generations subject
them. If they are to live potently in memory, they live not because
they illuminate remote times and places, but because they irra¬
diate the life of the present. We sense

An influence from the earth from those dead hearts
So passionate once, so deep, so truly kind,

That in the living child the spirit starts,

Feeling companioned still, not left behind.

And it is the measure of companionship which may be drawn
direct from past events that determines the true worth and per¬
manence of any historical happening or any human classic.

Out of the welter of the memories of the War, two impressions
still linger as illustrations of the autobiographical test which alone
proves the permanent worth of the classic event and the classic
record from the remote past. One memory is that of a presentation
of Euripides’ “Trojan Women.” The play was written in 415 B. C.
as a criticism of the military policy of Athens and as a human
commentary upon all wars. It uses the mythical story of Troy as
its text. But as retold in our own time, set to the background of
the recent years, all sense of the intervening centuries was lost,
and the play became modern in the only way that any classic can
be called modern, through a certain eternal fidelity to unchanging
human experience, which time does not give and which time,

49

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

therefore, cannot take away. Helen of Troy lived again as the
perennial seduction of the pride of life and the lust of the eye.
Hecuba was simply the unchanging lament of womanhood in all
wars — “behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my
sorrow.” The boy Astyanax laid at the last dead upon Hector’s
great shield was the childhood of all time immolated upon the
altar of all wars. There was no sense of historical discrepancy in
the poignant cry of old, the voice of Belgium and Flanders and
Armenia speaking for the moment in the thin guise of Troy.

Lo, I have seen the open hand of God;

And in it nothing, nothing save the rod

Of mine affliction.

So long as there shall be wars and rumors of war upon the earth,
the marching centuries which separate us farther and farther from
Euripides will never make his imperious tragedy archaic and re¬
mote. He will be at all such times the very present and sufficient
voice of suffering womanhood and outraged childhood, the rebel
protest of all realism. Until swords have been beaten irrevocably
into ploughshares, “The Trojan Women” stands entirely outside
the time process.

And the other memory is that of a symphony concert with
Paderewski as the assisting artist. With the orchestra he played
some long concerto, played it with matchless precision and tech¬
nique but without any suggestion of human feeling. The audience
would not let him go but called him back once more. Again he
played, this time alone at the piano, some passionless little inven¬
tion, given with adroitness but patently without heart. The audi¬
ence began to break up and drift out of the hall. The orchestra
members left the stage. But still a handful lingered, hoping that
the man might break through the armor of self-defense which
the artist had put on. Once more he came back, sat down at the
piano, brooded over the keys in wandering chords of indecision,
then straightened up and brought down both hands onto the
keyboard in the tremendous opening chords of a Chopin Mili¬
tary Polonaise. All sense of time and place were lost, all sense of
where one was and what was happening. And through the music
of a century gone, once more come into its own in history and at
the hand of a master, Chopin sang to us in the thunder and la-

50

HISTORY AND DOGMA

ment of his measures the tragedy of Poland. For the first citizen
of modern Poland at the piano, for those whom he welcomed into
his self-consciousness, there was nothing but imperious auto¬
biography — the heroic measures of yesterday living in an Eternal
Here and Now. It was the voice of life itself, the epic of humanity,
the minor measures of “the heavy and the weary weight of all
this unintelligible world” and the major affirmation of “man’s
unconquerable mind.”

From this ultimate autobiographical test no remote fact, no
ancient classic, can permanently escape. Every record of the past,
every voice of yesterday, must finally submit to this drastic proving
at the touchstone of the living spirit. The ancient fact, the alien
classic, which fail to serve as the voice of the present, pass away
into the Nirvana of all forgotten things. But the character, the epi¬
sode, the lyric, the drama, which still help men to understand
themselves and which say for men in noble measures what by
themselves they are not able to say, live on imperiously by virtue
of their own inherent immortal life.

This is the subjective test carried to its last logical conclusion.
The process which we have seen at work in the interpretation of
the historical Jesus is the process by which all historical fact, all
letters and all art are finally accredited or discredited. History is
simply the approved body of permanent autobiography in the
experience of our total humanity. All else is pedantry, archae¬
ology, a worship of the dinosaur and the dodo.

Those Concord philosophers pressed the premises of their view
of life to quixotic extreme. They caricatured themselves. But they
stood free of the obsession of dead fact, and prophesied over the
dry bones with a fearless self-confidence which contemporary
Christianity would do well to covet. In his memoir of Thoreau,
Emerson says that the distinctive quality of Thoreau’s mind was
his persistent habit of referring all facts in history and all items
in nature to the latitude and longitude of Concord. Thoreau,
asked whether he had traveled, replied, Yes, that he had traveled
widely in Concord. Invited to go to the Yosemite Valley with
friends, he declined on the ground that what might be seen in
California could be seen as well in Concord, that many a weed
in Massachusetts meant more to him than the big trees of the
Pacific Coast. Urged to take an Atlantic voyage, he refused, since

5i

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

the ocean was to him only a big Walden Pond. Reading Kane’s
“Arctic Explorations,” he put the volume by with the observation
that most of the phenomena which Kane had noted in the Arctic
Circle he himself had seen in Concord. In refusing a suggested
trip to Paris, he said that there was no use in going to France,
since Paris would be only a stepping stone to Concord, a school
in which to learn to live better at home.

My feet forever stand
On Concord fields,

And I must live the life
Which her soil yields.

All this is very far apart from the dominant temper of the his¬
torical method in religion as we know it to-day. But if our com¬
pendium of fact is ever to be resurrected into any immediate worth
and vitality it will be through the candid application of this fear¬
less and utterly contemporaneous temper.

The only man who reads his Bible aright is the man who dares
to read it as autobiography. From cover to cover it is to him
either a symbol of his own experience, or it is nothing at all other
than a remote chronicle of negligible fact. Until a man under¬
stands that he must live the whole Bible in his own person, it is
a closed book to him. But so read, it becomes to him the classic
statement of his own spiritual development. He begins in Eden
with his own age of innocence and passes on to his personal dis¬
cerning between good and evil. With that discovery there is for
him forever a flaming sword before the lost innocence of infancy.
The Call of Abraham is the story of his own soul’s awakening in
youth. The time of the Judges is the lawlessness of those early
years when he does what is right in his own eyes. The Kingdom
is his age of imitation, of protective spiritual coloration. With the
prophets he achieves his moral liberty and with the Psalmists and
Wisdom writers passes into the reflective life. In Job and Eccle¬
siastes he first feels and grapples with the somber mystery of
things. With the Gospels comes his second birth into religious
reality. The Acts and the Epistles mark his effort to apply the
convictions of his religious rebirth to the common task. And with
the Revelation he enters into the last wisdom of all religious
spirits — the vision of that ultimate Reality beyond the flaming

52

HISTORY AND DOGMA

walls of the world where all his imperfect aspirations are to be
made good in God.

Fearlessly to subject the central figure of Christian history, the
figure of Jesus, to this autobiographical rereading, may savor both
of arbitrary egoism and moral arrogance. But whatever the moral
perils of this process, they are inevitable in the life of free and
active faith, and they are less than the peril which lies in “archae¬
ological Christianity.” If Jesus is not our contemporary in some
profoundly historical sense of the word, then he is nothing to us,
and he can save neither himself nor us.

It is precisely because the intuitions of simple Christian piety
as to the presence of the living Christ in the soul rest upon the
solid foundations of a true theory of history and of the great
classics, that piety has so often been religiously right where ped¬
antry has been religiously wrong. Why is it that Shakespeare
lives and must live? Not because a conspiracy of the professors
has been formed to foist his plays off as a dull discipline upon
successive generations. Matthew Arnold knew why Shakespeare
lives, his dramas are the perennial autobiography of the race:

All pains the immortal spirit must endure,

All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,

Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.

As Matthew Arnold found himself in Shakespeare, so the humble
disciple sings of Jesus in the same strain:

Crown him the Son of Man,

Who every grief hath known
That wrings the human breast,

And takes and bears them for his own,

That all in him may rest.

The strongest motive which man can bring to bear upon man in
the things of the spirit is the exercise of sympathy. We draw
much of our power for living from the sense of things shared
fully and directly with our human kind. Here is the secret of the
power of Jesus over the marching generations:

O Saviour Christ, Thou too art man,

Thou hast been troubled, tempted, tried,

Thy kind but searching glance can scan
The very wounds that shame would hide.

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

To enter into the long, rich heritage of Christian history, to
appropriate the power that lies undiminished in the central figure
of that history, what is this but to dare to read the whole record
as our own spiritual autobiography? Only the courage of this high
freedom in the use of history can deliver us from the idolatry of
fact and make us disciples in spirit and in truth.

What is true of religious fact is equally true of religious doc¬
trine. Our age has a cheap contempt for the great systems of
Christian theology which is a sign, not of intellectual discrimina¬
tion, but of fundamental skepticism as to the value of all thought.
We shall do more justice to the past and more service to the
future if we approach the major doctrines of the Christian reli¬
gion with a deeper humility and a keener insight.

There are two axioms regarding all human thought which are
reasonably reliable and upon which the whole body of Christian
doctrine rests. The first is this: The human mind does not occupy
itself for any length of time with unreality. No matter how gro¬
tesque and incredible any single dogma may be, if century after
century the human mind revolves around that idea, it is a fair
deduction that at the heart of the matter there must be some
permanent core of human concern. And the second axiom is like
unto the first: Every theological doctrine, however uncongenial
to our modern mental furniture and method, has its origin in a
human experience. Our relation to the dogma is only a mediate
relationship, our ultimate and permanent interest is in the original
exciting experience.

St. Paul tells us that he had a stake in the flesh. That means
nothing to us to-day. But we may not, therefore, leap to the con¬
clusion that because modern medicine and surgery do not recog¬
nize “stakes in the flesh” there was nothing the matter with St.
Paul. It is his disease that concerns us, not his diagnosis. What
we have to do is to find out whether he had ophthalmia or acute
indigestion or epileptic headaches. Something was the matter with
St. Paul’s moral nature as well. He said that he had been infected
by Adam. Modern ethics does not recognize Adam as a carrier of
moral diseases. But this does not mean that St. Paul was a reli¬
gious valetudinarian imagining a sick conscience and a spiritual
impotence which did not exist. What we wish to know to-day is
this, What was the matter with the man? Where did he contract

54

HISTORY AND DOGMA

his ill? If not from Adam, then possibly from the saber-toothed
tiger. Do men have the same moral ills to-day? And, if so, how
do they describe them and what can be done to cure them? St.
Paul was cured of his spiritual disease on the road to Damascus.
The record is filled as a matter of literal account with certain
difficulties which inhere in the theory of the supernatural. But
those who question the supernatural intervention must still inter¬
pret the fact. It will not do to discount the whole narrative as the
exaggerated record of a slight sunstroke. The human conscience
is not set at ease by sunstrokes, churches are not founded and
continents evangelized by sunstrokes. If we abandon the whole
Pauline interpretation of experience, we may not, therefore, deny
the experience, but must seek its meanings and explanations in the
terms of our own thought and understanding of life.

Two of the major doctrines of the Christian religion, for
example, never perfectly reconciled, are the doctrines of Election
and Free Will. They are

The yea-nay of free will and fate,

Whereof both cannot be, yet are.

Judged merely as dogmas each is arbitrary and both are mu¬
tually irreconcilable. But read as the interpretation of experience
each is credible and both together adequate accounts of life.
These two doctrines never faced one another more frankly and
fully than in the Pelagian controversy. As a matter of the history
of dogma that controversy belongs to old, forgotten things. But
as a matter of permanent human experience this fifth century argu¬
ment is simply an item in the life of the twentieth century. To
Augustine, hounded by his own conscience from teacher to teacher,
driven at last to Milan, to Ambrose, and finally to a child’s voice
heard over a garden wall, “Tolle, lege ; tolle, lege ,” the doctrine
of the Irresistible Grace of God, of the Divine Election, seemed
the only true account of his passage through the time of storm
and stress into the peace of God. But to Pelagius, whose character
was the product of patient and unremitted moral watchfulness,
who had slowly built up the fabric of a Christian life by his own
effort, the doctrine of free will seemed the only true account of the
way men come to God. Each or both of these doctrines may be
inadequate and incredible, but the experience of Augustine and

55

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

Pelagius alike are both part of the common spiritual history of
good men.

The day is passed when “orthodoxy” is a hall-mark of religious
excellence. Orthodoxy, as Phillips Brooks used to remind candi¬
dates for ordination, has served a moderately useful function at
certain times of spiritual slack water in Christian history.

“It has no doubt served to carry the Church over, as it were,
some of those periods of depressed and weakened vitality which
come between the exalted and spontaneous conditions which are
its true life. The same service, perhaps, it renders also to the per¬
sonal experience, bridging the sad chasms between the rock of belief
on this side and the rock of belief on that side with the wooden
structure of conformity. But the indictment which can be sus¬
tained against it is tremendous. . . . Orthodoxy deals in coarse
averages. It makes of the world of truth a sort of dollar-store,
wherein a few things are rated below their real value for the sake
of making a host of other things pass for more than they are
worth. ... It makes possible an easy transmission of truth but
only by the deadening of truth, as a butcher freezes meat in order
to carry it across the sea.”

The case against wooden orthodoxy of doctrine has been so
fully established that it needs no further prosecution. The time
is coming, however, when we may well afford to realize that
although there cannot be any permanent orthodoxy in doctrine,
since the intellectual forms and fashions in which life expresses
itself are always in process of change, there is, however, a per¬
manent orthodoxy of religious experience.

It is this orthodoxy of experience, and not of dogma, which a
true interest in Christian doctrine always seeks. The paradox of
all heretics and all heresies lies in the fact that they dissent from
the letter of the dogma only to rediscover the orthodox experience.
Chesterton’s insistence that the heretic is really the most orthodox
man of his time could be made good again and again in Christian
history. The Christian Church can afford to be very tolerant of
her heretics, because they are the true mediators in history of the
only orthodoxy which is worth preserving and reverencing, that of
life itself. The Vincentian canon, “Quod semper , quod ubique ,
quod ab omnibus ” is meaningless as a theological dictum. But it

56

HISTORY AND DOGMA

is profoundly true as a definition of the major facts of religious
experience.

A great Protestant theologian of our own time has confessed
that “When a man grows older and sees more deeply into life, he
does not find if he possesses any inner world at all that he is
advanced by the external march of things, by The progress of
civilization.’ Nay, rather he feels himself, where he was before,
and forced to seek the sources of strength which his forefathers
sought.” That is a confession of orthodoxy in experience made by
one who is a radical in theology. Yet he rests the case for doctrine
where alone it can be permanently rested, on the community of
experience, rather than on the diversity of explanation.

There never has been, there is not now, for example, any en¬
tirely adequate doctrine of the atonement. The elder doctrines of
the atonement offend the moral sense of to-day. The latter doc¬
trines seem wanting in an appreciation of the mystery of Calvary.
Yet, as Royce reminds us, the doctrine of the atonement rests upon
a moral experience so deep and so universal that, even had Jesus
never lived and died, the mind of man would have had to fashion
some doctrine of atonement to account for life. For beneath and
beyond all inadequate dogmas of the cross lies the simple fact of
life, that good men again and again suffer because of bad men,
and that in the spectacle of this suffering there lies an almost
unequaled moral energy.

In earth or heaven,

Bold sailor on the sea,

What have I given

That you should die for me?

What can I give,

O soldier leal and brave,

Long as I live
To pay the life you gave?

What tithe or part
Can I return to thee,

O stricken heart,

That thou shouldest break for me?

The wind of death
For you hath slain life’s flowers.

It withereth (God grant)

All weeds in ours.

57

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

That is the great community of experience which lies behind
all doctrines of atonement. No doctrine can ever give an adequate
account of the central moral mystery. There can be no permanent
orthodoxy of explanation. Every dogma is at best a broken light
which serves its own time inadequately, then gutters and goes out.
But of the living comradeship of the centuries in the presence of
the Calvary-like experience there is no doubt. The ancient doc¬
trines may all be alien to our thought, but the old experience must
always be a part of our spiritual autobiography.

Every doctrine, then, is but a schoolmaster to lead us to the
relatively permanent content of common religious experience, its
few central emotions and convictions, actions and reactions. In
theology a man in our own time may be a heretic without peril to
his soul, but if he be a profoundly religious man he will become
more and more conscious of the orthodoxy of life itself and of his
own experience where it is hid in the common heart of man and
hid in the unchanging Reality that is the heart of God.

58

I

CHAPTER IV.

A Modern Doctrine of Original Sin.

“ 4 S I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted

/ % on a certain place, where was a Den, and I laid me down
X JL in that place to sleep. And as I slept, I dreamed a Dream.
I dreamed and behold I saw a Man cloathed with rags, standing
in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a Book in
his hand, and a great Burden upon his back. I looked and saw
him open the Book and read therein; and as he read, he wept and
trembled; and not being able longer to continue, he brake out
with a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do. . . . I am undone
by reason of a Burden that lieth hard upon me. ... I care not
what I meet if so be I can also meet deliverance from this
Burden .”

There is no point at which modern liberal Protestantism stands
in sharper contrast to historic Christianity as a whole than in its
indifference to this initial mood of Christian experience. It does
not matter where we turn, in what past century or to what type of
record, the Christian life uniformly began, in the generations gone,
as an effort to roll away the heavy burden of sin and guilt from
the bowed shoulders of the human conscience.

The preaching ministry of Jesus opened with an unqualified
command to repent. Jesus did not seek to create the sense of sin
or even to explain it, he presupposed it. Christianity came to Paul
as a great deliverance from the moral horror of a body of spiritual
death to which he had been chained. It released him from his
ghastly comradeship with ethical corruption. The classical world
into which Christianity entered and in which its early conquests
were made, was bowed down by the sense of sin. Neoplatonism
and the mystery religions, the only significant extra-Christian
movements of the first three centuries of our era, both appealed to
the troubled conscience of paganism. Christianity competed with

59

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

them and prevailed because it proffered a sounder healing for the
hurt at the heart of the ancient world.

The mystics, of whom Saint Martin says, “They all come from
the same country and speak the same language,” are at one in
their account of the rungs in the ladder of perfection. The first of
these steps, following hard after the moment of the soul’s con¬
scious awakening, is that of purgation, self-discipline, the effort
of the ardent conscience to roll from off its shoulders its heavy
and weary weight of guilt.

For eighteen hundred years the dominant theology of all creeds
and churches had, as its point of departure, its sting “that bids
nor sit nor stand but go,” this universal consciousness of inherent
and original sin. However Paul, Augustine, Calvin and Edwards
may have differed in theological detail they are all agreed in
appealing primarily to the malaise of the human conscience. The
comparative study of all religions, indeed, bears out William
James’s familiar statement that “The completest religions Sfeem
to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed.
Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best known to us
of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance.” Tyrrell
puts it in another way when he says that the Christian view of the
world is an ultimate optimism, but that this optimism rests on a
provisional pessimism. A religion which makes its initial appeal
to the consciousness of original goodness, to moral self-compla¬
cency, would not have been recognized before 1850 as the Chris¬
tian religion.

“The modern man,” says Sir Oliver Lodge, “is not bothering
about his sins. If he is good for anything he is up and doing.” The
conceiver of that premature birth which was known as the “New
Theology” began his Pilgrim’s Progress with a very different
statement from that of John Bunyan’s. He tells us that, al¬
though the average Christian still kneels in church and con¬
fesses Sunday by Sunday that he is a miserable sinner, he really
does not mean it. If someone were to stop him on the street Mon¬
day morning and charge him with actually being a miserable
sinner, he certainly would be very angry, would demand that the
libelous critic specify in detail and then would probably institute
legal proceedings for defamation of character!

So utterly has this whole dogma dropped below the religious

60

ORIGINAL SIN

horizon of the normal man of to-day that he simply has no idea of
what historic Christianity meant by its doctrine of total depravity.
It is told of a certain dour Scotch chaplain who was still under
the spell of the somber tenets of Calvinism, that one day, preach¬
ing to his boys in France, he fell under heavy conviction of sin
and said that he knew he was the wickedest and most sinful man
in France at that moment. The healthy young barbarians heard
this statement with a bewildered deference, and finally the awk¬
ward silence at the close of the service was broken by a breezy
young officer who stepped up and said, “Well, Sir, you must get
a tremendous lot of satisfaction out of remembering what a per¬
fectly ripping time you’ve had.” So little does the youth of our
day begin to appreciate the tears for sin with which the fathers
prevented the night watches.

“This, then,” says Johnston Ross, taking up the tale, “is the
quintessence of the Christianity of the hour — helpfulness. In the
dim backgrounds of a history semi-legendary, semi-mythological
lies the Titanic struggle of the Son of God with Sin and Death in
the agonies of Calvary, flung back there as we fling the legends
of Arthur and Beowulf and Siegfried. The older generation began
at a point of grave concern as to personal status before a holy
God. It wrestled with the awful facts of guilt and of the ineradi¬
cable consequences of sin. I remember that I once had the honor
of preaching for a minister of the older generation. I found him
preparing an address for the General Assembly. He said to me, T
am writing about the evangelical outlook. We older men knew
what Christ did for us on Calvary; but precisely what does this
beautiful young Apollo whom your younger men adore do for
you?’ ”

Nothing is clearer, to-day, than the indifference of the crowd to
the traditional message of the Christian religion, or at least to the
conventional terms in which that message has for centuries been
cast. The Church must accept her full and fair burden of the
responsibility for this growing misunderstanding, this lack of a
common ground of speech in the vernacular of the pulpit and the
vernacular of the street. But the problem is something more than
a mere lack of mutual understanding of vernaculars. The ground
of the apparent impotence of the Christian religion in modern
society is found, in part at least, in the fact that from the first

61

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

our religion has addressed itself primarily to the sense of human
sin and the burden of moral guilt. Most of the deeper stuff of our
spiritual heritage is concerned with the healing of the ills of the
human conscience. But young Apollos have no hurt of conscience,
and in a time which thinks well of itself morally, the offices of
Christianity seem superfluous and its central doctrine of salvation,
gratuitous.

There is in one of our American seaboard cities a long estab¬
lished philanthropy founded years ago to provide a decent shore
home for deep-sea sailors. In the days of the clipper ships the
life of a man before the mast yielded much hardship and few
compensations. A half century ago this sailors’ home hard by the
wharves kept open house for the seaman in port. The pittance
which he brought ashore as wages gave him there a decent home,
good food and a friendly environment. The clipper ships are
gone. The deck hands on the steamers which now dock where the
clippers used to lie are paid a hundred dollars a month at sea,
with all found, and a shore allowance of three dollars a day while
in port. They no longer need the charitable ministries of the
sailors’ home. They pass by its doors with a substantial roll of
bills in their pockets, they go up town to the regular hostelries,
and live as becomes men no longer dependent upon charity.
Meanwhile, bound hand and foot by laws governing the use of
trust funds, this sailors’ home cannot alienate any of its income
for the other human needs which have grown up in the city, and
after all expenses have been paid, there is a margin of income from
the endowments which rolls up year after year. Eventually some
radical readjustment to the contemporary fact will be necessary.
The society will have to seek relief from the legislature that it
may be free to divert these funds into lines of fresh service not
anticipated by the founders. Otherwise its present sponsors will
have hard work getting their ample camel of a charity into the
heaven of ultimate self-respect through the eye of the moral
needle. For one cannot minister to needs which have ceased to
exist.

Now contemporary Christianity is in something of the same
dilemma. Its sacred trust was at the first established and was sub¬
sequently endowed in history by the labors of many devoted
souls, to heal the hurt of the moral nature. But in a time when

62

ORIGINAL SIN

there is little or no felt hurt in the conscience of Christendom it
is a perfectly fair question what the office of the Christian religion
really is. Hoffding laments that whereas formerly religion was the
pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night which marched in the
vanguard of history, now it is only an ambulance corps trailing
along in the rear of the conflict caring for the sick and wounded.
But even this caring for the wounded has ceased to be a moral
ministry. It is divided, at the best, between proffering some solace
to the bereaved, a solace which the Psychical Research Society
threatens to monopolize, and doing “friendly visiting” for the
Associated Charities, too often a mistaken mixture of patronage
and curiosity. As for healing the moral hurt of those whose con¬
science has been sorely wounded in the conflict of life, that par¬
ticular type of wound is the exception.

We talk of “sin,” that ancient obsession of the fathers, and
“men smile and pass by.” There is, patently, some fundamental
maladaptation to environment in the whole situation. Whether the
spiritual fault be that of the religion or the environment is one
of the moot moral problems of the day. It simply does no good to
work oneself into a kind of dervish fervor of evangelical piety by
preaching about the exceeding sinfulness of sin, or to print the
word with a capital “S.” These are the poor resorts of a religion
which is confessedly at its wits’ ends to find something to do in
the world. They are a confession that evangelical piety despairs
of making itself understood in any rational way and has to resort
to the effects of theological incantation. All this is merely seeking
refuge in those vain repetitions against which the Master warned
us. The conventional revival meeting method of preaching sin is
about as effective with the modern mind as the idle revolutions
of a Thibetan prayer wheel. The trombone if played long enough
and loud enough may produce, by a kind of autosuggestion or
through a semi-hypnotic condition, a temporary sense of sin. But
the emotion does not last beyond the doors of the overheated
tabernacle, and it represents no permanent ethical reality in the
normal mind of the man of to-day. Proffering thus, the traditional
gospel of a glorious salvation from sin is a kind of casting the
pearls of our hereditary faith before men who so far from con¬
ceiving of themselves as immoral swine, habitually think of them-

63

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

selves as moral rajahs whose casket of virtues is so full that it
has no need of any pearl of great price more.

In short, the whole furniture of the Pauline doctrine of human
sinfulness no longer makes any appeal to the modern mind. It
is simply dead and gone, in its traditional form; of interest to the
antiquarian, but without any point of vital contact with the
moral consciousness of the present hour. To say “In Adam’s fall
we sinned all” is to say nothing to this generation. The modern
man feels that Adam has been a badly overworked character in
human history and that he deserves now some eternal Sabbath
of respite from the obloquy which our thankless predecessors cast
on him. We think better of him than they thought, and as for the
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil — the sin in
Eden that they did by two and two they must long since have
paid for one by one. It was, of course, the advent of the modern
sciences which issued Adam his indeterminate ticket of moral
leave in history and wrecked the whole grim system which had
been built up around him. He remained a person to conjure with
ethically until he was confronted by Darwin, Lyell, Spencer and
Co. Since then he has been superseded by a half-erect biped with
a sharply recessive forehead, somewhere along the line between
Pithecanthropus erectus and the Neanderthal savage whose back¬
ground is the nebular hypothesis and the primeval ooze; nebula,
ooze and biped all alike simply nonmoral.

One cannot review, however, the unbroken history of Christian
thought over eighteen centuries, and then the clean break of the
nineteenth century with the fundamental conviction of the past as
to man’s sinful nature, without some sober second thoughts. Cer¬
tainly Charles Darwin has not proved an altogether adequate
successor to the great preachers of yesterday, and “The Ascent
of Man” has not hastened the moral millennium appreciably.
Everywhere there is to-day a willingness to review the total wit¬
ness of Christian experience and to recover from the faith of the
past such of its central convictions as may have been too easily
and cavalierly abandoned.

If we abide by the proposition of the previous chapter that the
human mind does not permanently occupy itself with unreality
and that behind every doctrine, however incredible and arbitrary,
there lies some actual human experience, we have ground for the

64

ORIGINAL SIN

shrewd suspicion that in the old dogma of original sin there must
lie some more or less permanent element of the moral life, which
still persists though it is not recognized when clothed in the dis¬
carded systems of yesterday.

There is, as a matter of fact, no single article in the creeds of
the elder orthodoxy which so sorely needs candid reexamination
in our own day as does this of original sin, not only that we may
restore the continuity of the Christian consciousness unbroken,
but that once more we may commend our religion of salvation
to the deeper want of the world. What the thoughtful man seeks
to-day is not to rehabilitate the letter of the system of the fathers,
but to enter with a more resourceful sympathy into the experience
of the fathers, to discover what the marching generations still
share in the common moral consciousness of the race.

When we turn back to the tradition of the elders regarding
original sin, what strikes us at once is the fact that sin was not
with them a synonym for vice. It is just this modern reduction of
the idea of original sin to occasional vice which has created for
us our initial misunderstandings. The modern church member is
probably not a man of gross viciousness, but neither was Paul
such a man, nor Augustine, nor Calvin. Whatever the thing may
have been, it was not the sort of transgression which is confessed
by the sower of wild oats at a Salvation Army mourners’ bench.

Santayana says that Calvinism was essentially an expression of
the agonized conscience. That is the simplest and best working
definition of the whole system which could be fashioned. But the
longer one ponders this agonized conscience the clearer it is that
its suffering was not a mere superficial irritation. Just before he
died, Robert Hugh Benson said that he felt ill, “not at the top,
but deep down from the inside.” The conscience of the Calvinist
ailed in the same way, deep down inside. His constant burden was
not a mere cumulation of peccadilloes. It was not that he went to
sleep in the Lord’s house on Sunday and had to be prodded into
reverential wakefulness by the tithing man, or that he lost his
temper on Monday, or drank one too many mugs of mead on
Tuesday, or cut too sharp a corner on Wednesday’s horse trade.

These items were deplorable enough in their own way. But they
were of moral significance only because they were the outcroppings
of a constant liability which, weeded out at one spot in character,

65

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

reappeared in another. They were like those masses of pusley
which Charles Dudley Warner describes so feelingly in his
“Summer in a Garden.” The whole subsoil of that garden was
nothing but a tangled mesh of roots of witch grass. So, for the
Calvinist, the whole subsoil of character was matted through and
through by the weedy mesh of moral liability. To dig it up
seemed a hopeless task. If you cleared character at any one spot,
sin only got ahead of you somewhere else.

This thing that he called original sin seemed to be constantly
vitiating his whole personal struggle after virtue. His moral
problem was not to keep his petty cash account with God bal¬
anced week by week. What haunted his soul was the knowledge
that there was a mortgage on the whole business, and that if the
moral order suddenly foreclosed, as it might at any moment,
he would be found bankrupt, his few private profits on the moral
venture counting for nothing against his heavy outstanding human
liabilities.

So, in his famous Enfield sermon, Jonathan Edwards says that
every little child born into the world is more hateful to God than
the loathliest viper that crawls on the ground. But, as Leslie
Stephen shrewdly remarks, Jonathan Edwards seems, nevertheless,
“to have had a very happy time of it amid a brood of eleven little
vipers of his own begetting!” That comment lights up the other¬
wise baffling paradox which runs through all Calvinism that the
better a man is the more sinful he seems to himself to be. We must
conclude that the viperish quality of the Edwards brood was not
an induction from the facts of the Edwards home reached in a
bilious moment of parental petulance, but an a priori judgment
passed on all childhood, on which Edwards based his survey of
human nature as a whole. What vexed the soul of Jonathan
Edwards was not that the Edwards children were mischievous
and irritating beyond the common kind, but that simply by being
born into the world at all every one of us has to accept certain
inevitable and inalienable moral liabilities as part of his birth¬
right.

The problem which faces the modem preacher who still has a
message of salvation and redemption to preach to the world is
to find the equivalent forms of the agonized conscience of Calvin¬
ism in the thought of our own time. Once we define the doctrine

66

ORIGINAL SIN

of original sin as an early and inadequate effort to express the
sense of personal participation in the corporate moral liabilities
of humanity as a whole, we begin to see our way ahead. We may
candidly leave the items of private vice and virtue to one side
altogether. They have nothing to do with the major problem, save
as they are interesting casual manifestations of the moral situa¬
tion as a whole.

The true successors to the Calvinist with his agonized con¬
science and his initial dogma of original sin are to be found to-day
among the biologists, the psychologists, the novelists and the
dramatists. It is very seldom that one hears in the modern pulpit
any note approximating to that of the elder theology voicing its
burden of human guilt. But one does not have to seek far in
these other quarters before one realizes that one is still in the
presence of the agonized human conscience and that although it
now speaks a new dialect, its central consciousness is qualitatively
unchanged.

Perhaps the most important and epoch-making utterance in the
realm of biological science since Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was
Huxley’s Romanes Lecture on “Evolution and Ethics,” given at
Oxford in 1893. That is a full generation ago. But Huxley, as he
well enough knew, in delivering that address, was before his time
and he raised then what has since become the really important
problem in connection with the whole biological reading of man’s
life in nature and society.

In that address Huxley turned state’s evidence against the
whole overhopeful ethical deductions drawn by Spencer and John
Fiske and Henry Drummond from the theory of natural selec¬
tion. Huxley came in that maturest moment of his thinking to
the conclusion that the struggle for existence was immoral, or at
the best nonmoral in its methods. His argument need not be re¬
produced in detail. Suffice to say that he took his stand as an
ethical teacher against all the neopaganism of our day which
would seek salvation by abandoning ourselves to the instincts
which drive the cosmic process. The ape and the tiger served their
part in the hot youth of the race. They have ceased to be an asset
and have now become a liability. “The practice of what is ethi¬
cally best — what we call goodness or virtue — involves a course of
conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to

67

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

success in the cosmic struggle. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory
of existence. Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical
progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic struggle,
still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”

The significance of the Romanes Lecture for the religious
thinker lies in the fact that it aligned Huxley with Calvinism, and
that he knew it and was content to stand there. He himself cari¬
catured his own lecture as “a very orthodox sermon on ‘Satan the
Prince of this World.’ ” In other words, he felt that the science
of biology had revealed in some new and terrible way the moral
liability of every child of man, a liability reaching back of the
mythical Garden of Eden to the jungle where the saber-toothed
tiger roamed at large, and where red ravin went its lawless way.
And he felt the stirrings of the tiger in his own blood to be more
real and ominous than any spell cast by Adam over the race.

“It is,” he writes to a friend, “the superiority of the best
theological teachers to the majority of their opponents that they
substantially recognize the reality of things, however strange the
forms in which they clothe their conceptions. The doctrines of
predestination, original sin, of the innate depravity of man and
the evil fate of the greater part of the race, of the primacy of
Satan in this world, of the essential vileness of matter, appear to
me vastly nearer the truth than the liberal popular illusion that
babies are all born good, that it is given to everybody to realize
his ethical ideal if he will only try, that all partial evil is uni¬
versal good and other optimistic figments which bid us believe
that everything will come right at the last.” Huxley’s moral
consciousness, as a biologist, was agonized, and his initial outlook
on life was a provisional pessimism. He stands in the straight line
of ethical succession from Edwards, Calvin, Augustine and Paul.
He proffers no facile gospel of social salvation — he did not con¬
ceive that to be his task. His task was rather to find the facts and
make men face the facts, and these facts he held to be such as
compel in some form or other a doctrine of original sin. With the
moral problem which he stated, modern science is still wrestling.
But there is little or no tendency among sober scientists to-day to
question the ethical presupposition which Huxley laid down.

Mr. Wells has more than once popularized the Romanes Lec¬
ture in his novels and semi-theological tracts. And he tells us quite

68

ORIGINAL SIN

candidly that this life force in the struggle for existence may not
be deified — that it is in substance a sinister and ominous thing.
“The forms in which this being clothes itself bear thorns and
fangs and claws, are soaked with poison and bright with threats or
allurements, prey slyly or openly on one another, hold their own
for a little while, breed savagely and resentfully, and pass. . . . ”
So far have we come from John Fiske. And this advance of modern
thought is nothing but a circling back to the old haunting ob¬
session of a fundamental human liability, a burden of corporate
racial guilt. Huxley and Wells and all such preach this old somber
gospel of man’s sinful nature with a conviction and terrible
earnestness unsurpassed by any of the fathers. The language they
use is the language of our own time, but their central message to
our time is that of the elders to the earlier time, man is by nature
a sinner and needs salvation.

The modern psychologist in his study of human instincts is
also reverting to Calvinism. The best that he can say for our in¬
stincts is that they are the nonmoral sources of power in human
nature. Of themselves they are no more good or bad than any
other form of energy. Left to themselves uncontrolled and un¬
coordinated, they set up a civil warfare in our natures, disrupting
and destroying the house of flesh and spirit they ought to energize.
There is always potential moral evil in instincts not wrought into
some central harmony by a good will. And it needs but a little
remitting of the strong hand of the will to make this potential
moral evil a present actuality.

One of our own American philosophers has just written of
“Human Nature and Its Remaking.” The very title implies an
initial unfavorable verdict upon human nature in the raw. For
there is no moral necessity to remake that which is inherently
and inevitably good in itself. Every idealism, says the writer, has
its origin in some deprecatory judgment upon the primitive human
stuff out of which character is to be fashioned. There is no escape
for any idealist from his initial dictum that there is in this welter
of human instinct some maladjustment, some chaos that needs
saving and solving. The names which we give to the facts and to
the remaking process he regards as irrelevant. But he insists that
upon the facts themselves we shall agree. He will not suffer us to
put away the doctrine of original sin as a childish theological

69

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

nightmare. He even doubts whether this somber judgment upon
the nature of man is primarily a product of theological specula¬
tion. He shrewdly suspects it to be an inevitable deduction from
the life of humanity as a whole and insists that it has “a strong
support in common experience.” The modern psychologist is essen¬
tially a Calvinist when he surveys the chaos of human instinct.

But there marches beside this modem biological and psycho¬
logical restatement of the doctrine of original sin a further ex¬
pression of this same conviction which makes an even more direct
and deeper appeal to the mind of to-day. That is the conception
of man, not so much a sinner in nature, as a sinner through
society. It is through the voice of the social conscience that Cal¬
vinism finds its most adequate expression in this present time.

The social conscience is by no means a discovery of the nine¬
teenth and twentieth centuries. It is a fair question whether it
has ever been absent from simple Christian piety at its best. The
rank individualism of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, and of the
ultra-Protestant attitude suppressed it for generations in our
English-speaking world. But exact and entirely adequate state¬
ments of its central position can be found all through Christian
history. aPiers Plowman” is nothing but a tract on the social
conscience, written, indeed, over six hundred years ago, but essen¬
tially true to the modern form. Behind the institution of volun¬
tary poverty which inspired most of the lay brotherhood move¬
ments of the two centuries before the Reformation lay a sensitive
social conscience. John Woolman’s “Journal” is nothing but a
study in the agonized conscience of a single sensitive individual
following the social implications of his life to their sources and
their consequences. The thing is not new.

But the social conscience has come into a prominence in our
own time never so widely and deeply felt before, and its im¬
portance for theology lies in the fact that it must now do major
duty as the vehicle for that strange sense of original sin which
men seem always to have felt in some form or other. What did
the fathers mean, at bottom, by their doctrine of original sin?
Let Mr. Wells answer in the person of Mr. Britling, who, learning
to drive his new automobile, had all but killed a hapless cyclist,
and thus soliloquizes:

70

ORIGINAL SIN

“This last folly was surely the worst. To charge through this
patient world with — how much did the car weigh? A ton certainly
and perhaps more — reckless of every risk. Not only to himself
but to others. Once more he saw the bent back of the endangered
cyclist, and then through a long instant he drove helplessly at
the wall. . . .

Hell perhaps is only one such incident, indefinitely prolonged.
. . . Anything might have been there in front of him.

‘Good God!’ he cried, ‘if I had hit a child! I might have hit a
child.’ . . .

But this was not fair! He had hurt no child! . . .

It wasn’t his merit that the child hadn’t been there.

The child might have been there!

Mere luck.

If he had not crushed a child other people had. Such things
happened. Vicariously at any rate he had crushed many chil¬
dren. . . .

Why are children ever crushed?

And suddenly all the pain and destruction and remorse of all
the accidents in the world descended upon Mr. Britling.

He became Man on the automobile of civilization crushing his
thousands daily in his headlong yet aimless career. . . .

This was a trick of Mr. Britling’s mind. It had this tendency to
spread outward from himself to generalised issues. Many minds
are like that nowadays. He was not so completely individualised
as people are supposed to be individualised — in our law, in our
stories, in our moral judgments. He had a vicarious factor. He
could slip from concentrated reproaches to the liveliest remorse
for himself as the Automobilist in General, or for himself as Eng-
land, or for himself as Man. From remorse for smashing his guest
and his automobile he could pass, by what was for him the most
imperceptible of transitions, to remorse for every accident that has
ever happened through the error of an automobilist since auto¬
mobiles began. All that long succession of blunderers became
Mr. Britling. Or rather Mr. Britling became all that vast succes¬
sion of blunderers.”

It would be difficult to find in modern literature, theological or
otherwise, a more entirely adequate account of what the sense

7i

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

of original sin actually is when stated in the terms of the moral
consciousness of the twentieth century. Mr. Britling did prevent
the night watches with these sober reflections. Sir Oliver Lodge
to the contrary, he lay awake worrying about his Sin, not the
concrete actuality, but the potentiality new with each day he took
the wheel of his car, and wide as his vicarious sense of being the
Automobilist-at-Large. That he missed the cyclist was a minor
happy accident which in no way mitigated his daily social burden
of “original sin.”

If the modern novel strikes this penitential note of the agonized
conscience, the modern drama strikes it even more effectively. No
one who has ever read or seen Galsworthy’s “Justice,” for example,
is left without a sense of social guilt. Josiah Royce once said that
when he met a wooden mind he felt “bitterly ashamed” that
he lived in a world where truth could be made so dull and unin¬
teresting. One closes the cover or leaves the theater after the last
act of “Justice” bitterly ashamed that one lives in a world where
such cruel injustices prevail. Galsworthy is essentially a Calvinist
in the stuff of his agonized social conscience, and he preaches to
the present age the doctrine of corporate social sin with tremen¬
dous effectiveness.

But in many ways the most effective modern spokesman for
the elder theology is George Bernard Shaw. The play-going, play¬
reading world is divided into three parts. One part insists upon
treating Shaw as a buffoon. Another part regards him as the high
priest of a new religion. While a third part is always irritated and
angered by Shaw. Neither of the first two reactions are what
Shaw himself seeks for his work. He wishes to be taken seriously,
indeed, but not solemnly. The laugh is always there and Shaw
is too adroit a humorist to wish us to miss it. But what he is
really trying to do is to wound the vanity and self-complacency
of our modem world.

Bishop Creighton used to say that after we have gotten rid of
the ape and the tiger we shall have to dispose of the donkey, “a
much more intractable animal.” Shaw is willing to leave the
problem of the ape and the tiger to the keepers of the ethical zoo.
His mission is to run down the donkey-at-large in us all. This
stupid domestic brute is quite as much a moral problem as his

72

ORIGINAL SIN

companions of the jungle. Indeed, as modern society is organized,
he is a good deal more of a problem.

The method in Shaw’s madness always needs a little explana¬
tion. He tells us that in the old days the Court Jester enjoyed
certain immunities not granted to the sober courtiers. He was
the only man in the Kingdom who was allowed to talk treason
and he was given this license because it would have been danger¬
ous to admit that he was sane. The Court Jester was an invaluable
institution because he was the one source of moral perspective in
the kingdom who prevented His Majesty from losing his sense of
proportion. He was the touch of the finiteness and pathos of all
kings and kingdoms which always saved the doctrine of the
divinity of kings from overstepping its limits.

Because there are some things which must be said in this world,
and yet cannot be said by a sober man without charge of heresy
and treason, Shaw has appointed himself Court Jester to His
Majesty The Average Man in the modern world. Shaw is willing
to play the mountebank, not merely because the role is a con¬
genial one, but because he can say from beneath the cap and bells
some things that men would not hear from any other source.

Shaw’s initial attack upon our age is a wholesale condemnation
of the Romantic movement, and by Romanticism he means not
that movement in its purity and depth of early feeling, but in its
modern and decadent forms of sentimentalism and neopaganism.
He does not hesitate to identify himself with the old Puritan
theology. He writes plays for Puritans and sounds a rallying call
to a modern Puritanism, to a new intellectual and moral sincerity.
What angers him, ethically, about modern civilization is its insin¬
cerity, its worship under the guise of romantic virtue of bestial
and brutal ideals. Like Huxley he prefers the elder theology to
the modem because it was more honest in facing and naming facts.
He sees the innuendo of the twin-bed farce and the musical revue
leading straight to Mrs. Warren’s profession, and if prostitution
is what the modem author and play-goer mean, he prefers that
they should say so in so many words. He is essentially a spokes¬
man for the ethical realism of the Calvinist outlook on life, as
against the romantic Pharisaism of our time which would sanction
its license by a cheap and easy appeal to the theory that to the
pure all things are pure.

73

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

Shaw is no prude. He is not unwilling that a candid sensuality
should have its Rabelaisian horse laugh. He has no moral quarrel
with Falstaff or Doll Tearsheet, because they say exactly what
they mean. But he will not let us deify the decadent erotic motif.
Mrs. George, the Lady Mayoress of “Getting Married,” is not
averse to an occasional flirtation ; that is the way she enlarges her
knowledge of human life; but when her lover proposes to enshrine
their idle liaison in the golden casket of the Paolo-Francesca,
Lancelot- Guinevere tradition she will have none of it. “If I got
anxious about George’s health and I thought it would nourish
him, I would fry you with onions for his breakfast and think
nothing of it.” Very few illicit romances can survive this odor
for any length of time. Shaw really prefers the moral aroma of
fried onions to that of attar of roses. And he would subject all
modern morality to this pungent proving. The romance of war,
the romance of justice, the romance of vengeance, are spots of
moral horror in Shaw’s world because he senses in them all
fundamental insincerities which are wanting in the old Calvinist
scheme of things, which for all its harshness called things by their
right names. He would have us get away from the muddy self-
righteousness of the sentimentalist, and go back to the sharp
ethical distinctions of the realist. His initial temper is that of a
hundred and fifty years ago, not of our own time, and that is why
he seems such an anachronism.

When Shaw turns from the moral peril of the diffuse and de¬
cadent sentimentality of modern civilization to its specific social
sins, his agonized conscience speaks even more clearly, and his
burden of original sin is perfectly intelligible. Behind the buffoon
there is a prophet, who in his own perverse and arbitrary way is
bent upon one thing above all else, to play Nathan to King
Demos. He finds always near at hand some modern Pharisee
standing in self-righteous satisfaction, looking with scorn upon
the sins of the patent rascals of the day, and he leaves him at
the end of his drama a smitten and conscious sinner. He puts up
the glaring offender for our initial condemnation, the Prussian
militarist, the whiskey king, the pimp, the panderer, the owner of
a rotten slum block. He proceeds, as did Nathan and Amos, to
rouse our moral indignation against these outlaws, and then cast¬
ing the net of dramatic action around us, he adroitly and with

74

ORIGINAL SIN

inevitable logic involves us in their sins until we see ourselves as
partners in one or another of these nefarious traffics. He forces
us, in these plays, into the dilemma where he can wheel about
upon us and say, “Thou art the man!” Again and again he wrings
from the mouth of the Pharisee, venting his solemn indignation
upon the patent rascal, the final surprised and utterly humiliated
confession, “I am just as bad as you are.”

Would you know what original sin means when felt and stated
in the terms of the social conscience? Read any or all of the more
serious Shaw plays.

“Widower’s Houses” is the story of a self-righteous young
doctor, Trench, who falls in love with the daughter of a certain
wealthy Sartorius. Trench has a modest income of only seven
hundred pounds a year, but Sartorius is to add a generous allow¬
ance. All goes well until Trench discovers that Sartorius is agent
for some of the worst slums in London and that the money his
fiancee is to bring with her is wrung from the poor of the tene¬
ments. His conscience will not let him accept such tainted money
and he goes to Sartorius to state the case and to break the en¬
gagement. His prospective father-in-law listens with interest and
then asks him if he knows anything about the sources of his own
income. Trench replies that it is paid him as an annuity from a
trust fund, but that it is perfectly clean. Sartorius punctures his
self-righteousness by telling him that the whole trust fund in
question is invested as a first mortgage on the slum property for
which he is agent. Trench is left, at the end of the play, to grapple
with the new moral problem which rises from the discovery that
his own income is just as tainted as that of his beloved.

Vivie Warren, who has just graduated from Cambridge with
high mathematical honors, receives a proposal of marriage from
an old blackguard who turns out to be part proprietor in a chain
of “high-class” brothels in the capitals of Europe. Vivie rejects
the proposal with righteous indignation. Her suitor asks her how
much she knows about her mother. She has to answer that she
knows very little, her mother having been traveling on the con¬
tinent all the while she has been in school and college. She is told
to her humiliation that her mother is the other proprietor in these
same brothels, and that she need not refuse in moral horror the
luxuries offered her by her mother’s partner, since all her oppor-

75

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

tunities for years had been given her at the price of the shame
of her sorrowful sisters in society. Where, says Crofts, would your
Oxfords and your Cambridges, your Girtons and Newnhams be
but for the earnings of this traffic and a dozen like it? Vivie
Warren is left at the last a long-time, silent partner in the most
sinister traffic of the time.

Ferrovius, of “Androcles and the Lion,” prospective Christian
martyr in the Roman Arena, finds in the moment of his trial that
his giant sword arm has not forsaken him. He forgets his non¬
resisting Master, and kills six gladiators before the Emperor can
intervene. He discovers to his sorrow what his fellow disciple
Lavinia had already told him, “You know, Ferrovius, I am not
always a Christian; I do not think anybody is.” When Caesar
advances him on the spot to the Praetorian Guard, he answers:
“In my youth I worshipped the god Mars. I turned from him to
the Christian God, but to-day the Christian God forsook me and
Mars overcame me to claim his own. The Christian God is not yet.
He will come when Mars and I are dust; but meanwhile I will
serve the gods that are, not the gods that will be. Until then, I
accept service in the guard, Caesar.” Shaw will not suffer any of
us to seek solitary and self-righteous exemption from the total
corporate guilt of wars.

Major Barbara hopes to ease her troubled conscience by leaving
a home of luxury in the West End which lives by the profits of
the munitions trade. She joins the Salvation Army in the East
End. A bitter winter with cold and hunger falls on East London.
The Army, driven to desperation, appeals for funds. It is offered
five thousand pounds by Bodger, the whiskey distiller, if another
five thousand can be raised. Undershaft, Barbara’s father, comes
forward with the second five thousand. To Barbara’s sorrow and
humiliation the Army has no scruples about accepting the total
ten thousand from whiskey and shells. The Army apparently has
no conscience, for it cannot afford a conscience. Though she fly
from the West End and make her bed in the East End, Barbara’s
problem follows her and her guilt seeks her out. She leaves the
Army in sober and bitter second thought, and takes a job in her
father’s plant. When the curtain falls it falls on Barbara under the
shadow of the big guns, and in the midst of the moral problem of
high explosives. In other words, as Shaw has it in the blunt prose

76

ORIGINAL SIN

of his preface to this play, “You must either share the guilt of
this world or go to another planet.” The idea that there is to be
found in modern society clean money as against tainted money
Shaw writes down as an exploded individualist superstition. The
whole body of money in circulation is sullied by its part in trans¬
actions which fall short of moral idealism. It touches the con¬
taminated man in its circulation, it takes the germs of moral
infection from the situation through which it passes, and it brings
to us, no matter how it reaches us, its moral liabilities, its con¬
tagion of social injustice. Shaw’s central thesis is this, there is no
longer any desert to which the individual may retire, where he can
cut himself loose from his part in the corporate responsibility of
human society for all its patent evils and injustices. Whatever
your task, wherever you stand, the roots of your life reach down
so deep and out so far into society as a whole, that your life
becomes hopelessly intertwined with the tangled mesh of the sins
of society. The better you know yourself and your circumstances
the more clearly you see yourself to be guilty of “original sin,”
a moral partner in all the major evils of the time.

Beyond these sins of social commission there are those sins of
social omission, only half sensed, which really bulk so large in the
life of comfortable and complacent men and women to-day. The
burden of this form of moral failure can never be wholly absent
from the sensitive conscience. Such is the sin of all those who take
their ease in Zion, unmindful of the fatherless and the widow.

At Vesper tide

One virtuous and pure in heart did pray,

“Since none I wronged in deed or word to-day
From whom should I crave pardon, Master, say?”

A voice replied,

“From the sad child whose play thou hast not planned,

The goaded heart whose friend thou didst not stand,

The rose that died for water from thine hand.”

“Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of these
My brethren, ye did it not unto me.”

If the Christian preacher fails to discern the reappearance of
the old, persistent, agonized conscience of the human race, not in
the now antiquated terms of the Pauline theology, but in these

77

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

contemporary voices of modern science, fiction, drama and verse,
he misses one of his signal opportunities to preach the central
Christian doctrine of salvation.

The deeper ministry of the religions of salvation looks not so
much to the deliverance of the individual sinner from his specific
dilemmas as to the redemption of his whole human status. That
is why Christianity never can subscribe to the monastic solution
of the problem of evil. A religion which proffers me salvation but
leaves my world unsaved can be no true religion for me to-day.
I can only be saved in so far as I am saved in and with my race
and age as a whole. And if it comes to the choice there are many
passionately earnest men in the world to-day who would choose
to go to hell with the majority rather than to heaven with the
minority, simply because the sense of participation for better or
for worse in the major lot of the race is our deepest source of
spiritual satisfaction. In other words, the habitat of a moral
minority cannot be heaven for us.

Meanwhile our religion which looks to nothing short of the re¬
demption of the sinner’s total human status in nature and in
society can well afford to take up the intimations of “original sin”
to be found in all these extra-ecclesiastical sources and carry them
on to their fulfillment in the sincerely penitential spirit.

Shaw is a moral diagnostician, he is not a moral penitent in any
characteristically religious sense of the word. It is in John Wool-
man, in Tolstoi, that one finds the profoundly penitential note.
The Psalmist and the Hebrew prophet are needed to make spiritu¬
ally urgent the facts discovered by the biologist and the dramatist.

We have invoked in the past few years the prophetic ideal of
righteousness as the granite foundation of human society. We
have preached the Old Testament gospel of justice because it has
been so hard to preach the New Testament gospel of love. Each
of us in his own way has profited by the tonic of Hebraism. What
the mind of Christ may have to say to the more bloodthirsty
preaching from the vast majority of Christian pulpits over these
latter years only time can tell. One is reminded of Hardy’s remark
that a century ago the churches of England substituted hatred of
Napoleon for the love of God!

But even if we rest the case for the modern church during the
War and post-war troubles primarily upon the Old rather than

78

ORIGINAL SIN

the New Covenant, it is still perfectly clear that we have fallen
short of the total moral message of the Hebrew lawgiver and
prophet. We have been willing to play Amos in our denunciation
of the sins of the nations round. We have been very loath to follow
Amos to an equally clear confession of our own sins. The imme¬
diate aims of the temporal kingdoms are not always best served
by the penitential mood. That mood does not strengthen the
hands of the men of war, or of big business, or of anarchic pur¬
pose. One still looks in vain, as one has looked through all these
recent years, for any appreciable spirit of repentance. There has
been international recrimination without stint, there has been
mutual criticism between the classes. The truculent and abusive
voice has gained its followers by the thousands while the pro¬
foundly prophetic summons to repentance has gathered only its
handful. After all, Huxley, Tolstoi, Galsworthy, Shaw, are at the
best voices crying in a moral wilderness. And though an increas¬
ing number of men admit the truth of their ethical indictment of
the status of the average man, our age is still too inert and com¬
fortable to let these known facts sting us into any moral action.

It is very hard to find on the present horizon any signs which
indicate that the Kingdom of the Heavens is to dawn to-morrow.
Once more the apocalyptic hope of the imminent Kingdom is dis¬
pelled. Again Christ’s Kingdom is as a man journeying into a far
country. But if this Kingdom tarries, its tarrying is somehow
bound up with the untroubled self-righteousness of the crowd.
The voices of the politician, the class agitator, the maker of plat¬
forms and treaties are still strident with Pharisaism. There has
not been over the past six years and there is not now a single
official voice in Christendom which has begun to rise to the moral
level that Lincoln reached in the Second Inaugural. That address
is fitly called the greatest state paper of the nineteenth century.
The twentieth century has produced nothing as yet, even out of
the agony and bloody sweat of a Gethsemane fiercer than the
Civil War, which approximates to the spiritual austerity of Lin¬
coln’s major utterances. That nobility of his rested, not so much
upon his brief for the justice of God in history, as upon his appeal
to the penitential temper in his own race and nation.

We need in the Christian pulpit to-day a full and candid use of
all that modern science and modern literature have done to restate

79

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

the doctrine of original sin in intelligible and credible terms, that
we may press home to men their lost and needy state, their oppor¬
tunity for repentance and their prospect of forgiveness and sal¬
vation. In no other way is there the slightest hope that the years
immediately before us are to be in any real way more truly the
days of the Son of Man than the years immediately behind us.

The tumult and the shouting dies,

The captains and the kings depart.

Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

8o

CHAPTER V.

Is Christianity Practicable?

How very hard it is to be
A Christian! Hard for you and me,

Not the mere task of making real
That duty up to its ideal,

Effecting thus complete and whole,

A purpose for the human soul —

For that is always hard to do;

But hard I mean for me and you
To realize it more or less,

With even the moderate success
Which commonly repays our strife
To carry out the aims of life.

ROBERT BROWNING wrote these familiar words in 1850.
They were strangely prophetic of the whole drift of
^subsequent religious thought. In other days men asked,
“Is Christianity credible?” But for the past half century, and
to-day with increasing perplexity, men are asking, “Is Christianity
practicable?”

The gospel of Jesus can never be presented to men, in its in¬
tegrity, as an easy vocation. From the first, even in the realms of
purely private virtue, its appeal has been to the athletic, ardent
and sacrificial impulses of the human soul. The author of our
faith and all his noblest mediators down the centuries have had a
baffling way of welcoming “each rebuff that turns earth’s smooth¬
ness rough.” This personal struggle has kept the soul of Chris¬
tianity alive. A traveler once stopped at the door of a mediaeval
hermit’s cell and asked him how it was with the lust of the flesh.
The old man answered, “It knocketh but it passeth on.” In those
words was the whole long history of a solitary discipline, the world
forgetting and by the world forgot, which took no count of what
we call the modern social gospel, and yet was in its own way part
of the central effort of the Christian life.

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

There is a familiar type of Christianity which would confine
itself severely to the development of private piety and would
deliberately ignore the wider implications of the Christian ethic.
This type at its lowest is represented by those survivors of Puritan
individualism who content themselves with a rather arid impecca¬
bility in private life, but who have no interest in the social content
of Christianity. They are ethical bimetallists. They try to put
their personal character in its narrower contacts beyond the reach
of criticism, and they deprecate what they consider the slur cast
upon private piety by a wide concern for the Christian status of
society. At its best and noblest this type is represented by Tolstoi,
who said quite flatly, “The Christian teaching does not prescribe
any laws for all men, but explains to each separate man his posi¬
tion in the world and shows him what for him personally results
from that position.” The traditional individualism of the whole
Protestant interpretation of the religious life has contributed to
this point of view. The fluid conceptions of personality, which
prevailed when the Christian faith was first formulated, are alien
to the whole Anglo-Saxon temperament, which holds doggedly by
its doctrine of the impenetrable ego, and which looks with tem¬
peramental disfavor upon any mystical theories of the relation of
the individual to society and to God. There are still in our modern
Western Christendom vast numbers of earnest persons who cling
to the conviction that a man’s sole moral duty, to use the homely
vernacular of one of them, is to “tidy up his own front yard.”

Against this point of view what we call the social gospel is in
revolt. Like all revolutions it has swung to the other extreme and
may occasionally overstate its own case. There is, in the youth
of to-day, a certain cavalier indifference to private piety going
hand in hand with a genuine concern for the corporate aspects of
the Christian life which perplexes and troubles the older genera¬
tion. The fathers find it hard to believe that the sons who seem
so lax in their standards of private morality can be sincere in
their preoccupation with social problems. They suspect the moral
integrity of the oncoming generation, which plays fast and loose
with the blue laws at the same time that it professes to suffer
moral distress over the existence of slums and child labor and the
like. We shall eventually have to strike some moral mean between
these two extremes. If the elder type of moral individualism was

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IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

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too provincial in its conception of the Christian life, the modern
type may well become too vague and impersonal. The social
gospel is in a fair way to develop a breed of Christians who face
every moral challenge with the evasion, “Lord, and what wilt thou
have the social order to do?” In the last analysis the answer to
this question runs true to the old form, “If I will that the social
order tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me.” In
its extremer forms the social gospel is open to just as grave abuses
as the rank individualism of Puritanism. The burden of social
obligation when overoppressive may end in moral discouragement
and indifference, and these vaster, vaguer considerations may be¬
come for us a city of moral refuge where we seek shelter from the
accusations and inspirations of our own intimate conscience, which
in the last analysis always dares us to step out from the ranks into
some prophetic and pioneering solitude.

Between these two extremes the mind of the normal Christian
oscillates. At one moment we feel the validity of the dogged indi¬
vidualism of the fathers, the reckless solitude of a Tolstoi, and
at another moment we feel the truth of the dictum that we never
can be saved apart from the Beloved Community and that this
Beloved Community is potential in the world where we do our
work and live our lives. But it is perfectly clear, whatever mean
may be struck between these two extremes, or whatever compre¬
hensive conception of the Christian life may finally embrace them
both, that the individual problems of discipleship cannot be dis¬
sociated, in this generation, from their social setting. “Tidying
up our own front yard,” put it how we will, is a larger task than
it used to be in the days when every man’s front yard was clearly
defined by a picket fence. Picket fences are to-day the sign of
provincialism. They tend more and more to disappear from our
yards and our ethics. For every man there is a dubious borderland
where his estate abuts upon his neighbor’s estate or upon the
common highway, and moral tidiness demands a certain gener¬
osity and community spirit in the definition of its task.

What gives to the Christian religion as a moral program its
poignant perplexity is the conviction that one never can be a
Christian in the full and perfect sense of the word, in the world
as it now is. With the best will in the world many of the major
Christian impulses seem to be thwarted and rendered ineffectual

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

by the existing order. And it is the discouragement, born of this
sense of maladjustment, which creates for the normal Christian of
to-day his graver moral problem.

We have, for example, from the mind of Christ a religion which
is characterized above all else by its insistence upon “love” as
the plainest of its hall-marks and the finest of its graces. We
sorely need some new word to translate the gospel original. The
hard-worked Anglo-Saxon term “love” does duty for three or
four words in the ancient tongues which ranged in meaning all
the way from an almost passionless and impersonal devotion,
through the realms of Platonic friendship, to a candid eroticism.
At present the word “love” is too sicklied over with sentimental¬
ism to be of much service to the gospel idea. It was not until the
third or fourth century that the language of eroticism entered into
the symbolism of the Christian life, and its entry is generally
admitted to be a sign of decadence. The idea which inspired Jesus
and Paul was much nearer what we mean by loyalty or a great
good will. To rescue the conception of agape from its cloying
associations is part of the office of the Christian preacher to-day.
Nietzsche’s revolt against Christianity, in so far as it was a pro¬
test against sentimentalism, was entirely valid.

May we say broadly that the Christian motive of love implies
a cooperative view of human life? Its central dictum is its state¬
ment that all we are brothers, members one of another, that virtue
and sin are both “in widest commonalty spread.” But over against
this cooperative view of life, implied by the Christian ethic, there
stands the major institution of competition, which generates most
of the social energy of the present day, and by which success and
failure are measured.

How to apply a cooperative conception of life to competitive
processes and to express the one adequately through the other is
a problem which may well baffle the shrewdest casuist. And it is
just because the social machinery of the day in trade and states-
craft and war seems so ill fitted to express the central Christian
conviction that many men feel that Christianity is impracticable.
The would-be Christian of to-day is much in the position of a
householder who moves from the country to the city. He has
among his possessions a number of electrical contrivances built
to be run on the alternating current supplied by most provincial

84

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

companies. After he moves into the city he finds that the munici¬
pal plant furnishes a direct current and when he plugs in his
fixtures nothing happens. He must either buy a transformer,
which will change the current, or else he must scrap his fixtures
and buy a new set to be used on the direct current. If he makes his
standard of electrical excellence the devices which he already pos¬
sesses he must conclude that the direct current is an impracticable
form of electrical energy and will condemn it as useless.

In some such way the mind of the modern world approaches the
Christian religion. Most of the social machinery in our world was
built to be operated by the alternating current of a competitive
view of life. Connect this machinery with the direct current of
Christ’s great good will, his utterly cooperative conception of the
moral life, and nothing happens. The wheels of modem business
and modern war stand still. The energy which comes direct from
the mind of Christ is perfectly helpless so far as many if not most
of our present industrial and political contrivances are concerned.

It would be a real help to the clarification of our religious think¬
ing if we would admit candidly and without reservations, that in
many situations Christianity is impracticable to-day. There is no
moral gain in simply inspecting the wiring and polishing the con¬
tacts. There is a fundamental discrepancy which might as well
be admitted. For when a man makes his standard of moral judg¬
ment the normal competitive institutions of modern life, and in¬
sists upon testing all forms of spiritual energy by them, he may as
well rule Christianity out. The humane spirit which emanates from
Jesus may limit the graver abuses of competition, and may seek
to safeguard the welfare of those who suffer too grievously at its
hands, but so long as the competitive view of life is accepted as
the law and gospel of the moral life, the religion of Jesus is an
impracticable religion, and may as well be given up. The logical
consistency of the Prussian view of war lay in its perception of
this fact, even when it did grossest wrong to those dumb humane
instincts in our nature which seem always to be in revolt against
the extreme consequences of the competitive view of life. The
Prussians were logically right, even though they turned back the
clock a thousand years in the history of the humane spirit. Bern-
hardi saw clearly that the ultimately cooperative view of human
life in the Christian religion could not be turned to final account

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

in the waging of war, therefore he had no hesitation in dismissing
Jesus as, at this point, an impractical man. As a soldier he made
no profession of Christianity, but drove his machinery by the
alternating current of ruthless competition.

The error in this reasoning, however, lies in its premise. When
we say, as we must often say in certain clear-cut competitive
dilemmas, the Christian religion is impracticable in this connec¬
tion, we may be passing judgment on our existing social machinery
even more truly than on the energy of the gospel. The direct cur¬
rent of the municipal electric company is impracticable only to
the man who insists upon testing its value and validity by the
provincial machinery he brings with him. If he is willing to trans¬
form the current, or better still, to equip himself with a fresh set
of devices, he will find it entirely practicable. His first snap judg¬
ment of impracticability is quite as truly a judgment on himself
and his own devices as upon the form of power he cannot utilize.
The same thing is true in the world’s cavalier judgments of the
Christian ethic. An impracticable and morally impossible situation
arises when we try to arbitrate on the basis of the gospel a strike
which has gone beyond all limits of mutual understanding and
mutual interests and has become a simple test of endurance be¬
tween capital and labor. “Man, who made me a divider between
you?” Christianity was impracticable in that concrete dilemma
with which Jesus himself was confronted. He did not try to
pretend that it was otherwise. He gave up that problem as having
no possible Christian solution.

This whole argument, then, cuts both ways. The Christian
preacher would do well to follow Jesus’ example in these situations,
and not assume that Christianity is always practicable. And where
the world says, “So much the worse, then, for Christianity,” he
would do well to reply with equal bluntness, “So much the worse
for your competitive view of life, and all the institutions which
live by it.”

Moreover, the futility of passing finally upon the practica¬
bility of any idea on the basis of existing usage is perfectly clear
when one reviews the history of the world’s great discoveries in
the pure and applied sciences. Under the tender mercies of the
Inquisition Galileo recanted the heresy of the Copernican as¬
tronomy. The “practical”-minded Ptolemaics were too strong for

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

his old age and growing infirmity. But he gave to every theory
judged impracticable by its own time its one priceless text, E
pur se muove — “It moves for all that.” There probably is not a
single characteristic device of modern civilization which did not
have to make its way in the world in the face of the advance dog¬
matic statement that it was impracticable. The settled hostility of
the existing order to any proposition, mechanical or moral, which
calls for a radical readjustment of life’s methods is, perhaps, the
plainest fact on the pages of the past.

In his “History of the United States,” McMasters chronicles
the early fortunes of some of the now accepted commonplaces of
the present order. In their own first time they all had to run the
gauntlet of the criticism that they were impracticable. Of Ark¬
wright’s spinning- jenny he says: “It was indeed with this at first
as with every great invention, from the alphabet to the printing
press, from the printing press to the railroad, from the railroad
to the telegraph. It was bitterly opposed. The jennies were long
operated in secret. The life of the inventor was threatened. On
more than one occasion the machines were broken to pieces by
an angry mob.” So with the steamboat. “Fulton in 1807 made his
trip to Albany on the famous Clermont, and used it as a passenger
boat till the end of the year. But he met with the same opposition
which in our time we have seen expended on the telegraph and
sewing-machine, and which, some time far in the future, will be
encountered by inventions and discoveries of which we have not
now the smallest conception. No man in his senses, it was asserted,
would risk his life in such a fire boat as the Clermont when the
river was full of good packets.” Alexander Hamilton met similar
opposition when in 1791 he launched his plan for the Federal
Bank. There were at that time only four banks in the United
States, but in the four cities where these banks existed “Five men
out of ten had nothing to put in them. Of those who had, some
were deterred from making deposits by the recollection that
their fathers had never done so before them, others by the strong
antipathy which they felt for banks in general. The old way, they
said, of doing business was good enough. If a man were prosperous
and had cash to spare, the best place to keep it was in his own
house under his own lock and key.”

As for the Constitution of the United States, it was with the

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

greatest difficulty that it established itself in the face of the bitter
hostility and dismal predictions which it aroused. It seems to have
been regarded by the Anti federalists of that day much as the
Covenant of the League of Nations has been regarded by the
great majority of Americans to-day, a useless and Utopian scheme.
The criticisms visited upon it were precisely those which in the
past two years have been passed upon the Covenant as an ideal¬
istic and impracticable program. “The sovereignty of the States
was destroyed in its most precious parts. The form, indeed, of a
republican government was guaranteed to each by express words;
but any one who would read the instrument carefully, and not
suffer his understanding to be clouded with a multitude of fine
phrases could see that it was the form, and not the substance
that was promised. The most baleful results were certain to
come. . . . One representative for thirty thousand men is too
small. . . . The prospect in Massachusetts was not a pleasing
one. John Hancock, the Governor, gave the constitution but luke¬
warm support. Samuel Adams was strongly opposed to it. Dane,
one of the congressmen, had denounced it in the halls of Con¬
gress, and Gerry, one of the delegates at Philadelphia, had stoutly
refused to sign it. . . . Towards the Continental Government
all of the thirteen states acted precisely as if they were dealing
with a foreign power. In truth, one of the truest patriots of New
England had not been ashamed to stand up in the Massachusetts
House of Deputies and speak of the Congress of the States as a
foreign government. To him the smallest interest of the little
patch of earth he called his native state was of far more impor¬
tance than the greatest interest of the Confederation of States.”
Such were the Jeremiads addressed to the newborn Federal
Government.

Altogether the charge of impracticability against the Christian
religion is simply one aspect of the settled opposition of the exist¬
ing order to any program which means radical change and re¬
adjustment. Seen in long retrospect it has been just those more
daring visions of the human mind in invention and statescraft,
dismissed in their own day as Utopian and revolutionary, which
have lifted and advanced society.

“St. Paul complimented his Corinthian converts,” writes Lord
Bryce, “on their ‘suffering fools gladly.’ It is hard to suffer cranks

88

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

gladly, for they are impracticable persons. . . .Yet they ought
to be borne with, for the propensity to mere imitation is so
common, and independence of thinking is so rare, that much must
be pardoned to those who break the monotony of ordinary opinion.
Moreover, the longer we are in politics, the more do we realize
that our judgment is fallible. Practical politicians are too apt to
be impatient of what seems unpractical. Some of those so-called
cranks for whom their own contemporaries had no use, proved in
the end to have been the pioneers of great reforms.”

And the reverse side of this shield of impracticability has been
stated by Thomas Hardy, never better:

“Was Yeobright’s mind well-proportioned? No. A well propor¬
tioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which
we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined
as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer.
Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be ap¬
plauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its
usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity. It produces the
poetry of Rogers, the paintings of West, the spiritual guidance of
Sumner; enabling its possessors to find their way to wealth, to
wind up well, to step with dignity off the stage, to die comfortably
in their beds, and to get the decent monument which, in many
cases, they deserve.”

There is no doubt that these are “the people” in their own time,
but in history their practical wisdom always dies with them. The
Christian religion stands to lose nothing, in long historical per¬
spective, when at any given moment men declare its morality to
be visionary and unpractical. On the contrary, it thereby takes its
place with those movements which are continually remaking and
elevating human society because they refuse to identify human
possibility with present achievement. The Christian counsels to
love, forgiveness and the like may often be, in concrete dilemmas,
socially impracticable. They simply will not work because the
conditions in which the moral problem is stated do not allow of
their working and were not intended to utilize them. But what of
it? So were the locomotive, the automobile, the aeroplane, the
wireless telegraph and telephone declared impracticable by hard-
headed men of common sense. So were Democracy, and the Con¬
stitution of the United States. The final tale of human history is

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

yet to tell. Shaw states the case once and for all when he says,
“In short, Christianity, good or bad, right or wrong, must per¬
force be left out of the question in human affairs until it is made
practically applicable to them by complicated political devices.”
The task for the social gospel is not the direct application of the
Christian idea to every phase of the existing order, but the de¬
liberate construction of experimental ventures in whole-hearted
cooperation which alone can offer to the gospel of Jesus its
opportunity to energize the social mechanism.

In short, the practical mind fails to sense in this whole troubled
maladjustment the plain fact that what gives to any and all
idealisms their real significance is precisely their impracticability
at the present moment. In this respect Christianity does not stand
apart from all the world’s idealisms, but takes its place as one of
them, the major of them. All ardent moral effort has about it for
the moment the suggestion of impossibility. The dilemma is
bluntly stated by A. E. Taylor, in his “Problem of Conduct”:

“Make your account of the ethical ideal which you propose
for realization within your own experience and that of your own
immediate circle adequate, and you will find that your ideal has
ipso facto become unrealizable under the given conditions; con¬
tent yourself with a statement of what is realizable, and you will
find that, as an account of an ideal, it is most deplorably low and
inadequate. . . . The thesis of this antinomy may be briefly
given as ‘my ethical end must at least be capable of attainment,’
and the antithesis as ‘my end, just because it is an ethical end,
must be incapable of attainment.’ ”

There is no escape within the limits of morality from this con¬
tradiction, this dead center between idealism and fact. An ideal
which will work at full speed and full power from a dead start
never has been known and never can be known. Even those ideals
which are capable of direct transmission to the load of hard fact
have to be applied gradually. The most characteristic piece of
contemporary mechanism, the motor in an automobile, is im¬
practicable if it is abused. Many a man who bowls down the
avenue to the day’s work in his twelve cylinder car condemns the
Christian religion because it is impracticable, but he forgets that
he subjects religion to a form of strain which would wreck his
motor car if he were fool enough to try it. The children of this

90

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

world are wiser with their cars than with their ideals. The modern
motor is meant to develop sixty horse power to be transmitted to
a load moving at a high rate of speed. But there is no motor
devised which can start the car from a dead standstill in high
gear. To crank the car or to push the self-starter with the clutch
engaged and the gear in “high” is little short of mechanical mur¬
der in the first degree. The batteries are rapidly exhausted and
the whole engine is put to a terrific strain which it was never in¬
tended to stand. Ultimately the motor “stalls.” To meet this situa¬
tion the engineer has devised just those ingenious contrivances,
the clutch and the gears, which enable the driver to tune up the
motor apart from the load altogether, and then to apply it to
the load by a gradual application of power which never strains the
engine or the driving parts beyond the breaking point.

Now it is at least common sense to apply the teaching of this
homely modern parable of power to the problem of the applica¬
tion of Christianity to the dead load of the world’s moral inertia.
His biographer says of Canon Barnett that the parish machinery
of St. Jude’s in Whitechapel was inspired by “the spirit of a man
who founded temporary helpfulness on deathless principles.”
Indeed, Barnett used to say of his own work, “The problem which
is haunting this generation is how to open channels between eter¬
nal sources and every day’s need.” The practical folk and the
idealists might, at least, get within speaking distance of one
another if they would sit down around an automobile or over
Canon Barnett’s life. The Canon and his wife once attempted the
reformation of a confirmed drunkard, and they set before him as
his immediate ideal not total abstinence from the first, but getting
drunk only twice a week for a while, instead of every day! They
threw the moral gears into low speed until they had their subject
in motion.

The failure of the practical man to sense the delicate structure
of all idealism rests in his ethically impossible assumption that
the nobler an ideal is, the more immediately effective it ought to
be. If it is not at once effective, he fails to understand it and dis¬
cards it as useless. Whereas, as a matter of moral history, the more
high powered an idealism, the greater the number of gear shifts
necessary to transmit its full power to the dead load of fact. Only
low-powered cars can reduce the number of speeds with safety.

9i

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

And only a low-powered morality can operate full speed upon the
inert world the moment it is turned over.

The life of Luther furnishes a notable example of the wise appli¬
cation of idealism to fact. Martin Luther was by no means the
pioneer Reformer. For two hundred years free spirits in all parts
of Europe had held what were to be the characteristic Protestant
views of the Christian life. But they had launched these views in
one or another of their aspects full panoplied from their own
mature discipline. Luther succeeded historically where his prede¬
cessors had failed because he carried the German people with him
step by step in the successive stages of his own spiritual history.
He did not wait to announce the full findings of his religious
venture before sharing them with others. The result was, that,
taking his people with him by gradual degrees, he brought them
to the point where they finally stood with him for the full Protes¬
tant doctrine. What was unique in Luther’s history was not the
substance of his final position as a Christian thinker, but the
gradual method by which he carried Germany with him to the
historically achieved Reformation.

Over against these considerations which concern the trans¬
mission of an immediately impracticable ideal to the world of
practical affairs there is a further consideration which the idealist
would do well to ponder. To resume, for the moment, the parable
of the motor car. The purchaser of a car receives with the car a
little book of instructions, and foremost among them are two bits
of pertinent advice. “Do not idle the motor, it wastes gas. Do not
race the motor when the gear is in neutral. More motors are
ruined by racing them than by any other form of abuse.” If the
practical man has his method of abusing ideals by overstraining
them and stalling them, the idealist has a kindred moral danger.
There is a type of idealism which comes perilously near “idling
the motor,” using up spiritual energy without attempting to make
any definite connection with the actual moral load. And the temp¬
tation to race the idling motor of the spiritual life is always very
great.

The traditional revival meeting has fallen into moral disrepute
because of the suspicion that it is merely a process of racing the
religious motor. A tremendous amount of energy is generated,
but it is not applied to the total social load of the time. The line

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IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

between real emotion and sentimentalism is always a fine line.
But the fundamental difference between them lies in the fact that
real religious emotion is always in direct contact with the load of
fact. There is an actual transmission of energy taking place. Emo¬
tion, as its very root meaning implies, is a method of moving
things. But sentimentalism, which outwardly seems to be very
much the same type of experience, is really only a self-centered
pleasure in seeing and feeling the “wheels go round.” All morally
sensitive and right-minded men shrink from this form of religious
abuse.

There is not only an emotional unchastity in the revival type
of religion. There is an unchastity of the mind in certain forms of
idealism, which are far more interested in devising Utopias for
the sake of the detached mental satisfaction found in the process
than in actually trying to transmit any form of mental and moral
power to the concrete human problem. In his own way the man
whom we call the “intellectual” is as futile and unlovely a char¬
acter religiously as the sentimentalist whom he despises. For what
distinguishes the so-called “intellectual” from the true idealist is
just this persistent habit of idling the moral motor, and in mo¬
ments of mental activity racing it, without regard to fact.

Each type, the practical man and the visionary, needs the other
to save him from the perils of his own isolated point of view. The
problem of the practicability of the Christian religion is not the
simple and direct matter which each too often seems to imply.
Even where direct connection can be established between the
gospel ideal and the present fact it is a process of delicate and
gradual adjustment. The forced moral option, “All or Nothing,”
must always establish a dead center. There is a type of idealism
which will accept nothing short of the immediate All, and therefore
adds nothing to the present fact. And there is a practical type of
mind which has so little understanding of the ideal All that it
fails to utilize the emanations from the All which can be turned to
immediate account. This type likewise gains nothing. Both ideal¬
ism and common sense can profit by the parable of the motor and
the gears.

We need, also, to avoid this moral dead center, some broad
understanding of the way in which idealism does its work in his¬
tory. Gladstone used to say that political ideals were never

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

realized. But that does not mean that Gladstone made no use of
political ideals, or that political ideals have no effect on political
fact. The same holds true of Christian idealism. The gospel moral¬
ity has never been perfectly realized in any human society. But,
nevertheless, Christian morality has affected our institutions
widely and deeply. The abolition of the institution of human
slavery may be credited to the general spread of Christian moral¬
ity. The restriction of child labor, the prevention of industrial
accident and disease, the increasing emancipation of woman, are
all in some measure the consequences of a diffuse humane spirit
which reflects the Christian ethic. These moral advances cannot be
credited directly to ecclesiastical agitation. More often than other¬
wise churchmen have been social obstructionists. But over against
ecclesiasticism there is the constant subconscious thrust of the
Christian spirit constantly working its own changes in the common
point of view.

We talk of the moral struggle as though it were a process of
self-levitation, a lifting of life by its ethical boot-straps. We too
often and too easily forget that Christianity is primarily a religion
and not an ethical system. In so doing we limit the energy of our
religion to our own unaided effort. Robert Browning says some¬
where, in rugged lines, “What matter though I doubt in every
pore ... if in the end I have a life to show, the thing I did,
brought out in evidence against the thing done to me under¬
ground.” We have to struggle in this world against the things
done to us from beneath. But that does not mean that we are to
miss the help of the things done for us from on high. When Luther
says in his “Table Talk” that we have a free will for the little
things in life, building our houses, milking the cows and the like,
but that in the great issues of life we seem to be in the hands of
higher powers, he simply speaks out of common experience.
“Falling in love” is an experience of this strange helplessness
going hand in hand with a tremendous access of energy and value.
“Getting religion” is the same sort of experience. Chesterton re¬
marks that the value of any idea may be tested by our ability to
use it as an oath. The great realities of life are those men can
swear by. “Herein lies the weakness of ethical culture, for its oath
is ‘Oh, my goodness!’ ”

Now the Christian life, even in the moral struggle, is not a busi-

94

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

ness of saying, “Oh, my goodness.” It is an experience of the Grace
of God. What that grace actually means in the moral life Saint
Paul has told us, “But we all with unveiled face beholding as in a
mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image
from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit.” In other
words, victory in the moral struggle is not primarily a matter of
consciously elevating ourselves. It is living life in the constant
presence of the ethical ideal and suffering that ideal to work its
own changes in us and for us.

Hawthorne’s noble legend, “The Great Stone Face,” is a dis¬
criminating study of the moral life, of the process whereby men
realize ideals. The lad of the legend lived in the presence of the
nobly perfect image so long and so devotedly that unconsciously
he was changed into its likeness. The processes whereby human
society approximates more and more to the ethic of Jesus are not
otherwise. We live in the presence of a moral ideal which seems,
for the moment, unattainable. But if we are not disobedient to
the heavenly vision we waken some morning tot find that all the
time it has been doing its work in and through us, and we have
been drawing nearer to it all the while. Religion adds to the strenu¬
ousness of the moral struggle what Wordsworth calls “a wise pas¬
sivity,” which does not mean inertia or indifference, but rather a
correlative faith in the power of all true idealism to realize itself
in us.

The task of the Christian minister, therefore, is to preach the
total Christian ideal for human society in season and out of
season, no matter how remote it seems and how impracticable the
hard-headed world may judge it to be. He will do this, not be¬
cause he expects the kingdom immediately to appear, but because
he believes that there is an energy in true idealism, independent of
all human wit and moral ingenuity, which changes us uncon¬
sciously into its own likeness. The servant of the gospel ethic will
not fail or be discouraged because of the immediate perplexity and
impracticability which attend his task. “He shall see of the travail
of his soul and shall be satisfied.” He rests his moral case upon
the Grace of God, which is no theological fiction, but the con¬
summate statement of the working of all idealism in history.

There is a very beautiful passage in “Modern Painters” at the
end of the chapter on “The Mountain Glory” in which Ruskin

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

says that it was not to punish Moses that God gave him at the
last his vision of the promised land. “Thou shalt see the land
before thee; but thou shalt not go thither,” says the Deuterono-
mist, interpreting this experience as a form of moral retribution.
Ruskin candidly throws aside the Old Testament interpretation
of that hour, and rewrites the whole story saying, rather, that it
must have been to solace Moses and to give him peace at his
latter end that God took him up into that high place where his
labors ended with the wide prospect of his land of heart’s desire.

We too often accept the Old Testament interpretation of the
universal moral experience recorded in that story. Every true
Christian has his prophetic vision of the promised lands of inter¬
national and industrial peace, of righteousness and love in the
social order. But he feels, too often, that it is to embitter the moral
struggle that this vision is given him. It is far truer to human
experience at its deepest and best to say that life gives us these
visions of the morally perfect world to solace and sustain us.
When his judge read Savonarola out of the Church of Rome in
the public square in Florence, he said, “I excommunicate you from
the Church militant and triumphant.” And Savonarola answered,
“Militant but not triumphant.” Idealism always has this ultimate
solace, and the idealist never fails to avail himself of it.

The one sin for which there is no forgiveness in this whole realm
of Christian concern is that of skepticism as to the ultimate power
of the Christian ideal to work its own final victories in our world.
If we believe that truth is great and must prevail, we know that
our fighting is not losing because of the “right man on our side.”
To lose faith in the ultimate efficacy of the spirit of Christ, mani¬
fested in his moral teaching, and to cease upholding the prophetic
vision of a Christian order no matter if “his sad face on the cross
sees only this after the passion of a thousand years,” is to sin the
sin against the Holy Spirit for which there is not and, in the very
nature of the case, cannot be any forgiveness. It was this unfor¬
givable sin which made the Prussian morality so ominous a fact
in modern history.

The German mind, logical to the last, but without imagination,
spoke, during the war, with dogmatic assurance of hypocritical
England and hypocritical America, each professing a nominal
national Christianity, but both actually manifesting many un-

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IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

Christian aspects of national life. The charge of hypocrisy is the
commonest and at the same time the most cruel charge which can
be made against an individual or a state. If hypocrisy be the mere
contrast between the cherished ideal and the achieved moral fact,
we are nothing but a race of hypocrites. For there is no man who
does not feel the gulf between what he is and what he aspires to
be. But the essence of hypocrisy is not to be found in the mere
distance which separates the idealist from the object of his moral
effort. Hypocrisy lies in giving mere lip service to ideals which
one has no deep desire to realize in life. Hypocrisy is not a matter
of immediate ethical status, but of moral intention.

The Prussian solution of the dilemma created by the moral
contrast between what Christendom aspires to be and what it
now is, is very simple. The only difficulty with it is that it is too
simple. It cuts the Gordian knot which it has not the patience or
the wit to untie. Friedrich Naumann published in 1910 a very
significant series of “ Brief e iiber Religion ” In these Letters he
says:

“We live in an age of Capitalism, and we possess a religion
which was born before this age. ... We live in the midst of
Mammonism, however little we may individually be the servants
of Mammon. Our age has become financial and speculative. And
in this age we possess a Saviour who says, with inconsiderate de¬
cision, We cannot serve God and Mammon/ How can we escape
the pricks of our own conscience? . . . This our capitalistic world,
in which we live, because none other exists for us, is organized
according to the principle, ‘Thou shalt covet thy neighbour’s
house.’ Thou shalt will to gain the market which the English hold,
thou shalt get the influence in Constantinople which the French
possess, thou shalt eat the bread which, in strictness, the Russian
peasant himself should eat. And so on endlessly. ‘Thou shalt
covet.’ ... All the moods of the Gospel only hover, like distant,
white clouds of longing, above the actual doings of our time. . . .

This gospel of the poor is one of the standards of our life, but
it is not the only standard. Not our entire morality is rooted in
the Gospel, but only part of it. . . . Beside the Gospel there are
demands of power and right, without which human society cannot
exist. I myself, at least, do not know how to help myself in the

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

conflict between Christianity and the other tasks of life, save by
the attempt to recognize the limits of Christianity. A Christian
who follows exclusively his Christian theory is impossible in this
our world. . . .

Everywhere Christianity is part of life, nowhere life itself in
its entirety. In a word, I know that all of us, if we are to live at
all, are forced to accept and to use, as the foundations of our
existence, the conditions required by nature in the struggle for
existence; and that only upon this foundation do we possess the
capacity for realizing the higher morality of the Gospel, in so far
as this realization is possible upon such a foundation. . . . Now
this means for our practical life that we construct our house of
the State, not with cedars of Lebanon, but with the building
stones from the Roman Capitol. Hence we do not consult Jesus,
when we are concerned with things which belong to the domain
of the construction of the State and of Political Economy. This
sounds hard and abrupt for every human being brought up a
Christian, but appears to be sound Lutheranism.”

It may be sound Lutheranism, for Lutheranism always has been
too much an attempted religious sanction of Prussianism. But it
is not sound Christianity. There can be no possible quarrel with
NaumamTs statement of fact. Most of our modern states are
built with stones from Rome. The common law of Christendom
does look to the Capitol rather than to the Mount of the Beati¬
tudes. But the normal Christian conscience dissents from Nau-
mann’s conclusion that this situation is morally admirable and
should persist indefinitely. If the corporate Christian conscience
of our time is denied at least the hope of a social order which
looks to the Sermon on the Mount for its sanctions, and patient,
painful effort toward that order, then for most of us the deeper,
longer meaning of our Christian life has been taken away. Prus¬
sia, in the person of Naumann and his kind, rid itself of the charge
of hypocrisy, passed so glibly upon the rest of Christendom, by
the cheap and easy method of “recognizing the limits of Chris¬
tianity,” in other words of reverting to an essentially monastic
conception of the religious life. If it be true that “recognizing
the limits of Christianity” is sound Lutheranism, then Luther re¬
mained as truly a monk after the Reformation as he was before.

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IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

For monasticism is not a matter of hair shirts and cowls and
bare celibate cells. These are, at the most, its outward and visible
symbols. Monasticism always is what it was at first, not so much
a Christian contempt for the world as a Christian despair of the
world, a process of “recognizing the limits of Christianity,” that
is, of confining it to the narrow realm of private virtue and of
abandoning the social whole to Satan.

In so far as there was any Christian piety in modern Prussia, it
was essentially a monastic Christianity. It eased its conscience
of the suspicion of hypocrisy by its frank definition of the re¬
stricted limits of the gospel ethic. It left itself free to operate in
industry and statescraft and war on the basis of moral principles
which had nothing to do with the ethic of Jesus. On such a basis
there can be no hope for any profoundly Christian world. Once a
reservation is made as to the absoluteness of the moral claim of
Jesus over man’s total life, the Christian case is as good as lost.
Christianity may linger as an assurance to the dying, a solace to
the bereaved, and the like. But its work in history is over.

Better far the “hypocrisy” of England and America, that is, a
dumb, dogged hope that somehow we may get a world, in God’s
good time, more wholly Christlike, than the candid renunciation of
this hope. The Prussian may have eased his conscience by his
logic. But he forfeited at the same time any claim to a Christian
mission in human history. And by his monasticism he not only
left the world to Satan, he found himself forced to play the leading
role as the advocatus diaboli.

There are men in our America, who, without realizing it, hold
the Prussian conception of the relation of the ethic of Jesus to
the structure of society. They value the sentimental and solacing
aspects of the gospel as it touches their own mood and need. But
they will tell you candidly, even churchmen among them, that
they do not think our world as a whole could be run on a Chris¬
tian basis, that they make no pretence to do so themselves and no
effort to help realize such a world. These men are the loudest in
their denunciation of monks and monkery. They rebel, from the
depths of their well-fed, healthy and aggressive natures against
all for which they think monasticism stands. But in so far as they
are Christians, and many of them think they are in their private
life, they belong to the desert and their ethic is clothed in the

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

hair shirt. For they definitely commit the wider world of things
where they buy and sell, fight and rule, to the overlordship of
Satan, Satan being a synonym for the pitiless brutality of the
struggle for existence. Every accommodation train starting for the
city on a Monday morning with its load of commuters carries its
toll of monks, of respectable men who having been to church on
Sunday and having concluded the Lord’s Day by candidly “recog¬
nizing the limits of Christianity,” set off to town the next morning
to do business in a world which in advance they have deliberately
handed over to the powers of darkness. The essence of modern
monasticism is to be found, not in the Catholic convent or the
High Anglican monastery. It is to be found in any respectable
suburb where Christianity is identified with home, carpet slippers
and the “outside-business-hours” point of view, all of which are
left behind when the commuter pulls out of his innocuous sub¬
urban community on the eight o’clock train for town.

Spiritually such a man is taking to the desert when he goes to
the city. If he knew himself he would have the moral courage
to go to business in a cowl and a rope girdle to make it perfectly
plain that his Christianity has no social interest and no social
purpose and hope. He may draw a certain private satisfaction and
solace out of his “restricted Christianity.” But his Christian
mission in history is over and done. He might as well live on a
pillar in the middle of the Sahara desert so far as the City of
God on earth is concerned. He will never lift the stone or cleave
the wood to find and fashion it. Such is the Prussian sin against
the Holy Ghost when translated into the terms of normal American
life.

ioo

CHAPTER VI.

The Counsels of Perfection.

IN the fifth chapter of Genesis is to be found “the book of the
generations of Adams,” which is little more than a series of
“vital statistics” from Eden to the Flood. We read that
“Adam lived an hundred and thirty two years and begat a son
and called his name Seth; and all the days that Adam lived were
nine hundred and thirty years. And Seth lived an hundred and five
years and begat Enos; and all the days of Seth were nine hundred
and twelve years. And Enos lived ninety years and begat Cainan ;
and all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years.” . . .
“and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty and
nine years.”

What an extraordinarily barren record it is. In the thirty-two
verses of the chapter we cover eight thousand one hundred and
twenty-four years of human experience, and nothing to show for
it save these records of preposterous longevity. “All the days of
Mahalaleel were eight hundred and ninety and five years.” Did
Mahalaleel ever get tired of life? Is such a life indefinitely ex¬
tended in time what we mean by immortality?

Jesus of Nazareth lived thirty- three years at the most, probably
not more than thirty years. His active ministry was crowded into
a few months. But of that life his greatest biographer said, “And
there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which if
they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world
itself could not contain the books that should be written.”

When Jesus died on the cross, he cried, “It is finished.” It must
always seem one of the contradictions of history that Jesus could
speak of his life as a finished life. It had to come to its historical
end, but judged by the standards commonly used in passing on
men’s work in history his life was pathetically incomplete.

Consider for a moment the facts. Jesus was a young man. His
death presents the most difficult type of human problem which

ioi

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

we have to face — the interruption and cessation, just at its be¬
ginning, of a work full of great promise. The synoptic gospels
seem to suggest that the ministry of Jesus lasted only a single
year, for they know only one Passover, that of Passion Week. The
fourth gospel records three Passovers and thus allows but three
years at the outside for Jesus’ ministry. It is probable that the
synoptic chronology is to be preferred. The crucifixion must raise
in the sensitive mind, apart from its theological values, the natural
rebellion which Tennyson felt at the death of Arthur Hallam,
which any of us feel when a young doctor or minister or teacher
dies just as he is finding his feet in his life work. We try to dull
the edge of our sorrow and perplexity by the conventional plati¬
tudes, but they do not help much. We feel dumbly and deeply that
youth deserves better of life than that, and that dying at such a
time youth leaves life its heavy debtor. The last few years have
given a fresh poignancy to this problem.

Jesus left his teaching unfinished. The longer one ponders over
the New Testament the clearer it is that Jesus was not a system
maker, nor an ethics professor. He stands nearer to the prophets
than he stands to the professors, and even nearer the poets than
the prophets in that there is about his teaching a certain splendid
casualness, a great indifference to logical consistency and com¬
pleteness. The “argument from silence” in the gospels sometimes
seems their greatest argument. The truth that Jesus left unsaid,
which with more time he might have said, bulks very large in the
modern mind. For all their beauty and perfection the gospels seem
very unfinished in volume beside Plato’s Dialogues or the tomes
of Saint Augustine.

Jesus left his work unfinished. If any modern parish minister
were to come to the end of his life and leave his ministry at the
torn and ragged ends which mark the spot where the cross
wrenched Jesus away from his work, the world would instantly
write such a man’s ministry down as an utter failure. The last
thing the world would say of such a task would be, “It is fin¬
ished.” Jesus began his preaching ministry with a following of
many thousands. Before a year was half over he had alienated the
thousands and reduced his disciples to the tens. Of the handful
of followers who were with him from Caesarea Philippi onward
one finally betrayed him, another denied him, and save for a

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THE COUNSELS OF PERFECTION

beloved disciple and a few women at the foot of the cross, the
rest forsook him and fled. Even John Brown of Ossawatomie kept
his ragged band of revolutionaries with him to the last. It is very
hard, using any of our working standards of judgment, to see how
such a life could be called finished.

The more we reflect on this seeming contradiction in terms the
clearer it is that the world’s habitual quantitative standards of
value are simply ignored in the gospels. There is not a single
quantitative test of excellence by which Jesus’ life could be called
anything but a tragic failure. Judged by the Genesis conception
of life, Jesus died a mere child in the arms of history. Judged by
the Psalmist’s statement that the days of our years are three score
years and ten, and by reason of strength four score years, Jesus
lived less than half a life. If the gift of Proverbial wisdom is
length of days, Jesus must have failed to get understanding. Nor
are the Church Year Book methods of appraising Christian
achievement of any imaginable use when brought to the gospels.
“Number of communicants, value of church property, home ex¬
penses, benevolences;” there is absolutely no hope of measuring
the value of the life of Jesus in these terms.

In the prayer of Christ recorded in the seventeenth chapter of
John this word “finished” occurs again. “I have glorified thee on
the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.
... I have manifested thy name unto the men whom thou gavest
me out of the world.” Obviously the finished nature of the life of
Jesus was a matter of life’s quality, not of its quantities. The
Temptation of Jesus seems to have been a struggle with what one
of the moderns has called “the sin of the quantitative standard.”
Jesus must have come out of the wilderness with the whole quan¬
titative conception of human worth put behind him once and for
all, committed only to life’s divine quality. It could not have
mattered to him, after that, whether he lived one year more or
fifty more, whether he had five thousand disciples or only a frac¬
tion of his chosen twelve, so far as his own inner compensations
for living were concerned. His task was to “manifest the name of
God,” to reveal the qualitative perfection of his Father’s
righteousness.

But we live in an age of the quantitative standard. Much of our
difficulty in understanding Christianity rests on this fact. It is

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

said of the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan that one of his desires
toward the end of his life was to carry the electrification of the
New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad so far by the time
of his death, that the funeral train which would carry his body
from New York to Hartford for burial should be drawn as far as
New Haven by an electric locomotive. As a matter of fact when
that day came the electrification of the road had reached only to
Bridgeport, and the engines had to be changed there. On that
basis Mr. Morgan would have said of himself that he had lived
an unfinished life. For all his millions and his financial achieve¬
ments there was a pathetic irony in those dozen odd unfinished
miles between Bridgeport and New Haven.

But modern life is like that. The world is in conspiracy against
the man who sets up for himself a quantitative test of a finished
work. The tasks at which we labor to-day are so wide-reaching and
so far-reaching, that it is given to few men, or none, to isolate
their own labor and to see it begun, continued and ended as a
quantitatively achieved fact. This is supremely true of religion’s
work in history. For the religious task is as wide as all human so¬
ciety and as long as human history, and the most that any man
can do in his own generation is to lay well his tier of stone on
the slowly rising walls of the City of God.

The last verse of the fifth chapter of Matthew has given untold
perplexity and discouragement to Christians. “Be ye therefore
perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” So pre¬
posterous and impossible do these words seem that Christianity
has always tended to seek some mitigation of this incredible ideal¬
ism. The Roman Church would make the counsels of perfection
obligatory only upon those who definitely enter a “religious”
vocation. It then underwrites these counsels of perfection with less
exacting requirements for the laity at large. The early churches
of New England facing the same difficulty all but undermined the
spiritual integrity of their Christian idealism by establishing a
“Half Way Covenant” which met the requirements of respectable
citizenship in the State but asked for no margins of excellence in
the realm of the spirit.

Phillips Brooks used to tell candidates for the ministry that no
preacher ought to set before his people ideals which he did not
intend and expect them to realize. It would seem, on this basis,

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THE COUNSELS OF PERFECTION

that Jesus erred seriously as a preacher in setting before us an
absolutely impossible perfection as the goal of our effort. For as
the ethics don says:

“The theory of an ‘infinitely distant’ ideal, if you take it
seriously, so far from elevating and purifying morality, makes all
moral action unmeaning and worthless. And the mischievous
effects of devotion to so perverse an ethical doctrine are not mere
matters of theory: history, especially the history of the religious
life of individuals and nations, is only too eloquent as to the stag¬
nation of intellect, the indifference to pressing and practical
human needs, the carelessness of real human happiness and misery,
to which this unreasoning adoption of ideals out of all relation to
actual human life under definite terrestrial surroundings has
invariably led.”*

The whole difficulty with the supposed moral problem of the
“counsels of perfection” lies in the crude rule-of-thumb of the
quantitative standard by which we ordinarily measure perfection.
For as a matter of simple, literal fact Jesus did not say we were
to be as perfect as our Father. It is only careless reading of the
text, having its origins in the fixed idea of quantitative excellence,
which so blinds our eyes that we cannot even see the plain words
on the page of the gospel. What Jesus actually said was, “Be ye
therefore perfect , ... as your Father in heaven is perfect,” a
very different matter. There is no question of quantitative ex¬
cellence here, only of the quality of our goodness. We are not
asked to be as good as God is. But we are commanded to be
good, as God is good, in the way that He is good. How is God
good? The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ simplest answer to
that question. The divine goodness differs from the goodness of
the philistine world not in its degree but in its kind. The philistine
world loves its neighbors and hates its enemies. But the Eternal
Goodness loves its enemies, blesses those that curse it, does good
to those that hate it, and prays for those that persecute it. It
makes its sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends its rain
on the just and on the unjust. God differs from us, morally, not
because he knows more neighbors to love than we know, not
because he has more enemies to hate than we have. His perfection
is not a matter of degree at all. It is a matter of disposition, of

* “The Problem of Conduct,” A. E. Taylor, pp. 395, 396.

105

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

quality. The Divine Goodness needs but one enemy to occasion
its perfection, one persecutor to show its unlikeness to our im¬
perfect goodness. Loving a thousand enemies would not make it
any more perfect than loving one. Praying for a thousand perse¬
cutors would not enhance the qualitative perfection revealed in
the prayer for one persecutor.

In short, the Sermon on the Mount, with its central counsel of
Christian perfection, is moral nonsense when measured by the
quantitative test. It yields its meanings and opens its possibilities
only to the man who approaches it from this other and opposite
angle. Jesus means us to be perfect as our Father is perfect. There
is a kind of ethical soberness about the teaching of Jesus which
delivers it entirely from the charge of being an “infinitely distant”
ideal. The qualitative perfection of the Eternal Goodness is always
open to any man who chooses to claim and exercise it in any given
human situation.

We have spoken of those detached examples of the Christian
life which are to be found scattered all through history and litera¬
ture. What more could be added to them to enhance their per¬
fection? Edith Cavell, in the last moment when she tried to sum
up the whole temper of her living in those daring and revolution¬
ary words, “I see that patriotism is not enough. I must die
without hatred or bitterness toward any one,” was perfect as God
is perfect. No words which she could have added to what she said
in that moment, no longer years in which to live out her faith,
would have made her character more perfect than it was in that
moment. Qualitatively her goodness was one with the goodness
of God, and beyond that moral unity later life could not have
carried her. Even eternity has nothing which it can add to that
perfection.

Tolstoi filled hundreds upon hundreds of pages with his synop¬
sis and exposition of the four gospels. He added other volumes
of independent comment upon Christianity. Altogether his work
as a lay theologian was not inconsiderable. But Tolstoi’s most
perfect statement of the Christian religion is to be found in his
matchless little story, “Where Love is, there God is also.” This
brief parable takes only a half dozen pages, but qualitatively it
is perfect. No quantitative development of it could conceivably
add to its perfection.

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THE COUNSELS OF PERFECTION

The Puritan conscience unhappily severed the moral judgment
from the aesthetic judgment. The two are to be distinguished but
they ought not to be dissociated. And if there be in religion a real
beauty of holiness then the aesthetic judgment has its place in the
moral life. For the first axiom of aesthetics is something like this,
Beauty is a qualitative not a quantitative excellence.

The normal philistine mind of our time usually has to undergo
some process of conversion before it gets this point of view.
Niagara Falls is universally disappointing to the man who visits
it for the first time. He expects something “bigger.” Nothing
short of a transvaluation of values can ever reveal to him the
total beauty of the scene; the direct precision of the American
Falls, the “rest” and musical pause of Goat Island, and then the
great curve of the Horseshoe Falls. There are other falls where
more water drops a greater distance, but for perfect design they
do not match Niagara.

The visitor to the world’s great art galleries goes around in
advance with his Baedeker and penny prints. He knows what to
look for. He has his double stars already listed. What troubles
him, at first, is the fact that so many of the masterpieces are rela¬
tively so diminutive. He feels that a great picture deserves a great
canvas. Only a reversal of his standards of judgment will ever
persuade him that “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” which
takes a whole side wall, is not so “great” a picture as Gilbert
Stuart’s “Washington,” which needs only a half dozen square feet.
In short, beauty simply cannot be appraised with a yardstick.

Now part of the “foolishness of the gospel” rests in just this
indifference to the quantitative test. “Not many mighty, not many
noble, are called.” The ministry of Jesus sometimes perplexes us
moderns by its parochial character. Jesus was content to live
among his own people. So far as we know, Caesarea Philippi to
the north and Bethlehem to the south, a bare hundred miles,
marked the geographical limits of Jesus’ work. He undoubtedly
contemplated our total humanity from the North and from the
South, from the East and from the West, as part of his Kingdom-
to-be, but he never traveled afield as a propagandist. He confined
himself with a kind of deliberate provincialism to the lost sheep
of the house of Israel.

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

This inaction and indifference admits of no explanation save
on the theory that Jesus was seeking not to extend men’s quanti¬
tative conception of the Kingdom, but to establish for it a new
qualitative standard. For this purpose miles were irrelevant. He
needed only a child standing hard by, or a single visitor by night,
or the woman come to draw water at the well where he was sitting.
Qualitative religion is not a matter of statistics. The ministry of
Jesus is a very poor and meager thing when compared with globe¬
trotting ecclesiasticism and its tuft-hunting among the mighty
of this world.

The modern mind is troubled how to vindicate the central
Christian affirmation that God cares for the individual. Its cen¬
tral reason for clinging to this faith rests upon Jesus’ concern for
and concentration upon the single individual. God, we say, cannot
be less than Jesus in this respect. But Jesus’ concern for the indi¬
vidual had about it a moral artistry which is very hard for us to
understand, because we bring to our judgments the businesslike
test of quantities, rather than the artist’s subtler and truer test
of quality. The workaday mind is ready to charge off the single
sparrow fallen to the ground to biological profit and loss. It takes
the artist to see the beauty, the pathos and the value of the lone
little bird.

When we wish to seek help from the mind of our own time to
grasp the moral paradox of the sparrow and the flower of the field,
we must turn not to the statisticians but to the poets and the
painters. Bums with his love of the wee beasties of the field
understood Jesus. Wordsworth with his susceptibility to the mean¬
est flower that grows, his single eye for the small celandine or
the primrose by the river’s brim, writes in the gospel mood. In his
“Oxford Studies in Poetry,” Mr. Bradley calls attention to the
frequent and almost wearisome reiteration of the adjective “soli¬
tary” in Wordsworth’s poetry. There is hardly a page of either
“The Prelude” or “The Excursion” where this word is not found,
and sometimes often found. “The solitary tree,” “the solitary
sheep,” “the solitary tarn,” “The Solitary” himself, incarnation of
these solitudes, are Wordsworth’s central themes. These pages will
seem bleak, untenanted and uninteresting to those readers who
bring to them the quantitative standard. They yield their burden

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THE COUNSELS OF PERFECTION

of beauty and meaning only to those who understand the quali¬
tative nobility of the mind of Wordsworth.

In fact, nine tenths of our difficulties with the Christian doc¬
trine of God’s care for the single individual rise from our initial
conception of God as the business manager of the universe. A
large employer of American labor commenting upon the general
labor situation in New England has said that most of the present
misunderstandings arise from the lost contacts between the head
of the industry and the operatives. Formerly the head of the busi¬
ness knew all his employees, but that is no longer possible, and
there is everywhere a sense of broken human relationships between
the man at the head and the ranks who follow him. How to restore
those broken human contacts is the major human problem of
modern industry. Our theology labors under the same difficulty.
On the business manager theory of God’s relation to the world of
men he cannot care for us one by one. And Mr. Wells is justified
in his remark that he does not want a God who can afford to be
bothered with him eternally.

Only when we substitute the symbol of the artist for the execu¬
tive does the doctrine of the divine solicitude for the sparrow
become credible. A man has only to appeal to his own experience
as a creative artist, no matter how meager and imperfect that
experience may have been, to understand how the real creator
must value his creation. Every one of us has hidden away in some
private drawer, under his own lock and key, a poem that he once
tried to write, a picture that he tried to draw. He values these
poor things because they represent, not his quantitative dealing
with the world, but his effort at qualitative perfection. He will
annually clear out his drawers and burn the accumulation of re¬
ceipted bills and canceled checks, which represent his volume of
business. But through the years he will cling to those youthful and
ardent efforts to create, because those creations were a part of
himself. They never lose and never can lose their value to him,
individually, because they are mind of his mind and heart of his
heart.

Now Jesus’ realm of moral values is far more truly that of the
artist’s creative effort than of the ledgers of the business. What
gave to the widow’s two mites their value in the eye of Jesus was
their moral perfection. Hers was a qualitatively finished act, al-

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

though her alms did not sound quantitatively so loud in the
“trumpet” that received them. And what revolted Jesus in the
tithes of mint, anise and cummin, those meticulously measured
sprigs from the kitchen gardens of Jerusalem, was their quanti¬
tative precision and their qualitative worthlessness.

Our contemporary moral problem, even in its social aspects,
would lose something of its perplexity had we the courage to take
our moral stand upon the aesthetic judgment which Jesus passed
on the beauty of holiness. The social gospel will always be a
heart-breaking business if it is interpreted as the quantitative
redemption of the world. The single individual must finally be
crushed in spirit under his Atlas burden of the whole world’s sin
and need. He will know “the cursed spite that ever he was bom
to set it right.” The prophetic reluctance to face single-handed
the cleansing of the Augean stables — “Ah, Lord God, behold I
cannot speak: for I am a child” — has about it suggestions of the
quantitative magnitude and hopelessness of the total task.

But Christianity, surely, was not meant to break our hearts
and crush our spirits. And the social gospel is not meant to be an
occasion for final pessimism. “The Evangelization of the World
in This Generation” may make a certain appeal to the adminis¬
trative genius of contemporary Christianity. But if it be con¬
ceived as a mere matter of planting mission stations so thickly
over the world that there shall not be any ecclesiastical No Man’s
Land left in Thibet or Zambesi or New Guinea, it makes no par¬
ticular appeal to the pure moral artistry of the gospels. True,
Jesus saw “Satan falling from heaven” in prophetic vision. But
his historical method of fulfilling that vision was by washing the
feet of a few friends, by solacing the penitent thief on the hard-by
cross and by forgiving the world that put him away.

In short, our contemporary “evidences of Christianity” are
always of a relatively negligible volume in their quantity, but of
qualitative perfection in their kind. What makes us believe that
Christianity is practicable is not the array of figures in the Church
Year Book, or a crowded ecclesiastical convention hall with its
interminable resolutions as to this and the other social problem.
Passing resolutions in convention, as one has put it, is “the most
harmless form of amusement the human mind ever devised.” What
convinces us that we can be perfect as God is perfect is the single

no

THE COUNSELS OF PERFECTION

qualitatively perfect episode which falls under our notice. It is
the stray word or deed, happened upon in the day’s work, which
in its divine perfection stands out in glorious contrast to the
philistine morality.

Some little child, by a simple and utterly Christlike word,
rebukes and corrects the sophisticated wisdom of our maturity.
Some sufferer in a hospital bears the world’s burden of pain with
a resilience and splendor that transmutes the whole quality of pain,
so that it is touched again for us with the moral glory of the
cross. “I wish,” said one such, dying of cancer, “that I could
gather up into my own pain all that the world must suffer from
cancer and pay the whole debt as I go.” In such a temper is the
qualitative perfection of the death of Christ, which no quantita¬
tive measure of pain could ever reckon or achieve.

The Christian life is a morally hopeless enterprise only to the
disciple who has not yet been converted from the world’s rough
and ready reckoning of the volume of goodness. Goodness has no
volume. There is about it, ultimately, the arbitrariness which
belongs to the conceptions of time and space. Infinite goodness,
like infinite time and infinite space, means nothing the human
mind can grasp. What there is in God is “Eternal Goodness.”
Whittier knew it. And this eternal moral life may be as perfectly
experienced in “twenty minutes of reality” as in those nine hun¬
dred sixty and nine years which, at times, must have palled upon
Methuselah! “The life of God,” says Aristotle in one flaming
sentence of the “Metaphysics,” “is eternally like our life at its
rare best moments.”

The character of Christ is in its quality eternally like our
Christianity in its rare, best moments, those moments when we
know what it is to be perfect as our Father is perfect. The world
does not give that quality, therefore the world cannot take it
away. A man cannot add anything unto the words of such a
record nor can he take away from them. There can be more books
written after the New Testament, there never will be a more per¬
fect definition of religion than the Sermon on the Mount. Life
may multiply our experiences of perfection as the years go on,
but life never adds anything to the single moment or the single,
splendid, human situation when men know what it is to be perfect
as their Father in heaven is perfect.

hi

CHAPTER VII.

The Scientific Method and the
Religious Spirit.

IN December, 1911, Captain Robert Scott started on his
thousand-mile journey across the Antarctic Ice Barrier to the
South Pole. He took with him as medical officer of the polar
party Dr. Edward A. Wilson. Wilson finally perished with Scott
on the return journey from the Pole when, without food and fuel,
they were overtaken on the open ice by a driving blizzard and by
incredible cold.

“Scott’s Last Expedition,” duly chronicled in two volumes,
added its modicum to the meager body of polar knowledge. But
its major bequest to our time is the memory of the spirit which
from first to last sustained and inspired it. That spirit was in
part the doggedness of England. At a time when the modern
world was beginning to doubt the virility of the Anglo-Saxon,
these men proved, in Scott’s words, written to J. M. Barrie just
before the end, that “Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit,
fighting it out to the end.” The courage of these men was an
earnest of that heroism which so soon after and so suddenly was
to know a rebirth in history.

In other and equal part, this spirit was the genius of modern
science at its best, the dispassionate quest for knowledge, the love
of truth for its own sake. Among the most precious heritages
which gather around the memory of these few men is a little poem
which Dr. Wilson sent to the South Polar Times just before he
set out, a poem which is both a premonition of the final tragic fact,
and a clear witness to the scientist’s method and purpose.

The Silence was deep with a breath like sleep
As our sled runners slid on the snow,

But the fate-full fall of our fur-clad feet
Struck mute like a silent blow

1 1 2

SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND RELIGION

On a questioning “Hush?” as the settling crust
Shrank shivering over the floe.

And a voice that was thick from a soul that seemed sick
Came back from the Barrier : “Go !

For the secrets hidden are all forbidden
Till God means man to know.”

And this was the thought that the silence wrought,

As it scorched and froze us through,

That we were the men God meant should know
The heart of the Barrier snow,

By the heat of the sun, and the glow
And the glare from the glistening floe,

As it scorched and froze us through and through
With the bite of the drifting snow.

As a rival interpretation of life one might set over against
these lines a stanza from Francis Thompson’s “Nineteenth Cen¬
tury.” He tells the roster of the poets of that century and then,
thinking of Charles Darwin and earthworms and vegetable mold,
he admits sadly that it was not to her great poets that England
gave her loyalty, during the century gone.

But not to these

She gave her heart; her heart she gave
To the blind worm that bores the mold,

Bloodless, pertinacious, cold,

Unweeting what itself upturns.

The seer and prophet of the grave.

It reared its head from off the earth
(Which gives it life and gave it birth)

And placed upon its eyeless head a crown,

Thereon a name writ new,

“Science,” erstwhile with ampler meanings known;

And all the people in their turns

Before the blind worm bowed them down.

Yet crowned beyond its due,

It is a thing of sightless prophecies.

There is no doubt which is the better verse. As a poet Francis
Thompson stands almost alone in the last half century. He had an
unmatched skill in the handling of the literary medium. Beside
the precision and adroitness of Thompson’s lines the doctor’s
verse is the crude and bungling effort of a prosy layman. But it
is a fair question which of these two points of view comes nearer
to voicing the central temper of our age. At the best Francis

113

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

Thompson, the minnesinger of an evanescent beauty, had little
understanding of the moral passion which inspires the sober real¬
ism of the scientific spirit. For all his fumbling and unmetrical
lines the polar doctor caught the central nobility of the genius of
science, the conviction that the love of truth for its own sake is
essentially a religious passion.

Of all the wars of history none, perhaps, has involved such
spiritual misery as “The Warfare between Science and Religion.”
The initial bitterness of that struggle is now past. Huxley no
longer rages about the world “smiting the Amalekites.” Bishop
Wilberforce no longer imagines vain things. The religionist and the
scientist have both seen the folly of a war of mutual extermina¬
tion. They have agreed to live and let live and to traffic with one
another through interpreters. But there is still lacking, in the
main, any actual communism of aim and effort. “To the scientist
the earth must forever roll around the central solar fire; to the
poet the sun must forever set behind the western hills.”

The failure to establish any permanent peace between these
two great human interests rests very largely upon the mistaken
attempt to discover and to establish an actual identity between
the findings of science and the fruits of religious experience. The
two very often seem to coincide, but only to diverge again, and to
baffle those who would identify them. Henry Drummond’s ambi¬
tious attempt to establish an identity between the laws of nature
and the laws of the spiritual life broke down in the end. He points
out many suggestive parallels, which have a certain rough ex¬
change value when the mental coin of the one realm is cashed into
the currency of the other realm. But there his effort, and that of
every other kindred thinker, begins and ends.

If religion and science are ever to see eye to eye they must
approach one another on a different premise. Bertrand Russell
says, in one of his essays:

“There are two different ways in which a philosophy may seek
to base itself upon science. It may emphasize the most general
results of science, and seek to give even greater generality and
unity to these results. Or it may study the methods of science,
and seek to apply these methods, with necessary adaptations, to
its own peculiar province. Much philosophy inspired by science
has gone astray through preoccupation with the results momen-

114

SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND RELIGION

tarily supposed to have been achieved. It is not results, but
methods, that can be transferred with profit from the sphere of
the special sciences to the sphere of philosophy.”

In so far as every religion is a philosophy of life these words
hold equally true of the relation between science and religion.
Modern Protestantism, as we so often remind ourselves, is not a
body of belief, but a method of belief. Loyalty to the method is
even more central with the Protestant than concern with particu¬
lar results. “Love and do what you like,” was Augustine’s defini¬
tion of Christianity. We busy ourselves to-day to make the tree
of life good in the assurance that having done so good fruits must
follow in due and inevitable season. The initial heresy for the
freeman is that Jesuitical casuistry which begins by suggesting
that a religious end justifies an irreligious means, and which con¬
cludes by vitiating both faith and conduct. As against such an
ethic we hold that no significant result can be reached by a wrong
method, and that every result of a right method must be valid
and precious. In short, the problems of modern faith and con¬
duct are not so much problems of “What,” as problems of “How.”

It is precisely at this point that religion and science can meet
without private reservations and without mutual misunderstanding
and recrimination upon the basis of a common method. It is not
so much the findings of the scientific method as the initial temper
and permanent moral quality of the method which make the
modern scientist so essentially a religious man at the center of his
character. For the intellectual mood which speaks out in those
halting lines of the expedition’s doctor on the Antarctic Barrier is
very near what we mean by the mind’s pure love of God.

For the secrets hidden are all forbidden,

Till God means man to know.

And this was the thought that the silence wrought

^ % sf5 %

That we were the men God meant should know.

In his life of Saint Louis, the French chronicler Joinville tells
of a Saracen woman seen on the streets of Damascus, carrying a
pan of fire in one hand and a jug of water in the other. When
asked by a monk what she intended to do with these things, she
answered, “Burn up Paradise and put out the fires of hell, so that

ii5

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

men may do good for the love of God.” True religion always has
to resist the doctrine of rewards and punishments, because they
demean the essential nature of the spiritual life. They introduce
prudential and self-contemplating motives into a relationship
which ought to be inspired and sustained by love alone. When a
man begins to calculate upon the profit and loss involved in his
human affections he is undermining the very foundations of the
life of love. He certainly must not marry because he can get a
housekeeper cheaper in that way than in any other. If we can
take Elizabeth Barrett Browning at her word the lover may not
even say,

“I love her for her smile — her look — her way
Of speaking gently, — for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day,”

For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee. . . .

But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.

What is true of our human affections is true of the life of
religion. We are not to love God because we draw a passing intel¬
lectual or aesthetic pleasure from the act of worship. We may not
love God because we feel the sting of the incentive of reward and
punishment. There is only one way to love God, and that is for
love’s sake, that we may love on through love’s eternity.

The mediaeval mystic has much to say of what he called “the
unmercenary love of God.” The Sons of Martha, who predominate
in contemporary Christianity, always find it hard to understand
the “lone, sad, sunny idleness” of the Sons of Mary. There cer¬
tainly is no feature of the mystic’s conception of the religious life
which is more difficult for a commercial age to understand or more
remote from our generally utilitarian and pragmatic temper than
this same unmercenary temper of the mystic. But for that very
reason there is no single aspect of mysticism which needs greater
emphasis at the present moment. The mystic’s psychological in¬
tuitions were accurate even though he had no formal psychology
to aid his account of experience. And his ethical intuitions were
at many points far keener and more discriminating than those of
the modern workaday churchgoer.

116

SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND RELIGION

The nameless author of the “Theologia Germanica,” that match¬
less manual of the selfless spiritual life, classifies religious men in
four groups — those who practice religion because they fear the
penalties and punishments which attach to irreligion, those who
are drawn to religion by the promised rewards of an ultimate
felicity, those who are sustained by a Pharisaic self-righteousness,
and those who love religion for its own sake. The mystic regards
the first three types as at the best proselytes of the gate. They
really do not understand what transpires in the Holy of Holies.
It is the latter group alone who really deserve the name “re¬
ligious.”

“This is our answer to the question, ‘If a man by putting on
Christ’s life, can get nothing more than he hath already, and serve
no end, what good will it do him?’ This life is not chosen in order
to serve any end, or to get anything by it, but for love of its
nobleness, and because God loveth and esteemeth it so greatly.
And whosoever saith that he hath had enough of it, and may now
lay it aside, hath never tasted nor known it; for he who hath
truly felt or tasted it, can never give it up again. And he who hath
put on the life of Christ with the intent to win or deserve ought
thereby, hath taken it up as a hireling and not for love, and is
altogether without it. For he who doth not take it up for love hath
none of it at all; he may dream indeed that he hath put it on,
but he is deceived. Christ did not lead such a life as his for the
sake of reward, but out of love; and love maketh such a life light
and taketh away all its hardships so that it becometh sweet and is
gladly endured. But to him who hath not put it on for love, but
hath done so, as he dreameth, for the sake of reward, it is utterly
bitter and a weariness, and he fain would be quit of it. . . . God
rejoiceth more over one man who truly loveth, than over a thou¬
sand hirelings. . . . For a lover of God is better and dearer to
Him than a hundred thousand hirelings.”

Modern theology, with its doctrine of one world at a time, has
in some measure completed the dramatic task which the Saracen
woman undertook on the streets of Damascus. The fear of pun¬
ishment and the hope of rewards hereafter figure little or not at
all in the motives to the Christian life of to-day. The doctrine of
one world at a time has supplanted the elder doctrines of heaven
and hell. But this does not mean that the mercenary temper has

117

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

been exorcised. All that we have done in dismissing hell as a
threat and heaven as an inducement from our religious appeal, is
to substitute for the highly fictitious torments of Gehenna some
of the known punishments in this present world for a godless life,
and for the highly colored felicities of Paradise certain immediate
substantial compensations for the godly life. Our modem Chris¬
tianity has not abandoned the mercenary appeal. It has merely
changed the notation in the logic. The sulphur of Sheol is sup¬
planted in the present argument by the ravages of syphilis. The
remote prospect of a world of sardius and chrysoprase is a
“dead hypothesis” to the average man of to-day. But assure him
that when the riot of Oriental opulence in the mind of the apoca¬
lyptic writer is “spiritualized” it means a generous bank balance
and a country estate as the reward of Christian integrity in busi¬
ness and you commend religion to him with real effectiveness.
The waters of the river of life where the fathers hoped to slake
their thirst through all eternity reappear in contemporary piety as
Metchnikoff’s sour milk, which assures us of another ten years in
this vale of tears. Emerson said that “Five minutes of to-day is
worth as much to me as five minutes of eternity.” The religion of
healthy-mindedness intimates that it is worth a good deal more.
Better fifty years of the world we know than a cycle of the
Apocalyptic Cathay. The “red-blooded” muscular Christian of
to-day gets up very little enthusiasm about joining the hundred
and forty and four thousand who come out of great tribulation to
stand before the throne of the Lamb, but he is always ready to
join a class for “setting-up exercises.” The corpus sanurn is a
much more potent appeal for present-day piety than the pain-
drenched body of the martyr. But all this is simply a restatement
of the doctrine of rewards and punishments.

In short, a certain familiar type of modern religion, following
modern business, does not approach a man with a highly prob¬
lematical investment which may ultimately declare dispropor¬
tionately large dividends; it asks him to invest in an ethical
proposition where the moral capital is kept turning over all the
time, and from which modest but immediate dividends are paid
regularly. What gives to the whole Christian Science and New
Thought movement its particular appeal to our time is this busi-

1 18

SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND RELIGION

nesslike identification of the spiritual life with its returns in the
currency of this present world.

The common logic of the average apologia for Christianity
to-day is bound up with the conception that it pays here and now
to be a Christian, pays in health, wealth and long life. This fa¬
miliar mercenary argument for the spiritual life is candidly Old
Testament in its point of view. It savors of Jacob’s covenant. It
reflects the temper of the Book of Deuteronomy, which took no
more interest in the dividends of religion in the hereafter than we
take. The difficulty which attaches to the doctrine of reliable
rewards and punishments for the religious life in the terms of
creature well-being, springs from a rankly individualistic theory of
the moral life, which has no solid ground in the facts. Lecky
points out that the whole force of this argument depends upon
the immediate organization of the given society in which the in¬
dividual happens to find himself, “For there are undoubtedly some
conditions of society in which a perfectly upright life has not
even a general tendency to prosperity.” It is certainly true that
“the sin we sin by two and two we pay for one by one.” Moral
evil seems to end in a certain terrible isolation, since it disinte¬
grates society. The loneliness of the sinner is his ultimate direst
punishment. But conversely the sins that we sin one by one cannot
be isolated in their effect and others are dragged into the wake of
their unhappy consequences. Likewise the effects of private virtue
cannot be monopolized by the truly moral man but become a
fund of achieved labor into which others enter. In short, Bosan-
quet sums up the incredibility of all attempts to determine a com¬
mensurate relation between the individual’s moral nature and his
creature status in society when he says:

“If you could, or so far as you think you can, find a basis and
rule of apportionment to units taken as separate, the results
considered from an adequate point of view would certainly be
repulsive to us in their details, and would contradict the con¬
ception of unity in happiness and suffering. . . . If we are ar¬
ranging any system of enterprise of a really intimate character
for persons closely united in mind and thoroughly penetrated with
the spirit of the whole — persons not at arm’s length to one another
— all the presuppositions of an individualistic justice at once fall
to the ground. We do not give the ‘best’ man the most comfort,

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

the easiest task, or even, so far as the conduct of the enterprise
is concerned, the highest reward. We give him the greatest respon¬
sibility, the severest toil and hazard, the most continuous and
exacting toil and self-sacrifice. . . . We may think of the honours
and rewards that have come to the great poets of the world. . . .
Plainly, there is no word to be spoken of any proportion between
these and their services to the world. . . . There is no just pro¬
portion between their deserts and their treatment.”

The modern mercenary argument for religion, then, must come
up ultimately against its Job. Mr. Wells tells us that “all the
world is now Job.” He has somewhat anticipated the course of con¬
temporary religious history. Mr. Wells is Job because the merce¬
nary logic irks his soul. Years ago he assailed Mr. Norman Angell’s
thesis that war does not pay, as a double-edged and dangerous
sword to play with morally. Because, as he then said, nothing that
is really noble pays, poetry does not pay, music does not pay, love
does not pay, religion does not pay. But in the main, the modern
mind is a good deal nearer the position of Eliphaz, Bildad and Zo-
phar, who held that religion paid, than it is to the mind of Job,
who held that religion does not pay. The preacher of to-day who
launches his religious appeal with the statement that very probably
it may not pay here and now in the coin of this world to be a
Christian, will have to spend the rest of the sermon hour trying to
regain the sympathy and interest which he will certainly alienate
by his initial admission. For the Yankee in us all answers, “If it
doesn’t pay here and now to be a Christian what is the use of
Christianity?”

Saint Paul understood the answer to this question when he said
that we must judge spiritual things by spiritual, that there is no
bank of moral exchange in nature and history whereby we can
transmute the investment of a genuinely religious devotion into
an equivalent amount of temporal well-being. The ethical su¬
periority of the New Testament to the Old rests very largely in
its answer to the problem of the Book of Job, a problem to which
the Old Testament found no clear satisfactory solution. Jesus’
conception of the sequence of cause and effect in the spiritual life
is as far removed from the conception of cause and effect in
Jacob’s shrewd bargain with the Almighty as East from West.
And never the twain shall meet in ethics. As a matter of fact,

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SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND RELIGION

Jesus promised to his disciples pretty much the reverse of all that
the Old Testament had offered as the results of a religious life;
instead of long life the prospect of martyrdom, instead of health
hunger and nakedness, instead of wealth the penury of disciple-
ship. There is very little of the coin of this realm held out to men
in the gospels as an inducement to discipleship. What is the effect
of which true discipleship is a cause? “Peace I leave with you, my
peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.”
The Christian life is, and in the very nature of the case must be,
its own reward. It is the joy of a clear conscience, faith, hope and
love, and kindred abiding realities of which the mystic says, “the
internal is also the eternal.” Such is Rhodes’s point of view when
he says of John Brown of Ossawatomie, “God has honoured but
comparatively a small part of mankind with such mighty and soul-
satisfying rewards.”

It has been said that two symbols exhaust all possible concep¬
tions of the religious life, the symbol of money and the symbol of
love. The doctrine of rewards and punishments, whether it is
applied to eternity or to the three score years and ten, whether
it talks in terms of sulphur and amethyst or of delirium tremens
and bank balances, is cast in the symbolism of a money transac¬
tion. The whole argument is alien to the spirit of Jesus. The most
that Jesus would say is that all these things after which the
Gentiles seek shall be added unto you as the by-products of a
religious life in a truly religious world. But even in the perfected
Kingdom of God on earth they do not remain the objects of our
efforts and aspiration. At the best they are happy incidents of
the soul’s love of God for God’s own sake.

It takes only a single exception to wreck an abstract system.
You need only to have known one good woman dead of cancer
after a life of devotion to home and children and God’s work in
the world, to be face to face with the Book of Job again. You need
only to have seen a single idealistic business man who has con¬
scientiously tried to be a Christian in trade or industry, but who
has gone to the wall in the effort, to realize that the cheap and
easy logic which tells you that it always pays in dollars and cents
to be a Christian business man rests not on facts but on the hope
of recruits for churches and the like. The ethical relation between
a man’s inner spiritual life and his physical status in body and

1 2 I

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

circumstance involve social problems so intricate and baffling that
it is all but impossible to establish any direct connection between
our Christian character and our condition in this present world.
In a perfect Christian world there would be, unquestionably,
some direct and intelligible connection between the soul of hu¬
manity and its temporal circumstance. But in an imperfect and
half-pagan age, when every man’s health, wealth and temporal
happiness are affected in a thousand ways by the environing world,
it is little short of injustice and cruelty to credulous minds to
isolate the individual from his social setting and to preach to him
the sequences of moral cause and effect in his own case on the
basis of the present paying dividends of the Christian life. Christ
has many genuine disciples in our time with whom, as the world
goes, things stand well. But he has as many or more with whom
things have gone hard, whose devotion to the world of the spirit
has been matched by pain, disease, neglect, failure, sorrow; to
whom the money symbol is meaningless. They simply know that
in the coin of this realm it does not seem to pay to be Christians.
And if they are to be repaid, if there is any reliable cause and
effect in religion, their payment must come in another coinage.
We are not only giving the lie to countless facts when we preach
the cheap and easy doctrine that Christianity is always worth
while here and now in the terms of the world’s values, we are
making infinite perplexity and trouble for the future, and be¬
queathing to those who will finally know the anger and alienation
from religion occasioned by our short-sighted logic, the moral
problem which the Old Testament passed on to the New.

Nothing, then, is so much needed in modern Christianity as a
revival and a restatement in the terms of contemporary thought of
the mediaeval doctrine of the unmercenary love of God, which is
essentially Christ’s doctrine. If Christianity is to be permanently
saved for the world it must be dissociated from the lower appeal
which so often characterizes our present-day preaching.

John Calvin, in an early chapter of the “Institutes,” makes the
flat statement that the Essence of God is incomprehensible. He
does not hesitate to ally himself with the agnostics. God is known
to us only through his attributes discernible in man and nature.
The modem poet very beautifully pictures certain features of
nature and human life and then says of each in turn, “Some of

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us call it Evolution-Autumn-Longing-Consecration, And others
call it God.” So far from being a pantheist or a latitudinarian he is
perfectly true to the most rigid orthodoxy. A religious experience,
at its heart, is just the winning of the insight which enables us to
say “God” where formerly we had said “Evolution” or “Conse¬
cration.” Now the major attributes of God for the modern mind
must be the ideas of Beauty, Duty, and Truth, associated severally
with our aesthetic, moral and intellectual judgments.

If a man were to talk to a twentieth-century congregation about
the unmercenary love of God he would be speaking a dead theo¬
logical language. But when he restates that idea as “Art for Art’s
Sake” he plunges at once into one of the major discussions of the
day. Infinite pages of dreary controversy have been circulated on
this subject. But at the heart of it there is a genuinely religious
idea, namely, that the perception of beauty is its own sufficient
compensation. No one can believe that John Masefield’s medita¬
tive sonnets on the quest of beauty were written with an eye to
the main chance by way of author’s royalties.

If I should come again to that dear place

Where once I came, where Beauty lived and moved,

Where by the sea, I saw her face to face,

That soul alive by which the world has loved;

If as I stood at gaze among the leaves,

She would appear again, as once before,

«lv »lr %1#

m *p

Joy with its searing-iron would burn me wise,

I should know all; all powers, all mysteries.

Francis Thompson seems to have allowed no copyright on his
published poems.

He lives detached days;

He serveth not for praise;

For gold
He is not sold:

He measureth world’s pleasure,

World’s ease, as Saint might measure;

For hire
Just love entire
He asks.

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

There are in all our great cities in third floors back, in attic
studios, living from hand to mouth, countless, nameless young
men and women to whom religion as the unmercenary love of
beauty through music, painting, sculpture, letters, is the central
reality of life. There is a certain flavor of mediaeval asceticism
in their “Contemptus mundi ” They refuse to be the hirelings of a
mercenary time, preferring to be the lovers of God as he is re¬
vealed to them in the disciplines and compensations of their art.

So there are in these same cities of Mammon any number of
men and women who seldom think of themselves as being religious
in any conventional manner, but to whom the unmercenary love
of Duty is an ever present moral motive. The lover of his human
kind never forgets that in the moment of risk or peril the average
man may be relied upon to do his duty. And this doing of duty
in no way depends upon the wage paid, the prospect of a Carnegie
medal or the popular subscription for the hero of the moment.
The man in question does his duty because it is his duty, and it
never occurs to him that he is more than an unprofitable servant
because he has done that which he ought to have done. The fire¬
man, the policeman, the railroad engineer, the ship’s master, the
nurse, all who in their own ways are daily sustained and in the
moment of crisis transfigured by this central passion, very often
come a great deal nearer to the deeper essence of real religion than
the less devoted and single-minded folk in the sheltered classes of
society who make up the congregations of our churches. For
wherever there is an unmercenary love of Duty there is the Chris¬
tian religion in its original austerity and nobility.

But this old idea of the selfless love of God finds its best modern
exemplar in the scientist’s unmercenary love of Truth. This is
the major contribution of the scientific spirit to contemporary
Christianity. The contribution is seldom or almost never noticed
and pointed out. What gives to modern science at its best a cer¬
tain ascetic single-mindedness is this characteristic intellectual
temper and attitude. In this respect modern science stands in
sharp contrast to the self-regarding and generally mercenary spirit
of much of our apologia for present-day Christianity. And should
a man ever have to cast his lot with one of these interests as
against another, Christian history as a whole would warrant him
in throwing in his spiritual fortune with the scientists who love

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SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND RELIGION

truth whether it pays or not, rather than with those religionists
who preach a Christianity which is of value because in this world
its hard cash dividends are regularly paid.

Our modern preachers need, above all else, to understand this
central and distinguishing quality of the scientific mind. We are
troubled, to-day, by the absence of the educated man and
woman from our churches. We attribute their absence to the “un¬
settling” atmosphere of the modern college, its general agnosticism
and its persistent brushing the bloom off the credulity of youth.
But what intellectual welcome does the mind of the youth of
to-day find in a church which approaches the tangled problems of
modern faith and conduct with a timid “Hush”? Or how will the
young man, disciplined by four years in laboratories and class¬
rooms to the fearless quest after the love of truth for its own sake,
feel intellectually and morally at home in a church busy with the
sorry task of trying to prove that Christianity is of no value in
itself, but only as it makes us long lived, healthy and prosperous?
Such a man has grown up in an intellectual world where men are
not interested in whether truth pays or not, they are interested
only in whether the thing is true. If it be true, the question of its
costs and compensations must be reckoned with later.

Our theological seminaries would be wisely advised if they
prescribed as a requirement for graduation a course, not in the
general results of modern science as they bear upon religion, but
in the central temper and quality of the scientific mind. They
would require the candidate for a theological degree to read the
lives of Darwin and Huxley, that he might understand wherein
lies the profoundly religious quality of such characters.

In the ’60s, for example, there passed back and forth between
Thomas Huxley and Charles Kingsley a series of intimate letters
which for moral interest and essential nobility are almost un¬
equaled in the last century. At one point in these letters Huxley
says:

“Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest
manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian con-
ception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before
facts as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived
notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature
leads or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to
do this.”

Huxley was not an idolater of fact, a worshiper of the bony and
barren item of information, he was a lover of the truth. When he
went to Aberdeen to begin his duties as Rector of the University
there, he spoke in his inaugural of the university as a place where
the student breathed as his native air “a passion for veracity.”
This “fanaticism of veracity,” as he elsewhere called it, was the
central motive of Huxley’s character. No man who is fanatically
passionate in his devotion to truth is or can be called an irre¬
ligious man. The realm of truth where his mind moves may not be
that which in other days was described as “sacred.” But only a
provincial mind dares to divide truth into sacred and secular.
God is Truth and the Truth in every realm of human concern is
God.

So again, the author of the “Theologia Germanica” would have
found a kindred spirit in Charles Darwin. Not merely was there
in Darwin that same humility and selflessness which were in the
old German mystic of long ago, but no life of the nineteenth
century came nearer to being unmercenary at its heart. In the
little autobiographical memoir which precedes the biography
proper, Darwin tells us of himself that his success as a scientist
rested upon a single trait of mind.

“I had, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely,
that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought
came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make
a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found
by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to
escape from the memory than favorable ones. Owing to this habit,
very few objections were raised against my views which I had
not at least noticed and attempted to answer. ... As far as I
can judge, I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.
I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up
any hypothesis, however much beloved, as soon as facts are shown
to be opposed to it.”

How often does one meet in the modern preacher these out¬
standing qualities of the scientific mind? The sorry heritage of
the traditional “apologetic” temper of the pulpit makes most
preachers mere eclectic observers of fact and incident, gathering

126

SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND RELIGION

together out of the vast chaos of things so much as tells in behalf
of the Christian scheme, but without the austere fearlessness and
candor of the scientific mind. His scientific hypotheses were as
dear to Charles Darwin as are the creeds to the churches. It cost
Darwin as much courage and inner pain to abandon his beloved
theory in the realm of natural law as it costs the religionist to
give up some cherished article of the faith. Yet the willingness to
do this thing, to go wherever and to whatever abysses truth leads,
and at whatever cost, is the essence of the profoundly religious
quality of the scientific mind.

Professor Ralph Barton Perry in his “Present Conflict of Ideas”
returns again and again to this characteristic of the scientific
mind, its disinterestedness.

“Scientific method has come, therefore, to signify a respect for
facts, in the sense of that which is independent of all human
wishes. It has come to signify a conforming of judgment to things
as they are, regardless of likes and dislikes, hopes or fears. . . .
The true scientist will be simple and hardy in mind. He will keep
his love of truth purged of every ulterior motive. This he will
do not from frivolity or obstinacy, but in order to render his mind
a perfect instrument and medium of truth.”

If there be such a thing as a scientific system of philosophy,
that system must be characterized by this initial detachment and
indifference to the immediate pragmatic test. Bertrand Russell
admits that most philosophies are more interested in morality
and happiness than in knowledge for its own sake. “But if phi¬
losophy is to attain truth, it is necessary first and foremost that
philosophers should acquire the disinterested intellectual curiosity
which characterizes the genuine man of science.” .

The contrast between the disinterested and the interested
search for truth is not, however, an ultimate and absolute one.
Most of the immediate misunderstanding between the two points
of view rests upon too short views of the nature of truth. The
practical temper is certainly right in looking with suspicion and
impatience upon truth as the sole prerogative and private monop¬
oly of a mere detached and disinterested curiosity. The pedantic
type of mind rightly irks the earnest and active nature.

But the quest for a truth which may be applied effectively to
life must be undertaken in full recognition of the initial paradox

127

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

that the supposed truth, which is sought merely that it may be
accommodated to the immediate need or opportunity, usually
turns out to be a half truth if not a falsehood, while the truth,
which is permanently and fruitfully effective in life, more often
than otherwise comes as an entirely uncorrelated idea into imme¬
diate experience. If you are seeking primarily for something that
will work, what you find is usually not the truth in the largest
sense. And if you are seeking the truth you may discover for the
moment something which may not be “workable” but which yields
its measure of meaning and human worth only in due time.

The fundamental laws of energy and of the combination of
forces, which have now been turned to daily account in modern
civilization in the terms of the telephone, the wireless, the gaso¬
lene motor, the aeroplane, all passed through their “three years in
the desert of Arabia.” There is, for example, no spot so detached
from the world of immediate concern as the research laboratory
of some great industry. Here are men, like the poet “living de¬
tached days,” who are neither operatives nor managers nor sales¬
men. They are simply set apart as a kind of priestly order in
modern industry to go on the quest of truth for its own sake. It
is a recognized fact that every pertinent truth of science may
ultimately be brought to bear upon the processes of any given
industry, but for the moment there is little or no relation between
the investigations of the research worker in the laboratory and the
task of the hand in the factory. The great industries, which live
this dual life, have sensed the paradox which lies at the center of
all important applied knowledge, that the only way to discover a
truth which has ultimate applicability to life is to ignore the
application for the moment and to seek the truth for its own sake.

Now something of this same sort inheres in the theory of the
prophet’s chamber in religion. “Let us make a little chamber on
the wall,” said the woman of Shunem to her husband, “and let us
set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candle¬
stick.” That prophet’s chamber was a luxury then, as it is now.
It seems to involve a certain economic waste. It does nothing to
justify its existence much of the time, save to keep open house
for the great prophetic idea. A parsimonious and pragmatic criti¬
cism would suggest that religion ought to let that empty chamber
to some paying guest of the mind. But, as a matter of actual his-

128

SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND RELIGION

tory, every noble religious enthusiasm and every revivifying
spiritual energy enters human life and human society by way of
this prophet’s chamber. The day came when the woman of Shunem
had cause to be devoutly thankful for the disinterested hospitality
which had prompted the building of that little chamber on the
wall for Elisha. She discovered, in due season, the practical ad¬
vantages of keeping open house for a wandering prophet. But that
was no part of the initial impulse. And such is the paradox of the
spiritual life, that only the single eye permanently justifies itself
in the matured event.

It is at precisely this point that modern Christianity has failed
and is failing most patently. A well-known fellow of an Oxford
College and Canon of the Church of England can write:

“I may have been unfortunate, but it is certainly the fact that
I have never heard a single sermon devoted to emphasizing the
all-important fact that the love of truth is a fundamental element
in the love of God. To love God is to hate delusion and to long
to know that which really is. The love of truth is perhaps that
aspect of the love of God which is the most completely disinter¬
ested. ‘The philosopher,’ says Samuel Butler, ‘must be one who
has left all, even Christ Himself, for Christ’s sake!’ But while the
world — or rather its best men — have been seeking the truth, the
Church has been interested in defending tradition, with the result
that the intellectual leadership, which in the Middle Ages belonged
to the Church, has passed to the scientist.”

Just as our philosophy is too often a method of attempting to
find rational justification for opinions to which we are wedded
for irrational, sentimental and temperamental reasons, so our
theologies are too often attempts to find a religious justification
for hopes and purposes which rest on entirely irreligious premises.
Prussia dragoons the court preacher to lend the sanction of reli¬
gion to her temporal ambitions and then calls the resultant a Holy
War, a Christian Jehad. But no one confuses the two. Against this
whole temper the truly scientific spirit inveighs. The true scientist
may not have a weather eye to profit and loss in history. He
cannot prostitute Truth, making of her the kept woman of his
worldly ambitions. If he is to win her devotion he must bring to
her an intellectual chastity unsullied by ulterior motive.

129

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

“Friend, whereto art thou come?” Thus Verity;

Of each that to the world’s sad Olivet
Comes with no multitude, but alone by night,

Lit with the one torch of his lifted soul,

Seeking her that he may lay hands on her;

Thus: and waits answer from the mouth of deed.

Truth is a maid, whom men woo diversely;

But woe to him that takes the immortal kiss
And not estates her in his housing life,

Mother of all his seed! So he betrays,

Not Truth the unbetrayable, but himself;

And with his kiss’ rated traitor-craft
The Halcedema of a plot of days
He buys, to consummate his Judasry
Therein with Judas’ guerdon of despair.

This is not merely good poetry. It is the point at which Francis
Thompson unconsciously enters the Holy of Holies in the scientific
temper of the present time.

It is little wonder that a mind so disciplined to constant acts of
intellectual asceticism and renunciation, so utterly devoted to
truth for its own sake, finds itself in a morally alien environment
when it enters churches where Christianity is preached not as a
pearl of great price in and for itself, but merely as a convenient
and reliable means for realizing those temporal ends after which
the Gentiles seek. There is little or no doubt that the mind of
Christ finds a more congenial environment in the studio where
beauty is loved for its own sake and not because it pays, on the
ship’s bridge in a gale where duty is loved for its own sake and
not because it pays, in the science laboratory where truth is loved
for its own sake and not because it pays, than in the average
modern church where the preacher is busy with the sorry argu¬
ment ad hominem in behalf of a Christianity commended to moral
investors because it offers large material returns on the spiritual
venture. A well known American doctor who is a product and in¬
carnation of the modern scientific spirit put his finger on a sore
spot in contemporary religion when he said to his minister: “The
trouble with your profession is that it is not as honest as mine.
You are not trained, as we are, to seek the facts fearlessly and to
dare to face the truth no matter what its consequences.”

There is no single sign of the times so disquieting as the con¬
stant appeal in behalf of religion to the mercenary spirit. Great

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SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND RELIGION

Protestant denominations in the desire to swell their exchequers
have not hesitated in the last five years to commend their wares
to the modern business man on the basis that the Church is a
paying investment. Our daily papers and monthly magazines have
flaunted before our time such arguments as this: Modern business
rests upon credit, credit is impossible without honest men, the
churches are engaged in the business of making honest men, there¬
fore, Mr. Business Man, if you wish your business to prosper, you
can well afford to make us a generous gift and charge it up to your
sinking fund. Our denominational papers, interested in helping to
raise millions for clergy pension funds, have preached the same
shabby gospel; modern business depends upon law and order,
churches make for law and order, ministers run churches, there¬
fore, Mr. Business Man, you ought to support the clergy.
Modern missions, originally the most selfless venture of the
church, is always on the verge of stating its case on the purely
business basis ; missionaries go to backward races, they carry with
them the furniture of western civilization, they unconsciously
create a demand for this furniture in the economically and in¬
dustrially benighted parts of the world, they are advance agents
of sewing-machines, ploughs, tractors and threshing-machines,
automobiles and telephones, therefore any far-seeing corporation
will subscribe to foreign missions and charge the subscription off to
advance publicity.

The spread of this temper will be the moral ruin of the churches.
If it persists it will drive out of the ministry every self-respecting
preacher, and will effectively stop the thin stream of prophetic
souls still flowing into that holy office. For no man of moral free¬
dom and passion will be content to ally himself permanently with
an institution whose main function in history and society is but¬
tressing up “law and order,” when those words mean the existing
prerogative of vested interests. Nor will such a man consent to
enter an office which is commonly regarded as a mere private
chaplaincy to big business. The tacit, constant suggestion of this
whole sorry logic, that the main end of human history and the
final goal of human society is a ten per cent dividend with an
occasional “melon” thrown in, is simply so far outside the con¬
ception of human ends contemplated by the gospel of Jesus that
it has no possible claim to the designation “Christian.”

I3I

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

The artists know this, the men who honor duty for its own sake
know it though they cannot state it. And above all, the scientist
knows it. His whole life and discipline cut in the other direction.
A century of devoted and consecrated inquiry has taught him that
truth cannot be sought and found by those who have an advance
prudential eye to the market price of knowledge. What measure of
truth modern science has won for us has been gained by hardening
the heart and resolutely closing the mind against the insidious
seduction of the gospel of temporal rewards. The scientific spirit
dominates all the nobler intellectual effort of our time. If thinking
men and women find it hard to stop in churches which live at a
moral level lower than the austere altitude at which science at its
best always moves, then the churches have no redress and should
have none. The church which has one eye squinted toward Mam¬
mon will never have that vision of God which is our eternal life.
If the Church cannot shake itself free of the worldly-minded stand¬
ards of much of modern business, then its work is as good as done,
and the sacred trust of the unmercenary love of God will pass to
the artists, to the truly moral lovers of the day’s humble duty,
and above all to those noble minds disciplined by modern science
in the unmercenary love of Truth. For these souls, living their
deeper life in their several forms of the selfless love of God, stand
in the spiritual succession of the saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs.

For this cause I prayed, and understanding was given me:

I called upon God and there came to me a spirit of wisdom.

I preferred her before scepters and thrones,

And riches I esteemed nothing in comparison of her.

Neither did I liken to her any priceless gem,

Because all the gold of the earth in her presence is as a little sand,

And silver shall be accounted as clay before her.

Above health and comeliness I loved her,

And I chose to have her rather than light,

Because her bright shining is never laid to sleep.

But with her there came to me all good things together.

For there is in her a spirit quick of understanding, holy,

Alone in kind, manifold,

Subtil, freely moving,

Clear in utterance, unpolluted,

Distinct, unharmed,

Loving what is good, keen, unhindered,

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SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND RELIGION

Beneficent, loving toward man,

Steadfast, sure, free from care,

All powerful, all surveying,

And penetrating through all spirits

That are quick of understanding, pure, most subtil :

For wisdom is more mobile than any motion;

Yea she pervadeth and penetrateth all things by reason of her pureness.
For she is a breath of the power of God,

And a clear effulgence of the glory of the Almighty ;

Therefore can nothing defiled find entrance into her,

For she is an effulgence from everlasting light,

And an unspotted mirror of the working of God,

And an image of his goodness.

And she, being one, hath power to do all things;

And remaining in herself, reneweth all things:

And from generation to generation passing into holy souls
She maketh men friends of God and prophets.

For nothing doth God love save him that dwelleth with wisdom*

* “The Wisdom of Solomon,” Ch. vii.

133

CHAPTER VIII.

The Liberty of the Parish Minister.

O get on to that hackneyed subject, “The Collapse of
the Church.” Obviously the Church is as good as dead
and there remains little more to be done aside from the
decent obsequies. There is, for the passing Church, the mitigating
comfort to be derived from the prediction that the mortality among
all other ancient and venerated institutions will be high in the near
future. Her going is so timed that she can point the way for a very
respectable company of followers, the home, the state, the college
and other outworn cumberers of the ground, which have been
stricken down by the epidemic of “collapse,” and have nothing
more to ask of this world than the opportunity for decent
euthanasia.

Meanwhile, “Who would have thought the old man had so
much blood in him?” The Church is patently passing away from
an incurable and pernicious anaemia. But since this is a lingering
death, any number of humane practitioners are ready to shorten
the agony by opening for good and all some convenient artery
that invites the scalpel of wholesale condemnation. Even so, the
Church lingers. Like Browning’s martyr at the stake, the collaps¬
ing Church of the present time at least has voice enough to affirm,
“I was some time a-dying.”

As a matter of plain, ecclesiastical history, there never was a
time when the Church was not in collapse. The spiritual specialists
have always agreed in their diagnosis. This universal verdict may
have induced a certain constitutional hollow-chestedness on the
part of the institution which has now become habitual, and may
easily be mistaken for an acute, rather than a chronic condition.
For when the doctors all agree that the patient is suffering a com¬
plete breakdown, he must have more than a superhuman self-
confidence if his own posture does not reflect the consensus of

134

THE PARISH MINISTER

expert opinion. He is convinced that they are right, and yet he
surprises himself and the wise men by hanging on when, from all
the signs, he should be dead and buried. He realizes that he is a
physiological monstrosity and a medical scandal, but he cannot
help himself. He even finds a certain perverse satisfaction in his
innate vitality which cannot be measured by the book. The Church
has always had to live, and indeed has succeeded in living for
some hundreds of years, in the face of the combined and uniform
judgment of the specialists that, from all the symptoms, she should
be in her grave.

It is generally understood that the churches are practically
empty. No one any longer tries to pretend otherwise. It avails
nothing that many city churches are still crowded every Sunday,
that many more are half full, and that most of them muster their
handful of worshipers. Patently, this is the last flicker before the
end. And what are these among so many? The time was when
Jonathan and his armor bearer scaled the rocks Bozez and Seneh,
to attack the Philistine single-handed, because, in those days, there
was “no restraint to the Lord to save by many.” But modern
scholarship can dispose of that archaic temper, since the God of
Democracy never does anything without first counting noses. In
the old days it was considered dangerous procedure to number the
host. But to-day statistics are the handmaiden of piety, and the
figures are against the Church.

Yet empty churches do not seem to be solely a modern phe¬
nomenon. Nearly a hundred years ago Wordsworth lamented
“The Decay of Piety”:

Oft have I seen, ere Time had ploughed my cheek,

Matrons and sires — who, punctual to the call

Of their loved Church, on fast or festival

Through the long year the house of prayer would seek;

By Christmas snows, by visitation bleak
Of Easter wind unscared, from hut or hall
They came to lowly bench or sculptured stall,

But with one fervor of devotion meek.

I see the places where they once were known,

And ask . . .

Is Ancient Piety forever flown?

That was in 1827. As Francis Thompson says of nineteenth-
century England, “The east wind has replaced the discipline.”

135

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

But at least things are no worse now than they were in Words¬
worth’s time, and a hundred years of snow, hail and stormy
vapor have not entirely dissipated “the great congregation.”

Altogether, the reputedly empty meeting-houses have been able
to gather enough witnesses to embarrass the case for the prosecu¬
tion, and the suit of Society vs. the Church drags on in the court
of common opinion. After all, the major institutions of human
society are not so collapsible as they appear to be. They were not
fabricated wholesale for emergencies. They were put together by
patient hand labor. And they betray, when their framework is
investigated, the cunning of the human artificer at his best. They
have gone up, like Solomon’s temple, without noise in their build¬
ing. And he who takes the social contract for wrecking them would
do well to allow himself a little margin of time beyond his expecta¬
tion of completing the job.

Certain of the Oxford colleges are built of a very soft limestone,
dug from hard by, which weathers rapidly. After an odd century
or two at the mercy of the raw air of the upper Thames valley,
the fabric of these colleges looks to be in a state of imminent col¬
lapse. Two American women, wandering around Oxford not long
since, ventured into one of these shabby sepulchers of “lost
causes,” pushed their unabashed way up a stair in the back
quad, and opened a door. They saw before them a much alive and
entirely contemporary-looking boy, sprawled out in his basket
chair before a cheerful fire, filling the room with pipe smoke and
his brains with the Nicomachean Ethics. “We beg your pardon,
we didn’t know that these ruins were inhabited.” For the benefit
of those emancipated investigators who look upon the Church as
the home of a lost cause, it is worth while merely to say that the
ruins are still inhabited.

There is, however, one distinctively modern aspect of the
situation, altogether apart from the perennial Decay of Piety,
which is in a fair way to depopulate the ruins for good and all.
This particular aspect of the many-sided “Problem of the Church”
bears the mark of our own time, has already become a sore daily
perplexity to the ministry, and is fast becoming a conscious griev¬
ance on the part of the congregation.

Let us approach the problem by way of illustration. There was
once upon a time a very romantic institution known as the Chris-

136

THE PARISH MINISTER

tian Year. This arrangement of the calendar, arbitrary, artificial,
perhaps, but always suggestive, was devised to express a certain
cyclic tendency in human nature, the desire to get back or come
round again to some of the major items of thought and conduct.
There was Ember Day — what a romantic name! — and Maundy
Thursday — what an intriguing title! There were Innocents’ Day
and All Souls’ Day. There were Advent and Holy Week and Whit¬
sunday.

But this scheme of things has long since been superseded by
another Christian Year, which every minister has come to recog¬
nize. He sits down at his desk on Monday morning to try to re¬
cover a little of the lost grace of “recollection.” Next Sunday is
Epiphany, so much is clear in the near future. “Recollected” to
this tentative degree, he begins opening his morning mail. From
an important-looking envelope he takes out a legal-sized docu¬
ment, an impressive piece of printer’s art. (Mental note: That
would be good paper for my church calendar if we could afford
it — watermark shows “Capitalist Bond, Heavy Deckle.” But we
can’t afford printing like that!) The document announces that
next Sunday has been appointed to be observed in all the churches
as Nation-Wide Anti-Trichinosis Sunday. The secretary of some
department in Washington lends his sanction. A Minor Canon
adds that the opportunity of the Church is plain. Inside the folder
are pictures. Item: one trichina, very lifelike and sinister. Item:
victim of trichinosis, obvious ennui. Item: our agent in Lone
Ridge, Ford car and infected hogs in background. Item: cured
patient, alert and aggressive. The last page announces that parcel
post will bring cards allowing members of the congregation to en¬
list in the great modern crusade: annual dues, $i; sustaining
membership, $25; life membership, $100. It is confidently an¬
ticipated that at least two or three of the congregation will join
as life members, and that there will be a very general response to
the appeal for annual dues. Cards are to be returned to — and so
forth. There often follows an appropriate Bible text, counseling
sacrifice, as a last succulent morsel of bait for the ecclesiastical
mind.

The minister, whose business it is not to ignore any means by
which mankind may be bettered, begins to see that Epiphany is
after all an anachronism, that the great modern world has got

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

beyond that. Trichinae have the obvious advantage of contem¬
poraneity. Trichina it shall be. The plot thickens, however, as the
opening of the mail goes on. Five letters farther is a statement
that next Sunday has been appointed to be observed by all the
churches in behalf of the Relief of the War-Devastated Districts
of Upper Senegambia. Very prominent names in the business and
ecclesiastical world appear on this letterhead: well known bankers
and prominent churchmen, with a smattering of the humaner
radicals. More pictures of atrocities and plague victims. Obviously
the need in Senegambia is as great as in Lone Ridge. The minister
wishes to think internationally, and now leans to the war victims,
to avoid the charge of provincialism by concentrating upon the
American trichina. Perhaps it could be shown that Upper Sene¬
gambia is devastated by trichinae. The victims in both cases look
rather alike in the pictures. In that case the task would be made
simpler, and the collection could be equally divided.

But there seems to have been some lack of “ cooperation”- — fine
upstanding modern word, that! — on the part of these agencies.
The perplexed minister lets his problem simmer until midweek,
and then finally decides that he will preach a regular Epiphany
Sermon on the Manifestation of Jesus to the Wise Men of To¬
day. He does this, not in a moment of petulance or distraction,
but discreetly and advisedly, on the sober conviction that, in the
long run, he will do both these causes more practical good by
trying to make men understand the Mind of Christ, than by dis¬
cussing the causes, symptoms and cure of trichinosis, or by
getting mired in the political misfortunes of Senegambia.

His punishment tarrieth not. It cometh like the Assyrian. These
causes keep tab on him. They write him off the great books of life
which they keep at their headquarters. The report is passed on to
other agencies that he is out of touch with modern life, that he
is merely an impractical dreamer who cannot be counted on to
help when the fighting is hard. The cause went up to do battle for
the Lord and he stopped in Meroz. He has his taste of the curse
on Meroz. Various members of his own parish, who are specially
interested in the trichina or Senegambia or some other Holy Day
in the modern Christian Year, begin to feel that rumor is true.
Altogether he begins to realize that the world is determined to

138

THE PARISH MINISTER

write him down a renegade, and to adjust himself to that
situation.

This is not rhetoric. It is hardly satire. It is merely a free para¬
phrase of the everlasting problem of the modern minister. The
thing had gained great headway and vogue before the war. Even
then, the laziest minister in Christendom did not have to stoop to
buy his sermons ready written from that wholesale homiletics
factory somewhere out West. He could get them all free in outline
from the “causes.” With the war there was hardly a Sunday when
his way was not made plain before him, either by actual officials
or by civilian philanthropies. The Draft, the Bond Issues, the
Food Conservation, the Welfare Agencies — all of them claimed his
instant service, week by week. He was given very little oppor¬
tunity to reflect himself, or to ask others to reflect, that there are
certain humane and catholic aspects of the character of Jesus
which in history have somehow outlasted all wars and rumors
of wars.

He was somewhat startled to find that the great world of affairs
took him so seriously. Obviously, what he said still had some
influence, and it seemed to be taken for granted that he spoke to
more men and women than the “ruin hypothesis” implied. But he
never had time to think that contradiction through. After the war
his denominations, singly or collectively, having been illuminated
as to the true function of the modern minister, descended upon
him with programs for millions which, ten years ago, both he and
they would have thought impossible. His leaders were certainly
right to try to conserve the deeper moral lessons of the war. They
were right as to the need of the world and the opportunity of the
Church. But, somehow, in the process he found himself depersonal¬
ized. He had ceased to be a prophet and a pastor and had become
simply a middleman. The modern world of organized philan¬
thropy and ecclesiasticism had elected him salesman for its count¬
less causes. All he had to do was to follow instructions. The thing
culminated in the spring of 1920, when the Interchurch Move¬
ment relieved him of all further personal responsibility by out¬
lining his whole half year for him. He was to pray in January,
exhort in February, convert in March and collect in April and
May. Somehow, he broke down under the strain. His life had

r39

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

become too wooden. And he has been thinking his whole status
over once again.

He has had time for a little sober reflection as to what the rest
of his days are going to be if the process goes on indefinitely, and
he yields the major point of his independence. Obviously, there
will be no need for men to go to theological schools in the future,
if this is what the Christian ministry is to become. Young men
had much better take a couple of correspondence courses, one from
the man with the magnetic index finger, who can make him a per¬
suasive speaker, the other from some brisk, up-to-the-minute
school of salesmanship.

But this prospect calls for a revised conception of the ministry.
And its compensations are not those which he has associated with
his past liberty of prophesying and his cure of souls. He sees him¬
self as a kind of permanent beater for unending drives. He it is
who, week by week, must hound the now attenuated and gun-shy
giver into the open, where the causes may pot away with both
barrels and bag their budgets. The beater has none of the sport.
And he will be more than human if he does not come to have a
certain perverse sympathy for the flock in the covert assigned to
him. At least, he is perfectly clear that he cannot see them all
killed off before his eyes, but must allow a “righteous remnant”
to survive and breed, during the brief season closed to causes, —
say in Lent, — against next season’s need.

Why does not the Average Man go to church? Being a teacher
in a theological school as well as a parish minister, I sent out
spies into the great and wicked world last year to get an answer
to this question. Effectively disguised in mufti, they approached
the Average Man and asked him for an honest answer. They came
back to the camp and reported with surprising unanimity that,
among other things, the Average Man was getting tired of going
to church to worship God and being offered the trichina and
Senegambia as a substitute. One Average Man said quite bluntly
that fourteen Sundays at the height of the season had been wholly
taken up in his church by the presentation of fourteen different
denominational and social causes, and that he found his inclina¬
tion to go to church suffering a sea change. Not that trichinosis
and Senegambia were “dead hypotheses” to him. He took an
interest in these and all other similar moral opportunities. But

140

THE PARISH MINISTER

their name was legion; and any selection of them for the purposes
of public worship was arbitrary. He felt as if the parts were
getting in the way of the whole. The trouble with his moral and
spiritual life was just that he could not see the wood for the trees.
And the Church, so far from giving him the total perspective and
helping him unify his life, was merely adding to his confusion and
distraction. The Average Man was not quite certain what he
wanted when he went to church, but he knew it was something
which should have in it the element of contrast. He wanted a sus;-
gestion of the everlasting otherness of life which real religion
always intimates. He believed that all the fine, unselfish, organized
altruisms which abound in every city and claim the support of
Church people were aspects of twentieth-century Christianity.
He did not understand a Christianity which was so far removed
from this world that it called these activities secular. He believed
that modern religion is as wide as every honest effort to help the
world. But he was getting mired in detail. He was losing the
power to say “God” in connection with them all.

He seemed to remember something to the same effect in Saint
Augustine’s “Confessions.” “What do I love, when I love my
God?” asks Augustine. “I questioned the earth, and it said, T am
not He.’ I questioned the sea and the depths, and they replied,
‘We are not thy God; seek above us.’ I questioned the blowing
winds, and the whole air with its inhabitants replied, ‘Anaximenes
is wrong; I am not God.’ I questioned the heavens, sun, moon,
stars: ‘Neither are we,’ say they, ‘the God whom you seek.’ ”

All these were aspects of God, but religion, as the Average Man
saw it, was just the power to say “God” where the rest of the
world said Nature, Justice, Duty, Peace, Social Service, Foreign
Missions. And it seemed to him as he reflected upon it, that the
Church was missing its chance to help him say that thing. He
listened in the shell of modern being, and he heard the roar of
the sea of life, with its manifold activities. What he missed in
the method and temper of the modem Church was the constant
suggestion of a “central peace subsisting at the heart of endless
agitation.”

Now the parish minister has a religious duty toward the Average
Man in his own town quite as real as his duty toward all other
men in far lands. As things are now organized, the ability of the

141

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

Christian Church to maintain and to extend its whole missionary
and philanthropic program comes back upon the fund of real reli¬
gion in the average men and women in all average parishes. The
“friendly citizen” who was to help pay the bills proved to be a
hypothesis, et praeterea nihil! The parish minister does not
wish to encourage the Average Man in a selfish and inert Chris¬
tianity, particularly in a day of great need and opportunity. But
he does realize, nevertheless, that it is possible in this day to
preach a long-range and rather impersonal Christian charity which
is very largely a thing of subscription lists and check books, and
which brings with it no warmth and spiritual reality in the daily
experience of this average parishioner. His first duty to his parish
is to help the persons who comprise it to do their inevitable daily
work in a Christian spirit. If he fails to do this he fails his people
at the point where they need his help most sorely. And if he fails
to cultivate the central soul of his people he mortgages, at the
same time, those margins of the generous Over-Soul which find
ultimate expression in the causes. In short, the seed of the mission¬
ary enterprise and general social zeal will never bear its hundred¬
fold unless it falls into good ground. And the parish minister is
primarily the keeper and cultivator of that soil.

The parish minister of to-day claims, therefore, the right to
interpret his relation to causes philanthropic, political, industrial,
denominational, in the large. He sees his people become restive
under the rapid fire of drives to which they have been subjected
in the years immediately past. He does not put it all down to
their lethargy or selfishness. He knows them better than that. He
knows that all of them are generous, that most of them are en¬
listed in the regular support of many causes which have come
home to them with immediacy, and that many of them are giving
to the point of sacrifice and beyond. But leaving finances at one
side, he feels the peril of a dwindling congregation as the result
of the intrusion of all this machinery into the foreground of their
minds. They come to church in the patient and often dumb hope
that they may find bread for a hunger at the heart of them; but,
in accordance with the new Christian Year and the pressure of
authority or popular opinion, he has to offer them a stone in the
way of one more program to be explained and “set up.” They are
very patient under it all. But the Average Man is thinking of

142

THE PARISH MINISTER

serving an ultimatum on the minister. And the minister, being
only a middleman, can merely pass this ultimatum along to those
“higher up.”

The modern parish minister, in all charity and with abundant
good will, is about to serve notice on all parties concerned that he
must be allowed to preach religion, in something of its totality,
week by week, or else the denominations and the philanthropies
must look for some other kind of man to do their job.

He would make perfectly clear what he means by these words.
He would assure every social agency in modern society that he
regards its effort as a valid and essential part of the total reli¬
gious work of our time. He counts none of them secular in the
sense that it is outside the moral need and duty of the day. His
attitude is not one of indifference, but of concern for the whole
body of organized and efficient altruism. But he must affirm
that these causes have now become so numerous, and their fields
of activity so specialized, that no one of them can effectively
monopolize the religious spirit or offer itself as a modern equiva¬
lent for the total idea of God. He would remind some of them that
they seem to him to be drifting in this direction. He sometimes
feels a touch of fanaticism and bigotry about their attitude toward
him, his church and the world at large. They do not realize that
the last caller who left his study and the next to come are both
advocates of causes as worthy as that which has the carpet for
the moment, and that the minister’s task is not to distract seekers
after God by a multiplicity of modern attributes of God, but to
try to help men to something like the total vision.

Having said this, the parish minister would go on to say that
this position, to his mind, does not mean retiring again to some
innocuous generalities, known as “the pure gospel.” He holds
out no hope to those who, for selfish reasons, would like to see the
return of the happy days when the Church confined itself to reli¬
gion and did not meddle with business and politics. A disgruntled
parishioner of Newman’s once objected that the Cardinal’s preach¬
ing was interfering with the way he did business. “Sir,” said New¬
man, “it is the business of the Church to interfere with people.”
The parish minister sees the Church as Newman saw it. But his
interference with the world is a kind of total interference with its
tempers and spirits, an effort to combat and convert irreligious

143

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

points of view, rather than a hasty attempt to arbitrate every
concrete dilemma which comes along. If the parish minister of
to-day claims for himself the right to preach religion as he sees
it, in its totality, that religion will not be some harmless platitude
or remote speculation: it will be the sum of the fundamental
tempers which must enter into the making of a religious society.
He merely serves notice on the world of affairs that, when he says
religion, he does not mean some pale, private piety, but that he
has in mind Saint Paul’s description of Christianity as “dyna¬
mite,” in that he is thinking about a society which nothing short
of some revolution of worldly points of view will ever achieve.

Finally, the parish minister would invite those who manage the
affairs of his denomination to take long views of his task and
theirs. They are his representatives. He has been at times a poor
constituent. He admires their fine courage in seeing a world far
broader than his bailiwick. But he sometimes feels that there is
too much Platonism and too little Aristotelianism about them
when they approach him and his people. It is hard for them to get
their vision focused as they look at the single parish and its
minister. They find it relatively easy to assess the parish so much
and turn the job over to him to complete. He would remind them
that he cannot cry “Wolf” indefinitely. His rhetoric is limited;
the sentimental touch wears out; at last he falls back upon an
appeal for personal loyalty to himself.

But that process has its end, and beyond he cannot go. More¬
over, he would say to his denominational representatives quite
candidly that he can no more substitute the World Movement of
our Denomination for the idea of God, than he can substitute the
trichina or Senegambia. And that is what, at times, it seems to
him that he is expected to do. Organizing teams, and appointing
captains by their tens and hundreds, and fine-tooth-combing the
parish once more is not necessarily having a religious experience;
and the parish minister is on the ragged edge of concluding that
about the quickest way to undercut the whole support of the
Church-at-Large is to let its programs and machinery get into the
foreground and stay there. For men will not permanently, or even
long, accept as a substitute for the public worship of God a con¬
gregational committee meeting on Sunday morning to discuss in
detail the blue-print plans of the New Jerusalem.

144

THE PARISH MINISTER

The parish minister insists upon some restoration of his ancient
liberty of prophesying, not because he is indifferent, or wishes his
church to be indifferent, to any and all of these claims on time,
thought, service and money, but because he feels the danger of
religious shortsightedness, and even of fanaticism, in the urgent
clamor of these many voices. He believes that, if men can be
helped to true and adequate ideas of God, godly men, to whom
the task comes immediately home, will dispose of trichinosis in
due time, and will maintain all other valid causes outside the
Church and inside. But he fears that, if men lose the idea of God,
and forget how to practice the Presence of God, the trichinae will
multiply and the sects will indeed collapse, because the ruins will
have been emptied for good and all, as the result of a fundamen¬
tally short-sighted conception both of the Christian Church and
of the Parish Ministry.

Oh, if we draw a circle premature,

Heedless of far gain,

Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure
Bad is our bargain.

It is against that bad bargain, into which it seems to him the
causes and agencies have been threatening to drive him, that the
parish minister is trying to warn the world and to fortify himself.

CHAPTER IX.

The Validity of the Church.

WHEN William James defined religion as the God-ward
experiences of “individual men in their solitude” he
seems to have intended deliberately to rule out church
Christianity. He was concerned with what he called “acute reli¬
gion” as against “chronic religion,” and he suspected churches,
not without cause, of the latter type of Christianity. “Churches,”
he goes on to say, “when once established live at second hand
upon tradition — personal religion is the primordial thing.”

There is no reasonable doubt that James’s point of departure
is essentially valid and right. Every great religious idea or move¬
ment in history has had its origins in the conviction of some
individual man in his solitude. There is, further, no doubt that
William James struck a note that needed to be sounded at an
opportune moment in modern religious thought. Our world had
become too gregarious, too much given to protective coloration
in its idealisms, too trustful of the power of the social environ¬
ment, too skeptical of the moral value of the desert and desert
experiences. At least James has Plotinus on his side in the historic
definition of religion as “the flight of the alone to the Alone.”

Religion is the most intimate of all human experiences, there¬
fore it always must be in some ways the most solitary. But it
carries at the heart of it this paradox, that the deeper and truer
the solitary experience is the more catholic it is eventually dis¬
covered to be. The moment when the prophetic soul cries, “I,
even I only, am left,” is the very moment when its eyes are
opened to behold the unsuspected multitude of kindred spirits.
Perhaps something of this sort lies hidden in those baffling words
of Jesus about the words whispered in closets only to be shouted
on housetops, the pitiless and splendid publicity of even the
most intimate moments of religious experience.

146

THE VALIDITY OF THE CHURCH

Moreover, religion like every other great experience demands to
be shared. The value of our possessions and of the items of our
living may be roughly appraised by the inherent necessity of
sharing them with others. The books we value, the friends we en¬
joy, the places we cherish, we wish others to know and to enjoy
with us. Our noblest affections crave companionship that our joy
may be made full. The lover who wishes you to meet and admire
the beloved is an amiable nuisance whom we tolerate with an
amused good will, because we know he has the real heart of the
matter in him. Were he a silent recluse we should have good reason
to suspect the depth and reality of his passion.

It is not otherwise with religion. The initial reaction to a reli¬
gious experience is the desire to go and find the brother Simon,
or the neighbor Nathanael. This compulsion to sharing, which is
in all true religion, is not studied altruism, it is not even enlight¬
ened egoism, it is the spontaneous outreach of a nature grappling
with a Reality too vast to be comprehended in solitude, too rich
to be enjoyed alone.

From this social outreaching of the individual who in his soli¬
tude knows both the catholicity of his most personal and private
transactions with God and his need of comrades that his joy may
be made perfect, churches spring. Josiah Royce supplemented
William James’s conception of religion when he drew his pictures
of the “Beloved Community” wherein our happiness and strength
are found, and where our ultimate life in religion must be lived.
He added, however, that he did not identify this beloved com¬
munity with any sect or institution in existence, but was speaking
of the Church Invisible.

Few of us can be content with James’s definition of religion as
a form of the “self-sufficing power of solitude.” Most of us must
create or realize in imagination some “Beloved Community” to
which we belong. In Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” we find
Angel Clare trying to teach Tess history. Tess rebels because she
sees no use in learning that there were many other women like
herself long ago and that there will be many more women like
her hereafter; she prefers to live to herself in her ignorance.
There are moments, and Tess knew them bitterly, when utter
spiritual solitude is life’s best and only solace. But they are not
the major moments, nor are they the more frequent moments in

M7

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

life. Most of us draw direct strength from a homely knowledge
of our little human part in the experiences of the race as a whole,
both in joy and sorrow. It is a help to realize that we are not
alone. “I have often observed,” says Mark Rutherford, “that
the greatest help we get in time of trouble comes to us from some
friend who says quite simply, T have endured all that.’ ” Now
churches have their origin in this fundamental mood. Wherever
there is a common spiritual experience there two or three will be
gathered together. Their meeting place may be a Cave of Adullam
where they gather to share their tribulations and to organize their
grievances against the established order. It may be a formal
cathedral where they come to voice their obvious social wants.
But whatever the experience and the meeting place, where there is
a community of experience in any religious concern, there by the
inherent necessities of the case is a potential church.

But all this has nothing to do with the First Congregational
Church on the green of a New England village, or the Baptist
Meeting House in a frontier town, or the Roman Catholic mission
in the slums of a great city. A mind of the austerity and wise
human tolerance of Josiah Royce’s mind refrains from passing
any facile criticism upon these specific churches, yet it feels no
spiritual connection with any such church and no moral obligation
to it; while minds more caustic and impatient do not hesitate to
point out the obvious contrast between the “Beloved Community”
as visioned by the idealist, and the Calvary Presbyterian Church
or the All Souls’ Episcopal Church as managed by a session or a
vestry.

The immediate problem of the Church is not that of the
“Beloved Community” but of the particular congregation of the
particular sect and of the sum of all such concrete particulars.
To the abstract idea most men will give theoretical consent. To
an inner experience of the Invisible Church the few will always
rise. But when men talk of “the Church” they usually mean the
average parish machinery and building to be found on the next
corner. And it is this institution which is in their minds when they
undertake either to criticize or to defend the Christian Church.

That all is not well inside those four walls is a commonplace
observation which has lost both its poignancy and its pungence.
The sport of church-baiting no longer has any terrors for the

148

THE VALIDITY OF THE CHURCH

object of the attack or any zest for the attackers themselves.
Ministers and church members have long since become so familiar
with all the permutations and combinations of criticism against
the Church that the future has nothing new to offer them. And as
for the critics, the day is long gone when a man is in danger of
outlawing himself from good society or any other society because
of his caustic strictures on the Church.

It would be a healthy thing for contemporary Christianity if
this same parish church occasionally took a hand at criticism and
attempted to give some account of itself. What is this average
church doing to justify its existence? What is its real function in
our time? Why should men belong to it and support it?

At the very outset there is one type of criticism which the
Church is perfectly justified in ruling out of court. This is the
criticism coming from men and women who have no real under¬
standing of religion and who care nothing about it. The Church
must believe in the fundamental goodness of these persons, their
salvability. It is the main business of the Church to try to make
just such persons care about religion. But, for the moment, their
wholesale criticism of the Church springs from a dull materialistic
view of life, unrelieved by any idealism.

There is no reason why we should take too seriously the snap
judgment on the Christian Church passed by a man whose idea
of human happiness is to see a high-priced baseball player knock
a home run into the right field bleachers. The baseball bleachers
are certainly out of touch with the Church, or as it is more often
put, the Church is out of touch with the bleachers. But so are the
bleachers out of touch with all the nobler efforts and achievements
of the human mind, out of touch with art galleries and libraries
and symphony concerts, out of touch with Rodin, Francis Thomp¬
son and Tschaikowsky. The home run to the bleachers has its place
in the economy of human joy and sorrow, but the bleachers are
not the judgment seat from which to pass on the final values of
human life, or the mountain top from which the Vision of Reality
is best achieved.

It is not at all surprising that the man who knows far more
about the life history of Mutt and Jeff than he knows about the
life of Jesus of Nazareth finds the Church dull and uninteresting,
and the day’s lesson from the gospels dry. It is not surprising that

149

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

young men and women whose main passion in life is to keep
abreast of the musical comedies and to go the pace in modern
dances find the Church stupid, the stately hymns of Christendom
stale after the syncopation of the jazz band, the somber reflections
of Job uninteresting beside the patter of the comedienne. It is not
surprising that women who devour the social gossip of the Sunday
paper with scrupulous devotion, but who never heard of Mary of
Bethany, do not see the use of going to church.

There is no fallacy in the whole logic of contemporary religious
thinking so great as the fallacy which argues from the half truth
that “the common people heard him gladly” to the conclusion that
the common people would fill the churches if only the churches
were simple, natural and very real. It was those same “common
people” who a day or so later howled in Pilate’s court for Jesus’
death and then jeered around his cross.

The Church must humbly confess her known faults and scrupu¬
lously search her corporate life and practice for the unsuspected
faults, but there is absolutely no assurance that when she has set
her own house in order she will come into instant popularity. The
teaching of history cuts all in the other direction. Passionate and
prophetic souls have enjoyed from time to time a brief flood tide
of popular acclaim and success, but so soon as the crowd saw
where they were being led and what was being asked of them they
turned back again to those Egyptian flesh pots which have always
been the meat and drink of that baffling creature, “the man in
the street.” The average church may be a rather perfunctory and
lifeless institution but on the whole it compares favorably with /
that stumblingblock on which all idealisms in history finally trip,
the man in the street.

Shaw reminds us that there is no error in social analysis so
false to the facts as that which crudely divides the world into
religious and irreligious persons. He says that there are in every
generation a handful of passionately religious persons and a
smaller number of actively irreligious persons; one Wesley and his
small following, one Tom Paine and his smaller following, and
between these extremes the great mass of healthy Philistines who
eat, drink and are merry, who marry and are given in marriage —
whose life, in short, is a matter of finding attractive mates, making
money and having “a good time.”

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THE VALIDITY OF THE CHURCH

All this by way of saying that those who carry the burdens and
problems of the Christian Church upon their hearts and minds
are not to take too seriously the strictures upon the modern
Church which have their origins in a candidly materialistic view
of life. The chaplains and Y. M. C. A. workers in both the British
and American forces have published considerable volumes em¬
bodying their deductions and conclusions as to the religion of the
average man. These volumes abound with the hackneyed criticism
of churches — “dull, pedantic, unreal, insincere, out of date.” But
these criticisms rest on the plain fact that the man in the street,
i.e., 80 to 85 per cent of him, is not religious in any vital sense of
the word. And it is a perfectly fair question whether the classes
whose idea of Sunday is two full rounds of golf, or the masses
whose idea of Sunday is an aimless, idle self-indulgence at a
raucous seashore resort are in a moral position to pass any valu¬
able criticism on Christianity, institutional or otherwise. These
persons are not to be regarded as the final appraisers of the
Church but rather as its challenge and its opportunity. They are
the basis of the sober conclusion of the American chaplains that
“America is not a Christian country in any strict sense of the
word; it is a mission field.”

We come, on the other hand, to that residuum of the very real
and entirely warranted criticism of the Church which has its
origin in thoughtful and self-sacrificing lives. There is always in
history a minority of passionate and prophetic spirits whose per¬
sonal zeal and devotion outruns the chronic religion of the
churches, who would like to belong to the Church if they could do
so with a good conscience, but whose sincerity and ardor chafe
at the formalism and lethargy of the average church. These per¬
sons are troubled about the state of the Church and their own rela¬
tion to it. Young men are loath to enter the ministry because they
feel that the Church is cabin’d, cribb’d and confined, and that
through it they will not find the opportunities they crave for
sincere intellectual and ethical self-expression and service. Every¬
where in our cities there are scholars, artists, reformers and social
servants who are deeply interested in religion, who crave the social
expression of religion, and yet cannot bring themselves to work
in and through the Church. To these persons and to their case for
the prosecution the Church must give serious heed, and it must

151

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

have some adequate answer to give to their criticism if it is to
win their steadily increasing numbers.

As to the temper of the criticism, we should realize at the outset
that criticism from this source has its origin in a deep faith in the
Church as a potential if not an actual embodiment of Chris¬
tianity. It is precisely because men have such high ideals for the
Church, because they feel so deeply what she ought to be and
might be, that they are so pained and perplexed by what she is.
They criticize the Church not because they are indifferent to her,
but because they love her and have no other desire for her than
that she achieve the measure of the stature of the fullness of
Christ.

Moreover, this sober and significant criticism springs from a
newly awakened Christian conscience. The deadliest moral opiate
which can fasten, as a habit, on any man or institution, is the dull
habit of content which has numbed the pain of the divine discon¬
tent and stopped all questionings. The awakened conscience of
our time which no longer takes the conventional church for
granted is fighting for the living soul of religion itself. And even
though it be a long and painful process to throw off the moral
drug habit of inert acquiescence, this ferment of the true con¬
science is an immediate gain for Christianity and an ultimate gain
for churches.

Ferrero, the Italian historian, made a visit to America some
years ago, at the time when our papers and magazines were filled
with the muckraking researches into municipal politics. “The
Shame of the Cities” was on all lips. Ferrero had read these
criticisms and came to America expecting to find the civic morals
of this country debauched beyond anything that history had ever
known. To his perplexity and astonishment he found the average
American city living its life and conducting its municipal business
on a moral level far higher than he had anticipated. In many
cases he thought American cities politically cleaner and better
run than the cities of Europe. For a time he was utterly unable to
square the facts with the theory, until he realized that the old
Puritan conscience, long dead in most of Europe, was still alive
and functioning in America, that moral vices and political abuses
which had been tolerated so long in Europe that they had ceased
to awaken criticism any longer, still troubled the American con-

152

THE VALIDITY OF THE CHURCH

science. And he went back to Europe writing down “The Shame
of the Cities” to the credit of American public morals. Now pre¬
cisely the same fact holds true of all the serious criticism of the
modem Church. That we can and do criticize and accept criticism
of the Church is, even for institutional religion, a moral asset and
not a moral liability. The forward-moving times in Christian his¬
tory have not been the ages when criticism of the Church was
absent, they have been precisely those times when criticism was
most active and outspoken, both within and without. The great
Catholic orders, which in succession purified Catholicism, the
Reformation itself, the subsequent revolts within the reformed
churches, were the constructive critical movements by which
Christianity as a whole has been advanced. In short, in every
vital epoch of Christian history, rebuke of the Church has
abounded, and such ages have eventually proved themselves to
be the creative ages. The temper of sober criticism is, therefore,
seen in full historical perspective, perhaps the most hopeful sign
on the contemporary religious horizon.

Again, we must realize that all this criticism directed against
the Church is simply a single aspect of a far wider problem, per¬
haps the major problem of the present time, the relation of the
moral freeman to the fixed institution. The question which the
thoughtful man faces to-day is not the mere question of his rela¬
tion to the Church as such; that is simply one item and aspect of
the far wider problem of his relation to all institutionalism, to
the State, to universities, to industries. The problem, “Why go
to Church?” is of the same piece of cloth as the question, “Why
go to College?” for colleges are turning out academic products no
less conventional and hall-marked than the normal human output
of churches. The query, “Why join a Church?” is of the same
fabric as the query, “Why join a political party?” for political
parties are as hidebound and artificial as religious sects. What
the man of to-day is really thinking through is the total problem
of his relation to all institutions.

There has appeared recently an appraisal of the work of one of
the major departments of a great American university, written by
a professor in that institution. He says that the world at large
feels toward himself and his colleagues a contemptuous indiffer¬
ence. The universities are said to be out of touch with actual life,

153

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

they unfit men for active life, they breed academic pedants and
social snobs. If the reader were to run through the indictment and
substitute the word Church for the word University, the text
would stand as it is, as the familiar criticism of the Church. If
there are men and women out of patience with the churches to-day,
the same persons are out of patience with our whole educational
system, from the kindergarten through the professional post¬
graduate school. The colleges have to face, to-day, indictments of
their corporate life as sweeping and drastic as anything visited
upon churches. Likewise our modern political and industrial
machinery, our courts of law, our legislatures and our hereditary
parties, our arbitrary capitalism and our equally arbitrary labor
unionism, are all being subjected to the searching reexamination of
the free mind. What irks us is not institutional Christianity
alone, but all institutionalism with the formality and generally
mediocre level of attainment which is implied in the very nature
of an institution. It is the doctrine of the inglorious moral mean
by which institutions live that arouses the resentment and ardor
of the freeman.

When we come to the larger problem of the validity of any
institution, whether it be Church or State, a college, a political
party or a labor union, we are face to face with one of the most
difficult questions in human history. Emerson said, “An institution
is the lengthened shadow of a great man.” The contrast between
the live man and the thin and lifeless shadow always gives rise to
the critical temper. It was said that Mark Hopkins on one end of
a log and a student on the other end of the log constituted a
university. But Mark Hopkins was not immortal and the students
crowded their end of the log and Williams College is the result.
Whether Williams College of to-day, with its faculty and student
body and conventional classrooms, is as effective a medium for the
truth, as complete an incarnation of the idea of education, as
Mark Hopkins, the single student and the mutual log is a per¬
fectly debatable question. The practical problem is not how to
make Mark Hopkins immortal but what to do when nature in due
time removes him from the log. Are he and his ideas to perish
with him, or are they to be perpetuated in the lengthened shadow
which still rests as a college on the Berkshire Hills?

Any one of us would rather have for a suit of clothes a piece

i54

THE VALIDITY OF THE CHURCH

of Irish homespun woven on the hand looms in the cottages of
Donegal, with the bits of heather still uncombed from the fleece,
than the best piece of woolen goods turned out of an American
mill. But there are not looms enough or cottagers enough in Done¬
gal to clothe us as we should like to be clothed, and the actual
option is going unclothed or taking the product of the woolen mill.
No one of us, save in moments of election frenzy, really identifies
his political party with the fathers and founders of his country
and its succession of political idealists. We do not monopolize the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution for our brand
of vote. Our parties are always something less than the original
and true idea of democracy. Yet the practical option the citizen
faces is the choice of the best party available, whatever its obvious
limitations, or the entire frustration of his citizenship.

The problem which the religious man faces in his relation to the
Church is qualitatively identical with these other concrete prob¬
lems of his wider life. The absolute identification of the Church
with Christ must always savor either of arrogance or ignorance.
Churches which make such claims for themselves lay themselves
open to fair criticism. The mind of the average sect is by no means
the mind of Christ, nor is the life of the average church to be
compared with the simplicity and spiritual purity of Jesus’ original
comradeship with his disciples. Just in so far as Mark Hopkins
and his single student sitting together on the log was a simpler
and more adequate incarnation of the idea of education than the
subsequent college, just so far were Jesus and his disciples on the
Mount of Transfiguration a better and fuller expression of what we
mean by the Christian religion than the subsequent parish church
of any given sect. There is at least that much truth in the theory
that the Golden Age of the gospel was the primitive age.

The case for any and every institution in history is a debatable
case as against the case for the absolutely free man. The free man
is always the historical first cause of every institution. He seldom
senses in his own lifetime the organization which is to grow up
around his name and work. His part as the author of an institu¬
tion is more often unconscious than conscious. But we are entirely
within the bounds of historical truth when we speak of him as a
historical cause of institutions. The case of Jesus and the Church
is no exception to this general rule. There is little reason to sup-

155

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

pose that Jesus deliberately intended to establish a new institution
in history. Jesus belonged essentially to the order of the prophets,
and the prophetic mind has no interest in ecclesiasticism for its
own sake. But the Church is both an inevitable and a valid con¬
sequence of the life of Jesus. Thus we may speak, broadly, of
Jesus as the author of our faith and the founder of the Christian
Church.

But what the Church together with all other institutions so
often forgets is the fact that the free man is also its final cause.
If Jesus was the author of our faith he is also to be its finisher,
and Christlike characters in their liberty are the ends which
churches exist to realize. The peril which attends the life of the
Church is the peril that in this cycle from an initial freedom to an
ultimate freedom the process shall be arrested, and the institution
shall come to regard itself as its own end. This is, as a matter of
simple fact, the moral weakness of nine tenths of our organized
Christianity. Churches and churchmen treat the institution as the
center of values and alienate to themselves the spiritual worth
which attaches only to free men. When Kant said that one of
the signs of true morality is the habit of treating men as ends
in themselves, he passed judgment on all sorts and conditions of
modern institutions which are too prone to treat men as means
to their own ends. The Prussian theory of the State is the extreme
perversion of the only valid doctrine as to the relation of men and
institutions. But Prussianizing tendencies have communicated
themselves to many non-Prussian quarters, and it is seldom that
stress is laid to-day upon the fact that states, churches and the
like exist “for the people.”

In some ways those words of Jesus about the Sabbath are the
most revolutionary utterance in the gospels. They lay the axe
squarely at the root of all institutionalism which has usurped the
historical privileges and priority of the freeman. That saying of
Jesus is capable of almost infinite restatement, and indeed, to be
fully understood, must be translated into its widest and farthest
implications. Men were not made to belong to states, to join
churches, to subscribe to sacred literatures, to recite creeds, to
tend machines. All these are made for man’s own ends. When the
ecclesiastical, political or industrial machine precedes the freeman
in history it reverses the true order of moral values. Most modern

156

THE VALIDITY OF THE CHURCH

institutions, however, churches included, are very reluctant to
admit that Jesus was right in his flat dictum that these social
devices were made for man. And too often, when they sense this
attitude in the freeman, they follow Jerusalem and Rome in
suppressing him as guilty of heresy and treason.

The ecclesiastic must always be puzzled and dismayed by the
prophetic assurance that “there is no church in heaven.” Such a
heaven, to the “high-church” mind will be a place shorn of all
earth’s dearest interests and tasks. With the Church abolished
there will be nothing for the ecclesiastic to do. But the freeman
will understand this prophecy because he will not hesitate to apply
to the Church the standard by which he measures all institutions.
The best and most effective institution in history is that which
aims to fulfill and supplant itself by free men. The far-seeing in¬
stitution, in the forerunner’s spirit, is willing to decrease just in
so far as its mission is realized by an increase of true liberty.
Canon Barnett used to say that no philanthropy ought to exist
as an organized effort for more than twenty years. If it is an effi¬
cient institution it will have realized its particular end in that time.
If the end remains unrealized, it would seem that the institution
has become more concerned with keeping up its own organization
than with serving the world, and it had best dissolve. On this
principle he once said that his highest ambition for Toynbee Hall
was that it might become unnecessary. The highest ambition
which any churchman can have for the historical Church is that
it may become unnecessary. If he really stands in the right rela¬
tion to religion he looks with great desire for the coming of those
days of which the Lord saith: “I will put my law in their inward
parts, and write it in their hearts. And they shall teach no more
every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know
the Lord: for they shall all know me.” John Tauler says, some¬
where, that the holiest man he ever knew had never heard more
than six sermons in his life. When he had heard these sermons and
saw how the matter stood with him he went and did as the preacher
said and the matter ended there. It is because so few members of
the congregation take the offices of the Church directly and wholly
to heart that churches and ministers still have a work to do. A
race of men like Tauler’s friend would empty and close the
churches inside two months! But that would be the millennium,

157

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

for such is the heavenly end every true Christian institution
desires.

Meanwhile, in the historic cycle from initial freedom to ultimate
freedom, institutions do serve a necessary and entirely valid place
in our life.* Whatever may be said against them, this must be said
in their defense, they are the storehouses of human experience in
its totality. Into them is gathered the cumulative wisdom of the
race. The harvesting is done broadly and crudely. The tares are
not always separated from the wheat. The institution always
garners the total yield of history, both for better and for worse.
Yet the institution does save each oncoming generation from the
tedious necessity of having to begin its life all over again. It
enables the newcomer on the human scene to take up the task
where his predecessor laid it down. “Other men labored and ye are
entered into their labors,” is the legend over the threshold of all
institutions. Here is the sum of the experience of man in society in
his unremitted venture of trial and error. The institution is not
only the symbol of the continuity of human experience, it is the
very stuff and fabric of that continuity, which gives reality and
meaning to the time process.

The case for the Church, then, must stand or fall with the case
for all institutionalism. Its central problems and mission cannot
be dissociated from the wider considerations which attach to
the validity of political, educational, economic and industrial
organizations. None of these social machines is entirely adequate
as the medium for freedom in its particular field. All of them tend
to forget the liberty which at the first inspired them and the true
freedom which they exist to realize. The case against the Church
as it fails to incarnate the free spirit of Christ is precisely the case
against the state which fails to measure up to the ideal of de¬
mocracy, the college which falls short of all truth, the mill which
does not shelter free and happy workmen.

In one of the most suggestive passages in recent religious litera¬
ture,! Professor Hocking combats the theory that religion in his¬
tory can be defended on any utilitarian basis, and ventures the
suggestion that religion is not a “useful” but a “fertile” principle,
whose major function is a perpetual parentage. He points out the

* See “Human Nature and Its Remaking,” W. E. Hocking, pp. 177-225.

t “The Meaning of God in Human Experience,” pp. 11-26.

158

THE VALIDITY OF THE CHURCH

perfectly plain fact that practically every one of the modern
arts had its origin in a religious inspiration. Painting, sculpture,
poetry, law, music, teaching, social service — all of them are the
direct offspring of religion. And he raises the question whether
the case for religion must not rest upon what Tyrrell calls this
“divine fecundity” rather than upon the pragmatic test of effi¬
ciency at any given moment.

Some such parallel may be made in the case of the religious in¬
stitution as well as the religious idea. Hocking likens religion to
the queen bee. There is a similar illustration which may serve as
a symbol in the case of the Church. Biology is familiar in some
of the lower orders of life with the phenomenon of alternating
generations. There is, for example, a species of jellyfish which
lives in such a cycle. One generation is made up of free-swimming
individuals ranging as wide as the limits of the sea itself. The
offspring of this generation fastens at once to the sea bottom and
lives there a permanent, sessile, plantlike life, never moving from
its rooted place. But this fixed generation in due time buds off
from its stock a further generation which finally breaks away from
the sessile parent and becomes the free-swimming type.

The life of man in society is essentially a succession of alter¬
nating generations. The free man ranges through the world at his
own will. But his historical successors settle down in history and
become fixed around his memory and tradition as an institution.
This fixed institution, however, in due time develops and finally
buds off other free men who break away, remove themselves from
the parent stock and become in turn the founders of still other
institutions in society. Why this should be so is hard to say. How
the ends of man’s life in society and the longer purposes of his¬
tory are served better by this baffling economy than by uninter¬
rupted generations of free men is a problem that defies any cheap
and easy solution.

The value of this cycle of alternating generations in the spiritual
life of the race may lie in the fact that freedom is so costly and
evanescent an achievement that its successive advances can be
made permanently good to the race only by periods of arrest in
institutions. Saint Augustine, in his “City of God,” ventures to
criticize the tedious and painful process by which human beings
come to birth and says he would have ordered better had he been

159

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

the Creator. One may criticize the social processes whereby free
men are born into society only after gestation within the sessile
institutions. But the fact is plain, and meanwhile the purposes
of God are served in their own way by the existing methods.

To wipe the slate clean of all institutions, to propose to eradi¬
cate from the history of ongoing freedom its alternate generations
of institutional fixity is not to usher in the millennium. As
history stands this is simply to open the doors to old chaos come
again. The institution gives opportunity for mental and moral
assimilation of the fruits of freedom. It is the chance for the prag¬
matist and the utilitarian, which otherwise they would not have.
Moreover, the institution furnishes the soil of discipline from which
further forms of freedom are to spring. The freest souls in Chris¬
tian history have not been those nihilist natures who escaped or
evaded the discipline of life within the formal institution. They
have always been those men who learned of the Church of their
own day all that she had to teach, and who transcended her in
their own final freedom only when they had exhausted her re¬
sources.

Jesus is the outstanding example of this principle. We more and
more tend to regard him as the full flower and fruit of Judaism,
not as a “sport” or “freak of nature” in the spiritual history of
the race. His final matchless freedom rested upon a full initial
submission to Judaism, a discriminating jealousy for the true
value of the jot and the tittle, which on the basis of any other
explanation is absolutely unintelligible. The gospels have little or
no meaning apart from the law and the prophets. To isolate them
as spontaneous manifestations of religion is to make the liberty
of Christ an accident, not a normal historical reality. Paul stands
in like case. He had to be a good Pharisee in order to become a
good Christian. The free spirit of Christ would have had no mean¬
ing for him had he not drained the moral resources of the law to
their very end. The eighth chapter of Romans could never have
been written had not Paul passed clean through the disciplines
recorded in the prior seventh chapter. Martin Luther had given
the Roman doctrine of salvation by works full and fair trial in
his Augustinian days, and it was just this moral drudgery of the
monastery which led him on finally to his characteristic doctrine
of salvation by faith.

160

THE VALIDITY OF THE CHURCH

The Church, or something like the Church, seems to be his¬
torically necessary as a foil to religious anarchy and as the source
and exciting occasion for a disciplined freedom. It is a perfectly
fair question whether there would have been any permanent incre¬
ment of Christian liberty down the centuries were it not for the
sessile sects which always awaken the hunger for liberty, and
within which the rudiments of the fuller freedom are always con¬
ceived. Bernard, Francis, Wycliff, Huss, the Reformers, Fox,
Wesley, Emerson, Tolstoi, stand in Christian history as radiant
apostles of religious liberty at its best, but their freedom had its
uniform origin in a full discipline within the formal ecclesiasticism
of their own times. The free man in religious history always excites
our admiration. We recognize him as the fulfillment of the spiritual
aim of history, an earnest of what all religious men finally are to
be. But in our preoccupation with his mature freedom we too often
ignore his prior history as a member of some specific church,
which mediated to him the Christian tradition as a whole, and
was his point of spiritual departure.

To the practical question, How long ought a man to remain a
member of a church with which he does not find himself in entire
accord? the historical answer is perfectly plain, “As long as he
possibly can.” For if he consults merely his own spiritual future,
to say nothing of possible service to the religious idea, his freedom
will be better disciplined and more full of meaning if he does not
hasten his departure. It must have been this perception of the
mediate value of the institution, even when it irked him most,
which led George Tyrrell to insist that he would stay in the
Roman Church as long as he could. “I uphold the duty of each
man to stay within and work for his own household as long as
he conscientiously can. ... I will do nothing unnecessarily to
procure my own excommunication, and when it happens I will
stand on the doorstep and knock and ring and make myself a
nuisance in every way.” To be a Francis or a Wycliff or a Wesley
is an entirely legitimate ideal for every Christian. Such a destiny
will always mean some measure of schism with the Church that
now is. But men never have come and never will come to these
hours of prophetic freedom through deliberate and persistent
neglect of the existing Church. Only the man who knows the
Church of to-day through and through, and who has exhausted her

161

THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

resources, can lead the way to the Church of to-morrow. That
Church of to-morrow will never be achieved by those who ignore
the corporate continuity of Christian experience. If it is to come
at all, it will be the final achievement of sincere and earnest men
now in the Church.

The Church is a human institution, of divine origin and of
divine destiny if we will have it so, but at the present moment
as fallible and as far short of its author and finisher as are all
these kindred groups. If the Church seems a less perfect social
mechanism than the others, that is merely because the gospel of
Christ is so much more absolute and austere an ideal than the ends
served by avowedly secular institutions. The flaws of all insti¬
tutionalism are more patent in the case of the Church than else¬
where because the contrast between Christ and the Church is more
glaring than the contrasts between the Declaration of Inde¬
pendence and the Congress of the United States, or between Mark
Hopkins’s log and the average Williams College lecture room. The
Church always has been the first institution to fall, and always
will be the first to fall, under the condemnation of the free spirit,
not because she is an exception to an otherwise adequate and
perfect adjustment of human institutions to their ideal ends, but
because she is the most patent illustration of a problem that is
all but universal in human history. She is the stock example of
the inevitable perils of all institutional life. But qualitatively the
problems which surround her life are of the same stuff as those
which attend the political state, the modern profession with its
fixed traditions, the orthodox bank and the orthodox labor union.

The awakened Christian Church will not shirk the criticisms
which may be fairly passed upon her corporate life. She will not
attempt to deny the discrepancy between the gospel idea in its
original and ultimate purity and her faith and practice at any
given moment in her history. The consciousness of that contrast
is the seat of the divine discontent whereby the half-gods are
dethroned. But the Church has a perfect right to insist that men
shall have a fine and total consistency in their attitude toward
her. She asks that this age shall not isolate her problem as one
unique in the modern world, but that it shall treat her case as
part of the total problem of our civilization, that if men abandon
her because they elect the absolute religious idea as against the

162

THE VALIDITY OF THE CHURCH

historically imperfect and conditioned institution, they shall fol¬
low this logic to its conclusions in their relation to all the other
major institutions in modern life, and live as hermits apart from
all the imperfect social machinery by which the ideas of justice,
knowledge, health and the like are served. The man who refuses
to have anything to do with the Church because it does not meas¬
ure up to the fullness of the stature of Christ, but who blindly
votes his party ticket every election day, who runs in the deep,
narrow rut of his profession, and generally serves as a buttress for
the dull conventions of the present order, lives in a house divided
against itself, and is a contradiction in moral terms. The true
Church will never gainsay the really free and prophetic spirit in
history. She will not prosecute Abraham Lincoln because he could
not join her. She has, however, a moral right to some impatience
and distrust of those lesser souls who are always caviling at the
motes in her eye, but who never sense the beam in their own eye
which blinds them to their slavish devotion to all other modern
institutions. The Church asks of right-minded men, not that they
shall cease their criticism of her, but that they shall give to her
that discriminating and creative loyalty which they owe to the
other major institutions of our age. The only logical alternative
is a total social nihilism, a lonely hut on Walden Pond, a lodge
in the desert, the self-sufficing power of an absolutely consistent
solitude.

CHAPTER X.

The Work of the Church in the World

of To-day.

TOWARD the end of his spiritual Odyssey, George
Tyrrell said, “God will not ask us, What sort of Church
have you lived in? but, What sort of Church have you
longed for?” Every Christian in the modern world is entitled to
the solace of the homely conviction that in the matter of churches,
as in the matter of character, what he aspires to be is a truer
indication of his real nature than that which he has thus far
achieved. The many sects are, at the best, broken lights of the
Holy Church Universal, which is more than they.

Membership in any given parish or communion is for all
thoughtful men to-day simply an arbitrary expression of the
working will to be on the creative rather than the critical side of
the issue.

Meantime in the still recurring fear
Lest myself at unawares be found,

While attacking the choice of my neighbours round,

With none of my own made — I choose here !

For every candid man realizes that under present conditions the
“torch for burning” is a much easier tool to master and to use
than “the hammer for building.” However much a man may be
stirred by the rebel temper, and however deeply he may be
troubled by the divine discontent, he knows in his soberer mo¬
ments that the Kingdom of God will never be fashioned by a
wrecking gang.

The deeper peril of the whole critical temper which permeates
so much of the liberalism and latitudinarianism of our time is its
neglect of the creative capacity of the human soul. We live, to-day,

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THE WORK OF THE CHURCH

as a keen observer tells us, on a certain “Devil’s Island,” where
most men are attempting to reach reality by way of negation.

“They make the images of their gods in Devil’s Island, not by
the process of filling them in, but by the contrary process of
hollowing them out. That is to say, having cut the form out of
the matter, they throw the form away and worship the hole that
is left by its removal. They had an instrument designed for the
purpose. This instrument was a wonderful tool, and it was said
that the mightiest brains of Devil’s Island had spent three thou¬
sand years in bringing it to perfection. It was guaranteed to tear
the inside out of anything whether living or dead, and, being
made of all conceivable sizes and powers, was equally effectual
for driving a shaft through mountains of granite or taking the
core out of a grain of dust. When at work it made an ear-splitting,
heart-rending noise. There was something in the sound which re¬
minded one of an extremely harsh human voice saying ‘no’ at the
rate of twenty ‘noes’ per second.

Thus in the course of time the whole island came to be hollowed
out in a manner which not only rendered walking extremely
dangerous, but demanded excessive care in respect to everything
one touched. The objects which stood above ground had to be
treated in the same manner as those which lay beneath, so that
you could never push aside the branch of a tree or remove a
pebble from the beach, without the risk of disturbing some artistic
enclosure of empty space and thereby displacing the pediment
of a temple or breaking the nose of a god.

During my sojourn on Devil’s Island I became a fanatical con¬
vert to the cult of Hollowness. We never spoke of explanation.
The term by which we indicated that process was ‘dismissal.’ We
congratulated one another on the advent of the age of enlighten¬
ment, in which, as we said, everything has either been trium¬
phantly dismissed or has received notice to quit. Knowledge was
described as the Incoming Tenant, to provide for whose arrival
everything in the universe was under Notice to Quit. The act of
Quitting, we said, took place in Time, but the Notice to Quit was
eternal.

I well remember an article in the Times of Devil’s Island for
31st December of a certain year in which it was proudly claimed

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

that during the past twelve months a large number of fresh holes
had appeared in the substance of Reality owing to the splendid
labors of Professor So-and-So ; and no higher honour was ever paid
to a Devil’s Islander than that contained in the simple epitaph
which a few years later was engraved on this man’s tomb :

He drove his ploughshare into the Bowels of Being;

He tunnelled the Universe;

He found a Fact, and left a Vacuum.

Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice.”*

The via negativa may be the strait gate and the narrow way
that leads to reality. The business of dispossessing unlovely fact,
of making a desert and calling it peace, is for certain austere types
of mind the sole arduous trail to reality. But this way of negation
is also the broad, high road to Pharisaism, and many there be who
follow it, unconsciously, to that end. In addition to the two types
we noted in the previous chapter, the sodden materialist and the
prophetic revolutionary, there is a third group which complicates
the problem of the present-day Church. Unlike their predecessors
in the “intellectual” tradition these folk no longer carry drafts of
the Utopia in their vest pockets — they carry Notices to Quit.
They wander freely about history and society like billposters,
pasting their eviction orders on the doors and walls of all our
major institutions. The notices to quit are printed wholesale and
may be had for a little cheap thinking at any radical headquarters,
the sticky paste of a sentimental pessimism is easily mixed and
the inviting walls of past and present achievement are many and
garish. But these activities, under present conditions, recruit most
of their force from the unskilled labor of the human mind, and are
hardly more than once removed from intellectual unemployment.

Every city minister recognizes the type and can anticipate its
reaction to his institution. There is a certain nomad group which
roams around aimlessly from church to church to confirm its own
grievances. These folk will descend like the locust in response to
an occasional suggestion of critical pessimism, but they vanish
like the morning dew whenever they are summoned to creative
effort. They have developed a mental and moral flair for the dry
rot in the pulpit and the structural flaws in the masonry of the

* L. P. Jacks, “The Alchemy of Thought,” pp. 138 ff.

166

THE WORK OF THE CHURCH

Church, but they have no power to see beyond this obvious
“decay and ceaseless down-rushing of the universal World-fabric
from the granite mountain to the man or day-moth.” They have
become constitutionally unable to lift the quarry stone and to
cleave the green wood to fashion the future of the City of God.

Confront such a mind with a cathedral, and its major interest is
not in the aspirations and ardors of the mediaeval builder, but in
his structural blunders and makeshifts. This mind has no eye for
the beauties of the Galilee at Durham, because it is preoccupied
with the damning discovery that the pillars of the nave are not
solid masonry but are filled with rubble. This mind thinks it has
found the distinctive glory of Rochester when it learns, with
holy glee, that the foundations of that cathedral were laid, cen¬
turies ago, in a marsh, that the whole fabric has since settled and
has had to be refortified in these latter years by divers working in
the subterranean mud, burying bags of concrete around and
beneath the imperfect work of the past.

This familiar type defines itself ecclesiastically, in accordance
with the dominant temper of the time, not by the Church it longs
for, but by the Church it has left. Like the Athenian dilettanti,
it will always crowd up to Mars’ Hill to hear some new thing,
particularly if there is the prospect of the tart acid of negation.
But it will invariably leave before the collection is taken for the
saints in Jerusalem. The thing has become a kind of ecclesiastical .
vagrancy, pure and simple, without any inherent power to fashion
that which it holds to be the foil to present failure.

The old, neglected words of Jesus about judging not that we
be not judged come home to the present age with the fresh
validity given them by the dominant critical temper of our time.
Censoriousness soon destroys all kindly human relationships.
Criticism, when it becomes the fixed intellectual and moral habit
of a society, inhibits the life of faith. Faith is the giving of sub¬
stance to things hoped for, the demonstration of that which is as
yet unseen and unrealized, a man’s share in the nature and toil
of God. By faith the worlds were framed. By faith men become
fellow heirs with Jesus who said of himself, “The Father worketh
even until now and I work.” The detached attitude of the critic,
his self-appointed place outside the effort of history and above
the battle are his forfeit of faith. He invites toward himself the

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

indifference which he assumes toward others. He obstructs the
whole creative process in history when criticism pure and simple
becomes his only pathway to reality.

We need nothing so much in the life of the modern Church as
a correction of the major critical temper which is actually in¬
hibiting the faith of the Church. If men would devote themselves
for a generation to an undivided contemplation of the Church
they long for rather than a caustic condemnation of the Church
they live in or have left, the Church of the middle of the twentieth
century could not be recognized as the issue of the Church which
now is. If we could only restore the mood which fashioned the
Virgin of Chartres we should not be driven with Henry Adams to
the dynamo as the only contemporary religious equivalent. For
the mood was one of ineffable and pregnant longing.

To single out, by way of conclusion to the whole matter, one
aspect of the potential Church of our deepest desire, an aspect
which is neither unintelligible nor remotely impracticable, — the
Church we long for will be a Holy Catholic Church. There is no
point at which the churches that now are fall farther short of the
desired reality than in their racial, social, temperamental pro¬
vincialism. In this respect Protestantism is the greatest offender.

There has been much gain for religion in the Protestant vindica¬
tion of the plain man’s right to believe in God and to worship God
in his own vernacular. Protestantism in idea is a perpetual Pente¬
cost in which each man may hear the good news in his own tongue.
But Pentecost without an initial and sustaining experience of real
religion soon and easily degenerates into Babel, a hopeless con¬
fusion of the corporate aim and effort. Conversely, Romanism has
maintained a spurious catholicity under the dull, leaden incubus
of mediaeval Latin and all that that means. The Thomasian mind
still serves in a fashion to express the religion of “all men, every¬
where, always,” in the sense that it no longer expresses the spiritual
life of any particular man anywhere. It is the night in which all
cows are black, and in so far forth seems still to achieve a certain
catholicity. But the actual fact is that there is no Holy Church
Universal in the world of to-day. Romanism still makes claim to
that Unity on the basis of dogmas and liturgies which serve as
well as any other as a meeting place for men who say, “Credimus
quia impossibile est.” Protestantism, in practice, is simply the

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THE WORK OF THE CHURCH

ecclesiastical sanction for birds of a feather to foregather and breed
in their particular island of Arctic isolation.

The most interesting church venture which has been attempted
in our time is that of the Roman Catholic modernist, who as a.
historical fact has now been ruled out of court. The thing he was
after is the thing we all want. Perhaps he was the forerunner of
some genuinely Christlike Church-to-be. Certainly he aimed to
combine the intellectual and ethical liberty of the Protestant
with the Roman experience of catholicity. That he failed was the
fault and the tragedy of Rome. But he found even in Romanism
a shadow of the reality which every lover of the Church desires,
and that shadow was actually cast by the invisible reality.

Religion may be defined as the experience of communion or
union with God. There are rare natures who in rare moments are
given this experience in its ineffable simplicity and totality. But
both the temperament which is capable of this mystical rapture
and the times and seasons of the experience itself are beyond our
human control. And a practical mysticism, which is what the
present age needs above all else, will seek to suggest the nature
of religion by the homely intimations to be drawn from life in
the market place, rather than from the ineffable transactions of
those who have finally found themselves “in the desert of the
Godhead.”

The business of the Church is to persuade men of their actual
union with God through the life of faith and conduct. Contem¬
porary Christianity ought to be a dawning and maturing experi¬
ence of personal identity with the Wisdom and Spirit of the Uni¬
verse. No clue to that experience is too homely or trivial to be
followed to its destination in God. That is what the life of affec¬
tion and friendship ultimately means. That is what the solace and
serenity of nature suggest. That is where the comradeship of
human service leads. Religion is this overwhelming sense of
Oneness, suggested and mediated to us by the rich and varied
interests of daily life. If all ancient roads led to Rome, so all
right and honorable ways of modern life ought to lead to God.
And the major task of the Christian Church is not only to make
that simple affirmation, but to achieve the actual experience in
its noblest and most adequate form, primarily through the offices
of public worship.

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

The tragedy of modern life rests very largely on the fact that
the centrifugal and divisive forces are so many and so powerful
and the centripetal energy so weak. The increasing pace of compe¬
tition in business, professional and political life is constantly hurl¬
ing small groups of men and detached individuals off onto the soli¬
tary tangents of their own pursuits. A tremendous case can be
made for the loneliness of modern life. Under present conditions
distinction and success seem to offer only at the end of intensive
specialization. The utility man on the ball team, the jack of all
trades in industry and the general practitioner in professional life
have more points of contact with the world than has the specialist.
Their human rewards, their actual pleasure in the game of life,
may be greater than his. But given such a world as we now have,
opportunity beckons down the trail of specialization.

Any man who has stepped off the highway of general human
concern to follow one of these trails knows something of the lost
feeling involved in the adventure. The summons to independence
of mind which comes with all the intensive research work of the
modern world is also a summons to solitude. The intellectual
pioneer must leave the country of accredited knowledge and the
companionship of kindred minds and go out into the unknown.

Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges —

Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!

The explorer knows that the adventure is its own reward.

My price was paid me ten times over by my Maker.

But you wouldn’t understand it. You go up and occupy.

But there are hours when the typical freeman of our day is bur¬
dened by the heavy oppression of his detachment and remoteness
from the common mind. What was for the pioneering type once a
thing of physical geography, has now become a matter of spiritual
realities. The man who is blazing a trail along some single line
into the primeval wilderness of human ignorance will never com¬
plain that life is without its zest. But he must miss the heartening
companionship of his human kind.

Freedom, then, in the distinctive and significant labors of our
own time, carries with it a certain disintegrating principle which
is constantly resolving the social whole into its units. The more

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THE WORK OF THE CHURCH

independent a man is and the farther he has carried his task as a
specialist, the wider the gap which opens between himself and his
fellows. So far as the private professional compensations for living
are concerned, life abundant is to be found on these trails. But,
at the outset certainly, they lead away from the more obvious
forms of the experience of catholicity.

The deeper and more difficult task of the Christian Church is
concerned with the closing of these gaps in the modern world.
Religion has no interest to recall the freeman from his pioneering
labors. Indeed, for the pioneer the whole initial half of personal
religion must lie in the exercise of this liberty of mind apart from
all ecclesiastical leading strings. It is vain to try to persuade the
serious men and women of our day, who are doing the creative
work of the human mind by perfecting themselves in their par¬
ticular and distinctive fields, that religion ought to impose or can
rightly impose any limits upon their research. Religion for the
biologist must be, before all else, a matter of thinking God’s
thoughts after him, in the life history of the liver-fluke. No
crusader, kneeling naked in a night-long vigil before a candle-
lighted altar in a gloomy cathedral, has ever established historical
claim to a religiousness denied the modern astronomer who
through the hours of darkness, the world forgetting and by the
world forgot, follows some freshly visioned nebula across the
heavens with his hundred-inch telescope.

So, in the less specialized areas of human knowledge and labor,
where there is a measure of comradeship, the Church cannot per¬
suade the distinctive social and professional groups that religion
demands any denial of their native human loyalty. The Church
cannot expect the artisan to resign from his labor union, which
gives him in intense but restricted form a truly social experience.
Nor can the Church hope to win recruits by denying to doctors,
lawyers and teachers the strong fellowship of their several voca¬
tions. The Church of to-day signs with generous good will the
Magna Charta of all these new liberties of the human spirit. She
finds, in a restricted sense, something of her own nature and mis¬
sion in these intense companionships of modern toil. She cannot
now recall or revoke the right which has been granted to all sorts
and conditions of men to live freely and adventurously along the
lines of their individual gifts.

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

We must recognize the fact, however, that the problem for the
Holy Church Universal is being vastly complicated by the present
dissociation of society into human units and restricted groups.
Her own interior sects may be a nominal denial of her claim to
catholicity. But the real nub of the problem is to be found, not in
the multiplied denominations, but in the increasing schisms be¬
tween all our modern vocations. Given an Episcopalian lawyer and
a Congregational chemist, the two are far nearer one another reli¬
giously as Episcopalian and Congregationalist than as lawyer and
chemist, since for both of these men the major realities of life
center about the noun of them rather than the adjective. The task
of the modern Church is not a mere reconciliation of the de¬
nominational differences between these men. It is a spiritual
interpretation of their two vocations, each to the other. The
deeper problem of Church Unity is more than a matter of sec¬
tarian compromise and cooperation, it is one of total social trans¬
lation. Conceivably the Church Unity program might be brought
to some provisional conclusion by the merging of the denomina¬
tions, but the resultant comprehensive body would be no more
a true Church Universal than the scattered sects of the present,
simply because the religious problem in its broadest and deepest
aspects to-day is not a healing of sectarian schisms but a restoring
of the interrupted and broken lines of human communication
between the major groups of the industrial, professional and politi¬
cal world, and between all adventurous and pioneering freemen
now cut off from the strong and sustaining companionship of men
of kindred spirit.

The modern Church sometimes attempts to unite these persons
on the ground of a common avocation, lying quite outside their
major and imperious vocations. She enlists them in “church work”
under her own distinctive aegis. But “church work” in any con¬
siderable volume is a luxury and a labor of supererogation denied
to the busiest and most effective men and women of our day.
Their vocation fills the eight, ten, twelve hours of the working day.
It takes its toll of the best of a man’s strength and ardor. There
remain for “church work” only those meager margins of time and
interest which do not represent the real man.

Mark Rutherford says that men ought not to despise those
devices to which nature resorts to save us from ourselves, those

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THE WORK OF THE CHURCH

liberating avocations which are our spiritual exercise outside the
prison shop and prison cell of our particular task. Butterfly
catching, stamp collecting, violin practice, the study of poetry,
all these save a man from himself and have inherent spiritual
worth. A representative American has recently said that the longer
he lives the more he is driven to the conclusion that the only
important hours in his life are the hours outside the day’s work,
for it is then only that he has time to devote himself to the things
that really matter in this world.

The religious pathos and perplexity of modern life arises from
the fact that for many men their specialization has lost its initial
religious meaning and become a manual or mental drudgery,
and that they are driven to seek religion in their avocations. There
is no least prospect that for generations to come men are to be
released from specialized labor of hand and brain. The multipli¬
cation of industrial and professional species is apparently an
inevitable social fact. Liberty of inquiry and effort leads in that
direction. But it is as true of the spiritual life of man as of his
political life that every liberator becomes in turn a tyrant. And
the problem which the Christian Church faces to-day, as it dreams
of its mission and possibilities, is the keen problem occasioned by
the mental tyranny of the intensively specialized vocations of the
modern world.

Something may be done to heal the situation, temporarily, by
offering to the men of our time the common avocations of ordinary
church work. In particular those maturer natures who have come
to the point when they wish to see life steadily and see it whole,
as well as to see it intently, may be reunited to their fellow
seekers after God, in some small measure, through the normal
interests and activities of the average parish. There is a certain
type of business and professional man who has come to the point
where he wishes deliberately to give more time to the “work of
the Church,” because he wishes to restore the balance of life. But
the younger generation, staking out its holdings in the world of
to-morrow, has no time for these avocations. And the hope of
the Church rests with those who are still preoccupied with their
vocations, to the neglect of conventional ecclesiastical avocations.

If the Church is to hold the rising generation and make appre¬
ciable advance toward the experience of religious catholicity she

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

must harden her heart against the limited avocations she can offer
men, and must devote herself, first to sustaining the initial reli¬
gious enthusiasms of every form of freedom and then to the inter¬
pretation of all forms of modern freedom, the one to the other.

Canon Barnett in East London came to doubt whether any
such thing as distinctive “religious education” is now possible,
whether religion can be dissociated as a separate entity from the
multiplied interests of modern life. At least he reached the point
where he saw the futility of enlisting semi-religious persons to
teach so-called religious subjects. He preferred to have religious
men and women teach any and all subjects, believing that essen¬
tial and vital religion could be more effectively mediated in this
way. Religious education in Toynbee Hall meant, therefore, classes
in Botany, Chemistry, Clay Modeling, Geology, Shorthand, Sing¬
ing, Wood Carving and a hundred other subjects.

The modern Church would do well to study that splendid effort
to lighten the heavy and weary weight of life in Whitechapel.
Toynbee Hall was not severely ecclesiastical nor conventionally
religious, but it came far nearer realizing, under Canon Barnett,
something of the nature of the Holy Church Universal than the
average modern parish. The secret of its influence and success lay
in its entire readiness to grant the inherent religiousness of any
specialized human interest, at the same time that it interpreted
the Clay Modeler to the Wood Carver through the medium of the
common spirit. That Clay Modeling and Wood Carving were
avocations for the costers of the East End was an incident in the
history of Toynbee Hall. Barnett knew where his method led, and
what his experiments implied, and he looked ultimately to the
whole restatement of the Christian life in terms of the major
vocations of our time inspired and reunited by a genuinely catholic
Christian spirit.

Tyrrell, also, came finally to doubt whether the Christian reli¬
gion as such can ever be extricated intact from its setting in his¬
tory. He starts with the initial and inevitable historical judgment
that Jesus never intended to found a new and distinct religion,
but sought rather the spiritualizing of the life which he met at
hand. “Christianity was, therefore, not a religion, but a spirit,
mode or quality of religion, which might be found in various
religions, but never apart by itself, as it were a ‘subsistent quality.’

i74

THE WORK OF THE CHURCH

... To speak of a ‘pure unadulterated Christianity’ is really
nonsense.” Dean Inge is thinking in the same direction, “Saint
Paul understood what most Christians never realize, namely, that
the Gospel of Christ is not a religion, but religion itself in its
most universal and deepest aspects.”

Certainly the epochs of creative effort and of substantial ad¬
vance in Christian history have been those when men inter¬
preted religion in this intensive yet catholic spirit. Such a religion
is intensive because it sets about the business of releasing the
latent religiousness of each particular department of life. It is
catholic because it seeks to inspire all vocations and interests by
a common spirit. Christianity, thus interpreted, becomes not an
added entity outside the major tasks of daily life, a mere common
ecclesiastical avocation for the margins of men’s energy, but the
sum of all particulars of unselfish and sacrificial service in the
day’s work, and an experience of the actual community of sus¬
taining spirit. This is the real work of the Church in the world
of to-day, and nothing less than this will gain the interest and
hold the loyalty of men and women, who for worse if not for
better, are irrevocably committed to one or another of the imperi¬
ous vocations of modern life. The Church stands in the world of
to-day, not to offer men trivial and relatively unreal avocations,
for the exercise of the religious spirit, but to recover and to
incarnate the lost experience of human catholicity. If we do not
win our initial experience of union with God by way of the felt
solidarity of human interest and purpose, then religion remains a
negligible addendum to our busy days, but not its heartening
genius. And the Holy Church Universal will still linger long after
“Church Unity” has arrived, because the raucous Babel voices of
the specialists will still drown out the common theological ver¬
nacular of the reconciled sects.

Upon the continued presence of the religious freeman in the
world to-day the modern Church may safely count. No one who
knows our time well questions the fact that there are in all walks
of life countless busy men and women, with little time for church
avocations, who are really doing Christ’s work in history. Wher¬
ever teachers are mediating the truth, wherever lawyers are striv¬
ing to vindicate the eternal justice, wherever doctors and nurses
are healing, wherever honest men are producing and exchanging

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

the necessities of life, there the work of God’s Kingdom is going on.
Many such are consciously trying to do their task in a Christian
spirit and for Christian ends. They are very busy folk. Our age
drives men at high pressure. Men and women in our cities are
tired. Less and less will the wise modern church seek to draw
these persons away from their effective vocations to the less
effective avocations which she can offer them. Her task is to help
them bear the load they have assumed, to bear it with a fine
resilience, and keep replenished and refreshed the reservoirs of
spiritual enthusiasm which makes all honorable tasks a part of
the toil of God in history.

But there is one thing that all these folk need and they need
it more and more keenly as the years go on, a sense of the common
quality of spirit which goes into their varied labor. They are in
constant peril of becoming religiously provincial and at times of
becoming religiously discouraged because they do not sense the
host of kindred prophetic spirits all around them in the modern
world.

Where are these specialists to meet on any common ground?
They are reticent as to affirmations of the religious idealism of
their own task. They do not sense the spiritual quality in their
brothers’ vocations. These unecclesiastical Christians show forth
the gospel with their lives far more naturally and effectively than
with their lips. But somehow between this reticence and this lack
of sympathetic insight the very real and profound catholicity of
modern Christianity falls to the ground and is forgotten. The
lawyer will not sense the truly religious spirit of the artist’s studio.
The doctor will fail to understand the religious motif which goes
to the teaching of English literature. The business man will miss
the profoundly religious spirit which keeps the nurses at their
task. The housewife will not catch the religious idealism which
sustains the public librarian. Each of us, when he steps outside
the boundaries of his own vocation, is a stranger on the alien soils
of the other major callings. Because we fear to make public fools
of ourselves we keep our silence when we go intellectually visiting.
But all the time there is something craving to be said, some tacit
bond of felt sympathy crying for candid recognition.

It is with these forms of mature spiritual freedom in the modern
world as it is with brothers grown to manhood. The hunger for

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THE WORK OF THE CHURCH

some recognition of the commonalty of their heritage and experi¬
ence deepens with the years. What we took for granted in child¬
hood and youth we somehow crave to express in our maturity.
Yet this thing can never be said in the vernacular of our separate
callings. We found homes of our own and go our ways in the
world. My home must always be a strange place to my brother and
at the best he can be only a guest with me. So my brother’s home
can never be a truly common meeting ground and I must be
content to play the guest in turn when I go to him. That is why
we wish the father’s home kept always open, that we may go
there again and again, to share without restraint the common
blood ties of our manhood and to renew the purposes and enthu¬
siasms of our youth. It is under that roof tree where our manhood
was conceived and nurtured that we meet without restraint, no
matter how old we have grown or how widely we have scattered,
to know and feel the bond that makes us one.

In something of the same way the Church of to-day stands in
the modern world as the Father’s house, where the mature forms
of Christian liberty may still know their commonalty of Christian
heritage and inspiration. Whatever else a discerning modern
Church tries to do for men, she will seek to be a place where the
Christian doctor, the Christian teacher, the Christian lawyer, the
Christian workman, the Christian employer, may meet under the
Father’s roof tree and around the Father’s table.

There is no other institution which can keep open spiritual
house for all sorts and conditions of men. The common tradition
still rests in the Church no matter how independent our major
vocations may have become intellectually and morally. And the
only institution which still stands for the religious interest alone,
no matter how ineffectually, is the Church.

The minister of to-day who visualizes the relation of his pulpit
to his world will see that pulpit not as a Saint Simeon’s pillar
from which he may exhort the lesser breeds without the law. He
will see it as the crossroads of the world’s vocations, the clearing
house of the common interests of all forms of free Christian service
in our time. And he will see his church not as a city of refuge,
not as a citadel of orthodoxy, not as a foil to all other institutions,
but as the home of God in history, where God still meets his sons

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THE DISCIPLINES OF LIBERTY

in that deep and friendly companionship which arises when chil¬
dren grown to full and free manhood turn home again.

Whatever else she may be, the modern Church should be above
all things the place where any and every man who is trying to do
God’s work through Christ’s spirit may meet and know all sorts
and conditions of men who are trying to do the same work in the
same way. The Church ought to be the place where the truly reli¬
gious man will be prompted to know and to say,

Men and I be blood brethren
I will drink of no ditch, of no deep knowledge,

But from the Common Cups — all Christian souls.

The Church stands in our bewildering world with its intensive
specialization driving each one of us off onto the tangent of his
own particular vocation, to say quite simply and directly to us all,
“One is your father and all ye are brethren.”

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