THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
THE
ETERNAL RELIGION
BY
J. BRIERLEY, B.A.
( "J. B. )
Author of" The Common Life," " Ourselves and the Universe," &c n Ac.
gorfe:
THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 & 3, BIBLE HOUSE.
H0FF1TI
Preface.
AMID the seeming confusions of our timer
there is, amongst leading minds, growing into
ever clearer vision the main lines of the
structure which, when fully in view, will be
recognised by humanity as the Eternal Religion.
The earlier theologies were advance sketches
which, we are now coming to see, were not
only incomplete but, in important respects,
were wrongly drawn. We are better equipped
to-day than the older framers of systems. We
are in a more favourable position for discerning
between the evanescent and the permanent,
between what are essentials and what are
matters of detail.
It is the peculiar privilege of our age to
have come into possession at once of the
entire heritage of the past centuries, with their
vast endeavours after ultimate truth, and at
the same time of a scientific method for
assaying their results. In what I have here
advanced I have tried to utilise the advantages
of that position. I have kept always before
me the idea of religion as at once a principle
and a history. Its story, properly considered,
144458
vi PREFACE.
is that of eternal ideas expressed, with varying
degrees of clearness, in historical personalities.
The progress both of the ideas and of the
personalities has, it is here maintained, reached,
so far, its highest term in Christianity, which is
accordingly here treated as the Eternal
Religion. In the exposition of it under this
view I have tried first to prepare the ground
by the exhibition of certain principles, the
proper apprehension of which seems essential to
a grasp of the theme as a whole. Following
this I have dealt with some of the leading
positions of Christianity, with a statement of
the grounds on which its claim rests for
validity and permanence. The succeeding
chapters offer applications of religion, as thus
expounded, to some of the more prominent
phases of present-day life.
While dealing with the final religion, the
book, I need hardly say, lays no claim itself
to finality. It is the barest of sketches. It
merely suggests the roads along which the
thought of the future seems likely to travel.
Its purpose will be fully served if it help in any
humble degree to a better apprehension of
those great facts, and of those spiritual forces
upon which the humanity, both of to-day and
of to-morrow, must sustain its inward life.
J. B.
LONDON,
August, 1905.
Contents.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE ETERNAL REVELATION . . 1
II. DOCTRINE AND EXPERIENCE. . 10
III. THE ETERNAL COMMERCE . . 18
IV. LIFE AS SYMBOL ... 27
V. THE WAR OF GOOD WITH GOOD . 36
VI, THE SYSTEMS, AND MAN . . 46
VII. THE ETERNAL GOSPEL ... 55
VIII. CALVARY 65
IX. WHAT WAS THE RESURRECTION ? . 75
X. OUR MORAL HABITAT ... 86
XI. THE STORY OF MORALS . . 95
XII. ON HUMAN PERFECTION . . 105
XIII. ETHICS OF THE INTELLECT . .114
XIV. WEALTH AND LIFE . . .123
v XV. A LAYMAN'S RELIGION. . . 132
XVI. RELIGION AND ART . . . 141
XVII. NATURE THE PREACHER . .150
XVIII. BEHIND THE HISTORY . . . 159
XIX. OF SPIRITUAL Loss . . .168
XX. CONVERTS 177
XXL NECESSITY 186
XXII. FAITH AS A FORCE . . .195
XXIII. RELIGIOUS IMPOSTURE . . . 204
XXIV. THE SOUL'S EMANCIPATION . . 214
XXV. RECOGNITIONS . . . .224
XXVI. THE THOUGHT BEHIND. 233
viii CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
XXVII. CONSCIENCE . . . .243
XXVin. IDLE PIETY . . . .251
XXIX. THE CENTRAL MYSTERY . . 259
XXX. PHYSICAL RIGHTEOUSNESS . . 268
XXXI. PUBLIC RELIGION . . .277
XXXII. RELIGION AND AMUSEMENT . . 286
XX Xin. RELIGIOUS EPICURES . . .295
XXXIV. LAST THINGS 304
THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
i.
The Eternal Revelation.
THE late Auguste Sabatier, in his essay on
" Religion and Modern Culture," describes
in powerful language the gulf that has opened
in Europe between science and the Church.
For two hundred years the two forces have
been in antagonism. They represent two
opposing principles. The one founds itself
on the freest inquiry. The other rests on
external authority ; an authority which derives
from the past, which declares truth to be an
affair of a revelation made to men ages ago,
and, 'which is not to be added to nor taken
from. He gives the result of the conflict in
the country he knows best, his own France.
Irreligion, he says, has swept over it like a
sirocco. A later authority says there are
to-day less than two millions of practising
Catholics in that population of forty millions.
2 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
The rest are, for the most part, practically
outside Christianity.
The conflict here described is, of course, not
confined to France. It rages all over the
civilised world. In England, where religion
is an active interest, there have been abundant
attempts at compromise, most of them as
futile as they were well-meaning. Amongst
Protestants, where the principle of authority
had been shifted from an infallible Church to
an infallible Bible, we have seen endeavour
after endeavour, by means of interpretations
fearfully and wonderfully made, to join
modern science to ancient Genesis. The
difficulty here is that to our faith in the
Scripture has to be added an equally implicit
faith in the interpreters, an embarrassing
business when some half-dozen of them, at
odds with each other, claim at the same
moment our allegiance. The position to-day
amongst both religious teachers and their
followers is, in this matter, entirely unsatis-
factory. They are carrying two sets of ideas
in their minds, to each of which they in turn
defer, but which they are quite unable to
reconcile. They believe in science ; they
believe in revelation. They accept the truth
which is being arrived at by observation and
research ; they live morally by another truth
which they hold has come down from heaven.
But when these two appear to clash, as is often
THE ETERNAL REVELATION.
enough the case, the modern believer has no
solution of the difficulty. He is only uneasily
conscious that his two life theories are some-
how at war, and his soul suffers accordingly.
It is time this war was ended, and that can
only be in one way. Religious peace will
come, a peace final and abiding, when men
everywhere recognise that these two things
are, after all, one ; that science and revelation
are really the same thing ; that there is no true
revelation that is not science, and that there
is no true science that is not revelation.
Humanity has been long, and by devious
routes, working its way towards this con-
clusion, and at last it is fully in sight. To
accept it, we know, means to cut through
a greatmany venerable ideas, but,crec?e expertis,
when we have done the business, we find
ourselves spiritually not one penny the worse.
" What," exclaims some one, " are we then
to put Scripture on the same level as science ;
are we to regard the apostles as inspired in no
other way than a Copernicus or a Newton ? "
Let us take here one thing at a time. The
question for the moment is as to authority ;
as to a solid enough basis for our belief.
Waiving for the moment all speculative aspects
of the matter, and coming straight to the
practical issue, let us ask ourselves, " Which
of the two bases of belief to-day is the more
solidly established in the human mind, that
THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
which founds itself on scientific grounds, or
that founded on the old theological assumption?
When a man puts this question frankly
to himself there can be no doubt as to the
answer. Science is to-day the authority.
Do we not see, however, that by this admission
we recognise that the inspiration question
has really solved itself ? We cannot have
anything better than the best. There are no
two sorts or degrees of truth. Truth to us is
the thing we believe ; the thing which brings
to the mind its own irresistible proof. And
so the truth brought to us by a Paul, and
that offered by a Kepler, are seen as ultimately
on the same basis, that of the evidence behind
and in them; of their inherent congruity
with the perceptions and laws of our mental
life. What more do we want ? Calvin was
really, though perhaps unconsciously, recog-
nising this principle when, on being asked
on what he based the authority of the New
Testament, if he threw away the dogma of the
Church's infallibility, he replied that it carried
its own authority. It appealed to the heart
as colour appeals to the eye, and is its own
revelation.
Observe that here we are in no way diminish-
ing the religious value of revelation. We are
simply broadening its range and placing it on
a surer ground. For the universe which by
slow degrees is opening to us by the telescope
THE ETERNAL REVELATION.
and by spectrum analysis is one with the
universe discovered to us in the religious
consciousness and in the pages of the Bible.
They are only varying aspects of the same
reality. How certain this is is proved by the
simple consideration that every advance made
by science in cosmic knowledge has immediately
reacted upon our theological ideas. The
two things march together. The mere fact,
for instance, that the patristic writers of the
early Christian centuries based their inter-
pretations of Scripture, and their whole
thought system upon a world-view which
included a creation in six days, a geocentric
universe, and a literal interpretation of the
Genesis story of the Fall, alters entirely
our view of their own authority as spiritual
teachers, as well as of the formal creeds of
which they were the authors. Science has here
inevitably asserted its authority in the sphere
of doctrine. On the other hand we are
beginning to see, as never before, the directly
religious value of science. The great teachers
have, indeed, always realised that. Let any-
one read the lives of the pioneers of research ;
let him read the story of a Copernicus, of a
Kepler, of a Newton, the men who, as one
of them said, " read God's thoughts after
Him," and note the religious awe which
filled their spirits as the realm of truth opened
before them ; let him read of Copernicus,
THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
when his great discovery burst upon him,
regarding it as a new vision of God ; of Kepler,
praying that " he might find in his own soul
the God whom he discovered everywhere
without," and he will see that here also is one
of the open roads of the Spirit. The present
attitude of the scientific leaders is, in this
respect, most noteworthy. The materialism
of thirty years ago has been outgrown. Men
have tunnelled through their mountain and
are reaching the sunshine on the other side.
The utterances of a Kelvin, of a Crookes,
of a Lodge, are a testimony that the age
of revelation is not over, and that what is now
being opened to us is on the same note and
toward the same end as the utterance of
prophets and apostles.
Where the Church has fallen into error, and
brought confusion into our thinking, has been
not in affirming a Divine revelation, but in re-
stricting it to one particular time or set of times,
and to one particular order of ideas. Whereas
the Divine revelation is an eternal one ; has
been going on from the beginning ; is going
on now. It is a favourite idea of certain
researchers, illustrated, too, with a vast
mass of evidence, that every tribe of man has
in its literature or customs the marks of a pure
and elevated primitive faith. However that
may be, one cannot read the world's story at
any point without realising how, from the
THE ETERNAL REVELATION.
beginning, the men of every nation have been
under a spiritual discipline. Who that has
looked into the Bhagavad Gita but has felt
this as regards India ? When we read, too,
the definition of religion by Asoka, the great
Buddhist king : " Religion is an excellent
thing. But what is religion ? Religion is the
least possible evil, much good, piety, charity,
veracity, and also purity of life," can we doubt
that here, also, was a heavenly leading ?
The Stoics were seekers after God if ever there
were any ; and when Epictetus declares ;
" When you have shut your door and darkened
your room, say not to yourself you are alone ;
God is in your room " ; we may be sure
that some of them had not only sought God,
but found Him. That was a truth which some
of the early Fathers were not slow to realise.
It is pleasant to see an Origen, a Clement,
openly proclaiming that the great Greek and
Latin teachers spoke by the inspiration of the
Eternal Word. Zwingli, who saw so many
things before his time, saw this also. In a
" Confession of Faith " written just before
his death, he speaks of " the assembly of all
the saintly, the heroic, the faithful and the
virtuous, when Abel and Enoch, Noah and
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, will mingle with
Socrates, Aristides and Antigonus, with Numa
and Camillus, Hercules and Theseus, the
Scipios and the Catos, and when every upright
8 THE ETEKNAL RELIGION.
and holy man who has ever lived shall be
present with his Lord." Luther and Bossuet,
from their opposite camps, joined in con-
demning this utterance. We to-day, in
the clearer light that has come to us, are
sure that he was right and that they were
wrong.
It is only in this view of the eternal revelation
that we obtain any consistent or tenable
position in relation to the Scriptures. But
in that view all becomes clear. I The Bible,
properly read read, that is, in trie historical
sequence of its books offers the most striking
illustration in literature of that spiritual
evolution which constitutes the religious history
of the world. * These pages are like the fossil-
crowded strata in a geological series, that reveal
the successive steps along which life has
ascended from the beginning. We see here
how, under a never-ceasing guidance and
uplift, man has slowly clarified his view of
God, of his brother, of duty, of sacrifice, of life
and death. And just as the geological story
gives us at intervals gaps and convulsions,
periods which mark fresh eras and the coming
of a new order, so here, in the passage from
the Old Testament to the New, we discern
a fresh epoch opening, a glorious and unparal-
leled enhancement of man's spiritual life, j The
world has suddenly become warm with the
Divine presence. God has come nearer to
THE ETERNAL REVELATION. 9
man. Jesus, in His perfect consciousness of
the Father, has made all things new.
But the revelation still goes on. For no
fresh fact that emerges in the physical sphere
but will shed its own light on the spiritual
sphere. That the New Testament is a different
book to us from what it was to our fathers is
proof in itself that the revelation continues.
The Spirit of Truth is ever fulfilling His
mission. The human consciousness is a volume
in which God incessantly writes, and each
generation has its special contribution. Vinet
has in this connection a prophetic word which
we to-day need specially to remember. " The
Reformation," says he, " is ever permanent
in the Church even as Christianity. It is
Christianity restoring itself by its own inherent
strength. So that even to-day . . . the
Reformation is still a thing to be done, a thing
ever to be recommenced, and for which Luther
and Calvin only prepared a smoother and
broader way."
II.
Doctrine and Experience.
IN the former chapter we discussed, as a
phase of the eternal religion, the concurrent
revelation opened to us in science and Chris-
tianity. We may now take a further step in
reviewing some of the relations between the
existent Christian theology and the primitive
experiences on which it is based.
The world has had before it, for now some
fifteen centuries, a system of closely-knit
propositions, offered as the orthodox account
of the Christian faith. The acceptance of
these propositions has, during this time, been
regarded by devout persons as a condition
of salvation, as well as essential to character
and respectability. Upon them has been
reared a new morality, with a whole vocabulary
special to itself of " virtues and their contrary
vices." To doubt these propositions was a
deadly sin ; nay, more, it was a criminal
offence, for which millions of people have been
put to death. " Miscreant," than which we
have nowhere a more opprobrious word, is a
10
DOCTRINE AND EXPERIENCE. 11
literal translation of ' ' misbeliever. ' ' One needs
to be steeped in the patristic and mediaeval
literature to learn the terrific significance to
men of those times of the word " heretic.''
As late as the sixteenth century we have
Cardinal Pole declaring that thieves, murderers
and adulterers were not to be compared in
criminality with those who sought to tamper
with the Catholic belief ; while Newman, in
our own time, speaks of the publisher of heresy
as being " embodied evil."
But, as we have seen, there has arisen against
this set of ideas a vast and ever-growing
revolt. It was found for one thing that the
propositions themselves were some of them
doubtful. It was, perhaps, an even more
important discovery that the mere acceptance
of dogmas was in itself neither religion nor
morality. Of this latter truth the orthodox
centuries had indeed been piling up an only
too abundant evidence. There has never
been a lower morality, a more absolute
dissoluteness, and lack of all the fibre of
character than in times and places where every
article of the Creed has been accepted without
question. The brigands of Sicily and Spain
are orthodox Catholics. The monks who
figured in that unspeakable record the " Black
Book " of the monasteries, compiled for
Thomas Cromwell, had subscribed all the
creeds. It was not of heretical sects, but of
12 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
the Roman clergy, that Jerome in the fourth
century draws the life-like picture in which
they are depicted as " flattering rich matrons,
spending the day in calls at grand houses,
admiring a cushion or a handkerchief by way
of obtaining it as a present, walking abroad
with hair aesthetically arranged and rings
glittering on their fingers " ; while monks
are described as " worming their way into
favour with the rich, and pretending to fast,
while they repaid themselves with nightly
revelry."
The revolt against doctrine once started
took, as revolts are apt to do, extravagant
forms. The creeds which had so despotically
ruled, were in the fashionable circles of the
eighteenth century mocked at and despised.
In those " suppers of the gods," at Sans
Souci, with Frederick the Great as host, and
Voltaire, Algarotti, and D'Argens among
the guests ; when the wit was, according to
Sulzer, who had been present, " more brilliant
than anything he had read in books," the old
beliefs were one of the prime subjects of raillery.
Voltaire considered he had laughed the Chris-
tian doctrines out of existence. Condorcet
arraigned them as built up in ignorance of
natural laws. Diderot declared the Christian
system to be " of all systems the most absurd
and atrocious in its dogmas, the most unin-
telligible, metaphysical and intricate, and
DOCTEINE AND EXPERIENCE. 13
consequently the most liable to divisions,
schisms and heresies." A large portion of the
adult male population of France has since
that time been brought up in this opinion,
or has embraced it.
But the Voltairean position about Christian
doctrine is, with scholars and thinkers, as
much out of date as the dogmatic despotism
against which it was a reaction. The world,
after flying from one extreme to the other, is at
last, in these~matters, reaching a more central
and secure position. And the cardinal point in
the new thought structure is, as we have said,
the discovery of the proper relation between
doctrine and experience. Doctrine, as we
now see, is not the artificial product vamped
up by the priests for their own purpose
which the French Encyclopaedists imagined.
It has, on the contrary, its place in the nature
of things. It is in every case the explanation,
according to the lights available at the time,
of certain human experiences. However high
the metaphysics soar, their starting-point
is a phase of consciousness through which the
human spirit has at some time passed. The
Athanasian Creed may seem at first sight a
mass of cobweb speculation. But it would
never have been in the world apart from a series
of historical experiences. Its doctrine of
Christ is the attempt, according to the formulas
of that age, to put into words the transmitted
14 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
impressions of the first disciples concerning
their Master. The doctrine of the Spirit is
a similar rendering of inner movements of the
soul.
But the whole crux of the modern question,
the hinge of its demand for a theologic recon-
struction, lies in the question : Granted the
experiences, as genuine, and as unspeakably
valuable, are the doctrines handed down to
us a proper or adequate interpretation of
them ? In other departments it is a common-
place of history how experiences which for
centuries were common to all men had been
by all men misinterpreted. Countless millions
had seen the sun's daily ascent into the heavens,
and had obtained from the spectacle a view
of the solar system proved afterwards to be
false. It has been the world's age-long educa-
tion to gain rules for the proper interpretation
of phenomena. We are now discovering that
we are only at the beginning of the lesson.
How far, with all our training, we are competent
as interpreters is seen in the modern attitude
to Spiritualism. Here are experiences which
no one can doubt. But what do they stand
for ? There are serious and capable men who
declare them an obsession of evil spirits ; a
Huxley denounces them as frauds ; a con-
temporary of his, fully his mental equal, the
mathematician De Morgan, declares his con-
viction^that the phenomena he had seen
DOCTRINE AND EXPERIENCE. 15
" showed a combination of will, intellect
and physical power which were not that of
any of the human beings present."
But if we, after our ages of culture, in
presence of facts of this order, are so much
at sea in our explanations of them, how far, we
are now asking, were the first Christian disciples,
and the doctrine-makers who came after them?
in a position to explain what they had felt in
the presence of Christ ? They called Christ
divine; and truly, for they felt that in His
person, word and influence, the Divine had
in very deed come amongst them. Their
language, as it has come to us, is the evidence
of the stupendous spiritual impression the
Master had made. In like manner their
doctrine of the Spirit was a reflex of a blessed
yet unspeakable work going on within them.
That they should call Christ divine was not
only to express, as adequately as they knew
how, what was to them an indubitably Divine
Fact. It was, we have to remember, in
strict accord with the whole former tradition
of humanity. The world from the beginning
has held, with a true instinct, that the Divine
manifestation, wherever traceable, has been
always through the human. It was from the
human, indeed, men climbed to the idea of a
Divine. It may well be, as Euhemerus
maintained in the fourth century, and as
I^ocke and Nietzsche after him have contended,
16 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
that the pagan gods were originally illustrious
kings who were deified after death. All the
forms of worship and all its vocabulary began
on this lower plane. The kneeling, the uplifted
hand, the prayer of intercession, fhe adoring
words even, came first into history as addressed
to human rulers. The final reference to an
Unseen, Infinite and All Holy, was a later
inspiration.
What is behind the human has ever been
the mystery. And the mystery reached its
culmination in Christ. He stood before the
disciples with the Infinite as His background.
And this Infinite behind Him was also within
Him. The early Church did its best to describe
that Infinite, with what results we know.
But it is not these explanations that have
given us Christianity or that have advanced
religion. That was done by the soul's actual
experiences. It was when the disciples felt
their hearts " burn within them " in contact
with the Master, when they realised the gracious
uplift of His teaching, the ineffable peace He
breathed upon them, that in them religion
found its life and its self-propagating power.
And it has been so ever since. When Wesley,
at the meeting in Aldersgate Street in 1738,
" felt his heart strangely warmed," and entered
there and then into joy and peace in believing,
there were forces at work which neither he nor
we are fully competent to explain. But the
DOCTRINE AND EXPERIENCE. 17
forces were there, and they were redeeming
forces. It is here, in what men age after age
have felt of the inner quality of the Gospel, of
its mystic heavenly drawing of the soul
towards peace and purity, that its abiding
power consists. The doctrine may go. It is
at best an explanation. But the experience
is a fact, and remains. And it contains a
doctrine grander than any we have had yet.
III.
The Eternal Commerce.
WALTER BAGEHOT, in one of his essays, asks,
" How can a soul be a merchant ? What
relations to an immortal being have the price
of linseed, the fall of butter ? " The question
is flung out as a kind of challenge. And
assuredly, in the many sordid aspects of
modern business life, the soul, in any high
sense of it, has little enough to do. And yet
the soul has a commerce. There is, indeed,
no aspect of its life which opens so wide a
field as this of its give and take, of its incessant
barter with men and things, with the universe
it dwells in. It partakes to the full of that
vast system of intercourse by which every-
thing passes into everything else ; by which
earth and sky, sea and land, the light from
Sirius and the fire in yonder grate, are united
as in a cosmic zollverein, a league of perpetual
and intimate exchange. It is, indeed, when
we consider the soul's commercial methods,
the business laws, so to speak, which from the
beginning have been imposed on it ? that we
THE ETERNAL COMMERCE. 19
obtain glimpses of what is yet to rule in the
world's factories and counting-houses. If we
attentively study what we have imbedded at
the centre of us, we shall find there a political
economy, a business system, not yet recog-
nised on 'Change, but which is yet to rule.
Ethereal in quality, it is yet solid as the hills,
for it is rooted in the nature of things. The
commercial " vade mecum " of the future will
come out of the soul's primal intuitions ; will
follow its methods of getting and of giving.
Let us examine one or two of these methods.
The soul begins as a receiver on a vast
scale. It is as if a billionaire had invested
his capital in us. How ludicrous the pose
of independence when we think of our
history ! When our consciousness takes up
the business of life it begins millions of years
from the start. Through that immensity of
time the universe has been in incessant labour
to make you and me possible. It was there
with its myriad forces, shaping a world for us,
shaping a body, shaping a soul. The fingers
on our hand, the eyes in our head, the separate
mental faculties as we know them, have each
a history of development marvellous almost
beyond belief. If wealth is, as the economists
say, the product of labour, at what figure,
may we ask, would stand the inheritance we
have come into, and that without a farthing
paid on our part ?
20 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
That is a part of the account. Another
page of the ledger, always on the debit side,
opens with our conscious life. Here again an
incessant, unpaid for, receiving. We breathe
the air of liberty. It was won by our fore-
fathers, who, some of them, laid down their
lives as the price. Our mind, as it opens,
gulps knowledge, truth, beauty. Civilisation,
the arts, music, science, the myriad conveni-
ences of life, are there, waiting for us. And
they are all gifts. Our billionaire, it seems,
is fitting us up gratis and regardless of expense.
Yet more. It is made plain to us that this
largeness of reception is the condition and
ground of our value. Our quality of being
is according to our power of taking in. The
universe, with all its wealth of being, is around
the oyster just as much as around you and
me. The difference between us is that the
oyster cannot digest the universe as we can.
Our faculties, our organs, are the most insatiate
of beggars, incessant with their " give, give,"
at every point extracting from the world
its precious things, and carrying them to that
limitless absorber, our inner self.
At this stage of the account two points
arise. For one thing, the story of our
receptiveness should teach us something on
the ethics of reception. If our account here
be true, the cosmos lends no countenance to
the ascetic view of life. The history of the
THE ETERNAL COMMERCE. 21
soul's ascent shows the reverse of a break
with the world's treasures as a means of pro-
gress. It has been, on the contrary, by an
ever-increasing capacity of absorption, by a
multiplying of the channels and passages
along which the outer world could flow to
the inner, that the upward movement has
been marked. And this holds of material as
well as of spiritual goods. The two indeed
cannot be separated. There were no inner
function apart from the outer structure.
The ethic of the future, recognising all this,
will seek not to destroy wealth, but to increase
it. Its effort will be rather for a wider distri-
bution, so that each member of the family
may come by his share.
The other point is as to our personal attitude
towards receiving. There is a grace of
accepting, of consenting with humility and
gladness to be the receivers of gifts which
many of us have not yet learned. The lack
here is the peculiar failing of strong characters.
Such, royally generous in their giving, forget
sometimes that there is an even greater
generosity of receiving. For often, to take
a favour, to place ourselves under an obligation,
and especially where the giver is, in the
world's eye, inferior to ourselves, is the
sweetest as it is the subtlest form of human
kindness. It is offering our weaker brother
his chance. A man feels his dignity when he
22 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
gives. It is the moment often of his highest
self-realisation. Let us help him to that,
where it is a help. Indeed, whenever we
forget our essential dependence, both to one
another and to that whole scheme of things
which enfolds us ; whenever we forget that
our only proper attitude to the lowliest of
our fellows, as well as to the Power whence
all is derived, is that of humility and gratitude,
we show disloyalty to the soul's first principles ;
forgetfulness of the whole road along which
it has travelled.
Thus of receiving. But the ledger has
another side. Our capitalist, lavish though
he seems, does not appear to be a fool. His
outlay is an investment. He expects a
return. To vary our phrasing, the soul's
history, as we have sketched it, offers to every
rightly constituted mind a silent but irresistible
appeal. From these colossal figures on the
debit side the finger points to the opposite
column with mute but eloquent interrogation.
That enormous, piled-up indebtedness to life,
what does it mean to us ? Our nature in its
very make contains the germ of the response.
Linked with the afferent nerves which carry
the universe to our inner sense, are the efferent
nerves, designed to be the bearers of the output
by which we seek to balance the account.
It is this feeling of social obligation, weighing
on every mother's son of us, which in our
THE ETERNAL COMMERCE. 23
view should form one of the chief features in
modern education. We need to create in
every young heart a sense of what life, as they
possess it, has meant in toil and sacrifice to
former ages, till their soul burns with a desire
to repay. At every school-bench and college-
desk, the question should arise, " What !
Shall I sit at the world's banquet and feast
on these good things that others have provided,
and offer nothing in return ? " The question
should burn in them till they cry with Walt
Whitman, eager with him to leap into the
foremost files, " Pioneers, Pioneers ! "
Profoundly interesting is it also to note
the inner laws according to which the soul,
in its commerce, settles its debtor and creditor
account. The method is significantly different
from that current in some business circles.
We hear of "so much work for so much pay,"
where the aim is to get the highest pay for the
least work. There are transactions in which
the contracting parties seek each to get the
better of the other. That is not the soul's
way. Observe the action of a high nature.
Its commerce is that of a free giving as the
result of a free receiving. It takes in of all
sorts, transmuting, by its mystic chemistry,
the raw material into a something higher and
different. Like radium, an extract of an
extract, which out of a dozen substances has
become a new substance with infinite energy
24 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
and action ; so the soul, drawing in from every
realm and corner of the world, turns these
multiform ingredients into its own quality
of being, to pour it henceforth upon the world
as its own contribution to life.
This is the other, the royal side of the soul's
commerce, an incessant giving, which becomes
ever a nobler giving as our nature rises in
quality. We talk of our charities. We give,
in England, say the statisticians, fourteen
millions a year in public charities. But the
real giving finds no expression in figures.
The true worker is, in his work, always first
and foremost a giver. The artist, the poet,
the writer, the singer, follow the law of the
soul's commerce. " Paradise Lost," the
" Moonlight Sonata," the " Laocoon " were
never paid for in cash. The pay was hi the
joy of the worker, pouring out of his best.
There is more cash moving in artistic circles
to-day than of old, but the rule is still the
same. With the true soul the one impelling
motive is to offer of its highest.
But with such natures the best is not even
in the visible work, good though that may be.
At every conscious moment a great heart is
exhaling into the world a something more
precious than gold, more vital than art.
Matthew Arnold, when he speaks of the early
Christians as " drawing from the spiritual
world a source of joy so abundant that it ran
THE ETERNAL COMMERCE. 25
over upon the material world and trans-
figured it," gives the best illustration of what
we mean. The greatest happiness the heart
of man knows is in its contact with an outflow
of that kind. The first disciples willingly
left all and followed Christ because of what
they found in that contact. And as men
approximate to that Highest Nature so is
the preciousness of the gift of themselves.
What such have to offer is beautifully expressed
in the account given by Gregory Thaumaturgus
of his meeting with Origen, in which he declares
that " the first day of his receiving us was in
truth the first day to me, and the most precious
of all days, since then for the first time the
true sun began to rise upon me." What a
goal of character to aim at, even if not to
reach, where the mere contact with us is
reckoned as a red-letter day, as the hour
of sunrise for the soul !
A topic like this has endless applications.
The working, business world will never come
to its best till it allows the soul's intuitions
fuller play. The possibilities of life will never
be properly realised until each one of us is
intent on getting the best in order that he
may give the best. I am defrauding my
fellow if I do not seek to broaden and deepen
my mind, with every labour and exercise,
that I may speak to him from a fuller know-
ledge, a wider experience. What an immense
3
26 THE ETERNAL BELIGIOK.
significance for all teachers lies in that remark
of Stanley on Newman : " How different the
fortunes of the Church of England might have
been if Newman had been able to read German ! "
How dare any of us attempt to teach unless
we have learned something, and unless we are
continually learning more ! And this learning
will have to be more than a secular knowledge.
Our commerce will have also to be with the
Unseen. To us must apply that fine idea of
Plutarch's, where, speaking of the daimon of
Socrates, he declares that it was " the influence
of a superior intelligence, and a diviner soul
operating on the soul of Socrates, whose calm
and holy temper fitted him to hear this
spiritual speech."
IV.
Life as Symbol.
A FURTHER first principle of the eternal
religion may be stated as that of the essential
symbolism of all that is visible. That the
things of this world, open to our senses,
have another and hidden meaning, has long
been a commonplace amongst serious people.
Man has been persuaded of it from the begin-
ning of the world. He has, indeed, expressed
his conviction on this point in singularly odd
forms. One of the earliest and most favourite
methods of religious teaching has been the
symbolic, the allegorical. What the Jews
made of the Old Testament in this way can
be seen by consulting Philo Judseus. But
the Christian writers have not been behind-
hand. Origen's allegorical treatment of the
Bible history takes one's breath away. There
have been, indeed, successive schools
of allegorisers concerning the most of whom
Calvin's scathing indictment is not too severe :
" Some hare-brained spirits take occasion
from this to turn everything into allegory.
27
28 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
Thus they change dogs into men, trees into
angels, and all Scripture into a laughing
stock."
Extravagance apart, however, man has
found enough in the nature of things to con-
vince him of the inherent doubleness of life
and the world. Both he and his environment,
he discovers, are so constructed as inevitably
to convey this impression. We cannot lift
our hand without striking on this cosmic
symbolism. Every simplest thing has a mystic
invisible lurking behind it. Our natural is
matched ever with its supernatural. Take a
piece of writing. In itself it is a series of up
and down strokes, black lines on a piece of
white paper. But these strokes are loaded
with invisibles. From behind them there
may gleam the soul of a Shakespeare, out of
them may flash wit and wisdom treasured
there for three thousand years.
It is marvellous to note how this symbolism,
the taking of an outside visible as representing
a whole world of hidden values, has woven
itself into human things. In the course of the
Russo-Japanese war there was talk of a
tremendous struggle round a Russian flag.
Men died in heaps about that floating
streamer. What was it ? A soiled, ragged
piece of silk. That was all the eye saw.
But these men, who gave their life-blood to
keep it from the enemy, recognised there,
LIFE AS SYMBOL. 29
woven into its folds, all that was dear to
them country, home and honour. Men eat
and drink, the simplest and lowest of human
acts. They are doing here what the animals
do, urged by the same necessity. But the
wild Arab will make the eating of his bread
the covenant of an alliance with the stranger
who shares it, and through centuries millions
of believing men have taken bread and wine
as symbols of the holiest they knew, taken
them upon their knees, realising in the act
things ineffable of Divine pity and love.
Wonderful world, truly, in which, in this
taking of bread and wine a man could see what
Irenseus has expressed : " For as the bread
which is produced from the earth when it
receives the invocation of God is no longer
common bread but the Eucharist, consisting
of two realities, earthly and heavenly ; so
also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist,
are no longer corruptible, having the hope of
resurrection to eternity." It is not necessary
to agree here with Irenseus to realise the
wonder of the symbol to which he points us.
One might continue these illustrations,
endlessly. The world is full of them. Man
persists in seeing more in clay and mortar
than anything they yield to his senses. Yonder
is a cottage built of them, the simplest village
affair. Its worth as bricks and mortar is
ludicrously small. To yonder traveller, who
30 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
has come from the ends of the earth to see it,
and can hardly now see it for tears, it is the
place of unspeakable memories and affections.
Its walls are saturated with the invisibles
that give value to life ; every stone is eloquent
of the loved ones that are gone, of the faces
and voices to which this stranger forty years
ago bade farewell in his quest for fortune,
but which he has carried in his heart ever
since.
It is not strange that, with things like these
close to his hand to teach him, man should have
carried the significance of it all into his wider
conceptions of life. How natural that,
prompted thus on all sides, he should say to
himself, " Is not, then, this the key to the
whole riddle ? Is not all that I see simply
a sign and representative of a greater, vaster
thing behind ? " The Eastern world, in its
doctrine of Maya, or illusion, the doctrine that
the world revealed to our senses was a mere
mirage, and that reality was to be sought
elsewhere, had not read the writing quite
accurately. We read better when we under-
stand that what we see is reality, but only
the outer edge of it. For there are degrees
in reality, and we are as yet only in its outer
courts. Mr. Haldane, in his Gifford Lectures,
has struck nearer to the truth in his suggestive
remark where, speaking on the outlook to a
future life, he observes : " The mind looks
LIFE AS SYMBOL. 31
for the truth of those things as to be got,
not so much by setting up something beyond,
as by breaking down the reality of what is
here and now, so as to transform what is
appearance here and now into the presentation
of another and higher aspect."
It is when we have properly grasped the
idea of the world and life as a vast symbolism,
the visible standing always as the representa-
tive of a greater thing behind, that we are in
the best position for realising the proper
significance of the main doctrines of religion.
Multitudes of serious minds to-day are troubled
sorely by the difficulties which science and
modern criticism have raised as against the
prominent Christian dogmas. The modern
believer is startled on the one hand to find
articles of his creed impugned by criticism,
and on the other hand to find these same
articles paralleled, to a wonderful degree of
imitation, in other and alien faiths. His views
of revelation, incarnation, atonement, resurrec-
tion, are, in the form he has held them, assailed
by the weapons of history and of reason ;
they are, at the same time, to his astonish-
ment, placed alongside of what seem almost
exactly similar beliefs which Egyptians,
Babylonians, Mexicans and a host of other
peoples have held concerning the unseen world.
It is precisely at this point that our doctrine
of the symbol comes in at once as a mediator
THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
and an illuminant. For may we not say that
the law of the double which we have found
running through all life applies here also ;
and that the Christian doctrines, as men
have formulated them out of the Christian
facts, are themselves only representative and
symbolic ? They are not untrue ; they are
packed with truth. There is no great dogma
that has risen out of the human consciousness
and asserted itself with authority over genera-
tions of men but has some sure relation to the
reality of things. Where we have made the
mistake and got into the trouble is, that we have
taken these statements as the final ones, as
themselves the ultimate truth. Whereas they
are no more the ultimate than our other
surroundings, visible to the eye, are ultimate.
At best they are the dim adumbrations of a
reality whose other and higher aspects are
slowly but perpetually disclosing themselves.
Let no one doubt that there has been a
Christian incarnation, or that Jesus Christ
is other than, as Carlyle put it, " our divinest
symbol." But our setting of the fact may
be far enough away from the final one. So
of the Christian atonement. When, in one
of the earliest and most beautiful of the
Christian writings outside the New Testament,
the Epistle to Diognetus, we read this state-
ment of Christ's death : "He Himself took
on Him the burden of our iniquities ; He gave
LIFE AS SYMBOL. 33
His own Son to be a ransom for us, the Holy
One for transgressors, the Righteous One
for the unrighteous ! . . . Oh, benefits
surpassing all expectation, that the wickedness
of many should be hid in a single Righteous
One, and that the righteousness of One should
justify many transgressors," what do we
make of it all ? Do we accept every phrase
here as the literal truth ? Or do we reject
the statement as inherently false ? Neither.
We see as through a glass darkly. But
through the mists of this old interpretation
we discern looming the proportions of a
truth of life whose majesty and 'divine
inspiration surpass all our efforts properly
to express.
And so, we say, with all the great doctrines.
It is not that the present movement of science
and criticism will operate in the way of
diminishing their proportions or their human
value. The evolution of ideas on these high
subjects, when it has reached its term, will
have had the effect of heightening rather than
of lowering their worth and sacredness. For,
let us remember, the symbol is ever inferior
to the thing symbolised. It is at best only a
rough sketch of the actual. And what men
have laboriously endeavoured to set forth
in their creeds is always a truth immeasurably
vaster and more benign than their presenta-
tion of it.
34 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
This law of the double, indeed, in whatever
direction we apply it, yields ever the same
result. It gives a new meaning not only to
eternal things, not only to ideas and
doctrines, but also to events. Is not
the fact, the happening which meets us,
often so grimly visaged, on life's road, also a
symbol ? Have we done with it when we
have tasted its first rough impact ? Is there
not something behind, a spiritual wedded to
this visible ? The great souls have always
believed there was, and so have been fearless
in front of their event. What a word is that
of Ignatius in view of his martyrdom : " The
wild beasts are the road to God." To other
eyes the lions that awaited him in the arena
were just forces to tear and slay. To his eye
they were the way to the Celestial City. And
both were right ; only the martyr's was the
Tightest right.
We ourselves, as we stand here in the
world, are symbols. Our very body is a
sacred mystery hiding immortal things. Its
physical beauty is nothing but a hint of another
beauty. The latest investigation, as re-
presented by a Delanne, declares the
human being to be "a psychic form which
assimilates matter : when its energy is ex-
hausted it assimilates matter no longer, and
the physical body is disintegrated and the
soul, in another form, pursues its career. "
LIFE AS SYMBOL. 35
However that may be, we take our " here
and now " as the prophecy of a greater thing
behind. With Tennyson, we hold ourselves as
Not only cunning casts in clay ;
Let science prove we are, and then
What matters science unto men,
At least to me ? I would not stay.
To sum up. The world is according to
the eyes with which we view it. There are
men who find it nothing but a market in
which goods are bought and sold ; or who,
like the Catius whom Horace satirises, regard
it as a banqueting-place where gourmands
may feast. But these people are not built high
enough to see over a five-foot wall. To any-
one who has reached the proper human
proportions, the world opens in far vaster
perspectives. He realises that he is only at
the beginning. Amidst all uncertainties, of
this he is sure, that the ignoble, the frivolous,
the despairing view of life, is a false one.
He is inspired with the belief expressed by
the greatest and most Christian of our English
statesmen, that " life is a great and noble
calling, not a mean and grovelling thing, that
we are to struggle through as we can, but an
elevated and lofty destiny.'*
V.
The War of Good with Good.
IN no direction has the present interaction of
science with theology shown itself more im-
pressively than in the view which is fast taking
possession of the modern mind on the subject
of good and evil. For nearly a millennium
and a-half Christendom has held to the
Augustinian view, of the essential and eternal
difference between these two things. But
to-day Augustine's empire over religious
thought is trembling. We are beginning to
see in how many directions his ideas were
coloured more by his early Manicheeism than
by the Galilean Gospel. And we have learned
some other things since the fifth century.
In particular the doctrine of evolution has
changed the whole standpoint from which we
look over the ethical field. A single sentence
of John Fiske's gives us the main outlines of
the new position. " Theology," says he, " has
had much to say about original sin. This
original sin is neither more nor less than the
brute inheritance which every man carries
36
THE WAR OF GOOD WITH GOOD. 37
with him, and the process of evolution is an
advance towards true salvation."
This is not the solitary utterance of an
isolated thinker. One has only to turn
in any direction of serious literature to realise
how profound and widespread is the revolution
of thought on this question. Spinoza is at the
bottom of much of it. His declaration that
the human passions are not defects, and his
subtle remark that " we have not so much
an appetite for what is good, as that we deem
a thing good because we have for it an ap-
petite," set men's minds on a road they have
been travelling ever since. Some have travelled
it to strange lengths. In America Walt
Whitman preaches " there is, in fact, no evil ;
or, if there is, I say it is just as important to
you, to the land, or to me, as anything else."
From the Continent comes the word of
Nietzsche that " all good things were originally
bad things ; every original sin has developed
into an original virtue." And he adds in
support of his paradox that " matrimony fo r
a long time was a trespass ; a fine was imposed
for the presumption of claiming a woman for
oneself." Finally, from a German Christian
thinker, G. Prellnitz, we get this as the
ultimate philosophy : " Everything inferior is
a higher in the making ; everything hateful
is a coming beautiful ; everything evil a
coming good."
38 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
Are these new doctrines ? Not entirely.
In one aspect they appear, indeed, to be the
echo of a very old one. We seem, in fact, to
catch here the notes of the neo-Platonist
teaching, that " Evil was a not-being, the
necessary foil of the good, the shadow of the
light," an essential condition of finiteness.
The view is not dissimilar to that of the
Alexandrian fathers Clement and Origen, who
of all the Christian thinkers of the time, show
the greatest breadth. In the " Stromata,"
Clement declares that " evil is involuntary,
for no one prefers evil as evil." And he goes
still further with the remark, " that nothing
exists the cause of whose existence is not
supplied by God. Nothing then is hated by
God, nor yet by the Word." But the modern
position, while not without resemblance to this
earlier one, carries in it a distinct difference!
It rests on another basis. The Alexandrian
theory rested largely on speculation ; the
modern is an affair rather of scientific research.
Our view is ceasing to be a metaphysic. It is
deriving itself rather from plain facts.
Let us see in one or two particulars how
matters stand. What is now dawning upon
us is that the story of good and evil is nothing
else than the story of human progress. What
to us is now evil was an earlier good. It was
the best thing known until something better
emerged which put a shade upon it. The
THE WAR OF GOOD WITH GOOD. 39
war, we see, has always been not so much of
good with evil, as of good with good ; or rather
of good with better. There was a time when
the primitive instincts were the only incentive.
There was nothing beyond them. A tiger's
theory of morals is to get its hunger satisfied.
There was a stage of the human story in
which that was highest. St. Paul strikes
at once the history and the philosophy here
in his deep remark that " with the law is
the knowledge of sin." It was when some-
thing higher came into the consciousness,
that the old good became the new bad. And
the whole fight and struggle of the world
ever since has been between these two things,
the fight has been always between the inferior
and the superior good. In this view the
saying of our German, that " everything evil
is a coming good," is a reversal of the order.
Rather should it be said that evil is an old
decrepit good, a good outgrown, outworn
and left behind in the upward march. When
we sin we are simply falling back upon an
earlier ideal, that of the prehistoric savage.
We are deserting from the foremost files.
From life's university we have come back to
the dame school.
This struggle between the different goods
is, we say, perpetually going on, and there
is nothing so interesting as to watch its phases.
Often we discern the clash of the two, which
40 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION.
becomes eventually a fusion into a higher
third. A notable instance is that conflict
between head and heart which came with the
Christian Gospel. It has been a favourite
reproach of opponents that the introduction
of Christianity meant the eclipse and loss of
what Greece had taught the world. We are
pointed to the fact that the early Church
tabooed art ; that the decrees of its councils
destroyed the freedom of human thought ;
that, in short, the Christian ecclesiasticism
was the greatest of set-backs to intellectual
progress. It is often forgotten in this indict-
ment that what is here charged to the Church's
account does not belong to it at all. It was
not the religious question, but the break-up of
the empire by the invasion of the Northern
barbarians that plunged Europe into darkness.
But, waiving that point, and recognising, as
we must, that the Church teaching left one
side, and that not the lowest, of human develop-
ment almost untouched, to what, after all,
does this amount ? Have we not to recognise
here simply the first stage, which is usually
a warring stage, in the relation of two ideals,
each necessary to the world, to be followed
by their union in that glorious synthesis in
which heart and head shall each perfectly
minister to the other ? M. Villemain, the
eminent historian, in discussing this question,
has touched its centre in the remark that " it
THE WAR OF GOOD WITH GOOD. 41
is a moral progress which Christianity brought
into the world a progress of grief over oneself
and of charity for others. The heart of man
has gained more in this discipline than its
imagination has suffered."
Another phase of this war of good with good
has been the age-long conflict between liberty
and order. Order, we say, is heaven's first
law. It is the foundation of states, a first
condition of prosperity, an imperative of
Church and social life. And yet history is a
record of the continual breaking up of order,
and that by the best men. Against this good
fights another good, in battles that have often
been bloody and terrible. It is the good of a
larger liberty to which this other is barring
the way. The new good in the end beats the
old, but always at a price. Protestants and
progressives generally recognise the Reforma-
tion as a mighty stroke for the soul's freedom ;
but the old order it broke in upon had a
revenge of its own. The Reformation was not
all gain. There were times when Luther
and Calvin despaired of their work, and of the
new world it had brought. The doings of the
Miinster Anabaptists, the Peasants' War, the
queer interpretations of religion of some of the
emancipated princes, formed part of the heavy
bill of costs which order presented to the
Reformers as its price for breakages.
England had the same story to tell. Let any-
4
42 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
one read the state of affairs during the Somerset
protectorate, when the Universities were
called " the stables of asses, stews and schools
of the devil," when young gallants rode their
horses through the aisles of St. Paul's, when,
as Froude has it, " hospitals were gone, schools
broken up, almshouses swept away, and when
the poor, smarting with rage and suffering,
and seeing piety, honesty, duty trampled under
foot by their superiors, were sinking into
savages." It is a gloomy story enough ;
and yet this was the way along which the
two goods, order and liberty, were to travel,
and are still travelling, until they understand
each other better, and unite into something
ampler and purer than either has known
hitherto.
Nearly all the difficulties, both of yesterday
and to-day, have come from the inability of
one good to recognise another. It has been
so much easier to call names. The opposite
side has stood for wickedness, or foolery, or
both. Whereas the men on each side have
been following the best they knew. When
Diderot and his fellow Encyclopaedists
denounced Christianity as full of superstitions
and impossible doctrines, their writings were
tabooed by all good Catholics as of the devil.
What we now see is that each side stood
for a right whose victory is to-day one of
civilisation's most valuable assets. The libres
THE WAE OF GOOD WITH GOOD. 43
penseurs of the eighteenth century strove
for the freedom of investigation. The system
they fought was greatly in need of being
fought. It was, indeed, stuffed with super-
stitions and impossible beliefs. The real
Christianity behind that system is a good
that these attacks never touched. In the end
the heart's devotion and the mind's freedom
will know each other as of the same stock and
quality.
An illustration still more to the point, since
the question in it presses us with special
insistence to-day, is the matter of religion
and amusement. There has been a long fight
between the Church and the drama,
between the Church and the saloon. It has
been regarded as a battle between good and
evil, between God and Satan. The fathers
anathematised the pagan drama, and we
remember, in later times, that terrible denun-
ciation of Bossuet, where, in his " Maximessur
la Comedie," speaking of Moliere's last hours,
he says : " He passed from the pleasantries
of the theatre, among which he rendered
almost his last sigh, to the presence of Him
who said : ' Woe to you who laugh now,
for you shall weep.' " Is this to be the per-
manent attitude of Christian men ? What
in its essence is the drama ? If it be evil,
then life is evil, for it is the representation of
life. All children are evil, for all children are
44 THE ETEKNAL RELIGION.
actors. The drama is the human story,
embellished by light, colour, music, painting.
The great preachers are actors. The pulpit
has often enough been a stage, and with
excellent result. In the miracle plays of the
Middle Ages the Gospel was acted more
effectively than it had often been preached.
And the inn, the saloon, do these in their
idea represent simply an evil ? They are
the drawing-room, the fireside of the working
man, the caterers for his social nature.
The only rational position of the Church
to these sides of life is that of a good relating
itself properly to another good. Between
goods there must be not opposition, but
co-operation. But the higher here must
teach and lead the lower. The brightness,
the movement, the colour, the humour,
the human interest represented alike in the
theatre and in the public-house are to be
taken into the Church's scheme for the highest
furtherance of life. For these are all of the
assets of humanity, elements in its social
evolution. The problems connected with them
are so to be dealt with as to eliminate the
baser elements ; the remains of a time when
the sensual and the animal were man's highest
good.
These are illustrations of a theme which,
in its entirety, offers a new and fascinating
outlook upon the future. For it shows us
THE WAR OF GOOD WITH GOOD. 45
how the very problems of evil are really
the marks of an eternal progress ; how man's
very consciousness as a sinner is the evidence
of a movement towards an infinitely glorious
ideal yet to be realised in him.
VI.
The Systems, and Man.
CIVILISATION might, in general terms, be
described as a move from the open country to
the town. Man had reached a certain stage
of development when he roofed himself in,
and a further one when he learned to join
his particular roof to that of a neighbour.
And this, let it be noted, is true of his inner
as well as of his outer life. The great religious
systems which we find covering the world are
the several roofs which have been constructed
to shelter the soul from the waste, dread
infinity around it. The eternal religion has a
relation to these systems which we are bound
to take note of. Every tribe dwells under its
roof. Buddhism, Confucianism, Brahminism,
Mohammedanism, Christianity we see these
huge structures lifting their domes over their
several millions ; their foundations deep in
history, deeper still in human aspiration, fear
and hope. And underneath each main dome
are myriad minor structures. Our British
Christianity, to come close home, is a street
46
THE SYSTEMS, AND MAN. 47
of separate buildings, each walled off from
the others, and constructed after its own
special design. Episcopalian, Presbyterian,
Methodist, Independent, each has laboured with
prodigious industry to make his building
complete and to make it lasting.
Everywhere, we say, these thought-structures
have been thrown up by humanity, and every-
where they have been by their inhabitants
declared to be complete and final. To suspect
otherwise has been held as high treason to the
soul. To an outside observer it would indeed
appear to be one of the most singular and
pathetic things about man, this notion of the
finality of his system. For what is evident
is that not one of these structures is stable.
To keep to our own country and faith, let
anyone compare the religious ideas of only
fifty years ago, taken from any one of the
denominations, with the ideas in the same
religious bodies of to-day. He will find
himself in another universe. The pulpits
everywhere have been tuned to a different
note. The creeds and formularies in use may
be, as to words, the same ; but oh ! the
difference of interpretation ! The thought-
structure has, in fact, been re- windowed, with
an outlook over a new world.
The phenomenon thus presented is indeed
singular. The spectacle is of man in incessant
rebellion against himself. The system-maker
48 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
is by an equal necessity the system-destroyer.
By an imperious law of his being man over-
turns all that he creates. We are at last
beginning to understand why this is. When
the lesson has been completely learned the
revolt of one part of us against the other will
cease. What is the fact ? It is simply that
there can be no permanence for man in any
of his systems, and that because change is the
law of his own being. He is the eternal
changer. That, however, fortunately, is not
the whole. It is not mere wreckage that he
indulges in. His creeds, his constitutions,
incessantly crack and fall around him, because
he, the indweller, is ever getting bigger. And
the growing nature must, as part of the
process, continually cast its old shell. The
secret at his centre, which explains all, is that
man is not a Being so much as an eternal
Becoming, a passage always from one stage
to another. And because of this no externality
can be final for him. It stands, but he moves.
And the thing that stands is bound to be left
behind by the thing that moves.
It is noteworthy, and supremely interesting,
to observe how this law has operated in religious
history. There is no single century or spiritual
condition in which we do not find it at work.
We see ages where, to the superficial view,
everything has been regarded as fixed, where
the weight of authority seemed overwhelming,
THE SYSTEMS, AND MAN. 49
where the existing creeds were taken as the
absolute and ultimate truth. We look deeper
into those times, and what do we find ? Every-
where our law of movement ; everywhere
the human spirit, standing over against
the systems, questioning, measuring itself
against them, and knowing in its deepest
self that it is greater than they. How wonder-
ful its uprise against the strongest assertions
of authority, when these came across its own
unwritten laws ! That old Frisian king who,
with one foot in the baptismal font, drew it
back when the missionary told him that in
Paradise he would not meet his noble ancestors,
was acting from an authority higher and
mightier than that of his teacher.
We talk of the Middle Ages as illustrations
of a fixed orthodoxy. Protestants are apt to
think of them as a cast-iron period, fast bound
under the Roman yoke, and having no affinity
with their own spirit. We have only to look
into them to discover their mistake. There is,
to take one illustration, perhaps nothing more
wonderful in the history of Christianity than
the life and literature of the thirteenth century.
What an age, which produced a Dante, a
Dominic, a Francis, an Aquinas, a Bona-
ventura ! The astonishing thing about it is
its perfect freedom. Despite creeds, popes
and canons, men said the thing that was in
them to say. And the thing was often so
50 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
astoundingly daring. Francis of Assisi, the
man probably of all ages who most resembled
Jesus, calls and believes himself a Roman
Catholic. As a matter of fact he is free of all
theology. His mind is far away from the
systems. He is no theologian, but a simple
Christian man, living in his world as freely
and joyously as the birds he loved so well.
His thought, if you could give it a name,
is a kind of Christian pantheism, where fire,
wind and sun are his " brothers " and death is
his " sister." His " Hymn of the Creatures "
is the exultant song of a beautiful, emancipated
soul that, having nothing, possesses all things.
When we look more closely into that century
we discern how innumerable less-known men,
the best religious spirits of the age, were on
the same track, expressing to the full, in face
of the dogmatic systems, the rights of the
human spirit. What a phenomenon for us
that thirteenth-century preaching of " The
Eternal Gospel," a watchword which fired
humble souls all over Europe, and whose
message was, not a laudation of popes or
councils, but a declaration of doom against
the corruption in high places and of a coming
new kingdom of righteousness ! Has anything
bolder been uttered in the Church's history
than those manifestoes of a Joachim di Flor,
the Cistercian Abbot of Perugia, and of a
John of Parma, his ^ollower, wherein, voicing
THE SYSTEMS, AND MAN. 51
the dumb aspiration of patient watchers
throughout Christendom, they proclaimed the
swift approaching downfall of the visible
Church, with all its pomp, and the inauguration
of the reign of the Spirit ?
Every century, we say, exhibits the same
phenomenon ; on one side the visible system,
founded on the past, and buttressed by
authority, and on the other the live human
soul seeking ever to pull down these barns and
to build greater. Always is heard, too, the
protest against this demolition, a protest
which rings especially loud in our own time.
And the protest often seems well founded.
Our system, cries theology, is stable, and that
because it is founded, not on the shifting sand
of conjecture, but on the rock of fact. Granted
the restless movement of man's mind and its
destructive power. But it cannot sweep
away rock. Facts are our foundation just as
much as they are the foundation of science,
and a system so founded can never fall. But
in so stating its case theology has touched,
perhaps unwittingly, the very centre of our
problem. It is precisely on this question of
fact that the whole thing hinges. What we
have to note here, and which so many of us
have failed to note, is that the fact itself, as
related to the human spirit, is never stationary.
It changes as we change. The stars were one
thing to the men of the first century. They
52 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
are quite other things to us. As the mind
opens our fact opens, and is ever disclosing
new secrets.
It is on the mental condition in which earlier
men approached their fact what they made
of it that the value of their testimony, as
authorities for us, depends. Often enough its
value was small. The majority of people even
to-day cannot see the thing that is before them,
cannot properly and scientifically see it.
What, then, of onlookers a thousand years ago ?
Hiouen Thsang, the old Chinese Buddhist, in
his account of his famous pilgrimage to India,
solemnly declares, as an eyewitness, that the
footprints of Buddha seem of more or less size
according to the greater or less faith of the
beholder. In describing the relics he says of
one after another of them, " The persons who
worship it with sincere faith see it surrounded
with luminous rays." And if the multitude
of reporters of what is before their eyes are
so untrustworthy, what of the generation that
receives its account from them ? Buddhism
is for us a wonderfully instructive study on
this matter. When we study the accounts
of Buddha in the simple Sutras of the South,
as compared with the developed Sutras of the
North, we see as in a flash how a plain story in
the hands of simple people becomes a miracle-
studded legend. The story of St. Francis is
Christendom's exact parallel. As told by
THE SYSTEMS, AND MAN. 53
Frater Leo, his contemporary, it is a bit of
history. As given, in the same century, by a
Bonaventura, it is a tissue of impossible
miracles. When, then, we talk of founding
our system upon fact, the questions imme-
diately arise, " How much do we know of
our fact ? With what eyes have we or our
ancestors viewed it ? How much of its
innermost secret lies yet unveiled ? "
From a study of this kind some conclusions
emerge which none of us may neglect. One is
the supremacy of personality. Greater than
all his past work, as it stands there in sciences,
theologies, churches, is the worker himself.
You talk of revelation ! Here, man, did you
but know it, in your own living soul, is the very
tissue of revelation, the treasure-house out
of which it all has come ! And yet it is not
you, but the Something within and behind,
that is greatest of all. For you are ever the
Eternal coming into time, and by your growing
spirit making Himself visible and giving
Himself speech. This is above all things the
lesson of Christianity. It is throughout the
story of victorious personality. Jesus con-
quered the world, not so much by what He
said, divine as that is, but by what He was.
The Greek and Eastern philosophers had
uttered beforehand almost all His teachings,
but He exhibited to men a soul greater than
all teachings, a soul whose divine sweetness
54 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
and power have been the main human uplift
through all these later ages.
If such be the place and work of the human
spirit, what kind of life should we, its possessors,
be living in this world ? Our business, it
seems, is that God may more and more utter
Himself through us. The deeper we descend
into ourselves the surer do we become of this ;
the clearer the signs of a Divinity that is
within, beneath, behind us. The days and
the years are for the weaving of that Divine
into speech and act. We are here to help
on the ever-growing kingdom, nothing less or
other. In the words of Professor Royce, who
in his deep, philosophic way sums up thus the
aim of our human striving : " When I seek
my own goal I am seeking for the whole of
myself. In so far as my aim is the absolute
completion of my selfhood, my goal is identical
with the whole life of God."
VII.
The Eternal Gospel.
WITHIN the circle of modern Christianity
two movements are going on before our eyes,
each of extraordinary interest, and each re-
lated in the most vital manner to the other.
On the one hand we see an evangelistic Chris-
tianity putting forth its strength, and achiev-
ing the old triumphs over the human con-
science and will. But behind this activity
and emotion there has been going on a ceaseless
mental movement, which is carrying us far.
Men are praying and working with a new
enthusiasm. Into religion's open door new
converts are flocking. But the region they
enter is not entirely the same as that our
fathers knew. It has some new features. It
is a broader, roomier realm, with a fresher air
and a vaster prospect. In short, what has
been going on may be described as at once a
reinforcement and a reconstruction of the
Christian idea. It is to this latter movement
we wish here specially to give attention. We
propose to point out, in certain definite re-
55
56 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
spects, how modern research and what has
been called " the irresistible maturing of the
human mind " have acted upon our present-
day view of the Christian Gospel.
The doctrine in which people now middle-
aged were brought up was that of a Chris-
tianity which stood out from all other faiths as
the one true religion amongst a multitude of
false ones. According to it the outside world
was in absolute darkness. Even to-day the
word " heathen " carries the idea of realms
which are practically God-forsaken. Against
this outer desolation Christianity, with its
doctrines of Incarnation, of Divine Sonship,
of Atonement, of the Holy Spirit ; with its
sacred institutions, with its immortal life
behind, stood out as separate, distinct, divided
by an impassable gulf. The difference was
that between midday and midnight, between
truth and falsehood, between God and the
devil. This view was the foundation of
divinity systems, the staple of sermons, the
motive of missions. How does it look now ?
There has been an immense revulsion, and
one of the features of it is the discovery, so
vastly surprising to the average man, that the
doctrine he was brought up on was not the
earlier Christian teaching at all. The noblest
of the old apologists thought very differently,
he finds, of the outside races and faiths, from
what he had been led to imagine. He hears
THE ETERNAL GOSPEL. 57
of Justin Martyr, standing so close to the
apostolic age, who regards the wisdom of
Socrates as inspired by the " Word " ; of
Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, whose teaching
is of the entire race of man as under the Divine
tutorship ; of Lactantius maintaining that
belief in Providence was the common property
of all religions. In later days he notes Eras-
mus, with his proposition to canonise Virgil and
to bring " Saint Socrates " into the Litany.
The finer Christian minds have, in fact, in
every age gone more or less along this line.
It needed only that men should come into
contact with these outside races, whether in
their literature or face to face, to realise at
once that the " impassable gulf " theory be-
tween one religion and another was false to
life and to the soul. How otherwise ? Could
it be a Christian thought that those vast popu-
lations, succeeding each other through cen-
turies and millenniums, all of them, as we
come to know them, eager as ourselves to solve
the problem of life ; all, like ourselves, sinning,
suffering, repenting, and boundlessly aspiring ;
could it be possible, if a God were in heaven,
that these should be without a teaching, a
leading, a consolation, a preparation for death
and after ?
The view which, from the beginning, was
impossible to the heart has now become im-
possible to the intellect. Christianity has
5
58 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
to-day fallen into line. Its position has become
assured in a new way, by the discovery of its
marvellous relation to the faiths that have
gone before, and that have lived alongside it.
The first and last, the eternal religion, the
crown of all, it is at the same time seen as akin
to all. The famous saying of Augustine that
the Christian faith is that which has been in
the world from the beginning has received
confirmation in a way that would have sur-
prised himself. What we have now to rejoice
in is the truth, established in a thousand ways,
that the great doctrines and institutions of the
Gospel are the highest forms of a doctrine and
an institution that the race of man has been
trained in through all its history. God has
been teaching His child everywhere the same
truths and in the same way. Religion, by a
hundred different names and forms, has been
dropping the one seed into the human heart,
opening the one truth as the mind was able
to receive it. We may trace the process now
in one or two particulars.
We spoke just now of what are called the
distinctive doctrines of Christianity of In-
carnation, of Divine Sonship, of Atonement,
of the Holy Spirit. In an earlier chapter we
dealb with the symbolic character of these
doctrines. But there is now something
else to say. It is when we come to
inquire how these doctrines arose and took
THE ETERNAL GOSPEL. 59
their present shape, that we strike upon what
we may call the essential solidarity of the
great world-religions their kinship and unity
of meaning. The Gospel we have received
centres round the person and work of Christ,
as these are described for us in the New Tes-
tament. But has it ever occurred to us to
ask how these descriptions came into exist-
ence there ? Here we come on a marvel
The New Testament is a world's book, not only
because it is for the world, but also because
the whole world joined in the making of it.
We find that the personality of Jesus has been
here fitted into a framework which all the
ages and all the earlier faiths had united to
prepare. New Testament Christianity is, in
this way, the product not simply of the first
Christian century, and of the Galilean dis-
ciples. It had the entire human race as
collaborator.
The language, for instance, in which Christ
is described was all there, ready made. As
Wernle puts it : " The early Christians ex-
perienced something altogether abnormal in
Jesus, but their own words fail to express it.
So they turn to the Jewish categories nearest
at hand and attempt to confine the indefinable
within these definitions." And what were
these " Jewish categories " ? When, in the
Epistle to the Colossians, we read of Christ as
"the Son," as "the image of the invisible
60 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
God," as " the first-born of every creature,"
we ask, where did these ideas come from ?
Did they spring to birth at the moment by a
special inspiration in the mind of the writer ?
Was that the way also in which the prologue
to the fourth Gospel was written, in which
we have the doctrine of the eternal Word,
the Logos, who was " with God, and was God,
by whom all things were made " ? By no
means. These thought-forms, in which the
New Testament writers clothed the personality
of Jesus, were already there awaiting their use.
Judaism was full of them. Philo of Alexan-
dria, in his " De Monarchid" had already
written of the Logos as " the Word, by which
the world was made," as " the image of the
supreme Deity," as " His first begotten Son,"
as "an Intercessor between the Creator and
the created." And that "Book of Enoch"
which had been for a century the nurture of
pious Jews had taught the doctrine of a
Messiah who was " the Chosen One," the
" Son of Man who was hidden with God before
the world was, whose dominion endureth from
eternity to eternity."
And that true religion meant incarnation,
the humbling of Godhead into humanity was
a view also which Christianity, as it formulated
its doctrine, found everywhere already ac-
cepted amongst men. It was the doctrine of
Brahminism, of Buddhism, of the Zend Avesta,
THE ETERNAL GOSPEL. 61
of the Greek mythology. In the Empire where
Christianity was born the idea had lowered
itself to the gross and commonplace form of
the cult of the Emperor as divine. At Halicar-
nassus was to be seen the inscription to Augus-
tus which proclaimed him " the paternal Zeus
and saviour of the whole race of mankind."
And as with Incarnation so with sacrifice and
Atonement. The doctrine of the New Testa-
ment in the Gospels, in the Acts, in the
Epistles is above all things a doctrine of the
Cross, of sacrifice, of redemption by blood.
How did it get there ? The tragedy on Cal-
vary had, in the minds of the disciples who
looked upon it, no connection with this doc-
trine. What they saw was only a brutal doing
to death, a catastrophe, the ruin of all their
hopes. The Gospel narratives are at one in
this testimony. But as time passed, to that
first idea of helpless suffering and dying came
another. By a psychological process, which
was as inevitable as it was natural, the dying
of Jesus took on the clothing woven for it by
long centuries of Judaic teaching and
ceremony. "Here," they now realised, "was
the culmination of the long ages of sacrifice
and of religious blood-shedding." And so the
doctrine was born.
And as with the doctrine, so with the insti-
tutions in which the doctrines were enshrined.
Baptism and the Lord's Supper are held as
62 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
distinctive Christian rites, but they are kin with
religious mysteries that have been celebrated
the world over and the ages through. Scholars
have been recently studying the Eleusinian
mysteries in their relation to the Christian
cult. Here, as well as in the Church, are bap-
tism, penitence, a sacred communion of bread
and wine, and a special teaching for the initiate.
How marvellous, too, in this connection, is
that ancient cult of Mithras in Persia, where,
as M. Cumont says : " Like the Christians, the
followers of Mithras lived in closely united
societies, calling one another father and
brother ; like the Christians, they practised
baptism, communion and confirmation ; taught
an authoritative morality, preached conti-
nence, chastity and self-denial, believed in the
immortality of the soul and the resurrection
of the dead." Does not our heart thrill with
sympathy for these souls of the far-off time
who also yearned, as we do, for the Good !
Here is one of their prayers we copy from
Dieterich's Mithrasliturgie offered by a bap-
tized initiate : " If it hath pleased you to
grant me the birth to immortality, grant that
I, after the present distress, which sorely
afflicts me, may gaze upon the immortal First
Cause, that I, through the Spirit, may be
born again, and that in me, purified by sacred
rite, and delivered from guilt, the Holy Spirit
may live and move."
THE ETERNAL GOSPEL. 63
One might continue without end this line
of illustration and of argument. The field
which modern research has here opened is
boundless. But enough for our purpose has
been said. What we wanted to show is, in
these instances, sufficiently revealed that the
Christian Gospel is not a bizarre, isolated thing,
cut off from the rest of the human story, but
is linked intimately and indissolubly with the
entire history of the world, one with it in
its struggle, its aspiration and its victory.
Here find we the Gospel at the head of the
world's faiths, the goal towards which they
strove, the realisation of what they dreamed.
God is here revealed not as intervening in this
or that patch of world territory simply, or
on this or that day of history, but as every-
where in humanity and all the time.
In this view Christianity stands as the
eternal religion. Chrysostom tells us that
the people of his Church at Constantinople
were full of questions, asking why Christ had
not come sooner, and about God's dealing
with the heathen world. We are to-day in a
better condition for answering those questions.
No human soul, of whatever world-age or
world-longitude, has been left without witness
or without help. These distant realms and
times, so far from being cut off from the
Church fellowship, were privileged in the
Divine Providence to help weave the very
64 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
garment of thought and language in which the
Christian doctrine was first set forth. They,
too, assisted to build the sacred temple of the
eternal religion. They, too, were of its apos-
tolate, though they knew it not. It took
all these ages, the experience, the passion,
the aspiration of the whole world, to frame
our New Testament. The entire race had
its hand in that production. The entire race
shares the Divine grace it proclaims, the
Divine kingdom to which it points.
VIII.
Calvary.
THE eternal religion, we have so far insisted,
recognises in Christianity its fullest expression.
But of Christianity the death and reported
resurrection of Jesus are everywhere recog-
nised as of the essence of its message. It
would accordingly be impossible, in an exposi-
tion of this kind, with any consistency, to
omit a statement of what we conceive to have
been the actuality and significance of these
events. We begin with the Crucifixion.
The death of Jesus at Jerusalem is, we may
say, the best attested fact of His career.
Concerning other parts of it the birth, the
childhood, the beginning and continuance of
the ministry, the miracles there have been
endless doubts and controversies. There is
no doubt about the death. The most
pronounced scepticism is clear on 'that.
A French anti-Christian propaganda, in
denying the resurrection, put recently
its position into the antithesis : " Jesus ,
mort devant tout le monde, ressuscite
65
66 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
devant personnel For everyone, in fact,
non-believer as much as believer, the tragedy
we commemorate on Good Friday stands
in clear day. The sense of historic accuracy,
which compels us to reject so much else,
pronounces us here on firmest ground. The
event, so far as actuality is concerned, is on a
footing with the assassination of Caesar, or
the execution of Charles the First. When
the story brings before us Annas and Caiaphas,
or that dissolute Spanish Roman, Pontius
Pilate, we know perfectly where we are.
Annas and Caiaphas Josephus has given
us their portraits. We know our Lucius
Pontius ; his father before him ; his pre-
decessors in the Judsean procuratorship ; his
doings before and after the crucifixion. Myth
and legend have, of course, since played with
his name. They have forged epistles for
him in the ancient manner. But we are at
home to-day in dealing with this kind of
material, and in the business of separating the
false from the true.
The whole tragedy of that Friday, the
fourteenth of Nisan, the seventh of April of
that year in our notation, the facts and the
personages connected with it, are, we say,
clearly before us, having indisputable place
in human chronology. That procession of
men wending its way from the Praetorium
through the narrow, ill-smelling lanes of
CALVARY. 67
Jerusalem to Golgotha ; the curious crowd,
the indifferent soldiery, the uplifting of the
prisoner there on the cross, the awful punish-
ment, which Cicero describes as " crudelis-
simum teterrimumque," were features in the
old city's life as actual as the passage there
to-day of the modern excursionist who covers
the route, guide-book in hand.
Thus much of the history. What now do
we make of it ? Surely never had plain
grim fact so marvellous an outcome. On this
story has been founded a theology a succes-
sion, in fact, of theologies comprehending
the entire science of God and man. And the
remarkable thing about it is that the actors
in the drama, the people in immediate contact,
had no remotest suspicion of there being any
theology in it ! They had a theology of their
own, but they saw no application of ifc here.
To the Roman and to the Jew the dDctrine
of sacrifice, animal and even human, was
quite familiar. But the death of Jesus con-
veyed to them no hint of sacrifice. Tae
elements were wanting. A sacrifice meant
the offering of the victim as a gift or a pro-
pitiation to the unseen Powers. But Caiaphas
and Pilate were making no such offering. They
were simply carrying out a judicial sentence ;
putting to death a condemned criminal.
Yet on that, to them, commonplace trans-
action Jias, we say, been built a world-religion.
68 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
The cross, up to then a word synonymous
with our " gibbet," has become the most
sacred of names. On its grim front has been
hung the most wondrous of thought-systems,
a system varying with the times, but ever
renewing itself, a system compounded of
early world beliefs, of ancient cosmogonies,
of wildest phantasies, of profoundest truths.
In the early centuries ponderous tomes were
written to prove that Christ's death was an
offering to the devil. A later theory, which
ruled Christendom for centuries, saw in it an
offering to God for human sin ; a commercial
transaction, a quid pro quo of so much suffering
for so much guilt. People to-day sing hymns
with this as their motif ; many of them still
listen to sermons based on that assumption,
We imagine ourselves at a long distance
from the mental condition which led Jephthah
to slay his daughter, or Agamemnon to devote
Iphigenia to the knife. But the idea of
human sacrifice as a propitiation to Deity
is still an article in the creeds, and at the
back of much theological lucubration.
What, then, does the death of Jesus really
stand for ? What, if we reject these interpre-
tations, do we accept as its historical and
spiritual significance ? To get to that we need
to ask some preliminary questions. And
first we may inquire how it happened that the
event and these theories of it came together.
CALVARY. 69
Came together, we say, for the theory did not
grow out of the event ; rather it coalesced
with it. It is one of the miracles of history
that while no one ever thought of constructing
a theology out of the assassination of Caesar,
or the death of Socrates, there should have
come this one out of the death of Christ.
It is a miracle, we say, of the coincidence of
circumstance with a condition of the human
mind. On the one side stood the event ; at
first naked and solitary ; to all men, the
disciples included, an unrelieved tragedy.
Then floated towards it, not unguided, we
may be assured, the vast body of an ancient
people's thought and immemorial tradition.
The crucial point in the history here is that
the disciples, the apostles, Paul included,
were Jews. Their whole conception of the
world, its history, its religious purpose, was
Jewish. They had been brought up on the
doctrine of sacrifices as propitiatory of Deity.
As we to-day study scientifically the workings
of the human mind we perceive that it was
inevitable, if they framed a theory at all of
the death of their Master, it should cast itself
in this mould, be coloured by this conception.
It could not be otherwise. As we have
seen in the last chapter, the language,
the types, the whole thought-system were
there ready-made. They could only use the
tools they possessed ; they could only speak
70 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION.
the tongue they knew. The past, in the hour
even of its supersession, always exacts its
price. The price here was that, in dying,
Judaism fixed its language upon Christianity,
giving it a form of which we are to-day only
beginning to grasp the real significance.
But to-day, in which we are extracting the
true history from the " histories," in which
we are detaching events from their ancient
framework, in which we are moving among
myth and legend with the ease and certainty
which science has secured us ; to-day, is the
Cross, on these accounts, any less potent
or less precious to us ? In no degree. For
the marvel in spiritual evolution is that the
fading of earlier and cruder forms is always to
make room for fitter and more effectual ones.
The Cross has survived all its interpretations,
proof in itself of the Divine reality hidden in it.
The death there consummated was indeed
a sacrifice, the greatest of all, carrying in itself
whatsoever of worth was included in the dim
ideas of earlier times, and lifting the whole
conception into another plane. Augustine
had surely prophetic insight into this in that
great word of his in the De Civitate Dei : " Huic
summo veroque sacrificio cuncta sacrificia falsa
cesserunt. In this highest and true sacrifice
the false sacrifices around have ceased."
It is ever the way of evolution for the higher
form to contain in itself all the lower ones,
CALVARY. 71
in a new manifestation which at once trans-
forms and transcends them. And so we find
the New Testament writers, while using of
necessity the language and thought-forms
into which they were born, have in their
doctrine of the death made no mistake as to
the innermost significance of it.
It is one of the extraordinary features of
this theme that the critic, if his one interest
is the truth, is obliged in the end to become
constructive. The same rigid analysis which,
in discussing the history of the event, leads
him to cut away so much of the earlier con-
ceptions, compels him now upon another
and deeper line of things. The question he
has to answer is, why did the disciples, in their
story of the Cross, in Gospel and Epistle, offer
us this theory of it ? They threw their
theory, as we have said, into a given form ;
but why a theory at all ? They were not
paid to offer one ; neither bribe nor threat
compelled them to their view. It was a
purely voluntary business ; an irresistible inner
movement of the mind. Nobody, as we have
already said, made a religion out of the death
of Caesar. What caused a religion to come
out of the death of Christ ? The answer is
inevitable. It was because Christ was what
He was. It was the character, the life and
spirit of the Victim ; what He had done
and said ; what He had made them feel about
72 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
Himself ; this it was that wove the spell, that
created their doctrine.
And the doctrine, when we see beneath the
Judaic phraseology, is clear. Here is no
placation of an offended Deity. The better
mind of Israel had got already far beyond
that conception. The sacrifices of God are a
broken heart and a contrite spirit. A father
wants no intervening slaughter as a reason
for loving his prodigal. What bound the
New Testament Christians with everlasting
bonds to the Cross was that it was the Master
who hung there ; the Master whose love
reached here its highest expression, its perfect
and eternal consummation. That was what
they meant when they said that " He bore
our sins " ; that " He had purchased^the
Church with His own blood." Yes, He had
bought all His followers that way. He had
bound them for ever to Him by such love
as never before was dreamed. The Cross
became the fountain of redemption because
there throbbed the spirit of redemption. In
their sorrow, in their loss, in their disgrace,
in their weakness, in their hour of death, men
lift their eyes to the Cross because there they
see, in a light which no lapse of time, no
change of circumstance can ever dim, a
perfect submission, a perfect self-sacrifice, a
perfect love which reach even to the evil and
to the lost.
CALVARY. 73
It is this note of an absolute surrender
toward God, and a perfect love towards
men, that in all time has made the Cross
the saving power. It is this which, amid
all the barbaric interpretations of it, has given
the preaching of the Cross its unutterable
charm. The crudeness of the theory could
never prevent the love from breaking through,
and it was love that wrought the marvels.
A Bernard, a Luther, a Spurgeon preach the
Cross ; their doctrinal interpretation may differ
each from the others, and all from our own.
But the one spirit shines through, and human
hearts are melted and won. In every age
the charm works. What Justin Martyr said
at the beginning has gone on repeating itself.
" For Socrates has no one shown such faith
as to die for his doctrine, but for Christ's sake
not only philosophers, but also mechanics
and unlearned men have suffered death."
And thus, in Lamartine's words, the tomb
of Christ has been the grave of the old world
and the cradle of the new.
No religion could be perfect without a
perfect death. Christianity gives us that.
Rousseau, comparing Socrates with Jesus,
says that the death of Socrates was the death
of a hero, the death of Jesus was the death
of a God. It is significant that Mohamme-
danism, feeling its lack here, has, among the
Shiite section at least, invented a Passion
74 THE ETEKNAL RELIGION.
Week of its own ; and in Persia makes the
Passion plays which dramatise the deaths
of Ali and his sons the great religious festival
of the year. The substitute is a fit measure
of the distance between the two religions.
The Persian Teaziehs are a poor business
beside the Christian commemoration. At
Calvary we learn to love and to serve.
There also we learn to suffer and to die.
Said Michel Angelo, " When you come to die
remember the Passion of Jesus Christ." The
artist's sublime genius had taught him nothing
better than that. Calvary is indeed a good
place to come to. The Jew of old time trod
the slopes which led upward to the city with
,songs of rejoicing. We climb them with
a fuller, tenderer consciousness. The air we
breathe here is of heaven. The prospect is
divine. " Life," says our modern poet,
" struck sharp on death, makes awful lightning."
This Life, struck sharp on this Death, makes
more than lightning makes a radiance in
which God's innermost secret is revealed.
IX.
What was the Resurrection?
THE beliefs connected with Easter Day have,
within the lifetime of many of us, gone through
some startling phases. During that period
the educated mind has had, on this question,
shocks as it were of earthquake. Between
the present attitude and the unquestioning
assurance of the earlier orthodoxy a great gulf
has yawned. The state of mind which per-
mitted Tertullian to say, and generations to
repeat after him : " Et sepultus resurrexit ;
certum est quia impossibile est" " And He
being buried rose again ; it is certain because
it is impossible " has passed away. We can
no longer talk about the happening of im-
possibles. The new habit of historic realism
has destroyed our faculty of self-delusion.
The past has ceased to be the refuge of the
incredible. The first century, we realise,
belonged as much to the world-system as the
twentieth, and its happenings were under the
same laws. Palestine is as much a part of our
planet as New York or London, and whatever
75
76 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
has occurred in the one place is such as might
occur in the others. The documents, ancient
or otherwise, which deal with religion must,
with the modern man, have as much actuality
in them as his newspaper, if they are to have
any more than a conventional value.
The rise into clear consciousness of this feel-
ing produced first of all in our generation a
tremendous rebound in the direction of scepti-
cism. Thirty years ago the region of the actual,
as compared with the merely imaginable,
seemed to have become strangely narrowed
down. Physical science had closed in upon
man like a vast lid that shut out his sky.
Life was being examined with the scalpel and
the microscope, and these made no discoveries
of immortality. The new criticism threw
scorn upon the old human legend. Where
there was no scorn, there was despair. What
that first reaction meant for earnest souls is
given us in those memorable, mournful lines
of Matthew Arnold :
While we believed, on earth He went
And open stood His grave ;
Men called from chamber, church and tent
And Christ was by to save.
Now He is dead. Far hence He lies
In the lorn Syrian town,
And on His grave with shining eyes
The Syrian stars look down.
In that phase of the Western mind the f eeling
of literature was also represented by the
WHAT WAS THE RESURRECTION ? 77
wonderful passage in Renan, where, in the
Vie de Jesus, at that turning-point of all
history, he makes the fancy of an hysterical
woman, the opening and shutting of a door,
the breath of the Eastern breeze, into the
producing causes of the resurrection faith
which created Christendom.
But this attitude towards the great Easter
faith is already, with the best minds, passing
away. Some new factors in judging the
problem have come in. Modern science, which
began by limiting the human horizon, is now
enlarging it on every side. It is discovering
that the instruments it uses are not so adequate
as it once thought for sizing up man and his
destiny. It cannot explain him by its cycle
of laws. At a dozen points he breaks through
them into another sphere. And his history
breaks through likewise. In its own immediate
department, indeed, science is to-day using a
totally new language from that of a generation
ago. One of the most eminent of its professors,
Professor Shaler, speaking of the groups of
natural laws, declares of them that they are
not to be understood as " evidences of inevit-
able and infinitely distributed events, but as
having a limited field of certainty. They hold
on this planet and for our age." And further :
" All that we divine of the unseen leaves us
to conceive that it is a realm of unending
and infinitely varied originations. Into the
78 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
equation is continually going the influential
qualities of newly-formed individualities, and
from it is continually being drawn those that
pass away." In other words, our universe is
discovered to be vastly more elastic, fuller of
unimagined possibilities, freer to the play of
spirit, than the age of early Darwinism could
allow itself to believe.
When, from this new starting-point, we
come back to investigate the Easter tradition,
we find our attitude, while far removed from
that of the old conventional orthodoxy, to be
equally remote from that of a pessimistic un-
belief. It is that, in fact, of a faith, actual
and operative, because established on grounds
that the modern mind finds reliable. Let us
examine how the matter stands. Our first
duty we see is to take matters in their proper
order. And the natural order here, as in every
other inquiry, will lead us, as a beginning, not
to causes but to effects. What occupied
men first in the phenomena of a thunderstorm
were not the electrical laws, but the blinding
flash and the echoing roar, and the impression
these made on their senses. From that
followed the search for causes. In the quest
they were guided by the instinct which assured
them that this impression on their senses was
a reliable measure of the outside reality. In
like manner, in studying the phenomena of
the Easter faith, we come first to the immense
WHAT WAS THE RESURRECTION ? 79
fact of the faith itself. Here, as with the
impression of our thunderstorm, is a tre-
mendous effect wrought on a multitude of
human minds and hearts. Nobody, not the
most destructive of critics, ever questions
that effect. Nobody doubts that whatever
happened at Jerusalem after the death of
Christ, the apostles and the early Christians
believed and taught that He rose from the
dead. The belief and the teaching were un-
questionably there. What had caused them ?
This brings us to the account of the Resur-
rection, as given in the Christian Scriptures.
Have we here the true cause ? Again, much
depends on the order in which we take
the evidence. The average English reader
naturally accepts what, on this subject, he
finds first in the New Testament as what
actually is first. He needs to correct that
impression. The four Gospels are not our
earliest evidence of what really happened after
the crucifixion. The remarkable varieties of
the Gospel Resurrection narratives show in
themselves that they are not a first-hand
witness. They are the fruit of a time in which
discrepancies had been allowed to grow. So
great are these discrepancies that one of the
most eminent of modern critics, Professor
Harnack, declares that on this account the
Easter stories are not historically reliable.
But that, surely, is too sweeping an assertion.
80 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
Discrepancies may throw doubt upon details,
but not, of themselves, upon central facts.
It is the very nature of great facts to produce
discrepant stories. Mr. Andrew Lang, in his
work, " The Mystery of Marie Stuart," speak-
ing of the murder of Darnley, declares, and
with perfect justice, that if the wide differ-
ences of statement of persons closely connected
with the event were to be taken as invalidating
their testimony as to the central fact, then
assuredly the murder of Darnley never took
place at all. A newspaper controversy some
time ago revealed the extraordinary diver-
gences of statement of trustworthy persons
as to the way in which the news of Waterloo
first came to England. But no one doubts
the murder of Darnley, nor that England did
receive early tidings of Wellington's great
victory. Great events, it seems, commonly
create discrepant stories of them. It would
be a strange procedure, on that account, to
take the discrepancies as destroying the event !
But what, we ask again, was the event
which produced the Easter stories ? Fortu-
nately we have here an earlier witness than
that of the Synoptics and of the Fourth Gospel.
It is that of St. Paul. His letters are the earliest
written evidence as to that birth hour of
Christianity. St. Paul's Gospel, like that of the
other apostles, was, above all things, a Gospel
of the Resurrection. He preached a risen
WHAT WAS THE RESURRECTION ? 81
Christ, and he believed Christ risen because
he had seen Him and had felt His power.
When, in the fifteenth of I. Corinthians, one of
our very earliest extant Christian documents,
he speaks of the successive appearances of the
risen Lord, first to Cephas, then to the twelve,
then to five hundred at once, afterwards to
James, and again to all the apostles, he winds
up with the appearance to himself. That
appearance was an overwhelming fact in his
life. It had converted him from an opponent
to a fervent believer ; had wholly transformed
his views and his destinies. But what was
this appearance ? Observe, he puts it on
precisely the same level as the earlier mani-
festations to the other apostles and disciples.
He offers no hint that his experience in this
matter was other than theirs.
And his experience what of it ? The
supreme and governing fact about it is that
it was a purely subjective one. Whatever
happened at Damascus was a happening to his
own interior soul. What he saw was unseen
of his companions. And the whole after-
testimony of the apostle as to his relation to
Christ tallies with this first beginning. The
relation was that of a spiritual force working
upon him, within him, from out of the unseen
world. He knew his Master to be living in
that realm because of vital communications
from Him which set his being aflame. " When
82 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION.
it pleased God to reveal His Son in me " ;
here for Paul was the Easter faith and the
Easter fact.
It is here, in this earliest story of the Resur-
rection, that we have the clue to all the rest.
We ask our readers to study carefully the
whole of the narratives on this subject of
the four Gospels, to note what they say, and
more, what they suggest. Everywhere, they
will discover, there is the idea of a manifesta-
tion that takes the form of an unearthly,
immaterial and wholly spiritual happening.
What is the meaning of the phrase in Matthew
where, describing the appearance in Galilee,
the writer says, " But some doubted " ?
What else but that the awesome impression
made on the minds of the disciples left some
of them wondering what precise actuality
lay behind this glimpse, this stir from the
Unseen ? What is the suggestion in Luke's
story of the walk to Emmaus, where the
mysterious companion of the two disciples is
at first unrecognised by them, and then
vanishes out of their sight ? The psychic
character so unmistakably manifest in these
accounts is not less prominent in those of the
Fourth Gospel. It appears in the " touch me
not " of the garden story, and in the repeated
statement that " the doors were shut " when
the Master suddenly appeared to the assembled
company.
WHAT WAS THE RESURRECTION ? 83
There is no getting rid of these hints. Any
theory which takes the post-mortem Gospel
stories into account must square itself with
them. They dispose utterly of the idea that,
in the minds of the writers, the appearance to
the first believers was of a body which even
resembled in character and quality that which
had been laid in the grave. And it is precisely
at this point that we meet the objection of
those who ask, " What on this theory is to be
made of the empty tomb ; and what became
of the body of Jesus ? " Our answer is quite
simple. We do not know, nor does anyone
else. That is one of the secrets of history.
As De Wette says, a darkness rests on these
details which, with our present information,
it is impossible to penetrate. But, let it be
immediately observed, that if the view here
taken throws no light on this point, neither
does any other theory that holds closely to
the Biblical accounts, A form which made
men " suppose they had seen a spirit," which
appeared suddenly in a room whose doors were
closed, and which vanished without warning
from men's sight, whatever it might be, was
assuredly, we repeat, not the physical form
that was interred in Joseph's new tomb-
Moreover, the idea of a transformation of the
one into the other is neither scientific nor
Biblical. Apart from other considerations, it
would be a flat contradiction of St. Paul's
84 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
argument : " That which thou sowest, thou
sowest not that body that shall be ...
so also is the resurrection of the dead."
It is a sufficient clue ; it is a credible one ;
and it is one that leaves the vital Christian
faith not only unimpaired, but re-born to a
new actuality for our age. What had hap-
pened to Paul had happened to earlier fol-
lowers of the Crucified. They, too, " had
seen the Lord." After the last scene on
Calvary, after the pure soul on the Cross there
had breathed itself forth to the Father, there
was for a time nothing but blank desolation
for His followers. And then, striking across
the black darkness, there came, first to one
and then to another, mysterious thrills of the
Spirit, glimpses, unveilings, openings of the
inner eye, and visions printing themselves
upon it ; the supersensuous within vibrating
to motions of the supersensuous without.
And the whole ineffable movement was instinct
with a sense and feeling of their vanished
Lord. They knew that it was He. Before
His death He was a link for them between
two worlds. Even then the largest part
of Him was in and of that higher sphere.
Now, wholly taken into it, He was whispering
them from it, and pouring into their hearts
of its unimaginable treasures. The Resurrec-
tion, in fine, was the psychic manifestation of
the departed Lord.
WHAT WAS THE RESURRECTION ? 85
That was for the first disciples the Easter
faith. It was the faith that converted them
and started them to convert the world. When
people ask, " What was the Resurrection ? "
there is our reply. It is Paul's reply, and what
was good enough for him should be good
enough for us. The more so, as it is one in
which history, science and present human
experience unite and harmonise. And it
contains all we need, for it gives us the risen
and ever-living Christ, and opens the Kingdom
of Heaven to all belie vers*
X.
Our Moral Habitat.
A FUNDAMENTAL feature of the eternal religion
is its relation to morality. On one point all
sane men are agreed that moral character
is the supreme life value. The men of
action and the men of thought are alike solid
on this conclusion. Napoleon, and Cromwell
before him, held that beyond all question of
equipment or strategy was an army's morale
as a condition of victory. Huxley put his
conviction into the caustic saying, " Clever
men are as common as blackberries ; the rare
thing is to find a good one." Tyndall utters
his verdict in the saying, " There is a thing of
more value than science, and it is nobility of
character." From his side of things, Emerson
writes : " The foundation of culture, as of
character, is at last the moral sentiment.
If we live truly, we shall see truly." The
soldier, the sceptic, the materialist, the littera-
teur, as much as the orthodox theologian, is,
we see, convinced that in the mysterious
sphere of things deep down within us, where
OUR MORAL HABITAT. 87
work our powers of choice and will, is to be
sought the real significance and potency of our
life. All the world is of opinion that, for
national and individual welfare, nothing touches
in importance the securing, in that quarter,
of healthy conditions.
Yet, with all that taken for granted, nothing
is more singular than the way in which we
treat this side of ourselves. We occupy, and
daily do our work from, a given moral habitat,
with the vaguest ideas as to how we came
by it, as to what its condition is, and as to
how the changes which it is constantly under-
going tend to its betterment or its worsening.
The theme is one that, of course, runs through
the very centre of religious teaching, but
its treatment has been, too often, a purely
conventional one. There is room and need
for some more definite conclusions here than
most of us appear to have reached, conclusions
founded on the actual experience of life.
Be it remembered, to begin with, that
our moral habitat is a twofold affair. There is,
first, that of the external circumstances by
which we are surrounded. But within these,
and far closer to us, is a structure, which is also
a habitat, growing up around us, woven out
of our past, knit of a million volitions, judg-
ments and acts ; a vital structure we carry
everywhere with us, and which in a healthy
nature has become the master and manipulator
88 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
of the external, rejecting its deleterious,
transmuting its raw material into nutriment,
and by its adaptations securing health in the
midst of surrounding disease. Both these
forms of our moral habitat offer richest material
of observation, and are worth our most careful
study.
The sphere of outside circumstances is,
we say, in itself a moral habitat. Everything
in the world yonder the food we eat, the air
we breathe, the age we are born in, the country
we belong to, the social position we occupy
carries its special moral quality which is
incessantly working upon us. There have
been writers, indeed, who have made this
external factor the all-dominant one. Buckle,
in his " History of Civilisation," takes it as an
axiom that the character of nations and races
is an affair of their climate, of their geographical
conditions, of the food they eat. Buckle made
here the mistake of people who take the half
for the whole, yet his half has undoubtedly
to be reckoned with. Part of the mystery of
our fate lies in its being knit so closely to our
time and our class. A given age has a certain
tincture which dyes all the souls that are born
in it. What an inner adversity, for instance,
to have belonged to the Germany of the Thirty
Years' War, a time when, according to a con-
temporary writer, in addition to a physical
misery which reduced the population from
OUR MORAL HABITAT. 89
sixteen to four millions, and which led men to
devour the corpses that hung on the gallows,
there was a depravation of manners amongst
all classes, and amongst the nobility especially,
which almost surpasses belief. Professions
also, trades, callings, have their speciality
of moral climate. How is it, by the way,
that the " law " has in this connection got
everywhere so bad a name ? " Whv," cries
a character in one of our early English come-
dies, " does the lawyer wear black ? Does
he carry his conscience outside ? " And what
a cruel saying is that concerning St. Yves,
the lawyer saint of Brittany : " Advocatus
et non latro, res miranda populo" which we may
freely translate as, " He was a lawyer without
being a thief a thing which to the world was
a miracle in itself ! " We may fairly hope
the ethical climate in that particular quarter
has improved since then.
The influence of the external on character
has, perhaps, its most vivid illustration in the
effects of foreign travel, and the exile, voluntary
or7otherwise, of men from their native' land.
The Anglo-Saxon, as the great modern traveller
and coloniser, has in this respect shown a
singular moral hardihood. In search of
expansion, of new trade, of a career, our race
has been perpetually breaking bounds, and
that, apparently, without much thought as to
what the results would be on its morals.
7
90 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
The results have been often deplorable enough.
It used to be said that Anglo-Indians, on their
way out, dropped their religion at the Cape,
and picked it up again on their way home,
when their career was over. And yet it says
something for the essential soundness of the
race at bottom, that, in its new ventures,
however unpromising the beginnings, the
moral factor comes out uppermost in the end.
There seems a faculty of moral, as well as of
physical acclimatisation, which enables our
people to thrive inwardly as well as outwardly
in the strangest surroundings. Sydney began
as a penal settlement, and San Francisco as a
haven of desperadoes. But the Australian
and the American city are to-day amongst
the best churched of communities.
To most of us, however, a more immediately
practical side of this theme is that of the
moral habitat as it exists around us here at
home. Without travelling beyond our parish
boundary we may find there momentous
changes, continual fresh conditions which
demand our closest attention. It is from
their failure to estimate these properly that
the men of our time seem, in such vast numbers,
to miss their way in life. They set themselves,
for instance, upon the race for wealth wealth
at any price without considering apparently
the kind of life they are to get out of it. For
life, the clarity, strength and beauty of the
OUR MORAL HABITAT. 91
inner spirit, as it grows and energises within
us from day to day, is plainly, to all who can
see, the main thing for us, in this world or any
other. And so in contemplating any changed
or " improved " circumstances our question
first and last should be : What effect will all
this have upon my inner state ; will it make
me more humble, more helpful, more loving ;
will it fill me fuller of clear-springing thought ;
will ideals be higher, will the spiritual currents
run stronger and more deeply ?
We find much fault to-day with asceticism,
yet amid its excesses it had this merit, that it
stood for the idea of moral prosperity as above
all other prosperities. Savonarola at Florence,
and Bernard in his cell at Clairvaux, led their
life of outward bareness and poverty from the
conviction that, as related to the things they
sought for the fulness of spiritual power,
a conscious union with God, a freedom of
intercourse and growing influence for good
upon their fellows, and the expansion of all
their higher faculties the external pomps
and luxuries were a hindrance and a vanity.
They carried their ideas, we say, to an ex-
treme, but the experience of such men, and the
power they wielded, should be a lesson to
every teacher of religion. It is the lesson of
the simple life, which all the greater spirits
have practised. Will a million of money
or a palace to live in give me nobler inspira-
92 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
tions, a deeper insight into life, a warmer
affection for my fellows, a better power of
serving them ? Will all this build up in
me a structure of finer tissue, with which to
issue forth, when the time comes, to that
world unseen ? If not ; if it would rather be a
hindrance ; while frugality and simplicity, such
as a Socrates or a Milton practised, will be the
truer help, why for a moment crave the purple
and fine linen ? All religious teachers need,
we say, to remember this. They will lose
power if they forget it. It was a brutal remark
which George II. is reported to have made
of Hoadly, but it put in a coarse way the
line of thinking which the world instinctively
takes on this theme : " Very modest of a
canting, hypocritical knave to be crying ' the
Kingdom of Christ is not of this world ' at the
same time that he as Christ's ambassador
receives six thousand a year ! "
* In the war of sects which characterises
the religious life of England to-day the issues
are, by the contending parties, looked upon
largely as doctrinal or ecclesiastical. Some
day an observer will arise who will adjudge
the issues as quite other than this. Germany
had such an observer in Goethe. In his
" Dichtung und Wahrheit," after speaking
of the German Established Church of his time
as " giving barren morals without nourish-
ment for heart or soul/' and of the Dissenters
OUR MORAL HABITAT. 93
Quietists, Herrnhuters, Pietists and the
like as all " seeking a nearer access to God
than the forms of the Church afforded," he
observes : " the Dissenters were always in a
minority as to numbers, but ever remarkable
for originality, fervour and independence."
When in England, on the controversy between
privileged and unprivileged religion, the balance
has finally to be struck, the issue in like
manner will lie, we imagine, not in this or that
dogmatic definition, but in the relative moral
textures that have been woven, in the relative
inner states that have been realised, in the
rival communities. To some of us inner
freedom is worth many bishoprics.
There is one department of this study
which might well have occupied it entirely that
of the inner habitat which the soul provides
for itself, and which goes everywhere with it.
The grandest fruit of our earlier moral victories
is that their results are woven into this structure
and help to make it and us invulnerable.
It is because they have this as their sur-
rounding, that spiritual natures can live and
thrive in moral quagmires. The truth about
them is finely expressed in that rule which
St. Vincent de Paul gave to his " Filles de la
Charit6 " : " The streets of the city or the
houses of the sick shall be your cells, obedience
your solitude, the fear of God your grating, a
strict and holy modesty your only veil." In
94 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
a free and growing soul this structure, woven
out of our past and present, and open sheer
to the heavens, becomes growingly real to our
consciousness. It regulates for us the tempera-
ture of the outside world, and amid the dis-
orders of the external creates an inner calm
where the spiritual can have full play. It is,
as it were, the condensed exhalation of our
personality which, when death has loosed the
bond between us and the physical, may take
shape in the spiritual world as the form of the
life we have here been leading.
XI.
The Story of Morals.
A FURTHER insight into the question of religion
and morals will be gained by the glance,
which we propose to take in this chapter,
into the history of morality in its relation
to man's spiritual side. The story here, both
of past and present, is at first eight confusing
enough. Modern society offers us the sinister
spectacle of a religion which too often dispenses
with morality, and of a morality which is
seeking to dispense with religion. All the
civilised countries are contributing their special
variety of this entanglement. In France
we see a formidable movement to found a
so-called scientific morality, which shall be
independent of the Christian sanction. Paris
and the great towns have witnessed of late
huge assemblies where the speakers, cutting
themselves off from the religious idea, have
urged the promotion of justice, social order
and morality on purely naturalistic grounds.
If we pass from France to its ally Russia we see
the opposite extreme. Here is a religion, a
95
96 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
form of Christianity, professed with immense
fervour by all classes of the populace, but with
the loosest possible relation to morals. That
the village priest should regularly get drunk
is considered part of the order of things.
The nation swarms to the churches on every
possible occasion, and is meantime, throughout
its whole civil and military organisation, the
theatre of the vastest and most thoroughly
organised corruption in the world.
One could multiply these illustrations end-
lessly. Every nation, as we have said, offers
its own variety. There is one whole side of
the history of religion, the study of which
might put us in doubt as to whether it had any
ethical value at all. There have been faiths
which were direct panderers to vice. To be
a " Corinthian " was, down to Shakespeare's
day, a synonym for a dissolute character,
and Corinth owed its reputation in this respect
to its great temple of Aphrodite, with its
hundreds of female devotees whose religious
service was practically a prostitution. But
let us not suppose that paganism has been the
only offender here. The record of Christianity
in its relation to morals has been a very
mixed one. We have instanced Russia, but
there are others besides. An eminent
French ex-Abbe told the present writer that of
the French clergy of to-day perhaps one-
third might be reckoned as pure men, true to
THE STOEY OF^MORALS. 97
their celibate vows. Zwingli said of the
Catholic clergy of his time, " Scarce one in a
thousand was chaste." What the Church
morals of the Renaissance were is sufficiently
shown by the records of the Borgias, and by
the elevation of an ^Eneas Sylvius to the
Popedom. And lest we should think the
looseness here was all on one side, Protestants
will do well to remember that extraordinary
transaction of the double marriage of the
Landgrave of Hesse, when a Lutheran divine,
in giving his benediction to the marriage,
declared that " monogamy had had its day,"
and when Luther's friend, Bugenhagen, ad-
duced examples of bigamy among the early
Christians ! On this special aspect of morals
we get disquieting reports also nearer home.
Recently two of our English districts, specially
under the influence of Methodism Cornwall
and the Potteries have been marked out
(though we believe with some exaggeration)
as on the black-list in regard to sexual relations.
And one of the most baffling problems with
which earnest men have been confronted is
that contained in the undoubted fact that
intense religious feeling has been found, in so
many instances, susceptible of the swiftest
transition to animal passion.
But this is not all. There are other aspects
of the moral question in which the history
of religion offers us difficulties rather than
98 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
solutions. Take, for instance, the matter
of truthfulness. Pascal's maxim that " the
first of Christian truths is that truth should
be loved above all," has never yet taken real
hold of the religious consciousness. We are
suffering endless perplexities to-day simply
because the earlier Christian writers did not
esteem truth as a virtue. The modern scholar,
as he works upon that early Christian litera-
ture, is perpetually conscious that in his
search for the exact truth of things, he is
in contact with writers who had no vivid
sense themselves of the value of accuracy and
of the simple, unadorned fact. And to-day
there are numbers of religious people, excel-
lent in general character and intention, who
will refuse to open their minds to a truth,
however well it has been established, which
seems to contradict some earlier prepos-
session.
Here, then, we are face to face with some
great questions. Has religion, then, no in-
evitable bearing on morality ? Has morality,
as some are arguing to-day, nothing to do with
religion ? Is it a growth out of human nature
and its needs, with laws of development which
are independent of the creeds ? To find our
way here we need to answer two prior questions.
What is religion, and what is morality ?
We will look for a moment at the latter of
these first. Much of the existing confusion,
THE STORY OF MORALS. 99
and especially in the churches, arises from
want of clear thinking on this point.
Let us admit, to begin with for the facts
here compel us that human morality is an
organic growth, developing by a kind of inward
necessity. As we watch the centuries we
discern the varying stages of it, with standards
that continually shift as the years go on.
One of the most interesting things in the Bible
is the spectacle it offers of these separate moral
strata. The patriarchs were sincerely religious
men, but their morals, if practised here to-day,
would land them in gaol inside of a week.
Even under the Christian inspiration the
moral principle is, we see, subject to the
limitations of the time. Augustine was one
of the deepest and devoutest souls that ever
lived, but a host of his views on these matters
are impossible to us. Our time, indeed, is
witnessing a development of the moral per-
spective which amounts in itself almost to a
revelation. We understand, in a way never
realised before, that morality is, above all
things, the science of right living, the science
of procuring the fullest life, of securing the
highest type of man and woman. And this
view is bringing new elements into the question.
We see now what Socrates urged, the connection
between knowledge and ethics. To do things
best, we must know things best. Hence more
and more the idea will prevail that ignorance,
100 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
unskill in things, inasmuch as it keeps men back
from the higher realisations, is in itself a kind
of lower morality. Then the modern mind is
being more and more penetrated with the
relation of the individual to the social organism.
We see, as M. Bourgeois, in his " Solidarite,"
has so fully expounded, how the struggle for
individual development, while the first con-
dition and the initiative of all progress, becomes
in its turn part of a vast social movement
outside.
With this all admitted, where does religion
come in ? Can the moral movement go on
without it ? Here comes that other question
which we propounded : " What do we mean
by religion ? " We have seen how a certain
form of it, and that very intense and real in its
way, has subsisted and does subsist alongside
of the grossest immorality. That is one fact.
But to get a true view we must have all the
facts. And another of them, not less certainly
established, is that no advance in morality has
been made apart from religion. Man has never
yet been kept on his upward line by mere
scientific propositions. China is often pointed
to as a country which has subsisted on a bare
morality ? Has it ? Is Confucianism a bare
morality ? Confucius always turned to the
religious motive as the final sanction. He
pointed his disciples with admiration to that
wonderful inscription on the Golden Statue in
THE STORY OF MORALS. 101
the Temple of Lighfc : " When you speak, when
you act, when you think, you seem alone,
unseen, unheard, but the spirits are witnesses
of all." That is religion. It is the same
religion the religion of the unseen presence
that lay back of the best in Stoicism and gave
it its strength. The French revolutionaries
tried to get on without the religious motive,
and wound up with Robespierre's declaration
that if God did not exist it would be necessary
to invent Him.
Modern thinking, proposing to found
morality solely upon the principles of human
nature, will have to take account of all there
is in human nature. And one of the first things
we meet there is the necessity, in order that man
may come to his true self, that he be possessed
by some thing, some one beyond himself. In
one of Baudelaire's prose poems we have
this seemingly wild exclamation : "To escape
being the martyrised slaves of the hour,
intoxicate yourselves ! Be ever intoxicated
with wine, or poetry, or virtue, as you will.
But be ever intoxicated ! " A strange outburst,
yet with deep truth in it. Man must, to reach
his best, be filled with something not himself.
And that is the basal truth of all religion.
It is the topmost truth of Christianity. It is
where the personal Christ comes in as its
central and satisfying fact. Edmund Spiess, in
his " Logos Spermatikos," gives an exhaustive
102 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
comparison between the ancient Greek ethics
and the New Testament teaching. He finds
that almost everything said in the New Testa-
ment has been taught, in one form or another,
by the philosophers outside. And yet ancient
Greece had not Christianity. It lacked the
personality of Christ.
" We strike here the clarifying fact of our whole
controversy. A true morality, we have said,
requires a growing knowledge. But to be
operative it demands something more. It
must have a motive, an impelling force.
We know Matthew Arnold's definition of
religion " morality touched with emotion."
It is by no means a complete definition, but
it goes a long way. And it is the Christianity
of the presence of Christ that gives us the true
morality and the true emotion. In Russia, or
England, or anywhere else where religion
may be more or less dismembered from the best
living, it is because there is a link missing, a
lack of coherence between the knowing and
the feeling. Where the Gospel is really
understood and felt it has always uplifted the
morals. Chalmers in his early days preached
morals alone and with no moral result. He
became filled with the love of Christ, and with
that power behind him engraved the ethical
precepts on the heart of Scotland. M. Ville-
main, in his great work on the Fathers, while
recognising that the early Church lost much
THE STOEY OF MORALS. 103
of the intellectual treasure of the Greeks,
observes that it was more than compensated
by the moral force which Christianity brought
into the world. The heart of man, as he truly
says, has gained more in this discipline than
its imagination has lost.
To sum up then, in the Christianity of Christ
we have the best solution we know of the
problem involved in " religion and morals."
We have here the highest teaching, combined
with the highest motive for following it.
" Enivrez vous" says our Baudelaire. The
simple Christian has a better sense for this
than had Baudelaire. He has the best sort
of possession. Back of his knowing is a being,
behind the ethic a force to translate it into life.
The Church of to-day will gain or lose power
in proportion as it keeps the balance between
the two factors. Its exhortation must be
crammed with ethic. At its peril may it
arouse feeling, unless it use it as the way to
conduct. Historic Christianity is, as we have
confessed, full of moral failures. But it has had
also the most magnificent successes. They
have always come, and always will come,
when the Gospel in the fulness of its moral is
combined with the fulness of its spiritual power.
The modern pulpit, as an instruction in this
whole matter, cannot do better than to reread
the sermons of John Wesley. In those
wonderful compositions, examples of the
104 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
purest English, the great evangelist, who did
more for England than all the eighteenth-
century thinkers and politicians combined,
offers us a gospel which stirs to its depths
the spiritual passion, and then turns this
force to the performance of every human
duty. The Church to-day can do no better
than to copy that model.
XII.
On Human Perfection.
ONE dogma of the eternal religion will assuredly
be that of the human perfectibility. There
is, one may say, already a kind of
unanimity about it. The story of this faith,
and of the efforts and struggles it has occa-
sioned,is,perhaps, the most wonderful in history.
Theists, atheists, Greek philosophers and
evangelical Christians, Indian Yogis and
Western scientists, have found here a meeting-
place. Condorcet, who rejected Christianity
as a supernatural extravagance, nevertheless
put forward the human perfectibility as the
centre of his system. There is nothing more
pathetic in literature than the spectacle
of this hunted philosopher, in the days of the
" Terror," in daily expectation ot the guillotine,
occupying himself with his treatise on " The
Progress of the Human Spirit." On the
other side of the Channel his contemporaries,
John Wesley, and his ally, Fletcher of Madeley,
ardent evangelical believers, had in their
doctrine of " entire sanctification " proclaimed,
105 8
106 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
with a vast difference of accent, substantially
the same idea. In our day Nietzsche, their
completest imaginable contrast, has yet obeyed
the same inspiration in his doctrine of the
" Overman," a suggestion which Mr. H. G.
Wells, in his recent "Food of the Gods"
story, has developed into weirdest proportions.
These are later forms of a quest that has
been in the world from the beginning of time.
Ever has floated before our race the vision
of " the perfect man." It has been always
felt that our chief significance lay in our
promise of something better. It is remarkable
to note how the early Chinese philosophy,
reckoned as the most prosaic of cults, yet
contained in it the thought of the ideal man,
in whom both sexes and all other men existed,
the " holy one " in whom, as it were, inhered
the body spiritual of humanity. The East
has from time immemorial sought after per-
fection, and always in one way. The path
was that of the ascetic. The Indian Yogi
believes that through the training of body
and spirit enjoined by his cult, he can attain
to supernatural powers. On the same quest
we find in Persia the followers of Mithras,
living in closely united societies, calling each
other " father " and " brother," having rites
of baptism, confirmation and communion,
practising continence, self-control and self-
denial, believing in resurrection and the soul's
ON HUMAN PERFECTION. 107
immortality. Their life was one long aspira-
tion towards something higher.
In the West the idea of a perfected humanity
has been equally before the mind, but with
a characteristic difference. Plato, in the
" Republic," throws out the suggestion, ever
since caressed by philosophers, and notably
in recent years, that human perfection should
be approached by scientific methods applied
to questions of birth and training. We can
produce enormous developments in animal
life by a proper selection in breeding. Why
not apply the same principle to man ? We
know the Platonic suggestions on this head,
and the way they have been reproduced by
modern writers. One could almost have
wished, in the interests of experiment, that
the Emperor Gallienus had actually carried
out that scheme of his of building a city to
be called Platonopolis, to be administered
by him on the principles of the " Republic."
The problem, however, is not quite so easy
as the theorists, ancient and modern, appear
to think. What, after all, is human excel-
lence ? It is, we find, a marvellously complex
affair, and the elements of it' are distributed
in the strangest way. We have physical
giants without brains, and splendid intellects
on puny bodies. A healthy physique and
acute reasoning power may go with a hard
heart, while an angelic sweetness and patience
108 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
may be conjoined with mental mediocrity.
The qualities which make the human ideal
are, in fact, the property of humanity as a
whole, and not of any separate individuals.
It is as if Nature had said to us, " No, you must
grow together ; for you are one, both in your
weakness and your strength. Hand, foot
and head, body and soul, individual and
society, your make is one, and one must be
your common destiny."
There is, however, one side of our topic
to which all this is preliminary. It is its
definitely Christian aspect. To-day we have
put to us in a very precise form the question,
" Should Christians be perfectionists ? " A
school of evangelical believers, whose personal
character and service entitle them to our
highest respect, offer us here a clearly-defined
doctrine. Their principle is a life without
conscious sin, maintained in us daily and
hourly by the abiding presence, through the
Spirit, of the unseen Christ. For this con-
tention they quote His own great word :
"Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in
heaven is perfect," and those sublime passages
in the Epistles which speak of a complete
sanctification, of the preserving of body, soul
and spirit blameless unto the great Coming.
In this, as we have already suggested, the
school is following largely in the footsteps
of Wesley and Fletcher. Students of their
ON HUMAN PERFECTION. 109
writings will remember with what cogency
they insist upon an entire cleansing in this
life as a preparation for the heavenly life
beyond. What, asks Wesley, has death to
do with cleansing ? And yet the majority
of Christians seem to depend upon death
as the one preparation for the perfect life
beyond ! Here and now, he concludes, in
the will, soul, spirit, is the preparation to be
made ; it is the teaching of Scripture and of
common-sense.
And assuredly there is here much, very
much, with which all believing people must
agree. Do not our souls leap in response
to Christ's great word ? Do not we want
to share, with those Thessalonians to whom
Paul wrote, in the Spirit's completest work ?
And is not the thought of an abiding highest
Presence, on whose power we can hourly
lean, for resisting evil and accomplishing
good, of all thoughts the most inspiring ?
So far indeed from disagreeing here, our plea
would be for a fuller insistence by all sections
of the Church on truths at once so plain and
so ennobling.
While saying this, and from the heart, we
find this teaching susceptible at the same time
of a certain criticism. And the criticism
is, not a repudiation of the teaching, but a
complaint of its restrictedness. What it lacks
are some additions, necessary to bring it
110 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION,
into line with another range of realities. Its
fault has been in the failure to note the relation
between its own special message and other
truths not less visible and not less important.
To begin with. While to aim at perfection,
in the sense of sinlessness, is unquestionably
a duty and privilege for Christians, does
this in any sense imply consciousness, or an
actuality of sinlessness on their par b ? Neither
Scripture nor fact imply anything of the kind.
The nature of things is entirely against it.
For when we talk of perf ection,or of sinlessness,
we must remember that the whole thing
depends upon our ideal. A state that satisfies
one man's conscience will not satisfy that of
another. As we rise in the scale our ideal
rises, the perceptive faculty becomes keener.
A room in which a short-sighted person
discovers no speck of dust is to a keener
sight in quite a dusty condition. It is, we
conceive, with our moral faculty as with
other faculties, the artistic, for instance.
A painter who had seen only rustic daubs
might be entirely satisfied with his own
performances. Let him enlarge his view ;
let him visit the great galleries and see the
work of the masters, and his self-complacency
becomes self -disgust. And so our half-bred
saint, who speaks to-day of himself as being
without conscious sin, has only to be broadened
a little in his view, to have a stronger light
ON HUMAN PERFECTION. Ill
thrown on his ulterior, and his " sinlessness "
will be as the competency of our untravelled
artist.
And this leads us to another question a
root question. What do we mean by " sin "
and " sinlessness " ? We have to-day to
revise our meaning of these terms as we have
had to revise our meaning of the word " holi-
ness." This latter word we now recognise
as signifying neither less nor more than
" wholeness." It means the full equipment
of manhood, the highest state of body, soul
and spirit. In this connection we are coming
at last to understand that apostolic word
which bids us " add to our faith virtue, and
to our virtue knowledge." Here, in the New
Testament, is the sanction, to an extent
at least, of the Greek teaching which made
knowledge a condition of virtue. We remem-
ber how Socrates insisted that to be " good,"
in any practical sense, as " a good horseman,"
" a good musician " and so on, meant that a
person had knowledge and skill in these
matters ; and how he extended this view
to all departments of virtue and morality.
And we are recognising to-day, with a new
clearness, what truth there is in his argument.
We see at once how this view relates itself
to the doctrine of sinlessDess. A Christian
man, attending church and reading his Bible,
sincere in his desire for the best, looks into
112 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
himself and around on his environment, and
rejoices in the equilibrium that he finds there.
It is a peace which he feels is divine. He is
committing no conscious sin, and he thanks
God for his daily preservation. He has indeed
much to thank God for. But is this sinlessness ?
If you mean by that an equation between
what he is and what he thinks he should be,
well and good. But on a larger view the
word is seen to be ridiculously out of place.
His incapacity to see his huge defects is in
itself a fault. To the extent in which he
is untrained, undeveloped and he is un-
developed in a thousand things he is below
his possibility, and to that extent sinful.
Sinful we say, for the Greek word which is in
our New Testament means by sin " a missing
of the mark," and our man, in all these ways,
has been missing the mark.
"Be ye perfect " is our word. Yet think
of the " perfection " of our fingers as com-
pared with those of a Paderewski ; of our
muscular system as compared with that of a
Sandow ; of our scholarship as related to that
of a Max Miiller or of a Harnack ! In this
one realm of omissions, of failures to make
the best of our faculties, and to increase
thereby the depth and height of our being,
how enormous is the lack of the best of us,
how absurd the complacency which would
regard ourselves in such aspects as " perfect " 1
ON HUMAN PERFECTION. 113
There is another point not to be forgotten
in a discussion of this question. It is that we
can never consider human perfection, either
in a general or in a theological sense, as a
question of the individual alone. A perfect
man requires a perfect society. We cannot,
howsoever we may try, get away from our
relation to the brotherhood. This is the truth
at the bottom of Socialism. To the extent
to which the community is diseased, we are
diseased. We cannot, if we would, shake
off our solidarity. We have seen how the
different perfections are scattered over the
race. We are great, little, growing, dwindling,
in each other. We can taste no ultimate
perfection which our lowliest brother is not
to share.
To sum up. The Gospel is a Gospel of
perfection. To its ineffable height we are
all of us called. The indwelling Christ is for
us the daily victor over sin. But His greatest
work in us is to open incessantly to our gaze
the new depths of the riches of His calling,
and to make us, in the light of that great
vision, aware, as never before, of the poverty
and bareness of our present state, and athirst
for the yet untrod altitudes to which He
points,
XIII.
Ethics of the Intellect.
WE have spoken of morality as a central
feature of the eternal religion. But human
morality is a plant of strangely irregular
growth. Man has moralised himself in patches.
Nothing is more curious than to observe the
diligence with which one part of us has been
ethically tended as compared with the neglect
visible in other directions. Society has great
institutions for keeping us straight, but their
jurisdiction is a limited one. The law courts,
for instance, deal with ethics of the will and
of action. The Church so far has had to do
mainly with ethics of act and feeling. It
probes deeper than the law court, judging
not only men's evil acts, but the envy, lust,
avarice, wrath, hatred, out of which the acts
have come. But there remains another region
of human life for the regulation of which no
institution at present exists, and the laws of
which are still very much to seek. It is the
region of the pure intellect. A simple state-
ment of how the facts lie in this department
114
ETHICS OF THE" INTELLECT. 115
will be enough to show that throughout long
past ages, and with multitudes of earnest
people in our time, there has been no such thing
as an ebhic of the intellect at all. When that
ethic does arrive, when everybody realises
that mental morality is essential to every
other morality, we shall get some very different
thinking, leading to some very different acting
in our world, and not least amongst those who
are counted specially religious.
Let us see in one or two directions how the
account stands. We have to begin with a
reservation. There will never be an ethic of
the intellect pure and simple, because there
is no such thing in human nature as intellect
pure and simple. We are not built in water-
tight compartments. For the purposes of
analysis, philosophers divide our inner con-
sciousness into sections which they label as
reason, feeling, volition ; but, as a matter of
fact, these are never found alone. Our feeling
is always more or less charged with thinking,
and our thinking with feeling. The one may
be said always to contain the other in solution.
And, as we shall see, a morality of the mental
process must, as a consequence, impinge
continually on a morality of the feeling. But
when all this has been allowed for, there remains
in the action of the human reason, taken
separately, a sphere of ethics which demands
a far more diligent cultivation than has hitherto
116 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
been accorded to it, if man is, in the inner life,
to attain to his highest and best.
How badly we are in need of a new code
in this department is shown by the way in
which men have hitherto treated the intellect.
The ideals that have guided them in other
directions have here completely disappeared.
Reformers who have been ready to shed their
blood for their country's freedom have turned
with horror from the idea of liberty as applied
to their reasoning faculties. Is it not a most
singular circumstance that while the word
" free " is one of the most inspiring in the
language, the word " freethinker " carries
to-day with multitudes of excellent people the
most opprobrious of significances ? And yet
what thinking is valuable that is not free ?
One might suppose that the human reason
were some mischievous imp, some creation of
the powers of darkness, whose action, if left
unchained, would inevitably be evil and
deadly. It is time we all realised that the
mind in its most unfettered condition is as
much subject to law as are the tides ; that
when left to its proper action the results of
its labours are always and everywhere the
slow disclosure of ultimate truth. And yet
what despite has been done to this perfect
law of liberty ! The Church, which is supposed
to be the guardian of morals, has been in this
matter, of all institutions, the most unmoral.
ETHICS OF THE INTELLECT. 117
It has imagined that truth could be secured
by force. It has habitually coerced the
reason. The mind must bow before the
decisions of councils and of popes. How odd
all this to people who read history ! Councils !
But the councils have again and again flatly
contradicted each other ; and have had their
decisions declared heretical by others which
succeeded them ! We remember Aries and
Milan, which pronounced Athanasius a heretic
and declared for a creed which the later
Church emphatically condemned. Which are
we to believe ? And popes ! But what of
infallible popes who have spread heresy ? A
Pope Honorius, for instance, who taught the
Monothelite heterodoxy, for which he was
afterwards excommunicated by an (Ecumeni-
cal Council ! The whole business here is a
blunder. It is time we recognised that coercion
of this kind, wherever exercised, and by what-
ever authority, is a damage wrought on the
most delicate and valuable portion of the
human machinery, a violation of the ethic of
the intellect.
And, then, as further illustration of our
mental morality, observe the estimate which
men, the best of their time, have formed of the
value of truth ! It would seem as if there is
no lesson which humanity has been slower in
learning than that of simple veracity. For
ages the most unpopular of cults has been^the
118 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
cult of the plain fact. It was not good enough
for the human imagination, especially the
Eastern imagination. Here again the Church
has been one of the chief sinners. Religion,
which begins with emotion, expressed itself
first in picture and symbol. And this was
well enough so long as these were taken at
their proper value. The mischief came when
imagination was exhibited as history and
enshrined as dogma. We may allow the
allegorists fullest scope. Venerable Bede may
assure us that the text, " Elkanah had two
wives," means " Elkanah is our Lord and His
two wives are the Synagogue and the Church."
We shall not be much the worse for the inter-
pretation. But it is different when, on the
most vital subjects, fables are offered us as
realities. The Anglican divine, Conyers Midle-
ton, was denounced by his contemporaries
as a heretic for declaring, in his " Free Inquiry,"
that the religious leaders of the fourth century
had condoned falsehood, had allowed wholesale
forgery, and approved pious frauds. To the
modern critic these asservations are the
commonplaces of ecclesiastical history. Church
writers of those days considered forgery in a
" good cause " to be a virtue. " I did it for
the love of Paul," observes one of them as
his reason for issuing his production under
the Apostle's name. And this habit of putting
ecclesiastical interests before the truth has,
ETHICS OF THE INTELLECT. 119
alas ! survived in force to our own times.
Maurice's wonder that " the faith of scientific
men in the Bible has not wholly perished
when they see how small ours is, and by
what tricks we are sustaining it," is a wonder
for which to-day we find too abundant justi-
fication ! Religious men still proclaim their
passionate devotion to " the truth," " the
precious truths," " the great fundamental
truths," without daring to inquire whether
what they proclaim is true at all. Religion will
never set itself right with the present age, and
still less with the time that is coming, until it
has purged itself of, and done penance for,
this age-long and deadly infraction of the ethic
of the intellect.
And the wrong here done was so needless !
As if inquiry, the freest play of the mind on
religion, could ever damage it, or damage
humanity ! Do we suppose that the ultimate
facts and forces of the Gospel can lose any of
their value by being better understood ?
The truth is, as we are at length beginning to
discover, that it is only after giving the reason
its fullest exercise that we recognise its limits,
and come upon the real argument for faith.
It is then we find out for ourselves that there
is a truth undiscoverable to the intellect which
reveals itself instead to the heart. It is thus
that Christianity won its first victories. It
conquered men not as a syllogism, but as a
120 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
spiritual power. The truth of life is always
deeper than logic, and here was a truth of life.
When Aris tides in his " Apology " says of the
early Christians : " Wherefore they do not
commit adultery, nor fornication, nor bear
false witness, nor embezzle what is held in
pledge, nor covet what is not theirs. Whatso-
ever they would not that others should do to
them they do not to others," he is exhibiting
to us religion in its true quality and function
as a power to purify and uplift. In presence
of a force like this we are in contact with what
is beyond our mental analysis, so far as we
can at present carry it. But we feel here the
truth of the thing the more profoundly, for
the very reason that we cannot formulate it.
And this leads us to another point, closely
allied to the foregoing. We have spoken of
" the truth of life." But there is a converse
to that. It is in the relation of life to truth.
What has often been lost sight of in argument,
especially on the materialistic side, has been
the fact that certain aspects of truth, and those
of the highest importance, are only accessible
to certain spiritual states. You cannot get
the Mont Blanc prospect without climbing Mont
Blanc. The rigid ascetic discipline of the Neo-
Platonists was, after all, only an exaggerated
expression of the truth that to see into the
spiritual kingdom you must have a clean soul.
The intellect, in these regions, can never act
ETHICS OP THE INTELLECT. 121
by itself. One's vision must come to the whole
man. If I as a reasoner about religion have
not learned to forgive, to love and to serve, I
am lacking in the first qualification for the
business. The truth here is only known
through doing. Zwingli means this when in his
" True and False Religion " he says : " Truth
does not depend on the discussions of men, but
has its seat, and rests itself invincibly in the
soul. It is an experience which everyone may
have." Gregory Nazianzen is on the same line
in his exhortation : " Ascend by holiness of
life if thou desirest to become a theologian.
Keep the commandments, for action is the
step to contemplation." "On a toujours la
voix de son esprit" finely says a French writer.
The soul's voice is the expression of the soul's
state, and if that state is not one of movement
towards the highest, it can never catch or
interpret the*Divine~voices.
The subject has endless other lines of
investigation which we here glance at without
following. A study of this kind should, for
instance, be for some a new call to industry.
What are we doing with our brains ? There is
no such waste on the earth's surface as the
waste of mind power. We have not, likely
enough, taken even the trouble to find out what
we have. It was by mere accident, or the
pressure of necessity, that many of us discovered
what there really was inside us. Our mind
122 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
kingdom is wider than the British Empire,
but we have only cultivated as yet a patch
outside our kitchen door. What are we
reading ? The finest literature of the world
the best product of all its best minds is
open to us. What time do we devote to this
high fellowship, or is our reading-life a mere
slushy progress through literary gutters ?
There is also a social side to the theme.
The ethic of the intellect needs to be cultivated
above all things at the domestic hearth. No-
where so much as here should the mind's
action be so carefully watched. Nowhere so
much as here do we need the right atmosphere
of feeling in which the intellect may do its
work of thinking. For the people around us
will be to us precisely according to that atmo-
sphere and that thought. They will vary as
these vary. A French writer says we are
never just except to those we love. He is
right. There is no justice outside of love.
A wife, a husband, a brother, depend for
their justice, for their happiness, on the way
we set our minds towards them. They cry
to us to look for the good in them ; most of
all for that hidden good, which awaits our
loving culture to nurse it into life.
In sum. The ethic of the intellect unites
in the demand for truth, for life, for love.
But the greatest of these is love.
XIV.
Wealth and Life.
ONE of the results of the new idea of religion,
as the whole science of right living, is the
necessity it imposes on Christian teachers of
broadening their studies. In this view all
great literature, all true science, are a part of
theology and belong to its curriculum. And
quite indispensable as a branch of that learning,
lying as it does at the root of our vast social
question, and forming thus an integral feature
of the eternal religion, is the study of Political
Economy. The religious leader of to-day is
indeed badly equipped who is not familiar
with his Adam Smith, his Ricardo, his Mill,
his Sidgwick. For here are amassed and
arranged for him facts and laws, concerning
the individual and the community, which
touch his special business at every point.
Political economy has been called the Dismal
Science. As a matter of fact it is ignorance
of it which has made some of our most Dismal
History. What Adam Smith and his suc-
cessors had to teach concerning the creation
123
124 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
and distribution of wealth, the relations of
land, labour and capital, the theory of rent,
the laws governing currency and exchange,
and the hundred and one allied topics, forms
a branch of knowledge with which the Church,
if it is to fulfil its function, must be at least
as familiar as is the world.
But one of the chief reasons why the Chris-
tian community, as such, needs to interest
itself in this side of truth lies not so much
in the lessons it has to learn from it as in the
lessons it has to teach. When Ruskin began,
from his own standpoint, to discuss these
questions, he was regarded by many as a
fantastic dreamer, offering cloudy sentiment
as a refutation of hard fact. To-day we begin
to see things differently. His criticism is
discovered to be an entirely sound one.
The eighteenth-century economists saw a
great deal, but they did not see everything. In
treating man simply as a wealth-creating
machine they left out of the account some of
its biggest factors. They forgot that man is
not built in watertight compartments, and
that his idealisms, his religious aspirations,
that sphere of spiritual power whose work
upon him tends to change his whole centre
of gravity, cannot be left out of the economical
calculation. In truth the earlier political
economy, with its idea of self-interest as the
mainspring of activity, with its laws" of demand
WEALTH AND LIFE. 125
and supply, of buying in the cheapest and
selling in the dearest market, was exactly
like a theory of the world which should deal
accurately with inorganic forces with gravita-
tion, cohesion and so on but all the while
ignored the vast realm of organised life above.
Life is influenced at every point by the law of
gravitation, but we should understand it very
imperfectly if we knew no others. The old
economy is in fact a science of the lower laws.
It deals always with man as he is, not with
what he is to be ; it takes no account of the
upper forces which are making him something
different and higher. What then the religious
teacher has to-day for his task is, after acquaint-
ing himself thoroughly with this under sphere
of things, to open it up to, and relate
it definitely with, that realm of the spiritual
powers which alone can produce the true
human society.
Such a study will give us some sure results,
and should dissipate a good many mischievous
notions. It will, for instance, in no degree
diminish our sense of the value of wealth.
It will, instead, clarify our view of its position
and function. We shall realise, in the words
of a modern writer, that " money is com-
pressed force," and force, especially " com-
pressed force," is, we know, not a matter
to be trifled with. And there is a legitimate
enjoyment in wealth. Who that has known
126 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
at once the pinch of poverty and the sense of
abundance, but can honestly sympathise
with Sydney Smith's confession that " he
felt happier for every guinea he gained " ?
Indeed, theology here must come to the same
conclusion as economics. For if God be at once
the supremely Holy, and at the same time
the Possessor of all things, there can be no
intrinsic evil in wealth. We are, indeed, in a
very rich universe, with invitations scattered
over every yard of its surface to enter boldly
and partake. The real question here is, " On
what terms and for what end ? "
And here we come straight upon Ruskin's
great governing proposition, that " there is no
wealth but life." We are here, that is, not
ultimately for the purpose of heaping up riches,
but to live the great life. Wealth, then, is not
wealth unless it ministers to life. The pro-
position is, indeed, self-evident. A career,
whether it be of twenty or of ninety years,
is in the final analysis the sum of its thoughts,
its feelings, its deeds. To get the best in these
kinds is to have truly lived. To secure these
things in the largest degree for the community,
is the one worthy aim of the teacher and
leader of men. It is only as property
material having of whatsoever kind ministers
to this result that it is of value. Where it
hinders this result its influence has to be
regarded as mischievous. The only stand-
WEALTH AND LIFE. 127
point, then, from which we can properly study
the problem of wealth, is the standpoint of life.
And what, pray, is Life ? We are learning
some new things about it to-day. In an
admirable little work by Mr. Hibbert on
" Life and Energy," the author arrives by
scientific demonstration at the thesis that
life is not in itself a form of energy, but rather
" a non-factorial director of energy." He
shows, too, that life is the ultimate basis of
morals ; that the moral is always that which
furthers the development of life, and the
immoral that which depresses and retards it.
In the idea of life, also, is summed up not only
our present morality, but all our future
prospect. We do not yet know to what
further stages its development will reach.
The miracle of our present consciousness may
be only the veriest foretaste of what is yet to
be. There seems an infinitude of untouched
resource wrapped up as yet in its secret place,
and which the coming ages are yet to unfold.
How, then, is wealth related to life ? As we
look into this question we discover that, over
at least a wide aspect of it, the answer seems
mainly to be a negative one. When we ask
what makes up the best thinking, feeling and
doing, we find only a slender relation to pounds,
shillings and pence. We are in questions
here of bodily health, of good air, of hard work,
of inner training, of a soul tuned to the infinite.
128 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
But these things are all possible to poverty
as well as to riches. Fresh air, outside the
towns at least, can be had for the opening of
one's mouth. Physical vigour is nowhere
a millionaire's monopoly. The health-giving
food, as doctors are everywhere now preaching
to the rich, is the simplest food. The moneyed
classes are being told that they are destroying
themselves by over-eating and drinking. Dr.
Abernethy's " live on sixpence a day and earn
it " is declared to be the true philosophy.
Splendid bodies and brains have been built
up on Scotch porridge, a diet within easy
reach of most of us. And hard work, the
natural heritage of every Adam's son, is
not difficult to find. Amid all the frantic
strivings, defeats and disappointments of
the modern world, it is something surely
to have this one point fixed in our minds,
that the highest attainable life, the finest
thinking, feeling and doing, are by Nature's
immutable laws annexed to the simplest
and plainest natural conditions.
Why then is it, with all this demonstrably
true, that the modern man struggles so
desperately and sacrifices so enormously in
order to amass wealth ? The answer is simple.
It flings us back upon that earlier definition :
money is compressed force. Men seek riches
because they seek power. The mansion, with
its retinue of servants, is probably less com-
WEALTH AND LIFE. 129
fortable to live in than the cottage, but the
owner knows that the size of all this passes
somehow into the word he speaks to his
fellow, and commands his attention. In a
materialistic age, especially, wealth is the
supremest energy. It can carry you to the
ends of the earth ; it can open the door to
every circle of Society ; it can buy the very
thoughts and souls of men. How to its very
core did pagan Rome, the most materialistic
of civilisations, feel its power ! Witness that
word of Horace : " Et genus et virtus nisi
cum re vilior alga est." Both birth and virtue
without property are cheaper than seaweed.
And that companion word of Juvenal : " Omnia
Romae cum pretio," " Everything at Rome
has its price."
It is precisely here that wealth under
existing conditions threatens life. It is amongst
ourselves beginning to choke and to suppress
life's higher manifestations. As a single
illustration take the case of literature and
journalism. The prostitution of letters in
the service of Mammon is, of course, no new
thing. In the Renaissance time Aretino
excuses himself for his indecencies by the
remark : " Why write serious books ? Amuse-
ment and scandal are the only things that
pay." He is echoed by Des Periers, who
observes : " Let us write some vile thing and
we shall find a bookseller who will give ten
130 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
thousand crowns for the copy." Indecency
is not precisely the danger of our day, though
in some quarters there is enough of it. What
the modern world has to fear is the choking
of its thought by the money interest. The
independence of the Press is being threatened
by trust combinations in England, and even
more formidably in America. Here is a
shadow that is stealing over the entire modern
world. Imagine the Press of England con-
trolled by a Rand syndicate ! The whole
intellectual life of the country purchased by a
ring of alien company promoters ! Yet things
are tending this way. It may well be that
before long the modern Press, in the interests
of its own life and of all that is best in civilisa-
tion, will have to realise, as the Church did
of old, that to be of any true service its base
must be spiritual, its members an apostolate,
content to live, if need be, on bread and
water, if that be the price at which alone
they may speak the highest that is in them !
In the long run the problems of wealth
and life will adjust themselves, and we are
beginning to see how. The clue to the solution
will be, as we have said, in accepting life-
development as always the highest end.
The soul must first of all be free in order that
it may grow. The gold tyranny that seeks
to fetter it must at all costs be broken. And
that can only be by the uprising of men
WEALTH AND LIFE. 131
whose minds are not to be bought ; who will
speak naught but the truth, though they
starve in the process. And these men must
to-day speak the truth about wealth. They
must show that in the method of its procuring,
of its distribution, and of its enjoyment, no
law shall be broken that concerns the further-
ance of life. To this end the wealth must be
equitably distributed. The beauty it creates,
the energies it sets in motion, the art, the
literature, the enjoyment it promotes, must
be held as not the appanage of a few, but,
in as far as the ultimate conditions permit,
the inheritance of all. The end is that not a
clique or a caste, but man himself is to be
wealthy ; a being, that is, dowered with all the
capacity of being, doing and possessing that
is commensurate with the magnificent place
assigned to him in the scheme of the world.
XV.
A Layman's Religion.
WILL the eternal religion be a layman's
religion or the religion of the priest ? The
question receives curious illustration from
a controversy on "Do We Believe ? "
which some time ago filled day after day
the columns of one of our English news-
papers. A distinguishing feature of the contro-
versy was the fact that it was so largely
the utterance of the British layman. As a
rule, he is not addicted to speech on these
subjects. On this occasion, however, he cast
aside his reticence, cleared his throat, and
said his say. And it was the layman's voice
that was listened to. The clerical deliverances
on the question were not in the front rank of
interest. The words that sunk deepest into
the public mind were those of medical men, of
sailors, of lawyers, of policemen, of City
people of people, that is, in the thick of
secular affairs, who discussed religion from the
standpoint of simple manhood, and not from
that of a professional interest.
132
A LAYMAN'S RELIGION. 133
And the feeling which showed itself in this
instance is visible to-day in other directions
as well. The words men listen for as deter-
minative in matters of belief are not those of
the episcopate or of other members of the
hierarchy. The clergy themselves wait on the
utterances of a Lord Kelvin, of a Sir Oliver
Lodge, on their own subject, with a deference
that the bench of bishops is quite unable to
command. The clerical testimony to religion
is, in fact and inevitably, taken with a certain
discount. The ecclesiastic, it is felt, is com-
mitted to a certain position and cannot help
himself. Amongst the working classes this
view of things is especially widespread, and
accounts largely for their present coolness
towards Christianity and the Churches. There
is no doubt as to the fact, but many of us,
both inside and outside the Church, have not
yet taken the trouble to understand what
the fact means, nor the conclusions to which it
points. It is not too much to say, however, that
the whole fortune of the Churches and of Chris-
tianity depends on the way in which, in the future ,
the fact is comprehended and acted upon.
It is by an instinct which is essentially
sound that the clergy, as such, are at a dis-
count as a religious witness. The reason is
that in so far as they, as a class, are separated
from the laity, they are in a false position.
Their position is false at once historically and
134 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
by the nature of things. For primitive
Christianity was essentially a layman's religion.
It was this, in part, which constituted its
utterly revolutionary character. Against all
precedent and usage here was a faith with a
layman for its Founder and laymen for its
first propagators. Jesus had no connection
with the clerical order, nor had His followers.
Not one of His first disciples was in any sense
a " reverend gentleman." The virulent op-
position of the Jewish ecclesiastics was largely
a trades union opposition. A religion without
priests and sacrifices was to them, not only
the most daring of innovations ; it meant
destruction to the privileges and emoluments
of their order. No wonder at the priestly
hue and cry, or at the final tragedy at Jeru-
salem. Calvary was, in the eyes of the Judsean
" cloth," fit punishment for the unheard of
insolence of a lay religion. A way to God that
dispensed with sacrifices and with the hierarchy
must be necessarily, to the hierarchs them-
selves, the most damnable of heresies.
During the first period after the death
of its Founder, Christianity still held to this
distinctive and wholly revolutionary feature.
The New Testament religion is from beginning
to end a lay religion. The teaching of Jesus,
as preserved by that first society, is a religion
of the common life. As Wernle puts it, " Christ
will have the sanctification of life in the
A LAYMAN'S RELIGION. 135
world, the sanctification of one's calling,
one's everyday life, one's work, within the
limits of human society. All the demands
that Jesus makes are set up, not for monks
and ascetics, but for men in the world."
And the society was constituted on a lay
basis. As a great missionary organisation
it had, of course, a teaching function, but
there is not anywhere discernible so much
as the flutter of a sacerdotal robe. There
are elders, overseers, prophets, evangelists,
deacons, " helps," " ministries," but there
are no priests. We hear of no clerical
garments. The apostles dressed like other
men. It is a curious feature of the present
situation, that the robes worn to-day by the
Roman priests at the altar are a survival of the
ordinary lay dress of the first period. It is an
unwitting testimony by the sacerdotalist to the
non-sacerdotal character of his predecessors.
But the primitive Christianity did not
last. In what followed that first stage we
have the greatest perversion in history. The
new was conquered by the old. The pure
stream, leaping from the utmost heights,
fell into the sluggish river below, to take its
colour and to follow its course. The Horatian
verse which speaks of Rome as having con-
quered Greece by arms, to be itself conquered
by the Grecian arts, is the story also of the
new faith's contact with old-world custom and,
136 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
tradition. The two forces in their contact
each gave something to the other. What
Christianity gave was vital and could never
be destroyed. But in taking it the systems
of the immemorial past exacted their rights,
and the toll was a heavy one. As a result
of the compromise we have in the following
centuries a Christianity which is an amalgam
of the teaching and life of Jesus with the
priestism and clericalism with which Judaism
and heathendom had combined to endow it.
Christianity had ceased henceforth to be a
layman's religion.
How the change worked is now a matter
of history. That this bastard, unauthorised
priesthood produced great characters no one
acquainted with the story would for a moment
deny. The Jeromes, the Augus tines, the
Bernards were men of whom the world was
not worthy, to whom all succeeding ages
are indebted. It would, indeed, be out of
place to exclaim too excitedly against the
course which things took in mediaeval Christen-
dom. It is better, perhaps, to recognise
that this was the course which the world, in its
inner evolution, had to take. The nature
of things and the human limitations made it
inevitable. Human perfection is a long way
off, and the road to it is circuitous. It was
necessary that men should have their experi-
ment and see how their amalgam worked.
A LAYMAN'S RELIGION. 137
We can trace the result now with some
certainty.
Priesthood and monkhood, in all their
degrees, were alike the assertion of the same
principle the principle of separation, of a
class, a caste, theoretically superior in Christian
privilege, function and authority from the
commonalty. It was the principle of religious
professionalism. Its first result was upon
the clergy themselves. Great saints, we have
said, were to be found in their ranks, but the
general condition was deplorable. What a
picture is that which Jerome draws of the
Roman clergy in his day, flattering rich
matrons, spending the day in calls at grand
houses ; of monks gaining favour with the rich
by pretended austerities, while they repaid
themselves with nightly revelry. And matters
did not improve with the years. Could there
be anything more terrible as a revelation of
manners than Walter de Map's satire of
" Bishop Goliath " in the twelfth century ?
Yes, there is worse even than that. It is found
in the records of the Black Book, the publica-
tion of which sealed the doom of the English
monasteries. Thus was it with the clergy.
It fared worse with the laity, who, shut off
from their heritage of responsibility and
service, were lost for centuries to vital religion.
The Reformation was, for one thing, a revolt
against all this ; an endeavour to make
10
138 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
Christianity once again a layman's religion.
In the century preceding it, in the
words of J. R. Green, " Pope and king,
bishop and noble, vied with each other in
greed, in self-seeking, in lust, in faithlessness,
in a pitiless cruelty. . . . Religion and
morality passed out of the hands of the priest-
hood into those of the laity." The gist of
Protestantism was in this, that the layman
had once more found his soul. He had
opened the New Testament to discover with
astonishment and delight a religion without
the priest. That discovery produced the
Puritan and the Huguenot, the sturdiest
manhood of these later ages. Well may
Carlyle say of them : "It is a fruitful kind
of study, that of men who do in very deed
understand and feel at all moments that they
are in contact with God, that the right and
wrong of this little life has extended itself
into eternity and infinitude. It is at bottom
my religion too."
The vital religious movements ever since
have been essentially laymen's movements.
Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravian
community, was a layman. John Wesley
obtained his most vivifying spiritual experi-
ence from his contact with Peter Bohler, the
Moravian, also a layman. And Wesley's first
preachers, with whom he woke up England,
were a band of laymen. To-day General
A LAYMAN'S RELIGION. 139
Booth's vast evangelising work the world over
is conducted by lay people. D. L. Moody,
the greatest missioner of our generation, was
a layman. France to-day would not be, as it
is, in revolt against Christianity were it not
that in expelling its Huguenots three centuries
ago it thrust from its borders the exponents
of and witnesses to a laymen's religion, leaving
the land the prey to a professionalism which
the nation refuses any longer to endure.
Here are the facts, or some of them. But
to what do they lead ? Are we to conclude
from them that Christianity is better without
any separated order ; that in view of the evils
of clericalism, we are to do away with a clergy ?
That by no means follows. Abusus non tollit
usum. This would not be primitive Christi-
anity, which certainly had its separated
ministries. It stands to commonest sense that
a religion which rests on teaching must have
teachers, and that teaching, to be continuous
and effective, must have its specialists.
But what primitive Christianity and all
the later history do teach is plain enough.
Clericalism as an evil can only be avoided by
putting the teaching order on the primitive
basis. It is to be ever of the people, and with
the people and for the people. Sacerdotalism
contends that ecclesiastical authority comes
from above and not from beneath. It is
conferred by the episcopate, which, in its
140 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
turn, by apostolic succession, has received
it from the Church's Head. With the highest
Churchmen we too believe in an authority
which comes from above. The true teacher and
spiritual leader has ever his vocation from on
high. It begins there between his soul and God,
most august of commissions and of consecra-
tions. But thus commissioned he stands there
amongst his brethren, of and with them always,
his note union, and never separatism.
All sections of the Church have to relearn
this lesson if they are going to save religion
for the people. Nonconformists not a few
need to learn it afresh. Let them be done
for ever with dressings up and gestures and
postures. There is a professional smile and a
professional tone that are alike detestable.
Let religious speech be with blunt simplicity
and sincerity. Let the teacher be one with
the common life of the people. Let him
never by any assumption of his own permit
the business man to suppose that his partici-
pation in the duties of the Divine kingdom
has been transferred to other shoulders. In a
word, let Christianity, with its organisation
and its teaching faculty, resume its place
as a layman's religion ; let the great Layman,
its first Teacher, be permitted once more to
exhibit, without veil or intermediary, His
Divine life and doctrine, and again, as of old,
the common people will hear Him gladly.
XVI.
Religion and Art.
A FEATURE eternally associated with the
eternal religion is its expression in art. The
story of the relation here is often a complicated,
and, at times, a very puzzling one, yet crammed
at every point with interest and suggestion.
There have been periods when art has seemed
to ignore the religious feeling, and when, on
the other hand, the religious feeling has
ignored art. But despite attempts and surface
appearances there has never been any real
divorce. There cannot be. Religion will go
on producing art, and art will go on representing
religion, because they both belong to one and
the same nature of things. The artist, qua
artist, is religious. He may do nothing but
genre pictures, landscapes, flower and fruit
pieces, portraits, with never a suggestion of
so-called sacred history or symbolism. But
in so far as he is a genuine painter, his work is,
we say, religious, for its success from first to
last lies in its conformity to a law which is
divine. He is a disciple of an eternally
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142 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
ordained truth of things in the sphere of colour
and form, and would be a failure there if he
were other than this.
Yet this relation has varied enormously
in successive ages. The earliest art, wherever
we go, is religious. Man from the beginning
has been an inveterate symbolist. Behind
his rudest constructions in this line an arriere
pensee lingers. Is it not wonderful, this
instinct which invests some rudest block
the black Kaaba stone at Mecca, the sandstone
and granite monoliths at Stonehenge with a
mystical significance ? Beginning so humbly,
art in the earlier civilisations blossoms out
into the most elaborate forms, but always in
the service of religion. In Babylon, Egypt,
Greece, it was for the temple and the statue of
the god that the artist wrought. And we
may well believe that those early workers,
as they reared the Parthenon or carved the
statue of Jupiter, had beneath their technique
a genuine inspiration. They had in them
surely some stir of that feeling which makes
Plato, in the Symposium, break out in hia
glorious rhapsody on the Eternal Beauty :
" What would it be, then, were it granted to
any man to see very Beauty clear incorrup-
tible and undefiled, not mingled with colour
or flesh of man, or with aught that can consume
away, but single and divine ? " They saw
what Athenagoras, the Christian father, has
RELIGION AND ART. 143
so finely expressed : " For beauty on earth is
not self-made, but sent hither by the hand
and will of God."
And yet it is here that one of those curious
puzzles meets us in the story of religion and
art. How comes it that in the times and
among the peoples where the religious
sentiment has been at its highest, the feeling
and the production of art have been at the
lowest ; and that, contrariwise, the periods
of the greatest artistic splendour have been
marked so often by the utmost depravation of
morals and religion ? There is no doubt as
to the facts. The Christian history here is
a remarkable one. On the one side we may
remark three distinct periods where the
religious claim has been felt to its utmost,
and where at the same time the artistic
sentiment seemed either to be non-existent or
under ban. These were the first age of Chris-
tianity, the Puritan age, and the time in
England of the Evangelical revival. The
first Christian generation had its apostles,
its prophets, its teachers, its martyrs, but not
its artists. So barren was it in this direction
that we have no authentic portrait of Christ.
The early fathers are in flat contradiction,
even, as to His appearance ; some, as Justin
Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian,
declaring Him devoid of human comeliness,
while others, as Jerome and Augustine, speak of
144 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
His transcendent beauty of aspect. Eusebius
mentions a statue of Him at Csesarea Philippi
which he himself saw, but of which, however,
he gives no description. One would like, in
this confusion, to think that the wonderful
face in Leonardo da Vinci's " Last Supper " is,
as tradition holds it was, the copy of a real
portrait.
The broad fact remains, that for centuries
after the Advent Christendom had no art,
in the sense in which a Greek understood the
word. There was no room in it for a Phidias
or a Praxiteles. It did not appear to include
among the virtues the cult of physical and
visible beauty. When at last the picture was
introduced into churches it was as a concession
to the ignorance of the people that it might
be to them a simpler lesson-book. As Pope
Gregory I. has it, " therefore the picture is
used in churches that those who are ignorant of
letters may at least read, by seeing on the
walls, what they cannot read in books."
And the pictures were most of them terrible
daubs. What art had come to in those
times is illustrated by a decree of the second
Council of Nicaea, in which it is laid down that
the painter must have nothing to do with the
inspiration or idea of a picture, but only with
its execution. "It is not the painters, but
the holy fathers who have to invent and
dictate. To them manifestly belongs the
RELIGION AND ART. 145
composition, to the painter only the execu-
tion."
Puritanism and early Methodism seem only
to have repeated this story. The Scotch
Presbyterians and the Cromwellian Ironsides
would have none of an artistic religion.
They threw the pictures out of the churches,
trampled on the ornaments, broke the stained
windows, and whitewashed the walls. The
organ is to this day in many places taboo in
Scotland. And the early Methodists, " filled
with the Spirit," saw no connection between
their vocation as saints and that of the painter
and sculptor. They turned from an orna-
mental worship to the barest simplicity.
Their clothing was in itself a cult of plainness.
There is a story of a young Methodist preacher
" out West," of excellent character and
ability, but whose brethren were sorely exer-
cised about him because of the grace and
physical beauty of his appearance. They
insisted, as a condition of acceptance, that
he should cut his hair shorter and wear clothes
of an older fashion. They had no use for
comeliness.
And, as we have said, on the opposite side
there is this other puzzle : that the periods
of highest art have been again and again
those of moral and religious decadence. The
standing illustration here is, of course, the
Renaissance. The period which gave to art
146 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
Da Vinci's "Supper," Raphael's "Trans-
figuration," the Vatican frescoes, and St.
Peter's, was the period of the Borgias and of
Leo X., a time of utter pyrrhonism in belief
and of unbridled licence in morals. Perugino
and Da Vinci were sceptics, and Raphael was
a rake. One has to study the contemporary
records to get an idea of the enormous orgies
of the time. But, you say, " these men
painted religious subjects ! " They did, but
often enough the " sacred " picture had not a
particle of religious sentiment in it. We
admire these productions as art, but not as
religion. Rubens's " Descent from the Cross "
is magnificent in form and colour ; but it is
a pagan, not a Christian splendour. The same
may be said of the " Christ in the Pharisee's
House " of Paul Veronese. It is really a
brilliant sixteenth-century banquet. Com-
pare either of these works with the " Adoration
of the Lamb " of fifteenth-century Van Eyck,
or with the work of the ecstatic Fra Angelico,
the man who fainted from emotion as he
painted Christ upon the Cross ! In these you
have not only form and colour, but the expres-
sion of souls that are penetrated with the
innermost mystery and power of the Gospel.
Here, then, altogether is a curious tangle.
What, with a history like this before us, is
the true relation between art and religion ?
Does high religion banish art, or high art
RELIGION AND ART. 147
banish religion ? Or is the history a mere
jumble of opposites with no uniting principle
beneath it ? We believe in neither of these
propositions. One has to take a large view
here, a wide survey of facts. It is a survey
which shows us that even Christianity, taken
historically, has been only one of the educators
of humanity. Religion and beauty are twin
sisters, but they seem to have been put out
to different nurses, and in their after career
to have travelled so far afield as hardly at first
sight to be able to recognise each other.
Christianity came to us through the Hebrew
race, and artistic culture was not in its depart-
ment. The Greek here had a mission
denied to the Jew. Each had something
from God without which the other, and
humanity at large, would not be complete.
That is part of the story. But there is
another thing. The peoples we have men-
tioned, the early Christians, the Puritan
Nonconformists, the eighteenth - century
Methodists, who in their intense realisation of
religion tabooed art, were mainly, let us re-
member, of the poor and uncultured classes.
" Not many great, not many noble," were
called. No miracle was wrought in the
mental structure of these people. The moral
regeneration they had undergone was not
meant to be, and did not become, a substitute
for those ages of culture which in other races
148 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
and classes had produced the artistic feeling.
Let us further remember that for centuries
Christianity was struggling with the barbarism
of those Northern peoples who had flooded the
Roman Empire and stamped out its civilisation.
The history, rightly read, shows really no
contradiction. Art, instead of being opposed
to religion, is one of its inevitable products.
For goodness, as Joubert says, " is the be-
ginning of beauty." Its full development is
only a question of time. The early Christian,
the Puritan, the Methodist, had the whole
thing within them for which the highest art
strives. It was only that they had not the
means, nor the development required, to put
it all into form. They knew also, what the
truest art knows, that the deepest within
them could never be put into any visible
form. These men were artists in the great
way ; they realised with Milton, that the true
poem is a life, that the noblest creations are
in the sphere of character and the soul. And
that external beauty which they eschewed,
as inferior to this inner loveliness, and as
allied so often with moral rottenness, they
yet believed in. In those visions of the
Apocalypse which formed part of their inner
nurture, they recognised the final union of
spiritual and physical beauty, the alliance of
the inner holiness with the splendours of the
heavenly city.
RELIGION AND ART. 149
It is the business of the present day, taught
by this marvellous discipline, to bring these
great life factors into a yet more visible
harmony. We want artists, skilled not only
in that divine law of form revealed to Greece,
but in that diviner law of the soul which was
opened to men in the Sermon on the Mount.
We want an architecture as sublime as that of
the old cathedrals, but expressing that higher
note of life which they do not possess, that
greater freedom, that joy in living, that sense
of boundless possibility which is opening as
part of the religion of our time. We want a
combined culture which shall secure us what
Plato held to be the perfection of humanity,
a beautiful soul in a beautiful body. Art
and religion will reach their true unity when
man, radiant in his spiritual perfection, shall
look out upon a Paradise world which reflects
that inner splendour.
XVII.
Nature the Preacher.
FOR decades past it has happened with some
of us that, somewhere in the youth of the
year, a day has dawned which has sent us
straight to our Wordsworth. Certain lines
of his, and the morning we have waked upon,
seem predestinated for each other :
It is the first mild day of March,
Each moment sweeter than before,
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.
We feel " a blessing in the air," and that
One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason ;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.
As we try to analyse the delight with which spring
fills us, we find the matter becoming at every
moment wider and deeper. The finest joy of
the season, we perceive, is a religious joy. The
spell we are under is of an eloquence which we
cannot call ecclesiastical that were too narrow
a word but which, nevertheless, is Divine.
150
NATURE THE PREACHER. 151
The spell, we say, is religious. It bids
us talk of a certain preacher. In Church
circles a chief topic has always been the advent
of new preachers. The coming of a person-
ality of the first order, who devotes his powers
to the exposition of life's deepest things, is
ever, and rightly, felt as an event. There are
preachers who spring into prominence at a
bound. Others take long in maturing ;
remaining, maybe, in some obscure corner
for years, until the significance of their message
begins to dawn upon men. We propose here
to speak of a preacher of this latter order ;
one who has been long in the world, but who
nevertheless may be said to have only lately
" arrived." The preacher is Nature. Only
lately arrived we say, for it is within the last
generation or two that people have begun
to wake to the proper sense and feeling of the
message. For long centuries men have been
clamouring in the name of their various
dogmatisms, and thereby drowning effectually
the utterance of this finer voice. It is quite
lately that it has occurred to them, and only
then to a small number, to cease from shouting
and to take instead to listening. To these has at
last come the suggestion of a time of silence, of
waiting upon this other preacher, while she
opens her fact and argument upon them, as
just now the most fruitful of disciplines. On
them in fact it has dawned that here the eternal
152 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
religion finds its profoundest interpreter.
How slow has been the process of her recog-
nition will appear when we compare modern
thinking and feeling on her subject with that
of the earlier world. It would seem as if in
these days we have grown a new sense the
sense of Nature. As Walter Pater puts it :
" An intimate consciousness of the expression
of natural things, which weighs, listens,
penetrates, where the earlier mind passed
roughly by, is a large element of modern
poetry." He might have said of the modern
consciousness. There are entire literatures
that up to a late period have ignored the
countryside. Is it not, by the way, a remark-
able thing that in the whole New Testament
there is only one voice that seems to recognise
the world's beauty ? St. Paul travels through
the most magnificent scenery. He crosses
the ^Egean, he traverses the Taurus mountains,
he looks upon " the isles of Greece," but there
is no hint in his letters that he had even
noticed them. It was left to his Master to
read Nature. To Him her voice was Divine.
The sun, the flower, the bird of the air were
symbolic, sacramental. He delighted in her
beauty as one who read her secret.
Theology has in this matter followed more in
the footsteps of Paul than of Jesus. Here
and there has appeared a tranced soul, a
St. Francis, a Jeremy Taylor, who revelled
NATURE THE PREACHER. 153
in Nature, felt her beauty, seeing always the
spiritual shining behind. A Calvin even
astonishes us with that great word, " Pie hoc
potest dici Deum esse Naturam." (One may
say with reverence that God and Nature are
one.) He was, perhaps, thinking of that
noble utterance of Seneca : " The whole uni-
verse which you see around you, comprising
all things both Divine and human, is one.
We are members of one great body." But
ecclesiasticism as a rule has turned a blind eye
and a deaf ear to our preacher, and taught the
world to do the same. This indifference of
the past to what is our greatest inspiration is
indeed difficult to understand. We are amazed,
for instance, in studying French literature, to
find that Rousseau is the first who, as Sainte
Beuve has it, " puts green fields into it."
It was quite a revelation to Frenchmen when
Rousseau wrote thus of a country walk :
" The view of the country, the succession of
pleasant prospects, the open air ... the
distance from everything which reminds me
of my dependence, from everything which
recalls my personal situation to me all this
frees my spirit, gives audacity to my thought,
throws me, as it were, into the immensity of
things, which I can combine, choose from,
appropriate without trouble and without fear,
and act as master of all Nature." We have
travelled far since then. We have reached, to
11
154 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
a degree not dreamed of by our ancestors,
what may be called the cosmic consciousness.
Nature has become, as never before, a
preacher to us, the most formidable rival to
all other preachers. These last, indeed, need,
above all things, to get instruction in her
school. Her " Lessons on Preaching " are
the best extant. This orator has something
for every capacity ; her word for the little
child, her problem for the deepest mind.
She clothes her truth in beauty, she adorns
it with infinite illustration. Robert Hall used
to read everything in order that, on the topics
handled, he might always be ahead of his
hearers. Nature is always ahead of her hearers.
Behind her baldest commonplaces are depths
of meaning which no plummet can sound. This
is the teacher that never tires her audience.
Every day she has something fresh. What
holds us to her is her infinite suggestiveness.
What she offers is, we always feel, only a lure
to what she conceals. Ruskin says of art "that
nothing is satisfying that is complete ; that
every touch is false that does not suggest
more than it represents." Nature is here the
supreme artist. What draws us is her mystery,
her perpetual hint of the something behind.
But does this preacher teach anything ;
and if so, what is her doctrine ? Is it the
ecclesiastical dogma an affirmation of the
Thirty-nine Articles ? It would require some
NATURE THE PREACHER. 155
hardihood to affirm it. The teaching seems
rather to be enigmatical, occult. It has had
divers interpretations, some of which it
would be hard to reconcile. Thoreau, one
of the most devout worshippers at the shrine,
declares the preacher to be absolutely non-
committal. The wisest man, he says, follow-
ing her, "teaches no doctrines; he has no
scheme ; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb
against the heavens. It is clear sky. The
perfect God in His revelations of Himself
has never got to the length of one such pro-
position as you His prophets state." There
are many voices to-day to that effect. The
Church view that man has a special position
in the universe is held as shattered by modern
science. The position here is wittily voiced
by Fontenelle, who observes that " the human
way of thinking the world made for us reminds
one of a certain Athenian lunatic who imagined
that every vessel that entered the Piraeus
belonged to him." Are we then to pronounce
Nature as a preacher unorthodox ? Is she
a denier of the Church's doctrine ? Is Nature's
one affirmation that of Nature's supreme
indifference ? Has man in affirming his value
in the universe acted like the ancient alchemists
who found gold in their crucibles because
they had themselves put it there ?
Fresh from their new study of the universe,
men have been of late asking these questions
156 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
with a persistence which reveals the intensity
of their inner perturbation. Certainly we
find we are not so wise as we once thought.
We can no longer take ourselves, as was said
of a famous divine, " as of God's privy council."
There are more open questions than we
imagined. Yet Nature has some definite
teachings for us, and that upon the vital
points. The net result of them is to upset
some earlier judgments, to make some things
less sure than they seemed to be ; yet to give
us, on themes about which the soul has craved
for light, some new and blessed affirmations.
For one thing she has taught us that life
is fundamentally, divinely simple, and yet
the most complicated business in the world.
Simple, so that little children and ignorant
races that have never read books have,
generation after generation, drunk her draught
and found no hurt. And yet the infinite
complexity ! For as our mind opens we find
life to have in it a million things, each one
related to ourselves, each one with its own laws,
laws which we must learn and obey if we
would get life's blessing, and not its curse.
Life, we find, is, from beginning to end, cause
and effect, seed-sowing and harvest, the
harvest being according to the seed. No
pulpit thunder has ever declaimed this truth
with an impressiveness equal to that of
Nature as interpreted by science. The modern
NATURE THE PREACHER. 157
mind has, under this regime, had drilled into
it the inexorableness of the reign of law
more than by the lightnings of Sinai.
But Nature as studied to-day has another
teaching, not less definite. She has a doctrine
not only of law but also of grace. Her
punishments, her retributions, are severe, but
they are never final, never hopeless for the
criminal. Here her doctrine runs counter
to some of our earlier theology. Butler,
amongst others, founded an argument which
rested on an imperfect study of his question.
In the " Analogy " he points us to Nature as
giving example of certain courses which, if
unchecked, lead finally to irremediable ruin.
We know now that there is, in Nature at least,
no irremediable ruin. For there is no ending
that is more than a new beginning. The
uttermost clash of worlds were only a fresh
start of her combinations and her energies.
She has, indeed, a special grace, all her own,
for the ruined. She has a way of making them
comfortable. Our worn-out coat is the one
we like best, because we cannot spoil it.
When we are wet to the skin we walk entirely
at ease, for we can get no wetter. At the
bottom you can tumble no farther. Nature
is exhaustless in her patience as healer ; and
her very ruins are consolations. Has this
no bearing on the ultimate human fate ?
We pity the man who can study this aspect
158 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
of things without seeing the meaning of the
parable.
We put into a single paragraph a phase
of the theme that needs a study to itself.
When we ask, "Does Nature teach theology,
teach Christianity ? " we have in reply to
remember that Nature here must include
human nature, the human story, and all that
it contains. That man is what he is, that he
has thought his thought and done his deed ;
that he stands here to-day, with his religion
in him, with his ceaseless question, his eternal
aspiration this is all to be taken into account
in our gospel of Nature. As to Christianity,
if we are evolutionists, it is impossible for us
to suppose that the life and faith it stands for
came by chance or accident, that they were other
than inevitable in the onward course of things.
If God, whom Calvin speaks of as one with
Nature, is ever to have speech with man it
must be by becoming incarnate. In man alone
on this planet has the Eternal Reason emerged
into consciousness ; in man alone has that
Reason broken into thought and speech. And
the New Testament is in this sense a part of
Nature, showing us its spiritual, inner side,
shining in divinest light, revealing its most
intimate secret of love. Nature the preacher
performs her most gracious office, delivers her
supreme teaching, in pointing us beyond her
visible to an Infinite Goodness and Grace behind.
XVIII.
Behind the History.
A GREAT part of religion is, and always will
be, wrapped in history. Partly on this
account history, to some of us, becomes more
and more a fascination. The story of man
and of his environment is one of which we can
never tire. He is the only intelligence with
whom, so far, we have come into visible con-
tact, and we want so much to know what this
brother soul of ours thought and felt as he,
in the far past, trod this old earth and looked
upon the sun. The smallest hints he has
left, whether in the cuneiform inscriptions of
Syria, or the rock drawings in Rhodesia, or
the clay libraries of Babylon, are alike precious.
We are thankful beyond words to the men who
tell us something of their time. Even where,
as with a Livy and a Herodotus, the account
is stuffed with legends, it is for us full of
instruction. The legend at least shows us
how men of that day conceived things. When
our historian is at once a philosopher and a
recorder of contemporary events, as Thucy-
159
160 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
dides, we get in his pages perhaps the best
reading there is.
But there are so many ways of reproducing
the past. Is it not an extraordinary thing
that India, with its vast mentality, with its
ages of theological and metaphysical thinking,
has yet produced no history ? The Hindoo
mind has been so absorbed with the Infinite
that the mere finite conditions of human
living have not seemed to it worth recording.
And yet in its systems we have given us,
perhaps, a more vivid idea of the innermost
soul of India, of its entire attitude to the
universe and to life, than we could have
obtained from whole libraries of Court news.
It is not, indeed, the chroniclers, the Froissarts,
the De Commines, helpful though they be,
who give us the deepest insight into the things
they speak of. We are reminded here of
Leigh Hunt's remark: "I felt, though I did
not know, till Fielding told me, that there
was more truth in the verisimilitudes of fiction
than in the assumptions of history." A
Shakespeare, a Scobt, though they may be
free enough at times wifch their facts, will
make a period alive and moving for us far
more than the dry purveyor of names and
dates. It is often the small details, especially
if they come from the inside view, that teach
us more than the big events. We want not
only Austerlitz, but the gossip of a Madame
BEHIND THE HISTORY. 161
de Remusat to understand Napoleon; the
chatter of a De Chaulieu, as well as the tomes
of a Bossuefc, to realise the time of the Grand
Monarque.
Yet the more we study written history the
more dissatisfied are we with it as a real record
of what has actually happened on this planet.
We feel all the time that we are only on the
outer edge of reality. The thing itself, and
the thing said about it, are all so different.
Sir Walter Kaleigh, after hearing half-a-dozen
discordant accounts of something that had
happened under his windows, was amused at
his own idea of writing a history of the world.
There are, indeed, as many different accounts
of things as there are persons to relate them.
We have a score of contemporary reporters
of the death of Darnley, but the collation of
their reports makes the mystery of it blacker
than ever. Who wrote the " Imitatio " ?
Was it Gerson, or Thomas A'Kempis, or the
Abbe of Verceil ? We grope for answer amid
masses of statement this side and that, and
at the end are as puzzled as ever.
It is indeed the secret history, the history
behind the history, for which the inquirer
after reality is always in search. When, for
instance, we read our Bible, while under
unspeakable obligation for what is there, we
find an interest almost as deep in what is not
there. About the Old Testament we recog-
162 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION.
nise, with Sir William Dawson, that " we
are just beginning to realise that the fragments
of Hebrew literature contained in the Old
Testament are the wrecks of a vast literature
which extended over the Oriental world from a
remote past." If only we knew the genesis
of Genesis ; the earlier documents, the sub-
structures of legend, and the successive pro-
cesses out of which arose our Pentateuch !
The critics have helped us enormously here,
but the results are, at best, a guess. Of the
New Testament, much the same must be said.
When we open at Matthew how we long to
get at the sub-Matthew ! Ah ! to reach that
inner circle of fact ; to see the growth of the
story ; to watch the process by which the
scattered notes of events and discourses,
the tales passed from mouth to mouth, the
prepossessions and mental habitudes of wit-
nesses all finally condensed into this evangel
as we now have it !
All religions, indeed, have a secret history.
And that because what really transpires is
beyond accurate expression in speech. The
transcendental feeling in which they originate
has no exact correlative in language. What
was the Christianity of Christ ? What was,
we mean, the precise feeling of Jesus in con-
tact with God, with man and the universe ?
That is the whole question, and we can only
approximate to the answer. The men who
BEHIND THE HISTOBY. 163
came into contact with Him realised that they
were in the presence of something new and
incomparably beautiful. There was no lan-
guage ready in which accurately to express
their feeling. The best they could do was
to fall back upon the categories which Jewish
thought had created. And so they used
towards Jesus the terms in which Philo and
the Alexandrian school had clothed their
conception of the Logos. Let us never forget
that the language of the Gospels, while a
medium through which we have come to
know Christ, is a medium which is also a
barrier. In these pages we are on the outer
edge of the fact. We see through a glass,
darkly. We have to guess at the historic
reality behind.
Assuredly we are not saved by knowing.
The gaps in our Bible knowledge are paralleled
in every other department. It might seem,
indeed, as if Nature were in a good-humoured
conspiracy to keep us in ignorance until she
chose to reveal her secrets. Is there not a
suggestion of humour in allowing generation
after generation of civilised and cultured
men to believe implicitly that our world
was made in six days ? All the time the actual
record was there, writ in rock and fossil and
alluvial drift. The truth was open for all
eyes to behold, but no eye saw it. When a
faint glimmer of it began to show, it was held
,
164 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
as a part of religion to close one's eyes. A
few generations hence and how many com-
ceptions we now regard as necessary to the
spiritual life may seem to our descendants
equally unnecessary and grotesque !
We never get a complete history of one
another. " Est-ce qu'une vie de femme se
raconte?" asks Sainte Beuve. The question
applies not only to women. How should we
be able to write accurately about life when no
scientist can tell us what life is ? No man
can explain his own consciousness. Most of
us have little desire to make the attempt.
Talleyrand's mot that language is for the
purpose of concealing thought, holds a certan
amount of truth. It is in the line of Kant's
admission that <c openheartedness, the saying
of the whole truth we know of, is not to be
met with in human nature." The attempt
to do so has actually a displeasing effect.
The nearest approach to it is probably to
be found in Rousseau's " Confessions " ; and
who that has read him has not felt a certain
repugnance, as if a stranger were stripping
himself naked before us in the open street ?
With most of us our best and our worst is
alike concealed. An unfriendly critic declared
of Chateaubriand that " within Chateaubriand
was an obscene Chateaubriand." There has
been something similar in a good many
persons of repute. But a true record of our
BEHIND THE HISTORY. 165
fellows, while reporting these black spots,
would report also many an unsuspected holy
of holies, shrines where have burned the flames
of passionate devotion, of pure ethereal desire,
in hearts we have thought cold and hard.
William Watson's judgment on Burns is one
that may be applied over a wider area :
Not ours to gauge the more or less,
The will's defect, the blood's excess,
The earthly humours that oppress
The radiant mind.
His greatness, not his littleness,
Concerns mankind.
The history behind the history ; that, we
say, is the ever-interesting thing. The un-
written outweighs immeasurably all we have
in print. What records are in the faces we
meet ! One is overwhelmed with the tragic
interest of those lines of feature, of those
volumes contained in a glance. Do we get
properly behind our newspapers of a morning ?
When we read of Port Arthur and its casualty
list, did we get from the cold print to the actual
history ; to what passed, for instance, in every
bosom of those nameless thousands of the
Japanese army who swarmed up the shell-
swept slopes in attack after attack, and whose
bodies afterwards lay stark on the hillside that
story unwritten in each man of keenest,
Agonised consciousness up to the last fatal
166 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
moment ? Will all that we wonder, in this
or any other world, ever emerge into speech ?
Or have we ever tried to think ourselves
into the consciousness of the animal creation,
of those dumb millions that travel with us in
the life- journey, that suffer and say no
word ? There is a secret history beyond even
this. Beneath the life we know, of man and
animal, opens a mystery of existence still
more inscrutable. What is the life of atoms,
of the earth itself ? Deep beneath our planet's
surface, in the far interior, there lie, probably,
great open spaces, subterranean lakes, that
have been there from the beginning. Can we
realise that solitude ? Some geologists give
fifty million years from the Laurentian period
to the Early Pleistocene. Imagine the move-
ment of the hours, the centuries that made that
period, in these vast, dark, silent interiors t
And yet is not that story, each moment of
it, written upon some world-consciousness ?
It must be, for matter is only the outer side
of spirit, and there can be no existence any-
where which has not its spiritual counterpart.
And here come we, at the end, to the root
of the whole matter. The unwritten, the
secret history is, we have contended, the
deepest and most important of histories. And
we can see now the reason. It is that the
whole of the visible, in its entire manifestation,
rests upon a greater invisible. The outer
BEHIND THE HISTOBY. 167
world is a deposit from the unseen. Mind is,
we perceive, both essentially and historically
before matter, for it is only through mind
and in terms of mind we can conceive matter.
Out of such a study as this emerges the in-
evitable truth that man is a spiritual being
in a spiritual universe. This truth, the end
of historical inquiry, is the beginning of religious
experience. The abiding realities, the per-
manent forces, are " the things unseen." Our
age is asking, in an agony of doubt, this
question :
Can a finite thing created in the bounds of time and
space,
Can it live and grow and love Thee, catch the glory of
Thy face,
Fade and die, be gone for ever, know no being, have no
place ?
We have here the answer. It cannot be, for
man's being in its essence is founded on the
unseen ; and while " the things that are seen
are temporal, the things that are not seen are
eternal."
XIX.
Of Spiritual Loss.
THE modern habit of thinking theology in
terms of physical science is apt, if we are not
careful, to lead us, in some directions at least,
very far astray. A notable instance is where
we begin to speculate OD spiritual power,
as though it were on the same plane and
subject to the same laws as the power which
energises in the natural world. About this
latter force, as we know, physicists argue
on the supposition that it is a constant quantity ;
that its amount is fixed ; that while you may
indefinitely change its form, you cannot
add to it or take from it. It is very easy
for the scientific mind to reason on the same
lines concerning the soul's energies. There
is so much that is analogous. Here, too,
are wonderful transmutations. Spiritual
power, as far as we can trace it, seems hidden
away in all kinds of elements ; its apparent
loss is constantly a mere disappearance, as of
heat when it becomes latent. Does not
the parallel, then, go all the way ? When
168
OF SPIRITUAL Loss. 169
heights are reached in one direction, will it
not be at the expense of a corresponding
depression elsewhere ? Is not a supposed
progress, then, simply the sway backwards
and forwards of an energy whose quantity
is always really the same ?
Along this line, we say, modern thought is
apt to travel easily. But it is a false line.
For the laws in this region are not on a level
with those of physical energy. So far from
being a fixed quantity, life in its higher and
spiritual manifestations is an ever-growing
quantity. From the invisible spheres it is
flowing in upon humanity in a deepening
stream, augmenting always with the capacity
to receive it. The supply seems limitless,
as seems also the inner development which
it works to produce. It is this consideration
which upsets completely the modern
materialistic determinism. When we are told
that character is fixed by the shape of a man's
forehead, that, as Schopenhauer has it, " the
wicked man is born with his wickedness as
much as the serpent is with his poison fangs
and glands, nor can the former change his
nature a whit more than the latter," we see
the gaping flaw in the argument. It forgets
the progressive force that is shaping humanity ;
working on its foreheads, altering its physical
conditions, touching to new issues its centres
of feeling and thought.
12
170 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
These higher manifestations, which, for
want of a better term, we define as " the
spiritual life," are being more and more
recognised as humanity's most precious asset,
its pearl of great price. To lose them, or to
stop their free development, is, by the best
minds, seen to be a loss greater infinitely
than the failure of the crops or the breakdown
of the national credit. To the degree hi
which a country is backward here it is under
a disability not to be reckoned in figures.
It is like a want of eyesight. We do not
stay now to define the contents of the spiritual
consciousness. St. Paul has done it excel-
lently for us in his description of the " fruits
of the Spirit." What we want specially
to dwell on is the possibility of losing it.
That the loss, in more or less degree, is quite
possible history abundantly shows. What
history, however, has made quite as
abundantly manifest is the curious blunders
men have made in guarding against the loss.
The wider our observation, the more careful
shall we become in declaring what is actually
a spiritual loss. So often do we mistake
the apparent for the real, so often do we
find that what needed to be corrected was,
not the thing outside us so much as our
own standard of judgment. What we imagine
has gone has simply become latent. There
are instances, of course, where much more
OF SPIRITUAL Loss. 171
than that has to be said. When Louis XIV.,
by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
drove out the Huguenots, it is impossible
not to see the enormous impoverishment
that was occasioned in the highest life of
France. She lost then her Puritans and
Nonconformists, and her spiritual life has
never recovered the blow. What a strange
confession that is of Renan, which he seems
to regard, indeed, as a commendation of the
modern French mind ! " The French mind
is altogether in the most perfect harmony
with the proportions of our planet ; it has
estimated the dimensions at a glance, and
does not go beyond them." This planetary
provincialism does not seem, however, to have
produced the highest results, if we may
credit the description by a French writer of
to-day of the inner condition of his country :.
" More than a hundred years after the great
Revolution ; after thirty years of a republic,
by turns Conservative, Opportunist, Radical
and Socialist, we find ourselves wallowing
in the mud of our industrialism, our pauperism,
our revolts, our wars ; with prostitution and
alcoholism for our joys, the Press and politics
for our activities, with money and appearance
for ideal."
Who also can fail to discern, amid much
progress in other directions, a lack of the
highest life in our own land in that eighteenth-
172 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
century society of which Hume and his school
were the accepted prophets ! What a level
of thinking and of being which permitted
the following, quoted with approbation by
Adam Smith from Hume, as the proper
attitude towards religion ! " And in the end
the civil magistrate will find that he has
dearly paid for his intended frugality in
saving a fixed establishment for the priests ;
and that in reality the most decent and
advantageous composition which he can make
with the spiritual guides is to bribe their
indolence by assigning fixed salaries to their
profession, and rendering it superfluous for
them to be further active than merely to
prevent their flock from straying in quest
of new pastors." In other words, one must
establish religion as the best way of restricting
its activities ! This idea, astonishing as it
may seem to most of us, has nevertheless been
at the back of the mind of a good many of our
legislators. It found expression in the remark
of that good establishmentarian and pillar of
the Church, Lord Melbourne. " If," said he,
" we are to have a religion, let us have one
that is cool and indifferent ; and such a one
asjwe have got." It is to be hoped the world
is at last arriving at a different conception from
this of man's relation to the spiritual powers.
And yet amongst those who have had the
profoundest sense of religion and the keenest
OF SPIRITUAL Loss. 173
desire to conserve its interests, we discern a
blindness not less fatuous. When we review
the various precautions against spiritual loss,
we remember Voltaire's mot about the doctors
and bodily health. " They put drugs of which
they know little into a body of which they
know nothing." For centuries the belief
prevailed throughout Christendom that the
only way of saving men's souls was to secure
an absolute uniformity of theological opinion.
Augustine, founding himself on the text,
" Compel them to come in," taught this fatal
doctrine to the imperial Government a
doctrine which was afterwards to deluge the
world with blood. We are apt to think of
Philip II. the man under whose auspices
Alva wrought his butcheries in the Netherlands,
who sent the Armada against England, and
who worked the Inquisition with such terrific
energy amongst his own Spaniards as a
monster of cruelty. In reality, he was a man
naturally of mild disposition and of strong
affections. In his later years especially he
was revered by the people as a saint. His
slaughters and persecutions were wrought
under the profound conviction that he, their
crowned monarch, was responsible for the
souls of his people ; that only by the victory
of the Catholic faith, of which he was in
his realm the appointed custodian, could the
Kingdom of God come amongst them.
174 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
We have made some advances since Philip's
day, yet in many quarters we have ideas
almost as erroneous on the causes of spiritual
loss. Ignorance is still fostered as a safeguard
of piety. A minister once expressed to the
present writer his thankfulness that he had
not learned German. German literature he
considered was so unsettling. There are to-day
reputable preachers who taboo the critical
investigation of the Scriptures as a kind of
infidelity.
There is, indeed, a certain religious exalta-
tion to which study of any kind which does
not directly feed emotion is regarded as
hindering the spiritual life. And assuredly it
does hinder feeling, but the mistake here is to
regard feeling as the whole of life. When
Ignatius Loyala, turned from warrior into
saint, began to learn Latin, he found it a
miserable substitute for his earlier raptures.
But he had the good sense to persevere, it
being granted him to see, as some of our zealots
have failed to see, that zeal without knowledge
can offer at best only a lame and limping
service. Is not this, indeed, one of the
damning heresies, though no council has
denounced it, the idea of exalting feeling,
the rapture of devotion, as the supreme test
of the spiritual life ? It is often when feeling
is crushed and broken, when the whole realm
of sensation is in revolt, that a man's soul
OF SPIRITUAL Loss. 175
is at its highest point. When Jesus stood in
Gethsemane, when He trod the road up to
Calvary, His mental state was the reverse
of rapture, but it was there He was conquering
for Himself and the world. Men do their
grandest things often when the heart within
them feels like a stone. The heroic Males-
herbes, safely away from the Revolution at
Lausanne, hears that Louis XVI., his master,
is a captive and in danger. He has his horses
put to. " What are you doing ? " ask his
friends. " Je pars pour Paris." He was
going himself to his doom and knew it. It
was midnight in his soul as he went, but the
man was never higher, or nearer heaven.
It is time we understood more clearly
what really constitutes spiritual gain and
loss. The safeguards devised by monarchs
and ecclesiastics for the spiritual kingdom
are on a par with the Protectionist proposals
for the benefit of commerce. Practitioners
of this order in both departments do not
perceive that the only healthy condition
here is one of absolute freedom. Anything
that hinders the freest circulation of the
spiritual forces is a loss. The pursuit of
research, the clash of opinion, where full liberty
is, can only end in spiritual furtherance, for the
laws of the human mind, where they are free to
act, tend inevitably towards the truth. To
underprop religion by the old artificial methods
176 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
is like underpropping the planet. The spiritual
kingdom, like the planet, requires no under-
propping, because it, too, is sustained by forces
that are invisible.
There is a personal aspect to this theme
which in itself might well have occupied us
entirely. Nothing in the whole range of a
man's possessions is so well worth safeguarding
as his spiritual estate. And he is himself
a fair judge of how matters are going there.
As we advance from youth to age a great
many things change in us. There may be
decay of bodily strength and of some forms of
mental faculty. But it is a glorious fact that
in all that makes the soul of a man the move-
ment may be one always of less to more.
If there is in us a perceptible lessening of the
sense of justice, of the passion for purity,
of human sympathy, of sensitiveness to the
spiritual world and all of beauty and promise
that it holds, the fault is not with the years
but with ourselves. After all, the one great
touchstone of spiritual loss or gain, as the
apostle has told us in immortal words, is love.
The night has a thousand eyes
And the day but one ;
But the light of a whole world ( 7 ies
With the setting sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes
And the heart but one ;
But the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
XX.
Converts.
AN abiding question for all the Churches
is the question of converts. It is one which
requires from them not only their best doing
but their best thinking. And yet there is
no topic so persistently shirked ; or where,
when attention is given to it, the ideas are so
shallow and so inadequate. There are shoals
of ecclesiastics amongst whom the matter
is hardly even considered. With them the
word " conversion " has dropped out. And
yet this one thing is, in Luther's words, " the
article of a standing or falling Church."
Modern Christianity will have to get to the
bottom of the business or perish from the
earth. As a religion it is, as never before, on
its defence, and its only successful defence
will be in attack. The time has come for a
complete revision on this subject, both of ideas
and of methods. It will be when we come
back to the conception of the Gospel as, not so
much a theology as a dynamic, a motive
power for the changing and uplifting of men,
177
178 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
that the Church will get off the down-grade
on which it is so swiftly gliding and take its
place once more at the head of the human
movement.
What are the facts of the present situation ?
The most salient of them is that the working
class, from whom almost exclusively the first
Christian converts were drawn, is to-day the
class at the farthest remove from the Church.
We have here, we say, an exact reversal of
the primitive state. In that first age it was
the rich, the titled, the important people who
stood aloof from Christianity, and the common
people who received it gladly. To-day,
throughout Protestantism in Germany, in
England, in America organised Christianity
is maintained by the capitalist classes, while
the proletariat keeps outside. So extra-
ordinary a swing round surely demands
attention. As a fact in sociology it offers
a challenge to inquiry ; as a feature in modern
religion it stands as a matter of life and death.
There is no doubt as to the facts. In Germany,
according to Dr. Stb'cker, " Protestantism is
sick, sick unto death. The working men
of the towns, belonging, as they often do, to
the Social Democratic party, are everywhere
hostile." In the United States, during a
recent investigation, pastor after pastor of
the town churches testified that they had
not a single working man on their roll. What
CONVERTS. 179
the condition is in our own land the researches
of Mr. Charles Booth and the recent Church
censuses have sufficiently revealed. Here,
surely, is a state of things that requires some
looking into.
What theory and practice has the Church
to-day concerning converts ? Conversion is a
business the world has been about for a good
many years now, and with a remarkable
variety of method. It is reported of Xavier,
that on one of his missionary expeditions, on
passing some islands where he was unable
to land, he waved in their direction a brush
dipped in holy water, making over them the
sign of the cross, and on the strength of this
procedure claimed the inhabitants for the
Catholic Church. Charlemagne took more
trouble with the Saxons, but his methods also
were summary. After defeating one of their
armies, he offered his prisoners one of two
alternatives, either to be baptized in the
neighbouring river, or to have their throats
cut. They became converts at once. Queen
Mary would seem to have had a view not
remote from that of the Frankish conqueror
when she burnt heretics, declaring, as is
recorded of her, that " she could not be wrong
in this, as God would otherwise do it in hell."
We do not in our time propose these ways
of solving the religious problem. But they
were at least vigorous, and the question arises
180 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
whether our lack of initiative is not, in its way,
as far from a proper handling of the matter as
was their crudeness ? If our idea is not that
of Charlemagne, what is it ? Protestantism,
in so far as it possesses a theory, has dealt
hitherto with conversion as an exclusively
personal question. It holds, or professes to,
that a man can be vitally changed ; made,
in New Testament language, " a new creature,"
by the operation in him of a gracious Divine
power. And that in itself surely is a great
Gospel to proclaim. There are innumerable
witnesses to such happenings. Everything,
indeed, in cosmic analogy would lead us to
affirm such a possibility. If man, in other
spheres, can multiply his power a hundredfold
by alliance with outside energies ; can call in
steam, electricity, a thousand things as
magnifiers and intensifiers of his personality,
why should not the same hold in the sphere
of the spiritual ? Why should there not lie
here external aids waiting for him to appro-
priate ? And when primitive Christianity
speaks of this aid as a personal one, modern
psychology can have nothing against it.
If in so humble a region as hypnotism we
see one will passing into and executing
itself in another personality, why hesitate
to accept, in the highest realm, the doctrine
of the " possession " of us by a Divine
personality ?
CONVERTS. 181
So far good. But the mischief with modern
Protestantism is that in its reading, alike
of the New Testament and of the facts of
human life, it has only gone half-way. It has
taken the doctrine, while overlooking the
setting, the environment of the doctrine.
But, as related to converts, the one is as
important as the other. And the neglect
of it is the cause of all the present decadence.
The thing forgotten, and now at all costs to be
recovered, is the fact that primitive Christianity
had a social as well as an individual programme.
Its appeal to men was not only in relation
to something invisible in the heavens, but to
something visible here before them on the
earth. And the something it offered was
felt by these poor disinherited ones as a
good something. It was a social organisation
whose watchwords were the very ones that
thrilled Europe a century ago : " Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity." The Gospel's offer
was not only a secret and mystical rapture
of the soul, but a fellowship of unequalled
charm and sweetness. No wonder the poor
flocked in at these doors ! The slave, treated
outside as dross, felt himself here a man.
Surrounded, frowned upon in the world by
huge, pitiless tyrannies, in the Christian
brotherhood he found a sacred democracy
where everything good was freely shared.
He had come into his kingdom.
182 THE ETEENAL RELIGION.
It is really amazing that our modern
ecclesiastic can fail so utterly to grasp this
side of his problem. He sees the masses of
the people outside his system, and asks in
piteous bewilderment for the reason. Is,
then, Christianity a failure ; or is it that our
generation has a double dose of original sin ?
It is neither, my good friend, but simply that
you and those with you have not yet been able
to recognise the most obvious facts of the
situation. What, in heaven's name, do you
propose to convert these people to ? Is it to
modern Anglicanism ? That institution has
undoubtedly some Christian doctrine inside it.
But what is its environment ? What social
instincts of the working man does its system
appeal to ? Its religious services are con-
ducted by a white-robed gentleman, who
reads or intones a ritual which might as well
be addressed to the moon as to our artisan.
This goes on in a cold building, whose occupants
are well-dressed persons who would be insulted
if he sat by their side. Genial atmosphere
this for the expansion of his social instincts !
When, in addition, our proletaire learns that
the institution which, as a convert, he is here
invited to join is the trenched and moated
citadel of the aristocratic, feudal principle ;
that in its government the people have no
voice ; that its interests are, above all things,
the interests of property, of class distinction,
CONVERTS. 183
of social exclusiveness, of all, in short, that
militates most fiercely against his individual
and class aspiration, can we be serious in
proposing that he embrace it ? His con-
version to all this would indeed be the most
astounding of miracles. But do not, in the
name of common-sense, let us speak of this
attitude of his as a rejection of Christianity.
It is a rejection of feudalism and of the cold
shoulder.
Shall we never learn our lesson ? Chris-
tianity is first and foremost a democracy, and
it can succeed upon no other terms. The
Kingdom of God it proclaims is none other than
freedom inner and outer ; the participation
of the best by all ; the brotherhood of men,
where each serves the other ; a family where
all are one in Christ their Brother and God
their Father. That Church is a mockery
of the Gospel which invites men to anything
other or less than this. If evidence were
needed of the truth of all this, it is found,
surely, in the fact that precisely to the extent
in which Christian communities, of whatever
name, are awaking to these ideas, to that
degree are they breaking down the barriers
between themselves and the people. Where
religious services partake of the democratic
note ; where the entrance is free and the
welcome hearty ; where song, prayer and
speech are the voice of the brotherhood ;
184 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
where the institutions springing from the
central force are all manifestations of
the same spirit, there the ancient, eternal
Gospel asserts at once its power and renews
its immortal youth.
There is another aspect of this subject
worth far more attention than we shall here
give to it. It is that of what the convert,
when he is found, brings with him. This is
one of the little noted, but really most signifi-
cant features in the history of religion. We
are not yet at the bottom of all it means.
The point is that whenever the Church,
in the great springtimes of its activity, has
admitted the inflowing hosts from outside,
the result has been, not simply a change
wrought in them, but a change also wrought
in itself. The convert is always a giver as well
as a receiver. Each contributes something
of his own to historic Christianity. The
conversion of the Latin races brought into
the Church the rigid discipline of Catholicism ;
the entrance of the Greek peoples gave her
the creeds and a dogmatic theology. It was
the stern, cruel temper of the North African
peoples that produced in a Tertullian and an
Augustine that dark, fearsome aspect with
which for centuries they clouded the Christian
eschatology. With the new races that are
yet to come in the same law will hold. A
converted India and China will mean new
CONVERTS. 185
conceptions of the Gospel. What they will
bring will be only less in importance to what
they take. Have we evor tried to estimate
what it meant for our religious thought when
Paul, with his previous rabbinical Draining,
with his notions of sacrifice and other vital
topics, became a Christian convert : of the
difference to our whole conception of Christ's
death, for instance, had this particular Jew
never been baptized ? And there may yet
arise hi China or India men who, at least
to their own countrymen, will prove as original
and as influential exponents of Christ as he of
Tarsus has been to us.
In sum. The question of converts is the
topic for to-day. It is time we gave Chris-
tianity its chance. At present half its force
is locked up. There are two oars in the
boat and we are only using one. The result
is the boat goes round and round instead of
moving on. When we have got the whole
programme ; when the peoples hear the voice
and see the institutions of the Democratic
Gospel, they will rally to it. It is, they will
recognise, the supreme good for which they
and their fathers, through all the weary ages,
have ceaselessly yearned.
13
XXI.
Necessity.
EVERY religion has had its doctrine of necessity.
The final one will assuredly also contain it.
The word itself, whichever way we take it, is
assuredly one of the grimmest in the language.
We use it in two widely different senses, but
in each of them it looms over human life like
a thundercloud. It represents for one thing
that stern metaphysical doctrine which denies
freewill to man, regarding his life and action
as the inevitable result of preordained causes.
Science has translated this metaphysic into
biology, and taught a predestination which
announces itself in the shape of a nose, in a
chin's weakness or strength, in the quantity
and quality of the brain's grey matter. " As
you are made," it says, " so you will act."
The peculiarity of the position here is that
the argument which may convince the intellect
convinces never the conscience. Against all
evidence our moral sense declares us free.
We are here, indeed, fixed in one of those
antinomies with which life is full. The con-
ies
NECESSITY. 187
tradiction of necessity and free will is only
one of many. The mathematician offers us
calculations in which we can discern no flaw,
but which lead to exactly opposite results.
What they really prove is that our mind, under
its present limitations, is trustworthy only up
to a certain point. There are savages who
can count up to ten and get no farther. Our
reason is a calculator up to a point which is
equally limited.
The world's best minds have broken them-
selves on these problems, and there is no
better exercise in dialectic than to study
their efforts at a solution. The boundaries
of human thinking in this direction were
reached pretty early. The doctrine of Hera-
clitus that fate or destiny was " the general
reason that runs through the whole nature
of the universe " ; of Chrysippus that it was
" a spiritual power that disposed the world
in order " ; of Plato that it was " the eternal
reason or law of nature," represent a view of
things which we have scarcely improved
upon. Their handling, too, of the mystery of
evil as related to necessity is marvellously
interesting. How ingeniously does Plato work
out his idea that the Creator, having to mix
together necessity and thought, made the
universe as like to Himself as He could ; and
how subtle is Aristotle's argument that the
universe consisting of matter and form, the
188 THE ETERNAL EELIGION.
Divine perfection is found in the form, while
all imperfections derive from the matter !
No thinkers in these realms can afford to
overlook Leibnitz's Theodicee, in which he
derives evil from the necessary relations of
finite and infinite, and argues that God is
the author not of moral evil, but of the
possibility of it, since whoever commits a trust
to others opens this possibility. He is the
cause of the existence of character, not the
cause of what the character shall be. The
problem which is here solved is how to promote
the free conditions of character, with the best
security for its tendency upwards.
But it is not after all with necessity, as
thus understood, that we wish here mainly
to concern ourselves. It is, we suppose, only
the few to whom this aspect of the matter is in
any sense a trouble. There is another side
of it, however, which grips every son of Adam.
Millions who never gave to necessity a thought
as a speculation know and obey it every hour
of the day as a compeller. And in this aspect
we say it is among the grimmest of presences.
At the end of a holiday, for instance, when
the period of "go as you please " is over,
and there looms in front that region of " must,"
of inevitable performance, of stern restriction,
of that " necessity," in short, which for a brief
time we had escaped, how unlovely, how
desperately forbidding, does it all appear !
NECESSITY. 189
It is worth while, for our comfort and
heartening, to look into this matter a little.
It may be, ere we have done, we may form a
judgment less harsh of our necessity, if we
have not fallen in love with it altogether.
For when all is said, this grim attendant of
ours is not an enemy, but a friend, one of our
best. To the race as a whole, and to ourselves
as individuals, it has been what the driving
power is to a train. That fiery furnace heat,
that fierce blast of the urgent steam, are things
not to be trifled with, terrible to encounter on
their wrong side, but there were no progress
without them. When we speak of the gifts
with which humanity has been dowered, the
grace by which it has lived and thriven,
we must put necessity high in the roll. For
it is at once a gift and a grace. When we
reckon up our capabilities we must always
add this " needs must " to the sum of them.
We only know our full self when yoked thus
to the inevitable. We are on this planet to
have the best got out of us, and here are
the pick and shovel that dig it up. For it is
the " must " that not simply orders but accom-
plishes. The amateur Alpine climber (we speak
here from experience) reaches a spot which
seems an absolute impasse. But necessity
compels him across the impossible, and he does
it quite easily. The journalist writes against
time, and the pressure itself does the work.
190 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION.
And it is not simply that, under this com-
pelling force, we reach our limit. It is this
same compulsion that perpetually enlarges
us, pushing our boundary-line ever further
on. In our extremity we fall back on our
reserves, to discover with astonishment the
hitherto unknown riches in that territory.
Our normal, at such moments, becomes raised
to an n th power. The papers contained the
other day the story of a paralytic who was
cured by an alarm of fire in the house. The
shock and sudden exertion broke open some
hidden reservoir that reinforced the failing
nerve centres. Man, indeed, is never so
worthy of study as in times of sudden ex-
tremity. It is then that he rises above or
falls beneath himself. There is, of course,
this latter possibility. A great pressure may
demoralise as well as strengthen. Burke, in
one of his speeches, argues that times of great
mortality are times of special wickedness.
" It was so," he says, " in the great plague
of Athens. It was so in the plague of London.
It appears in soldiers, sailors, &c. Whoever
would contrive to render the life of man much
shorter than it is would, I am satisfied, find
the surest recipe for increasing the wickedness
of our nature." This reminds us of Kenan's
argument that if the world were convinced
of a speedy end of things it would give itself
up to general debauchery.
NECESSITY. 191
We have grave doubts on the point, Burke
and Renan notwithstanding. What we are
discussing here, however, is not so much
the effect of the sudden pressures, which vary
with the whole extent of the previously acquired
character, as the action of the steadier and
more permanent ones. It is here we see, in
sun-bright clearness, the redemptive and
uplifting power of our necessity. Every
historian, every sociologist, is agreed that the
nation with the hardest struggle is the nation
with the best asset and the surest future.
Nature flings here her contradictions broad-
cast. She shows us how the peoples most
continually in danger are really the safest,
and how the protected peoples, assured by
their situation against the foreign foe, and
by climate and fertility against the struggle
for life, are on the road to decay and extinction.
It is along this road of hardship and dire
extremity, in terror of famine, of nakedness,
of tempest, of wild beast, that our prehistoric
ancestor fought his way upward. His
difficulty was the creator of his faculty. Out
of this external besetment he won his power.
And to-day it is the nations that are most
exposed, that are faced with the sternest
problems, that hold the future's greatest
promise. Were England to be rid of her
competitors to-morrow, the deliverance would
be a loss not reckonable in millions.
192 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
But there is a deeper note yet to be struck.
The education of necessity carries more, much
more, than is contained in the physical battle
for life. The significant thing about man is
that the animal struggle is, in all its character-
istics, reduplicated in a higher sphere. Man's
necessity is a graded one. The soul has its
" must " as well as the body. And it is in
contemplating this side of human life that,
perhaps more than anywhere else, we obtain
assurance of the sure foundations and the
everlasting continuance of religion. It is
not in churches or Bibles that we find the
final guarantee. That lies in the inherent
structure of the soul. And the " must "
here is, that a Divineness, a Holiness outside
ourselves should ally itself with us and give
a meaning to life. Precisely as his nakedness
and physical destitution have been the con-
ditions of man's external progress, BO with
his inner life. The true beginning of the
soul's prosperity is the sense of its helplessness
as of itself. Romanes, who had trodden
every inch of this road, speaks our experience
as well as his own when he says : " There
is a vacuum in the soul which nothing can fill
but God." There is no surer proof of God
than our spirit's need of Him. It is what
hunger is to the body a pledge in itself
of food somewhere. The great souls have
everywhere realised this. What Walter Pater
NECESSITY. 193
says of Pascal is true of them all : " It is from
the homelessness of the world which science
analyses so victoriously, its dark unspirituality,
wherein the soul he is conscious of seems
such a stranger, that Pascal turns to his rest,
in the conception of a world of wholly reason-
able and moral agencies."
It is a grand achievement for the soul
when, sure of its place in the world's spiritual
order, sure of its relation to and reinforcement
from the Highest Life, it finds a new necessity
in itself, an imperative of honour and noble-
ness to which all else within that is inferior
must submit. It is here that man becomes
as God, " who cannot deny Himself." There
is nothing, indeed, so godlike on this earth
as the soul's imperative. What a height is
that of Dante when, invited to return to
Florence at the price of dishonour, he exclaims,
" What ! Are not the sun and stars to be seen
in every land ? Shall I not be able under
every part of heaven to meditate sweet truth,
unless I first make myself inglorious, nay,
ignominious, to my people and my country ? "
When Luther, with a whole world against him,
exclaims, " I can do no other," he is at one
with the great exile ; he, too, is exhibiting
the soul's necessity of being ever loyal to^the
highest.
The lessons of this theme are innumerable,
but we must leave our readers to deduce^them.
194 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
They concern our personal attitude to life, and
our whole method of preparation for it.
The subject is one above aU for the educa-
tionist. When we have grasped it we shall
know, for one thing, that in shielding the
young from the sterner aspects, the " musts "
of the world, we are cutting them off from their
best friend. The ancients can teach us some-
thing here. When Marcus Aurelius, born
to the purple, testifies with gratitude that
" from my tutor I learned endurance of labour,
and to want little, and to work with my own
hands," he shows the insight into life which
so many of us lack. We repeat, necessity is a
grace of God. That outside hardness yonder
is waiting to be translated into a grand hardi-
ness in ourselves. Through the outer com-
pulsion we come to an inner liberty. This
experience of what has happened and is
happening in the sphere of the known is
surely also a pledge for all that awaits us in
the sphere of the Unknown. Death itself, as
part of this spiritual order, will bring a result
not inferior to that of life.
XXII.
Faith as a Force.
THE world's religions are frequently spoken
of as faiths. The appellation is justified, for
religion is, was, and always will be, founded on
faith. The eternal religion is, we may say, a
faith, and we may well accordingly inquire at
this point as to what precisely faith is and
how it works as a force.
Two things, said Kant, filled him with awe
the contemplation of the starry heavens
above and of the moral law within. We are
sweeping both these realms to-day, and with
new instruments. Spectrum analysis, the
Lick telescope and stellar photography are
giving us a more vivid sense of the infinity above
us than was possible in Kant's time. And
that other subject of his study, the inner
world of the moral consciousness, is in like
manner yielding fresh results. A new analysis
is being brought to bear on the human interior,
in the light of which it is discovering itself
as more wonderful, as opening vaster per-
spectives even than the immensity without.
195
196 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
The quest here opened touches the inmost
secret of religion. In the depths of man's
inner consciousness, scientifically probed, we
find at once faith's history, its vindication and its
promise of the future. In former times men
have studied religion as a system of formulated
beliefs, as an institution, an ecclesiasticism .
To-day we are broadening the reference, and
viewing it as a working force in humanity,
asking how it got there and what its presence
signifies.
The difference between earlier inquiries on
this theme and those which we are upon to-day
is, that beforetime men concentrated their
attention largely on the product of this inner
force, whereas we are now turning our gaze
upon the force itself. The thing I see yonder
may be of the utmost interest and importance.
But whatever it be, it is not to me comparable
in value to the faculty by which I see it.
It is for lack of appreciating this difference that
theologians in the past have made such
prodigious blunders in their estimate of the
sphere and efficacy of faith. They have
described faith from without rather than from
within. At a time when the marvellous
faculty was in its infancy, seeing things dimly
and distortedly, through mists of ignorance
and prejudice, they took its reports, in all
their circumstantial detail, as finalities, the
very buttresses of religion and the ground
FAITH AS A FORCE. 197
of salvation. Of this order have we such
products as the Athanasian Creed, which
makes saving faith to be the acceptance of a
bewildering reticulation of metaphysical pro-
positions. To call this faith is as sensible
as to declare that the stone wall I am now
looking at is eyesight.
It is when they pursue theology through
the false track it here opened, and so long
followed, that the critics and deniers find so
rich a harvest of crimes and misdemeanours
which they lay to the account of religion. If
we identify faith with its cruder products
we have indeed a sorry business on hand.
We see it then as a persecutor, perpetrating
those cruelties which make Lecky, speaking
of mediaeval Catholicism, say with truth,
" the Church of Rome has inflicted a greater
amount of unmerited suffering than any
other religion that has ever existed amongst
mankind." This confusion between the pro-
duct and the faculty which produced it, as
though the former were the all-important,
has done wrongs to the mind not less than
to the body. Mutianus Rufus, the sixteenth-
century German theologian, has a sense of this
when he declares of his contemporary clerics,
" By faith we mean not the conformity of
what we say with fact, but an opinion about
Divine things founded on credulity, and
persuasion which seeks after profit." Indeed,
198 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
if we confine our notion of religious faith to
any one of the formulated systems which the
Churches have erected, however valuable these
may be in themselves, we shall miss the chief
argument from faith, as an answer to present-
day unbelief. The whole force of the argu-
ment lies in this, that the human soul contains
the element as one of its working forces, and
that its presence demands an explanation which
only a spiritual religion can give.
If at this stage we are asked what this
feature of our inner constitution really is, v,*3
should be disposed, first of all, to fall back
on a great word of Calvin, himself a mighty
system-builder, but who, nevertheless, saw
that faith in itself is hardly a matter of defini-
tion. The ultimate forces rarely are. Let us
quote his pregnant word : " Assensionem ipsam
iterum repetam cordis esse magis quam cerebri, et
affectus magis quam intdlig enticed "Again I
repeat that this assent is an affair of the heart
rather than of the reason, of the feelings more
than of the mere intelligence." In its broadest
sense, as we find it throughout humanity, we
might speak of faith as a sense of the unseen,
a feeling that we are related to an invisible
and higher world, that our destiny is essentially
a moral and spiritual destiny. The feeling
which De Quincey attributed to Coleridge is
one which might well be ascribed to humanity :
'* He wanted better bread than can be made
FAITH AS A FORCE. 199
with wheat." Let it be proved that men
come from the dust. The soul will never
believe that the dust made it. This sense
of an inner unseen universe that is moral,
to which we are vitally related, and with
which all our destinies are bound up, has
been the prime working force in the world.
It has been the creator of history, the founder
of religions, the chief builder of character.
It shows itself everywhere, in art, in literature,
in all thinking and doing. It becomes latent
at times, as heat becomes latent, but is never
destroyed. It is, to all appearance, as in-
destructible as oxygen.
This power, we say, has been at work in
man from the beginning. From history's
earliest dawn man knows himself as spiritual
and related to an eternal moral order. The
Egyptians, millenniums before Christ, had
the clearest perception of a future life. In
India, Vedic hymns that are three thousand
five hundred years old declare a belief in a
psychic body inside the fleshly one, by which
the dead rose to the upper spheres. What
our later researches are making increasingly
plain is, that these long-forgotten races, whom
in our narrower conception we had thought
of as religiously outcast and uncovenanted,
had really a knowledge of spiritual law which
in some respects was more profound than our
own, and were enjoying a very rich religious
200 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
inheritance. Much of that higher living which
we have regarded as our specialty had been
for thousands of years realised in humanity,
the possession, in its full fruition, of the
choicer spirits, yet dimly discerned and
unconsciously working among the less en-
lightened.
It will be upon this vaster view that the
religion of the future will be framed. We are
in sight of a scientific demonstration of its
essential principle, which will establish it
beyond the reach of doubt, and confound
alike the narrow sectarianism that finds
salvation in some sectional shibboleth, and
the more miserable nihilism which denies
man a soul and a future. It is wonderful
in this connection to note how, in each age,
the faith element receives the aliment ap-
propriate to itself. To-day experimental
science is the greatest master of belief, and it
is this science which is beginning to furnish
us with evidence, procured in its own way,
for the great religious affirmations.
It is, for instance, giving us precisely the
proof which the modern intellect demands
of a future existence. The moral life depends
on a hereafter as one of the conditions of its
growth. Let humanity be persuaded that
there is no future, and all its higher interests
wither. Away goes its romance, its aspiration,
its beauty of holiness, its noblest feeling,
FAITH AS A FORCE. 201
its higher striving. And yet this belief in a
future is dead against all the testimony of
the senses. It is in itself a mystery that,
with such a dead weight of evidence before
him, man has so widely, so universally held
to his idea of another world. There have
been, indeed, generations that could not
resist the materialistic argument. Diderot's
sarcasm seemed in the eighteenth century to
settle the matter: " If you can believe insight
without eyes, in hearing without ears, in
thinking without a head, if you could love
without a heart, feel without senses
. . . then we might indulge this hope
of a future life."
But it is precisely on the French philo-
sopher's own ground that modern science
is meeting this doctrine of despair. It is,
by the demonstrations of hypnotism, proving
conclusively that men can see without eyes
and hear without ears ; that behind the
apparatus of the senses is another and finer
apparatus which dispenses with them, and
gives us the phenomena of consciousness apart
from nerve and brain tissue. More, the
experiments of a Cahagnet and a Rochas
give us the astonishing phenomenon of a
magnetised person throwing off an emanation,
visible in the hypnotic state, which assumes
the contours of the body, and which is as
sensitive as the body itself. Here is the inner
14
202 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
force of a human personality projecting itself,
under certain mental conditions, beyond the
body, and operating outside it. With a
result like this before us, as a matter of common
experiment, what becomes of the argument
that our bodily life is all ? Science is, in fact,
giving us a new Gospel. But its teaching is
the same as the old one. It is building up
before our eyes the manifestation of an eternal
life of which our present brief existence is
only an initial stage.
The great souls in every age have taught
this. It was Christ's message. He lived
in this sphere as One who, in it, was perfectly
at home. The multitudes who have followed
Him have been in like manner sure of their
fact. Their faith carried its own proof by the
work it did in them. Huxley, in a striking
passage, describes the evolution in a sala-
mander's egg, in watching which " one is
almost involuntarily possessed with the idea
that some more subtle aid to vision than the
microscope would show the hidden artist,
with his plan before him." But a finer piece
of work than the evolution of a salamander is
the evolution of a soul. And here again
the unseen artist is at work. The tools are
finer, but the operation is unmistakable.
The finest piece of artistry in the world
is the spectacle of faith working upon a
personality and producing its results. These
FAITH AS A FORCE. 203
phenomena of the moral sensibilities, of prayer,
love, sacrifice, of mighty hopes, of sustained
enthusiasms, all energising in a human interior
are, we say, the greatest sight the world has
to show. Amid the shaking of the creeds
these things remain. The breaking down of
dogmatic limitations is only a widening of
faith's prospect. The decay of older evidence
simply makes room for more trustworthy
affirmations. We are on the eve of a mighty
revival of faith. It will emerge purified
from a thousand gross accretions, established
upon immutable bases, showing itself as the
synthesis of all life, as the explanation of all
history, as the motive of all noble striving.
With its dawn the great age of humanity will
begin.
XXIII.
Religious Imposture.
A DISCUSSION of the permanent in religion
would hardly be complete without some notice
of those excrescences which have, from time
to time, appeared on its surface, and which
illustrate better, perhaps, than aught else
the distinction between its essence and its
temporary environments. Of these the story
of imposture is one of the most singular and
instructive.
" The country," said Cobden once, speaking
of England, " is governed by the ignorance
of the country." Had he extended the
reference and said " the world " his utterance
would still hardly have been exaggerated.
And in no sphere has the government of
ignorance been more despotic or far-reaching
than that of religion. The region it occupies,
by its very nature, gives unrivalled oppor-
tunities for the growth and success of char-
latanism. Religion from the beginning has
been the abode of mystery. At every point
it impinges on the unknown. It employs
204
RELIGIOUS IMPOSTURE. 205
as among its chief instruments three factors,
each of which, when fully developed, has the
power of paralysing the reason we mean
the elements of imagination, of hope, and of
fear. When we combine with these features
the naive and childish conceptions of the
universe which prevailed in earlier ages of the
world's history, it is not difficult for us to
understand the rise and progress, the vagaries,
and often the astounding success, of the
religious impostor.
The story here is, indeed, a pitiful one, but
it is certainly not without its humorous
side. Our impostor is usually a character,
and often a most interesting character. He
is going strong in these later ages, but we
doubt whether the earlier practitioner could
not give points to his modern successor.
In the non-scientific times he held all the
cards. Human credulity in our day is a
marvellously rich field, but in antiquity it
was not only rich but boundless. One of the
best illustrations we know of its possibilities,
under the handling of a clever rogue, is the
story of Alexander of Abonotichos, as told,
with all his unrivalled power of sarcastic
description, by Lucian, that Heine of the
second century. Alexander was a " whole
hogger." Amid the crowd of magicians and
soothsayers who swarmed in the Roman
Empire in his century, he shines forth " Velut
206 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
inter ignes Luna minor es" He was a great
healer and a deliverer of oracles. His mission,
he declared, was religious. Himself descended,
as he gave out, from Perseus, he carried with
him a serpent, on which he had fastened an
artificial head with human features, and which
he introduced to his astonished auditories as
an incarnation of ^Esculapius. He employed
an army of spies, who ascertained for him
the private history of the people who came
to him for advice. This knowledge, besides
convincing his clients of his inspiration,
enabled him to add enormously to his revenue
by the levying of blackmail. No exposures
shook the people's faith in him. He lived
magnificently, and with the grossest licence.
He maintained his popularity to the last, and
died at the age of seventy. The modern
practitioner in this line might study his
predecessor with advantage.
In speaking of religious imposture we have,
however, to discriminate. There is a wide-
spread variety of it which has no relation
to the rascalities of an Alexander or his
imitators. In this region of things the world
has been, for ages, addicted to imposing
on itself. Generation after generation has
been brought up on illusions which they have
lived in and loved. The study, for instance,
of the early Christian centuries offers us in
this regard some puzzling and even painful
RELIGIOUS IMPOSTURE. 207
problems. When Middle ton, in his " Free
Inquiry," published his famous attack on
the patristic miracles, he created a terrible
flutter in the ecclesiastical dovecotes of the
eighteenth century, but his allegations we
now recognise -as all too true. Men in those
days, religious men, had no historical sense,
no feeling for accuracy. The more amazing
a story was the more ground tor accepting it,
and for spreading its fame. Pious frauds
were the fashion. Clerical writers forged
other people's names without a thought of
doing wrong. The " Acts of Paul and Thecla,"
the "Gospel of Peter," the "Gospel
of Thomas," and scores of similar publications
were the work of men who, in putting fictitious
names on their title-page in place of their
own, imagined they were performing a meri-
torious act. And so, as we read their accounts
of signs and wonders, we are inclined to
cry with our Meredith in " The Shaving of
Shagpat " :
Oh world diseased ! Oh race empirical !
Where fools are the fathers of every miracle !
What an amazing story, for instance, to
which fathers of such standing as Gregory
Nazianzen, Sozomen and Theodoret lend their
names, that of the occurrences at Jerusalem
when the Emperor Julian ordered the founda-
tions to be dug for a new Jewish temple !
208 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
These writers gravely tell us not only of a
whirlwind and an earthquake, but of balls
of fire, the appearance of a luminous cross in
the sky, and of crosses, " star-shaped and of
blackish hue," imprinted on the garments
of the beholders ! When, from the heathen
standpoint, Suetonius speaks of the super-
natural generation of Augustus, and gives
the account of great wonders in the sky
at his birth, we realise that we have here the
same attitude of mind and level of knowledge
as gave birth to the prodigies of these
ecclesiastical historians of ours.
There is in this line of things one department
which in the present day seems to call for
some special notice. We refer to the matter
of healing and of the so-called faith-healing.
That question is very closely bound up with
religion, and especially with Christianity.
Christ's own work was, we read, accompanied
everywhere with great healings. The apostles
followed here in their Master's track, and
down through the ages the great saints have
been almost invariably credited with similar
works. Augustine records seventy miracles
wrought in two years in his own diocese of
Hippo by the body of St. Stephen. We should
doubt the authority of many of them, but it is
more difficult to deny the testimony of St.
Bernard, who speaks not only as eye-witness,
but as agent, when, in the account of his
RELIGIOUS IMPOSTURE. 209
preaching the second Crusade, he says : "I
ask myself with the deepest astonishment
what these miracles mean, and why it has
pleased God to do such things by the hands
of a man like me ? ... It seems to me
I have read of nothing more wonderful even
in Scripture." The rankest scepticism can
hardly pass over a statement of that kind,
and there are others not less authoritative.
David Hume refers to the cures at the tomb
of the Abbe Paris in 1731, in which Charcot,
the modern exponent of hypnotism, avows
his belief as proved facts.
The question now is, if we admit these
statements as true, what do we make of them ;
and especially what is their relation to our
theme of religious imposture ? The results
of modern investigation enable us, happily,
on a question which beforetime was met
either with unreasoning scepticism or an
unreasoning credulity, to adopt a different
and saner attitude. These results have re-
vealed to us for one thing the presence of
psychic powers in the human constitution,
barely perceptible in some, but in certain
select spirits present to a degree which have
rendered them capable of producing almost
incalculable effects. These powers, it is seen,
can work with an almost equal result on both
mental and bodily conditions. When, as in
the crusade of which Bernard speaks, or in
210 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
the extraordinary excitements around the
Abbe Paris tomb, the emotions of the recipient
multitude are wrought to a high pitch, the
psychic possibilities are enormously increased.
It is then, especially, that the potency as a
healer of that " self-suggestion " of which
modern hypnotism has given us the law is
revealed. The mind, wrought to the point
of upturning its own hidden powers, turns
upon itself and the body which contains
it with an almost magical effect. It is then,
also, that the magnetism of the healer outside,
be it a St. Paul or a Bernard, pours itself
in on the receptive organism with resistless
power. The influence of one personality on
another wherever exercised, whether that
of an orator on his hearers, or of a general
ordering his troops to the charge, is ever
a mystery. To compel another man's will
by our volition is as real a wonder, though
we have not thought it so, as to move by the
same subtle force his nerve and muscular
system towards cure and strength.
But how does all this bear upon religious
imposture ? We can now come to that.
The point for us here to remember is that
while many saintly men have possessed in
an unusual degree the personal magnetism,
the psychic force of which we have spoken,
its possession does not by any means in itself
prove the possession of saintliness. We may,
RELIGIOUS IMPOSTURE. 211
if we will, call it a great gift of God, but these
other powers, reason, imagination, eloquence,
volition, are also great gifts of God, yet one
and all of them may be used for the most
sinister purposes. There is no reason why
the curative power, just as much as the power
of reasoning, may not be exploited for un-
worthy ends. It is not difficult, indeed, in
the light of what we now know both of history
and the inner working of the human mind,
to trace the genesis and development of the
" faith-healing " movements by which the
Dowies and the Eddys have in our time
made themselves so notorious. These people
discover in themselves a certain power, which
they exercise at first in a manner that is
entirely legitimate. But their success in time
upsets their moral equilibrium alas for poor
human nature, it is so easily upset ! and
we have our practitioners, by-and-by, making
claims and assumptions about themselves
which are perhaps not so much a deliberate
fraud as the self-deception of a diseased and
abnormal vanity.
In what has been said we have only touched
the fringes of an immense subject. There are
wide departments of it, all too visible and
active in our day, which we will only here
hint at. We have still with us, in our com-
mercial circles, the man who makes his
orthodoxy a cover for the shadiest trans-
212 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
actions ; the adventurer who exploits for his
own purposes a religious reputation, after
having lost the religion on which it was
originally founded. There are Sicilian bandits
who go to mass before setting out on tbeir
predatory expeditions. Nearer home their
counterparts sing anthems and hear sermons
in our churches before robbing their neighbours
in the City.
Is the Church itself to-day free from im-
posture ? Some of us fail to understand how
good men can subscribe creeds in which they
do not believe. Another side of the matter
is exhibited in Maurice's wonder " that the
faith of scientific men in the Bible has not
utterly perished when they see by what
tricks we are sustaining it." His criticism
applies with absolute accuracy to certain modern
apologetics. One wonders whether statements
made by seemingly capable and one would
fain think honest men are from sheer ignorance
and stupidity, or, if not, by what strange
process an apparently sane mind has so
completely hid itself from the truth. In
presence of some of the dogmatisms of our
religious leaders we cry with Kant, "
Candour, thou Astrsea who art fled from
earth to heaven, how shall man draw thee,
the ground of conscience and of all inner
religion, back again ! " If only we would
remember, all of us, that a religion which is
RELIGIOUS IMPOSTURE. 213
worth anything must have truth, honesty
and candour among its very presuppositions !
And why are we afraid of truth ? Do we
suppose that when its most vigorous demand
has been satisfied, any true spiritual possession
can be lost to humanity ? It were blasphemy
to the God of truth to think so.
XXIV.
The Soul's Emancipation.
ONE of the questions with which the
eternal religion has always concerned itself,
and which to the end will be one of its supreme
preoccupations, is that of inner freedom.
The earliest human consciousness is a sense
of inner bondage, its earliest expression a sigh
for deliverance. The Platonic philosophy,
borrowed in its turn from the East, was fond
of describing the soul as an exile from a higher
sphere, encased in the flesh as in a prison,
awaiting its emancipation in another life. All
the theologies have centred upon the same
conception. The world religions are so many
prescriptions for securing spiritual liberty.
The remedies often seem fanciful, based upon
theories badly in want of foundation. What
for many of us is more interesting than the
theories is the individual testimony, the story
of the actual human experience. It is a
wonderful and enthralling story. Through the
ages men have been calling to each other as to
how they have fared in this mighty strife.
214
THE SOUL'S EMANCIPATION. 215
What is the verdict ? Is there any consensus
of opinion on which we can found ourselves ?
Have men ever won their freedom ? Have
they discovered a road to it on which we can
confidently travel ?
In looking for the answer it would be easy
to take a narrow view. We might shut our-
selves up in an ecclesiastical formula pre-
scribed as medicine vendors prescribe their
pills and declare men to be free or in bondage
as they stand in relation to this formula.
But there were souls in the world before our
formula, souls which felt in themselves the
same primal necessities, which were embarked
on the same pilgrimage, were conscious of the
same limitations, and had glimmering before
them the same far-off goal. These also are
our kin. Our fortunes are bound up with
theirs. If, in this universe, no good was
intended for them, there is none intended for
us. We cannot be indifferent to their experi-
ence. It would, indeed, be the most heathenish
of actions to cut ourselves off in spirit or
sympathy from these outsiders. For in the
fate of one soul is bound up the fate of us all.
At first sight it seems all a confusion this
fight of men for their emancipation, and the
results of the battle. Multitudes of us profess,
and with all sincerity, that we have found
in religion our inner deliverance. How, then,
are we to account for a Lucretius, expressing
216 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
in magnificent verse his conviction that in the
rejection of religion, and of its teaching about
death and after death, man would alone
find his liberty ? And of modern men what
precisely is contained in that verdict of Pattison,
the representative of the latest Oxford culture,
who, recording his own experience, declares :
" It cost me years more of extrication of thought
before I rose to the conception that the
highest life is the art to live, and that both
men, women and books are equally essential
ingredients of such a life ! " This is hardly
a theological extrication ! Then, next door
to us is France, with its forty millions of vivid
souls embarked on this same life venture as
ourselves. These, too, have struggled for
freedom, and how strange to us the method
and outcome ! One might call it the Voltairian
way of settling everything with a laugh. "II
fait le tout en badinant.' History is " La
Comedie Humaine." The emancipation here
seems often an emancipation at once from fear
and from hope. What a philosophy of life is
represented by these lines of Leconte de Lisle :
Le faible souffre et pleure, et I'insense a'irrite,
Mais le plus sage en rit, saohant qu'il doit mourir !
(The feeble suffer and weep ; the fool gets angry ; but
the wise man laughs at it all, knowing that he must die.)
Are these, then, the final results of the
world's wisdom ? Is this the end of its
THE SOUL'S EMANCIPATION. 217
search for freedom ? Knowing all that the
Church teaches, and knowing also all that
the world from its experience of life has said
in reply, are we, at this end of the age, in
possession of anything certain as to the true
inward liberty ?
We believe there is a reassuring answer
to this question. The outlook is not nearly
so confusing as it might at first seem. The
world, divided much in details, has, neverthe-
less, learned something as to the essentials
on which we may safely count. It is, for one
thing, becoming ever clearer that while the
religion of terror of which Lucretius spoke
was a bondage from which men were well
advised to get deliverance, nevertheless, the
inner liberty is achieved through religion.
We cannot get on satisfactorily in this universe
except by an act of faith. As Sabatier has
put it : " Science will never tell us, outside
an act of faith, why life is to be lived well."
This act of faith founds itself upon facts of the
inner consciousness. It argues from a moral
order which it discovers there to a moral
order outside itself, and which encompasses
and rules the whole existing system of things.
And this order is a good and a beneficent
order. For man has found his world to be
on the whole a good world. He has found,
as Kenan puts it, " there are few situations
in the vast field of existence . . . wherein
15
218 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
the balance of debt and credit does not leave
a little surplus of happiness." The most
suffering of mortals have been those who
have realised this the most clearly. It was
when Stevenson had been worn to a thread
by his fatal illness that he attained that
" belief in the kindness of the scheme of
things, and the goodness of our veiled God,"
which he found to be " an excellent and paci-
fying compensation." A man who has reached
to so much faith as this has dropped one of
the heaviest weights that clog the soul.
But religion, and Christianity especially
as its highest exponent, has been emancipator
in another sphere. Emerson once described
men as " having the appearance of being
whipped through the world." Who are the
drivers ? In most cases the animal passions
presided over by a bad conscience. In this
region the religion of Galilee has indeed
wrought miracles. Its proclamation of
" deliverance to the captive " has in no wise
belied itself. It is a religion of conversions,
where the predominating, exultant sense has
been of a new, free and upward-bearing
moral life. Let the psychologist explain the
thing as he will, the facts are there, multiplying
daily before our eyes. They are the verifica-
tion of what Edmond Scherer, sceptic as he
was, found himself compelled to admit :
*' If there is anything certain in this world
THE SOUL'S EMANCIPATION. 219
it is that the destinies of the Bible are linked
with the destinies of holiness on earth."
But there are some broader aspects of this
question, which the fullest acquiescence in
what religion has to teach us should by no
means permit us to neglect. What Pattison,
as we have quoted him, is after, what France
seeks, is a side of the matter which religion
has too often left out. There are multitudes
of religious people who are by no means
emancipated. They have not yet learned
the full art of living. The education for life
has, indeed, a good many branches, and
excellent people, on all sides of us, are to-day
groaning in bondage because of non-pro-
ficiency in one or other of them. In some
branches we seem to have gone back rather
than forward. Who can doubt that the
Spartan and Stoic cult of physical hardihood
was, for instance, a step towards inner freedom !
Was not that a splendid lesson which Marcus
Aurelius learned from his tutor ? "I learned,"
says he, " endurance of labour, and to want
little, and to work with my own hands."
Not all his imperial legions could win him
such conquests as these. Mme. de Genlis
must surely have planned her scheme of
education on this model when she taught
Louis Philippe as a youth " to wait on himself,
to despise all softness, to sleep regularly on a
hard bed, to brave sun, rain and cold, and to
220 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
endure the greatest fatigues." Whether we
be prince or peasant, Christian or pagan, these
are teachings with the marrow of reality in
them. We are becoming enslaved to softness
in our time. The Christian professor and the
pronounced agnostic are alike in being un-
comfortable unless their luxuries are to hand.
But all that is treason to the inner liberty.
What we should incessantly cultivate is a
limber soul that sits easily to circumstance.
We are bunglers in life's first principles unless
we can sing the heart's song with bread and
water for our meal and a board for our couch.
The laugh of Le Sage at the English people
" that they are the most miserable people in
the world, with their liberty, their property
and their three meals a day," has some point.
So long as our happiness holds of a given round
of physical comforts we may call ourselves
by what name we choose, but we are slaves
and not free men.
Another lesson which, alas ! the world
has had to learn outside the Churches, is on the
relation of knowledge to inner emancipation.
It is here, indeed, that the great name of
religion has been, and still is, invoked for the
forces that make for bondage. Half -educated
people (and our English folk are among the
least educated of civilised nations) are tyran-
nised over by ardent religionists who announce
exploded opinions as tests of piety. The biting
THE SOUL'S EMANCIPATION. 221
words of Hazlitt are still appropriate : " We
may believe, and know, not only that a thing
is false, but that others believe and know
it to be so, that they are quite as much in the
secret of the imposture as we are, . . . and
yet if anyone has the art or power to get the
management of it, he shall keep possession
of the public ear, and by dint of effrontery
and perseverance, make all the world believe
and repeat what all the world knows to be
false." It is only when the English people
study such subjects as the Bible, not simply
by listening to fervid platform addresses,
but by a calm analysis of the facts of the case,
as they have been accumulated and tabulated
by scientific research, that they will find them-
selves free from the tyranny of dogmatic
and irrelevant appeal. It is when we know
the origin of so many of the doctrines that
have coerced and terrified men, know their
source as purely human, and as having arisen
in ages of less enlightenment than our own,
that we are able quietly to assert our freedom
from their control, however pretentious the
auspices under which they are asserted.
And yet mental freedom is only one of the
ways to the soul's emancipation. It is not
here that the greatest victory is gained. That
is a moral one. We have not tasted real liberty
till we have got the true measure of what the
world calls success, till we have learned to be
222 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
satisfied from within and not from without.
The best men in all ages have sooner or later
come to this. Gregory of Nazianzen records
their experience in his own : " Therefore I
have returned into myself, and deem quiet
the only safety of the soul." We find out
with Fenelon that the best freedom is freedom
from vain expectation. In a letter to his friend
Des touches he says : "I ask little of men.
I seek to give them much and expect from
them nothing." We discover the wisdom
of that French saying : " If we have not what
we like, let us like what we have." Does
the world take little or no notice of us ? What
then ? Are we not on the side of that character
in Hazlitt, who " sees enough in the Universe
to interest him, without putting himself
forward to fix the eyes of the Universe upon
him " ? Is ours a private rather than a
public place ; are we remote from the seats
of power ? Let us thank God for our destiny.
Jeremy Taylor at Golden Grove, his Welsh
retreat, where his status was that of a domestic
chaplain, was infinitely better off than when
Bishop of Down and Connor. It was not in
his bishopric but in his humble position that
he had his sublimest visions, his heavenliest
thoughts, and that he wrote the works that
have been the comfort and inspiration of
multitudes. Cardinal Mazarin died, as the
world calls it, a rich man. But how poor was
THE SOUL'S EMANCIPATION. 223
Mazarin on that day when, almost at the end,
dragging himself through the gallery of his
splendid palace, Brienne overheard him say,
as he surveyed his treasures, " II faut quitter
tout cela ! "
Our emancipation is accomplished when
the soul, free from fears because sure of its
place in the Divine order, accepts each day
as a new gift from God, looks back on its past
with gratitude, and forward with the joy of
perfect trust.
XXV.
Recognitions.
FEW people, except ecclesiastical students,
know nowadays anything of the " Clementine
Recognitions." But the book was vastly
favourite reading amongst the Christians of
the early centuries. In it, mixed up with a
religious teaching which sounds strange to our
ears, is a romance, in which people closely
akin are for a while in contact with each other,
without suspecting their relationship, until
the moment of revealing comes, when they
discover they are of the same household.
The story is clumsy enough in its setting
the Christian in search of literary diversion
seems in those days to have been easily satisfied-
But its theme is infinitely suggestive. It is a
parable of the world and ourselves. For life
as we know it is a drama of recognitions.
We go about amongst men and things as
strangers, with our eyes holden ; and then, as
in a flash, they stand revealed as tied to us
by all manner of new, yet eternally old relation-
224
RECOGNITIONS. 225
To begin with, we may note that all our
knowing is really a recognition that is to
say, a re-knowing. Our every act of per-
ception is full of memory. We can see this
most clearly by analysing what goes on
within us when we are examining what we
call a new object. Our instinct is to classify
it, and for this we immediately call up all we
remember of objects that approach it in
similarity. The new perception, when complete,
is, we see, the fitting in of the fresh sensation
to a thousand, thousand former acts of memory.
We scarcely, indeed, realise to what an extent
our daily experience is a constant recognition.
We open our eyes in the morning and see the
sky, the sun, the earth, the myriad surround-
ings of our household life. We are hardly con-
scious of a mental act in surveying them ;
it is all so easy, so much a matter of course.
And yet how stupendous and how mysterious
an act it is that we perform ! For every one
in this countless host of objects, from the
greatest to the smallest, in the heavens and
on the earth, represents a separate re-
collection, the comparison with an image
that lay before in our minds. Every glance
of our eye carries innumerable classifications.
If we can imagine our waking up one morning
and finding nothing above or beneath that we
recognised, we may get some idea of what
actually is involved in our daily mental
226 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
round. We see, then, that the world for us
is so full without because we have so full a
world within.
But that is only a beginning. When we
look upon the world, we know it, we say,
to be the same, day by day, as the one our mind
has reported to us before. But as our know-
ledge of it deepens there comes a recognition of
a deeper kind. We discover something behind.
Just as, in our acquaintances, the body we see
is the visible expression of an unseen reality
beneath a mind, a character, which is the
thing we really value in them so, in all the
deeper thinking both of the East and of the
West, does the matter stand as between our-
selves and the universe. The very fact that
we regard the world as intelligible supposes
that it is an expression of intelligence. Our
mind fits the world only by means of the mind
that is in the world. The cosmos, narrowly
viewed, is indeed nothing less than petrified
thought. When we speak of its laws, of its
powers, of its cause and effect, we are at every
word naming the attributes of mind. And
thus we come to the great Recognition. We
look into the universe as into a mirror, and
see there the face of God. The voice that
utters itself in the depths of the soul is that
which makes the music of the spheres. That
is no parochial belief. It is the verdict of
humanity. Protestant Germany utters it in
227
Luther's saying : " God is in the smallest
creature, in a leaf, a blade of grass " ; and hoary
India re-echoes the mystery in the great
word of the Bhagavad Gita : " I am moisture
in the water, light in the sun and moon,
sound in the firmament, human nature in
mankind, savour in the earth, glory in the
source of light ; . . . I am the eternal
seed of all nature."
We reach a further stage on this road
when we find, as we shall if we go far
enough, that all religious conviction of the
true kind is, first and foremost, a recognition.
If the time ever comes when a history of
Christianity can be written from a world-
inclusive standpoint, it will then be seen that
the unique force of the Gospel has lain always
in this, that there, as nowhere else, has been
offered for man's recognition the image and
example of his truest self. We may remember
in this connection Aristotle's dictum in the
" Politics," that " the nature of a thing is
that which it has become when its process of
development is completed." That is the other
side of the Platonic doctrine of ideas, that behind
and antecedent to things as we see them are the
ideas of them which are perfect and eternal.
Every man carries in him the plan of a Perfect
which his own nature at once suggests and
craves after. And the first fresh emotion
which everywhere has sprung in the human
228 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
heart in studying the Gospels and the Life
there depicted has been this leap of kinship.
Here the soul at last has met its mate, its
answer, its completion. Its own unuttered
Gospel has found voice. Here at last is the
Divine Idea expressed in adequate form.
Humanity labouring through the ages has at
length brought forth. Now at last it knows
itself divine, for here is Immanuel !
And as with the central heart of the Gospel,
so is it with every doctrine that is drawn from
it. We have had, in the history of Christendom,
innumerable theological systems ; doctrines
of Incarnation, of the Atonement, of Resur-
rection, Judgment, Miracles, of the Church,
of Sacraments and what not. In studying
them one cannot but feel how far greater a
chance of permanence and of religious efficacy
these dogmas would have possessed, had their
framers previously made a proper study
of this initial and covering doctrine of recogni-
tion. For it is safe to say that no theological
doctrine, whatever its special theme, has the
element of permanence unless, in its substance
and form, it is a reflection of something pre-
viously found in the universal mind. For
the doctrine to find a man the man must first
find himself there. When that condition ob-
tains, no ridicule can dislodge it. We may
take, for a single illustration, the doctrine of
Atonement. On this theme what reams of
RECOGNITIONS. 229
arid utterance, of interest to no mortal,
lie unread on the back shelves of libraries !
And the modern preacher, discovering in
himself no response to these dryasdust de-
liverances, is apt to eschew the subject in
favour of something he deems closer to the
actualities of the time. And, indeed, until he
has something more real to offer than what at
times has passed for Christian doctrine on this
theme, he were better silent. But when,
out of his own sin and sorrow and
life burden, he comes to it, and the Cross
behind it, for what it has to say to his
own soul ; when he recognises himself, his
being, his character, his destiny inextricably
and vitally mingled in this Eternal Sacrifice,
will his utterance then be the chaff of unreality ?
Never. What has found him will find his
fellow. There will be more recognitions. The
old story will be repeated. " In this sign
thou wilt conquer."
There are manifold further applications
of our theme which we pass over in order
to bring in a word on an aspect of the matter
vital to us all its outlook on a future life.
Our doctrine of recognition bears on this
problem in more ways than one. It has some-
thing to say on the future life as a possibility
for us, and also as to the kind of life it may
be expected to be. In the first place, the chance
for us of a continuity of existence beyond
230 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
death is, as everybody sees, intimately bound
up with the question of persistence and identity
amid organic change. Men put questions of
this kind : " If you speak of surviving, what
of you is to survive ? Yourself as child,
as youth, or as old man ? What is the good,"
they say, " of this talk of after-death survival
when the earlier ' you ' of the child or the
youth has not even survived the processes of
life ? As you are, here in this world, you are
already three-parts dead. You represent even
now the eternal flux of things, of which the
end will be the crowning illustration." But
surely the argument here contains its own
refutation. Its very terms give us the answer.
For we should not know of the " eternal flux,"
apart from the fixed points, outside the move-
ment, which enable us to judge it. And the
fixed point here is the "I," which we always
recognise as our very selves, which survives
all the changes, and which indeed registers
them. Are we told that the child dies into
the youth and the youth into the man ?
The truth here is rather that the child lives
in the youth and in the man. The growing
personality is made up of them all, recognises
them all, and is the uniting point of all. What,
then, is there in the whole analogy of things
to hinder us from the acceptance of religion's
final affirmation, that as the physical material
at death undergoes, not destruction, but^meta-
RECOGNITIONS. 231
morphosis, so the inner unity of which the body
has been at once the symbol and the servant
will, at the great moment, carry itself forward
into a new expression and surrounding ?
A new expression and surrounding ! And
yet not one that is foreign or unfriendly.
The best assurance of what happens at birth
into that higher world is what happens at
birth into our own. Nothing surely, in this
regard, is more reassuring than the ways of
children as they come to us on this planet.
They are entirely at home from the beginning.
They recognise the world and its people as
familiar. It is as if they had been here before.
And in that further birth that awaits us there
will surely be no reversal of the kindly law.
Ifc is not only a want of faith, but a false
induction from the system of things as we
know it, that expresses itself in such lines as
these :
Alone ! to land alone upon that shore !
To begin alone to live for evermore ;
To have no one to teach
The manners or the speech
Of that new life, or put us at our ease :
Oh ! that we might die in pairs or companies !
We need cherish no such fears. Fatherhood,
motherhood, brotherhood are no monopoly of
this world or this life. All that they contain,
all the sweetness of home and the inmost
232 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION.
rapture of love, forming part as they do of
the riches of that Divine Nature out of which
our humanity has come, will be there to meet us
on the farther shore. That will be the greatest
and gladdest of our Recognitions.
XXVI.
The Thought Behind.
" THOUGHT-BEADING " is one of the many
forms of dabbling with the mysterious which
modern society takes up, partly as an amuse-
ment and partly as a cult. Mr. Stuart
Cumberland's drawing-room exhibitions
belonged to that half-laughing, half-serious
coquetting with the occult which is one of
the features of the time. We shall probably
have a good deal more of this in the near
future. It will not be surprising if Europe
and America present by-and-by the character-
istics which Lucian describes with so much
vivacity of the later days of the Roman
Empire, when the world was overrun with
necromancers, magicians, prophets, and
exploiters of every form of dark art. Not
that the tendencies of the age in this direction
are merely frivolous. Far otherwise. A good
deal of what is now going on in the Western
mind is an awakening to the sense of a lost
intellectual inheritance. Hegel's belief that
second sight was " a product of an
233 16
234 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
earlier day and an earlier intellectual con-
dition than ours," is very suggestive
on this point. We have developed along
certain lines to the neglect of others,
and have paid the penalty. Our civilisation
has not been all gain. Watchmaking has
robbed us of the art of telling the time by the
sun. Koad-making has put us beneath the
savage in tracking our way through the forest.
And when the Zulu " opens the gates of
distance," and obtains knowledge of far-off
events by a wireless telegraphy of his own,
he hints at mental endowments which higher
races have lost and must regain. It will
be by developments along this side of the
mind that the next great human advance
will not improbably be made.
Meanwhile, and with the workaday faculties
we already possess, there is wonderful thought-
reading for every mother's son of us if only
we will give ourselves to it. Our world is,
more than anything else, a magnificent treasury
of thoughts. This treasury is open to all,
and the laws of enjoying it are the same
for all. It is dumbfounding to pessimism,
and yet true, that in what most concerns
a mortal's sheer happiness and well-being
the conditions are, for king and cotter, pre-
cisely the same. Our main joy is in thought-
reading, and in this, for us, central business,
rank or wealth do not count.
THE THOUGHT BEHIND. 235
We begin early as thought-readers. The
child, almost as soon as it is born, commences
the process. It reads the face and knows
at once whether the expression on it means
kindness or the reverse. Indeed, if we want
to begin at the beginning we must go lower
down than the children. The dogs read our
thoughts. They are charming pictures which
Darwin gives us, in his " Expression of the
Emotions," of the way in which his four-
footed companions studied his face and learned
there both his mood and his intentions.
Our dumb friends partake, in a measure
greater than we have imagined, of God's great
feast of the inner life. One of the marvels
of this language of expression is that both
the language itself and the interpretation of
it are practically the same throughout the
whole human family. Go to China or India,
or the islands of the Pacific, or among the
aborigines of Australia, and the story of the
soul's awe, or terror, or delight, or anger will
be signalled on the features and the body by
identically the same signs. This is the
primordial language, read of all men, created
before grammar was, or words, a language
wrought deep into the physical frame by
the mystic processes of the growing soul.
But the study of expression, as we see it in
human faces, is only the beginning of our
thought-reading. As the mind opens, it
236 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
becomes aware of other thoughts lying around
it, vast beyond expression, embedded in
symbol and hieroglyph, whose meaning yields
only to patience and humility. For the
meanings are so deeply infolded. There are
surface interpretations, with which the frivolous
may content themselves, but which serve
really as only veils and wrappings of a deeper
sense. In other words, the world we live in is
a thought-world, and our business is to
decipher it. We are scarcely aware to what
extent this is so. As a matter of fact, the
street we walk down, the houses which bound
it on either side, are really thoughts. The
length of that street and its breadth ; the size,
shape, fittings and furniture of every building
in it existed once as ideas in a human brain.
These things will abide there, for the time
they last, as embodiments in brick, stone, wood,
of what once went on in a mind.
But when we have left the city and reached
the country ; when we look, not upon houses,
but upon land, sea or sky ; when our surround-
ings are simply light, colour and form what
are we now in contact with ? Do we listen
here simply to the echoes of our own footsteps*?
Is our own mind, which peers curiously on
this side of these appearances, the only one
engaged upon them ? Or are the appearances
in their turn, like the houses we just left, the
embodied thoughts of a thinker ? One of the
THE THOUGHT BEHIND. 237
latest exponents of the evolutionary philosophy
gives the following as the answer of science :
" All is quivering with energy. . . . Matter
is indestructible, motion is continuous, and
beneath both these fundamental truths lies
the fundamental truth that force is persistent.
All the myriad phenomena of the universe
. . . are manifestations of a single ani-
mating principle that is both infinite and
eternal." Eloquent words, and true, but
not as they stand enough, surely, for the
human soul. The writer here is afraid to
apply Personality to his " single animating
principle," because, forsooth, that is an-
thropomorphism ! It is to the last degree
singular that brilliant and conscientious
thinkers of our time should have permitted
themselves to be frightened by a word. If it
comes to that, we are all of us, atheists as well
as Christians, anthropomorphic, and can be
no other if we try. When the materialist
speaks of force or of cause in his account of
the universe he is just as much applying ideas
derived from human experience as when
believers speak of the mind and heart of
God. And yet this bugbear word has
actually, for multitudes of able men, emptied
the spiritual atmosphere of all its summer
warmth and light. It has reduced them
to a theory of which Goethe said : "It
appeared to me so grey, so Cimmerian and
238 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
so dead that we shuddered at it as at a
ghost."
But the world is coming back to sanity in
in this matter. It is beginning to believe
in the validity of its best instincts. It refuses,
as a modern writer has it, " to admit that the
universe is a farrago of nonsense." Nor will
it accept the attitude which Emerson satirised :
" Ah ! says my languid Oxford gentleman,
nothing new and nothing true, and no matter."
The visible world, we find, is full of intellect.
Both in its form and its arrangement it is
crammed with mathematics and chemistry
and logic. Its combinations are alive with
artistry, impregnate with the sense of the
beautiful. Its sounds are embedded in laws
which, as we understand and apply them,
yield the most exquisite music ; plainest of
hints that at their back stands a Musician-
But mathematics, and chemistry, and logic,
and art and music are Thoughts. The fact
that the world's phenomena are reducible to
common mental expressions shows that they all
lie on a common mental basis. The possibility
of our arriving, as individuals, at a universal
truth supposes a Universal Mind in which that
truth inheres. The student of science is thus,
whether he know it or not, a thought-reader.
He is reading God's thoughts after Him.
But there are thoughts and thoughts. We
utter one order of them to bare acquaintances,
THE THOUGHT BEHIND. 239
another to intimates. And that is a rule
which holds in all spheres. Our innermost
yields itself only to kindred spirits and to the
solicitations of love. A man going into
St. Mark's, Venice, shall find it discoursing
to him according to his degree of initiation.
If he be entirely uneducated it may impress
him simply as a glowing mass of form and
colour. Certainly it says that to all who
come. To the artist it has far more to com-
municate. He reads miles deeper into its
thought. But even he may miss its central
intention. It is to the sympathetic believer,
and to him alone, that it tells its whole secret.
It is he who finds in these " Stones of Venice,"
as their uttermost meaning, the Christian
Gospel.
In like manner it is with that vaster fane
whose dome is the starry firmament, and
whose measurements are infinity and eternity.
There are those, the careless and unthinking,
to whom the universe discloses only its
commoner and surface meanings. And there
are, if we may so say, God's intimates, to
whom He whispers His finer thoughts. It is
in man, the microcosm, in whom all the
universe meets, that the Divine ideas chiefly
unfold themselves, and that in proportion as
his receiving surface is purified and expanded.
Emerson has put this in his own way in the
statement that " the foundation of culture
240 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
as of character is at last the moral sentiment.
If we live truly we shall see truly." An old
English mystic has expressed it quaintly,
yet more nearly : " As long as we be meddling
with any part of sin we shall never see clearly
the blissful cheer of our Lord." It is here,
indeed, that we have the secret of the moral
authority of Jesus. His absolute purity was
the light in which He read the heart of God.
He saw it as an open book. He spoke with
the certitude of conscious oneness with the
Divine. And His way is for all the ages and
all the worlds the only way of intimately
knowing God. By mathematics and chemistry
and art we may scrape some acquaintance.
It is only through love and purity and
humility and sacrifice that we learn the inner
secret.
But if Christianity is in this way a thought-
reading of God, it is not less, let us remember,
a thought-reading of man. It is the one
religion which meddles persistently with the
innermost life. The motto of pagan humanity
was, " intus ut libet, foris ut moris est : in
private do as you like, in public follow the
fashion." To turn all this upside down, and
to invade a man's privacy with an over-
powering sense of a Divine holy presence,
was indeed to bring in a new religion. The
present writer, in a chance conversation with
a traveller on the Continent, Was surprised to
THE THOUGHT BEHIND. 241
find this urged as a conclusive argument
against Christianity as a practical scheme.
" Why," said he, and he was a man of culture,
" what can be said for a religion which puts
an embargo on your very thoughts ! " And
he did not seem persuaded by our contention
that if religion was to be of any moral use to
us it was precisely in this thought-region that
it must begin its work.
What gives thought-reading its undying
interest is thiat it brings us in contact with
persons. Materialism would rid the unseen
universe of the personal. It replaces God with
a "principle of unity." The soul's sure
instinct rejects all this. It knows that the
be-all and end-all of existence is union with
Holiness and Love. And as we more and
more clearly see God in His world men will
catch the reflection of Him in ourselves.
The ineffable vision will leave its shining
trace. That becomes true which was said
half -jokingly, half -admiringly, by Sydney
Smith of a contemporary : " The Ten Com-
mandments are written upon his countenance,"
We read of St. Vincent de Paul, who covered
the France of the seventeenth century with
charitable institutions, that his originally
ugly features were transformed by the sublime
goodness which beamed through them. In
what terms of physiology can we state that
fact ? It requires another t science than
242 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
physiology. This man had been in the highest
society and caught its manner. He was a
thought-reader of the inner mysteries. And
the^word they spelled out to him was the
Eternal Love.
XXVII.
Conscience.
OF the soul's working forces, none bulks
before the general mind more largely than
conscience. It is generally looked upon as
our chief moral driving power, as a kind of
interior Divine law-giver. When, however,
we come more narrowly to examine conscience,
both in its operation on ourselves, and outside,
over the whole sphere of world-history, we
become conscious of some strange complexities.
Side by side with its normal action we discern
a puzzling kind of by-play. Conscience, we
discover, has not only a moral, but sometimes
a non-moral, even an immoral activity. We
are beginning now to understand the meaning
of this, but we have not yet emerged from the
confusions in which earlier misconceptions
involved the subject. Prodigious blunders
in ethics and theology have been made from
regarding conscience as something absolute
in man, instead of considering it, like every-
thing else in him, as a growth. What we are
now learning is that the world-conscience has
243
244 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION.
had its boyhood, when, boy-like, it played
tricks which the grown-up conscience of our
later days has to allow for and to set right.
This relation of past and present is, as we
shall see, not the only region in which we
observe the by-play of conscience, but we may
begin with it as perhaps the most important.
At no time has man's ethical guide played
stranger antics with him than when it has
allied itself with the notion that the moral
ideas of an earlier time could be taken as
the standard for to-day. The great example
of this is in the early world-conscience expressed
in the Old Testament, and in the influence
which has been accorded to it over later ethics.
Nowhere has the misconception of the idea
of inspiration wrought more mischief both to
faith and practice. The notion that the
early Hebrew records exhibited a Divine,
and therefore absolute standard of conduct,
made Augustine the advocate of religious
persecution, formed a chief prop of American
slavery, furnished Joseph Smith with a sanction
for polygamy at Nauvoo, and, during the late
Armenian massacres, gave point to the sneer
against those Christians who denounced the
Sultan as an assassin, while regarding Joshua,
red with the pitiless slaughter of the Canaanites,
as a special commissioner of heaven.
Another of the vagaries of the cruder
conscience, from the effects of which we are
CONSCIENCE. 245
still suffering, appears in its connection with
belief. Relating itself to the view that certain
dogmas were necessary to the religious life it
has, in their interest, sanctioned and vehem-
ently supported what we now regard as sheer
immoralities. Pious frauds, in which men
" lie for conscience sake," have produced
entanglements in Christianity from which
we have not yet shaken ourselves clear.
The early literature of our faith is full of
forgeries, of pseudo-gospels bidding for a
hearing by the borrowing of Apostolic names
as their authors, of invented miracles, of
history manufactured to chime with prophecy.
If the religious propagandists who did this in
that early time had possessed the modern
conscience in these matters we should have
been saved a world of trouble. But they did
not. And it is curious how this cruder religious
conscience has survived. Protestantism was
distinctly a move towards theological veracity,
but the progress has been slow and the goal
is not yet reached. The older Protestantism
could invent as well as the old Catholicism.
In Mary's reign a wall spoke at Aldgate
against the Mass. It was discovered after-
wards that a girl concealed behind the plaster
had worked the oracle. And in many Pro-
testant pulpits to-day statements are made
by excellent men which it would be impossible
for them to utter were it not that
246 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
their " religious conscience " prevents them
from candidly examining the facts.
It is time, perhaps, now to come to explana-
tions, for what has been said leads to some
vital questions. What then is conscience ;
have we misnamed it when we call it a Divine
inward monitor and judge ; is there then,
after all, no infallible guide for our life ?
The modern answer on these points represents
a broader outlook than the older one ; yet,
properly considered, it is not one whit less
spiritual or religious. Conscience in this view
is the correspondence of our individual feeling
with a common outside standard. But this
standard is continually rising and its upward
progress is nothing less than the growing
revelation of God in and to our race. The
Divine inspiration was assuredly in the pat-
riarchs, though their manner of life if practised
here would have consigned them to a gaol
within a week. The explanation is that
while the force working in them was from
above, its uplift could, in the nature of things,
carry them only as far as it was in their
generation to go. There is an immutable
standard of right and wrong, but it was not
plumped into the world all at once. Itf.is
dawning-' upon us bit by bit in the ceaseless
development of the human spirit. Conscience
is the Divine in us, but like another incar-
nation, it was born a babe and comes to
CONSCIENCE. 247
itself by degrees, " increasing in wisdom and
stature."
We may now follow our subject into one
or two separate by-paths. It tempts us, for
instance, to ask whether conscience is pre-
cisely the same thing in men as in women.
The general verdict amongst those who profess
to know is to the contrary. Woman's nature,
according to them, echoes more clearly than
that of man the cry of Faust, " Gefiihl ist
alles" La Bruyere has an uncompromising
verdict on the point : " La plupart des femmes
n'ont guere des principes : elles se conduisent
par le cwur, et dependent pour leurs mceurs de
ceux qvCelles aiment" We speak of the
growing liberty of opinion, but we doubt very
much whether the witty Frenchman would
have dared to write this had he lived in the
twentieth century instead of the seventeenth.
Yet a countryman of his of our own time gives
an illustration of a certain type of the feminine
conscience, which, in its way, is quite as curious
as the deliverance of La Bruyere. In his
" Journeys through France " M. Taine quotes
a shopkeeper in a French provincial town who
said to him of the women there : " Not one
ofthem would stay away from Mass on
Sunday ; but they are light-fingered folk.
We have to keep our eye on them. They
would not steal money, but anything in the
shop is fair game." It would be unsafe,
248 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
however, to found on this a homily on the
feminine moral sense. It would probably be
retorted that the difference between the men
and the women of this place and class would
be simply in the fact that the former did " stay
away from Mass on Sunday." But we will
hasten off this dangerous ground.
Our modern civilisation offers us some
strange and unprepossessing illustrations of
the by-play of conscience. It is, of course,
not exclusively a feature of our time, but one
which is, nevertheless, most unpleasantly
prominent in it, that some of the most loath-
some of livelihoods are to-day made out
of the exploitation of conscience. The tramp,
the impostor, the begging-letter writer live
by a conscience not their own. Possessing
not a gleam of noble sentiment in themselves,
they can calculate to a nicety the working
of it in their better-minded fellow-creatures.
The charitable instincts, the sense of duty
to others, of the clergyman, the philanthropist,
and the religious community generally are
accurately weighed and delicately handled.
Truly a curious business ! But a deeper
level is reached when the vein worked for
profit is not a man's good, but his evil con-
science. In all the annals of the human
tragedy we come upon nothing so purely
infernal as when we see men or women,
themselves lost to the sense of virtue, enticing
CONSCIENCE. 249
some weak or unsuspecting victim to his fall,
that then they may use the misery of his
awakened conscience as a source of income.
In our strange world there are, however,
compensations in the most unexpected quarters,
and it is probable that this latest outcrop of a
corrupt civilisation serves, in its way, as a
breakwater of virtue. The safeguard between
many a man and vice is the dread that, as a
consequence of his sin, his own guilty
conscience may be exploited by those who
have no conscience at all. Of this side of
the topic one might indeed, adduce any
number of illustrations.
The by-play of conscience, its non-moral
activity, is shown for instance in our state
of mind towards people we have wronged.
If the inner tumult occasioned by the act
does not issue in a determination to repair
the evil, it produces the curious opposite
result of a settled dislike of our victim. He
has somehow put us in the wrong, and we
bear a grudge against him for it. A long
chapter might also be written on the strange
vocabulary of excuse which the by-play
of conscience has created, and by which men,
when they go wrong, contrive somehow to
compound with their better self. The study
of the subject shows that conscience requires
not only to be listened to, but to be trained.
It needs a teacher and an ally, We are here
17
250 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
only on safe ground when we realise, as
Quaker Barclay puts it in his Apology, " that
Christians are to be led inwardly and immedi-
ately by the Spirit of God, even in the same
manner, though it befall not many to be led
in the same measure, as the saints were
of old."
XXVIII.
Idle Piety.
IT was a saying of Dean Church, which all
schools of us may well note, that " the call
to be religious is not stronger than the call
to see of what sort our religion is." And the
label which properly describes our " sort "
of religion will, let us remember, by no means
necessarily be a denominational one. The
dividing lines which mark the difference
between a good religion and a bad one are
not at all parallel with our sectarianisms.
Taine was not thinking of this or that Church
when he spoke of religion as " differing with
different minds, some interpreting it well,
and on it feeding generous feelings, exalted
hopes, great thoughts ; others falsifying it
and making of it an affair of kneelings, pro-
cessions, bows, ridiculous practices." All the
Churches have bred great souls, and all of
them, though some more than others, have
seen interpretations of religion that have been
a hindrance rather than a help to true living.
Moreover, we find, clinging to all the Churches
251
252 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
in greater or less degree, expressions of religion
that arose out of an inferior development, out
of a more limited outlook than our own.
It is time now that we recognised these for
what they are worth. They may be designated
as a species of " idle piety. "
Here let us not be misunderstood. We need
to use our term " idle " warily. Religion
in its highest form holds, and will always hold
a large element of passivity. One of its
functions is that of a refuge from the rush
of the external life. " How few are the
moments," says a modern writer, " in which
it seems to us that we have really lived, and
not been merely busied with preparations
for living ! " It is within religion's most
intimate circle that we realise those moments.
Religion, on one side of it at least, is an inward-
ness, a sacred hush, a sabbatismos. It is the
soul resting in itself and in the thought of its
Divine ally a musing, a contemplation, a
vision of the unseen, a feeding upon the
hidden manna.
Also, the seeming passivities which enter
so much into the religious life are often really
a form of the most potent activity. We
have not yet penetrated the law of this inner
working, but the fact is there, and un-
questionable. When Christ hung on the Cross
He was doing nothing but to hang therefc
But in that quiet of mere suffering were
IDLE PIETY. 253
being elaborated forces, the sweep and range
of which no imagination can properly grasp.
When a great man, away from the hurly burly,
sits brooding his problem, he may to the
outsider seem an idle person. All the time,
in his interior, is elaborating a piece of work,
in the shape of a new resolve, or in the emerg-
ence there of a new truth of life, which in its
effect on the race shall be more potent than
the roar of a million looms. We need to know
our way well in this region ere we fling our
word of reproach.
Not the less evident is it that religion to-day,
and all the vast interests bound up in it, are
suffering from forms of idleness that need to
be exposed and exorcised. Ecclesiasticism
by its notions, its organisations of living and
worshipping, by even its activities, has been
responsible for an enormous waste of the
world's time. It has used human brains
and bodies that might have been so well
employed otherwise, in pursuits that are
futile and that lead to nothing. When
Casaubon, on his first visit to Paris, was shown
over the great hall of the Sorbonne, he was
told by his guide, " This is where the theo-
logians have disputed for five hundred years."
" Indeed," was the reply, " and pray what
have they settled ? " It is not, however,
so much in the direction of opinion though
any one who has attempted to wade through
254 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
the morass of mediaeval theology finds
Erasmus's description of it not too strong
that one realises most keenly the unprofitable-
ness of much ecclesiasticism. In his thinking,
man has had to flounder through innumerable
blunders on his way to a true method of
research. He has had, so stupid is he, to
beat his head against the wall, to discover
there was no road that way. The theology
then, was not entirely idle.
But what shall we say of the life ? For
centuries the Church's ideal of piety was the
monastery. Everything outside that was a
compromise, a " second best." Now it will
not do to pass an undiscriminating judgment
on the monastic life. There have been times
when it stood for the best there was in our
world. Its note has been often the reverse
of an idle piety. The early Benedictines,
as in successive companies they streamed out,
in the sixth century, from their home at
Monte Cassino, were the chief agents in the
spread of Christianity, of learning and of
civilisation amongst the rude Western peoples.
One watches these companies with a sympathe-
tic admiration as, settling on some well-
considered spot in the surrounding waste,
they reared their simple habitation, cleared
the land, drained, ploughed, sowed and
ultimately turned the wilderness into a garden.
One follows them indoors, where, in the
IDLE PIETY. 255
intervals of warfare with external nature,
they pored over their manuscripts, copying,
illuminating and so preserving for after ages
the treasures of antiquity-
But alas ! in these institutions the fine gold
so soon became dim. Of all the religious
orders it may be said that, aiming in the
beginning at the highest, they sank ultimately
to the lowest. Seeking perfection in a segre-
gation from the common humanity, they
ended in losing their manhood. What a picture
is that which Walter de Map offers of the
clergy and the monks in the twelfth century,
abbots purple as their wines, monks feeding
and chattering like parrots in the refectory,
and his Bishop Goliath, who sums up the
enormities of aU, void of conscience, drunken,
unchaste, lost in sensuality ! The later
pictures tally with this early one. Boccaccio,
Chaucer, Ulrich von Hiitten, and a score of
other satirists, have let in the daylight on
these nests of uncleanness. And that Black
Book of the monasteries, which in ! Henry
YIII.'s time was compiled by Thomas Cromwell,
revealed two-thirds of the monks in England
as living in habits which may not be described*
During these times and amongst these
people a fatal thing had happened to religion.
Amidst this vice and sloth and ignorance
there was going on day by day in the churches
and monasteries the drone of litanies, the
256 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
offering of masses, the endless repetitions
of psalms and Scriptures. It was imagined
that the Almighty was so absurd a being
as to be placated by these procedures ; was
so occupied by the sniffing of incense as to
have no thought for questions of character !
The mischief is that so much of this idea still
clings to us. God is imagined as an ecclesi-
astical person chiefly interested in priestly
ceremonies. As Sir Walter Besant once put
it with exceeding plainness, there are persons
among us " who imagine they can please
the Lord by making a stink in a church."
A great awakening is preparing against
this whole view of things. And it is one
that will shake Protestantism as well as
the priest-religions. It is coming inevitably
upon the heels of a new and higher conception
of the Divine Nature. We think too well
of God to conceive of Him as occupied, like
some fussy Court Chamberlain, with the
exact rendering of Church ceremonial. Surely
the Psalm singing and creed reciting might,
much of it, in heaven's view, as well as earth's
like the secretary's report at a meeting be
" taken as read " ! There is other work to be
done in His world that seems more worth
while ! The Catholic ceremonial has often
its match in futility in the Protestant
emotionalism. We are in an age of Con-
ventions, in which the higher life is sought
IDLE PIETY. 257
in a round of high excitements, as though
spiritual power and the inner victory are won
by an incessant play upon the feelings. Are
we so sure that these are the right methods ?
Or may it not be that in surfeiting the feelings
we are emasculating the will ! Would it not
be true to say that a quiet resolve on our
own separate part, to amend a certain habit,
to start a new line of work, to get up, maybe,
an hour earlier in the morning, would be
more efficacious upon our life and service
than attendance at fifty religious conventions ?
Spiritual power comes not by external excite-
ments, but by the inward discipline of the
soul. It is by obedience to the laws of the
spiritual life, to the laws written in letters
of fire upon the Cross of Christ, that a man
rises to the highest levels.
A deeper study at once of the nature of
God, of the laws of the soul, and of the needs
of the modern world, are, we say, bringing
a vast modification of our ideas upon the
whole subject of the pious life. Under the
influence of it our truest worship will become
more and more a work. We are realising
how much of our best self, of our belief, our
affection, our sacrifice, can be put into the
deed we do, and how our truest inwardness
is obtained in doing that deed. Our service
of God will express itself in a service of man.
Our prayer will be more and more a quiet, yet
258 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
hard, leaning upon God, as we haste in His
name to help our brother.
The best thought of our time is moving
in these directions. The Church is becoming
tired of idle piety. Its leaders are eager with
their programme of social reform. In Germany
Pastor von Bodelschwingh has covered the
land with his labour colonies. In America
the Churches are becoming centres of institu-
tions which reach the whole life of man.
Here in England the mind of Christ is being
reincarnated as the spirit of social reform.
Man, it is seen, is to be dealt with not simply
as a soul, not even as a soul and a body, but
as part of a social organism, that is itself
to be cleansed and saved.
When this evolution has been completed,
when we have carried our creed into our
work, and our work into our creed, our worship
will regain that accent of reality which it has
lost. Men turn from the Church ceremonial of
to-day as a cult of strange gods. It is so much
of it an idlesse, beneath the level of the strenu-
ous man. What wonder that, with Horace,
he is " parcus deorum cultor et infrequens ? "
But that is a phase which will not continue.
Christianity, which has been the soul of other
ages, will again be the soul of this. At
present soul and body are seeking each other.
In the end they will find their point of contact,
and Christ will again come to His own.
XXIX.
The Central Mystery.
THAT cosmic picture with which Genesis
opens, of a formless void with a Spirit moving
on the face of the waters, is, when we think
of it, a marvellous portrait of ourselves. We
look into this abyss, boundless, chaotic, yet
with a light as from heaven upon its heaving
surface, and discover that this is the thing
we are. " Know thyself," says the ancient
oracle, and we strive diligently to obey the
mandate, but we come from the quest realising
that the knowledge is, and for ever will be,
beyond us. It may be true, as Epicharmus
averred, that " we live by logic and arithmetic,"
but the logic and arithmetic are of another
mind than ours. It were better to say that,
from our standpoint, life is an equation in
which we never find the value of "or," An
enigma to our neighbour, we are a far greater
to ourselves. We go through the world and
have never seen our own face. We have had
reflections of it, more or less accurate a
moment's glimpse in a glass. That also is the
260 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
view we have had of our soul. Some surface
impressions, a foam tossed up from beneath
that catches the light, but not soundings even
of the deeps behind.
That this is not mere rhetoric but sober
fact will appear when we proceed to specify
some of our unknowns. The first thing we
discover is that our greatest part is non-
existent. Our career is a perpetual becoming.
The acorn is the oak, and yet bears
no resemblance to it ; its existence is a
continuous gathering of itself from what
is not itself. The human nucleus that at any
given moment is known as " I " has an even
wider and more complicated partnership.
How shall we ever begin to know ourselves
when the chief factor in our personality
is its relation to a boundless universe that is
perpetually invading us with the unforeseen
and the unimagined ? The event that shapes
us gives, as often as not, no intimation either
of its approach or of its character. We
accumulate endless knowledge from our books
and our instructors, yet of the Something that
is at this moment travelling to meet us, and
which, when it finally crosses our path, will
change everything, we are as ignorant as a
babe. We seem ever in the hands of the
unlocked for. A chance makes or mars us.
In the coup d'etat of Brumaire, 1799, when
Napoleon overthrew the Legislature, there
THE CENTRAL MYSTERY. 261
was only the turning of a hair between
success and a fiasco. And at Marengo it was
the unexpected arrival of Kellermann that
turned a certain defeat for Bonaparte into a
victory and the beginning of his greater
fortunes. It is curious to note how the
ancients regarded this unknown quantity of
the external event. It bore to them a sinister
aspect. There seemed ever, to their minds,
a spice of malice in it. In JSschylus this
note continually recurs. The prosperous man
must be always on his guard. He is an
overladen ship. Let him throw some of his
cargo overboard or an envious fate will surely
engulph him.
Over against this unknown of our outward
relations stands the equally unexplored of
our " ego " proper. The later researches
both in philosophy and biology have made
it more than ever difficult to say what our
central " I " really is. The play of the forces
round it is so bewilderingly puzzling. We
are beginning to realise that a great part
of our thinking and feeling is done for us
rather than by us. A large part of us is
automaton. What emerges on the surface
of consciousness from moment to moment is
sent up there by the mysterious toilers in the
dim under- world of our sub-conscious self . How
exactly you will feel in a given situation,
you cannot guess. But that inner thought-
262 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
organism of which you are a kind of tenant
or hanger-on, knows all about it. Were
it announced to you to-morrow that you
were heir to a fortune or about to be hanged,
the machinery underneath would, without a
moment's hesitation, provide the exactly
fitting sensation.
We have an elaborated science of the
laws of thought, yet no one knows how his
thought comes, or why it takes this shape
rather than that. We are the subjects of
all manner of "possessions." We are the
passage ways of mysterious forces that sweep
through us, leaving us wondering. A Mozart,
a Beethoven, as he writes his symphony knows
that he is only an instrument. The eternal
music that was before the worlds is vibrating
on the chords. The poem, the drama, grows,
we see not how. Some men dream their
creations when asleep, others dream them
awake. That story, which Bede tells of
Caedmon, of how, when a herdman in the
service of Whitby monastery, he heard in his
sleep a voice commanding him to sing, and
how, in response, he sang in his dream the
great hymn of praise with which English
literature begins, is no solitary instance in
this field. What precisely is it that is at
work here ? What is the mover in such
experiences as Goethe, in his " Dichtung und
Wahrheit" recounts of his grandfather, who
THE CENTRAL MYSTERY. 263
had revealed to him in dreams beforehand
some of the principal events of his lif e !
Glancing along another side of this topic
we discover we are, and must remain, unknown
to ourselves as long as we are unacquainted
with our possibilities of combination. To say
we know carbon from an examination of its
properties as a simple element would be very
absurd. The chemist has to make acquaint-
ance besides with its behaviour in conjunction
with this or that proportion of oxygen, of
hydrogen, of the whole series, in fact, with
which it combines. Our harmless glycerine
may, by a simple partnership of quality,
become the most terrific of explosives. But
nothing we meet with in these spheres has a
range of combination, or a variety of result,
comparable with the human soul. Till we
have met those other souls that are to en-
counter us on our way ; till we have touched
the mysteries of affinity and relationship ;
known what it is to be absorbed, may be, by
a stronger spirit, or to have experienced the
immeasurable give and take of some perfectly
answering nature, we have not made a start
to the knowing of ourselves. It is along
this line that life becomes so breathlessly
fascinating ; its risks and its chances alike
so immense. That story which Augustine
tells of his friend Alypius, how being dragged
by companions in Kome to a gladiatorial
264 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
show, he kept his eyes shut, until at a sudden
cry opening them, he was seized with a passion
for blood, is eloquent of the risks. It was
thinking of this, perhaps, that led the African
bishop elsewhere to exclaim : " O friendship,
worse than the deepest enmity, unfathomable
betrayer of the soul ! Merely because some
one says, * Come, let us do this or that,' and
we are ashamed not to be shameless ! "
Yet is it along the line of combination that
humanity's greatest hope rests. That the
soul of every man, however savage or degraded,
can attach itself to a higher, and partake
of its purifying influence, is that biological
fact of the spiritual world which spells
redemption. The story, to take one out
of a hundred such, of Wesley's apostolic
work amongst the mobs of the eighteenth
century amongst the weavers of Yorkshire,
the colliers at Kingswood, the miners and
fishers of Cornwall reaching in these half-
savage men that hidden chord in the human
heart which vibrates to the Divine, and
thereby effecting wholly marvellous trans-
formations, offers an aspect of our central
mystery which should for ever abolish
pessimism. It is enough in itself, surely,
to dispose of the argument of Bichat and
Schopenhauer who, the one from the stand-
point of biology and the other from that
of philosophy, aver that the moral character
THE CENTRAL MYSTERY. 265
in man is fixed and unchangeable, depending
as they say it does, on the organic structure
and functions. Their purview is too limited.
They have forgotten the fact of spiritual
transfusion.
But the points we have been noting, both
hopeful and otherwise, seem, so far, to lead
one way. They suggest life as in the grip
of necessity. Man appears as the helpless
subject of the mysterious powers that work
upon him. One could bring in masses of
evidence that apparently tell the same story.
There is, for instance, the unknown factor
that is perpetually remaking us through
the mere lapse of time. Ten does not know
itself at twenty, nor twenty at forty. The
emergence, as the years circle, of new powers,
affections and interests, is as impossible
of retardation as the progress of the seasons.
The physiological theory of morals has made
much of this. It fixes a man's character
by the number of his birthdays. Huxley,
in one of his letters, touches with his own
sardonic gaiety the bearing of this theory
on old age : "As you get older and lose
volition, primitive evil tendencies, heretofore
mastered, come out and show themselves.
A nice prospect for venerable old gentlemen ! "
Altogether the meshes seem, on every side,
drawn tightly around us. Hemmed in are
we, caught up, whirled hither and thither
18
266 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
on the mighty loom of circumstance, a single
thread in Time's endlessly woven fabric.
And yet, miracle that we are, a single glance
within, and the web has disappeared and we
stand free, in a universe of freedom ! We
may never explain the mystery of this, but
we cannot doubt the fact. Like a lighthouse
rising out of a stormy sea stands the fortress
of our own thought and our own will. The
waves of the devouring ocean outside may
wash its walls, but they will not enter. In a
thousand hidden ways, as we have said,
the material plays under and round our
thought, but it is not our thought.
Consciousness, which is, let us remember, our
only guarantee of an outer world at all, is
still surer of its own spiritual realm. We
only know of causes outside us by first knowing
that we ourselves are a cause. Impinged
on by a myriad energies, we also are centres
of energy, ultimate moral beginners. The
laborious analysis of these later years, from
Kant downwards, has at least demonstrated
that.
And this gives us, at a stroke, a new universe
of our own. That welter of forces which
confronts us in the outside world becomes
suddenly less formidable. The event, so
strange and uncouth as it sweeps on us from
its far-off origin, assumes, as it nears, a new
aspect. It takes on the image of our own
THE CENTRAL MYSTERY. 267
soul. We find it shaping itself according to
the mould which our faith, our love, our
courage have been giving to the spirit within.
It will strike us finally as some astronomers
imagine that projectiles strike the sun to
feed its heat and light.
The spiritual man, while contemplating
with awe and wonder the unknown within
and without, by which his life is compassed,
will, in this higher view, cease to fear it.
He carries the certitude that the abyss into
which he peers is carried within a greater
abyss, that of the knowledge and the love of
God. From the one he takes refuge in the
other. He outruns and conquers the event
by submission and self-offering. " God gives
us the cross," as a great mystic says, " and
the cross gives us to God." It is a profitable
exchange.
Entered upon such a discipline we shall
take the measure of the external. We shall
place no high value of what it can or cannot
do. Our main interests will be inward ones.
The real fascination of life for us will be in
such a cultivation of the inner kingdom as
shall make it possible for something greater,
sublimer than we have yet known to flash upon
our spirit. The Christian's " central mystery "
has indeed been put for us into a great apostolic
word : " Now are we the sons of God, and it
doth not yet appear what we shall be."
XXX.
Physical Righteousness.
THE coming Theology will bring important
readjustments in more than one direction.
Nowhere will the change be more apparent
than in its concepts of sin and righteousness,
and of human responsibility in general. The
spiritual consciousness is for one thing
developing a new department of activity, to
which are being transferred its most sacred
sanctions and appeals. We may call it the
department of physical righteousness. It is
singular, in looking back over the old Theology,
to note how barren it has been in this region.
Where it has pronounced at all it has been,
as often as not, to utter the most flagrant
cosmic heresies. In the supposed interests
of sanctity it has again and again, in the
coolest manner, invited rebellion against plain
natural laws. It was utterly ignorant of the
fact that the law of the universe is one and
that to break it in the physical, as well
as in the highest moral sphere, was to brand
oneself a transgressor. And that condition
PHYSICAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 269
of thinking is still largely prevalent. One
of the most needed steps towards the regenera-
tion of modern society is the rise among us
of a new conviction of sin ; the turning
upon our present bodily conditions of some-
thing of that sacred horror with which the
earlier sainthood regarded its spiritual failures.
But let us, before entering on particulars
here, be quite sure about our principle. In
religion some of our oldest and most
venerable words are so worn by usage that
we are apt to miss their original and true
significance. In this word " righteousness,"
for example, we need beware lest we take
an emotional substitute for the actual meaning.
For, in heaven and upon earth, it has only
one meaning, Tightness, which, again, means
always a conformity to the law of things.
In all her myriad departments, Nature has
one rule of conduct towards us. She pays
according to our conformity to her law.
In music her saints are the Beethovens and
Mozarts, who study here most carefully her
eternal patterns and copy them most closely.
In the sphere of the highest spiritual, and just
the same in athletics, or in mechanics, the
one rule holds. In each those will win results
who are obedient to the laws they see. Their
observance will be counted to them for
righteousness. The man who, in any corner
of her realm, opens an account with Nature
270 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
on these terms is a creditor whom she will
never fail to pay.
Life being, as we have said, a unity, the
term " righteousness " may, then, properly
be employed for all its ranges. Its appro-
priateness for physical conditions will be more
clearly seen when we take into account that
close alliance which modern research has
revealed between the bodily and spiritual
states. While repudiating, on good
philosophical grounds, the medical materialism
of a Bichat and others, who make the moral
dispositions, good or bad, an affair purely
of our organic structure and functions, we
nevertheless recognise, with a new clearness,
the marvellous interplay between the two.
What, indeed, has come about in modern
thought has been, not so much the
materialisation of spirit as the spiritualisation
of matter. There is no mental change without
a physical concomitant. And we never alter
the conditions of our bodily life without
setting in motion forces which, in a hundred
subtle ways, affect for good or ill our inmost
character.
With all this in mind let us examine a little
how things stand in the matter of our physical
righteousness. A glance only is needed to
reveal an extraordinary condition of things.
On all sides we find people, of acutely sensitive
consciences in what are called moral questions,
PHYSICAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 271
in this other direction living in flattest rebellion.
Let us take as a single example the matter
of the air we breathe. The mass of us here
are flouting Nature every day, and reaping
the consequences. We are hearing just now
of wonders being wrought by what is called
the open-air cure. The consumptive, instead
of being dosed with medicines, is dosed with
pure air, and gets well under the treatment.
What a hint for the rest of us ! There are
more than consumptives who need this regime.
The truth is, under the modern conditions of
industrialism and great cities, we are all of us
semi-invalids, and there is only one way
of curing us. The English people are suffering
a famine of fresh air. The population is
dwindling visibly before our eyes. Over 70
per cent, of us are shut up in towns, and if any
one would know what that means, let him
make a simple calculation. The most constant
and important of our physical operations is
breathing. Moment by moment, by day and
by night, sleeping and waking, it perpetually
goes on. And every one of the innumerable
breaths we draw in the course of a day,
according to its quality, whether pure or
impure, whether full of ozone or laden with
poisonous elements, is telling on our whole
nature, making its influence felt on our every
organ, our every thought, and the whole quality
of our feeling. What will be the sum total
272 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION.
of effect here in the course of a year ; what
upon the length and effectiveness of our life ?
And what will be the sum of effect of these
conditions upon a generation, and upon the
progress from century to century of an entire
people ?
And yet we are most of us regulating our
life, or having it regulated for us, as though
such a consideration were of no importance
at all. We cannot grow decent flowers in
the heart of a city, but we think we can grow
men. The modern world will have to find
speedily some substitute for, or at least some
amelioration of, its town and factory
system or it will perish of inanition.
Plato, in his ideal Republic, kept his settle-
ments down to 4,000 families. Sir Thomas
More's Utopians changed from town to country,
and vice versa, at intervals of years, that the
whole people might enjoy in turn the
advantages of both. However we may settle
the problem, whether by " garden cities,"
or by the readjustment in manufacturing
which the distribution of electric power may
accomplish, it is plain that the present con-
ditions will have to go. Nature's demands here
are too imperative ; her penalties for neglect
are too appalling. The business of a State, as
Thucydides said long ago, is not so much to
produce this or that product as to grow men.
And you can only grow them in the open air.
PHYSICAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 273
In the meantime, and before these wholesale
remodellings, why is it that such multitudes
of us, who are under no economic compulsions,
are yet, from sheer indifference, breaking
every day this law of physical righteousness ?
The strange thing is that those we should
naturally regard as guides should be so often
among the worst offenders. Look at our
clerical, our journalist, our literary classes !
They are a legion of pale faces. Their records
are full of breakdowns. They give us a
dyspeptic theology and a pessimistic literature.
And the reason is that so many of them are
living just below the level of a healthy view
and output. And yet so small a change would
often turn the scale. Has not an eminent
authority assured us that the difference
between happiness and misery is the difference
between the spending habitually of one
farthing less rather than one farthing more
of our weekly income ? That is true of our
nerve income as well as of that in pounds
and pence. And yet, we repeat, so small
a change of habit would rehabilitate our
nerve bankrupts. Why cannot preachers and
writers do their work out of doors ? When a
caller at Wordsworth's house asked to see
his study, the servant pointed him to the
woods and hills outside. They formed the
best possible study, and Wordsworth's use
of it accounted largely, we do not doubt, both
274 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
for the quality of his work and the length of
his life. It is an example for every brain-
worker to follow. A trained mind can concen-
trate just as easily outside as within walls, and
its thought will be fresher, because fed every
moment with better air. It is a regime for
almost all weathers. In the winter a man
may read or write as he walks, if need be.
At all hazards let him be, through the seasons,
a Nature's man, taking alike her buffets and
her smiles. She will reward him a hundredfold.
We have touched only one department of
physical righteousness, but there are so many
others. There is the question of our food
and drink. The new conviction of sin of
which we have spoken will work here in many
directions. It will smite the ascetic not less
than the man of excess. For its standard is
the highest physical efficiency, and it will
reject as a delusion and a snare the notion
that any spiritual excellence can be secured
by starving and neglecting the body. On
the other hand, the new consciousness will
war decisively against the present cult of the
stomach. Whatever answer we give to
Maeterlinck's question as to flesh-eating it is
certain that multitudes of our " well-to-do "
are physically most ill-to-do from their eating
habits. Their high living is really a very low
living. They will never get to the heights
with the loads they carry.
PHYSICAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 275
And if that is true of eating, still more is it
of drinking. Some day, surely, we shall
invent a better drink than alcohol. It is
good neither for work nor play. As to the
former, we may take Huxley's dictum. Asked
about its use as a stimulant for mental work,
his reply was : "I would just as soon take a
dose of arsenic as I would of alcohol under
such circumstances." And for play, his own
experience may be also cited : "I am as jolly
as a sandboy so long as I live on a minimum
and drink no alcohol."
Plainly, for its way upward society wants
a new doctrine and a new conscience of the
body. It will have to recognise what we
may call the spirituality of the body ;
recognise what
Truths in manhood darkly join,
Deep seated in our mystic frame.
Its doctrine of spirit must include the body,
while its doctrine of body must include the
spirit. When we understand better how one
lives in the other many mysteries will open
to us. We shall learn how the soul at times
of its own energy heals the body. We shall
aspire after that dynamic of faith of the early
Church which permits a Tertullian to speak
thus, as of a familiar experience : " Finally
we often aid in this way even the heathen,
seeing we have been endowed by God with
276 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
that power which the apostle first used when
he despised the viper's bite." In a word,
physical righteousness, wrought out in the
Church and in the State, will be the foundation
of that vaster, nobler human life which, in its
powers of thought, its capacity of enjoyment,
its range of performance, and its depth and
sweetness of emotion shall be the spirit's
glorious fruition in our present sphere, and
the harbinger of its greater heritage of the
world to come.
XXXI.
Public Religion.
THE nation during these last years has been
making repeated investigations into its religious
condition. It has suspected itself of invalidism.
It has called in the specialists. Its pulse
has been examined, its temperature taken
and its chest sounded. Numerous bulletins
have been issued censuses of church attend-
ance, reports of religious societies, voluminous
newspaper correspondences. It is note-
worthy that these inquiries, one and all,
have gone on the supposition that religion
is a public matter, and that its condition
is registered by its public manifestations.
So many services, so many people inside
the church door so much religion. But
before we count heads in this matter it is
desirable to settle, if we can, a preliminary
question. Is religion, after all, a public
matter ? Are our ceremonials the proper
gauge of its health and activity ? It is
entirely necessary for any proper estimate
of the national condition, and well, perhaps,
278 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
for our own private conduct, that upon this
point we first of all come to some conclusion.
That the public and spectacular side of
religion is an important one goes without
saying. For long ages it was practically
all there was. In so advanced a period of
world history as the Greek and Roman
civilisations, we have, among the masses
at least, this public side as the one and only
conception. There was no idea of connecting
religion with morals, with a state of mind
and character. Its relation to morals, indeed,
was mainly in being immoral. Imagine a
worship such as that of the Temple of Aphrodite
on the Acrocorinthus at Corinth, where, as part
of the religious rites, a thousand female slaves
were kept for the use of strangers ! Religion
was a ceremony, a holiday, very often an orgie.
Both in Greece and Rome it was not the priest,
it was the philosopher who taught morality.
It was from an Aristotle and a Socrates, from
an Epictetus and a Seneca, not from augur or
sacrificer that generous souls caught their
inspiration. How strikingly does Aristotle
set forth at once the power and the limitation
of this philosophic cult in that passage of the
Nicomachean ethics where, speaking of moral
treatises, he says : " The truth is they seem
to have power to urge on and excite young men
of liberal minds, and to make a character that
is generous and truly honourable, easily
PUBLIC RELIGION. 279
influenced by virtue ; but that they have no
power to persuade the multitude to what is
virtuous and honourable."
When the Greek and Roman world came
under the sway of Catholic Christianity the
popular conception of religion as public still
largely prevailed. That compromise between
paganism and the Gospel which made up
Catholicism, was extended to the conception
of Church worship and festival. The Catholic
festivals, were largely baptized heathen feasts.
Harnack, speaking of the fourth-century
Church says : " The saints took the place of
the local pagan deities ; their festivals of the
old provincial services of the gods. The cultus
of the Emperor tended to intrude itself into
the Church. . . . The Christian religion
threatened to become a new paganism."
And this tradition, this hereditary pre-
possession, of religion as a ceremony, a spectacle
beginning and ending there, has, despite all
the knowledge that has come into the world,
showed ever since an astonishing strength of
life. Was there, after all, any great difference
between the ancient Greek, whose delight
it was adire Corinthum, there to indulge at
one and the same time his passions and his
religious sentiment, and the people of the
Versailles Court circle in the eighteenth
century, whom Horace Walpole describes ?
" At Versailles Royal Chapel there was Madame
280 THE ETEKNAL RELIGION.
du Barry, the King's reigning mistress, close
to the altar ; her husband's sister was with
her. In the tribune above, surrounded by
prelates, was the amorous and still handsome
King. One could not help smiling at the
mixture of piety, pomp and carnality." It is,
indeed, to us almost incredible, yet perfectly
true, that with the New Testament before
them, ecclesiastical authorities should have
taught and lived as though Christianity was
merely a public religion. But the mediaeval
and Renaissance literature is full of the proofs.
Witness, amongst a thousand other evidences,
the letters of Piccolomini, afterwards Pope
Pius II., in which he speaks without reserve
of his gross debaucheries, and the corres-
pondence, in a later day, of the Abbe de
Chaulieu, at the same time an ecclesiastic and
the recognised pander to the Vendome princes !
When we turn from these ideas and habits
to religion as it is exhibited in the teaching
and example of Jesus the contrast is startling.
Here public religion is almost nothing, private
religion is almost everything. Throughout
the Gospels no emphasis whatever is laid on
public services or ceremonies. In that sum-
mary of our relations with God and man
contained in the Sermon on the Mount,
there is no mention of churches or congrega-
tions. It speaks of prayers to be offered in
secret, of alms about which there is to be no
PUBLIC RELIGION. 281
advertisement. We hear nothing of
processions or of vestments, of organings and
Te Deums, as means of pleasing Heaven.
When we think of the world's ideas in those
days it is an amazing omission. What is
put in their place is no less marvellous. Here,
spite of the habits of countless centuries,
religion is presented as viewless, as a condition
or state of each man's secret consciousness,
a daily regulation of his inmost thought,
feeling and volition. The whole standard
is reversed. Instead of proposing a census
of the annual pilgrimage to the Temple,
Christ asks, as the test of religion, " Are you,
men and women of the common life, lowly
in spirit, meek, merciful, pure, peaceful,
hungering for righteousness, ready to suffer
for its sake ; are you forgiving, truthful,
temperate, happy in childlike trust, believing
in the eternal life here and the eternal life
hereafter ? " To be this, says Jesus, is to
be religious. From beginning to end it is an
affair of invisibles. If you wanted to estimate
the existing sum of religion in Israel it would
have to be done, according to Him, not by
counting heads in the synagogues, but by
weighing the amount of righteousness, purity,
love, faith and humility there and then
existent in human souls. And His action, so
far as we read of it, was in accord with His
words. We hear nothing of His reputation
19
282 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
as a churchgoer. He entered a synagogue
once on the Sabbath day, but the result
of His visit was to scandalise grievously the
ecclesiastical authorities. Nothing, indeed,
is more certain than that, in both the teachings
and the habits of Jesus, public or ceremonial
religion was far back in the second rank.
With these facts before us, how, we now
ask, do matters stand in relation to our
own conceptions of religion ? We in the
twentieth century have our church habitude
and tradition ; we also have Christ. In these
later times we have indeed rediscovered
Christ, have in some degree rescued His
personality from the ecclesiasticism which for
centuries had obscured His true significance.
And the discovery has reacted profoundly, and
will do so yet more, on our view of public
as related to private religion. Protestantism
started the movement by offering to men's
gaze the Christianity of the Bible side by side
with the Christianity of the Church. In the
Reformed communities the new knowledge
produced immediately a radical change in
the conception of public worship. It was
everywhere seen, though more or less clearly,
that public religion existed for, and had its
whole raison d'etre in, the promotion of private
religion. The Church, with its ceremonies,
its prayers and public exhortations, was not
an end in itself ; it was only justified as the
PUBLIC RELIGION. 283
means to an end, the production, namely, in
men's minds and hearts of that series of
invisible but glorious realities pictured in the
Sermon on the Mount.
This end has in many churches, and for
long periods, been obscured by doctrinal and
ecclesiastical considerations, but in our day
it is at last emerging into sunbright clearness.
The best men everywhere recognise that if
Christ's Christianity means anything, it means
that the Church exists for the reformation
and development of inner character. Dogmatic
eagerness, emotional excitement, aesthetic
religious delights are nothing except in so far
as they can be translated into permanent
states of the mind. The highest Churchman
would concede as much, and would say with
Hooker of his Church festivals that they are
not only " the splendour and outward dignity
of our religion," but " the forcible witnesses
of ancient truth, provocations to the exercise
of all piety, shadows of our endless felicity
in heaven, on earth everlasting records and
memorials."
To have come so far is indeed to have
made an enormous advance on those earlier
conceptions with which we have dealt. But
we shall go farther yet. For we are still
in the toils of ecclesiasticism, and have not
yet found the courage to follow Christ. But the
day draws nearer when religion will be put
284 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
entirely on His basis. His kingdom will be
known as always within. This is not to say
that public religion will decline, far less die
out. That would be to contradict human
nature, which demands the outward ex-
pression of its inner feeling. There are heights
and depths of human emotion which can
only be reached in company. A French
writer has a deeply interesting book on the
phenomena of crowds. Man in the mass is
other and, in some respects, greater than
man by himself. And that feature of his life
has vitally important aspects in the matter
of religion.
The common worship has indeed an im-
mense future. Men will bring new elements
into it and will make it express the vaster
aspiration, the wider view, the heightened
joy of living, the fuller realisation of the soul's
utmost powers which to-day are opening to
the human gaze. The message proclaimed
there, saturated with that New Testament
ethic which an Edmond Scherer, sceptic as he
was, declared to be " for ever linked with the
destinies of holiness on earth," and charged
with those mysterious spiritual forces which
spring from the Gospel's heart will continue
as of old to search men's lives, to heal wounded
spirits, to arrest the young at the parting
of the roads and set their feet on the way
everlasting.
PUBLIC RELIGION. 285
But when all this is said the point of our
theme remains. Henceforth, we shall make
no mistake as to where the emphasis of Christ's
religion lies. It is not in congregations, nor
in the figures of a church census. You have
not fixed your man, in any Christian sense,
by calling him Anglican or Presbyterian,
orthodox or otherdox. If I see my neighbour
this Sunday morning in the next pew, well.
If instead he is worshipping God on the hill
side I have no word from Christ to throw
at him. You and I are Christians not by
these tests, but according to the precise
height in us of love and faith, of purity,
generosity, and helpfulness. Indeed, when
the best of human living has been reached
it will be in a city without a church.
The Bible depicts that condition in one of its
sublimest and final words : " And I saw no
temple therein ; for the Lord God Almighty
and the Lamb are the temple of it."
XXXII.
Religion and Amusement.
AN indispensable feature of the final religion
will be the fixing of its attitude to life's lighter
side. The question here is a difficult one,
and that chiefly, perhaps, from the fact that
the great religious founders are themselves,
by temperament more even than by convic-
tion, somewhat remote from this side. The
elite here are away from the masses.
" Life," said Sir George Cornewall Lewis,
" would be very tolerable were it not for its
amusements." He was apparently of Bagehot's
opinion that " business is so much more
amusing than pleasure." It is the cry of all
the finer spirits. What the multitude goes
after is to them an incomprehensibly childish
affair. Westcott could not fit the clown into
his scheme of the universe. And, indeed, is
there anything more ghastly, more fitted to
throw one into the abysses of pessimism, than
the painted face of the comedian ? Pascal
took pleasure as one of the grounds of his
indictment of life ; men pursued it, he said,
RELIGION AND AMUSEMENT. 287
in order to forget their miserable selves. It
has to be said, however, that the pursuit,
whatever underlies it, is in fullest vogue to-day.
Preachers complain, as did Chrysostom, a
millennium and a half ago, at Constantinople,
that people are leaving the church to flock
to the spectacle. There are twenty thousand
at the football match on a Saturday, and not
one in a hundred of them in the meeting-
house next day. The crowd is not serious.
What it reads is mainly trash. The thing
that holds it is not philosophy or theology,
but a music-hall catch, or the tug of war
between a Hackenschmidt and a Madrali.
To begin with, must we suppose that our
generation is more frivolous than another ?
The idea hardly accords with our reading of
history. Follow the story of any given
century, its literature, the record of its vie
intime, and compare it with to-day. What
are our wrestlings and prize fights compared
with the sights of the Roman Coliseum, where
men and women looked from the crowded
benches with rapture on the slaughter of
hundreds of hapless victims ! Take the
common life where we will, what is its quality ?
Here, for instance, is Alexandria in Clement's
time, after Christianity had been long at work
and powerful there. Let anyone read that
curious chapter of his in the " Paedagogus "
on the occupations and diversions of the
288 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION.
women ; how " at the dawn of the day
mangling, racking and plastering themselves
over with certain compositions, they chill the
skin, furrow the flesh with poisons, and with
curiously prepared washes, thus blighting
their own beauty." It is, in fact, Juvenal's
story over again. We leap across a thousand
years, to the Renaissance time, and find
Aretino excusing himself thus for one of his
infamous productions : "I have to consider
the tastes of my contemporaries. Amusement
and scandal are the only things that pay.
Why write serious books ? I sent one to
Francis I. five years ago, and am still waiting
acknowledgment. I have just addressed my
* Courtesan ' to the King, and by return of
post received a gold chain." Examine, in fact,
any period of the past, looking specially into
its private records, and you find, with one
or two brief exceptions, a condition of things
as to frivolity and licence that makes our time
seem a sobersides indeed.
Yet these centuries, as they have rolled
on, with their inconsequence, their thought-
lessness, their madcap revelries, have had
always their earnest remonstrants. The
Christian Church, with its message to men
of life's immense invisible issues, has con-
tinually used this as an argument for the
restraint of its mirth. The Fathers were
dead against the spectacles and theatrical
RELIGION AND AMUSEMENT. 289
exhibitions of the Roman world. In that
work of uncertain date the " Apostolic
Constitutions " we read, " If anyone follows
the sports of the theatre, their huntings, or
horse races, or combats, either let him leave
them off, or let him be rejected." The same
note is everywhere in that early literature.
And it has been constantly repeated both in
Catholicism and Protestantism. In 1694 the
theologians of the Sorbonne decided that
" comedians by their profession, as they
exercise it, are in a state of mortal sin."
And we remember the terrible words which
Bossuet in the same age, used of the dead
Moliere. The Protestant Churches have borne
similar testimony : witness our Puritans,
Prynne with his Histriomastix, and Jeremy
Collier with his " Serious View."
Thus of the past. But what now of the
present, and of ourselves ? Are we bound
by those earlier judgments ? Were they
universal judgments, good for all time because
founded in the eternal law ? Is the theatre
taboo to the Christian of the twentieth as it
was to the Christian of the third century ?
These are questions which are put to every
religious teacher by anxious souls. On our
way to an answer let us remember two or
three things. First, that the judgment of
the early Church, or of the Church in any
later period, does not, of itself, constitute
290 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
any binding obligation for us. The categorical
imperative for our conscience must be some-
thing more than an echo from the past. It
must contain its own reasons. That the
early Church believed the world was made
in six days, that the sun went round the earth,
that the end of things was immediately at
hand, constitutes to me absolutely no reason
why I should believe these things, as against
contrary evidence that seems stronger. In
like manner in matters of conduct, what the
Fathers say, whether singly or in Council, is
to be taken by us precisely for what it is
worth, regard being had to the circumstances
of their time, to their education as compared
with our own, and to the relation of their
action and utterance to ultimate principles.
When we take things along these lines
we find, to begin with, that the problem the
early Fathers confronted, as to the theatre
and spectacles generally, was a very different
one from that before us to-day. Christianity
was then a missionary encampment in the
midst of a hostile country. It was engaged
in the immense task of the elaboration of a
new social order. It was creating a fresh
world, which should have work and play,
duties and diversions of its own. The amuse-
ments outside had become really too bad to be
admitted or copied. The student of classic
literature knows what we speak of. The
RELIGION AND AMUSEMENT. 291
English reader will get some information
from his Gibbon or his Lecky.
The problem we have to face belongs, on
the contrary, to the amusements that have
arisen within Christendom. The modern
theatre is actually an offspring of the Church.
Its origin is in the mystery plays of the Middle
Ages, where sacred scenes were exhibited
by the clergy assisted by the laity ; at first
with a purely religious intention, and then,
as the thing developed, with an intermixture
of the broadest and coarsest farce. And let us
here remember that the drama, in some form
or other, is bound to emerge and to assert itself,
and that because its substance lies in the
very fibre of human nature. Life itself
is drama. It was inevitable with this raw
material at hand, these tragedies and comedies
of daily affairs, this play of the passions, this
exuberance in the soul of humour and fancy,
of wrath and pity, that it should all
be dramatised. The rough facts of things
were bound to be lifted, in this way, to the
plane of the ideal, that men might find here
a refuge from what Pater calls " a certain
vulgarity in the actual."
But that, we are told by modern remon-
strants, is not the point. We may admit,
they say, the drama in the abstract ; may
hold with George Macdonald to the thought
of an ideal Christian theatre. What we have
292 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
to deal with is the theatre as it is, and the
patronage which professed Christians are
extending to it. In this connection Clement
Scott, the well-known critic, is quoted with
his really appalling word : " It is nearly
impossible for a woman to remain pure who
adopts the stage as a profession." Can any
man with a conscience, it is asked, support
an institution which has this as its outcome ?
Ought he not, rather, with all his might to
labour to suppress it ? The statement was,
we believe, modified by its author, but as it
stands, the argument seems irresistibly strong.
It is singular, however, that people who so
keenly realise what seems the logic of the
situation should so utterly fail to see its
application elsewhere. The argument would,
for instance, rob us of our breakfast table.
Almost everything there our tea, coffee,
sugar, bread and a dozen other things, come
from oversea. They are carried in ocean
tramps, the existing conditions of which
almost exclude any religious or high moral life
amongst the seamen. Are we, then, by our use
of tea and coffee and these other things, to sup-
port a system which so demoralises vast numbers
of our fellow-men ? One scarcely knows, indeed,
where this argument would stop, or what it
would leave us, if once we set it going.
The truth is that, in this bewildering complex
of a world, we cannot at present attain any-
RELIGION AND AMUSEMENT. 293
where to the strict, high logic of things. We
are mixed up in a scheme where much needs
mending. Well, let us mend it ! We shall
not give up our imports because our sailors
are not within reach of church on Sunday
morning, nor need we suggest the abolition
of the drama because of the present conditions
in the green-room. These things, the ship
and the play, are part, as it seems, of the
business of living, and the question for con-
scientious men is, not of their suppression,
which is impossible, but of their being made,
by effort and teaching and the presentation
of ideals, a part of the business, not only of
living, but of the higher living.
The point we chiefly insist upon here is
that the more instructed spirits, who have
found the deeper joys of life, should not
be too eager in their judgment of those less
enlightened who are on the plane of the
inferior things. Let us catch something of
the large patience of God. We cannot coerce
our masses into the Kingdom. They must
find their own way upward. A policy of
coercion and of condemnation is no true
religious method. It savours of the French
revolutionary's cry, " Be my brother, or I
will kill you."
To some of us, occupied with life's deeper
business, in contact with its highest things,
to whom the world visible and invisible opens
294 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
daily with an ever more ravishing sense of
its inner meaning, it may indeed seem strange
and pitiful to see men rushing here and there,
on such false scents, for what they call their
pleasure. But that we are further up gives
us no right to judge the man who is lower
down. If we would help him it must be by
something better than those " scruples "
which, as Dr. Johnson said, " often make men
miserable, but never make them good."
Yet, how one pities these " pleasure " seekers
If only they knew that to be blessed, as
possession of the inner treasure makes men
blessed, contains all they find and a thousand
things more !
XXXIII.
Religious Epicures.
THE word " epicure," as we now use it, has a
too restricted application. We apply it usually
to the gourmet, to the club exquisite whose
palate is the most educated part of him.
But there are other epicures, who are in no
special sense devotees of the stomach. In this
connection it is curious to note that Epicurus
himself, from whom the term is derived, is
reported to have lived on brown bread and
water, and to " have borrowed some cheese
from a friend, when he would make a solemn
feast ! " Indeed, it must be said that Epicurus
has been somewhat badly used in history
and in the popular mind. His view of pleasure
was very different from that of the mere
sensualist. And when he declared pleasure
to be the highest good he was only saying
what Bentham, Paley and many another
modern philosopher of repute has repeated
after him. The Bentham and Paley definition
of happiness is, we may remember, " the sum
of pleasures," and these writers are not even
296 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
as particular as was the Greek philosopher in
assigning a qualitative difference to pleasure.
The discussion here, indeed, is an old one,
and promises to be interminable. When one
controversialist says that enjoyment, and
another that duty, and a third that inner
development, the attainment of perfection,
is the highest end of man, we find so subtly
is the spiritual organism interwoven, by such
delicate and imperceptible degrees does one
phase shade into (another that we are fairly
at a loss for our own decision. Duty ?
Pleasure ? Development ? But is not duty
a phase of pleasure ? Who shall say that,
with the higher minds, duty is not embraced
instinctively as the noblest joy, and that
these two, duty and the happiness of per-
forming it, are not in their turn the essentials
of development ?
But amid the confusion one thing stands
out with perfect clearness- While the pursuit
of pleasure, or, if you will, of happiness, is
common to the race, the whole difference
of character lies in the kind of pleasures that
most appeal to us. The saint and the
sensualist may be described as seeking with
an equal ardour for enjoyment. But what
an immeasurable difference in quality, in the
whole range and character of life, between
the low delights of a Catherine Sforza, or of a
Sardanapolus, with his terrible motto, " Eat
RELIGIOUS EPICURES. 297
and drink and gratify your lust, for all else is
little worth," and the pure, intellectual joy
of a Spinoza, or the religious raptures of a
Madame Guyon ! That distinction, indeed,
which David Hartley labours in his
" Observations on Man," and with which the
eighteenth century so much occupied itself,
between pleasures, as those of " gross self-
interest," " refined self-interest," and " rational
self-interest," is still worthy of our best
study.
It is significant to note, in the wide
divergence of opinion, that on one point
men of the most opposite schools seem agreed.
They unite in regarding a self -culture which
may yield them the highest type of pleasures
as one at least of life's chief aims. Over two
thousand years ago Plato, in the Phsedrus,
uttered a word which, in varied form, we have
ever since been repeating ; " Grant me to
become fair within, and whatever external
things I have, let them be agreeable to what
is within." It is that same sentiment
Taine expresses in his diary and which a
Catholic or a Methodist might adopt with
equal ardour " My only desire is to improve
myself, in order to be worth a little more every
day, and able to look within myself without
displeasure. . . Being a true Sybarite,
I am going to sweep and garnish this inmost
dwelling, and to set up in it some true ideas,
20
298 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
some good intentions and a few sincere
affections." On the same line we find
Maeterlinck, in his declaration that, for this
higher enjoyment, " sterile pleasures of the
body must be sacrificed ; all that is not in
absolute harmony with a larger, more durable
energy of thought."
In the Christian scheme and experience we
have this inner cultivation, the development
of all the finer feeling, carried to its highest
point. Whatever else may be said, it will
ever remain true that hi this school have been
developed the noblest emotions that have
throbbed in the human bosom. What
banquets of the soul have been here enjoyed !
What a height of inner consciousness is
represented by that wonderful saying of
Augustine, true nevertheless to a myriad
humbler men : " And sometimes Thou
admittest me to an affection, very unusual, in
my inmost soul, rising to a strange sweetness,
which, it it were perfected in me, I know
not what in it would not belong to the life
to come." And if this is the joy of the solitary
soul, what of that exquisite community of
feeling which the Christian fellowship has also
produced ! Take, for illustration, that lovely
picture of the brotherhood of disciples who
gathered round and lived with the saintly
Origen. It is Gregory Thaumaturgus who
gives us the scene : " This sacred fatherland,
RELIGIOUS EPICURES. 299
where, both by day and by night, the holy
laws are declared, and hymns and songs and
spiritual words are heard ; where also there
is perpetual sunlight, and where by day in
waking vision we have access to the mysteries
of God, and by night in dreams we are still
occupied with what the soul has seen and
handled in the day, and where, in short, the
inspiration of Divine things prevails over all
continually."
Gracious pictures truly ! And yet it is
precisely here that one of the gravest moral
questions emerges, and one of the subtlest
of life's temptations. For the very luxury
of higher emotion, to which Christianity so
lends itself, may, if not watched, lead fatally
astray. There opens a road here to a refined
but not less deadly selfishness. When a man
has made the one object of his life the feeding
of his religious sensibilities, he is startling
though it may seem off the track and in a
bad way. To become an epicure of feeling,
even though it be the higher feeling, is one
of the things a wholesome nature will avoid,
as a kind of internal disease. And yet so
fascinating a road this, one which to sensitive
natures appeals with so irresistible a charm !
A man convinces himself that here is the true
and blessed life. From the vulgar pursuit
of sensual delights, from the sordid rush for
gain, from the debauches that bring satiety,
300 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
and the actions that are followed by the
disquiet of an evil conscience from aU this
he will withdraw himself that, without let or
hindrance, he may set his mind day by day
upon " the contemplation and enjoyment
of the highest good." And at the end he
shall be the Sir Willoughby Patterne of his
circle, and his true denomination, " the
egotist " !
No. It will not do. Nobleness does not
consist hi the perpetual hunt for fine emotions.
Nature herself reads us this lesson by refusing
these sensations to the too eager searcher,
and offering him instead an unhealthy
morbidity. And she has written the same
lesson broad and deep upon history. It is
precisely the cult of emotion, the perpetual
balancing of present or prospective sensations
in relation to a given course of conduct, that
has led to some of the gravest disorders and
disasters of the Church's life. The tendency
has, amongst other things, been one of the
main feeders of ecclesiastical ignorance and
obscurantism. There is a whole school of
piety that turns away from honest inquiry
because it fears to lose a given phase of feeling.
It is well illustrated by the story of one of
Wesley's preachers, to whom somebody,
desirous of improving the exhorter's English,
sent a grammar with the request that he would
study it. The gift was soon after returned by
RELIGIOUS EPICURES. 3C1
the Methodist, with the remark that " he
could find nothing about Christ in it " !
Better cultivated men than this worthy are
to-day in a similar mental condition. Till
a man has learned to value truth above
the taste of any particular sensibility, he is
an outsider to genuine manhood.
The test yields the same result when we
come from mental life to that of action. The
exquisites of feeling are not commonly the
stuff of which heroes are made. The poor
serving-maid who trudges along cheerfully
day by day with her monotonous task ; the
rough collier, of sporting instinct and lurid
vocabulary, who yet when his comrade is
entombed risks his life without a moment's
hesitation in the effort to save him, are, on
the whole, better human types than the
neurotic mental gourmand, who searches
incessantly for this and that flavour of feeling,
who examines his pulse at each moment to dis-
cover the precise condition of his inner health.
This question is of the first importance
for the religious life. We are in an age of
conventions, of retreats and other aids to
devotion. Kept within their proper limits,
and strictly to their true uses, gatherings
of this kind are a noble stimulus to humble
and earnest souls. But even here the danger
lurks. The peril is that a man shall get
the habit of staying on the transfigured
302 THE ETEKNAL RELIGION.,
mount above, while the sick and needy await
in vain his presence below. When we run
from the drudgery of some uninspiring duty,
leaving it, maybe, to others, or altogether
undone, in order that we may taste the latest
spiritual sensation, we are on a byway to the
pit. Coleridge, who as Hazlitt said, " talked
on for ever and you wished him to talk on for
ever " ; who dreamed through every phase
of the religious consciousness, was content
with dreaming, and talked, but did nothing.
And meanwhile neither men nor nations are
made by dreaming and talking.
Nature moreover gives her verdict on this
question by the rewards she offers to those
who, heroic of purpose, do their deed irre-
spective of what feeling may accompany
or follow. It is precisely those who stand
to their task, " hi scorn of consequence," to
whom she opens, at most unexpected moments,
her rarest treasures of feeling. It was not a
spiritual epicureanism, a mere desire for a
refined pleasure, that sent plain John Nelson to
a filthy dungeon for preaching the Gospel,
But it was the gracious, wonderful spiritual
law that rules the universe which, when he
got there, made his soul as he tells us, "as a
watered garden," and caused him " to sing
praises to God all day long."
To-day we want the heroic temper, " A
great time demands great hearts," wrote the
RELIGIOUS EPICURES. 303
hero-poet, Korner, who gave his life for his
German Fatherland. " Shall I write vaude-
villes when my country calls me ? " And if
humanity, in the degenerate days that are
now upon us, is to be saved anew to faith and
freedom, the deed will be wrought byfmen
and women of this mould. In this fight ^it
will not be by people who count over their
sensations, who think of life mainly as "a
sum of pleasures," that the victory is won.
Not by the " epicures of feeling," but by
hero souls " who count not their lives dear unto
themselves," shall an emasculated, pleasure-
drunk generation be won back to strength
and righteousness.
XXXIV.
Last Things.
ANYONE desirous of exhibiting in unconven-
tional fashion the religious significance of
life, could hardly do better than investigate
what is contained in its " never more."
Nothing, probably, has done so much to
educate the human spirit, to compel it to
seriousness, as its experience of endings. One
can imagine a world in which there were none,
but that is not our world. The most insistent
fact with which we have each one of us to
deal is that nothing lasts. The system of
things under which we live arranges for us,
in all directions, a series of repetitions which
continues just long enough to give us the idea
of permanence, and then breaks down. We
do a thing for ten thousand times and then do
it no more. A preacher wears the steps of
his pulpit with innumerable ascents. He
goes down them one day, saying to himself,
" It is over." With a careless "Good-night,"
we leave an acquaintance of forty years,
expecting to see him on the morrow. It is
LAST THINGS. 305
our final word. This is the inevitable that is
written upon everything. As surely as we
begin we end. Our every course of action,
our every circle of friends, our every phase of
thinking and of feeling exists, as it seems,
for this one sure result, that it may pass
and be no more.
It is heia, we have just said, from the point
of view of the transitory, that we most clearly
discern life's religious significance. From the
beginning men have recognised this. It is
true that mocking spirits have from time to
time sought to extract from it a contrary
doctrine. The " Sceptics of the Old Tebca-
ment," as a recent author has named the
writers of Job and of Ecclesiastes, suggest at
times a mood of despair, as though our exist-
ence, in view of its endings, were vain and
worthless. And they have been followed by
later and more frivolous minds who ask us,
on the same grounds, to regard the world
as a comedy, if not a farce. But that is not
the deliberate finding of the human soul.
It has everywhere felt that transitoriness, the
universal flux and movement of things to an end,
is, above all things, a spiritual appeal. That
has been at the basis of every religion. It is one
of the most prominent features of Christianity.
The way in which this idea has possessed
men has been at times singular ; one might
almost say unwholesome. At the beginning
306 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
of the Gospel, and for a long time on in the
history of the Church, we find a doctrine of
endings, of last things, which filled the minds
of believera to an extent which we can now
hardly realise. Men looked, in their own
generation, for a final consummation of things
in which the world should be burned up and
men's destiny sealed. The warning note of
the Apocalypse, " Behold, I come quickly,"
was the Church's watchword. It is pathetic
to see the insistence with which the ablest
of her teachers discovered, in the circumstances
of each succeeding century, the portents of the
impending catastrophe. In the year 1000
A.D. the whole Catholic world was mad with
excitement over warnings of the coming event ;
and our own day has not wanted for prophets
who have flourished exceedingly on similar
predictions. The methods, indeed, of some of
these last suggest irresistibly the " slim "
procedure of certain Moslem ulemas of the last
century in Egypt who, when they had nearly
frightened their followers to death with an
announcement of the approaching end of the
world, reaped a harvest of honours and
rewards by announcing later, after the date
had passed and nothing had happened, that
the Almighty, having regard to their prayers,
had changed His mind.
It is evident that a mistake lurked in the
doctrine of last things as here conceived, a
LAST THINGS. 307
mistake of large proportions, whose elements
lay scattered over many different departments
of thinking. There was error about the actual
cosmical conditions, about the relations of
time and eternity, about what really is meant
by an " end." We may say, indeed, with the
learned author of " Exploratio Evangelica,"
that, as to this portion at least of the early
creed, " Undeveloped science, imperfect philo-
sophy, perverted notions of history, all pre-
sided over its formation." It was a belief
that, in its intenser forms, militated seriously
against morality and human progress, inducing
in some hysterical excitements, in others
unmanly terrors, and calling men ofi from the
calm pursuit of their daily duty.
But if this doctrine of last things was all a
mistake, how can we speak of its religious
value ? To begin with, it was not all a
mistake. What we now recognise in that
early view is one of those Divine ideas which
have been the great educators of the human
race, but whose history, as Hegel somewhere
says, is that of successive forms which are
successively transcended. The belief in an
approaching catastrophic end, as cherished
by the first disciples, was, to use Joubert's
daring phrase, one of those ** illusions that
are sent from heaven." The feeling of a great
approaching finality which at that time bit
so deeply into the human spirit was a necessary
308 THE ETEBNAL RELIGION.
factor in a certain stage of the world's inward
development. It welded men into a religious
cohesion strong enough to withstand the
tremendous onset of persecution, and gave
the Church a driving power adequate to the
re-making of the world. It is ideas that
govern men, but the ideas, in their turn, are
governed by something stronger than them-
selves. They are, as to their form, subject
to the law of change, and when they have
done their work they pass away.
We see to-day the working of this law in
the idea of " last things " as held by the
first generations of believers, when compared
with the later view. What has happened to
belief on this subject is similar to the history
of faith in the Messiah. The Messianic idea
which dominated Israel for centuries was, in
the popular mind, associated with sensational
and materialistic elements at the uttermost
remove from the realisation of it in the meek
and lowly Jesus. To pass from that first form
of the idea to this later was a trial of faith
which has been too much for the Jewish
nation even to this day. And, so far as ap-
pearances go, it will take some generations
yet before the materialistic form of the doctrine
of last things undergoes a similar transforma-
tion.
That earlier notion, as we have said, carried
in it an illusion which we^are now beginning
LAST THINGS. 309
to grow out of. The people in whose minds
it lived imagined they knew the meaning of
the word " end." It is clear that they did
not. They imagined a finality where none
such existed. Ends, to whatever limits our
thoughts pursue them, are, we discover,
nothing more than reconstructions, new be-
ginnings. People talk of a universal conflagra-
tion which is to finish everything. It would
finish nothing. The materials for existence
would be there as before, every jot and tittle,
with the whole leisure of eternity before them
in which to transact their business. The fever
of the human imagination, especially of the
theologic imagination, is indeed in ludicrous
contrast with the majestic calm of the uni-
verse, with the steadfast infinity that is
around us.
We come, then, to the view that our last
things are, in another aspect, always first
things, that our ends are ever beginnings.
God has ordained for us a discipline of ends, a
discipline that is severe and searching, at times
awful in its seeming inexorableness. But that
discipline, while it cuts so sharp and deep, is
ever the sculptor of the sacred. It is because
the world is full of endings, of partings,
of seeming finalities, that human lives
and human actions gain for themselves a
mystic preciousness. They are taken from
us that they may be understood and valued.
310 THE ETERNAL RELIGION.
But the topic will not stop at this point.
It insists on a further word. The whole trend
of things which we have been here trying
to indicate presses in one direction. The
movement is big with an immense suggestion.
It is that of the soul's greater future. Life, we
have seen, is full of closings that turn out to
be commencements. Nature loves to repeat
herself. She stops that she may begin over
again. But her repetition is never quite the
same thing. She is a musician that, having
played over a simple air, returns upon it with
incessant new and lovely variations. And so
it seems to be not merely a thought that
haunts the mind, but a scientific idea grounded
in the truth of things, that all we have yet
known of life its rapture of youth, its high
endeavour, its delight of friendship, its tender-
ness of love, its aspiration toward the Highest
and the Holiest, is but the first simple strain
that in our experience is to be repeated and
repeated, with an ever-growing complex of
majestic harmonies, in that ampler existence
to which the life we now lead, " on our dull
side of death," is but the prelude.
W. SPEAIGHT AKD SONS,
PRINTERS,
TBTTEK LANE, LONDON, B.C.
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