The evolution of Christianity

PRINCETON, N. J.

Ske//

BR 121 .A2 1892
Abbott, Lyman, 1835-1922
The evolution of
Christianity

THE EVOLUTION OF
CHRISTIANITY

LYMAN ABBOTT

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

(Stbe Eitersjbc \Bxt3s, Cambriboe

1S92

Copyright, 1S92,
Bt LYMAN ABBOTT.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge., Ufass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped aud Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

PREFACE.

We are living in a time of religious ferment.
What shaU we do ? Attempt to keep the new
wine in the old bottles ? That can only end in
destroying the bottles and spUling the wine.
Attempt to stop the fermentation ? Impossible !
And if possible, the only result would be to
spoil the wine. No ! Put the new wine into
new bottles, that both may be preserved. Spir-
itual experience is always new. It must there-
fore find a new expression in each age. This
book is an attempt to restate the eternal yet
ever new truths of the religious life in the terms
of modern philosophic thought.

The teachers in the modern church may be
divided into three parties : one is endeavoring
to defend the faith of the fathers and the forms
in which that faith was expressed ; one repudi-
ates both the faith and the forms ; one holds
fast to the faith, but endeavors to restate it in

iv PREFACE.

forms more rational and more consistent with
modern habits of thought. To confound the
second and third of these parties, because they
agree in discarding ancient formularies, is a
natural but a very radical blunder. The New
Theology does not tend toward unf aith ; it is,
on the contrary, an endeavor to maintain faith
by expressing it in terms which are more intel-
ligible and credible. I hope that the reader of
these pages will discover that I have not aban-
doned the historic faith of Christendom to be-
come an evolutionist, but have endeavored to
show that the historic faith of Christendom,
when stated in the terms of an evolutionary
philosophy, is not only preserved, but is so
cleansed of pagan thought and feeling, as to
be presented in a purer and more powerful
form.

Mr. Drummond has contended, not that there
is an analogy between natural and spiritual laws,
but that the natural and the spiritual belong
to one kingdom, so that the natural laws are
projected into the spiritual world. It is my en-
deavor in this volume, in like manner, not to
trace an analogy between evolution in the phy-

PREFACE. X

sical realm, and progress in the spiritual realm,
but to show that the law of progress is the same
in both. In the spiritual, as in the physical,
God is the secret and source of life ; phenomena,
whether material or spiritual, are the manifesta-
tion of his presence ; but he manifests himself
in growth, not in stereotyped and stationary
forms ; and this growth is from lower to higher,
from simjjler to more complex forms, accord-
ing to weU defined and invariable laws, and
by a force resident in the growing object itself.
That unknown force is God — God in nature,
God in the church, God in society, and God in
the individual soul. The only cognizable dif-
ference between evolution in the physical and
evolution in the spiritual realms is that nature
cannot shut God out, nor hinder his working,
nor disregard the laws of its own life ; but man
can and does. These principles constitute, to
borrow a musical phrase, the motif of this book.
The chapters which constitute the book were
originally delivered, extemporaneously, as lec-
tures before the Lowell Institute of Boston.
After their delivery their publication was called
for. They had not been reported in full, and

Ti PREFACE.

compliance with the request for their publication
necessitated writing them. In some instances
criticism showed that I had failed to make my
meaning clear. In such cases I have modified
my original statements. But this has been done
only for the purpose of avoiding misapprehen-
sion, not because in any case I have thought
it prudent to modify the opinions expressed. I
have not hesitated to incorporate in the book, as
in the lectures, the substance, and in some cases
the phraseology, of previous periodical publi-
cations ; chapter fourth is to a considerable
extent such a modification of matter previously
printed.

To some readers the chapter on the Evolution
of the Bible, and that on the Evolution of the
Soul, may seem to surrender vital and essential
articles of Chi'istian faith. I hope to others
they will make all that is vital in the faith of
the church concerning justification, sin, and
redemption more rational and credible. My
aim has been, not to destroy, but to reconstruct.

LYMAN ABBOTT.
Brooklyn, N. Y., May, 1892.

CONTENTS.

CHAFTEB FAQB

I. Evolution and Religion 1

II. The Evolution of the Bible . . • 26 '^

III. The Evolution of Theology : The Old The-

ology 63

IV. The Evolution of Theology : The New The-

ology 96

V. The Evolution of the Church . . . 136
VI. The Evolution of Christian Society . . 173
VII. The Evolution of the Soul .... 203 *■''
VIII. The Secret of Spiritual Evolution . . 229
IX. Conclusion: The Consummation of Spiritual

Evolution 245 ^

THE

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

CHAPTER I.

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION.

Evolution is defined by Professor Le Conte
as "continuous progressive change, according to
certain laws, and by means of resident forces."
Religion has been defined by an English divine
as "the life of God in the soul of man." It is
my object to show that the Christian religion is
itself an evolution ; that is, that this life of God
in humanity is one of continuous progressive
change, according to certain divine laws, and by
means of forces, or a force, resident in human-
ity. The proposition is a very simple one ; illus-
trated and applied, it may help to solve some
of the problems which are perplexing us con-
cerning the Bible, the church, theology, social
ethics, and spiritual experience.

All scientific men to-day are evolutionists.
That is, they agree substantially in holding
that all life proceeds, by a regular and orderly

2 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

sequence, from simple to more complex forms,
from lower to higher forms, and in accordance
with laws which either now are or may yet be
understood, or are at all events a proper sub-
ject of hopeful investigation. The truth of this
doctrine I assume ; that is, I assume that all life,
including the religious life, proceeds by a reg-
ular and orderly sequence from simple and lower
forms to more complex and higher forms, in
institutions, in thought, in practical conduct,
and in spiritual experience. It is my purpose
not so much to demonstrate this proposition as
to state, exemplify, and apply it.

As "evolution" is the latest word of science,
so "life" is the supreme word of religion. All
religious men agree that there is a life of God
in the soul of man. Max Miiller suggests a
more scientific definition of religion, — but the
two are identical in sense, though different in
form. He says that "religion consists in the
perception of the Infinite under such manifesta-
tions as are able to influence the moral character
of man."^ The Christian religion, then, is the
perception of that manifestation of God, histori-
cally made in and through Jesus Christ, which
has produced the changes in the moral life of
man whose aggregate result is seen in the com-
plex life of Christendom, past and present. As
1 Natural Bdigion, p. 188.

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. S

all scientific men believe in evolution, — the
orderly development of life from lower to higher
forms, — so all Christians believe that there has
been a manifestation of God in Jesus Christ
which has produced historical Christianity. As
I assume the truth of evolution, so I assume the
truth of this fundamental article of the Christian
faith. With the scientific believer, I believe in
the orderly and progressive development of all
life ; with the religious believer, I believe in the
reality of a life of God in the soul of man. It is
not my object to reconcile these two beliefs, but,
assuming the truth of both, to show that this
divine life is itself subject to the law of all life ;
that Christianity is itself an evolution. Apply-
ing this law to the history of the Christian re-
ligion, it is my object to show that the manifesta-
tion of God in Jesus Christ has been a gradual
and growing manifestation, and that the changes
wrought thereby in the moral life of man have
been gradual and growing changes, wrought by
spiritual forces, or a spiritual force, resident in
man.

There are in Professor Le Conte's definition
of evolution three terms. Evolution is Jirst a
continuous progressive change; second, accord-
ing to certain laws ; third, by means of resident
forces. Each of these elements enters into and
characterizes the development of Christianity.

4 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

Christianity has been, not a fixed and unchang-
ing factor, but a life, subject to a continuous
progressive change; this change has been, not
lawless, irregular, and unaccountable, but ac-
cording to certain laws, which, though by no
means well understood, have never been either
suspended or violated; and the cause of this
change, or these changes, has been a force, not
foreign to man himself, but residing in him.
Thus Christianity, whether regarded as an insti-
tutional, an intellectual, a social, or a moral life,
has exemplified the law of evolution.

A few more words of exact definition are
needed, for it cannot be doubted that in the
discussion concerning the relation of Christian-
ity to evolution — or in the larger and less exact
phrase, concerning the relation of theology to
science — there has been much ignorance and
more prejudice: on the part of theological ex-
perts, ignorance respecting the true nature of
evolution ; on the part of scientific experts, igno-
rance respecting the true nature of religion. The
theological discussions of our time grow out of
an attempt, on the one hand, to restate the prin-
ciples of the Christian life in terms of an evolu-
tionary philosophy, or in terms consistent with
that philosophy ; and, on the other hand, out of
resistance to this attempt, either by denying
evolutionary philosophy altogether, or by main-

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 5

taining that the Christian religion is an exception
to the ordinary laws of life : that it is not and
cannot be a continuous progression, but is and
must be always unchanging ; that it is not gov-
erned by certain laws, certainly not by laws
which man can understand, but is dependent on
the inscrutable if not capricious will of an un-
known Person ; that it has its operating causes,
not in a force or forces resident in humanity,
but in a force or forces outside humanity. As
I have said, I do not propose to discuss this
question, except as an attempt to restate the
principles of the Christian life in the terms of
an evolutionary philosophy is such a discussion ;
but it is evident, if such a restatement is to be
made, that we must understand at the outset
what we mean both by evolution and by the
Christian life.

The doctrine of evolution, then, makes no at-
tempt whatever to explain the nature or origin
of life. It is concerned, not with the origin,
but with the phenomena of life. It sees the
forces resident in the phenomena, but it throws
no light on the question how they came there.
It traces the tree from the seed, the animal
from the embryo, the planetary system from
its nebulous condition; it investigates and as-
certains the process of development : but it does
not explain, or offer to explain, what is the

6 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

difference between the seed which is a living
thing and the grain of sand which is dead, or
between the vitalized and the unvitalized egg,
or what there is in the nebulse which produces
out of chaos a beautiful world fitted for human
habitation. One may with Haeckel believe in
spontaneous generation, or with Tyndall disbe-
lieve in it, and in either case be an evolutionist.
Evolution traces only the processes of life; it
does not offer to explain the nature or the origin
of life. Life antedates all progress; and evo-
lution only traces progress. The evolutionary
theologian, then, must believe that the spiritual
life shows itself in a continuous progress accord-
ing to an orderly and regular sequence ; but his
belief in evolution will throw no light whatever
on the question as to the secret of that life which
antedates spiritual progress. He must believe
that this spiritual force is resident in humanity ;
but how it came to be resident in humanity,
evolution cannot tell him. This he must learn,
if at all, elsewhere.

Making no attempt to explain the origin of
life, the evolutionist insists that the processes of
life are always from the simple to the complex :
from the simple nebulse to the complicated world
containing mineral substances and vegetable and
animal life ; from the germinant moUusk through
every form of animate creation up to the ver-

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 7

tebrate mammal, including man ; from the fam-
ily, through the tribe, to the nation; from the
paternal form of government, through the oli-
garchic and the aristocratic, to the democratic;
from slavery, — the patriarchal capitalist own-
ing his slave on terms hardly different from
those on which he owns his wife, — to*the com-
plicated relationship of modern society between
employer and employed. In this movement,
notwithstanding apparent blunders, false types
and arrested developments, the evolutionist sees
a steady progress from lower to higher forms
of life. The Christian evolutionist, then, will
expect to find modern Christianity more com-
plex than primitive Christianity. For the pur-
pose of this comparison, I do not go back of
Bethlehem: then, the confession "Thou art the
Christ, the Son of the Living God," — now, the
Episcopal Thirty-nine Articles, the Methodist
Episcopal Twenty-four Articles, or the West-
minster Confession of Faith of Thirty-three
Chapters, with their numerous sub-sections;
then, the simple supper-talk with the twelve
friends, met in a fellowship sanctified by prayer
and love — now, an elaborate altar, jeweled Vest-
ments, pealing organ, kneeling and awe-stricken
worshipers; then, meetings from house to house
for prayer. Christian praise, and instruction in
the simpler facts of the Master's life and the

8 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

fundamental principles of his kingdom, — now,
churches, with preachers, elders, bishops, ses-
sions, presbyteries, councils, associations, mis-
sionary boards ; then, a brief prayer, breathing
the common wants of universal humanity in a
few simple petitions, — now, an elaborate ritual,
appealin^to ear and eye and imagination, by all
the accessories which art and music and historic
association combined can confer; then, a bro-
therhood in Jerusalem, with all things in com-
mon, and a board of deacons to see that all were
fed and none were surfeited, — now, a brotherly
love making its way, in spite of selfishness, to-
wards the realization of that brotherhood of hu-
manity which is as yet only a dream of poets.
And he will expect to find that the Christianity
of the nineteenth century, despite its failures
and defects, is better, intellectually, organically,
morally, and spiritually, than the Christianity
of the first century.

The doctrine of evolution is not a doctrine of
harmonious and uninterrupted progress. The
most common, if not the most accurate fornnda
of evolution is "struggle for existence, survival
of the fittest." The doctrine of evolution as-
sumes that there are forces in the world seem-
ingly hostile to progress, that life is a perpetual
battle and progress a perpetual victory. The
Christian evolutionist will then expect to find

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 9

Christianity a warfare — in church, in society,
in the individual. He will expect Christianity
to be a Centaur, — half horse, half man; a Lao-
coon struggling with the serpents from the sea ;
a seed fighting its way against frost and dark-
ness towards the light and life. He will recur
continually to his definition that evolution is a
continuous progressive change by means of resi-
dent forces. He will remember that the divine
life is resident in undiviue humanity. He will
not be surprised to find the waters of the stream
disturbed; for he will reflect that the divine
purity has come into a turbid stream, and that it
can purify only by being itself indistinguishably
combined with the impure. When he is told
that modern Christianity is only a "civilized
paganism," he will reply, "That is exactly what
I supposed it to be ; and it will continue to be a
civilized paganism until the civilization has en-
tirely eliminated the paganism." He will not
be surprised to find pagan ceremonies in the rit-
ual, pagan superstitions in the creed, pagan self-
ishness in the life, ignorance and superstition in
the church, and even errors and partialisms in
the Bible. For he will remember that the divine
life, which is bringing all life into harmony with
itseK, is a life resident in man. He will re-
member that the Bible does not claim to be the
absolute Word of God ; that, on the contrary.

V.'^

10 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

it declares that the Word of God was with God
and was God, and existed before the world was ;
that it claims to be the Word of God, as pei^-
ceived and understood hy holy men of old, the
Word as spoken to men, and understood and
interpreted by men, who saw it in part as we
still see it, and reflected it as from a mirror in
enigmas. He will remember that the Church is
not yet the bride of Christ, but the plebeian
daughter whom Christ is educating to be his
bride. He will remember that Christianity is
not the absolutely divine, but the divine in hu-
manity, the divine force resident in man and
transforming man into the likeness of the divine.
Christianity is the light struggling with the
darkness, life battling with death, the spiritual
overcoming the animal. The end is not yet.
We judge Christianity as the scientist judges
the embryo, as the gardener the bud, as the
teacher the pupil, — not by what it is, but by
what it promises to be.

The doctrine of evolution is not inconsistent
with the existence of types of arrested develop-
ment, nor with deterioration and decay. The
progress is continuous, but not unbroken. Na-
ture halts. She shows specimens of unfinished
work. Evolution is not all onward and upward.
There are incomplete types, stereotyped and
left unchanged and unchanging; there are no-

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 11

movements, lateral movements, downward move-
ments; there is inertia, death, decay. The
Christian evolutionist is not therefore surprised
to find all these phenomena in the evolution of
Christianity. His finding them there does not
shake his faith in the divine life which struggles
toward victory against obstacles, and sometimes
seems to suffer defeat. He expects to find faith
hardened at certain epochs into cast-iron creeds ;
thought arrested in its development; men strug-
gling to prevent all growth, imagining that death
is life and life is death, that evolution is danger-
ous and that arrested development alone is safe.
He expects to find pagan superstitions sometimes
triumphing over Christian faith, even in church
creeds ; pagan ceremonies sometimes masquerad-
ing in Christian robes, even in church services;
and pagan selfishness poisoning the life blood of
Christian love, even in communities which think
themselves wholly Christian.

"A growing tree," says Professor Le Conte,
"branches and again branches in all directions,
some branches going upward, some sidewise,
and some downward, — anywhere, everywhere,
for light and air; but the whole tree grows ever
taller in its higher branches, larger in the cir-
cumference of its outstretching arms, and more
diversified in structure. Even so the tree of
life, by the law of differentiation, branches and

12 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

rebranches continually in all directions, — some
branches going upward to higher planes (pro-
gress) ; some pushing horizontally, neither rising
nor sinking, but only going further from the
generalized origin (specialization); some going
downward (degeneration), — anywhere, every-
where, for an unoccupied place in the economy of
Nature ; but the whole tree grows ever higher in
its highest parts, grander in its proportions, and
more complexly diversified in its structure."
Consciously or unconsciously. Professor Le
Conte has borrowed his figure from Christ. The
mustard seed is growing to be the greatest of all
herbs; but it grows in all directions; some
branches pushing upward to higher planes ; some
growing only further and further away from the
original stock, different therefrom in apparent
direction, yet the same in nature and in fruit;
some growing downward and earthward; some
with fresh wood and fresh leaves ; some halting
in their growth and standing stunted and
dwarfed, yet living ; some dead, and only wait-
ing the sharp pruning knife of the gardener, or
nature's slower knife of decay; yet the whole
"higher in its highest parts, grander in its pro-
portions, and more complexly diversified in its
structure " than when the Nazarene cast the seed
into the ground by the shores of Gennesaret.
Then, a solitary physician, healing a few score

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 13

of lame and halt and blind and lepers by a touch
or a word, — now, throughout all lands which
his presence has made holy, hospitals for every
form of disease known among mankind; then,
a single feeding of five thousand men, beside
women and children, seated in serried ranks
upon the ground, — now, an organized benefac-
tion, which, through the consecrated channels of
commerce, so distributes to the needs of man,
that in a truly Christian community a famine
is well-nigh impossible ; then, a single teacher
speaking to a single congregation on the hillside
and illustrating the simplest principles of the
moral life, — now, unnumbered followers, so in-
structing men concerning God, duty, love, life,
that not only does every nation hear the truth
in a dialect which it can understand, but every
temperament also in a language of intellect and
emotion unconsciously adapted to its special
need.

Does any Christian think that such a view
is lacking in reverence for the Master? He
may settle the question with the Master him-
self, who said, "Greater works than these shall
ye do; because I go to my Father."

I may perhaps assume that the scientist, if
he accepts religion in any sense, will not object
to this view of Christianity. If he believes
that man is a spiritual being and possesses a

14 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

spiritual life, he will welcome the attempt to
trace the development of this life according to
the now generally accepted principles of evolu-
tion. But certain religious minds will at once
interpose an objection. The religious life will
seem to them to be an exception to the general
law of evolution. They may hesitate to formu-
late an objection which their feeling really in-
terposes. They may even be startled if they
attempt to formulate such an objection, by dis-
covering that, in so doing, they are denying the
unity of life, and thus in fact, though not in form,
throwing doubt upon the unity of God. But
they will easily find this objection formulated
for them. They will find it stated by Lord
Macaulay in the interest of rationalism. "All
divine truth, "he says, "is, according to the doc-
trine of all Protestant churches, revealed in cer-
tain books. It is equally open to all who, in
any age, can read those books ; nor can all the
discoveries of all the philosophies of the world
add a single verse to any of those books. It is
plain, therefore, that in divinity there cannot
be a progress analogous to that which is con-
stantly taking place in pharmacy, geology, and
navigation. A Christian of the fifth century
with a Bible is neither better nor worse situated
than a Christian of the nineteenth century with
a Bible, candor and natural acuteness being of

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 15

course supposed equal." ^ They will find the
same objection to progress in religion stated
with equal vigor by Dean Burgon, but in the
interest of theological conservatism. "The es-
sential difference between theology and every
other science which can be named is this : that
whereas the others are progressive, theology
does not admit of progress, and that for the rea-
son already assigned, viz., because it came to
man, in the first instance, not as a partial dis-
covery, but as a complete revelation. Whereas,
therefore, in the investigation of natural phe-
nomena, man's business is to discover some-
thing 7ieiv, theology bids its professors inquire
for what is old.""^

This objection cannot be met by analogical
arguments from other departments of thought
and life, for its gist lies in a supposed contrast
between theology, the science of the divine life,
and all other sciences. The Bible is interpreted,
alike by Lord Macaulay and by Dean Burgon,
alike by the apostle of a cultivated agnosticism
and by the representative of a conservative ec-
clesiasticism, as a bar to progress in theology.
It would be vain to point out that the Christian-

^ Ma«aulay's Essay on Ranke's " History of the Popes,"
Miscellaneous Works, vol. ii. p. 618.

2 Dean Burgon, in the Fortnightly Review for April, 1887,
p. 606.

16 THE EVOLUTION OF CHBISTIANITY.

ity of the nineteenth century is not the same as
the Christianity of the first century. The reply
will be that it is not the same because of the de-
cadence into which the church has fallen. We
turn, then, to the Bible itseK, since those who
deny that progress may be predicated of religion
claim to base this denial wholly upon the Bible,
and ask whether it claims to prevent or to pro-
mote progress in religious thought ; whether
its command is "halt" or "forward march;"
whether, in Dean Burgon's phrase, it forbids
men to discover aught that is new, and com-
mands those who believe in it to inquire only
for what is old.

To ask this question is to answer it. The most
casual glance at the Bible discloses the fact that,
from its opening to its closing utterance, it is
the record of progress, a call to progress, an in-
spiration to progress. Its face is always set
towards the future. The story of the Fall in
Genesis is in some respects similar to that in
other ancient legends; but Genesis alone con-
tains a promise of restoration, "He shall bruise
thy heel, but thou shalt bruise his head." Poi-
soned shalt thou be by the spirit of evil, but the
spirit of evil shall be ground to powder beneath
thy feet at last. The story of the Deluge is com-
mon to Genesis and other traditions as ancient
or more ancient; but it is in Genesis that the

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 17

rainbow spans the retreating cloud, bidding man
look forward with hope to a divinely ordered
future. Abraham is led out of the land of his
idolatry by a promise to be fulfilled, not in his
time, but in that of his children's children.
Israel is summoned out of Egypt by the expec-
tation of a future prosperity for which the past
and the present give no warrant. The Taber-
nacle in the Wilderness is a preparation for a
Temple in the Holy Land. The Temple is de-
stroyed forever, and with it the idolatrous idea
that God's presence is confined to holy places,
or his revelation of himself to particular forms;
in its place, seventy years of exile give to the
Jewish people the Synagogue and the Holy
Scriptures. From Genesis to Malachi the faces
of patriarch, prophet, and priest are turned to
the future : the religion of the Old Testament is
a religion of expectancy ; the hope and faith of
Israel are fixed u^son a Coming One. The con-
dition of the Jews is exactly the reverse of that
which Dean Burgon recommends ; their theology
makes it their business to look for something
new, not to inquire for and be content with what
is old.

Three or four centuries pass by. The new
dispensation opens with a prophecy and a prom-
ise. Its first word turns all thoughts to the fu-
ture. Prepare ye the way of the coming Lord

18 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

is the burden of John the Baptist's message.
Jesus takes up the cry. His preaching is also
a summons to hope and expectancy : " The king-
dom of God is at hand." The people dwell in
their past ; he summons them continually to the
future. Thay are content with Moses and the
prophets; he not only proclaims another and a
better law, but he also declares in unmistakable
terms his relation to the old : it is unfinished, he
comes to complete ; it is undeveloped, he comes
to ripen. The process will be gradual; the con-
summation requires time. His kingdom is not
a completed kingdom : it is a seed cast in the
ground; it is a wheat-field growing up for a
future harvest. His teaching is new wine, it re-
quires new bottles ; it is a new life, it requires
a new garment. The institutions of Christianity
must be elastic, because Christianity itself is
a growing religion, with a life greater in the
future than in the present. As the end draws
near, Christ gathers with his disciples outside the
walls of Jerusalem, and as the setting sun gilds
the spires and domes of the Holy City, he fore-
tells the destruction of Jerusalem, and bids his
disciples take a long look forward, through the
gloom of that dreadful day, to a redemption to
be perfected and a Second Coming of the Re-
deemer. He meets them in the upper chamber,
where he repeats the message in tenderer words :

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 19

he has many things to say to them which now
they are not able to bear ; they must wait for the
best; it lies in the future. As he ascends out
of their sight, the angelic word to them is that
they must look for his reajDpearing, and through
patience, hope, and a blessed activity prepare for
it. That which inspires the apostles, as they take
up their work, is not the memory of a great
past, but the hope of a great future. They are
as those that seek a country. They are pil-
grims and strangers, and their haven lies before
them. They forget the things that are behind ;
they press forward for their prize. They count
not themselves to have attained; they follow
after, if they may apprehend that for which they
are apprehended in Christ Jesus. They look
for a new heaven and a new earth in which
dwelleth righteousness. They exhort one an-
other to grow in grace and in knowledge. And
when at last the canon closes, the last vision
which greets our eyes is not a completed city,
but a city still descending oiit of heaven upon
the earth; not a completed victory, but a Cap-
tain riding forth conquering and to conquer;
not a kingdom accomplished, but an hour yet to
come when the kingdoms of this earth shall have
become the kingdom of our Lord and of his
Christ. From the vague promises of redemp-
tion in the first chapter of Genesis to the clear

20 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

vision of victory in tlie last chapter of Revela-
tion, the cry of patriarch, prophet, martyr,
apostle, and seer is the cry of the Lord to Moses
by the shore of the Red Sea : " Speak unto the
children of Israel that they go forward." If
Lord Macaulay and Dean Burgon are right, if
"theology does not admit of progress," Moses
could not have added to Abraham's call the
clearer words of the Ten Commandments, nor
David supplanted the Tabernacle with prepara-
tions for a Temple, nor the prophets of exile
have encouraged the organization of the syna-
gogues, nor the Master substituted the Sermon
on the Mount for the Mosaic Law, nor Paul
have completed the wisdom of Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes with the diviner and profounder
wisdom of the EjDistles to the Romans and to
the Ephesians.

This whole notion of revealed religion consist-
ing in a revelation made once for all and there-
fore forbidding progress, or confining it within
very narrow limits, — to the criticism and inter-
pretation, for example, of a Book or a restate-
ment of what the Book says, but in slightly dif-
ferent forms of sj)eech, — grows out of a singular
misapprehension of the nature of revelation.
The sun in the heavens is obscured by the clouds ;
through a break in the clouds it appears for an
instant ; the navigator catches its place, makes

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 21

up his record, and by that record thenceforth
steers his vessel. So the ancient prophets are
conceived to have caught a glimpse of divine
truth, entered it in their log, and given us the
reckoning by which ever after the world is to
be navigated. But this notion of revelation, as
something external to man, is as inconsistent
with Scripture as it is with the analogies of all
education and the fundamental principles of
psychology. Revelation is unveiling; but the
veil is over the mind of the pupil, not over the
face of the truth. This veil is removed and '
can only be removed gradually, as the mind it-
self acquires a capacity to perceive and receive
truth before incomprehensible. The figure is
not original with me; I borrow it from Paul:
"Even unto this day when Moses is read, the j
veil is upon their heart. Nevertheless, when one I
shall turn to the Lord, the veil shall be taken '
away." The heavens are not veiled from the
pupil, but the pupil is veiled, so that he can-
not comprehend the stellar spaces, magnitudes,
movements, until education has removed the veil
and so revealed the truth.

As in physical, so in moral science, revealing
is a psychological process. It is the creation of
capacity, — moral and intellectual, or both. In
the nature of the case it can be nothing else.
Truth cannot be revealed to incapacity. That y

22 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

God is love is the simplest, as it is the most
fundamental revelation concerning God which
his Word contains. But it means and can
mean no more than love means to the individual
soul. The child in the infant class prattles it
artlessly, scarcely knowing the meaning of the
word. The maiden sees a new and deeper
meaning in it, as love looks out of her eyes into
the eyes of the bridegroom at the altar. The
mother has a new revelation when the babe
upon her bosom strikes a new note of love in
her heart. The aged saint, through the joy and
the sorrow of love, the hunger and the satisfac-
tion of love, love at the marriage, love in the
home, love at the open grave, has learned some-
thing more, though not all, of the height and
depth, the length and breadth of love immeas-
urable; the text lightly dropped from her lijjs
in childhood she cannot speak without bowed
head and tearful eyes. As with the individual,
so with the race : love means in the Nineteenth
Century what it could not mean in the First;
from the lips of a Henry Ward Beecher what it
could not mean from the lij^s of an Augustine
or a Calvin.

Thus the Bible is not so much a revelation as
a means of revelation. It is a revelation, be-
cause beyond all other books it stimulates the
moral and spiritual nature, stirs men to think

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 23

and feel, awakens their life, and so develops in
them a capacity to perceive and receive the
truths of the moral and the spiritual order.
God is not veiled, but man is blind; and the
Bible opens the eyes of the blind. The church
has indeed often adopted, consciously or uncon-
sciously, the philosophy of Lord Macaulay and
Dean Burgon; it has endeavored to crystallize
truth into a formal and final state. For a creed
is truth crystallized. But a crystal is a dead
thing, and truth is living. Truth is not a crystal,
it is a seed. It is to be planted, and what comes
from the planting will depend as much on the
soil in which it is planted as on the seed itself.
The fisTire is Christ's. "A sower went forth to
sow; some seed fell by the wayside, some upon
stony places; some among thorns; some into
good ground and brought forth fruit, some an
hundred fold, some sixty fold, some thirty fold."
Which way does the seed look : backward to the
winter or forward to the autumn? The fun-
damental difficulty about all attempts to define
truth in a creed is that truth is infinite, and
therefore transcends all definitions. As soon as
humanity understands the creed, the creed ceases
to be to humanity the whole truth; because
there is truth yet beyond, not confined within
the creed. The fundamental difficulty in all
attempts to reduce truth to a dogma is that they

24 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

are attempts to reveal truth without imparting
life. But truth cannot be revealed except as
life is imparted; for we can Imow only as we
live. Revelation is, of psychological necessity,
progressive; for we know the truth only as we
grow in life -capacity to know the truth. The
Bible never falls into the error of the church.
It never attempts to reduce truth to a dogma,
never crystallizes it in a creed. The value of
the Bible is not that it furnishes men with
thought, but that it makes them think. The
Bible is a revelation because it is a literature of
power; it operates on humanity for cataract;
it removes the veil from the readers' eyes ; it stirs
them to see truth with their own eyes and to
think it in their own thoughts.

In fact, this has always been the effect of
the Bible. Churches, creeds, and theological
and ecclesiastical systems have often repressed
thought, checked it, or at least tethered it. The
Bible has emancipated the mind, set men think-
ing, and created differences and divisions. Not
without historical warrant does Kaulbach, in his
cartoon of the Reformation, group all the in-
tellectual activity of the Seventeenth Century
around Luther with his open Bible in his hand.
The Bible reveals truth not by making it so plain
that men need not study, but by making it so
fascinating that they must study. Lessing said

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION. 25

that if one offered him Truth in the one hand
and Search for Truth in the other, he wouhl
choose Search for Truth. Search for Truth the
Bible has given to man ever since the Waldenses
studied it in secret in their mountain fastnesses,
and by it fed that independence and individu-
ality which the ecclesiasticism of their age had
almost extirpated everywhere else in Europe.

The belief, then, that the Christian religion is
a divine life is not inconsistent with the belief
that it is an evolution, since evolution offers no
explanation of the nature or origin of life ; it
only explains life's process. The belief that the
Bible is a revelation from God is not inconsis-
tent with the belief that the Christian religion
is an evolution ; for revelation is not a final state-
ment of truth, crystallized into dogma, but a
gradual and progressive unveiling of the mind
that it may see truth clearly and receive it vitally.
The Bible is not fossilized truth in an amber
Book; it is a seed which vitalizes the soil into
which it is cast; a window through which the
light of dawning day enters the quickened mind ;
a voice commanding humanity to look forward
and to go forward; a prophet who bids men
seek their golden age in the future, not in the
past.

l^'

CHAPTER II.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE.

According to Max Miiller, religion consists
in "the perception of the Infinite under such
manifestations as are able to influence the moral
character of man." According to Professor Le
Conte, evolution is "continuous progressive
change, according to certain laws, and by means
of resident forces." According to the evolution-
ary theory, therefore, revelation will be such a
manifestation of the Infinite as is able to influ-
ence the moral character of man, made, however,
not perfect and complete at the outset, but in a
series of continuous progressive changes, accord-
ing to certain laws, and by means of a spiritual
force or forces in the men who are themselves
the media of this revelation. The current ques-
tions in Christian circles respecting the Bible
may all be reduced to the question whether rev-
elation is thus a progressive revelation, with
those incompletenesses and imperfections which
are necessary accompaniments of progression, or
whether it is a complete and perfect revelation,
unchanging and unchangeable from the outset,

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 21

aud like its divine Author, the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever.

The question, therefore, to which I invite the
reader's attention in this chapter is not whether
the Bible is an inspired literature and contains
a divine revelation. To deny this is to deny
Christianity. He who disbelieves in the Bible
as the text-book of revealed religion is not in
his belief a Christian, whatever he may be in his
character. He is, properly speaking, a theist.
The Bible has a unique place in the literature
of the world. It has comforted the sorrowing,
inspired the apathetic, guided the perplexed,
strengthened the weak, and called to practical
repentance the sinful and the erring. No the-
ology can be true which takes this Bible out of
human life, weakens its sacred authority, makes
it less valuable as an inspiration and a guide,
reduces it to the commonplaces of the world's
thought, and degrades it and deprives it of its
life-giving power. There is no better test of
spiritual truth than spiritual fruitf ulness ; and in
making our estimate of truth and falsehood we
must take into account the spiritual as well as
the logical faculties, the testimony of the intui-
tions as well as the conclusions of the judgment.

But, on the other hand, the question is not
whether this Bible has in it some incidental in-
accuracies and imperfections : whether some of its

28 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

dates are wrong, some of its words and phrases
mistranslated, miscopied, or even originally mis-
cliosen ; whether there are differences in detail in
its parallel narratives, showing an absence of
absolute and minute accuracy; whether there
are, as a conservative theologian has conceived
that there are, some specks of sandstone in the
marble. The question is far more fundamental.
How are we to regard the Bible ? How are we
to regard inspiration and revelation? Are we
to think that God has given us a perfect and
infallible standard, something complete and per-
fect from its inception ; or are we to think that
he has given us a literature in which the mani-
festations of his presence and power are unique,
but in which they are made through men of like
passions as we ourselves are, men who saw truth
as in a glass darkly, men who knew in part
and prophesied in part? Is the Bible like the
Northern Lights, flashing instantly and without
premonition upon a world of darkness, and set-
ting all the heavens aglow with its resplendent
fire ; or is it like the sunrise, silvering first the
mountain tops, gradually creeping down the val-
leys, a progressive light, mingled with, yet grad-
ually vanquishing the darkness, its pathway like
that of the righteous man, growing brighter and
brighter unto the perfect day ?

The first of these opinions has been very gen-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 29

erally held in the churches born of the Refor-
mation. The Reformers repudiated an infal-
lible church, and, when asked what authority
they would substitute therefor, rej)lied, "The
Bible." They did not indeed at first claim for
the Bible, as we have it to-day, absolute iner-
rancy. Luther almost contemptuously repudi-
ated the Epistle of James as an epistle of straw. ^
But as the battle between the Roman Catholic
and the Protestant churches went on, the Pro-
testant theologians, for polemical reasons, laid
more and more stress on the authority of Scrip-
ture, and the doctrine of infallible inspiration
crept into the church. With it came the gen-
eral claim for the Bible that it is an absolute
and an infallible authority upon all subjects, — •
science, chronology, history, literature, rhetoric,
theology. The revelation was regarded, more or
less consistently, as a complete and perfect rev-
elation given to Moses at the outset. Pagan
beliefs and institutions parallel to those of the
Mosaic dispensation were supposed to have been
borrowed from Biblical revelation. The incon-
sistency between the practices of Israel and this
earlier revelation was regarded as degeneracy and
apostasy, incidents of the Fall. The object of
the prophets was supposed to be to reform and

^ See, for further illustration, Hageiibach's History of Chris-
tian Doctrine, sec. 243, note 1.

30 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

restore the original revelation. And the New
Testament was interpreted, not as an addition
and enlargement to the spiritual knowledge of
the world, but only as a revelation in a new
form of the truth which the world had received
in the Garden of Eden.

No one any longer really believes this; but
a great many attempt to believe it, or to make
themselves believe that they believe it. Thus
fragments of this belief still remain in an incon-
gruous no-system of theology, fragments which
it is well-nigh impossible to put together in a
connected and coherent whole. As a system it
cannot be described, but the fragments which
remain of it, found in different systems, may be
sketched by way of illustration.

The man, then, who holds, or thinks he holds,
or desires to hold this conception of the Bible,
as a complete, perfect, and flawless revelation of
divine truth from the beginning, finds in its
first chapter a histoiy of the creation which he
regards as a divine revelation of the mode of the
world's formation. This chapter declares that
the world was made in six days by successive
utterances of God, and that the writer may
leave no doubt as to his meaning, he declares that
evening and morning made each successive day.
But our devout reader, who has begun by believ-
ing the Bible to be an authority on natural sci-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 31

ence, abandons the earlier belief that the world
was made by divine utterances in six days, be-
cause all geological science establishes the con-
trary beyond peradventure. First, he conceives
that day means an epoch, and cites in support of
his conclusion the statement that a thousand years
are with the Lord as one day ; then he supposes
with Hugh Miller that the revelation was not
according to reality, but according to appear-
ance, that the process of creation was seen in
a vision by the inspired prophet ; and finally
he modifies his original theory respecting the
supreme authority of the Bible by concluding
that it is not an authority in matters of natural
science. He reads the story of man's creation
and believes that he is infallibly taught that man
was made out of the dust by a sculptor's process,
six thousand years ago. Anthropology demon-
strates to him that man has been upon the earth
a considerably longer time than this, and he
concludes, after ruminating upon this fact, that
the Biblical chronology was introduced into the
Bible in the time of Archbishop Usher, in the
sixteenth century, and is not a part of its infal-
lible revelation. He reads the story of the Fall,
with its tree, the fruit of which was to make man
immortal, with its weedless garden, and its talk-
ing serpent, and its death following sin. He
learns again from science that death has existed

32 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

in the world from the beginning, and must have
existed, that the immortality of man's body is an
impossible conception, and that all science more
and more tends to the conclusion that man as an
animal has been developed by gradual processes
from a lower animal condition. As in defend-
ing his conception of a revelation perfect and
complete from the beginning he first fought geo-
logy as irreligious, and then the antiquity of
man as ii-religious, so now he is fighting the doc-
trine of evolution as irreligious, not knowing to
what new position he can retreat if his belief
in the historical verity of the Fall is taken from
him.

He reads on in his Bible, and finds that the
political laws of this book gave allowance to, if
not direct approval of, polygamy and slavery. If
he be a Mormon, he avails himself of its author-
ity and pronounces polygamy a patriarchal insti-
tution; if he be a slave-holder, he pronounces
slavery to be a patriarchal institution ; but if he
be neither, he concedes that these laws, giving an
apparent sanction to lust and covetousness, are
not divine ideals, but a concession to the infirm-
ity of human flesh. In support of this position
he cites Christ, but he fails to see that he has
already conceded that the revelation is not the
perfect and flawless manifestation of a divine
ideal which at first he thought it to be.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 33

It is quite possible that he passes by the ec-
clesiastical laws altogether, but if he studies them
he does not comply with them. The early rev-
elation required circumcision ; but his children
are not circumcised. It required worship to be
performed only in the Temple, or chiefly there,
but he rightly believes one place to be as sacred
as another. It forbade all conduct of public wor-
ship except by the children of a single specified
parentage, but in his church the conduct of pub-
lic worship is thrown open to any man properly
equipped, spiritually and intellectually, for the
performance of that function. It provided as a
form of worship a system of sacrifices ; the bleat-
ing of sheep and the lowing of cattle mingled in
the Temple with the chants of praise, and rivers
of blood flowed underground from the sanctuary ;
but in his church there are neither cattle, sheep,
nor doves. And yet he thinks, or thinks that
he thinks, that originally this ecclesiastical cult
was framed in heaven and given to man, and he
endeavors to preserve, or imagines that he en-
deavors to preserve, some traces of it in his own
worship. Baptism has taken the place of cir-
cumcision ; in his prayers, though nowhere else,
he calls his meeting-house a temple ; perhaps he
calls his minister a priest, or, if Protestant pre-
judices do not permit this, he confers upon him
quasi priestly functions, which grow less and

34 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

less, until at last the only clerical act which a
layman may not perform is to pronounce a bene-
diction, — as though a prayer for the blessing of
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit on a con-
gregation could be asked only by an ordained
clergyman. His communion table he calls an
altar ; possibly he even preserves in the service
thereat, in the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass, an
attenuated form of the Jewish sacrificial system ;
or, banishing it from worship altogether, still
clings to it tenaciously by insisting that in the
creed the word sacrificial shall be coupled with
the atonement. The evolutionist recognizes a
spiritual continuity between the past and the
present, and in the earlier forms a primitive ex-
pression of that life of God in the soul of man
which survives all changes of ritual ; but in spite
of specious arguments, any man of common
sense, putting side by side the Jewish ritual and
the Puritan forms of worship, instantly perceives
that the modern service is by no means conformed
to the earlier one as to a complete, perfect, au-
thoritative, and final revelation.

Perhaps this student finally concludes that,
as the Bible is not a final authority in science, so
the Mosaic law is not a final authority in ecclesi-
asticism. Perhaps, though he can find no author-
ity for it whatever in either Christ or Paul, he
assumes that the New Testament has abolished

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 35

the ceremonial law, not one jot or tittle of which
Christ declared shovild pass away until all be ful-
filled. He makes his stand upon the decla-
ration that the moral laws of the Old Testament
constitute the final and authoritative word of God
upon the subject of the moral life. But even to
those moral laws he pays no literal obedience.
Unless he is a Seventh Day Christian, he works
on the seventh day with the rest of his neighbors,
and takes another day in the week for his rest
and his religious observances. In the chancel of
his church, by the side of the law, "Thou shalt
not make unto thee any graven image," he puts
without hesitation the bas-relief of the last pas-
tor. He finds himself involved by his theory in
moral perplexities from which he endeavors in
vain to escape. He reads the story miscalled the
Sacrifice of Isaac, and no argument can make it
seem to him really possible that God, who has
implanted in every father's heart the command
to protect his child, uttered to one father the
command to kill his child. He reads in some
imprecatory Psalm the prayer of the Psalmist
that God will not forgive Israel's enemies; he
reads the Sermon on the Mount, with its com-
mand from the Master to love our enemies, and
pray for those that injure us ; and no exegetieal
skill can make the two morally harmonious.
How can the first be a complete and perfect

36 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

transcription of the divine will, since the second
flatly contradicts it?

There is danger in skepticism, but there is
greater danger in shams; in making-believe be-
lieve ; in trying to think something which is not
really thinkable, or at least is not really thought;
in shutting our ears and our hearts to the truth
which is knocking for admission. The Master
never condemned honest doubt, but shams of all
sorts were odious to him. He denounced the
Pharisees who for a pretense made long prayers ;
he put out of the room the hired mourners who
simulated grief; and the dissimulating Judas
Iscariot he bade depart, before he would com-
mence his last sacred conference with his disci-
ples. He who was the Truth could not endure
a lie. Let us be true with ourselves, come what
may to our theology.

An infallible book is an impossible concep-
tion, and to-day no one really believes that our
present Bible is such a book. Theologians
maintain, indeed, that the original utterances of
the original writers were infallibly accurate, but
we have not the original utterances of the origi-
nal writers. An infallible book is a book which
without any error whatever conveys truth from
one mind to another mind. In order that the
Bible should be infallible, the original writers
must have been infallibly informed as to the

\J^

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 37

truth ; they must have been able to express it in-
fallibly; they must have had a language which
was an infallible vehicle for the communication
of their thoughts ; after their death their manu-
scripts must have been infallibly preserved and
infallibly copied; when translation became nec-
essary, the translators must have been able to
give an infallible translation; and finally, the
men who receive the book must be able infallibly
to apprehend what was thus infallibly understood
by the writers, infallibly communicated by them,
infallibly preserved, infallibly copied, and infal-
libly translated. Nothing less than this combi-
nation would give us to-day an infallible Bible ;
and no one believes that this infallible combi-
nation exists. Whether the original writers in-
fallibly understood the truth, or not, they had
no infallible vehicle of communicating it : their
manuscripts were not infallibly preserved or cop-
ied or translated; and the sectarian differences
which exist to-day afford an absolute demonstra-
tion that we are not able infallibly to understand
their meaning.

God has not given us an infallible standard,
but something far better, namely, a divine reve- '
lation. There is one relatively infallible book
in the world, — Euclid's Geometry. It was
written years before Christ, and, so far as I
know, no material errors have been found in it

38 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

from that day to this ; but it has exerted no such
influence upon mankind as the Bible. It is in-
errant, but it is not divine. The. vahie of the
Bible consists not in the supposed fact that there
are no errors in it, but in this, that its books have
been written by men who, with various degrees
of clearness of vision, saw God in his world of
nature and in his world of men, and were able to
make others see him. It is God — God's truth,
God's life — revealed in and imparted by the
Bible which makes it a sacred book; and that
impartation is all the better, and that revelation
is all the clearer, because men were the media
through which the life was imparted and the rev-
elation was made, — men who saw the truth, as
we see it, in a glass darkly, and who knew it, as
we know it, in part only.

As a collection of literature, the Bible is un-
questionably the result of evolution. It is a
library of sixty-six different books, written by
between fifty and sixty different writers. If we
assume, as I think we may, that the first writ-
ings of the canon ^ date from the age of Moses and
the last from the close of the first century, this

■^ I do not say books. Into the vexed question of the age of
the Pentateuch I do not enter. But I do not doubt that it cou-
tains writings — the Ten Commandments, for example, and in
my judgment much more — which date from the days of
Moses.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 39

volume is the product of about sixteen centuries
of national life. During these centuries, the
religious teachers of Israel, the men who had
in themselves that life of God which is the es-
sence of religion, who perceived in themselves
and in life such a manifestation of the Infinite
as produced a real change in their moral nature,
instructed the people concerning this life, occa-
sionally by writing, generally by speech. Parts
of what they spoke were by others reduced to
writing; parts of what were thus reduced to
writing were preserved ; parts of what were thus
preserved were incorporated in what is known
as the Bible. This incorporation in a single
volume was not effected at a definite date ^ nor
by any well-defined authority. The process by
which the books, both of the Old Testament
and of the New Testament, were selected was a
gradual one. The canon of the Old Testament,
substantially as we now possess it, existed at
the time of the translation of the Hebrew into
the Septuagint, about the third century before
Christ. But even to-day the Christian church is
divided upon the question what constitutes that
canon, Roman Catholic theologians, and some

^ " For the opinion, often met with in modern books, that the
canon of the Old Testament was closed by Ezra or in Ezra's
time, there is no foundation in antiquity whatever." — Canon
Driver, Introduction to the Old Testament, p. xxxi.

40 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

Protestant theologians, placing as high a value
on the ajjocryphal books as on some of the so-
called canonical books.

The New Testament grew in a similar manner.
At first the infant church depended on oral re-
ports for a knowledge of the sayings and the acts
of Christ. These were in time reduced to writ-
ing by different biographers. The apostles from
time to time wrote letters of counsel to the dif-
ferent churches. These biographies and these
letters were interchanged. Gradually the larger
churches acquired a collection of these fragmen-
tary writings. The first approximation to a
canonical collection of these books dates from
the second century of the Christian era, but it
does not include all the books in the present
canon, which did not assvune its present form till
the close of the fourth century ; nor is it possible
to state exactly when or by whom the various
books were first collected and formally recognized
as one collection. Thus, both the Old Testament
and the New Testament were constructed by a
process of natural selection. As collections of
literature both can be described, in terms of an
evolutionary philosophy, as the result of a prac-
tical process of selection and elimination, or as
"a stru2:o:le for existence and a survival of the
fittest."

As the collection of books which constitutes

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 41

the Bible was formed by a gradual process, so
a gradual development is to be seen in the teach-
ing contained in the collection. The later books
present higher ideals of character and conduct,
clearer and nobler conceptions of God, more
catholic and more positive interpretations of his
redeeming work in the world, than the earlier
books. The revelation is a progressive revela-
tion. The forms, whether of religious thought,
of public worship, or of church order and organ-
ization, in the Bible are not the same ; those of
the later ages have grown out of those of the
former ages, and are superior to them. In brief,
the Bible is the history of the development of
the life of God in the life of a peculiar people ;
and it traces the development of that life from
lower to higher and from simpler to more com-
plex forms. It is the record of a spiritual evolu-
tion ; of a clearer and ever clearer perception of
the Infinite, under such manifestations as tend to
produce a continually higher and stronger moral
influence on the character and conduct of men.
We can most easily trace this process of evolu-
tion by considering the Bible in four aspects, as
a volmne of history, of laws, of ethics, and of
theology.

1. The book of Genesis is a collection of nar-
ratives of prehistoric events. No one supposes
that aU of it was written by contemporaneous

42 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

authors. Adam is not credited with the author-
ship of the chapter about Eden, nor Noah with
the story of the Deluge, nor Abraham with the
record of the first great migration. The un-
known author or editor of Genesis does not tell
us how he obtained his knowledge of these events.
He does not claim that the facts were revealed to
him; and no later Biblical writer makes this
claim for him. The natural presumption there-
fore is that he obtained his information, as most
writers obtain their information concernino-
events outside their own observation, by investi-
gation, inquiry, and collation of preexisting ma-
terial. Luke tells us how he obtained his know-
ledge of the facts which make up his biography
of Christ : he obtained them from others, who
were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word.
Presumptively, the writer of Genesis obtained
his knowledge in a similar way, and this pre-
sumption is greatly strengthened by two circum-
stances. In the first place, a careful analysis of
the book makes it clear that it is composed of
two or more narratives which have been put to-
gether by an editor. The book of Genesis is a
Harmony analogous to the Harmonies of the
Gospel, which have been composed at various
times by piecing together in a continuous nar-
rative the Four Gospels. In the second place,
narratives of the Creation, the Temptation and

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 43

Fall, and the Deluge, in important respects an-
alogous to those in Genesis, are found in early
traditions, some of them apparently older than
even the most remote date assigned to Genesis
by any scholar. The Hebrew prophet's account
is unique, not because of the events narrated,
but because of the spirit in which he has nar-
rated them. He has taken the material as he
found it, and with that material has re-written
the early history of the world, and written God
into it.

"The first chapters of Genesis," says Lenor-
mant, "constitute a 'Book of the Beginnings,'
in accordance with the stories handed down in
Israel from generation to generation, ever since
the times of the Patriarchs, which in all its
essential affirmations is parallel with the state-
ments of the sacred books from the banks of the
Euphrates and Tigris. But, if this is so, I shall
perhaps be asked, Where then do you find the
divine inspiration of the writers who made this
archaeology, that supernatural help by which, as
a Christian, you must believe them to have been
guided? Where? In the absolutely new spirit
which animates their narration, even though the
form of it may have remained in almost every
respect the same as among the neighboring na-
tions. It is the same narrative, and in it the
same episodes succeed one another in like man-

44 THE EVOLUTION OF CHBISTIANITY.

ner ; and yet one would be blind not to perceive
that the signification has become altogether dif-
ferent. The exuberant polytheism which en-
cumbers these stories among the Chaldseans has
been carefully eliminated, to give place to the
severest monotheism. What formerly expressed
naturalistic conceptions of a singular grossuess,
here becomes the garb of moral trutlis of the
most exalted and most purely spiritual order.
The essential features of the form of the tradi-
tion have been preserved, and yet between the
Bible and the sacred books of Chaldaea there is
all the distance of one of the most tremendous
revolutions which have ever been effected in
human beliefs. Herein consists the miracle,
and it is none the less amazing for being trans-
posed. Others may seek to explain this by the
simple, natural progress of the conscience of
humanity; for myself, I do not hesitate to find
in it the effect of a supernatural intervention of
divine Providence, and I bow before the God
who inspired the Law and the Prophets." ^

The Christian evolutionist, with Lenormant,
does not suppose that the facts narrated in the
book of Genesis were supernaturally revealed to
the historian. He finds for the writer no such
claim anywhere in the Bible ; and he sees no rea-

^ Beginnings of History, by Francis Lenormant. Charles
Scribner's Sons. Preface, pp. xvi, xvii.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 45

son to make such a claim in the writer's behalf.
He supposes that a devout soul, who had in him-
self the power of spiritual perception, and who
saw God in his world, set himself to write the
beginnings of history in such a way that those
who were familiar with these prehistoric legends
should hereafter see God to have been with the
race from the beginning. He indicates this pur-
pose in the opening sentences of his narrative :
"In the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth." The material universe, which the
pagan nations deified and worshiped, he per-
ceives to be the creation of a divine mind, and
he so represents it. That depersonification of
nature which Greek philosophy did not accom-
plish till centuries later confronts us in the open-
ing chapter of Genesis. Other religions taught
man to fear natural phenomena as gods. This
unknown prophet teaches that God made the
world and all it contains, for man's habitation
and use, and made man to exercise a divine con-
trol over it. That God is the Creator of the
world, that man is God's child, and is made in

God's likeness, that sin is disobedience to God, I
. . i

that penalty is separation from God and loss of

the life of God, that God began redemption on

the day in which man began to sin, — these are

the lessons of the first chapter of Genesis : and

they are equally valuable whether one believes or

46 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

disbelieves that the description of creation in the
first chapter of Genesis is scientifically accurate,
or the account of the Garden of Eden in the
third chapter of Genesis, with its miraculous life-
giving fruit and its talking serpent, is histori-
cally accurate. The lessons which the divinely
inspired prophet found in life and wrote into the
already current history of a prehistoric age are
alike inspired, whether the scientific and histori-
cal materials were revelations or traditions.

This perception of God in history character-
izes all the historic records of the Old Testa-
ment. Abraham leaves the land of his nativity
that he may find God and may worship him.
Joseph illustrates faith in God alike in the dun-
geon and in the palace. God proves himself in
the plagues of Egypt above all the gods, and
calls his peojjle out of bondage that they may
become the people of God. God fights for them
and with them ; their victories are his victories,
and their land the land which he has given
them. And in all the subsequent history, from
the colonial days through the days of imperial
sj)lendor, later division and degradation, and
final exile and captivity, we have not the annals
of a great nation, not the glorification of great
leaders and the memorial of splendid achieve-
ments, but history written by men who saw God
in history, and wrote that they might enable us

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 47

also to see him, as a God of righteousness. It is
all written to elucidate the principle that " right-
eousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach
to any people." In this is the divineness of the
Bible history : not in the accuracy of its chrono-
logical and historical details, but in its percep-
tion of the spiritual meaning of life's great
drama. That meaning is not really less in the
history of the United States than in that of Pal-
estine ; but the Hebrew historians perceived that
meaning, and so told the story that all readers
perceive it. This constitutes the essential differ-
ence between the Hebrew Scriptures and the
modern press. In the Hebrew Bible is a per-
ception of the Infinite manifesting himself in
the national life ; in the American newspaper,
for the most part, only a perception of party
policies, politicians, strifes, defeats, and victo-
ries.

2. As Biblical history traces the development
of the divine life in the nation, so Biblical laws
exemplify the development of that life. The
Levitical law is not a revealed code of worship
to be literally obeyed by the Jews and symboli-
cally obeyed by other peoples. Circumcision,
temple, priesthood, altar, sacrifices, did not orig-
inate with Moses, and were not confined to the
Jewish people. The great lawgiver finds these
forms of the religious life in the surrounding

48 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

nations. He accepts them, gives them a new
meaning, and adapts them to a higher and better
life. A movable tent will serve as well for wor-
ship as a splendid Temple; for wherever we
gather to meet God in reverence and holy desire,
there he is. The nation must have a priesthood,
for to abolish it at this epoch in human history
would be to abolish all religious service and all
that feeds and fosters the religious life ; but the
priesthood are deprived of that power which in
all lands and all ages has made it dangerous.
The priests have no share in the ownership of
the land ; and are made wholly dependent upon
the voluntary offerings of the people, — volun-
tary, I say, for though the amount to be con-
tributed is definitely determined, there is no
process provided for enforcing it as a tax. The
priestly claim to be the sole teachers of the peo-
ple is repudiated, and the teaching function is
throughout Israel's history left to be exercised
mainly by a wholly unorganized and unofficial
body of prophets. Altars are prohibited ; one
only may be built ; and this of the simplest con-
struction. "An altar of earth shalt thou make
unto me; . . . and if thou wilt make me an
altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn
stone." Sacrifices are allowed; but the spirit
which in pagan lands sacrificed prisoners, and
offered hundreds of cattle and sheep is exorcised.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 49

Human sacrifice is forbidden; sacrifices are
never measured by their magnitude or value. A
single bullock, or a lamb, or a pigeon, or even
a sheaf of wheat, — anything will do, so that it
be not some defective thing, of no use for other
purposes, and so that it be offered in simplicity
and sincerity. Any lawyer, subjecting the Le-
vitical statutes to a lawyer's examination, would
not hesitate to declare that they are regulative,
not mandatory, that is, that their object is not
to require altar, and sacrifice, and priesthood,
but to regulate, restrain, and limit these eccle-
siastical institutions already existing.^ In the
history of Israel there is the same controversy
between ecclesiasticism and sj)irituality, high
church and low church, ceremonialism and sim-
plicity, which has characterized the church in
all ages. A striking illustration is afforded by
the 51st Psalm, in which the original prophet
declares that "the sacrifices of God are a broken
spirit," and a later priestly writer adds, with
curious incongruity, "Build thou the walls of
Jerusalem; then shalt thou be pleased with
burnt offering and whole burnt offering." It is
an addition quite in the spirit of much modern

^ My authority for this statement is my brother, Austin
Abbott, Dean of the New York University Law School. It
is abundantly borne out by a careful and unprejudiced study
of the laws.

50 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

hymn tinkering. Mediaeval European history
is, in this respect, ahnost an exact reproduction
of mediaeval Jewish history. The priests are
always urging the importance of Temple and
altar and sacrifice ; the prophets are always in-
sisting that these are valuable only as the instru-
ments of a devout spirit, and that to obey is
better than sacrifice. At last, with the coming
of Christ, the whole system of sacrifice comes to
an end. The sinners come to him, and he habit-
ually bids them go in peace and sin no more.
Only once does he send men to the Temple, and
then as a sanitary measure, that the cure of their
lej^rosy may be officially ascertained and pro-
nounced. Not once does he bid a j)enitent to
offer any sacrifice for his sins.

The Christian evolutionist, then, does not see
in the Levitical code a divine authority for a
sacrificial system to be maintained in attenuated
forms, as in a bloodless sacrifice of the Mass, or a
perpetuated phrase in a creed. On the contrary,
he takes account of the notion universally pre-
vailing among pagan peoples, and not yet elimi-
nated from Christian lands, that God must be
appeased by pain and approached by sacrifice;
he sees in the Levitical code a permission of sac-
rifices, because their abolition could not have
been comprehended by a primitive and spiritu-
ally uneducated people; but he also sees that

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 51

these sacrifices are not so much commanded, or
commended, as restrained, limited, and dimin-
ished ; he sees prophet after prophet declaring,
either that they are utterly valueless, or valuable
only as the expression of religious feeling and
purpose; he sees Christ, even when in close
proximity to the Temple, disregarding the sacri-
ficial system altogether in his treatment of re-
pentant sinners ; he sees Paul declaring that we
need no other sacrifice and no other mercy-seat
than Christ. He believes that the sacrificial \
system represents a profound spiritual truth, ,
the truth that it costs to forgive sin ; of this A
truth I shall have something to say in a subse-
quent chapter. He recognizes in the ceremo-
nial law of the Old Testament, not a law to be
universally obeyed, either literally or symboli-
cally, by all peoples, but part of a system of
education, a "continuous progressive change,"
from that conception of God which regards him
as an offended King, to be approached only in
fear, with an offering and by a court ceremoni-
alism, to that conception of God which regards
him as a Father, to be approached with the un-
ceremonious confidence* of unfrightened child-
hood.

The Christian evolutionist looks upon the
political laws of the Jews in the same way.
There are three great organic sins destructive

52 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

of any society which harbors them : war, which
is destructive of national order, and while it
lasts turns the nation into an armed camp ; slay;-
ery, which degrades labor and forbids the educa-
tion of the laborers, that is, of the vast majoritj*
of the population ; and polygamy, which makes
family life impossible, and in the individual sub-
stitutes lust for love. These three organic sins
are inevitably characteristic of the earlier and
more barbaric states of society : for combative-
ness, which is the inspiration of war; idleness,
which is the inspiration of slavery; and lust,
I which is the inspiration of polygamy, are the
three animal vices which are fastened upon man
as he first issues from an animal condition. The
evolutionist sees these facts clearly; but being
an evolutionist he has more faith in education
than in law, in growth than in manufacture, in
other words, in resident forces working from
within than in external forces operating from
without. He does not think that it is the func-
tion of government to enforce moral ideals upon
an uneducated community by penal enactment.
He sees therefore in the political law of the Jews
the same evolution which he sees in their ecclesi-
astical law.

A prophetic lawgiver perceives that war is not
an honorable avocation for a nation, and issues
laws in restraint of war; he perceives that slav-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 53

ery cannot enrich a people, and issues laws in
restraint of slavery; he perceives that polygamy
cannot promote welfare, and as a consequence
issues laws in protection of womanhood. The
evolutionist thinks no better, but rather worse, of
slavery and polygamy because they are "patri-
archal institutions ; " and he measures the Mosaic
laws on the subject by their effect, which already
in the time of Christ had been such as practically
to abolish both the harem and the slave from
loyal Jewish households, and has now made the
Jewish people, whatever other faults they may
possess, the most industrious and the most chaste
people on the face of the globe.

3. As the ecclesiastical and the political
laws, so the moral laws of the Bible afford no
perfect ideal of life at the outset, but show a
"continuous and progressive change" from a
simple to a more complex, from a lower to a
higher law. There are certain fundamental
principles which underlie all social order, the
habitual violation of which can end in nothing
but anarchy. These are such as the following : .
reverence for a righteous God as the only real
Lawgiver, so that on the one hand the state has
no right to enact or enforce a law not divine in
its nature, and on the other the individual must
obey, not because there is force to compel him,
but because conscience requires obedience ; some

54 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

stated time redeemed for self -development from
toil and drudgery, else man sinks back into the
animal and life becomes a prison house ; respect
by children for parents, indispensable to home
government, order, and training; respect by
every man for the three great fundamental rights
of his neighbor, — life, property, and family
. relationships.

The Ten Commandments prohibit the more
palj)able violation of these principles. These
commandments are not only wonderful expres-
sions of social righteousness for that early age,
but the princijjles embodied in them underlie all
our modern criminal legislation. But they are
not, and are not intended to be, final moral
ideals for the life of the individual. One might
keep each one of these statutes, excejit perhaps
the last, and not be admitted to good society of
to-day. He might not swear, but might be vul-
gar and obscene. He might not commit adul-
tery, but might be sensual, licentious, and an
habitual drunkard. He might not steal, but
might run a faro table or a lottery shop.

Nor is it correct to say, as it sometimes has
been said, that Christ gives to these command-
ments a personal and sjDiritual interpretation,
which clothes them with a different meaning.
For Christ does not say. It hath been said to
them of old time, Thou shalt not kill, and what

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 55

they meant was, Thou shalt value life. He says,
But I say unto you, Be not angry without a
cause. He puts his law in sharp contrast
with the ancient law. There is as little reason
for saying that Christ re-affirms and spiritualizes
the Ten Commandments, as there is for saying
that he re-affirms and spiritualizes the law. An
eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

The Ten Commandments are simply prohibi-
tions of the more palpable violations of the laws
of social well-being. They do not afford, and
are not intended to afford, God's ideal of moral
character or conduct. Later in Jewish history
a higher ideal is presented ; in such utterances
as, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart and soul and strength; " "Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself; " "Who shall as-
cend unto the hill of the Lord, and who shall
stand in his Holy Place? He that hath clean
hands and a pure heart." Yet these are not the
Christian ideal. When Christ is asked. Which
is the great command of the Law ? and replies,
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart and soul and strength, and thy neighbor
as thyself," he does not in his answer give his
ideal of life. He simply repeats the Jewish
ideal, as it is expressed in two general laws
found in the Jewish books. To love one's neigh-
bor as one's self is not the Christian law of love:

56 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

it is the Jewish law of justice. Who am I, that
I should expect better treatment than or higher
regard from my neighbor than I accord to him ?
Christ's ideal is quite different. He gives it
to his own disciples, in his last interview with
them before his death. "A new commandment
give I unto you," he says; "that ye love one
another as I have loved you." Did he love his
disciples only as he loved himself? He that
beggared himself that he might make us rich,
he that emptied himself of divinity that he
might make us divine, he that lived and loved
and suffered and died for those that were unwor-
thy of his sacrifice, loved us far more than he
loved himself. This ideal of love he left as a
legacy for his followers ; and it is not an impos-
sible one for us. Paul loved the Gentile world
better than himself; and every true missionary
has done so. William of Orange loved his coun-
try better than himself; and every true patriot
has done so. William Lloyd Garrison loved the
enslaved better than he loved himseK ; and every
true reformer has done so. The true mother
loves her child better than herself; the nurse her
patient; the martyr his church. It is not the
Ten Commandments which should be put up in
our churches, as the ideals of our moral life for
us to pattern after. They are but the primitive
prohibitions of the grosser sins against social

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 57

order. In their place should be put the New |
Commandment, "That ye love one another as I
have loved you."

This conception of moral evolution in the Bible
reconciles incongruities and relieves difficulties,
which on the theory of a perfect and complete
revelation at the outset are morally^ and intellec-
tually unendurable. That God should tell a\
father to kill his child, it is impossible really to J
believe. He would be commanding by special |
edict what by a law written in the universal con- |
science he has prohibited. A few years ago a
father sincerely believed that he had received
such a command; and the community unani-
mously adjudged him to be insane. But that in
those early ages a devout father should know
that he must consecrate his child, even his only
begotten child, to God, and in his ignorance
should imagine sacrifice by death to be the
only possible form of such consecration, and that
God should interpose to teach him, and through
him his descendants, that life, not death, is the
true consecration, — that it is not difficult to be-
lieve. That God should command the children
of Israel to exterminate the Canaanites, slaying
men, women, and children, the same God whose
patient love was manifested in the life and char-
acter of Jesus Christ, it is impossible to believe.
But it is quite possible to believe that in a

58 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

primitive age a people sliould be inspired with
an enthusiasm for righteousness by their proph-
ets, and with a wholly sacred determination to
destroy, root and branch, the iniquities which
made the Canaanites the most corrupt nation
of a corrupt age; and that they should be
unable to see any other way of destroying the
sin than by destroying the sinners, having no
even remote conception of the possibility of con-
verting and educating them. Even in the Chris-
tian church in the nineteenth century, there is a
very general unbelief in the efficacy of any mea-
sures for the conversion of pagan peoples to a
higher and purer life. It is impossible to believe
that God, who through his Son bids his children
"Love your enemies; do good to them who de-
spitefuUy use you, and persecute you, that ye
may be the children of your father which is in
heaven," should have inspired a persecuted He-
brew in exile to execrate Babylon with the words,
" O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed ;
happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou
hast served us; happy shall he be that taketh
and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."
But it is not impossible to believe that a Hebrew,
in this hour of utter bitterness, experiencing the
cruel scorn of a people who derisively demanded
of their captives an exhibition of their sacred
psalmody, — somewhat as we sometimes call

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE.

59

upon the North American Indians to amuse us
with their war songs and their war dances, —
in the very frankness of his soul should have
breathed out to God the bitterness of a wholly
unchristian hate, and in so doing should have
found relief. It is not the unknown author of
the imprecatory Psalms who says "Follow me; "
it is Christ ; and the imprecatory Psalms remain
to show us out of what bitterness of feeling he
delivers those that follow him. To go back
from the Sermon on the Mount to the impreca-
tory Psalms, and try to find a divine ideal in
them, is as if Bunyan's Pilgrim should go back
from the Land of Beulah to the Slough of De-
spond, because he began his pilgrimage by floun-
dering therein.

4. The object of the Bible is primarily, not
a revelation of law, either ecclesiastical, politi-
cal, or moral, but a revelation of God. This
revelation is both imperfect and progressive. It
is imperfect, because it is the revelation of the
infinite to the finite, and the finite cannot per-
fectly comprehend the infinite ; it is progressive,
because as man gi-ows in spiritual and intellec-
tual capacity, his apprehension of the infinite
grows also. This proposition is as familiar to
the student of theology as it is axiomatic. "If,"
says Professor Harris, "God reveals himself, it
must be through the medium of the finite., and to

/V\

4

60 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

finite being's. The revelation must be commen-
surate with the medium through which it is made
and with the develoiDment of the minds to whom
it is made. Hence, both the revelation itself,
and man's apijrehension of the God revealed,
must be progressive, and at any point of time
incomplete. Hence, while it is the true God who
reveals himseK, man's apj)rehension of God at
different stages of his own development may be
not only incomplete, but marred by gross mis-
conception."

The Bible illustrates this truth. The reve-
lation of God grows both in clearness and in
spiritual grandeur as man grows in capacity to
receive and to communicate it. Moses' concep-
tion of God is superior to that of Abraham,
David's is superior to that of Moses, Isaiah's is
superior to that of David, and Paul's is superior
to that of Isaiah.

The conception of creation bodied forth in
the first chapter of Genesis is very different
from that found in the Chaldean tablets or the
Phoenician mythology; but the difference is re-
ligious, not scientific ; that is, it is a difference,
not chiefly in the nature of the phenomena re-
corded, but in the spirit in which they are re-
corded and in the perception of the One whose
nature they manifest and whose glory they ex-
press. In the more ancient Chaldean tablets,

TIIi: EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 61

chaos forms the gods; in Genesis, God out of
chaos forms the world. In the Chaldean accounts
of the creation of men, Belus "commanded one
of the gods to cut off his head and mix the blood
which flowed forth with earth, and form men
therewith, and beasts that could bear the light.
So man was made and was intelligent, being a
partaker of the divine wisdom. " ^ In Genesis,
God forms man out of the dust of the earth and
breathes into him the breath of the divine life.
In brief, to quote Lenormant, the prehistoric
narrative in Genesis is the same as in the Chal-
dean tablets; "in it the same episodes succeed
one another in the same manner ; and yet one
would be blind not to perceive that the signi-
fication has become altogether different. The
exuberant polytheism which encumbers these
stories among the Chaldeans has been carefully
eliminated to give place to the reverent monothe-
ism." Thus the progressive revelation begins
with the conception of God as the creator of the
world, and of man as made in the image of God ;
therefore of God as spirit, and of matter as the
creature of and subordinate to spirit. Yet this
monotheism is by no means always clear at first.
Generally God is represented as the one and
only true God ; sometimes, however, as only a

1 Lenormant's Beginnings of History, p. 491. Rawlinson's
Ancient Monarchies, vol. i. p. 143.

62 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

God above all other gods. And while the former
is certainly the view generally entertained and
pressed upon the people by the prophets, the sec-
ond is the view generally entertained among the
people. It does not seem absurd to them to
think that they cannot conquer the Philistines in
the plains because their God is not the God of
the plains; nor to imagine that golden calves,
representing the sacred bulls of Egypt, may
serve to symbolize the gods that brought them

I up ovit of Egypt. It is at least a fair question
whether the plural form Elohim (gods) used by
one of the writers of Genesis is not an indication
that the prevailing polytheism of the pagan na-
tions had not in these earliest times entirely dis-
appeared from the minds of even the inspired
prophets.

The monotheistic conception lays the founda-
tion for the next step in the progress of the rev-
elation of God to his people : this, namely, that
God is a righteous God. The first distinct
statement of this truth, to us so fundamental
and even axiomatic, is in the narrative of Abra-
ham's interview with God, and in this interview
it is not asserted dogmatically, not assumed as
axiomatic, but put in a tone of expostulation and
entreaty : " Shall not the Judge of all the earth
do right? " This conception of God as a God
that is righteous and does right is brought clearly

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 63

into prominence in the revelation to and through
Moses. Even more than monotheism does this
distinguish the religion of the Hebrews from that
of the pagan nations. Out of this grows natu-
rally and necessarily the conception of religion
as righteousness. Unorthodox writers see this as
clearly as the most orthodox. "The conditions
of Jahveh's covenant with his people," says Re-
nan, ^ "are exclusively moral; he recompenses
them with prosperity in this world, giving it to
those who please him, and the man who pleases
him must be irreproachable. In order to enjoy
a long life and to be happy, a man must avoid
evil. The great step is taken. The old reli-
gions, in which the god granted his blessings
to those who offered him the first sacrifices and
who most carefully observed the ritual of his
worship, were quite left behind."

Life often seems inconsistent with this faith in
a righteous God who rewards righteousness and
punishes sin. For often the righteous suffer and
the wicked prosper. Out of this terrible trag-
edy of life, this incongruity between life and the
moral sense of man assuring him of the divine
nature of righteousness, the drama of Job is con-
structed. Only as it gradually dawns upon the
spiritual vision that this is not all of life, and
that another life may bring compensation and
^ History of the People of Israel, ii. 336.

64 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

adjust the unequal balances, does faith in the
righteousness of God reassure itself. At first
the most spiritual prophet cannot conceive that
a righteous God should forgive sin. Overlook it
he cannot; and the cure of it by patient love is
at first not seen at all, and later only dimly, im-
perfectly, and gradually. Joshua, indeed, dis-
tinctly tells the people that they cannot serve
Jehovah because he will not forgive their sin;
and Moses sometimes implies the same, some-
times the reverse. Moreover, at first Jehovah is
the God of the nation rather than the God of the
individual. He is the God of Battles, the God
of the Host of Israel, a Man of War, a Caj)tain,
a King ; he marches at the head of the nation,
directs its campaigns, gives it the victory. In
the earlier history he is rarely referred to by
terms which indicate personal filial relations be-
tween the soul and himself, as a Shepherd, a
Father, a Friend. The phraseology of religion
is that of the camp rather than that of the house-
hold. But by David's time this new and ten-
derer and deeper conception of God has begun
to dawn on the mind of Israel. Repeatedly by
the Psalmist is Jehovah addressed as "wz?/ God,"
a phrase apparently used but twice before
David's time. In the Hebrew Psalter, God is
seen to be a merciful God, a personal Friend
redeeming even more than judging the world.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 65

" Wlio forgiveth all thine iniquities ;
Who healeth all thy diseases ;
Who redeemeth thy life from destruction ;

The Lord is full of compassion and gi-acious,

Slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.

He will not always chide ;

Neither will he keep his anger for ever.

He hath not dealt with us after our sins,

Nor rewarded us after our iniquities.

For as the heaven is high above the earth,

So great is his mercy toward them that fear him.

As far as the east is from the west,

So far hath he removed our transgressions from us."

Nothing like this, scarcely anything approxi-
mating this, is to be found in the Pentateuch.
The only even partial parallels are in Deutero-
nomy, which there is at least good reason to be-
lieve was written towards the close of the mon-
archy. But even in the Psalms God is still the
God of Israel ; and still in the main the ground
of appeal to him is the righteousness of him
who appeals. It is not till Isaiah, the Second
Isaiah,^ that God is clearly revealed as a God
whose mercy, as well as justice, extends to all
the inhabitants of the earth. Israel is still the
chosen people of God, but chosen to be a light
to lighten the Gentiles. God is still a just God,

^ Nearly all modern critics regard Isa. xl.-lxvi. as written
a century later than the preceding portion of the hook, and
hy another author, designated as the Great Unknown, or some-
times as the Second Isaiah.

66 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

but a God whose justice is mercy, and whose
righteousness redeems. And a glimpse, the
first in this resplendent progress of man's ac-
quaintance with God, is given of that divine
suffering love which is at once to judge and to
redeem the world, in the person of the Suffering
Servant of Jehovah, who bears the iniquities of
Jehovah's people, and by his justice justifies
many.

Thus the Christian evolutionist sees in the
Bible not a complete and perfect revelation of
science, history, law, ethics, or even theology; he
sees man gradually receiving God's revelation of
himself. The Bible is not an infallible standard
of truth or life. It is the history of the growth
of man's consciousness of God. It is the ex-
pression of God in human thought, God speak-
ing to man and through man, God speaking
through the selected writings of the selected
projjhets of a selected people. Thus it is truly a
standard ; but not a final and infallible standard.
Its history is composed, as other histories have
been composed, out of such materials as were at
hand or could be secured ; but the historian saw,
what other contemporaneous historians did not
see, God in his world, and wrote the history with
God manifested in it. The laws, ceremonial and
political, do not afford, and are not intended to
afford, a final form for either worship or justice;

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE. 67

they are suited to their times, and are such forms
as are best adapted to express worship and to
execute justice in a rude age and among a bar-
barous people; and they are the more divine
because they are not perfect, but are with divine
compassion adapted to an early age and fitted to
prepare for better days to come. The earliest
moral laws are not ideals for the individual con-
duct and character; they embody such regula-
tions as are necessary to social order, like the
regulations in a school, without which order,
and therefore intelligent progress, would be im-
possible; and they express such ideals as could
be apprehended by man in the earlier stages of
his moral development. Their value consists,
not in the fact that they afford a moral standard
for all time, but in the fact that they prepare
men for a better standard in the future. And
the earliest conceptions of God, while immeasur-
ably superior to those embodied in the pagan
literature about, and superior to many that even
now prevail in intelligent circles in the United
States, are inferior to those which are expressed
in the experience of the later prophets. Each
successive age sees God more clearly and inter-
prets him more clearly than does its predeces-
sor, until the fullness of time has come, and the
Word no longer speaks through the broken ut-
terances of men, but becomes incarnate.

CHAPTER III.

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY.

The Old Theology,

The Bible is a book of religion, not a book
of theology. The questions which the Hebrew
mind asked were questions of religion, not of
theology. Let us recur to Max Miiller's defi-
nition of religion : " Religion consists in the per-
ception of the Infinite under such manifestations
as are able to influence the moral character of
man." The Hebrew prophets, then, sought for
such a perception of the Infinite as would influ-
ence the moral character of those to whom they
spoke. They did not ask the question, What is
God? but, What is the way to Him? Nor,
What is the nature of sin ? but, How shall we get
rid of it ? Nor, What is the origin of pain ? but.
How shall we make a true spiritual use of it?
The Bible accordingly contains few or no defini-
tions. None of God, unless "God is love" be
regarded as a definition; none of sin, unless
"Sin is lawlessness" be regarded as a defini-
tion; none of faith, unless "Faith is the sub-

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. G9

stance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen," be regarded as a definition;
and absokitely none of atonement, regeneration,
the foro-iveness of sin, the nature of Christ, or
the divine attributes.

The book of Job, if not in authorship the old-
est in the Bible, undoubtedly represents the ear-
liest religious life. It is a picture of Hebraic
thought in its beginnings. If not written be-
fore the Mosaic law, it is written to portray a
prior state of society. There is in it no refer-
ence to the Mosaic dispensation, to the sacrifices,
to the Ten Commandments, or to any explicit
revelation. It is a book of questionings, rather
than of answers. Job is a theist, living before
revelation. He has believed that God is a
righteous God, and will reward righteousness
and pmiish iniquity. He has been righteous,
and yet he has suffered overwhelming disaster.
When his friends insist that he must have sinned,
otherwise this disaster would not have come upon
him, he repudiates indignantly their explana-
tion. He is too honest to pretend a confession
which is not real. His utterances are the cry
of a perplexed soul. He interprets the problem
of life as it presents itself, not to the philoso-
pher in his study, but to men and women in
the actual experiences of their life. "Oh, that
I knew where I might find him," he cries, "that

70 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

I might come even unto bis dwelling place. I
would set in order my cause before him." Un-
able to find God, he longs for some mediator
who shall interpret him. "He is not a man
as I am, that I should answer him, and we should
come together in judgment. Neither is there
any Daysman \i. e. mediator or umpire] betwixt
us that might lay his hand upon us both." He
longs for some clear revelation that will interpret
to him the enigma of his own personal life, and
will make clear to him what he should do. " Oh
that I had the indictment which mine adversary
had written; surely I would carry it upon my
shoulder, I would bind it unto me as a crown."
These are not the questions of philosophy, but of
life. They are evoked out of spiritual struggle ;
they are far profounder, more serious, more
agonizing, than the questions which the philoso-
pher calmly ponders in his study, surrounded by
his volumes.

To these questions the Hebrew prophets af-
forded, even in the Old Testament, partial an-
swers. They did not attempt to define God,
but they did point the way to him.

" Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord ?
Or who shall stand in his holy place ?
He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart ;
Who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceit-
fully.

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 71

He shall receive the blessing from the Lord,
And righteousness from the God o£ his salvation."

These prophets did not attempt to define the
nature of sin, but they did point out the remedy.

" Wash you ; make you clean ; put away the
evil of your doings from before mine eyes ; cease
to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment ; re-
lieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead
for the widow. Come now, and let us reason to-
gether, saith the Lord : though your sins be as
scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though
they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."

The prophets did not discuss the origin of
pain. They did not puzzle themselves over the
problem how, into a world governed by love, sin
and suffering have come. They sought for peace
in an experience of trust transcending knowledge.

" Commit thy way unto the Lord ;

Trust also in him ; and he shall bring it to pass.

And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light,

And thy judgment as the noonday.

Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him :

Fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way."

To these practical questions of life, to which
the Hebrew prophets gave partial and tentative
answers, Jesus Christ gave answers fuller and
more complete. He fulfilled the law and the
prophets, that Is, he filled out the outline sketch
which they had made. He began his ministry

72 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

by proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was at
hand; then, in private conference with his dis-
ciples, he told them that he was the long-prom-
ised Messiah, come to bring that kingdom upon
the earth; and finally, he assured them that it
was through him that they were to come to God.
"I have manifested the Father's name," he said
to them. "He that hath seen me hath seen the
Father." He said nothing against the Jewish
system of sacrifices; but he absolutely ignored
it. When men came to him repentant, with the
burden of their sin, he simply told them their
sins were forgiven, and they were to arise and
go their way and sin no more; but he never
sent a penitent to the priest to ofEer a sin-offer-
ing for his sins. More by his deeds than by
his words he taught men that pain was not evil;
that sanctified by love it was beneficent ; that it
was a glorious thing to suffer for love's sake;
that such love-suffering was to be coveted, not
fled from ; and he bade his disciples take up the
cross and follow him. Thus he answered the
three great questions of religion : How to find
God ; how to get rid of sin ; how to utilize suf-
fering. But his silence was only less significant
than his speech. Like the prophets who pre-
ceded him, he preached religion, not theology.
That is, he answered the vital questions of expe-
rience, not the curious inquiries of the intellect.

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 73

He furnished no catalogue of divine attributes
and no definition of the Infinite, but he told
men the way to God. He did not discuss the
nature of sin, nor its origin, nor in one single
instance the relation of the individual to the
race, to his ancestry, or to Adam. But he as-
sured men that by breaking off their sins in
righteousness they might find forgiveness and re-
lief. He never discussed the question how pain
entered into the world, but he gave to pain a
new meaning and to the souls of men a new in-
spiration, which made them eager to enter into
it. Nowhere outside the church of Christ can
one find such an expression as that of Paul, "I
count all things but loss for the excellency of
the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. . . .
That I may know him, and the power of his
resurrection, and the fellowship of his suffer-
ings, being made conformable unto his death."
In order to introduce Christianity into the
Greek and Roman world, it was as necessary
that it should be re-cast into Greek and Roman
thought moulds as that it should be expressed in
Greek and Roman language. For this re-cast-
ing of it, the world is chiefly indebted to the
Apostle Paul. Humanly speaking, Christianity
would have been only a reformed Judaism, but
for him. He did not add to Christianity, as
some have imagined, nor did he corrupt it, as

74 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

others have imagined ; neither did he simply re-
iterate what Jesus Christ had taught in the forms
in which Jesus Christ taught it. He translated
Christianity from Hebrew into Greek and
Roman forms of thought. He was the necessary
link between the Hebraic and the Gentile world.
Paul seems to me to have been greatly misun-
derstood, alike by his admirers and his critics.
He was not primarily a philosopher, loving the
truth for its own sake and constructing^ it in
carefidly articulated systems. He had and ex-
pressed a vigorous contempt for mere wisdom.
In his writings there are few or no references to
the philosophical systems of his time. He was
not by nature a logician ; he did not reach his
conclusions by labored processes of argument.
He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, belono-ine:
by race and by his inherent religious spirit to a
people who have given the world a David and
an Isaiah. He was the last of the Hebrew pro-
phets, a seer rather than a logician. His mind
was more nearly of the type of Emerson or
Goethe than of the type of Calvin or Thomas
Aquinas. His life was not that of a philosopher,
but that of an evangelist. He traveled from
city to city, preaching the gospel. The churches
which sprang up where he jireached, he carried
as a burden on his heart. He wrote to them
practical letters of counsel. From these letters

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 75

and from the evangelistic sermons of which we
have fragmentary reports, his system of theology
has to be deduced, as one might deduce a system
of practical theology from the sermons of Dwight
L. Moody, or George Whitefield. His logic is
often defective, and it is always the logic of an
advocate. He does not hesitate to use the argu-
mentum ad hominem. He appeals to the pre-
conceived notions and the established prejudices
of his hearers in order to secure their assent to
the truths and principles which he is inculcating.
Thus, in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters
of Romans, he appeals to a people who believed
in election, — believed that God had chosen the
Jews as his peculiar people, and had passed by
all the rest of mankind. Assuming the divine
sovereignty, which was the fundamental postu-
late of all Jewish theology, Paul argues from it
that God has a right to elect the heathen and pass
by the Jews, if he so chooses. He is not in these
chapters arguing for election and confirming a
narrow view of divine grace, but he is using a
doctrine of election so firmly established in his
auditors' hearts as to be ineradicable, in order to
give them an enlarged conception of divine grace
and lead them to the final conclusion that " God
hath shut them all up together in unbelief that
he might have mercy upon all."

But while Paul was by nature a Hebrew and

76 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

a prophet, he lived in a scholastic age and re-
ceived a scholastic education. There were no
prophets in Judsea, no poets in Greece. The
greatest genius is at once a product and a cause
of his times. In Paul, scholasticism overlaid a
spiritual nature, and at the same time scholasti-
cism was voluntarily chosen by a sjairitual nature
as an instrument for the production of spiritual
realities. Thus this man, evangelist and prophet
in his essential nature, was philosojiher and scho-
lastic and dialectician in his forms of thought,
partly because education modified his nature,
partly because it was his nature to be, as he him-
self said, "all things to all men," if by any means
he might save some.

But the problems which interested him were
the Hebraic rather than the Greek problems,
the problems of religion, not those of intellectual
curiosity : not the question how to define God,
but how to find him ; not how to account for sin,
but how to get rid of it; not how to explain the
existence of suffering, but how to maintain a life
of peace and joy in the midst of pain. That this
was his purpose he has expressed again and again
in the autobiographic aspirations for himself and
for those to whom he ministered. His letters
abound with such prayers as " That ye might be
filled with all the fullness of God." "The very
God of peace sanctify you wholly." "The peace

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 77

of God which passeth all understanding keep
your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."
These are the utterances of a man the inspiration
of whose life is, not curiosity to solve difficult
thought problems, but a great desire to enrich in
himseK and in others the spiritual life of faith
and hope and love. For the accomplishment of
this purpose he translated Christ's answers to the
great problems of our spiritual life into Greek
and Eoman forms of thought. The history of
Christian theology is the history of the intermix-
ture of his answers with pagan philosophy, and
of the gradual process by which the gospel, as
Christ proclaimed it and Paul interpreted it,
pervaded, purified, and transformed pagan con-
ceptions.

The ancient world of thought may be divided
into three classes: the Oriental or mystic, the
Greek or philosophical, the Eoman or legal.
We shall perhaps best trace the progress of the
Old Theology by considering it under these three
aspects.

1. The Oriental does not think, — he medi-
tates ; the Occidental does not meditate, — he
thinks. The object of the Oriental is vision, the
object of the Occidental is action. To see God
is the supreme religious desire of the one ; to do
God's will is the supreme religious desire of the
other. The combination of Orientalism with

78 THE EVOLUTION OF CHBISTIANITY.

Christianity gave gnosticism. The predominat-
ing characteristic of gnosticism was its unreality.
Matter had no real existence, or existence only
as an emanation of pure thought. Sin and evil
were not, they only seemed to be. The spiritual
was the only actual ; all else was as the j)hantas-
magoria of a dream. God was the only reality.
God is good, therefore nothing but goodness
really exists. Individualism is separation from
God, and therefore evil. The end of religion is
not life, that is, individuality, but absorption in
God, that is, ceasing to live. In various forms
this Orientalism has at times reappeared in the
Christian church, usually as a reaction and pro-
test against legalism and dogmatism. It is need-
less here to trace its successive appearances as
mysticism, pietism, quietism. In our own time
a lingering survival of it is seen sometimes in
spiritual experiences expressed in such a hymn as

" Oh to be nothing', nothing,
Only to lie at his feet,
A broken and empty vessel
For the Master's service meet."

Sometimes it appears in exotic forms of semi-
religious philosophy, as in the spiritual exalta-
tion which says, " Believe that you are righteous,
and you are righteous," or even "Believe that
you are well, and you are well."

Between this Oriental gnosticism and the

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 79

practical religion of the Old and New Testa-
ments there is little in common. It is not a
broken and empty vessel, but a whole and full
one, which is for the Master's service meet. The
life which Christ inspires leads to the prayer to
be something, not nothing, and ever something
more and more. The end of his religion is not
absorption in God, but an individual life filled
full of the spirit of God. Pain, disease, death,
are not unreal evils to be imagined out of ex-
istence ; they are blessed realities to be used by
the spiritual soul in growing Godward. Sin
and evil are not phantasmagoria, but terrible
realities, and the battle against them to which
we are called is the battle, not of an insane man
with his dreams, but of soldiers against an
actual foe. So, in spite of its occasional and
episodical appearances in the Christian church.
Oriental gnosticism has never gotten a foothold
in Christendom ; and on the other hand, Chris-
tianity, though its cradle was in the East, trav-
eled not eastward but westward, and has never
yet succeeded in i3ervading Oriental countries.
Not its methods only, but its very principles and
aims, are radically different from those of Orien-
tal philosophy.

2. The Greek mind was speculative. The
Athenians, who "spent their time in nothing else,
but either to tell or to hear some new thing,"

80 THE EVOLUTION OF CHEISTIANITY.

were characteristic Greeks. The problems of
Greek philosophy were not like those of the He-
brew prophets. The Hebrew asked, What shall
I do? The Greek, What shall I think? So the
Greeks looked to the new religion to tell them,
What is God? What is sin ? What is the origin
of evil? At the same time Christianity brought
with it new problems, to the solution of which
they set themselves. Paul said that Jesus
Christ had come into the world to answer the
question of the Altar to the Unknown God:
"Whom ye ignorantly worship, him declare I
unto you." Straightway the Greek began to
ask, Who is this Christ, and what is his relation
to the Infinite? Paul said that Jesus Christ is
the power of God unto salvation. The Greek
began to ask, What kind of power? How does
he effect salvation ? In what consists the efficacy
of his life and death? To these and kindred
speculative questions the Greeks gave their
strength. The result was not primarily a right-
eous life, but a philosophical system. The an-
swer to speculative questions never does more
than send the questioner back of the answer to
ask a new question more difficult than before.
The sj^irit of speculation was not allayed, but
stimulated, by discussion, until finally the scho-
lastic debates reached their climax in the extra-
ordinary contradictions of the Athanasian Creed :

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 81

" Whosoever will be saved : before all thines
it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith.
Which faith except every one do keep whole
and undefiled : without doubt he shall perish
everlastingly. And the Catholic faith is this:
That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity
in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons:
nor dividing the Substance (Essence). For
there is one Person of the Father: another of
the Son : and another of the Holy Ghost. The
Father uncreate (uncreated) : the Son uncreate
(uncreated) : and the Holy Ghost uncreate (un-
created). The Father incomprehensible (unlim-
ited): the Son incomprehensible (unlimited):
and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible (unlimited
or infinite). The Father eternal: the Son eter-
nal : and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they
are not three eternals : but one eternal. As also
there are not three incomprehensibles (Infinites),
nor three uncreated : but one uncreated : and
one incomprehensible (infinite). So likewise the
Father is Almighty : the Son Almighty : and the
Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet they are not
three Almighties: but one Almighty. So the
Father is God : the Son is God : and the Holy
Ghost is God. And yet they are not three
Gods : but one God. So likewise the Father is
Lord : the Son Lord : and the Holy Ghost Lord.
And yet not three Lords: but one Lord."

82 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

Whether these speculative answers to the
speculative questions of the Greek mind are right
or wrong, intelligible or unintelligible, pro-
foundly significant or without real significance,
I do not here inquire. Whatever opinion one
may entertain of the creed as the embodiment of
an intellectual system, it is perfectly clear that
it does not answer, and does not even pretend
to answer, the Hebrew questions. How shall I
find God ? and How shall I become like him ?
Be the answers true or false, they are intellec-
tual answers to an intellectual problem. They
are not and do not pretend to be spiritual an-
swers to a spiritual problem. The difference
between the Athanasian Creed and the Twenty-
fourth Psalm, or the Parable of the Prodigal
Son, is not a difference in philosophy, it is a
difference between speculation and religion.
The very nature of duty and life is differently
regarded : in the teaching of Jesus Christ, duty
consists in loving the Lord your God with all
your heart and soul and strength, and your
neighbor as yourself; in the Athanasian Creed
it consists in believing certain enigmatical de-
clarations respecting the interrelationships of
the Infinite. Isaiah tells us, whoever will be
saved must cease to do evil and learn to do
well. The Athanasian Creed has nothing to
say about ceasing to do evil or learning to do

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 83

well. He that will be saved must think in a
certain prescribed form of the Trinity. The
nature of life and the conditions of salvation are
quite different in the two documents. Eeligion
has given place to theology.

3. The Koman mind was practical, not specu-
lative ; but it was also legal and governmental,
not spiritual or religious. As the Oriental was
given to dreams and the Greek to speculative
thinking, so the Roman was given to problems
of law and of government. The Roman solu-
tion of those problems was as simple as it is to
us unsatisfactory. There was one Emperor at
the head of the Empire, absolute in his control
of it, from whom issued edicts which were of
binding force on all the citizens of that Empire.
Loyalty to those edicts was the one virtue recog-
nized in the Empire; disobedience to those
edicts was visited by an inexorable penalty ; for-
giveness was a personal pardon for a personal
offense, and could ordinarily only be granted
upon condition of some expiation or satisfaction
of the violated law; and finally, access to the
Emperor was for most men only through subor-
dinate officials and intermediaries.

Christianity entering Rome, and beginning
there, its work of transformation, was in the
process itself transformed. As theology in the
Orient became mystical and imaginative, and

84 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

in Greece speculative and philosophical, so in
Rome it became forensic or governmental or
imperial. By the very necessity of his intel-
lectual condition, the Roman, as the Greek, was
compelled to organize his religious philosophy
along the lines in which he had been educated,
and to which he was accustomed. He therefore
thought of God as a great imperial Caesar, from
whom all authority proceeded; absolute, but
always righteous and always just. He conceived
of laws as edicts or statutes proceeding from this
imperial God, inexorable, certain to be admin-
istered, against which no man could throw him-
self without being destroyed in the collision.
He thought of the Bible as a book of statutes,
explaining and promulgating these edicts of the
imperial God to the sons of men. It was essen-
tial in his conception, therefore, that this stat-
ute book should be without any error or any
mistake. A mistake in the transcription of a
statute of the legislature of the State of New
York, if it does not absolutely vitiate the stat-
ute, vitiates it for all practical purposes. We
are to be governed by the written record of the
will of the legislature, not by the unknown will
which has been mistakenly reported. The
Roman theology, therefore, conceived of the
Bible as an absolute and inexorable record of
the laws which this imperial God had issued for

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 85

the government of his subjects. Sin was a vio-
lation of this law, and must be punished; be-
cause, if it were not punished, anarchy, disorder,
and the disruption of this grSat divine empire
woidd be the inevitable result. If any mercy
were shown to the sinner, if he were pardoned,
then somethino- must be found that would be a
substitute for this punishment, in order that jus-
tice, the character of the imperial God, and the
sanctity and the greatness of law might be main-
tained. This God was too august and too remote
to be immediately approached. Only through
subalterns and intermediaries could he be
reached. The Son must intercede with the Fa-
ther, the Virgin Mary with the Son, the saints
with the Virgin Mary, and finally the priests
with the saints. Such, roughly sketched, was the
system of Roman or imperial theology in its
final development, as theologically organized by
Augustine and ecclesiastically perfected by Hil-
debrand. It differed from the Greek in that it
undertook to answer the practical questions,
How shall I approach God? How shaU I be de-
livered froi^ the burden of sin? In this respect
Augustinian theology was a distinct advance
over Athanasian or even Nicene theology. But
it borrowed the formulas of Roman government
for its answers. It did not go with Christ to
the family for a parable to interpret the relation

8G THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

of God to humanity; it went to imperial Rome.
Its God was not an All-Father, but an infinite
and eternal emperor. Its government was not
one of redeeming love, but of imperial, inexo-
rable justice. The Koman theology was forged
in the same fires and cast in the same mould as
the Roman hierarchy ; and the two must event-
ually stand or fall together.

When the Reformation burst upon the world,
all theology seemed at first to be swept away by
this cyclone from the north. The Reformers
were charged with being infidels and atheists.
They were in some measure iconoclasts. Their
movement was at first partially destructive. It
was necessary to organize a new and reformed
theology to take the place of the old. Then it
was that John Calvin rose upon the world with
his doctrine of divine sovereignty. He was the
theological organizer of his epoch. His service
to mankind is far more liable to be underesti-
mated than overestimated.

There is, he said in effect, no king but one ;
no father but one. God alone is the vmiversal
King, the All-Father. Kings ancL hierarchies
do but play at law-making ; he is the only Law-
giver. Crowns and thrones and chairs are but
toys; he is the only crowned and enthroned
and sceptred One. From him all authority
comes; in him all authority centres; to him

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 87

all allegiance is due ; his will is the final, ulti-
mate, absolute fact in the universe. It cannot
be questioned ; and from it there is no appeal and
no escape. This is Calvinism, the doctrine of
divine sovereignty; to be read in the light of
the age, against whose dormant anarchy, awak-
ening later in the French Revolution, it was a
solemn protest. Nor can we say even now, in
the United States of America, with its shallow
doctrine of popular sovereignty, its cry of Vox
jiopuli vox Dei, its egotism of democracy, its
Dead Sea fruit of anarchism, that there is no
need to listen to and heed this protest of a
solemn voice, reaffirming the sublime doctrine
of the ancient Hebrew prophets, and itself re-
affirmed by one of the least religiously minded
of modern historians."^

John Calvin's service to humanity can never
be forgotten. He was the prophet and forerun-

1 " A king or a parliament enacts a law, and we imagine we
are creating some new regulation to encounter unprecedented
circumstances. The law itself which is applied to these cir-
cumstances was enacted from eternity. It has its existence
independent of us, and will enforce itself either to reward or
punish, as the attitude which we assume towards it is wise or
unwise. Our human laws are but copies, more or less imper-
fect, of the eternal laws so far as we can read them, and
either succeed and promote our welfare, or fail and bring con-
fusion and disaster, according as the legislator's insight has
detected the true principle, or has been distorted by igno-
rance or selfishness." — J. A. Froude, Essay on Calvinism.

88 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

iier of civil and religious liberty. He built
the bridge over which the church passed from a
theocratic imperialism to republicanism, for he
showed that republicanism also might be theo-
cratic. Nor was the doctrine of election, which
he borrowed from Augustine and reaffirmed, the
narrow and exclusive doctrine which it has often
been thought to be. It is only in these later days
that the Christian church is beginning to believe
that "There's a wideness in God's mercy like
the wideness of the sea." It has always believed
in a doctrine of election. The Jews believed
that God had chosen them as his people and had
passed by the pagans. The Roman Catholic
church believed that he chose the baptized as his
people and passed by the unbaptized. In the
Inferno, Dante finds in the outermost circle of
hell the good and true of pagan nations who
have not received baptism. Calvin preached a
broader doctrine of election than that of either
Judaism or Romanism. God has chosen, he
said, whom he will, and whom he will he passeth
by. The ground of his choice lies not in the
accident of a race, it lies not in the chance of
a baptism, it lies in his own inscrutable will.
And he thus laid the foundation for the broader
doctrine that God has chosen the whole human
race, the doctrine of Paul that the grace of God
is as universal and inclusive as the sinfulness of
humanity.

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 89

But affirming the sovereignty of God, John
Calvin denied the freedom of man. Any con-
sistent system of philosophy must start either
from the testimony of consciousness, accepting
thereupon human freedom and human responsi-
bility as final and ultimate facts, or it must start
with the universality of law and the consequent
absolute sovereignty of the lawgiver. Calvin's
system was self-consistent. He declared that
man had lost his freedom in the fall, and was free
no more. Denying the freedom of man, he took
away all incentive to activity, undermined the
sense of personal responsibility by the sweeping-
universality of his indictment of the race, robbed
the gospel of all power to convict the individ-
ual, and laid the foundation for that philosophy
of necessarianism which denies not only the re-
ality, but the possibility, of a religious or even
an ethical life.^ This imperial theology, as in-
terpreted by John Calvin and his great master
and predecessor, has been so admirably described
by James Martineau,^ that I need make no
apology for transferring his description to my
pages, instead of essaying a description of my
own.

^ A man with a criminal nature and education, under given
circumstances of temptation, can no more help committing
crime than he could help having a headache under certain con-
ditions of train and stomach. — J. Cotter Morison, The Ser-
vice of Man, p. 2S9.

2 Tyjjes of Ethical Theory, Intro, pp. 17, 18.

90 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

"The Augustinlan theology is founded upon
a sense of sin so passionate and absolute as to
plunge the conscience into unrelieved shadows.
It pledges itself to find traces everywhere of the
lost condition of humanity, in virtue of which
there is no longer any freedom for good, and a
hopeless taint is mingled with the very springs
of our activity. This doctrine is evidently the
utterance of a deep but despairing moral asi3ira-
tion : it estimates with such stern purity the de-
mands of the divine holiness upon us, that only
the first man, fresh with unspoiled powers, was
capable of fulfilling them; and since he was
false, the sole opportunity of voluntary holiness
has been thrown away, and we must live in hope-
less knowledge of obligations which we cannot
discharge. Hence there has never been more
than one solitary hour of real probation for the
human race ; during that hour there was a posi-
tive trust committed to a capable will, and the
young world was under genuine moral adminis-
tration ; but, ever since, evil only has been pos-
sible to human volition, and good can pass no
further than our dreams. It follows that, as
the human game is already lost, we no longer
live a probationary life, and can have no doc-
trine of applied ethics which shall have the
slightest religious value ; the moralities, consid-
ered as divine, are obsolete as Eden ; and human

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 91

nature, as it is, can produce no voluntary acts
that are not relatively neutral, because uni-
formly offensive, to the sentiment of God. Its
restoration must proceed from sources extra-
neous to the will; and unless snatched away in
some fiery chariot of grace, it must gaze in
vain upon the heaven that spreads its awful
beauty above the earth. Thus a doctrine which
begins with the highest proclamation of the di-
vine moral law ends with practically supersed-
ing it. The history of the universe opens with
an act of probation and closes with one of re-
tribution, but through every intervening mo-
ment is destitute of moral conditions, and man,
the central figure of the whole, — though a
stately actor at the first, and an infinite recipient
or victim at the last, — so falls through in the
meanwhile between the powers that tempt and
those that save him, that as an ethical agent he
sinks into nonentity, and becomes the mere prize
contended for by the spirits of darkness and of
light. In this system the human personality,
by the very intensity with which it burns at its
own fecus, consumes itself away; and the very
attempt to idealize the severity and sanctity of
the divine law does but cancel it from the act-
ual, and banish it to the beginning and end of
time. The man of to-day is no free individual-
ity at all, but the mere meeting point of opposite

92 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

forces foreign to his will ; ruined by nature, res-
cued by God, — with no range of power, there-
fore none of responsibility between."

The Roman or imperial system of religious
doctrine, known sometimes from its origin as
Latin theology, sometimes from its two greatest
representatives as Augustinian or as Calvinistic
theology, sometimes from its legal character as
forensic theology, passed from Geneva into Eng-
land, and from England and Scotland to New
England and so became the Puritan theology. It
is august, but terrible ; and equally worthy of
the student's attention from the elements which
it contained and those which it omitted. It put
an end forever to the polytheism which had per-
vaded Europe; it dei)ersonified nature, brought
it into subjection to man, and made its pheno-
mena no longer an object of terror but of utility;
it gave a ground for and a sanctity to law, in its
presentation of the divine Lawgiver; it laid a
foundation for liberty by discovering a sanction
for law in the universal conscience ; it empha-
sized the reality and awfulness of sin, and the
necessity of repentance and a new life. •But it
forgot that God is love, and knew him only as
power; it made both law and revelation exter-
nal to man, not a power and a vision within
him; it made religion obedience to a government
from without, not a new life working from

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 93

within ; it made the church, and later the Bible,
an authority imposed on men, not a voice evok-
ing in the conscience a divine authority within ;
and it denied the liberty of the individual will,
and so destroyed the sense of moral responsibil-
ity, paralyzed Christian activities, and fatally
failed in the great work of a Christian theo-
logy, that of promoting a missionary spirit.
The great missionary movements which charac- \
terize the latter part of the nineteenth century
originated in the Moravian and the Methodist
churches, each of them distinctively anti-Cal-
vinistie.

As the same social and intellectual forces
which created the Roman hierarchy created the
Roman theology, so the revival of intellectual
and sjjiritual life, which emancipated the church
from the former, is emancipating the church
from the latter. This emancipation it should be
our aim to facilitate, not to retard; but so to
direct that it shall be an evolution, not a revolu-
tion. The theology of the future ought to retain
all of the truth which was successively contributed
by Oriental, by Greek, and by Roman thought;
for in the evolution of Christian theology, each
of these three phases of thought made a valu-
able addition to the religious life of Christen-
dom, — an addition which we cannot afford
to despise and cast away. Oriental thought

94 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

emphasized the transcendently important truth
that spirit is more than matter, and is superior
over matter, — a truth preeminently needed in
this age, which lives by sight and scoffs at faith.
Spiritual perception is as much to be trusted as
sensual perception. We see moral truths as
really as we see material substance, distinctions
between right and wrong as truly as distinctions
between red and yellow. Moral blindness is
much more rare than color blindness. And
if it be true that the world of sense is real, it
is equally true that it is not the only reality.
Greek thought emphasized the truth that re-
ligion is rational, that all its articles of faith
are consonant with each other and with reason ;
and it prepared the way for the construction of
a self-consistent system of religious thought, a
system which in all its parts would realize the
fundamental truth that there is possible such a
perception of the Infinite as will naturally influ-
ence the mind and moral nature of men. It
emphasized the truth of the divine immanence ;
that God is in his world of nature and in his
world of men; and that he has manifested him-
self in the one imique and incomparable Man ;
and in all history by his Spirit speaking to and
with men ; that he is in the world revealing him-
self to the world, and by that revelation redeem-
ing the world and making it a partaker of his

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 95

nature. Roman thought emphasized the truth
that God is transcendent ; that he is not nature
nor humanity, and, though in nature and in hu-
manity, yet transcends both ; that law is divine ;
that man can neither make nor unmake it, but
only discover and apply it; and that sin is not
a mere unripeness or immaturity, but a real
and willful transgression of a real law, known
and approved, though violated, by the sinner.
Thus all three theologies contributed something
toward the theology of the future : Orientalism,
the reality of the spiritual and its corollaries;
Grecism, the divine immanence and its corol-
laries; Romanism, the divine transcendence and
its corollaries. The modern evolution of theo-
logical thought, popularly known as the New
Theology, is partly a continuation of these
three elements in a new and larger system of
thought than either one singly, and partly a re-
vulsion from the purely scholastic and forensic
questions of Greek and Roman thought to the
more practical and spiritual questions of Hebraic
thought : How shall I find God ? How get rid
of sin? How utilize suffering?

How this New Theology has been developed
out of the Old, by that incursion of Teutonic
life and thought into Latin and Greek Chris-
tianity which led to the Reformation, will be the
subject of consideration in the next chapter.

CHAPTER IV.

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY (CONTINUED).

The New Theology.

The Lutheran Reformation was a North-
Europe reaction against Roman imperialism,
the protest of the Germanic race against eccle-
siastical Caesarism; a great intellectual and
spiritual awakening, due to a new interpreta-
tion of Christianity by a people whose nature and
traditions were individualistic. Its birthplace
was Germany; its inspiration was Teutonic.

Almost simultaneously with the protests
against the papal authority and the demand for
an open Bible were the discovery of a Western
continent and a quickened commerce, the inven-
tion of the printing-press and a revival and en-
largement of literature, the birth of the scien-
tific spirit and its application both to theoretical
science and to the practical arts. Shakespeare
and Cervantes, Gutenberg and Albert Diirer,
Columbus and Copernicus, Loyola and Calvin,
Xavier and Luther, were almost contemporaries.
The first post-office, the first printing-press, the

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 97

first telescope, the first spinning-wlieel, were all
nearly contemporaneous with the first open Bible
and the first freedom of religious speech. These
are not accidents. In history there are no acci-
dents. The predominant principle of the Re-
formation, — the right of private judgment, —
was more than a religious principle; certainly
it had much more than a theological application.
It was a revolt against authority. It threw
humanity back upon its own resources. Rights
are duties; and the right of private judgment
laid upon mankind the duty of original investi-
gation and inquiry. This right had first to be
taught to man, who is always reluctant to take
up a new right if it impose a new duty. The
opportunity to exercise it had to be won in
many a hard battle. It involved the wars in
the Netherlands, the massacres in France, the
civil wars in England. It cannot be said to be
undisputed even now.

But by the beginning of the present century
in all Protestant Europe, and even in most of
Roman Catholic Europe, the right of man to
think for himself had been established. It is
still denied ; it is still punished with ecclesias-
tical pains and penalties; but it no longer in-
volves a hazard of life or limb. With the pre-
sent century there began, therefore, a new era
of intellectual activity, an era of individual

98 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

and independent thinking. Authority was dis-
carded; not religious authority only, but all
authority over intellectual processes. The mind
may be fettered, or it may be free, but it cannot
long be partly fettered and partly free. Free-
dom is indivisible; and the right to think in
either science, politics, or religion carried with
it necessarily the right to think in each of the
other departments of thought. Liberty to in-
vestigate led to investigation. The Baconian
philosophy was a natural and necessary produc-
tion of the Lutheran Reformation; and a new
science of life was the natural and necessary
production of the Baconian philosophy. A
fresh investigation was made into history. Rec-
ords that had been unquestioned were subject to
scrutiny. Niebuhr gave the world a new com-
prehension, not merely of Roman events, but of
all ancient history. Stories that had passed
current for generations were subjected to a free,
not to say an irreverent scrutiny. William
Tell was declared to be a myth. Literature
fared no better. Homer was abolished, and the
Homeric ballads were attributed to an imper-
sonal epoch. Shakespeare was reduced from
the rank of a poet to that of an actor, and
his i:)lays were variously attributed to Bacon and
to anonymous authors. Scientific theories which
tradition had stamped as current coin in the

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 99

intellectual realm were cast into the melting-pot
for a new assay. Some radical errors were dis-
covered; and each discovery made easier the
work of the critic. Every hypothesis was sub-
jected to suspicion. The whole body of scien-
tific tradition was swept away by the same spirit
which refused to own allegiance to ecclesiastical
tradition. The scientific Talmuds were put away
on the shelf as antique curiosities; and the
world began an independent and direct investi-
gation of phenomena, sometimes incited thereto
by a spirit of iconoclastic egotism wholly un-
scientific, but in the main inspired by a noble
curiosity, an appetite for the truth. Harvey's
discovery of the circulation of the blood led to
a new physiology ; a new botany, a new astro-
nomy, and a new biology followed. In the ma-
terial sciences the text-books of ten years ago
are already out of date.

The students of psychology were the last to
catch the new spirit of the age ; but they were
not and could not be impervious to it. Plato was
for a while closed, though we are beginning to
open him again ; and the scholars, turning aside
from a study of what other scholars had said
about man, began to study man himself. Gall,
Spurzheim, and Combe discovered the intimate
relations of mind and brain, and developed a sci-
ence of organology which, if it is somewhat crude

100 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

and has sometimes been diverted to purposes of
traveling charlatans, yet represents a profound
truth which science is tardily beginning to recog-
nize. Sir William Hamilton set an example of
direct study of consciousness which modern psy-
chology is carrying forward with valuable results.
It would have been strange indeed if the reaction
against the despotic autliority of tradition had
not produced some unhealthy contempt for it,
and this doubtless was the case ; but we are get-
ting beyond this first stage of the new era, and
the sober-minded thinkers in all dejiartments
agree in condemning nihilism as no better in
science or religion than in politics, and in com-
mending the aphorism of Mr. Gladstone, "No
greater calamity can happen to a peoj^le than to
break utterly with its past."

It would have been equally strange if the im-
pulse to original investigation and independent
judgment which was derived from the religious
life had not in turn affected religious thought;
if, having learned in the school of conscience the
right and duty of private judgment, mankind
had made no attempt to exercise it in measuring
the truth and value of all religious tradition ; if,
renouncing the authority of the ancient church,
it had bowed submissively to the authority of the
more modern one ; if, in disowning the supremacy
of the creeds of the past, it had not also dis-

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 101

owned the supremacy of creeds fresh from the
press; nay, if in its reaction, the same spirit
of somewhat iconoclastic skepticism, which had
repudiated Homer, should not also show itself
in discussions respecting the Hebrew Scriptures.
It was in the nature of things impossible that
there should be a New Science, a New Politics,
and a New Philosophy, and not also a New The-
ology. The one is no more to be dreaded than
the other; and the philosophic mind will be
equally unready in each instance to rush to the
conclusion that the new is wholly true or wholly
false.

At all events, as matter of historic fact, the
same spirit of independent thought which set
men to original investigation of the phenomena
of vegetable, animal, social, and political life
moved another class of thinkers to an indepen-
dent investigation of the sources of religious
truth and life; and as Protestants regarded the
Bible as one of these original sources, if not the
chief source, the beginning of the present cen-
tury witnessed in all Protestant Christendom the
beginning of an original, systematic, and enthu-
siastic study of the Bible. It had been studied
before, but never with the same spirit mani-
fested in the same degree. It was now for the
first time a study of independent investigation.
Biblical criticism assumed a new significance

102 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

and a new importance. The question of the
authorship and composition of the books of the
Bible, the object of the writers, the circum-
stances under which they wrote, the audiences
to which they spoke, have been studied anew and
with valuable results. The libraries of Europe
and even the monasteries of the East have been
ransacked for manuscripts, and the manuscripts
themselves have been collated and comj)ared
with an enthusiasm and a painstaking far greater
than that bestowed on any secular writers of
equal antiquity. The writings have been sub-
jected to a minute and even a microscopic crit-
ical examination, and a more comprehensive
study of their general tenor has not been neg-
lected. In the theological seminaries, at first in
Germany, then in our own country, a new de-
partment of " Biblical Theology " has been estab-
lished, and the departments of Biblical Exegesis
and Biblical Theology are coming to hold a place
equal with, if not superior to, that of Systematic
Theology, which had before dominated every
seminary. New translations of the Scriptures
have sprung up in every land; and these have
proved themselves in England and America fore-
runners of a new revision of the English ver-
sion, undertaken by representatives of the entire
Protestant church. Its scholarly qualities are
indubitable, whatever objections to it may be

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 103

made by a conservative spirit or a literary taste.
A new class of commentators on the Scriptures
has arisen, and a new class of commentaries
has superseded their more polemical and less
independent predecessors. Meyer in Germany,
Godet in France, and AKord in England may
not be abler as thinkers than Augustine or
Calvin; but their spirit is radically different.
They attempt neither to interpret Scripture in
harmony with a preconceived theological system,
nor even to deduce a theological system from
Scripture — hardly to prove that it is self -con-
sistent and harmonious. They simply endeavor
to show the reader what the language of the
sacred writers, properly interpreted, means, and
leave him to deduce his own system. ^ Finally,
the whole Protestant church in Europe and
America agreed upon a course of study of the
Bible in the Sabbath-schools, in a series of pre-
arranged lessons; and so wide is the interest in
this course of Bible study that every religious
newspaper, and some secular papers, print every
week a commentary on the current lesson. These
helps are naturally not always very scholarly,

1 A striking illustration of this is offered by Dean Alford's
frank declaration that there is no authority in the New Testa-
ment for the doctrine of apostolic succession. With this con-
trast Calvin's constant thrust at the papacy in his Commenta-
ries, which are as polemically Protestant as are his Institutes.

104 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

the study in the Sabbath-school is not always
very thorough, and the selection of the lessons
themselves is not above criticism ; but the fact
that several millions of children are simultane-
ously engaged in a weekly study of the Bible,
and that this Bible study has very generally
usurped the place allotted a hundred years ago,
or even less, to the catechism, is significant of
the movement of the century away from tradi-
tional authority towards independent investiga-
tion in theology, as in all other sciences. More
important than all is the concentrated attention
which this study of the church has directed to-
wards the life and character of Christ. One has
only to compare Fleetwood's "Life of Christ"
with any one of those which are to be found to-
day upon any minister's book-shelves to perceive
the difference in the theological spirit of the
eiohteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The
past half-century has produced above a score
of Lives of Christ. 1 Without concord of ac-
tion they have appeared almost simultaneously
in Germany, France, Holland, England, and
America. They have been written by Jews,
Rationalists, Liberal Christians, and strict Cal-
vinists; they represent every attitude of mind
— the coldly critical in Strauss, the rationalistic

^ I count on my own shelves twenty-five separate Lives of
Christ ; and of course my collection is far from complete.

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 105

but reverent in Hooykaas, the dramatic and
imaginative in Renan, the critically orthodox in
Lange and Ebrard, the historical and scholarly
in Geikie and Edersheim, the devout and popu-
lar in Beecher, Hanna, and Farrar. It thus
appears, from a merely cursory survey of the
history of religious thought since the beginning
of the present century, that the entire church
has been engaged, to an extent never known
before, and in a spirit never possible before, in a
study of the Bible, and especially of the life of
Christ. This study has been pursued by every
school of thought and by every type of mind :
by the rationalist and the orthodox, the critical
and the devotional, the textual and the theo-
logical, the gray-haired professor and the infant-
class. And all of every age and every school
have been engaged, though doubtless in diifei'-
ent degrees both of independence and earnest-
ness, in an original investigation of the source of
Christian truth and life, and with a purpose to
ascertain for themselves, and from the original
sources, what are Christian truth and Christian
life, as interpreted by Christ and his immedi-
ate disciples.

Now it is impossible that such a study could
have been pursued for over half a century and
not give us something new in both theology and
ethics. It is impossible that such an intellectual

106 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

activity should exist and not produce some new
and profound convictions, some new and clear
apprehensions, and some new and crude notions
which further study pursued in the same spirit
will eventually correct. If half a century of
study of the Bible — if, especially, half a century
of study of the life and teachings of Jesus of
Nazareth — did nothing to give the Christian
student a clearer vision, a wider horizon, and a
larger faith, hope, and charity, we might well
begin to doubt whether either the Bible was the
book, or Christ the person, we had thought;
whether they were not correct who tell us that
the world has outgrown the teaching of the one
and the example of the other. If I have read
aright the signs of the times, what is called the
/ New Theology is not, properly speaking, a the-
I ology at all; it is certainly not a New England
notion nor a German importation. It is the
spirit of original investigation, characteristic of
I the age, applied to the elucidation of the prob-
I lems of religious thought and life ; it is a desire
i for a clearer understanding of the Christianity
I of Jesus Christ, and a quest for it in the ori-
ginal sources of information.

This new life led to certain sporadic protests
against the Roman or forensic or Puritan the-
ology, but these movements were both partial
and local. The church of the New Jerusalem,

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 107

popularly known from its founder as Sweden-
borgianism, reintroduced into Christian theology
some of the best elements of Orientalism : reem-
phasized the reality of the spiritual life ; gave a
more spiritual conception to heaven and hell;
demanded that the Bible be read as a spiritual
revelation, not as a book of external laws ; and
was emphatic in its declaration that character is
salvation, and that there is and can be no other.
In a different form the same aspect of truth
was received and emphasized by the Friends or
Quakers. Methodism, born of the earlier Mo-
ravianism, studying life from the point of view
of human consciousness, accepted its testimony
to human freedom, and by affirming what Calvin
had denied, that man caii repent and turn to
God, gave a new and vital sense of sin, furnished
a ground of responsibility, and inspired a new
hope of life in man who had been made apathetic
by the teachings of fatalism. The subsequent
Oxford movement created simultaneously in
the Anglican Church two counter-currents : one,
reacting from the inconsistent position of semi-
Protestantism, led back to the imperialism of
Rome, — its hierarchical authority, its ecclesi-
astical system, and its theological dogmatism;
the other, carrying Protestantism forward to its
logical conclusion, led on to the doctrine that
God is a living God, that all men are his chil-

108 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

clren, that in every man is a capacity to hear
God's voice and to receive his guidance, that the
spiritual consciousness may be trusted, and is in
the last analysis the seat of authority in religion.
And finally, in Puritan England and New
England, arose Universalism and Unitarianism,
necessary products by reaction against the Puri-
tan theologies: the one affirmed with Calvin
that God can make all men righteous, and con-
eluded with inexorable logic that he will, else
he would not be a righteous God ; the other de-
nied the Augustinian doctrine of native deprav-
ity, and declared that man is by creation a Son
of God ; and from this premise its more advanced
section, by a natural though not necessary pro-
cess of reasoning, passed on to deny altogether
any necessity for a redemption divinely revealed,
divinely authenticated, and operating with di-
vine efficacy, to bring men into true filial rela-
tions with God. These five movements, the
Swedenborgian, the Friends, the Methodist, the
Broad Church, and the Unitarian and Univer-
salist, all of them drawing more or less from
Oriental and Greek sources, have contributed to
make that modern revolution in thought which
is miscalled the New Theology.

Not less, perhaps more potent than all, has
been the influence of modern social and political
life. That is characteristically democratic;

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 109

not only in government, but in the arts and
sciences, in education, and in religion. And an
imperial theology cannot permanently remain
unmodified in a democratic society.

Nevertheless, this so-called New Theology is
neither new nor a theology. It is not absolutely
but only relatively new, — new only in contrast
with the Puritan theology out of which it has
sprung, and from which it is a reaction. It is
not truly a theology, since its chief inspiration
is a deep desire to get away from the questions
of the purely speculative intellect, the answers
to which constitute theology, to the practical
questions of the Hebrew seers, the answers to
which constitute religion. It may be roughly de-
scribed as largely composed of three elements : a
renaissance of Greek thought; a revival of the
Hebraic spirit; and a spirit of humanism due
to apparently triumphant democracy. Without
attempting in this chapter to distinguish the
various elements which have contributed to pro-
ducing it, I endeavor here to give briefly its
most characteristic features, describing what it
aims to be rather than what it is, that is, de-
scribing it as a tendency rather than as a fin-
ished product.

The church, then, is coming more and more to
conceive of God, not as some one outside of his
creation ruling over it, but as some one inside

110 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

his creation ruling within it. In its material ap-
plications this is a familiar truth — God not a
mechanic who has built an engine and stands in
the locomotive and holds the lever, turning off or
on the steam, and regulating the machine as he
will ; but God a spirit, and as a spirit indwelling
in all that he has made. The organist sits at the
instrument and plays upon it. He is not the
organ. He ministers it, directs it, controls it.
Presently he stops. The quartet rise and sing.
They also use organs. Their own throats are the
organs they use, and they can put into their
music far more of their real spirit, because they
are using themselves, than he can who uses but
the tubes of tin or of wood. Now, we are com-
ing to think of God as dwelling in nature as
the spirit dwells in the body. Not that God
V and nature are identical; he transcends nature
as I transcend my body, and am more than my
body, and shall live on when my body is lust
and ashes; nevertheless now ruling not over
my body, but in my body. We are also com-
ing to think of God as ruling, not only in phy-
sical nature, but in a somewhat similar man-
ner in human nature. The king rules over
his subjects. The father rules in his children.
The Czar of the Russias does not know those
that are subject to his authority. He issues
his laws. They are sent out every whither by

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. Ill

messengers, and executed by subordinates. He
does not and cannot put himself into the Rus-
sians. All he can do is to tell them what they
must do. He cannot transform them into a like-
ness of himseK. But the father, just in the
measure that he is a father, can do this. He
uses authority only as a means to this end. He
does not say to his child, Thou shalt and Thou
shalt not, any further than the infirmity of his
nature compels him to do it. He puts his
own nature into his children. They do not say,
My father has made this law, I must obey it
or suffer ; but they come to think as he thinks,
feel as he feels, love what he loves, have the
ambition that he possesses, the purity that he
possesses, the hopes and purposes that he pos-
sesses; they become, as we say, "chips of the^
old block." Thus the new doctrine of divine
sovereignty transcends the older doctrine. The
conception of God that is in man surpasses the
conception of God over man. The doctrine of
evolution is not atheistic. The conception of
God in nature and in humanity does not remove
God from humanity. In olden times the Jews
once a year went up to the great Temple to see
their King ; subsequently once a week to the syn-
agogue to see their King. But the child of God
lives not under a king whom he can go to see
only once a year or once a week ; he lives with

r^\\

112 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

his Father; the child's life is the Father's life,
and the child's will is naught save as he brings
it into subjection, in every thought, every desire,
every aspiration, to the Father's will. What
does the bride mean when she promises to ohei/
her husband? That the wife is to be the serf
and the husband is to rule oi)er her? No! But
that in the royal realm of love the wife will
merge her will with her husband's will, so that,
as life flows on, these two wills will become one
will in the loyalty of love. The church is not
the servant, it is the bride of God.

This new conception of God, as immanent in
nature, is necessarily accompanied by a new con-
ception of law and miracles. Rather, we are
going back to the New Testament conception
and definition of miracles. They are no longer
regarded as violations of natural law, or even as
suspensions of natural law. Indeed, in strict-
ness of speech, in the view of this philosophy,
there are no natural laws to be violated or sus-
pended. There is only one Force, that is God;
law is but the habit of God's action; miracles
are but the manifestation of his power and pres-
ence in unexpected actions, demonstrating the
existence of an intelligent Will and Power
superior to that of man. I say that this is a
recurrence to the New Testament conception and
definition of miracles, for the writers of the New

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 113

Testament knew nothing about nature and the
supernatural, nothing about natural causes and
the violation or suspension of natural laws.
The words they used to characterize what we
call miracles indicate their apprehension of these
events. Four words were used by them: "won-
ders," "powers," "works," and "signs" or
"miracles." 1 Any event attracting attention
and compelling loonder, exhibiting unusual or
more than human poiver, accomplishing a real
work, usually beneficent, and serving as the
sign of a special messenger and an authentica-
tion of his message, is in the conception of the
writers of the New Testament a miracle. As
the New Theology believes that " aU power be-
longs to God," that God is immanent in the uni-
verse, that there is no real distinction between
the natural and the supernatural, that the only
dualism is the material or physical and the im-
material or spiritual, it has no difficulty in be-
lieving that the control of the physical by the
spiritual, and therefore of the universe by its
God, is sometimes manifested by unexpected or
unusual acts of power and wisdom for spiritual
ends. These are miracles. Whether any parti-
cular event reported as such a witness of divine

1 The latter word is of course merely the transliteration of
the Latin word miraculum, the Latin equivalent of seemeion,
" sign.' '

114 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

power actually took place is purely and simply
a question of evidence. The New Theology has
no hesitation, therefore, in accepting some mira-
cles and rejecting others : in accepting, for ex-
ample, the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a fact
sufficiently authenticated ; doubting the resurrec-
tion of the saints at the death of Christ, recorded
only by Matthew, as insufficiently authenticated ;
and disbelieving the historical character of the
Jonah legend of the great fish, as not authenti-
cated at all.

As we are coming to think of God in men, not
over men, so we are coming to think of the laws
which God issues as in himself and in man, not
apart from liimseK and over man: not less in-
violable, but more inviolable ; not less certain,
but more certain ; not as laws apart from man to
which he must subject himself, but laws wrought
into his nature and the very constitution of his
being. We speak of laws of the State. They
have been enacted by our legislators, some good,
some bad, some indifferent. We sjieak of the
laws of art, the laws of music, the laws of politi-
cal economy, the laws of history. They have not
been enacted by a legislative body. They are
not statutes that have been enacted over art,
over music, over industry ; they are inherent in
the very nature of art, of music, of literature,
of industry, of politics. Whether God wrote the

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 115

Ten Commandments with his finger in the stone
or not, and whatever that strange enigmatical
declaration means, he wrote them in the very-
nature of man when he made man. They are not
something God has issued, saying, You must
obey this : they are something God has wrought .
into the very fibre and structure of man's being.
These laws are laws of man because they are the
laws of God, and laws of God because they are
laws of man, and because man and God are in
very essence one. The laws of the sunbeam are
the laws of the sun, because the sunbeam comes
from the sun, bringing the laws of the sun and
the nature of the sun, that it may warm and
vivify the earth. And the laws of my nature
are the laws of God's own nature because I come
from God, have God's nature written in my
members, and am a child of God, possessing my
Father's nature. They are wrought into the
very fibre and structure of the human soul; in-
violable, not because a divine imperial author-
ity, sitting above, looks out on all the earth,
and sees every violation and follows it with ar-
rest and punishment, — inviolable, because they
are inherent in the nature of man and inherent
in the nature of God; so absolute and so invio-
lable, that if we could conceive that God himself
were dethroned and ceased to exist, law would
still go on throughout eternity, unless nature it-
self were dissolved into anarchy.

116 THE EVOLUTION OF CHEISTIANITY.

Hence, revelation is not a book external to
men, giving laws which are external to men, by
a God who is external to men. Revelation is
the nnveiling in human consciousness of that
which God wrote in the human soul when he
made it. In the spring I go to my garden bed,
and write in the soil with my finger certain let-
ters, and sow the proper seeds and cover them
over, and there is nothing but a bed of mould.
In June, from these seeds flowers will have
sprung up, and they will have spelled out a name.
The sun has revealed them. They were there,
but the sun has made that to appear which but
for the shining of the sun would not have ap-
peared. So, in the heart of man God has writ-
ten his message, his inviolable law and his mer-
ciful redemption, because he has made the heart
of man akin to the heart of God. Revelation
is the upspringing of this life of law and love,
of righteousness and mercy, under the influence
of God's own personal presence and power. The
question between the two schools of theology con-
cerning the Bible is thus important and even
fundamental. It is not whether there are some
specks of sandstone in the marble. To the Old
Theology, God, as a great infinite Caesar ruling
the world, has framed certain statutes and given
them to us, and we must obey them, or come into
collision with him and suffer the threatened pen-

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 117

alties. To the New Theology, he has made man
after his own image and written his own nature
in the human conscience and in human love, and
then has interpreted by the mouth of his pro-
phets what he has written in the hearts of his
children.

Such a revelation is not infallible; but it is
for that very reason the more perfect revelation.
It is said, If you think that the gold and the
earth are mixed together in the Bible, how will
you discriminate, how will you tell what is gold
and what is earth ? We do not wish to discri-
minate; we do not wish to separate. It is not
gold with dross; it is oxygen with nitrogen.
The oxygen is mixed with the nitrogen in order
that it may the better be breathed, and the bet-
ter minister to human life. In the Bible the |
divine is mingled — inextricably and indi visibly
mingled — with the human, that humanity may
receive it and be ministered to by it. We can-
not take the great truths of God and his gov-
ernment and his love into our own experiences
except as they are woven into the experience
of men of like passions and infirmities and im-
perfections as ourselves. The. Bible is a more
sacred book because it is a hmnan book. It
is a diviner book, not merely because it shows
us the law of God and the nature of God, but
because it shows us God and man inextricably

118 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

woven together so that they cannot be separated.
It is impossible to run a knife of cleavage
through the character of Jesus Christ, and say,
"This was God, and this man." The glory of
Christ's revelation of God to men is that he
shows that God and man are so interwoven that
separation is impossible. That which is true
of incarnation is true of revelation; the divine
glory of the Bible is that the truth and love and
life and glory of God show themselves in human
experience. Thus the Bible becomes not an
end, but a means to an end. It is the glass in
and through which we see God darkly. And
all the better because darkly. If the glass were
not smoked, we could not see the sun at all. Our
faith is not in the book, but in the God to whom
they bear witness whose lives and teachings are
revealed in the book. We first hear the echo
in prophet and epistle; then we listen for the
Voice itself. Thus we follow our fathers, but
it is that we may come to the Presence to which
they came. The wings of God's own angels are
over us, and the very presence of God himself
is in our heart, and his eyes look love into our
eyes, and his life is filling our life, and we will
not go back to the portico of the Temple and the
echo of the Voice.

Faith in God has gratlually brought with it
faith in man as the son of God ; and faith in the

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 119

power of man, — not of a few mystics, or espe-
cially elected saints, or divinely appointed priests
and prophets, — but faitli in the power of man,
and of every man, as a son of God, to know
God directly and immediately. Imperialism in
theology necessarily carried with it rationalism.
Immanence in theology necessarily carries with
it intuitionalism. In the United States, in the
death of Dr. Emmons, in 1840, there died the
last representative of the old school of New
England preachers, the purely logical. A new
school is taking its place, the intuitional. That
man is a reasonable creature ; that the reason is
the supreme and divine faculty ; that his reason
is to be convinced by the truth ; that when his
reason is convinced his will must obey; that
when this result is reached he is a converted be-
ing — this was the philosophy which, sometimes
avowed, sometimes unrecognized, underlay the
preaching of the old school. The whole fabric
of the religious life was built by logical pro-
cesses, by means of doctrine, on the human rea-
son. But aU men are not logical ; and all men
do not obey the truth, even when it is made
clear to their logical understanding. The office
of logic is to criticise rather than to enforce, and
to enforce rather than to reveal. Spiritual truth
is not mined by picks and beaten out by ham-
mers. It is in the heavens, not buried in the

120 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

eartli ; to be seen, not mined. It is within, not
without ; not to be arrived at by slow processes
of deduction, but to be apprehended and ajDpre-
ciated upon a mere presentation of it. This far-
reaching truth was spoken outside the church,
in England by a Carlyle, and in America by an
Emerson; its spiritual prophet in the Puritan
churches of New England was Horace Bushnell.
That truth is immediately and directly seen by
the soul ; that God is no best hypothesis to ac-
count for the phenomena of creation, but the
soul's best friend, its Father, its intimate personal
companion; that inspiration is no remote phe-
nomenon, once attested by miracles, now forever
silenced in the grave of a dead God, but a uni-
versal and eternal communion between a living
God and living souls ; that the forgiveness of sins
is infinitely more than any theory of atonement,
and that no theory of atonement can comprehend
the full meaning of forgiveness of sins — these
were not the theories of a philosopher ; they were
the realities, the vital convictions, the personal
experiences of the saint, whose sainthood must be
in the heart of the critic before he can criticise
and in the heart of the disciple before he can
comprehend.

Thus the New Theology, breaking away from
the external and governmental conceptions of
Romanism, and through a revival of Orientalism

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 121

getting a more spiritual conception of the teach-
ins: of the New Testament, uses both the church
and the Bible as instruments for creating in the
heart of men in the nineteenth century the same
spiritual life which the Bible portrays in the
hearts of the patriarchs and the prophets of olden
time, and develops a style of preaching which
appeals directly and immediately to the divine
in humanity, and speaks with authority, because
it evokes the authority of the divinity which is
in every man.

As the Latin or Puritan system of theology
gave a conception of God, of law, and of revela-
tion as external, so it represented sin, though
less consistently, as external. For its concep-
tion of sin was, substantially, that there is a
great King who is absolutely righteous, and who
has issued certain laws which ought to be
obeyed, and that men have set their will against
the will of this great King, and have deliber-
ately determined that they will not do what he
commands them to do. But, inasmuch as a
great number, if not the great majority, of men
are utterly unconscious of having set their will
deliberately against the will of God, or of being
in any wise in rebellion against him, this theo-
logy ran back the history of sin to a supposed
origin in a remote past ; it said there was a pro-
genitor of this whole human race to whom this

122 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

edict was given, who disobeyed it, and that in
his sin we all sinned, and in his fall we all fell.
By that one act the whole human race was
brought into rebellion against God. We have
accordingly, it was said, a state of society resem-
bling that which existed in our Southern States
twenty -five or more years ago. The world is in
rebellion against God, and, although individ-
uals may not have directly enlisted against the
Almighty, they have been swept along by the
current into this rebellion, and are really, even
if unconsciously, rebels against him and his gov-
ernment and laws.

Three different causes are at work under-
mining this theological system which makes sin
for the race rest fundamentally upon one act of
apostasy by a progenitor in some remote past.
Evolution declares that the human race has not
fallen from a higher estate to a lower, but is
climbing from a lower estate to a higher. Mod-
ern Biblical critics maintain that the story of
the Fall is not and does not claim to be a reve-
lation, but is a spiritualized account of an an-
cient legend or myth, to be found in other lit-
erature at least as ancient as the most ancient
date attributed by any scholar to the author of
Genesis. And students in sociology have dis-
covered that the cause of crime is not a strong
and rebellious will, but a weak and irresolute

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 123

one. It does not follow that modern tlioiiglit
is coming to the conclusion that there is no real
sin in the human race, no penalty following sin,
and no need of forgiveness and redemption to
deliver from both sin and penalty. On the
contrary, I think we are coming to have a
deeper and a diviner sense of sin ; a truer and a
more practical conception of what sin is, and in
what it does really consist. The laws of God
are laws written in the human soul, and the sin
of man is a sin against the law of his own na-
ture. Sin is not man setting himself against
a law external to himself. Every man is two
men ; every man is a battle-ground in which the
higher and the lower man are contending one
against the other. Man has come up out of the
lower condition, and in every new stage of his
life he comes under a new and a diviner law,
the law of a new and a diviner nature. He is
no longer under the laws of his old being. The
very standards of truth and righteousness change.
In every new stage of evolution he comes under
a new law of righteousness. Men are coming-
step by step into a higher and spiritual realm,
and under the authority of a higher and spir-
itual law. Sin is a relapse. Depravity lies in
those elements of the old nature which makes
such a relapse always a possible and real danger.
"If ye were blind," says Christ, "ye should

124 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

have no sin : but now ye say, We see ; therefore
your sin remaineth." It is as we come up into
the light that sin becomes possible. If there
were no redemption, there would be no sin.

I can remember, when a boy, how the minister
used to exhort me to lay down the weapons of
my rebellion. I did not know what he meant.
I had no weapons of rebellion. I thought I was
doubly wicked because I did not see that I was
a rebel, though in very truth I cannot, looking
back along my life, remember the time when I
did not sincerely, in my deepest heart of hearts,
desire to know the will of God and do the will
of God. No ! I am not a rebel, and never have
been. I repeat the language of the Episcopa-
lian Confession : " I have done the things which
I ought not to have done, and I have left un-
done the things which I ought to have done."
True ! and yet, after all, if my Father were to
stop me, and say, "Make your inventory; tell
me what things you did yesterday that you ought
not to have done," I should often find it diffi-
cult to put my finger on one of them; "Tell
me what things you left undone yesterday that
you ought to have done," I might not easily put
my finger even on one of those. But when I
come to the closing sentence of that triple decla-
ration, "There is no health in me," it is in no
figurative sense that I feel like putting my hand

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 125

on my moutla and my mouth in the dust, and
crying out, "Woe unto me, for I am unclean."
It is not the things which I have done, it is
not the things which I have left undone, that
call me to repentance. It is the kind of being
I am. I have not stained my hand with the
blood of my neighbor. I have not put my
liand into his pocket and filched his earnings.
But, when I look into my heart, and see what
there is of ambition and pride and selfishness and
greed still hiding there, I do not know but that,
if I had lived where my brother lives, my hand
would be red as his is, my hand would be
smirched with greed as his has been. I am
haunted by another self. I hate no man except
myself. And when this shadowy monster walks
by my side and whispers the evil suggestion
into my ear, I long to get my hand upon his
throat and my feet upon his prostrate person !
It is not what I have done ; it is not what I have
left undone : it is what there is left in me, that
came I know not whence, that is here I know
not why, and that somehow must be cleansed
away before I am the man, God helping me, I
mean to be.^

As we are coming, then, to think of sin not
as successive acts of the will performed, and cer-

^ This subject is more fully treated in a subsequent chapter
on " The Evolution of the Individual Soul."

126 THE EVOLUTIONS OF CHRISTIANITY.

tainly not as some great apostasy in the past in
whieh we had no share, but as in elements of
our being which are unworthy of those that are
called the children of God, so we are coming to
see that penalty is not external penalty inflicted
by a governor for crime perpetrated. The law
is in ourselves; the disease and the disorder are
in ourselves; and the penalty is in ourselves.
Every sin comes back to plague the sinner.
There is no need of any flagellations ; every man
flagellates himseK. No God in heaven or devil
in hell is needed to kindle the fire that is not
quenched, or to breed the worm that dieth not.
Every man kindles the fire and breeds the worm
in his own soul. This is not new. The old
Greek tragedians saw it, and wrought it into
their tragedies. Dante saw it, and repeated it
in the story of the Inferno. Shakespeare saw
it, and revealed it in Macbeth and in Othello.
Browning and Tennyson have seen and inter-
preted it. That penalty and sin are both within
' the man ; that we never enter into heaven, but
heaven into us ; that we never enter into hell, but
hell into us — this, the vision of the poets, pagan
and Christian, the church is beginning slowly
and after long years of miseducation to appropri-
ate and make its own. How this self-indidgent
appetite vitiates and destroys the very tissues
of the body and makes impossible the simple,

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 127

natural, healthful pleasures of the physical or-
ganization! How this grasping, greedy, cov-
etous appetite grows by what it feeds on, until
the man is consumed by the fire of his own in-
satiable lust for wealth ! How this pride walls
the man in, and isolates him, and separates him
from his fellows ; how it incrusts him, and turns
him from a living man into stone ! And this
vanity that makes us desire the applause of our
fellow-men, and puffs us up with conceit, how
it deprives us of the pleasure we seek in the
very process of our striving for their applause,
and brings us into contempt in the very act by
which we strive to gratify our vanity ! Nay,
how all these sins isolate us from one another,
and isolate us from God! Men build them-
selves into narrow cells, inflict upon themselves
the penalty of a perpetual solitary confinement,
go out of the brotherhood, and estrange them-
selves from their heavenly Father. No Peter
stands at the heavenly gate to say who may
come in and who may not. The gates of the
Heavenly City are flung wide open day and
night, and when men die they may go straight
up to that gate and walk in — if they wish.
But as men that dive to the bottom of the sea
incase themselves in armor, and then going
down are untouched by the sea, we, by our
pride, our selfishness, our vanity, our self-con-

128 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

ceit, our appetites, so incase ourselves tliat,
standing in tlie midst of purity and light and
life, we are untouched by it, solitary in the
kingdom of God on earth, solitary in the king-
dom of God in heaven.

If forgiveness of sin were taking away an
external penalty threatened by an imperial God
upon men for violation of an external law, then
it could be taken away externally. But if pen-
alty is sin and sin is penalty, if these are only
two aspects of the same thing, different ways of
spelling, as it were, the same word, then redemp-
tion must be within, as the penalty is within and
as the lawlessness is within. The man who is
a battle-ground between the animal and the spir-
itual can find peace only in one of two ways :
either he must go back to the animal or he must
go up to the heavenly. The man in whose na-
ture appetite is struggling with self-respect and
conscience must go back to the abyss or up to
the Son of God, or remain torn in sunder eter-
nally by these two conflicting motives that are
within his soul. God himself cannot take the
penalty out of a life and leave the sin in, unless
he were to revolutionize the nature of man and
his own nature. What God is doing in the
world is not lifting off the threatened penalty
from men that have done something wrong, but
putting life into men who are as yet only half

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 129

living, and taking the death out of men that are (
still half dead. There is not one single passage |
in the New Testament that in explicit terms f
promises remission of penalty ; but the Bible
is written all over its pages with the radiant
promise of the remission of sins. The function \
and aim of the gospel is to take the pride, the
passion, the selfishness, the vanity, the vice, the
sensuality, and whatever other evil thing there
may be, out of the heart and out of the life.
Redemption is within, not without. It is heal-
ing. Not uncommon in forensic theology is the
figure of the sinner shut up in his prison-house,
and the messenger coming with the word of par-
don signed and sealed in the blood of Christ,
and the promise. If the prisoner will accept this
pardon in faith and repentance, he may go free.
But no such figure is found in the Bible. What
are the figures there ? They are such as these :
Your sins are a cloud in the heavens ; like the
shining of the sun on the cloud is the shining of
the life of God on the heart, and he will shine
on, until he has blotted out every sin. Sin is
like a record in a book ; he will with chemicals
erase the record and make the page white and
ready for a new writing. The life is like that
lived in some preexisting state; the man may
be born again. Man is a slave to sin; God
will set him free. Man is in his grave, and

130 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

such corruj)tion lias taken hold of him that other
men say, "Do not go near him, he is so cor-
rupt; leave him to himself ; " but Christ comes
and stands at the grave and says: "Lazarus,
come forth." To be redeemed is to come forth,
now, out of that corrujjtion, out of that dark-
ness, into the bright shining of the sun, into
the singing of the birds, into the innnortal life
that is here and now, the life with God and in
God. The New Theology is not the doctrine
that men need no forgiveness and no God to
forgive them. It is profoundly the reverse ; it
is the doctrine that sin is wrought into the very
fibre and structure of man, that penalty is a
part of the sin and must exist so long as sin is
' there, and that forgiveness is casting the sin out
and putting new life in.

And so incarnation is not merely a coming of
God to man, it is a dwelling of God in man.
Universalism and Unitarianism were the nat-
ural, if not the logical and necessary, conclu-
sions of Calvinism. They were bred in the Pu-
ritan atmosphere. They grew in the Puritan
community. They were Presbyterian in Old
England and Congregational in New England.
They have never grown out of Methodism.
Let the world believe that God is sovereign in
any such sense as that man has no sovereignty
left, and that whether he shall remain in sin

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 131

and misery throughout eternity depends wholly
upon God, and in no wise upon the individual
man, — then whenever the world comes also to
believe that God is love, it will inevitably be-
lieve also in a universal salvation. Let the world
think that God is on his throne apart from man,
that what he is doing for men he is doing exter-
nally for them, that a great gulf exists between
God and man, that they are not of kin, that
man's nature is not divine, is indeed undivine,
and it will inevitably come to think of the Christ
coming to earth as a messenger with an embas-
sage from the sovereign to the rebels, telling
them the terms on which humanity may be
pardoned. But, on the other hand, let the
world and the church come to believe that law
and revelation and sin and redemption are all
written in man, and it will come to write another
word in man, and that word Incarnation, — God
coming into one life in order that he may come
into all lives; into one human experience, in
order that he may enter into all human expe-
riences ; Christ the door through which and by
which man enters into God and God enters into
man. As in the spring the first lily of the season ■
puts its white head above the ground, then drops , ^ > "^"^
its head that it may whisper to its seed sisters, j
saying to them, "Come, come! this is what you 1
are meant to be," so into the darkness of a |

i

132 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

pagan night, and into the vileness of a wholly
earthly history, came the one transcendent,
pure, divine figure, standing for those few short
years upon the earth, showing what is truly God
by showing what is truly man when God is in
him, and calling out to us, still in the earth-
iness, still in the darkness, and saying to us,
"Come! this is what you were meant to be, this
is what God is trying to make you, this is what
your aspirations mean. You are sons of God ;
the law of his nature is the law of your nature;
and, working with him and letting him work in
you, you shall come out into the sunlight of
God's own love and become the sharer of his
own life."

If we cannot state philosophically, and cannot
even see quite clearly, how it is that the sacrifice
of Christ works out this divine redemption in
the human soul, at least we can see that there is
no such Christian redemption except through
the ministry of suffering. It is not that man
is sacrificed to appease God — it is God who
is sacrificed to redeem man. Christ could not
have revealed a God of truth and not have
been a teaching Christ; nor revealed a God of
life and not have been a living Christ, carrying
out in life the principles he inculcated; nor
revealed a God of love and not have been a
suffering Christ, for love must suffer so long as

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 133

the loved one sins. Christ — who came that he
might reveal the nature and heart of God, who
came that he might show us God in man, help-
ing man toward God — came to mingle his
tears with our tears, and, sinless though he
was, his vicarious repentance and his death to
sin with our death in sin, in order that he
might make it clear to us that God is always
suffering and struggling and laboring with us.
In the wonderful statue of the Laocoon, — the
father and the two children, one on either side,
and the serpents who have come up out of the
sea to destroy them, — the father is fighting the
serpents, not for his own life, but for his sons'
lives. But the struggle and the anguish in their
faces are less than in his, for love's battle is
hotter and love's suffering greater than the bat-
tle and the suffering of self. So out of that
dark past, out of that animal nature, out of that
strange mystery from which we were called by
the creative word of God, who makes us of clay,
yet breathes the breath of his own life into us,
come the serpentine elements that are in our
own complex nature, as if to strangle all that
is divine and truly manly in us; and it is our
Father who is with us, and whose reflected
image we see in the cross. The agony in the
soul of the Christ is but the reflection of the
sorrow that is in the Father's soul. Every

134 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

burden o£ our life is in liis life, and he wrestles
for us and will conquer for us. It is not the
omniscience nor the omnipotence of God that is
most unfathomable, but his mercy, his sympa-
thy, his love ; the sympathy of- a God who is in
such touch with humanity that we never com-
mit a sin that he does not feel the shame of it,
and we never feel a remorse that the bitterness
of it does not enter into him, and we never
know a sorrow that he does not sit down with
us in our grief, and we are never lifted up with
a great joy that he is not joyful also. For not
by the suffering only, but by the joy also; not
by the struggle only, but by the peace also ; by
the whole entering of God into human life, his
life becomes our life, and we are made par-
takers of his nature, because he comes down and
makes himself partaker with us in our lives.

Thus the New Theology is evolved out of the
Old Theology, and the same spiritual faith is in
them both. We believe that God is an abso-
lute, supreme King ; but we know this King to
be our Father, in personal relations with each
one of us. We believe his laws are absolute,
and not to be broken ; but they are his laws be-
cause they are the laws of his own nature, and
our laws because they are the laws of our nature,
for we are the children of God and have come
from him. We believe in a revelation that is

THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY. 135

written in a unique book, with a unique character
and a unique history ; but we believe that the
writino:s in this book are but the reflection of
that which was written by God in the inmost
being of the proj)hets, and we see the vision bet-
ter because we see it reflected from a mirror and
in enio^ma. We believe in the awf ulness of sin ;
not chiefly in the things which we have done, not
chiefly in the things which we have left undone,
but in the weakness, the infirmity, the animal-
ism, the unworthiness that is in us, and that
might sweep us out any moment into the abyss
from which the hand of Providence has thus far
guarded us. We believe in the certainty of
punishment, not because by and by we shall be
heard before an omniscient Judge; but because
in man's own conscience is erected a judgment
seat from which he never can escape unless he
flies from his own nature. We believe in a
great redemption; not one that opens the door
of a prison and lets us out, but one that opens
the door of our own self -erected prison and lets
Christ in, and so fulfils in us the prayer of Ten-
nyson,

" Oh, for a man to arise in me,
That the man that I am may cease to be ! "

We believe in a sacrifice, not of a mediator to j

appease the wrath of God, but of God manifest \
in the flesh, sacrificing himself to purify and

perfect the children of men. '

CHAPTER V.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHUECH.

Jesus Christ was the founder neither of reli-
gion nor of a religion. If religion be the life of
God in the soul of man, that existed long before
eTesus Christ came into the world. Not to go
outside of Judaism, it was seen in Abraham,
Moses, David, Isaiah, and the long line of patri-
archs and prophets of Jewish history. If reli-
gion be such a manifestation of God as produces
a moral influence on the life and character of
man, that also had existed, both within and with-
out Judaism, long prior to the time of Christ.
Jesus Christ was not, therefore, the founder of
religion. It was founded in the beginning, when
God created man in his own image and breathed
into him the breath of a spiritual life. Nor was
he the founder of a religion. A religion, as dis-
tinguished from religion, is a particular and
organized type of the life of God in the soul
of man. It is a particular form of moral and
spiritual organization, resulting from some spe-
cialized perception of that manifestation of God
to man which is as universal as the race. Each

TUE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 137

religion has therefore its own specific expres-
sion or embodiment : an intellectual expression
in a creed or theological system ; an emotional
expression in a ritual or liturgy ; and an organic
expression in an institution or institutions.
Christ gave to his disciples neither a creed, a
liturgy, nor rules for the construction of an ec-
clesiastical organization. He has told us very
distinctly for what he came into the world. " I
have come," he said, "that they might have life,
and that they might have it more abundantly."
"I o-ive unto them eternal life." "Father, thou
hast given thy Son power over all flesh, that he
should give eternal life to as many as thou hast
given him." He came that he might give life,
and this life has expressed itself in intellectual
forms, that is in creeds; in emotional forms,
that is in liturgies ; in institutional forms, that
is in churches. But he gave neither a creed, a
liturgy, nor a church to the world.

He assumed certain truths and gave expres-
sion to them as truths of vital experience, but
he never crystallized them into a creed. Thus
he was accustomed to address God as his Fa-
ther, and he told his disciples to do the same.
He illustrated the relationship between God and
man by that between a benignant father and an
erring child. He said that God was more ready
to impart his holy influence to those that desii'ed

138 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

it than an earthly father to give good gifts to his
children. But he never described the attributes
of God, nor afforded any theological definition of
God, nor discussed philosophically the character
of the Infinite One, or his relations to the finite
creation. He assumed that men were bound
together by a deeper relationship than that which
finds expression in church, state, or even race.
He passed beyond all these boundaries within
which we still, for the most part, confine our
sympathies. He skillfully awakened human re-
gard, even in the breast of a narrow-minded Jew,
for the renegade, apostate, and heretical Samar-
itan, by picturing such an one with a compas-
sionate and tender heart. But one looks in vain
in his sayings for a definition of human brother-
hood or a systematic philosophy of society. He
treated men habitually as possessing immortal
natures, — treated life here as a fragment whose
consequences are projected into the hereafter;
but he never discussed the doctrine of immor-
tality, much less the specific conditions of the
future state. One may, perhaps, out of his say-
ings construct a Christian doctrine of Last
Things, but he will have to construct it himself ;
he will not find it in the Gospels made ready to
his hand. Jesus Christ lived at a time and in
a country when sacrifices were the universal
expression of worship, and access to God and

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 139

relief from the burden and remorse of sin were
supposed possible only through the shedding of
blood. He said nothing against this sacrificial
system, but when he saw in men the signs of a
genuine repentance, he simply bade them go in
peace and sin no more. He assmned that there
was a provision by which the burdened soul
might find peace, and that all that was necessary
for that purpose was to abandon the sin and
enter upon a new life. A doctrine of atonement
may be deduced from his teaching, — has been
deduced from his teaching, — but the doctrine
of the atonement is a deduction. Christ no-
where gives expression to it in a philosophical or
doctrinal form. He assumed a position toward
mankind of calm superiority. He never classed
himself with men. He never expressed repent-
ance for sin, or aspiration for a purer life. He
acted as one who had come out of a great full-
ness to impart to humanity in its great poverty.
And yet the doctrine of the Person of Christ,
though not stated in the teachings of Christ,
may be deduced from them. That he left his
claim to divinity unformulated, to be made for
him by his followers, rather than by him for
himself, is evident from a single significant cir-
cumstance. When he was put on trial for his
life, it was impossible to find two witnesses who
could agree together concerning any utterance

140 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

of Jesus Christ whlcli even a partial and preju-
diced court could construe into an exjjlicit claim
of divinity; humanly speaking, it may safely
be said that Christ could not have been con-
demned for blasphemy, even by the corrupt
court of Caiaphas, had he not consented to be
put upon the stand himself and to have the oath
administered to him, and then and there, un-
der the solemn sanction of that oath, and with
the death jDenalty hanging over him as the re-
sult, declared that he was the Son of God, and
would come in the clouds of glory to judge the
world.

As Jesus Christ formulated no creed, that is,
no intellectual expression of the religious life,
so he foi'mulated no liturgy, that is, no emo-
tional exjDression of the religious life. He was
accustomed to pray, though generally in private.
On at least one occasion, however, he met with
his disciples and united with them in a simple
service of prayer and praise about the Passover
table. Once they asked him to give them a
liturgy. He answered in an incomparable form
of prayer which includes the common wants of
humanity, its need of food, of forgiveness, and
of guidance, expressed in three very simple pe-
titions; but that neither he nor his disciples
laid stress upon the form of words is evident
from the fact that the form differs in the two

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 141

reports which have been preserved for us, while
the indications are that the prayer itseK was in
part, at least, composed of petitions which were
before current in Jewish worship. The Jews
were accustomed to baptize proselytes from
heathen communities, as a token that the baj)-
tized washed away their old superstitions and
entered a new life; John the Baptist, seizing
on this familiar rite, declared that the Jews
as well as pagans needed purification, and he
used baptism to enforce this teaching. Some of
Christ's disciples followed John's example, and
Christ, after his resurrection, bade them use this
symbol among all people, regardless of race,
and as a form of initiation, not into Judaism,
nor into a sect of reformed Jews, but into a
universal and divine fellowship. The birthday
of the Jewish nation was celebrated by a great
festival, one feature of it being a supper. Jesus
Christ bade his followers in the future remem-
ber him whenever they thus celebrated their
nation's birthday. In neither case did he create
or institute a ceremonial ; he simply gave a new
and deeper significance and direction to one al-
ready familiar. In brief, Jesus Christ inspired,
his disciples with reverence, with aspiration,
with thanksgiving, with love ; but he left them
to express that spiritual life which he had im-
parted to them in language of their own.

142 THEtEVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

In a similar manner he organized no insti-
tutions of religion. Early in his ministry, he
called about him from his followers twelve to be
his more immediate comjianions. A little later
he sent them out two by two, to tell the people
in the villages and rural districts that the King-
dom of God was at hand, while he carried the
same message to the towns and cities. Sub-
sequently he retreated from the crowd which
thronged about him in Galilee, and seeking
retirement with these twelve, devoted several
weeks to giving them instruction concerning the
spirit which should actuate them and the prin-
ciples which should guide them, in carrying on
his work after he was gone. Still later, in a
wider district, with a more scattered popula-
tion, he sent out seventy itinerant prophets on
an evangelistic mission. After his death and
resurrection, he met those who had remained
loyal to him, and told them to continue their
ministry, and to carry unto others the new life
which they had received from him. But he
organized no society, formulated no constitu-
tion, appointed no officers, prescribed no rules.
He left the life to create its own ecclesiastical
organization, as he left it to find its own intel-
lectual and emotional expression.

The reason for this is not far to seek. Paul
has explicitly stated it. Prophecies, he says,

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 143

shall fail, tongues shall cease, knowledge shall
vanish away, but faith, hope, love, abide forever.
Even inspired teaching, and all the forms in
which it may utter itself, and all the articu-
lated knowledge of which it is the expression,
are evanescent. These are phenomena, and
phenomena always are and always must be tran-
sitory. What abides, — what only can abide,
— is life. It was this life which Jesus Christ
came to impart, the life of faith, looking through
visible things as through a veil, to the invisible
glory which the visible at once conceals and dis-
closes; the life of hope looking forward and
upward in the expectation of a to-morrow that
shall be better than to-day ; the life of love seek-
ing not its own welfare, but the weKare of
others. This threefold spirit is eternal and con-
stant, while all expressions of this threefold
spirit are transitory and changeful. Christ in-
stituted no ecclesiastical organism, framed no
constitution, prescribed no rules, appointed no
officers; but he gave in various ways expression
to this spirit of faith, and hope, and love, as
a spirit that must embody itself in a church
which after his death should carry on his work.

But he did more than this.

The Jews in the Wilderness had instituted a
Great Congregation which assembled on certain
occasions for the determination of great national

144 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

questions. Whether the Jewish commonwealth
was a free democracy and all the people assem-
bled for the purjiose of mutual conference and
public decision, or whether it was a republic
and this Great Congregation was a representa-
tive body is not altogether certain. Probably
in the earlier history it was a popular assembly,
in the later history a representative assembly.
It was, at all events, the representative of the
nation, and its action reflected the national will.
In the Greek version of the Scrijjtures the name
Ecclesia, meaning the Called Forth, was given
to this assembly. The same name was given in
Greece to an analogous assembly of the people
for national consultation and common action.
Christ implied that his followers were to consti-
tute themselves into such an Ecclesia or assem-
bly. The principles which he indicated as essen-
tial to its existence and efficiency are these : —

1. There was to be a church, that is, a gather-
ing together, of all loyal followers of the Master.
The bond which was to unite this assembly in
one great brotherhood was to be loyalty, — not
to a creed, not to an order or an organization,
but to a Person, and that Person himself.

The sole condition of admission to this bro-
therhood while Christ lived was personal loyalty
to him. In no solitary instance did he ask any
would-be disciple what he believed, or where or

THE EVOLUTION OF TUE CHURCH. 145

how he worshiped, or to what nation or religion
he belonged. 1 He simply asked, Are you will-
ing to enter my school and learn of me ; enter
my kingdom and obey my directions? Pie was
equally willing to welcome to his organization
the devout John, the rough, sailor-like, profane
Peter, the publican Matthev/, the pagan centu-
rion. On the other hand, the scribe who would
follow him provided he might first go back to
his home to bury his father, or bid his kinsfolk
good-by; the ruler of the synagogue who would
join him, provided he might still keep the con-
trol and administration of his own wealth; the
Nicodemus, master in Israel, who was interested
in his teaching but thought himseK in no need of
a new life, were rejected. And when crowds
thronged about him with a great enthusiasm, he
turned to them and declared that unless they
loved him more than father or mother or life
itself, they were not worthy of him. If they
would be his followers, they must take up the
cross daily and follow him. He required of
those within the church the same spirit of abso-
lute and unquestioning loyalty. When one of

^ The case of the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mark vii. 24-30)
may be thought to be an exception ; but she was not seeking
to enter Christ's body of followers as herself a follower, and
it is clear from the context that ChrLst's first refusal to cure
her daughter was because granting the cure sought for was
sure to destroy that rest and privacy which he was seeking.

146 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

his best friends rebuked him for foretellinof his
own crucifixion, he vouchsafed no explanation,
but turned upon the recalcitrant disciple with a
sharp rebuke. "Get thee behind me, Satan,"
he said. When two other friends came to ask
for honorable position in the coming kingdom,
he answered with a test of their loyalty, "Are
ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink
of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I
am baptized with? " He sat down at the table
with his disciples, no one of whom had thought
to offer his services in washing the soiled feet
of the others, or even of the Master himseK,
When he rose, girded himself as a slave, and
proceeded with basin and towel to wash and
wipe the feet of the disciples, and one pro-
tested, he answered simply, I will give you no
explanation ; you must submit or leave the disci-
pleship. When, after his resurrection, he fore-
told the martyrdom of Peter, and Peter asked.
What shall befall John? the only reply was,
" What is that to thee ? Follow thou me." Nor
was this loyalty to him a temporary condition of
the little band, continuing only while the Master
was living. On the contrary, he declared ex-
plicitly before his death that he would continue
to be with his disciples ; that he and his Father
would come and dwell with them; that the spirit
that abode in him should abide with them also;

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 147

*

that it should interpret to them the meaning of
his teaching, and open to them new truths which
they had not yet been able to receive; that it
should impart to them power; and that under
this impartation they should do greater works
even than those which he had done. Neai the
close of his life he gave in a beautiful parable
an illustration of this principle of spiritual unity
in personal loyalty to him as a living Lord and
Master. He was just about going out with
his friends to a vineyard outside the city walls,
or perhaps had already reached this coveted re-
tirement. A vine was growing against the wall ;
the pruning knife liad been at work and some
dead branches lay upon the ground. Behold, he
said, the symbol of your future life. I am the
vine, and shall always be with you. Loyalty to
me, fellowship with me, unity with me, is the
one condition of our order and our organization.
So long as this loyalty is maintained, you will
bear fruit ; whenever this loyalty is lost, when-
ever for my will you substitute your own and
for my life your independent and individual life,
you will be like these branches, cut off from
the vine and thrown upon the ground ; there will
be no life in you. The first principle of his
church, the sole secret of its unity, was to be
personal loyalty to himself.

2. The second great principle of his church

148 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

was that of equality. This future organization
was to be a brotherhood of equals. In it there
were to be no ranks and orders for the exercise
of authority. In the world without, he said,
the great and strong dominate the rest. In your
organization it shall not be so. You are to ac-
knowledge no Master except myself; all ye are
brethren. Offices there may be, but they shall
exist, not for honor and emulation, nor for the
exercise of authority, but only for service.
"He that is greatest among you shall be your
servant." More than once the disciples engaged
in hot discussion among themselves as to which
should be greatest, and strove for precedence.
It was after one of these questions that he ad-
ministered that stinging rebuke, to which I have
just referred, by himself washing the feet of the
disciples who had been quarreling upon the
question which should have the place of honor
at the table. On another similar occasion he
asked them what had been the subject of their
contention, and getting no answer, took a child,
and set him in the midst of them, and said.
Except ye be converted and become as a little
child, ye shall not enter into the kingdom
of heaven. This fundamental principle, that
every one in his church is responsible directly to
God and under no authority except for purposes
of service, he illustrated by a pregnant figure

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 149

which has been singularly misinterpreted by one
section of his church. In the East, a key is not
unfrequently given to the steward of an estate
as the symbol of his authority, much as a bunch
of keys is sometimes given to the housekeeper
in England, and by her worn, hanging from
the waist. I give unto each one of you, he said,
the keys of the kingdom of heaven. You are
to have authority over yourselves. Whatsoever
you prohibit shaU be prohibited for you, and
whatsoever you permit shall be permitted for
you. For you are called unto liberty and self-
control. ^

3. The third principle of his church was that
of liberty. In his kingdom no force should be
used. Its only appeal should be to the con-
science ; its only instrument, truth. In the very
beginning of his ministry he was tempted to
adopt world methods in order to win power, and
he peremptorily refused. Later, the people in
their enthusiasm would have crowned him King ;
he refused the coronation and departed from
them. He told his disciples that they were not
to resist injustice by force. When he was about
to be arrested, and one of the disciples would

^ Observe that in this famous passage Christ does not say
whomsoeveT, but whatsoeyer. Observe also that the kingdom
of heaven is in the language of Christ a kingdom of God upon
the earth.

150 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

have resisted, he bade his impetuous friend put
up his sword. When he stood before Pilate and
was questioned, Art thou a king? he replied, I
am, but a king whose only authority is the truth,
and whose only followers are those who acknow-
ledge supreme allegiance to the truth. And in
telling his disciples how they were to act in the
church towards those who refused to acknow-
ledge its decisions, he said. Let such an one "be
unto thee as an heathen man and a publican."
That is, let him go his way, have nothing more
to do with him. They were not to attemj)t to
coerce him. He was to have his liberty; they
were to have theirs.

At the death of Jesus Christ, the disciples
went forth to carry the new life which they had
received from their Master, the life of faith and
hope and love, into a world which was sensual,
despairing, and cruelly selfish. At first, they
made no attempt to form any ecclesiastical or-
ganization. They had no conception how long
and weary a time must elapse before the king-
dom of God would arrive which they believed
their Master had come to usher in. They fully
expected his return during their lifetime. They
conceived no need of any society which should
outlast a single generation. The organizations
which sprang up out of the apostolic preaching
were spontaneous in their origin and different

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 151

from one another in their form and structure,
though at first essentially the same in their
spirit. The early disciples had no regular
places of worship; they often met in private
homes ; their societies were in their nature what
they were sometimes called, households of faith.
Occasionally an entire Jewish synagogue would
accept the new faith. Then the organization
remained unchanged, while the spirit which ani-
mated it was revolutionized. Sometimes the
brotherhood was composed chiefly of converted
pagans ; then the organization naturally fell into
the forms and methods with which the pagans
were familiar. These households of faith,
whether Jewish or pagan in their social origin,
had no creed, no organized system of theology,
no established liturgy. But they believed in a
Messiah to whose second coming in their own
generation they all joyfully looked forward;
they used the Hebrew psalmody both for praise
and for their responsive readings, as in the
Jewish liturgies; they employed the Lord's
Prayer, though in connection with extempora-
neous prayer; they made the worship subordi-
nate to instruction ; they gathered frequently, if
not every week, about a supper-table, in com-
memoration of their Lord's death and in joy-
ful anticipation of his return ; this they followed
sometimes with a church supper, partly as an

152 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

occasion of social fellowship, partly as a means
for providing the poor with food out of the re-
sources of the more wealthy ; and they used bap-
tism, generally, if not always, by immersion,
as a rite of initiation into the new brotherhood,
at first with the simple formula " In the name
of the Lord Jesus Christ," — subsequently with
the formida now generally in use, "In the name
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."
But the princij)les of which I have spoken were
characteristic of all these primitive households.
That is, the one condition of their unity was
loyalty to the Master; and this loyalty to one
Master carried with it the liberty of an abso-
lute and an equal brotherhood.

The Eoman empire was founded on principles
directly antagonistic to those propounded by
Jesus Christ. That empire was organized upon
the principle of absolute subservient obedience
to the emperor : his will was the source of all
law; belief in him was the Roman's sole creed;
reverence for him was the Roman's sole religion.
To him altars were raised in every household ;
from him was derived the only authority which
the Roman recognized. And this authority was
exhibited and exercised through an elaborate
bureaucracy. There was no brotherhood, and
no semblance of brotherhood. Absolutism was
filtered down through successive subalterns to

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 153

the remotest province and to the minutest affairs
of the great empire. And this authority, cen-
tring in the emperor and expressed and exercised
through ranks and orders of subordinates, was
enforced by physical penalties. The ground of
this authority was not in conscience, but in fear.
Rome was a great armed camp — armed alike for
the enforcement of imperial authority over its
own citizens, and for the extension of that au-
thority over countries which did not as yet recog-
nize it.

Thus at the beginning of the century stood
these two kingdoms over against each other,
with their diametrically antagonistic principles.
The infant church of Christ: a brotherhood of
absolute equals, centred in loyalty to an invisi-
ble master, enforced only by the individual con-
science. The giant empire of Rome : an armed
camp, under the absolute authority of an en-
throned Caesar, enforced by a standing army,
extending throughout its entire territory, and
secured through officials who were classified in
ranks and orders according to the measure of
their authority. The difference between these
two empires is strikingly illustrated by their
respective capitals. To the pagan, Rome was
"The Eternal City; " the Christian looked for
a new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from
God.

154 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

From the very first, these two organizations
instinctively recognized in each other a mortal
foe. The Roman empire was tolerant of all re-
ligions except the Christian religion ; ^ that reli-
gion Rome bent all its energies to destroy. The
Christian church saw in Rome the incarnation of
the world power, and John, the great prophet
of the infant church, in a vision beheld the
Christ going forth conquering and to conquer
until the kingdoms of the world had become the
kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ. The
history of the church down to the j)eriod of the
Reformation is the history of the way in which
Christian principles and the Christian spirit
pervaded and transformed pagan institutions,
and in which Christian institutions were moulded
and pervaded by pagan principles. The result
in the Middle Ages was an empire partially
christianized, and a church partially paganized.

Eulogy and condemnation of the church of the
Middle Ages are alike easy; a discriminating
judgment is always difficult. The admirers of
the papal church — the most splendid, the most
enduring, and historically the most powerfid of
all human organizations — have abundant mate-
rial for their eulogies. They can point to a life
so long that by the side of it the most ancient

1 It never antagonized tlie Jewish religion until Christianity
issued from Judaism.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 155

Protestant sect is but a youth in its teens ; they
can point to a missionary zeal so great that by
the side of it the greatest missionary triumphs
of our Protestant religion, if triumphs are to be
measured by majorities, are insignificant. They
can point to a self-sacrifice so deep, so abiding,
so sacred, that the unbelieving- world wonders
and the believing world worships, — women de-
nying themselves the sacred joys of wifely and
maternal love; men cutting themselves off from
the possibility of a home, that they may serve
the church, to them wife, mother, father, hus-
band, God. There is no desert where the sol-
diers of this church have not penetrated, there
is no danger which has daunted them, no martyr-
dom which they have not courted. They have
planted the cross in the snows of Kamschatka,
and in the burning deserts of Arabia ; their mis-
sionaries have penetrated without protection
other than that of a sincere, enthusiastic, per-
haps a fanatical faith, the wilds of China and of
Africa, the cities of pagan India and the snow-
covered forests of our own North America.
Avarice and ambition have had no more devoted
adherents than the Church of Rome has had.
Seeking for the souls of the Indians, they dared
every danger and suffered every privation that
the boldest trapper dared or endured. Pesti-
lence has not kept them from the hospital, nor

166 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

the bullet from the battle-field. The Church of
Rome has in her true sainthood enrolled the
names of a hundred Howards and Florence
Nightingales.

We read this page in her history with admi-
ration. It is written in letters of living light,
of more than golden glory. We turn the page ;
we find on the reverse side a history that fills us
with alternate amazement and indignation — a
history written in letters of blood and of fire.
The cruelties of the Mohammedan Saladin pale
beside those of the Christian Duke of Alva.
Looking into the uncovered dungeons of the In-
quisition, no wonder if we forget the patient, un-
tiring seK-devotion of the monks of St. Bernard.
The festivities of cruelty that make us turn away
from the pages of Waldensian history blot from
our recollections the undying love of the Jesuit
missionaries in North America. The solemn
tolling: of a bell breaks the silence of the mid-
night, calling to more horrible sacrifices than
ever Phoenician offered to his Moloch, or Druid
to his God. Thirty thousand lives fall in the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew, victims to the
remorseless religious cruelty of this enigmatic
church. For it is in very truth the unsolved
enigma of history, — its flag red on one side
with blood of martyrs whom it has slain, on the
other side red with its own martyrs who have

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 157

died for it; bearing the uplifted sword in the
one hand, and the uplifted cross in the other;
distinguished alike by the names of Loyola and
of Xavier, of Torquemada and of Bishop Fene-
lon. Enigma as it is, yet he who recognizes
that the church is itself an evolution, in which
the religious life has struggled for existence and
has survived only by proving its right to sur-
vival, will find in the doctrine of evolution the
explanation of this enigma. The glory of the
Roman Catholic Church, the glory of self-sac-
rifice, is the glory of Christianity; its shame of
pride, sensuality, and cruelty is the shame of
paganism.

After Christ's death, as the Messiah's ex-
pected return was delayed, and the church re-
alized the necessity of a permanent work of
preparation for his coming, it realized also the
imperative necessity for a permanent organiza-
tion of his church. They who met at first in
private houses for prayer, praise, and mutual
instruction very soon began to plan and push
forward enterprises for imparting to others the
life of faith and hope and love which they
themselves possessed. The Jewish law had laid
upon the church a duty of charity, and the
spirit of Christ converted this duty into an
enthusiasm. The forces first of Judaism and
then of paganism were alert and aggressive to

158 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

destroy the infant church, and persecution com-
pelled mutual cooperation for mutual protection.
Thus missionary zeal, the enthusiasm of love,
and the necessities of self - defense compelled
organization. The early Christian societies were
modeled after those of existing institutions.
"With probably no single exception," says Pro-
fessor Hatch, "the names of Christian institu-
tions and Christian officers are shared by them
in common with institutions and officers outside
of Christianity." Each separate household of
faith came to have a presiding officer, some-
times called elder or presbyter, sometimes called
overseer or bishop. Then two or more of these
households of faith in any given town were
united under one president. Then the house-
holds of a province were similarly united under
a president who himself presided over the work
of the other local presidents ; and so gradually
grew up a systematic and highly organized epis=
copal system.

By the fourth century the Christian church
had become so strong that the sagacious Con-
stantine thought it wiser and easier to use than
to fight it. He discovered that "the Christian
soldiers were stronger and braver than their fel-
lows," and " man for man and battalion for bat-
talion were more than a match for the pagans."
By an imperial decree he made Christianity the

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 159

religion of the state. But it was the fundamen-
tal maxim of the Roman constitution that the
care of religion was the right as well as the duty
of the civil magistrate. Thus, the decree which
made Christianity the religion of the state made
Constantine the head of the church. Thus, the
conversion of the empire was the perversion of
the church. If the one was haK Christianized,
the other was at the same time and by the same
act haK paganized. Imperial Christianity was
a mongrel religion. Its character is indicated
by a single significant fact : the coin which Con-
stantine issued bore the name of Christ on one
side, and the figure of ApoUo on the other.

As the church waxed stronger and the empire
grew weaker, the central and imperial authority
was gradually transferred from the Emperor to
the Bishop of Rome. It is needless here to trace
the process of the transfer. It was effectually
symbolized when, A. D. 800, Charlemagne knelt
before the high altar of the stateliest temple of
Christian Rome, and received from the hands of
the Pope the diadem of the Caesars. From that
day the Church of Rome has maintained with
an obstinate consistency that it is the right of the
Pope, as the Vicar of God, to give the crown to
whom he will, and take it away when the king
proves himself unworthy. True, the Popes have
not always been successful in maintaining this

160 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

authority. Sometimes the Emperor has been
subject to the Pope, sometimes the Pojie has
been subject to the Emperor, and sometimes the
two have shared the authority between them.
But the claim to imperial authority asserted
by Leo III. in the coronation of Charlemagne
has never been formally withdrawn or disavowed
by any successor, from that day to this.

With this adoption of the imperialism of Rome
by the church of Christ, there came necessarily
the adoption of its bureaucratic method. It is
impossible for the head of a paternal government
to exercise his authority directly over all his sub-
jects, as the father of a family may over his
children. That authority must be entrusted to
subordinates and transmitted through them.
Thus grew up in the church of Rome a hierar-
chy whose offices were analogous to those of the
Roman empire, and whose very names, as we
have seen, were borrowed from their pagan pro-
totypes. Father, Rabbi, Master, whom Christ
had said should not exist in his church, were all
transferred with imperialism from pagan to papal
Rome. And this transmutation of the Christian
into the 23agan organization was necessarily fol-
lowed by the repudiation of Christ's jjrincijDle
that force was not to be employed in his church.

In pagan thought the Christian idea of pun-
ishment as remedial found absolutely no place.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHUECH. 161

The object of pagan punishment was either the
gratification of a personal revenge, the exercise
of what is called vindictive justice, or the de-
terring of other criminals from the perpetration
of similar crimes. With these three objects in
view, the punishments were made as cruel as
possible. This pagan conception of punishment
has not even in our day been wholly eliminated,
and we are only very gradually learning that
mercy has more power than cruelty to deter. In
the Middle Ages, the punishments inflicted by
the state were pitiless. "The wh^el, the caul-
dron of boiling oil, burning alive, burying alive,
flaying alive, tearing apart with wild horses,
were the ordinary expedients by which the
criminal jurist sought to deter crime by fright-
ful examples which would make a profound im-
pression on a not over-sensitive population." ^
In England, theft was punished by burning; in
France, by burying alive ; in Germany, murder
and arson were punished by breaking on the
wheel. In Denmark, blasphemers first had their
tongues cut out and then were beheaded. In
Hanover, the false coiner was punished by be-
ing burned to death. When the church once
adopted the principle that force might be used
for the pimishment of heresy, it was inevita-

1 H. C. Lea's History of the Inquisition, vol. i. 234, from
•which also the other illustrations are taken.

162 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

\Ae that it sliould use the cruel punishments in
vogue in its own age. Yet it adopted this
principle only gradually and reluctantly. The
first persecutions for religious opinion were in-
troduced by Constantine, and against them bish-
ops in the church vigorously protested. The
first persecuting bishops were compelled to re-
sign. Even as late as the eleventh century, per-
secution of heretics by the church was compelled
by the mob in spite of ineffectual resistance by
the ecclesiastics. The truth that no opinion,
however erroneous, can be a sin, is still unrecog-
nized by the majority of the church.^ It is not
strange that in the Middle Ages such false opin-
ions were regarded as crimes; and as injuries
to the soul are greater than injuries to the body,
and as apostasy from God is a greater sin than
treason to the state, it is not strange that no
punishment was deemed too severe for these, the
greatest and the most pernicious crimes.

Thus, by the fifteenth century the abandon-
ment of Christ's principles seemed to be com-
plete. The bond which united the church was
not loyalty to Christ, but loyalty to the Bishop
of Rome. The Christian brotherhood was
abandoned, and for it was substituted an elabo-

^ I assume, without discussion, that sin consists in the act of
the ■will, and therefore that no purely intellectual act can be
sinful, though it may grow out of sin or lead into sin.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 163

rate ecclesiastical hierarchy. The principle that
the only force to be used in the church is that
of the individual conscience had given place to
the use of the rack, the fagot, and the sword.
The medal given by Gregory VII. to the
Knights of St. John, having the cross on one
side and the sword on the other, was a true sam-
ple of the adoption by the church of the military
methods of the pagan empire. The very word
"spiritual" had lost its signification. Ecclesi-
astics, if they were duly ordained ; buildings, if
they were properly consecrated ; and even lands,
if they belonged to the church, had become
"spiritual."

A beautiful legend of this epoch illustrates the
change which had passed over the spirit of the
church. According to this legend, Jesus Christ
comes back upon the earth, and shows himself
at a great auto dafe in Seville, where hundreds
of heretics are burned in his honor. He walks
about in the ashes of the martyrs. The common
people throng about him, and he blesses them.
The chief Inquisitor causes him to be arrested
and at midnight visits him in his cell. "You
are wrong," says the Inquisitor, "in coming
again to the earth to interfere in the work of
your church. You were wrong not to accept
the offer of the Tempter, wrong to undertake to
convert the world by silent and spiritual forces.

164 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

There are but three forces on earth which can
keep humanity in check, — the miracle, the mys-
tery, and the authority. You have rejected
them all, to proclaim a freedom and a love for
which mankind are not ready. It has been
necessary for the church to correct your work
and supplement it with the sword of Cjesar.
You also, to-morrow, shall be burned, for you
shall not be permitted to interfere with the
work of your church." Christ answers not a
word, looks into the eyes of the Inquisitor with
mild, familiar gaze, then stoops and kisses the
old man on his bloodless mouth. The old man
trembles, opens the cell door, and bids the Mas-
ter depart, never to return. Eloquently does
the legend indicate the change which had come
over the spirit of Christ's church since the days
of Christ.

And yet, if Christianity had been corrupted
by paganism, paganism had been ameliorated by
Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church was
not exceptionally cruel ; it shared the cruelty of
a cruel age. Really denying, it in form recog-
nized Christ's fundamental principle, that force
is not to be used in the maintenance of his king-
dom. It did not itself j)unish heresy. It tried
and condemned the heretic, and then turned him
over to the civil authorities to be punished for
the crime of which he was convicted. If the

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 165

state refused to punish crime and maintain order
and truth, the church absolved the citizens from
their allegiance to the king on the ground that
the king had failed of his solemn duty. If like
Frederick II. of Germany, the king was an in-
fidel, or like John of England, an apostate, the
church claimed the right to dethrone him and
put another and a loyal king in his place. But
the punishments inflicted for heresy were in-
flicted in the name of the state, to whose mercy
the church in terms always commended the
heretic.

The Roman Catholic bureaucracy, unlike that
of imperial Rome, was a democratic bureau-
cracy. The humblest person might, and some-
times did become Pope, and he earned that office
by services rendered, not always indeed to hu-
manity, but always to the church. The bro-
therhood which Christ had sketched existed in
fragmentary and modified forms in various mo-
nastic orders. The Latin tongue was adopted as
the language of the church under all skies and
in all nations. The church, by preaching the
unity of God, laid the foundation for a true
unity of Christendom. The confederation of
the churches throughout the Roman empire
created a common life. Poverty in one section
was felt as a common sorrow, and was alleviated
by contributions from the churches far and near.

166 THE EVOLUTION OF CURlSTIANITr.

The foundation of a public opinion was laid in
a system of instruction, which, emanating from
and ruled over by one head, was essentially
one, and by a spiritual life which, though cor-
rupted by gross superstitions, bound the church
together. The Poj)e was without any consider-
able army. His only force was this public ojjin-
ion which the church had created and kept alive.
It was before this public opinion that kings
trembled and bowed. It was to this public
opinion that finally the church itself was com-
pelled to bow.

Though the Bishop of Rome took the place of
the Emperor of Rome, and though allegiance
to him, not to the invisible Christ, became the
bond of union of the church, still the emperor
was not deified. He was not God, but the
Vicar of God. Households raised no altars
to his name; no church worshiped him; and
when at St. Peter's the Host, symbol of Christ,
was raised in air, Pope, cardinal, bishojj, priest,
altar boy, and peasant bowed together in rev-
erence before it.

The Reformation was primarily the protest
of the Teutonic race against the imperialism of
Rome. The doctrine that every man shall give
account of himself to God was Luther's war-
cry, and it became the central doctrine of Cal-
vinism. The early Reformers did not see the

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 167

full significance of this doctrine, but it neces-
sarily carries with it the abolition of the use
of force in the church. The last remnant of
Eoman militarism lingers in the ecclesiastical
trials of our day, whose only penalty upon the
offending clergyman is a new ecclesiastical affi-
liation, witli usually a larger congregation and
a greater influence and prestige than before.
Protestantism, abandoning the doctrine of force,
abandoned also the Roman emperor as the cen-
tre of the church, and loyalty to the Roman
emperor as its bond of union. But it did not
make Jesus Christ, as a personal and living
Master, its centre, nor has it been content to
make simple loyalty to him the only condition
of membership and the only bond of union. In
lieu thereof it offers three substitutes. The Re-
formed churches propose a creed; they recur
from Roman imperialism to Greek philosophy;
the church, from being an army, becomes a
school of philosophy. The Anglicans affirm an
apostolical succession; they recur to Judaism;
and propose, as the bond uniting their churches
in an organism, a spiritualized survival of the
Aaronic priesthood. Finally, the Independents
abolish church unity altogether ; and for a plan-
etary system substitute a universe of wandering
comets. Thus in the Protestant church of to-
day the use of force as a means of maintaining

168 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

authority is abandoned, though there is not yet
a frank recognition of the supreme authority
of conscience ; and offices are coming to be
places of service, not of authority, though the
distinction between the two functions is not
sharply drawn. But the j)roblem of church
unity remains still unsolved. The church of to-
day is still a composite. In it, more than in
any other organization, is the spirit of faith and
hope and love manifested. Its life is the life of
Christ, but its organization is still pagan, Jew-
ish, or a composite of the two. The organi-
zation of the church of Rome is a survival of
Caesarism; that of Anglicanism is a survival
of Judaism; that of the Reformed or Presbyte-
rian churches is a survival of Greek schools of
philosophy; and that of the Independents or
Congregationalists is a survival of Teutonic in-
dividualism.

What of the future? How shall the unsolved
problem of church unity be solved? Not by
going back to papal imperialism. There is, in-
deed, no danger to American civilization in the
papal church. The Inquisition will never be
revived. It belonged not to the church, but to
a barbarism which Christianity has already con-
quered. But the papal church is neither our
model nor our goal. It is a strange amalgam.
Its bloodless sacrifice of the Mass, its Eternal

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 169

City, its Pope and priesthood, are relics of the
sacrificial and hierarchical system of Judaism.
Its mediatorial theology, its intercession of
saints and angels, its adoration of images, and
its absolutism in government are relics of Ro-
man paganism. Its monasteries and convents
are curious specimens of the arrested develop-
ment of that brotherhood of man which has
found in our later days larger, better, and more
Christian expression. Its confessional for pri-
vate counsel, its absolution, giving public and
authoritative declaration of the forgiveness of
sins, and its self-sacrificing spirit, shown in
many a monk, missionary, and priest, all mani-
fest, though in forms somewhat archaic, the
spirit of the gospel, and furnish both inspira-
tion and suggestion to those who deny the au-
thority of the Church of Rome, and find no help
to their spiritual life in its Jewish and Roman
symbolism. Take it for all in all, the Christian
evolutionist sees in the Church of Rome, not
an antichrist, but a specimen of arrested Chris-
tian development, the remedy for which is not
war, but education, not theological polemics, but
the schoolhouse.

Nor will church unity be secured by accepting,
as the final word of God's Providence, Presby^
terianism. The creed is not the centre of the
church, loyalty to the creed is not the bond of

170 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

union. The intellect is divisive. Creeds are
not intended to unite men, but to separate them.
From the Nicene Creed down to the last creed of
Congregationalism, there is not one which had
not for its prime object the exclusion of certain
classes of men from the organization which
adopted the creed as its platform. The Nicene
Creed was framed to exclude the Arians; the
Decrees of the Council of Trent were framed to
exclude Protestants; the Westminster Confes-
sion of Faith was framed to exclude Arminians ;
the Episcopal Thirty -nine Articles were framed
to exclude Roman Catholics and Indeiiendents ;
and the latest creed of Congregationalism was
framed to exclude Unitarians and Universalists,
The church which adopts a creed as its centre,
and loyalty to a creed as its bond of union, is
a school of philosophy. Its assumed function is
to teach a system, not to proclaim a person.

Nor does Episcopacy answer the unanswered
problem of church unity. The bishops of the
Episcopal Church projDose four conditions of
Christian union, the Bible, the Nicene Creed,
the two sacraments, and the historic Episcopacy.
The first two conditions are Protestant, a revival
of Greek philosophy ; the second two conditions
are Roman and Jewish, a revival of a semi-im-
perial hierarchy. But the church is a circle,
not an ellipse; with one centre, not with two foci.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHURCH. 171

That centre is loyalty to Christ alone. It is
not loyalty to a Book, though the book gives us
information concerning the Christ ; it is not loy-
alty to a creed, though the creed may admirably
express the opinion of a noble age concerning the
Christ; it is not loyalty to an organization or
hierarchy, though that organization or hierarchy
may be admirably adapted to do the work of the
Christ ; and it is not loyalty to ceremonials, few
or many, though they may be splendid and use-
ful symbols of the spiritual life.

Nor are we to abandon the problem of church
unity altogether, and substitute for the church
of Christ an aggregation of individual and inde-
pendent assemblies. If the papacy is a survival
of Roman imperialism, Presbyterianism of Greek
philosophical schools, and Episcopacy of a Ju-
daic hierarchy, Independency is a survival of
Teutonic individualism ; as essentially incongru-
ous with the ideal toward which all churches
should set their face as are either of its sister
systems. The church of Christ, as Christ and
the Apostles depicted it, is an organic thing, with
a unity, an organic life, a historical continuity.
When the Apostle declares that the church is
the bride of the Lamb, it is not a Solomon's
harem he has in mind. When he declares that
the church is the body in which God taber-
nacles, he is not thinking of a number of dis-

172 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

jecta 7nembra. The river of God is not meant
to separate into multitudinous streams as it
nears the sea, like the Nile at the Delta. We
do not all come unto the unity of the faith and
of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a per-
fect man in Christ Jesus, by si)litting up into
warring sects with polemical creeds and pugilistic
piety. The glory of God in his church is not
best seen by breaking it up into bits, each with
its own peculiar shape and peculiar color, tum-
bled promiscuously together and showing a new
pattern with every turn of the kaleidoscope.
The church described in the New Testament is
a tree, rooted and grounded in Christ ; a body,
Christ the head; a household, Christ the father;
a kingdom, Christ the king. The true church
of Christ is one ; but the unity of the church lies
in the future. We shall not come to it until
we recognize that loyalty to Christ — the his-
toric Christ, the risen and living Christ — is
the sole condition of union, and in that union
is absolute liberty of thought, of worship, and
of action. Christ the only Pope, Christ the
only creed, they who possess Christ's spirit the
only apostolical succession; and all who are in
Christ one, because they are in him, and are
doing; his work.

CHAPTER VI.

THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY.

The first century of the Christian era was
morally the darkest in history. The apparent
splendor of the Eoman Empire did not conceal
from even its own thinkers the corruption which
foretold approaching dissolution. The moral
influences of the past seemed to have sj)ent
themselves, and no new power of righteousness
had arisen for Rome's redemption. Govern-
ment was an absolute despotism. Society was
divided into two classes — many paupers and
a few rich. Public corruption was not a pub-
lic disgrace. Gluttony and drunkenness were
fine arts, and licentiousness and prostitution a
religion. The laborers were slaves ; public edu-
cation there was none ; marriage was a partner-
ship dissoluble at the will of either partner.
In Palestine, also, there was decay, though yet
not so complete. Thanks to the system of pub-
lic education which Moses had founded, there
was a parochial school for the children of the
peasantry in every village that had a synagogue ;
thanks to the restrictions which Moses had put

174 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

about slavery and polygamy, there were few or
no slaves in Jewish households, and not a harem
in all Palestine. And yet even in Palestine the
church had fallen under the dominion of a cor-
rupt and infidel priesthood, who were agnostics
in their creed, though they were still ritualists
in their practice.

At this time there appeared a young man of
thirty whose brief life and simple teaching were to
reconstruct the social order. He never went be-
yond the bounds of his own little province. He
gathered a few hundred of the common peasan-
try about him, and talked to them of truth, duty,
love, God. He told them that the world was
not orphaned ; that it had a Father in heaven
who loved his children, cared for them, suffered
with them. He told them that all men were
brethren ; that distinctions between rich and
poor, high and low, cidtured and ignorant, be-
tween Hebrew and Greek, between Jew and
pagan, — differences of ritual, of creed, of condi-
tion, of race, — were of small consequence ; that
the only vital distinction was between righteous-
ness and unrighteousness, truth and falsehood,
virtue and vice, love and malice. He told them
that life was for service ; that to be useful was
to be great ; that to be self-denying was to be
happy ; that sorrow rightly borne was a blessing,
not a bane ; that the way to overcome evil

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 175

was by love and patience, not by force. Moses
had told the Jew to love his Jewish neighbor as
himself ; Jesus told him that the apostate and
heretical Samaritan was his neighbor. Moses
had forbidden cruel and disproportionate pun-
ishments ; only maim, he said, the one that
maims ; kill only the one who has killed. Christ
went further. Do not punish sin at all, he
said ; cure it. Love is better than justice ; a
penitentiary than a prison ; a reformatory than
a jail. Resist not evil ; do good to them that de-
spitefully use you. Moses had told them that
God was justice — too holy to clear the guilty ;
Jesus told them that God was love — so holy
that he would cure the guilty. He came as a
physician to cure the sin-sick. Forgiveness of
sin, deliverance from sin, was his mission. He
told them that not ignorance, nor wretchedness,
nor race, nor even sin separated the soul from
God. The more the soul needed God, the
readier was God to give the help of his com-
panionship.

He, however, made no attempt to reform the
institutions of society. He declared that mar-
riage was not a commercial partnership, but a
divinely ordained and ordered life, and he con-
demned free divorce ; but with this exception
he uttered no explicit directions respecting civil
or political institutions. As he prescribed no

176 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

ritual, creed, or ecclesiastical organization, so
he framed no civic order. He uttered no coun-
sels respecting forms of government, and one
cannot deduce from his teaching whether he
approved of monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, or
democracy. He said nothing respecting slav-
ery, the industrial organization which was then
almost universally prevalent. He made no at-
tempt to institute any system of public educa-
tion or to improve the schools which in Palestine
were connected with the Jewish synagogues.
It has been said that Jesus Christ was the first
socialist. This is certainly an incorrect, if not
an absolutely erroneous statement. It would be
more nearly correct to say that he was the first
individualist. The socialist assumes that the
prolific cause of misery in the world is bad social
organization, and that the first duty of the phi-
lanthropist is to reform social organizations.
Christ assumed that the prolific cause of misery
in the world is individual wrong doing, and he
set himself to the work of curing the individual.
He was not a reformer, he was a life-giver, and
giving life he left it to form its own social as
its own religious organizations. But he taught
both implicitly and explicitly that the effect of
the life which he gave would be to change radi-
cally the social organizations of the world. His
first preaching was as a herald proclaiming that

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 177

the kingdom of God was at hand. His first
great sermon, the only one which has been pre-
served to us in anything like completeness, was
an exposition of the principles which would un-
derlie and the spirit which would pervade this
kingdom. And the disciple who stood nearest
to him, and miderstood him best, declared in
the later years of his life, his faith in the social
and civic character of Christianity by the as-
sertion that the kingdoms of this world would
become the kingdom of our Lord and of his
Christ.

In order to understand the nature of the life
which Jesus Christ imparted, we must take into
account the Jewish religion, upon which, as on
a foundation, he based his own instructions. We
must remember that Judaism and Christianity
are the same religion, one in the bud, the other
in the blossom. Faith in man is as characteris-
tic of this religion as faith in God. According
to its teaching, the whole human race descends
from one pair and have one blood. The kin-
ship which unites men in one great brotherhood
is more fundamental and more enduring than
that which unites them in separate tribes, na-
tions, or races. Man, not a particular class or
clan of men, is made in God's image. To man
it is given to exercise dominion over all nature.
Sin is a fault not natural, but distinctly and

178 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

emphatically unnatural, contra-natural, against
man's true, real nature. The theology of Ju-
daism is based on the fundamental doctrine
that man is of kin to God. The religious ap-
peals of the prophets are to man's inherent
and indestructible divine nature. The civic
institutions of Judaism are based on the same
fundamental assimiptiou, — man's inherent ca-
pability to solve the problems of his own destiny
under the immediate guidance and direction of
God. When the Jewish commonwealth was to
be founded, the assent of the people was first
secured. Not even God would assume to be
their king until they had by popular sviffrage ac-
cepted him.^ The officers of the commonwealth
were similarly elected by popidar, if not by uni-
versal suffrage, and were responsible to the peo-
ple who had elected them. The problems of the
national life were discussed and determined by
two representative bodies, a Great Congregation,
answering to our House of Representatives, and
a Council of Elders, answering to our Senate.
Local self-government was provided for by the
organization of the nation into twelve tribes,
each with its separate territory. Govermnent
was divided into three great departments, the
legislative, the executive, and the judicial ; a
division which experience has since demonstrated

1 Exodus xix, 3-8.

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 179

to be essential to the continuance of freedom.
The adjustment of penalty to transgression was
not left to the discretion of judges, nor to that
of an imperial despot, but was determined by-
explicit and definite statutes. Neither landed
gentry nor hereditary caste was allowed in this
commonwealth. A priesthood was organized,
but it was forbidden any share in the distribu-
tion of the land, and was made dependent on
the voluntary contributions of the people. Ag-
riculture was encouraged, war was discouraged ;
slavery and polygamy were hedged about with
such restrictions that they both ceased to exist ;
the education of the common people was pro-
vided for, at first by itinerant prophets and
Levites, later by parochial schools connected
with the synagogues ; and when finally the re-
public became a monarchy, the appointment of
a king was permitted only as a concession to
public prejudice.^

To a people thus prepared by a conception
of human dignity unparalleled elsewhere among
the nations of the earth, comes the Christ. His
coming gives to all that believe in him a new
sense of the value and the dignity of mankind.
Whatever our estimate of Christ may be, the

1 A fuller exposition of the practical principles of the
Hebraic commonwealth will be found in my Jesus of Naza-
reth, chap. ii.

ISO THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

estimate of the Apostolic cliurcli is not doubt-
ful. Matthew saw in him the Messiah, the Son
of the Living God ; John beheld him the Word
of God made flesh and tabernacling among us.
Paid bowed the knee to him as one who, being
in the form of God, beggared himself that he
might be made in the form of a servant; the
unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
believed him to be the creator of the world, the
brightness of God's glory, and the express image
of his person. Put what philosophical interpre-
tation we may upon their expressions of primi-
tive faith, we cannot doubt that those who ut-
tered them saw in this coming of God into a
human life a new glorification of humanity.
The Roman, by deifying man had degraded the
conception of God ; the Christian, by humaniz-
ing God had glorified the conception of man.
For God had chosen man to be his tabernacle,
his dwelling place, his image, the medium for
his manifestation of himself.

Entering humanity, God entered into one
of the himiblest class. It was not priest or
king, but peasant child, whom he chose for his
indwelling. So entering life, he addressed him-
self to the lowest and the outcast. He recog-
nized a divinity in every man, and spake that
he might evoke and inspire that divinity. Him-
seK a peasant in his youth, he gathered his im-

EVOLUTION OF CHBISTIAN SOCIETY. 181

mediate disciples from the peasant class. The
nascent Christianity caught this spirit of its
founder and entered the Roman Empire at the
bottom. It passed by the rich and the noble, it
gathered its recruits from the freedmen and the
slaves. The message of the Christian religion
to a people living in hopelessness was one of
inspiration. You are, it said to them, the chil-
dren of God ; you have before you an immortal
destiny ; the world's deliverer, who is yet to be
crowned Lord of lords and King of kings, is
one of your own class, a peasant like yourseK ;
God has entered him that he may enter you,
and in him has glorified the humblest and the
lowest. Hmnan hearts responded to this trum-
pet-call of hope. Self-respect and with it mu-
tual respect were aroused in the hearts of a
class which had hitherto known only universal
contempt. The history of the first four cen-
turies of the Christian church is, politically
speaking, the history of a great popidar upris-
ing, the cause of which was the awakening of a
profound and inspiring religious life. When in
the fourth century Constantine yielded and made
Christianity the religion of the state, it was to a
new-born democracy lie yielded ; it was a new-
born democracy he summoned to be his ally.

In all subsequent history the power of the Ro-
man church was the power of the common peo-

182 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

pie. The Popes, in the epoch when their domin-
ion was least questioned, possessed no army of
any consequence. They appealed to the people,
and by their appeals to the people they ruled
over kings. It was democracy which in the per-
son of Leo III. crowned Charlemagne, and later
in the person of Gregory VII. kept the Emperor
of Germany shivering in a penitent's shirt, wait-
ing permission to enter the pontiff's presence.
The Reformation was a further uprising of a
more enlightened and a more free-spirited peo-
ple. It was Teuton versus Roman. Ahnost
the sole power of Luther in his battle with
Rome was the power of a public opinion which
Rome could neither supj^ress nor control. It
was public oj)inion which enabled Henry VIII.
to emancipate England from the political power
of the Poj)e ; which checked Bloody Mary in her
sanguinary course ; pushed on Queen Elizabeth
to a larger and more radical reformation than
she ever intended or desired ; dethroned and
beheaded Charles I., and dethroned and exiled
James II. ; and has by successive revolutions,
some of them peaceful and others warlike, com-
pletely changed the character, while preserving
the form, of the British Constitution.

This public opinion created by Christianity,
organized and solidified unconsciously by the
Roman Catholic Church, inspired with a new

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 183

spirit by tlie Teutonic incursion, and at once
creating and re-created by Protestantism, laid
here on this continent, in a Christian faith, the
foundation of a new form of government. The
Puritans in New England, the Dutch in New
York, the Roman Catholics in Maryland, the
Anglicans in Virginia, and the Huguenots in
France, widely as they differed from one an-
other in their denominational tenets, possessed
a common faith in God as the All Father, and
in man as his child. They derived from a com-
mon source — the Jewish and the Christian
Scriptures — that faith in the capacity of man
without which free institutions are impossible.

They thus prepared this country for that gov-
ernment by public opinion which is the essence
of a true democracy. Jefferson is reputed to
have said that if he had to choose between a
country with newspapers and without govern-
ment, and a coimtry with government and with-
out newspapers, he would choose the former.
To say that Americans have chosen the former
would be to sacrifice truth to antithesis ; but
they have developed a life in which newspapers
make and unmake governments. The news-
paper is the voice of public opinion, and it is
this fact which gives the press its power. The
voice is sometimes coarse, sometimes immoral,
oftener uiunoral ; but it faithfully repeats the

184 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

sentiments of its constituency. The newspaper
brings the community to a consciousness of its
own inner life. Each separate journal reflects
by its advertisements the trade, by its news
columns the conduct, by its editorials the
thoughts and feelings, of the world whose or-
gan it is. And every newspaper is an organ
of some constituency. Whenever it breaks away
from its constituency and misrepresents its read-
ers, it loses its power and prestige, as more than
one instance in the history of American jour-
nalism demonstrates. To thoughtful men the
condition of American journalism is far from
satisfactory ; the press of to-day is more enter-
prising than educative ; and there seems to be
even a decadence, moral and mtellectual, since
the days of Greeley, Raymond, Bryant, and
Bowles. But to the student of our national life
the reason is plain. Our public schools have
taught great masses of men to read who have not
yet learned to think ; and our more widely cir-
culated, not necessarily our more influential jour-
nals, represent a reading, but not a thoughtful
constituency. It is on the whole an advantage
to have life photographed ; it is well that half
the world shoidd know how the other half lives ;
and the evolutionist looks with hope for the day
when a better education will correct the e\als of
an imperfect education, and the press will im-

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 185

prove because the public whose voice it is has
improved.

Meanwhile we can hardly fail to see, whether
the fact inspires satisfaction or regret, that the
press is really more potent than legislatures.
To vacate one of the more influential editorial
chairs for a seat in Congress is a distinct descent
from a position of larger to one of lesser influence.
The press in reflecting helps also to shape pub-
lic opinion, which in turn creates legislatui'es and
coerces them to do its bidding. Our lawmakers
no longer really govern, nor even discuss prob-
lems of government ; they only embody in legal
forms the decisions to which the community has
come, by discussion in public assemblages and
through the public press. Every interest has to-
day its journal, and almost every interest its Con-
gTess. A Prison Congress outlines and demands
prison reform ; a Banking Association formu-
lates the principles of banking and currency to
be incorporated in state and national legislation ;
a Lake Mohonk Conference shapes the course of
the nation towards the Indians ; a Civil Service
Reform Association secures reform as fast as it
is able to create a public opinion favorable to
reform ; a Liquor Dealers Association demands
less restraint, and various temperance and Chris-
tian bodies demand more restraint, on the liquor
traffic, and legislation oscillates between the two,

186 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

almost exactly registering the state of public
opinion in each local community. Thus for a gov-
ernment of the one over the all (monarchy) and
government of the few over the many (oligar-
chy) has been substituted that self-govermnent,
through the power of a public opinion, which
gives, not indeed always the best mimediate gov-
ernment, but always the freest, the most progres-
sive, and the most hopeful for the future. It is
needless to trace in further detail the progress
of this development. Enough has been said in
this rapid survey to show that Christianity is
the source of that uprising in the individual
without which the uprising of the mass would
have been impossible. All good government is
aristocratic, that is, the government of the best
over the inferior. Various attempts have been
made in the world's history to select the best
class to rule over the inferior classes. Chris-
tianity evokes the best in each individual to rule
over his inferior self, and thus lays the founda-
tion for self-government in the community by
making possible self-government in the indi-
vidual.

If the reader believes this rapid survey of
the political history of Europe to be correct, he
will readily see that Christianity, in creating
government by public opinion, has with it cre-
ated great political and social changes. It is

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 187

not possible within the limits of a single chapter
to trace these changes in detail, nor is it neces-
sary. It is sufficient to indicate very briefly
some of the more important of them. He who
is interested in tracing them out more fully will
find the material in such works as Charles L.
Brace's " Gest» Christi," Dr. R. S. Storrs'
" Historical Evidences of Christianity," and
Lecky's " History of Christian Morals. "

I. Government has passed through one radi-
cal change, but only to enter upon another
which may possibly prove to be not less radical.
The earliest government was that of the family ;
and the earliest tribal and national governments
were formed upon the pattern of the family.
The king, as father of his nation, ruled over it.
He was thought to be endowed with a super-
natural grace and wisdom ; and his people were
regarded as children, quite unable to care for
themselves. Christianity has already proved to
the German race, and is convincing the Latin
races, that men are men, not children, and do
not need a political father to take care of them.
Under this tuition the first step is to take from
the king his paternal authority, to organize the
state upon the principle of the sovereignty of
the people, and to reduce government to the
minimum necessary in order to protect the com-
munity from wrong-doing at the hands of other

188 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

communities, and the individual in the commu-
nity from wrong-doing at the hands of other
individuals.

But already men are beginning to question
whether, if the individual can take care of him-
self without paternal interference, the commu-
nity cannot by common action take care of its
common interests. Undoubtedly it requires a
much higher degree of intellectual and moral
development for fifty million people to coijper-
ate in industrial partnership, than it does for
any individual to act alone, or in cooperation
with a few like-minded with himself. Socialism
affirms that men possess this higher intellectual
and moral capacity ; or if this is not yet their
possession, that it is within their reach. Thus,
under the influence of Christianity, with its
optimistic faith in man, — a faith quite incredi-
ble except as it is founded upon a faith in God
the All-Father, — government is undergoing a
transition through three successive stages, which
may be expressed by the words. Paternalism,
Individualism, Fraternalism. Even the ultra-
socialist is not, what he is sometimes called, a
paternalist. He is a fraternalist. His schemes
are founded on his belief, not in the incapacity,
but in the capacity of man. He does not pro-
pose that a paternal government shall do for
him, but that by communal action he shall do

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 189

for himself. Bossism has been driven from the
church ; is being driven from the state ; and
the socialist hopes that it will be driven from
the mine and the factory. What progress has
been made in free commonwealths in this direc-
tion is hardly realized by most men, so rapidly
and yet so silently have the changes been
wrought. It is less than a century since the
question was seriously discussed whether letters
could not be more advantageously carried by
private enterprise than by government. Now,
in England, the telegraph is a branch of the
post-office ; in Switzerland all express business is
conducted by the government ; in Australia all
railroads are owned and operated by the govern-
ment ; while city after city, both in this country
and abroad, has initiated mvmicipal industries,
including governmental ownership and control
of water supply, lighting, and transportation.
I make no mention of the progress in this di-
rection in Germany, where both banking and
insurance have become distinctly governmental
functions, since it may be a fair question
whether in Germany these are the products of a
paternal or a fraternal government. But on the
other hand, the student of modern history should
not overlook the fact that by far the greatest
proportion of the educational work of this coun-
try is carried on under the immediate direction

190 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

of the people themselves, and this in every
grade from the kindergarten to the university,
and even to the post-graduate and professional
school.

This movement toward fraternalism in gov-
ernment is still in its experimental stage, and
so far as the wisdom of these experiments de-
pends on the question of the proper function of
government, it is one about which Christianity
has nothing to say. It may well be that as
church and state are better separated, so are
church and industry. It may well be that the
organization which governs would better not be
the organization which carries on great indus-
trial enterprises, even those which are of a com-
mon concern. It would be foreign to my pur-
pose to enter upon that question here. It must
suffice to say that the Christian evolutionist
will, if he is consistent, base his objection to
state control or even to state ownership of rail-
roads, mines, telegraphs, banks, and other com-
mon enterprises, on some other ground than the
absolute and ineradicable incapacity of the com-
mon peojjle to control or even to conduct tliem,^

1 That I may not seem to my reader to come perilously
near a debated question only skillfully to evade it, I may add
that according- to my judgment industrial and political func-
tions are different; that any movement for enlarging the
functions of government in the direction of industrial enter-
prises should be very cautious ; but that I believe — subject

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 191

II. The relation of Christianity to science
may not be at first very evident ; for the Bible
contains no revelation of any scientific truths ;
the indications are that its wi'iters shared the
scientific opinions of their age ; and if Christ
himself knew better about the laws of nature
than did his contemporaries, it is certain that he
did nothing to enlighten them on that subject.
No important additions to the scientific know-
ledge of the race can, so far as I know, be at-
tributed to the early Hebrew people. But the
scientific development which characterizes this
age would have been impossible had it not been
for the inculcation of two moral principles by
the Bible, to both of which I have already re-
ferred.

The first is the Biblical teaching that nature is
subject to the dominion of men ; rather the pro-
founder teaching that the physical is wholly sub-
ject to the dominion of the spiritual. Nature is
depersonified in the first chapter of Genesis, and

to a change of mind as the result of actual experiment — that
the people have the right to conduct any public industrial
enterprises, the conduct of which is essential to their common
well being, such as street lighting, transportation, water sup-
ply, and the like, which upon actual experiment it appears
they can conduct more economically and efficiently for them-
selves, through public officials, than by entrusting them to
private enterprise and paying " what the business will bear."

192 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

never in tlie history of the Jews are there traces
of that personification which is ahnost universal
in other lands. We meet in Hebrew literature
with no sprites, or nymphs, or fauns, or gnomes,
or fairies, or Robin Goodfellows. God is im-
manent in nature ; and man as the son of God
shares God's mastery and dominion over nature.
So long as men believed that the lightning was
the thunderbolt of Jove, it was impossible that
they should attempt to catch it and send it on
their errands. The faith that all material things
are subject to a spii'itual lordship is essential to
scientific exploration, much more to scientific
dominion over nature.

Nor are the teachings and spirit of Christianity
less a prerequisite to all that phase of scientific
development which has for its inspiration a sense
of public weKare. A community which existed
only for a small wealthy class could not have
invented the press, the power loom, the photo-
graph, the railroad, the steamboat, and the tele-
graph. The secret of these great inventions has
been the uprising of the people, and their de-
mand for greater facilities and a larger life.
Thus faith which sees the superiority of the in-
visible to the visible, and love which seeks the
greatest good of the greatest number, have been
necessary partners in the scientific development
of the race ; and that scientific development has

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 193

been therefore not only confined to Christendom,
but chiefly to those regions and those epochs in
which Christian life and spirit have been most
pervasive.

III. It can hardly be necessary to point out
the very apparent fact that popular education
and Christianity have been both contempora-
neous and geographically co-terminous ; for the
schools of China cannot be said to furnish an
education, since they do not teach their pupils
to think. In the first century, as I have al-
ready pointed out, the only system of popular
education in the Roman Empire was that which
was organized in connection with the Jewish
synagogues, for the children of Jewish parents.
Primitive as were the methods employed, we
might learn something from them, for these
schools furnished both religious and industrial
education. As Christianity extended over Eu-
rope, it created both a desire for knowledge and
the schools to gratify that desire. Every mon-
astery and convent had its library ; many of
them their schools for the children of the town.
That we have to-day any copies of the Bible,
or of the Greek and Latin classics, is due to
the monastic libraries and the monastic copy-
ists. Modern agriculture dates from the ex-
perimental schools of the Benedictine monks.
The first seeds of the English revolution were

194 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

sown by the democratic teaching o£ the Fran-
ciscan friars in the towns and cities of England.
When public education had gone so far that it
became dangerous to the clergy, the clergy en-
deavored to halt it. But the mind refuses to
stop, let who will cry halt ! When ecclesiasti-
cism began to educate men, not for their own
sake, but for the sake of the church, democracy
took the work of self-education into its own
hands. The public school has taken the place
of the parochial school. The questions that
arise between the two are not those of method
merely. The message of the parochial school
is, Believe and obey. The message of the pub-
lic school is. Inquire and act. The one aims to
enforce authority, the other to give liberty ; the
one to build up out of obedient children a great
church, the other, out of independent thinkers, a
free commonwealth. The school will not asfain
nestle under the rafters of the monastery or
the church ; but it should not dishonorably for-
get its parentage because it has grown strong
enough to live alone.

IV. The change in criminal law wrought by
Christianity is equally plain, and may be indi-
cated in as few words. The punishments of
j)aganism were at first acts of personal ven-
geance. The next of kin was left to avenge the
murder of his relations. Public offenses against

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 195

the state were personal wrongs against the king,
and in the punishments inflicted he embodied
the vindictive justice of the state, when he did
not gratify his own vindictive passions. How
cruel were the punishments which were invented
under the inspiration of such a philosophy we
have ah'cady seen. Christianity declared that
it was not the function of men to judge and pun-
ish their fellow-men. Judge not, Christ said ;
vindictive justice does not belong to man. My
followers are to remit sin, not to avenge it. The
Roman Catholic Church has accepted this mis-
sion more fully than has the Protestant Church ;
and in this fact consists one great element of
her spiritual power. But, gradually, in the best
penological system we are approximating Chris-
tian philosophy. Our prisons are made peni-
tentiaries ; our jails reformatories. The most
advanced penologists have now nearly arrived
at the conclusions announced as premises by
Jesus Christ, eighteen centuries ago. The latest
and best form of penal administration treats the
criminal as it treats the lunatic, — imprisons
him, not to inflict vengeance on him for a crime
committed, but to cure him of the disposition
to commit crime in the future ; organizes its
punislunents, its industries, its schools, with re-
ference to creating a new habit of life and a new
nature in the criminal ; detains him in prison

196 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

until the reform is accomplisliecl ; and releases
him as soon as satisfactory evidence is afforded
that he has both the ability and the steadfast
purpose to live henceforth by honorable indus-
try. Thus redemption is substituted for ven-
geance as the end of punishment. The signifi-
cance of this revolution is hardly miderstood
even by those who have been promoting it ; still
less by the public, who desire only to inflict
their vengeance on the criminal, or to get rid
of him and forget him altogether. Space does
not allow me to trace here the gradual process
by which this evolution in criminal jurispru-
dence has been wrought, and show how to the
intervention of the church is due the early en-
grafting of the principle of mercy on the sys-
tem of so-called justice, — a principle which is
radically changing the original stock. It mast
suffice to remind the reader that the ecclesias-
tical system of penances and purgatory was the
first organized method of punishment in human
society of which the avowed end was not ven-
geance but reformation ; that the right of sanc-
tuary, the essential idea of which was derived
from the old Levitical " cities of refuge," was
the first attempt to alleviate the administration
of a rude justice by the principle of mercy ; and
that courts of equity were created to mitigate
the severity of Roman law in order to make the

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 197

results of jurisprudence accord with the demands
of a partially christianized conscience.

V. The same influence which gradually eman-
cipated the state from the despotic control of an
irresponsible despot gradually took the shackles
off the limbs of the laborer. The Jewish reli-
gion honored labor. One of its most ancient
traditions represents the first man as placed in
a garden to dress and to keep it. The patri-
archs, fathers of the race, were men of peaceful
industry, not warriors, except as self-protection
necessitated war. The greatest king of Israel,
David, and her two greatest prophets, Moses
and Isaiah, were taken from agricultural pur-
suits. The nation was bidden by its constitu-
tion to depend on a volunteer militia, to allow
no standing army. The Messiah whom the
Christians proclaimed as the deliverer of the
world was born as the son of a carpenter, and
had himself worked at the bench. His imme-
diate followers were peasants, who depended for
their livelihood on the work of their own hands.
This honor paid to toil was carried with Chris-
tianity wherever it went. In the opinion of the
Christian church, idleness was a disgrace, pov-
erty was not. At the same time the doctrine of
human brotherhood was not only preached by
the apostles of the new movement, but enforced
by the consideration that the time was short

198 TEE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

in which caste distinctions would be recognized.
As the church grew in power, the one distinction
between clergy and laity dwarfed all others.
Thus while the slave was taught that he was a
son of God, the master was taught to treat his
slaves as a brother in the household of faith.
Christianity and Roman slavery coidd not co-
exist. At fii'st, emancipation was of individ-
uals, then of increasmg nmnbers. " St. Melanie
was said to have emancipated 8000 slaves ; St.
Ovidius, a rich martyr of Gaul, 5000 ; Chroma-
tious, the Roman prefect under Diocletian, 1400 ;
Hermes, a prefect in the reign of Trajan, 1250.
. . . Numerous charters and epitaphs still re-
cord the gift of liberty to slaves throughout the
Middle Ages, for the benefit of the soul of the
donor or testator. ... In the twelfth century
slaves were very rare. In the fourteenth cen-
tury slavery was almost imknown." ^ Despite
many assertions to the contrary, despite some
ground for them in a practical apostasy from
Christian principle within the church of Christ,
it may be safely affirmed that emancipation in
Great Britain and in this country would not
have been possible but for the influence of Chris-
tianity in awakening and strengthening those
sentiments of humanity which finally proved too
strong for the political and commercial influ-
1 Lecky's History of European Morals, ii. 73-76.

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 199

ences leagued together to perpetuate and extend
the slave-power.

The abolition of slavery is, however, but one
step of that continuous and progressive change
in the industrial condition of mankind which is
due to Christianity. The end is not yet. That
change is seen in four successive stages : first,
slavery, in which the capitalist owns the laborer ;
second, feudalism, in which the capitalist owns
the land and has a lien upon the laborer, who is
attached to the land ; third, individualism, in
which the laborer is free to come and go where
and as he will, and competition is relied upon
to equalize and adjust property rights and the
distribution of wealth ; fourth, the wages-system,
under which a few men become the owners of
all implements of industry, including the land,
the great highways of conunerce, and, under our
patent laws, the great forces of nature, and the
many use these implements of industry in pro-
ductive toil for such wages as can be agreed
upon by the two parties. This is not worse
than slavery, as it is sometimes said to be, but
infinitely better, — if for no other reason, be-
cause the workingman is free. Nor will Ruskin
and Carlyle be able to carry us back to the
feudal system, with its pseudo-charity and its
real oppression. Yet neither is it the finished
kingdom of God. A system of industry under

\.

200 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

I which one man may acquire in a lifetime as
much money as Adam could have laid by out of
his earnings, if he had lived till our time and
saved one hundred dollars each working day, is
not a perfected system of human brotherhood.
A system under which men and women have to
work twelve or fourteen hours a day in order to
earn bread enough to sustain life ; under which
little children are set to work when they should
be at school ; under which Eve, worn out by the
burden of child-bearing, has also to bear Adam's
burden of ill-remunerated toil ; under which
God's universal gifts to his children, — fresh air,
sunlight, pure water, and the soil, — are denied
to hundreds of thousands, who are doomed to a
life of drudgery in unsanitary conditions, and
without hope of self-improvement, this is not the
ideal brotherhood which the Master came to es-
tablish upon the earth. Nor will that brother-
hood be established until the democracy of
political power, founded on a democracy of re-
ligion and education, shall be accompanied by
an industrial democracy ; until the tool workers
have become also the tool owners, and class
antagonisms are settled by the simj^le expedient
of making the same class both cajiitalist and
laborer ; until labor of brain and hand counts
for more than money in the world's market, and
the present aphorism of political economy is

EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. 201

revolutionized, and capital, not labor, money not
men, is the commodity to be hired in the cheap-
est market.

If to any of my readers these seem revolu-
tionary sentences, I can only remind them of
the accusation brought against Paul and his
associates, " They have turned the world upside
down ; " and add my conviction that the accusa-
tion was quite true. Christianity is turning the
world upside down, and will not cease so to do
until the world is right-side up. That all ser-
vice is honorable and all idleness is a disgrace ;
that to get money by whatever strategy without
furnishing an equivalent is a dishonorable spoli-
ation ; that wealth is a trust, and that men are
to be measured, not by what they possess, but by
what use they make of it ; that things are for
men, not men for things, and that any civiliza-
tion is wasteful which grinds up men and wo-
men to make cheap goods ; that industry is not
righteously organized until it is so organized
that every honest and willing worker can fuid
work, and find work so remunerative as to give
him and his cliildren an opportunity for self-
development as well as for mere life — these are
some of the axioms of the Christianity of Jesus
Christ.

The evolution of Christianity will not be com- •
plete until on these principles the social and

202 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

industrial structure of modern society is built,
and there is much for the reformer to do before
this consummation is finally and fully accom-
plished.

CHAPTER VII.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL.

How does man come to a divine manhood? Is
tlie process of redemption consistent with the doc-
trine of evolution ? Can the doctrine of redemp-
tion be stated in the terms of an evohitionary
philosophy ? Christlieb has said that the whole
Christian creed can be stated in two words, sin
and salvation. Are these two articles of our
common Christian faith consistent with the doc-
trine that all life, spiritual as well as physical,
proceeds by a " continuous progressive change,
according to certain laws, and by means of resi-
dent forces "? If not. Christian faith and evo-
lutionary philosophy are inconsistent, and we
must conclude either that evolutionary philoso-
phy is false ; that Christian faith is false ; or
that spiritual life is not subject to the law of
all other forms of life. For any belief which
eliminates these two articles, sin and salvation,
from the Christian creed destroys it altogether.
It may leave us theists, but not Christians.

The evolutionary philosophy is certainly not
consistent with the popular statement of either

204 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

I sin or salvation. That statement is briefly this :
God made man perfect. By an act of voluntary
disobedience man feU. As a result of that fall,
aU his descendants became either depraved, i. e.,
inherently inclined to sin (the New School the-
ory), or sinful, i. e., inherently guilty before
God and deserving of his condemnation, inde-
pendent of any voluntary conscious act com-
mitted by the individual (the Old School the-
ory). From this lost and ruined condition,
produced by Adam's Fall, man is to be restored
to that perfect condition in which he was origi-
nally created. By this process of grace, either
all men will be restored to Adamic perfection
(Universalism) ; or a certain number of men
specially selected for such restoration by God,
the rest of whom he has been pleased to pass by
(Calvinism) ; or a certain number self-selected,
namely, all who choose to repent of their sin and
accept Christ in this life (Arminianism) ; or in
addition, those who, not having understood the
terms of salvation in this life, receive and accept
them in a life to come (the Doctrine of Future
Probation) ; or finally, all those who, wdthout
ever having heard of divine grace, possess such
character and disposition that they would have
accepted the divine grace if they had known
about it (Modern New England Theology).
This restoration is, at least in its inception, an

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 205

instantaneous act. It is in no sense a gradual
change. The subject of it passes at once from
darkness into the light, as one emerges at a
given instant, in a swiftly moving train, from
a tunnel into the sunshine, or wakes from a
long sleep to find the room flooded with day-
light. Formerly the soul was expected to know
the month, day, hour, of the transition. If he
did not, his conversion was looked upon with
suspicion. Theologians still generally regard
the change as instantaneous, though it is prac-
tically conceded that in a majority of cases the
time of the change cannot be definitely known.
The soul creeps back into Eden and knows not
when it has passed the cherubim with the flam-
ing sword. The wilderness has become so blos-
soming and joyful that the transition is not
marked. But the commonly accepted theory re-
mains the same : an original state of perfection ;
a fall by a representative of the race ; a con-
sequent universal condition of sinf idness ; and
a restoration to that state from which the race
feU. 1

^ This view is not always, nor indeed generally, consistently
held. A friend of mine a few years ago heard a sermon in a
back country district, in which the preacher contended that
Adam was made acquainted by direct revelation with all that
modern discovery and invention has given to us, that his
knowledge was passed down by tradition to his descendants,
that it was gradually lost as a result of the Fall, that this

206 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

Now the doctrine of the Fall and of redemp-
tion, as thus stated, is inconsistent with the
doctrine of evolution. It is impossible to recon-
cile the two. Evolution declares that all life
begins at a lower stage and issues through a
gradual development into a higher ; the theology
just described affirms that man was made at the
highest stage and fell to the lower: evolution
declares that life is a continuous and progressive
change ; this theology, that spiritual life always
begins in an instantaneous transformation : evo-
lution, that each stage in the process of life is
a step into a new life never before possessed ;
this theology, that the end of all spiritual pro-
gress is a return to a life once possessed,
now lost. Evolution is quite consistent with
theism, — with the doctrine that God made the
world and rules over it, working out his pur-
poses of love ; with the doctrine that the world

traditional knowledge was the secret of the so-called " lost
arts," and that the human race, through redemption, is gradu-
ally recovering the intelligence as well as the moral and spir-
itual perfection originally enjoyed by Adam and Eve. Few
theologians, however, would now take so consistent a view as
this ; the original doctrine of fall and salvation is generally
combined in modern preaching with a doctrine of quasi evolu-
tion both intellectual and moral ; the concession is made to
the spirit of the age, that in many respects the modern Nine-
teenth Century Anglo-Saxon is superior to our First Parents.
I am not aware of any attempt to reconcile this modern view
with the doctrine of the Fall in its original form.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 207

is gradually growing better under the ministry
of his gracious and loving presence. But to
many it seems, as it once seemed to me, incon-
sistent with the two cardinal doctrines of the
Christian faith, — sin and salvation ; to deny
the two most fundamental tenets of Christian
revelation and of Christian experience ; to re-
duce sin to a mere imperfection and immaturity ;
and redemption to a mere process of growth and
ripening.

If I were still of the same opinion, I should
not be a Christian evolutionist. For philosophy
must take account of all the phenomena of
life ; and a substantially universal consciousness
testifies to the reality of sin and remorse. No
philosophy can be true which ignores this testi-
mony. I accept the evolutionary philosophy as
an interpretation of the spiritual life, because I
have come to believe that, rightly apprehended,
it gives a more rational and self -consistent inter-
pretation to the great facts of sin and redemp-
tion than did the unevolutionary philosophy
which accounted for sin by the Fall of our first
parents, and made redemption consist of a re-
storation to the condition which they had lost.
The reader will pardon me if, in stating the
grounds of my present convictions on this sub-
ject, I state in an autobiographical form the pro-
cess by which I was led to them.

208 THE EVOLUTION OF CHBISTIANITY.

When tlie evolutionary philosophy first began
to be discussed in theological circles, the pro-
gressive theologians put all their strength into a
discussion of the relation of evolution to theism.
They showed, and as it seemed to me showed
conclusively, not only that the two were not in-
consistent, but that evolution gave a grander
view, both of creation and providence, than did
the old philosophy, which made the one an in-
stantaneous act and the other a constant inter-
ference. But the real question, the relation of
evolution to redemption, they did not discuss at
all. ^ Jesus Christ came into the world to save
sinners. If there were no sinners, only imma-
ture men, how could there be either a salvation
or a Saviour ? And clearly, sin and immaturity
are not the same. The immaturity of a child is
charming. Who would desire to see him a little
old man ? But the willful wickedness of a child
is not charming ; it is odious. Evolution, in de-
nying, as it logically must, the doctrine of the
fall of the race in Adam, seemed to me to deny
the common sinfulness of the race, which I had
been accustomed to trace back to Adam's Fall.
Being accustomed all my life to gather my
theology from the Bible, I went to the Bible to

1 I desire to express my indebtedness for the first light I
received on this subject to an address delivered by Dr. R. W.
Raymond before the Congregational Club of New York city.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 209

make a fresh investigation of this subject. In
this investigation it was early made clear to me
that the Bible lays no such stress upon the Fall
as the ecclesiastical systems have done. There
is an account of the Fall in the third chapter
of Genesis ; but elsewhere in the Old Testa-
ment, no direct reference to it. The law does
not mention it ; the Old Testament historians
do not refer to it ; the poets and the prophets
do not so much as allude to it.^ In the New
Testament the reticence is equally marked and
significant. Christ never mentions Adam's Fall.
Neither does Jolm, nor Jude, nor Peter. Neither
Peter nor Paul refers to it in their reported
sermons. Paul once gives an account of it in
one of his Epistles ; but that in a parenthesis.
The whole parenthesis might be taken out, and
the argument would be unaffected, save by the
loss of an incidental illustration. In two or
three other passages he refers to it incidentally,
as in the phrase, " As in Adam all die, even so
in Christ shall all be made alive." But he never
treats it as a fundamental and essential fact.
In his opening chapter of the Epistle to the

1 The only Old Testament references given to tlie Fall by
the Westminster Confession of Faith, apart from Gen. iii.,
are Ecclesiastes vii. 29 ; Psalm li. 5 ; Job xiv. 4 ; xv. 14 ;
Jeremiah xvii. 9. Some of these references indicate cer-
tainly hereditary depravity, but no one of them, unless Eccle-
siastes vii. 29, even remotely suggests a Fall.

210 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

Romans, where he brings his terrible indictment
against Jew and Gentile, that he may show that
all the world is guilty before God, though he
gathers both from observation of life and the Old
Testament material for this indictment, he makes
no reference to any doctrine of a Fall. His only
references to it are in arguments addressed to
a people who already believed in it, and are
made for the purpose of showing them that
grace must be as universal as the race, because
sin is as universal. This investigation made it
first of all clear to me that, whether the doctrine
of Adam's Fall were true or not, it occupied in
the theology of the Bible no such place of prom-
inence as it has occupied since in the scholastic
systems of theology.

Pursuing this inquiry further, I began to ask
myself who wrote the account of the Fall in Gen-
esis, and how in literature should this account
be classified. The book in which this account is
found is quite anonymous ; there is no word in it
to indicate who is its author. An ancient tradi-
tion attributes it to Moses ; modern scholarship
to an unlaiown author many centuries subsequent
to Moses. If we accept the ancient tradition
and attribute the book to the most ancient date
assigned to it by any scholar, and then accept
the chronology given in the margins of our Eng-
lish Bibles, the history was written twenty-five

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 211

centuries after the fall of Adam occurred.
How did the wi"iter obtain his knowledge of
the event ? He was not present, nor is there any
reason to suppose that Adam or Eve wrote the
narrative. It is not, then, the testimony of an
eyewitness. Did God reveal the facts to the
historian ? The historian makes no claim to
have received any such revelation. Presump-
tively he gathered his materials, as other his-
torians gather theirs, from such sources as were
accessible to him, — legends, myths, traditions.
This presumption is strengthened by the fact
that such materials are found in ancient legends
of other nations and in the Chaldean tablets,
whose age is at least as great as that of the
Book of Genesis. It is further strengthened by
a caref id scrutiny of the Book of Genesis, which
has enabled the scholars to separate it, hypothet-
icaUy, into the narratives of which it was com-
posed. It receives additional confirmation from
the nature of the story of Eden, which, if found
anywhere save in Hebrew literature, woidd at
once be characterized by the reader as poetic
and imaginative, not as scientific and historical.
Finally, separating the Book of Genesis into its
component parts, I found that in one of the nar-
ratives of which it is composed, — the one con-
taining the incomparable account of the crea-
tion embodied in the first chapter of Genesis,

212 THE EVOLUTION OF CHBISTIANITY.

— there was nowhere, directly or indirectly,
any reference to an Eden or a Fall. It thus be-
came very clear to me that the doctrine, " In
Adam's Fall, we sinned all," which was the
first item of theology taught me in my child-
hood, is not the fundamental doctrine which I
had once held it to be ; that, on the contrary,
it furnishes a very unsubstantial foundation for
the elaborate theological superstructure which
has been reared Tipon it. It took me some years
of study and reflection to reach this conclusion,
and it will not be strange, if the reader, accus-
tomed to think that the doctrine of the Fall is
woven into the very structure of the Bible, be-
cause he has found it woven into the very struc-
ture of the creeds, is slow to accept at my hands
this contrary conclusion ; but I must here as-
smne it as established, and go on to a further
investigation of the question what light philos-
ophy and science throw upon the origin and
nature of man, and upon the phenomena of sin
and remorse, of jjardon and peace.

What, then, is man ? and what his origin and
the law of his development ?

Comparative physiology and anatomy make it
clear that he is an animal ; sub-kingdom, verte-
brate ; class, manunal ; order, apes. Whatever
the historic origin of the race, embryology makes
it clear that the origin of each individual of the

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 213

race is animal, and that he passes in the earlier
stage of his existence through processes of devel-
opment analogous to, if not precisely the same
as, those through which other animals of the
same general class and order pass. Comparative
philology and scientific anthropology, so far as
we can trace animal life back to prehistoric peri-
ods, lead towards the conclusion that all races of
men not only have a common origin, but one in
conunon with other Idndred animals. Finally this
conclusion is confirmed by the general results
of investigation in other departments of life, —
material, animal, social, political, historical, —
which have led substantially all scientific stu-
dents to the conclusion that all life proceeds by
a "continuous progressive change, according to
certain laws, and by means of resident forces."

The objections to the theory that man himself
has been developed in accordance with this law
from a lower animal order are four, — the senti-
mental, the scientific, the Biblical, and the re-
ligious.

The sentimental is expressed by the now fa-
miliar joke : So, you think your grandfather
was an ape? But to have ascended from an
ape is not more ignominious than to have as-
cended from a clay man. Whether God has
put a divine spirit into the animal man is a
question of fundamental religious significance,

214 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

and we will consider it presently : but how he
prepared this animal habitation for the indwell-
ing of the divine spirit, whether by an instanta-
neous creative act or by a gradual evolutionary
process, is a question with no religious signifi-
cance whatever. It is to be determined wholly
by scientific considerations.

The scientific objection is that there are gaps
both in historical and in physiological continu-
ity ; that, on the one hand, the famous " miss-
ing link " between primitive man and the ape
has never been found by geological research ;
and, on the other, that to-day the difference be-
tween the brain capacity of man and that of the
ape constitutes a gap which the evolutionary
hypothesis is unable to bridge, — a difference
freely and frankly admitted by the greatest
exponents of evolution.^ It is not necessary

^ Thus Darwin, in The Descent of Man : "We have seen in
the last chapter that man bears in his bodily structure clear
traces of his descent from some lower form ; but it may be
urged that, as man differs so greatly in his mental power from
all other animals, there must be some error in this conclusion.
No doubt the difference in this respect is enormous, even if we
compare the mind of one of the lowest savages, who has no
words to express any number higher than four, and who uses
no abstract terms for the commonest objects or affections,
with that of the most highly organized ape. The difference
would, no doubt, still remain immense, even if one of the
higher apes had been improved or civilized as much as a dog
has been in comparison with its parent-form, the wolf or

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 215

for me here to reproduce the scientific answer
to this objection, for this is not a scientific trea-
tise. It must suffice to say that he who is not
a scientific expert must be content to await
the final judgment of those who are experts on
this subject, and meanwhile accept tentatively
their conclusion ; and that conclusion, arrived
at with substantial unanimity by all who have
investigated this subject, is that the scientific '
objections to the doctrine of the evolution of '
man from a lower animal order are insignificant \
in comparison with the evidence in support of ^
that hypothesis and the objections to any other.
Thus Le Conte, himself a Christian believer, de-
clares that " evolution, therefore, is no longer
a school of thought. The words evolutionism
and evolutiojiist ought not any longer to be

jackal. The Fuegians rank among the lowest barbarians ;
but I was continually struck with surprise how closely the
three natives on board H. M. S. Beagle, who had lived
some years in England, and could talk a little English, resem-
bled us in disposition, and in most of our mental faculties."
(Vol. i. 133.) Similarly Huxley, in Evidences as to Ma7i^s Place
in Nature : " It must not be overlooked, however, that there
is a very striking difference in absolute mass and weight be-
tween the lowest human brain and that of the highest ape —
a difference which is all the more remarkable when we recol-
lect that a full grown Gorilla is probably pretty nearly twice
as heavy as a Bosjes man, or as many an European woman.
It may be doubted whether a healthy human adult brain ever
weighed less than thirty one or two ounces, or that the heavi-
est Gorilla brain has exceeded twenty ounces" (p. 231).

216 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

used, any more than gravitationism and gravi-
tationist ; for the law of evolution is as certain
as the law of gravitation. Nay, it is far more
certain." In view of such a statement from
such a source, it is decorous for the non-expert
in science to pass by without discussion the sci-
entific objection to the doctrine.

The Biblical objection I have already consid-
ered ; the religious or spiritual objection de-
serves some further consideration. This objec-
tion is, in brief, that evolution degrades and
dishonors man ; denies the divinity in him ;
despoils him alike of his divme parentage, his
present hopes and expectations, and his immortal
future ; reduces him from a child of God to a
child of the beast. If this were true, it would
be conclusive. For consciousness is the final
factor in the determination of every problem ;
and no scientific hypothesis could be true which
set itseK against the testimony of consciousness
bearing witness to every man that there is in
him a divine personality and an illimitable
destiny.

Man is an animal ; but he is more than an
animal. To say of a man, " He is a perfect
brute," is not to pay him the highest possible
compliment. Nor is the difference between him
and the highest animals one of physical pecu-
liarities merely. A two-handed ape would not

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 217

be a man, nor a four-footed man an ape. Each
would be simjsly a freak of nature. Nor is it
that one possesses only instinct, and the other
reason. Philosophy has long since abandoned
the endeavor to maintain that sharp distinction
between reason and instinct which was assumed
by the older philosophies. Observation has
noted many illustrations of reasoning power, of
a limited degree, in the higher animals.^

But one looks in vain in the animal race for
those moral and spiritual elements which are
characteristic of men. The conscience of the
dog is caught from his master, and he can with
equal facility be taught that it is a virtue or a
vice to steal. Reverence for invisible qualities
or for an invisible power is rarely, if ever, want-
ing in even the lowest types of manhood, and

1 The books are full of well-authenticated instances of
reasoning in dogs, horses, and elephants. One, if I remember
aright, told by Philip Gilbert Hanierton, may serve as a type.
A spaniel, who had been taught that he must not go upon the
garden beds, was observed attempting to drive a hen and
cliickens from the garden. They ran among the beds, while
he ran round the beds, from path to path, in a vainly wild at-
tempt to expel them. Suddenly he was seen to drop down in
the path with his nose between his paws, as if in meditation ;
then to spring suddenly again to his feet, make a dart, catch
one of the chickens in liis mouth and start for the garden gate.
The mother ran clucking after him, the brood followed her.
Once outside the gate he dropped the chicken unharmed, and
trotted up to the house, wagging his tail. If this was not rea-
son, what was it ?

218 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

never discoverable in the highest type of the
animals. Worship of some sort is substantially
universal with mankind, and unknown except
among mankind. The ants have their slaves,
the bees their warehouses, the beavers their col-
onies ; bvit nowhere sign of temple, priesthood,
or worship. In men alone is there the possi-
bility of illimitable development. The end of
education in the best trained animal is soon
reached. Every new acquirement of man adds
to his moral and intellectual power and in-
creases his moral intelligence. He carries in
himself the evidence that he is of kin to the
Infinite, because he never reaches enduring sat-
isfaction in what he has secured, but ever finds
therein a new incentive to seek something yet
to come. Thus the animal is, while man never
is, but always is becoming. Whence did he
receive this divine, this immortal, this midying,
this illimitable life ? Is the author of the first
chapter of Genesis correct ? Did God at some
moment in man's upward career, by an instan-
taneous act, breathe the breath of a divine life
into man ? Or are we to accept the theory of
the radical evolutionists, as interpreted by Le
Conte and Darwin, and believe that this higher
nature of man was developed out of the lower
animal instincts, as the body of men out of an
earlier and inferior form ? This latter hypo-

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 219

thesis must be regarded as yet among the un-
proved hypotheses of science ; with more at
present, it seems to me, against than for it.
But the question is one of science, not of reli-
gion, and we may well leave it for science to
determine. Religion has to do with the present
and the future, not with the past, — save as it
disentangles us from the past for the future.
It knows but three words. Duty, Destiny, God.
Religion may well leave science to determine
the question where man came from, and devote
itself to the question what man is and what he
can become. The candid reader, desirous only
of the truth, will gladly recognize that the most
skeptical of evolutionists affirms the existence
in man of moral and spiritual qvialities which
differentiate him from the animal, and agrees
with the orthodox believer that man possesses a
divine nature and a divine destiny.

Says Mr. Huxley : "I have endeavored to
show that no absolute structural line of demarca-
tion, wider than that between the animals which
immediately succeed us in the scale, can be
drawn between the animal world and ourselves ;
and I may add the expression of my belief that
the attempt to draw a physical distinction is
equally futile, and that even the liighest facul-
ties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate
in lower forms of hfe. At the same time, no

220 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

one is more strongly convinced than I am of the
vastness of the guK between civilized man and
the brutes ; or is more certain that, whether
from them or not, he is assuredly not of them.
No one is less disposed to tliink lightly of the
present dignity, or despairingly of the future
hopes, of the only consciously intelligent deni-
zen of this world. We are indeed told by those
who assume authority in these matters that the
two sets of opinions are incompatible, and that
the belief in the unity of origin of man and
brutes involves the brutalizatiou and degrada-
tion of the former. But is this really so?
Could not a sensible child confute, by obvious
arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would
force this conclusion upon us? Is it indeed
true that the poet, or the philosopher, or the
artist, whose genius is the glory of his age, is
degraded from his high estate by the undoubted
historical probabihty, not to say certainty, that
he is the direct descendant of some naked and
bestial savage, whose intelligence was just suffi-
cient to make him a little more cunning than
the fox, and by so much more dangerous than
the tiger ? Or is he bound to howl and grovel
on aU fours because of the wholly unquestion-
able fact that he was once an egg, which no or-
dinary power of discrimination could distinguish
from that of a dog ? Or is the philanthropist

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 221

or the saint to give up his endeavors to lead a
noble life because the simplest study of man's
nature reveals, at its foundations, all the selfish
passions and fierce appetites of the merest qua-
druped ? Is mother-love vile, because a hen
shows it ; or fidelity base, because dogs possess
it ? . . . Our reverence for the nobility of man-
hood wiU not be lessened by the knowledge that
man is in substance and in structure one with
the brutes ; for he alone possesses the marvel-
ous endowment of intelligible and rational
speech, whereby, in the secular period of his ex-
istence, he has slowly accumulated and organized
the experience which is almost wholly lost with
the cessation of every individual life in other
animals ; so that now he stands raised upon it,
as on a mountain-top, far above the level of
his humble fellows, and transfigured from his
grosser nature by reflecting here and there a
ray from the infinite source of truth." ^

I conclude, then, that the doctrine that man is
developed from a lower animal order is not in-
consistent with the teaching of the Bible, if the
Bible be interpreted as itself the history of the
development of religious thought and life, the
life of God in the soul of man, as I have en-
deavored to interpret it in the second chapter of
this volmne ; nor is it inconsistent with the spir-
1 Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature^ page 234.

222 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

itual consciousness of man, — his consciousness
of a divine life wliicli makes him more than an
animal and links him to God.

Nor does it militate against the doctrine of
redemption. On the contrary, it gives a nobler
and grander conception of redemption than was
ever afforded by the doctrine of Adam's fall.
For the evolutionist sees in redemption, not a
mere restoration of man to a former state of in-
nocence, but a process of divine development
which, beginning with man just emerging from
the animal condition, carries him forward, from
innocence, through temptation, fall, and sin, into
virtue and holiness. To make this clear, I ask
the reader, laying aside doubtful questionings
as to the prehistoric history and development of
the race, to trace with me in the rest of this
chapter the actual progress of a soul, as we see
it in life, from the cradle to a truly heroic and
saintly manhood.

The babe is innocent. No theology can make
the mother really believe that the soul which
looks trustingly up to her through those eloquent
eyes is guilty, " under the wrath and condem-
nation of God." But the innocence of the babe
is the innocence of ignorance. It is guiltless of
wrong-doing because it does not know the differ-
ence between right and wrong ; innocent, but
lawless ; not yet brought under law. It is a

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 223

little animal. It knows only how to suckle and
to cry. It is without power of self-control by
intelligent consciousness and will, because intel-
ligent consciousness and will are not yet evoked.
It is greedy, has no control of its appetite,
clamors and cries for its mother's breast, does
not sip daintily and delicately, but drinks greed-
ily, like every other animal. It is predatory,
by nature a robber, but as innocent in its rob-
bery as the magpie. It sees another baby on
the floor, enjoying a rattle, crawls across, assails
the possessor of the wealth, seizes it, and has no
consciousness of wrong-doing. As it has to learn
how to use eyes and hands and feet, so it has to
learn how to use reason, consciousness, reverence,
love. Little by little it learns that it is in a
world of law. Fire teaches it that some things
cannot be touched with safety; sour or bitter
tastes, that all things cannot be put into the
mouth with comfort. If the mother be wise, the
child early begins to learn, by mother's prohibi-
tions enforced by mother's penalties, that there
are also moral laws. It begins to eat the fruit
of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Con-
science is awakened ; and conscience begins to
legislate and to enforce its legislation. Thus by
law comes a knowledge of sin. As the life en-
larges, the experience of law increases. Brothers
and sisters enforce unwritten law. The child

224 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

goes to school. The laws of the school-fellows
are more numerous and more exacting than the
laws of the school-master. Busmess life creates
new relations, and discovers new laws of busi-
ness honor. Citizenship reveals still another
code, or, to sj)eak more accurately, other appli-
cations of the one law of love. Marriage in-
troduces the young man to another life, with
obligations of chivalry, husband-love and father-
love, protection of the weak and the defenseless.
Thus each new development of life brings with
it a new revelation of duty. In each stage of
life the growing man conies to a new Mt. Sinai.
And with the growing consciousness of law, en-
forced by penalties, — paternal, governmental,
social, or self-inflicted, — comes an ever-growing
sense of right and wrong ; an ever-growing con-
sciousness of the praiseworthiness of right con-
duct and the blameworthiness of wrong conduct.
The little animal is growing up into manhood ;
and the process of this growth is a process in
which, by successive stages, it is brought into the
consciousness of a moral law, and so into the
consciousness of a higher than a mere animal
nature.

This process of growth by law, enforced by
penalties which are inflicted by authority with-
out or consciousness within, is essential to moral
character. And essential to this process of

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 225

growth is temptation, that is, the conflict be-
tween the higher and the lower nature. Only
through temj^tation conies virtue, that is, the
subjection of the lower to the higher nature ;
and incidental to temptation is sin, that is, the
subjection of the higher nature to the lower.
Without this growth of moral consciousness
— this emergence from the innocence of the
mere animal — neither sin nor virtue is possible.
Gluttony is not sin in a hog ; the greater glut-
ton, the better the breed. Combativeness is not
sin in a bull-dog ; the bitterer fighter, the bet-
ter the dog. To heap up wealth for another
to enjoy after they are dead is not sin in the
bees ; the more they gather and the less they
give, the more valuable the hive. To spend life
in the mere pleasure of song and sunshine is
not sin in the bird ; the more careless the song-
ster, the sweeter is his companionship. But to
man there is a higher life possible than to feed
with the hog, fight with the dog, gather with the
bee, or sing with the birds ; it is as he comes to
a knowledge of this higher nature that he comes
to a knowledge of good and evil ; it is as the
higher nature becomes victor over the lower that
he comes to a life of true virtue.

It is conceivable that man might go on this
pilgrimage upward and onward from the animal
to the intellectual and moral life without a lapse,

226 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

that is, without that degeneration which, as we
have seen,^ the scientists recognize as inciden-
tal to evohition. But in fact man never thus
progresses. He deliberately, and again and
again, turns his back upon the higher life, and
sroes down into the lower life from which he
has emerged. The self-indulgent appetite, the
unregulated passion, the blind and uninspired
acquisitiveness, the surrender to selfish pleasure-
seeking, is a recurrence to the animal nature
from which the voice of reason, of conscience,
of reverence, — that is, of God, — has sum-
moned him. To call this recurrence to the
animal nature, this degeneration from the spir-
itual to the sensual, a " step in advance " is to
confound the obstacles to progress with the
progress which they hinder and delay. In every
such lapse there is a true fall ; and we so recog-
nize it in the common language of our daily life.
If a theretofore honest and honorable man,
yielding to some great temptation, has embez-
zled or defaulted, we speak of him as having
fallen ; and a " fallen woman " is the common
designation of one whose lapse has been sudden
from a position of the highest purity to one of
sensual degradation. Whether Adam fell six
thousand years ago, by eating the fruit of a for-
bidden tree, is a debatable question, on which
^ See chap. i. p. 10.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SOUL. 227

really little depends. Every man falls when, by
yielding to the enticements of his lower, animal
nature, he descends from his vantage-ground of
moral consciousness to the earthiness out of
which he had begun to emerge.

Thus, in the view of the Christian evolution-
ist, sin is not mere unripeness and immaturity
which growth and sunshine will cure. It is a
deliberate disobedience of the divine law, into
the knowledge of wliich the soul has come in its
emergence from the animal condition.

And fall is not an historic act of disobedience
by the parents of our race in some prehistoric
age, through which a sinful nature has descended
or been imparted to all their descendants. It
is the conscious and deliberate descent of the
individual soul from the vantage ground of a
higher life to the life of the animal from which
he had been uplifted.

And redemption is not the restoration of the
race to that state of innocence from which itl
has departed ; it is the entire process of intel- \
lectual and spiritual development in which man
passes, by means of law and temptation, through
the possibility of sin and fall, from the condi-
tion of innocence, that is, of ignorance of law I
and therefore exemption from guilt, into the '
condition of virtue, that is, into a conscious
recognition of law, and the subjugation of the

228 THE EVOLUTION OF CHBISTIANITY.

animal self to tlie higher nature which law and
temptation have evoked.^ Something more re-
mains to be said in the next chapter of this
process of redemption from the point of view
of the Christian evolutionist.

^ It may be observed, incidentally, that this statement
affords an interpretation of such declarations concerning Christ
as that he " was in all points tempted like as we are, yet with-
out sin," that he, as the captain of our salvation, was made
" perfect through suffering," and that he " increased in wisdom
and stature and in favor with God and man." These and
kindred declarations indicate that he passed from the inno-
cence of infancy to the virtue of manhood, through the path-
way of law and temptation, exactly as all other men ; with
this one radical difference, that as far as he came to a know-
ledge of righteousness he fulfilled righteousness ; he never
disobeyed, and so never lapsed or fell.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION.

Virtue, tlie conscious recognition of a moral
law and the conscious and deliberate conformity
to it, is not the consununation of character.
There is something still higher. The law of the
spiritual life is not truly the law of the soul
until wrought into the nature itseK. Then vir-
tue becomes the second nature. The man no
longer by deliberate acts of the will conforms
to a standard external to himself ; he is not
subject to law, but is himseK an embodied law ;
becomes a law unto himself ; does whatever he
pleases because he pleases to do whatever is
right. Thus, in that spiritual evolution which
constitutes redemption, man passes through three
stages : in the first he is lawless but innocent,
and in his ignorance of the law he is controlled
by his animal impidses ; ^ in the second stage he
recognizes the higher law of his nascent divine
nature, and endeavors to conform his life and

^ He is by nature the child of wrath (Ephes. ii. 3), not
of God's wrath, but of his own unregulated appetites and
passions.

230 TEE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

character to it ; in the third stage this law has
become the law of his being, and he lives in
peace and liberty, because his impulses have
themselves become spiritual impulses. The first
stage is innocence ; the second is virtue ; the
third is holiness.

What is the secret power by which this revo-
lution, or, if the reader prefers, this evolution,
in character is wrought ? The process is growth ;
but what is the power ?

Life gives to this question a very plain an-
swer. The power which effects transformations
in character is the power of another personality.
This is the power recognized in all systems of
education : the power of the teacher, inciting,
inspiring, moulding the pupil. This is the
power of the true orator, who moves his audi-
ence less by what he says, or the method of his
saying it, than by what he is. His speech is
only the expression of himself ; and it is not the
expression, nor the thought expressed, but the
person, expressed in and through the thought
and the sj)eech, which moves and shapes the
audience to the orator's will. This is the power
of the musician ; the difference between the
true musician and the mere performer being
that the latter has only technique, while the
former has also what we call soul ; music is but
the method which that soul takes to utter itself.

SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 231

This makes great leaders great. The presence
of the " Little Corporal " is worth a battalion
of soldiers, because by his mere presence he in-
fuses his own invincible courage into all his
army, and re-creates it by his military spirit.
This is the secret of the mother's influence ;
this gives value to her training. Instruction in
methods cannot make, and ignorance of methods
cannot mar. If the mother has a true spirit of
motherly devotion, if she has piety and truth and
courage and self-sacrifice, these will find their
expression, and the child wiU be formed less by
what his mother deliberately designs than by
what in her inmost being she is.

The secret of the world's moral evolution is
such a personality, brooding all mankind ; utter-
ing itself through all history in " broken lights "
and transitory gleams; uttering itself through
Hebrew history by " divers portions and in
divers manners ; " and finally and perfectly in-
carnate in the Christ.

Who, then, was the Christ ? And what is his
relation to the religious life, — the life of God
in the soul of men ?

Theological controversies about the Christ are
not in Christ's spirit, nor do they tend to pro-
mote reverence for his person or his life, nor
help to bring any soul into a greater love or a
truer following of him. Into these controversies

232 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

I mean never to enter. Nor have I any psycho-
logy of his unique personality to offer to myself
or others, nor any definition of his relations to
the Infinite and the Eternal. All our know-
ledge of truth is relative : I say our knoioledge of
truth, not truth itself. What matter is, no man
can tell. We can understand only its relations
to ourselves. What spirit is, no man can tell.
We can understand it only as it appears in and
to ourselves. What Jesus Christ is to the infi-
nite and eternal Father, I make no attempt to
discuss. I consider only what he is to the indi-
vidual soul, and what he has been to the human
race. He is himself the answer to the two g:reat
questions of our spiritual life : What is man ?
Who is God ?

These are the profoundest questions that ever
addressed themselves to the human soul. What
am I, and what is my destiny ? — not what am
I now, still less where did I come from, but
what are the possibilities within me, and what
the life that beckons me on to an illimitable
life ? What will be evolved out of me when the
work of growth is over ? — that is the real ques-
tion. If the Christian church had spent half
the time in studying the problem how it could
get on, which it has spent in debating the ques-
tion whether it came from Adam or not, it would
have made much further progress than it has.

SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 233

Evolution is the development of any object
towards the fulfillment of the end of its being ;
and by a force resident in the object itseK.
What I may become depends in the last analy-
sis upon what is the power within me — the
power which by my free acceptance I take, and
so cause to be within me. If I were not a free
moral agent, it woidd not be important for me
to ask this question ; but I am a free moral
agent. The seed does not ask. Shall I become
a rose or a pear? because the seed will become
whatever the soil and the sunshine and its orioi-
nal nature make it. But just because I am a
free moral agent I must work with God, and
what I become, whether rose or thistle, depends
— ■ I say it reverently — as tridy on myself as
on him. I am not a flute, out of which he can
draw what music he likes ; I am not plastic
clay on the revolving table, which he fashions
into what he likes ; I am not a movable type
which he puts where he likes. There is in me a
power, and that power must cooperate with him,
or there will be no music in my life, no divine
figure wrought, no divine truth printed. Now,
if I am to cooperate with God, if he and I are
in partnership, if I must toil with him as the
teacher toils with his pupil or the mother with
the child, I must know who and what I am to
be. I must be able to ask him. What sort of a

234 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

utensil are you purposing to make ? We must
work together, and therefore we must under-
stand each another.

To this great question of questions, What is
man ? — not in his present condition, but in his
future possibility — Jesus Christ furnishes the
answer. He does not furnish the answer in detail.
Not even Christ is to be blindly and servilely imi-
tated. You cannot ask him what are the pecu-
liar duties of a wife to a husband, or of a hus-
band to a wife, for he never was married ; how
you are to treat children, for he never had chil-
dren ; how you are to vote in the coming elec-
tion — he never cast a vote ; how you shall treat
your customers and clerks — he was no mer-
chant. It almost seems as if the details of life
were left out of his experiences in order that we
might not follow in detail any life, not even
his. We follow Christ as every ship that
crosses the ocean from Si3ain to America fol-
lows Columbus, marking none the less a spe-
cial pathway for itself, — each going in its own
course, yet each following to a common goal.
He came to give life, and he gave it abundantly,
and for fulhiess of life there must be individual-
ity. He makes us live, not by directing us to
hew ourselves to a precise and particular pattern,
but by showing every man how he may be his
own best self. None the less, but rather far

SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 235

more, for this reason, he answered the question,
What is man ? for he is the type of manhood.

He was a Jew, and yet he was the reverse of
a Jew — unworldly, catholic, free. He was born
in the Orient, hut he was not characteristically
Oriental, — no dreamer or visionary, he. His
religion was one of practical, every-day life.
He transcends even the limitations of sex. Man
he was, yet with all the patience, gentleness,
and tenderness we attribute to woman ; but who
will think of calling him that poorest and weak-
est of creatures, a womanly man? He tran-
scends all ages, and is the ideal of to-day as he
was the ideal in the first century. He fought
no battles, yet Havelock reads the story of his
life and is quickened in courage. He nursed no
sick, yet the nurses in a thousand hospitals fiiid
the inspiration of their patient toil in the story
of his patient life. He was no merchant, and
yet he was the exemplar of our Amos La%vrence
and our Cooper. He was no statesman, yet
Gladstone is his follower. All men find alike
in this one unique and incomparable figure the
one worthy of their following, the type of their
manhood. He was not a man, but the man,
filling full the ideal of a complete manhood.
Do we not idealize him ? No, we have not ideal-
ized Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is engaged in
idealizing us, and the work is not completed.

236 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

As he answers the one great question of our
lives, What is man ? so, he answers the other
great question of our lives, Who is God ? The
great factor in human reformation is divine per-
sonality. But, if we are to be moulded by a
person, we must know who that person is. Do
we want to know about God, or do we want
personally to be acquainted ivith God ? These
are two different questions. In the one, curi-
osity asks for the measurement of him ; in the
other, reverence and love ask for personal fel-
lowship with him. Only curiosity can be satis-
fied by an ambassador, a prophet, a teacher.
Out of that Roman conception of theology which
made God an eternal Csesar and men his sub-
jects grew by a natural process the conception of
Jesus Christ as an ambassador from God to
man. But if God is not a king whose laws we
are to understand, but a Father whose heart I
need to know, then no revelation of teacher, be
he human, angelic, or superangelic, will suffice.
It is the Person himself I need to know. I can-
not love by proxy. No account, philosophical
and skiUful though it may be, of the attributes
of God suffices as a foundation for love toward
God. Tell me he is perfect in wisdom, power,
love, mercy ; these are but attributes : it is him-
self I want to know. The cry of the hmnan
being from the earliest age — the cry of Job,

SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 237

" Oh that I knew where I might find him ! " —
is still the cry of humanity. All history is the
search after God, All science, whether the sci-
entist knows it or not, is the thinking of the
thoughts of God after him, the trying to find
him. All art is the search after the ideal art as
it exists in some true, divine artist. All love —
of lover, wife, husband, child, patriot — is but
the fragmentary and imperfect expression of the
Infinite and Eternal All-loving. All men have
at the hearts of them more or less of this hun-
ger and desire to know the Infinite and the
Eternal. To this hunger Christ is the answer,
to this " cry of the human " he is the response
of the divine.

Let us consider, for one moment, that God is
training children to be free like himself, and by
their own free choice to become partakers of his
nature ; that he can do this only by impressing
his own personality upon them ; and that he can
impress that personality upon them only by
manifesting himself to them. Are there not
just three ways in which he can do this, and
only three ? — to the intellect, to the sensibili-
ties, and to the will? Must he not either by
his works show himself to the thought of man,
or by his personal presentation in life show him-
self to the affections of man, or by his personal
contact with man, bringing hmi into obedience

238 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

to himself, show himself to the will of man?
How can Arnold of Rugby be known ? Is there
any way but these three ? We know his school,
and so we know something of the work he has
done. We read the story of his life, and we
see the personality of the man. We sit at
his table and talk with him ; our life becomes
intertwined with his ; we enter into sorrow or
joy and work together with him. Deism gives
us intellectual knowledge of God — we know
him through his works. Theism gives us know-
ledge of him through his will entering our life
and our attempt to follow out his will as it
is interpreted in our own conscience. The faith
of the ages in the Christian church gives us
these ; but it gives us also the other element, a
Person manifesting God on the earth — God
interpreted in terms of human biography, in
order that we may see and know and love him.
Corresponding with these three ways of knowing
God are the three great historical religions, each
of which serves as a representative of the three
religions which are now clamoring in America
for our suffrages — ethical culture, mysticism,
and historical Christianity. Ethical cidture,
which claims to know that there is a right and
xH wrong, but can discover no eternal basis for it

in a Personal and Eternal Lawgiver, has pro-
duced China. Mysticism, which perceives God

SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 239

only as he is immanent in every human soul,
but discovers no objective and historical mani-
festation of him, has produced India. And his-
torical Christianity, with its triune manifestation
of God, in nature, in human consciousness, and
in the one sacred and unique Life, has produced
Europe. By their fruits ye shall know them.

It has been sometimes said in orthodox litera-
ture that Jesus Christ was God ; but that state-
ment in the New Testament is always accom-
panied by limitations — the Word of God made
flesh, God tabernacling among us. The image of
God's person. The brightness of God's glory.
Jesus Christ is, in other words, represented as
God reducing himself to finite proportions and
walking in finite relations, that we may com-
prehend him whom otherwise we could not com-
prehend. The doctrine of the church is explicit
in its recognition of the truth expressed by Paul
in his declaration of Christ's " self -beggary " in
order that he might enter into humanity and fill
it with the riches of his nature.

Thus to these two questions of the humaa
soul Jesus Christ is the answer. What is man ?

— He is the ideal of manhood. Who is God ?

— What Jesus Christ was, in the limit of a few
years' time and in the little province of Pales-
tine, that is the Infinite and Eternal Father in
his dealings with the universe.

240 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

It is said by one class of critics that the doc-
trine of the evohition of Christianity necessarily
involves the belief that Jesus Christ was himself
a product of evolution ; and as there have been
over eighteen centuries of sj^iritual evolution
since Christ's time, it involves a presumption
that there are other products of spiritual evolu-
tion superior to him, or at least that there will
be such superior products m the future. If
the evolutionist denies this, if he claims to be-
lieve in the divinity of Jesus Christ, or, using
the very inadequate language of theological
metaphysics, in his supernatural character, then
it is said that he believes in evolution "with
an if ; " that he is not a consistent evolutionist,
but makes an exception. Now if either of these
statements were true, the result woidd be fatal
to the philosophy which underlies this book. If
the Christian evolutionist regards Jesus Christ
as a product of spiritual evolution, he gives up
Christianity, not merely as an ideal of life, but
as a philosophy. He may still be a devout
theist ; but he is in no p7iiloso])1iical sense a
Christian. If on the other hand he declares
that Jesus Christ is an exception to the law of
evolution, he gives up evolution ; for God's laws
are not like the laws of Greek grammar, with
exceptions. When science seeks to formulate a
law of life, it succeeds only in case the law pro-

SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 241

vides for all the phenomena of life. If some of
these phenomena are inconsistent with the sup-
posed law, the supposed law does not exist. A
single established exception to the law of gravi-
tation would require a re-statement of the law
in such terms as would provide for that excep-
tion.

Philosophically, Jesus Christ can be regarded
by the evolutionist in only one of two ways : as
a product or as the producer of evolution. The
careful reader will perhaps recall a statement in
the introductory chapter of this volume to thei
effect that evolution does not account for the
origin, but only for the processes of life. Even
the agnostic evolutionist does not — certainly
most agnostic evolutionists do not — consider
that life is a product of evolution. Life is a
cause ; phenomena are the product ; evolution
is the method. The theistic evolutionist does
not believe that God is a product of evolution. ,
God is the cause ; phenomena are the product ;
evolution is the method. So, the Christian evo-
lutionist does not believe that Jesus Chi-ist is the
product of evolution. Jesus Christ is the cause ;
phenomena are the product; evolution is the
method. This is what the Christian evolution-
ist means by the divinity of Jesus Christ ; life,
God, Christ, are not synonymous terms, but each
of them expresses the finite apprehension of

242 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

different phases of the Infinite. Life is the In-
finite in nature as the scientist sees him, evolv-
ing out material phenomena according to the
law of growth or evolution; God is the Infi-
nite as the devout soul sees him, evolving out
both material and spiritual phenomena accord-
ing to the laws of growth or evolution ; and
Christ is the Infinite entering into human life,
and taking on the finite, in order that he may
achieve the end of all evolution, material and
spiritual, in bringing men to know and be at
one with God. Does the scientific evolutionist
believe in evolution " with an if," because he
believes that life — the Infinite and Eternal
Energy — is the cause, not the product, of evo-
lution ? Does the theist believe in evolution
" with an if " because he believes that God is
the cause, not the product, of evolution ? As
little does the Christian evolutionist believe in
evolution " with an if," because he believes that
Jesus Christ is the cause, not the product, of
redemption. Must a man choose whether he
wiU believe in light, or in the sun ? As little
need he choose whether he will believe in a
divine spirit which pervades all life, or in a
divine spirit from whom comes light and life
into the world. The huntsman with his burning-
glass concentrates the diffused rays of the sun
upon his fagots and kindles them into a blaze.

SECRET OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION. 243

In Jesus Christ, the diffiisecl spirit of God, the
Infinite and Eternal Energy from whom aU
things proceed, tlie Power not ourselves that
makes for righteousness, is concentrated in a
single human life, and kindles humanity into a
blaze of love, imparting to it his own glory.

If my reader will remember the perfectly
simple fact that philosophy must in its study
always recognize three factors, a cause, a pro-
cess, and a product, that evolution has to do
only with the process, and that the Christian
evolutionist regards Jesus Christ as the cause,
evolution as the process, and Christianity as the
product, however much he may disagree with
my interpretation of Christianity, he will at
least be saved from a radical misapprehension
of it.

To sum up, then, these two chapters in a par-
agraph : God is in his world of matter and his
world of men. He is the Word, — " The Word
was with God and the Word was God." That
is, from eternity God has been a seK-revealing
Person. He has been disclosing himseK. He
has not been like the Egyptian Sphinx ; he has
from eternity expressed himself in matter by
creation, and in human history by the utter-
ances of his prophets and apostles, and in Jesus
Christ in propria persona has entered human
life, in order that he might show us who he is,

244 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY,

that so we miglit have One round whom we
might put our arms, before whom we might
bow in reverence, to whom we might give our
highest, supremest, tenclerest love.

CHAPTER IX.

CONCLUSION : THE CONSUMMATION OF SPIRITUAL
EVOLUTION.

In this chapter I propose rapidly to survey
the ground ah'eady traversed, re-state the con-
elusions reached, and finally re-define, in the
language of evolutionary theology, some theolo-
gical terms in common use.

God is in his world. Nature is not a ma-
chine which a mechanic has made, wound up,
and set going, and with which he must from
time to time interfere, as a watchmaker inter-
feres to regulate a somewhat imperfect time-
keeper. Nature is the expression of God's
thought, the outward utterance of himself. He
dwells in it and works through it. Amid all
the mysteries by which we are surrounded, says
Herbert Spencer, nothing is more certain than
this, that we are ever in the presence of an Infi-
nite and Eternal Energy from which all things
proceed. This Infinite and Eternal Energy
from which all things proceed is an intelligent
Energy. It is an Energy that thinks, and cre-
ation is the expression of the thought of this

246 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

Infinite and Eternal Energy. Much of the old
teleologieal argument, as it is called, may per-
haps be set aside by modern research, and 1 be-
lieve that the notion of secondary causes pro-
ceeding from a great First Cause must be set
aside. But in the world there is one underlying
Cause which is the source and fountain of all
power ; and the fact that we investigate natural
phenomena, and endeavor to see their relations
to one another, shows that there are relations
in those phenomena which the intellect can com-
prehend, and which therefore are themselves in-
tellectual. Science is not the mere putting of
phenomena in pigeon-holes and setting labels
upon them. Science perceives in nature a real
thoughtfulness, and follows along the path which
preexisting thought has marked out for it. Even
Haeckel, in the very chapter in which he under-
takes to show that the notion of a divine Cre-
ator behind the creation should be abandoned,
repeats on almost every page the language of
intellectualism, showing the " purpose " of this,
the " object " of that, and the " design " of the
other. He cannot speak of the phenomena of
the universe, even in the attempt to dethrone
God from it, without in his very words show-
ing that there is a Designer, a Thinker, and a
Purposer.

This God, whose existence is demonstrated by

CONCLUSION. 247

the unity in the material universe, is no less
demonstrated by the unity of the immaterial
universe. There is as truly a science of history
and sociology as there is a science of astronomy
and of biology ; and as nature, so humanity has
a unity and a continuity. Mankind are not
mere sesfreoated atoms of sand on the beach —
there is a moral unity in the human race. All
history recognizes this, and evolution brings it
out more clearly than it was brought out before.
History as a mere record of the separate acts -
of individuals has passed away, and now the
true historian, following the example of those
who in the last century first began to write
modern history, sees that there is a moral devel-
opment ; that events lead on to other events in
the realm of spirit as in the realm of matter ;
that there is a God in history, as there is a God
in nature — a God who is working out ^ome
great design among men, as there is a God who
is working out gi'eat designs through all mate-
rial and mechanical phenomena.

But God can express himself in terms of
moral life — can utter himself in terms of right-
eousness — only through beings that have the
power of righteousness, and therefore through
beings that are free to be unrighteous. A man
forced to be virtuous is not virtuous at all, for
freedom to choose the evil is essential to consti-

248 THi: EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

tute the good. Thus while in nature God may
work out the mechanical evidences of liis skill
and love of beauty, he can work out the expres-
sions of his truth, purity, and holiness only in
a world which has in it a possibility of the re-
verse.

In such a world as this he is expressing
himself, and has expressed himself from the
beginning. All men are his children, and all
nations are his. But as some men show greater
susceptibility to his presence than others, so
in some nations he is more manifested than in
others ; and as he expresses himself more truly
in some lives than in others, so in some nations
and races he expresses himself more truly than
in other nations and races. If you ask why one
man seems to be more susceptible to divine in-
fluence than another, I answer that I do not
know. I take life as I find it, and recognize
the fact without offering any explanation. As
I do not know why the acorn produces an oak,
or why the apple-seed produces an apple-tree,
so I do not know why God in one life seems
to brinof forth results which in another life he
does not bring forth. But such is the fact ;
and our business in a scientific study of human
life is to accept the fact.

Among all the nations of antiquity, the one
nation which displayed a peculiar genius for

CONCLUSION. 249

what men call religion — that is, a peculiar
genius for the spiritual and invisible — was the
Hebrew race. As compared with modern races,
the Hebrews often seem dull and obtuse ; but
as compared with the nations about them, they
were a nation fitted for the beginning of a mani-
festation of righteousness. For fifteen centuries
of history, God was dealing with this nation as
with all nations ; but in this nation the fruit of
his dealing was manifest as in none other, and
in men of special spiritual genius of this nation
as in no other men. During these fifteen cen-
turies of his dealing with this people, he called
forth their genius, and out of the writings of
their prophets he secured, by what you may call
natural selection or divine providence, according
as you are scientifically or religiously inclined,
a permanent book, the Bible. Thus the Bible
is the expression of God In human thought —
God speaking to men and through men — God
speaking through the selected writings of the
selected prophets of a selected people. When
the ripeness of time had come, this process of
speaking to men issued in the Incarnation —
the speaking of God in man. Up to the first
century, the Word had been a word spoken to
humanity. In the birth of Jesus Christ, the
Word itself became incarnate : God, who had
expressed himself through men, now expressed

250 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

himself in a human life. He entered into hu-
manity, and in Christ Jesus became a sharer of
human nature. The Word tabernacled among
men became subject to human conditions, shared
the weaknesses, the wants, the ignorance of
humanity.

For what purpose ? Simply to manifest him-
self to men ? Such a manifestation, if it led
to nothing, would give no cheer, — would bring
no good tidings. If God came into the world
simply to tell us what God is and what is his
ideal for humanity, the gospel woidd be the sad-
dest message that could be conceived as dehv-
ered to the human race. As an athlete coming
to a hospital merely to exhibit to hopeless in-
valids the glory of a vigorous manhood would
add to their despair, so a perfectly righteous
One coming into a world simply to show sin-
ners how glorious is righteousness would enhance
j their gloom. Christ comes, not merely to show
I divinity to us, but to evolve the latent divinity
which he has implanted in us. God has entered
into the one man Christ Jesus, in order that
through him he may enter into all men. Christ
is a door, through which the divine enters into
humanity, through which man enters into the
divine. " Whom he did foreknow he also did
predestinate to be conformed to the image of
his Son, that he might be the first-born among
many brethren."

CONCLUSION. 251

Christ is not a man like other men, but man-
kind is to become like Christ. The tulip is
not like the bulb, but the bulb is to become like
the tulip. This is Christ's own declaration of
the object of his mission. "I have come," he
says, " that you might have life." How much ?
Life more abundantly. What kind of life ?
Eternal life. The life of God in the soul of
man. The life that was in Christ. Life such
that, when humanity is filled with it, his prayer
will be fulfilled, " that they all may be one as
thou. Father, art in me and I in thee, that they
also may be one in us."

Christ, then, who is the secret of spiritual evo-
lution, is also the type and pattern of that which
will be wrought in universal humanity when
spiritual evolution is consummated. The incar-
nation is not an isolated episode, — it is the be-
ginning of a perpetual work. God is still Em-
manuel, " God with us." God has not passed
through human life, entering at one door and
going out at the other ; he has come into human
life, and is gradually filling it with himself.
Thus the Christ is a perpetual presence, an ever- .
living Christ. He is really in his church ; his
church is really his body; he is incarnating
himself in humanity ; and thus incarnate is still
growing in wisdom and in favor with God and
man. God is still a Word, still a speaking

262 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

God, still manifesting himself. He is entering
into human consciousness, and the divine and
human are inextricably intermingled in one
divine-human consciousness. The end of evo-
lution is a glorified humanity, a humanity in
which God dwells. His tabernacle shall be
with men. They shall be his children, and he
shall be their God. This truth is written all
through the New Testament ; it shines on almost
every page. Listen to Christ himself.

You shall be my disciples, my followers ;
shall take up my cross ; shall do the works that
I have done and even greater works than I have
done. I send you into the world as the Father
has sent me into the world : to teach as I have
taught, to manifest God as I have manifested
him ; to suffer vicariously for others' sins, as I
have suffered. The secret of my life shall be
yours. Ye shall abide in me, and I will abide
in you. You shall be as a branch engrafted on
me, drawing as from my veins the life that ani-
mates me. You shall share my glory, the
glory that I had with the Father before the
world was ; shall be with me where I am ; shall
be one with the Father as I am one with the
Father. Paul takes up the same theme and
writes it out with endless variation. Yet it is
always the same theme. Righteousness in man
is the righteousness of God, God's own right-

CONCLUSION. 253

eousness, coming out of God's heart into human
hearts. We are partakers of the divine nature ;
heirs of God — inheritors of his nature ; joint
heirs with the Lord Jesus Christ ; — having in
us the same spirit that was in him ; holy as he
was holy ; pure as he was pure. He is dead : we
are to die with him. He has risen : we are to
rise with him. Already we sit in the heavenly
places with him ; reflecting liis glory, we are
changed from glory to glory into the same im-
age. There is scarce any title of dignity given
to Jesus Christ in the New Testament which is
not in a modified form given by the sacred writ-
ers to his followers. He is the Light of the
world, — we are lights in the world. He is the
only begotten Son of God, — we are sons of
God. He is the great High Priest, King of
kings and Lord of lords, — we are kings and
priests unto God. He is the eternal sacrifice,
— we are bidden to j^resent our bodies hving
sacrifices. God tabernacled in him, and tab-
ernacles in us. In him dwelt the fullness of
the Godhead bodily, and we are bidden to pray
that, being rooted and grounded in love, we
also may be filled with all the fullness of God.
In brief, the Bible, starting with the declaration
that God made man in his own image, going on
to interpret God in the terms of human expe-
rience by the mouth of poet and prophet, and

254 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

finally revealing in the person of Jesus Christ
an incarnate God dwelling in a perfect man,
emphasizes the fundamental truth that in their
essential natures God and man are the same,
and points forward to the time when man, re-

, ' deemed from the earthy and the animal debris
which still clings to him, shall be presented
faultless, because filled with the divine indwell-
ing. NoV are we sous of God, but sons at
school and in process of education ; then, when
we see him, not adumbrated and incognito as
we see him now, but in all the regal splendor of
his character, and with all the justice and the
purity and the love which constitute his divine
glory, we shall be like him, and God will be in
us, as in Christ, the All in all.

History is but the record of the process of
this evolution of the divinity out of humanity.
It is a continuous progressive change, from lower
to higher, and from simpler to more comj)lex.
It is according to certain definite laws of the
moral and spiritual life : and it is by means of

■"resident forces, or rather a resident force, —
the force of God in the individual soul ; the force
of Christ, — God manifest in the flesh, — in
human society. Thus the church. Christian so-
ciety, the individual, are all a strange intermix-
ture of paganism and Christianity, in which
Christianity is steadily, but surely, gaining the

CONCLUSION. 255

victory over paganism. The church is partly
Roman imperialism and partly Christian bro-
therhood ; but brotherhood is steadily displacing
imperialism. Society is partly pagan selfish-
ness and partly Christian love ; but Christian
love is steadily displacing pagan selfishness.
Theology is partly Christian truth and partly
pagan superstition ; but truth is steadily dis-
placing superstition. The individual man is
partly the animal from which he has come, and
partly the God who is coming into him ; but
God is steadily displacing the animal. So,
whether we look at the individual, the church,
or society, we see the process of that spiritual
evolution by which, through Jesus Christ, men
are coming first to know God, and then to dwell
with him. Under the inspirational power of
the divine spirit their spiritual nature is grow-
ing stronger and their animal and earthly na-
ture more subjugated ; and when the end has
come, they will be heirs with God and joint heirs
with the Lord Jesus Christ.

In bringing this book to a close, I cannot
better sum up the conclusions to which I have
endeavored to conduct the reader, than by re-
defining some common theological phrases in
terms of evolutionary belief.

Christianity is an evolution, a growing reve-

256 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

lation of God though prophets in the Ohl Tes-
tament, incarnate in Jesus Christ in the New
Testament ; a revelation which is itself the se-
cret and the power of a growing spiritual life
in man, beginning in the early dawn of human
history, when man first came to moral conscious-
ness, and to be consummated no one can tell
when or how.

Inspiration is the breathing of God upon the
soul of man ; it is as universal as the race, but
reaches its highest manifestation in the selected
prophets of the Hebrew people.

Revelation is unveiling, but the veil is on the
face of man, and not on the face of God ; and the
revelation is therefore a progressive revelation,
man growing in the knowledge of God as the
veil of his ignorance and degradation is taken
away.

Incarnation is the indwelling of God in a
unique man, in order that all men may come to
be at one with God.

Atonement is the bringing of man and God
together ; uniting them, not as the river is united
with the sea, losing its personality therein, but
as the child is united with the father or the wife
with the husband, the personality and individ-
uality of man strengthened and increased by
the union.

CONCLUSION. 267

Sacrifice is not penalty borne by one person
in order that another person may be relieved
from the wrath of a third person ; sacrifice is
the sorrow which love feels for the loved one,
and the shame which love endures with him be-
cause of his sin.

Repentance is the sorrow and the shame which
the sinner feels for his own wrong-doing ; when
man is thus ashamed for himself, and his hea-
venly Father enters into that shame, as he has
done from the foundation of the world, — a
truth of God revealed by the Passion of the
Word of God, — then, in this beginning of the
commingling of the sorrow of the two is the
beginning of atonement, the end of which is
not until the penitent thinks as God thinks,
feels as God feels, wills as God wills.

Redemption is not the restoration of man to
a state of innocence from which he has fallen ;
it is the progTess of spiritual evolution, by ■
which, out of such clay as we are made of, God
is creating a humanity that will be glorious at
the last, in and with the glory manifested in
Jesus Christ.

Finally: religion is not a creed, long or
short, nor a ceremonial, complex or simple, nor
a life more or less perfectly conformed to an
external law ; it is the life of God in the soul

258 THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY.

of man, re-creating the individual ; through the
individual constituting a church ; and by the
church transforming human society into a king-
dom of God.

American iSeligtou^ Leaner^!.

A Series of Biographies of Men who have had great

influence on Religious Thought and

Life in the United States.

JONATHAN EDWARDS. By Professor A. V. a

Allen, author of " The Continuity of Christian Thought."

DR. MUHLENBERG. By Rev. William Wilberforce
Newton.

WILBUR FISK. By Professor George Prentice, of
Wesleyan University.

FRANCIS WAYLAND. By Professor J. O. Mur-
ray, of Princeton.

CHARLES G. FINNEY. By Professor G. Frederick
Wright.

MARK HOPKINS. By President Franklin Carter,
of Williams College.

HENRY BOYNTON SMITH. By Professor L. F.
Stearns.

In Preparation.

THEODORE PARKER. By John Fiske, author of
" The Idea of God," " Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," etc.

This series includes biographies of eminent men
who represent the theology and methods of the va-
rious religious denominations of America. The Se-
ries when completed will not only depict in a clear
and memorable way several great figures in American
religious history, but will indicate the leading charac-
teristics of that history, the progress and process of
religious philosophy in America, the various types of
theology which have shaped or been shaped by the
various churches, and the relation of these to the life
and thought of the Nation.

Other volumes to be announced hereafter. Each volume, i6mo,
gilt top, %i.2S.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.

4 Park St., Boston; ii East 17TH St., New York,

American CommonttJealt^^,

Edited by Horace E. Scudder.
VIRGINIA. A History of the People. ByJohnEsten

Cooke, author of " Life of Stonewall Jackson," etc.

OREGON. The Struggle for Possession, By William

Barrows, D. D.

MARYLAND. The History of a Palatinate. By Wil-
liam Hand Browne, Associate of Johns Hopkins University.

KENTUCKY. A Pioneer Commonwealth. By Na-
thaniel S. Shaler, S. D., Professor of Palaeontology, Harvard Uni-
versity.

MICHIGAN. A History of Governments. By Thomas

Mclntyre Cooley, LL. D., fonr.erly Chief Justice of I^Tichigan.

KANSAS. The Prelude to the War for the Union.

By Leverett W. Spring, formerly Professor in English Literature in
the University of Kansas.

CALIFORNIA. From the Conquest in 1846 to the

Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco. A Study of American
Character. By Josiah Royce, Assistant Professor of F'hilosophy in
Harvard University, formerly Professor in the University of California.

NEW YORK. The Planting and the Growth of the

Empire State. By the Hon. Ellis H. Roberts, Editor of the Utica
Herald. In two volumes.

CONNECTICUT. A Study of a Commonwealth De-

mocracy. By Professor Alexander Johnston, author of " American
Politics."

MISSOURI. A Bone of Contention. By Lucien Carr,

M. A., Assistant Curator of the Feabody Museum of Archjeology.

INDIANA. A Redemption from Slavery. By J. P.

Dunn, Jr., author of " Massacres of the Mountains."

OHIO. First Fruits of the Ordinance of 1787. By

Hon. Rufus King.

VERMONT. By Rowland E. Robinson.

/// Preparation.
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ILLINOIS. By E. G. Mason.
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