HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Will to Freedom ; or, The Gospel of
Nietzsche and the Gospel of Christ.
Being the Bross Lectures delivered in the
Lake Forest College, Illinois, 1915. Crown
8vo, 6s. 6d. net.
The Gospel and Human Needs : Hulsean
Lectures. With Additions. Crown 8vo, 55.
net.
Religion and English Society. Two Ad
dresses. 8vo, 2s. net ; paper covers, is. net.
Civilisation at the Cross Roads. Four Lec
tures delivered on the William Belden Noble
Foundation before Harvard University in
the year 1911. Crown 8vo, 6s. net.
Churches in the Modern State. Crown 8vo,
5^. net.
Antichrist, and Other Sermons. Crown 8vo,
6s. net.
Selections from the Correspondence of the
First Lord Acton. Edited with an Intro
duction by JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS, Litt.D.,
Honorary Fellow of St. Catharine s College,
Cambridge, and REGINALD VERE LAURENCE,
M.A., Fellow and Senior Tutor of Trinity
College, Cambridge. Vol. I. Correspond
ence with Cardinal Newman, Lady Blenner-
hassett, W. E. Gladstone and others. 8vo,
15*. net.
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
HOPES FOR
ENGLISH RELIGION
BY
JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS, D.D., Lrrx.D.
OF THE COMMUNITY OF THE RESURRECTION
HONORARY FELLOW OF ST. CATHARINE S COLLEGE,
CAMBRIDGE
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
FOURTH AVENUE & 3 oTH STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1919
THE iNsrrn T i STUDIES
TC= ", c ^
DEC 2 1 1031
3 852.
TO
ANNIE FIGGIS
IN REVERENT LOVE
CONTENTS
HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
(Preached at Grosvenor Chapel, Mayfair, August 79/7)
PAGE
i. FREEDOM . i
ii. REDEMPTION . 13
in. SACRAMENTALISM . . 27
iv. HUMANISM ... 43
OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
(Preached at St. Barnabas Church, Pimlico)
i. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND . . 55
ii. OUR DEBT TO ROME 62
in. OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME ... . 70
iv. ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS ... 82
v. THE DISTINCTIVE TYPE OF ENGLISH
CATHOLICISM 92
UNIVERSITY SERMONS
i. THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE ... 103
(Cambridge, January j/, /9/f.)
ii. FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY . . . .114
(Oxford, January 23, 1916.)
in. CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE ... 126
(Oxford, February 18, /9/7- )
iv. THE ETERNAL REFUGE . . . . .136
(Cambridge, June 2, iqrS.}
vii
viii CONTENTS
Four Sermons preached at Grosvenor Chapel,
May fair, August 1918
PAGE
THE NEED OF GOD ... .148
THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN . . . .155
REJOICE EVERMORE 160
SERVICE 167
THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN . . . .172
(Festival of Corpus Chris ti. Preached at All Saints ,
Margaret Street. )
ANGELIC MINISTRY 178
(Preached at St. Michael s, Paddington, September 29, 1917.)
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE . . . .184
THE INELUCTABLE CHARM . . . . . .196
HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
I. FREEDOM
Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother
of us all. Gal. iv. 26.
WE are beginning the fourth year of the war ;
our leaders have been taking stock and clearly
stating its objects. Many statements of these
are made. Some of them concern diplomatic
arrangements or legal topics. With these we are
not concerned here ; what we are concerned
with is the conflict between principles. The
war, we have been told, is a war of ideals, and
this is in the main true. The conflict is between
the soul of the English and the soul of the Prus
sian. Our danger is that in conquering the body
of our enemy we shall be inspired with his spirit.
Last week Mr. Asquith defined the meaning
of the struggle as the conflict between ideals of
freedom and of force. So far as we are assured
that freedom is the end for which we are fighting,
we know that our aim is spiritual. Faith in
freedom implies faith in the spiritual nature of
man. Prussia in its characteristic incarnation,
Bismarck, always scouted the ideal of freedom,
and her actions are all in harmony. English-
A
2 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
men believe in freedom even if they do not always
achieve it, and even though they may have been
at times false to their ideals for the higher and
the more spiritual your ideals, the greater gap
must there be, always will there be, between ideal
and practice. It is only the people with a low
ideal who carry it out nearly. Only the devil is
completely successful.
Now the great hope for English freedom is that
at least in politics we do not confuse it with
anarchy. In religion, in morals, there may be
a tendency to carry individual liberty to excess ;
but there is less of this in political and social life,
or in social arrangements. That excessive in
dividualism comes from a false view of human
nature ; it loses sight of the essentially social
nature of personality. The greatness of England
has been that in all her characteristic institutions
she has succeeded in harmonising both com
munal life and individual liberty. The best
proof of that is, that people who stress one to the
excess of the other always disapprove of those
institutions ; they will either tell you that it
is a tyranny, or else that it is anarchy.
We recognise that the individual is free, and
we also recognise him as a member of a group.
More and more does the problem of liberty turn
on the recognition of small groups by the side of
large ones.
It is this character of freedom at stake that has
FREEDOM 3
brought America into the war, and led to the
Russian cataclysm. We must not be surprised
if the latter event has in its early stages pro
duced excesses which are the cause of military
disaster. As a power at war we must deplore
this, but do not let us get into the habit of laying
it all on the present regime, or want of regime,
in Russia. The fault is with the bureaucrats of
the last regime, who kept the millions ignorant.
It is the cheapest form of Pharisaism to attack
the Russian revolution just because it has not
worked like clockwork at the first ; moreover, it
is practically certain that without this revolution
the Russian Government (not the Emperor)
would have made a separate peace some time ago.
Let us not, then, get into the tone of Pharisaic
superiority, abusing people who are at this
moment unduly suffering from the intoxication
of liberty when first enjoyed. Still, that ought
to be a lesson for us not to mistake liberty for
anarchy, or to suppose that if every man can do
what is right in his own eyes you can still have
a real commonwealth.
The second error with regard to freedom is
this : that it consists in desiring our own way.
Everybody desires his own way. That is how
the worst tyrant that ever was would express
his aim in life. The true test of faith in free
dom is the measure of tolerance we have for those
who go a different way. Those who really
4 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
believe in freedom prove it by upholding the
rights of others, whether peoples or individuals ;
moreover, the limits of individual action in any
nation, or in any part of a nation, must vary
with circumstances. You cannot have the same
liberty in a city besieged as in time of peace ;
there must be concentration and even inter
ference for the sake of bare existence.
Englishmen have been able to see these things ;
that is what has united all classes, and led them
to submit not only to sacrifices, but to all kinds
of regulation very alien from their habit. We
can all of us think of cases where that has not
been done, but if you consider the ordinary
Englishman s strong dislike of interference, the
amazing thing is the amount of interference he
has stood, and the nation as a whole has stood,
as compared with the small number of those
who claim in one thing or another to be sup
ported by the nation at a time of crisis, while
they themselves do exactly what they like.
However, it is not of the war that I am to speak
on these four Sundays. I do not think people
very much want sermons about the war they
come to church to get away from it.
Last year we considered here during the four
Sundays in August some of the defects in English
religion. On the eve of the National Mission
it was well that we should see what was wrong ;
but we are not wise if we fix our minds only upon
FREEDOM 5
that ; we have enough to depress us as it is.
This month, let us try to see what are the grounds
of hope for the Catholic religion ; these are real.
We forget them sometimes, owing to the English
like of grumbling ; it is known that people who
do not understand the English always imagine
that their institutions are very much worse or
less suited to them than they are, because one
of the things that is a sine qiia non in any English
institution to the average Englishman is some
thing in it at which he can grumble.
Let us this morning take that which is germane
to the day, namely, the liberating force of true
religion. This is not always recognised. Re
ligion in a country like this has become involved
in a mass of traditional and social institutions,
and, consequently, some people identify religion
with convention, and among many believers
there are those who think of it mainly as a com
plex system of taboo, mainly concerned with
prohibiting things. This may even be defended
as needful discipline, or it may be attacked as
cramping. Many of the younger generation in
revolt think of it simply in dislike. But that is
not the main quality of religion. In any time
of religious awakening, it is the freedom-giving
note that is the loudest. This exhilarating, up
lifting spirit you can see throughout the Psalms,
and also throughout the New Testament. The
reason why people without knowing it are so
6 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
fond of the Psalms is that the Psalms are so full
of exhilaration, the sense of freedom given by
real religion. One not a Christian has said that
the whole meaning of religious experience is
summed up in the words : My soul has escaped
even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler.*
Psalm cxix. is occupied mainly with the law of
God, yet you see it also brings in the same
notion : I will walk in the way of Thy com
mandments, when Thou hast set my heart at
liberty.
This sense of liberty, of escape, of being lifted
above the torments of time, all of us need. We
need it just now more especially. As the long
agony of the conflict goes on men feel this.
Most of all they will feel it when it is over. They
will feel it partly because there will come a sense
of terrific fatigue ; and partly because the throes
of war will be in some ways less perplexing than
the social and economic tangle we shall have
then to unravel. If we are not to be enmeshed
in the net of circumstances we need faith in some
power which shall lift us above that. In other
words, the world needs a faith, men need a faith,
in the eternal values, as they are called, in a
power beyond this life. They want to be able
to believe in themselves as having immortal aims,
and they want to be able to believe in something
that is beyond the extraordinary, ugly and
tangled mess which life seems.
FREEDOM 7
This is brought home to them in an age like
this new age in which we now live, and of which
we cannot live to see the end. It is a life and
immortality brought to light by the Gospel
which can alone assure us ; for that does lift
us up ; that shows us that our real life is in a
world of which all these other things are only
elements or stepping-stones. This thought of a
God Who really lives and of a human life which,
in society, is to go on beyond the grave that
can lift us up above * the rumour of the periods,
and free our feet from sinking in the slough of
despond. That was what the Jews found in the
days when their kingdom was destroyed, as you
can see in some of the later prophets. That was
the sustenance of the first Christians. These
people we do not remember it these early
Christians were most of them slaves ; slaves,
no doubt, with different degrees of education,
but slaves legally, and they had nothing in this
life to look to, and no sense of freedom in the
world they lived in. They found it in the
Christian Church.
It is remarkable how modern writers who are
enemies of freedom can find nothing but scorn
for the early Christians. Believers in race
supremacy, like Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
are never weary of talking about what he calls
the chaos of the Roman Empire and the mongrel
people who embraced Christianity ; and out of
8 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
that he would lead us into a new conquering
and Teutonic religion still to be called Christian.
It is a remarkable fact that people in this country
to a large extent admired that book, The Foun
dations of the Nineteenth Century, when it was
translated about 1911 or 1912. It was greeted
with a thunder of applause, although it is ex
tremely superficial, and, indeed, in certain places
absolutely wild ; yet men were not afraid then
of this notion, which is inimical to freedom and
opposed to Christianity.
Now we have learned a little what that means.
But we must realise that to many minds those
early Christians are still what they were in the
days of St. Paul, when he described them as the
offscouring of all things. We who are Christians
do well to compare ourselves to the men of that
day, for the position of the Church in regard to
the world has in the last fifty years more and
more closely approximated to the earlier days of
its obscurity. That is one reason why St. Paul
is so modern and so helpful. We can all of us
get refreshment and strength from St. Paul. It
is the sense of a new-found freedom which
breathes in all his utterances. All this is the
secret of his terrific vitality. It is amazing to
me how any one can seriously believe that the
Christian Church is an institution which is hostile
to life, in face of the writings of St. Paul. They
do believe it, because they identify the Christian
FREEDOM 9
Church with certain by-products, or else because
they make the mistake which we used to make, so
many of us, before the war, of thinking that all
discipline is deadly. The same spirit can be
-seen in the Apocalypse of St. John. There the
writer sees the Church as the liberating force
setting men free from the tyrannous immoralism
of the world-empire.
Such stirrings of the sense of freedom we see
all around us now. You have heard of the Life
and Liberty Movement. That movement is not
the effort of a few cranks ; nor is it the push
of one party. What precisely it will effect we
cannot say. But it is gathering together many
men and women of very different sympathies,
solely on the ground that it represents religion
as the spirit of liberty, and that it is determined
to secure for the Church freedom from ancient,
legal, and institutional trammels.
Another quality of freedom which we have
that is in this country is the variety of parties
in the Church of England. People on all sides
deplore this ; they would like the Church to be
of one colour ; they would like to turn out those
who do not think the Church means what they
think it means. And this is by no means
confined to any one party ; it is equally virulent
in those who are always talking about Liberalism.
Yet by keeping all within one body we influence
each other. The modern Christian, whether he
io HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
is a High, Low, or Broad Churchman, if I may
use the old terms, owes more than he would like
to admit to the contributions of those whom he
regards as opponents. It is extraordinary how
the work of men like Frederick Denison Maurice,
or men like Bishop Westcott, or great Evangelical
teachers on the Atonement, have entered into
the minds of people who would be regarded as
very different. Moreover there is a difference
between attacking people inside the Church and
desiring to turn them out of it. To say that
people s views are very inadequate or very wrong
is a very different thing from turning them out,
so long as they mean what they think the Church
means. In the same way, how often we feel that,
though we may agree fundamentally with certain
men in other bodies, there are barriers between
us which no fraternisation can destroy.
Freedom and variety in the Church is our
special note. It has its special dangers, and is
a great trouble to many ; but I think we should
be ill-advised if, in consequence of those dangers,
we were to adopt a system which gave a greater
appearance of uniformity, and possibly concealed
beneath it even wider differences.
Further, if freedom is the quality of religion,
if this is to be our main appeal to this age, we
must look for more varied experiments. Such
experiments will be of different kinds. We
need not expect them all to be successful, but
FREEDOM ii
we must be generous to them all. We are not
to condemn them by maxims derived from Acts
of Uniformity or the Test Act. The coercive
force of these statutes may have long vanished,
or mainly so, yet many people are still dominated
by ideals suited only for the Caroline, and even
sometimes the Elizabethan, period.
Lastly, let us not be afraid to claim for our
selves as Catholic Christians the name of Liberal.
That term is not the exclusive property of
persons with negative opinions closely allied to
those of clerics like Bishop Hoadley of the eight
eenth century. Still less must we allow the
title of free spirit to be appropriated by those
who in the name of religion would deny the
Cross, and would jettison the whole experience
of the race. They are right in thinking that
religion is new and has the future, but it has the
future because it is the inheritor of the past.
Our claim as Catholics is just this : that we are
neither the slaves of mere rationalistic theory,
nor are we the victims of a lifeless tradition.
We have no use for religion in tabloids, whether
orthodox or not. Our claim is that we are in
union with a living Person through a great
society ; that we share the experience of all its
members, and that into our life is poured the
depth of St. Augustine, and the power of St.
Ambrose, and the energy of St. Dominic, and
the love of St. Francis. That Society is the
12 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
witness in this world to the reality of the other ;
it lives not by the force of a carnal command
ment, but by the power of an endless life. It
is universal, and it outlasts the empires ; it is
beyond the distinctions of race, just as it holds
within it every kind of individual quality which
can make God glad.
The Church is not an ancient Jewish insti
tution which has survived ; nor is it merely
Greek philosophy transmuted, nor modern Eng
lish or French, or even Italian, but it blends
the best elements in all. It is essentially free
because its life is essentially personal, the spirit
of Jesus, changing ever in expression, so that the
Church can always teach because she can always
learn.
That is the strange El Dorado adventure, at
once the starting-point and the goal of the human
spirit, the home of the soul and the paradise of
God, on which you and I are going ; and in that
adventure we shall be able both to find and to
give freedom, for Jerusalem which is above is
free, which is the mother of us all.
II. REDEMPTION
The whole creation groaneth and travaileth, waiting for
the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. Rom.
viii. 22-23.
THE Catholic religion, as we saw last week, is
the great liberating force of the world. This is
our ground for hope at this day, provided we see
the Catholic religion in its beauty, that we do
not, as one has put it, mistake for Christ the
grave-clothes that enwrapped His Body.
These principles, of which we speak this
month, are sometimes forgotten, but if they are
borne in mind and become the motives of action,
they give us grounds of hope.
To-day we will look at another of them. The
redemptive character of the Christian religion
is our great hope, especially when we compare it
with other principles of reconstruction. Therein,
in this redemptive character, lies the dynamic
energy of Christianity, and by a redemptive
system I mean a system which postulates, first,
that the present condition of things is evil ; and,
secondly, that this evil is not to be remedied
from within, but that a remedy from without is
forthcoming.
13
I 4 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
You remember how William James, who cer
tainly was not a Christian, defined the essence of
all religion as, first, the sense that something is
wrong ; and secondly, that this wrong can be
put right by making the necessary adjustments
with the higher powers. I am not sure that all
religion can be got into that formula, but certainly
redemptive religion can. Nor must we suppose
that our religion is the only religion of redemp
tion. If it were, our task would be simpler.
Buddhism is also a religion of redemption ; it
teaches that evil is inherent in individual exist
ence, and it inculcates an ethic of self-annihilation
annihilation which, by a long discipline of
denial, is to destroy this evil nature.
The doctrine of Nietzsche is an ethic, if not a
religion, of redemption ; it teaches that man s
present evil or worthless character will be re
moved by the supersession of Christian ethics
through its opposite, and by the development of
a race of masters living on the top ; the rest
of the world does not count. Christianity also
teaches that the world is very evil ; that evil,
it says, is due to sin, to the wrongful direction
of the will. Yet it is different from either of the
two systems I have mentioned in teaching the
inherent dignity of human nature. It is not
human nature, not classes of men, nor the fact
of existence that is wrong, but the disease of the
will. Human nature is in itself of so high a
REDEMPTION 15
worth that God could take that nature upon
Him, and bring about redemption through the
death on the Cross, and give us life from His own
risen life.
This deliverance, once wrought, men appro
priate by becoming new creatures in that
society which shares and communicates the
Divine life. Everybody who joins a new society,
in so far as the pressure of that society is effec
tive, is to some extent a new creature, and the
universality and penetrating quality of religion
makes this more true of Christianity than of
others. Buddhism believes that human indivi
duality is so bad that it must be done away with.
Nietzsche teaches that most men are inherently
worthless, and that the only thing to be done
with them is to treat them as instruments, but
he says that the ruthless exploitation of the
many will make possible, not in this age but in
future ages, a small body of true and noble
characters.
But Christianity is the most democratic of all
religions, though Mohammedanism in that re
spect runs it hard. It sees hope for every man
who wants it by virtue of the Cross and Passion
of our Lord Jesus Christ. It declares that no
body is sunk so low that he may not be raised
to share in the Divine life of Christ. On the
other hand, it declares also (and that is harder
to our own day) that nobody is so naturally
16 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
noble that he does not need God s help and for
giveness. Theosophy would, I suppose, give
you other means of redemption ; I think it is
a system of redemption.
All these are different from the optimism of
the last two centuries. Any one of them has a
better chance just now than the shallow senti
ment of a good-natured universe which I suppose
nearly ever since the time of Leibnitz has ruled
a large amount of educated and benevolent
opinion.
This war has put an end to this optim
ism. Certain notions once popular have been
destroyed by it. The intellectual baggage for
life s cabin passage, which a little while ago
did duty, has been torpedoed. First and fore
most, men have learned the reality of evil.
Men used to say that evil was ignorance, or that
it was imperfection, or arrested development, or
the survival of animal instinct, or even that it
was mere illusion, the inevitable error of a
limited and partial view, but that from the
point of view of God there was no such thing as
evil. Now the world has seen it in all the
naked horror of the truth. Evil is the chosen
idol of a will self-absorbed and worshipping its
own fancies. Other errors this age may make
and will make. All kinds of different schemes
for salvation it may embrace. One thing it will
not do : it will not deny that salvation in some
REDEMPTION 17
form is a need of the world ; nor will it assert
that evil is an illusion, a tremor of the imagina
tion. The world knows evil and feels it, as it
has not done for generations. It suspects it for
what it is love turned the wrong way. Do not
misunderstand me when I say that our age is
like to be free from these errors of the near past.
I do not mean that they .will not be held at all.
You can never say of any view that nobody will
hold it ; some survivals there are, people who
belong to the previous age in any time, and some
cranks who see only what they wish to see.
Have we not in this land with us our own dear
pacifists, just like the Bourbons of a past age,
in order to show us that it is possible to live
through a time of lurid tragedy, learning nothing
and forgetting nothing, and repeating with a
complacent satisfaction the formula and the
catchwords of an age which had not the revelation
which we have ?
Secondly, the notion of progress progress
automatic and inevitable has gone ; I do not
say that there is not a right sense in which we
can talk of human progress : there certainly is.
Yet this war with an enemy, more fiendish and
brutal and treacherous than the worst days of
barbarism, has shown how false is that idea of
the last age, that the world gets better of itself,
like a child growing in its sleep. Tennyson
bade men move upward working out the beast,
B
i8 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
and let the ape and tiger die/ Such appeals
ring false now because the ape and tiger are so
far preferable to the All Highest, and still more
so to the intellectual apologists of his scheme.
For the remarkable thing is, as the French
Ambassador pointed out in speaking of la
barbaric pedante, not a certain amount of bar
barous action presumably that takes place in
all war but the intellectual backing which such
actions have had, and the definite command on the
part of the highest authorities among the enemy.
The tendencies of thought which this war has
accentuated had begun before. The war is the
culminating point. Huxley began this process.
He had no religious bias ; he remained a strong
agnostic to the end, but he showed in his famous
Romanes Lecture that the best things in human
life had not come from natural evolution, but
from the human will set upon good and resist
ing cosmic development. Still the old doctrine
bore sway in the popular mind, and also in a
large part of theological writing, especially that
intended to be liberal, and still more so across
the sea. I remember once after I had been talk
ing to some American students on the subject,
Marvel not if the world hate you/ that one or
two of these spoke to me (so far as I recollect
one was a Churchman and the other probably
not ; neither, as far as I know, had any objections
to orthodox Christianity) but they both came
REDEMPTION 19
to me and said they could not understand what
I meant : surely the world as a matter of course
was getting more and more Christian every day ?
We did not talk like that even then in this
country, and now we know how far it is from
the truth. We can no longer say that apart
from the grace of God men show any tendency
to get better ; rather they get worse. The mind
becomes subtler ; life becomes more complex.
All that means greater power for evil, both ex
ternal and internal. Compare the possibilities
both in action and in his inner life of a highly
educated Prussian prince with those of some
chief of a tribe in the Caribbean Sea. The
latter may order cruelties and thefts, but his
mind is only half awake, and much is due to
custom ; his villainies bear the same sort of
relation to the other as the naughtiness of a child
of five to the calculated scheme of a Crippen
or a Charles Peace.
Thirdly, and closely connected with the last
point, even more patently false than the doctrine
of natural goodness and inevitable progress, is
the doctrine that all necessary amelioration can
be effected by culture. In education, in the
powers of a trained mind and will, no one dis
putes the pre-eminence of the Prussian. I
suppose it would have been admitted before the
war that the Prussian officer is in this matter of
mental training as much superior, not, of course,
20 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
to all, but to his average English compeer, as
Mommsen is to Mrs. Markham. At any rate,
we need not deny that two generations of English
men and other countries have bowed before the
Germans in music, in history, in classical scholar
ship, in philosophy, in science, and still more,
of course, in the military art. But for this war
Teutonic culture would have conquered the
world ; and possibly that dream of Houston
Stewart Chamberlain of a new religion, nomi
nally Christian, but entirely Teutonic, paying
no regard to the development of Catholic Chris
tianity, might have come true. Fortunately
the Germans have saved us by showing in act
and deed both the matter and the manner of their
doings ; they have shown us our mistake, and
delivered the world from an unreasoning faith
in culture. Education increases the power of
a nation or an individual to manipulate the
world. A man knows more and knows better
what he wants. He has more command of the
means to attain his wants. He has learned the
self-control needful to wait and to set aside sub
sidiary aims ; but a man does not, because he is
educated, necessarily have nobler aims than
others, and he may be more and not less con
scienceless. Germany has shown us with less of
grace and refinement what Europe in the fifteenth
century learned from some of the Renaissance
princes and popes.
REDEMPTION 21
All this, the revelation of the reality of evil,
of the if I may so put it non-inevitability of
progress and of the inadequacy of culture, has
made men feel that the world as it is is in a
parlous state, and that it needs redemption.
That has been the cry of social reformers of
every school ; it is the hit motif of revolution
aries ; it is the burden of much recent literature.
Mr. Wells said so long since in a book called
Marriage. It inspires the writings of Mr. Gals
worthy and even of Mr. Shaw, and you will find it
in many other popular writings. The facile op
timism of the last age has gone for a time.
Christianity has new rivals, some of them
formidable, but they are different in kind from
the agnosticism of the past age. Neither rose-
water idealism nor cold self-restrained moralism
has much appeal. All the competitors of
Christianity come with some kind of gospel,
catastrophic, redemptive, apocalyptic. In that
way they will be nearer akin to the Christ of the
New Testament than was the liberal Protestant
caricature of Him, or than any philosophic
meliorist with His maxims.
This, then, is the ground of hope for the Chris
tian religion : the world not only needs but feels
the need of redemption ; it does not always use
the word. But if we are to realise this hope, we
must fulfil certain conditions. First of all, this re
demptive character of the Christian Faith must
22 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
not be slurred over ; to use technical language, the
theology of grace must be emphasised, the sense
that it is not of him that willeth, or him that
runneth, but God from Whom comes all help
and power the picture of the Gospel as light to
a world in darkness, or, more accurately, a spar
to a man drowning in a rough sea, and not merely
the thought of religion as the guarantee of
man s own higher thought, or the sanction of
honourable living, or of social piety. It is that,
but it is much more than that. What the
world needs is help ; it feels that it cannot help
itself alone, and if it can only believe it is ready
to recognise that power from beyond which shall
tell us that our warfare is accomplished, our
sin is pardoned.
People are afraid sometimes to talk about the
forgiveness of sins, but it is what we all want
now. The Tractarian Movement went too far
in its reaction from the crude language and
excited appeals to be saved of the Evangelicals.
In the last age the Atonement was not denied ;
it was taken for granted. Conversion, definite
conversion, very often was denied. Men thought
of the Incarnation as the central truth, and that
if they concentrated upon that all the rest would
follow.
Unfortunately, what has followed this thrust
ing aside of the Atonement has been an increasing
hesitation about the worship of Jesus as Lord.
REDEMPTION 23
Make people think of Jesus as Saviour, and they
will soon worship Him as Lord. Make Him
only the Lord of all good life, and they will begin
to think of Him merely as the embodiment of
the moral ideal ; and gradually, almost without
knowing it, to lose sight of His transcendent
nature. It is Jesus as our Saviour Who always
wins men, and always will do, except the vir
tuous few, the moral gentlemen/ upon whom
Dr. Forsyth casts scorn. But what men need is
that strange Man upon the Cross, God supreme,
not in power, but in humility and suffering and
submission. I, if I be lifted up, will draw all
men unto Me.
Along with the Cross, we must emphasise the
unique character of our religion. Sometimes
we hear that this war has shown the bankruptcy
of the Christian Church. That is nonsense.
What it has shown is the bankruptcy of all
other ways of life. Ever since the Renaissance
people have been excluding Christianity from
any influence on public life, or intellectual ideals.
Christendom was a fact in the Middle Ages ; now
it is no more than a geographical expression, if
it be so much. This war was provoked by the
universal prevalence, in industrial no less than
in international relations, of ideals and methods
which not even its enemies would call Christian ;
and so it has proved the death of all hopes for
the world based upon pure naturalism. I do
24 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
not say that it is the death of naturalism itself,
because you can hold that if you are con
sistently pessimistic ; but it destroys the hope
from it.
But the Christian doctrine of loyalty to the
brotherhood of human life as essentially a society
and springing out of loyalty to Christ the Re
deemer, of the permanence in the other world
of personal and social relations of love and
worship this is not only intact, but it shows
the only optimistic way out. Apart from its
theological foundations and its reference to the
other world, it is being preached as the one hope
of mankind by many who are far enough from
our Faith.
Lastly, the Alexandrian age, as I may call it,
of English religion has closed the period domi
nated by Westcott ; that method of assimilation
and culture (the same sort of motive that inspired
Clement of Alexandria and others of the Greek
fathers) has come to an end. It did a very
valuable work, but we have passed that stage.
The growth of influential systems of thought
and inspirers of action which not only deny
creeds but repudiate Christian ideals of life, has
forced upon us the realisation of our own distinct
ness, our unique quality as Christians. All high
ideals ultimately have their sanction in the
Christian Church, and without that support will
soon decay ; just in the same way as the ancient
REDEMPTION 25
world on its better side was feeling after a sys
tem of life only fulfilled in completeness by the
Gospel. But we must not take these things as
the measure of our aim. In the same way the
philosophy of the Cross of Christ was precisely
the same as the philosophy that we see now ful
filled so wonderfully in the sacrifice of those who
are dying for us at the Front. But although it is
the same it is a great deal more, and bigger.
Frank paganism is now proclaimed by some ;
others throw scorn upon every object of Christian
reverence, even the character of our Lord. It
is clear that we must realise our own unique
position ; we must present our Faith as desirable
because it is different from other things, and not
in spite of the fact. Too many people have been
inclined to argue that there can be no harm in
accepting Christianity, because it is just the
same as all high moral ideals. We want its
distinct beauty and colour, and that is what the
world wants, though some will reject it. To
that end we need more and more to feed upon
the Bible.
That is the great help for us in England. The
Bible is not so well known or read as it used to
be, apart from students. The great tradition,
the atmosphere of Scripture, is still with the
masses. Quotations still are made quite natur
ally. This is more so, I think, with the great
masses of men than it is with the most highly
26 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
educated. But if we are to bring out these
qualities, the redemptive, the apocalyptic, the
unique nature of the Catholic religion, we need
more and more to dwell upon the words and the
pictures of Scripture ; not upon any summary
of the philosophy of religion or the ideals of
Christianity, but the pictures of Jesus in the
Gospels, or that wonderful picture of the heart
and mind of that great human being St. Paul,
or the sublime, almost unearthly vision of
St. John. It is often the best hope for any one
who is in doubt about his faith to get him to
read the First Epistle of St. John.
But for ourselves, let those words and phrases
mean more and more to us ; let us meditate upon
them, and once more perhaps we shall win that
in which we are so sorely behind the world, the
courage for which all things are possible. In
the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of
good cheer, I have overcome the world.
III. SACRAMENTALISM
4 The invisible things of God are clearly seen, through the
things that are visible. Rom. i. 20.
ONE of our chief grounds for hope is the Sacra
mental character of the Catholic religion. In
face of certain notorious facts this statement
may seem strange, but I think it is true. Sacra-
mentalism is not an excrescence upon Chris
tianity ; it is of its inmost being.
Secondly, it is congruous with human life,
and in the true sense natural.
Thirdly, it is the form which makes reli
gion effective for the average man. Professor
Gwatkin used to deplore that the natural man
is a born Catholic. We may accept the fact,
but we need not deplore it. A religion which
is to help men in general must accept while
sublimating the natural qualities of human
life.
The first of these is our condition in a world
of space and time with inward and outward in
extricably mingled. Secondly, man is by nature
a social being ; society is not a thing added on
at will. He develops himself through living in
groups, of which the most obvious is the natural
27
28 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
group of the family. The Church bases her
claim upon these facts.
Firstly, man is not a discarnate spirit ; he is
a being which functions in space and in changing
time ; nor, except in thought, can we separate
the outward life of the body from the inward life
of self-consciousness. This latter, strictly speak
ing, is all that we can be sure to know. Any
religion which appeals to man, and not to a
piece of him, must do so in a concrete form, and
not merely in ideas and sentiments ; that is, it
must make use of outward means as well as of
inward. That is the method of Incarnation.
It is a commonplace that the Sacramental
method involves the same principle. Most argu
ments against the Sacramental significance of
Baptism or the Eucharist can equally well be
used against the Incarnation.
On the general principle of a religion which
shall be more than merely notional we need not
go to High Churchmen. We can take two such
typical eighteenth-century prelates as Bishop
Butler and Bishop Warburton. The former in
a Charge to the clergy of Durham argues forcibly
for the external formulation of religion. He says:
The form of religion may indeed be where
there is little of the thing itself ; but the thing
itself cannot be preserved among mankind
without the form/ Warburton, in The Alliance
between Church and State, answers the claim that
SACRAMENTALISM 29
Christianity need be no more than the relation
of each individual to God. He says : It may
be asked whether this intercourse as it begins,
so likewise, it should not end in mental exercise ;
and consequently whether religion be not what
many seem now disposed to think it, but a kind of
divine philosophy in the mind ; which composes
only a spiritual and mystic body of followers.
For if this indeed be the case there is an end of
all religious society. . . . We can easily con
ceive how a mere mental religion may fit the
nature of pure immaterial spirits. . . . But man
being compounded of two natures, soul and body,
it seems necessary at first sight that religion
here should partake of the character of its
subject/
Yet, as Warburton knew, the dislike of this
doctrine of any external form of religion is
common ; it always will be common. Religion
has been defined as living from the deepest
depths of being. To many who try to feel
these depths consciously, abstraction from
any outward form seems a needful means ;
in consequence they resent any notion
that, for instance, Sacraments can be vitally
effective. This objection is further connected
with the doctrine that it is degrading to God to
suppose that He would make use of such means
as bread and wine, purely material means, as a
condition of a gift so spiritual as grace is. That
30 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
objection owes its force to the subtle Manichaean
doctrine that matter is evil. There is a feeling
that God cannot enter into the material world.
This doctrine has great attractions, especially
for good people. It is so easy to see an inera
dicable taint in all outward things. Then you
will go on to declare that God is not to be wor
shipped by consecrating material things, but by
living so far as may be in denial of them. But
after all, as the text says, the outward world is
a Sacrament of the inner. This Sacramental
claim is not, as some would have it, the claim of
some strange and foreign element intruding into
religion and degrading it : rather it comes from
life in this world, and is congruous with the
natural pieties of life. The sense of worship
which rises on the hills, or, as we contemplate
a sunset ; our reverence for the spirit in the
simplest and most ancient form of family re
union ; the belief that a meal is a sort of sacra
ment of friendship ; the age-long belief that the
highest kind of life is sustained by some physical
communication of the divine all these are
summed up, and find their true development in
the Christian cult.
That some of these notions are of earlier origin
and wider prevalence than Jewish religion may
be true ; if so, we may welcome the fact. Sacra
mental Christianity is the consecration of the
spiritual life of the race, and the Church is the
SACRAMENTALISM 31
natural home of the soul. So far from its being
an objection, it is a gain when we are told in
detail how the Gospel is a net which gathers in
many kinds. This characteristic of our religion
makes it a charter of liberties for all. Chris
tianity is a religion not for saints only, but for
sinners : I come not to call the righteous but
sinners to repentance. The Church is not
meant to be a small body of nice people ; it is
the great universal society of sinning, suffering,
and struggling men and women, saints and
sinners, good, as the world calls them, and bad ;
the phlegmatic no less than the zealous ; realists
no less than idealists.
Now, Sacramental religion is the one safeguard
of this ; those to whom religion is an interest
even more than it is a principle have always
the temptation to get by themselves into a
Paradise apart. This they may well do, pro
vided they gather into guilds within the great
Society and not apart from it, or do not try to
make themselves the whole. The danger is
always lest good people want to make the Church
consist of themselves alone. That was the fault
of the Donatists. It has been the bane of
Puritanism ; but we can see it at times even
in zealous Catholics. Every one who feels him
self burning in zeal has the temptation to wish
to cast out people who seem lukewarm ; he thinks,
their religion means nothing to them ; but he may
32 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
be wrong. The Church is not meant to consist
only of spiritual athletes, still less is it meant to
consist of spiritual dilettanti. The Church is a
body of men, not supermen. Are all apostles ?
Are all prophets ? Have all the gift of tongues ?
No religion has any claim to be universal which
of set purpose leaves out the average man, and
by the average man, remember, we mean the man
of no more than average spiritual endowments
and religious tastes, for these are independent
of earthly circumstances. The Catholic Church
would not be democratic if it merely included
the whole spiritual elite, though they happened
to be crossing-sweepers, because this endowment,
these spiritual faculties, as I say, do not depend
on education to any great extent and certainly
not on position ; but we must not deceive our
selves into believing that the Church would be
anything more than a coterie if it excluded no
one from its fellowship, dukes or dustmen,
making only the condition that all must have
great spiritual power. It is glorious to think
that the prince of the Apostles was St. Peter,
that bungling fisherman, and not an educated
intellectual genius like St. Paul, or a born mystic
like St. John. The various Puritan systems
have always tried to make, or would make,
of the Church a body of the spiritual elite ;
belief in the Sacraments is a great safeguard
against that, because it does not depend upon
SACRAMENTALISM 33
our capacity to have spiritually exalted ex
periences.
Secondly, the Sacraments are universal in
their operation. Not only do they appeal to all,
but they help us in all moods, and we know very
well we need them most when we feel dullest.
It is not when, as we say, we feel good or feel
spiritually moved that we need most the help
of God in this way. You need not have any
particular thrill to get the benefit of Sacramental
grace. What some people regard as the shame
of Holy Baptism and the Eucharist is their glory.
The grace is from God, and works independently
of the mood and of the temperament of the
recipient.
On the other plan religious life becomes a
succession of rare ecstasies followed very often
by the attempt to galvanise ourselves into
thrills that we can imagine to be ecstasies.
Nothing is more dangerous, but it fits in with
the modern cult of excitement for excitement s
sake.
Let us then have hope ; for in presenting Sac
ramental Christianity we are not offering the
world a weird and unnatural mysticism, nor are
we demanding some rare spiritual experience
beyond the common power. Rather it is natural
piety sublimated, and it has its special appeal
and place for the man of ordinary, and no
more than ordinary, spiritual endowment. The
C
34 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
person who can do best without it is not the
ordinary man, but a person of a naturally high
character and aspirations, and so we often find.
More than this, we must claim for the Sacra
mental principle that it is of the essence of
Christianity. When the Church appears in
history she is Sacramental. It is not an ex
traneous foreign infusion in the simple life of the
early Christians. If it were, we should not have
the Epistle to the Hebrews taking for granted
as first principle the doctrine of Baptism. All
modern researches show that we cannot cut the
Sacramental notion out of the New Testament.
Even those who attribute all to St. Paul testify
to its primitive quality ; for the epistles of
St. Paul are our earliest authority for Christian
practice. It is now charged against St. Paul
that he invented the Eucharist, that he adapted
Christianity to the mystery cults at that time
so fashionable ; but we find that the First
Epistle to the Corinthians clearly speaks of the
Eucharistic worship as something established
and well known. Still it may be admitted that
Christianity is a mystery religion. How much it
owes to them in terms like salvation I hardly
think we can say. It fulfilled a want of whose
existence the prevailing mystery cults were evi
dence ; that is, it gave those people in reality
what they had been long seeking for and trying
to invent.
SACRAMENTALISM 35
But that is only one side ; you cannot cut off
the entail which binds the Christian Church to
the Jewish. It is being asked now whether our
Lord really founded the Church, with a strong
presumption in favour of a negative reply. The
answer to that is not to point to a definite polity
sketched out by our Lord, as we must suppose
in the great Forty Days, but rather to em
phasise His claims to be the Messiah. I am
not come to destroy the law but to fulfil it.
The Christian Church is the Jewish Church
come to its consummation. The object of
Christ s earthly ministry was to get the Jewish
nation to recognise that the Kingdom had come
at last, and that the meaning of their hopes was
there. Had they done that, there would have
been no question about this continuity ; since
they did not, the Church has, to some extent at
least, the appearance of being a totally new body,
and even her own apologists sometimes over-
stress this newness. That is why it is so im
portant to dwell upon the prophecies of the Old
Testament to see how all is working up to the
doctrine of the Kingdom of God and the Messiah.
And that is why we are right in claiming that
loyalty to the Church is a duty. Loyalty to
the brotherhood, somebody said the other day,
1 is incompatible with loyalty to the Spirit.
That is true only on the doctrine of absolute in
dividualism false alike in politics and in religion.
36 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
The Catholic Church, it is said, owes more to
Greece and Rome than to Galilee. In truth it
owes a great deal to both. The ancient world
was strong in its sense of loyalty to the com
munal life. In Aristotle s famous phrase, The
State is prior to the individual. In this way we
can see how much of the antique passion of
sacrifice for the compact city-State has had to
do with the Christian notion of reverence for
the body. But is the Jews passionate sense of
loyalty to their own polity as God-given to go
for nothing ? From which side is derived that
notion of a peculiar people, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation ? Surely the Jewish. Even now
we are told the Jewish sense of fellowship and
loyalty to their own body shames that of many
a Christian. Both Jewish polity and ancient
civic piety bear witness to the same truth
the inherent sociality of man and his need of
loyalty to the body. Professor Royce argues
that this loyalty to the brotherhood is the whole
meaning of Christianity.
Authority rightly understood is not a fetter
upon the freedom of the spirit ; it is a means for
its growth. All men, even the most unconven
tional, must pay regard, first, to their past, and,
secondly, to their fellows. You cannot cut the
painter, and begin the world afresh each genera
tion even if you try : nor can any man live unto
himself alone ; if he did he would have no Ian-
SACRAMENTALISM 37
guage. The point is whether these things
loyalty to the traditional wisdom of men and
loyalty to the collective judgment are of the
essence of our life, or whether they are things in
regard to which you can, without damage,
exercise your own caprice.
The Catholic Church, as do all wise statesmen,
insists upon the former view ; only, as we see
from the case of Germany, you must not make
that claim of authority absolute ; authority is
not infallibility. The opposite scheme, that of
extreme individualism, is put forward as a rule
by a few highly placed persons living on the
accumulated treasures of society, and cherishing
an isolation of spirit which is rendered possible
only by the vast communal labour of the present
and by ages of fellowship and sacrifice in the
past. Sheltered in such a way, men can preach
alike in politics and religion a purely self-centred
individualism. Long since it has been discarded
in politics. From the Christian Faith it is in
herently alien, not on account of any high-flown
supernatural doctrine, but because it conflicts
with the essential principle of love. The in
dividualist mystic, treating Church life as an
accident, disbelieving in Church prayers and
collective organisation such a one may, indeed
often does, practise benevolence ; he tries to love
his neighbour, but this cannot seem to him in
the same way part of his spiritual life as it is to
38 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
one who feels that he is a Christian as being a
baptized member of the Church, drinking in the
life of the whole, and in his turn contributing to
that life. We must never forget that if the in
dividual takes, he also gives, and that is why
we are each of us so deeply responsible.
Church authority is a communal fact in which
every single member not the priests or the
bishops alone has his part. Newman saw that
long ago, and pointed it out in his paper on
Consulting the Laity on Matters of Doctrine.
This is our final reply to those who charge
us with making an addition to, and perverting
the purity of, the original faith. Churchliness,
treating men as Christians because they are
members of the Body, is of the essence of Chris
tianity ; because Christianity is the revelation
that love is the goal of human life, and the mean
ing of the Godhead. Therefore society is not
an afterthought, but inherent in the nature of
things.
For the same reason we can take courage ;
the taunts of our enemies may be bitter, and
the prospect may look black, but the Catholic
religion has its strength in the immemorial depths
of human life ; just as it gathers beauty from
the devotion of a hundred generations. We are
not to fear but that it will outlast the shocks
of time, the shows of circumstance, even in a
day that seems turned to other things.
SACRAMENTALISM 39
It does seem turned. It will be asked : if
your principles are universal, why is it that
they are so little accepted ? First of all, Chris
tianity needs faith. The religion of love as the
essence of things is not obvious. If we thought
it was so in 1914, we cannot think so now. It
cannot be proved. The cumulative force of
many different arguments may be strong, but
it is not coercive, and therefore, unless you have
persecution, so long as you have education you
cannot have religious uniformity. In all ages,
many, perhaps the majority, will reject Chris
tianity. A philosopher said all the fundamental
philosophical positions are tenable in any age,
though not all are equally prevalent. If they
are free, some men will take one, some another.
We cannot expect to do away with unbelief in
this world. Great harm is done by trying to
state Christianity in such a way as to embrace
every one in a world like this. All we can hope
for is a religion which makes a universal appeal.
But even so it may be said, even among
Christians, only a small minority accept these
principles. Ask the man in the street, and what
will he tell you ? Still I would say it is not a
minority if we take Christendom as a whole.
And secondly, even in this country more people
accept these principles than we suppose. Where
they differ is in their application. Methodists
arose really owing to their strong feeling of
40 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
Churchliness and to the Establishment of the
eighteenth century not providing for them. The
Baptists have, or had, a strong doctrine of Sacra
mental Grace in regard to Baptism, and even
among Churchmen who dislike the word Catholic
there is a great deal more faith in its fundamental
principles than we suppose. They may not like
what they think is elaborate and fussy ceremonial ;
but they do not want religion utterly non-
sacramental and interior ; and for the more part
they believe in Baptism as constituting member
ship of the Church, and have a vague but real
belief in Sacramental Grace.
Still, even with all these qualifications, are
there not those who repudiate all this doctrine
of the Church and Sacraments, and only tolerate
its power at present in the hope of getting rid
of it, while they still retain faith in our Lord as
their Redeemer ? Yes, there are. But will they
go on in that way ? I think that Evangelical
Christianity apart from the Church is not easy
to maintain. Quakerism carries these principles
to their logical conclusion ; but remember that
the Quakers arose in an age when all accepted
the Incarnation and the Bible. But the doctrine
of the inner light is really a denial of both. If
the individual is to be guided solely by his own
immediate inspiration, which he believes to come
from God, then he has no possible means of con
necting anything that comes to him with the Jesus
SACRAMENTALISM 41
of history, still less of believing in a doctrine to
explain or to expound Jesus, such as the Incar
nation. He believes only in the immediate gift
of God to his own spirit, and ultimately you
must have, so far as I can see, a purely sub
jective religion without any reference to any
historical development. Even a less rigid ac
ceptance of the evangelical parts of the
Creed apart from the others is not much more
hopeful. We have seen the way things have
gone in Geneva and in Germany. But, on the
other hand, we must remember this ; as I said
the first week I was speaking to you, people will,
and are intended to, emphasise very different
parts of Christian life. There will always be
those within the great society of the Church
who may accept and indeed use the Sacramental
system, whose religious life will go on mainly
apart from it. We must always be prepared for
this emphasis of different elements in the life
of the Christian Church. So long as people
are content to live within the one great body
and not to pour scorn on others, we must admit
that there are some for whom the Sacramental
side of religion is not the most important.
But for the great mass of Christians I believe
that will not be so. More and more as I muse
upon it, more and more as the wonder and beauty
of the Catholic experience of all ages come into
my soul, do I feel that the more rich and strange
42 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
is the experience that may be ours, and the sense
of praise and worship and of God s Presence given
to us in our Eucharistic worship ; and more
and more am I convinced that for the majority
of men and women, not, perhaps, capable
through time or temperament of high speculation
or of any great powers of religious rapture, the
system of external ordinances and of Sacramental
means is the one truly democratic system in
religion which gives them each and all their
place and their rights independent of their tem
perament, their education, and, if I may say so,
of their character. It provides for them, not
at the time when they are at their best, but at
the time when faith burns dim, when the light
of life seems low, when everything seems dull
and nothing worth doing then they can come
and rest in the beauty of the Sacrament when
they would perhaps by themselves be unable to
make prayers of any meaning.
IV. HUMANISM
I am come that they might have life, and that they
might have it more abundantly. St. John x. 10.
THE most dangerous notion that modern Chris
tianity has to combat is that it means a shrinking
from life, that by its moral system it closes the
avenues of human experience, and that in that it
is wedded to the tradition which starves the mind.
Yet the heightened life of which these words
speak is the quality of the Christian Church as
we see it in the New Testament, and it is clearly
shown in all great periods of the Church, and it
is also found in individuals.
So, too, it gives this sense of the right to a
full life to people of whom outwardly we should
think the reverse was true. True, this system
involves discipline, and all discipline is a dying,
the cutting off of what we like best at the moment,
or the facing of something painful or dangerous ;
but, if discipline be a dying to life, we can em
brace it. No artist, no thinker, no successful
leader was ever made without it. Christianity
is the hardest discipline, for its aim is to make
us pilgrims of eternity fit for our destiny.
But that aim is the development of our fuller
43
44 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
personality, functioning in a society, rich in
every spiritual treasure. It is not, as in
Buddhism and other Oriental religions, the
annihilation of personality.
Our hopes for the Catholic religion at this
stage rest upon our faith in its power to stimulate
every living and wholesome interest of human
life and society. We claim that in the Christian
Church each man in the degree and measure of
his capacity can have not less but more of the
love of beauty, as shown in art, letters, and
music, or the sense of order and the desire for
truth in the investigation of natural phenomena,
or that love of intimacy with human life in every
age which we call the historical sense, no less than
he can in the growth of all bodily powers and
courage, and the readiness for adventure, mental
and physical.
In a word, Christianity is the sanction of
Humanism in its best sense, and the Church is
the true home of the soul and the body. These
are large claims. Many do not believe that
they are well founded. Yet our hopes for win
ning men and women in this age, avid of ex
perience, set on fire by the love of what is new,
depend upon our trying with all our force to
make that claim good. Its success rests upon
each of us each Christian man and woman.
Any turning back or shrinking, any frowning out
on puritanic or obscurantist lines, or undue
HUMANISM 45
readiness to be shocked (which is all that some
people think religion means) may do incalculable
harm. I heard of an eminent bishop, who when
visiting was introduced by the priest to his
churchwarden, the publican of the village, and
an excellent man, but the bishop s remark was,
1 Could you not have managed to get some one
else ?
Remember that this depends upon the laity
more than it does upon the clergy. Some will
say how absurd it is to claim for the Church any
place in this movement of the spirit. Is it not
notorious that Christians are of small account
in certain circles which are predominantly intel
lectual, while as to art, letters, science, the
majority of Christians, even of those who have
what is called a good education, are avowedly
unsympathetic ? The English clergy used to
be called the wonder of the world for their learn
ing, and a little later it was expected, as a matter
of course, that the vicar of the parish would be
the most cultivated man in it. Is it not, rather,
true that there is a gulf between the Church and
culture, and that this gulf is widening daily ?
In so far as it is true, I claim that it is only an
incidental phase, and that it is our business to
end it. Moreover, the Church does not mean
the clergy. It is for Christians because they are
Christians to have this sympathy, and in some
rather obvious cases it is not the priest who
46 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
should be expected to develop it. It is not the
business of any one to try to be everything.
It is the business of the Church to include every
real interest. We cannot expect, for instance,
a hard-working parish priest in a populous slum
district to have at his finger-ends the latest
literary, artistic, or scientific gossip. My point
is that these qualities and these interests ought
to be shown by the Church in its members, and
that they may be.
The divorce between the Church and intel
lectual activities, so far as it is a fact, is due to
several causes. The first has been the attempt
to dominate scientific inquiry by conclusions
supposed to be derived from theology. Of this
the cardinal instance is the case of Galileo. The
outcry against Charles Darwin in the last age
was an unpleasant echo of that. The effect of
that error was disastrous, and it is not yet over.
There persists amongst scientific men a sus
picion of all theological thought, and it still
persists, although it is probably mitigated. But
science has acquired her independence ; even that,
however, has tended to make the Church take up
a position of entire detachment and to disclaim
interests in a sphere beyond its direct province.
Other causes are deeper. Religion is, as I
believe, the ultimate sanction for all that can
be called humane culture ; that is, culture may
exist at any moment without religion, but it has
HUMANISM 47
no real right to do so, and it may decay. Yet
this basis is not obvious, nor is it always clear
what is meant by culture as a fruit of the religious
spirit. To the profoundly religious mind the
danger of absorption in these interests may
present itself as an acute form of the temptation
of the world, more acute because more subtle
than in its somewhat grosser form. You know the
famous story of St. Bernard, how he walked past
the Lake of Geneva, and was so absorbed in
Divine contemplation that he had no leisure to
admire the scenery. At other times he showed
a real regard for scenery. Since the other world
is the goal of the religious man, and since his final
place can be only in the City of God, the religious
man may be inclined to treat interest in all these
matters of human creation as though it meant
living upon a lower level, and to detach himself
therefrom. Where this notion rules, in propor
tion as people are earnest in religion, they will
tend to regard themselves as superior to learning,
without the need of any earthly cult of beauty.
For certain rare souls that may be true, but it
is not true for the mass of men, even Christian
men. The effect of this has been bad. It has
tended to make both religion and culture of de
partmental interest as you see in shop windows
the term * Art fabrics. Instead of ministering
to the whole life of the people, having a broadly
human appeal, as we see in the great age of the
48 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
thirteenth century, both religion and culture
are now regarded as the affairs of those who like
that sort of thing and have time for it, and each
of them tends to be treated as a something apart
from the main stream of civilisation as presented
to us in all its beauty by the factory and the
cinema. Religion to be human must be in prin
ciple Sacramental. Treated as a purely other
worldly interest it becomes the property of those
who can make it their main form of earthly
activity.
This need not be. Of that we have evidence
in history. The better side of the ancient world
from the time of Socrates developed in ideals
which had their outcome in Christianity, and
which could be fulfilled in no other way. The
Church has been the most potent means for
preserving what is good in the ancient culture,
and handing it down. Clement of Alexandria
saw this, and claimed that the educated Christian
was the true Gnostic. St. Augustine, uncom
promising as he is, is fully imbued with the cul
ture of his day, and influenced by the writings
of Vergil and Cicero. Here we have shown the
power of the great Christian Society to assimi
late all that was malleable to its spirit of an
ancient civilisation. In the Middle Ages we see
its creative activity at work. It is easy to sneer
at the barbarism of those times, so different
is it not ? from our world, as the combats
HUMANISM 49
of kites and crows. Bishop Creighton was right
in saying that the greatest age yet known was
the thirteenth century. There we find the high-
water mark of achievement in the greatest Gothic,
like the Sainte Chapelle and all the subsidiaries.
Poetry never surpassed the Divina Commedia of
Dante ; and the intellectual activity of the uni
versities of those days put ours to shame, and
it was not the possession merely of a class.
Every part of life was claimed for God, but in
writers like St. Thomas the intellect obtains its
rights, and in spite of reverence for authority has
rarely been freer. The revival of the spirit of
humility and poverty in the friars went side by
side with the development of a vast system of
law founded on the Roman, and attempts to
prevent the oppression of the poor, which, if not
wholy successful, were preferable to the methods
of the Manchester Economists and their fellows,
who encouraged the slavery of children, so ably
described recently by Mr. and Mrs. Hammond
in their new book, The Town Labourer. Even
the change to the modern world was the work of
Churchmen. In its later stages the Renaissance
may have been anti-Christian. Machiavelli and
others, like Nietzsche, took the bad elements
of the pagan mind ; but the great rush of the re
discovery of Humanist enthusiasm was not anti-
Christian, and the debt of culture is great to
Popes of blameless life and human learning
50 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
like Nicholas V. It was so also in the seven
teenth century. Alike in this country and
France, there was a great intellectual ferment,
and in the main it was nothing incompatible
with religious fervour. We see that in men like
Jeremy Taylor, or Bossuet, or Fenelon. On the
evidence of history it cannot be maintained that
the Church is divorced from culture.
I think we can go further. In the first part of
his work, The Foundations of Belief, Mr. Arthur
Balfour has shown that a thorough-going accept
ance of the principle of naturalism must be the
death of religion and all the other goods of
human life beyond immediate comfort. This
thesis has been developed by others, like Mr.
Mallock. This is not true always of indi
viduals, and would show itself but gradually.
What is true is that the pursuit of truth, the
worship of beauty, alike depend upon faith in
the universe as the work of God. Apart from
the practical work of science in enslaving nature,
there is no reason for going on with laborious
toil unless we believe ourselves to have permanent
value. Truth is worth getting at if we think
we are immortal beings. Otherwise man is a
stranger in a hostile universe, and can but make
the best of a short day of frost and sun before
all goes down. Still more is this true with the
worship of beauty. That is the ultimate meaning
of all the markings, whether stone or paint, or
HUMANISM 51
sound or words. What makes it worth while,
or, rather, what does this ineradicable instinct
of the artist imply ? Beauty, as has been well
said, is the form of Love, and the meaning of
aesthetic activity is faith in Eternal Love, that
light whose smile kindles the universe, that
benediction in which all things move. Many
may be content with the fact who do not seek
for the cause, and repudiate, indeed, the further
reference.
Still, it is there. A civilisation cut off wholly
from God would be a civilisation without the
highest kind of culture, whether aesthetic or
intellectual. It would have no motive beyond
fear, immediate pleasure, and the desire to ward
off the terrors of pain or death to pursue these
ends. If indeed there be eternal life, and man
can share it, then indeed the goods of sight and
imagination, the treasures of thought, and all
the ardours of spiritual adventure are the out
ward and visible signs of that inward and in
visible grace which we term the glory of God.
Further, for these things to be held to the
full there must be peace in the soul. Not a
peace necessarily of body or outward things, or
a life without trouble or sacrifice. Even in art
it is true that men must die to live. You
cannot keep the cross out of any form of human
life. This is admitted by all the greatest poets,
even where they are not Christian. The true
52 HOPES1FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
artist is like the man in Daudet s tale with the
head of gold, who had the means of making
richer any one he cared for, but it was only by
the costly sacrifice of a part of himself. At the
base of all this must be a sense of peace, of
resting on a sure foundation, of being at home
with all things, and this can only be to those
who have the peace of God.
Lastly, we must bear in mind that, if Chris
tianity be the source of culture, it is because of
its belief in Eternal Love, and in human society
as a fellowship. All culture requires a social
atmosphere. The notion that we can be purely
individualistic is false in fact. Some intel
lectuals are for denying the social elements in
culture, and claiming that every one can be for
himself alone. I am glad that most who think
that deny the Christian Faith, but if our faith be
in the fellowship of the redeemed, in the human
family as heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,
then we must beware of making anything ex
clusive. The great need of our hideous in
dustrial cities is not more money, but a higher
life for all ; not better houses, but better com
munal buildings ; a first-rate theatre for every
city, with a municipal orchestra ; for more
universities, not only for the few but for all.
This is not only a just claim, but it is eminently
Christian. The great evil of the culture which
came in with the Renaissance, and sheltered in
HUMANISM 53
the courts of princes, and flowered in educated
Europe in the eighteenth century, was that it
was exclusive. The writings of Gibbon or
Montesquieu or Goethe, or, in a lesser scale,
of Horace Walpole or Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, are evidence of this. We Catholic
Christians, as I contend, and no one else, are
the true Argonauts of the ideal ; but we cannot
be that, as Christians, if we are clinging to a class
culture, the treasure of an expensive education,
lifting us above our common fellowship, for that
exclusive spirit, alas ! is too often the result of
education a culture purely selfish . The Church,
I am persuaded, has a greater and more glorious
opportunity than she has ever had in the past,
but she must not be a class Church, either in
fact or name. She must be ready to see the
value of the principle of fellowship, as something
truly Christian, and not to gather up her skirts
because some people are different in their ways
and speech. Ethically considered, the most
thoroughgoing Christian movement of the last
century was the Trade Union movement, which
expressed the principle of brotherhood. Yet
many people disapproved. How needful it was
is shown by the facts detailed by Mr. and Mrs.
Hammond in their book on The Town Labourer,
and it cannot be said that the Church did much
to understand or welcome it, though we must not
forget the labours, in a cause despised by all the
54 HOPES FOR ENGLISH RELIGION
intellectuals of that day, of the great Lord
Shaftesbury. It has been well said that, horrible
as the state of things was in the factories as
regards child labour a hundred years ago, pro
bably in a hundred years to come we shall be
equally aghast at the wastage of child life to
day in blind-alley occupations and bad housing.
We ought to be the people most alive to it, but
is our conscience alive ? If it is not, I do not
know whether we shall have a great Church
very long with a live and wholesome life of really
human interests.
Still, there are many signs of hope, and there
are more people whose consciences are awakened.
Let us, then, pursue all these things which go
by the name of culture. Let us repudiate the
charge that we are afraid of thought, but let us
above all bear in mind that the Christian life
is the fellowship of brotherhood, that we are
determined to do all we can to make these things
common. * Whatsoever things are true, what
soever things are honest, whatsoever things are
just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good
report : if there be any virtue, and if there be
any praise, think on these things/
OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
I. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
IN ENGLAND
I have a goodly heritage. 3 Psalm xvi. 6.
HAVE I ? That is the question which many
English Churchmen ask themselves. What is
the worth of our so-called Catholic heritage in
the English Church ? That is the topic which
we shall consider together these five Sundays.
Many people just now are inclined to doubt
either the reality, or else the value of this heritage.
Such doubts are natural, but I think that they
are not well founded. Nor must we over- rate
their importance. The English branch of the
Church of God is one of our most characteristic
institutions, and we know that it is always an
Englishman s privilege to grumble. That privi
lege has been exercised to the full by English
Church people, lay and clerical, male and female.
From the days of John Henry Newman onwards
many have been found to echo the scorn of the
Apologia at the comfortable Church ; some, too,
will feel the justice of those pathetic words in
the last sermon at Littlemore : O my mother,
55
56 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
whence is this unto thee, that thou hast good
things poured upon thee and canst not keep them,
and bearest children yet darest not own them ?
Why hast thou not the skill to use their services,
nor the heart to rejoice in their love ? How is
it that whatever is generous in purpose, and
tender or deep in devotion, thy flower and thy
promise, falls from thy bosom and finds no home
within thine arms ? Who hath put this note
upon thee to have a " miscarrying womb and dry
breasts," to be strange to thine own flesh and
thine eye cruel towards thy little ones ? Thine
own offspring, the fruit of thy womb, who love
thee and would toil for thee, thou dost gaze
upon with fear as though a portent, or thou dost
loathe as an offence ; at best thou dost but
endure, as if they had no claim but on thy
patience, self-possession, and vigilance, to be
rid of them as easily as thou mayest. Thou
makest them stand all the day idle, as the very
condition of thy bearing with them ; or thou
biddest them be gone where they will be more
welcome ; or thou sellest them for nought to
the stranger that passes by. And what wilt
thou do in the end thereof ? l
Such complaints have much to be said for them.
The faults of our Church are gross as a moun
tain, open, palpable. But they are the defects
of her qualities, and if we dwell only on the dark
1 Newman, Sermons on Subjects of the Day, No. xxvi., pp .407-8.
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND 57
side we shall form a wrong picture of the whole.
Always there is a tendency to see the ill in any
society in which we are living. In bidding you
be thankful for the great privileges of an English
Catholic I must not be understood to echo that
self-complacent optimism once so fashionable,
and even now not unknown. Quite in the
manner of the eighteenth century, some people
treat the Church as a part of the British Con
stitution, alongside of the lion and unicorn.
Still connected with our present happy establish
ment in Church and State, it recalls the defeat
of the Armada and Guy Fawkes Day, and the
victories of the great Marlborough, and other
like joyous colourings of history. These people
are not so buoyant as of old. They have begun
to doubt the truth of their dream, and the Church
is very obviously not the nation, nor is it likely
to become so.
The Toleration Act it is, and not any bigotry
of High and Low, which has made the Church
a small society, relatively. True, every bap
tized person is a member of the Church Catholic,
and what is the precise relation of those bap
tized who prefer other associations no one
has yet determined. Yet even so, the Church
can no longer be said to be the Nation. That is
the first fact that we must face. The Church of
England may still be established, but it is only
one religious society among many others. It
58 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
might be very nice to live in the seventeenth
century, but we do not. All views of the Church
and its relations to the State or to politics, or to
other bodies, which assume that the Church is
coextensive with the nation, are erroneous, and
if we try to act on them disaster will result.
Still we, the minority who cling to our member
ship in the historic Church of the country, are not
wrong in viewing with pride its long connection
with the English State, and with the most striking
events in English history. We do right when
we are proud of our Archbishop being the suc
cessor of Stephen Langton no less than of Laud,
of Becket as well as Parker. This historical
sentiment is wholesome ; but I am not sure
whether it greatly appeals to the younger gene
ration.
The proudest title in our Church is that of
Catholic. Right as we are in disapproval of
those who scorn her English character, still it is
the Catholic, universal quality which is the
greatest. We are loyal to the Church of the
land as the representative of the whole body,
and one element in the great Society : she is no
absolutely separate entity. We cannot under
stand her hierarchy, her Liturgy, her Creeds, even
her outward embodiments, apart from that great
body ; even her Prayer-Book is not the separate,
unique production some imagine it.
Nor, again, is her origin independent. Some
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND 59
years ago Bishop Lightfoot tried to derive the
English Church from Celtic Christianity. He
did not succeed. Dr. Collins proved that, great
as is our debt to St. Columba and St. Chad, it
is still to Pope Gregory and St. Augustine, to
Wilfrid and to Theodore of Tarsus that we owe
our Church and its organisation. Let us be
frank in this admission. Even those parts
evangelised by Celtic missionaries soon lost their
peculiar quality. Nor need we regret this.
Neither for English Christianity nor for English
culture would it have been aught but a calamity
if she had grown up in isolation from Europe.
Yet has she not grown to that condition ?
Almost : a couple of centuries ago it seemed
as though the tightening of all national bonds had
led to a completely insular Church. But with
the nineteenth century that appearance (it was
never more) had ceased, though still we need to
guard ourselves against that pert and provincial
spirit which sees in the English Church the word
English and nothing else ; and, whatever her
continuity with the past, would shut off our
national Christianity in a bombproof shelter,
where no foreign fliers could touch her. Some
people talk of our not being a Church, but the
two Provinces of York and Canterbury. Such
a phrase has its truth, provided it be not held
to mean any obligation of allegiance to the
autocrat at Rome. Its use does serve to explain
60 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
the relation of the Church to Christendom.
(Not indeed that the phrase l Church of Eng
land is new. That Ecclesia Anglicana liber a
sit is the first provision of Magna Charta.)
Mr. Lacey, in his admirable little volume on
Catholicity, tells us that we must repent of
Anglicanism no less than of Romanism. That
is true, if he means by it that self-righteous spirit
which seems to think the English character is
the one among all the nations of the world which
needs no redemption.
What is it but her inherent Catholicity which
makes it always impossible to treat the English
Church as a purely Protestant institution ? The
experiment has been tried, and tried more than
once ; but it has never succeeded. The Pro
testant elements in the Church, which assuredly
are there, from time to time try to make out that
they are its whole essence ; and then the Catholic
elements uprise and reassert their claim. This
is a far better way of arguing the Catholic reality
of the Church than the argument of continuity.
When that is used, what is proved is usually
only legal and historical continuity, not spiritual.
Moreover, even though a society were continuous
with a mediaeval Church, it might have shed
irrevocably all the characteristic elements. Too
much stress laid on the continuity argument
has another danger ; it may foster the spirit of
antiquarianism no bad thing, but not what
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN ENGLAND 61
people want mainly in religion. Neither legal
continuity, nor national sentiment, nor ecclesi
astical antiquarianism interesting as are all
these is our real claim to thankfulness ; but
the sense that the Church has the power of an
endless life, that she gathers up all the ages,
and that she is the Church of the future, because
she is the Church of the past, that she is rather
a living spirit than a dead tradition. It is such
a Church as this, with its worshipping people,
which is the best evidence of the Catholic and
universal character of the Church. It is for you
for it is the work of the laity far more than the
clergy to show by your lives the transforming
power of the Catholic religion, and by a devotion
removed from all pettiness to display its grace
to beautify the most common of daily duties.
II. OUR DEBT TO ROME
Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn. Isaiah li. i.
LAST week we began to speak of our Catholic
heritage in the English Church. We saw that it
is the greatest treasure which we possess. We
spoke of the danger of becoming what Father
Tyrrell called pert and provincial in our
Churchmanship, and the evil of confining the
development of the Church to any single epoch.
That is the cardinal objection to the purely
Protestant theory of the Church. It makes it
too much a thing of one time. Some upheaval
was needed if Christianity was to survive after
the Renaissance. No trained historical judg
ment can deny the abuses which stifled Church
life in the later Middle Ages. No judge of men
will question that the mighty influence which
swept the abuses away, and much else with them,
was predominantly religious, although many other
things added to its force. One age isolated the
Reformation, and apotheosised that most human
of all religious leaders, aptly described by Robert
Browning as grand, rough, old Martin Luther.
That exaggeration is no excuse for our going to
the opposite extreme and treating the whole
M
OUR DEBT TO ROME 63
series of movements as one vast mistake. As a
very good Catholic said once to me, Salvation
by faith was a needful substitute for salvation
by dodges.
Yet the claim in some quarters to treat the
Church as a manufacture of the sixteenth cen
tury alone is outrageous. If we reject this claim
and I suppose that all of us here do reject it
then we are faced with the problem of Rome.
If the Catholic life of all the ages means to you
as much as you say that it means, why cut your
self off from the greatest embodiment ? You
are Western, and your obvious duty is sub
mission to the ruler of all the West. Some such
doubt must be faced by all who hold to the
Catholic ideal. It is not merely Protestants on
the one hand, or Papists on the other, who will
put these questions. It is their own minds.
These questionings arise naturally from present
conditions. It is not honest to speak of those
who go to Rome (and still less of those who feel
Roman difficulties) as though they were driven
only by some strange spirit of perversity. We
cannot claim the title of Catholics without ask
ing ourselves why that does not mean Roman
Catholics. If we are not going to be Papists,
we must have some grounds. Moreover, we
shall probably feel that many of the grounds
alleged in previous ages are invalid. We must
face the problem for ourselves.
64 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
To-day, however, I want to make the ground
clear by speaking a little more of our debt to
Rome. Last Sunday I stated the fact that to
Rome is due the Christianisation of the English.
Even the ecclesiastical divisions were framed
on the lines of the Roman Province of Britain,
and when the Primate of England meets the
Primate of All England he testifies to the living
power of an Empire which seems long since to
have ended. If we owe our Christianity to the
Papacy, so also we owe our ecclesiastical de
velopment. No doubt existed in the later
Middle Ages about the relation of the English
Church to the Roman See. These bonds had
been tightened by St. Dunstan, and again by
Lanfranc. The thirteenth century witnessed
the most complete subjection of the English
Church to the Pope. Yet all through there was
no real question about it. This needs to be men
tioned, owing to a common error. Somewhere
in the Victorian era High Churchmen thought
that they could do their cause service by proving
that the English Church was, in the Middle
Ages, an independent society. This well-mean
ing dream is not history. True, the English
kings disliked the temporal interference of the
Pope. Patrons resented his claim to provide
to benefices. The whole people wished ill to his
tax-gatherers. Incumbents liked to be let alone.
So they do now. Parliament could pass Acts
OUR DEBT TO ROME 65
like Provisors and Prsemunire in order to restrain
Papal interference, and proclaim in high-sound
ing phrases that this Crown of England hath
been at all times so free that it hath been in
no earthly subjection in all things touching the
regality of the said Crown. This is true. But
the corollary which some might think would
follow did not follow. Neither king, nor nobles,
nor people rejected the spiritual rule of the
Papacy. No one claimed a special law for the
English Church. Whenever the Government
allowed the Courts Christian to do their work,
they did it on the lines followed throughout
Western Europe. So far from England s atti
tude to the Pope being merely honorific, she was
more submissive than the Gallican Church, and
less of a separate entity. Dr. Maitland s classical
book on this subject has established this point.
Some few qualifications rftay have to be made,
and Mr. Ogle showed that Lyndewood was
something better than the stark Papalist
Maitland styled him. In the main it is true to
say that those who have attempted to prove
an independent entity for the English Church
in the Middle Ages have failed.
Nor, again, need we regret the fact that we
were ruled for so long by Rome. In a valuable
series of lectures on Church and State in the
Middle Ages, Mr. A. L. Smith has shown that at
least up to the middle of the thirteenth century
E
66 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
the influence of the Papacy was, on the whole,
a good one ; that a strong international insti
tution was the only possible check on unbridled
tyranny either of sovereigns or feudal lords ; and
that in their religious life the barbarian races
were far too crude to develop without tutelage.
In many matters, such as the marriage laws, he
shows the unfairness with which the Papacy has
been treated, and he proves conclusively that
neither for people nor priests would an inde
pendent position have led to a deeper religious
life and morality, but rather to a very sensible
lowering of both. We therefore need not be
ashamed to admit our debt to Rome, whether
in regard to the origin and the development of
the English Church, nor need we deny that it
was a good thing.
That, however, some would say, is all over.
Since the sixteenth century, which rid us of the
1 Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enor
mities, we have no further relations with the
See of Rome, and we are not concerned to take
any lessons from this great obscurantist Church.
Such a water-tight compartment doctrine of the
Christian Society is, however, untrue to the facts
of life. Spiritual connections are deeper and
more subtle than material, and we cannot, if we
would, escape the influence of this vast associa
tion any more than in certain other matters we
can or do escape Lutheran and Calvinist influence.
OUR DEBT TO ROME 67
More than this, if the effort were feasible it would
still be undesirable. For the most venerable
See in the West, and the most illustrious in the
world, are we to have no feeling of respect ? Is
our relation for a relation there must be to
be merely negative ? We English, who pride
ourselves beyond all the nations of the earth on
our reverence for tradition, and for the slow-
moving spirit of the ages ; we who are impatient
of novelties and despise the mere jerry-built
structures of the moment ; who seek the origins
of our national institutions in the most im
memorial monuments of the past are we to be
such unworthy children of our ancestors, who
covered this country with those abbeys and
cathedrals which are still its chief glory, that we
shall copy every little vulgar upstart and deny
the fact of our affiliation ? I trow not. English
Churchmen need not be ashamed to acknow
ledge what is mere fact that the Bishop of
Rome is the occupant of the one Apostolic See
in the West ; that we are Western, and that once
certain obstacles were removed we should be
glad to accord to the Primatial See of Chris
tendom its primatial dignity. What prospect
within the next five centuries there is of a
truly (Ecumenical Council, who shall say ? But
should there ever be one I do not think we are
concerned to repudiate the claim of the Pope
to act as its natural President. All this is very
68 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
far from admitting such claims as those of uni
versal Bishop or infallible autocrat. That,
which is our real difference, will form our topic
next week.
Short of this there are many things in which
we can learn from Rome. Into the battle of the
styles in ritual I shall not enter. This much
may be said it is no argument against adopting
some usage that it has been commended on the
score of convenience or devotion, and has been
mixed with life in the last couple of centuries.
The supreme quality of Rome is her supernatural
and her democratic character. No one, not even
her bitterest enemies, denies that the Roman sys
tem is the great witness to the supernatural.
No one, again, who believes in the Sacramental
idea would deny that it is a main feature of the
Roman system. Personally, I do not like the
Latin clearness of cut, its hard-and-fast dis
tinctions, its pigeon-hole use of words, its ex
treme articulateness and machine-like logic.
But I cannot doubt that for many this is the
most adequate, indeed the only possible method
of apprehension of the supernatural in life, and
it were better to accept the whole cycle of Latin
thought and cult than to give up that, supposing
the choice had to be made. I do not believe
that it has. But this supernatural atmosphere,
this intimacy with the other world, this natural
habit of talking to God and the Saints, this per-
OUR DEBT TO ROME 69
petual expression of the prayer idea can we
say that we have them in any like degree ?
Then, lastly, Rome is a Church where all are
at home. Nobody thinks of the Roman Church
in the way many people, I fear, think of the
English Church in this country. These people
may be wrong, but they think of us as the
Church of the prosperous, a middle-class insti
tution, not upper class as some do vainly boast,
but an appanage of the prosperous, which goes
along with banks and co-operative stores, and
week-end tickets. Now, unless I am mistaken,
this is not the case with Rome. The rich are
there, and we may think a little over-advertised,
but the poor are there too, and as a matter of
right and not of favour. You can see the differ
ence at once if you spend a holiday in Italy and
go, say, to St. Mark s, Venice, and then return
to an English Cathedral Close. Then, again,
have we nothing to learn from the flame of sacri
fice which burns so brightly in their temple ? I
do not deny the magnificent offerings of life
which English priests, both at home and in the
mission field, have poured out. But what are
they what is our tiny stream of martyrs as
compared with the mighty river on the other
side ?
III. OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME
Not as lords over God s heritage, but as ensamples to
the flock. i Peter v. 3.
THERE is the true ideal of Episcopal authority.
To-day we are giving the sinister side of the
Roman emblem. We have seen the error of
treating the English part of the Universal Church
as a thing in itself entirely separate. We have
seen our duty of reverent regard for what came
to us through Rome, and the danger of a purely
negative attitude even to its modern represen
tative. If, then, we are not prepared to go
further, and to admit the modern claim of the
Papacy, we must perforce ask ourselves why ?
Our reply to this rests primarily on the false
conception of authority inculcated by Rome ;
and secondly, it rests partly upon history and
partly upon the present condition of the Churches
of God in the East.
The discussion of Roman claims is best carried
on apart from the somewhat intricate subtleties
involved in the Vatican Decrees. Infallibility
in the famous definition need not mean very
much, as you can see if you read Newman s
famous letter to the Duke of Norfolk. I have
70
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 71
read a book by a modern Romanist claiming
that only two documents in the history of the
Church come under the head of that decree
one, the tome of St. Leo the Great, and the
other the decree of Pius ix. establishing the
Immaculate Conception. One word in the
Vatican decree alone is really important
* irreformable. It says that the decrees of the
Popes are irreformable. If the Pope be en
dowed with that infallibility which Christ gave
to the Church, the question arises, What kind
of infallibility did Christ give to the Church ?
Is it a power of uttering verbally exact pro
positions, always adequate to Divine realities
like the old theory of inspiration, in which case
the Pope would be a sort of super-gramophone
or is the power rather of the nature described
by the writers of the seventeenth century, and
by Bossuet, as * indefectibility, an assurance
that the Christian Society is living by the power
of the Holy Spirit, and will never so far go wrong
as to make separation a duty. If we could bring
our adversaries to understand no more than this
by infallibility, union would be nearer. I fear
that it will be long ere that end is reached, for
they have chosen to confuse infallibility with
authority. Theoretically it might be possible
to maintain the doctrine that the Pope is
infallible while separating this from the Ultra
montane mode of its exercise. I do not say that
72 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
it would so be possible, but I am not altogether
certain that it would not. What is important
for our purpose is that as a fact these two, In-
fallibilism and Ultramontanism, are not so dis
sociated. The claim to infallibility is merely the
culmination of the long series of events which
have produced the triumph of a complete auto
cracy within the Latin Obedience. The claim
for the Pope to act alone, to act apart from a
Council, comes before us as part of his general
assertion of absolute power by Divine right, and
this sheer autocracy it is which we repudiate, and
say that, short of a revolution, we could not be
brought to accept the Roman claims. Whether
any other matters, such as the doctrine of the
Eucharist or the Immaculate Conception, or
various extravagances in popular devotion or
practical abuses, would be sufficient, apart from
this, to justify our separation, I do not know.
Perhaps they would not.
The real head and front of the Papal offend
ing is, in our eyes, this claim to an absolute
monarchy within the Church upon earth. This
seems practically to deny the Headship of Christ,
and unduly to divide the Church militant from
the Church triumphant. As it was humorously
said by the late H. D. Traill : The Pope seems
to claim to be the Vicar of Christ in the sense that
a man is said to be the vicar of his curate. This
seems to us to be contrary to the very idea of
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 73
Christianity, for that asserts the spiritual free
dom of every baptized Christian, and that
freedom must affect every part of his being,
intellect no less than conscience. It gives him,
therefore, some share, however small, in that
authority which belongs to the whole body, and
is not vested in any official, or in any class of
officials, to the exclusion of all others. I would
say that even so devoted a Papist as John Henry
Newman has taught us much about the true
nature of authority. In an article entitled
On Consulting the Laity in Matters of Faith/
which was printed in the Rambler, was not liked
at Rome, and was not reprinted until lately,
Newman explains how it was to the laity, and
not either to the Popes or the Bishops, that the
preservation of the reality of faith in Christ s
Godhead was due during the storms of the fourth
century the time when, as somebody said, that
at one moment the whole world woke up to find
itself Arian. All that we know about human
life and society combines with all that we have
been given in the Christian revelation to drive
us to a passionate and resolved repudiation of
the Ultramontane monstrosity, rightly styled
by the great Puritan allege rist Giant Pope.
The late Pius x. s Encyclical on Modernism
was not altogether wrong in its account of the
dangers of that movement. This fact has been
proved by the later career and writings of M.
74 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
Loisy. But where the Pope was wrong was in
the denial of any real place in the development
of the Church to the laity. They are merely the
basins into which you are to pour the truth.
They were, in fact, reduced to that condition
ascribed to the people by Bishop Horsley :
The people have nothing to do with the laws
except to obey them ; or put with naked
brutality by Mr. Talbot : What is the function
of the laity ? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain
a strange notion of the office of our Lord,
because a layman as such is a member of the
Church. After this gathering of the forces of
the Church into a special caste the clergy
the Pope may seem to have provided himself
with a firm basis for support in the universal
love of domination. Unluckily he does not stop
there. The clergy themselves are under orders.
The whole teaching power is claimed to reside
in the Episcopate. The clergy are reduced to
the rank of non-commissioned officers.* Finally,
even Episcopal authority is rejected in the
interests of absolutism. The Pope can say
triumphantly : * U&glisc c est moi, for he becomes
its one essential element, and his flatterers can
develop doctrines about the Real Presence
within him as being on a par with that of Christ
in the Eucharist, a position condemned, if by
nothing else, by its vulgarity like some other
things in Rome. This may not be said by many
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 75
people. What is clear, however, is that in the
Pope all jurisdiction centres ; from him every
kind of life in the Church, except its purely
Sacramental life, is held to derive. This system
we reject, for it is false to all our ideas of what
Society by its very nature must be. Also it is
false to the Christian idea of God ; it gives
one a purely oracular conception of authority.
Nothing is left to the reason and conscience of
the individual, and no kind of reality is allowed
to those innumerable social units, parochial,
diocesan, provincial, national guilds, and so
forth which make up the life of the Church. In
my judgment, this kind of authority cannot be
ascribed even to God Himself ; for by the In
carnation He has shown that there must be chords
in us to respond, or else the music of the spheres
will have no meaning. The truth is that the
conception of the Church as a society has really
vanished before the Ultramontane horror. Pa-
palism is, as Tyrrell said I think it was Tyrrell
or Loisy only an extreme form of individual
ism ; so that in the last resort the extremes meet.
Luther and Ignatius have met together, and
sheer anarchism is seen to be identical with the
apotheosis of Imperial tyranny.
For it is imperialism, and it is tyranny. The
Papalist theory is not a gift of revealed truth ;
it is the pillage of the Roman law-books, for the
Church became the residuary legatee of the
76 OUR CATHOLIC INIIKRITANCE
antique Kmpire, and imbibed its conceptions
of the nature of civil authority absolutism at
one end and a mass of unrelaled individuals at
(lie other. Certain it is that some of the most
famous texts from the Roman law-books can be
applied straight away to the Pope and the
authority of the Papacy. This is precisely the
same error as that of the Prussian theory of the
State, with this one exception : the Roman
Church, whatever its faults, is incurably Chris
tian, and has never denied the profound truth
of human individuality resting on the immortal
worth of every soul. Consequently it does not
fall into some of those immoralist excesses
which attach to that doctrine of the State, which
looks solely to this world and treats the in
dividual as having no worth except as a cog in
the gigantic machine. The individual, so far
as his own life goes, is always something more
than merely a means, although whether this is
justifiable to the Roman theory is not so certain.
That theory makes the Church exist for the sake
of the Pope, and confuses infallibility with
authority. The weight of authority rightly
understood is presumptive, however great. In
fallibility assumes an absoluteness which denies
all reality to the heart and conscience. The
real vice of the Roman system need not be
sought in any doctrinal or dogmatic study.
It can be found in writers like Angus tin us
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 77
Triumphus in the fourteenth century, and is
expressed succinctly in the words of Pope
Boniface vm. claiming to have all law locked
within his own breast.
But it may be said that no analogies from
human society are arguments. The Church is
not a human, it is a Divine institution. Christ
surely exercised, and He did institute, an authority
coming from above. No question in my mind
exists that there is an element of what we may
call aboveness, an outsideness in authority, only
it is not the whole of it. But the Petrine texts,
it is said, are a proof that He gave this power to
St. Peter, and therefore to his successors. Are
they a proof ? Read the texts over for yourself,
and see whether that explanation would natur
ally occur. I think that no one would have been
more astounded than St. Peter if he could have
been present at the Vatican Council, or even
at Lyons in 1245, to find that the text Feed
My Sheep was held to mean the right to treat
kings as his executive officers, to depose them
for non-compliance, and to substitute himself
for every other form of teaching authority for
everybody within the Church, so as to destroy
all meaning of the social apprehension of truth.
And not only would Peter have been surprised ;
so would many of his successors. Do you sup
pose that Popes Zosimus and Vigilius, Liberius
or Honorius believed in this power, still more
78 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
those who accused them of teaching heresy ?
And remember that though Papalists have tried
to explain these errors, the defects may have
been apologised for, but they have never been
explained on the Papal theory. Take the Re
naissance Popes ; however strongly they believed
in their power, they would have laughed at you.
That beau-idSal of Churchmanship, Pope Alex
ander VI., or the genial and highly-educated
epicurean Leo X., or that charming and most
delightfully unscrupulous of men Pius II., or the
eloquent and learned Nicholas V. how they
would be disgusted at the Jesuit-scented atmo
sphere of the modern Curia ! It may not dis
prove the doctrine, but it cannot be held to
recommend it to those of us who are without,
that for many centuries the Popes themselves
were unaware of this infallible power ; that the
Church without hesitation might accuse some of
heresy ; and that, though they set forth great
claims to govern, they had nowhere reached a
point of claiming complete inerrancy. But there
is far more than this. By the latter part of the
Middle Ages they had developed a very long
way in the direction of absolutism, but this
development was not unchallenged. A great
Council, whose decisions were afterwards ap
proved by a Pope, definitely asserted the
authority of the Council over the Pope ; it
deposed three Popes, and denied the extra-con-
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 79
ciliar autocracy now claimed. When certain
Papalists in our branch of the Church, ignorant
of history, and glorying in a pharisaic legalism,
are trying to stab the Church of England in the
back, and bidding us bow down before this image
of mere power, forgetting all abuses and the
tyranny in the past and the present, I could
wish that they might be forced to study some
of the original writings of those great men Zaba-
rella and d Ailly, and the greatest of all, Nicholas
of Cusa. Cardinals all, they had no illusions.
They lived too near to the Pope to think that an
unrelieved autocracy would be safe in his hands.
They were well known to our Caroline divines.
Ignorance of history and of the whole historical
habit of mind is the evil with those in our
Church who are inclined to move towards the
theory of Papalism.
Finally, there are the Eastern Churches. No
Papalist can get over the fact that the auto
cratic claims of the Pope never have been, and
never will be, admitted in the East ; that this
usurpation is the real ground of division between
the East and the West ; that when in the four
teenth century peace was patched up or at
least seemed to have been at the Council of
Florence, the real authority in the Church
the general consent and obedience of the faith
ful rejected it at once in the East. They re
pudiated alike the Pope, the Eastern Emperor,
8o OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
and their own Patriarch. They would have
nothing to do with submission. Further, I am
told that they have developed a definite theory
of the Church which does justice, first, to its real
authority ; secondly, to the diffusive consent
of the faithful as its power ; and thirdly, to the
inherent rights of smaller groups within the
whole. But I must say that I have not read
the authors of that. We are standing up in
England not only for individual freedom so much
as for the reality of the group-life within the
Church, for a conception of the religious society
which is organic and federalised, as against one
which is merely unitary and absolutist. This
relative independence never absolute indepen
dence of parish, of diocese, of province, of
local union, this organic and federalist concep
tion of the whole, is at one with the facts of life
in society of all kinds. We must remember that
society does not cease to be society because it
calls itself the Church, and that certain truths
about society rise out of the nature of things.
You may deny that nature of things, and try
living for a while as though it did not exist ; but
it is there, and ultimately you w r ill come to con
fusion if you ignore it. The admission of this life
may result in some confusion. It does not give us
the clear-cut logical system of Rome ; but it has
the realism, the variety, the richness, the infinite
powers of growth and adaptability of life itself.
OUR DIFFERENCE FROM ROME 81
Last week I said that supposing that the sole
guaranty of the supernatural religion were to be
found in submission to the Roman claims, rather
than give up that supernatural faith I would
submit to all those claims, for at bottom they
are concerned with a matter of government.
This I would do. To-day I must add that, once
I were assured of that supernatural faith I would
prefer the religion of the wildest and the most
eccentric sectary, even though it came to me
devoid of any historical sentiment, of all intel
lectual interest, and of every kind of aesthetic
charm, offending the taste at every moment.
I would rather accept such extreme sectarianism
than I would give in to that notion which is at
the bottom of all Ultramontanism, destructive
as I believe it ultimately to be of the true social
and organic conception of the Church, dangerous
to the individual conscience which it supersedes,
ultimately productive of widespread infidelity,
and opposed alike to the teachings of experience
and the whole method and spirit of our Lord
Jesus Christ.
IV. ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS
Diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit : diversities of
operations, but the same Lord. I Cor. xii. 4 and 6.
So far we have been considering what the Church
of England is not. It is not a self-subsistent
entity, but can be understood only as part of
a larger whole the Universal Church of Christ.
It is not historically independent of Rome, and
owes much to the Papacy. Yet it is not Roman
in the distinctive modern sense, for it denies the
autocratic claims of the Curia, and is opposed
to the Ultramontane conception of Church life.
Let us to-day consider some of the specially
distinctive characteristics of our part of the
Church.
The first fact which strikes the observer who
compares the English with the Roman, or, I
suppose, the Eastern Churches, is the great
variety of type which exists within her. True,
in all English churches Matins and Evensong
will be said or sung on a Sunday, and the clergy
man will wear a surplice, and there will be a
sermon at least once, and those of you who
know the seventeenth century know how hard
it was even for this minimum to be enforced.
82
ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 83
Apart from that, no one who does not know
the particular church beforehand can tell you
what is going to happen. Take any diocese,
any county, any large city, what do you find ?
Some of the churches will have the Holy Eu
charist once a month ; some will have it on
Sunday evenings ; some will have it daily ;
some will have congregations instructed to
receive fasting ; some churches will use the
vestments ; some the surplice and stole ; some
will wear a hood for the celebration ; some will
perform it with as little outside help as possible ;
some will celebrate it with every accessory of
beauty and ceremonial. Or, again, in one
church you will see confessional boxes ; in
another the people will be told that private con
fession is a soul-destroying practice. In one
church you will hear sermons preached which
might be taken from the Penny Catechism, and
a great deal said perhaps in honour of Our Lady
and about the Invocation of the Saints. In
another you will hear, not now and then, but
week in and week out, appeals which savour of
the Methodist Revival. Yet a third will give
doctrine which, as Mark Pattison said, defecates
the idea of God to a pure transparency. So also
in the books written by English official clergy
men, priests and bishops alike, differences can
be found. Except reverence for our Lord as a
Teacher sent from God at least so much and
84 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
the belief in a general morality of love (and
these things are not nothing, as we are learning
just now), there is hardly any doctrine that
you hear in one church which you may not
hear denied in another, and all of them Church
of England.
All this raises a real difficulty. How, says
the Roman controversialist, or how, say many
of us to ourselves, can we be certain of anything
at all if we remain in this City of Confusion ?
Is it not an outrage to talk of the mind of the
Church of England if such differences, whether
approved or not, can openly be proclaimed ?
This difficulty cannot be ignored. We must
get over it. This state of things exists, and
does not look as if it would cease. Ever since
the seventeenth century three parties in the
Church have been active. Sometimes one,
sometimes another, has been officially pre
dominant. None, however, has been strong
enough to drive out its adversaries, or even to
coerce them, although this has been tried.
Any defence of the Church of England must
somehow meet this problem and excuse, if it
cannot altogether justify, this apparent disorder.
First of all let us remember that extremes at
either end of any society do not prove that there
is no normal, no general type. Rather are
they evidence of its existence. That is true of
all types the average Englishman, the Public
ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 85
School type, the normal man of the world, the
normal professional man, and so forth. Each
type presents certain marked characteristics.
That does not mean that every one, every
member of these classes, has all of the character
istics, nor does it exclude the freak, the person
who, though he belongs to a class, possesses
none of its typical qualities. So with the Church
of England. It may have a mind, a general
view, a common way of life ; but that does not
prevent there being many people on the fringe.
This is shown nowhere in entirety, but more or
less perfectly in many places and people. There
may be a few freak churches which suggest
either Rome or Methodism. Short of coercion,
such exceptions cannot be prevented, but there
may be a very general type for all that, and it
may be conformed to a very real authority.
Authority in the theoretical sphere does not in
volve infallibility. It need not. It means a
presumption in favour of tradition or official
exponents, or general opinion as against mere
individual insight. In the same way in the
executive sphere authority does not mean merely
military authority enforced by the sword. It
may be perfectly real, although no one can be
turned off who does not obey it. What is the
authority, for instance, which makes most men
wear two buttons at the back of a tail-coat ?
No one can compel them to do so ; even if the
86 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
tailor puts them on, you can cut them off, and
it makes no important difference to your coat.
Here is a very real authority. Most of the
authorities which have made us are of that sort.
At this moment the papers are discussing some
thing about changes in women s fashions, and
some people write to the papers and say it will
be impossible for them to stand up against it.
What is the authority ? Nothing in the nature
of coercion. A study of the distinctive English
divines from Hooker through Laud down to
Westcott and Liddon, will not show them always
in agreement, but it may very likely give a fair
general notion of the Church of England out
look. We cannot say that there is no specially
distinctive ethos of the Church, because some
people have it only in very slight degree.
However, it is not the sameness ; it is the
differences that we are speaking of to-day.
How can you justify, or even tolerate, such deep
and fundamental differences, not merely among
laymen, but among the official teachers ? The
common answer has been found in the phrase
1 glorious comprehensiveness/ but this reply is
felt by many to be unsatisfactory. Let us try
to see what it means. Are there any facts, per
manent facts, to justify it ? If there are we
need not trouble, even though the principle
be carried further than we like in certain cases.
Do the differences which all admit in our Church
ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 87
correspond to anything "permanent in human
nature ? For instance, in politics the two-party
system may have its evils. In times of many
complex and conflicting problems that system
is difficult and misleading, for they cannot all
be settled on the same principles, and people are
only held to their own party by organisation ;
consequently it is denounced as artificial and
hypocritical. There is no reason why a person
in favour of or opposed to Home Rule for Ireland
should be in favour of or opposed to Dises
tablishment for Wales, and so forth. Conse
quently the party system is unreal. Yet it
maintains itself because in human nature, so far
as politics are concerned, there are, broadly
speaking, two kinds of temperament. First,
the temperament of the person who likes change,
who thinks that things are so bad that any
change is better than going on as they are, who
is prepared to take risks in the hope of a real
improvement, or who desires change simply for
the sake of shuffling the cards. Secondly, on
the other hand, there is the other kind of tem
perament which dislikes change the purely
conservative, who is happy in what exists because
it exists, and who does not desire the coal
scuttle ever to stand in a different place from
that to which it has been accustomed. Or the
highly critical temperament, which does not in
the least satisfy itself in existing conditions, but
88 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
is timid and critical of every change. It sees
objection to every course of action, and so forth.
Are there in religious matters any similar funda
mental differences ? Do these party divisions,
once known as High, Low, and Broad, correspond
to anything real in human nature ? If they do,
in some form or other they will subsist, however
much you may attempt to secure a rigid uni
formity. I think that they do. Always there are
temperaments to whom religion appeals most on
its institutional, its sacramental side, to whom
tradition and ordered cult will be much, and
whose conception of Christian life is that of
gradual growth. Always, again, there will be
those in whom the intellectual or the purely
moralising element is the predominant. Lastly,
there will be those in whom the personal, the
emotional, the mystical is strong, whose sense
of the immediate relation of the soul to God is
acute, and who worship by prayer with a mini
mum of outward paraphernalia. Doubtless all
these tendencies may be found in every one ;
and in the same person different tendencies will
be directing at different times in his life ; yet,
in spite of all these cross-currents, broadly
speaking, there remain those people in whom
one or another of these the institutional, the
intellectualist, and the mystical is predominant.
That fact is the real ground of our despised
comprehensiveness. Possibly it is carried too
ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 89
far. No one denies that our Church suffers
from the defects of her qualities. In the judg
ment of many of us these temperamental diffi
culties would be less disagreeable if they were
restrained by the outward show of uniformity.
But that is all a matter of detail. If these types
of mind are genuine and are permanent, can we
rightly complain that the Church of England
allows for and admits of that difference ? To
take two instances more especially pertinent
here. We will not take the Sacramental type.
You and I may be of opinion that the so-called
Evangelicals betray a lamentable lack of the
corporate sense of religion, and that they are
dangerously near to subjective religion in their
depreciation of the Sacrament. But can we
deny the vast service they performed, not only
in the days of Simeon, but even at this moment,
by the reality of their personal religion, their
vital hold on the Cross of Christ, and their rigid
austerity of life ? This may not be true of mere
Low Churchmen or of many persons who attend
Evangelical churches, but you must judge any
religious party not by its fringe, not by the
people who merely make use of it, but by its
type the people to whom it means most. If
that were not the case, we here might be in a bad
way. We should be judged as people so often
wish to judge us, by the fringe of the soi-disant
Catholic party, by any dilettante ritualist, or
90 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
hide-bound legalist. They would form the cri
terion by which we should be judged. If we
claim that we are to be judged by our best as
our most typical, we must allow that claim to
others. Personally I believe that, in spite of all
our differences, the Evangelical party is so much
at one with us in regard to the deeper realities,
and is so much concerned with the depths of
personal religion that we can well afford to put
up with what may seem to us its half-informed
criticisms, in return for the rich treasures of
prayer and devotion it gives to the Church of
England.
So, again, with what used to be called the
Broad Church party. Certain cases we may all
find, in which not only the dogmas but the very
spirit of Christianity seem to be a matter of scorn
to the superior person whose intellectualism
is always more manifest than his intellect. Yet
the Liberals are performing a needed service.
They are forcing the Church and without them
it would not be forced to face the problem
which has been raised by modern inquiry and
modern thought, and to adapt itself to a new
world. For it is a new world. We cannot go
on living as though nothing had been discovered
of any value since 1400. We must beware of
all things of a religion which is merely historical
sentiment, whether that sentiment be Mediaeval,
Caroline, or even Tractarian. We have to face
ANGLICAN COMPREHENSIVENESS 91
the world of to-day. We have to show that it
is through the Church of God that redemption
and fulness of life will come to the modern man
or woman, to the growing boy and girl, to the
soldier in the trenches and to his officers. This
we cannot show unless we are open to every
current, and live in the world to-day, while pay
ing every reverence to those that are gone before.
We hope for a true mastery of the present and
the future, while we must avoid all slavishness
to the dead hand of the past, and at the same
time must oppose that insolent caprice which
supposes that everything is bad because it merely
has been, and will do strange and weird things
solely because they are new. We are, at least,
in this Church, true to the spirit of our fore
fathers, not only those of long ago, but those
who have made this particular Church what it is
true to their spirit, men who carried on their
work not in any servile rigidity, but with the
power and the potency of life, and with faith in
the inexhaustible riches of the Grace of God s
Holy Spirit.
V. THE DISTINCTIVE TYPE OF
ENGLISH CATHOLICISM
Things new and old. St. Matt. xiii. 52.
SOME of you know the story of Isaac Casaubon,
the Genevan scholar, who was favoured first by
Henri IV. and afterward by James I. He died
in 1614. The mordant Rector of Lincoln, Mark
Pattison, related his life once more for the
nineteenth century. His book is a work of almost
excessive erudition and extreme severity of treat
ment. No one could accuse the writer of any
penchant for any ecclesiastical party. By the
time he came to write that book his views had
gone to the extreme negative position. His book
was due to the interest of a scholar in one who
was pre-eminent in the age of the giants of
scholarship, fit to be named alongside even the
great Scaliger. Incidentally, this contribution
to the history of classical scholarship shows us
what is the best defence or the best justification
of our position in the Church of England.
Casaubon was by birth a Swiss Calvinist and by
profession a student, and taught first at Geneva.
Leaving there for France after a short Professor-
92
DISTINCTIVE ENGLISH CATHOLICISM 93
ship at Montpellier, he went ultimately to Paris,
and enjoyed to some extent the favour of Henri
IV. That was the great age of book-lovers,
and Europe honoured him. Natural it was that
efforts should be made to convert him, and you
must remember that this took place after the
conversion of Henri IV. himself in the earlier
years of his reign. There was a very great effort
to bring over by persuasion all the more im
portant Huguenots, for it was known that some
features of Protestantism were not pleasing to
Casaubon. He did not get on well with his co
religionists, and at times great hopes of his
conversion to Rome, or fears of it, were enter
tained. Every blandishment was displayed, and
even a Cardinal so far condescended as to
argue with him. (It was the learned Cardinal
du Perron.) Protestant alarm was great, and
Casaubon had not been conciliatory. Yet all
the efforts were unavailing ; his intellectual and
historical conscience forbade the change. Later,
however, he came to England, and there he saw
a very different scene from the Huguenot temples
in France. The English Church had not dis
carded Episcopacy ; she did not make light of
tradition ; she did not despise history in the
desire for a new creation. So this great scholar
found his true resting-place in the English
Church, and wrote in this country his exposure
of the appalling blunders of the new and much-
94 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
belauded Annals of Cardinal Baronius, which
was supposed to set history on a basis favourable
to the Papacy.
That career of Casaubon is a lesson to all who
desire a balanced judgment on the ecclesiasti
cal conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Casaubon s studies had been leading
him to a theoretical position almost identical,
when fortune showed him the concrete English
Church. That fact and other similar facts
could be mentioned is part of the ground for
the statement of Mandell Creighton that the
basis of the Church of England is reverence for
sound learning. This does not mean that the
Church is purely intellectualist either in its doc
trine of religion or life, still less that she has a
monopoly of knowledge. No English Church
man would be so foolish as to deny the immense
value of the work of students in other Com
munions, whether Roman or very different from
Rome. Even in the last few years we owe to
Rome such books as Pastor s History of the Popes,
Janssen s History of the German People ; and the
works of Denifle and Grisar on Martin Luther,
which have revolutionised the subject ; while
of the value of Presbyterian and other Protestant
scholarship it is needless to speak. For all that,
I think that the great historian bishop was right,
and I would that all those troubled with doubts
in our Church would read the various lectures
DISTINCTIVE ENGLISH CATHOLICISM 95
and essays which he put forth on this topic.
Her writers in the seventeenth century spoke
of her as the Protestant Catholic Church.
You will find the phrase in the book of John
Nalson, who afterwards became a Non juror.
They mean that she rejected Papalism, with its
offshoots, as in the main a mediaeval usurpation,
although for the germ of the Papal claims we
have to go back further than they thought then.
On the other hand, the Church of England
was opposed to that passionate repudiation of
the past, that revolutionary conception of the
sixteenth-century changes which in their earlier
days had distinguished all the Protestant sects.
I mean that they all repudiated their connection
with the past, as well as they could, and dis
liked it. Now, I think, they would speak dif
ferently. Unlike these, the English Church
refused to make any greater breaches than were
necessary ; and, if some matters of forms of
devotion remained for a time obscured, she
preserved within herself the means once more of
restoring them, as we have seen them restored,
and may see more restored openly. All through
her history it has been sound learning which has
distinguished the Church in this country, and
has been her special contribution. This, re
member, is a method rather than a quantity.
It is the temper of mind, the spirit at once of
inquiry and reverence, which makes the scholar
96 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
or historian, not the number of odd facts he
has managed to accumulate, or even the number
of books which he has read or analysed. Now
it is this peculiar temper, which to one side
seems too conservative, and to another too
vague, which is like to be the need of the Church
in the present distress. And I think, further,
that we may look to our branch of the Church
as likely to contribute a very valuable asset to
the Church in the future.
First of all there comes the great inrush of
modern knowledge. How much of this is know
ledge, and how is it to be assimilated to the
ancient cult of worship and ideals ? No one
knows. Some youthful scholar, in love with new
things and new theories, may claim that the
latest hypothesis is new knowledge such as
that the women who went to the tomb of our
Lord were mistaken as to the tomb and desire
that we remodel our Creeds accordingly, and that
all our belief be altered. Other pious but old-
fashioned divines, reckless of anything later than
Alford s Greek Testament, may want to put
back the hands of the clock and hold to the
Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, or simi
lar things. The one would seem to be the line
adopted in such a book as Dr. Latimer Jackson s
Hulsean Lectures on the Eschatology of the New
Testament ; the other is the position of the
Roman official world. Here we see the Church
DISTINCTIVE ENGLISH CATHOLICISM 97
in our branch taking a wiser course. She is not
prepared beforehand to condemn the conclusions
of scholars, and, even when she dislikes them,
uses no machinery to displace them. She is not,
as some would claim, desirous to give up her
character as an historical religion embedded in
the concrete. She will not allow the cry that
criticism should be free, which is a civil right,
to be confused with a claim to act as an official
in a society while denying the statements in its
Creeds, which are documents more historical
than philosophic. It is with small justice that
any one here raises the cry of persecution. To
complain that it is a case of religious persecution,
which means the infliction of civil penalties for
religious opinions, when the only question is
whether an individual may minister in a society
whose opinions he denies this would be like
complaining if a man were turned out of a Free
Trade Club upon becoming a Protectionist.
But, it may be said, that is just what you do
not do. People are not turned out. Therefore
you have no authority. The Bishops last spring
issued a declaration that certain historical state
ments in the Creed were to be taken literally.
Yet it is notorious that those who repudiate such
a view are untouched. They are honoured in
many Church circles. Where is your authority ?
This complaint comes from the cardinal error
of identifying authority with the policeman.
G
98 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
Authority is the pressure of the community
upon individuals. One form of its exercise, and
only one, is the swift judgment of the sword, but
its more usual form is subtler, more penetrating,
more enduring, and very much more continuous.
This process is less clean-cut than the militarist
use, and consequently the number of open dis
sentients is larger. As I said last week, with
our methods in the Church of England there will
always be plenty of people on the margin. Such
people will no doubt exist in other Churches,
even on a militarist plan like that of Rome, but
they will have to be more discreet, or they will
be silenced. Our method is in the long run more
effective, for the mind and the conscience go
with it. In England, for instance, it is doubt
less easier to express opinions against the war
than it would be in Germany to take a differ
ent topic as an illustration. A pro-German in
this country is only disliked. Mr. Bernard Shaw
can write letters to the papers showing, to his own
satisfaction, that this war was the outcome of a
Machiavellian plot on the part of Sir Edward
Grey. Germany was dragged into violating the
integrity of Belgium just before we did so, or
were going to do so, in order that we might have
a better case. A pro-Englishman in Germany
would, I suppose, be shot, if he said anything
like as much. Yet can you deny that there is
a strong pressure, a general social pressure, in
DISTINCTIVE ENGLISH CATHOLICISM 99
favour of the war, which is constant and effective
to a large extent ? You must remember that
no absolute authority is entirely effective, for
no State has been without its criminal classes.
If you mould the Church on this absolute
authority you will still have people living within
her who do not obey her rules properly.
Or, again, let us take a more germane topic,
some ecclesiastical matter. In the eighteenth
century, or the greater part of it, the Georgian
period, all the official favour was for latitudi-
narian and Erastian opinions, and people like
Bishop Hoadley were typical bishops. Yet
they were never able to identify themselves
with the Church as a whole. They tried very
hard, and I dare say that an outside observer
visiting England would have predicted the com
plete triumph of what was really a Socinian
Christianity. But that was defeated by the
uprising of the Evangelical movement, and then
the Tractarian. Or, again, in the Victorian
period up to about 1880, all the official favour
was against the Tractarians and their succes
sors of the next generation. Yet they have won
a position from which it will not be possible
to dislodge them. The question is now, not
whether they have a place, but how much place
others have within the borders of the Church.
So will it be with the movement for critical and
historical developments. These are the con-
ioo OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
tribution of scholars to the life of the Church.
They are not separate from it.
The Dean of Christ Church, in an admirable
pamphlet, has pointed out that religion is made
up of many elements other than the purely intel
lectual, and that the deep instinct of the com
munity as a whole is a safeguard against the
eccentricities of mere cleverness, and that we
must beware of offending that instinct. But at
the same time scholarship, modern knowledge,
is making great changes in the whole outlook of
people, and it will be for the Church of the future
to assimilate these changes, to sift them, and to
take up into herself that which is permanently
valuable. That process of sifting is going on,
and has been going on for thirty or forty years.
It is not complete ; nobody knows exactly what
will be the final judgment on many matters,
but can it not be said that our Communion
offers the best chance of that wise judgment
being at once Christian and well-grounded ?
Take another favourite topic of our time
Reunion. The Papal condemnation of Anglican
Orders showed how vain it was to expect that
Rome was ripe for anything but unconditional
submission on our part. If you read Mr. Lacey s
Diary you will see that he rather regrets that he
took part in that movement. But the desire
for reunion on all sides is a most significant fact.
It seems to me that the days when people could
DISTINCTIVE ENGLISH CATHOLICISM 101
glorify schism as such has come to an end. The
desire for Reunion is very remarkable in our
Church. The desire in many of the Noncon
formist Churches is perhaps more remarkable,
and something will ultimately come of all this.
What the future may bring about in this way
we cannot tell, and I do not know that it is very
much worth while to speculate. But a Reunion
which is to be in any way universal through
Christendom must surely be very much the
work of the Church of England. She stands in
a peculiar relation to the Protestant communities,
not understood either by Rome or by the East.
On the other hand, she is to Rome in a relation
quite unlike that of the non-Episcopal bodies,
however much it may suit some persons on
either side to say that it is the same. Towards
the East her relations are going to be closer than
they were, and the present war will intensify the
rapprochement which has been going on for some
time. It is the extraordinary power of the
English character to stand by the old while
assimilating the new, which has been her greatest
political strength in the past, and is likely to be
her greatest contribution to the future. That
work, however, will not be accomplished sup
posing the members of the English Church do
nothing but look across the water and wish that
we were there.
Let us close with a note of thanks. Is there
102 OUR CATHOLIC INHERITANCE
not a claim upon you and me for our loyalty, not
only to the men of a far past, but to those of a
nearer past ? The Tractarians and the gene
ration which succeeded them the generation
which is above my own it is to them that we
owe very much of that recovery of which we are
thinking. It is to their sacrifice and at their
cost, which some of us are apt to depreciate, that
we owe the greatness and the richness of our
Catholic life in the Church. I do not mean that
they would have meant that we should be loyal
to them in any slavish or dead spirit, but surely
their sense of the value of English Catholicism
is one of the most important elements in their
whole spiritual life. It is to the value of English
Catholicism, to the special contribution of our
Church to the life of the great Church as a whole,
and to the glorious chances of the future, that we
need at this time to be loyal and devoted. Let
us, while taking no narrow, no insular, no merely
provincial view let us, while allowing full weight
to the great claim of Rome for her real gifts to
us in the past, and perhaps in the present let
us still be loyal to the very distinctive type of
English Catholicism, and still feel that we are
right and have a place set us by God to minister
to the needs of the present, and to the hopes of
all future generations.
UNIVERSITY SERMONS
I. THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE
A new heaven and a new earth. Rev. xxi. I.
CHANGES greater than those of the fifteenth
century have passed over the mind of Europe
during fifty years. Queen Victoria s death made
us aware of this. Present conditions intensify it.
Men s ideal dreams, and the means of their
achievement are like to be other than all of
us supposed in youth. This transvaluation of
values may well arouse misgiving among mem
bers of the Christian Church. Constantly we
are met by the taunt either that Christianity,
not as a dogma but as a way of life, has been
a disaster ; or at best that, if once of service,
it is now outworn. I do not think that either of
these charges is true. Yet there is much to be
said for them. Never was the future of God s
Church more bright with hope : provided it be
treated as an institution purely religious, and
provided also we can rid ourselves of obsolete
entanglements and persuade the men and women
of our day that we mean something more than a
103
104 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
dull survival of a different age, like a boarding-
house made out of a mansion.
First, the world in which we live is going to
have a religion. Religion is a fact. No argu
ment can destroy that fact ; and no apologetic
entirely explains it. Religion is a feature of life
which can no more be destroyed by argument
than falling in love can be killed by eugenics.
This is now realised. Unbelief in its more power
ful forms tends to organise itself like a Church,
to make its appeal to the emotional and mystical,
no less than to the rational elements in man, to
surround its votaries from birth to death with
an atmosphere which shall asphyxiate Christian
ideals. It is anti-Christian more than non-
Christian. Much of our talk is futile, through
the implied assumption that, whatever the super
structure of dogmatic or ecclesiastical archi
tecture, the substructure of ethical ideals is
always the same. It is not. So far as inter
national politics are concerned, this fact has
been known to students ever since Machiavelli
told the truth about Italy. So far as our
personal life goes, even the most optimistic
should be persuaded by a glance through the
magazines, plays, and novels for any period of
six months in the last ten years.
Religion may be seen to be a normal human
activity, but that does not make easier our task,
as believers in a specific historical religion, im-
THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE 105
bedded in the concrete. Such recognition need
go no further than a belief that certain states
of mind strengthening and consolatory can be
reached only by ways of religion ; but this belief
may be coupled with the sense that it has been
produced in religious systems of any and every
content, atheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic,
theistic, humanist. Secondly, this knowledge
may give to our adversaries an enthusiasm of
hatred, rarely seen in Victorian unbelief. Thirdly,
some of the outworks may provide sufficient
refuge for many who in other times would have
sought their home in the Church. Now, some
1 higher thought circle may appear to give you
all the comfort of Christian living without its
commonness, so that the anodynes of religious
feeling can be drunk with all the pride of superior
culture.
Secondly, conventional religion has long been
dying. This war will bury it. Muffled Chris
tianity, as Mr. Wells calls it, has no charms for
the younger generation. Five years hence it will
have still less. All the compromises, the half-
lights and half-tones, the suggestive accom
modations, the drab proprieties, the sentimental
veneer, natural at one time, will be swept with
their scorn. Those young men portrayed in
Sinister Street, those who will come back from
the war, may want more Christianity, or they
may want less, than what we call Victorian.
106 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
But never, never will they slake their souls
thirst with the tepid weak tea of respectable
choristers Anglicanism. Echoes of Charlotte
Yonge are not a war-cry for this age. Our
friends will be our hardest task- masters for
they will ask much.
But fewer of them will ask it, you will say.
If it is only blazing Christianity, the flaming
splendour coloured with the blood of man, that
will attract, fewer will rise to this. Yes, there
will be fewer. That comes of liberty. For two
hundred years religious freedom has been de
veloping. With this the proportion of any one
religious body to the whole must be smaller.
Many people do not intend to live as Christians ;
when they are educated and free they cease to
profess a faith which has to them no meaning.
This means that all who do profess it mean
something, and the Church will gain in inten
sive force far more than she has lost in exten
sion. Ever since the peace of a thousand years
ago, the Church has suffered from the nominal
adherence of many to whom her system makes
no appeal. Now, that curse is lessened. It is
a pity that many people go on talking as though
we lived in the seventeenth century. Policies
are sometimes suggested for the State which are
feasible only on the assumption, long obsolete,
that Churchmanship and citizenship are co-ex
tensive. Even if they ought to be, they are
THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE 107
not, nor are they likely to become so for many
centuries.
In the religious trend of the hour, the loud
cry for mystical experience strikes one s ears
daily. Immediate knowledge is the claim of
the mystic ; that claim comes with peculiar
force to an age which relies on facts. Nothing
but ignorance can deny to the mystics the fact
of a mighty inward experience. No reader,
however hostile, of St. Teresa, or St. John of the
Cross, or Madame Guyon can resist the evid
ence. Personal religion probably always con
tains a large element of mysticism. Any setting
forth of the Christian Faith which belittles this
element will fail to-day ; and it ought to fail.
But we need not ignore it. Herrmann, the great
Protestant, thinks that Catholicism and mysticism
are almost identical, and declares the mystical
life to be the aim of that most characteristically
Catholic institution, the monastic life. We need
not be so unfair to Protestant faith as this would
imply. Protestantism on its highest side has
always had a large proportion of mystics. Such
a charge, however, allows us to claim that the
society which embodies all the past of religion
has been the most fruitful soil of mysticism ;
also it alone guards against its dangers. The
positive experience of the mystic may be had
in all religions. Certainly Plotinus had it, no
less than the converted Augustine. Yet if
io8 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
mystics, without any criticism, dictate to us we
shall have a tyranny of the elect, an oligarchy
of the spiritually elite. If not, we shall have
pure subjectivism, and religion will become
mere feeling. Against these dangers we find
the best safeguard in the Catholic Church, which
with its vast and majestic life can absorb and
control even the religious genius, while yet it
allows his powers to develop with a rich variety
not possible in any meaner atmosphere.
This problem (the relation of the mystic to
the whole community) helps us to answer the
question, What is the special claim of the
Christian society on the present age ? The
worship of Jesus as Lord ? This, indeed, is a
sine qua non. Many deny even respect to Jesus
of Nazareth, calling him a decadent One who
died for His own guilt. Christianity to them is
a two thousand years catastrophe, not because
it has failed to understand its Founder, but in
so far as it has succeeded. This hatred of the
spirit of Jesus we have to face. It is intense
and real ; so long as human pride exists, we shall
find it. Lately it has become self-conscious,
and definitely proclaims itself as Antichrist.
Yet this alone is not enough. For even Comte
set Him high among men ; Positivism may be
Christian in ethics. Even if we go on to say the
Church rests in the belief in Jesus as Son of God,
we cannot make this its sole appeal. Person-
THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE 109
ally, I do not believe that ethical admiration
will be retained, if once you quite give up the
historical society which makes this effective.
Yet many individuals continue to exist without
this, even apart from Quakers or Unitarians.
Nor again can one seek the solution in the
possibility of communion with God. That is the
postulate of prayer ; and the essential part in
mysticism. But this may be had apart from
Christianity. All these things are included in
the Church s claim. Yet the claim means more
than all these things. The Church claims to be
the sphere of the action of Divine Grace, that
is, power given from without upon mankind.
The social nature of man makes it needful that,
if the redemptive work of Christ is to be made
effective for all, it must be done by the creation
of a society enveloping the individual like the
air he breathes, and leaving no part of him
untouched by this atmosphere.
The question whether the Church is essential,
or merely a convenience, involves the whole
problem of the relation of individual to com
munal life. Absolute individualism is no more
possible in religion than in politics ; and its
contrary carries the idea of a Church, which is
deep and penetrating in its effects, because
religion is the most poignant and far-reaching of
all human interests. Otherwise a Church is no
more than a limited company, to be joined or
i io UNIVERSITY SERMONS
left at will, while essential Christianity remains
untouched. The charm of the Church is the
charm that belongs to the age-long home of
the human spirit, which preserves all the values
of religion, and holds them in harmony. She
gathers of every kind in rite and language, in
movement and colour ; she holds in union
experiences which are older than Christianity.
She is Catholic, because she is tied to no one
temperament, to no peculiar culture. There
the mystic finds the food of his soul, and withal
the control of dangerous dreams ; there the
institutionist finds form and order and the
hallowing of all outward means ; there, too, the
intellectual temper finds an exhaustless store
of ideas, without any surrender to mere Rational
ism. There even the mere moralist can find his
principles given their true ground, and the
legalist exercise his powers without losing fer
vour. There the enthusiast finds fire, but also
light to guide. There the man of no more but
even less than normal religious interests finds
what enables him to do his best, and consoles
him in grief, not condemning him because he
cannot, like some, make of religion his hobby.
There can be found those whose conversion is
catastrophic, alongside of others God-fearing
and simple, who do not know the meaning of
the term. Our Catholic society is so called,
not because she is English, or Latin, or Eastern,
THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE in
but because she has a place for all, excluding
none save by his own choice. The central fact
in the spiritual experience of the race, she is
universal in her appeal ; though she cannot
be so in numbers so long as man is free. The
least that she means is human fellowship, is
the love of God through Christ ; and those who
hold to none of these will desire no place in
her roll of citizens.
But the Church being universal cannot be
tied to one particular age. We must beware of
an apologetic of historical sentiment. The age
is conscious of its newness, and in all its culture is
anxious to be free from a dead tradition. If the
Catholic Church is to appeal to men just now,
her defenders must avoid laying overmuch stress
on an argument which to you and me may be
appealing, but repels those who take the golden
road to Samarcand and cry for new worlds to
conquer. Rather must we show that what we
hold is no dead tradition, but a living spirit
which evermore makes all things new ; that
so far as we cling to the past it is not as slaves,
but as children using our elders gifts to create
new joys, and finding every day in those magic
treasures not the dry bones of facts and dates,
but the fresh springs of a power that is ever
a wonder, a beauty, and a terror/
Further, as against the recurrent charge that
we teach a service of self-denial which means
H2 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
death, we need to show that this is no more the
case with the die to live of Christianity than
it is with the war-cry Who dies if England
live ? The Christian Church is the great
1 yea-saying to life ; but that yea-saying
neither in Church nor State, neither for mind
nor bodily delights, neither for man nor boy,
can ever be reached by mere pleasure ; it in
volves selection, self-denial, mortification. Let us
make it plain that it is not death, but life, and
more abundant life, that we bring. This war
has shown many how, in true life, sacrifice is
a part ; they will not shrink, rather will they
demand the heroic sacrificial side of Christianity.
Once they are assured, it is a real yea-saying,
and not like Eastern pessimism, a destruction of
personal force. Love heightens every power,
yet it cannot be without sacrifice ; and so we
find in every lover, in every patriot, and in all
the saints, beginning with St. Paul.
Lastly, it is vital that we be rid of bondage to
Victorian traditions. Even at the cost of offend
ing the Aunt Plessingtons of the Church, we
must be ready for that call to reality now so
piercing. All the pieties and age-long tenderness
that gather round the Communion of Saints,
the natural and proper place of devotion to the
Mother of our Lord, the enhancement of all that
tends to place the Eucharist where the martyrs
set it, the development under many forms of the
* religious life all these must and will play
THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE 113
a part in the life of the English branch of the
Church far greater than in the last century.
We must not be afraid, that is our great danger.
We must be ready to go to school to the East,
to leaven the practical Rationalism of Western
religion by a greater sense of the contemplative,
the ascetic, and the mystical aspects. Many
Nonconformists do this. For we have no raison
d etre apart from the other worldly values ; and
I suspect that the Cross, both as a finished work
and as a daily example, will be set higher in the
days to come than it was either by the Liberal
Protestantism or the respectable Churchmanship
of the last century.
Bright, as I said, are our prospects ; bright,
but difficult. Courage and the unconquerable
will are the one thing needful, for we have real
enemies ; and they hate Christ. Yet it is only
in Him that we can learn the maxim, Be bold,
and everywhere be bold. We see on the fields
of Flanders and all the oceans of the world men,
some without faith, who make us ask whether
any of us is worth what they can do for us, or
how far his faith makes him act as nobly. The
same call comes to the Church. If we trust our
own high resolve, we shall sink, like Peter. Only
in Christ will be enduring courage. In this fight
we shall be lost if we have not Him to trust.
1 In the world ye shall have tribulation ; but
be of good cheer : I have overcome the world/
H
II. FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY
I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou
hast set my heart at liberty. Psalm cxix. 32.
LIBERTY and authority are matched like the
man and woman in the Indian tale. They seem
able neither to live with one another nor with
out one another. No theory can set forth their
relations exactly ; nor in practice can these be
fixed, for varying conditions change the limits
of both. Abstract logic applied to this notion
leads to disasters ; since this ignores the shifting
kaleidoscope of human affairs. Certainly the
knot is not cut by saying that freedom means
the right to do what we ought. Nothing could
make more surely for tyranny. Even this leaves
it open to make individual choice decide, and
call it conscience. So we race into anarchy.
No society but must set some bounds to the
acts of its members, or else it will not be a society.
In a state of siege, normal safeguards of freedom
will vanish. Otherwise the society will.
No less is true if we start from the counter-
principle. Unity is the end of human society.
Those who reason mechanically from that notion
114
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY us
find an easy descent ; and the individual goes
to ground. Unity is the plea of all tyrants or
their henchmen, from Haman to Hollweg. All
this is commonplace. The war has flashed it
on the skies.
Freedom, we are told in every speech, in most
leading articles, in essays and poems and sermons,
is the aim of the Allies. Freedom tempered
with order, the idea of right and of peace, have
kissed each other in the English Constitution.
On that ground the soul of the English is aflame
as it feels it is being attacked. Yet others have
ever dubbed us hypocrites. So we must needs
take pains, lest either we should not be sincere
in this claim, or else that we fail to grasp what
it means. Liberty enjoys two hundred de
finitions. Many a man believes it his object
who is ignorant of its nature and hostile to its
claims. Either this war will fail, or it will bring
more freedom to the world. Freedom must
belong to more people. It must be understood
better ; it must become a reality to many classes
who now are only mocked by the word. To
reach this end those who have faith in freedom
must bestir themselves. Awake, awake, put
on strength, O Zion. Put on thy beautiful
garments, O Jerusalem.
The love of power, the desire to make other
people do things, is universal. Often in States
or individuals it dons the dress of liberty. Cesare
n6 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
Borgia wanted freedom to do what he willed,
so did Napoleon ; so do many more inglorious
Neroes of the counting-house.
What, then, is the test of our faith in freedom ?
It cannot be the desire to do what we like.
Rather it consists in respect for the personality
of others. The egoist must ever cry, Here I am,
there is none beside me. All men are tools for
his pleasure ; the world a baby s toy. The
legal maxim, the slave is a thing, not a person,
states the unconscious postulate of many. Some,
like Jefferson of the American revolt, repeat the
phrases of Rousseau and uphold at the same
time race-slavery. Max Stirner s doctrine that
the individual must be governed by no tyrant
but himself is logical on the principles of
naturalism. On the postulates common to both
he did well to pour scorn on Positivists. The
religion of humanity without faith in a world
beyond is sheer illusion. Faith in freedom
carries with it faith in the spiritual nature of
men. Denial of the one brings denial of the
other in its train.
Justly, on the whole, we can claim to be a free
people. This war has shown the truth of the
motto Imperium et Liber tas. The bond that
seemed so brittle has been proved strong
Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove can show it. The
practical recognition of the freedom inherent in
its different groups by the one Commonwealth
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 117
may pave the way to new thoughts about the
State. At home it is our sympathies that need
widening. The fortunate classes know freedom.
Education is not bureaucratic. Our schools
show us each a true society with its own life
and special quality. Within them minor groups,
each something for itself. Tyranny in the eyes
of the sheer individualist, it would seem like
anarchy to a Prussian. As a fact it secures in
dividual power along with a sense of corporate
claim. Our ancient universities have a like
spirit. Their spell lies largely in the inter
dependent life of colleges, separate yet united in
the common society. All individuals bear their
stamp, yet each has his own gift. So in a less
degree it is in the army with the strength of
regimental tradition. So also with the Inns of
Court, whose corporate teaching alone in Europe
preserved a national law, and thus withstood
the Roman torrent at the Renaissance.
All this is part of the make-up of the educated
Englishman. Too often it seems as if that were
all. Men imbued with these ideals for them
selves can contemplate the masses as unrelated
units, and denounce as tyranny all efforts after
group-life and sacrifice. Yet that great spon
taneous movement we call Trades Unionism
is governed by the same spirit. Germane to
our English character down to dislike of the
blackleg it is seen now as a treating power in
u8 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
the State. Signs already appear of it taking
some directing share in those industries of which
it is a chief constituent. We cannot go on for
ever as we are, leaving direction only to one
party in a joint concern with the working men,
who largely are the concern, to be treated as the
pensioners on the bounty of employers, grateful
to be taken on, as something they ought to be.
We may not like this prospect of change. We
must face it. As I said, there are affinities
between the two spheres of activity, which ought
to widen our sympathy. Not lack of wages or
long hours of inequality men are unequal
but the denial of personal interest is the blot
on the scutcheon of modern industry. As one
puts it :
Freedom may be hard to define in set terms,
but the man who can be perfectly happy without
it, enjoys the passive contentment of the animal
rather than the positive well-being proper to
a man. The neglect of this obvious truth in
the working of our industrial government is
the simplest and most potent element in the in
articulate labour unrest which has so much
hampered British trade and industry of recent
years. Harmony can only be restored by frankly
basing our industrial life, as our political life is
already based, on the principle of responsible
self-government.
This war will not be lost, though we all should
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 119
be impoverished for three generations. But it
will be lost if we do not win more freedom, and
at the same time more order. It is the com
bination of the two that is the secret of the
English strength. Both these developments
have this quality. For both repudiate a freedom
which is anti-social. Both claim that a man
shall have regard to the experience of his fellows.
The man who believes in authority is not the man
who utters consecrated formulae, or wants to
subject other people to discipline. It is the man
who can subject himself, who defers to the
common judgment, who knows that if he is per
suaded he must stand alone, but who differs
with reluctance, believing that, however certain
he feels, it is less likely that the accumulated
experience of ages is in error than that he him
self suffers from some obliquity of vision.
These truths of freedom and order apply to
religion even more than they do to civil society.
What measures shall effect these ends we need
not discuss. The Gospel gives us no programme.
Christ did not come to make statesmen lazy.
But He did come to assure us of our end the
eternal world for every man, and his share in the
kingdom. That truth is at root of all claims
to freedom and it secures the balance of
authority.
Even more clearly do these truths shine out in
the Church. If we consider the individual alone,
120 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
anarchy results ; religion is no more than sub
jective feeling. If we argue from the unity of the
Church in any mechanical way, it is not hard
to arrive at some such external type of autho
rity as the ultramontane Papacy. In a great
society there will always be much group life.
Men of like temper tend to get together. What
is dangerous is when such groups become ex
clusive. That is sectarianism not the emphasis
on this or that dogma. Sectarianism is an
attempt to combine in one exclusive society
all men of a special kind of temperament in
religion. The Church holds all. Within the
Catholic society let there be groups as many as
you will. We need more, not less, of the guild
principle. So long as human life exists there will
be temperaments in which the personal side of
religion is uppermost ; others which emphasise
the critical ; others the sacramental and insti
tutional. Parties in the Church roughly corre
spond to these permanent differences. No
system can change this. We are not intended
all to think or act alike. Churchmanship is
tested by the power to bear with one another.
All share the common life ; each contributes
his special gift, and gains from those most unlike.
Freedom, as we saw, implies respect for others.
In so vast a life as the Catholic Church, with
its immeasurable reflections in human per
sonality, with its multitudinous controversies,
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 121
its many-coloured history, its treasury of inter
pretative literature, its varieties of cult all
centred round the Creeds, men may be loyal
to the whole while greatly differing in the value
they set upon their parts. Nor need they like
each other equally. To the old-fashioned Evan
gelical, with his strong sense of personal union
and pardon, the ritual of an advanced Church
seems to place the form before the substance,
and to disturb the quiet of the soul. To him
who glories in the Catholic heritage, his brother s
gospel seems partial, and to lack all bulwarks
against subjectivism. Both think the Liberal,
as he loves to be called, coldly intellectual, and
suspect unbelief even where they cannot trace
it. To the latter the two seem wilfully ignorant
of modern problems and timorous in thought.
Each is apt to accuse the other of heresy, wishing
he were out of the Church. Yet reflection shows
that each group has the defects of its qualities.
The best way to correct these defects is to com
bine one group with others whose emphasis
differs. So long as this is done in loyalty to
the whole, danger is at a minimum.
We are not to jettison our standards. But we
need in our thoughts to give the maximum of
margin to those who differ. Toleration to be
real means more than is thought. It does not
mean that we tolerate opinions on matters only
which we think doubtful, but that we must
122 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
endure what we actively dislike, confident in
the power of a living society to reject what is
alien to its idea, and reserving our powers to
combat them in argument.
This freedom is not absolute. Even ethical
agreement involves postulates about human
nature. Faith in God as our Father is open to
doubts which to many seem insuperable. The
simplest view of our relation to Christ implies a
host of historical affirmations, none of which is
unquestioned. The claim for absolute freedom
of criticism inside the Church involves a contra
diction. For it asserts that a religion essentially
historical may be indifferent to all historical
content. This would leave us with an ethics
without direction, a theology that was not even
negative, a society which lacks all principle of
life, and a religion without meaning.
With this caveat, let us bear in mind that
English Churchmanship, if true to its special task,
should lean to the side of freedom. It is hard to
be fair to what we feel to be wrong. It is always
exhilarating to take the offensive. Only real
faith can afford to be sympathetic. Too
often when we think we are defending the
faith we are only betraying our own weakness
of hold.
These principles apply to all, not least to the
intolerant preacher of toleration. The name of
Liberal does not prove liberality, nor the name
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 123
of Catholic universality, nor that of Evangelical
a Gospel spirit.
Even worse is a danger of all these parties
the temptation to treat religion as the property
of those who have taste for it. It may be the
individual dwelling in a private Paradise, occult
withheld, untrod, rolling Scripture phrases like
wine on the palate. It may be the critical
intellectualist, exhaustless in discussion. It may
be the institutionalist aflame with the wonder of
the Church of all the ages, erudite in details of
her cult. Any or all may make the error of
treating religion as mainly an interest. The
love of God, and of man, made possible by
Jesus Christ, and carried out in daily life, that
is the principle of the Gospel. To many a God
fearing man this is the star to steer by, to whom
all our party cries are of little meaning. Religion
does not mean reading the Church papers or
going to the May meetings. We know that now.
Yet are we not apt to treat as the only true
Christians those who have the same sort of
interest in it as we have ourselves ?
Calvinism makes Christianity the treasure
of the religious elite. Its dogmas are gone.
Its spirit takes Protean forms ; it is the worst
of all cankers in the Church. It works uncon
sciously, taking people on the side of their en
thusiasms. Yet we do not judge a man a good
citizen by his interest in a political club. Too
124 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
often this is accepted by the plain man, who
thinks the Church no place for him. Nothing
will do more to ruin God s cause than to turn the
family into a sect of leisured persons with a
taste for religion. Instead of the Church of
God being a home for the souls of men, it would
become a conservatoire for training spiritual
virtuosity. It would imply radical differences
in human life, instead of the unity of all in love.
That is the bond of society not sentimental
affection, but will to the good of others along
with our own. All effort for humanity comes
of the golden rule. The essence of the golden
rule is the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. Free
dom and authority are abstract terms. We
may dispute about them for ever. Love is the
activity of persons transforming the whole.
Alike in matters of dogma and organisation
we should simplify our problems if we had at
heart the governing principles of that writing
in the New Testament which is fullest of dogma,
yet gives imperishable form to the social appeal
grounded on the nature of God.
1 Beloved, let us love one another : for love is
of God, and every one that loveth is born of God,
and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth
not God ; for God is love. In this was mani
fested the love of God toward us, because that
God sent His only begotten Son into the world,
that we might live through Him. Herein is love,
FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY 125
not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and
sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love
one another. No man hath seen God at any
time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in
us, and His love is perfected in us. Hereby
know we that we dwell in Him, and He in us,
because He hath given us of His Spirit. And
we have seen and do testify that the Father sent
the Son to be the Saviour of the world. Who
soever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God,
God dwelleth in him and he in God. And we
have known and believed the love that God
hath to us. God is love ; and he that dwelleth
in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.
III. CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE
All things are yours. I Cor. iii. 21.
THIS passage is the charter of Christian culture.
St. Paul lays down the right of the Christian
to share in the riches of human experience, and
the limits within which that right must be
exercised. All things are yours. Only because
we are Christ s, and Christ is God s. The
Christian holds the master-key to the treasury
of life. The words are to us a truism. We
quote them lightly. They were not lightly
written. Had the Apostle been writing to the
hierophants of a prosperous and established
Church, his words would have seemed obvious.
Danger there might be lest possession should
seem everything, and the proviso be forgotten.
No difficulty about these words would have
occurred to a mediaeval statesman Pope, holding
in his hands the threads of universal diplomacy,
and master of an organisation the most subtle
and penetrating known in history. Some one
like Innocent IV. or John XXII. would have
expounded them in a legal case, as proof of his
own more than royal rights. Or, again, these
126
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 127
words might seem the best warrant for en
thusiasm in all humane studies of a Pope of the
Renaissance, like Nicolas V., with high ideals
as a scholar, sensible that he was leader of a
great intellectual movement, desirous to justify
Rome as capital of the country of culture/
What was felt at the centre would be felt also at
the circumference. Any member of a military
order like the Templars, or a prosperous mer
chant like the father of St. Francis of Assisi,
would feel this. Indeed, that was partly why
the latter was so deeply wounded by his son s
marriage with Holy Poverty. Or, again, a plain
schoolmaster in the sixteenth century might take
these words to himself, and believe that he was
following in the steps of Vittorino da Feltre.
In all time of our wealth as a Church these
words would seem natural to the Christian man
of affairs, or the Christian scholar.
That was not so with St. Paul s first readers.
Slaves they were for the most part : men at least
of no social weight. The new faith was not yet
formidable enough even to merit official perse
cution. Christianity meant less to the Roman
world than the prophecies of Dr. Dowie and Zion
City meant to us.
This fact alone shows how impossible it is to
think of St. Paul as speaking of material pos
sessions. If is of experience, not the material
basis of experience, that he speaks. St. Francis
128 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
once said that he got more out of the riches of
King Louis than the King himself. The King
enjoyed his treasures but he enjoyed the King s
joy. In other words, love, with its gift of
sympathy, enriches the personality. Selfishness
makes individuality a prison-house. It narrows
the character, even in the presence of vast
wealth.
What St. Paul said has proved true. Most
that was of enduring value in the ancient culture
was absorbed by the Catholic Church. Then,
in union with the fresh races of the north, she
framed a culture richer, more varied, and more
penetrating than any known before. It is hard
to see how any one can belittle the services of
the Church to humane culture, in view of the
material evidence still subsisting. Yet some
can speak of the gloomy asceticism of the
Catholic Church destroying love and laughter.
Such an one can never have looked at the
grotesques in a mediaeval cathedral. St. Francis
of Assisi was in some ways the most thorough
going ascetic, yet his whole life is like a child s
smile on a dull day. Those who bring against
the Church this charge of hostility to culture do
not argue from facts of these they are ignor
ant but from theories. They know that the
Church prohibits certain actions and inculcates
self-denial. They jump to the conclusion that
she is inhuman and opposed to natural joy.
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 129
If Christianity could be identified with Puritan
ism they might be right.
All comes of two errors : (a) a misconception
of the Christian maxim die to live, and (b) the
failure to see that this principle is true of all
worthy human life, is indeed involved in the
very nature of culture, for that involves selection.
The Christian law is that we must lose ourselves
to save ourselves that pain, risk, drudgery, all
forms of daily dying, are essential for any
mastery, whether bodily, mental, social, or
spiritual. This maxim die to live is a postulate
of all education. The most perfect bodily func
tions will give no one athletic freedom unless
he go through a discipline. Brilliant mental
gifts run to seed unless there be a hard and
hurting pruning process. Without this prin
ciple, the sacrifice of the moment to the future,
no success can be won either in politics or affairs,
or any profession or liberal art. When the
Cross of Christ is held before us, it is not as a
strange, unique phenomenon. It is the inner
meaning of all our struggles, the symbol of all
sacrifice for distant ends. Even for culture we
need the Cross. Mere hedonism will not do.
No high culture is possible without an asceticism
of the taste. How little such is practised now
may be seen in our cheap magazines, and some
of our best advertised novelists. Nobody can
learn to write unless he is willing to be ruthless
I
130 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
to himself. Nowadays people wonder at the
story of a town like Siena. They read of its
constant wars with other cities, its internecine
civil strife, its insecurity and bloodshed. They
ask how is it possible that a people so distracted
should produce the things we know ? Is not
the answer partly in these very distractions,
the symptoms of intensified life ? The brilliance
of life and all its beauty were realised owing
to the nearness of death that gives a colour
and a glory quite unique. Take other cities, set
on a hill, Buxton or Harrogate. There you
have no wars, but fine hotels and efficient police.
But will there be anything for people to wish to
look at five hundred years hence ?
Perhaps the party is not large which attacks
the Church in this way. Few people deny the
services she has wrought in the past say the
thirteenth century. That, it is thought, can
be relegated to history. Can we not look for
ward to an age of purely humanist culture,
without any disturbing supernatural interest.
Ever since the Renaissance we have been wit
nessing efforts to produce this condition. At
last we have some glimpse of its naked beauty.
The present moral of the Prussian people is
the direct result of the marriage of European
scepticism with State idolatry. The sometime
friend and pupil of Voltaire, Frederick the Great,
is the symbol of it all. What has gone on since
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 131
then is merely the logical development of the
philosophy of sans-souci. People were shocked
and surprised at the bonfire of Louvain, the
murder of Captain Fryatt, the Belgian depor
tations. They may have done well to be shocked,
but they are foolish to be surprised. Nobody
who has read Busch s Memoirs of Bismarck
ought to be surprised at anything that the
Germans have done. That is the kind of culture
for which all deniers of the supernatural are
preparing the way, though not always with
direct intention.
The higher goods even of human culture will
not persist apart from a spiritual ideal ; they
will cease to be thought of as goods, and their
value will decay. Even education if material
success be all must undergo a like change.
More and more will a vulgar commercial spirit
decline to allow time and energy to be spent in
any fundamental problems. Scientific research
will be honoured for a time. But as soon as
it is discerned or suspected that much of it is
without practical value, the man of science will
be despised like the poet, and bidden to work
in fetters. Art, indeed, never did and never
can subsist on a rationalist basis, for in its very
idea art invokes other elements of human nature.
A society living on the mechanistic hypothesis
would soon begin to ask of poets what they were
dreaming of, and of musicians why they were so
132 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
idle ? So far from making fresh masterpieces
such a world soon becomes incapable of com
prehending the old ones. Most of us know in
stances of this.
If, however, religion be the foundation of en
during culture, culture is no less needful to the
Catholic Church. The final truth may not be
with intellectualism ; we are not on that ground
to despise the intellect, but rather to develop
and direct it. Without God, human society
becomes barren and decays. That does not
mean that we are to despise human society.
Rather we are to show its value to the man of
God if he would be perfect and entire. Art,
if followed on lines of pure naturalism, will lose
its dignity and sweetness. We are not on that
ground to turn aside in Puritan contempt, but
rather to do all we can to elevate artistic motives.
So with all human instincts none of them but
may lead astray if pursued apart from God.
But none of them but enriches the Christian
if done in the right spirit. Sexual intercourse
may be animal merely, or worse ; Christian
marriage is a Sacrament of the union between
Christ and the Church.
On all hands we see the problem between
a spiritual and a non-spiritual culture. The
solution is not to be looked for in any form of
Puritanism a movement confined to no one
epoch and no one branch of the Church but
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 133
always seductive to austere minds ; and always
heretical.
If we think to convert the modern world by
retiring into a coterie, we shall make a grievous
error. Whatever the man of the present day
accepts, it will not be Puritanism. Half of our
trouble is due to this the old Puritan ideals
have gone, and in their stead we have licence.
In those days there was no king in Israel, and
every man did what was right in his own eyes.
Let us brace ourselves to meet this need. We
have a world crying out for religion, but sus
picious of authority, and nervously afraid lest
religious people are blind to the needs of humane
culture. That dread we must remove.
There is less inclination than there used to be
to suppose that you can get on comfortably
enough without any religion. But the religion
of the coterie is of no use. A religious world
with its ecclesiastical gossip, its clerical cliques,
its great preachers, and its paraphernalia of fuss
will not attract thinking men. What will interest
the world is to show that (i) we mean what we
say when we talk of human life as being a
fellowship, and (2) that on the intellectual side
the highest and deepest culture is that of the
Christian. Never shall I forget the impression
made on me as an undergraduate by being
brought into touch with a great scholar who was
above all things a humanist, but the very depth
134 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
of whose humanism was due to his Christianity.
It is essential for us who glory in the name of
Catholics to show these two things for it is
useless to prate of Catholicity if you spend your
time sneering at all efforts after fellowship in
secular affairs, and it seems equally unreal to
boast of that name in any narrow specialist
spirit apart from the great tradition of European
culture. We have to show that we, because we
are Christians, have deeper social sympathies
and more acute intellectual interests than those
who are not.
I wish that this were more realised. For
many of the most earnest among the clergy
seem content with their culture at twenty-five.
Since then they learn nothing, though they have
forgotten a good deal. Too many vicars seem
to frown on any intellectual activities, whether
in clergy or laity, with disastrous results. The
consequence is that the professional man (or
woman) of high modern education finds little to
help him in the Church, and is often given the
sense that he is not wanted as compared with
other people. No wonder where they retain
religion they surrender to the vague idealism*
guiltless of creeds which is all in the air.
If there be any here whose life is not yet fixed
in a groove, I would say this : Let your sense
of the need of religion be equally yoked with a
passionate enthusiasm for all the goods of
CHRISTIANITY AND CULTURE 135
human culture. Do not let any desire to do
immediate good hinder you from the develop
ment of mental interests ; and do not suppose
that that development is ended at thirty, or
even at forty or fifty. We live in a difficult
world, but a very glorious one. Upon us, the
inheritors of European culture, is laid a burden
honourable, but onerous. We have to show that
in all excellences of humane activities, study, in
vention, artistic enthusiasm, social grace, wise
and instructed statesmanship, the care for good
books, there reigns in the Christian not less but
more of the passion for knowledge than in his
fellows. Nobody is the master of his own gifts,
and talent is not a merit, but as Catholic Chris
tians we can all develop the gifts that we have,
and show forth religion, as a harmony of many
hues, of many times and places, subtly inter
woven. It is the office of all Christians to show
forth their faith in its beauty and universal
subtlety of gladness.
IV. THE ETERNAL REFUGE
The Lord sitteth above the water-flood ; the Lord re-
maineth a King for ever. Psalm xxix. 10.
DOES He ? That question is asked by many
now who did not dream a doubt four years ago.
Practical reality forces itself upon us. We cannot
but wonder how far our hopes for man are well
founded. Is there goodness at the heart of
things ? For us this involves a belief in the
Blessed Trinity, a God whose nature it is to love
and be loved and a world of human fellowship
based on His Fatherhood.
Ultimately the doctrine of human brotherhood
will not be maintained apart from Christian
Faith. What concerns men at the moment is
not so much faith in God as belief in the prin
ciples of human life, which are symbolised in
the Golden Rule. Mr. George Santayana in
his brilliant volume Egotism in German Philo
sophy, points out that what our new pedant
barbarism sets at naught is the whole complex
of moral and humane doctrine, the traditional
sanctities of men s social unity. That is what
we fight for. Without giving way to the German
136
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 137
creed, many are in doubt about their own. We
ask, Can there be any real foundation for all those
hopes and ideals which in the past were so sup
porting ? Far off they seem and faint, echoes
of a dying song.
First of all, in religion we see something
remote. This struggle absorbs our imagination.
Even about prayer there is an air of unreality
how useless to the main struggle is that which
is to us so full of comfort, the Holy Communion.
Us these things refresh and uplift. Yet are
they not almost fiddling whilst Rome burns ?
Even more is this true of our discussions and
movements, and ecclesiastical paraphernalia.
Are they not shams while realities are all in
France ? We must reply that these are parts of
life, and they cannot all be stopped and that
it is our duty to carry on and not mope. This
sense of remoteness affects many of the interests
honoured in this place. The manifold occu
pations of art and letters the throwing the
imagination into the past, all recondite inquiry,
all learning that has not an immediate object
all suffer under the shadow of unreality,
except in so far as they can be defended as re
freshment. So that it is not the religious
interest alone that must question itself.
But religion is not a luxury ; it is a neces
sity. A large part of religion has been luxury.
That must go. All that is mere sentiment, all
138 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
languorous acquiescence will prove wanting.
The war should destroy all religion that is not
vital.
That is only the beginning of the trouble.
Let it be that our religion is vital to us : our
consolation and our hope. What is going on
makes us doubt how far we have any right to
this hope. May it not be only a dream of the
imagination, i.e. a refuge for the spirit of man,
created for himself through the pressure of need,
but having no root in reality. The more in
tensely we feel this need, the more acutely do
we question our right to satisfy it. Not only
we ; others in every age have sighed for the con
solations of religion. Yet might it not be that
they only hypnotised themselves into the belief
that the universe was less cruel than it seemed.
Faith in an age like this is always tortured by
the fear of self-hypnotism. It would not be
faith if it were not.
Many people have believed in a good-natured,
sentimental Deity. That faith was the reflection
of their own weakness. It is not Christian ; it
never was. Our God is a consuming fire. In
Jesus of Nazareth there is deep austerity often
ignored by the graceful sentimentalism which
Renan made popular. There is nothing so
merciless as the mercy of God, I have heard said.
This war has done us good in recalling us to the
severity of God s love so deep that He will
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 139
shrink from nothing to His children s profit,
except that of coercing their freedom.
Freedom ! All men are free, or partly so. If
God be Love, He cannot desire the service of
machines. If He creates spirits to love Him,
they must be free to love themselves better :
in doing that they will cause vast suffering. This
war shows us on a colossal scale the consequence
of human freedom being turned to wrong ends.
It gives no argument against a God who is Love ;
but it shows a world, which was forgetting it in
genial tolerance, the naked horror of sin. Many
people who did not believe in the theological
doctrine of sin, now see what it means. That
is the reply to the often heard word, There can
be no God, or else He would stop the war.
That does not take away our trouble. There
remains the Presence in the imagination. Facts
about us are so terrific We cannot live in a
fools Paradise. Is the time-honoured wisdom
of mankind anything more than a set of copy
book maxims, fit for small children, and scorned
by any one else ? Is not there (apart from the
war) a great deal in the competition of commerce,
in the exploitation of the weak, in the methods
even of Western civilisation that bears out such
a view ? Is what is called morality as between
man and man anything more than the exaltation
of certain elements of this human life, useful at
all times to the weak, and obligatory between
140 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
friends, but belied by the world at large ? We
may admire the maxim to love as brethren, and
honour the perfection of self-sacrificing Love
upon the Cross. But is not the truth of man s
nature rather expressed by philosophers like
Hobbes, with his belief in universal selfishness,
or like Machiavelli and Bernhardi which is the
same thing on the international scale ? Is there
indeed a * power not ourselves that makes for
righteousness, or is it all a dream ? Did Christ
enunciate the true law of human life after
all?
You cannot prove it. No belief in God or any
predominant power above selfishness is possible
save to faith. We know this by the common
argument of selfish men, that even a self-sacri
ficing act is in some way the interest of a person
of special temperament. This is no matter of
high doctrine. It is concerned with all the
venerated sanctities of human life ; the love
of man and woman, motherhood, friendship,
mutual help, loyalty, truthfulness are all these
things to be honoured as the highest, or are they,
except as the playthings of a coterie, the merest
moonshine ? In all ages some have thought
this. At any moment, the mass of practice may
be plausibly argued to be against them, albeit,
from time immemorial men have given them
lip-service. Without faith even the ideals of
humane living are impossible. That makes us
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 141
afraid. May not our faith be self-hypnotism ?
We cannot prove the contrary. We can see what
are the alternatives. If they should carry us to
conclusions even more difficult, we have grounds
for the venture of faith. Faith would be no
faith if there were no venture.
But first of all even the alternative, the selfish
ideal, requires faith. You must make a venture
even to accept the ethics of Thomas Hobbes of
Malmesbury. For to do that you have to ex
plain away all the acts of love and fellowship ;
and also the high value mankind has put on
them. I do not say that that cannot be done.
But the explanation does not satisfy. It seems
unreal, just what they call our view. The com
mon man is revolted when he is bidden to hold
that an act of heroism like that of the bomb
ing officer who saved his men s lives at the cost
of his own is no more than his form of selfishness.
In some ways the war may make things harder
to believe for those on the side of the angels.
But the uncounted acts of devotion to others,
and mutual help, have added to the spiritual
assets of the race. They make the cynical view
even less probable than before.
Neither the cynical nor the fraternal theory
of life can be proved. Both have some facts,
and neither has them all. Whichever way you
take, you must choose one set of facts and rank
them higher. Are the qualities hitherto thought
142 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
nobler in reality so ? We need not enhance our
difficulties. Christian and humane ethics do
not teach an absolute altruism, but bid us love
our neighbour as ourselves. It does not destroy
individuality, but asserts that true self-develop
ment is found in service. Is not that the lesson
taught us shrinking Christians by thousands of
quite ordinary privates ? Even the State wor
ship of Prussia is by no means all on the side
of the selfish doctrine. True, it annihilates every
moral restraint in politics or war. But to do
this it has to develop in a high degree the selfless
devotion of the individual. It makes the State
his conscience. It might be argued that the
successes of our foes are due more to their good
than to their bad qualities. They are a people
really at one, willing to endure all for the father
land, and sacrificing everything to the herd-
instinct. This cohesion is not, cannot be,
merely created by force it is in the mind of the
people. Within the limits of the nation, we
may find many instances of the paramount
claims of human fellowship. They all point
to the individual reaching his real life in devotion
to a cause national immorality, but individual
sacrifice, is their motto. Indeed, I have seen it
argued, by one who hates Christian ethics, that
modern Prussia is their chief embodiment.
Whether you take the family, or the State, or
any social union, you find that human life cannot
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 143
be understood without some infusion of the
despised doctrine of mutual service.
Still, we have an alternative. Let us consider
it. We want to see what it involves, whether
it does not bring us into greater difficulties even
than our own ideal. Friedrich Nietzsche repu
diated with scorn all those ethical values, save
courage, which the human race, Buddhist and
Chinese no less than Christian, has at all times
chosen for honour. But while he did this, he
was also saying the universe is chaos ; it has no
order, no meaning, no goal. The rejection of
ethical values leads to the doctrine that the
world is nonsense : this he reiterates with the
lyrical raptures in which he is a master. You
may say that he is not consistent, that he did
find in it a meaning the will to power. But
that has no end. The world is a recurring
decimal ; the will to power goes on producing
a series of cycles of never-ending struggle,
leading to nothing. That is his eternal return/
Can it not be said that at blackest moments
our view is less improbable than this, and there
fore that the world somehow gives warrant to
ethics of human fellowship. Besides, there is
a sense in that we all have a right to argue
that the deepest aspirations have some warrant
in the constitution of things. Ultimately this
comes to mean that existence cannot be entirely
nonsense. This it is, and not any individual
144 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
sense of permanence, that is the argument for
the life beyond (apart from Revelation). Just
now this is enhanced. It is not so hard to believe
that death closes all in those who die with work
done at the evening of life. It is all but im
possible to credit that some great character cut
off in the height of power, or some youth noble
and heroic killed in fight, has gone out into the
dark for ever. If the world be not meaningless,
we must think of them as alive. That is the
real argument for an eternal world which shall
ratify all that is noble in this : it is expressed in
Browning s Abt Vogler, in lines almost too
well known to quote.
The contrary is to make the devil Lord of all
things. That is not thinkable. You cannot
conceive, though Nietzsche suggested it, that
the ground of all being is a lie. The argument
that the deepest needs of human nature have
their satisfaction in reality may rest on faith.
It does. But it is not unreasonable. It is the
faith that the world has a meaning, and that
man is not a freak of nature.
This faith in the inner permanence of good
guarantees no result either way in the present
struggle. We greatly err if we suppose that
because we are right, more than right, therefore
military triumph is assured. That would be to
make success the measure of right, and to justify
the worst crimes. In the Old Testament, tern-
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 145
poral blessings are the meed of right being.
Precisely the opposite is the lesson of Jesus Christ
in word and fact. The war shows how apparent
defeat is the cause of spiritual triumph. The
success of the British Empire and its justice
have made us forget that. It may be that we
have to learn it afresh, and the process will be
hard.
At the sack of Rome by Alaric, all human
ideals suffered shipwreck ; the grandeur of the
eternal city had seemed part of the nature of
things, and all faith was shattered. The greatest
of St. Augustine s works was designed to rebuild
it. The De Civitate Dei removed the notion
that, because earthly props were gone, God was
the less with us and Christianity false. In words
all have accepted that view. Nobody now pro
fesses to believe that earthly blessings attend on
the virtuous man, as a thing of course. All
Christians accept the doctrine of the Cross, that
strength may be made perfect in weakness that
apparent loss, even of power to work for God,
may bring real gain. In words we believe that,
but we find it hard in act in our own case.
Still harder is it in the national cause. Yet
nations, like individuals, may be the greatest
when they have to tread the via dolor osa, like
Belgium now. The age-long triumph of English
freedom might conceivably come, not after a
victory but out of a disaster unparalleled. I am
K
146 UNIVERSITY SERMONS
not saying that this need be, or that we should
not strain every nerve. Only let us not cease
to remind ourselves that our faith in God s love
as the ground of life must not be made depen
dent on the issue of any actual struggle.
Too wide for our ken is the sweeping orbit of
human history. We have but a clear vision of
a piece of it. What may be the future of the
peoples of West Europe and America we cannot
say, any more than four years ago we could have
said what was the destiny of so many gone forth
from here, and now dead in our defence.
Either our virtues or our vices might lose us
the war. The sins of West Europe, the worship
of gold and pleasure, the class-selfishness, ex
ploitation of the weak, commercial and industrial
ruthlessness all may need the punishment of a
power, which displays the same principles on a
vaster scale with less of restraint. For the
scientific barbarism of Prussia might win in the
same way that the hard barbarians of the West
broke into the peace-lapped Roman Empire in
the fifth century. God forfend this. Yet it
might be. We must face facts.
We are in the most awful hour yet of this
war. What we neecl is not prophecy, but hope.
Hope, if it be unconquerable, must be indepen
dent of any earthly vicissitude. It must have
its vision in the world beyond. No hope save
that in the eternal God can satisfy us at any
THE ETERNAL REFUGE 147
time. Yet now it is clearer than ever that if
we are not to sink in the sea of trouble we need
some refuge beyond the stress of life, that also
can sustain us in the faith that our cause is at
one with the heart of God that our life, whether
a nation or as individual, is in His hands. Not
in bright but in dark times do we feel most
the reality of the eternal consolation.
The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures :
He leadeth me beside the still waters. He re-
storeth my soul : He leadeth me in the paths of
righteousness for His name s sake. Yea, though
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil : for Thou art with me ; Thy
rod and Thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the pres
ence of mine enemies : Thou anointest my head
with oil ; my cup runneth over. Surely good
ness and mercy shall follow me all the days of
my life : and I will dwell in the house of the
Lord for ever.
THE NEED OF GOD
Hitherto the Lord hath helped us. I Sam. vii. 12.
WORDS are little needed to-day. The solemnity
of the hour preaches its own sermon. Since
August, 1914, what ages have passed ! Each
year has come to us with a graver sense of the
issues ; each year we have felt more deeply how
hard is the task. Each year there is an increas
ing inability to foretell the end. Every month
the prophets grow fewer as to how and when it
will close. To many the chief asset is only this
that after four years we must be making some
approach to mutual exhaustion. But of an end
we see no sign, and have less hope than a year
ago.
Every year has deepened our knowledge of the
greatness of our task. Has it in an equal degree
deepened our dependence upon God ? Has it
done this even among Christian people ? I
doubt it. Not long since I had a letter from an
Englishwoman who had lived in Rumania until
this year. Once, early in the war, had she been
home, and is now returned. She felt that she
was breathing a different atmosphere from what
there was in 1915. Then the ideals of sacrifice
148
THE NEED OF GOD 149
and noble aims and brotherhood in freedom
were all in the air. Now it was not so. Instead,
there is a dogged will to hold on ; and absorp
tion in the things of the moment. Is there no
truth in that ? Partly it may be right. In any
struggle, if serious, a period comes in which the
mind is taken up with holding on. The far aim
may be there, but it cannot hold the attention.
That is so now alike in those who fight and
those who watch. The war has paralysed all
activities whether of mind or soul, which do not
have a direct bearing on victory. At least, it
tends to paralyse them.
So far as prayer is regarded, it might seem
that to believers it would have the opposite
result. So it has to some. They are not many.
Prayer is little understood even by those who
pray. The immediate pressure of anxiety, or of
sorrow, or more often simply of work, is so acute,
that prayer and everything other-worldly seem
unreal. People may not disbelieve it all seems
remote, irrelevant like going to Church to a
child who wants to go on with its game. It is
well then that at this time we should remind
ourselves (a) of our duty, (b) of our grounds of
thanks.
First comes the thought of thanksgiving.
Horrors the war has shown. History has no
parallel for the suffering it has entailed, or for
the elaborated evil mind at the back of it. If
ISO THE NEED OF GOD
the world does not know more of God, it under
stands the devil better. Despite this our grounds
for thanksgiving are large.
We now know in a way we had no conception
of four years ago, how terrific is the force of our
adversary. The magnitude of our peril in 1914
was not realised till after. This year has its
special grounds for thanks. Four months ago,
one month ago, our feelings had undergone a
great change. I do not say that one expected
the enemy to win. But most believed that ere
this the position would be far more unfavour
able than it is. Do not mistake me. We are
in no sense secure. Even now, by some stroke
of skill or fortune, the enemy might secure gains
which would more than make up for the last
fortnight. Still, on the soberest estimate, this
is less likely than it was. The Allies power of
repercussion against attack is far greater.
If we are to thank our Heavenly Father for
deliverance, we must thank Him also for achieve
ment. Who could have foreseen this four years
ago ? Who would have been believed if he had ?
England has won imperishable renown : and
France, the eldest son of the Church, the parent
of the Crusades, has added to the glory of her
title. Even the proudest believers in the his
toric glory of this century could hardly have
imagined what has come about. Hysteria is
nauseous. But beyond hyperbole the fact re-
THE NEED OF GOD 151
mains. Our troops by land and sea, no longer
a small body of trained professionals, but the
life of the nation, have set an example of heroism
and devoted unselfishness which might shame
saints. The value of any nation, its gift to the
world, is spiritual. The real treasures of the
Allies are indefinitely greater than they were.
Secondly, there is a treasure more hardly won
than the heroism of youth the union in spirit
between the Allies. That union sacree, which
silenced political battle-cries in France, is more
than paralleled by our four years intimacy
with a nation so diverse. The fineness of
English culture will be vastly enhanced as a
result of this rapprochement if it lead to a real
interpenetration. French and Italian, all Latin
culture indeed, has been undervalued by us.
Now it is to be hoped we shall do this no more.
It may be the beginnings not only of a new
England, but of a new Europe a true Renais
sance. Even greater, some think, will be the
results of our alliance with U.S.A. Certain
things united us with them before, but less than
most people thought or than newspapers told.
Now there are noble auguries for civilised pro
gress. Already the American President seems
more than any other statesman the spokesman
of the common mind of the Allied peoples.
All these things are grounds of thanks. The
wonder of deliverance ; the treasure of human
152 THE NEED OF GOD
devotion alike in field and hospital ; the accom
plished and enduring union of spirit among the
nations.
All these enhance the need of prayer. All are
spiritual treasures. Except the patriotic effort
none could have been at all counted upon.
No less unexpected than failures have been the
successes of this war. The retreat from Mons,
the victory of the Marne, the First Battle of
Ypres, were triumphs not of brains only but
of the spirit. The union between the Allied
Powers for so long was a thing almost beyond
hope. So much so that even now German
cunning is ever occupied with expedients to
break it up.
Apart from this there is the habit not yet
abandoned of speaking of victory as a mathe
matical certainty because we have more money,
more man-power. This war has shown that
we cannot bank on mathematical certainties of
that sort. Machinery counts greatly we know.
But if you forget that all machines must be
constructed, worked, and directed by human
beings, you may lose your war in a day, either by
a strike or a mutiny, or stupidity at the top, or
intuition on the other side, or lack of moral
cohesion, or a tired mind, or mere flightiness.
Who could have guessed that Russia would make
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ? Too much of this
talk leads to over-confidence ; and even in the
THE NEED OF GOD 153
field leaves out the great factor of generalship.
It was generalship that won the second victory
of the Marne as it won the first and that is all
a matter not of intelligence but of the spirit.
This ignores, too, the spirit and moral of
armies, and still more the subtle problems that
arise in such numbers from a body of allied
nations with different governments, presiding
over people of different temper, different history,
different climate and language and culture.
Even in a human sense, prayer can help us. It
puts the mind of those who pray in that state in
which they will be best in a crisis. Even though
he may not know it, the mind of a man who prays
has a certain inward peace. He has a sort of
sub-conscious rest, while all the surface, even his
own brain and nerves, may be tossed with storms.
Besides, prayer does more than calm. It en
larges horizons and gives vistas : I will lift up
mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my
help. Prayer gives spaces and leisure, so that
the man of prayer has (so to say) extra holidays.
Unfortunately he sometimes trusts to this, and
breaks down.
The temper of the people at home will affect
that of the armies. Here, if anywhere, prayer
is needed. Always there are many who do
not pray. War breaks down barriers. It has
changed the outlook of millions. It has cut
many from their moorings. It has enlarged
154 THE NEED OF GOD
their opportunities and multiplied their temp
tations. Much as we have cause for thanks
giving, what man of reflection can deny that
there are at this time great dangers dangers
of licence, of corruption, of hysteria, and of a
fanatical nationalism, which in a panic could
win the war by stains on the great name of
England. We had an instance last week in the
House of Lords when a motion was introduced
with an implied insult to the Royal Family, so
unbalanced was the fear of even suspects of alien
blood. There are all the dangers too of a people
living up to concert pitch danger especially for
the youth of both sexes. Victory of itself will
not make us a better nation, or England a better
place to live in. We need to pray as we never
prayed before for the realisation in acts not words
of the objects of the war freedom, and that for
all, not for some ; ordered liberty ; the mingling
of the gains of the past with the hopes of a new
world. Above all we need prayer, that God
may enter more fully into the life of humanity.
THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN
1 God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are, or
even as this publican. St. Luke xviii. u.
THIS flash of insight revealed the unconscious
mind of the Pharisees. We are apt to think of
its particular application. Were not the Phari
sees the wicked enemies who brought Jesus of
Nazareth to the Cross ? No wonder, if such
was their arrogance. How good to see them
shown up. Let us look and pass on.
Not so. The Pharisees are not an uncommon
type. Still less were they hardened criminals.
What they were hardened in was religiosity.
Religion to them was the supreme interest.
Their politics were also their religion. Nowhere
was such devoted nationalism. Their cause
was noble the free theocracy of the old Hebrew
Church-State. The Pharisees were the spear-
point of the Jewish people in a world hostile and
indifferent. What wonder if they had some
pride ? They were strict in observance ; so
they won respect. They were patriots, and had
on their side all men who were moved by historic
sentiment. They were the leaders of respecta
bility, keeping high their private morals, yet
155
156 PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN
finding their financial account in existing eco
nomic conditions. Sometimes they were hard
at a bargain, merciless to the weak, greedy of
their interest, and careless as to how it was won.
They had no eyes for the problem of riches and
power, and thought that all things were the best
in the economic world, provided people would
abstain from trying to make them better. What
should surprise us in that ? These were the
faults incident to their place, often noticed
by prophets among the Jews. The Pharisees
had the defects of their qualities. Who has
not ?
These defects brought Jesus to the Cross. They
cast an indelible stain on the memory of their
party, and upon all parties in history which set
up religion as a party cause, and in the process
neglect God, Who is Love. To you and me this
warning comes afresh. Always it is needed. To
us the Church may be a cause, and to many of
us religion may be the chief interest in life.
All of us have temptations akin to those which
were too strong for the Pharisees the temptation
to make of religion the interest of nice people and
of religious activity the promotion of a party
cause. It is easy to serve God if you picture
Him as no more than the figure-head of your
party. Also this sense produces contempt for
all whose ways are not the same as ours. Cannot
we see this on all hands in the prominent religious
PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN 157
parties of the day ? I am not sure that it has
not increased of late.
This, however, is not the fault of most English
men. Their fault is the opposite. They make
a Pharisaism out of Publicanism. God, I
thank Thee that I am not as other men are, or
even as this parson. I do not fast once a week,
and strongly disapprove of such nonsense in my
sister-in-law. I give what I like, and will not be
meddled with. I make no profession, but I
believe in the maxim Live and let Live/ This
pose of religious indifference is taken by many
some of them are far from being indifferent.
But they are afraid of one another, and dare not
show what they feel. Most of us men are prigs
in our fear of being thought priggish. In the
clergy this produces an affectation of one sort,
in the laity that of callousness. Such people
like a clergyman to be conventional, and are
horrified if he makes jokes. They want some
one else to preserve the pose of religion, as they
do the opposite.
At this moment this is particularly dangerous.
It leads people to think that people are afraid
of their religion, or that it is unreal. Somewhere
Mr. H. G. Wells talks of muffled Christianity.
That is precisely what the new generation will
not endure. A Christianity of half tones and
half beliefs, with the Eucharist tucked away in
hours when most people are in bed, so that
158 PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN
pious folk are almost like Nicodemus who came
to Jesus by night a Christianity with no power
of natural utterance in an age when every other
interest artistic, intellectual, poetic, moral, poli
tical, economic blares its cr.eed like a steam
organ. This twilight religion is to them worse
than none. Something indeed it has in its
power. Danger lies the other way. Every
priest knows this. To have to talk about
religion leads to a pose which may create some
self-deception ; it is almost certain to lead at
times to an attempt to force the note. That is
why the men of the eighteenth century had such
a horror of what they called enthusiasm the
peril of a religion which was more than the ex
pression of a certain tension of the nerves.
The way to counter that danger is not for the
normal balanced person to refuse to speak of it.
Rather he should take it for granted. In a
Christian society it ought to be as easy to talk
of going to Holy Communion as it is to talk of
going to a concert. All this shyness comes from
that neglect of prayer as an atmosphere, of
which I spoke last week. Until prayer becomes
really natural, no dealings with religion but
must seem a little strange.
The second evil that results from this is the
treatment of religion as departmental. It is
your affair, your own affair, what you believe.
If it pleases you to spend certain parts of your
PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN 159
time in Church, do so by all means. I don t
seek to interfere. It does not appeal to me, it
is waste of time. But then I never go to church.
Some people never look at pictures. Every man
to his taste. Let him fill his spare time as he
pleases.
Is not that the modern attitude ? Anti-
religious fanatics there are. But more common
is that I have outlined. This is due to many
causes. But one is this reserve about religion
this treating of it as a private luxury, a mere
question of how you employ your leisure, of
little more importance than whether you prefer
eau-de-cologne to lavender water. Partly it
comes from this inverted Pharisaism, this keeping
our religion to ourselves, except that a certain
order of men the clergy is supported in order
to do all the needful public representations of it.
A religion which is apart from life has ceased
to make appeal. Unless our religion can conse
crate all our life, the new age will have nothing
to do with it it will not keep it in a separate
compartment. Much of the unrest is due to
that. The age needs a religion, but it feels that
the present organisation of life is out of relation
to it. That may mean a new arrangement of
life, but it inevitably means the death of the
idea that religion is a matter merely of private
taste.
1 REJOICE EVERMORE
THESE words are in the Gospel for to-day.
St. Paul lays down a duty. Most of us think
of joy as the expression of a mood. The first
Christians were full of joy. A conquering, new
born joy awoke, said Matthew Arnold, in lines
well known. That joy was indeed a conqueror.
By grace of it the Church triumphed in three
hundred years of conflict with the worldly
power organised and splendid as it had never
been. Joy is shown by the newly converted.
Sometimes this takes a form which moves us to
smile. We should do better to reflect : How
poor an example of Christian joy am I. Little
joy do most of us show in our lives except when
our spirits are high.
St. Paul was assuredly not telling the people
to be hilarious when they felt, as we say, jolly/
Nobody needs telling that. A man newly in love,
one who has just won a triumph, a youth at the
call of some new venture with hopes of El
Dorado, a man of science with a discovery, an
artist in sound or words or colour knowing that
a new work is good such people are full of joy.
160
REJOICE EVERMORE 161
They cannot help it. So are we when we are like
that.
St. Paul meant his Christians to know that they
had within them a source of joy independent of
the state of their bodies or their prospects in
life. That inner feeling is what the Christian
has a right to claim, and a duty to set forth.
Why is it that we fail to do this ?
Lack of faith is one cause. Even now many
people accept their religion and make use of it.
Still to some it is as natural as the air they
breathe from the days of childhood onwards.
The world about us is imperfect enough, but in
some sort Christianity is a part of it. It enters
into its daily surroundings, and is part of our
history. All this we can think away. Some
do. This needs effort. That is why many un
believers are so self-conscious. In such a society
as ours, with Christianity a part of the furniture
of national life, individual faith is often weak.
(These conditions are passing, but for many
people they remain.) Consequently when gloom
comes, or trouble, or great perplexity, such
people have no standing-ground. My religion
is no use to me. How many have not said that
in recent years ? Their house is built on the
shifting sands of social tradition. When the
storm comes, it is swept away.
Others are not like that. They have felt the
changing forces of the modern world and known
L
162 REJOICE EVERMORE
doubt. Perhaps, for there are not a few so
placed ; they have been bred up in circles which
disbelieve in Christian Faith. Their faith then is
a hard-won treasure. It seems real. Yet all the
time they live in a world of doubt, hostility,
denial. Temptation comes to such in a different
way. At times of crisis they wonder whether
they have been right, whether after all it is not
those who take the other side who are justified.
The very intensity of their faith at some moments
makes them ask themselves at others whether it
be more than self-hypnotism, something they
took up because it soothed, or because it served
to give unity to their scattered purposes, and
now that seeming is no more. The power to
soothe is gone. They forget. Our Lord never
promised us a faith or a joy that should do away
with trouble. What He promised to all His
disciples was the Cross. If any man will not
take his Cross and deny himself, he cannot be
My disciple. Many people find that. They
have used these words, but meant little by them.
Then they find the Cross laid upon them. But
our Lord said, The disciple is not above his
master. In the world ye shall have tribulation.
But He added : Be of good cheer, I have over
come the world. Our faith must embrace that,
or else it is not Christian faith at all. Only as we
learn that * grace is sufficient not to take away
the Cross, but to help us to bear a harder one,
REJOICE EVERMORE
can we have the spring of Christian joy. This
comes only by experience. You cannot take
the Cross by deputy. You may have thought
of the Passion of our Lord and of the early
martyrs as doing away with the need of any such
joy in suffering on our part. It does nothing
of the kind. It shows us the way in which we
may encounter the changes and chances of this
mortal life. It makes no profession. It never
has made any profession to lessen for us those
* changes and chances.
Selfishness is one of the causes of our lack of
joy. Years of settled peace, a prosperous and
developing civilisation, the thousand and one
newnesses of the modern world, induced in most
people an imperious demand for happiness con
ditioned in external joy. When the conditions
were taken away there was a corresponding
sense of wrong. Yet in some way and at some
time they are taken from most persons during
this lifetime. Bereavement, broken friendship,
failure, sudden ill-health, the oncoming of age,
money troubles anything may be the cause of
the loss. Never, I suppose, has the loss befallen
so many at once as that which the War has
wrought. It has changed the horizon of all of us.
We find it hard to bear. We have thought so
much about ourselves, even our work has been
too much our own ; not enough God s work, our
affections have been self-centred so that any-
1 64 REJOICE EVERMORE
thing that interferes with them destroys all our
joy. We tend to make others gloomy, so as to
have all in tune. We throw our own gloom over
the world. We are apt to make all things dull
that they may accord with our melancholy.
How are we to remedy this ? Not by meditat
ing on our blessings. Moods of this sort will not
give a man much profit from the perusal of The
Saints Everlasting Rest. The Imitation of Christ
will only make him want to give up a task which
seems too hard for him. In all conditions of
dulness it is never wise to say, Try and be
cheerful. The maxim strikes one with a chill
like the photographer saying : Now, sir, a
smile if you please. The best antidote is to do
something for others. No one feels the joy of
doing an unselfish action like a man or woman in
a fit of gloom. Our religious life is not real, but
it is too often a separate, private thing ; our own
special patent medicine, not something we com
municate to others. We have been so greedy
to take, so churlish to give. That is why we fine-
it so hard to stand up against the temptations
to be absorbed in our earthly sorrows, and to
neglect or deny the inward power of Christian
joy.
In this way, then, by a stronger faith coming
from a selfless activity, shall we hope to fulfil
our duty of joy in times of darkness. Such times
must come. They are meant to come. The
REJOICE EVERMORE 165
only matter is how we take them. Do we, for
instance, take them as well as our soldiers do ?
We know we do not. They shame us. Yet our
duty is the same as theirs a cheerful courage.
This might give us that sense of union with them
of which many people just now feel the lack.
At this moment most people at home, if they
are not absorbed in work, have a special temp
tation to gloom in that malaise which comes to
those who perforce have to watch while others
are in the furnace. They feel they can do so
little in this supreme crisis that they are apt to
do nothing at all. We ought to be making others
happy by showing where true joys are to be
found. Instead of this we are apt to mope.
Yet could we give this help, could we show
forth the grace of joy, we should do more to
convert the world than any preacher, more very
often than can be done by those with more shin
ing virtues. Joy is contagious. The Catholic
Church has been, as we said, the greatest treasury
of joy in human history. It is partly our fault
if it seems to many now a dull, spiritless insti
tution, resting only on the past without any
principle but conservative sentiment, lacking in
colour and charm. Such notions are wrong.
They are not all our fault. Partly they are.
Let us live more nearly as we pray.
1 O Almighty Lord and Everlasting God, Who
alone canst order the unruly wills and affections
1 66 REJOICE EVERMORE
of sinful men ; grant unto Thy people, that they
may love the thing which Thou commandest,
and desire that which Thou dost promise ; that
so, among the sundry and manifold changes of
the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed,
where true joys are to be found/
SERVICE
I am among you as he that serveth. St. Luke xxii. 7.
THESE well-known words of our Lord are out of
the Gospel for St. Bartholomew s Festival, which
we kept on Saturday. Now they come to us
with special force. Service is in the air. Every
where we hear about the duty of service. Most
of us are swift to see the call of it for other
people. We condemn whole classes for any
lapse or supposed lapse in this.
The right to a self-centred life on individual
istic lines is challenged as it has not been before
or rather the challenge which used to be cried
by the few is now echoed from all sides. All this
in regard to the crisis of our country.
The appeal of Christianity as a religion of
service will therefore come home to many in a
new way. At least it ought. We Christians
need to examine ourselves with a new severity.
How far are we followers in act of Him who spoke
the words ? Words like these are familiar to us.
They seem the obvious expression of Jesus
character. To those who heard them they
were startling. The disciples knew indeed that
the Master was no grandee, but they hoped
that He soon would be. At that moment He
167
168 SERVICE
was in the eye of the world even the small
world of Palestine nobody, or at most a new
popular leader. Picture the evening conver
sation of some tolerant Rabbi with a young
zealot of the Law. Have you heard the latest
the youth might say the new prophet is
setting the Jordan on fire. Crowds follow him
large crowds. Yesterday there was a scene
in the Temple such a scene, the interference
with legitimate trade by a provincial fanatic and
his rabble. He makes the ignorant imagine that
they are cured, so he leads them on to revolution.
Why don t the Sanhedrin do something ? What
are they for ? It is their office to foresee dangers
and to nip in the bud these disturbing move
ments. It will be awkward, uncommonly awk
ward, for you and me if this absurd Galilean pro
paganda makes headway. Not that I think it
will. Our people, even the lower orders of
Jerusalem, are too quick-witted. They will soon
see through this mystery. The peasants of
Galilee are gullible. What else could you ex
pect ? But at the worst there is some culture
in the capital. Still, it is time something were
done. I always said the old gentlemen had no
backbone. We want new blood, new blood, sir,
in the council. To this tirade the elder and
man of the world would reply : I do not quite
take you ; I think you mistake fireworks for light
ning. You are very quick, and can see many
SERVICE 169
things. I tell you there are some things it is
better for a man not to see. This prophet
what is his name ? oh, Jesus of Nazareth I saw
him once. There is no danger there. The
whole thing is too absurd. We need pay no
regard to a fanatic (I grant you he is sincere)
who talks about giving bread which is flesh,
and tells pretty stories with a moral. The cures
alleged might do some damage. A few effects
on those of weak nerves may be real but they
will not differentiate him from many others.
Some charm he has, and the ignorant almost love
him. That will pass. It always does. They 11
grow tired, and run after another mountebank.
The best thing to do with a movement like this
is to leave it alone. It will burn itself out.
Likely enough these peasants crying Hosanna
will soon be crying for his blood/ Well, they did.
To the disciples He was never like this. That
is not because He seemed to them as one that
serveth. These works healing and helping,
this going about doing good, were to them so
many expedients. They were the means needful
to reach the crowd that end was political
dominion. When the Kingdom was established
the Master would be seen in His true light
leader and commander of the people.
They too would all find this account. Like
Napoleon s marshals, they might now be only
private soldiers, but each had the baton in his
i/o SERVICE
girdle. One day they would reach their goal
and be hailed as friends.
So they are. But princes of the royal high
way of the Holy Cross, not palace officials with
honours and earthly wealth. That is what they
hoped. This is clear from the request of the
mother of James and John.
We know what a mistake they made. So well
are we aware of it that yet we cannot think of
ourselves doing anything like it. Are we so
sure ? How do we interpret to ourselves this
maxim, 1 1 am among you as He that serveth ?
True, we are willing to serve. We don t want,
at least we should not admit that we want, to lead
selfish, isolated lives. But what sort of service
is it that we want to give ? Is it not curiously
like that of the sons of Zebedee ? They wanted
to serve who doubts it, but to serve in a place
of rule. We want to be known as having a right
to command. We need a sphere of work where
our talents and character are recognised. Some
people serve the world best as leaders. That
we know. Commanders there must be. We
think we are born for that. In the mid-nine
teenth century the religious life was being re
vived. It was a not uncommon gibe that many
devout persons believed that they had vocations
to be a Superior. Is not that like most of us ?
Serve ! Oh, yes, of course I serve, but honour
me for serving is our word to the world. That
SERVICE 171
is the one condition. Like the Scribes and
Pharisees, we like to be called Rabbis and love
greetings in the market-places and the reserved
enclosure at public functions. What depth of
insight there is in these words of Jesus. The
humble, obscure tasks are not for us with our
gifts. We are by nature different from the mob
(the uneducated, or the untrained, or the un
disciplined). Either brain or tact or control
gives us rank. Now it is true that any man or
woman has his own special gift of God one star
differs from another star in glory. But we err
in supposing that we alone are exceptional.
Every one is exceptional. Not a single Christian
in the Church, not a single citizen in a State,
but has his own peculiar contribution to make.
Yet the world can only see a few, and we want
to be one of these few.
Where the Christian disciple falls below his
Master is here. Not because he thinks he has
a special task ; he has but because he wants
to deny that other people have, and looks for a
pedestal. How little do we take to heart the
hackneyed lines :
All service ranks the same with God,
If now as formerly He trod
Paradise. His presence fills the earth,
Each only as God wills
Can work : God s puppets and worst
Are we ; there is no last nor worst.
4 THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN
THIS festival, it may be said, has no practical
value. Every day we have the Eucharist, and
we can kneel in adoration before the Sacrament
always. True. God s gifts, however, go beyond
immediate practice they give us joy. Some of
our troubles would be less if more people could
think of the Eucharist as a source of joy, and
not merely of help. Let us fix our minds now
on this joy. That joy is a fact. Those who
deride us, or patronise as useful but unimportant
a Sacramental Christianity, do not seem to realise
the great experience we have. It is possible even
to believe in the Real Presence, and to make
much personal use of the Communion, and yet
to know little of its joy. To this end we need
leisure and spaces set apart. Most people are
in a hurry. Western men and women always
want to get something in their religion. Let
us then for the moment make abstraction of
all the other and so necessary aspects of the
Eucharist, its assurance of pardon, its gift of
strength, and think only of this, its deep under
lying joy.
The joy of the Eucharist, apart from the joy
172
THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN 173
of common worship, is of more than one kind.
There is the joy of wonder. Men may say what
they like about needing a religion everywhere
intelligible, and I do not deny the efforts, nowhere
greater than in so grand an upholder of the
Eucharist as St. Thomas, to put the whole
Catholic faith into a coherent system. Still
there remains in the religious mind an irreducible
sense of mystery. No religion without mystery
will long hold the allegiance of men. They never
have. Even an agnostic like Herbert Spencer
was willing to claim for his faith in the Unknown
and Unknowable Reality that it kept alive the
consciousness of mystery. That he thought was
all that the religious spirit needed. It is not all,
but it is a part. The sense of the mystery of
life of ourselves, of any single fact is over
whelming. Science does not remove it, science
describes but does not explain. Science tells us
that it depends on the number and rapidity of
vibrations whether we see blue or red, but that
statement leaves more crying than ever the
difference of blueness and redness to the mind.
Omnia exeunt in mysterium said the old adage, and
the joy of the Eucharist is that it keeps ever alive
this sense of wonder, and gives us the right to cry,
O altitude. It gives us the outward and visible
presentment, that sense of the depth and height
and length of the Love of Jesus, which passeth
knowledge. Asjwe revere that strange humility
174 THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN
of God which permits us to adore Jesus present
in the Sacrament of the Altar, we are more and
not less able than before to see God in every hue
and sound of nature, and feel Him in every
breath of air. This mystery does but focus
and concentrate our wonder. It prevents that
most precious gift from fading in the light of
common day.
Secondly, there is the joy of rest. We have
come home. As we kneel before the altar,
knowing that here indeed we have Emmanuel,
we have the sense that we are at rest. Rest does
not come from inaction, and is often contrary
thereto. The sense of rest belongs to one who
feels that he is in harmony with what is. The
storms of the world, and the anxieties of the
mind, and the distracting irritation of sin, and
the pressure of temptation, and the fever of
thought, and the whirring machinery of this life,
both inward and outward, may go on, but they
are superficial. He is at peace, and his mind
is stayed on God, and, though the base of his
life may rock, the life itself is secure.
Lastly, we have the joy of faith. To many in
this age of doubt and denial the Eucharist has
that chief joy. The sense that here is the very
centre of opposition makes them the more
courageous to stand by it. The impugners of
the supernatural can never be brought to faith
in sacramental religion, though with pious
THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN 175
phrases some may honour it as a symbol of the
sanctity of all things, or as a venerable monu
ment of historic faith. But we know that at
bottom they deride us, and so, like a soldier
laughing at the foe, we cling with the elan of
faith to the blessed fact. We have perchance a
feeling somewhat akin to that of early martyrs,
who stood for this faith the more boldly though
all the world poured scorn. Only this joy needs
control, or we may merely use it in pride, and
plume ourselves on imagined superiority. We
are right to have this joy, but we need it to
deepen our own faith. If we use it merely to
fling defiance at our foes, we are taking the means
for the end, and are like to lose the very faith
we so delight in. Faith must be deepened, and
made more serene by the Eucharist. The faith
which is partly the joy of battle is like the faith
of the controversialist, who seems to think that
the object of faith is not so much for life as for
defence, just as a barrister values his brief not
for any truth it contains, but as a material for
forensic triumphs. All we who have to defend
the faith and which of us has not ? are liable
to this snare. They think more of the debate
than the object. Obsessed with argument, they
have so much lived in dialectics that their faith
has no reality in it when dialectic palls.
Let us, then, have our joy in the Blessed Sacra
ment, a joy of wonder, a joy of home-coming, a
i;6 THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN
joy of courageous adventure, but let us above
all keep the feast in the spirit of quiet. Not
the music, not the incense, not the light, nor all
the decor express so fully the joy that is ours, as
the hush before the Blessed Sacrament. Only as
we live in that spirit of silent awe can we have
this joy about us always or take it into all our
outside actions and keep it in our troubles, like
that purest of all knights :
And at the sacring of the mass I saw
The holy elements alone ; but he,
Saw ye no more ? I, Galahad, saw the Grail,
The Holy Grail, descend upon the shrine :
I saw the fiery face as of a child
That smote itself into the bread, and went ;
And hither am I come ; and never yet
Hath what thy sister taught me first to see,
This Holy Thing, fail d from my side, nr come
Cover d, but moving with me night and day,
Fainter by day, but always in the night
Blood-red, and sliding down the blacken d marsh
Blood-red, and on the naked mountain-top
Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below
Blood-red. And in the strength of this I rode,
Shattering all evil customs everywhere,
And past thro Pagan realms, and made them mine,
And clash d with Pagan hordes, and bore them down,
And broke thro all, and in the strength of this
Came victor.
You and I know many such knights to-day ;
their life is more like that of Galahad, than a
THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN 177
little while ago we would have dreamed. As
we pray for them, some of whom know not this
mystery, let us pray that the joy of the Eucharist
may unite us, and that its glory may dawn on
some who do not see it yet.
M
ANGELIC MINISTRY
1 That they may succour and defend us on earth.
Collect for Michaelmas Day.
How many Churchmen use these words with
reality ? Has not the belief in angels vanished
from most ? To many it is at best no more
than a poetic fancy. It pictures in imagination
a belief in something without us which prevents
us being alone. Few have any real belief in
angels, real living beings, out of sight, created
for praise and helping us. A pious fancy, we
think. People might not be the worse if they
gave it credence. Hardly could they be the
better. For the doctrine of angels is no use.
It does not help us in the moral conflict. That,
to many, is the essence of religious life. Let us
keep to what we feel sure of God our Father,
and His Son Jesus Christ, our Redeemer. That
expresses the mind of the larger number of
English Christians at this moment.
This has been developing since the sixteenth
century. The worship of angels, as of saints,
had grown vastly in the later Middle Ages
perhaps too much. To some of the simpler folk
this worship may have obscured not their faith,
but their devotion and sense of intimacy with
178
ANGELIC MINISTRY 179
God. In reaction against this the Protestants
made a clean sweep. Invocation of Saints was
done away, and treated as idolatrous. Atten
tion was withdrawn from angelic ministries.
Few people saw what was meant even by the
terms in Milton s Paradise Lost. Yet more
remote are they from the serene and gracious
mind of Hooker who, as he lay dying, was
asked on what he mused, and gave answer The
number and nature of the angels and their
blessed obedience and order. More and more
did men lay stress on the practical nature of
religion. Great was their hostility to any ela
boration of a cult which could not plead utility
and a rather obvious utility at that. The
words of Queen Elizabeth, Take away those
lights, we see very well, are typical of the Pro
testant spirit. For some time the effect desired
was produced. A minority never more than a
minority did have an intenser concentration
upon the central truths. The ardour of spiritual
vision among the Puritans (the flight of the alone
to the alone) was a fact. Even that was only
produced at a cost the cost of making religion
for the mass of men a vague, formless thing
and prayer a wish breathed into the void.
To the mediaeval mind the unseen world was
concrete, alive with individuals. Saints and
angels seemed natural to them. When deprived
of these, the popular mind had nothing to fix
180 ANGELIC MINISTRY
upon the heavens so bright and coloured and
gay to their fathers, Jerusalem the Golden,
became to them a vague entity, without form,
and void. The other world had been a home
the happy home to which the pilgrim looked
passionately forward now it was a waste howl
ing wilderness, swept by no winds of love. Dante
may have been too concrete, too full of parti
cularity in description. This is a less error than
that of being too abstract, too negative. In
the result there was nothing left to interest people
in the world beyond. After interest had gone,
faith quickly began to go. Belief in our Lord
became vaguer and vaguer, when all His attend
ants, the solemn pomps and sweet societies/
had gone. Christ became no more than a name
for religious experience. The other world was
whittled down to a vague providence. Life
beyond lost its meaning when it was no longer
possible to picture it. True, many who gave
up all real sense of Communion with saints and
angels believed still in individual immortality,
and looked to see,
With the morn, those angel faces smile,
Which they had loved long since, and lost awhile.
In the last generation that, too, began to
vanish. Modern science defined the intimate
relation between inner consciousness and matter.
It did not prove, but it made plausible, the view
ANGELIC MINISTRY 181
that our personality is a mere effluence from the
body, and dies along with it. This went along
with the tendency to confine religion to what
was immediately useful. Men settled down
under the influence of all these forces into a
state in which vast numbers not only have no
belief in saints and angels, but no value for
Christ, except as an impressive but antique
moralist ; no faith in a living God, though the
word is an elevated name for the sum of realities ;
no belief in their own personality for how can
you believe in a self which will go out like a
candle extinguished ? Men faced this world
with hope, but the hope is only for a few short
days of frost and sun : they faced death with
courage, but without faith. Strangers they
wander in an enemy universe, without meaning,
without love and without joy, save for those
transient and melancholy delights with which,
like opiates, they seek to dull the knowledge of
the ineluctable end.
Then came the War. The immediate rending
of ties with the youths of a thousand homes
made insupportable the thought of annihilation.
When you have to do with those who die in the
natural order work done, careers achieved,
and powers failing, and children and grand
children to carry on then it is not so hard
to think that death closes all. But when the
splendour of youth is reft from us, youth with
182 ANGELIC MINISTRY
its wealth in promise, its gifts of potency, its
work all yet to do its wistful gaze into the
unknown when this is smitten, it is hard to
think that all is done, and all that treasure of
power is lost. Consequently there was a great
turning to the thought of a life hereafter. Those
who believed were eager to restore a practice,
deemed noxious for ages, praying for the dead.
Others less fortunate ran this way and that,
crying for light giving credence to any prac
titioner in the occult who could assure them that
all was not lost. Spiritualism increased upon
us by leaps and bounds. Why should we
be surprised ? The fact that with so many
these things have taken the place of Christian
Faith is a Nemesis on the Church for neglect.
Religion has been to many either a thing of
this world, or merely a system of ideas. Its
accredited and official spokesmen have been so
timid of all doings that make a concrete reality
of communion with the world beyond, that
our generation has turned otherwhere for the
springs of consolation. Instead of getting angry,
we should do better to revive our faith in the
unseen presences, and go back to the doctrine
of the Prayer Book for it is Prayer Book doc
trine, not sentimental nor exotic devotions, of
which I speak.
Either we believe or we do not believe in the
supernatural, i.e. in a world beyond and includ-
ANGELIC MINISTRY 183
ing this universe of time and space. If we do
believe in it and faith in God means that let
us take our belief seriously and not be afraid of
its consequences. In that view there can be
nothing improbable in the existence or the
presence about us of beings invisible and of an
order different from ours. The corrective to all
exaggerated spiritualism is the doctrine of angels.
And the only ground for disbelieving it is the
materialist notion that the physical universe
is all. Let us, then, have the courage of our
convictions. Let us not be ashamed to confess
faith in what they involve. This faith will need
an effort, because for so long it has passed from
our minds. That effort will be easier if we fix
our thoughts not alone on the existence, but on
the fostering care of the angels as Jesus did
Himself. So we shall once more pray with real
faith the Michaelmas Collect :
O Everlasting God, Who hast ordained and
constituted the services of angels and men in
a wonderful order ; mercifully grant, that as
Thy holy angels always do Thee service in
heaven, so by Thy appointment they may
succour and defend us on earth ; through Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen.
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE
1 O Lord, how manifold are Thy works ! in wisdom hast
Thou made them all ; the earth is full of Thy riches. . . .
* I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live ; I will praise
my God while I have my being. Ps. civ. 24, 33.
THESE words might well be inscribed on the
portals of every university. Herein we find the
ground of study, its value, and its end.
The world is a world, not an aggregate of un
related items ; even a heap of sand is a heap,
not merely so many grains. Rich, indeed, and
various is this Aladdin s palace of delight, from
its 4 widening wandering skies and clouds eter
nally new, and every incident of night and day,
and all the many-coloured pageant of mankind.
This is the first thought
* The world is so full of a number of things,
I m sure we should all be as happy as kings,
said Stevenson to the child ; and so, like the
Psalmist, I will sing unto the Lord as long as
I live ; and we are right to have our joy in
Him.
Not only is the world manifold. It has a
meaning ; in wisdom hast Thou made them all.
184
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 785
Were it not rich and wonderful we should not
want to study it. Were it not in some sense
the embodiment of wisdom, our study would not
be worth while. Some thread of secret con
nection there must be, or all our toil of inquiry
would be vain. This sense is our unconscious
basis whatever we think of the nature of this
thread, or even if we hardly know there is one.
Else we are soon driven to despair ; and the
weariness of drudgery would have no light at
the last. But we do not think that. All our
investigations rest on the faith that we shall
see of the travail of the soul and be satisfied.
Many stop here. And I do not say that more
is absolutely needful to justify study than this
sense that the universe is a wonder, and that
we may become intimate with it if we take
pains ; and that some unity lies between us and
its secret, which will bring results. We, how
ever, who come here to worship can go further ;
we can say with the Psalmist that this unity is
not merely mechanical which ultimately would
give a world with no meaning, for necessity is
blind but that all the machinery is the means
employed by a Personal Spirit to reach far goals ;
and that any beauty here is the symbol and the
sacrament of the Altogether Lovely.
But gathered in this place, we are witnesses
to one more principle the method of our search
is social. We seek these things together. The
1 86 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE
term University means, as all know, a society ;
a university is not only a place of universal
knowledge, even if it involve that ; first and fore
most it is the life of a society of men and women,
united by a common spirit, and labouring far
beyond the compass of any single individual.
Moreover, each member is changed by that
very union ; the stamp of the common life is
on him, and he is for good and evil set beyond
and above his purely private ends. The river
is more than an aggregation of drops ; and so
in our common search for knowledge each of
us takes from the whole more than he gives.
More and more is it seen that wide and endur
ing knowledge comes to men gathered in congre
gations of inquiry, and is not the reward in its
completeness of mere lonely brooding. Even
in the more abstract of sciences, like mathe
matics, progress is made by darts of imagination,
which is kindled and corrected by the common
life with those like-minded. In all study, and
certainly in those of human interest, it is when
a man works, not as an individual, but as one
of an order, that alone we gain that fine tact
which is almost instinct, that faculty of selection,
that swoop on to the relevant, all that subtlety
and delicacy of intellectual work, which is com
pact of reason, imagination, and personal sym
pathy. The great Danish critic defines style as
the determined exclusion of what is almost, but
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 187
not quite right ; and no man learns that ascetic
austerity except through a social medium. Not
that we should undervalue the gift of the in
dividual, or ever suppose through modesty that
even the humblest has not something to offer to
the whole his own and no one else s. Still
less should we deny the meed of honour to some
who, away from all studious encouragements,
have given themselves in lonely sacrifice to adding
to the sum of known truth. Yet these too are
social workers. Even if they stand apart from
the life of to-day, they are using the accumulated
riches of the race. Men could not, if they would,
reach to any fresh discovery, entirely oblivious
of all done before. The non-social student, like
the self-made man, is a figment. All depends
on the experience of ages, and the organised
life of society.
All this is yet more pertinent if we regard
Universities in their second aspect. To many,
indeed, it is their only importance : to be places
of education. Now education is, in its very
idea, social, communal. It is to secure a supply
of men duly qualified to serve God in Church
and State. It is to make them better members
of society ; and that, whether you mean by
society a cricket club or a church, a municipal
body, or even a joint stock company. It is to
make them better citizens, better Churchmen,
better Nonconformists, better Atheists even, if
188 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE
you understand me. For the University is not
set to teach this or that opinion, either in politics
or religion. What it has to cultivate is a spirit ;
to help men to clear away the thickets which
impede the path to judgment ; to look before
and after in any present problem ; to maintain
principle without anger, and to criticise oppon
ents without malice.
As John Henry Newman said in that incom
parable Idea of a University, which W. Pater
took as an instance of a perfect presentment of
a theory :
1 If he engages in controversy of any kind, his
disciplined intellect preserves him from the
blundering discourtesy of better, perhaps not
less, educated minds, which, like blunt weapons,
tear and hack instead of cutting clean, mistake
the point in argument, misconceive their ad
versary, and leave the question more unsolved
than they find it. He may be right or wrong
in his opinion ; but he is too clear-headed to be
unjust. He is as simple as he is forcible, and
as brief as he is designed. He throws himself
into the minds of his opponents ; he accounts
for their mistakes. Nowhere shall we find
greater candour, consideration, indulgence.
But if education is designed to fit us to live
alongside of other people, we must ever bear this
thought in mind. The common life into which
we enter is not limited by those who are with us
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 189
at the moment ; nor even by our own land ;
nor even by the world of all civilised men. Our
course is bright with all who lived long ago,
and it embraces those to come. Citizens of the
world, we are to enter into the gathered experi
ence of all the races of every age : to make our
selves akin with the far past, and to see our
friends in children that are not yet.
Both of these elements must go to make us.
That spiritual heritage, which some call culture,
has its roots far back, and we may not deny
them. Yet it is not all. Nietzsche wrote one
of his most piercing essays on the Use and Abuse
of History. Therein he showed the danger of a
culture which, resting only on the past, was ever
bidding its votaries look back. What he calls
the Culture-Philistine is the person whose life
is little but a congeries of memories. Instead
of marching bravely towards the unknown, they
cling to all that has been ; and then only at
second-hand. This was a needed warning.
Mr. Kipling cried it to the house-tops in
Tomlinson.
Do not let us forget this. Some in every age
preen themselves on their culture, boasting
their superiority, when for sheer vitality the
laziest schoolboy could shame them ; and even
an American millionaire has more reality. Let
us steer clear of this vice ; and beware of being
so greatly concerned with the objects and dreams
190 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE
of men long gone, that we have no eye for the
urgent interests of our age, making ourselves the
futile mouthpiece of a tradition instead of the
embodiments of a living spirit. The past enters
with us ; we are the heirs of all the ages, but
also we are in the foremost files of time. We
are to transmit what we have, not dried like a
mummy s face, but using all its wonder to add
some fresh quality, all our own ; leaving some
thing better, as we pass. Each of us has life
to MAKE something ; and it is very true what
is said that God Himself could only create by
creating creators ; and none but has his share
in the great artistry of the world.
Other dangers attach to the opposed view.
Futurism does but put in heightened language a
doctrine now widely held. That is the desire
to cut the painter altogether ; and to live for
a new age regardless of all that has come down.
This age is very conscious of its newness ; and,
like all fresh epochs, scornful of the last. l God,
I thank Thee that I am not as other men, ignor
ant, Philistine, borne, or even as this Victorian.
Once again is the eighteenth century in fashion,
and to young men and women just now the
nineteenth is prehistoric. This sense of fresh
ness, of quickening life, makes on the whole for
good ; and it has a truth, for things have changed.
But if carried to extremes, it leads the wrong
way. First, it ignores human nature whatever
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 191
their mechanical environment, and even if their
thoughts go faster, men and women remain the
same wise, idle, childish things, who love and
struggle and suffer and sin. That is the in
alienable need of the Gospel, which tells us that
none can sink so low but the blood of Christ
redeems him, and none can rise so high but
he needs forgiveness. Secondly, this Futurism
tries to do the impossible. You cannot get rid
of the past, so long as you deign to remain living
in the world. However much we deplore it, we
are what we are, as members of that great
society of which I spoke. The whole history of
man, rather the universe of created things, is
part of us ; had there not been Archimedes,
there would be no airmen ; but for the life of
Julius Caesar, we could not have the Kaiser
Wilhelm to admire.
However, this boisterous effort to deny our
parentage is little more than the naughtiness of
a boy in his teens who votes his family a mistake :
and we know these rude ways will pass as he
grows to the age when he can at once comprehend
his ancestry and yet go beyond it.
Other dangers encompass the student : there
is the narrowing of sympathy. Culture at its
best should deepen every sympathy. Yet this
result is not certain. Sometimes it sets up
barriers, instead of pulling them down. Men
bore their own tunnel of private work, forgetful
192 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE
of the world, and blind to every interest save
one. Or else, wrapping their souls in a garment
of refinement, they sit, like the gods in Olympus,
pcla vT>orT6*, scorning the crowd. Or, what is
more, content with some added efficiency, they
seek their fortune, reckless of all who lack their
chances. These things are not merely wrong ;
they are false to the notion of education. The
specialist s blinkers, the aesthete s proud-flesh,
the jingling watch-chain of the money-maker
all alike are parasites of the University:
they are not of its life, and run contrary to
its idea.
For that ideal of education in common, which
we call a University life, has its value in the
balance and proportion of our development.
Of one part of this I speak only to show it is
not forgotten. Training in outdoor things is
not often neglected by Englishmen. All that
we need say is this : no greater snare lies before
the man of intellectual interest than the itch
to despise it. Faults we may have in England,
by overrating it ; but they are faults on the
right side.
But this ideal of harmony is far wider in range
than the linking of bodily with mental activities.
It bids us pay due regard to those little graces
without which social life lacks charm, and not
to think courtesy silly. Also it reminds us to
give to the imagination its scope no less than to
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 193
the reason. In broad, the power to kindle the
imagination is of greater moment than almost
any other quality ; and that, in every avenue
of effort, social, political, economic, religious.
Further, we are saved from the tyranny of any
one method ; from fastening on to a Procrustean
mechanical bed matters, which exceed all mechan
ism, being, like poetry, of the breath of life. It
bids us so to cultivate knowledge, as not to
forgo wisdom ; and so to encourage the poetic,
as not to lose sight of the actual. It saves us
from that blind absorption in our own interest
which narrows the whole life, and ultimately is
fatal even to that one pursuit. Equally should
it guard from that other pitfall of being content
with a dilettante, bowing acquaintance with
many matters, without being at the pains to
fathom one of them. Above all, it keeps us
from the fatal twist of making culture the appan
age of a clique, and narrowing into the treasures
of a coterie what is meant to be a gift to man
kind.
All these aims depth, width, variety, har
mony, sympathy find their ground in the
service of Jesus Christ. Here is the Light of
the world, no less than of the Church ; and in
union with that gracious and piercing Spirit we
shall find nothing too low to gaze at, and nothing
too high to climb to.
For the goal and meaning of all our striving is
N
194 THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE
not only with ourselves alone ; it is not even
that larger self we call the race though to some
that hope is its far horizon it is God : and its
hallowing of all life finds its ground in those
sinless years beneath the Syrian blue.
Come, then, like the three kings, and make
your offering. Bring to that strange Child,
Who rose upon the world at Bethlehem, what
you have, and be not anxious overmuch if it
seems to you but mean. Bring to Him the gold
of your work ; and let the fruit of all toil be to
make this world a place where Christ could more
fitly come, and your fellow-men would be better
minded to receive Him ; bring to Him the
frankincense of your worship ; and remember
that all art, when real, is the praise of God ;
and that the beauty of the world, and all the
wonder of it, whether your part therein be that
of giver or receiver, is but a shadow of that
angelic hymn, which praises Him first, Him last,
Him midst, and without end.
And one thing more. Bring to Him, to Jesus,
Who died so lonely on the Cross, the myrrh com
pact of many pains ; and every sacrifice God
gives you strength to make. Look to an offering
which shall be whole ; for then it must have
within it not merely the gold, the fruit of pro
sperous and honourable effort ; not only the in
cense, the fair savour of a heart that is glad in
the Lord ; but even also the myrrh, the sacrifice
THE IDEAL OF A UNIVERSITY LIFE 195
of a life on fire for love, and the blood and tears
of many struggles, the gift of the pain and self-
lowering denials of a spirit which makes the
Cross its bitter help, and knows its Master in
the Calvary cry.
THE INELUCTABLE CHARM
Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of
eternal life. St. John vi. 68.
GLOOM had come over that small band. Jesus
was no longer in the fashion. Hopes must be
given up. The rapid and complete conversion
of the Jewish people was out of the question.
Many followers left Him, as soon as they saw
what He meant.
Jesus turned to His intimates : What of
you ? Are you going to leave me ? St. Peter s
answer is clear : How can we ? Prospects are
not bright, but we have no alternative no other
leader. Some leader we must have. Thou
hast the words of eternal life. It was that or
nothing. Outward hopes might be few. In
wardly was the assurance of power. Thou
hast the words of eternal life. The ineluctable
spell was on these men. It has been on the
world ever since. It is so now, and that though
some do not feel it, and some feel it only partly.
4 Can we do without Jesus ? is the question
which is being asked all round us. Many people
think they can. Just now they proclaim such
thoughts freely, and cry scorn on all Christians.
186
THE INELUCTABLE CHARM 197
Mr. Arnold Bennett, at home in The Five Towns,
tells us that Christianity is dead. From the days
of Voltaire onwards like claims have been made
in vain. Yet the shrill voice in which death
is decreed is evidence of panic rather than of
certainty. Part of the virulence of anti-Christian
attack is due to this. The Church, which these
people say is dead, and believe to be dead, has
an irritating way of coming to life again. Nor
can we always say that this is the mere galvan
ising of a corpse. When I am gloomy I always
think of the eighteenth century of the recovery
since. Nietzsche gets over this by saying that
the Churches are mausoleums of the dead God.
Yet, since the words were written forty years
ago, there has been an amazing growth of real
religion ; the set-back is mainly on the con
ventional side.
The charm of Jesus of Nazareth touches
many who do not admit His claims. To take
one instance. The Irish novelist, Mr. George
Moore, has no faith, and has said so with some
emphasis. Yet as he grows older he turns eagerly
to the New Testament, and gives us that strange
romance, The Brook Kerith. In this book Jesus
is not depicted even as an ethical teacher of per
manent worth. We are shown a strange mystic
with some compelling attraction, misled by
vanity to think Himself Messiah. He swoons
on the Cross, Joseph of Arimathea restores Him,
N 2
198 THE INELUCTABLE CHARM
and He lives unknown, an Essene shepherd,
with all the old dreams renounced. This is the
fantasy of an infidel ; blasphemous, too, some
will say. May be. Yet over all there is this
weird charm, as of something beyond our ken.
Such a book from such a man is proof of the
deathless charm of the Nazarene. So do others.
Even the attacks of Nietzsche testify to the in
exhaustible interest of the Christian motif. It
cannot be ignored. Moreover, the iconoclast
seems at times struck by a strange awe. He
discriminates between Jesus and all His followers.
In places be bows before the charm, though all
is qualified with the saying that Jesus was a
1 most interesting decadent/
One step further men may go. Without
taking our Lord for anything beyond the ordi
nary, men may treat Him as the noblest of all
teachers and regard His principles as permanent.
Mr. Bernard Shaw has but lately done himself
the honour of taking this view. All the dogmatic
aspects, all the Messianic and Redemptive claims
are to him mere moonshine. But Jesus of
Nazareth Himself is the eternal teacher of right
ways of life. He speaks not only to His own
world, but to us. He shows us the true relations
of human society. If the world would but take
His principles, founding all its polity thereon, alike
international and domestic, all would yet be well,
for they are the eternal truths of human society.
THE INELUCTABLE CHARM 199
This position is attractive to a hurrying world
which wants practicable maxims and hates to be
bothered by ultimate problems. Yet less and
less can it be accepted by thoughtful men. First
we must cut out, as delusions, many of our
Lord s most striking sayings, and even much of
His action. If we do that, we must ask : Is it
likely, is it barely probable, that a provincial Jew
carpenter, with no outlook beyond the local
horizons, and no acquaintance with the culture
of the great world, should have been endowed
with insight into the eternal bases of human life ?
Which are more likely to be right, those men
who repudiate not merely His Godhead, but His
whole teaching, and regard it as unnatural, or
those who see in Him a stupendous prophet, out-
topping all others, causing the greatest of all
historical changes, yet without any nature beyond
that which is common, and with that nature
tainted by a fundamental delusion ? We in this
day can hardly make the dilemma that was once
in fashion, Aut Deus aut homo non bonus, but
we can say this, Aut Deus aut mens non sana.
Besides, that love to our neighbour, which is
the essence of Christ s teaching and life, was, in
His view, based on the Love of God. He had
no place for humanitarian ethics of a Positivist
type. God, too, is not to Jesus a vague entity,
the absolute of thought ; He is the tender Father
of us all, willing the good of His family, and
200 THE INELUCTABLE CHARM
lifting us from the mire. Jesus came not to
teach only, but to seek and to save that which
was lost. He saw a world in need and gave
His life a ransom for many. His teaching
comes of love, and for that love l He lays down
His life for His friends. He is Redeemer as well
as Revealer.
That is why we need Him now. That is the
secret of His ineluctable charm. His teaching is
so full of wonder, because He is more than any
teacher. Even His life, great as it is, is ten times
enhanced by the glory of His death.
My friends, upon us here are come also 4 the
ends of the world. We see a universe ante nos.
Much that we deemed so secure is gone. The
serene and gracious harmonies of ten years back
are not for us. Then, indeed, people might talk
as though civilisation worked of itself, and pro
gress was a thing of course. Then there might
be those sheltered in cultured pieties who believe
in the duty of man to take part in the har
monious religious development of the world, and
to evolve, and banish such words as hell as in
decent, and sin as an ecclesiastical prejudice,
and salvation as ill-educated nonsense. That
is gone. The carnival of Flanders has put an
end to it. Progress, with a capital P, was tor
pedoed by the man who sunk the Lusitania. We
know nowknow with a certainty unlike the
fancies of the naif-believers of their casual
THE INELUCTABLE CHARM 201
creeds, that it may be given to man to increase
his organisations in complexity and his mastery
over the material world ; and yet, withal, this
increase may bring only a more appalling cata
strophe, where the will is turned awry. Bar
barity, which in the Dark Ages was nude, is now
clad in the shining armour of modern science
that is all. Goodness, kindness, truth, loyalty,
unselfishness these things in the past age men
could admire, and even, as some did, persuade
themselves to believe were developing in geo
metrical progression with the process of the suns,
almost apart from human choice.
We are in no such delusion. We know that
wickedness is no result of ignorance or priest
craft, but is at its foulest in the most highly
educated. God is saving man as by fire from
the facile optimism of Victorian complacency.
He is showing us that evil is a reality, and that
it is a matter of will, and how far it can go. So
overwhelming is the evidence that some are
tempted to say that all is evil, that the old values
are as nothing, and the doctrine of the will to
power alone faithful to fact. That is a transient
error. Most will retain the ancient ideals of
human life ; but they will be set against a tragic
background in a world where sin is sin at last,
and man s need very real. Like the frightened
jailor of old, mankind is once more crying, What
must I do to be saved ? The answer is ever
202 THE INELUCTABLE CHARM
the same : Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ
and thou shalt be saved.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee ;
Let the water and the blood
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.
Not the labours of my hands
Can fulfil Thy law s demands ;
Could my zeal no respite know,
Could my tears for ever flow,
All for sin could not atone,
Thou must save, and Thou alone.
Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling ;
Naked, come to Thee for dress,
Helpless, look to Thee for grace ;
Foul, I to the Fountain fly ;
Wash me, Saviour, ere I die.
While I draw this fleeting breath,
When my eyelids close in death,
When I soar to worlds unknown,
See Thee on Thy judgment throne,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press, Scotland
FIGGIS. JOHN NEVILLE BOX
AUTHOR 2016
Hopes for English .F54
TITLE
religion
s 1 *
ROOM
FIGGIS, JOHN NEVILLE 3QX
2016
Hopes for English religion. F54*
