Published on the 15th of the month.
Al
Vol. XII., No. 9.
DECEMBER, 1922.
THE
MODERN
CHURCHMAN
A monthly Magazine to maintain the cause of
TRUTH, FREEDOM, and COMPREHENSIVENESS
in the Anglican Communion,
EDITOR : H. D. A. MAJOR, B.D.
\& P
CONTENTS
If and Peradventure. The Editor
A Century of Anglican Theology • •
C. C. J, Webb, M.A., Hon. LL.D.
The Prophetic Ministry of the New Reformation
R, Meiklejohn, B.D., LL.B.
The Advent Hope . .
English Poetry and the War, H, G. Mulliner, B.A.
Book Notices:—
Genesis and the Chinese
Early Christianity . .
The Gospel of the Manhood
An Ambiguous Manifesto
A Much-Needed Book
Wholesome Words
Correspondence :—
The Lord of Thought . .
The Other Side of Hinduism
The Church in the West Indies
Unity in China- . . .
The Brahmo-Somaj and Christianity
Dr. Harris's ' Creeds or no Creeds '
A Book for Parents and Teachers
A Revised Canon of the Scriptures
The Virgin-Birth
Emigrants and Honorary Clergy
JUL23 1924
481
498
504
511
519
520
521
523
524
525
526
526
527
529
530
531
533
533
534
535
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THE
MODERN CHURCHMAN
By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make
orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance. — Erasmus.
A State without the means of change is without the
means uf its conservation. — Edmund Burke.
No. 9. DECEMBER, 1922. VOL. XII.
IF AND PERADVENTURE
By the EDITOR.
TWO recent novels, one of which in nine months has run
through twenty-three editions, raise issues with which
Modernists are concerned.
In // Winter Comes we hear the hero of the tale — and he is
a real hero — Mark Sabre, saying :
' All are looking for something. You can see it in half the faces
you see. Some wanting, and knowing they are wanting something.
Others wanting something, but just putting up with it, just content
to be discontented. You can see it. Yes, you can. Looking for
what? Love? But lots have love. Happiness? But aren't lots
happy? But are they?
* It goes deeper than that. It's some universal thing that's
wanting. I think it's something that religion ought to give, but
doesn't. Light? Some new light to give every one certainty in
religion, in belief. Light?1' (p. 84).
And again :
* I said to him, " What's the remedy, Sabre? " He said to me,
" Hapgood, the remedy's the old remedy. The old God. But it's
more than that. It's Light : more Light. The old revelation was
good for the old world, and suited to the old world, and told in
themes of the old world's understanding. Mystical for ages steeped
in the mystical ; poetic for minds receptive of nothing beyond story
and allegory and parable. We want a. new revelation in terms of the
new world's understanding. We want light, light ! Do you suppose
a man who lives on meat is going to find sustenance in bread and
milk? Do you suppose an age that knows wireless and can fly is
going to find spiritual sustenance in the food of an age that thought
thunder was God speaking? Man's done with it. It mean's nothing
to him. He turns all that's in him to get all he wants out of this
world and let the next go hang . . . But I tell you, Hapgood, that
plumb down in the crypt and abyss of every man's soul is a hunger,
a craving for other food than this earthly stuff. And the churches
know it, and instead of reaching down to him what he wants— light,
light — instead of that, they invite him to dancing and picture shows,
482 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
and you're a jolly good fellow . . . Why, man, he can get all that
outside the churches and get it better. Light, light ! He wants
light, Hapgood. And the padres come down and drink beer with
him, and watch boxing matches with him, and sing music-hall songs
with him, and dance and jazz with him, and call it making Religion
a Living Thing in the Lives of the People. Lift the hearts of the
people to God, they say, by shewing them that religion is not in-
compatible with having a jolly fine time. And there's no God there
that a man can understand for him to be lifted to. ... A man would
not care what he had to give up if he knew he was making for some-
thing inestimably precious. But he doesn't know. Light, light . . .
that's what he wants; and the longer it's withheld the lower he'll
sink. Light ! Light ! ' (pp. 255-6).
The meaning of this is clear enough. Mark Sabre feels
deep down the need of religion, and he also feels the incredi-
bility and the impossibility of religion as presented to him in the
traditional form. The fact that the padres sugar their pill with
the sweets of popular amusements and popular manners does
not make it any more palatable or possible for him to swallow
it. He feels the need of religion, but he insists on reality in
religion. The old religion must somehow be brought up-to-
date. Light and certainty are what he demands.
We turn now to the other novel — Peradventure, by Robert
Keable. This book has been compared to Mrs. Humphry
Ward's Robert Elsmere. It is slighter, but it has need to be.
The twentieth century novel reader is intellectually and morally
lighter than the nineteenth.
Its hero, Paul Kestern — a religious, emotional, young man
— passes through a series of religious phases. He begins by
being an enthusiastic, whole-hearted Evangelical. Next he
becomes an ardent Ariglo-Catholic, and very nearly enters the
Roman Church. He pursues his spiritual pilgrimage, and
when the story ends he has discarded institutional Christianity
its dogmatic system and its conventional ethical standards
have ceased to have any authority for him. His last Gospel
seems not to be the Gospel of the Cross, but the Gospel of
Beauty. At least, it is a Gospel which is not world-renouncing.
It is the Gospel of the humanist ; certainly it is not the Gospel
of the monk. It is a Gospel which finds its heaven here and
now and troubles not about the hereafter. The best expres-
sion of it in the author's words is as follows :
* A gospel that origins and ends don't matter and that we ought
to be influenced by them not at all ; that God is veiled, but the veil
is good ; that we are kin to all that is; that barriers are of our own
IF AND PERADVENTURE 483
making ; that the urge of life within us is our guide ; and that
moralities and revelations and false spiritualities have themselves
made sin. And . . . that the true spiritual life consists in the pursuit
of learning, experience, and beauty, according to vocation, without
fear and for themselves alone ' (pp. 300-1).
A nobler and more philosophical expression of it is found
in a citation from Richard Lewis Nettleship. He wrote :
* The only strength for me is to be found in the sense of a personal
presence everywhere, it scarcely matters whether it be called human
or divine. . . . Into this presence we come, not by leaving behind
what are usually called earthly things, or by loving them less, but
by living more intensely in them, and loving more what is really
lovable in them ; for it is literally true that this world is everything
to us, if only we choose to make it so, if only we " live in the
present" because it is eternity.1
Another aspect of it is expressed in a letter of the poet
Keats :
' I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affec-
tions, and the truth of imagination.'3
Another aspect of it is expressed in Matthew Arnold's
Memorial Verses on Goethe :
' He said — the end is everywhere,
Art still has truth, take refuge there.'
Paul Kestern's final religion seems at first sight to have
advanced little beyond that of the writer of Eccles'iastes
(200 B.C.). It might be summed up in the words of the
Preacher :
' Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth ; and let thy heart cheer
thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart,
and in the sight of thine eyes : but know thou, that for all these
things God shall bring thee into judgment.'
Peradventure is Eccles'iastes brought up-to-date, but by the
omission of that sinister sting of ' judgment to come ' — which
protrudes through its cheery invitation to present enjoyment.3
Yet we must be careful not to do Robert Keable's hero an
injustice. He is preaching not merely a Gospel of Beauty and
of Enjoyment. His is a Gospel which includes high en-
deavour and noble service — it is the Epicureanism of Epi-
curus, not of some of his disciples, but so far as God is con-
cerned, Paul Kestern knows nothing for certain. It is all
summed up by the title : Peradventure.
1 Lectures and Memories, Vol. I, p. 72. 2 Letters, Nov. 22, 1817.
3 Some of our O.T. critics think these admonitory passages were inter-
polated by a later hand.
484 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
Thus, indirectly, Robert Keable's book answers the demand
of A. J. M. Hutchinson's hero. Mark Sabre demands certainty
in religion. Paul Kestern has come to the conclusion that
there is no such thing as certainty in religion : it is all a perad-
venture. Is there, then, no way of reconciling these two?
There most certainly is. We find ourselves in agreement with
both of them. Robert Keable is right in this : the existence of
God is a great peradventure. We cannot prove it to demonstra-
tion. A future life is a great peradventure. We cannot
prove it to demonstration, and so with all the great moral and
spiritual values they are like Bank of England notes, their
value depends upon an ' if/ Whilst England is England
the Bank of England notes are all right, and whilst the King-
dom of Heaven is a reality the moral and spiritual values are
all right — but there is an ' if/ We must admit that.
Yet we are altogether with Mark Sabre. We cannot do with
obscurantism in our religion. A religion which we feel is
based on false science, doubtful history, dubious arguments
— is a religion that can give us but little support and
strength. It cannot carry us victorious through seductive
temptation; it cannot inspire us with a hope full of immor-
tality; it cannot give us inner strength, and joy, and peace.
We must have certainty in our religion — yes, and we must
have light. To have a religion which fears the light ; a religion
which cannot bear looking into; well that sort of religion is
a religion to be ashamed of : it is not the kind of religion to
which a modern-minde'd man can be loyal. This is quite evi-
dent. Many men and women to-day have done with the
Church because it seems unable to give them the religion which
they need and know they need. They want light and they
get obscurantism : they want certainty and they are offered
credulity. Yet is not this a necessity when Robert Keable
expresses the whole religious position by the word Peradven-
ture? Not at all. The Christian Religion "is a Peradventure
with the emphasis not on the per but on the adventure : it is in
fact a great adventure. It is a working hypothesis. You
begin with an uncertainty, but as you advance on the right
road you advance in assurance. The situation gradually
clears up. St. Paul himself recognised this element of un-
certainty. In writing to the 'Corinthians, he said : ' Here we
IF AND PERADVENTURE 485
see through a glass darkly ' or as some would translate it :
1 Here we see in a mirror in a riddle ' ; but in the last extant
letter he wrote, he says this : ' I know Him in whom I have be-
lieved, and I am persuaded that He is able to guard that which
I have committed unto Him against that day/ (II Tim. i, 12.)
The Christian Religion is a call to noble endeavour, to high
adventure for God : the call of faith comes to men as it came
to Abraham, who went out not knowing whither he went. He
heard God's call : the call of the spiritual world ; the call
of whatsoever things are just, pure, lovely, and of good report;
the call of that God whose nature he shared and who was cal-
ling him to be with Him and to serve Him. If that call be
obeyed, that spiritual world from which it came becomes
clearer. Assurance grows and ' the called of God ' advance
towards certainty. Hence the Christian life because it is not
a static thing, but a dynamic thing ; a progress, not a stand-still ;
begins with uncertainty but ends with certainty — that is if it
be lived in loyalty to the Divine Will. But the certainty which
it progressively imparts 'comes through life not through logic' ;
it comes through experience not through argument. Argument
does not take us very far.
* Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint and heard great argument
About it and about, but ever more
Came out by the same door wherein I went.'
It is this attitude, the recognition that we are living by
a working hypothesis, that we cannot claim absolute certainty,
though we ought to be advancing towards it, which is certainly
a distinctive note of Modernism. It is summed up for us in
Dr. Illingworth's golden saying :
' The Christian Religion refuses to be proved first and practised
afterwards, its practice and its proof go hand in hand.'
But when we speak of the Christian Religion, let us be sure
what we mean by the Christian Religion. It is the religion of
Jesus Christ Himself — the religion of the Lord's Prayer, the
religion of the Beatitudes, the religion of the Two Great
Commandments which bid us love God and our neighbour
whole-heartedly. It is not much, if any, of the dogmatic and
ecclesiastical impedimenta of the Churches which we can hope
to prove by Christian faith and Christian endeavour : it is only
the very essence of the Gospel — but that is enough.
486 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
A CENTURY OF ANGLICAN THEOLOGY
in relation to the general movement of
European Thought*
By C. C. J. WEBB, M.A., Hon. LL.D., Oriel Professor of the
Philosophy of the Christian Religion, Oxford.
II.
These papers are specially concerned with the last hundred
years : but in dealing with the thought of any period, it is always
necessary to cast one's eye upon that of the preceding period
also; and I will accordingly ask your attention to a few re-
marks about some general tendencies of European thought
during the age embracing the later eighteenth and earlier nine-
teenth centuries, the age which was signalized by the Declara-
tion of American Independence, the French Revolution and
the career of the great Napoleon.
An English scholar of the seventeenth century, William
Cave, in writing a History of Ecclesiastical Literature, gave to
the successive ages with which he was called upon to deal,
names indicative of what is most memorable in each : thus he
calls the first century of our era the Saeculum Apostolicum,
the fourth the Saeculum Arianum, the thirteenth the Saeculum
Scholasticum, the sixteenth (the last with which he deals) the
Saeculum Reformatum, and so with the rest. An author I
quoted in my last lecture, Mark Pattison, has suggested that
on the same principle the eighteenth century might well be
called the Saecidum Rationalisticum. My first task will be to
call your attention to the tendency to what is called Rationalism,
here noted as characteristic of that century, as a preface to an
account of a reaction against it which, felt all over Europe in
one shape or another, is represented in Anglican theology by
the Evangelical movement, a movement which at the date from
which my survey is supposed to start — a hundred years ago
—had indeed to some extent spent its first force, but was still
probably the most vital spiritual power in the religious life of
the Church of England.
^Delivered as lectures to Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford, 1921.
A CENTURY OF ANGLICAN THEOLOGY 487
In every age in which the passion for knowledge is alive,
we may expect to find some one science or group of sciences
dominant, by which the best intellect of the time is attracted
and by which the view of the world taken by cultivated men is
coloured. The dominant intellectual interest of the seventeenth
and earlier eighteenth centuries may, I think, be said to have
been the interest of mathematical science. This was the age
of Galileo, of Descartes, of Pascal, of Newton, of Leibnitz, all
of them men of great mathematical genius. Now it was natural
that this dominant intellectual interest of the time should show
itself in a widespread passion for that clearness and distinction
which belong especially to mathematical ideas; and in a ten-
dency to leave out of account whatever in experience may seem
to be incapable of being set out in the clear, consecutive and
convincing form which is proper to mathematical proof. The
chief philosophers of the period from Bacon to Leibnitz we
find accordingly dreaming of a presentation of moral and meta-
physical truth after a mathematical fashion which, by the use
of precise definitions and the observation of such an ordered
system of thinking as we find in Euclid, should lead to ethical
and metaphysical conclusions as certain and as capable of win-
ning universal assent as the conclusions of arithmetic and geo-
metry. These elements of reality, and especially those elements
of human life which do not readily emerge into the full light
of consciousness, are in such a period in danger of being neg-
lected. The State, for example, is thought of as deliberately
made by a social contract, rather than, after a fashion more
familiar to us, as, like an organism, ' growing secretly/ It is
attempted to make religion reasonable by the omission or, at
least, relegation to the background of what is paradoxical and
remote from ordinary ways of thinking — such as, for example,
the doctrines of the Trinity in the Godhead, or of salvation by
the blood of Christ's atoning sacrifice. Morality is, indeed,
brought into prominence relatively to religion because, in con-
trast with the mystery of religious dogmas and their failure to
win acknowledgment outside a restricted circle, the intuitions
of conscience are comparatively clear, and the main principles
of distinction between right and wrong are generally accepted.
There is everywhere a tendency to attend to what is done openl)
488 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
in the full light of consciousness and a corresponding tendency
to disregard in comparison with this those dark roots of ex-
perience in the subconscious and unconscious regions of
spiritual life, which we are in our days rather in danger of over-
emphasizing than of forgetting.
It must not, of course, be overlooked that during all the
period, throughout which a certain neglect of these dark roots
of spiritual experience was dominant, there were witnesses to
the importance of the consideration of them. At the very begin-
ning of it, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century,
there were great mystics with a profound sense of these : the
greatest names among them were those of a Roman Catholic,
the Spanish Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, and a Lutheran,
the Silesian shoemaker, Jakob Boehme. A century after the
latter's death, a great Anglican, William Law, the author of
what is, perhaps, among devotional books written by members
of the Church of England, the one which can most plausibly
be described as a work of genius, I mean The Serious Call, a
saint and a thinker, and one of the best prose writers of his day,
introduced into this country the doctrines of Boehme, or, as he
was generally called in England, Behmen. Somewhat later, a
very different man, also a great Anglican, Joseph Butler, Bishop
of Durham, insisted in his famous Analogy on the point that
what is generally called Deism — the belief, widely held in his
day, that a thoughtful survey of Nature might lead to a belief
in a wise and good God, unembarrassed by the difficulties which
beset the doctrines of -historical Christianity — would after all
not fulfil its promises just because it ignored the difficulties—
for example, the waste of life involved in the course of what
men had not then learnt to call the ' struggle for existence '-
which would perplex any thorough-going seeker for God in the
facts of nature, no less than the mysteries of revelation per-
plexed the enquirer into the doctrines of Christianity. Even
among the great mathematical thinkers themselves, there were
not lacking signs of protests against the rationalism which con-
centration on mathematical and physical studies had fostered.
Thus we have Pascal's saying that the heart has its reasons
which the reason does not know. And if rationalism, fostered by
mathematical and physical studies, led, as it doubtless did, to
A CENTURY OF ANGLICAN THEOLOGY 489
neglect of the region of spiritual life which lies below the thresh-
hold of consciousness, one of the greatest mathematicians and
philosophers of the age, Leibnitz, was led by his interest as a
mathematician in the thought of continuity to insist upon the
existence of such a subconscious region, continuous with our
conscious life ; and so to point the way in which, in latter days,
so many psychologists have followed him in the exploration of
this obscure background from which our conscious life seems
to emerge, as the islands in the sea are in truth peaks of sub-
marine mountain ranges overtopping the level below which the
greater part of the chain is permanently sunk.
There were, however, more or less isolated exceptions to
the general rule that, during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, it was what was clear and distinct and orderly and
able to give a good account of itself before the tribunal of good
sense and calm judgment that appealed to the general temper
of the time. What is mysterious, strange, weird, inexpressible
in language has little attraction for those imbued with the
rationalistic temper; at the best it might amuse an idle hour.
* Enthusiasm ' is with them a term of reproach, suggesting only
extravagance and a want of self-control. But no one familiar
with the history of ideas will be surprised to find that as the
Saeculum Rationalisticum (to use Pattison's name for the
period) went on, there began to reveal itself side by side with
this exclusive delight in what can be clearly and distinctly con-
ceived, with this tendency to limit the sphere of Reason to what,
being highly abstract, most easily permits itself to be thus clearly
and distinctly conceived (for example, the quantities and mag-
nitudes studied by mathematicians), with this comparative neg-
lect of the obscure and the subconscious as being irrational
rather than as being provocative of more hardy attempts of
Reason to master the less amenable material which they offered
to its consideration, an exactly opposite tendency. This was
a tendency to insist on the supreme value of feeling or senti-
ment, and brought about at last a real danger that all care for
what is rational or sensible should be submerged by a flood of
emotion. This tendency manifested itself first in a succession
of religious movements with a strongly-marked emotional side
—in the Protestant world in Pietism, Moravianism, Methodism,
490 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
and in the Roman Catholic Church in the rise of the devotion of
the Sacred Heart, originating in the visions of a French nun
of the late seventeenth century, the Blessed Marie-Marguerite
Alacoque, the imagery connected with which devotion reminds
us so closely of that to be found in the hymns produced by
the more or less contemporary movements in the Protestant
Churches.
At last this tendency, which I may call for short ' senti-
mental/ without implying by that word any criticism of it, but
only that it lays its principal stress upon feeling as contrasted
with reason; this ( sentimental ' tendency revealed itself as a
great intellectual force in Jean Jacques Rousseau. There is to
be found in Lord Morley's book upon Rousseau a very interest-
ing account of his far-reaching influence upon every depart-
ment of the spiritual life of Europe. I will here confine myself
to the theological aspects of this influence, before coming to
exhibit the Evangelical movement in the Church of England as
the Anglican representation of the tendency for which Rous-
seau stands in the general history of European thought. And I
will also add to what I have to say about Rousseau himself
something about certain developments of his principles which
we may associate respectively with the French Revolution, for
which Rousseau did so much to pave the way : with the moral
philosophy of Kant, upon which Rousseau exercised, as Kant
tells us, in a certain way a decisive influence : and with the
work of the poet Goethe in the next generation. To both these
developments something corresponding may be observed in
the Evangielicalism which in Anglican theology reflects the
whole movement of which Rousseau is in general literature the
central figure.
The contrast between the civilized state and a state of
nature which might be supposed to lie behind it was a very old
one; but it had not always been understood in the same way.
The English philosopher Hobbes in the seventeenth century
had described the state of nature as 'poor, nasty, solitary,
brutish, short' — in other words, as a mere animal existence.
Rousseau and his followers were, on the other hand, disposed
to regard it as better than civilization had come to be. Hence the
new movement ran counter to the preference which, in the pre-
A CENTURY OF ANGLICAN THEOLOGY 491
ceding age, the Age of Rationalism, as I called it, men generally
felt for what is cultivated and civilized over what is undomesti-
cated and wild ; and we may note that this might seem to bring
it into line with the theological tradition which had regarded
the history of civilization as beginning in a fall from innocence,
and had refused to allow that human nature could expect to
attain perfection by making the best of its own resources, and
asserted its absolute need of a supply from without of super-
natural grace. The tradition, although out of sympathy with
the prevailing tone of the Age of Rationalism with its confid-
ence in Reason, its satisfaction with the gifts of civilization,
was by no means new. It had indeed during that period been
especially emphasized by the Calvinists in the Protestant
Churches and by the Jansenists in the Roman Catholic Church
in opposition to what seemed to them the acquiescence of
Arminians and of Jesuits in the prevailing tendency to exalt
unduly the native powers of humanity and the value of what
was achieved by these alone. But this theological tradition was
in opposition to this prevailing tendency, and the comparative
depreciation of the results of civilization by Rousseau might, as
I said, seem to reinforce it in so far as this also saw in the
actual history of civilization the story of a corruption rather
than of an improvement. But it could not be said that its em-
phasis on the need of divine grace or its requirement of the
conviction of sin as the first step to be taken in the spiritual life
was reinforced by the new philosophy. Rather that philosophy
was marked by reticence upon and a trust in the native instincts
of that human heart which the sterner schools of theology had
regarded as ' desperately wicked/ Despite this great differ-
ence, however, between the tradition of Christian theology and
the teaching associated with the name of Rousseau, it is here
(as Lord Morley points out in the book to which I have already
referred) that he was a pioneer of religious revival. Voltaire
and the deists of the generation before Rousseau had believed
in a God (you may still see at Ferney the church which, as the
inscription on its portico proclaims, Deo Erexit Voltaire) whom
it was indeed reasonable and right to honour, but with whom
no intimate communion was to be enjoyed. Rousseau's con-
ception of God may indeed have been no less vague : but God
492 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
was for him an object of ecstatic emotion. He could lie mur-
A A
muring O Grand Eire, Grand Eire, rapt in feelings of adora-
tion which would have been foolishness to Voltaire. Appear-
ing when and where it did, this new kind of piety showed that
one must either pass beyond the cold deism of Voltaire to the
open atheism of some of the Encyclopaedists, or with Rousseau
to a more intimate realization in feeling of a Divinity which,
as a mere inference from the order of nature, was rapidly fading
from men's view. Rousseau stands for the sentiment of God,
as he does also for the sentiment of Nature, but rather for senti-
ment in both cases than for effort to know either. Thus the two
great contemporaries, born in the same year, 1770, the German
philosopher Hegel and the English poet Wordsworth alike
pre-suppose Rousseau, but pass beyond him in an effort to know
what Rousseau did but feel.
The great French Revolution (which was not only a French
Revolution) may be from one point of view regarded as the
explosion of the combined forces of Rationalism and its oppo-
site and successor, Sentimentalism — forces typified respectively
by two great writers, Voltaire and Rousseau. Rationalism, -with
its emphasis on clear and distinct understanding, its neglect
of obscure processes of growth and development, its corres-
ponding indifference to tradition, had undermined genuine be-
lief in the political and religious traditions which were em-
bodied in the structure of Church and State. But by itself
Rationalism was too careless of sentiment in general to afford
a substitute for the sentiments which the traditional order of
society had created. It was, on the whole, aristocratic, for clear
and distinct understanding is plainly for the few and not for the
common mass of men; it did not therefore aim at disturbing
the ideas of the people at large, who were perhaps only to be
kept in order by the help of superstitious beliefs in rewards and
penalties supposed to be entailed by obedience or disobedience
to laws whose true ground they could not be' expected to appre-
ciate. The Rationalist's very lack of sympathy with the dogmas
of the established religion made him powerless, and not very
desirous, to disturb their hold over those who were not guided
by reason.
The Sentimentalism of Rousseau, though in a way the very
A CENTURY OF ANGLICAN THEOLOGY 493
opposite of this Rationalism, came in to complete what it had
left incomplete. Just as the sentiment of Nature, of man's
natural equality, was able to take the heart out of an interested
belief in aristocratic superiority which Rationalism had already
deprived of any convincing sanctions, so too the sentiment of
undogmatic religion was able to touch with a certain enthusiasm
the alienation of men from an established system in the truth
of the principles underlying which they themselves, and not
only they but even many of the official representatives of the
established system itself, had ceased to have any convinced be-
lief. An order of society, then, in Church and State alike, which
neither in belief nor yet in feeling had a serious faith in itself,
was bound to go down before the rationalistic belief in an ab-
stract theory to which the traditional institutions by no means
corresponded, as soon as this belief in the abstract theory was
reinforced by the sentiment for human equality and the com-
mon nature of man, in which high and low were alike. We must
think, then, of Rousseau's teaching for our present purpose to-
gether with the revolutionary consequences of that teaching,
consequences which were dependent upon an abstract theory of
human equality, a sentiment for the common nature of man,
which led to impatience with the historical institutions which
had produced distinctions whether social, national or racial
among those who shared in that nature, and which it was thought
must be swept away or, at any rate, allowed to decay and left
to die if that common nature was to attain to its full natural
expression.
I said that there were other developments of Rousseau's
teaching on which I wished to say a word before proceeding to
show how the Evangelical movement in Anglican theology re-
flected this Sentimentalist movement — developments which I
associated with the names of Kant and Goethe respectively.
Kant tells us himself that he was by natural bent a scientific
enquirer or researcher, and began by despising the common folk
who had no part in the pursuit of learning and knowledge to
which his own life was devoted; but that he was convinced by
the study of Rousseau to abandon this overwhelming estimate
of the dignity of his own special vocation and to learn rever-
ence for the common humanity which binds us to all, whether
494 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
high or low, who possess the simple consciousness of duty, as
distinct from and, it may be, opposed to, inclination. It is, how-
ever, to be noted that this sense of a common humanity takes
in Kant, in accordance with the peculiarity of his personal char-
acter, the form of an austere respect for duty rather than the
form of benevolent sentiment ; yet we have his own word for it
that the great master of sentiment, Rousseau, was his master
here : and it is not without significance that, as the movement
which culminated in Rousseau had, before Rousseau's day,
taken a religious form in the Pietism of Germany (of which
our English Methodism and, through Methodism, our English
Evangelicalism, were direct decendants), it was in a Pietistic
household that Kant had been brought up, and an eminent Pie-
tistic clergyman had been the first person of superior position
to interest himself in the saddler's boy who was to become the
most illustrious thinker of modern times. And though there
remained very little of the Pietist in the mature Kant, either as
regards opinion or as regards sentiment, yet the depth and
strength of his moral experience, the witness of which no diffi-
culty in reconciling the freedom which it required with the deter-
minism no less decidedly postulated by our scientific investi-
gations could avail to make him doubt for a moment, may well
have owed something to what his schoolfellow, the classical
scholar Ruhnken, writing to Kant after both had become
famous, calls ' that harsh, yet useful and by no means to be re-
gretted, discipline which we underwent from the fanatics/
The poet Goethe indeed considered it Kant's great service,
by his insistence on duty rather than on feeling, to have lifted
his cultivated countrymen from the slough of sentimentality
into which, to a great extent under the influence of Rousseau's
writings, they had been sinking. This sentimentality had taken
in the second generation a profoundly pessimistic form — in
English literature we may take the poet Byron as the type
of this development — and Goethe, who had known by ex-
perience the sense of dissatisfaction and despair which it en-
gendered, had purged himself of it by writing the Sorrows of
Werther, a story of love and suicide, suggested by the actual
life and death of a young contemporary of his own under the
influence of an indulged melancholy of this kind, induced in
A CENTURY OF ANGLICAN THEOLOGY 495
his case by a hopeless passion for another man's wife. We must
remember, then, that we must associate with the general ten-
dency of thought and feeling to which I have attached the name
of Rousseau, and which I propose to show you was echoed in
Anglican theology by the Evangelical movement, not only the
sentiment of Rousseau himself for Nature and for a God im-
manent in Nature, but also the indifference to history which was
so markedly manifested both in the political ideals of the revo-
lutionary period and in the moral philosophy of Kant. For
Kant dwells upon our common nature as rational beings, and
the duty which belongs to us as such, and takes little account
of the different standards characteristic of different stages of
historical nationalities; or again, of the historical process
through which men have been brought to a realization of their
common humanity or the conscience has been matured to the
point at which it would respond to Kant's teaching about the
' categorical imperative ' or unconditional command of duty. And
besides this again we have to remember, as a feature of the
general tendency which the Evangelical movement represents
in Anglican theology, that vivid realization of the disappoint-
ment and vanity of life which is so often caused by reaction
from highly-strung sentiment, and which obtained literary em-
bodiment in Goethe's Sorrows of W erther as well as in much
of the poetry of Byron.
Let us now turn at last to the Evangelical movement in the
Church of England, and see how the various features of the
great spiritual movement of the age are there represented.
It is obvious, in the first place, that this Evangelicalism re-
acts against the rationalism of the period in which it arose by
its emphasis on feeling, on the heart. ' Lord/ says the poel
of the movement, ' it is my chief complaint, that my love is
weak and faint.' A new stress is laid on conversion, less as a
changed course of conduct than as a conscious difference of atti-
tude towards God; sacramental incorporation into the Church
and intellectual conviction of the truth of Christianity are second-
ary to the first-hand experience which is attested by the crushing
sense of sin, the personal response to the offer of salvation, the
inward assurance of pardon, which marked the stages of the
spiritual drama of the individual sinner's reconciliation to God
496 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
in Christ. It would, of course, be absurd to suppose that these
things were unknown before the end of the eighteenth century,
or are only found in those whom one would call Evangelicals in
theology. But unquestionably these things stand out for
Evangelicalism, as they do not for other forms of Christian
piety, as the distinctive features of the religious life; unques-
tionably there was, at the period of which I am speaking, a re-
discovery of their importance in which we cannot but recognize
the form taken by the sentimental revolt against rationalism in
the minds of those children of the age for whom religion, rather
than science or art or politics, was the principal interest of life.
I have already quoted some lines of Cowper, the sweetest
singer of English Evangelicalism. Do we not see in his sad
despair, to which he gave such memorable and terrible ex-
pression in his poem of the Castaway, something akin to the
ungliickliche Bewusstsein, ' the unhappy consciousness ' as the
philosopher Hegel was afterwards to call such states of mind,
which brought into fashion such suicide as that of Jerusalem,
the original of Goethe's Werther, and which breathes in the
pages of Senancour's Obermann (the deep impression made by
which our Matthew Arnold has commemorated in two well-known
poems, In Memory of the Author of Obermann and Obermann
Once More), or again in those of the Rene of the great French
prose poet Chateaubriand? There is indeed a true kinship
between the gentle recluse of Olney and these sad spirits, but
yet, even though the disordered intellect of Cowper fastening on
the fearful dogma which he had learned from his Calvinistic
teachers made him in theory the most hopeless of them all, his
sincere piety in fact touches his melancholy with a sort of gentle
radiance which that of his less religious fellows lacks :
' Sometimes a light surprises
The Christian when he sing's :
It is the Lord who rises
With healingf in his wings.'
To the Evangelical, in the famous phrase of Newman, who in
his Apologia fully acknowledges his debt to the Evangelical
teaching under which he received his earliest religious impres-
sions, the ' two, and two only, supreme and luminous self-
evident beings ' were himself and his Creator. A certain indi-
vidualism of outlook arising from preoccupation with the inner
A CENTURY OF ANGLICAN THEOLOGY 497
drama of one's own spiritual life is another feature in which
Evangelicalism reflects the character of the great movement of
which Rousseau is the literary protagonist; and with this
individualism of outlook goes a lack of interest in the indi-
vidual's historical setting and antecedents, and a consequent
general lack of historical perspective which, as we have already
seen, characterized the political ideals of the Revolution and
the moral philosophy of Kant, and which is no less evident in
some conspicuous features of Evangelical theology; for in-
stance, in its tendency to isolate the Scriptures, to disparage the
authority of ecclesiastical tradition, and to belittle the mediation
of the Church.
Such individualism of outlook must not, however, be re-
garded as implying egoism or selfishness. No doubt selfish-
ness may have sometimes clothed itself in the forms of Evange-
lical piety as in other disguises which lay ready to its hand, but
the natural result of Evangelical individualism was not selfish-
ness but rather a passionate love of individual souls. The
great outburst of missionary zeal which marked the beginning
of the nineteenth century, the abolition of the slave-trade, the
Factory Acts, associated respectively with the names of Carey
and Martyn, of Wilberforce and of Shaftesbury are a sufficient
proof of this. No movement has been richer in works of prac-
tical philanthropy than Evangelicalism. And here too once
more it is true to the general character of the wider movement
with which it is historically connected, while touching it with a
religious fervour which it has elsewhere sometimes lacked. We
have seen how the study of Rousseau converted Kant to a re-
spect for all men, simple as well as learned, which found ex-
pression in his ethical doctrine that we are ' to treat humanity
in our own person, or in that of another, always as an end and
never merely as a means ' ; and we have seen, too, how the
same Rousseau's teaching fired the zeal of the French revolu-
tionaries for the rights of man. The politics of English Evange-
licalism were marked by a characteristically English sobriety
and conservatism which had little in common with the violence
and radicalism of continental republicanism ; but the two were
less apart in their ultimate inspiration than their respective fol-
lowers would have readily allowed. And indeed it is not at all
498 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
my intention to suggest in this account of the relation of
Evangelicalism to the European movement with which I have
brought it into connexion, that its kinship with that movement
was something of which Evangelicals or their leaders were for
the most part aware. The names of Rousseau and of Kant
would to the majority of them have been the names of danger-
ous enemies of the truth they prized; the former would have
been familiar, but execrated; the latter unfamiliar but, so far
as known, thought of as belonging to a world outside the circle
of those who shared an experience which was to them the one
pearl of great price, and which they were too apt to think in-
separable from certain ways of thinking and speaking which
they had come to regard as its necessary tokens and evidences.
But I have already pointed out in my first lecture that the
isolation characteristic of Anglican theology often comes out
in the fact that it echoes world movements without intending
to do so or being aware that it does so. We shall see this illus-
trated again in the history of the next great movement, that
which has often been named the Oxford Movement, because it
is at Oxford that it first found an articulate voice in The
Christian Y ear and the Tracts for the Times.
THE PROPHETIC MINISTRY OF THE
NEW REFORMATION
By the Rev. R. MEIKLEJOHN, B.D., LL.B.
IT is a significant fact that the pulpit has, in these latter days,
ceased to dominate the minds of men. It may be questioned
if it even seriously influences them, except perhaps in a few
specially favoured places, where preachers of personality and
power may still be found. The age of sermons has passed away
and the age of ceremonies has succeeded it. The multitudes
no longer sit at the feet of the prophet, thrilled by his impas-
sioned earnestness, moved by the manifestly divine quality of
his message. They have now no splendid vision of God, no
true appreciation of the grandeur of human life. They are no
longer stirred by deep emotions or attracted by high ideals.
They are possessed of no definite religious convictions, they are
capable of no sustained spiritual effort. The cause of this dis-
THE PROPHETIC MINISTRY 499
tressful condition is sufficiently obvious even to the most casual
observer. The prophetic line is extinct. There is no one whose
teaching is of authority. The great mass of the accredited
teachers of religion is infected with Scribism. Where there is
no vision the people perish.
The fact is to be regretted, for even the most hardened
sacerdotalist can scarcely deny to the ministry of the Word a
co-equal dignity with the ministry of the Sacraments. And in-
deed, whatever theoretic equality may exist, it is an indubitable
fact that the prophet has always exercised an incomparably
greater influence upon the minds of men than has the priest.
Those priests who have most moved their contemporaries have
done so, not by the splendid pageantry of their services, not by
the solemn symbolism of their altars, but by the moving inspira-
tion of their spoken word. They have achieved success only in
so far as they have merged the priestly in the prophetic office,
only when they have deliberately sacrificed the sacerdotal vest-
ment, and with it the sacerdotal mind, for the raiment of earners
hair and the mind of the man of God.
The gradual process by which the prophet is being elimi-
nated, the slow decay of the preaching ministry, will, unless it
is speedily arrested, prove fatal to the vital and vitalizing life
of the Church. The prophetic mind is creative; the priestly
mind is merely imitative. The prophet strives to make all
things new ; the priest is restrained by the icy grip of the dead
hand reaching out from a dark and distant past. The prophet
pursues a great ideal with unswerving directness, deathless
courage, and unquenchable hope ; the priest runs round in hope-
less circles like the traveller lost in the desert. It is in the re-
vival, therefore, of the prophetic office that the salvation of
the Church is to be found. It is by diligent study and per-
suasive preaching, rather than by sumptuous services and sen-
suous music that the clergy of the Church must regain their
hold upon the men of the world. The ministry of the Word
must come into its own, or the Church, as a human institution,
will cease to exist.
Unfortunately the party which is now dominant in the eccle-
siastical world tends to minimize the importance of sound and
effective preaching. High Anglicanism is almost exclusively
interested in the magnification of the sacramental idea. The
500 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
altar, rather than the pulpit, is the centre of its universe. The
service of the sanctuary is to its clergy the great duty of their
lives. The sermon is a matter of minor importance.
Such is the attitude of the most influential party in the Eng-
lish Church at a time when, more urgently than ever before,
the world is seeking for spiritual leadership. It might perhaps
be imagined that, through the default of High Anglicanism, the
party which stands at the opposite pole of the ecclesiastical
world would supply the pressing need of a preaching ministry.
Evangelicalism has never been sacerdotal or excessively sacra-
mental, and has always cherished the prophetic tradition and
honoured the prophetic office. A hundred years ago the Evange-
licals were, perhaps, the strongest force within the Church. The
Wesleyan revival had been their inspiration, and within the
limitations of the Establishment they had adopted something
of the Wesleyan method and achieved much of the Wesleyan
success. If their clergy preached almost exclusively upon one
Christian doctrine, determining, with St. Paul, to know only
Christ and Him crucified, they preached with an impassioned
sincerity and conviction, which impressed their age no less by
its earnestness than by its novelty. But the brilliant promise of
the youth of Evangelicalism has not been fulfilled in its
maturer years. The reason is not far to seek. Biblical criticism,
the product of the inquiring mind of the nineteenth century,
shattered its belief in the literal truth of the Divine Word ; and
it was upon the literal truth of the Divine Word that the preach-
ing power of Evangelicalism depended. It was not so much
disturbed by the destructive criticism of the Old Testament,
though that was sufficientlv alarming ; but it was grievously dis-
tressed when of logical necessity the same process of literary
investigation was applied to the New. It was willing, under
pressure, to be sceptical about the whale's capacity to swallow
Jonah ; it refused absolutely to face the far profounder problem
which centred round the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. And
so, because it failed to perceive the trend of modern thought,
it failed, despite its manifest prophetic qualities, to grip the
modern mind.
The writer is strongly persuaded that the prophetic ministry
of the future will be the, product of the third and greatest party* .
THE PROPHETIC MINISTRY 501
within the English Church. A modern writer has not unjustly
observed that ' it is probable that no real revival of religion will
take place amongst us till the Church has escaped from the
backwash of the two great ecclesiastical movements of the nine-
teenth century, the Evangelical and the Tractarian, and re-
sumed its normal position on the religious curve/ The Liberal
Party, whose great tradition goes back to the school of Falk-
land, Hales, Chillingworth and the Cambridge Platonists, is at
last coming into its own. Liberalism, in the last century, tended
to further that normal growth in theological science and that
normal development of ecclesiastical polity which Evange-
licalism and Tractarianism had almost succeeded in arresting.
It was manifesting a friendliness for Dissent, which sought to
reverse the historic blunders of the seventeenth century. It was
enthusiastic for the wide application of the principles of Christ
to every national, social, and industrial interest. It exhibited a
willingness to investigate, in an open, fearless manner, the new
problems which the development of scientific and literary criti-
cism was disclosing. But it formed no great party and inaugur-
ated no far-reaching movement. It was the conviction of very
many thinking English Churchmen; but it was a conviction felt
rather than expressed, a habit of thought and life rather than a
definite statement of opinion and belief. Liberalism was arti-
culate only in the few ; and those few had to bear the suspicions
of unprogressive, and the almost vindictive hatred of reaction-
ary Churchmen. It is the habit of the world, especially of the
ecclesiastical world, to stone its prophets.
It was the defect of the Liberal party of the nineteenth
century that it was not only thus unorganized, but that it was,
to a very considerable extent, academic, and remote from the
turmoil and confusions of modern religious life. With a few
noteworthy exceptions, the great Liberal divines of the nine-
teenth century were not unlike the great Latitudinarian philo-
sophers of the seventeenth. They were men of books rather
than of affairs, leaders in thought rather than captains in action.
But now, in the present century, Liberalism has emerged from
the peaceful seclusion of the study to proclaim its gospel in the
highways and byways and market places of the modern world.
The long years of preparation have come to an end. The torch
502 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
of learning has been handed on to a younger, more active, more
enthusiastic generation. Liberalism is massing its ranks and is
going forth into the battle and the shouting and the dust. It is
beginning to blaze the trail for mankind to follow into the King-
dom of God.
From this younger Liberal party there will arise, within a
decade or less, a new prophetic school. Through the labours of
this school, the ministry of the Word will be restored to its
rightful importance and endued with an effectiveness which, ex-
cept in isolated instances, it has never possessed before. The
new prophetic school will be strongly institutional, but it will
always think of the institution in which the Spirit of Christ is
embodied, and by which it is expressed, as the Kingdom rather
than as the Ch^lrch. It will proclaim a conception of the King-
dom infinitely wider than any existing conception. It will aim
at an ideal infinitely more spacious and comprehensive than the
existing ideals of mutually hostile and conflicting denomina-
tions. It will seek to break down all walls of partition and to
achieve, amid a diversity of forms and ceremonies and govern-
ments, that unity of spiritual aim and effort for which Christen-
dom has always so wistfully yearned and which it has never
been able to accomplish. It will set its face like flint against
those who imagine they are serving the God of all mankind by
perpetuating old and out-worn prejudices or by fomenting nar-
row and bigoted fanaticisms.
And yet, since any preaching ministry which is to touch the
hearts of men must be mystical, the new prophetic school will
possess the mystical quality. All the great prophets of the past
have been mystics. They have sought, not only to regenerate
societies, but to bring individuals into direct and immediate
touch with God. That is why they have always assessed sacer-
dotalism at its proper value, and have been more than contemp-
tuous of the blood of bulls and of goats. The prophet of the
future will adopt the same method and pursue the same end.
He will teach his disciples a mature and not a primitive, a
mystical and not a magical, religion. He will proclaim God—
if we may adapt the words of the Dean of St. Paul's to our
context — 'not as an object, but as an atmosphere. His creed
will be simplified and intensified. He will preach the power
THE PROPHETIC MINISTRY 503
and vitality and intimacy of that spiritual presence, which St.
Paul called Christ. He will tell men that the Christ of experi-
ence is at once their moral ideal and the power that transforms
them according to that ideal ; that the normal development of
religion culminates in that experience of complete harmony with
a loving and wise spiritual Power, which St. Paul expresses in
the simple word : ' For me to live is Christ.'1
And, finally, the preaching of the new prophetic school will
be effective, not only because it will proclaim that moral unity
for which Christendom longs, not only because it will satisfy,
simply and directly, the desire of the human heart for God,
but because it will offer to the inquiring mind a rational pre-
sentation of the fudamental truths of religion. It is the common
assertion of the opponents of Liberal Christianity that its
methods are merely destructive, that, in a sceptical spirit, it
remorsely seeks to destroy the idea of the Christian Church,
to mutilate beyond recognition the Christian Bible, and to evac-
uate of all doctrinal significance the Christian Creeds. The
assertion is simply untrue. Every Liberal Churchman knows
that the work to which he is pledged is constructive; that he
seeks to enlarge the idea of the Christian Church, to re-discover
the essentially spiritual teaching of the Christian Bible, and to
re-interpret Christian dogma in a manner which shall confirm
rather than weaken belief. It is the traditional Church, har-
dened and fossilized; it is the unexamined and unexplained
Bible, invested with an impossible, fictitious sanctity; it is the
stereotyped Creed, placed under an irrational, priestly tabu,
that repels the thoughtful mind of the present age. The new
preaching will derive no small part of its power from a frank
and courageous recognition of these facts. Only when the
broken ruins of collapsed beliefs are removed can the work of
reconstruction be begun.
Already is appearing, surely and unmistakably, the dawn of
a better day. Like the prodigal, wretchedly poor, desperately
unhappy, disgusted with past follies, sickened with the futilities
of a present aimless existence, humanity is coming to itself. In
a little while the new prophetic line will arise to lead it back
to God.
1 Inge, Truth and Falsehood in Religion, p. 89.
504 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
THE ADVENT HOPE*
I.
PHE prayers and Scriptures and hymns at our church ser-
1 vices for Advent are arranged to remind us of Christ's
return in glory to judge the quick and the dead. Yet it must be
confessed that we do not think of this return of Christ as our
forefathers did. A modern historian asserts that the Return of
Christ has ' ceased to arouse any emotional interest.'2 Certainly
we do not ask : When will this return of Christ to earth take
place ? And if people tell us that, as a result of their study of
Scripture and their observation of the signs of the times, we
may expect the return of Christ in the year 1923, or 1924, we
listen with a certain bored politeness, but wonder in our hearts
how they can possibly think as they do. And what is our reason
for this ? Is it that we are convinced that £ of that day and that
hour knoweth no one, neither the angels in heaven, neither the
Son, but the Father only ' ? (Mk. xiii, 22 ; Mt. xxiv, 36, and Acts
i, 7). No, it is because we have given up all hope of its ever
taking place at all. That I believe to be the case with the vast
majority of the educated classes of this country. As for our un-
educated classes — and they are a diminishing multitude — only
a very limited number of them hold fast the Advent Hope in
its traditional form. The form, I mean, in which it is presented
for instance in Thomas of Celano's magnificent hymn :
'Dies irae, dies ilia
Solvet saeclum in favilla.'
or in Charles Wesley's triumphant paen :
' Lo ! He comes with clouds descending
Once for favoured sinners slain,
Thousand thousand saints attending
Swell the triumph of His train,
Alleluia ! Alleluia !
Christ appears on earth again.'
The fact that such a propaganda as 'Millions now living
will never die ' — some of you have no doubt seen the booklet3-
1 A sermon preached on the First Sunday in Advent, in St. Mary-the-
Virgin, Oxford, to junior members of the University, by the Rev. H. D. A.
Major, B.D. 2 Prof. Bury : The Idea of Progress, p. 351.
3 Millions now living will never die, by Judge Rutherford, 128 pp?, i/-
post free ; pub. International Bible Students' Association.
THE ADVENT HOPE 505
can gain adherents to-day — few perhaps in England, yet many
more in America — seems to some of us modern Christians
amazing; yet let us not forget that this crude and dramatic
eschatology constituted the Advent Hope of the whole Christian
Church until quite modern times. It was the hope with which
St. Paul bade the Thessalonian Christians comfort themselves;4
and so far as we can tell, it was the conviction of all the primi-
tive apostles, and possibly of all the New Testament writers,
with the exception perhaps of the author of the Fourth Gospel
and First Epistle, which are called John's. Yet for us the arch-
angel's trump, the return of Christ seated on the clouds, the
rising of the dead from their graves, the assembling of all
humanity for judgment before the great white throne — things
which the Christian Church has expected for eighteen hundred
years with a mingled thrill of exultation and terror — have passed
away under the influence of modern critical research and the
modern scientific outlook. I need not say that there may be
serious loss in this exit; for the expectation of this dramatic
close of human history on this planet was bound up in the minds
of many with belief in the providence and rulership of God :
it brought home to them their personal accountability to God;
it caused them to realize the transitory character of human his-
tory, and the valuelessness of human success and mundane
prosperity, unless that prosperity and success were the reward
of moral action and had set on them the seal of the final
righteous judgment of God.
With the abandonment of the traditional view, Christ's Ad-
vent, from being the Church's Hope, has become the Church's
Problem. Academic Church circles have rung with the voices
of the disputants in the eschatological controversy and the dis-
cussion of the question : Did Jesus Himself actually teach
these things, or did they come into the primitive Gospel and
into the primitive Church not from Jesus Himself, but from the
Jewish apocalyptists and those Jewish Christians whose eschato-
logical expectations were mainly instrumental in leading them
to accept Jesus as the Messiah?5 I would urge that in this
4 I Thess., iv, 18.
5 See, for the most recent contributions to this controversy, The Lord of
Thought, by L. Dougall and C. W. Emmet (1922).
506 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
matter the most important issue is not whether Jesus voiced the
Advent Hope in eschatological language, and taught it in the
form in which it appears in the Jewish Apocalypses, but whether
He did not include in that conception important elements un-
known to contemporary Judaism. For example, it is certain that
the Advent Hope which Jesus taught was divorced from
nationalism, while the apocalyptists were wedded to it.
II.
Concurrently with the weakening of belief in the traditional
Advent Hope, there was growing up in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, especially in France, England and Germany,,
a belief in human progress. An admirable account of the origin
and progress of the idea of progress appeared from the pen
of Professor Bury in 1920. The growth of the idea of progress,
as he points out, has been closely connected with the growth
of modern science (particularly biological science), with the
growth of rationalism, and with the struggle for political and
religious liberty.6
It was this idea of progress which the Dean of St. Paul's
attacked so fiercely in his Romanes Lecture of 1920 as a popu-
lar but discredited idol, although Mr. A. J. Balfour (now Lord
Balfour) some thirty years ago had in an address delivered at
Glasgow expressed serious doubts as to whether the belief was
soundly based. However, it is not surprising that men came to
believe in it, when those who were regarded as great leaders of
thought in the nineteenth century were so sure of it, e.g. Darwin,
wrote :
' All corporeal and mental environments will tend to progress
towards perfection.'7
Herbert Spencer wrote :
* Progress is not an accident, but a necessity. What we call evil
and immorality must disappear. It is certain that man must become
perfect.8
And again :
' Always towards perfection is the mighty movement — towards a
complete development and a more unmixed good. . . . Even in evils
the student learns to recognise only a struggling beneficence. But
above all he is struck with the inherent sufficing-ness of thing's.'9
6 See Bury : The Idea of Progress, p. 348. 7 Cited by Bury, p. 336.
8 Cited by Ing-e : Outspoken Essays, 2nd series (1922), p. 163.
9 Bury cited, p. 340.
THE ADVENT HOPE 507
That trenchant controversialist, Professor Huxley, was able to
discern in man's
' Long- progress through the past, a reasonable ground of faith in
his attainment of a nobler future.'
But one must add that these optimistic hopes of an earthly
paradise were not shared by all the great thinkers of the period.
We have noted the doubts of Mr. Balfour — but he was not
alone. Hermann Lotze did not anticipate the Millenium, and
that because of the constitution of human nature; moreover,
the kind of paradise predicted did not attract him. He wrote :
* Never one fold and one shepherd, never one uniform culture for
all mankind, never universal nobleness. Our virtue and happiness
can only flourish amid an active conflict with wrong. If every
stumbling1 block were smoothed away, men would no longer be like
men, but like a flock of innocent brutes, feeding on good things
provided by nature as at the very beginning of their course.'10
And von Hartmann revived the idea of J. J. Rousseau 'that
civilization and happiness are mutually antagonistic, and that
progress means an increase of misery/11 But these were voices
crying in the wilderness or like the disquieting and ineffective
utterance of Micaiah, the son of Imlah, faced by Ahab's four
hundred prophets. Biological research, scientific invention, tne
accumulation of material wealth, the spread of popular educa-
tion, the advance of rationalism, the growing popularity of de-
mocratic and socialist ideals, all in their particular way contri-
buted to assist the belief in progress. With few exceptions, all
were awaiting the inevitable advent of a mundane society in
which disease would be non-existent, poverty abolished, crime
eliminated, war impossible, the ape and tiger as well as the
primitive donkey in man all worked out, and the span of human
life prolonged.12
This cheerful expectation of a terrestrial Utopia more than
compensated most educated people for the loss of the traditional
Advent Hope ; but then there came the War, the most terrible
and sanguinary that human history has known, followed by the
revolting horrors of Russian Bolshevism, Irish Terrorism and
Greek and Turkish barbarism, and the idea of human progress
10 Cited by Bury, p. 343, Microcosmus, Bk. VII, 5, E.T., p. 300.
L1 Bury, op. cit., p. 344.
12 See also Inge's Outspoken Essays (2nd series), p. 163.
5o8 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
was shattered in the minds of many. The aged Victorian in
many cases became a pessimist, and the young Georgian, with
a keen appetite for enjoyment, preferred to utilize the present
to the best of his ability, and give as little thought as possible
to a quite unpredictable future. Max Beerbohm's caricature
exactly presented the contrast between the Victorian and Geor-
gian outlooks. A comfortable Victorian with side-whiskers sees
in the future a magnified image of himself. A slim young Geor-
gian wearing a mourning band sees only a great note of inter-
rogation. Probably of the two outlooks, the Georgian is more
wholesome than the Victorian. To be an agnostic is better than
to be a materialist and a determinist, although it is not so com-
fortable. It is better to be quite uncertain about progress than
to believe that it is a sort of mechanical necessity; that pro-
gress in material things means real progress; and that an in-
crease in scientific knowledge can achieve alone a desirable and
stable civilization. A satirist has said that the American idea
of progress is acceleration. But what are our triumphs in elec-
tricity really worth when, as another satirist has said, they ' seem
to convey us with unparalleled rapidity from over-crowding and
vice in Battersea to over-crowding and vice in Hoxton/1'
Huxley in his later years came to take a less sanguine view
of human progress when he recognized clearly that real pro-
gress depended upon the ethical development of mankind. It
appeared to him that man's moral nature, which is very feeble
and fluctuating, is faced by terrible odds, and that in the course
of history it had gone down with painful frequency. He wrote :
' I know of no study which is so> saddening as that of the evolution
of humanity. . . . Man is a brute, only more intelligent than other
brutes. ' ' The theory of evolution encourages no millenial anticipa-
tions.' ' Social progress! means the checking of the cosmic process
at every step and the substitution for it of another which may be
called the ethical process.'14
I believe most of us are coming round to this view. We have
parted with the Christian Advent Hope in its traditional form ;
we have also parted with the optimistic Spencerian faith in
inevitable human progress.
13 E. J. Bicknell : The Christian Idea of Sin, p. 107.
14 Cited by Bury, op. cit., pp. 344-5.
THE ADVENT HOPE 509*
III.
What remains for us as we face the future? Only a great
note of interrogation ? No ; there remains the ideal of the com-
ing of the Kingdom of God on earth. This differs widely from
the nineteenth century idea of progress. It is essentially and
fundamentally moral and spiritual. It is based on faith in a
Divine Providence, a Divine Over-ruling and a Divine Ideal
for humanity, and that faith, as Lord Balfour's recent lecture
at Glasgow indicates, has strong arguments to support it. In
order to believe in a possible Kingdom of God on earth, it is
first needful to believe in a Kingdom of God in heaven; in
other words, to believe in a spiritual world. 'Thy Kingdom
come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.5 Next it is
needful to believe in co-operation with this spiritual world, and
to realize that all hope of the Kingdom of God coming on earth
depends on man's co-operation with this spiritual world. In
other words, to believe in the Kingdom of God we must believe
in God, and the need for God's strength and help gained by
communion with Him if the Kingdom of God is to come at all
in this world. Canning, the statesman, dealing with a political
situation, exclaimed : ' I call in the new world to redress the
balance of the old.' So if the Kingdom of God is to come on
earth, it is needful to secure the help and inspiration and
strength and self-sacrifice which alliance with the Kingdom of
God in heaven can alone secure ; in other words, sane and life-
giving relations with the Eternal. It is this alliance, this co-
operation, which the' Gospel of Christ advocates and conse-
crates, and wherever and whenever it has been in some measure
realized, there the Kingdom of God has begun to come. What
that has meant and may mean we can find delightfully and truth-
fully presented in a book now, alas ! too little read, The Gifts
of Civilization, by R. W. Church, Dean of St, Paul's. There
you will find neither pessimism nor gloom, nor feeble optimism
and sentimentality, but a picture of civilization seen with the
eyes of Christian faith ; and in the present season of moral de-
jection and loss of ideals, our personal salvation and the sal-
vation of society depend on our seeing that vision. You re-
5io THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
member the scene in the Pilgrim's Progress, when Evangelist
meets with Christian :
' Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide
field, Do you see yonder1 wicket-gate? The man said, No. Then said
the other, Do you see yonder shining light? He said, I think I do<.
Then said Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly
thereto. '
Professor McDougall, in his little book on National W el-
fare, writes :
' One factor alone can secure our future and save us as a people
from the fatal decline, and may even secure for us a continued pro-
gress' in all that makes the worth of human living.
' It is the increasing knowledge of human nature and of human
society, and of the conditions that make for or against the flourishing
of human nature and society. . . . Fortunately, there is widely dif-
fused a belief in the value of science and of its application to human
life. Many keen workers are adding to the sum of knowledge, and
we are learning to be guided by it. Therein lies our hope for the
future ' (p. 174).
I am sure I do believe in the value of science as a factor in
bringing in the Kingdom of God on earth — a very important
factor — but unless science can be united to the Vision of God
— and it must be God as unveiled in Christ, seen in Christ's love
and sacrifice — it cannot prevail to save human society ; and the
Vision of God — although many of our scientists have had it-
was not the gift of science unless we extend the meaning of
that term much beyond what it usually includes.
There is something which takes place within us which Plato
called the turning of the soul towards the light: that is the
first step towards the coming of the Kingdom of God, first in
ourselves and then in the world. The dialogue of Jesus with
Nicodemus in the Fourth Gospel emphasizes this :
* Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again (or
from above) he cannot see the Kingdom of God. . . . Marvel not that
I said unto thee, Ye must be born again (or from above) ' (iii, 3,8).
The late Professor Henry Drummond commented thus on
these words, and I wish to conclude with his comment, for it
suggests a vital question addressed to each one of us, which
makes the coming of the Kingdom of God a personal matter :
* Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. Marvel
not as though it were incredible : marvel not as though it were im-
possible : marvel not as though it were unnecessary : that ye must
be born again — but marvel if you are : marvel if you are not : marvel
that it may be to-day. '
WAR POETRY 51
SOME REFLECTIONS ON ENGLISH
POETRY AND THE WAR
By H. G. MULLINER, B.A., Hertford College, Oxford.
I.
HEROIC verse has from all time been associated with the
art of war. Mr. Binyon writes in Oxford in War Time :
' But immortal verse
Is now exchanged for its! immortal theme,
Victory ; proud loss ; and the enduring mind. '
As it ever has been so it was in the late war ; but only in a
few minds and they the less remarkable, and only for a short
time and that at the beginning. Rupert Brooke will at once
occur to all as an example of this, and especially those great
lines commencing :
' Now God be thanked who* matched us with this hour
And caught our manhood and wakened us from sleeping. '
and the fine sentiment of The Soldier :
' If I should die think only this of me :
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. '
No one else expressed so well the spirit of August, 1914,
as it was felt by those many in whom patriotism had not died
and in whom fear had not brought disillusionment. In the
same key there ar,e the gentle lyrics of farewell, such as
W. N. Hodgson's Ave, Mater, atque vale addressed to Eng-
land, and Mr. Nichol's Farewell to a place of comfort. This
is the last verse of that poem :
' O bronzen pines, evenings of gold and blue,
Steep mellow slope, brimmed twilit pools below,
Hushed trees, still vale dissolving in the dew,
Farewell ! Farewell ! There is no more to do.
We have been happy. Happy now I go.'
Grenfell and Hodgson carried the same spirit to France. The
former's Into Battle contains much that is beautiful. Take
these two verses :
' The blackbird sings to him, " Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another,
Brother, sing."
In dreary, doubtful, waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers ;
O patient eyes, courageous hearts.'
512 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
Hodgson in Back to Rest is unique in writing :
' Now when the fight is ended
We know that it was g'ood.'
Only in the early days of the war was the idealism of the poet
sufficient to produce such a thought. More typical are such
poems as Tennant's Home Thoughts from Laventie, which
sang of the countryside left behind. The first poem from
the front in The Times has such a subject. These poets stand
alone. They are amongst those to whom the war brought
immediate action. They do not stop, even if they cared, to
sing of Right, Liberty, Honour, or of political themes. The
subjects are as personal to the poets as their methods of
treating them. Their poetry is heroic, charming, sometimes
beautiful. There is nothing striking in its form or original
in its technique. What distinguishes it from so much of the
third-rate verse is its mastery of words, its simplicity, its
sincerity and refinement of sentiment.
The war aroused patriotism and patriotism produced poetry.
The files of The Times for the first six months of the war give
very varied examples of this early patriotic verse. On the
whole, it may be said not unkindly, that such verse was inevit-
able, and shows it. They are poems, not of reflection but of
emotion, both personal and national. Even on August 6th
the hate of the Kaiser and the purity of England was a poet's
theme. But in some there is a higher inspiration. Sir Henry
Newbolt sang of the war as he sang of Clifton. He represents
the flower of that fine idealism which is to be found in our
maligned public schools. He assumes that idealism, portrays
it, and appeals to it as Mr. Kipling often appeals to the
simpler sentiments of Britishers. This is seen in the last verse
of Newbolt's beautiful poem, The Vigil, published on August
5th : « So shalt tho>u when morning comes
Rise to conquer or to fall,
Joyful hear the rolling drums,
Joyful hear the trumpets call.
Then let Memory tell thy heart;
ff England! what thou wert, thou art! "
Gird thee with thine ancient might,
Forth ! and God defend the Right ! '
Whether intentionally or not it seems nearly identical in spirit
with the famous picture with the same title. It is indeed
WAR POETRY
Victorian, but it is the product of sincere faith in the ideals
of the great Victorians.
' Drink to our fathers who begot us men,
To the dead voices that are never dumb ;
Then to the land of all our loves, and then
To the long parting, and th© age to come. '
There is perhaps little finer of its ' artistic kind ' than his
Volunteer, which is so much truer to the spirit of the day than
Herbert Asquith's more stately and detached poem.
Similar to these poems, though less vigorous in style, are
those of Mr. Noyes. Mr. Kipling contributed For All We
Have and Are. In common with the other writers of this class
he appeals to the moral ideals of the public, but there is also
in his writings a critical vein which he shares with the realists.
In Mesopotamia, /p//, and in some of his Epitaphs he turns
against the authorities whose slothfulness left to die ' the eager
and whole hearted whom we gave/ In Natural Theology he
turns again on those who blame God for a war, inevitable in
a society which spends money on armies and fleets. Generally
Mr. Kipling appeals to reason and sentiment rather than to
emotion. In some of his Epitaphs there is a bitter realism
similar to Mr. Sassoon's :
4 If any mourn us in the workshop, say
We died because the shift kept holiday.'
There were many poems in The Times dealing with politi-
cal themes. Many were addressed to our Allies. Lines such
as ' Reveals within her milk-white breast, the blood-red heart
of war/ in Heart of Italy, are barely commendable, and it is
felt that only political reasons could justify such international
courtesies in bad verse. To the Empire there are many poems.
Indian soldiers are exhorted ' Into their hearts, my brothers,
drive home, drive home the steel ' !
The Public School man and, above all, the home folk, might
accept with gladness the refined idealism of Sir Henry New-
bolt. But it was another matter when one writer published
some Marching Songs for soldiers. One of them, to the tune
of John Brown's Body, has this third verse :
1 The shrines of God Almighty are shattered with shells ; (ter)
But the Kaiser's got to pay.
Chorus : Glory, Glory, Hallelujah ' (ter).
5i4 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
It can be agreed that they were ' in the simplest words/ but it
cannot be agreed with The Times leader that ' if the soldiers
choose to sing them they are well worthy of the honour.' In
fact, as a correspondent pointed out, what the troops were
really singing was :
1 Send out the Army and the Navy,
Send out the rank and file,
(Have a banana.)
Send out the brave Territorials,
They easily can run a mile.
(I don't think.)
Send out the boys of the girls' brigade,
They will keep old England free ;
Send out my mother, my sister, and my brother,
But for goodness' sake don't send me.'
To this age it seems undoubtedly true, as the same leader
pointed out, that f a joke in the face of death is something finer
than a heroic attitude, and we believe a joke can be kept up
longer than the attitude.5
Between the ordinary soldier refusing the heroics, which
some would have given him to sing, in emulation of Deutsck-
land uber Alles, and the realist poet profoundly distrusting
all Victorian (sic) idealism, there is something in common.
tThere is the same fear of cant phrases and of their hardening
effect, and further, there is a sense of the inadequacy of the
words to express his understanding of life, and a lurking sus-
picion that they are not too closely related to the real facts. As
for the spirit of hate with which some would have inspired him,
he ignored it :
4 Oh, oh, oh, it's a lovely war ;
What do you want with eggs: and 'am,
When you've got plum and apple jam. ... *
i
Food was more interesting than hate. Besides, he had with his
foes a community in suffering and obedience. And so Sorley,
though it is probably an early poem :
' When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown moire loving-kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain. '
WAR POETRY 515
II.
Turning to the younger poets, the transition to the realistic
school can be made by considering the poems of Mr. Geoffrey
Dearmer. He went out to Gallipoli, and very early in From
* W ' Beach, he wrote this :
' Celestial Gardeners speed the hurrying day
And saw the plains of night with silver grain,
So shall this transient havoc fade away
And the proud cape be beautiful again.'
But later he wrote a poem, 7^ he Dead Turk :
* Dead, dead and dumbly chill. He seemed to lie
Carved from the earth, in beauty without stain.
And suddenly
Day turned to night, and I beheld again
A still centurion with eyes ablaze
And Calvary re-echoed with his cry —
His cry of stark amaze.'
If we mistake not, the first belief in the transiency of war's
effect gave place to a sense of the incomprehensible wrong of
war. Dearmer is a lover of Keats, as the style of the first quo-
tation may suggest. Yet like most moderns he fears above all
what he called ' tattered sentiment/ The war palls on him in
its horror. He feels acutely with the pain of others, and yet he
seeks the beautiful within it all. It is this conflict which makes
much of his poetry live, and it is to be found most attractively
in his Turkish Trench Dog. In his Sentinel he turned to
portray the psychology of being under fire, and it is significant
that while he describes the fear of one man, the sentinel, like
the sentinel of Pompeii, remains immovable, the symbol of
strength and triumph. The object of the war-poet is, in his
words, to ' conjure heaven from the surrounding hell.' So he
attempts, but his poems have more pathos than joy. What he
can never forget is :
* the iron bitterness and keen
Of voices ever clamouring farewell.'
It is not surprising, then, that there were others to whom
the portrayal of the realities of war, its pity and its horror,
seemed more the poet's task.
* For we are poets
And shall tell the truth.'
as one wrote in a bitter poem. But best of all has this been
expressed by the greatest of these poets, Wilfrid Owen. In
516 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
his Apologia pro poemate meo he writes of seeing God through
mud, of the laughter, and the fellowship, and the beauty, pre-
sent even in France, and then he concludes :
* Nevertheless except you share
With them the sorrowful dark of hell,
Who'se world is but the trembling- of a flare,
And heaven but as the highway of a shell,
You shall not hear their mirth.
You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears ; you are not worth their merriment. '
How great is the change in method and style between the
poets of to-day and those of yesterday will be appreciated if
we contrast two passages ; one an extract from Byron's Bride of
Abydos and the other Cameron Wilson's poem A Soldier.
Selim is shot dead in the presence of his beloved just as he is
about to escape in a boat ; and this is how Byron portrays it :
' There as his last step left the land
And the last death blow dealt his hand —
Ah, wherefore did he pause to look
For her, his eyes but sought in vain ?
That pause, that fatal gaze he took,
Hath doom'd his death or fix'd his chain.
Sad proof in peril or in pain
How late will lovers' hope remain !
His back was to the splashing spray;
Behind but close his comrades lay,
When at the instant hissed the ball —
' So may the foe of Giaffir fall ! '
Whose voice is heard ? Whose carbine rang ?
Whose bullet through the night air sang,
Too nearly, deadly aimed to err?
" 'Tis thine— Abdulla' s murderer ! "
Wilson's A Soldier :
1 He laughed. His blue eyes searched the morning,
Found the unceasing song of the lark
In a brown twinkle of wings, far out.
Great clouds, like galleons, sailed the distance.
The young spring day had slipped the cloak of dark
And stood straight up and naked with a shout.
Through the green wheat like laughing schoolboys,
Tumbled together the yellow mustard flowers unchecked.
The wet earth reeked and smoked in the sun. . . .
He thought of the waking farm in England.
The deep thatch of the roof — all shadow fleck'd —
The clank of pails at the pump . . . the day begun.
" After the war . . . . " he thought, His heart beat faster
With a new love for things familiar and plain.
The Spring leaned down and whispered to him low
Of a slim brown-throated woman he had kissed . . .
WAR POETRY 517
He saw in sons which were himself again
The only immortality that man may know.
And then a sound grew out of the morning
And a shell came moving a destined way,
Thin and swift and lustful, making its moan.
A moment his brave white body knew the Spring,
The next, it lay
In a red ruin of blood and guts and bone.
Oh nothing was tortured there. Nothing could know
How death blasphemed all men and their high birth
With his obscenities. Already moved
Within those shattered tissues, that dim force,
Which is the ancient alchemy of Earth,
Changing him to the very flowers he loved.
' Nothing was tortured there.' Oh, pretty thought !
When God Himself might well bow down His head
And hide His haunted eyes before the dead/
The difference between these two poems is obvious. [The
restrained rhythm, the sober metre of Wilson fits his theme.
The rhetorical questions and moral asides of Byron jar. What
Wilson loses in the formlessness of his poetic thought, he seems
to overcome by emotional unity and balance.
But in Mr. Gibson's poems the use of contrast (so prominent
in A Soldier) gives way to simple narration. The Bayonet is
an example of an extreme type :
' This bloody steel
Has killed a man.
I heard him squeal
As on I ran.
' He watched me come
With wagging head.
I pressed it home
And he was dead.
' Though clean and clear
I've wiped the steel,
I still can hear
That dying squeal.'
And Mad :
' Neck deep in mud
He mowed and raved —
He who had braved
The field of blood—
And as a lad
Just out of school
Yelled " April Fool ! "
And laughed like mad.'
Si8 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
It is to be noted in these two poems that the metre, rhyme,
and rhythm are perfectly straightforward. The words are
colourless and description is restrained. Despite their sub-
jects they are very short. There is not the slightest emotional
significance. And if realism must, as I hold it must, include
the emotional content of a scene, then these poems can only be
called realistic in a limited sense. At times they seem to be
bathos. But whether that bathos is in the poem itself or is the
result of the mental make-up of the reader, which would natur-
ally inhibit the visualisation of so repellent an incident — this
is a question which it is hard to answer. But they are remark-
able poems regarded historically because they are clearly the
product of that mind of unfeeling realism which was acquired
by so many in France. Either acquired because self-interest
killed pity, or as with Mr. Gibson, because the pity was so great
that no words could adequately express it — a point worked out
in Owen's Insensibility.
There is a poem, Break of Day, by Mr. Sassoon which is
suggestive. He describes a soldier, trying to sleep in a trench
and waking to remember :
' Zero's at nine; how bloody if I'm done in
Under the freedom of that morning1 sky ! '
He sleeps again and dreams of England, of a Sussex lane, of
a hunt in the Big Wood ; the old horse ' stretches down his neck
to crop the green.' And then asterisks and a concluding line,
' Hark ! there's the horn : they're drawing the big wood.' The
antithesis is marked clearly between the life in the trenches
and at home, but where one expects a synthesis there are
asterisks. In other poems of this school one finds the same
unresolved antithesis and contentment to describe conflict.
Asterisks are the confession and the symbol of this failure to
achieve a synthesis.
As Mr. Sassoon's Counter Attack is more detached and less
introspective than Mr. Nichol's Assault, so Wilfred Owen in the
Strange Meeting is more detached than either. It is the most
remarkable of all our War poems. He pictures himself meet-
ing the man he has killed ; the dead man speaks to him as one
who has shared his prof oundest ideals for humanity ; and from
within the setting of war the poem rises to conceptions that tran-
scend it. Owens' other poems include The Sentry, Dead Beat*
WAR POETRY 51O
Mental Cases, Disabled, and will by their titles give some indi-
cation of the trend of the poet's thought. With much strength
and delicacy of feeling and an original use of consonantal
rhymes, he achieves poems of great attraction and possibly of
lasting worth. These poems are marked by an emotional
unity.
What has been written in this article will indicate the kind
of poetry life on the battlefield inspired. My next article will
deal with the real attitude to the war of those poets who fought
in it.
BOOK NOTICES
GENESIS AND THE CHINESE*
The work of the Bible Society in China is invaluable. In its absence
missionaries would be crippled and the Chinese Church be without its Book,
or, on the other hand, there would be as many different versions as there
are denominations at work. For good or for ill, by their constitutions the
Bible Societies may only issue their excellent versions without note or
comment. This enables Christians of varying, even antagonistic views,
to co-operate harmoniously in the preparation and distribution of the
Scriptures, but like al] compromises it has disadvantages. In this instance
it means that portions of the Old and New Testaments are distributed
amongst a people who have neither our tradition nor our perspective, and
who may therefore obtain inaccurate ideas of our religion. The Bible
Society does its duty in the Mission Field admirably, but its work needs
supplementing by others who have greater freedom.
Take for instance the book of Genesis, which is disseminated by the
thousand in China. Here we have a book which, read by a modern
Chinese student, may very easily make him an enemy of our Faith, on the
ground that the scientific knowledge of to-day controverts the truth of its
statements. The Creation, the making of Adam and Eve, the Tower of
Babel, the Flood and so on — these fascinating stories are pictures to us
portraying God. To a modern educated Chinese, who never has our back-
ground and traditional sympathy, it is not God who is visible in the picture,
but a series of false notions.
Bishop Norris, of the S.P.G., Peking, has just issued in Chinese, a
useful Introduction to Genesis i — xi, adapted from The Early Narratives
of Genesis, by the Rt. Rev. H. E. Ryle, D.D. Its purpose is to show the
educated Chinese what is the modern Christian attitude towards these
chapters. His preface says :
' This little book is an attempt to make the early chapters of Gene-
sis really helpful, and yet not misleading to Chinese readers. The
book of Genesis is one of the most widely circulated ' portions ' issued
by the Bible Societies, presumably on the ground that it gives a true
and accurate account of the ' beginning ' of the world and of the
human race. Circulated as it is without note or comment, I cannot but
feel that it will constitute a grave danger to the Church of the future,
unless we try to set it in its true light, as containing Hebrew tradi-
1 Published by the S.P.C.K., price 10 cents.
520 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
tions, selected and preserved under the guidance of God's Holy Spirit,
because — in this form — they had a lesson of the highest value for the
Jewish race and for all mankind.
* That the " conflict of science and religion " should have taken
place in the West was inevitable, because " religion " was crystallised
by centuries of " literal interpretation," if not of " verbal inspiration
theory," when the science; of the nineteenth century came into exist-
ence. The results of that conflict were often deplorable ; they would have
been far worse but for the firm hold that had been taken during cen-
turies of faith by the deeper truths that underlay" religion." The same
conflict need never — at least in the old form — take place in China, if
teachers are wise. But if they are not, it will not only take place and
that soon, but its results in young Churches full of recent converts
will surely be dangerous indeed. Bishop Ryle in the preface to his
little book wrote thus: " The old position is no longer tenable. A
new position has to be taken up at once, prayerfully chosen and hope-
fully held." If that was true twenty-five years ago in England, it is
doubly true to-day in China, where the apparent possibility of holding
the old position for a few more years is more than outweighed by the
present opportunity for taking up the new position, " prayerfully
chosen," and to be " hopefully held."
Amongst the young Christians of China are many who have been
brought up in the modern interpretation, but who are constantly meeting
on the one hand, with the hostile criticism of educated non-Christians, and,
on the other, with the hostility of missionaries and Christians of the older
school. To such as these Bishop Norris's book should be especially wel-
come. More such works are needed and no doubt will soon be produced
by the fine body of scholarly young missionaries and educated young
Chinese who are rapidly undertaking larger responsibilities in the Church.
W. E. SOOTHILL.
EARLY CHRISTIANITY.*
The first volume of this gigantic work was reviewed by Mr. Creed in
this magazine in December, 1920. The second volume is, in my opinion,
more valuable than the first. The editors have been assisted by such emi*
nent authorities as Mr. Cadbury, Mr. Emmet and Professor Burkitt. A
composite work like this lacks the completeness and rotundity of a great
book by a single author. There is a want of proportion, and also lacunae
and inconsistencies. But it has the advantage that each section is by a
specially qualified writer, and various views can be set forth in succession
and placed side by side.
The first chapter, on Greek and Jewish methods of writing history, is
fundamental. One wishes it could have been even more complete than it
is, for there is, in English, no really thorough and satisfactory treatment
of the subject, though Professor Bury's work on the Greek historians is
valuable. Until we know the purpose of a writer, and what literary tradi-
tions he follows, we read him with half-shut eyes. There is much in this
volume in regard to the purpose of the writer of Acts, but perhaps sufficient
stress is hardly laid on the consideration that the purpose of a writer may
be quite unconscious. Whether he puts on coloured spectacles or not, he
yet sees everything in a light of his own.
In Professor Burkitt' s chapter on the use of Mlark in the Gospel of
Luke, we again touch bed-rock. For as Luke treats Mark's narrative,
*TJie Beginnings of Christianity • Part I, The Acts of the Apostles. By F. J. FOAKES
JACKSON and KIRSOPP LAKE. Vol. II, Prolegomena and Criticism. (Macmillan and Co.)
BOOK NOTICES 521
which he had before him, so he is likely to treat other documents. But
Luke is elusive. He has so much literary skill, in addition to the dramatic
power which strikes every reader, that he constantly baffles the critic. A
clear result which Mr. Burkitt reaches is that it is difficult, or even impos-
sible, to get beyond Luke to his sources by a mere analysis of his narrative.
Some critics have a way of thinking that when a narrative is flat and point-
less it is untrustworthy ; but Mr. Burkitt is nearer the mark when he points
out that these qualities are just what may be expected in a spectator's
reminiscences. The point of a tale is very often contributed by literary
skill.
The question whether Luke, the friend of St. Paul, is the author of Acts
is discussed from both sides, and at great length. Most readers will con-
sider that * the ayes have it.' Undue stress is sometimes laid on an argu-
ment, on the other side, that the author often misunderstands St. Paul,
and very imperfectly appreciates him. The fact seems to be that the two
men were of very different characters ; and however much Luke may have
admired his great friend, he could not fathom his depths. He certainly
was no Boswell.
To English and American readers one of the mo'St interesting chapters
will be Mr. Hunkin's on British work on the Acts. The writer sets forth
with much clearness and learning the merits of a great succession of Eng-
lish writers, from Dean Co-let to Bishop Lightfoot, who have dealt with
the subject. Their books shew little of the brilliant theorizing of the great
German critics, but they are marked by sound judgement and wise caution.
Much of their work has a permanent value. In one field, that of archae-
ological illustration, they have been especially active and useful. Lewin,
Howson, James Smith and especially Ramsay, have done much to make
the background of the drama of St. Paul's life clear to us. This laborious
and illuminative toil ought never to< be overlooked.
In an appendix are considered two literary analogies, the story of St.
Francis of Assisi, by Mr. G. G. Coulton; and the story of Margaret Catch-
pole, by the Editors. In 1889 I inserted in Exploratio Evangelica a long
note (pp. 174 — 6) on the parallel between the Go<spel story and that of St.
Francis. I am glad that Mr. Coulton has worked out this moist instructive
analogy in more detail, and with far greater knowledge of medieval life.
But I think we might have dispensed with Margaret Catchpole, who really
helps us very little, and brings in a heap of irrevelant matter. It is a pity
that the learned editors did not, instead, give a brief summary of the most
illuminating" work of Dr. Edwin Abbott on the Miracles of St. Thomas of
Canterbury. This would have been far nearer to the point.
This great introduction to the book of Acts will certainly be of much
value in theological colleges and to the educated English and American laity
(are they diminishing: in number?) who are deeply interested in the origins
of the Christian religion. Though the authors; write in America, they
were brought up among us, and they do- not give way to the prevalent
American (and Scottish) notion, e Germania sola lux. P. GARDNER.
THE GOSPEL OF THE MANHOOD.*
Dr. Skrine's book may perhaps best be regarded as an expansion of,
and commentary upon a great sentence of Dr. R. C. Moberly's : ' He
(Christ) is, then, not so much God and man, as God in, and through, and
as man.' (Atonement and Personality, p. 96.) We are to learn the Divi-
*The Gospel of the Manhood. By JOHN HUNTLEY SKRINE, D.D. (Skeffington, 1922.
Price 5/- net.)
522 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
nity of Christ by a study of his Humanity, and there is no other way.
' Masked words in lieu of truth ' will not help us, and those who pin their
faith to the formula : * Jesus Christ is the Son of God ' are challenged to
think out and explain to others the implications of their creed.
The words attributed to the risen Christ at the close of the first Gospel :
' Lo ! I am with you all the days,' are to be regarded as no mere rhetorical
expression of Christian experience, but as the very pith and marrow of a
true faith. Jesus of Nazareth was not brought to nothingness by death.
Unless He who became a man has not remained a man, Christ can profit
us nothing. The Gospel of the Manhood is the good news, received, wel-
comed, and acted upon, that it is with a Man that we have to do. ' His
human heart is not gone from Him, but contrariwise has widened to the
compass of all human hearts.' He is the same yesterday, to-day and for
ever, or rather, different only in this, that the range of His influence as a
Man is now one with the boundless sweep of the activity of God. ' The
human becomes infinite — is not this the Divine? '
Dr. Skrine shews throughout the scholar's passion fof reality. He will
probe a dogma relentlessly in order to reach the fundamental truth which
justified its formulation. And that fundamental truth, to be truth, must be
capable of adequate expression in the simplest terms, and must find a
spontaneous response in the life experience of the ordinary Christian.
We speak readily enough of the dogma of our Lord's sinlessness. But
the conception is negative and therefore lacking in dynamic effect. Say
rather: * Christ is the Living One,' the transmitter of divine life to men,
and then test the truth of every doctrine, the worth of every institution,
by the measure in which the doctrine or the institution serves as a vehicle
for that life's transmission. This is the author's own method. He will
have us think of the Atonement as the inflowing1 of the divine life of Jesus
into the lives of those whom He seeks to save, since in the last resort life
and At-onement, or fellowship with God, are interchangeable terms.
So, too, the Resurrection is important, primarily for this, that it re-es-
tablished personal, life-giving intercourse between Jesus and His friends.
But what was the essential character of this empowering fellowship between
Master and disciple, and by what means was it maintained? In seeking
an answer to this question, Dr. Skrine makes use of a modern terminology,
and adduces the phenomena of telepathy, or to use his own word,
'Thought-conference,' as helpful towards a right interpretation of Chris-
tian experience. The truth of central importance is that the mind and
thoughts of Jesus of Nazareth are as much at the disposal of the twentieth
century Christians as of Peter and John, and that his method of com-
munication with us to-day is essentially unchanged. The Christian doc-
trine of the Holy Spirit is valuable only as it expresses unflinchingly the
truth of the Abiding Manhood. The Lord is the Spirit. The Spirit who
directs, controls, empowers, is the Spirit of Jesus. Unless that be recog-
nised the Gospel of the Manhood will fail of its full effect.
But what bearing has this Gospel of the Manhood, this doctrine of a
life-imparting, human Christ upon the pressing problems of the day? What
are the true principles of reconstruction, whether of Creed or Church, what
the rightful terms of reunion, what the means whereby the saving truth
of Christianity can be brought home to those we call the masses? In ap-
proaching these problems, Dr. Skrine applies his main principles with
dauntless consistency. The truth of a creed may be tested by the measure
in which it serves as an instrument of life to those who hold it. The work
of a church may be judged by its ability to create the life of Christ in its
adherents, and the ultimate test of a church's right to the name is found
BOOK NOTICES 523
not in the form of its government nor the formal correctness of its creed,
but rather in the nature of its fellowship with the living Christ.
To' this living Christ, who is vitally concerned with all our problems,
every question must be referred. Certainly it is the Christian way, and
nothing is beyond the scope of His interest. If women seek the priest-
hood, the appeal is not to tradition but to Christ, * a Christ greater than the
Christ of Galilean days. ' He it is with whom we have to do, and He it is
• — this Jesus not of long ago but of now — who can * speak to the condition '
of the ordinary man. Our doctrine must not be divorced from experience.
Framers of philosophic systems may be few, but the simple and unlearned
1 is philosopher enough to be unable to think a doctrine which cannot make
its way into the little circle of ideas which is his narrow knowledge of the
world he lives in.' Here is a challenge offered to Modernist and Tradi-
tionalist alike, and we shall agree that Dr. Skrine is right in his assertion
that in the Gospel of the Manhood we have that which may carry conviction
to all sorts and conditions of men. The book is an appeal to the Church to
think ' growing thoughts of God and man,' to discard the all too common
attitude of ' woodenness ' in face of new needs, to realise that it is less
' the steadfastness than the adventurousnessi of faith ' which is the demand
of our day, and, above all, to discover and fearlessly to proclaim a doctrine
of Christ life-giving for both mind and will. W.M.P.
AN AMBIGUOUS MANIFESTO*
This collection of essays with an Introduction by Bishop Gore and an
Epilogue by Mr. G. K. Chesterton is an interesting sign of the times.
Christian socialism, it would appear, is raising its head again after the
slump in idealism which we have experienced since the war. Bishop Gore
outlines the social philosophy of the writers when he says :
* They hold that our present industrial society rests upon a rotten
foundation ; and that what is needed to remedy the manifest " sick-
ness " of our "Acquisitive Society" is something much more than
particular social reforms. There is needed the substitution of a true
idea or principle of Society — that is of Socialism in some sense —
for the false ' (p. 9).
The * rotten foundation ' above alluded to is likely to have a con-
siderable lease of life, however, being what it is, i.e. ungenerate human
nature. Probably where the idealists err is in their lack of psychological
insight ; the majority of men are not rational, still less doctrinaire. Never-
theless, it is well to have ideals formulated.
Mr. Widdrington, whose essay seems to us the best thing in the book,
finds in the old conception of the Kingdom of God a sufficient formulation
of the spiritual, moral, and social ideal. It has to be admitted that the
phrase is ceasing to mean much to the plain citizen : to him it seems like
one of those hallowed yet commercially worthless pieces of currency which
the Musical-Bank-Managers were in the habit of passing on the Ere-
whonian public.
Mr. Widdrington makes a vigorous attempt to bring the idea back
into the sphere of realities, reminds us of its history in the past, and
emphasises its necessity for the present if we are to emerge from the
difficulties, ethical, social, and religious, which surround us. Being trans-
lated into necessarily general language, the idea now signifies^ that * Chris-
tian living postulates the background of a common life in which Christian
values are embodied ' (p. 92). In other words the days of individualism
* The Return of Christendom. By a Group of Churchmen. (Allen and Unwin ; 7/6 net.)
524 . THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
in religion are past, for if religion, cannot work a fundamental change in,
our social and economic environment, that environment will eliminate
religion.
There seems to be need of nothing less than another Reformation ' in
comparison with which the Reformation of the sixteenth century will seem
a small thing (p. 108) ; and a revised theology of the Kingdom would
purge the Church of that plausible insincerity which masquerades as
4 spiritual religion,' (p. no). We read, too, in a footnote (p. 95) that it
will ' purge the Church of associations with the modern equivalents of
Mystery Cults, Neo^Platonism, &c.'
We do not anticipate that observations of this kind will render the
new propaganda attractive in those circles! to which the term * catholic '
is commonly attached, and possibly it may have been with the idea of
reconciling pietistic readers to the somewhat uncompromising utterances
of Mr. Widdrington that two or three essays of a mo-re palatable nature
have been included in this collection. The Rev. L. S. Thornton, and the
Rev. Paul Bull, write respectively on * The Necessity of Catholic Dogma,'
and ' The Kingdom of God and the Church to-day. ' Mr. H. H. Slessor,
too, contributes an essay with the reassuring title : * The Return of
Dogma.'
At the same time, while fully appreciating the quality of these con-
tributions and the motives which included them, we cannot but doubt the
wisdom o>f mixing up the sheep and the goats in this way. As it stands,
this volume will meet with little unqualified approbation. One section of
the religious public will be scandalised by Mr. Widdrington' s candid
polemic, while another section . will wonder whether it is not being led
back into the theological labyrinth when it reads passages like the fol-
lowing from Mr. Thornton :
' Nature had failed ; nothing could help it but a new creative act
of God, or rather a series of acts unmistakably supernatural in
character. So the Son of God became Man and was born of a
Virgin, worked miracles upon earth, lived and died and rose from
the dead, taking again His body and ascending into heaven. So,
too<, on the basis of these redemptive acts He instituted the Catholic
Church, pouring His Spirit into it and so1 creating in it a new centre
of world-wide fellowship' (p. 71).
We cannot but feel that a new ' Kingdom of God ' theology (if we may
be allowed the term), while resisting the temptation to* indulge in nega-
tions, would be well-advised to lay down its rule of faith in other terms
than these outlined by Mr. Thornton. If the New Reformation is to
follow its sixteenth-century predecessor in burdening itself with a mass
of disputable history and antiquated philosophy, its effectiveness as a
spiritual force is likely to be compromised. We urge these reflections upon
Mr. Widdrington and those who think with him.
In closing this notice we desire to commend the two admirable essays
of Mr. Reckitt on * The Moralization of Property ' and * The Idea of
Christendom in Relation to Modern Society.' J. C. H.
A MUCH-NEEDED BOOK.*
Those who have had anything to do with schoolboys or remember their
own schooldays, will be aware o«f the strange gaps in the body of historical
information possessed by the more or less intelligent adolescent. A certain
amount of Greek and Roman history (nothing of course of the decline and
* A Short History of our Religion, by D. C. Somervell. (Bell and Sons ; 6/- net.)
BOOK NOTICES
525
fall of the Roman Empire), some scraps of Hebrew mythology and history,
some slig-ht knowledge of mediaeval England (none of mediaeval Europe)*
and a rather more comprehensive acquaintance with the Stuart and
Hanoverian periods. These fragments co-exist in a more or less discon-
nected fashion, and thusi profit little, or less than they ought.
Mr. Somervell, who is himself a schoolmaster, does not attempt to
supply us with an universal history ; but in something over three hundred
pages he gives us a history of Christianity from its pre-natal origins
among the Hebrews and Greeks, down to the present day. The work
strikes us as being extraordinarily well done. The style is lively, the
matter interesting, and a plain tale is told without pedantry, without ob-
scurity, and, we may add, without obscurantism. The book, too, is
remarkably comprehensive ; a glance at the eighteen-page index, which
is almost entirely composed of names of persons, indicates the scope of the
volume. Here the fascinated schoolboy or schoolgirl will read about that
neglected period between the Old and New Testaments, about the founda-
tion of the Holy Roman Empire and the first dawn after the night of the
dark ages, about those bold mediaeval thinkers, like Abelard and Anselm,
who created the Scholastic theology, about Loyola and his Spiritual Exer-
cises, and so on ; and, above all, they will learn something of the history of
ideas, not to speak of the history of institutions.
An additional advantage is that the book is very cheap ; 6/- now-a-days
is a small price, to pay for so much material. We can only hope that the
sales will equal the merit of this admirable work. J. C. H.
WHOLESOME WORDS-*
These six short lectures contain, much excellent matter. Theirs is that
spiritual and yet rational temper which characterises, or used to charac-
terise, English religion — the temper of the Cambridge Platonists so widely
sundered from both superstition and legalism. Whichcote or John Smith
might have written the following :
* Things have their highest value in so far as they are symbols
of something beyond, which we feel to be our true home, and where
lies at once our source and our destiny . . .Religion is the turning
our face to the light, where we behold a world infinite in value,
infinite in glory, infinite in life, to which the path leads from our own
inner self ' (p. 14).
Besides passages such as the above, many .striking sayings occur :
1 It is the life that is maintaining a lie that grows old and
weary ' (p. 10).
' We reach the highest note of praise in ' We thank Thee for Thy
great glory ' (p. 63).
' We lose the condition of knowledge just as we become knowing '
(P- I?)-
* The Jew who has enriched the world is not Solomon in all his.
glory ' (p. 58).
' The humanity of Christ, where it was not marvellous, was treated
as a disguise rather than a revelation ' (p. 19).
We have noted one passage where we think Mr. Simms is liable to
be misunderstood. He says (p. u) that the danger of « identifying God
with something less than the highest ' is one to which ' the uncritical andi
* Christianity To-day. By the Rev. A. E. N. SIMMS. (Griffiths ; 3/- net.)
526 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
unlearned ' are specially exposed. No doubt there is a truth here. Yet,
on the other hand, it is not the critical and unlearned who are the most
sure of escaping- this dang-er. As St. Anselm said, ' there is many an old
woman who knows more of the love of God than do the theologians.'
Spinoza, too, that religious genius, told his pious landlady at the Hague
that if she sought God in her own way she would find Him. ' Blessed are
the unsophisticated, for they shall know God,' might be another beatitude.
J. C. H.
READINGS FROM THE APOCRYPHA. By E. H. Blakeney, M.A. (Texts for
Students, No. 28). London, S.P.C.K. Price, i/- paper covers ; 1/6
cloth boards.
This volume contains about fifty representative pieces selected from the
Apocrypha, with a brief historical introduction, notes, and index. The
text is eclectic: while it is based on the A.V., it has been changed
in a good number of places, wherever the old translations were plainly at
fault. The book is handsomely printed, in large type, and can easily be
slipped into the pocket.
CORRESPONDENCE
THE LORD OF THOUGHT.
To THE EDITOR OF The Modern Churchman.
SIR,
May I be allowed one word of comment on the excellent review of
The Lord of Thought in your last issue? Mr. Pryke finds the main
objection to the theory that Christ rejected the Apocalyptic outlook in the
saying, ' of that day or that hour knoweth no one,' &c. I agree with
him that the saying is authentic, but if he will look again at my discussion
of Mark xiii he will find the suggestion that originally these words
applied to the fall of Jerusalem, though of course in their present setting
they refer to the Parousia. The question asked of Christ (according to
Mark and Luke) had to do with the destruction of the Temple, and the
original elements in the discourse (including the words quoted by Mr.
Pryke) may be held to have been solely an answer to this question. In
subsequent tradition additions were made which turned it into a pre-
diction of a Second Coming of the Son of Man.
C. W. EMMET.
THE OTHER SIDE OF HINDUISM.
SIR,
In Mr. Greaves' s paper on ' Hinduism,' which appears in this year's
Oxford Conference Number of the Modern Churchman, there is one sen-
tence which seems to me to merit careful attention. He writes :
' Speaking broadly, Hindus are often about as far in advance of
the Hinduism they profess as are nominal Christians behind the
Christianity which they are supposed to obey.' (p. 410).
Now if this is true (and certainly my own experience, which during
the last three years hasi brought me into daily contact with young Hindu
students, confirms its truth), then it seems to me that this suggests that
CORRESPONDENCE 527
*»••" ' ' T. — I-JI- - - --_._" - -- - - - - -_-.- ,_, - .
there may be more of value in Hinduism than would be gathered from
the general tone of Mr. Greaves' paper. For if the fruits of a religion,
as seen in the lives of its adherents, are on the whole better than its tenets
would lead us to expect, it may be that the explanation is, that these tenets
have not been perfectly understood by us. Especially is this the case with
a religion the fundamental axioms of which are so unfamiliar, not to say
unthinkable, as those of Hinduism are to the normal Western mind. The
sense of bewilderment, if not of repulsion, which is generally produced by
our first contact with the ideas; of Karma, Maya, Reincarnation, and the
other corallaries of Oriental Pantheism is liable to deaden our powers ot
reasonable appreciation, and to pervert the fairness of our judgment.
Yet there are certainly many Christians, with a long and intimate
knowledge of Hinduism, who, while by no means blind to its grievous
defects and errors, yet show ai much larger appreciation of its merits than
is suggested in Mr. Greaves' article. I would venture to hope that your
readers will not dismiss Hinduism as a mere valueless system of super-
stition until they have read some o<f the sympathetic (and yet discriminating)
studies recently published, such as those by Mr. Sinclair Stevenson or Dr.
Sydney Cave. The former, in ' The Rites of the Twice^Born ' and * The
Heart of Jainism,' has given us two delightful pictures of Hinduism (and
its cousin, Jainism) in daily life and worship ; while the latter, in his
* Redemption, Hindu and Christian,' takes us with insight into the deeper
realms of philosophy and theology. Both these writers (together with
many others among Christian Missionaries) show that generous attitude
towards non-Christian thought and experience, to> which Dr. Percy Gardner
referred with commendation in his Presidential Address at the Oxford
Conference; an attitude which it ought to be the special privilege of
Liberal Churchmen to safeguard and cherish.
And in the case of Hinduism, the warm appreciation which its sacred
books have evoked from Western scholars and thinkers, such as Max
Miiller and Schopenhauer, Deussen and Royce, should surely suggest to
every lesser student that here is a religion which he will do well to study,
not only with sympathy, but with humility and respect.
E. C. DEWICK.
ST. PAUL'S COLLEGE,
CALCUTTA.
November jth, 1922.
THE CHURCH IN THE WEST INDIES.
SIR,
I am sending you herewith a copy of the Pastoral Letter of the Bishops
of our Province, and a copy of their Resolutions assembled in Synod. As
these documents are, I imagine, typical utterances of missionary Bishops,
I think it worth while to make some observations upon them from a
Liberal standpoint.
The scope and subjects dealt with in the Pastoral — its narrowly con-
fined range will come as something of a shock to the regular reader who
has been studying the articles on Missionary Problems lately in the
Modern Churchman, — or who has come fresh from this year's Confer-
ence. To use your own phrase, ' they do not know that things are
shaken — and still paddle boats in ecclesiastical back-waters. ' Their ap-
parent busy preoccupation with diocesan problems, their ambiguous lan-
guage and attention to ecclesiastical detail will deceive nobody. Did none
of them recollect Archbishop Tait's words, written in 1877 : ' I am some-
528 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
times dispirited by thinking- how the energies of the Bishops and clergy,
which might by God's blessing- produce isuch great results, are wasted
by being1 diverted to paltry and miserable questions . . . what might not
the Church do if discarding1 . . . disputes! about anise and cummiri
the clergy would place themselves at the Head of the Christian Progress
of the Age.'
By what standard and test is this constitution of the Anglican Bishops
of the West Indies, sent forth with authority after due consideration, to
be judged and valued as giving helpful guidance for the times ? I answer
in the words of Dr. H. Rashdall (quoted in Review, Modern Churchman,.
May, 1922, p. 10; from Jesus , Human and Divine/ pp. 78-79).
' I do not hesitate to say that one of the greatest needs — perhaps
the greatest need of the Church to-day is an improvement in the
education of the clergy, and a changed attitude towards intellectual
questions not only of the clergy but of the religious laity. Without
that: not all the devotion of the laborious parochial clergy, not all
the subscriptions of the benevolent laity, &c., — will avail to make the
Church hold its own and do its work in the world of to-day. '
Having reflected upon these striking words the thoughtful man care-
fully reading the Pastoral Letter and resolutions will feel distinctly un-
happy and disturbed. If he had an inside and first-hand knowledge of
the leading problems that trouble and perplex the Dioceses of the West
Indian Province he will be puzzled to assign a reason for the ominous
silence upon so many of them. It may be paradoxical, but a later age
will value these documents for their notable omissions. Thus there is no
message of Christian leadership upon the Colour Problem which year by
year is becoming a more intricate problem and further disturbing the
counsels, peace, and good fellowship of the West Indian Church. Nothing*
is said as to the reasons, no doubt very good ones, which have prompted;
the almost universal though tacit abandonment of a coloured or native
ministry. A Church that is responsible in some cases for five races of
people, whose crying need is a distinctive Liturgy and Revised Services,
has the alternative of having, if the Bishop in question approves, the 1549
Liturgy. And indeed reactionary thought is the basis for many of the
conclusions and recommendations of the Bishops.
It has been said that the present Bishop of London does all his reading
in his motor-car, but perhaps this is apocryphal ; at all events some of
the istatements of the Bishops which amount only to assertions1 and there-
fore call for suspension of judgment — give one pause rather uneasily.
They seem ignorant of Dr. Headlam's Bampton Lectures; they do not
seem to know of the difference of opinion on ' The Relation of Baptism
to Confirmation, ' between, for instance, Dr. Darwell Stone and Canon
A. J. Mason; the New Psychology has not it appears reached them.
Archdeacon Charles, it appears, has laboured in vain even to secure a
hearing on the subject of Divorce. Everything is assumed and taken, for
granted though Bishop Gore and an authority like Professor G. H. Box,
D.D., are unable to agree between themselves in a joint book on the
subject.
The Bishops speak much of the Lambeth Conference. The Bishop of
Durham, Dr. Henson, closes his book on Anglicanism (Macmillan, 1921)
with a chapter on the Conference. His gaitered brethren from overseas
may note that on p. 245 he says : * Unanimity ceases to be morally im-
pressive when it appears to be the result of calculating diplomacy. ' With
some dryness of tone he further adds (p. 246), * A missionary Bishop has
CORRESPONDENCE 529
to be chosen for reasons which have no special relevance to the case of
a Bishop in England. Physical vigour and great ardour of devotion are
indispensable in the o<ne case ; there are other qualities which might seem
not less indispensable in the other. Zeal is rarely allied with learning,
dispassionateness, and the love of justice. These, however, are the pri-
mary requisites, when such questions as those which engage the attention
of Bishops in Conference are being discussed.'
A CARIBBEAN MISSIONARY.
[We regret that we have no space for the Pastoral and Resolutions.
The following quotation from R. 13 will suggest that the Church in Eng-
land is not so clericalist as some of her daughter churches :
' We do further declare that the conduct of public worship is
committed by the constitution of the Church of Christ to the Bishop
and his clergy, to whom in such matters the allegiance of all the
faithful laity is due,' — ED. M.C.]
UNITY IN CHINA.
SIR,
It is a great encouragement to us out here to see soi much evidence of
interest in missionary problems in the Modern Churchman. Since I sent
you the article which appeared in the May issue, the National Christian
Conference — representing practically all Protestant missionary bodies in
China — has been held in Shanghai. This Conference is held every ten
years and this is the first time that Chinese delegates have attended in
equal numbers with foreign missionaries. Moreover, the Chairman of the
Conference was a Chinese, Dr. C. Y. Cheng, the Chairman of the Chinese
Home Missionary Society and Secretary of the ' China for Christ ' move-
ment.
The particular point of interest for us is the fact that an attempt was
made to introduce for acceptance a doctrinal statement of a narrow and
exclusive type, and that wiser counsels saved the harmony of the con-
ference. The proceedings of the conference may be summed up as fol-
lows :
(a) Preparations were made for many months beforehand by
appointing five ' Commissions ' of investigation, which made their re-
ports to the conference, these reports being adopted as resolutions.
(b) A resolution was adopted by rising vote and the singing of the
Doxology, in place of the suggested doctrinal statement.
(c) A National Council of one hundred members — half Chinese and
half foreign — was appointed, representing the following bodies :
Anglican, Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian, United Church,
Lutheran, Miethodist, China Inland Mission, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A.,
Christian and Missionary Alliance, Independent Churches, Colleges,
National Organisations, Literature Organisations, Others, General.
(d) A resolution on the subject of industrial questions was passed.
The spirit of the Conference was well expressed by Dr. Liu, of the L.M.S.
in Peking, in the striking phrase that the Chinese Church of the future
' shall teach her members to agree to differ, but resolve to love. ' Reso-
lution (b) makes clear the position of the Conference and the function of
the National Council. The principal points in it are as follows :
' We, the members of the Conference, joyfully confess our faith in,
and renew our allegiance to, God the Father Almighty, Jesus Christ
His Son our Lord and Saviour, who loved us and gave Himself for
530 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
our sins, and the Holy Spirit the Lord and,' Giver of Life : and acknow-
ledge our loyalty to the Holy Scriptures as the supreme guide of faith
and conduct and to the fundamental Christian beliefs held by the
Churches to which we severally belong . . . The Conference . . .
recognizes that the authority to determine what are the essential affir-
mations of the Christian faith lies with the several Churches of which
those attending this Conference are members. Any National Christian
Council which may be appointed by this Conference will not be in any
sense a Church Council ... It will be an advisory body which will
seek to carry forward the work of this Conference and to bring the
representatives of the different Churches and missions in China to-
gether in order that they may mutually enrich one another through
common counsel, and will take action in matters of common interest
only when it has reason to believe that the action taken will be in
accordance with the wishes of the co-operating bodies.'
The resolution on the subject of industrial questions is worth quoting :
* In view of the importance of industrial problems^ and of the
present state of public opinion in China, be it resolved tnat this Con-
ference expresses its endorsement of the following standards for in-
dustrial labour :
(a) No employment of children under twelve years of age.
(b) One day's rest in seven.
(c) The safeguarding of the health of the workers, by limiting
hours, by the improvement of sanitary conditions, by the
installing of safety devices.
That this Conference directs! the National Council to give these
standards the widest publicity. And that this Conference calls upon
Christian organisations throughout the country to endorse these
standards and to take action to see that they are brought intoi force
in China as soon as possible.'
I would venture to claim that, if the National Council fulfils its
' promise,' a Christian Church may be established in China which will be
an example of unity of spirit to the world. And if it carries out its
instructions in regard to' industrial problems it will be a great factor in
moulding the life of a united republic of China. F. E. A. SHEPHERD.
Boone University, Wu Chang, China,
THE BRAHMO-SOMAJ AND CHRISTIANITY.
SIR,
After reading the article in the July issue on ' Christianity and the
Religions of Asia,' I turned up a letter which I received in 1904 from
Mr. Mozoomdar, a member of the Brahmo-Somaj, who believed himself
to be as truly called by the Lord Jesus as was St. P'aul. His book, The
Oriental Christ, is in Dr. Williams' Library ; I presented it to that in-
stitution after careful reading and frequent lending, so anyone who cares
to read the account of his conversion and his exposition of the life of
Jesus, as he understood it, can borrow it from this library.
He expressed to me in one of his letters his ardent desire to see the
Kingdom of Christ triumphant in India. Of course he did not mean that
he identified the Kingdom with any particular ecclesiastical organisation.
In a letter written from t^e Himalayas, dated June isth, 1904, he wrote :
CORRESPONDENCE 531
' Our central aim and aspiration is after the Spirit of God and Him alone.
But, nevertheless, our relationship to His eternal Son is most tender and
personal. We realize further that but for the revelation of the Father's
nature as made by Christ Jesus, the image of God would be a blurred and
fragmentary one ! Here our agreement is perhaps complete. But what
that revelation truly was is a matter in which we Easterns might claim
a voice. Our old religious traditions and the trend of our whole spiritual
culture point to unity with the Christ-Ideal which St. John the Evangelist
set forth, as none before or after him has ever done.'
Mr. Mozoomdar has now passed out of our earthly limitations, and I
have lost touch with the present members of the Brahmo-Somaj, and I
do not know how far they resemble Mir. Mozoomdar in their fervent de-
votion to the Person and ideals of our' Lord Jesus Christ.
If any one would care to borrow Mr. Mozoomdar's book, The Spirit
of God, I shall be pleased to lend it on application, with gd. to cover
postage. H. A. DALLAS.
INNISFAIL, CRAWLEY, SUSSEX.
DR. HARRIS'S CREEDS OR NO CREEDS.
SIR,
Having read Dr. Harris's Creeds or No Creeds in extenso, I am ven-
turing to send you a few quotations and remarks :
' It is a great venture of faith, possible only by the help of grace,
to* believe that the Almighty Ruler of the Universe has humbled Him-
self to become man in the P'erson of Jesus of Nazareth, and to die
upon the Cross ' (p. 21).
' The idea of God dwelling in man (which is what is meant by
Immanence) and that of God becoming man (which is what is meant
by Incarnation) are radically distinct, and indeed contradictory ' (p.
145)-
' That the Awful and Omnipotent Creator of all things, King of
the Ages . . . out of love for sinners should deign to take their
nature upon Him, to work for years as a village carpenter ' (p. 267).
' He (Jesus) Who on earth had lived as a mere village carpenter *
(p. 280).
' In the Person of His Incarnate So<n (i.e. in His own Person),
He hungered, thirsted, &c.' (p. 341).
* God entire — the whole substance of God — became man in the
Person of His Eternal Son, and (as man) suffered and died for us '
(P- 344, cf. p. 340).
' God is a perfect society of persons . . . each Person of the Trinity
gives Himself wholly and unreservedly in love to each of the others,
and loses Himself in order to find Himself again in the others ' (p. 348).
' The Logos became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth ' (p. 366).
It seems to me that a plain man, comparing the above passages, would
find it very difficult to derive an intelligible and consistent theology from
them, while a theologian might suspect Dr. Harris of being a Patripassian,
or an Apollinarian, or both. In his anxiety to avoid dividing the Sub-
stance he confounds the Persons, and then lapses into popular Tritheism.
To prove the distinct Personality of the Spirit he gives six references to
Acts (p. 40). In four of these we have * The Holy Spirit said ' ; in i66,
' hindered by the Holy Spirit ' ; in 19% * did ye receive Holy Spirit (no
article) ? '
532 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
The following are miscellaneous specimens of Dr. Harris's thought :
' If at first sight any of the circumstances of the post-Resurrection
appearances (such as the handling and the eating) seem to imply that
His body still consisted of natural flesh and blood, these must be under-
stood to' have been the result of a temporary accommodation to earthly
conditions for evidential purposes ' (p. 124).
Is there not a suggestion of pious fraud in this? I am reminded of
Dummelow's comment on Luke 2426, which I believe is quoted by Dr.
Harris :
' Probably our Lord was in heaven during the Forty days, descend-
ing to earth for occasional interviews.'
' At the last Great Assize, He will not, like other men, stand be^-
fore the judgment seat of God to be judged, but will Himself sit upon
the tribunal, and assign to the whole human race, and to the evil
spirits, their eternal recompense' (p. 219).
Dr. Harris does not tell us how long the Judgment Day will last.
' All the fundamental doctrines of science are based upon faith, not
evidence ' (p. 242). Scientific men, please note.
* When we see God face to face in heaven, and . . . drink of His
essence ' (p. 25$).
I suppose there are people to whom such language is grateful and com-
forting. Is the essence ' whole and indivisible '?
' " Flesh and blood," in their natural and unglorified condition,
cannot inherit the Kingdom of God ' (p. 274).
What is glorified blood like?
* The strange thing is that they (Modernists) do not perceive that,
if the Incarnation is a fact, the conception of Jesus, 'whether His
mother was a virgin or not, was a divine miracle ' (p. 291).
I thought this was just what Modernists do perceive, and many Tradi-
tionalists do not.
At the end of the book Dr. Harris quotes :
' Two most distinguished scholars, Dr. Foakes-Jackson and Dr.
Lake, who until recently were prominent in the Modernist movement,
have now abandoned it, and have passed upon it strictures similar to
my own, but much more severe ' (p. 359).
The plain man is left tq infer that they are now strong Traditionalists.
Is this honest?
The Bishop of Lichfield, in his preface to the book, says : ' I hope that
it will be widely read, and (seeing that the author is the last to fear criti-
cism) acutely criticized. Its purpose is to find and to establish the Truth
as it is in Jesus.' With what Dr. Harris says about disinterested love of
truth (pp. no — 11) all Modernists will agree; and they will admire his
piety, his learning, and his immense industry. Yet I cannot help feeling
that he writes as an advocate, and not as a truth-seeker. And he deepens
my melancholy conviction that between his mind and that of the average
Modernist there is a great gulf fixed, which at present nothing can bridge.
If this letter isi not too long, I should like to add a few words from Canon
Barnes's review in the Church Family Newspaper :
' English Modernism, though Dr. Harris does not realize the fact,
is becoming constructive and it is showing that the Christian faith,
when set in the framework made by modern knowledge, has all its old
beauty and spiritual power, combined with an intellectual strength un-
suspected by many of its critics.' T. F. ROYDS, B.D.
CORRESPONDENCE 533
A BOOK FOR PARENTS AND TEACHERS.
SIR,
I wish to commend to the notice of readers interested in the education
of the young- a book which appears to me to be of more than ordinary
value in this connection : The Mysteries of Life, by Stanley De Brath,
M.Inst.C.E., late Headmaster, Preston House Preparatory School, East
Grinstead (Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 5/-).
Although written originally for the young- and those who train them,
its value and interest is by no means limited to these readers. The author
combines a thoroughly modern outlook on nature, human life, and divine
revelation, with a sane and reverent conservatism. In addition to> a wide
range of knowledge, he also possesses insight into the significance
underlying phenomena, tradition, and history ; appreciation of relative
values is a marked feature of the book, the style is lucid and attractive.
The volume covers such subjects as ' The Mystery of the Body,' * Human
Evolution,' ' The Mystery of Sex,' ' Revelation of God.' Under the latter
heading the survey of the Bible is illuminating, and will be specially
appreciated by modern Churchmen.
The subjects which require delicate handling are treated with admirable
discretion ; the tone of the whole is both rational and Christian.
If such teaching were given mo-re widely youths would leave school
with a more reasonable faith and a healthier moral sense.
H.A.D.
A REVISED CANON OF THE SCRIPTURES.
SIR,
Professor Adolf Harnack has, I believe, recently declared his opinion
that it is time that the Old Testament should be cut out of the Canon.
Few will follow the learned professor in such a course. But is it not
time to consider the desirability of overhauling and revising the Canon
as it has come down to us from early times? Much might be said for
removing from the Old Testament Canon such books as Esther, Daniel
and Canticles — to say nothing of some of the Psalms, portions of Judges
and Joshua, and the Chronicles — and relegating them to the Apocrypha.
Meanwhile, Maccabees I and the Wisdom books of the Apocrypha might
have a place in the Old Testament collection. The New Testament, no
doubt, stands on a different footing; but II Peter, beautiful as much of
it is, could hardly be included in a revised Canon of the New Testament,
and it seems probable that Jude should find its home in the revised and
enlarged Apocrypha. The question, ' What is to be done with the Apoc-
alypse ' ? is difficult to answer : its position in the Canon was long-
disputed.
One thing seems clear : if any revision were attempted, some effort
should be made to put the various books of the Bible in an approximately
correct chronological o<rder. If the Pauline epistles were chronologically
arranged, students would get a far surer understanding of Pauline thought
in its vigorous development. It is very unsatisfactory, as things are,
to find the two epistles to the Thessalonians printed after Romans and
Corinthians; and equally so to find the Apocalypse at the close of the
New Testament while the fourth Gospel remains where it now is.
E. B. H.
534 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
SIR THE VIRGIN-BIRTH.
In a recent lecture on the Incarnation first published in the Church
Times, and afterwards in a small volume entitled Foundations of Belief,
Canon Vernon Storr deals in a brief but striking manner with the story
of the Virgin-birth. He removes or attempts to remove the burden of
proving the truth of the story from those who believe it, and casts it on
those who disbelieve it. 'If,' he says, 'the story is not true adequate
evidence must be produced to show how the story arose. '
This is a bold challenge.
And he then asks the question, ' Whether the story could have arisen
spontaneously in Jewish soil? ' and answers it in the negative.
I venture to think that there was no time more likely than the latter
half of the first century, and no place more likely than Palestine, for such
a story to have arisen spontaneously.
We must bear in mind that at the time the story arose, the stupendous
miracles of our Lord's bodily resurrection, and of his bodily ascension into
Heaven had only recently taken place, and were believed by all members
of the Christian Church to be literally true. It was a time of great
religious excitement and tension. It would then not have been thought at
all unreasonable to suppose that He who passed out of the world in this
abnormal and miraculous manner should also* have entered it in an abnor-
mal and miraculous manner. At any rate, it would have been easier to
think this: of him than of any other person. This thought, if it existed,
may have remained hidden in the mind for a long time before it was
expressed, though it would be ready for expression asi soon as the neces-
sary stimulus was supplied.
It should also be remembered that in, Jewish History stories of births
which were miraculous or at least abnormal were not uncommon. It was
recorded of Isaac, of Jacob and Esau, of Joseph, of Samson, of Samuel,
and of John the Baptist that they were all born of mothers who were
past the age of child-bearing, or were barren, and that their births were
due to the intervention of angels of Jahweh, or took place as the result
of the special intervention of Jahweh' s answer to* prayer.
Were the stories of these births absolutely and literally true or did
they grow spontaneously on Jewish soil?
If the latter alternative be accepted, we have the clearest evidence of a
tendency in Jewish thought to> attribute to the births of prominent per-
sonages abnormal or miraculous incidents, so that at the time when the
story of the virgin-birth was first published abroad there were hearers
ready to accept it. They would receive the news with a bias in its favour
rather than with impartial minds.
As to the circumstances in which the story was invented, if it were
invented, it is impossible to dogmatise. It is not necessary to affirm
that a sober-minded Jewish Christian learned in the law and the prophets
deliberately constructed it out of his imagination and then published it
abroad as true. On the contrary, it is easy to- suppose that it arose
quite spontaneously. A casual remark possibly misunderstood made in
the presence of a few enthusiasts may have been the origin of a rumour
which spread at first slowly but at length obtained general credence.
I do not claim to have solved the question of the origin of the story of
the Virgin-Birth. I am not competent to discuss it in all its bearings, but I
confidently submit that I have said enough to show that the story may have
' arisen spontaneously in Jewish soil.'
CORRESPONDENCE 535
I will only add one remark. If it did so arise, it is unlikely that
it arose during- the life-time of Mary, as it could have been contradicted
by her if it had not been true. This; accounts for its late origin. On
the other hand, if the story be true, I cannot understand why Mary
did not made it known at an earlier date. It is said that she kept it secret
from motives of delicacy. I wish some women of hig-h character would
express their fully-considered opinion on this point. They would be the
best judg-es. W. WHITWORTH.
1 8 Essex Villas,
Kensington, W(.8.
[We believe Miss Maude Royden has done so publicly, but are unable to
g-ive the reference. Surely the supreme difficulty is to account for
words and actions of the Virgin-Mother recorded in the Synoptic
Gospels, which suggest not that she was keeping- secret the fact of
the miraculous birth, but that she was ignorant of it. — ED. M.C.]
SlR EMIGRANTS AND HONORARY CLERGY..
An article in the Modern Churchman for May drew attention to a
clamant need when it pointed to the great numbers of emigrants from
our shores to the Dominions, and to the small provision for preventing"
their loss o-f all organised religious life. It proposed a bold policy to meet
the need, viz. the ordaining the: most suitable among- them to be voluntary
clergy, who might carry on their secular occupations as emigrants while
securing, as far as opportunity goes, the religious needs of those around
them in their new homes. Such a proposal deserves consideration, but
many may feel that the more it is considered the mo-re serious the objec-
tions to it become. I do not intend to enter upon these, but rather to
ask if better results might not be gained by simpler and less revolutionary
means. I propose two reforms ; one an old proposal, the other a new one,
neither of which would be sufficient alone, though each in itself would be
valuable and would serve many purposes. They would supplement one
another, and taken together might go far to meet the; need of emigrants,
and a good many other needs felt in the Church besides.
1. The Diaconate provides for a life in Orders which admits at the
same time of civil occupation and spiritual service ; and its abeyance,
save as a stepping stone to Priesthood, is a loss of many opportunities.
Its revival as a permanent status might turn these to account. A number
of permanent Deacons sent out among the thousands emigrating, would
go far to meet their need, while other pressing needs would also be met
by the revival of the Diaconate for men to whom the Priesthood is not
an end in view, and to whom it should not be opened. The union of small
parishes in the country, and the better service of poor parishes in towns,
would often become practicable, where this is not so now, if two* or three
permanent Deacons served under the direction of one responsible incum-
bent in full Orders, while supporting themselves, and giving only a part of
their time to religious duties. And in this way scope for very valuable
service might be given to many men whose education or mental qualifica-
tions are inadequate for, or whose ties and obligations preclude them
from, full Orders and the entire consecration of their lives.
2. But this alone would not provide what is needed. There must be
coupled with it a second reform which quite independently is much to be
desired. And the second might also help our emigrants, while it would
help in many ways beside. This consists of Bishops gwing commission
limited alike in time and place, to men found fit to undertake some service
536 THE MODERN CHURCHMAN
under1 particular1 conditions only. Ordination confers a commission which
is permanent and universal : what is wanted is that side by side with this
there should be a commission which is strictly ad hoc and terminable.
An important example of the great value such a restricted commission
might have is to be seen in Confirmation. At present this is a burden
too great for many Bishops to> bear, and Bishops Suffragfan or Bishops
Coadjutant are costly and unsatisfactory expedients for getting over the
difficulty. The Bishop who tries to do his duty without them finds fatigue
and istaleness result inevitably from continual confirming, which seriously
lessen the value of his service. His time for other duties becomes insuffi-
cient, and those confirmed receive less help than they might. But in
every Diocese there are a score or two of the Clergy who, if commissioned
to do SO', might administer confirmation, each in a few assigned centres
for the current season om the Bishop's behalf; and being personally fitted
for such service they would render it with great advantage to the laity
concerned, to the. Bishop, and it may be added to themselves, since it
does a man good to call his latent powers into use. The administration
of Confirmation by the Priesthood has longf since been the practice in the
Eastern Church, and that of Baptism by Priests and others is everywhere
admitted. Yet Baptism is undoubtedly the greater moment than Con-
firmation which is the seal set to complete it ; and at one time Baptism
was usually undertaken by the Bishop. There is therefore no room for
objection on the ground of order; and the magnitude of the benefit that
mig-ht result should over-ride mere habit.
Similar commissions ad hoc might well be given, where there is
occasion, by Bishops to permanent Deacons, to celebrate the other
sacrament. In some sparsely populated region of an outlying Dominion
such a Deacon working his own land mig-ht gather around him at inter-
vals Christian people beyond the reach of a Priest for the time being-,
and be authorised to act then and there as the Bishop'' s Commissary in
consecrating" and administering- the Holy Communion. This sacrament
is the act of the Church ; and it would be just as much by the authority
of the Church mediated through the Bishop if his commission were a
restricted one given to a Deacon for particular purpose as it is when a
general one is given in conferring- Priests' Orders. Of course the consent
of the Church would be given in the initiation, of such a reform of practice ;
and no Bishop would be entitled to give ad hoc commission except for
service within his Diocese and during the time in which he himself
maintained it. Here 'again there mig-ht be found good occasion for such
action in small grouped parishes, or in large under-staffed ones at home.
There is plenty of precedent for Episcopal Commission, ad hoc only,
in a number of other directions; e.g. in the matter of institutions and
inductions, in the appointment of Surrogates for the issue of marriage
licences, and in the consecration, of churches and churchyards, not to
mention: the varied duties of Bishops Suffragan, who, in spite of their
Episcopal Order, depend on special commission from their Diocesan. The
reform here asked for would therefore be no more than an extension of
existing usage in fresh directions. And so many facts of experience
suggest that a bold extension of such ad hoc commission by Episcopal
authority to suitable men, for service: beyond their ordinary range, whether
as Deacons or Priests, might prove of the greatest value to the religious
life of the Church, that perhaps the Modern Churchman may be able to
secure wide consideration for it. E. P. BOYS-SMITH.
HORDLE VICARAGE,
BROCKENHURST.
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