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OIL AND WINE

BY

GEORGE TYRRELL

AUTHOR OF

"Hard Sayings," etc.

4<an& Drawing nigb be bounb up bis
woun&s, pouring in oil ano wine"

Luke x 34

New impression

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA

1907

2,^fO0

This book was first published by Mr. Sydney
Mayle, of Hampstead, in April, 1906, and the
publication transferred to Messrs. Longmans,
Green, and Co., and reissued by them, with a new
Preface, in February, 1907.

Reprinted, March, 1907.

jhnsv^h*-* innt'SArffJjjL try Cr

0

PREFACE TO THE NEW ISSUE
OF "OIL AND WINE."

This volume was on the point of publication a few
years ago, when it was withdrawn for reasons to
which at the time I was bound to defer. Into
those reasons it is not my purpose to enter here.
Reverence for the dead ; respect for a distinguished
and estimable personality forbid me to rake up
the embers of an extinct and perfectly private
controversy, and perhaps to raise a satirical smile
on the lips of those to whom no excellency of
character can ever compensate for what seems, to
their very superior judgment, a limitation of out-
look. Hence I have declined the suggestion of
printing in an Appendix the three theological
critiques on the strength of which the publication
had to be abandoned, though to have done so
would have been to provide a presumable antidote
to the poison with which my pages were said to
be replete, and to deprive the volume of all sus-
picion of being a dangerous book. It would have
been in some sense the equivalent of an official

vi PREFACE.

authorization. But an authorization of that kind
is precisely what I most earnestly wish to avoid.
I wish to label the book Dangerous in the largest
type possible, and, as far as my will goes, to place
it on the Index of prohibited works. And this,
needless to say, not out of any lack of due respect
for such authorizations, but because they so often
induce simple and uncritical people, for whom
I have never written, to approach my writings on
their knees, in that spirit of blind trust and passive
receptivity in which they are accustomed to
approach the teachings of the Church herself. In
theory, episcopal approbation in no way justifies
this supine attitude, this wholesale deglutition; but
in practice it is far otherwise. The fact that such
official approvals are liable to revision and have of
late been frequently revised by a higher tribunal is
one that seems to make no sufficient impression on
the popular mind or to diminish its exaggerated
confidence in the Imprimatur. From first to last,
I have written, not from on high, as a teacher, but
as an inquirer on the same platform as my readers.
There is nothing I desiderate less in them than
that reverent docility of mind which considers
before all things the official and ecclesiastical status
of the writer, the credentials of respectability with
which his book is fortified ; which looks to the
external authority rather than to the intrinsic
value of what he writes. Everything that tends

PREFACE. vii

to diminish the writer's external prestige, to destroy
such docility, to evoke a critical and cautious
disposition, to make the mind keenly alert and
distrustful, will help to the fulfilment of the sole
end to which these and similar pages are directed.
That end is not to dogmatize, nor to ventilate new
opinions, nor to win adherents for them, nor to form
a school, nor to prescribe rules of conduct ; but simply
to suggest, to provoke reflection, to aid it when
provoked, to furnish a hodge-podge of materials,
good, bad, and indifferent, from which real and
living minds can freely select such as are fit to be
built into their own fabric by their own strenuous
labour. There is no spiritual progress without jolt
and jar and many a rude awakening. Nowhere
have smooth tracks been laid down for the benefit
of those who would slumber and sleep on their
route Heavenwards. Yet if it is part of the divine
idea of education never to weaken the soul by any
unnecessary assistance, it also belongs to the same
wise charity to assist it up to the measure of its
necessity ; to temper the roughness of the road to
the weakness or weariness of the wayfarer. One
and the same method of ministry is not suited for
all. The child cannot keep stride with the man.
It were as unfair to prescribe that all should be
abreast of the swiftest as that all should hang back
with the slowest. In both cases there is offence
and scandal; there, of the weak; here, of the

viii PREFACE.

strong. Previous to its first publication last
year by Mr. Sydney Mayle, of Hampstead, this
volume had been circulated more or less privately
among the latter, and it is hardly too much to say
that whatever difficulties it may have alleviated, it
has not created even one ; and that however many
souls it may have stimulated, I know of none that
it has discouraged or scandalized — a result largely
due to the fact that the conditions under which it
was circulated, were such as to secure a critical and
distrustful reading. This is in no wise to question
the more educated wisdom of those whose good sense
judged it worthy of episcopal approval, in the first
instance. It is only to assert that such official
approbation, as commonly misinterpreted, might
have made the book a snare to the passively docile.
That, indeed, were not reason enough for withhold-
ing approval ; for the only books that can do no
harm are those that can do no good. Unwary and
unstable souls have been warped and perverted by
the Imitation, by Rodriguez, by S.John of the Cross,
by the Spiritual Exercises ; above all, by the written
Word of God. Yet, except the last, none of these
books has ever been forbidden to the general reader.
If when this volume first left my hands, carefully
revised in accordance with official criticism, I was
fully aware that it must abound in ignorances,
errors, and inconsistencies which no censorial
vigilance could possibly eliminate from the work of

PREFACE.

mortal man, far more am I now explicitly
conscious of faults I would fain amend were it
practicable to re-write it from beginning to end.
For example, what I have in various parts said
about the stability of faith implies a " voluntarism "
as crude as is the " intellectualism " against which
it revolts. The relation of mutual dependence
between faith and orthodoxy, revelation and
theology, is very imperfectly grasped and expressed.
In avoiding the false " transcendence " of Deism I
may have drifted too near the Charybdis of
Pantheism in search of the middle course of
Panentheism ; in urging the unity, I may have
endangered the distinctness of souls. Let it suffice,
however, to have thus sounded my fog-bell once
and for all. I am too conscious of my blindness
to wish to be a leader of the blind.

But it may be objected that for all alike, for the
wise as for the simple, any sort of search and
inquiry into religious truth is inconsistent with that
whole-hearted acceptance of traditional forms, that
docile, unquestioning, uncurious receptivity which
should characterize the loyal Catholic.

I cannot but think that the principle underlying
this objection is one that would condemn Catholic
doctrine to absolute sterility ; that would, with fatal
consequences, have bound it fast in the swaddling-
clothes of its earliest infancy ; that would justify the
worst that has ever been said of its obstructive and
soul-destroying character.

PREFACE.

We are Catholics because we know that the
organ in which the embodied Spirit of Truth and
Righteousness gradually reveals itself and works
out its fuller manifestation is not the individual but
the community; because we subject the limited
infallibility of our own mental processes, to that of
a social experience and reflection — to an infallibility
which is higher according to the width, the depth,
the antiquity of that stream of collective experience.
Yet we know too that if the individual spirit is
wakened, stimulated, and formed by the general
mind, it also contributes to its formation. Growth
requires a principle of variation and suggestion
subject to a principle of criticism, selection, and
assimilation.

And by the general we do not mean the average
mind, the popular impression ; but rather that one
truth which fills and overflows both the deepest
ocean valleys and the noisiest shallows of the beach ;
which all are striving to compass according to their
several capacities. We are, then, each of us joint-
labourers with all Catholics, present, past, and
future, in the work of building up the great fabric
of religious truth wherein our souls and theirs who
shall come after us are to be housed. The city that
our fathers began to build for us we have to continue
for our children. Their needs will differ as widely
from ours, as ours from those of the distant past.
None of us may build wildly according to his private

PREFACE.

freak and fancy, but solely in the best attainable
light as to what has already been done and what
has yet to be done by the historical Church. Unity
of spirit, of idea or plan, must pervade the work
from beginning to end : and to apprehend this idea
ever more adequately through the study of the past,
in the light of the present and of the immediate
future, is a labour in which we are all in some degree
co-operant. To gather together the fruits of in-
dividual reflection and experience ; to sort and
compare them ; to subject them to the sovereign
criticism of that Spirit of Truth which is, not
external to, but embodied in the whole Church,
which utters its slow verdict, not in words but in
practical results, by the survival of what is life-
giving ; by the decay and obsolescence of what is
unreal — that is the function of the Church's official
teachers.

The stimulation of religious experience and
reflection is therefore an essential condition of the
Church's vitality and growth, without which the
walls of the ecclesiastical city will prove all too
narrow for the thronging generations of the future.

Nor is it hard for sane common sense to see the
difference between mere freakishness and wanton
innovation, and the sober endeavour to interpret
and give clearer expression to the general mind.
To depart from established conventions for merely
selfish motives is licence and not liberty. To do for

xii PREFACE.

the negative reason that we do not see their utility,
that we cannot compass the wide and persistent
experience of which they are the fruit, is intellectual
conceit and self-sufficiency. To do so because we
positively see, still more because many others are
independently beginning to see, that they have
become hurtful to the sovereign law of the Common
Good, is not disobedience, but that most courageous
and costing obedience to which all social reform and
progress is due. And the same holds good of
conventional formulations of the Collective Mind,
which through altered modes of thought and speech,
have lost their first usefulness and grown to be
misleading. It is not " private judgment " if, when
it has irresistibly declared itself, we prefer the
sovereign and most universal to any subordinate
rule or ruler.

Turning then from my co-religionists of both
sorts — those for whom I do, and those for whom
I do not write ; the critically alert and the reveren-
tially receptive — I owe a kind of apology to those
outsiders who, over-estimating the rational signifi-
cance of ecclesiastical approbations, have taken as
representative of official Catholicism writings which,
at the most, have been tolerated. In point of fact
these writings have been disliked and distrusted the
nearer they have come to that centre of ecclesiastical
government where the interests of the passive many
are, not unnaturally, of more account than those of

PREFACE. xiii

the active-minded minority. This I have always
conscientiously explained to individual seekers who
have been drawn towards the Church in the belief
that my utterances, because sealed with an
Imprimatur, were those of the hierarchy itself. To
disillusion them was a duty I owed both to them
and to those officials in whose name alone I had
any right to receive them. Either they had
recourse to others, or else went away sad, unwilling
to give up the great possession of their liberty.

Nothing was more remote from my wishes and
intentions than to act or to be used as a decoy in
the interests of proselytism, and I would have no
dealings with those who wanted to enter the Church
by some side postern instead of by the front door.
Of this, scores could witness; some still outside,
others since admitted by confessors more eager than
I to "snatch a brand from the burning" at any
price.

If then I exposed and defended a wider and
kindlier interpretation of Catholicism, it was not
that I thought such a spirit was approved, or was
more than barely tolerated by the school at present
in the ascendency at headquarters; but that I
thought it might at least be just tolerated. Yet,
tolerated or not, I believed and do still believe it
to be the spirit which dwells deep down in the
nethermost heart of the Catholic community, and
which is bound one day to assert itself triumphantly

PREFACE.

over every sort of cruelty and moral violence and
intolerance. In the interests of order one may be
bound to defer externally to those who believe
otherwise, yet their well-meant presentment of the
Church's features can never seem to me more than
a libellous caricature. Did I agree with them, every
reason for external deference to them would be
gone.

In the process of "restoring all things in Christ,"
we must sooner or later work back to the overlaid
elements of His Gospel. His spirit is not so con-
centrated and confined in the institutional Church
as not to be also diffused throughout Christendom
and throughout humanity, where faith may often
be found of a kind unknown in Israel. The seed
carried over the wall of a garden may sometimes
fructify more abundantly beyond, and in due time
come to refertilize the exhausted soil of its origin.
The Church may at times weaken but she cannot
wholly destroy her inevitable solidarity with the
age. She must eventually be leavened and softened
by those " kindlier manners and gentler laws," that
have been developed in the civilization which she
herself once nurtured with the milk of the Gospel.

One word as to the title of this volume. It
alludes not to the oil of consolation and the wine
of spiritual stimulus, but to the unauthorized,
unofficial, irregular character of these ministrations
of the Word. Having been both myself I have

PREFACE.

more than once spoken up for the priest and the
levite, who work under limitations and embarrass-
ments of which the irresponsible layman has little
conception. If they are to exercise the liberty of the
Samaritan and the outcast, they must see that their
action is clearly understood as personal, and as in
no wise compromising the corporation of which they
are members. Sacred as are the offices of divine
charity, there are cases when communicatio in sacvis
cannot be tolerated without offence to others, nor
may the responsible shepherd of Israel lightly
suffer it to be said of him : " Thou art a Samaritan
and hast a devil." Yet, however indelible the
priestly " character," it is not so deeply imprinted
as to obliterate completely the stamp of humanity,
nor is the lay-spirit ever wholly exorcised by the
imposition of episcopal hands. And there are
possible conditions under which even the priest or
the levite may, without scandal, draw near un-
officially to the half-murdered wayfarer, and bind
up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine.

G. Tyrrell.
January 25, 1907.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

THE INEVITABLE QUESTION -

THE STABILITY OF FAITH

FAITH AS A CHOICE

FAITH AS A NECESSITY -

THE TEMPER OF FAITH

RATIONALISM -

VERBAL UNBELIEF AND REAL

FAITH AND ACTION

UNWILLING BELIEF

INTERNAL TRUTHFULNESS

THE ASSIMILATION OF DOCTRINE

DIFFERENCES OF APPREHENSION -

THE LANGUAGE OF REVELATION

THE STAR

OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL

MIRACLES

FAITH IN CHRIST -

THE DESIRE OF ALL AGES

THE SACRED HUMANITY

THE SON OF GOD

THE ATONEMENT -

THE PASSION -

WATER AND BLOOD

THE RESURRECTION

PAGE
V

I
15
25
36
4*

47
5*
60

64
65
66
69
7i
73
76

79
89
95
99
102

103
109
116
119
126

CONTENTS.

THE ASCENSION

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

THE VOICE OF THE MULTITUDE

NEED OF AUTHORITY -

UNITY AND VARIETY

THE BOND OF PROFESSION

SACRAMENTS

THE MUSTARD SEED

VERITAS PR^EVALEBIT

THE HERETICAL FALLACY

PRIEST AND PROPHET

CONVERSION -

ELECTION

CONFESSION -

FORGIVENESS OF SIN

THE DIVINE ANGER

GOD IN US

GOD'S LIFE IN OURS

CHRIST IN US -

god's JEALOUSY

THE PATH OF COUNSEL

LEAVING ALL

PRAYER OF PETITION

THE PRAYER OF CONFORMITY

CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTION

SPIRITUAL EQUILIBRIUM

VIRGO MATER

THE IDEAL OF REDEMPTION

THE LOWLINESS OF HIS HANDMAIDEN

BREADTH

PAGE
M4

139
I46
149
151

'57
161
168
170
171

i74
181
185
188
194
200
203
214
223
230

243
246
248

251
256
258
260
265
268
271
274

CONTENTS. xix

}'AGB
NARROWNESS ------ 278

LIBERTY FOR OTHERS .... 282

INTROSPECTION ..... 286

DIVINE SELF-GIVING .... 292

THE GOVERNING AIM ... 294

AIMLESSNESS .... - 298

SELF-MANAGEMENT - - - - -299

THi: SOCIAL STANDARD AND THE MORAL - - S°3

SOME PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES .... 305

THE JUDGE OF EACH .... 310

THE JUDGE OF ALL - - - - "314

AFTER DEATH ..... 317

THE COMMUNION OF SOULS - - - "3^1

PURGATION BY LOVE .... 328

HEAVEN AS CONCEIVABLE - - - "331

THE UNDYING PAST .... 333

THE DEAD ...... 342

OUR DUMB BRETHREN .... 346

INDEX - - - - - - 351

INTRODUCTION.

And there shall be One Fold and One Shepherd. — John x. 16.

The charge of sentimentalism has been too
lightly brought against those who assert that
religion is something prior to, and separable from,
any of its forms or formulations. If the assertion
mean that, consequently, religion may subsist
without any form whatever ; or that there is no
gradation of lower or higher among the various
attempts to interpret the religious instinct of man's
heart; or that God Himself has not come to our
aid in the matter and disclosed us to ourselves
through Christ, it cannot be defended by any
Christian. Religion is prior to its form with a
merely logical priority; it did not exist before
them, and can never exist without them, just as
the moral instinct is inseparable from some one
or other definite code of morality, were it even the
rudest. We do not begin with the abstract notions
of right and wrong, and then use them to determine
particulars ; but conversely, from a comparison of
definite actions, bidden or forbidden by conscience,
we rise slowly to these abstractions, and to a more
distinct and explicit idea of conscience. So too
13

INTRODUCTION.

" religion in general " is an abstraction derived from
a comparison of concrete religions with their various
forms ; and can no more be realized in fact, than
any other abstraction.

Still, although we are bound in conscience to
strive, each of us, after the highest and worthiest
expression of things divine that it may be possible
for us to compass ; although we may not " sink our
differences," or undervalue any little glimmer of
light that enables us to see less dimly through the
dark glass of symbols and similitudes into the inner
sense of eternal riddles ; yet it is now, more than
ever, of the utmost importance for us to remember
that, even the divinest adaptation of infinite truth
to the finite mind is but a breaking up of that pure
unbroken Light which enlightens every man who
comes into the world ; which beats equally, so to
say, upon the eyes of all, but enters unequally, and
elicits unequal response. And as the sunlight is
said to fashion, or at least to condition the
fashioning of, the bodily vision into an ever closer
responsiveness to its own appeal, — and that, not
capriciously, but according to a steady law of
progress ; so the eternal Reality, apart from disturb-
ing conditions and wilful resistance, by its continual
pressure on all sides, by the ceaseless beating of its
waves, forces the heart and mind of man into an
ever closer correspondence and sympathy with
itself. Through whatever medium it be viewed,
whether dense and distorting, or less dense and
less distorting ; whether it be all but obliterated
in the degrading religions of savagery, or focussed

INTRODUCTION.

to a blinding intensity in the highest form of
Christianity, that Reality which is seen, is one and
the same — always immeasurably greater and other
than those minds whose very life and blessedness
consists in straining everlastingly to compass the
incomprehensible. Here then, without indifferentism
or any disloyalty to the claims of truth, is a ground
of agreement between all religions as such. All
alike originate from the same centre of attraction
drawing man back to his Source — back to his home
in the invisible ; out of time, out of space, —
ex urnbris et imaginibiis in veritatetn. And in this,
without attempting futile definitions, we seem to
find the most general characteristic by which
religion is distinguished from morality and other
allied manifestations of rational life — it is the
recognition of man's practical relation to superior
beings of the invisible order, one or many, good
or evil.

The universality of this attraction to the spiritual
centre — however it be interpreted, or even if it be
dismissed as illusory, — is a fact ; and is besides,
a fact more deeply rooted in our nature than
any analysis or explanation of the fact can be ; nor
can our differences as to the latter ever be so
important as our agreement as to the former.
Doctrines are but explanations of the source and
end of the attraction, and of the means by which
that end is to be realized. We explain the unknown
in terms of the known ; the invisible in the language
of the visible ; and, in this case, the infinitely
greater in terms of the infinitely less. Hence every

INTRODUCTION.

explanation of the other world is both analogical and
inadequate ; it is a similitude, not an equation ; and
whatever excellence it predicates is less excellent
than the reality. The truth of such doctrines is
therefore not the truth of an equation, but of an
analogy — true similarity, not true sameness. One
similitude may be fuller than another, and yet that
other may be true. A nation may be compared
truly to a mechanism, to a tree, to an animal, to
a hive of bees, with different degrees of truth.
Christ calls the Church a kingdom, a net, a
mustard-seed, a wedding-feast. But the same thing
cannot be literally a machine and a tree — a
kingdom, and a net. It is only when doctrines and
systems are taken as equations that they necessarily
contradict one another by being different. But in
all this there is no justification of indifferentism
about doctrines, as though any little degree of
greater adequacy and truthfulness were negligeable ;
but only a plea for charity and intelligence, and a
warning against missing any glimmer of light that
may be derived from systems other than our own.

As in the development of conscience, we need
not, and do not, doubt the truth and reality of our
advance upon lower stages from which we have
emerged, although we can well believe that in a
fuller day our present light may seem darkness ; so
in regard to faith (taken widely for our beliefs and
hopes concerning the unseen), we need have no
scepticism as to the greater fulness and truth of one
doctrine and system as compared with another.
The Law is not untrue because the Gospel

INTRODUCTION.

transcends it ; nor is our present faith untrue,
because it will be swallowed up in vision. If
indeed we cannot, in virtue of an appeal, not to
our mind alone, but to our whole spiritual nature,
discern between greater and less ; higher and lower ;
richer and poorer ; if we cannot know when we are
growing and expanding, or when we are cramped
and contracted ; if we cannot bring truth to the
test of life; then no efforts of mere reasoning or
criticism will save us from agnostic despair. As
correctives they have their due place in regard to
religious beliefs ; as creative principles they are
impotent. " No man having drunk old wine,
straightway desireth new ; for he saith : The old
is better ; " it is in the last resort a matter of taste
and experiment ; he cannot prove his preference,
but he does not doubt it. And so it is with those
"who have tasted of the Heavenly Gift; and have
tasted the good word of God and the powers of the
world to come."

From the principles here put forward it follows
that, he who keeps the commandment shall know
of the doctrine whether it be of God ; that doctrine
depends upon religion as much as, if not more,
than religion upon doctrine ; since it is the effort of
religion to find utterance and embodiment. For
as the strong creative thought of genius selects
spontaneously the aptest language at its disposal,
so a deeply religious spirit will not fail to respond
to that doctrine or system which is more consonant
with its needs and exigencies.

Hence though some kind of doctrinal system is

INTRODUCTION.

inseparable from religion, yet it is but as the con-
taining bark which ever breaks and mends, and
readjusts itself to the growth of the trunk which
it encases. Our commonest danger is that of
inverting the order of dependence; of making
religion the outgrowth ; with the result that in
seasons of readjustment or obscurity, when we are
on our way to greater gain, we expose ourselves to
utter loss, mistaking the pains of growth for the
pangs of death. In this, we do not speak of the
necessarily rigid formulae of public and external
religion, which however have their analogous law
of modification, but of each one's subjective and
individual mode of apprehending religious truth,
which, unless he be dead to all vital interest in the
matter, must ever grow with the growth of his mind
and strengthen with its strength.

Yet the chief condition of this growth is, to
have no anxiety save as to the " one thing needful "
— as to the practical realization of our relationship
with God so far as we understand it. Doctrine
registers, but does not stay, the growth of this
communion. Like the rising stem of the palm-
tree, it ever lifts its crown of spreading foliage to a
higher plane of more luxuriant and vigorous life,
and receives a return in the increment of its own
substance. We feel a truth before we formulate it ;
and when formulated, it helps us to feel our way to
a further truth ; but our life is in the feeling, not in
the formula ; in the foliage, not in the stem.

If these things were better understood we should
seek remedy for the religious divisions in this

INTRODUCTION.

country, neither by a violent and hopeless attempt
at a superficial adjustment of doctrinal differences
by means of controversy ; nor by an equally violent
or short-sighted denial of the significance of these
differences; but by digging down to the very root
from which all religions spring, and whose morbid
condition is the source of the evil in question.
Instead of arguing over the form and function of
this dry bone or the other, we should put them all
together joint to joint and clothe them with flesh
and nerve and muscle, and breathe into them the
breath of life. For life is the test of religious
truth ; the true words are " the words of eternal
life " — the life, not merely of intellectual truth, not
merely of ethical purity of conduct, interior and
exterior, but of our felt and experienced relationship
to the incomprehensible realities of the world to
come ; — the life, in other words, of faith and hope
and divine love.

Marvellous as is the range of doctrinal variety
amongst us, from the simplest and most amorphous
kind of theism or deism, up to the complexly
organized system of Catholic Christianity, we are
many of us profoundly united in our primary
religious impulses, in our ultimate religious aspira-
tions. This very earnestness as to the common end
in view, will make indifferentism as to the means
impossible ; but it should also change the whole
spirit and temper and method of our endeavour to
draw others to what we ourselves believe to be the
better and straighter way. And what makes this
striving towards union so incumbent on all who

8 INTRODUCTION.

have any say in the matter ; what makes in-
differentism so morally inexcusable, is not the
distress of cultivated minds seeking the luxury of
a philosophical synthesis ; but the condition of the
multitudes harassed and scattered as sheep having
no shepherd. The dissensions of the independent
leaders of thought and belief may be of little hurt
to themselves ; for them, conceivably, religion may
be separable from a religion : they may seem to
breathe a purer air in the heights of speculation
than do the closely-packed multitudes on the plain
below ; to

Sit like God holding no form of creed
But contemplating all.

Even were all this allowed — and surely it is in-
admissible— yet what of " the man in the street " ?
What of -the crowd to whom religion must be,
always has been, a religion ; whose stability of
belief and practice must depend, always has
depended, on the unanimity of those around them,
and eventually on the unanimity of those above
them, who create and shape the general mind ?
Before improved means of intercourse had fused
peoples together as they are now fused, differences
of creed were a less all-present influence for evil
than they have become in consequence. But now
even the least educated can point to the world-wide
dissensions of the thoughtful and learned in justifi-
cation of his indifferentism, as in former times he
would have appealed to their unanimity in justifi
cation of his belief.

INTRODUCTION.

It is this consideration that causes the eyes of
some who stand aloof, bewildered with the clash
of creeds, to turn wistfully towards the Catholic
ideal of an international or universal religion, and
to lament over what seems to them the perversion
and stultification of a system which once promised
such great things for the good of humanity.
Whether, for them, Catholicism mean the divided
East and West, or the Churches dependent upon
Rome, in either case they regard it — not as a
religion that lives in the present age, but as one
that survives from a former — a noble attempt that
has failed ignominiously. And yet the hopelessness
of finding a substitute drives them back, time after
time, to reconsider the Church's claims. That in
spite of seeming petrifaction, Catholicism has its
living and life-giving message for the soul ; that,
whatever lethargy now seems to weigh upon its
weary limbs, it can yet rise to even more vigorous
activity than it has hitherto known, is the faint
hope of many a soul perplexed with the problems
of the present day.

That such faint hope may be confirmed is
avowedly an indirect motive of the present effort
— an effort in no sense apologetic or controversial ;
but, so to say, medicinal and experimental. We
have not to manipulate the truth, but simply to
clear the eye of the soul and let it see what it
will. Without this, all assent is mere formalism ;
with this, all error is but superficial. Approaching
our differences in this spirit we shall at least tend
towards, if we do not arrive at, the same centre,

INTRODUCTION.

from quarters how opposite soever. But though
the interests of those outside the visible com-
munion of the Church have determined much that
has been said and much that has been omitted
in these desultory pages — gleaned from the notes
of occasional sermons and instructions — it is not
directly to them but to those of the household of
the faith that these reflections are offered as matter
for meditation or private reading, in order to deepen
their understanding of just those elements of
Catholic Christianity which are still to a great
extent retained, appreciated, loved, and practised
by so many of their fellow-countrymen as yet
separated from the centre of unity. It is only in
virtue of what we still hold in common that we
can get to understand one another, and to enter
into that sympathy of spirit which alone can create
the wish and prepare the way for an agreement in
thought and profession.

Hence, in order to forestall some of the misunder-
standings to which such an undertaking as this is
inevitably exposed, it should be noted that it is not
the writer's aim to put forth the fulness of Catholic
belief and devotion in all detail, but rather, deliber-
ately and of set purpose, to prescind from those
points which, without being exactly essential, are
so distinctively Catholic as to awake no echo of
sympathy in those outside the visible communion
of the Church : and to build so far as possible
upon common ground. For owing to the con-
tinual insistence of Catholics themselves on these
very points of difference in the face of aggressive

INTRODUCTION. ii

negation, an impression has been inevitably created
in the minds of outsiders that their religion consists
entirely and exclusively in these things, and that
they have no appreciation or esteem of those funda-
mental aspects of Christianity which they do not
bring into controversy just because they are taken
for granted as common to all. The practice of
defining things briefly by their differences leads to
the fallacy of forgetting their other constituents.
Hence a Catholic is popularly considered as one
who lives by authority, seeks salvation in externals,
worships the Virgin and the Saints, and so forth ;
and it is a matter of surprise if he is found to be
in living sympathy with what is best in all religions
and in all grades of Christian profession. Nothing
more effectually deters many devout Christians
from considering the claims of the Church than the
notion that in submitting to her they would have
to sacrifice much of that internal spiritual vitality
which their conscience tells them is God's work in
their souls, and whose reality they could not deny
without shaking the basis of the possibility of any
certitude in religious matters. It is then most
necessary they should see that all they cling to is
saved, if it is also transcended and supplemented,
in Catholicism; and that, to this end, Catholics
themselves should be reminded of the danger, even
in their own practice, of so emphasizing what is
peculiar to themselves, as to underrate what is
common to all.

Hence to those who read without respect to the
writer's guiding motive it may be a matter of

ta INTRODUCTION.

unmerited complaint on the one hand, or of unmerited
commendation on the other, that he suppresses all
insistence on the pre-eminence and exclusiveness
of Catholic Christianity, as alien to his scope.
There are many labourers in that field.

A somewhat similar exception may be taken to
the stress laid upon the almost infinite inadequacy
of any human forms of expression — borrowed, as
they necessarily are, from those physical phenomena
which are our only possible medium of inter-
course— to compass the realities of the spiritual
and supernatural world. Not that so obvious a
point of theological teaching can be questioned
for a moment ; but that from this point of view,
the difference between the highest and the lowest
forms of religion seems to be dwarfed to insignifi-
cance. The same, however, might be said of our
intellectual or ethical standards as measured with
the infinity of the Divine wisdom and sanctity.
But with such a measure we have no business.
What is of infinitesimal value from an infinite
point of view, may be of almost infinite value
from a finite point of view. For us, the difference
between the morals and science of savagery and
our own is of immeasurable consequence ; and
similarly that between the lower and the higher
forms of religion. Compared with the bulk of
the universe, those of a man and a mite are practi-
cally equal; but compared with one another, the
difference is all-important. To draw any conclusion
in favour of religious indifferentism from so obvious
a reflection, would be to trespass against the elemen-

INTRODUCTION 13

tary principles of sound reasoning and to ignore
explicit statements to the contrary which abound
in these pages.

It is a point of loyalty to the teaching-authority
of the Church to dig a deep trench between what is
imposed and what is permitted in the matter of
belief, and to be jealous of giving idolatrously to
the latter the honour that is due to the former
alone. It were no less an unwarranted usurpation
to bind what the Church has loosed, or left loose,
than to loose what she has bound. Those Catholics
who are properly instructed in the elements of
their religion — and those who are not, had better
lay this book down — will easily discern in these
pages, what is of faith and received doctrine from
what lies outside that region and is permitted
to the liberty of individual opinion. In this out-
lying territory the writer has used freely the latitude
which authority freely accords : and claims no more
attention than is due to the inherent worth of what
is said — be it more or less. There is nothing here
that Catholics may not believe and say, though
there is a great deal which they need not, and as a
fact, do not universally believe or say.

Finally, it must be admitted that, from the
nature of the subjects handled, as well as from
defective handling, there are many things hard to be
understood which the unstable and unwary may
wrest to their own hurt, and which would make one
hesitate as to the wisdom of publishing at all, were
it not that the needs of the wary and stable seem
equally worthy of consideration. No hurt need be

INTRODUCTION.

feared if it be remembered that what startles us as
being new in sound or substance does not neces-
sarily scandalize us ; it may be as well a sudden
transition from darkness to light as from light to
darkness. In either case there is surprise; but
loss, only in the latter. The Gospel was naturally
a surprise to the Jews, but it ought not to have
been a scandal. Yet it is evident that in some
minds the terms are synonymous, and that what-
ever is new, relatively to their own knowledge, is
regarded as dangerous, just as to the savage every
stranger is therefore an enemy.

Also it should be remembered that passages torn
away from their context and analyzed as though
they were dogmatic definitions or theological theses,
are bound to yield a different sense from that which
they bear, taken in their concrete relationship to the
whole of which they are part. So treated, it is
notorious that the Sacred Scriptures themselves
have been adduced in support of every heresy the
Church has known ; much less then can the present
writer pretend to be armed invulnerably against the
venomed shafts of so ungenerous and uncritical a
method of onslaught.

G. TYRRELL.

London, Easter, rgoo.

THE INEVITABLE QUESTION.

Remember, O man, that thou art dust and that unto dust thou
shalt return.

Though not a truth of religion, there is no natural
truth more closely allied to the religious problem
that that of man's mortality. It is one in which
we are all agreed — believers, doubters, unbelievers
— and, more than any other, it forces on us the
question : Is death the end ?

Yet though so notionally evident to the mind, so
universally confessed with the lips, there is no truth
more practically forgotten, less generally realized
than this; none whose realization works a deeper
change in our life, for good or for ill, according to
the view we take of death. For, a fact, however
real in itself, however notionally true for our mind,
is not real for us until we give it substance by the
accommodation to it of our action and life ; in a
word, by treating it practically as a reality, and as
an element of our world and environment. This is
precisely what we mean by " conviction." It is
possible, and common, to go through life without
once realizing the fact of death till it grips us by
the throat. Even those of us into whom the reality
of death has entered (as a poisonous sting or as a

16 THE INEVITABLE QUESTION.

salutary tonic — as a double-edged sword piercing to
the joints and marrow and discerning the thoughts
of the heart), float so much upon the surface and in
the middle of things, that our different views as
to what lies in the hidden depths, or beyond the
bounding shores, does not, save in rare moments of
reflection, tell seriously upon our happiness one way
or the other ; so that in the long intervals there is
little to distinguish the man of faith from the man
of doubt or unbelief. Besides the large fraction of
our time which is passed in bodily sleep, our deepest
self, our full freedom and perfect reason, are wrapt
in slumber, more or less profound, during most of
those waking hours in which our surface life and
movement, interior and exterior, is passively deter-
mined by instinct, habit, routine, inclination,
mimicry, mechanical obedience, and similar prin-
ciples, without which the occasional exercise of our
truest selfhood would be impossible and wholly
insufficient for the increasing adaptation of our life
to its infinitely complex surroundings. For the
most part, we must commit ourselves to this natural
machinery; but we are not fully alive or awake,
save in those moments in which we withdraw
ourselves from it, and oppose ourselves to it, and
thereby mark ourselves off as distinct and inde-
pendent agents and personalities. By resisting
ourselves we assert ourselves; dying we live. But
there is a spiritual insomnia as morbid as the
cerebral malady — a tension of life at its highest
pitch that cannot long be sustained without disaster.
We are none of us strong enough to live without

THE INEVITABLE QUESTION. 17

some spiritual sleep and relaxation ; while many are
so weak that nearly their whole life is spent in
slumber. There are multitudes who live a purely
passive phenomenal life ; from hand to mouth as it
were — from incident to incident, concerned only
with the immediate past and future; feeling no
need of any other unity in their life than that of a
drop-by-drop trickle of honey. They are as swarm-
ing gnats ; as the " flies of later spring " rejoicing in
to-day's sunshine ; neither questioning, nor affirm-
ing, nor denying ; but simply heedless of the coming
night with its chill contempt of their mazy dances,
their battlings and their senseless buzzings.

Preachers and moralists are perhaps too quick
to ascribe all this to the inborn naughtiness of man's
heart. It is but the abuse, or over-use, of wise
Nature's narcotic, who knows that the naked bones
of truth need to be shrouded in the garments of
illusion, if they are to be serviceable to man ; that
mortal eyes cannot see God and live. With Death
and Eternity ever before our eyes, we should have
no stomach for those thousand little trivialities
which make up the padding of life. Were it not for
the feeling of hunger and thirst we should perish,
left merely to the guidance of reason for the
nourishment of our bodies ; and were it not that
the prizes of life — riches and honours and pleasures
— loom large to us through the mist of illusion, and
seem as valuable to the individual as in reality they
are only to the race, our energies would languish
for lack of stimulus, and society would fall to decay.
There is indeed a reason — the reason of collective
c

18 THE INEVITABLE QUESTION.

mankind — at the back of these relative illusions ;
but it is one too wide-reaching and remote to affect
the average individual, whose reasoning is mostly
self-regarding. That we should find a relatively
irrational and inexplicable interest in the trifles of
life is therefore right and natural ; and fault comes
in only when the means is turned into an end ; when
what is indeed much, is made everything ; and what
is the commonest rule of right conduct, is made the
supreme and only rule. There is sleep and sleep ;
the death-deep sleep of the weary that sets its
leaden seal on every sense ; and the light slumber
of the watchful, who springs up alert at the faintest
echo of an expected footfall. Of this latter it is
said : " I sleep, but my heart waketh." We may lend,
but not give ourselves to repose, lest we be drawn
down and engulphed in darkness. Sleep is medicine
but not food ; rest is for the sake of labour and life.

" Let us eat and drink ; for to-morrow we die "
is the practical and reflex conclusion of those who
have asked themselves this great question as to life's
value and have answered it in this way; who
remember that they are but dust and believe that
they are nothing more. But multitudes live the life
of passivity, instinctively, unreflectingly, in complete
forgetfulness of death, caring nothing whether or
no there be a bottom to the ocean of appearances
so long as they can drift comfortably on the top,
buoyed up and belted round with illusions. They
are indeed " spirits in prison " and cannot be
judged "according to men in the flesh," until the
Gospel has been preached to them ; until the fact of

THE INEVITABLE QUESTION. 19

death is in some way made real to them, rousing
them from their lethargy like a cry at midnight ;
forcing upon them the great riddle on whose answer
their fate depends. Thousands however seem to
pass through life and out of it, not merely like
children, but children in fact — as far as spiritual
development is concerned ; and we can only trust
that " God will be sorry for their childishness."

When once the problem of life's meaning has
been forced upon us, we must either give it up as
unanswerable ; or we must answer it by saying that
life has no meaning; or by saying that it means
this or that. To give it up as unanswerable, is the
response of the sluggard who, being roused, turns
round upon the other side to resume his broken
dreams. But vainly; for no man having once heard
the cry can be the same as if he had never heard
it. In turning a deaf ear, he has already taken an
attitude in regard to it — he has chosen, and thereby
created, the world in which he will live. He may
go back, by deliberate choice, to the drifting, hand-
to-mouth, passive existence of his unawakened state ;
he can be childlike or childish; but he can never
be a child again ; aged in an instant by the cold
touch of death, he cannot enter again into his
mother's womb and be reborn ; hereafter his sim-
plicity is but a pose, a grimace, a copying of some-
thing that he was, but no longer is, or can be. He
may turn his back upon the shadow, but he knows
and feels it is there, and in the very studiousness of
his endeavour to forget it, confesses his continual
sense of its presence.

?o THE INEVITABLE QUESTION.

Better, however, thus to school ourselves to
sleep again ; to court a studied forgetfulness ; to
pour our whole being into each passing moment ;
than to probe down to the bases of life only to
discover ourselves the denizens of a phantom city
suspended in the air, — to find the whole process of
the world's movement a " vicious circle ; " without
assignable beginning or end outside itself; leading
from nowhere to nowhere; the idle flax and reflux
of a restless sea on whose waves we are tost up and
down with a certain regularity and order, but with
no advance, no meaning, no purpose. Better far to
choke reflection, to refuse inquiry, to mitigate the
fear of the worst with some faint hope of the best,
than to stand stript of every comfortable illusion,
staring with chattering teeth into the cold, dark
void of nothingness. If life have no meaning, if
it be a " tale told by an idiot, full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing ; " if man be dust and
nothing more ; then " let us eat and drink for
to-morrow we die; " let us shut out the light that
would paralyze our energy with a sense of futility;
that would rob us of our pleasant dreams ; if death
be the end let us forget the end and live as though
it were not; "Remember not man that thou art
dust and that unto dust thou shalt return." Yet
this remembrance, shut out deliberately by an act
of the will, is essentially different from the naive
forgetfulness of those to whom the problem has not
been presented for decision. It is a self-chosen
attitude in regard to life by which a man approves,
creates, makes real to himself the world in which

THE INEVITABLE QUESTION. 21

he is to live and to which he shall adapt his action.
In this case, it is a world of dust — of chaos and
confusion.

The practical issue of such a position — too
violently contradictory of our nature to be very
consistently realized — is the disintegration of our
whole rational and moral being. It is the abandon-
ment of all desire and effort after unity of thought
and action ; of all upward straining against the
current of inclination, against the deceptiveness
of appearance ; it is a " letting-go " of all that holds
us together and prevents our mind and character
falling back into dust. However false or unworthy
may be the end which we propose to ourselves as
the goal of life, it will bring some sort of system
and unity into our action and thought ; it will
involve some sort of self-sacrifice and effort whereby
our personality and independence is asserted against
the downward drag of nature levelling everything
to the ground ; to live for pleasure, or for fame,
or for power, may lead to pleasure, fame, or power;
it will certainly bring some order and unity into
our life ; but to live for nothing leads to nothing.

When we consider the heavens in that withering
light of modern knowledge which dwarfs the
physical significance of our earth (once viewed as
the all-important kernel enwrapped in the pro-
tecting heavens as in its worthless husk), to that
of a solitary flake in a snow-storm, the old problem :
" What is man ? " seems capable of only two
answers : " Little more than a gnat," or " Little
less than a god " — " Infinitely insignificant," or

22 THE INEVITABLE QUESTION.

"Infinitely significant." Between the pessimist
answer — or no answer — which we have just con-
sidered, and the optimist, there are many stages,
but no resting-place. If life has a meaning, a
value; if there is something worth doing, worth
living for (and we are incapable of coherently
thinking otherwise, as is evident from the fact that
we act at all), we cannot rest in any fractional
kind of life, as though it were the whole. The life
of sense, the intellectual, moral, or social life ; the
life of philanthropy, and universal good-will and
benevolence — no one of these is self-explanatory
and coherent apart from all the rest ; nor are all
together self-explanatory and coherent apart from
the divine life of religion. The will-to-live that
works in us inextinguishably, can be satisfied with
nothing less than that divine life to which all other
stages are subservient and by which they are
embraced in one organic unity. Anything short
of this sharing of the divine universal life leaves
us still in the dust, — struggling upward it may be,
but doomed to relapse. Neither mind nor heart
can rest long in that Naturalism which gives
principality to the life of sensation, and explains
intellect and morality and social life in reference
to this ; nor in the worship of Humanity which
leaves unanswered the question as to the kind of
life which we should secure for ourselves and
others, and ignores the fact that Humanity too is
dust and must return to dust ; that the race, like
the unit, must pass away as a shadow; nor in
intellectualism ; nor in truth for truth's sake ; nor

THE INEVITABLE QUESTION. 23

right for right's sake. All these systems live, and
save their elements of truth, as parts of that Whole
which is crowned by the life of religion. Cut off
from that living unity they crumble to dust ;
because so severed, they are incoherent and unreal.

Multiform in its manifestation and virtuality,
our life is but one life ; nor does it find adequate
actuation and expression save in those actions in
which we consciously make and show ourselves to
be what we really are — obedient, free, sympathetic
instruments of the Divine Will which operates in
and through us. In such actions we make and feel
our reality, and are delivered from the shadowiness
and incoherence of merely phenomenal life; while
phenomenal life itself derives a dependent reality
and substance from the divine.

It matters little to us as conscious beings what
we are passively, and in spite of ourselves ; what
we are, relatively to others. What we are to
ourselves ; what we believe and will ourselves to be;
what we act as if we were, is everything ; that, we
are in the fullest sense. A stick or stone exists for
us, but not for itself. Who would care for the
immortality of a mummy, or of a tranced unself-
conscious existence ?

In the same free act by which we create the
world of our choice and give it relative reality, we
also create ourselves and become to ourselves what
we freely choose ourselves to be — whatever be the
absolute value of our choice in other eyes. If we
reckon ourselves as dust in a world of dust, dust
we are. And yet our soul cannot cleave to the dust;

24 THE INEVITABLE QUESTION.

cannot eat dust and be satisfied. Its will is not
realized or equalled by such an object ; nor by
anything short of what lifts it to the right hand
of God above all that is measurable. We are made
to cling, not to the dust, but to God — " It is good
for me to cleave unto God." Even those heavens
which shrivel us up to nothing so long as we cleave
to the dust, shall be then shrivelled up in our esteem:
" They shall perish, but Thou remainest ; they shall
all wax old as doth a garment, . . . but Thou art
the self-same, and Thy years shall not fail."

Not humility, but cynicism and bitter self-
contempt is gendered by the realization of their
mortality and physical nothingness in those to whom
the physical is the only reality. Humility implies a
comparison of ourselves with something good and
great that dwarfs us in our own esteem. The
indefinite bulk of space, the aimless onward rolling
of countless aeons, may bewilder, but it does not
subdue or humble us. We feel helpless under the
tyranny of force and matter, but we despise and
resent it ; we know that as conscious, free, and
personal, the meanest of us is nobler than all the
stars put together.

But the truth by humbling, exalts us, and
by exalting, humbles us. It shows us that our
body is the symbol of our spiritual being; that
apart from God we are spiritually dust, and to dust
we must return ; that to live His life, to give ex-
pression to his Will and Action in us and through
us, is to bring a satisfying unity into our otherwise
unmeaning and chaotic life. This is the kind of

THE STABILITY OF FAITH. 25

action by which we most fully assert our personality,
our independence of the machinery of the lower
life ; by which we use it, instead of being used by
it, and make each new stage attained to be a
stepping-stone to higher things.

But even in the downward attraction of each
lower level that we have passed ; in the gravitation
of our soul towards the dust and nothingness from
which God has lifted it, we must recognize the
Divine Will which finds utterance in every natural
law. In a sense, it is God who tempts us and it
is God who helps us against temptation. As Jacob
wrestled with God for His blessing ; so, as self-
forming beings we have to wrestle with Him for
each breath of our soul's life. He draws us up
from the dust with one hand, and down to the dust
with the other. He thrusts us from Him and pulls
towards Him. But He wills that we should wrestle
with Him and conquer Him; and hides Himself
only that we may seek Him ; for to seek Him is to
live.

II.

THE STABILITY OF FAITH.1
Now Faith is the substance of things hoped for. — Heb. xi. 1.

The recognition of the dominant part played
by the will in the assent of faith furnishes an answer
to many difficulties experienced by believers them-
selves who are troubled as to the reality of their

1 That faith is a gift of God, a supernatural virtue which can
be induced by no natural skill according to prescribed rules or
methods, is the common belief of all Christians ; but it is also one
that can, and has been, made to shelter a form of pure subjectivism

26 THE STABILITY OF FAITH.

faith owing to their inability to explain the natural
side of the process in a way satisfactory to them-
selves or to others. For which of us does not
almost daily meet with Christians who are seriously
troubled as to the sincerity of their faith, and whose
trouble, on examination, is found to be rooted in the
misapprehension — that unless they feel towards the
mysteries of faith, all, and more than all, that sense
of helpless, irresistible persuasion that they feel in
regard to their own existence, there is something
wrong, something untruthful and insincere in their
professing a certainty which they have not got ?

which tends to do away with all freedom and responsibility in the
matter and to throw the whole burden and blame of unbelief upon
God, who gives to one man the gift which He withholds from
another. Whence the need of maintaining that faith has also a
natural aspect, and involves an orderly process of the mind and
will, of which a well-instructed Christian ought to be able to give
such an account as to exclude all confusion of the supernatural
with the miraculous or the capricious. The following words express
the same thought : " Pour que la definition de l'acte de foi soit
philosophiquement recevable, il faut qu'elle implique le point
d'insertion naturel sur lequel le surnaturel puisse se greffer; il faut
trouver une faculte naturelle qui devienne son point reel d'adaptation
en nous." . . .

"Cette faculte naturelle de croire, voila done le point precis
d'insertion du surnaturel en nous." . . .

" Introduire dans la definition de la foi le concept de la croyance
naturelle, e'est done l'unique moyen de legitimer, aux yeux de la
critique philosophique, la synthese des deux ordres, de donner a
notre acte de foi un charactere de haute philosophie et de trouver
enfin un large terrain de reconciliation possible." (Ed. Pechegut,
Revue du Clcrge Frangais, Dec. I, 1901.)

We may also cordially endorse the words of Abbe Gayraud's
somewhat hostile criticism of M. Pechegut, when he says (Revue du
Clerge Frangais, Dec. 15, 1901) : " Est-il besoin de remarquer ici que
• la faculte naturelle de croire ' que nous possedons, a cte observeeet
mise en lumiere longtemps avaut MM. Olle-Laprune Brunetiere et

THE STABILITY OF FAITH. 27

This is a fallacy which occasionally drives people
out of the Church; and far more often prevents their
coming into it. It is, of course, by no means the
only cause of the rapidly spreading decay of faith,
but it is a sufficiently prominent one to be worth a
few moments' attention.

In this country, the mistake is encouraged by
inevitable contact and intercourse with rationalistic
Christianity to which the idea of faith as a voluntary
certainty is unfamiliar ; which assumes that to
believe, means, to hold a very firm personal opinion
with regard to some religious question, which

Balfour ? Je ne rappellerai que S. Augustin. ... La question est
elucidee depuis longtemps et L'Ecole en cela a beaucoup devance la
philosophic moderne."

According to both the older and the later theology of the Schools
the natural act of belief is an assent of the mind not forced directly
by intellectual motives, but enjoined upon the mind by the will in
response to moral motives. Its supernatural subjective certitude
is due, according to the older view, to the action of grace upon the
will affecting the intellect indirectly ; according to the later, it is
due to the direct action of grace upon the intellect, conditioned by
the previous act of the will. The difference is rather psychological
than theological. In both views grace so collaborates with nature
that the act of faith is supernatural without being in any sense
miraculous.

To say, "I believe because I cannot help it, but do not know
why," may be a comfortable position for oneself, but it is of little
comfort to others who are not conscious of any such unaccountable
prepossession. But to reconcile the notions of faith as a free gift
of God, and as also a reasonable service of which a reasonable
account can be rendered, is a task at which theologians have
laboured with very different results. The play of the will in the
affairs of the understanding is a difficult problem which has been
solved, now in one way, now in another. Comparatively recent
years have seen a reaction, inside as well as outside the Church,
against that purely rationalistic mind-theory which views our
judgments as determined lawfully only by the laws of dialectic,

28 THE STABILITY OF FAITH.

mere opinion, especially in such obscure matters,
can never reach the firmness of mathematical
truths. Now many certainly speak as though they
had imbibed this notion ; as though, in reciting the
Creed, they were giving a summary of their own
private opinions, and not rather making a solemn
promise or vow to stand by these truths through

and regards the direct influence of the will as wholly illegitimate in
matters of belief. Influenced by these assumptions many apolo-
gists had departed from the simpler view of St. Thomas Aquinas,
and had thereby found themselves in a dilemma from which there
was no escape save in a return to the less artificial mind-theory
which underlay the older teaching. "The understanding of one
who believes," says that teaching {Summa Theologica, p. II-IIae.
q. ii. a. I. ad. 3m. et alibi passim), "is determined not by the
reasoning faculty, but by the will ; and, therefore, ' assent ' stands
here for an act of the understanding so far as it is determined by
the will." ( " Intellectus credentis determinatur ad unum, non per
rationem sed per voluntatem ; et ideo assensus hie accipitur pro
actu intellectus secundum quod a voluntate determinatur ad unum.")
According to this, it is much easier to see how faith can, like
every good movement of the will, be supernatural without being
supernormal. Reasoning can show us what we ought to like or
love, but it cannot make us like it or love it. The heart is in the
hand of the Mover of hearts. Granted that there are free beliefs
which are legitimate matter of choice, to be decided not by the
response of abstract reasoning alone, but by that of the whole soul
and character, it follows that faith in the last resort depends upon
Him who, without forcing, inclines the heart by His grace which
He offers to all men at all times, though in different measures
of sufficiency or superabundance. Faith is thus an object of choice
proposed to us by our reason as good and morally obligatory ; but
not as intellectually irresistible. God both guides the reason and
inclines the heart — supernaturally, but not miraculously, nor by
any assignable departure from the known laws of our spiritual life.
Thus the understanding can apprehend and set forth those objective
reasons which would make men desire to give their whole will to
the work of believing what cannot be demonstrated; but thus to
see the reasonableness of an act, still leaves the will free to choose
or reject what is reasonable.

THE STABILITY OF FAITH. 29

thick and thin ; they seem to forget that the Creed
is an expression of a resolve on the part of the will,
far more than an expression of an intuition on the
part of the mind.

Another source of the evil, connected with this,
is the prominence necessarily given in our age and
country to apologetic instructions — oral and written;
to controversy and argumentation of all kinds —
whereby an impression is insensibly created that
faith depends upon arguments as upon its cause, and
that it stands and falls therewith ; whence again it is
plain that no belief so supported can satisfy the
mind as completely as simple axioms and first
principles do. No doubt we are often told that
these arguments are but a condition, and that the
will is the real, effectual cause of faith ; but this
statement is too occasional, too indistinct, to
obliterate the deeper impression created by the
ceaseless din of argument and controversy, and
hence comes the very prevalent disposition on the
part of the educated or half-educated to rest their
belief directly upon arguments, and thus to slip
unconsciously from faith into rationalism.

The only remedy for the disease is the clear and
frequent reassertion of the part played by the will
in the free assent of faith ; for it is not merely that
we must will to apply our mind to considering the
motives and grounds of faith, or that certain moral
dispositions and sympathies are needed for the
appreciation of the grounds and motives ; but given
all this intelligence and appreciation of the grounds
of faith, the act itself is a free assent elicited from

30 THE STABILITY OF FAITH.

the mind — not passively under compulsion of
evidence, but actively under compulsion of the
will.

Faith then is not a passive and forced belief,
but an actively free belief. Under the force of
evidence our mind is passive and receptive like a
mirror ; or, as our eyes are, under the influence of
objects duly presented to them. When the evidence
is put before us clearly, we cannot resist or withhold
our consent, even if we would. But in the case
of a free assent like faith, we have to assert
ourselves. It is not a case of " letting go," but of
" holding on ; " not of drifting down stream, but
of beating our way up against the stream. It is an
occasion for action and energy; for asserting our
personality by opposing ourselves to, and resisting
natural causes, instead of losing our identity by
submitting to them passively and becoming part of
the machinery of nature. It is just in these beliefs
of our free choice that we are most human and
least mechanical ; it is in them that we determine
our own character and life and end, — in some sort,
creating for ourselves the world in which we choose
to live; it is by them, and for them, that we shal
be judged at the last, as worthy of eternal life
or death.

These free beliefs are, as such, the noblest furni-
ture of our mind, far nobler than those forced
assents that we have to yield to necessary and
natural truths, general or particular. These latter
may be compared to those instincts and acquired
habits to which we commit the greater part of our

THE STABILITY OF FAITH. 31

conduct, not because semi-unconscious mechanical
action is better in itself, but because hereby our
attention is liberated for the exercise of those free,
conscious, intelligent acts which are proper to man
as man, and distinguish him from automata.
Similarly, the natural and necessary beliefs that
are forced on us by evidence, are wholly subservient
to, and for the sake of, those free and self-chosen
beliefs, which are the fruit of our own action and
mental life.

But what seems so important to observe is that,
a certain sense of unreality, one might almost say,
of pretence, is the normal and natural accompani-
ment of these freely-chosen, actively-sustained
beliefs ; and that this sense of unrest and infirmity
is in no wise incompatible with the deepest and
most genuine faith. For faith has it in common
with opinion, that it does not quiet or satisfy the
mind according to the laws of thought,1 and by
motives proper to the mind, although it secures
a greater than scientific certainty through the
extrinsic influence of the will, supplementing the
defects of sense and reason.

While then our necessary beliefs are self-sup-
porting, our free-beliefs need to be supported by
the continual exercise of the will ; the former are
like the things we see, that force themselves on our
vision ; the latter are like the pictures we construct

1 "Alio modo intellectus assentit alicui non quia sufficienter
moveatur ab objecto proprio, sed per quamdam electionem voluntarie
declinans in unam partem magis quam in aliam," &c. (Summa Theol,
II-IIae. q. 1. a. iv.; cf. ibid. q. 2. a. 1. c.)

32 THE STABILITY OF FAITH.

in our imagination, that depend on our will for
their maintenance.

For when (for one reason or another) we choose
to believe what we are not forced to believe, it
means that we take and treat as a fact, what, rela-
tively to our perception, is not a fact.1 It means,
not only that we speak and act as though we saw
it to be true (for often we do not act up to our
faith), but that we think and reason and argue in
our own minds as though we saw it to be true.
And yet all the while, we do not see it to be true,
but hold it true by an act of our will. It is
somewhat as when a mathematician assumes a
certain value of x, and builds up all his calculations
on that assumption. So with faith ; what my natural
reason proclaims to be bread, I freely believe to be
the Body of Christ. I not only worship it and
receive it as such ; but in my reasonings and reflec-
tions I build on that assumption; and bring the rest
of my mind into agreement with this belief.

Now in all this there seems to be the same
element of pretence and unreality that comes into
mere fictions and working hypotheses. I seem to
be saying from the teeth outwards that something
is white, while in my heart, all the time, I know it
to be black. Yet the difference is that, in the case
of hypotheses, and fictions and other freely chosen
beliefs, the motive of our choice is not such as to
make it a matter of supreme moral obligation;
whereas in the case of faith we hold to the belief

1 Cf. Prsestet iides supplementura
Sensuum defectui

THE STABILITY OF FAITH. 33

in obedience to the command of God as made
known by the voice of conscience. And further-
more, we hold to it with that degree of willingness
which He commands. Did we see the truth as it
lies in God's mind, our intellect would be irresistibly
forced to assent to it more firmly than to any
natural truth ; but since we do not, and cannot,
we throw our whole will, without any reserve, into
the act of belief, that it may have as much certainty
for us as our will can possibly give to it. But all
this will never prevent that seeming black to us,
which God tells us and which we sincerely believe to
be white, which we treat as though it were white
in our conduct and in our reasonings ; and therefore
a certain sense of unreality and fiction is an essen-
tial part of the trial of faith.

Nor is this peculiar to truths of faith. It holds
equally for those moral principles and ideals whose
values we accept on testimony before we have come
to prove it by experience ; it holds even of physical
and scientific truths, so far as we take them on
faith, not seeing the reasons for them ; for there are
numbers, for instance, who believe firmly that they
must die, who regulate their conduct, thought, and
speech by that belief, and yet to whom it is such a
fiction and unreality that death comes in the end
as a surprise and shock.

But it must not be forgotten that a free belief
which costs us at first some effort to sustain and
live up to, in process of time comes to be woven
into the very fabric of our thought and life, so that
even were our will to change, and our faith to
P

34

THE STABILITY OF FAITH.

fail, it would need some effort to cast aside the
belief and to free ourselves from its influence. Tc
a large extent this is due to the natural growth
of mental habits ; and the apparent reality and
firmness that it gives to our faith is not due to any
strengthening of the will to believe, or to what
deserves the name of "virtue." At best, it is the
removal of a certain natural difficulty in believing,
for which relief we ought to be thankful ; seeing
at the same time that we do not turn it to an
occasion of slothfulness in faith. Thus manual
labour, which at first calls for self-conquest and
will-effort, eventually through the mere strength-
ening of the muscles ceases to make any such
demand. This muscular habit must not be con-
founded with virtue, which means an increased
readiness of will, a habit of self-conquest. So
neither must the negative easiness in belief which
comes from custom, imitation, or even thoughtless-
ness, be confounded with that easiness which comes
from an increased goodness and strength of will
subduing the mind, in obedience to the Will of
God. This latter is compatible with all that feeling
of unreality, pretence, and dreaminess which so
needlessly disturbs those who hear that "the
certainty of faith " is the highest of all certainties,
and who falsely conclude that doubt about faith
should seem to them as impossible as doubt about
their own existence ; which of course it does not,
ought not, and cannot ; else, faith were not free.

There is some danger — is there not ? — lest we
who have for so many years, perhaps from infancy,

THE STABILITY OF FAITH. 35

been accustomed to speak and think and act on the
suppositions of faith ; who have lived chiefly in the
society of those governed by these beliefs; who
have had the adventitious support that education,
custom, tradition, and example can lend to faith, —
there is some danger lest we confound this negative
facility in believing, due to the removal of difficulty,
with that positive facility due to the conquest of
difficulty, — with that strengthening of the " will to
believe " implied in the growth of faith. The
strength which these causes add to a belief is no
guarantee of its truth ; since they operate no less
effectually to confirm the errors of misbelievers
than the faith of believers, and are therefore a
curse or a blessing according to circumstances.
These crutches provided for faith by natural habit,
education, and example, may spare us from putting
too great a tax on our legs, may support us when
else our strength would fail ; but it is the support
of a wooden prop, not the vital support of intelli-
gent virtue ; and it may well be that the faith of
those who lack the facility is stronger than ours,
for the very reason that it needs to be stronger.

The more our beliefs have become customary
to us, and have been wrought into the tissue of life
and mind, and the more they have become inde-
pendent of the exercise of our free-will, and of the
virtue of faith, the less are we able to put ourselves
in the condition of those whose belief is the fruit
of faith and of faith alone ; still if we cannot feel, at
least we can understand their state of mind and
soul, and so far minister to its necessities.

36 FAITH, AS A CHOICE.

III.

FAITH, AS A CHOICE.
With the heart man believeth unto righteousness.— Rem. x. 10.

In regard to our beliefs and assents our mind is
both active and passive, determining and deter-
mined ; it forms itself and is formed by other causes
and influences outside itself. It is only in so far as
it is freely self-forming and active, that it is delivered
from the determinism of Nature, from being merely
a wheel in the mechanism of the universe ; or that
it defines, asserts, and creates its own distinct per-
sonality as "other" than the world, to which it
opposes itself. Those who consider the automatism
of habit and instinct to be the noblest form of
human activity, to which free and conscious action
is but as a means to an end ; who value the ease of
virtue as a release from the difficulty of that self-
asserting, self-creating action by which we strike up
against the stream of necessity, instead of passively
floating in a dream down the currents of inclination ;
who fail to recognize that the use and justification
of habit is but to free us for wider, higher, and
more strenuous energizing and self-creation — such
thinkers will consistently look upon faith and other
free assents as a derogation from pure intellectualism ;
and will regard necessary and irresistible truths as
the noblest possession of our mind. That they are
an essential and indispensable possession ; that they
are the prerequisite condition of the very possibility
of free assents must be allowed. But consistently

FAITH, AS A CHOICE. 37

with the only sane view of the relation of habit to
action ; of determinism to freedom ; of nature to
individuality, we must say that necessary beliefs are
valuable simply as making free beliefs possible ; that
it profits us to be moved, and helped, and directed
just so far as thereby we are enabled more largely
to move, help, and direct ourselves ; and that there-
fore faith and free assent is the great end of our
mental life; and understanding, but a means to,
and a condition of faith.

Not that the will can make that to be true in
itself which is not true, except so far as its own
decision, with all the resulting consequences, intro-
duces a new series of facts into the world ; or so far
as a freely chosen belief, whether false or true,
determines the working of our thought and life, and
is therefore pregnant with practical issues. But
even in regard to facts not created or creatable by
its own act, the will can, may, and at times ought,
to make that a solid fact relatively to our life and
action, which is not a fact relatively to our under-
standing; it may resolve to live, inwardly and
outwardly, by a truth which is intellectually doubtful,
when that doubt is not so strong as to make the
belief ridiculous. And when it is so weak as to
make unbelief ridiculous, the will is bound to come
in and supplement the defect of the understanding.
To refuse to act or argue upon a truth till it is
irresistibly evident, is to cut down our beliefs to a
few barren tautologies, and to paralyze almost
entirely our inner and outer activity. Save for the
very few that have been forced upon our passive

38 PA I'M, AS A CHOICE.

assent by evidence and direct experience, the great
mass of our beliefs, piled up on that narrow basis,
are reversible, and depend for their stability on the
action or permission of the will. We have just
enough "necessary truth," as it is called, in our
mind, to guide us in our search for further truth ;
and to secure that our free beliefs, if prudently
formed, will ever approximate more and more closely
to things as they are. In the conduct of our mind,
as in that of our life, we are left to our own sagacity
and prudence, — to the wise or foolish use of our
faculties and of our experience. In both cases risk
and venture are the conditions of success ; and
good luck has to be balanced against ill. Only in
the rarest and least important matters, do we, or
can we, philosophically suspend our judgment. The
ceaseless weaving-process of our thought hurries on
our assent as imperatively as the pressure of outward
life forces our practical decisions. Later, we may
have to unravel what we have laboriously wrought
into the tissue of our mind, but for the time being
we must say Yea or Nay ! and face the consequences
for better or for worse. For except when we are
merely theorizing, most of our beliefs are so inex-
tricably bound up, both as causes and effects, with
our practical life, that we cannot afford to remain
indetermined.

In the ethical order we praise him alone "who
might have transgressed yet did not transgress;
might have done evil but did not do evil; " else his
innocence were not his own, but something imposed
upon him. As soon then as we recognize that the

FAITH, AS A CHOICE. 39

formation of our mind, the selection of our beliefs,
is committed to our liberty, we see that such free
beliefs are more truly our own, than the necessary
beliefs that are imposed upon our passive accept-
ance ; that by them alone we are characterized, and
are cut off from the general mechanism of nature as
relatively independent beings.

The pure in heart shall see the truth, means
that — given equal data, and the same intellectual
advantage — the morally better man will strike the
truth more nearly, will be more happy in his guesses
and ventures, since he is more in harmony with
reality, more subtly responsive to its hints. Not
only the mind but the whole soul is the organ of
truth. Successful scientific thought — unless when
it deals with the barest forms and abstract fabrica-
tions of the mind ; with the mere receptacles and
frames of knowledge — asks for patience, industry,
self-denial, honesty, candour, detachment, humility,
love of truth, courage and the whole catena of
gospel virtues. Far more are these moral disposi-
tions needed for the fabrication of our practical
mind, i.e., of the whole body of our beliefs concern-
ing the end and meaning of our life, and of the
steps by which that end is to be reached ; for these
are problems bearing directly on our affections, and
in regard to which, pain and pleasure, hope and
fear, joy and sorrow, come in to bias our judgment.
In science and history many beliefs are forced upon
us and our will intervenes for the most part only
indirectly. But in practical thought the first prin-
ciple, and all that hangs upon it, is of free choice.

40 FAITH, AS A CHOICE.

Our notions of right or wrong in particular cases
depend upon our belief as to the general meaning of
life ; and this, upon our belief concerning the world
as a whole. It is plain that, we who accept the
Christian view of man's supernatural destiny, hold
it on faith, by a voluntary act which sustains that
view for us, and gives it a relative reality and stabi-
lity which it could never derive from the under-
standing ; our will creates for us that supernatural
system in which we elect to live, and gives it
substance and reality — for that is real for us which
we treat as reality, and to which we accommodate
our inward and outward life. At any moment we
can say No! and our whole world vanishes into
nothing like a cloud-city.

Apart from revelation, all that the understanding,
working upon the data of moral sense, and guided
by the ethical sympathies of a pure heart, can force
upon us is, the duty, the rightfulness, of freely
assenting to what may be called the religious view
of life — the duty of a certain natural faith in God
and in man's divine destiny. Far less can it force
upon us an immoral or pessimistic or simply
sceptical view. But it does force us, in every free
act, implicitly or explicitly to choose, or to modify,
some one or other possible view of life — rational,
religious, sensual, earthly or devilish. If we stir at
all, it must be in some direction — towards some
point of the compass.

Since then no theory of life as a whole, can be
coercively evident to the mind, irrespective of moral
sentiments and sympathies, it rests with each of us,

FAITH, AS A NECESSITY.

by an act of will to create (that is, to give relative
reality and substance to) the sort of world to which
we shall accommodate our thought and action. To
do so is our fundamental duty; it is the implicit
choice upon which the Tightness of every other
choice is founded. It might seem pleasanter could
we evade this responsibility, and were our mind, in
this point, passive like a mirror, that reflects what-
ever rays strike upon its surface according to an
inevitable necessity. But if free action is our very
life and being, it is manifestly more consonant with
our self-forming nature that each of us should
construct for himself the kind of world in which he
would live, and that he should be judged in this
matter according as his mind and will is more in
sympathy with God's, and according as, by purity of
heart, he knows himself more truly and deeply, and
discerns more clearly the kind of life which he was
created to lead.

IV.

FAITH, AS A NECESSITY.

Without faith it is impossible to please God.— Heb. xi. 6.

Faith which is the foundation of our spiritual
life is before all things a personal relation between
ourselves and Christ ; it is an affection of our whole
soul in regard to Him ; and by no means a merely
intellectual relation of our mind to a truth or a
system of truths. It is true, in a sense, to say that
the " object " of our faith is the Apostles' Creed,
which is a bundle of propositions set forth, com-
mented on, and considerably amplified by the

At PAITHt AS A NECESSITY.

Catholic Church. But faith in the teacher comes
before faith in the teaching. We must believe in
Christ and in the Church, before we believe in what
they teach us ; and it is with this prior faith we are
concerned.

The three "theological virtues," as they are
called, of Faith, Hope, and Charity, supplement
the essential dependence and insufficiency of the
soul, by wedding it to God, as to its natural support
and prop. Vce solit woe to him that is alone, is
the doom of every human soul that lives in proud
separation from God and man. Away from society
our mind would lie dormant, our tongue silent;
we should be helpless, loveless. It is far more by the
mind of others, the strength of others, the love of
others that we live, than by our own. We are
essentially members of society, and broken off
from its unity we perish like twigs plucked from the
tree. Separate, we have no power of subsistence
or self-maintenance.

But in respect to the highest life of our soul, to
live, is to lean upon God, and to appropriate His
life ; it is to avail ourselves of His light, and of
His strength, and of His love ; for here we not
only fail ourselves, but our fellow-creatures fail us.
In other practical matters, our beliefs are rightly
and reasonably determined by the society in which
we live ; nor do we seek to investigate for ourselves,
independently, what universal experience is agreed
about. But in the most practical of all matters,
namely, the ultimate end of life and the means
whereby it is to be attained, human experience fails

FAITH, AS A NECESSITY. 43

us, and human reason gives too wavering and un-
certain an answer to stablish us in the hour of
temptation ; and He only can assure us, who is
Himself our first beginning and our last end ; and
the means whereby we are to reach it — who is the
Way and the Truth and the Life.

Our reason cannot go round and compass these
truths which are at the extreme boundary of its
horizon. It can touch them at a stretch, timidly,
uncertainly; but it cannot fully apprehend, much
less comprehend them. Yet of all truths they are the
most vital, the best worth knowing. Why then has
God set them so far and made them so difficult ?
Not because He delights to puzzle us ; or to tempt
us by ingeniously wrapping the truth in riddles.
He who makes a riddle strives to hide what is plain,
whereas God's whole endeavour in revelation is to
make plain what is hid ; He " desires all men to be
saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth."
It is because of our present state of intellectual
and moral imperfection, that He is simply unable to
give us more light than we have got or can receive.
He longs to give us more, and to lead us, as quickly
as may be, to that full light which they enjoy who
see the Truth unveiled and face to face ; who speak
with It " as a friend with a friend." " I have many
things to say to you," He tells us, " but you cannot
bear them now." And again : " What I do thou
knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter."

Our mental eye cannot bear more than a certain
limited intensity of light. Children question us
about fifty things that we would gladly explain to

44 FAITH, AS A NECESSITY.

them, but their minds are insufficiently prepared by
education to understand our explanations ; they
would in many cases completely misunderstand
them, and be hurt by them. " Cast not your pearls
before swine," says our Saviour, 'lest they turn
again and rend you." Reasons to children are often
pearls before swine. How often our own conduct or
the conduct of others is better unexplained, than
explained to those who cannot possibly know the
infinite context which justifies it !

But besides this mental incapacity and ignorance,
our moral incapacity makes us unfit to receive the
full light all at once. We may not give people in-
formation, however true, that we know will create
insuperable temptations for them, and will be an
occasion of ruin to them. It were often wiser to
let a boy think he must earn his bread, than to
reveal to him prematurely the fact of his in-
dependence. There must therefore be an infinity
of truths in God's mind which as yet we are
mentally and morally incapable of receiving ; and
for this reason, as well as for others, His revelation,
being only a fractional truth, must necessarily seem
mysterious, disjointed and even perverse.

It is therefore, not of God's free choice, but of
the necessary nature of things, that the finite
intelligence must fail at the points where things
emerge from, and remerge into, the Infinite ; and
yet it is just at these points that those great
truths lie touching " the things that belong to
our peace." If then, at the best of times, in
our calmest moments of clear intuition, our

FAITH, AS A NECESSITY. 45

reason's grasp on these life -truths is so im-
perfect, how shall it hold to them in the hour of
passion and temptation, when we do not even want
to believe, and when our weak eyes are blinded
with the fire and smoke of our turbulent affections ?
In the affairs of our natural and outward life,
common prudence tells us to trust the judgment
of our friends and advisers in any crisis when we
are like to lose our heads, and be carried away into
hasty utterances and actions, through the heat of
anger or of any other excitement ; that is, we are
to put aside our own judgment and not to try to
see, when we are consciously incapable of seeing
straight ; but by an act of our will we are to assent
to, and act on, the judgment of others. This is
the whole principle of faith ; which is, everywhere,
a holding on by the will to truths which for the
moment the mind does not see, or is incapable of
seeing. Even when I adhere to my former good
resolution and refuse to open the question again in
the moment of temptation, this is a sort of faith
in my better self — an appeal from self drunk to
self sober. It is a voluntary refusal to examine in
the twilight or the dark, a matter already examined
and decided in the full light of day ; it is a wilful
blind holding on to what I saw before, but cannot
see now. And so far, faith is a condition of success
not only in the spiritual and moral life, but in the
natural and secular life. Men who shilly-shally at
the crisis of action, who distrust their past clear
judgments, and attempt to decide in the moment
of confusion, are doomed to failure and defeat.

45 FAITH, AS A NECESSITY.

Much more needful is it however, and indeed
altogether indispensable to salvation that, in the
dark pass of temptation, we should reach out with
our will and lay firm hold of God's immutable word,
and so steady ourselves against the shock of doubt.
Nor is it only an expediency, but a positive and
most imperative duty laid upon us by conscience.
The same inner voice that obliges us to morality
and holiness, obliges us to the essential conditions
of holiness, and of these faith is the most essential :
" Without faith it is impossible to please God ;
for he that would draw near to God," who would
more perfectly resemble God in holiness, "must
believe that He exists and that He is the rewarder
of them that seek Him." All our beliefs are but
closer determinations of this simple creed touching
the fact of God and the nature of God ; and all
our doubts are as to one or the other of these
articles. When we rightly estimate the goodness
and love of God, we are tempted to doubt the fact
of His existence ; when we are convinced as to this
fact, we question if He can be all good and loving.
He is, to our dim sight, either a beautiful dream or
an unbeautiful reality.

And yet if, in spite of all appearance to the
contrary, we do not hold fast to the belief that
Love and Goodness is at the base of everything ;
that Truth and Right will infallibly prevail in the
long run ; that every obedience to conscience,
however trivial and secret, will in the end meet
with just reward, moral life becomes a simple
impossibility. Therefore God, in the voice of

THE TEMPER OE E A IT II. 47

conscience, commands faith and bids us put away
any doubt and hesitation which is equivalent to
moral suicide. As in business matters and practical
affairs a man does wrong by indulging a tendency
to indecision after he has arrived at prudent and
sufficient certainty ; so in the highest business of life
a man sins against God and his own soul who gives
entrance to enervating doubt, after he has received
sufficient light to make him responsible.

By faith, in the fuller sense, we therefore mean,
holding on to the truth with our will, in obedience to
God or to conscience ; and because we recognize
that it is wrong to doubt ; and that, by doing so,
we imperil our souls. And this is true alike of that
mere outline of revelation which is vouchsafed to
all men ; and of its fuller determinations in tho
Christian and Catholic Religion.

THE TEMPER OF FAITH.

Now, Lord, dost Thou let Thy servant depart in peace according
to Thy word. — Luke ii. 29.

The bondage and entanglement of the mind in
face of the inscrutable perplexities of God's ways,
is part of the necessary trial of finite intelligence
slowly struggling towards the light — towards the
truth that makes it free and bursts its bonds asunder.
Love presents itself to us in blood-stained garments
and terrible aspect ; Wisdom comes to us decked
out in the cap and bells of folly; and it needs
strong-minded faith to resist or to dispel these

48 THE TEMPER OF FAITH.

disturbing illusions created by the murky atmos-
phere with which we are surrounded. Faith of
this patient kind often merits, even here, a rift in
the fog, and a sharp clear glance into the brightness
beyond, and lives, in the dark intervals, on these
flashes of sunshine. For some, perhaps, the mist
never lifts on this side of death ; for many, it clears
away at, or towards, the end — a grace we beg when

we say :

Largire lumen vespere
Quo vita nunquam decidat.1

God seems, not seldom, to mingle the dawn of
everlasting vision with the vesper-light of faith
whose sad day is passing away in peace. This is
his guerdon who has fought the good fight, finished
his course, and kept the faith, patiently, wisely,
strongly, not seeking a sign, nor dictating the terms
of his capitulation, as he who said: "Except I see
the print in His hands, except I thrust my hand
into His side, I will not believe " — the guerdon of
Simeon, the type of all such, whose evening was
gladdened by the dawn of another sun, making for
him one unbroken day of time and eternity.

And of what sort was he? "A just man"
fretted and saddened by the crookednesses and
irregularities of life; by the exaltation of the
proud and untruthful, and the depression of the
lowly and sincere ; consumed with a zeal for
God's House, hungering and thirsting after justice.
"A God-fearing man" (timoratus) ; full of rever-

1 O shed o'er life's declining day
The light that passeth not away.

THE TEMPER OF FAITH 49

ential awe; sensible of that infinite gulf between
the Absolute mind and ours, which is wide as the
East from the West, deep as the earth below the
heavens; not surprised therefore or childishly
indignant at the seeming strangeness and perver-
sity of God's words and ways when meted in the
tiny balance of our reason. Hence, doubtless, a
silent man, internally and externally; "God is in
heaven and thou art on earth, wherefore let thy
words be few" — not hasty to explain God's ways
to himself or to others, or to jump at tempting
hypotheses, as though he had been God's councillor
standing by and advising when the foundations
of the earth were laid and the heavens spread
abroad as a curtain ; swift to hear, to observe, to
remember ; slow to speak, to affirm, to dogmatize ;
reverently uncertain, knowing that Eternal Truth
flies from rough and violent hands, and will not
brook syllogistic chains and fetters.

Again : he was himself awaiting the consolation
of Israel; crying, "O that Thou wouldst burst
through the dark clouds and come down. Come
Lord and delay no longer; my soul hath fainted
for Thy salvation saying : When wilt Thou comfort
me?" He was not merely just, not merely striving
after that impersonal objective order and equality,
which is God's will on earth ; not merely rendering
to each one his due, from a love of right and equity,
from a desire of abstract justice ; but he was
11 charitable " in that he sought the good of others
from a motive of personal love in their regard. He
was one who, though living apart, yet in his thought

50 THE TEMPER OF FAITH.

and affections lived wholly out of himself and for
the sake of others, knowing well that they often
minister most effectually to the common good of
others who but stand and wait. A strong enthusiast
for the salvation of Israel, kindling his heart with
dreams and visions of the glory to be revealed ;
yet not crying aloud, nor lifting up his voice in
the street, not agitating, directing, advising; not
stretching unbidden hands of faithless mistrust to
steady the tottering ark, or to sustain the trembling
columns of Church and State : full of unshakable
confidence and of the hope that cries : " It is good
to wait silently for God's salvation ; " and, " If thou
wouldst only suffer in silence, assuredly thou wouldst
see the advent of God's help."1

Again : " The Holy Spirit was with him ; " for
only by the Spirit are the deep things of God, the
truths underlying appearances, apprehended. The
animal man, like the animals, lives only in the
present, on the surface; he is not necessarily a
sensualist, a Herod, for whom Christ has never a
word save the eloquence of silence ; but is one who
confounds seeming with being; who takes one
fraction of the soul — the senses, or the intellect —
as though it were the whole man ; who gives
exclusive value to some one aspect of our many-
sided experience to the prejudice of the rest; for-
getting that God and Truth and Reality and Life
are apprehended not by the senses alone, not by the
sentiments, not by science and metaphysics, but

1 " Bonum est prsestolari cum silentio salutare Dei." " Si tu scis
pati et tacere procul dubio vitfebis auxilium Dei venire ad te."

RATIONALISM.

by the whole action of the whole man — " with all
thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy strength."

Finally: He had received an answer from the
Spirit that he should not die till he had seen the
Lord's Christ. Already his faith and hope had
been rewarded by an answer to his unspoken desire,
by a rift in the cloud and a glimpse beyond the veil.
But now his hope is crowned, not with full fruition,
but with the prophetic certitude that makes faith no
longer an effort, but an irresistible conviction, as
satisfying as vision itself. This is the light that
replaces the evening twilight, for those who through
life have laboured hard to keep the faith, and who
already begin to enter into their rest. To his senses
and narrower reason nothing is apparent to Simeon
but a helpless babe lying in his arms; but heart
speaks to heart, and the Spirit discerns the deep
things of the Spirit, and reveals to him the Salvation
prepared before the face of all people ; the Light
of the Gentiles and the Glory of Israel.

VI.

RATIONALISM.

He who will not receive the Kingdom of God as a child shall
not enter therein.— Luke xviii. 17.

As far as concerns the further elaboration of the
belief in God the Rewarder, no one will contend
that the ignorance of those who are territorially
removed from the Church's reach should be held
culpable ; but we are apt to forget that there are

52 RATIONALISM.

other than territorial barriers which are just as
effectual in holding the truth from open and willing
eyes. The facts and principles that we have taken
on faith from our parents and guides during child-
hood and which we have never verified for ourselves,
form a large proportion of our mental furniture,
even in the case of the most independent minds ;
and our ability to see and criticize depends entirely
on the sum total of the facts and principles of
which we are in possession ; and, what with our
ignorance and our positive errors, there are
numbers of truths to which even the most intelli-
gent and enlightened are irremediably blind.

Early training and education often make it
psychologically impossible for the light of truth
to enter into certain corners and crevices of our
mind. Again, it is obvious that to profit by a
teacher we must at least understand his language ;
but it is not less true that we must understand
his mind-language, that is, his modes of thought,
his categories, his assumptions, his fundamental
standpoints. But here the agnostic, or the non-
Christian, is very often as far removed from the
understanding of the Church's voice as if he were
buried in the heart of pagandom. Again, a man
must be some way acceptable to us before we enter
into converse with him. Christ indeed drew all
men of good-will to His side ; but the Christian is
not Christ ; and is often repellent rather than
attractive ; so that again we have, in effect, the
disadvantage of distance. Often it is the eternal
scandal of Christian inconsistency, as contrasting

RATIONALISM. 33

with the better lives of some who make no pro-
fession ; often it is the unintelligence, the ignorance,
the violent dogmatism of clumsy and unworthy
exponents of the faith, that repels those who are
more in sympathy with the gentleness of Christ,
than are many of His followers. For the loudest
and most forward champions of any cause are not
the most likely to do it credit ; it is they who
delight to accentuate and exaggerate differences, to
minimize agreements, to keep old wounds open,
and under cover of zeal for truth, to gratify
that tyrannical instinct which bids us force our
opinions on others, just because they are our own
opinions.

Such a spirit is peculiarly repellent to those
whose best disposition for faith lies precisely in
their sense of the extreme feebleness of the human
mind in presence of the problems of eternity.
However essential dogma may be to religion, yet
what is called the "dogmatizing spirit" is near of kin
to the narrow rationalistic spirit, and as far removed
as possible from the spirit of faith. The desire to
unify, systematize, illustrate and explain the dis-
jointed fragments of eternal truth which God has
given us in revelation, has its legitimate sphere, but
may easily step beyond it and become inordinate.
It is an ease and rest for the mind to see, or even
to conjecture, the connection and purport of God's
mysteries ; yet it is a luxury rather than a necessity
or a right ; and if too freely indulged in it soon
comes to be regarded as a right. It was the abuse
of scholasticism that gave birth to that narrow

54 RATIONALISM.

rationalism which is answerable for the prevalent
decay of faith in modern times.

Because, to some extent, revelation may be
harmonized into one system with the truths of
reason and the facts of experience, it does not follow
that such harmony is the best or the essential con-
dition of its credibility. This thirst for clearness,
completeness, comprehensibility; this impatience of
shadows and half-lights; this forgetfulness of the
essentially analogical nature of all our conceptions
of spiritual and eternal realities, is altogether
antagonistic to faith. When we find the principles
of arithmetic, or of experimental science, used
together with the principles of strict revelation, to
deduce necessary conclusions, with no allowance
made for the symbolic and inadequate character of
the revealed premisses, we feel at once that reason
has overstepped the limits of its lawful territory
and has given place to rationalism. Analogy is
not necessarily mere metaphor ; but it is as
insecure a basis of argumentation. What we have
called the "dogmatizing" spirit is a product of
this rationalism. Its assurance is not really be-
gotten of an obedient will, holding fast to God in
spite of mental difficulties; but rather, of the
absence of all sense of difficulty; of shallow
clearness of vision to which everything is obvious
and common-sense, and every doubt an evidence
either of stupidity or of bad faith.

Dialectical minds are much more concerned
about the correctness of sequences and inferences
than about the truth of the premisses from which

RATIONALISM. 55

they are drawn or of the conclusions to which
they lead. Like combative people, who care little
which side they are on, so long as the battle is well
fought and the rules of the game observed, it is the
process that delights them and not the result. What
they are defending ultimately is, for them, a mere
bundle of words, a formula accepted on hearsay, and
no more. They have never translated these words
into realities, or tried to build their thought upon
things; and since their words and conceptions are
but the ghosts, outlines, and shadows of concrete
things whose reality is simply inexhaustible by our
thought, to these word-weavers nothing is incom-
prehensible or mysterious ; everything is as clear as
"twice two is four" — and as barren. With such
minds the desire to secure a dialectical victory over
any comer, might at first sight be mistaken for a
zeal for the truth, but it does not need much dis-
cernment to perceive that such zeal is similar in
character to the excitement about a game whose
results are confessedly not of the slightest con-
sequence to the player.

But the mind to which faith is congenial is one
which has a profound distrust of unreality and
formalism; which translates phrases into things,
which is not content that the words should be true
for this man or for that, but asks : " Are they true
for me? Have I found it so?" Dealing habitually
with the inexhaustible complexity of the concrete,
and not with abstractions, which are simple only
because they are barren forms created by the mind
itself, it is familiar with the infinite difficulty and

56 RATIONALISM.

mystery of things ; it is deeply conscious of its own
limitation and infirmities, and willing to bear with
the infirmities of other minds. Hence it is " swift
to hear and slow to speak," swift to gather in
evidence, and slow to decide ; its spirit is therefore
the very antithesis of the dogmatic rationalistic
spirit.

Now, just as this rationalistic tendency, though
it is adverse to faith, may, and often does co-exist
with faith ; so the " mystical " tendency — as we may
call it for want of a better name— though favourable
to faith often co-exists with true agnosticism — never
of course with the pseudo-agnosticism which is only
a disguised dogmatism. Up to a certain point faith
and doubt traverse the same path undistinguished,
and then they separate at its bifurcation and take on,
each its own distinctive characteristic. In other
words, they have a common element in that deep
sense of the insufficiency of the human mind to
grasp and hold firmly the ultimate and vital truths
of eternity. Sometimes this intellectual diffidence
is due to the natural calibre of a mind that is large
and comprehensive, and so apprehends its own
ignorance instinctively ; oftener it is developed, if
not wholly created, by prolonged and futile effort *o
attain the unattainable, to comprehend the incom-
prehensible; so that the agnostic is but the chastened
and repentant rationalist in whom the fever has
worked its own cure — and these are the agnostics
whose agnosticism is the most incurable, partly,
because they often retain a secret vein of positiveness
in their very agnosticism, partly, because two mental

RATIONALISM. 57

revolutions in a life-time can hardly be expected in
ordinary cases. " Except I see, I will not believe "
often continues to be their attitude of mind, even
after they have convinced themselves of the impossi-
bility of seeing ; they resent the darkness in which
ultimate truths are shrouded, as indicating a radical
crookedness in the nature of things that justifies an
intellectual pessimism and despair.

The cure for this disease is not to be sought in
a return to the narrowness of rationalism, in an
endeavour to minimize difficulties and explain them
away or to deny the essential infirmities of the
human mind; nor yet in a forced and insincere act
of blind faith, as it were, burying one's head under
the clothes so as not to see the spectres by one's
bedside ; such pseudo-faith were but intellectual
cowardice and suicide. Rather it is to be sought in
a more consistent, a deeper and truer agnosticism,
like that of which Christ speaks, saying: "Thou
hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and
hast revealed them unto the little ones ; " and again:
" Unless ye be converted and become as little
children ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom
of heaven." Doubtless this is what the egoistic
dogmatizer is always dinning into our ears, quoting
Scripture for his own purpose ; " intellectual pride "
and " secret immorality " are his two explanations of
any opinions other than his own ; but he does not
notice the difference between the merely negative
simplicity and docility of the child ; and, the reflex
and positive simplicity to which a man is gradually
converted by wisdom acting on experience. We are

58 RATIONALISM.

not to become children, but as children ; — like, but
not the same.

Of the difficulties which faith encounters, some
are more obviously superficial and appeal only to the
professedly rationalistic mind. We mean diffi-
culties in the very effort to rationalize mysteries and
bring them within human comprehension, or at
least to harmonize them with particular systems
of philosophy. Such difficulties are more often
suggested, than answered by the very exponents and
defenders of faith, in their laudable endeavour to
make things easy and agreeable to common-sense.
What is tendered as an indulgence comes to be
claimed as a right ; and if the metaphysical explana-
tions of the Trinity in Unity, or of the Hypostatic
Union, or of the Real Presence seem to break down?
the very reasonableness of faith is considered to be
thereby destroyed. With such we are not concerned ;
but rather with the secret unconscious rationalism
of many a professed agnostic, which makes him
regard the very existence of mysteries as a grievance;
and it is in the purging out of this last narrowness
that the soul is immediately prepared for reflex or
intelligent faith.

For indeed, it is a narrowness — a sort of in-
tellectual " provincialism " that makes us fail to
realize how necessarily impossible it is for any
part to comprehend that Whole of which it is a part.
Were our eye or our ear gifted with independent
personality and intelligence it would assuredly
conceive the whole body as an eye or ear of some
super-excellent kind, and would pass judgment on

RATIONALISM. 5$

its action accordingly ; unless indeed it knew of its
own necessary infirmity, in which case no difficulty
would be very surprising. To the chicken the hen-
coop would be a great egg-shell, and the world a
great hen-coop ; and to man the universe is an
infinite earth governed by an infinite man — the only
difference being that man can and ought to know his
own nescience. Nothing but the whole can be really
like the whole, except where we are dealing with a
mere quantitative homogeneous totality, such as the
ocean whose every part is a little ocean. Yet we go
on criticizing the work of God on the supposition
that the universe is a machine, or an organism, or a
kingdom or something which we can comprehend —
only on an indefinitely large scale ; it is not its nature,
we think, that baffles us, only its bigness. As long
as we argue from images and metaphors, our pre-
dictions and anticipations must be hopelessly
disappointed and set at nought ; and yet beyond
images and metaphors we cannot possibly go. It
is only when this very obvious consideration has
penetrated from our thought into our imagination,
that we begin to realize, as well as to assent to, the
truth that as the heavens are above the earth so are
God's ways above our ways and His thoughts above
our thoughts ; that nothing is so unreasonable as to
expect God's ways to seem always kind or reasonable
to us ; that a plain and comprehensible revelation or
philosophy is antecedently condemned as absurd, on
the very score of its plainness ; and is thereby con-
victed as being of human authorship.

This "quia absurdum " is of course no reason for

60 VERBAL UNBELIEF AND REAL.

believing absurd theories about the Whole, which
minds, as limited as our own, would fain impose
upon us as divine revelations ; though it is some-
times invoked in behalf of such impostures. Yet a
true revelation of what is necessarily to us incom-
prehensible, will assuredly prove bewildering and
full of inextricable difficulties. Credo quia absurdum
is perhaps a paradox ; but a religion without diffi-
culties stands self-condemned as incredible.

VII.

VERBAL UNBELIEF AND REAL.
The fool hath said in his heart : There is no God.— Ps. xiv. 9.

In ancient thought wickedness was but folly or
unwisdom in moral and practical matters, even as
virtue was but light and understanding — hence
"the fool" was the wicked man. No doubt the
voluntary character of this self-caused folly was
implied, though not emphasized; just as with us
the moral untruth involved in every sin escapes the
attention that is concentrated on the obliquity of
will. Speculatively in his intellect the wicked man
may be a theist ; but in his heart and affections and
practice he is an atheist. The devils believe and
tremble, i.e., they would rather not believe; they
would rather there were no God, no justice, no
goodness; whereas faith implies a love of what is
believed, a gladness that it is true. Similarly a
man, through some accidental confusion of mind,
may be speculatively an unbeliever, and yet wish

VERBAL UNBELIEF AND REAL. 61

in his heart that Christianity were true ; and by his
whole life confess his affection for it.

But when we consider how much we fail in self-
analysis and self-expression, it is not unlikely that
our verbal confessions of theism or atheism may in
many cases belie our true mental attitude. As in
other matters, we mistake intellectual difficulties and
obscurities for denial ; and theoretical conviction for
real. Yet a chain of the most cogent evidence may
fail to destroy any real belief in the value of this life,
or to create a real belief in the value of the next.
Formal reason is impotent against the spiritual
sense, in a case of conflict. Yet we fancy that our
beliefs are dictated by the former, and give ourselves
out as holding what in our deepest mind we do not
hold. Nearly all the utterances of formal reason
are ultimately hypothetical, and never absolute —
based on assumptions that are not " real " for us ;
and on data that are but partial — on the merest
fragment of our total experience. Hence if by
"the heart" we understand the deeper subconscious
reasoning of the spiritual sense, it is not he who says
with his lips " there is no God " who is necessarily
the fool ; but he who says it in his heart. These
heart-beliefs are for the most part unknown to us,
although our whole life of action and affection is
controlled by them.

Besides those who do not want to believe, or
who even want not to believe ; there is a large class
of those who really want to believe, and yet are
hindered through difficulties and confusions of the
intellect; to whom the truth has not really been

62 VERBAL UNBELIEF AND REAL.

presented ; and to confound those two classes indis-
criminately under the title of "agnostics" or
" unbelievers " is a source of much harm. Among
this latter class are to be found sometimes Catholics
or Christians, who, without any fault of their own,
are troubled in mind concerning the creed to which
they still hold on firmly by their will; sometimes
non-Christians who, like the Apostles after the
Resurrection, are non credentes pre? gaudio, incredu-
lous because it all seems too good to be true ; who
are so sensitively loyal to the truth that they shrink
from what might be fatuous self-deception, a self-
indulgent slumber in a fool's paradise, a deliberate
refusal to face the horrible realities of a godless
chaos. It is practically impossible to doubt that
those who are in love with what they suppose to be
only a dream, would not gladly admit it to be a
reality ; that those who worship God's image where-
ever it is found in truth, purity, justice, and holiness
— would not worship the substance that casts these
shadows. If 1 admire a man's works, and hold his
opinions, and sympathize with his tastes, is it likely
that I should be reluctant to meet him, or anxious
to regard his existence as a myth ? We must then
carefully separate these two classes of non credentes
prcB gaudio ; and non credentes prce timore ; of reluctant
and of willing unbelievers.

It is an accepted conclusion of certain theological
schools that no man of normally developed intelli-
gence can be inculpably ignorant of the existence of
God the Rewarder of them that seek Him ; but
when carefully examined this conclusion is not so

VERBAL UNBELIEF AND REAL. 63

severe as it sounds. For we must not be too quick
to judge men by their formulated beliefs ; and often
one who says he does not believe in God, only
repudiates a belief in some conception of God that
his reason tells him is untrue or impossible ; and he
would only need a skilful Socrates to show him that
a belief in God is knit into the very texture of his
thought and life. Men express their beliefs more
spontaneously and truly in their conduct than in
their attempted analyses and formulae ; and a man
who puts truth, and honour, and goodness before
every other claim ; who at least theoretically, admits
that death is preferable to sacrifice of principle, who
therefore subjects himself to righteousness and does
not seek it for his own spiritual self-satisfaction or
any less worthy motive, but regards it as the abso-
lute and sovereign ruler of life — such a man, could
he disentangle his ideas would, doubtless, find
himself governed ultimately by a de-humanized but
essentially sufficient idea of God. After all, this
" humanization " of our notion of God is confessedly
a blemish and not a perfection in our mode of
conceiving ; and it is just this very element of the
conception which often puzzles such men out of
their faith. It is a needful, unavoidable alloy,
but it should not be forced on men's acceptance as
pure gold, but practically estimated for what it is.

64 FAITH AND ACTION.

VIII.

FAITH AND ACTION.

This do and thou shalt live. ... Go thou and do likewise. —
Luke x. 28, 37.

There are three sorts of inquirers after religious
truth : those whose anxiety is simply pretence ; who
are convinced that they already know, and only
want to find out if we know, to test our orthodoxy,
to tangle us in our statements, to refute us and
perhaps betray us.

Secondly : those who inquire out of intellectual
curiosity; dealers in views and theories; lovers of
the subtleties of controversy.

Thirdly, those whose sole aim is eternal life,
who care for the truth only for the sake of the life.

This canon-lawyer who stood up to test Christ
was of the first sort ; he did not want to practise
eternal life but to know the theory of it. By
assiduously applying logic to the letter of the
Mosaic law, he had lost all sense of its spirit, as
one who should cut up and examine each part of
the human frame and thus fail to find the quickening
principle of its growth and vitality and to appreciate
the significance of its harmonious unity. Well-
grounded in all the rabbinical controversies of the
day, he had the zeal of the professional controver-
sialist which is ostensibly for truth, but really for
his own school or clique; and which therefore
shows itself in a fierce intolerance of any contra-
diction. Christ deals prudently with the mischief-

UNWILLING BELIEF. 65

maker ; forces him to answer himself from his own
text-book ; commits Himself to no disputed view of
the " neighbour " controversy ; and yet lets the
truth appear in a self-evident and utterly unassail-
able form. He bids the inquirer to go and live the
truth if he would know more about it. Eternal
life is not a theory ; it is as much an art as
swimming; and the theory follows and depends
on the practice; not the practice on the theory.
Christ is not merely a truth to be believed, but a
way to be trodden, a life to be lived. We get to
know Christ as fellow-travellers, fellow-workers,
fellow- soldiers, get to know one another, — by
mingling their lives together.

IX.

UNWILLING BELIEF.

Thou believest there is but one God. Thou doest well; the
devils also believe and tremble. — Jas. ii. 19.

A belief in God may be forced upon an unwilling
mind by irresistible evidence or by testimony past
suspicion. This is not faith, because it is an in-
voluntary assent, not motived by that " devout
wish to believe " of which theologians speak. This
wish to believe, this rejoicing in the truth, may
exist where evidence of the same truth leaves no
room for faith. For faith is "the substance of
things hoped for ; the evidence of things that appear
not." Wherefore faith supposes, first, that the
truth is not mathematically cogent, albeit one which
may and certainly ought to be accepted; and

F

66 INTERNAL TRUTHFULNESS.

secondly, that it is a welcome truth which one would
prefer to believe rather than doubt. Hence there is
a certain incipient love of God involved in the
most imperfect faith; a certain conditional and
qualified (but not necessarily supreme and absolute)
appreciation of the Divine excellence. Without
this the belief is like that of the devils, not merely
imperfect but quite dead and involuntary. Nor
is this the case only when evidence forces the truth
on a reluctant mind (as may conceivably happen),
but also when the belief is held by mere force of
education, fashion, tradition, without any sort of
sympathy or even with a certain repugnance kept in
check by mere superstition. The fear of God based
on such unwilling belief is (like the devils' trembling)
abjectly servile. Men who in their hearts wish there
were no God, no morality, no hereafter, and who
are held back simply by a calculation of conse-
quences, have no true faith, no saving fear, but only
a prudential cowardice. But between this and filial
fear — the companion of perfect love — there is a fear
based upon a willing faith, and companion to a love
that is as yet weak and qualified and in need of the
support of self-regarding motives.

X.

INTERNAL TRUTHFULNESS.
Who speaketh the truth in his heart. — Ps. xiv. 3.

There are many who would cheerfully die rather
than say with their lips what they knew to be false ;
and who nevertheless are untruthful in the worst

INTERNAL TRUTHFULNESS. 67

sense of the word ; i.e., they do not speak the truth
in their own heart, in that solitary converse of the
soul with herself. For our mind is not merely
passive in the apprehension of truth, as it were a
mirror faithfully reflecting, by a sort of mechanical
necessity, every ray of evidence that falls upon its
burnished surface. On the contrary, it sorts and
interprets such evidence, and out of materials
thence selected builds up its own presentment of
the object; and as in verbal utterance it gives
substance to that presentment and sets it before
the hearer, so, previously, by a certain spiritual
utterance or internal word it speaks to itself and
constructs an idea of reality, that is either true
or false. And though it is often false through
defect of evidence (i.e., of the material out of which
it is constituted), or through lack of skill in inter-
preting evidence, yet, no less often, the perversion
is wilful owing to a want of internal truthfulness ;
of a genuine love of reality and light ; of a genuine
hatred of pretence and unreality. All that is known
as bias and prejudice, all distortion of the judgment
through " inordinate affections," through a desire
not to see unpleasant, disturbing, mortifying truths
that would entail troublesome and painful alterations
in our thought and conduct; all such blinking of
disagreeable facts and stifling of unwelcome sugges-
tions, are indications of mental untruthfulness. If,
as often happens, verbal veracity coexists with this
interior insincerity, it cannot have its root in a love
of truth and reality for its own sake, but in defer-
ence to social sanctions and standards, or in a sense

68 INTERNAL TRUTHFULNESS.

of justice, or in some other motive, good or bad,
that is not the proper motive of veracity as such
— namely, a hatred of sham and pretence, and a
love of truth and reality.

In this stricter sense truthfulness is the most
distinctively human virtue, perfecting that faculty
and tendency which is distinctive of man as such.
Passions, affections, emotions, have their shadows
and analogies in the higher animals, but to live for
reality and to rest therein belongs only to the rational
creature. But among men there is a vast majority
of " formalists ; " that is, of those who seem to care
little or nothing about reality; or who, if they dispute
and reason and prove, it is in defence, not of reality,
not of what they have touched by personal experi-
ence, but of some shadow or picture of reality
which they have borrowed from others, some
formula or bundle of words which they have never
attempted to translate into reality, so as to deter-
mine its true value. Their mind deals with counters
and not with coin. Wonderful are the feats of
arithmetical jugglery they will perform with these
counters, but their highest results are "words,
words, words." We feel that they have never once
touched reality, or tried honestly to speak the truth
in their hearts.

Yet the most truth-loving mind must be content
to depend largely on untranslated formulae, on
beliefs taken on faith, or acquired by tradition and
education. Our life is too short, our light too dim,
our experience too narrow, our energy too limited,
to allow us to verify personally more than a slight

THE ASSIMILATION OF DOCTRINE. 69

portion of our beliefs. But while the formalist feels
no need of such verification, so long as he is super-
ficially or exteriorly consistent with his assumptions,
the truth-lover is ever conscious of the difference
between what he merely believes, and what he has
actually thought and experienced.

The only conceivable, though quite inadmissible,
argument in favour of untruthfulness in speech
would be that, those who regard a verbal lie as a
moral impossibility may be tempted to warp their
mind into agreement with what is most convenient
to say. They will never say what they do not
believe ; but they will be fain to believe what they
want to be able to say truthfully. Thus mental
truthfulness will be sacrificed to verbal. Of the
two, the mental lie is worse, both for the individual,
and in the long run, for society.

XL

THE ASSIMILATION OF DOCTRINE.
Take this scroll and eat it. — Ezechiel iii. 1.

The mere swallowing of food is not enough
unless it be assimilated and digested; yet it is a
necessary condition of digestion. So with our
beliefs; we swallow them wholesale by an act of
extrinsic faith based on the word of others ; and
such faith is like the prop that supports a plant
till it strikes root downwards and becomes self-
supporting. They are not ours fully save in the
measure that we have worked them into the
fabric of our life and thought. Thus the collective

70 THE ASSIMILATION OF DOCTRINE.

mind, the corporate experience and reflection of the
society into which we are born, does not live in us
fully except so far as it has ceased to be an external
rule of faith and has reproduced itself in our own
mind and drawn it into living and active conformity
with itself. So too with Divine revelation whose
mysteries are obscure, not because God wants to
hide truth from us, but because we are not educated
sufficiently, either mentally or morally, to apprehend
them aright. Its purpose is to enlighten us, not to
puzzle us; to improve our mind, not to stultify it.
Our intelligence should, so to say, eat its way gradu-
ally into the meaning of what at first we hold to
merely by obedient assent. Yet there is ever a
Beyond of mystery ; for the more we know, the
more we wonder. It needs understanding to under-
stand the extent of our ignorance. It is precisely
as being beyond us that revelation provokes the
growth of our mind. We strain upwards and find
the outlook ever widening around us; and from
each question answered, a new brood of doubt is
born.

Nasce per quello a guisa di rampollo
A pie del ver il dubbio ; ed e natura,
Che al summo pinge noi di colic- in collo.1

Let us not then imagine that we have finished
our duty by swallowing revelation wholesale in
submission to external authority ; we swallow that

1 Hence from the root of every truth shoot up
New questionings ; and thus from ridge to ridge
Our nature spurs us till we scale the height.

DIFFERENCES OF APPREHENSION, 71

we may digest, and we digest that we may live the
eternal life of the mind and heart by an intelligent
sympathy with the mind and heart of God.

XII.

DIFFERENCES OF APPREHENSION.

To you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God ;
but to them that are without, all these things are done in parables.
— Mark iv. 11.

Nothing could be more offensive to the demo-
cratic temper of this age than the distinction
between esoteric and exoteric religion — than the
notion of mysteries kept apart from the profanum
vulgus by a priestly caste ; of things too holy to be
given to the dogs, too frailly precious to be cast
before swine. Indeed it may be said that " popu-
larity" was, and is, the distinctive note of Christ's
religion in which it differs from the ancient and espe-
cially the Oriental cults : "Go and tell John, ... to
the poor the Gospel is preached," not to the "wise
and prudent." " In secret," says Christ to His
accusers, " I have spoken nothing." So prevalent
however was the notion of a disciplina arcani in all
religions of the time ; so great the need of a certain
secrecy in the face of persecution, slander, and
calumny ; so natural the temptation of any priest-
hood to lay claim to a special gnosis, that we find
everywhere in the Church the strangest results of
the conflict of the two principles. Those who may
not touch the sacred vessels in which the Sacrament
lies, may not only touch, but taste and feed on the
Sacrament itself; they may not enter the sanctuary

72 DIFFERENCES OF APPREHENSION.

because of the presence of That whose raison d'etre
is to enter into them. And this is symbolic of an
all-pervading anomaly.

But though it is the desire of Christ to bring
every man to the fullest possible knowledge of the
truth ; though He does not make mysteries wantonly
or hold back certain truths for a more privileged
class of " initiated ; " yet in the very nature of
things the same seed will evoke a different yield
from different soil. The range of capacity, of
intelligence, education, and spiritual sympathy, is
almost limitless among the adherents of a world-
wide religion, embracing all classes of society, and
reaching over many centuries of human experience.
To speak to each man, each class, each people, each
age, in its own language, on its own presupposi-
tions— scientific, historical, philosophical, nay, even
religious — so far from being contrary to, is alto-
gether consonant with, the democratic spirit of the
Gospel. The truth spoken is the same, and the
whole endeavour of accommodation is inspired by
the wish to speak it as fully as the hearer can hear it.

If indeed our language, when applied to things
spiritual and eternal were, not an analogy, but an
equation, as when we speak of things bodily and
measurable, then an alteration of the expression
would be an alteration of the truth. But with like-
nesses and similitudes it is not so. What is like, is
also unlike, and like something else quite different.
And thus the representation of the same eternal
realities, in one mind and another, may be almost
infinitely different ; so that they seem like two

THE LANGUAGE OF REVELATION. 73

distinct creeds, whereas they are both presentments
of one and the same. In this sense there must
always and necessarily be a fuller and a less full
understanding of revealed truths ; not indeed a hard
and fast line of demarcation between esoteric and
exoteric Christianity, between the mind of the priest-
hood and of the laity ; between the initiated and the
uninitiated ; but such a division as exists in every
department of knowledge and in every art and skill,
between the upper and lower portions of a con-
tinuous scale of intelligence. If a different appre-
hension of the same truths makes a different religion,
then it is not one Christianity for the cultivated,
another for the rude and ignorant, but as many
Christianities as there are Christians. And this
explains the apparent inconsistency of Christ's
words : " To you it is given to know the mysteries
of the kingdom of God ; but to others in parables "
— a difference not in doctrine, but in mode of pro-
position.

XIII.

THE LANGUAGE OF REVELATION.

I will make you fishers of men. — Matt. iv. 19.

See how God speaks to every soul, to every
class, in its own language, moulding the truth
according to the governing categories and forms of
the mind in question. For a merchant, or a builder,
or a farmer understands truths most easily when
they are translated into the familiar terms of his
own occupation ; nor will he thus be led astray so

74 THE LANGUAGE OF REVELATION.

long as he does not confound illustrations with
exact measurements.

Here God presents Himself as the great Fisher
of Souls, imparting His piscatorial, as elsewhere
His pastoral, office to His Aposdes. He fishes for
souls with nets and hooks and baits .and loving
snares, let down from the invisible and spiritual
world into this visible and empirical life of ours,
with regard to which He is "truly a Hidden God,"
as little capable in His own Divine nature of
mingling with our visible life as the fisher on the
river-bank with the fish-life of the stream. When
we wonder at His silence, at His invisibility, His
inaction, we are as gold-fish in a tank wondering
why they never find him who feeds and cares for
them, swimming about like themselves. He holds
some blind dumb-show communication with them
from the outer world, by touches, perhaps, and
signs not without meaning, just as God touches us
from the other world and drives us in this direction
or that for purposes which we may conjecture
rightly or wrongly; — it matters little which — so
long as He gets His way.

It might seem perhaps that this principle of
accommodation is not consistent with the unity and
immutability of Divine truth ; but this is to forget
that our language can never be treated as an equa-
tion when we are expressing concrete realities and
not merely abstract forms and figures ; still less
when it is applied to other-world realities which eye
hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived.
Christ's task as Revealer is comparable, without

THE LANGUAGE OF REVELATION. 75

any exaggeration, to that of one who should en-
deavour to reveal the visible world of form and
colour to a race void of the sense of sight and of
all language derived from or appealing to that sense.
Such an one would have to adapt the language of
the other senses to the almost impossible purpose
of building up some rough analogy of the world of
light. And then in how many quite different ways
might not the same truth be said ! And what folly
would result from the application of logic to state-
ments so entirely analogous ; what solemn nonsense
might not be gravely deduced by the rabbinical
mind !

The progress of revelation from first to last is
the result of the continual striving of God's Spirit
in and with the spirit of man, whereby the material
furnished by the workings of the human mind in its
endeavour to cope with heavenly truths is continually
refined and corrected through Divine inspiration
into closer conformity with spiritual realities. There
is no material so poor and gross but God can weave
of it a clinging web delicate enough to reveal this or
that neglected detail of Truth's contour. Thus did
He, patiently and through the course of ages, first,
through Moses ; then, through the prophets ; lastly,
through Christ, refine upon the grosser and more
barbaric conceptions of sacrifice, till the mustard-
seed of truth, hidden in those first clumsy efforts of
the religious spirit, found its full development in
the sacrifice of a sinless humanity in the fire of
Charity. In all cases if the language, legend, or
ritual be human, the Spirit that purifies and enriches

76 THE STAR.

its significance is divine ; and like every other
process, this too is to be interpreted by the direction
it makes for, rather than by the stage already
attained. The cramped symbolism of human expres
sion admits perhaps of little expansion ; but there
is no limit to the wealth of meaning that inspiration
can crowd into those narrow moulds. He whose
Immensity did " not shrink from the Virgin's
womb " does not disdain to confine His eternal
truth in the swaddling-clothes of those childish
legends and categories whereby the finite mind
strives to compass the infinite, but gives Himself
willingly into the feeble hands that are stretched
out to receive Him.

XIV.

THE STAR.
We have seen His star in the East.— Matt. ii. 2.

These Magi were astrologers. They believed
that each man had his lucky star; that his fate
was determined by the planetary conjunction under
which he was born. As science and learning went
in those days, they were learned and scientific
men ; though we laugh at their science, as those
who come after us will laugh at ours. Yet God
accommodates His revelation to their scientific
superstitions, and leads them by astrology to
Christ. As He takes the lifeless dust and breathes
into it the breath of life, so He takes our worth-
less errors and superstitions and weaves them into
a language for the expression of eternal truths.

THE STAR. 77

As it is His creative prerogative to bring good out
of, and through, permitted evil ; so it is His glory
and triumph to bring light and truth out of dark-
ness and error.

The supernatural order does not necessarily
interrupt the established course of nature, or hasten
the slow growth of human knowledge and under-
standing in matters within the compass of our
natural faculties. Christ does not speak to us in
the terms of the final science or philosophy — if such
be conceivable — but in the terms of that which He
finds to hand ; for all alike are more or less inadequate
to the perfect expression of Divine mysteries. To the
Jews He is a Jew : a Samaritan to the Samaritans,
and a Magus to the Magi. No error, or superstition
can hinder God's ingress into the soul that He
chooses to enter ; no tongue or language is so feeble,
coarse, or imperfect but He can use it to utter the
words of eternal life. And this should make us
less anxious and despairing in the face of so much
darkness that is merely intellectual ; for no fault of
the mind can ever hinder that goodness of will
which may co-exist with the lowest degree of ethical
and religious enlightenment, even as it may be
wanting to the highest. For natural knowledge,
God leaves us to the provisions of nature ; He does
not help us to our hurt, or spare us any profitable
labour or exertion which is essential to our dignity
as self-forming, self-determining personalities. And
this is true of the race as of the unit. Mankind is
self-forming, no less than man. Only in regard to
the things that belong to our eternal peace and

78 THE STAR.

where we cannot possibly help ourselves, does He
come to our aid supernaturally. He did not send
His Son to teach us astronomy or chemistry ; but
suffered us to struggle to the light through the
superstitions of astrology and alchemy.

Nor can it be supposed that the religious specu-
lations of these Magi were much more successful
than their scientific endeavours. Even if they were
monotheists, which is very questionable, they were
in outer darkness in respect to Jewish orthodoxy.
Yet seated in darkness, they beheld a great light,
because they had eyes to see : whereas Herod, and
the priests, and the teachers of Jewry sat in the
light and saw nothing, because their eyes were
sealed. For a pure heart is the eye of the soul.
Not with the brain or the mind alone do we see
God : but with the whole spirit. " If thine eye be
single " is the condition of light ; that is, if we seek
Him with our whole heart we shall surely find Him.
But this means first to want Him with our whole
heart, for we seek just in the measure that we want.
Herod did not want a King; nor the priests, a
Priest ; nor the teachers, a Teacher : all were filled
with the lust of dominating over men's bodies, or
their wills, or their reason; tyrants of the purse;
tyrants of the conscience; tyrants of the mind.
How could such want the great Deliverer of the
oppressed ? How could they seek Him with their
whole hearts except to destroy Him ?

But these men from afar — distant not only
locally, but mentally and educationally — were
hungering and thirsting after truth and justice,

OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL. 79

longing for some vaguely conceived Divine Teacher
and Ruler, some Deliverer of the nations — Prophet,
Priest, and King — to whom they might offer their
myrrh and frankincense and gold. And God heard
the dumb prayer of their heart, formulated though
it may have been in the language of error or super-
stition; and spoke to them in the language they
knew and sent the Star to show " where Hope was
born." He did not speak this language to those
who had Moses and the Prophets ; these needed no
sign nor wonder, but had only to clear the mists of
worldliness and self-complacency from their own
eyes. Orthodox to the point of pedantry, they
counted the books and chapters, the letters, jots
and tittles of the law; but of its sense and spirit
they knew nothing.

Self-blinded, they sat in the midst of light and
beheld only darkness.

XV.

OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL.
For we wrestle not with flesh and blood. — Eph. vi. 12.

The woman who came behind Christ that she
might not be seen, and touched the hem of His
garment, believed undoubtedly that some healing
physical influence would pass into her from His
body, and that He wrought His cures more as a
chemical than as a free and conscious agency.
But she also believed that He possessed this
healing power because He was the beloved Son of
God. Her view as to the mode of operation —

80 OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL.

which is the view of many of those who have
recourse to relics — was scientifically superstitious.
But her faith in Christ was not superstitious.
He had not come to teach us the modus operandi
either of medicine or of miracle ; and far from
correcting her error on so irrelevant a matter or
giving her the true rationale of the seeming wonder,
He accommodates Himself to her mind and
language. " Who touched Me ? " — as though He
did not know; "I perceive virtue has gone out
from Me " — as though it could be drawn from Him
without His knowledge and will. And elsewhere
the Evangelist adopts the same standpoint when
he says : " Virtue went forth from Him and healed
them all " — as it were, by an involuntary radiation.
And thus throughout, Christ clothes the ineffable
truth of eternity in such poor ragged materials as
He finds to hand; He adopts the language, the
mental forms and categories, the science, the
philosophy, the ethics, the history, the religious
tradition and ritual of those to whom He addresses
Himself, and in the terms of these things He
speaks of what eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,
nor heart conceived. Had He first, as a necessary
preliminary, tried to rectify their conceptions in all
these matters, to give them the final scientific truth
towards which human effort is ever pressing, He
would have bewildered them to no purpose ; for, the
language of even the highest culture would not,
absolutely speaking, have been appreciably more
adequate to divine realities, while, relatively to
ruder minds, it would have been less adequate.

OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL. 81

Thus, in regard to what may be called " pneu-
matology," or the doctrine of souls and spirits, of
angels and devils, Christ seems scarcely to have
modified that which He found to hand, but to have
used it for the shadowing forth of facts whose
adequate nature is, to us, inscrutable. He accom-
modates Himself to our picturing of the soul or
spirit as a filmy, aerial, perhaps diminutive, replica
of the human form ; as something but slightly
released from the conditions of matter — from the
bonds of time and space ; as flitting hither and
thither, entering or leaving the body, as it were a
house ; He speaks of the devil and his angels, or
of St. Michael and his hosts, as it might be of an
earthly army marching out to do battle. And in
accepting this presentment of the facts and accom-
modating our lives to it ; in praying to our guardian
angel ; in watching against the snares of the devil ;
in treating it as adequate while we know it is not
adequate, we shall be more in harmony with the
truth than were we either to trust any conjectures
of our own in such an unknowable region, or to
treat so imperfect an account of facts as practically
worthless.

Doubtless the grotesque and superstitious demon-
ology of the middle ages is responsible for the
comparative suppression and neglect of what, after
all, is an integral factor of the supernatural order
as represented in the Christian revelation. That
primitive expression of the eternal truth, clothed
in the language used by Christ and His Apostles,
is the germ out of which all subsequent develop-

G

82 0*72? APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL.

merit has grown, and by which it must be criticized.
In that expression, as in any analogy or similitude,
we must of course distinguish between the abstract
or " dictionary " sense of the words, and the sense
of the speaker; for in using a public language we
say both more and less than we mean. When
Christ says that the mustard-seed is the least of all
seeds, He uses a common belief to express another
truth, but He does not make that belief His own.
Were some smaller seed alleged, it would be foolish
to quote Christ's authority against the allegation.
When He says : " I perceive virtue is gone out of
Me," He used, but He does not accept or sanction,
the materialism implied in the statement. Such a
conception of veracity would make speech impos-
sible ; we might not say that a man " breathes forth
his soul into the hands of his Creator."

On this score some might think that the demon-
ology implied in Christ's language was but incidental
to the mode of expression, but no part of the sub-
stance of His revelation. Yet closer examination
rejects this suggestion, and although we may fully
allow the analogical character of what is said about
the devil and his angels, it is impossible to deny that
mysterious facts are thereby conveyed to us which
form an integral part of the supernatural order;
and that therefore no development of Christianity
which prescinds from that part of Christ's teaching
can be full and coherent. St. Paul's utterance on
the subject is as dogmatic and precise as possible,
where he says that our wrestling is not only against
flesh and blood, not only against temptations

OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL. 83

coming from the frailty of our nature, or from the
secret influence or direct violence of the world ; but
also against wicked spirits who are the rulers of the
world ; and a glance at a concordance will show
how the belief is woven in and out of his teaching
from first to last. And so we find it in St. Peter
and in the four Gospels, and back to the very
beginning of the Old Testament ; the part played
by these super- or infra-human spiritual agencies
in the drama of man's history as presented to us in
the Judaeo-Christian religion is not incidental but
-essential. To strike it out, is not to develope, but
to reconstruct the whole conception.

Yet there is no point of his belief concerning
which the modern-minded Christian is more silent
or shy — one might almost say, ashamed. It seems
to make him responsible for all the freakishness of
mediaeval demonology ; and to connect him by
descent, lineally, or collaterally, with some of the
lower or lowest forms of pagan religion. Certainly,
the amount of superstition, sometimes only silly,
often dangerous and malignant, that clustered round
and obscured the authorized Christian doctrine in
former days, may well excuse this shyness. As a
whole, the system of demonology had become so
preposterous, that by the mere growth of intelli-
gence it was left behind and ignored, nor was any
effort made to unravel so seemingly hopeless a
tangle. While the pictorial art of those times
shows us that there was always a sense that our
human picturings of God and His angels were
unworthy and needed etherealizing ; there was no

84 OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL.

such conscience in respect to evil spirits, for whom
the unspoilt human frame was all too good. It was
almost a point of religion and piety to materialize
them in every way; to depict them as animal
monstrosities. This symbolism was rightly under-
stood by the cultivated ; but there was na
motive, no effort, to check the literalism of the
millions.

Further, in a pre-scientific age the devil was
necessarily made the residuary legatee of any
seemingly supernatural marvel that could not con-
veniently be ascribed to divine intervention. Even
in some dark corners, this line of argument survives
with regard to hypnotic and allied phenomena :
"They are not yet fully explicable, therefore they
are supernatural; they cannot be from God,
therefore they must be from the devil." A better
knowledge of physical nature, of the workings of
our own mind and body and nervous system ; of the
true causes of insanity, diseases, epidemics ; a better
understanding of our spiritual dependence on others,
past and present, has exonerated the devil from so
much of the burden of mischief formerly laid upon
him, that it is an easy inference to suppose that in
the course of time there will be nothing left for him
to bear, and that "we shall have no need of such an
hypothesis."

If, however, we look to the Scriptural present-
ment of the devil, we shall find some reason to arrest
this precipitation. For there we observe, on the
whole, a surprising unity of conception, and none of
that incoherent freakishness which characterizes

OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL 85

the demonology of those crude religions, from which
the symbolism may have been partly adopted or
derived, or with which it may have some common
source. From first to last, the spirits of evil figure
as the rulers of the darkness of this world, as the
•enemies of the light of knowledge and wisdom ; as
working upon the mind through fallacies, deceits,
and subtleties; as following invariably serpentine
tactics, noiseless, accommodating, insinuating. If
we penetrate beneath the letter, it is impossible not
to be struck with the perfect unity of spirit between
the temptation of Eve in Paradise and that of Christ
in the desert ; in each case an attempt to blind the
higher reason through an appeal to lower inclination;
to obscure the wider-reaching view in favour of the
narrower and more partial ; and always with a show
of greater reasonableness and Tightness — the Prince
of darkness transforming himself into an angel of
light. And then, as Christ meets his suggestions,
not by argument but by an appeal to authority — to
what is written — so St. Paul tells us to use the shield
of faith against the fiery darts of doubt ; and
St. Peter urges the need of sobriety and vigilance —
of the interior quiet and absence of excitement and
confusion which are the conditions of spiritual clear-
sightedness, if, strong in the faith, we would resist
our adversary. For faith is a voluntary holding to
truths that were accepted by us in the hour of peace,
but which are now obscured in the darkness of
passion and temptation. On this showing, the
peculiar influence of the rulers of darkness is exerted
upon the mind, in favour of doubt, scepticism,

86 OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL.

credulity, superstition, ignorance; and against
intelligence, reason, and faith.

They tempt us by way of direct suggestion ;
or, indirectly, in so far as the nature and trend
of our thoughts is for the most part governed
by the state of our feelings and sentiments. If
this be, so to say, the special department of
temptation authoritatively assigned to the devil,
it cannot be said that the, at least partially, diabolic
origin of such phenomena is either less or more
evident than formerly, or has been sensibly affected
by advances in knowledge. They lie in far too
obscure a region and are too infinitely complex in
their conditions. So far, however, as natural obser-
vation seems to favour the Christian belief, it is when
we look to the results of comparative demonology in
the widest sense. Here those who are not biassed
by some " naturalistic " presupposition, will be the
first to admit that the existence and intervention
of super-human or infra-human intelligence, is,
of all hypotheses so far suggested, the simplest,
and that which harmonizes the greatest number
of facts.

To say that the Christian belief has difficulties,
is to say that it embodies facts relatively mysterious
belonging to an order of being other than our own ;
and also, that we have to express such facts in terms
of those with which we are familiar. Yet some of
these difficulties are commonplace enough. The
permitted existence of creatures hostile to God and
His servants is not a greater mystery in the case of
devils than in that of evil men. The seeming un*

OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL. 87

fairness and inequality of the conflict between the
hidden and all-crafty tempter, and poor, passionate,
leaden-witted man may be met by the general
doctrine of God's Providence in adjusting the strain
of temptation to our strength and profit. The
precise mode of diabolic suggestion is unimaginable
enough, and yet we are confronted with too many
problems connected with thought-transference and
hypnotic control to say that there is no access from
mind to mind, save through the road of the senses ;
or that there may not be a dynamic connection or
sympathy between every spirit, as there is between
every particle of matter in the universe. There are
cases, not perhaps wholly imaginary, of personalities
whose silent presence is a felt influence for good or
for evil — for peace or for a strange disquiet.

That a spaceless, timeless, supersensible order of
being cannot possibly be realized by our sense-
bounded intelligence goes without saying ; but that
it should therefore be regarded as impossible or even
as improbable, is simply an instance of the narrow-
ness, the " incurable provincialism " of the human
mind — part of that same racial egotism which made
the belief in geocentricism die so hard ; and which
still makes us seek some central sun within the
range of our telescopes as the pivot of the physical
universe. When we think how one born blind lives
in the midst of a world of colour and form to which
he is dead ; and when we cast up the probability of
our few senses exhausting any appreciable fraction
of possible sense-experience we can hardly be less
than certain that we live in the midst of countless

88 OUR APPREHENSION OF THE SPIRITUAL.

interpenetrating worlds to which we are blind, but
whose denizens, if such there be, are not necessarily
blind to ours.

Thus if we cannot insist too strongly on the
merely analogous truth of the language of revelation
concerning the devil and his angels, whether he be
figured as a serpent, a dragon, a roaring lion, or as
the leader of an army of shadows in human form ;
neither can we, if we hold Christian teaching in its
integrity, deny the practical and relative truth, as far
as we are concerned, of this presentment of mys-
terious facts.

To regard the devil as the mere personification of
temptation in the abstract, as a more compendious
re-concretion of ideas already derived from a
scattered multitude of concrete instances, would be
but the rationalizing of a poetic fiction. It would
be to show that what sounds much, meant little ;
that what was needlessly difficult was really quite
simple. If, however, we affirm the personality of
these spirits we must also remember that if person-
ality is an obscure conception applied to ourselves, it
is a thousand times more so when applied to an
order of being of which we know so little. The
truth figured in revelation is not less than it seems,
or simpler, but inexpressibly fuller and more difficult.
We can only receive so much of it as will go into our
deplorably inadequate language. Yet to pray and
to act and to guide ourselves by this revealed pre-
sentment of it is our plain duty. Faith lies rather
in the practical recognition of other-world realities
than in the exact mental conception of them. Such

MIRACLES. 89

knowledge as we are given of them is directed rather
to the guidance of our life and action than to the
interests of theory and speculation.

XVI.

MIRACLES.

This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and
manifested forth His glory and His disciples believed in Him. —
John ii. 11.

Probably these words were written late enough
to be intended as a denial of the silly legends that
were rapidly clustering round and obscuring the life
of Jesus, and presenting Him to the world as a A
wonder-working magician, rather than as a teacher
sent from God and the hater of all superstition.
When we read in the apocryphal gospels how the
Holy Child gave life to sparrows moulded in clay
and made them fly off to the astonishment of His
playmates ; or how He cast the dyer's cloth into the
fire and then restored it miraculously from its ashes ;
or how He refuted the ignorance of His schoolmaster
and covered him with confusion by a display of
precocious and somewhat useless and questionable
erudition ; or finally, how He punished with instant
death the sacrilegious act of a man who accidentally
knocked up against Him in the street, we feel at once
that, the men who could narrate or believe such
things of Christ, of Him who sought not His own
glory, who likened Himself to His brethren in all
things, who prayed for His murderers and calumnia-
tors, must have been already blind and dead to the
very first lessons of truth and love. If we may use

go MIRACLES.

words so low, the very charm and spell of Christ's
personality lie in His absolute self-suppression ; in
the fact that He emptied Himself of the glory, the
power, the supernal prerogatives which belonged by a
certain right — as it were, naturally — to the humanity
of God Incarnate ; that He took the likeness, not of
glorified flesh but of sinful flesh ; and in order to be
like us, elected to win back through obedience in
suffering, what was already His by birthright. Only
in behalf of others and for the glory of Him who sent
Him, did He ever exercise His miraculous powers.
He saved others ; Himself He would not save ; He
would not descend from His Cross, nor call angelic
legions to His aid. Only a mind as gross and
materialistic as that of Herod could confound His
miracles with the magical displays of some self-
advertizing conjuror challenging competition.

There were two purposes served by Christ's
miracles — the confirmation and the illustration of
His teaching. The former is plainly insisted on in
the words we have quoted : " He manifested forth
His glory and His disciples believed in Him," and
He Himself appeals to His miracles more than once
as making unbelief inexcusable. Now no wonder-
working is of itself an evidence of divine mission.
To an untutored savage the effects of the telephone or
the phonograph would be relatively as miraculous as
many of Christ's miracles would be to us — just as far
beyond their realm of observed and established uni-
formities— their "order of Nature." All attempts to
fix limits to Nature's powers are idle and sophistical.
Nor does a miracle mean that an effect is produced

MIRACLES.

gt

without a cause or otherwise than by the concurrence
of its necessary conditions. The superiority it
implies in the worker is a superiority of knowledge ;
for knowledge is power ; because God is omniscient
He is omnipotent; and man works wonders in Nature
just in the measure that he understands Nature. If
the savant works what is a miracle relatively to the
savage's conception of Nature, it does not directly
prove to the latter that he is a teacher sent from God
or that God is with him ; but only that he possesses
a wider knowledge than the savage; that he sees
Nature from a higher standpoint — not necessarily,
from the Absolute standpoint.

Granting that in some sense the raising of the
dead or the turning of water to wine, were a super-
natural deed beyond the limits of any observed or
unobserved uniformity of nature ; yet we cannot at
once say whether it be from the powers above or the
powers below. Some Catholic theologians have
thought that the power of creating might belong
instrumentally to a creature ; and the ancient
Gnostics held that it could not belong to the First
Cause, or indeed to any but an evil principle — so
little is it clear to reason that this, the highest con-
ceivable miracle, is necessarily from God ; still less,
any lower manifestation of power. And even if
philosophers and theologians could apply certain
subtle criteria to test the supernatural character of
the fact, what would this avail those ignorant crowds
in whose behalf Christ wrought most of His miracles?
Were they competent to say what was or what was
not beyond the capacity of unexplored nature ; and

92 MIRACLES.

even when they rightly judged Christ's miracles to
be from God, was it on the strength of sound meta-
physical reasoning ?

Hence, viewed in itself and apart from circum-
stances, there is no fact so marvellous as to be
evidently beyond the power of created causes. How
then were Christ's miracles a seal set upon His work
by God ? What was their proving value ?

They could have had no such value except as
wrought by one whose absolute truthfulness and
sincerity was already admitted as beyond all question
— one manifestly incapable of chicanery or boastful
display. It was only with those who thus implicitly
trusted Christ as altogether selfless and sincere that
His miracles availed as proof. " His disciples believed
in Him " — those who had conversed with Him in-
timately, and felt the spell of His sinless and pure
personality. The reasons for personal trust are
complex to analyze but simple to apprehend ; they
need no dialectic skill but only a certain spiritual
likeness and sympathy ; they are often hid from the
savants and revealed to babes. But the priests, the
scribes, and the lawyers saw the same miracles and
believed not; for they interpreted Christ by- them-
selves, as being ambitious, worldly, deceitful, insincere
— at least they wished to think so, and ended by
succeeding in blinding themselves. They did not
know how He wrought these miracles, but when He
claimed to do so by the power of God they practi-
cally said : " How do we know ? We have only His
word for it. Perhaps it is by Beelzebub, prince of
the devils, that He casts out devils ! And did not

MIRACLES. 93

the magicians of Pharoah work sign for sign against
Moses ? And has not every false Messias wrought
miracles ? " Yes, they had only His word for it, and
no other disproof of wilful deceit was possible. If
they lacked that sympathetic insight which discerns
the quality of truthfulness in a character, they had
no available criterion to distinguish imposture and
jugglery from miracle. And so miracles have always
appealed in vain to the cynical, the worldly, the
untruthful-minded. " If they will not hear Moses
and the Prophets neither will they be persuaded
though one rose from the dead."

But surely, one will say, if such a trust in Christ's
truthfulness must already exist before His miracles
can have any proving-value for us, of what use is the
miracle ? Is it not enough that He assure us that He
is a teacher sent from God ?

It is not enough, just because there is such a thing
as bona fide illusion, not only in the case of fanatical
enthusiasm and over-strung spiritual fervour, but
even in the very sanest and most temperate judg-
ments. But more especially is such illusion incident
to the prophetic office, as all experts in spiritual
discernment are aware. Here, more than anywhere,
is the over-taxed brain and exhausted nerve-system
likely to falsify the divine message by addition or
perversion ; and therefore some external proof is
needed to show that the prophet really has that
access to, and power in, the realms of ultra-natural
experience which he honestly and sincerely professes
to have.

Thus, though the miracle by itself is never

94 MIRACLES

demonstrably a sign from God, yet it is so, taken in
connection with the unimpeachable truthfulness of
him who advances it as a sign from God — a sign,
not of his own truthfulness, m which must be pre-
supposed, but of his immunity from self-illusion.

"But," says St. Gregory, "the miracles of our
Lord and Saviour are to be received both as actually
credible facts, and also as conveying some significant
lesson to us; as exercises of power they teach us
one thing, and another in so far as they express
some mystic sense." (Horn. 2, in Luc. 18.) They
are indeed enacted parables — a mode of utterance
proper to Him " by whom all things were made " to
tell forth His glory and to be a language between
God and the soul which is fashioned to His own
image and likeness. The miracles of the apocryphal
Gospels, like those with which popular traditions of
all times are wont to embellish and obscure the
memory of Saints and heroes, lack this feature of
mystic and doctrinal significance, but the genuine
miracles of Christ are not merely seals, but sacra-
ments and symbols of the truths He came to teach ;
evidences not of His power alone, nor even of His
goodness and beneficence, but also of His wisdom
and light. And this, at Cana — the first of the series,
strikes the key-note and is singularly rich in mystical
sense. It tells us how God brings strength out of
weakness, wine out of water, infusing His divinity
into our humanity in the economy of the Incarnation;
how the extremity of man's misery is the opportunity
of God's mercy, and how He suffers things to grow
worse that the need may be felt more keenly, that

FAITH IN CHRIST. 95

there may be a deeper desire and capacity, a heartier
cry, and a more liberal response. Not till man had
learnt his helplessness by long and bitter experience
did God send forth His Son in the fulness of time.
And He did so in answer to the prayers and interces-
sions of His Saints who from the beginning were
co-operant with Christ in the work of redemption,
whose part is symbolized by Mary's whispered
reminder : " They have no wine." And if men soon
grow weary in well-doing, if their love burns brightly
at first, but soon languishes ; not so with Him whose
love gathers strength like a torrent in its course, who
puts forth what is worse in the beginning but keeps
the good wine till the end : " Behold," says St. John,
** now are we the sons of God, but it doth not
yet appear what we shall be;" i.e., what we shall
be when the wine of the Sacred Chalice shall seem
as water in contrast to that which we shall drink with
Christ in the Kingdom of God, of which it said :
Calix metis inebrians, quam prceclarus est!" and " Thou
hast kept the good wine until now ! "

XVII.

FAITH IN CHRIST.

My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.
— John x. 27.

As to conscience which gives us the revelation of
God the Rewarder, the sense of its authority is born
in us, and however weakened by habitual deafness
and disobedience, is never wholly lost. But faith in
Christ and His Church comes to us, in some sense,

FAITH IN CHRIST.

from without, and by a process of recognition. u My
sheep hear My voice;" those who have accustomed
themselves to the tone of conscience will recognize
it in the voice of Christ. It is as waking and satis-
fying the highest, and ever higher, aspirations of our
moral nature that Christ proves Himself to be, in
some sort, the Human Conscience Incarnate; that is
to say : God made man.

Being pre-eminently a practical matter, a religion
must be brought to the test of practice and experi-
ment. Life — the highest life of the soul — is the end
to which it is directed. The great question therefore
is, its bearing upon life. Before we put ourselves
into the hand of the physician we must have some
reasonable ground for our trust ; and this is usually
found in the benefit that we ourselves and our friends
have experienced from his treatment. His degrees
and certificates count for little beside this experi-
mental evidence. A like test is used in the case of
political systems. Logically, the British Constitution
is absurd and impossible ; but it works ; the Code
Napoleon is admirable on paper, but fails before the
test of life.

Christ's recommendation, as a "teacher sent from
God," is of the practical kind : " Lord, to whom shall
we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life." Life
— the life of the higher and eternal part of us — is
what we are hungering for ; the life which is fed in
some sense upon words. But there are words and
words — empty, and solid grain; there are dead
formulae, learnt by heart and passed on from mouth
to mouth, at kest the ghosts of truths that once were

FAITH IN CHRIST. 97

alive; and there are living, life-giving words, from
His heart who reads the human soul through and
through, and so knows each individual's need and
remedy ; who calls His sheep by their name. And
it is only in obedience to such a personal call,
addressed to me as to no other, that faith is born
in the soul. " No man cometh to Me unless the
Father draw him." The words to which we have
long listened with dead ears, when spoken by men,
suddenly seem lit up with new meaning, invigorated
with strange force, and as it were thrust upon our
notice, and aimed at our individual case by the special
providence of God.

In other words, it is on the irresistible conviction
that Christ is the food of our soul, that His words
are the words of our Eternal Life — of the life of our
heart, and mind — that our faith in Him as our
Teacher and Master rests. It may not be a welcome
conviction, it may be one we have long resisted ; still,
as soon as conscience condemns this resistance as
wrong, as suicidal in regard to our higher life, we
must either obey, or be condemned on the score of
bad faith.

As far as even an impersonal, objective argument
for Christ and Christianity is concerned, the test of
life is chiefest : " No man can do the works which
Thou dost except God be with him." It does not
need much subtlety to discern Christianity from
Christians ; and to recognize that whatever ameliora-
tion there has ever been in man's moral and social
life, whether before Christ or after, has been the
work of those principles of which Christianity is the
H

98 FAITH IN CHRIST-

synthesis and highest expression ; and that whatever
evil has prevailed, whether among Christians or
others, has been due to the neglect of those princi.
pies : " He was the true light that enlighteneth every
man that cometh into this world;" and whatever
light has glimmered in the darkness of other religions
has been a reflected beam from that sun :

They are but broken lights of Thee
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.

Faith, then, is the response of our whole soul, not of
the mind alone, but also of the heart and affections
and social instincts to Christ and to His Church so
far as, often in spite of themselves — like the faithless
prophets — and to their own condemnation, her
official teachers are constrained by God's Spirit to
preach Christ ; and to hold up to the world the light
by which perhaps they themselves refuse to walk.

And of this truth a kind of induction gives us an
almost experimental assurance. For it is ever in
what we know to be our best moods that we find
ourselves most in sympathy with Christ; when we
walk most faithfully by the light of conscience ; when
we are freest from the warp and bias of violent
emotions or unruly attachments and prepossessions ;
when we are enjoying the fullest liberty of self-
mastery; when, in short, we are living the life of
Christ. On the contrary, it is in what we know are
our worst moods, that the light of faith begins to
grow dim ; when we are disturbed, tempted, dis-
tracted, out of sympathy with our conscience. In
other words, our better self is always more responsive,
our worse self always less responsive, to the call of

THE DESIRE OF ALL AGES. 99

Christ ; and it is this experienced fact that makes us
as impervious to all merely rationalistic or critical
difficulties against our faith, as we should be to those
urged against our personal identity. Christ is no
longer an abstraction for us ; nor a bundle of argu-
ments, but an object of experience and real contact ;
" Whom I have seen ; whom I have loved ; in whom
I have believed ; in whom I have delighted ; " or as
St. John has it: "That which was from the beginning;
which we have heard, which we have seen with our
eyes, which we have examined through and through,
and handled with our hands."

XVIII.

THE DESIRE OF ALL AGES.
The First-born of every creature. — Col. i. 15.

Prophecy is more easily understandable if we
remember the somewhat organic nature of God's
entire work; how that the final result is really
contained in the first germ, and the entire process
governed and each step of it explained by the idea
of the End. As every animal is but a lower offshoot
of that tree of life whereof man is the crown ; so
the just man of every age, and his history, is but an
imperfect essay at that ideal which is realized in
Christ alone. After many vain Teachings towards
one another, sea and sky at last unite in the water-
spout ; and so in the prophets, heroes, and great
ones of all time, heaven and earth have strained
towards a union realized only in the Word-made-
Flesh. Hence, so many features are common to

ioo THE DESIRE OF ALL AGES.

the lives and characters of all just and holy men,
in so far as they converge upwards and towards
that point of union of the Divine and Human.

Since the man is in the boy, as the flower is in
the seed, there are, in each earlier stage of life,
conscious anticipations and prognostications of the
later ; prophetic figurings of what is going to be ;
and similarly in the life of the race, considered as an
organic unity, the collective consciousness of primi-
tive times, " the prophetic soul of the wide world
dreaming of things to come" may have felt and
roughly pictured to itself, in terms of things familiar,
the later phases of its own development. The
prophet (in any department of knowledge) or the
seer, is one whose mind is in more sensitive sympathy
with the collective mind of his own times ; who
enters more deeply into the contemporary life of his
nation or people, and can forecast by instinctive
sagacity the coming phases of its progress. The
religious prophet is one who enters also into the
mind of God to some degree, and thus has access
to that chief factor in the making of futurity, from
which the natural mind is excluded. But since all
growth and progress is effected by the working of
the universal Mind and Will in each several part of
creation ; it is conceivable that even in the natural
order some more than others should have a special
gift of introspective divination, i.e., of interpreting
and guessing at the aims of that interior Power to
which they are habitually obedient.

The religious sense, like every other sense, in
the measure that it is developed, acquires, even in

THE DESIRE OF ALL AGES.

the individual, a certain extension of insight and
foresight that is prophetic in the eyes of those not
similarly endowed. But it is only in some sort of
religious society that this sense can normally be
wakened and educated so as to appropriate the
acquisitions of the general mind, to add to them
and to put the impress of personal character upon
them. Through intercourse these personal incre-
ments are gradually made common property and
modify the general religious sense of the community.
The strictly prophetic mind, in the natural order, is
one in which the general religious sense of the
community is so comprehensively and distinctly
reproduced as to reveal those remoter implications
and consequences which are neither contained
within the narrower horizon nor perceptible to the
less sensitively sympathetic vision of the average good
man. If we all contribute to the quiet increment of
the general religious sense through which God
reveals Himself, it is through the prophets that it
receives what are more properly developments—
changes of character and not merely of intensity.
Thus in the Sacred Scriptures we find the Messianic
ideal passing periodically from one stage of spiritual-
isation to another; till through Christ Himself it was
stripped of the last shreds of material grossness and
worldly gaudiness and left naked on the Cross in all
its divine beauty. The vague desire of the nations,
of man in the misery of his savagery and barbarism,
or rather, of God's Spirit striving in man, slowly
worked itself clear and found its full utterance and
expression in Christ crucified.

i6i THE SACRED HUMANITY.

XIX.

THE SACRED HUMANITY.

No creature should hold us back from God, since not even our
Lord Himself, in so far as He vouchsafed to become the Way.
wished to hold us back, but went from us lest we should cleave
weakly to those things done and suffered by Him, in time, for our
salvation instead of hastening onwards more quickly by means
of them.1

Christ in His humanity, is the Way, and no man
cometh to the Father but by that Way; for, no
man hath seen God at any time, that he should have
any adequate or proper conception of the Divine
nature, or should see otherwise than through the
darkened glass of analogies drawn from finite things ;
or in the enigmas of antimony and paradox. But
the Only-Begotten "who is in the bosom of the
Father," He hath declared Him and manifested His
Name or Nature upon earth ; He hath shown us the
Father as far as the Father can possibly be shown
to minds like ours ; as far as He can be spoken in
human language, and expressed in the terms of the
most perfect human life. "The Word" (the reflex
of the Father) "was made flesh," was translated
into the terms of humanity, and dwelt among us,
full of grace and truth. He who hath seen Him
hath, so far, seen the Father ; for there is nothing
in Him of gentleness, goodness, love, wisdom, power,

1 " Nulla res in via ad Deum tenere nos debet, quando nee ipse
Dominus, inquantum via nostra esse dignatus est, tenere nos voluit,
sed transire; ne rebus temporalibus, quamvis ab illo pro salute
nostra susceptis et gestis, hsereamus infirmiter, sed per eas potius
curramus alacriter." (Aug.,.D* Doct. Christ, ch. 34.)

THE SON OF GOD. 103

compassion, sorrow, and suffering, that is not in the
Father superexcellently and beyond all comprehen-
sion. And those who know the nature of the human
mind, will see that there is no way to the knowledge
of the Father but by Him ; that we must conceive
God human-wise or not at all ; that the object of our
love must be, not merely a personality but a human
personality ; and that therefore the highest humanity
is the highest image we can possess of the unimagin-
able divinity. Yet we must not rest in the way, but
by it pass into that Rest which lies beyond it " in
the Bosom of the Father," when Christ shall deliver
up the keys that God may be all in all. For the
end of all this image-making and image-worship is
to prepare our mind and heart for the direct know-
ledge and love of the imaged reality ; to raise us to \
that highest point of spiritual evolution in the
present order at which we are to pass into an order
of Knowledge and Love as different from this, as
this is from the merely animal level of conscious
existence. The chasm that separates life from the
lifeless, sense from the senseless, reason from the
irrational, the superspiritual from the spiritual, is in
all cases equally mysterious.

XX.

THE SON OF GOD.

What think ye of Christ ? Whose Son is He ?— Matt. xxii.

The contention that there was little or on
Christology in Christ's teaching : that it was His fyjv
enthusiastic followers who first laid such stress on

i64 rilE SON OF Gdb.

what He was, as distinct from what He said and did
— on the Revealer as distinct from His revelation —
is a popular and plausible criticism that will not bear
close examination. To expurgate even the synoptic
Gospels of the many quiet matter-of-fact claims He
made concerning His own person and dignity —
claims which, on the part of the greatest of prophets,
would have been held arrogant and blasphemous —
would be to leave an unrecognizable residuum of
Christianity whose power and attractiveness and
subsequent conquest of the world would be very
unintelligible.

It is the belief that He who for our sakes became
poor, who felt and ministered to our infirmities of
body and mind, who knelt to wash our feet, who
bore to be put to death by our foes — those wolves
that prey upon the flock — it is the belief that He
was really our God and Maker, long veiled from our
eyes under the terrible masks of men's devising,
now at last revealing Himself in all His humanity
and benignity, full of grace and truth, that alone
explains the spell exerted by the name of Jesus over
the nations of the earth. If He had come principally
to reveal the unknown or mis-known Father, it was
not merely by means of words and syllables strung
together, whence the hearer might build up in his
own mind some tottering image of the ineffable
Reality ; but He was Himself, in His manhood, that
revelation : " He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father" — hath seen the fullest possible expression
of the Divine character in the terms of human
character — hath seen man's life as lived by Him who

THE SON OF GOD. 105

made man. Hence, in order to reveal the Father
He had to reveal Himself; and so He asks, not
merely once in a way and verbally, but continually,
and by His whole life, ministry, and death : " What
think ye of Christ ? Whose Son is He ? " — for if
He be the Son of God, then He that knoweth the
Son knoweth the Father also, whose features He
bears. His own personality was therefore the
central point of His teaching : He bore witness to
Himself — as His adversaries complained from first
to last.

What lends plausibility to the rationalistic criti-
cism above mentioned is the fact that the dogma of
the Divinity of Christ and of the Hypostatic Union,
in its purely intellectual and metaphysical aspect,
is so far removed from common modes of thought
and from the capacity of ordinary men, unversed in
the theology of the schools, that it seems wholly out
of keeping with the simplicity of the Gospel to
suppose that Christ, whose mission was mainly to
the poor and uncultured ; who addressed Himself so
much to the heart and so little to the mind, should
expect of His disciples a theory concerning Himself
so bewilderingly beyond the comprehension of the
vast majority : or that, failing this, He should be
content with, or set any value on, a merely verbal
assent of obedience to a belief upon which the whole
of the Christian's inward life must be built — the
belief namely, that Christ is God.

Plainly, then, there is some living, life-giving
manner of apprehending this truth other than the
intellectual, nor should we willingly allow that any

io6 THE SON OF COD.

soul could be at a spiritual disadvantage through
mere speculative incapacity. Did the eternal life of
the many depend on their mental accuracy — on their
understanding what theology understands by God,
Nature, Person, Union, how few could be saved !
As to Nature and Personality — their definition and
their relation to one another — theologians themselves
are divided into opposite and irreconcilable schools.
The very term " Person ** has so changed its meaning
in many modern languages that it were almost a
truer translation of theology to say there are two
persons in Christ and one in the Godhead ; since by
"person" is now understood a distinct mind and
will. If the conceptions of the wise and learned
are so unclear, what shall we say of those of the
uneducated or untheological ?

We shall certainly not say that, for most of them
the dogma : " Christ is God " is a mere jangle of
words to which no internal meaning answers. For
man is before mind and prior to mind. Mind is but
,sJv^a part of him, torn away from the rest by abstraction,
for purposes of clear speech and methodical thought :
• >'X but in reality what we call mind, will, act, affection,

feeling, sense, are but aspects of one indivisible
being — man. Things may have a meaning and
reality for the whole man, long before they have a
clear meaning for his mind whose office it is to
express, measure, and formulate what is first given
in his concrete experience. A word, name, or
phrase may answer to no definite or coherent idea
of the mind, and yet be full of inward meaning for
the soul : it may express the state of the affection,

The son of god. 107

the practical attitude of the will, the response of the
whole spiritual nature to the object signified by the
word or phrase in question. God is known to man
long before, and better than, He is known to the
mind of man. Long before the notions of law and
causality are formulated, long before such words as
" Self-subsistent " and " Infinite" are required, those
whom we regard as savages may feel, and confess
with their will, the same God of whom they think
and speak so much more childishly than we do. For
those crowds to whom Christ spoke, God was far
more human, far less metaphysical, than He is for
even popular theology in these days : He was the
Father, Maker, and Judge of all men, but the notion
of His spirituality had to be enforced and was, as it
always is, a difficult conception for the many. That
He was one and supreme, all-seeing, all-mighty, were
truths of revelation, rather than of reason : derived
from prophets, rather than from schoolmen. The
notion of another God than Jehovah would have
shocked their faith more than their reason — their
soul, more than their mind. To them, perhaps, the
multiplication of Divine persons, the notion of a Son
of God, was less of a mystery to reason, than it is to
us : though not less, but more, of a difficulty to their
faith, — seeming, as it did, to contradict the central
dogma of their religion.

To such as these — to Peter, Andrew, James, and
John, to Mary, and Martha, and Lazarus — what did
the truth of Christ's Godhead mean ? As a theo-
logical conception, as an apprehension of the mind,
little or nothing that they could define. As an

io$ i-HE SON OF GOD.

apprehension of the whole soul, — all or more
perhaps, than it means for the profoundest theo-
logian. It meant that the whole practical attitude
of the will and affections towards Him was that
which befits the creature in relation to its Creator —
an attitude of latria, of absolute worship, submis-
sion, and devotion, such as is due to God alone.
The theoretical justification of this attitude was of
secondary importance, compared with the fact of its
existence.

A truth ceases to be, for us, a mere speculation,
and becomes a conviction, as soon as we begin to
treat it as a reality, to adapt our life to it, to allow
for it in our conduct and in our thought. It thereby
becomes a reality for us — for that is relatively real
which acts upon us and modifies our action. And
for this reason it can be a conviction of our soul..
long before it has become a necessity for our
thought.

Thus it is that the dogma " Christ is God " can
be most real and no mere formula to millions foi
whom it means little intellectually. Whatever place
He may occupy in the dim labyrinth of their tangled
thoughts ; yet in their lives, in their affections, in
their whole will-attitude, He is their God, "whose
they are: whom they serve;" He is that one being
of their own species whom they may safely idolize
and whom they can never love too much. He asks
of them no perplexing comprehension of His infinite
claims, but only that no creature shall take that
place in their affection and action which is due to
Him alone. " He that loveth father or mother more

THE ATONEMENT. log

than Me is not worthy of Me," and " He that loseth
his life for My sake shall find it," and " Unless a man
forsake all that he hath he cannot be My disciple."
These are the practical claims of Divinity. He who,
in his inward and outward life, puts Christ before
all, even before his own life and the objects of his
deepest affection, thereby admits His Godhead with
a conviction more vital than any of which the bare
intellect is capable. And yet who is so simple or
childlike as to be incapable of this conviction ?
Who cannot yield to Christ that place in his life
which else he must idolatrously yield to self or to
some creature — for without a god no man can live ?
Our life, internal and external, is the expression
of the deepest convictions of our soul of which even
our own formal and explicit thought may take no
account. It is from the whole soul and not from
the surface of the mind alone that we must answer
the question : " What think ye of Christ ? Whose
Son is He?"

XXI.

THE ATONEMENT.

Behold the Lamb of God who beareth the sins of the world.
—John i. 29.

The story of Job, who is the typical Just Man of
all ages and races, and of whom Christ is the fullest
antitype, is designed to bring out the difference
between Christian collectivism and worldly indi-
vidualism and to establish the true relations of
personality and society.

According to his three comforters, personal

THE ATONEMENT.

suffering must always be the punishment of personal
sin: Job suffers, therefore he has sinned; let him
confess his sin, and God will stay His chastening
hand: "The soul that sinneth it shall die," is
seemingly the word of God and certainly the word
of natural justice ; and the inference follows easily,
if not altogether logically, that the soul that dies or
suffers must have sinned. This is life as they
conceive it ought to be ; that it appears otherwise,
is but appearance and no more; and God's own
day will banish the darkness.

Job, on the other hand, holds through thick and
thin to the acquittal his conscience accords to him ;
and God in the end justifies Job, and rebukes the
presumption and arrogance of those who would
pretend to read the mysteries of His Providence
and to mete out His justice in their own petty
scales.

Suffering is not necessarily the punishment of
personal sin, but oftenest a consequence of the fact
that we are not isolated units, but are linked
together into one body, whereof if one member
sorrow or rejoice the others perforce must rejoice
or sorrow with it. That God makes His sun to
shine, His rain to fall, on the just and the unjust
indiscriminately, is not appearance but fact; and
the spiritual equivalent of this fact is found in the
blessings thar fall upon the evil through the merits
of the good, and the afflictions that befall the good
through the demerits of the evil. It is a matter of
experience that, as human society is constituted,
the evil results of sin fall continually and largely

THE ATONEMENT. ill

upon the innocent, while the worthless and unde-
serving reap the harvests of blessing which others
have sown. And yet this glaring inequality which
at first sight is the abiding scandal of God's crea-
tion, may, on closer thought, seem to be an element
of a wider harmony than we can now comprehend.
In her worship of the Holy Innocents, those
involuntary sufferers on Christ's account, the Church
seems to admit a principle of redemption whereof
the Atonement is but the highest and fullest appli-
cation— the principle, namely, that the sufferings
entailed upon the innocent in the carrying out of
God's dispensation have an expiatory and inter-
cessory value for the taking away of the sins of the
world. " Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the
death of His holy ones." God must be at least as
good as the best of us; must realize, in infinitely
transcending, our highest moral ideals. But we
ourselves should feel some debt of generosity, if not
of rigorous justice, to one whom we had all uninten-
tionally injured in estate or reputation through the
lawful prosecution of our own rights, duties, or
plans. It is for the universal good, for the ultimate
gain of all, that God's world should be governed,
not freakishly, but by firmly established and seem-
ingly relentless laws, so that free, self-forming
personalities may be able by the investigation, know-
ledge, and use of these laws to shape their own
destinies according to the Divine Will so revealed.
Else, they would be as the children of some weak,
capricious father whose will, alterable at every cry
of discontent, would be incalculable, and his house-

H2 THE ATONEMENT.

hold a lawless chaos. And so God's mill grinds out
the general good according to the fixed laws of
Nature, of human thought, of human life, nor will
He lightly alter their ruthless mechanism or throw
His system into confusion in response to those
short-sighted and often selfish murmurings against
His wisdom and goodness, which would subject the
universal interest to our own. Rather He leads us
to that higher faith which prays, not that the chalice
may pass ; but that strength may be given to drain
it; not that His will may be altered, but ours;
which takes evil from His hand as well as good, nor
seeks shallow interpretations of the details of His
providence.

Yet is it credible for a moment that any living
creature should suffer blamelessly in the grinding
out of God's general designs ; should be crushed or
torn in the wheels of His mill and go unrecom-
pensed ? Nor is it here only a question of physical
suffering, of hunger and thirst, of sickness, pain,
and death ; but also of every spiritual and moral
hurt or privation which results inevitably from the
limitations of general laws — of ignorance, darkness,
degradation, of inherited defects of temperament
and " taints of blood," of morally poisonous environ-
ment, of all that, not being fault meriting penalty,
is misfortune meriting compassion and compensa-
tion. So far as these evils result to the individual
from the determinism of Nature which is established
in the interests of that far-off general good which is
spoken of in revelation as the Kingdom and the
Glory of God, our moral sense, which is a faint

THE ATONEMENT. 113

echo of the divine, clamours for compensation to
the injured and maimed, in soul or body, to the
Innocents who have died, not willingly even, but
only incidentally, that Christ might live, i.e., for the
general good and for the Will of God.

It is surely not too much to hope that all the
unmerited, though involuntary, sufferings in the
world, incidental to the working out of God's plans;
the sufferings not merely of those who have sinned
and therefore deserve to suffer in some form, but the
sufferings of the sinless, of little children, nay, even
of the dumb creatures of whom God has care, may
all be taken under, and sanctified by the sufferings
of the Most Innocent One who is the " recapitula-
tion " of all creatures — and may thus receive a
sacramental efficacy for the blotting out of the sins
of the world.

Still more is this credible in regard to the
voluntary patience of God's saints, martyrs, con-
fessors, and prophets in all times ; whom He has
sent forth as lambs into the midst of wolves for
the saving of their destroyers. It is because "the
world" (i.e., the strong majority of the worldly)
being corrupted by sin hates God and what is
godlike, that it of necessity hates, persecutes, and
kills the godlike, god-loving man. But he, in the
measure that he emulates God, and instead of
resisting evil with evil, takes it into himself, lest
it should react upon the doer ; in the measure that
he prays : " Father forgive them " and " Lay not
this sin to their charge " is, in a still higher order,
a participator in the redemption of sinners, and
1

ii4 THE ATONEMENT.

makes intercession for the transgressors with whom
he is united as part of the same living organism.

But the sufferings of His servants would have
availed little, had not God in the fulness of time
sent forth His Son, the heir of the whole Kingdom
of Justice and Holiness, in whom the manifold
righteousness of all the saints is gathered up to a
focus of infinite brilliancy — the Lamb of God who
beareth the sins of the whole world. In every
violation of conscience we extinguish some little
spark of the divinity that is in us; we eliminate
God from our lives. All sin is some sort of God-
murder — "We will not have this man to reign over
us." And what each one of us does to that Divine
One who in the midst of our soul struggles against
the godless crowd of our passions and impulses ;
that, the world does always and everywhere to the
"just man," who is to society what conscience is to
the individual. Most of all did it seize upon God's
dearest and best beloved, upon the Lamb of God,
tearing Him limb from limb, so that in the slain
Son of God we see sin revealed and made palpable
and visible in its true character. " This is the heir ;
let us kill him and the heritage shall be ours."

Yet if the slaying of Christ was the great sin
and self-condemnation of the world, compared with
which all other violences done to God or to His
Saints seem trivial ; it was also the great expiation
and redemption, under which, and in union with
which, all the meekness and voluntary sufferings of
the Saints get a new and sacramental expiatory
value, making therewith one organic total of suffer-

THE ATONEMENT. 115

ing whereby the sin of the world is covered and
forgotten.

Of its own nature sin leads eventually to misery,
and is the poison of human happiness ; when man
flings himself rebelliously against the adamantine
rock of God's will, he but shatters himself to pieces.
He intends murder, but effects suicide. But God,
in His pitying meekness, instead of resisting, yields,
that the hurt may be all His and in nowise ours.
And this too He makes visible to us, in taking to
Himself the passible nature of our humanity, in
which when He might have come down from the
Cross He would not ; " When He was reviled He
reviled not again ; when He suffered, threatened
not." Christ as man, in His human mind and will,
by His sympathy with the " meekness and pity " of
God, and by His perfect intelligent obedience to the
Father's forgiving will, showed Himself to be that
Beloved Son in whom God was so well pleased that
the sin of the world was hid from His displeasure
and obliterated.

Thus by the exercise of His creative prerogative
which draws good out of evil, order from chaos,
and light from darkness, God made (and ever makes)
man's most suicidal act instrumental to his fullest
salvation. 0 certe necessaruim A dee peccatum ! O Felix
culpa quce talcm et tantum meruit habere redemptorem t
0 mira circa nos tuce pietatis dignatio — " O truly
needful sin of Adam ; O happy fault which won
such and so great a ransom ; O wondrous gracious-
ness of Thy encompassing pity ! "

It is not then accurate to say that Christ, con-

n6 THE PASSION.

sidered as a separate individual, was " punished "
for our sins, though He suffered for them and
because of them. It was because the world was a
sinful world that God's Lamb, coming to His own,
came into the midst of wolves and was torn by
them ; and yet came knowingly and willingly that
He might save them through being torn by them.
Yet if we consider Him as making with the whole
race one thing, then indeed it was the whole body
of humanity that sinned (in virtue of its guilty
members) and was punished for its sin with a
punishment that fell also upon its innocent members,
chief of whom was Christ, the Saint of saints ; and
these by their meek submission have purchased
glory for themselves and redemption for their sinful
brethren.

XXII.

THE PASSION.

Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.
— Is. liii. 4.

The mother who watches the sufferings of her
infant suffers herself far more by sympathy. Could
we conceive a human mind which could comprehend
in all its distinctness the whole history of the
world's griefs and sorrows — present, past, and to
come — of its pain, weariness, sickness, poverty,
hunger, and thirst; of all its bodily anguish and
want ; of all its mental sufferings, darkness, doubts,
perplexities, ignorances, and errors; all humiliations
and woundings of self-esteem ; all shame and
disgrace; all calumnies, slanders, and injustices;

TttS PASSlOtf. II?

all the sorrows of the heart and affections; the
partings of friends, disappointments, betrayals,
infidelities, deaths, and losses ; all temptations and
spiritual conflicts, and defeats ; and could we
conceive a human heart that could love each of
us as God loves us— God who has created the
human heart and filled it with pity and tender
affection — and which could feel for us and with us
as God feels for us and with us — each and all ;
then we should understand the passion of Christ ;
how He took upon Himself, — into His own mind
and heart — all the griefs, sins, and sorrows of our
race, and felt them more than we ourselves could
feel them. In this again He is the Just Man par
excellence ; for all God's Saints and great ones have
in some measure entered into and felt by sympathy
the sorrows and sins of their people ; and this,
because of something godlike in them. But Christ
Who is God could turn the gaze of His human soul
to the mirror of His divine mind and see there the
full record of the whole creation's groaning and
travailling from first to last ; and could use this
piercing insight as a sword to cleave His most
tender and sympathetic heart in twain. What He
suffered in His own separate personality, in the
way of temptation, bodily weariness, pain, and
wounding ; in the way of scorn, mockery, and
injustice ; in the way of grief, disappointment,
and separation — as it were sampling each class of
suffering — was but a drop in the ocean of His
passion ; a mere symbolization of the spiritual
crucifixion of all humanity which was repeated and

U8 THE PASSION.

intensified in His own soul by supernatural insight
and sympathy. Thus has He taken on Himself
even the very least of our pains and aches ; even
the tiny sorrows and crosses of childhood ; and
has thereby consecrated them with a sacramental
efficacy and made them part of that great organic
body of suffering whereof His passion is the soul
and unitive principle ; and by which the sin of the
world is blotted out of the sight of God, and the
dark cloud between earth and heaven lit up with a
sunset glory.

The deeper we enter into and realize the truth
of our corporate unity with the whole race, present
and past, the liker are we to Him who so realized
it that He bore all the sins and sorrows of the
world as though they were His own personal sins
and sorrows. We sometimes speak of " blushing for
our common humanity'' at witnessing some deed
of shame and degradation ; yet only for a few does
the phrase express a real emotion of shame such
as we should feel for the disgrace of parent, spouse,
or child. One of the many ways in which self-
centralization ministers to pride is in striking
this load of shame off our shoulders and enabling
us to stand erect like the Pharisee — all unaware
that the publican's sins are our own. We must
either disown our poor relations or else share their
shabbiness and poverty.

WATER AND BLOOD. 119

XXIII.

WATER AND BLOOD.
And straightway there came forth water and blood.— John xii. 34.

That is, from the heart of Christ, the symbol of
that Eternal Love which is the very core of the
Divinity round which all the other Divine attributes
cluster, at once revealing and hiding it. And
because the deepest and most central, it is often
the hardest to distinguish, being, in relation to our
knowledge, as it were the buried root of the God-
head. From this source issue forth in divergent
streams water and blood ; good and evil ; light and
darkness ; purity and guilt ; life and death ; to this,
again, these seeming contraries will converge at the
last ; and show themselves to be but the many-
coloured strands from which the web of God's glory
is woven. We see but the middle of the process
where the divergence is at its greatest ; but the
beginning and the end are buried in those two
infinite nights which are cleft asunder by the brief
day of our mortal existence.

Nor does the imperfect nature of our vision
merely break up what is pure and simple into a
chaos of conflicting parts ; it also colours what is
transparent and colourless ; it changes water into
blood. To our less than childish estimate the Lover
of our soul seems at times cruel and bloodthirsty —
" Clad in a vesture stained with blood and His
name was the Word of God." This is in truth the
mystery of faith, namely, that sorrow and darkness

120 WATER AND BLOOu.

and death should spring from and manifest the
same Love as joy and light and life ; that the same
fountain should bring forth bitter and sweet ; that
the same central attraction should draw and repel,
causing one substance to sink and another to float ;
that blood no less than water should flow forth from
the very heart of the dying God to deluge the earth
and to return again to its source having accomplished
all whereunto it was sent ; that God should look back
upon all that now seems to us evil in the labour of
His hands, and pronounce the sum total to be
"exceeding good."

All serious, as opposed to crudely rationalistic,
difficulties against faith are directed against the
goodness and wisdom of God, and thus our
problem is the problem of evil. " If there were a
God," we say, " these things could not be ; either
He cannot prevent sin and suffering ; and so He is
not almighty; or He will not, and so He is not
all-loving." Even in regard to the mysteries of
revelation, the chief difficulties are quite analogous
to those which are offered to us by the spectacle of
the natural world ; difficulties which offend what
we feel and know to be the best in us — our higher
wisdom, our benevolence and justice and faithful-
ness ; difficulties suggested by such seeming un-
wisdom and cruelty as is involved in the mysteries
of predestiny, eternal punishment and the like.

But here it is that faith comes in with its wise
hesitancy and checks the first impulse of our mind
to cry out : " God can never have said it." Our
better reason rebukes us and asks : " He that made

WATER AtiD BLOOD. tit

the eye shall He net see? He that gave us our
sense of equity and justice and benevolence, shall
He not prove in the event just and fair and gentle
and loving beyond our wildest dreams ? Shall man
be more just than His Maker; or shall the stream
rise higher than its source?" And together with
this, it tells us that a partial view, still more an
infinitesimally fractional view of any action and its
motives is necessarily distorted, and that God's
kindness not only may but often must seem cruelty,
and His wisdom folly, until we can know all as He
knows it.

We are not then to deny these mysteries, but to
regard them as half-truths whose edges will seem
jagged and crooked till the other halves are adjusted
to them. It is in some sense as a riddle whose
absurdity does not scandalize us because we know
it is a riddle, — true in some sense, but precisely in
what sense, we know not. The only difference is
that, a riddle is designed to obscure a truth, whereas
a revelation is designed to make as much of it plain
as will be profitable and bearable for us. Hence we
should never attempt to alleviate the difficulty of>
say, the doctrine of Hell or of Predestination by
forced explanations and rationalistic conjectures ;
but rather accentuate and emphasize it ; we should
admit freely and fearlessly that were any man to act
as God seems to act, were he to give favours that
he knew infallibly would be used by the recipient to
his eternal hurt, and so forth, such a man's conduct
would be indefensible ; and that God does come to
us in blood-stained garments, and presents Himself

122 WATER AND BLOOD.

to us under an appearance of injustice and severity
that would be intolerable, were we to credit appear-
ances. But knowing that Love is at the heart of
everything, we know as certainly that what shocks
us in revelation or in nature, is the creation of our
own limited vision ; that when we shall see all,
" God shall be justified in His sayings."

Of this noble nescience, Mother Julian of Norwich
writes as follows :

"There be many evil deeds done in our sight,
and so great harms taken that it seemeth to us that
it were impossible that ever it should come to a
good end. And upon this we look, and sorrow and
mourn therefor. So that we cannot rest us in the
blissful beholding of God, as we should do. And
the cause is this, that the use of our reason is now
so blind, so low, and so simple, that we cannot
know the high marvellous wisdom, the might, and
the goodness of the blissful Trinity. And this
meaneth He where He saith : Thou shalt see thyself
that all manner of thing shall be well, . . . There is a
deed which the blissful Trinity shall do in the last
day (as to my sight) ; and what that deed shall be,
and how it shall be done, it is unknown of all
creatures which are beneath Christ ; and shall be
[unknown] till when it shall be done. The goodness
of our Lord God willeth that we wit it shall be;
and the might and the wisdom of Him, by the same
love, will conceal it and hide it from us, what it shall
be, and how it shall be done. And the cause why
He wisheth us to know that it shall be is this ; that
He wisheth us to be more eased in our soul, and

WATER AND BLOOD. 123

peaceable in love, leaving the beholding of all
tempests that might hinder us from truly believing
in Him. This is the great deed ordained by God
our Lord from eternity; treasured and hid in His
blessed Breast, known only to Himself, by which
deed He shall make all things well ; for right as the
Blessed Trinity made all things out of nothing;
right so the same Blessed Trinity shall make well
all that is not well. And in this sight I marvelled
greatly and beheld our faith ; meaning thus : Our
faith is grounded in God's word ; and it belongeth
to our faith that we believe that God's word shall
be saved in all things. And one point of our faith
is that many creatures shall be damned, [such] as
the Angels that fell out of Heaven for pride ; and
many on earth that died out of the faith of Holy
Church. ... All these shall be damned to Hell
without end as Holy Church teacheth me to believe;
and, standing all this, methought it was impossible
that all manner of thing should be well, as our Lord
showed in this time. And as to this I had no other
answer in the showing of our Lord, but this : That
which is impossible to thee is not impossible to Me; I
shall save My word in all things, and I shall make all
things well. And in this I was taught by the grace
of God, that I should steadfastly hold me fast in the
faith as I had before understood ; and therewith that
I should stand and firmly believe that all manner of
thing shall be well, as our Lord showed in the same
time. For this is the great deed that our Lord God
shall do ; in which deed He shall save His word in
all things, and He shall make well all that is not

i$4 Water and blood.

well. But what that deed shall be, and how it shall
be done, there is no creature beneath Christ that
knoweth it, nor ever shall know it till it be done."

This is not universalism, but a repudiation
of that facile solution, and yet it is as solacing a
doctrine, or rather more, for it at once saves the
truth of the Christian faith, and assures us that all
shall be well. Nor do we rest on this vision as
though it contained some new point of revelation,
for it only insists upon what reason and revelation
alike assure us of, that God's goodness infinitely
transcends our utmost conception, and what appears
otherwise is only appearance.

Elsewhere we read that she says to our Lord :
" Ah, good Lord, how might all be well for the great
harm that is come by sin to Thy creatures ? . . . And
to this our Blessed Lord answered full meekly,
and with lovely cheer, and showed that Adam's
sin was the most harm that was ever done, or ever
shall be unto the world's end. . . . Furthermore
He learned me that I should behold the glorious
satisfaction, for this satisfaction-making is more
pleasing to the Blessed Godhead, and more worship-
ful for man's salvation than ever was the sin of
Adam harmful. Then meaneth our Blessed Lord
thus : * For since that I have made well by the most
harm, then it is my will that thou know thereby that I
shall make well all that is less.''

Once more she draws a distinction between that
mere fringe of eternity that appears to us through
a rift in the cloud, and the infinite substance thereof
which lies beyond our ken : " The one part is our

WATER AND BLOOD. 125

Saviour and our salvation. This blessed part is
open, clear, fair and light and plenteous. . . .
Hereto we be bound of God, and drawn and
counselled, and learned inwardly by the Holy Ghost
and outwardly by Holy Church. . . . The other
part is hid and shut up from us, that is to say, all
that is besides [i.e., not pertinent to] our salvation ;
for that is our Lord's privy counsel; and it belongeth
to the royal Lordship of God to have His privy
counsels in peace ; and it belongeth to His servants,
for obedience and reverence, not to will to know His
counsels. Our Lord hath pity and compassion on
us, for that some creatures make themselves so busy
therein ; and I am sure if we wist how greatly we
should please Him and ease ourselves to leave it, we
would. The Saints in Heaven will to know nothing
but what God our Lord shall show them, . . . and
thus ought we, that our will may be like to theirs."

In all this one cannot fail to be struck with the
deep and true reasonableness of such faith, as
contrasted with the shallow rationalism of dogmatic
denial and the subtler rationalism of agnostic
despair. Doubtless, faith, like morality, is the
more difficult attitude and involves a continual
straining against our own narrowness and con-
traction of view. We need only "let go" in order
to drift down to agnosticism and rationalism, as
to a position of stable equilibrium. If we never
look at or think of the stars, the world will seem
as big to us as it does to the most untutored savage;
and if our reason is never exercised on matters that
exceed it, it soon thinks itself equal to everything.

r*6 THE RESURRECTION.

XXIV.

THE RESURRECTION.

They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have
laid Him. And when she had said this she turned behind her and
saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. — John xx.

This incident of Mary weeping at the empty
tomb has received many mystical applications at the
hands of preachers — all more or less fanciful; but it
is not uncommonly used in these days of failing
faith as a picture of the overwhelming desolation
and perplexity of many a devout soul in the face of
that all-destructive criticism which seems to have
changed or wholly obliterated the old landmarks of
religion and which leaves it gazing with strained
eyes into the grave of its shattered hopes. "They
have taken away my Lord and I know not where
they have laid Him." Yet surely it is inept and
violent thus to tear part of the incident from the
living unity of its context and to find in the fragment
a symbol of despair, when the unbroken whole gives
us a divine lesson of imperishable hope, which he
who runs may read. There is a certain wantonness,
characteristic of those in love with death and
darkness, in thus stopping short and refusing to see
the issue of the process by which God brings joy out
of sorrow and fruition out of loss ; killing that He
may quicken ; disappointing that He may satisfy
abundantly beyond our utmost expectations.

For what was that hope together with which
Mary's heart was shattered and the fountains of her

THE RESURRECTION. 127

deep love set free in rivers of tears ? A lowly hope
begotten of a feeble flickering faith ; for with her,
Love had grown in wild luxuriance at the expense, it
might seem, of the sister graces. She had no ears for
what Jesus said ; the prediction of His passion and
resurrection were to her as the serious talk of parents
to the ears of their little ones who gaze up at the
dear faces and feel confident that all will be well
whatever these strange words may mean. Her soul
lived on the sound of His voice, more than on the
sense of His words ; and thus the fact of His death
had driven from her mind whatever vague dreamings
the predictions of His resurrection may have given
birth to. He was dead, and that one thought
engrossed all her affection and all her under-
standing ; Faith and Reason were paralyzed in the
grip of grief. What remained for her now but to
seek relief in every natural utterance of her pent-up
sorrow, to empty the broken vessel of her heart and
pour the spikenard of her love over all that was left
to her of Him, to hasten to His tomb at the first
lawful moment, "very early ere the sun was yet
risen," outstripping all others in the energy of her
devotedness, to seek the dead among the dead.
This then was the humble goal of her desires, the
object of that hope which kept her from sinking into
the apathy and listlessness of utter despair ; while
any sacred relic of Him remained upon earth, life
and love could find something to feed upon, some-
thing round which past memories could cluster and
re-embody themselves so as to be tasted over and
over again and become a perpetual experience.

xa8 THE RESURRECTION.

Day by day as long as her widowed life might last
would she come to that sacred spot and sit in spirit
at His feet and in fancy hear His voice calling her
by her name : " Mary ! "

But as we now contemplate her, this last glimmer
of hope has been rudely extinguished; the little
house of refuge which her soul had built for itself on
the sands of illusion has crashed down and left her
homeless and desolate. Again and again, with an
obstinate incredulity that will not resign itself to the
worst and disbelieves its own eyes, she peers into
the darkness of the sepulchre and gropes with her
hands in every corner and gathers each time a new
conviction of despair which is cast away forthwith,
to be presently sought anew. It is indeed her
darkest hour, yet, as the by-word goes, it is also that
closest upon the dawn. " When thou thinkest all is
lost then art thou often in the way of the greatest
gain ; when thou deemest I am furthest from thee,
then am I often nearest to thee." It is God's
universal law in His dealings with the human soul,
nay, with the human race, to suffer things to run
their evil course that evil may cure itself, and in
defeating itself give birth to good. Each lie must
obtain credence and work itself out to its practical
and speculative absurdities before the truth can be
adequately mastered by minds such as ours. A slow
and painful method it seems to us creatures of a
brief day, impatient to behold the goodness of God
in the land of the living, and to see the Lord's
Christ ere we taste death.

For in the slow ages that are but as moments

THE RESURRECTION. 129

to Him, how many must wander in darkness and
death's shadow, how many a soul be starved and
tortured, how many a heart must be crushed,
and personality maimed and distorted in the long
wearisome process by which truth and justice are
ground out through the machinery of the natural
laws by which the growth of humanity is governed !
Surely His ways are not as our ways ; and we are
often constrained, not only by the limits of our
intelligence, but by the imperative of our moral
conscience to fight against God by seeking His
glory in ways that seem effectual from our standpoint,
though from His, they may be manifestly disastrous.
We often may not let things go from bad to worse
and reduce themselves to absurdity, even though it
were plainly the only possible and effectual remedy ;
we are often bound to strive might and main against
lying and iniquity, though in so doing we but retard
the process of decay and corruption through which
alone resurrection to a new and better life can be
secured. We are compelled by our moral nature to
labour and die for a foredoomed cause even as our
bodily nature struggles to the bitter end against the
relentless forces of dissolution. Throughout creation
we see God everywhere thus fighting with Himself,
one hand as it were against the other, pulling
upwards and downwards, East against West and
North against South ; and reflection seems to show
that this endless conflict of opposites, each balancing
the other, is an essential condition of life and
progress ; that we must wrestle with God in order to
force from Him those very blessings which He is
J

13°

THE RESURRECTION.

longing to give, but can give on no other terms
without hurt to our character. Hence He bids us
seek Him in one direction that we may at last find
Him in another, just when we have abandoned hope
and are retracing our weary steps ; He bids us fight
for blessings that come through our defeat and not
through our victory. Christ in His own person and
in that of every Christ-like man, " agonized unto
death for justice' sake," and in failing triumphed.
In all this He deals with us as a wise-loving Father
with His children, who governs not by caprice, over-
interference and debilitating supervision and assist-
ance ; but according to fixed and established laws,
not lightly to be set aside, and in accordance with
which the young mind can shape and govern itself
and quickly attain that independence and autonomy
which is the essence of personality. At times there
seems to us a ruthlessness in the way things are
suffered to run their course, and work out their
natural and inevitable consequences. We cannot
see why God does not, will not, interfere with the
relentless machinery of Nature which grinds on in
spite of all our cries to the deaf Heavens. Vision
so dim and narrow-ranged as ours needs the supple-
ment of no little faith in that Love and Wisdom
which we feel must be at the back of everything, if
we are not to be perplexed even to madness in our
endeavour to read God's riddles and equal our mind
with His. Still in quiet moments, when we are not
on the rack of doubt and bewilderment, reflection
tells us that His ways not only are not, but could not
possibly be as our ways, and are bound to seem

THE RESURRECTION. 131

crooked and even cruel in our eyes until we see the
whole of which they are but part.

In more ways than one, therefore, is Mary an
image of disappointed hope. It was Divine Love
Himself who drew her steps after Him in odorem
unguentorum suorum to seek Him here where He could
not be found — " the living among the dead ; " who
prepared this valley of sorrow and desolation in her
heart that He might fill it to overflowing with the
torrents of joy and gladness, who kept her eyes
turned away from Him and peering into the dark-
ness, that He might presently flood them with the
brightness of His living glory.

And how is her night turned into day ? Not by
perseverance in the method of her quest, but by a
sudden change of method and direction : Conversa
retrorsutn. At a word from Him, she turns round.
Yet so possessed is she by the belief that He is to be
sought among the dead, that, seeing Him among the
living she knows Him not, — for we never recognize
what we in no wise expect to see. And thus it is
that deliverance comes to us in our darkest hour.
What we need is a new standpoint — to turn right
round and look behind us ; to find Him living and
near to us in the same moment that we sought Him
dead and found Him not. Left to ourselves we
should remain for ever gazing despairingly into the
dark tomb from which He has vanished; but He
who wisely permits us to stray, ever follows our
footsteps ; nor is our zealous quest less pleasing to
Him because it is misguided : He says to the soul,
Mulier quid ploras quern quaris ? Why weepest thou ?

1 32 THE RESURRECTION.

Whom seekest thou ? He knows well whom and
why ; nor could we care to seek Him were He
not seeking us and drawing us to Himself — albeit
through devious paths and crooked windings: Tu
enim prior excitasti me ut qucererem Te.

And so it befalls that when hope is in its death
agony, He speaks to our startled ears some word
that makes us turn right round and find the truth
behind our backs, and where we least expected it.
How often have we not fled from our salvation as
from the face of a serpent ; and sought light in the
darkness of some empty tomb ! How often, on the
other hand, have not our enemies been turned into
our footstool, our rest and support ? Dismayed by
appearances, bewildered by the roar and tumult of
the buoyant surf, we drive our ships for safety on the
rock-bound coast and are dashed to pieces ; when
safety lay in pushing out further into the deep.

And so in these days of failing faith we destroy
ourselves by cowardice veiled under a mask of
prudence. We turn from the light of the living
present to seek Christ in the gloom of the buried
past — in the place where He lay but lies no more ;
He is not there, He is risen ; why seek the living
among the dead ?

" Mary on turning round saw Jesus standing, but
knew not it was Jesus ; " and we in like manner are too
stupefied by our prejudices and fixed ideas to recog-
nize Him in any wholly unexpected quarter until He
speaks to the very core of our heart and calls us by
our name as none other can call us. Then indeed
we are instantly at His feet, ashamed of our in-

THE RESURRECTION. 133

credulity and slowness of heart. This stupidity or
slowness of heart is indeed a grave flaw in the virtue
of Faith ; it implies a certain wilful obstinacy and
disorderly attachment, not to the word of God, but
to our own view of what God has said or can say —
a mingling of the alloy of transitory philosophical,
historical or scientific beliefs, or of our own personal
reasonings and reflections with the pure gold of
divine truth. Except a man forsake all that he
hath, says the Truth, he cannot be My disciple.
Detachment of the mind no less than detachment of
the heart is the necessary condition of following
God.

Faith is a certain pliability of the living mind in
respect to the Truth, by which a man is ready to
follow it "whithersoever it goeth" with perfect
liberty, certain that God " will save His word in all
things " and " be justified in His sayings." It is not
a state of inflexible rigidity — of a rock graven with
inscribed formulae ; but of a living converse between
the Creator and the creature who sits at the Master's
feet and drinks in the ever-progressive stream of His
words. A faith which does not grow every instant
into something new that swallows up and includes
the faith of the moment before, is dead in formalism
and unreality; for life is movement, before every-
thing. Hence while living faith clings with unshaken
confidence to the Divine Word, it is wholly detached
from its own inadequate apprehension of that word ;
ever ready to receive continual correction and adjust-
ment ; never surprised at any new face the familiar
but many-sided Truth may present. It will never

134 THE ASCENSION.

be so obstinately set upon looking for the Truth in
one direction only, according to some ungrounded
prepossession, as not to be ready at a word to turn
right round and find Jesus standing in the light of
the Sun, not lying in the darkness of the tomb ',
living among the living, not dead among the dead —
nearest where He seemed furthest away.

XXV.

THE ASCENSION.

It is good for you that I go away ; for if I go not away, the*
Comforter will not come ; but if I go, I will send Him unto you. —
John xvi. 7.

Judged from our standpoint, down at the bottom
of this narrow valley, nothing could be at first sight
less expedient, nothing more disastrous for the
Church than that her Spouse should go away. For
example, it is to the fact of the Resurrection that
we appeal as to the divine seal and signature of the
Christian revelation. How invincibly evident its
claims would have' been to all men, how quickly it
would have spread over the whole world, had the
risen Christ continued these two thousand years in
our midst as a living evidence of the fact. On the
other hand, when the world says : " Show us the
risen Christ that we may believe ; " how weak-
sounding an answer it is to say that His friends, not
His enemies, bore witness to the fact that for forty
days He appeared, not to His enemies but to His
friends ; that He was then caught up into the clouds
and vanished from their sight !

THE ASCENSION. 135

Again, when we read the painful history of un-
ending wranglings over points of belief, of heresies
and schisms thence resulting ; and think how simple
it would have been if Christ had remained with
us to interpret and supplement His own revela-
tion directly, instead of leaving us to the slow and
expensive method of theological development — even
divinely assisted — it is not easy at once to see how
His departure was so expedient for us.

Nor any more easy, when, we reflect how much
the Church has suffered through the unwisdom, the
human frailty, nay, the wickedness of her rulers and
pastors at one time or another ; how her ethical and
spiritual beauty has at times been obscured and
changed to repulsiveness ; and how different all
might have been had He held the helm with His
own hands throughout the ages ; had His light shone
forth in the eyes of all men that they might see and
give glory to God.

Nor are the reasons He gives for His going less
mysterious than the mystery they would solve,
though to thoughtless hearers they seem partially
satisfying. Like children, we are often content with
the mere sound of a reason — with a "since" or
" because," and inquire no further. " For if I go
not away, the Comforter will not come." Is it then
obvious that the invisible Paraclete is more useful to
us than the visible Incarnate Truth ? or that He
cannot come unless Christ go ? or that He must, as
it were, be fetched from some distant locality ? Or
that, at least, Christ could not return with Him ?
Are they contraries that exclude one another from

136 THE ASCENSION.

the same sphere ? Cannot Christ, nay, does He not,
exercise His intercessory office as fully on earth,
whether upon Calvary or upon the Altar, as in some
locally distant Heaven at God's right Hand ? Need
He go out of our sight in order to prepare a place
for us, as though His action were limited by the
bonds of space ?

Plainly we have here but the form and sound
of a reason without the reality ; mystery is answered
by deeper mystery ; the unknown by the less known.
And so it must ever be when we seek to know truths
to which our mind is not yet grown. All explanation
supposes some root of knowledge already in us into
which the new truth can be engrafted, or from which
it can be developed ; but there are whole realms of
truth in regard to which we have as yet not even the
rudiments of an apprehension. As to what is
proximately good for us, we can have some little
wisdom of our own ; but as to what is ultimately
good, absolutely expedient, we are immeasurably less
than babes in regard to Him who, from His infinite
height, surveys all things together from end to end,
from eternity to eternity. Hence that all things work
together for the good of them that love God we can
well believe ; but how they so work we cannot
possibly expect to comprehend ; and we are but
victims of merited illusion when to ourselves we seem
to comprehend.

On Tabor we say confidently: " It is good for us
to be here ; " but God judges otherwise and brings
us to Gethsemane. That good should come from
the defeat of good, that the Son of God should con-

THE ASCENSION. 137

tinually be mocked and scourged and crucified, is an
intolerable notion to our narrowness ; and yet we
have evidence that not merely in spite of, but through,
and in, His defeat and humiliation He was glorified ;
that it behoved Christ to suffer and in suffering to
enter into a spiritual glory whereof the radiance of
His Risen Body was but the symbolic expression,
suited to carnal minds as yet incapable of discerning
the glory of Calvary.

And yet, without pretending to sound the deep-
lying reasons of so great a mystery, we may note
certain incidental advantages to set off against the
no less incidental disadvantages of this strange
dispensation.

As a principle of education it is obvious that to
live continually at close quarters with a masterful
personality, far above our own in mental and moral
gifts, may be hurtful more than helpful to our
growth. For in the first place we are encouraged
in our race to emulate those ahead of us, so long as
the intervening distance seems superable; but if
the distance be altogether hopeless, the effect may
rather be to dishearten. To live with a saint might
drive many a one to disgust and despair. Christ in
His converse with His disciples seems to have con-
tinually economized, and to have held the dazzling
glory of His sanctity in reserve, making publicans
and sinners at home with Himself. Else He would
have lost touch with them and influence over them ;
even as in the training of their minds He could
enlighten them only by condescending to use their
language and modes of thought — not some ideally

138 THE ASCENSION.

perfect language and philosophy. The Good
Shepherd goes in front of His sheep to lure them
on; — but not miles in front. When for a brief
moment Peter wakes to a sense of the Divinity
veiled in everyday lowliness he cries : " Depart
from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord ; " or again,
"Thou shalt never wash my feet." He was not only
overwhelmed by Majesty, but driven away by it.
Hence Christ withdrew when the multitude would
make Him a King and thereby end His power of
secretly leavening the sinful masses in which He
lay hidden. And when this secret ministry was over,
and His eternal kingship had been proclaimed by
the fact of His Resurrection, He withdrew Himself
from His disciples as no longer profitable to them
on earth in the way of direct influence ; for He knew
they would come and make Him a King and set an
impassable barrier between His soul and theirs.

And perhaps moreover there would be some
intolerable indecency and profanity in the attempt
to array the Incarnate Son of God in the vulgar
trappings of earthly power and gaudy splendour —
in the notion of a Court of Christ. There was a
godlike dignity in the garments of His poverty, —
in the purple robe and the crown of thorns, — that
gold and jewels could never express; there was a
degree of worship in the hatred and contempt of
the world which its praise and homage could never
hope to equal.

But, secondly, it is bad for us to have an oracle
ever at hand to settle every difficulty for us, to solve
every problem ; to have one who will supply every

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 139

want, carry every burden, and take on himself all
our responsibility. It is only just so far as we
cannot help ourselves that help is a real kindness, —
that it is truly help. All beyond that, weakens us
and retards our growth and development. To be a
person is to be independent, distinct, active, self-
helping; and so far as we are passive and depen-
dent our personality is defective. Thus, while on
earth Christ doled out His help to individuals
according to this law ; for His whole aim was
spiritual development ; to fulfil and not to destroy.
It may well be that the Church, regarded collec-
tively, would have been hindered and not helped
by His continued presence in her midst ; that it
was good for her to be thrown on her own
resources, to have to struggle with the pains of
growth ; to be largely the mistress of her own
destiny ; to pass through weakness and humiliation
into her glory ; not indeed without His initial and
continual help ; but without superabundant and
hurtful help. He will lead His flock like a
Shepherd and He will carry the lambs in His
arms, — but not the grown sheep.

XXVI.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build My Church. —
Matt. xvi. 18.

It is in virtue of her stability in the faith of
Peter that the Church claims to be founded upon
a rock, or upon Peter who was an immovable rock
in his belief in the Divine Sonship of Christ.

i4o THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

As for his three-fold verbal denial who can put
it on a level with his divinely inspired confession,
or regard it as a fully-free, self-representative act,
unveiling the deep convictions of the heart and
will ? Here we find exemplified the profound
difference between the consent of the soul and the
assent of the mind ; between what a truth is for
our whole being when we are, as we say, "all
there," and what it is for us when we are more or
less eclipsed and hidden from ourselves by some
contracting fear, some blinding passion or prejudice;
when we think, speak, or act hastily from the upper
surface, not from the unseen depths of our person-
ality; when we are determined to some extent
passively by habit, impulse, impression; not actively
and freely by the pure, unembarrassed self.

Comparatively rare in most lives are those
moments when the clouds which wrap the bases
of our being in darkness are rolled away and when
the sharp isolated peak on which we seem to dwell
habitually in our consciousness is seen to slope
down and spread out till it merges in the common
ground on which we all stand, from which we all
spring.

Often in these flashes of illumination, a truth
that has heretofore been denied, or held dreamily
with the mind alone, is seen face to face as a solid
reality, altering the whole complexion of life, calling
forth a sudden and complete readjustment of the
attitude of the will and affections that abides after
the vision has departed from our memory. Ere
the moment of his great confession, Peter may have

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 141

believed and said that Jesus was the Son of the
Living God, he may have held to the truth and
possessed it ; but now the truth has taken hold of
him and possessed him, branded itself ineffaceably
upon his central soul ; nor can he ever shake it off
for any passing temptation, or tangle of the mind.
Flesh and blood have not revealed it to him ; his
conviction depends on no persuasiveness of human
eloquence or subtilty, on nothing that man can give
or take away : " Your joy no man taketh from you,"
says Christ.

And of this ineradicable conviction of Christ's
Godhead, the Church is heir — a conviction inde-
pendent of flesh and blood ; of the fluctuations of
thought and theory; practical, effective, affective,
rather than notional or speculative; a conviction
of the whole soul and not merely of the mind, — not
of a severed fraction of that living unity. This is
that truth of which she has proved herself in history
the unfailing, unwavering guardian. Whatever else
she teaches it is but as implying or implied in this,
whether as presupposition, or consequence. In
substance, as in kind, her faith is no other than
that of Peter's confession. Upon that she is built ;
in regard to that she is immovable and unchange-
able as a rock. Her language, her forms of thought
are those of many nations and many ages : but her
faith — that conviction of her inmost soul which her
mind can never compass exhaustively — is above
those laws of change and progress by which its
presentment is governed. As theologically con-
ceived, Christ differs for different minds and stages

i42 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

of intelligence ; but for faith, and as a conviction
of the soul, He is "the same yesterday, to-day and
for ever " — He is practically related to the soul and
the soul to Him as her Maker, Master, and God.

It is by her whole life and action in the world,
by her worship and ritual, by the practical attitude
of her will and affections in regard to Him — even
more than by her formulated dogma — that the
Church betrays the faith that is in her heart and
proclaims Christ to be the Son of the Living God.
Her chief raison d'etre as a society, is by her cor-
porate life and action to continue and extend to
all ages and nations the faith and confession of
Peter; to proclaim always and everywhere the
Godhead of Christ crucified, that is, to vindicate
for Him a right to that unlimited reverence, love,
and service, of which her whole practical attitude
is the manifestation. Her contest over the syllable
that separates Arianism from orthodoxy has often
been criticized as of purely metaphysical significance
and as showing how quickly the simplicity of the
Gospel had been supplanted in general interest by
the barren subtleties of the schools. Yet it was
as threatening Christ's supremacy in men's hearts
and lives rather than in the interests of correct
metaphysical speculation — on which she insists for
its own sake no more than her Master — that she
instinctively opposed herself might and main to a
formula which, in the mind-language of that day,
meant the dethroning of Christ from His seat by
the right hand of the Father in the centre of man's
soul.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 143

Historically it is to the Church as an organized
society that we owe the preservation of the person-
ality of Christ and the extension of His salutary
influence to all times and places ; nor can we well
conceive how the effect could possibly have been
secured without such an organization.

Although it is for His sake only that we believe
in and cling to His Church, and make ourselves
one with that crowd which has followed Him for
two thousand years; yet it is only through the
Church that we are able to know Him at all. It
is she who has treasured the records of His earthly
life, and made them the supreme rule of her official
teaching ; and by her ceremonial, which accords
them a relative honour almost divine, has secured
them a reverence which those, who have long since
discarded her ceremonial, still inherit — almost in
spite of themselves.

It is not to His followers severally and in isola-
tion that Christ has transmitted the faith of Peter,
but to the whole Church as one many-membered
organism. No great idea can be developed : that
is to say, no great reality can be exhaustively
comprehended, by the labour of one mind, or of
many minds in one generation. It needs the
collaboration of generation after generation, each
enriched by the experience and reflection of the
preceding. The unfolding of the implications of
her unchanging faith in the Godhead of Christ,
the explanation of her sentiment and will-attitude
in regard to Him, the translation into thought and
language and action of that which can never find

i44 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

adequate outward expression — all this constitutes
the growth of the collective mind of the Church.
Those who stand apart from her may appropriate
in some way the results of her vital activity, but
they are not sharers of that activity. Torn from
the living whole, some fragment of an idea may
seem at first sight more intelligible and satisfactory
than when cumbered with its vast and largely unin-
telligible context. But time and experience will
prove that it has no vitality when severed from the
organic unity to which it belongs. Heresies take
some seemingly neglected fragment of the Christian
conception, and, not content with giving it due
emphasis, go on to treat it as an independent whole;
and to reject the remainder from which it draws
life. Only in the Church, collectively — not merely
in her formulae, which from time to time gather up
and give expression to her growing self-conscious-
ness; but in her corporate will-attitude, sentiment
and action — is preserved the full faith of Peter in
Christ the Son of the Living God. The results
of independent speculation are perhaps at first sight
more brilliant and rapid, but eventually are seen to
be vitiated by some limitation of view against which
there is no security but in patient waiting on the
slow growth of the Catholic mind. In this sense
we may say : Extra Ecclesiam salus nulla : There
is no security outside the Church ; and for this
reason we hold on to her because we feel that she
is being guided safely, surely, infallibly, into an
ever fuller and clearer expression of her abiding
faith in Christ.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 145

From all this it follows that faith in the Church
is merely an extension of faith in Christ the Son of
the Living God. She is the medium in which, and
together with which, He is revealed to us ; if it is
for His sake we accept her, it is through her that
we are able to accept Him. Normally, there is no
priority in these acceptances but simultaneity. And
as these faiths in Christ and the Church agree in
object, so also in kind. A clear, intellectual con-
ception of the Church and of the rational basis
of her claims is a necessity for the theologian and
for the controversialist ; but is not essential to a
deep and living faith which often obtains where the
other is absent or impossible. The uninstructed
not only may and often do lack a coherent idea of
the Church, but may also pick up and repeat and
even think things quite inconsistent with the truth ;
just as a child might have most incorrect ideas as
to grounds of the obedience and affection due to
its mother. But in both cases it is the practical
attitude of the whole soul, of the will and the
affections, that is the true substance and profession
of faith.1

In the case of the instructed or the instructable
whose reflex thought reacts upon their will and
affections, a false mental conception is full of
danger, and for this reason the intellectual expres-
sion or equivalent of faith needs to be safeguarded

1 Cf., "A weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book, knows
nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of
parental love, but only knows one face and one lap towards
which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture." (G. Eliot's
Silas Mar tier.)
K

i46 THE VOICE OF THE MULTITUDE.

by authority; but for the simple this danger is
minimized. We must not then suppose that
because the words of the Creed sometimes answer
to no clear and coherent concept of the mind, they
are therefore mere words and correspond to no
inward spiritual reality.

Nor again must it be thought that this inward
faith is necessarily a living faith, fruitful in obedi-
ence and good works. The child may feel and yet
rebel against parental authority; and there is as
much faith involved in this disobedience as there
would be in obedience. And so, too, ignorant
people may not only think ignorantly or wrongly
about the Church ; but may also set her authority
at defiance, and yet have a deep and firm faith in
their spiritual mother.

XXVII.

THE VOICE OF THE MULTITUDE.

The voice of His words was as the voice of a multitude. —
Dan. x. 6.

Vox populi vox Dei — the voice of the people is
the voice of God — not of the mob, or of the
populace, but of the people. The amount of
mingled truth and falsehood in this principle makes
it most difficult to appraise. The judgment of the
entire multitude will not be vitiated by the pre-
judices and interests peculiar to any one section
thereof, and in this way personal and class errors
are eliminated. On the other hand, the judgments
in which all agree represent the most general and

THE VOICE OF THE MULTITUDE. 147

therefore the lowest stage of intellectual and moral
development, and are for that reason the most
inadequate and misleading. But against this it
must be said that two heads are better than one,
in as far as the experience of the wisest is narrow,
and needs to be supplemented by that of others;
and even his sagacity in dealing with experience is
often one-sided, unless it be stimulated by the
doubts and questionings, the solutions and hypo-
theses, suggested by other brains. Perhaps then it is
the wisdom of the few, criticizing and judging the
expressed opinion of the many, that should be
considered the voice of the people and the voice of
God. This is what the constitution of Catholic
Christianity seems to suppose. The u deposit " of
Christ's revelation lies in the mind of the Church
at large. But what is this seeming abstraction
which we call "the mind of the Church"? It
cannot be supposed that in the mind of the deepest
theologian or most enlightened saint of this present,
or of any other age of Christianity, the whole idea
of Christ's religion has existed in its perfect purity
and full development. Nor again that the points
which are clear to all or to the great majority
of Christians would represent any but the least
developed and most imperfect conception of the
same. It is as though we were to look for a
complete account of the recent war in its unity
and detail from a single officer, or still more
absurdly, to accept that average account, on which
all the men in the ranks should agree. Plainly no
one mind has the whole idea ; but like an organism

i43 THE VOICE OF THE MULTITUDE.

which can be reintegrated from any one part, it is
radically or seminally in every mind, perfectly in
none, and similarly, in no two alike. One sees one
side of its development ; another, another ; a third,
a third ; and by mutual conference and comparison
they can all together build up a fuller conception
than any one of them separately would have attained
to ; while those positive errors and false develop-
ments, inseparable from isolated and inadequate
views of reality, are recognized and cast out. So it
is with the idea of Christianity, in itself one and
simple, though necessarily broken up in order to be
digested by our manifold mind. No single mind in
any age seizes more than a broken fragment of its
living substance, but by conference and comparison
these fragments are pieced together into larger but
still fragmentary units; so that the voice of the
Council, of the Christian people, is the voice of
God. Further, the voice of many ages is for the
same reason more divine, more truly the vox Dei,
than the voice of one ; and no single age was less
capable of interpreting the apostolic revelation than
that which first entered on the task.

Nothing argues better for the need of a world-
wide perpetual institution with a sort of corporate
consciousness of its total experience, present and
past, than the fact of the hopeless insufficiency of
the isolated mind; or even of the isolated com-
munity of minds. We are unable to concentrate
our attention on one side of the truth, without
losing account of the other ; and to diffuse it equally
over the whole area of our limited experience

NEED OF AUTHORITY. 149

would be to penetrate no part deeply, and to ensure
an universal fogginess of apprehension. As in
practical matters, so even in intellectual, there can
be no intensity without narrowness. Hence we
need to co-operate by division of labour and to
supplement one another's narrownesses. And the
like holds good of different ages and countries, each
of which lays emphasis on some one truth to the
neglect of another equally important. The Catholic
ideal — however far from realization — is to bind
together the ages and races; and to superimpose
mind upon mind, so that the faults in one may
be covered by the fulness in another ; to bring into
one corporate consciousness the gathered fragments
of Heavenly Bread, that nothing be lost.

XXVIII.

NEED OF AUTHORITY.

But when He saw the multitude He was moved with compas-
sion on them because they fainted and were scattered abroad as
sheep having no shepherd. — Matt. ix. 36.

As to the faith of simple folk, the problem will
have to be solved eventually by a distinction
between causes of belief, and reasons of belief.
Allowing that inferences may be rational, though
informal and unconscious; and that the motives
of belief are, in the case of many, justified con-
tinually on this score, yet it is hard to see how this
can be maintained with regard to that section of
the masses (large or small matters not) whose
belief is in no conceivable sense formally rational ;
who, we know most certainly, would have been

i5o NEED OF AUTHORITY.

Islamites or Sun-worshippers had their lot been
cast among such ; with whom, in a word, imita-
tion, tradition, and education are everything; and
criticism absolutely nothing. Even in regard to
the most intelligent and educated, the limitations
of the mind are such that, in all but a few matters,
criticism of a fundamental nature is impossible;
for this would mean a complete mastery of the
subject. Our beliefs are mostly caused and deter-
mined by the milieu in which we chance to find
ourselves, but are not (at least ultimately) based on
reasoning, either implicit or explicit. Where the
collective mind is divided against itself in these
matters, there may be on our part a certain choice
and selection of the authorities which we follow:
but none the less it is the authority and not the
intrinsic reasonableness which moves us to assent.
Still more is this true of the illiterate in regard to
nearly all their beliefs, which come to them (not
without God's providence and grace) by way of
heritage, and not by their proper industry. As it
is no thanks to this one to have been bred up
a Christian ; so neither is it blame to that one to
have been bred a pagan. The cause of belief in
each case, is outside reason ; is determining and not
free. Only when doubt occurs is there a call for
personal choice, and then, as in all other matters,
prudence bids us not to criticize where we are not
experts, but to be content with our heritage. Little
short of miracle will in such cases excuse a depar-
ture from the only safe, though not infallible rule.
The belief may not be right, but at present it may

UNITY AND VARIETY. 151

be certainly right to stick to it ; certainly wrong to
open up the question.

When, as here and now, there is no longer any
public unity of faith, profession, or practice, the
great mass of those who depend on imitation and
gregariousness for their belief are lost to religion.
For them the trumpet of general agreement gives
an uncertain sound, or rather, no sound at all ; and
therefore no man prepares for the battle. Where
religion is public and respectable, many are held to
the sources of light and grace who fall away from
them as soon as they can do so with undamaged
repute. It is shallow to say that they are better
away, unless we are prepared to carry the principle
much further. Children may go to school reluc-
tantly and under compulsion, but they are taught
none the less, and are glad in later life that pressure
was used with them.

XXIX.

UNITY AND VARIETY.
For we, being many, are one bread and one body. — 1 Cor. x. 17.

It was the birth-day of Catholicism in religion,
and also the death-day of nationalism in religion,
when the Holy Spirit, one and the same, found
utterance in diverse tongues, when Parthians,
Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia, Judea,
Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia,
Egypt, Libya, Cyrene, strangers from Rome, Jews,
Proselytes, Cretans and Arabs, all heard, each in
his own tongue, one and the same gospel of the
wonderful works of God.

i52 UNITY AND VARIETY.

For this is indeed the essential idea of Catholi-
cism— unity in diversity ; unity of truth in diversity
of clothing ; — a due respect to both these comple-
mentary principles of life and growth and health.
Judaism had no vague, fluctuating creed ; nor did
she lack her daily magisterium, her authoritative
teaching emanating from the Scribes and Pharisees
— the degenerate, but none the less legitimate,
successors of Moses and the Prophets. But what
she gained in unity and solidity she lost in diversity
and flexibility ; nationalism was of her very essence,
and if she dreamt of world-wide dominion over
souls, it was to be accomplished by the absorption
and destruction of other nationalities, by the sub-
jection of the Gentiles, not merely to Jewish faith,
but to Jewish form and language and expression ;
by the establishment of a dead mechanical uni-
formity, and not of a vital " sameness-in-diversity ; "
in a word, by the triumph of nationalism, and not
by birth and growth of Catholicism.

It was not merely a new and fuller revelation of
divine truth that was communicated to mankind on
the day of Pentecost ; for such a treasure might have
still been left in the hands of the Synagogue ; but
a new method was inaugurated, a new machinery
was devised for the spread of revelation, — new
skins, in fact, for the young wine of the Gospel.

A balance between two contrary and comple-
mentary principles is always a difficult task for the
feebleness of the human mind, which finds extreme
positions so much simpler to understand, and so
much easier to maintain. He is a skilled seaman

UNITY AND VARIETY. 153

who can keep mid-deck when the vessel is rolling
from side to side; and when passengers have to
cling hard to the bulwarks on one side or the other ;
they care little which. And if we watch the growth
of our mind in regard to any problem on which we
think independently, we shall find that, it is only
after oscillations from one extreme to another that
we gained strength to balance ourselves — very much
as children learn to stand and walk after tumbling
about in all directions. And so it is with the mind
of the whole race which God is educating "at
sundry times and in divers manners ; " in times past
by the Prophets, in these latter days by His Son,
and His Spirit. Unity in the sense of rigid
mechanical uniformity, they can understand ; it is
a simple and an easy position, not calling for
mental comprehensiveness and delicacy of adjust-
ment. And similarly diversity, chaotic license, is
intelligible to the feeblest mediocrity. But to save
unity in diversity; and diversity in unity; to
escape the narrow intolerance of Judaism on the
one side; and flaccid indifferentism on the other,
is the secret and strength of Christianity.

In regard to this very conception, as much as
in regard to any part of the Creed, we must
recognize a certain growth in the mind of the
Christian Church ; for, as we have said, the con-
ception is not an easy one, like either of the
extremes which it repudiates ; and the respective
confines of lawful diversity and obligatory unity are
not discerned in a moment. Hence we find St. Paul
in more than one passage insisting, now upon the

I54 UNITY AND VARIETY.

importance of unity of spirit, of faith, of sacrament,
of government ; and then on the no less importance
of diversity of manifestation, of function, of expres-
sion, of language.

For indeed the flexibility and mobility of the
body, the multitude and diversity of its members
and organs, far from being hostile to the unity of
the quickening spirit is the very condition of that
unity. In the body and its parts and functions,
the spirit unfolds and reveals its hidden power and
excellence, and this revelation is more complete as
the range of circumstances to which the body adapts
itself is wider and more various. The spirit which
animates the Church of Christ, has already in these
few centuries of her existence, shown herself
identical, at least in tendency, with that spirit of
wisdom which the Scripture describes as " under-
standing, holy, one, manifold, subtile, active, quick,
which nothing hindereth, having all power, oversee-
ing all things, and containing all spirits."1 Yet it
may well be that but an inconsiderable fraction ot
the tale is told; and that the changes in culture,
in art, in science, in social and political relations,
already in rapid progress and whose final issue is
to us quite unimaginable, may disclose to posterity
aspects and latent powers of the Spirit of Christi-
anity undreamt of by us.

But in every living organism or society the
difficulty is, to check the self-assertive, narrow-
minded egotistic tendency of each part and member;
its tendency to insist that every other part shall be

1 Wisdom vii. 22, 23.

UNITY AND VARIETY. 155

fashioned like to itself; and shall function in the
same way. Our first uncorrected impulse is always
to wonder why others are not as we are ; why they
do not see as we see, and do as we do ; to resent
this liberty of theirs, and to force ourselves upon
them as a seal or mould whose shape they must
take. And this tendency is observable even in
those larger and more complex parts, whereof the
Church's continuity in time and place is made up ;
in the attitude of nation towards nation ; and of
one age and generation towards another ; each will
have its own peculiar expression of the Catholic
religion to be the full and adequate and only
possible expression, from which none can depart
without falling into error, by way of excess or
defect ; each will impose itself and its ways as a
rule upon all the rest ; each would substitute a
national for a Catholic religion, a religion of one
age for a religion of all ages. Now it is the Latin
races that would make their peculiar form of
Catholicism the universal type ; now the Anglo-
Saxon ; while each particular century looks patroni-
zingly on former times, or perhaps while indignantly
chafing under inherited responsibilities, tries itself
to fetter posterity by laws and regulations that a
decade may prove unworkable and mischievous.

Thus it is that the idea and principle of
Catholicism has hard work to assert itself against
the littleness and narrowness of man's mind and
affections ; yet slowly it seems to struggle into
clearer recognition as time after time the Church
has been forced to bear witness to that truth which

3 56 UNITY AND VARIETY.

is so much greater and better than any of its
exponents. While then the religion of Christ is
neither Italian, nor English, nor American ; neither
primitive nor mediaeval nor modern ; yet it finds
legitimate and distinct, though always inadequate,
expression in all these divers forms and languages ;
and it were as grave a departure from Catholicism
to suppress or distrust the diversity of form, as to
deny the unity of faith.

Yet there are minds which see no distinction
between blank, fruitless uniformity, and that fruitful
unity-in-variety which is the characteristic of life.
With them St. Paul remonstrates, saying: "The
body is not one member but many : if the eye were
the whole body, where would the hearing be ? If
hearing were the whole, where would the sense of
smell be ? " Were the whole Church Latinized,
what would become of the Teutons ; were it
Europeanized, what of the Orientals and the
Americans? Were it essentially primitive or me-
diaeval or modern, what of posterity ?

This is obvious to state, yet it is repugnant to
the first and strongest instinct of the individual part
or member — to the instinct of selfishness ; and with
that selfish instinct, God's Catholic spirit struggles
slowly and laboriously. Even the best of us find it
easier to live by rule than by principle ; by the
letter, than by the spirit ; for a rule is inflexible
and is applied blindly to each case; whereas a
principle is vital and flexible and needs to be
adapted each time, at the cost of thought and
reflection. And similarly it is much easier to make

THE BOND OF PROFESSION. 157

a common rule in indifferent things and impose it
upon all nationalities alike, than to take thought
for each nationality in particular, and to study its
temper and language, its peculiar needs and
circumstances. Yet we may hope that things
are gradually working that way ; and that the
rough-and-ready expedients of centralization may
slowly give place to a more delicate and vital
system of government in things pertaining, not to
the unity of spirit, but to the diversity of embodi-
ment. The attempt to preserve life by petrifying
its bodily habitation and thereby destroying the
essential condition of its vigorous exercise bespeaks
a zeal not altogether according to knowledge.

XXX.

THE BOND OF PROFESSION.
We being many are one Bread. — 1 Cor. x. 17.

Not merely bread, but bread shared in common
is the essential symbolism of the Eucharist. It is
not a solitary meal, but a banquet or sacrificial
feast. Nor is each celebration a repetition of a
similar banquet ; but all celebrations from first to
last are administrations of one and the same
banquet whereat all ages and nations sit down to
meat. Nor do I communicate as a solitary indi-
vidual, but as an organ of the whole mystical body
which is fed in my person. Nor am I strengthened
sacramentally in myself alone, but the bands and
ligatures by which I am connected with the whole
organism are multiplied and tightened. The
Eucharist strengthens us by combining us, as frail

158 THE BOND OF PROFESSION.

strands are twisted into tough cords. In the
natural order we are absolutely dependent on our
membership with surrounding society for our very
existence, our life, action, thought and speech. In
society we live, move, and have our being. We
borrow almost everything; we originate almost
nothing. By intercourse with others, our dormant
faculties are wakened, formed, and guided. Like-
wise membership with ecclesiastical society is the
essential condition of our religious birth and evo-
lution; tied to the Church we are strong, severed
from her we are weak. Both in matters of belief
and of conduct, our gregarious instinct is what
determines many of us altogether ; most of us in
most things. Before we have come to any sort
of power of independent reason we are already
formed almost beyond possible reform, by the
milieu into which we have been born. Even when
we begin to reason and criticize, it is always on
assumptions given us by tradition, nor could even
a Descartes wholly divest himself of all such.
Absolute independence of thought is as impossible
as absolute independence of action. Faulty and
erroneous as the public standards of belief and
practice may be, we must perforce, and we ought
to, trust them and be swayed by them except
where we are competent to criticize and resist
them. They are the natural provision for creatures
as imperfect as we are. It is hard to stick to the
truth in the face of a contradictory consensus;
hard to be honest and upright in the midst of
rogues. But the majority, who would be too

THE BOND OF PROFESSION. 159

weak to stand up for truth and justice, alone and
opposed, are supported by a healthy public opinion
and practice; while the still more servile are, in
some sense, coerced and restrained by social influ-
ence which serves them in lieu of conscience. As
one who has not yet learnt to swim, or even the
weak or wearied swimmer, is buoyed up by a belt
of corks, so those whose faith and character is
unformed or imperfect need the support of social
influence, which the Church affords them all the
more as representing the public opinion, not merely
of a locality, or a generation ; but of all Christen-
dom from the beginning ; and as claiming a divine
and infallible guidance. It would need no ordinary
independence of mind for one who had ever come
under such an influence, to shake off the spell.

But here the difference between direct experience
and mere inference or hearsay is very marked. A
few Christians scattered in a non-Christian country
will fail to realize, what they know theoretically
about the antiquity and comparative universality
of their religion, and the helpful influence of that
knowledge will be weakened or destroyed ; whereas
in a Christian country the mere hearsay knowledge
of the existence of other creeds will do less harm
than logic might seem to warrant. Of course this
support and supplement of faith must no more be
confounded with faith itself, than the strength of
a crutch with that of the ailing limb it supports ;
though naturally few distinguish between what their
firmness in faith owes to tradition, education, and
example and what it owes to a free, intelligent

i6o THE BOND OF PROFESSION.

self-determination of their will. If to live in a
Christian milieu is a grace for the majority, who
are weak; a non-Christian milieu may in some
ways be helpful to the few who are strong and
independent ; and it is from such minorities that we
should look for vigorous movements of religious
renaissance rather than from lands where facilities
of faith and practice have led to a luxuriant but
enfeebled outgrowth.

Still in alien surroundings, " by the waters of
Babylon," it is more needful to " remember Sion " —
to insist on external acts of reunion with the body
of the Church, chief of which is the use of the
Eucharist; and this, in order to realize what we
know, sc.t that we are compassed about with a
great cloud of witnesses to the truth of our faith ;
that we are in communion not only with every
assembly throughout the world where this Bread is
broken, but with the generations past and future
which have been or shall be our fellow-guests at
this banquet. Hence the wisdom with which the
Church insists, not only on a certain substantial
sameness of the outward rite, irrespective of
national and local differences; but also on the
reverent preservation of forms and ceremonies
whose original significance is lost in antiquity,
but whose present significance lies in the fact
that they link us to the remote past, and waken
in us that historic sense to which Catholic worship,
as distinguished from its most accurate imitations,
alone appeals. "As our fathers did, so also do
we ; " for that reason alone, if for no other.

SACRAMENTS. 161

XXXI.

SACRAMENTS.
Do this for a remembrance of Me. — Luke xxii.

It is needful to insist so much upon the deeper
and more mysterious aspects of religious dogmas
and institutions — upon those in regard to which
faith needs to be continually fortified against
reason — that the simpler aspects are in danger
at times of being overlooked and forgotten, not
without some considerable loss to the interests of
the mind and heart. In the face of denial we lay
such stress on the points denied that we have
none left for those that are admitted on both sides.

Thus besides the mysterious import of the
Sacraments there is an import which is altogether
natural and understandable, and which ought not
to be overlooked, though in some sense its value
may be like that of candle by daylight.

There is a perfectly understandable sense in
which Christ still lives on earth in the Church
which He instituted and which is the lineal descen-
dant of the little group of faithful, if frail, disciples
who stood by Him in His temptations. So far as,
and when, she speaks the words that He commis-
sioned her to speak, it is His voice that we hear;
and what she does by His deputation, is done by
Him. It is He who baptizes, feeds, anoints,
blesses; it is His hand that is laid upon us to
strengthen and ordain. We, in receiving these
sacraments, take Him as our God ; He, in con-

L

162 SACRAMENTS.

ferring them, takes us for His people and the
sheep of His pasture. What idea could be simpler,
or commend itself more readily to human modes
of thought and symbolism ! And yet to those who
reflect, how infinite, even under this aspect, is the
dignity and solemnity of these rites wherein the
soul makes her act of homage to Christ as her
God ! It is strange that those who see thus much
in the Christian sacraments, even though they see
no more, should find anything excessive in the
accessory solemnities and ceremonies with which
the Catholic tradition has wisely emphasized the
profound significance of these rites and guarded
them against the profanation of light and care-
less handling, — ever sedulously preserving their
character of an unchangeable bond of union bind-
ing the most various peoples and ages to one
another and to Christ. For through them Christ
is made virtually present over the whole face of
the earth, reaching out His saving hand across the
centuries, wheresoever the Church shoots forth her
branches and spreads her cool leaves for the healing
of the nations. All the wealth of Catholic ritual
is but too poor a language to convey adequately
this fragmentary aspect of the sacraments to eye
and ear and heart; and the puritanism which has
swept it all away, has thereby buried the lesser
and natural, as well as the deeper and supernatural,
conception of the sacraments from public con-
sciousness.

Especially does this seem true of the Blessed
Sacrament which viewed even in its merely natural

SACRAMENTS. 163

aspect, as a memorial of Christ's leave-taking of
His friends, would seem to deserve a far greater
importance than is accorded it by those who regard
it as nothing more. In Eastern symbolism the
breaking of bread with another is a profession of
unanimity and fidelity almost equivalent to an oath
or vow — a fact which lent a deeper dye to the
treachery of Judas. To break bread with Him
whom we believe to be the Son of God, and with
those who share the same belief, is surely as grave an
undertaking as the most solemn and compromising
vow could possibly be. No military oath binds a
man to so absolute a service and fidelity to his
leader as this bread-breaking pledges us to in
regard to Christ. On this score alone the veriest
Zwinglian might well " examine himself and so
eat of that bread " as one who discerns the Lord's
body from any mere love-feast of Christian brother-
hood.

But it is more than a bread-breaking ; it is at
least a symbolizing and calling to mind of that
Love which was carried to the extremity of death
— to the rending of the body and the pouring out
of the blood. Not a memorial devised later by His
grateful followers, but one instituted by Himself on
the night before He suffered, when His heart was full
of His friends, — past, present, and to come — of the
"you" and the "many" fcr uhcffi His blood was
to be shed; instituted, because He wanted to be
remembered by men more than men, frail and for-
getful of love, would ever want to remember Him.
To partake is therefore to remember, to acknow-

164 SACRAMENTS.

ledge and to accept that extravagance of Divine
love : and to return the embrace with all the power
and devotion of our soul.

And without penetrating the veil of the inmost
mystery, we can understand, in some way, that it is
not only a remembering but a feeding upon Christ
crucified : that as our bodies are nourished by bread
and wine so our souls are mystically strengthened
in the duly received sacrament in virtue of the rent
body and outpoured blood of Christ ; nor is this
belief in a "virtual" presence tied up in any way to
the further mystery of the real presence.

Once more, in its public aspect, the celebration
of this rite is a true setting forth or announcing of
the Lord's death in the eyes of Heaven no less than
in the eyes of men ; it is, at least, a solemn pleading
of the sacrifice of the Cross, even were it not also
a sacrificial pleading.

How then is it possible for those who admit so
much as this, to consider that the central place, the
external reverence and solemnity assigned to this
rite in Divine worship by the Catholic tradition is
in any way excessive ? Quite independently of the
doctrine of the Real Presence, the Blessed Eucharist
claims all this honour and much more. Nay, the
reverence shown to the sacred elements as reserved
for the sick or as exposed upon the altar for
veneration, taken as relative and not absolute
worship, would be most natural and fitting on the
part of those who hold even the least that could
be held by any Christian in the way of Eucharistic
doctrine.

SACRAMENTS. 165

Those who hold to the fulness of the Catholic
tradition would do well to dwell occasionally on
these less mysterious aspects of the Blessed
Sacrament which offer so solid and independent
a basis for their devotion and reverence. At times
the mystery of the Presence is too great and
overwhelming to be helpful ; we believe but cannot
realize it or cope with it ; whence a sort of stupe-
faction and deadness. In such states it were well
to descend from the rarefied atmosphere of the
mountain-tops and breathe the air of our native
plains ; to feed our soul on food that is commoner
and less choice, but more easily assimilated by our
weak apprehension.

Sometimes it happens that souls are troubled in
approaching the altar, not by any doubt as to their
moral dispositions, but by what they imagine must
be temptations against faith in the real presence of
Christ's Body ; yet it is not their faith that wavers,
but only their apprehension of the theological
explanation of the doctrine. They are trying to
grasp with mental exactitude, and, still worse,
trying to picture with their imagination, the meaning

of

Blood is poured, and Flesh is broken
Yet in either wondrous token,
Christ entire we know to be.1

And,

Doubt not, but believe 'tis spoken,
That each severed outward token
Doth the very whole contain.

1 Caro cibus, Sanguis potus :
Manet tamen Christus totu3
Sub utraque specie.

166 SACRAMENTS.

Naught the precious gift divideth,
Breaking but the sign betideth,
Jesus still the same abideth,
Still unbroken doth remain.1

It is rightly contended that if "This is My
Body " is to be taken literally and not figuratively,
there is no evading the above doctrinal implications.
By them alone can the letter of Christ's words be
saved in its plain directness.

It is also contended that the simple folk who
heard these words must have taken them literally.

But it cannot possibly be contended that they
also explicitly recognized all the above metaphysical
corollaries of the truth. Indeed the first impres-
sion derived from the literal acceptation would not
be consistent with theological accuracy; for to
the simple bystander the broken bread would
correspond, part by part, to the broken Body ; and
the outpoured wine similarly to the outpoured
Blood ; he would assume that signwn and signatum,
the veil and the thing veiled, were rent by one and
the same act.

What then shall we say of the simple faith of
those millions of Catholic Christians who profess
to take these words literally and yet are mentally
incapable of understanding even the theological

1 Ne vacilles sed memento
Tantum esse sub fragmento
Quantum toto tegitur.
Nulla rei fit scissura ;
Signi tantum fit fractura ;
Qua nee status, nee statura
Signati minuitur.

SACRAMENTS. 167

statement of the Real Presence ; who if they try
to understand it, are almost sure to misunderstand
it, and to confuse their ideas by the very effort to
make them clear ? Is the brightness of their faith
in any way tarnished by the mists of their under-
standing ?

The answer is to be found in what has already
been said as to the dogma of Christ's divinity.
Words that correspond to no clear or correct idea
in the mere mind, can correspond to some internal
realization of the whole soul. The mental idea
evoked by the words : u This is My Body " is
of secondary value compared with the practical
response of the heart and will and affections by
which the soul adjusts itself to its belief and by
treating it as a fact — as an element of the world of
reality to which its action has to be adapted — gives
it a substance and verity that it may often lack
where the mental idea is clear and well-defined.
Just then as faith in Christ's Godhead means
principally to treat with Him as with God ; so
faith in the Eucharistic Presence means to treat
with Him as there present. The mental conception
of the mode of union in the one case, and of the
mode of presence in the other, is of consequence
to the theologian, or to those who seek an intel-
lectual explanation of the conviction of Faith ; but
is, at most, secondary to such conviction.

Those therefore who are puzzled and perplexed
by these conceptions and explanations; whose
devotion is chilled and whose faith is troubled
by the persistent rebellion of their mind, would

168 THE MUSTARD-SEED.

do well to distinguish between the obligation of
practical acknowledgment, internal and external,
and the obligation of theologically correct appre-
hension. The former is absolute and for all ; the
latter is only for some, and as far as possible. We
can be obliged to believe, but not to understand ;
the former is in our power, but not the latter. To
believe a truth is to make it a reality for our
practical life ; to allow for it, as for a fact, in all
our actions interior and exterior.

XXXII.

THE MUSTARD-SEED.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a grain of mustard-seed.
— Matt. xiii. 31.

Organic growth, whether of plant or animal but
more especially in the case of the higher animals, is
characterized by a sort of backward process, as
though what is last should have been first ; and
what first, last. There is throughout an anticipation
of, and preparing for what is to come ; and much
that is at the time unmeaning and aimless finds its
justification fully but only in the finished work. It
is chiefly as an organic growth that the Catholic
religion is seen to be from the God of Nature ; it is
because what was aimless and unmeaning in her
earlier history is seen in the light of later develop-
ment to have been preparatory to purposes then
beyond human conjecture ; it is because the words
of Christ and His Apostles receive fuller explana-
tion and deeper significance by what would seem

THE MUSTARD-SEEfr. 169

the undesigned course of events, that we recognize
an organic unity not merely in the present structure
of the Church, considered statically, but in the
secular process of growth from earliest times, from
the first planting of the mustard-seed up to the
present day. In history we see the process at work —
unity, dissension, selection, reintegration— repeated
over and over again ; each time giving us a new
definition and a new heresy. We see the human
mind struggling, not unguided, to find an ever less
inadequate formula for a world of spiritual realities
that must ever exceed its grasp and burst through
its straining fingers. As the mind grows it becomes
always more conscious of the inadequacy of its
former attempts, and tries its new strength in the
same direction ; but from the nature of the case
the task is endless. It is, however, only on the
supposition, that the whole process no less than its
initiation is the work of the same Divine Spirit,
that it is possible to accept as identical two results
so widely different, at first sight, as the germ and
the well-grown organism — the simple religion of
Christ and the complex system of modern Christi-
anity; the former pure and unmixed with the
corrupt mass it had to redeem — with the world of
human sin and error, of those beliefs, speculations,
traditions, customs, laws by which life is governed ;
the latter mingled with it, partly conquering, partly
withstood by it, as yet far from triumphant and but
feebly militant.

170 VERITAS PRMVALEBIT.

XXXIII.

VERITAS PRiEVALEBIT.

Every plant that My Father hath not planted shall be uprooted.
— Matt. xv. 13.

Nothing, however robust to the outer eye, can
finally endure, which defies any law of morality or
of right reason. " Let them alone," says Gamaliel,
" for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will
be overthrown ; but if it is of God ye will not be
able to withstand them, lest haply ye be found to
be fighting against God." (Acts v. 28.) Where decay
lurks in any corner, it will quietly work its way to
the uttermost in God's good time and manner, and
from the very corruption He will build up life,
wasting no particle of the debris. There may be
much unwisdom and short-sightedness in our expe-
ditious cremation methods. We are impatient to
see reform within the compass of our own short
day : " Give peace in our time, O Lord ! " This is
a natural though a presumptuous longing, which
characterizes every prophet and lover of God's
glory ; " My eyes have failed looking for Thy salva-
tion, saying : When wilt Thou comfort me ? " In
Simeon's case the longing was gratified : " My eyes
have seen Thy salvation;" but for most, patient
faith in a dimly foreseen future is their only con-
solation. As our ways would seem not only infinitely
mysterious but also infinitely slow to some creature
whose century was a brief second; so to us God's
geonian movements seem like perfect stillness, and

THE HERETICAL FALLACY. 171

inactivity, — imperceptible yet irresistible as the
crawling advance of the glacier crushing its way on
through every obstacle — "A thousand years are
with the Lord as but one day." Often it were
better to u await in silence the salvation of God,"
to let the lie rot away through its own corruption,
than to hasten the process by artificial and short-
sighted methods. The evil we so check and
abbreviate may have been the rich fostering soil
from which a whole harvest of glory was to sprout
forth. Haste, like economy, has no value in God's
eyes, who is as prodigal of time as of His other
bounties. He loves that indirect and lengthy
method of self-justification, which logic knows as
the reductio ad absurdum ; that is, He lets evils run
their suicidal course and yield their full fruits of
death that He may be justified in His saying,
and victorious when brought to judgment.

XXXIV.

THE HERETICAL FALLACY.

The eye cannot say to the hand: I need not thy help; nor
again, the head to the feet : I have no need of you Yea, much
more ; those that seem to be the more feeble members of the body,
are more necessary. — 1 Cor. xii. 21, 22.

Heresy is intellectual schism ; it is a rending

asunder of the seamless coat of divine truth, a

pulling to pieces of the living organic whole of

Christian belief. No severed limb can retain

life in itself but must decay and drop to pieces.

Nor is any part self-explanatory or comprehensible

except in living connection with the whole. This

is the danger inseparable from analytical reasoning

173 THE HERETICAL FALLACY.

and the pregnant source of every heresy. The
Trinity, the Creation, the Incarnation, the Church,
the Eucharist, the Communion of Saints, are none
of them definable apart from the rest ; though for
method's sake they must be heated as independent
wholes.

Further, the idea of Christianity must grow as
one thing; and the hasty development of one
member in advance of the rest would mean dis-
tortion and monstrosity in the issue. Until we
know what the whole is going to be, we have no
guide as to what its several parts should be ; and
we may force their growth in a wrong direction.
The desire to make some one dogma or principle
supreme and central, to the detrusion of the others,
is the usual motive of heresy; just as in science or
philosophy, every newly observed law is treated by
its discoverer as all-pervading and fundamental until
the attempt to prove it so demonstrates its partial
and hypothetical character. The neglect of some
particular aspect of the Christian idea eventually
leads to its emphasis ; and this, by force of reaction,
tends to be exaggerated and excessive at first ; so
that most additions to the Creed have cost a heresy
in their making.

Without being a heretic, one may have an
heretical way of viewing doctrines ; namely, by
regarding them as separate and self-explanatory
wholes, and forgetting that their meaning is like
that of several words in a sentence, to be deter-
mined by the context and not by the dictionary.
In the Church only does the Christian idea live and

THE HERETICAL FALLACY. 173

grow in its entirety. Sects may tear off this or that
fragment and give it the completeness and clearness
of an independent system ; they may seem to hasten
its growth and development; but in effect they
comment on an abstraction — on a word out of
context. In her possession and slow development
of the whole Idea or Word, the Christian Church
is the divinely appointed organ of that Spirit which
in the course of time will teach her all things, and
bring all to her mind that Christ said to her ere she
was able to understand and bear the full sense.
She is the pillar and ground of the Truth, and he who
separates from her may seem to follow a quicker
route, but in the end will be deceived. Not to
analyze or dissect ; nor to try to understand the
separate parts of her dogma ; to take the Idea as
a whole, as a treasure in earthen vessels, as eternal
truth translated into forms and expressions all too
narrow and unworthy ; not to attempt prematurely
to sunder the ore from the gold ; not to risk
casting away what perhaps contains a precious and
fruitful principle under some uncouth appearance
of puerility or superstition — all this is the dictate
of true faith and wisdom as contrasted with the
analytical, logic-chopping spirit which in its love
of meretricious clearness and brilliancy is close kin
to the spirit of heresy. If the religion of the millions
seems to us in many ways superstitious, let us
remember that it represents the philosophy and
enlightenment of an age not so long past ; and that
before God the difference between the best and the
worst of our gropings is not very significant.

174 PRIEST AND PROPHET.

XXXV.

PRIEST AND PROPHET.
This is My beloved Son; hear ye Him. — Mark ix. 6.

Not Moses, nor Elias ; not the Law, nor the
prophets, but Christ. The human mind comes to
its rest in the centre of truth only after many
decreasing oscillations first towards one extreme ;
then, towards its contrary. The right way, the
pure truth, the perfect life, all are to be found in a
certain difficult equipoise between two opposite
tendencies to which the many find it easier to yield
themselves passively. Hence Christ says that the
way to eternal life is a narrow way, as it were, the
ridge of a mountain that slopes down steeply on
the right and on the left to certain destruction and
death. And as it is of the nature of our imperfect
mind to learn wisdom gradually by experience of
unwisdom, so God in teaching us, adapts Himself
to our nature — He sends us first Moses, then, by
way of antithesis, Elias ; then Christ, the synthesis.
Moses and Elias ; the Law and the prophets ; the
letter and the spirit — they are related as body and
soul, the two elements into which the conception of
our complete nature may be resolved ; neither, of
itself, sufficient without the other; neither to be
despised without prejudice to the other; and yet
the soul, principal, though not independent; and
the body subordinate, though essential and insepar-
able. The latter is the principle of stability — litera
scripta tnanet— it abides unchanged, and thereby

PRIEST AND PROPHET. 175

counteracts the volatile nature of the spirit which
it incorporates and ties down to earth ; the spirit is
the principle of that movement of perpetual self-
adaptation and response to changing circumstance
in which life consists — " It bloweth where it listeth,
and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not
tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth." Apart
from the embodying letter it is wayward and unac-
countable, like other natural forces which are useless,
or even destructive, until they are restrained by the
fetters of some mechanism. If the letter without
the spirit is dead and deadly ; the spirit without the
letter is not life-giving — for lack of that which it
should quicken. Every sort of human society, civil
or ecclesiastical, lives and thrives by the fusion and
balance of these two principles. If genius and
inspiration be too liberally diffused, and institutions
tampered with too lightly at the first suggestion of
improvement, nor " Use and Wont " allowed their
legitimate claim to reverence, we have the restless
instability of France. If reverence for custom and
routine pass into blind idolatry, we have the petri-
fication of China. As no institution or social
mechanism can create itself, so neither can it
re-create itself or provide for its own renewal and
reform ; all attempts at self-repairing machinery
have failed. What the spirit alone can create and
mould to its own use, that, the spirit alone can
remould and adjust; the body by its passivity can
limit and restrain, but it cannot initiate.

The history of Israel shows us the law and the
prophets, the letter and the spirit, as co-principles

1 76 PRIEST AND PROPHET.

of the public life in virtue of their " harmonious
discord " — of their very conflict and opposition.
As a French penseuy has said : " Et cette contradiction
est une avantage, puisqu* elk est Vorigine d'un confiit,
d'un mouvement, et une condition de progres. Toute
vie est une lutte interieure ; toute lutte suppose deux
forces contraires." (Amiel.) The ecclesiastical system,
which the living spirit of the Law had created for
its own embodiment and preservation, was, of its
own nature, hostile to other manifestations of that
very same spirit working through the mediation of
prophets or other unofficial individuals. Its very
office was to " try those spirits " whether they were
of God ; to oppose and thwart, rather than to foster
and encourage. The same justice and unselfishness
that would have enabled the priesthood to exercise
this criticism of prophetic spirits with moderation,
would have obviated the need of prophetic inter-
vention. It was because the priesthood, like any
other unopposed section of the social organism,
tended naturally to arrogance and self-seeking that
it needed the opposition or counter-balance of the
prophetic office to keep it in its place — not, of
course, in a state of unbroken equilibrium, but
continually driven back within its own borders as
often as it pushed itself forward unduly. For social
forces, like those of physical nature, are blind and
selfish, and would be immoral were they under the
direction of a single personal will ; and it is a fallacy
to imagine that the sections and classes of a com-
munity can be subjected to a moral code that
appeals only to free individual personalities. Of

PRIEST AND PROPHET. 177

such forces, no one will hold back modestly that
another may have fair play, but each strives to
assert itself without limit ; and it is in virtue of
this very aggressiveness that it serves the common
good, checking and being checked in turn.

As the mind can rarely or ever seize one side of
a truth without losing its hold on the other, so each
class or section of a community considers that
interest to which its own energy and attention are
mainly devoted as alone of supreme and unlimited
importance, before which all other interests must
give way. That the several members of each such
class should be animated by this egoistic, though
impersonal, class-spirit, that the relative whole
should thus dwell and act in each of its parts, is
perfectly normal and irreprehensible. It is in each
of them a lawful principle of action ; but must not
be the supreme and absolute guide. The sense of
blind, instinctive, unreasoned opposition which the
priest, as such, feels towards the prophet as such,
and conversely, the prophet towards the priest,
derives from the Universal Reason, like any other
natural instinct of self-preservation, whereby each
species maintains itself in the harmony of Nature.

But as a free personality, no man may blindly
obey such impersonal and universal instincts as he
finds within himself; each impulse has to be tried
before the bar of reason and then to be used or
denied, according to the verdict. The priest must
hold in check his zeal for the status quo — for
traditions, customs, prescriptions, institutions — for
all that is meant by " the letter," that he may judge

M

j78 PRIEST AND PROPHET.

just judgment, that he may discern the spirits
whether they be of God, that he may not ascribe
to Beelzebub the work of the Holy Ghost ; and the
prophet or reformer, must restrain his consuming
ardour for the claims of the spirit against the letter,
and give due heed to the Scribes and Pharisees that
sit in the chair of Moses.

Let either class-instinct rage uncontrolled, and
we have, on the one side, Jerusalem slaying the
prophets and crucifying Christ and, like a body
overcome by age from which the quickening spirit
has departed, crumbling to destruction till not a
stone is left upon another ; and on the other side
we have the reckless waste of divine energies, given
for purposes of edification but turned to purposes of
destruction — to the violent disintegration of exist-
ing institutions and traditions ere any proved and
reliable substitute has been provided to take their
place ; whence, as inevitable a chaos as that which
more slowly results from idolatrous letter-worship.

For, the priest who persecutes the prophet to-day
will build up his sepulchre to-morrow ; that is, will
preserve his memory and the letter of his teaching
to future generations, who else would be deprived of
that transmitted spark of his inspiration which,
however enfeebled in the process, may be enough
to set some kindred spirit aflame, and so re-enforce
his dwindling influence. Not in destroying the letter,
but in modifying and completing it, so as to make
of it a worthier embodiment and expression of itself —
a home wherein it may dwell — does the spirit best
provide for its own preservation and vitality. Only

PRIEST AND PROPHET. 179

so far as the conflict between letter and spirit, priest
and prophet, tradition and inspiration, issues in
some new adjustment of the social mechanism to
altered circumstances, is it saved from being fruit-
less, if not positively mischievous, on one side and
the other.

For the thoughts and the conduct of the great
multitudes who form the passive element of society
and for whose service the active few receive their
gifts of initiative and originality, are shaped and
governed by that great body of traditions, customs,
laws, and beliefs, which constitute what might be
called the public mind and will. Only so far as the
prophet or the originator can mould that body for
the better, will his work be diffused through the
community and permeate to future generations ;
but to do so he has to overcome, not only its natural
inertness, but the action and opposition of the priest
or the official whose very function is to fight for the
preservation of the status quo.

What is here exemplified by the conflict between
priest and prophet in the Jewish theocracy, is plainly
of universal application to every kind of society,
civil and religious, since it draws its truth from the
very structure of the human mind. Christ stands
for that unattainable ideal towards which the
endless effort of our alternations between Moses
and Elias is directed. Now, we need to be recalled
to the letter ; now, to the spirit ; we seem unable
to love the one without despising the other ; nor do
we remember that each is good and needful in its
measure; and Christ alone good without measure —

i8o PRIEST AND PROPHET.

not Moses, nor Elias, but He who is the perfect
synthesis of both — a synthesis towards which we
may approximate but which we shall never attain in
these finite conditions of untransfigured humanity.

Not even in the Christian Church do we escape
from this law of conflicting forces in which its life
is realized. The episcopate, the hierarchy, all the
machinery of ecclesiasticism has for its function the
preservation of the " Christ-Idea " committed to
its charge, and the censorship of all developments
and expansions of the same that may originate in
the process of time ; but it does not of itself
initiate ; its work is negative and not positive.
History shows us that all substantial advance has
been the work not of officials, but of individuals,
almost in opposition to officials ; not of the system,
but of those who have to some extent corrected and
modified the system. The great teachers of the
Church have been the Fathers who, though often
Bishops, were not as a class members of the
Ecclesia Docens. Except St. Augustine, no one
teacher has taught the Western Church more than
St. Thomas Aquinas — not a member of its official
teaching staff. To-day the beliefs of the faithful
are de facto determined far more by unofficial
individuals and by schools of theology than by the
episcopate. Yet no other teaching but that of the
episcopate is authoritative; and if it originates
little or nothing, still its function of opposing,
correcting, approving, and authorizing what is
originated by others is essential to the vitality of
dogma. And so also in matters of discipline and

CONVERSION. 1S1

practice, the function of Moses and Elias must be
blended and balanced if we are to approximate to
the ideal which is Christ the Way, the Via Media,
and therefore the Truth and the Life — the Beloved
Son in whom alone God is well pleased.

XXXVI.

CONVERSION.
Convert us, O God our Saviour.— Ps. Ixxxiv. 5.

The notion of spiritual conversion has been
somewhat appropriated and spoilt by revivalists of
all sorts. It has come to suggest a strong and
sudden gust of almost sensuous self-complacency, a
thrilling sense of being saved and changed into
something better — an hysterical mingling of sorrow
and joy, tears and laughter. Also, " conversion " in
the sense of a " serious turn " or a "serious call"
from a certain thoughtlessness and lack of religious
interest, is held by Evangelicals to be a sine qua non
for all the elect. Moreover, if it be genuine con-
version it is to be once and for all ; there can be no
relapse, no need of further conversion ; the fact of
apparent relapse would prove the conversion to have
been unreal and hypocritical.

Freed from these perversions the term is needed
for a very common fact or group of facts incident to
the spiritual life.

Beside moral conversion, there is a "conversion"
of the mind from error or ignorance, whether
general, or in some particular matter. Or if not
from error, it may be from " formalism," from a

ifa CONVERSION

dead, passive, and merely traditional acceptance of
truths, to a living, active realization of them. Thus
many men take their political views by tradition
from their parents; they respect certain maxims
and party-cries; they are even violent partisans,
owing to the prejudice that does duty for judgment ;
but for many, a day comes when the mind is inter-
ested in some political problem ; and forthwith the
ferment of a new inner life, of a complete mental
revolution aad reformation is set up ; the old ready-
made garments are cast away, and new ones
fashioned to order.

A like " conversion " is common in regard to
religion which often becomes, and very often
remains, a theme of merely intellectual interest
apart from any moral conversion ; minds of a philo-
sophical or argumentative turn, find in religion a
boundless field wherein to expatiate, and this first
waking to interest, in a matter previously uninterest-
ing, is a sort of "conversion." Whether from error
or formalism (particular or general), a mind-con-
version may be slow and natural, or sudden and
apparently supernatural ; and the latter may be not
without some accompanying emotional thrills which
will make it more easily mistaken for a moral con-
version. J. H. Newman exemplifies a slow "mind-
conversion " from the imperfect germ to the perfect
development of an idea. Never was he a " forma-
list " in religious questions, which seem always to
have been his chief intellectual interest ; nor does
there seem to have been need of any notable
M moral " conversion in his case ; whether from evil

CONVERSION 183

or from mechanism. On the other hand, Paul of
Tarsus, a zealot and enthusiast for justice before his
conversion, needed only a sudden flash of revelation
to show him his error and to turn the fervid torrent
of his energy into the right channel.

Of awakenings from partial or complete " forma-
lism," we have abundant examples on every side.
If we are not so now, we have most of us been
parrots or word-mongers, in regard to some or all
of the doctrines of our religion, during the earlier
years of our life; and have needed some gradual or
sudden " conversion " of our sluggish mind to a
state of alert and intelligent interest.

" Moral " conversion means a turning round of
the will either from wickedness, or from mechanism
and routine, in regard either to the very foundations
of our practical life, or to some particular line of
conduct ; and, in like manner, such conversion may
be sudden as with Mary Magdalene, or slow as with
St. Augustine. If sudden and also emotional, there
is always a possibility of illusion. It may be that
the soil is shallow and the response rapid and short-
lived. More usually a reforming idea enters the
mind noiselessly enough, and works as a leaven,
gradually bringing the rest of the soul into agree-
ment with itself; though sometimes a train has
been laid silently and in the dark, to which but a
chance spark need be applied to bring about what
seems a sudden cataclysm.

Conversion from grievous sin, or misbelief, is
not needed for all ; though there are few who would
not be the better of a conversion from formalism

t&l CONVERSION.

and mechanism to a more vivid faith, a more
fervent activity. Yet there are thousands of "the
least in the kingdom of Heaven " whose spiritual
life-pulse has ever been feeble; who have neither
thought nor done grievously amiss ; who have run
obediently in established grooves without ever keenly
realizing, and then freely rejecting, the possibility
and the pleasure of doing otherwise ; — without ever
making their religion " their own " in the fullest
sense. The multitude of these and of others, who,
by God's grace, have kept their souls unspotted
from the world makes some of our popular " acts of
contrition " for past enormities, which would come
well from the lips of a converted profligate or
brigand, most unsuitable for promiscuous use. And
the same may be said of certain highly-seasoned
discourses and meditations on our past sins. The
same strong diet can hardly agree with a worn-out
roue and a convent-school girl. The Miserere was
called forth by adultery and murder. Contrition or
broken-heartedness for sin is not a fourth "theological
virtue," and therefore needed for all ; but only an
ex hypothesi manifestation of faith, hope, and charity.
Conversion, were it only from formalism in
regard to a belief, or from mechanism in regard to
a practice, is not to be confounded with progress or
uninterrupted advance from good to better. It is
always an un-doing, a casting aside, a self-condem-
nation. As a boy outgrows his clothes, suit after
suit must be cast aside, in spite of ingenious
patchings and lettings-out ; and similarly our reli-
gious ideas, practices, and methods are good pro-

ELECTION. 1S5

visionally for a certain stage, but wear out and
become relatively bad and hurtful. We need there-
fore a series of conversions, of those freer graces
which, like fair weather, depend wholly on God's
providence, and which we ourselves can determine
only by prayer. It is just the failure of our ingenuity
and reflection, the exhaustion of our energy, the
deadening of our use-blunted stimulus, that bring
us to a state of dryness where we can no longer
help ourselves, but must sit down and wait for the
reviving rain. Naturally these graces and visitings
are more frequent and emphatic when we are
growing rapidly from spiritual infancy to maturity ;
and later they become rarer and less revolutionary.
Still we have ever need to pray daily for our daily
bread : u Convert us, O God our Saviour, and turn
away Thine anger from us." " All the days of my
warfare I hope for my change. Thou shalt call me
and I will answer Thee ; Thou shalt stretch forth
Thy right hand to Thy creature. For though Thou
hast counted my footsteps, yet wilt Thou spare my
sins ; and though Thou hast sealed my crimes in a
sack, yet wilt Thou cure me of my wickedness."

XXXVII.

ELECTION.
You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you. — John xv. 16.

It is a strange, and not always a pleasing, experi-
ence to discover that others have been playing us
like a fish, and that while we have fancied ourselves
free and self-determining in the guidance of our life

rS6 ELECTION.

and conduct, we have really been doing the will of
another who knew how to manage us. Yet, in a
sense, we have really been doing our own will all
the way through.

But God's management of us is much more
intimate and all-pervading than this. Never in
the exercise of our free self-conscious life are we
released from the magnetism of His influence upon
our will. Nay, our whole mental and spiritual life
consists in a continual commerce with Him — He
offering us, according to laws we cannot regulate or
control, new lights, new impulses, new energies,
new desires; and we accepting or rejecting. He
is as much a condition of our soul's life, as is the
air, of our body's life. As the whole structure and
nature of our lungs postulates the atmosphere from
which we draw sustenance ; so the whole structure
and nature of our mind and will supposes that we
are immersed in God, the ocean of truth and
goodness, whose substance we build into our
nothingness by the right use of our powers of free
acceptance.

But whereas we need only open our mouth and
draw in our breath when we would breathe, since
the atmosphere presses on us necessarily and not
freely; in our commerce with God another Will
than our own intervenes. True, He ever stands
at the door and knocks ; yet He is not constrained
to knock ; nor does He bear the same message for
all or at all times. He is ever offering us materials
for the building up of our spiritual substance, light
for our mind and lire for our heart; yet the selection

ELECTION. T87

of them as to kind and measure rests with Him
and not with us; just as in the circumstances of
our outward life, our lots are in His hand, and He
shapes our history more than we ourselves do. In
our unreflecting years we seem to guide ourselves
and walk where we will ; but when we are older we
see that it is another who guides us, and leads often
whither we would not; that when we thought we
were choosing Him, He was in reality choosing
us. Strange, it is only when He has vanished from
our sight that we remember how our hearts burnt
within us as we walked with Him in the way ; it is
only in retrospect that we recognize how He has
" managed " us all along, even in the days when we
never gave Him a thought or scarce believed in Him
at all. That we had squandered all the substance
and reality of our life and had brought ourselves
down to the dust — to desire the mere husks and
appearances of reality — was in some sense the
fruit of self-management ; for we do not need God's
help to destroy ourselves ; we have but to reject
His offers, and to refuse Him the ingress that He
asks, and forthwith we wither away as grass in a
drought, whose substance and bulk is a borrowed
substance. We can always relax the tendrils by
which we should cling to, spread ourselves over, and
embrace more and more of the one Reality; we
can always relapse into our own unsupported pheno-
menal existence. But to rise up again, or to wish
to rise up, must be, and always is, given to us. He
must choose to offer it, before we can choose to
accept it. More than this, our very falling-away

188 CONFESSION.

has not evaded His providence in our regard, how-
ever it be counter to His immediate will ; since " all
things " even their very sins " work together for the
good of them that love God."

In a word, God leads and we have to follow His
lead. As Abraham went out from Ur of the
Chaldees he knew not whither; so we know not,
from any self-analysis, or from any attempted inter-
pretation of our present conditions, what God has
in store for us ; what He is going to make of us.
We know that an acorn will grow to an oak ; that
a child will grow to a man. These things are
already made in the germ, and are not self-making.
But our own moral and supernatural being is not
contained in our nature, but is ministered from
without, and built up by our free co-operation with
that ministry. It is, from beginning to end, a
matter of choice ; first of His choice, then of ours.

XXXVIII.

CONFESSION.

Confess your sins one to another and pray for one another that
you may be healed. — James v. 16.

Whether, designedly or not, the Roman form of
general confession known as the Confiteor seems to
condense in itself a whole theology of sin, of which
the following points are worth noticing. It does
not only say " I have sinned," but " I confess that
I have sinned," implying a reflex consciousness of
the nature and need of the act of confession. It is
not easy to cry Peccavi ; pride suppresses the cry,

CONFESSION. iSg

and the word " I confess " expresses this reluctance
which has been overcome by humility. The reluct-
ance is natural and right ; its absence is shameless-
ness, and lack of due self-reverence. If we blush
for our sins in our heart, we shall blush to confess
them. The fulness of every human act requires
its outward embodiment in word or deed. It is
not enough to believe in the heart, we must also
profess the faith with our lips and lives; and so,
of penitential sorrow. The word reacts upon the
thought : "If we say that we have no sin we
deceive ourselves ; " for by saying it often enough,
by continual self-justification, we come to believe
it. We can suffer no greater spiritual detriment
than a forfeiture of the power of self-discernment ;
yet it is the inevitable result of insincerity and
pretence — of acting a part, not necessarily before
others, but even before ourselves in the theatre of
our imagination. The madman fancies himself a
king; but he differs from many a sane man only
in that his illusion is quite involuntary. Instead of
struggling to make ourselves better than we are and
have been, we delight to dream that we have already
apprehended and are already perfect. By perpetual
posing before a lying mirror we come to forget,
beyond hope of recovery, what manner of men we
really are ; and end in absolute self-puzzlement and
loss of simplicity. Hence the healthy tonic effect
of continual and simple acknowledgment of our
faults and mistakes and defects. Half the hurt of
sin is in the perversion of our moral judgment
through the attempt of pride to justify sin. H§

igo CONFESSION.

who spits out the venom promptly and says, " I
was wrong altogether, wilfully and inexcusably," is
already half-cured.

But what injures our spiritual nature, injures
Him whose ideal and will is uttered in that nature.
Sin is an offence, an injustice ; man against God,
judgment against judgment, will against will.
Where wills collide, the heat of anger is generated ;
and anger is the energy which tends to make
the thwarted will effectual over opposition. We
conceive God more truly in conceiving Him thus
humanwise, as one offended and angered by sin.
When we have wrongly opposed another, confession
is part of the reparation due to him ; occult com-
pensation, from the very fact that it saves our pride,
can never fully satisfy the debt. Hence we have
not paid our debt to God (as we are constrained
to conceive Him), till we have confessed our sin by
a special act of acknowledgment addressed to Him ;
nor will it do to rest passively in the thought that
He knows all and needs not that we should tell
Him. " If we confess our sins He is faithful and
just to forgive us ; " but as we ourselves are, so
also is God irritated and angered by those who
obstinately justify themselves — who never own
themselves wrong. To those who confess frankly,
honestly, promptly, He is all propitiable and for-
giving. "I have sinned," says David; "The Lord
hath taken away thy sin " is the instant response.
In the same moment that we resolve upon con-
fession, He runs forth to meet us, and to silence
our lips with the kiss of peace,

CONFESSION. igi

" Against Thee only have I sinned," says David.
But though it is only as a violation of the Divine
will that the hurt we do to ourselves or to our
neighbour puts on the character of sin; though
it is only as representing God's will that any other
will has a right over ours ; yet God has so incorpor-
ated Himself with the whole Church of redeemed
humanity in becoming the Head and Heart of that
mystical organism, that confession is due not to
Him alone but to that entire living body in union
with which our salvation consists. By sin we always
weaken, if we do not wholly sever, our vital connec-
tion with that " Tree of Life " through which alone
we receive the quickening sap of God's grace. If
we have lost our wedding garment we may not sit
down to the Eucharistic Feast with " Blessed Mary
ever Virgin, Blessed Michael the Archangel, Blessed
John the Baptist, the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul,"
and all the Saints in Heaven, and all the just on
earth. They are identified mystically with God,
against whom alone we have sinned ; and to them
we owe a debt of confession and sorrow. We
confess not merely before them as before witnesses,
but to them as to plaintives and accusers : " Confess
your sins one to another and pray for one another
that ye may be healed." Hence in the Roman
form we confess (clergy and laity alike) not only
to the Church in Heaven, to the Blessed Virgin, to
the Angels, Patriarchs, Apostles, and Saints; but
also to the visible Church on earth, the priest to the
people, the people to the priest, — for all collectively
and singly are injured by the sins of each. The

192 CONFESSION.

most secret thought against truth, or purity, 01
charity violates and disgraces that humanity which,
however divided in its branches, is at root one and
undivided. It is not I only who have sinned, but
the whole body of mankind in me and through me,
as through its organ and representative. And in
nice manner I come before God, laden not merely
with my personal sins but with those of the millions
of past and present humanity with whom I am so
intimately identified : for thus it is that Christ made
our sins His own, and His justice ours ; thus it was
that He, the spotless, would pray, even as He taught
us sinners to pray: "Forgive us our trespasses."
The deeper this truth enters our soul the less shall
we be in danger of Pharisaism (or " separatism," as
the word means), of the spirit of those who gather-
in their garments from contact with sinners, and
thank God they are not as others, forgetting their
identity with, and their responsibility for, those
others.

The matter for confession being our sinful acts
and omissions in respect to thought, word, and
deed, we are taught very emphatically to put aside
all self-deceiving attempts at palliation; to ascribe
the disorderly act not to ignorance or to violence
or to any sort of determinism or fatality, but to
our own free choice as the true and ultimate
determining cause. Doubtless there is much, far
more than is commonly allowed, in our faulty
conduct, both inward and outward, which is neces-
sitated ; but so far as there is matter for confession
there must be some residue of culpability; something

CONFESSION. 193

which we really knew was wrong ; really knew we
could have avoided; and yet did not avoid.

If such a confession is honest and humbling, it
is also stimulating and encouraging. A false con-
viction that we cannot help sinning, that we can be
snared or forced into it against our wish, unnerves
our effort, destroys our liberty, and creates the
necessity by dreaming of it. It is here especially
that humility and honesty, as opposed to insincere
self-justification, is so invigorating and healthful.
Those idees fixes as to the pleasures of sin, the
painfulness of moral cleanness, the necessity of
falling, the impossibility of resisting, and a host of
other disastrous illusions, are natural sequels of
sin which nothing but confession and honest self-
facing can remedy.

The remainder of the form is founded on the
precept : " Pray for one another that ye may be
healed." Having confessed the sins which tend to
exclude us from the communion of the just in
Heaven and on Earth, we ask those just ones to
pray for our restoration to unity. In earlier days
confession was chiefly of this public kind ; and had
relation to those sins which were called mortal or
" unto death," because they cut the soul off from
the visible communion of the faithful, and from the
propitiatory sacrificial banquet. And since visible
union with the Church was, for those who knew, a
condition of divine favour, whoever refused to seek
readmission to her communion could not hope for
God's grace (" He who heareth you heareth Me,"
and " Whatsoever ye bind on earth it shall be bound

N

194 FORGIVENESS OF SIN.

in heaven"). Absolution is therefore an authoritative
restoration to full ecclesiastical communion, to a
seat at the Eucharistic banquet. Without it one
cannot, in ordinary circumstances, be restored to
Divine grace; though without interior contrition
for sin, the mere readmission to communion is worse
than of no avail before God. It were to lie to God
and not unto men ; to eat and drink not discerning
the Lord's Body.

XXXIX.

FORGIVENESS OF SIN.
Where sin abounded Grace did much more abound. — Rom. v. 20.

There is something strong and stimulating,
albeit at times disheartening, in the notion of the
irreparable character of moral evil, of the eternal
punishment of loss consequent not only on grievous
sin but on the smallest infidelity to grace and to
opportunities that pass, never to return; in the
notion that the very saints in bliss are subject to a
just doom which for ever shuts them out from a
higher bliss forfeited by their wilful negligence.
What human lover would not be pained, not only
by the remembrance of his past infidelities, but still
more by the thought that but for them his present
love might have been more than it is? But is it
really true that Heaven itself can thus be seasoned
with Hell's bitterest flavouring ? that the elect are
but the remnants and ruins of what they might
have been had they never needed repentance ? that
their glory is but the residue of a series of irre-
vocable subtractions, betrayals, birth-right sellings ?

FORGIVENESS OF SIN. 195

that even if the returning prodigal sits higher than
his brother that went not astray, yet he can never
sit so high as had he never left the home of his
childhood ?

Were the blessed, at some Lethean spring, to
drink away the remembrance of such saddening
thoughts, yet the eternal loss would remain though
their sense of it were gone : nor should we care to
think that our future joy in the vision of Truth were
thus to depend on a blinding illusion or on defective
self-knowledge, or that when time shall be no more,
and the past shall be as the present, we shall not be
able to face that risen and reinstated past in all its
details, with unruffled serenity. If here illusions
are to some extent the wraps and mufflings which
save us from perishing through the chill of life's
cruel realities ; if we are forced to shut our eyes to
irremediable horrors and to live in a little garden of
roses walled in by our imagination, lest, stricken
down by fruitless sorrow and despair, we should
lose that hopeful energy in well-doing which can
only be secured by a certain narrowness of vision ;
yet "when that which is perfect is come" the
economies needed for the time of imperfection and
spiritual childhood shall be done away.

Shall we then evade the difficulty by pressing to
their utmost the words : " All things work together
for the good of them that love God " — as meaning
that "all things," even our very sins by which we
have fallen from love, become graces and helps in
the moment that we are restored to love ; that
God's creative power, which brings, not only being

i96 FORGIVENESS OF SIN.

from nothingness, but good out of and by means of
permitted evil, uses our past sins as the sacraments
of our sanctification, so that the forgiven soul may
always cry: 0 Felix Culpa! — O Blessed Sin that
called forth so great a wealth of pitying grace and
found so liberal and superabundant a redemption ?

Nay, do we not feel intuitively, are we not meant
to feel, that Peter and Paul and Augustine and
many another penitent Saint was sanctified not
only in spite of, but because of and through his
sins ; thai; had he not fallen so low he had never
risen so high ?

If then sin be the fuel that feeds the brightest
flame of God's love, if it be the web from which He
weaves the first robe of grace reserved for the
younger son and denied to the elder ; if it be the
gossamer on which He threads the flashing jewels
of His mercy, what then shall we say ? Shall we
continue in sin that grace may abound ?

Oh, if we held the doctrine sound
For life outliving hearts of youth
Yet who would preach it as a truth

To those who eddy round and round ?

Yet if we deny such mercy to God, lest a doctrine
so easily abused should be decadent rather than
stimulating in its general effect, how can we stop
short of the gloomiest tenets of Calvinism or
Montanism ? If God forgave but once in a life-time
and not seventy times seven ; or, if each time, with
a greatly increased reluctance, would men, taken in
the gross, sin as lightly as they do ? Is there not a
wide-spread unconscious presuming on God's mercy

FORGIVENESS OF SIN. 197

for which Christianity is largely responsible, and
which contrasts unfavourably with the dread of
relentless Nemesis, with the sense of the eternal
irreparability of sin, fostered, not only by the merci-
less religions of old, but by that equally merciless
positivism of our own days which throws the
hopelessness of a scientific necessity into the doom :
" Be sure your sin will find you out ; " and offers no
place for repentance even though it be sought with
tears ? Let me ask myself frankly : " Would I have
sinned on this or that given occasion had I believed
the sin irremissible both in this world and in the
next ? had I not thought that with God there is
mercy and plenteous redemption?"

True, we must, in calculating the general result
of the severer doctrine, allow for the great access
of reckless wickedness on the part of the lapsed
whose foolish logic would often be : " In for a
penny in for a pound ; " who would be slightly or
nowise deterred from headlong licentiousness by the
doctrine of a graduated hell with many mansions.
Still, if in such case the bad had been worse, the
good had perhaps been better ; and since a capita-
tion reckoning of good and bad, irrespective of the
kind and degree of goodness or badness, is manifestly
a fallacy, it remains conceivable that severity might
have been a kinder discipline for us than gentleness

What really revolts us in the harsher view is not
only that those now bad would be worse, but that
those now good would be bad. The badness of vice,
and the badness of the state of sin resulting from
a single sinful act, are perfectly distinct and dis-

ig8 FORGIVENESS OF SIN.

sociable. A first sin, however grievous, cannot
spring from a culpable viciousness induced by a
series of sins. On the other hand, in the moment
of his first uprising from the mire, the penitent
prodigal has all the foul rags of his vicious inclin-
ations still clinging to him. He means not merely
to confess and desist from his sinful acts, but to
correct his evil inclinations and self-induced vices ;
he has turned his face homewards as a convert ; but
he is yet a long way off. The single act that
suffices to break or to renew the bond of divine
friendship, cannot of itself change the whole
character and disposition according to which we
reckon a man good or bad. True though it be that
good dispositions are valued only for the sake of the
actual good conduct which they secure, yet men,
since their lives are not concentrated into an instant
but spread out over time, are to be classified not by
single and often quite exceptional lapses, but by
their habitual and average behaviour : " Take a
man on his average " is a just and humane maxim,
tending to a higher and less cynical view of the race,
than is afforded by the principle which says :
" Only what is everyway perfect is good ; whereas
what is anywise imperfect is bad."

Hence, were the first or even the seventh or
seventieth sin irremissible, how many of the best
and most lovable of mankind who have risen " from
stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher
things," whose very sins were blent into the result-
ing harmony of their life as a whole, would have
been shut out from the kingdom into everlasting

FORGIVENESS OF SIN. 199

darkness ! In like manner, this same turning of
every sin to our spiritual gain which characterizes
divine forgiveness, if it weakens the stimulus of
fear, reinforces the stimulus of love. It is indeed
but an extension of the redemption to every detail
of man's transgression ; since it solves in the same
way the problem how God is to " save His word
in all things," to vindicate the natural law of the
irreparability of sin, of the eternal loss of graces
and opportunities neglected ; and yet " to make all
well that is not well ; " namely, by the assumption of
the natural into the supernatural in which it is saved
and yet transcended, — its substance preserved, its
limits abolished. For as part of a greater whole,
the very ruggednesses and fractures by which its
contour is destroyed are the means by which it is
morticed and firmly knit to the rest.

In the death of Christ, God's wisdom devised a
plan whereby, natural justice being in all things
satisfied, man might be the better and not the
worse, for sin ; saving His divine word in all things
and yet making well what was not well by a
mysterious deed whose nature and whose full fruit
is yet hid from us.

Doubtless this whole economy gives a handle
to presumption, even though it be admitted that to
presume on God's generosity is to forfeit it. But
against this disadvantage we must set off the
salvation of many who would have fallen away
through discouragement under the dispensation of
fear, and the immeasurably higher kind of love and
service elicited by a truer knowledge of the tender

200 THE DIVINE ANGER.

mercies of our God whose forgiveness turns our sins
into sacraments and bids us say of each as of all :
"0 Felix Culpa quce talem et tantum meruit habere
redenifitorem."

XL.

THE DIVINE ANGER.

Wilt Thou display Thy power against a leaf that is driven by
the wind. — Job xiii. 25. (Vulgate.)

God's anger against sin and the sinner is a solid
fundamental truth of all religions ; even though the
attribution of so human a passion to the divinity-
be but analogous. The fear of God's anger is the
beginning of divine wisdom. We must know His
greatness before we can understand His humility;
we must realize His wrath before we can be subdued
by His gentleness and mercy. In this, religion but
gives explicit shape to the shapeless implications of
conscience, — to its sanctions of serene peacefulness
or of boding fear.

Yet there is a false conception of God's wrath
and anger which, in the case of crude religions,
mingles with and mars the true. When man
trespasses against his fellow-man, and opposes will
to will, and desire to desire, not only does he injure
his neighbour in his person or in his estate ; but he
also wounds him in honour ; he hurts that natural
and laudable pride which a man takes in being
regarded and esteemed by others, which makes him
desire the praise and shrink from the contempt of
even the least of his fellow-men, just because he is a
social, unselfish being, destined to live out of himself

THE DIVINE ANGER. 201

and in others, as they in him. And as a rule, it is
this wounding of our honour that galls and angers
us far more than the outward hurt by which such
contempt is implied. I may be impatient aud even
angry with a persistent and troublesome fly, but I
am not offended with it ; nor am I offended by
unintentional injuries, however much I may other-
wise suffer in consequence of them.

And in the measure that we think the respect
and good opinion of another is better worth having,
we are more offended and wounded by its denial.
Sometimes the littleness of the offender is an irri-
tating circumstance, yet, not because his opinion is
valuable, — for his approval would be almost as
impertinent as his censure ; but because of the just
indignation we rightly feel against his unwarranted
self-exaltation. What we should laugh at as inno-
cence in a child of five, we should consider imperti-
nence in a boy of ten.

As long as God is imagined man-wise, as, more
or less, the first of creatures, it is difficult to the verge
of impossibility, to realize what we know so well,
namely, that He is not in Himself injured or hurt
either in His estate or in His honour by any sin we
commit against Him ; that all His anger is on our
account and not on His own, and is but the obverse
of His infinite love for us. He wants our love, our
praise, our reverence, because it is for our good,
which is identical with His external glory. He
hates sin because it will hurt and destroy us, not
because it can hurt or destroy Him. Our human
way of picturing it saves us from the fatal deistic

202 THE DIVINE ANGER.

error of supposing God to be indifferent to our
attitude in His regard one way or the other. His
thirst for our love, His wrath against sin, is not only
real, but more than real ; our image falls short of
the truth. But the pure selflessness of this love and
wrath is obscured by our figures and analogies, which
constrain us to forget the gratuitous lovingness of the
act by which God creates, and enters into associa-
tion with His creatures, — all human associations
being founded on mutual indigence. He is angry
at our sin and irreverence, — infinitely angry in a
sense, — just because it is our mortal self-hurt, and
because He loves us infinitely. It is not for His
own sake, as though His inner divine life and glory
and joy depended upon our service or our good
opinion. Yet this is what is implied in all more or
less Calvinistic conceptions of God's anger at sin ;
it is pictured as the anger of a king who has been
insulted by the meanest of His slaves ; and its heat
is measured by the distance between the dignity of
the offender aud the offended. But God's anger is
not that of offended dignity. Besides, with the
magnanimous — and we must attribute magnanimity
to God — dignity is less, and not more, offended as the
distance in rank is greater ; and vanishes altogether
when the distance is infinite. I am annoyed with
the mosquito which stings me; but even were its
malace intentional, even were it to think meanly of
me, or, through its inability to comprehend me, to
deny my very existence while feeding on my life-
blood, I should not be offended at the absurdity.
And shall God whose serene inward peace is un-

GOD IN US. 203

broken and unbreakable and neither heeds the blas-
phemies of our worst denials, nor feels the stinging
of our most venomous malice, shall He be piqued
and mortified and infuriated on His own account
for aught that little man can ever think or do?
Shall He display His omnipotence against a leaf
that is shaken with the wind ; or trample a withered
straw in the fury of His indignation ? Here then
our " King-and-subject " category misleads us and
entangles us in the unreality of all sorts of abstract
and easily misunderstood statements about the infi-
nite malice of sin as measured by the infinite dignity
of God, — a malice of which only an infinite being were
capable. Objectively, as a disorder in God's world,
sin is doubtless an infinite evil ; also, as compared
with physical evil, with which it has no common
measure. But subjectively a finite being is as
incapable of infinite badness (in any positive sense
of badness) as of infinite goodness. God's anger is
more kin to that of the mother who sees her little
child playing with fire. He knows that in losing
Him our loss is infinite; and therefore His hatred
of sin as an infinite evil is measured by His measure-
less love for us.

XLI.

GOD IN US.

If you keep My commandments you shall abide in My love. —
John xv. 10.

That our idea of God to some extent determines
our love of Him is but a case of the more general
principle that will is dependent upon knowledge —

*o4 GOD IN US.

"Nihil volitum nisi cognitum" Hence to get to know
about God is admittedly one of our first and highest
duties. On the other hand, it is no less evident and
familiar to us that there is no exact equality between
the measure of our love, and the measure of our
knowledge ; between the clearness of our theological
conceptions and the purity of our lives. For often
the most ignorant and untutored souls, whose ideas
about God are almost as grotesque as the idols of
primitive savagery, are full of an effectual and
tender love of God, in no way justified or explained
by their notions of Him ; while a refined, spiritual
and altogether philosophical conception of the
Deity will as often leave the heart dead and cold as
a stone.

Indeed Christ seems to imply that, as a rule, the
love of God varies inversely with the power of con-
ceiving Him intelligently: "Thou hast hid these
things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed
them to babes.' Doubtless, if the wood be dry a
little spark will start a great conflagration ; whereas
green wood may be stubborn to yield to the fiercest
flame. The simple unspoilt heart of the child may
be quickly and strongly responsive to those feebler
rays of divine loveliness which beat idly on the
callous surface of a heart hardened by worldliness
and sensuality, and by infidelity to past light.
Hence the spoken word that falls equally on many
ears, is as seed sown over a tract of varying fertility,
yielding here nothing, there thirty, sixty, or an
hundred-fold.

So far then we may regard the word, the notion,

GOD IN US. 205

the mental image of God as a cause of divine love
whose efficacy, however, is conditioned by the state
of the heart to which the word is spoken. It is not
then without reason that, when religious teachers
or preachers come to us and tell us that we ought
to, and must and shall love God with our whole
heart and above all things, we demand : Who is
He? Where is He? What is He like, that we
should thus love Him on hearsay ? And then they
begin, each according to his ability, to describe to
us in lame words — not God, whom they have never
seen, but that notion or image or picture of God
which they have laboriously painted in their own
minds, that poor, clumsy skeleton-conception which
they have strung together piece by piece, and joint
by joint, and set up for worship in the shrine of
their hearts. And often we could wish that they
had either held their peace altogether or had said
less. He, who came from the bosom of the Father,
could have said much, and yet He said but little ;
for He knew a more living language than that of
the tongue, — one in which He " showed us the
Father " by stretching out His all-embracing arms
and dying, not only, as man does, for His friends,
but, as God does, for His enemies. Hence we are
but slowly and slightly stirred by the spoken word,
by the notion of God that is transferred, through
language, from some other intelligence to our own.
What moves us more really in the preacher is, the
manner of one who has found some treasure which
he himself cannot rightly conceive, still less express
to us in words; who has found a well of living

*o6 GOD IN US.

water, a secret fount of happiness which he would
willingly share with the thirsty; who therefore
excites our curiosity and bids us come and see and
taste for ourselves; who knows that his stammering
descriptions are almost irreverently unlike what
personal experience alone can reveal to his hearers
— as unlike as a spoken description of some wonder-
ful symphony, of which all one ought to say is :
" Go and hear it."

Therefore a deeper reason why, as a rule, a
strong and supreme love of God is quite separable
from a clear intellectual conception of His nature,
is to be sought in the truth that, in this life God
presents Himself to us as an object of the heart and
will, rather than as an object of the mind and
intelligence; as something to be laid hold of by
action rather than by contemplation, as something
to be done, rather than as something to be gazed at
or argued about. " This is life eternal," says Christ,
"that they should know Thee ; " and certainly here-
after we hope to see God face to face, not as our
mind now sees Him in images and symbols and
ideas, even as we see our departed friends in their
portraits, or in their letters, or in some work they
have left behind them. To have the veil torn away
which now prevents the light of God's face shining
straight into the eyes of our soul, is indeed what we
long and labour for. But meantime the veil is
there ; and it is not by our mind but only by our
action that, in this life, we are brought into imme-
diate contact with God. It is right and obligatory
that we should, as far as our education and ability

GOD IN US. 207

allow, strive to render our ideas about God, those
images or pictures of Him which we construct in
our mind, before which we so often pray (which is
no harm) and to which we so often pray (which is
great harm) — to render those ideas less and less
unworthy and superstitious and inadequate. Still
we must ever remember that our idea of God is not
God ; that it is but an internal image and likeness
that we have made of Him in our mind ; that if in
any degree it reveals Him or resembles Him, it also
to a far greater extent conceals and dissembles Him ;
that could we come to see Him directly as He really
is, the difference between the savage's grotesque
conception of God and the philosopher's more
spiritual and cultivated conception would seem of
little importance in the light of the infinite inade-
quacy of either ; that both alike necessarily conceive
God after the likeness of man and in the terms of
things bodily and finite ; that our boasted superiority
in this respect over the savage is that of a child of
five over a child of four.

However God may work in the working of our
mind, giving it its power and act of vision, giving
its objects whatever intelligibility or transparency
they possess ; yet He Himself is not, in this life, a
direct object of our mind; and if here we are to
touch Him and be immediately united with Him, it
is not in thinking about Him but in acting with Him.
For every good action of ours is His also — the off-
spring of the marriage of our will with His ; the seal
and pledge of the active union, the union in action,
of our soul with Him. From the first suggestion of

208 GOD IN US

good, to the wish, the desire, the will, the accom-
plishment, He is co-operant with every movement
of our faculties.

Who would not envy the lot of Joseph who
had Christ for his fellow-labourer in the carpenter's
shed at Nazareth ; whose knowledge and love of
Him was fed by continual partnership in toil, by the
sense of co-authorship in the same productions,
however lowly and perishable ? Yet this is but a
faltering symbol of our close intimacy with God in
bringing forth in our souls the fruit of a good life —
a labour in which His will and action and life is
intertwined with ours from beginning to end. We
are so used to the influence of His will upon ours
that we have lost all sense of it ; just as we are so
used to the drag exerted upon our bodies by the
attraction of the earth that we come to look upon
weight as part of our very constitution, and to forget
that it is the effect of an action from outside. God
is that centre of goodness which draws us ever
towards closer union with itself, by a continual
magnetic attraction. Whether we climb up-hill or
run down-hill we are influenced by the earth's attrac-
tion, resisting its force in the one case, using it in
the other; and similarly, whether we resist the
inclination or use it, in every conscious and free
action we are under the influence, however dimly
acknowledged, of an attraction towards goodness, of
a wish, however feeble and ineffectual, to do the right
thing ; and if we go with the attraction there is a
sense of ease ; and if we go against it, a sense of
unrest. And this attraction is simply the felt will of

GOD IN US. 209

God, whose presence within us is as essentially a
condition of our conscious rational life, as air or
light is of our bodily life.

And so when we talk of " union with God " let
us put aside all childish pictures of the mind which
portray that union as a sort of local relation of two
things face to face, or fastened or fused together,
inactive and unchanging ; and let us rather picture
it as the meeting or mingling of two streams rein-
forcing one another, even as when we run down-hill
our own action and that of the earth conspire to one
and the same end.

So it is not in standing still, but in movement
and action that we are united to God and our life
mingled with His. And the closer we come to Him
the more strongly He draws us; the more frequently,
fully, and strenuously we act with God, the more
abundantly does He enter into us ; so that action is,
in a way, the vessel into which God is received.
And like every other appetite, the desire for that
sense of rest and peace that comes of yielding to
God's magnetism, grows keener with every indul-
gence, till it comes easily to out-sway every counter-
attraction, and till nothing irks us more than the
unrest of having resisted.

Thus it is that whereas not God, but only some
feeble image or symbol of His nature can be touched
by our mind, He Himself can be touched by the
heart where His will is felt striving with our will, and
His spirit with our spirit ; and He can be embraced
and held fast in the embrace of action whereby His
life and ours are spun together and firmly co-twisted
o

2io OOD IN US.

in the union of a single and undivided process. " I
am the Way," He says, "and the Truth and the
Life" — but principally a Way to be trodden; a Life
to be lived. He is also a Truth to be known, an
idea to be conceived ; yet here, not directly, but
through images and shadows — as things distant and
absent are known to us.

It is well to know the name, the nature, the
effects of some needed medicine if this knowledge
will help us to procure and apply it ; yet it is not the
knowledge that heals us but the medicine ; and so a
mind-knowledge of God is useful in the present life
if it helps us to take Him into our life and action
and make Him the medicine of our souls. But it is
as the Way and the Life rather than as the Truth
that He heals us now ; it is not in knowing, but in
willing and doing that we realize Him.

Yet if God gives Himself to us in this life to be
felt, tasted, and touched rather than seen or pictured
to the mind, it must not be forgotten that these
forms of direct experience are in their way true
knowledge. Gustate et videte, says the Psalmist :
u Taste, and by tasting see " that God is sweet ; as
though he would say: It is not the mere idea of
God's sweetness that will sweeten life's bitterness,
but only the experimental proving of it. Had we no
idea of what salt or sugar looked or felt like in their
crystallized state, did we but know them in solution,
experimentally, as what makes the difference to our
palate between brackish water and fresh ; or between
sweet water and tasteless, yet this would be a most
real though partial knowledge ; and in like manner

GOD IN US 211

had we no idea or mental picture of God as a distinct
Being, unrelated to our practical life, we might yet
know Him far more directly, really, and practically
as that inward attraction to every kind of goodness
which it is sweet to yield to, and bitter to resist ;
we might know and feel His will experimentally long
before we could form any mental idol or picture of
His personality. And to say that the extent and
clearness of this experimental knowledge depends
on the frequency, constancy, and intensity of our
experiences, of our active co-operations with God's
will, is to utter the veriest truism.

Hence we need trouble ourselves but little about
our theoretical notions of God, which are but as
pictures of the absent — useful perhaps, as the image
of a Saint is useful, to steady our attention, to
stimulate memory, and devotion, through memory.
"Through memory," for there is no sanctity in the
statue, nor anything to appeal directly to our
devotion ; and similarly there is no divinity in our
idea of God, nothing that we can fall down before
and worship. We may pray before it, as before a
statue, but not to it, for that were idolatry, — not less
because our ideas of what God is in Himself are
somewhat less grotesque than those to which the
savage gives expression in his idols.

Another consequence of this truth is that those
who have perhaps never heard God's name — if such
there be; who have formed no distinct notion of
Him as a separate being ; or whose notions of Him
are what we should consider utterly false and un-
worthy ; or those again who consider all such notions

GOD IN US.

equally false and to be repudiated, may yet know
God experimentally and love Him with their whole
heart, and mind, and soul, and strength ; they may
put the claims of duty above life itself; they may
put truth before father, mother, child, possessions ;
they may not merely be in sympathy with God's will
and way, but in absolute reverential subjection to it;
following it not simply because they like it, but
because they know it should be followed whether
they like it or not. If there are those who " profess
that they know God, but who in works deny Him,"
there are also many who profess not to know Him,
but whose deeds contradict their profession.

Often what men deny with their lips they confess
with their lives ; the sense in which they reject
received dogmas is not the true sense, but a travesty
thereof — their own or another's ; it is not God whom
they refuse to worship, but some unworthy idol of
the imagination. Of our deepest convictions, our
conduct is often the truest utterance; it is just in
regard to them that our powers of self-analysis and
expression are most apt to fail.

While, then, no man can be saved without
faith and knowledge of God, yet there is a truer
knowledge than that of ideas and images; a
knowledge of direct contact and experiment, a
matter of tasting, touching, and feeling. For a
musician, a knowledge of Beethoven, means a skill
in reproducing his music ; not an acquaintance with
the details of his biography, though this may be
added as a luxury. We know God in the only way
essential to our nature and destiny when we know

GOD IN US. 213

how to reproduce the music of His life in our own.
We need to know the sun as that which gives light
and warmth and vigour, but its internal composition
concerns us but little.

God is, for many, a necessity of the mind ; the
bond of unity by which their view of all reality is
connected into a whole. Take away the thought of
God and their philosophy falls to pieces like a bundle
of faggots when the string is cut. Yet it is not
so with all. There are imperfect and erroneous
philosophies from which He is excluded ; which
seek the bond of union elsewhere, or seek it in some
wholly false conception of God. So feeble and
perturbable are our best philosophies that he who
holds God only with his mind holds Him most
insecurely. Until He has become a necessity of our
whole life, and not merely of our mental life, our
faith has no firm root ; Expertus potest credere ! For
our life and action has also its principle of unity;
some end, some love, some devotion for which we
do actually (and not only theoretically and pro-
fessionally) live. If to part with God or to deny
Him would take the meaning and point out of our
existence ; would extinguish our best enthusiasms ;
would unidealize our friendships; would cynicize
our criticism ; would render us hopeless, pessimistic,
frivolous, bitter, sensual, then, little as we may be
aware of it, He is not only our God but our All.
Thus it is that those who are least capable of an
intelligent conception of God, do as a rule love Him
far more than those whose notions about Him are
more philosophical, less obviously superstitious ; for

2i4 GOD'S LIFE IN OURS.

the knowledge which feeds their love is not concep-
tual or notional, but real and experimental. " I
confess to Thee, O Father," says Christ, looking on
the world as it always is and shall be, the untaught
multitudes on one side, and their teachers on the
other, " I confess that Thou hast hid these things
from the wise and prudent," from the scientist and
metaphysician, from the scribe, the pharisee, and the
casuist, " and has revealed them unto babes."

XLII.
god's life in ours.

He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is Love. . . .
God is love, and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God it*
him. — i John iv.

Our Lord tells us that eternal life consists in
knowing God ; and if at first sight it seems strange
that life should consist in what is but a condition
and means of life, namely, in knowing, St. John tells
us more clearly the kind of knowing that is meant ;
— a direct experimental knowledge of God's action
in us ; not an indirect mental representation of God
as He seems to Himself. So far as our love of God
is excited by consideration and reflection, — by the
images and ideas of Him that we form in our mind,
— knowledge precedes love. But that knowledge
in which eternal life consists follows upon Love.
It is a knowledge of God manifested in the fact of
our own love of others, of God acting in our action ;
of God, not as He might seem to other possible
creatures, or, apart from all, to the divine self'

GOD'S LIFE IN OURS. 215

consciousness, but as He is in us, mingling His life
with ours so inextricably as to defy clear analysis or
separation. And he that loveth not his brother
knoweth not God, however correctly or sublimely
he may conceive Him with his mind ; whereas he
that loveth, knoweth God, even were his theological
notions those of simple savagery or childhood.

Moreover, it is in the inward and outward
exercise and operation of love, that we dwell in God
and He in us. The dwelling is altogether dynamic
and active ; — a process, as when one sustained
musical note makes harmony with another ; 1 not a
position, as of a jewel at rest in its setting.

Not however in any kind of love is the divine life
carried on in us and through us ; but in that kind
only in which all our energies, impulses, and appetites
are subordinated to, and pressed into the service of,
that sovereign universal Love, which is but the Will
of God seeking expression through the instrument-
ality and co-operation of the rational creature,
created for no other end than this. Any other rebel
love, breaking from the traces and refusing to serve,
brings misty confusion into our life and hides us
from ourselves. Only the sovereign love reveals to
us what we are in reality, — solidifies the mists of
self-illusion into our very truth and substance ;
wakes us from intangible dreaminess to palpable fact
and actuality. St. John speaks of it, not as the

* Mark, how one string sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering ;
Resembling sire ana child and happy mother
"Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing.

Shakespeare

2i6 GOD'S LIFE IN OURS.

direct love of God, but as the love of our brethren,
behind, and through, and in whom God is loved ;
and more particularly, as the continuance in us and
through us of Christ's love for our brethren and for
the Father in, and through them.

Love is specified or characterized by its scope
and aim, as a seed is by the full-grown tree into
which it tends to develop. This love of the brethren,
which constitutes our divine life, and in which we
recognize the action of God mingling with our own,
has no less universal an aim than has the love of
Christ, whereof it is but an extension in the same
way that the vitality of the branches is but an
extension of that of the Vine. Slowly indeed its
true character and final expression is developed in
human consciousness. Felt at first as a mere push
in the dark, we know not whence the blind impulse
comes or whither it would drive us; but as with
other instincts, we make essays, seeking ease, in
this direction and in that, and as one or other
satisfies the instinct more, or thwarts it less, we
follow on faithfully till some new and fuller indica-
tion of its purpose is vouchsafed to us. And thus,
in course of time, if we obey, its meaning is
gradually expanded before us, and we pass from
strength to strength, till we are face to face with
God, — with the all-embracing universal Spirit of
Love, which strove with our spirit when we knew
Him not ; — when we yet walked with Him, as with
a stranger, by the way, with burning hearts and
blinded eyes.

Left to our own gropings we seek the satisfaction

GOD'S LIFE IN OURS. 217

of this divine instinct first in an enlightened egoism
— in dying to mere animalism, in living to truth and
purity, in giving the supremacy to spiritual over
bodily excellence. Breaking from this prison of
solitude to that fuller and better self-understanding
involved in the instinct of fraternity and justice,
we recognize ourselves as members subordinated to
the society of our immediate entourage ; we seek or
sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others. Yet the
Divine Will cannot rest there, but ever enlarges the
circle of our interest till we come to know ourselves
more and more deeply, as members of the human
race, and identified with its destiny ; then, as part
of the entire universe of creatures, animate and
inanimate, from which we originate, whose secular
labour we gather up into ourselves, to whom we
owe, with usury, all that we have received. Still
the heart is not at rest ; not even in the fondest
Utopian dreams of the universal well-being of all
creatures is its desire fully interpreted. It is on
its way to reality, following the clue, but has not yet
arrived. What is still lacking is the keystone of
the arch which gives reality and stability to all
the substructure. Apart from God, the universal
creature is an illusion, an abstraction, an incoherent
self-contradicting idea, as is the superficies of the
geometer apart from the solid body which it limits.
And as the geometrical point or line can have no
greater physical reality than the superficies, so I, as
a fraction of humanity, or of the universal creature
(if these be viewed as suspended in vacuo and not as
resting on the solid rock of God's reality), am but a

2i8 GOD'S LIFE IN OURS.

dream within a dream ; and the good that I live
for, whether my own or that of all my fellow-
creatures, is but a less or greater dream, if God's
Will be not behind all to give reality to my shadowy
aims. Else the chain of purposes, one leading to
another, ends nowhere, and hangs on nothing ; we
can answer the question : " What is this or that
for ? " but never : " What is everything for ? "
unless we accept the Will of God as the solution :
Fiat voluntas Tua stent in coslo et in terra. That
therefore which I really want, or rather, that which
the Divine Will in me wants, is the Divine Good, —
created and uncreated. As God is the Author, so is
He the end of that Love or Charity which He
Himself works in me. The good of all creation
could not satisfy that Will except in so far as it is
identical with the good of the Creator :

In la Sua volontade I nostra pace.

We want all things to be and move as God
wants them to be and move ; that is to say, in
perfect harmony with His being and movement ; so
that His being and movement is, when we come to
understand ourselves, the first and governing object
of our higher will, apart from which, the subordinate
object is not coherently thinkable. Picture a man
suddenly created in some barren waste who feels for
the first time the cravings of physical hunger. We
indeed know the meaning, the full physiological
interpretation of that craving ; we know moreover
that if it is a desire for food, it is, by presupposition,
a desire or love of self, and of food only in its

GOD'S LIFE IN OURS. 2ig

relation to self — a desire of self-sustenance, self-
preservation ; but to him it is a vague mysterious
longing till experience shall have taught him — till
the presence of its object shall have explained and
intensified the appetite. So with this ineradicable
appetite of the soul for the food of reality, — at first
vague and unintelligible,

this palpitating heart,
This blind and unrelated joy,
That moves me strangely like the Child
Who in the flushing darkness troubled lies
Inventing lonely prophecies
Which even to his Mother mild
He dares not tell ;
To which himself is infidel ;
His heart, not less, on fire
With dreams impossible as wildest Arab tale.

In me life's even flood
What eddies thus ?
What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood
Like a perturbed moon of Uranus
Reaching to some great world in ungauged darkness hid ? l

As with every other desire, the adequate object
towards which the Divine Will within us drives
and constrains us, is not something apart from self;
but self in some state of betterment, of which the
so-called object is but a condition. It is not food
that we seek, whether for soul or for body, but self-
refreshment, self-development. We desire to grow ;
that is, to "be" more than we are; to have more
reality, more life, more love and action than we
have.

1 Unknown Eros. By C. Patmore.

GOD'S LIFE JN OURS.

Thus from the nature of its object we come to
understand the nature of the subject or self to
which the will or desire belongs, to whose better-
ment it tends. If I pass from egoism to a dis-
interested desire of the well-being of humanity
(disinterested relative to the more narrowly and
imperfectly conceived self), it is because I am really
a member of humanity, and because humanity lives
in me, and is the real self which is the subject of
the desire, and which seeks its own betterment in
and through me, as the whole body seeks its general
self-betterment through each several organ and
member. But humanity itself is only a part of
still greater whole which lives in it, and therefore
in me, and whose will and self-seeking also works
in mine, though still more deeply and subconsciously.
Yet even this will of the universal creature is not
coherent or self-explanatory save as a manifestation
of the Divine Will whereby Deus vult suutn esse —
God wills to be — wills, principally and fundamen-
tally, the eternal life and action which He ever
enjoys; wills, secondarily and dependently, the
perfect development and expression of His life
and action in the finite order.

This then explains Christ's saying: "My meat
is to do the will of Him that sent Me and to perfect
His work." The deepest and most fundamental
appetite in the soul is God's love of His own life
and action, temporal and eternal. The soul is
not God, yet has no reality except in conjunction
with the reality of God, who is her foundation
and support. Alone, she were unintelligible and

GOD'S LIFE IN OURS. 221

incoherent, as shadow without substance, for she
is essentially associated with another (namely, with
her God) in the deepest springs of her conscious
life. His Will is ever present to her as the will of
another, however dimly that "otherness" be appre-
hended. It 15 He who, in conjunction with her
and with His whole creation — as it were, one
Self, one Subject, — desires and seeks the universal
good whereby all creatures enter into the eternal
joy of their Lord — that joy which He finds in His
inner life and action.

That God should be and live, in Himself and
in His creatures, is therefore the full object which
explains and satisfies the groping of our higher
will ; and the Self to which this will belongs is a
corporate self, double or manifold, the self of a
Society — of " God-in-Man " or " God-with-man "
in so far as God already lives and dwells in His
creatures and desires to dwell in them more fully.
God cannot be more than He is eternally, but this
Society of God and creatures can grow to an ever
greater fulness of being, even as body and soul can
grow, though in a sense the soul grows not. It is
only as conjoined and associated with God that
we possess a certain dependent and secondary
reality of our own ; and that further reality which
we seek, is dependent on Him in like manner.
Apart from Him or in ignorance of Him, our
will can find nothing solid to rest upon or aim
at; nothing but what is incoherent, unrelated, or
related to the unknown ; dreams within dreams ;
and parts of wholes that are parts of other wholes,

GOD'S LIFE IN OURS.

in endless process; lines from all directions ever
converging but never meeting.

The question : " Who is this that cometh up
from the desert leaning on her Beloved ? " conveys
a true image of the shadowy and unsubstantial
nature of the soul, — as it were the empty skin
sloughed by a snake — save so far as God infuses
His reality, life and action, into hers. Leaning on
Him she is coherent and thinkable ; apart from
Him she is nothing, and if we would understand
her out of reference to Him, we deal with a
surd.

Therefore St. Paul says : " If I have not love, I
am nothing ; " for God is Love, and if that Love
should cease to work in me and mingle itself as the
fundamental or governing element in all my action,
all the reality and coherence of my life and aims
were gone. And in so far as I wilfully throw myself
out of harmony with this divine bourdon and sing
false to it, I am struggling away from God and
reality into chaos and nothingness, vainly indeed,
as one who should seek to escape the thraldom of
the earth's attraction by climbing a steep mountain.
In Him even the most reprobate live, and move,
and have their being and reality, however much
they may hate it and cry for the death that will not
come.

CHRIST IN US. 223

XLIII.

CHRIST IN US.
I live, now not I, but Christ in me. — Gal. ii. 20.

The difference between Christian mysticism, and
that which can be realized apart from a knowledge
of Christ, is that, the divine life which struggles in
us for self-expression is now more clearly revealed
as to its origin and its aim. As the life of Christ
seeking an instrument of further self-manifestation
in our being and faculties, its " otherness " in our
own life is more clearly denned; it is less of an
unattached impersonal tendency towards righteous-
ness ; more of a personality, a will, a spirit striving
with our spirit, set against our will, marking off our
personality. If there may be a partial untruth in
this conception of " otherness " between God and
the soul, in so far as it seems to number God with
His own creatures, to view Him as a great Self
among a multitude of subordinate selves, and not as
that on which they all depend; yet this error of
exaggerated, or rather of an over-materialized,
"otherness" is less hurtful, than the almost neces-
sarily alternative error of attributing to our own
agency that divine action which, though in us, is
not of us, or from us.

Again, Christ as realizing in His own life the
divine ideal of perfect humanity, interprets to. us
the meaning of this blind groping after God which
we experience in ourselves ; He sets the end to
which we are being moved before our eyes; He

224 CHRIST IN US.

shows us the complete development of the divine
seed that is sown in us by nature and fostered by
grace.

Not only does Christ's humanity, by thus
explaining us to ourselves, add new definiteness to
the mystical life; it is also instrumental, through
the as yet hidden, but dimly felt, organic oneness of
all human souls, in the reinvigoration and extension
of that life. " I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me," says St. Paul, ascribing the divine action in
the Christian soul to the Incarnate God, who is the
Head and Form of that living body, whereof all are
members, and which acts as a whole in the action
of each, — a truth which finds expression in the
Sacramental system.

Hence in the Christlike action of each several
member Christ does literally extend and continue
that life which He began while here on earth ; not
merely exemplariter as the schoolmen would say,
not merely by way of replica and reflection, but
causaliter, since a holy life or action resembles His,
precisely because it is His. What frightens many
away from mysticism, and makes them cling to the
easily-pictured, though crude conceptions of their
childhood — (those, namely, with which the religious
art of the middle ages furnishes us), is a vague
apprehension of pantheism or else of illuminism ;
— of confusing the clear, hard lines by which a
materialistic theism divides God from the soul, and
souls from one another, without any sort of even
local compenetration.

The true nature of the distinction being un-

CHRIST IN US. 22$

imaginable, if we take away that which is imagin-
able we seem to have nothing left to save us from
the fallacy of confusion. Yet the counter-fallacy
which numbers God and His creatures in the same
category — one here, one there, is not less irreverent,
and is at the root of much unreality in religion.

Every comparison necessarily misrepresents a
relationship which is altogether unique; but a
multitude of such comparisons may hedge in and
narrow the area in which the inaccessible truth lies
buried. If in some sense God is the soul of our
soul, it does not mean that, with it He constitutes
one substance. It does mean that the soul depends
on Him for its existence and action far more imme-
diately and closely than the body does upon the
soul, though in a different and inexplicable way. It
means that the soul is by nature an organ of divine
self-expression, as the body is the organ by which
the soul utters itself — yet again, in a different and
inexplicable way. It means that as the body and
soul are distinct, without being two things of the
same class or kind ; so God and the soul are distinct
yet not " connumerable," — though again in a
spiritual and inexplicable way. It does not mean
that absolutely and in Himself, God would not be
intelligible without reference to the soul, as the soul
would be unintelligible without reference to the
body; but it does mean that as the body is alto-
gether for the soul and is inconceivable and impos-
sible apart from it, so the soul is inconceivable save
in reference to God, who is the key that alone
unlocks the treasury of her highest capacities; it
P

22b CHRIST IN US.

means that He shapes her to His own purpose and
end even as she gathers to herself the dust of earth
and weaves it in to that bodily garment that half
hides and half reveals her mysterious nature ; that
when His free action in our mind and heart is
impeded, the corruption and disintegration of our
whole moral and mental life is the result. Yet God
is not a part or constituent of our personality,
although His presence, His life, His action are thus
mingled with ours ; and although a shadow does not
relate to and depend on a substance more closely
than our soul on God. The earth on which we
tread, the air we breathe, the light we behold, the
food on which we live, are no part of our being. Yet
our muscles and limbs, our organs, our senses are
unintelligible without them and idle apart from
them. So too God is the ground on which our soul
rests and walks; the light it sees by, the food it
feeds on, the heat that warms it, the air that
invigorates it ; we are in Him as He in us : " In
Him we live and move and are " no less than He
lives and moves and is in us.

But even when the fear of pantheism is removed,
the notion of mystical religion is often associated
with the claim to a false illuminism, to an ecstatic
vision of the deity, a special intuition of divine
mysteries which is usually taught to be the pre-
rogative only of the blessed in Paradise. Flying
from such an illusion, we may and mostly do fall
into another, far more deadening to spiritual reality ;
that, namely, which denies any other generally
accessible knowledge of God than that indirect,

CHRIST IN US. 227

inferential knowledge of Him as He is imaged in
the constructions of theological reasoning or in the
materialized pictures of the imagination. These
mental ideas and pictures are not revealed to us or
created in our mind by God; they are our own
patchwork, put together laboriously from indirect
evidence. If I see a man face to face his image is
impressed on my senses without any building up on
my part. If I only hear him spoken of, the visual
image I form of him is of my own making. So the
images and mental ideas in which we know God
are not derived from facial vision of His being, but
are built up in accordance with our inferences as
to His nature, drawn from the character of His
work in us and outside us ; and being confessedly
fashioned more or less human-wise, are infinitely
inadequate and unworthy.

So far then as mysticism is thought to aim at a
direct ecstatic vision of God, and to derive its ideas
and images of Him from such vision, and not by
the ordinary way of inference, it is justly feared as
fostering dangerous illusions. But true mysticism
has no such aim. It simply emphasizes and gives
the first importance to that direct and experimental
knowledge of God which is possessed by all, though
little heeded. So far as it represents God in mental
ideas and images, constructed in accordance with
what from His workings we infer He ought to be
like, seen face to face, its likenesses of Him are no
better, no less childish, than those of other men.
Perhaps the mystic is more explicitly conscious than
they, of the essential and necessary untruthfulness

aa8 CHRIST IN US.

involved in the very notion of a likeness of God.
Every " likeness," as such, affirms that the original
is thus or thus. This affirmation may be true when
creatures are represented ; but must be false when
God is represented, and it is only by recognizing its
falsehood that we can get some truth out of it — the
truth of an analogy.

But if instead of trying to build up pictures and
theories of what God is in Himself — or rather, to
Himself — I content myself with observing what He
is to me, what He is to His creatures; this knowledge
of His workings in me and outside me is direct,
experimental, and accessible to all. It is one thing
to know God in His workings; another to know
Him from His workings.

If in the dark I feel myself violently pushed 01
drawn in one direction, I know there is some cause
at work of which I can form no certain visua1
picture, and yet of which I have a very real and
direct knowledge in its immediate effects. So toe
we all have direct experience of a kind of force that
draws or impels our will towards what is right ; and
if we yield ourselves to this force and do not resist
it, we discern more clearly the design by which it is
governed, the ultimate purpose towards which it is
developing slowly. This knowledge of God's working
and action in regard to us is direct, and not infer-
ential ; though it supplies the ground of an inference
by which we pass from the known to the unknown —
from the nature of God's manifest workings to the
nature of His hidden being. The mystic views the
former practical concrete knowledge as all-important,

CHRIST IN US. itf

and the latter, which is theoretical and abstract, as
less important. For us who walk in the light of
faith it is more needful to grip hold of God's hand,
than to dream what His face is like, still more as
the dreaming often enfeebles our grasp.

The somewhat intellectual " meditations which
play so large a part in the spiritual exercises of
modern piety are liable to be vitiated by an excessive
straining after ideas and images of what God is to
Himself; as though He were to be known only
through the representations of our mind ; and not
chiefly in His direct workings upon the heart. In
short, what is secondary and subordinate is made
primary and everything ; for the whole value of our
religious theory and symbolism is to give some lame
sort of mental expression and interpretation to those
facts of internal experience which are the substance
and root of all religion — facts which can no more
be exhausted by theories, than a flower by a
botanical formula.

Even Christ is sought rather in the life that He
once led outside us, than in that which He is con-
tinually living within us, and in which every event
of the other has its mystical counterpart.

Unheeded, the unknown God cries out in the
heart of man by the voice of conscience: "Why
persecutest thou Me ? ' He cries out to us as one
most intimate with us from our childhood, calling
us, as would a parent or a brother, by our own
name. He calls out in His pain and anguish, His
hunger and thirst from that spiritual Calvary in our
soul, where we crucify Him daily and put Him to

a3o GOD'S JEALOUSY.

an open shame, resisting, tormenting, persecuting
Him. And yet, in some sense, unwittingly ; for so
close is He to us that in thought we do not divide
Him from ourselves, but confound that Holy Will
that strives and works in us, with our own. For
"closer is He than breathing, and nearer than
hands and feet." " Who art Thou ? " we answer to
His cry of sharp pain when, through His grace,
this sense of "otherness" is brought home to us
for the first time, and we find that in betraying,
despising, and resisting our conscience we have all
along been betraying, despising, and resisting our
God, as real actors in that supreme tragedy which
the historical Passion of Christ but symbolizes and
makes visible to our imagination. Even when we
are not crucifying Him afresh by flagrant sin, we are
ever tormenting and persecuting Him by negligence,
by recklessness, by skirting the edge of sin's preci-
pice, so that He is never at rest or free from anxiety.

XLIV.

god's jealousy.

I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God.— Exodus xx. 5.

There is certainly a sense in which God must be
loved alone ; in which we are to have no other god
but Him. Some, following in the wake of certain
mystics, have taught that in its highest perfection
the soul's love for God is so like that of spouse for
spouse as to put on the same character of exclusive
and lawful jealousy. " My beloved for me," they
quote, " and I for Him ; " and in this they place

GOD'S JEALOUS*. 23!

the rationale of the need of celibacy or virginity
for those who aspire to perfect love — denying, not
perhaps the absolute, but certainly the practical,
possibility of such love of God in the case of those
who owe so similar a love to wife or husband : God,
in fact, might have reason to be jealous. Even
those who regard the two loves as moving in
different planes, and therefore not capable of direct
collision, consider that the sum of human energy
and attention being limited, the same part of it
which is given to the one kind of love must be
taken from the other ; so that God may be jealous
not of the love, but of the attention and energy it
absorbs— as a lover might be jealous of his mistress'
spaniel. In this sense also God might conceivably
be jealous of any absorbing love whether of parent
or child or brother or friend ; and more especially
of conjugal love, simply as more absorbing. These,
more aptly than the others, appeal to St. Paul's
words when he says that the married care for their
partners, whereas the unmarried care for the Lord.

By way of objection to the first view, it is clear
that the " sponsal " analogy or metaphor, while in
no sense ever equalling the mysterious union of love
and operation between God and the soul, must not
be pressed in all points. " Each for the other
only " is distinctive of the earthly relationship ; but
can it be said in any very evident sense that God
is for the soul only ? That He loves each separate
soul with an exclusive love is, on the surface at all
events, a contradiction in terms. That He loves
each as though He loved no other, means merely that

i32 GOD'S JEALOUSY.

His love is not, like ours, thinned by diffusion, that
it is as particular as it is universal and all-embracing.
If we would love another with anything like the
same particularity, it must be by withdrawing our
care and attention from millions of others equally
or more loveable. This narrowing of the vision
and the affections is produced spontaneously by the
passion of love ; and also by a free act of the will
when we give our affection to another in some ex-
clusive way, as happens in marriage, where each
virtually promises not to look abroad but to con-
centrate and focus the mind upon the other, thus
seconding the natural blinding tendency of the
conjugal affection. It is an instinctive recognition
of the limited quantity of human attention, affection,
and energy, that lies at the root of the feeling of
jealousy. "The more for you," it seems to say,
M the less for me ; and I will have all or none."

God therefore loves each with a particularity that
in us would often involve loving no other, but in Him
consists with loving every other as particularly.
Hence His love for my soul is not exclusive, and if
He wants me on my part to love Him exclusively,
with a quasi-conjugal love, He does not pretend to
reciprocate this exclusiveness, or to pay me that
compliment after which jealousy might hanker, of
being all and only for me. To sacrifice reverence
to clearness — it is as in the polygamous family
where each wife must have only one husband, but
that husband may have many other wives. Indeed
it is the Church, the Human Soul taken collectively,
in its million-membered organic unity, that is the

GOD'S JEALOUSY. *33

Spouse of God and the archetype of Christian
monogamy. It is through all, that He is wedded
to each.

Even then if God wants a quasi-conjugal love
from the soul, incompatible with the bestowal of
the full measure of such love on any creature, the
non-exclusive nature of the love, which He gives in
return, points to one serious limitation of the whole
metaphor.

In all this matter there are two distinct con-
ceptions struggling for birth, often in one and the
same mind, and whose relations of compatibility or
repugnance will be best determined by endeavouring
to give them clear enunciation.

First, there is that implied in the common
language of all, save a very few, of the principal
ascetics and saints — language perhaps consciously
symbolic and defective in its first usage, but which
has been inevitably literalized and hardened when
taken upon the lips of the multitude. The God of
popular asceticism is almost necessarily viewed as a
" Giant Self amid a multitude of lesser selves,'*
as the First of creatures competing with the rest
for the love of man's heart. Whatever love they
win from us in their own right, is taken from Him.
Even though He be loved better than all of them
put together and thrown into the opposite scale of
our estimation, — even though He beloved supremely,
yet He is not loved perfectly till He be loved alone.
Those who would be perfect must mortify every
natural affection for father, mother, brethren, and
friends ; above all they must exclude the absorbing

234 GOD'S JEALOUSY.

affection of spouse for spouse if they would be His
only, all for Him. If the unsocial issues of this
transfer of all natural affection from the creature
to the Creator be objected, it is explained that the
regard or service paid to them purely for God's
sake, and irrespective of their own inherent quali-
ties, is something far higher, more universal and
impartial than that which such inherent qualities
would naturally and directly elicit without any
reference to God. In no other way is it allowed
that we can love creatures without taking away
from the love of God. Else we love them instead
of God ; or more than God ; or in addition to
God; and therefore more or less idolatrously.

If all our truths are in some way alloyed with
falsehood, spiritual truths, which are confessedly
veiled in symbols and metaphors, are more essen-
tially subject to such limitation ; nor is it ever a
choice between a wholly true or a wholly false
proposition, but at best between a less or more true ;
a more or less false. Further, what is in itself, or
with reference to a better instructed mind, a truer
expression may, to a ruder mind be less true, and
more practically misleading. And so this imperfect
popular essay at an arrangement of facts such as
to justify the precept of the sovereign and exclusive
love of God is, for all its limitations, the most
generally serviceable. Treated as unalloyed truth,
and pressed accordingly to its utmost logical con-
sequences, it becomes a source of danger ; but as a
fact it is not and will not be so treated by the
majority of those who serve God faithfully but

GOD'S JEALOUSY. 235

without enthusiasm. With these the love of God
is mainly rational and but slightly emotional. They
are habitually resolved to give Him His due, and
not to offend Him ; but as they do not conceive
themselves called to offer Him an all-absorbing
affection, or to love Him exclusively as well as
supremely — this being, according to the view in
question, a special and exceptional vocation — their
natural affections are not weakened, but at most
curbed of any sinful extravagance. It is only
when they conceive themselves called to perfect
love, that the element of falsehood with which
their view of the matter is alloyed, begins to work
mischief.

First of all there is the initial assumption that
the precept of loving God alone and exclusively
binds some but not all; that it interferes with
certain natural relationships, social and domestic ;
that to embrace the married state is to resign higher
degrees of friendship with God. Hence a violent
effort to limit and weaken every kind of natural
affection in order to transfer the energy thus econo-
mized to God, viewed, so to say, as the First and
Greatest of creatures, and apprehended, not directly,
but only through the uncertain ideas which the mind
has clumsily built up to represent Him, or still more
commonly, through the merely symbolic pictures of
the imagination. It is in some sort like an effort
to take no pleasure in the simple melody we are
listening to, but to stop our ears to its distracting
loveliness, in order to be ravished by the newspaper
report of an oratorio. Here and there a vivid

»36 GOD'S JEALOUSY.

imagination and an unwontedly concentrated effort
of will may partially accomplish the feat ; but in
most cases we miss both the melody and the
oratorio ; that is to say, we detach our affections
from creatures and fail to attach them to the dull
image we have formed of the Creator. This is the
root-reason of so much of that dryness and desola-
tion, that sense of stifled powers and starved
capacities of love, of which so many religious
and devout people complain who have left all in
order to love God better and seem to have done
so in vain. Well for them if a heart, vacant and
" to let," do not fall into the disrepair and ruin of
selfishness. The exceptional cases in which the
heart seems to find a full expansion of its affections
in an exclusive devotion to God leave it still doubtful
whether that devotion is really stronger because
other devotions are weakened or cut off; the more
so as we notice that a St. Teresa or a St. Francis of
Assisi overflows with a love for those around, which
it is hard to explain as purely extrinsic and indirect,
or as in no way elicited naturally by the inherent
loveableness of the creature. Indeed, souls of that
type seem to be, at least unconsciously, dominated
by a wholly different conception of the matter, even
when they adopt the language of popular asceticism,
or break but rarely from its customary and con-
secrated forms of expression.

In some sense or other it is plainly as natural
for man to love God and to realize his final happi-
ness in that love, as it is for him to love his parents
or children or spouse. But whereas there is a

GOD'S JEALOUSY. 237

faculty of easy apprehension and knowledge, to
feed the flame of filial or parental or neighbourly
affection, we have no such God-apprehending
faculty whereby divine love can find a stimulus
at all comparable. God, as a separate personality,
apart and in Himself, is known by inference from
His works or by faith in His revelation. A human
personality so known, however loveable in itself,
or beneficent in regard to us, could hardly hope to
compete very successfully for the affection we give
to those who are ever present to our senses and
who necessarily occupy our continual attention. It
might possess the homage of our reason and the
loyalty of our reverence and service above all others,
but the endeavour to wrest our emotional affection
from those present, to bestow it on one absent would
be doomed to failure because it would be violent
and non-natural. But whereas we can build up
some tolerable image of a man whom we know only
from his works and by hearsay ; of God as He is
in Himself, and as a separate object of possible
affection, we can have no image that is not entirely
symbolical and unlike the reality. Hence the
doctrine of an Incarnation meets a definite want
which makes itself felt in the religious intelligence
as soon as anthropomorphic conceptions have been
outgrown. Yet the noblest human attributes of
even a Christ are not divine ; nor is the love they
elicit divine love, although it be the love of that
Man who is also God. In fine, the effort to transfer
to God, as known through or in the self-constructed
representations of the mind, that affection which is

238 GOD'S JEALOUSY.

called forth naturally by those around us, is unreal,
and nearly as impossible as the effort to fly without
wings, or to perform any other feat beyond our
natural faculties. We can and must yield Him the
supreme place in our rational estimation or practical
recognition ; but this purely spiritual worship, being
in a different plane, cannot interfere with the fullest
development of any well-ordered natural affection
however intense or absorbing ; or justify the sus-
picion of any jealousy in God.

Our escape from the maze is effected by recog-
nizing that these same natural affections, when pure
and well-ordered, far from robbing God of so much
affection, are part and parcel of the love that we
owe to Him ; that so far as the love of God is
affectionate and emotional, as well as spiritual and
rational, that affection is elicited by the loveable
qualities of His creatures ; that it passes to Him
through them. Not as though we were to argue :
" If the creature is thus fair, how much fairer the
Creator : hence let me take my heart from the
creature and give it to the Creator," for this were
to put God beside His creature, and not — as the
light that shines through it — behind it. If we
remember that God cares more to be known as in
us, than as apart from us, — in solution, so to say,
than in separation — as a will, a power, an action, a
life mingling with and essentially conditioning our
own will power, action, and life, than as He is to
Himself, or as He is in relation to other things
outside us ; that He cares more that we should grip
His hand in the dark than dream about His face,

GOD'S JEALOUSY. 239

we shall understand that for us to love God
supremely and alone, means to care for nothing
but that in all our life and action the divine life
and action shall find the fullest possible expression ;
that as we are actively at one with the stream when
we swim with the current and not against it, so we
shall be actively at one with God in yielding our-
selves to His impulses and attractions ; that in all
our natural affections we love God, if we love what
He would have us love, and in the divinest way
possible — as Christ in similar conditions would
have loved, whether as father, son, brother, or
husband, nay, more, whether as mother, daughter,
sister, or wife.

To illustrate by what is really an imperfect
aspect of the same truth, when we say that a man's
first care should be to love reasonably and in no
way unreasonably, we imply that he should love
Reason above all things. Now though in the last
resort Reason is not an abstraction, but God the
personal source of all reasonableness, yet the Reason
on whose claims to preference we insist is not
consciously conceived as a separate person compet-
ing for the affection of those whom we love, but as
an infused element and formal principle by which
that affection is elevated, strengthened, and purified,
which interferes with nothing but its possible
extravagances and corruptions. Reason, however,
is but a thinner and poorer conception of the Divine,
the Christlike, the will of God; and so when we
speak of giving God the first place in our affections
we mean chiefly and only caring that every affection

GOD'S JEALOUSY.

be as Godlike and God-pleasing as possible ; we do
not mean, crowding them all into a corner to make
room for God in our hearts; we mean that the Divine
Love, which is the sovereign reasonableness, should
mingle with, control, and perfect every other love.
It is the " form, " the principle of order and
harmony our natural affections are the " matter "
harmonized and set in order ; it is the soul, they are
the body of that divine love whose adequate object
is, God in His creatures; which loves all in Him,
and Him in all not falsely sundering what He has
joined together ; not making two loves out of the
imperfect co-principles of one perfect love.

Union with God is oftenest conceived statically,
as it were a permanent embrace of the soul clinging
to her Maker, as the ivy to the oak ; or as her fixed
and motionless contemplation of that picture of
Him which she has fashioned for herself; or, if at
all dynamically, it is as the union of two men
working in the field, or of two women grinding at
the same mill. But more truly, it is a union of the
soul with herself, to which we might not inaptly
twist the words : " Jerusalem is built as a city
which is at unity with itself." For in yielding,
instead of opposing, all her energies and affections
to that Will of whose continuous stress she is as
conscious as of the earth beneath her feet, she alone
realizes her true self, her true life, — God's action and
love becoming the " form " of her action and love.

And as he is the principal Agent in her every
right action, the principal Lover in her every well-
ordered love, and she but the instrument; so, in

COD'S JEALOUSY. 241

whatever or whomsoever she loves rightly and
divinely, for its true goodness and divinity, it is He
who is ultimately loved — He, who shines through it.
Hence in all pure affection it is ultimately God who
loves, and God who is loved ; it is God returning to
Himself, the One to the One.

To imagine then that we can love God more, by
loving creatures less, is an error akin to that which
supposes that we can know Him better the less we
know of those creatures which reveal Him ; and
that He is to be found by shutting our eyes and not
by opening them. If Christianity taught that the
perfect love of God required us, in any literal sense,
to hate father or mother or to love them less we
might well cry : " This is a hard saying : who can
bear it ? " He who wept over the grave of His friend
will not be jealous because His friend weeps over the
grave of a mother or a child. Indeed all the saints
and practical proficients in the science of divine love
felt this truth, and have striven in various degrees to
give it clear expression, though not always consis-
tently freeing themselves from the entanglements
of the popular conception. If St. Paul commends
celibacy it is, obviously, because of the practical
incompatibility of the active service of God and the
service of a family : because of the consequent
freedom to live or die for the cause of the Gospel ;
and not because Christianized married love is
something apart from the love of God or incom-
patible with its highest perfection, or otherwise than
one of the most fruitful occasions of the exercise of
that love.
Q

GOD'S JEALOUSY.

Though well-ordered natural affections can no
more interfere with the love of God than a straight
line can interfere with straightness, or a sweet
savour with sweetness, yet they can interfere with
one another, being in the same plane. We cannot
each love God in all these modes simultaneously,
but must make choice according to our circum-
stances. Those who seek Him in the love of the
family, cannot well seek Him in a direct and
exclusive devotion to the Church or the Community;
but both alike find Him in a full, though different,
expansion of their natural affections.

It is perhaps a common misunderstanding of
that Catholic tradition which exalts voluntary
virginity above the conjugal state, that favours
the notion of God's being jealous of the more
absorbing forms of human affection, and requiring
an impossible transfer thereof to Himself. In her
conception of the relationship subsisting between
the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, the Church
teaches implicitly that absolute virgin chastity not
only consists with but characterizes the highest ideal
of conjugal love ; that human love is divine in the
measure that it is elevated, strengthened and
purified by self-denial ; that it is woven of impulse
and restraint, and that all its degradation is due
not to the absolute excess of the former, — there is
no such thing — but to the relative defect of the
latter, since the stronger horse needs the tighter
rein. Neither in the Church's preference of
virginity, nor in her commendation of celibacy as
practically expedient for her clergy; nor in the

THE PATH OF COUNSEL. 243

words of Christ Himself; nor in the clear teaching
of the great masters of Christian mysticism, is there
aught to countenance that explanation of the divine
jealousy which regards God practically as the First
of creatures competing with the rest for the limited
kingdom of the human heart — an explanation which
in some respects seems part of the miserable legacy
bequeathed to the Church by Neo-platonism, and
which tends to represent religion as hostile to the
natural life of man's intelligence and affections, and
not as the formal principle and inherent perfection,
whereby that life is eternalized and deified.

XLV.

THE PATH OF COUNSEL.

If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments; if thou
wilt be perfect, go sell all that thou hast . . . and follow Me.
— Matt. xix. 17.

Although the more essential and obligatory way
of knowing and loving God is to know Him experi-
mentally, as we know that act by which our own
will co-operates with His internal impulse, and to
love Him, not alongside of, but through, in, and with
the creatures which He inclines us to love, — which
He loves by means of our love ; yet He should also
be the study of our mind, according to the measure
of our intelligence and education. We are bound
to try to form, not an adequate, but a symbolically
truthful image and likeness of God ; to express Him
to ourselves as worthily as He can be expressed in
the terms of things finite, in ideas borrowed by
abstraction from the objects that fall under our

244 THE PATH OF COUNSEL.

senses. When we have laboriously built up our
noblest image of Him it differs but in degree of
unworthiness from the crudest idol of the savage
mind, unless we consciously regard it as merely a
symbol of what is ineffable and inexpressible. In
the act of divine love we make ourselves like to God ;
but in the contemplative effort we try to make God
like to us ; the will becomes like its object — we are
what we love; but the mind receives the object into
its own mould, and gives it its own shape.

This mind-knowledge of God, as of a distant
Being apart from creatures, really figures Him as
the Head and First of creatures ; for we can figure
no other kind of being or unity or distinction. Yet
we need the incidental error of this mode of viewing
Him, to correct the contrary error incidental to the
experimental method of knowing Him, namely, the
error of confusion — of failing to mark the "other-
ness," the personal distinctness, of the Will within
our will. On one side we lean towards deism, on
the other towards pantheism; truth lies midway,
and evades any exact similitude. The relation of
God to His creature is unique and incomparable.

For this mind-knowledge, in any high degree,
special aptitudes are needed — not merely intellectual
but imaginative, ethical, emotional. If the study of
mere theology needs certain mental sacrifices and
withdrawals — a certain narrowing of other interests,
and an absorption of time and attention ; plainly the
endeavour to lead a life of intellectual contempla-
tion— of more or less conscious and reflex attention
to the presence of God, distinguished in and from

THE PATH OF COUNSEL. 245

creatures; to cultivate conceptions of the divine
personality and character calculated to elicit a love
of the unseen Goodness from which all seen goodness
is derived — plainly such an endeavour demands that
withdrawal from the ordinary conditions of life which
is the raison d'etre of contemplative monasticism.
Vacate et videte — Leisure is the condition of this sort
of vision. Like the call to continence or to the
apostolate, it is exceptional — for the few, not for the
many ; it is more or less a super-human vocation to
the state of angels rather than of men,— an attempt
to anticipate the life of vision, and to see God as
the blessed see Him face to face.

No such vocation can be fulfilled but by a sacrifice
of functions proper and helpful to a lower grade of
life. The notion of a full development of all our
capacities is self-contradictory, since of the in-
numerable shapes into which we might successfully
mould ourselves, we are forced to choose one and
forsake all the rest. To say that the religious
vocation stunts and absorbs the family affections, is
as true as to say that domestic life stunts and
absorbs the contemplative faculty — just as all the
time and attention a man bestows on literature
interferes with the development of his scientific
faculty ; and vice versa. An equal, all-round develop-
ment even of simultaneously compatible perfections
would ensure a sort of regular-featured mediocrity ;
but would exclude any kind of eminence which, as a
fact, is always purchased at the cost of some little
deformity and narrowness.

And for this reason, men are associated together

246 LEAVING ALL.

— their inequalities and jagged edges being the very
principle of their cohesion — so that where one is
weak, another may be strong ; where one is narrow,
another may be broad. Were we isolated, indepen-
dent units we could not afford to specialize, interiorly
or exteriorly, but should have to make everything for
ourselves, and to limit our wants to the barest
beginnings of life, spiritual or temporal.

XLVI.

LEAVING ALL.
And Jesus looking upon him loved him. — Mark x. 21.

Loved him for what he already was and had
been ; and for what he might yet, but would never
be. Unlike the apathetic and carnal-minded multi-
tudes this man was eager, not for the meat that
perisheth, but for the meat which endureth to life
everlasting. " What shall I do to possess eternal
life ? " — this had been the governing anxiety of his
soul from his youth upwards ; nor, had there been
self-complacency and pretence behind his claim to
unbroken fidelity to the commandments, would
Christ, the reader of hearts, and lover of truth, have
looked into him and loved him. And yet he was
rich and young and in high position — three condi-
tions usually deemed unfavourable to religious
enthusiasm. But he comes running eagerly and
openly before the eyes of all, and bends the knee to
one so compromised, so dangerous to acknowledge
openly; he calls Him "Good Master" in some pre-
eminent and divine sense ; he lays bare his anxiety

LEAVING ALL. 347

with ardent abruptness and impetuosity. And he is
no dreamy contemplative, no doctrinal dilettante:
" What shall I do?" he asks — he, who had already
done so much, keeping the commandments from his
youth upwards. For he knows that the eternal and
highest life of man consists in action, in energy, in
sacrifice of what a man has, still more of what he is ;
for he that would save his life must lose it, he that
would live must die. And yet he is not at peace ;
he is haunted by the importunity of Divine grace
with its ceaseless : M Friend, come up higher." Nor
can he discern what it is that he lacks ; and so he
hastens to the all-discerning Physician of souls and
demands : " What more is lacking to me ? " It is
one thing to enter into the state of eternal life,
wherein God is overwhelmingly the substance and
principal condition of our happiness, for whom we
would forsake all ; and another thing to be perfect in
that state ; to need no other supplementary condi-
tion to complete our happiness, and to bring every
other affection into perfect harmony with the great
central governing Love of our life ; to love God not
merely supremely, but alone. In this pure and
generous soul it would seem that wealth was loved,
not in opposition to God, but apart from God as
something supplementary ; that there was a sort of
qualified will to do everything to get nearer to
God — everything compatible with retaining his
possessions. He would have sacrificed them in
order to enter into life and save his soul ; but not in
order to be perfect, and to walk still more closely
with God. Subconsciously he hopes our Saviour

a48 PRAYER OF PETITION.

will ease his unrest by suggesting some compromise.
But Christ reads him through and through, and
looking into him loves him for what he is, and for
what he might be, but never will be — as a sculptor
might look at some fair block of marble and think of
all he could make out of it were it not for just one
little flaw. With firm kindness He lays His skilled
finger on the shrinking sore, and mercifully unmer-
ciful gives the dreaded and unwelcome verdict :
"Go; sell all and give to the poor." " He went
away sad," as many another soul turns its back, not
upon salvation, but on the fuller and nobler salva-
tion, content to bear thirty instead of sixty or an
hundred-fold. And Christ too went away sad.

XLVII.

PRAYER OF PETITION.
Ask and it shall be given to you. — Luke xi. 9.

Prayer in the stricter sense of asking for things
which we cannot otherwise get, offers no difficulties
where more or less anthropomorphic notions of God
prevail ; but these begin to be felt as a more
scientific theology developes, and as the reign of
law is seen to be more universal. Hence we cannot
argue for such prayer as we do for religion, sc, that
it is postulated more strongly as man grows upward
to intellectual and ethical maturity. But, as in
other points, the simpler view may be nearer the
truth than the more abstract and reflex; and if
philosophy in its present stage weakens the basis
of such prayer, revealed religion calls us back to

PRAYER OF PETITION. 249

the more human conception of the All-Father,
purified of its primitive rudeness and unworthiness,
and anticipates herein the deeper philosophic reflec-
tion of times to come. " Ask and ye shall have ;
seek and ye shall find ; knock and it shall be opened
to you" is the word of One who realized that "your
Father knoweth that ye have need of all these
things ; " who was alive (as even the old prophets
were alive) to the dangers of anthropomorphism, to
the need of a spiritual conception of God, and yet
saw beyond to that point where ends and begin-
nings so often meet, and where we discover that we
left our first thought only to find it again in a
purified form as the result of many wanderings and
seekings.

The motive of all prayer must be the Divine
Will so far as that will is (in accordance with the
established order) determinable by prayer. Prayer
and persuasion between man and man is a real
determining factor in human life, modifying but not
interfering miraculously with the course of nature ;
and granting a quasi-paternal relation between God
and man, Divine prayer-answering is as little an
interference with the order of the world. An
increased knowledge of physical laws shows us that
many things we might otherwise have asked for
as dependent solely on prayer, would involve an
interference with the regular course of nature which
would be miraculous ; i.e., would call not merely for
an application of God's perfect knowledge and
power in the use of nature's mechanism, but for an
alteration in the structure itself. Conceivably such

*5o PRAYER OF PETITION.

a miraculous interference might be "good;" and
under that condition it might be prayed for : but per
se it is not good ; and to ask for it would be an
exhibition of wilfulness.

We need not doubt that prayers and petitions
addressed to false gods are really heard and
answered ; or that various illicit or ignorant kinds
of recourse to other-world aid are really effectual.
For God respects the faith-element in all such
appeals, and ignores and pardons the blamelessly
unworthy form in which such prayer is couched.
Are not our own best and most philosophical con-
ceptions of God crude and childish, and our most
cultivated prayers correspondingly mingled with
false suppositions of all kinds? Were God to be
deaf to ignorant prayer lest He should seem to
condone and sanction error, who could be saved?
To believe that this sensible world is not all; to
acknowledge an other-world Wisdom, Power, and
Providence greater than our own ; to regard our-
selves as naturally and essentially dependent on
that higher world — this is that elemental faith that
lies at the bottom of all religions, even of the most
barbarous, and which makes prayer as natural to man
as speech is : i.e., the prayer of petition and impe-
tration as distinct from the prayer of mystic
contemplation ; the prayer addressed to the Power
and Providence which rules this world. God, " who
feedeth the young ravens that call upon Him," will
not quench the smoking flax, but respects the faith
of the lowliest cry for help, however harsh and
discordant. To say that because prayer addressed

THE PRAYER OF CONFORMITY. 15X

to a filse god is answered ; or that because a certain
superstitious method of appeal proves efficacious,
therefore the falsehood and the superstition is toler-
able or non-existent is plainly a fallacy.

XLVIII.

THE PRAYER OF CONFORMITY,

O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me ; never
theless not as I will but as Thou wilt.— Matt. xxvi. 39.

It is only so far as God condescends to bear
Himself humanwise in our regard, — to "become
man and dwell among us " — that we can enter into
those practical relations with Him in which religion
consists. Were His thoughts in no wise as our
thoughts, nor His ways as our ways, we could as
soon hold intercourse with the sun or the moon
to whose influence we are subject, but to which we
make no appeal, and look for no sympathy.

Unless the Infinite can equivalently limit Himself
to something like our smallness; unless the All-
Knowing can become ignorant, and the unchanging
changeable, religion is impossible, and a dreary
deistic philosophy takes the place of faith in a God
who is not only the " First Cause " but also " Our
Father." This is the faith and hope which under-
lies the lowliest beginnings of religion, and for
which bare reason apart from our deeper spiritual
instincts offers so trembling a basis. To purify
our conception of God from every semblance of
humanity would be to destroy any possibility of
its appeal to our imagination and emotion, without
which it would be practically ineffectual in our

252 THE PRAYER OF CONFORMITY.

lives. And thus there is a graduated continuity
between our lowest and our highest representations
of the Heavenly Father ; though it cannot be said
that the more intellectual notion is always the
more forcible and effectual : for which reason it
would almost seem that as soon as men rose to
a more spiritualized idea of God, the Incarnation,
which gave them a God-man — was a practical
necessity for the survival of religion. The God of
Neo-platonism could have done little for humanity.

The practice of making our petitions known to
God by prayer or supplication, supposes that He
makes Himself known to us as being equivalently
a human father or ruler who, in the main, governs
us by fixed and practically irrevocable laws, but
leaves many details to be determined, each indi-
vidually, in response to petition and merit, by which
favours the general law suffers no exception or
derogation. In ordinary prayer of petition we do
not mean to ask for a miracle — for any exception
to general laws — but in our ignorance of the limits
of the reign of law many of our requests are for
what would be a miracle, or at least a derange-
ment of some wide-reaching eternal plan affecting
interests infinitely more important than our own.

Thus our particular requests, if reasonable, must
always be conditional : " If it be possible, let this cup
pass from Me " — if it be among those things left
open to prayer and not already determined irrevo-
cably by universal laws. Our steadily increasing
discovery of law in regions where formerly its
presence was undreamt-of, has given birth to an

THE PRAYER OF CONFORMITY. 253

inductive belief in its absolutely universal prevalence
(at least in the physical order— for, recent reflection
tends to exclude the very possibility of uniformity
from the world of freedom, personality, and spiritual
action).

Hence we are better prepared to find that
petitions demanding a miraculous interference with
the determinism of Nature are seldom answered
according to the letter, and we are more apt to
attribute seeming answers to coincidence or illusion
in many cases.

But we cannot admit that such requests, made
in good faith, and conditionally, are fruitless, or
should in any wise be discouraged. Those, of
course, whose minds are obsessed with the sense
of all-pervading law cannot, and ought not ordi-
narily, to pray for what they would regard as
miracles, and what simpler souls can ask for heartily
and naturally. The faithful prayer of these latter
does not return empty into their bosom, though its
object is impossible, but wins for them an equivalent
blessing. As for the former, they have still endless
scope for the exercise of prayer. First, because
outside the world of material determinism there is
the world of spirit and liberty to which the direct
dealings between God and the soul belong. In the
movements of our inmost life where every act, taken
adequately, is unique, and unlike any other in all
human experience, there is no room for repetition,
uniformity, and law, no certain prediction of con-
sequent from antecedent. The mechanism of our
brain may be as rigid as that of our body, but

334 7fl£ PRAYER OF CONFORMITY.

in the use and application of that mechanism we
are free. We do not ask intentionally of our
neighbour a service which is beyond the fixed
limits by which his capacity is circumscribed —
morally or physically. But we can ask con-
ditionally for what we presume to be consistent
with those limits; and we can ask unconditionally
for the free and untrammelled service of his good-will
— the greatest service man can render to man, and
that which constitutes the social bond and makes
one body out of many members. And since we
must take God as He has given Himself to us,
humanwise or nowise, we can always ask con-
ditionally for what may be within the limits of
His immutable designs; and absolutely, for His
grace and favour.

But the Prayer of Conformity which says:
11 Not My will but Thine," belongs to a higher
level of faith and hope than the Prayer of Petition.
It is a higher worship to bend our will to God's
than to seek to bend His will to ours; to believe
that behind all the pitiless mechanism of Nature,
whose grinding wheels no prayer of ours can stay ;
behind those inexorable all-pervading laws which
seem to look to universal, infinitely distant results
with a ruthless contempt of the individual ; there
is at work that tender Love which pities the
unfledged sparrow fallen from its nest and numbers
the hairs of our head ; and to believe that behind
such a semblance of aimlessness — of futile flux and
reflux, making and marring, order and confusion,
plan and counterplan— -there is at work that Wisdom

THE PRAYER OF CONFORMITY. 255

which reaches from end to end, wasting nothing,
over-looking nothing, whose hand never falters in
the exact fulfilment of its eternal design.

This is the firm faith of those who interpret
the world not by mere reasoning from external
observation; but by the fulness of their whole
inward life which constitutes the greater part of
the world of their experience, and that wherein
they have most right to look for a revelation of
the divine character. To look for it outside alone,
were as futile as to study humanity in a corpse.

It needs no little faith to see our own immediate
interests sacrificed to laws which look to an abso-
lutely universal and indefinitely future interest,
and to believe that in the end we shall save the
life which we now lose. But given this trust,
who does not see that such submission is a
greater worship than the lesser faith that cries,
Transeat Calix : " Let the cup pass from Me."

Only in a world governed by laws could men
be men, i.e., self-helping, self-governing beings.
Amid chaos and caprice we should need angels
holding us up at every turn in order to exist at
all. The love of law grows with the social un-
selfing instincts that impel us to give ourselves
up for the general good. Hence we hold those
the more loyal subjects who will not seek dis-
pensations for themselves, but abide by the law
unconditionally for sake of public good.

And for a like reason, the Prayer of Conformity
is, as a general rule, an index of greater faith,
hope, and love than the Prayer of Petition.

256 CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER.

Even in matters determinable by petition, there
is often more trust in leaving the thing in silence
to God, who reads the unspoken desires of the
heart.

Yet the Prayer of Conformity is not only
an act of resignation; but implies a petition for
greater conformity, as well as an effort of self-
adaptation to the Divine Will and Law. What
we ask and strive for is a change in ourselves
rather than in the order of things outside us—
namely, the conformity of our will to the irresis-
tible designs of God's universal providence. Fiat
voluntas Tua sicut in Ccelo et in Terra — is, after
all, the prayer of prayers, yet far from demanding
any suspense of law, it expresses, and in expressing,
deepens our full-hearted assent to God's ways and
methods as being surely the wisest and the best,
however inexplicable they may seem from our own
standpoint.

XLIX.

CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER.

But Mary sat at Jesus' feet, and heard His words.— Luke x. 39.

And hence she has ever been taken as a type of
the contemplative life ; yet not always intelligently.
For when we are alone with God in prayer, we do
not ordinarily receive streams of revelation as she
did who listened with an almost passive mind to the
words of the Incarnate Truth. God indeed speaks
to us indirectly through the spontaneous or volun-
tary workings of our mind and affection. Our
faculties and our movements are from Him. He

CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER. 257

is the Truth known in every truth ; the Good loved
in every good. But Mary enjoyed an advantage
beyond all this, in being fed where we have to feed
ourselves, in being carried where we have to walk.

It is therefore somewhat presumptuous for us
who are not saints to count on the privileges ot
those few saints who like Mary have received direct
revelation from the lips of Christ ; to fancy that
the way to prayer is to empty our mind of all
contents; to paralyze it by disuse; to withdraw
ourselves from all reading, social intercourse, and
action, and then, in external solitude and internal
vacancy, to hold a one-sided converse with God in
which He says nothing and we have nothing to
say.

"As I mused," said the Psalmist, "the fire
kindled." The end of all contemplative prayer is
the kindling of divine love ; and the fuel of this
flame is the whole world of God's creation and
providence — of being and movement ; which, when
mused upon, reveals to us the underlying love whose
expression it is. The more we know of this world
by observation, reflection, by social intercourse, and
most of all, by action, the more abundant is our
store of Love's fuel. We have no visible Christ
to heap fuel on the fire for us, but must glean and
gather laboriously for ourselves.

Nor is it enough in the interests of prayer to
stock our mind with material; for we must also
train its powers of reflection, attention, and con«
centration. How much of our dryness and wander-
ing is due simply to the fact that our minds arc

R

258 CONTEMPLATION AND ACTION.

ill-stocked and ill-trained ; that we have no sugges-
tiveness or fertility, and no power of meditation ;
no material to build with, and no skill to construct.
As far as we are self-sanctifying and co-operant with
grace, and apart from God's free intervention, our
idea of God, however simple in the result, is pro-
duced by the convergence of many experiences to one
point: just as is our idea of any human character.
Everything that throws new light upon God and
His ways is a new grace, a new occasion of greater
love. Hence we must not be like the Buddhist
contemplative stupefying our minds even to the
bare consciousness of existence ; but, remembering
that God has made all things good and god-like
in some degree, we must ascend from the likeness
♦ i the original.

L.

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTION.

liut Mary sat at the feet of Jesus and heard His words. —
Luke x. 39.

She was not always sitting there, for she was one
of those who followed Him and ministered to Him in
His own person and in that of the poor and needy;
but she realized, perhaps better than Martha, that
by duly proportioned alternations, inner and outer
activity help one another ; that either is impover-
ished by the undue restriction of the other; that
the outer is animated by the inner, and the inner
defined, emphasized, and registered in the outer.

To ask which is the greater and more necessary,
were to imply a false separation, as though either

CONTEMPLATION AND ACTION. 239

were complete without the other ; yet undoubtedly
the spiritual element — the inner face of action —
is the principal ; it is the one thing to look to, the
unum necessarium. As implying a moral judgment,
a view of right conduct ; in determining the whole
attitude of our will and affections; in adding
another stone to the structure of that irrevocable
past self whose character tells so much on our
present and future self, each action finds its reality
and chief significance, compared with which its
outer bearing is of trivial moment.

What lends its value to another, must itself be
more valuable ; and our outward action is spiritual
and divine just in so far as it is an expression of
inward light and love ; else it approximates to the
lifelessness of a mere fact. The root grows not
only with, but because of, the growth of that which
springs from it and is its continuation; and simi-
larly our inner and outer life are interdependent
and correlated factors of one organic whole; if
either interferes with the other, it is because of
its unreal and defective character; it is because
our contemplation but feeds curiosity or evaporates
in sentiment ; or because our practical life is fussy,
mechanical, precipitate.

Martha seemed to forget the need of this alter-
nation ; to attach exclusive value to tangible results;
to view contemplation as a mere rest, or even as
mere idleness ; to forget that it is the spirit of
our good works that quickeneth, whereas the flesh
profiteth nothing.

But Mary sat and listened. Her attitude of

26o SPIRITUAL EQUILIBRIUM.

rest symbolizes a certain restfulness of soul which
is the essential condition of inward hearing, a
shutting of the memory and attention against the
intrusion of distracting interests ; a patient expec-
tancy, as of one who having cast his net and done
all that can be done, waits tranquilly for what God
will send him, not fretting or railing against seeming
ill-luck; and — when at times some miraculous
draught fills the net to breaking — a quiet content-
ment with sufficiency that saves one from losing
all in grasping all — from congesting the mind with
more than it can hold, as though He who has given
so liberally, would never give any more.

LI.

SPIRITUAL EQUILIBRIUM.

Simon Peter saith unto them : I go a-fishing. They say unto
him : We also go with thee. — John xxi. 3.

The instinct which in seasons of strong emo-
tional preoccupation, whether joyful or sorrowful,
bids us turn back to the hypnotizing rhythm and
routine of our ordinary avocations, is true to reason.
At root it is the same which makes an excitable
speaker unconsciously seek relief from the nervous
tension under which he is labouring, in some sort
of fidgety movement or mechanical idling. The
unduly prolonged concentration of the entire energy
and attention on any one point of interest wearies
out the faculties of perception and emotion so
engagec, and weakens the rest by under-exercise.
As in hysteria, laughter and tears alternately give

SPIRITUAL EQUILIBRIUM. 261

birth each to the other by way of violent reaction,
so it is sometimes observed that an unwisely sus-
tained intellectual or contemplative effort prepares
the way for an act of reprisal on the part of
violated Nature in the form of a rebellion of the
senses and lower affections. The worn-out spirit
half slumbers for sheer exhaustion and leaves the
starved and irritated senses almost as free to run
riot as they would be in the state of bodily sleep.
M Thou art man," says a Kempis, M and not an
angel." The attempt to anticipate the state of the
Blessed in Heaven, and to live as the angels who
behold the face of the Father, if pushed far beyond
metaphor, can only result in singed wings and a
disastrous fall into the mire. Had we been meant
to live as angels — we should have had the faculties
of angels— a God-seeing faculty, and no body to
cumber us ; Heaven would have been as near to us
as earth, as evident as the things we see, touch,
and taste. But we are made to walk by faith, not
by sight ; by inference, not by intuition. We deal
with God, for the most part in and through
creatures — as identified with them, not as apart
from them ; and only occasionally, in the explicit
exercises of religion and worship, do we treat
with Him directly as distinct from and above all
creatures.

Thus, though religion should dominate our whole
life, it is not our whole life, but only a part — albeit
the head and principal part. It need not ordinarily
dominate, in the sense of occupying the greater
part of our time and attention : — God reserves but

26a SPIRITUAL EQUILIBRIUM.

one day in seven ; — but in the sense that its claims
are paramount and that its obligation in case of
conflict take precedence of all others. If it so
dominate, then indeed our whole life, so far as it
is not counter to religion, may be said to be,
implicitly, a continual act of prayer and praise.

But as the body is not all head, so neither
should our life be all religion. Neither are the
members solely for the sake of the head, nor is
the head solely for the sake of the members ; but
both are directly for the sake of the whole, and
indirectly for the sake of each other. Religion is
not simply a means to the greater fulness and
sanctification of our temporal life; nor is this
wholly subordinated to religion. Our natural cares,
interests, occupations, and studies do not need to be
justified by a direct reference to religion as relax-
ations, or inevitable interruptions, or necessary
ministrations and conditions thereof. They are, of
their own right, and co-ordinately with religion,
integral though secondary elements in our whole
human life.

The organic connection of these co-ordinate
factors of our life is such that if one member
suffer, the rest suffer with it ; and that the undue
development of one to the prejudice of the rest on
which it depends, eventually issues in the hurt and
destruction of that one together with the rest.
Religion has therefore everything to gain by the
evenly balanced development of those other depart-
ments of life over which it should reign, not as a
tyrant, but as a constitutional monarch.

SPIRITUAL EQUILIBRIUM. 263

An all-round even development of all our
capacities is never possible, since many of them
are so incompatible, that we must choose one and
forego the other. We must fix on some one of the
many professions or pursuits of which we are
equally capable. Such matters are oftenest deter-
mined for us by outward circumstances which will
not allow us to choose what would bring out of
us the best that is in us. We may not bury the
talents that we have been told to use, but God
Himself buries most of our talents in the disposi-
tion of His Providence.

But even where the matter rests with ourselves,
the limits of any one life are too narrow to admit of
the successful development of even all those talents
whose development is compatible. We must make
a selection in such wise as to get as much out of
ourselves as circumstances will allow. But though
with a view to this, specialization, wholesale exclu-
sion and sacrifice are the conditions of any sort
of excellence and fertility ; yet there is a point at
which one-sidedness and narrowness become deadly.
Common-sense suggests that we should make one
interest central in respect to the time and attention
we give to it ; and should develope such others as
either minister to it, or else harmonize with it, were
it even by way of contrast and difference, so as to
preserve the soul's balance.

To make religion not only dominant in point
of dignity and influence, but also central in point
of time and attention, is a special vocation granted
to the few who are drawn to live before God more

264 SPIRITUAL EQUILIBRIUM.

consciously and explicitly than others, to give Him
their whole mind as well as their whole heart, and
who therefore withdraw themselves from the con-
ditions that would make such concentration morally
impossible and even indiscrete.

Yet these too, as has been implied, will better
consult the interest of contemplation by the
adoption of some keen and absorbing interest,
practical or speculative, which will preserve them
from spiritual lop-sidedness and will, as it were,
minister a body for their religion to govern, lest it
should be as a head bereft of its subject members.

This principle underlies the ancient Carthusian
conception of the Christian life as constituted by
a three-fold labour — of heart, mind, and hand— -a
conception based upon the study of the Gospel,
if not actually preserved by unbroken tradition
from the earliest days of Christianity. This
resolving of life into three main divisions — affec-
tion, thought, and action, is practically satisfactory.
In each of these realms to have some strong
central interest will secure the desired equilibrium
of the soul. If religion be the central preoccupation
of the heart, it will gain in strength, health, and
endurance, if it be balanced by some keen discipline
of the mind not directly connected with religion ;
and both will benefit by some outward work of art,
skill, or ministration, which calls mainly upon the
bodily powers and the practical intelligence, and
not directly upon the intellect or the spirit.

As things are, this three-fold labour is largely
put in commission among three classes of society,

VIRGO MATER. 26;

to the great detriment of each. We have those
whose hands are so ceaselessly exercised that their
minds are crippled and their souls stifled. And we
have intellect divorced from religion and action, and
degenerating into intellectualism. And we have
religion neither intelligent nor practical, and out
of all sympathy with intellect and labour. Some
degree of such specialization is inevitable and even
desirable; but when it becomes absolute and
complete there is no passage from the mind of
one class to that of the other, no common ground
of sympathy and understanding between the men
of prayer and the men of thought and the men of
action ; and therefore no possibility of mutual
influence — of that give-and-take whereby each class
can supply to the others of its superabundance, and
receive of theirs.

LII.

VIRGO MATER.

Behold thou shalt conceive and bring forth a Son.— Luke i. 31.

St. Leo in his first Sermon on the Nativity
writes : Ut divinam atque humanam prolem prius
mente quant corpore conciperet — " That she might first
conceive in her mind that divine and human offspring
which she afterwards conceived in her body."

Some would explain life as a matter of subtle
mechanism, or cunning chemistry ; as the mere sum
of its inanimate conditions and antecedents ; they
would reduce the higher to terms of the lower, and
account for the movements of the substance by those
of its shadow. A saner and simpler view7 sees mind

266 VIRGO MATER.

V

prior to matter; spirit, the parent of body; idea
and conception at the core of every existence and
movement. Reason, no less than revelation says :
In principio erat Verbum. Thought is at the begin-
ning of all things, and without it is nothing made.
The world into which we have the clearest insight
is that whereof we ourselves are authors, and over
which alone we have dominion — the world of our
own free thought and action, and the world of human
society ; and in this world we see the pre-eminence
and productive power of the idea ; how ideas have
been as levers lifting the world off its hinges ; how
they have gone forth like the Creative Spirit to renew
the face of the exhausted earth ; like seed increasing
and multiplying, replenishing and subduing the land.

And if this social life which we ourselves create
and therefore comprehend is the child of thought,
conceived in our mind and fostered by energetic
love, more readily can we believe the mysterious life
whose nature and origin so baffles us, to be the fruit
of that Mind which broods over all Nature, — to
be from something not less than mind, however
infinitely greater.

And thus we are better prepared to hear that
some great thought was instrumental in the concep-
tion of the God-Man by His Virgin-Mother; that
she first conceived Him in her mind, and embraced
Him in her affection, before she conceived Him in
her womb; that the Holy Ghost, who taught the
prophets of old, lifting up here and there a corner
of the veil that shrouded the glory of the coming
dispensation, came upon her who was the Queen of

VIRGO MAT&R. 267

Prophets and rending that veil asunder revealed to
her the Holy of Holies; that she beheld in that
instant, as did none other, the Messianic scheme in
its entirety — Christ, and all that grew out of Christ ;
Alpha and Omega ; the seed-sowing and the harvest-
home ; that she lifted up her eyes to that Dies
Domini when they that sow in tears shall reap in
joy ; when the hungry shall be filled, and the lowly
exalted, and the mighty put down, and the proud
scattered, and the rich sent away empty ; when the
glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall
see it together ; that she saw how this glory could
be purchased only by pain, and sorrow, and poverty,
and shame, and defeat ; by the united sufferings of
creation sanctified through and with those of the
Man of Sorrows, of whose bitter chalice none should
drink more deeply than she. This was the " idea,"
the great scheme of God's glory and man's bliss
which the Holy Ghost revealed to Mary's wondering
gaze, and whose realization was conditioned by her
faith and love and devotion. And as she gazed
her love was kindled — no faltering love like that of
Eve, who once in like manner held our destiny in
her hand — but a firm, all-embracing love which
"beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all
things, and endureth all things ; " and taking upon
herself the universal motherhood of miserable man,
embracing with her heart what she has conceived in
her mind, she cries : " Behold the handmaiden of
the Lord; be it done unto me according to Thy
word." And thus " the Word was made flesh," and
the idea became a reality.

268 THE IDEAL OF REDEMPTION

And in this act of conception we are all of us
partakers in the measure that we understand, enter
into, and freely ratify with our whole heart the idea
and the ideals of the Incarnation ; in the measure
that we make the Divine Will in the matter, our
own, and say, Fiat. But in conceiving and bringing
forth Christ in ourselves, we enter even more closely
into Mary's chiefest glory. Blessed was the womb
that bore His body, and the breasts that gave Him
suck ; but more blessed was the soul that heard the
word of God and kept it, in which Christ realized
and reproduced Himself, and lived again His divine
life. And in our soul, too, this conception is the
fruit of the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost ; of
the Creative Spirit which, as of old, broods over the
dark void of its nothingness and brings forth the
Eternal Light; who fertilizes its sterile virginity,
and has regard only to its conscious lowliness as to
its sole merit. Yet the soul's personality is inviolable.
He who made her without her consent, cannot wed
her, or save her without her consent; not till she
says : " Behold the handmaiden of the Lord," can it
be done unto her according to His word.

LIII.

THE IDEAL OF REDEMPTION.

I will set enmity between thee and the woman and between thy
seed and her seed. — Gen. iii. 15.

The notion of Mary as the second Eve is an idea
that has struck root in the Christian Church and
one from which the whole doctrine of her office in

THE IDEAL OF REDEMPTION. 269

the scheme of redemption has grown by steady
development.

Nor is it only in the mind but in the sentiment
and practical devotion of the Church that Mary has
taken root and grown. The immaculacy of her
conception is but a closer definition of her unique
excellence as being the one purely human soul in
which God has had His way unimpeded from first
to last; — as being the ideal of a fully redeemed
humanity — a soul in which God's first thought found
full expression, nor needed to be adjusted to subse-
quent interferences, and obstacles; to which He
looked forward from the beginning as a workman
looks forward to the furthest and finest fruit of long
years of labour, spurred by the thought to patience
and endurance — A b initio et ante sczcula creata sum et
usque ad futurum saculum non desinam — " From the
beginning and before all ages was I created, nor unto
all eternity shall I cease to be."

She is, as the Church sings, the Turris Draconi
impervia — that close-built fortress without crack or
crevice to offer entrance or foothold to the enemy.
In us there is by nature and heredity a certain
internal responsiveness to the appeal of external
temptation which, though not sin, is sinful, and is
due to a lack of perfect harmony and balance in the
kingdom of our mind and affections — a defect which
can be continually diminished if never wholly elimi-
nated. Not that the virtue of Mary or of Christ
meant a sort of insensibility to natural stimulus ;
but that it excluded any undue or irregular sensi-
bility, approaching the nature of vice or irregularity.

270 THE IDEAL OF REDEMPTION.

This wholeness and soundness of the moral disposi-
tion is the secret of that possibility of not sinning —
of that ability to stand fast spontaneously and
without conscious self-resistance, which character-
izes the "just made perfect" on earth ; as opposed
to the necessity of sinning — to the spontaneous
tendency to sin, if once we let ourselves drift, which
characterizes the imperfect and the fallen. The
former can sin only by cool deliberation and malice ;
the latter, so far as they are fallen, can go right only
by conscious choice and effort. We have to tend
ever towards this imperviousness to temptation, this
moral healthiness and wholeness; this habit of
faultless conscientiousness or immaculacy. A little
rift in the robe of our integrity how small soever and
the Devil can hook his claw into it and rend it to
pieces. Instantly as we recognize the rift let us
haste to sew it up; to set ourselves straight with
conscience at once ; to cry Peccavi between the trip
and the tumble. There is often less hurt in the sin,
than there is in the blank interval between the
offence and the reconciliation when we go about
remiss and unbraced, with wounds agape, bleeding
away our strength. Then it is so often that the haft
of the hatchet is thrown after the head ; that items
are added to the account to be lumped together
under one settling, that the penny grows to a pound.
Thus, though we cannot imitate the original, inborn
immaculacy of Mary, we can set her moral whole-
ness and integrity before us as an ideal, a pole-star
to be followed, though never to be reached ; we can
make our own soul somewhat of a Turris Draconi

THE LOWLINESS OF HIS HANDMAIDEN. 271

impervia — a fortress with high, close-knit, smooth-
surfaced walls, the despair of the most adroit
assailant of the Woman and her seed.

LIV.

THE LOWLINESS OF HIS HANDMAIDEN.
He hath regarded the humility of His handmaiden.— Luke i. 48.

To those whom we worship we ascribe such
qualities and attributes as we most desire; hence
the objects we select for veneration, or the praises
we offer to those proposed for our veneration, are
an index of our own spiritual level.

" The Jews seek a sign ; the Greeks wisdom ;
but we preach Christ crucified." Here we have
three stages of spiritual development through which
humanity passes in its journey from earth to heaven,
from matter to spirit.

Physical prowess, mere immensity of force, or
the craft whereby force can be eked out or increased,
are what appeal to the awe and admiration of the
lowest stages of civilization, whose gods are decor-
ated with such attributes as exalt the warrior to be
the tribal chief and ruler. Dii gentium damonia;
the gods of the heathen are devils, i.e., destitute
of moral excellence, wonder-workers, magnified
sorcerers, fierce, cruel, vengeful, strong.

Then, mind, which in the form of craftiness was
first prized merely as instrumental to force, comes
to be prized for its own sake as the noblest thing
in man ; and Apollo and Athene are worshipped for
a cold intellectual excellence, void of nearly all
moral reference.

272 THE LOWLINESS OF HIS HANDMAIDEN.

Lastly, mind is felt to be subservient to righteous-
ness and love, and God is worshipped more promi-
nently for His goodness than for His wisdom or
His power ; while it is recognized that, as wisdom
and knowledge involve power in a higher form, so
the highest love and goodness involve wisdom
and knowledge.

And this necessary law of progress is verified in
regard to the Christ of Christianity. To grosser
and more childish ages, peoples, or individuals,
Christ appeals in virtue of His power; to the inter-
mediate period of youth, it is the philosophy or
wisdom of His doctrine that speaks His Godhead ;
to a matured spirituality it is not the earthquake
nor the darkness nor the convulsions of nature, but
it is the spectacle of Divine Love humbled to death
— it is " Christ Crucified," the Power and the
Wisdom of God, that appeals as the miracle of
miracles forcing it to confess : " This truly is the
Son of God."

And similarly as to the appreciation of the
Blessed Virgin, the first-fruits and archetype of
redeemed humanity. There is little or nothing
authenticated as to any display on her part of
those excellencies of power or wisdom which appeal
to the less discerning part of mankind. Hence
those who are blind to the more delicate shades
and lines of spiritual beauty are forced to picture
her to their own taste, or else to be silent in her
praise. What they regard or would regard in God's
handmaiden would be best symbolized by crowns
and jewels, and cloth of gold and loud-coloured

THE LOWLINESS OF HIS HANDMAIDEN. 273

vesture; and the gaudy, barbaric splendour of
Solomon in all his glory. What God Himself looks
to and regards in her is something to their eyes
quiet, colourless, frail as the lilies of the field that
are trampled heedlessly under foot. Respexit humili-
tatem — He hath looked to the humility of His hand-
maiden ; to the lowliness of her self-esteem — not
as though she were in anywise ignorant of what God
had done for her, of the power with which He had
entrusted her, of the wisdom with which He had
enlightened her — Fecit mthi magna : "He hath done
great things for me ; " for humility is a truthful self-
estimate which neither underrates nor overrates.
But comparing herself and her gifts, not with things
below, but with things above ; not with the " little
less " of other creatures, but with God's " infinitely
more," all differences between herself and the last
and least of mankind were levelled and lost in the
deep realization of the nothingness and emptiness
of everything when measured with the Eternal and
Infinite.

It is by looking ever up instead of down ; by
going abroad instead of staying at home, that our
mind is cured of that narrowness and littleness
which is the root of pride. The pomp of the village
magnate, the dogmatism of the parish schoolmaster,
are the fruit of continual mingling with inferiors in
station and learning : whereas a wide culture and
extended influence often produce a sort of natural
humility — a sense of the mere relativity of our
importance, of our absolute insignificance.

And therefore by frequent contact with the
s

274 BREADTH.

sublime and infinite, with God and Eternity, in
prayer and contemplation, the soul is beaten down
low with the realization of its nothingness, and at
the same time filled with a sense of confident
dependence on God, which saves it from a paralysis
of depression, and changes what would else be
cynical self-contempt into a loving humility. To
a soul thus humbled all differences and advantages
over others seem ridiculously unimportant, while
that self-giving, self-abasing love which is the root
of effective and practical humility, teaches it to
regard every gift as a mere instrument of service ;
and to be ambitious of no other greatness than
the Divine greatness of self-spending, universal
helpfulness.

This is what God looked to in Mary. What do
we look to in those we worship and admire ? What
do we praise in others ? For as we are, such will
our praise be.

LV.

BREADTH.

Who hath weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a
balance. . . . Behold He taketh up the isles as a very little thing.
— Isaias xl. 12.

It is well at times to " take wings of fancy and
ascend " to God's throne and look down upon the
littleness of created things with His eyes; to
remember that the value which things bear (and
must and ought to bear), to us as great and impor-
tant, is but relative to the smallness and narrowness
of our life.

BREADTH. 273

Yet to dwell ever in so high and rarefied an
atmosphere would paralyze our energies ; and for
the most part it is better for us to yield ourselves
to the self-magnifying illusions of our imagination,
lest wishing to be as gods we should become as
beasts. But to yield ourselves consciously, and not
unconsciously, to this illusion, is what saves us from
our pettiness ; just as the knowledge of our ignor-
ance, and the sense of the inadequacy of our
ideas redeem us from utter darkness and blindness.
Therefore from time to time we should " consider
the heavens" and dwarf ourselves and our little
earth by comparison with things sublime and
immense, lest we should altogether give, instead
of merely lending, ourselves to the play of life
in which we must bear our part with a certain
outward seriousness, if the tragedy is not to be
turned into burlesque. Without some such periodic
bracing we shall not reach that divine magnanimity,
that imperturbable tranquillity of which it is written :
94 They that trust in the Lord," that believe in Him
as the one absolute reality, beside which all others
are shadowy ; they that care for Him as the one
thing worth taking altogether seriously, "shall be
as Mount Sion that shall never be moved ; " they
shall share God's own mountain-like immobility as
regards events and concerns which however relatively
serious, are ultimately infinitesimal.

Behind all their clouds they will be ever conscious
of this clear, untroubled ether ; beneath life's surface
storms they will be aware of unfathomed depths
of stillness. They will weigh mountains in the

*76 BREADTH.

scales and the hills in a balance, and will take np
the islands as a very little thing.

" Qui multo peregrinantur" says a Kempis,
" raro sanctificantur " — great pilgrims are rarely
great saints ; what they gain at the shrine is lost
on the road. And yet travel, in some sense of the
word, is a necessity for the soul. Its effect is to
open the mind and cure its provincialism or paro-
chialism ; to convince us of our ignorance and insig-
nificance; for in small surroundings we loom big.
Even in a very large empty room we are shrivelled
up and begin to long for some cosier apartment of
which we shall fill a more appreciable fraction. The
field of our total experiences, past and present,
seems, like that of our vision, to be of a constant
and limited compass ; so that as new items are
added to the mosaic the rest are crowded together
to make room for them. Thus, roughly speaking,
a year being, to a child of seven, one-seventh of its
total experience, seems ten times longer than to a
man of seventy ; and he who has now a thousand
interests, cares ten times less about any of them,
than had he only a hundred.

Hence it is characteristic of those whose experi-
ence is narrow, owing to youth or to other circum-
stances, to lose that sense of proportion which is
gained by viewing things, not from a personal,
parochial, or national, but from an historical and
more universal standpoint. To travel through
humanity, past and present; to view things as
they constitute part of that universal experience,
gives us a most valuable aspect of truth. Yet

BREADTH. 277

after all, it is but one, even if a more important
aspect, and it needs to be complemented by the
other and narrower aspect. If an event, relatively
to humanity, is truly small ; relatively to me it is
none the less truly great ; and only God, who can
keep both the universal and the particular aspects
co-present to His gaze, can judge events altogether
justly. And even in the case of the widest outlook
of which we are capable, events seem immeasurably
larger than they would from the standpoint of the
infinite, whence they would vanish into nothingness
for minds constituted as ours are.

Thus the effect of a too great largeness of view
is often weakening and enervating, except when the
faculty of concrete imagination is relatively strong.
Indecision and hesitancy characterizes a mind with
more information than it can comfortably grapple
with — which sees a thousand sides to every
question, and range after range of mountainous
difficulties stretching away into the future ; nor can
it ever possess that concentrated strength of affec-
tion and interest, that intensity and enthusiasm
of which a certain narrowness seems the indispens-
able condition. For little creatures like ourselves
narrowness is the lesser evil ; for if we go too far
from ourselves we shall perchance lose ourselves
in the dreary void of the infinite. Life is love
and action, and these are paralyzed by distraction
and indecision. For they deal with the concrete and
particular. But, with us, to be broad and compre-
hensive means leaving the concrete and particular
for the abstract and general. For we are men and

278 NARROWNESS.

not gods. It is the pent-up steam that does work ;
not that which escapes; and since sanctification
means intensity and enthusiasm, he will rarely be
a saint who travels too much. Yet neither will he
who travels too little; for man has a measure in
reference to which " broad " and " narrow " have a
true meaning, the one good and the other evil.

LVI.

NARROWNESS.
Enter ye in at the strait gate. — Matt. vii. 14.

There are broad and narrow ways of thinking
and acting. Narrowness is a term of reproach ; so
that we usually affect "breadth," however much
we all lack it. Yet Christ seems to censure wide,
roomy ways of thought and life ; and moreover it is
accepted generally that there is a certain safety in
narrowness : " good people " are usually more or
less narrow, not only with that voluntary narrow-
ness which is implied in all concentration of energy
and decision of purpose, and is simply a necessary
mortification of rejected possibilities in the interest
of that which has been accepted ; but often by a
sort of inborn narrowness which is the cause rather
than the effect of their goodness. " How hardly
shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom
of God " seems to have its application here as well.

Again, the same anti-liberal disposition which
cleaves naturally to tradition, customs, and pre-
cedent, and refuses to discuss moral or religious
problems on their own intrinsic merits, is very

NARROWNESS. 279

conducive to uniformity of conduct, and thereby
to depth or stability of habit. It helps much
to decision and energy in well-doing to believe in
sharply denned lines between truth and error, good
and evil ; to believe that there is no truth outside
one's own creed or school; no good whatever in
worldly or irreligious people; to feel that there is
everything to be said for one side, and nothing
at all for the other; whereas resolution is often
relaxed by the decay of this almost tribal instinct,
this firm faith in conventional judgments, as a
substitute for which, our own dim intuition of
things, not, as they are said to be, but as they
really seem to ourselves, is feeble and ineffectual.

If then all men tend to an excess either of con-
servatism or of liberalism, the virtuous will in the
main be found in the former class. But none the
less, nothing is more strikingly characteristic of
Christ's own teaching and practice than its breadth
and charitable comprehensiveness. If He was in-
tolerant of anything it was of intolerance ; — of the
censorious Pharisee ; of the tyrannical priest ; of the
pedantic scribe ; of the hair-splitting lawyer and
moralist ; of the materialistic and literal, as opposed
to the catholic and spiritual, interpretation of God's
law. Yet He tells us that the path to the higher
and eternal life of the spirit is narrow and hard to
find ; whereas the wide and easy path leads down to
spiritual death.

The eternal life of the soul is the life of the
higher thoughts and affections — the life of truth and
love ; and it is a matter of reason and common-

28o NARROWNESS.

sense that all darkness and error is some kind of
narrowness, some lack of experience, some unwilling-
ness or inability to look truth in the face. It is
because we never see all things together, but must
always treat what is only a part as though it were a
complete self-explanatory whole, that the broadest
human view is narrow, inadequate, and to some
extent positively misleading — so that all our truths
are necessarily alloyed with error, and will ensnare
whoever does not recognize the fact. And, as
regards the affections, are they not dwarfed, per-
verted and even exterminated by narrowness, by
selfishness of every kind ? Is not breadth of
sympathy, catholicity of taste, comprehensiveness
of love, the very essence of eternal life ?

Plainly then, though eternal life means a certain
breadth and expansion of the soul, yet the path that
leads to it is narrow, and few there be that find it.
Narrowness of mind and heart is as easy as selfish-
ness and ignorance; the way that leads to that
spiritual death is wide, easy, and down-hill, and
many there be that go in thereat. Truth and
goodness alike consist in a certain mean, in a
difficult and delicate adjustment of the motives of
belief and action. The path to life is along a
narrow ridge from which it is easy to slip down on
one side or the other, towards the contrary extremes
of laxity or rigorism.

The former is the easier and more perilous slope
and is thronged by those whose life consists, not of
action and self-movement, but of passive drifting,
along the current of inclination, — believing or

NARROWNESS. 281

denying, doing or not doing, according as less
resistance is needed for one or the other ; and also
by those fewer who throw energy into their sin;
who rush down the slope to destruction like the
devil-possessed swine of Gadara.

The contrary incline is occupied by the well-
meaning and ill-judging multitude of those who find
it so much easier to live by hard-and-fast unqualified
rules of right belief and right conduct, than by a
just and elastic application of living principles to
each particular and individual case. What confirms
them in their obduracy is, the consciousness that
they are going against nature and overcoming
themselves, and their belief that the harder way is
the better or at least the safer.

Yet if they would but try, they might find some-
thing as much harder than narrowness, as narrow-
ness is than looseness. " It is easier to keep silence
altogether than not offend in speech ; " and indeed
everywhere total abstinence is easier than temper-
ance. But it is not always better or as good. " I
pray not that Thou shouldst take them out of the
world," says Christ of His Apostles, "but that
Thou shouldst keep them from evil." Indeed, far
from being the safer, the rigid way is often the more
dangerous, as leading to strong reactions of disgust
and rebellion on the part of violated nature ; and as
at best cramping that natural expansiveness of the
soul, which is the essential condition of its life.

As in the fine arts, so in the art of life, the right
way is high, difficult, and narrow, and few there be,
if any, that find it. Left to ourselves we all slip

282 LIBERTY FOR OTHERS.

down the easier slope ; and if grace for a moment
raise us to the summit, we slip down the other.
But He has come to show to all the Narrow Way,
and to make the lost secret, common property. " I
am the Way," He says, " and the Truth, and the
Life, no man cometh to the Father but by Me."

LVII.

LIBERTY FOR OTHERS.
Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not.— Rom. xiv. 3.

Though few desire real liberty, there is an element
of liberty that all naturally desire. A man lost in
the middle of the Sahara desert is not so free as a
galley-slave chained to his oar, since the latter has
the needful conditions for a certain limited degree of
life ; while the former is face to face with extinction.
Yet it is something not to be coerced by another will
than our own. Be such coercion just or unjust, the
first instinct of our will is to resent it and rebel
against it. Perfect freedom is doubtless his whose
mind and heart are so attuned to just law, divine
and human, as to obey without friction or sense of
thwart ; and who moreover lives in an ideal world
where every law is just and divine. But even in
such a soul it is not submission to just compulsion
that satisfies and frees, but the conviction that the
occasion for such compulsion will never arise ; since
perfect love has cast out fear and its torment.
Hence the hatred of being tied down is natural and
right, since it is our final destiny to be freed from
such friction and coercion. It is this instinct which

LIBERTY FOR OTHERS. 283

angers us against any attempt to advise or persuade
us even to some course of conduct which else we had
freely chosen; which makes us hesitate to commit
ourselves to some one out of many possible lines of
action, and thereby to put the alternatives out of
our reach for ever; which make us feel our most
voluntary engagements an intolerable burden as soon
as they are entered upon ; which prompts us to puzzle
people by unexpected and freakish turns of word
and action, lest knowing the laws and uniformities
of our conduct, they should be able to manage us
secretly and play upon the several keys of our
character at will.

Like the love of money, or of any other means of
life, this love of being " let alone " and not interfered
with, becomes, if over-indulged, an unreasoning
passion ; the end being forgotten in the eager pursuit
of the means. Few love liberty for justice' sake, and
simply that they and others indifferently may lead
the best and fullest life; and many love licence in
their hearts and call it liberty with their lips ; but
most love non-interference for its own sake without a
thought of the end for which it should be desired ;
just as we often love to hurry through work, and to
struggle for an unlimited ocean of leisure, without
the faintest notion of what is to be done with the
leisure when secured. All occupation is embittered
by a secret sense of an infinity of alternatives and
incompatible occupations which are excluded; for,
if to be idle is to enjoy none of them actually, it is at
least to be at liberty to enjoy any of them.

That we mostly love non-interference for its own

4284 LIBERT? FOR OTHERS.

sake, or for our own sake, and not for justice' sake,
that is, not from that disinterested love of order as
an absolute good — is clear from our readiness to in-
terfere with others in order to secure fuller freedom
for ourselves. We resent having the mind and will
of another imposed as the norm of our own : but
we would enforce our own notions and tastes on
everyone else.

This desire to bring all others round to our way
of thinking and acting is also a natural and useful
instinct — one of the cohesive forces of society ;
and its absence is a grave defect ; but it is a very
subordinate principle of conduct, needing often to
be checked and over-ridden by many another and
better. The social organism requires a nice adjust-
ment of uniformity and variety ; since an excess of
the one means petrification ; of the other, disinte-
gration. And so in the Christian Church there are
certain established points of faith that are held in
common by all ; but beyond, there is a region of
opinion and free speculation as to matters in regard
to which the Church's mind is still unformed ; and
were no liberty tolerated in that region, there would
be no variety of conflicting opinions illustrating and
explaining one another, each holding an element
of that full truth which is eventually to be accepted
and appropriated as a development of the body of
dogmatic teaching.

Again, there are obligatory practices common
to all Christians, but a still wider region of individual
variations in regard to which a wise liberty and
^mutual toleration should be maintained. Doubtless

LIBERTY FOR OTHERS. 285

many of the existing uniformities and obligations
were selected, by reason of their proven utility, from
the mass of local and particular observances, and
extended to the Universal Church. To suppress
variations would be to suppress growth. Hence
we should be as jealous for liberty as for law, since
they are co-principles of social life ; we should
be indignant against unauthorized dogmatism —
doctrinal or practical — in matters where the Church
has left us free.

For example, as regards the greater or lesser
frequenting of the Sacraments, the usage of the
Church has differed immensely in different ages
and countries ; and Saints have been formed on both
systems ; nor can we say that there has ever been a
steady progress towards the present frequency, since
this is but a revival of the most primitive practice.
The truth is that, frequency is but one condition
of fruitfulness, and fervour is the other ; so that
in some sense it is indifferent whether we go
frequently and fairly well, or rarely and very well ;
whether we replenish our cup after every sip or wait
till it is nearly empty ; we do not drink more on
one system than on the other. Outward circum-
stances often determine the matter for us; still
more should we consult our mental temperament.
For some, frequency begets routine and formalism ;
for others it secures the stability of habit ; some
can only snatch now and then the inner or
outer leisure needed for that concentration which
their sense of reverence demands in approaching
the Sacraments ; others, owing to the evenness of

286 INTROSPECTION.

their mind and circumstances, can keep themselves
always at, or near, the necessary level of recollec-
tion.

Doubtless in each age or locality there is an
established average of frequency, — once a month,
or once a week, or four times a year; and one should
so far respect that rule as not to depart from it
notably without positive reason ; but such reasons
so abound, that we must leave men full liberty to
go much more frequently or much less frequently
without daring to rank them spiritually by the
frequency of their communions. Wherefore "let
not him that eateth, despise him that eateth not ;
nor let him that eateth not, judge him that eateth.
He that eateth, eateth in the Lord and giveth
thanks ; and likewise he that eateth not ; " i.e.,
both have a good reason for what they do, and
glorify God in opposite ways. We can go to
Heaven by sea, as well as by land. " Who art thou
that judgest another ? To his own Maker he standeth
or falleth." These words are the too easily forgotten
Magna Charta of Christian liberty. " In God's
house are many mansions," and there is room for
all sorts and conditions of men, even for the most
unlikely and unimaginable.

LVIII.

INTROSPECTION.
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. — Matt. vi. 28.

The immediate purport of these words is to
forbid all anxiety as to temporal affairs, all needless
and futile carefulness which strives to foresee and

INTROSPECTION. 287

provide for what is quite beyond all human fore-
sight and control. We can plough and sow and
irrigate, but the weather is in God's hands, nor
can we by taking thought hasten the mysterious
process of growth or determine the ratio of
increase. Having done our part, a certain Stoical
indifference as to the future, is not fatalism but
faith. Sortes mece in manu tua sunt : " My destinies
are in Thy hands," nor could they be in better.
But no less in regard to the spiritual life is
anxiety reprehensible. We can watch and pray
and co-operate, but the rain of God's softening
graces and the sunshine of His light and conso-
lation rest with His will; or if there be a fixed
law of their distribution it is beyond our ken,
hidden away in God's heart ; nor can we for
all our straining, our anxiety, our impatience, add
a single inch to our soul's stature.

Quomodo crescunt. Consider how they grow.
Growth and increase of every kind is an impene-
trable mystery which use has robbed of its appeal
to our wonder. We know the fact; we observe
and define certain of its conditions; but its
inner necessity is hidden for ever from our
guesses. As an event whose cause is unimagin-
able and unthinkable we might call it a "miracle,"
were it not so familiar. But use makes us think
it necessary and natural that a stone unsup-
ported should fall to the earth for no apparent
cause ; and would make us cry " miracle ! " were
it to remain inertly suspended in mid-air as, for
all we can see, it ought to. Perhaps growth

288 INTROSPECTION.

seems less marvellous, less to be considered,
because we vaguely explain it to ourselves as a
sort of building-up process by which the several
parts give birth to the whole — a feeble analogy
which tries to force the greater into the form
and mould of the less; which forgets that in a
growth it is the whole which gives birth to the
parts ; that it is a building which builds itself,
and repairs itself, and multiplies itself.

" It cometh up we know not how " and never
shall know; we can devise no improvements of
the laws of growth nor deduce from them any
method or art of growth. Still less in the
spiritual order, do we understand how truth and
light grow in the mind, or goodness and love in
the heart. "The wind bloweth where it listeth
and ye hear the sound thereof, but whence it
cometh ye know not and whither it goeth who
can tell? So is every one that is born of the
Spirit." The signs and effects, the conditions
and antecedents of such growth, may be partially
determined, but God alone gives or withholds
the increase. Here too, we confound conditions
with causes; we use mechanical figures and
metaphors ; we invent plans, and routines and
methods. We appoint times for God's free visita-
tions ; we fix His inspirations down on paper, we
try by every means to cage the Divine Spirit
and keep it under control for our own use, as
we cage the wild forces of nature and press
them into our service. " The wind bloweth where
it listeth ; " so it seems to us ; yet not really

INTROSPECTION. 289

" where it listeth ; " for it is passively determined
by physical laws ; but God's Spirit is free, active,
self-determining. If we would breathe, we need
but open our mouth and draw in our breath :
Os meum aperui et attraxi spiritum ; the atmosphere
presses in on every side and at all times. Not
so with the breath of supernatural life, for there,
there are two free-wills to be reckoned with,
and not merely one ; there is a giving on God's
part, as well as a receiving on ours; and when
we have made all ready for His reception we
must wait for the Guest ; two have to agree as
to place and time and measure of inspiration.
We cannot sit down when we will, and have
bright intuitions and ardent desires. At prayer-
time we are most often barren and distracted ;
and perhaps at work or abroad, belated grace
comes interrupting us with unsolicited suggestions
and eager inspirations. We can indeed sow the
seed of truths already received from God ; we
can dispose ourselves to catch the first glimmer
of light ; we can reach out our hand for the alms ;
we can let down our net for the draught ; but
our labour neither conditions nor coerces, nor even
measures, the Divine response.

" Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as
one of these ; " and all our self-devised artificial
glory and perfection, as compared with the natural
beauty of God's handiwork, is as vulgar, preten-
tious, and unreal, as the gaudy splendour of some
semi-barbarous Oriental monarch. Consider the
lilies of the field and the array which God's

T

2go INTROSPECTION.

fingers have woven for them. In them He lives,
and works His way unimpeded ; in them He
freely utters the word which from eternity He has
conceived, willed, and loved in regard to them. He
has not to stand at the door and knock, but
finds the entrance ever wide open.

But we, self-forming, self-determining creatures,
can obstruct the free flow of the sap that rises
in our spiritual veins at seasons of spring-time
and renewal, — not only by sin, which shuts the
door in God's face ; but by false solicitude ; by
mistaking conditions for causes ; by over-trust in
methods, devices, and industries. We are as an
impatient, self-confident learner who runs ahead of
his teacher and spoils the task ; forgetting that
unless God build up the house of our sanctity,
our labour is in vain ; unless He watch over the
citadel of our soul, our watchfulness is fruitless
self-wearying.

Or again, we can interfere by spiritual vanity ;
by seeking graces and virtues as objects of personal
adornment which minister to our self-complacency.
The common phrase : " To adorn the soul with
virtues," has a false ring about it ; and savours
more of Stoicism than of Christianity. It may
be the wisest and noblest self-interest to prefei
virtue to wealth or honour or any other possession ;
but to seek it as a possession and as a personal
adornment is to make a creature of the Creator — a
means of what should be the end, — a possession of
that by which we should be possessed ; which we
should serve and worship and honour. " Virtue "

INTROSPECTION. 291

<cold pedantry for Divine Love, or the Love of
the Divine) is God dwelling in the soul and taking
full possession of it.

And may there not be even a still more vulgar
love of display, half-unconsciously stimulating our
quest of perfection ; not perhaps anything so ugly
as hypocrisy, which would seek unmerited praise ;
but a desire for merited praise more keen than
the desire for merit — a desire like that which was
satisfied in King Solomon when the Queen of the
South, drawn to him from afar by the trumpet-
call of his fame, fainted at the sight of a splendour
so transcending her wildest imaginings. Subtle and
all-permeating love of worship, lurking deep down
in the heart of the saintly solitary who has buried
himself for ever from the knowledge of his fellow-
men ! Part of our God-given, ineradicable social
instinct, whereby we are knit together in love
and mutual regard and taken out of our narrow-
ness and false independence ; yet a spring of
action so easily disordered — so difficult to regulate
and correct ! In itself a constitutive and essential
part of humility and charity ; yet the very sub-
stance out of which pride and selfishness are
fashioned.

How then do they grow, these lilies of the field
— these miracles of, what we might irreverently
call, God's infinite good taste ?

Not by reflex conscious effort ; not by measuring
their rate of growth hour by hour and day by day ;
not by tearing themselves up by the very roots and
transplanting themselves, now here, now there, in

292 DIVINE SELF-GIVING.

obedience to every fidgety suggestion of self-improve-
ment. How then ? We know not how ; for it is
God's care and concern, and not ours. We know
that they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet
that Solomon in all his barbaric glory was not
arrayed as one of these divine miracles of beauty
— so common, so countless, that we trample them
heedlessly under foot as of no account.

LIX

DIVINE SELF-GIVING.

Yea, gladly will I spend and be spent for you, though the more-
I love you the less I be loved.— 2 Cor. xii. 15.

Undoubtedly it is the very nature of love to
crave a return. But it is no less evident that to
love is its own reward ; that life consists in loving
and self-giving; that were one loved and wor-
shipped by all, he would be but as a stock or
a stone, "of all men the most miserable," did he
not love. It would seem as though (in higher
beings at least) the craving to be loved were created
by the recognition of the fact that the lover cannot
give what the beloved cannot receive ; that he
cannot feed one who is not hungry, nor clothe one
who is not naked ; that he cannot, in a word,
satisfy an appetite or fill a void that has no
existence. Such a craving to be loved is perhaps
more other-regarding than self-regarding. Yet, in
another sense, to love without being loved back,
is a more complete self-squandering, a more
generous exercise of love ; and thus it is that God

DIVINE SELF-GIVING. 293

delays to kindle greater love of Himself in our
hearts, that one day we may look back and say :
" Behold how He loved us ! even when we were yet
sinners and slighted or did not care for Him-
Behold how He kissed and embraced us in an
ecstasy of love, time after time, in the Sacred
Communion ; how He poured Himself into us,
poured His Blood into our veins ; and mingled
His pure flesh with our sinful flesh in sacramental
mysteries ; thus both figuring and realizing that
passionate love whereby He humbles Himself to
become the food of the soul He has created, that
they may be two in one." If now He suffers the
inflowing tide of His love to be withstood, it is that
later the heaped-up waters may burst in with all
their accumulated force and sweep away every
obstacle from their path ; and that thus He may,
in the event, be able to spend and be spent for
us more lavishly, than had we never resisted His
grace.

Hence He says : " I have greatly desired to eat
this Passover with you before I suffer," and, of that
suffering : " How am I straitened till it be accom-
plished ! " We look upon the Eucharist too much
from our own side, as if it were simply the satis-
faction of our need ; and we forget that, in a
mysterious sense, it is the satisfaction of the
Divine need, of God's own hunger and thirst, of
that love which strains and bursts the walls of the
Divine Heart ; and pours itself out over all creatures,
more gladly where the gift is more gratuitous and
Jess merited.

294 THE GOVERNING AIM.

LX.

THE GOVERNING AIM.
Seek Him in the singleness of your heart. — Wisdom i. x.

When we set before ourselves some distant end-
to be attained, some ambition to be realized, we
confusedly embrace in that same act of will the
whole connected system of means, the entire
process by which it is to be accomplished. And
similarly in the accomplishment of each several step
we are governed, at least confusedly, by the " inten-
tion" of the whole process — by the endurance of
that act of will. We may perhaps at times con-
sciously and deliberately do some act which implies
that we have changed or modified our intention,
and which, of its own nature, makes for some
incompatible end, and alters the direction of our
will for the time being. Else every single action
belonging to the connected series from first to last
involves an implicit renewal of the primary resolve,
and is, so to say, an abortive or imperfect attempt
to bring the entire conception to birth.

Many of our free actions, however, can lie
outside the system of actions connected with some
partial and particular end ; but not one lies outside
the system of actions connected with the one
universal end to which each life is necessarily
directed. And by this end we do not mean that
abstract beatitude or well-being, after which w&
all equally and necessarily grope in every action,
but the concrete object, or state, or mode of life id

THE GOVERNING AIM. 295

which each of us freely places his ultimate hap-
piness and primary satisfaction — whether it be
religion, or philanthropy, or conscientiousness, or
pre-eminence, or luxury, or passivity, or extinction,
or some combination of these and similar elements.
Every free act, that is, every act which is a true
expression of our deepest self, and is not merely
reflected from the surface or from some less fun-
damental layer of our personality ; which is not
merely automatic, instinctive, imitative — either
creates, or rectifies, or negatives, or modifies, our
practical attitude towards life as a whole ; it is an
aborted attempt to realize a certain conception of
ourselves ; of our ideal state ; to bring to full effect
that general will which is behind this particular
action and animates it — as it were the vital prin-
ciple of the seed. The full interpretation of each
single free action would reveal to us the outgrowth
of this seed. We cannot move in two directions
at once; we may deflect from our course with a
mind to turn back to it later, but for the moment
it is abandoned.

The whole life of our will is as that of the
agitated needle seeking its pole ; and, ideally,
it should be marked by a steady decreasing range
of oscillation, and by an ever nearer approach to
the precision of truth. Each good choice should
prepare the way for a better. Every step towards
our ideal should show it to us more closely and
clearly; should expand and articulate our con-
ception of it ; should reveal to us more distinctly
the implicit content of our governing will, and

2g6 THE GOVERNING AIM.

explain to us that want, which we felt long before
we could understand or express it. It is for lack
of this clearness and precise determination that,
with the best will in the world, we must swing to
this side or that of the true mark and never find
complete rest ; though we can indefinitely narrow
the limits wherein it is to be sought.

This is the way of the Saints ; but with others
there is no such steadiness of approximation. Yet
if we do not raise and improve our ideal in every
free act we either reassert it, or else, alter it,
wholly or in part. At one time, it is such an act
as makes for God and for God only — for the purest
and divinest life of the soul ; but presently perhaps
our conduct implies that, though God is chief in our
regard He does not fill up our cup of happiness to
the brim, that we also need something that is loved
not for His sake or in connection with Him. Later
perhaps, our action means that God holds a minor
part of the field of our ideal of perfect life — that He
is loved sincerely up to a certain point, worshipped
with costly sacrifices, but not loved supremely, —
much less, loved alone or worshipped with the
sacrifice of our best or of our all.

At other times this irreverence may extend to an
almost complete exclusion of God and the divine
mode of life from our scheme of happiness.

We are perhaps too apt to look upon our will
as a sort of ledger of separate resolutions, kept
up to date by erasures and additions ; and to forget
that it is simply our inmost present self viewed
as actively tending towards its end or ideal ; as

THE GOVERNING AIM. 297

growing into the self that it wants to become. It
is not a bundle of separate potential energies — each
a little will in itself with reference to this matter or
that, moving freely and separately from the rest, like
fingers of the same hand ; but it is one simple force,
ever in act, — shaped and directed, if you will, by
each particular choice, but asserting its whole self
with all these modes and shapings, in each several
action.

Every movement of the past has left its mark
upon it and helps to characterize this present act,
which in its turn will be built into the fabric. As
every experience added to our mind alters the
character of our mental reaction in regard to every
future experience, — causing us to receive it other-
wise than we should else have received it ; so with
our action, the whole past is contained in every
present, not indeed determining, but characterizing
it. An opportunity of well-doing or evil-doing,
outwardly the same, is inwardly different as pre-
sented to this character or to that ; it " becomes "
or " misbecomes " in a different way and degree.
To take or to reject it, is free to both, and is not
necessitated by their antecedents ; while the nature
and number of such graces and temptations, from
which the character may be built up and by which
it is fed, is in the hands of God ; so that we never
can predict what He is going to make of us, —
though we have the refusal or acceptance of His
plans.

298 AIMLESSNESS.

LXI.

AIMLESSNESS.

He shall be as a tree planted by the waters' edge. . . . Not so
the wicked, but rather, as dust before the face of the wind. — Ps. i. 3.

The tree is made from the dust which the wind
scatters; and to the dust it returns when the
principle of its organic unity is destroyed. There
is no free finality, no cohesion, in the life of passion
and inclination, — in the life of one who drifts along
aimlessly and passively like dust before the wind,
determined wholly from without, yielding to the
stronger impulse on the one side, and the lesser
resistance on the other. The movement of such a
life is a process of dissolution and decay, not of
construction and growth. Yet though possessing
no system or self-determined end, and even denying
the existence or possibility of such, the moral
sceptic cannot escape the necessity of living for
happiness and of electing the kind of life which he
thinks will secure it, although it be a life of chaos
and doubt and nothingness. By a sort of faith and
not by experience (which would need to be infinite
in order to verify the judgment), he judges all to
be " vanity of vanities," and because he believes
reason and system to be illusions, he turns from
them in the quest of the truer happiness which he
falsely imagines to lie in utter aimlessness.

But he who believes that life has an end and
meaning ; and who seeks that end in God (i.e., in
moral rectitude and reasonableness,) brings organic
unity out of the confusion of conflicting passions

SELF-MANAGEMENT. 299

and impulses. The body of his moral life is
inspired and quickened by the rational end to which
all its parts are directed and subordinated. He is
like the living tree planted firmly by the waters'
edge — stable, coherent, self-governing, and pro-
gressive ; drawing full draughts of life from the
Source of life in which the root-fibres of his
spiritual being are continually bathed. Let that
source be dried up, and slowly but surely the
process of decay sets in and he becomes as dust
scattered before the wind — aimless, passive, inco-
herent, fruitless.

Nor is this less true of societies than of indi-
viduals. There too order and law mean life and
liberty; while the lawlessness of tyranny on the
one side and of rebellion and injustice on the other,
preludes disintegration and ruin. So, for example,
the Church Catholic, with her organic unity of
doctrine and structure, contrasts with the sects
which crumble to dust by division and subdivision,
whereas she is like a tree planted by the river-brink
yielding fruit in due season, and whose leaves are
for the healing of the nations.

LXII.

SELF- MANAGEMENT.

You say to them : Go in peace : be ye warmed and filled : yet
give them not those things that are necessary for the body.
— James ii. 16.

Nothing would frighten timorous consciences
more than to tell them that some of their tempta-
tions are of their own making and could be easily

3oo SELF-MANAGEMENT.

avoided ; for at once they would understand that
they were morally responsible for them, which they
are not. They could avoid them if they knew
how ; if they understood better the laws that govern
their own mind ; if they were more observant of
their own character. Psychological ignorance is at
the root of the evil ; they do not know how to
manage their own minds; just as men are often
ailing because they do not know how to manage
their own bodies. In simpler times men ascribed
their diseases to the devil, and not to their own
ignorance and indiscretion ; and this same simpli-
city survives in regard to many temptations and
spiritual diseases. Some day no doubt moralists
will wake up to the value of much of our modern
practical psychology and apply it to the guidance
of souls. At present, beyond a bundle of rough-
and-ready empirical maxims, often mutually contra-
dictory, they have no way of mediating between
the knowledge and the performance of duty. As
moralists, of course, their office ends with the
former ; and they assume that when the right path
is determined, it is a mere question of will, to walk
in it. For directors, the management of the will is
really a greater concern : yet how often they take
the line of saying : " You can if you like, and if you
do not, it is because you do not want to : " — as
though one should say to a man who first mounts
a restive horse : " Look how others stick on ! You
can do the same if you choose." He can, through
the mediation of knowledge, experience, guidance,
observation; but not at once, — not in his present

SELF -MA NA GEMENT. 30 1

untaught state. Prayer and the sacraments are
intended to increase the desire to do well, to quicken
our industry in using all means thereto ; but they
do not impart definite instruction as to how the
difficult task of self-education is to be carried out.
Hence, in every form of Christianity besides the
mere declaration of the law of righteousness, and
besides urgent persuasion and exhortation to fulfil
it, some informal attempt is made to mediate
between the will and the deed, to show how the law
of the members may be brought into conformity
with the law of the mind.

But the science of self-management is still in
the state in which medicine was in the days of
Galen and Hippocrates. It may be contended that
the old rough-and-ready methods of knife and
cautery gave better results by weeding out the
feeble, who were killed when not cured ; but this
contention can hardly be urged when it is a question
of soul-slaughter.

And sometimes it can scarcely be less. We
should punish a child for meddling ignorantly with
the complicated mechanism of a watch; and
the law will punish a man who, without a medical
diploma, should meddle with the infinitely more
complex and valuable mechanism of the human
frame. But far greater is the danger of ministering
to minds diseased, whose complexity excels that of
the body, as the body's does that of the watch.

Granted the most perfect power of self-analysis
and self-expression on the one side, and the most
perfectly experienced intelligence and sympathy on

302 SELF-MANAGEMENT.

the other, are we not, at the best, groping in the
dark, and ought we not for that reason to be most
sensitively delicate in our touch ? Surely the best
we can do is to impart the science of self-diagnosis
and self-management, as we should to a sick man
walled away from all help in some impenetrable
dungeon. Saints and Prophets may claim to read
the secrets of hearts and to share the Divine
insight into the hidden springs of life. Such men
can offer a sort of guidance to souls wholly beyond
the capacity of ordinary mortals, who must trust
simply to observation, experience, and intelligence,
and give up all reliance on gifts and graces of a
purely exceptional and semi-miraculous character.
In the absence of a prophet, the right or wrong of
any particular case has usually to be settled by each
one for himself. Others can give rules and princi-
ples, advice and experience; they can help us to
make up our mind, but they cannot and ought not
to decide for us; for their decision is necessarily
abstract and leaves out of account the all but
infinite multitude of circumstances that charac-
terize each individual action in the concrete.

But all this emphasizes the necessity of bringing
the science of self-management into definite shape ;
of not trusting to hap-hazard empirical nostrums :
of listening to all that recent observation and
research has verified concerning the interdepen-
dence of mind and body, and the laws by which
their several operations are governed. If much be
still hypothetical and dubious, far more is firmly
established than we have yet taken any practical

THE SOCIAL STANDARD AND THE MORAL. 303

account of. We love the old grooves — the rhythm
of ancient maxims and oracles ; and we wonder and
deplore that prayers and sacraments and exhorta-
tions fail to do what they were never meant to do,
namely, to take the place of vigilance, observation,
and common sense; to connect the good desires,
which it is their function to create and foster, with
their outward fulfilment ; to bring the law of the
members into conformity with the law of the mind,
and to bridge over the gulf that divides right ethics
from right action.

LXIII.

THE SOCIAL STANDARD AND THE MORAL.
Judge not before the time. — 2 Cor. iv. 5.

It is not sufficiently observed by moralists,
ascetics, and directors to how large an extent many
virtues involve and depend on gifts that are purely
mental, or physical or at least non-moral. Ingrati-
tude, for instance, may be the result of a forget-
fulness which shows itself in a hundred other ways
in the same individual. Cruelty may be due to
lack of imagination and consequently of sympathy.
Courage is often the result of inexperience or
obtuseness. Hence, at different stages of mental
and social development, different virtues are
rendered possible, and the only common universal
virtue under which these particulars are subsumed,
and by reason of which they are praiseworthy, is
the love of righteousness and the hatred of iniquity.
Apart from this ingredient, it is almost impossible
to discern moral from merely psychological good

304 THE SOCIAL STANDARD AND THE MORAL.

qualities. The lover of righteousness will strive
honestly to judge correctly in moral matters, and to
give effect to his judgments; but the measure of
his success will not necessarily be proportioned to
his effort, but will depend on the amount of social
enlightenment to which he is heir; on his own
intellectual acumen : on his training and education :
and finally on an incalculable multitude of external
circumstances.

This distinction between the social or utilitarian
standard of goodness, and the divine standard by
which each man shall be judged at the last, cannot
be kept too clearly in view in face of the surface
difficulty presented by the existence of ethically
degraded populations at home and abroad, whose
units are deprived of the support of a healthy public
opinion and example, — a support to which the
respectable and religious owe nine-tenths of their
respectability and religion. The force of tradition
and example playing on the instinct of docility and
imitation is what determines the greater part of our
conduct. Even though we react from within, in
response to these determinations from outside, it is
seldom from the central core of our personality, but
mostly from some layer or other of the enveloping
cortices. Instinct, habit, passion, mimicry, con-
vention, hold the reins, save in those rare moments
when the buried self wakes up to seize them in some
crisis or another. Like a sunken rock, it is only
when the waves run mountain-high that it reveals
itself — in storms and stresses that call forth all that
is in a man, proving him as gold is proved in

SOME PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES. 305

the furnace, baptizing him with a baptism of
blood.

Send the rabble from our slums into the battle-
field where duty is plain to the dullest, and as exact-
ing and costly as it is plain, and is the average
of heroism and self-sacrifice appreciably different
between class and class ? It is only the piercing
sword that can reveal the thoughts of the heart.
And so we are warned by the Friend of publicans
and sinners, who knew what was in man — the
latent goodness of the bad, and the latent badness
of the good — that our social standard is not the
ultimate or the highest : that the first shall be last,
and the last first.

But this truth were altogether mischievous and
decadent without its complement. If goodness of
will is everything it is because it involves a will and
ceaseless effort to find out what is objectively right ;
to bring the machinery of habit and inclination into
agreement with the dictates of reason ; to create
and develope a sound standard of public opinion
and example ; to secure all the non-moral conditions
of morality, both for ourselves and for others ! For
to be zealous about the end and indifferent about
the means is a palpable insincerity, entirely incon-
sistent with good-will.

LXIV.

SOME PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES.
The Wisdom of the Prudent is to understand his way. — Prov. xiv. 8.
As illustrative of the preceding paragraph we
may notice how largely the virtue of purity is a
U

3o6 SOME PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES.

matter of self-management guided by a knowledge
of the laws that govern our thoughts and feelings »
how it is not only a thing to pray for ; but a thing
to be taught and learnt.

It is more than nine-tenths a virtue of the imagi-
nation or heart ; not only because nearly all bodily
temptation is dependent on certain images and
associations with which it comes and goes, increases
and diminishes, and through which alone it is
encouraged or resisted ; but also quite apart from
images, memories, and fancies — directly or indi-
rectly suggestive, — there are certain illusions, fears,
fixed ideas, which have to be banished in the
interests of purity. The very fear of the tempta-
tion suggests the vivid idea of the reality, and this
is but one step from the reality itself. Hence a
nervous dread of temptation is often the worst
temptation ; and the scrupulous are troubled, where
the unscrupulous are left in peace.

Again: " expectant attention " is a further degree
of the same illusion ; for it means not only the fear,
but the certainty, that the temptation will occur ;
and therefore almost infallibly ensures its occur-
rence.

Again, the pleasure-value and pain-value of things
looked back upon or looked forward to, is dependent
almost entirely on imagination. Things affect our
will according as we believe them to be pleasant or
unpleasant ; not according to the actual degree of
pleasure with which they affect our senses. Nay,
even in the fruition, most of our pleasure is due to
imagination, rather than to sense — to association,

SOME PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES. 307

to prospect or retrospect, or to a believed (as opposed
to a verified) valuation of the enjoyment. Faith in
the social estimate makes a snail a physically revolt-
ing article of diet to the Englishman^ and a dainty
to the Frenchman ; we eat rottenness with com-
placency, if convention declares it to be good ;
and are sickened by absolutely imperceptible in-
gredients in our food, which the same authority
declares to be disgusting. It is not what things are
to us, but what we believe them to be to us, that
matters. And this belief is not only created for us
by others, but is largely in our own power to create.
Nay, even by repeated verbal assertion we can
persuade ourselves into, or out of, many likes or
dislikes ; and can correct one illusion by another.
And this principle is very largely true with regard
to sensuality, where the real, as opposed to the
illusory and imaginative, element of pleasure, is
often incredibly small.

Again, we cannot attempt what we fixedly believe
to be impossible. Belief in our possession of power
will not create power that is not there, but if it be
there it will liberate it and bring it to act where
else it were dormant, and as good as absent. Hence
the value of self-confidence, and the use of encourage-
ment. Every doctor knows what suggestion can do,
whether to paralyze or to invigorate ; and in moral
matters the same law prevails. The fixed idea that
we cannot control our imagination, our feelings, our
movements ; that we are " possessed " by some alien
power, or that we are the victims of some morbid
condition, is often the sole and only reason why we

3o8 SOME PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES.

cannot, and do not. Sometimes, moreover, this
false conviction is the result of a certain " wish to
believe," — of a half-desire to be tempted, and to be
helpless against temptation. The cure is, to wake
up clearly to the illusory character of this hysterical
impression ; and to make acts of faith in our perfect
freedom from obsession ; to face boldly the deep-
down conviction that we could have resisted had we
chosen — a conviction we are in the habit of shirking
and blinking.

Once more : to believe that we want to conquer,
and that we can conquer, is not enough, unless we
also believe that we are in fact going to conquer ;
and this third conviction is the most important,
since it will bring to act anything that is in our
power, even though it be something we do not want,
as in cases of " fascination " where the idea of doing
something horrible absorbs our whole interest and
becomes so vivid as to pass into act. The mental
side of every conscious act consists in forming a
conviction that it is going to happen. Sometimes
this conviction is freely formed ; sometimes it is
forced upon us. A resolution is simply a voluntary
belief that we are going to act in a certain way ; and
if we can hold to the belief, the action (if a possible
one) will come off in the present or foreseen
conditions. But here again, illusion and imagin-
ation can paralyze us. I know that I want to get
out of bed, and that I can do it, yet perhaps I cannot
believe that I am going to do it ; and for this reason
alone I fail. I need therefore to create the unhesita-
ting conviction that I am going to do it at a definite

SOME PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES. 309

instant. Here expectancy depends largely on
experience. If what we want to do, and can do, in
any matter has been habitually done, with few or
no exceptions, then it is easy and natural to believe
firmly that it will be done again. But if it has been
habitually shirked and deferred ; if our resolutions
have not been steadily associated with performance ;
if they have been constantly changed, not through
changed conditions, but through flinching from
foreseen inconveniences, then the conviction that
we want to get up does not carry after it, by a sort
of habitual necessity, the conviction that we are
going to get up ; and may even (in cases of will-
paralysis) suggest the belief that we are certainly
not going to get up. This is the reason why when
we postpone a disagreeable duty, such as answering
a dull letter, it seems to get every day more and
more impossible. It is not that it gets more
difficult, but that we get less and less able to
convince ourselves that we are going to do it ; we
get to distrust ourselves, just as we distrust others
who break their promises time after time. When
others lie to us repeatedly we cannot believe them
any more, nor control, nor govern them ; so, when
by repeatedly breaking our resolutions we have lied
to ourself time after time, we cease to have faith in
our own promises and to be able to control ourselves.
That the resolve and the deed, should, by habit, be
inseparably associated is the essential condition
of moral strength and self-government. The child
who has once learnt that commands can be reversed
by persevering entreaties and annoyance is no

3io THE JUDGE OF EACH.

longer manageable. And as to associate the ideas
of resolve and execution is the condition of self-
control ; so, to associate the dictate of conscience
with resolve, is the condition of moral and virtuous
self-control. Still, however this expectancy, hopeful
or despairing, may be determined by habit and
experience, it has got no rational foundation, and
can be resisted by simply recognizing its illusory
character and going against it. That I have failed
a thousand times (in what I wanted to do and could
have done) is no reason why I should fail now, except
so far as it makes it difficult for me to imagine
myself succeeding, or to expect to succeed. Thus
here again purity, and many other virtues, depend
chiefly on the control of the imagination by the
reasoning faculty.

LXV.

THE JUDGE OF EACH.

This Child is set for the fall and for the resurrection of many
in Israel, and for a sign that shall be contradicted (and thine own
soul a sword shall pierce), that out of many hearts thoughts may be
revealed. — Luke ii. 35.

Though there seems a good deal of religious
indifferentism abroad, it is impossible to take an
indifferent attitude in regard to Christ. " He who
is not with Me is against Me ; he who is not against
Me is for Me." " What think ye of Christ ; whose
Son is He ? " is a question that sooner or later must
be faced and answered by every man in the secret of
his conscience, and on that answer depends his
eternal rising or his eternal fall. As chemical sub-
stances are proved and tested by their reactions to

THE JUDGE OF EACH. 311

a known acid, so every man is proved and tested,
and the hidden thoughts of his heart are revealed
when he is fairly confronted with Christ. His
attitude must infallibly be one of like or dislike ;
of love or hatred ; enthusiastically for Him, or
enthusiastically against Him.

He tells us how at the final judgment the Blessed
will be drawn to Him, as to a magnet, like to like;
and the wicked driven away from before His face.
It is not His spoken word Come or Go that draws
the former or repels the latter, but His whole nature
and being, which in the one case delights, and in
the other revolts. The same sunlight that gladdens
the healthy eye, blinds and tortures the unhealthy ;
the same fire that warms and quickens, may also
consume us.

But even now, He is judging the earth wherever
and so far as His name is known ; even now He is
winnowing the chaff from the grain, He is setting
the sheep at His right hand and the goats at His
left — Nunc est judicium hujus mundi — " Now is the
judgment of this world." As in a surging multi-
tudinous assembly, at a given word, each struggles
to his place, so since the Gospel word has gone
forth to the ends of the earth the whole race of man
is astir like a nest of frightened ants, each seeking
for what he considers salvation whether in Christ or
from Christ ; whether in the world, or from the
world. And when this work of shaking and winnow-
ing is finished, when all that impedes and delays
the perfect equilibrium of the whole system shall be
at an end ; when each atom shall no longer stand in

312 THE JUDGE OF EACH.

the path of any other, or arrest its destined progress,
but all shall fly, by the unassisted force of their
natural gravitation, to their eternal posts in the
universal system, some to the right and some to the
left of the Central Sun, then shall the judgment of
the world be accomplished and the thoughts of all
hearts be revealed.

But even now judgment is begun wherever, and
so far as, His name is known ; for wherever, and so
far as, the true conception of Christ has been brought
home to the heart, that heart must be drawn or
repelled, and thereby its secret tendencies and
thoughts revealed to itself. The crucifix says Come
or Go to every man who sees it intelligently and
otherwise than as the dull eye of a mere animal
might see it. It passes judgment on his present
state ; on what would be, were he now to die, his
eternal state.

And what is true of Christ is true proportionally
of them that are His. He is the Just One par
excellence, the Sun of Justice by whose borrowed
light they shine, the eternal substance whereof they
are the flitting temporal shadows; yet in varying
measure every just man of whatever age or clime is
by adoption a son of God, a defective Christ, set
for the fall or the resurrection of many, for a sign to
be spoken against, that the thoughts of many hearts
may be revealed. To His Apostles Christ promises
a future share in His judicial office, as the reward
of their participation in His humiliation : " You have
stood by Me in My trials and shall sit by Me on
thrones judging the tribes of Israel ; " but even here

THE JUDGE OF EACH. 313

and now, this honour belongs to all His Saints —
"The Saints shall judge the world." The Hebrew
prophets of old prefigured Christ and His passion in
the precise measure that they loved righteousness
and hated iniquity ; and what is written in the book
of Wisdom of the Just Man in general might have
been copied from the life of Christ. There is not
an honest man in the world who is not so far a
prophet of God and a Judge of the people.

Hence it is, that the non-Christian who has
never known Christ in substance, knows Him in
shadow ; knows Him in the person of His just ones
and His prophets ; and is judged, tested, and revealed
by his attitude in regard to them, whether it be one
of like or dislike, love or hatred. He who shrinks
from the moonlight shall he not be tortured by the
blaze of the noon-day sun ; he who is enamoured
of the image, shall he not fall down and worship
the reality ? As yet judgment is only begun ; Christ
is as weak in the world, as conscience is in the
midst of our raging passions and ambitions. His
foes are not yet under His feet ; rather it is He who
is under the feet of all; despised and rejected of
men. The world that one day shall wither away
like a burning scroll from the face of His contempt,
now leaps upon Him like a wild beast ; and all who
would live godly in Christ must so far suffer perse-
cution, must be targets for the arrows of slander
and calumny, signs to be spoken against as she was
who, as she stood closer to Him in His trials than
all others, was of all others most keenly pierced
with the sword of His Sorrows.

3M THE JUDGE OF ALL.

LXVI.

THE JUDGE OF ALL.
From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

The distinction between the general and public
judgment of the human race, and the particular and
private judgment of each soul after death, seems to
have come but gradually to Catholic consciousness,
in obedience perhaps to the felt exigencies of the
sense of justice. At first, when the day of general
retribution was believed to be so imminent that those
there standing would behold its dawn with their
bodily eyes, no such distinction was suggested.
Later, the destiny of the departed, yet awaiting the
second advent, must have given rise to a question
which was answered by the doctrine of the particular
judgment.

Christ Himself has given us a visual picture of
that final and public adjustment which is to be the
fruit of His own mediation in the Divine plan;
and Christian imagination has given an analogous
setting, borrowed also from the judicial process of
earthly tribunals, to the revelation of each soul to
itself in the instant when it passes from the condi-
tions of time and place into those of eternity — when
" the body shall return to the dust ; and the soul,
to God who gave it."

Surely we need not, save in point of degree and
intensity, go beyond the known experiences of
conscience to get at the reality veiled beneath the
popular imagery of the particular judgment. For

THE JUDGE OF ALL. 315

there, in that tribunal of the heart, God and self are
ever face to face. Let us but see God more clearly,
and self more clearly ; let but the mists of memory
be cleared away, and let all our past in minutest
detail be simultaneously brought to life again, and
set before our inavertible gaze, in the blinding light
of God's spotless holiness, and the soul is already
judged in the first flash of everlasting day.

But the soul is not related to God alone ; it is
related to the whole organism of humanity whereof
it is a member. We are not, and ought not to be,
indifferent to the judgment of our fellow-men ; and
the desire we have of their merited esteem and
affection is at once a result and a furthering cause
of that spiritual oneness of all men, whereof their
bodily relationship and likeness is but the defective
symbol. We naturally desire the praise, and fear
the censure of the just ; of those whose judgment
is an echo of the divine. If we have been wrong-
fully accused before men, it is not enough for us to
be righted secretly before God ; if iniquity is hidden
on earth under the cloak of justice, it is not enough
for us to know that it is stript bare and revealed
before the angels in heaven. That sense of justice
which we derive from God, in the measure that we
are like Him, will never be satisfied till "the glory
of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it
together," This sense of justice is indeed our con-
sciousness of that divine and universal Will, which
works in us and in all creatures, and makes them
converge and co-operate to the perfect realization of
that idea, that "• glory of the sum of things " to

3i6 THE JUDGE OF ALL.

which all are moving, or being moved, consciously
or unconsciously, freely or forcedly; — to that deliver-
ance of expectant creation (God's finite son and
image) from the bondage under which it is now
groaning and travailling.

The more strongly this divine sense of justice
is developed in us, and the more we fret over the
inequalities and unfairnesses which God's unfinished
work now presents to our onesided view ; so much
the more do we crave and cry out for that final
consummation and perfect vision which will show
us everything in its right place and true proportions ;
which will admit us into the light of that eternal
Sabbath-day from which God looks back restfully on
His finished labour and sees that all, when taken
together, is exceeding good. For this, the just of
all ages and nations and religions have cried aloud ;
of this the prophets have dreamt and sung, lifting
up their eyes with. Mary, to the hills of dim futurity
already touched with the promise of that golden
day, when every valley shall be exalted, and every
mountain and hill shall be brought low ; when the
crooked ways shall be made straight and the rough
places smooth; when the mighty shall be put down
and the lowly lifted up ; the hungry filled, and the
rich emptied ; when the glory of the Lord shall be
revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

We picture this general judgment as a distinct
event which intervenes between the disorder and
tumult of time, and the order and quiet of eternity.
But the reality which is figured in the picture of the
valley of Jehosaphat, the throne of judgment, the

AFTER DEATH. 317

sheep and the goats, is that permanent state of
equilibrium to which all things, now rudely shaken
together, are settling down in obedience to that law
of gravitation by which the creature is drawn back
to the bosom of the Creator, whose love breathed
it forth that it might return to Him not void, but
having fulfilled all whereunto it was sent. Some
nearer, some further, some at the right hand, some
at the left, they all cluster round that centre and
take their appointed places in the system for all
eternity.

LXVII.

AFTER DEATH.
None has ever been known to return from the grave.— Wisdom ii. 1.

Even the lips of Lazarus were sealed, if indeed
he had been permitted an entry into the eternal
realities. As for the results of " psychic research "
they give us stones for bread. Even what they
apparently establish is humiliating in its childishness
and witlessness. Aimless freakishness characterizes
all the dealings of these disembodied agencies that
are supposed to be the liberated spirits of rational
beings. Who will believe that a spirit can just rap
on a table and find no other way of expression ?
One thing alone is established — the universal and
perpetual yet unsatisfied craving for one word to
break the silence between the living and the dead.
Yet our impatience with this silence is in some sort
as childish and irrational as the resentment we feel
at God's silence when, picturing Him manwise, as
we must do, we think He is naturally corporeal,

3i8 AFTER DEATH.

visible, audible, and only hides Himself wilfully by
some magical power. When better taught, we
understand how it is that He ever speaks and reveals
Himself, how He is never silent, never out of our
ken for an instant. " Closer is He than breathing,
and nearer than hands and feet." By our ignorant
presuppositions and expectations "our eyes were
held and we knew Him not," though our hearts
burnt within us, while He walked by our side and
spoke to our heart and affections — just as we fail to
recognize the sun in the warmth of our bodies, or
the earth in the weight of our limbs. So, it is because
we still fancy the soul in terms of the body — because
we picture that which thinks and knows, as itself
something thought and known, that we expect it to
come to us from some imaginary otherwhere, and
speak to us with lips of flesh and warm human
breath. We forget that were such manifestation
given (by divine permission or power) it would be
only an " economy " adapted to our childish thought
— a device of " language " in the larger sense. And
indeed the usual accordance of such appearances
and revelations with the preconceived views and
fancies of the recipient, points altogether this way.
When we once realize the absurdity of trying to
express reality in the terms of appearance, to think
of that which thinks, or to know that which knows,
we see that there cannot possibly be any real contact
of our senses with the realities of the spiritual world ;
but at best with the bodily symbols of that world.
As the world of sound and the world of colour
interpenetrate one another, and yet the former is

AFTER DEATH. 319

sealed to one born deaf, the latter to one born blind ;
so there may be, and doubtless is, penetrating this
natural order a spiritual order to which we are deaf
and blind.

In this life all language and consequently all
communication between spirit and spirit is depen-
dent on material symbolism, and is carried on
through our bodies. The disembodiment of either
interlocutor makes converse impossible. As the
partial decay or disorder of the body, partially shuts
the soul off from its proper relation to the physical
world, so by death it is shut off altogether. We
speak childishly of the soul leaving the body, as
though it were a body within the body ; we might as
well talk of gravitation leaving the body when it falls
to pieces. It is rather the body that leaves the soul.
All our perplexities about the pre-existence, multi-
plication, and distinction of souls are rooted in the
same fallacy of conceiving it body-wise, and indeed
it is our only possible way of conceiving it, namely,
by analogy with the natural objects of our knowledge
which are the appearances of bodily things. If the
falseness of our analogy could be corrected by the
falseness of a complementary analogy, it might be
said that the human soul is one eternal thing which
developes a new centre of consciousness as often as
it finds a new organism meet for the exercise of
its functions, and providing it with the means of
acquiring another sum of experiences which we call
a human life. The dead do not return because they
do not depart ; they are ever with us and in us —
" spirit to spirit, and ghost to ghost." We are still

320 AFTER DEATH.

tied to the consciousness of our own experience,
past and present; whether death will break down
this barrier and let us into the secret of every other
human life, opening up to us the records of universal
memory, we cannot say. But even the ancient
scholastic theory about the converse of pure spirits
[v. De locutione Angelorum apud Thomam Aquinatis]
favoured the conjecture that our bodies are but cell-
walls that now sever one hermit-spirit from another ;
that the dead look us through and through, and our
minds are transparent to them, though theirs are
opaque to us while we yet walk blindfold in the
flesh ; and hence though we speak to them passively
and in spite of ourselves, they cannot speak to us.

This fusion of souls, this perfect interchange of
experience with experience, would be "another
world " more " other " than the localized heaven.
Nay, it would have in itself the making of a heaven
or hell according to the manner of beholding, and
the disposition of the beholder — to God it is Heaven,
and to Satan it is Hell. He lacks the final link that
binds all together and makes order of chaos, light
of darkness, Jerusalem of Babylon. These indeed
are dreamings and fancies, but so are all our conjec-
tures in these matters; and we* might at least try
to have fair fancies rather than foul. At all events
it is well to see how far our grievance at the silence
of the dead may be aggravated by expectations
founded on false analogy.

THE COMMUNION OF SOULS. 321

LXVIII.

THE COMMUNION OF SOULS.

If one member suffer anything all the members suffer with
it ; or if one member glory, all the members rejoice with it. Now
ye are the body of Christ and members in particular.— 1 Cor. xii. 26.

As a mere hypothesis or pictorial symbolism, the
belief that our several souls are not like so many
grains of corn, wholly separate and mutually exclu-
sives, but are rather like the distinct and individuated
fingers of the same hand, meeting in it and with it
forming one thing, may be said to be probable in
so far as it binds together more facts, and labours
under fewer difficulties than the others. Although
in regard to our animal organism the "arboreal"
conception of our racial unity, is destroyed by the
breaking-off of each new offshoot from the parent
stem ; and by the decay and death of those inter-
mediary links which bind the present generation to
the remote past ; yet if generation be but a variety
of growth, as physiology is beginning to realize, it
may well be that, the subject of all human experi-
ence is one and the same thing, diversely terminated
in independent centres of consciousness and experi-
ence— as it were reaching out new branches, new
feelers, in every direction wherein fresh food for its
corporate life may be gathered ; that it is in some
vague sense one nature in many persons, and therein
a less inadequate image of the Godhead than we
imagine ; that there may be some truth, some dim
expression of real observation in the old Arabic
v

322 THE COMMUNION OF SOULS.

speculations as to the oneness of the intellectual
principal in all men.

The obvious objection is the apparent pantheistic
trend of this hypothesis, — the endangering of per-
sonal distinctness. God dwells in us and we in
Him without prejudice to personal distinctness.
Nowhere is personality so distinct as where mind,
will, and operation are absolutely identical, sc.t in
God ; nor does this view imply that, our conscious-
ness of our own distinctness from other centres of
consciousness and experience is illusory ; or that
all selfs are but disturbances and ripples on the
face of an ocean of unconsciousness; nor does it
even deny the distinctness of my total of direct
experience from every other person's total. It only
divines that these several peaks of consciousness
spring up from and rest upon a common earth ;
that the direct experience of one, is the indirect
experience of all; that all is recorded in those
deeper strata of memory which lie below the plane
from which the peaks shoot up and which run
through and under all. Normally our light is too
weak to reach far below the surface, or to show us
more than part of the record even of our own
personal experience ; but could it be strengthened
indefinitely it might carry our vision to that buried
treasury into which all consciousness present and
past have poured their contributions — that Dooms-
day book in quo totum continetur ; wide mundus
judicetur.1

1 Wherein all has been recorded
Whence man's doom shall be awarded.

THE COMMUNION OF SOULS. 323

And there seem to be moments of supernormal
enlightenment, intense flashes of intuitive intro-
spection, when we see recorded in ourselves the
thoughts, or the sufferings, or the experiences of
another who is distinct from us in place — perhaps,
even in time ; when a strong cry to which some
sympathetic heart is resonant, pierces to the depth
and thence reverberates with an echo audible for
" those who have ears to hear/'

Still clearer is the testimony of the will and
the affections — of that most familiar and least
considered fact of the sympathetic sentiment of
fraternity which makes the joys and sorrows of
another to be felt as in some measure our own.
What simpler solution can this commonest mystery
find than the possible fact that, somewhere, deep
down, every other soul is vitally connected with
our own, — is more or less remotely a part of
ourself; that as the Divine will lives and works
in our whole being, and claims supremacy over
our own will, so every created will makes itself
felt in us and claims to be considered among the
motives of our action. Such a conception, though
inevitably materialistic like all our conceptions of
spirit, is at least free from the grosser materialism
that regards the soul as a body within the body,
as something which escapes after death, — as it
might be a vapour ; which passes through space to
heaven or hell, and is therefore measurable by
reference to space, and corporeal.

Although ever insisting on the immateriality of
the spirit, there is not a preacher or theologian

324 THE COMMUNION OF SOULS.

who perforce does not straightway contradict
himself the moment he tries to speak about the
spirit — for indeed our mind is not equal save to
the things of sense.1

Furthermore, revelation, in most cases, throws
light on nature, and anticipates the slow and un-
certain fruits of philosophy ; and the revealed idea
of the Communion of Saints, of the mystical Body
of Christ, of the Blessed Trinity, and the dependent
conception of Divine Charity, all seem to presuppose
and expand the relationship here suggested between
soul and soul ; all imply that man's final blessedness
and perfection consist in a likeness and union with
the Holy Trinity where Three Persons enjoy one
and the same life, thought, and love ; in the
adoption of all created souls into that same unity;
in the communizing of all our experience and the
breaking down of those cell-walls that now make
us mysteries to one another ; in the perfect trans-
parency of every mind to every mind, and of every
heart to every heart ; so that there shall be many
eyes but one vision ; many tongues but one word ;
many hearts but one joy.

Also, the development of our conscious and
moral being points the same way. To know
ourselves through and through, as we really are,
is the end of all our prayers; it is another aspect
of the knowledge of God and of Reality. Our first

1 Common-sense philosophy, as it is called, is the philosophy
implied in common language ; and language being a symbolism
addressed to the eye or the ear, is essentially materialistic in its
implications.

THE COMMUNION OF SOULS. 325

and barbarous self-knowledge is superficial and
unreal. In that stage we are egoistic in the narrow
sense. But as we rise in self-knowledge and moral
dignity, we gradually realize our true self and
recognize that we are but parts of a whole, whose
well-being is our own — first, parts of the family;
then of the tribe and nation ; then of humanity,
and lastly of all creation. That is, in the measure
that our deepening knowledge passes down from the
vertex of the peak to its base — from the intense
consciousness of separateness, to the dim conscious-
ness of sameness; from the luminousness of our
personal experience, to the twilight and darkness
of universal experience, we come to see that the
whole lives in us, and that in it we live and move
and have our being.

And yet we must not talk too glibly of entering
into the heart and mind of others and making
their experience our own, as we shall if we picture
the subject and its experience in terms of the
object ; as though it were a sort of invisible
substance which, could it be made visible, would
betray its modifications and changes to our very
eyes. I can know what you know; feel what you
feel ; but I cannot know your knowing ; or feel
your feeling; I can more or less reproduce your
experience to myself as far as the objective facts
are concerned; but the co-factor is "you" in
your case and " I „ in mine. In reading the
biography of another the measure of my own
past experience limits the extent to which I can
reproduce it to myself. I become his image, and

326 THE COMMUNION OF SOULS.

know him, not directly, but in this image ; the
form and fashion may be more or less similar, but
the central substance is different. Is there not
then an illusion or fallacy in the vague wish to
read the soul of another made transparent in some
way to my intuition — as though memory were a
volume in which each recorded his experience to
be taken up and re-read at pleasure, and which
might conceivably be passed on to another or laid
open to his gaze ?

Yet if even now, by aid of language we can
reveal some part of our inner experience to others
or enable them to reproduce an image of it in
themselves, and in this way to get inferentially at
our thoughts ; we can at least conjecture the possi-
bility of some far richer and more subtle vehicle
of self-disclosure whereby a like indirect access to
the heart-secrets of another might be secured to
an indefinitely higher degree. Yet this mere thin-
ning of its partition-walls to transparency hardly
answers the craving we have for a direct present-
ment of the experience of others. We sometimes
come very near to feeling the physical wounds of
another as though they were inflicted on our own
limbs. If, then, sympathy can make the body of
another to be as our own, why not the soul as well ?
And if the soul of one, why not of all ?

Certainly this will-union of perfect sympathy and
mutual understanding is the closest spiritual union
of which we can have any clear and distinct con-
ception ; and yet we may and do grope after
something higher and still more intimate that

THE COMMUNION OF SOULS. 327

transcends our powers of precise explanation and
belongs to the realm of mystery. We feel that
God at least must be at the very centre and in the
very act of our knowing and willing and feeling;
that our experience must in some sense be His
also — that in all our afflictions He is afflicted, and
in all our gladness He is rejoiced ; that whatever
is done to the least of His little ones is done to
Him, not merely vicariously, but, in some mysterious
way, identically ; that He is concentric with every
centre of life — not as a person (for that perhaps were
a contradiction), but as being more than a person ;
as being the fountain of all personality and dis-
tinctness ; in whom all persons live and move
and are; against whose intimate permeation no
barrier can avail. Shall He build a house into
which He cannot enter ? In Him at least, our
ultimate loneliness is broken down ; if in spite of
fullest sympathy of thought and love we remain for
ever secrets to one another, in His heart all these
secrets are treasured and put together. There, is
the root whence all personalities branch out with a
separateness that increases with every moment of
their several lives. Perchance when we shall know
ourselves down to the root we shall find that our
union in Him is far more real, than our separate-
ness outside Him. " I in them," says Christ, "and
Thou in Me, that they may be perfect in one."

328 PURGATION BY LOVE.

LXIX.
PURGATION BY LOVE.

If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him.—
2 Tim. ii. 12.

Christ passed through His passion to His glory
that He might go before us who have, in the very
nature of things, to pass to the Father by the same
road. " I am the Way : ... no man cometh to the
Father but by Me. ... If any man will come after
Me let him take up his cross and follow Me." But
the inward and most fiery suffering of Christ's
passion was not what He suffered directly in what
befell Him personally ; but what He tasted of the
ocean of all human suffering by divine fulness of
insight and divine depth of compassion— the whole
detailed record, past, present, and future, being
unrolled before His gaze while He hung on His
Cross.

And this is the fire that of all others is to purify
our souls, — the fire of grief and anguish for the
sins, the ignorance, the sorrows and afflictions of
those whom we love; not a self-centred sorrow
for our troubles, temporal and spiritual ; but an
unselfish, love-born sorrow. Just in the measure
that here on earth we wake to a sense of our true
self, and recognize our solidarity with others as
fellow-branches of one Mystical Vine rooted in the
very heart of Christ and fed with His life-blood ;
do we begin to purge ourselves by this sharing in
the unselfish passion of Christ. To love is neces-

PURGATION BY LOVE. 329

sarily to suffer; to love better and more widely,
is to suffer more and more ; that is, however, as
long as our growing knowledge is still incomplete
and multiplies more problems and perplexities than
it solves ; and before we come to share the divine
comprehension of the Sum of Things, — of the final
results when death shall be swallowed up in victory,
and good shall be the final goal of ill, and God
shall, with that vision, wipe away all tears from our
eyes.

As it is the last word of a clause or sentence
which gives meaning to all before, or even alters
its apparent meaning to something quite opposite,
so it is just the lack of perhaps one explanatory
addition that makes the most perfect unity a mere
chaos up to the last moment of its completion.
That unknown deed by which God shall save His
word in all things and yet make all well that is
not well, is included in that absolute view which
things eternally present to His untroubled gaze.
Viditqae Deus cuncta qua creavit et ecce bona erant
valde — God viewed the collective result of the
labour, and lo! it was exceeding good; and God
entered into His rest. But for the finite mind this
total view must be built up laboriously piece by
piece ; and indeed as it grows, the sense of chaos,
of inequality, of wickedness victorious over goodness,
often becomes more painful, and the impenetrable
mystery of evil gets darker and darker and more
overwhelming as its data are more widely and deeply
comprehended, until hope is well-nigh extinct and
the soul cries from its cross: " My God, my God,

330 PURGATION BY LOVE.

why hast Thou forsaken me? Carest Thou not
that we perish ? "

It would seem to be almost demanded of the
nature of our soul and of its eternal life, that no
one should pass to the Father, should enter into
that full vision of the glory of "all things taken
together " which constitutes the joy of their Lord,
without enduring, according to the fullest measure
of their capacity, that fiery trial through which the
human soul of Christ freely chose to pass for our
encouragement and redemption. Hence if not here,
at least hereafter, the whole history of man's sorrow
must gradually be unfolded to our gaze from the
first to that last syllable of that recorded time which
is suddenly to turn it all into joy, and give meaning
to its incoherence.

. . . There no shade can last

In that deep dawn behind the tomb,

But clear from marge to marge shall bloom

The eternal landscape of the past.

This is the true purgatorial fire, the agony of
unselfish love. When the cell-walls that now shut
us up in solitude, save for what leaks into us of the
lives of others through the chinks and crannies of
our senses, shall have resolved themselves into mist
and nothingness; when the mysterious oneness of
all souls in God, closer than the closest brotherhood,
shall break upon our astonished understanding and
give birth to a passionate love corresponding to our
expanded vision ; then surely the gradual mastering
of the many-chaptered tale of the sorrows and sins
of those newly endeared multitudes must be no less

HEAVEN AS CONCEIVABLE. 331

than a drop-by-drop draining of the chalice of
Christ's own passion. We need not idly conjecture
if this purgatorial process be temporal or instan-
taneous, since in either case it has to be gone
through with ; the total idea must be built up of
its several parts and stages ; the blessed end cannot
be reached without the bitter means; none can
comprehend the glory who has not tasted the
shame ; or enjoy the rest who has not been through
the labour ; or find peace in the answer who has
not comprehended the full magnitude of the diffi-
culty.

LXX.

HEAVEN AS CONCEIVABLE.

Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, not hath it entered into the
heart of man to conceive. — 1 Cor. ii. 9.

How effectual a motive the hope of Heaven
would be, were it less transcendently and unimagin-
ably glorious ! Who would not keep faithful to the
narrow, up-hill path, were he certain it would lead
him just to such a life of converse with the blessed
dead as endeared them to him here on earth. But
even they, according to the common conception of
the matter, will be so denaturalized, so raised above
all their endearing human weakness, so wrested
from the only surroundings in which their life, as
we knew them, could have play, that our reunion
seems in prospect a rather more dubious joy than
that which we anticipate at meeting, after fifty years
of silent absence, some sister or brother, known to
us only as the companion of our babyhood. What

332 HEAVEN AS CONCEIVABLE.

we really crave for is " the old familiar faces " and
the old familiar ways ; and to secure these we could
well dispense with radiancy, agility, subtlety, and all
the other perplexing anomalies of the glorified body
and soul.

Hell is, as a rule, a more animating motive
than Heaven, partly of course because pain is
more stimulating than pleasure ; but partly also
because it is popularly set before us in terms so
much more imaginable and concrete. A sensuous
Heaven were unworthy of a spiritual religion, but a
sensuous Hell is not so obviously inconsistent.

But can this pure-minded craving to have back
the old days remain unsatisfied if Heaven is to N
really a Heaven for the human heart ? If memory,
even with its present imperfection, sets us back
more us less really in the past ; if it reunites us
for a moment with our dead self of long ago, and
with other selves now changed or altogether gone ;
if what once has been for consciousness, acquires
through memory a certain immutable eternity, may
it not be so in a higher and better way for memory
perfected hereafter ? Shall not the haze of distance
that separates us from the old days be dispelled
by this sense of eternity, and swallowed up in one
co-present experience of all that we have lived
through? If time be the creature of our mind,
then it is only in respect to our limited knowledge
that the past is non-existent; while a better eye
could perhaps pierce through time, as well as
through space, and bring everything to here and
now.

THE UNDYING PAST. 333

LXXI.

THE UNDYING PAST.

The angel . lifted up his hand to Heaven and swore by Him
that liveth for ever and ever that time should be no longer. — Rev.
x. 5, 6.

To seize each " now " and make the very best
of it, is, in some sense, the secret of a successful
life ; for past and future are imaginary, whereas
the " now " is real. Yet on closer inspection this
"now" dwindles into a metaphysical abstraction,
a mere point between past and future — between our
memories and our expectations ; and what we really
live on is retrospect and prospect, more or less
remote ; the " present " being but the more imme-
diate past and future.

A satisfactory retrospect should therefore be our
chief care for many reasons. First because our
memories to a large extent determine our expecta-
tions: our prospect takes colour from our retro-
spect ; the successful are more likely to be hopeful —
and of hopes and fears as to the future, of regrets
and pleasures as to the past, our will-life is built up.
But while the future into which we strain our eyes
is furnished by the shadowy creatures of imagina-
tion, our past is made up of fact and reality, and
its taste, sweet or bitter, is forced upon us, and is
not now of our determining. The ghosts we raise
we can also lay ; we can banish vain fears and
hopes for a future that may never be ; but what
we have written, we have written for ever in the
record of the past, and only by wilful self-blinding

334 r#j5 UNDYING PAST.

and at the sacrifice of some integral part of our
inner life can we shut the gates of memory. How
will this action look in retrospect, when fitted into
the mosaic of memory ? a restful support, or a
haunting horror ? — that is the question that should
chiefly guide our conduct.

This past, moreover, enters into and determines
every present ; it is the framework, the shape or
mould into which each fresh experience is received.
As each individual borrows the language, the mind,
the beliefs, the tastes of the society into which he is
born ; as his originality, even were it the greatest,
is but one-tenth, and his unoriginality nine-tenths
of his character; so each new experience that is
born into our consciousness is chiefly determined
by the multitudes that have preceded it ; the action
from without is overwhelmed by the reaction from
within. . . . Qualis quisque est talis ei finis videtur —
As a man is, so seem things good or evil to him.

Yet why is it that, when we can freely excite
pleasing emotions by mere day-dreaming, by castle-
building, by the fictitious experience of the imagi-
nation, we need care, and do care so much for
the reality, the " factual " character, of our past ?
Undoubtedly such mere dreamings effectively de-
termine our character according as they feed or
strengthen certain emotions and appetites, or starve
and paralyze others. On this fact the importance
of high standards in fine art is based — the educa-
tional value of music, poetry, fiction, and even
history — the wisdom of the Christian religion which
tells us that apart from the effectual desires and

THE UNDYING PAST. 335

emotions to which they gave birth, our thoughts
have a moralizing or demoralizing effect, and must
be guarded and purified.

Is it, then, merely in point of intensity that the
remembrance of the past that has been, differs, in
educational value, from the dream of a past that
might have been ? I wake in the morning following
some calamity : " It was a dream, . . . but no, it
was a reality." What an irreducible difference
of mental and emotional attitude these two affirma-
tions excite ! Indeed, is it not wonderful how we
face sleep, night after night, knowing the terrible
experiences we may have to pass through in our
dreams — so absolutely real for us at the time —
simply because their unreality is recognized before
and after ? Obviously, facts and realities entail after
consequences ; they change the current of our sub-
sequent experience in a way that dreams and
fancies cannot ; they affect that part of our life that
is determined from outside, and independently of
our free action and inward response. But often
such consequences are not present to our con-
sciousness, and yet the same obstinate difference
between the value of facts and fancies remains.
I can blush now for some gaucherie, some faux pas
of twenty years ago, witnessed by no one now
alive, stripped of every conceivable present con-
sequence. I should like to think it a dream. Yet
why? Furthermore, the present consequences of
our remote past are so utterly incalculable, — evil is
so largely fruitful of unforeseen good ; and good, of
unforeseen evil, — that this consideration of conse-

336 THE UNDYING PAST.

quences has little to do with our frequent wish that
the past had been otherwise.

It seems then that we are driven back to the
ultimate and irreducible truth, that fact and reality
is the object of our spiritual will, by which it is
determined and which, in turn, it strives to deter-
mine and bring into conformity with itself. Doubt-
less, fancies too are facts, but until they are realized
and linked into the chain of external phenomena
they are subject to our will — our slaves and not our
masters — they do not determine that world which
determines us and curtails our liberty. Fancy is
but the suggestion of a fact that might be, but
is not ; might have been, but was not.

The past that no longer exists for our senses,
exists for our will, and exists for ever, except so far
as failing memory may curtain it off from our
regard. It exists for our will, because it acts upon
us with an action that either jars or soothes, as it is
discordant or accordant with what we now wish the
past to have been — an action as real and present as
that of the light that beats upon our eyes, or of the
sound-waves that break upon our ears. Not merely
in memory, not merely in the present to which
it has given posthumous birth, is the past still
alive. These are the symbols — the reverberating
echoes — by which it speaks to us; but in itself,
what has once been, is, and shall be — Quod scrips!,
scripsi.

For the notion of " presence," which is borrowed
from the order of sense, is inseparable from that of
action. So long as, and just in the measure that,

THE UNDYING PAST. 337

an object acts on the several senses it is said to be
present to them, however distant in other respects.
The star long since extinct may be still present to
vision — no image, but the star itself, unless we are to
say that all we see is but the image of what we see.
Present to hearing may be absent from sight or from
contact. Absent from sense may be present to
memory; and is not this presence as "real" as
t le other in its own order ?

We give however a greater reality to what we
can touch, to what resists us ; because it is the
resistance offered to our will that first makes us
aware of our own reality, and of other realities that
seem to have a contrary will. What wills and acts ;
what determines sensations and appearances and
memories, is for us, the real par excellence. It is
therefore the unalterable, will-resisting character of
facts that distinguishes them from fancies which we
can mould at pleasure. It is because the past for
ever acts upon our will by resisting it, that, for us,
it is ever real and present. The indelible character
therefore of the past, its joys and sorrows, its light
and darkness, can never be to us a matter of indiffer-
ence as are the dreams, however fraught with thrilling
interest, at which we smile on waking.

Just now our memory is too dull and weak to
permit the immeasurable past to oppose its full
force to our will. A fast-fading and feebly-coloured
fragment of our own personal history, and some
shreds and tatters of the page of universal history
from which it has been torn off, is as much as we
can now conveniently deal with. But where memory
w

338 THE UNDYING PAST.

is perfect in any particular, it so far puts us in
touch with the reality of the past once more ; for
the object is always there, it is only our faculty
that fails us. If the remote past is not a reality,
neither is the immediate past ; yet all our real
perceptions are of the immediate past, since the
present is but a mathematical abstraction. As we
can see through space what is not immediately
present to the eye ; so we have in memory, a
faculty that looks back through time, — whose object,
like that of the eye, is no self-constructed, pliable
image, but the bygone reality or fact which faces
us like a solid adamantine rock — which our wills
cannot alter, — and that is what we mean by reality.
Hence the vast importance of ever thinking how
our actions will strike us in the " House not made
with hands ; " when " clear from marge to marge
shall bloom the eternal landscape of the past ; "
when in virtue of perfect vision and memory the
dead shall rise again, and time shall be no more,
and every detail of the past shall live again for us,
and the intervening mist (projected now from the
tired eyes of memory) shall be cleared away.

Presso e lontano li ne pon ne leva —
There Near and Far nor help nor hinder sight,

and the sound of every word we have spoken in the
past shall ring in our ears for ever.

But surely there is more bitterness than sweet-
ness in this thought. If there is an insatiable
hankering to have the old days back again that
it will satisfy, is there not a past we should gladly,

THE UNDYING PAST. 339

were it possible, think to be but a dream ; whose
obstinate reality is a torture to us ; against which
we interpose the thickest curtains of voluntary
oblivion. Can present joy and glory, or even final
and eternal joy, make the reality of past suffering
or shame indifferent to us, especially if the past
shall live again, and shall move us with all the
efficacy of the present ? Shall the river of Time's
gathered tears pour its cataracts into the bosom of
Heaven's calm crystal sea ? Shall the groans and
sighs and shrieks of all the ages, whose travail was
the price of present fruition, mingle harmoniously
with " the shout of them that triumph, the song of
them that feast " ?

Cold and cruel is the philosophy that bids us
rest in the thought of some future age on earth
when, by slow evolution, the interests of duty and
pleasure shall have become coincident. Even could
we who have heard and believed this new gospel,
now find solace for our pains in the prospective joys
of that remote and problematic futurity (whose per-
manence and stability is not even suggested) ; even
could we see therein some objective compensation
for the degradation, the savagery, the ape-and-tiger
animalism through which the race had necessarily
to pass in struggling upwards from the mire ; what
of the countless millions of sufferers who never
dreamt, who could not dream of, or care for, such
a compensation ? Shall it be the aim of that perfect
and triumphant humanity to co-operate with the
ieebleness of its memory, with the faultiness of its
blood-stained record, and so to wall itself off from

34o THE UNDYING PAST.

the disagreeable realities of the past, like a man
who by some fraud has stept to a sudden fortune
and would gladly forget what refuses to be forgotten ;
or as some of our money-princes who have trodden
their wealth out of the millions, as wine is trodden
out of grapes ?

Our sense of justice and wisdom and love is
exigent of far more than such a philosophy offers us.
It will at least dream, and hold fast to its dream, of
a final restitution of all things ; it will see the dead
both small and great ; poor and rich ; ignorant
and enlightened ; degraded and cultured ; ancient
and modern ; the first and the last ; those who
have laboured, and those who have entered into
their labours — standing before the throne of trium-
phant justice ; it will see all who, even unconsciously
and unwillingly (like the blessed Innocents and their
sorrowing mothers), have suffered in the working-out
of God's plan, entering according to their several
capacities into the common joy of their Lord; it
will see them rewarded not only according to their
personal merits, but according to another, and, by
them unexpected, scale of compensation ; it will see
the illusion of " pastness " swept away like a blinding
mist, and the reality and eternal worth of each
single syllable of recorded time revealed ; it will see
how the very pain and shame and sorrow that so
much of it reawakens, are active and necessary
ingredients of that inconceivable bliss which is the
total resultant; it will see that, as the sense of
tragedy demands a present remembrance of former
happiness ; so the tribulations, sins and sorrows of

THE UNDYING PAST. 341

the Saints are turned into joy, not because they are
forgotten, but because they are remembered ; or
rather, not because they are eternally past, but
because they are eternally present as elements in
the harmonious chord, the great and final Amen.

If the bliss promised us by our religion is really
to meet and quiet the ineradicable longings of our
heart, it may be other than this, or more than this,
but it cannot be less. Why is it that what is
distant from us in time or in space is shrouded
in a haze of sadness and unaccountable regret ? that
I yearn towards some distant hill on the horizon,
knowing well that, once there, it would please me
no more than that on which I now stand, and
which I should then regard with the same dissatis-
fied wistfulness ? Why do I hunger for "the days
that are no more," even when I know they were
brief and full of misery, more perhaps than the
days that are now ? Whence that craving, — which
is the devotion of the pantheist, — to be at one
with all nature, and to enter into and share her
immensity, her eternity, differing though they do
but in degree from our own extent and duration ?
Whence all this, if not from the conflict between
our will and our ability? We would be at once
everywhere and everywhen ; we would enter into
the divine life and experience, immense and eternal,
and be freed from the limits of time and space in
which now our soul is caged liked a fluttering and
broken-hearted bird. All our finite gains are at
the cost of infinite sacrifice. Before we choose, a
thousand courses are open to us, all of which we

342 THE DEAD.

desire under some aspect. When we have chosen,
the joy of our choice is swallowed up in the accumu-
lated regrets for the alternatives laid aside and put
out of our reach for ever. If I choose to be here,
I must sacrifice the wish to be in a thousand other
places at the same time. If I adopt one study, or
pursuit, or state of life, I must resign every other.
The gifts that I can use are but a fraction of those
that I must therefore bury. In fine, man must
either seek the coward's narcotic of contentment,
or suffer continually from the sense of capacities
unrealized and, under present conditions, unrealiz-
able. If then in Heaven " there shall be no more
pain," it must be because the former things which
in some sense shall have passed away, shall in a
deeper sense abide for ever when " time shall be no
more."

LXXII.

THE DEAD.

All these died according to faith, not having received the
promises, but beholding them afar off and saluting them. . . . God
having provided some better thing for us that they should not be
perfected without us. — Heb. xi. 13, 40.

The neglect of prayer for the dead, and a
general lack of interest in the vast buried body of
humanity, whereof we who now live are only the
newly-forming but as yet unformed matter, is
characteristic of the ultra-individualism of modern
religion. Of course, if the dead are really dead,
and have not merely entered into fuller life; if
they live, as other transient causes live, only in
their surviving effects ; if there is no immortality

THE DEAD. 345

save that of fame and if the mortui ex corde, the
forgotten dead, are as though they had never been ;
if our relation to them is simply that of one grain-
crop to the previous crops from whose seed it has
sprung, and not rather that of each year's growth
to the spreading vine ; then our debt in their regard
is mainly one of sentiment, since our creditors are
but vague shadows in our memory.

If however the organic conception of humanity
be true, and not merely metaphorical ; if the dead
exist, really, fully, perfectly; and we, only seem-
ingly, partially, and imperfectly ; if we are but the
year's shoots sent forth into this upper air, to glean
from the sunshine a new and abiding increment of
life and vigour for the whole organism, to be centres
of fresh experience, and to bring back store of
new food for the secret general life of wonder and
joy ; if the past is rather the invisible present, out
of which the visible present grows, — upon which it
depends ; then the Catholic instinct which prays
for, worships, and has recourse to the blessed dead
is more conformable with reality ; then indeed the
living are but strangers and pilgrims on this visible
earth, seeking an invisible city whose builder and
maker is God, whose foundations are upon the hills
of eternity. In this view, Humanity is one great
tree of life which, year by year, sends forth its
green, tender shoots to be hardened into formed
wood as autumn and winter succeed to summer and
spring.

Who can tolerate the thin, shadowy immortality
promised to us by positivism ? If each life has not

344 THE DEAD.

an eternal and abiding effect on every other, apart
from the modifications it may have produced in the
temporal course of this visible world, how slight its
significance ! how lost to humanity all that is best
in the best lives — those interior thoughts, struggles,
and aspirations — those solitary hours of inward
activity — which found no expression, or no adequate
expression in word or outward deed ! Is it not
plain that the lives most influential for good in this
world need not be the best lives; that the great
bulk of moral and spiritual goodness, is, as far as
others are concerned, so much waste energy through
lack of the occasion and opportunity which now
and then favour the mediocre and render their
rarer and poorer goodness beneficial to others ?
Hence to the Positivist, the hermit is a social
suicide. But then, how is it that the fate he inflicts
upon himself befalls the majority of good men, or
at least the greater part of their goodness, in the
very inevitable nature of things ? How far more
accordant to the deeper needs of the heart is the
Christian belief that, each life, in all its detail, will
be set for ever in the eyes of all, as a theme of
wonder and joy ; that its chiefest utility in relation
to others is not what it seems now, but what it will
seem for all eternity !

Or who can rest in the Evolutionist's dream
of a coming golden age wherein an unthinkably
distant posterity shall enter into the fruit of the
miseries of those forgotten generations that have
preceded them from the beginning? If the finite
nature of things requires that light should grow

THE DEAD. 345

out of darkn ess ; strength out of weakness ; good
out of evil ; civilization out of savagery ; truth out of
error; if others had to be poor that we might be
rich, if they had to sow in tears that we might reap
in joy, is it like that Loving Justice, which is the
root and the fruit of all, to shut out from their
share in the general glory, those whose humiliation
and shame were its necessary conditions? Dimly
and from afar they beheld the promises and hailed
t them, as the frost-bound earth thrills with some
vague anticipation of the spring ; but they received
not those promises, God having provided some
better thing that they without us should not be made
perfect.

Not till the whole framework of humanity is
complete, shall the common joy, shared in due and
different measure by the lowliest and meanest, as
well as by the highest and most honoured of its
members, be made perfect. Then only shall the
meaning of the least particle and letter of that
utterance be fully revealed, when the last syllable
shall have been added to give sense and coher-
ence to all that went before.

This organic conception of the Church holds the
yet unguessed answer to many a dark mystery.
Those in the Church who are last and least in point
of grace and light, have their function in the general
harmony and may under a certain aspect be more
serviceable, useful, and necessary than the Saints
themselves. Considered apart and abstractly they
are " common and unclean ; " but taken in the
concrete, as part of the total unity, they are cleansed

346 OUR DUMB BRETHREN.

by a certain extrinsic sanctification. Their personal
and separate reward and joy is little or nothing ;
but that joy of the whole, which as parts they share,
" no man taketh from them." Even the condemned
felon in his cell cannot but thrill with the victory
won by his country over her foes. As the Holy
Innocents were crowned for sufferings not willingly
endured but entailed on them by the working out
of God's plans ; so no suffering or humiliation
involved in the unfolding of Heaven's designs shall
pass unrecompensed. For God's "creature" is a
collective unit whose final glory and joy shall be
reflected back over all to the very beginning. So
too in the growth of the human race those countless
generations who have passed through darkness and
degradation that we might rise to light and grace ;
the earth-buried root, the unsightly stem, the shape-
less branches, no less than the fragant flower and
golden fruit shall enter into the collective joy of
the Whole, however trivial or negative their personal
contribution to that total effect. Unwittingly, like
the Holy Innocents, yet none the less really, they
have served and ministered to God's glory, and we
without them should not have been made perfect.

LXXIII.

OUR DUMB BRETHREN.
Not one of them is forgotten before God. — Luke xii. 6.

As Christians have often made Christianity
ridiculous and contemptible, so zoophilists have made
zoophily a mere fanaticism of sentimentality. But

OUR DUMB BRETHREN.

347

surely there is not only a sound rational basis but
even a revealed basis for a tender regard for our
dumb fellow-mortals. " Your Heavenly Father
hath care for them; " means that they are each the
object of that same particular and minute providence
which numbers the very hairs of our head. " Ye
are of more value than many sparrows " does not
mean that these are of no value, but asserts a
rational scale of valuation, a recognition of patent
inequalities. Community of nature is what gives
every man as man, certain common rights, over and
above which some have special rights according
to their individual differences and relationships.
But with every sort of creature we enjoy some
degree of community of nature — higher with higher
animals ; lower with the lower ; and it matters little
practically whether we say that they have rights
and we duties to them ; or that, God holds their
rights for them, as parents do for minors, and that
we have duties to Him in their regard. In either
case the golden rule : " Do as you would be done
by" must, with the usual limitations, govern our
action in regard to them. Nor need we trouble about
their psychology and their power of reflex suffering.
It is by their sufferings as we imagine them (i.e.,
more or less " humanwise ") that nature requires us
to shape our conduct. A delicate consideration in
this matter is the invariable property of a more
cultivated gentleness of character; and is a point
of more perfect Christliness. Indeed, it is only an
expansion of that growing consciousness of our
unity with the whole organism of God's creation.

348 OUR DUMB BRETHREN.

Our most superficial consciousness is of isolated
selfishness ; then of this self as merged in the
isolated family ; then of the merging of the family,
tribe, nation into the unity of human brotherhood ;
finally, we take the sentient creation, the whole
world of life, nay, inanimate nature herself, into the
circle of our widening affection, and recognize the
arms of our Father in Heaven clasped round the
whole body and bulk of His creation :— the child of
His love. " Your Heavenly Father hath care of
them," and in the measure that we have care for
them our mind and affections are more attuned to
His : " He prayeth best who loveth best all things
both great and small." That they have to perish in
our interest, to die and suffer that we may live and
enjoy, is part of the general economy, so perplexing
to faith and yet not quite so bewildering to love, by
which God even in Nature gives Himself in sacrifice
for the life of His creatures; and teaches us that
dying for others may be a greater end than living for
ourselves. That, like the Innocents, they are involun-
tary victims to the general welfare ; that, in a sense,
it is the Heavenly Father who careth for them with
a deeper pity than He has given to any of us — it is
He who gives them over to pain and death for
others ; that it is He Himself who, in them, dies
daily for us — all this, far from lessening, should
increase our consideration for them, and should
make us extend to them the sort of reverence
accorded to the garlanded victims ot a religious
sacrifice. If moreover we hold the Aristotelian
psychology with its harsh division of perishable

OUR DUMB BRETHREN.

349

and imperishable "forms," which dooms each spark
of non-rational life to speedy and final extinction, we
ought in some sense to be even more merciful to the
more helpless and less gifted of our fellow-creatures
— more careful not heedlessly to shorten or embitter
an existence so short at the best. If however we
can trust, whether faintly or firmly to the larger

hope

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed
Or cast as rubbish in the void
When God has made the whole complete ;

that no centre of experience, however humble, once
formed, is ever obliterated ; then we hold a view
which is fanciful if you will; certainly, incorrect
and inadequate, yet which is so much as it is more
kindly and liberal than the other, is so far nearer
the truth.

THE END.

INDEX.

Action, Contemplation and

258.
After death 317.
Aim, The Governing 294.
Aimlessness 298.
Anger, The Divine 200.
Apprehension, Differences of

7*-

Apprehension of the Spiritual,

Our 79.
Ascension, The 134.
Assimilation of Doctrine 69.
Atonement, The 109.
Authority, Need of 149.

Belief, Unwilling 65.

Bond of Profession, The 157.

Breadth 274.

Brethren, Our dumb 347.

Catholic Church, The 139.
Christ, Faith in 95.
Christ in us 223.
Communion of Souls, The 321.
Confession 188.
Conformity, The Prayer of

251.
Contemplation and Action

258.
Contemplative Prayer 256.
Conversion 181.
Counsel, The Path of 243.

Dead, The 342.

Death, After 317.

Desire of all Ages, The 99.

Differences of Apprehension

Divine Anger, The 200.
Divine Self-giving, The 292.
Doctrine, The Assimilation

of 69.
Dumb Brethren, Our 347.

Election 185. •
Equilibrium, Spiritual 260.

Faith and Action 64.
Faith as a Choice 36.
Faith as a Necessity 41.
Faith in Christ 95.
Faith, Stability of 25.
Faith, Temper of 47.
Forgiveness of Sin 194.

God in us 203.
God's jealousy 230.
God's life in ours 214.
Governing Aim, The 294.

Heaven as conceivable 331.
Heretical Fallacy, The 171.
Humanity, The Sacred 102.

Ideal of Redemption,The 268.
Inevitable Question, The 1.

352

INDEX.

Internal Truthfulness 66.
Introspection 286.

Jealousy, God's 230.
Judge of all, The 314.
Judge of each, The 310.

Language of Revelation, The

73-
Leaving all 246.
Liberty for others 282.
Lowliness of His Handmaiden ,

The 271.
Love, Purgation by 328.

Miracles 89.

Multitude, Voice of the 146.

Mustard-seed, The 168.

Narrowness 278.
Need of Authority 149.

Past, The Undying 333.
Path of Counsel, The 243.
Passion, The 116.
Practical Principles,Some 305.
Prayer, Contemplative 256.
Prayer of Conformity 251.
Prayer of Petition 248.
Priest and Prophet 174.
Profession, The Bond of 157.
Purgation by Love 328.

Question, The inevitable 1.

Rationalism 51.
Redemption, The Ideal of 268.

Resurrection, The 126.
Revelation, The Language
°f73-

Sacraments 161.

Sacred Humanity, The 102.

Self-giving, The Divine 292.

Self-management 299.

Sin, The forgiveness of 194.

Social Standard and the Moral,

The 303.
Son of God, The 103.
Souls, The Communion of 321.
Spiritual, Apprehension of the

79-
Spiritual Equilibrium 260.
Stability of Faith, The 25.
Star, The 76.

Temper of Faith, The 47.
Truthfulness, Internal 66.

Unbelief, Verbal and Real

60.
Undying Past, The 333.
Unity and Variety 151.
Unwilling Belief 65.

Verbal Unbelief and Real 60,
Veritas Praevalebit 170.
Virgo Mater 265.
Voice of the Multitude, The
146.

Water and Blood 119.

BQ'
7477
.Y87
038

Tyrrell, George, 1861-1909.
Oil and wine. —