PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
PROBLEMS OF LIVING
BY
J. BRIERLEY, B.A.
("J. B.")
of "Ourselves and the Universe," "Studies of the Soul,'
THe Sternal Religion, 1 ' " The O<mm<m IAfe*' *e.
Seventh Thousand
iLontion :
JAMES CLARKE fe CO., 13 <k 14, FLEET STREET.
Preface.
IN these pages I have treated the human
problem, both in its individual and social
aspects, as essentially a transcendental one.
The separate studies have been written under
the conviction that the spiritual element in
man is not only the one feature that gives
distinction to life, but is the only adequate
clue to our sphinx riddle of a world. The
problem, as here dealt with, is followed on
many tracks. But whether pursued along its
physical, its historical, or its economic sides,
or into our most intimately personal realm, it
is ever in the sphere of the invisible that the
answer is sought. Spite of the modern asser-
tion to the contrary, our " problems of living "
are finally religious, and look to religion for
their solution.
But what religion ? In these pages I have
constantly urged the view that a faith adequate
for such a purpose must be one that, free from
sectarian limits, allies itself to the soul's
2031150
PREFACE.
universal affirmations, and is one with the
inmost nature of things. I have argued that
Christianity, properly conceived, is that religion,
or contains it. But it must be a purified
Christianity. Half the difficulties the modern
man finds in Christian belief arise from faults
of statement. Much of what is written here
is accordingly an effort at restatement. The
eternal revelation uses for each age its own
special language. Happy is that teacher who
catches something at least of the note in which
the Unseen is uttering itself to his generation !
J. B.
LONDON, 1903.
Contents.
PAO
I. Religion's Impossibles 1
II. The Moral Impossibles . 12
III. The Coming Creed 22
IV. Religion and Justice ... ... 32
V. Cosmic Free Grace 42
VI. Of Sacred and Secular 52
VII. Religion's Silences 62
VIII. A Doctrine of Remnants 71
IX. Our Enemy 81
X. At the Front 91
XI. Principles and Persons 101
XII. On Keeping Young Ill
XIII. The Rebirths of Feeling 120
XIV. Imagination in Ethics 130
XV. -Our Links with Lowliness 140
XVI. By Roads to Faith 150
XVIL Religion and the Child 159
XVIII. Our Wilderness Side 168
XIX.-The Quality of Belief 178
XX. The Moment After 188
XXI. The Interplay of Ideas 198
XXII. Religion's Vocabulary 207
XXIII. The Discipline of Joy 217
XXIV. Religion and Physique 228
XXV. Religion's Higher Energies 237
XXVI. The Soul's Secret . 247
CONTENTS.
PAGB
XXVII. The Higher Lawlessness 257
XX VIII. The Logic of Life 267
XXIX. The Soul's Bemaking 277
XXX. The Cosmio Accuracy 287
XXXI. History's Secret Springs 296
XXXII. Of Spiritual Appetite 306
XXXIII. On Being an Outsider 317
XXXIV. Life's Eefusals 327
XXXV. Life's Outer Edge 337
XXXVI. The Furtherance of Life .. . 347
PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
Religion's Impossibles.
IF we can imagine a man of high nature,
trained in the science of the modern world,
coming, without any prepossession, quite fresh
to the study of the New Testament, what may
we suppose would be his feeling ? There
would probably be a strange mingling of
sensations. He would discover there un-
questionably, for one thing, a moral infinitude
that would stir him profoundly a spiritual
deep from without calling to the utmost deeps
within. But, side by side with this inner
grandeur there would be a strange sense of
difficulties, of apparent contradictions, of
intellectual and moral impossibles. Against
Christianity's assumption of a personal and
PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
beneficent God would arise in his mind all the
metaphysical arguments from Democritus to
Mill ; its miraculous element would seem to be
ruled out of court by the modern conviction
of the uniformity of nature, and by those
anthropological researches which have en-
lightened us as to the evolution of the myth.
Perhaps even more staggering to our inquirer,
bred, as we may suppose, in the principles
of political economy, would be some of the
Gospel's moral precepts. The Sermon on the
Mount would seem made for another world
than this. " Resist not evil " ; " lay not up
for yourselves treasures on earth " ; " take
no thought . . . what ye shall eat or
drink " ; would sound strange indeed. Chris-
tian people, he would discover, were passing
by these words as impossible to their civilisa-
tion. Thoreau's verdict would seem to him
hardly too severe when, quoting the words,
" Sell all thou hast," and " What is a man
profited if he gain the whole world ? " he adds,
" Let but one of these sentences be rightly
read from any pulpit in the land, and there
would not be left one stone of that meeting-
house upon another."
And certainly these objections are formid-
RELIGION'S IMPOSSIBLES.
able ; the difficulties are great. Not the less
so that they lie upon the surface, and are the
first things that catch the eye. It is interesting
to note what their effect has been upon different
classes of mind. Of these varieties of result
there seem to have been three main types.
A great host of devout minds, knowing by
another process than that of the intellect
the inward truth of religion, convinced by
those " arguments of the heart " which, as
Pascal says, " the reason does not know,"
have dealt with the difficulties by ignoring
them. In order to believe, they have refused
to think. A second class, in whom that inner
sense has not been strong, have taken up their
mental abode in the region of these contra-
dictories and have refused to go farther.
Such, with Feuerbach, have regarded Christian
sentiment as a kind of mental disease ; or,
with Diderot, have denounced the Gospel
as " absurd in its dogmas and unsociable
in its morals " ; or, with Condorcet, have
declared religion to be "a supernatural
extravagance founded on ignorance of natural
laws."
But " the irresistible maturing of the human
mind," to use Emerson's striking expression,
PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
does not seem likely to favour either of these
classes. It will not, for one thing, allow a
religion that bars thinking. That were to
tolerate what Plato calls " the lie in the soul."
Even a mediaeval pope could see that. Said
Innocent III. : " Falsitas sub velamine sancti-
tatis tolerari non debet ; we are not to tolerate
falsity under the veil of sanctity," a noble
utterance, which it had been well if his Church
had better regarded. But the non-believers
are not likely to survive any more than the
non- thinkers. Feuerbach is not an authority
to-day, though George Eliot translated him ;
and the reasons for scepticism urged by the
eighteenth century encyclopedists are felt
to be even shallower than their opponents'
arguments for orthodoxy. The future is
plainly with that third class who have reached
a religion that at once thinks and believes,
that believes because it thinks.
These last have their own way of looking
at what we have called religion's impossibles,
and it may be helpful to state, in one or two
particulars, what that way is. We may glance
first at the intellectual contradictories. Here,
first of all, it is to be observed that, whether
we accept or reject revealed religion, we shall
RELIGION'S IMPOSSIBLES.
still have to dwell in the region of seeming
impossibles. And that by the sheer limita-
tions of our mental constitution. Whatever
our creed, or no creed, we are, as the most
pronounced Agnostic has to acknowledge, in
contact with an infinite which, on whatever
side we turn, beggars our logic. Both meta-
physics and mathematics can construct pairs
of propositions which, taken separately, the
reason accepts as true, but which, placed
together, stand as hopeless contradictions.
Kant, and Hamilton after him, have drawn
out lists of these in philosophy, and every
mathematical student is familiar with similar
ones in his own department. Religion, then,
as dealing directly with an infinite which
is beyond the range of our intellectual
machinery, cannot be blamed for offering on
its upper side difficulties which are found
equally in every other department of human
thought.
" Very well, so far as it goes," replies the
Agnostic, " but that is not far. Indeed, so
far as Christianity is concerned, it goes no
distance at all, for the argument may be used
with equal force of Buddhism, Shintoism, and
every religion that exists in the world. Are
PEOBLEMS OF LIVING.
they also not grounded on an infinite which
beats our logic ? It is on the under side, on
that sphere of human experience where our
reason is at home, and where science can give
a positive verdict, that your Christianity
shows itself incredible. Its personal Deity,
its Incarnation, its miracles, its morality,
are to-day tried in the balances and found
wanting."
We may look presently at some of these
points separately, but first let us notice one
or two considerations, common to them all,
that are looming more and more in the modern
mind, and that are putting the whole subject
in an entirely new light. For one thing, the
more the problem of personality is considered,
the more clearly is it beginning to be seen that
it is in the supposedly impossible Christian
doctrine of Incarnation that the idea of a
personal God becomes at all intelligible to us.
It is being recognised that, on this planet at
least, man is the appointed organ and voice
of the Eternal Reason, and that only along this
channel has the Soul of the Universe come to
speaking terms with our consciousness. The
personal, as we know it, we admit with philo-
sophy, is ipso facto a limitation, and can never
RELIGION'S IMPOSSIBLES.
be the whole of God. The Absolute in itself
is for ever beyond us. It is
The Somewhat which we name, but cannot know,
Ev'n as we name a star and only see
Hia quenchless flashings forth, which ever show
And ever hide him, and which are not he.
But that Infinite Thought and Heart are, we
see, on this earth, gradually fashioning for
themselves a body and form in humanity.
God, through the ages, is steadily pulsing upon
man as the tide pulses, in successive waves,
upon the shore. The evolution which physicists
point us to as going on in nature is a small
thing as compared with that evolution which
goes on ceaselessly in the inner, the spiritual
realm. The world-process is, in short, as
far as we discern it, the ever clearer exhibition
of God as Person, and that process is by the
method of incarnation.
" But," says our Agnostic, " you are juggling
with words. You are asking us to accept
incarnation as a natural process, but your
Christian incarnation is supernatural : it is
full of the miraculous, and the miraculous, we
now know, is only another name for the
legendary." This has been the talk of culture
during the last two or three generations, but
8 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
here again a new consideration is dawning. It
may well be that a good deal in the Christian
records which hitherto has passed as miraculous
will hereafter be regarded as legendary, but
that will in no wise dispose of an eternal
miraculous and an eternal supernatural in the
Gospel.
What is the supernatural ? When we come
to the last analysis we discover that it is always
what is above our natural. We are super-
natural to our dog. We can do things which
would be miraculous in him. We may, we
suppose, say with Byron that " dogs have a
religion and their gods are their masters."
A civilised being with firearms, electricity,
and all the modern arts, is as a god to a savage,
and often receives worship from him. Each
grade of being is supernatural to the one below
it. When we toss a stone into the air we tran-
scend the laws which belong to the stone. We
may say, indeed, that a man of higher genius
exhibits all this in relation to the common
man. By sheer quality of his nature he does
things which, in the lower man, would be as a
sign and a wonder. How he came by this
nature questions of birth and what not are
not the point at all. The point is that he has it.
RELIGION'S IMPOSSIBLES. 9
It is here precisely that the supernatural
in Christianity lies. There is no doubt that
the early Christian history is undergoing, in
the modern mind, a process of re-setting. We
have been accustomed to think of the Apostolic
age as one in which, for Christians at least,
faith was easy. Beading the Epistles and
the Acts we have thought of those early
believers as living in a world of constant
Divine intervention. Jerusalem, Antioch,
Damascus ; the regions of Asia Minor, of
Galatia, of Macedonia, were all hallowed by the
immediate presence of God, who manifested
Himself by constant miracle. To those re-
ligiously brought up, it is only by a special
effort of mind they realise, what nevertheless
was the fact, that for these early Christian
messengers the world's processes went on
precisely as they do for us to-day. As Paul
journeyed across the Taurus, or pursued his
way by the coasts of the ^Egean, the same
voiceless stars which we now behold looked
down upon him from their glittering depths ;
the grim mountains, the storm-tossed ocean,
the wandering winds, had the message for him
they have for us ; " the eternal silence of the
infinite spaces " terrified him, doubtless, at
10 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
times, as they did Pascal. Not a grain of
sand moved by any other law than moves it
now. Whatsoever of God was to be found in
the universe was no whit more apparent in it
then than to-day.
What, then, had happened ? Where, then,
was the supernatural ? We find it as soon
as we begin to look for it in the right way.
It was in the sphere, not so much of the
physical as of the spiritual, not in man's outer
so much as in his inner world. And the new
spiritual development had come, as always,
through a new personality. We are beating
about the bush hi talking about Christ's
miracles. Christ is the miracle. He is the
spiritual grade above us. He was bound to
come ; history was expecting Him, for she had
taught that it is thus the Infinite is ever
disclosing itself. One grade upon another.
First the stone that lies on the ground, and
then the man who defies its gravitation and
tosses it into the air. When this higher
spiritual comes we cannot say what it will do,
either in the interior world or the exterior
world. We can only wait and see. The
witnesses will probably exaggerate what hap-
pens here ; their story will grow as it passes
RELIGION'S IMPOSSIBLES. 11
from hand to hand, and all allowances will
have to be made.
But these will not affect the general result.
For unquestionably a new note has been
struck. While the external universe remains
what it was, in that spiritual world which is
man's most real abiding-place we discern a
change. The tremors of a new vast move-
ment have made themselves felt. A new
vision of the Eternal has reached the human
consciousness. Men look into the face of
Christ and say with a conviction that trans-
cends all argument that they have seen God.
The outer world is the same as from eternity.
But in the inner all things have become new.
But our opening question is at best only
half -answered. It must be left to another
chapter to discuss those seeming moral impos-
sibles which, not less than the intellectual,
front us in the New Testament.
II.
The Moral Impossibles.
IN our last chapter, dealing with " Religion's
Impossibles," we discussed some of the diffi-
culties to thought which lie on the surface
of the Gospel. We propose to draw attention
to some of the problems it offers as a morality,
a system of living.
As our latest civilisation and the Sermon on
the Mount look each other in the face, do
they in fact discover in each other any trace
of resemblance ? " Lay not up for yourselves
treasures upon earth." But the front places
to-day are for those who have laid them up
most lavishly. " Take no thought what ye
shall eat or drink, or wherewithal ye shall be
clothed." But Society offers us a carnival
of feasting, and is ablaze with splendid apparel.
" Resist not evil ; but whosoever shall smite
thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other
also." But modern civilisation includes the
soldier whose whole business it is to strike
THE MORAL IMPOSSIBLES. 13
back. What can this mean but that civilisa-
tion has tried the New Testament and found
it impracticable ; that while retaining its
precepts as a form it ignores them as a guide
for living ?
Unquestionably we have in all this a
difficulty of belief for the modern mind
not less urgent than those of a more purely
intellectual character which we have already
examined. The Gospel seems at the surface
as impossible on its economic and ethical
side as on that of its supernaturalism and
miracle. But here, as we found in dealing
with that last aspect, some deeper considera-
tions come in which, to a properly-trained
judgment, will make all the difference in the
verdict.
To begin with, as modern research has
abundantly shown, we are all at sea in our
interpretation of the Gospel till we have made
allowance for the Orientalism of its form.
Dr. Wendt, in his Lehre Jesu, has pointed out
a characteristic of the ethical teaching of Christ
to which we have not given sufficient attention.
It is the rhetorical method, perfectly under-
stood by His Eastern hearers, of pushing
antithesis to its extremest form. He urged
14 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
what literally were impossibles, in order that
His words might, as Guthrie used to say,
" strike and stick." In most instances the
very form shows they were not intended as
literal. It was plainly impossible to receive,
as a reward for fidelity, a hundredfold, not
only of houses and lands, but of wives and of
mothers. The statement in Luke, that if
a man hate not father, mother and house-
hold he cannot be Christ's disciple, is in
Matthew expressly changed into " loveth father
and mother more than Me," the two formulas
being evidently intended to mean the same
thing. So the command not to lay up treasure
on earth was perfectly understood by the
disciples, explained to them as it was, in
fact, by the conduct of Christ Himself. His
society had an exchequer, and one that was by
no means always empty. And the collections
which Paul made amongst his Gentile con-
verts, and his instructions to the churches
concerning the raising of funds for Christian
purposes, show that the first believers did not
dream of interpreting Christ's words on this
theme as meaning the abolition of capital.
As Wendt has here so elaborately shown,
the West must learn accurately to translate
THE MORAL IMPOSSIBLES. 15
the East ; must find the proper equation
between the luxuriant metaphors of the Orient
and its own cold literalism of expression,
before it has grasped the true ethical signifi-
cance of the sayings of Christ.
But an explanation of this kind does not
go far. When every allowance has been made,
the Gospel ethic stands at so immense a re-
move from the average human performance,
as to excite despair in some minds and ridicule
in others. Utilitarianism finds in it a negation
of the general working principles of Society;
asceticism regards it as a protest against
civilisation. Through the ages we discern
a long procession of anchorites, monks and
enthusiasts of varied name, who have found
in Christ's words a call to leave the world.
Of later demonstrations of this order one
of the most striking is that of the Danish
theologian Kirkegaarde, a writer less known
than he should be in this country, who,
writing out of a powerful intellect and a pro-
found religious feeling, proclaims the Gospel
as an eternal protest against all the principles
of the world movement of to-day.
But are these opposite interpretations the
only ones from which we may choose ? Does
16 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
the Gospel ethic offer us the dilemma simply
of a rejection of Christ's words on the one
hand, or of a breach with Society on the
other ? Surely not. It is to be remembered
that in forming our judgment here we hold
an advantage which earlier ages did not possess.
We have the ethic p'us eighteen centuries
of history, along which we are able to note
its action upon the world. To examine a
system by analysis of its constituent elements
is in itself something. There is much more when
we add to this a study of its action over great
breadths of time and upon an infinite variety
of conditions. No adequate idea can be
obtained without combining the two. It is
precisely when we take this course and read
Christ's precepts in the light, not merely of
what they contain in themselves, but of their
whole effect upon the world, that we get a
proper appreciation of them. And the result-
ing judgment, we discover, is a balance between
extremes.
For one thing, the Gospel's moral impos-
sibles appear, in this light, not as an objection
to Christianity, but as one of its most striking
evidences. A religion to be of any service
to man must, above all things, be an in-
THE MORAL IMPOSSIBLES. 17
spiration, an appeal to his soul's highest
instincts. Its call must be to the infinite
within him, and the morality it offers must
partake of that infinitude. That is why
religion has always been, for one thing, a
prophecy. It is never content with the
already attained, but calls for an illimitable
progression. It is the soul's eye, which
reveals to us spiritual deeps beyond our pre-
sent range, just as our physical eye offers a
view of unreachables in the starry heavens.
It is precisely because Christianity in its
ethic opens this moral infinite that it has been
the inspiration of the world. Its magnificent
imperative, " Be ye perfect," is at once caught
at by the spiritual in us as the highest truth
and reason of our being. An impossible, but an
impossible which somehow claims to be realised.
And we are at once set in motion towards it.
The movement will be perhaps as that of an
asymptote to a curve which ever approaches
but never touches, but we know it is a Divine
movement all the same. We have only to
contrast the effect on us of this high vision, set
for us in the sky, with that of some easy-going
philosophy of living in everybody's reach,
the everyday wisdom, say, of a Horace or an
18 PKOBLEMS OF LIVING.
Epicurus, to understand how indispensable
it was for human progression that religion
should offer us a moral law that lay, not near
for our easy grasping, but high up in the
heavens for our endless aspiration.
And the soul's verdict here has been abun-
dantly justified by history. Each successive
generation has found the Gospel ethic an
impossible one to realise, but each has, hi
its turn, been, by its mystic drawing, advanced
a stage. The world is absorbing this un-
attainable bit by bit. If anyone would know
the force of the uplift let him read such a work
as the Gesta Christi of Loring Brace, and
learn how the hideous injustices of the earlier
world, its cruelties, its monstrous oppressions,
have, one by one, felt the impact of the new
ethic, and gone down under it. This "eternity
of sympathy and benevolence and purity,"
as Brace calls it, has, he concludes, " floated
everything else in history like straws on its
stream thus far." That ardent Spencerian
evolutionist, John Fiske, predicts the time
when the altruism of the Sermon on the Mount
will become the normal social principle.
" The meek shall inherit the earth." Christ's
doctrine was, he says, a foresight of the moral
THE MOEAL IMPOSSIBLES. 19
world-process and its result. With this celestial
commandment hanging far up above him man
marches " from a primitive social state in
which he was little better than a brute
towards an ultimate social state in which
his character shall have become so trans-
formed that nothing of the brute can be de-
tected in it."
Nothing, indeed, is more interesting than to
watch these results of the Gospel's moralising
process upon the world. It has overthrown,
not only oppressive interests, but equally
oppressive theories. Of late years thoughtful
minds have been weighted with the pretensions
of a physiological determinism which has
declared the moral character to be unchange-
able, depending, as in this view it does, upon
the organic structure and functions. But this
system reckons without the spiritual world,
and it is contradicted by the plain facts. The
savages of Tierra del Fuego had sustained no
radical modifications of organic structure
during the period of missionary labour in their
midst, but even a Charles Darwin bore witness
to the complete moral transformation which
the Gospel had wrought in them. When we
come from the study of races to that of in-
20 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
dividuals the effect of the Christian ethic
and of what lies behind it becomes more
visibly wonderful. The past, happily, has
yielded us not only histories, but biographies.
There are hundreds of them extant, from the
story of Paul to that of James Chalmers,
and the metamorphoses they reveal are a
greater marvel than those of Ovid. The lives
of the earliest Methodist preachers alone, as a
study hi the possibilities of human psychology,
may be matched against all the theorisings
of a Schopenhauer and a Bichat. They reveal
that a central fact of man's nature is its sus-
ceptibility to change under the impact of a
higher spiritual power.
The religious anomalies which modern society
exhibits are not then really the contradictions
they seem. They reveal the differing curves
of a world-process which, despite apparent
aberrations, works towards one end. Civilisa-
tion is humanity hi the making, and the
Gospel ideal, which it often seems to negate,
is all the time working at the task. The
treasures of pearl and gold which civilisation
shows are a part of the world's assets. They
were there to be discovered and to be used.
But Christ's word about humanity's real
THE MOKAL IMPOSSIBLES. 21
treasure still holds, and the soul knows its
truth. The soldiers whom civilisation uses are
symbols of a period of physical force which
even now visibly draws to its close. Each
succeeding war goes nearer to making war
impossible. The temporary setbacks are
nothing in the history of an eternal progress.
While man strays hither and thither in the
search for a completer experience ; while
epochs open for him in which the physical
and material seem to rule, in which his whole
attention seems set upon the possibilities
of his surface life ; ever as he strives and
fights, there shines upon him from its mystic
height this transcendental Gospel, whose
beauty and whose message he may never
forget. Shine on and ever will it, till it
has wooed and won him, till by its soft omni-
potence it has conquered his world's last
injustice and wrought within and without
him its own ultimate of good.
III.
The Coming Creed.
IT is an impressive feature of the present
religious situation that such numbers of earnest
people are in search of a creed. There is to-
day a feeling, not only amongst doubters,
but hi the most religious minds, a feeling so
widespread that it may almost be called
universal, that the creeds which in the orthodox
historic churches stand for Christianity are,
in their present form, the survival of a thought-
world which has been outgrown, and that they
are consequently a hindrance to faith rather
than its bulwark. Perhaps the most signifi-
cant element in this feeling is, not so much
the objections on scientific or critical grounds
to this or that dogma, as the growing suspicion
that, apart altogether from the question of
their credibility, these doctrinal propositions
are not the highest or final expression of the
Christian faith. The feeling crops up in the
most unexpected places. Here, for instance,
THE COMING CUBED. 23
is Westcott, who, speaking of the Thirty-
Nine Articles, says : " It is that T object to
them altogether, and not to any particular
doctrines. I have at times fancied it was
presumption in us to attempt to define and
determine what Scripture has not defined.
. V . The whole tenor of Scripture seems
to me opposed to all dogmatism and full of
all application." From another side John
Wesley, after one of the fullest experiences
ever given to mortal of the action of religion
in human life, declares in his old age : " I am
sick of opinions. I am weary to bear them ;
my soul loathes the frothy food. Give me
solid, substantial religion ; give me a humble,
gentle lover of God and man, a man full of
mercy and good faith, a man laying himself
out in the work of faith, the patience of hope,
the labour of love. Let my soul be with
those Christians wheresoever they be and
whatsoever opinions they are of." The cita-
tion may be fittingly closed with these re-
markable words from John Henry Newman :
" Freedom from symbols and articles is ab-
stractedly the highest state of the Christian
communion and the peculiar privilege of the
primitive Church. . . . Technicality and
24 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
formalism are in their degree inevitable results
of public confessions of faith. . . . When
confessions do not exist the mysteries of
Divine truth, instead of being exposed to the
gaze of the profane and uninstructed, are kept
hidden in the bosom of the Church far more
fruitfully than is otherwise possible."
These witnesses had all signed creeds ; they
belonged to Churches which bristled with
dogmatic propositions. Yet what is evident
is that at the back of their minds lay a con-
sciousness, not formulated, and therefore all
the more powerful, that the strength and
vitality of the Church lay quite otherwhere
than in its tables of doctrine. And as we
look through the history of the Christian
centuries we find everywhere confirmation of
this truth. The creeds arose out of the specu-
lative, not the religious spirit. The " heretics "
speculated first, and the Church met them
with counter-speculations of its own. To
wade through the literature of those early
centuries, the literature which lies back of the
creeds, is a discipline of incredible tediousness,
but it helps one greatly to an estimate of the
value of these products.
The ages that produced the formularies
THE COMING CREED.
were the least vital ; the periods when they
had the fullest sway were those of the greatest
licence and degradation of character. Gregory
of Nyssa gives us a vivid description of the
absorption of the Eastern peoples in doctrinal
metaphysics, when " knots of people at the
corners of the streets in Constantinople dis-
cussed incomprehensibles, when, if anyone
asked for a bath, the reply was, ' the Son of
God was created from nothing.' " And yet
was there ever a more frivolous or licentious
population ? And in Europe, during the
Middle Ages, when the Roman dogma had
the completest outward ascendency, the life
of the people was at the farthest remove from
the New Testament ideal. Dip into the
English chronicles, say, of the fourteenth
century, and you find that what religious
spirit there is dwells mainly in the rebels
against the prevailing dogma. The Lollards
did some wild things. They smashed images,
and as with the stalwart knight who took
home the consecrated wafer and lunched on it
with wine and oysters, they took at times odd
ways of expressing their dissent. But the
genuine Christianity of character and life at
that time was, all the same, with Wycliffe's
26 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
" poor preachers " and the disciples they
gathered.
This kind of inquiry wherever pursued
gives the same results, and they are not
favourable. But while theology and the
Church, in the matter before us, yield only a
negative outcome, another experience, in a
different field, has meantime been accumu-
lating its treasures, and at an opportune
moment, is able to offer them for the eluci-
dation of our problem. That half -expressed
feeling of the unsatisfactoriness of the Church
formulas, as either a ground or a statement
of the faith, which we found in a Westcott,
a Wesley and a Newman is, when we turn in
another direction, suddenly illuminated, and
shown as by a flash in its true logical relations,
by the light which comes from another sphere.
While the Church has been busy with its
propositions, another power has been quietly
rising by its side, and influencing with an
ever-increasing potency the sphere of human
affairs. This power is science, in its applica-
tion to the arts of life. We talk of creeds.
What are the creeds of science and how does
it express them ? When we have understood
the bearings of that question, and of ita
THE COMING CREED. 27
answer, we shall possess, if not the solution
of our theological problem, at least a sub-
stantial help towards it.
Modern science may be said to be a church
which has no infidels in its constituency ;
whose decisions are accepted by all classes ;
whose work is everywhere recognised as
beneficent ; and which advances, with ever-
increasing speed, toward the conquest of its
world. What, we ask again, of its creed ?
Undoubtedly it has one ; but it has come by
it, and it uses it, hi a quite different way from
that to which the Church of theology is ac-
customed. For one thing, it has reached its
infallibility by persistently refusing to be
regarded as infallible ; by making mistakes
and acknowledging them ; and by leaving all
its decisions open to every species of test.
And theology will only regain the ground it has
lost, and secure once more the world's intel-
lectual respect, by following in this track. It
will have to renounce its bogus infallibility,
and gain its certitudes where only they are
to be found.
But this part of the method of science, im-
portant though it be, is perhaps not the chief
lesson it has to teach. That comes when we
PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
study the way science uses its creed. It is
not, we discover, occupied in incessantly re-
peating it. It does not sing, chant or recite
it. It does not impose it as a test, or require
a subscription to its articles. Yet its creed
is ever present, at the base of all its operations.
And it cannot afford to be incorrect in it, for
error throws all its operations into confusion.
Observe an engineer as he plans and builds
his bridge. His entire working belief is there.
His theories of statics and dynamics ; his con-
victions about currents and wind pressures,
about leverages, about the properties of the
arch and of its thrust on buttresses ; his views
on the relation of beauty to utility, all are
there. He has- not sung them, or shouted
them or subscribed them. He has built
them into his bridge. His creed is embedded
in his work. And men, when they find the
work good, proclaim the creed to be sound.
Our engineer, it may be observed, has,
outside his work, all manner of theories. He
may have interesting things to say on the
ultimate properties of matter ; may doubt,
with Berkeley, whether matter exists at all
apart from mind. But the world will take
his ideas on these outside questions lightly.
THE COMING CREED. 29
They are at least " pious opinions," which he
may hold or not hold, and no one a penny the
worse. What men insist on is that his beliefs
on bridge-building and the other things which
he contracts to do shall be sound. In that
sphere they will tolerate no heresy.
In this way of using its creed, science, we
repeat, has, just now, a lesson of supreme
importance to teach theology. The Church,
if it be wise, will also discover that its belief
is given it, not for incessant subscribing and
chanting and repeating, but as a plan to work
by. Its creed should be a programme. No
article of it should be allowed that cannot be
expressed in the form, not so much of words
as of works and institutions. Is not this,
after all, God's way of expressing Himself ?
He has a belief, we may be sure, but He is
marvellously sparing of words. Time was
when men held that He had shouted pro-
positions from the clouds. To-day we are dis-
posed to say with Thoreau, " The perfect God
in His revelation of Himself has never got to
the length of one such proposition as you,
His prophets, state." He has said enough
to us, but not in words.
When the Church has found this way of
30 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
expressing itself it will have no trouble with
heretics. We put our creed into a word,
and straightway our neighbour is ready with
his counter- word. The ring of our syllables
irresistibly invites opposition. But when we
have put our belief into our character, into
our deed of kindness, into our hero-sacrifice,
there is no room for arguing. And what of
our creed cannot be expressed in these ways,
what of it remains as mere words, untrans-
lateable into things, may well be left out.
The Church of the future will, there is little
doubt, organise itself upon these lines. The
coming creed will be a programme ; it will be
a statement of the laws of the spiritual forces,
and of their application to the regeneration
of men. And the business of the Church
will lie in that application. Its life will be
found, not so much in its verbal affirmations
as in the institutions it develops, the character
it creates. The great apostles and evangelists
of the race have instinctively gone upon these
lines. Wesley accepted the theological con-
ceptions of his time, but his working power
lay in a creed which was a programme. He
believed in a living God, revealed to him in
Christ, and he believed in a present spiritual
THE COMING CREED. 31
energy which by faith and prayer could be
made operative to the converting of men.
With these for working principles he could
have cut away most of his speculative notions,
and no harm done.
The Church began without the creeds, and
it has no more need of them to-day than in its
first age. The missionary will go forth now, as
then, equipped with a Power and a Programme,
and will find them enough. Taking in his
heart the love of God and of his fellow, the
mind of Christ and the Spirit's energies, taking
with him also, as far as may be, the arts and
crafts by which God's revelation of perfect
human living is expressed, he will win new
victories of faith, and with none to gainsay the
triumph.
IV.
Religion and Justice.
ONE of the most significant features of modern
thinking is the shifting it discloses in the centres
of moral interest. The Church needs to take
note of the fact that the questions men are now
asking are not those for which its formularies
provide answers. What the masses are dis-
cussing to-day is not justification, but justice.
The artisans of the Continent have become
almost fiercely hostile to organised Chris-
tianity, because, in their view, it is allied
with a social system which oppresses the
worker. They scorn its charities and ask
that instead they may receive their rights.
While ideas of this kind are germinating
amongst the people we find some of the best
minds moving along a similar track. Tolstoi
and Ruskin unite in making the redress of
social injustice religion's first work, if not its
ration d'etre. The theologian Rothe declared
that if Christ were to return to earth now His
RELIGION AND JUSTICE. 33
interest would lie in social and economical
rather than in ecclesiastical developments.
The younger generation of religious teachers
are possessed more and more by the same
thought. In Germany an influential school of
theologians is devoting its whole religious
ardour to reclaiming, in the name of Chris-
tianity, a more equitable basis for the common
life. Students at college are being told that
in their preparation for the pastorate their
study of Numbers must be, not that of a
book in the Pentateuch, but of percentages
of work and wages, of cubic feet of air allotted
in workrooms and sleeping-places, of the death-
rate in certain trades. In some prophets of
the time the new sentiment has taken the
place of the religious passion of an earlier
day. The intensity of its note is seen in
this typical passage of Maeterlinck : " For
it is enough that we should feel the cold a
little less than the labourer who passes by,
that we should be better fed or clad than he,
that we should buy any object that is not
strictly indispensable, and we have uncon-
sciously returned, through a thousand byways,
to the ruthless act of primitive man despoiling
his weaker brother."
8
34 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
The significance of all this, for discerning
minds, becomes the plainer when we remember
that it is precisely from movements of this
kind in the human thought and feeling
that history is made. Every action, says
Emerson, has a thought for its ancestor.
These thoughts before long will bring forth
actions. Their general spread and acceptance
is the more striking when we consider the
past that is behind them. The sentiment of
justice, as we now understand it, is one of the
world's latest growths. In the great Pagan
civilisations, so full as they were of intellect
and varied power, the very idea was non-
existent. The Greek citizenship, as expounded
by an Aristotle, rested on a basis of slavery,
in which the slave had no rights. In India
the caste system, which shut up each class in
limits it could never pass, was wrought not
only into the religion but the very life of the
people. And amongst the Western nations,
so slow has been the perception of rights, that
the English Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel was, at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, an owner of slaves.
Yet it was in England, amongst the Western
peoples, that we discern the first movings of
RELIGION AND JUSTICE. 36
the public mind towards a true theory of social
conditions. Hobbes in the seventeenth cen-
tury had made an incursion into this field,
but his anti-social system, which regarded
man as naturally at war with his neighbour,
and Government as a divinely-ordained power
for keeping him in check, was early felt to be
an unsatisfactory solution. Cumberland, who
followed him, argued in opposition, that the
social system rested not on mere force but on
sentiments of justice and altruism resident in
human nature. His argument as to the rights
of private property shows, however, by what
tentative and halting steps the idea of public
justice has progressed. He shows with much
acuteness that property holding is justified
by the fact that an undisturbed possession by
the individual of goods and tools is necessary
to the general well-being, but he entirely over-
looks the question whether the original dis-
tribution of these goods was in any sense a
just one. Hume, in his turn, treats of justice
in relation to property, and argues that the
problem here has arisen from the fact that
there is not enough of external goods to go
round. The notion of justice has been evoked
because, first, the supply of goods is not ade-
36 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
quate to the general need, and, secondly, be-
cause man as an individual is selfish. Herbert
Spencer's treatment of the theme is more
abstract. He defines justice as the principle
that every man has freedom to do what he
wills, provided he infringes not the equal
freedom of any other man.
The cautious and temperate movement
of the English mind on these questions is
in striking contrast with the fierce rushes,
the wild leaps in the dark, of Continental
theorists and leaders. The " Contrat Social "
of Rousseau, viewed in the light of modern
knowledge, is the absurdest of theories, but
it was a call to arms which precipitated the
Revolution. Later came the still wilder
"phalanstery scheme" of Fourier, and later
still, the German Socialism of Marx and
Lassalle, whose fundamental assumption was
that capital is the people's foe and oppressor.
Amongst millions of working men in Germany,
France, Belgium, and other European countries
that idea still holds sway. With these multi-
tudes Socialism is a religion ; the capitalist
is the enemy, private property is robbery,
and the Church as its upholder is a participator
in the crime. The abolition of the whole
RELIGION AND JUSTICE. 37
existing system is a condition of the worker
coming to his own, and of the human progress
towards the millennium.
The movement which has reached this ex-
treme has provoked rejoinders of not less
violence. The fiery denunciations of a Las-
salle have been met with the finished cynicism
of a Nietzsche. To the charge that the
propertied classes have exploited the workers,
the philosopher replies, " Quite so, and it is
precisely their business to go on exploiting.
It is the proper function of the strong to
compel the weak, and they can do so without
fear, for the weak will always be weak and in
their power."
Most of us, however, realise that the social
question is not to be settled by cynicism.
What are the other ways ? There is that of
fact and argument. The attack on capital,
for instance, which has characterised the
cruder Socialism has been, for all thinking
persons, conclusively refuted. It is one of the
first lessons of political economy that without
a reserve force, such as capital represents,
there would be no possibility even of living,
to say nothing of progress. The idea, also,
still cherished amongst the proletariat, that
38 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING.
the world's wealth is produced entirely by
the "labouring classes," and that capital is
largely a robbery of their proper share, has
also again and again been disproved. What,
for instance, are we to make of the simple
fact that three times as much wealth is pro-
duced now by the same working population,
that is, by the same muscular power, as hi an
earlier generation ? What has made the
difference ? Not the labourer, but the think-
ing brain behind him. The real question here
is, " What are the proper wages of ability ? "
A calculation has been made that, of the Eng-
lish national income, labour produces five-
thirteenths, and the fruits of invention and
combination that is, of applied ability
eight-thirteenths of the whole. In other words,
it is the thinker who has been the great wealth-
creator ; and as the sum works out, this man
behind the labourer call him combiner, in-
ventor, capitalist, entrepeneur, what you will,
the brain behind the tool appears to have
taken for himself actually less rather than more
of the balance due.
Clearly, if the destruction of capital, or even
the equal sharing of it amongst men, be the
demand, it is for ever an impossible one, for
RELIGION AND JUSTICE. 39
the nature of things is against it. Were we
all put on a pound a week to-morrow, the old
inequality would be rampant in a fortnight.
Some would have spent all, others would have
saved ; there would be the clever use of the
pound and the stupid use of it, with the result
that the old cry of the " haves " and " have
note " would again be heard in the land. The
supposition, indeed, that social justice means
equality is one of which all sane men should
by this time have effectually rid themselves.
There is no such thing in heaven or in earth.
The universe was not built that way. On this
supposition the ant might shriek its wrong in
not being an elephant, and the human family
in a mass revolt at not being archangels.
It is strange that amid all these confused
cries for " rights " and for " justice " it has
occurred so little to men to inquire as to what
have been the real factors in men's progress
and happiness. For, when we look beneath
the surface, we find that the Power behind
the scenes that has really created history has
worked on a plan that pays no attention
seemingly to these watchwords. The human
uplift is traceable almost always to something
so different. We know astronomy, we travel
40 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
by railway, we read Hamlet, we conquer small-
pox, we listen to the " Moonlight Sonata,"
we experience religion's sublime emotions and
inward victories in a word, we enjoy our
whole human inheritance, not because of
social programmes, but because Newton's
and Stephenson's, and Shakespeares and
Jenners and Beethovens, and the prophets and
apostles of the Spirit have from time to time
appeared amongst men and conquered for
them a fresh territory of life. " The value of a
truly great man," says a modern writer, " con-
sists in his increasing the value of all mankind."
Somehow heaven's method with us in these
matters goes so much deeper than our Par-
liamentary prattle. A dozen great souls vouch-
safed the world to-day in different departments
would be worth all the political manifestoes.
The key to the social problem is a deeper
one than that of political economy. It is the
New Testament key. It is a matter not of
codes, but of spirit. The French Revolution
and kindred attempts have sought to bring
the millennium in by force. Sois mon frere
ou je vous tue. But men will not become
brothers by a threat of being killed if they
don't. The art of social living is learned not
RELIGION AND JUSTICE. 41
in the school of polemic, but in that of the
Crucified. We shall only secure the human
brotherhood through the Christ love and
sacrifice. When by God's mercy a fresh bap-
tism of that Spirit comes upon us we shall get
our justice. What good men will then come
to see is that the real conception of the human
relation is that of a household, a family.
There is no equality in family life. The
parents have a different position, a different
influence, a different income from that of their
children. But the differences contribute to,
rather than take from, the family happiness.
The strength of the strong here is for every
weak one, and the love is from each for all.
The whole question is one of feeling. The
sentiment we have inside our door is simply
to be carried outside. No child within our
doors, while we can help it, will go without food,
or clothing, or education, or opportunity, or love,
and when we have all transferred this feeling to
the other side of our door, have made it the
working idea of the community, we shall be solv-
ing the social question in the only way in which
it can ever be solved. Here is a Church pro-
gramme that might well unite us all. It is that
of building the State upon the Mind of Christ.
V.
Cosmic Free Grace.
THE immense movement of ideas observable
in modern theology has given birth to the
fear that a serious portion of the faith held
by our fathers has disappeared. That is far
from the truth. What has happened is not
a disappearance, but a resetting. All that is
vital in the earlier creed is still with us, but
in a changed form. It is almost a rebirth,
but one in which the old lives again in the
new. Science, for instance, is giving us back
the theological predestination in its concept
of law and heredity. And the whole of what
the old divines knew as " the doctrines of
grace," now almost foreign to our generation,
will, we predict, come back upon us with
the force of a new conviction when reset hi
that greater cosmic conception to which the
later research has introduced us. It will be
seen that the order of things under which we
live is, substantially, none other than that of
COSMIC FREE GEACE. 43
the " free grace " which Augustine and the
Puritans proclaimed. What is more, the
range of the doctrine will be found to be far
wider than that of theology proper. It affects
in the most intimate and vital manner our
conclusions as to the economic and social
questions about which the world is wrangling
to-day.
The doctrine of the old divines was that
we were in the universe as pensioners on a
royal bounty ; that, personally undeserving,
we had received everything for nothing ;
what we held was not a debt paid to us, but a
gift bestowed ; our position was one, not of
rights, but of privileges. And this doctrine
of our position furnished the doctrine of our
duties. It was not enough for us to render his
" rights " to our fellow. We were to stand to
him as, in our turn, we stood to the Higher
Power. As we had " freely received," beyond
and apart from our desert, we were " freely
to give." What we owed our brother was
not what he had earned and could demand
from us, but the best we had to give. It is,
by the way, worth noting in this connection
that Augustine, in that great compendium
of his doctrine, the " Enchiridion ad Lauren-
44 PEOBLEMS OP LIVING.
tium," gives the widest range to the idea of
" alms." He speaks of every good we offer to
others, such as advice, comfort, discipline, as
alms, and he regards the highest " almsgiving "
as the forgiveness of sins and the love of our
enemies. The whole notion, comprehending
every part of life, is that we are not under law,
but under grace.
To-day, as we noted in the last chapter, the
world is fascinated by another conception,
that of " justice." This is the watchword of
the toiling classes. The cry is not for gifts,
but for rights. And the reason is that the
deepest sense with many of them is of wrongs.
Life as they see it is a system in which they,
the unprivileged, are shut out from a due share
of what is going. Their religion accordingly
is an effort to get that share. They see on the
one side the luxury of the Park Lane millionaire,
and on the other the privations of the sweated
labourer in John Street, and find here a mon-
strosity which is to be repressed. And this is
to be done by a struggle. Man is a belligerent
animal, and has an inherent love of a fight.
And a fight for his " rights " stirs him to the
depths. The modern toilers do not, in this
campaign of theirs, look for any extra-mundane
COSMIC FREE GRACE. 45
assistance. A great thinker has told them
"there is no justice in the outside universe;
it exists only in the human soul." But they
will get then 1 justice, and by their own efforts.
The campaign shall be waged in the Press, on
the platform, at the polling booth ; if need be,
on the stricken field. " We will win our
rights, and by our own efforts secure a just
world as between man and man."
And truly a great idea is that of justice as
between man and man. If there is nothing
better to be had this certainly is something
to be striven for. That no one shall be allowed
to grind his fellow ; that a surcease shall be
put to monopolies which appropriate the
greater results of industry to the benefit of a
few, leaving only a bare subsistence to the
producer ; that old age and helplessness shall
not, in a solvent community, be allowed to
spell starvation ; that the goods of the world
shall be so distributed as to give everyone
his opportunity of joy and of development
these are results to gain which every honest
man may well buckle on his armour. But
the question remains, " How are they going to
be gained ? " It is precisely here that the
modern theory of "justice," as a sort of
46 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
commercial equation between competing indi-
viduals, breaks down. It will not work any
way, and that because it is contrary to the
idea on which this universe is built.
To take as an illustration the burning ques-
tion of the distribution of goods. In the pre-
ceding chapter we noticed one of the fallacies
of the earlier socialism in the matter of labour
and its reward. Thirty years ago it was
argued with the utmost vehemence on the
Continent, and still is argued in some circles,
that the fruits of industry belonged to the
manual worker because he earned them. The
other classes, in taking the share they held,
robbed the worker. We pointed out that,
as a matter of business calculation, the enor-
mous increase in the world's wealth of these
later generations has been due, not to the
efforts of the manual labourer, but to the
skill, the combinations and the enterprise
of the investor and the capitalist. But is
this a cynical plea for things as they are ; an
argument which shields the monopolist in
his exploitation of the suffering million ?
That would be a very hasty conclusion.
The figures we gave, according to which ability
and combination gain eight-thirteenths of
COSMIC FREE GRACE. 47
the national income while labour gains five-
thirteenths, tell their own story. But what
is the story ? If our social system rests on
the modern notion of " right," on the payment,
that is, to each man of what is due, the hand-
ing over the counter to the separate agent
the net result of what his hand, brain, or
resources have produced, then the stronger
and the cleverer will go on getting most of
what there is, and will let the feeble and the
unendowed scramble for the leavings. And
on the bare " justice " theory how are we to
condemn him ? That theory, indeed, offers
no logical ground of condemnation. But
there is another theory and a sounder, which
puts him in his proper place.
For it is, we repeat, not upon the " justice "
principle that humanity is being developed, or
by which the individual, in body and soul, is
to come to his own. The distribution of pro-
perty, in a shape that will satisfy the moral
consciousness, will not begin till the community
at large recognises that the " wage due theory,"
the " cash-nexus theory," is not good enough.
If the men who declare that " there is no
justice in the outside universe " will only
examine the universe a little more
48 PBOBLEMS or LIVING.
they may, perhaps, discover that its method
is, after all, a great deal better than theirs.
For it is a method of grace and not of debt.
The lesson it offers on the social question is
writ large, for those who look, on every page
of life. The capitalist, the inventor, the strong
man who produces wealth, would by this law
be convicted as the grossest defaulter if he
interpreted his duty to labour simply by the
figures of the ready reckoner. He will only
begin to do it when he discovers himself to be
under another principle, not extractable from
arithmetic, a law which bids him pay not
according to debt but to grace.
We might get the whole proof of this without
stirring from the point where we find ourselves.
The very fight for human rights itself offers
us all we want. For what is this battle,
and how has it come about ? Did it spring out
of a debtor and creditor account ? Do the
Tolstois and the Ruskins appear on the scene
battling for Russian serfs or Dudley nail-
makers as the result of a capital calculation
or distribution ? When the people get any
measure of their " rights " is it not because
leaders are given them whose very appearance
and endowment is a reversal of the supposed
COSMIC FREE GRACE. 49
law of equality, and whose work is neither
inspired nor paid by any calculable wages ?
Herein, surely, is a strange thing. To get
our economical justice we have to wait for
men who come into the world, not because
the world has paid them to come ; who, when
here, work for a wage which the world has
no means of paying ; and whose leadership,
while the truest factor of progress for the
mass, annihilates equality by setting them
so far apart from the mass !
And the law which works so manifestly in
this department meets us in every other. Our
best work can never be done for wages ; and
it can never be paid in wages. We begin
by being immeasurable debtors. We come
into the world with an endowment of faculty
and opportunity that was all unbought.
No word passed between us and the universe,
but there was the gift waiting. We look back
across the ages, and we see that a myriad
noble souls were there before us, and we enter,
without a farthing of payment, into all the
heritage of their suffering and their achieve-
ment. It all spells one word, Grace. The
universe is built upon free giving and free
receiving. If we cannot see that, we are blind
50 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
indeed. And, seeing it, there is only one thing
left us to do, and that is to follow in this
glorious cosmic way of things, and to offer to
our God and to our fellow the best that is in
us in return.
The universe, we say, being interpreted,
gives us back again our old Gospel. For a
doctrine of grace is a doctrine that by the
necessity of things is saturated with the Divine
Personality. Law may be conceived of as
without a heart, but grace never. It is the
sense of a great love that enwraps humanity,
that has suffered for it on a Cross, that is at
the heart of all genuine reforms. It is this
which will win us all our rights. They will
come by no other process. Without it we
might perhaps capture a world and gain the
right to be supremely miserable in it. Whether
I am employer, or fellow-worker, or employed,
I shall do well if in these relations I am loving
well, and am well beloved. The rights of man
or woman are the rights secured by the grace
in themselves and in their fellows. There
are no others worth having. To get this
spirit back into the world is the way of its
redemption. At the Cross, whence we look
into the heart of God, we learn that our highest
COSMIC FREE GBACB. 51
right is that of a free giving. There, we find
no better battle-cry than this :
O Lord, that I could waste my life for others,
With no ends of my own,
That I could pour my life into my brothers,
And live for them aloae.
VI.
Of Sacred and Secular.
AMONGST the problems besetting and bewilder-
ing our age, not the least puzzling is that which
lies around the words " sacred " and " secular."
The modern man comes into the world with
a tradition on this subject which grips him
every day, but of which he can give no
satisfactory account to himself. The Church
shares his dilemma, and is uneasily conscious
that the boundary lines here have been badly
drawn, and that a revision is necessary. ' ' Why
is this sacred and that secular, and what is the
ground for the division between them ? "
It is not a new question. The eighteenth
century asked it with a characteristic im-
patience. Said Rousseau : "As soon as he
is born man is wrapped in swaddling clothes ;
when he is dead he is sewed up in a shroud.
All his life long he is pinioned by laws, manners
and customs, decorum and professional obliga-
tions." The reply of the Revolution was to
OF SACRED AND SECULAR. 53
cut out the " sacred " and bring all to a
secular level. But the experiment did not
turn out well, and we shall not repeat it. To
reach a solution that will satisfy us to-day two
things are necessary. We need to re-explore
the ground on both sides of the dividing lines,
and also to study the process, the evolution
by which these boundaries themselves came
into being.
To begin with a definition. It will be
sufficiently accurate for our purpose if we say
that the " sacred " as commonly understood
is that which is associated with worship and
the exercise of the religious feelings, while in
the " secular " is included all that falls outside
this category. When, armed with these defini-
tions, we set out on the proposed inquiry, we
find the first fact meeting us is the remarkable
one, that in the history of civilisation it is
invariably the sacred that comes first. What
we know as the secular is always a later evolu-
tion. If, for example, we take the subject of
legislation, now regarded everywhere as a
secular business, there is not one of the ancient
systems that was not originally held to be of
Divine origin. The Egyptians referred their
code to the god Thoth ; Minos was said to
54 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
receive his from Jove ; that of Lycurgus in
Sparta came from Apollo ; Zoroaster in
Persia was inspired by Ahura-Mazda ; Numa
Pompilius at Rome by the nymph Egeria ;
and we are all familiar with the story of the
Mosaic law-giving.
But this is only one illustration out of many.
Everywhere does the secular find its origin in
the sacred. The Greek drama was originally
a religious function ; and its arts of painting
and sculpture were immediately associated
with worship. In Christendom the same law
has obtained. The Church of the earlier ages
took upon itself to organise the whole of
human affairs. In documents such as the
" Apostolical Constitutions " and the later
Canon law we have life, from the cradle to the
grave, definitely mapped out. What are now
known as the secular arts and professions were
all of ecclesiastical origin. The modern drama
has its root in the mystery plays ; architecture
was first mainly concerned hi the building of
churches ; painting and sculpture were de-
veloped for their adornment. Literature, in
the early Christian period, was confined to
theology and the lives of the saints. And the
history of any new religious movement, we
OF SACRED AND SECULAR. 65
discover, follows exactly the same process. It
resembles always what geologists give us as the
story of our planet. The movement is at first
molten ; then follows a process of cooling and
hardening, until upon the solid crust there
appear forms and developments which seem
remote and alien from the first fiery phase.
The fruits of a revival will, in the next genera-
tion, appear often as successful commerce, or
as an impulse to scientific and philosophic
investigation.
The question now arises, How came it that
developments of civilisation which began in the
sphere of the " sacred " should find, as we see,
their later resting-place in the " secular " ?
The history of the process is the history of the
Church's mistakes and shortcomings. The
mistakes were of its intellect, the shortcomings
of its heart. To understand what happened we
need to begin with a diagnosis of religious
exclusiveness. One needs a clear insight here,
for nowhere have good and evil been more
subtly intermixed. At the beginning of reli-
gious movements men taste a peculiar rapture.
It is an intense emotion associated with a sense
of intimate intercourse with the spiritual world.
God is known and felt as a Person. The
56 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
dwellers in this inner circle discover that they
are the recipients of unutterable things. Into
the soul flow tides of energy that translate
themselves into the sense of pardon, of fellow-
ship with the Highest, of victory over the
world, of immortal hope beyond the grave.
It is felt, and rightly felt, that in comparison
with such experiences life has nothing else
that is equal to offer. And most natural is it,
further, to conclude that whatever seems to
interrupt the flow of such celestial intercourse
is harmful, and should be placed under taboo.
We are here at the secret of the whole
business. It is precisely at this point that we
discover how the highest individual aspirations
may fail to adjust themselves to the wholeness
of things. Our religionist will at all cost keep
up his fervour. Good ! But he has fed it
solely upon one kind of food. And he has no
notion of a possibly beneficial change of diet.
When for his inner development, in addition
to the prayers, the exercises, the spiritual
records which have appealed to him hitherto,
there is offered a whole new range of ideas and
activities, his instinct is to start back and refuse.
There is a story of one of the early Methodists
who, on being presented in the interests of the
OF SACRED AND SECULAR. 57
King's English with a grammar, returned the
gift with the remark that he could nowhere find
Christ in it. Wiser than he, Ignatius Loyola,
at a similar point in his history, came
to a different conclusion. After the raptures
attendant on his conversion he found he
was very ignorant, and that if he was to
exercise any influence in the world he must
conquer learning. But to give up his spiritual
communings for such pursuits seemed to be
leaving Paradise for the desert. But that
way, he saw, lay his duty. The pampering
of religious feeling was not everything, might
at times be even a harmful thing. He must
" leave God for God," " ad majorem gloriam
Dei."
The failure to see this has, with religious
men, been at the root of all the mischief. The
idea that there was no other food for the
soul than that they had known, for one
thing, narrowed immeasurably their outlook.
Imagine, for instance, the sheer waste of time,
in a world with a million things to learn, that
has gone on for centuries as the result of the
monkish theory of the religious feelings ! Think
of people, as in the Eastern Church, year after
year, going through the daily repetition of the
58 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
Psalms, going through the same eternal round
at Lauds, Prime, Tierce, Sext, Nones and
Compline ; with what good to God or man ?
How weary the heavens must be of this cease-
less grind of words ! And there is so much to
do that is useful !
But that was not the worst. Into a far
more disastrous blunder did the Church fall
when it identified its spiritual treasure and its
religious feeling with a world-view which
science was discovering to be inadequate and
erroneous. What that blunder meant for
civilisation Lecky has described for us. " Every
mental disposition which philosophy pronounces
to be essential to a legitimate research was
almost uniformly branded as a sin, and a large
proportion of the most deadly intellectual
vices were deliberately inculcated as virtues.
The theologians, by destroying every book that
could generate discussion, by diffusing to every
field of knowledge a spirit of boundless credulity
. . . succeeded in almost arresting the
action of the European mind."
In the light of these hints we discover how
our two separate territories came into being,
with the boundary wall between them. On
the one side was religion, enamoured of its
OF SACRED AND SECULAR. 59
high emotions, unwilling to admit anything
that served to hinder their flow, and in their
supposed interests thrusting out or stamping
down all that was new and strange. On the
other side a whole fresh world of sciences,
arts and interests developing out of the religious
consciousness, yet disowned by it ; sure of
themselves and of their right to exist, yet
ostracised by their parents ; growing away
from their first home, and so, to a large extent,
strange to the inspirations which that home
alone could supply. So have we to-day the
spectacle of a " sacred " of Sabbath, Church,
Bible, ministry, worship and creed, with a
" secular " of science, politics, business, art
and amusement, each eyeing the other askance,
unable to find their true basis of relation, or
to exercise reciprocally their proper and
legitimate influence.
It is time this state of things should cease.
With a knowledge of the point where the first
false steps were taken it is for us to strike
afresh the right track. Past ages have wit-
nessed a progress from sacred to secular. It
is ours to reverse the process and find the way
from secular to sacred. The early short-
coming was really moral as much as intellectual.
60 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
It lay in a want of faith. The average sense of
God was so feeble, the flow so limited, that it
could only keep running while in the narrowest
channels. Spread over a wider surface it
seemed to lose itself. We have to-day to rise
above this weakness. The Christian soul has
to cultivate a wider receptiveness. In every
aspect of the universal life has it to find its
food, recognising that at the heart of every-
thing is God. That deeper insight by which a
St. Francis saw in the natural forces, such as
fire and storm, brethren to be loved, because,
like himself, they were God's servants indwelt
of Him, must more and more be ours. The
wider world-sense which enabled a Justin
Martyr, one of the earliest Christian writers,
to recognise all men " who had lived according
to reason as Christians, because the Logos, the
Eternal Reason," had been their inspirer, must
again be sought and found of the Church. It
has, as a modern French writer well observes,
"to beware of a religion that substitutes itself
for everything ; that makes monks ; and to
seek one which penetrates everything, for that
makes Christians."
In a word, religion must found itself on a
wider synthesis. Only thus can it reconquer
OP SACRED AND SECULAR. 61
a world half of which it has allowed to slip out
of its grasp. To science, to art, to commerce,
to the drama, to amusement, it must resume
the relation which it had at the beginning, and
which only its own folly has dislocated. No
religion is complete without a relation to
every department of life. No department of
life is complete without a relation to religion.
There is no science, no art, no true pleasure in
which a properly-adjusted nature cannot imme-
diately find and enjoy God. We have to learn
to-day the sacredness of the secular, the avenues
to the very Holy of Holies which open up from
the commonest duties. A great physician of
the past, Dr. T. W. Latham, in a lecture to
medical students, has put the gist of the matter
into one memorable sentence : " Happy indeed
is that man whose moral nature and whose
spiritual being are all harmoniously engaged
in the daily business of his life ; with whom
the same act has become his own happiness,
a dispensation of good to his fellows, and a
worship of God."
vn.
Religion's Silences.
THERE is, perhaps, in the history of religion
nothing more striking, nor, in a way, more
pathetic, than the human hunger it reveals
for a clear, undimmed mental outlook. In
every age men have asked from Faith a full
explanation of life, and have in succession
shown every degree and form of disappoint-
ment at not getting it. The dream of a theo-
logical chart of the whole universe which
haunted the Middle Ages and found its ex-
pression in the " De Divisione Naturae "
of a Scotus Erigena and in the gigantic
" Summa " of an Aquinas, is still with us.
Men ask to-day with the same na/ivete as of
old for the clearing up of every mystery.
Every prominent religious teacher is bom-
barded with inquiries for exact definition.
Now it is a question of the person of Christ,
again of miracles, again of the validity of
Genesis ; an explanation is wanted of the
RELIGION'S SILENCES. 63
Atonement, or the Trinity, or the state after
death. Unless the special difficulty of the
questioner can be met there is no Faith
for him and no Christian life.
This demand for a religion of absolute and
scientific precision of idea on all the subjects
of human speculation is entirely natural,
and one that we have all shared. But it is
time now that we understood what this ex-
pectation is really worth. Studied in the
light of history, it discovers itself as a will-o'-
the-wisp that has steered believers and
unbelievers alike into the bog. The Church
led the way when, under its influence, it pro-
ceeded to define and authoritatively pronounce
upon all the questions which its wiser first
period had left open. The bog was reached
from the opposite direction when the revolting
Western mind, declaring these definitions to be
unscientific and outgrown, rejected both them
and revealed religion with them. It was the
strange aberration of the eighteenth century to
confound the Church's " Greek metaphysics,"
as Dr. Hatch calls them, with the essential
Christian revelation, and to discard both, as
though they were one. When Condorcet
tells us " there is not a religious system
64 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
or a piece of supernatural extravagance
that does not rest on ignorance of natural
laws," and when Diderot, even more ferocious
in his attack, speaks of Christianity as "Of
all systems the most absurd and atrocious,
in its dogmas the most unintelligible, meta-
physical and intricate," they are simply
confronting one ineptitude with another. It
is difficult to say which party to the contro-
versy exhibited the more stupidity the Church
which claimed to explain everything and de-
clared its explanation infallible, or these
objectors, too short-sighted to see over the
poor wall of ecclesiastical pretension to the
immense reality that lay behind.
In our own day the disappointment is
expressing itself in another fashion not less
curious. The critics of Christianity, finding
it fail to reply with clearness to all the ques-
tions proposed, revenge themselves by de-
claring it destitute of any distinctive light
at all. It brought, they say, no new ideas into
the world. Its Golden Rule was anticipated
ages before by Confucius. The Sermon on
the Mount has its finest maxims forestalled
in Hillel and Shammai, in the Egyptian
"Book of the Dead," in the Indian Pan-
RELIGION'S SILENCES. 65
chatantra and Matrabharata. " Why," it is
asked, " should we worry other people with
our costly and dangerous missionary cam-
paigns, when they possess in their own teach-
ings all the really essential ideas that Chris-
tianity has to offer ? "
There is in this latest position a miscon-
ception just as gross as in that earlier one
of the eighteenth century. The mistake be-
comes evident when we pass from a priori
ideas as to what Christianity ought to do,
to what it really proposes to itself, and to
what it really accomplishes. One cannot
study it understandmgly for five minutes
without becoming certain that its role is
distinctly not to clear up mysteries, nor to
present us with an encyclopaedia of the know-
able. Rather does it open to us continually
fresh mysteries, and when it has filled us with
longing for their comprehension falls into
wondrous silences concerning them. It has,
for instance, no philosophy either of beginnings
or of endings. Genesis is an epic and so is
the Apocalypse. Neither is history. The
one is a splendid chant of the dawn of life,
while the other, in Milton's magnificent words,
ifi simply " the majestic image of a high and
5
66 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
stately tragedy, shutting up and intermingling
her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold
chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."
The same reticence is visible in the whole body
of its teaching.
The central revelation of Christianity is, of
course, Jesus Christ, but here note how little
of positive knowledge the sources offer us
concerning Him. The New Testament calls
Christ the Son of God, and theology has ever
since been dying with curiosity to know
the precise scientific value of the term. It
must have its theory of the Incarnation ;
it raises discussions as to ousia, hypostasis,
prosopon, phusis. Consider what, with all
our theological prepossessions thick upon us,
we should have expected in an authoritative
account of Jesus, and then turn to one of these
accounts ! We open the Gospel of Mark,
recognised generally as our earliest history ;
written, tradition says, under the eye of
Peter, to find that the things about which
the greatest pother has been made are simply
not there. As to the lineage of Jesus, the
manner of His entrance into the world, the
position of His mother, the metaphysics of
His relation to the Father, this writer has
RELIGION'S SILENCES. 67
no word. The simple wondrous story he offers
raises in us a storm of questions to which the
answer is silence. The like is true to what-
ever part of the New Testament we go. Mar-
vellous facts are flung down before us ; immense
issues are raised ; we are stirred to the utmost
pitch at what we read ; there are a thousand
things we want to discuss, but ere our mouths
are open the curtain is down and the seance
over.
The same is true of the great Christian
doctrines. Enough is said to stir the soul
to its depths, but not to give it clear defini-
tions. We may quote here some pregnant
words of a great German thinker. Says
Lotze : " Christian theology calls Christ the
Son of God, the most distinctive article of
Christian belief. But it does this in a figure,
the exact significance of which is by no
means positively determined. The figure taken
simply indicates that intimate nature of the
relationship between God and Christ which is
clear to feeling. There is no explanation of
the mode of that relation. So, also, religious
feeling meets the Christian teaching about
the redeeming power of Christ's death with
ready faith, but definitions do not help it."
68 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
Christianity, we repeat, does not exist for
the sake of its definitions. It gives us facts
enough and knowledge enough for the great
feelings, for the great beliefs, and for the great
life, and leaves the rest undetermined. It
recognises from the beginning, what a Goethe
has in these later ages put for us into words,
that " the highest and most excellent thing
in man is formless, and we must guard against
giving it shape in anything save noble deeds."
Here, too, is the answer to those who to-day
complain of the paucity in the Gospel of new
ideas. One might say much on this question
which the vaunters of Hindoo and Buddhistic
morality might find it hard to answer. But
the point, after all, is not there. It is hi this,
that New Testament religion has made itself
potent and necessary in the world, not so
much by its speech as by its silence, not so
much by its spoken word as by its deed,
by its unseen, mysterious work on the human
heart and character. The new thing which
it has brought into the world, and with which
we can never again dispense, is a new temper,
a new life. Some of its utterances may have
been known before, but a thing never before
seen was the societies of men and women
RELIGION'S SILENCES.
gathered in the name of the Crucified, into
whom had been breathed a spirit which
triumphed over sin, sorrow and the grave.
Two points here suggest themselves. Chris-
tianity is a religion of silences, of reticences
that at times are to us, not only mysterious,
but most hard to bear.
For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by
the veil
When, however, we are disposed to repine at
this feature of our lot, let us remember that
religion's mysteries are great because the life
it deals with is on so vast a scale. Science,
which in destroying the cheap theologic
cosmogonies of an earlier time had seemed to
do Faith a disservice, has in reality supplied
it with a far nobler pabulum. For in opening
up to us a physical universe vaster than any
which our fathers conceived, it irresistibly
suggests the parallel that in like manner
the spiritual universe, the realm of love, joy,
holiness and immortal life is a reality, vaster
in height and breadth and depth than our
highest thought has touched.
The other point is that religion's silences are,
in another point of view, simply the limitations
of our present spiritual development. Science
70 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
tells us of a world of sound perpetually rolling
around us, but which is at once above and
beneath our hearing capacity. Our auditory
nerve answers only to a certain range of
vibration. So it is in our spiritual culture.
When we speak of the awful silences of the
unseen world it is only another way of saying
that most of us are deaf. That elect souls
here and there have heard a " thus saith the
Lord," which when uttered has been called
" revelation," means simply that our race pro-
duces from time to time a certain number of
open ears. " Religion's silence " is, after all,
a relative term. When our spirits are attuned,
the " silence " changes into a still, small,
but always recognisable Divine voice.
VIII.
A Doctrine of Remnants.
THE cosmic scheme we live under includes
plainly a Discipline of Remnants. The unseen
law ordains that at a swiftly coming period
of our career we shall seem but a fragment of
our former selves. The athlete of thirty years
ago walks with stiffened limbs to gaze at the
impossible feats of his successor. Faded poli-
ticians, actors, preachers, watch from their
obscurity the men who now fill the public
eye. How the old stars have paled ! Is this an
irony of nature ? Is there a sardonic humour
overhead which delights in turning our poor,
boastful humanity inside out and showing how
ridiculous it is ? If there be any jesting in
the spheres we certainly lay ourselves open
to it. Our modern inflation and frantic
self-advertisement invite rebuff, and we get
it. Do men who live solely in the breath
of popular applause ; who are never easy unless
the limelight is on them ; whose attitude is a
72 PEOBLBMS OF LIVING.
perpetual cry, " Behold me, good people, I
am important," ever reflect on what is await-
ing them ? They will be taken down in good
time. And yet not unkindly. For behind the
remnant-discipline there looms a remnant-
doctrine, and it is one that should not only
console but inspire. There is, doubtless,
humour in the universe, a humour which shows
in the treatment we get. But it was for some-
thing other than laughter that the strokes
were ordained that leave us so often only a
fragment of ourselves.
Early in history did our doctrine begin to
disclose itself to the finer minds. The Old
Testament is full of it. As there stated, it
deals with the community rather than the indi-
vidual, but it has abundant suggestion for our
personal fates. The pressure of moral and
political calamity turned the whole Jewish
mind upon the significance of the remnant.
The study left them with the conviction that
the remnant was the essential. In morals it
was the minority that saved. Ten righteous
would have preserved Sodom. A later voice
declared of Israel that " had it not been for a
very small remnant we had been as Sodom
and even as Gomorrah." After the exile it
A DOCTRINE OF REMNANTS. 73
dawned upon the prophetic spirits that the
shattering of the kingdom was the beginning
of a larger destiny. It was not out of the
monarchy, out of the State in its vigour and
prosperity, but from this broken remnant
that the religion was to arise whose later de-
velopment should conquer the world. The old
organism had been smashed that something
imprisoned in it might be liberated for a vaster
mission.
The prophetic view here has received the
confirmation of history. The evidence has
been ever accumulating that the remnant-
doctrine represents one of the laws of life.
At first sight it might seem a hard and even a
senseless one. " What," we exclaim, " sacri-
fice the bulk for the sake of the remnant ?
Why this waste ? Why so much blossom
on the ground for this tiny fruit on the tree ;
thousands of blooms for our one little ounce
of attar of roses ; a new religious conception
at the price of a nation's shattering ? What
use to preach economy, when the nature of
things under which we live is such a reckless
prodigal ? " The objection would be a real
one if it represented the whole truth. But it
leaves half the fact unstated. We forget here
74 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
that the fabrics and organisms which, in
breaking up, yield this remnant are not them-
selves really wasted. To be dissolved is not
to be lost. The blossom on the ground is as
much cared for as the fruit on the tree. The
structure that has gone is yet in another sense
here, precious, imperishable ; destined, in
other forms, to the service of the Whole.
It is to be noted also that our remnant,
while representing on one side an evident loss,
exhibits on another a vast accretion. When
Michael Angelo had finished his " Moses,"
the statue was, in a sense, only a fragment of
the block out of which he had hewn it. Yet,
balancing every piece that had been struck
off, a something had been added. Concur-
rently with the visible wastage was there a
spiritual inflow. The stroke that severed the
marble replaced it with a sentiment, with an
impress of artistry, with the reflex of a soul's
beauty. And so the statue ended by being
immeasurably greater than the block. We
should miss the whole formative idea of the
doctrine of remnants did we not recognise
this same process on the wider scale of world-
history. Again and again do we find, both
in the community and in the individual, that
A DOCTRINE or REMNANTS. 75
the shrinkage of visibles has been simply a
clearing of the road for the passage inward of
incomparable invisibles. In a true evolution
there is, in fact, no giving up without this
answering intake. We have dropped one
value to receive a greater. The rude bulk
has vanished ; but, could we see, we should
find in its place a secret energy and a vast
promise. Christianity has translated this cos-
mic mystery into its doctrine of renunciation,
of dying to live. Giving up is simply making
room. Of St. Francis it was said, " Ante
obitum mortuus, post obitum vivus " " dead
was he before dying, and alive after death."
He had hewed away at his externals till there
seemed next to nothing left. But so vast was
the answer from the Unseen, that this de-
nuded life was, in its generation, the richest
and most potent of all.
As, with this clue in our hand, we survey
the great world-processes around us, we reach
an inward assurance that fears not the most
revolutionary changes. The changes are
coming. The compacted system of thought
and belief which our fathers bequeathed to us
is in parts visibly cracking and breaking down.
But as we look closer we discover a something
76 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
hidden there, an indestructible fragment of
which this system has been the appointed
guardian, and which, as the old framework
passes, is to be the corner-stone of a new and
nobler structure. We need not be afraid of
the new when we have learned that it is
always the old we cherished carried to a
higher expression. We may melt our theo-
logy and find in the process a vast shrinkage
of the original bulk. But not an ounce of its
pure gold will have disappeared.
We began this theme, however, for the
sake mainly of its bearing on our individual
lives, and it is time we turned more definitely
to that one of its aspects. On the broad scale
we have seen that the remnant is the last
thing we should despise or despair of. But
it is precisely when we apply the doctrine to
our personal fates that our faith is apt to fail.
We do not like being a remnant. We are not
good at fighting what seems a losing battle.
" Our line is broken : then sauve qui pent."
There are numbers of people who die simply
because they have not the courage to live.
Chalmers, the great missionary, reports how
the natives he worked amongst, when smitten
with disease sank, he was convinced in many
A DOCTRINE OF REMNANTS. 77
instances, simply because from the beginning
they gave up hope. And he tells how, on
the contrary, he once willed himself back to
life. At death's door with fever and believing
himself passing, he heard some of his native
helpers bewailing then: certain doom in savage
New Guinea if their leader died. He realised
at that moment that he could not afford to
die. His will awoke, he called on his fading
energies, and from that moment his face was
turned from death. And we remember how
Melancthon recovered because Luther's faith
would not let him go.
The world is full of people whose whole
happiness and inner salvation depend upon
their doctrine and practice of the remnant.
We have referred already to the decay and
obscurity of later life. But the position is
equally true of multitudes in their prime.
With them also the fragment is all that seems
left. They have lost the thing which made
life desirable. Their fortune has gone, or
their friend, or their health. Passion has
wrought disillusion. The man or woman on
whom they had staked their affections is
not what they thought. The cup which
brimmed and sparkled has turned into a
78 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
draught of bitterness. Is this then life's
defeat ? Not unless we choose. Some of
us are old enough to recognise that the crush-
ing blow of years gone by was the stroke that
liberated our true self. It was when we were
forced back from the path we craved the
entrance gate slammed in our face that
we found the road on which our destiny was
to be accomplished. There is no loss of
fortune, no wreck of personal affection, no
disaster in the sphere of the visible, but can be
turned by the soul's inner energy into some
higher phase of living. Pascal, as his sister
tells us, made his ill-health into a means of
spiritual perfection. Wesley accepted the
wreck of domestic happiness as another call
to his public work.
And as the cultivation of the remnant in
ourselves is often our personal salvation, so is
it with that of our brother man. In the home
and the more intimate relations it is here the
question is decided of desert or paradise.
The husband, the son, may be large part of them
savage. The higher human is in them as a
thin streak, a fragment. But to discover
that, and work incessantly upon it, ignoring
the rest, is the supreme art of wifehood and
A DOCTRINE OF REMNANTS. 79
motherhood. Here also is the ground and the
hope of all evangelising. Noblest work as-
suredly is this to which any mortal can lend
himself, to believe in and back up the hard-
pressed spiritual in our brother, until it can
stand of itself against the overwhelming odds,
and expel the Philistine and the Canaanite
from its promised land.
If we have correctly stated the facts of
life as related to this theme, they point to
one conclusion. Exposed as he is to such a
destiny, there is for man no middle term
between despair and faith. If our seeming
failures and disappointments, our loppings
and prunings on every side, have not their
solution in a higher and infinite destiny, for
which these things are a preparation, then
indeed is our life a sordid mockery. The
sinister advice of the gloomy Roman satirist
Interea, dum fata sinunt
Jungamus amores
" Meanwhile, as long as the fates permit, let
us enjoy our lusts," would to multitudes seem
natural and in place. Renan's terrible sug_
gestion in the " Abbesse de Jouarre " that
humanity without hope would deliver itself
up to unbridled licentiousness has in it a
80 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
ghastly probability. Indeed, to-day where
faith is weakening the tendency is all in this
direction. Men revenge themselves against
the cosmic cruelty by a reckless indulgence.
"After a certain age there is nothing left but
the pleasures of the table " the remark at a
city banquet is the modern echo of " Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Strange
that the revolt of our highest instincts against
such a solution should not convince men that
it is false and impossible. The whole world-
process is against it. If, looming out of his-
tory, we see everywhere the doctrine of the
remnant ; if nations and systems dying down
leave ever behind a something precious that
survives ; if physical wasting means so con-
stantly an inner and spiritual accretion, why
should we not carry the doctrine to its legi-
timate conclusion, and hold, as religion's
mystic voice affirms, that the break-up of our
physical frame means again a survival ; that
this last catastrophe is for a new and greater
beginning ?
IX.
Our Enemy.
To have an enemy is an experience common
to us all. We may be the most pacific among
mortals, but we cannot escape being in oppo-
sition to somebody. Hostility fronts us some-
where, if not in our individual, at least in
our corporate and communal capacity. To be,
for instance, an Englishman is to stir the bile
of a dozen outside nationalities. We are
part of the world, whose present aspect would
almost justify Hobbes' contention that warfare
is man's natural condition, and that peace is
a mere truce and interlude. The nations
glower at each other from behind their arma-
ments. Each people nurtures its grudge
against its neighbour. We are fain to believe
the cynic couplet :
Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure,
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.
And while this is the result of a world-survey,
82 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
the prospect is not dissimilar as we narrow
the view. In England one-half of us is at
loggerheads with the other half on account
of religion. The odium theologicum still con-
tinues to poison the sweetest natures. It was
with this in view surely that Lucretius wrote
his terrible line :
Saepius olim
Religio peperit scelerosa atque
impia facta.
We do not now burn each other alive, but
when a Newman, so naturally amiable,
described as " like Scott able only to see the
best and highest in human character, hoping
ever against hope," could write, " a publisher
of heresy should be treated as if he were
embodied evil," we realise what an abiding
and formidable source we have here of human
estrangement.
In addition to these outside and public
causes we find our private life, from time to
time, yielding us " our enemy." In our
journeying onward there falls upon us now
and again the shadow of another man's
dislike. Without meaning or wishing it we
find ourselves standing in some one else's
way. Our interests clash, and we become
OUR ENEMY. 83
the mark for a rival's hostility. Or it may
be a matter, not so much of outward interests
as of innate antipathies. Human nature has
its unaccountable attractions and repulsions.
There are temperaments which inevitably
jar one upon another. The qualities which
draw to us one type of mind produce revulsion
elsewhere. " That man dislikes us," we say
to ourselves, " and he cannot help it."
Life, then, as we know it, contains " the
enemy " as a part of its usual conditions.
The point now is, what place does he take in
our philosophy ? Where do we put him in
that inner code we have framed of our daily
thought and procedure ? That is a Sphinx
question which meets us all to-day, and
demands an answer under penalties. As the
average man looks round for that answer he
finds himself confronted by all manner of
complicated problems. Human history, cosmic
history and the Sermon on the Mount appear
hopelessly at issue. And if the seeming
quarrel here between science and religion can
be settled, is he any nearer a working code ?
Is the Sermon " practical politics " ? What is
really meant by its doctrine of forgiveness
and of non-resistance ? Here are matters
84 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
which it is impossible to discuss with any
approach to completeness, but on which,
nevertheless, we will venture some hints.
Without entering on the critical question
which scholars raise as to how far Christ's
teaching, here as elsewhere, took the form,
constantly used and recognised in the East,
of rhetorical extreme, let us ask ourselves
first how the doctrine, as given us in the Gospel,
relates itself to human and to cosmic history.
At first sight there seems a gulf. The doctrine,
we say, is a peace doctrine, yet the world as
we know it appears to be organised on a
fighting basis. Everywhere is there the clash
of opposites, and it is by these mighty strivings
the universe is kept going. Our planet is held
in its orbit by the tug of war between a cen-
tripetal and a centrifugal force. Evolution is
all through a gigantic struggle. Fiske is
not exaggerating when he declares, " battles
far more deadly than Gettysburg or Gravelotte
have been incessantly waged on every square
mile of earth's life-bearing surface since life
first began." And man from the beginning
has been a fighting animal. He has fought
for his tribal and national existence, for his
territory, for his religion, for his commerce.
OUR ENEMY. 85
Almost every human result hitherto has been
blood-bought.
In the face of this, what is the meaning of
Christ's teaching ? Is it a pronouncement
against history and the cosmic scheme ? Does
His " I say unto you " declare these imme-
morial struggles, with their blood and tears,
to have been a blunder and a crime ? Such an
interpretation would be an utter misunder-
standing both of Christ and the past. It
would be an accusation not merely of man
but of God. Very different does the message
appear when set in its true framework, as
part of the nature of things. It then reveals
to us Christ as taking His place not against
evolution, but in the line of it, and unfolding
to us the mystery of its higher law. The earlier
fight had been for a purpose ; it was a needed
fight, and it was still to go on. But hence-
forth with new weapons. What happened
to the world in the advent and teaching of
Jesus was, in the moral sphere, precisely
what had been continuously witnessed in other
departments of life the supercession, namely,
of a lower power by a higher. Humanity in
its progress is continually evolving new forces,
each more subtle than the last. In the
86 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
physical region it begins with muscle, gets
by-and-by to steam and railway, until elec-
tricity promises to supersede both. The fresh
instrument is at first handled awkwardly,
and leads to all manner of accidents. The
primitive sailor would do better steering
by the coastline than by a compass he did
not understand. The savage prefers his bow
and arrow till he learns the mystery of the
rifle. There will be a hecatomb of aeronauts
before man has conquered the upper air.
In like manner, in the moral sphere, Christ,
with His doctrine of forgiveness and of " non-
resistance," brought, we say, into the human
conflict a new weapon which, in time, will
supersede the old. His " non-resistance " did
not mean the discontinuance of fighting.
Christ was the greatest fighter the world
has seen. Alone He stood up against the
mob, against the priesthood, against the
empire, against almost everything there was,
and with the might of His single personality
fought for a new kingdom and a new style of
life. The weapon He introduced is only just
beginning to be understood, so slowly does
human history move. But as surely as electric
traction will take the place of animal haulage,
OTJE ENEMY. 87
so surely will Christ's way of dealing with evil
and with " our enemy " supersede the brute-
force method of an earlier time. It is not
so much theology as science that is to-day
affirming this. Herbert Spencer has hinted
as much in his " Ethics," and that ardent
Spencerian John Fiske declares that the next
stage of human evolution will show an enorm-
ous increase of altruism and sympathy. The
Christian doctrine, he declares, was a foresight
of the scientific result.
Christ's method was to oppose to the enemy
the force, not of muscle, but of the soul. That
force could not have been used before humanity
had reached a certain level, for it was not there.
But its mystic pulsations are now being felt
over ever-widening areas and with ever-in-
creasing distinctness, and there can be no
doubt what the result will be. Men are timid
at trying a new law. It is like mounting a
bicycle for the first time. But the expert
knows the new law is as sure as any of the
old ones, and will never fail him. The early
Christians were experts of the higher knowledge.
Those of whom Athenagoras says, " When
struck they do not strike again ; when robbed
they do not go to law ; they give to those who
88 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
ask of them, and love their neighbours as them-
selves," were men who knew themselves as
conquerors. They were in charge of a force
against which swords and spears were as
nought. And wherever since it has been
tried the results have been equally unmistak-
able. In John Woolman's delightful Auto-
biography, we read how he went, single-
handed and unarmed, to preach the Gospel to
a tribe of Indians, actually on the warpath
against his own countrymen, delivered his
message, and returned without a hair of his
head being injured. And the heroic mission-
ary of the South Seas, John G. Paton, records
how a band of native Christians visited a
cannibal tribe who had threatened with death
any who should approach their village. " We
come," said the chief and his companions,
" without weapons of war. We come only to
tell you about Jesus." Spears were thrown
at them, which they secured and turned aside
with their bare hands. " The heathen were
perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked
on the Christians as protected by some In-
visible One. We lived to see that chief and
all his tribe sitting in the school of Christ."
The conquest of the world by this new
OUR ENEMY. 89
spirit may be accomplished sooner than
present appearances would seem to indicate.
What we have to judge by is not the bristling
armaments so much as the new thought that
is working in the minds of men. It is astonish-
ing how quickly the world can be swept clean
by a fresh idea. Never was the stage coach
system so developed, so prosperous, so seem-
ingly established as on the eve of its disappear-
ance. A thought came into the mind of
Geordie Stephenson, and stage coachism was
gone. History is made not by treaties and
diplomacies, but by the working towards the
front of a deep, common impulse that possesses
the souls of men.
And while these ideas are preparing to
rule and remake the world, it is for us to gladly
open our hearts to their sway upon our individ-
ual life. He is a babe indeed who has not yet
learned the bliss of forgiving his enemy, the
bliss of returning good for his evil. There are
so many reasons for forgiving him, and all
good ones. He may have a just cause of
offence against us, and then, plainly, our
business is not reprisals, but personal amend-
ment. Nine times out of ten, hostility is an
affair of misconception. " He threw the water
90 PEOBLEMS or LIVING.
not on me, but on the man he thought I was,"
was the calm comment of Archelaus of Macedon
on the citizen who thus behaved to him. When
abused for what is really foreign to our
character the reply is to exhibit our true
character. " Not to do likewise is the best
revenge." Our enemy is never entirely our
enemy. The best part of him is our friend, and
the appeal of our highest to his highest will
be precisely the help he needs in his conflict
against himself. However our material inter-
ests may clash, our spiritual ones are the same,
and can never be furthered except in this way.
And amongst all the delights tasted by the
epicures of sensation there is none with a
more exquisite flavour than this of gaining,
in the simple Christian way, the confidence and
esteem of a brother who has been divided from
us. In this treatment of " the enemy,"
whether public or private, the New Testament
ethic is the most daring experiment which the
book of history records, but it is one whose
soundness is revealed by every new test. Here,
as elsewhere, Christ has revealed to us the
ultimate law of human living.
X.
At the Front.
" AT the front " is a phrase which a great
war burns into our minds. It means the line
of extremest exposure. It is curious to note
the gradations of endurance amongst a people
who are waging a campaign. At the farthest
rear are the home irresponsibles, who pay no
costs, incur no risks, and to whom the war is
mainly a subject of gossip. Beyond these are
the taxpayers, who have a stake in the matter,
who lose with the war's losses, but who per-
sonally are shielded from its real horrors.
Further in front are the executive government
who carry a wearing strain of responsibility.
In a totally different position from all these
are the men in the actual field of operations.
But even here there are gradations. Those
on the lines of communication, occupied with
the mechanism of transport, may go through
the war without being in sight of the foe. But
finally there is the man who, by ship, by train,
91
92 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
by long marchings, has in succession passed
all these halting-places of his countrymen,
until he is at a point where there is nothing
between himself and the bullet of the enemy.
He is "at the front." In the firing line each
man carries the whole tragedy of the war in his
own single breast. He is at exposure's utmost
limit, at the very meeting of life and death.
In an army this is the post of honour. The
man who has stood there and stood well is a
veteran. It is a place which the best men
choose. In the list of British dead, after
a battle, one has noted always the large pro-
portion of officers. They fell because they
understood that, for honour's sake and for
the sake of the rank and file behind, they
must be "at the front."
That is how matters arrange themselves in
time of war. Let us look now a moment at
the conditions in time of peace. There is up
to a certain point a striking parallel. Up to
a certain point ; but here emerges an enormous
difference, upon which it will be well to direct
some attention. In our civil society, just as
in our military operations, there is a firing
line, a point of uttermost exposure, and behind
it, at successive removes, the halting-places
AT THE FRONT. 93
of the sheltered and protected classes. As to
the front rank, any winter's experience enables
us to trace its outline with a deadly precision.
In that struggle for existence which we call
peace we are most of us at a farther or less
remove from the firing line. Against the
fierce elemental powers, against frost and
snow, against cold and hunger, we are sheltered
behind the walls of our homes, behind our
bank balances, behind our strength and
energy. But we read in the papers of men,
women and children who, in this battle, have
no entrenchments. They are veritably " at
the front." The fortunes of our peace- war
have thrust them beyond the shelter of homes.
The midnight cold finds them in the open.
Without employment, without clothing, with-
out food, between them and barbaric Nature's
wildest onset there is nothing.
So far the parallel holds. In campaigning
abroad, and in the social state as we have it
at home, there is equally a line of utmost
exposure. As the soldier faces the extremity
of hardship, the full brunt of the actual and
all the terrors of the unknown, so here, in full
view of the rest of us, is it with the files of our
unendowed. But now opens the strange and
94 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
sinister difference. In military operations the
front line is furnished with leaders. Precisely
where the exposure is greatest there, at a
pinch, you will find the best stuff in the army.
The firing line notes its officers in front, and
is heartened by the sight. And the central
commanding brain of the force is working
at every point of that line. The advance is an
organised business. The front is a post of
honour and a way to power. But in the other
condition all this is reversed. On this firing
line we have an endurance that is without
leaders and without hope. Its hardships
win no battles and gain no glory. There is no
presiding genius directing its operations, no
gladdening sight of a leader who shares the
danger and cheers with inspiring words. The
ranks here are a rabble and not an army.
They have not chosen the post, but have been
driven there by grimmest fate. The foe is
armed to the teeth, but these bear no weapons.
Their one consciousness is of helplessness and
despair.
Here, truly, is something for us to reflect
on ! We decry our militarism, but it is our
civism that needs mending. Our war is far
less cruel than our peace. What is the remedy ?
AT THE FRONT. 95
It is when we begin to discuss this question
that the vastness of our social disorganisation
appears. The masses suffer because they are
without a head, without a system, without a
programme. An army comes to disaster when
every man has his plan, and is left to carry it
out, and that at present is our civic state. In
crises of this kind the separate impulses of the
individual are no remedy. Their very oppo-
sition adds only to the confusion. Selfish-
ness and generosity defeat each other's ends.
In the hunger time one man makes a corner in
provisions, and enriches himself through the
general starvation. His neighbour, driven by
conscience and the sight of the suffering, pro-
poses to strip himself of his property and
become as poor as the rest. But would the
self-sacrifice of the one be any more a solution
than the selfishness of the other ? We doubt
it. In nine cases out of ten it would be to
transfer resources from good and capable
hands to hands that were neither good nor
capable. The mere impulse to make things
easy all round is not a help, but a mischief.
Carried out on a general scale, it would result
simply in a rush of the improvident to the
centres where the good things were going, in
96 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING.
a swift deterioration of ability and character,
followed at no distant period by social bank-
ruptcy.
We shall not get our solution till we have
more squarely faced the question, " What
is it that our front line needs ? What are its
real foes and how may it be helped in the
fight against them ? " Let us understand to
begin with that this enemy is not mere physical
endurance, mere physical hardship. These are
not enemies. In humanity's balance-sheets
they can never be reckoned on the adverse
side. They are part of the making of man-
hood. If they were out of reach we should
die for the lack of them. The strenuous fore-
most nations have everywhere been brought
up on hardship. The Spartan system drew
on it as a recipe for victory. In modern life
men will rush from the luxury of clubland that,
in Thibet or Central Africa, they may satiate
the desire within them for hunger and thirst,
and weariness and danger. Where men and
women give up the strenuous life, the ele-
mental conflict with nature, and entrench
themselves at the farthest remove from the
front, intent only on a soft indulgence, we see
speedily the pass they come to. We have the
AT THE FRONT. 97
spectacle of a fashionable society, diseased at
its centre, poisoning the air with the stench
of its vices. And in healthier sections the
question needs assuredly to be pondered,
which Professor William James pointedly asks
in his Gifford lectures, " Whether the modern
easy system of bringing up children is not
developing a certain trashiness of fibre ? "
Hardship is not the enemy. The foe that
haunts our poor front line has a grimmer
aspect. His name is Despair. And the way
to fight despair is not by alms or by coddling,
but by work. We need to reorganise our
front line on a basis of work. Work, nothing
else and nothing less, is the gospel of social
salvation. It is a gospel that has to be
taught. Many of the feckless ones on the
line of exposure are there from the lack of
will rather than of opportunity. Very
well, a will must be found for them. If
there is not one inside, a will outside must
serve. Society must perforce add here to
its benevolent compulsions. Knowing, as
we now do, that neither State nor individual
can prosper apart from labour, the daily
task must be made compulsory, just as
education or the decent covering of the body
98 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
is compulsory. Here Germany, with her
labour colonies, may well instruct us. The
loafer must cease out of the land. In a com-
munity where everybody is healthily at work,
hopelessness and despair die a natural death.
But evidently to reach the consummation
of a universal, wholesome industry is a question
of something more than of the worker himself .
Most of our front liners are willing, but where
is the work ? It is here we see the chaotic
condition of our social system. It is only the
rudiment of a formation, a mob rather than
an army. We cannot put up much longer
with this barbarism. The human family,
recognising its essential solidarity, is casting
about to-day for the organs of its expression,
and will not be long in finding them. One of
the first stages in the new evolution will un-
questionably be in a municipal and State
organisation of labour. Its special function
as a beginning will be a supply of alternative
tasks. The immense specialisation of modern
industry has made our workers helpless out-
side of the one detail in which they are pro-
ficient. When business is slack in the Leicester
shoe factory, or the composing-room of the
London printer, the shoemaker and the com-
AT THE FRONT. 99
positor are straightway " unemployed." That
is a condition which the State must remedy.
It must have its organisation of alternative
industries. There need be no lack of these.
The work is waiting. It is the co-ordinating
mind that is wanting. Half our cities need
rebuilding ; great agricultural areas wait to
be developed ; vast treasuries of underground
wealth lie unopened. Not a fraction of the new
toils need be unremunerative. Denmark has
shown us how the State, stepping hi as teacher
and director of agricultural enterprise, con-
verted in a few years one of the poorest coun-
tries in Europe into one of the richest. Eng-
land, which spent two hundred and fifty millions
in the war in South Africa, can afford to back
its own people in their war against want.
There is no superfluous population. Every
individual can be a wealth-creator, if the
community will give him his chance.
But the communal responsibility here does
not destroy our own. If war's code of honour
sends the officers to the firing line the Christian
code in this other fight has something not less
stringent to say to the religious man. The
asceticism of some of the great saints was
evidently their answer to this call. They
100 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
wanted to be in humanity's firing line. " Where
my brothers are, at the point of utmost ex-
posure, there must I be, to share their feeling
and to hearten them by my faith," was evi-
dently the argument that went on in their
soul. And it cannot be well with us, either
in this world or the next, if we skulk in our
entrenchments, or seek only to penetrate
nearer the centre, while on the far periphery,
where the guns are booming, our brothers are
left by us to fight their grim battle uncom-
passionated and unhelped. Says Bunyan,
"Woe be to those against whom the Scriptures
bend themselves." Against none do they bend
with a sterner menace than those who, in the
absorption of their own self-regard, have for-
gotten their neighbour. When we have ceased
to care for and help our brother we have
turned our back upon God.
XI.
Principles and Persons.
OUR moral and religious loyalties are continually
posing us with difficult problems. Of these
none are more confusing than the rival attrac-
tions of principles and of persons. We are
here continually pulled in opposite ways.
The people who most fervently utter our
shibboleth are often those we least admire.
" So and so," we say, " is perfectly sound on
our position. But oh, if only he were a
gentleman ! " On the other hand, we meet
somebody whose views have been a bugbear
to us for years and straightway fall in love
with him. " Don't introduce me to that
man," said Lamb once. " I feel it my duty
to hate him, and you can't hate a man when
you know him ! " One might, indeed, at first
sight suppose there was really no connection
between persons and principles, that the labels
were there by chance, and had nothing to do
with the essential character. Could one
101
102 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING.
imagine a greater difference between the formu-
lated theology of General Gordon and the
views of Charles Darwin ! And yet these
two men produced on Huxley the same moral
impression. Says he of Gordon : "He and
Darwin, of all the people I have known in
my life, are the two in whom I have found
something bigger than ordinary humanity
an unequalled simplicity and directness of
purpose a sublime unselfishness."
To conclude, however, from observations
of this kind, that principles have no causal
or effective relation to persons would be
to take a most superficial view of the matter.
The search for the truth here leads through
winding and difficult ways, but the path is at
every point full of interest, and it opens
finally upon the widest prospects. It brings
us to the old-fashioned conclusions, but with
new reasons for them. Everywhere, as our
fathers taught us, principles rule character
and create it. The seeming anomalies clear
themselves away when we look a little deeper
into what we mean by principles, and into
the way in which they work.
In such a quest one of the first discoveries
is that people's so-called views, religious or
PRINCIPLES AND PERSONS. 103
otherwise, are often enough not their life
principles at all. A remark of Bishop Creigh-
ton, in one of his mediaeval studies, illustrates
what we mean. " In mediaeval times," says
he, " men were much more concerned to
have an ideal than they were interested to
realise it. They rejoiced in the possession
of principles, but they were chary in applying
them." The Bishop might have gone further
here. In the religious wars he was depicting
the opposing theological propositions of the
combatants were not really their principles.
They were simply watchwords, rallying points,
for the concentration of opposing hosts whose
real motor power was the fighting instinct.
There are, of course, times when the written
or spoken formulary does express the inner
passion, but it is by no means always. The
distinction here is simple enough, but we are
continually overlooking it, and floundering
in consequence.
With the mediae valists, as with ourselves,
principles governed character, but the prin-
ciples did not, and do not, always lie in formu-
lated propositions. The deepest things in
us are ideas, but ideas that as yet have
not got into human speech. They are, in
104 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING.
Tennyson's words, " deep-seated in our mystic
frame." They constitute what Milton speaks
of as " the utterless facts." One of the axioms
of M. Taine's philosophy was that every
man is a theorem a bundle of principles work-
ing out. It is a far cry from Taine to Plato.
The world-views of the two men were most of
them as the poles asunder. Yet in the Greek
thinker's position, that all things and persons
have as their essence an antecedent type,
an eternal idea that is expressed hi the forms
we see, there is an unmistakable kinship
with this latest utterance of French culture.
It is along this line, indeed, that we get
within sight of the conclusion that persons,
in the ultimate of their character, are, despite
all surface appearances to the contrary, the
creation of principles. The history, both of
individuals and of generations, is the harvest
of vast, Divine ideas that lie behind the
visible, and that are working themselves
out on the plane of human affairs. These
ideas wait their appointed time, wait that
they may incarnate themselves in flesh and
blood, in character and action. How long
many of them have to wait ! One might
almost think that at times they grow im-
PRINCIPLES AND PERSONS. 105
patient and seek to make a premature en-
trance on the scene. We read, for instance,
how, at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
the principle of universal peace was floating
over Europe. Says Erasmus : " There is a
project to have a Congress of Kings at Cambrai,
to enter into mutual engagements to preserve
peace with each other and through Europe.
But certain persons, who get nothing by
peace and a great deal by war, throw obstacles
in the way." In this matter, alas ! the
" persons " and the " obstacles " are not yet
out of the way. But the day will come when
the human developement will have reached
the point at which man and the principle
will fit each other, and then the nations will
learn war no more.
It is indeed a high day in the human story
when a great principle reaches its hour. For
ages it may have been working silently along
the subterranean channels of the world's
life. At times it has, for a brief moment, shown
itself above the surface, only to be hunted
back again, with scoff and insult. But it is
already in the blood, and will, by-and-by,
mount to the brain's throne. There had been
Luthers before Luther, assertors of the soul's
106 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING.
immediacy of access to God without mediation
of priests. But they were swallows before
the summer. Spiritual history has its own
rate of progress, as inevitable as the process
of the suns. When the appointed time is
come the idea creates its man, and the credential
of his authority is the echo of his word in
every soul.
To watch this steady, ceaseless infiltration
of the Divine ideas into humanity is one of
the fascinations of history. Of the great
moral divisions, one is into those with whom
a principle is merely a watch-word, a battle-
cry, and those in whom it is a working force.
There have been centuries in which Christianity
has been little more than the former. Men
thought they had done enough when they had
baptised their passions into the Church name.
The Renaissance abounded with characters
like that of .Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini, known
afterwards as Pope Pius II., who, while in
his earlier years a debauchee who gloried
in his shame, thought it enough, on gaining
the Popedom, to bid the world " renounce
^Eneas but accept Pius." It would be absurd
to bracket characters of this order with
Christianity, as in any sense responsible
PRINCIPLES AND PERSONS. 107
for them. One might as well try to judge
the quality of an inn from the picture on its
sign-board. The forces at work in such
lives have their origin in quite another quarter.
In distinction from them, and as illustrating
the outcome of a genuinely formative principle,
one may take Hazlitt's fine description of
some Dissenting ministers of his day : " They
were true priests. They set up an image
in their own minds it was truth. They
worshipped an idol there it was justice.
They looked on man as their brother, and
only bowed the knee to the Highest. Separating
from the world, they walked humbly with
their God, and in thought with those who
had borne testimony of a good conscience,
with the spirits of just men in all ages."
The principles at work in good men, which
are at once fashioning them, and enabling
them to fashion others, are often beyond their
own comprehension. They blunder badly when
they try to express them. We find strangely
narrow creeds professed by the noblest cha-
racters. Yet men cleave to and reverence
these teachers because of an inner persuasion
that, behind their spoken words, operating
as their real motor-power, are principles
108 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
greater and nobler than their own theological
propositions. As we listen to the wits who
make the affirmations of these men the butt
of their ridicule, and who plume themselves
on their own deliverance from " childish
superstitions," the inmost of us laughs quietly
to itself. " Ah ! my fine gentlemen," it
seems to say, " and are you so very sure
of your own position ? These humble people,
with a great spiritual ideal flashing before
them, and in the strength of it devoting
themselves heart and soul to the service of
humanity, are they the right quarter for
your sneers ? Their fault, if they have one,
is simply a want of knowledge of the grandeur
of their principle. Whereas your fault,
well, the heavens will perhaps have something
to say to it presently."
The road we have travelled should help us
to unravel the puzzle with which we began.
The characters that, on opposite sides to our
own in the world's controversies, yet hold us
by their beauty, are not anomalies, nor con-
tradictions of spiritual truth. Wherever noble-
ness appears it is the outworking of eternal
principle. It could come in no other way
than by conformity to the highest. A physical
PRINCIPLES AND PERSONS. 109
or an intellectual charm has ever some truth
of God for its origin. It tells of an ancestor,
maybe, who, while others were chaffering
about propositions, sought the fresh air,
and the open spaces, or mastered some ele-
mentary lessons in God's book of right living.
The grace of manner, the sweetness of temper
in our opponent, work back to that primal
law and ultimate gospel in which we and he
are one. Its appearance in him is an invita-
tion to us to betake ourselves, for our own
improvement, to the place where that lesson
was learned.
Principles and Persons. Perhaps we should
have inverted the title. For, as we think the
thing out, we find that in the order of being,
person must ever stand first. As we cross-
examine our mind we find it an unthinkable
proposition that " a principle of righteousness "
can exist apart from a pre-existent personality.
Righteousness is a characteristic of a soul, and
can be no otherwise imagined. When, there-
fore, we talk of Divine ideas filtering into
human history, the implication is always of
One in whom, finally, they inhere. The
principles that are slowly evolving themselves
in the human story are nothing less than the
110 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
Incarnation of God in humanity. That is
how the early fathers interpreted Christianity.
How noble is this utterance of Justin Martyr,
writing from the edge of the Apostolic age !
" He (Christ) is the Word of whom every
race of men were partakers ; and those who
live reasonably are Christians, even though they
have been thought atheists, as among the
Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and men like
them."
There have we the world's great secret.
The uttermost truth of the Gospel is the
uttermost truth of life. In Christ the ultimate
Divine Principle has become the ultimate
Divine Person.
XII.
On Keeping Young.
DUMAS, in one of his stories, pictures a com-
pany of old men to whom magician Cagliostro
administers one of his secret elixirs. It
works wonders. The wrinkles disappear from
the withered cheeks ; the aged eyes are lit
with the old fires ; the thoughts, the talk
are of twenty-five. The world and them-
selves are remade. But, alas ! the change
is not permanent. The glorious hour passes,
and leaves the company back in its senility,
with an added sense of weariness. Elderly
men read the page with a sigh. Ah, to be
young again ! Age is coming to be regarded
by the moderns as the shadow upon life.
Men exclaim that Nature here drives too
hard a bargain with them. What a wail
is that which Beranger raises when fifty !
En maux cuisants la vieillesse abonde
G'est la goutte qui nous meurtrit ;
La excite, prison profonde,
La sui-dite, dont chacun rit.
ill
112 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
And so on to the gloomy end. But even
his picture is not so dismal as that of Amiel,
who, at forty-seven, finds this as his out-
look : " All the swarm of my juvenile hopes
fled. I cannot conceal my outlook as one
of increasing isolation, interior mortification,
long regrets, inconsolable sadness, lugubrious
old age, slow agony, death in the desert."
What a gospel! Is this, then, all that
life, in its later stages, has to offer us ? If
so, we might honour the wisdom of those
Hyperboreans, of whom Clement speaks in
the " Stromata," who " took those who were
sixty years old without the gates and made
away with them." With Tithonus, we might
pray to be delivered from those burdened
years. We find ourselves, however, unable
to pass any such judgment on the order of
things under which we live. If there is a
mistake anywhere, it is not in the cosmic
system, but in our interpretation of it. For,
in the way, at least, in which Amiel and other
moderns picture the business, there is abso-
lutely no need to grow old. Life may be,
and was meant to be, an immortal youth.
Of course there is here a qualification.
We cannot put back the clock, and no phil-
ON KEEPING YOUNG. 113
osophy can obliterate the difference between
seventy and twenty-one. Of each one of
us, if we live long enough, the poet's words
will be true : "He heard the voice that tells
men they are old." The march of the physical
processes is unceasing, and goes on without
our consent being asked. Our consciousness
is a kind of lodger in a vast establishment
whose business is carried on to a large extent
outside its cognisance. The heart is a labourer
to whom we pay no wages, with whom we hold
no conversation, who gets his orders else-
where, who elects to work, and at the end,
to cease to work without any say of ours in
the matter. And so of the other organs.
In some mysterious way they run the machine.
Someone has wound them up to go for a certain
time. When their energies slacken we feel
it, but cannot alter the situation. The body
ages, as a plant or a planet ages, by a rhythmic,
immutable process.
That at least is how it seems to us. It is
the way a biologist would talk. And yet
even here it is very easy to make a mistake.
Indeed, a vast blunder would it be to conclude
from such data that the body's work and
growth were independent of the soul. It is,
114 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
let us remember, one thing to talk of our con-
sciousness, and quite another to talk of the
soul. The latter is as an iceberg floating in
ocean, the greater part of whose bulk is
beneath the surface. What we feel is only
a tithe of what we spiritually are. And
so it comes about that the apparent inde-
pendence of the physical processes is only
apparent. At every moment and at every
point the soul is influencing them nay, in a
manner creating them. Every physical state
has, inwoven with it, a mental one. A
gloomy mood blocks every bit of work the
organs are trying to do. Worry is a foe
to the heart, to the digestion, the circulation,
to every nerve, vesicle and brain cell, and
will leave on them all its evil mark. The
science of life is realising ever more clearly
the exact co-ordination between the spiritual
and the physical states. Our bodily weather
originates, all of it, in the uppermost spheres.
To the extent in which the soul is wrong
every part of us, from top to toe, is out of
gear. We see, then, that while the inevitable
years produce their results, the inner spiritual
conditions are at every point profoundly
modifying them.
ON KEEPING YOUNG. 115
It is not, however, of this side of us that
we are chiefly thinking in our study of the art
of " keeping young." Indeed, in the process
of getting old it seems often as though the
body and the years had least to do with it.
There are men who are young at eighty,
and others who are old at thirty. One meets
people in their third decade who already are
disillusioned, disenchanted, aged at heart.
Their world, instead of being a wonder,
a temple, a mystery of delight, is banal and
empty. Bagehot, in writing of Lady Wortley
Montague, sketches for us the mental interior
of a blasee woman of fashion : " Society is
good, but I have seen society. What is the
use of talking or of hearing bon mots ? I
have done both till I am tired of doing either.
I have laughed till I have no wish to laugh
again, and made others laugh till I have hated
them for being such fools." What is left
to such people ? They have exhausted all
the springs that are in sight, and have no
inclination to bore for deeper ones. One
encounters all varieties of character and con-
dition, but, so far as we have seen, God's
earth contains no such specimens of sheer
hopelessness as your comfortably placed youth
116 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
of both sexes, whose one discovery is that
life is not worth living. And their life cer-
tainly is not. To keep young is a secret of
the soul. This great achievement, the greatest,
shall we say that the earthly career presents,
demands in the first place some renunciations.
We have, for one thing, to weed our pleasure
garden of ignoble satisfactions. We are to
be resolutely human and not animal. The
debauchee, in seeking his delight, destroys
all chance of it. His satyr feast ends before
he can get the morsel to his mouth, and he
finds:
Both table and provision vanished quite
With sound of harpies' wings and talons heard.
The wisdom of the ages is unanimous here.
Across thousands of years the Indian Bhagavad
Gita warns us that "it is the enemy, lust
or passion, offspring of the carnal principle,
by which the world is covered, as the flame
by the smoke, as the mirror by rust." And
the twentieth century, still panting after
the best, echoes that old Eastern testimony.
Maeterlinck speaks for it in saying, " Sterile
pleasures of the body must be sacrificed ;
all that is not in absolute harmony with a
larger, more durable energy of thought."
ON KEEPING YOUNG. 117
But no man will enter a discipline of this
kind till he has something more to go upon,
some motive power of definite inducement.
And it is at this point we come at the secret
of the whole matter. The one and only
prescription for perpetual youth is the life
of faith. Justification by faith has to be
restated in our age, and it is time it were done,
for society is going to pieces for want of it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was a youth at
eighty, puts the matter in a nutshell : "It
is faith in something, an enthusiasm for some-
thing, that makes life worth living." The
faith may take on manifold forms, may attach
itself to various creeds, but in essence it
is always the same the soul's grasp of what
is higher than itself, a conviction of a spiritual
order, pure and holy, regnant in the universe,
which though at present invisible, will in
the end make its triumph known. And so
we find people of all religions made young
by faith. Tolstoi, ere he had reached middle
age, was a pessimist of the deepest dye.
How old and withered was that heart ! To-
day, at the utmost term of life, he is as a child
just born. The miracle that made him young
was the new hope that the Gospel brought.
118 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
Some day humanity will know more probably
than now of the psychological mystery that
is involved in these transformations. It will,
perhaps, be found that just as waves of energy
pass through earth and rock, and certain
forms of light penetrate our bodies, so the
spiritual forces, where our receptive condi-
tions are favourable, pour into us from above,
producing their subtle and enduring results
not only upon our consciousness, but over
the entire area of our being.
Here have we the daily renewing that keeps
the soul young. This juvenescence does not
necessarily carry with it animal health, strength,
or length of days. But it means throughout
life a feeling of youth, a glorious exultancy,
a growing and aspiring soul. This is the art
of living carried to its highest point. The
examples are everywhere, and of all ages.
Olympia Morata, of the sixteenth century,
who before she was sixteen had written Greek
and Latin dissertations on the deepest sub-
jects, died young. As life ebbed she said
smilingly to her husband : "I can scarcely
see you any longer, but everywhere seems
full of the most beautiful flowers." John
Wesley was over eighty when he passed,
ON KEEPING YOUNG. 119
but his concluding words were : " The best of
all is God is with us." These two, whom we
should call young and old, were both youthful
souls. They knew they had only begun.
How strange that, with the path so clearly
marked for us, we of this age should still
on this vital matter, be blundering along the
wrongest of roads ! Men waste themselves
in accumulating giant fortunes. For what ?
To build mansions whose vastness precludes
comfort, and which will be white elephants
to their successors, or to multiply residences
whose number abolishes for the owner the
very idea of home ! To build oneself into
bricks and mortar, when one might be fashion-
ing the soul for the sublimest possibilities !
By-and-by men will cease this fooling. The
absurdity will be too apparent. They will
discover that the only wealth is life ; that
the only way to make the best of this world
is to make the best of the other. For the
two are one. The highest gleams ever through
this lower. The pilgrim to the better country
is the man who, living or dying, knows the
bliss of a perpetual youth.
XIII.
The Rebirths of Feeling.
OUR histories, both of individuals and of
nations, are at best but the clumsiest of make-
shifts. They are only approximations, at a
long remove from the reality. What can be
expressed in words is always a husk, a body,
and the body is never the same thing as the soul.
The true story of the man, the story which,
with our present instruments, can never be
told, is that of his Feeling. The measurement
of a life, whether it has been a success or a
failure, is here and nowhere else. When, in
your appraisement of a man, you discuss his
station, his property, the figure he makes
before his fellows, you are occupied with
irrelevancies. The decisive point in a life's
prosperity is in the quality and range of its
consciousness. To talk of fortune in terms
only of the money market is simply to show
our limitations. How does a man front life
of a morning ? The whole question is there :
THE REBIRTHS OF FEELING. 121
Can he step out at dawn from his door with
an unspeakable sense of renewal ; feeling
every breath he draws, every movement of
his limbs, every glance at the open sky, to be
a new wedding of himself with the infinite, a
participation in a boundless wealth of being ?
Is it a sense of rapture, this early greeting of
his soul and the world ? If so, what need to
go further into his affairs ?
But this view of prosperity, which to some
of us appears so simple, is as yet apparently
a quite neglected piece of the world's educa-
tion. There is a general rush for good things,
but the movement is so woefully undiscriminat-
ing. Humanity, for its next step upward,
will have to learn a little psychology. It will
then discover that the only world it can possess
is an inner world, that the outside is only the
shadow of the inside ; that its material pos-
sessions are ever the reflex of its spiritual ones.
It will learn further that the higher qualities
of feeling which constitute life's true riches
are related to an inner organism whose delicacy
is proportioned to the rare results it produces.
Here are we in the region of inexorable law.
The finer the product the greater the com-
plexity of the producing organ, and the greater
122 PEOBLEMS OF LIVING.
its liability to injury. You may run a pin into
your hand and no great harm will be done.
Let there be a lesion of the optic nerve and the
visible world has become for ever a blank.
While everybody knows this as a law of the
body, it has not yet occurred to the generality
that precisely the same law holds of the soul.
This magnificent possession, which, properly
tended, will secure to a man through life a
consciousness ever ascending, both hi range
and quality, until it can reach angelic heights,
is treated with the crassest disregard both of
its possibilities and of the laws of its working.
Ignorance is the true original sin. Men are
bankrupts morally because they do not know
the gold mine that is in them.
It is here we get a true view of the nature
and function of religion. When we come to
its genuine sources we find it always as a
form of the highest feeling. Christianity is
known to us as a church, a ceremonial, a body
of doctrine, a history of deeds, a mass of con-
troverted opinions. At its purest we have it
in the reported words of Christ and the apostles.
But the highest Christianity that has been in
this world is, in a way, veiled from us. What
we do not know, and would give worlds to
THE REBIBTHS OP FEELING. 123
know, is the precise feeling that was in Christ's
own breast, the daily consciousness with
which He fronted life and the universe. That
was the original Christianity. The words He
uttered, the deeds He performed, the influ-
ences He rained upon others were sparks from
that central glow, but not the thing itself.
Christ's quality of feeling was the greatest
thing that has been in the world. The next
greatest was the answering consciousness
created in His disciples. The organisms here
were immeasurably lower than His own ; the
faculties all untrained to the highest exercises.
But at this distance of time we catch a reflex
of the thrill that went through them as they
communed with that radiant soul. To trans-
mit that feeling, to develop the organs in
which it can reside, to warm the heart of
humanity everywhere with this central heat
that is the business of religion to-day.
The first appearance of this highest con-
sciousness in the race is, we have said, a
mystery. For its origin we have to refer back
to a cause that is ultra-planetary, to that
spiritual universe which presses at every point
on our visible, and out of which all our good
and great has come. But when we study the
124 PROBLEMS or LIVING.
persistency of the feeling, its continual rebirth
in nations and in individuals, we come upon a
group of facts that it is of the highest import-
ance to classify and to use. One of these is
the extraordinary relation of the feeling to
outer circumstance. What has become a
scientific certainty is the essentially spiritual
character of events. The roughest, the most
painful of experiences, are only marks of
divinest things underneath. If the true wealth
of life lies in its noblest feeling where, in our
world, are we most likely to find it ? The
answer of history is a strange one, but it offers
clues which, properly followed, should lead to
the solution of more than one problem. For
the place and time of the rebirth of divinest
feeling has been the place and time of out-
ward stress and pain. There is no doubt of
this. Says Lecky, in his history of European
morals : " There has probably never existed
upon earth a community whose members were
bound to one another by a deeper or purer
affection than the Christians in the days of
the persecutions." How near this is to the
fact those only who have closely followed the
story of Christianity from the beginning can
properly realise. As a single instance let any
THE REBIRTHS OF FEELINQ. 125
one read the account of the trials of the Church
in Alexandria during the Valerian persecution,
as related by its Bishop, Dionysius. Says he :
" Then with one impulse they all rushed upon
the houses of the God-fearing, and robbed and
plundered them. . . . The brethren, however,
simply gave way and withdrew, and like
those to whom Paul bears witness, they took
the spoiling of their goods with joy." He
then describes how many of his people, old
and young, and of both sexes, were put to
death with every imaginable torture ; how, in
the midst of all this, the plague broke out in
the city, and how, while the pagan population
in their panic left their sick untended and the
dead unburied, the Christians remained ten-
derly nursing both foes and friends ; how their
own people died in triumph, while those who
remained " rejoiced deeply in the peace of
Christ, which He committed to us alone."
And that story has been repeated in every
age. Here from the seventeenth century is
the testimony of a humble Huguenot woman
persecuted under Louis XIV. When stripped,
bound with cords and whipped, she declares :
" At this moment I received the greatest con-
solation I can ever receive in my life, since I
126 PBOBLEMS OF LIVING.
had the honour of being whipped for the name
of Christ. Why can I not write down the
inconceivable influences, consolations and
peace which I felt interiorly ? To understand
them one must have passed through the same
trial." And to take one more instance : in
the eighteenth century we have Methodist
John Nelson, when imprisoned in a filthy, ill-
smelling hole for the crime of preaching the
Gospel, exclaiming : " My soul was as a watered
garden, and I could sing praises to God all day
long. For He turned my captivity into joy,
and gave me to rest as well on the boards as if
I had been on a bed of down." Any one,
indeed, who takes the trouble to study history
must realise that he is in these instances
dealing with no chance phenomenon, no mere
freak of temperament, but with a spiritual law
as certain as the movement of the planets.
Another significant fact in this group is in
connection with the spread of the higher feel-
ing. There is a law of multiple action here
more wonderful than any of the contagions of
the physical world. Science tells amazing
stories of the propagation of germs, bearing it
may be disease, or its cure, from one organism
to another. But on the spiritual sphere these
THE REBIRTHS OF FEELING. 127
activities are all transcended. It is as algebra
to arithmetic. The quantities are limitless.
The secret of great revivals is that a single
soul filled with the Divine consciousness will
communicate itself to innumerable other souls,
the while suffering no diminution of its own
store of energy. Have we properly studied
this phenomenon, that whereas all partition in
the natural world means diminution and
exhaustion of the original stock, in the spiritual
realm the contrary obtains ? A voice for God
charged with feeling, a Christian act saturated
with love, spreads its mystic power over
thousands of souls, and while each recipient
gets his fill, he has thereby lowered no whit
the original stock. Carried out to its legitimate
deductions, the experience here is another
evidence that while the body has to do with
the finite and the measurable, the soul's trans-
actions are, by right of its inherent nature,
with the imperishable and the infinite.
The Churches are just now inquiring anxi-
ously how they may regain their lost hold over
the masses. They will regain their hold of
the masses when they have regained their hold
of the laws and forces of the spiritual life. If
they want a revival, they must understand the
128 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
psychology of a revival. The laws here are
as sure as those of electricity. Men ought not
at this time of day to be groping about for
the right way of winning souls. It is as old as
the hills. What is the meaning of the state-
ment that the great spiritual renewals have
been always preceded by earnest prayer ? It
is the formula of the soul's dynamic. It
means, in other words, that in a few disciplined
spirits the inner organs, developed and purified
by these exercises, have become recipients and
reservoirs of the higher forces, and come in the
end to a condition in which these forces pass
out with resistless power upon their fellows.
We are here at the science of the soul's evolution
and of the generation and transmission of
spiritual energy. People talk of the Church's
obscurantism. They may well do so. When,
in all its sections, the Church has begun to
learn the real science of its department, men
will become religious as naturally and as
universally as they have become human.
Meanwhile, it is for those who know, to
exhibit to their fellows the joy of the right
living. Their experience must be a reaffirma-
tion of religion's ultimate truths. They must
make it evident that no music is comparable
THE REBIRTHS OF FEELING. 129
to that which the universe sings through a
soul in tune. Who can deny damnation
when he sees men around him losing the
capacity for all the higher notes ? Who can
deny heaven when he knows of souls that
live there to-day ? Our poor human race !
Prodigal son that has wandered into the far
country and fed on the husks that the swine
eat ! But it will come back again. The
Heimweh is already upon it. It is already
sated with its ignoble feast and straining its
ears to the Father's voice. A rebirth of
spiritual feeling is ahead. It will be the
greatest the world has known since Christ.
XIV.
Imagination in Ethics.
ERASMUS tells a merry story of a company
riding to Richmond, when a jocose member
of the party stopped suddenly, staring into
the sky, " God avert this prodigy ! " " What?"
" Can you not see that large dragon there with
horns of flame and tail looped into a circle ? "
" No." But finally one said he saw it. Then
the others in quick succession. In three
days the report ran through the land of a
great portent. The jest might be taken as an
experiment in the force of imagination. And
the faculty is as potent in the twentieth
as in the sixteenth century, but it is for us
to make a more profitable use of it than did
the Richmond pilgrims. Now that we are
beginning to see how life's upward move-
ment depends on the better and saner de-
velopment of our inner powers, the cult of
the imagination will become more and more
a feature of education. It is perhaps the
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS. 131
greatest of character-builders. Out of it man
makes his world ; it creates his happiness
or his woe. Pascal's mot that " If an artisan
were sure of dreaming every night that he
was king, he would be almost as happy as a
king who should dream every night he was
an artisan," would apply here. For man
dreams almost as much awake as when asleep.
What he imagines is a great part of what he is.
It would be a mere repetition of the obvious
to point out the place imagination occupies
in what we may call the decorative side
of life. That the painter, the poet, the
dramatist, the romancer find here their chief
material is what we all know. The exact
sciences, even as much as the arts, depend on it
for aliment and furtherance. George Henry
Lewes is strictly within bounds when he says,
" No man ever made a discovery (he may have
stumbled on one) without the exercise of
as much imagination as, employed in another
direction and in alliance with other faculties,
would have gone to the creation of a poem.
To imagine a good experiment is as difficult
as to invent a good fable." All this has become
a truism. What, however, is not so fully
recognised is the part played by imagination
132 PROBLEMS or LIVING.
in our working, e very-day ethics. The moral
teacher of the future, instead of generalising
on the subject of sin and reclamation, will
specialise on the laws of action of the different
inner powers, and on their training and co-
operation for the best results.
When, with this object, we study the
imaginative faculty, we find an admittedly
enormous power, whose relation to morals
seems at first quite undefined. In the battle
of good and evil it would appear to resemble
those mercenary troops of the mediaeval
time who were ready with equal alacrity
to fight on either side. Human nature is
still in the making, probably at a very early
stage of the making, and the action of its
visualising power has hitherto been of a corre-
spondingly crude and unregulated kind. Over
vast tracts of history its influence would
seem as often evil as good. What infernal
cruelties have had imagination for their
source ! People dreamed of gods that lusted
for blood, and slaughtered old and young
to satisfy them. Arnobius, one of the early
Christian apologists, devotes whole chapters of
his principal work to disprove the view univers-
ally held amongst the pagans, and which was
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS. 133
one of the main causes of persecution, that
the famines, earthquakes, plagues, and other
calamities of the times had as their reason the
anger of the gods against the Christians.
It is undeniable also that an unregulated
imagination is one of the most powerful
auxiliaries of private vice. In that interior
region of the mind where we are beyond the
reach of public opinion, beyond the judgment
even of our most intimate friends, the real
tussle comes, and there is it that imagination
often plays its most sinister part. Moving
outwardly amid the primmest of conventions,
paying ostentatious respect to the proprieties,
a man may in the secret chamber of his
imagery, be feasting his vision with every
kind of lubricity. It is here, indeed, that the
impressionable temperament which makes poet
and artist finds often its sorest trial, its most
frequent stone of stumbling. To how many,
in this way, has genius proved a damnosa
hereditas ! The strongest have barely escaped
with their lives. Bunyan in his " Grace
Abounding," tells how, long after his pro-
fession as a Christian, the old thought-springs
of his earlier life at times burst upward from
beneath, and poured their black floods over
134 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
the inner realm ; and what mighty wrestlings
and acts of faith were needed ere he had secured
a clean interior.
Yet none the less true is it that this same
imagination, so disastrous in its unregulated
activities, will, in a true scheme of life, rank
as one of the chief redeeming and cleansing
forces. Was it not by the imagination,
indeed, that man became first of all a moral
being ? It was the vision of something
higher than himself that made him at once
moral and immoral, which gave him at the
same moment the sense of sin and the promise
of saintship. It is worthy of note, also,
that the early legislators who, hi different
parts of the world, gave to mankind in their
codes the first great ethical disciplines, were
unanimous in their call on the imagination
as their chief auxiliary. It was to visions
and voices and mystic rites they appealed
as props to their authority. And this with
entire sincerity. When the great lawgivers
of Egypt, of Greece, of Persia, of Rome,
and of Palestine declared their Codes to
have originated with the deities of the land
they were simply expressing in their own way
the truth, which one of the early fathers so
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS. 135
finely sums up in the remark that "the
different human laws were all fed from one
Divine law."
It is, however, when we come to the prac-
tical business of our own daily living that
we see most clearly the part a cultivated
imagination can play in ethics. We shall,
for instance, only be able to do justice to our
neighbour in proportion as we are able to
visualise him. By justice here we mean far
more than what is demanded by law or by
public opinion. Our greatest crimes against
him may be committed in a sphere where
these powers never reach. As we advance
in spiritual culture those sins of calumny and
of scandal which make so much of the misery
of human life will become less and less possible
to us, and the power which keeps us from them
will be that of imagination. We have only,
in discussing an absent acquaintance, to
picture him to ourselves as of the company,
and the base spirit of disparagement is exor-
cised. So, too, where the tendency is to
Schadenfreude, to use the expressive German
phrase, the base exultancy over a rival's
discomfiture ; the moment a man can visualise
for himself this other's interior he will recoil
136 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
from the thought of taking pleasure in view
of that inner sadness. The misunderstandings,
the jealousies, the ignoble satisfactions of
triumphant rivalry will die out of men when
they have gained the faculty of seeing their
brother not, as now, from without, but from
within. When we have constructed his life
from his own standpoint, and seen its struggle
and its sorrow, it will be so easy to forgive,
so easy to help, so impossible to hate ! That
is why Christ, the great seer, was the great
forgiver. " Put yourself in his place," was
the dictum of a great novelist. It is one of
the necessities of the higher ethic, and it
is by vision power the miracle is wrought.
To a more cultured imagination, also,
is it we shall have to look for an improvement
in what we may call negative morality, the
abstention, that is, from vicious or criminal
acts. Half the follies and badness of the
world will be done with when men have brain
enough, ere the deed is done, to project
themselves mentally into " the moment after."
When people can present to themselves the
exact feeling which follows upon a debauch
or an infamy, they will repent of it before-
hand, instead of after, when it is too late.
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS. 137
What vastly greater sweetness would come
into many a home circle were there only a
little more vision in it ! Ah ! could the man
at his fireside realise what the homely face
before him, which he has so often smitten
into grief by his hard words, will mean to him
when so soon it may be ! it has gone for
ever from his sight ! It is a good word, one
for us all to remember, that of Siebenkas in
Richter's " Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces " :
" Every morning, every evening, he said to
himself : How much ought I not to forgive, for
we shall remain so short a time together ! "
The visualising faculty is also the great
feeder of our sympathies. It is when we
" see together " that we " feel together."
The cool complacency of the well-to-do,
who nurse their own comfortable sensations,
while ignoring the wretchedness beyond their
boundary wall, would break up the moment
they saw clearly into those other interiors.
The tortures which in barbarous ages men
inflicted on each other had been impossible
could the oppressor have had a clear view
of the inner actuality of his victim. We are
beyond that stage, but still are woefully
dim sighted. The world's habitations of
138 PBOBLEMS OF LIVING.
cruelty will be dealt with in drastic fashion
when the civilised peoples have had their
vision. When, in the seventies, the tidings
of the Turkish massacres in Bulgaria were
flashed to Europe, the present writer found
himself one summer day walking through
a lovely English village. He had been reading
of what the Bashi-Bazouks had been doing
at Batak and elsewhere. Suddenly the account
was visualised before him in the scene where
he found himself. He saw the village church
in flames, the street startled from its quietness
by the inrush of armed savages, the rural
quiet changed in a moment to a pandemonium,
the little girls and boys, who before had been
playing in the streets, spitted on the ends of
bayonets, the ah" filled with shrieks and groans,
the gutters red with blood. As he saw it all,
" This," he said to himself, " is precisely what
has happened in a few days' journey of where
I am standing now." That flash of vision gave
him a feeling for oppressed peoples, such as he
had never before experienced, and which all
the following years have never dimmed.
What has been here said is only the fringe
of a great subject. Indeed, so much has been
left unsaid that, as it stands, the theme thus
IMAGINATION IN ETHICS. 139
handled might easily lead to misconceptions.
So we end with a warning hint or two. It
must not, for instance, be supposed that the
mere culture of the imagination is of itself
going to bring about great ethical reforms.
The great imaginers have not by any means
been all great moralists. Else the musicians and
the painters were all saints which they are not.
It is only in alliance, at every point, with the
will that our visualising can be morally helpful.
Could Coleridge have linked that imagination
which, as Hazlitt says, " had angelic wings and
fed on manna," with a healthy volition, what
a sublime career would England have seen !
And here we come upon something deeper
yet. Behind the imagination the will, but
behind the will ! Science is beginning
to discover that our separate faculties are
not themselves originators. They are but
the organs of a deeper life, fed from sources
that are otherwhere. Man is constructed so
as not to be complete in himself. He is
a planet that moves round a sun. He can
never know the true harmony or the healthy
development of his being till his earthly
is consciously linked with a heavenly.
XV.
Our Links with Lowliness,
MAN is unquestionably the aristocrat of this
planet. His thought-world is a royalty than
which nothing can be imagined more supreme,
more august. Let one side of him speak,
and you are in contact with infinitudes.
We compare him with what else lives and
moves in the world, only to realise the re-
moteness, the lonely grandeur of his position.
As Professor Fiske has it : " While for zoological
man you can hardly erect a distinct family
from that of the chimpanzee and orang,
for psychological man you must erect a
distinct kingdom ; nay, you must dichotomize
the universe, putting man on one side and
all things else on the other." And it is, on
the whole, a healthy tendency of our modern
culture to put the stress on this loftier side
of humanity. Our question is, and rightly,
not so much what we have come from, as
what we can grow to. Aspiration we recog-
OUR LINKS WITH LOWLINESS. 141
nise as one of our greatest faculties. For-
getting the things that are behind we press
toward the prize in front. A sense of boundless
human possibility is the note of the twentieth
century. We feel that victory will be to the
race that believes in itself, in the greatness
of its destiny.
But we are not permitted to talk in this
vein without checks and reminders of other
things. There is another side of life that can
never, for long, be kept out of sight. The
cosmic arrangement under which we live has
wedded our ambitions to the strangest of
circumstances. We must needs study the soil
in which we are rooted as well as the heavens
to which we aspire. Science traces our origin
to the dust. The proofs stare us in the face.
Every child born into the world has, in its
pre-natal, embryo period, recapitulated the
whole humbling story of man's ascent to
his present stature. What, perhaps, is even
more striking is that the child's mind, from
babyhood on, reproduces the successive mental
developments of the human race on its way
upward from the primitive savage beginnings.
But our links with lowliness do not end
here. The career of each one of us shows
142 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
another element than that which soars and
triumphs. The most favoured, the most
fortunate of mortals do not escape this under
side. It is the successful, the high - soaring
man, indeed, that has the keenest sense
of the human limitations. Strange that his
mind, "that wanders through eternity," should
be partnered with a bodily life, with functions,
that seem so coarse and degrading ! And
then, as surely as a man goes up, he comes
down. He reaches his culminating point,
and decline begins. His strength decays ;
he has, men say, " seen his best days," he
falls to the rear, and takes some lowlier post.
By-and-by he fades out of life, dies, and is
forgotten of his fellows. This is the human
story which each one of us, with variations
that make no difference to the main result,
will in his turn repeat. What a vast and
intimate relationship have we to the lowly,
the sordid, the perishable !
There are moments, indeed, when the link
with lowliness seems the one overshadowing
feature of life. It is on this feature that
modern pessimism has planted itself. Numbers
of first-class minds have been permanently
gloomed by their inability to get away from
OUR LINKS WITH LOWLINESS. 143
this obsession. We have Taine as a young
man, telling us how " the sight of mutilated
human nature. . . . of man, who, wounded
in his innermost being, drags his incurable
hurt along the roads which Time opens to
him, moved him like the sight of ships in
danger on the sea." To Nietzsche the human
existence appears at times, not always, as
an absurdity, " a side show on some ridiculous
star." Schopenhauer thinks we should all
commit suicide were the business a purely
negative one, simply " a sudden stoppage of
existence." Our own Watson, reviewing the
limitations of life, asks if man is not " some
random throw of heedless nature's die ? "
The modern pessimists are unanimous also
in rejecting the argument of a future perfection
as counterpoise to present ills. " How,"
they cry, " can a supposed future good make
any alteration in the fact that the present
is bad ? What has your as yet unexistent
millennium to do with our now existent and
too evident slum ? " Thus our pessimist,
who refuses to be comforted.
But while the writers of this school are,
many of them, our contemporaries, they
have almost ceased to be modern. Their
144 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
day is already over. Before long the world
will wonder that able men could be so parochial,
could build themselves on so short-sighted
a philosophy. It can hardly be called a
" view," for there is no insight in it. What,
i at this time of day, is to be said for a system
which begins with the vulgar error of taking
appearances for the ultimate reality ? The
later metaphysic is already constructing a
new standpoint for these studies. When
astronomy, discovering the real position and
relations of our planet in space, destroyed
the old notion of " upper " and " under,"
showing that what was " above " with us was
" below " at Melbourne, that " going up "
and " going down " were, in a cosmic view,
merely relative and local terms, it opened
a wider range of inferences than were contained
in matter and space. And it shattered for
ever our trust in appearances as representing
the ultimate truth. So, when our pessimist
compels our attention upon the present fact,
and will have the whole of life judged from it,
we will admit his claim provided he will,
for himself and us, gauge the fact in its entirety.
As a simple test of his capacity here, suppose
we were to take, what has been in all time a
OUR LINKS WITH LOWLINESS. 145
stock material of pessimism, the condition
of bodily limitation and weakness, and ask
for a complete analysis ? What is our bodily
weakness ? Shall we say that the particles
which make up our physical frame are weak ?
That evidently is only a bit of the truth. In
themselves they are just as strong as the ever-
lasting hills. They are one with the same
cosmic system as the hills. They have flowed
into us out of that eternal complex of matter
and force which makes the outside world,
and perpetually go out to reunite with it
that complex which is never weary, never
weak, never dies. There is no weakness even
in a dead body. All its constituents are
entering into the eternal play of the universe,
and are mighty with its might. The weakness
we know and talk of is at most only a fraction
of the reality, a passing phase of our con-
sciousness ; the limitations it imposes are
an equation between ourselves and the sum
of things, whose results it would require
an infinite mind to work out. And our pessi-
mist's mind is plainly not of that dimension.
Our links with lowliness will take a quite
other than pessimistic interpretation when,
further, we consider how, in the scheme
10
146 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
of things, what we call highest and lowest
are ever inextricably blended. Here again
" upper " and " under," we find, are only
relative and local terms. It is precisely the
shadow upon life that ought to inspire us with
the greatest hopes about it. It is when we
peer into that darkness that the divinest
things seem, in the dimness, to be shaping
themselves. When a man is stricken with
his mortal illness, when his income falls off,
when the world's pleasure and applause are
done with him, when all the supports have
given way and he falls back helpless upon the
void, what does he find ? The instructed
soul finds that as the seemingly solid earth
on which he built his house rests upon nothing,
and yet is upheld, so he, launched upon the
abyss, is also miraculously upstayed. What a
wonderful word is that which Socrates uttered
to his judges after being condemned to death !
He had spoken to them of the Daimon or
guardian spirit which, warning him throughout
his career against all evils, did not, he said,
warn him against his trial and death. " What,
then," he continues, " do I suppose to be the
reason thereof ? I will tell you. I think it is
that what has happened to me has been a
OUR LINKS WITH LOWLINESS. 147
good thing ; and we must have been mistaken
when we supposed that death was an evil."
That limitation, poverty, weakness, death
itself have behind them a reality quite other
than what seems that they are, in short,
veiled forms of the highest, is a conception
that grows upon us the more closely we
study them. The spiritual gifts which crown
man's being come all in this dress. Are we
to imagine it a mere chance that the purest
religion began this way ? The new philosophy
of the cosmos, which finds highest in lowest,
life's choicest treasures lurking in humblest
disguises, will have things of its own to say
about the doctrines both of Incarnation
and of the Cross. The translation into modern
thought of the apostolic utterances on these
themes will tell substantially the same story
as that which has inspired the heart of Christen-
dom through all the centuries. The universe's
spiritual highest, humbling itself to human
birth, clothing itself with poverty, walking
in lowliest ways, and enduring pain to its
last extremity in the service of good this
will be accepted as the centre of philosophy,
as it is the heart of religion.
By no chance coincidence is it either that
148 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
the wedding of highest and lowest, which
received such illustration at the beginning
of Christianity, has been perpetually repeat-
ing itself in religion's history since. Earthen
vessels carry the heavenly treasure. When
Arnobius reports what paganism said of the
Christians of his time, that " they were un-
learned, rude, unpolished, rustic, barbarous,
madmen, nondescripts of trivial and sordid
speech," we are reminded curiously of Cowley's
gibe at the Puritans, of Sydney Smith's
criticism of cobbler William Carey, and of
the opinion entertained of the early Methodists
amongst polite society of the eighteenth
century. And the gibes had point, for who
can deny the rudeness and the rusticity of
these professors ? And yet who to-day will
deny that these humble peoples were the
bearers to their fellows and to after generations
of some of the most precious gifts of life ?
The man who has mastered his philosophy
of lowliness will be free of many things. He
will not be disappointed at his limitations
or his weakness ; and that not because he
is in love with limitations or littleness, but
because he discerns behind all this an infinite
greatness looming. It is here also he will
OUR LINKS WITH LOWLINESS. 149
find his strength to be honest and fearless
as a truth-seeker and a truth-utterer. Your
true independents are the men who are at
their ease in lowliness. One of the greatest
weaknesses of public life to-day, in politics
as in religion, is the slavery of men to out-
ward position and to popular applause. We
shall not get a revival of moral and spiritual
force till leaders and public teachers, renewing
themselves at the sources of highest life,
have won their emancipation from the false
high in its every form, and speak and act in
absolute loyalty to the true high, though
it be linked with a manger or a cross. Here
find we, indeed, our emancipation from all
that is called evil. When we have reached this
deeper view have realised for ourselves that
what, in its inner aspect, is a limit, opens on
its other side to infinite freedom ; that ex-
periences which, in our present appeal to our
consciousness, are gloomy and painful, have be-
hind them immeasurable other aspects, vastest
transformations ; that death itself is an appear-
ance with a quite other reality behind the day
of our freedom will have dawned. We shall
accept life in its totality as a Divine gift. In its
highest and lowest we shall alike touch God.
XVI.
By- Roads to Faith.
" IT is faith in something, an enthusiasm for
something, that makes life worth living." So
spoke the veteran, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
and his words find echo in all healthy minds.
It is the everlasting " Yea," and not some
miserable, croaking " No," that creates great
history and great character. An affirmation
of ultimate good is creation's ground- tone.
The soul carries in itself an inextinguishable
belief in a final, triumphant answer to its
problems, in the satisfaction of its highest
longing. We are hi an age of criticism, of the
dissolution of belief, of the apparent triumph
of the negative. But a survey of the past
should do away with our panics. It reveals
to us, in a thousand iterations, that roads that
seemed to lead to the abyss have turned out
to be the by-ways of faith ; that agencies which,
in then* terror, men denounced as the enemies
of the kingdom, have done some of the best
work for its spread and establishment.
150
BY-ROADS TO FAITH. 151
The most interesting thing this planet could
show would be a universal experience-meeting,
in which the world should be summoned to
witness how, collectively and individually, it
had come by its faith. The answer, supposing
the inquiry to be pursued with thoroughness
and accuracy, would be full of surprises. It
would be seen, for one thing, how many so-
called aids to faith have been no aids ; how in
his endeavours to rear this particular plant,
the professional religious horticulturist has
proved to be the most clumsy and bungling
of workers. The history of his attempts has
so often been a history of how not to do it '
So often has he been putting in the wrong
seed, and producing a crop of superstitions, in
place of the tree of healing. Plutarch, him-
self one of the most devout of men, in his
" De Superstitione," argues that even dis-
belief in God is less mischievous than a base
perversion of belief concerning Him. " For,"
says he, " the atheist does not see God at all,
but the superstitious sees Him malevolent
instead of benign." What kind of a faith
was likely to be grown in Catholic Europe by
those " theologasters," whom Erasmus scathes
as being " endowed with the most rotten
152 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
brains, the most barbarous tongues, the most
unfruitful learning, the coarsest manners, the
spitefullest tongues, the blackest hearts ! "
It was these people, the professional agents
and monopolists of faith, who, could faith
have been destroyed from the earth, would
have had to be named as its destroyers.
But it is not to be destroyed, and we see
this just as clearly when, on the other hand,
we survey the efforts of those who in pious
circles have been regarded as the enemy.
When our religious communities have reached
a further enlargement of view, they will regard
with quite another aspect the results of what
is often called destructive criticism. We are
learning something to-day of the real nature
of these " destructions." We know that
every living organism has, going on perpetu-
ally within it, a destructive process, which is
one of the most essential functions of its life.
Within our bodies is an elaborate apparatus
occupied incessantly in the breaking down
and removal of the decaying tissues, in the
perpetual replacement of material that has
done its work. Were that process to be stopped
in us, we should stop. And we are discover-
ing now that the organic life of the Christian
BY-ROADS TO FAITH. 153
community is under a precisely similar law, and
that what faint hearts were imagining to be the
deadliest assaults on the religious principle were
really parts of faith's great vital process.
We need here, indeed, to be continually
discriminating between the apparent and the
real. Our talk about the direction of given
movements needs to be a very cautious one.
When a man appears to be walking westward
he is really being carried eastward by the earth's
rotation at the rate of a thousand miles an
hour. There are vast under-motions that are
so much greater than the surface ones. So
it is emphatically in the human movements
in their relation to the spiritual kingdom.
Our man shall be walking furiously westward
and be travelling eastward all the time. The
path he starts on takes, by-and-by, such
unexpected turnings. Our Saul of Tarsus sets
out to imprison Christians, and is on his road
to his own conversion. When Strauss wrote
that Life of Christ which, while it contains so
much, omits Jesus, he started scholars on the
track of that genuine historical investigation
which has done so much to give us back the
Master. That was an excellent thing which
the Empress Eugenie said of Kenan's " Vie
154 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
de Jesus " : "It will do no harm to those who
believe in Christ, and to those who do not it will
do good." Assuredly. The book, with its pro-
digious defects, both in fact and sentiment,
made Jesus interesting to multitudes who cared
nothing for Him before. And when men become
interested in Jesus, they are on a good road.
The age-long knowledge of the human soul
and its motions which history secures to us,
should indeed, by this time, have made us
tolerably sure of it, in all its relations to
religious doubt and to religious certainty. We
see, as we glance over the long record, how the
denial of one generation has led in the next
to a new grand affirmation, including in its
sweep the truth that lay in the denial ; how,
underneath the seeming spiritual death of a
given period, as in the age before the Reforma-
tion, and the years that preceded the eigh-
teenth-century evangelical revival, lay working
forces that, when things seemed at the worst,
burst forth into glorious spiritual manifestation.
That world's experience- meeting we have
suggested, in its quest for the sources of faith,
would indeed have to go far down. It would
have to acquaint itself with the law of trans-
mutations. It would discover how the finest
BY-ROADS TO FAITH. 155
issues are woven out of the strangest raw
material. We are, for instance, accustomed
to trace revivals of faith to the influence of
the great spiritual leaders ; but nobody troubles
himself to inquire as to the genesis of these
leaders. Yet this is of the essence of the
matter. The natural history of a prophet
opens up the most curious questions as to
the interplay of matter and spirit. We think
of the doctrine he preaches, of his fervour
and height of soul, of his evangelic gifts, his
saving power. But there would have been
none of this, and our evangelist's name had
never emerged, but for long previous processes,
which seemed at the time to have no connection
with faith at all. The inquiry here would
have to concern itself with the fresh air breathed
by generations of long -gone ancestors, with
that eager wrestling of theirs with the world
that built up our prophet's vigour, his com-
bativeness ; that gave him his red blood, his
trumpet voice, his eye of fire. As we trace back
these winding tracks we discover how the roads
to faith start from the very roots of the world.
One of the strangest of these byways has
been that of illusion. There is a mission of
illusion which we are only just beginning to
156 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
understand. Theology has suffered grievously
from its failure to realise that we are treated
in this world with a certain humour. If only
our dogmatists could have recognised that the
celestial powers have laughed at us a little !
We have been dealt with in these matters
exactly as we deal with our children. We give
them the oddest answers to some of their
questions, and smile meantime up our sleeves.
And we are nowise ashamed of this, for the
exact truth is not for them as yet. They will
know it when they are ready for it. And
Nature, we say, has dealt with us so. She
had the truth within her bosom, but was in no
hurry to impart it. She allowed uncounted
generations to believe that the sun went round
the earth. The belief was good enough for
these child races. It would be time enough to
learn more when they had grown up. So has
it been with religious faith. It does not
shock us now* to discover that the Christian
Church itself was, as to a multitude of subjects,
cradled in illusions. Its view both of the past
and of the future was largely imaginative.
Wise men to-day are satisfied to recognise that
these views in no way interfered with, rather
indeed contributed to, its distinctive spiritual
BY-ROADS TO FAITH. 157
power ; that they in no way turned it from the
redemptive road which God had set it to travel.
But there is another of the hidden roads to
faith which we of the present day especially
need to take account of. In the region of
physical research nothing more wonderful has
been discovered than the capacity which
living bodies possess of creating the organs of
which they stand in need. We know now
that the eye is developed out of a hair. From
touch we have mounted to sight. And in
life's highest regions the same process is going
on. Here, as in the physical realm, humanity
will develop the organs which its ever-mounting
aspiration calls for. Not for ever will the soul
walk blindly in its world. Already it sees
men as trees walking. An Edison declares
his conviction that we are on the edge of a
new revelation of God along the road of science.
Maybe ; but the road of science, the road of
weighing and measuring, is not the only or
the highest path the soul traverses. That
spiritual sense whose potency Schleiermacher
revealed to his age, is yet, we may well believe,
only in the dawn of its powers. When it
reaches its next stage of faculty we shall have
revelations indeed.
158 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
The personal applications of this theme are
innumerable, and can only be hinted at here.
Few earnest souls reach faith by a plain or easy
road. Oftenest there is a plunge through
morasses and a fight with dragons. A man
who has never doubted can hardly know what
conviction really means. And the road is so
often not one of logic at all. The heart, as
Pascal says, " has reasons which the reason
knows not of." It is life that convinces
us more than syllogisms. Have we not bowed
to the mystical influence of a good man,
without being able to give account of his power
over us ? There is, indeed, no arguing against
the saintliness of a saint. When the Church
has absorbed the Sermon on the Mount it will
not need to publish Apologias.
And for final word. The road to faith for
some is the longest in the world. At present
there are souls which have to make so vast a
circuit on their way thither that they do not
complete the round in the present life. To us
they seem at the end still going westward.
But at some point, beyond our mortal ken,
there will be a bend in the road, and they also
shall see God,
XVII.
Religion and the Child.
IN the art galleries of Europe what perhaps
ot'tenest strikes the eye is the subject, inces-
santly repeated, and by the world's greatest
artists, of a Mother and a Child. Genius,
with its fine intuition, offers us here the highest
religion as centred in a birth. It is strange
that, with such an object-lesson before it,
the world, and especially the religious world,
should have failed so signally in recognising
the spiritual significance of childhood. The
Churches have wrangled prodigiously over
baptism, and have had much to say of infancy
in its relation to original sin. But of the
deepest, most central, and withal most in-
spiring teaching that is here offered us, one
may turn over many theological tomes and
find no word. Men to-day, concerned for
the prospects of religion, take anxious note
of its visible resources. They count up
churches, revenues, adherents. They take
160 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
note of prevailing mental tendencies, and also
of those spiritual reinforcements which their
doctrinal systems admit. What really, when
properly understood, will be found to bulk
greatest in any such calculation, is the least
thought of. It is that of the birth into the
world of children, the perpetual renewal in
humanity of the child-nature.
The modern world is vastly concerned as to
what is the proper teaching it should offer to
childhood. It is time it began to understand
the teaching which childhood offers to it.
Has it occurred to us yet that the greatest
religious force in the world is not the pulpit,
but the cradle ? Man has two points of imme-
diate contact with the Unseen that of birth
and that of death. With the latter, especially
as he grows older, he becomes more and more
preoccupied ; the link between religion and
death is always visible. But this other
contact-point of birth, in its whole significance
for the spiritual life of men, offers a region
of thought where the footprints are few and
uncertain. Yet do we but explore it for our-
selves over never so small a portion of its sur-
face, and we shall discover how extraordinary
is its richness. It sends us back at least with
RELIGION AND THE CHILD. 161
this conviction, that of all the reinforcements
of religion there is none more potent ; that
of all the guarantees for the progress of the
world's spiritual evolution there is none more
certain than what is furnished by the constantly
renewed appearance in it of the child.
What these guarantees amount to will
perhaps appear most clearly when we discuss
the child's own relation to the Unseen. But
its religious work does not commence there.
Science is beginning to instruct us as to the
wonderful way in which infancy, considered
simply as helpless and dependent, has worked
towards the evolution of the human soul.
It was through the child that altruism first
came into the world. It was in the care of
their helpless offspring that our primitive
ancestors got their first dim apprehensions
of unselfish regard for others ; it was here
that motherhood and fatherhood, in the high
senses which now attach to the words, were
born ; here were wrought out the ideas that
made possible the religious teaching about a
Father in heaven ; here also was it that man,
as he nursed his offspring, nursed also the first
glimmerings of that conception of self-sacrifice
which was to form its culmination in the cross.
u
162 PEOBLEMS or LIVING.
This in itself, it will be admitted, forms a
not inconsiderable contribution to the world's
spiritual life. But another aspect of the
matter opens when we begin to study the
nature of childhood and its immediate rela-
tions with the Unseen. On the point as to
what birth actually signifies in its spiritual
relations, it is remarkable that two great
English poets have lighted upon the same
thought. Wordsworth in his magnificent " Ode
on Immortality " tells us
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar ;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.
To him, on the same theme, answers Mrs.
Browning in " Aurora Leigh " :
I, writing thus, am still what men call young ;
I have not so far left the coasts of life
As not to hear the murmur of that outer Infinite
Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep
When wondered at for smiling.
The thought of both here is, of course, pure
Platonism, and Platonism, in its doctrine of
souls and of birth, is again the echo of a mystic
RELIGION AND THE CHILD. 163
teaching that seems to have haunted mankind
from the beginning. The teaching is that birth
is the entrance into this life of a being that
has come from the realm of pure spirit, and
that is, in its earliest years, vaguely yet deeply
conscious of this, its celestial origin. A bold
and inspiring affirmation if only it were true !
Well, there is evidence, which to the finer
natures at least carries far, though its voice
be low and indistinct. Such natures can
certainly affirm that in those earliest years
there was a sense of this world as a Temple,
the sense of a Divine nearness, of celestial
meanings in earth and sky, of strange mystic
stirrings of the soul, such as have not been
realised since. Who can fathom the religion
of a child ? Who has not recognised himself
in that young correspondent of Goethe, who
felt the world to be alive and struggling to
express its meaning ? While men and women
are absorbed in the vulgar rush for wealth
and place, in the nursery there are little ones
who stand in the ways of Paradise, who hear
the ripple of its rivers of water, who see its
white-winged angels, and who recognise the
voice of the Lord God as He walks therein.
Away from the arid dust of the arena, these
164 PROBLEMS or LIVING.
little ones dwell at the sources of life and
touch the Infinite at every point.
Marvellous is it to note, also, that what
transpires in the life of a child is precisely the
history over again that is written for us in the
early chapters of Genesis. The history of
humanity, as Pascal pointed out, is the history
of the individual writ large. The drama of
Paradise and of the Fall is re-enacted in each
living soul. Evolution and the Bible may
be read here together without any sense of
discord. The slow ascent of life which the
former teaches brings us first to the threshold
of the moral life, to the state of inferior, un-
conscious moral innocence where sin was un-
known, because the higher, inner law had not
yet dawned on the soul. A step yet further
in the human development and sin has become
possible because moral choice between higher
and lower has become possible. Humanity
falls as one of the incidents of its way up-
wards, and one of the signs of its progress.
That is the drama of humanity as told by
evolution. But this is precisely what, told
in its own mystic language, is given us in the
Scriptures, and the child who comes into the
world to greet the twentieth century will be
RELIGION AND THE CHILD. 165
the latest stage on which the drama is repeated.
Born into the paradise of the lower innocence,
it will leave it, driven by a Destiny that is
stern but kindly, to fare through a wilderness
of toil and of failure, that nevertheless is the
way to a nobler paradise that lies in front.
We have said earlier that the child is the
guarantee of religion in the world. We here
repeat it, with the addition that the child thus
signified is not simply the new-born infant,
but also that element of our grown-up man-
hood which, despite all our years and experi-
ences, remains as the survival of our childhood.
It is this part of a man, not the disputer in
him, not the logician, but the child, the
wonderer, the mystic, the bit of him that from
the beginning has felt secret ineffable yearnings
for something his eye hath not seen but his
soul hath wotted of ; it is at this side of him
the preacher and religious teacher should
chiefly aim. When Guthrie, as he lay a-dying,
asked the watchers to " sing a bairn's hymn,"
he was revealing the whole secret. The child
in us is our doorway to the Infinite. It is so
with the good, and just as much so with the
bad. In presence of his child the worst man
has a moral longing. He conceals his vices
166 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
from him. That his boy should imitate him
there is a thought he cannot endure. If the
Church knew only how to touch this instinct !
It has worried itself about infant baptism ; it
has split itself in twain on the subject of infant
communion. Had it eyes it would see that
its vital question lies not in such things, but
in adequately meeting that child yearning
of each human soul which, mightier in it than
logic, mightier in it than science, is the evidence
of the Paradise Lost which it seeks to regain.
In a chapter on " Religion and the Child "
most readers would expect some observations
on religious training, and of this there has
been, so far, no word. One could indeed say
much, but we content ourselves with a hint.
Men and women should begin to train their
children long years before they are born. It
sounds a paradox, but there is nothing truer.
In what we are doing now, as young men and
women, with our own souls we are training
the children that are yet to be. We begin
generations even before they are born. The
ancestors of John Wesley the fine old non-
juring clergyman on the one side, and the
Puritans who suffered for conscience' sake
on the other were shaping, all unwittingly
RELIGION AND THE CHILD. 167
to themselves, the spiritual fibre and sinew
of the great evangelist that was to come. When
the children are actually with us, a curse will
surely rest on the man or woman of us who
obstructs their view of the heavenly kingdom.
Religion is the basis of child-life, and when
it is not also the basis of parent-life Nature
in her holiest part has been outraged. The
best dowry for a child, more in value than all
the world can offer, is the memory of a mother
who prays. To be chosen by our child as its
ideal is, perhaps, the highest honour that we
could receive. But even that is not enough.
We have failed unless, in embracing us as his
ideal, our child is thereby set on the direct
route to the Highest.
XVIII.
Our Wilderness Side.
A LARGE part of our planet will always be a
wilderness. When the last cultivable acre
has been reached, there will stretch beyond
it the wild moorland and the eternal hills. To
the end of time the mountains will be a solitude ;
so will the wastes of sandy desert, and the
interminable stretches of the lonely ocean. We
are all of us glad that it is so. For the wilder-
ness side of our world answers so perfectly
to the wilderness side in ourselves. You
may case a man in all the conventionalities
and all the proprieties, but there is a bit of
" Chaos and old night " inside him, a frag-
ment of the original formless infinite, that
refuses to be cabined or confined. The best
drilled of us cannot forget his relation to the
original immensity. The city clerk on thirty
shillings a week looks up to the shining stars
at night and finds in himself some kinship
with them.
OUR WILDERNESS SIDE. 169
The more civilisation presses us the more
insistent becomes our instinct for the wilder-
ness. It shows in all classes. West-end ex-
quisites will take the train at Waterloo and
disappear for a year or more. They are next
heard of as hunting big game in Central
Africa, or finding new pathways across the
Himalayas. The rush in the holiday season
means not so much a search for health as the
desire to mate the wilderness within us to
the wilderness without. It is Mother Nature
that calls, and there is no resisting her appeal.
By her rivers or on her moorlands we lie in
her bosom, taking our
Fill of deep and liquid rest,
Forgetful of all ill
The men who in their regular life are the
most entombed in routine are often the most
tranced listeners to the mystic voice. In
the published letters of T. E. Brown, of
Clifton College, we see how the learned,
conscientious schoolmaster of term time was, in
the holidays, and, indeed, inwardly all the
year through, the Manxman, the poet, whose
soul was by the sea and the mountains, and
in the land of dreams. Jerome became a
monk largely because he loved the wilderness
170 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
and hated cities. We get a touch of his
feeling where in one of his commentaries
he speaks of Elijah and Elisha as monks,
and praises the condition as one of solitude
and liberty. Speaking of himself and his
friends he says that after the freedom of
their lonely life they found confinement in
cities as bad as imprisonment. Indeed, most
leaders have been wilderness men. It is
in solitude they have found themselves and
their mission.
This instinct for the wilderness outside
answers, we have said, to a related realm of
the soul. There are, indeed, two sorts of
desert within us one like that of the moun-
tains and the sea primitive eternal, beyond
the touch of plough and harrow ; the other a
waste that cries for cultivation. The first
is one of our most precious possessions. Has
it ever occurred to us to appraise the value to
life of that vast inner region whose dim boun-
daries impinge at a hundred points on our
consciousness, without ever becoming fully
recognisable in it ? Outside the narrow area
of our definite knowing looms the vast realm
of that Formless which inscrutably creates
our knowing. There, in a way that is hidden
OUR WILDERNESS SIDE. 171
from us, is manufactured the light of ou/
seeing. How the soul exults in this inner
infinite ! It is the open air of thought.
From out of our creeds and our definite know-
ledge we emerge, as from time to time we
escape from our crowded cities, to exult in
the sense of these vaster horizons beyond.
But there is a wilderness side in man of
which very different things are to be said.
It is that part of him which was meant to be
cultivated, and that still lies waste. In this
respect we are as settlers in a new country.
The centre of the estate has been cleared,
the trees cut down, roads made here and there,
and a goodly acreage put under crops. But
there is no sense of finish. The stumps of oak
and elm are still in the ground ; outside the
middle area are bog and uncultivated bush,
and here and there are neglected points
where the primeval forest, pushed back for a
space, is again asserting itself.
We are so accustomed to ourselves as we
are, that most of us pass through life without
realising the amount of waste ground there
is lying about within us. The crop we raise
out of our mere physical capacity might be
quadrupled by a better farming. What is
172 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
the difference in value between a trained
and an untrained finger ? A Paderewski
might instruct us on the point. And the
eye, the ear, the foot, every limb, organ and
physical power can be lifted to almost in-
credible capacities by the sheer power of
drill. A new stage of the human evolution
will be in sight when a system of thorough
physical culture, beginning from infancy,
has been universally recognised as an essential
condition of securing to our race the full
wealth of its inheritance of life.
It is, however, when we reach the sphere of
moral dispositions and actions that we be-
come most conscious of our wilderness con-
dition. We may have reformed our actions
and brought our speech under control, but
what of our thoughts ? In his " Grace Abound-
ing," that marvellous portraiture of a struggling
soul, Bunyan sketches for us the stages
of his moral progress under the influence of
religion. There was the start, in the open
avowal of himself as a Christian disciple,
and then the breaking of old habits and asso-
ciations. But long after the taking of these
steps there was inward chaos. Rebel thoughts,
inspired as it seemed by demons, chased
OUE WILDERNESS SIDE. 173
through the bck chambers of his brain
and made hideous turmoil. To gain the
mastery there was the last and hardest fight.
Bagehot says somewhere that mediaeval Chris-
tianity was occupied largely in fighting and
even dying for principles which it was utterly
careless about carrying into practice. There
are people to-day who disbelieve altogether
in the practice. The present writer once
found himself in an argument in France
with a cultivated sceptic, whose position
was that Christianity was impossible as a
religion because it demanded purity even
in a man's thoughts ! He preferred the
motto of the Renaissance humanists : " Intus
ut libet, foris ut moris est : In private do what
you like, in public follow the custom." And
the modern man, in some sections at least,
has not got much further than this.
Yet certain is it that no one has come
to his inheritance, has tasted the fulness and
sweetness of life, who has not brought this
part of himself into order. That has been
seen plainly enough outside of Christianity.
What a word is that of Plato which speaks of
the true man, " the kingly man," as "a
living law " ! It was here that the great
174 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
melancholy emperor-stoic, Marcus Aurelius,
placed the real worth of life. " The one
thing worth living for," says he, " is to keep
one's soul pure." Seneca, with his Si vis
tibi omnia svbjicere, te subjice rationi " If thou
wouldest bring all things into subjection subject
thyself to reason " is on the same track. He
would cultivate the ground by a rigorous self-
examination. " I blink no unpleasant part.
I pass nothing over. For why should I fear
to face any one of my faults when it lies in
my power to say, ' For to-day I pardon thee,
but sin no more ' ? "
But while heathenism made brave incursions
into this ground it is in the school of Christ
that the true farming of it has been learned.
There is no truer refreshment than to come
upon those " pastures of great souls," where
the green verdure, the laden trees, the waving
grain, and the scented air are all the fruit
of this incomparable culture. How these
husbandmen of the spirit know each other
across the ages ! They each drop their
pregnant word of experience as they pass.
It is a Clement of Alexandria who says that
" fastings signify abstinence from all evils
whatsoever, both in action and hi word,
OUR WILDERNESS SIDE. 175
and in thought itself," or yet more powerfully,
where he insists that our inner goodness
must infect our neighbour : "If the neigh-
bours of an elect man sin, the elect man has
sinned. For had he conducted himself as
the Word prescribes, his neighbour also would
have been filled with such reverence for the
life as not to sin." Or it is Friar Laurence
with his " practice of the presence of God,"
or that sweet saint of the Middle Ages the
Anchoress Julian : " As long as we be meddling
with any part of sin we shall never see clearly
the Blissful Cheer of our Lord." As we glance
across fields like these there is no doubt
about the farming or the results.
But finished husbandry of that kind is
exceptional. Man is at an early stage of his
evolution, and has only just begun to be
spiritual. His farm is on the edge of the
wilderness, and the savage growths are
perpetually reasserting themselves. How be-
wildering are these intrusions ! Every section
of our life has its new kind of weed. We
struggle through youth to find in manhood
that we have to begin again. Further on the
discovery is made that old age has its special
vices. The weeds come up in our best flower-
176 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
beds. An Indian mystic said that one of
the most ineffaceable things was the vanity
of a saint. Our very religion is full of wilder-
ness. Pious people are as eager to-day as
were the Pharisees of old for the chief seats
in the synagogue. At meetings for spiritual
edification a speaker will declaim with seraphic
fervour, while robbing the man who comes
after him of his time allowance in the spirit
of a highwayman. We are moral along the
beaten tracks, and outside make the strangest
exhibitions of ourselves. A little success and
our head is turned. The enriched Christian
has lost the charm of his poorer day. All the
time the swamp and morass are so close out-
side. Every now and then comes from them
a poisonous breath which brings fever to the
blood, and we are no longer ourselves. Men
remember with a shudder the barbaric " pos-
sessions" that for a time have held them.
They wonder what would have happened
had favouring circumstances been allied with
certain moods.
Nevertheless man, so raw a settler in this
higher realm, will yet conquer it, and make
it his home. The surrounding swamps will
be drained and the air made wholesome.
OUR WILDERNESS SIDE. 177
The high dreams of his uppermost part will
all be fulfilled. His aspiration for inner per-
fection is a prophecy, a dawn of the coming
day. This always is the method of life.
It never comes unannounced. Before the
main body, often far in advance, are the
avant-couriers, the flying messengers that
tell of what is to follow. Herein is the supreme
significance for us of the character of Christ.
The significance is that in this He is " the
first-born of many brethren." In that sinless
career, in which the whole inner life moves
with absolute harmony, in which imagination,
thought, feeling, will and desire, in a con-
tinued perfect co-operation make one celestial
music, we perceive, as though it were written
on the sky, the glorious promise for our race.
For the height on which Christ moved is a
human height. The destiny of this Divine
Son, " made perfect," is for ever mingled
with our own.
12
XIX.
The Quality of Belief.
" DIFFERENCES of belief " is a familiar phrase,
but its real significance is only imperfectly
realised. With the mass of people, including
a good many moral and religious teachers,
the emphasis is placed almost entirely on the
something believed. And assuredly that is of
prime importance. In some directions it is
everything. If an engine driver believes that
a signal shows white when it is red, or a pilot
that a sunken reef on to which he is steering
is a mile away, it will not in these cases matter
greatly how the conviction was reached. The
whole result will follow from the conviction
itself. Indeed, in every department of life,
the " what " we believe in, whether it be true
or false, is of such enormous import that we
may easily reach the notion that the whole
content of faith lies there. Whether, in the
trade we are engaged in, we believe in this
method or that ; whether in science we accept
178
THE QUALITY OF BELIEF. 179
evolution or reject it ; whether in finance we
hold by the soundness or otherwise of this
investment ; hi religion whether we believe
in a God or not ; throughout the whole circle
of affairs the thing we believe in, its actual
Tightness or wrongness, seems so to fill the
whole view, as to leave room for nothing else.
Yet, when we examine more closely we
discover that, in one sphere at least, the thing
believed in is not nearly the whole of belief.
In the region of morals and religion the " what "
we believe is, to a degree not nearly enough
understood, conditioned by the " how." The
study of religious history, both in the gross
and in individual careers, shows us that the
body of a creed, its doctrinal content, as an
influence upon character, has been often
subordinate to this other question, how the
belief has been come at, and the way in which
it has been held. In other words, what has to
be ever taken into account in the estimate is
not only the quantity but the quality of the
belief. The question is a practical one, and
there are some present-day applications of it
that are urgent.
What we have to realise is that the sublimest
belief may be held nobly or ignobly ; and
180 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
on the other hand that a belief, poor and
meagre in itself, may be so worthily held as to
be an instrument of genuine progress. M.
Taine, in one of his earlier letters, puts well
one aspect of this theme when he says : " Re-
ligion, though one, differs with different minds.
Some interpret it well, and on it feed generous
feelings, exalted hopes, great thoughts. Others
falsify it, and make it a matter of kneeling,
processions, penances, bows, ridiculous prac-
tices, tending to destroy health, to injure the
intelligence, and to banish peace of mind."
With the same creed, that is, one man is
growing to nobleness, and another to a despic-
able meanness. It is a question of use.
As we survey our credal furniture of to-day
and compare it with that of some of the past
Christian times, we find that, great as is the
divergence on some matters of knowledge, the
real difference lies quite outside the intellec-
tual sphere. If we want convincing of this,
we have only to compare the average twentieth-
century holding of Christianity with that, say,
of the ages of persecution. The creed of the
Church to-day, in its general statements,
is very much that of Tertullian's time. The
views of the great African as to the person of
THE QUALITY OF BELIEF. 181
Christ, the Salvation by Him, the Christian
community, the resurrection, the future state,
are reflected in the formularies that are now
in use. But let anyone turn to the literature
of that time and he will understand what we
mean by the quality of belief. As we look from
one period to the other we are inclined to ask :
" Is there anything in common between the
easy-going life-system of our British Church-
man, with a creed which he inherits as part of
his position in society, and that second-century
fellowship lived within view of the flames ? "
It were worth while for our good citizen, as a
change in his reading, to substitute one morn-
ing for the money article of The Times such a
document, say, as Tertullian's " Ad Martyras,"
a letter which it would be difficult for the
hardest of us to read without emotion. Fancy
something of this sort, addressed to us in view
of what might be our lot to-morrow ! " The
flesh, perhaps, will dread the merciless sword
and the lofty cross, and the rage of wild beasts,
and that punishment of the flames, of all
most terrible, and all the skill of the execu-
tioner in torture." Or this from his exhorta-
tion on Patience : " We who carry about our
very soul, our very body, exposed in this world
182 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
to injury from all, and exhibit patience under
that injury, shall we be hurt at the loss of
less important things ? " To call our citizen's
correct recital of his creed at Sunday morning
service by the same name as the faith of these
men and women, held in view of the torture
chamber and under the very heat and smoke
of the pyre, is surely to invoke our sense of the
ludicrous.
It seems, then, that the conditions under
which we obtain and hold our belief, as well as
the content of it, have to be weighed in any
estimation of its real value. A man has
signed his thirty-nine articles, and his neigh-
bour finds himself unable to put his name to a
single one, and often enough heaven has more
hopes of this last than of the other. What the
first holds may be in itself the most important
truth, but he holds it in such a way that it is
practically of no good to himself or to anyone
else. Our creedless man, on the other hand,
may be in his present condition on his way from
a formalism which meant nothing to a faith
which, agonised and fought for, shall be a power
to reform the world. Its articles will probably
be less in number than thirty-nine, but they
will be enough for life and victory. It is
THE QUALITY OF BELIEF. 183
convictions of this order and parentage that
make history. Robertson of Brighton, after the
first shaking of his traditional creed, tumbled
from negation to negation, until the only
thing left him was the eternal difference
between right and wrong. But from that
one certitude he climbed step by step to others,
proved each to his inmost soul, until he found
again a Christian Gospel which was a message
of life to multitudes.
Religious belief is for the sake of the religious
life. The moment we realise that, we recog-
nise how much more must enter into it than
the definitions which the intellect furnishes.
Its roots lie so much deeper than the intellect.
Flourishing hi the midst of gross superstitions
we find sweet natures, that select instinctively
from their system all that is morally helpful
and live on that. And there are natures that
touch the highest truths only to degrade them.
In lowliest things some find suggestions of the
noblest ; in the noblest others see nothing
but the sordid. A book has just been issued
which finds the ultimate origins of Christianity
in the lowest obscenities of Paganism. " It grew
originally out of Phallic worship ! " Put a hog
into a palace and it will make of it a sty.
184 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
Amongst simple races the moral quality of
belief shows almost exclusively in the way it
is used. There is hardly a question here as to
how it has been come by. It is like the
elements around them, a primitive fact, into
the midst of which they were born, which
they accept and live in, as they accept and
live in the air and the sunshine. With the
educated man of to-day the quality of belief
is a question of much farther reach. For a
creed to be acceptable he must recognise in its
texture the elements of knowledge and of
veracity. He realises with Pascal, that " the
first of all Christian truths is that truth shall be
loved above all." And as to what constitutes
-truth some fine old crusted formulas no longer
attract him. A certain order of mind will
doubtless for a long while to come bow down
to ecclesiastically manufactured authority, and
accept as religion a sentiment of this sort,
uttered not long ago by a Jesuit professor at
Maynooth : " The principle of liberty of
conscience is one which is not, and never has
been and never will be, approved by the
Church of Christ." But Rome, with the best
will for the work, no longer creates the beliefs
of the world. Before resuming that role she
THE QUALITY OF BELIEF. 185
will have to purge herself of her sins against
truth ; she must renounce her bogus infalli-
bilities, her habit of persecution, her veto
upon research, her fostering of superstition,
and other deadly intellectual vices. A religious
belief that can show no better credentials than
this will not survive in the future. What
survives must ring true to the intellect. It
will be nothing more nor less than the spiritual
interpretation of proved facts.
And how will that interpretation be gained ?
Always in one way by a personal experience.
The experience not, perhaps, so much of the
multitude, as of the leaders whom God from
time to time vouchsafes to the world. As long
as humanity endures there will probably be
this difference in faith ; the difference between
the simple human devotion of earnest men with
their eyes fixed upon the teacher who guides
and inspires them, and the faith of the leader
himself who, in advance of the crowd, his eyes
lifted to the heavens, guided not by authority,
but by inner voices, and by the breaking dawn
far in front, goes " sounding on his dim and
perilous way." It is a Luther with his Ich
kann nicht anders, a Jesus who, with face set
towards Jerusalem, walks solitary while the
I
186 PKOBLBMS OF LIVING.
disciples behind are amazed and afraid. The
great teacher of each age is one who, on the
one side, gathers up into himself all the life
of his time, and through that sees God : who,
on the other, having found God for himself,
makes the atmosphere of his day the medium
through which he brings God afresh to the
experience of his fellows. Thus is it that the
eternal Christ is reborn in each true teacher,
and found afresh in each true disciple.
The final moral test of a religious belief is
that " it works." A genuine conviction is a
spring of inculcable power. There is no force
in the world to compare with it. That was
the argument which struck Darwin at Tahiti.
Said he : " The lesson of the missionaries is
the enchanter's wand ; the march of improve-
ment consequent on the introduction of
Christianity through the South Seas probably
stands by itself in the records of history."
The apostolic word that " faith without works
is dead," is a fragment of natural history. A
creed that is doing nothing is not faith. It is
its grinning skeleton from which the life is
departed. A Church whose members recite
formularies that have no relation to their
active life is rotting at the core. It breathes
THE QUALITY OF BELIEF. 187
putrescence and is a danger to the moral
health of the community. Than continue
thus, it were better it should dissolve and
refound itself upon a single affirmation, if only
it can be sure that the affirmation is true.
Happily, there is no need for extremities of
this kind. Our moral world is full of the
materials for great convictions. Humanity
can never lose again the revelations that have
been made to it. But the treasure is hid in
the field, and each soul of us must dig until he
find it.
XX.
The Moment After.
A MODEEN writer asks, " What moment should
we choose as the one from which we could pass
our surest verdict upon life ? " A tantalising
question, to which, however, there is no
satisfying answer. For there is no one moment
whose verdict, taken by itself, is entirely
trustworthy. The scene changes so utterly
as we view our life from the standpoints, now
of expectation, now of fruition, and again of
memory. From no one of these do we get the
whole. But we could spare no one of them
in the final summing. Of a quite peculiar
significance is the view-point we now propose
to examine. A thoughtful man will the more
eagerly, the longer he lives, look for the answers
which come to him from " the moment after."
Every experience we go through yields this
particular product, and it has always a quality
entirely its own. Nowhere else do we find
so immense a rebound, so intense an energy of
THE MOMENT AFTER. 189
self-realisation. The results consequently are
of the first importance, both for our personal
guidance as individuals, as well as for the data
they offer for a philosophy of life.
We have just said that every experience
has " its moment after." As we study these
moments, we find that, while varying immensely
in their contents, they have a significant
unanimity in the lesson they point. They all
turn us in one direction towards the relation
of the soul to our animal life. We take, for
instance, " the moment after " of our sensuous
pleasures. One of those many things, the
commonness of which hides from us their
intrinsic strangeness, is the way in which,
in the cosmic constitution, our so-called
" pleasures " are organised for us. They are
in every case the pursuit of something we
never reach. Whatever the pleasure may be,
whether the gratification of an appetite, the
rush of the chase, or the listening to a thrilling
story, the experience is, in essence, the same
the eager movement towards a consummation,
which, when gained, is a vacuity, a throwing
us back on an empty self. Goethe, an epicure
in sensation, has registered for us this result
in the memorable words : " We are never so
190 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
far removed from the object of our desires as
when we imagine we possess that which we
desire." To the pleasure-seeker " the moment
after " is generally a moment of pessimism.
Every one of us to a more or less degree has
tasted the bitterness of this disgust. But it
is strange that more of us do not inquire why
it should be so. Why is it that such a result,
issuing evidently from the inmost nature of
things, should invariably, at these moments
confront us ? If the scheme under which we
live offered us no other considerations, we
might, surely, find in this one alone the evidence
that, for man, the satisfaction of the animal
nature offers no key to the real solution of his
life.
But " the moment after " opens other prob-
lems not less baffling. Its position in the
natural history of passion, for instance, con-
fronts us with mysteries which go beyond the
measure of our sounding lines. We are
appalled at the vindictive cruelty, or if not
that, the cynical mockery, with which some
men's careers seem mapped out. They are the
victims of a delusion which first blinds and
then cheats them. No man follows evil as
such. He follows always what seems to him
THE MOMENT AFTER. 191
a good, and so often the pursuit of his good
becomes his ruin. There comes a time when
between him and a fancied gain the acquisi-
tion of wealth, the winning of a position, the
gratifying of an imperious desire lies a deed
which, in his hurry, he will not stop to analyse.
The blow is struck, and he leaps forward for the
reward. It is then that the universe plays on
him its deathly trick. The very objects which
drew him on to his deed undergo a ghastly
transformation. He realises, all too late,
the baleful energy of " the moment after."
The anticipated pleasure has disappeared in
this tremendous unforeseen preoccupation. It
is not the crown to be worn but the blood that
is shed that in his " moment after " fills the
soul of Macbeth, making the world for him
" one red." And this human tragedy, with
every variety of detail, is being every day
The spectacle here offered is one on which
men have pondered, doubtingly, despairingly,
cynically, according to their mood, from the
beginning. " Why," it is asked, " should so
cruel a comedy be played upon mortal man ?
We pity the victim in a great crime, but ought
we not to pity the criminal more ? He has
192 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
been such a plaything for the unseen powers !
Why cheat him so utterly ? Why could not
the revelation of " the moment after " have
been given him the moment before ? Why
reserve the knowledge of the true character of
his deed to the hour when it is irremediably
done ? The old Greek dramatists were
full of this problem. For them the solution
was hi a remorseless fate. Continually in
^schylus and Sophocles do we get this note
of a pitiless Necessity, which first blinds the
eyes of men to the real nature of their projected
deed, and then for ever pursues them with its
fell results. A grim solution, and a curious
commentary, surely, on that modern teaching
which bids us forsake our present religious
abiding-places for " the happier life-outlook
of that old Greek world " !
There is a later exposition of guilt's "moment
after " which, differing from the Greek, is yet
hardly an improvement. Nietzsche has de-
voted some of his most caustic pages to what
he calls an analysis of " bad conscience."
In his view man has no business with a " bad
conscience " at all. It is a result of the wrong
turn in the road which he took when he " inter-
nalised himself " when, that is, he turned
THE MOMENT AFTER. 193
inwards on his own nature the instincts which
had been accustomed to discharge themselves
outwardly. Man now attacks himself, turns
the war upon his own instincts, his own
pleasures, instead of, as in the good old
days, upon the world and upon his enemy.
He tells us the time has come to reverse this
action of conscience, to turn its force " against
all unnatural bents, against all those aspirations
for another life, for all that is hostile to the
senses, the instincts, animality in a word,
against all the old ideals."
One would hardly notice such utterances
were it not that they are having their vogue
in certain circles, with a sinister result both
upon ideals and upon morals. Sensualists
love to hear of a philosophy which is an apologia
for their vices ; they will accept it, even when
it dates from Bedlam. The Nietzsche theory
here serves only to illustrate what Cicero
had already learned in his day that " Nihil
tarn absurde did polest, quod non dictatur ab
aliquo philosophorum" (There is no utterable
absurdity which has not been uttered by some
philosopher.) When a man brings an indict-
ment against the world's sanitj 7 it is time for
his friends to look after his own. We ma be
194 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
sure the slow, universal development of the
human moral consciousness has been something
else than a blunder. And the deepest difficulties
connected with it, including this age-long puzzle
of passion's blinding till " the moment after,"
has, we may be certain, a significance better
than that of the Greek fatalism, and better
than that of our latest philosophic cynicism.
The cosmic scheme, as it unfolds before us,
is so healthy and so large-minded as a whole
that we may trust it for its mysteries.
Could the history of the soul's ascent be fully
opened to us, it would be seen that, for some
at least, there was no way up except by this
one tremendous path of tragic disillusion.
As Lessing has said, in spiritual matters it is not
always the straightest road that is the nearest.
Reculer peur mieux sauter is again and again
the rule. How serene in its faith, as against
the despairs and denials outside, is that word
of Clement of Alexandria, who, dealing with
these mysteries of evil, affirms on the one
hand that " nothing exists the cause of whose
existence is not supplied by God ; nothing,
then, is hated by God nor yet by the Word " ;
and, on the other hand, declares of those whose
career has seemed nought but catastrophe,
THE MOMENT AFTER. 195
" Some are ill to cure, and, like iron, are
wrought into shape with fire and hammer and
anvil." To him the universe meant not faith
and not mockery, but uttermost redemption.
But the verdict on our pleasures and on our
lapses is not the only one delivered by " the
moment after." It has others, whose signifi-
ance as related to the cosmic order is not less
arresting. There is that, for instance, which
follows upon misfortune and calamity. After
our pleasures we have seen that the soul
laughs with a certain scorn. " Is this, then,"
it seems to say, " the thing you were after ? "
In the other case, that of disaster, it also has
its laugh, but it is this time one of gaiety and
assurance. " Your catastrophe, about whose
oncoming you shivered so pitifully, has it turned
out so bad an affair after all ? " One of the
most wonderful things in life is this note of
our inmost nature in face of some crash of the
outward. Often and often has a man had
to wait till then for his most ecstatic
moment. With his world gone to pieces below,
his soul is singing high up in the empyrean.
Granted that the experience may be transient,
yet that the soul should give out such a note
at such a time is a fact which no explorer in this
196 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
field may overlook. Ally it on one side with
the truth which we found at the threshold of
our study, that the sphere of animal sensation
gives no real satisfaction, and on the other
with this further truth (which would take an
essay of itself properly to develop), that an
act of goodness yields always for its " moment
after " a consciousness not only wondrous
sweet, but celestial and supernal in the char-
acter of its sweetness, and we have here a co-
sensus of inner testimony, the united blend
of voices from life's " moment after," which
compels the belief that the one solution of our
existence in this world is in its link with an
order of things invisible, spiritual and holy.
And such a result leads inevitably to one
other. To study " the moment after " is to
be fronted ultimately with the greatest of the
world-enigmas. What of death's " moment
after " ? Aristotle spoke of death as " a limit,"
and Horace, in a well-know line, echoes the
word. But our knowledge of to-day is abolish-
ing limits and destroying finalities. Nature's
every end is only a new beginning. Were all
the suns and systems to clash together in
universal ruin the sum of things and of forces
would be there just the same, ready to begin
THE MOMENT AFTER. 197
afresh. And the sum of mind assuredly not
less than of matter. The testimony of science
to-day is to a hidden world possessing " the
power of an endless life." Blended with
religion, it proclaims for every hurt a healing,
for every sin a cleansing, for every catastrophe
a reparation, for death the renewal of life.
It is the exacter expression of what for ages
has been the cry of the human heart. Ancient
Egypt buried its dead crowned with the
emblems of immortality. Greece in its sacred
drama asked :
Who knows if life be death and death life ?
The Indian oracle declared " the end of death
is birth." These mingled voices were a
Preparatio Evangelica, the avant-couriers of
that final Gospel which has crowned humanity
with " glory, honour and immortality."
XXI.
The Interplay of Ideas.
IN that weird book by Balzac, the " Peau de
Chagrin," one of the characters thus expresses
himself on the subject of ideas : " Our ideas
are complete, organised beings, which live in
an invisible world, and have power on our
destinies." The speaker is in a vein of rhe-
torical exaggeration, but in what he says here
he skirts the edge of some deep truths. It
would be absurdly incorrect to speak in such
terms of every notion that surges in our own
or our neighbour's brain. Yet there is a king-
dom of ideas about which these words express
hardly more than the sober fact. Certaink
our world is ruled by ideas, and could we see
the machinery at work it would be the most
wonderful of spectacles. We should look upon
tidal movements of thought, sweeping from
land to land and from century to century,
movements that are rhythmical, whose every
pulsation is according to law, working out
198
THE INTERPLAY OF IDEAS. 199
a pre-destined result. We should see how
ideas, apparently the most opposed, obey a
law of mutual attraction, so that then- seeming
clash and collision turn out to be a marriage,
having for offspring a new thought-series
enriched from both sides. We should see
great idea-systems rising, developing, decay-
ing, dissolving, and in their dissolution setting
free new forces that work towards fresh com-
binations. Behind the uproar of the outside
world, without noise, without visible appearance,
lives and energises this mighty inner universe,
that silently shapes our life and destiny.
It will not, we imagine, be an unprofitable
study if we show how, in some different direc-
tions, this interplay of ideas has revealed itself
in history. The examples, taken by them-
selves, are sufficiently significant, but far more
so when viewed as a whole. The subject, seen
in its entire length and breadth, gives a won-
drous insight into the way our universe is
governed, and as to what, ultimately, we may
expect from it.
Beginning at the centre, in the sphere of
our most vital interests, we may notice, first,
how the organised movement of ideas has
worked in humanity's religious life. To-day,
200 PBOBLEMS OP LIVING.
as since the dawn of history, the world offers
the spectacle of a number of rival and com-
peting religions. Up to a period well within
the lifetime of many of us, each of these
religions was regarded by its adherents as the
one truth, outside of which there was neither
goodness, happiness, nor salvation. To-day the
Western nations at least are learning better.
They are beginning at last to understand their
own religion and its true relation to the others.
Unique in the Person of its Founder, in the
character it moulds, and in the moral and
spiritual forces which it wields, Christianity is
seen, nevertheless, not to be alien from the
other faiths, but closely and lovingly akin.
For at its background is a system of ideas
which are not of one land or nation, but are
universal in humanity. Tindal, with his
" Christianity as Old as the Creation," made
a prodigious flutter amongst the orthodox of
the eighteenth century, and there is a great
deal in that singular work to which we should
be sorry to subscribe. But there was truth
in his idea all the same, and it was one which
Augustine, centuries before, had recognised and
was not afraid to enunciate. That surely is a
memorable passage where, in the " Betracta-
THE INTERPLAY OF IDEAS. 201
tiones," the work of his later years, in which
he revised his earlier judgments, he writes
these words : " Res ipsa, quae nunc rdigio
Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud antiques, nee
defuit ah initio generis humani" (The thing
itself which is now known as the Christian
religion existed among the ancients, and in fact
was with the human race from the beginning.)
We understand that now, in a wider sense
even than did Augustine. We have oome to
recognise Christianity, not as an isolated
phenomenon, but as the culmination in history
of a set of Divine, redemptive ideas that have
been working amongst men everywhere from
the first. With the advent of comparative
religion has come a great knocking down of
barriers. The common element it reveals is
the scientific affirmation of the faith of the
nobler souls in every age. Zinzendorf declared
the good men of every nation to be his brethren
in Christ. Erasmus proposed to canonise
Socrates. The Greek fathers were never tired
of affirming that the struggle towards virtue
of the pagan races was the sign of the indwelling
Word. Even Tertullian, so fierce at times in
his exclusiveness, has his hours of illumination,
when he can pen noble utterances such as this ;
202 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
" Man is the one name belonging to every
nation upon earth ; there is one soul and many
tongues, one spirit and various sounds ; every
country has its own speech, but the subjects
of speech are common to all. God is every-
where, and the goodness of God is everywhere."
And not the least, surely, of the evidences
of the common origin of these ideas is the way
they have worked. The resemblance of the
main features of the religious life in widely-
separated races and cults is too wonderful to
be ignored. All the great religions have
doctrines of incarnation, of sacrifice and sacra-
ments, of renunciation, of resurrection and of
judgment. The following statement from M.
Cumont of the followers of Mithras is not only
sufficiently accurate in itself, but might be
quoted with little variation of many another
faith outside our own : " Like the Christians,
the followers of Mithras lived in closely united
societies, calling one another father and
brother. Like the Christians, they practised
baptism, communion and confirmation ; they
taught an authoritative morality, preached
continence, chastity, self-denial and self-con-
trol ; like the Christians they spoke of a deluge,
and believed in the immortality of the soul
THE INTERPLAY OF IDEAS. 203
and resurrection of the dead, in a heaven for
the blessed and hell as the abode of evil spirits."
There was a time, not so long ago, when facts of
this kind would have been staggering and con-
fusing to the evangelic consciousness. We
accept them now as a confirmation of faith.
They show the Gospel as Divine because so
intimately and universally human. They show
it to be the reaffirmation, under highest auspices,
of that great charter of spiritual deliverance
which is the common heritage of our race.
We may now come to another phase of that
great interplay of ideas by which the world
is at once governed and inspired. We spoke
at the beginning of the law of alliances by which
seeming opposites in the thought-world come
ultimately together, producing by their union
fresh, fruitful syntheses which combine in
themselves the older and once hostile elements.
The erstwhile enemies, by a mysterious inner
law which they cannot resist, become first
friends and then the parents of a new line of
spiritual descendants. This is what has been
happening in our own day in the supposed
conflict between science and religion. One
might almost fancy, studying the two great
lines of ideas, bred respectively in the regions
204 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
of science and of Christian theology, that they
were alive. They peer out at each other from
their opposite sides, at first with suspicion and
aversion. More and more closely do they scan
each other's lineaments, and begin finally to
recognise a mysterious affinity. A mutual,
irresistible attraction draws them, till at length
they embrace, and discover themselves to us
as one. Evolution, forty years ago, seemed
to spell the ruin of evangelical doctrine. To-
day, with religion's most thoughtful exponents,
it forms one of its strongest bases, as well as
one of its most fruitful illustrations.
The attraction of ideas is stronger than any
human devices for keeping them apart. The
more exclusive communions have endlessly
multiplied these devices. They have built high
walls, carrying heavy artillery of anathema
and persecution to keep off aliens and intruders
from without. Romanism is the conspicuous
example of this method, and its present posi-
tion is an object-lesson on our theme. Its
embattled fortifications tower to the heavens,
but they cannot keep out the atmosphere, nor
the ideas with which it is charged. A French
bishop was a while ago lamenting in one
of the Ultramontane journals that the seminar-
THE INTERPLAY or IDEAS. 205
ists, the students for the priesthood, in his
diocese, instead of studying Thomas Aquinas
and the orthodox exponents of the Vatican
creed, were actually reading Wellhausen and
the other leaders of the new Biblical criticism.
Alas for the bishop and his cause ! They
are on the losing side. Their weapons are
carnal and out of date. Of no avail are they
against the powers of the Spirit, against the
Divine ideas of truth and freedom which sweep
to-day across continents and across systems, and
are mighty for the pulling down of strongholds.
There is a side of the theme that demands
at least a word that of the interplay between
ideas and character. There is a whole world
of spiritual truth here which waits to be
investigated. Suffice it now to say that we
get no real religious solutions apart from inner
purification. The progressive elevation of our
spiritual life brings us, at each step of the pro-
gress, to new springs of noble thought. When
a man loves nobly, and acts and suffers nobly,
there come from such experiences legions of
ideas that are as winged angels out of heaven.
In Dante's feeling for Beatrice we see how a
human affection, free from every trace of
ignoble passion, becomes the etherealising and
206 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
the eternising of love ; in his long exile, endured
for the love of justice and of his country, we find
the seed plot of that Poem for all time " on which
both heaven and earth had laid their hands."
Here, indeed, do we come to the pith and
heart of the whole matter. We have dis-
cussed the interplay between systems of think-
ing and of believing. But the whole signifi-
cance of this lies in what is behind. It would
be nothing to us to watch the flow of ideas
from continent to continent and from century
to century did we not discern here the evidence
of a flow that is deeper and mightier. The key
to it all is hi the interplay between heaven
and earth. The significance of religion lies in
this that here man has been thinking a
greater thought than his own. His history is
the working out, towards an ever-clearer
expression, of Divine ideas that in their com-
plete expansion offer to us the vision of immortal
beauty and of final perfectness. They suggest
our great poet's question
What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to the other like ?
And they leave us in no doubt as to the answer.
XXII.
Religion's Vocabulary.
IN his " Chips from a German Workshop "
Max Miiller describes the way in which, from
the study of the primitive Aryan language, we
may obtain an idea of the height to which the
earliest common civilisation had risen, before
the separate branches of the family broke off.
His method is to find the words which, in the
languages of all the Asiatic and European
peoples descended from the Aryan stock, are
traceable to a common root. That part of a
nation's vocabulary which cannot be shown
to derive from the same source represents
experiences of life that had been encountered
after the great separation. It is an ingenious
and most valuable method of research, which
yields all manner of striking results. But the
suggestions it opens go farther than the great
philologist's immediate application of it. For
language, properly investigated, tells more than
the story of a given group of peoples. Its
207
208 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
history and development lay bare at every
stage the deepest truths about man's central
life. In religion's vocabulary, in particular, we
have new and fascinating ways opened to us
into the heart of the soul's mysteries.
Religion, it is true, existed before its vocabu-
lary. It had a language probably of signs
before it had one of words. There is suggestive-
ness in that view of a modern writer who regards
the attitude of kneeling and of clasping the
uplifted hands in prayer as originating in the
attitude of suppliant captives, who offered
their hands to be bound by the victor. And
religious experience comes before both the
sign and the word. Tertullian touches this
in his fine saying, " Unquestionably, the soul
existed before letters, and speech before books,
and ideas before the writing of them, and man
himself before the poets and philosophers."
Always, too, in its onward march, does religious
experience transcend its old word-tools and find
itself compelled to forge new ones. Newman,
in a well-known passage, speaks of all the
truths of the later creeds and confessions as hid
from the beginning in the bosom of the Church,
waiting, till time and necessity should bring
them to verbal expression. And advanced
RELIGION'S VOCABULARY. 209
minds know also what it is to prepare homes
in what seem void places of the soul, for truths
that have not yet appeared, but which, they
know, are on the way, and will require, by and
by, their own special vehicle of utterance.
When, however, we turn to the language
which religion has already forged for itself we
shall, if we are at the proper standpoint, obtain
as nowhere else a sense of the height to which
man has climbed, and of the extraordinary
richness and complexity of his inner life. In
the words he has coined man gives the register
of the growth of his soul. Language is the
clothing of the new inner organs which it
is perpetually putting forth. And here, in
particular, we have one of the tests, singularly
little noticed by the average apologist, of
the place of Christianity in the human
movement. The religious public, including its
teachers, freely using, as they do, the ordinary
Christian vocabulary, have not, surely, paid
sufficient attention to the wonder of that
vocabulary in itself ? To get a proper sense
of it one needs to have a course of reading in
the classic literature of the old pagan world.
When, after a study of its poets, philosophers
and moralists, and the garnering of its highest
14
210 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
thought, we come to the Christian ages, we
find ourselves arrested, for the first thing, by
something quite new in the sphere of words.
Something startlingly fresh has been added
to the human vocabulary.
We say this in full view of the reservations
that have to be made. Much of what the
average Bible reader regards as special to the
Gospel the scholar knows to be otherwise.
Judaism had created a vocabulary on which
the New Testament writers freely drew. The
great words applied to Christ, for instance, are
mainly borrowed. Philo Judseus speaks of the
Logos as " His first-begotten Son," and as
" the Image of God and First-Born of all
intelligent creatures." He describes God as
" appointing a Price and Ransom for the soul,"
and declares it " necessary for a person per-
forming his duty to the All Father to apply
to His Son as an Advocate." From the
Book of Enoch we get also the " Day of Judg-
ment " with the " Son of Man " as Judge ;
the titles of Messiah as the " Christ or Anointed
One," the " Righteous One," the " Elect or
Chosen One," and " Michael " and " Gabriel "
as names of archangels. Comparative re-
ligion shows us the idea of the Trinity as a
RELIGION'S VOCABULARY. 211
common possession of the old-world faiths, as
well as a familiar formulary of the ancient
philosophies. To recognise all this is, indeed,
for the Christian believer not so much an
admission as a further basis for his faith.
Have we not here the culmination of a universal
movement centring on the " Desire of All
Nations " as its ultimate end ?
But when this is said we are left with an
undiminished marvel in the Christian speech.
For it contains a whole range of new words that
have had to be created in order to express the
new facts. And the common phrases needed
to be put into fresh combinations and to bear
the weight of wholly fresh meanings. The
apostles, and the saints who have followed
them, when they talk of regeneration, of
conversion, of the baptism and fruits of
the Spirit, of sanctification, of oneness
with Christ, of Divine assurance, of the
heavenly rest, have had, as it were, to remake
a language that it might carry the new life-
treasures of which they were conscious. What-
ever these words may mean to us, they assuredly
meant something to them. If we are living
beneath their true significance, not less do
they represent a height to which humanity, in
212 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
its choicer spirits, has, under the Christian
inspiration, at one time risen. Evolution
teaches us that expanding life aims ever at
creating organs adequate to its range, and
these words are nothing less than the organs
by which the soul at its loftiest has expressed
itself.
It is almost impossible for us properly to
estimate the addition to the wealth of the
human spirit when this great religious voca-
bulary first filtered down to the minds of the
common people. We have no calculating
apparatus that will give as the total of bene-
diction that came to men when a Wiclif and a
Luther threw the Scriptures open to the
general speech. In them the aspiration of
Erasmus was fulfilled. " I wish," says he of
the Epistles and Gospels, " they were trans-
lated into all languages of the people. I wish
that the husbandman might sing parts of them
at his plough, and the weaver at his shuttle,
and that the traveller might beguile with their
narration the weariness of his way." And the
people when these riches came in sight, were
not slow to grasp them. Says Foxe, " After
Wiclif's time some gave a load of hay for a
few chapters of St. James or of St. Paul." We
RELIGION'S VOCABULARY. 213
have in these days grown careless, almost
oblivious of our wealth, from its very redun-
dance and ease of acquirement. Yet the easy
estimate of a surfeited and indifferent age will
not blind the instructed spirit to the magnifi-
cence of the inheritance to which it has here
succeeded.
But while all this is true we are, alas ! not
allowed to forget that there is a contrary
account. Religion's vocabulary is an affair
not only of living words but also of dead ones.
And the range of human vision contains few
things more unsightly than these withered
symbols out of which the life has gone. The
human loathing of cant is its healthy horror
of skeletons, of carcases, of decayed things
generally. Men shrink more and more from
religious functions that are stuffed with defunct
phrases. They hear in them the rattle of
gibbets. When the Church has these things
mainly to offer, men will keep outside. Within,
they scent the odour of putrefaction, and they
prefer the fresh air.
And in this sphere we encounter not only
words out of which the life has gone, but
debased specimens, alive, indeed, but with an
inferior vitality which is wholly mischievous.
214 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
In the periods representing religion's upward
movement words, as we have said, are created
as the organs and expressions of its abounding
life. But there is also a word coinage of its
decadent periods, when men indulge in the
manufacture of vocables, because they have
nothing better to do. It is then we get
theological logomachies in which people fight
to the death about a syllable. It is of this
kind of manufacture that Edmond Scherer
says : " Le mot c'est Vartisan des idols"
Gregory of Nyssa gives us a vivid account
of this phase in the Eastern Church, when, as
he describes, " knots of people gathered at the
street corners of Constantinople discussing
incomprehensibilities. When a tradesman was
asked how many oboli a thing cost, he started
a discussion upon generated and ungenerated
existence. Inquiries of a baker were answered
by the assertion that the Father was greater
than the Son." We could have forgiven the
speculations if people had been good-humoured
over them. But these were the times when
bloody battles were fought over single words,
which nobody really understood. Well may
Dr. Hatch declare the darkest ages of the
Church " those which record the story of its
RELIGION'S VOCABULARY. 215
endeavouring to force its transformed Greek
metaphysics upon men or upon races to whom
they were alien."
The evil of these word-wrangles is happily
abated to-day, though far from extinct. Our
personal concern with religion's vocabulary
lies elsewhere. It is commonly a twofold
concern. It is our urgent business, for one
thing, to know whether we can claim a share
in those great New Testament words which
stand for the soul's central truth and highest
life. Aloft in the spiritual firmament they
shine, beckoning us perpetually to their own
sphere. No man is rich apart from these
riches ; no life is blessed to which these words
have not opened themselves and shed the
fulness of their mighty meaning.
Our other concern will be with the religious
use of the common vocabulary. The old
Quaker's " thee " and " thou " have fallen into
desuetude, but his fine measurement of words is
a grand rule. To speak the simple truth with-
out fear, and to speak it in love, is one of the
greatest of human deeds. The common words
take on a new meaning when a disciplined
soul speaks them. The language, as a diction-
ary product, is the same for this man, and
216 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
that ; but the one's " Yes " and " No " are a
feather-weight ; the other's carry a world.
Christ's " Sermon " was the simplest of utter-
ances, with not a theological phrase in it.
Yet it runs through the world and through the
ages as a fountain of living water. It is the
pattern of a religious vocabulary : the homely
human utterance, with love and heaven shining
through.
XXIII.
The Discipline of Joy.
THE human story so far has been largely that
of a discipline of pain. On this point science
and religion are for once in agreement. Man
has won his present position at the sword's
point, and with sweat of blood. Nature has
been a rigid disciplinarian, a stern taskmistress.
It is impossible to think without a certain
emotion of that pre-historic ancestor of ours,
unsheltered, ill-clad, feebly equipped, carrying
on his fight against the elements, against
monstrous beasts, against disease and death,
and all for our sakes. We know nothing of
him as an individual ; we pay him no respect
as a separate personality. And yet, in that
dim past, our destiny was in his single hand.
Had he not kept his feet in the bitter strife,
sheltered against every gust the torch of
existence until he could hand it on, we had not
been. Evolution tells us of the terrific cost,
in endurances, in wholesale destructions, at
817
218 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
which every advance in physical ability and
in mental quality has been gained. And
religion, as we have said, brings a similar
evidence. Christianity has been called " the
religion of sorrow." Assuredly it has fathomed,
as no other faith, the depths of suffering,
wrung from pain its deepest secret, set over
against it the Divinest consolations. Its centre
is a cross, and the human soul, whatever its
future fortunes, will carry that mark on it for
ever.
But it is easy to misinterpret this history,
and strange mistakes have been made about
it. The pain element in human education
has been exaggerated, and the wrong inferences
been drawn. It is natural that more should be
made on this side of the account than the other,
for man calls out when he is hurt, but gives little
record of himself when at ease. Thirty years of
peace will produce no such history as one year
of war. From the very beginning, notwith-
standing its hardships, life has been sweet to
the race. Our ancestor was happy in his own
way. Despite the costs, it was a good thing
for him to be alive. A false perspective here
has been the creator, amongst both heathen
and Christian, of much bad theology. The
THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY. 219
sorrow element in man, exaggerated by his
imagination, has cast its shadow upon the
heavens, and created the religion of fear.
Paganism trembled as it snatched its joy. It
hardly dared to be prosperous, lest some god,
or malignant power, should be provoked to
jealousy. The saying in the " Agamemnon " :
And man's prosperous state
Moves on its course and strikes
Upon an unseen rock,
is typical of the entire attitude of the pre-
Christian world. The idea was abroad that
man was at the mercy of Powers who, at any
opportunity, would take it out of him to
satisfy their spite or for the pleasure the
spectacle afforded them. A remarkable passage
in Athenagoras, the early Christian Father,
testifies to this feeling in the second century.
In his Ad Gentes he says : " Who else than
demons could have persuaded the priests of
Diana to wound themselves in a thousand
ways, and others to tear themselves with
whips ? Whereas the true God would never
lead us to what was contrary to nature ; as
He is goodness itself, He is ever benevolent."
But, unfortunately for Christian theology,
the noble and clear -sighted views of the early
220 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
Greek Fathers, of an Athenagoras, an Origen,
an Alexandrian Clement, were superseded by
a darker system, which once more shadowed
the heavens and made religion a thing of
fear. Asceticism founded itself on the notion
that human suffering and privation were in
themselves pleasing to God. Men deprived
themselves of every comfort, constructed beds
on which it was impossible to get an hour's
real repose, wore instruments of torture next
the skin which drew blood at every movement,
with the idea that they were thus perfecting
themselves spiritually and gaining merit with
heaven. On this whole business Sir Thomas
More, a devout Christian and a Catholic to boot,
has an admirable passage hi the " Utopia."
He argues that if the ascetic principle were the
true one our endeavours as Christians to pro-
mote the happiness and good estate of our
fellows must be a mistake. " For a joyful life,
that is a pleasant life, is either evil ; and if it
be so then thou shouldest not only help no
man thereto, but rather as much as in thee
lieth withdraw all men from it as noisome
and hurtful, or else, if thou not only mayest,
but are also of duty bound to procure it to
others, why not chiefly to thyself ? "
THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY. 221
Far be it from us to say that the ascetic
cult was a wasted effort. That can be said
of no sincere moral experiment ; certainly not
of this. It was part of the movement upward.
And its revelation of the soul's capacity of
endurance, of winning even a secret, mighty
joy out of the heart of privation, has been a
lesson of inexpressible value in the science of
life.
But asceticism, the cult of many a noble
soul, carried in it no finality. It was a phase,
and not a whole. It was no key to the world-
system, no ultimate revelation of God, no
ultimate goal of human development. More
and more is it becoming evident that the
ministry of pain, mighty factor as it has been
in the making of man, will, in the future, play
a diminishing role. The race, tutored so long
in the school of hardness and adversity, is,
for a further stage, to be taken in hand by a
new educator prosperity. One of the great
ethical tasks of a swiftly-coming period will
be to adjust the human character to a vast
increment of enjoyment. Look where we will,
the signs of this are evident. On the negative
side we are parting with half the old world
pains. Science is on the track of disease,
222 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
with full belief in its power ultimately to
master every ailment. Anaesthetics have
already substituted a pleasant sleep for many
a racking torture. And on the positive side,
in the more advanced communities, we see
an enormous increase, amongst all classes, of
the apparatus of pleasurable sensation. The
railway train, the bicycle, the free library,
the great organisations of sport, spectacle and
entertainment, the shortened hours of labour,
are all movements in one direction towards
a promised land of larger privilege. The whole
art of great living is coming in.
The question is, and it is a vital one What
does this amount to for the moral and inner
life ? Can man afford to enjoy himself more
than he has done ? Is gladness, as well as
sorrow, to be trusted as a spiritual educator ?
The average Christian is, on this matter, in a
curious jumble of thinking. Logically he
should be all on the side of joy as supreme
moraliser, for is not his heaven at once the
place of vastest delight, and yet of highest
perfection ? But with the other side of his
head he distrusts this doctrine. He tells you
he has seen so many characters rotting in the
sunshine that he is afraid of it. And the
THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY. 223
entrance of a nation at large into a greater sum
of pleasures will, to his thinking, be the sure
herald of a moral decline.
His fears are not without foundation, but it
is doubtful whether he has sufficiently studied
the grounds of them. There are probably few
of us, indeed, who have accurately diagnosed
the new conditions. Is the frequently wit-
nessed moral deterioration in presence of
new-found delights an argument against joy,
or is it not rather an argument, loud and
clamant, for a new discipline of joy ? Is what
we witness and mourn over, after all, anything
more than man's stumble in a new situation ?
He is an old scholar in that earlier school of
privation. He is raw and untrained in the
new academy. It will take time to habituate
him to its ways. But this is his next stage,
and he will learn the laws of it and grow to
the possibilities it opens, not less certainly
than he learned and grew in that older pupilage.
Religion has been wavering and uncertain
in its doctrine of enjoyment, and philosophy
not less. There have been, and still are,
vast differences hi the schools as to the place
which pleasure takes in ethics. Bentham's
doctrine that the summum bonum is happiness,
224 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
and that happiness is the sum of pleasures,
had a long and extensive reign, but there are
few now who would accept its naked Hedon-
ism without qualification. With an influen-
tial and ever-growing school of thinkers religion
and philosophy meet in the affirmation that an
essential element in our judgment of pleasure
is the question of its quality. The drunkard
over his cups and the martyr witnessing for his
faith both taste a pleasure, but the difference
in quality covers the whole range of ethics.
Between this qualitative conception and the
views, such as those of Professor Sidgwick
and others, who regard the self-realisation and
perfection of the moral being as the highest end,
and find the sense of duty, of " ought," to be
irreducible to any other term, there is hardly
any difference in fact ; for the highest self-
realisation can scarcely be separated from
the highest quality of joy.
What religion and morals have then to
provide for in the coming time is an education
in the qualitative value of the human joys.
That pleasure is one at least of the " cosmic
intentions " no man can doubt who takes the
trouble to look around him. The material for
it is so varied and so immense. We strike the
THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY. 225
rock nowhere, but this spring bursts forth.
In a normal, healthy condition, enjoyment is
connected with our every movement, our every
phase of living. When we open our eyes,
or move our limbs, or breathe the air, or talk
to our friend ; in society or solitude, working
or resting, we find in every attitude and activity
its waiting joy. And ever as we get deeper into
life the springs become more numerous and
more copious in their flow. In a world so rich
we can only account for the pessimist on the
Horatian principle that " unless the vessel is
sweet whatever we pour into it turns sour."
But more and more, as we have said, the
choice and use of our joys will constitute for
us the discipline of life. The world has for
some ages now been a taster of the different
kinds, and its judgment of qualities and results
is one that by this time can be considered as
final. It has shown us which kinds lead down-
ward and which upward. Our spiritual destiny
forbids us to be sensualists. We turn as by
instinct from the " Sirenum voces et Circaea
pocula." And we will have nothing to do
with the softnesses and indulgence that breed
flabbiness of character. To-day, as in Seneca's
time, " Avida est periculi virtus " (Virtue is
15
226 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
eager for danger). The great races keep the
finest edge of their quality by hardihood and
exposure, by mighty wrestlings with nature's
toughest problems for the body and the soul.
Also, if we listen to the best guides, we shall turn
with equal decision from the subtler allure-
ments that beset success. We shall enjoy
excellence, but not the vulgarity of excelling ;
find delight in our work rather than in the
applause it may bring ; a satisfaction in the
quiet things in the beauty of a spring morn-
ing, in the humble service of our neighbour,
in our communion with the spiritual in us and
beyond us far surpassing that of any external
and noisily-extolled performances. We shall
develop a taste even for certain " bitter
sweets," and say, with Christina Rossetti :
When I was young I deemed that sweets are sweet ;
But now I deem some certain bitters are
Sweeter than sweets, and more refreshing far^
As this education, this discipline of joy
reaches its higher stages, the mind chooses its
delights as by instinct, and with a certain
infallibility. And hi these upper ranges what
exquisite distillations and essences of noblest
consciousness await the developed soul !
What a heaven of intercourse is that which
THE DISCIPLINE OF JOY. 227
Gregory Thaumaturgus pictures as enjoyed
by himself and fellow disciples with the
saintly Origen, when their society was " a
sacred fatherland in which was perpetual sun-
light, and where . . . the inspiration of
Divine thought prevailed over all continually " !
And another Christian Father, Irenaeus, has
expressed for us in unsurpassable words the
consummation of this " discipline of joy " :
" For our face shall see the face of the Lord,
and shall rejoice with joy unspeakable, that
is to say when it shall behold its own Delight."
XXIV.
Religion and Physique.
ON the great ecclesiastical festivals the Church
has its doors open, and attracts not incon-
siderable numbers of people. But the great
crowds are outside. High days and holy
days, including the fifty-two Sundays of our
year, are now marked by an ever-increasing
rush to the open. The spectacle is suggestive
of much. It is doubtful, however, whether
most of us, including the average ecclesiastic,
have caught the really vital point in the situa-
tion. What is happening around us will
bring by-and-by into the common view some
hitherto unnoted factors of the religious
position. It will then be recognised that the
things the theologians have been wrangling
over are not the essentials at all. The really
determining elements have all the time been
lying outside, waiting for a name. One
of these elements, neglected hitherto, but
about to enter its claim with an irresistible
228
RELIGION AND PHYSIQUE. 220
cogency, may be stated as a proposition.
The Church's future, the whole question of its
teaching, services and organisation, will be
conditioned by its relation to life's physical
basis. The various communions Roman,
Anglican, Nonconformist seem separated by
immense gulfs of doctrine and practice, but
they are really reducible to one common
denominator. The articulus stantis aut cadentis
ecclesice of the future is something that stands
away from all their controversies.
An illustration will best explain what we
mean ; and it shall be a homely one. Let us
imagine two congregations, a Romanist and
a Methodist, listening, each in their separate
building, to their respective pastors. The
one proclaims salvation by Church and sacra-
ment, the other by faith and free grace. Great
are the apparent oppositions of theological
opinion and religious feeling. The camps
seem hostile. But now at the same moment,
in the two buildings, a new physical factor is
introduced. The atmosphere, let us say, is
denuded of its oxygen, and its place taken
by carbonic acid gas. A point will speedily
be reached when, with Romanist and Methodist
alike, the theological difference, the theological
230 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
interest as such, will vanish. The one supreme
interest will be to get fresh air.
The illustration may seem far-fetched, but,
in fact, it is absolutely pertinent to the situation
of to-day. The Church of every denomina-
tion has to deal with a population that is
gasping for air. Here is a new factor that
will dominate the whole position. Our present
religious interests, our outlooks, regulations,
theologies have been developed under con-
ditions when this feature was not even dreamed
of. Nonconformity, for instance, lives on its
Puritan tradition, but the fact it has to awake
to is that this tradition was fitted to a world
that has passed away. The Puritan was of
an England whose whole population was smaller
than that of London to-day. He was an
Englishman who lived in the country. He
breathed a clear air, ate wholesome food,
found material conditions easy and without
strain. He was of the mould that Shakespeare
had in view when he speaks of the
Good yeomen
Whose limbs were made in England.
And it was these strong, sturdy men, with their
health and their leisure, who framed the re-
ligious ordinances and services which the
RELIGION AND PHYSIQUE. 231
Church in our age has inherited, and which
it is astonished to find the present generation
is rejecting.
Is it not time we realised what is actually
happening ? The congregat'on, in other words,
the nation, is being denuded of its oxygen
and is rushing out in search of air. The Church,
we repeat, has now to take up as its most
imminent and urgent problem the relation of
religion to life's physical basis. The Puritan
never thought of this. He had no need.
The conditions were there, and they made
him what he was without his knowing it.
Do we imagine that his strength of conviction
and fervour of feeling could have been pro-
duced out of the stuffy air of crowded factories,
out of the unwho esome conditions, continued
through three or four generations, of our
swarming towns ? No. The inner power of
a Cromwell, of a Howe, was an affair, on one
side at least, of leisure and the open. It was
the vital force of the countryside, accumulated
through generations of sturdy forbears, stored
up in nerve and tissue and brain cell, as the
sun's force is stored up in the coal, that in these
men translated itself into the highest phases
of the spiritual life. For of religion we may,
232 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
with another application, use Virgil's words :
" Ingreditur solo, et caput inter nubila condit."
Hiding its head in the clouds, it begins, never-
theless, upon the ground. Its supreme spiritual
significance will never, if we are wise, cause us
to ignore its constant and intimate relation to
the physical.
But when this elementary fact has been
fairly recognised it is bound to alter our whole
view of the Church's mission to the people.
Beneath and beyond all doctrines will be seen
to loom the fundamental doctrine that the
Church's raison d'etre lies in developing the
best type of man. The true religion is the
religion that is truly virile. With that for a
foundation we may begin to revise at once our
outlook and our programme. Many features
of the existing situation take on in this light
a new aspect. The fact, for instance, that such
multitudes in the present day are spending
their Sundays in the open will not have to be
put aside by a reference to original sin or to
the spread of religious indifference. Is it not
rather that the congregation cannot listen
because it is being stifled ? Is not the Sunday
rush to the country Nature's effort to keep her
pent-up devitalised children alive ? Have
RELIGION AND PHYSIQUE. 233
we sufficiently taken it into account that our
Sunday services and schools under the existing
programme are largely a repetition of the con-
finement, the constraint, the stuffy atmosphere,
which throughout all the other days are
robbing our citizens of the very essence of
life?
At present our physical and our moral seem
all at odds with each other. At the margin
of civilisation we find a race of rough and
reckless pioneers, cowboys, miners, prospectors,
frontiersmen, with little or no religious observ-
ance and the crudest morality. The highest
spiritual laws are scarcely at all in view. Yet
on another side the life they are leading con-
tains the very making of manhood. This exist-
ence of hardy enterprise, of simple fare, of keen
winds, of wide, open spaces is storing up in
these men incalculable riches, the powers out
of which nations are made. With this at the
frontier, we have at the centre our highly-
organised religions, with services, teaching,
discipline arranged to tell with a constant,
urgent impact on conscience and feeling.
We have here devotees with an immense
sense of duty and the feeblest vitality ; people
who are mighty in prayer, but who are refused
234 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
at every life insurance office ; great souls, and
bodies not big enough to decently cover them.
The Church, meanwhile, goes on with this
monstrous anomaly, and sees nothing wrong
in it. A revival of religion is for it still a
revival of services, of more stuffy meetings,
of more emotional expenditure. Thread paper
Christians, who have toiled in shops all day,
under this persuasion, spend their nights in
gas-poisoned rooms and become still more
attenuated. If it were not for our barbarians
outside, the whole race would be on its way
to extinction. Assuredly we are not to be
saved, for either this world or the next, by
a deoxygenated Christianity. Nature has given
her verdict in these matters in the campaign
of Goth and Vandal against the effeminate
later-Roman. The polished denizen of cities
goes down before the man from the open.
The Church must wake up to the new con-
ditions, or drop behind. Its immediate busi-
ness is to bring these two opposites together.
Each possesses what a healthy nation cannot
do without. These halves were made to fit
into each other. The spiritual must re-root
itself in the physical. With a population in
this country, between seventy and eighty per
RELIGION AND PHYSIQUE. 235
cent, of which is crowded into the towns,
and engaged mostly in devitalising occupations,
organised religion has a problem such as never
in all its previous history has been offered it.
In such circumstances it cannot go on as
though nothing had happened. Many of its
arrangements must be revised and many
of its prejudices must go. The question will
be, not how many meetings can be crowded
into a week, but what can be done to restore to
us a virile humanity ? Believing with Ruskin
that " the only real wealth consists in noble
and happy human beings," the Church will
lay itself out in all ways to gain that high
end. It will henceforth know, and never
again forget, that the highest is rooted in the
lowest, and that either at its peril may ignore
the other.
The view of true religion as essentially virile
will, when fully accepted, lead to a decisive
verdict on many disputed questions. The
doctrine of fasting, which, during Lent, leads
numbers of anaemic priests and people to
keep themselves at starvation point in the
supposed interests of religion, will give way to
a wholesomer view. The " fast " of the
future will be the barring of the perpetual
236 PROBLEMS OF
feasting with which the well-to-do are to-
day cramming their bodies with diseases, and
the return to an eating and drinking that are
healthful because they are simple. A virile
religion will be one that makes for a strong
character inside a strong physique. It will
cultivate not only limb-power but will-power.
It will, therefore, have nothing to do with
systems that put a man's intellect and con-
science in the keeping of another. Religious
hypnotism of this kind may be soothing to
weak nerves, but it is inner paralysis all the
same. Protestantism, despite its limitations,
has thrived and become the religion of the
foremost races, because, in its doctrine of a
man's own responsibility before God, it allies
itself with the central laws of inward power.
To sum up in a word. The loftiest spiritual
emotions are related to inexorable physical
conditions. The Church's greatest achieve-
ment will be the securing for humanity the
physique of the athlete with the consciousness
of the saint.
XXV.
Religion's Higher Energies.
IN the previous chapter, dealing with the
Church's deficiencies hi view of present-day
problems, we discussed the position arising
from the changed physical conditions of the
time. To meet these conditions we urged
a readjustment of machinery and arrangement.
The new world we are in demands a revised
programme. But, on such a theme, to stop
in the sphere of the outward would be to
offer a miserably inadequate idea of the
Church's requirement. It leaves the chief
thing untouched. It is, indeed, the puzzle
of the world we live in that its physical and
its spiritual are perpetually obscuring each
other. We cannot do justice to both at the
same time. The physicist studies his side
and forgets there is a spiritual religion, living
in its own sublime conception, which in turn
ignores the material. Every now and then
they wake up to each other's existence, and
238 PBOBLEMS OP LIVING.
then there is collision and deadlock. Nearly
all the difficulties of faith in this generation
have origin in our failure to unite the two in
one act of vision. We shall learn better some
day. Meanwhile, after our study of the
Church's external relations, we may now
adjust the balance somewhat by a consideration
of its inner and higher energies. For, after
all, it is from these, from its resources in the
invisible, that to-day, as of old, its victories
must come. In each age the religious position
has been fixed, not by method and machinery,
but by what has been going on hi the secret
recesses of some inspired, deep-communing
soul.
We say of some soul, for it is there, in the
realm behind the mere perceptive and reason-
ing faculties, that the higher energies reside
and show themselves. Only now, after cen-
turies of floundering in a false psychology, are
we coming to see this. It was necessary, we
suppose, to pass through the theological ages,
with their fierce word combats, in order to
obtain final demonstration that the real
spiritual power and value lay not in them at
all. Who goes to the fourth century for in-
spiration ? That age, when men staked every-
RELIGION'S HIGHER ENERGIES. 239
thing on definitions and metaphysical con-
cepts, has rendered us one service. The arid
Soudan of Christian history, it has shown us
how utterly barren is theology, in itself, of
religious result. Huxley was at least half
right when, in that pathetic letter of his to
Kingsley, after the death of his firstborn, he
says : ' " Sartor Resartus " led me to know
that a deep sense of religion was compatible
with an entire absence of theology." Certain
is it that not out of the formula-grinding
faculty does man ever quench the thirst of
his soul.
The springs of history are more secret than
this. They are beneath our definitions. That
is why religion, fed from its inner fountains,
is continually baffling the average ecclesias-
ticism. Again and again the channels duly dug
for it, along which all the authorised toll-
houses are erected, seem suddenly to dry up,
and there is consternation in the official mind.
But there is no real shortage of supply. The
stream has simply broken out on a new line.
Shortage there cannot be, for religion is man's
relation to the Infinite, and escape can be
never from that supreme environment. Elected
spirits, specially endowed, stationed near the
240 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
outer edge of the visible, are ever bringing
fresh news of the Unseen which bounds it, and
acting as channels of its mystic power. Capax
Dei, the religious man stands in the world
sure of his highest relationships, his soul a
perpetual absorbent, drinking inspirations as
the flower drinks sunshine, and exhaling subtle
fragrances of that summer land he knows.
Souls of this order are the true fountains
of religious energy. At the head and summit
of them stands the Christ. The Gospel shows
itself psychologically true, notwithstanding
the aberrations of its interpreters, by giving
as the source of its power, not a theological
system, but a Personality wholly absorbent
of, and saturated through and through with
the Divine. It was not mere mentality that
made the Christ. It was soul. What a
remove from the thing we call " cleverness,"
the element which made Jesus supreme in
the hearts of His followers ! Was it by
" cleverness " that, in Ullmann's striking
words, " His mere presence passed a silent
but irresistible sentence upon those by whom
He was surrounded ? " Was it a mere trick
of the intellect that His look could break a
strong man's heart ? In this highest example
RELIGION'S HIGHER ENERGIES. 241
we have demonstration of the fact that the
crowning endowment of humanity is beyond
and behind the intellect, using that only as
a tool.
As with Master so with disciples. The
higher energies by which they have swayed
men are always their own secret. Possessed
with their mystery of power they go about as
healers of souls, yea, also of bodies. Have
we reached any understanding yet of the
means by which men of religion have wrought
cures ? When Bernard preached the second
crusade things passed of this order of which
he himself could give no account, except
that, in his own words, " I have read of nothing
more wonderful even in Scripture." We re-
member Matthew Arnold's saying anent
Christ's healings : " Medical science has never
gauged never, perhaps, set itself to gauge
the intimate connection between moral fault
and disease. . . . The bringer of light
and happiness, the calmer and pacifier, the
invigorator and stimulator is one of the
chiefest of doctors." True words, but, as
an explanation of all that has happened in
this sphere, only a faint gleam upon the
surface of unfathomable deeps. From those
16
242 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
same depths comes also the charm which holds
men in the thrall of the greater souls. What
an illustration we have of this in Old Thorpe's
account of Wycliffe ! ' ' Master John Wycliffe was
considered by many to be the most holy of all
the men in his age. . . . Wherefore very
many of the chief men of this kingdom
who frequently held counsel with him, were
devotedly attached to him, ancl^kept a record
of what he said, and guided themselves after
his manner of life."
From the same source comes that prophetic
element which belongs to the highest kind of
religious speech. No true teacher but in his
greater moments finds himself yielding to a
kind of inspiration in his words. There
emerges a tense and awful consciousness that
he is then but an instrument of a higher Power ;
that the word is far more than his own ; that
his very limitations, his weakness and defect,
his sense of personal nothingness, are but
factors of a movement in which he, indeed,
is taking part, but not as originator. This
was the note of the marvellous daily preach-
ings of Pere Vianney, the apostle of France
in the last century, preachings which pro-
duced their mighty effects with no other
RELIGION'S HIGHER ENERGIES. 243
preparation than his ' constant occupation
with God." It was this which Madame Guyon
meant when, detailing her Grenoble experi-
ences, she speaks of being " invested with the
Apostolic state," and of revealing the inmost
condition of the souls of those who spoke
to her. The priests who crowded round for
her exhortations had themselves heard
Rome's " Accipe potestatem," but whatever
that did for them, it conveyed no such power
as this. What a striking hint, too, of this
truth of the soul is that given in Plutarch's
account of the daimon of Socrates, where he
speaks of the influence of a superior Being
upon the mind of the sage, " whose holy temper
fitted him to hear this spiritual speech which,
though filling all the air around, is heard only
by those whose souls are freed from passion
and its perturbing influence." In such utter-
ances have we the dim adumbrations of the
great truth of the Divine Spirit, the Paraclete,
and his ministration among men, which shines
in its full splendour in the Christian Scriptures.
This region of the soul's locked-up energies
is, alas ! an unknown world to most of us.
Only most faintly realised is it by the mass
of the accredited teachers of religion. Yet
244 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
nothing is more certain than that the Church
will wait for the resumption of its influence
among men till it has reconquered these inner
realms. We are in an age of culture and of
general knowledge-grinding. More than ever
necessary is that for every teacher, but it is
only a beginning. In the higher natures mind
is only servant of the soul. Our qualification
for any grade of spiritual office is in the in-
cessant cultivation of our central and inner-
most. It is when we find our higher self, our
greater Ego, the infinite Ground of our being
to be more and more filling us and making
our life, that we can speak of progress. To reach
these states is by a discipline, the lines of which
we can only here in the barest manner suggest.
Our first need is the recovery of the almost
lost art of prayer. That the newer concepts
of the universe and of the uniformity of law
have affected in any way the reasons for prayer
is one of those modern superstitions which
every self-respecting thinker should by this
time have seen through. Prayer is one of
the laws of the spiritual nature as surely as
gravitation is of the physical. It is indeed of
itself a gravitation. It is the soul's inevitable
impulse towards its Centre and Source. The
RELIGION'S HIGHER ENERGIES. 245
author of " Exploratio Evangelica," who dis-
cusses the religious problem in a spirit of the
severest science, finds prayer irremovably
grounded in the structure of the moral nature.
Its practice is its own vindication, for, begin-
ning as a kind of egotism, it ends, if truly
followed, ever in a self -surrender. " Man
learns that the higher the tone of his request
the more sure it is to be granted, and thus
there slowly dawns upon him the perception
of a Divine will which wills what is best. . . .
He seeks inner changes rather than mere out-
ward interpositions." It is in this Divine
air, in this " practice of the presence of God,"
as " brother Lawrence " finely calk it, that
the soul grows. If we set our unaccustomed
feet upon this path we can hardly do better
for a beginning than to study the books, the
inspired legacies, of souls that have been
great in prayer. A Church in earnest will
turn afresh to the great devotional literature
of the past, in whose pages religion's higher
energies still live, exhaling heaven's own per-
fume, throbbing with heaven's own force.
As we read we are borne upward on these
wings of brother spirits till we find our own,
and are free ourselves of the upper airs.
246 PKOBLEMS OP LIVING.
Following this line we gain that habit of
leaning on the invisible which is faith in its
essence. As true to-day is it as in tho time of
Heraclitus " that much knowledge of things
Divine escapes us through want of faith."
As we become experts in this line we shall
assuredly touch also the force which the nature
of things has wedded to sacrifice and renun-
ciation. Astronomers can calculate the power
of gravitation. Who shall measure for us the
sheer moral energy of a self -offering, of a suffer-
ing for the good ? As Westcott has truly said,
"A life of absolute and calculated sacrifice
is a spring of immeasurable power " ; and
St. Columba, who knew whereof he spoke,
" Whoever overcomes himself treads the world
under foot."
To sum up. We have spoken before of th e
Church's outwardness. Here have we some
thing of its inwardness. Vastly important,
and to-day imminently urgent, as we have
contended, are the claims of the outward.
But when all is said it is by the inner con-
dition that religion triumphs. For in the
twentieth century, as in the first, " the
weapons of our warfare are not carnal but
spiritual."
XXVI.
The Soul's Secret.
MODERN society seems trying to persuade
itself that life is, after all, a very simple
business. Civilisation polishes off its rough
surfaces and makes all as trim as a suburban
grass plot. We are putting everything into
figures. Even morality is statistical. There
will be so many crimes to so many public-
houses. Our social value is a matter of rank
and of a banking account. Can any kind of
life be conceived of in Camberwell which
would not elicit the pitying condescension
of Mayfair ? Everything has been analysed
and made clear to us. A school of in-
vestigators has arisen that measures even
our sensations, and gives you the range and
rapidity of mental reactions in terms of
arithmetic. It all seems so plain, till we take
a step or two aside. We alter for a moment
our point of view, and it is as when, leaving
the saloon of an ocean liner, we walk out upon
M7
248 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
the deck. Away below, within a few feet of
us, in that gilded scene, is society's latest
fashionable phase. But here, where we now
stand, all this is blotted from us as we watch
the infinitudes of space, immensities of starry
heavens, the sweep of tempests, ocean's
devouring depths. Our neighbour offers to
us day by day his saloon side, and we know
it to weariness. But behind is a world of
his own, full of strangest scenery, of which
he renders us no proper account, and that
because he cannot.
There is need to emphasize this side of
things just now, because the world seems
bent on ignoring it. It will do that at its
peril. To be careless of surface facts is
bad enough ; to take no heed of the central
ones is certain destruction. We are all now
for cultivating the surface. We are to ameli-
orate life by clearing the slums, by creating
garden cities, by cheaper transit, by model
public-houses, by old-age pensions. And we
are all keen on these things, for we can all
see their value. Yet when our politicians
and our religious teachers are filling up their
whole time with social programmes of this
order, our ear is caught by what seems a
THE SOUL'S SECRET. 249
laugh from the innermost soul of things.
" What then," it seems to say, " is this your
pill for the earthquake ? And will your
fool be any less a fool if you take him sixty
miles an hour instead of twenty ? And your
latest electric system, which flashes news of
the last murder round the globe in a few
minutes, will it work anything for the moral
interior of your murderer ? " And truly
the laugh against us is justified. A blindness
more than Egyptian must be upon us if we
can see no further into our problem than this.
For this, after all, is the saloon side, and
the moment we get away to the deck we
note how all the aspects and problems have
changed. We see then that a man's life
means just what from day to day is going
on inside him. It is the secret of his soul.
He can never tell us what that is, because
the greatest part of it is far beyond the power
of words. If we regard, for instance, his
mere thinking, we find that, always behind
the ideas which seem clear to him, there is a
formative process going on of far greater
import, but dim and unknown, for which he has
no language at all. Have we ever carefully
studied that insensible turning of the mind
250 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
towards a new conviction ? Some morning we
discover that an old portion of our creed has
lost its power, and can never again be to us
what once it was. Yet has our mind rendered
to us any exact account of the process which
brought this about ? No. The history here
is an illustration of Joubert's remark that
" in the mind there is going on perpetually
a circulation of unconscious arguments." In
like manner, before a new conception dawns,
there come glimmering from the deeps behind
mysterious flashes of intimation ; we realise
that room is being prepared within us for a
new truth, and that a large part of the process
is beyond our will is, in fact, a part of that
evolution of our personality which is the
secret of the soul.
But another process is daily going on within
of larger moment even than our thinking.
We are brought continually into the arena
of moral decision, and our interior is here
the strangest, most tragic of battle-grounds.
Outside there is nothing for our neighbour
to suspect. Our best and worst are alike
hidden from him. The surface is like the
exterior of a seemingly extinct volcano.
The ground for a long while has been given up
THE SOUL'S SECRET. 251
to cultivation, and year by year smiles with
its fruits and flowers. No hint is there to
the casual observer of the chaotic forces that
storm below, and may perchance some day
cover the ground again with lava and ashes.
But down in this boiling cauldron is our life
perpetually in the making. The mystery is
that in the crises of our inner history we most
often do not know there is a crisis. Confused
fermentations are going on which we do not
stay to analyse. After all, does it amount to
much how it all turns out ? Of the higher
or lower choice presented to us is there any
spectator but ourselves ? It would be some-
thing if, after what is called " a moral vic-
tory," we received a sensational acclaim.
But there will be no illuminations, no huzzas.
The thing begins and ends inside us, and we,
too, shall end soon enough. So long as we
keep the surface swept for our neighbour's
eye, what need for further trouble ?
It is precisely at this point in our secret
history that all the materialistic philosophies,
all theories of " the greatest happiness of the
greatest number " as a sufficing moral support,
reach their Sedan. It is here, down deep in
the centre, we perceive the utter futility
252 PBOBLEMS OF LIVING.
of any schemes of human betterment that
ignore the basal spiritual facts. Let any man
who has made progress in inward develop-
ment ask himself what has really happened
in the struggles through which he has come.
Why did we fight down that imperious lower
instinct ? What led us the other day to
sacrifice our personal ease in a service where
we knew there would be no glory, no pecuniary
gain, and very likely entire misconstruction
of motive ? Again, as we wait for answer, we
seem to hear the soul laughing quietly to itself.
Good-humouredly this time, as though it were
hugging its own secret. For here it is so
sure of itself. It knows there is no other
explanation than the transcendental one.
We did these things because of an Onlooker,
an Inspirer, because we know ourselves as
belonging to a spiritual order whose command
is upon us and in us. An order which tells
us that we are here to add to the sum of good ;
that the unselfish deed, the choice for purity,
work out of ourselves into results that are
permanent, and vaster than we can perceive.
We said a moment ago that there are no
trumpetings, no thunderclaps over these un-
seen battlefields. Yet assuredly are they
THE SOUL'S SECRET. 253
not without witnesses. The results tell us that.
The results themselves indeed seem alive.
Is it not they that have at last raised those
invisible barriers that now shut us off from the
lower life that was once so near ? But they
would not work thus without direction. Says
Amiel, whose testimony is the more valuable
that it is wrung from the depths of a sceptical
temperament : " J'eprouve avec intensite que
rhomme dans tout ce qu' il fait de beau,
de grand, n'est que 1'organe, vehicule de quelque
chose, ou de quelqu'un de plus haut que lui."
(" Intensely do I realise that man in everything
great and noble he accomplishes is but the
organ, the vehicle of something or some one
higher than himself.") Here do we see how
the mere facts of the soul, as interpreted by a
sufficiently clear introspection, carry us straight
to the New Testament. Amiel finds out for
himself what Augustine had discovered before.
Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis. (Give what
Thou commandest and then command what
Thou wilt.) In other words, man lives in-
wardly by One greater than himself. As
Barclay, the Quaker apologist, puts it, " Chris-
tians now are led inwardly and immediately
by the Spirit of God, even in the same manner,
254 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
though it befall not many to be led in the
same measure, as the saints were of old."
There is no way of right living in our soul's
innermost centre except by the overbrooding
of a greater Personality. We accomplish
our secret good and vanquish our secret evil
by the law and power which led Christ to
die on Calvary.
But do not let us suppose that this secret
of the soul, while finding its grandest ex-
pression in the Christian Gospel, has been
shut up there, has been confined only to
organised Christianity. The early Fathers,
better informed than their successors, never
dreamed of such a limitation. They knew
that it was fundamentally in the soul, by
virtue of its own existence and quality of
being. India knew it, and so did Egypt, and
so did Greece. What but a Divine leading
brought the Hindu mind to such a perception
as this of a man's true happiness ? We quote
from the Bhagavad Gita : " He becometh
acquainted with that boundless pleasure which
is far more worthy of the understanding
than that which ariseth from the sense
depending upon which, the mind moveth not
from its principles ; which, having obtained,
SOUL'S SECRET. 255
be respecteth no other acquisition, so great
is it ; in which depending, he is not moved by
the severest pain."
Indeed, ringing through both the Eastern
and Western world is heard the soul's laugh
of derision against the scheme which confounds
the highest good with a mere comfort-
philosophy. When we have brought White-
chapel to Belgravia's standard of luxury,
do we imagine that we have solved our world-
problem ? It does not lie there at all. When
our hog has got both foot and mouth in the
trough, it is enough, doubtless, for his hog-
hood. But the soul will not rest content in
the best furnished of styes. What is such fare
to a St. Teresa, who cries, " When persecuted
my soul is then so mistress of itself that it
seems that it is in its kingdom and has every-
thing under its feet " ? This hog philosophy
makes also our pity to be often so ludicrously
misplaced. Do we, from our snug citizen
ease, pity the warrior who is lying out there
in the wind and the rain, dying neglected
on the battlefield ? What business have we
with our pity ? Do we know his soul's
secret ? May it not be with him, as with the
young officer who, as has been recently related,
256 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
wrote on his tablets before the cancer choked
him, " These have been the happiest months
I ever spent in my life ! "
What has been here urged will not, let
us hope, be misinterpreted. We are all social
reformers to-day, and the Church must be
the chief of them. No college curriculum
will henceforth dare to omit the laws of social
and economical well-being. They are part
of the constitution of the city of God. But
while we clamour for better legislation, for
purer air, for healthier physical conditions,
let us never forget that these at best are only
a scratching of the surface. Man himself
can never be effectively dealt with except
where his central mystery resides. The
weapons of this inner warfare are not carnal,
but spiritual. There is perhaps no country
where social organisation is being carried to a
higher perfection than Germany. But it
was a profound appreciation of the real condi-
tions of the problem which led the Kaiser
in a recent memorable address to exclaim,
" The man whose life is not founded on
religion is lost,''
xxvn.
The Higher Lawlessness.
THERE are few more fascinating studies than
that of man's relation to law. His whole
story is here the story of his soul. The puzzles
in this story, its amazing inconsistencies, baffle,
yet entice us. We ponder them with the
feeling that behind lies the clue to everything.
But their mystery is great. It mocks seem-
ingly at all our pre-conceived opinions. One
of our most cherished convictions is as to the
sanctity of law, and the disgrace attached
to the transgression of it. To speak of a
people as " law abiding " is to pay it the
highest of compliments, while " a lawless
rabble " represents to us the zero of character.
And yet, striking full upon our feeling here
is the fact that the noblest characters in
history, and the most decisive of its upward
movements, are identified with an apparent
lawlessness. The prison which in one cell
holds thief or murderer may, in the next,
257 17
258 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
contain a prophet of the new time, an apostle
of the higher living. The same authority
which crucified two robbers at Golgotha
stretched Jesus Christ on the middle cross
between. The law breakers, in age after age,
have included the best and worst of the race.
It is of the highest consequence, both to our
knowledge of life and for our personal conduct,
that we resolve this puzzle. And to do this
we must, it is evident, inquire first as to the
nature and origin of law. There are two roads
of investigation. We may study man and his
laws from the outside, or we may study them
from within. On the one side, evolution has
taught us much of the natural history of law
making and keeping. The tribal system
which is older than humanity, for it exists in
full vigour amongst the herds and flocks of the
animal kingdom is a combination which, by
its very nature, places a certain restriction and
discipline upon the individual. It is, we are
told by one school, in this tribal association
that we have the whole origin of law and of
conscience. The tribe was the individual's
larger self. Its approbation or disapprobation,
its vengeance or reward, rubbed into his mind
a set of interests, of desires, hopes and fears,
THE HIGHER LAWLESSNESS. 259
wider than those of his private personality.
A breach of his tribal compact, even when
undetected and unpunished, brought reverbera-
tions to his interior soul from the larger con-
sciousness outside and oppressed him with a
guilty fear. Here, it is said, is the whole story
of man's law, and conscience, and sense of sin.
But to anyone who looks beneath the surface
this attempt to give the tribal system as the
whole truth will be absurdly superficial. At the
most the tribal system has been but an instru-
ment, one of the tools used in a vast process.
When we change our standpoint, and look at
this process from within, we get an entirely
new perspective. We see then law, both in
the individual and in society, appearing as the
register of moral progress. It is the perpetual
shaping of that Formless which is at the back-
ground of the soul into new act and new thought
the mystic breath which, touching at first
the highest natures, is felt at last over the whole
human surface, and crystallises finally into
constitutions, into canons, into legal codes.
The new thought thus becomes a common
standard of living, to which society, in the
general interest, demands adherence under
penalties.
260 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
But what we next observe is that this
process is for ever going on, and that conse-
quently man's codified law is at no time in a
condition of finality. The Formless behind
and in him is always at work, pushing him
on from high to higher. In his ascent man
is continually discovering that what he thought
was universal is only provincial, and what he
thought final was only provisional. Even in
physical science he is continually breaking
through what once seemed fixed and eternal
boundaries. Darwinism, to take one instance,
is already being superseded. Natural selec-
tion, which a few years ago was regarded as the
one key to development, is now regarded as
only one amongst many. Even the law of
gravitation is becoming suspect, at least in its
earlier claim for a universal application. It
explains the motions of the solar system, but
nothing beyond.
But man himself is the great example of non-
finality. In him all the kingdoms of Nature
meet ; he is a general exhibition of their
systems of laws and of their transcendence in
succession by something higher. His bodily
life, by its vitality, walks clean away from the
whole law region of the inorganic world. He
THE HIGHER LAWLESSNESS. 261
his stone gaily into the air, as though
his act were not an outrage upon all the old-
established and highly respectable laws of
statics. And higher yet, in the mystery
of his volitional freedom, he has the whole
reticulation of cosmic law, in all its gradations,
at his service, and plays with it at his will.
When we have studied in this way the
working of law, both in the outer regions of
man's nature and in his inner consciousness,
we find some glimmering of b'ght on the puzzle
which met us at the beginning. We begin to
understand why it comes about that man is
ever under a system of law, which, on the
whole, it is good for him to obey ; and why,
also, there arrive periods in his history when it
becomes natural, and even necessary, for him
to disobey. But even here the seeming law-
lessness is only apparent. The act of a higher
nature, in what appears a disobedience, is
always according to a law. The difference is
that it is a higher one, invisible at present to
those who are lower down. The stone flung
into the air is obeying a law in its ascent just as
certainly as when, feeling the tug of gravita-
tion, it falls again to the earth ; and the parallel
holds strictly in the moral world.
PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
In that sphere the revelation of the new
law comes, we say, first to the higher natures,
and it is their recognition of it, and of its
transcendence of the life-rules that have been
current hitherto, that puts them so frequently
in the category of transgressors. Here we
find Jesus Himself as the most outstanding
example. The saying concerning Him, that
" He was numbered with the transgressors,"
contains more than is generally allowed to
it. He was indeed a transgressor, and that
of set purpose. He deliberately trampled
underfoot whole schools of laws, enactments,
regulations which had obtained amongst His
countrymen for generations, some of them
for ages, and which had been invested by them
with the most solemn religious sanctions.
His " It hath been said by them of old time ;
. . . but I say unto you " was a buffet,
crushing and deadly, struck in the very face
of law. It was entirely in the nature of things
that its paid custodians should prosecute Him
to the death. The old order has no notion
of being unceremoniously kicked out by
the new. It always makes a fight for it, and
generally contrives to land some ugly blows.
The prophet makes his account with that.
THE HIGHER LAWLESSNESS. 263
The road upwards is so often across his body,
but he is glad, even at that price, to be a step
on in the glorious movement.
As with the Master, so it fared with His
followers. Christianity for three centuries
was, from the imperial standpoint, " a lawless
movement." It would be a wholesome change
for modern Christians, in search of something
new in their reading, to find it in a study of
those three centuries. There is a wide and
varied literature of them still extant. Much
of it is strange and even repellant to our ways
of thinking, but oh ! that note of quiet heroism,
of utmost scorn of consequence ; the calm
unblenching gaze into the face of hideous
torture ! Our emasculated generation, sur-
feited with comforts, would do well to think
itself back into that time, and then, may be,
it would appreciate a little better the inherit-
ance that was won for it at this price.
These were the transgressors of a lower law
for the sake of a new and higher. To us now
it seems amazing that men should be perse-
cuted for trying to be good. That is the
thought which occurred at times to the sufferers
themselves. What a touching, and at the
same time revealing word, is that which
264 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
Arnobius utters, in his astonishment at their
treatment : " For why, indeed, have our
writings deserved to be given to the flames,
our meetings to be cruelly broken up, in which
prayer is made to the supreme God ; peace and
pardon are asked for all in authority, for
soldiers, kings, friends, enemies, for those still
in life, and those freed from the bondage of
the flesh ; in which all that is said is such as to
make men humane, gentle, modest, virtuous,
chaste, generous in dealing with their substance,
and inseparably united to all embraced in our
brotherhood ! "
But the story here has been continually repeat-
ed since. Man's ascent is always in spite of
himself. His deepest grudge is against the
disturber who wakes him from his sleep and
bids him resume the march onward. Those
times of awaking are ever the crucial points
of history. We watch what is going on with
breathless interest. It is like the moment
in the life of a butterfly when the grub state
is exchanged for the new form and sphere of a
winged creature. It is the grandest sight this
world affords, the spectacle of some man of
destiny, to whom the new law has been com-
mitted, revealing this mystery of life to his
THE HIGHER LAWLESSNESS. 265
astonished contemporaries. And these men
are all law-breakers. Luther, with his justifi-
cation by faith, is the iconoclast of a thousand
venerable traditions ; George Fox, with his
freedom of the spirit and sufficient priesthood
of the individual, shocks Protestantism almost
as much as Luther had shocked Catholicism.
Wesley, with his bold Gospel-campaigning,
tramples under foot at every step the orthodox
conventions of his time. To-day we know
that their law breaking was a law making, and
that the world's highest interests could not
spare one of the strokes they struck.
The process is not over yet. Those who
imagine that religion is a manufactured
article, produced once for all in one given form,
which we are all to subscribe and keep to,
need to learn the first lessons both of history
and psychology. The human soul was not
built that way. If the English Free Churches
stood to-day for nothing else than the assertion
of the rights of the human spirit to follow its
own line of development, and to recast its
thought in accordance with every new Divine
unveiling, they would more than justify their
existence.
And further. When, in the sphere of public
266 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
life, laws enacted in opposition to clearly
revealed principles of equity are thrust in
the face of religious men, and their submission
demanded under penalties, their education
alike in history and in the things of the spirit
will teach them very clearly how to act.
There are times when the highest law that such
men know imperiously demands a seeming
lawlessness. In obeying this they tread a
path their Master trod before them. The
people who propose to coerce them may well
think twice before entering on the conflict.
The question might even occur to the coer-
cionist which came to Meissner, one of the
examiners at the prosecution of Jacob Boehme,
" Who knows what stands behind this man ? "
XXVIII.
The Logic of Life.
HOLT BUTTON records that Bagehot and he,
when lads, wandered once for two hours up
and down Regent Street, in the heat of an
argument as to whether the so-called logical
principle of identity (A is A) were a law of
thought or only a postulate of language. It
is safe to say the number of Englishmen is
strictly limited who would care to spend two
hours in Regent Street, or elsewhere, on any
such discussion. Formal logic is not our forte.
Most of us, in framing our arguments, are
blissfully unconscious of the " Barbara,
Celarent " of the ancient schools. The Hegelian
doctrine, which reduces the universe to a
syllogism, and makes all life to consist in the
strictly logical development of a fontal Idea,
is one that, if comprehended at all, would
sound strangely unreal to the average inhabi-
tant of these isles.
Nevertheless, ours is a logical world, and
307
268 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
life only becomes intelligible in proportion as
we recognise the fact. The universe, when
we look more deeply into it, becomes to us
actually a mass of petrified thoughts. Out of
every particle of its matter peeps a mind.
You cannot pick up a stone on the road and
begin to describe it without, at every phrase,
referring yourself to the cosmic logic-book.
What is your talk of the stone its relation
to unity and plurality, to genus and species,
to time and space, to qualities, to similarity
or dissimilarity, and a thousand other things
but a recognition of the fact that this stone,
here in its world, is, as its first characteristic,
fitted into a system of thought-forms, that it
is part of a rational scheme, that its very
substance is penetrated with a mind that
answers to our own and works on similar
lines !
But the point where ardent thinkers have
been most apt to get astray, and to create
confusion for themselves and their fellows, is
in failing to recognise that the cosmic logic
is, while similar to, yet so much deeper and
subtler than their own. The legislators and
the theologians have been alike in their zeal
for boundary lines. They have drawn these
THE LOGIC OF LIFE.
lines with the assurance that they ran parallel
at all points with the universal scheme of
things, and have imposed them as such upon
their fellows. An Abbe Sieves at the French
Revolution draws up what he conceives to be
a perfect political constitution ; an (Ecumenical
Council defines infallibly the nature of the
Godhead and its relation to man. But, alas !
the perfect constitution of our Sieyes fails
somehow to work ; and the lines of our theo-
logical scheme are being obliterated by that
very nature of things which they were sup-
posed to exactly determine. Divinity !
Humanity ! What is Divine ? What is
Human ? The boundaries were so clear, so
precise. But to-day we are not so sure. The
material of our thinking on these points has
outgrown all our formulae. We know there is
a logic here, but it is beyond us :
Draw if thou can'st the mystic line
Which human, which Divine !
In this field, indeed, we begin to discover that
the poets have done better than the theo-
logians. The singers, happy men, have been
able to express the power, the mystery, the
transcendent beauty of the universal, while
270 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
realising that its ultimate facts went beyond
the range of our definitions.
For while, as we have said, any intelligible
view of the Cosmos supposes a logic behind it,
yet are we perpetually being reminded of the
marvellous subtlety, of the fineness beyond all
our discernment, of its processes. Men find
a deeper thing in themselves than their own
logic. Of their greatest actions they can give
no proper account. The final inner move-
ment that determines a man upon some deci-
sive course is beyond any theory he can frame.
When the Puritans of the seventeenth century
rose against Charles and Laud, it would have
puzzled them to explain to themselves or to
others why they should have borne so much,
and then have elected to bear no more. Why
endurance thus far, and defiance after ? A
Luther can give some of the reasons which
impel him at Worms to defy Pope and Emperor,
but not all. The secret inner compulsion, the
" Ich kann nicht anders " ("I can no other "),
while supremely imperative, is yet a mystery
to himself. He is, in fact, the result and expres-
sion of a deeper logic than his own. And it is
just that deeper logic which is making the
history of the world.
THE LOGIC OF LIFE. 271
One of the greatest results of history is the
spectacle it affords us of the way in which the
world grinds out its own logic, and places
it in contrast with the productions, in this line,
of the theorists and formula makers. We take,
for instance, the story of Christianity. From
the time of its birth into the world, two sets
of dogmatists have been busy about it. There
have been, on the one side, its official inter-
preters and defenders, on the other its pro-
fessed opponents. The Church theologians
have defined its beliefs, erected within its
boundaries the immense edifice of the creeds,
and denounced, with tremendous imprecations,
all departures from their view of its meaning.
Meanwhile the Opposition, from Celsus and
Lucian to Voltaire and Bradlaugh, has been
labouring diligently to exhibit its inaccuracies
of science and history, and to show "the
absurdity, the impossibility, the turpitude " of
its doctrinal system. It has been a pretty
quarrel. Shrewd have been the blows of the
doughty combatants, and terrible the havoc
they have made of each other.
But while this wordy war has been going on,
another judge, working on quite other materials,
has been quietly formulating a decision on the
272 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
matter. There seems a certain humour in his
aspect, as he regards the opposing camps.
"Go to, now," he seems to say, " stop your
stone- thro wing. You are both right and both
wrong. But wrong chiefly. Has it not
occurred to you that you may here be tilting
at windmills and missing the essence of the
matter ? " Who is this judge ? It is the
logic of life ; in other words, the Cosmos
itself, to which the Gospel, as a fact of human
history and as a theory and practice of life,
has committed its record for judgment. We
observe how that judgment is gradually un-
rolling itself. The nature of things, which at
the beginning took this new material into its
laboratory, exposed it to all the tests, stretched
it upon the apparatus of an age-long, thousand-
fold experience, is giving us now sentence after
sentence of its leisurely verdict. It is pro-
nouncing Christianity to be at once deeper than
its successive theologies and deeper than the
refutations of them. Clear enough is its pro-
nouncement on the Gospel as a life value.
Its summing-up on this point might, indeed,
be put in Lowell's memorable words : " When
scepticism has turned its attention to human
society, and has found a place on this planet
THE LOGIC OF LIFF; 273
ten miles square where a decent man can
live in decency, comfort and security . . .
a place where age is reverenced, infancy
protected, manhood respected, womanhood
honoured, and human life held in due regard ;
when sceptics can find such a place ten miles
square on this globe where the Gospel of
Christ has not gone and cleared the way and
laid the foundation, it will then be in order
for the sceptical literati to move thither and
there to ventilate their views."
But the logic of life, saying this with immense
emphasis for the Gospel as a fact in history
and a practice of living, will have nothing to
do with our parochialisms of religious thought.
It admits much of the opposition argument
against the theologies, and may admit more
yet. It is creating in us a faith in universals
rather than in this or that particular. It
compels us to reverence the work of human
uplifting done by other forms of religion as
well as our own. It is revealing to us hidden
affinities in cults that seemed at first so alien ;
it is showing us that faith, love, sacrifice,
purity, forgiveness, brotherhood, are the same
in human souls the world over, the inbreathing
there of the life of the one Father ; it is opening
18
274 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
the immense prospect of a universal faith
resting upon indisputable facts, upon common
aspirations, upon the participation of the same
spiritual heritage. From every quarter hands
are being stretched out for such a consumma-
tion. The best men everywhere see this
coming day. Is it not something to get a
word like this from India ? It is P. C.
Mozoomdar who speaks : " We look forward
to a day when Christian missionaries and
Hindu reformers will form a brotherhood,
different indeed in theology, but one in spirit,
in aim, in the inspired humanity of Jesus
Christ and the Fatherhood of God." One of
the greatest things, we imagine, that is at
present being done on the mission field is the
education of the missionaries themselves hi
the principles of this universal faith.
It is, indeed, not to the theologies, or the
camps of rival disputants, but to this logic of
life, producing its results from age to age,
that we shall look for the settlement of all our
controversies. Its pronouncements are final.
Our theory, however fine-spun, however based
in tradition or authority, if it conform not
to those findings, will fail to hold its ground.
Here, indeed, is our Vatican. Exasperatingly
THE LOGIC OF LIFE. 275
slow is it in its processes, but sure as it is
slow, and certain in the end to win humanity
to its decisions.
The subject has immense personal applica-
tions. The leader of men is he who under-
stands the logic of life. Certain data, he realises,
will without fail yield certain results. His
view of things includes sight, insight and fore-
sight ; not only does he see the thing before
his eyes, but deeper, into the principles under-
lying it, and further into its future unfoldings.
He knows that facts are full of logic, and that
their developments will follow the spiritual
laws with which he has made himself familiar.
And our own individual experience will be
a constant education in the logic of life. We
take our theory of living and offer it as an
equation to that " nature of things " which
encloses us. It will yield back the answer to
the equation with an unerring accuracy.
There seems a certain grimness, indeed, in
this relation. Our personal contribution is
often so fitful, so stupid, and the answer that
comes back is so terrifically scientific ! We
have forgotten a given duty. The Cosmos
refuses to forget that we have forgotten. It
remembers our lapse and fails not to produce
276 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
it to our confusion. We should be utterly
beaten in this business were it not for another
revelation that life brings us namely, that
there is something deeper in it even than its
logic, and that is a Grace that is infinite
and exhaustless.
XXIX.
The Soul's Remaking:.
OUR word "poet," which signifies originally
" the maker," plainly fits other heads than
that of the polisher of verses. It belongs to
us all, for, as Hazlitt says, " poetry is the stuff
of which life is made." We are perpetually
weaving our epic, our comedy, our tragedy.
The maker, that is man's true title. He is
ever making his world, and ever making himself.
His record on the planet itself is truly a marvel-
lous one. Within certain limits, he is the
greatest cosmic force we know. With his
tool in hand and brain behind it, he transforms
in a few years the laborious handiwork of count-
less aeons. He carves continents and alters
the set of ocean currents. A river bed which
it has taken Nature ten million years to con-
struct is rearranged by this bantling in a given
number of months. As world-maker he is
indeed only now beginning to feel his power.
But we have just said he is maker, not only
277
278 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
of his world, but also of himself. And even
more wonderful business is this latter, and one
which we have not yet sufficiently studied. It
was a great word of Heraclitus " that man is
a perpetual becoming." He is not, that is, a
thing, a finished product, but rather a passage
from something to something more. The
modern doctrine of evolution has put that
old truth into a new light. But with multi-
tudes a misconception has crept in as to the
way in which the evolution is accomplished.
The word has carried them over to a kind of
fatalism. They imagine themselves as simply
the resultant of the forces that are playing
upon them a something that is being shaped
and fashioned, the outcome of an irresistible
process. They are what they are made, and
are spectators of what is going on, rather than
active participants. Phrases of this kind form
one of those half-truths the use of which is
like rowing with one oar. There is no progress
that way.
Perhaps the greatest problem of life is here
before us : Can we to any extent remake our
minds ? Are we simply a product, or can
we be creators of ourselves ? Man, as we have
seen, is a revolutionist in his outside world.
THE SOUL'S REMAKING. 279
There he levels mountains, turns deserts into
gardens, uses Niagaras to grind his corn.
Can he, as well, be a revolutionist within,
and there also make his desert into a garden ?
Let us try and examine this question with as
close a reference as possible to the facts of
the case.
If we study our present inward condition
we shall find there two sets of phenomena, or,
we may say, two phases of feeling. The first,
and the one perhaps most carefully to be noted,
is that of our immediate and involuntary-
response to each fresh appeal of the outside
world. By observing that response, we may
get to a nicety the measure of our present
selves. When, for instance, a new difficulty
or affliction confronts us, when a needy man
asks our help, when our rival secures a success
greater than our own, the feeling that first leaps
into consciousness is the thing for us, with a
rigorous and scientific exactness, to investigate.
For here have we the precise summing of our
progress or non-progress thus far. In that
first flash of feeling there working hi us, before
we have had time to think of its quality, we
see the point we have reached. Variations
of quality in these first impressions there
280 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
may be, but we shall be safe in taking their
average.
The survey, if we make it searchingly and
thoroughly, will to most of us yield curious
revelations, often far from gratifying. What
uglinesses gleam out from that troubled surface !
A photographic impression of it all, taken in
the raw, and before there has been any time
for trimming, will often show as much paganism
as an early chapter of Gibbon. Those instinc-
tive judgments of our fellows, those forecastings
of our future, those suggestions for action,
dragged now to the cold daylight and examined
there, are not an ideal picture ! Poor indeed
and all unlovely should we be if this were all.
But it is not all. For immediately behind
this surface impression we discern another ;
dimmer, in the background, but there and
profoundly modifying the picture. All of
us who are in any degree ethically alive know
that " something behind," which checks the
first impulse, questions it, turns it round, asks
whether it is worthy of us. Here, in this
second line of inner movement, have we that
secret of Heraclitus, that man is primarily a
becoming. For this is our better self in the
making. What goes on here in the region of
THE SOUL'S REMAKING. 281
the soul is precisely what we find occurring
in our bodily exercises. There we know two
kinds of action, the automatic, which comes
first ; and behind that, the voluntary. Our
walking, our dressing, our ordinary speaking
are mainly automatic ; the activities come
of themselves. But a time was when every
one of them was a laboured effort, demanding
at each point a distinct exercise of will. We
are learning other things now, may be skating,
riding, a foreign language and the actions
here are still in the voluntary, effortful stage.
If we persevere they will in turn join our
automatic activities, and be part of our in-
stinctive selves. The passage of the conscious
into the instinctive is ever the sign of advance.
But what is true here of our physical evolu-
tion is equally true of the mental. The active
striving, behind our surface involuntary, of
something that judges, corrects and seeks to
supplant it, is our march upward. Here,
again, the voluntary is preparing to become in
its turn the involuntary. Wonderful, when
we come to think of it, that power in man
unknown, so far as we can discover, to all the
animal races of projecting, from out of his
interior, ideals that are ever ahead of his actual
282 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
character, and that ever tempt and entice him
towards their realisation ! Wonderful, also,
that, ever as the straining actual mounts, does
the ideal in its turn mount, and give no sign
of stopping short till it reach the Infinite Per-
fection ! It is in contemplation of this faculty
in man that Plato in the " Symposium " bursts
into that wonderful description of the Eternal
Beauty and of the human quest for it. " Could
man's life in that vision of beatitude be poor
and low ? Or deemest thou not that then
alone it will be possible for this man, discerning
spiritual beauty with those eyes by which it is
spiritually discerned, to beget no shadow of
virtue, since that is no shadow to which he
clings, but virtue in very truth, since he hath
the very truth in his embrace ? . . . And
rearing virtue as his child he must needs
become the friend of God ; and if there be any
man who is immortal that man is he."
This projection of ideals is the first element
in the mind's remaking. We find the next
in the enormous elasticity and adaptability of
the material itself. No substance in nature
gives us any adequate illustration of the bound-
less spring, the format iveness and reformative-
ness of the human soul. It can apparently
THE SOTJL'S REMAKING. 283
take on any shape and be educated to any
degree. This is, perhaps, best seen in the
lower ranges of its activity. You can train
yourself into and out of all kinds of tastes.
There is no original taste for port or champagne.
The hardened smoker endured agonies as a
boy over his first cigar. The medical student,
with whom dissecting has become a passion,
fainted at his first operation. We can place
no limit, indeed, to this adaptability of the
human consciousness, and that fact gives us
another ground for faith in the mind's remaking.
But an immeasurable adaptability, and an
inborn instinct towards its own betterment,
do not represent all that, along this line, is at
work in the soul. For, to reconstruct, we
need new material, and what we next discern in
our process is the continuous reception by the
mind of new spiritual elements. It is here with
our interior nature as with the planet we in-
habit. Everywhere within and without we
find a vast receptivity. The world would not
exist an hour but for its communications from
outside. We know something of what the sun
sends us. The stars also contribute their
quota. As a modern writer finely says :
" The solid earth, the ocean's floor, are covered
284 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
with meteoric dust, the dust of the cosmic
wayside which we have gathered in our rush
through the constellations." And quite as
certain and as constant as this rain of sunlight
and star dust upon our world is the impact
upon the inner spirit of influences and powers
that move upon it from above. There is no
ethical consciousness of any degree of develop-
ment but is sure of this. At times, upon
specially sensitised natures, the inrush is
almost overwhelming. How many have had
an experience such as that which James
Russell Lowell once recounted of himself !
" I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of
God in me and around me. The whole room
seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to
hover to and fro with the presence of Some-
thing, I know not what."
The co-operation, on the under side, with
this celestial incoming is what we know as
prayer. In his " Heart of Midlothian " Sir
Walter Scott has a fine passage which gives
half the truth about prayer : " Without enter-
ing into an abstruse point of Divinity one thing
is plain namely, that the person who lays
open his doubts and distresses in prayer, with
feeling and sincerity, must necessarily in the
THE SOUL'S REMAKING. 285
act purify his mind from the dross of worldly
passions and interests, and bring it into that
state when the resolutions adopted are likely
to be selected rather from a sense of duty than
from any inferior motive." But Sir Walter
gives us here only the under side of the truth.
In its higher aspect prayer is the soul's
receptivity ; the spreading out of its upper
surface to the rain upon it of that light and heat
whose source is beyond the stars.
The Church's view of the mind's remaking
lies in its doctrine of conversion, a doctrine
which has to be reconstructed for our genera-
tion, and urged upon it as a veritable science
of the soul. The best thinkers are all coming
back to this, each in his own way. Professor
James, of Harvard, speaks of the process as a
voluntary union of a man's higher part of
himself " with a More of the same quality
which is operative in the universe outside him,
and which he can keep in touch with, and in a
fashion get on board of." What this union
can effect for man's remaking, and that over
every department of his nature, is writ large
in the history of religious experience, the history
which, of all literature, ancient or modern, is
the best worth reading.
286 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
The story is a glorious one, and no man who
studies it need ever despair of himself. What
miraculous cures it contains of minds diseased ;
what renovations, what remakings of the inner
world, what liftings from hell to heaven !
And all that has been done can still be done in
you and me. " Die Geisterwelt ist nicht
verschlossen." It is treason to the highest in
us ever to stop where we are. To be weaving
our nobler self is to be our chief occupation in
this world. It is the one that here and here-
after will yield an endlessly satisfying result.
The Cosmic Accuracy.
THE saying of Epicharmus that " we live by
arithmetic and by logic " has for us a wider
extension than the old Greek philosopher
himself imagined. The early world, it is
true, had a very vivid sense of the element
of calculation in the world's order. Pytha-
goras, who discovered the relation of number
to the harmonic system, made it the central
feature of his philosophy and theology. And
one can dip nowhere into those old cosmic
schemes without being constantly met with
the idea of number as in itself full of mystical
significance. But modern research has brought
us some new ideas on this subject. Astronomy
has revealed the exactness of the cosmic
bookkeeping. It gives us, for instance, our
planet, doing its million and a-half miles
or so per day, with slackenings and accelera-
tions of speed at different points of its ellip-
tical orbit, and yet accomplishing its little
288 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
run of between five and six hundred million
miles during the year, and coming in to time
to the minutest fraction of a second.
And as we ascend in the scale of life, we find
in the higher ranges the same story of minute
and errorless accuracy. Chemistry has been
one of the great revealers here. Its law of
combining proportions is a wonderful ex-
position of the arithmetic of matter. Nature's
bookkeeping takes account of every fraction,
of every atom. She allows no waste. We burn
up the fuel hi our grate, and there is an end
of it for us. Not for her. Dissolved into
the primitive elements, or caught up into
new, invisible combinations, the burnt-up
material, to its last atom, is there, ready to
answer her call, holding its place in the sum
of her working forces. And in the yet higher
complex which physiology offers, in the living
organism, the same thing meets us. Our
bodily life has its place in the ledger where an
absolutely true account of it is kept. The
air we breathe, the exercise we take, the food
we eat, our whole habitudes of work and
rest, of sleeping and of pleasuring, will be
figured out with a perfect exactitude into
their equivalent of vitality, of output and of
THE COSMIC ACCURACY. 289
longevity. We can ourselves make a rough
kind of calculation in these matters, and it
is of the greatest importance we should ;
but our attempt at the best is only a guess.
It offers no parallel to the cosmic account-
keeping, which tots up the total to the last
decimal.
But now comes a question. When, in
our ascent, we cross the " Great Divide "
from matter into spirit ; when we reach that
mind's kingdom, where the freedom of the
will seems to transcend all the lower laws,
and to introduce a new and untrackable
factor into the world's activities, can we still
speak of a " cosmic accuracy " ? Are the
results in this sphere as certain and as calculable
as in the others ? We need not enter here
on the problem of Determinism. Our line
of investigation lies outside. The point is
not as to how the results are produced, but
as to the results themselves. And in this
region, the wider and the more intelligent
our outlook, the deeper, we believe, will be
our sense of a bookkeeping, patient, detailed
and entirely accurate that is going on, and
whose figures are at times vividly discernible.
The world, we know, is full of the cry of in-
19
290 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
justice and of the feeling of it. As the scheme
of things grinds out its results, and presents
our appointed share to each of us, we fume and
revolt against the " glaring inequalities."
" So much," we say, " to this man and so
little to me ! " And it would be quite useless
to try and square this account to the satis-
faction of all the creditors. We, at least,
shall not attempt it. What can be said is
that amid the seeming confusions here, there
is discernible a working towards moral accuracy,
a broad law of treatment, a system of balancings
and compensations, of hidden payments and
rewards, of a deep working justice that, while
leisurely in operation, never relaxes the pursuit
of its end, that gives, to some of us at least,
a great hope and a great faith to live by.
After all, how sane and sure is the world's
final judgment of men and things ! Securus
judicat orbis terrarum. In the long run it
fits every man into his proper place. The
charlatan, the pretender may for a while
hold a position which does not belong to him ;
but, by-and-by, he will be found out and
reduced to his real proportions. Abraham
Lincoln has put the matter for us in his un-
forgettable way : " You may fool all the
THE COSMIC ACCUBACY. 291
people part of the time ; you may fool some of
the people all the time ; but you cannot fool
all the people all the time." It takes us a
very long while to discover the essential
justice of the world's verdict about ourselves.
The personal equation here is the iron near
the compass, which deflects the needle and
totally vitiates the reckoning. " How amazing,
how exasperating, that this purblind, asinine
public fails so utterly to recognise my merit ! "
" No, sir. The public is fully as sane as you
are, and the cosmos behind is even saner.
You will get your place. Your niche, the
height of it, and the dimensions of ifc, will
be arranged and wrought with a hairbreadth
accuracy." Our world, which rolls us to and
fro in such amazing fashion, which batters
us this side and that with such seeming re-
morseless strokes, is, we eventually discover,
an artist, skilled yet kindly. Even humorous
withal. We find out that the rogue positively
pokes fun at us ! He makes sly use even of
our poor little vanity ! It is an element in
his calculations, part of the working force
by which he gets the most out of us. When
this dawns upon us, how can we do other
than laughingly acquiesce ?
292 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
But the moral accuracy of the cosmos is
by no means all a laughing matter. In that
dim and awful region of the soul where volition's
battle incessantly goes on, and where alter-
nate victories and defeats shape the char-
acter and life, we discover an arbiter, a judge
who with a marvellous precision fits the
results to the acts. The Eastern doctrine
of Karma is a rough expression of this cosmic
truth. Plutarch in his " De Sera Numinis
Vindicta " is on the same lines in his fine
argument that punishment does not so much
follow upon injustice, but, as he finds in
Hesiod, that the two are contemporaneous,
and spring up from one and the same root.
So is it that, in external oppressions and
injustices, there is discernible in an ulterior
circle the working of forces that readjust,
in a wonderful way, the balance between
the wronger and the wronged. The tyrant
who oppresses is, in that subtler and yet most
accurate calculation, always worse off than
the victim of his oppression. The most clear-
sighted of the victims have ever recognised
this. " Beat on," said Anaxarchus to his
executioners, " beat on at the case of Anax-
archus ; no stroke falls on Anaxarchus himself."
THE COSMIC ACCURACY. 293
And Justin Martyr is of the same mind when
he declares in the first Apology, " We reckon
that no evil can be done us, unless we be
convicted as evil-doers ; you can kill, but not
hurt us." The m3n who are fighting or
suffering for a good cause, even though,
like Plato's " just man," they be " stretched
on the rack and their eyes dug out," have
always the consciousness that they have
the upper hand in the conflict, and so have
an inner triumph in the midst of their pains.
This feeling that, in the most central re-
gions of the moral sphere, there is an absolute
accuracy of reckoning, is discernible through-
out the whole history of man's religious
thinking. It comes out at times in the strangest
ways. We see it, for instance, in those doc-
trines of Atonement, of substitution, which
in their cruder form have been so repellent
to modern thought. When the earlier Cal-
vinists spoke of Christ's sufferings as being,
in their quantity and intensity, an exact
equivalent for the sins of the elect, they were
exhibiting, in a manner congenial to the
thought of the time, their sense of the cosmic
accuracy. It was their way of saying that
the moral world possessed an arithmetic
294 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
which reckoned to the last farthing. The
earlier fathers had a better, a more Christian
way of expressing the same truth. What a
fine sense, for example, of moral equivalence,
of a Divine humiliation and suffering for a
corresponding human uplifting, have we in
that passage of Methodius in which, speaking
of the cross, he says : " For the Word suffered,
being in the flesh affixed to the cross, that
he might bring man, who had been deceived
by error, to His supreme and Godlike majesty,
restoring him to that Divine life from which
he had become alienated."
The cosmic accuracy in these highest realms
is indeed our surest guarantee, and our best
incentive for the religious life. That the
spiritual laws can be trusted, that we can
commit ourselves fearlessly to them, as a
strong swimmer gives himself to the waves,
feeling himself at home there, and knowing
that they will bear him, here is the genuine
groundwork of a life of faith. Man's failure
with the higher laws is never the fault of the
laws. It is an affair of his unfitness and
ignorance. Once he has mastered their secret
he realises their utter fidelity ; they fail him
never. And we grow here according to our
THE COSMIC ACCURACY. 295
faith and our works. We are building now
the spiritual house in which we shall dwell.
The structure will reveal the strictest arith-
metic. Its size, proportions, materials, will
be according to what we put into it. And
yet behind will appear a larger arithmetic
than our own the reckoning of that calculus
whose terms are the Infinite Grace and the
Eternal love.
It is when we think along these lines, and
come upon conclusions of this order that
there grows upon us the argument, whose
cumulative effect becomes at last irresistible,
for a life beyond the present. It is, indeed,
only on this supposition that the doctrine of
cosmic accuracy vindicates itself. For the
results which work out with such complete-
ness in life's lower spheres break off in the
upper and really important ones with so
startling an abruptness, that we are driven
to the supposition of a further ledger account
to which they are transferred, and where they
are completed. An apostolic word gives us
some hint of the features of that final summing :
" For I reckon that the sufferings of this pre-
sent time are not worthy to be compared
with the glory that shall be revealed in us."
XXXI.
History's Secret Springs.
NOTHING perhaps expresses more strikingly the
bewilderment which has overtaken the modern
man than his interpretations of history.
Schopenhauer finds it the most unsatisfactory
of studies. It deals, he says, not like philosophy
and science, with ideas and conceptions, but
only with endless particulars, with things that
happened once and then ceased to exist. " It
does not rise to a universal law ; it is always
crawling on the ground of individual experi-
ence." Buckle, on the other hand, was sure
about his law of history. He found it in
material conditions. Given the climate, the
food, and the physical geography of a country,
and its fortunes might be predicted. Fonte-
nelle also thought history a comparatively
simple affair. " A man of great skill," he
says, " simply by considering human nature,
might guess all past and future history without
ever having heard of a single event." Mill, too,
HISTORY'S SECRET SPRINGS. 297
it will be remembered, at one period of his
career, dreamed of constructing an " Ethology,"
a science of conduct which should give us the
laws of past events, and enable us in some
degree to predict the future.
Other writers have been overborne with
a sense of the fortuitous in history. Condorcet
observed that had Xerxes been victorious at
Salamis we might still be barbarians. The
saying is akin to that of Gibbon, that, but for
Charles Martel's victory, Mohammedan doctors
might to-day be teaching the Koran at Oxford.
There is also a cynical view which, at recurring
intervals, gains vogue, that regards the written
histories as merely a full dress view of human-
ity, giving no true view of its real inwardness.
What actually happens, these people say, is
too sordid for recital. The story, so told,
would be a series of chroniques scandaleuses.
We remember Pascal's grim jest, " If the nose
of Cleopatra had been shorter, the whole face
of the earth would have been changed."
And this sardonic view of history could be made
entirely consistent, because every event and
series of events has two sides, an upper and
an under, and we can choose which we look at.
The English Reformation may be discussed in
298 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
the light of the labours and sufferings of a
Tyndale and a Coverdale, or as an affair of
the relations of Henry VIII. with Anne Boleyn.
We might judge the Anglicanism of the
Restoration by the seraphic fervour of a
Thomas Ken, or by the action of his con-
temporary of Durham, who secured his bishop-
ric by a bribe of some thousands to Nell
Gwynn. Surely nothing exists in the wide
universe that lends itself to more opposite
interpretations than human nature and human
affairs. To the average observer they offer
almost irresistible temptations to take a side
view, and judge from that. But he will be
all wrong. He may accumulate innumerable
facts, but his perspective will be out of joint.
Plainly, not a too well-marked track this
science of history, and the philosopher as
well as the wayfaring man may easily err
therein. And yet the deeper minds, as they
have brooded this question, have felt a growing
certitude that the human story contained a
central secret of co-ordination, which, when
found, would be discovered to be not a sordid
one. It has often been said that Bossuet in
his " Histoire Universelle " laid the foundations
of the philosophy of history. It was laid long
HISTORY'S SECRET SPRINGS. 299
centuries before his day. Augustine, in his
" City of God," propounds a view of the world
and of human nature in general which contains
too much of his early Manicheeism to suit the
modern conscience, but in his great sweep
of vision, in which he views the whole story
of the world as one vast drama with a pre-
determined end, he undoubtedly opened the
way which has been traversed with such
results by the Lessings and the Hegels of later
times.
As outcome of all these researches and ques-
tionings it remains that while, as we have seen,
at a far remove from anything like complete-
ness of view, we are at least able now to make
some affirmations. One is that the springs
of real history are ever hidden. We are all of
us more or less conscious of this. It is the
first feeling of the genuine student, as he turns
the pages of this or that authority. He longs
to get behind his Gibbon or his Macaulay to
the sources where they worked. And when
we are there we still want to press on. Behind
the parchments and the ancient chronicles
there is still a secret. Our feeling in watching
this turbid current of human life as it rolls its
vast volume before our eyes is that of Heroditus
300 PROBLEMS or LIVING.
when he looked on old Nilus. We would,
with him, fain follow back to the head waters.
As we stand at gaze over this stretch of ages,
what, we ask, is the chief contributor to its
history ? We speak of wars, of migrations,
of heroes and their achievements. But we
are sensible that here, after all, is not the clue.
It is the simple fact to say that the one unfailing
source and feeder of the current has, from the
beginning, been the Unseen. We take a course
of centuries, and above the din and whirl of
events we discern every now and then, hovering
over the horizon, a thin streak of new light, a
fresh inspiration for the soul, let down as it
seems from the upper heaven. Of the earliest
of these we have no record. We only know
they have been there by the result. What
was it, we wonderingly imagine, that made that
stupendous difference between man of the
palaeolithic and man of the neolithic time ?
What had come in upon the race during these
two prehistoric periods that had changed our
ancestor from a seemingly non-religious to a
religious being ?
He is not there to tell us, but what has
happened since enables us to make a good
guess. As we come on these later stages we
HISTORY'S SECRET SPRINGS. 301
find the same hint everywhere thrown out.
It is that of an unseen hand at work. On the
plains of Babylonia we find the old Accadians,
four thousand years ago, in possession of
arithmetic, of geometry, of the divisions of
time, of the Sabbath. Who had been their
teacher ? Then, spite of himself, man has
become moralised. Like a child born amid
wild beasts, the instinct of altruism, of regard
for others, appears amidst the horde of devour-
ing animal passions, and grows until it gradu-
ally dominates them. How did this come
about ? There is only one answer. Behind
the prehistoric, as behind the later and clearer
time, what we see is a perpetual secret feeding
of humanity from a spiritual source. The
story has been well compared to what happens
when a handful of iron filings, sprinkled on a
sheet of paper, are exposed to the action of a
bar-magnet passed underneath. Under its
influence the filings arrange themselves into
a series of symmetrical curves ; when the magnet
is removed the atoms resolve themselves back
into their original chaos. Human society
at present is at a far remove from an ordered
cosmos ; but it is equally remote from a chaos.
As Amiel says : " From the point of view of the
302 PROBLEMS or LIVING.
ideal, man shows much of the sad and of the
ugly ; but judged by its origins the human
race has not altogether lost its time." The
secret is that the magnet behind the screen
has incessantly been at work. Man has been
the recipient of a perpetual inspiration. As a
Greek father puts it : " And sometimes the
' power ' breathes in men's thoughts and
reasonings, and puts in their hearts strength
and a keener perception."
With this clue in our hands we may survey
what is going on around us with quiet con-
fidence, and at the same time with eager
expectancy. We are continually looking in
the wrong place for the manufacture of history.
As Dr. Creighton has well said : " We sometimes
speak as though nothing ever happens save
what is formally discussed and voted upon.
The most important changes are those which
are unperceived and unrecognised till they
have been accomplished." Nowhere does this
truth apply with greater cogency than in what
has happened and is happening in the history
of religion. We go continually on the supposi-
tion that spiritual progress is a matter of the
multiplication of churches and of the recon-
struction of our ecclesiastical organisations.
HISTORY'S SECRET SPRINGS. 303
It has never been so. The source is always an
unseen one. The religious destiny of a genera-
tion has again and again, we discover, lain in
what was going on in the depths of two or
three elect and disciplined souls. How the
fortunes of Anglicanism, we now see, were bound
up in the thinkings, the discussions, the in-
ward struggles of two or three young men
in the Oriel common room in the thirties !
Of what deeper significance for the religion of
the Anglo-Saxon race were the spiritual com-
munings of another young Oxford student
one John Wesley at Lincoln College a century
before ! What issues for Catholicism lay in
the broodings of the young Spanish knight
Ignatius Loyola, as he lay, wounded by a cannon
shot at Pampeluna, beguiling the weary hours
with a copy of the " Lives of the Saints " !
Here, then, deep down in the consciousness
of great, earnest souls, lies the religion of the
future, as ever its fortunes have lain in the
past. But immediately, as we say this, the
question arises, Whence do these souls come ?
There are transcendental answers which a
Plato or a second century Gnostic would have
been eager to supply. But on a humbler and
less speculative side it is worth noting that
304 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
a part, at least, of their secret is one of ancestry.
The immense spiritual force by which Wesley
re-endowed the Anglo-Saxon populace with the
Christian Gospel did not, let us be sure, begin
with him. It was a treasure, slowly accumu-
lating in the consciousness of those faithful
ancestors on both sides who, during successive
generations, had stood for what was best at
once in Anglicanism and in Nonconformity.
It is a lesson most inspiring and reassuring
in the continuity of spiritual force. Nothing in
this realm, any more than in the material one,
is ever lost. The humble follower of the Chris-
tian ideal, who to-day, in his family and his
private life, is striving to put what he knows
into his character and his work, may himself
be no prophet of the time. But it is in the
simple fidelity of such as he that we find the
hidden springs of a future greatness. It is
along these lines the spirit travels, to burst into
glorious illumination in some inspired soul yet
to come.
Human history, we say then, is from age to
age progressively yielding its secret. The
final analysis reveals a factor that infinitely
outweighs all of sordid and of discouraging that
we find there. It shows us an agent behind
HISTORY'S SECRET SPRINGS. 305
the scenes, whose silence and slowness are
indeed often baffling to us, but whose mark is
upon every age, and whose results are ever
of one character. Von Hartmann spoke of the
human race as being cradled in illusions ; first
of a possible happiness in this life, next of
happiness in a life to come, then of a happiness
for the race in a future age. Deceived in them
all the only problem he declares now is to
close the illusion with the ending of existence.
But the \ ei'dict is not according to the evidence,
and we may dismiss it as the moan of a diseased
mind. It is indeed this pessimistic school,
and not humanity at large, that is cradled in
illusions. Busy with its muckrake amongst
the garbage of life, it has no time to look up
and discover the golden crown which hovers
above. For all who can see, the crown, never-
theless, is there. All the signs tell us that
history moves to a great consummation. The
secret spring that through the ages has fed the
world is none other than the River of God, by
whose living waters man shall yet find his
Paradise.
XXXII.
Of Spiritual Appetite.
THE modern approach to religion through
psychology and physiology is continually yield-
ing us fresh results. These findings, while not
a contradiction of the earlier theology, offer
outlooks which that theology never contem-
plated. And their value is that they make
religion so new a thing to us, related in such
hitherto unthought-of ways to the realities
of life. Considerations of this kind press
on the mind in such a study as is before us.
The idea of "a spiritual appetite " as part
of our human equipment is familiar, probably,
to most of us, though held with a varying
degree of precision. It will be near enough
to the fact, and to our purpose here, if we
speak of it as a sense of the unseen, mingled
with a desire for the special experiences which
that sense brings. Religious minds associate
with it the deepest realisations, and the most
potent spurs to action that life possesses.
OF SPIRITUAL APPETITE. 307
But in studying spiritual appetite, as thus con-
ceived, modern observation opens up a class
of considerations never imagined by the older
divines, and confronts a range of problems
which it is peculiarly the task of our day to
resolve.
One of the first results we get at here is the
somewhat puzzling discovery that spiritual
appetite, in the most conspicuous at least of
its forms, is intermittent in humanity. As
with our physical desires, it comes and goes.
It is a hunger which is diminished by what
it feeds on, until it cries " Enough ! " That this
is so the simplest reflection on what is daily
happening will prove to us. Let us imagine
the ablest and most earnest of preachers,
charged to his fullest capacity with Divine
influences, and before him a picked audience
of the most devout souls, hungering and thirst-
ing after God. A point would be reached in
his utterance beyond which it were well for
him not to pass. It would be the point of
repletion. Let him add more and yet more,
even of the highest things, and in time the
joy of the audience would be turned to pain
and repulsion. The physiologist would at this
point be ready with his explanation. The
308 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
interest of the audience, he will tell you, de-
pends upon the freshness and activity of
certain brain centres, and its decline arises
from the fact that these centres become in
the end overcharged and fatigued. Spiritual
appetite, he will say, is a form of thinking
and feeling, and, as part of the law of
its action, must have its rests and alterna-
tions.
There wiU be more to say on this physical
side of the matter presently, but before drawing
any conclusions we may go on with our obser-
vations. Another notable fact in connection
with spiritual appetite is that in many, and often
notable persons, it coexists with all manner of
semingly most incongruous elements. For
a time it will be the ruling factor, revealing
itself with the utmost reality and intensity,
then to be succeeded by headlong rushes of
sensual passion, by all varieties of greed,
ambition, and lower interest, until its own turn
come again. There have been men who have
constructed their theory of life on this per-
petual alternation. Their soul is a wheel
which revolves, and they reck little as
to which side at the moment happens to be
uppermost. To yield fully to the passion of
OP SPIRITUAL APPETITE. 309
the hour, whether it be a spiritual ecstasy or
a sexual debauch, is their view of tasting life
in its wholeness. Certain ages have been con-
spicuous for the production of this type. The
Italian Renaissance abounded in them. The
memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini offer us, perhaps,
the best exemplar. That extraordinary book
reveals the author as now reading the Epistles
of Paul with utmost relish, or, again, with
equal keenness pursuing his monstrous amours,
or plunging his dagger into the heart of his
adversary. In France we have his feminine
counterpart in a Margaret of Valois, who was
eqally at home in ribald stories, in lofty specu-
lations, and in the contemplation of God.
She seems to put one self into " The Mirror
of the Soul," her first work, and another, quite
different self, into the gross chronicles of the
Heptameron. In such souls there seems no
discrimination between one appetite and
another. Everything that comes along appears
equally good, equally worthy to reign. With
Marie Bashkirtseff, these people could choose
by turns to be Sardanapalus and Napoleon,
the Pope and the Devil. If they exercise
discrimination, it is one solely of age. They
would accept the witty Frenchman's appor-
310 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
tionment, and be a pretty woman till thirty,
an ambassador till fifty, and a cardinal for the
rest.
This ebb and flow of spiritual appetite,
observable more or less in us all, has given rise
to abundant theorising and to abundant ex-
perimenting, in religion and life. In every age
there have been heroic souls, with a special
gift of temperament, who, rebelling against
the natural law, have conceived a life in which
the mind should keep ever at its topmost
strain, with no admixture of what was beneath.
For this they have been willing to pay the
price, and to cut themselves loose, as far as
might be, from the world's activities and in-
citements. But the common sense of humanity
has rejected asceticism. There is not blood
enough in its veins. Pascal's word, " that
man is neither angel nor beast, but in trying
to make an angel of him one often ends in
making him a beast," has sunk into the world's
memory, so verified as it has been by a long
experience. The revelations of the " Black
Book," compiled by Thomas Cromwell at his
visitation of the English monasteries, are a
proof, horrible, but for ever convincing, of
what Nature thinks of the violation, under
OF SPIRITUAL APPETITE. 311
whatsoever auspices, of her fundamental con-
ditions.
It is, by the way, in this connection curious
to note that the Renaissance period, which
exhibited such strange admixtures of religious
fervour and animal passion, gave birth also
to a lofty attempt at the spiritualisation of
human love. We find in the Italy of the six-
teenth century women proclaiming a new
doctrine which relegated what they called
"matrimonial love" to an inferior moral posi-
tion as compared with the " celestial love "
which was to unite men and women in a nobler
bond. Cardinal Bembo writes eloquently on
this theme, declaring that the knowledge how
truly to love comes only in riper years, and
that its essence consists in eluding the impulse
of the senses, which only disturb the spiritual
rapture of pure affection. It sounds well, but
at best it was a doctrine for the elite, and one
that, so far as we know, had little enough effect
on the morals of the time. A daring attempt,
from another side, to solve the problem has
been in the Antinomianism, appearing under
various guises in different ages, and revived
in a peculiarly dangerous form by a modern
school of Continental mysticism, which has
312 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
allowed the bodily life every kind of excess,
under the plea that the soul in all this is a
non-participant.
Truly the puzzle of how best to live in this
world has been a great one, and sorely have
our predecessors been bewildered in their
attempts to answer it. In our own solutions
we have at least the immense advantage of
their experience. They traversed every road,
and each band of searchers seems to have
brought back a bit of the answer. But they
are all tormented with the feeling that they
have not the whole of it. How the best in its
wholeness seems ever to elude these eager
travellers ! A second best, or a fragment of
the best, seems all they hope for. We can
sympathise so fully with that old thirteenth-
century writer who finds in himself an appetite
for three things, " honour, wealth, and God's
grace, in order that he should possess the ful-
ness of his power." But he despairs of getting
them altogether. " Alas ! It cannot be that
riches and honour and the grace of God should
come together in a single life." It does not
occur to him to ask " Why not ? " He is
obsessed by that Latin conception of God and
the world which made Augustine reproach
OF SPIRITUAL APPETITE. 313
himself for his joy in music and in the sunshine
which gave so great a relish to life.
But what, then, are our own conclusions ?
Are we nearer than our fathers to the solution of
the enigma ? Are we to admit that spiritual
appetite and its satisfactions are an evan-
escence, a portion of that eternal flux of things
which belongs to the human consciousness as
well as to the outside world ; a something be-
gotten of a previous, different state, and pro-
ducing in its turn another mental condition,
often its opposite ? Assuredly in certain forms
of the soul's desire there is, as we have already
acknowledged, a to and fro, a coming and a
vanishing. Plotinus speaks of having three
times enjoyed the immediate vision of God ;
Jacob Behmen tells of a great experience in
which " the triumph that was in my soul
I can neither tell nor describe." But in all
these instances, and one could multiply them
indefinitely, we have ever repeated the old
story of the ebb and flow. These highest
reaches of the soul are but a moment in a life,
which the memory alone retains. And the
physiologist, as we have said, assures us that
the very structure of the body and brain makes
it impossible that it should be otherwise.
314 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
But at this point physiology has another
thing to say to us. While it shows the spirit's
highest exercises as dependent upon an organ,
it points also to a power which in its turn is
operating mysteriously upon the organ and
making it anew. It is well known that the
brain of a great scholar contains deep and
crooked furrows, and hundreds of creases which
do not appear in the brains of ordinary men.
This means that mental toil is continually
transforming and developing the tool whicif
the mind works with. The soul is ever shap-
ing its instrument. And when we speak of
the volatile character of religious feeling and
desire, we have to remember that in the
spiritual evolution of humanity, the brain
channels along which man's highest perceptions
reach him will become immeasurably developed,
and his capacity in these directions correspond-
ingly strengthened. We are in this respect the
creators of ourselves. Every act of our will by
which we respond to the celestial voices, by
which we reject the lower and choose the higher,
adds to the perfection of the instrument by
which the heavens register themselves in us,
broadens and deepens the channels along which
flow the currents of spiritual power.
OF SPIRITUAL APPETITE. 315
And that is not all. The spiritual appetite,
as a vivid form of consciousness, we say, comes
and goes. That of necessity. But what is to
follow it ? Shall a man, after a great inward
realisation, come away, eat and drink, play
with his children, listen to music, go to business
and make money ? Shall he, after divinest
things have passed in his mind, fill it now
with the thousand things which the world
offers, and allow them in their turn to fire
his ardour and to work on his will ? The medi-
aeval monk said "No." The modern man
has learned better. For he discovers that
God is in this world as well as above it, and
that he will not even know God in all His
aspects apart from a hearty use and enjoyment
of His material manifestations. The " seeing
all things in God " by which Malebranche
sought to solve the metaphysical puzzle of
perception, turned into " a seeing God in all
things," becomes at once his life's joy and
safeguard. And in this sense the spiritual
appetite, mutable as to its form, becomes in
faithful souls, an unchanging possession. They
have the broadest range, for the Kingdom is
infinite, but they will take nothing from the
world, not its wealth, or power, or beauty,
316 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
which does not yield Him who is Holiness
and Love as the ground of their satisfactions.
" Are you recollected ? " Wesley was accus-
tomed to ask of his followers. He meant,
" were they in all their variety of pursuit
aiming ever at the highest ? " It is an excellent
question for us all.
XXXIII.
On Being an Outsider.
SCHOPENHAUER, in one of his diatribes upon
life, compares it to a conjuror's booth, where
the old tricks are perpetually played on each
new generation, producing in them the same
illusions. It is a cynical illustration, with
which we have small sympathy. But there
is a side of the comparison which he does not
touch, but which might well have occupied his
sombre genius. It is that of the behaviour
of the crowd in front of the booth. Here we
see the outsider perpetually struggling to
become an insider. The specially-endowed
with thew and elbow worms and wriggles his
way from row to row of the narrowing circles,
until at last, panting with his exertions, he
finds himself at the centre. When there he
discovers usually that he has not gained much.
The show is commonly a paltry one. Is this
nearer view worth the crowding ? The outside,
if one only had thought of it, was so much freer.
317
318 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
The fresh air and the infinite spaces lay there.
One could move at one's ease, whereas here
the air is stifling, and the pressure on every side
as of a strait-waistcoat.
Yes, in nine cases out of ten the outside of
the crowd is vastly the better, but in the world's
present humour you will have an almost
impossible task in getting your neighbour to
believe it. One finds everywhere an enormous
centripetal energy. In all departments the
great preoccupation is centre-seeking. To be
at society's middle point, of a community's
" inner circle," the member of a club whose
characteristic is exclusiveness, to be talked of,
digito monstrari, this is paradise, while to be
outside is, in Lord Beaconsfield's phrase, to
endure " the hell of failure." And as men get
further into the crowd, nearer their booth,
the airs they give themselves ! The disease
of swelled head is an old and inveterate one.
In his " Praise of Folly " Erasmus sketches
the literary lionlet of his time. " It is amusing
to see how easily a few favourable reviews
puff up all such scribblers, and if they chance
to become notorious enough to have their works
placed on the front row of the booksellers'
stalls, or to be themselves pointed out, or
ON BEING AN OUTSIDER. 319
whispered about, while tramping the streets,
there is no living with them." The words
might have been written yesterday. The
modern ecclesiastic (of all denominations)
shares to the full the craze of centre-seeking.
The scribes and Pharisees of the New Testament
time were assuredly not in it for scientific
pushfulness with your cleric of to-day. In the
synagogue the chief seats are at a greater
premium than ever. The man of old time who
blew a trumpet before him and demanded
to be called " rabbi," would, in the light of
modern developments, have recognised him-
self as a child at the business. We have
learned a thing or two since then we who are
in the age of the limelight, of purchased bogus
degrees, and of the well-engineered newspaper
reclame.
And yet, in the midst of his utmost pushing
and elbowing, there arises at times in the bosom
of our struggler a doubt, a most disquieting
query, as to whether in all this he is not writing
himself down an ass ! After all, was not that
fresh air he left behind better than this stifling
breath ? And this strait-waistcoat of utmost
convention, though of gilt stripes and richest
material, is it not most uncomfortably tight 1
320 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
Fancy a virile, full-blooded man compelled
to dress every morning as an archbishop !
Must there not be at times, in the most reverend
bosom, a frantic desire for a desert island
where, if one chose, one could go naked and not
ashamed ? There are times and there are
natures in which the absurdity of the situation
seems suddenly to reveal itself, and then come
great revolts. We have princes and princesses
running away from Court, dropping their
titles and proposing to earn their living.
Religion has seen these revolts. The anchorit-
ism of the early Church was largely a move-
ment against convention. Jerome tells us
that the monks of his time loved their solitary
life, preferring the great free air of the desert
to the crowded cities. Every age gives us
born outsiders, people who flee from the reeking
centres to the farthest edge of the open. Of
then* number are the explorers, a Columbus,
of whom an Italian poet so finely says, " In
him the instinct of an unknown continent
burned " ; a Livingstone, a Chalmers, who
were only truly at home when in the wilderness.
The expansion of Britain means, in fact,
that the race inhabiting its borders has in its
soul this irresistible yearning for the great
ON BEING AN OUTSIDER. 321
spaces, a yearning that sends it ever from
convention's narrowing boundaries to stretch
its limbs under wider skies.
Outsiders of this order have the feeling
as a kind of physical sensation. They cannot
be crowded. They want a view clear to the
stars and to the horizons without the interrup-
tion of their neighbours' chimney-pots. But
amongst the untravelled, who dwell all their
lives in the densest civilisations, there are here
and there primitive souls who, in another way,
insist on taking their liberty. You cannot
tame these men nor buy them. Their career,
in its simplicity and unworldliness, even in
what may be called its extravagances, is an
object-lesson in the real values of life. They
do not propose to sell themselves in the market
because they find the transaction unremunera-
tive at the price. They will let the other men
sweat for ambitious prizes, if only they may
be allowed to possess their own souls.
The crowded centre let who will get there,
and breathe its hot and foetid ah 1 , if that
is their taste. For them the riches of
their inner kingdom, with the universe for
their playground ! The tub of Diogenes is,
in this regard, more eloquent to us than the
21
322 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
tub of most pulpit orators. We cannot
help a cheer, either, to Thoreau, when, amongst
his dollar-hunting Yankees, he declares, " If
I should sell both my forenoons and my after-
noons to society, as most appear to do, I am
sure that for me there would be nothing left
worth living for." Such men are worth watch-
ing. When a daring soul, under an irresistible
impulse, bursts the bonds of his time, and
commences to steer a course of his own under
the infinite heavens, we are often at the new
beginnings of history.
It is necessary, however, at this point, to
be more precise in our delineation. For there
is a fanaticism of the outside, as well as of the
inside, and before we can accurately pronounce
judgment here we need to have settled in our
own minds some preliminary questions. As
we look deeper into this matter, we discover
that the chiefest of the world's outsiders have
been at the same time the most central of its
insiders, and that they were the one by virtue
of being the other. They came away from
society's centres in quest of the real centres,
which seemed to them to be elsewhere. They,
too, were centripetal, in search of their middle
point. The two things they wanted were truth
ON BEING AN OUTSIDER. 323
and life, and for these hid treasures they were
ready to sell all they had. When Xenophanes
declared the claims of religion would be best
advanced by cleansing the moral atmosphere
of the gods whose recorded lives were in oppo-
sition to purity, and when Socrates laid
down his life in defence of the same thesis,
these Greek apostles became outsiders to the
religion of their country, in order to lead their
compatriots to its true centre. Luther's stand
was exactly to the same purport. The papal
system had become a centre so remote from
the fresh air that the human soul could no
longer breathe freely there.
A terrible thing indeed is it for a nation or
an age when society's religious centre has
become so choked and encumbered that men
who want freedom and reality have to go out-
side in search of it. Such a state of things is
depicted for us by Basil, who, speaking of the
Church of the East in the fourth century, says :
" Sacred things are profaned ; those of the
laity who are sound in the faith avoid the
places of worship as schools of impiety, and
raise their hands in solitude, with groans and
tears, to the Lord in heaven." What this
exclusion of the outer air in religion means
324 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
for our own day is exhibited at this moment in
France, where, as Pere Hyacinthe says, " the
Jesuits are masters of the Church, the Atheists
are masters of the Republic." The two con-
ditions are cause and effect. How the position
is working out on the popular mind is
illustrated by the spectacle of a Sunday in
Paris, described in the Chretien Franqais, by
M. Bourrier, where, in a pouring rain which
emptied the orthodox places of worship, an
enthusiastic crowd of some five thousand
people packed the Trocadero to celebrate
the " F6te of Reason," and where the orators,
while ridiculing " the dead gods on whom
the priests live," " saluted morality, moral
force, justice and the social order." M.
Bourrier thinks they were making religion
without knowing it. May be. But is it not
tragical that these people, in search of their
souls, have to go outside the organised Chris-
tianity of their land in order to find them ?
What is evident is that where, and so long
as, the Church centres are not the soul's
centres, there will be revolt and secession.
The problem of the hour is accordingly to
bring the spiritual fellowship everywhere into
line with the ultimate truths and laws of life.
ON BEING AN OUTSIDER. 325
The outsider who shows us these is the truest
insider. It was for this that Christ went out-
side the contemporary Judaism. For the
same cause His disciples " suffered without
the camp, bearing His reproach." No more
wholesome lesson on the true doctrine of
outside and inside can be anywhere gained
than by reading the records of the early
Christian centuries. Here we find the most
radical of outsiders who were also the most
tremendous of insiders. The unity of the
primitive Church, so jealously guarded by the
succession of its teachers, was felt to be a
unity round a true centre. Against the wild
imaginings of hare-brained innovators within,
as against the barbarian pressure of the world
outside, these fathers fought for the Christian
institution and the Christian tradition, know-
ing they had here a spiritual deposit, a record
of fact and a habit of life that represented
for them the midmost point of the soul's
kingdom. The Church fellowship of the future
will, in like manner, be preserved only by
a similar fidelity to absolute inner reality.
But it is, after all, in its personal aspects that
the topic has for us its greatest fascination.
It is the doctrine of all others for the humble
326 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
and the unnoted. Are we outsiders from the
" select circles " ? The fact ought to touch
our sense of humour, if we have any. With
God's love in our hearts and God's work to do
in the world, though we be on society's utmost
verge, we have life's best. For our position
offers the choicest of all soils on which the
soul can grow. Outsiders ! Yes, but also
Insiders. If we look up from our work we
see enclosing us on every hand the walls of the
New Jerusalem.
XXXIV,
Life's Refusals.
PERHAPS the most mysterious, as certainly
the most tantalising, of life's aspects is its
element of refusal. The world dangles before
our desire a million things, which it takes care
at the same time to keep well out of our reach.
Our vision is our torment. It mocks us with
the unattainable. In the mountain country it
catches at a glance a score of peaks, each one
of which we yearn to climb and cannot. Our
discontent on the mountain is exaggerated on
the plain. Social arrangements seem con-
structed expressly for the irritation and baffling
of desire. The irony for the hovel-dweller is
in his being able to see the palace on the farther
side of the road. The jest becomes too much
for humanity at times, and then there are
emeutes and revolutions. When the fighting is
over the people discover that the world is just
as full as before of things they wish for and
cannot have. And it would have been so had
328 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
each one captured a bank and kept its contents.
For no social or political rearrangements can
stop for a moment the working of this system
of refusal. And for a good reason. It is
innate in the nature of things.
The world is sometimes divided into the
" haves " and the " have-nots." But that
really is only a surface division. We are all
fundamentally " have-nots," and were in-
tended to be. It is not enough, in discussing
such a theme, to dwell on the special cases.
One thinks, indeed, with tender sympathy
of those on whom life seems here to bear most
hardly : of the poverty-stricken ; of lonely
women to whom love and children have been
denied ; of the maimed, the disfavoured, the
invalided, who cry unavailingly for the strength
and beauty they see around them ; of men who
have been within an inch of fame and prosperity,
and seen at the critical point the cup dashed
from their lips. Pitiful, truly. But that is
only half the story. The other half is the
history of our so-called satisfactions. For it
is at the moment of " having " that man
is most acutely sensible of " not having."
The soul is never further from its inmost of
aspiration than when it has secured what it
LIFE'S REFUSALS. 329
ssemed to be seeking for. The moment of
fruition is the moment of disillusion. We lift
the veil and discover there is nothing behind.
Have we quenched our desire in its so-called
fulfilment ? We have multiplied it and added
to its rage. We climbed our peak, and,
instead of that being the end, it opened up
simply a vast perspective of realms beyond
our scope.
This sense of life as a calculated refusal
grows upon us with the years. It is too
evidently premeditated. The animals have
no sense of what man here experiences. It is
his peculium to have a faculty of vision and of
consequent yearning which, on every side of his
life, transcends a thousandfold what it is
possible for him to obtain. And each stage of
his career rubs this fact deeper into him. For
with his ardour, his thirst for realisation all
undiminished, he finds in his later periods doors
which before had been wide open shut, one
after another, in his face. Passing strange,
is it not, that means of enjoyment which in
youth were in fullest activity should now,
when the soul's aspirations have reached their
greatest urgency, be withering and closing up ?
The problem here has pressed on the world
330 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
through all the ages, and many are the proffered
solutions. The explanation of some is that
there is no explanationT" The early world
writer who declared that man is the plaything
of the gods is answered in our generation by a
Nietzsche, who thinks our planet a ridiculous
side-show in the stellar system, and by a
Huxley, who argues that moral sentiment is not
discernible hi the universe, but is a home
product for which our race may take consider-
able credit to itself. A Maeterlinck endorses
this verdict with his statement that justice does
not exist in the outer cosmos, but dwells alone
in the soul. But answers of this kind do not,
happily, find any permanent acceptance. If
they did they would speedily work moral
disaster. Man cannot keep the upward way
apart from the conviction that he is being
reinforced from outside. If the invisible
powers are indifferent, the world in its despair
will take the counsel of Propertius : " While
the fates permit, let us satiate our eyes with
lust, for the long night is coming, to which
there shall be no dawn."
Infinitely pathetic is it, indeed, to watch
man as, age after age, he has faced the Sphinx
and brought his answers. The Stoic reply
LIFE'S REFUSALS. 331
was not unworthy. The situation, if it offered
no ground for hope, should at least be met with
fortitude. We must meet life's refusal with
our own refusal. " It is easier," says Seneca,
4t and more tolerable not to acquire than to
lose." " Diogenes," he continues, " so acted
that nothing could be taken from him. He
kept himself outside the fortuitous. It is as
if he had said : ' Go your way, Fortune. You
have nothing to do with Diogenes ! ' ' From
the East, from Buddhism, came an even more
uncompromising answer. Desire itself is the
root-evil of humanity. The only real deliver-
ance from the burden of life lies in the extinc-
tion of it, of the whole " will to live."
Such an outlook as this is, to say the
least of it, not exhilarating. And the in-
vincible optimism that lies at the root of
healthy natures tells us that it is not true.
All the theories we have been discussing break
down at one vital point. They fail to discern
the real nature, at once of life's refusals and
of its fulfilments. A deeper view discerns
here what can only be expressed in paradox.
It discerns that fulfilments are not fulfilments,
and that refusals are not refusals. And this
because there is no finality in either. What we
332 PROBLEMS or LIVING.
call a refusal has always something behind it.
We discover by-and-by that it is a gift. Do
we imagine that when Nature takes from us
she leaves only a blank ? On the contrary ;
precisely as the so-called satisfactions are
recognised by the soul as not ultimates, so
with equal clearness does it affirm that the
disappointments are not ultimates either.
The dissatisfaction after a world-fruition and
the ache after a world-denial are practically
the same thing. They are agents towards a
farther end. Their message, to him who will
hear, is that desire, so far from being a mockery,
so far from being an evil, is of all human
prophecies the greatest. That man cannot get
his desires fulfilled, that what he has named
fulfilments are denied by the deepest in him,
is Nature's way of saying that he is launched
upon an infinite career. What he cannot find
is precisely the thing he is predestined to find.
That he drinks of every stream and thirsts
again is the surest mark of the eternal that is
in him.
It is here that Christianity fits in so perfectly
with the world-system in which we find
ourselves. It assumes that life's refusals are
part of our assets. The smart of the dis-
LIFE'S REFUSALS. 333
appointment is one of the working forces in our
destiny. The pain of the process is never an
end in itself. It is a beginning. Could we see
into what by-and-by it will transform itself we
should say, as did Madame Swetchine when
her friends prayed round her death-bed, " Do
not ask God for me one day more nor one
suffering less." This is the attitude of Christ.
He has no thought of stifling life's desires.
On the contrary, as He contemplates the cross,
they are intensified. " With desire have I
desired." He knew that what He desired He
would obtain. Life's refusal would seem to
have reached its uttermost in the thought
of Calvary, but He takes it with the triumphant
calm coming from a perfect comprehension
of its meaning. His personal suffering is lost
in the largeness of the Divine purpose. He
yields to His fate, knowing that His fate
conceals within itself the ultimate best. He
could have said, with one of His early followers,
himself a martyr, " You may kill, but you
cannot hurt us."
It is when men have caught from Christ
this inner secret that life's refusals, the hardest
and bitterest, become transformed. A conquest
greater than aught achieved by Alexander or
334 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
Napoleon has been obtained when the soul,
met by overwhelming loss or blankest dis-
appointment, questioning at that hour its
inmost self, finds there the clear-toned answer
that all is well. When St. John of the Cross
exclaims, " Whatever you find pleasant to
soul or body abandon ; whatever is painful
embrace it," we may gird at the extravagance
of the saying. But let us not in our censure
forget the marvellous richness of that life
provision which has made it possible for men
to strip themselves of every surface joy, in the
assured confidence that the void would be
straightway filled by something the soul recog-
nised as sweetest of all ! By sure experience
have they learned that
Some searching bitters are
Sweeter than sweets and more refreshing far;
Indeed, nothing in the history of humanity
has been more marvellous than the answer
which Christian souls, age after age, have made
to life's refusals. They have caught their
meaning, and with inner exultancy have applied
their lesson. These adepts have become world
conquerors. A Bernard who gives up a court
for a cell rules Europe with his counsels. Dr.
LIFE'S REFUSALS. 335
Creighton, in a striking passage, speaks of
Hildebrand " as knowing well that only that
monk will help to subjugate the world who
shuns it. . . . Renunciation of the world
in the service of a world-ruling Church such
is the amazing problem that Gregory VII.
solved for the next century and a-half."
These men had taken and used the priceless
gift which lay in the hand of refusal.
The topic is for ourselves as the " have-
nots." We are all in that category. We are
maimed somewhere. The door has been shut
against us on one side or another. To some
the " No " seems to have been so much more
emphatic than to others, and they complain
at the harshness with which it has been dashed
in their teeth. Every day we hear the cry
of the smitten. The maimed, the aged, the
bereaved, the desolate ask for comfort which
we long to give. What comfort is there ?
So far as we know there is none greater than
that derived from a steady gaze into the true
inwardness of what has happened. For the
refusals are God's promises ; and of a special
kind. The words in prophet or gospel are
everybody's, and mine only in common with
the rest. But my sorrows, my weakness, my
336 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
losses, these are the promises which belong
not to another but to me. Every one of them
is a prophecy, every one a force. They can no
more retain permanently their present shape
than can the fuel in the fire. They are evolving,
and on the line of an infinite progression which
carries me with it. If we bring to them faith,
even as of a grain of mustard seed, we shall
assuredly see in them all, as Stevenson puts it,
" the kindness of the scheme of things, and
the goodness of our veiled God."
XXXV.
Life's Outer Edge.
WE have not touched the wonders and mys-
teries of our life when we consider it simply
as a daily thinking and acting. Marvellous,
indeed, is that side of it, opening at every
point to deeps for which we have no sounding
lines. But what we call our strictly personal,
our immediately conscious life is only a frag-
ment of our actual selves. To catch a glimpse
of what we really stand for in the universe
we need to get away from our nature's centre
and observe the prospect that opens from its
outer edge. A familiar illustration will make
our meaning plainer. We see the sun in the
heavens as a definitely outlined orb, occupying
always the same amount of space, a body of
given weight and diameter. But it would be
a curious mistake to regard the sun as ending
really with these outlines of it. Science shows
us that, leaping beyond the great disc, are
masses of incandescent gas that flame out for
837 22
338 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
tens of thousands of miles into the surrounding
space. But that is only the beginning. For
the whole planetary system is really the sun.
These whirling orbs are born of it, receive their
motion from its initial energy, and live by
the light and heat which it pours upon them.
Now, our personality, in some at least of
its aspects, may be set forth in somewhat
similar terms. It consists not simply of the
well-defined orb of our actual thinking, active
life, but of innumerable, immense projections
which, flung off from our centre, and wander-
ing far afield, are, nevertheless, as potent as
the thought that is in us to-day. More, these
projections are at every moment representing
us in the general sum of things. It will be
worth while to note some points in the work
of this depersonalised activity, of this out-
reach of ourselves beyond ourselves.
Has it, for instance, ever occurred to us to
explore the mystery of our dormant relations ?
The phenomenon we know as latent heat has
a curious analogy here in our mental life
In certain natural processes, as in the passage
of matter from a solid to a fluid state, a mass
of heat seems to disappear. But no particle
of it is lost. It is simply latent, and a reversing
LIFE'S OUTER EDGE. 339
process will restore it undiminished. In like
manner there is a latent heat of conscious-
ness, a force that seemingly disappears, but
which is all the time powerfully affecting our
relations with our fellows. There are numbers
of people in the world of whom from day to day
we do not think, and who do not think of us.
And yet through every moment a power is
binding us together. A part of us lies in them,
a part of them in us. The thing that passed
between us years ago, the word spoken, the
deed done, is there in each, alive and working ;
and the fruit of this working will show itself
with rigorous exactness the next time our
paths cross. It is curious to note the steadfast
persistency of this relative life. There is an
immortality in it. My old comrade in another
corner of the world may have had no inter-
course with me for years. And yet that he
is there is a fact for me almost as much as for
himself. His work, his quality, his goodness
are all a part of my possessions. If I do
not recognise this now, I shall do when he
is gone.
But this outer rim of what we have called
our dormant relations stretches ever farther
as we gaze. It opens upwards and down-
340 PROBLEMS or LIVING.
wards, backwards and forwards in endless
perspectives. It puts, for instance, our past
in quite a new light. We are apt to think of
the bygone years as lost to us. Moralists
have for ages discoursed of the vanity of
things, because of the fateful transitoriness
that is in them. But that is largely an illusion.
The past is, though in another way, as much
alive as the present. When we are disposed
to ignore this truth, we get some rude awaken-
ings. The story of Jacob and Esau is here
a true verdict upon life. When the prosperous
supplanter, returning to Canaan with his
flocks and herds, learns that the brother whom
long before he had wronged is advancing with
four hundred men to meet him, he discovers,
as men have been doing ever since, that nothing
is so much alive, so crammed with vengeful
energy, as the evil wrought in the seeming
buried years.
And if the past is in this way alive, what
shall we say of the future ? That also do we
carry with us. All those peoples that are to
come, all the vast developments that the sun
is yet to look upon, are there, coiled and stored
in our personality. There is something posi-
tively eerie in the thought that the long defiles
LIFE'S OUTER EDGE. 341
of the unborn generations are already taking
their destiny from us. Their whole outfit of
ideas, beliefs, and inner impulses, the woof
and web of their happiness and woe, is being
woven from what we are thinking, feeling,
performing to-day. They are not here yet,
but the relation between us is begun. That
vast non-existent looms already as an ac-
tuality. What a prodigious responsibility does
this lay on us to do and be the best we know !
Our duty, to those we see, to our kinsfolk, our
fellow-citizens, is an ever-present stimulus to
an honest man. But these unseen myriads
who beckon to us out of the future touch us
with a more pathetic pleading. So helpless
are they, so utterly passive in our hands. To
the extent a man is spiritually educated will
he respond with all his nature to that un-
voiced prayer. He will strive, not only for
the present, but also for this other time that
waits. A mighty imperative is upon us all to
secure that, as the result of our being and
doing,
Sweeter shall the roses blow
In those far years, those happier years ;
And children weep when we lie lew
Far fewer tears, far softer tears.
342 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
But the dormant relations belonging to our
past and future by no means exhaust the
facts that lie upon life's outer edge. Another
class of them appear when we consider what
is actually going on in the immediate present.
Modern investigations are bringing to light
the strangest results of what may be called
our depersonalised life. Of our disengaged
part that has cut itself off from our centre and
is working on its own behalf outside we get
every now and then bewildering glimpses.
What, for instance, are we to make of a case
such as that which the scientists of Salpetriere
relate of a young unlettered peasant girl of
Brittany, who in a certain stage of hypnotism
imagined herself to be a priest of the Middle
Ages and poured out a stream of monkish
Latin ? Here one might suppose that we have
the double of a personality, thrown off centuries
ago, and wandering through the ages to settle
and express itself once more through another
mind. Or, to take another case, what hidden
power of projection is represented by that
perfectly authenticated story of a man in
London suddenly made to think of an old
comrade in New Zealand, whom he had lost
sight of there for years, enduring for hours an
LIFE'S OUTER EDGE. 343
unaccountable mental agony on account of
him, and discovering afterwards that at that
very time his friend was being tortured to
death by the Maoris ? We have at present no
satisfactory theory of these things. But what,
at least, they show us is that the life that has
left us, as well as that which beats in our pulses,
is an activity with a vast area of function,
and a seeming endlessness in its operation.
It is, indeed, precisely when we consider the
action of that part of us which has been dis-
lodged from our immediate self that we find
most deeply graven the word Immortality.
It is surely significant as to what is to happen
to our central Ego that for this outer edge of
us there seems no death.
And this brings us to another point. In
dealing with the future we have spoken of a
relation which is alive and conscious on our side
and dormant on another. The unborn, we
have seen, are the passive to our active. But
the very fact of such a tie suggests another
where the conditions are reversed. The con-
siderations already advanced reveal a uni-
verse of such illimitable spiritual potencies
that the next step is almost inevitable, to
the belief in relations where we are the passive
344 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
subjects of higher activities. It would be
contrary to the whole analogy of life to sup-
pose that our perpetual forthgiving has no
complemental process. A strangely limited
being must he be who hears throughout the
universe no echo but that of his own footsteps.
Everything points to the fact that in our turn
we are perpetually receiving ; that the pro-
jection of life does not begin with us, but high
up through all the spheres of being. The
wonderful story of the vision at Dothan,
where the prophet beholds around him pano-
plied hosts invisible to unpurged eyes, is
authentic to the soul, accordant to all its
higher knowing. What the unborn generations
are to us, deaf and dumb as yet to all we are
doing and thinking on their behalf, so are we to
intelligences that are beyond us. Prophetic
natures, whose flesh walls have worn thin,
get glimpses here and there of what is behind.
We have nothing more than a hint, but the
whole movement of the universe, so far as
disclosed to us, is behind that hint.
In this view death itself is not so much a
fact as a suggestion. To Milton's great word that
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen,
Both when we sleep and when we wake,
LIFE'S OUTER EDGE. 345
we may add Rothe's inspiring thought that
these angelic hosts are the developed human
personalities to whom death has been the
last refinement. And not the less near to us
that their activity is at present untranslatable
into aught our senses record. That we are un-
born to their sphere, as our posterity is as yet
unborn to ours, cannot, in the light of what we
know, be a bar to our faith in its reality. That
strain is too meagre in its message which sings
thus of love :
God gives us love. Something to love
He lends us ; but, when love is grown
To ripeness, that on which it throve
Falls off, and love is left alone.
No ; the love that kindled ours is not lost. It
may have become latent, but the hidden energy
is there, working in another form, waiting
the hour of retranslation and rediscovery to
its answering soul.
All this is, of course, the merest sketch.
But it is at least based upon reality, and needs
to be taken into any proper account of life.
At a time when the tendency is to belittle
humanity and the worth of existence ; a time,
too, when great physical catastrophes have
startled men into a new questioning of their
346 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
cosmic status, it is well to see, along such lines
as these, the vastness of the scale on which
our life is planned, and the sublimity of the
end toward which its story points.
XXXVI.
The Furtherance of Life.
THE earlier antagonism between Science and
Christianity is making way for a remarkable
alliance between them. The new relation is
indeed more than an alliance ; it is a fusion.
When we are told that the Gospel for the
twentieth century is to be a scientific Gospel,
we can, as believers in the message of the
New Testament, heartily endorse the state-
ment. For, when stripped of sectarian. badges
and of artificial accretions, Christianity stands
essentially as a science of life. " Learn to live,
not live to learn," says a modern French critic,
and it is Christianity which teaches us how to
apply the motto. The remarkable feature
of present-day scientific thinking is that its
main deduction, as applied to the human
position in the world, is precisely that which
Christianity has enforced from the beginning.
What Science tells us is that the whole effort
of Nature, as we see it, is directed to one point,
348 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
the furtherance of life. Incessantly is she
striving to enlarge and perfect the organs which
may better express the soul of which she is
full. Her fierce competitions, her war of species
mean that. Types and races that fail to re-
spond to her call go down and make way for
others that understand her better. And Chris-
tianity is nothing other than the application of
this law to man's higher levels. It gives us first
a statement of the life of this upper side and
an ethic for its guidance, and then opens, for
those ready for it, a stream of influence which
expands and vivifies every organ and sets
the whole nature on a movement toward new
powers.
With this double clue, both of Science and of
the New Testament, as to the proper object of
human existence, it is strange that masses
of supposedly intelligent people should make
such a blunder of the business of living. The
" smart " circles in this view, are anything but
smart. The mercenary hordes who make exist-
ence simply a rush for gold and for the things
it purchases excite one's wondering pity. The
feeling is not so much of their moral obliquity
as of their essential, hide-bound stupidity.
They are not clever enough to see the plainest
THE FURTHERANCE OF LIFE. 349
things. The individuals who imagine, and
tens of thousands do to-day, that a position
which gives them the privilege of loafing, of
limitless animal indulgence, of commanding
the services of others and of being absolved
from rendering service themselves, and the
further one of looking down with disdain upon
the largest possible number of their fellow
creatures, is of all things the position to be
desired, are hardly so much " miserable sinners "
as dolts and blockheads who need to be put to
the kindergarten department of the school of
life. When the world is a little wiser that is,
when its spiritual evolution has advanced a
further stage there will be a general smile at
this earlier folly. It will seem so strange that
people who were advanced enough to make all
kinds of experiments in chemistry and elec-
tricity, and to profit by them, should have been
incapable of reading the results of very simple
experiments on themselves. For the effects
of given lines of conduct register with the ab-
solute certainty of mathematics, and are under-
standable by anyone who is not a fool. The
results can be scientifically tabulated. Cha-
racter products arise from given constituents as
inevitably as does water from its combining
350 PROBLEMS OP LIVING.
proportions of oxygen and hydrogen. And the
outcome of the diagnosis is to confirm at every
point the New Testament theory of life and to
exhibit the ruinous effects of its opposite.
This theory confronts the idea of ease with
that of strenuous endeavour, the pleasures of
animal appetite with those of the mental and
spiritual consciousness, the joy of being served
with that of the joy of serving, the gratifica-
tions of pride and arrogance with those arising
from reverence and humility. The list of
antitheses might be indefinably enlarged, but
these sufficiently outline the opposing positions.
The point is that whatever of these antitheses
we take up and judge according to the scientific
test of the resulting enlargement or diminution
of life, the result is the same. The Christian
ideal wins along the whole line. The godless
theory that opposes it is seen by experiment
to produce a shrinkage of the entire area of
human nature, a decay of its sensibilities, a
drying up of its life sources. Along the lines
it opens, on the contrary, there is a continual
widening of the consciousness, a growing
delicacy of perception, a new surface preparing
for hitherto unknown impulsions from the
unseen.
THE FURTHERANCE or LIFE. 351
The question of feeling is by no means the
sole element to judge by here, but it is a large
one and may be safely called in evidence.
A dissipated Roman emperor offered a great
reward to anyone who could invent for him a
new pleasure. The question was in itself a
tragedy. It was a quest after some outside
stimulant potent enough to stir once again to
some semblance of life the faded, worn-out
sensual nerve which had supplied all that this
poor crowned wretch had associated with en-
joyment. And nobody was sensible enough
or courageous enough to tell him of
locked-up powers capable of rendering the
most delicate and growing delights ! To-day
there are multitudes of reputedly well to-do
people who are no better off. One won-
ders whether it ever occurs to them to consider
the kind of bargain they are making when, for
the ever-narrowing round of their easily
exhausted delights, they shut themselves off
from the vast realm of subtle and exquisite
sensibilities which belong to the spiritual life.
Does no hint ever come of that sphere of en-
joyment where, in Augustine's words, " there
shineth into my soul what space cannot con-
tain, and there soundeth what time beareth
352 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
not away, and there exhaleth odours that the
breath disperseth not, and there tasteth what
eating diminisheth not, and there abideth
what satiety devoureth not " ? Strange taste,
to strum for ever on the bottom note of the
instrument while a whole gamut above waits
to be touched into melody !
But there are others of higher moral and
religious pretension who, to their own grievous
hurt, are not less obviously neglecting the
Christian laws of the furtherance of life. One
meets people who pray fervently but shirk
all self-denial, and fancy they can do it with
impunity. They might as well propose to
ignore gravitation. The broken spiritual law
as surely as the natural one will have its revenge.
When a man because he is wealthy gives up the
strenuous life and falls back on idleness, there
is an immediate inward impoverishment.
Middle-class citizens will often, as they call it,
" retire from business," and in so doing retire
from manhood. No man should retire into
anything that keeps him back from the full
stretch of his every faculty. We should be
fishers in the sea of infinite life possibility, with
every net spread, and every line searching its
treasure-hiding waves.
THE FURTHERANCE OF LIFE. 353
One sees, too, with commiseration the starved
and shrivelled natures that try to live by the
pagan law of receiving rather than by the
Christian law of giving. A man who is in-
cessantly served and waited upon ; who has
become accustomed to this and to nothing
else ; who places his main happiness on what is
offered to him by others, is truly in piteous
case. A millionaire he may be, but he is a
pauper essentially. Think of the abject mendi-
cancy of the proud man ! He goes starving
unless his neighbour incessantly feeds him
with homage. And the food is poison ; it
exacerbates his disease instead of affording
healthy nourishment. Contrast with this the
simple results of the New Testament law of
serving ! In obeying it a whole group of
beautiful life-forces begin to develop them-
selves. The joy here does not wait for any
outside response. It springs up in the act
itself, and is part of it. And as soon as we
serve, even if it be a dog or the most ill-
conditioned of our fellows, we begin to love.
And to love is a happiness of which no outside
happening can rob us. There are religious
people miserable in their domestic relation-
ships, and that simply because they are ignor-
23
354 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
ing plain laws. They resent the neglects, the
failure of appreciation of themselves by wife
or husband or child. Alas ! they are handling
their happiness by the wrong end and spoiling
it in the process. Let them feel first of all and
exercise to the full their privilege of giving ;
let them do their whole duty of serving to
these seeming unthankful ones. In the act
itself a new surprise of inner delight springs
up, and soon the brightness of it will be re-
flected from those on whom its radiance strikes.
That this is the way and the only way to a
really successful life is further evidenced when
we consider the developments to which it
leads. In the course of a man's career all
manner of things subsidiary existences, one
may say arise, culminate and decay within
him. His bony skeleton has reached its
maximum at twenty. His muscular system is
at its fullest power before he is thirty, and shows
a speedy decline afterwards. Intellectual force
tends to diminish with the advance in years.
The passions have their flowering time and
their decay. Certain phases of mental and
emotional interest exhaust themselves and
cede their place. And then some people tire.
Goethe speaks of an acquaintance who was
THE FURTHERANCE OF LIFE. 355
weary of seeing the green of the springtime,
and wished for a change of colour ! Marcus
Aurelius complains of the unvarying spectacle
of the world which goes on exhibiting the
same round of things, whether you live to be
twenty or a hundred. It is the easiest thing
in the world to make life a weariness. The
selfish, the indulgent and the idle are certain
of the achievement.
But along the line that working Christianity
has opened we escape these wearinesses and
these disgusts. With perfect insight did
Vinet describe Christianity as " the eternal
youth of the human race." The practice of
it gives the secret of a perpetual inner vitality.
It makes life endlessly interesting. For amid
all other decays the soul under its nurture is
ever consciously growing. The blows of cir-
cumstance are felt as furthering its life. It
infallibly accumulates wealth, for " the only
real wealth," according to the sane definition
of Ruskin, " consists in noble and happy human
beings." As the years pass and the fruits of
the discipline show themselves, the life pros-
pect becomes illimitable. There seem no
bounds either to the growth of the receptive
capacity or to the spiritual force which pulses
356 PROBLEMS OF LIVING.
in on it from the unseen. More and more does
the surface widen on which the sunbeams play.
And the last act, in which the soul accepts
death itself as part of this widening process,
is its greatest venture of faith. For it proclaims
the seeming end to be only the next step in
" the furtherance of life."
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JAMES CLARKE AtfD CO.'S
Index
of Titles
^^-
PAGE
PACK
Abbey Mill, The .
17
Christian Certitude .
7
America in the East
4
Christian Life, The . 21,
26
Ancient Musical Instrun ents .
20
Christian Life and Belief
12
Animal Gambols .
23
Christian of To-day, The
7
Animal Playtime .
23
Christian World Pulpit, The .
5
Animals in Fun-Land
23
Christianity hi Common Speech
25
Anne Killigrew .
3
Chrystabel . . .10,
17
Apocalyptical Writers The
Church and Modern Life, The
8
Messages of the
Apostles, The Messages of the
11
11
Church and the Kingdom, The
Church and the Next Genera-
21
Aspects of the Spiritual .
Asquith, The Right Hon. H. H.,
7
tion, The
Church Questions of Our Tune
16
11
M.P
7
Cinderella . . 3,
17
At the Gatoa of the Dawn .
22
City of Delight, The
4
Atonement and Progress
16
Comforts of God, The
22
Atonement in Modern Thought,
Common Life, The .
9
Th . . ' .
8
Common-sense Christianity .
18
Augustinian Revolution in
Theology
Aunt Agatha Ann
Authority & the Light Within
Awe of the New Century, The
12
26
16
25
Conquered World, The 21,
Conquering Prayer
Courage of the Coward, The .
Crucible of Experience, The .
Daughter of Fife, A . 18,
13
18
27
Baptist Handbook, The
Barrow, Henry, Separatist
15
3
Days of Old .
Debt of the Damerals, The .
6
18
Beads of Tasmer, The . 11,
18
Divine Satisfaction, The
25
Beatitudes and the Contrasts,
Do We Need a New Theology ?
22
The ....
12
Dutch in the Medway, The .
10
Between Two Loves . 11,
27
Earlier Prophets, The Messages
Bible Definition of Religion,
of the ....
11
The ....
25
Earliest Christian Hymn, The
15
Birthday of Hope, The .
Bishop and the Caterpillar, The
26
26
Early Pupils of the Spirit
Ecce Vir
17
Black Familiars, The . 4,
17 Education of a Soul, The
II
Border Shepherdess, A .
1 1 Emilia's Inheritance . .
17
Bow of Orange Ribbon, The 18,
Britain's Hope
'-7 England's Danger
20 Epistle to the Galatians, The
26
15
Brudenells of Brude, The
17
Esther Wynne . . 10,
17
Burning Questions
20
Eternal Religion, The .
9
Canonbury Holt . . .
17
Evangelical Heterodoxy
7
Cartoons of St. Mark .
5
Evolution, Life and Religion .
5
Challenge, The . . .
14 1 Evolution of Old Testament
Character through Inspiration
-1 Relinion, The
8
Chats with Women on Every-
Exposition, The Art of .
6
day Subjects .
19
Ezekiel, The Book of .
2
Children's Pace, The .
21
Faces hi the Mist .
4
Children's Paul, The .
16
Faith and Form .
1!)
Christ in Everyday Life
13
Faith and Verification .
5
Christ of the Children, The .
17
Faith of a Wayfarer, The
19
Christ or Chaos T .
6
Faith the Beginning, Self-Sur-
Christ that is To Be, The
10
render the Fulfilment, of
Christ, the Church and the
the Spiritual Life . 21,
M
Child, The .
Christ, The Private Relation-
12
Family Pravers for Morning U-e
Father Fabian
10
17
ships of ...
Christ Within, The
5
21
Fifty Years' Reminiscences of a
Free Church Musician .
13
Christ's Pathway to the Cross
18 Fireside Fairy Tales
23
CATALOGUE OF BOOKS
PACK
First Christians, The . . 9
Flower-o'-the-Corn . 3, 17
Forgotten Sheaf, The . . 20
Fortune's Favourite . .17
Fortunes of Cyril Denham, The
17, 27
" Freedom of Faith " Series,
The . . . .18
Friend Olivia ... 4
Gambia with Life, A . .10
Garrisoned Soul, The . . 22
Gloria Patri . . . .10
Glorious Company of the
Apostles, The. . .16
God's Greater Britain . .10
Golden Truths for Young Folk 23
Good New Times, The . .15
Gospel of Grace, The . . 8
Grey and Gold . . .17
Grey House at Endlestone . 17
Growing Revelation, The . 5
Harvest Gleanings . .15
Health and Home Nursing . 24
Health in the Home Life . 13
Heart of Jessy Laurie, The . 4
Heavenly Visions ... 6
Heirs of Errington, The . . 17
Helga Lloyd ... 3
Helps to Health and Beauty . 24
Higher on the Hill . . 6
His Next of Kin . . 10, 17
History of the United States, A 2
Holidays in Animal Land . 23 j
Holy Christian Empire . .27
Holy Spirit, The ... 19
House of Bondage, The . .17
House of tha Secret. The . 3
How to Become Like Christ . 21
How to Read the Bible . . i'3
Husbands and Wives . .17
Ideals for Girls . . .10
Ideals in Sunday School Teach-
ing .... 19
Immanence of Christ in Modern
Life, The . . .13
Impregnable Faith, An . . 13
Incarnation of the Lord, The 5
Infoldings and Unfoldings of
the Divine Genius . .21
Inner Mission Leaflets, The . 20
Inner Mission Pamphlets, The 16
Inspiration in Common Life . 18
Interludes in a Time of Change 7
Invisible Companion, The . 19
Inward Light, The . . 9
Israel's Law Givers, The
Messages of . . .11
Jan Vedder's Wife . 18, 27
Jealousy of God, The . . 21
PAOB
Jesus and His Teaching . . 8
Jesus and the Seekers . .12
Jesus or Christ ? . . .10
Jesus : Seven Questions . 8
Jesus, The First Things of . 7
Jesus, The Messages of, Accord-
ing to the Gospel of John 1 1
Jesus, The Messages of. Accord-
ing to tha Synoptista . 11
Joan Carisbroke . . .17
Joshua, The Book of . .3
Jowett, J. H., M.A., D.D. . 19
Judges of Jesus, The . .16
Judges, Tha Book of . .3
Kid McGhie . . 3, 17
Kingdom of the Lord Jesus,
The . . .21, 26
King George and Queen Mary 12
Kit Kennedy : Country Boy 3, 17
Lady Clarissa . . .17
Last of the MacAllisters, The
11, 18
Later Prophets, The Messages
of the . . . . 11
Leaves for Quiet Hours . .14
Let us Pray . . . .20
Letters of Christ, The . .18
LetterstoaMinisterinlSi.il . 12
Liberty and Religion . .14
Life and Letters of Alexander
Mackennal, The . . 5
Life and Teaching of Jesus,
Notes on the . . .19
Life and the Ideal ... 6
Life, Faith, and Prayer of the
Church . . .22
Life in His Name ... 7
Life's Beginnings . . .12
Lifted Veil. A . . .13
Loves of Miss Anne, The 3, 17
Lynch, Rev. T. T. : A Memoir 4
Lyrics of the Soul . . .13
Making of Heaven and Hell,
The . . .19
Manual for Free Church Minis-
ters, A . . . .19
Margaret Torrington . 17, 27
Marprelate Tracts, The . . 2
Martineau's Study of Religion
21, 2
Merry Animal Picture Book,
The . . .23
Messages of Hope ... 8
Messages of the Bible, The . 1 1
Millicent Kendrick . . 17
Ministers of the Abbey Inde-
pendent Church, The . tf
Ministry of the Modern
Church, Tha . . .13
80
JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S
PAGB
Miss Devereux, Spinster . 18
Model Prayer, The . .18
Modern Minor Prophets . 13
Modern Theories of Sin . . 7
More Tasty Dishes . . 24
Morning and Evening Cries . 16
Morning Mist, A . . .18
Morning, Noon, and Night . 24
Morningten Lecture, The . 4
Mora J ami a Vitoe . . .23
Mr. Montmorency'a Money 10, 17
My Baptism . . .16
My Beuef .... 8
My Neighbour and God . .14
New Evangel, The . .13
New Mrs. Lascelles, The .18
New Testament in Modern
Speech, The . . .14
Nineteen Hundred T . .10
Nobly Born. . . . 17
Nonconformist Church Build-
ings . . . .15
No Boom in the Inn .19
Old Pictures in Modern Frames 2 1
Old Testament Stories in 19
Modern Light . .18
Oliver Cromwell. . . 25
Oliver Westwood . . .17
Our City of God ... 9
Our Girls' Cookery . . 25
Ourselves and the Universe 9, 27
Outline Text Lessons for
Junior Classes . . 23
Overdale . . . 10, 17
Passion for Souls, The . .18
Paton, J. B., M.A., D.D. . 5
Paul and Christina . .11
Paul, The Messages of . .11
Pearl Divera of Boncador
Reef, The . . .10
Personality of Jesus, The . 11
Pilot, The . . . .14
Plain Talka . . . .22
Poems. By Mme. Guyou . 11
Poems of Mackenzie Bell, The 1 4
Poets, The Messages of the . 1 1
Polychrome Bible, The 2, 3
Popular Argument for the
Unity of Isaiah, A . .15
Popular History of the Free
Churches, A . . 4, 14
Practical Lay-Preaching and
Speaking to Men . .14
Prayer . . . .18
Preaching to the Times . .10
Price of Priestcraft, The . 22
PriJe of the Family, The . 18
Problems of Immanence . 13
Problems of Living . . 9
PAOB
Prophetical and Priestly His-
torians, The Messages of .
T'salraists, The Messages of the
Purpose of the Cross, The
Quickening of Caliban, The .
Quiet Hints to Growing
Preachers in My Study .
Race and Religion.
Reasonable View of Life, A .
Reasonableness of Jesus, The .
Reasons Why for Congrega-
tionalists
Reasons Why for Free Church-
men ....
Reform in Sunday School
Teaching
Religion and Experience
Religion and Miracle
Religion of Jesus, The .
Religion : The Quest of the
Ideal ....
Religion that will Wear, A .
Resultant Greek Testament,
The ....
Rights of Man, The
Rise of Philip Barrett, The . 4,
Robert Wreford's Daughter .
Rogers, J. Guinness
Rome from the Inside .
Rosebud Annual, The . 6,
Ruling Ideas of the Present
Age ....
Sceptre Without a Sword, The 25
School Hymns . .12,
Scourge of God, The
Sculptors of Life . .
Secret of Living, The .
Sermon Illustration, The Art of
Sharing His Sufferings .
She Loved a Sailor
Ship of the Soul, The . 21,
Ship's Engines, The
Sidelights on Religion .
Simple Cookery
Simple Things of the Christ ian
Life, The
Singlehurst Manor . 10,
. Sissie . . . .10,
! Sister to Esau, A . 11,
Small Books on Great Subjects
21,
Smith, John, the Se-Baptist,
Thomas Helwys, and the
First Baptist Church in
England . . .
Social Salvation .
Social Worship on Everlasting
Necessity . .21,
Squire of Sandal Side, The 11,
26
CATALOGUE OF BOOKS
31
St. Betha's . . 17, 27
Storehouse for Prchrs and
Teachers ... 20
Stories of Old . . .-17
Story of Congregationalism in
Surrey, The ... 8
Story of Joseph the Dreamer,
The . . . .16
Story of Penelope, The . .17
Story of the English Baptists,
The .... 9
Studies of the Soul . 9, 27
Sunday Afternoon Song Book
23, 27
Sunday Morning Talks with
Boys and Girls . .15
Sunny Memories of Australasia 20
Supreme Argument for Chris-
tianity, The ... 21
Tale of a Telephone, A . .26
Talks to Little Folks . . 25
Taste of Death and the Life of
Graoe, The . . 21, 26
Tasty Dishes . . .24
Ten Commandments, The . 16
Theology and Truth . . 5
Theophilus Trinal, Memorials of 4
Things Most Surely Believed . 13
Thornycroft Hall . . .17
Thoughts for Life's Journey . 12
Through Science to Faith . 4
Tools and the Man . . 6
Town Romance, A . .18
Transfigured Church, The . 6
Trial and Triumph . . 20
True Christ, The . . .12
Typee of Christian Life . . 21
Ungilded Gold . . 14, 20
Unique Class Chart and
Register . . .27
Universal Over-Presence, The 12
Unknown to Herself . .18
Value of the Apocrypha, The . 18
Value of the Old Testament . 16
Vida 3
Violet Vaughan . 10, 17, 27
Voice from China, A . .8
Warleigh's Trust . . .17
Wayfarer at the Cross Roads,
The . . .18
Way of Life, The . . .21
Way of Prayer, The . .19
Wayside Angels . . .24
Web of Circumstance, The . 4
Westminster Sermons . . 7
What is the Bible ? .6
Who Wrote the Bible T . .20
Why We Believe . . .14
Wideness f God's Mercy, The 1 8
Whining of Immortality, The 7
Wisdom of God and the Word
of God, The ... 6
Woman's Patience, A . .17
Women and Their Saviour . 22
Women and Their Work . 20
Words by the Wayside . . 20
Working Woman's Life, A . g
Woven of Love and Glory II, i g
Young Man's Ideal, A . .13
Young Man's Religion, A . 15
Index of Authors
PAGE TA.Q*
PAGE
Abbott, Lymau 4. 8
Benvle, Aa*r*w . 6
Burgees, W. H. .
5
A4ney, W. F. 8, 23
Betts.C. H. 12, 1$
Burgin, Isabel .
4
Aked, C. F. .0
Blake. J. M. 18, 19
Campbell, R. f. .
g
Allin, T. . 12, 21
Blonndn-BurU>n
Carlile, J. C. !)
25
Andrews, C. C. . 18
J. . . .18
Cave, Dr. .
8
Angus, A. H. . 19
Bonner, Carey . 12
Cleal, E. E. .
g
Antrara, C. K. P. . 22
Boseley, I. . . 6
Clifford, John 10.-.
1,26
Armstrong, R. A.
Bosworth, E. I. . 13
Collins, B. G.
16
21, 26
Baker, E. . .22
Bradford, Amory
H. . . 8. 9
Cowper, W.
Crockett, S. R. :!,
11
17
Barr, Amelia E.
Brierley, H. E. . 22
Cubitt, James
16
4, 11, 18, 27
Brierley, J. 6,7,8,9, 27
Cuff, W. .
20
Barrett, O. S. . 15
Briggs, C. A. . 6
Darlow, F. H. .
20
Barrows, C. H. . 11
Brooke, Stopford
Davidson, Ghi.lv*
23
Becke, Louis . 10
A. . . 21, 26
Dods, MarciiH a.
21
Bell, Mackenzie . 14
Brown, C. . , 18, 20 Klias, F.
7
Bennett, W. H. . 3 Burford, W. K. . 24 Ellis, J . !iO,
23
32
JAMES CLARKE AND CO.'S CATALOGUE
PAGE ! PAGE
PAGS
Evans, H. . .22
Kenyon, Edith C. Iff
Bold, J. . .7
Farningham, Mari-
Kirk, E. B. .5
Rickett, Sir J.
anne, 8, 10, 13.
Knight, W. A. . 19
Compton . 10, i'5
15, 20, 22
Lansfddt. L. .18
Riddette, J. H. . 27
Farrar, Dean . 8
La Toucho, E. D. 7
Robarts, F. H. . 15
FhJayson, T. Camp-
Layman, A. . 22
Roberts, R. .16
bell . . 26
Lee>, E. . . 3
Rogers, J. Guin-
Fiske, J. . .2
Lee, W. T. . . 14
ness . . 2
Forsytn, P. T.
8, 21, 26, 27
Leggatt, F. Y. . 19
Lewi*, E. W. . 19
Russell, F. A. .18
Sabatier, A. . 8
Foston, H. . .12
Freraantle, Dean . 8
Llewellyn, D. J. . 20
Lyall, David 4. 15
Sanders, F. K. . 11
Schrenck, E. von 8
Furnesi, H. H. . 2
Lynch, T. T. . 4
Scottish Presbyte-
Garrie, A. E. .12
Lynd, William . 20
rian, A . .24
Gibbon, J. Morgan
Macfadyen, D. 5, 11
Shakespeare. J. H. 19
7, 15
McFadyen, J. E. 19
Shepherd, J. A. . 23
Giborne, Agnes . 18
Gladden, Washington
Macfarlane.Charles 10
M'Intyre.D. M. . 7
Sinclair, Archdea-
con . 21, 26
6, 8, 20, 21
Mackennal, Alex-
Smyth, Newman . 4
Glover, R. . .22
ander . 21, 26
Snell, Bernard J.
Godet, Professor . 8
Gordon, George A. 7
Manners, Mary E. 26
Man of the World, A 12
8, 16, 18
Steuart, J. A. . 4
Gould, G. P. . 19
Marchant Bessie 18
Stevenson, J. G.
Greenhough, J. G.
Marchant, J. . 5
13, 14, 16, 17
15, 21
Marshall, N. H.
Stewart, D. M. 13, 22
Griffis, W. E. . 4
Griffith -Jones, E.5, 21
5, 12, 16
Martineau, Jas. 21, 26
Stuart Duncan . 3
Sntter, Julie . 20
Grubb, E. 16. 19
Mason, E. A. . 26
Swan, F. R. . 13
Gunn.E. H.M. 12, 27
Mather, Lessels . 24
Swetenham, L. .13
Guyon, Madame . 1 1
Matheson, George
Tarboltbn, A. C.. 16
Harnack, Professor 8
8, 12, 14, 20, 25
Thomas, H. Arnold 21
Harvey-Jellie, W. 6
Maver, J. S. .21
Tipple, S. A. .6
Haupt, P. . .2
Meade, L. T. .18
Toy, 0. H, . . 2
Haweis, H. R. . 16
Metcalfe, R. D. . 23
Tymms, T. V. 5
Heddle, Ethel F. 18
Meyer, F. B. 18, 22
Tynan, Katharine 3
Henson, Canon H.
Michael, C. D. . 17
Tytler, S. . .18
Hensley . 7, 10
Miller, Elizabeth . 4
Varloy, H. . .19
Hill, F. A. . . 2
Minshall, E. .13
Veitch, R. . 7, 9
Hocking, S. K. . 10
Moore, G. F. . S
Wain, Louis 23, 26
Hodgson, J. M. . 12
Morgan, Q. Camp-
Walford, L. B. 4, 17
Herder, W. Garrett 21
bell . 15, 18
Walker, W. L. . 12
Home, C. Silvester
Morison, F. .19
Warschauer. J.
4, 8, 13, 14. 18, 20
! Morten, Honnor . 13 j 6, 8, 13, 19
Horton, R. F. 5.
Mountain, J. . 16 Warwick, H. . 12
8, 19, 21, 24, 25, 26
i Mnngor, T. T. 8, 21 Waters. N. MoO. 16
Hunter, John . 8
j Neilson, H. B. . 23
Watkinson, W. L. 18
" J. B." of The
Orchard, W. E. 7, 8
Watson. E. S. 6
Christian World 25
Palmer, Frederic. 7 Wateon, W. 13, 18
J. M. G. . .10
! Paton, J. B. Weymouth, R. F.
Jefferson, C. E. . 11
11, 16, 20, 22
14. 15
Jeffs, H. 6,7,13, 14 15
i Peake, A. S. . 20 j White, W. . ."4
John, Griffith . 8
Pharmaceutical i Whiton, J. M.
Jones, J. D. 8, 13,
Chemist, A 24
7, 10, 17, 25
16, 18, 20, 22, 26
Picton, J. Allanson 17
Williams, T.R. 18, 21
Jowett.J. H. , 18, 19
Pierce, W. . .2
Wilson, P. W. . 14
Kennedy, H. A. 23, 27
Powicke, F. J. . 3
Worboiae, Emma
Kennedy, John . 15
Pringle, A. 18, 19
J. 10, 17, 27
Kent, C. F. .11
Pulsford, John . 21
Yatea, T. . .13
W. S?ai0M * ftmc. Prmtirt, FttUr Lam, <m<i*n, Jf.C.
32 JAMES CLAB
PAGE |
Evans, H. . .22
Faroingham, Mari-
anne 8, 10, 13,
15, 20,
Farrar, Dean
Fmlayson, T. Camp-
bell . . 26 j
Fiake, J. . . 2\ T
Forayth, P. T.
8, 21, 26, 27 J
Foston, H. . . .Ill 1
Freraantle, DCATI . 8 ' 1
Fumess, H. H. . 2 j J
Ganrfc, A. E. .121
Gibbon, J. Morgan
7, 15 ! ;
Qibwne, Agnes . 181
Gladden, Washington
6, 8, 20,
21
Glover, R. .
22^
Godet, Professor .
Gordon, George A.
Gould, G. P. .
Qreenhough, J. G.
3 ,
19
15,
21
Grlffis, W. E. .
4
Griffith -Jones, E.5,
21
Grubb, E. 16.
19
Gunn.E. H. M. 12,
27
Guyon, Madame .
H
Harnack, Professor
8
Harvey-Jellie, W.
6
Haupt, P. .
2
Haweis, H. R. .
16
Heddle, Ethel F.
18
Henson, Canon H.
Hensley . 7,
10
Hill, F. A. .
2
Hocking, S. K. .
10
Hodgson, J. M. .
12
Herder, W. Garrett
21
Home, C. Silvester
4, 8, 13, 14, 18,
20
Horton, R. F. 5,
8, 19, 21, 24, 25,
26
Hunter, John
8
" J. B." of The
Christian World
25
J. M. G. .
10
Jefferson, C. E. .
11
Jeffs, H. 6,7,13, 14
15
John, Griffith .
8
Jones, J. D. 8, 13,
16, 18, 20, 22, 26 i
Jowett, J.H. , 18, 19' 1
Kennedy, H. A. 23, 27 I
Kennedy, John . 15 I
Kent, C. F. . Ill -I
W.
A 000022605
