Religion in history and in modern life; together with an essay on the church and the working classes

BR 121 .

F25

Fairbairn, A

. M.

1838-

■1912.

Religion in history and

in

modern

life

Religion in History

AND IN

MODERN LIFE

TOGETHER WITH AN ESSAY ON THE CHURCH
AND THE WORKING CLASSES

BY

:*i. M, FAIRBAIRN. D.II

PRINCIPAL OF MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD

NEW YORK

THOMAS WHITTAKER
2 AND 3 Bible House

''Quench not the Spirit; despise not prophesyings ; prove
all things ; hold fast that which is good ; abstain from every
form of evil.

''And the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly ; and
may your spirit and soul and body be preserved enure, without
blame, at the coming of our Lord Jesm Christ.^' — 1 Thess. v.
19-23.

RELIGION IN HISTORY

AND IN

MODERN LIFE

** Nevertheless it is open to seriOTis question, which Heave to
the reade?'^s jjondering, lohether, among national manufac-
tures, that of souls of a good quality may not at last turn out a
quite leadingly lucrative one ? Nay, in some far-away and yet
undreamt-of hour, I can even imagine that England may cast
all thoughts of possessing wealth back to the barbaric nations
among whonn they first arose ; and that, while the sands of the
Indus and adamant of Oolconda my yet stiffen the housings of
the charger, and flash from the turban of the slave, she, as a
Christian motJier, may at last attain to the virtues and the
treasures of a heathen one, and be able to lead forth her sons,
saying: ^ These are my jewels.''^'' — Ruskin, "Unto this
Last," ii.

" The people are the most important element [in a country} ;
the spirits of the land and grain are the next ; the ruler is the
lightest.

" Therefore, to gam the peasantry is the way to become the
son of Heaven ; to gain the son of Heaven is the way to become
the prince of a state ; to gain the prince of a state is the way
to become a great officer,'' — "Mencius," Book vii., Part ii.,
Chapter xiv.

" It was the lesson of our great ancestor: —
The people should be cherished,
And not looked down upon.
The people are the root of a country;
The root firm, the country is tranquil.

Should dissatisfaction be waited for till it appears ?
Before it is seen, it should be guarded against.
In my dealings with the millions of the people,
I should feel as much anxiety as if I were driving
six horses with rotten reiyis.'"'

The Shu King, Part i., Book iii.

" Nothing is more becoming to him who governs than to de-
spise no man and not show arrogance, but to preside over all
with equal care."— Epictetus, "Encheiridion," cxxxii.

PREFACE.

This little book is republished in response to much
friendly pressure which has come from many sides.
While it has been revised throughout, and in certain
places expanded, yet expansion has not been found
possible where it was most needed — in the conclud-
ing lecture. But this is the less regretted as the
book is not an essay in what it is the fashion to call
Christian Economics, but rather a discussion as to
the nature and action of the Christian Religion as
it has revealed and fulfilled itself in history. Ab-
stract economics, even though deduced from the
Sermon on the Mount, are more likely to be ingenious
than either relevant to the original or practicable
in the present, ideals that do not so much produce
realities as become apologies for their absence. A
man who is a good exegete but an inexperienced
economist, is no more able to apply the New Testa-
ment to our social and industrial problems, than
the man who is an expert economist but a stranger
to the New Testament. To make knowledge of the
one subject a reason for attempting to write on both,
is simply to show how foolish a reasonable man may
be, for it is nowhere so hard to think truly and speak

vi Religion in History,

wisely as in the application of simple maxims to
complex problems. This, of course, does not mean
either that the ethics of Christ ought not, or that
they cannot be applied to modern economics; on the
contrary, the whole argument of the book is gov-
erned by the conviction that they ought to be so
applied, and that the whole past life of the Christian
Religion has been a series of efforts to embody itself
in a higher social and economical order. From
these efforts the religion cannot desist, and against
the hindrances to them it must for evermore contend.
But then in order to the success of this contention
the churches must see clearly that they may strike
boldly; to hit blindly is only to inflict damage all
round.

Now, the author is not a student of economics —
in this region he feels rather than sees, but he is a
student of the history of religion, and he feels more
able to define the duty and function of religion in
the present when he comes to it through the experi-
ence of the past. And this is all he really professes to
do, but even so, this is no little or insignificant thing
to attempt. In studying the history and the action of
Christian ideas, we move in the region of the actual,
and learn through what the religion has done, what
it is capable of doing, what it has failed to do, why
it has failed to do it, and what it ought now to set
itself to accomplish. The historical thus becomes
a most practical discussion, and forms a necessary
and sobering introduction to every attempt to deal
either critically or constructively with the economic
functions of the Christian religion. But the author

Preface. vii

has no wish to escape, under the disguise of an histori-
cal discussion, the grave responsibility which lies
upon every Christian teacher to apply his religion
to the present. His sense of this responsibility,
within the limits defined by the origin and purpose
of the lectures, is partially expressed in the essay on
''The Church and the Working Classes." Without
this recognition of duty he could not have allowed
this book to go forth in a new edition.

Perhaps it may be as wefl to recall the original
purpose of the Lectures which form the body of the
book. The author was then resident in the neigh-
bourhood of Bradford, and he volunteered to address
the working men of the town on ' ' Religion in His-
tory, " expressly through the press inviting them to
attend. His purpose was thus stated in the Preface
to the First Edition: —

' ' The reasons which induced me to take so un-
usual a step had a twofold source; first, the strong
conviction of what Religion is, and what it ought to
do; and, secondly, the feeling that it is the duty of
the special student to become, as far as possible, a
teacher of the people, especially in matters where
the peopfe so much need instruction, and where
instruction is so necessary to their highest good.
Our hard-worked ministers and clergy have quite
enough to do without attempting labour of this
kind; yet it is labour that ought to be done. The
ordinary pulpit leaves many questions undiscussed,
and the ordinary congregation does not desire or
require their discussion; yet they are questions

viii Religion in History,

everywhere anxiously debated by earnest and most
excellent men. It is easy, through the press, to
reach the cultivated and leisured classes; it is not
so easy, indeed to many it is quite impossible, to
reach the industrial classes through it. Yet these
latter are often the more susceptible, with natures
more open to conviction, more fully convinced, if
convinced at all. Some things that had recently
happened within my own experience, made me very
vividly aware of the peculiar forms our religious
problems and difficulties assume among our working
men, and this discovery led to the feeling of obliga-
tion that resulted in the delivery of these Lectures.
I felt bound, as a student and teacher of the Chris-
tian religion, to speak to my fellow townsmen, es-
pecially those of the industrial classes, concerning
questions they were discussing and honestly trying
to understand.

''The Lectures were determined alike as to mat-
ter and form by their purpose. They are not apolo-
getic in the customary sense, but I hope they are
something better, because more relevant to the act-
ual state of mind of the persons addressed. It will
be but just if they are judged according to their real
intention and scope, and in no respect as a polemi-
cal and controversial endeavour."

December 10, 1893.

" The King said to his people : ' The good in you I will not
dare to keep co7icealed ; and for the evil in me I will not dare
to forgive myself. I will examine these things in harmony
with the mind of God. When guilt is found anywhere in you
who occupy the myriad regions, let it rest on me, the O^ie Tnan.
When guilt is found in me, the One Tnan, it shall not attach to
you who occupy the myriad regions.' " — " The Shu King," Part
iv., Book iii., Part 3.

" Heaven loves the people, and the sovereign should reverently
carry out (this mind of) Heaven.'' — lb., Part v., Book i., § 2.

** The ancients have said, * He who soothes us is our sov-
ereign; he who oppresses us is our enemy. " — lb., Part v.,
Book i., § 3.

" A state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the
sake of life only : if life only were the object, slaves and brute
animals might form a state ; but they cannot, for they have oio
share in happiness or in a life of free choice. . . . Whefice
it may be further inferred that virtue must be the serious care
of a state which truly deserves the name : for (without this
ethical end) the coimnunity becomes a mere alliance which dif-
fers only in place from alliances of which the members live
apart; and law is only a convention, ' a surety to one another
of justice,' as the sophist Lycophron says, and has no real
power to make the citizens good and just.'" — Aristotle, "Poli-
tics," Book L, § 9.

'•Ji{ has been well said that '■he who has never learned to
obey cannot be a good commander.' The two are not the same,
but the good citizen ought to be capable of both ; he should
know how to govern like a freeman, and how to obey like a
freeman — tJiese are the virtues of a citizen." — lb., Book iii., § 4.

'* Two principles are characteristic of democracy, the gov-
ernment of the majority and freedom. Men think that what is
just is equal ; and that equality is the supremacy of thej)opidar
will; and that freedom and equality mean the doing what a
man likes, hi such democracies every one lives as he pleases,
or in the words of Euripides, 'according to his fancy.' But
this is all wrong ; men should not think it slavery to live ac-
cording to the rule of the constitution ; for it is their salvation."
lb., Book v., § 9.

"Neither is a horse elated nor proud of his manger and
trappings and coverings, nor a bird of his little shreds of
cloth or of his nest : but both of them are proud of their swift-
ness ; one proud of the swiftness of the feet, and"^ the other of
the wings. Do you also, then, not be greatly proud of your
food and dress, a?id, in short, of any external things, but be
proud of your integrity and good deeds (£i);roira)."— Epictetus,
'* Encheiridion," xxvi.

CONTENTS.

THE CHURCH AND THE WORKING CLASSES.

PAGE

1. Its Changed Attitude to the Working Classes —

The Religious Causes of this Change and its Forms 1
Its Effects on Different Classes of Society . . 3
The New and Practical Interest in Labour Ques-
tions 6

2. The Attitude of the Men to the Churches —

Less Change in their Attitude .... 10
The Alienation from the Churches ... 11

3. Causes, Apparent and Real, of Alienation —

Distrust of the Churches rather than Disbelief at

Work 15

The Loss of Adaptation by the Church to its Envir-
onment 18

4. Influence op the Political Development —

The Organic Relation of Political and Religious

Thought 22

The Conflict of the New Ideas and the Old Order

in the French Revolution .... 25

The New Ideas and the English Churches . .26

The Church to-day must be as the State is . .29

5. Influence of Society and the Social Spirit —

Divisive Social Tendencies 31

Their Action within the Churches, how to be

checked ^3

6. Influence of the Industrial Development —

Its Hostility to the Cultivation of the Religious

Spirit 37

The Remedies and the Counteragencies required . 39

xii Contents.

PAGE

7. Influence of the Intellectual Movement —

The Literature and Educative Forces of Modern

Life 42

Religious Education as it is and as it ought to be 46

8. The Conciliation of the Alienated —

The Church to be faithful to its Mission . . 49
Its Influence on the Mind, the Life, and the Home 54

9. Urgency of the Need —

The Modern Democracy : our Last Reserves . 68
The Rulers must be ruled 61

LECTURE I.

What is Religion?

Clearness in our Idea of it necessary ... 65

1. The Relation of the Churches to it . . .67

2. It is universal and natural to Man . . .71

3. Philosophical Explanations 77

4. Its Highest Conception determines its Character 80
By it the Ends of God realized through Man . 87

LECTURE II.

The Place and Sicnificance of the Old
Testament in ReliCtIon.

Restatement of Temper and Principles of Inquiry 92

1. The Scientific Method of Study .... 95
Popular Difficulties concerning the Bible . . 99

2. The Old Testament the History of a Religion . 104
The Name and Character of God .... 107
The Hebrew People and its Faith . . . .111

Contents. xiii

PAGE

3. The Regulative and Organizing Power of a Great

Conception ....
The Mosaic Ideal of Religion

4. Its Notion of Man as moral
And of the State as the same

6. The Law in Other Relations .

The Spiritual and Moral Wealth of the Old
Testament ....

LECTURE III.

114
117
119
121
123

127

The Place and Significance of the New
Testament in Religion.

1. The Old Testament the Primary Source of our

Moral Ideals in Religion 132

The New Testament inherits and universalizes

these 136

2. Christ and the Traditional Ideals of His Day . 138

His Own Ideal 141

The Kingdom of God, its Embodiment . . . 142

3. The Christian Ideas of God and of Man . . 145
These Ideas, how related in Christianity and in

OTHER Religions 151

4. The Unity of Mankind in the City of God . . 154
Christianity a Religion of Redemption . . 159

5. Christ's Influence on Personalities . . .163
The Redeemer and Leader of Progress . .166

LECTURE lY.

The Christian Religion in the First Fifteen
Centuries of its Existence.

The Scope and Purpose of the Lecture . .169

1. The Distinctive Notes of Early Christianity . 173

2. The Influence of certain old Pagan and Judaic

Ideas 183

XIV Contents.

PAGE

3. The Effect of Christian Ideas on the Industrial and

Social System of Ancient Rome . . .187

4. The Action of the Christian Faith on the Life of Man 193

LECTURE y.

The Christian Religion in Modern Europe.

The Energy and the Pain of Modern Life . .199

1. The Power OF THE Churches and the Strength OF Faith 201

2. The Renaissance and the Reformation . . .205

3. The Influence of Calvin 209

4. Liberty, Political and Religious, whence sprung . 213
Its Source in the Religion of Christ . . .218

Equality 224

Fraternity 225

The Amelioratiye Forces of Modern Society . . 226

LECTURE YI.

The Christian Religion in Modern Life.

The Province of Religion 229

1. Ultimate Ideas and THE Organization OF Societies . 231
The Evolution of the Modern Christian Ideal of

Humanity 234

2. Various Ancient and Modern Ideals compared here-

with 236

The Architectonic Power of the Christian Religion 243

3. Its Application in Various Departments of Life . 245
The Ideal of Christ our Hope for the Future , ,260

'^Behold my servant, luhom I uphold; my chosen^ in whom
my soul delighteth : I have put my spirit upon him ; he shall
bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. Be shall not cry, nor
lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised
reed shall he not break, and the smokiyig flax shall he not
quench : he shall bring forth judgment in truth. He shall not
fail norjbe discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth ;
and the isles shall wait for his law." — ]^aiah xlii. 1-4.

*'And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up :
and he entered, as his custom was, into the synagogue on the sab-
bath day, and stood up to read. And there was delivered unto
him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And he opened the book,
and found the place where it was written,

* The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the

poor :
He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives.
And recovering of sight to the blind.
To set at liberty them that are bruised,
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.'' "

St. Luke iv. 16-19.

** For when the ear heard me, then it blessed me :
And when the eye saw me, it gave witness unto me :
Because I delivered the poor that cried.
The fatherless also, that had none to help him.
The blessing of him that was ready to perish came

upon me :
And I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy.
I put on righteousness, and it clothed me :
My justice was as a robe and a diadem,
I was eyes to the blind.
And feet was I to the lame.
I was a father to the needy :
And the cause of him that I knew not I searched out.'*

Job xxix. 11-16.

*• Render to no man evil for evil. Take thought for things
honourable in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much
as in you lieth, be at peace with all wew."— Romans xii. 17, 18.

THE CHURCH AND THE
WORKING CLASSES

" The Working Classes cannot any longer go on without gov-
ernment; without being SiCtually guided a7id govet'ned; England
cannot subsist in peace till, by some means or other, some
guidance and government for them is found.'' — Carlyle,
♦'Chartism," Chapter vi.

" There is not a hamlet where ijoor peasants congregate,
but, by one means and another, a Church- Apparatus has been
got together, — roofed edifice, with reveiiues and belfries; pul-
pit, reading-desk, with Books and Methods: 2^ossibility, in
short, and strict prescription. That a man stand there and
speak of spiritual things to men. It is beautiful ; — even in its
great obscuration and decadence, it is among the beautifulest,
most touching objects one sees on the Earth. This Sjjeaking Man
has indeed, in these times, wandered terribly from the point ;
has, alas, as it were, totally lost sight of the point : yet, at bot-
tom, whom have we to compare with him ? Of all public func-
tionaries boarded and lodged on the Industry of Modern
Europe, is there one worthier of the board he has ? A man
even professing, and never so languidly making still some
endeavour, to save the souls of me7i: contrast him with a man
professing to do little but shoot the partridges of men I I wish
he could find the point again, this Speaking One; and stick to
it with tenacity, with deadly energy; for there is need of him
yet! The Speaking Function, this of Truth coming to us u'ith
a living voice, nay in a living shape, and as a concrete prac-
tical exemplar: this, with all our Writing and Printing Func-
tions, has a perennial place. Coidd he but find the point
again, — take the old spectacles off his nose, and looking up
discover, almost in contact with him, n-ihat the real Satanas
and soul-devouring, world-devouring Devil, no^o is ! Original
Sin and suchlike are bad enoughs I doubt not : but distilled Gin.
dark Ignorance, Stupidity, dark Corn-Law, Bastille and Com-
pany, what are they ! Will he discover our neio real Satan,
whom he has to fight ; or go on droning through his old nose-
S2)ectacles about old extinct Satans; and never see the real
one, till he feel him at his own throat and ours ? That is a
question, for the world I " — Carlyle, "Past and Present," Book
iv., Chapter i.

RELIGION IN HISTORY AND IN
MODERN LIFE.

CHAPTER I.

THE CHURCH AND THE WORKING CLASSES.

It is now almost ten years since these Lectures
were delivered, and this period is remarkable lor
the growth in all religious societies of a new feeling
for our workmen, and of responsibility in connexion
with their special problems.

1. The causes and forms of this latest and most
hopeful outgrowth of the Christian conscience are
many and most varied. The generous and trustful
humanity of the older Christian Socialists — Maurice,
Kingsley, and Hughes — fired the enthusiasm of their
disciples, and led them, now as teachers and now as
co-operators, through personal intercourse to such a
knowledge of working men, their character, their
capacity, their aims and claims, as awakened a new
.sense of affinity with their manhood, and sympathy

2 Religion in History.

with their efforts after amelioration. The extension
of primary and the reform of secondary education
made the more open-minded men of the older uni-
versities, see the intellectual promise and abilities of
those who had hitherto been excluded from the
higher culture. The finely blended speculative and
practical genius of T. H. Green became a passion
for the realization of the ideals of freedom and justice
in all the grades of our social and in all the forms of
our national life, and his personal influence imparted
his passion to several generations of university men,
who later expressed it in their own ways, now in
economics, now in politics, and now in the church.
The study of the industrial revolution in the spirit
and through the philosophy of Green made Arnold
Toynbee feel that the man who tended the machine
must no longer be sacrificed to the machine he
tended, but be made, even by the craft he followed,
better as a man and more efficient as a citizen. The
teachings of Carlyle distilled through Ruskin, and
woven by him into the theories of art and the criti-
cisms of life that were his message to the age,
inspired with a will for service many who would
otherwise have wasted their sensitive enthusiasm in
admiration of dubious art. The Anglican revival,
like the older evangelical, became in many of its
sons a love of souls, and certain both of its priests
and laymen made the East End of London the scene
of as unselfish labours and as consecrated lives as
the most heroic ages of the Church have known.

The result of these and similar causes is the
varied movements, outwardly so different, which have

The Church and the Working Classes. 3

had as their common end help of the working classes,
especially those whose lot is hardest and least hope-
ful. Hence have come Toynbee Hall with its sane
and sagacious belief in the value of art for the
squalid East End, and its brave endeavour to educate
the universities by means of Whitechapel, and to
save Whitechapel by the culture and service of the
universities; Oxford House, with its intense con-
viction of the mission of the Church to the masses,
though of a mission that the ordinary ecclesiastical
agencies and methods are quite unable to fulfil;
Mansfield House, w^ith its strong, practical spirit,
seeking to improve the houses, the amusements, the
minds, the relationships, and the lives of the workers
in the farther East End; the Wesleyan settlement at
Bermondsey, with its noble religious zeal and broad
philanthropy attempting at once to heal the bodies
and save the souls of those it can reach; University
Hall, with its intellectual energy and its belief in
knowledge as a saving and civilizing power; and
besides these a multitude of houses and missions in-
dependently and separately maintained by colleges
and public schools.

But the first broad and most apparent result of
these varied institutions is this, they have affected
much more profoundly those who have conducted
them than those for w^hose sakes they are being con-
ducted. Men who, left to the ordinary tendencies of
nurture and culture, would have seen things only
through the eyes of the propertied and leisured
classes, have come or are coming to study them
through the eyes of those who eat their bread in the

4 Religion in History.

sweat of their brow, often finding but little bread for
all their sweat and toil. And it has been found
surely enough that the same things look wonderfully
different when seen from those two opposite points
of view. For largely out of these settlements, and
the influences by which they have persuaded cultured
minds to occupy, sympathetically, the standpoint of
the labourer, there has come both an academic and a
religious socialism, which is powerfully modifying
political, economical, and ecclesiastical doctrine, and
which promises to affect the teaching and practice
of the churches as radically as it is affecting the
spirit and the scope of our civil legislation. We are
witnessing a process of conversion, but it is of the
missionaries at the unconscious hands of those they
were sent out to convert; and this is a process which
may have the most momentous results for the future
of society and religion in England.

2. But correspondent to the new feeling which
these causes have been contributing to produce in the
churches, is the birth of a new spirit in the lower
labour. It is possessed of a hopefulness which may
be described as the child of a new sense, — on the one
side, of internal competence or capability, and on
the other, of the sympathy which comes from being
better understood. In other words, it does not feel
so much in bondage to its own infirmities, or so
much an outcast from the community of freedom and
progress and hope. This has been illustrated by
those recent events in our economic history, which
showed, first, the ability of the classes that live by
what is termed unskilled labour to conceive methods

The Church and the Working Classes. 5

and to use means for their own amelioration, and
even to combine in support of them; and secondly,
the willingness of classes once hostile or indifferent
to assume a kindlier and more intelligent attitude
to the disputes of labour, and even the tendency to
regard its questions as the concern not simply of
economics, but of social ethics. This spirit of sym-
pathy from without labour which has so cheered the
upward impulse from within it, stands in notable
contrast to the jealous and fretful criticism wiiich
hindered and harassed the earliest attempts of the
skilled workmen at combination. Both of these are
hopeful elements, for the men who can design a pol-
icy of social and industrial improvement and unite
in its support, have become something more and bet-
ter than day labourers; while the society that looks at
an industrial question through living persons and in
its effects upon them, and not simply through the
abstract ideas of capital and labour, production and
distribution, has translated the problem as to wealth
into one as to well-being. The laws of political
economy may be regarded in the one case, as in the
other, as expressing actual processes or relations
between co-ordinated phenomena, but they will be
supplemented in the one case, as they would not be
in the other, by the attempt to discover those coun-
tervailing forces, or to create those modifying con-
ditions, that shall change their morally indifferent or
sectionally injurious action into one socially and col-
lectively beneficent. For economics may show the
need of change, and the alternative lines along which
it may move; but it is the function of the social con-

6 Religion in History.

science to say which line the common good makes
the more imperative. Thus economics may tell that
either rent, or interest, or wages, must rise or fall,
but it belongs to ethics to say which of these has
the prior right to consideration in the adjustment
of the upward or downward scale.

We may, then, venture to affirm that the ethical
is the strongest and most significant tendency in
social and political thought. And so men are com-
ing to see more clearly that, for moral rather than
economical reasons, questions between classes are
never merely class questions, and that what depresses
the standard of living in any one class lowers the
level and worth of life throughout the community as
a whole. And this idea is so penetrating the com-
munity that we see it daily becoming more distinctly
conscious that it is as responsible for safeguarding
the skill which is the sole property of the artisan,
and, as far as possible, securing his happiness also,
as for protecting his employer in the use and enjoy-
ment of his capital. And this is a point which the
industrial struggle through which we are even now
passing with so much pain and shame, is only the
more defining and emphasizing. In no previous
economic struggle has the sense of justice within the
community been so widely and deeply touched, or so
vigorously expressed. The feeling has grown that
both masters and men have a responsibility to the
community as well as to each other, and that the
community has such a responsibility to both as will
not allow it to stand as an idle or uninterested
«iV^ctator of the disastrous strife. The awakening

The Church and the Working Classes. t

sense of justice means that legislation embodying it
will most surely follow, and this legislation will seek
to deal justly with both classes — with the demand
of the men for a living wage, and of the masters for
guarded property and fair profits, — and will attempt
to secure that each class shall deal justly by the
other, and both by the community as a whole. It
seems, then, as if we were tending towards a state
where we shall have greater unity of feeling and
solidarity of ethical interests; and where these are,
there will be more of the pressure of the community
upon the class than of the dominion of the class over
the community, though, it must be confessed, this is
a state where wisdom and justice are demanded as
they were never demanded or needed before.

3. Now, the most efficient factors of this change
have been many, labour itself being the most efficient
factor of all. Our workmen are no longer dumb;
we cannot now speak of them with Carlyle as the
inarticulate multitude. They have a mind of their
own and a most potent voice, while they have been
represented by many convinced and persuasive
spokesmen. The economics of the school and the
study do not now reign in undisputed supremacy;
they are confronted and challenged by the economics
of the workshop and the trades-union. And while
we may here leave thesis and antithesis to qualify
each other, we must confess that not only has the
workman's experience forced the student to modify
his doctrines, but his arguments have also conquered
many of the prejudices and modified the mind of our
English public, which, though often unreasonable and

8 Religion in History.

hard to convince, is invariably, when convinced, a
mind both honest and just. Yet while the workmen
themselves have been the most efficient factors of this
changed attitude to their questions, we may say that
those who have given the most remarkable and em-
phatic expression to the change have been churchmen,
princes of the Roman, bishops of the Anglican, pas-
tors of the Nonconformist communions. It is not said
or meant that these were the men who formulated the
principles or inaugurated the movements that effected
the change, — this, we have just said, the workmen
were and the churchmen certainly were not; but they
expressed it, gave the sort of social sanction that made
society aware of the process that was going forward,
of the new feelings towards labour, its state and
claims, that were rising within it. The really signifi-
cant thing is that Roman priests, English bishops,
and dissenting ministers have so tried to intervene, or
have so succeeded in intervening, as arbiters between
masters and workmen as to express the idea that
conflicts between capital and labour concern as well
the whole community, and especially the religious
societies within it, as the immediate parties to the
quarrel. They represent the pressure of the more
reasonable social mind, or the more sensitive con-
science, upon the belligerents. This is the most ob-
vious moral to be drawn from the negotiations, wheth-
er successful or abortive, in connection with the strikes
of the dockers in London, the shoemakers at North-
ampton, the miners in Durham, and with the locked-
out at Hull. These events have not, indeed, the
intrinsic significance of the fact we noticed above,

TJie Church and the Working Glasses 9

the action of the working men on the strong and sen-
sitive minds that have chosen to work for or live
among them. Those events are significant as ex-
pressing common tendencies and achieved results,
but this action as denoting nascent yet potent causes.
The meaning of the former can in a manner be already
measured, the latter is only a little bit of leaven just
begun to act within the lamp.

CHAPTER II.

THE ATTITUDE OF THE MEN TO THE CHURCHES.

1. But while the churches through their most
honoured representatives, or through their strongest
and most resolute sons, have turned this friendly and
helpful face towards labour, what has been its cor-
respondent or reciprocal attitude? The help has
been accepted with a sort of proud yet indulgent
gratitude, as if for duty at last performed by one
who had not been accustomed to perform it; but
there has been little sign of any changed attitude to
the faith and worship of the Church. The men who
represent labour, and the labour they represent, may
be quite willing to enlist the ecclesiastic as a recruit,
but they show no inclination of joining the army he
leads, or of submitting to his discipline. Thej may
hail the attempt of the Church to fulfil economic
functions, whether as mediator or as teacher, or even
seriously propose to capture her as the chosen citadel
of the capitalist, and turn her into the stronghold
of labour and the minister of the democracy; but
they do not mean to commit themselves to her,
whether as regards her policy for this life or her
dogmas as to the life to come. Nor need we wonder

The Attitude of the Men to the Church. 11

at their attitude ; we are rather tempted to commend
it as both reasonable and reverent. The Church is
infinitely more than an economic institution; the man
or society would be a secularist of the very worst
type who would enter it simply because of its promise
to be profitable for the life that now is. This is a
reason worthy of the suitor for social recognition,
but not of the blunt integrity of the English work-
man. Then all churches are historical institutions;
the attitude to them of classes and bodies of men is
also historical. Agreement on a current question
does not affect an attitude which depends on ancient
and permanent causes. If, then, we would discover
how the Church and the industrial classes are to be
reconciled, we must inquire into those causes which
worked their estrangement and still keep them
estranged. This estrangement is too general to be
explained by any local or accidental or occasional
cause, or indeed any cause that affects only one of
the two sides. The causes are of so common and so
essential a kind that they have affected and do affect
equally the churches and the industrial classes, both
in themselves and in their mutual relations.

2. It may be doubted whether the estrangement
can properly be described as general ; but it is
general in this sense that (the Graeco-Eussian Church
does not come into our purview) it is a state which
all churches know and have cause to lament. The
experience of the Roman Church is not uniform, but
it is decisive enough. There is no country where
the anti-clerical and anti-Church feeling is so strong
as in France, and it is intensest — becoming almost a

12 Religion in History.

sort of fanaticism — in the artisan class. The Belgian
workman is less demonstrative and more tolerant
than his French neighbour, but quite as little does
he love the Church. There is no Church in the
United States that suffers so much from leakage, or
the loss of those immigrants and their descendants
who were hers by race, as the Koman Catholic. It
is, of course, different in Ireland, in the South
American Eepublics, and in certain of the countries
of Southern Europe ; but it is only different in these
cases because the industrial development has been
arrested, or has not well begun. In the case of
Ireland, indeed, there is this special characteristic :
Catholicism and patriotism have only been different
aspects of the same thing, church and people lay
under the same disabilities, suffered from the same
penal laws, and were therefore one in their conflict
for justice and freedom. But as regards the general
question the significant thing is, that where industry
has been so far developed as to allow the causes
which most tend to alienation to operate, the Eoman
religion has, so far from preventing, emphasized
and exasperated the effect. The Anglican Church,
too, has here failed signally, often in spite of
her many beneficences, sometimes even because
of the form her beneficences have assumed. There
are districts in England where, if it had not been
for certain dissenting bodies, paganism would have
practically prevailed. Her debt to those bodies she
can never pay, and, unhappily, she is not always
willing even to recognize it, at least in a form that
an honourable creditor can regard as recognition.

The Attitude of the Men to the Church. 13

Methodism, in its several branches, has done more
for the conversion and reconciliation of certain of the
industrial classes to religion than any other English
Church. It is but just to say that the enfranchisement of
our mining and agricultural populations made this evi-
dent, that their regulative ideas were religious rather
than utilitarian and secular. The politician finds when
he addresses the peasantry that he has to appeal to
more distinctly ethical and religious principles than
when ne addresses the upper or middle classes, and
we may hope that even in a politician the principles
he appeals to may ultimately afiect his policy.
Meanwhile we simply note that it is the local
preacher rather than the secularist lecturer who has,
while converting the soul, really formed the mind of
the miner and labourer, and who now so largely rep-
resents the ideas he seeks in his dim and inarticulate
way to see applied to national policy and legislation.
The Congregational and the Presbyterian Churches
have been more successful with the middle than with
either the lower or the upper classes; they may in-
deed be said to represent the older English Noncon-
formity, but while the latter is largely Scotch, the
former inherits the mind and traditions of the burgh-
ers and the yeomen who formed the main body of
the Independents of the Commonwealth. Theirs
were the men who governed England from '32 to '68,
and who have not been inactive since then. They
are mainly the men who have created our industries
and extended our commerce, and made the con-
science for integrity and economy in the English
race. These things are not said by way of

14 Religion in History.

polemic against any church, or of apologetic
on behalf of any; but simply by way of stating a
fact that needs to be explained. Of all forms of
ecclesiastical controversy, the most sordid and mean
is the form of mutual reproach, or blame for failure
where there has been common guilt. The body that
has helped to keep any class or any proportion of
any class religious, deserves the gratitude of all the
rest; the body that has failed, though it has tried to
succeed, deserves at least their sympathy and re-
spect. But when our churches stand face to face
with the alienated classes of our great cities and in-
dustries, the only mood that becomes any and is in-
cumbent upon all, is one of humiliation and confes-
sion of sin with a view to amendment of life. But
this only emphasizes our special point — where the
effect is so general there must be common causes
more or less uniform in their operation. Our prob-
lem is the discovery and the determination of these
causes.

CHAPTER III.

CAUSES, APPARENT AND REAL, OF ALIENATION.

1. Now among these causes I do not reckon as
primary, either in time or in importance, what is
popularly known as infidelity or unbelief. No doubt
there is among artisans under various forms and
names a great deal of vigorous and thoroughgoing
negation. Forty years ago it used to be termed
Secularism, which was a sort of instinctive and un-
reasoned agnosticism. Its basis was a rough-and-
ready doctrine of utility, which regarded this life as
the only real object or field of knowledge, and judged
everything by its value or efficiency in helping man
to live it honestly and happily. Then, under the
new scientific impulse, came a wave of more positive
materialism, and doctrines and dicta from men like
Darwin and Huxley, down through Tyndall to Mole-
schott and Biichner, were repeated and interpreted
into a sort of philosophy of existence, though now and
then an ideal or intellectual element was so introduced
as to modify the conception into a species of Pan-
theism. The critcism which was its polemic against
Christianity, especially so far as directed against the
Scriptures as sources or authorities in religion, was

16 Religion in History.

mainly antiquated, as it were a posthumous Deism.
The remarkable thing is that the infidelity of the
working man is essentially derivative, an acquired or
borrowed thing; and the men from whom he has
borrowed it were those of the eighteenth century,
with their hard and prosaic spirit, their unhistorical
sense, their inability to see anything in the historical
records of the received religion, save the unreason or
combined folly and hypocrisy of the present in pro-
fessing to believe that such books could be of divine
origin and authority. We may say, then, that this
borrowed infidelity is an efiect rather than a cause of
the working man's estrangement from the churches;
it is an apology for the attitude he holds, rather than
the reason why he assumed the attitude. So far as
careful inquiries and observation may be trusted, we
may venture to affirm that the number of unbelievers
to the whole class is proportionally small, though it
contains some men of marked integrity and independ-
ence of mind. Since, then, the intellectual reasons or
diflBculties' must be held to be secondary causes of
disbelief, we may find the primary in a moral convic-
tion, the belief that the churches are not religious
realities, not bodies organized for the teaching and
doing of righteousness, but for the maintenance
of vested interests and conventional respectabilities.
There is disbelief in the churches rather than in
religion, though, when the disbelief becomes articu-
late, it tends to extend to the ideas and history in-
volved in the claims and creeds of the churches.

The distinction between disbelief in religion and
in the churches may seem illicit, but is, in fact, both

Causes, Apparent and Real, of Alienation. 11

radical and real. The one may be said to bo in-
tellectual, but the other social or moral and emo-
tional in its origin; the one comes to a man through
education, but the other through the experiences of
life. Disbelief in religion may be conjoined with con-
formity to a church ; disbelief in the churches involves
the refusal to be identified with their religion, or to
join in their profession and worship. The former is
a state of things not unknown in the upper and
educated classes; the latter is more congenial to
the franker and less illumined intellect of the work-
man. The cultured man lives in a world of deli-
cate shades and fine gradations; doubt may come
through a hundred channels, till the strenuous faith of
the past or the convinced present seems to him only
a series of childlike illusions; but he may so feel the
inconvenience both for himself and others of disturb-
ing the established order that he will prefer to act as
if what he knew to be illusions he believed to be
realities. The workman, on the other hand, lives in
a world of well-marked lines and clear-cut realities;
his thinking has always the merit of directness and
simplicity, while his logic works with the rigour
of his own machines, and so if he comes to the
conclusion that certain things are illusory or unreal,
he finds it most convenient to act in harmony with
the conclusion to which he has come. Hence the
man of culture may be a speculative agnostic or
philosophic sceptic, or even in things critical and
historical, a rationalist, but at the same time, for
reasons that weigh with his conventional conscience,
a conforming churchman and even an ecclesiastical

18 Religion in History.

conservative. But this attitude is simply unintelligi^
ble to the unsophisticated mind of the artisan, and so
to assume it is impossible to him; he simply cannot
understand how it can be an honest thing to join in
professions you have ceased to believe, or spare
institutions whose central ideas you conceive to be
imaginary or false. The two unbeliefs are thus
generically unlike; the one is the unbelief of a man
whose mind has outgrown the faith of a world with
whose social order he is satisfied, and wishes to
maintain; the other is the unbelief of a man who is
dissatisfied with the social order in which he finds
himself, and so comes to doubt the ideas which are
invoked as its sanction and basis. The former
infidelity is the child of the intellect, but the latter
of experience; the one cultivates a doubt which
allows or even requires him to support the church,
but the other faces a church which he so conceives
as to be compelled to doubt. In the one position
there is fatal insincerity, in the other vigorous ve-
racity; and the church which knew its opportunity and
mission would hope more from the mind that denied
and opposed than from the mind that doubted and
conformed.

2. We have been concerned here simply with the
analysis of phenomena that are familiar to every one
who knows and has observed both the educated and
the working classes. And this analysis has illustrated
the position that the infidelity of the latter is an
effect rather than a cause of the alienation from the
churches, while it helps to explain the derivative
character of the arguments used to defend and

Causes y Apparent and Real, of Alienation. 19

maintain it. But this only throws us back on the
prior question as to the causes of this alienation.
And here two things have to be observed: first, these
causes are not of yesterday, but are old, have been
almost imperceptible in growth, and gradual yet
continuous in their action; and secondly, they have
not been incidental or occasional, but belong to the
complex process which has produced our present
social order. The function of the Church is not simply
to maintain an established Christianity, but to create
it anew in the spirit and conscience of each successive
generation. We use very general, and, it may be,
altogether misleading terms when we speak of the
present as being the heir of the past. The heir, in
order to possess, must recreate or reconstitute his
inheritance, assimilate it in form of being and mode
of action to himself and his world. The remarkable
thing in the law of heredity, whether individual or
collective, is not what man does, but what he does
not, inherit. The son may repeat his father's features,
colour, voice, gait, and even his minuter tricks or
niceties of manner, but yet be, as regards mind, char-
acter, faith, his exact opposite, i.e. he inherits the
accidents or outward semblance, not the intrinsic
qualities or distinctive characteristics. And this
means that the new individual constitutes, in a
perfectly real sense, out of himself and from among
the old conditions a new world. And the same
principle governs the evolution of society, though,
as it works here on so vast a scale, the succession
is less rapid, the changes more gradual, the contrasts
not so violent. It is no mere fancy of the philo-

20 Religion in History.

sophical historian that each century has a character
of its own; it is by what is distinctive in the
character of each that the progress of the AYorld is
measured.

Now, it is in conformity with this law that we say
that each generation must have a Christianity of its
own born anew within it, and not simply repeating
the traditions or appropriating the habits of the
fathers. No single generation has ever been com-
pletely Christianized, and even the most Christian of
all the past generations, whether primitive or medi-
aeval, would, were it re-incorporated and judged b}^
our more exacting modern standards, be considered
hardly Christian at all. The simpler a society is,
the simpler will its religion be; the more complex
the society, the richer in all its elements and the
stronger in all its forces must the religion become,
especially if it has to satisfy the whole nature,
command and inspire the whole of life. Now, the
social evolution has with us been vaster and more
rapid than the religious or ecclesiastical. Society
has changed as the Church has not; it falsifies its
living past by attempting to retain in a new world
the organization, methods, ideals that were made
in an old, and were excellently adapted to the world
in which they were made, and to a vigorous life
within it. Adaptation to environment is a necessity
to all organisms; it is only by variation of form that
continuity of life can be secured. Where the
Roman Church has been most successful in main-
taining her ancient ascendency in the ancient form,
she has either annihilated progress, i.e. stopped the

Causes, Apparent and Real, of Alienation. 21

evolution of a higher order in society, as in Spain,
or she has helped to reduce it to a mediaeval tur-
bulence, as in the South American Republics. But
in Protestant countries the social development has
outrun the religious, and it will only be by the re-
ligious development overtaking the social that the
Church will be able to reclaim the masses.

This, then, is the general position: the alienation
of the industrial classes from the Church is a result
of this process of uneven or unequal development,
or of the successive stages by which the Church
has lost adaptation to the environment within which
it lives. But what this means will become evident
only when we have considered the stages or forms of
this process in detail.

CHAPTER lY.

INFLUENCE OP THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT.

We begin with the action of our modern political
thought and history on the mind and feelings of the
classes which here concern us. Of this immense
subject only a few salient points can be touched.

1. At the outset two things must be noted — first
political and religious thought are so organically
related, that each is but a form of the other. Politi-
cal thought is the religious idea applied to the State.
and the conduct of its public afi'airs, while religious
thought is but our view of the polity of the universe,
and man's relation to it. It follows that as man
thinks in the one field, he comes to think also in the
other; the unconscious logic which develops our
instincts or intuitions into judgments is often much
more rigorous than the conscious reasoning which
builds up our intellectual system of things. And
it is by force of this unconscious logic that the
classes who reason because they feel, bring their
political and religious ideas into harmony. And
secondly, we live in the first century since the
foundation of the world in which these classes have

Injiuence of the Political Development. 23

by a process of gradual and ordered change been,
as it were, emancipated, become, even as those who
were erst their superiors, possessed of political power.
The promise of the first Christian preachers Chris-
tian states are only now beginning to try to fulfil; and
though this result has been achieved through the
action of Christian ideas, yet it has not seldom been in
the face of the now active and now passive resistance
of Christian societies, or their official representatives.
In the Middle Ages, the political and the ec-
clesiastical systems were strictly supplementary and
harmonious; the one was feudal, the other papal, and
both within their limits and after their kind patriar-
chal. The King was head of the State, and all with-
in it held under him; the Pope was head of the Church,
and all within it held under him. Each in his own
order reigned by divine right, though attempts were
made to limit the power of the one by charters and by
parliaments, and the authority of the other by creeds
and councils. But the qualifying force was lodged
in the one case in the barons and burghers, in the
other in the bishops and clergy; as regards both
the multitude was dumb, made to be ruled and to obey,
not to reason and advise. The civil and ecclesiasti-
cal potentates might reason and negotiate and differ
concerning their respective authorities or pro-
vinces, but in these high aff'airs the people had no
voice; they had to suff'er the ban or the blessing, as
the one or the other of the rival authorities decreed.
The Saxon serf in some respects hardly differed from
the Roman slave, and though the English burgher
and yeoman conquered his ft-eedom, the peasant re-

24 Religion in History.

mained the son of the bondwoman, without a voice
in the assembly of his people.

In consequence of the change of religion the old
factors of order in England were new combined, the
forces from beneath were not relieved and called into
play. The King could without fear of the Pope affirm
his divine right, and he so did it as to compel the
barons and the burghers and the yeomen to qualify
his rights by theirs. They, after a century of struggle,
triumphed, and after the kings by divine right came
a line which reigned by the grace of the aristocracy
and gentry. The rights that know governed were
those of property, and they proved even more merci-
less to the peasant and the workman than the
feudal overlord or the autocratic king. They did not
assert themselves by means of vassalage or villen-
age or arbitrary exactions, but mainly by the slow
growth of claims which devoured ancient privileges,
and of new laws which abolished old liberties and
rights. And under this reign the people were help-
less, almost as dumb as they had been in the old feudal
days. But change was at hand; the idea of free
speech penetrated downwards, and with it a new
order of rights began to be conceived. There are
writers who can cleverly demonstrate the logical ab-
surdities that lie in such phrases as ' '■ the rights of
man," and by analysis eliminate the idea of rights
from any conception of him that can be formed.
But all phrases are relative, and have some histori-
cal occasion which must be known if they are to be
understood. ' ' The rights of man " is a phrase which
must be construed as the antithesis to the rights of

Influence of the Political Development. 25

special or favoured classes, kings or priests or peers.
It denotes the idea which Knox expressed in his fine
reply to Queen Mary: '^ And what are you in this
commonwealth ? " ' ^ A subj ect born within the same,
Madam; " and because a subject with a place as real
and rights as valid and claims to consideration as
sacred as those of the sovereign. Once this idea had
penetrated the mind of the multitude, the hour of
deliverance from the narrower and more violent
rights, regal, clerical, baronial, was at hand.

2. But the new ideas had to struggle hard first
for a footing, then for victory; and the conflict was
carried on not without sweat and dust. The estab-
lished political and ecclesiastical order had been, as it
were, woven in the loom of time into a single web,
and to unweave the web seemed like undoing the
chief work of time, dissolving society into chaos.
On the one side, men defended the political order
that they might save the ecclesiastical; on the other
side, men assailed the ecclesiastical, which was
the more vulnerable, that they might reach the
political. The supreme calamity of French Catholi-
cism, or rather the crime which no later sufl'erings
can ever atone for, was its alliance with the king and
the Court. The king had been a convenient instru-
ment in the religious wars; by his help Protestantism
was practically annihilated, and it was thought that
since he was so good for one thing, he could be made
equally good for all. As his will was sovereign, to
control him was to control France. And so the
great concern of Catholicism was to keep possession
of the king, which it did without being too curious as

26 Religion in History.

to the kind and quality of the king possessed. But in
being so careful of him it lost the people, and pat into
the hands of his enemies, who were therefore aisothe
enemies of his church, the most tremendous weapon
that was ever levelled against religion. For in their
invj the assailants did not distinguish religion from
the men who betrayed it, and Christianity was made
to bear and to suffer for the sins of Catholicism. And it
did suffer. There never was a raillery like Yoltaire's,
a mockery so pitiless, so charged with scorn, so heated
through and through with passion, yet so perfectly
controlled and adapted to its end. While he incar-
nated, he did not exhaust the spirit of revolt; he only
inaugurated its reign. The Encyclopedists opposed
the illumination to superstition; Rousseau the state
of nature to the state of custom and convention and
fictitious inequality. And so the conflict spread from
religion and the Catholicism which was held to be its
only real and adequate embodiment, to society and the
State. The denial passed through the church to the
king it had crowned with divine rights and declared to
be most Christian; it was seen that he had neglected
his duties to the lives, as much as the church had
neglected its duty to the minds of men. And so the
movement which began with the Christ of the Roman
Church as 'Hhe Infamous" it was to erase, ended
in the erasure of the monarch. The two that had
stood together that they might abolish the Protest-
antism of the seventeenth century, fell together in
the consequent revolution of the eighteenth.

3. But France largely determined the spirit and
form of our modern political thought, and helped to

Influence of the Political Development. 27

give it, especially so far as the people are concerned,
so much the character of a religious revolt. The
books which had at the end of last century, and
throughout the first half of this, by far the greatest
influence on the awakening mind of the English
artisan, The Age of Reason and TJie Rights of Man,
were steeped in the spirit of France and the Revolu-
tion. No doubt they found here friendly conditions.
The Established Church was torpid, and a guardian
of obnoxious interests rather than a teacher of
neglected duties. The middle classes were in the
hands of the old dissent, the peasantry were being
reached by the new Methodism; but for the artisan
, no one seemed specially to care. His food was a
radical philosophy, a popularized version of the Ency-
clopedic; he lived in the age of reason, and believed
in the charter and the rights of man. There is a
remarkable diflerence at this period in the respective
attitudes of the middle and the working classes to
politics and religion. The middle classes were essen-
tially religious, Tom Paine was a name they abhorred;
but they were vigorous reformers, anxious to repeal
disabilities, to simplify and ameliorate law, to facili-
tate the creation and distribution of wealth, to hus-
band the national resources, and to use them in the
most economical, yet profitable and productive way.
They had great respect for property, and no theory as
to the abstract or innate rights of man as man which
they thirsted to apply to politics in general, and the
sufirage in particular. But the working classes were
more rigorously philosophical; they were governed
by ideals which they had reasoned out and applied

28 Religion in History,

to the organization of the State; a man, simply be
cause he was a man, was sacred in their eyes, and
possessed of rights which were proper to himself, and
did not depend on any property, great or small,
he might hold. On this ground they pleaded for
political justice, and the changes it required were
matters of right, not of mere expediency, which,
indeed, was to them a peculiarly abhorrent concep-
tion. But to this political philosophy the Church
was a greater offence than the State; it was the
apotheosis of inequalities, loved rank and wealth,
privilege and prescription, forgot the poverty of its
founders, who had laboured with their hands, and of
all the beatitudes most believed the one the Master
had neglected to utter, Beati possidentes. With the
Anglican Church, then, they felt that as now con-
stituted they could have no part or lot. As Estab-
lished it was the creation of privilege, as Episcopal
it embodied to them the hated aristocratic principle,
as administered, it regarded the people as children or
paupers, and not as reasonable and independent men.
As to the Free Churches, those of the older dissent
were too plutocratic, too much governed by class
feeling — an interested society, whose heart was where
its interests were, with the employers and the trades-
men; while those of the later dissent were too emo-
tional, too little intellectual, so concerned with the
future as to forget the present. So they reasoned,
and they acted as they reasoned; stood aloof from
the churches, criticized them, disliked them, doubted
their reality, denied their sincerity, and became
sceptical of all they believed.

Influence of the Political Development. 29

4. So far we have been strictly historical and
expository, but now it is time to confess that the
churches had in them more than enough to justify
this attitude. Since then they have changed in
many ways for the better, but they must be prepared
to change still more if they would win back what
they have lost. For one thing, it is impossible to
maintain an aristocratic church in a democratic state,
save, indeed, as the church of the aristocracy, their
dependents and imitators. Such a church is easy
to maintain, at least so long as the aristocracy are
able and willing to maintain it; yet its maintenance
is, as regards national religion, a thing of infinite
insignificance. We need the same sort of harmony
between the ideas of Church and State in the modern
as there was in the mediseval mind. Only in a
feudal state can a papal church be in place, and a
church which contradicts the whole spirit and genius
of democracy may within a free state be the church
of a class, but can never be the home of the collective
people. The principles that regulate their political
will regulate their ecclesiastical thinking; in a State
''broad based upon the people's will," the only
church that has any chance of continuance must be
one whose polity has the same basis, and the will
that is the basis must be the main factor of order
and organization. Of course, a church may argue
that its polity was a matter of revelation, that its
order was given to it, that its orders have been his-
torically maintained, and are of its very essence.
But these are to the people mere theories; about
them scholars may like to argue — for they are per-

30 Religion in History.

sons who dearly love discussions about points where
conjecture has free scope and positive proof is im-
possible; but for men of thought or action such
theories have no worth. Yet, however this may be,
one thing is clear, the will that has become an
efficient factor in the State will never be content
with a Church which simply reduces it into a mere
receptivity or political inefficient. And the people
are even more within their rights in claiming an
active place in the conduct and legislation of the
Church than in those of the State. They are but
returning to the original idea and practice. The
early churches were real democracies; their citizens
had all the privileges of the fully enfranchized; and
the constituents of the modern ought to have the
place and the privileges of those of the ancient
churches. But, of course, the cardinal principle of
the ancient Church must be maintained in the mod-
ern; its people must be the people of God, for what
other sheep can be of this fold? On this matter the
democratic feeling is altogether sound; it loves real-
ity, dislikes sham, pretence, and make-believe. It
does not wish to see a man who has no religion busy
himself with religious concerns; it does wish to see
a man who professes religion be and do as he pro-
fesses. And if the Church be organized and admin-
istered by the really religious, and look jealously to
the character of those who compose it, then cer-
tainly the English workman will be the first to give
it the homage of that respect which is the earliest
and simplest form of faith.

CHAPTER V.

INFLUENCE OP SOCIETY AND THE SOCIAL SPIRix.

1. But there are social tendencies and a social
temper which are even more divisive in their action
than political thought and feeling. These seem to
be increasing in strength rather than decreasing.
The more highly specialized our industrial life be-
comes, the more divided our society appears to
grow. The plutocracy is ever pressing on the heels
of the aristocracy, and with the small pride but
great vanity that seeks to forget the rock whence it
was hewn, it deepens, in the very degree that it suc-
ceeds, the line that divides the upper from the lower
classes. Masters and workmen are every year grow-
ing farther apart, becoming rivals that with fear and
distrust jealously watch and willingly outwit each
other. The old personal relations between them are
being lost. Limited liability companies are em-
ployers, but not masters, and directors feel respon-
sibility to shareholders a more immediate and exact-
ing thing than concern for their men. Associations
and unions, too, tend to place their relations on a
strictly impersonal and financial basis. The master
will not act without the approval of his association,

32 Religion in History.

or the workman without the sanction of his union,
and they negotiate through ofiBcials ^nd in pursu-
ance of a policy rather than as men. Then the new
social hunger affects both. The unions differentiate
the workmen. The skilled and unskilled are divided
by a gulf over which intelligence of each other's
wellbeing can hardly pass. The finest gradations
01 feeling and social sense distinguish the various
crafts, and within what seems the same craft status
IS determined by the quality and rarity of the skill.
And why should not an aristocracy of art be known
to workmen as well as to artists? why may social
distinction, based on the kind and degree of skill
required, be allowed to professions and denied to
handicrafts? Still, if the unions diflTerentiate the
craftsmen they unite the workers, but the social
jOins with the industrial tendency in making the di-
vision from the employer absolute. The master does
not love to live among his men; he prefers the so-
ciety of his suburb; most of all, where he can com-
mand it, a town house where he and his womankind
can see society and enjoy the gaieties of the season.
This is a feature ominous of serious social change.
The old Lancashire and Yorkshire manufacturer
was a man of shrewd mind, but simple tastes. He
lived quite plainly, and he worked hard. And
though he and his work-people had many a tussle,
ending now and then in a violence and destruction
quite unknown in these days, yet they knew each
other, understood each other, and learned through
their common life and toil to cultivate a sort of
genial brotherhood. But the head of a great firm

Influence of Society and the Social Spirit. 33

is mostly invisible; he is a name to his people, and
nothing more; his people are to him part of his ma-
chinery, distinguished from the other parts by being
less manageable, and when deranged more difficult
to repair. And so they tend to fall ever farther
apart, to influence each other less, to be less just to
each other, to care for nothing save the profit to be
got from the labour the one seeks to sell and the
other to buy.

2. Now the churches have hitherto tended to
follow the path of increasing social specialization,
which is the line of least resistance, and to grow into
societies for the demarcation and consecration of
class. And the more they have done so, the more
distasteful they have become to working men. There
is nothing they so abhor as the social distinction
which claims a religious sanction and assumes a
religious shape; it wounds them in the most
sensitive part. They cannot believe in a God who
regards a man as any the better for the accident of
his birth, or of superior dignity because of his rank,
and they will not respect a society which claims to
represent God on the earth, and yet puts its trust in
the House of Lords, or boasts of its aristocratic con-
nections, or leans for support on some plutocrat who
is loudly generous without being plainly just. Nor
are they any more enamoured of churches composed
altogether of people of their own class, for this is
only another sort of insult to their sensitive pride.
And this pride expresses a true feeling, the feeling
that as all men are equal before God, so in His church
there ought to be no respect of persons, — saintliness

34 Beligion in History,

alone being recognized as honourable and dis-
tinguished. And this feeling may be, and ought to
be, as much outraged by the workman who will not
for social reasons worship with his master, as by the
master who will not for similar reasons worship with
his workman. If wealth were wise, there is nothing
«t would more dread than the separation of classes in
the house of God, or the separation of different houses
of God to different classes; and if it were good as
well as wise there is nothing it would so little allow.
The master who goes to worship where only other
masters are, does his best to alienate himself from
his people, to lower religion in their eyes, and to
bring on the social revolution; for the only salt that
can preserve society is sympathy and communion in
the most serious things of the spirit between all
classes. And this means that into the Church the
sense and the air of social superiority must not be
allowed to come. The attitude of patronage or
condescension is here entirely out of place and purely
mischievous; for in matters of religion the cottage
may be more able to play the Lady Bountiful to the
hall, than the hall to the cottage. And the Church,
if it is wise, will prefer a workman qualified to
serve to even a qualified master; for while society is
always ready to honour position, it ought to be the
distinction and privilege of the Church jealously both
to see and to show that it honours spiritual fitness,
and not rank or social status. And if master and
workman are associated on equal terms in church
affairs, they will attain the mutual knowledge and
develop the mutual respect that will make intercourse

influence of Society and the Social Spirit. 35

on other things more pleasant and reasonable. If the
Church could secure this service according to spiritual
gifts, it would do more for social order and stability
than any possible legislation.

This is written in a Scotch manse, and under the
influence of the memories it awakens. Here pres-
bytery nas been an extraordinary power; of the re-
ligious people of Scotland ninety per cent, are within
its fold, and its power has been largely due to its
parity, the way in which it has enlisted men of all
classes in the service of the Church. It was within
my recollection no unusual thing to see as members
of the same session, all duly ordained elders charged
with the spiritual oversight of the congregation, the
laird, the school-master, the doctor, the farmer, the
farm servant, or shepherd; and of these I have known
the last to be the man of finest character, of most
wisdom in council and greatest spiritual weight in
the congregation or parish. Indeed, as a fact, from
the experience of one who was himself for several
happy years the moderator of a kirk-session, this
ought to be told — that the person who above all
others stands out in his memory as a man of delicate
feeling, of clear, yet charitable judgment, was a
working quarryman. And the presence of such a
man in a high ministerial office, elected and ordained
to it by the act and sanction of the Church, was a
good to all concerned. The laird, the school-master,
the doctor, and the farmer could not but respect the
hind or the shepherd whose words were often wiser
than their own, and in him they respected his whole
class. It, too, was dignified by the office he filled so

36 Religion in History.

worthily, and the words of reproof he had to speak
at the cottage hearth, or of consolation at some
humble death-bed, were tempered by a feeling of kin-
ship, even when the sense of spiritual vocation most
burdened his spirit. Again must I express the sober
and deep conviction — the church that dares to associ-
ate its poor with its rich in the same service when
both are alike qualified for it, is the only church en-
titled to command, or worthy to receive the obedience
and the love of both.

CHAPTER YI.

INFLUENCE OF THE INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT.

1. But beside the political and social tendencies
we must place the industrial. The harder the struggle
for existence grows, the harder does it become to be
religious. If the wolf is not only at the door, but
has to be held out by sheer strength of muscle, we
can scarcely expect the man who holds it to think
of other, even though they be higher things. In
order to worship there must be not only a day of
rest for the man, but a rested man for the day. If
its hours are mostly needed to sleep off the fatigue
or lassitude of the week, it can be little used for
worship. And if the only religious exercise of the
week be on the Sunday, the exercise will soon grow
burdensome and irritating. Now the conditions
under which work is done are increasingly unfavour-
able to the cultivation of the religious spirit. Com-
petition grows every year keener, the weaker men are
pushed downward, the abler men find it harder to rise,
or even to make a beginning, and where time is so
imperious in its claims, little thought can be spared
for eternity. Possibly the matter may be put most
closely by the statement of an actual but most typical

38 Religion in History,

case — that of a Yorkshire village, which would be a
goodly western town. It was once a great evangelical
centre, had quite an army of home missionaries,
and created congregations and schools in towns much
more important but less religious than itself. Its
industry was weaving, which it cultivated with old-
fashioned leisure. The men wove in their own
houses or sheds, regulated their own hours, and were
never too busy to discuss a question in politics or a
problem in theology. They had time after breakfast
for morning prayers, and in the evening the family as-
sembled for worship. It was the proud boast of the
village that at least once every day the sound of psalm
and of prayer could be heard in its houses. But steam
came, and the power-loom and the great factory, with
''Hands " whose hours and work were as rigorously
regulated as the looms they tended. The old leisure,
with the old home life it allowed, was no more.
Breakfast became a hurried meal, time enough to
eat, but time for nothing more; the men and women
who came home in the evening were tired, so ex-
hausted with the heated atmosphere that they craved
the open air, with a sound in the ears that made the
old animated talk an irritation. So the old habits
were broken off, and new and less excellent habits
formed. The women in the mill lost their domestic
feeling, and became noisier, coarser, more masculine,
liking the factory as freedom, hating the home as
drudgery. And the men lost their old quieter and
more intellectual interests, grew fond of excitement,
of amusements noisier than the noisy looms. And
so the passion was awakened for the athletics that

Influence of the Industrial Development. 39

supplied opportunities to drink and gamble, and the
more it developed the more averse they became to
the old religious life, indeed incompetent for it in
its old staid simplicity. May we not say, then, that
this industrial development has created conditions
that have made religion indefinitely harder to the
man who must keep pace with it in order to live?

2. But it is easier to see these evils than to discover
a remedy which the churches can supply. The evils
are consequents inseparable from the conditions under
which our industries have been developed, rather than
from the development itself, and the remedy must
come, not from arresting the development, but chang-
ing the conditions. Whatever makes the struggle for
life not less strenuous or inevitable, but less mechani-
cal and monotonous, will conduce to a happier spirit
in the workman. It is not the work that kills
idealism, but the sordid conditions within and with-
out the worker. And of these the inner are the
fontal; and so the first thing to be done is to en-
rich and ennoble his soul, beget in him purer tastes,
and evoke higher capacities. This is a thing that
ought to be considered from the very beginning
of his intelligent being, attempted in our schools,
and incorporated in our systems of education. The
school ought to be made as bright and beautiful as
possible, the imagination ought to be cultivated as
well as the understanding, and artistic faculty made
as real an end as technical skill. If taste or the in-
tellect could be so developed that to satisfy it became
as instinctive and imperious a need in the workman
as in the cultivated lawj^er, or doctor, or statesman,—

40 Religion in History.

and these are certainly often more cruelly overworked
than he — then he would even as they pluck from the
very heart of his toil the moments needed for the
refreshment of his mind or the culture of his spirit.
Then, there ought to be accessible to him places
where he could cultivate the tastes which had been
developed within. The bath has been a great refin-
ing agency, for physical is near nf Vjn to spiritual
cleanliness; but these both can flourk* ^^nly where
the means for their being can be forbid, and the
churches ought to be as jealous about the condi-
tions necessary to intellectual and spiritual health as
our public authorities are about those needful for the
physical. Museums, picture galleries, and palaces
of delight may, without a prepared people, be worse
than useless; indeed, only haunts for the idle; but
to a people prepared they may be made high means
of grace.

These two things, then, the churches ought to do
their best to create and to cultivate, the faculties
that need intellectual and spiritual exercise for their
very being, and the opportunities and means for
keeping them in exercise. For the more these be-
come necessaries to a man, the more open will he be
to religious and moral influences. But these things
must not stand alone; recreation and amusement are
growing necessities to our industrial population, and
there are no agencies more able to refine or brutalize.
And for the moment the brutalizing force seems the
stronger. Gambling threatens to be the ruin of all
manly sport, while the passions it evokes and the
drinking it encourages are making great matches

tnjluence of the Industrial Development. 41

more a terror to decency than a recreation to weari-
ness. To refine our amusements would be a most
religious work, and one that religious societies
might very well undertake, even with some hope of
success. Yet they would need to begin above rather
than below; it is precisely in the point of amuse-
ments that the upper classes act most mischievously
on the lower, and provoke the imitation that is here
worst flattery. If the church could persuade our
gilded youth so to improve their pleasures as to re-
form their manners, it would help to make the amuse-
ments of all classes purer and healthier. But the
most needful thing of all is the recreation of the home,
for in industrial England it has almost ceased to be.
Increased domesticity means the increase of all the
finer aflections, the rise of all the more gracious
cares, and hopes, and loves. And where these are,
religion is never far away; and where they are not,
it will only be an external and, as it were, manufac-
tured thing. It seems, therefore, as if the recovery
of the home were the final necessity of the situation.
If only the church could rebuild the home, it would
create the conditions that would, even in the face of
our modern industrial development, make all the old
chivalries and graces of religion still possible.

CHAPTER YII.

INFLUENCE OF THE INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT.

1. But alongside the industrial development we
must place the intellectual. The last half-century
has been a period of remarkable mental activity and
change — certainly much greater among the working
than among the leisured and professional classes.
In this period the penny morning and the halfpenny
evening newspaper have been created, and has ceased
to be a mere news-sheet or political organ, and
become a medium for all sorts of intelligence —
sporting and scientific, social and literary. The
newspaper has become, as it were, a circulating
national library containing all kinds of stuff, good,
bad, and indifferent, always appetizing, though not
always wholesome and refreshing. In the old
Chartist days newspapers were few, but they were
filled with a serious purpose, serious men read them,
passed them from hand to hand, and seriously dis-
cussed their contents. Now, though many journals
are high-toned, not a few are edited on the principle
that they must please to live, and the pleasure they
conceive is of no noble or generous order. There
are society papers for the working as for the upper

Influence of the Intellectual Movement. 43

classes, and each is spiced with the sauce its
readers most relish. Sensations are loved below
as well as above, but their flavour depends not on
mystery or innuendo, but on blunt brutality. The
records of the police courts are racy reading, but
still racier the filthy gossip of backstairs and
sporting-house and club. The sins of the west
end are well known in the east, the achievements
of every noble lord who has distinguished himself
in the divorce court or a gambling hell are written
out in full; and where the follies and crimes of the
aristocracy are concerned the democracy has a good
memory. These things are read by many because
unclean, but by others because they speak of judg-
ment to come. And this element has a subtle
way of penetrating even the graver thought and
argument of the people. I shall never forget the
loathing which was awakened by the gruesome and
sensual suggestions, touching certain sacred persons
and histories, made by what professed to be an
organ of advanced thought. It was the severest shock
my faith in the intellectual character of the free-
thinking workman ever received. But *t was signi-
ficant of the mental atmosphere created by the
society newspaper wherever it circulates, whether
among the upper ten thousand or the lower twenty
millions.

Yet this is a digression on intellectual deteriora-
tion rather than development. Let us hope that
these things represent only a muddy eddy in the
main onward moving and clarifying stream; and
then mark the signs of mental expansion and

4:4: Beligion in History,

activity. The industrial classes have proved them-
selves to possess political capacity in a high degree.
They have had statesmen and legislators of their
own raising; their unions have exhibited as much
organizing and administrative genius as could be
found in any modern government. They are in-
deed, whatever view we may take of their means
and action, a marvellous creation, accomplished in
spite of innumerable difficulties, both internal and
external. And this capacity is beginning to con-
cern itself with the State. The old Chartist was
primarily a politician; he was concerned about legis-
lation and government, he wanted to be a citizen
and to have the State so constituted that there
would be room and a function in it for him; but
the modern trades-unionist is primarily an econ-
omist, concerned about labour and its rights — how
to sell it to the best advantage, and how to main-
tain its price even in a falling market. Yet, as
the Chartist saw lying behind his politics the field
of economics, so the "Unionist looks through his
economics at politics, not, indeed, as an end, but
as a means: in other words, he comes to parliament
through the union, and all legislation is but a vehicle
for its economical action. But what concerns us
here is the mental and moral discipline involved
in the organization and administration of the unions,
and so the kind and quality of the men now being
formed within labour, both for its sectional direction
and its place in national politics. They are within
their own order distinctly statesmen and legisla-
tors, and their class must be measured by its

Influence of the Intellectual Movement 45

highest and strongest members, not by its lowest
and feeblest.

Then, education has extended, and still extends
and improves; the school is now common, and the
School Board is a body with higher aims than the
statesmen who created it ever dreamed of. The
people are not so easily satisfied as their representa-
tives, they want higher and more efficient instruction,
and the more they control the board the more they
get what they want. And so to the primary has
been added the higher Board school, and to both the
technical and the continuation school. And as the
ability to read is created, so is the opportunity for
its exercise. Free libraries and reading-rooms now
exist in all our cities and considerable towns, their
number still increases, and as fast as it increases the
space is occupied and the demand rises for more.
And there, through novel and history, through science
and biography, through philosophy and theology,
through criticism and poetry, the people are being
educated, and by their own will and at their own
expense are carrying forward the work of the schools.
And a special literature is growing up to meet their
demand. For their enlightenment science ceases to
be technical, and becomes so simple that he who reads
may run, history is cultivated by masters of literary
style, travels are made as fascinating as fiction, and
fiction is as full of accurate knowledge as if it
were science. Men who once knew no story but the
Pilgrim's Progress now resid Thackeray and Dickons,
Walter Scott and George Eliot; or those whose only
history book was the Old Testament, now read

46 Religion in History,

Carlyle and Froude, Gardiner and Lecky; or those
whose only poetry was Watts' or Wesley's Hymns,
now study Tennyson and Browning, Arthur Hugh
Clough and Matthew Arnold. And they cannot
read these things without getting a certain largeness
of view or a critical attitude that makes them im-
patient with everything that savours of a narrower
and more unreasoning world.

2. Now, has there been any correspondent change
in what passes for religious education? On the con-
trary, may we not say it stands where it did fifty
years ago? Anything more fatuous than the policy
of the religious communities on this matter it is
hardly possible to conceive. They have been con-
tented with their old standards, their old methods,
their old agents. It is humiliating to think that the
thing which the majority in the London Scliool
Board so fanatically fights for, is called religious
education. The thing wanted is not to be got at
the ordinary Board school or from the average Sun-
day School teacher; the churches must give it,
make it their constant charge, do it as their most
vital work, devote to it their finest and best equipped
spirits. What is called religious education is, to
L'peak the blunt truth, often only a preparation for
S'iepticism. It is appalling to think what would
happen were the highest mysteries of the Christian
faith made into subjects and standards for the
ordinary Board school; even in the hands of a
skilful and reverent teacher they would appear as
a series of antinomies that grew ever more incredible
and ever less capable of reconciliation. These are

Injlueiice of tlie Intellectual Movement. 47

things that only the most highly trained scholarly
and philosophical intellect is qualified to teach, espe-
cially to boys. We can already see how the method
has operated, and with what fatal results, in a region
far less open to abuse than the doctrinal. Crude views
of Biblical history crudely presented to a boy of four-
teen, and then confusedly remembered by him when he
has become a man, may be said to be the material for
the ideas as to religion and the Bible which are dis-
cussed and destroyed by the sulphureous criticism of
the secular hall and the free-thinking press. The an-
swer to their infidelity is not argument but education,
yet education of the church that gives it, as well as of
the men to whom it is given. It must be conducted
in the school, but also in the home; must begin
when the boy is a child, and not cease at the very
moment when it is most needed, just as he is
blossoming into the man, going out into the world
and learning the gravity of work and the impotence
of will. Yet in order to this the Church ought to
be the school, for, to look at the matter under only
a single aspect, the boy's relation to the school
ends, and with it his education ceases, but his rela-
tion to the Church ought to be continuous, and its
care for him a thing as constant and progressive as
its responsibility. And here the most courageous
is also the wisest policy; religious knowledge in
the school is fixed and formulated, but in the Church
is living and growing, and so the two give things
generically different. The school may drill, but the
Church communicates life. And simply because it
deals with living knowledge, it cannot be held in

48 Religion in History,

bondage to standards and rigid formulae. And here
it is of cardinal moment that the wider thought
should not be held back from the youth till he
hears of it in the debating club or hall of science.
He ought to be taken as far into the confidence
of the scholar and the mind of the religious thinker
as he is able to go; and as the mind grows, in.
struction ought also to grow with the mind. And so
far from being limited to the text and the catechetical
formulae that are the hope of our Philistine School
Board legislators, it ought to be made as many-sided
and comprehensive as religion itself, sympathetic to
poetry, akin to art, related to history, bound up with
philosophy, embedded in science. If religion could
only be so taught, then the whole education of our
people would become a discipline in the knowledge
whose end is piety and whose inspiration is God.

CHAPTER YIII.

THE CONCILIATION OF THE ALIENATED.

Our argument, so far as it has proceeded, may
be stated thus: The present state of the working
classes may be described as one of alienation rather
from the churches than from religion; but this aliena-
tion has been due not to one but to many causes,
which, as springing out of our whole modern de-
velopment, have affected equally and radically both
sides. The churches have of late manifested a
changed feeling, are possessed of a new sense of
their duty to end the alienation, but to this there is
no reciprocal or correspondent feeling on the part
of the working classes. As the estrangement has
been gradual, the reconciliation must be the same,
and it can only be accomplished by the Church
as a whole reaching, and either neutralizing or
removing all the causes of the alienation. This
may involve large modifications in the polities and
methods, and an enlargement in all the activities
of our varied religious societies, but the Church
cannot hope for exemption from the inexorable law
that the organism that would survive in the struggle
for existence must adapt itself to its environment.

50 Religion in History,

Grant these positions, and the problem follows: How
is the Church not only to reach and remove the causes
of alienation, but to reach and reconcile the alienated^
1. Now, it is evident, the Church can do this only
as an essential part of the mission with which it
has been charged — the saving of man. Its strength
does not lie in policies or economic stratagems, in
ceremonial pomp or impressive spectacles; but in
the truth it teaches, the life it communicates, and
the character it forms. It may constitute a happy
world out of good and happy persons, but it could
never create an ordered society out of the most feli-
citous speculations, political, economical, or the-
ological.

' The first thing, then, for the Church to be is to
be faithful to its own mission and ideal, to live and
think and act as if it were indeed the Saviour of men.
It exists, like its Founder and Head, not to be
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give its life
a ransom for the many. It ought to know neither
aristocracy nor democracy, but only man; its concern
is neither with capital nor labour, but with the men
who hold the capitalor do the labour. Its work is
to save souls, to teach truth, to enforce duty and
discipline, in a word, so to cause the kingdom of God
to come, that His will may be done on earth as in
heaven. But this is the most radical work possible;
it is deeper than politics, for it deals with the men
who make and administer and obey the laws; it is
more fundamental than economics, for it touches the
sources and ends of wealth, the men who create and
distribute, and who accumulate and apply it; it is

The Conciliation of (ihe Alienated, 51

more determinative than society, for it judges the
social units, limits yet guards their rights, and tries
their conventions. But the faithfulness must be to
the whole mission. It is not enough for the Church
to conceive itself as an institute for worship or
preaching or the observance of ritual, or as a society
adorned by official dignities and constituted by the
orders that govern; it is necessary that it be trans-
muted by the fire of a great enthusiasm into the re-
generator and moral guide of life. It must conceive
itself as through and through ethical, as it were
the embodied conscience and law of God, created
expressly for the moral direction and inspiration ot
man. It ought to contend for purity of belief in order
to purity of character, and to hold sin the one heresy
that makes a man excommunicate. It must not
mistake conformity to custom for obedience to moral
law, or be so false in its standards as to allow a bad
man to be a patron of its clergy or of their livings,
while denying to a good man who serves Christ
in his own way the name of Christian. Nor must
it wink at sin in high places or in low, or allow its
discipline to become a dead letter. And discipline
is worse than a dead letter when it is so misguided
as to condemn in a peasant what it fails to see in a
peer, however flagrantly flaunted before its eyes, or
when it spares the mystery of iniquity lying at its
own door while angrily reproachful where the door
chances to be a neighbour's. Discipline would be a
tremendous power were it vigorously and righteously
exercised; where the law could not reach it would
penetrate, the manifest sin that is more mischievous

62 Religion in History.

than open crime it would punish, and its penalties
would follow the immoralities whose guilt is real,
though, perhaps, not legal. And not till the
Church be fearless in its discipline, will it seem
honest to those outside it; but were it to prove
its faith by enforcing its discipline, it would reclaim
the masses by compelling them into admiration and
belief.

The Church, then, will be strong only as it is just,
and it will be just as it deals with men as men, and
not simply as grouped into classes. It is as impossible
to draw up an indictment against a class as against
a whole people, and where an indictment cannot be
drawn, a sentence cannot be passed. But the
ambition of the Church will be to create men with a
passion for righteousness, and to use all its forces and
all its influences to have righteousness realized by
every person in every class and in every region of
our private and social, our industrial, commercial, and
national life. It ought to be as incapable of servitude
to a majority as to a monarchy, to the masses as to
the classes, and it is certain that subservience is the
surest way to forfeit both obedience and respect.
And only as it is above suspicion will it be able to
accomplish the work of reconciliation, and the more
it can reconcile to itself the more will it create a
happy and harmonious people. For the Church more
than any other agency in our midst can play the
part of mediator. Not by intervening in strikes and
strifes, but by bringing about the understanding that
will prevent their occurrence. The gospel came to
make peace on earth by creating in men good-wlil,

The Conciliation of the Alienated. 53

and there is no cause of ill-will like the conflict of
interests conducted in the darkness of mutual ignor-
ance and distrust. We are just being made to feel
that the wars of industry may be as calamitous as the
wars of peoples ; indeed, the strike or the lock-out
is but civil war waged under the forms suitable to
these days. Now, the Church should in the very
process of fulfilling her duty do two things, first,
teach men of all classes to be in the highest Christian
sense religious men in all their offices, trades, and
relations; and, secondly, bring men of all classes
together as men, make them to know each other, and
look each at his own questions with the other"'\ eyes.
Men united and humbled before God, and inspired
by a common sense of duty, might disagree, but the
more they understood the more would they respect
each other, and would the more reluctantly differ.
The workman needs to know the master that he may
comprehend his case ; the master needs to know the
workman that he may understand where the shoe
pinches, and how it can be made to fit the foot. If
they could so meet together that the master would
have to cease to think of the workman as a servant,
or as a being of inferior nature with inferior rights
to his own, and the workman would learn to think
of the master as a man beset on all sides with responsi-
bilities and the servant, or even victim, of forces
he deeply dislikes, they would soon discover through
their common natures the community of their inter-
ests and the duty, which they must somehow find a
way to fulfil, of living together in peace. And the
only agency by which they can be thus united and

54 Religion in History.

made mutually intelligible is a church which knows
them as men, but refuses to know them as interests
or as classes.

2. But over and above this general principle of
fidelity to its own idea or mission, the Church must
follow special lines or methods of action, and these
ought to be as varied as the needs and minds of the
people it would reclaim.

(1) The Church must appeal to the alienated
mind, seek to persuade it by reason and argument.
It must become in a larger degree the instructor of
the people. In order to this it must think more
and better of its own mission, of the truth it carries
that it may interpret and realize. Here almost every-
thing has to be done ; we need to escape from the
bondage of the letter into the freedom of the spirit.
The Church must be a learner before it can be a
teacher, and it will find, when it speaks out of its
own honest and living convictions, that none will hear
more gladly than our workmen. Any man who has
preached knows what a keen and appreciative audi-
ence they can form, more greedy of instruction than
any upper or higher middle class congregation. It is
in these latter that the impatience of the sermon has
become decisive and uncontrolled, and this impatience
largely means that instruction is not wanted because
religion is conceived as a form or a service, not as duty
and truth. Yet this cause does not stand alone.
Nothing falls into contempt quite undeserved. Ser-
mons worthy of respect will continue to be respected
even by those who now conceive them as having no
place in the worship of God. But the very desire for

Tfie Conciliation of the Alienated. 55

knowledge and direction makes the want or the in-
efficiency of the sermon a thing intolerable to the
thoughtful working man. To meet his needs it must
change its character and enlarge its range, must not
fear to deal with the central questions of religion, to
re-state and re-discuss the highest mysteries of Chris-
tianity, to handle the criticism and theology of the
Scriptures, to reason concerning Christian ethics, and
apply them to all the problems and occasions of life.
There is nothing the pulpit so much needs as courage,
both in its mode of handling things and in its choice
of the things it handles; there ought to be nothing too
high or too abstruse, too critical or too philosophical
for it, any more than too plain or too practical. It
may be that want of courage is only another term for
want of capacity; but whichever name be applied
to the defect, it is one that every energy should be
strained to repair and remove. The potentialities
of the pulpit are incalculable; hardly any limit could
be set to what it might accomplish. The whole
realm of thought and feeling, truth and duty, history
and life, art and literature, knowledge and action lies
before it; crowds of anxious, expectant, perplexed,
thoughtful men and women wait for its words. The
mysteries that most appeal to the imagination, the
history that most moves the heart, the hopes that
most uplift, the fears that most abase, the motives
that persuade the will, and the ideals that control the
conscience are at its command, ready to be used as
means to its ends and instruments of its power.
What it needs is men; if the Church could find men
equal to its opportunity it would possess and govern

66 Religion in History,

the mind of England, possibly most of all the minds
of its working men.

(2) Ihe alienated life must be touched and
changed. Carlyle long ago preached this gospel:
*'Soul isl indled only by soul. To Heach' religion,
the first thing needful, and also the last and the
only thing, is the finding of a man who has religion. "
And what is the Church but a nursery for the making
of such men? But once they are made they must
be distributed, the living soul must come face to face
with the soul it has to quicken. And here much may
be expected from colonies of the brave and good
in our East Ends, and in all the districts, urban,
suburban, and rural, where our workers congregate ;
but hitherto these have been composed mainly of
young men, and we must, by ceaseless help and re-
plenishment, take care that their surroundings do not
prove stronger than they. There is no civilizing or
Christianizing power like that of a good person, and
the good person is most needed where the good are
few. A thoughtful and observant medical officer once
said to me, ^ ' A single cleanly family raises the stand-
ard of cleanliness in a whole tenement, and I have
seen the removal of one attended by deterioration all
round." And what is true of outward is true of in-
ward cleanliness. The presence of the morally healthy
acts as a kind of moral deodorizer, and his absence
is the despair of the worker in the slums. If, then,
the moral and religious colony is to accomplish any-
thing, it must be carried out on a vaster scale than
has yet been dreamed of The churches must not
fear to give of their noblest and their best, who cer-

The Conciliation of the Alienated. 57

tainly will not themselves refuse to be given, to the
service of the brothers who live by labour.

(3) But the place that most needs our care is
the home where the alienated life is nursed and
formed. We speak of the working man, and we forget
his wife; but his wife is a more potent factor in his
improvement or deterioration than he is himself. She
suffers more in the struggle for life than he does,
has fewer elements of change and brightness in her
life, and readily falls into a hopeless drudge, unable
to cheer, because incapable of cheerfulness. Yet
she is more susceptible of cheer from her sister
woman than her husband from his brother man.
Here is a field where splendid work may be done.
The poor have had more than enough of parochial
charities, and congregational visitors, and ofl&cious
distributors of tracts which are seldom read. What
they need is an army of good motherly or sisterly
women, who will never be prying or condescending,
but only patient and neighbourly, and who will stay
in and cook the husband's dinner, or tend a fractious
child, or even tidy up the room while the mother
escapes from the hated four walls to breathe a fresher
air and see a larger world. If we could only create
the happier and more wholesome home, the battle
were as good as won.

CHAPTER IX.

URGENCY OP THE NEED.

1. What we have called the reconciliation of
the working classes is a matter of vital necessity
both to themselves, the State, and the Churches.
We live in the generation that has witnessed the
transit of power, and this means that for the battle
to maintain our place and fulfil our function in the
history of humanity we have called out our last
reserves. The evils of no past sovereignty were
irremediable, for behind the reigning house or class
we had reserves vaster than the army in the field.
When the king was supreme, we had an aristocracy
often able, and always willing, to correct his blunders
and save us from the results. When the aristocracy
governed, we had the middle class, watchful, ex-
pectant, capable, eager to embody in legislation
their larger and more noble conception of the State.
When the middle class had exhausted their energies
and realized their ideals, we had the people waiting
the opportunity for the exercise of their still untried
strength. And now their opportunity is come, our
last reserves are summoned to the front, and on
their skill and endurance the issue of the battle will

Urgency of the Need. 59

depend. The moment is critical, for, as all history
testifies, it is more easy to gain power than to exer-
cise it wisely; and our modern democracies are, for
reasons partially stated in Lecture IV., the very
converse of the ancient. The ancient democracies
were all in a sense aristocracies, i.e. they repre-
sented the reign of a dominant order or race. The
demos might be coextensive with the citizens, but
the citizens were not coextensive with the popula-
tion, citizenship being rigorously limited to men of
a given birth and blood. Then, too, the old democ-
racies were municipalities rather than nationalities,
their area was so limited, their politics so simple,
their opportunities for discussion so multitudinous,
their legislative machinery so potent and direct,
that it was not dififtcult for the citizen to master the
mysteries and the method of state-craft. He was
trained in the discussion of political ideas from his
boyhood; the city which was his state lived before
his eyes, its statesmen passed him daily on the street;
his public life was but private life enlarged, and as
he knew himself only through his family, so he con-
ceived his family as only through and for the State.
But our modern democracies are an almost complete
contrast to this, especially in those things that con-
cern the exercise of sovereign power. The causes,
represented by the growth and reign of Christian
ideas, which abolished slavery and serfdom, have
made the modern demos coextensive with the man-
hood of the State. While the State is not a city or
a confederacy of cities, but a series of nationalities,
the people, into whose hands power has passed, are

60 Religion in History,

not a select and homogeneous race, or the citizens
of a small city welded together by pride of blood,
local ambitions and jealousies, and the need of hold-
ing down a multitude of helots whose labour is
necessary to their very being; but they are a mixed
and heterogeneous multitude, as it were the helots
rather than the citizens, not gathered into a single
centre, but distributed through many provinces,
each with a centre of its own, often more conscious
of the many conflicting interests which divide them
than of the few great common interests which
unite.

Now, it is impossible to conceive anything more
critical than the recognized and conscious sover-
eignty of a people so constituted and so placed, one
more capable of infinite good or incalculable ill.
And the earliest moments in the use of power must
always be the most critical, for they are the formative
moments. In the modern as in the ancient world
there will be opportunity enough for a Cleon to attempt
to lead by flattering the vanity or the foibles or the
greed of the many; or for an Aristophanes to at-
tempt by savage satire of Cleon or brutal caricature
of Socrates to befool the many and secure power to
the few. But, happily, there is always a limit to
the influence of the demagogue. "^ ^aether he be an
avowed man of the people or a oisguised oligarch,
and the limit is soon reached and rarely tran.
scendcd. The more real danger lies in the tenden-
cies common to human nature, especially the ten-
dency to use power to gratify narrow interests, or
sectional passions, or immediate and selfish needs.

Urgency of the Need. 61

Those tendencies have governed much of the legis-
lation of the past, but their action was less injurious
when they operated through a single class or
through several but mutually qualifying classes than
they would be if they worked in and through the
collective people. We are face to face, then, with
what we may truly call the supreme moment of our
history. It is the people that now rule, and unless
God live in and rule through the people, the end of
all our struggles, the goal of all our boasted pro-
gress, will be chaos, — and chaos is death.

2. The sovereign people, then, ought not to be
sovereignless; but their only possible sovereign is
the God who is Lord of the conscience. His is the
only voice that can still the noise of the passions and
the tumult of the interests. This does not mean that
His sovereignty is needed to be, as it were, a bit and
bridle by which they can be ridden or driven with
greater ease; nor does it mean that its real or ex-
clusive organ is a hierarchy or an organized clergy
or official priesthood; but it does mean that the be-
lief in an Infinite Majesty who reigns over all peo-
ples and all persons, and to whom all are, now and
eternally, responsible, needs to be worked into the
very substance of the commonwealth and made, as
it were, its common soul. And this work lies upon
the Church as an imperative duty.

Without the '^ common people" who heard its
Founder and Head gladly, it is depotentiated and
impoverished. Its wealth lies in the souls it loves
and teaches to love. Its function is to enrich their
time with the ideals of eternity. And churches

62 Religion in History.

composed exclusively of rich or poor mean the reign
of the conditions and categories of time within the
realm of the Eternal. A labour church is a creation
more of despair than of hope, an attempt, as it were,
to sanctify an evil rather than to cure it. The
terms ^'Master" and ^'Servant," ''Capital" and
''Labour" denote relations the Church ought not to
know, and may not recognize, and to embody such
distinctions in her very name is but to run up the
flag of surrender. She carries for all mankind the
noblest inheritance of our race, the wealth of divine
love and grace, of human faith and hope and devo-
tion, of saintly memory and heroic achievement,
and only as she makes the inheritance she carries
the possession of the common people, does she fulfil
the end for which she was created.

RELIGION IN HISTORY

" We treat God with irremrmce by banishing Mm from our
thoughts, not by referring to His will on slight occasions. His
is not the finite authority or intelligence which cannot he trou-
bled with small things. There is nothing so small hut that we
may honour God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him
by taking it into our own hands; and what is true of the
Deity is equally true of His Revelation. We use it most rever-
ently when most habitually; our insolence is in ever acting
without reference to it, our true honouring of it is in its uni-
versal application,'' — Ruskin, "Seven Lamps of Architecture,"
Introduction.

" To those who act on what they knowy more shall be re-
vealed; and thus, if any man will do His willy he shall know
the doctrine whether it be of God. Any man, not the man
who has most means of knoioing, who has the subtlest brains,
or sits under the most orthodox preacher, or has his library
fullest of most orthodox hooks, — hut the man who strives to
know, who takes God at His word, and sets himself to dig up
the heavenly rnystery, roots and all, before sunset, and the
night come, when no m,an can work. Beside such a man,
God stands in more and more visible presence as he toils, and
teaches him that which no preacher can teach — no earthly
authority gainsay. By such a man the preacher must himself
be judged. — Ruskin, "Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds,"
" On the Old Road," ii. §§ 201, 202.

" We do not at all know everything which we have Luther
and the Reformation in general to thank for. We have become
free from the fetters of spiritual narrowness, we have, because
of our progressive culture, become capable of returning to the
source and apprehending Christianity in its purity. We have
regained the courage to stand with firm feet on God's own
earth, and to feel within us our human nature God-endowed.
Let S2nritual culture continue ever to advance, let the natural
scietices grow ever broader and deeper, and the human spirit
enlarge itself as it will, — yet beyond the majesty and moral
culture, which shines and lightens in the Gospels, it will not
advance."— QqqVuq, <« Eckermann's Gesprache," Dritter Th.,
pp. 372-373.

LECTURE I.

WHAT IS RELIGION ?

Clear ideas are always necessary to intelligent
discussion; but clear ideas are very hard to get,
especially about the most familiar things. As a rule,
what everybody is thought to know, nobody is found
to understand. Now religion is one of the most
familiar of things. We think, or hear, or speak, or
read about it every day. Many are instructed in it
every week of their lives. Yet were the question,
What is religion? suddenly submitted to every man
here, can you conceive what precisely would be the
character of the answers? It is hardly too much to
say that the variety, the contradictions, the confusion,
the bewilderment, would be something wonderful,
and most wonderful in the case of the men who
thought that they understood the matter best and
were quite prepared to put the perverted intelligence
of the world right. To go to church, to go to chapel,
to do Sunday School work, to read the Bible, to hold
the faith of a given church, to observe its customs, to
confess to the priest, to respect the parson, to agree
with the minister, to believe in another world which
has no concern with this, to be good, to do good, to

66 Religion in History.

love the society of good people — these, and such-like,
might probably be found among the definitions.

Now whether these do, or do not, fairly represent
current ideas, one thing, and one thing only, is meant
to be here perceived, this, viz. , that if we start with
different ideas as to what the term religion means,
we shall never understand each other's meaning or
mind, never at any point of the reasoning become
intelligible to each other, and so shall never by any
possibility be able to reach a common agreement.
Men may use the same word to express not only un-
like, but opposite ideas, and if language be so em-
ployed it becomes a vehicle or means of hiding, not
of communicating thought. Speech so used can
only confuse and bewilder the judgment. Hence it
is necessary at the outset of the discussion that
we clearly and distinctly understand what the term
'^Religion" means. If we can do this, much is
gained. You may not agree with my meaning or
my mind, but at least you will be in a position to
understand my arguments and judge the cogency or
otherwise of any train and process of reasoning. In
the world of thought, mischief is caused more by
confusion than by any other cause. Not otherwise
than by clear thinking can man reason to any pur-
pose or reach any clear and sound conclusion.

Now I must begin by frankly bespeaking your
patience. It is a hard matter to make intelligible
abstract and abstruse things. You are many of
you men accustomed to manual toil; I am a man
accustomed to mental toil. I should be very much
astonished and bewildered at the simplest processes

What is Religion ? 67

of your daily work. You would have need to be
patient in explaining the matter to me; and I often
might be so stupid as not to understand the veriest
rudiments of your craft. And so you may not at
once see the issues and modes of a mental craft, that
has occupied a man for many years more hours a day
than any trades-union would allow him to work — has
kept him hard at it in the early morning, at noon,
and at night, until his subject may have become so
much a matter of daily expression and association to
him that he is unable really to estimate the diflBculty
of comprehension on the part of others not accus-
tomed to the same methods and the same tfiemes.
Pardon me, then, if, to-night in particular, I occa-
sionally become somewhat abstruse, and not as lucid
as you would like me to be; but as we are concerned
this night with the principles that underlie our
whole argument, I must ask you to labour strenu-
ously to comprehend these, that the later and more
familiar discussions may have their proper place and
force.

Our question then is, ''What is religion?" Now
it is best to begin by clearing our minds. You know
Dr. Johnson's advice, "Clear your mind of cant."
Now the cant it is needful to clear our minds of is
the confused thought that may stand in the way of
clear comprehension. To this end let us at once
note this — the relation of the churches to religion,
of religion to the churches. Now, many people,
perhaps most people, look at religion through the

68 Religion in History.

churches, and cannot understand it apart from them.
To many, church is religion, and religion is church.
Religion is the Church's concern. What it does is
the religious. What it does not do is secular, or
profane, or outside religion. What it condemns is
irreligious. Well, many, so thinking, set down all
the good religion has done to the churches; while
others, so thinking, set down all the evil the churches
have done to religion. Books have been written,
speeches are daily made, to show how mischievous
the action of the churches has been; and, therefore,
how mischievous the action of religion. The churches
have often been on the side of the rich and against
the poor; the churches have often been on the side
of tyranny and against freedom; the churches have
often repressed liberty of thought, and hindered
free discussion; the churches have often produced
churchmen who have been fond of place, fond of
power, fond of wealth. And all these things have
been set down to the discredit of religion — the sins
of the churches been made its sins, the evil of the
churches its evil. Now, I mean to reverse that
process, and look at the churches through religion,
not at religion through the churches. They exist
for it; it does not exist for them; they are to be
judged as they are faithful to it ; it is not to be con-
demned because they are unfaithful to their own
great purpose and own great mission. Often the
hardest obstacle to the realization of religion has
been a church. An unfaithful servant may ruin a
master; a church unfaithful may discredit religion.
The great point, therefore, is to find what relation

What is Religion ? 69

exists between these, that the one may be rightly
conceived in its ideal perfection, and the other rightly
judged in its historical sin or imperfection.

Let me illustrate what I mean. In Europe you
have various types of polities. There is the impe-
rial, absolute as in Russia; modified as in Austria,
elective as in Germany. Then you have the monar-
chical running through various degrees; personal as
in Prussia, constitutional as in Italy, and constitu-
tional and limited — very limited indeed — as in Eng-
land. Then you have the republican, young as in
France, centuries old as in Switzerland. Now do
you identify these polities with the peoples that
dwell under them? or do you distinguish the two,
studying the polities and judging them in relation to
the peoples? The polities that do most to maintain
law and order and to distribute impartial justice,
that really represent the people, that help the just
distribution of capital and wealth, that do most to
promote the happiness, the progress, the freedom,
of their peoples, are judged by you to be good; but
the polities that fail to secure these things are judged
by you to be bad, and bad in proportion to their
failure. You do not judge the people through the
polity; but you judge the polity through the people.
If the polity be bad you do not pronounce condem-
nation on the people, but you pity them; you are
gentle to them in proportion as the system from
which they suffer is severe. Now as polities stand
related to peoples, churches stand related to reli-
gion. The best polity is the polity that best secures
highest material and social welfare; the best church

70 Religion in History.

is the church that secures most perfect realization
for the ideal and spiritual — that is, the eternal, con-
tents of religion. That polity which fails to do jus-
tice to the ideal of man is bad. That church which
fails to do justice to the ideal of religion is not good.
But you will perceive that we have fixed an im-
portant principle. Religion is not to be looked at
or judged simply from the churches. The churches
are to be judged by religion. Again I say, they exist
for it; it does not exist for them. They are good as
they realize it; bad as they fail in realization. But
that involves two points; first the utter futility
and folly of condemning religion through and be-
cause of the churches; the utter injustice of identify-
ing it with their imperfections and evils, or even
holding it responsible for them. If a polity wrongs a
people, depraves and hurts it, you don't declare that
all government ought to cease; nay, you say. Let a
government be created that shall do justice to the
people, and help it to realize all the best possibilities
within it, the whole ideal of society and of man it
may contain. So, if you find imperfections in
churches, do not use them as occasions to condemn
religion; use religion as a law or standard to condemn
these imperfections, and insist that perfect churches
alone can do justice to perfect religion. Then here
is the next and second point: you must have a posi-
tive idea of religion before you can have a standard
by which to judge the churches. The standard by
which you judge a polity is the supreme good of the
people. It depends upon your idea of the people's
good how you judge the polity. But it is only a

What is Religion? 71

very recently recognized principle, this of the happi-
ness of the people as supreme good. Old maxims
were maxims like these: whose the region, his the
religion; the divine right of the king to rule, the
divine duty of the people to obey, so making people
exist for king, not king for people. We now under-
stand, thanks to agencies which will be discussed
later, that the grand purpose of all government is to
promote the highest weal of the people; that being
reached, we can easily by due discussion determine
the best form of polity and institution. So when we
have got at the idea of religion we shall be able to
determine in what way, by what methods, according
to what polity, along what lines, churches must serve
religion in order that they may serve the cause of
God and of man.

II.

We have got then the length of seeing this point:
that the churches exist for religion, and are to be
judged purely by their capability or power of realiz-
ing it. It is not to be held responsible for their
imperfections; nay, these are to be judged by its
perfection. But that only, as we see, throws us back
upon the question with which we started — What is
religion? But now, if we are to answer that, we
must do so not only in a clear way, but in a large
way; for mark! — man is a religious being. Look
to the north and south, the east and west, and what
do you see? religions. Wherever you turn — man;
wherever man — religion. ' ' No, " says some very wise
person, '' not at all; there are low tribes, far down

12 "Religion in History.

in the scale, found without any religious customs,
without any religious ideas; religion is not uni-
versal. " Well, I will not discuss the matter, but will
only say this: the greatest ethnographers, — that is,
the men who have most extensively studied the
customs, the manners, the beliefs of men, — are on my
side in affirming the opposite. But I do not stand
on that. If you insist on it, let us grant that there
are low tribes without religion. What then? Why
this: to be without it is to be fallen into utter
savagery; to be without it is to have the sure and
indelible mark of lost manhood and utter barbarism.
A great and distinguished thinker, Schelling, wrote
a great book, which started from this principle: —
Man in the very act of founding society realizes
religion; without religion there is no society; at its
root, in all its customs, throughout all its laws,
religion runs; and society is only where religion has
begun to be. And that is a simple, certain fact. No
man who knows ethnography, sociology, or whatever
he may call the science which deals with the origins
of institutions and civilization, will question it for a
moment. Society and religion, as it were, begin to
be together. Man cannot become a social, and
therefore a civilized, being untilhe has a religion.

But now that has brought us to this point — that
religion, since as old and as universal as man, is
natural to him. It does not need a miracle to create
it; rather this may be said: its cessation would re-
quire a miracle, would need the de-rationalizing, or,
if you like, the de-naturalizing, of man. That might,
along a great variety of lines, be proved io you. It

What is Religion ? 73

would not be so very difficult of proof either were
time only granted; but this meanwhile may be said:
So consonant are religious ideas with man's nature
that that nature has always been at its best, whether
in the individual or in the nation, when the religious
idea was purest and when the religious idea was
strongest. That is a matter capable of historical
proof, absolutely incapable of historical disproof.
Peoples that have been great in art have been great,
for what reasons? To the Greeks, the masters in
this region of all time, art was religious — the
temple, the sculpture that glorified the god, de-
clared the excellency of religion. Peoples, too,
that have been great in literature have been great
through their religious ideas. Look at the Jews.
They were at the largest when at home a small
people — a very little handful; they were rude, they
were unlettered in a sense, yet they created what,
from the literary point of view, must be called the
most extraordinary literature in the world. There
is in India a wonderful literature, vast, immense;
it begins with the hymns of the Rig Yeda, about,
fourteen hundred years before Christ, and comes
down through the great Epics and Law Books and
Philosophers to the Puranas, works almost of oui
own day. And what marks it? Religious ideas,
and here as elsewhere, the purer and sublimer the
religious idea, the finer and nobler the literatures
only when it is lost in mythical and idolatrous
extravagance does the literature become foolish and
depraved. The Chinese have a great literature.
What marks it? It is the exposition of the religion

74 Beligion in History.

and the rule by which they seek to live. The Greeks,
too, at their highest, noblest moment: what sort of a
literature did they make? — what marks it? — religious
ideas, and those very ideas were the breath of life to
the men who vanquished Persia and made the drama
and the philosophy of Greece. But it is not matter
of art and of literature only. Take politics, the
collective life, the freedom, the ideals which have
been realized in all the higher and nobler forms of
collective and social being, whence have they come?
From religion; wherever there has been highest
order, wherever there has been noblest freedom, wher-
ever there has been a patriotism that did not fear to
die and did not care to live, save in so far as it lived
for fatherland and faith, there has also been as the
factor and inspiration of all the rest, the reign of
great religious ideas. It is a universal law. Man
at his best, man at his noblest, has been so through
the action and by the help of religious ideas.

We see, then, that religion is something natural;
that religious ideas are inseparable from our kind,
that human nature is at its best when most religious.
Now what does a wise man do when he stands face
to face with facts of this sort? Does he begin a
polemic against the absurdity of all religious ideas
because of the false forms into which some have
been forced, and the base uses to which they have
been turned? No; when he stands face to face
with this natural universalism, he asks. Whence
are our common and imperishable religious ideas?
Why do they everywhere come to be? Why has
man Sx history been what he has been? Why has

What is Religion ? 75

he thought as he has thought? These are necessary
questions; these are scientific questions. It is not
enough to say, certain orders of ideas are incredible.
There stands behind us man in his history, and the
whole course of that history illustrates man's invaria-
ble, uniform, absolutely universal tendency to pro-
duce, or generate if you like, or evolve religious
ideas, and to be, in the whole of his institutions and
in all his social order, governed and determined by
them. Why? that is the point — why? He only
who is able to enter into the meaning of that why,
and get a reason, has come within glimpse of under-
standing the question — What is religion; for what
it is depends in great part upon why it is.

Now I am not going to pause very long on this
matter — the why — though I would it were possible
to do so. I stand at a point where the passion and
studies of my lifetime all converge; such energy as
belongs to me having through years, and anxious and
laborious days, been directed to the study and com-
prehension of some of the great problems that here
arise. And when I see the shallow way in which
many a man who thinks himself wise — wise from
reading current magazines or newspapers — talks
about matters of this kind, I feel,— if he could only
be made to pass through twenty years of hard work
along given lines, he would get to know enough of
the matter he talked about to keep him at least a
more modest man. But that is a matter only by
the way. There are two great questions that arise
out of that ^'why is religion?"— the one philosophi
cal, the other historical. The philosophical question

76 Religion in History.

asks the reason as to the existence, as to the
coming into being, and as to the growth in history of
religious ideas and religious customs; and seeking
this reason, it comes to see, what all history makes
manifest, that the production and growth of these
ideas are inseparable from the genesis and evolution
of the reasonable nature of man. For what is his-
tory? It is a great attempt to realize man's inmost
mind. It is but the externalization of what lay
contained in him and his spirit. You cannot find
that anything comes into being without a reason.
You create institutions; this town is full of them:
infirmaries, societies, unions — all manner of institu-
tions; what are they? The realization of ideas,
created by ideas, by thoughts which imperiously de-
manded of man that he should so embody them.
And it is the function of the philosophic historian,
the man of science in the field of religion, to get by
analysis at the whole history of the genesis of the
ideas that create our religious institutions. He is
not concerned simply about how they are, he asks
why they are, and traces them back into man, where
mind acts and dwells. But what is so native and
necessary to man is no matter of chance or accident;
it is there of purpose; it was built into his nature by
his Maker. And what the Creator thus purposed
appears everywhere in and with the creature.

So much for the philosophical question, but the
historical is quite as vital. It is a comparative one,
concerned with all the religions of man. It puts the
actual, extant, existing religions together, and com-
pares them; and, comparing them, proceeds on the

What is Religion ? *l*i

same scientific principle that comparative anatomy
recognizes when it sees begin in the leaf the struct-
ural plan or purpose which finds its culmination in
the glorious form and moving image of man. And
so you find running through the religions a struct-
ural principle. Where that principle stands highest,
in its greatest perfection, there and there only have
you a perfect religion.

III.

Now you see that this second discussion has carried
us beyond the principle which was the conclusion or
deduction from our first. Since man is unable to
escape from religion, that which stands highest and
is the best has most claim on his acceptance. Mark
this — the people that has conceived the best idea of
a commonwealth is the people farthest on the way to
its realization, and the people that has the most per-
fect or the ideal religion has the greatest, the human-
est, the wealthiest of all possessions, for it is the
condition of every other ideal good. But there is
another point involved in this second discussion. Re-
ligion is no affair of the churches. They did not
create it. It created them. It is a great fact of
nature, rooted in nature, growing out of nature, in-
dissolubly connected with the whole system of nature
or order to which man belongs. It is impossible for
man to be, and yet to be without religion — observe, I
say man, not men. Now, so much being determined by
our two discussions, we are only the more completely
and absolutely thrown back on our old question-

78 Religion in History.

What is religion, this universal, this natural, this in-
alienable possession of man? We must get a large
idea; and we must get a clear idea. Now perhaps
the best way for me to proceed in attempting to an-
swer this question will be by looking at the opinions
of some great men concerning it, and in order to be
perfectly fair and impartial it will be best to drop
theologians out of account. Theologians may be
dangerous: they may be, as it were, counsel retained
for the defence. Well, we will ask, Are there any
philosophers who can help us? Yes, many, for it is
a mark of our best modern philosophers that they feel
that they must face and answer this question — why
is religion? and what is it? You know the old
deist who lived last century was a very remarkable
man. He thought he could make what he called a
religion of nature; but then you see he made that
religion out of his own nature; and his nature was
not Nature's nature, but one that had been largely
educated, civilized, refined, in a word. Christianized.
As a result his religion was a purely ideal thing, a
creation of his own consciousness, which had in its
turn long passed out of a state of nature, and there-
fore could not make a natural in the sense of a
primitive or aboriginal thing; but what we want
from the philosopher is not an ideal construction of
that kind. We want to know what religion is, why
it is universal, and what function it has to fulfil in
the life of the individual and of the race.

Now there are two points of view from which the
question may be discussed — the subjective and the
objective, or religion conceived through man and

What is Religion ? 79

religion in relation to man. We begin with the sub-
jective, or more philosophical, for the function of a
philosopher is this: — He seeks to explain what is or
what comes to be through the nature of man, through
the reason or the subjective personal capabilities of
men. A pliilosopher is a lover of wisdom, and he
goes in search of his wisdom not into the world with-
out, but into the world within. But now it may as-
tonish you — yet it is true — if I say that all knowledge
of the world without is built on or involves a philoso-
phy of the world within; and every natural science
implies a given philosophy of knowledge and is de-
termined to be what it is, not by its own processes,
not by its imagined results, but entirely and abso-
lutely by the relation in which it stands to thought,
to knowledge, and therefore to the science concerned
with what knows. Well, then, we will ask these
philosophers to help us, and we shall find them so
explaining religion that they fall into three classes —
those who have tried to explain it through the intel-
lect; those who have tried to explain it through the
feelings; and those who have tried to explain it
through the conscience.

First, then, those who have tried to explain it
through the intellect; and three writers come here.
One man says it is a matter of belief — altogether of
belief, and not at all of reason. Jacobi, a distin-
guished German, said, ^'I believe; by my faith I am
a Christian; by my reason I am a heathen." Now
that man's theory is worth nothing, and I will tell
you why. Any theory that leaves a division in a
man's own soul is false. If religion be a mere

80 Religion in History.

matter of faith, unable to bear the light of reason, it
is untrue to the nature the Creator gave the man.
The second theory said, it is a matter of intuition;
men, without proof direct, by action of intuitive
reason, see the truths that constitute religion. This
was Schelling's view, but he erred, and for this reason:
a man's intuition may be sufficient for himself, but if
made authoritative for other men, it is only dog-
matism; it is his own affirmation of what he knows
made to have universal validity. The third writer
is Hegel. He said, ' ^ Religion is a matter of thought,
of spirit." Now Hegel stood in this position: —
People say that we have knowledge of phenomena.
They forget that knowledge is not phenomenal.
Phenomena are what appear. Take away the sub-
ject to whom they appear, and where are your
phenomena? Seek to find a world where there is
no thought, and you will never find any world at all.
You can never reach a point where thought is not.
Thought ever is the principle alike of the intelligence
and the intelligible; without it man cannot interpret
nature, nor could nature be interpreted. Hence it is
implied in all things scientific, for the scientific is
simply the intelligible. And the thought which
makes science makes also experience possible; and
thence comes this very vast but most valid deduction:
as behind all experience thought lies, so at the root
of the universe thought is. What is necessary to
explain me, is necessary to explain nature. I am
thought, and since phenomena can be only as
thought is, then the reason or consciousness which
is the condition of their existence, cannot be itself

What is Religion ? 81

one of them. Nature, then, can be only as thought
makes nature, underlies it, and builds it into an
order or system. And that is apparent, for you can
interpret nature only where you can take thought
out of it, that is, only where you find the thought
that is intelligible to your intelligence. There is
not a language on earth that is not capable of
allowing translation into any other language. This
capability of being translated is the distinction
between language and gibberish. You can take
thought out of Greek and put it into English;
you can take thought out of English and put it into
Sanskrit; you can take thought out of Sanskrit and
translate it into all the languages man has ever
spoken. But what is the necessary condition?
That thought be in the language. Where there is
no thought, there can be no translation, nor can there
be any language. There must be reason within in
order that reason may be got out; and what is true
of language is true of nature. Man could not get
any natural science, could not get any knowledge of
nature, unless nature were the great speech, the great
language, an articulate and definite expression of
thought. And as thought is the very medium in
which reason lives and moves, religion as something
rational has to do with thought, is our thought of
the ultimate Being or Reason, and of our relation to
Him. It is a matter of the Spirit within us and
its relation to the Spirit without us; it is the thought
wherein man, the individual, places himself in rela-
tion to the universal — the intelligence in me to the
intelligence that underlies all things.

82 Religion in History.

But now we come to the second class of explana-
tions. ' ' Feeling, " said the only theologian to whom
I shall here allude, though he was quite as much a
philosopher as any member of the band, ^ ' Feeling is
the source of religion, a feeling of dependence.''
Now, you will note, a feeling of dependence is a
thought of dependence. I cannot feel that I depend
on anything or any one unless I think of myself as
dependent. Without thought of the Independent
upon whom the dependent self depends, no feeling
of dependence is possible. Thought is contained
in feeling. But another and specifically English
thinker, with a similar idea, but as it were differently
complexioned, has attempted to reconcile science and
religion on the basis that worship, which is the
essential element in religion, is feeling, the feeling
of admiration. To admire is to worship; to worship
is to be religious. But, now, you cannot have
admiration unless you have found something admir-
able; and if you have found something admirable,
you have conceived it, you have thought it; you
cannot have admiration without thought. Lastly, in
this connexion, there comes that intellectually wise
man, Mr. Herbert Spencer, who says, ^' Religion is a
feeling, a feeling of wonder, a feeling of wonder in the
presence of the Unknown." Now I don't wonder at
his thinking wonder the root and essence of religion.
I would, when his first principles are considered, have
wondered exceedingly had he thought otherwise.
It would be altogether inexplicable were a man to
think that any other emotion whatever could be
excited by the great Unknown. It is no extra-

What is Religion ? 83

ordinary thing that a man who translates the
Unknown by force, persistent force, should think
that wonder was the one fit feeling, the feeling in any
way proper to religion, that could arise in its presence.
But you see ho does not get his feeling till he has
got his thought; you must conceive that the Un-
known is before you can wonder at it. Yet the
most wonderful thing of all is his theory as to
the historical genesis of the feeling. He derives
the feeling after the supersensible, after the divine
— whence? — out of visions, seen in sleep, ghosts
that have appeared in what we can only describe
as the nightmares of a benighted and over-fed
savage. Now if aught shows how men build
theory without facing fact, it is a theory of this
sort. There is not a historical religion in the
whole world, save one, the Egyptian, that lends
countenance to it, and that one, rightly understood,
does not. All the rest, in China, India, through all
Asia, in Europe, in Africa, with the one exception I
have just named, and in America, all absolutely rise
up and refuse to own it. The surprising thing, in-
deed, is that a man claiming to be a sociologist should
seek to explain religion by phenomena that no
historical religion, with the proverbial exception
which proves the rule, recognizes as of primary
importance.

Well, let us dismiss feeling as by itself, in any
sense or degree, an adequate explanation of either
the origin or nature of religion. All feeling means
thought; you cannot feel unless you think; and
you feel as you think. Then there is the next class

84 Religion in History,

of theories; and of these I will only mention two.
One of them makes conscience the great mother ot
religion; or, religion is our duty apprehended as a
Divine command. That is Kant's view; and the
second is like unto it, only expressing by the outer
sign the inward source — its author being the dis-
tinguished Englishman, Matthew Arnold. He de-
scribes religion as morality touched by emotion.
But mark this: — You cannot have morality without
thought. Thought underlies all, and is generic,
while the others are only specific. Now religion is
thought; it is feeling; it is action. It is not one
of these. Yet it is all these, and something more.
Man thinks; as he thinks, he feels, as he thinks and
feels, he acts. Thought is the parent, determinative
of feeling; feeling is the source of the motive which
impels to act — that is, is the occasion of action, not
its cause.

Well, when we analyze this subjective definition,
what do we find? That religion is, on the side of
the person, his thought of the cause, or order, or
highest law under which he stands, and the way in
which he feels and acts towards him or it. That is
a very wide definition. We shall fill it up by and
by. But I will indicate to you why it is so wide.
It is wide for this reason: that it must comprehend
all forms of religious expression or life that we may
discover to exist. These have wonderful affinities.
There is an African bending down before a fetish.
He offers it a bribe; or perhaps he tries the opposite
policy and castigates it- — why? He thinks it can
have influence for good or for evil on his life, and

What is Religion ? 85

so he seeks to secure the good and prevent the evil.
There, again, is John Stuart Mill. He says, speak-
ing of the woman who became his wife: ''Her
memory became to me a religion, and her approba-
tion the standard by which, summing up as it did all
worthiness, I endeavour to regulate my life." So,
the thought, the memory, and imagined approbation
of his wife, became a religion. It was the religion
by which he ordered his life. In both there is a
given notion or conception of the position occupied
and the influence exercised, in the one case, by a
thing, which is yet conceived to be so alive as to be
susceptible to flattery or abuse, in the other, by a dead
woman, who yet lives as a moral ideal; and there
results, on the one hand, the emotion here of fear,
there of love, while, on the other hand, there is action,
the sort of action the spirit which is in the thing or
the woman who is idealized, is supposed to approve.
Then there is the Chinaman who has great ideas of
his ancestors, the ancestral spirits. He has a large
calendar of saints, and a great hall where the sages
of the past stand. He believes that all his people
constitute a mighty organic whole, and he propitiates
the spirits of the dead that he may live a happy and
a dutiful life. It is a long cry from China to France;
yetComte's notion of the worship of humanity, with
its sages and calendar of saints, with much of its
outward pomp and worship, is but the ancient
Chinese thought amplified by baptism into the rites
and associations of the Catholic Church. Our wide
notion of religion enables us to comprehend under it
systems as distant and dissimilar as these.

86 Religion in History.

IV.

Now, when we have got a notion of religion on
the subjective side, we want another of it on the
objective; and here I must pray your simple atten-
tion.

1. Looking, then, at religion on the objective
side, we may say, that the character of its highest
conception — i.e. the course or order or highest law
under which man conceives himself to stand —
determines its nature and quality; or, in other words,
the highest conception which a religion possesses
determines its moral character. A bad god can
never have a good religion. As is the deity, such
must the faith that is built on him be. Find out
then the character of the deity, and you find out the
character of the religion. In other words, discover
the quality of a man's highest thought, and you
discover the character and quality of the principles
that regulate his whole life. That is absolutely true.
You may take it of religion; you may take it of
any intellectual system. Suppose, for example, that
a man declares force to be the ultimate, or the only
known ultimate of ultimates, how would it affect his
notion of life and the law that governs conduct?
First, I would ask you to consider whence the man
got his idea of force. If you take mind away, what
is force? A man tells me, '' I know only phenomena."
Let me ask him,, are you then a phenomenon? Are
you? For if you are, then see this: phenomena can
never determine each other; they may co-exist but
they do not produce and govern one another; they

Wliat is Religion ? 87

must be determined or governed by something real.
To speak in English, not in Greek — things can
appear only provided there are those to whom they
appear. Take away the persons for whom are appear-
ances, and where, pray, are the appearances? But,
secondly, without going into metaphysics, let us see
this: if a man postulates force as his highest thought,
the primary or ultimate cause of all that is known,
what follows? Force, according to its very idea,
must exact in every change an equivalent for what
is expended. Wherever force rules, the laws of
mechanics rule; wherever the laws of mechanics rule,
necessity rules; wherever necessity rules, freedom is
absent; wherever freedom is absent, morality is
impossible; wherever morality is impossible, duty is
impossible, and all the varieties of service into which
and through which a noble and ordered society can
be constructed. The highest conception thus deter-
mines the whole order of thought. Now that idea
of force, or the idea of creation that it is thought
to translate, is a very old idea. The ancient Hindus
knew it; and it is only an unconscious translation
of Hindu thought into an ill-fitting English garb.
Thousands of years ago it stood in Sanskrit, clear
and unmistakable, in more scientific form than it has
in English to-day, with results which it is hoped later
lectures may make abundantly manifest.

2. But, if you apply the principle — as is the
highest thought, so is the system — to religion, you
get this conclusion: if you have a God absolutely
righteous, absolutely holy, absolutely loving, all the
system He creates or builds must be intended to

88 Religion in History,

conform to Him. But, simply because he is so
spiritual and moral, its absolute conformity cannot
be secured by any mechanical method. If it were
made conformable by a mechanical method, this
would mean that it was done by necessity, and
necessity destroys morality; and hence we must
qualify and complete our first by a second principle
— the method and medium by which God secures
conformity to Himself must be as moral as He
Himself is: in other words,, while God is the great
determinative idea of religion, religion itself must
always be realized through man. It must, I say,
be realized through man — man free, rational, intelli-
gent. Man stands open to God, God speaks through
man. The pure in soul see and hear Him. Did
you ever hear an oratorio? Who made it? Nature
never made it, nor could she by herself alone take
one step towards its making. Yet nature to the sus-
ceptible ear is full of sounds, soft, loud, low, sweet,
murmuring, gentle, varied, is a very orchestra of
musical, rhythmical sounds; and the master spirit
gathers into his vast imagination all these sounds,
weaves them into splendid harmonies, and pours
them out in the great organ swell, or the vast choir
made of human beings, who yet make music as if
they were one. And so the spirit open to God,
God's true prophet, is the great master spirit telling
the truth of God for the joy and the life of men.

3. But this brings us to a third position. Since
religion, while it comes from God, is yet realized
through men, it is realized for the purposes of God.
It exists for His ends, and for these alone. Now,

What is Religion ? 89

in looking at it as a great agent for carrying out
God's purposes, what do we see? Two things.
First, religion has a power that nothing else has
of making bad men good. There is no power like
it for changing bad into good, the profane into the
holy, the man unreal into the man most true. Science
has not that power; nor has art. Science and art
witness to the elevation of man; they do not cause it.
Religion causes the elevation of man, and creates his
science and his art. Secondly, the progress, the for-
ward movement of the race of man, has been worked
by good persons, persons made good by their religious
ideas. That is an absolute law. Sometimes there
is a sneaking kindness in the heart of a people in a
certain stage of growth or decay for a statesman
who is a brilliant scoundrel, because they conceive
him to be a great, or an astute genius; but, when
the reins of a state are in the hands of a brilliant
scoundrel, the state is being driven right into the
heart of a great evil, or some signal misfortune. It
is only the good person that can create really good
things; and so we may add, wherever you have per-
sons, whether inside or outside Christianity, that lift
men up, and send men forward, you find them per-
sons inspired by religious ideas.

And now we must from these positions draw what
may be termed a provisional conclusion: — Since
the great forward movement of the world is worked
by religious persons, then the higher their thought
the greater and more beneficent their power; the
purer the idea that works in them and through them,
the greater and grander will be the religion. I will

90 Religion in History.

not by comparison run through Brahmanism, through
Buddhism, through Islam, through Egypt, through
Greece; I will not try by comparison to show
where this grandest idea is. But I will ask you to
think of God as the Saviour has taught us to think
of Him, and then see how this bears on action.
He is not only almighty, but He is good, holy, wise,
loving, tender, compassionate, just. Take for ex-
ample: God is a being infinitely good; then He
cannot but hate sin. He cannot but hate all conscious
and voluntary guilt; but if God hates sin, the
religious man, governed by his idea of God, hates
it too, and lives that he may end its reign on earth.
God is righteous. Then if He is righteous. He
cannot but hate wrong; all forms of wrong,
personal, social, industrial, political are hateful to
Him; and the man who is a religious man, governed
by his thought of God, must live to conquer wrong.
God is tender, compassionate; then all sorrow, all
pain, and all anguish are to Him painful, the cause of
deepest pity and regret ; and the religious man lives
to overcome all pain, to subdue it, to minister to it;
to take the outcast, and the lonely, and the feeble,
and the desolate into the protection of his great pity.
God is love; then He loves to see man saved, to see
him happy, to see happiness multiplied below; and
so the religious man is the man who saves men, who
creates happiness, who makes all earth a scene of
wider joy and of grander moral worth. Theology is
the interpretation of the universe through the idea of
God. Religion is the regulation of life through the
same great idea; it is the application to all things,

What is Religion ? 91

and all events, of the great, spiritual, moral, ethical,
rational elements contained in that idea.

Now that description of religion has yet to be
filled up. Historically we must deal with it later.
This lecture alone cannot be either complete or, per-
haps, fully intelligible, for it is only a vestibule, a
hall, introducing you to what is within and behind.
But even as the question now stands, mark this: re-
ligion has become no simple way of merely saving
men; it saves them — but for God's ends, not simply
their own. It is no mere method for giving peace
in death, or a happy immortality; it accomplishes
that by making time happy, and a happy society.
Religion is in order that eternal justice, eternal
holiness, eternal purity, eternal harmony, eternal
love may, through man, be made everywhere to
reign among men. Religion is that the purpose of
God through all the ages may by men be more per-
fectly fulfilled. Where it comes in its perfection, it
comes for ends like these. If religion be this, where
is the man who would not be religious? — and relig-
ious that he may serve God and work the good of
man.

LECTURE II.

THE PLACE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
IN RELIGION.

Last Sunday evening we were mainly concerned
with principles, with an attempt to fix the ideal or
standard for judgment in our discussions on religion.
Without such a standard we cannot be just; can
neither rightly understand, nor fairly estimate,
the action of religion in history. Justice is always
discriminative, and the man who has neither
the patience nor the mind carefully to sift a matter
to the bottom, and distinguish what does, from
what does not, belong to it, is not fit to be a judge.
But the judge needs more than a discerning judg-
ment. He needs an impartial mind and a stand-
ard or norm, both moral and legal, by which to test
or measure the guilt or innocence of the person he
tries. That impartial mind no man can give to
another; he must by earnest repression of passion
and prejudice, by diligent criticism of his own temper
and motives, by cultivation of simple and honest love
of truth, gain it, and keep it for himself. Goethe said,
' ' I can promise to be sincere, but I cannot promise
to be impartial." Controversy may be sincere, but

The Old Testament in Religion. 93

justice must be both sincere and impartial, and with-
out justice no judgment can be just.

Well, then, it is your part to cultivate and to
exercise the impartial mind; it was mine to attempt
to formulate the standard or ideal that should regu-
late judgment; in other words, the law according to
which you were to be asked to judge. That stand-
ard or law was the idea of religion. That its sig-
nificance may be seen, it may be necessary to recall
it, or rather, the steps in the discussion that led up
to and culminated in it.

Note, then, religion is not Church. The churches
are our means, or associations, or agencies, for its
realization, good so far as efficient, bad in the degree
that they are inefficient. If in their teaching they
misinterpret its truths, if in their action they pervert
or misrepresent its spirit, then, however loud their
speech, however high their claims, they are irreligiqus,
mischievous in proportion to their strength. While
religion is no creation of the churches, it is the high-
est concern of man, universal as man, necessary to his
nature, inseparable from it, needing no miracle to
create, in need rather of a miracle to uncreate, it.
Since universal as man, every true science and philo-
sophy of man must seek to understand his religions,
must find their reason or cause in him, and in the
system to which he belongs; must find, too, that
since necessary, the most perfect is the best religion
for man, needed to perfect or complete his nature.
But, then, if religion be universal, by what terms
may it best be expressed or defined? Neither in
those of thought or feeling, or action, but by some

94 Religion in History.

notion large enough to combine the three. So it was
described as man's thought as to the cause or order
or highest law under which he stands, and the way
in which he feels and acts towards him or it. Now,
that definition was wide enough to comprehend the
most distant and dissimilar religions. But, then, it
remains empty till it be supplemented by an objective
analysis. Now, that analysis revealed three points : —
first, that in a religion the supreme idea was the de-
terminative idea, viz., the thought, or conception of
God, or what was made a substitute for Him. A
bad god never had a good religion; as man thinks
of his deity, so is he and so is his religion. But,
secondly, while God was the determinative idea,
religion was realized through men, and conditioned
by the men through whom it was realized. And,
thirdly, while realized by men, it was, as proceeding
from God, a means to His ends. Hence the better
the god, the better the means and the nobler the end.
In short, the religion is the conception or idea of
God applied to the ordering of life, and to the
organization of society. If God be the absolutely
good, supreme in all goodness, then to say that a
religion worthy of Him exists, is just to say that life
will be ordered and society organized according to
the highest possible ideal.

Now, this restatement and summary of the previous
lecture is needed for two reasons in particular — first,
to show what was not intended. There was no at-
tempt at argument for the existence of deity, no
endeavour after a constructive theism. Had I in-
tended to prove the being of God, I should have

The Old Testament in Religion. 95

gone to work in another method, along other lines,
although they might have touched at one point the
argument of last evening. It was the idea of religion,
not the idea of God, that was under discussion; and
so, secondly, the purpose was to explicate and
formulate principles that should regulate judgment
concerning it. We are about to study certain
religions in history ; but we cannot understand their
character and action, lyiless we have a true and
clear idea of what religion is as regards origin and
essence and nature. That idea being formulated,
the principles are expressed that are to be our
standard, our ideal, applied or implied, in all our
after discussions.

1. Our study, then, is the study of certain religions
in history, first that of the Old Testament, and next,
that of the New. Now it ought to be possible to
make that a scientific study, scientific in method,
purpose, spirit, and it will be this, if we are able,
in the brief time at our disposal, to discuss the pre-
cise action of these great religions in the history and
social progress of man. But this is a scientific
study for a pre-eminently practical purpose. It is
the duty of all men to seek for the truth, for only so
is it to be found; but it is no less the interest of every
man to discover what ideas and influences have been,
in the long and varied life of our race, morally
and socially healthful, and what morally and socially
injurious. It must be to the advantage of every
person to know the good; it can be to the profit o['

96 Religion in History.

no one to maintain the pernicious or bad. For here
we are all of us, in our own order and place, workers;
we work by hand or brain, we work at the desk or
in the mill, in the library or in the laboratory. And
what we, as men who work, want to know, is this,
what are the best principles for organizing society,
for helping the creation of personal wellbeing, and
no less for the making of the common weal, and so
for the forming of a true commonwealth. Now,
there is only one way in which we can do this with
any real advantage; we must study man in history,
that we may discover the great forces that have been
the great factors of these results. It is only through
the study of history, scientifically pursued, that we
can find out what ideas and agencies have most
worked for good, have, by their action alike on the
individual and on collective society, best served the
progress, the peace, the wellbeing of the race.

Now, I confess, frankly and at once, that the
truths of the religions of the Old and New Testaments
are to me the ideas that have worked most creatively,
beneficently, and progressively in history, have above
all others brightened and enriched the lot of the men
who toil. But let me also add, you are not to be
asked to believe this on my word, but only so far as
it is by history and argument scientifically proved.
I must ask you to come to the inquiry with free and
unprejudiced minds. You know dogmaticism is not
peculiar to men who believe; it is often more charac-
teristic of men who disbelieve. You may almost
any day find the most arrogant, because the most
ignorant, dogmaticism disguised as scepticism —

The Old Testament in Religion. 97

indeed, I will venture to say you will find more in a
week's issue of the so-called free thought press than
in all the decrees of the council of Trent. All that
I wish is the open mind, not the spirit that looks
into the past only that it may find a weapon with
which to beat the present, but the spirit only anxious
to discover the beliefs that have most worked for
human good. To such a spirit, and only to such, is
a scientific study of religion in history possible.

But what makes a study scientific? It is the
method, the way in which it is done. Scientific
study in the field of history simply means, a skilled
man working in a skilled way for the discovery of the
truth. Nothing is here possible without skill, and
skill gained by long and hard and patient work. No
man can gain it by reading a few books and making
them his authorities. He must go to the fountain-
head himself. That man, and that man alone, can
use the scientific method, who has steeped his spirit
to the very core in the thought and mind of the
people, the times, the literature, the religion, he
seeks to understand and make understood. A man
who knows both to-day and the past finds it diflBcult
to be just to the past, but to the man who knows
only to-day, justice is not at all possible. If you read
the past as you read the columns of a newspaper,
and judge it as you judge our current literature, if
you carry back into it the opinions, associations,
standards, and conflicts of to-day, then you study it
as a prejudiced polemic or a pitiful controversialist,
not as a scientific student. And what will be the
result? Why, you will never get at the truth, you

98 Religion in History.

will arrive instead only at falsehood and error; you
will, besides, do the most frightful injustice to the
past and inflict the utmost injury on your own mind
by persuading it that it is seeking for the truth, when
the object of its search is really material for con-
troversy.

But how, then, does the scientific student proceed?
While enriched with the experience and critical in-
sight centuries have been required to win, he so uses
them as to look at the period he studies as it was
amid its own lights and under its own conditions,
judging it as a root, not as a branch of to-day. He
follows history, watches its way, does not force it to
take his. He does not think that to know a river
you have only to look at it from the city that
stands at its mouth, but he believes that to be
scientific the explorer must ascend to its source,
noting and measuring every rivulet that swells its
waters. But to do this in history, what do you
need? You need imagination, large scholarship,
keen and earnest thought; so that you may, as it
were, live in the past, and make it live its veritable
life in the light of your pwn eyes. You must go
back, say, into the Mosaic age, study Moses, study
Egyi^t, study Mesopotamia, study Phoenicia, their
peoples, their religions, their politics, their social
state, their morals, their wealth and poverty and
commerce; you must study, too, India, ancient
through modern Arabia, the nascent Isles of Greece
through their languages and mythologies; — and then,
when you are full of all this knowledge, with your
imagination quickened and kindled by it, you must

The Old Testament in Religion. 99

construct the world as it then was, and appl}^ to
its peoples and their conduct, not yours, but their
own moral standards and ideas. But you do this,
not simply to know the given period, but to under-
stand its contribution to the common good and
progress of man. You thus compare the peoples,
their laws, customs, religions, and religious ideas,
in order that you may seek to find out where, and
when, and why these laws, customs, religions, and
religious ideas arose; and then, possessed of this
comparative knowledge, you try to measure these
things in their influence on the then present, in
their influence on what was then future, in their
power to afiect for good their own age, and the
ages that were still to come. The man who can go
back and make an old religion live in its real his-
toric being and relations, is the only man capable of
applying the scientific method, either to religion or
history.

2. Now, I am going to ask you to-night to look
at only one religion, though we shall try to do so in
this comparative way, the religion which has as its
peculiar literature the Old Testament. I would it were
here possible to apply to it in fullest measure the
historical and comparative method. But to do so and
bring it and all the religions of its time into com-
parison would take too many evenings from me, and
would too much tax your thought and patience. A
distinguished scholar, whose name is well known
throughout Europe as almost the symbol for scientific
inquiries on this field, said but two months ago to me,
''If you want to prove the truth, the wisdom, the

100 Religion in History.

sober and honest history of the Bible, and the purity
of its religion, place it among the Sacred Books of
the East. In these books there are many grains of
gold, but they are hid in mountains of the most
extraordinary rubbish; and the extraordinary thing
is that it is the rubbish that calls forth the enthusi-
asm and admiration of the peoples that own them.
The sobriety of the Bible, the purity of its spirit, the
elevation and devotion of its tone, make it occupy
an entirely unique place. Placed among the Sacred
Books of the East the contrast would make its truth
only the more stand out. " While, however, it is here
impossible to follow the comparative method, yet let
me ask for the Book itself your earnest, impartial,
careful consideration. To that, indeed, it has an
indefeasible right. Simply as a piece of literature
it is the most marvellous thing in the world. You
call it a Book, but it stands there a literature, the
creation of from twelve to fifteen hundred years, in
fragments, some small, others larger, each fragment
reflecting its own age, the earliest being most dis-
similar and strange to the latest; yet with all its
distance, and all its variety, this Book is so modern,
and stands so near to us, that it may be said to be
of all the books in the world the nearest to our
spirits. It contains, from the literary and moral
points of view, the most remarkable code of ancient
times. It contains the quaintest, most beautiful,
and graphic history. It contains the supreme devo-
tional literature of the world, the literature that
men in their highest moments of religious transport
or of pious meditation have used to express thoughts

'riie Old Testament in Religion. 101

too deep for tears. It contains poetrj^ that, simply
as poetry, stands foremost in its own order, full of a
great sense of mystery, full of an awful sense of suf-
fering, pierced and transformed by a glorious sense
of God. It possesses more than all a conception of
God and an idea of man, without a parallel in the
literature and religions of the ancient world. That
Book is the noblest heirloom of humanity. To every
man it belongs as an inalienable birthright. To its
best truths, to its inmost heart, to its meaning, for
this and for all times, you have all an indefeasible
right. The worst of frauds were the act of the man
who should cheat you out of it. The man who can
use it only as the bone of a father wherewith to
smite a son, only shows himself of the order of men
who rush in where angels fear to tread.

Of course, I know what is said in certain organs
of what calls itself free thought. There are sayings
in the Old Testament that sound not too refined to
our dainty and delicate modern ears. There are
persons in it guilty of acts that, measured by
modern standards, cannot be called good, but must
be pronounced evil. There are statements in it
that seem to conflict with our latest wisdom, or are
out of harmony with our last new science. It is
easy to bring up hundreds of the sort of difficulties
which we find raised by men who study it from and
on the polemical platform of to-day. Such men will
tell you, in gravest tones, of difficulties fatal to the
religious claims and character of the book, but when
you come to examine them, they turn out to be the
mere creatures of ignorance, formed out of a theory

102 Religion in History.

of the Bible and its religion, more akin to childish
simplicity than to masculine intelligence. Before a
true theory of its origin and meaning these difficul-
ties could no more live than a man could breathe in
a vacuum. Yet I feel tender to the man, so touching
is his intellectual innocence, who would reject the
Bible because of the doings of Jacob, the sins of
David, or the perplexities in the history of Cain.
His difficulties come to me like a reminiscence out
of my own boyhood; his perplexities recall those
that daily troubled the good and devout people
amongst whom my earliest life was cast, only they
had the wisdom to see that what perplexed them be-
longed to the incidents of the history, not to the
essence of the religion.

But, now, instead of dealing with such things as
if deserving of grave and detailed criticism, let me
ask you a question, Do you thing these difficulties
explain the Bible, the power it has had, and still
has? Do they help you to understand it better,
or do they make it in any degree intelligible to
you? Do they not when regarded as making it
incredible, and unworthy of respect, rather make it
and its influence utterly unintelligible? For, think,
in making the Bible ridiculous, what is it you make
ridiculous? It is not simply a Book — that were a
small matter, but it is a race, nay, two races, the
two that have done most for civilization, that have
created it, that form the noblest flower and fruit of
humanity. What makes the Bible ridiculous, makes
man so; what makes man ridiculous, turns his his-
tory into the very march of unreason. You say,

The Old Testament in Religion. 103

perhaps, ' '■ These things oflFend my conscience, and
what offends my conscience I must condemn. " Good;
they offend my conscience, and my conscience con-
demns them ; but to condemn the doings of Jacob or
the sins of David is not to condemn the Bible, nay, is
rather to vindicate it, for it did not record these things
for our approval, but for our disapproval on the one
hand, and for our personal instruction on the other.
What conscience disapproves, ought not to be spoken
of with approval, whoever or whatever may command
us to do so. But before a man uses the judgment
of his conscience on the acts of certain men or a
certain nation as a reason why he should despise the
Bible and reject its religion, ought he not to raise this
prior question : — Whether he has got at the meaning
of the book, and whether he understands the methods
of its use? Think what the Bible has been to the
devoutest and most pious of our race, the most moral,
the most humane, the most gentle to men, the
most obedient to God. Has it not been their inspira-
tion for good, the power that has entered their lives
and lifted them from the lowest of sensuous levels to
the highest and noblest of spiritual ideals? And
ought not this simple fact alone make our innocent
objectors pause and ask, whether it is the Bible or
their theory of the Bible that is at fault ? whether it
has been the fortune of their ignorance to find what
knowledge missed, or whether there has befallen it
the fate of the unskilled sailor, who has mistaken
the ripple on a sandbank for the long roll of the
Atlantic waves.

104 Religion in History.

1. But these are mere introductory and formal ques-
tions; and we must hasten to others more radical
and material. What concerns us is the place and
the significance of the book in religion, and of its
religion among religions. Now, note this self-evident
and apparent distinction: — the book is the history of
a religion, it is not a history which is a religion, and
it is with the religion and its history, and not simply
with the book, that we are here concerned. I do not
deny that reason, conscience, judgment, and all the
faculties of criticism must be exercised upon and
about the book, but it is less the book than its religion
that we want to understand. And note, next, as the
book is a history, or the materials for a history, so
our concern with it relates not to questions in its
literary criticism, but to the beginning or origin,
the matter or nature, the growth, the progress,
and the culmination of the religion. You have to
study the religion in what it was, what it did, and
what it became. In its course there is much mixed
up with it that is historical setting, that belongs
to place or time. But it is the kernel, the ever-
lasting essence, the pre-eminent and abiding sub-
stance that here concerns us, not what by the way
falls off and perishes.

Now, mark, the religion is said to come from God.
That is not an incredible or irrational proposition:
Nay, it is one that has the highest reason, though to
attempt to demonstrate its reasonableness would lead
us too far away from our proper subject. That revela-

The Old Testament in Religion. 105

tion is possible is here, if not conceded, yet assumed.
I do not speak to atheists. I do not speak as an
atheist, but as a theist to theists. And now to say
that God is, is simply to say that revelation is possible;
to say that God is not, is simply to say that revelation
is impossible. If He is. He must be free to act; if
He acts, He must be free to stand in relation to man;
if He is free to stand in relation to man, He can
speak to him and through him. There is a theism
that denies God in fact, though it affirms Him in
words. The man who so limits God's activity as to
prevent His action every moment and in relation to
every man is no theist, but in the strict historical
sense of the term a deist. Deism set God at a great
distance from nature and man. The world went
according to its own laws, without any help from
Him; indeed all such help was described as inter-
ference or intervention, as it were a violation of law
on the part of Him who made the law; but to me
such a deism is only atheism in providence. As I
conceive matters, the laws of nature are modes of
God's action, they simply express His ceaseless
activity. Man's relation to God is based on God's
prior relation to man, and so, if the being of God be
granted, manifestative or self-communicative action,
or, in other words, revelation, and as a consequence,
religion follows as a logical necessity, which only
means a necessity in reason. Revelation and
religion but express the continued activity of God ;
the idea of God regulates the history of tlie revela-
tion and determines the character of religion.
Since religion is from God but through man, uuiii

106 Religion in History,

is the condition through which the institutive revela-
tion comes. But, coming through man, it partakes
of the imperfect, the earthly quality of the vessel
that bears it. To an absolutely perfect religion,
you need an absolutely perfect vehicle. Until you
get the perfect vehicle, you have not, and cannot
have, perfect religion.

Again, religion comes through men to make man
perfect. Since it does not come to man as already
perfect, it falls necessarily under the law of human
progress. You cannot create a perfect moral char-
acter. A perfect physical creature may be created,
but a perfect moral creature is incapable of creation.
He must act, he must be disciplined, he must be
taught; he is made perfect by the things which he
suffers. He is like

Iron dug from central gloom.
And heated hot with burning fears.
And dipt in baths of hissing tears.

And batter' d with the shocks of doom
To shape and use.

But this carries with it necessarily the position —
since man is the vehicle or form through whom
religion comes, then it begins to come to man in his
least perfect moment in order that it may prepare
him for a more perfect state. To think that the
ideal of religion is at the earliest moment of its
appearance already manifested in ideal men, is to
have no historical sense, and so no faculty for the
scientific study of history. It comes to the man, to
the people, or the race, to make the man, the people,
or the race, into the perfect beings they need to be-
come. Primarily and necessarily the man is below

TJie Old Testament in Religion. lOT

the religion, but his elevation is ordered and meas-
ured by its development. The religion comes to lift
the man. And so its history exhibits, on the one
hand, a process in man and, on the other, a progress
in idea and institution; the process is the greater
fitness of the vehicle, the progress is the greater
perfection of the religion.

2. Now these statements and distinctions will
help us to deal with the history of the religion which
we believe to have come from God, but know to have
been realized through man. It has, therefore,
necessarily the imperfection of the form through
which it comes, conditioning what belongs to the
perfection of the source whence it proceeds. But
from these more or less external questions, let us now
advance to questions essential and central; and note
this — the distinctive, the great determinative prin-
ciple in the Old Testament was the conception of God.
And you must distinguish here between the con-
ception and its history, what belongs to it by virtue
of its own nature, and what belongs to its reflection
in the minds and in the history of the men, or
people to whom it came.

We shall take the conception first; and here we
must note that it was a new thing in the world. It
came expressing faith in one God, a monotheism, —
the parent of all other monotheisms. As it was
the first it became the greatest and purest, and it
expressed this pre-eminence in two emphatic ways,
by name and by character.

(i.) By name. This age is greatly exercised to
discover a name for the Primary Cause. It has

108 Religion in History.

been termed the Unconditioned, the Unknown, the
Unknowable, the Unconscious, the Infinite, negatives
all without a single positive trait. But of all the
names for the ultimate Cause or God ever discovered,
the grandest yet most descriptive was that used by
the old Hebrew men. Note that name — Jehovah,
or Yahveh; Lord as it is given in our English ver-
sion, or as the French give it, the Eternal. Now, if
you resolve it into its original speech, what does it
mean? Its meaning, though about it there have
been many discussions, is yet clear. It must mean
either He who is, or He who causes to be. It is then
a verb, but it is a verb used as a proper name, He
who causes to be, or He who is.

But apart from this all the older and earlier names
of God came from one of two sources. First, they
were borrowed from nature, its phenomena, pro-
cesses, or events. Such were the Indo-European
names, those of the stock to which we ourselves be-
long. Their names were all primarily physical terms,
the earth, the sun, the blue heaven, the starry
heaven, the great sea, the hills, the moon, the dawn,
the sunset. These all provided names for God, but
mark the result ! The gods all partook of the quali-
ties of the nature that supplied them with names;
like it they were unstable, stormy, tempestuous, var-
iable; they had a created and limited being, and were
gifted with passions like men, so that when men
stood in relation to them, it was as fully on a par or
equality with them. And this followed — no people
of our stock ever thought of God as a Creator, not
one. Wise people in these days say, the idea of a

The Old Testament in Religion. 109

cause created the idea of God. But we must recog-
nize this plain historical fact, that not a single prim-
itive god of the race to which we belong, from India
to Western America, had the idea of creation asso-
ciated with him. Every god was a created being,
stood in the circle of nature, passionate, stormy,
variable, manlike.

The second great source of divine names was Man,
his political offices, metaphysical attributes or func-
tions. God was called the strong, or the mighty;
He was called the King, or the Lord, and men were
His servants. Now, the stock of which the Jews
came used names of this order, and what did the
usage mean? That, as the King was, so was the
god conceived to be, as was the Lord, so was the
Almighty. In the East the despot reigned, and so
God was thought to be arbitrary, cruel, bloodthirsty,
propitiated by human sacrifice. In the East, kings
cared not for men, but only and always loved power,
even though bought by blood and death. And as
were the kings such were the gods, — violent, des-
potic, prone to an anger that could be appeased only
by blood.

These, then, were the old conceptions, but now
came this new great conception: — God is not a mul-
titude. He is one, and we call Him by no name that
suggests man, by no name that suggests nature; we
call Him — He who is. He who causes to be. He is
one, beside whom is no fellow. He is a person; His
''Thou" stands over against my ''I," He is not
caused, but He causes; is boundless, mighty, potent,
powerful, personal, Jehovah. This name of God,

110 Religion in History,

this great and mighty name, could help men to think
under other forms, in another and nobler fashion, of
the great and supreme One.

(ii.) Now, note the next point — the character.
The fundamental idea as to character stands ex-
pressed in the formula, ^^ Be ye holy, for I am holy."
God is holy, and only a holy man, only a holy peo-
ple, can please Him. Therefore, the religious man
must be a good man. ''Of course," you say, ''of
course. We all expect a religious man to be a good
man. The most pious ought to be the most honour-
able of men." But, pray, why do you expect him to
be this? No heathen of antiquity ever expected any
such thing. Piety had nothing to do with the gen-
eral personal virtues; ethics were the concern of the
schools and the poets, not of the temple and the
priests. A religious man in the ancient world did
not need to be a good man. Why, the gods them-
selves were not good, — often most utterly iniquitous
and bad. In India, in the old hymns you could get
written in honour of a god a drinking song that any
man in these days in an hour of hilarity might fitly
sing. In beautiful, skilful, radiant Greece, what was
Zeus, their great god? — an adulterer; what was
Aphrodite? — personified lust. If you had said to a
Greek, you ought to be god-like, he would have said,
"Nay, I will be man-like; that is more noble and
honourable than to live after the manner of the gods."
And if you had gone east into Phoenicia where the
neighbours of the Jews lived, what would you have
found? — You would have found gods, impurest of the
impure, served not only by human sacrifice, but by

The Old Testament in Religion. in

blackest, vilest, human lust. Religion was no moral
thing then, in any degree whatever, and where it
had power without morality its power worked in the
most immoral way. Imagine then, the transcendent
moment for man, the moment of supremest promise,
of grandest hope, when the idea of a moral deity en-
tered his heart, and passed into his history, when
all the energies of religion came to be moral energies
for the making of moral men. That was a moment,
I call it, of revelation — you may call it of supreme
guesswork or grandest discovery; or you may, by
magnifying incidental difficulties, attempt to conceal
from yourselves its meaning. Yet it were only to
speak with prosaic soberness were we to say, — the
moment when gravitation, navigation, the secret of
the sea, of the sun, or the stars, or the earth, were
discovered had neither singly nor all combined equal
or even approximate significance for man. Take
from the heart of him this religion steeped in moral-
ity, made living by the moral character of its God,
and you will leave him without the grandest energy
working for good and peace and progress that ever
came into his history or into his heart.

3. Now let us see where we stand: we have got
the distinctive character and quality of the new
idea: — God is one, personal, supreme, self-existent,
a Being who can be named after no object in nature,
and no attribute or office of man, but only as He
who is or He who causes to be. And He is moral
— high and severe in righteousness, He loves good
and hates evil. As He is His people ought to be;
no service but moral service can be acceptable to

112 Religion in History.

Him. Such, then, was the idea; but it was one thing
to get it, another to translate it into reality and life.
A generation may suffice for the one, but centuries
are needed for the other. The ideal was of God,
but the realization was through man, and we must
distinguish what belonged to the perfect Source from
what was proper and peculiar to the imperfect me-
dium. The religion did not stoop to the level of the
people, the people had to struggle up to the altitude
of the religion, and their struggle was attended by
many an error, many a fall, and many a wilful apos-
tasy. Indeed, it remained ever far above them, and
so proved its divinity, just as their failure proved their
humanity. Consider what they were, and where
they stood, when they received the religion of God
and His law. Slaves, just escaped from Egypt, with
the vices of their kind, ignorant, unstable, stubborn,
impatient of freedom, accustomed to a cruel and
crushing tyranny, rebellious under an authority too
moral to coerce. Then, imagine them settled in
their old land^ undisciplined men, unfamiliar with
an ordered life, with all the arts of peace to learn,
surrounded by such religions as I have described,
envious of the licence they allowed, anxious to be let
sin as their neighbours sinned, and to conceive,
appease, and please Jehovah as the other peoples
conceived and appeased and pleased their gods.

Now, let me put two questions to you, how ought
you to judge a people so placed? By the standards
of our day, or of their own? And, again, how
ought you to judge their religion, — through the peo-
pie, or the people through it? In the first place,

The Old Testament in Religion, 113

could you conceive a people so situated and so con-
stituted, producing of their own mere will and out
of their own poor nature such a religion? It stood
in conflict with their habits, their passions, with all
their circumstances, with what they most liked and
most desired. Now, can that which stands in radical
contradiction to a nature be a product of the nature
it radically contradicts? In the next place, can you
wonder that the religion and the people were often
in collision? The collision was altogether to its
honour— its standard being so high, but altogether
in keeping with their nature, its tendencies and
instincts being what they were. Yet why do you
judge the Hebrews more harshly than you judge
any other people of antiquity? I am not saying you
are wrong in so judging, I am only asking the
reason. They were not worse, they were better
than their neighbours. Their kinsmen, the Arabs,
were incomparably more cruel, treacherous, and
bloodthirsty. The Phoenicians, kinsmen too, far
richer and more cultivated, were proverbial for lust,
lying, and greed, for a horrible lasciviousness that
made them pollute every shore and people they
touched. The Assyrians, also kinsmen, were tyran-
nous, ruthless, and exterminating to a degree that
made them hated and feared throughout all the
ancient world. Now, why are you so severe to the
comparatively moral and inoffensive Hebrews, while
you are silent as to the awful immoralities that
made kindred and contemporary peoples a positive
plague, causes of utmost disaster to their own and
later times? Is it not because you expect more of

114 Religion in History.

the Hebrews, which surely can only mean that you
judge them by a higher law. But why do you so
judge them? Is it not because you think them
possessed of such a law, and hold them to be men
bound to live according to it? But do you not
see that in so judging, you are paying the highest
possible tribute to their religion? To the degree
that you condemn the men, you praise their law;
in holding that they ought to have been the best in
living, you acknowledge that their religion was the
best. The standard you apply to Israel, Israel sup-
plied to you, but in falling below it, what did Israel
confess but that his standard was not of himself, but
of his God?

III.

1. We have seen, then, the new theistic or religious
idea and the people in themselves and in their mutual
relations. We must now proceed a step further.
Remember that the determinative thing in religion
is the character of God. Well, we have got a Go4
with a moral character, but have made no attempt
at an analysis of its moral elements. These, when
we first find the idea, are few and simple, but its
character becomes in process of time ethically suh-
limer, purer, richer. Here, the first thing necessary
is to see how, even in its simplest form, the new idea
affected the organization of society and the regulation
of life. These two, — the thought of the divine and
the thought of the human, — are related £is ide^l and
reality, as design and structure; and so we can test
by history the action of the divine idea in human

The Old Testament in Religion. 115

society and life. For here it acted according to a

law common in all religions, the highest idea is

distinguished from all others by its being the force

which causes the society to crystallize or become an

organism. In order that we may perceive what

this means, let me ask — Suppose you conceive God

as force, or soul, or energy, without morality or

moral character, then how would you conceive

human life and human society? A man may say,

'■ '■ I believe in force, and I believe in necessity, yet I

am a moral man, and hold a moral theory of life."

But see, there is no logic like the logic of fact. There

is no law of reason so inevitable as the law that fulfils

itself in historical movement. We are able to see

when we turn to history the regulative and organizing

power of a highest conception which is void of moral

qualities and acts by necessity, working on the most

stupendous scale. Let us look at India. What has

been the great organizing power of society there?

The notion of Brahma. That name represents a

conception as nearly as possible parallel to Mr.

Herbert Spencer's ' ' persistent force. " Brahma is an

ever-acting indestructible energy. From him proceed

by necessity all the forms, varieties, forces of life.

What men call the soul, comes to be by necessary

law, revolves through innumerable cycles, remaining

in each and in all the same as to essence, changing

only its form. The human person is a transitory

shape or vehicle, which incarnates and carries the

soul— which is an entity, or atom, or invisible force

that circles from form of being to form of being,

until its cycle of multitudinous changes being com-

116 Religion in History.

plete it is absorbed into Brahma. The life that now
is, which is determined by lives that have been,
determines in its turn lives to be; each life is but
one new link in the chain forged by Brahma, who sits
at the source of Being, a necessitated creator, and
waits at its end, an unconscious goal. While indiv-
idual life is so conceived, what of the social, the
collective? Man's place here is determined by that
awful, inevitable force which binds his various forms
of existence together. Now, as it depended on
whence the soul or person had first proceeded, from
the head or from the feet of Brahma, whether the
man was to be high caste or low caste, so the whole
social system was a system that expressed in an
organized form the operation of an unmoral cause.
There was no moral basis of society, only one of
prerogative and privilege; and so, as a necessary
result, to break caste was to break the highest law.
There was no sin like the sin of infidelity to caste, the
worst apostasy was for a high caste to become an out-
cast, the last presumption for a low caste to attempt
to enter a higher. And so India represents a society
organized on the principle of a creative force with-
out moral idea or quality, and shows on the most stu-
pendous scale that from such a conception, the only
possible result is tyranny, or a life governed by an
unmoral necessity. If the cause of man and society
be not moral, neither the man nor the society can
recognize moral law as their regulative principle,
and where moral law is not so recognized, force,
— either physical, civil, or sacerdotal, — is the only
alternative.

The Old Testament in Religion, 11 Y

2. Let us turn now lo tne regulative and organizing
action of the Old Testament idea of God. This we
have to observe in its most rudimentary form in the
Mosaic Society. And here let me ask you to note
what I may call its extraordinary Secularism. By
that term I mean to indicate the place given to time,
and to realizing in time the order that should express
the mind and will of God. It is simply a matter of
exegetical and historical fact, that of all religions in
antiquity, the Mosaic laid least stress upon the future
state, or life to come. This, of course, relates to its
earliest stage. But it is here that the value of the
idea as a new basis for society can best be seen.
There was a very great and learned book written
last century by a most belligerent divine, a mighty
man of controversial valour — Bishop Warburton. Its
name was The Divine Legation of Moses, and its
purpose was to prove what has been well held to be
a paradox, this, namely, that the Hebrew or Mosaic
religion was, by its not appealing to the sanctions
of the future, proved to be of divine institution,
and altogether miraculous in character. All other
religions, it was argued, maintained their authority
by invoking the sanctions of another world. To this,
the Hebrew was an exception, and since it ruled
without help from the future, it could only have
come to be by the direct action of God, and have con-
tinued authoritative by His immediate and constant
guidance and superintendence. Now, I do not mean
to endorse that opinion, or even so much of it as
relates to the absence of the sanction drawn from
the future life, but this I mean to do, to say that

118 Religion in History,

emphasis was in the Mosaic state laid op the present,
on time, on the construction of such a state in the
world that now is as should be altogether in harmony
with the will of God. The men who were called to
constitute that state, were not invited to do so in
view of rewards and punishments that were to follow
in another life. They were not able to glory in the
inequalities of this life as certain to be redressed by
the rewards of the life to come. They were not
persuaded to neglect the transient present because of
an imperishable future, but they were told to build
up where they stood, as living men, a city that was
in its laws, in its character, its work, its ideal, to be
a city of God, a state constituted and constructed
according to the divine plan. And this was to be
done because God, who created the world, so com-
manded. And as he was moral, the laws that
were at the root of the whole were moral laws,
enforced reverence to God, dependence upon Him,
worship that was moral obedience, truthfulness,
honesty, chastity, neighbourliness, filial devotion,
and love.

Two points here call for notice: — first, the in-
dependence of the Mosaic ideal of the future proves
the absolute independence of the Mosaic religion of
Egypt. The Egyptian religion was a religion of the
future, absolutely and altogether concerned about
man's happiness there. The Mosaic was the religion
of the present, making men work in it for God and
His purposes, for man and his good. And, secondly,
this religion, as giving a moral law alike to the
individual and to society, was an absolutely new

Tfie Old Testament in Heligion. II9

thing. Not only did it directly concern the present,
but the idea, as applied to the governance and
organization of life, made God the supreme law-giver,
while His supreme law was moral. lie founded the
state, He gave the law. He called the state into
being for His purposes, and to do so was to give it a
sublimity that no other ancient state had, a universal-
ity not of fact, but of idea, that made it without a
parallel or peer amid all the ancient states and
empires. Where the fundamental laws of a people
are moral, and are the laws of a moral Deity, the
tyrannies of despotism and conquest or force are at
an end.

IV.

1. But now we shall the better study the action of
this great creative idea when we place it in rela-
tion to the notion of man. This must correspond to
the notion of God. The one is the counterpart and
mirror of the other. Now the Mosaic religion, as it
was the first that had the idea of a moral Deity, was
also the first that had the notion of man as a moral,
free, conscious individual, with rights no man could
take from him, and with duties no man could fulfil
for him. The full significance of this, especially as
regards its social and political action, will become
apparent if you note this— that the great notion in
all the ancient Empires was, the king or the priest
owns the people. The idea of man as a conscious,
rational, moral individual, of worth for his own sake,
of equal dignity before his Maker, did not exist in
antiquity till it came into being through Israel. Do

120 Religion in History.

you think I mis-state the matter? Let us see the
fact. Did you ever look at the great pyramids of
Egypt and ask, why or how they came to be?
Millions of nameless men died to create for two or
three almost unknown kings a tomb. Look at the
largest: — one hundred thousand men are said to
have worked by forced labour every day at its build-
ing, and it took twenty years to build. A hundred
thousand men driven by force through twenty years
to unpaid labour, and all to build a tomb for a king I
Imagine every able-bodied man in a city as large as
Manchester or Liverpool, forced for twenty years to
work without pay for the vanity of one man, and you
have a single illustration of the value of man and
his work as the remoter antiquity understood it. Do
not let this surprise you. Take some of the hymns
of ancient Egypt, which of late years have been re-
covered, and you will find the king praised as god,
extolled as divine, all divine qualities being attribut-
ed to him. Pass from the valley of the Nile to the
valley of the Euphrates, and ask what do you find
there? The king is the master of men, he can muster
his thousands by will, by will he can throw his thou-
sands awaj", and it is his concern if the men are lost;
the loss is his, not theirs. No man has worth, save
to the king and for his ends. No man is valued as a
person, or as a man. The idea of manhood, as any-
thing real or possible, does not as yet exist. Go still
further east, to India, and what do you find? As a
man acts to the priest, the Brahman, so his place in
this life and the life to come is determined. What-
ever maintains the purity of caste is right, whatever

Tlie Old Testament in Religion, 121

interferes with it is wrong, and lite is everywhere
under a shadow because without the dignifying
presence of the moral ideal. But when the Mosaic
state came into being, what did it bring with it? A
new notion of man, a higher conception of manhood.
It had no king, God was King, every man of the
people was precious in God's sight, each had an equal
worth, all had equal duties and equal rights. The
idea of the rights of man and the correlative idea
of his duties, were created by the religion that gave
the moral idea of God. In no ancient state was
man more dignified, was life so valued. To touch it
was to touch what God made and protected. The
very sovereign was good only as he did God's will,
and his last sin was to oppress the people he had
received from God.

2. But we have not only to consider the idea of
man, we have to see man built into a state. Now the
basis of the state is a moral one. And it is moral
because it is the will, the expressed will of the moral
Deity. God is to be honoured as the One God. He
is to be revered. Man is to remain pure, to be no
adulterer, to speak the truth, not to covet, not to
kill, not to steal. All duty laid down by God is law
to be fulfilled by man. Now, I have already said
that the gods of the ancients were, as a rule, unmoral
or immoral, that as a consequence religion was no
friend to morality, was often most lustful and impure.
But now, note, that in and under and because of
Moses came the idea that to serve God you must do
your duty by man, must be obedient and faithful in
the simplest daily things. Now, I do not intend to

12^ Ueligion in History.

defend the Mosaic law — which is here taken to mean
no more than those ten Commandments which are
the heart of all the Levitical legislation — as a perfect
law for all time, or to say that it contains all morality.
It was impossible that the earliest form of the Hebrew
religion could be as perfect as the latest, but it had
as a germ all the capabilities of growth and expan-
sion needed for ultimate perfection. And this I
further say, that from this moment moral life at
once in the state and in the man is based and
built on this great ethical conception of God, and
God's will, as a moral will, becomes the basis of
human society.

Now, we have to observe a further consequence,
the state became God's. This, too, was a new idea.
In every other ancient state, in Greece, in India,
in Assyria, in Egypt, the state owned the gods.
They were the state's. The state possessed the
religion, and the men who belonged to it must be
of its faith. If a man questioned the gods, he
questioned the law, and was guilty of treason in its
most offensive form, and so the state put him to
death. To question the law of the state in matters
of religion was so much a crime in the eyes of the
heathen that persecution seemed a natural and
obvious necessity. It was indeed the coming of
heathen ideas into the Christian religion that made
freedom of thought anywhere in any Christian land
a crime. You will see then that the notion of the
ancient world was by the Hebrews here reversed;
the state did not own God, He owned it, founded it,
and founded it in order that His will, a moral will,

The Old Testament in Religion. 123

might be done within it. That is the fundamental
social conception of the most ancient Hebrew legis-
lation, and it is therefore moral while social, and
moral and social because religious — the Moral Deity
is the basis of society, and He proclaims, defines,
and enforces the law regulative of life, both individ-
ual and collective.

V.

1. But the law could not be moral without becom-
ing much more, and so it had to become social, eco-
nomical, and religious as well. And this in the
course of the centuries it became, progressively more
and more. Yet the influence of the moral centre
and basis never ceased to extend to the circumfer-
ence and summit. As to these wider aspects I can-
not speak in detail, but will simply note three points.
First, of the law in relation to Nature. There never
was a saner law than the Mosaic. It loved Nature,
could not bear to see the fields impoverished, and
decreed that no man should be allowed to injure
either his posterity, or his neighbours, or the land
on which they lived, by impoverishing its fields.
Nor could it bear to see the human form mutilated,
and so it declared that only the unblemished was
beautiful in the sight of God, and fit to do Him
public and sacred service. It did not Iotc to harass
or burden the dumb creation; the ox tliat trod out
the corn was not to be muzzled. The young tender
tree was protected, and was not to be unduly taxed
to yield abundance. The law was thus full of a great
sense of the good of nature, a great sense of the

124 Religion in History,

glory within humanity, and of the large and lovely
harmony without.

Secondly, the law in relation to man. There never
was so careful a law about what we call sanitation.
It cared for the cleanliness of the body. It feared
infection, and separated those with infectious dis-
eases from the great multitude, declaring them un-
clean. Its laws of ceremonial uncleanness had great
health in them — a real human sanity. Then, though
it knew slavery, as all the ancient world did, the
slavery it knew was of the gentlest, the most gener-
ous kind. Every man taken as a slave could, in the
sabbatic year, regain his freedom, go forth into the
world a free man. Its laws, too, concerning the
wealth of man, were noble laws. They made
property sacred, yet did not allow its accumulation
in a few hands, or in one, but sought to secure its
fair and equal distribution. Every Jubilee year
the land was redistributed; the old families that
had lost it might again possess their inheritance.
And so if by misfortune, or by crime, a man had
lost his estate, he had a chance given to him to re-
deem himself and his place in the community, to go
"back into his old and better order. Capital, also,
was carefully guarded, that it should not become an
immense and oppressive power in the hands of the
rich, to make them extortionate over the poor. We
may indeed, without fear of contradiction, affirm that
the Jewish law is the justest law to the poor yet
framed, to the man that toiled, to the man prepared
honestly by sweat of brow and labour of hand to earn
his bread. Let us do it justice. I ask for it from

TJie Old Testament in Religion. 125

you only justice, but justice I do ask; for that is only
a just demand. Where the idea of a moral God and
a free, responsible man came in and held possession
of the people, there, applied to the questions of
industry and economics, emerged a law that secured,
as far as law can secure such things, the equitable
distribution of wealth, and the highest degree of
individual wellbeing.

But, thirdly, we have to note a characteristic
peculiarity in the laws relating to God and His
service. Among the surrounding states of antiquity
the Mosaic state stood distinguished for one thing,
the absence of human sacrifice, a matter most signi-
ficant as to the character of God, as to His way of
educating and teaching man. Human sacrifice was
one of the commonest and most horrible rites of the
ancient religions. And it was one of the hardest
things to bring the Jewish people out of the
common and coarser into the rarer and kindlier
service. Remember that question which the prophet
represents the king as asking: ''How shall I come
before the Lord, and bow myself before the most
high God? Shall I give the fruit of my body
for the sin of my soul? " That was a common
question in the ancient religions. But in its answer
Israel stood alone and pre-eminent: — ''He hath
showed thee, O man, what is good. And what doth
the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" The
answer is significant alike of the new dignity and
worth of man, and of the new and noble tenderness
ill the character of his God.

i26 Religion in History.

But you may say, ''See how many of the laws
are imperfect and severe, nay, even cruel. Take, for
example, the law against witchcraft. ' Thou shalt
not suffer a witch to live. ' Had not that law to do
with the burnings for witchcraft in the sixteenth,
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ? And how can
you defend the religion against the charge of burning
people for an impossible crime? " Now there are
here two "questions, one as to the law, and another
as to its interpretation or application in later history.
''Thou Shalt not suffer a witch to live," must be
looked at through the eyes of that time, in the spirit
of a historical student, asking the meaning of a
religion, and what witchcraft signified to it. It did
not mean an old woman addicted to black arts, who
burnt before the fire the image of a man who was
thought to decay as the image melted. It meant the
presence and power of the religions lying around.
It stood in necessary alliance with them, and in
necessary antithesis to the fundamental idea of a
moral religion, realized in a moral life. And it was
a simple necessity if the religion of Israel was to
remain and not be superseded by the cruel and
lascivious religion of Phoenicia, that the witch who
was, as it were, the very prophet and priestess of
Phoenicia, and the w^orst elements in heathenism,
should not be suffered to live in Israel. The other
question, as to its interpretation and application two
or tliree centuries ago, is another matter altogether,
and for it the men of that time are alone responsible.
They did two things — they misunderstood the pur-
port and function of the Mosaic law, and they forgot

The Old Testament in Religion. 12T

the relation in which it stood to the law of Christ.
It was only preparatory, provisional, intended for a
time long past, and passing with the time for which
it was intended. Any man who scientifically looks
at the matter, sees that the law of Moses, or the
ideal of the Mosaic state, was not universal and
permanent, intended for all time. Men have thought
that it was, as perhaps Calvin, when he founded his
Theocracy at Geneva, and the Puritans, when they
founded their Church-State over in New England.
The mistakes of these men are to be judged, like
all other mistakes of historical interpretation, as
reflecting on the men, and not on the law they
misunderstood. Then, for the further point, come
to the moment when Christ declared the true yet
simple relation in which the transitory and per-
manent in the old law stood to Himself. It had
been said, ^ ^ An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a
tooth, but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil. "
Here was a law written and formulated as Mosaic,
but it was a law designed and fitted only for an im-
perfect state, intended, therefore, to be repealed and
cancelled in a state higher and more perfect. And
this single is an illustrative case. Do not judge a
provisional as if it were a permanent law, a law for
a people like the Hebrews as if it had been the ulti-
mate code of the Christian Church. The moral
elements in Moses abide, the ceremonial and occa-
sional have passed and perished.

2. We have as yet discussed but a very small part
of a very great subject; and time will allow us to
discuss no more. All that has been attempted has

128 Religion in History,

been to bring out the distinctive Hebrew conception

of God as the source and basis of the distinctive

Hebrew state. We must end; yet I feel as if I had

not brought you even within sight of the boundless

riches of the marvellous book which we call the

Scriptures of the Old Testament. Here, indeed, one

feels the pathos of standing on the narrow shore, and

looking over the boundless, unexplored, mysterious

ocean. Beside us a prosaic disputant may stand

and say, '^What see you but a barren expanse of

water, vexed by angry winds? " But let our answer

be: ^' Man, be silent; we are looking over the mighty

pathway of the peoples, and we see it thronged with

argosies hastening to distribute their unsearchable

wealth among all kindreds of the world. " It is not

possible to describe this wealth, but let me in a

hurried sentence or two indicate its kind and extent.

Well, then, no literature of antiquity is possessed

with so deep a love of the poor, speaks so strong and

generous words concerning them, surrounds them

with so much dignity and so many rights as this

Old Testament. I know what I say, and I say

what no man who knows antiquity can contradict.

Without the Bible labour would be without its

noblest vindicator, without the one ancient witness

that testified in behalf of its honour and its claims.

There is no book that so denounces the king who

dares to oppress, or the priest who dares to deceive

the poor, that so praises the man who does justice

and loves mercy. To help the poor is to please

God, to wrong them is to provoke His wrath. The

ideal king is one who ^ ' Shall govern thy people with

The Old Testament in Religion. 129

righteousness, and thy poor with judgment." ^'He
shall save the children of the needy, and shall break
in pieces the oppressor. " ^ ^ He shall deliver the poor,
and him that hath no helper. " ''He shall redeem
their soul from deceit and violence, and precious
shall their blood be in his sight." Connected here-
with is its love of the weak and defenceless, the way
it seeks to honour and guard the woman and child.
Do you know how Roman law dealt with the father?
It invested him within his family with absolute power,
over against him the wife and child could not be
said to possess any rights; and the Roman law is
the finest blossom of the Roman spirit, and in the
field of civil legislation of all antiquity. But in the
Old Testament the great preachers who speak in the
name of God will allow no such absolute power to
man; not right, but duty is in proportion to strength;
the greater the weakness, the greater the claim on
the resourceful and the strong. ' ' Children are an
heritage of the Lord," to be dealt with as riches
held in trust for Him. The man he most approves
is the one who ''judges the fatherless and pleads for
the widow." Then there is no book so full of the
love of honesty, the praise of justice between man
and man. It hates "the false balance," the lying
tongue, the over-reaching spirit. It commends alike
the generous master and the faithful servant. In a
word, its ideal of life — industrial, domestic, civil,
commercial — is the highest, purest, sublimest, known
to the ancient world, for it is an ideal that struggles
towards the creation of righteousness in all persons
and in all relations.

130 Religion in History.

But why attempt to sketch in hasty words the
meaning and wealth of this marvellous literature?
Let me simply urge you to read it anew, with open
eye and clear vision.^ Look at its proverbs, so laden
with moral wisdom, so possessed with the belief that
true goodness is best prudence, and obedience to God
the condition of all good. Look at its Psalms; what
wonderful poetry is there ! It has no parallel or peer.
For thousands of years these Psalms have been sung,
and men sing them still, feeling as if they were the
most modern, the most living of all religious songs.
They have been translated out of their primitive
Hebrew speech into almost all our human tongues,
and have become, as it were, the universal language
in which man can tell his joy or sorrow, his contrition
or exultation, to God. Then, look at its attitude to
the profoundest of all the problems that can vex the
human spirit, the problem of the good man suffering
in an evil world! That was the problem of Job and
the second part of Isaiah; in the one the perfect man
is the man who suffers most, in the other the servant
of God, his anointed, in whom his soul delighted, is
the Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with grief. The
perfect man and servant suffers that he may redeem;
his holiness and our sin are the twin causes of his
sorrow, but as the sorrow of the holy it can save the
man who has sinned. His suffering is the redemption
of his kind. Then, think, with all its sense of evil
and sorrow it never lost hope, but found in the
presence of wrong only a deeper need for faith in a
righteous God, new ground for confidence in a reign
that would right all. And so we sec those marvellous

The Old Testament in Religion. 131

prophets, turning from a time of impotence and evil,
when the little handful of their people, beset, harassed,
hunted, broken, could not realize their own imperfect
vision of the prophetic ideal, look forward and anti-
cipate the true golden age when peace and joy among
nations, wealth and perfect manhood among men,
should everywhere prevail. The fulfilment of their
vision tarries, but their God reigns, and it will surely
come!

LECTURE III.

THE PLACE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
IN RELIGION.

The fundamental idea of the previous lecture was
this — The religion of Israel was an altogether new
order of religion, and it was this by virtue of its
conception or thought of God and His law. By
means of these it laid the basis for a new notion of
man, a new type of society, a new structure or order of
humanity. So long as men believe in a multitude of
gods, they will never believe in the unity of man; so
long as they believe in a deity without moral character,
they will never live under what they feel to be a
common moral law. Might will be right. Their
world will be the strong man's world, where the
weakest goes to the wall, and the poor, unpitied, live
or die to please the rich.

1. Now, the change that has made our idea of man
and society so unlike the ancient, is a change that
begins with the notion of God and His law that came
through Moses. That is a simple matter of historic

The New Testament in Religion. 133

fact and certainty. No code of antiquity possessed,
in anything like the same degree, so exalted a notion
of man, of the rights of man, of the dignity of man's
labour, of his duties, of his moral worth and relations,
of his claim to reap and to possess the harvest of
profit, or of plenty, his own hands had sowed. It
was not the priest's, or the king's law, it was God's.
In that lay the secret of its power, the source of the
great dignity it gave to man. Make the law the
king's or the priest's, make king or priest own the
people, and you have as an inevitable result despotism,
oppression, wrong, sacrifice of the weak to the strong.
Make the law and the people God's, and you have as
an inevitable result, the equality of all men before
God, and, once that is clearly and fully understood,
the equal freedom and the equal rights of all men.
The law which came through Moses was, to the
people as a whole, the most generous, the most
righteous law of antiquity, reposing as it did on the
humanest of all the ancient conceptions of God.

Now, I wish to restate and re-emphasize this
central and fundamental idea, or principle. What-
ever men may say, it is incontestable, a simple fact
which history has verified. You will never build a
society or a state, ordered, free, righteous, unless
you build it on a great moral belief, and the greatest
of all moral beliefs is the belief in a moral Deity;
for that makes the source, the laws, the method, the
course, the end of life, all alike moral. A society
built up from the foundation consistently according
to that notion, would be a perfect society, but to a
perfect society you need not only a great theoretic

134 Religion in History.

principle, you need perfect persons, equal in their
perfection to the theoretic belief they hold. But the
function of great beliefs is not to find perfect men,
but to make them, to take the poor material it gets,
and out of it to build up nobler characters and nobler
men. To take the individual, the isolated men and
acts of a given race, or a given people, and make the
system bear the blame of their imperfections, is to
act, perhaps, in the spirit of controversy, but not in
the spirit of science, which seeks to discover the
action, through persons or peoples, of great beliefs on
man, and in this action to see their character and
quality revealed. Now I am able to say, as another
simple and incontrovertible fact, of all ancient
literatures, of all ancient writings possessed by man,
the writings with the largest sense of humanity, the
greatest sense of the rights of the individual, the
noblest conception of labour and its reward, of
society and its functions, are the writings of the
Hebrews. Nowhere is the king so reproved, no-
where is the priest so reproached, when either dares
to forget his supreme obedience to God, or his su-
preme duty to man. If either dares so to forget,
the prophet stands forward, and says, '^ Bring no
more vain oblations: incense is abomination unto
God; your new moons and your appointed feasts
His soul hateth. Wash you, make you clean; put
away the evil of your doings from before His eyes;
cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment,
relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for
the widow."

Now let me ask you as open-minded men to

The New Testament in Religion. 135

consider this simple question; since every ancient
empire, as the pyramids of Egypt and the records of
Babylonia show us, despised the common people,
forced them to labour as if they had no claim or
right to their own strength and the profits of their
own skill, and threw away their lives as if they had
no personal worth — Why is it otherwise with us?
Modern Oriental empires, where the ancient basis of
society still in a measure survives, have the old
contempt of man and life. China will see a thousand
men perish with less concern than we would see a
score. Before we went to India life was squandered
as if it were a worthless thing; our care for life in
India has within this century caused so extraordinary
an increase of the population as to bring upon us the
gravest of all economical questions — How deal with
a people whose increase threatens to outrun the
means of subsistence? Why, then, do we so value
life? Why do we so value man that we seek to
secure to every one the reward of his own labour?
Why do we so hate the pestilence or the famine, the
war or the accident, which comes to destroy noble
and valued being? History supplies the answer, the
facts which cannot be disputed, and they say that
the right to your own labour, to your own manhood,
to your very personal freedom, in a word, the ideas
that make men of you, run back into the belief in
God and God's law that came through Moses.

Let us abide by the facts; do not let any man
divert you from them and what they teach. Do not
let a sneer at a Hebrew patriarch or king by a man
too ill-informed and prejudiced to understand him.

136 Religion in History.

and the times in which he lived, lead you away from
the real point at issue — Why is man and his labour,
why are the common people and their rights, so
differently esteemed and valued now from what they
were in the ancient world? And comparative science,
working with the historical material, finds only one
answer — these ideas rose in connection with the re-
ligion of Israel, and have their primary source and
basis in the great beliefs it created and supplied. Yet
it was only provisional, imperfect, a mere prophecy
of a more perfect method, of a nobler order and a
larger faith. Without the preparatory, the final and
perfect could not have been : without the perfect, the
preparatory had been but a promise, a blossom that
had never rounded and ripened into fruit.

2. We come now, then, to the New Testament and
its significance for our question. In dealing with it
we must not change our standpoint or our method.
We must apply the same principles; we must look
at all matters under the same lights as heretofore.
Now, while the religion of the Old Testament aimed
at creating a state or organizing a people on the
basis of the belief in the one personal and moral
Deity, and of obedience to His law, we may describe
the religion of the New Testament as a method for
creating and constituting a new humanity, and this
new mankind it seeks to create and constitute by its
idea of God, and what that idea contains and makes
manifest. It is not, observe, a religion of anxious
individualism, concerned about nothing except saving
isolated souls; careful only to make men contented in
life, peaceful in death, and happy in eternity. It may

The Neiv Testament in Religion, 137

accomplish these, but these are only means, not ends.
In its essence it is a mighty plan, splendid in its
design and in its efficiency, for the construction, from
the base upwards, of a humanity or a society that
shall, in all its parts, through all its members, in all
its relations, express or articulate the righteous will
of God. It is thus an ideal for the whole of humanity,
and a great method for its realization. It is at this
point that it stands at once related to the religion
of Israel and distinguished from it; what Israel
tried to do for a people, the New Testament came to
do for mankind. What existed as particular and
provisional in the old, exists as general and perma-
nent in the new.

Here, again, the great constitutive factor, chang-
ing and regulating the individual, building up and
organizing the society, is the conception of God.
And the place He occupies, as well as the way
in which He is conceived, makes a generic differ-
ence between the Christian and other religions.
Yarro, an old and most learned Roman, said, ' ' In
order that gods may be established, states must
first exist." That was the pagan idea, the state
owned the god, and the god had no power or
authority outside its own state. In perfect harmony
with this notion the emperor or king was deified in
a way that greatly astonishes the men of to-day.
Suppose the people of England were to call their
Queen goddess; or suppose the people of Russia,
dark and benighted as they may seem, were to call
a man, whose moral character was like the late
Emperor's, god, what would you think of them?

138 Religion in History,

Yet in the days of Christ and His apostles, the high
bloom-time of the Roman empire, men like Nero,
who could fiddle while Rome burned; men like
Caligula, who drank, feasted, and committed crime
of the worst imaginable sorts, were called divine,
and they received honour and worship as gods.
Yet, strange as all this may seem, it was logical,
it grew out of the idea that the state was greater
than the religion, and established the gods; they
did not own but were owned by the state, it was
their factor, they were not its. And as the state
was thus more divine and comprehensive than the
religion, the person who symbolized its authority,
its unity, and being, could be fitly termed divus
or even deus. Now why would the use of the term
goddess to queen or god to emperor seem to us
so profane? Is it not because there has passed into
our blood, into the very marrow, as it were, of our
spirit and mind, a conception of deity that makes
these old conceptions unutterably degrading? But
does not this very elevation of our conception of
the divine measure the influence of Christianity?
It has so exalted every man's idea of God as to
make the ancient idea abhorrent where it is not
unintelligible.

II.

1. Now if we are to understand the significance of
the New Testament for our discussion, we must come
to it with open spirit, and look at its idea of religion
as embodied in its great Personality. In other words,
we must seek to understand its idea through Christ.

The Neiv Testament in Religion. 139

Now His life was one of very remarkable simplicity,
and one of still more remarkable significance. It was
altogether, from the religious point of view, unlike the
ideal that had become traditional in Israel. For
religions may grow, but they may also decay, and
the distance between the vision and thought of an
Isaiah, and the ideal and embodiment of a priest or
a scribe or a pharisee in the day of Christ is almost
immeasurable. The traditional ideal in Christ's day,
the period of decadence, was twofold, there was the
priest's, and there was the scribe's. The priest's idea
was — the temple, the worship, the priesthood are the
religion. God dwells in the temple; He is ap-
proached through His priesthood. He is appeased by
their sacrifices, and the most pious man is the man
who most often visits the temple, uses the priesthood,
offers the costliest and greatest oblations. The idea
of the scribe was different, yet akin. It was an
ideal of forms, full of fasts and holy days, formulas
and prayers, positions and phylacteries, reading of
Scriptures and general performance of things by
rule. In short, it was men living by rote, accord-
ing to the fashion of the fathers or the times. The
priests said, ''No man can please God, unless he
worships in a consecrated place, employs authorized
persons, uses the proper and catholic means." The
scribe said, ''No man can worship God, unless he
stands by tradition and follows what it prescribes. "
Worthy men they were, no doubt, honest after their
lights, scrupulous, obedient to every jot and tittle of
the law, forgetful only of one thing — that the law
of God was infinitely greater than their thoughts.

140 Religion in History,

Their ideals, I have said, were akin, and their
kinship stands expressed here: — they made scrupu-
lous men, men of most rigid conscientiousness, who
would have gone to prison or the stake for a rite
or a privilege, but they never yet made magnani-
mous men, who would have died for humanity.

These, then, were the traditional ideals, religion as
materialized and depraved by priest and scribe. Now
Christ's ideal was essentially different. To them He
was utterly unintelligible, a person not to be under-
stood. He lived away in Galilee, remote from the
city of the religion, and so at first came but seldom
into conflict with the priests. They could not under-
stand a person pre-eminent in religion, who would
not, and did not, frequent the temple according to
rule and routine and season, and use the sacrifices.
With the scribes, again, He was in ceaseless collision
about their weightiest matters of the law, their
solemn days, their fasts, their feasts, their periods
of prayer, their tithing mint, anise, and cummin,
about the formal ways, all so little, yet all so bur-
densome, in which they thought to do religious
work. When He went through the fields on the
Sabbath, and His disciples plucked the ears of corn,
they thought and spoke as if He had broken the
whole law of God; and when He opposed to their
'^Thus saith the fathers, or thus saith tradition,"
His own authority as Son of Man and Lord of the
Sabbath, they only thought Him guilty of the deeper
profanity and even the worst blasphemy. He was
too elevated to be understood of them, and so was
miunderstood in the gravest degree, and to the

The New Testament in Religion, 141

most disastrous results. Not to fulfil their ideal was
to be worthy of the cross.

2. But while His ideal stood in opposition to
theirs, see how noble it looks by the contrast. He
was the Son of Man and the Son of God, and He
seemed to lie as it were embosomed in the Father's
arms, feeling as if round His path and about His
soul, in darkest hour, in supremest moment, the di-
vine hands watched to guide and to bless. He felt
at all times at home with God; He lived in God, God
lived in Him; men felt in His presence as in the
presence of the Father, because in the presence of
the only begotten Son. And, note, when He became
religiously active, what He did, and where He was
found. Not in the temple, but in the highway,
where disease was to be cured; in the home where
wisdom was to be taught; on the sea, and by the
shore, where men were prepared to listen; at the
receipt of custom, or in the haunts of the outcast,
where men were waiting to be saved; there, where
He could best bring to lost men the great message
of life, there was He found. And, high though He
seemed. He gave to no man the sense that He con-
descended; great though His acts were, His conde-
scension was never conscious. What He did was
through the gracious and sweet compulsion of a true
and holy love. What God is among His worlds,
Christ was among men. He was the minister of
God for good to man, come to give His life a ransom
for many. He was the great Helper of the forlorn,
the Saviour who seized and uplifted the lowly, and
carried on His own weary shoulders the burden of

142 Religion in History.

guilt that crushed men to the earth. And what
feeling did He give them? A new strange feeling,
making the men who were guilty feel a passion for
good; He changed the sense of sin in the outcast
into the sense of sonship, the being beloved of the
Father and the Son. He loved love into being, and
commanded by the love He begot. And so the ideal
of religion He realized was altogether new; it
needed for its being no priest, no scribe, no temple,
save the temple of a pure and true spirit and the
presence of a loving God, no order consecrated and
set apart to sacerdotal functions and ceremonious
duties, but only the consecrated spirit of the child
face to face with the Father. Where love is, the in-
trusion of a priest is an impertinence, a dark shade
that sheds coldness into the spirit. And where would
it have been so impertinent as on the heart and in
the Spirit of Him who, as Son of Man and Son of
God, sorrowed in Gethsemane, and died on the
cross?

3. As His religion was in deed, so in word.
What He lived He taught. What He taught He
lived. Many remarkable elements about that teach-
ing might here be summarized and described,
strange, remarkable elements, too. Here is the
Founder of a religion. Then what does He do? In
the life He lives He never does a priestly act, or
gives himself a priestly name, never assumes to-
wards man the attitude, or manifests the temper, or
falls into the tone of the conventional priest. More,
He founds His society, and He does not name any man
He calls to office within it priest, appoints no man to

The New Testament in Religion. 143

do any priestly act, institutes no official priesthood,
simply and purely makes them apostles, or disci-
ples, or prophets, men who learned, and men who
taught, or who learned that they might teach.
When He wishes to impress great duties upon men,
how does He do it? By parable. And when He
uses the parable to enforce the highest duty man
owes to man, where does He get His example. His
impersonation of love? In the priest and the
Levite? Nay, in the man they held to be unclean
and an outcast, the Samaritan. When He wishes to
express duty to God, the true idea of prayer, where
does He get His type? Not from the man who has
his formula and his book, his regular fasts and his
legal tithes, but in the publican, who prays out oi
his stricken conscience, '■ ' God be merciful to me, a
sinner." And here the Pharisee, the man of forms,
stands in the background to make the picture more
distinct. And "when He wishes to find the qualities
He most praises, where does He find them? Not in
the old conventional ideal, but in the pure in heart,
the peacemaker, the lover of righteousness, the suf-
ferer, the man that mourns. They are the blessed,
and if He wishes to describe the supreme law of
God, He finds it in two things, love to God in
heaven, love to man on earth. On these hang all
the law and the prophets. Nay, more. He so com-
bines these, as to make each involve the other, as if
He meant to say — where perfect love is to God,
there will perfect love be to man, and where love to
man, there all the duties God requires will be ful-
filled.

144 Religion in History.

But observe; the maxims, ethical and moral, do
not stand alone. They are part of a vast and im-
mense system. They are built on a great foundation.
They rise out of the conception of God, and His
relation to man. Then, note. He does not mean the
people He calls to remain individuals, shut ofl* from
each other; He associates them in a great kingdom.
That kingdom is called of heaven: which means, it
is not like the kingdoms of earth, created by physical
power, planted by passion or pride — that were
despotism; but it came from above down into man,
and must be received freely to be received at all.
Then He says, it is a kingdom of God. That means,
it does not come from the act of might or tyranny
or deception, the ambition of some great man, plant-
ed on the throne of empire; it was God's, meant to
be realized in conscience, to show the authority of
God over the man. The people drawn into that
kingdom, are drawn into it by the truth, that is, its
citizens are obedient to the truth by belief of the
truth. The men that compose it are men that must
not seek to extend it by sword or persecution, by
civil law or military power. It is a kingdom of the
truth, standing, extending, reigning, only through
the truth and the agencies it employs. Within that
kingdom, which has no visible form and can know no
limits of time and place, the faithful and holy men of
all ages and races are gathered, and, all unconscious-
ly to themselves, are engaged in a common labour,
working together with God through His Son in
building up a new humanity, where, instead of the
old despotism of force, the new force of divine love

The Neiv Testament in Religion. 145

shall reign supreme. That kingdom is an eternal
ideal ever in process of realization, never to be per-
fectly realized. Yet it is all the mightier because it
is so ideal, because it means that our most perfect
state is but the shadow of the most perfect possible.
In the mind of God there lies a pattern according to
which the new creation is made, and that pattern is
the kingdom which Jesus instituted, and which His
people constitute. Within it truth reigns, law rules,
and obedience is realized. It has come, yet it is
only coming; when a man has entered it, he is a
citizen of God's city. Once it is completely realized
on earth, the will of God will be done here as in
heaven.

III.

But hitherto we have been concerned only with
the personal religion and ideal of Jesus: yet these
implied and reposed on certain great truths; were,
indeed, just their articulation or expression in the
region of reality and life. Now we must descend to
these truths themselves; it is only through them
that we can understand the person and work of
Christ. I am not going to ask you to discuss the
high theological doctrine of the Godhead, but only
to consider this — a person and work like Christ's is
a superstructure, cannot stand on nothing, can be
there and abide only provided it be built on a founda-
tion of reality and truth. Now it is not possible
either to state or discuss what we may call these
sub-structural truths; but I wish you to look at
those aspects of them that bear on the idea of

146 Beligion in History,

religion, and those questions concerning its action in
history that are meanwhile before us. The analysis
and presentation of Christ's personal ideal of reli-
gion has prepared us for this new discussion.

1. We shall best begin by returning to our funda-
mental principle; the idea of the divine is the deter-
minative idea. A religion always is as its deity is, or,
in other words, a man is made by his thought of
God or what stands in its place. There is no surer
measure of a people's progress than its successive
conceptions of the Being it worships. The deities
of a rude age become little better that the devils of
an age more refined. The evil power the savage
propitiates, the sage despises or disbelieves. If,
therefore, a religion stands rooted in a depraved or
narrow notion of God, it can never become or con-
tinue to be the religion of a civilized and progres-
sive people. The gods the Homeric Greeks believed
in were abhorrent to the pious men of the Socratic
schools, to the exalted mind of Xenophanes, to the
devout spirit of Plato, and the subtle intellect of
Aristotle. Yet their ideas are to us hardly more
real than the Homeric. The destiny of ^schylos,
inevitable, merciless, moving resistless to punish un-
conscious as well as conscious sin, is a dread power
from which the heart of the world shrinks, a power
it could never in its soul worship, but only so soon
as it had courage repudiate or deny. The God of
Islam, solitary, severe, stern, inducing man to obey
by motives that debase, depraving woman, hating
the infidel, handing him over to the exterminating
sword, is a fit deity for wild Arabs, or fierce Turks,

The New Testament in Religion. 141

but no god for civilized and free man. Even the
God certain ancient Jews conceived, jealous, angry,
vengeful, taking pleasure in seeing the little ones of
the heathen dashed against the stones, is not a
being that, so conceived, can remain the divine
sovereign of man. The ultimate and absolute God
of man must bear on him the mark of no age, no
place, no race, must stand over all like His own
heaven, be like it luminous, serene, unsullied, receiv-
ing the foul breath of earth only to purify it, its
fragrance only to send it back in holy and gentle
influences.

And what is the Christian idea? That God is the
Father, the Common Father of man, universal,
everlasting in His love. He hates no child, miscon-
duct does not create dislike. Love was the end for
which He made the world, for which He made every
human soul. His glory is to difluse happiness, to
fill up the silent places of the universe with voices
that speak out of glad hearts. As a Father He
cannot but be Sovereign, for the patriarch is the
absolute king. As Sovereign He cannot but enforce
order, for only thus can the end which is love be ob-
tained. But He is first Father, then Sovereign,
anxious to assert His authority, not for the sake of
the law, but to save His child. Because He made man
for love He cannot bear man to be lost, rather than
see the loss fall on man He will suffer sacrifice; sacri-
fice to Him will become joy when it restores the ruined,
but loss to man will be absolute, for losing himself he
loses all. So the great Father loves man in spite of
his sin, in the midst of his guilt, loves that He may

148 Religion in History,

save, and even should He fail in saving, He does not
cease to love. In the place we call hell eternal love as
really is as in the place we call heaven, though in the
one case it is the complacency or pleasure in the holy
and the happy which seems like the brightness of
everlasting sunshine or the glad music of waves that
break into perennial laughter, but in the other it is
the compassion or pity for the bad and the miserable
which seems like a face shaded with everlasting
regret, or the raufiled weeping of a sorrow too deep
to be heard. That grand thought of a God who is
the eternal and universal Father, all the more regal
a Sovereign that He is so absolutely Father, can
never fail to touch the heart of the man who under-
stands it, be he savage or sage.

2. But this extraordinary elevation of the idea of
God could not stand alone, it affected every region
of thought and feeling. The first thing it touched
and ennobled was the idea of man. The more divinely
men thought of God, the m.ore highly they thought
of man. Into the new conception of God all the
sublime and strong elements of the old had been
received, but exalted and softened, made at once
majestic and gracious. Men at a given stage of
culture understand severity better than gentleness;
and so the severer aspect of God came first, because
the men Moses led out of Egypt could understand it,
and were more open to the influence of justice than
of grace. When, by the discipline of history and
the teaching of prophets, they were better able to
understand higher conceptions, higher came, but only
by Him who realized perfect manhood was the perfect

The New Testament in Religion. 149

Godhead made known. And the higher the notion
of God rose, the higher grew the notion of man.
Man must rightly conceive himself to respect himself,
and his progress may best be measured by his suc-
cessive ideas of his own nature. He is to himself,
the older he gets, only the more mysterious; his
being is a miniature universe, surrounded with all the
mysteries of the vaster. We cannot forget that we
once were not, that we soon shall not be; great
eternity lies behind, an eternity no less great lies
before; boundless immensity surrounds us; and we,
small, self-conscious, rise like marvellous islets of life
out of the immeasurable reaches of eternity, and feel
washed by the wide spaces of immensity. Every man
who has ever speculated much, has stood silent, fear-
ful, before that thought of himself, feeling as if his
little self-conscious being trembled like a solitary
point of light in depths of unfathomable darkness.
All the great thinkers of antiquity, indeed, of all
time, have felt the mystery of personal being, and
have thought of it as holding within it the secret of
the universe. A great teacher, one who lately passed
away from us, in one of the many wonderful para-
graphs of his most characteristic work, has described
this humanity of ours as ^ ^ Emerging, like a God-
created, fire-breathing spirit-host, from the Inane; as
hastening stormfully across the astonished earth, and
plunging again into the Inane. Earth's mountains
are levelled and her seas filled up, in our passage;
can the earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist
spirits which have reality and are alive? On the
hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in;

160 Religion in History.

the last rear of the host will read traces of the earliest
van. But whence? O, heaven, whither? Sense
knows not; faith knows not; only that it is through
mystery to mystery, from God and to God. "

" We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our httle life
Is rounded with a sleep! "

Now, think of the soft transforming light the
Christian faith has by its conception of God shed
upon the idea of man, and the stern mystery of
human life, its source and destiny. Man is son of
the Eternal Father, and everlasting son; he is spirit,
for God is spirit. The thought he incarnates is ever
seeking the thought incarnated in all material being,
and working in all historical movements. Man who
is thought, finding thought all around him, feels in
the midst of these great infinities at home. But the
homeliness becomes sweeter and diviner when he
knows himself a filial spirit, with God as the paternal.
His eternity becomes our eternity; to sense this
universe is a dark and insoluble mystery, but to
spirit that knows God it is light, for He is Light.
No moment in eternity, no point in space can be
terrible to the soul that loves to be at home with the
Eternal, and knows that His home is everywhere and
every moment. Where the conscious Son is, there
is the besetting Father. We issued forth from no
Inane, but from the bosom of Infinite Love; we
vanish into no Inane, but are received into those
divine hands that love to hold and welcome the spirit
that trusts. ^' Thou hast made us for Thyself, " said

The New Testament in Religion. 151

Augustine, ^^ and our hearts are restless till they
repose in Thee. " The heart at peace with God can
taste no trouble, for it finds all things in all places
work together for its good.

3. But now, how are God and man related? The
simplest duty of the son is love; nothing is more
beautiful or simple than filial piety. The joy of the
father is affection, his delight is to secure the happi-
ness of his child. In the religions of man we see man's
tendency to God, his search after Him. The search,
indeed, is often painful, the track is marked with
blood. In one aspect the study of religions is a most
humiliating study, because it shows what dark, what
dismal ideas of Deity, and painful methods of reach-
ing and pleasing Him have prevailed among men.
I often sympathize with the Roman Lucretius, when,
looking at religion as it was in his day, he spoke of
it as lowering upon mortals with a hideous aspect, as
pressing human life down under its inexorable foot.
For if you look at the way in which man has con-
ceived God and tried to please Him, you will find it
hard at times to admire his religion. Take one rite —
human sacrifice. Think what horror and pain must
have been associated with Deity in the minds of those
who could give the fruit of their body for the sin of
the soul! There is a wondrous Greek tragedy that
tells how the great hero, Agamemnon, offered up his
daughter Iphigenia, that he might win from the gods
a favourable breeze to waft the Greek ships to the
Trojan shore. It was little wonder that the Greek
poets saw in that sacrifice an act that, while it might
please Deity, yet offended the moral order of the

152 Religion in History.

universe, and awoke the Eumenides, the dread un-
slumbering furies, who bring retribution to man.
Where men seek to please God by outraging heart
and conscience, religion has become perverted from
a universal good to the basest evil; and, as I said
before, human sacrifices were known to almost all
the old religions, as indeed they are known to many
heathen worships to-day. Remember the fundamental
principle, as is the god so is the religion, and you
will see that human sacrifice but expresses or repre-
sents the idea of God in these heathen faiths.

Yet it, no less, represents another idea, man's sense
of sin, of ill-desert, of inability by character or con-
duct to please God. There is no sterner fact in
human experience than the guilty conscience; the
man who is not saved from it becomes its victim, it
depraves him and darkens all his world. If his
religion does not deliver him from it, it debases the
religion. Yet does not this only the more help us to
see the miserable ideas of Deity that prevailed among
the most cultured peoples? They did not think so
well of God that they could conceive of God saving
them, pitying and helping them the more for their
awful consciousness of misery and sin. Instead they
had to win his favour, win it by pain, by sufiering,
by surrendering to what they most feared the object
they most loved. If we think of these things need
we wonder that heathen men should have despised
their gods and hated religion?

4. But now see how strangely and beautifully
changed and dissimilar the Christian notion is. Here
God does not demand the sacrifice, He makes it;

The New Testament in Religion. 153

He does not extort blood, does not delight in suffer-
ing and death; He gives, and the giving is a passion
to Him. He so loves the world that He gives for
its life His only-begotten Son. The great sacrifice
is one not demanded from man, it is given of God;
His is the act and His, too, the design to bring man
home, to win the prodigal, who is still a son, from
his misery, and shame, and sin, to the light and life
and love of the Father's house. Under Moses God
gave the law, and the law came with its severity, the
dread threatening that every sin had its appropriate
penalty. But under Christ God gives His love, that
He may the more completely win man's. The idea
was a development when viewed in relation to the
Old Testament religion; but it is a contrast, nay a
contradiction, to all the other religions man has ever
professed. It is, indeed, a contradiction that but
brings out at once the grandeur and the uniqueness
of the Christian conception. It shows the moral
energy of God exercised, not in the way of retri-
bution, but in the way of redemption; it shows the
sovereign working in the way of the Father, stooping
unto utmost sacrifice that He might save and restore
man.

And the form in which He works this glorious
redemption is remarkable. It is in His son, in and
through One who bears the nature of man, and is in
that nature the image of the invisible God. Deity
does not dwell remote, aloof, apart from man. He is
around. He is about. He is within, He has lifted
human nature into connexion and kinship Avith the
Divine. The Son who suffers for us dignifies the

154 Religion in History.

nature in which he suffers. In condemning sin He
exalts humanity; ever since man through Christ
learned the great secret — the kinship of his humanity
with Deity, see how that humanity has risen out of
the dust, become conscious of the Divine affinities
within it, and striven towards the realization of its
more glorious possibilities.

Thus in the doctrine of the incarnation the great
truth is implied, that man is bound by kinship, by
fellowship of nature to the God who is his Father.
What shows us the descent of God to man, shows us
also the ascent of man to God; He who came down
into our humanity, lowly as His outward form seemed,
has more than all the sages of the world given us an
idea of our humanity that ennobles each individual
man.

IV.

We must now turn from these beliefs in them-
selves, and look at their action in and through the
Christian religion as it appears in history. We
have seen Christ's idea of religion in His own
person, and in His teaching. We have also seen
the great cardinal beliefs on which it reposed. We
have now to see how these were or ought to be
expressed, articulated, and embodied in the Chris-
tian religion.

1. And we had better begin this new discussion
by looking first at their action on the ideal of
humanity. Now note, Christ created the idea of
humanity; it was not till He made it; it was His
creation, He spoke, and it stood up a living thing.

The New Testament in Religion, 155

Two great classes of forces, which we may call cen-
trifugal, had hitherto prevented, as in many places
they still prevent, tjie ideal of humanity from being
realized and understood. The first of these orders
of forces was the national. Men are divided into
nations, and nations are divided by race, by lan-
guage and by religion. The differences of nation
and race, and language, can be overcome, but differ-
ences of religion are radical; where they stand, men
can never meet as brothers. If men differ in colour,
in blood, and in speech, they may still recognize
common manhood, but as a matter of history,
common manhood has never been recognized save
through common religion, and the only common
religion which has made men recognize their com-
mon humanity has been tha.t of Christ.

The second great class of centrifugal forces are so-
cial, they are caste, rank, blood, class, money, culture
— all the thousand things that make men of the same
race, language, and religion feel as if they were yet
divided into a multitude of separate cliques or sects.
These divisions find in certain religions their highest
sanction. The Brahmanism of to-day has no unity
of worship or of faith, its distinctive characteristic is
its system of castes, the deep and impassable lines
by which it distinguishes men who speak the same
language, and live under the same laws.

Now the Christian is the only religion that in
history and in idea has opposed and victoriously con-
tended against these social, separative, and dis-
integrative forces. For Islam is in this respect
secondary and derivative; its universalism but illus-

156 Religion in History.

trates and confirms the Christian. The idea of
Roman citizenship when extended to the provincials
seemed to create equality, but the fact of Roman
slavery cancelled and repealed it. The idea of
humanity could not be created by external machinery,
like the action of an imperial policy; it could only
grow out of a conception of man's nature, and the
relations in which he stood as a whole to the Creator.
The peculiarity of Christ's action was that it modified
man from within; it made humanity one by its
doctrine of God on the one hand, and of human
sonship on the other. What was the very first thing
that the greatest of the Christian apostles said to the
most cultivated of the heathens? ^^ God hath made
of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all
the face of the earth." When he addressed the
Christian communities, what did he say? '^In
Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision
nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor
free, but Christ is all and in all." And what did
this mean? The distinctions of race had perished
before the universal religion; at its bidding humanity
stood forth as one, a brotherhood. So the unity of
man meant fraternity; men who were sons of God,
who called God Father, were brothers. Brother-
hood necessarily involved equality; where frater-
nity reigned, slavery could have no place, the sons
of the free home must themselves be free. With
freedom there came the right of man to seek God,
to speak to Him, to live according to the will He
revealed in His word and to the conscience; and
therefore the right men call of private judgment,

The New Testament in Religion. 15t

the right to think and speak the thoughts man
holds most true. But where men were conceived
to be one, a brotherhood, equal and free, there the
duty emerged of common love and common service.
The men God loved, man was bound to love, where
He willed good, man was bound to do it; without
love of man no love of God was possible, without
service of man there could be no service which God
approved.

Out of this ideal grew the great notion of a divine
society, humanity organized into a city or state that
should perfectly express and realize the will of God.
The Christian ideal or thought of the city of God
had no parallel in any religion or system of antiquity.
Had I time I would sketch for you the greatest ideal
of a perfect society known to the ancient world, —
perhaps, outside Christ, the greatest ideal known to
the modern, — the dream Plato incarnated in his
'^ Republic." Were it possible I could have wished
to unsphere the spirit of Plato, and call him from
those worlds that hold

"The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook,"

that he might teach us how he, the greatest of the
Greeks, conceived and would realize the ideal state.
Think where he lived, in the fairest land of antiquity,
under the brightest sun, amid the most cultivated
people, pupil of the greatest teacher and philosopher
of his race, associated with the wisest statesmen, heir
to an heroic past, moved by a poetry that is still the
joy of the scholar, and then conceive him turning in

158 Religion in History,

his maturest manhood to think out the model of a
perfect republic. And what was it? It was a state
where there was to be little freedom, for philosophers
were to be kings — and a strange king the philosopher
always makes, for he is a man resolute to fit men
into his theory, and his best theory is, you may be
well assured, a bad frame for the simplest man.
And the state these philosophers were to rule was
to be one where the home was destroyed, where
women were to be held in common, where there was
to be a community of goods, where life was to be
regulated by rules and hard fixed methods that
would have allowed no elasticity, no play for glad
and spontaneous energy. That Republic could not
have been realized without the ruin of humanity, and
was possible at its best only for the Greek, was con-
ceived in derision of the barbarian, and afforded even
to Greek nature only the poorest exercise.

Turn now to the ideal Christ created. It lifted
all men, through its doctrine of God and the Redeemer,
into a unity that was a brotherhood, and involved an
equality of rights on the one hand and a sovereignty
of duty on the other. It left the mother and the
wife and the daughter to make glad and enlarge the
spirit of the husband and the father, to evoke and
ennoble the soul of the son. It left the man to be
while the citizen, the husband, while the husband,
the brother of his kind, the servant in his age of the
everlasting God. It left the state where it stood, but
it changed all the citizens, ennobled them, made them
simpler, truer men; and through this change of the
men altogether changed the state. It aimed at the

The New Testament in Beligion. 159

good of all, through seeking the good of each, by
blessing the one it laboured to bless the many.
Whatever meant misery to man the Christian was to
relieve, whatever meant wrong he was to redress.
They say that Christ has nothing to do with ques-
tions of state; what concerns the conduct of nations
or of peoples does not concern Him. No saying less
true could any man utter; all questions of state, all
social and civil politics are to me questions of religion.
And such they must be to the man who wishes to
realize on earth the kingdom of God. Never, while an
abuse tarries, while a hate reigns, while a barbarism
remains unconquered, never, while ignorance broods
with its dark and jealous wing over the mind of man,
while injustice or unequal law or disorder or wrong
live on earth can the Christian man be still or
inactive in the arena of public life. All without as
within us must be brought into harmony with the
great law of Christ, and only as the harmony of the
renewed spirit is reflected in the renewed humanity
will the glorious dream of the city of God be realized.
2. This brings us, secondly, to Christ's method of
realizing the ideal of humanity. His method, indeed,
is very simple, but it is remarkable in its strength.
That method does not proceed by ignoring the
hardest and most painful facts of our human experi-
ence. Christ was open-eyed as regards the actual state
of our nature and world. He knew it was miserable,
altogether evil, but He did not mean to skin the sore.
He said, as He laid His finger on the evil, '^ This sore
must be healed, sin is, and sin must be vanquished."
No religion has so great a sense of sin and at the

160 Religion in History.

same time of salvation. The sense of sin indeed is
almost shared in its intensity by another than the
religion of Christ, that of Buddha. Buddha was a
beautiful spirit, a character of rare pity and gentle-
ness, touched to his inmost soul by sorrow for sin,
and at the sight of human misery. And his whole
system was inspired with the desire to deliver man
from the sorrow he hated — but how deliver him?
By freeing him from being, by bringing him to a
death that was annihilation. He saved men by
destroying man, and he magnified sin that he might
only the more pour contempt on life. But what of
Christ? His sense of sin had for background His
exalted ideal of man; it was because man was so
noble that his sin was so terrible. And what did
He aim at? Vanquishing the sin but saving the
man. If you throw away a life that you may deliver
from disease, what does it mean but that you do not
care for the person whose life it is. But if you die
to conquer the disease and save the person, does it
not mean that your hatred of disease is only the
reverse side of your love for life? Christ's aversion
to sin but expresses His love of man, and the glorious
peculiarity of His method was this — while He van-
quished the sin He saved the man.

It is well to look at Christ's peculiarity in this
matter. Men in face of sin may be divided into
various classes. There is the Cynic; he is a common
person in these days; our clubs make him; they
are great factors of cynicism. Where amid much
comfort you can talk scandal, indulge wit, and
derive comfort from the scorn in which you hold

The New Testament in Religion. 161

weaker men — it is easy and natural to be a cynic.
The cynic has ever risen in days like these, he was
in Christ's time and before it, as he is now, and said
then as he says now, ' ' What a poor thing is man 1
A compound of meanness and vanity, and whether
his meanness or his vanity be most to be despised,
it is hard to tell, yet were it not for this compound,
what should be have to laugh at, what to make life
pleasant? " The cynic little dreams that in so de-
spising man, he but shows himself despicable. Yet
it is ever so; the faultiest men quickly see and
severely condemn their own faults when reflected in
another's face.

Then there is the Epicurean, the man who loves
pleasure, who hates alike the thought and the
experience of pain. To be burdened with a sense of
man's misery, is but to have his own pleasure marred,
and so he says: ^^ Why trouble ourselves about a state
we cannot mend; man will be foolish; let him be a
fool, while we here can at least make our own lives
pleasant, and so lessen the pain of humanity by secur-
ing and enlarging our own happiness."

Then there is the Stoic, who believes in the
sanity of Nature and the 'suflSciency of man to
obey the laws contained within it. And so he
speaks thus: ^'Virtue is beautiful, the man who is
not virtuous is a creature to be pitied; he belongs to
the lowest type of men, for he contradicts and defeats
the nature by virtue of which he is Man. But our
virtue is our own, evolved by our own action from
within ourselves; let us cultivate virtue, and so, by
showing its beauty, make it attractive, only let eur

162 Religion in History.

calm never be broken by the restless passion that
would suffer for the evil. The weaker must always
be, but to the stronger they ought only to be condi-
tions for the exercise of his calmer strength."

These are the criticisms of selfishness, the doctrines
of impotence. Virtue that will not suffer to save
man, is but decent vice. There is no parsimony so
miserable as the one whose chief concern is personal
happiness. But even men of these types have often,
especially under the influence of Christian ideals,
become zealous doers of good, helpers of humanity,
and let us give all honour to men ruled, even though
they may not know it, by the Spirit of Christ, who
follow Him in any degree even while they do not
honour His name.

But observe Christ's peculiarity; He stood alone,
and His religion stands alone here — He was a
Redeemer, His religion is a religion of redemption.
It sees sin, and it hates sin, but to it every sinner
is a man that may be saved. To save him Christ
lived and died, to save him the Spirit of God works
and wills, to save him every good man ought to
labour and to watch. The passion of Christ is the
symbol of His religion, it suffers everywhere for the
sin of humanity, but in order to the deliverance of
the humanity that has sinned. The state of estrange-
ment from God, God wills to change into a state of
reconciliation, and the religion of Christ is the means
that works it; and it is of all the religions the only
one that is in the true and proper sense a religion
of redemption.

The New Testament in Religion. 163

V.

Now, the thing that chiefly concerns us about
this religion of redemption, is the way in which it
affects the personal and collective life of man.

1. Well, then, mark how it restores the depraved
nature into the image of its Creator, and makes it as
redeemed a vehicle of the Divine purposes, a factor of
the order and ends of God. Now I would just note
three simple historical facts in relation to Christ's
redemptive action. He has proved Himself in His
handling of men possessed of three great powers.
First: an unparalleled power to change men, to make
bad men good. Secondly: an unparalleled power to
make the men He has reformed into factors of good
— agents of redemption. Thirdly: an unparalleled
power to associate the men He has redeemed into
societies with larger ideas than the states of earth,
societies with an ideal and mission of their own,
or rather, one that is altogether His. In proof
of His possession of these gifts I would appeal to
history. I ask you this: Where will you find three
men who have more profoundly affected the history
of the world than Peter, Paul and John? What were
they? Peter, when Jesus found him, was an ignorant,
impulsive, superstitious fisherman, plying his craft on
the sea of Galilee, without thought or vision of the
greater world around. John was a brother fisherman,
rather more cultivated and refined perhaps, yet with
hardly more promise of capability and power. Paul,
when Jesus found him, was a tentmaker, poor, mean
in bodily appearance, possibly painful to look at,

1€4 Religion in History,

certainly no person a passer-by would have selected as
a manifest king of men. But just see what these
three men, coming under the influence of Christ, be-
came and did. Peter conducts himself before priests
and rulers like a statesman, founds and administers
churches with the wisdom of a far-seeing ruler of
men. John writes the most marvellous history on
record, serenest, clearest, profoundest, fullest of in-
sight into the secret springs of life and action in God,
tenderest in the delicate portraiture of the Christ he
knew, most awful and graphic in its description of
the men that plotted his death, and accomplished it.
Paul becomes the author of Epistles that command
the mind, that have made and governed the thought
of the cultivated peoples of these Christian centuries.
And these three are but typical. In every age
this marvellous power that Christ possesses has stood
expressed and declared in great persons. The creative
personalities of the Christian centuries are of Christ's
making, and as He made the persons, so He has
ruled their conduct and their lives. The order of his-
tory since He lived has been an order He has guided,
especially in all that has made for human grace
and good. He who has been so able to change
men and make them factors of good for man has
indeed been proved by transcendent fact our great
Redeemer.

2. What I think of the action of Christian men
and societies in history will in later lectures become
apparent. But let the creative personalities of the
Christian centuries, the men with a passion for the
good of man, witness to the distinctive power of

Tlie New Testament in Religion. 165

Christ. In Himself we see what He means man to
be to man; in the men He has formed, who huve
lived under the inspiration of His love, we see the
sort of service He has rendered to humanity in
history, one of the ways in which He has ameliorated
our common lot. Deeds are greater than words.
Men may find parallels to sayings of the New Testa-
ment in Confucius or in Buddha, in Plato or in
Seneca, but one thing they cannot parallel, the
achievements of Christ in the region of human
personalities. Here He has been the Supreme
Creator, one who dwells altogether alone. Do not
think that Buddha can stand by His side. The
person so named was, as I have said, a gentle and
beautiful human character, oppressed by the sense of
human suffering, laden with sorrow at the thought of
the miserable and illusive life to which man was
doomed; but he had not the love of life that turned
all man's moral energies into forces that worked for
its amelioration. Buddha so hated life as to ex-
tinguish the very desire to mend it; Christ so loved
life as to create in all who loved Him the desire for
its ennoblement. The men who have most imitated
Buddha have preached a gospel of annihilation; the
men who have best known Christ have preached a
gospel of salvation, of grace that reigns through
righteousness unto eternal life. The aim of Buddha
was to make men know their misery that they might
be willing to lay down the burden of existence, but
the purpose of Christ was to make men conscious of
sin that they might live unto holiness, forsake the
darkness and seek the light. To Buddha the highest

166 Religion in History.

life was the secluded, the renunciation of the fami-
liar duties of society and the home; but to Christ the
holiest life was the life of active beneficence, the
piety that helped our neighbour, that hoaoured God
by serving man. The secret of His power was His
love of man; the men that love Him must love as
He loved, and so translate into the realities of
personal character and social conduct the health, the
holiness, the wholeness of His glorious ideal.

3. I know there are men in England who use base
words when they speak of our Christianity. It is
to you, working men, that they make their appeal.
Now, in matters of this kind, we can only concern
ourselves with men who use honourable and veracious
speech; with those whose language is but buffoon-
ery, and the brutal buffoonery of poltoons, we can
have no concern whatever. The great heart of the
world is just, and, turning from the ignorant and ran-
corous men, who fight with the poisoned weapons of
savages or slaves, I cry across the ages to the mighty
spirits of the Christian centuries, ' ' What think ye of
Christ? " The poets, led by the great Florentine,
the man of sad, lone spirit, of face so beautiful, yet
so full of wondrous thought, who imagined the
strange circles of the Inferno^ and yet saw as in
open vision the celestial ^' Mount of light," while
Chaucer, in his quaint English guise, and Shake-
speare, ^' Fancy's sweetest child," and Milton, whose
voice had a sound as of the sea, and Cowper, and
Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and many another
bright spirit follow in his train — make answer, '■'• He
was the soul of our poetry, our inspiration, and our

TJie New Testament in Religion. 167

joy." ''What think ye of Christ?" we ask men
of thought, and out of the middle ages rise the
schoolmen whose mighty intellects made light in its
darkness, the founders of Modern Philosophy,
Descartes, and Bacon, and Locke, the foremost
minds of the eighteenth century, the century of
unbelief, Leibnitz, and Newton, and Berkeley,
and Kant; the thinkers, too, that in sheer intel-
lectual force transcend all the other men of this
century of conscious wisdom, Schelling and Hegel,
and they altogether confess and acknowledge ' ' the
Christ stands alone, pre-eminent, only Son of God
among men." ''What think ye of Christ?" we ask
the great philanthropists, the men who have made
our laws kindlier while more just to the criminal, our
prisons more wholesome while more deterrent of
crime, who have accomplished the liberation of the
slave, who have made us conscious of our duties to
savage peoples abroad and to our lapsed at home;
the men who in these centuries have been foremost
in doing good and in guiding to nobleness the mind
of man, and Bernard and Francis of Assisi, John
Howard and Mrs. Fry, Wilberforce and Livingstone,
surrounded by the noble band of all our good
Samaritans, answer with one accord, "Without Him
we should have been without our inspiration and our
strength, the love of man and the hatred of wrong
that have constrained us to our work. " ' ' What think
ye of Christ? " we cry to the great masters of music
and song, who have woven for us the divine speech of
the Oratorio, and filled the air with harmonies grander
than any nature has known, and they for answer but

168 Religion in History.

bid us read the names of their supreme works,
'^Messiah," ^^St. Paul," ^ ^ Redemption, " and know
that but for Christ the one art in which the modern
has far transcended the ancient world would never
have been. ' ' What think ye of Christ? " we ask the
painters who have made the canvas live with their
ideals of love and holiness, pity and suffering; the
sculptors who have chiselled the shapeless marble
into forms so noble as to need only speech to be the
living man made perfect; and their great leaders,
from famed Giotto through Fra Angelico to Michael
Angelo and Raphael, down to our own Reynolds and
Ruskin, send forth the response, ''He has been the
soul of our art, our dream by night, our joy by day,
to paint Him worthily were the highest, though,
alas, most hopless feat of man. " 0, yes; thou Christ
the Redeemer, Son of God yet Son of Man, stand
forth in Thy serene and glorious power, Leader of
our progress, Author of all our good, ideal and in-
spiration of all our right and righteousness, and
reign over the hearts and in the lives of men!

LECTURE lY.

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN THE FIRST FIFTEEN
CENTURIES OF ITS EXISTENCE.

What we have to attempt this evening is to study
the action of the religion of Christ in the first fifteen
centuries of its existence. That is an immense sub-
ject, quite sufficient in itself to awe and oppress
any one's spirit. To make the attempt to discuss or
describe it in an hour's discourse, is certainly to ex-
hibit a courage more allied to adventure than to
discretion. What, too, is intended, is the more
difficult, as we must attempt to get below the sur-
face at the underlying principles or causes, that we
may the better discover their nature, their action,
and their end.

It were easy to write or to tell the history of a
Church, but it is not so easy to describe the history
of a Religion. Yet, to the partial, or partisan, or
careless historian, or to the designing polemic, these
are identical, to be treated as one and the same.
Here they are to be held as throughout distinct; as
though often blended in action, yet as diflerent as are
form and matter. It is needful that we see that what
runs back into Christ, or follows by necessary conse-

170 Religion in History.

quence from Him, and from the circle of truths He
created, and whose centre He is, is of the essence of
the Christian Religion; but what springs from the
needs, the ambitions, the interests of any Christian
Society, is the Society's alone.

I do not stand here as the apologist of any church,
least of all those of churches that to me, in many
points, fundamentally misconceive and misinterpret
the very idea, as in many respects they have per-
verted and depraved the reality, of the religion of
Christ. What I wish to do is simply this, to see how
that religion has acted in history, how it has affected
the happiness, the progress, the wellbeing of society
and of man. In the nineteen centuries of its exist-
ence, it has furnished, on the most stupendous scale,
experimental proof of its intrinsic character, contents,
and qualities. In spite of manifold and most burden-
some impedimenta, it has changed everything, man
most of all; and every change it has, as a religion,
worked, has worked altogether for good. We know
what the world was when Christianity entered it, we
know what it is to-day, and at every moment between
then and now, we can trace the history and action of
the great Christian ideas or truths, now acting in
secret, now openly, now receiving the merciless hate
of a mighty empire, now collecting, directing, pene-
trating, as with the passion of God, the concentrated
enthusiasms of peoples. And if we are to understand
matters aright, we must compare what was with what
is, and find in what Tvay Christianity has worked to
change what was into what is; and only when that
has been done, can we be in a position to answer the

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. Itl

question — has it acted in the common life of man as
a divine religion ought to act? have its fruits been
but the apples of Sodom, or have they been indeed
living grapes from the living vine planted in the
paradise of God?

I hope it is not necessary to restate the purpose of
these lectures. They were intended, not to deal with
doubt on the one hand, or doctrine on the other, but
simply to exhibit the action of religion in history,
with a view to discover its true relation to the great
economical, industrial, and political problems that
interest the working men of to-day. This is a work
which I think you have a right to ask from the men
who study and teach the religion of Jesus Christ.
Here are Christian men and churches faced with
Nihilism, Socialism, Secularism, and many another
form of negation, or passionate unbelief, often more
remarkable for the intensity of its bigotry and the
density of its ignorance than any other quality be-
sides. I have meanwhile no wish to deal with these
as a critic on the one hand, or an apologist on the
other. It were an easy thing to grapple with their
assumptions and their ignorance, and handle them
after the manner of the apologetical protagonist.
But my purpose is quite other. If they are, why
are they? There is a reason for their being. Have
they not in this and other lands been born of disap-
pointed hopes? Men have a right to expect that
religion, as Christian religion, shall cure poverty,
shall make the charity that is at once the luxury of
the rich and the misery of the poor, cease; shall
bring a time when wealth, equally distributed, shall

1*72 Religion in History,

create the happiest of civil and social and secular
states. And much of our Nihilism and our Socialism
has been born of disappointed hopes, and hopes that
were legitimate. And the Christian churches, if
they are wise, will not simply play the part of apolo-
gist, and say to these people, '^How false and futile
are your beliefs, ill-considered, inconsequent, incoher-
ent, formed without knowledge, maintained without
science, a bundle of mere illiterate dogmatisms;"
but, though, unhappily, all this may be true, they
will say, ^' We are to blame for these crude negations;
they are the children of our neglect, the Nemesis
that has followed on the heels of our unfulfilled
duties. They do not represent the rebellion of rea-
son, but it is a rebellion with a reason, for it has not
been caused by dislike to the truth of God, but by
the inaction or impotence of His churches." Then,
turning to the great and fruitful idea of religion,
the vital truths and realities of faith, they will ask,
^'' What do they mean for life? what message have
they to the multitudes of men who toil and spin, and
how are we to build up in the world, and in view of
man and mankind, a state, a society that, in all its
parts, shall express and declare the great ideal of a
city of God, a society in harmony with His spirit
and mind ? "

Now, my attempt hitherto has been to bring out
the principles and qualities in religion as an idea,
and in the religions of the Old and the New Testa-
ments, creative of a happier order, contributory to a
wealthier state, and a more progressive society; and
I wish to*night, to try to discover how the Christian

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 173

religion, even in its earliest birth, has affected these
same great forces, and worked towards these great
purposes and ends.

Let me begin then, by simply stating that it is
here necessary to look at the Christian religion from
three points of view. 1. As regards some of the dis-
tinctive notes or qualities it possessed at its birth, or
on its appearance in the world. 2. At the way in
which the Christian societies were affected by certain
old Pagan and Judaic ideas; and 3. At the way in
which, in spite of these, the Christian truths or ideas
so worked through the Christian Societies as to affect
for good the common life of man, our industrial and
economical systems, and our toiling men and multi-
tudes.

Now, you will note, beginning with the first, that
Christianity at its birth stood a centre of new ideas,
a circle of great and splendid beliefs. Some of these,
cardinal and central for our question, were exhibited
in the previous lecture. Those meant specially con-
cerned the new ideas of God, of man, and of the
method of reconciling God and man. These were
such as to make man the glorious vehicle or organ
for fulfilling or carrying out to completion the divine
purpose or plan in history. Growing directly out
of those ideas, or truths, or beliefs, came these
qualities : —

1. Christianity was a universal, not a national
religion. As universal, it was something generically
new, absolutely unlike all that had been before, or

174 Religion in History.

were around. A universal religion is a religion
capable of living anywhere and everjrwhere, suited
to men of all classes and in all stages of their
development, capable of satisfying the largest, yet
of stooping to the meanest nature; yet able so to fill
the nature as to make it dissatisfied with its attain-
ment, ever craving after something nobler and higher.
A universal is more than a missionary religion. It
must be missionary, but all missionary are not
universal religions. Buddhism is missionary, yet we
can see this, that it so hates life, it so hates society,
it so dislikes whatever tends to create an order that
shall prolong and lift the life of humanity, as to act
as a sort of paralysis of progress, as to produce a
sort of general collapse in all the more progressive
and ameliorative agencies of time. Islam is mission-
ary, but then it spreads not simply by power, but
so as to deprave the civilized, as to lower the higher
and nobler races. A universal religion must be one
that can help man ever forward, enlarge his nature,
give him for ever the idea that far as he has come he
has yet an infinite path to travel to a higher and
nobler perfection.

Now the universalism of Christianity rose out of
its cardinal ideas. The one God made mankind one.
One God and one humanity could be expressed only
by one religion. Now, mark, that was at first an un-
intelligible idea. To the early world all religions
were local. Zeus could not be understood out of
Greece, Jupiter could not be understood out of Rome.
The Roman might carry his faith with him, but it
was bound up with the being of his state, with the

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries, 115

idea of his city. No man can be a Brahman out of
India. If he comes here he loses so much of his
Brahmanism that he has to be purged and purified
at his return. There was not then, as there is not
now, any religion, but the religion of Christ that
possessed universalism, that could be anywhere by
any man believed and obeyed, and that tended to
embrace all men in a glorious unity. That made it
a most insoluble problem, a strange anomaly, to men
possessed of the older ideas, and many a great
historian and thinker stood puzzled and helpless
before the notion that a faith could be universal, that
there could be a religion expressing faith in one God,
one Humanity, and one great Mediator between
them.

2. The second distinctive note was spiritual. It
was purely spiritual, alike as regards its matter and
its independence of all outer and local forms. Every
old religion, as has been explained, had its temples,
its priests, its hierarchy, its augurs, its processions,
its sacrifices, the varied signs and symbols by which
externally it lived. But now here was the wonderful
anomaly. Christ was no priest, appointed no man a
priest, erected no temple, established no ritual, laid
down no law of sacrifice, enjoined no sacrifice but
the sacrifice of clean hands and a pure heart, a holy
and noble life unto God. Now its independence of
all sacerdotal forms made His religion a greater
anomaly than its Founder, more wonderful, less in-
telligible. That it should be without a priest, with-
out a priesthood, without an altar, without a temple
for a home; made it seem to the ancient Greeks,

1*76 Religion in History.

Romans, and Jews, a religion? — nay, an atheism, an
utter denial of all religious belief. And so, why
were the Christians condemned to the lions? Why
were they forced to the amphitheatre? They were
said to be Atheists, men profane, without God, while
in truth, they were so spiritually religious that the
unspiritual religions could not understand them. And
bigoted, intolerant, as all heathen religions were, the
Roman doomed the Christians, as men godless and
atheistic, to the stake.

But not only so; the religion was independent
of all political organizations, all hierarchical and
graduated orders. By that I mean this — the polities
now thought so cardinal to the religion had no
existence in its purest and most historical form, the
primitive state of the religion as it issued from the
mind of its Founder and the hands of His apostles.
Men say, Christianity is papacy. Nay, papacy was
fatal to many things in the cardinal Christian idea.
The father is an excellent authority when his family
are children; but once the family is grown they must
not be treated as infants. Papacy making men
spiritual infants stands in the way of the realization
of the highest Christian idea, which is essentially the
religion of manhood, and speaks to men as men.
And as with papacy, so with all hierarchical forms.
They were later, they did not belong to the early
Church. The earliest was a society where men
taught, men learned and lived, each after his own
kind. The man who believed became a member of
Christ. Becoming a member of Christ, he became a
worker for man; and those little communities that

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 17 1

rose in those ancient cities that stood round the tide-
less Mediterranean, what were they, every one of
them, but missionary societies formed of men who
lived in the most devoted way for man, to cure his
sorrow, to heal his misery, to help his sin, to bring
all into holier relations to God? The abolition of the
old sacerdotalism was the creation of a grand
spiritual religion formed from heaven.

3. That brings us to the third great quality.
The religion was a religion creative and regulative
of a new life, both individual and collective. Now,
as has been stated over and over again, the ancient
religions did not pretend to give a moral law, directive
of personal and social and civil life. The moralist
was never the priest, he was always the philosopher.
No man did good because his religion bound him.
No, it was only the maxims of the schools that could
direct and teach. If you Tyant to find the highest
ideal of morality in Pagan times, where do you go?
Certainly not to the oracles, certainly not to the
mysteries, certainly not to the priesthoods. Nay,
but you go to the academy, to the porch, or to the
grove, and say to Plato, or Zeno, or Aristotle,
'^ Teach me how to regulate my life." And as there
was no morality connected with the religion, so the
gods did not concern themselves about morality. A
Pagan moralist could say, '^The gods give me life
and fortune, but a cheerful, contented spirit I secure
for myself" Or he could say, '^ The gods send war
and pestilence, and wc offer sacrifices to propitiate
their wrath; but the virtuous man is suflScient for
himself, he needs no help of the gods."

178 Religion in History,

Now the result was inevitable; where religion had
no concern with morality, morality could draw from it
no inspiration. But when Christ appeared, these
were bound together in indissoluble marriage, the
highest moral principle iwid the highest religious
faith were united in eternal alliance. And the result
was seen at once; first in this: man was placed in
the centre of new moral forces, new moral forces
were placed within the man. Then happened a
wonderful thing. Where the schools had been power-
less, Christianity became powerful, and men who
never felt the inspiration to a good and noble life
felt it now.

And, as a second result, the virtues were univer-
salized. If you had wished to scandalize an ancient
philosopher, you could not have done it more effectu-
ally than by associating him with the unlettered, with
the people. Celsus, the great assailant of the Christian
faith, held up the Christians to scorn because they
were unlettered men, slaves, cobblers, weavers, men
who were not equal to stand in an Academy, or speak
in elegant Greek. But therein lay its power, it took
the poor, the outcast, the despised, and it made them
more moral than the schools had made the philo-
sophers. You will get many a beautiful proverb in
Seneca, you will get many a fine ethical principle in
Plato, you will find in Stoicism some of the most
exalted precepts that human ethics have ever known.
But mark you one thing, you will never discover that
these elevated the common life of man, affected the
course of lust, made the bad good, or the impure
holy. Where they failed, Christ succeeded with

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 179

splendid, glorious success; He made out of the very
outcasts men that became saints to God.

And then followed a third thing. Virtues new
and beautiful were created. Now I don't mean to
compare the Greek ''Eros," the Latin ''Amor," and
the Christian "Love." The man who knows classic
life knows that the distance between these is an in-
finite distance. Love, what did it signify to the
ancient world but a form of lust, or what at best
carried with it every connotation of passion and its
pain? But Love, what does it become to Christian
man? Read that wonderful chapter which stands as
the xiii. of first Corinthians, the glorious descrip-
tion ol Christian love, the power that can inspire,
can regulate, can ennoble man, making him live for
his fellows the wide world over. Or take another
thing, take the tenderness it brought into life, of
man to 'woman, of strong to weak. There is no
grander ancient character than Socrates, beautiful
character he is in many a way. He, citizen,
thinker, teacher, plying that wondrous dialectic
craft of his in the streets of Athens, is a form
attractive to all eyes. And he is so attractive be-
cause he stands out from among the crowd the
creator of a new moral ideal, at once stronger,
higher, and more humane than the old epic and
heroic ideal embodied in the Homeric Achilles.
But now, look how over against him stands the
image of Xanthippe, his wife. She has had hard
measure dealt to her; his contemporaries and his-
torians have made her seem one who led the poor
philosopher a hardish life, and have made her the

180 Religion in History,

type of a woman who makes life not pleasant to the
man that has wedded her. And many a dry-as-
dust commentator has grown somewhat humorous
over the sweet relief that death brought to Socrates
when it saved him from Xanthippe.

But if you examine the simple truth as it stands in
history, that woman has no right to be so rated j the
man, on the other hand, reason to be rated most
soundly. His love is all for the state and not for the
home, marriage is for him only a convenient institu-
tion, carrying with it no duties of living affection, of
mutual helpfulness and cheerful intercourse, and his
conduct was but too good an exponent of his
opinions. He cultivated an admiring friendship for
Aspasia, but he had only the coldest neglect for poor
Xanthippe. His duties are all to Athens and Greece,
and not at all to home. He puns, questions, teaches
for the good of philosophy and the state, but she has
to provide for their children. She goes to him in
the hour of death, grieved, distressed in a woman's
way, and he sits as in the Phaedo, sublimely dis-
coursing with his friends. When she comes he never
feels a bit the loss to her, they do not feel the pain
to the woman and to the children; nay, it is going
to trouble the serenity of the philosopher to see the
woman who was his wife, and the children she had
borne him. And they send her away with no word
of comfort, with scorn rather than with cheer.
There now stands out clear and distinct one of
the great differences the religion of Christ brought
in, it brought in the spirit of love, made the weak
dependent on the strong, made the strong thought-

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 181

ful of the weak, made the man in his might, in his
manhood, with all the rights of manhood upon him,
be to the weak generous, and to the dependent
noble. There is but one phase of its action in univer-
salizing and creating a higher virtue, and so purify-
ing and perfecting the whole notion of society.
The state of life built up in harmony with these prin-
ciples, according to these great ideals, could not but
be a kindlier, nobler, humaner state.

4. Imagine, then, Christianity launched on the
stream. It has those features we have sketched,
and how has it to live and do its work? By means
of the preacher, the teacher, the man that persuades
the reason. That, too, made it something new. A
man like Gibbon has represented the old religions as
tolerant. I stand here to say that no ancient religion
was tolerant, or could be tolerant. It was in the
heart of it a narrow nationalism, and it could allow
to live within the nation only the men that supported
it. Why was Socrates done to death? Religion, as
the ancients understood it, persecuted him thereto.
Or why was Protagoras banished from Athens, in
spite of the friendship and protection of Pericles, the
most illustrious statesman of Athens in her most
illustrious age? Because he had ventured, in a
treatise on the gods, to say, '^ I do not know whether
the gods do or do not exist." To express such a
doubt was to become liable to the last penalty; and
Protagoras preferred exile to death. But, perhaps,
you may think Rome better than Greece. Well,
take Maecenas, the man Horace so greatly praises,
and get at his advice to Augustus. What does he

182 Beligion in History.

say ? He tells Augustus that whatever he tolerates he
is not to tolerate alien religions, he is not to allow his
people to break from the ancient faith. But it may
be thought, this man was no true Roman and lover of
liberty, rather he was the friend and admirer of the new
emperor, advising him how best to found a despotism
on the ruins of the ancient freedom. Let us appeal,
then, to Cicero, and we find him in his treatise on
Laws saying, that no man shall be allowed to worship
any gods except those publicly recognized by law;
or let us ask the distinguished Roman jurist, Julius
Paulus, what he understands to be the law on this
matter? and he explicitly enough answers, ''Who-
ever introduces new and unknown religions, by which
the minds of men may be disturbed, are, if belonging
to the higher ranks, to be banished, but if to the lower,
they are to receive the penalty of death." These
principles of Roman law made the persecution of the
Christians not only legal, but necessary; and they
stood associated with the fundamental idea and
condition of the Roman state. To doubt the state
religion, was to doubt the right of the state to be,
its right to make and administer its own laws. The
state was above the religion and made it, above the
gods and decreed their worship; and so it was but
legal and natural that the emperor, as the head and
symbol of the Roman state, should be declared divine,
and that all men should be held bound to worship
and believe as he determined and decreed.

Now, let us see how radically Christianity stood
here opposed to all the old religions. It worked by
persuasion, its great instrument was speech. It did

Meligion in First Fifteen Centuries. 183

not seek to live by the protection or help of the state,
but wished to penetrate as truth and love the mind
and heart of man. It did not ask the laws to favour
it, asked only to be allowed to live and work in
its own way. And so what is it we see when it
first appears on the great stage of history? We
see that it comes and appeals to reason, it speaks
to intellect, it tries to persuade spirit. The man
that goes out and preaches stands, where? On
Mars Hill, and reasons with the philosophers. The
man that goes to Corinth, does what? Preaches, and
preaches that he may convert and change. It is as
a power living by speech, living by persuasion, that
Christianity begins to be. When it has persuaded,
what does it require? That a man live a life holy
unto God. Mark this, that where the old religions
placed animal, the new religion placed spiritual sacri-
fices. Men were to offer their spirits, their bodies,
their living souls unto God. Where the old religions
placed outer service, the new religion placed purity,
peace, faith, hope, love, service of kind. While the
old religions stood in subordination to the state,
the new stood in supremacy over man, was a moral
law over him, and so over any society into which
he might be gathered. All was changed, and every
man it reached became a great factor of change, a
means of making a new humanity, a whole world new.

II.

1. Well, now, passing from these distinctive notes
or features of the new religion, I would notice two of

184 Religion in History.

the ways in which the old Pagan and Jewish ideas
affected and changed it. The first of these was the
way in which the old sacerdotal ideas came back.
Remember, it is one thing for a truth to be revealed,
another thing for it to be understood. It takes
centuries before the mind of man grasps the meaning
of a great truth. It takes centuries more before he
is able to express it in outward action. Consider
the situation; for ages the world had been accustomed
to religions with priests, with sacrifices, with temples.
The Jews had a priesthood, a temple, a ritual at once
extensive and minute; all the Pagans had the same.
Now when they came to think of Christianity, even
after they had become Christian, the old elements in
their minds were in some respects stronger than the
new. They could not easily conceive a religion
without those modes and orders which had seemed
the very essence of all the religions they knew, and so
they proceeded, though all unconsciously, to translate
the new back into the old. And so they thought of
the apostle, of the prophet, or the presbyter as a
priest; and they could not think of a priest without
thinking of a sacrifice; and they could not think of a
sacrifice without thinking of a temple; and so old
Pagan ideas came back and held, for many a drear
century, sway within the Christian Church.

It is not possible here either to trace the history
of the change or fully explain its nature and effects.
But let us try to weigh a fact or two. In the earliest
Christian literature, apostolic and post-apostolic, no
man who bears office in the Church is called a priest.
In it there was no official priesthood, and none of

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 185

the signs and rites associated with one. The men who
held office were called either apostles, or prophets,
or evangelists, or pastors, or teachers, or elders, or
ministers, or overseers, but never priests. About the
end of the second century, however, that fateful name
begins to appear. A great Latin father, Tertullian,
speaks of ' ' the sacerdotal order, " and calls the bishop
priest, and even high priest, though he was far enough
from allowing priesthood in any sense that denied
the spiritual priesthood of universal Christian men.
Half a century later another writer, Cyprian, makes
quite a strong claim on behalf of an official priest-
hood, and shows us just beginning the change of
the Lord's Supper from a simple feast of love and
remembrance into a sacrificial ceremony. Now, once
a change like this begins it proceeds rapidly, and the
further it proceeds the more disastrous it becomes. It
forced into Christianity many of the limitations and
much of the materialism of Judaism and paganism.
In the apostolic days every Christian man was a
priest, with the right to approach God when and
where he pleased; but this neo-heathenism tended
to give, and ultimately gave, the official priest the
right to stand between God and man, distributing
the grace of the one, granting or denying access or
pardon to the other. In the religion of Christ, no
place was sacred or necessary to the worship of the
Father, the one thing needful was the pure and true
spirit; but the renascent sacerdotalism created a
whole new order of sacred persons, places, ceremonies,
acts, which had to be respected if the worship was to
be approved. The Christianity of the New Testament

186 Religion in History.

was a religion inward and spiritual, all its virtues were
those of the believing, meek, true and loving spirit;
but the Christianity of the priesthood and their
church became outward and material, consisted in
things the priesthood could prescribe and regulate,
rather than the obedience commanded and approved
of God. You will see at once how this affected the
religion and modified its action. It was then as
always, the truth of God had to wrestle with the
ignorance and sin and imperfection of man. These
cannot be expelled by mechanical forces, only by
moral means, and the conquests of moral agencies
are slow, but in the process the nature of man is
uplifted and renewed. His nature affected the
religion, but it more mightily afiected his nature.
What was of God prevailed.

2. Then there was a second class of influences
which we may describe as political. Men, as
accustomed to a great state and religion as bound
up with it, thought that apart from the forms of the
state it could not be. So the result was that both in
East and West, the state and the church tended to
draw nearer and nearer in political form and idea to
each other. It was an ill moment when Constantino
took over his idea of Pontifex Maximus into the
church. The old emperor had been supreme priest,
the new emperor in the new religion tried to become
the same. That either gave to the church a master,
or, by turning the church into an organized state,
with its hierarchies and graded orders, created the
political interests and ambitions which made the
church try to be master over the state. In the East

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries, 187

the state remained master, and we see the result in
Athanasius banished from his see at the fiat of an
emperor, or recalled when the emperor so willed.
Or we see it in the great Chrysostom, when he
dared to rebuke the vice of an unclean or impure
court, banished by Arcadius, a tool in the hands of
the vengeful Eudoxia. In the West there was the
opposite process, where the church, developing into
a mighty state, became a mighty power, seeking to
control in its own interest all the secular policies.
It may have ofttimes stood on the side of order,
nay, in its earliest days it almost always so stood.
But so vast a departure from the old original idea
made the religion less potent for good than in its
pure and primitive days. Yet, in spite of the return
of the old sacerdotal, of the old political or civil
idea. Christian truth lived. Christian thought worked,
and there distilled into society through the Chris-
tian Church great ameliorative principles which
were operative for good.

III.

Now this brings us to the point where we must
consider the action, even as so qualified, of Chris-
tian ideas, truths, or beliefs, on the prosperity and
happiness of man. And I am anxious that this
should be considered in relation, simply and purely,
to the great industrial and economical questions.

1. Well, then, I will ask you to consider as a first
step the state of the world as regards its social and
economical condition when Christianity appeared.

188 Beligion in History,

And I will take it at its most favourable point,

as it existed in Rome. Now Rome was a great

city, it was the mistress of the world; the tribute

of all places flowed into it. The Roman was a

sturdy and stern man, proud of his great history,

vain of his eternal city, remembering his republican

virtues, and glorying in his past. What, then, was

the state of Rome, the highest point of ancient

civilization, in the first century of the Christian

era? Here I want working men to listen, for I wish

to speak purely and simply from the standpoint of

one who believes that economical, industrial, and

social questions are questions of religion, and who

wishes to regard them altogether as such. Well,

the population of Rome, if we are to take Mommsen,

the greatest of all its historians in recent times, as

our authority, was, in the first century, 1,610,000.

How was it composed? There were 10,000 senators

and knights, 60,000 foreigners, 20,000 garrison,

320,000 free citizens, 300,000 women and children,

and 900,000 slaves. Mark that: — about three-fifths

of the population of Rome were slaves. That is one

fact.

(a) Now consider how the slaves afiected in-
dustrial and social economics. You will notice in
the first place, that these slaves were the absolute
property of the master; he could do with them as
you can do at this moment with your dog. Nay,
your dog has more rights than a Roman slave had.
For English law has grown so tender that it protects
even the animal from the cruelty of man; but Roman
law did not so protect the slave. Take, for example,

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 189

a case like that of Flaminius, who, when a gay young
friend said ho had never seen a man in the agonies
of death, had a slave killed to show him what he
wished. Or take the case of Pollio, who liked delicate
lampreys, and fed them with his slaves. Or take
cases such as that of Cato the elder dealing with
his slaves as cattle, mere tools for the creation of
wealth, to be broken or sold when useless. They
were things, chattels, and no man who was a Roman
citizen need care what happened to them.

(/5) But now there is another and no less pertinent
question, how did slavery affect labour? Well, you
perceive all labour was done by slaves; trade and
labour were altogether in the hands of the wealthy,
but in a peculiar way: the rich who owned the land,
owned the slaves, and through their slaves conducted
trade. We know well what the conflict between la-
bour and capital means. Yes, and with us labour can
often hold its own ; but there was no conflict between la-
bour and capital then, for labour was capital, all
slaves were capital, men that worked for the masters,
and the owners reaped the profit. Many a man
tilled his farm by slaves working chained in gangs.
Many a man conducted a vast business by slaves,
who made the profit and handed it to him. Many
a man produced the raw material, manufactured it,
carried it, and sold it, — all by means of his slaves;
theirs being the labour, and his the reward. And
the scale on which the richest Romans could do
business of this kind may be judged from the fact
that some had as many as 10,000 slaves, and even
20,000 was not an unknown number. The work,

190 Religion in History.

then, of the Capital was done by these 900,000
slaves, and so the wealth of Rome was gathered into
the hands of the few thousand men who owned
them; and everywhere, except for these few thousand
men, there was deep poverty, and within the poverty
there was a slavery of a deeper and darker kind
still.

{y) But there is a third question, which has an
even more significant light to shed on the temper and
state of the time. Whence came the supply of
slaves ? Kome could not of herself have produced
and maintained so extraordinary a number; they
were in large part the fruits of conquest. I said the
tribute of the world flowed into Rome, and slaves
were the tribute of the vanquished. If a Roman
army conquered a province, or defeated another
army, the captives, if they were not butchered in
cold blood, were sent to Rome, to be sold as slaves.
And here let me ask, and then leave you to answer,
a simple question, yet one of profoundest moral
import: — ^^ Is it possible to calculate the degree in
which this way of handling the conquered must have
depraved the conquerors? "

2. But now we must study the social and ethical
effects of this system. How did the multitude of
slaves affect the 320,000 free citizens? Where
work, labour, trade, was the mark and sign of bond-
age, with these no freeman could soil his hands. He
could not labour, labour was a thing for slaves, and
slaves alone. And so these 320,000 were idle, or
they were worse than idle, the pimps, the buffoons,
the men that lived to cstter by crime for the pleasures

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 191

of those who could afford to buy. But as a necessary
consequence, when productive industry was so little
cultivated, the citizens who despised labor had to be
maintained by the emperor at the public expense.
The feeding of these citizens was a great problem.
The grain ships from all the provinces came to
Rome, and every citizen had his right to so much
grain, and, as a rule, rich or poor took it. How
many of you that could earn your bread would take
help raised by a poor-tax, in a word, parochial re-
lief? What man, earning a good salary, would be
so mean as to go and get his parochial allowance?
Yet what was parochial allowance in its very worst
form was taken by almost every man of these Roman
citizens. And this dependency of the citizen on the
government vitiated both, as this may illustrate:
whenever an emperor came to power, or any fortunate
event happened, he had to distribute great largesses;
he sat in his seat, he remained emperor only by
keeping the multitude sweet and well-inclined to him,
and they were well-inclined only when paid, and well
paid; and they often transferred their allegiance
from the man that paid ill to the man that paid well.
And so a Nero, and a Domitian, and a Caligula could
reign, though each was shameful to his kind, because
they not only were supported by the legionaries, but
condescended to pay well the citizens who were too
proud to work, but not too proud to live as beggarly
dependents on an evil emperor.

But there were other and no less inevitable results.
If you wish to keep a people sweet, you must not
only feed them; if they have no work to do you must

192 Religion in History.

amuse them, and the amusing is the harder and more
arduous thing. And how did the great Roman em-
perors amuse their men? Why, they built splendid
amphitheatres in every Roman city, most of all in
imperial Rome. There the ruins may still be viewed.
Look at that mighty Colosseum, capable of seating
87,000 people. Think what it means. It means
that an emperor had a people so idle, that he not
only had to maintain them, but to amuse them.
And what were the amusements? Whole rows of
gladiators, men, or even ungentle women, met there,
with knife, shield, and sword, to fight, row upon row,
and unto death. And ofttimes, when the weaker
went down, he might look his look of pity that cried
for mercy. But there, in the crowded benches, the
empress and many another dainty dame would put
down their thumbs, which meant, ^'No mercy; do
him to death!" And if they did not fight man to
man, then they fought man and beast, lion, tiger,
bear, sometimes the man defenceless, sometimes the
man with offensive weapons. In a show, given by
wise Julius Caesar, 320 pairs of gladiators fought;
Titus, the good and gracious, held a series of shows
which extended over one hundred days; Trajan, the
just, celebrated a triumph by an exhibition in which
5000 contended; Domitian excelled himself and dis-
covered a new sensation by instituting a fight be-
tween dwarfs and women. There was a people
glutted with blood, fed with slaughter, amused with
death! And it is told that it became a kind of
study in certain cases to watch the lines on the face
of the dying. That was a nice and refined sestheti-

Beligion in First Fifteen Centuries, 198

cism, yet the most fit for the spectators of the glad-
iatorial show.

Such was Rome, and Rome in the early years of
our Christian era, Rome in its refinement, Rome in
its pride, Rome in its might. And if the Romans
were not careful for toil and labor, or careful for
life, what cared they for the defenceless? Infants
are a joy to man; childhood is sweet and beautiful to
us; yet in Rome what so common as exposure? what
so little deemed a crime? what so little punished as
an ofience? Nay, men followed as a trade taking up
the exposed children that they might turn them to
the basest of uses, that they might make them live
the most miserable of lives. Do you think the
ancient world happy, radiant, because undarkened
by the shadow of the cross? You can only so
think in your ignorance. Its good was all for
the few, the rich and the strong; but for the
masses, the mighty multitudes of the poor and
the conquered, the dependent and the enslaved, it
was a miserable world, and their lot a lot of misery.
The very sense of their rights was not yet born; the
feeling of obligation towards them waited on the
footsteps of Christ.

IV.

Now into this world, and face to face with it,
Christianity came; and how did the religion affect
the world? It is easy for us to see how truth
must act; truth needs to work slowly, with many a
great and painful struo-glc, into mind, and through

194 Religion in History.

mind into life. We think that a man has just to
believe in order to be a new man. But though
he is a new man, it is long ere the new manhood
becomes perfect in its blossom, longer still ere the
new man makes a new humanity; and so we must
watch the slow, yet sure and most effective way in
which Christianity, in its grand ideal period, went
to work. Let me sketch in rapid outline one or two
of the branches of its action.

First, slavery. It could not and it did not
abolish slavery; yet it declared itself in its ideal
period the foe of slavery. In Christ there is neither
Jew nor Greek, bond nor free. In the church
there was no slave and no master; there all were
servants of Christ, and members one of another.
Slowly, as Christianity prevailed, the idea of man's
equality entered into the heart of society. When
you come to Justinian and his laws, slavery is still
allowed, but to kill a slave is made a crime. Over
him Christian law throws its shield. When you
come later down still, the slave gains new rights.
He can become a free man, he can enter into a
religious order, he can there become the peer of the
best; and in the new states that Christianity formed
slavery, in the old sense, had no place. Nay, in
spite of its many sins and imperfections, look how
the church welded in Spain Iberian and Yisigoth
together; how in France it welded Kelt and Frank;
how in England it welded first Briton and Saxon, then
Saxon and Norman, creating an entirely new ideal,
the ideal of a society without slaves, where manhood
is known and honoured, and has its rights confessed.

Religion in First Fifteen Centuries. 195

Then secondly, let us see how it affected the
feelings and spirit of humanity. One of the
earliest decrees of the Emperor Constantino was
against the amphitheatre. The people passionately
loved and still clung to their brutal play. But
Christian faith held on against it, till finally, in the
reign of Honorius, when a great victory was being
celebrated, the monk Telemachus leaped into the
ring, and gave himself a prey to the wild beasts.
While many an angry howl rose against the man
who had spoiled their sport, it was found that his
deed had given the death-blow to the great evil; for
the consciences of men were pricked and touched by
that act of self-sacrifice. Then the great arena had
its doom, the public conscience ratified the imperial
decree, and the amphitheatre ceased.

Then, thirdly, with the greater love of freedom
and the softer social spirit, there came a large belief
in the dignity of labour. Jesus had been a worker,
Paul had been a worker, John and Peter and all the
apostles had been workers. They gave dignity to
toil. The Roman citizen could not soil his hands;
the Christian preacher worked, toiling with his hands.
And so labour became dignified, was made honour-
able; men found that no manhood was so base as
an idle manhood, manhood that loved to be relieved
from toil and work. And now mark that this went
on even when you little think it. The idle monks
are frequently blamed; yet the monasteries used to
be scenes of toil. You often go to Bolton or to
Fountains, and you say in the wise manner of to-day,
''Those old monks knew what they were doing; they

196 Religion in History.

placed their houses in favoured spots, thej chose
beautiful situations." Yet they found them deserts,
and they made them gardens; they found them moors,
and they planted them, and drained them, and made
them fertile fields. Our agriculture, our culture, our
learning, owes more to the monasteries than many a
modern man thinks. They made, or helped to make,
work religious. ' ' Laborare 6st orare, " they said; to
work is to worship, to toil is to pray.

Then, fourthly, see how the Christian religion con-
secrated the home. It threw over the woman, it
threw over the child, the halo of a great love. The
child was of the kingdom of heaven. He who gave
our faith its being was born of a woman, and so
made woman sacred. I confess that there are mo-
ments when, with all my strong dislike to priest-
craft, sacerdotalism, and the poor and external form
of Christianity it implies, I can feel how it taught us
reverence for woman; how its adoration of a woman
helped to create the purer, the nobler ideal of the
home, the purer and grander faith in maternity.
The man who is capable of despising his mother, of
disowning or neglecting a wife, or being cruel to a
child, is no man, he wants the soul of chivalry. The
faith that brought out that great latent passion in
man for gentleness to woman and child, has achieved
a right noble work, has done a grand thing.

But, fifthly, besides the consecration of the home,
the early church organized the charities, the benefi-
cences of time. You know not how destitute of true
and generous action the ancient world was I It was
a new thing that Lucian laughed at, — the sight of

Beligion in First Fifteen Centuries. 19 T

Christians visiting the prisons and ministering to the
captives. He thought them simpletons, weak people
who offered themselves as easy prey to the designing
and crafty. He did not know that their act expressed
a new passion, the enthusiasm of humanity, and had in
it the promise of redemption for the world. It was a
new thing, despised of many a man, to see poverty
relieved, to see disease nursed, to see pestilence faced.
If time had permitted I could have told how, when
the barbarian hordes swept over Italy or across
Africa or into Spain, rich Pagans fled far into their
retreats, and left pestilence and famine and death to
rage as they listed. But brave men like Ambrose
and Augustine, faced the desolation and death. The
matrons and the maids of the new faith went out to
nurse in hospitals, in churches, by many a bedside,
creating, where only misery had been, a sweet and
gentle peace. The religion of Christ created charity;
at its very birth it stood forth to organize the benefi-
cence of man into the instrument of the providence
of God.

But above all, and most of all, what Christianity
in these centuries did was to substitute a new mental,
a new moral, a new spiritual basis for life. Life was
made far sweeter, far nobler, far diviner by having a
grander basis. No imperial decree, no fiat of state,
no word of mere might constituted the organizing
force of society. Men believed in a living God who
was Eternal Sovereign and Father, in a living Christ
who was an Eternal Brother. Men believed that
man was to man a brother the world over. As
brothers they owed duties that time could never

198 Religion in History.

fulfil, that place could uever separate. The faith,
however imperfect its forms, that lived and worked
for these sublime and glorious ends, was a faith
that indeed came from God, and made preparation
and provision for another and better time when
the large and eternal principles of righteousness
could be applied to life and society.

LECTURE y.

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN MODERN EUROPE.

The point we have reached is one of the deepest in-
terest. It brings us face to face with questions that
relate to the immediate past, and concern the living
present. Ancient history is the field of the special
student. He works in it, knows it, loves it, lives
in it, is perhaps more at home with its persons,
principles, events than with the men, the problems,
and the interests that appear and wrestle, that pre-
vail and vanish on the stage of the passing hour.
But modern Europe is our own very world. We
belong to it, breathe its atmosphere, live its life,
and think its thoughts, and feel its electric currents
thrill along our nerves. Its every movement is
answered by the responsive pulsations of our hearts.
Now this modern world of ours, in which we live, is
one full of good, yet full also of evil; wealthier than
any past age, freer, better educated, more informed,
with vaster energies exercised on the field of politics,
commerce, industry, science, literature, art, and
religion. But it is also a world that in the lucid
moments that come between the periods of its posses-
sion by the pride of knowledge, feels, as no other

200 Religion in History.

age ever felt, over-burdened by a sense of its poverty,
misery, failure, vice, and crime. There are in our
world more and mightier forces contending against
evil, than in any previous time. They fight all
along the line a victorious battle. But while so
fighting, never was age so moved and so possessed
with the consciousness of evil. Now the sense of
suffering is one thing, the actual amount and degree
of suffering another, and altogether different. The
conditions of happiness are to-day more and higher
than ever in the history of the world before. But
then the feeling of unhappiness is perhaps deeper,
the sense of it keener and more real. Yet is not
that an element of the highest promise of good?
Evils that men do not feel, they will not remedy;
evils that are deeply felt are evils not to be borne :
and where they are not to be borne, they are certain
to be abolished. To make an age conscious of evil
is the first condition of making it consciously happy,
in preparing it for larger happiness. There is at this
moment a wide sense of suffering and of sin, but
then within it there is also a great faith, a faith that
we can win, and that we shall win, the saner, the
more normal state of happy holy being. Modern
Europe is far more conscious of suffering than
ancient Europe, but in that consciousness there
live and work the elements that have the most
promise of deliverance, those that look toward the
great and permanent ameliorative state that is sure
to come.

Christian Religion in 3Iodern Europe. 201

1. Now, in attempting to discuss so large a question
as Christianity in modern Europe, it is easy to see
that there is a great variety of sides from which it
can be discussed, while only a few from which it
is possible to discuss it here and now. We might
look at the question as a question of Churches. That
indeed would be a matter of profoundest interest and
instruction. We could compare the Greek, the
Roman, the Reformed, the Lutheran, the Anglican,
the multitudinous Free Churches of the modern
world; describe their respective characters, the
number of adherents they possess, the truths or
doctrines they hold, the constitutions they boast, the
work they have done or tried to do, the influence
they have exercised or still exercise. That were
indeed a noble as well as an instructive work. The
churches represent perhaps the mightiest mass of
devoted labour, of noble living, of ungrudging service
of our kind, ever at any moment seen in the history
of man. I put it to every fair-minded person as a
simple problem: imagine all the Churches with their
agencies and institutions suddenly destroyed, can
you conceive the result for our order, for our society
and age? Think — would not the myriad -branched
stream of charity be almost completely dried up at
its source? Would not the ministries of mercy, of
healing, of gentleness, of readiness to rescue the
fallen, and cure the diseased, be suddenly brought
to an end? Would not the inspiration that lifts
many a life out of the dust be extinguished, and

202 Religion in History.

some of the fairest and most beautiful phases of
human character be utterly blighted and blurred?
I know that in certain places what professes to be
satire, but is only brutal coarseness, delights to
magnify the individual error, crime, or sin of men
who are held to represent Christian Churches and
the Christian religion. That shallow system which
does not or will not see the nobility, the magnanimity,
the heroism that in many a life serves its kiud with-
out money and without price, is no system conscious
of its own truth, fighting a noble battle with noble
weapons. Men and women! a cause that needs an
ignoble instrument is an ignoble cause. Fear not
to say, the cause that can see nothing to honour in
religion, when it has created and is creating millions
of honourable lives, is no cause that believes in its
own truth, or can wield a power for righteousness.
It would be easy, too, by comparing the churches
of to-day with the mediaeval churches to show how
much mightier the former are. The ages of faith
are now, not once were. The age of ignorance and
superstition, or ceremony, lies behind, in mediaeval
bygone Christianity. The age of faith is in our
midst. True, you may think of a time when all over
Europe one church reigned, when the monastery was
as many acred — acred up to the lip, consolled up to
the chin — as the modern peer. You may think of the
time when out of their vast wealth the monks built
their stately buildings, or the church reared its
grand cathedral, as a time of faith. I think other-
wise, and turn from then to now. I think of a land
like England, where men often out of their poverty

Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 203

maintain and propagate their faith. I have known
many a one who has given up large prospects of
commercial wealth, large prospects of professional
success, and lived a life of purest poverty that he
might live a life altogether unto Christ. Or I think
of lands like that lying beyond the Atlantic, where
all churches are free, and a living people make the
living church. And I say, look how the fact stands:
The man in the market, on the exchange, in the
factory, in the infirmary, by the sick bed, anywhere,
everywhere, whose life is possessed and ruled and
inspired by the great truths of religion, is the true
measure of its power. And never at any moment
in the whole history of the Christian faith were there
so many men filled, commanded, guided by the holier
and simpler truths of our faith.

2. Yet we must look at the matter not simply as
a question of Churches or Christian living, but also
as a matter of belief. Here I will say, never was age
more marked by its strong and victorious belief than
ours. I know what I say. The truth of Christ is
slowly subduing the mind of man into itself. Never
was His authority so great as it is now. It is greater
now than in that mediaeval time, when religion was
the great concern of the few, the mere pastime of
the many. Then indeed the penances, the absolu-
tions, the festivals, the fasts, the indulgences granted
by a mighty priesthood helped the Church often only
to gain influence over men by making a league with
sin. It is now mightier than in the Reformation
time, when princes and statesmen, ecclesiastics and
divines made it their exclusive business, and armies

204 Religion in History.

fought to determine to what Church or to what creed
the whole country or the whole people should belong.
It is mightier, too, than in an age like the eighteenth
century, the pre-eminent age of apologetics. Then
it was that on the one side there stood men like
Toland, Collins, and Tindal, Bolingbroke and Chubb
and Hume: and on the other men like Butler, and
Berkeley, and Paley. Yet great as were the apolo-
gies of that time, the greatest apologist of them all
had to confess, ^^ I know not how it has happened,
but so it is, that many take for granted that the
Christian religion is not so much as a subject of
inquiry, but is at length discovered to be ficti-
tious." That may not now be said. This century
has given to faith its brightest sons. The men who
when it is past will stand up as the great time-marks
of the period, are men who boast of strong and
noble faith. The thinkers that have had the might-
iest influence are Christian thinkers. It may be that
we have phases and forms of loud-speaking infidelity.
It is true, nevertheless, that we have a great deep
strong '^sea of faith," a sea of faith that never was so
near its full. And still it will continue to rise. As
man's knowledge extends, so will it enlarge. It is
not knowledge that religion has to fear, it is ig-
norance: it is the absence of science applied to re-
ligion. Give us more scientific spirit, give us
wider knowledge, give us calm impartial study of
man and man's past and man's spirit: and religion
will reign, its power will grow, its might increase.
Now these are phases of our question and subject
that might fitly enough be here and now discussed.

Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 205

But they are not the peculiar phases that I wish to
present to you. I have invited working men: to
working men as workers I wish to speak. I have
tried to exhibit religion in relation to history, to
society, to the great practical problems that emerge
in connexion with man in his social and collective
life; and to that phase I am pre-eminently wishful to
adhere. I want to look at Christianity — the Chris-
tian religion in modern Europe — as it has affected
the political, the social, the economical questions;
or rather the great principles that lie as the com-
mon basis underneath them all. And we look at
these aspects and phases only in order that we may
discover what religion is, and that we may say
what it is to men who are workers and toilers,
anxious to find freedom in the world, anxious to find
wealth, character, happiness, and to know that to
him that worketh there are proper wages and sure
reward.

II.

1. Such, then, being our peculiar problem, I
would say, at the outset, that modern Europe, as
distinguished from ancient Europe, may be traced
back into two great movements; a movement of the
fifteenth century, and a movement of the sixteenth;
one the Renaissance, the other the Reformation.
The Renaissance afteeted and aflects art and letters.
The Reformation affected and atfects religion. The
Renaissance was the revival of letters, touched all
questions that related to man as a thinking, perceiv-
ing, living being, who needs to be educated. The

206 Religion in History,

particular form that it took was in great part due
to the rise of the Turkish power in the East, and
the consequent extinction of the Greek Empire.
At its fall many Greeks travelled westward bring-
ing their language, their ancient literature, the
laws, the practically lost knowledge of Greece and
Rome. Their main home and centre of work
was Italy. There they taught many a joyous
and earnest spirit to read Plato, to know Aristotle,
to discourse with the ancient orators and feel the
exaltation and inspiration of the great poets.
There men who had been accustomed to a medi-
aeval and often heathenish Christianity, suddenly
found themselves face to face with the old pagan-
ism, pure and simple. And it became as it were
the basis of their lives. They went back to the
old naturalism, the love of flesh and of nature that
had so marked, especially in its decadence, the
ancient world.

Now how did this pagan revival, which replaced
in great part mediaeval Christianity, aflect these cities
of Italy? It found them free: Florence rich, artistic,
strong, rejoicing in its political freedom and republi-
can institutions: Pisa enterprising, its rival, almost
its equal: Bologna, Padua, full of life, the one
studying law, the other studying medicine, both
great in their universities : Genoa, Venice, both
queens of the sea, sending their fleets afar, bringing
in the riches of distant Asia, making their merchant
princes prouder than any royal blood in Europe: all
free, all energetic, as it were in the flood tide of vic-
torious life. But in the presence of that revived

Christian Religion in Modern Europe, 20*7

paganism, enervating public life at its source, what
happened? The rise of the Medici at Florence, the
usurpations of tyranny and the growth of a perni-
cious luxury in them all, made these Italian cities —
once the freest, the wealthiest, and most enterprising
of Europe — the poorest and most reactionary.
There Italy remains, the victim of two great forces,
the Renaissance in its classic naturalism and the
Church it tried to supersede. Most beautiful, most
historic of European countries, she lives at this day
only in the first energies of a new attempt at life,
seeking to catch up the other and more northern na-
tions which have sped far forward in the great path
of progress opened by freedom.

2. The Renaissance as it passed into the Reforma-
tion was by it incorporated and made a servant, true
and good, of religion, helping the discovery and the
knowledge of the old religious books. But taking
the Reformation simply by itself, we find it was
an attempt to recover the lost or forgotten ideal of
the Christian religion, an attempt to return to the
real and genuine religion of Christ. As indicated in
the previous lecture, two great heathen influences
had entered the Church. The first was sacerdotal,
the second political. The sacerdotal brought into a
religion which knew no priest, no temple, no sacrifice
save what was spiritual, an immense hierarchy, a
disciplined and organized priesthood, that by com-
mand of the access to God and the rewards and
penalties of the life to come, had become an organ-
ized tyranny, which tyrannized not through what it
got from Christ, but only through what it acquired

208 Religion in History.

from Judaized heathenism. The sacerdotal mind
and practice is invariably disastrous to spiritual re-
ligion. The man who stands where only Christ
should stand, between man and God, obscures faith,
hides God behind his office and his rites. Where
God cannot be seen for a man, the man conceals God,
and in so doing is the great enemy of man. But
while the sacerdotal was mischievous on the one
side, the political was mischievous on the other. It
made the Church aim at a supremacy over the
State, which was not spiritual and moral, but politi-
cal and secular; a supremacy which consisted, not in
the reign of beliefs and ideals through the reason
over the conscience, but in one organized polity
commanding all the rest. The distinctive element
of the Christian religion had been the reign of God
in the human soul, commanding the man by com-
manding the man's spirit and conscience. When
the Church was taken and organized into the great
civitas, or State, or polity which sought to win, by its
command over the future, authority in the present,
in all that pertained to civil as well as religious life
— it perverted Christianity and turned it back into
the older heathenism. Now the Reformation was a
great attempt to escape from these two Pagan ele-
ments, to get back into a purer and nobler, because
a more primitive religion. It meant to say, not the
religion of the Church but the religion of Christ is
what man needs.

So Luther said, ' ^ Get quit of the Pope, get rid of
the priests, rid of all that stands between the
individual soul and God. Let God and the soul

Christian Religion in Modern Europe, 209

stand face to face. Let God and the soul know and
be known to each other. Here, in this immediate
knowledge of God given by God, I stand; I can do
no other. God help me, for God commands me."
His watchword, which summed up this belief, was
'^ Justification by faith," — faith, face to face know-
ledge of God, and justification, peace in the con-
science where God lived, where God's voice was
heard, believed, obeyed. That cry wakened Germany.
They say, Luther made the literature of Germany.
Do you know what that means ? To make a litera-
ture means to make the mind of the people. To
create the literature of a people is to create a people's
spirit, its thought, its science, its whole inmost life;
and, his enemies being witness, Luther did that; he
created the literature of Germany by that word of
his, by his revival of the old faith. It entered into
the spirit of Teutonic man and made his thought
anew.

III.

That was only one section of the Reformation;
there was another. Calvin went further than Luther.
He not only insisted on God and man standing face
to face, but he insisted on applying his notion of
religion by building it into a state. Now I do not
mean either to defend or expound Calvin's notion of
God, any more than I intend to defend and expound
his attempted realization of a State. I think both
had august and noble elements. I think both had
very terrible, very stern, very awful elements indeed.
One thing I mean you to see and so must empMsize

210 Religion in History.

in your hearing: wherein he found faith he found life,
he made belief into a law for living: he made the duty
of the conscience to God the foremost duty of man.
This conception of human duty he so bound up
with his notion of God, his idea of religion, as to
compel unity to enter into the life of the real believer.
So doing, Calvin powerfully affected five countries —
Switzerland, France, Holland, England, Scotland.

1. Switzerland we may leave aside. But look at
France. There came to her reformed people the
hardest problem that could be set to any one. The
faith they held, their king would not allow. The
duty their conscience demanded, the State declared
a duty not to be permitted. It is hard to be
obedient citizens when the first law of the State
contradicts the first necessity of conscience. Yet
this people, though they stood for God against their
king, became, whenever opportunity allowed, indus-
trious, peaceable citizens, making their cities beauti-
ful, their districts wealthy. When inspired by influ-
ences born not of religion simply, but of other and
baser motives as well, Louis XIV. revoked the edict
that allowed them to live in peace, they bade, in
great numbers, farewell to their Fatherland, that
they might go elsewhere and serve their God. And
so there came this principle through them: Religion
is so supreme a matter of conscience, that the State
which means to remain one, united, compact, har-
monious, must grant freedom in religion. Martyrs
to the doctrine they were; but in the State as in
the Church, the blood of the martyr is the seed of
freedom, power, and success.

Christian Religion in Modern Europe, 211

2. Note, next, the influence in Holland. Holland
fou know has a noble history. The king it had
for ruler, Philip of Spain, — forsooth no good man
in the moral sense, though most pious in the
ecclesiastical, — held that his subjects must be of his
faith. But these Dutchmen said, ' ' This light of the
reformed religion has come to us from God. We
believe it to be His truth, and we shall obey God,
rather than King Philip." Patient they had been,
calm, industrious, fighting that great fight of theirs
against the tides of old Ocean in the swamps by the
sea. They had built out the waves; beneath their
level they had cultivated their fields. A peaceful but
most enduring people they were, to whom religion, as
now understood, came, a very revelation of the pres-
ence and power of God. They mustered in their
cities and mustered in their fields; and against them
came the great legions of Spain, led by Parma, led
by Alva, led by Don John of Austria, led by the most
famous captains of the age. But these men of
Holland stood by their cities and fought in their
swamps like heroes. They let the sea sweep over
their fields and waste their cities, rather than yield
the freedom that came to them from God. And
when they had beaten back the mighty power of
Spain, and gained their freedom, they nobly showed
how a people that had fought to the death for their
own freedom could help to make other peoples free.
Their land became the very home and house of refuge
for the oppressed of all lands. There freedom of
thought and speech did reign, and reign in peace.

3. Next in England. The Anglican Church is

212 Religion in History.

very proud of not being a Puritan Church, reformed
by means of Puritan theology. Yet the great
English people lie under immensest obligations to
Calvin, to Geneva, to the Reformed men and doctrine.
The men Calvin influenced were called Puritan, which
meant — they thought religious men were men who
ought to be pure, holy, of good report. These Puritan
men became lovers of freedom, and they won freedom
for you. When men said of a man weak, self-willed,
proud, very much in want of all that makes manhood
true and generous, ' ^ He is king by Divine right, sits
enthroned to be obeyed as the very vicar and repre-
sentative of God," these Puritans stood forward and
answered, '■ '■ Nay, this people of England is a free
people. We stand under obligation to God first. We
are bound to obey Him. Being bound to obey Him,
when the king commands what conflicts with the
command of God, we must obey God rather than the
king." Believing that, they fought their fight, and
they won it, even though it seemed in defeat.
Charles I., when he lost his head, made this great
principle manifest and intelligible to all kings, that
they are for peoples, and not peoples for them. That
is the political principle England owed to her Puri-
tans, and to the fundamental article of their faith;
the article that, religion being of God, the religious
man can be responsible for his faith, and for the
conduct his faith demands, to God alone.

Nor was their contribution to freedom limited to
England. The revolution they accomplished not
without blood, made the bloodless revolution of a
later generation possible; and supplied at once prin-

Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 213

ciples and inspirations that were in the succeeding
centuries to help oppressed and impoverished peoples
to cast off the regal and sacerdotal tyrannies under
which they groaned. And they did more than teach;
they sent out a branch that was destined to bear the
noblest fruits of freedom. Of these Puritans many
finding it hopeless to expect to be allowed to live at
home and serve God in their own way, crossed the
ocean and made another English nation beyond the
sea. And they took with them the principles that
lie at the foundation of the great American Republic,
principles which have secured absolute freedom of
religious thought, and made our kin beyond ^^the sea
the freest of all the peoples earth has known.

4. Lastly, in Scotland. What did the reformed
faith find there, and what did it accomplish? It
found a people barbarous, downtrodden, enslaved,
made coarse and brutal by a long war of independ-
ence against their mighty neighbour; and as it were
by the breath of a^creative word, it made that people
stand up happy, free, educated, strong. Whatever
success the sons of that land have achieved, they
have achieved by the faith, and the political energy
created of the faith, they received from the reformed
religion.

IV.

IN'ow this rapid historical sketch has showed us
that the Reformation, by virtue of its being a return,
or an attempted return, to the religion of Christ, the
purer and more genuine Christian religion, accom-
plished far more than it attempted. It revealed

214" Religion in History.

ideas, energies, elements in religion that worked
powerfully for human freedom, that created in the
State a freer and a higher life, and created in man
and in society nobler purpose, greater independence,
that love of equal freedom and equal justice which
but expresses the love of man. The principles that
thence emerge may be illustrated on one or two
points of detail. That their action may be appre-
hended, we must come down to matters of living
interest, matters of clear historical certainty that
ought to be familiar to you.

1. Now, let me ask you as men who work, what
are the three great terms that you think, as it were,
the true Palladia of the order most to be desired?
They are the terms which were the watchwords of
the French Revolution — Liberty, Equality, Frater-
nity. I cannot enter into a discussion as to the
French Revolution. It has two phases, and can only
be understood when both these are regarded. One
phase is its negative, the other its positive side. Its
negative phase it owes to Yoltaire, to Rousseau, to
the Encyclopaedists, and owes it to them mainly be-
cause of the great abuses against which they had to
contend. The French Revolution was a supreme
act of retribution, the supreme act of national
retribution on the stage of modern history. Under
and after Louis XI Y. , the king and the Church had
bound themselves in an unholy alliance. That alli-
ance meant bondage to man, meant poverty to the
multitude, meant abdication of the highest political
and social duties both of king and Church. The
revolution, in its negative phase, hastened, though

Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 216

not caused, by the literature which exposed the un-
holy alliance, was an act of retribution and retribution
was never more deserved and never more inevitable.
On the positive side it was an affirmation of principles
which did not come from these negative quarters. It
was the affirmation of the principles of Liberty, Equal-
ity, and Fraternity; although in its practical working-
out it was the greatest affront to these principles, and
repudiation of them which modern times have known.
I am concerned purely with the great positive prin-
ciples, not with the event, not with the method in
which it was conducted, not with its retributive
relation to the past, but only with its relation to
these three great ideas of Liberty, Equality, Fra-
ternity— whence came they?

i. Liberty. Liberty is of two kinds, political and
religious. Political liberty is revealed in the highest
and most perfect degree where the people have the
right absolute to make and to amend their own laws.
Religious liberty is realized where every citizen
possesses the right to judge in religious matters,
and to determine the faith or the religion by or
after which he shall order his life. Whence came
the two great ideas as now understood, liberty,
political and religious?

(a) Political. It did not come from antiquity.
No Oriental monarchy possessed or possesses it.
They, every one, were or are despotic. It did not
come from any ancient European state. You had
a slight glimpse of what Rome was; there three-
fifths of the population were slaves, and only two-
fifths free. But there is Greece, and you will say,

216 Religion in History.

^' Think of those great republics of Greece; at
Athens, where Plato lived, and Aeschulos sang; at
Lacedaemon, where dwelt the great heroes of Grecian
story? Think of those happy times before the
Peloponnesian war— ^he days of the heroes of Mar-
athon and Thermopylae, when Attica and Sparta
were freel " But what do you mean by free? How
many made the State? Hear this: There were for
every twenty-seven freemen in Attica a hundred
slaves, almost four slaves to one free man: that was
the ancient ideal of liberty!

When you come to modern times and ask,
'^ Whence came our liberty? Has it come from free
thought?" Let us appeal to history; its testimony
no man can gainsay. Who is the father of modern
materialism? Thomas Hobbes. And wiiat says he?
The primitive state was a state of war, the strong-
est man — and this is modern Evolution — prevailed,
and so became king: might is right; and the
king, being king by divine might, he alone is the
free man, other men are bound to be his servants
and do his will. But, you say, remember the later
freethinkers! Well, try Bolingbroke; he believes in
a patriot king, and sketched the ideal of one. And
what sort of king was he? One who by skilful
manipulation of the people was able to win, retain,
and exercise absolute power, using all their political
institutions as instruments of his will, deluding
them by a representation that was only a means to
his own ends. But a still more typical man is
David Hume, the choicest sceptic Europe has ever
known. Hume had two great enemies, and he loved

Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 217

nothing better than to swoop down first on one and
then on the other. And these two great enemies of
his were religion and liberty. Try Edward Gibbon.
No man ever clothed a sneer in language so stately,
or mocked in periods so majestic. Well, then, in the
correspondence that unbosoms his inmost convictions,
he warns his friend against the Anti-Slavery Agita-
tion, for wild ideas of the rights and natural equality
of men lurk in it. Democracy he hates; to him it is
the last apostasy. He has only scorn for it: and
he speaks of the French Revolution as an accursed
thing. But these, you will say, are old, even anti-
quated men; try, then, so late an exponent of free-
thought as Comte. Where does he find his ideal king?
Not in the sovereign of England; not in the monarch
of any Constitutional State; but in the Czar, the
Emperor of all the Russias, the greatest of the auto-
crats, Nicholas. No, if you want political freedom,
it is to States that have known what it was to believe
in the Christian religion that you must go. You must
go to Holland, as she issues purified from her baptism
of blood, strengthened in her faith, and ennobled in
her spirit by the unequal, yet victorious struggle
against Spain. You must go to England as the
Puritans made her. You must go to Scotland as
she was made by Knox. You must go to America,
so largely formed, organized, and governed by the
sturdy Puritan men of New England and the mild
inflexible Friends and stalwart Presbyterians of
Pennsylvania. And underneath all you find that
the grand dominant factors are the religious ideas,
the faith that came through Jesus Christ.

218 Religion in History.

(/3) But, perhaps, some of you will tell me that
with religious liberty it is different. On the contrary,
I tell you that with religious liberty the same truth
holds in a still more eminent degree. Gibbon, in
many a memorable phrase, stated his faith that the
Old World was tolerant. Yes, it was tolerant — to
gentlemen of culture, to persons of refined taste, who
could, while taking part in religious services, despise
religion ,• but never tolerant to an earnest man,
who dared openly to differ from the religion of the
State. I love Plato; I look upon his books every
day, and I never look upon them but with love. The
thoughts that lived in him are living thoughts in
many a mind still. But now look at his idea of
religious freedom. Hypocrisy he would punish as a
crime. Disloyalty to the gods accepted by the State,
he would visit with imprisonment, solitary and stern,
for five years, and if the man at the end still rebelled,
he would have given him over to death. That was
the idea of perhaps the most enlightened man in all
antiquity. And, as we have already seen, it was the
same in Rome. There the laws of the State and
public opinion were just as severe in dealing with
men who had broken with the ancient faith, or had
dared to accept a new one. To this the early
Christian persecutions alone were a suflicient witness.
Where, then, do you find the first assertion of religi-
ous liberty? In the fathers of the Christian Church.
TertuUian, for example, says, ^^It is ill homage to
God to compel a man to serve him, as if He could
be pleased with the service of hypocrisy." Athan-
asius says, ' ^ No forced obedience pleases God :

Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 219

He dislikes that men should be made religious by
hatchet and by sword." Hilary of Poitiers told an
Emperor, '^You govern that all may enjoy sweet
liberty; and peace can be established only by allow-
ing each to live wholly according to his own convic-
tions." '^God is the Lord of the universe, and
requires not an obedience that is forced." And
Lactantius, one of the most eloquent of the Fathers,
argued that only reason, never compulsion, availed
in religion, which could be defended not by slaying,
but by dying; not by wasting, but by suffering; not
by injustice, but by fidelity.

When we come to modern times, what do we
find? Now that the principle is gained, you get many
a man who has denied religion crying, give us freedom
of thought. But look at the men who have made
the modern belief in liberty of mind, and do you
find that they were anti-religious, atheistic, infidel?
Here is Hobbes's principle: ^^ The prince has a right
to say what his subjects are to believe." So great
is that right that if any subject dares to deny what
the king enjoins, he commits a crime against the
law of the State. If a man were to come from
the Indies and teach his religion where another has
been established, he ought to be prosecuted for
crime. Nay, if the king be infidel, yet the people
are to believe after his manner, for he was appointed
to his office of God ! Where God has appointed,
men are bound to obey. So held and so reasoned
the man who may be most justly termed the father
and founder of modern Materialism.

Again, no man did more to bring round the

220 Religion in History.

French Revolution on the negative side than
Kousseau. And what did he teach in his "Social
Contract"? He lays down the natural articles of
belief, and they are to be articles of citizenship.
If a man denies them, he is to be exiled, exiled
not as denying religious dogma, but because he is
"unsocial," violates, as it were, one of the primary
articles of association. If a man, who has con-
fessed himself as "social," and thus expressed his
"sociability," is unfaithful to the profession of belief
that admitted to society, then he ought to die as
guilty of crime against the law, the social law on
which the society or state was based, and which he
had accepted and received. In the ' ^ Spirit of Laws, "
Montesquieu, another precursor of the French Revolu-
tion, teaches, that where an established religion is,
there no new religion ought to be allowed to be.
An established religion is the law of the land, and no
land, he argued, with fine contempt for the rights of
conscience, can allow its laws to lie neglected. And
grant the principles from which the men reasoned,
and we must concede that these were legitimate
inferences; — clear, plain, logical deductions from a
system that posits, as the grand parent of social or-
der, force, whether dubbed as matter, or social con-
tract, or regal power, or indeed any form of unmoral
might.

If, then, I want to find where religious freedom
came from in modern times, where am I to go?
Lecky says, "Toleration is created by scepticism,
and belongs to a sceptical age." But all modern his-
tory disproves that assertion. Where religion is made

Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 221

a matter of conscience and not of the magistrate, tol-
eration is necessary. Where religion is made no mat-
ter of the conscience, but of the magistrate, intoler-
ance and persecution arc inevitable. So we find those
Reformers and religious thinkers of whom I have al-
ready spoken, men like Jacobs, like Hanserd Knollys,
like John Robinson, maintaining — religion is a mat-
ter of conscience; therefore the magistrate ought to
leave to conscience the question of religion, and in
no way interfere with it. Roger Williams, having
pleaded in England and in New England for tolera-
tion, realized religious freedom in his settlement on
Narragansett Bay. Harry Yane, the younger, a
stern and true, yet most devout and tender spirit, a
typical Puritan and Republican, was also a great
advocate of the same principle, with faith enough
to put it in practice when he was in power. In
these days, when I wish to brace my spirit, to feel
the strength of a great conviction which fears no
discussion, and lies open on all sides to the light,
which it craves as God's own gift, where do I so
gladly go as to the Areopagitica of John Milton?
There, in that speech for unlicensed printing, stands
forward the grandest plea for freedom of thought
which the English language or any other language con-
tains. Later, too, did not the ' ' Letters on Toleration"
by John Locke, reason out, on narrower and less noble
grounds it is true, but still, on religious grounds, tlio
same great principle? The only convincing and vic-
torious pica for freedom of thought, for liberty to be-
lieve according to reason and speak according to con-
science, is the one that finds its ultimate principle

222 Religion in History,

and basis in the great faith, that religion belongs to
the man and to the man's God, that it is the sacred
inmost possession of conscience, and must be free from
the magistrate, a matter in which the responsibility
is to God only.

When you go from the actual advocacy to the at-
tempted realization of the principle, our position
holds even more completely. Where, as a matter of
historical fact, was religious freedom first realized by
a state? In Holland. She had won freedom, had
shaken off Spain, and had learned from her own bit-
ter experience what freedom and religion meant.
And so almost as soon as she had achieved liberty,
she became the home of the persecuted in Europe.
There, within the very country which had been
quickened, revived, created by a great religious en-
thusiasm, religious freedom reigned. There you
might find the French Descartes writing, pleading,
free to speak as became the father of modern philo-
sophy. There you might find Italian, Spanish, and
Portuguese Jews, tolerated while intolerant. Spi-
noza, cast out by the synagogue, but tolerated by the
reformed state, there stands forward to advocate his
Pantheism and his political theory. There, too, you
might discover English Puritans like Perkins and
Ames, like Robinson and Jacobs, erecting their
churches, addressing their flocks, free to speak the
thing they willed. When the same principles were
recognized in Rhode Island, by Roger Williams's
settlement, in the settlement of Penn, and finally
through all the states of the American Republic, it
was done for religious reasons, in vindication of

Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 223

those rights conscience most strongly aflarms when
it most strenuously believes that God is its only
Sovereign, and that where He reigns no man or
magistrate can be allowed to interfere.

But when Revolution in France passed into the
hands of Deists and Atheists, what happened? Ay,
what happened? I do not simply refer to the way in
which the Church was, so to speak, levelled to the
dust, and the clergy expelled or sent to the guillotine.
I refer to such events as the guillotining of Clootz
and Chaumette. The deistic, the Worship-of-the-
Supreme-Being, party said, '' These men are atheists:
they deny the immortality of the soul, a doctrine
which comforted Socrates in his death: the idea of
the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul
is a continual appeal to justice; it is, therefore, social
and republican, and so the men who deny it ought to
die." And on this very ground, maintained and
vindicated by Robespierre, nineteen of the worship-
of-Reason and deity-of-the-people party, including
'^ Anaxagoras" Chaumette, ' ^ Anacharsis" Clootz, and
Hebert, were doomed to death, sacrifices to their
own principle — ^^ There is now one god only, the
people." And even they themselves, Hebert and
Chaumette and Clootz, the men of the atheistic party,
were no better. To utter the word Providence was
denounced as a crime, and to publish a book that
expressed belief in God was declared a crime the law
ought to punish and prevent. And to-day, if you
want to find a party that has in its heart the will to
be intolerant, you have but to look across the Chan-
nel, and there you will find the party that is most

224 Religion in History,

aggressively negative prepared to proceed to the ex-
tremest measures of repression, both as regards the
profession and practice of religion. Political liberty,
liberty of thought in matters religious, was made by
the religion of Christ, especially as it existed before
it was civilly established and after it was reformed.
It alone has the right to stand and say, I have made
liberty. And this is an historical fact which no man
can gainsay.

ii. Then there is the matter of Equality. Equality
means that in the eye of the law and of justice there
is no difference between man and man. Law and
justice know no rich and know no poor: know no
sovereign and know no beggar: they only know the
man. But equality means more than this. It means
not of course that inherent capacity, mental endow-
ment, personal dignity and character are the same in
all men; but it means that in the latent, yet actual
ideal of humanity, or in the potential yet intrinsic
worth which belongs to our nature as human, all men
are equal. Within every man there is an ideal latent,
perhaps dead and even buried, but still an ideal
capable of resurrection: and it is this ideal of
humanity in every man which makes the true equality.
And whence came the ideal which constitutes what
we term equality? It came into the world Avhen this
principle was stated: — ^* There is no respect of per-
sons with God: God is no respecter of persons."
That was the first great yet simple formulization
of the principle; and the principle lies at the root
of all our later social development, making this
evident that it is only where you have men equally

Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 225

related to God, God equally related to every man,
that you have men made equal.

iii. As with Equality, so with Fraternity. It
reposes upon the great faith in the Fatherhood of
God and the consequent brotherhood of men. You
cannot find any other basis so deep, so broad, so
strong as this. And this is the basis Christianity
laid, without which the belief in fraternity would never
have been, and could not even now continue to be. It
is only where men feel as sons of a common Father,
that they feel towards each other, however distant in
time or space, however dissimilar in race or speech
or nationality, as towards brothers. And have you
considered the form s in which the Christian religion
has helped men to realize their brotherhood? ^ '• Who
is my neighbour? " asked the lawyer, and Jesus made
answer by the parable of the good Samaritan; and
ever since, the men who have most loved Christ,
have been men who have done into practice the
moral of His parable. What did the charities of the
early church signify? That a religion had arisen
among men that was a religion of brotherhood and
mutual helpfulness. What do modern missions
signify? That the most cultivated and high-blooded
peoples on earth recognize their kinship, and the
obligations of their kinship, to the most savage and
debased? Science loves to be generous and benefi-
cent, but it cannot be said to pity the savage; knows
not what better to do with him than to speculate
as to his place in the history of ci^dlization, and as to
the causes of his decline and decay under its touch.
Commerce likes to discover new peoples and lands,

226 Religion in History,

but only that she may find a new market, a field
where by more advantageous barter she can increase
the riches of the civilized, even though it be by
working poverty and ruin to the savage. Certain
imperial peoples love to find new scenes for the
exercise and display of theii' imperial genius; but
imperial policies only the more deeply divide the
sovereign from the subject race. These are not the
methods either for creating or expressing fraternity;
where the stronger man sees in the weaker only a
means for his own instruction, or a source of wealth,
or an instrument for his ends, he may use him as a
tool, but he will never think of him, feel to him, or
act towards him, as a brother. But Christian missions
witness to the fact that the Christian religion has
accomplished this marvellous feat. It has made
civilized man feel that he and the savage are of one
blood, that the savage is as dear to God as he is, has
as vast capabilities, as boundless promise of being as
his own nature can boast. The religion that has
created this sense of kinship and duty is the true
mother of man's faith in human fraternity.

2. I deeply regret that I must now leave out a large
part of what I had meant to say, and shall only ask
you to consider whence came the great forces ameli-
orative and helpful in modern society. Take for ex-
ample the emancipation of the slave — why accom-
plished, why prosecuted, by whom and for what
reasons ultimately carried through. Were not the
men and their motives altogether Christian? Then
think of the reform of prisons. Can you forget John
Howard and Mrs. Fry, what they were and what

Christian Religion in Modern Europe. 221

they did? Consider, too, the attempts at criminal
reform — ragged schools, reformatories, the varied
agencies which wed mercy with justice and reform
with penalty. If you look even at the great broad
field of war, so dread, so terrible in its destructive-
ness, what touches it with the gentle spirit of mercy?
Why is there the red cross on the white ground?
What does it mean but that the minister of mercy is
the minister of religion, conscious or unconscious
minister perhaps, yet minister still. Had time per-
mitted, I should also have surveyed some of our
modern philosophies, especially those that seek to
create a religion of humanity, and should have
attempted to show that wherever they are creative,
energetic, great in their ameliorative impulse, they
have borrowed, without acknowledgment, and un-
consciously perhaps, but still borrowed from the
religion of Christ. This only must I ask you in
conclusion to remember: These elements, all of
them, need to be gathered into an organic whole,
into a living structure, placed in relation to a great
throbbing centre. You cannot have sporadic, dis-
membered, isolated Christian forces, walking up and
down the land doing their work: you must bring all
into unity, j^ou must centre, converge, weld them
into the great central thought, into the mighty living
organism. Without Christ, without the Eternal
Father, without the living Saviour and the living
God, they are impotent, destined to slow, inevitable
death. Men and brethren! I speak to you as unto
men who love order, who love freedom, who love
justice, who love right. What has come to you as a

228 Beligion in History.

glorious heirloom from the past, a splendid force that
has worked out your highest happiness, your best
prosperity, your darling principles of hope, claims as
its due your strenuous loyalty and noblest thanks.
Faith, life, enthusiasm, entire devotion of the spirit,
are the simple tribute it deserves.

LECTURE YI.

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY AND IN MODERN
LIFE.

The lecture of to-night is to deal with religion in
the face of to-day, especially so far as it has
light to shed upon the great and the vital problems
that relate to the welfare and to the wellbeing of
our toiling millions. If religion be what it has been
here described as being, it ought to have some light
to shed on these problems. It is not the theoretical
unbelief of to-day that troubles me; it is its practical
ungodliness. The worst denial is not the denial of
the name of God, but of the reign of God, and His
reign is denied whenever men confess that He is,
but live as if He had no kingdom, no law to govern
the individual, to be incorporated or realized in the
society or the state. Men have been too anxious to
limit religion, to keep it as they think to its own
province and work, forgetting that the province of
religion is the whole man and the whole life of all
men. To narrow the sphere or the authority of
religion is only a bad way of impugning its truth,
a stealthy way of evading its claims. To throw the
emphasis from the inward and ethical to the out-

230 Religion in History.

ward and ceremonial is but a more pretentious lorm
of evasion. I confess that I am sick even unto
death of what Ruskin has well called the ^ '■ dramatic
Christianity of the organ and the aisle, of dawn-
service and twilight revival, gas-lighted and gas-
inspired Christianity," and I long with my whole
heart to see all our cliurcnes become branches of
the only true mother-church, the church that is the
mother of all our humanities, because the home of
all our divinities, the bearer, the living vehicle, of
the great purpose, or burden God sent through His
Son and by His Spirit to man. If religion were
truly interpreted and represented in the living
of all Christian men, as it ought to be, I have
no fear as to its being believed. It needs but
Christian men and churches to be faithful to the
mind of Christ to make that mind reign in and
over modern men.

Now the aim and purpose of these lectures has
been to exhibit religion in its larger aspect, in its
wider historical and social significance. There has
been no attempt at philosophical or historical apolo-
getics, only at the discovery and exposition of the
forces which history has proved to have worked most
for our common human good. The faith of Christ
is to me the last and highest truth, the worthiest as
concerns God, the most reasonable as it relates to
man. But though that position be most capable of
proof, it is not one that has been here specifically
attempted to be proved. I may at some future time
make the attempt; for I do not deny the right of
inquiry in matters of faith, on the contrary, I hold

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 231

it a most sacred duty. Truth loves to be searched
into, to be inquired after, to have the light of heaven
let in upon it from all sides; but truth discloses her
presence to none but the pure in mind and heart,
to those only who seek her out of sincerity and
great love. The man who speaks dishonourably of
another's faith does no honour to his own; the man
who uses a dishonourable weapon in the battle for
the truth dishonours truth, and to dishonour it is to
be disowned of the truth, and so to lose it. For
what can it do but forsake the man whose soul is
forsaken of reverence?

1. Our purpose, then, has not been apologetic,
but simply historical and expository, an attempt
by the help of scientific analysis and comparative
criticism to discover those moral and religious forces
that have most contributed alike to the individual
and common good. And this question was chosen
because it seemed at once the most radical and the
most relevant to the problems now before the people.
The work done for the past has now to be done for
the present, and so to-night we shall attempt a further
exposition of those principles we have been studying
in history in their relation to living man, or simply
to our political, social, industrial questions. Yet it
is necessary that we see the relation of our new dis-
cussion to our old. Mark, then, the principle which
has underlain all our discussions: — Every society is
built up on certain ,2:reat beliefs or ideas. It articu-
lates or expresses these in its institutions, laws, ideals,

232 Religion in History.

aims. The beliefs or ideas that underlie the society
or state are the truths or beliefs that constitute its
religion. As these are, its institutions must be.
Find out the ultimate beliefs of a people and you
will find out the character of its institutions, or from
the study of its institutions you can work back to its
fundamental beliefs. Where these beliefs are bad,
society cannot be good. Where the fundamental
faith is in a might, — that is, in an oppressive, ir-
resistible force, — the institutions will express simply
a realized tyranny, a struggle of conflicting forces
where the strongest has prevailed.

Look for one moment at certain typical religions.
China is remarkable for its ancestral worship. That
is its most common and its most ancient worship;
but to worship ancestors is so to revere the past as
to stand for ever by it. The people who worship
their forefathers are the most conservative of
peoples; where the father stood, the sons try to
stand; departure from the old law is last impiety.
So China has been through thousands of years
stationary, has hardly known change, and living so,
has been persistent, remaining while other more
changeful empires pass and decay. Or look at
India. As we have seen, the ultimate thought in
the Indian mind is Brahma. Brahma means the
universal soul, or life; it is but the equivalent of
necessity, the reign of a force that, unresting, runs
through all forms of being, one in essence, and
necessary in its action, while ever changing its
form. In harmony therewith they have conceived
Brahma as the universal soul, and thinking of

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 233

him anthropomorphically, have said: from his head
was made the Brahman, the man of the priestly
race, from his breast and arms the Kshatriya,
the royal and warrior caste, from his legs was
made the Yaisya, the yeoman, the farmer, and from
his feet were made the Sudras, the toiling class,
the lowest caste in the ancient Hindu world. Now,
that is a religious theory become a social tyranny.
The caste-order is the order of God, and the head
has not only the right of commanding the arms and
the trunk, and of using the limbs, but of treading
ruthlessly on those formed from the feet and lying
underneath them. Or take, as before, the ancient
empires of the nearer east, Egypt or Assyria. They
conceived emperor or king as divine. He owned
the nation, all the people were his, and he could do
with his own as he pleased, and as he pleased he
did with his own. So look how Tiglath-Pileser,
Shalmanezer, Sennacherib, Assur-Bani-Pal, and the
other Babylonian and Assj-rian conquerors, led forth
their mighty thousands, threw their armies away
in the desert, or at a siege, and cared nothing for
the armies they threw away, only for their own pur-
poses or ends. Now contrast with this the past
week.^ Every home in England has thrilled with
pain — why? In an African desert a handful of
heroic Englishmen were surrounded and assailed by
an army of strong and brave Soudanese, and there,
in the unequal conflict, 11 0 of our brothers are said
to have perished. And how have we received the

1 Sunday, March 16.— On tho Thursday before the battle of El Teh
had been fought.

234 Religion in History.

news? The thought of those brothers of ours
dying there, and no less the thought of the brave
barbarians who so strenuously fought and so will-
ingly died for altar and home, is to this people a
thought of suffering, brings a sense of personal pain
and loss. Now, why do we so value human life,
while in the ancient world life was thrown so
thoughtlessly away. To ask anew that question
is right and necessary, for in it lies the difference
between two worlds. You will never build up a
free and ordered state, you will never have wealth
well distributed, you will never have honour and
order, good in their kind, realized, unless you esteem
man noble, and esteem all men alike. Here, then
is the problem : — high order, waiting on a right idea
of man, is in process of being realized now, but was
not reafized in the old world, nor is realized in any
eastern heathenism — why this difference? The
answer is the answer that comes back over all the
ages; because of what has come through Christ.

2. Let me recall, though but for a moment, the
argument of the past lectures. They proceeded,
when the question became historical, from this
position: all old religions prior to the religion of
Israel had no moral character, because no moral
deity. Being without moral deities and religions,
the nations were not built upon moral principles or
for moral ends, but only through despotism or for
personal or sectional interests. The coming, through
Moses, of the high faith in Jehovah and His law laid
the foundation for a new order, made one possible.
The order was not a priest's, the order was not a

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 235

king's, it was God's, and as God's based on His moral
law, which expressed His moral nature. It made
every man responsible to God directly. It made God
govern every man alike. Where God is the common
Ruler, the distinction between king and subject may
remain on the lower and limited field of the State,
but its old absolute character is lost, for on the higher
plane, where temporal distinctions disappear in eter-
nal, both stand alike as subjects of God, equal in the
eye of His law. The rich and the poor meet together,
the Lord is the maker of them all. And standing equal
in the eye of His law, then there is a worth attached
to the man, to the single person, to the individual soul,
that makes his sutferings, the loss of his life or of his
happiness, a crime against God and against the order
He instituted. Starting from that rudimentary point,
note how the ancient Jewish state was built up. It
was built up in order that the will of God, — that is,
His moral law, — might in the relations of man to
man reign, and in the action of state and people
be realized. Now, the ideas of the Old Testament
were taken up and incorporated in the New, but
extended into a universalism. God became the
Father of all men, loved all men, all men became
brethren, the human race one vast family, every unit
stood to every other as brother to brother, and the
duties enjoined were fraternal duties, the duties of
universal neighbourliness and brotherliness. On
this great position an entirely new order of the
world could be built, an entirely new course and
organization of humanity could take place. Man
at first did not understand what liad come. The

236 Religion in History.

old was too strong for the new, out of the ancient
religions, out of the ancient state, old forces came
into the Christian society and reigned there, yet
in spite of these, through the form in which they
were incorporated, great Christian truths worked,
and worked penetratingly, lovingly, assimilatively,
through the whole of society and the life of
man. And when later, in a moment of supreme
religious fervour, which was also a moment of
rare intellectual quickening, the world tried to
go back to the nobler primitive thought, then
new forces, released and relieved, created higher
liberty in the state, purer thought in the life, more
equal justice between man and man. And so the
new spiritual force has been at work, subordinating
the old unto itself, and the humanity that is rising
is a humanity distinctively in its basis of Christ,
though for God.

II.

1. Now, mark, the conclusion of our past discus-
sions is the foundation of our new. The conclusion
is this, the great fundamental Christian beliefs, the
beliefs as to God, as to man, as to man in relation to
God and His purposes, have supplied a new basis
for human thought, and so a new foundation for
human society; and the society that is being built up
on this basis is radically unlike the ancient society.
Now, observe, I say is being, I do not say has been,
built up. The work is in process. It is not com-
pleted, and in the doing of it every man of us
ought to bear his part. But while the building

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 237

proceeds, worked by the hands of men, it is to be in
harmony with the beliefs directly created by Christ.
These beliefs may be described as, borrowing a
word from one of the greatest philosophers, archi-
tectonic, that is, they are beliefs that while they
construct, regulate the structure, govern it in all
its parts and in its ultimate design. Their action
has been illustrated in history, for wherever Christ's
personal influence has been mightiest and most im-
mediate, there the building has most victorious-
ly proceeded. It has been with Him, in Him,
through Him, that all has been done. Did time
permit, I would take you a wide survey of the an-
cient ideals of humanity, and compare them with
our own. I would take you, for example, to the an-
cestral worship of China, the adoration of heaven,
as prescribed and followed by the ancient sages, and
would show you this worship making a people that
may not move, that lives on in a kind of permanent
immobility; or I would take you to the ancient
Hindoo ideal as it stands incarnated in the laws of
Manu. These laws determine a man's future by
his relation to the priestly caste. If a man de-
spises a priest, stands in his way, or uses profane
speech of him, he is sentenced to painful punish-
ment, here and hereafter. If a Brahman woman
breaks her caste by marriage, there follows degrada-
tion for her, and for her oflspring, and for their off-
spring, degradation in ever descending degrees.
There we find a whole society fitted into an iron
framework, built up, inflexible, immovable, accord-
ing to the mind of a tyrannical priesthood. Or I

238 Religion in History.

would take you to the greater ideas that lie in
Plato, in the Republic and in the Laws, already in a
way sketched, making the modified Greek Republic
possible, yet making a humanity utterly void and
mean. He, great as he was, thanked providence
that he was born a Greek, and no barbarian, free
and no slave. To be a barbarian! It had been
better not to have been born than to have had so to
speak as to emit sounds that could hardly be held
articulate or reasonable speech.

But, now, what is our own modern dream,' our
ideal vision? All this great humanity forms a
mighty family. Man, in all his units, stands the
creature of God, His offspring eternally loved by
Him, called by Him through love into being. Man
as a race is constituted in all his branches a unity
through the one God, and is, as an individual, a
being who owes duties to every other man, owes
duties of good, of service, of truth, of honour, of
right, of grace. There is here a notion of man, of
humanity, that gives a dignity to the person and
a nobility to the race unimagined by the ancients,
that makes of human nature a higher thing, and of
hun;an life a nobler thing. And I anew affirm, the
life we live and know, is, while in all its noble ele-
ments the direct creation of Christ, yet at best re-
mains only the promise of what He has still to
achieve.

2. Now, I should have liked exceedingly, in the
light of our discussions, to have compared these
Christian beliefs with certain modern ideas, pro-
posed as substitutes for them, and have judged

Christian Eeligion in Modern Life. 239

these beliefs and ideas comparatively. For example,
men say, if we could get rid of the human soul and its
immortality, how much happier we should be; the
belief in a continued being hereafter only makes the
here more intolerable. Now one great advantage
of the comparative study of religion is this: — When-
ever a statement like that is made, you at once
turn to places or religions where such things
have been realized, look at them, analyze their
elements and action, and so discover their intrinsic
quality and essential results. Now, there is a
religion that does deny souls, and knows no con-
scious personal immortality. What of that religion
— the religion of Buddha — so far as concerns happi-
ness in this life? It is the apotheosis of misery, the
religion that declares that life is not worth living,
and that the supreme good is the entire escape from
personal being. Observe, where suffering is glorified,
is made a sort of deity that devours the very notion
of life, the religion instead of saving from pain, is
one that arrests progress, that entirely bars secular
action, that prevents the highest social forms of life
from being realized; and these, precisely, are the
results that have followed the religion of Buddha.
Again, there is the notion abroad, clothed, too,
in the terms of a very large and audacious philoso-
phy, that we might find in matter or in force a sub-
stitute for God, or, at least, the term that could best
express the permanent and efficient course of the
world we know. Now, note, I will not discuss the
question from the metaphysical point of view, other-
wise I should ask — pray, how do you know matter.

240 Religion in History.

and what may matter be? If you subtract mind and
the qualities mind supplies to matter, what of
matter may remain, and what of your knowledge
of its qualities? A late distinguished thinker,
John Stuart Mill, defined matter as the permanent
possibility of sensation, but he carefully avoided
telling us what the permanent possibility of sensa-
tion meant. Does it mean the permanent possibility
of force, or does it mean the permanent possibility
of mind? Sensation is a mental state, something
caused or experienced, derivative therefore and not
ultimate; its essential element is the conscious, the
perceived, the felt. And so to speak of matter as a
permanent possibility of sensation makes it subjec-
tive, not objective, that which is known through
mind, not capable of definition otherwise than in its
terms. Or suppose you take a distinguished physi-
cist, Professor Tyndall, who in a large way in a
presidential address to the British Association led
us an excursion into a past which he very imperfect-
ly knew, indeed, could not be said to know at all.
He there told us — matter has the promise and the
potency of every form and quality of life, but when
we began to seek after this matter, we were told it
is mysterious, an inscrutable power, somethimg
utterly unknown. And if we call in the great master
of Agnosticism and ask him for his proof that matter
or force is the known ultimate, he will tell you that
you know it because it resists you. The force with-
in meets resistant forces without, and you know,
therefore, matter to be. But, look, take away the
force within, and what of the forces without? You

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 241

must postulate will, or how can you discover or
conceive force? you must postulate thought, or
how can you find matter or describe what property
or quality it has?

But leaving aside the metaphysics, and looking
at the question as one concerned merely with a basis
for society and state, for an order and law to help
the men who work, what then? Well, if matter
be the ultimate or causal reality, it means the reign
of the mechanical, the necessary, the reign of force,
but, mark, when it comes to be applied as a reign
of force to life, to the region of social and industrial
structure, how does it act? The weakest go to the
wall, the strongest survive. All that are feeble
perish or are crushed, all that are mighty reign and
endure. When it comes to the region of political
life, what is the action? The same. Might is the
regnant force or power, strength is victor; the king
is the person who is mightiest, the one who has
subdued all. Translate that into speech for modern
times, and it means this: wherever you have most
might, the greatest strength and the power to use it,
there you have the source of order, the power that
reigns, the very reason and essence of government.
But what do you call that? Why you call it tyranny,
despotism, the hardest, most obdurate and inflexible.
Thus from mechanical force, taken as the ultimate
datum of consciousness and factor of change, and so
as the new basis of social order, we shall have the
worst tyranny the world ever saw, tyranny that
would throw life away without grudge or care,
tyranny that would expel morality, annihilate pro-

242 Religion in History,

gress, and make the rich ever richer, the poor ever
poorer, marching onward like a mighty law of nature
which sets its ruthless foot down on every feeble
cause, crushing under it everything that could not by
sheer and simple might assert its right to be. That
reign would be the ruin of all our noblest order, the
loss of our grandest gains.

Now I would it were possible to look at some of
the ways of evading this conclusion that have become
very fashionable in these recent years. One distin-
guished thinker wrote lately on ^ '■ The Religion of the
Future, " and another not less distinguished thinker
described his doctrine as ^^ The Ghost of Religion,"
and went on to propound the grand Comtean thesis
of a religion of humanity, where humanity was the
object of worship, and humanity was loved, and
served as the modern and natural deity. Now, I
have no special care or concern to ask respecting
the genesis of Comte's idea of humanity as a great
being. But what his disciples think concerning that
as a grand new generalization of positive science and
philosophy only shows their pathetic innocence as to
the actual facts of history and faith. There is a
notion of collective humanity far grander than
Comte's. There is a notion of humanity which
makes it one immense family, a family of God;
makes it one immense society, a society of sons
who are brothers — one immense household, where
every member is bound to serve the others, that by
this service he may the better serve his own Eternal
Father. That was a grander idea than Comte's,
penetrated throughout by a principle of tremendous

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 243

energy, which could build up and organize the race
into a vital unity. His is but a headless humanity,
an aggregation of atoms, no living organism. It
rises, he knows not whence, moves across the earth,
and vanishes, he knows not whither. But this is a
humanity lifted into eternity, living in the life of
God, a humanity loved of God, redeemed of Him,
intended to be perfected in all its parts and in all its
members, that it may live in holiest fellowship with
Him. Every man who does good unto the least of
men, does it unto God: practical beneficence in time,
the love that suffers unto the saving of man is the
noblest service of the Eternal. That is a sublime
idea. In its presence the positive notion is indeed
the veriest ghost of religion, spectral, impalpable,
impotent, save to the visionary who sees it.

3. Let us came back, then, to our position, though
only that we may re-aifirm it the more strongly; the
Christian religion is by virtue of its very nature crea-
tive of a new mankind, constitutive of a new society.
Its fundamental principles are architectonic, supply
at once the basis and the regulative ideal for the
renewed humanity. It is meant to create a perfect
state through perfect men, and it certainly does not
mean to leave its renewed men under the control of
an unspiritual order. Do not think that I am speak-
ing new things, they are things as old as Christianity.
At its birth our religion was possessed of a divine
ambition, for it was inspired by divine truth, and
articulated a divine design. Christ's coming was
no accident; it had been purposed from eternity.
Nature and man had been alike founded on and by

244 Religion in History,

Him. So one apostle said: ''All things were made
by Him, and without Him was not anything made
that was made." He was ''the true Light" and
"the true Life," and there was no true life, no true
light, in the world that did not come from Him.
Another apostle said, "By Him were all things
created that are in heaven and earth; " and ' ' in Him
all things hold together," stand in order or system.
As He is the source. He is also the means and end,
for through Him and to Him are all things. And
so He is represented, not only as the Head of the
Church, but as the One in whom all things, both
which are in heaven and on earth, are to be gathered
together, summed up, or made into a unity. Now
ideas of that kind signify a large faith, the faith that
1 all things were created and constituted in Christ, that
! as He is, on the one side, the image of the invisible
God, so He is, on the other, the ideal or regulative
principle of the visible creation. Applied to our
present subject this means, that Christ was intended
to be, in the fullest sense, a Saviour, not only of the
individual, but also of society, making the man
new, but doing it that He might renew mankind.
Within Him were the energies needed to create a
perfect order, a holy society, a humanity that should
articulate the Creator's ideal. The work that He
came to do was to reconcile man to God, to bring
alike our nature as persons and the order in which
we lived and worked into harmony with the will of
God. And so He was the Son of Man who made
man into the Son of God, the Redeemer, delivering
from sin, the Saviour, bringing into life eternal. The

Christian Beligion in Modern Life. 245

grand thing about His mission was its positive aspect
— His saving man, and the completeness of His sal-
vation. The Christian religion had indeed an awful
sense of sin, a deep sense of misery; but that is only
the reverse side of its majestic sense of God, its
sublime idea of man. It is because it conceives man
to be so great that it feels his sin to be so terrible;
it is because it conceived man to be so near of kin to
God that it allowed him such susceptibility to suffer-
ing, such faculty of gain, such capacity for loss. But
as was the loss, so is the salvation. It is not finished
when a man is forgiven, or has obtained peace with
God; it is completed only when Christ is all and in
all — that is, when humanity has been built up in all
its parts and regulated in all its relations by the ideal
of love and sonship that had lived from eternity in
the bosom of God.

III.

You see, then, there are, as I conceive it, archi-
tectonic principles in the religion of Christ; and it is
the simplest and most rudimentary of these that I
wish to apply to our political, social, and industrial
questions. This is only a small branch of an
immense subject; but I am anxious so to handle it
as to illustrate for our time the significance of the
Christian religion. These questions will suflBciently
test its right to be the organizing principle of the
noblest society, and the regulative law of the truest
life.

1. Our political, social, and industrial questions,
while distinct, are so related as to form an organic

246 Religion in History.

whole. You cannot touch one without touching all
the rest; the body politic is as sensitive and as much
an organic unity, as the body of the living man.
Our political questions concern man as a citizen,
with the rights and duties proper to one; they touch
his relation to the state, and the state's to him. Our
social questions concern man's place and functions,
duties and ri'ghts, as a part of a mighty organism,
whose members are human beings; and view or-
ganism and members in their mutual relations and
obligations, as affected by and affecting each other.
Our industrial questions concern the creation, ac-
cumulation and distribution of wealth, regard man
as producer, distributer, consumer, as a being capa-
ble of toil, yet needing rest, with capital, land or
money or skill, that he wishes to lend or sell, that
he may obtain or create a wealthier condition of
being. These provinces of thought and action,
though distinct, are inseparable. Every question
raised in the one has its correlative in the other, and
the point of unity is man. He is the living and sen-
sitive atom that thrills with pleasure or writhes in
pain with every current that passes through the
body, political, social or industrial.

i. Now, if we are to consider the Christian religion
in relation to these questions, we must do so in the
light of some simple principles, yet they must be
those of the architectonic order. Now, our simplest,
yet mightiest, principle is given us in the idea of God
as manifested in Christ, the Father as declared by the
only begotten Son. What was the purpose of God
relative to man, alike in creation and redemption?

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 247

His good — his highest good. Man may have as
his chief end to glorify God, but God finds His glory
— and in the light of Christ's words and work it is
seen to be the only godlike glory possible — in pro-
moting the good of man. As He intends that, so He
means that all the godlike energies in the universe
shall contribute to it. But what is for man the chief
good? It consists in two elements, in the union, as
the moralist would say, of virtue and pleasure, or,
as the religious man, of holiness and happiness. In
the state of perfect good, virtue is completely happy,
holiness has attained beatitude. But what does this
involve? The perfect man, but also the perfect
state, the state ordered and administered in perfect
righteousness, where the virtue within has its mirror
and reflection in the order without. We could not
have the highest good with vice, for it is hateful,
envious, miserable, seeks only to get pleasure, loves
only to inflict pain; so virtue is necessary, the
holiness that loves to do the best and obey the holiest.
Nor could the highest good be found in a vicious
state; the good, the perfect man may live there, but
the evil without would hate him, and he could not
love it; there might be the joy of conflict, but there
could not be the highest joy, the joy of perfect
harmony, of the constant motion that is constant rest.
In order then to the chief good, the righteous man
must live in a righteous state; virtue within and
virtue without must dwell together in beautiful and
holy unity. But if God means that each person
realize the chief good, what ideal does He set before
us for society? This : that the individuals composing

248 Religion in History.

it shall, every one of them, be perfectly virtuous or
perfectly holy, and that the state into which they are
organized shall in every respect be perfectly ordered
and perfectly righteous, an altogether good and holy
state. No less an ideal as respects man, on the one
hand, and society, on the other, can satisfy the
Christian idea of God.

ii. Now this, you will confess, is no mean ideal,
and rests on no contemptible or ignoble principle.
We may be an infinite distance from its realization,
but it is a matter of infinite importance that we feel
ourselves held bound to work for it and to travel
with our faces towards it; making, while we do so,
the present better, and bringing the golden future
more near. To have conceived this ideal is to feel
man ennobled, is to have gained a brighter view of
the prospects and possibilities of our kind. Yet on
what does it rest? On the notion of God as a
Spiritual Father and Sovereign on the one hand,
ynd, on the other, on the notion of man as His son
and subject, bound to be obedient to Him and to
realize His order. Now let me ask you a simple
question — Do you know any principle so able as
this to do large and generous justice to the noblest
possibilities of order and progress in the state, and
of happiness and manhood in the man? The idea
of humanity, you say; but Christ created the idea of
humanity, and divorced from Him it is but a bastard
idea, at once emasculated and depraved. What
value is there in an idea that is but an impotent
abstraction, that gives no moral source, no moral
sovereign, and no moral end to human life, either

Christian Religion in Modern Life, 249

individual or collective? If you renounce this
Christian principle, where will you find a basis for
your social structure? for a basis you must find;
and remember this — as is the basis, such must the
structure be. Suppose we enquire at the men best
able to advise us in this matter, really representative
and creative thinkers, who have attempted to find
another than the Christian basis for society. We
shall find that they confirm the truth of the argu-
ment we have before pursued. There is Hobbes,
an honest and courageous Materialist, who did not
fear to deduce from his first principles their
rigorous logical results. To believe in matter as
the ultimate ground and cause of all things, is to
believe in the supremacy and sufficiency of force,
and in a conflict of forces the strongest must prevail.
Carry out that doctrine in the arena of politics, and
you have Hobbes's theory, the most forcible man is
king. The original state was a state of war, that
is, a conflict of opposing forces; order came from
the victory of the mightiest, which means that the
strongest force prevailed; the victor became the
sovereign, his will became the law, made the right,
instituted, constituted the order and relations in
which the people lived. That is a clear and in-
telligible theory, massive in its simplicity, rigorous
in its consistency, but what does it mean? The
most absolute tyranny, despotism unrelieved. Let
us try another. Rousseau hated Materialism, but
wished to find a social doctrine that should, apart
from Christianity, secure to all men their natural
rights. And what did he propose? The theory

250 Religion in History,

of a ^'Social Contract." Men met together and
agreed on the conditions on which they would
associate; signed, as it were, a pre-historical con-
tract of co-operation, which concluded, they laid
aside their isolation or individualism, and combined
in a society or state. Those who kept to the
contract were the lawful citizens, those who broke
it by claiming too much or by doing too little, were
the guilty. But, mark, a society held together by
a covenant or bond is an artificial society; the
bond, too, is in this case an historical fiction,
made all the falser by making the savage the
ideal or standard for the civilized man. Humanity
bound to fulfil an imaginary primitive bond, has
lost at once the rights of the present and the
inspiration of the future, and renounced the idea
of order and the hope of progress. Again, David
Hume, subtlest and most consistent of Sceptics,
always, as we saw. Sceptic-like opposed to the
highest human liberty, said, ''Government has no
other object or purpose than the distribution of
justice, or, in other words, the support of the twelve
judges. " And why? ' ' Every man must be supposed
a knave," with no other end but his private interest,
which he must be prevented gratifying at the expense
of the public. So government in its last analysis is
a plan which a multitude of knaves have adopted, if
not for making each other honest, yet for keeping
by fear of punishment dishonesty within bounds.
Could you conceive a more miserable basis for
politics, or one that did more injustice alike to the
idea and the history of man? It rests on a notion

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 251

of him so mean that it bemeans everything; it
appeals to the meanest motives in man, and makes
of him a creature who has interests, but no duties,
who may need protection, but can exercise no rights.
It is small wonder that a system so based should
have had no room for liberty, no idea of moral order,
or faith in the higher progress and wellbeing of
man.

Now what, in opposition to these, does the
Christian religion offer as its grand fundamental
principle in politics? Its idea of God and its ideal
of man, viewed in their mutual or reciprocal relations.
It says: ''God is the father of man, man is the
child of God. He wills every man's good, and every
man ought to attain the good He wills; what is
possible to the individual is possible to the society.
He is capable of being virtuous, it is capable of being
in all its order and relations righteous. The ideal
that is in him, it is bound to accept, and to work for
its realization; the ideal that is before it, he is
bound to regard as his own, and strenuously to do his
utmost to secure its embodiment. The law of the
state ought to be in harmony with God's will, and so
such as shall intend and promote the good of all its
citizens; the conduct of the citizen ought to be gov-
erned by the same will, and seek at once the reign
of righteousness in the state, and its realization in
the individual. To the good man the law of God is
absolute and universal, a law alike for persons and
peoples, designed to govern all states, and be obeyed
of all men. If, then, in civil life, there lie a wrong,
Christian politics ought to redress the wrong; if in

252 Beligion in History.

social life inequalities or agencies that hinder the
distribution or creation of good. Christian society-
ought to move against them. Religion cannot be
satisfied till the ideal of the perfect man in the per-
fect state be realized."

2. You see, then, that the Christian religion sup-
plies us for all civil and social questions with con-
structive and regulative principles of the noblest
kind. In their light politics become the science of
working out a perfect order in which every man
shall achieve virtue and attain happiness, that is,
realize the ideal of humanity latent within him.
But I can only state the principles: it is impossible
to apply them in detail to the questions of legislation
and government. Yet, though only by way of illus-
tration, let us glance at a question or two.

i. And first, as being most germane to our subject,
as concerns our poor. Religion does not regard
poverty as a normal state, rather as one that ought
not to be. Where charity is needed, it is a noble
thing to be charitable, and charity was one of the
most characteristic creations of Christ. But there is
something better than charity, a state where it is not
needed, where all men are able and willing to earn
their own livelihood, and enjoy what they have
earned. Now religion deals with poverty primarily
as a matter of persons, and it is through persons
alone that it can be overcome. Laws may mitigate
its severity, but its removal depends on the kind and
quality of persons composing the state. The better
a man is made, the better a worker he is, the fitter
an agent for the creation of wealth, and the expul-

Christian Beligion in Modern Life. 253

sion of poverty. It is the worthless that waste;
worth is productive and distributive. It makes for
itself, but loves also to share with others. Now the
Christian religion in making good men makes good
workers, self-respectful, independent, fore-thought-
ful; in honouring work as no other religion does, it
dignifies the workman. Yet, if misfortune or disas-
ter comes, there is no spirit so tender, so helpful as
the Christian. It will not leave to perish, but helps
that it may save. And its charity is not of the legal
order, hurting where it helps; but of the merciful
order, which is twice blessed, blessing him that gives
and him that takes. So our religion works at once
to prevent poverty, and where it must be, is qualified
so to ameliorate its action that it shall not deprave
the man. A people wholly Christian could not be
poor.

ii. Another question, partly political and partly
social, is the one now being so much discussed as to
the housing of the poor. Has religion, as here con-
strued, any light to shed on it? It insists, in an
equal degree, on the person and his conditions being
good. What makes a person bad or compels him to
live under bad conditions, conditions unfavourable to
moral and physical health, is a religious wrong.
Thus, if a man owns a rookery, and makes it his
business to let houses unfit for human homes, he
must be held guilty of crime before God and against
man. Religion binds a man to follow no profession,
to exercise no craft, save one promotive of human
wellbeing. If it be profitable while injurious, the
profits only the more add to the sin, because empha^

254 Religion in History,

sizing its reckless selfishness. Men must live, but
our means of living must be honourable to be ap-
proved of religion. And see here its value as the
power for making right persons. Only mean men
are capable of doing mean things, while noble men
alone are equal to noble deeds. Let a man be pos-
sessed of the spirit of Christ, the charity that seek-
eth not her own, that seeks generously the good of
every neighbour, and to him the miserable greed
that can make money out of the poverty or destitu-
tion of man is not only impossible, but unholy and
abominable.

iii. We have a third question, or rather set of
questions, connected with what is perhaps the sad-
dest of all our modern problems, what men call the
social evil. There is no deeper or viler sore in the
heart of society, though I may not speak of it here
as it needs to be spoken of. Yet it is an evil on
which religion has a pre-eminent right to be heard,
while also lying under solemnest obligations to speak.
To it man can never be a mass of organized lusts,
whose indulgence is to be tempered by prudence, for
to it man at his noblest is most continent. Of all
humankind, there is none poorer, no wretch more
contemptible or base, than the lustful man, capable
of working grief to a woman, heedless of her sorrow
or shame, her sad, blighted, lost womanhood; capable
of hiring for the indulgence of his bestial passions
a poor fallen creature, forgetful that even wrecked
womanhood ought to be sacred to the man who is a
son, and had, or has, a mother. Could I compass
it, I should make every such lustful man a man to be

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 255

punished, for there is no greater foe to social good,
no force that so threatens the peace of every virtu-
ous home. Yet, how is he to be reached, how dealt
with? Not by outer laws simply, not by external
restraints, not by preaching the prudence that tem-
pers passion only that it may be the longer indulged;
but by filling him with a spirit too great, too hon-
ourable, too noble, too full of chivalrous chastity
to feel the passion of lust, or the fascination of
base desires. And only one supreme love has
been able to accomplish that. The love of Christ
has been the love of purity, both in man and woman,
the love of God has ever been love of chastity, bind-
ing man to too noble issues to allow him to stain his
manhood with impurity, or to deprave womanhood
by his passions. Were that love to reign in society,
we should soon see realized the highest social good,
iv. But now we must come, though for the briefest
glance, to our Industrial Questions. One thing
Religion cannot do — it cannot lose sight of man as a
living, reasonable soul; but what Religion cannot do,
Political Economy did. Its founder, Adam Smith,
was not responsible for that. The author of the
' ' Wealth of Nations " was also the author of a system
of Moral Philosophy. And do you know its peculiar
doctrine? It was based on feeling, on sympathy;
it was your feeling for man, your sympathy with
him, that made you approve what promoted his
good, disapprove what hindered it. But the men
who followed Adam Smith forgot his '■ ' Theory of
Moral Sentiments," and dealt with wealth as if the
factors of its creation and distribution had been mere

256 Religion in History.

tools, instruments, pieces of mechanism. You know
Sismondi's question to Ricardo: — '^ When then I is
wealth everything? is man nothing? " And wealth
was everything to the political economist, man
valued only in relation to it. And it was this in-
difference to men that made political economy to
Carlyle, Adam Smith's great countryman, the ^'dis-
mal science." But who creates? who distributes?
who accumulates wealth? Who but man? And man
is greater than any product, or any process of pro-
duction, or even all the creations of his hand or
genius. And no product is good that does not help
to make the producer happier and better; and only
as the producers are improved can the products go
on improving. And so the science that does not
take men into account is no true science of wealth.
For what is wealth? A state of weal. The common
wealth is the state of common weal. And what is
that? The state of good to all. Now wealth is not
money, but what constitutes man's weal; it is the
wellbeing of the living. The only wealth of nations
is the weal of the peoples; to be rich in persons,
rich in the varied elements that make life good to
all, is for a nation to have wealth, and to be wealthy.
Here, as elsewhere, persons are supreme. Give us
persons of the right order, producers, consumers,
capitalists, labourers, and all other things will be
added — they will adjust themselves into an order
promotive of the common good. Treat all questions
in industry as questions in religion, and it is certain
that those great problems which perplex the present
will become problems solved.

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 257

(1) But, to select an example or two, take our
problems as to land. There are no questions men
speak more of to-day. Yet here the supreme thing
is the good of the people. All legislation relative to
land ought to have that good prominently in view.
There is no law of God, there ought to be no law of
man, that so favours the man who owns property in
land as to enable him to dispossess the people. He
owns it for their good. Even where his rights are
recognized, and I recognize them most soundly, he is
still, in his very rights, trustee of a great national
possession, not for his own weal simply, but for the
common good. The rights of property concern a
class, and are based on fulfilled duties, which concern
the whole people. I am come of a long race of
farmers, and love the soil. My grandfather owned a
little farm of a hundred odd acres, and he farmed
the land he owned. One who loved him as became
a daughter used to tell how once, in the corn-law
times, when the proprietors cried, ^' Let us have more
protection," the great lord of the neighbourhood
came to visit him, and to ask him to sign a petition,
praying that still higher duties might be imposed;
and the old man said, ''No! I will not sign."
''What! not sign? It will enhance the value of
your land." "Sir," was the reply, "I will never
enhance the value of my land at the expense of the
people's food." And he there stated the great
principle of religion in the matter. He was a religious
man, and as such known and revered all round, and
he only thus expressed in a practical article the faith
by which he lived. The land was meant to serve

25 S Religion in History,

the people's good whilst maintaining him. Without
it the people cannot live, on it the people have a
right to live, and so it can become no man's absolute
possession, to be done with as he wills. The rights
of property in land, pushed to their last legal limit,
might easily become a more oppressive and disastrous
tyranny than the divine right of kings to govern
wrong; but the principle alike of the Old and New
Testament, — the land is for the people, their possession
before the Lord, — limits and defines these rights.
The people have not lost their rights in the land by
ownership becoming personal; nay, have only, in a
sense, the more fully secured and affirmed them.
Communal was exchanged for personal ownership,
that through personal responsibilities and action the
riches of the soil might be the more increased and
extensively distributed. It happened not that all
the rights might be concentrated on the head of the
possessor, but that all the capabilities of the posses-
sion might be developed and diffused. Unless this
result follow, personal ownership may become a pub-
lic wrong, and what has become that may become an
evil not to be borne. Trusts faithfully discharged
are rights firmly secured; personal ownership held
and exercised for the public good is the only owner-
ship above the need, and so above the fear, of
change.

(2) But these are only general religious and
Christian principles applied to an economical question,
and all that is here possible is to state them. Now
this statement ought to lead up to other and varied
questions, especially those connected with capital and

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 259

labour. Now, if this question were approached from
the same point of view as one of mutual duties, which
imply and recognize mutual rights, how simple it would
become ! Where a man works as a religious man to
God, he will do it, not as for wage, but as best effort
for noblest purpose. Then his ambition will not be
to do as little and get as much as he can, but to do
the best his skill and energies will allow. Where
the employer is religious, he will recognize that he
has duties he owes to his workmen, and his ambition
will be not to deal with them as ^' hands," machines
that differ from his engines only in being more un-
stable and irregular in their action, but as souls, to
be loved as such, and handled as rational and re-
sponsible and sensitive men. If your questions are
determined as questions between men who have great
moral obligations both in working and employing
work, the mutual duties will solve and unite where
mutual interests only embitter and divide. But the
supreme necessity is here, as elsewhere, the order of
persons religion has created and can create. Men
who seek each other's good will harmoniously promote
each other's weal. Men who believe that they con-
stitute a brotherhood before God will do generously
by each other in all questions of economical and
industrial relations.

There are also other questions, such as those con-
nected with amusements for the people — which I
could have liked to notice, but must leave alone.
This question of amusements is one that requires
wise methods of solution, for there is nothing we
nave more need to do than to make life a little more

260 Religion in History,

beautiful, fuller of promise and gladness for labour-
ing men. We all ought to . feel that a people has
a right to be happy, and happy all good men will
seek to make them. But all I can say is, let the
great moral principles of religion be expressed in
our economical methods and laws, and we shall be
sure to realize the highest and most beneficent state
of being.

My hope for the future is in the ideal of Christ.
My hope for man is in a more perfect and complete
embodiment of the Christian religion. When I look
abroad and see the disintegrative agencies that are
hard at work, the one thing I am anxious to do is
to bring the great constructive, the great architect-
onic principles of our Christian faith into relation
with life and action. Every Christian principle
embodied in law or society, every Christian deed
accomplished in industry, helps on the happier time.
I have come for these six nights out of my own
study in obedience to no call but the call of duty as
my conscience apprehended it, to speak to you, my
Fellow-townsmen, on matters that are alike to you
and me matters of the most vital and transcendent
interest, whether as men who work in time or men
destined to live in eternity.

I have endeavoured to show you the principles
which have done most for humanity in the past; ana
to make manifest to you, that if in this living present
we are to have real and highest welfare, a wealthier
state and wealthier men, because men who have
realized their manhood's highest state and truest
weal, then we must be men more and more baptized

Christian Religion in Modern Life. 261

into Christ, possessed of His truth, inspired by His
love. Then when so inspired, working the work of
time as in eternity, building on this earth a city,
meant to be the great city of God, we shall kand on
to a brightening future the nearer fulfilment of the
promise which came to the ages through Jesus Christ
our Lord.

THE END.

il, G. SHERWOOD & COu
O^INTERS. NEW YOfiK

Date Due )

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