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THE SPIRIT

THE RELATION OF GOD AND MAN,
CONSIDERED FROM THE STANDPOINT
OF RECENT PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

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TORONTO

THE SPIRIT

THE RELATION OF GOD AND MAN,
CONSIDERED FROM THE STANDPOINT
OF RECENT PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE

A. SETH PRINGLE-PATTISON, LL.D., D.C.L.

J. A. HADFIELD, M.A., M.B. /

C. A. ANDERSON SCOTT, M.A.
C. W. EMMET, B.D.
A. CLUTTON-BROCK

AND OTHERS

EDITED BY
B. H. STREETER, M.A.

Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, Canon
Residentiary of Hereford

jfteto gork

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922

r67i

5009F

Tli-DEN

I DATIONS

Set up and electrotyped. Published December, 1915.

" My wish is that I may perceive God, whom I find everywhere in
the external world, in like manner within and inside me."

Kepler.

" I cannot but think that the reformation in our day, which I expect
to be more deep and searching than that of the sixteenth century, will
turn upon the Spirit's presence and life, as that did upon the Justifica-
tion by the Son."

F. D. Maurice.

" The traditional doctrine of the Holy Spirit, neglected by the early
theologians of the Church, even when the creeds were still in the
formative period of their existence, has remained until this day in the
background of inquiry, both for the theologians and for the philoso-
phers. A favourite target for hostile, although often inarticulate,
criticism on the part of the opponents of tradition, and a frequent
object of reverential, but confessedly problematic and often very vague,
exposition on the part of the defenders of the faith, — the article of the
creed regarding the Holy Spirit is, I believe, the one matter about
which most who discuss the problem of Christianity have least to say
in the way of definite theory. Yet, if I am right, this is, in many
respects, the really distinctive and therefore the capital article of the
Christian creed, so far as that creed suggests a theory of the divine
nature. This article, then, should be understood, if the spirit of
Christianity, in its most human and vital of features, is to be under-
stood at all. And this article should be philosophically expounded and
defended, if any distinctively Christian article of the creed is to find
a foundation in a rationally defensible metaphysical theory of the
universe."

Professor Royce of Harvard.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
I. IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

By A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, LL.D., D.C.L., Fellow
of the British Academy, Professor of Logic and
Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh, Au-
thor of 'The Idea of God in the Light of Recent
Philosophy,' etc.

II. GOD IN ACTION

By Lily Dougall, Author of 'Pro Christo et Ecclesia'
'Christus Futurus,' 'The Practice of Christianity'
etc 25

III. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER

By Captain J. Arthur Hadfield, M.A. (Oxon.),
M.B. Edin.), Ashhurst Neurological War Hospital,
Oxford 68

IV. WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST

By C. A. Anderson Scott, M.A., D.D., Professor of
the New Testament at Westminster College, Cam-
bridge, Author of 'Dominus Nosticr,' Commentary
on Revelation in 'Century Bible/ etc. . . . 115

V. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE:
HOW GOD HELPS

By C. W. Emmet, B.D., Vicar of West Hendred,
Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Oxford,
Author of 'The Eschatological Questions in the
Gospels,' 'The Epistle to the Galatians' (Readers'
Commentary), 'Conscience, Creeds, and Critics,'

efc 157

vii

viii CONTENTS

VI. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRA-
TION: HOW GOD TEACHES

PAGE

By C. W. Emmet, B.D 195

VII. THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL:
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE
CHRISTIAN SACRAMENTS

By Lily Dougall 223

VIII. SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
By A. Clutton-Brock 277

IX. SPIRIT AND MATTER
By A. Clutton-Brock 309

X. CHRIST THE CONSTRUCTIVE
REVOLUTIONARY

By B. Hilliman Streeter, M.A., Hon. D.D. Edin.,
Fellow of Queen s College, Oxford; Canon Resi-
dentiary of Hereford; Editor of 'Foundations'
'Concerning Prayer,' 'Immortality' 'God and the
Struggle for Existence' ; Author of 'Restatement
and Reunion' 345

Index of Subjects 369

Index of Proper Names 375

INTRODUCTION

If the advance of knowledge has long ago made bank-
rupt the crude supernaturalism of traditional Christian-
ity, it seems well on the way towards discrediting no
less completely the crude materialism of Victorian sci-
ence. Supported by the prestige of men justly famed
for epoch-making discoveries, the philosophical system
known as Scientific Materialism could for a long while,
in the popular view, hold its own against a stream of
continual protest from the side of Metaphysics, Ethics
and Aesthetics. But now that these protests are being
reinforced by the latest investigations in Biology, Physi-
ology, and especially Psychology, the case is altered.

The idea that mechanism is an adequate explanation
of life and that consciousness is a bye-product of the
dance of atoms, is one intrinsically so incredible that
it could secure general acceptance onlv if supported bv
a consensus of the leaders of thought. Accordingly of
recent years the mind of the age has been moving to-
wards a more vitalistic conception of the nature of the
Power behind phenomena — a conception of which,
perhaps, the happiest expression is Boutroux's vague
but impressive formula " The Beyond that is
Within." There are few, however, who pause to
consider how far this is identical, how far diverse, from
that conception of the Spirit as the active indwelling:
of the transcendent Divine in whom " we live and
move and have our being " which dazzled the minds of
a St. Paul or a St. John.

Essentially the two conceptions are the same — but

with one important difference. The early Christian is

more vivid, more vital, more definite. But this defi-

x INTRODUCTION

niteness is precisely the element in it which modern
thought regards as unwarranted — and up to a point
the objection is well founded. The definiteness which
traditional Theology has given to the concept of the
Spirit is a definiteness of the wrong kind. On the one
hand, the Holy Ghost of the classical theology is a scho-
lastic abstraction. On the other, if we turn from that
to popular Christianity of the evangelical type, we find
indeed a conception of the Spirit which, through its
connection with a moving religious experience, is in-
deed the reverse of abstract, but which is still definite
with a definiteness of the wrong kind. For only cer-
tain types of experience are given spiritual significance,
and no attempt is made to relate this experience to a
thought-out philosophy of the universe. It is not
therefore surprising that it should sometimes lead to
narrowness of outlook and a tendency to value religious
emotion for its own sake.

In religious discussions the question is often raised
whether " definiteness of the wrong kind " may not
after all be better than a " general vagueness." The
question is purely academic. Practical men do not
waste time in debating which of two evils is the worse,
unless and until it has become clear that another and a
more satisfactory alternative is not forthcoming.
When definiteness of the right kind is in sight it is folly
to rest content until it is attained. And it can be at-
tained. The relation of religion and the creative
thought of the day is quite different now from what it
was fifty, or even fifteen, years ago. On the one side,
the spirit of scientific inquiry has — it must be con-
fessed, only after a hard struggle — firmly established
itself in Christian Theology; on the other, the leaders
of the world's thought have discovered that no philos-
ophy can hold water which has not sympathetically
studied, and in its system found a place for, the his-
torical and psychological phenomena in which religion
has found expression. After centuries of bickering,

INTRODUCTION xi

Religion and Science at last have shaken hands — and
if only they would go a step farther and become fast
friends, they could, by pooling their resources, regene-
rate the world.

The Scholastic Theology, considered in relation to
its own age and the social and intellectual develop-
ments of its own time, is one of the greatest monuments
of human genius. But the survival of what is really,
though often unconsciously, the Scholastic standpoint
has forced upon the Church a timid and defensive atti-
tude towards all new discovery. Worse still, it has
erected an artificial barrier which has fenced off modern
thinkers from the greatest spiritual tradition in the
world's history. It is not sufficiently realised that the
divorce between the Church and the living thought of
the day has impoverished Philosophy as much as it has
enfeebled the Church.

The promise of a way out of the present impasse
would seem to lie in a re-examination of the conception
of the Spirit — considered as God in action — in the
light alike of the religious experience and theological
reflection of the Christian Church throughout the ages,
and of present-day movements in Philosophy, Psychol-
ogy, and Art. In the way, however, of such an enter-
prise is one outstanding difficulty. Nobody can rea-
sonably hope to produce work of any degree of orig-
inality in any subject unless he has devoted to it the
^.concentrated study of many years; and no one person
can have done this to all the subjects vitally connected
with the present quest. Accordingly the method of in-
vestigation pursued has been the same as that used in
the preparation of the books Foundations, Concerning
Prayer, and Immortality.1 A series of conference-re-
treats, which the majority of contributors were able to
attend, supplemented by individual discussion for mu-
tual criticism and information, has made it possible
gradually to focus on a single point the results of a first-

l The method is described at greater length in Immortality, pp. x.-xiii.

xii INTRODUCTION

hand study, not only of Philosophy, Psychology, and
the theory of Art, but of the relevant branches of mod-
ern scientific Theology.

It should perhaps be added that the Holy Spirit
formed the subject of discussion at a joint retreat of
the Anglican and Free Church Fellowships at Easter
1 9 17, at which several of the contributors to this vol-
ume were present, and some read papers. And this
book owes not a little to that discussion, and still
more to the insight into the meaning and possibilities
of spiritual fellowship gained at this and at similar
gatherings.

The Essays form a continuous series the order of
which is self-explanatory — with one exception. The
Essay on " Spirit and Matter " by Mr. Clutton-Brock
opens with an argument for the existence of spirit di-
rected against the materialistic affirmation that matter
is the only reality. Logically this argument should
have come very early in the book. But the Essay in
which it occurs and the Essay by the same author which
precedes it present, if taken together, a constructive
discussion of Spirit from the standpoint of Aesthetics
which seems most appropriately placed in the later po-
sition.

To sum up, this volume is an attempt to put forward
a conception of the Spirit of God which is definite but
not scholastic, and which is capable of affording an in-
tellectual basis both for a coherent Philosophy of the
universe and for a Religion passionate and ethical, mys-
tical and practical. Of the success of the attempt it
is not for the authors to judge; but even to fail in a
great task is to make the way easier for those who
follow.

B. H. S.
Cutts End, Cumnor,
September 9, 1919.

IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

A. SETH PRINGLE-PATTISON, LL.D., D.C.L.

FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY

PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

AUTHOR OF " THE IDEA OF GOD IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT PHILOSOPHY," ETC.

SYNOPSIS

The question of immanence or transcendence is a fundamental issue in
religious philosophy, and the central doctrines of Christian theology are
in the main directed towards a satisfactory solution.

A purely immanental view of the divine is equivalent to a pantheism
which equates God and nature, to the extent of holding that God is
present equally in everything. Such a view leaves no room for moral
distinctions, or indeed for any distinction of higher and lower; every-
thing just as it exists is equally divine and therefore equally perfect.
On the other hand, the conception of God as a purely transcendent
and extra-mundane Being fails to realise His activity as indwelling
Spirit. In the history of religious thought such a theory is known as
Deism. It is exemplified in the rigid monotheism of the Hebrew re-
ligion and still more in Mohammedanism. In the Psalms the pity of
God is compared to that of a father for his children, but there is a gulf
between the sonship of man as thus conceived and as it is conceived,
for example, in the Gospel of St. John.

Looked at philosophically, and apart from the obsolete terminology
in which it is expressed, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation,
developed by the speculative theologians of the Eastern Church on the
basis of the older doctrine of the Logos, may be regarded as an attempt
on a grand scale to harmonise the ideas of immanence and transcen-
dence. The inmost nature of God as self-giving Love is taken to be
revealed in the human life and death of Jesus: "he that hath seen me
hath seen the Father." And in the complementary conception of the
indwelling and ever-active Spirit (originally identified with the eternal
Logos), it is implied that the presence of the divine is not limited to
any one age or individual. But popular Christianity, by reinstating
the deistic conception of a purely transcendent and impassible Creator,
and by stressing the divinity of the Christ in such a way as to make
Him no longer truly man, loses hold of the vital significance of its
own central doctrines. A God thus deistically conceived comes to be
treated merely as a great First Cause, and the idea completes its
natural evolution in modern thought as the Unknown and the
Unknowable.

It is important, therefore, for religious thought to rid itself of a
transcendency which seeks to magnify God's greatness by separating
Him from the world and making Him self-sufficient and complete
without it. The process of the finite world is not extrinsic to the
being of God; on the contrary, it may be said that only in the process
of creation and redemption do we touch the essential secret of the
divine life. The word creation is apt perhaps to suggest primarily
the calling into being of the material system of things. But,
philosophically regarded, the material world is an abstraction when
sundered from the conscious lives in which it culminates; it is but
God's medium for the shaping of souls. The whole meaning of
creation lies in the origination of conscious spirits to whom God can
reveal Himself and from whom He can obtain an appropriate response.
Creation in this sense is demanded by ihe nature of God, and it implies
a real agency and responsibility on the part of the beings created.
Freedom, and to that extent contingency, is thus a condition of the
existence of a finite world at all in any real sense. But the Spirit of
God moving the hearts of men is the guiding and formative agency in

i IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 3

the process, bearing with His creatures the whole stress and pain of the
world and drawing them to Himself with the infinite patience of love.
Such is the conception of the divine immanence suggested in Christian
thought. Obviously such immanence does not imply the sheer
identification of the being and life of God with the process of human
history or with the last term (so far reached) of any finite attainment.
This identification, made by some absolutist philosophers, stultifies
itself, for it fails to explain even the progress so far achieved. The
immanent God is always the infinitely transcendent, and it is the
presence of the Infinite in our finite lives that alone explains the
essential nature of man.

IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

The question of immanence and transcendence touches
the fundamentals of religious philosophy; and Christian
theology in particular, in its main doctrines, is little else
than a persistent attempt to reconcile these two views
of the divine nature and action. Let us first try to
clarify our ideas by considering the two views in their
mutual opposition and exclusiveness. We can best do
this by reference to philosophical types of the two ex-
tremes. A purely immanental view of the divine is
equivalent to a sheer Pantheism in which no distinction
whatever is drawn between God and nature. Spin-
oza's equation of Deus she Natura is often taken as
the typical example of such a position, but there are
elements in Spinoza's thought, particularly his doc-
trine of " degrees of perfection," which carry us beyond
it and point to a more satisfactory theory. Pure im-
manence or pure Pantheism is perhaps better exempli-
fied in those phases of Eastern thought in which this
doctrine of degrees seems entirely absent. " The
learned" — so runs a typical saying — "behold God
alike in the reverend Brahmin, in the ox and the ele-
phant, in the dog and in him who eateth the flesh of
dogs." In the popular religious cults in which this atti-
tude is expressed, the immanental unity of the divine is
little more than the idea of a teeming nature, and passes
easily into a gross polytheism, whose deities represent
and consecrate every natural force and tendency.
Such a view may be called the Lower Pantheism in or-
der to distinguish it from the Higher Pantheism (in
Tennyson's phrase), the doctrine of the divine imma-
nence which, as I hold, must be the heart of any true
philosophy. There is much, however, to be said for
a suggestion of Dean Inge's that the name Pantheists

i IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 5

" should be reserved for those who hold that God is
present equally in every part of His creation." x
Pope's often quoted phrases in the Essay on Man,
though they may be due to alliteration and antithesis
rather than to a full appreciation of their philosophical
meaning, are an exact expression of Pantheism in this
sense :

As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart . . .
To Him no high, no low, no great, no small,
He fills, He bounds, connects, and equals all!

In such a view there is no place either for aspiration
or condemnation. Morality and the most specific ex-
periences of religion become alike unmeaning. There
is neither good nor bad, neither better nor worse; for
everything, just as it exists, is equally divine, and there-
fore equally perfect. Existence and perfection become
identical terms.

If a purely immanental doctrine is equivalent to Pan-
theism in the sense just indicated, a doctrine of pure
transcendence might, I would suggest, be fitly styled
Deism, the term Theism being reserved for such theo-
ries as attempt to mediate between the two extremes
and to combine the truths on which they one-sidedly in-
sist, in a way which does not override, but on the con-
trary serves to explain, our moral and religious expe-
rience. No doubt, etymologically, the two terms, De-
ism and Theism, mean exactly the same thing, and
usage varies. Theism is used by some writers to desig-
nate a position distinguished from, and to some extent
opposed to, the Christian doctrine of God. It will be
found, however, that when Theism is so employed, the
doctrine in view is one which treats God merely as a
transcendent or extra-mundane Creator without recog-
nition of His activity as indwelling Spirit. Now the
term Deism acquired just this specific connotation in the
'beginning of the eighteenth century, when the English

1 Personal Idealism and Mysticism, p. 43.

6 THE SPIRIT i

Deists, as they are styled, supported what they called
" the religion of nature " as distinguished from the
special tenets of Christianity as a " revealed " religion.
It was an age not remarkable either for speculative in-
sight or for depth of religious feeling; and although the
Deists were duly answered by orthodox Churchmen,
the disputants on both sides accepted the same external
view of the relation of God to the world. The
Churchmen were just as far from being " Theists " in
the modern sense of the term as their opponents were.
The additional dogmas which they professed to accept
were accepted not from the analysis of religious experi-
ence but on the authority of an external revelation; and
the doctrines were powerless therefore to transform
the defective deistic notion of God with which they
started. Deism, in short, rather than Christianity,
was the common creed of the age. It seems a pity,
therefore, with the two terms at our disposal, to use
them indiscriminately in the same sense; they might be
usefully specialised in the way I have suggested.

On the large scale of history the pure transcendency
of the divine is exemplified in Judaism, out of which
Christianity developed, and still more clearly by Mo-
hammedanism, which is a conscious reaction against the
central Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.

The monotheism of the Hebrews has been called the
religion of Sublimity as contrasted with the religion of
Beauty, the nature-religion of the Greeks. Nothing,
indeed, can surpass in sublimity some of the utterances
in the Psalms and the Prophets, or the Book of Job.
But to the Hebrew writers the sublimities of nature
are not in strictness a revelation of God; they are used
rather to enhance the measureless and irresistible
power of God by their nothingness before Him.1 " It
is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the
inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers. . . . Behold,
the nations are as a drop in the bucket, and are counted

1 Cf. Caird's Evolution of Religion, i. 385.

i IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 7

as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up
the isles as a very little thing (Isaiah xl.). " He look-
eth on the earth and it trembleth: he toucheth the hills
and they smoke" (Ps. civ. 32). " The voice of the
Lord breaketh the cedars; yea, the Lord breaketh the
cedars of Lebanon (Ps. xxix.). " The earth saw and
trembled. The hills melted like wax at the presence of
the Lord" (Ps. xcvii.). Omnipotence which creates
and destroys with a word, enthroned above the heavens,
immeasurably remote from the thoughts and ways of
men, an absolute Will with something of the arbitrari-
ness and irresponsibility of an Eastern despot — such
are perhaps the foundational elements of the Jewish
conception. " By the word of the Lord were the heav-
ens made. . . . He spake and it was done " (Ps.
xxxv.). "He commanded and they were created"
(Ps. cxlviii.). " I form the light and create darkness;
I make peace and create evil; I, the Lord, do all these
things. . . . Woe unto him that striveth with his
Maker ! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of
the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth
it, what makest thou ? " ( Isaiah xlv. ) .

The history of Jewish religion is the record of the
process by which the original conception of a vengeful
tribal deity, in very truth a Lord of Hosts, a God of
battles, was purified into this lofty monotheism without
weakening the national faith in Jehovah as the guide
and protector of His people. " The God of Heaven,"
" the God of the whole earth," is still in a special sense
" the God of Israel," the redeemer of His chosen peo-
ple; and the realisation of this relationship prevents the
sheer transcendency of the divine from producing its
full effect. At the same time, the higher conception of
God implies a rising above mere nationalism: the bond
between Jehovah and His chosen people is thought of
as founded in righteousness and obedience. As this is
deepened and spiritualised in the prophetic teaching,
the national relationship becomes also an individual

8 THE SPIRIT i

relationship between the worshipper and his God,
which gives us in the Psalms and the Prophets some of
the most intimate expressions of devotional feeling.
The distance is partially annulled : " The Lord is nigh
unto them that are of a broken heart" (Ps. xxxiv.).
" For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth
eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and
holy place, with him also that is of a humble and con-
trite spirit" (Isaiah lvii. 15). " Like as a father pit-
ieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear
him." But the very thought of the fatherly pity is
linked with that of the infinite contrast between the
divine and the human: it is the reflection on human
frailty and transience that calls it forth. " For he
knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.
As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the
field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it,
and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no
more " (Ps. ciii.). Pity may be akin to love, but it is
not quite the same thing, and this fatherhood is still far
removed from that implied in the sonship of which St.
John speaks: " To them gave he power to become the
sons of God."

" The Lord looketh from heaven. . . . From the
place of his habitation he looketh upon all the inhab-
itants of the earth" (Ps. xxxiii. 13-14). "And the
Word was made flesh and dwelt among us " (John i.
14). These two sayings measure the distance that
divides the Psalms from the Fourth Gospel, and that is
the difference between the Jewish and the Christian
doctrine of God and man. As it has been well said,
11 the transition through which the meaning of the ex-
pression ' Word of God ' passes in the interval between
the Old Testament and the Gospel of St. John contains
in it a whole history of the development of religion." x

It is no part of my purpose here to trace that transi-
tion in detail, even if I were competent to do so. It is

1 Caird, op. cit., i. 386.

i IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 9

sufficient to refer to the Hebrew conception of the Wis-
dom of God as developed in the Apocryphal books, and
the fusion of this in Philo of Alexandria with the old
Greek idea of the Logos or indwelling reason of the
world. As philosophical speculation in that age, exag-
gerating the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition,
stressed more and more the transcendence — the inac-
cessibility, and incomprehensibility — of the divine, the
need became clamant for some principle to bridge the
chasm, some mediator between God and man. Thus
we get Philo's doctrine of " the second God," the
Logos, the uttered Reason, the first-born Son, the Pla-
tonic world of Ideas conceived as a creative force
through which God formed the world, conceived also
in religious language as the high-priest who through
his intercession creates and preserves relations between
God and man. The Logos as the indwelling deity is
knowable, while God Himself, as exalted beyond all
predicates, remains unknowable. The identification of
this eternal revelation of God in the cosmos with the
historical revelation of the character of God and His
purposes with men in the man Christ Jesus was the
work of the speculative Christian theologians of the
second and third centuries, and was fixed as the doctrine
of the Church by Athanasius in the fourth. That doc-
trine, as elaborated in the heat of controversy and
stated in the creed which goes by his name, is apt to
appear as the climax of irrationality, a tissue of incredi-
bilities, and the doctrine of Arius comparatively intelli-
gible and credible. But Arianism is really a reversion
to the idea of a purely transcendent, an inaccessible and
incommunicable God; and the Arian Christ, a demigod
called into existence to create the world, is a purely
mythological being, neither God nor man, but standing
midway between the two. As it has been said, " the
supernatural being whom Arius sets forth as mediator
between God and man does not unite but separates
them, for he serves to reveal the infinite impassable

io THE SPIRIT i

gulf that lies between them. . . . Union with Deity
according to such a theology is impossible." 1 On the
other hand, whatever fault we may find with the phil-
osophical terminology in which the Athanasian position
is expressed, the position is broadly based by Athana-
sius himself on a philosophical doctrine of immanence
inherited by the Alexandrians from Stoic philosophy,
an immanence not restricted to a single historical indi-
vidual. Because God is immanent in the world as a
whole, and specifically in all mankind, Athanasius ar-
gues at times, there is nothing contrary to reason,
nothing unworthy of the divine, in the idea that
He should manifest Himself pre-eminently in one
man.2

The controversy, to the modern mind so tedious and
futile, which subsequently distracted theologians con-
cerning the union of the two natures in Christ — as if
they were two substances which refused to mingle, or
two consciousnesses miraculously maintained in water-
tight compartments within a single human organism —
depended on the tacit denial of the spiritual unity as-
serted in the Incarnation. If I understand the doc-
trine of the Church aright, it teaches that just in so far
as Jesus is perfect man, He is also, and thereby, the per-
fect revelation of the Father, the express image of His
person. Spiritual things must be spiritually discerned.
Clothed in an obsolete and misleading terminology,
they degenerate into materialistic miracles and become
a stumbling-block to faith instead of a help to living
piety. Profound religious feeling will not go astray,
but popular Christianity is probably in the main a kind
of Arianism, if not a Tritheism. It is, to my mind, a
great misfortune that " the spirit of God," the in/lu-

1 Allen, The Continuity of Christian Thought, p. 87.

2" If the Word of God is in the universe ... if it beseems Ilini to unite
Himself with the universe and to be made known in the whole, it must beseem
Him also to appear in a human body and that by Him it ihould be illumined
and work. ... It cannot be ahsurd if, ordering as He does the whole and giv-
ing life to all things and having willed to make Himself known through men,
He has used as an instrument, a human body, to manifest the truth and knowl-
edge of the Father. For humanity, too, is an actual part of the whole " (cf. De
Inoarnatione Verbi, ohaps. 41 and 42).

I IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE n

ence of God in the human soul, or, as it is alternatively
called in the New Testament, " Christ," " the spirit of
Jesus," the mystic presence of the Lord in the hearts of
His followers, a spirit of comfort and consolation in
their loss, revealing the mind of the Master whom on
earth they had often so ill understood, and so guiding
them and the Church after them into all truth — it is,
I say a misfortune that expressions like these, and the
spiritual fact for which they stand, should have been
materialised so as to suggest the existence of a third
personality or agency distinct from both the Father and
the Son. For what better word could be found to ex-
press just the fact of divine immanence on which the
possibility of communion with God is based, the illum-
inative presence of God operative in every soul which
He has created? The conception of the Spirit is, in
fact, the final and complete account of the one God as
the Father of spirits, their Creator, Inspirer, and Re-
deemer.

But popular Christianity is unable to assimilate this
sublime mysticism, and falls back upon a deistic concep-
tion of the transcendent and impassible Creator, the un-
bending Judge of His sinful creatures; and so we arrive
at forensic theories of the Atonement and similar doc-
trines which are neither ethical nor religious. For such
a mode of thought the doctrine of the Incarnation itself
loses its significance as an expression of the essential
nature of God eternally giving and revealing Himself.
It becomes, if one may say so, almost an after-thought
resorted to as a remedy for the miscarriage of the di-
vine plan. And this is because, for a deistic theory,
the whole process of the world — its creation and its
redemption alike — is non-essential to the life of God.
But the course of modern thought shows conclusively
that the existence of such an extraneous self-involved
Deity is difficult to maintain, and that the notion of
such a Being rapidly loses all content, and consequently
ceases to possess any vital significance. He had been

12 THE SPIRIT i

supposed to give evidence of His existence by interfer-
ing with the course of nature from time to time; but
with the growth of a scientific and critical temper of
mind the evidence of such interferences becomes more
and more suspect and the interferences themselves less
and less credible. Hence the notion becomes atten-
uated to the idea of a Great First Cause, and, as noth-
ing about the universe seems to be explained simply by
postulating a divine mechanic to set it agoing, the
Deism with which the eighteenth century opened
passed, towards its close, into the explicit Atheism of
the French Encyclopaedists or the shadowy belief on
which Hume makes theist and atheist shake hands at
the conclusion of his Dialogues concerning Natural Re-
ligion, seeing that the proposition on which they agree
11 affords," as he says, " no inference that can affect hu-
man life, or can be the source of any action or for-
bearance." In more recent times, no doubt with more
of reverence but by the same inevitable logic, we see
the notion reduced to that of the unknown God, or. in
more sweeping phrase, the Unknown and Unknowable.
This characteristic product of later nineteenth-century
thought reappears in Mr. Wells's new theology as the
Veiled Being, and Mr. Wells also is unable to discover
any religious value in such a conception. He proposes
accordingly to transfer the name of God and the effec-
tive qualities of deity to the mythological being whom
he styles the Invisible King — a being purely mytholog-
ical, as Mr. Wells presents him, but one in whom it is
easy enough for others than Mr. Wells to recognise, in
a mutilated form, some of the characteristic features of
the Christ whom the author of the Epistle to the He-
brews spoke of long ago as the " Captain " of our sal-
vation.

It is highly important, therefore, for religious think-
ing — and for philosophic thinking also — to rid itself
of a transcendency which seeks to magnify God's great-
ness by separating Him from the world, placing Him at

i IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 13

a distance from it, and making Him self-sufficient and
complete without it. Transcendence in the only im-
portant sense is reached on other lines, as I hope to
show; but against this kind of transcendence it must be
contended that God is not a causa remota, who created
a universe once upon a time. He is its ever-present
sustaining ground. The universe of the finite and
everything in it exists from one moment to another
only because He perpetually creates it. As the medi-
aeval thinkers taught, to sustain in existence is equiva-
lent to continuous creation. Moreover, any account of
creation in terms of mere will is fundamentally mis-
leading. Yet this, I think, is beyond doubt the popular
idea. The idea of creation as an act of will and the
idea of creation as taking place once upon a time are,
indeed, connected in the closest way. According to
this conception, God existed in all His perfection and
blessedness before the creation of the world: He chose
to create a world, but He might equally have forborne
to create, and his abstention would have made no dif-
ference to His already self-sufficient being. The
world, in other words, is in no way organic to the di-
vine life. It is something that happened, but it is an
accident — in the old logical sense, that it cannot be
deduced from the essential nature of God. It remains,
as one may say, extrinsic to the courses of His being.
Against such a view Spinoza insisted, I think rightly,
that God is the cause of all thngs per se, not per acci-
dens; that is to say, it belongs to His very nature to be
Creator, or, in more modern and perhaps more re-
ligious language, God is essentially the self-revealing,
the self-giving, and (shall we say?) the self-sacrificing
God. In the process of this revelation and self-giving
consists His own very being and His eternal joy.
" Verily," said the Hebrew prophet, " thou art a God
that hidest thyself"; " clouds and darkness," says the
Psalmist, " are round about him." But the true God
is no deus absconditus, hidden, withdrawn from our

i4 THE SPIRIT I

sight, but a Creator that eternally utters Himself in
and to His creatures.

The common objection to Spinoza's way of putting
it — especially when he illustrates his thesis, as he is so
fond of doing, from the necessity with which the prop-
erties of a triangle follow from the definition of the
figure — is that God seems, if one may say so, to have
no personal choice in the matter. If creation is a
necessary act, then it is a process which seems to achieve
itself independently of His will; and, instead of a per-
sonal life, we are left, it is said, with a system of ab-
stract necessity, which is little better than the all-em-
bracing mechanism of the materialists. But such a
conception of necessity as an external compulsion im-
posed upon the divine action, a kind of abstract fate
which he passively carries into execution, is less than
just to Spinoza's intention, though it may be fostered
by his illustrations and may find support in certain fea-
tures of his own system. For the necessity of which he
speaks is the necessity of the divine nature itself, and,
according to his doctrine, God alone enjoys perfect
freedom because, as the sole self-subsistent Being, there
is nothing external to Him which could affect His ac-
tion. To perfect knowledge and perfect goodness
there can be no choice, in our sense of the word, as a
dubiety between alternatives and a making up of our
minds for one or the other. He must act in every case
out of the fulness of His own nature; His action is
simply the realisation of His nature. And that this
is the idea! of action — this and not the so-called free-
dom of choice, characteristic of the finite will — we ac-
knowledge, when we envisage, as the goal of our own
religious endeavour, the " service " which is " perfect
freedom," that state of moral being in which our ac-
tions shall respond with a like spontaneity to " the
mind of God," as we have learned to know it. They
become the expression, in other words, of a nature at-
tuned to the divine.

i IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 15

We find more thoughtful theologians recognising ac-
cordingly that the divine will must in every case be an
expression of the divine nature, and many of them, fol-
lowing out this line of thought, have accepted the idea
of creation as an eternal act, which means that God
never existed without a world in which He was mani-
fested. But although many would go thus far, I have
found others (and perhaps even some of those who
would accept the general idea of an eternal creation)
protesting against any form of words which seems, as
they say, to " bind up " God and the world in a rela-
tion of reciprocal implication; for that is, they say, to
make God " dependent " upon man in a sense which
contradicts the notion of Him as the self-subsistent and
infinitely perfect Being, and is also at variance, it has
been objected, with the feeling of utter dependence on
our part which has been defined as the essence of re-
ligion, and which is at any rate an abiding element in
religious experience. But surely this is to strain at a
word, as before in the case of necessity, and to import
into the idea of " dependence " a meaning which could
only attach to it if the finite creatures were beings exist-
ing in their own right, and capable as it were, of enter-
ing into a concordat with the Infinite, whereby finite
and infinite should agree to support one another in ex-
istence. It may be freely conceded that to represent
God as dependent on anything ontologically extraneous
to Himself contradicts our whole conception of Him;
but surely nothing of the kind is suggested in the view
I have maintained. Whatever ethical independence is
conferred upon the finite creature, he is sustained in ex-
istence at all only by the concursus dei, as the old theo-
logians taught, and from the same infinite source he
draws his rational and moral sustenance. Both for the
fact of his existence and the content of his life he is thus
utterly dependent, and the most heartfelt expressions of
religious feeling are full of the acknowledgement of
this dependence. Obviously it is not in this sense that

16 THE SPIRIT i

God can be said to depend on the creature, and the
word " dependent " is none of mine. But I say that in
the nature of the case we can have no knowledge of
God except in relation to the world of His creatures,
and that in attempting to conceive His solitary and self-
sufficient existence out of that relation, we make an ab-
straction for which we have no warrant; and if we
think we are thereby framing a more elevated notion of
Him we deceive ourselves; on the contrary, we are rob-
bing Him of the perfections which we recognise to be
most divine. Need I do more than mention the Chris-
tian conception of redemptive Love? That is surely
no " accident " of the divine experience, but the very
process in which God's life consists. If we believe this,
it is unmeaning to say that " God's nature is complete
without creation."

But it is important to be clear as to what we mean
by creation. In the popular use of the term I think we
are apt to have in our mind primarily the fabric of the
material universe, and hence the process seems compar-
able to that of turning out a manufactured article; and
the product, summoned somehow into existence, ap-
pears to stand there henceforth independent of God, as
it is similarly independent of, and, as we say, external
to, finite spirits like ourselves who are, on this view, the
result of a subsequent and distinct act of creation.
But, if we think philosophically, we must not think of
creation as a serial process in which a material system
of things was first brought into existence, to which con-
scious beings were afterwards added as its denizens.
Such a way of thinking bestows an artificial independ-
ence upon the material cosmos and lands us in a number
of difficulties, as, for instance, what meaning we can at-
tach to the existence of unconscious material things en-
tirely out of relation to the experience of conscious
beings. If we think in terms of process (of time) we
must at any rate remember that no process can be truly
described unless it is viewed in its completeness, that is

;

i IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 17

to say, in the light of its final result, that to which it
all leads up. And the process of the material universe
is towards life and consciousness. As Browning says:

All tended to mankind
And, man produced, all has its end thus far:
But in completed man begins anew
A tendency to God.1

Viewed thus, the whole meaning of creation is seen to
be the origination of conscious spirits; for to them
alone God can reveal Himself, and from them only can
He obtain a response. Everything else, the whole ma-
terial fabric, is but God's medium, as it were, for the
shaping of souls, and we need not involve ourselves in
difficulties by thinking of it as something created inde-
pendently and standing, so to speak, on its own basis.
There is, in strictness, no creation — no finite universe
at all — till spirits are created. And if, when we think
of creation, we think primarily of the origination of
conscious spirits, we shall not be tempted to relapse into
what has been called the cabinetmaker theory of crea-
tion. For spirits are not things that are " made."
The bold metaphor of the Creed, " begotten not
made," would indeed seem better to suggest the rela-
tion of every potential son of God to the Being whose
image he bears and of whose nature he is invited to
partake.

But when we speak thus of creation as an eternal
act, we mean simply that the basal constitution of the
universe (using that term now in the largest sense) is
eternally complete. If the ultimate definition of God
is Love, then the divine life is essentially a process of
self-communication, a life in and through others, and
it is a contradiction to imagine Him existing without
objects of that love.2 The statement is not meant to
imply that we can eliminate considerations of time (of

1 Paracelsus, ad fin.

2 The doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son may be taken as symbol-
ising this ideal necessity.

1 8 THE SPIRIT i

process, of effort, of co-operation) when we think of
the dealings of God with any concrete individual or any
particular race. Certainly it does not mean that what
we call the history of the world has no meaning for
God, inasmuch as the end is for Him one with the be-
ginning, and the whole predetermined in every detail.
That would be to belie the very meaning of creation as
we have used the term; for it would mean that God was
the sole agent in everything that happened, we being,
in literal truth, God's puppets. Such a view acts like
a paralysis upon the moral life. Creation, as de-
manded by the nature of God, implies, on the contrary,
a real independence, a real agency and responsibility, on
the part of the beings created. As a matter of fact,
such beings are not turned out like ready-made articles;
they are rather given an opportunity of making them-
selves. Freedom, and to that extent contingence, is
therefore a condition of there being a finite world in
any real sense at all. The Spirit of God moving in the
hearts of men is the guiding and formative agency in
the process, operating not as a natural force that over-
bears opposition, but as an inward illumination, draw-
ing them with the infinite patience of love. If we be-
lieve in the omnipotence of love, the victorious issue
may be secure — secure, that is to say, in the long run
and in general outline — but nowise determined as to
the details of its realisation in individual lives or com-
munities, and perhaps not even certain of gathering all
the sheep into the fold, so strange is the power of self-
determination vested in the finite will. If God is not
thus active in the time-process, bearing with His crea-
tures the whole stress and pain of it, the immanence of
the Creative Spirit becomes an unmeaning phrase.
However difficult it may be for us to realise the rela-
tion of the temporal to the eternal, no solution can be
true which simply abolishes the one or the other. The
time-process must be rooted in an eternal reality, but
the eternal is not the timeless. It must be conceived

i IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 19

as somehow comprehending the temporal as an element
— and a necessary element — in its own being.

It should be almost needless to add that all this
emphasis on the essentially creative nature of God, and
the immanence, therefore, of God in His universe, must
not be taken to mean the equation of the divine with
the process of finite experience. Such a sheer identifi-
cation of the two seems to be implied in the statements
of many absolutist philosophies. Take Hegel's sys-
tem, for example. Hegel traces in his Philosophy of
Law and in his Philosophy of History the human rec-
ord in these different spheres, and in each case the rec-
ord of gradual advance is represented as the process by
which the Absolute attains full self-consciousness —
attains it, one is almost ashamed to add — in the social
and political structure of Europe, and of Germany in
particular — at the opening of the nineteenth century.
And, similarly, as we unroll the history of philosophy
we are supposed to have before us the successive stages
by which God arrived at a knowledge of Himself, com-
plete knowledge being attained in the Hegelian philos-
ophy with which Hegel's record naturally terminates.
The convinced Hegelians of the first generation de-
bated in sober earnest what the further history of the
world could consist in, seeing that by attaining to self-
knowledge in the philosophy of the Master the world-
spirit had already reached its goal. Such sublime self-
satisfaction is perhaps only possible to certain types of
the German mind, and it hardly needed Lotze's ridi-
cule to expose the inherent absurdity of the " dialectical
idyll " according to which the " creative cause of the
universe issued from its darkness into the light of man-
ifestation only by the narrow path of earthly nature,
and after having formed man and human life again re-
treated into infinity, as if with all its ends accomp-
lished." 1 But in a less extreme form of expression
the same tendency has invaded a good deal of modern

1 Microcosmus, i. 458 (English translation).

20 THE SPIRIT i

philosophy. Because we may truly say that God is
manifested in the mind of man and in the process of
human history, philosophers pass on to treat the
achievement of humanity, taken collectively, as the sole
and sufficient self-realisation of the divine. But this
extraordinary deification of the status quo — of man as
he is — has only to be stated, it seems to me, in order
to condemn itself. It means, of course, the denial of
any divine selfhood, any actuality of God for Himself.
There is no knowledge, that is to say, in the universe,
no understanding of the scheme of things anywhere,
more comprehensive than that which works itself out
in laborious patchwork in this and the other human
brain; no goodness, no justice, no tenderness, save that
which springs in the human heart. But such a theory
does not even explain the status quo in which it rests;
for to accept any present as final is to misread the
whole nature of development. If the indwelling God
is just man as he is, there would be no consciousness
of higher and lower, no ideal set before us, and no
progress at all therefore possible. The principle
which explains human progress is the presence of God,
and, as grounded in God, that progress must be " on
and always on," for no finite achievement can body
forth the infinite perfection. Humility deepens with
each step in advance. " Not as though I had already
attained," says the Apostle, " either were already per-
fect, but I follow after . . . forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things
which are before." On no other view is the process of
human experience explicable.

We speak naturally in this context of God and man.
But we have only to lift our gaze to the midnight sky
to remember that we have no right to restrict the reve-
lation of God to the comparatively recent inhabitants
of this humble planet.

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay.

i IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 21

And in these worlds, or in worlds unseen by the bodily
eye, multitudes of self-conscious spirits may exist, chil-
dren of the same Father and admitted to the same fel-
lowship. " Other sheep I have which are not of this
fold." The words spoken by the Johannine Christ in
a narrower reference may well be given this wider ap-
plication. Man, therefore, in this context is merely
representative of the finite spirit wherever found, and
among those other spirits many may, in every form of
spiritual excellence, vastly surpass mankind as we know
it. But whatever range beyond range of experience
and achievement may thus open before us, nothing is
altered in principle as regards the relation of the finite
spirit to the infinite source of its aspirations. He that
has gone farthest will be the foremost to declare that
he has not already attained, and that it is not in his
own strength that he has won his way thus far.

To return, in conclusion, to the opposite views of the
divine nature and action which we set out to consider,
the eternal contrast between the actual and the ideal
seems to me to furnish the natural key to the problem
of immanence and transcendence. Transcendence does
not mean remoteness or aloofness. The distinction it
points to is that between the perfect and the imperfect;
and by perfection we do not understand the possession
of innumerable unknown attributes, but the perfect
realisation of those very values which we recognise as
the glory and crown of our human nature. This idea
of perfection disclosing its features gradually, as men
become able to apprehend the vision, is the immanent
God, the inspiring Spirit to whom all progress is due.
But the immanent God is thus always the infinitely
transcendent. The two aspects imply one another. A
purely immanental theory, as we saw in the earlier part
of this paper, means- the denial of the divine altogether
as in any way distinguishable from the human, and in-
volves, therefore, the unqualified acceptance of every-
thing just as it is. A theory of pure transcendence, on

22 THE SPIRIT i

the other hand, tends to leave us with a " mighty Dark-
ness filling the seat of power," for only so far as God
is present in our experience can we know anything about
Him at all. It is the immanence of the transcendent,
the presence of the infinite in our finite lives, that alone
explains the essential nature of man — the " divine dis-
content " which is the root of all progress, the strange
sense of doubleness in our being, the incessant conflict
of the lower and the higher self, so graphically de-
scribed by St. Paul as a law in his members warring
against the law of his mind. And the more clearly we
identify the call of the higher with our true self the
more unfeignedly do we recognise the illumination of
the divine Spirit. Deus illuminatio mea — " In Thy
light shall we see light."

GOD IN ACTION

LILY DOUGALL

AUTHOR OF " PRO CHRISTO ET ECCLESIA," &C.

ANALYSIS

The Holy Spirit for the early Christians was the joyful indwelling
force of love and life which they felt to be God.

Later the Spirit, as one Person of the Trinity, was regarded as God
in action in the world of men.

I. The Spirit acts always in accord with nature, not by overriding
natural ways and laws.

II. On this view consider how apparently miraculous or supernatural
religious experience may be understood in the light of psychological
law.

Such experience considered under four heads: Inward illumination;
Inspired utterance; Unusual power of resisting temptation or of in-
fluencing other minds; The reception of specific benefits in answer to
prayer.

Such experiences may be shown to be in accord with psychological
law.

The fact of free will does not result in man acting otherwise than in
co-operation with natural law: nature, we conceive, is in the same way
God's instrument by which He accomplishes the desire expressed in
every true prayer.

Religious experience is evidence of God's action in the world, because
in it the religious instinct gets satisfaction, not because the method of its
getting satisfaction is magical or miraculous.

III. We must not regard all that happens as the work of the Spirit:
He works always for good and opposes evil.

IV. The universal good for which the Spirit works is man's perfect
correspondence with environment, i.e. the Kingdom of Heaven. The
universal brotherhood implied in this does not come with the mere
process of the ages; it depends on the free choice and sacrificial work
of men.

The difficulty in recognising the Spirit's work in the process of
development arises from the constant sacrifice of the individual while
the Kingdom lingers.

But the fact that, through human development of that self-sacrifice
traceable in the whole biological system, the value of the individual is
increasingly recognised, indicates that the Spirit is urging on this value
and will justify it.

The adventure of world-creating in conscious communion with the
Spirit brings about a better future, while it affords the individual who
pursues it the fruition of all his permanent desires.

Jesus Christ discovered and proclaimed the power of the Spirit to
enhance and harmonise all life and so to bring in the Kingdom of
Heaven.

GOD IN ACTION

What thought and feeling rises unbidden in us when
we hear some one speak of the Holy Ghost or the Holy
Spirit?

In some it is a sort of wondering, half-respectful de-
rision, such as we all feel when we come upon belief in
creeds that we hold to be outworn. In others it is the
simple boredom always experienced by the inferior
mind when confronted with what is great in poetry or
music or painting. In others, again, who do not doubt
that the term signifies a great reality, the thought of
holiness rouses onlv a sense of repulsion. For them
the adjective " holy " is synonymous with " forbid-
ding " — a perfection which imperfection, however
well-intentioned, may not touch without being
" thrust through with a dart."

Yet to the spirit of all living creatures belong such
life, hope, health, enterprise, curiosity, joy, kindness,
love, as they may know. Stones or corpses do not
know these affections; therefore it is to the spirit in
the universe that life and love belong. The associa-
tions of the word " spirit," therefore, ought not to be
dulness or fear. It will be said that to spirit belong
also animosities, pride, scorn, cruelty. True; and
these also have been, and are still, attributed to such
invisible power or powers as many worship. Hence
the notion of " taboo " — a notion strongly compact
of the unapproachable, the irrational, the terrible.
The early Christians, whatever their mistakes, sins,
and ignorances, did this interesting thing — they took
the world " holy " — which, originally having its roots
in taboo, had been elevated by the Old Testament

26 THE SPIRIT ii

prophets to mean goodness, awful and exclusive —
they took this word and appropriated it to the Divine
Spirit which made for fellowship.1 It was a new use
of the word. So used it served to distinguish the in-
dwelling force they felt to be God from those demonic
forces which they, in common with their world, believed
to inspire men with animosities and diseases. They
were hilarious, these early Christians. In their
records we come constantly upon words that evince
good spirits. Their delight in a new-found spiritual
Friend triumphed over all their misfortunes. They
upset the world with their joy and liveliness. They
had the same sense of fellowship and enterprise as
have the men of a regiment, and they went joyfully
to meet persecution as men certain of victory go joyfully
to battle. They felt themselves possessed by some
external force of love and life which filled them with
beautiful hopes and empowered them to carry out their
desires.

After that, in the growth of the creed, we get the
conception of the Trinity; but all that we are here
concerned with is that the " Holy Spirit " is the name
given by Christians to God in action in the world of
men.

It is essential to any developed religion to believe
that God is a Spirit and that He acts in the world of
men. To attain a right conception, therefore, of the
nature of the Spirit, and of His action, is the most
fundamental need of religious thought.

In this connection the chief questions which are
exercising the minds of present-day thinkers are the
following: —

I. Does the Spirit act in accordance with nature, or
by overriding natural ways or laws?

II. If the Spirit works through nature, how may we
explain apparently miraculous or supernatural religious
experience?

1 Cf . Essay IV. p. 133.

ii GOD IN ACTION 27

III. Are all things that happen the work of the
Spirit? or does He work for good and oppose evil?

IV. If for good only, what is the nature of that
good? and if by natural processes, how may man attain
to natural co-operation with Him?

Spirit and the Reign of Law

Science is discarding the mechanistic and determinist
conception of natural consequence. The term " law,"
used for the habits of whatever acts in a dependable
and explicable manner, is ambiguous, but the phrase
" laws of nature " is so engrafted in our speech that
it is pedantic to avoid it.

The modern biologist, although believing that life
is governed by law, describes something like choice
and adventure at every stage of development, from the
amoeba upwards. The psychologist, who long ago
discovered that the reign of law prevails in the sphere
of mind, is still able to treat each self as a centre of
spontaneity. Science no longer compels us to regard
nature as an iron-bound system, but at the same time
insists that nature is entirely dependable. We may
perhaps think now of the system of our universe as
to be relied on as the actions of a good man of estab-
lished character are to be entirely relied on because
we know no motion of his mind will be eccentric. It
is in this sense that we use the term, " the reign of
law," in considering its relation to the action of God.

I. Those who have been accustomed to teach the
religious world have long brought forward, as proofs
of God's existence and evidence of His character, cer-
tain events held to be more than natural. We who
love God have been taught to fear that the world may
ignore Him if He does not sometimes override nature.
Yet if we can truly trust God, we shall perceive that
there is nothing to fear whatever the upshot of any
truth-seeking. Whatever is true is God's way of
revealing Himself; we may fearlessly seek the fullest

28 THE SPIRIT ii

knowledge of that way, even though that involve the
sacrifice of some favourite tradition.

A child taught to believe in the existence of the
ocean because he has heard the roar and murmur of its
surges when he puts the curling shell to his ear, may
naturally suppose that the ocean itself is only a beauti-
ful myth when the acoustic reason of the surging, throb-
bing sound of the shell against his ear is first explained
to him. But the ocean is a fact too large and insistent
to be ignored. And, what is more, the relation be-
tween the child's delicate sense of hearing and the
echoing of the shell is the same relation as that between
his ear and waves of sound made by the surf upon the
shore, or the dance of the waves that clap their hands
to the winds in mid-ocean. In so far as such sounds are
music to him, in so far as such music raises in his con-
sciousness images of beauty and thoughts of infinite
spaces and wild delights, both the ocean and the shell
bear the same relation to his own power of poetic
interpretation. The only reason why he might tempo-
rarily doubt the existence of the ocean lies in the beauti-
ful but erroneous nursery tradition that the sea sounds
through the orifice of the shell.

It is a fundamental question whether in certain times
and conditions we can think of God's action as some-
thing so apart from and different from the ordinary
working of nature as to be incalculable, and the evi-
dence of something of which we have no other evidence
— as tradition teaches, or whether we may believe that
God works in the world only by the qualities and powers
of the creatures and things in the world.

It is well that we should realise how small is the area
that has ever been claimed by religion for God's
miraculous action. Even in ancient times, when no
intellectual difficulty was felt in admitting the direct
visible action of invisible powers, we find that such
action was only assumed with regard to events that
appeared extraordinary and not otherwise explicable.

ii GOD IN ACTION 29

And from the earliest times the progress of culture and
education tended to restrict the area of divine interpo-
sition as it extended the area of human knowledge into
the working of nature. This tendency to restrict the
area of miracle has ebbed and flowed with the enlighten-
ment, and the more or less emotional temper, of the
age. We are all aware how greatly it has shrunk in
our own age before the advance of modern science.
Let us ask ourselves how far an orthodox Christian of
today and a modern atheist would differ as to the evi-
dence for the supernatural.

First, let us observe that the word " supernatural "
is used by the orthodox to describe a larger area of
experience than what is strictly miraculous: all that is
miraculous is supernatural, but all that is supernatural
is not called miraculous. God's supernatural grace, it
is said, may be realised only as subjective, producing
for the unbeliever no evidence of the operation of any-
thing extraneous to nature. But a miracle is conceived
as taking place irrespective of human expectation or
mood, and is regarded as evidence, valid for any candid
observer, of God's supernatural action. The area of
the miraculous, always restricted, dwindled in the minds
of many educated Christians at the end of the last
century until it only covered the Birth and Resurrection
of our Lord, and other miracles of the New Testa-
ment. To confine God's miraculous activity to one age
and country was found to be rather absurd in face of
the many millenniums of human history and the world's
great need; accordingly, those who believe in special
miracles have tended, in the last two decades, to in-
clude again some of the alleged miracles of Christian
saints, and, in modern times, such events as sudden
recoveries from disease occurring in answer to prayer.
Throwing the net, however, as widely as the modern
mind may dare to throw it, God's miraculous actions
in the world are very few and, for the non-Christian
mind, apparently unimportant in comparison with the

30 THE SPIRIT n

great stream of events whose causes are discoverable.
But, as already noted, the area alleged by the orthodox;
to be covered by the supernatural action of God is much
larger. It covers everything that may be considered
the result of the grace of God in the lives of Chris-
tians, and its reality is evinced to the faithful in certain
exalted moments, in their conscious participation in
prayer and worship, and especially through sacramental
rites. The difficulty about this conception of the super-
natural is threefold: (a) the area of what is considered
divine grace in the Church appears small by the total
of human life — as did the area of the miraculous;
and (b) such results of supernatural grace as can be
descried in the Church by the world do not appear
sufficiently different from, and more important than,
natural processes of the same grace outside the Church
to vindicate a religious philosophy based upon the evi-
dence they afford — for example, to the eye of reason
the good devout person is not, take him all in all,
much better than the good and earnest agnostic, and
sometimes not as good; or (r) if, as some Jesuit au-
thorities affirm, God's sacramental grace may build
up a supernatural life in man which has no visible out-
come in moral character, the Author of such grace
appears somewhat indifferent to the harm its subjects
commit.

If by " supernatural " we could simply mean that
which, being divine, transcends our finite conception
of nature, while it also interpenetrates that nature, it
would be quite accurate to call our salvation super-
natural, for the main and outstanding idea expressed
by the Christian doctrine of the Spirit is that help
comes to man from God — help adequate and efficient
from the Spirit of God, which is other than man's spirit.
An explanation of the way in which God's Spirit may-
be thought of as giving help to man's spirit may be
found in another Essay in this book.1 Our point here

/ l Essay V. pp. 155-158.

ii GOD IN ACTION 31

is that the help does not originate in man, nor is it
planted in man, like a seed, and left for him to develop
and increase by his own efforts. Man can help him-
self, of course; he can do a great deal for himself in
every way; he is a centre of life — which means, of
origination, of the choice of experience, of purpose, of
effort. All this he is by God's initial gift of life. A
sea-anemone on a rock is a definite centre of life, and
has within itself certain powers; but the tide which
comes twice a day to bring it all that it requires for
life is something other than the anemone; and yet,
illimitable as is the onrush of the ocean over the small
life, it brings to that small life only just so much as the
creature can or will assimilate. It puts forth its richly-
coloured tentacles in the translucent flood, and lives by
what it can catch of the water's wealth. So is the
action of God's Spirit on the soul of man; it is some-
thing other than his own action. Salvation flows over
him always — a warm, illimitable river of life. Man
takes from it, if he will, what he can, and what he can
must ultimately depend upon what he will.

It is this otherness of God, this initiation and carry-
ing out of efficient help by God, that is the valuable
truth in the insistence laid by many on the supernatural
element in our salvation. The term " supernatural "
is, indeed, sometimes used to express this " otherness "
and nothing more. But if this be the meaning of the
word " supernatural," then we require another word
for " supernatural " in its ordinary sense, meaning
something which overrides the order of nature. Un-
less we hold the crudest dualism we must believe that
nature is the manifestation of God, and that God has,
by the creative process, produced human nature " for
Himself," as St. Augustine truly preached. If nature
in God's conception and purpose be the creaturely exist-
ence which develops to its utmost possibility of good
by His constant friendship and aid, then such aid is
natural in the sense that it is of the very essence of

32 THE SPIRIT ii

true natural development. To call it supernatural is
to confuse it with an incompatible theory of divine
grace. Indeed, those who lay most stress upon the
supernatural character of the divine salvation do not
mean that God works only in natural ways. They
mean that God has come, and still comes, in certain
times and places, to operate upon man's spirit or body
or upon external nature, in ways that cannot be
analysed or classified by physical or psychological
science. The word " supernatural " is, unfortunately,
too deeply dyed with this meaning to be safely used in
any other.

On the other hand, there is growing up a school of
Christians who believe that the restriction of the area
of what is taken to be God's supernatural or miraculous
action by our increasing knowledge of natural causes
points to the conclusion that God always acts through
nature, and that nature at its highest and best is always
the manifestation of God's character as He reveals
Himself to us, and is also the indication of His will for
our further development. If men regard the universe
as fundamentally spiritual, they can draw no line be-
tween nature and supernature, because all nature is the
evidence of something which is above and beyond. If
they believe in God they must believe that that trans-
cendent Spirit is personality and intelligence, but need
not therefore believe that His action is ever manifested
apart from the coherent system of things which we call
" nature."

We may perhaps make quite clear the distinction
between these two schools of religious thought — i.e.
those who believe in the miraculous and the super-
natural and those who believe God works only naturally
— by an illustration. Those who still hold that our
faith in God depends upon our belief in His occasional
direct interference with nature believe that the Birth
and Resurrection of Jesus were unique events in the
sense that they happened because He was God, not

ii GOD IN ACTION 33

because He was the ideal man. On the other hand,
those who believe that nature is a progressive revela-
tion of God's character and purpose believe, either
that our Lord's coming into and going out of this
world were not physically different from the birth and
the entry into eternal life of other men, or that, if
they were different, that difference was something truly
natural to humanity at its highest and best, the triumph
of spirit over body, something to which all humanity
may one day attain — the first-fruits of what physical
existence must become when God's will is done on
earth as in heaven. In such a view these events would
be thought of as the supreme instance of the power
of mind over body — a power increasingly realised
to-day.

If we take this " natural " view of God's relation to
the world, as opposed to the supernatural, we shall
look for the explanation of all that has been called
" supernatural " in the action of God evoking latent
powers of the human — powers capable of being stated
in terms of natural sequence, i.e. of psychological law.

What, then, is it that so many religious people fear
may be lost by the acceptance of the view that the
whole of religious experience is strictly natural from
the psychologist's and the biologist's point of view?
Clearly they are afraid that, if this view is accepted,
God will seem to have left Himself without witness in
the world and that men will deny God's existence and
cease to worship Him if they cannot believe that some
small special part of their life experience is not natural
but supernatural, in the sense in which we have here
agreed to use the terms.

There has always been something very good, as well
as something foolish and something cruel, in the oppo-
sition that we of the Church have shown to any inter-
ference with traditional belief. On each occasion the
attitude evinced a very real faith in God and in the
Christian salvation, and a willingness to sacrifice much

34 THE SPIRIT n

in order to bear witness to the truth for the protection
of defenceless multitudes and in defiance of any enemy
to the faith. Our folly lay in fearing that what was
not of God might bring to nought what was of God.
There is, moreover, more than folly, there is something
really evil, in the complex state of mind which we have
often displayed. Like the Pharisees criticising Christ,
we have allowed ourselves to attribute moral defect to
those who evince a disinterested love of truth.

When Galileo affirmed that the world went round
the sun, the Church took upon itself positively to deny
the discovery; and if, with the aid of dramatic insight,
we can picture the theologians of that time, we shall see
them chatting to each other at street corners, in church
porches, and in convent cloisters, deriding the notion,
and so entirely convinced that it is absurd that it never
occurs to any of them that their derision and righteous
indignation will become in future ages a byword for
ecclesiastical folly. Very much the same thing is hap-
pening to-day with regard to scientific discoveries in in-
dividual and social psychology, and, at the present stage
of our knowledge, with less excuse. No astronomical
discovery is of as much importance to the world as any
really forward step in the knowledge of the human
mind; but the ecclesiastical mind, as such, often appears
even more averse to the psychological knowledge of
to-day than it was to the astronomy of the Renaissance.

In seeking to analyse the psychological aspect of re-
ligious experience our question can only be, " What is
truth? " secure in the faith that God, who has begun a
good work in the world, will continue to inspire man
with faith that is in accordance with truth.

The Psychological Aspect of Religious
Experience

II. Both those who claim a special function or mani-
festation for God's supernatural action and those who
claim that God works naturally lay stress on the evi-

ii GOD IN ACTION 35

dence of the religious experience. It would be well,
therefore, to discuss this experience in the light thrown
upon it by psychology.

The phenomena of the religious life maybe classified
thus:

( 1 ) Inward illumination, with corresponding effect
on volition.

(2) Inspired utterance, individual and corporate,
which may perhaps be defined as the power to express
what is received in inward illumination.

(3) Unusual power of (a) resistance to temptation
and progress in virtue; (b) physical or mental effort,
endurance of suffering, and power to regulate the health
of the body; (c) influence over the minds of others.

(4) The reception of other benefits for which
definite prayer has been made.

I will first give typical and rather striking examples
of each phenomenon, reserving discussion and analysis
of them till later.

(1) Under the head of "illumination" I would
class all experience of vivid enlightenment which comes
to seeking souls, whether as to the nature of sin and
holiness or as to the nature of God's personal attitude
to the self or the world. There can be no question as
to the extraordinary reality and productiveness of this
experience, nor can any believer in God question that,
when increased knowledge of truth or of vital virtue is
attained in this way, the enlightenment comes from
God. On the threshold of the religious life such en-
lightenment often takes the form of a vivid sense of
God's presence, which, perhaps for the first time, brings
the conviction of His existence to the sceptical or the
careless. The conviction of sin, of forgiveness, of vo-
cation, of guidance in perplexity, often comes suddenly
as the apparent result of what is figuratively expressed
as a flash of light abolishing mental obscurity. Mo-
ments of illumination may become habitual in private
prayer or in participation in the Eucharist, or in confes-

36 THE SPIRIT ii

sion and absolution, or in the pursuit of beauty or truth.
Many cases of looking for external signs, or opening
books at random to find direction, come under this head.

An incident related by Dr. Horton in his Auto-
biography illustrates this. " In my Union time I felt
it my duty to invite the Committee to breakfast. . . .
It was then the universal custom to bring up after
breakfast tankards of college ale. To omit this would
have seemed bad form; and for Oxford in those days
' form ' came before both virtue and religion. I was
greatly exercised, for I had, on principle, refused to
keep wine in my rooms, and the custom of having beer
at breakfast was to me revolting. And yet I wanted
to show the usual civilities to my guests. The night
before the party I knelt in my room and entreated God
to guide me. While I waited on Him I opened my I
Bible, and my eye fell on a text in Isaiah which up to
that night I had never heard or seen: 'Woe unto
them that rise up early in the morning, that they may
follow strong drink ' (Isa. v. 1 1 ) . I could not at first
believe my eyes; it was as if I had seen it written:
' You shall not have beer for breakfast.' The question
was at once settled."

(2) Inspiration. — The thoughtful mind demands
of Omnipotence, not only enhancement of vision, but
power of expression. We may refer to four classes.
The artist, be he painter, musician, or poet, with some
glimpse of a beauty which he feels powerless to ex-
press, reaches out in desire to some universal Power for
gift of expression. To the thinker truth is an ob-
jective reality which he seeks with disinterested passion.
The social worker, faced with the stupidity or selfish
passions of the herd, demands something more than
common power of vision and of endurance in order to
mould the situation for the betterment of the world.
In the avowedly religious man this instinctive demand
becomes articulate prayer to a Divine Personality who
embodies his highest conception of good; and in the

ii GOD IN ACTION 37

Christian this conception of good or God is moulded
upon his interpretation of the life and teachings of
Jesus Christ. To all these come moments or hours in
which they feel that something other than themselves
is expressing beauty or truth or wisdom with eternal
authority.

This power to give effective expression to what has
come to the soul as a matter of direct personal illumi-
nation is not common. It is the characteristic of
prophetic literature as well as of the highest poetry.
Such expression of individual conviction with regard
to the realities of the religious life is always a powerful
factor in moulding the religious and moral character
of other persons or of communities. It is, therefore,
always entitled to be classed as involving a degree of
religious inspiration. Words spoken or written,
which seem to come without the will of the person pro-
ducing them and to transcend his mental level, are a
not uncommon result of religious fervour. In the in-
dividual life it commonly takes the form of teaching
or writing, and it is often called " religious genius."
The twenty-third Psalm, St. Paul's hymn to Charity,
the description of mercy in The Merchant of Venice,
and Wordsworth's lines on " Tintern Abbey," are out-
standing examples.

More rare is the power to express the corporate
illumination of assemblies or communities who are to-
gether seeking religious truth. Phrases in historic
creeds come to mind at once as evidence of such in-
spiration. So also do certain restatements of Christian
belief which reforming bodies have from time to time
set forth under the impulse of a corporate revival of
spiritual life. Luther's battle-cry, " Justification by
faith," and the creed of the French Revolution,
" Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," are instances of these.

(3) Again, th~ experience of unusual power over
circumstances which is felt to come direct from God is
a frequent element in religious experience.

38 THE SPIRIT ii

(a) Christian converts have declared that the
appetite for some habitual vice to which they were
enslaved has been taken from them once for all by the
realisation of divine forgiveness. More often, how-
ever, the conquest of such appetite is gradual, the pace
of conquest being obviously much quickened by deep-
ening religious experience. Again, the development of
marked virtues or talents sometimes synchronises with
the religious experience, and in missionary effort the
power to persuade and convert often receives extra-
ordinary reinforcement after periods of prayer.
Many instances of this class are recorded by William
James.1

(b) The increase of power to do and to endure in
the Christian life, which by many is commonly experi-
enced after private prayer or after participation in the
Eucharist, is an actual experience. I once met a public
singer who, having been converted by a band of Amer-
ican evangelists, joined them, and was in the habit of
singing sacred solos at their meetings. She told me
how, when advertised to sing at a series of meetings in
a Western town, she had been attacked by severe
laryngitis. Her problem was, whether to go to bed
or, as she phrased it, " to go forward, trusting in
God." Having decided on the latter course, she found
herself, by some accident, turned out of a hot sleeping-
carriage in the middle of a winter night, and forced to
wait on the platform of a country station for the next
train. She described how she went alone to the end of
the platform, and there, under the frosty stars, with
swollen, aching throat, entreated God to make her
extremity His opportunity. The fever left her; her
throat became comfortable; she continued her journey,
and found her power of persuasive song at its best.

(r) Power of influence over other minds is illus-
trated by a story I once heard Moody, the evangelist,
tell of how it was borne in upon his mind that he ought

l Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 220-228.

ii GOD IN ACTION 39

to go to a small and inconveniently placed town to
hold a series of meetings, lie knew no sufficient
reason for doing so, and was more than fully occupied
with other plans. By degrees, however, the insistent
recurrence of the name of this town to his mind, when
discussing plans, led him to arrange to visit it. i\fter
doing so he discovered that in that town there was a
poor cripple who, having heard of his work, had been
unceasingly praying that he might come and preach the
Gospel to her neighbours.

(4) The reception of other specific benefits in re-
sponse to prayer. — A friend of mine was one winter
concerned for the welfare of a certain poor district of
the city of Montreal. A blizzard had visited the place,
almost stopping the traffic, and making the price of
food prohibitive to the poor. My friend arranged
that the women of her neighbourhood should come to a
certain chapel kitchen for soup. Early in the day on
which it was to be ready she went to the kitchen to
find that the butcher, who with much difficulty had
delivered bones, had not chopped them, and no vessel
was at hand large enough to cook them whole. She
went out, standing to gaze upon a street drifted by
almost untrodden snow, and prayed earnestly for a
large pot. She immediately felt what she described as
an insane desire to visit a certain poor house from
which she could not reasonably expect any help. Going
there, she found the doorway, to her amused delight,
almost blocked by a great copper pot which the family
had acquired a few days before for a bad debt, but
which was useless to them. In this vessel the soup was
easily made.

I give experiences personally known to me, as well
as others, because I wish to insist that such marvels
constantly happen, and happen in connection with
prayer. It would be easy to give chapter and verse
for stories of the same sort in the biographies of me-
diaeval saints and modern missionaries.

4o THE SPIRIT n

The question must now be asked, are they open to
psychological analysis, and can they be referred to the
natural order?

The hypothesis of this essay is that God is all-power-
ful to produce good in His own way by educating, not
by compelling, living spirits that each have their own
degree of freedom; by using the organising power of
life as His instrument, not by overriding nature. It is,
therefore, for two reasons necessary that we should
learn as much as we can of the modus operandi of re-
ligious experience: first, because man is always imagin-
ing an unreal religious experience which he mistakes for
the real; and, secondly, because man's humble co-opera-
tion with God must always be furthered by a better un-
derstanding of His ways.

It is from this standpoint that we ask, does our
advance in knowledge suffice to suggest a " natural "
explanation of such experiences as have been cited?

To this I believe that a well-considered " yes " may
be given. In the last few years we have learned from
the experiments of scientific psychologists, and of late
notably of medical men attending patients suffering
from shell-shock, various facts which throw a flood of
light upon the psychology of religious experience.
These facts go far to explain by known psychological
causes many of the elements in religious experience that
have seemed inexplicable, and therefore warrant a
strong presumption that other facts, which they do
not cover, have a kindred explanation.

To put it quite simply, the mind of man has been
found to be something larger than his consciousness.
One part of that mind is conscious, the other subcon-
scious. From the subconscious mind come impulses to
action, or to refrain from action, impulses to think of
certain subjects or to refrain from thinking of them,
impulses to the encouragement of certain emotions or
to their discouragement. This subconscious part of
the mind, which cannot be awakened or controlled by

ii GOD IN ACTION 41

any direct effort of the will, can be controlled and edu-
cated by what is called " mental suggestion," and men-
tal suggestion is found to work most powerfully when
the conscious mind is either quiescent or has its atten-
tion distracted.

Such quiescent condition, though a state of mental
and physical repose, is not a state of dulness, nor is it
always a state of passivity, but is very often rather a
state of great progress of thought and insight on any
subject on which the attention is focussed. Also in this
state certain powers of the mind, unsuspected in for-
mer times, come into evidence.

We know this because men often find that during
sleep they have formed correct judgments on matters
in which they had been wavering and perplexed.
Again, the suggestion, under medical hypnosis, that
they have the power to do certain things which they
have never been able to do before, enables them to do
them; they can remember what otherwise they had en-
tirely forgotten, and under the right suggestion bad
habits have been entirely abandoned. Yet again, un-
der medical hypnosis the centres of sensuous impression
can be so controlled that negative or positive hallucina-
tions are induced — a fact which bears on cases in which
visions are seen, voices heard, etc. Once more, phys-
ical functions, such as the circulation of the blood, the
action of muscles, respiration, etc., can be affected by
mental suggestion — a fact which bears on the healing
of disease, and on accession of physical strength to do
or to endure.

It is also now recognised that sleep is not necessary
to the quiescent state in which the greatest potency of
mental suggestion obtains. Such a state can very eas-
ily be induced by the mental strain involved in fixing the
attention upon one external object or one idea; and
those who have scientific knowledge of such states know
that people who fall into them are seldom able to real-
ise their own suggestible condition.

42 THE SPIRIT ii

When it is realised that the prolonged effort and
emotion of the various phases of " devotional exer-
cises," attention to religious rites or earnestness in pri-
vate prayer, provide just the strain of attention neces-
sary to produce the quiescent and suggestible state, the
candid mind will at once perceive that suggestion,
either from some external source or from the automatic
movement of the subconscious mind, will be potent in
hours of devotion, and that any of the phenomena of
the suggestible state may then be experienced, and in-
duce results unexpected by the subject.1

Let us then take as a provisional hypothesis the posi-
tion that the faculties revealed in suggestible condi-
tions, which may be, and are, used by men both for
good and evil, are used by the Spirit in the exercise of
His beneficent power. We may now take this hypoth-
esis and see how it applies to the various instances
already given.

( i ) Illumination. — Take the case of Dr. Horton's
solution of his dilemma quoted on p. 36. A reviewer
in The New Statesman remarks on the capriciousness
attaching to divine guidance on any such theory, and
adds: " No one would mock at the boy who did this,
but what is one to say as to the judgement, the intel-
lectual capacity, of the man who, repeating this story,
can also admit that he wasted much of his life in thun-
dering against the superstitious errors and the lack of
truth among his fellow-Christians? "

But the reviewer is here criticising the magical view
of such direction. The natural view would be to take
it as a fact of the established order that in every man
there resides a greater power of judgement than he or-
dinarily exercises; that in the case of a religious man
who, perplexed, cries to God, God enhances his latent
natural power; that when, weary after effort, such a
man waits humbly to receive wisdom, the Spirit through
this enhancement gives the right auto-suggestion. To
put it in other words: the man's mind will then rise to

1 See Essay VII.. pp. 253-5, 262.

ii GOD IN ACTION 43

its own highest capacity; he will see the real issue clear
of perplexity; on that account he will estimate more
clearly the probable results of different courses. Just
in so far as his whole past life has educated him to see
God's purpose for himself and for the world, he will
see the right decision. Any oracle that he consults will
be useful just in so far as it helps to stimulate and form-
ulate his own best judgement; it will be misleading just
in so far as he accepts what contradicts in any degree
his own best judgement. In the case of Dr. Horton's
youthful perplexity, it is probable that before this inci-
dent arose he had made up his mind on the general
principle that conformity to what he regarded as fool-
ish customs was the lower path. In quiet recollection
he was able to penetrate below the strong counter-cur-
rents that confused his surface mind and apply the
deeper principle of his life to the particular case in
point. Had he turned up any text which suggested the
importance of doing right, even at the cost of tem-
porary misunderstanding, he would probably have
found it equally convincing. Had he turned up the
text, " Take a little wine for thy stomach's sake and
thine often infirmity," he would probably have reflected
that it did not apply to his particular visitors.
(Whether or not there is, as some think, a latent nat-
ural power of what might be called " X-ray vision " or
" second sight," which would enable any one in such a
case to turn up an appropriate text, must be left to fu-
ture investigation to decide.) Superstition, in such a
case, would be involved in accepting some fiat of the
Bible, or other external authority, when it contradicted
his own best judgement. In the more important cases
in which, as the reviewer points out, he, in later life,
admits his judgement erred, the probability is that he
took for granted that his course was righteous, went
through no searching of heart and mind, and made no
candid and humble appeal for help to the Source of
wisdom.

44 THE SPIRIT n

Thus interpreted, this trivial instance suggests a clue
which may lead us into the heart of every case of ap-
parently supernatural illumination. If God be acting
always for our good, the God-consciousness, ex hypoth-
esi, is not needed to bring God into a man's life, but it
opens a man's intelligence and emotional nature to an
awareness of the Spirit's standard of values — a stan-
dard transcending any standard of pleasure or of mere
expediency — and gives the Spirit opportunity to en-
hance the natural powers of the mind.

(2) Inspiration. — Again, with regard to inspired
expression, many of us know some artist or writer or
speaker who experiences the mood of feeling in which
he is carried beyond his own powers, and feels enabled
to do or say something greater than his natural ability
would produce. Frederick Myers called this " an up-
rush from the subliminal self." He believed this self
to be something much greater than the conscious self,
but later psychologists believe it to be merely the repos-
itory of past experience, subjective or objective, plus
such latent powers as the mind may possess undevel-
oped by exercise or education. We incline to the lat-
ter belief; our sudden memories of things long forgot-
ten, our odd and unexpected impulses, suggest that
what is evil and absurd as well as what is splendid may
come from this source into consciousness. And that,
indeed, is what happens. Words containing sublime
messages for the world have risen unbidden in the
minds of prophets; but the same conviction of inspira-
tion occurs in fools and fanatics as in sages and proph-
ets; and most people who are subject to it acknowledge
that they have at times, under its influence, produced
what was not worth production. What seems like
automatic speech or art or writing is a perfectly natural
process which may or may not be used to interpret the
values of the Spirit to the world of sense. How it
will be used will depend upon other factors in the life.

We have also to take into account that there is a

ii GOD IN ACTION 45

good deal of evidence of the transference of mood and
notion from mind to mind without sense perception,
the condition usually being strong or vivid emotion in
one or more of the agents and a quiescent condition
in the percipient. Of transference of mood we have
evidence in many historic corporate manias, chronicles
recording that people, even children, living apart in
country places, who had heard and seen nothing of the
popular commotion, were moved sometimes to dancing,
sometimes to beating themselves, sometimes to setting
out upon pilgrimage, in the same way in which the
populace of the district happened to be moved. We
might set aside these annals as false were it not that in
our own days we well know that political or military
excitement can move people to opinions and actions
that they could never rationally infer from what they
see and hear, and infection of mood appears to account
for the phenomena. There are also very many well-
authenticated cases of mental coincidences beyond the
possibility of chance and sense perception for the ex-
planation of which we must either accept the spiritual-
istic hypothesis of the agency of discarnate spirits, or
believe that where there is strong emotion in the agent,
and quiescence in the percipient, there may be a natural
transference of mood and notion which comes as a mes-
sage from the unseen, and only half a century ago
would have been considered miraculous.1

In modern accounts of mental coincidence the im-
pression, as interpreted by the recipient, rarely corre-
sponds in all points with the ideas that were trans-
mitted. I may illustrate this from my own experience.
One night I dreamed that two friends — a brother and
sister — had had a carriage accident. In my dream
I saw the brother carried into a garden gateway in a

1 It will be observed that this statement makes no reference to evidence for
or against such thought-reading as has been claimed to pass between people
where no emotion is involved. The negative result of the experiments made at
Leland Stanford Junior University by Dr. Coover has no bearing upon what we
are now discussing under the name of telepathy, as in his experiments no emo-
tion appears to have been involved; nor does there appear to have been any
attempt to experiment with percipients in hypnotic conditions.

46 THE SPIRIT n

man's arms, and heard his sister say shortly after,^in a
tone of relief, " There are no bones broken." So
vivid was the dream that, although not accustomed to
notice dreams, I wrote to inquire, and found the fact
to be that the day before the friends in question had
been driving out. The brother had seen his favourite
dog run over by a cart and carried in the groom's arms
into a gateway to be examined; that, shortly after-
wards, his sister had called out that no bones were
broken. Neither of them had connected the incident
in any conscious way with me. Such experiences seem
to point to a natural faculty of giving and receiving
non-sensuous messages which lies below the level of
consciousness. Such impressions, when vivid, urge the
conscious mind to find its own fallible interpretation
of them.

When we study the religious utterances of minds
that the religious world has rightly counted inspired, we
find a condition of things closely akin to telepathic
impression. Both form and content of the utterance
seem so much conditioned by age and nation that they
appear to be the prophet's interpretation of some sug-
gestion impressed upon his subconscious mind, rather
than anything approaching infallible diction.

(3) Cases of unusual power.

(a) The new personality that may emerge from
sudden conversion has been analysed and described by
Professor James.1

(b) It is admitted 2 that power of endurance may be
enhanced, and that disease can often be cured by mental
suggestion, as in the case quoted of the public singer.

(c) The prayer of the cripple which brought Moody
the evangelist out of his way may fitly be regarded as
an instance of the working of telepathy.

There should be no difficulty either to faith or reason
in accepting these results as the action of the Spirit.
If we believe that the Divine Spirit is always, every-

1 Varieties of Religion* Experience, p. -i<>-~A7- 2 Cf. Essay III., p. 69 PS.

ii GOD IN ACTION

where, acting in the world, we believe, ex hypothesi,
that He does, by personal influence, exercise a real
force of persuasion and instruction upon living spirits
that do not shut themselves off from goodness. His
working is thus contingent on man's attitude and will.
We may grant — what is not yet proven — that all the
motions of inanimate nature are pre-determined and
fixed in a mechanical certainty, but we must still admit
that we have, interpenetrating this mechanical system,
life which is not mechanical, whose motions we do not
believe to be pre-determined. Now that the biologists
are throwing aside the dream of a mechanical system
of life which is pre-determined, the theologian can with
the more confidence repudiate the corresponding con-
ception of the pre-determination of all events by God.
(4) The reception of benefits after definite prayer.
— The amusing case of the lady and the copper pot
may have been both an answer to prayer and entirely
natural. The pot was near by, and in the possession
of a person who did not want it. The lady who dis-
covered it had previously been the subject of several
experiences commonly attributed to " second sight."
Whatever natural faculty of the mind such experiences
betray had therefore already been quickened by exer-
cise. All that is necessary to place the Spirit's action
in this case within the natural order is to say that the
subconscious power of this faculty was quickened by
Him in response to prayer. Her intense sympathy
with the hungry poor, her child-like dependence on
God and eager prayer, gave the Spirit opportunity.
Had the pot not been at hand we may assume she might
have been guided, by means of the same natural fac-
ulty, to some other way out of the difficulty — e. g.,
some one whose mind was open to good and God might
have been guided by telepathic impression to come to
her aid.

Probably one element in our Lord's vision of the
Kingdom was the human community whose many minds

48 THE SPIRIT ii

should all always be open to such quickening by the
Spirit that they would work in harmony, aware of each
other's needs. If we say that our antagonisms and
dulness have prevented the rise of such a community,
we offer a rational explanation of the undoubted fact
that many prayers for help in good work as earnest
and single-hearted as this one are not followed by im-
mediate relief.

In our present state of knowledge it appears to be
just as short-sighted to hold that prayer can only affect
the world by elevating the soul that prays, as to insist
that God's power overrides natural sequence. Either
view appears to entail a moral nemesis that ought to
warn us that it is not the track of truth. Those who
wed their souls to the first supposition lose in their in-
tercourse with God and man an element of child-like
hope in fresh possibilities which, when retained, gives
to the mature mind a poise, charm, and influence that
nothing else can give. On the other hand, those who
believe that God overrides nature on occasion are
forced to depict His way as cruel or entirely incompre-
hensible because of the great multitude of cases in
which there is no marvellous response to prayer. This
last is the ethical difficulty of the belief in miracles that
override natural sequences. A world awakened to ask
" the reason why " can never be reconciled to a God
cruel or wholly arbitrary; it can understand a God self-
limited by creation.

On this question of whether, and how, God responds
to definite petitions we often hear the argument that
because man, by free will, can interfere in the course
of nature it is absurd to suppose that God cannot. But
man cannot interfere with nature in the sense of abro-
gating natural laws; he can only control their work-
ing. It has been said that a man who catches a cricket-
ball in its flight neutralises the force of gravitation,
by which law, without his wilful action, the ball would
fall to the ground. But his whole action is conditioned
by the force of gravitation; without it he could do

ii GOD IN ACTION 49

nothing. By that he stands his ground and exerts the
force necessary to catch the ball. The will and skill
to catch the ball are the contribution of the man's mind,
but he effects his purpose in strict co-operation with all
the laws that govern matter and motion. As far as
reason differs from folly, so far does the belief that
man can only perform what he wills in accordance with
natural law differ from the assumption that man's
choice is predetermined by mechanical sequence.
There is the same difference between the belief that
God's action will always be in accordance with natural
sequence and the assumption that He cannot act in the
world in direct response to man's desire. We may ac-
cept the hypothesis that God acts only through natural
means while at the same time we retain the fullest be-
lief in His personal freedom to answer prayer by shap-
ing natural events in the line of our desire. There is
much evidence encouraging the belief that God evokes
our faith by using prayer as a factor in the construc-
tion of the immediate future. It is unquestionable
that without the calculable properties of matter man
could carry out no purpose. What we call natural law
is his instrument, his tool, his weapon. It is the instru-
ment of life in all its forms, from the smallest germ of
vegetation to the greatest human genius. Our hypoth-
esis is that all life, culminating in man's free spirit with
its intelligence, is, in turn, God's instrument, by which
he will accomplish the desire expressed in every true
prayer.

What then, we ask, is the value of religious experi-
ence as an evidence of God's action in the world? The
only evidence that has really convinced religious men of
God's action is the correspondence of the religious de-
sire with its satisfaction. It is not the appearance of
magic in the method of its satisfaction that is convinc-
ing. The religious instinct demands from God the se-
curity of mutual love and the enhancement of life. If
God does not satisfy these demands of those who seek

$o THE SPIRIT ii

Him, then, as the Apostle said, " religion is vain."
Every godly mind rises to corroborate the truth of the
cry, " Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that
he loved us" (i John iv. 10) ; or this, "Thou hast
been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in
his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from
the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a
storm against the wall " (Isaiah xxv. 4) ; or this, " My
soul shall be joyful in my God, for he hath clothed me
with the garments of salvation " (Isaiah lxi. 10) ; or
again, " As far as the east is from the west, so far hath
he removed our transgressions from us. Like as a
father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them
that fear him " (Ps. ciii. 12-13). ^ *s tne discovery
that the godward appeal is a valid cheque upon the
bank of reality that convinces those who make it of the
reality of God's action. If a man pray for bread his
faith that he is answered does not depend on his seeing
the bread brought by a raven instead of a baker. If
he seek direction from God he does not turn atheist
because he gets it through a neighbour's advice.
Though it be proved to us that all response to our
prayer and aspiration comes through natural process,
our faith will not fail as long as we are sure of response.

Not All That Happens Expresses God's Mind

III. If, then, we agree that God is a Spirit and
works in the world through natural process, are we to
believe that whatever happens is God's will — that
whenever disaster occurs it is a divine judgement?
Theology has often taught this, but in seeking thus
to enhance the divine glory it has really detracted
from it.

Man's judgements with regard to truth, goodness,
and beauty certainly exist; and these realities are in
sharp opposition to human error, ugliness, and cruelty,
and their results — which also actually exist. Both,
however, cannot equally be the work of the Spirit; we

ii GOD IN ACTION 51

cannot read the divine character equally in both. And
we cannot believe that God is divided; that as God the
Father He does one thing, and as the Holy Spirit op-
poses His own act. He cannot by His sovereign will
drive men mad in order to destroy them, while by His
Spirit He seeks to save them.

And if human action can oppose God, what right
have we to suppose that all other creatures that make
up the biological system of which man is a part always
act in concert with God? The power which controls
the world is either a non-moral power, and therefore
despicable in man's judgement, or, man's judgements
of value show the influence of the Spirit upon his spirit,
and it is to them that we must look to discover God's
character. The Holy Spirit cannot both be the divine
power of Christian experience and the divine power of
the fatalist who cries, " Whatever is, is right."

We need more clear thinking in this respect than
religious teachers sometimes give. Many men, look-
ing back on their past lives, see that good has come to
them out of misfortunes; and history presents cases
when national disasters, and even national crimes, have
inaugurated new eras of higher development. This
proves that the Spirit may inspire men to meet evil in
such a way as to attain a higher good than was theirs
before they encountered the evil. It does not prove
more than this. A mariner whose ship is struck by a
storm may set his sails so as to be sped upon his way
while at the same time he is in peril from the blast.
This does not prove that he would not have made a bet-
ter voyage by a steady, favourable wind. Our imag-
inations are feeble; whenever we try to conceive an-
other past than that which has actually happened, they
wave in nothingness as the tendrils of a young climbing
plant, unsupported, wave in air. We comfort our-
selves for our feeble-mindedness by falling back upon
what we call " real life," and pointing out that when-
ever men or nations have enjoyed monotonous prosper-

52 THE SPIRIT ii

ity they have degenerated. We are like a mariner
who, reaching his port by a skilful use of storms, does
not picture the voyage that might have been with the
steady, favourable wind, but points to ships that are be-
calmed and thanks his lucky stars. The fact that men
and nations often deteriorate when they enjoy monot-
onous security is undeniable, but such security has had
its source in the temper which hedges itself about with
safety, and refuses, in this present evil world, to " live
dangerously." That temper carries within it the seeds
of degeneration. Such fact does not prove that the
disasters which men of noble endeavour frequently meet
are of the Spirit's contriving, or even that the disasters
which befall notorious evildoers are His work. In
fact, if we will but interrogate our own beliefs strictly
we shall see that we none of us believe the fatalist creed
that on occasion we recite. We do not believe the
Holy Spirit inspired the Jerusalem crowd to cry for
the crucifixion of Jesus. The spirit that urged this
crowd to this national crime was not the spirit which
urged a crowd in the same city to repentance on the
day of Pentecost. The spirit that urges a mob to
lynch a criminal is not the spirit that urges prison re-
form. The spirit that urged the pioneers of modern
science to seek the truth of things is not the spirit which
urges ecclesiastics to their persecution. The spirit
that urges men to the subjection of the weak and the
atrocities of war is not the spirit that urges them to
true brotherhood and true bravery, to the heroism of
the magnanimous victor and the heroic nurse, to bal-
anced thought and good statesmanship. The miseries
that come to man through men do not come to them be-
cause their opponents are inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Or if we take the disasters that befall men from the
forces of what we call lower nature, we are all ready to
admit that the spirit which urges men so to observe and
co-operate with these forces that they may avoid de-
struction from them, and even make them their serv-

ii GOD IN ACTION 53

ants, is not the spirit that inspires men stupidly to ac-
quiesce in the recurrence of such evils.

Curiously enough, while popular theology often as-
cribes calamity to God, it never ascribes it to the Holy
Spirit. But orthodox theology has never countenanced
tritheism. No one would assert that God the Father
urges men to rob or murder their neighbours while the
Holy Spirit is striving with them to resist the tempta-
tion. Yet this is implied if we say that disasters
brought about by the wickedness of men are the will of
God. Nor can we suppose that God the Father has
foredoomed men to destruction — let us say, by earth-
quake — while the Spirit of Wisdom, working through
science and sanity, is prompting them to quit the area
of danger. The God of the fatalist is not the God of
the Christian; and the effort of Christian thought to
combine these two characters in one Being is the chief
cause of the practical atheism widespread in all ranks of
society and among nominal Christians.

It is unavailing for the advocates of this combina-
tion-God, who builds and destroys, afflicts and consoles,
to cry that God is so great that He transcends the op-
position in a way the finite mind cannot understand, be-
cause God only enters into man's field of vision at all in
so far as man can understand His character.

If we interrogate religious experience as to the char-
acter of the supreme Spirit, we find it has always
claimed to possess the mutual understanding involved
in kinship. Thus the religious mind claims always to
be "His offspring," to be "made in his image"; it
cries, " His spirit beareth witness with our spirit that
we are the sons of God"; "Whereby we cry Abba
Father"; "Our father, which art in heaven." All
these are ways of expressing the conviction of kinship
or a mutuality of comprehension which implies that hu-
man judgements of good are God-implanted and reflect
— feebly indeed, but still reflect — God's intenser
knowledge of good and evil. And as the religious

54 THE SPIRIT n

mind rises to apprehend the more universal obligations
of goodwill, it realises that the forces and animosities
which cause all that is dire cannot be the action of r.
good God.

The Goal of the Spirit

IV. If, then, we are agreed that the Divine Spirit is
at work in the world of men in ways that are natural
to the world and to men, and also that in that world
good and evil are really opposed to one another, the
Spirit working on the side of good and against evil, we
have still to discover (a) what is the nature of the good
for which the Spirit works, and (b) how we may co-
operate with the Spirit for the realisation of that good.

(a) What do we to-day understand the universal
good to be? Science tells us that it is correspondence
with environment; Jesus Christ calls it " the kingdom
of God "or "of heaven."

We are accustomed to realise that the welfare of any
living thing depends upon correspondence with its en-
vironment. It only lives in so far as it corresponds;
it only lives perfectly by perfect correspondence.
Taking humanity as a whole, it is clear that man will
not correspond perfectly with his physical environment
until the knowledge and skill of all applied science ren-
der him no longer in any degree the sport of the ele-
ments but their master. As the old tradition had it
that God brought the animals one by one to Adam to
receive their names, and gave him dominion over them,
so science is bringing to mankind the forces of earth,
air, fire, and water to receive their names, and giving
men dominion over them. An Abraham or a Hesiod
may correspond better with local and temporary en-
vironment than does a modern man of science, but
while the race has failed, and fails, to deal rightly with
plague, famine, and war, genius must have little chance
and successive nations prematurely perish. What has
that to do with Jesus of Nazareth and His kingdom of

ii GOD IN ACTION 55

God? Does not one glance at our world to-day show
us that as long as man uses each small advance in
knowledge and skill to subject and destroy his fellow-
man he is not in correspondence with his human en-
vironment, nor forwarding the universal knowledge of
constructive arts? The utilisation of the forces of
earth for human welfare can only be achieved by broth-
erhood and co-operation. Peace, which is the jump-
ing-off place for the great adventure of catching and
harnessing the elements for the world's welfare, can
only be obtained by learning how to sympathise with
our fellows, learning how to like and befriend and cor-
respond with them. Man is the greatest factor in
man's environment. If, then, what we call nature is
working for man's correspondence with his environ-
ment, it is working through every effort that tends to
endow the coming race with kindly and good-humoured
impulses, with a store of skilful methods of righting
wrongs and governing the wrong-headed by friendly
means instead of by grim disapprobation or cruel sup-
pression, by laughter rather than by tears.1

To correspond with his environment, man must learn
not only to be ready if need be to die rather than com-
promise with falsity, but also to forgive to seventy
times seven, and to love his enemies. If the push of
life be for the survival of those who can best corres-
pond with their environment, universal brotherhood
and goodwill is the far-off event towards which evolu-
tion moves. The movement, as we have seen, is not
mechanical, for the mere process of the ages does not
bring wisdom. It must always depend on the right
choice of free creatures. The character of God the
Spirit, as revealed by this divine purpose of universal
goodwill, is the same as that revealed by Christ, and
also by every prophetic soul that has had glimpses of
the truth. To put it more adequately — Jesus Christ
gave forth definitely the good news of the harmony to-

1 This subject is more fully dealt with in the present writer's essay in God
and the Struggle for Existence (published by the Student Christian Movement).

56 THE SPIRIT ii

ward which the historic process tends, and explicitly
declared the method by which it should come. This
method was the response of man to the saving pro-
cesses of the Holy Spirit — processes of forgiveness
and healing, helpfulness and goodwill, of passion for
truth and reality, and a true comparison of man's taw-
dry notions of glory with the beauty of nature when-
ever it is receptive to the care of God. The harmony
of human wills, when attained, will be a new starting-
point for unrestricted racial development; but to us it
is the mountain-peak which we must reach before we
can see further.

Thus our question, What is the good for which the
Spirit works? would find an easy answer if we could be
satisfied by a far-off future event and a future culmina-
tion of our race. We cannot be satisfied with what is
future, except as it explains and justifies the present and
the past. Such a culmination would justify the past
and present of the race as a whole, but it could not
justify the mistakes and sufferings of the individuals in
each generation.

The great difficulty in recognising the Spirit's work
in the process of development arises from the fact that
the individual, and the single generation, is constantly
crushed in the process, without apparent opportunity
of escape. The great armies of Humanity march on
to victory, but on every yard of the advance lie the
wounded and the dead. The course of evolution, con-
sidered in itself, seems wholly careless of the indi-
vidual.

Yet, in apparent opposition to this there is the
striking paradox that, considered as an educative pro-
cess, it has educed, and does educe, in men, not greater
contempt for the individual in comparison with the
whole, but ever-increasing respect for every individual
of every generation. This fact — that the claim of
the individual on society has everywhere through long
ages become more and more clearly recognised —

ii GOD IN ACTION 57

points perhaps to a solution of the difficulty. The
value set upon the individual life, its well-being, free-
dom, and education, which has become the criterion of
higher and lower in our estimate of national progress,
reveals, if anything reveals, the character of the Spir-
it's work, for it is here discovered in the efflorescence of
the great principle which no less conspicuously pene-
trates the struggle for existence, showing itself in pa-
rental affection, family devotion, and the tribal bond
— the principle of the sacrifice of the strong for the
weak, the wise for the ignorant, the righteous for the
lawless. If, then, we can accept this principle — which
is, indeed, the shadow of the Cross projected by the
level light of sunrise across all the ages of evolution —
as indicating the character of the Spirit, we may reason-
ably suppose that the Spirit has His own ways and
means of compensating the individual for whatever of
failure or misery has been thrust upon him.

In what way can this compensation be given? We
cannot believe a good to be all-inclusive unless it repre-
sents the fruition of the desires of all men and women
who have lived, and must still live and die, before the
era of human triumph which we may descry on the hor-
izon of this world's future. It is on salvation for the
individual that Jesus laid His emphasis, and we must
inquire how far we have reason to believe that the
Spirit gives to each living soul ample opportunity to
enter into a process of development which will both
bring it to such fruition of all its permanent desires as
will compensate it for all suffering and will make it a
co-operator in realising the universal good.

As any process must be estimated by its outcome, let
us first consider the case of those souls who are most
vitally Christianised, frankly admitting that vital
Christianity is different from nominal Christianity.
The Gospel of Christ teaches us that full salvation de-
pends upon the soul setting forth to save the world in
the experience of being himself saved by the Spirit.

58 THE SPIRIT ii

Salvation is offered freely, and must be experienced as a
gift. This is no missionary cant, but a psychological
fact. The result of the experience is that the saved
soul so loves the world that it gives its all that the
world may be saved. Both these elements are inter-
dependent, and both are a process. Yet from the
moment that the soul really sees God in Christ, i. e.
sees that the Spirit's character and action on the world
may be interpreted by the character of Christ, it knows
the fruition of all its desires to be secure. It is saved
perfectly and ideally in prospect, and yet it will for ever
continue to be raised to fuller vision. Likewise, the
moment the soul really sees God in Christ it also sets
forth to save the world. It can no other. It sees the
divine character giving to the utmost for the world's
salvation, and by that sight is transformed into a life-
centre whose main and most permanent desire is to live
for the perfecting of all things, realising the prospec-
tive joy of God therein. But many a transient and
lower desire may temporarily intervene and be followed
— as a child may chase butterflies hither and thither
while still proceeding in the direction of home. The
giving up of all by the soul for the world's salvation
is a process, as the experience of being saved is a pro-
cess. Yet from the moment the soul really sees God in
Christ, its most permanent and abiding desire is to
speed further and further in the great adventure of
world-saving, whether by the avenue of truth, of
beauty, or of moral right. Irreligious it can never
again be, for the universe has become a fane, and the
love of God its light.

There are very many who see this vision reflected
in the best thought of their age, and are themselves
inspired by it, yet, misled by the blind guidance of
His nominal exponents, they deny Jesus Christ to be its
source. These, because really inspired by Him, though
only indirectly, are at one with Him in the Spirit's
power. On the other hand, undoubting acceptance of

ii GOD IN ACTION 59

the most correct of creeds may leave the soul without
the vision, still working for its own salvation, still re-
pulsive in its zeal for what it holds to be the salvation
of the world. The unthinking acceptance of religious
tradition, the docile obedience to a religious rule, may
each have a value of a different sort for different souls,
but they are not the vision of God in Christ. That
vision is the realisation that the supreme Spirit at
work in all life has the character of Jesus Christ. The
realisation of this fact may be sudden or gradual, but
it is an experience which transforms any self-regarding
effort to attain salvation into an other-regarding effort
to show forth the beauty of God to whatever coterie
of souls, little or large, may form its world. Can it be
said that this adventure of world-saving, and the future
toward which we believe it tends, will afford the frui-
tion of all desire?

Before answering we must clear away any narrow
or grotesque pictures of world-saving that we may have
formed. There are as many ways in which the world
of men may be effectively helped forward into co-opera-
tion with the Divine Spirit as there are men and women ;
and that of itself is sufficient evidence that the Spirit
has for each a unique mission, and that that mission will
best conserve and develop all the powers and faculties
of each soul. Human good is a trinity of truth and
beauty and social welfare; and while none of these qual-
ities can really exist without the others, the vocations of
men can roughly be put into three classes, according as
men exercise their enterprise an ingenuity to augment
the world-stock of any one of these. Heretofore the
phrase " soul-saving " has been too exclusively associ-
ated with strictly pious effort; it is along all the avenues
opened by this trinity of God that the Spirit urges and
inspires us to link up men in trust and fealty to the
Source of Love and Life.

Can we, indeed, think of any other or greater frui-
tion of our desires than the exercise and development

60 THE SPIRIT n

of all our powers in making some unique and lasting
addition to the good of the whole? What artist, what
patriot, what self-seeker even, can ask for more?

But, granted that this creative work can satisfy those
who may become vitally Christ-like in giving them-
selves as instruments of the Spirit for the world's sal-
vation, can we infer from their satisfaction anything
which will justify the suffering of those innumerable
lives that seem to have been, and still to be, crushed in
the process of race education? Yes, for their case
proves that nature, when she urges to correspondence
with environment, is the instrument of the Spirit urg-
ing the race to inexhaustible goodwill as well as to all
scientific enterprise; and if we see reason to believe this,
and further to believe that the individual who enters
into conscious communion with the Spirit is not only
led into the fruition of all his own permanent desires,
but led into a constantly increasing carefulness for the
welfare of every other individual life, then we are
bound to believe that the character of God is indicated
by this double testimony. Because God is God, each
life will some way find its compensation and develop-
ment. " He is not the God of the dead but of the liv-
ing"; life's opportunities do not end on earth.

(b) The Christian Church should be the nursery of
all free souls, but, like the rest of creation, it has shown
forth no transcendent and flawless perfection. It is
hardly reasonable, however, on that account to deny
it to be a characteristic school of the Spirit, unless we
are prepared to set aside the claim of all nature to be
the manifestation of God because of the chaotic ele-
ments of harm and destruction and consequent misery
that still exist in the world as it now is. But it is vital
to distinguish between the inspiration of the Church
and the chaotic evils within it that still frustrate that
inspiration.

The man who sees God the Spirit in the world or in
the Church must bring forward his tests of good and

ii GOD IN ACTION 61

true and beautiful, and claim as divine in the whole sys-
tem only what tends toward the good and true and
beautiful, holding that such tendencies alone point in
the direction in which the whole must move for the
accomplishment of the divine purpose. We shall make
mistakes, but we cannot escape the responsibility of
exercising our own discrimination. We naturally de-
sire to be saved the trouble of search and discovery; we
passionately desire that some visible finger from heaven
should point out to us the track of the Spirit; but if it
is God's way that we should find out in what the holi-
ness of the Spirit consists by the faithful exploiting of
our own values for beauty and goodness and truth, this
end could not be attained by infallible external revela-
tion. Our values are within our own souls. Jesus
taught that we must first find within us the kingdom —
the purposes and works of the Spirit — before that
kingdom can be realised in the complex harmony of the
external life. In the Church we must fix our aspira-
tion upon increase of religious insight rather than upon
any repetition of the past.

The great tragedy of human life has been the
amount of religious force that has been expended in
vain efforts to obtain the help of God. The word re-
ligion is commonly used to mean all human activity that
is in intention directed Godward; but if God's Spirit in-
spires, not everything, but only what is good, we must
recognise that much of man's religious activity has been
and is directed toward something merely imagined to
be God. While our sense of justice constrains us to
believe that every man who thinks of God as his own
highest ideal of good comes into touch with Him when
he tries to worship or pray, and thereby gives the Spirit
opportunity to enhance his own nature and the natures
of those for whom he prays, it by no means follows
that when men worship and entreat a Being of char-
acter morally inferior to themselves they will come by
that means into touch with Creative Power. A popu-

62 THE SPIRIT ii

lation visited by plague might quite innocently believe
that the disease could be moved magically by the fiat of
God. As long as their prayer was offered to a God as
good — i.e. as kind and compassionate — as they
themselves would like to be, we must, on our hypothe-
sis, believe that the prayer would be answered by some
enhancement of the life of the community; that hope,
observation, understanding, and physical vitality would
be quickened, with consequent result upon health.
Jesus Christ constantly averred that it is faith in God's
fatherliness that makes the human spirit accessible to
Him; but, if so, then the more men wailed out en-
treaties to a hard-hearted God, the more they per-
formed penances to propitiate Him, the more they
would be actually turning away from the proffered help
of Heaven. For men, although faulty and ignorant,
know not only how to give good things to their chil-
dren, but how to give them kindly, without waiting for
the child to grovel and wail and torture itself. A nor-
mal standard of kindness was never far to seek: even in
very primitive communities the claim of a sick child
on the utmost kindness of its parents is recognised. A
sense of sin need not confuse human judgement in this
respect, for very degraded is the parent who refuses to
help a suffering or dying child because it has previously
been naughty. Prayer and worship directed to a God
conceived as acting on the level of such a degraded
parent would naturally tend to shut the soul against the
Spirit with His recreative power. If, therefore, men
seek to obtain either spiritual or physical good from
God by such a method, they are sinning against the light
that lighteth every man coming into the world. The
same may be said of attempts to propitiate God by rit-
ual exactions or by the use of relics and mascots, prac-
tices that no father or kind man would require from the
needy before giving aid. The single or simple eye, of
which Jesus Christ speaks, sees goodness as one both
in God and man, and is therefore the avenue of light

ii GOD IN ACTION 63

and life. The father in the parable of the Prodigal
Son shows God seen by this simple eye. If we believe
that the Spirit works according to psychological law and
awaits this child-like simplicity in man, the failure of
much religious prayer and effort can be explained.

But in admitting this we must not overlook the fact
that human experience is always complex. In so far as
men are kind to each other, even while they worship a
hard-hearted notion of God, they come unconsciously
into touch with the Spirit by their kindness. The
poetic insight of the Christ depicts the virtues of pagans
in the story of the sheep gathered from all nations.
Again, good people whose unchallenged traditions have
led them to believe in a false notion of God are often,
after performing propitiatory rites to an unkind God,
in a frame of mind to turn with simple faith to the
notion of true goodness in God, and thus come in the
end, and intermittently, into touch with the Creative
Spirit. The result of such worship we should expect
to be a combination of power and weakness, insight
and superstition, common sense and folly, magic and
science, cruelty and love. Religious history certainly
bears out our hypothesis here.

In turning from the imperfect historic actual to the
better thing which might have been, we are bound to
question again the mind of Christ. What concerns us
here is the discovery made by Jesus Christ of the power
of the Spirit and the conditions under which that power
could be received, not as the occasional afflatus which
men had recognised from all time, but as the very warp
and woof of the web of man's social life, the daily food
by which men, women, and children could be satisfied
and empowered for the greater enterprise — dowered
with the inward resourceful wisdom that can make the
liberty of each harmonise with the good of all. A
community thus inspired was to be the new reign, or
what we might call the new civilisation, of Heaven or
of God. Whether realised on earth, or in some new

64 THE SPIRIT ii

plane of being mystically conceived, what was essential
was the power of the Spirit. " Neither be ye called
masters, for One is your master." " It is not ye who
speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in
you." " The kingdom of heaven is within you."
" Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the king-
dom."

It was not a new idea that divine wisdom might be
a quasi-personal emanation from God, and live in inti-
mate fellowship with man ; but Jesus saw that this Spirit
was God, and cared with creative purpose for despised
field flowers and sparrows, for the body of man as well
as the soul. He saw that this Divine Spirit was at the
same time the emotion that surges up into the prac-
tice of parental kindness, the instinctive wit of all true
love, and also the eternal source and goal of all.

This discovery of Jesus — which He called the mys-
tery of the kingdom — was nothing less than such in-
sight into the very heart of the relation of life to its
environment, as enabled Him to see the goal from the
starting-point, to see the divine, far-off ideal toward
which the whole race must move. He saw the way in
which men, while still in a false civilisation, must live so
as not only to bring about the true order, but in the
midst of the old to grasp at once the joy and liberty
and fellowship of the new. This was a fetch of genius
— the genius at once of the poet, the prophet, and the
statesman; yet Jesus seems to have drawn in this wis-
dom as simply as He drew His breath. To Him the
method was, in truth, very simple; it was the opening
of the heart to the creating Spirit which could not only
teach that all things in the universe are held together
by attraction, not compulsion, but also, at every step
of the way, could show how this great principle of ani-
mation by love may be translated into life.

Ill

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER

Captain J. A. HADFIELD, M.A. (Oxon.), M.B. (Edin.;

ASHHURST NEUROLOGICAL WAR HOSPITAL, OXFORD

ANALYSIS

The Psychology of Power.

The urgency of the problem of energy and fatigue.
The view of the physicist, and of the religious.
The psychological view.

Evidence of Extraordinary Powers.
Illustrated from various fields.
Conclusions from these illustrations:

(i) Existence of an ample re-supply of strength.

(2) Not attained by power of will.

(3) Originate in the instinctive emotions.

The Mental Factor in Fatigue.

I. Mental origin of fatigue demonstrated by —

(a) Experiments in hypnotic suggestion.

(b) Experiments in physiology.

These prove the importance and priority of mental fatigue.
Biological reasons why mind is fatigued before the body.
II. Forms of fatigue:

(1 ) Physical fatigue.

(2) Over-sensitiveness o» mind to physical fatigue.
Application of this to everyday life.

(3) False interpretation of mental fatigue as physical.

(4) Purely mental fatigue, due to mental conflict.

The Infirmity of the Will.

Power does not originate in the will.

Illustrations to prove impotence of will against conviction and

suggestion.
Evil habits unconquered.
Will requires power of the emotions.

The Instincts.

The force of ideas: will: emotions.

Instinctive emotions the real driving force of our lives.
The importance of instincts in modern life.

Policy of suppression a false one. Passion necessary in morality
and religion.

The Instincts and Morality.

Is power derived from the instincts moral?

(1) Many instincts in themselves beneficent, e.g. maternal.

(2) Instincts apparently anti-social may be directed to useful

ends.

(3) In the long run the maximum power is gained when

instincts are harmonised and directed by the reason
towards worthy ends.

The Conflict of Instincts.

Of will and emotion: of emotion with emotion.

Illustration.

Minor conflicts exemplified in worry and anxiety.

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 67

The Conversion of the Instincts.

Living beings raise the potential of energy.

Illustration of the conversion of the instincts and instinctive

emotions.
Hunting: curiosity: pugnacity.

Fear: necessary fear; morbid fear; fear that stimulates.
Sex: its overflow into the parental instinct.
Self-assertion: aggression; submission; confidence.

Confidence and Faith.

Derived from instinct of self-assertion.
Essential to success and power.
Illustrations.

The Expenditure of Power.

Damming up the flow of energy leads to stagnation and fatigue.
The inspiration of a purpose.
Strength comes to those who expend it.

Energy and Rest.

The cause of fatigue in mental conflict.

The remedy is mental quietude.

The characteristic neurasthenic.

Physiological law of alternation of activity and rest.

The art of resting.

The Source of Energy.

Physiological, psychological, and philosophical theories.
Summary.

The Dynamic of Religion.

The power of the Christian religion in abolishing conflict and

directing the instinctive energies to high purposes.
Power characteristic of primitive Christianity.
Restfulness and peace also characteristic.
Christianity as a moral healing force.

Conclusion.

Ill

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER

The increasing pressure of modern life, with its anxi-
eties and cares, constitutes an ever-augmenting tax upon
our strength. It is hardly surprising that nervous
breakdowns are common, and that neurasthenia, or
nerve fatigue, is the most significant disease of the age.
Yet while, on the one hand, we see men and women so
ill-adapted to face the demands of life that the slight-
est exertion produces fatigue; on the other, we are
called upon to witness exhibitions of power which fill us
with wonder. The increasing demand for the power
and energy requisite to face the strain compels us to in-
vestigate the sources of their supply. The purpose of
my study is to direct attention to the problem of the
sources of human energy and power.

It is commonly supposed that in each of us there is
a reservoir, as it were, containing a certain supply of
energy. This energy is said to be derived from the
food we eat and the air we breathe, and to be, there-
fore, strictly limited in amount. When our expendi-
ture is excessive our supply of energy runs very low,
and we consequently suffer from a feeling of fatigue.
Such is the theory of the physicist. The natural con-
sequence of this belief in the physical character and
the limited supply of our energy is that we are careful
to economise our little store of strength, to husband our
resources, lest by excess of expenditure we find the
springs of our life run dry.

In contrast with this view, there have been men, and
chiefly among them religious men, who have held that
if our powers seem to fail, it is not because all the en-
ergy available is used up, but because its flow is checked,

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 69

either by the channel being blocked up or by our inabil-
ity to use it aright. The chief cause of fatigue is not
exhaustion but stagnation. The way to power, there-
fore, is not to harbour our resources and store up our
strength by inactivity, but to find the way to tap the
resources of power at our disposal, so that they may
flood our life and fill us with energy.

Of the two theories above stated modern psychology
tends, on the whole, to support the second. At least
the fact that (whatever their ultimate origin) there are
resources of power, whose existence we do not ordinar-
ily recognise but which can be made available for the
purposes of our daily life, is one which has been firmly
established by the scientific researches of recent years.
In this Essay I propose, in the first place, to produce
evidence of the existence of resources of power nor-
mally untapped; secondly, I shall show that these are
psychic rather than physical in character; and, after dis-
cussing their relation to the instinctive emotions and to
the will, shall consider the means by which they can be
made available.

Evidence of Extraordinary Powers

I cannot do better than introduce the subject to the
reader by one or two illustrations. A patient of mine,
a tailor by trade, was buried by a high explosive shell
in France. One of the striking features of his case was
extreme weakness, the slightest exertion or a short walk
producing fatigue. In the course of the treatment I
induced him under hypnosis to remember the details of
the incident, and made him live through it all again —
the terrifying explosion, the debris burying him up to
his neck, and a great baulk of timber tottering above
his head in act to fall. By the recollection of these
things he was thrown into a condition of extreme ter-
ror, and began to fight like a madman, flinging himself
on the floor and dragging the bed down over him, seiz-
ing a heavy armchair and flinging it across the room,

7o THE SPIRIT in

and generally putting forth such extraordinary strength
that it required four men to hold him down. The
strength he exhibited appeared almost superhuman,
and it was quite beyond his voluntary power, for when
he was awake his greatest exertion of will served only
to emphasise his weakness and impotence. Further-
more, when he was wakened from the attack, far from
being fatigued, he was relieved and refreshed, and
spontaneously told me how much better he felt.

Similar exhibitions of strength are quite common in
men swayed and mastered by a great emotion. Such
strength is typical also of madness, in which strong
bonds are broken, iron bars are wrenched loose, and
extraordinary feats of endurance are performed.
What is the secret of such power? In all these cases
men seem to be tapping resources of strength, whether
from within or from without, which, if we could dis-
cover and use, would rescue us from feeble ineffective-
ness to a life of untold possibilities. We look upon
such an exhibition of strength with much the same feel-
ings as when we behold the lightning rend the heavens
and tear up oaks by the roots — if only we could seize
and store up such energy and devote it to the uses of
our daily life !

The endurance and strength of men fighting against
fearful odds when they are " up against it " is noto-
rious, and many instances could be given from the war.
Another of my patients had suddenly found himself in
a trench containing six Germans. Realising that he
was cornered he fought with fury, and succeeded in
killing three of them before he was stunned by one of
the survivors. A corporal, whose courage won the
V. C, was for several days cut oft from our troops, was
exposed the whole time to bombardment (subsisting
meanwhile on the barest rations), and yet, in spite of
the awful strain, he came out feeling cheerful, elated,
and without fatigue. Several men with him had the
endurance to pass through the same experience, but at

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 71

the end were exhausted and broke down. The cor-
poral had evidently discovered sources of power which
were not exhausted by the terrible strain he underwent,
but provided an ample re-supply.

One of my patients, suffering from an obstinate neu-
rasthenia, asked for leave one day because his wife, the
mother of six little children, had fallen ill with pneu-
monia consequent on influenza, and, owing to the epi-
demic, could secure no doctor except for the one visit
in which her condition had been diagnosed. He had
been a most despondent and depressed individual,
scarcely ever speaking to any one else in the ward, and
left, still suffering from the tiredness and exhaustion
typical of neurasthenia. He returned some days after,
looking bright and cheerful, and almost his first words
to me were, " I shall never doubt the power of prayer
again, sir." In addition to the worry with the chil-
dren, he had had the great anxiety of nursing his wife
through a very serious illness without the aid of a doc-
tor, and had been up day and night in his devoted la-
bours. It is only those who have passed through a
strain of that kind who know what it means; but it is
equally true that they alone know the mighty resources
that come to our aid in the time of extremity. In this
case, his keenness to bring about the recovery of his
wife, and the conviction of divine assistance, buoyed
him up during the time of anxiety; and after the strain
was over, the exhilaration of triumph saved him from
the relapse that people too often bring on themselves
by their lack of confidence.

Four years ago, at midnight, I witnessed an explo-
sion at a great munition factory, and afterwards heard
that a woman, after her day's work, had risen from bed
and, in anxiety for the safety of her husband and son,
had run practically the whole distance of seven miles to
the scene of the explosion in an incredibly short time.

William McDougall quotes the case of a boy who,
being chased by a furious animal, leaped a fence which

72 THE SPIRIT in

he could never afterwards scale even as a grown man,
and after continuous athletic training. The emotion
of fear liberated powers which his strength of will
could never equal.

The reader will be able to add many, and perhaps
more striking, cases than those I have mentioned.
Most men, indeed, have experienced the invigorating
effect of an overmastering emotion whose power is ex-
pressed not only in mental vigour, but in physical man-
ifestations— the hot rush of blood in the veins, the
quickening pulse, the deep strong breathing, the quiver-
ing nerve, the tense muscle, and the inrush of power
which fortifies the soul and renders it quick to act and
brave to endure.

Glancing over these illustrations of extraordinary
powers, we are struck with three outstanding facts.

( i ) Under certain conditions extraordinary expen-
diture of energy can take place without equivalent fa-
tigue. It is generally assumed that such outbursts of
power must end in a relapse leaving the exhausted man
or woman broken in health. This undoubtedly often
occurs, but is by no means necessary, and did not in fact
occur in the cases that I have quoted from my own ex-
perience. The fatigue consequent on great exertion
seems to bear no necessary relation to the amount of
energy expended. One can become fatigued, like the
neurasthenic, on very slight exertion; but, on the other
hand, as in these cases, men, essentially no different
from ourselves, are seen to exhibit extraordinary pow-
ers without any apparent fatigue. The successful issue
of a great endeavour causes the gladness of victory
to refresh the soul. This fact suggests to us the hy-
pothesis that, while our energy is being used up, there
is an ample store of energy to take its place if we could
but discover and conform to the law of its supply: " the
barrel of meal wastes not, neither does the cruse of oil
fail." The power which can sustain us during the trial
can renew our strength when victory is won.

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 73

(2) We observe that these powe,s are greater than
any at the disposal of the conscious will. The most
strenuous efforts to walk made by the soldier who had
been buried ended only in weakness; the athlete could
never leap the fence again; the patient who has passed
through the time of anxiety and strain with his wife's
illness felt that, though his will was feeble, some other
power laid hold of his life and gave it strength.

(3) As to the origin of these powers, those who ex-
perience them can give no more account than the on-
looker. In olden times such outbursts of strength were
looked upon sometimes as being due to possession by
evil spirits; at other times, as in the story of Samson,
the amazed beholders exclaimed, " The spirit of the
Lord came mightily upon him." To the scientific ob-
server, however, there is one very significant phenome-
non. In every case these powers are associated with
one of the fundamental instinctive emotions — whether
of fear in the buried soldier and the athlete, tender-
ness in the husband and the wife, or in the other cases,
the instincts of self-preservation rnd pugnacity. It
would look as if it were only when instinctive emotions
like these are aroused that energies are liberated ade-
quate to sweep away all obstacles and take complete
mastery of our lives.

These points we shall discuss in order, taking up
first the question of fatigue, then illustrating the in-
firmity of the will, and, lastly, the power of the instinc-
tive emotions.

The Mental Factor in Fatigue

If we are to discover the sources of strength we must
first investigate the causes of fatigue. There is a fa-
tigue that comes from the body, and a fatigue that is of
the mind; and these two forms of fatigue are very
closely associated, although they are separable in or-
igin. A mile walk with a bore is more fatiguing than
twenty miles with the lady of your choice. Disap-

74 THE SPIRIT in

pointment will leave us tired out. The desert traveller
is about to fall exhausted, when the sight of an oasis
will revive his spirits and give him energy to plod on
for miles.

We have already observed in the illustrations of ex-
traordinary powers — the endurance of men fighting
with their backs to the wall, or buoyed up by a great
hope — that great emotions can endow men and women
with almost superhuman strength. On the other hand,
the neurasthenic, tired with the slightest exertion, is
suffering from a fatigue due sometimes to despair or
stagnation of the mind, rendering the body lifeless and
inert, sometimes to discouragement resulting from a
conviction of bodily debility. This is the type of fa-
tigue from which most of us normally suffer. It may
take the form of a feeling of boredom, of ennui, of the
want of ideals and ambitions, which makes the soul limp
and exhausts the body; or it may express itself in a
helpless inability to cope with work in which we are
really interested. In all these instances it can be shown
that it is the mind that has flagged and become fa-
tigued; when the mind is revived it iinds the body ready
and prepared to answer to its call.

The mental origin of fatigue may be illustrated by
two experiments — the one psychological, the other
physiological. (a) In the first, an experiment in hyp-
notic suggestion, we shall see how either fatigue or
strength of body can be brought about purely by a men-
tal attitude. (/>) In the second, an experiment first
devised by Mosso, we shall see that of all the functions
that come into play in the performance of any action,
the mind is the first to be fatigued; and it is therefore
with fatigue of the mind that we have to concern our-
selves most.

(a) Before describing the experiment in hypnotic
suggestion it is, perhaps, well to say that the old view
that in hypnosis some virtue, fluid, or power goes out
from the hypnotiser to the subject, is now completely

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 75

discredited. The essential feature of hypnotic sug-
gestion is the communication of an idea to the mind of
the patient; by hypnotic suggestion we inhibit for the
moment the critical powers of the mind, and get the
mind into such a condition of receptivity that any idea
introduced into it is accepted without question and, for
the time being, holds complete sway. The hypnotist
does not, as is sometimes supposed, impose his will
upon a reluctant subject; he merely suggests an idea to
the mind of the patient under conditions which predis-
pose the patient to accept and appropriate it as his own.

To illustrate this point I may be pardoned for quot-
ing the words of a patient. " When I came," he
writes, " I thought I was going to be doped; that you
were going to put something in me, perhaps something
I did not like. Now I know that I have lived for years
in a cellar; you have lifted me out and liberated what
was in me." 1

To return to my experiment. I asked three men to
submit themselves to test the effect of mental sugges-
tion on their strength, which was measured by grip-
ping a dynamometer. I tested them ( 1 ) in their nor-
mal waking condition; (2) after suggesting to them un-
der hypnosis that they were "weak"; (3) after sug-
gesting under hypnosis that they were " very strong."
In each case the men were told to grip the dynamo-
meter as tightly as they could — that is to say, to exert
the will to the utmost. Under hypnosis the mind is
very suggestible, and the response to the suggestions of
weakness and strength gave very remarkable results.
In the normal waking condition the men gave an ave-
rage grip of 101 lbs. W^hen, under hypnosis, I had
given the men the idea that they were very weak, the
average grip was only 29 lbs., one of them, a prize-
fighter, remarking that his arm felt " tiny, just like a
baby's." My suggestions of strength produced an
average grip of 142 lbs. as against the 101 lbs. which

1 For a fuller discussion of the nature of the state of hypnosis, I may refer
\J the reader to my article on " The Mind and the Brain," in Immortality, pp. $2 ff.

76 THE SPIRIT in

was the best they could do in their normal waking con-
ditions. A second test, measured by the time occupied
in holding out a weight, gave similar results. In brief,
when I suggested " weakness," the full flood of energy
was checked and the men were capable of only one-
third of their normal strength, whereas by suggestion
of " strength " latent powers were liberated and their
normal strength increased by half as much again.

Such an experiment shows us that, when our minds
are depressed with the idea of weakness, our strength
may be diminished by two-thirds; whereas if we have
the stimulus of a great inspiration our strength may
thereby be increased by one-half. It is a conclusion of
the utmost importance for practical life. The weak-
ness that overtook the men when they felt they were
weak is exactly what we observe in those suffering from
neurasthenia. In these men there was produced an ar-
tificial neurasthenia. The neurasthenic, whose tired-
ness makes him a burden to himself and to every one
else, is in the same case as these three men when their
minds were obsessed by the idea of weakness so that
they could grip only 29 lbs. He, like them, is physi-
cally strong, but he is overmastered by the feeling that
he has no strength, and therefore is easily fatigued.
The radical defect, both in the neurasthenic and in these
three men when weakness was suggested, is in the mind.
They believed they were weak and fatigued, and this
belief produced the reality. According to their faith
was it done to them. Once let the mind lose confidence
in its strength, and its energy flows away like water.

On the other hand, the condition of the three men
when, being obsessed with the idea of strength, they
could grip 142 lbs. illustrates the cases of men of whom
we have given examples, who were possessed of an ab-
normal energy for which they themselves could not ac-
count, but which made them capable of almost incred-
ible feats of strength and endurance.

It would seem, then, that the limits of possibility in

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 77

our daily lives are defined less by the body than by the
mind, and that the resources of power are psychic
rather than physical in character.

(b) Mosso's famous experiment proves that, of all
the factors involved in the performance of any action,
the mind is the first to be fatigued. In an ordinary
voluntary action, say, the moving of an arm, the im-
pulse passes from the mind and will by means of the
cells of the brain, down the nerves, passing through the
nerve-endings to the muscle. By stimulating the nerve
with electric shocks, one can produce contractions of the
muscle, but after a time these contractions cease, owing
to fatigue; but if the muscle alone is then stimulated,
the muscle continues to contract. That is to say, it
is not the muscle that has been fatigued. By similar
experiments it is proved that neither is it the nerve nor
the nerve-cell that first is fatigued, but the nerve-end-
ing; indeed, the nerve-cell and the nerve are found to be
almost unfatiguable. But press the experiment a stage
further and the more important question then arises,
whether the fatigue may not be psychic rather than
physical in origin. Is it the mind or the nervous sys-
tem that is first fatigued? Mosso's experiment helps
to decide this question. A man's fatiguability is tested
by trying a weight to his finger and making him flex
and extend the finger until the onset of fatigue prevents
him moving his finger any more. If the nerve to the
finger is then immediately stimulated by a weak electric
current, without giving time for the fatigue to pass off,
the finger continues to flex and extend. In other
words, the fatigue does not originate in nerve, nerve-
ending, or muscle, which are all still quite active, but in
the will.1 The mind is fatigued, whereas the body is
prepared to go on: the flesh is willing, but the spirit is
weak.

The deduction that we draw from this experiment is

1 It is possible, of course, to hold that toxins formed in the body poison the
brain (see below, on Physical Fatigue) and thus produce the fatigue, but it is
inconceivable that the amount of waste products from the exercise of one finger
could have such wide-reaching effects.

78 THE SPIRIT m

that the mind is exhausted before the body. And this
fact, strange as it may seem at first sight, is explicable
on biological grounds, and that for two reasons.

The first reason is obvious. The mind is the latest
part of the human organism to have developed in evo-
lution, and is therefore the least completely adapted to
its environment. In the face of the chances and re-
buffs of life it frequently finds itself nonplussed: it can-
not live as it would because of the limitations surround-
ing it; it turns away sick at the problems it has to face.
From time to time we actually get cases from the seat
of war of men who have " regressed " to childhood,
behaving almost exactly as children of two or three
years old. In these cases the mind, unable any longer
to endure the strain of living under such conditions, be-
comes tired out and reverts once again to the golden
age of a protected infancy.

The second biological reason would appear to be
that the body may be protected from exhaustion. The
susceptibility of the mind to fatigue is valuable in warn-
ing the body of its approach to the danger zone, and so
preventing the body from going too far. If it were
not for this warning we might sometimes be carried
away by our enthusiasm. The man of genius has, in-
deed, an extraordinary capacity for work, because his
mind is inspired by a great enthusiasm; but his inspira-
tion might urge him to deeds too strenuous for his out-
worn body, and the world would perhaps be poorer for
his loss. Thus nature determines that the mind shall
normally be fatigued first, so that he will not put too
great a strain on the body. But in the majority of men
(if we may assume that the majority are not men of
genius) such mental fatigue occurs long before we get
anywhere near the danger zone of bodily fatigue, and
the body is rarely given the opportunity of showing the
extent of its endurance.

The discussion so far has put us in the position of
being able to affirm the dominant influence of the mind

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 79

in the production of fatigue, and to sum up the four
main forms of fatigue: (1) Purely physical fatigue;

(2) Over-sensitiveness of the mind to physical fatigue;

(3) False interpretation of mental fatigue as physical;

(4) Purely mental fatigue, chiefly due to the conflict in
the mind itself between will and emotion, or between
the different emotions themselves.

( 1 ) Physical fatigue. — I would not have it assumed
that, in emphasising mental fatigue, I am denying there
is such a thing as physical fatigue. During the exercise
of the muscles there are formed certain waste products
which are supposed gradually to poison the nervous sys-
tem; and after a great physical effort changes are seen
to take place in the nerve-cells. There are, again,
cases in which the mind's activity outstrips the body in
strength. This has been observed in birds flying across
the continent, in whom the instinct of migration is so
strong that it outdoes the body and the birds fall dead
with exhaustion. This also occurs occasionally in men
whom some great enthusiasm or passion for reform
drives on to reckless neglect of their strength, till they
are compelled to rest their bodies in eternal sleep. But
the psychological experiment in hypnotic suggestion, as
well as the physiological experiments quoted above,
show that at any rate the greater part of the fatigue
from which we suffer is of mental origin; in fact, ex-
haustion of purely physical origin is rare.

(2) The over-sensitiveness of the mind to physical
fatigue. — In the course of our daily life we more often
feel fatigued because we are too sensitive to this phys-
ical tiredness; we take notice of its symptoms when we
ought to neglect them. Normally there are thousands
of impressions and sensations in our body which ought
never to reach consciousness but should be dealt with
and responded to by the lower brain centres, such as
the beating of the heart, the movements of the stom-
ach, the sense of position of our limbs, and the sensa-
tion of normal fatigue in our body. But sometimes,

8o - THE SPIRIT in

owing to some exceptional experience — palpitation
through fear, indigestion, or extreme physical exhaus-
tion — these sensations force their way into conscious-
ness, and, having once gained a footing, continue to
claim the conscious attention of the mind. The mind
begins to pay undue heed to these sensations, and
pseudo angina pectoris, nervous dyspepsia, and neuras-
thenia with its over-sensitiveness to fatigue result.
Even with reasonably healthy people the mind may at
certain times be responsible for the fatigue felt in that
it may be over-sensitive to the tiredness of the body
and, by forcing it into consciousness, may exaggerate
what should be a trifling and transient sensation into a
feeling of complete exhaustion. Normal fatigue of
body, like all the other thousand routine sensations of
the body, should never reach consciousness except under
very exceptional circumstances. The healthy individ-
ual comes in from a long, pleasant walk, and, though
his body may be tired, he takes no notice of it and is
quite happy. The neurasthenic, perhaps owing to
some exceptional experience of over-fatigue in the past,
but more often through introspection, becomes over-
sensitive to these sensations. The same amount of
waste products are probably formed in each of the men
after the same length of walk, but, while the healthy
man neglects, the neurasthenic notices his tiredness, and
therefore suffers from exhaustion. Under hypnotic
suggestion a pin-prick can be made to feel like the stab
of a dagger, and the lifting of a book can cause com-
plete exhaustion, because the mind is made over-sensi-
tive. Similarly the man who is always expecting fa-
tigue will find what he looks for. The slightest thing
tires him, but only because he is sensitive to the slightest
thing. He turns the molehill into a mountain, and this
mountain goes into labour and brings forth neurasthenia.
(3) Meanwhile we need to point out that fatigur of
purely mental origin is often misinterpreted and is at-
tributed to a physical origin. Man has not yet learnt

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 81

to discriminate clearly between mental and physical sen-
sations. Hence mental pain tends to express itself in
terms of physical injury. Thus when we receive had
news the shock is primarily mental, but our mind sub-
consciously finds a physical expression for the pain and
localises it in the head, with the result that we get a
nervous headache; but this is because our mind has no
other way of finding for a " mental pain " a local habi-
tation and a name. This is the explanation of not a
few apparently physical, but really functional, diseases,
For this reason, when the mind is itself fatigued by
worry, anxiety, depression, or fear, this fatigue, though
purely mental, is often felt to be physical, and we have
the same sensations as if it were the body that was tired
out.

(4) Purely mental fatigue is chiefly due to the con-
flict in the mind between the instincts and the will, or
between the instincts themselves, and is of the greatest
importance not only in the study of the causes of fa-
tigue but for the acquisition of power. The powerful
instincts crave for free expression; the will attempts to
hold them down; the house is divided against itself and
cannot stand. The instinctive emotions conflict with
one another, and the struggle for mastery robs our lives
of strength and leaves us prostrate. This inner con-
flict, the chief cause of fatigue, and its cure, we shall
study in a later section.1

To call fatigue mental rather than physical is not to
suggest that it is " unreal." Mental fatigue is the
most real and the most important for our lives. It fol-
lows that those who would live lives of energy must
look to the resources of the mind rather than to those
of the body, and must study the laws which condition
mental energy and mental fatigue.

The Infirmity of the Will

It is generally considered that it is only by force of
will that we exercise power; and in recent years the

1 p. 92.

82 THE SPIRIT m

glorification of will power has been characteristic of
certain philosophers, mainly of Teutonic origin, and
has been exploited by advertisers in pictures of square-
jawed, clenched-fistcd supermen. But is the will in
point of fact as potent as popular theory would have us
believe? My own hospital ward, as well as those of
every physician of the mind, is full of examples of will
that fails to accomplish what it wills. We are con-
stantly dealing with cases where a man tries his utmost
to perform certain actions and fails to do them; and
yet they are perfectly possible to him.

I had a patient, a healthy lad of twenty, who had
been engulfed in the marshes of the Piave and was in-
valided home paralysed in both legs. When put on his
feet he was absolutely terror-stricken, and was with the
greatest difficulty supported by two men. He fre-
quently attempted to walk, exerting his will and deter-
mination to the utmost, but his attempts all ended in
failure and distress. As there was no actual disease
of the nervous system I treated him by hypnotic sugges-
tion, and a few weeks later he was playing football.
The desire to walk was there; the effort of will to walk
was there; but these could not cure him — the will was
impotent to save.

Another lad, whom I treated only a few days ago,
suffered from a bullet wound through the shoulder,
which, however, did not injure any important nerve,
but paralysed his whole arm. I hypnotised him, and in
less than two minutes had restored the power which had
been lacking for months. His greatest effort to move
it had resulted in failure; yet movement proved to be
possible. Again, where the will was impotent, some
other power succeeded.1

To revert back to my illustrations: the man who in
fright leaped the fence, the patient who struggled so

l It is only right that I should mention that " shell-shock " cases are more
dramatic in their symptoms and in their cure than we can hope for in civilian
patients, where the disease is often of long standing, its cause difficult to ex-
pose, and its cure proportionately more difficult.

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 83

violently that four men were needed to keep him down,
the man fighting with his back to the wall, were all able
to do things which by the greatest effort of will they
could never have accomplished. On the other hand, I
have been in my ward speaking casually with the men
when suddenly I have told one man that he could not
rise from his chair but was stuck to it; another that he
could not move his arm; another that he felt compelled
to stand on one leg; and it was ludicrous to observe the
strenuous efforts they made to act contrary to my sug-
gestions. They exercised their wills, but to no effect.
The performances of public hypnotists abound with
such experiments; my only excuse for doing them is that
I may convince men whom I want to heal of the power
of suggestion, even in the absence of hypnosis.

Let me refer again to my hypnotic experiment in
fatigue. As each man gripped the dynamometer I told
him to do so " as hard as ever he could." Yet a man
would one minute be able to do only 29 lbs., and a few
minutes after he could manage 142 lbs. It is quite ob-
vious that the difference in power was due, not to the
exercise of the will, which was strained to the utmost in
each case, but to some force that the will was impotent
to affect. We shall observe, later, that this obstacle
to the full exercise of the will was the belief that the
thing attempted was impossible.1 This breakdown of
the will accounts for a large number of the nervous ills
and morbid habits with which the physician has to deal.
Sometimes it takes the form of perversion. I have a
patient who, when trying to move his right leg, invari-
ably moves his left leg. He observes his mistake but
cannot correct it. There is a want of co-ordination
somewhere : the couplings have gone wrong.

But I have only to appeal to the reader to look into
his own life to realise how futile is the will to help us
in many of our difficulties. Our attempts to prevent
blushing produce only a deeper crimson ; the effort to be

1 See section on " Confidence and Faith."

84 THE SPIRIT in

at our ease produces a strained attitude; and i-n moral
actions how often does our greatest determination to
do right end in failure? It was long ago that one dis-
covered " what I would, that do I not; but what I hate,
that do I." One thing is willed, another is performed.
The victim of a moody or irritable temper, or of some
evil habit, spends days and nights in vain endeavour to
master it. What more pathetic sight than that of a
confirmed drug-taker affirming with a sickly smile that
he can easily give it up. A vulture was seen to be feed-
ing on a carcase as lit floated down the Niagara river
above the Falls; when the danger-point came it doubt-
less expected to spread its wings and fly off; but when,
in fact, it spread its wings, it found that it could not
rise ; its talons were frozen to the carcase on which it
fed, and so it was carried over the Falls to its doom.
So the victim of evil habit tells you, " I am all right,
you don't need to bother about me; I can give it up
when I want to"; but when he rises to shake himself
and put on strength, he finds his will power has gone.
The freedom of the will may be a doctrine which holds
true of the healthy, and, indeed, the exercise of will and
determination is the normal way in which to summon
the resources of power; but the doctrine that the will
alone is the way to power is a most woe-begone theory
for the relief of the morally sick — and who of us is
whole? Freedom to choose? Yes! But what if,
when we choose, we have no power to perform? We
open the sluice-gates, but the channels are dry; we pull
the lever, but nothing happens; we try by our will to
summon up our strength, but no strength comes.

We cannot kindle when we would
The fire that in the soul resides.

Will and determination are, of course, essential to
moral endeavour, and without them the instincts would
run riot. When we say " I will," we feel an accession
of power that enables us to conquer, and we attribute
that power to the will. But the futility of looking to

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 85

the will alone for our source of strength is obvious, and
those who rely on it are running the risk of disaster: for
practical action the will is dependent on some other
power. As long as it acts in conformity with this
power all is well. Under these circumstances the more
strenuous the will, and the greater our resolution and
determination, the greater will be our strength. But
if it conflicts with this power, as in our illustrations, the
will is impotent. The energies which give the driving
force to our lives are not derived from the will, but
from another source; they will be found to have their
origin in the instinctive emotions. As we shall observe
later, the function of the will is to direct and work in
conformity with the potent forces derived from the in-
stinctive emotions, and to regulate the release of these
forces waiting ready for action.

This view of the will suggests two conclusions of
great importance for religion. (1) An evil deed is
not always due to an " evil will " for which one is to be
held responsible, but may be due to impulses over which
the will has no control, or to distortions of character
which the will is unable to set right, and it is only just
that the offender should be treated as sick rather than
sinful.1 (2) We cannot rely upon the will alone to
deliver us from evil habits. Modern psychotherapy
confirms the old religious belief that to give power to
the will, confidence and faith in the possibility of victory
are essential.

The Instincts

The great driving forces of life are the Instinctive
Emotions.2 The Will may open the sluice-gates, but

1 I would suggest that the " cure of souls " is a practice too seriously neg-
lected by the modern church.

2 On the subject of the instincts and their practical bearing on human life, I
would urge the reader, if he has not yet done so, to study W. McDougall's
Social Psychology, for it is to Dr. McDougall that we owe the recognition of
the paramount importance of the instincts in social life. That book shows how
intimately connected are the instincts and certain great emotions, and I use
the term Instinctive Emotion to indicate such emotions as Fear, Tenderness,
Wonder, which are racially inherited and primitive, and therefore can dominate
our whole human life and conduct.

86 THE SPIRIT in

the Instinctive Emotions constitute the flood which
sweeps through the channel. Great Ideas may sway
masses of men as when the cry of " Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity " called thousands to rise in revolution;
yet it is only when associated with an emotion, and
particularly an instinctive emotion, that the idea is
charged with compelling power.

The instinctive emotions give driving force to the
will and put life into great ideas, and, being liberated
like the winds from the cave of Aeolus, burst forth,
either to do their work of destruction or, if rightly
controlled, to speed us, with full-bellied sail, on the
voyage to the harbour of our destiny.

When we look back on our previous illustrations of
extraordinary powers we see that the main forces acting
in and through these men were the instinctive emotions.
Fear, the expression of the instinct of self-preservation,
gave the soldier, buried in the debris and fighting for
his life, almost superhuman power. The instinct of
pugnacity gave one desperate man surrounded by the
enemy the strength of five. The instinctive emotion
of fear enabled the athlete to make a spring which he
could never afterwards accomplish by power of will
alone. In these cases the driving force obviously
comes from the instinctive emotions; and they are none
the less at work in great reformers, statesmen, and
industrial monarchs. Wilberforce could never have
induced Britain to make so great a sacrifice in hard
cash for the liberation of the slaves had he not ap-
pealed to an instinctive emotion which could sweep
away thoughts of prudent economy. The emotion
aroused in his own soul, and which he quickened in the
soul of others, was the feeling of pity, an emotion
characteristic of the parental instinct.1 The instinct
of constructiveness combined with the instinct of self-
assertion and the ambitious desire for power drives one
man from the seclusion of a village to control the affairs

l " Like as a father pitieth his own children."

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 87

of an empire, and another to organise a trust. It is
when our feelings are aroused, when passion is
awakened in the breast, when the approach of danger
makes us alert to strike, when the sight of brutality to
a child kindles our indignation, or when we are pos-
sessed by some soul-satisfying ambition, — it is then
that we feel most deeply the sense of power. Not in
the cold, deliberate choice of the will, but in the passion
of the soul is to be found that flood of energy which
can open to us the resources of power. Mastered by
such a passion the soul will admit no defeat.

The strength of the instincts has not yet been fully
appreciated, nor is it fully realised how great a part
they play in common life. They have been boycotted
by the cultured as brutish survivals, and even now
some regard them as little more than a power that
makes the birds migrate and the bees furnish the hive.
Hardly do these people realise that society itself exists
in response to an instinct of the herd, that their desire
to travel is a response to the instinct of migration, and
the impulse to build great cities and empires is the same
impulse as compels the beaver to build the dam. The
sociologist is most concerned with the gregarious in-
stinct, so lucidly demonstrated by Trotter in The In-
stinct of the Herd. Yet it is only recently that ade-
quate recognition has been given by sociologists to the
instincts. Fortunately we have now ceased to ignore
them, and we realise that the instincts are the raw
material upon the direction of which depends most of
our individual and social life, and we now regard them
for the most part as healthy. But even to this day
many moralists adopt the prevailing attitude towards
the instincts in advocating a stern suppression of them.
Such an attempt is doomed to failure, for two reasons.
Because, in the first place, it is practically impossible to
suppress such deep-rooted hereditary predispositions;
and, secondly, because the suppression of them would
only dam up the channels of power which nature has

88 THE SPIRIT in

provided. If we attempt to suppress our instincts, will
is divided against instinct and the house cannot stand.

Religious teaching has sometimes been guilty of this
mistaken suppression in two ways. The one is exemp-
lified by those who would suppress the instinct of
curiosity on which, as will be shown later, intellectual
inquiry is based, and advocate that so-called " asceti-
cism of the intellect " which would ultimately stifle
truth. The other, with which we are more concerned
here, is the suppression of emotion. In their dread of
emotionalism — the unruly debauch of unrestrained
feeling — and its consequences in conduct, they have
attempted to abolish all emotion as a thing either
dangerous or vulgar. In so doing they have failed to
appreciate that the Christian religion is founded on
an emotion — the all-embracing emotion of love. To
rob the soul of emotion is to deprive it of its driving
force and leave it lifeless. Matthew Arnold's descrip-
tion of religion as being morality tinged with emotion
is a delightful though unconscious satire on what re-
ligion actually is at the present day, but certainly not
what it should be. A " tinge " of emotion is not the
kind of thing to turn the world upside-down. " No
heart is pure that is not passionate; no virtue is safe
that is not enthusiastic." If religion means anything
at all, it ought to mean the full and harmonious display
and exercise of all our powers, emotional and in-
tellectual, so that we present our whole selves a living
sacrifice to God.

The Instincts and Morality

But if we accept the thesis that the instinctive emo-
tions are, humanly speaking, the sources of our human
energies, the question arises — Are these forces moral ?
Revenge and lust, as well as heroism, bring an enhance-
ment of strength. If the instinctive emotions are the
springs of power, can the sexual libertine lay claim to
it as justifiably as the devoted mother ? The blind rage

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 89

of instinctive passion can scarcely be called moral, and
yet it fills beast and man with extraordinary power.

The following observations are therefore necessary
to a true estimate of the moral value of the instinctive
emotions.

( 1 ) In the first place, it must be recognised how
many of the instincts have naturally a truly moral ten-
dency. The tenderness of a mother for her child, per-
haps the most perfect example of virtue in the whole
of human life, is at the same time the most perfect
example of a beneficent instinct. It is found not only
in the human mother but in the lioness, the tigress, and
the bird. Again, in the herd instinct, which makes
the individual surrender all his personal claims to the
demands of the pack, lie the germ and source of most
of the social virtues. The instincts are not brutal be-
cause they are shared by brutes, and, indeed, it might
be urged that the noblest deeds of man have sprung
from the altruistic instincts which originate in mother-
love and loyalty to one's fellows and can be traced far
back into the animal kingdom. But even such benef-
icent instincts need to be wisely directed. In the case
of the maternal instinct, for instance, there comes the
time when the child must no longer rely upon the
mother but win independence. The lingering care of
the mother for the grown-up daughter is certain at
some time to clash with the impulse to independence in
the daughter, and is the cause of that misunderstanding
and consequent friction which so often brings unhappi-
ness to both mother and daughter. They are both
guided by instinctive impulses that are right and neces-
sary — the one of maternal care, the other of inde-
pendence. The friction which so often results would
frequently be avoided were both mother and daughter
to realise the causes of their misunderstandings. A
wider knowledge of the influence of the instincts would
materially assist in bringing about peace and harmony
in everyday life. As soon as both mother and

90 THE SPIRIT m

daughter realise that the opinions and desires of the
other are not due to " sheer cussedness," but under-
stand that such desires are instinctive and natural, so
soon will this understanding bring about peace and
forgiveness.1

(2) On the broadest definition, morality is that
which is found to be valuable for social life. In the
animal world all the instincts are, in this sense, moral.
And, as we have seen, some of them, such as the tender-
ness of the mother for her young, or the loyalty of the
individual to the pack, can, with but a little sublimation,
become the basis of all that is best and highest in human
life. Others, however, like the instinct of pugnacity,
may seem in human society to have outlived their day.
At an early stage of human evolution such an instinct
was valuable in the struggle for existence. But this
struggle, at least in its cruder form, is, or ought to be,
a thing of the past; with the result that the instinct of
pugnacity may easily lead to anti-social conduct.
Nevertheless, every instinct, however ill-adapted to the
requirements of present-day civilised life, has had its
value in its day in that it worked for the good of the
species as a whole, and should be regarded, so far, as
moral, or capable of being moralised. I shall deal
with the question of the transformation and moralisa-
tion of the instincts in a later section.

(3) The moral potentialities of the force mani-
fested in the instincts may be judged also from another
point of view. The source of power lies not in in-
stinctive emotion alone, but in instinctive emotion ex-
pressed in a way with which the whole man can, for the
time being at least, identify himself. Ultimately, this
is impossible without the achievement of a harmony
of all the instincts and the approval of the reason. An

1 The need for sucli understanding is most felt in regard to the instincts in
growing children, whose impulses Inwards the expression of the instincts are so
often treated as " naughtiness." The child naturally feels unjustly treated, for
the impulse to obey the instincts, a perfectly beneficent impulse if wisely guided,
is stronger than the impulse to obey the injunctions of the parent, whose busi-
ness it ought to be to make the instincts amenable to the control of reason.

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 91

evil man has access to the same instinctive emotions as
the good man, and may use them for wrong ends — as
a Napoleon for his ambition, or a murderer for his
hate. The man who gives vent to blind rage may
feel the same satisfaction and relief as does the man
who shows his indignation at some moral wrong. Yet
in the long run those who misuse their powers destroy
themselves by their very passions. It may be true
that the man who takes personal vengeance on another
may satisfy his instinct of revenge and feel elated, but
he is apt to be so ostracised by his fellows that, quite
independently of any practical inconvenience their con-
sequent action towards him may entail, the herd instinct
in him rises up in opposition to the instinct of revenge
and sets up an internal conflict which soon robs him of
that harmony of the instincts which I shall show later
on to be essential to power.1 Thus the greatest and
permanent power comes to him who uses it not for his
own personal ends, but for the good of his fellows; for
only by such a use of it does he achieve the maximum
inner harmony. We may therefore assert that, while
it is open to the evil man to give vent to a particular
instinctive emotion, and thereby to lay claim for a
moment to the power that nature lavishes upon those
who use her gifts, it is only to those who use them
aright that the greatest powers are given. Thus the
powers at our disposal are not so neutral and non-moral
as they seem, but tend to favour those who will use
them for the noblest purposes. Revenge, pride, and
passion destroy the permanent inner harmony of the
soul, even though they may temporarily energise it into
activity. Chivalry, honour, and love, devoted to the
service of others, tend to produce a transformation
of instincts and a living harmony of the soul which
can permanently keep open the sluice-gates of power.
We shall proceed, then, to deal with the questions
which have just arisen, and show how the crude forces

1 See section on " The Conflict of Instincts."

92 THE SPIRIT in

which reside in the instinctive emotions can best be
utilised for human endeavours and ideals. We shall
first show how the instincts of the baser sort, if
focussed on some dominating purpose or idea, may be
transformed; after which we shall demonstrate the
necessity of expending our powers as a pre-requisite
of receiving more power, and finally we shall deal with
the question of the conflict of instincts, the abolition
of which conflict is necessary to unity and to power.

The Conflict of Instincts
The presence of conflict in the soul drains it of
strength, and is one of the main causes of weakness.
" I see another law in my members warring against
the law of my mind." The conflict may be of instinc-
tive emotions with ideas, as when a man is feeble be-
cause he is obsessed with intellectual doubt. At other
times the weakness is due to the conflict of instinctive
emotions and will, one of the most common forms of
which is the attempt to suppress the instincts by the
will, already referred to. But chiefly our powers are
sapped because the instincts are divided against them-
selves. Let one instinct sway the mind and there is
the sense of power. But the instincts are often op-
posed and turn many of our best endeavours into
failures. We are ambitious to succeed, but we are
checked by the fear of making fools of ourselves. We
never learn to skate, because we think of the ridiculous
figure we should cut if we fell. Thus the desire to
excel in any accomplishment (the instinct of self-
assertion) conflicts with the possible feeling of shame
and self-abasement.

The following case illustrates my point so well that
I shall give it in some detail. I have recently been
treating a lady who, when she came to me, was so
neurasthenic and easily fatigued that she habitually
slept for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. After
a good night's sleep from 9 P. M. till 7 A. M. she would

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 93

rise and have breakfast, but the effort caused her so
much fatigue that she would retire to bed again at 9
A. M. to sleep till 12. Now this was not laziness in the
ordinary sense; she was an affectionate mother, and
was anxious above all things to be able to work and
play with her children, but she had not the strength.
It was purely a case of mental fatigue, produced by a
conflict of instinctive emotions.

Her cure could only be effected by discovering the
cause and eradicating it from the mind. This process
of discovery was conducted largely under hypnosis,
since the patient could give little assistance in her wak-
ing state. It was discovered that the cause was the
long-continued strain of nursing a very delicate child,
when on more than one occasion it seemed that it must
be a question of whether mother or child should be
sacrificed. In her, then, two most powerful instinctive
emotions had been at war, namely, the instinct of self-
preservation and the maternal instinct. The result
was a complete breakdown, several phobias, and a
fatigue lasting some years, even though the original
cause of anxiety was happily at an end. These were in
turn removed, the instincts readjusted, the phobias ex-
plained, and the last account I have received from her
husband, some months later, is to the effect that she is
perfectly well.1

Fortunately most of us are not called on to suffer
from such conflicts, but conflict is nevertheless repre-
sented in everyday life by anxiety and worry. Anxiety
is essentially a conflict of emotions. Anxiety about the
future, about one's children, about the dinner one is

1 Other cases of conflict leading to nervous breakdown which have lately come
under my notice may be briefly indicated. The sense of duty to her mother
clashed with the instinctive desire for independence in a grown-up daughter, and
a feeling of restless discontent resulted. Fear and the impulse to run away
conflicted in the mind of the soldier with his sense of duty, and ended in a
condition of paralysis of the legs, unconsciously produced, which solved the im-
mediate problem but brought about a breakdown in health. The eagerness to
please a master, with whom a patient of mine was in love, together with the
constant sense of failure in this attempt, brought about a conflict between
sexual instinct and self-pride, and produced a neurasthenia of many years'
standing. A man's desire to live a clean and pure life was hampered by the
shame of a past sin.

94 THE SPIRIT m

giving, about the destiny of one's soul, about a railway
journey or one's health, are all conflicts of opposing
emotions. By such worries and restlessness of spirit
we waste our strength and sap our vitality. By facing
our conflicts and deliberately making our choice, by
directing all our endeavours to one great purpose, con-
fidently and fearlessly, the soul is restored again to
harmony and strength.

The Conversion of the Instincts
Perhaps the most characteristic feature of a living
being is, that it can raise energy from a lower potential
to a higher potential, i.e. its efficiency for a given pur-
pose is increased. In all ///animate things energy, such
as heat or motion, tends to be dissipated instead of
being raised to a high potential. The human being can
raise the energy contained in food and transform it
into nerve energy, and by so doing he raises the poten-
tial of this form of energy. William James probably
had in mind this difference of potential when he says:
" Writing is higher than walking, thinking is higher
than writing, deciding higher than thinking, deciding
1 no ' higher than deciding ' yes.' " It is the in-
tellectual and moral privilege of the human being that
he can similarly raise the energy contained in the in-
stincts, the radical fault in most of which is their
selfish and egocentric character, to higher potentials;
that is to say, by transforming the quality of this
energy he raises its power to accomplish his ends, as
sexual passion has been transformed into love; and by
changing the direction of the energy he endows it with
a greater effectiveness of purpose. By doing so he re-
tains the power or force of the instincts, but directs
that force to greater purpose. Furthermore, directed
to altruistic ends, these individual instincts will no
longer clash with the social instincts and thereby be
deprived of strength, but co-operating and working in
harmony with the social instincts they will be mag-
nificently reinforced and their power multiplied.

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 95

The hunting instinct affords an obvious illustration of
this principle. We see its evolution in the transforma-
tion from the child's game of " hide and seek," to the
keenness of the boy scout, until finally it assumes the
form of exploration and discovery, its original object
having been almost entirely forgotten.

Again, the instinct of curiosity is one the poten-
tialities of which are not sufficiently realised. We
often use this term in a derogatory sense, as when one
is said to be " inquisitive out of mere curiosity."
Curiosity often takes the form of prying into other
people's affairs; it has driven more than one medical
student I have known into morphinomania, and it leads
many a young man and woman to sample those
" thrills " which constitute " seeing life." " It is in
their blood," we say, by which we imply that this im-
pulse is instinctive. But this instinct of curiosity also
gives the impulse to all true scientific pursuit. The
instinct of curiosity directed towards human nature
makes of one person a prying gossip, but leads another
to search, like the psychologist, into the hidden depths
of the human mind with sympathetic insight. Nothing
short of a fundamental instinct could urge on the scien-
tist to the researches which he pursues year after year,
regardless of result or reward, to the great good of
mankind.

The combative instinct. — We often hear it main-
tained that the instinct of pugnacity which in the past
has led to war must necessarily do so in the future, and
that those who look for a permanent peace are there-
fore doomed to disappointment. This is a most un-
justifiable assumption. Granting that the emotional
element of every instinct must always remain, it is not
necessary either that the same stimuli should awaken
that emotion, or that the emotion should express itself
in the same action — in this case, in slaughter. The
instinct for combat finds expression in games such as
football and in the rivalry of sport; and it is probably

96 THE SPIRIT

for this reason that the English people are less aggres-
sive than other nations we know, though when the
instinct is directed to war the Englishman throws him-
self into it with no less energy and zest. Long ago,
William James pointed out the possibility of finding a
moral equivalent of war in social service, from an
egocentric to an altruistic and chivalrous end.1 We
can take up arms for others even though we refuse to
do so for ourselves. Then our instinct ceases to be
aggressive, and becomes protective. So ultimately we
shall learn that we can fight with other weapons for
truth and purity, we shall join a crusade against oppres-
sion and vice — and this kind of combat will employ
for social ends those emotions and instincts which at
present we use for war and destruction. So we may
confidently hope that the pugnacious instinct will find
scope in fields of social service in the fight for justice,
purity, and right.

It is often said that instincts are blind. It is rather
we who are blind to their potency and to the purposes
for which they exist. The abandonment of that false
doctrine which would have us suppress them, and the
substitution for it of an understanding of their proper
uses, would open up to us resources of power which
would give us in abundance energy and life.

Fear: Sex: Self-assertion. — The instinctive emo-
tion of fear and the instincts of sex and self-assertion
deserve more detailed description on account of their
great power — a power derived from their primitive
character, their origin dating back to the earliest forms
of animal life, but one far greater than the circum-
stances of modern life necessitate. Abolish these in-
stincts and their effects in individual and social life, and
the problems of mankind would be well-nigh solved.
But abolish them we cannot; to suppress them is to

1 In the Great War men in this country were largely divided into those who
fought because they hated the Hun and those who fought in chivalrous defence
of the Belgian nation. The resultant action was the same, yet the motive for
the im|>ule was very different, being the expression of a selfish instinct in one
case and of an altruistic one in the other.

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 97

deprive ourselves of their forces. To convert them
and to redirect their forces to higher purposes is the
work of beings possessed of intelligence, of will, and
of an ideal.

The instinctive emotion of fear, so intimately asso-
ciated with self-preservation, is one very necessary to
our existence; without it we should soon be run down
in the street. But the strength of this instinct is far
greater than the uses of our civilised life require, for
modern life is comparatively safe. There is a great
deal of the primitive fear that is left over, as it were,
which we cannot use. The consequence is that the ex-
cess of fear tends to flow into wrong channels, or we
fear excessively things which should rightly be objects
of fear. Our surplus fear produces fear of poverty,
fear of sickness and pain, fear of the future, fear of
what might have been, fear of ourselves, fear of death,
fear of life, fear of failure, and, perhaps most paralys-
ing of all, fear of fear. If fear were abolished from
modern life, the work of the psychotherapist would be
nearly gone. It was not without cause that the Master
of the soul so often reiterated " Fear not," " Be not
afraid," " Be not anxious."

Is this, then, an instinct we should suppress? That
is both impossible and undesirable. The effects of fear
are of two kinds: there is the fear that paralyses and
the fear that inspires. Nothing paralyses our lives
so much as fear, depriving them as it does of that
abundance of power which is our birthright. But there
is also the fear that nerves and inspires and expresses
itself in the effective avoidance of imminent disaster.
Now, we ask what constitutes the difference between
the fear in these two cases? The answer is that fear
paralyses when it offers no way of escape; it inspires
when it is associated with hope. A hare, suddenly
surprised, is either temporarily paralysed by fear, or
stimulated to its topmost speed. It has been con-
jectured that the paralysis is probably a protective

98 THE SPIRIT

mechanism to enable the animal to hide when it cannot
escape. If escape is possible the fear no longer
paralyses, but is expressed in that tension of muscle,
that alertness of mind, which make swift and effective
action possible. Fear which includes a large element
of hope passes into confidence, and this, as we have
seen, is the first essential of power. If we apply our
principle to what we have said concerning morbid fear,
we can see that our problem is to turn the fear that
paralyses into the fear that inspires. The fear of
poverty inspires us to greater efforts, the fear of the
future saves us from indolence, the fear of accident
makes us alert; but this transformation takes place
only when we have confidence that we can come
through, and that the struggle will issue in victory.

Those who have raised discussion as to whether we
should " fear God " have, I think, failed to appreciate
this difference between the fear that paralyses and the
fear akin to hope that urges us to active service. To
fear God may mean that we are afraid of God because
He may punish us, and in this case the fear is paralysing
and brings forth no good result — " I knew thee, that
thou wert an austere man . . . and hid thy talent in
the ground." But the fear of God may mean that,
indifferent to ourselves, we are filled with reverent awe
(in which emotion there is an element of fear), com-
bined with a conviction of His willingness and power
to help. This shifts the fear from ourselves, turns it
into hope, and fills us with a confidence which stimulates
us to great endeavours, and gives us that inspiration
which only comes to those who humbly devote them-
selves to a noble cause.

The sexual instinct at first sight appears to be in-
capable of being raised to higher uses. It is an instinct
which is necessary to the race for the purpose of repro-
duction. But, like fear, it has a far greater " affect "
or emotional tone than we need for this purpose, and
therefore its lavish expression apparently needs to be

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 99

suppressed. On the other hand, the suppression of
this instinct causes a very large number of the nervous
ills to which men, and still more women, fall victims.
But the sexual instinct, which naturally expresses itself
as admiration for personal beauty, is probably at the
basis of all the higher forms of art and may well be
sublimated to this end. Further, this instinct is very
closely associated with the maternal and paternal in-
stincts, and seems almost to form a harmonious com-
plex with them. The true lover is not only moved by
the sexual instinct, but almost always associates with it
the maternal or paternal instinct, and desires to " have
some one to care for." * Many a woman has married
an invalid man simply in order to gratify this maternal
instinct in caring for him. Unmarried women, in
whom the sexual instincts are strong (and let them
never be ashamed that these instincts are strong) , may
transform them into the maternal instinct in caring for
children, " mothering " the lonely, or nursing the sick.
The sexual instincts, debased to the uses of fleshly lust,
kill the soul and stifle all noble thought and feeling;
but from the same soil there may spring the stainless
flower of love, whence comes all that is pure and holy
in human life.

The instinct of self-assertion, when directed to purely
individual ends, produces that aggressive character
which is as offensive as it is anti-social. Nevertheless
the opposite emotion of submission, if over-emphasised,
results in a lack of practical initiative and independ-
ence. The virtue which corresponds to these excesses
is not to be found in the " mean " between them, as
Aristotle would say, but is the right direction of them
both to altruistic ends. There is room for a new ethic
on these lines. A self-assertion which forgets itself in
the pursuit of a noble end is the truest humility. Sub-
mission that is self-conscious may be egoism disguised.

1 The intimate connection between the sexual instinct and the maternal in-
stinct is demonstrated by the physiological co-operation between the physical
organs corresponding respectively to these instincts.

675009 A.

ioo THE SPIRIT in

True humility consists not in thinking little of oneself,
but in not thinking of oneself at all. Thus both self-
assertion and submissiveness are harmonised, and so
lend the force of two combined instinctive emotions to
the accomplishment of a noble end.

But more than that, the instinct of self-assertion is
at the basis of the sense of confidence which I shall
proceed to show is so essential to a life of power. Be-
sides the intellectual acceptance of the idea " this is
possible," confidence consists in the emotional reaction
arising out of the instinct of self-assertion, " what is
possible / can do," whether the confidence is based on
the belief in my own power or in some other power on
which I can rely.

Confidence and Faith

Confidence, deriving its power from the instinct of
self-assertion, turns weakness into strength and failure
into success.

" Somehow, when I started, I knew I was going to
succeed." This is a phrase we often hear on the lips of
a man flushed with success. He hardly realises that it
was his confidence in success, his belief that he would
succeed, that gave him the power to surmount his diffi-
culties and win his way to victory. All round us we
see men failing simply because they lack the confidence
that they will succeed, while men with far less ability
and talent, but with greater daring, carry off the prizes
that life has to offer. It is not that the others do not
try, but that they do not expect to succeed.

In the section on the will I quoted cases of men
paralysed in arms and legs whom the will was quite
impotent to restore to health: yet there was nothing
organically wrong with such patients. Why, then,
were they paralysed? Why did not their strenuous
efforts enable them to walk? Because they believed
they could not move their limbs. They could say " I
will," but they had not learnt to say " I can." The
man paralysed in both legs would cling to me with such

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 101

vigour that he nearly pulled me down with him —
simply because he had not the confidence to trust him-
self to walk. In the hypnotic experiment on fatigue
the subject could only grip 29 lbs. because he said " I
am weak, I cannot grip it any harder." When he said,
and believed, " I am strong and powerful," his strength
was multiplied fivefold. I suddenly told another man
that he could not talk; he tried, but found that he was
dumb — simply because, being suggestible to my words,
he lost confidence in his power to speak, and believed
what I suggested to be in fact true. In all such cases
we have seen that the will alone does not ensure suc-
cess. " To will is present with me, but how to perform
I know not." That which is lacking is " confidence."

I have spoken of the paralysing effects of fear.
Confidence removes this paralysis and turns belief into
a mighty impulse to act. It fills men with the strength
which makes the soul master of its fate. It possesses
the timid who cling to the shores of life, who have
toiled all night and caught nothing, and bids them
launch out into the deep, where endeavour is crowned
with overwhelming success. Want of belief in its pos-
sibility is always the main obstacle to the performing
of any mighty work. Faith in its possibility — a faith
not necessarily founded on evidence but one that dares
to take the risk — is the greatest asset to success in
any task. "If thou canst?" "All things are pos-
sible to them that believe."

The Expenditure of Power
Nature is economic in her gifts: she will not give
strength to those who will not expend it. These re-
main uninspiring and uninspired. She is lavish in her
gifts to those who will use them, and especially to those
who devote them to nature's altruistic ends, for such
ends harmonise the soul. Life demands expression.
If the life-stream that flows through us finds the chan-
nel blocked by a life of inactivity, we inevitably suffer
from staleness and boredom, or a sense of physical

102 THE SPIRIT in

debility. A purposeless life is a life of fatigue. We
all know from personal experience how tired we may
become while doing nothing, but let us once find an
outlet for our energies, some object upon which to ex-
pend them, and our instinctive powers awake us to life.
The Sea of Galilee is fresh and blue, and gives life to
living creatures within its sunlit waters — not because
it receives waters, but because it gives of them freely.
The Dead Sea is dead, not because there is no supply
of fresh water, but because it permits no outlet. It is
therefore stagnant and deadly; no fish lives in its
waters, nor is any beast to be found upon its shores.
It is a law of nature — a law of life — that only by
giving shall we receive. None is so healthy and fresh
as he who gives freely of his strength, and thereby
liberates his impulses and instinctive powers into quick-
ened activity. This is of immense practical impor-
tance. In the treatment of neurasthenia, the chief
symptom of which is fatigue, it is often found that the
" Weir Mitchell " treatment of inactivity and isolation
is the worst a physician can prescribe. Already is the
patient suffering from too much self-consciousness and
introspection. Some disappointment or sorrow may
have taken all the life out of him: the zeal and keen-
ness of his life has suddenly gone. In popular lan-
guage, what he needs is " something to take him out of
himself "; something to interest him, some object which
will liberate the forces pent up in his soul. Give such
a man " something to live for," that awakens his inter-
est, and his ambition will arouse his instinctive emotions
till the heart that was sluggish palpitates with the joy
of life once more, the nerves tingle with eager expecta-
tion. Life's demand for expression will be satisfied.

How wonderful is the way in which, with quite
ordinary folk, power leaps to our aid in any time of
emergency. We lead timid lives, shrinking from diffi-
cult tasks till perhaps we are forced into them or our-
selves determine on them, and immediately we seem to

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 103

unlock the unseen forces. When we have to face
danger, then courage comes; when trial puts a long-
continued strain upon us, we find ourselves possessed
by the power to endure; or when disaster ultimately
brings the fall which we so long dreaded, we feel under-
neath us the strength as of the everlasting arms. Com-
mon experience teaches that, when great demands are
made upon us, if only we fearlessly accept the challenge
and confidently expend our strength, every danger or
difficulty brings its own strength — " As thy days so
shall thy strength be."

Energy and Rest

In considering the causes of fatigue we found that
the mental factor played a very prominent part. The
main causes of such fatigue were over-sensitiveness to
ordinary physical fatigue, the conviction of weakness,
and the conflict of will and emotions or of the emotions
with themselves. A life of purposeful and altruistic
activity will rid us of that habit of introspection which
produces the first form of fatigue; the sense of con-
fidence will drive away thoughts of weakness; and we
have now to deal with the third form, conflict within
the mind, the most characteristic form of which is
worry and anxiety. This is to be met, firstly, by dis-
covering and bringing into consciousness the latent
cause of our worry, which normally tends to elude con-
sciousness. Modern practice in psychotherapy con-
firms the old belief that confession, more especially con-
fession of fears and anxieties, is good for the soul.
The " letting out " of the " repressed complex " is it-
self often sufficient to cure; secondly, by converting the
instincts and directing their energies towards useful and
harmonious ends; and, thirdly, by cultivating a restf ill-
ness of mind which is the counterpart of a life of energy.

Weakness results from the wastage caused by rest-
lessness of mind; Power comes from a condition of
mental quietude. The secret of energy is to learn to
keep the mind at rest, even in the multitude of life's

104 THE SPIRIT in

activities. Look at this patient suffering from neur-
asthenia. He complains that he is suffering from
fatigue; but there is another symptom you notice about
him — he is irritable, cannot stand noises, cannot bear
to be crossed or disturbed. The fatigue and the irri-
tability are part of the same trouble. It is a char-
acteristic of nervous patients that they are always
restless: they tell you that they must always be doing
something, always be " on the go." They cannot con-
centrate, they cannot remember. They are in a state
of perpetual motion. They are worried and anxious,
fret and are irritable, until, through sheer exhaustion
of mind, they drift into the most characteristic condi-
tion of the neurasthenic, that of fatigue. And it is not
surprising that such men become fatigued. The aver-
age neurasthenic is ordered to take a rest in the after-
noon, but he spends the time in reading the paper;
he goes to bed early at night, but sits up reading a
novel. He gives his body more rest than it needs,
failing to realise that what the body needs is not re-
laxation but re-invigoration. At the same time he
never permits his mind that rest which alone can
enable it to invigorate the body. It is characteristic
of the neurasthenic that in the morning, possibly after
a long night's sleep, he wakes up more fatigued than
he went to bed; for though his body has had many
hours' rest, his mind has been restless and perturbed
even in sleep.

This art of resting the mind and the power of dis-
missing from it all care and worry is probably one of
the secrets of energy in our great men. It is generally
said that Edison, the inventor, finds four hours' sleep
sufficient for his needs and that he works for eighteen
hours. If that is the case, I can conceive him as a man
whose mind, in spite of the nature of his work, has the
power of banishing all the problems and difficulties of
the day. This, I understand, was also one of the

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 105

secrets of the energy of Gladstone, and probably also
of many other great men who have the power to free
their minds entirely from the business of the day in
dreamless sleep. Look into the face of Napoleon and,
besides the cruelty there, you will see that perfect com-
posure and calm which stamps him as a man of great
reserve power.1

The mental and moral strain that some men have to
undergo seems incredible. In the course of a day a
Prime Minister, for instance, guides the counsels of
state, directs wars, settles industrial disputes, and con-
ducts diplomatic relations with other nations, all in
addition to the ordinary cares of his private affairs.
Compare his output of energy with that, say, of his
barber, whose anxieties are confined to his little shop,
whose disputes are concerned only with his two assist-
ants, and whose diplomacy reaches its height in his
attempt to persuade you to buy his hair lotion without
suggesting that you are bald. Yet, if you observe these
two men at the close of day, probably the Prime
Minister is the less fatigued of the two. The thing
that strikes us is that, however much energy such a
man expends, there always seems to be an ample re-
supply which keeps him vigorous and fresh.

At the present time I am treating each morning
about twenty neurasthenic patients at once by hypnotic
suggestion. I always commence treatment by sugges-
tions of quietness and calmness of mind, of freedom
from anxiety and the passing away of all nervousness
and fear. To attempt to stimulate a restless and
worried mind with energetic suggestions is as futile as
whipping a dying horse. When the mind is quiet and
rested, only then do I suggest thoughts of vigour of
mind, strength of body, and determination of will.
Inspiring, stimulating thoughts, falling on a mind calm
and receptive, draw from its silent depths ample re-

1 It is interesting to note that, even physiologically, Napoleon was con-
structed with a power of rest shared by few men, for he had a pulse rate of
only about 50 compared with the normal rate of 75.

106 THE SPIRIT in

sources of strength which produce calmness and peace.
The confidence and happiness with which these men rise
from their half-hour's rest is a proof that this rest,
unlike the neurasthenic's ordinary night's " rest," has
brought them into touch with untold resources of
power.

The art of alternating rest and activity is an art well
worth acquiring. Some people have the power of
putting themselves to sleep for five or ten minutes at
any time of the day. This carries with it the power
of dismissing from the mind at any time all cares,
which forthwith

fold up their tents like the Arabs
And silently steal away.

Night time should be reserved for sleep, and no
thoughts of the day should be permitted to break into
the preserves of sleep.

I once put into a short hypnotic sleep a patient,
tremulous, anxious, sleepless. When he awakened he
spontaneously remarked that that was the best sleep he
had had for months, and on being questioned replied
that he thought he had slept for several hours, whereas,
in point of fact, he had slept only a few minutes.
During those few moments he had had a perfect con-
trol over a mind worried with anxious thoughts.

That the life of energy is dependent on the art of
resting is one of the fundamental laws of phvsiology as
well as of psychology. The alternation of rest and
work is necessary for the activity of life. Even the
heart is not always active, as is sometimes supposed;
it has its periods of repose at the end of each beat when
there is a rest and relaxation, which, though it lasts
only the fraction of a second, is sufficient to refresh it
for the next beat. In the last section we mentioned
the fact that a nerve was practically unfatiguable.
That fact is not due to there being no wastage, for the
nerve tissue is always being used up ; as Waller says, the
nerve " is inexhaustible, not because there is little or no

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 107

expenditure, but because there is an ample re-supply."
The nerve rests for only a very small fraction of a
second between the electric shocks which pass along
it, yet in that moment of rest it is able to draw upon
that ample re-supply which reinvigorates it to renewed
activity. These physiological principles point the way
to find refreshment of the mind. There are ample
resources of power at our disposal, but in the course
of our life we need moments of mental rest when the
soul can go apart and rest awhile. Life, like music,
has its rhythm of silence as well as of sound; it has its
crests of surging energy, and its quiet calm in the
trough of the wave. Life has its moments of throb-
bing energy, but needs also its moments of relaxation.
The restful life does not demand that we withdraw
from the world in ascetic retreat; but it demands such
a control of our thoughts and feelings that, even when
active in body, we can have that quiescence of mind
which is itself the most perfect rest.

And out of that tranquillity shall rise
The end and healing of our earthly pains,
Since the mind governed is the mind at rest.

The Source of Energy

This Essay has raised the question as to whether our
strength comes from within ourselves, in which case we
may be conceived as a reservoir of energy, or whether
it is derived from an outside source, using us as a
channel for its activity. ( 1 ) It is true that we do
store up a certain amount of energy derived, physiolog-
ically from the nutriment of food and air, psychologi-
cally from the myriads of impressions of sight, sound,
and touch, which are continually falling upon our senses
and being recorded and stored, probably in the lower
brain centres. (2) But what we have been specially
considering are not these acquired energies, but the
great hereditary instinctive powers which have borne
down like a wave through humanity from generation
to generation. (3) Several of the greatest psycholo-

108 THE SPIRIT in

gists, and, in particular, those clinical psychologists
who have to deal with the actual diseases of men, have
tended towards the view that the source of power is to
be regarded as some impulse that works through us,
and is not of our own making. What Janet calls
" mental energy " is a force which ebbs in the neur-
asthenic and flows in the healthy man; Jung speaks of
libido or urge as a force which surges through our
lives, now as an impulse towards nutrition, now as the
sexual instinct; there is also the elan vital of Bergson.
These views suggest that we are not merely receptacles
but channels of energy. Life and power is not so much
contained in us, it courses through us. Man's might
is not to be measured by the stagnant water in the
well, but by the limitless supply from the clouds of
heaven. These descriptive theories represent man as
borne on the crest of an impulse which he can only
partially control. Whether we are to look upon this
impulse as cosmic energy, as a life force, or what may
be its relation to the Divine immanence in Nature, it is
for other investigators to say. It is the business of
the philosopher to speculate upon the ultimate nature
of reality. The scientist has merely to study the laws
of its manifestation in concrete expression. I merely
wish to point out that the views expressed above as to
the derivation of our human energies from the in-
stinctive emotions does not exclude the foregoing or
any other theories as to their ultimate source, which is
yet a matter of speculation.

The Dynamic of Religion
While it has not been the purpose of this Essay to
deal with questions of theology, I cannot help pointing
out that our discussion of the psychology of power has
a very direct bearing on the question of the dynamic of
religion, and especially on the power possessed by the
Christian religion of liberating energies which can
transform the living soul into a quickening spirit. In
its fundamental doctrine of love to God and man.

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER 109

Christianity harmonises the emotions of the soul into
one inspiring purpose, thereby abolishing all conflict,
and liberating instead of suppressing the free energies
of men. In its doctrine of the Spirit it emphasises the
element of power in religion. No reader of the New
Testament can fail to be struck by the constant reitera-
tion in different forms of the idea that the normal
experience of a Christian at that epoch was enhance-
ment of power — "I can do all things " — an enhance-
ment attributed by them to the operation in and
through them of a divine energy to which the com-
munity gave the name of the " Spirit " — " Ye shall
receive power." Pentecost, the healing miracles of the
Apostolic Age, the triumphant progress of the religion
through the Roman Empire, the heroic deeds of saints
and martyrs, — all these point to the sense of a power
newly discovered. In contrast, looking at the Church
of to-day, one cannot but be struck with its powerless-
ness. It contains men of intellect; it produces a type
of piety and devotion which one cannot but admire; it
sacrifices itself in works of kindness and beneficence;
but even its best friends would not claim that it inspires
in the world the sense of power. What strikes one
rather is its impotence and failure. This want of in-
spiration and power is associated with the fact that men
no longer believe in the existence of the Spirit in any
effective practical way. They believe in God the
Father, and they are reverent; they believe in the Son,
and the Church numbers amongst its members millions
who humbly try to " follow in His steps "; but for all
practical purposes they are like that little band at
Ephesus who had " not so much as heard whether
there be any Holy Ghost," and, lacking the inspiration
of such a belief, they are weak and wonder why.

In this place I need only indicate the close connection
between restfulness of mind, so essential to the cure of
nervous ills, and that characteristic of religious devo-
tion. " They that wait on the Lord shall renew their

no THE SPIRIT in

strength." There is the alternation of repose and
work, and the insistence on the source of strength being
of a psychical and not a physical character. Chris-
tianity also teaches that to learn to rest, not only in
moments snatched from our work but by keeping a
mind free from worry and anxiety, neither caring for
the morrow nor fearful of the forgiven past, is to
give ourselves the opportunity of drawing on that
" ample re-supply " which comes to those who do not
fear to expend their energy for others. Life will throb
within and through us, but our souls will be in repose.

The religious writings of men of old constantly em-
phasised confidence and cheerfulness as the keynote to
strength. " In quietness and confidence shall be your
strength." " Let not your heart be troubled." " Be
not anxious." " Be of good cheer, I have overcome
the world." " Say unto them of a fearful heart, ' Be
strong, fear not.' " Such words as the following are
literally fulfilled before our eyes in a shell-shock hos-
pital of the present day. " The eyes of the blind shall
be opened, and the ears of the deaf be unstopped.
Then shall the lame man leap as an hart and the tongue
of the dumb shall sing. They shall obtain gladness and
joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." Accur-
ately and wonderfully these words describe both the
treatment by the suggestion of confidence and its effects,
as well on the body as on the mind.

This power which the Church has lost is being re-
discovered, but along different lines. The psycho-
therapist, who is a physician of the soul, has been com-
pelled to acknowledge the validity of the practical
principles of the Christian religion, though he may or
may not accept the doctrines on which they are said to
be based.

Speaking as a student of psychotherapy, who, as
such, has no concern with theology, I am convinced
that the Christian religion is one of the most valuable
and potent influences that we possess for producing that

in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POWER m

harmony and peace of mind and that confidence of soul
which is needed to bring health and power to a large
proportion of nervous patients. In some cases I have
attempted to cure nervous patients with suggestions of
quietness and confidence, but without success until I
have linked these suggestions on to that faith in the
power of God which is the substance of the Christian's
confidence and hope. Then the patient has become
strong.1

I have tried to show that the experience of applied
psychology, and especially psychotherapy, points to-
wards the conclusion that we are living far below the
limits of our possible selves, and that there are open
to us resources of power, available through the right
use of our instincts, which, if directed to noble pur-
poses, will free our minds from those worries,
anxieties, and morbid fatigue which spoil our lives, and
will free us for a life of energy and strength.

In the course of my argument I have indicated direc-
tions in which this line of investigation cannot but
affect the theory and practice of religion : to have done
more than indicate directions might have seemed pre-
sumptuous in one who speaks as a student of science
rather than as a philosopher or theologian. I hope,
however, that I have made it clear that few things

1 Lest this should be considered a prejudiced view I quote from Jung (Ana-
lytical Psychology) : " I have come to the conclusion that these religious and
philosophical motive forces — the so-called metaphysical needs of the human
being — must receive positive consideration at the hands of the analyst (physi-
cian) ... he must make them serve biological ends as psychologically valuable
factors. Thus these instincts assume once more those functions that have been
theirs from time immemorial." Again in a volume entitled The Christian Re-
ligion as a Healing Power (E. Worcester and others), I find quoted some
weighty opinions. Mobius, the neurologist, says: " The consciousness of be-
ing within the hand of Providence, the confident hope of future righteousness
and redemption, is a support to the believer in his work, his care and his need,
for which unbelief has no compensation. If we consider the effect of irreligion
as increasing our helplessness to resist the storms of life, its relation to nervous-
ness cannot be doubted." " Religious faith," says Dubois of Berne, himself an
agnostic, " would be the best preventative against the maladies of the soul and
the most powerful means of curing them, if it had sufficient life to create true
Christian stoicism in its followers. Feeling himself upheld by his God, he fears
neither sickness nor death ... he remains unshaken in the midst of his suffer-
ings, and is inaccessible to the cowardly emotions of nervous people." Dr.
Clouston of Edinburgh, the specialist in mental diseases, says, " to treat of the
hygiene of the mind, without including a consideration of the religious instinct
and its effects, would be to omit one of its most powerful factors."

ii2 THE SPIRIT in

would be of more value, whether for medical science,
for everyday conduct, or for religion, than such a re-
interpretation of some of the fundamental beliefs of
Christianity as would make them intellectually possible
of acceptance to the modern man. And Psychology
has opened up lines along which one may look to see
effected that reconciliation between science and religion,
the attempt to procure which led to an impasse a gen-
eration ago because " science " was taken almost ex-
clusively to mean Physics. The main object, however,
of the Essay has been practical — to show that there
are resources of power at the disposal of all. But the
fact that so many seek for power and yet do not receive
it suggests that piety is not the only requisite of power.
To obtain it we must obey the higher laws of nature,
and in particular make use of the forces we already
find at our human disposal; and fearlessly expending
them in a spirit of confidence for the fulfilment of our
ideals, we shall harmonise mind, will, and emotion in
one throbbing impulse of life and power.

Taking, then, the instincts in their cruder form as
handed down to us by our brutish ancestry, we should
seek not to suppress them, but to use the powers which
lie latent in them. We may transform where we can-
not suppress, and, by aid of reason and the higher
emotions, re-direct the lower instincts to nobler pur-
poses. We need not obstruct, but press into our ser-
vice, the passions of the soul; we can fill our sails with
the very winds and gales which threaten the shipwreck
of our lives; tap the resources of the lightning which
ruthlessly destroys, and turn its electric power into the
driving-force of our enterprises.

IV
WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST

C. A. ANDERSON SCOTT, MA., D.D.

PROFESSOR OF THE NEW TESTAMENT AT WESTMINSTER COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

AUTHOR OF
DOMINUS NOSTER," COMMENTARY ON REVELATION IN " CENTURY BIBLE," ETC.

SYNOPSIS

Introduction. — Current answers may be true, but are not adequate
— origin of conception of spirit. Specific contribution of Hebrew mind,
the idea of the Spirit of God. Functions assigned to the Spirit,
especially that of inspiration. Operations sporadic and discontinuous.
Ethical connotation of the idea but slightly developed in the Old
Testament. Profound change in the conception of the Spirit due to
the teaching of Christ, and the experience of Pentecost.

The Upper Room. — The persons present were taking up a common
faith attitude to Jesus — the miraculous features of the narrative are
capable of explanation along the lines of psychological phenomena and
traditional accompaniments of the Spirit. The speaking with tongues
was not comprehensible: its true character. The narrative is not the
result of mythical accretion. There has been a converse process of
clarification of the experience through the application of the ethical
criterion. The " founding of the Church " not an adequate explanation.

The New Thing: Emergency of the Fellowship. — Significance
of the Koinonia. Illustrations of its importance from the Acts and from
St. Paul. The power of the Spirit was first manifested in permanent
form in the emergence of the Fellowship, with Agape for its connecting
tissue. Nature of the Fellowship.

The Symbol of the Fellowships: the Loaf. — There is a symbolism
attaching to the Loaf even prior to the breaking — and a symbolism in
the breaking. Further, the Body represented by the Loaf was there to
be offered up.

The Fellowship the Organ of Insight. — The intense vitality of
the new community was manifested alike in thought and in diversity
of organisation. A clue to the meaning of St. Paul's formula " in
Christ."

The Ethical Confirmation.

Further Results: Gifts and Powers.

What a New Pentecost would be like.

WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST

The coming of the Spirit? But was there any time
when the Spirit was not at work among God's people?
Was there any people in whom God's Spirit did not
continually seek to operate or " rule " (Gen. vi. 3) ?
Was there any people that did not show some results
of the Spirit's working in intellectual and moral
progress?

The birth of the Church? But was there not al-
ready "- a Church " existing in some real sense before
the day of Pentecost? Was it not prr,jent as a Chris-
tian Church from the day when Jesus first gathered
round Himself a band of permanent disciples — not to
speak of the existence of a Church of God under vari-
ous aspects from the time that God called His people
out of Egypt? What was afterwards described as
" the fruit of the Spirit " was not a new phenomenon
in any of its parts: no generation had been without
some witness of the response of man to the ethical
ideals of God.

Neither the presence of the Spirit, nor the recogni-
tion of that presence, nor yet some results of it, had
been lacking prior to Pentecost. What then happened
that was so epoch-making? It is plain that though
most of the answers which are commonly given to
this question are correct, few, if any, of them penetrate
to the heart of the matter as an experience which
produced such stupendous results.

To find a true answer to the question we must first
examine the origin of the conception of " the Spirit,"
and then the limitations under which prior to Pentecost
the Spirit was understood to work.

115

n6 THE SPIRIT iv

The origin of the conception lies far back in the
history of human thought. Earlier than any written
record, it is nevertheless not obscurely indicated by
the history of human speech. This testifies that the
fundamental idea underlying the word " spirit " is
that of invisible force. The earliest form of invisible
force of which men became aware was undoubtedly
the wind without, the breath within, themselves. And
there is great significance in the fact that in many
languages the same word has stood for " wind,"
" breath," and " spirit." The spectacle of the leaves
being whirled over the ground, or of the trees shaken
by the gale, was impressive evidence of an invisible
force. A similar invisible force within man himself
was somehow connected with his being " alive." When
man " whose breath is in his nostrils," " breathed
his last," the power that animated him departed. He
ceased to "live"; but what about the power? Did
it cease to be, or to be invisible force? If it did not
disperse, if it continued to exist, it was natural to
think of it as still his " breath," his " spirit," invisible
but not wholly unknown, seeing that the man him-
self had been known. And to it came to be ascribed
not only a continuance of existence but a continuance
of force or influence. To human beings in almost
total ignorance of the " natural " causes of phenomena
which affected them, perhaps the readiest explanation
of such happenings would be the influence still exer-
cised by the "spirits" of the departed — more espe-
cially when the event corresponded to their disposition
when alive, malevolent or otherwise. Thus for men
at a certain stage of development the unseen world, the
air or the sky, came to be peopled with invisible spirit-
forces, manifesting in the experience of those they
affected characters of good or evil.

By a converse process it was natural to ascribe to
other invisible forces of Nature, as they were success-
ively discerned, entity and character corresponding to

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 117

what was observed in men. And so to unseen forces
of human origin were added " super-human " forces,
what St. Paul calls " the spirit-forces in the unseen "
(Eph. vi. 12).

Upon this basis of speculation common at least to
most primitive religions the Hebrew mind developed
a conception which appears to have been peculiar to
itself, part of its specific contribution to human thought
about God. Alone among the races of which we have
record the Hebrews conceived of the " Spirit of God."
They thought of their God Jehovah as having a
"Spirit"; and increasingly, as time went on, they
traced the effects of the Divine Will, especially those
which were startling or abnormal, to the agency of
this Spirit. This was partly due to the increasing
reluctance to ascribe such things to the direct opera-
tion of God, the increasing tendency to feel a necessity
for intermediaries between God Himself and man.
The old frank and simple anthropomorphism had not
felt that necessity. God conversed directly with men.
But a change had followed the revelation which came
through the prophets, of the " holiness " and the uni-
versality of God. To the attribute of ritual " holi-
ness " or separation was added that of ethical separate-
ness: " Thou art of purer eyes than to behold iniquity."
At the same time the discovery was made that the God
of Israel was " the Lord of all the earth." In both
ways, through the moralising of His " holiness " and
the increase of His majesty, it became increasingly
difficult to think of God entering into immediate com-
munication with men. Human sinfulness and the
Divine " holiness," human littleness and the Divine
" majesty " — to account for communication or inter-
course between these wide extremes it seemed neces-
sary to posit the operation of intermediate agencies.
Sometimes these were represented by " spirits," " mes-
sengers," or " angels " sent " from the Lord ": " who
maketh His angels spirits, his ministers a flaming fire."

n8 THE SPIRIT iv

But even more commonly the agency was ascribed to
some specific energy of the Divine being — God's
Word, God's Wisdom, or God's Spirit.

It does not appear that the writers of the Old Tes-
tament drew any exclusive distinction between these
forms of the Divine activity in respect of the func-
tions which were assigned to one or other of them.
The place of Agent in Creation, for example, is as-
signed by different writers to each of the three, to
the Word, the Wisdom, and the Spirit (Ps. civ. 30)
of God. Nevertheless there are certain functions
which were assigned to the Spirit as peculiarly appro-
priate to its activity. These include the enhancement
in certain men of their natural gifts and powers,
such as wisdom, judgement, skill, and craftsmanship.
But there is one function which is specially assigned to
the Spirit in the Old Testament, that of " inspiration."
It was the Spirit that took possession of men, and
became the organ of Divine communication through
men to other men. It is the Spirit that inspires men to
" prophesy," that is, primarily, to give ecstatic utter-
ance to religious emotion and conviction. Possession
of and by the Spirit was sole and sufficient authority for
speaking the truth of God in the name of God (Is.
lxi. 1). In the Old Testament this operation of the
Spirit is both sporadic and discontinuous. It was recog-
nised from time to time in certain individuals or in cer-
tain groups. It was not part of the general and con-
tinuous endowment of God's people. And we have a
measure both of the value attached to the manifesta-
tion, and of the wistful desire for its extension, in the
fact that part of the promise held out regarding the
Messianic period was a wide extension, if not a uni-
versalising, of the gift: "I will pour out my spirit
upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall
prophesy " (Joel ii. 28).

It is only very rarely in the Old Testament that the
Spirit appears as agent in the sphere of physical nature :

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 119

" The Spirit works on man and through man." And
still more rarely is its influence represented as affecting
the moral nature of man.

The modern reader is apt to take the contrary for
granted. It is natural to assume that throughout the
Bible the specific influence of " the Holy Spirit " is
and must be towards " holiness," " sanctification," in
the meaning which we attach to the words to-day.
The fact, however, is that we owe it to the teaching of
Christ that we give an ethical meaning to these words
to-day. Only twice in the Old Testament does the
phrase "holy spirit" occur (Ps. li. II, Is. lxiii. 10).
And prior to the revelation through Him there was at
most only a rudimentary trace of ethical meaning in
the words " holy," " holiness." In the Old Testament
they signify primarily, and almost exclusively, " separ-
ated " or " dedicated," and so " belonging to God "
Whereas in the Epistles of the New Testament the
ethical significance of the words has established itself,
and is rapidly advancing to a position of predominance,
though not to the entire exclusion of the earlier
" ritual " meaning.1 If we find in the later portions
of the Old Testament the beginnings of the idea that
he who is " holy " as belonging to God ought to be and
is on the way to be " holy " in the sense of conformity
to His character, it is to Christ that we owe not only
the confirmation of the possibility but the full contents
of the conception.2 " Holy Spirit " in the Old Testa-
ment is best represented to our minds by " Divine
Spirit."

Even in the Old Testament, therefore, God in His
active relation to man was conceived in terms of
" spirit." The revelation " God is Spirit," with all
its implications, was still in the future. But already
a discovery or revelation (the two words describe the

1 To realise the change it is sufficient to compare Lev. xi. 44 with 1 Pet. i. 15,
16, where the same precept evidently involves different conditions of fulfilment
on the two occasions. Cf. also Ps. lxxxvi. 2.

2 That the other conception has not disappeared from the New Testament is
seen, for example, in 1 Cor. vii. 14, where it forms the basis of Paul's argument.

120 THE SPIRIT iv

same thing looked at from opposite ends) had been
made that God reached the minds and wills of men
through His " Spirit." This discovery was to prove
of momentous importance in the history of religion.
It opened the way for the development of religion on
a new plane, for all that is properly described as
"spiritual religion"; in other words, for a religion
which involves and expresses reciprocal intercourse and
fellowship between God who is Spirit and the spirit of
man — one in which law and ritual, authority and ob-
servance, fall into a subordinate and ancillary position,
as valuable but not indispensable — one which can be
universal because it postulates no other condition than
the activity of the Spirit, " the ultimate expression of
the unity and communion of God and man." 1 The
men who first spoke of " the Spirit of God " were
unconsciously preparing for the revelation that " God
is Spirit," and that religion in its highest form is the
cultivation of the reciprocal bond between God as
Spirit and man made a living spirit by the Spirit of
God, even as redemption is the restoration of that bond
suspended or destroyed by sin.

But before Pentecost " the Spirit was not yet, be-
cause Jesus was not yet glorified." So did one, writing
after fifty years' experience of the Spirit's influence
within the Church, express the immeasurable difference
between its power and its character as apprehended
before and after Pentecost. After Pentecost the effec-
tive presence of the Spirit within and among men had
become so indubitable, so revolutionary, and so central
to religious experience, that, by comparison with what
went before, it was as though the Spirit had then come
into being. Of course the writer of the Fourth Gospel
neither meant nor expected that his statement would
be taken literally. It was not likely that he would
deny the existence of the Spirit, even under the earlier
dispensation, or its influence in former generations on

l Pringle-Pattison, Idea of God, p. 410.

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 121

certain persons and in certain directions. Neither were
any of his fellow-disciples, who had been nourished on
the Hebrew Scriptures, in ignorance on the subject.
Just as the mind of Christ in His relation to the world
of men and things had been there described as His
" Wisdom," so His Will in effective contact with men
had been described as His Spirit. It was not in the
Spirit that any change had taken place, but in men,
who had become fully receptive of the Spirit through
the experiences that culminated in, and those that
started from, the Upper Room.

The Upper Room

The Persons. — The gift of the Spirit under the new
conditions came first to a company of men and women,
some hundred and twenty in all, numerous enough to
include many widely divergent types of character and
experience. The Apostles (their number restored to
twelve) were apparently all present, though the narra-
tive does not call attention to the fact, and still less
gives any ground for supposing that the gift was
bestowed on them alone. What had brought this
company together, what was holding them together,
was a common attitude of mind and will to Him who
had been known as Jesus of Nazareth. This was an
attitude of the whole personality; that is to say, it
involved not only the feelings — admiration, affection,
sorrow at His removal, wistful longing for His return
— but also the intellect, in the recognition of Him as
the Messiah, the One in whom the age-long expecta-
tion of Israel was at last realised. And it was an
attitude involving not feeling and intellect alone, but
also will. In Jesus they had yielded to the authority
of a unique personality, a character wholly inspired
by love. Through Him and His fellowship they had
discovered God as a supreme force of love and right-
eousness that really counted in their lives. And though
they were not yet able to construe the implications of

122 THE SPIRIT iv

their submission to Jesus and to God in Him — any
more than they were able to express the total im-
pression He had made upon their minds in proposi-
tions regarding Him — they had accepted His yoke;
they were, as in the Acts they are frequently called,
His " disciples." Their confidence in Him as the
Messiah had been restored by the Resurrection. They
had not yet perhaps been led to give to Him " the
name that is above every name," the name of " Lord."
But all the motives and dispositions for so " sanctify-
ing Christ as Lord " were already present, except the
experience of His gift of the Spirit.

And for that they were waiting. It was " the
promise of the Father." And they believed that the
fulfilment was imminent. Their recognition of Jesus
as the Messiah, their conviction that the Messianic Age
had begun, or was just about to begin, would quicken
the hope that the promise which went back to Joel
would now be fulfilled, and that God would " pour
forth of Llis Spirit upon all flesh." It was to the
disciples of Jesus taking up this attitude to Him, and
gathered together in one place, that the Spirit in the
first instance came.

The Event. — As they waited the Spirit "came."
There were elements of emotional tension and strained
expectation, as well as elements of assured faith and
joyful thankfulness, in the psychological situation.
And it would be small wonder if all of these have con-
tributed to the account which was afterwards given of
the events of Pentecost. Our interpretation of the
narrative must take account of modern research in re-
spect of what was physically or psychologically abnor-
mal. It takes but little heightening of well-authenti-
cated psychological phenomena to account for the im-
pressions, whether of hearing or seeing.1 And the
things heard and seen, the wind and the flame, were, it
is not unimportant to notice, phenomena that were

l Cf. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 478.

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 123

traditionally associated with the Spirit.1 They were
therefore the kind of thing which people profoundly
convinced of the Spirit's coming would be likely to feel
and see, or think they felt and saw. So that whether
we think of this company of believers in Jesus as
Messiah, intensely pre-occupied with the thought of
His function and His promise, exalted by a high emo-
tional tension, and then " receiving the Spirit," or
whether we think of one of them who had shared with
the rest in the wonderful " baptism," afterwards de-
scribing what happened, it is not difficult to understand
how the hearing of wind and the seeing of flame came
to be the form in which the central fact was expressed.

The other external phenomenon, which is specially
emphasised in the account of Pentecost, is the glossola-
lia or " speaking with tongues." This was reproduced
on other occasions of the " descent " of the Spirit, and
was reckoned as one of the charismata or normal mani-
festations of the Spirit's presence. It appears to have
been widespread in the Church, and persisted certainly
for twenty years, and probably for much longer in cer-
tain areas.

Here also the narrative in the Acts bears marks of
heightening due to emotional excitation, and possibly
to traditional association. There can be little doubt,
however, that the glossolalia of Pentecost did not differ
in character from that which was afterwards a familiar
feature in the worship of the Church at Corinth. That
is to say, so far from it being speech intelligible to
those who spoke a different language from the speaker,
it was speech or utterance which was intelligible to no
one. " He that speaketh in a tongue edifieth himself,"
but if he is to edify others, he must either interpret
for himself or find an interpreter (1 Cor. xii. 2-13).
So it was in Corinth twenty years later; and we may
be sure it was not otherwise at Jerusalem on the day of

1 According to Justin Martyr and also the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Spirit
appeared at the Baptism of Jesus in the form of fire. Cf. also Ps. civ. 4.

i24 THE SPIRIT iv

Pentecost. There it is important to observe the dif-
ferent witness borne by different sections of the crowd.
Some, possibly those on the outskirts, or possibly those
who had no religious interest in the scene, were content
with the explanation, " these are filled with sweet
wine." To their ears the utterances were incoherent,
just as St. Paul assumed that the " tongues " at Corinth
would be: " If outsiders or unbelievers come in, will
they not say you are insane ? " ( i Cor. xi. 23 ) . Others
again, possibly those who stood nearer, or possibly
those who were less " outsiders " in a religious sense,
were deeply impressed, and are reported to have said,
representative though they were of many nationalities,
" We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonder-
ful works of God." The crowd was not, however, so
heterogeneous as is suggested by the list of nationali-
ties. It was made up for the most part, if not wholly,
of " Jews and proselytes," the racially miscellaneous
yet religiously homogeneous crowd brought together
in Jerusalem by the attraction of a religious festival of
the Jews. What they heard need not have been co-
herent or even intelligible speech, but such utterances
as quickened in their minds a sympathetic response.
Their own stored-up recollections of the " wonderful
works of God " were set loose by the ecstatic, though
it may have been unintelligible, utterances of men with
whom they were to some extent en rapport.^

The situation may be illustrated by something which
occurred at Westminster just before the war. There
was then held a worldwide conference of the Salvation
Army, at which were present representatives of nations
even more numerous and more heterogeneous than
those tabulated in Acts ii. A report of one of the
meetings contains the following striking sentence:
" Each time the theme (the saving love of God in
Christ) was touched upon, it brought forth from the

1 The expression given to the experience, and possibly the psychological
character of the experience itself, may find illustration in John iv. 29, " Come
fee a man that told me all things that ever I did."

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 125

pent-up feelings of the vast assembly a sort of half-
sigh of appreciation. Yet many in the audience knew
no English, but they felt that the one great truth to
them was being announced at this particular moment.
Indians, Chinese, Canadians, Peruvians, Swedes, all of
them gave the deep emotional response." It would
not be difficult to believe that when the speaker on
that occasion had finished, representatives of these
various races would be found saying, " We heard him
speaking in our tongue the mighty works of God." x

Ecstatic utterance, requiring, but on the occasion of
Pentecost lacking, interpretation to make it compre-
hensible to the hearers, but utterance which at the same
time quickened in those who had some religious feeling
in common with the speakers a sympathetic response,
an excitation of religious emotion and insight — such
appears to have been the phenomenon of glossolalia as
manifested at Pentecost and after.2

Subsequent chapters of the Acts record cases both of
individuals and of groups in which the taking up of the
same faith-attitude to Jesus (expressed by calling upon
Him as " Lord ") was followed by a similar reception
of the Spirit. In one instance (which may possibly
embody another tradition of the initial experience of
Pentecost) we find allusion to accompanying phenom-
ena in the physical order. " The place was shaken
where they were assembled together" (Acts iv. 31).
Similarly there is more than one case where we are
told that the reception of the Holy Spirit was followed
by the gift of glossolalia (Acts x. 44-48, xix. 6) ; but
had it not been for the long discussion of the subject
in 1 Corinthians we should not have known how wide
and how enduring was the experience. But meanwhile
other " charisms " had begun to manifest themselves,
for which there was no opportunity in the Upper Room
— " gifts of healings," " working of miracles," as well

lChurch Times, June 26, 1914.

2 See Bartlct, Apostolic Age, pp. 13, 14; also Comm. on Acts of the Apostles,
P. 384-

126 THE SPIRIT iv

as "prophecy" and "discerning of spirits" {e.g. i
Cor. xii. 9). The striking thing about the allusions
to these gifts is the way in which they are taken for
granted as phenomena with which every one was fa-
miliar. They were valued not as evidence, say, of the
truth of the Gospel, but for the contribution they made
to the common life of the community. No appeal is
made to such manifestations as evidence of anything
else than the effective presence of the Holy Spirit. The
nearest approach to an argument based upon the pos-
session of such powers is found in Paul's claim to be
recognised as an Apostle on the ground that he showed
" the signs of an Apostle," " by signs and wonders and
mighty works" (2 Cor. xii. 12). "Miracles" were
commoner in those days, and less significant, than many
have supposed.

This comparatively subordinate position assigned
to " miracles " in the defence or presentation of the
Gospel is very remarkable. We may see not only
a singular correspondence between the attitude and
method of the primitive Church and those adopted
by our Lord Himself, we see also a clear indication
that it is not in phenomena of this class that we are
to find the really significant results of the Spirit's work-
ing. And there is a further indication of their minor
importance in the fact that St. Paul foresaw regarding
" prophecies " that they should " fail," and " tongues "
that they should " cease." Neither does the Apostle
appear to have been disturbed by the anticipation.
But nothing that was transitory can give the true dif-
ferentiation of what happened at Pentecost. We have
to look for something that was lasting and revolution-
ary, something that underlies and accounts for the ex-
perience along its whole length. We may well be
guided by the criterion employed by St. Paul. The
Apostle never displayed his spiritual insight more con-
spicuously than in his analysis of the group of " char-
isms " or " spiritual gifts " which were in fact forms

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 127

of the Spirit's action (1 Cor. xii.-xiv. ). He arranges
them in a definite scale of comparative value. There
are among them good, better, and best. The best of
all is love, with its correlates (which indeed it includes)
Faith and Hope. And the criterion by which its su-
premacy is primarily confirmed is its permanence. It
" abides." Prophecies, tongues, even knowledge, fail
or disappear. " Love never faileth." The same cri-
terion of comparative value is to be applied to the
whole range of phenomena connected with Pentecost.

Some have sought to explain the marvellous features
in the narrative of Acts ii. as due to mythical accretion.
But this is not necessary, nor even probable. Such
accretion may take place around a person or movement
the circumstances of whose initial appearance have been
obscure or unimpressive. In such a case an internal
experience or impression of a striking kind has been
the first thing to be distinguished. And " mythical
accretion " is due to the attempt to objectivise it, to
give the experience a concrete form adequate to the
impression. To this we have a parallel in the growth
of the " legend " of St. Francis. But here we are pre-
sented with the converse process. When the initial
impulse has been externally startling in its character
and immediate in some of the results, the tendency of
an approximately contemporary account is to enhance
the attendant circumstances, but for subsequent reflec-
tion, penetrating through the circumstances to the real
phenomenon, to reduce the emphasis on the externally
marvellous and concentrate on the essential facts.

It is this latter process of which we see evidence
when we compare successive stages in the record of
the Spirit's influence in the primitive community. In
the first stage attention is concentrated on the marvel-
lous accompaniments which attended the original out-
pouring of the Spirit, but were not, so far as we are
told, repeated. A vivid description is given of ex-

i28 THE SPIRIT iv

ternal phenomena culminating in the disciples " speak-
ing with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utter-
ance," and the consequent amazement on the part of
the bystanders. In the second stage the phenomena
belonging to the physical order no longer appear. The
Spirit comes upon men, but no reference is found to
any " rushing mighty wind," or to the appearance of
" tongues as of fire." The glossolalia or " speaking
with tongues " continues, but as a manifestation which
requires to be regulated. On the other hand, it is now
found to be accompanied by a group of exceptional
manifestations also belonging to the psychological
order, such as gifts of healing, prophecy, and adminis-
tration. In the third stage, while the physical phe-
nomena continue to be absent, the importance of the
psychologically abnormal is markedly diminished; they
tend to die out, because the ethical consequences of the
Spirit's presence are now clearly observed and esti-
mated at their superior value. First glossolalia, and
afterwards prophecy, falls into discredit. The ethical
results assert their supremacy.

This is not a process of " mythical accretion," but
of progressive clarification, through the application of
an ethical criterion.1 And the way in which the record
in the Acts preserves the features that marked the
earliest stage is a point in favour of its historical char-
acter. Luke reproduced the story as he got it from
some one who may have be-en in the company, or pres-
ent at the subsequent scene,- regardless of the fact that

l A good parallel to the process suggested in the text (which might be de-
scribed as " decretion " of mythical material) is furnished by a comparison be-
tween the three narratives of St. Paul's conversion which we find in Acts (ix.
1-19; xxii. 6-16; xxvi. 13-20), to which may be added as representing a further
stage. Gal. i. 15-16. In this series the first is plainly characterised by special
emphasis on the marvellous. The details are elaborated with the obvious desire
to enhance the certainty of the wonder by dwelling on the attendant circum-
stances. The later accounts differ in consequence of a shifting of the emphasis
on to that internal experience to which the speaker could testify. And the lat-
est, from the pen of the subject of the experience himself, touches the heart of
the matter, and that only ("It pleased God to reveal his Son in me"). The
process becomes even more striking (and more intelligible) if, according to
Professor Torrey's theory, the series represents three different authorities —
(1) an Aramaic source, (2) Luke, (3) Paul.

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 129

the coming of the Spirit was no longer evidenced by
the same physical phenomena. He laid himself open
to the challenge: How do we know that the Spirit
really comes now, seeing that these things do not hap-
pen now? He trusted the consciousness of the Church
to dismiss such a challenge with an appeal to religious
and ethical experience.

If, however, neither any nor all of the physical or
psychological phenomena which accompanied or fol-
lowed the descent of the Spirit provide a sufficient an-
swer to our question, and if, as will be generally agreed,
we cannot be content to say " The Holy Spirit came,"
what was it that happened? Many have been content
to answer, " The Church." Whereas some have re-
garded the Church as " founded " on that day, others,
holding it to have been founded by the Master in the
Galilean days, would see the Church coming to self-
consciousness and taking shape before the eyes of men
on and immediately after Pentecost. There is no
doubt a true fact lying behind this answer; but while
it is certainly not an exhaustive account of what hap-
pened at Pentecost, it is doubtful whether, even so
far as it goes, it is a satisfactory one.

Much depends upon the significance which we attach
to the word " Church." If we allow our thought to be
guided by anything bearing the name which has come
under our own observation, or by anything that is
described for us subsequent to the first weeks, we are
in danger of going far astray. For one thing, the
narrative in Acts (chapters ii.-iv.) is strangely silent as
to any such phenomenon appearing as an immediate
result of Pentecost. St. Luke, or more probably the
source which he is using, gives no hint of anything which
can be said to characterise the Church as an externally
visible and organised institution. And he rather
markedly refrains from using the word " Church "
itself. Even in v. 11, where it occurs for the first time,

i3o THE SPIRIT iv

he may be using it, as Dr. Hort suggests, " by anticipa-
tion." l And in the preceding chapter he rings the
changes on descriptive phrases, such as " they that be-
lieved," " the brethren," and the like. Indeed, it is
difficult not to feel that he (or his source) is actually
at a loss for a word to describe the new community:
" the Lord added . . . thereunto." Later copyists,
recognising the ambiguity, substituted the word
" Church " for Luke's ambiguous phrase, and so we
find " added to the Church " (Acts ii. 47) in our A.V.

Further, we must note the fact that in these chapters
the increasing body of believers, though positively dis-
tinguished from their surroundings by their common
faith-attitude to Jesus as Messiah, are not yet nega-
tively delimited by separation from the Jewish Church.
The Temple is still for them the natural place for
meeting and for worship : " day after day they resorted
thither," and " they were looked on with favour by
all the people." Moreover, the speech of St. Peter in
Solomon's Portico (Acts iii.) is remarkable for its tone
of mildness and consideration towards the Jews: " I
know, however, that you acted through ignorance, like
your rulers." It looks as though down to the appoint-
ment of the Seven — the first definite step in organisa-
tion — the new community was not conscious of essen-
tial distinctness from the Church of the Jews; and even
as though down to the subsequent martyrdom of Ste-
phen it was not beyond hope that the people as a whole
might be swept into the movement.2

It is sometimes suggested that, either during His
ministry or during the forty days following the resur-
rection, Christ had given to His disciples, or to the
Apostles, instructions for the organisation and adminis-
tration of such an institution as the Church, and that

1 Christian licclcsia, p. 49.

2 St. Paul's remarkable phrase in Gal. i. 20, " the churches of Judaea which
were in Christ," appears to distinguish the " Christian " Churches there from
the Jewish (cf. 1 Thess. ii. 4); and, if so, it is an echo, perhaps the latest,
of this consciousness of sharing a common status with the Jewish Church; it
would also be a point in favour of an early date for the Galatian Epistle.

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 131

these instructions were carried out immediately after
the coming of the Spirit. But apart from the serious
difficulty arising from the fact that the record is silent
as to any such instructions, the suggestion is untenable
because inconsistent with that expectation concerning
the future which was dominant in the Christian con-
sciousness of these first weeks. " The first disciples
believed that they had their Master's authority for
expecting the end of the existing world order in their
own lifetime. Whether they understood Him or not,
clearly they could not have held this opinion if they had
received instructions for the constitution of a church." l

Such considerations — the absence of recorded in-
struction, the incompatibility with the dominant out-
look on the future, the absence of evidence in the open-
ing chapters of the Acts, and the evidence pointing to
a community as yet imperfectly differentiated from the
Jewish Church — seem to preclude the possibility that
there was, at least during the first weeks, anything to
which we should give the name of " Church," an insti-
tution present to the eyes of men as a distinct and
organised society. How, then, are we to describe the
common consciousness of the disciples during the
interval?

There is, moreover, an interval of another order
which cannot but be felt. It is the psychological gap
between the action of the Spirit upon the spirits of the
Apostles and any external result of man's reaction to
the Spirit's influence. Modern psychology would rule
out categorical instruction by the Spirit; even the
quickening of memory as to earlier instructions is pre-
cluded by what has just been said. Some intermediate
result of the Spirit's influence seems to be called for, as
well as something to fill the interval of time, some form
of consciousness which on the one hand had been quick-
ened by the Spirit, and on the other led to the organisa-
tion of the Church.

1 Dean Inge in the Quarterly Review, 1918, p. 33.

132 THE SPIRIT iv

The conclusion seems to be that neither in the mani-
festation of supernatural phenomena, nor in those
" gifts " and " powers " which were subsequently traced
to the Spirit's presence, nor yet in " the foundation of
the Church " do we find an explanation which is at
once adequate and penetrating of what happened at
Pentecost.

The New Thing: Emergence of the Fellowship

All types of explanation emphasise the descent of
the Spirit as the significant happening at Pentecost, but
none of them explore its dynamic meaning. Whereas
for one class of explanation this coming of the Spirit
remained the unexplored fact which the supernatural
phenomena serve to attest, for the other it remained
the unexplored starting-point for the development of
an organisation. The question still remains, What was
the real, primary, and enduring result of the Spirit's
coming? And the answer here suggested is that the
primary result which was permanent, and that which
filled the interval, was what was recognised and de-
scribed as the " Fellowship " (?) Kouwia) ; that the
symbol of the Fellowship (to which the highest im-
portance was attached) was "the Loaf" (o apro?) ;
that its religious efficacy was found in " intuition of
truth" ( eVtyi/onm ) , and that its demonstration to the
world, which was found in the first instance in " mighty
works," was ultimately and permanently discovered in
what St. Paul called " the fruit of the Spirit."

Among the many meanings or shades of meaning
which may legitimately be assigned to Koinonia, it
would seem as though the primary and most important
one has been seriously overlooked. There is reason
to think that in the Acts and the Epistles the word
not infrequently bears an absolute significance which
corresponds to a specific element in the primary con-
sciousness of the nascent Church. The earliest instance
of its use is found in connection with the narrative of

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 133

Pentecost, in Acts ii. 42, as now read by the critical
editions: "They were steadfastly adhering to the
teaching of the Apostles and to the fellowship, to the
breaking of bread and the prayers." The old render-
ing following the Received Text ran: "continued
steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship":
and our Revisers have not thought it necessary to
alter the translation. But most, if not all, modern
commentators recognise that the introduction in the
critical texts of the article before the word KouWa
justifies, if indeed it does not require, the recognition
of the phrase into an independent one. It is not the
teaching and fellowship of the Apostles to which the
community adhered, but the teaching of the Apostles
and the Fellowship. It was a new name for a new
thing, community of spirit issuing in community of
life : * that was the primary result of the coming of the
Spirit.

Consistent with this view is the emphasis which
in these opening chapters is laid upon the fact of
" togetherness," where the external coming together
and being together so frequently referred to is the
expression of that inward sense of oneness indicated
by Koinonia. The intense reality with which this
oneness was felt is indicated in Acts iv. 32 : " the mul-
titude of those that believed had but one heart and
one soul." It was something approximating to a cor-
porate personality that had come into being. The
persons of whom it was made up were conscious of a
" oneness " with one another which was spiritual, and
anterior to any of the more or less external forms in
which it proceeded to express itself.

The first indication of this inward bond was seen in
their "togetherness" ("the believers all kept to-
gether") ; the next in an eager readiness to treat the

1 Cf. "Inward Fellowship and its outward Manifestation" (R. J. Knowling) :
" Used in connection with the Christian Society to express the idea of the fel-
lowship in which it is united, and the acts of fellowship in which the fellowship
is realised " (J. Armitage Robinson).

134 THE SPIRIT iv

possessions of each as belonging to all: " they shared
all they had with one another; they would sell their
possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds
among all, as any one might need" (Acts iii. 45 ff.;
cf. v. 32, 34 ff. ). To describe this as " an experiment
in communism " is seriously to misconceive the situa-
tion. The conduct described was rather the spontane-
ous expression of the spirit of fellowship, in those first
moments when it welled up in each individual member
at the touch of the Spirit of Christ. The attitude of
the individual towards the things he had called his
own was a measure of the completeness with which he
had been merged in the Koinonia.

This is thrown into high relief by the story of
Ananias. His offence was not simply falsehood, but
treachery, treachery to the Koinonia to which he pro-
fessed allegiance. He had acted falsely to its inherent
character, and in so doing he had " cheated the Holy
Spirit." It was a gross case of failing to " discern the
Body," i.e. to act loyally in accordance with its nature.1

Turning to St. Paul we find that both the reality
and the importance of this new thing were clearly
apprehended by him. And he gives it the same name,
Koinonia. He reminds the Corinthians for their
comfort that it is a " faithful " God who has called
them (with an " effectual calling") " into the Fellow-
ship of Christ." 2 And by this he means not the
" companionship " of Christ, but the Fellowship belong-
ing to and named after Him. And the same may
also be described as " the Fellowship of the Spirit "
(Phil. ii. 1). The Spirit has called it into being, and
by the indwelling of the same Spirit it is sustained.
" If Christ has any appeal, if love carries any sanction,
if the Spirit has really created a Fellowship, if affection
and tenderness are really its atmosphere," show it in
word and deed. A third case is found in 2 Corinthians

1 See my article in Expositor, VIII. x. 182.

2 The thought is the same as that which finds very different expression in
John xv. 16: "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you."

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 135

xiii. 13, where the same idea appears in the Apostolic
Benediction — " the communion of the Holy Ghost be
with you all." There Paul prays not for the compan-
ionship of the Spirit with individual believers, but that
the Fellowship which has been created by the Spirit
may continue, even as he prays for the continuous mani-
festation of the grace of the Lord Jesus and of the love
of God.1

The power of the Spirit was manifested in this way
first in the experience of a company of men and women
who belonged to the same race, and were already united
together by earlier religious affinities. But it was
subsequently displayed not only in bringing into one
Fellowship those who belonged to non-Jewish races and
religions, but, greatest miracle of all, in combining
within one such Divine Society Jews and Gentiles,
between whom there had been an impassable gulf.
This was in truth for St. Paul the supreme miracle,
paralleled only by the miracle of Reconciliation between
God and man, of which indeed it was for him an essen-
tial part (Eph. iii. 9-1 1). This was the mystery that
had been concealed from previous generations, the
secret purpose of God now illumined by Christ. It
was " the mystery of Christ," " the mystery of the
Gospel" (Eph. iii. 4, vi. 19). This indeed was the
specific element in Paul's teaching which he called his
Gospel, and which, as distinct from those elements of
his preaching which reached him from older disciples,
he traced to direct revelation by God to himself
(Gal. i. 12; Eph. iii. 3). The Gentiles were eligible
for the Fellowship, and on the same terms as the Jews;
they were o^Wwyua, i.e. participators in the life of the
same Body.

This is the true theme of the Epistle to the

l It has been said that " no cxegetical skill can give us certainty as to the
meaning of this phrase." But one thing it cannot mean, and that is what in
all probability it is usually supposed to mean — " the companionship of the Holy
Ghost." And there is at least high probability that all three genitives are sub-
jective, and signify respectively the grace, the love, and the fellowship, of which
Father, Son, and Spirit are severally the source.

136 THE SPIRIT

Ephesians, which is quite inadequately described as
" the unity of the Church." The august act of God
which Paul here celebrates is rather the unification
into one Body of those sections of humanity — Jews
and Gentiles — which had hitherto been as poles asun-
der, held apart by prejudice, misunderstanding, hostility
(Eph. ii. 1 6), and even, as it appeared to the Jew,
by divine ordinance (Col. ii. 14). This removal of
" the middle wall of partition," the cancelling of " the
feud of the law" (Eph. ii. 15), the unification into
" one new man " of these hitherto antagonistic ele-
ments, was what filled the Apostle's mind with wonder
and adoring praise. It was for him a factor in the
work of Christ so vast in its import, and so contribu-
tory to the glory of God, that to do justice to his
thought we have to set side by side the two phrases :
" He is our peace " (i.e. the source and ground of
peace between us who were previously alienated) and
" We have peace with God."

Another name for the Koinonia is the Unity
(cvot?;?).1 Under this name also Paul traces its exist-
ence to the work of the Spirit, and urges the duty of
maintaining it (Eph. iv. 3). It is the " Unity of the
Spirit." In Ephesians iv. 13 he indicates its primary
sources within the human personality; it is the unity
brought about by faith and knowledge of the Son of
God. In his eyes it is a sacred thing, and he strives to
make those to whom he writes realise its sacredness.
When he warns them not to " grieve the Holy Spirit of
God," he is really summing up the various precepts
which he has just laid down — "lie not one to an-
other " " be angry and sin not "; " let your speech be
not destructive of the moral coherence " (o-aTrpo?) but
" unto upbuilding." All these find their sanction and
appeal in the sense of corporate unity, and in the
sacredness of its claim. Whatever denies or injures
that corporate unity offends the Spirit who has

1 Cf. Ignatius, Phil. 4. eh Ivwoiv rov aifiaros avrov.

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 137

created, and now maintains, the Koinonia (Eph. iv.
25-30; cf. Acts v. 3). The same principle is further
illustrated by the appearance in the catalogue of " deeds
of the flesh " (Gal. v. 19, 20) of such things as exhibi-
tions of rivalry, sectarianism, party spirit (<upe<7««) .
Such sins against the body corporate are treated as
equally heinous with those against the individual body.

Further light is thrown upon the conception by the
relation which St. Paul postulates between the Spirit
and that Love which is the connective tissue of the
new man. This " love " is part of the " fruit of the
Spirit " (Gal. v. 2). And the same thought underlies
the striking collocation in 2 Corinthians vi. 6: "by
kindness, by the Holy Spirit, by unaffected love." The
remark " See how these Christians love one another "
was not originally made in irony.

The emergence of the consciousness described as
Koinonia, not only at the first in Jerusalem, but else-
where and subsequently as successive new groups of
believers " received the Spirit," points to the fact that
the primary function of that Spirit was the removal
of " diffinities," and the bringing into existence of a
sacred Fellowship in which " there was neither male nor
female, bond nor free." And this Fellowship became
in turn the organ of the Spirit, and so an extension of
the Incarnation, to which it was only natural, ere many
years had passed, to give the description " Body of
Christ." With almost incredible boldness Paul seems
in one passage (1 Cor. xii. 12) to identify this, the
corporate body of believers, with Christ Himself.
Certainly he had before his mind the vision of a re-
deemed humanity growing up into " the measure of
the stature of the fulness of Christ"; and the vision
was no baseless dream, but rested on his observation
of what had already been accomplished through the
Holy Spirit in creating the Koinonia.

The word in this specific sense would appear to
denote a fellowship which was not merely a fellowship

138 THE SPIRIT iv

of believers inter se, nor yet a fellowship of the be-
lievers individually with the Spirit, but a complex ex-
perience which included both. It was in relationship
with one another that men continuously realised their
relation to Christ and to God through Him. Indeed,
they found in this reciprocal fellowship the convincing
proof of their own salvation: " we know that we have
passed from death unto life, because we love the
brethren " (i John iii. 14). The " Fellowship " was,
in fact, the sphere within which this complex experience
was realised, the reciprocal inter-action of moral and
spiritual forces divine and human. And this Koinonia,
called into being by the Holy Spirit, was prior to the
organised Ecclesia: it was related to it as the life to
the organisation.

The Symbol of the Fellowship: the Loaf

Of this Koinonia the primitive community recognised
that it possessed a symbolic representation, which
played an important part in the devotional life of
the early Christians. This was the loaf, or " bread,"
as it is translated in our English versions. These
disciples of the first days were known by the fact that
they adhered not only to the teaching of the Apostles
and the Fellowship, but also to " the breaking of the
loaf." '

The investigation of this initial stage of Christian
worship has tended to overlook this symbolism of
the loaf, and the symbolism of its breaking apart
from, and anterior to, the partaking of it. The com-
mentators are probably mistaken who consider them-
selves justified in reading back into this and similar
allusions in the Acts what they believe to be St. Paul's
interpretation of the Eucharist. As a synonym for
the Eucharist, or for the Eucharistic element in the

1 According to the accepted critical texts, as well as the Tcxtus ReceptUS.
But the Western text has a very interesting variant, according to whi<
adhered to " the fellowship of the breaking of the loaf." Rlass appears to think
that the original form may have been " the fellowship of the loaf."

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 139

Agape, " the breaking of bread " has certainly an
antiquarian sound. And if Luke wrote with Paul's
teaching before his mind, it is all the more necessary
to account, if possible, for the use of a phrase which
emphasises the breaking, and passes over in silence
the partaking, not to speak of other features of the
Eucharist. It seems at least equally probable that
in this, as in other matters, the writer of the Acts has
preserved with marked fidelity the recollection of a
stage of thought anterior to St. Paul, and that here
also the work of the Apostle was to develop or add to
the primitive conception.

Paul himself does not use the phrase " breaking of
bread," though he describes the action in the institution
of the rite. But the usage in the Acts suggests that
there was a time when alongside the symbolism of
partaking, and possibly overshadowing it, there was a
symbolism attaching to the loaf itself and to the break-
ing of it. Of this we seem to have the latest surviving
evidence in the Didache, and in the designation there
given to the Eucharistic rite or to part of it: "The
Breaking " or " the thing for breaking." And the
prayer which is there prescribed in connection with
the rite is remarkable no less for what it omits than
for what it emphasises: "Concerning the Breaking.
We thank Thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge
which Thou hast made known to us through Jesus Thy
servant. ... As this broken bread was scattered upon
the hills and being gathered together became one, so
let Thy Church be gathered together from the ends
of the earth unto Thy kingdom." 1 According to this
prayer the loaf of the Eucharist was the sacred symbol
of the unity into which believers had been kneaded,
that corporate unity of common life, compact of all
the individual lives, which was also expressed as Koin-
onia. But this was always understood to be more than

1 The Paulicians who preserved so many primitive features of doctrine and
practice laid great stress on the oneness of the loaf; see F. C. Conybeare, Key
of Truth, pp. xlix, 123, etc.

i4o THE SPIRIT iv

the sum of these personalities. For it was the
11 Koinonia of the Spirit " : it had a life of its own,
created and sustained by Him.

From this we may infer the significance which in the
Acts is attached to " the breaking of bread." The
loaf represented the fact that the new life was held and
enjoyed in common. It was the symbol both of the
Koinonia and of the " bread from heaven " by which
it was nourished.

In this symbolism pertaining to the loaf itself we
may find the key to the right interpretation of the
difficult passage in i Cor. x. 16: " The loaf which we
break, does it not represent a fellowship of the Body of
'Christ?" x The loaf represents His corporate Body,
the Church. And what is the Body there for? In the
first place, to be broken; in the second place, to be of-
fered up. The breaking may possibly have symbolised
the spiritual participation of Christ's followers in His
death, the " death to sin " of which the Apostle speaks
elsewhere, and in His sufferings, participation in which
belonged both to the anticipation and to the experience
of His Church. In any case it would symbolise
participation by the individual member in the common
(heavenly) life of the whole.

The Body represented by the loaf was there also to
be " offered up." The Church itself was the subject
of a sacrificial offering to God. It is the proud con-
sciousness of being the agent in such an offering, and
in that sense a " sacrificing priest," which rings through
Paul's words in Romans xv. 16. He acts as a priest
for the Gentiles, when he leads them in the act of
worship which consists in the offering up of themselves,
of the sacred Body of Christ, which has been "con-
secrated by the Holy Spirit." 2 This was their
" spiritual worship," before whose intense moral real-

1 The reasons supporting this translation will be found in my article, " The
Communion of the Body," in the Expositor for August, 1919-

2 It is to this conception that we arc to trace all the allusions to " sacrifice "
in connection with the Eucharist down to the end of the second century.

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 141

ity every other form of sacrifice withered into ir-
relevance.

This again may have been symbolised in the " break-
ing"; and when the people proceeded to partake of
the loaf thus broken, they set forth to themselves their
several dependence on the common sacred life of the
Body. It was the " Body of Christ," inhabited and
consecrated by His Spirit; and they drew from It, from
the Spirit, and from Christ, whom it represented, the
nourishment necessary for the growth and strengthen-
ing of the " new man."

The Fellowship the Organ of Insight

The presence of the Spirit in the Koinonia was
attested by an extraordinary measure of what we can
only call vitality. And the vitality manifests itself in
many ways, in the spheres of intellectual insight, of
admiration, and of character.

The Fellowship was recognised as the organ of
spiritual insight. In writing to Philemon, St. Paul
prays that "your faith-fellowship (the fellowship
founded on your faith) may be effective unto the recog-
nition of every good thing that is ours in Christ."
That is to say, the Fellowship is to have its proper and
expected result in the progressive discovery of spir-
itual truth. This is the only passage where such a
result is traced expressly to the Koinonia; but precisely
the same idea is illustrated by the close connection
which for the Apostle exists between " love " and
11 knowledge," or " intuition." Writing to the Philip-
pians (i. 9), he prays that their love " may more and
more abound in insight and all manner of perception."
For the Ephesians he prays in like manner (iii. 18)
that, " being rooted in love, they may be able to com-
prehend with all God's people what is the breadth,"
etc., and for the Colossians that, " being knit together
in love," they may have all the wealth of conviction
and insight into the mystery of God (ii. 2). It is in

i42 THE SPIRIT iv

the company of God's people, " with all saints," that
the fulness of spirtual insight is attained. And the
" Love " which is the atmosphere of the Fellowship, is
the condition, the stimulating medium, of spiritual
knowledge.

In Ephesians iv. 20 ff. we find a striking illustration
of the process as observed and understood by the
Apostle. He reminds these Ephesian Christians that
they had " learned Christ," had been " taught Him,"
had been " instructed in Him." What they had
learned, the " truth as it is in Jesus," was in the first
place what we should call doctrine, the possibility and
the necessity of " putting on the new man "; but also
morals, the details of Christian duty. And this knowl-
edge, this instruction, had come to them " in Christ,"
that is, in that sphere of intensely realised faith, hope,
and love, which looked at from its divine side was
" Christ," but looked at from its human side was the
Koinonia. Instruction both on faith and on life, with
the spiritual insight which made it vital, was due to
reciprocal action within the Koinonia. Within that
sphere every faculty of the Christian personality was
quickened, and along with others that apprehension of
ethical and spiritual realities which St. Paul describes
as Epignosis of Knowledge.

This experience of the Fellowship as the organ of
insight was that which finds classical expression in the
promise regarding the Holy Spirit which appears in the
fourth gospel: "he shall lead you into all truth." It
has long been recognised that what is meant by
" truth " here and elsewhere is not rightly represented
by any collection of truths however complete, or even
by the totality of relevant truths. The " truth " is
the living reality, the eternal which lies beyond and
behind the changing phenomena of experience. One
function of the Spirit was to conduct men into this
whole region of reality. Under His influence (and
that was supremely experienced within the Fellowship)

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 143

they saw things of time and of eternity, as they are,
and saw them in their right proportionate value.

The New Testament as a whole bears witness to
the working of the same vitality with similar results.
Everywhere we find the same paradox of independent
variation combined with conformity to a general type.
When we compare, for example, the three Synoptic
Gospels, we are almost baffled by the oscillations be-
tween conformity and variation. The variations are
due, not so much to the influence of conscious pre-
suppositions or literary motives, as to the working of
creative minds on plastic material; and yet they are
held in check by loyalty to a common type, or what
Plato would have called tSe'a. We find the same when
we compare either the three groups of Pauline epistles
with one another, or the work of Paul, Peter, and the
author to the Hebrews. The difficulty which has been
found in establishing the literary relations between
these is due to the fact that these relations are not so
much literary as psychical. It is a common experience
still hot from the crucible which is run into these
various moulds. And here again the variations are
not more striking than the general conformity to type;
the diversities of operation are as conspicuous as the
oneness of the Spirit.

And the penetrating insight ( eViyvwo-is, ato-^o-i?,
<rijv6o-i?), which is claimed as the product of the
Koinonia, or of love its animating temper, finds con-
spicuous illustration in the case of St. Paul, and that in
at least two directions. By his searching examina-
tion of the history of his own conscience, he became the
pioneer for European thought in the moral analysis of
self. And he penetrated deeply into the meaning of
Jesus, both as an ethical teacher and as a religious per-
sonality. In both connections he seized what was cen-
tral, and in both connections it was the same, namely,
Love (1 Thess. v. 9; Gal. ii. 20). And from that
centre he drew in each case a circle, the ethical contents

i44 THE SPIRIT iv

of which prove to be what was in the mind of Christ,
whether of ideal for humanity or of purpose for Him-
self. A portrait of an ideal Christian drawn from
material provided by the first Epistle to the Thessa-
lonians would not be easy to distinguish from one con-
structed out of the Synoptic Gospels. And yet the
one is not a copy of the other. They are portraits of
what is seen by two different persons from practically
the same point of view. It was not without reason
that Paul said, " We have the mind of Christ."

These manifestations of " life," intellectual, ethical,
spiritual, and practical, could be described indifferently
as taking place " in Christ," " in the Spirit," and " in "
or " through the Fellowship." These three concep-
tions mutually support and explain one another.
They are really different ways of contemplating the
sphere of Christian experience. And, indeed, it is here
that we shall find the clue to what is called the " mys-
ticism of St. Paul." " The Lord is the Spirit," wrote
the Apostle in a sentence of profound significance.
The epoch-making discovery was due to the observed
identity in the working of the Spirit with the recorded
influence of Jesus. It was a discovery as important in
its bearing on the conception of the Spirit as on the
conception of Christ. If Jesus, who was the Christ, is
now thought of in terms of " the Spirit," the Spirit
is now understood in terms of Christ. Previous to
Pentecost it had been regarded as the divine
energy in its operation especially upon men —
invisible, potent, somewhat unaccountable. Hence-
forward, through being discovered to have char-
acter, the Spirit is conceived as " personal." It,
or as the writers of the New Testament now begin
to call it, " He " operates along lines which can be
foreseen, because they have been observed already as
guiding the activities and the influence of Jesus. And
the Koinonia, within which men could count on feeling
the full pressure of their influence, might be described

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 145

indifferently as the sphere that was " Christ," or the
atmosphere that was " the Spirit." If " Messiah "
connects " the Spirit " with history, the " Fellowship "
connects them both with experience.

The Ethical Confirmation

It has become the fashion with some to label much
of what has been here set forth as " Pauline mysti-
cism," and to dismiss it as subjective, or esoteric, or in-
comprehensible. But if the view which I have tried to
expound and support be correct, this line of thought
runs back behind Paul; 1 it is rooted in the experience
of the days immediately following Pentecost; and it
is redeemed from the imputation of being only
" mysticism " by the attestation it receives from the
ethical standards and achievements of the primitive
Church. An ayamj or " love " which embraced Gen-
tiles as well as Jews was as new to the Jew as other
parts of the Christian ideal were to the Gentile. And
neither the ayewnj nor any part of the ideal remained
as ideal only. Members of the Koinonia manifested
distinct approximation to it in all its parts. Paul's
demand for further achievement, even his criticism of
failure, must not blind us to the evidence that he
assumed, and must have had ground to assume, a firm
foundation of purpose and of achievement on which to
build further. He is found perpetually rejoicing over
the alliance between religion and morality, between the
experience of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit.
Already in the opening of the first Thessalonian
Epistle, in what are probably the earliest written
words of Paul that have come down to us, we meet
the triad of Christian virtues — faith, love, and hope;
and these not as requiring to be inculcated or extolled
as ideals, but as already distinguishing, and known by
the outer world to distinguish, the Christians of

1 There is some reason to think that even the phrase ec Xotorw and the sig-
nificant use of it were pre-Pauline.

i46 THE SPIRIT iv

Thessalonica. And further, by the phraseology which
the Apostle here adopts we may clearly see these vir-
tues not merely passive or dormant. We see faith at
work producing achievement (epyov) ; love undertaking,
and manifesting itself in, toil; and hope issuing in
patient endurance, apparently of the disabilities and
persecutions incident to the profession of faith in
Christ. And in these facts, before him, the Apostle
finds ground for the assurance that his message had
been " not in word only, but in power and in the Holy
Spirit."

For the acceptance of this ideal and the partial ful-
filment of it was not due to the adoption of a new law
or code for the regulation of life. The Christian had
a law, in the sense that he knew what was required of
him; but it was no external code; it was the law, the
regulative influence, of the Spirit, who was the source
of the life he lived in Christ Jesus (Rom. viii. 2).
The effect of it was to emancipate him from any sys-
tem of positive law; and at the same time the same
Spirit was at work to do in him and through him the
things that " the law could not do." For the Spirit
was recognised as the source of those inward condi-
tions realised by the believer alone, the " love, joy,
peace," and also as the source of those ethical qualities
and tempers which distinguished the internal relations
of the new community, the " long-temperedness, kind-
ness, goodness."

But these things again had been characteristic of the
Christ in the days of His flesh (2 Cor. x. 1 ), and they
were found developed within the Koinonia established
by His Spirit. The new life, the life of the " new
man," had transcendence and a divine quality secured
to it by its being " in the Spirit "; its norm and goal
were set for it by its being " in Christ "; it discovered
the experimental confirmation of its reality and the
pledge of its perfection in the ethical power and prog-
ress generated within the Koinonia.

iy WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 147

The immediate and essential result of Pentecost was
the creation of this Koinonia : " a community of sacred
love which frees humanity from all limitations of nat-
ural egotism." The primary work of the Spirit had
been to sweep away or to submerge diffinities, to com-
bine men and women of many different types into this
Divine Fellowship, which became in turn the organ of
the same Spirit in deepening the knowledge of God
and in purifying and ennobling the character of those
who were at once partakers in the Fellowship and con-
tributors to its life.

Further Results: Gifts and Powers

We need not extend our survey of what happened
at Pentecost far beyond the early days before we meet
evidence of another phenomenon which should not be
overlooked. The " life " which pulsed through the
Body and its members was not life of a kind which had
to do only with the world to come; and it showed its
presence and its energy in the rapid differentiation of
functions within the community, functions which minis-
tered to its own well-being and to its extension in
the world. The Koinonia displays marked capacity
both for analysis and for synthesis.

Its power of synthesis is seen in the real coalescence
of the several groups in which the Koinonia was suc-
cessively embodied. They flowed together spon-
taneously, with the result that there emerged the
consciousness of a catholic Koinonia. They stretched
out hands to one another, hands containing that " col-
lection " for the poor Christians at Jerusalem which
Paul valued so highly as the symbol of this all-includ-
ing unity (1 Cor. xvi. I, etc.). No official " organ of
unity" was yet called for; the connective tissue which
held this larger Fellowship together was still ayair-q or
Love.

And the Koinonia showed the power of analysis.
It recognised and rejoiced in that differentiation of

148 THE SPIRIT iv

functions — " diversities of operations," Paul calls
it — which also was the work of the Spirit.
" Apostles," " evangelists," " prophets," " pastors
and teachers," " workers of miracles," " healers,"
11 helpers," " administrators," " speakers in tongues,"
" discerners of spirits," " interpreters of tongues " —
even that list does not exhaust the varieties of talents,
with corresponding varieties of service, which were
recognised within the primitive community. These
highly differentiated powers are described as " set in
the Church " by God, or as " given " to the Church by
the ascended Lord, or as graceworkings of the Spirit.
It will not be supposed, however, that in the case of
any of these powers the gift was an entirely new thing
in the individual who received it, a pure addition to
faculties which were otherwise without it. It was the
doing and gift of God; but, looked at from another
standpoint, it was in fact the quickening, at the touch
of the Spirit, of powers that were already there, but
dormant, the sudden release of faculties that had lain
below the " threshold " of consciousness.

The purpose and function of all these gifts and
powers was " the upbuilding of the Body of Christ."
Devotion to Him, in which the whole experience
started, was translated into devotion to the highest
interests, whether intensive or extensive, of the
Koinonia. And in the impulse of self-communication,
the realisation of the life, and service of the needs, of
others, was found the secret of the intensification of
individual life.1 The nascent Church discovered the
truth of its Master's teaching: "He that hateth his
life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal."

Organisation followed. The question has been
raised and copiously discussed whether the organisa-
tion was " from above " or " from below." It was
neither; it was from within. It arose within the sacred
Body through the operation of powers belonging to it

1 Cf. A. S. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, p. 308.

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 149

as the Body of Christ. " The body secreted the skele-
ton." The Fellowship displayed powers of selection
and co-ordination. Tested by the one criterion, to
what degree does it edify? The various gifts and
powers were arranged in order of value. Sane judge-
ment of spiritual values was one of the functions of the
Fellowship. Some of those at the lower end of the
scale, such as speaking with tongues, dropped out.
They " failed," or " ceased," because they were of
little value to the community.

This is illuminative not only of the power of the
Spirit to enable men to discern proportionate values,
but also of the true " end " or purpose of the gifts.
That was not immediately, at any rate, the salvation,
sanctification, or perfection of the individual, but the
growth, purification of the community, and intensifica-
tion of its life. The Apostle's language in Eph. iv. 12
is no illustration of the contrary. The " perfecting of
the saints " (A.V.) means the knitting together of
God's people, the continuous repairing of the fabric of
the Body. Saintliness, according to the New Testa-
ment conception of it, is a social phenomenon. An
isolated or individual " saint " would have appeared
to its writers as little less than a contradiction in terms.
And as personality has been well defined as " capacity
for fellowship," so the society which educes and
educates that capacity is at the same time the strongest
force in the development of personality. So far is it
from being true that the New Testament, or any of
the voices which speak to us through it, urges us to
" save our own souls," that it preaches consistently and
insistently that the way to self-realisation is found in
that denial of self which is implied in and consecrated
by the Fellowship.

By the use of these gifts, and in the exercise of
these powers of selection and co-ordination, the Fellow-
ship proceeded to develop an organisation, " in its
growth taking to itself such outward form as it needed

i5o THE SPIRIT iv

for its inward life." ! There is no evidence in the
New Testament that any particular form, Congrega-
tional, Presbyterian, or Episcopal, had been prescribed
for it, or that any single form is necessary either for its
existence or its well-being. In the earliest stage or
stages which we can detect the organisation was fluid
or flexible. Some of the factors in it which at the first
were most highly esteemed either disappeared (like the
Apostles) or even fell into disrepute (like the Proph-
ets). The shaping of the nascent organisation was
guided from the first by analogies which were already
familiar — analogies of the family, the village com-
munity, the voluntary association; at a subsequent
period by the ancient institutions of Judaism (as in the
threefold ministry), and then by the administrative
forms of the Empire (as in the diocesan organisation).
But during " the high tides of the Spirit " it is evi-
dent that the community was conscious of the abiding
possibility that new forms of service and of capacity
for it might at any time emerge; and further, that it
was conscious of its own inherent right to recognise,
adjust, or, if need be, dispense with any such form.
For was it not the " Fellowship of the Spirit "? And
" where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

What a close Examination shows to have
been the situation: a modern pentecost

What happened at Pentecost provides the classical
illustration of what happens at the " coming " of the
Holy Spirit. Christendom has not been without ex-
perience of such coming in a striking measure at dif-
ferent periods and in many parts of the world. But
the Church has never ceased to pray that the Spirit of
Christ may be given to it with a fulness hitherto un-
known, that His presence may be realised on a scale
such as the world has never yet seen. It may be worth
while to consider what, in the light of the classical

l J. L. Paton in Cambridge Essays on Education, p. 9.

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 151

instance, we might expect to happen if these prayers
were answered.

( 1 ) The manner and the effect of His coming would
certainly be stated in different terms from those fa-
miliar to us from the New Testament. There, as we
have found, the experience is described, as is only nat-
ural, in terms of that conception of spirit which pre-
vailed at the time. If that conception was akin to
that of physical, though invisible, forces, such as air,
wind, breath, carrying the suggestion of fluid or in-
finitely divided matter, it was inevitable that the ex-
perience should clothe itself in such language as we
find. The Spirit " came upon them," was " poured
out," " shed forth "; it " entered " into men as though
from without; and its influence was regarded as im-
pelling men as though by an external force ( Rom. viii.
14; cf. 1 Cor. xii. 2). But it would make no differ-
ence to the reality of the experience if it proved natural
to us to describe it in quite other terms, in terms de-
rived not from the physical, but from the psychical
nature of man.

For us spirit represents the subtlest element in per-
sonality, that which alone, and then only in favour-
able circumstances, can open communication between
one personality and another. We ascribe to it in gen-
eral " that indefinitely penetrative and penetrable
quality, that power of embracing and stimulating other
minds, which we know, from daily experience, consti-
tutes the very character, actuation, and worth of our
'own spirit." x The Spirit " searches the depths of
human personality "; by it God penetrates all the outer
envelopes of our individual being, and touches our
spirit. And they are kin one to another, so that in
what follows it is hard to distinguish what arrives from
God from what arises from the subconscious self of
man. And the experience would be not less truly due
to the action (or arrival) of the Divine Spirit al-

1 Von Hiigel, Eternal Life, p. 229.

i52 THE SPIRIT iv

though what the New Testament describes as " the
gifts " or " the power " of the Spirit were to be recog-
nised as what had been dormant capabilities or unem-
ployed determinations of the human self. Michael
Angelo in his " Creation of Adam " has shown us the
complete man vitalised into possession of all his pow-
ers by the touch of " the finger of God."

(2) The coming of the Spirit is to be looked for
rather by a group than by an individual, unless it
be at the moment when the individual merges himself
in the group. It would be a group, or a community
gathered round Jesus Christ as a centre, to whom they
give the absolute value that belongs only to the Divine.
For them all other values would be a part of this, or
else subordinate to it. Stated in Scripture language
they would " sanctify Christ in their hearts as Lord,"
and be seeking His Kingdom before all else. That is
to say, the personal object of their devotion would be
felt to include all social values which make for the true
happiness of mankind; and for the sake of these they
would be prepared to sacrifice all other values. So
that to this devotion, simple in its direction, yet com-
plex in its grasp, would be subordinated every other
interest, whether personal or corporate, ecclesiastical
or social. Christ would be " all in all," because He
is all that has eternal value.

(3) The first result of the coming of the Spirit
would be seen in the removal of diffinities. Christ be-
ing the centre, the centripetal forces would be found to
exceed the centrifugal. The group, whether small or
large, would discover its power to assimilate indi-
viduals or other groups which, while spiritually akin
to it, were separated from it by differences of taste,
social standing, or intellectual outlook. The common
relation to a universal would outweigh all divisive rela-
tions to particulars.

A further result would be " life, more life," mani-
festing itself in a great enhancement of powers already

iv WHAT HAPPENED AT PENTECOST 153

operative, but also in the uprush of others which had
been dormant below the threshold. We should see an
overmastering sense of brotherhood (aydirr]) , a se-
renity of mind and temper (eipr/n?), and a restoration
of religious joy such as Paul noted as the fruit of
the Spirit; and accompanying these a marked increase
of qualities whose social value we have been inclined
to under-estimate — long-temperedness, kindness,
goodness, as well as of others the world has always
valued — honour, considerateness, self-control.

But, judging by the analogy of Pentecost, we should
have to be prepared also for consequences that might
be described as revolutionary, whether in thought or
in organisation. The Spirit is sovereign where He
dwells, though His witness to the individual has always
to be checked by His witness to the community.
Even the doctrine of private property went up in that
flame. Even the Temple and the system it stood for
became an irrelevance. To pray for the coming of
the Spirit with understanding of what His coming
would mean, and " with faith nothing wavering," is
indeed a great achievement. But the answer to such
a prayer is prompt and decisive of all the supreme is-
sues of life.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE:
HOW GOD HELPS

C. W. EMMET, B.D.

VICAR OF WEST HENDRED

EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF OXFORD

AUTHOR OF

' THE ESCHATOLOGICAL QUESTION IN THE GOSPELS," " THE EPISTLE TO THE GALA-
TIANS " (READERS' COMMENTARY), " CONSCIENCE, CREEDS, AND CRITICS," ETC.

ANALYSIS

Introduction. — The relation of personalities as seen in the con-
ductor and his orchestra, the teacher and his pupils. The influence of
the Spirit of God on man is of the same nature; this influence is grace,
which is not a semi-physical force, sui generis.

The Eucharist as a Means of Grace. — This point of view applied
to the Eucharist. The " special " presence of Christ psychologically
considered; the words, the acts, the elements. True and false sym-
bolism. The corporate aspect of the Eucharist. The minister; his
" unworthiness." The place of ritual.

Nature and Grace. — The New Testament usage. The contrast not
equivalent (a) to that between evil and good; (b) to that between a
lower and a higher type of goodness. All goodness due to the grace of
God ; His constant action on man. Man's recognition of what is
always there. The difference which comes with conscious fellowship
with God (the catastrophic element in conversion). But grace not to
be confined to its highest manifestations.

Grace and Free-Will. — Disputes as to various kinds of grace;
based on false assumptions as to its nature. The psychological parallel
in human experience of the " I " and the " not I."

Grace as God's undeserved Favour. — The legalistic method of
approach. Is there a "contract" between God and man, and does He
go beyond it? The relation of love, as known in actual life, trans-
cends such conceptions.

Conclusion. — Summary. Reality of communion not dependent on
emotional thrill. The test and result in life.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE:
HOW GOD HELPS

All who have any appreciation of music, even though
they may be without technical knowledge of the sub-
ject, realise something of the work and function of a
great conductor. It is not his business simply to cor-
rect false notes and secure uniformity of time and
rhythm. He impresses on the performers his own
conception of the music, an insight into the depths
of its meaning which they would never have had if
left to themselves. He also gives to them a power of
expressing this meaning in a way they could not have
done without him. Lie does this partly by word and
gesture, but also by a more subtle influence which it is
not easy to analyse or explain. We sometimes call
it vaguely personal magnetism, but no one knows pre-
cisely what it is or how it works. It is a kind of
telepathy, a direct influence of mind upon mind, bring-
ing with it a real communion or intermingling of
spirits.

It is to be noted that, though we may speak rightly
of the spirit of the conductor entering into the members
of the orchestra, though that spirit is absorbed by them
so that their own ideas become subordinate to his, yet
in the end it is they, each one individually, who execute
the several parts. By the contact of his own richer
personality with theirs he calls into being hidden po-
tentialities which would otherwise have remained un-
realised. They must have the necessary musical
knowledge and power of execution, though he may
raise these to heights of which they were quite un-
conscious. They must have also the artistic sense
which enables them to penetrate into the subtlest mean-

157

158 THE SPIRIT v

ing of the symphony, once contact with him has evoked
this sense and discovered to them that meaning which
had been beyond the range of their former understand-
ing. It is the richer personality which by its influence
elicits the latent or subconscious powers of the self; the
result is an enhancement of the personality. It is " I,
yet not I," but also it is " I myself through that which
is not I." The violinist plays his part himself; he
uses his own skill and powers, but these would never
have reached so high a pitch without the influence from
outside; this influence is a real and necessary fac-
tor.

The same law may be observed in other fields. It
is seen in the general relation of teacher and pupil.
You have the pupil plodding along doggedly and
conscientiously, but making no startling progress and
showing no unusual powers, and once more there comes
the teacher with the mysterious gift of personality.
A new thing happens; under the fresh influence the
learner develops unsuspected powers of understanding
and expression. He can do things when in touch with
the new master which he could not do before; inspired
achievement takes the place of mediocrity. Once
more we may say that the spirit of the teacher enters
into the spirit of the pupil, but still it is his own self
which works, the old self raised to a higher plane.1

When we pass to the sphere of moral goodness we
find exactly the same principle at work. It is a com-
monplace, confirmed by all experience, that the chief
factor in moral achievement is personal influence. It
works by way of word and example, and it is for this
reason that we insist on the value of reading the ex-
ploits and the life-story of good men and women.
But it works most powerfully through personal con-
tact. The presence of a good man or woman with
the gift of a sympathetic personality is admittedly the
greatest human force in developing character. This

l We miptht illustrate further from the relation of the psychotherapist to his
patient; sec pp. 69 ff.

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 159

gift is found in very varying degrees. There are some
whose lives seem to be lived on a high level, yet they
do not attract or influence. On the contrary, their
presence by a kind of instinctive reaction fills us with
an unreasoning desire to be as wicked as possible. Cer-
tain teachers notoriously have this effect upon many
of their children; they have neither the charm of good-
ness nor the spell of personality. Others, whose lives
may sometimes be more open to obvious criticism, have
it to a marked degree. To be with them is the safe-
guard against sin and the inducement to goodness.1
Once more there is a blending of spirit with spirit, but
the self of the one who is influenced remains his own
self, discovering unrealised capacities of moral great-
ness and hidden depths of character.

It will be generally agreed that this gift of evoking
such latent capacities is seen at its highest in Christ.
It meets us on every page of the Gospels. Men ab-
sorbed in their business, like Levi or Zacchaeus, the
outcast and abandoned, of whom all despaired and
who had come to despair of themselves, the very con-
vict at the point of death, find in personal contact with
Him a new love of goodness and a new power of
realising it. But the experience of Christianity has
been that the possibility of such personal contact, with
all that it implies, did not cease with the death of
Jesus. The conviction of the reality of intercourse
with Him and of the incalculable results of that inter-
course runs through the whole of the New Testament.
It is the centre of what is called the " mysticism " of
St. Paul and St. John. Under varying forms of ex-
pression Christians of all ages have found that they
can come into personal touch with God and with Christ.
His Spirit dwells in them; they are "in Him" and
" He in them"; their own personality is purified and

1 It need hardly be added that an evil personality is equally the greatest
force in the opposite direction. In the career of a Rasputin we have such
a personality influencing in the most extraordinary way many of those who
come within its orbit and degrading them to its own level.

160 THE SPIRIT v

enhanced. They can do new things; it is they who
do them through God who worketh in them.

The whole process is personal, resting on the contact
between the human spirit and the divine, and the argu-
ment of this paper is that this is always and solely
what we mean, or ought to mean, by grace. Grace is
simply the result of contact of man's personality, or
spirit, with God's.1 Personality has been defined as
" capacity for fellowship," 2 and it only discovers its
full capacities in that fellowship which is the knowl-
edge of God and of Jesus Christ whom He has sent.

It is not suggested that this is a novel conception.
It has, indeed, always been the underlying experience
of Christianity, and very often an important element in
its teaching. But it has been confused and overlaid by
artificial ideas of grace.3 Grace has been conceived of
as an external, semi-physical " something " which
comes into some souls at certain times and under cer-
tain conditions, much like an electric current.4 It is a
force infused, a drug prescribed to counteract the
microbe of sin, something which can be taken in quan-
tities and at regular intervals, and which has its special
channels and means.

Further, it is regarded as something sui generis.
The divine grace is not in line with ordinary human
experience. The illustrations we have been consider-
ing would be admitted only as distant analogies of the
way in which grace may come. But our contention is
that they are more than analogies; they are examples
on a lower scale of what actually happens when we
come into touch with the Divine Spirit. Grace is

1 For our present purpose it is not very important whether we think of this as
contact with God, Christ, or the Holy Spirit.

2 J. L. Paton in Cambridge lissays on Education, P- 8.

3 See detached note A on " The New Testament Conception of Grace."

4 " Disregard of the fact of moral personality, as though religion could be
passed into the soul like a stream of electricity, is invariably caused by or
causes the thought of grace as a secret Divine energy, due solely to omnipo-
tence, and acting on the human will with irresistible pressure — a quasi-physical
force, stored within the Church, atid applied to the soul-substance in its subcon-
scious depths" (II. R. Mackintosh, line, of Religion and Ethicr, s.7\ "Grace").
The companion article, " Grace, Doctrine of (Roman Catholic)," affords abun-
dant illustrations of this way of regarding grace.

iv THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 161

nothing but the result of such contact; it comes from
the intercourse of person with person. " The means
of grace " are simply ways of getting into personal
relation with God. We have been almost afraid of
this immediate relation between ourselves and Him,
and have substituted for the idea of the direct action
of the Spirit, which we find in the New Testament, the
idea of grace as a separate force, much as later
Judaism interposed its intermediaries between man
and God. The substitution has been helped by the
external and legal analogies, dear to the Latin mind,
which attached themselves to the word gratia.1 It
would no doubt be pedantic to refuse ever to speak of
grace as a force, or to banish the familiar metaphors
of the heavenly reservoir, and of pipes and channels,
which suggest that grace is conveyed to the soul like
a supernatural water.2 But it is important that such
ways of speaking should not be central, and that we
should not press them too far. The fundamental idea
is that grace is God Himself (or Christ, or the Spirit)
working in and influencing the soul, just as one great
personality influences another, though far more ef-
fectively and consistently.

This view must not, of course, be interpreted as
implying that God is thought of as merely one person-
ality among many, greater, but essentially on the same
level. He is rather the all-pervading, the sole pos-
sessor of full and complete personality, the underlying

i See detached note B.

2 It is worth noting that these metaphors generally go back to the obscure,
probably textually corrupt, apocalyptic picture of the candlestick, the pipes, and
the olive trees in Zech. iv.; see Driver's notes on the passage in the Century
Bible. As is shown in note A (p. 193) phrases such as "means of grace" are
not found in the New Testament. It may be remarked that in the early days of
mesmerism and hypnotism, magnetism was also thought of as a mysterious in-
visible fluid, passing from one body or mind to another, and all kinds of experi-
ments were made to discover the most effective means of conveying it. See,
e. g., the description of Mesmer's famous baquet, a large trough filled with glass
and iron filings and bottles immersed in water, round which the patients to be
influenced sat connected with cords and holding one another's hands (quoted in
G. B. Cutten's Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing, p. 235). This false
conception led to all kinds of mistakes, and it is now realised that all the phe-
nomena of hypnotism and suggestion depend on the direct influence of mind
upon mind (see above, p. 75).

162 THE SPIRIT v

reality of every human personality: from His all others
are derived; apart from His they are imperfect. But
none the less we are justified in arguing from what we
know of the relation of human personalities to one
another to the relation of this Personality to ourselves,
just because personality, incomplete though it is, is the
greatest thing we know, that of which we have the
highest and most direct experience. The mechanical
conception of grace is based on something lower than
personal influence as seen at its best between man
and man; much less can it do justice to what happens-
between man and God.

The Eucharist as a Means of Grace

It is fairly obvious that these principles apply to such
" means of grace " as prayer, meditation, and the read-
ing of the Bible; they are all methods by which the
soul can come into direct contact with God. But it
may be useful to consider at some length what light
they throw on our conception of the Holy Communion.
It will be agreed by different schools of thought that,
in spite of differences of theory, the essence of the
Eucharist lies in its power of bringing us into touch
with a personal Christ. This is, in fact, the underly-
ing idea of the " real presence," apart from theories as
to the effect of consecration on the elements, and so
forth. The belief is in its way as strong in Noncon-
formist celebrations of the rite as it is in circles which
hold the doctrine of transubstantiation, or something
like it. In such celebrations the favourite passages for
reading are just those which speak of this " real pres-
ence " of the Lord, the appearances in the Upper
Room, the walk to Emmaus, or the promise " where
two or three are gathered together in my name, there
am I in the midst of them." Now there are, of course,
obvious difficulties directly we come to speak of the
special presence of an immanent Spirit, present every-
where. It is best to approach the question from the

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 163

point of view of man's realisation of that presence, a
realisation which, as a matter of experience, does admit
of degree and difference. In the words of Dr. Illing-
worth,1 " wherever an omnipresent God is specially
realised, He specially is." " A Being who is omni-
present is, vi termini, present at all times and in all
places. When, therefore, He is recognised at a par-
ticular time or place, the recognition is not imaginary
but real. He is there and causes His own recognition,
or reveals Himself." Such recognition must depend
on man's expectancy and receptivity, his faith. Why,
then, is there a special presence of Christ, or a special
recognition of His universal presence, in the Holy
Communion? Simply because the whole rite is
charged with the associations of His personality.
The words, the elements, the acts, carry us back di-
rectly to the supreme crisis of His life. No one can
be present at the rite with a serious purpose without
thinking vividly of Him. And, putting aside the ques-
tion as to how the case may stand with departed
friends, we are concerned here, not with one who is
dead and gone, but with One who is alive and spir-
itually present. To think earnestly and lovingly of
Him is to realise His presence, to be with Him, to
open the heart to all the influence which comes from
contact with His Spirit, to be in Him and He in us.
All this is not metaphor, but experience, widespread
and in direct line with similar, though lower, experi-
ences which come from intercourse with human per-
sonalities. Let it not be supposed that such a view is
purely " subjective," that it is a case of faith creating
its object. The whole point is that there is something,
or rather Someone, really there. Faith, or the recep-
tive mind, under the influence of the associations of the
rite, realises and appropriates to itself the Presence
which is there independently, which is striving to re-
veal itself.

We can see at once from this point of view why

1 Divine Immanence, pp. xv, 132.

1 64 THE SPIRIT v

the words of institution, the bread and the wine, and
the special acts of consecration, are " necessary " to
the Eucharist. It is not because the gift is a mys-
terious force, which by a special divine fiat can only
come through certain media, much as electricity must
have its proper conductor, wire and not glass. Nor
is it that it has been decreed that " something hap-
pens " if the proper words are used by the proper man.
It is because these words, these elements, these acts,
and no others, are instinct and alive with the person-
ality of Jesus. Rice and milk in themselves might be
the symbols of a meal of communion with the Deity,
and of the worshippers with one another; in some
countries they would be the most natural symbols.
But they would be arbitrary and artificial, and there-
fore psychologically ineffective, symbols of communion
with Christ; they are not charged with the associations
of His personality, and therefore they would not be, to
the same extent as the bread and wine, effective signs
or means of fellowship with Him.

We notice further that, even before they attached
to themselves this particular associations, bread and
wine had a natural symbolism of their own, whether
they were chosen by Christ for this reason or not.
Not only are they the simplest, the most universal,
types of food and drink, and therefore of spiritual
nourishment and growth, these latter being themselves
natural descriptions of the enriching of the soul which
comes from personal intercourse with a greater per-
sonality; but they also speak directly of the crushing
of the separate grains and grapes, of their gathering
together into one, so that they become through death
the means of life. The very colour of the wine sug-
gests the blood poured out. And so they are charged
with the associations of the death and new life of
Christ; they "are" His broken Body and poured-
out Blood, and the means by which, according to
psychological law, His Spirit of sacrifice and service

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 165

enters into us and calls out the same hidden qualities
in our own spirits.

It may also be added that wine which maketh glad
the heart of man suggests the joy of fellowship. It is
not thought of as the indulgence of the isolated and
selfish individual, but is associated with the joyful fes-
tivals of reunion and of gathering of friends. Christ,
at the institution of the Eucharist, looked forward to
drinking it with those He loved at the Messianic Feast
in the Kingdom of God. This symbolism has its bear-
ing on the corporate aspect of the rite, on which some-
thing will be said later on.

If, then, symbols are a means of grace, it is neces-
sary to draw a distinction between true and false sym-
bolism, between the kind of associations which are ra-
tional and psychologically valuable, and those which
are merely magical and superstitious. In a true sym-
bolism the connection between the symbol and the thing
symbolised is natural and appropriate, not arbitrary
and artificial, as in the crude analogies often drawn
by primitive religions. Associations which are to be
psychologically sound must go back to fact, not to
fancy. If then, as we hold, the Eucharist does medi-
tate a real communion with a present Christ, on ac-
count of its symbolism and associations, why should
not a relic, or a fragment of the true cross, do the
same? Here there are two things to be said. (1)
In fact relics have not as a rule been valued simply
from their associations, as means of opening the heart
of the worshipper to the divine presence. They have
been regarded as themselves possessing a quasi-magical
virtue, property, or mana, working their cure or im-
parting merit in themselves, through their inherent
sanctity. Hence there has often been a readiness to
venerate relics which are trivial, ludicrous, and even
disgusting. No normally-minded mother would treas-
ure the thigh-bone of her son or the parings of his
toe-nails as a means of inducing loving thoughts of

166 THE SPIRIT v

him. Saintly relics of this type can only be valued as
wonder-working charms; and a relic regarded as a
charm can only lead the mind away from the true
grace of God. (2) If a fragment of the Cross or
a visit to Calvary is treated simply as a means of
bringing vividly before the mind the love of Christ
through its associations, it is, to some at least, psycho-
logically effective and legitimate; it does really help to
communion with Him. But there must be reasonable
ground for believing that the association rests on
fact — that the site is the true site of the event com-
memorated, that the treasured piece of wood did ac-
tually form part of the Cross. A mother will not find
consolation in visiting the supposed grave of her
soldier-son in France if she learns that there is no
evidence that he was in fact buried there. It may be
argued that in all such cases it is better to leave people
undisturbed in their happy belief. So long as the
simple peasant thinks the relic genuine, it will have
the same effect on him psychologically as if it were
so. There may no doubt be special cases in private
life, and perhaps also in religion, where it would be
cruel to disabuse the trusting mind of some valued
fancied association, but in the long run any such method
of pious fraud brings its own nemesis. In the first
place people do, and must in the end, find out, and
indignation against those responsible for deceiving
them sometimes has very far-reaching consequences.
Secondly, we are looking at these things as means of
coming into personal touch with God. Truth, which
implies reverence for fact, and even for what may seem
trivial fact, is part of the very being of God, and there-
fore any cynical or easy-going indifference to truth is
itself an obstacle to real fellowship with Him, an ob-
stacle which will far outweigh any temporary gain
brought by associations believed in in spite of evidence.
Neither deceiver nor those who willingly allow them-
selves to be deceived can under such conditions enter

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 167

into full communion with the God of truth. When,
then, we are told that, if we approach the Sacraments
and methods of worship from the side of psychology,
we must leave ignorance and superstition untouched on
the ground that they too work well, our reply must be
that in the long run they do not work well, nor can
they ever do so in a universe in which reverence for
truth is a fundamental principle.

To return to the Eucharist, we may, from the point
of view we are testing, understand something of its
corporate aspect. We recall the parallel of the con-
ductor and his orchestra. Just because, and in so far
as, the players are a group of men actuated by the
same purpose, the influence of his personality on theirs
is intensified. There is a common telepathic pull which
increases the responsiveness of each; they are knit not
only to him but to one another by sharing the same
spirit. So it is in the Holy Communion and in all
common worship. While, as with the single pupil
and his teacher, there is a true contact between the
individual soul and God, solus cum solo, the response
of the human spirit to the divine, the intermingling of
the two, reaches its highest point when two or three,
or, better still, a- great multitude, are gathered together
under the inspiration of a single purpose. Grace is
indeed no private privilege, nor is salvation ever
purely individual. Neither they without us, nor we
without them, can be made perfect. In the actual
thought and practice of the Church this conception of
the fellowship of grace and salvation has often been
forgotten, and nowhere more so than in the Eucharist.
We have been satisfied with the multiplication of a
number of separate celebrations, attended by mere
fractions of the faithful, in which each one " makes
his communion." We shall never realise the full pos-
sibilities of the rite till we somehow make it the " fel-
lowship meal " at least of the whole parish.1 Such a

1 A fuller discussion of this point will be found in my paper " Matins and

168 THE SPIRIT v

fellowship is in no sense a merely " human " brother-
hood; it is essentially mediated by the common sharing
of the spirit of Christ. It is both a fact of psychology
and also one of the deepest truths of Christian ethics
that our own joy in receiving that Spirit is intensified
by the knoAvledge that others are receiving it too, and
that our very power of response is increased by their
response. Even though the command " Drink ye all
of this " is only recorded in the First Gospel,1 it un-
doubtedly expresses the mind of Christ.

Here we may find the solution to a problem on
which our psychological method may seem at first
sight to throw little light. Why, on these lines, should
not the Eucharist be celebrated by any private indi-
vidual who cares to do so? Why, by fairly general
consent of the Christian instinct, even outside circles
which hold the doctrine of Apostolic Succession, is the
chief part in the celebration confined to duly ordained
ministers? It is not because in any quasi-magical
sense this is the condition of something coming into
the elements or the soul, but because in the rite the
minister stands both for Christ and the Church. It
is his function to bring to the worshippers the sense of
the present personality of Christ. And, as we have
seen, the Holy Communion is essentially corporate.
Each Eucharist expresses ideally the desire of the
whole Church as a society, as the Body of Christ, to
come into communion with its Head. From both
points of view the honour of acting as the leader in
such a rite cannot normally be taken to himself by any
man; he must be duly authorised as the representative
of the Church.2 If we may adapt our initial illustra-

Holy Communion" in Ideals of Common Prayer (No. i of Tracts on Common
Prayer, edited by Dr. Sanday).

1 Si. Mark lias "they all drank of it."

2 We ne<-d not here enter into the question whether in fart only cpiscopally
ordained ministers can he regarded as such representatives, btll il may he noted
that in recent discussions as to the validity of orders more and more stress has
come to he laid, not on the minister as possei ial power to do certain
things, but on his being the representative of the Church, whatever the concep-
tion of the Church, or the view taken of the proper method of his appointment.

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 169

tion, not only do the members of the orchestra enter
into the spirit of the conductor; he also mediates to
them the mind, the personality, of the composer. So
all priesthood, whether exercised in rite or in teach-
ing, is a link between the soul and God. The true
priest will have the spirit of Christ, as the conductor
must have the spirit of Beethoven.

There have been long debates as to whether the
unworthiness of the minister " invalidates " the Sacra-
ments, and the Church, faced with the appalling con-
sequences of a negative answer, has realised that their
objective validity cannot be regarded as depending on
so uncertain a factor as the moral condition and sin-
cerity of the officiant. And just because, as we insist,
Christ is always there, ready to enter into any heart
which opens itself to the Presence, we shall certainly
agree that His coming is not made impossible by the
sin of the priest or of any part of the congregation.
But we have been too readily satisfied with a technical
answer which is largely based on the idea of grace,
and especially sacramental grace, as a special force
generated under certain conditions. For though the
coming is not made impossible by any sin except the
sin of the worshipper himself, it is made more difficult.
Psychologically the worshipper cannot respond so
readily if he is conscious that the rite which should be
instinct with the personality of Christ is performed by
one whose whole life is un-Christlike, or with a careless
indifference which gives the lie to its spiritual meaning.
If by a correct ritual we understand simply the exact
repetition of a ceremony according to certain traditional
and more or less mechanical rules, we shall not attach
much importance to it. But every public action,
whether religious or civil, must gather round itself
some ritual; the purpose of such ritual should be to
bring out the underlying meaning in whatever way is
found to be most effective psychologically, that is to
say in the impression conveyed to the mind of those

i7o THE SPIRIT v

present. In such a ritual, while due weight is given
to the inherited traditions and experience of the past,
there should be room for variations according to the
genuine and spontaneous mood of the movement; it
must be alive. But a fixed outline is valuable just be-
cause we can none of us depend on always being at our
best. Every minister in every denomination must some-
times find himself conducting a service when from
physical or other causes he is not completely " in the
mood." If his general method, whether of prayer or
celebrating, is deliberately formed on principles of
recollectedness and reverence, this disciplined habit will
not altogether fail, even at seasons of deadness. The
habitual awareness of the presence of God will persist
in the subconsciousness even when the actual conscious-
ness is faint for the moment. And both the minister
and the worshipper will at such times be safeguarded
by a ritual which is not simply an unthinking and me-
chanical imitation of the past, but represent the pre-
dominant instinct of a genuine reverence. There can
be little doubt that clergy of all denominations need to
pay far more attention than they sometimes do to the
psyschological effect of their method of conducting
divine service. Revision of the text of the Prayer Book
is urgently needed, but the constant complaint of the
laity that the clergy do not from the point of view we
are considering make the best of the Prayer Book as
it stands is not without good ground. There is food
for thought in the remark of a working man after a
certain rapid rendering of Matins that he supposed
"the parson was paid by piece-work"; speed is not
the primary condition of helping the congregation to
feel the presence of God. In the last resort the min-
ister will only succeed in doing this in proportion as he
trains himself to feel that presence. According to the
highest conception of true priesthood the unworthiness
of the minister is by no means irrelevant; there is a

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 171

sense in which he is the mediator between God and
man.

The significance of Baptism may be treated very
briefly.1 To the adult it both symbolises and, accord-
ing to the principles already suggested, it does in fact
psychologically mediate a personal union with Christ.
In the Pauline phrase the convert is baptized into
Christ, or puts on Christ. In the case of Infant Bap-
tism, while it is impossible to speak of conscious fel-
lowship, it does stand for incorporation into the com-
munity, or spiritual atmosphere, in which that fellow-
ship may subsequently be best realised. It marks the
initial stage of that personal union which, if the rite is
more than a form, later training and religious experi-
ence will make actual.

Nature and Grace

A familiar phrase in the Anglican Church Catechism
states that we are " by nature born in sin and the
children of wrath " and are in baptism " made the
children of grace." It rests on a misapplication of
Eph. ii. 3, " we also all once lived in the lusts of our
flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and
were by nature children of wrath." The last phrase
is a Hebraism, like "sons of disobedience"; there is
no reference to infancy or to original sin; St. Paul
" is speaking of actual transgressions," and " by nature
means simply ' in ourselves,' as apart from the divine
purpose of mercy." 2 In fact the New Testament
writers use the words " nature," " natural," only
occasionally, and when they do it is in a good, or
at least a neutral, sense (Rom. i. 26 f., xi. 21 ff.,
1 Cor. xi. 14; 2 Pet. ii. 12 comes the nearest to a
bad sense). In some passages, such as 1 Cor. ii. 14
(" the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit

1 It is discussed more fully on pp. 252 ff.

2 J. A. Robinson, Epistle to the Ephesians, ad loc.

i72 THE SPIRIT v

of God ") or xv. 44 ff., a different word (" psychic ")
is used; and we do in fact find in St. Paul a sharp
contrast between psyche and spirit, or between the
" flesh " (very nearly equivalent to man as he is) and
the spirit, between the unregenerate and the regenerate
man. Grace is confined to the latter. It is true that
pre-Christian Abraham is the type of faith, but the
principle of the working of grace before or outside the
Christian Church is not carried further, as it is in the
list of heroes of faith in Heb. xi. There is little idea
of the presence of grace or faith below the surface even
in Judaism, which controversial requirements lead St.
Paul to contrast sharply with the Christian dispensa-
tion; such a conception as "that rock was Christ" is
quite exceptional. Much less is there any hint of it in
the Gentile world; redemption and the work of grace
are confined to the Christian community, understood
strictly. It is true that in Rom. ii. we hear of Gentiles
doing by nature the works of the law, a conception
which it is not easy to harmonise with the standpoint of
the rest of the Epistle. For the moment St. Paul is
arguing from the point of view of ordinary morality.
His object is to establish the responsibility of all before
God and the indifference of the law, not to suggest that
Gentiles could be " justified " by their good deeds.
The whole passage is exceptional and out of keeping
with the strict Pauline theory of salvation. In general,
though the exact terms are not used, we do find in the
technical theology of St. Paul something which corre-
sponds to the sharp opposition between the realms of
nature and of grace which, since the time of Augustine,
has been part of the common Christian tradition.

In itself this conception is not an easy one, but we
must not make it harder by interpreting the distinction
between nature and grace as equivalent to the distinc-
tion between evil and goodness, as though nature were
in itself bad. As we have seen, this is not the teaching
of the New Testament; it is in fact Manichean rather

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 173

than Christian. Nor is it the teaching of Augustine.
"All nature," he says, " in so far as it is nature, is
good; in so far as it corrupted, it is evil." "The
nature of the devil himself, in so far as it is nature, is
not bad, but perversity makes it bad." 1 According to
his view, sin alone is against nature; even in our fallen
state all human actions are good in so far as they are
natural. The rebellion of the flesh is due to the weak-
ness we have earned by sinning, and this does become
a kind of second nature. He also sometimes treats
the natural as the fixed and necessary, opposed to free-
will, e.g. natural movements in contrast to voluntary.
We may, then, reject without qualification the view
that the distinction between nature and grace corre-
sponds to that between evil and good. According to
another view, which is at first sight more reasonable
and has behind it the authority of Augustine, the differ-
ence between the two is the difference between a lower
and a higher kind of goodness, more or less correspond-
ing to the distinction between natural and revealed re-
ligion. There are, it is held, natural virtues which go
a certain way and are independent of grace. Ordinary
temptations can, it is suggested, be resisted by man's
natural strength, but others, and especially sensual
temptations, require the grace of God. " God does
not command impossibilities, but bids you do what you
can and ask for what is beyond your power." 2 Num-
ber XIII. of the Thirty-nine Articles speaks of works
— clearly what the ordinary man would call good
works — done before the grace of God and having the
nature of sin. In the phrase wrongly attributed to
Augustine, but true to his thought, they are splendida

The underlying conception here is that grace is super-
natural, in the sense that it does not come to man as

1 I owe these quotations to T. A. Lacey, Nature, Miracle and Sin, pp. 92, 115.
See Aug. De Nat. Boni, 1; De Civ. Dei, xix. 13.

2 De Nat. et Grat. 43 (quoted by Lacey, of. cit. p. 127).

3 See Lacey, Nature, Miracle, and Sin, p. 141.

i74 THE SPIRIT v

man; it is given to some, not to all. To Augustine
grace is expressly not the general providence and benev-
olence of God; it is " that by which we are Christians."
" It is not nature, but that by which nature is saved." *
The accepted view since his time has been that super-
natural grace was withdrawn at the Fall and restored
by Christ.

We ask what bearing our psychological conception
of grace as the result of the direct impact of the Divine
Personality on the human has on all such distinctions
between nature and grace. We cannot believe that
God has ever left man alone; He has been always
seeking and drawing him to Himself, establishing that
contact between His Spirit and the human spirit which
is the essence of religion. Or, looking at it from the
other side, man, everywhere and always, is made in the
image of God, and has within him something of the
divine nature which yearns for fellowship with God,
like seeking like by the law of its being. What hap-
pened when Christianity came into the world was that
the new religion manifested this eternal seeking on
God's part in a new way; it opened to man new possi-
bilities of satisfying his yearning for fellowship.

In the fresh enthusiasm engendered by it, when its
experiences were novel and vivid, and when the need
of distinguishing it sharply from Judaism and its
other competitors in the mystery religions was widely
felt, it was natural to emphasise, and even to over-
emphasise, the uniqueness of its gift. Christianity, it
seemed, had brought into the world and man's life
a new power with which the non-Christian had noth-
ing to do. Both St. Paul, and subsequently Augus-
tine and Luther, who have been the main influences
in moulding Christian language and thought on the
subjects of redemption and grace, had specially potent
personal experiences of a conversion bringing with
it an entire breach with the past. But it was also very

1 Lacry, ib. pp. 128 ff.

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 175

soon realised that it was impossible to deny the exis-
tence of goodness or of fellowship with the Divine
outside Christianity. St. John states, though he does
not develop, the doctrine of the Word, or Logos,
lighting every man who comes into the world. This
aspect is emphasised by Justin and the Apologists.
Accepting the position that salvation, fellowship with
the Father, and real goodness could only come through
Christ, there were two alternatives. It was possible,
though not reasonable, to deny the reality of such
things outside Christianity, and to ascribe them to
demonic imitation of their only genuine manifestations;
or, on the other hand, to say boldly that, wherever they
were found, there was Christ, the immanent Logos —
in Socrates and Plato, as well as in the Christian con-
vert. This second alternative was boldly developed by
the great Alexandrians, Clement and Origen. Though
Christian theology has sometimes ignored it, it has
never cast it aside, however much it may have hesitated
to draw out its full implications. To us to-day no
other view is possible. The corollary of the truth " no
man cometh unto the Father but by Me," is that wher-
ever any man in fact finds God there Christ has been
present. The historic Christ and historical Christi-
anity becomes the supreme manifestations of a prin-
ciple and power at work in men always; the Spirit
cannot in the end and in the strict sense be confined
to the Christian dispensation. The doctrine of un-
covenanted mercies is only the epicycle introduced when
the facts refuse to be squared with the circles postulated
by theory.

It is, however, clear that the distinction between
nature and grace is in some sense central to a good deal
of Christian thought, and we may be sure that there
must be a vital spiritual truth behind it. We return to
our illustration. We saw how the teacher with the gift
of influence and personality does make such a differ-
ence to the work of the pupil that the result is, in a true

176 THE SPIRIT v

sense, a new thing. He rises from mediocrity, from
an uninspired accuracy, to a new stage of achievement.
He does so precisely in proportion as he opens himself
without reservre to the inspiration of his master. If
there is on the side of the pupil any antagonism, con-
scious or unconscious, if there is any clash of ideals
and values, the flow of the new influence is blocked
and ineffective. The spirit of the conductor cannot
work in a player who insists on his own reading of
the music, who refuses to meet him with a complete
self-surrender of his own preconceived notions. So
with the soul and God. There comes a point where
the soul definitely realises the Divine presence and
deliberately opens itself to His influence, where it sur-
renders its own lower and opposing will, and makes
its own the higher ideals and values. Here too the
result is a new stage of achievement. In place of the
dull level of respectable, plodding, average morality,
we find a fresh type of character, heroic, self-forgetting,
full of charm and attractiveness, bringing to others a
sense of the Divine. It is not the imitation of an ex-
ternal code, the painful attempt to live up to a stand-
ard of duty imposed from without; it becomes the
spontaneous expression of a life and personality identi-
fied with and penetrated by the Divine Personality.

Here then, it might be said, we have after all the
old sharp dividing line between nature and grace. Yet
still there is a difference, in so far as the old view rests
on the assumption that God influences some men and
not others. For though, as we are arguing, the way in
which God influences man is not essentially different
from the way in which we influence one another, there
is one important distinction between the two cases.
The influence of the great teacher or conductor is a
new thing introduced into the life at a particular stage;
but the influence of the Spirit of God is not a new
factor; it has been there all the time. The new thing is
that the soul realises and responds to it in a way it had

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 177

not done before. The main obstacle to such response
is always sin in some form, a self-centredness which
shuts out the divine influence. This is the underlying
truth of the doctrine that supernatural grace was with-
drawn at the Fall. Without entering upon the ques-
tion whether in fact there has been a breach in man's
spiritual evolution, it is at least clear that sin is the
barrier which blocks the way to a free communion
between man and God. We see why repentance is
the first stage in opening the way to a high degree
of such communion, and why conversion, the complete
surrender of the self (perhaps better regarded as the
complete dedication of the self), sometimes coming at
a definite crisis, does mark a new relationship to God.
Even from the strictly psychological point of view, sin
needs to be taken very seriously; it is not an easy
thing to open the soul completely to the divine in-
fluence and indwelling. At the same time we must
remember that after all God has been there all along,
even in a sense within the soul, unrealised, His influ-
ence to a great extent thwarted. Whatever there has
been of goodness and achievement, however imperfect,
has, so far as it is good, come from Him, from His
grace and presence in the heart. " Every virtue we
possess and every thought of holiness are His alone."
The Collect, " O God, from whom all holy desires, all
good counsels, and all just works do proceed," cannot
in the last resort be taken as referring only to the
" converted " Christian. We cannot maintain that
there is a natural goodness which takes man up to a
certain point, and that then supernatural grace comes
in as a new factor. The difference is in the degree of
man's response to the same divine influence which is
always there.

It is, then, in the degree of this response that we
must find the difference between the converted and
unconverted, the regenerate and unregenerate man.
Facts do not allow us to hold that it corresponds

178 THE SPIRIT v

closely to any external distinction between the baptized
and unbaptized, the communicant and the non-com-
municant, or even the Christian and the non-Christian.
It is simply that, speaking roughly, each one of us has
opened his heart to God or he has not; he is, or he is
not, recognising and striving to live by higher values;
he does, or he does not, bring his will into harmony
with God's. But of course in actual experience the
distinction is confused and ambiguous. Men are not
entirely in the flesh or in the Spirit; salvation is a
process which implies continual struggle, and an ever-
increasing identification of the self with God. " Even
the man most centred in himself responds to the
prompting of some affection and some loyalty every
day of his life." ! Such language is used constantly,
even by the strictest of theologians when writing from
the ordinary standpoint; it implies not only that every
man has the grace of God, but that, to however small
an extent, he uses it.

Our problem, then, is to do justice to the double
truth. There is in the coming of the grace of God
both the catastrophic element and also the fact of its
continuity. On the one hand we need to recognise
the startling, sometimes the abrupt, change which
marks the breaking down of opposition and the de-
liberate identification of the human will and purpose
with the divine. In this change there may be stages.
The soul may have come to range itself on the side
of goodness and the grace of God, without recognising
it for what it is. There may be a real fellowship with
the Spirit which is an unconscious fellowship. On the
road to Emmaus the two travellers find themselves in
intercourse with a stranger which becomes more and
more intimate as the barriers of despair and reserve are
broken down. Even then their hearts burn within
them and fresh powers of insight and hope are called
into being. Had nothing more happened the experience

1 Competition : a Study in Human Motive, by John Harvey and others, p. 169.

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 179

would have been genuine and fruitful. But it is a
greater experience still when their eyes are opened and
they know Who is the friend who has been with them
all the time. The recognition colours and interprets
the earlier experience. Unconscious fellowship with
God is neither to be denied nor despised, but conscious
fellowship is something more. " To recognise the
grace of God, to affirm it, is to be aware of the very
scent of God and to be drawn by it the more power-
fully because it is known for what it is. The scent of
bluebells is stronger and sweeter to us if we know what
it is than if we think it comes from a soap factory or
is produced in us by some digestive process of our
own." ! It is not always true psychologically that " a
rose by any other name will smell as sweet." Even in
our sense perceptions we are not passive. What we re-
ceive effectively depends on attention, on the deliberate
response of our powers of appreciation. The delicate
bouquet of the wine will often be missed unless the
expectation is sharpened by the knowledge of what is
offered to us. Still more in personal intercourse we
can only reach the complete intermingling of spirit
with spirit when we know the friend or the great per-
sonality for what he is. Life becomes a new thing
when this awareness of the companion God, known as
such, bursts on the soul for the first time, as it may
in a hundred different ways. And it is an experience
which may be often repeated.

So even I athirst for His inspiring,

I who have talked with Him forget again;
Yes, many days with sobs and with desiring

Offer to God a patience and a pain ;
Then thro' the mid complaint of my confession,

Then thro' the pang and passion of my prayer,
Leaps with a start the shock of His possession,

Thrills me and touches, and the Lord is there.2

" The shock of His possession," the knowledge that

1 A. Clutton-Brock, Studies in Christianity, p. 105.

2 Myers, St. Paul.

180 THE SPIRIT v

" the Lord is there," the dweller in the innermost of
our being, the source of all our good, is grace at its
highest. It might indeed be argued that we should
keep the term " grace " for what happens when the
touch between the human and the Divine reaches this
stage of conscious awareness, but this would be to
ignore the other side. The phraseology which confines
grace to its supreme manifestations inevitably suggests
that what has gone before is not grace, that whatever
of goodness the soul has reached in the past has come
from some other source. It implies that God has
given or done something which He had not done
previously; it is not the natural way of saying that
man has opened his heart more completely to that
which has always been there. Side by side with the
catastrophic element we need to insist on the continuity
of God's influence on the soul, on the fact that this
influence is universal, and that it is the one source of
all goodness and achievement, moral, intellectual, and
aesthetic, always and everywhere. Though it is true
that certain kinds of virtues do grow more readily on
Christian soil, they are not altogether peculiar to it,
nor are they generically different in kind to others.
Moral goodness is homogeneous; we cannot divide it
up into that due to nature and that due to grace,1 nor
can we hold that there are essentially different types of
divine help and influence, as though humanity outside
the range of Christianity were a vessel propelled by
steam, while within its borders the new driving power
of electricity had suddenly come into play.

It is worth quoting some words of Dr. Hort 2 on
the Article " Of Works before Justification," to which

1 In fact much of the goodness which is held to be supernatural and due
specifically to grace is conventional and negative, having little of the heroism,
self-forgetfulness, and charm which are the real marks of the close fellowship of
the human spirit with the Divine. On the other hand, some non-Christian, or
Stoic, virtues lack much which is found in Christianity. But this is not to say
that, so far as they are virtues, they come from any other source than the grace
of God.

2 Life and Letters, ii. 337 (quoted in full by Gibson, Thirty-nine Articles,
p. 422)-

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE

I8i

we referred earlier in this section: "The principle
underlying Article XIII. seems to me to be this, that
there are not two totally different modes of access
to God for men, faith for Christians, meritorious
performance for non-Christians. . . . Faith itself . . .
is present in a more or less rudimentary state in every
upward effort and aspiration of men. . . . Practically
the principle of the Article teaches us to regard all the
good there is in the world as what one may call imper-
fect Christianity, not as something essentially different,
requiring, so to speak, to be dealt with by God in a
wholly different manner." We may doubt whether
this is really what the Article means to say, but it will
certainly be our own position. From our point of view,
indeed, the discussion as to good " works done before
the grace of God " is meaningless. The test of the
presence of grace, i.e. of some contact with God, is
found in the fruits. In so far as these are present, we
conclude that grace has been at work and that there has
been some response. We shall really reverse the way
of putting the question. We do not ask whether cer-
tain people are within the range of grace {e.g. in the
Church), and if the answer is in the negative, conclude
that their " works," though apparently good, are not
so in fact; we look at the character, and say that, in so
far as this is good, there must have been some response
to grace.1

Grace and Free-Will

The pages of Christian theology are full of some-
what repellent technicalities and hoary controversies
as to the kinds of grace and its relation to free-will.
Echoes of all this are to be heard in the Articles of the
Anglican Church and in the Confessions of other

1 An emphatic recognition of this truth is given by Lord Halifax: " ' Without
me ye can do nothing.' Now, what follows from this? Surely that in whatever
degree we see this Christian life being lived there we may be certain God's grace
has been given, and that as long as any soul faithfully corresponds with the
grace given to it, that soul is living in God's favour, and that as such we have no
need to be disquieted about its spiritual condition." The reference is specifically
to members of different Christian bodies {The Church Times, June 21, 1918).

182 THE SPIRIT v

Churches. The candidate for Orders still spends much
time in attempting to grasp the precise difference be-
tween gratia preveniens and co-operans, gratia de con-
gruo and de condigno, or between sufficient and effica-
cious grace. Two quotations will suffice. " Starting
from the view that the Fall only involved the loss of the
donitm supernatural e [the supernatural gift], and left
man with moral and religious faculties belonging to him
by nature, [the schoolmen] taught that the exercise of
these faculties was the natural transition to grace, and
that a good use of them was the medium of grace, or,
in their phraseology, merited it of congruity (de con-
gruo) . God, they said, was not bound to reward such
actions, but it was congruous or fitting that he should.
But after grace was received, the work done in de-
pendence on the aid of the Holy Spirit was really good,
and this God was bound to reward, crowning His own
gifts in man. Such actions deserved grace de condigno,
and for them God was a debtor." 1

A Roman Catholic theologian2 sums up the teaching
of Augustine and the Church in this way: "God
provided for the fulfilment of His decree of predestina-
tion and for the preservation of the freedom of the
will, by granting to the unpredestined only sufficient
grace, which they were sure always freely to disobey by
their own fault, and by providing for the predestined
efficacious grace, which they were sure always freely to
follow." And then he goes on to explain how it is
that a grace which is " really and truly sufficient "
should always be disobeyed, while a grace " infallibly
efficacious " yet does not infringe upon the freedom of
the will. Readers of Pascal will recall some of the
irony of Les Provinciates with regard to such concep-
tions.

It is obvious that all such subtleties presuppose the
idea of grace as a force sui generis, something sent by

1 Gibson, Thirty-nine Articles, p. 419.

-' K. L. van Bccelacre in Enc. Rcl. and Ethics, s.v. " Grace (Roman Cath-
olic)."

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 183

God at special times and under special conditions. No
doubt the questions they raise are sometimes of real
importance, but they will be stated very differently
when grace is interpreted in terms of personal influence.
This is especially the case with the problem of grace
and free-will. In our parallels from human experience
we found a blending of personalities, of the pupil with
the teacher, the violinist with the conductor. The
learner has the sense of being in the grip of a power
higher and other than himself, yet it is he who acts,
his own personality transformed and enabled by that
which has become part of his very self. So it is with
man and God: "work out your own salvation, for
it is God that worketh in you." But there is no sub-
stitution of the divine nature for the human, no de-
personalising of man. In the last resort each must
save himself, but the self which saves is a different self,
a self delivered from the bondage of corruption and
transformed by the renewing of the mind through the
indwelling Spirit of Christ. No doubt the ultimate
philosophical problem remains as to free-will, predes-
tination, God's power and foreknowledge, but it loses
much of its sting, and is in fact solved in experience, so
soon as we cease to regard grace as a force introduced
into the soul ah extra, and approach it from the point
of view of the relation of personalities to one another.

Grace as God's Undeserved Favour

Grace is often defined as the undeserved, the un-
expected, favour of God, and the idea of His free love
and undeserved mercies is a fundamental element in
the religious instinct. But the conception has often
been stated in a way which is artificial and repellent.
It is held that God as creator is bound to give His
creatures a certain degree of help and a certain pos-
sibility of happiness hereafter, such a vision and pos-
session of Himself as the natural man can desire and
appropriate. But " by a munificent and gratuitous

i«4 THE SPIRIT v

decision " 1 He has gone beyond His bond in sending
His Son, in restoring the gift of supernatural grace,
and in fitting some men for the supernatural reward of
the beatific vision itself. Or, as it would be put by
the older Protestant theology, man by the sin which is
common to the race deserves hell, but some are saved
from this by God's special and unlooked-for grace. It
is as though hell and death were the ruling principles
of the universe, and other principles of life and salva-
tion had been introduced as an unexpected afterthought.
Such statements of the case simply provoke objections
in the spirit of Omar's cry, which is not blasphemous
but ethical:

Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the road I was to wander in,

Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my fall to Sin!

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake,

For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blackened — Man's forgiveness give — and take!

If God has put His children into a world in which as
a matter of experience they all inevitably fall, is He
not bound to save them? The fact is that in all such
ways of putting the case we are in the grip of cramping
and mechanical legal analogies. The conception is of
a father who is bound by law to provide a certain
minimum of support and protection for his children,
but is not bound to risk his life to save them from
a burning house. And yet if he is a true father he
cannot do otherwise. His act is not an unexpected
extra; it is the necessary manifestation of his character,
the inevitable result of the relationship between him
and his children. This is not to say that they will
take it as a matter of course that they have been saved

1 See Enc. of Rel. and Ethics, t.V. "Grace (Roman Catholic)," where this
point of view is stated quite clearly.

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 185

by their father's devotion and suffering, or that their
gratitude will be any the less, but the point is that where
the essence of the relationship is love we cannot argue
on the basis of strict and limited legal requirements.

We must not, then, split up God's gifts and dealings
with men into two classes, saying that some are required
by an implied contract between the Father and His
children, while others go beyond the minimum and are
something added. All He does and gives is the ex-
pression of His love, though that love may be more
clearly seen in some things than in others. We could
not have said a priori that this love would go so far
as the sharing of man's sufferings, but once this has
been shown it is understood to be the inevitable out-
come of His essential nature; He too could do no other.
This way of looking at the matter really heightens our
adoring love and gratitude first for what He is, and
then for what He does. It removes it from the sphere
of hard legal analogies to one where the only bond, the
only compulsion, is that of mutual love. The Cross
and the offer of eternal life are the supreme manifes-
tations of that love, and they reflect back on all the
divine dealings with us.

This is the real principle which underlies the great
Pauline opposition between faith and works, and the
insistence on salvation as the free gift of God. Any-
thing of the nature of a debit and credit account be-
tween man and God is as much out of place as it is
between father and child, or husband and wife. At our
best, and in our noblest relationships, we do not deal
with one another on any such basis, nor does God so
deal with us, or we with God. " By grace are ye
saved," by the unstinted sacrifice and self-giving flow-
ing inevitably from the love which is the essence of the
divine nature, just as the devotion of the mother, even
unto death, is the inevitable expression of true mother-
hood. The child who is saved does not ask in such
a case whether he deserved it or not, or whether she

186 THE SPIRIT v

could reasonably have omitted the sacrifice. He meets
it with a responsive love and a humility which resolves
to make himself worthy of it and of her.

Indeed, the best safeguard against the external and
legalistic point of view is to realise that grace is not
something which God gives; it is God Himself knock-
ing at the door of the soul and admitted into its inmost
sanctuary. Think of it as a " gift " which is some-
thing other than God, and there is always the danger
of self-seeking; we stumble against that which is the
most subtle obstacle to true religion, the temptation
to use God for our own purpose, even if the purpose
be the salvation of our soul. We must learn to allow
God to use us; it is a greater thing to seek Him for His
own sake than to seek the highest of His gifts for our
own. When we know that grace is this intimate re-
lation between the soul and Him, the heart is flooded
with the self-abandonment and devotion of the lover;
it can no longer think in terms of the market-place or
law-court, claiming this as desert, welcoming that as
unmerited favour.

Conclusion

We have tried then to look at grace, not as a special
force imparted by God to some men, under certain
conditions, and at certain times and for certain pur-
poses, but as the enhancement of personality which
is the constant result of the proper relation between
the divine and the human spirit. We believe that
there is in all men, at least unless they have quenched
the Spirit, some degree of personal contact with Him,
even if it be but partial and unconscious. Every effort
after goodness, however faint, implies this and can be
ascribed to no other source. The differences in degree
are indeed impressive and far-reaching, just as the dif-
ferences in the standard of character and attainment
vary almost beyond measure. These differences de-
pend on the extent to which we let God in, on the close-

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 187

ness of the intercourse between our Spirit and God.
Let it be repeated that such a view is not, as is some-
times supposed, a purely " subjective " view of religion,
reducing it to a matter of what we think or feel.
There seems to be a wide-spread impression that to of-
fer a psychological explanation of anything is equivalent
to treating it as pure imagination; in particular that
it reduces the religious experience to auto-suggestion
from our " better self." But the psychologist is free
to hold that there is Someone there whom we may
come to know, a power not ourselves on which he may
and must depend. In the last resort the difference
between one man and another must turn upon the
extent to which he opens himself to the divine influence
which is always there, available in its completeness
for every child of God. This is indeed true on any
view of the nature of grace; even if we think of it
under the old picture of the inexhaustible reservoir on
which we are to draw, it depends on ourselves how
much we draw and how often. Few, if any, will deny
that the divine love is all-embracing, and that it is for
us to respond to it. "According to your faith so be it
done unto you " is the law which Christ lays down as
governing the relation of man to God and Himself,
and no one will call Christ's doctrine of faith, or St.
Paul's, purely subjective.

It is further important to remind ourselves that the
reality and closeness of our contact with the Divine
Personality does not depend on, or always vary very
closely with, our emotional sense of this contact.
Where it is at its highest there is indeed, as we have
seen, always some deliberate recognition of God, some-
thing which may be called a sense of His presence. But
this is not dependent on any emotional thrill; it is
rather the deliberate orientation of the will Godward.
And His influence may be very real, even where there
is but little consciousness of it. It sometimes happens
that we are profoundly affected by scenery, pictures,

188 THE SPIRIT v

or books, while hardly conscious at the time of the
influence they are exerting on us. In our psycho-
logical parallels the supreme influence of the great
teacher or the good friend, stealing into the inmost
depths of our being, is not always recognised till years
after. And so the reality of our communion with God
— and this is especially to be remembered in connection
with the Eucharist — does not stand or fall with the
extent to which we can honestly say that we realise or
feel His presence. The final test of such communion
is to be found in its effects on the life and character.
" No man hath beheld God at any time : if we love one
another, God abideth in us, and his love is perfected
in us: hereby know we that we abide in him and he in
us, because he hath given us of his Spirit." If a man
is growing like God and Christ, it can only be because
he is in a vital relation with the Divine Spirit. This
relation will at its highest bring with it at times a
real awareness of God, yet it may also be completely
independent of anything of the nature of emotional
thrills. And if it be asked what may be the full results
of such relation, we can only reply that they are, in the
moral sphere as in others, limitless. It draws out the
hidden capacities of human nature at its best, and that
nature is in its essence divine. It is when St. Paul
thinks of his converts as strengthened with power
through the Spirit of God in the inner man, of Christ
as dwelling in their hearts through faith, that he bursts
out into his cry of praise " to him who is able to do
exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think,
according to the power that worketh in us." For this
power is not an effluence or an influence, not a force
or a gift from God; it is Christ Himself, present in
us through His Spirit.

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 189

DETACHED NOTE A

The Meaning of Grace in the New Testament

" Grace " has come to mean, both in technical and in
popular theology, a specific power or help granted by
God to man, usually in order to resist temptation and
to do what is right. But this is not the ordinary
meaning of x^15? the Greek term which is translated
" grace," either in the Septuagint or in the New Testa-
ment. In the former it is usually the translation of
the Hebrew hen, or favour, and the same idea is
primary in the New Testament usage. Grace is a
characteristic of God, something He feels or shows
to man; the nearest equivalents are loving-kindness or
mercy. It will be found that in most of the New
Testament passages some such word can always be
substituted for the English " grace." It is noteworthy
that the Twentieth Century New Testament, in fact,
uses these or similar translations and avoids grace alto-
gether. " By grace ye are saved " becomes " By God's
loving-kindness you have been saved."

The term x"Pts is not found in Matthew or Mark;
it is rare in the Johannine writings, and is most fre-
quent in Luke and Paul; in other words, it belongs,
especially in its theological use, to the specifically
Pauline vocabulary. God's loving-kindness has been
shown pre-eminently by the gift of forgiveness and
salvation through Christ, and in St. Paul x<¥>ls is spe-
cially connected with the extension of these to the
Gentiles.1 Hence, besides denoting the loving-kind-
ness of God, it sometimes denotes the gifts which come
from that loving-kindness ( 1 Cor. iii. 10 ; 2 Cor. vi. 1 ) .
In such a passage as Acts viii. 8 (Stephen " full of
grace "), it is doubtful whether the meaning is to be
looked for in this direction or rather in the classical
sense of charm or attractiveness. But for our purpose

1 See on this point J. A. Robinson, St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, pp.
221 ft".

i9o THE SPIRIT v

it is not necessary to discuss the details and shades of
the actual use; the point is that with all its varieties it
does not include the modern technical sense. " The
later technical use [of grace], esp. of the Latin gratia,
for the divine prompting and help which precedes and
accompanies right action does not correspond exactly
to the usage of N.T." 1 And in particular we never
find in its pages phrases such as " means " or " chan-
nels " of grace, or any conception of different kinds of
grace, e.g. sacramental and other.

We may note one or two passages which come near-
est to the modern usage.

i Cor. xv. 10, " By the grace of God I am what I
am"; i.e. by his loving mercy.

2 Cor xii. 9, " My grace is sufficient for thee "; i.e.
he can trust in God's love and mercy. But note
" strength " in the parallel clause, which easily paves
the way for the later usage.

Heb. iv. 1 6, " Come with boldness to the throne of
grace"; cf. "throne of glory"; the throne where
grace or mercy sits enthroned, not where " grace " is
dispensed. The meaning in this clause determines the
following words, " find grace."

James iv. 6, " Giveth greater grace," i.e greater
acceptance than the world or its friendship; cf. the
quotation from Prov. iii. 34 which follows; see Hort,
Epistle of St. James, ad he.

1 Peter iv. 10, " As good stewards of the manifold
grace of God"; this is nearest to the modern use,
suggesting a store which is to be dispensed, though the
reference in the context is to specific endowments.

Such passages are transitional; taken alone they
might be interpreted in the modern sense, but it is
clear that their strict exegesis must be determined by
the general use of x"/>,<; in the New Testament.

1 Sanday and Headlam, Romans, p. II.

v THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GRACE 191

DETACHED NOTE B
The Concrete Meaning of " Gratia "

The change of meaning in the Latin gratia, from
an abstract quality to the concrete expression of that
quality, may be paralleled from the history of the
word liberalitas. Imperial coins bear the inscription
Liberalitas Augusti, celebrating the generosity of the
Emperor as a quality, just as they celebrate his piety
or clemency. The usual type is a female figure with
a cornucopia. But other types are found with an
elaborate composition representing the Emperor dis-
tributing a congiarium, or largess. And successive
congiaria are enumerated on coins with the inscription
Liberalitas Augusti II, III, etc., for which Congiarium
Augusti II, etc., is sometimes found. That is to say,
liberalitas has come to have the concrete meaning of
" the gift bestowed," equivalent to congiarium. See
also Tacitus, Hist. i. 20, " decuma parte liberalitatis
apud quemque eorum relicta."

For the substance of this note I am indebted to the
kindness of the Rev. C. H. Dodd of Mansfield College,
Oxford.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION
HOW GOD TEACHES

C. W. EMMET, B.D.

ANALYSIS

Inspiration and Grace. — The question with Inspiration, as with
Grace, is of the influence of the Divine Personality on the human. The
parallel between the two cases.

The Desire for a special Method of Revelation. — The primitive
identification of inspiration with the psychically abnormal; the modern
identification with what is psychologically inexplicable. Dr. Hamil-
ton's view of the origin of the Hebrew belief in monotheism. The
distinction between " Revelation " and " revelation " untenable. God
revealed in nature. The belief in immortality due to a diffused
popular inspiration.

The Flash of Discovery. — Boy calculators. The conscious and
subconscious preparation for what seems the spontaneous intuition;
examples. The principle applied to the prophets.

The Sense of Otherness. — Examples. The conviction not in itself
a guarantee of truth; Nietzsche; H. G. Wells. The parallel with
grace; intermingling of the divine and human.

The Test of Inspiration. — The criterion the truth of the message,
not the method of revelation. The responsibility of judging for our-
selves. The instinct of selection to which we owe the Bible.

The unexplained Residuum. — Discovery, or revelation, dependent
on man's response. Why does one respond, while another does not?
The unexplained personal factor always present. God not to be sought
in the gaps.

Inspiration and Communion with God. — The underlying condition
always contact with the Divine, though this cannot be used as the
primary criterion of truth. The supreme inspiration of Christ.

The Inspiration of the ordinary Man. — Inspiration in the last
resort not peculiar to a few or confined to the sphere of religion. The
danger and the value of individual intuitions.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION:
HOW GOD TEACHES

Inspiration and Grace

We have been discussing the question how God helps
us, and have tried to find the key in the relation of the
Divine Personality to the human, interpreted on the
lines, though not within the limits, of the relation of
human personalities to one another. We may now
apply the same key to the problem of how God teaches
us. Our illustration of what happens as between mas-
ter and pupil has obvious bearings on the question of
inspiration. We have found that the secret is the
action of mind upon mind, not only by the direct
methods of speech and instruction, but most of all
through the more subtle gift of personal influence.
The result is the inspiration of the pupil, whether for
conduct or for creative thought, the enhancement of
his personality to a degree which could not have come
otherwise. This inspiration often comes suddenly
and mysteriously, sometimes in ways hard to account
for; it brings with it in a true sense the embodiment
of the teacher's idea and spirit. But this spirit has
been blended with the pupil's spirit; it has not dis-
lodged it or taken its place. It does not in any way
supersede the need for study and personal effort. The
idea has become the pupil's, and in the expression of
it there is always something individual, whether for
better or for worse.

If we keep his point of view clearly before our minds
we shall be saved from the fundamental misconceptions
which have often vitiated the popular ideas of inspira-
tion in the past. It is persons who are inspired, not

195

196 THE SPIRIT vi

books. No doubt it is perfectly legitimate to transfer
the epithet and to speak of an " inspired " poem or
piece of music; but we must never allow ourselves to
forget that such a use of the term is secondary. In-
spiration is the quickening of vision, the enhancement
of the personality, which can only come to a person.
The distinction is not merely verbal; it excludes at once
any notion of a message or book of which the words
have simply been miraculously dictated. We shall
therefore approach the problem of inspiration from
the side of psychology and personality. However it
comes and however it works, it is the result of the in-
fluence of the Divine Spirit upon the human.

Speaking generally, we shall find that the principles
which we have discussed in our treatment of grace will
hold good here too. On the one hand we insist on
the university and the continuity of the creative work-
ing of the Divine Spirit. If He is always and every-
where helping and raising man, He is also always
teaching him. Any discovery of the good, the true,
the beautiful, can only come as the result of God's
revelation of Himself and His works to the mind of
man. The inventor, the thinker, the artist, in what-
ever medium, is inspired in so far as his thoughts and
the expression of them correspond to the divine
thought. But on the other hand, while we refuse to
draw a sharp line between divine inspiration and hu-
man discovery, just as we refused to draw it between
natural and supernatural goodness, we must not ig-
nore the supreme importance of the difference of the
degree in which men, whether in science, or in art, or in
religion, do succeed in entering into the mind of God.
As with goodness, so with beauty and truth, the ap-
propriation and expression of that mind may be un-
conscious, commonplace, partial, or it may rise to
heights of genius. The barriers of sin and self-will, of
blindness and ignorance, are abiding facts which need
to *he taken very seriously in this context as in the
other.

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 197

The Desire for a Special Method of
Revelation

The question, however, at once arises, Can we dis-
cover any criterion as to the degree of inspiration —
in other words, of the closeness of communion with the
Divine Spirit — in any given case, and the amount of
truth in the result as expressed in word or art? The
purpose of this essay is to suggest that this criterion is
in no way dependent on any one particular mode of
discovery or revelation. In quite primitive times in-
spiration was connected with what is psychically ab-
normal, the dream or trance, ecstasy or frenzy, where
the human reason is at its lowest. Such a position has
long been abandoned. The time has passed when
men could agree with Tertullian in holding that " the
majority of men learn God from visions," or when
an ignorant peasant could be made patriarch of an
important see in obedience to a dream of his dying
predecessor.1 Studies of psychical phenomena,
whether in trance or in automatic speech and writing,
prove conclusively that, even if such methods may some-
times be a channel of truth, they are in no possible
sense a guarantee of truth, or the necessary accompan-
iments of the highest types of revelation. But old de-
lusions die hard. There are still those who would
make the extent of the revelation depend on the degree
to which it is psychologically unintelligible. Is the
message unexpected? Has it come by a sudden in-
tuition? Is it apparently inexplicable as the result of
previous study and reflection? If so, it is suggested,
we have at last evidence of a direct self-revelation of
God. The idea of the verbal infallibility of Scripture
■ is dead, not so its chief presupposition, that somehow
revelation must be the imparting of correct informa-
tion, and inspiration the power of receiving it. And
so attempts are still made, even by those who claim to
accept the modern view of inspiration, to vindicate a

1 See Inge, Christian Mysticism, p. 16.

198 THE SPIRIT vi

special position and authority for the Bible, based not
on its inherent truth and intrinsic appeal, but on some-
thing which can be regarded as unique in the manner
of its composition. It must at all costs be given a
special status in a class by itself, different in kind, not
only in degree, from all other books.

A typical example of such an attempt may be found
in a comparatively recent book, Dr. Hamilton's The
People of God. He argues that the monotheism of
the Hebrew prophets (/'. e. their belief that Jehovah is
the sole God of the world, opposed to the older idea
that He was the God of the Hebrews) was due to a
special self-revelation of God. It cannot, he urges, be
explained as the result of environment, or reflection on
the facts of life and history, or intellectual dialectic.
Its origin is quite different to that of the Greek philoso-
phical monotheism, and can only be accounted for by an
inner spiritual experience in which God manifested
Himself directly and immediately by a mode confined
to one race. In the same way A. Sabatier has main-
tained that the new and critical ideas in the history
of religion — the unity of God, His Fatherhood, and
the Brotherhood of man — cannot be explained as due
to inference or reflection; they must be regarded as due
to an immediate revelation.1 Dr. Hamilton therefore
draws a sharp distinction between discovery and Revela-
tion, or between revelation with a small and Revelation
with a large " R " : " ' revelation ' means the knowl-
edge about God which man derives from reflection on
the facts of existence, and would perhaps be better
called ' human discovery.' ' Revelation ' stands for a
knowledge of God given directly to man by God Him-
self, and not mediated through reflection on the nature
of existence. ... In the one case man arrives at a
knowledge of God's existence and character by a slow
and painful process of endeavouring to solve the riddle
of existence; in the other case this knowledge comes

l Sec Rashdall, Philosophy and Religion, p. 115.

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 199

directly without being mediated through such a process
of reflection." 1

Not for a moment would we quarrel with the po-
sition that the prophetic insistence on Jehovah as the
one God is an outstanding example of inspiration, or
revelation, at its highest, though Dr. Hamilton's view
of the uniqueness of the Hebrew monotheism is open to
some question. What we have to ask is whether there
is a special channel and type of Revelation in an ex-
clusive sense, confined to one race and religion. How
far is it true that certain truths are directly revealed
by God, while others are discovered by man through
the exercise of his own reason?

In the first place, let us consider the suggested dis-
tinction between " Revelation " and " revelation."
Dr. Hamilton himself seems to have some difficulty in
drawing the line as sharply as he suggests. For be-
tween the two sentences just quoted comes another
which, carefully considered, endangers his whole posi-
tion. " The dividing line between Revelation and
revelation is not that the former is God's effort to seek
after man and the latter man's effort to seek after God;
for we do not know that the Eternal Spirit is not seek-
ing to disclose Himself to man through his own pow-
ers of observation and reflection." Here precisely is
the crux. As we have already suggested, all discov-
ery is in the end revelation. Man is seeking, God is
revealing, always and by many channels. In all
progress of thought, in all approach to the fuller
knowledge of the good, the true, and the beautiful,
there is some contact between the divine and human
personalities. To the Christian there can be no other
source of truth. The difference between one man and
another is a difference of insight and of nearness; in
some the divine is clogged, in others it flows freely.
We have tended to treat discovery as active at the
human end and passive at the divine, while with revela-

1 Op. cit. i. 165.

200 PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION vi

tion we have reversed the roles. Discovery is re-
garded as a processs in which man looks through the
telescope and the divine is simply seen. In Revela-
tion God is thought of as speaking through the tele-
phone, while man has only to listen. The reality is
always a blending of the two: man both hears and
sees; God both speaks and makes Himself seen. No
doubt there are differences of method, diversities of
operation, but one and the self-same Spirit is at work
in all. There is the desire to discover truth, beauty,
and moral goodness, and to express them in word, art,
or conduct; there is the seeking for the divine fellow-
ship in prayer and meditation; there are immediate in-
tuitions bringing with them a direct sense of His pres-
ence. But can we ultimately separate sharply between
them, labelling some discovery and others Revelation?
Are not most of them found in varying proportions in
the same persons, and in all their activities?

Again, it cannot be denied that there comes to many
a sense of direct contact with God through nature.
Dr. Hamilton would regard this as " revelation " or
discovery, a means of getting to know about God by
our own efforts, but such a position is simply untrue to
the experience of nature-mystics and poets of all ages,
as well as to that of many plain men and women who
claim to find here a personal communion with the
Divine.1 While we reserve the right to analyse such
experiences, and to distinguish between the psycho-
logical fact and its supposed content and expression,
we must accept them as valid so far as they go, pre-
cisely as we accept the fact of religious experiences in
the narrower sense. And it is worth adding that this
experience of God through nature is of two kinds.
There is the case of those who have already found
God through the more usual religious channels, and
then go on to find Him in the world without. But
there are also others to whom nature is the primary,

1 Sec Illinjrworth, Divine Immanence, chap, ii., and Inge, Christian Mysticism,
chaps, vii., viii. ; also the essay in this volume on " Spiritual Experience."

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 201

and even to the end of the predominant, means of
communion with Him. One result of such com-
munion, here as elsewhere, is inspiration or vision.
We need not discuss whether Wordsworth is more or
less inspired than some of the Biblical writers, but we
are concerned to maintain that God does reveal Him-
self through nature, and that so far as He does so the
result is a knowledge of divine truth and beauty.

Let it be repeated that we do not wish in any way
to deny or undervalue the reality or the significance of
the personal experience of the prophets. What we are
asking is whether that experience is peculiar to them
and is the unique method by which God reveals new
truths about Himself. Even in the field of religion
itself we may find important truths which have not
come through the special channel which is regarded as
the peculiar vehicle of Revelation. At least as won-
derful as the original discovery of monotheism by a
few chosen spirits (the prophets) is what happened
after the exile in regard to the belief in Immortality
— the emergence of which is, equally with monotheism,
a crucial stage in the history of revelation. In the
later books of the Old Testament, in the Apocrypha
and the Apocalyptic literature, we can trace the stages
of its growth, here a little and there a little. It can-
not be claimed as the outcome of some outstanding
revelation to one or two favoured seers. Those to
whom we owe it do not seem to have been men of any
conspicuous religious or literary genius. Their very
names are unknown, and in most cases their writings
have only survived by accident and in translations.
Yet under the pressure of experience the belief gradu-
ally emerged till it became so strong that Christ and
His Apostles could take it for granted. And up to a
point we can see why this happened. The old view
that earthly happiness corresponded to desert was in-
creasingly contradicted by facts; there was a growing
sense of personality which both looked for the per-

202 THE SPIRIT vi

manence of that communion with God which had been
felt to be the highest thing in life, and also refused to
be satisfied with some glorious future for the nation,
receding ever further and further, in which generation
after generation of faithful souls was to have no per-
sonal share. There was also a closer contact with
other religions, especially Zoroastrianism, in which the
belief in a life after death played a large part. The
growth of the belief among the Jews thus becomes
psychologically intelligible; none the less it marks an
epoch in religious history. It is due not to any unique
self-revelation of God but to a diffused popular in-
spiration, shared by more than one race.

The Flash of Discovery

To the Hebrew prophet the " word of the Lord "
seems often to have come as suddenly and inexplicably
as lightning from a clear sky. But, we must ask, is
the mere fact of suddenness or psychological unin-
telligibility in itself a criterion of a special revelation of
the highest truth, or even of truth at all? The most
startling examples of knowledge flashed into the mind
by a process which is at present inexplicable are to be
found in the boy calculators, who solve the most com-
plicated arithmetical problems in a moment by a kind
of intuition.1 Or we may instance the perfectly
authenticated faculty of water-finding, whereby certain
persons can discover water at some depth by the
twitching of a twig in the hands as they walk over the

l Examples may be seen in Myers's Human Personality, pp. 64 ff. ; or we may
instance the following account of the powers of a Tamil boy: " Representatives
of the Ceylon Department of Education had prepared a series of complicated
sums. Each of these he answered within a few seconds. One sum was:
'A chetty gave as a treat to 173 persons a bushel of rice each. Each bushel
contained 3,431,272 grains, and the chetty stipulated that 17 per cent should
be given to the temple, llow many grains did the temple get? ' Within
three seconds came the answer (which had to be translated): 100,913,709,
with 52 as the fraction over. The boy was told that the answer should be
100,913,719. He shook his head, and though the sum was several times
repeated to him maintained he was right. The Education Department repre-
sentative the next day had to admit that he had miscopied the answer, and had
also omitted the fractional part in the copy he had made.

" In some cases hardly had the last word of the interpretation of the sum
been uttered before the correct reply was begun " (The Times, October 1, 1912).

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 203

ground. In such cases the results have not been pre-
pared for by previous study; they are immediate and
inexplicable, and not due to conscious reflection. No
doubt these faculties are valuable, and do give us some-
thing which is true and therefore in its measure divine,
but they are concerned with comparatively low grades
of truth, and no one would argue that they are due to
a special self-revelation of God.

When, however, we examine their experiences we see
good reason to doubt whether the direct revelation
which is claimed for the prophets is either so inex-
plicable or so independent of the ordinary human
means of discovery as at first sight appears. Modern
psychology by its analysis both of the phenomenon of
religious conversion and of the process of discovery
and artistic production has thrown much light on the
whole subject. What seems the spontaneous, unex-
plicable flash is shown to be in fact the outcome, emerg-
ing into consciousness, of a long period of subconscious
reflection on material which the conscious mind has
supplied. A good illustration is afforded by the
dreams of Professor Hilprecht.1 He went to bed on
one occasion after a hard spell of work on the trans-
lation of an Assyrian stone, of which he had assumed
a false interpretation, and awoke in the morning with
a new translation in his mind which turned out to be
correct. He had a dim consciouness of having con-
tinued his work in a dream. Much more remarkable
is his account of a dream in which a priest of Nippur
leads him to the treasure-chamber of a temple and ex-
plains to him the history of two fragments of agate
which he had been studying from a sketch, telling him
how they may be fitted together and the inscription
deciphered. He had had no idea that the two frag-
ments were in fact connected, since they were described
as being of different colours, but the " revelation " was
found to be absolutely accurate in all verifiable par-

1 See Myers, Human Personality, pp. 365 ff. (one vol. edition).

2o4 THE SPIRIT vi

ticulars, and entirely probable in the parts where proof
was no longer possible. The point to note is " that
not one of these items of information was beyond the
reach of the processes of associative reasoning which
Professor Hilprecht daily employs." In each case the
final solution of the problem, coming in this dramatic
and unexpected way, appears to have been the crystal-
lising, or precipitate, of weeks of apparently fruitless
study. In particular he uses in his second dream a
piece of information given to him some years pre-
viously by a friend and entirely forgotten by his waking
mind.

Numerous illustrations of such subconscious men-
tation, following hard and sometimes apparently
fruitless thinking, may be found in the realms of liter-
ature and art.1 A contemporary instance is Donald
Hankey's description of his writing of The Lord of All
Good Life: " I would have you realise that it was
written spontaneously, in a burst, in six weeks. . . .
I had tried and tried, but without success. Then sud-
denly everything cleared up. To myself the writing of
it was an illumination." 2 Most quite ordinary work-
ers will in fact be able to illustrate from their own
knowledge this experience of the sudden solution of a
difficulty long pondered over in vain, of the apparently
spontaneous arrangement of a complicated train of
thought, often after the problem has been laid aside for
some time, or of the flashing into the mind of the
artistic or literary inspiration. They will understand
how these things come with a sense of mysterious au-
thority, as though from some source outside them-
selves. But they will also know that the result is al-
ways the outcome of the work and effort which have

1 See, e.g., Myers, Human Personality, p. 71 (one vol. edition). F. B. Bond
(The Gate of Remembrance, p. 48) gives a remarkable example of a recon-
struction of a lost piece of architecture, which was afterwards discovered to be
quite correct. He holds that such mental pictures of the past become
spontaneously apparent to the artist " when in a state of mental passivity after
intellectual exertion in the particular direction needed." This instance is
independent of the discoveries he describes as made at Glastonbury through
automatic writing, which indeed may be explained on the same principle.

2 The Student in Arms (2nd series), p. 31.

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 205

gone before; it is not a gift dropped mysteriously and
spontaneously from heaven. It is only a half-truth to
say that " art happens." Genius is no doubt more
than " an unlimited capacity for taking pains," but this
is almost invariably one of its conditions. A classical
description of the process is given in Myers's St. Paul:

Lo as some bard on isles of the Aegean,

Lovely and eager when the earth was young,

Burning to hurl his heart into a paean,

Praise of the hero from whose loins he sprung; —

He, I suppose, with such a care to carry,

Wandered disconsolate and waited long,
Smiting his breast, wherein the notes would tarry,

Chiding the slumber of the seed of song:

Then in the sudden glory of a minute,

Airy and excellent the proem came,
Rending his bosom, for a god was in it,

Waking the seed, for it had burst in flame.

In view of these considerations we shall not have
much doubt what answer to give to the question asked
by Dr. Davidson 1 with regard to Biblical inspiration:
" When truth suddenly dawned on the prophet's mind,
which formerly he strove unsuccessfully to reach by
means of reflection, did the feeling he had at such a
moment differ from the feeling men still have, when
oftentimes, in peculiarly spontaneous frames of mind,
difficulties are broken up and problems solved which
before resisted all conscious and direct efforts of the
mind? " We may take as an example Isaiah's account
of his call.2 Here we have a religious experience
which seems at first sight to be entirely spontaneous.
Yet we may find the key in the opening words of the
chapter: " In the year that king Uzziah died." The
king had been the hero of the young prophet; the shock
of his tragic end led him up from hero-worship and
imperialism to religion and God. The subsequent

1 Old Testament Prophecy, p. ill.

2 Isaiah vi.

206 THE SPIRIT vi

vision and revelation become psychologically intel-
ligible as the outcome of a spiritual crisis, due to his-
torical events and reflection on them.1 But they do
not therefore cease to be true and epoch-making. We
cannot indeed always trace the psychological ante-
cedents which condition the experiences of the Biblical
writers. They were not interested in psychology or
in the process by which they arrived at their con-
clusions; in many cases they were probably unconscious
of any such process. But there is no evidence that
their minds did not work in the same way as the minds
of other men; what seemed spontaneous had really been
prepared for.

Once more, while what seems to be the intuitive
flash of genius is often of supreme significance, whether
in religion or in art, we must not make it the special
criterion of discovery or of communion with the Divine.
" ' What constitutes the true artist,' says a master of
style, ' is not the slowness or quickness of the process,
but the absolute success of the result.' . . . Beauty and
truth may come together and find the exactly right
words in the flash of a moment, or after many at-
tempts." 2 A piece of music such as the last move-
ment of the Ninth Symphony, hammered out after
many experiments and rejected themes, may be as in-
spired as Schubert's Songs, flashing into the mind un-
expectedly and almost ready formed. St. Luke's Gos-
pel, the result of the comparison and blending of earlier
documents and materials, or the considered argument
of the Epistle to the Romans, are no less inspired
than the vision of the Apocalypse. The highest ex-
amples of revelation are not necessarily to be found
where the process is obscure, or where the outcome
seems to be spontaneous; still less should this ob-
scurity or spontaneity be regarded as the tests of
revelation.

1 Cf . G. A. Smith's discussion of the passage in The Book of Isaiah ("The
Expositor's Bible "), pp. 58 ff.

2 E. T. Cook, Literary Recreations, p. 316.

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 207

The Sense of Otherness

It is, indeed, not surprising that in such cases of
apparently spontaneous emergence the feeling of " oth-
erness " and of external inspiration is especially strong.
The popular use of the phrase " it came as an inspira-
tion " is of an idea flashing unexpectedly into the mind,
as though from some outside source, and welcomed at
once as valuable and correct. Stevenson, not alto-
gether playfully,1 attributes his stories to his
" Brownies," both when he is asleep and even to some
extent during his waking hours. Blake attributes his
poems to spiritual helpers. As he walked along the
seashore he was haunted by the forms of Moses and
the prophets, of Homer and Milton, who seemed to
communicate to him directly what he was to write.
" I may praise it," he says, " since I dare not pretend
to be other than the secretary; the authors are in
eternity." " I have written this poem from immediate
dictation, twelve, or sometimes twenty or thirty lines
at a time without premeditation, and even against my
will."2 So Bohme,3 speaking of his visions, says:
" Whatever I could bring into outwardness, that I
wrote down. The work is none of mine; I am but
the Lord's instrument, wherewith He doeth what He
will." The account which the prophetic writers of the
Bible give of themselves is often in line with this con-
ception. No doubt it is difficult to be quite sure how
far " The Lord said unto me," or the language of
visions, whether in the prophets or the Apocalyptic
writers, represents in all cases a real psychological ex-
perience, or whether it is sometimes merely an ac-
cepted literary and religious mode of expression. But
in either case it unquestionably stands for a conviction
that the message is not only true but in some sense is
not the prophet's own, coming from a higher source
outside himself.

1 Across the Plains, " A Chapter on Dreams."

2 See F. Granger, The Seal of a Christian, pp. 215 ff.

3 Quoted in Inge, Christian Mysticism, p. 277.

208 THE SPIRIT vi

But this sense of otherness is not in itself the hall-
mark of a divine revelation. We find, for example,
in the realm of art works which have been produced by
this intuitive process, by what Myers would regard as
specifically the method of genius, without being in
themselves works of genius.1 He instances Haydon's
Raising of Lazarus, which, as his Autobiography
shows, flashed upon him with an overmastering sense
of direct inspiration, or Voltaire's " unreadable
tragedy Catilina," written in a week and ascribed by
him to a flash of genius, the gift of God. Where
Blake insists most on his " inspiration," as in the
prophetic books, the result is on a lower level than in
the lyrics produced in a more normal way. In the
same way immediacy, or the overmastering sense of
certainty and " given-ness," is no guarantee of superior
excellence or truth in philosophy or religion. Here is
Nietzsche's account of his own experience of " inspi-
ration " :

If one had the smallest vestige of superstition left in one,
it would hardly be possible completely to set aside the idea that
one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of an
almighty power. The idea of revelation in the sense that
something which profoundly convulses and upsets one becomes
suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and
accuracy describes the simple fact. One hears — one does not
seek — one takes — one does not ask who gives : a thought sud-
denly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, without
faltering. I have never had any choice in the matter.2

The account is combined with an extravagant insis-
tence on the absolute truth and pre-eminence of the re-
sult: " If all the spirit and goodness of every great
soul were collated together, the whole could not create
a single one of Zarathustra's discourses." 3 As Dr.
Figgis points out, Nietzsche's philosophy is not in fact

1 Human Personality (one vol. edition), p. 60.

2 Quoted from Ecce Homo, p. ioi, by J. N. Figgis, The Will to Freedom,
pp. 160 ff.

.! Figgis, op. cit., p. 163.

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 209

so original as he supposed, and we certainly shall not
accept it as divinely inspired, but here we have a sin-
cere conviction of inspiration in the prophetic sense.
Of course Nietzsche himself rejects the prima facie
impression that he is in communion with a higher
power, but even in the case of those who insist, and no
doubt insist rightly, that they are in such communion,
wc cannot consent to accept their message as true on
this ground alone.

Claims to such communion are found in many re-
ligions; we cannot reject as delusions all which are \
not associated with our own creed, nor on the other
hand are we compelled to accept the teaching based on
them as " revelations." Such considerations are a
commonplace with regard to the experiences and the
writings of the mystics, as well as of the prophets,
true and false, of the Old Testament. Again, let us
listen to the testimony of Mr. Wells:

Then suddenly, in a little while, in His own time, God
comes. This cardinal experience is an undoubting immediate
sense of God. It is as if one were touched at every point by a
being akin to oneself, sympathetic beyond measure. ... It
is like standing side by side with and touching someone we
love very dearly and trust completely. ' Closer is he than
breathing, nearer than hands and feet." The moment may
come while we are alone in the darkness, under the stars, or
while walking by ourselves, or in a crowd, or while we sit and
muse. It may come in the sinking ship or in the tumult
of battle. But after it has come our lives are changed. God
is with us, and there is no more doubt of God.1

These words undoubtedly represent a first-hand re-
ligious experience, but they do not compel us to ac-
cept the theology of God the Invisible King as the out-
come of a special revelation. Are we then justified
in arguing in the case of the Bible that the unquestioned
genuineness of the religious experience of its writers is
in itself the proof of the truth of everything in their
teaching? In the Psalms we find the sense of personal

1 God the Invisible King, p. 27.

2IO

THE SPIRIT vi

fellowship with God at its highest, but this does not,
as has sometimes been suggested, carry with it any
guarantee that the attitude towards enemies adopted in
some of them corresponds to the Divine Mind.

We may remind ourselves of the parallel problem
which we found in connection with grace. There too
there was the sense of " otherness." It is a conviction
of all deep religious experience that it is " a power not
ourselves " which raises and saves, and which also re-
veals and teaches. But in the moral sphere this
" otherness " did not justify us in drawing a sharp line
between natural and supernatural virtues, or imply a
class of actions which could be called perfect. Both
with grace and with inspiration the Divine influence
works by entering into the personality so as to co-op-
erate with it; it does not supersede it by way of pos-
session.

It follows that it is impossible to find in anything
which comes through the medium of a human mind an
absolute " Revelation." There is always some dross
with the gold, something individual and peculiar, tem-
porary and inadequate. " No man hath seen God at
any time," nor is His voice heard speaking from
heaven. We insist on the absolute reality of com-
munion with Him, but we cannot take certain forms
of this communion and say, " This is seeing God face
to face, as a man sees and talks with his friend in the
body, while at other times we only know about God as
we may read a letter from a friend, hear or talk or
think about him." We cannot say, " Here God comes
personally to the prophets and reveals Himself, while
in all other cases He merely leads men to discover
something about Him." The outside element, the di-
vine entering into the human spirit, is indeed a reality
and does make a difference; but it is not confined to
any one type of communion, nor is it ever found in
isolation from the human contribution. The prophet,
whether in religion, art, or science, is justified in his

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 211

claim " Thus saith the Lord," but it cannot be held to
carry with it the elimination of the human element or
to place the content of his message beyond criticism.
Nor again does it imply an access to a mode of inspira-
tion wholly denied to the ordinary man.

The Test of Inspiration

What, then, is the final test of inspiration? We can
only reply that there is no special criterion peculiar to
the realm of religion, or applicable to one particular
type of literature such as the Bible. The test whether
a writer is inspired is simply whether his message is
true. The criterion of truth is indeed a much vexed
question of philosophy, but no system makes truth, or
the highest truth, dependent on the special channel
through which it comes. The test may be congruity
with experience, or with the whole correlated body of
truth; it may be a certain self-evidencing power, or
even the fact that it " works " in the broadest sense.
But in any case the appeal must be to the reason, to
the whole personality at its highest and best. All
revelation must be judged by its inherent truth, by its
power of finding us and appealing to our conscience,
by the degree in which it calls out the best in us and
awakens the response of the highest part of our being.
It cannot rest ultimately on any external authority be-
cause we ourselves can be the only judges of the claims
of such authority. In particular we have found reason
to believe that it is not bound up with any one psycho-
logical process, or peculiar to any one age or set of
people. We cannot escape the responsibility of judg-
ing for ourselves by throwing ourselves in blind faith
upon the method of revelation and finding in that a
guarantee of divine truth.

To many religious minds it will seem to be no light
thing to abandon this hope of some external infallible
authority. In our weakness we crave something
definite on which to lean, something which may tell us

212 THE SPIRIT vi

without possibility of error what we are to do, what we
are to believe. And yet here too the message of Chris-
tianity is that by losing our life we find it. It tells
us to live dangerously and take risks. It never
allows us merely to play for safety; in thought no less
than in action we must be ready for adventure to set
forth into the unknown, each one for himself, in re-
liance on the Spirit of God.

But though it is true that each of us must take the
responsibility of forming his own judgement, yet it is
equally important to insist that ultimately the indi-
vidual does not stand alone. The organ which decides
on truth is in the last resort the community of which
he is a member, the communis sensus fidelium, by which
we mean agreement of the highest and best trained
minds in any field, working over the generations. A
decision so reached is slow, and it is not at any given
moment, or in respect to any given point, infallible,
but, in the long run, securus judicat orbis terrarum.
And it is to this general instinct of the religious com-
munity that we owe the Bible. By a gradual and un-
conscious process of selection this instinct picked out
the best books from their competitors — the best
Psalms, for instance, from the Jewish sacred poetry of
many centuries, the best Gospels from the various Lives
of Christ. When we are able to compare, as we can
to some extent in this latter case, or in the case of the
Jewish literature which arose subsequently to the Old
Testament, we see clearly that this instinct, though not
beyond mistake or question, did on the whole work
out right. The official stamping of books as canonical
was simply the formal endorsement of this instinctive
selection. And it is worth noting that the process still
goes on, as the Bible is used. The pages of St. John
or the Epistle to the Philippians are thumbed, while
Chronicles or Esther remain untouched. Whatever
be the official rules as to the use of the Psalms, those
who are free to choose unconsciously select their

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 213

favourites, and, within limits, the selection is much the
same in all ages and in all classes. It is further of the
highest significance that the verdict of the simple de-
votional reader of the Bible agrees on the whole with
the verdict of the professed student, and even of the
advanced critic, as to the books and the passages which
stand on the highest level of inspiration. The more
we abandon external tests of inspiration the more im-
pressive becomes the fact of the universal appeal of
the noblest parts of the Bible to the religious instinct
of mankind. It is the same general method that we
see at work in the selection of the highest achieve-
ments of art or literature, no less than in the sifting
of truth from error. As the mills of judgement grind
slowly, so does this process of testing and sifting. The
Spirit of God gives us no clear-cut information as to
what we are to approve or value most highly. He
places no external hall-mark of authenticity on His
revelation, yet gradually, but surely, He trains the
divine faculty in man by which he may respond to the
true and the beautiful, and sift the gold from the dross.

The Unexplained Residuum

Neither in religion nor in philosophy, art, or science
can we in the last resort say why a particular discovery
or revelation comes to one man or one age rather than
to another. Men living at the same time have the
same raw material to work upon; some of them may
be engaged on the same line of thought or artistic ef-
fort with apparently equal sincerity and devotion; the
same fellowship with the Spirit is open to all. Yet the
flash of discovery, or the special gift of expression,
comes to one and not to another. Sometimes we can
in a measure explain the reason; sometimes we are
baffled. But in general we may surely conclude that,
whereas God is always and everywhere seeking to re-
veal Himself to the mind of man in the perfection of
His goodness, truth, and beauty, how much man can

214

THE SPIRIT vi

receive depends on his power of response and vision.
Even when inspiration was regarded as direct dicta-
tion, this fact was dimly recognised. There is a Jew-
ish legend that when the children of Israel sinned with
the Golden Calf the divine writing vanished from
the Tables.1 The measure of apprehension depends
partly on the spiritual atmosphere of the whole com-
munity, partly on the preparedness of particular in-
dividuals within the community. The genius can never
be independent of this atmosphere, nor can he be in-
definitely in advance of it. He focusses in himself all
that is best in the thought or the artistic instincts of
the many, and so progress comes. Up to a certain
point we can explain psychologically the conditions and
the method of such progress, but there is always the
unexplained residuum, and this depends on the per-
sonal factor. We cannot completely account for the
fact that the highest insight into the character and
being of God came to the Jew and not to the Baby-
lonian or the Greek. Why, in the last resort, does
one generation, race, or individual open itself to the
all-pervading divine influence, while others absorb but
little of it? But the problem is not in any way pe-
culiar to the region of the revelation of religious truth.
Precisely the same problem faces us in considering any
great advance in moral goodness, scientific discovery,
philosophic insight, or artistic achievement. It is the
same question why, in the ultimate nature of things,
one man is worse or more stupid than another; why
one responds to the grace of God while his neighbour
does not. From this point of view it is no easier to
explain why one is a dunce, unable to master the
pons asinorum, than it is to account for Shakespeare
and his plays, or the religious insight of Isaiah.

The problem, then, is really parallel to the biological
problem of explaining the origin of valuable variations
in the species, a problem to which no complete answer
has been given. But because there is always this un-

1 The Biblical Antiquities of Pliilo, xii. 7 (edited by M. R. James).

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 215

explained factor, the personal x, in goodness and bad-
ness, in success and failure alike, this does not justify
us in arguing that the degree to which God is present
depends on the amount which seems to be left unex-
plained in any given case. The only test of the pres-
ence of God, of the extent to which we have entered
into His mind, is the result: how far is it good, beau-
tiful, or true? The method or the degree of unex-
pectedness is, as we have seen, irrelevant. The fact
that we may be able to trace the working of cause and
effect does not banish God, nor is He specially present
where we have so far failed to unravel the sequence.
We do not look for the peculiar evidence of the Divine
in that which we cannot explain by hitherto deciphered
laws, whether of nature or psychology, in supposed
breaches of the process of evolution, in discoveries
of which the genesis is obscure. God is in the order of
nature as a whole, not specifically in what seem to be
its gaps.

Inspiration and Communion with God

But though there is no external criterion of inspira-
tion, though there is no one method or process of its
working, none the less it has one fixed condition. It is
that from which we started, the contact of the human
spirit with the divine, the right experience of God.
Without this there can be no revelation of God, and
where it exists there is always some measure of revela-
tion. Such contact may come through dream or vision,
through trance or ecstasy, or it may come in the sober
light of common day, when the faculties are fully
awake and the reason stretched to its point of highest
^ tension. The revelation of the truth may seem to
I flash into the mind as a sudden intuition, apparently
unprepared for and inexplicable by ordinary psycho-
logical law; it may be arrived at slowly, here a little
and there a little, by what seems to be the natural
result of hard study and thought. It may be mediated

216 THE SPIRIT vi

by prayer and meditation, or by the search for truth,
beauty, and goodness, pursued unselfishly as absolute
values. But in proportion to the extent and reality
of the contact will be the measure of the inspiration,
and therefore we shall not be surprised to find it at its
highest when the communion is deliberate and con-
scious. And this is precisely the case with the Bible as
;a whole. Many, though not indeed all, of its writers
do manifest quite clearly the sense of personal contact
with a personal God. He is to them not the personi-
fication of an abstract principle, but a vividly realised
friend, teacher, and leader. They make it their de-
liberate purpose to enter into direct communion with
Him, spirit meeting with spirit. We do not indeed
accept their inspiration or the truth of their message
primarily on account of such a claim. But once their
teaching has commended itself to the conscience and
reason by its inherent appeal, we can then go back to
that claim and accept it fully and without reserve; we
can see that it has indeed been the condition and the
explanation of their high inspiration.

The same holds good with regard to other seers.
The truth, the beauty, the moral grandeur prove their
inspiration; it is not the inspiration which proves that
their message is true. But especially where religious
values, such as the innermost being and character of
God, are concerned, we do find in general that where
the highest truth has been discovered there has been
some form or other of conscious communion with Him;
the Divine Spirit has entered into the human.

We shall agree in finding the supreme example of
inspiration in Christ. And here to a pre-eminent
degree the condition of personal communion with the
Father, constant and unbroken, is fulfilled. In a special
sense He claims to know the Father, i.e. to be in touch
with Him. His message is not His own, but His
Father's; the sense of " otherness " is very strong, and
with it the conviction of authority and certainty. But,

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 217

once more, the ground on which we accept His teaching,
the revelation which comes through Him, is the appeal
which it makes to the highest instincts of mankind, an
appeal confirmed by, though it does not logically start
from, the impression left by our records that Jesus was
in a unique sense in touch with God. The proof to
others of the reality of such intercourse can in each case
only be found in the effects on the character and insight
of him who claims to experience it. There are indeed
several features to be noted with regard to the inspira-
tion of Christ which confirm the line of thought we
have been following here. ( 1 ) There is a striking
absence of any claim to peculiar or abnormal modes of
intercourse; we hear but little of ecstatic vision or
mystic absorption. What Christ experienced was a
close and unsullied union with His Father through the
normal means which are open to every child of God.
(2) It is now generally agreed that this personal in-
spiration did not bring with it any externally revealed
knowledge of historical or scientific fact; what He
knew of these matters came through the ordinary
channels; His originality lay in the insight which He
brought to bear on the interpretation of life. (3) He
left no written record of His own to stereotype the rev-
elation of which He was the bearer. More and more
do we realise the profound significance of the fact that
the highest example of inspiration which mankind has
known works primarily as a living Spirit in the hearts of
those in touch with Him. There is the written record
of the Gospels which allows us to know the character
and outlines of His teaching, but this teaching comes to
us in a diluted form; it is not fixed in a series of ipsis-
sima verba which might be regarded as final, infallible,
absolute truth. Thus even in the case of the record of
the sayings of the Master Himself the principle holds
good that nowhere can we put our finger on a direct
undiluted word from heaven; always there is the human
medium which lends its own colour to the revelation.

218 THE SPIRIT vi

The Inspiration of the Ordinary Man

We have been speaking of the supreme examples of
inspiration, and in general usage we confine the term to
these, though the line may be drawn at very different

I points. And it is important to remember that in all1
fields it needs the genius to originate or discover, while
the ordinary man can but assimilate and understand,
at best improve and develop. At the same time, while
recognising this general usage, based on a real difference
of degrees of insight, we are concerned to maintain that
in the last resort it is a question of degree. Inspiration
is not a rare thing, peculiar to a small class; in its
measure it is open to, and does often actually come
to, the ordinary man. The limitation is parallel to a
similar limitation often made in connection with con-
duct. Holiness, or sainthood, is spoken of as the mark
of a few select spirits who have climbed the heights,
and yet all God's children, and particularly those who
are in fellowship with Christ, may, and often do, at-
tain to their measure of holiness. Even so, as all are
called to be saints, they may all be taught of God.
Further, while we think specially of inspiration as con-
cerned with religion and spiritual values, in the wider
sense it covers all life. It is open to the artist and the
man of science, to the historian and the statesman, to
the merchant and the labourer. Only from God can
each get the right judgement in whatever his hands
find to do, and this right judgement is in the last resort
of the same nature and comes from the same source,
with the same variety of method and process, as in-
spiration in the narrower sense. We are sometimes
suspicious of such inspiration because it has often been
associated with illogical, detached intuitions, received
as special divine leadings without serious examination,
shifting the responsibility of thought and decision from
the shoulders of the individual, and acted on with
disastrous results to himself and those around him.
There is the constant desire to be able to cry " Lo

vi PSYCHOLOGY OF INSPIRATION 219

here or Lo there is the finger of God directing me
in my way and determining my future." Few, indeed,
who have had their eyes open to see the working of
God's providence in their life, and have tried to train
their ears to hear the voice which says " This is the
way, walk, ye in it," will deny that at times such lead-
ings do come with a real authority and certainty. But
the point which emerges from our investigation is that
such supposed intuitions cannot be accepted blindly and
without thought as the direct and unquestioned voice
of God. They must be approved of by the conscience
and reason; inspiration implies not the disintegration
of personality but its enhancement, not the over-riding
of the faculties of insight and decision, the God-given
powers by which each one of us must direct his way on
his own ultimate responsibility, but their purging and
quickening. If this be remembered, we may, and
should, look in joyful confidence and without reserve
for the inspiration of the Spirit in our daily life. Not
for one moment would we underestimate the supreme
value of the inspiration of the seer or the saint, the
poet or the thinker, but it is crucial to realise that God
has not one method of speaking to and teaching the
prophet and something quite different for us ordinary
folk. We, too, may find the same personal guidance
and illumination, just in so far as by prayer and medita-
tion, by study and thought, by experiment and honest
work, on the particular material with which we have to
deal, we succeed in opening our hearts to the Presence
which is always there.

VII

THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL:

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE

CHRISTIAN SACRAMENTS

L. DOUGALL

ANALYSIS

Language is developed by fellowship.

But spoken language is never a perfect vehicle of thought.
Conversation is necessary to the development of the soul.
Action is needed to express thought when words fail.
The language of action, like speech, is traditional, but also mutable.
Religion needs its language of action — ritual.

A symbol is something that manifests to human sense a non-
sensuous reality.

Much of the action of daily life is symbolic.
The Christian language of action.

The two main ideas of earl}- Christianity — the joy of fellowship
with Christ in God's family, and the getting rid of habits of ill-will
in order to enjoy it — are symbolised in the Eucharist and Baptism.
Two points necessary for vital Christian ceremonial:

(i) It must express definitely the differentia of the Christian

religion.
(2) It must both embody tradition and also register the pro-
gressive understanding of truth.
Psychological explanation of the power of the Sacraments:
They act through the psychic law of suggestion.
The potency of a suggestion is in proportion to (1) the arrest of
attention in the receiving mind; (2) the suitability of the
suggestion to the prevailing mental attitude.
Objections, and an illustration.
The significance of infant baptism.
Confession and Absolution.

The rites associated with the Eucharist, and their suggestive
significance.
Need of appropriate ceremonial.

VII

THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL:

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE

CHRISTIAN SACRAMENTS

The Evolution of Language

In its simplest form language must be the attempt of
one living being to communicate with another living
being. In this sense the yap of the hound to attract
the pack would be language, even if it were the first
yap that the first hound ever gave. But by language we
ordinarily mean something more developed — the use
of signs agreed upon by the communicators. In so far
as a man is solitary, language is impossible, although,
having first learnt language by fellowship, he may make
of himself an imaginary fellow, and in solitude take
great delight in discoursing with himself.

Any system of words which we call a human language
has been produced by centuries of psychical develop-
ment through fellowship; and any language that can
be written, however simple and elementary, carries
with it the story of a civilization which is a fellowship
systematised. There is a real mystery, and one which
ought to evoke our reverence and wonder, in the growth
of a highly organised language. Where has its gram-
mar come from? Grammarians discover; they do not
create. If the language in which any great literature is
written were a production of conscious art or ingenuity,
we should honour its creator as in the first rank of
human genius. But no man made it, although every
man who ever used it aided in its construction. So
when we commonly say that a written language is pro-
duced by the genius of a people, we do not mean that
any individual or any number of individuals consciously

223

224 THE SPIRIT vn

set to work to construct it. Language is not a thing
of conscious construction; it is the unconscious product
of many minds, and reflects deep resemblances of char-
acter of which no one of them may be aware. I see
no reason to suppose that the corporate soul of a tribe
or nation has any one centre of initiation. A language
is the result of the interaction of souls in a fellowship,
and it becomes flexible and highly developed only when
fellowship is intimate and prolonged.

Limitations of Verbal Language

What, however, we need more particularly to con-
sider here is the limitation of even the most highly
developed verbal language. The failure of words to
express what is most essential in life is so constantly
with us that, like the ticking of a clock, we do not
even notice it. It is not alone the deep things, but
also the shallow things that we cannot say to one
another except when the subject is matter of common
and familiar experience. I remember once being in
the company of some educated people when a new
fruit had been exposed for sale in the market of a
midland town. Half of my companions had eaten the
fruit, while half had not seen it. Those who knew
it were unable to explain its nature to those who did
not know it. Those who had not seen it agreed with
one voice that they were only confused by the different
descriptions. When an object is quite novel, words
fail to express what an instant's experience of sense-
perception will fully convey. What words can possibly
convey the idea of a new sound or scent or smell or
texture? Old words fail; new words must come into
being to describe the new experience.

If this be true of the attempt to describe mere sense-
perceptions, it is much more true of the attempt to
describe new ideas. To do this the race is constantly
using old words in a new sense.

Thus wherever there is development of mind or

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 225

experience, language is developing to produce new
words and new meanings for old ones; but it always
lags behind experience — new words are always being
coined and new meanings given to old ones. Language
is never static, but its advance is never adequate to
express the whole advance of thought or experience.
There must always be a fringe, not only of novel dis-
coveries, but of novel thought in any community which
its words fail as yet to convey. The original thinker
on this account always finds a large part of his exposi-
tion must consist in carefully defining his terms.

There is, however, another failure of verbal lan-
guage with which we are all familiar. There are in
every man stirrings of emotion and volition, and half-
seen glimpses of complex thoughts, which he cannot
put into words even to himself. It is not only that he
cannot, or does not wish to, reveal them to others;
his own comprehension of himself fails in that he
cannot say at such times what he experiences; he can-
not resolve into its constituent parts an experience con-
fused, blurred, fleeting, elusive.

Beneath the level of our conscious and therefore
acquired habits of thought lies the conflux of our
primary and secondary instincts. Impulses prompted
by any of these provoke in developed minds half-linked
associations of thought with other instinctive emotions.
In this region appetites and aspirations are blurred,
and emotions and desires are like a tangled web. One
feeling touches the sympathetic psychic associations
of many diverse feelings. It is quite impossible to
express what is felt, or what is thought, or what is
willed, because when we say it is this, we know that it
is also that, and that other, that we feel and desire.

Of course a great deal of human experience that
must once have been confused and inexplicable has
become clear, because it has been analysed. The pleas-
ures of eating and drinking, for example, are very
real emotions, and there is very little in this common

226 THE SPIRIT vii

experience that an intelligent man cannot analyse, com-
prehend, and talk about if he wishes to; but it is quite
probable that to a dog the emotion roused by hunger
may be a half-comprehended and sacred fervour, asso-
ciated inextricably with affection for the usual donor
of food, and with the deeper and blind instinct of
self-preservation and the appetite of sex, and with
dim memories of hours of ecstasy in the hunt and the
fight. If this be so, whatever means the dog has of
communicating with his fellows and with men, such
language could only express the main fact of imme-
diate hunger; but beyond that he would be experienc-
ing things unutterable and inexpressible. The whole
attitude of a hungry dog asking for food suggests a
quivering intensity of experience which seems to find
no adequate vent in the various yaps and attitudes by
which he expresses the immediate fact.

In man the emotion of vague longing roused by
objects of surpassing beauty or sublimity may produce
a fervour of desire incommunicable because it touches
the deep spring of other associated instincts. The best
verbal utterance we can find for those half-formed
thoughts and unanalysed emotions and desires which
transcend common speech is poetry; and poetry
usually satisfies us as the expression of such experience
by what it suggests rather than by what it says. There
is, however, still much that is unexpressed in words,
and as the soul can only develop as it finds some means
of self-expression, some language of action must supple-
ment the language of words. But before considering
the language of action let us pause to realise how true
it is that the soul can only develop as it finds means
of expression.

Conversation Necessary to the Development
of the Soul

If we would understand the Christian ideal of fel-
lowship we must fully realise that communication is

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 227

necessary for the growth of the living soul. We so
hug to ourselves the idea that we are deep and great
beyond the powers of speech that we are apt to value
ourselves mainly by what we do not even try to say;
but the inference we superficially draw from this valu-
ation — that expression is comparatively unimportant
to the growth of the soul — will not bear a moment's
reflection.

Everywhere we see that as animals rise in the scale
of life they rise also in the power of making themselves
understood by their kind, and by man when they come
into contact with man. Human intelligence is seen to
rise above animal intelligence when it is able to use one
sound for a whole class of sensations or ideas. A little
child begins by gesticulation, and then by words, to say
" I want that flower," " I want that ball " ; but it goes
on to generalise as to the attributes of all balls, all
flowers; and then to classify things accordingly, and to
give to the class a common name. Thus it is only by
learning to speak that it learns to think. Without dis-
tinguishing individuals and classes, subjects and predi-
cates, it is impossible to think. When the child or
the savage acquires a language by which these things
can be expressed, it has for the first time a means by
which to compare its sensations with the sensations
of others, and to argue about them, and thus increase
its experience. History shows that men grow in power
over circumstances and in mutual usefulness at a pace
exactly proportionate to their power of thought, which
again depends upon their power of exact expression.
They can learn only a very little more than they can
express, and everywhere the soul is filled with a passion-
ate desire to express that little more, so man is a talk-
ing animal. At his highest, as at his lowest, he must
talk.

There are three things that move the human soul
supremely to desire and admiration — truth and beauty
and generosity. His conception of these may be de-

228 THE SPIRIT vn

based or exalted. His pursuit of truth may be that
of a Newton or a Darwin, or merely that of a pastry-
cook for the best way of making pastry. His idea
of beauty may be that of one of the world's greatest
artists or poets, or it may be the ecstasy of a factory
girl over the show in a draper's window, or it may be
the ploughman's love of an even furrow. A man's
idea of generosity may be expressed in the casual dole
out of an abundance, or in dying to save the world.
The sum of all that a soul desires or admires may be
merely its own comfort, or it may be the God of the
most exalted prophet; but whatever it is, that it will
pursue unremittingly; and to this pursuit understanding
is essential, and to understanding language is essential.
Language is necessary both for what a man would
learn from his fellow-men, and for such dialectic as
he must carry on within his own mind. Its necessity
for progress is brought out by the fact that when
anything is fully mastered by the race or the individual,
the necessity for conversation in regard to it tends to
pass away. On the other hand, wherever man in his
pursuit of the good for which he lives begins to tran-
scend what has become a commonplace, there speech of
some sort becomes a vital necessity. The whole fer-
ment of his mind is there on the fringe where the un-
known enticingly glimmers just beyond the known: at
that point he must talk or fail of his desire. He may
be most conscious of the need to talk to himself, or to
talk to other men, or to talk to God; but talk he will,
for talk he must, for talk is necessary to further under-
standing which must precede further acquirement. The
working of this law is so constant and invariable that
we hardly notice it. How little talk there is in any
village about the boiling of potatoes or the digging of
the ground! If a new industry is established, a new
vegetable introduced, what an amount of talk is re-
quired before the corresponding necessary habit be-
comes established.

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 229

But what is it that happens when the acquirement
upon which the soul has staked its all is something for
which the race has coined no word? Language is still
necessary; nay, it is then most necessary of all.

But, lest we go too fast, let us, before considering
further this need of self-expression, estimate the value
of solitary self-culture. Of course the speech common
to any race fails to express the idiosyncrasies of in-
dividual experience. Not only is the self of the friend
or companion always something to be apprehended
by faith, but also every soul, when it comes to inter-
rogate itself, finds that what is most its own, and
therefore most precious, has no verbal expression.
This fact gives colour to a conviction abroad in our
civilisation, that the individual mind lives at its highest
when it withdraws itself from all communication with
others. It is natural enough that this idea should
have become prevalent, because in every civilisation
there comes a stage when it is observed by those
of superior education that many ideas which are in
the true sense of the word vulgar, i.e. common to
the multitude, are of a tawdry and artificial character.
They do not represent the realities by which alone
the noble mind can live; and the first reaction to this
discovery is, very naturally, an undue emphasis upon
the comparative nobility of a state of solitude and the
idea that the merely individual reaction on life is the
highest truth attainable. Such proverbs as " God made
the country but man made the town," " Speech is sil-
vern, silence is golden," testified to the cult of solitude
by the votaries both of sensibility and of religion, and
also by that scholarly class of men who have thought
kindly of the Stoic conception of the self-contained life.
It is the first and most obvious reaction of the mind that
finds itself making some progress beyond the ideas and
sentiments which have become the common property of
its generation. " Mob " and " crowd " psychology, the
so-called " psychology of the herd," are new phrases

23o THE SPIRIT vii

often used to cover the premature generalisations and
conclusions which psychology, like every infant science,
makes; but in all ages of the world there has been
instinctive recognition of certain truths of crowd
psychology by reasonable men. The inference they
usually drew from them was the desirability of being in
some things a law to oneself and living an inward life
apart from men, either holding no communion what-
ever upon the deep things of the heart, or holding such
communion only with a God conceived as unrelated to
all those things which occupy natural human speech.
The self-sufficing idea of Stoic philosophy and ethics,
the self and God sufficiency of monastic religion and
of the mysticism of the Plotinus tradition, were in
each case an individualism bred of some distinctive
education which the ordinary man of the world did not
enjoy. When in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
education became a more common grace, this idea that
wisdom lay in aloofness naturally spread to a much
larger class in the community. In our last two decades
fellowship rather than Stoicism has been the fashion of
the hour, but to some it appears a mere fashion:
Wordsworth has not yet lost his influence when he
sings praise of solitude.1

Before we can estimate fully the need which every
soul has of a language that will express its whole
mental life, we must satisfy ourselves adequately as
to the truth and the untruth of that attitude of mind
which regards retirement within itself — either for the

1 " In aloofness and loneliness of mind [Wordsworth] is exceeded by no
mystic of the cloister. ... In his youth he confesses that human beings had
only a secondary interest for him; and though lie says that Nature soon led
him to man. it was to man as a ' unity,' as ' one spirit,' that he was drawn,
not to men as individuals. See Prelude, viii." (Inge, Christian Mysticism).
Compare the closing lines of Prelude, bk. viii.:

Nature had led me on;
And oft amid the " busy hum " I seemed
To travel independent of her help,
As if I had forgotten her; but no,
The world of human-kind outweighed not hers
In my habitual thoughts; the scale of love,
Though filling daily, still was light, compared
With that in which her mighty objects lay.

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 231

purpose of discovering religious or philosophical or
ethical truth, or for the enjoyment of beauty, — as a
condition superior to any phase of communication with
fellow-minds. We can see its partial truth in the case
of the man who perceives that he has ideas and aspira-
tions in advance of those current among others. It is
evident that he is quite right in believing that solitude
or inward retirement is more favorable to his progress
than participation in the babble of the market-place or
street. For example, the man who to-day wished to
form a just estimate of the faults and virtues of his
nation's enemies would certainly do well to retire often
from the Stock Exchange, or the political gathering, or
the fashionable club. To withdraw mind, if not body,
from the common talk of these assemblies would be
necessary to the formation of conclusions characterised
by outstanding justice or nobility. Humility would
not stand in the way of his knowing that he had within
himself a higher guide; if he did not know this he
would be blinded by folly.

If, however, such a man hugs himself and is satisfied
in such retirement, his mistake consists in his ignorance
of the fact that in a fellowship of souls, as eager or
more eager than himself for justice and nobility of
mental attitude, he would attain to* still higher insight,
and be able to form truer conclusions. Under the
stimulus of this higher fellowship individual variation
of thought would find constantly increasing power of
expression, and would thus become more, not less,
distinctive. Thus we see that while the superiority
of self-communion embodies a very important truth,
taken by itself it forms a half-truth which amounts
to pernicious falsehood; for communion with others
is necessary to the soul.

Yet further, it is essential to the development of the
soul that it should learn expression in all ways and on
all aspects of life. That is why the small community
of select souls, exceedingly valuable as it is, is not

232 THE SPIRIT vii

an end in itself. The truth learned in such a fellow-
ship must be made explicable to the world. The outer
world must constantly be being drawn into the fellow-
ship, or else the members, having no universal aim, will
be satisfied with only that partial expression necessary
for their mutual understanding. The individual re-
main dwarfed except as a member of a " beloved com-
munity," and the loving community degenerates except
when it seeks to save the world.

The Language of Action

Because the need of self-expression is so imperative
it follows that action must be used when words fail.
While power of expression and consequent understand-
ing will always increase by communion between differ-
ent minds, it will always lag behind power of insight.
As we have seen, the suggestions of poetry carry us
beyond the precise meaning of the words in which it is
expressed, and the language of action comes in to aid
when words fail utterly. Thus poetry lies upon the
border line between the language of speech and the
language of action. True poetry is not written about
anything that can be fully said in words; it is the use of
words to suggest what lies just beyond their power to
express. It gives us pictures of things that are like
other things for which there is no picture; and when
these things are the great and deep realities of life, and
the pictures that poetry presents create an adequate
suggestion of what cannot be pictured, it is great
poetry. But just beyond the language of poetry there
is the "language of look and of gesture and of the action
that " speaks louder than words." We understand
our own laughter and tears as a language expressing
amusement or sorrow when words for these fail us.
Not very long ago human laughter was used to express
happiness when that transcended words, but at present
in our civilisation we only use laughter for the particu-
lar kind of joy we call amusement; other and deeper

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 233

joy has neither word nor sound. The language of
tears is also inadequate. When Wordsworth says:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,

he is expressing the inadequacy that we all recognise of
even the language of tears.

And the mind as well as the body has its gestures
inexpressible in words; indeed, as men develop more
self-control they express themselves less and less in the
glance and in bodily gesture, but the mind retains its
downward and its upward look, its inquiring look, its
look of love. We speak of aspiration, of pessimism,
of curiosity, or adoration, and perhaps we do not
always realise that these are merely words for the way
in which the eyes of the soul act toward what is just
beyond the soul's power of verbal expression. We
speak of the feeling of being baffled, the feeling of
being on the verge of illumination, the feeling of
impulsion toward we know not what, and many other
phrases we use to describe what are really gestures of
the mind, inarticulate gestures like the dropping of the
arms when effort is useless, like the stretching out of
the arms to denote a yearning to receive, like the atti-
tude of alertness assumed by a messenger when waiting
for the word of command.

Every man has within himself unappeasable desires
for beauty, for truth, for generosity, and in his attitude
toward these he seeks to express in action what he can-
not express in words. All art is, in a sense, the lan-
guage of action; by music and painting we express our
unspoken conceptions of the best. Art must be indi-
vidual or it is nothing — "Le style c'est l'homme."
What is not original genius is valueless as art, and
every man and woman is in some aspect of life an artist.

Now if the soul in regard to its deepest inward
individual experience and aspirations cannot do without
the language of action, it is quite certain that it cannot

234 THE SPIRIT vn

do without this form of language in any phase of com-
munal life. It is for the topics men have in common
that such language is most in use. In corporate life
the meaning of actions must be agreed upon. Caresses
such as mothers give to children are understood the
world over, except in a few savage tribes. The shak-
ing of the fist, the menace of the eye, the toss of the
head in scorn, the bowing of the head in shame or shy-
ness, the handclasp of friendship — all these are signs
of a language which is common to Western nations.
If by some process of rigorous training a clique in so-
ciety reaches the point where such signs are in abeyance,
we know that vitality in that class is waning, and that
what was artificial and cold has taken the place of the
natural and warm-hearted. On the other hand, where
such language of action is violent it is also crude, and as
it becomes subtle, with more various gradations ex-
pressing more, it is, for that very reason, more re-
strained. For whatever purpose men are associated
together, some common language of action is necessary
to them. What would public life be without cheers
and handclapping and groans? What would social
life be without the dance of festivity and the slow pro-
cession that follows the bier?

It is most important to observe that all this necessary
language of action is expressive and wholesome only so
far as it is both natural in its mode and spontaneous at
the time of action; and in so far as it is both these it
will always be both traditional and ready to break
with tradition — that is to say, it will be handed down,
like the language of words, from one generation to
another, and at the same time, like the language of
words, it will be undergoing ceaseless modifications.
It goes without saying that a language will remain
fundamentally the same from generation to generation.
The English language has been the same language
through all its developments, although Beowulf could
not be read easily in the fifteenth century, or Chaucer

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 235

in the eighteenth. Nor did its changes come by mere
individual pleasure; variations had to be approved by
the corporate sense of the community before they be-
came part of the national language.

On the other hand, it is to be noted that whenever
naturalness and popular variation in the use of words
is not tolerated, and some classic standard is rigidly
adhered to by the educated, the art of speech becomes
the artificial practice of a few. It moves stiffly, like a
man walking on stilts. One who talks and writes in
that way may be admired for singular dexterity, but he
can company only with the few who also walk on
stilts. Great literature is not produced in periods
when men seek to conform their whole diction to rules
of speech bequeathed by a former age, but when popu-
lar language is virile and growing.

So it is with the language of action. It is, of course,
traditional, handed down from father to son, and yet it
is mutable. There are at different periods, in different
classes of society, mannerisms which remain fixed till
they are lifeless and become the symptoms of social
decadence. Certain Oriental habits of obeisance and
compliment, which are senselessly repeated generation
after generation at great expense of time and energy,
could not be tolerated by a nation in a vital, alert, and
progressive state. In the West we have had our
social rituals, both in courts and cottages. At the time
they arise such rituals express truly the taste, dignity,
and sense of order of those who use them, but as rigid
survivals they express nothing, and are thrown off when
there is a revival of vitality.

All this applies equally to the rituals of religion.
We have seen that the deeper and more instinctive our
outgoing impulse toward any object of desire, the more
it becomes mixed up in our thought with all else de-
sirable. Hence the most inexpressible outflow of the
heart is toward the source of all good things, i.e. toward
what constitutes God to each soul. It is thus most of

236 THE SPIRIT vii

all in religion, whatever a man's religion may be, that
the language of action is most necessary. Accordingly
we find that wherever religion has emerged as some-
thing which requires separate associations and separate
treatment from the rest of life, it has had its separate
phraseology, its separate poetry, and its separate lan-
guage of action.

All evidence, both historic and psychological, goes
to show that personal or corporate religion must find
expression not only in words but in rites. He who
believes that for all men religion would be better or
purer if it ceased to find expression in the language of
action is surely mistaken. He is doubtless right in his
disapproval of a merely conventional language of ac-
tion or rigid ritual, but wrong in supposing that men do
not require to give their religion the fullest expression
of which they are capable. Religion needs to employ
the language of reason, as precise and as full as it
can be made, the language of art, which carries into
different regions of the depth and height, and the
language of action, which is like a hand pointing to
the distance where clear vision fails, like a hand held
behind the ear in the consciousness of a music whose
vibrations are barely audible. Looking upon the past,
we see that wherever religion has, by the clearer vision
of some great prophet, received a new start and a new
impulse, it has begun at once to form a certain language
of its own, using the common speech to express as well
as may be its new ideas, giving old words new meanings
and coining words by new combinations of syllables.
It has also produced a new poetry and a new art; but
even before these have come into being it has had new
ceremonies and rites. Psychologically it is not possible
that it should be otherwise; historically we see that it
has always been so.

What is a Symbol?
There is an idea prevalent that a symbol is something
that pretends to be some other thing which it is not,

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 237

or, to speak more accurately, that it is something which
is set up or*used as a pretence for something else. Just
as a child, for example, who wraps a kerchief round a
poker and nurses it, pretends that the poker is a doll,
or as a child may nurse a doll pretending it is a baby.
We are told that in the rites of initiation practised by
nations in a certain stage of development, men use
the heads of fierce animals as masks, and, pretending
to be the animal personated, get carried away by the
excitement of the ceremonies into the belief that, for
the time being, they really are the animal they pretend
to be.

Now, in these three instances, the poker, the doll,
and the head of the lion or bull are properly not sym-
bols at all; they are toys which a child-like imagination,
always ready with its make-believe, determines for the
time to regard as something which they are not.

A symbol, on the other hand, is something which
manifests to human sense a non-sensuous reality; and
the truest symbols are those things in human life which
are the most natural manifestations of the unseen
reality.

A national flag is a symbol of the national ideal so
long as the great majority of the nation can unite in an
ideal for which one symbol may stand. When there is
civil war the same flag cannot be the symbol of oppos-
ing ideas, and two will be necessary, e.g. the red flag of
Socialism has often opposed a national banner. A flag,
however, is in essence a military symbol; in its begin-
ning it was a banner held aloft in order that the fol-
lowers of chieftain or king might rally round him. Al-
though it has long been used in time of peace to rally
the forces of national sentiment, as in primitive times
it was used to rally the force of their spears, it is still
an anti-foreign sentiment to which it usually and natu-
rally appeals. It is quite possible that when all swords
are beaten into ploughshares flags will become as much
relics of the past as are the emblems of heraldry to-day,

238 THE SPIRIT vii

and nations will evolve new symbols more consonant
with their ideals. The point to be noted, however, is
that there is no pretence that a flag is what it is not.
The British flag is not, and does not pretend to be,
British justice or British honesty or British kindliness
or British honour or power; but these realities, tre-
mendous though they are, are unseen; they are spiritual
realities which, by reason of their nature, can only be
made actual to our senses by a visible and material
symbol. The crew of a wrecked ship, drifting with-
out compass and without star upon the sea, if it came
in sight of shore or ship on which our flag was waving,
would have no doubt whatever as to the invisible reali-
ties for which it stands and of which it is the accepted
manifestation.

The other point about the flag is that, although it
may now seem a purely arbitrary symbol, it was at first
chosen as the most natural and convenient expression
of tribal unity. It was as natural for a chieftain in war
to wave some particular colour to rally his particular
men as it is for a rabbit to display the white lining of
her tail when she runs before her little ones to guide
them to safety. Further, as no cumbrous object could
be carried into battle, it was necessary to use cloth that
could be unfurled and furled. In so far as our symbol
of nationality needs to be carried about and waved
aloft to-day, a flag is for the same reason necessary;
nothing else would practically do as well.

If we want to understand further the true nature of
a symbol we may examine some symbols which seem
to us still more natural than the flag. Take a mother
caressing her child. She kisess the little one: the kiss
is not her affection, it is only a symbol. If the mother
knew herself to be the prey of some infectious disease,
she would love the child just as much, but she would
not kiss it. If a cold-hearted nurse found it to her
interest to pretend to love the child, she would caress
it although she did not love it. Caresses are not love;

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 239

they are its natural symbol, and, like all symbols, when
honestly used they make manifest a great reality.

Again, let us take any of those things acknowledged
to be the customary signs of a certain relation between
people. Friends clasp each others' hands; domestic
servants stand in the presence of their employers. The
hand-grasp is not friendship, though it can be made to
symbolise every varying degree of friendship. If a
man's hands are otherwise occupied, or if he have lost
the use of them, no one would suspect, the absence of
the hand-shake to indicate any necessary alteration in
his friendship. An English servant stands before his
employer because that is his way of symbolising his
loyalty to the engagement he has entered into to be
alert to carry out the other's wishes: in some parts of
America a man with another training, who had entered
into a similar engagement and with the same loyalty
at heart, would remain seated in a lounging attitude.

Symbols, then, of necessity enter largely into the
daily life of any community that has a past in common.
Certain actions have come to stand as the expression of
certain inner realities. The expression is in no sense a
pretence; it is the only way, or at least the commonly
accepted way, of manifesting forth a reality which
otherwise could not be seen or heard or touched.

Christian Language of Action

Not long ago two girls sat by my fireside talking
of sacramental religion. The elder ended the conversa-
tion by saying, " Our Lord commanded us to do these
things; that is why we do them." She spoke with
shining face and serene faith; but when she had left
the room the other spoke in passionate disagreement
in words like these. " Every educated person knows
that we do not know precisely what words our Lord
used, and His meaning needs interpretation. As to
St. Paul, when he could make so big a mistake about
the Second Coming he may easily have made mistakes

24o THE SPIRIT vn

about the Sacraments. I cannot honestly do what
seems meaningless to -me upon mere ecclesiastical
authority." I think we must admit that the first of
these girls represents a dwindling minority, the second
a growing majority of earnest-minded young people,
for a very small proportion of the young now frequent
our churches. Can we face this fact without fear?
Have we any need for fear if we appeal to truth rather
than to mere tradition?

All religions have a language of action. Christianity
is no exception to the rule, and it will be worth while
to consider how far its rites are natural and appro-
priate.

If we had no record of its early days, if there were
no written command that we could even suppose to be
the authentic fiat of its founder, if all that we know
about it was the main emphasis of its idealism, we
might yet make a shrewd guess at what its peculiar
language of action would at first be. The privilege of
companionship with God, the duty and privilege of
fellowship with men, one dependent on the other, and
the joy of both, is certainly the main theme of the
earliest Christian teaching. This is commonly ex-
pressed as the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man; and thus expressed the two elements are seen
to be one theme, one idea — that of God's family on
earth.

But to love God and to love man is an art; it is the
very art of living; it is the art at which all religions
and all civilisations have been aiming; for by love we
mean, not only a certain personal liking, but such
goodwill that kindness must govern all the changeful
moods and developments of life. The common life of
men who love displays harmony, not only in chords
here and there, but throughout all the movement of
the symphony of public and private life. All laws,
all morals, all rituals have been efforts to get rid of
discord, to set the movement and development of the

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 241

individual life or the community life free from the
clash and anguish of the antagonistic elements that
hamper life. When primitive man realised the fear
of the unseen he had to invent modes of propitiating
the supposed anger of spirits. When the individual
quarrel or family feud weakened the tribe, some court
of justice was set up, so that within the tribe there
might be peace. The effort to get agreement in greater
and greater areas of common life was not only the
beginning but the method of each successive stage in
all religion and all civilisation.

The world into which Christianity came was civilised
and religious; a world also in which communities of
people, not satisfied with the general conception of
civilisation and religion, were on all sides setting up
brotherhoods — the so-called Mystery Religions —
with elaborate secret ways of getting into harmony with
God and with each other. The joy and simplicity of
the main Christian idea was the recognition that the
art of living harmoniously with God and man was not
recondite, was not a secret shut off from the common
man by mysterious initiations or by long and severe
disciplines, but was very near to all men, something that
would spring up spontaneously in the lives of men who
sought it, the very reign of God within the heart, which
would be expressed in all the simple and common
things of life. Yet in the very hour in which the
inspiration and technique of this fine art of living
joyfully and freely with God and man was seen to be
possible to the common man, the one reason of his
failure so to live was seen also. When it was realised
that the Spirit of God was the love that attracted but
did not compel, it was realised that man's failure to
be its instrument was due to those habits of ill-will
and repulsive antagonisms in forming which he had
forged his own chains. Jesus taught that goodwill to
men was a necessary condition of divine inspiration.1

1 Mark xi. 25.

242 THE SPIRIT vii

His followers came to see that aspiration and desire
were in antagonism to habits which the Jew naturally
called " sin " and the Greek called " ignorance." So
that the second main idea of Christianity became the
need of getting rid of these habits of ill-will. Intense
desire was naturally felt for some way of leaving sin
behind, as one would leave the soil of dirty work in
the water of a bath before joining the family meal.

These two main ideas — the joy of life in God's
family, and the getting rid of habits of ill-will in order
to enjoy it — had a very natural language of action in
the feast of the Eucharist, and in washing as a rite of
initiation into the community.

In thinking of early Christianity as instinct with
these two ideas, we realise that the early sense of joy in
them would not only necessarily imply, but in reality be,
an outgoing of affection and loyalty to the Master who
had so pushed back the veil of confused human think-
ing, so dissipated the murk arising from deified ill-will,
as to bring their sunlight to earth. No language of
action could grow up in such a community that was not
centred in His memory, so that the natural expression
of the truth that He had revealed might easily come to
be spoken of as memorials of this, or as acts done in
obedience to His verbal commands, even if no proof of
such commands survived.

So far we can see how the Christian Sacraments
would come into being, and therefore we can the more
easily believe that they were given by the Master.
His insight into the heart of man and the ways of
God was too deep to find expression in arbitrary com-
mands. Can the various phases of Church teaching
concerning these Sacraments be shown to be psycho-
logically natural ?

We are familiar with the human habit of calling two
ideas when closely associated by the name of one, or
using the picture of something that can be pictured
to stand more especially for something that cannot be

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 243

pictured. Thus we speak of " the State," meaning the
liberties and securities and the unifying of many into
one for which the State stands, and also its political
machinery and material defences; but most of our
language concerning it presents to the mind's eye, not
the great ideas which make the State of value, but the
machinery which has been created — the mere instru-
ment of ideas. In periods of national deadness the
ideas are more and more lost sight of, and the ma-
chinery becomes an end in itself.

In all personal affection the body and soul and
thoughts of the object of our affection are welded
into a unity not to be dissociated in thought : we love —
not the body, nor the soul, nor the thoughts of a friend
— but we love him or her.

But most of our language referring to the soul pre-
sents to " our mind's eye " only the body:

Now my soul hath elbow-room.

King John, Act v. Sc. 7.

I'll wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at.

Othello, Act i. Sc. 1.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

Julius Caesar.

I saw Othello's visage in his mind.

Othello, Act i. Sc. 3.

Drink to me only with thine eyes.

To Celia.

Such language understood figuratively when life beats
high becomes pernicious when life is flat and uninspired.
It helps us to lose sight of all that in the reality of
things not only ought to make, but does make, the
body dear. Thus in uninspired times of the Church
we naturally find an exaltation of the body of Jesus
in the interpretation of the Sacrament of the Eucharist,
without submission to His spirit.

Again, we see the same with regard to truth and
personality. We closely associate our heroes with that

244 THE SPIRIT vn

truth for which they stood, not only by virtue of
the law of association, but because a man is the truth
that he takes his stand upon. It is something in-
herent in his soul which causes that ray of light to
burst through him to the world, something inherent
in his character that causes him to be the living ex-
ponent of the truth he reveals. Just as the body is
the expression and instrument of the soul and is there-
fore rightly reverenced as the vehicle of a soul worthy
of reverence and adoration, so, in a closer sense, a
man's character revealed in his action and teaching
is the expression of such part of God's eternal truth
as the prism of his soul lets through. But here again
the language we use naturally pictures for us, not
the invisible truth, but the man speaking and acting;
and wherever hero-worship degenerates, the truth
which was an inseparable part of the man himself is
lost sight of, and the name and perhaps one or two
dramatic actions of the hero become objects of rever-
ence in themselves to thousands who are not actuated
by the truth that he made his own. This is proved by
the fact that nearly all proverbs in which great men are
remembered leave out their true greatness — "A Daniel
come to judgement'; "Alexander weeping for fresh
worlds to conquer"; "As meek as Moses." Thus in
many Catholic countries we get genuine enthusiasm for
the name of Christ as honoured in the Eucharist among
populations rife with cheating and adultery and
quarrels of every kind. It is found on inquiry that in
; such communities little is known of Jesus except the
dramatic stories of His birth and death.

What is curious in this whole process of substituting
the seen for the unseen is that those who lose sight of
the spirit and adore the visible expression as something
sacred in itself, proceed to impugn, as a violation of
this sanctity, any teaching that body can only be an
evanescent expression of the soul; and when they come
to worship merely the name and the dramatic actions

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 245

of their heroes, they regard those heroes as in some
way profaned if the truth in which they lived and
which they disseminated be greatly magnified. In our
own Church to-day we find many who deprecate insis-
tence upon the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man, because they imagine that the Cross and Atone-
ment and Sacramental Grace will be belittled thereby.
In our Lord Jesus Christ we see a character able to
perceive and assimilate, not some one particular ray of
the eternal light, but the light itself. Truth, as far as
it concerned the relation of God and man, formed His
soul and thus became one with Himself. What He
seems to have seen in constant vision was the whole
concrete harmony which would be effected by the
Spirit's unfettered activity, and which He called " the
kingdom of heaven." His truth-seeing, truth-assimi-
lating soul was manifested naturally in a body symbolic
of ideal humanity, whose presence brought joy and
peace, whose touch was health. If, then, we do not
lose sight of the truth of the kingdom, or forget that
body must always be a transient vehicle of spirit, we
are right in seeing in Jesus Christ the way, the truth,
the life. But to find, amid the various vicissitudes of
the society He founded, discrepant phases of devotion
to Him is only what we should expect. We should
expect to find times when the body of the beloved
would stand for the spirit and would veil any adequate
perception of that spirit. And, again, we are not sur-
prised to find that some picturesque expression of cer-
tain phases of the action and passion of our Lord have
at times been allowed to eclipse the eternal truth of
which He was the manifestation. These vicissitudes,
patent in the history of Christian doctrine, are all
chronicled also in the various phases of the Christian
ceremonial which grew up around the rites of Baptism
and the Eucharist; and because the interpretation of
that language, and the consequent usages that have
grown up in connection with it, have passed through

246 THE SPIRIT vii

these various phases of partiality and succeeding
falsity, it is not surprising that many of the most
earnest lovers of the Master should begin to feel that
the language of action is so likely to become misleading
as to be in itself undesirable, or at least unnecessary.
But such an attitude, though natural as a reaction
against crude and mechanical conceptions, goes too far.
Sacramental language is in itself of surpassing value,
and it cannot mislead so long as Jesus Christ, His out-
ward manifestation, and the great truths for which
He stood, are all recognised as one object of devotion,
and so long as it is not stereotyped by a rigid, unalter-
able tradition.

Christian Ceremonial

In all religions the language of action is complex,
and Christianity is no exception. Ordinarily Chris-
tians observe a somewhat long ceremony of mingled
words and acts. We have just discovered two points
necessary to ceremonial vitality: (i) its words must
express such thoughts and feelings as are common to
the worshippers; and (2) there must be constant modi-
fication of its words and actions which must display
both the traditional and the revolutionary character
of language.

(1) The Christian ceremonial must be Christian —
i.e. it must definitely express that which differentiates
the Christian religion from other religions, even where
other religions express truth. Truth when vital is not
patient of abstraction; no part of it can be dissociated
from the rest; so that we cannot with accuracy say
that minds differing really and vitally from one another
have common ground, or that religions differing in one
basal part are the same in other parts, although this
way of speaking is often sufficiently accurate for con-
venience. Two fields may be green with the same
green corn, lying in the same sunshine; but if one field
contains a splash of red poppies and the other has a

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 247

grey ruin within its circumference, the green of the two
fields will be seen to reflect the light differently because
of the different colours with which it is contrasted.
Two men may be equally honest, but if one is honest
because of loyalty to his neighbour and the other
because he wishes to be respectable, it cannot be said
that their honesty is in reality common ground. Men
who express the same truths differently may, in reality,
have far more in common than would appear from
their expression, but if they do really apprehend any
part of truth differently, the whole of truth that they
apprehend will be modified accordingly. So, while it
remains true that many who sit at meat in the kingdom
may be found to come from the East of a nominal
agnosticism or the West of some other religion, and
many of the children of the profession may be cast out,
it still must also remain true that a Christian has a
special way of apprehending all truth which comes to
him in the light of the revelation of God in Christ, and
which makes a permanent difference in his apprehension
of all truth. It is just this difference which ought to
be expressed in the Christian's language of action.
That action must have definite relation to the historic
Jesus.

(2) The details of the ceremony are an effort to in-
terpret the central rite. A form must never crystallise;
when it does so it ceases to be spontaneous speech and
becomes rehearsal. The twofold value of language
is that while it registers the knowledge attained in
the past it is also an aid to progressive understanding,
and it is not in mere rehearsal or recitation that we
obtain further light and new experiences. It is of the
very essence of life that every day must bring the cast-
ing off of something old, the acquirement of something
new. We see this process going on even in the hills
which are called eternal, and in all organic nature. In
nature, or in human history, there is no real repetition,
but the incessant and permanent use of the same simple

248 THE SPIRIT vii

elements and methods to produce an ever-increasing
variety, with the constant change toward what is more
worthy or towards degeneration. In the same way
ritual, to be vital, must, while making permanent use
of the same elements and methods, be always passing
into some new phase, always leaving some older phase
behind. It is no valid objection to the ceremonial
of the Latin Mass to point out how far it is removed
from the usage of the second century. It is a valid
criticism to urge that in an ever-expanding civilisation
it has been practically at a standstill for a thousand
years.

The Psychological Explanation of the
Power of the Sacraments

In an earlier generation the scientific discoveries
concerning common sequences of cause and effect in the
visible world — what are popularly called "laws of
nature " — gravely disturbed the religious mind, before
the new knowledge could be assimilated to what was
indestructible in the old. A similar disturbance is being
caused to-day by the application of the same methods
of science to sequences in the unseen world of thought
and feeling, especially by their application to Christian
religious experience; and in some quarters we have a
repetition of the old mistake — the desire to deny the
new knowledge or to insist that it does not apply to
some particular sphere of fact. It is unfortunate that
so many of those who are ardent for the old religious
truth should be ardent also for that old religious error
— the error of refusing to learn from experience.

But whether those who are religious desire it or not,
the psychologists will bring forward what they call their
" explanation " of the power generated by Christian
usages. Attempts to consider religious practices in the
light of the newly discovered laws of Mental Sugges-
tion are constantly being made. We are told that
preaching produces its effects, not only by its appeal to

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 249

reason, but by the power of quasi-hypnotic suggestion;
that hymn-singing has the effect of rendering the mind
peculiarly open to suggestion; that the power of prayer
is the power of auto-suggestion; and that the power of
suggestion is an explanation peculiarly applicable to the
results of rites and ceremonies. The law of suggestion
appears to be this — The potency of a suggestion upon
an individual mind at any given time corresponds with
the quiescence of that mind's initiative energy at the
time of receiving the suggestion. That is to say, the
more the energy of the mind is being expended upon
what it of itself wills to think or to do, the less it is open
to suggestion; the more its initiative energy is sus-
pended, the more it experiences the force of suggestion.
All traditional forms of religious ceremony are calcu-
lated to produce both quiescence and forceful sugges-
tion in greater or less degree. Religious ceremonies
grow as the grammar of any language grows, and their
form is the result of their effectiveness. They survive
because they are fitted to survive. When the potency
of a ceremony, or the effectiveness of any portion of
it, ceases, men neglect it. Ceremonies are potent just
in the degree in which they lead the mind up to a
moment of supreme receptiveness, and lull it or per-
suade it into yielding to present suggestion offered from
without, or past teaching arising within the soul at the
receptive moment.

We may be over-suggestible by nature, i.e. we may
be inclined to follow every suggestion that comes to us,
as is a happy child, without exercising rational criticism
on our own inclination, or exerting a due power of self-
initiation. We may be contra-suggestible by nature,
i.e. we may be inclined to oppose whatever any other
human being suggests to us, as a peevish child does,
without rational criticism of our own disinclination or
attempting to exert our power of self-initiation. Or we
may be well-balanced, and use all suggestion merely as
grist for the mill of instinctive or reasoned judgement.

25o THE SPIRIT vn

But in any case we are constantly subject to suggestion;
without suggestion from outside we lose individuality,
our faculties atrophy. But suggestion coming upon a
distracted mind, over-busy or anxious, has no force;
and just as hunger previous to eating is necessary
for the proper assimilation of food by the body, so
quiescence before receiving suggestion is neressary for
the full force of the suggestion to be realised. Experi-
ence will always teach religious leaders, by degrees, how
to produce that condition of mind in a congregation
without which any ceremonial is ineffective. The mod-
ern psychologist merely discovers and explains the law
by which the Church has instinctively worked in thus
formalising the garnered fruit of religious experience.

It may be well to observe that this whole matter is
confused in the minds of many by the trivial and more
or less accidental fact that the word suggestion, used in
this scientific sense, first became popularised in connec-
tion with some fact — and much exaggerated fiction —
concerning the control exercised by certain charlatan
hypnotists over hypnotic subjects. Such instances of
the tyrannical power wielded over innocent subjects by
hypnotists bear the same relation to the ordinary laws
of mental receptiveness and the usefulness of suggestion
that sensational instances of the cruelty of parents to
children bear to the common order and discipline of
every nursery and schoolroom. We do not argue that
all school discipline is wrong because we have read of
Mr. Squeers, or that all education for little boys is
wrong because Paul Dombey and others in the same
case are killed by mental overwork; but this is the sort
of argument which lies behind the popular prejudice
against the idea.

There is, however, a better reason why a number of
well-informed people are afraid to admit that mental
quiescence and mental suggestion are the method by
which the Spirit uses religious ceremonial. The con-
stant effort of pietists in religion and pietists i-n politics,

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 251

of the demagogue and newspaper writer, to govern the
world, or what little part of the world is in their power,
by abuse of the law of suggestion — making appeal to
the emotions of the masses while the facts on which
they might form a rational judgement are withheld —
— has always been a serious evil in human society, and
is perhaps the worst evil of our modern life. It is the
spirit of pseudo- or anti-democracy in Church and State,
which, feigning to be true democracy, deceives the very
elect. In the Christian Church this abuse of the power
of suggestion to arouse party spirit might indeed be
called Antichrist. But such abuse of physical law
only proves the universality of the law, which, working
as it does in religious ceremonial, may by participants
be abused or rightly used, just as the power of public
speaking or writing may be. The misuse of all these
is a great anti-social sin, and lies in some degree on the
souls of the people who are willing to be misled, as
well as in a greater degree on the souls of those who are
still more aware of what they are doing in misleading
them. But if we analyse this sin we shall find it con-
sists first and mainly in asking people to form opinions
while withholding or slurring over facts the knowledge
of which is necessary before the average mind can form
a right judgement; or secondly, in suggesting to them
that people better able to judge than themselves have
discovered the truth, so that they will be justified, or are
even to be commended, in saving themselves the trouble
of using their reason and taking the proffered decision
on authority; or thirdly, in making appeal to the emo-
tions of people when their minds are insufficiently
informed upon the matter to be decided, or they have
been persuaded not to use them. Any appeal to human
beings which has any or all of these three elements is
an act of great wickedness, wickedness in which people
who allow themselves to be thus led participate. But
we cannot argue from this that any appeal to the
emotions of a crowd is wrong, or that bringing the

252 THE SPIRIT vii

crowd into a quiescent state of receptiveness and ex-
pectancy before that appeal is made is wrong. An
appeal to the emotions of men when their minds are
hushed by the gravity of the hour is a perfectly legiti-
mate way of dealing with them, provided that the
people thus dealt with have been given no ex parte
statements but have the fullest information and knowl-
edge that can be given concerning the matter in hand,
and provided their reasoning powers are stimulated
and encouraged at all other times.

Professor McDougall defines suggestion as " a pro-
cess of communication resulting in the acceptance with
conviction of the communicated proposition in the ab-
sence of logically adequate grounds for its accept-
ance." 1 But to this must be added that it is also a
method of convincing the subconcious mind of propo-
sitions which the reason has accepted, but which the
will cannot act on. E.g. a drunkard reasonably be-
lieves that he ought to refrain from drink and can, yet,
like St. Paul,2 what he wills he cannot do. When sug-
gestion drives his conscious conviction into his subcon-
scious mind he can reform. Such suggestion may be
forcibly conveyed by a sacrament.

Baptism

I remember once seeing a baptism on the shore
of the Atlantic in the State of Maine. Two mission
preachers — one a Presbyterian, the other a Canadian
Anglican — had joined in an open-air mission, and that
evening, when the sun was setting, they baptised their
converts, dipping them in the surf of the ocean. A
curious and solemn silence fell upon the little crowd of
spectators who gathered between a fragrant pine-wood
and the incoming tide. Baptism by immersion is the
traditional use of the American camp-meeting. The
missioners, their black Geneva gowns floating behind
them on the water, looked intrepid and serene in the

1 Social Psychology, p. 97. 2 Romans vii.

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 253

rolling waves. The candidates went through the high
surf and returned with a swinging, elastic step, enthusi-
asm upon their faces. Of one or two cases I happened
later to get personal details, and learnt that this bap-
tism had marked a turning-point in the life. An hour
after his baptism I walked with one of the men. Al-
though trembling with cold and excitement, he told me
that his ecstasy of inward joy was so great that he could
hardly refrain from shouting aloud. He said that for
many years he had been resisting the belief that he
ought to be baptized by immersion, such baptism for
him involving publicity, from which he shrank; but
that for some time he had been convinced that the
Holy Spirit would not come into his soul till in this
matter he conformed. He had been baptized in in-
fancy, but had grown up a fretful and self-centred
man; he became radiant and self-forgetful. Those
who believe that " all grace is the grace of God "
will not deny that for this man this particular form
of baptism became the natural channel of enhanced
life, because when he at last ended the inner conflict
there ensued a state of passivity in which the powerful
suggestion of the dramatic ceremony moved, not only
his conscious, but his whole instinctive, life. He went
forward in the power of that suggestion until a new
habit of mind was established.

The baptizings of the Primitive Church were, no
doubt, similarly dramatic; the preparation of the can-
didates would lead them to expect a corresponding
dramatic change in their life, and the rite would be
a channel of divine grace. The tradition of a super-
natural power being received Would naturally grow up;
but if by " supernatural " is meant something differing
both in kind and degree from that which may be ob-
tained through non-sacramental forms of right mental
suggestion, the word appears to imply a misreading of
the ways of God. Christian adult baptism, or confir-
mation, is normally accompanied by the acceptance on

254 THE SPIRIT vn

the part of the candidate of those standards of value
which are typical of traditional Christianity. In so far
as these standards are truly Christian they are the high-
est that the world knows, and their acceptance, espe-
cially when worked into the inner consciousness by a
suggestive rite, has transforming force. It is such
transforming force that is the mark of the Spirit's
working. To believe that salvation is magically con-
ferred by the rite, where there is no change in the trend
of life from downward to upward, is to believe some-
thing for which there is no evidence. Where there is
such a change in the life-current there is surely adequate
proof of the endowment of God without the assertion
of any further non-natural endowment.

Another way in which baptism in the early Church
would be found in practice to conduce to new life in a
convert was by his translation into the new environment
of the Christian society, then sharply cut off from pagan
laxity. Such a change would operate powerfully to
make a new man. That complete change of environ-
ment was not possible when the world became nominally
Christian, but the tradition of a complete change
lingered and could not fail to be suggestive.

If, however, this point of view appears to some
inadequate to express God's ways with those who seek
His grace in holy rites, we would ask such whether, in
view of what we know of " mental suggestion " and the
law of its working, they can maintain that it is absent
in the observance of religious rites. I think all will ad-
mit that it forms the natural modus operandi of the
power experienced at such times, that whether the grace
of God as realised by the soul in such rites be natural
or supernatural, it comes, at least partially, by sugges-
tion. It must also be admitted that the suggestibility
of the mind can on occasion be used by preacher or
orator to produce effects in the lives of men quite as
notable, either for good or evil, as can be observed to
follow from religious ceremonies. Is it not, then, more

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 255

honouring to God to believe that He respects the
nature He has given to man in refusing to affect him
in any non-natural way, than to suppose that at certain
times He gives supernatural aid, when this particular
aid, so far as the world can see, is no more potent than
the aid which the heaven-sent preacher or teacher can
give through verbal suggestion? It was quite natural
and proper, while the psychological laws of suggestion
and attention were not understood and the latent
powers of the human mind largely unsuspected, that
men should believe that all results beyond their com-
prehension were effected by supernatural power, either
good or evil. That they should doggedly hold to the
same phraseology in accounting for certain religious
facts and no others, when clearer knowledge of natural
possibilities has come, appears to many only to make
the religious truth thus tricked out in the fashion of a
more ignorant age seem trivial.

Such a psychological explanation cannot, of course,
be applied in the case of infant baptism; nevertheless I
would urge that the practice is one that can be justified
psychologically, though in a somewhat different way.
In infant baptism we have the ceremony of bringing
a child within the doors of some church, if possible, of
holding it to the priest to be sprinkled with water and
formally received into the Christian Society, of offering
prayer for its spiritual welfare and thanksgiving to
God on its behalf. People thus bringing children have
various reasons for their action, various notions of
the result affected by baptism; but a common motive
actuates the vast majority, and that is the desire to
bring the child in some way within the focus of a
Power greater than that of parent or guardian, which
is recognised as making for good.

If we believe that God is always ready to reward
those who seek Him, and that the reward He gives is
not something arbitrary or in the future, but the im-
parting, here and now, of so much of His own life as

256 THE SPIRIT vn

the soul, often close shut, is able to assimilate, our
question becomes, How can this special action of bap-
tism, accomplished jointly by the priest and the friends
of the child, bring about in the child any special assim-
ilation of the divine goodness?

In answering this question we have, first, fearlessly
and frankly to face the undoubted fact that large
populations in different parts of the world, which have
been, and are, scrupulous in bringing all their children
to receive Christian baptism, at the same time have
lived, and live, in moral degradation. The child by
baptism is outwardly made a member of the Christian
community in which he lives, and theoretically a mem-
ber of the whole Christian church on earth and in the
immortal life. But unless the immediate community
into which he is received be Christlike, there is no
evidence whatever that baptism introduces the life of
Christ into the infant soul. Just to the extent to
which the community is bringing forth the fruits of
the Spirit will the average child manifest them. I
was once in a little company of seaside visitors, mostly
Protestants, in a Roman Catholic province when a small
schooner was driven upon the rocky shore in a storm.
It was night, but of course every one turned out. A
hardy man managed to swim out with a rope to the
distressed vessel, and then the hope of her salvation
lay in being pulled toward a sandy beach where the
crew could save themselves. A long string of visitors,
who were soon hauling at the rope, included Red
Indians, Agnostics, and a Quaker. Even some women
tourists were helping in the long and tough piece of
work. The Catholic residents, who alone made a liv-
ing in the place, stood idle, demanding a price for their
services. Time and again the group of watching
women thought they saw the gallant little vessel drift
too near the rocks to escape, and then some flicker
of lightning through the storm showed that there was
still hope. All the time the company of good Catholic

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 257

mercenaries were standing out for a better bargain.
They were not specially to blame. That was the level
of the local community into which they had been bap-
tized. They had no public spirit, and their money
harvest was the short tourist season. What had they
received in Catholic baptism as infants? A dogma-
tism centuries old assures us that they had received
the grace of regeneration. But our world has recently
passed through flood and fire; we are born again into
a new day of thought and social regeneration. What
value for us have these old assertions of ecclesiastical
theory if no evidence can be found to give them sup-
port? When it is asserted to-day that the Pagan
Indian, the unbaptized Agnostic, and the Quaker, who
strained heart and limb at the rope on that remote
shore, lacked the assurance of God's grace possessed
by the others who stood aloof, we Christians think
such a belief dishonouring to Christ as the captain of
our salvation, while the outer world gives one short
whistle of ironic incredulity and goes on its way.

Is infant baptism, then, an empty form! Surely
not! We cannot adequately express in words all that
we hope for a little new-born life. Our desires for its
earthly life of joy and fellowship, and for the immortal
grandeur to which it may develop, raise in us thoughts
unutterable. We may be only dimly conscious that the
fears and hopes that cluster round an infant centre in
God's saving grace; but whatever religious notions a
parent may have must be stirred by the responsibility
of a new-born child. If these notions be Christian they
cannot find expression in action and symbol more truly
than in a rite which enrols the child as a member of
the larger family of God and touches him with the same
water that in time past was used to symbolise the wash-
ing away of the pagan terrors and pagan atrocities of
his remote forefathers.

In our ceremony of baptism there is, first, the
element of intercessory prayer. Parents and sponsors

258 THE SPIRIT vii

offer, not only their own faith, but the faith of the
Church at large, on the child's behalf; and if they
are godly they thus bring to the delicate mind of the
unconscious infant the telepathic force of love and
hope. In this atmosphere something is done once and
for ever on the child's behalf; there is a symbolic
gesture of the Church toward the throne of God, and
an action used to express the Church's faith that God
understands the prayer and the gesture, and rewards
it by looking on the child with acceptance. It in no
way contradicts the larger fact that unbaptized children
are the subject of the Spirit's educative care, and that
all such, sharing inevitably the Christian environment,
may also share the Christian salvation. Indeed, the
acceptance of God's fatherhood for the one child consti-
tutes him for the hour the representative of all children.
Meagre indeed must be the conception of God, of
the ideal friendship, or of the issues of life bound up in
a little child, existing in the mind of man or woman
who could find words adequately to express what is
involved in the dedication of an infant to God. We
appreciate the point of view of the Baptists, who post-
pone the rite, or the Quakers, who, adepts as they
are in exploring the power of silence, eschew it alto-
gether; but we believe the more general instinct of
Christendom is sound which finds in this common
Christian symbol of infant baptism a meaning that
overflows all verbal channels and will not be suppressed.

Confession and Absolution

The soul's need of expression has been not only
proved, but much forced upon our attention of late by
the astonishing success of the therapeutic method
as psycho-analysis. Briefly, the discovery of a certain
medical school is that many mental and nervous dis-
eases are caused by some emotional experience which
has never found vent in open expression. Such an
experience leaves a memory, conscious or subconscious,

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 259

which causes a prolonged emotional strain, the sup-
pression of which works mischief in the soul, with con-
sequent ill effects upon physical and mental health.
The original cause of this strain may be forgotten, or
ignored by the patient, but when it is brought to light,
and the patient persuaded to converse freely on the
subject, the result is great relief. The physician, by
convincing the patient that he need no longer go in
bondage to the past, completes the cure.

The parallel between this scientific discovery and
the Catholic doctrine of sacramental confession and
absolution is obvious. The following is quoted from
the book by Dr. A. E. Davis, of the Liverpool Psycho-
Therapeutic Clinic:

A frequent cause of obsession, or obsessive thoughts, is the
feeling of shame or regret arising out of bad habits in early life.
These obsessions are most intense, persistent, and painful in
character. Of all classes of obsessions this is probably one of
the most easily and permanently curable. If psycho-analytic
treatment had no other justification than in this class of case it
would have fully justified its inclusion in psycho-therapy. By
its means, and the power of classification which its practice
gives, one is enabled quickly to expose the painful complex.
The rest is easy. The patient is encouraged to give a circum-
stantial account of his former habits, his struggles, regrets, and
the literature which first planted the seeds of fear and remorse
in his mind.

The unburdening of the mind, the discharge of the pent-
up, painful emotions, the feeling that the secret burden under
which he has toiled for years friendless and helpless, is no
longer secret, but shared with a sympathetic listener; the
sum of all this relief is so great as to be almost incredible.
This is no flight of fancy, it is a tragedy in real life. Only
those who have suffered, or have heard the confessions of
sufferers, can conceive the awful, ever-present remorse, fear
and shame, haunting them day and night for years. It is prob-
able that some cases of insanity and suicide are due to this
cause alone.1

From this it is easy to see the power of the Catholic
confessional in all cases where the burden of shame or

1 Hypnotism and Treatment by Suggestion, pp. 46-47.

260 THE SPIRIT vn

remorse or fear has weighed upon the soul. The act
of confession, the dramatic words of absolution, the
advice of a kindly confessor, bring to the believing
heart the recognition of God's forgiveness, and natu-
rally produce in the penitent a new sense of power and
freedom such as a prisoner feels whose chains have
been broken. It is certain also that, in the case of
penitents struggling against bad habits of body or mind,
the practice of frequent confession would always be a
comparatively simple method of conforming the charac-
ter to the new ideal aimed at, because confession and
penance inevitably impose on the subconscious mind
a forceful suggestion as to the suppression of certain
habits and the formation of others. Thus we see how
a conviction would arise and become traditional, at-
tributing to the confessor the power to dispense the
grace of God; and the ritual, not only of this rite of
confession, but of the priestly ordination which con-
ferred such power upon him, would be modified in
accordance with the belief.

We find, then, that the Church has been guided
by a sure instinct in accord with psychological law in
instituting a practice by which burdened souls could
find this relief, relying upon the absolute secrecy of the
confessor. In Protestant congregations, where there
is no official on whose secrecy a frightened soul can rely,
there is a great lack.

While this is true, there appears to be no justifica-
tion for much of the Catholic doctrine and practice
of the confessional. The sooner a patient becomes
independent of the psycho-therapist the better. No
medical psycho-therapist would ask for the confessions
of the healthy or would count his work for the dis-
eased successful if the patient needed to come to him
frequently all his lifetime. Such dependence would
indicate and perpetuate mental and moral weakness,
unless it became a mere form, in which case it would
be worse than worthless. Unless psycho-therapy pro-

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 261

duce in morbid characters a new freedom in which they
can develop a healthy initiative inspired from within,
it must necessarily tend to weaken the moral fibre.

Likewise, from the mental and moral point of view,
compulsory confession for the healthy, or frequent
confession throughout a lifetime for any, has no justi-
fication. Can it be justified from the religious stand-
point? Religiously all institutions must stand or fall
by what they imply as to the character of God. The
doctrine of sacramental confession and absolution grew
up in an age when Christian theology was dominated
by legal conceptions. In Semitic and in Roman law
a criminal had only his misdeeds measured by legal
requirements. No court of law has ever weighed the
good deeds of a criminal and balanced them nicely
against his transgressions, which is what the natural
heart of man demands as justice. As far as law is
concerned, any consideration of merit is gratuitous,
and each infringement of the code must be penalised
and the account settled before the criminal can live at
ease. In the age of which we speak God was thought
of as the great giver of such law, the great Judge who
dispensed it. The divine event toward which the whole
creation moved was thought of as a great legal assize.
It was under such a juristic conception of sin and
God that the doctrine of priestly absolution grew up.
Absolution is essentially the formal pronunciation, by
a properly qualified agent, of the divine forgiveness of
certain definite offences. Do we to-day really feel that
God's attitude toward evil in the human heart is rightly
represented by such a conception? Can a sentence of
absolution pronounced on a definite act of sin cleanse
the disposition of soul out of which the act sprang?
If God the Spirit dwells with the aspiring soul, always
changing it from day to day by His personal compan-
ionship, can the vicarious representation of an external
juristic authority, pronouncing judgement upon particu-
lar offences, bring home to us the reality of His con-

262 THE SPIRIT vii

stant forgiving renewal and encouragement? Does
the confessional cause us to understand the transcendent
Father who manifested His attitude to men in the liv-
ing service and dying love of Jesus Christ? Do we
recognise in the ritual of confession and absolution the
outward and visible sign of a salvation which is in the
soul a perpetual well-spring of living water,1 which
flows forth from every saved soul like a river of living
water2 for the healing of the world? If not, the
practice of sacramental absolution does not appear to
have justification, though the occasional practice of
private confession is often a necessary means of grace
to souls burdened by past sins or present infirmities.
Every Christian minister ought to be carefully trained
to be a trustworthy " spiritual director," in order that
he may win confidence and convince the oppressed of
God's forgiveness and certain and practical help.

The Eucharist

Let us turn now to examine the traditional cere-
monies associated with the celebration of the Eucharist.
We find that in all cases the unconscious instinct of the
Church has produced forms likely to bring about in the
soul that quiescent or receptive attitude in which the
suggestion of the acts will have greatest power. The
psychological instinct has worked with a sure touch in
producing these forms. Thus in the service of the
Roman Catholic Mass, words, music, silences, the sharp
tinkling of the bell, are all admirably calculated to pro-
duce a state of mind quiescent to all else, concentrated
upon one idea and expectant, a state in which the mind
is ready for the most powerful working of any sugges-
tion. The offering of the elements of life to God as
symbols of the life of Christ carries the soul to the
offering of self as a living sacrifice. The act of giving
and receiving the holy food is, of course, in itself ex-

l John iv. 14. 2 John vii. 38.

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 263

traordinarily suggestive of some augmentation of inner
strength which passes from the Source of all life to the
individual life of the soul. The whole service prepares
for and enhances the act of reception: first, whatever
burden of sin may be upon the communicant's mind is
laid aside by confession and absolution; secondly, its
anxieties are allayed by intercession and thanksgiving,
and all acts of worship that pass between that and the
act of reception tend to increase concentration and ex-
pectancy, so that the suggestion of the act pierces, as
it were, like a two-edged sword underneath the dis-
quiet and distraction of the upper levels of conscious-
ness, into a region of calm psychic life where it can act
with a compelling power. In more modern forms of
the Communion service we find a similar touch of sure
psychological instinct.1

So far as the reception of Holy Communion goes to
the building up of moral character, or — what is the
same thing — to the bringing forth of the fruits of the
Spirit, the Christian graces, we are again bound to face
the evidence that, except in the case of rare souls, the
characters of the devout conform to the standard of
the local religious community. Whatever is current as
the Christian ideal is formed — given time and normal
conditions — in the character of the constant com-
municant. In different parts of the world these ideals
are different — a fact which certainly harmonises with
the hypothesis that the formative force is auto-sugges-
tion combined with the suggestion of power as given in
the holy food.

But why, it may be asked, do we need such periodic
suggestion? When I was a child living in a Roman
Catholic country I caught up some phrases of religious
polemic and was repeating them to my father, when he
said, " No intelligent person who believes that God is a
Spirit questions the Real Presence in the Mass; it is the
Special Presence they question." This is, of course,

1 E.g. the Presbyterian service.

264 THE SPIRIT vn

true; no one who realises the spiritual presence of the
Christ can fail to feel the full import of the words,
" Where two or three are gathered together in my
name there am I in the midst of them." But what
relation do time and space bear to such spiritual
presence? Is there any point of space or time — even
though that point centre in a material object — of
which we would dare to assert that the divine presence
was absent?

" If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the
uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand
lead me and thy right hand shall hold me." 1

" Lo, I am with you alway." 2

Nor can we fail, unless we accept a materialist
philosophy, to regard the material universe as instinct
with God.

" Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the
waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot."3

" He flew swiftly upon the wings of the wind. He
made darkness his hiding-place." 4

" Raise the stone and thou shalt find me; cleave the
wood and there am I." 5

" And every common bush afire with God." 6

By the Special Presence, then, in any place or time
we must mean a special awareness of the divine presence
by human spirits. But just because the consciousness
or awareness of the divine presence is, in every in-
dividual, so dependent upon our subjective states, it
appears necessary that the faith of the Church in the
all-present Christ should be summed up and brought
home to the individual in a recurring action. Such
action expresses not only our assurance too deep for
words, but also our common relation to the all-present
Christ and our fellowship with one another. That is
the reason not only why this special awareness ,of the
divine presence can come to us with the supreme act

1 Ps. exxxix. 9-10. 4 Ps. xviii. 10.

2 Matt, xxviii. 26. •*> Oxyrhyncbus Logia.
8 Ps. civ. 3. • Mrs. Browning.

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 265

of the Church's language of action, but why we have
good ground for our belief that, however languid and
oblivious we may feel, we may verily come into touch
with the presence by our participation in that action.1

Such periodic acts of attention are necessary, or at
least most helpful, to the soul's vitality. The finite
life of all things proceeds each by a certain rhythm
peculiar to itself. The living organism sleeps and
wakes, acts and rests, feeds and assimilates. The
morning stars sing together, the waves of the ocean
clap their hands, in rhythmic motion; from the whole
of creation there arises a music in which time is meted
out in regular rhythm. So it is with the soul of man,
except that he has a certain power of controlling his
own rhythm, and a bad jar and jangle he often makes
of it. But the more he yields to the experience of
salvation — the more he responds to the comfort or
comradeship of the Spirit — the more right will be the
rhythm of his religious action; and he finds that regular
times for private worship and public worship, for learn-
ing what other men have discovered concerning God
and for meditating upon this garnered knowledge, are
the best response to God's constant presence, just as
regular times for refreshing the body with the food
that is always within reach are essential to that body's
well-being.

If this be granted it is evident that we want, for
such ceremonial, the most beautiful setting of edifice
and furniture that we can give, and the actions of our
ritual must be true, absolutely true, to our best instincts
of prayer and praise. In the degree in which these
things become ornate rather than beautiful the rite will
be neglected by healthy souls. The issue has long been
obscured by the confusion of moral and aesthetic values,
and also by the party spirit which has entered into
controversies on this subject. Whether any observance
had its origin in Pagan or Christian Rome, or in the

1 Cf. Essay V., p. 163.

266 THE SPIRIT vn

Byzantine Court, is unimportant. If it conformed to
our ancestors' ideals of truth and beauty it was right
for them. If we do not now hold it true to our sense
of beauty and truth and our highest ideals of worship,
it is wrong for us.

I have only seen one modern church building that
appeared to embody the ideal of a living community.
It was made of logs, and it stood in a little open sp?ce
in the forest. They were the best logs that could be
got, and they lay upon one another unhewn in all their
natural beauty. It was a simple, oblong building of
good proportions — something better than any dwell-
ing-house around, and homely. From inside people
looked up through large windows to see the arching
branches of trees, and above them the kindly blue or
the hurrying clouds. There was, for the Eucharist,
one plain broad table — the best table that could be
made — covered with the whitest of cloths. The little
log church in the forest was perfect in its way because
it was the best of its kind and homely. The most
splendid Gothic cathedrals were also, for those who
built them, the best they could give, and homely, for
their homes were also Gothic — dark, cold, ill-aired,
but of their type beautiful. But imitation Gothic in
the midst of the ugly, box-like tenements of the poor
is ugly and unhomely. What would be the best church
edifice that modern wealth in centres of civilisation
could produce? We cannot tell; and we never shall
be able to tell until we get the beauty of holiness in our
homes, and return to simplicity and homeliness in our
churches.

When young I was often taken to a service in a
chapel on a steep hillside. Its interior was very simple
and austere; but on one side the high windows were
clear to a great expanse of sky, and on the other, up
the steep slope of a hill, was a convent garden in which,
at a regular hour, a long procession of nuns in their
black and cumbrous mediaeval gowns walked, through

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 267

the gracious summer, with heads bent, into a darkened
church. Above them was a screen of fluttering poplar
leaves and the splendour of the summer sky; but they
never looked up. I have never forgotten the sky as
seen through those windows of clear, latticed glass in
the chapel, nor the poetry of the Psalms and the simple
drama of the Gospel story as they came to us with the
changeful lights of sun and shade and the endless pro-
cession of the summer clouds. The contrast between
this and the picture on which we could look not far
away — the black, draped figures entering a dark door,
with, beyond, the twinkle of artificial altar lights —
has always remained with me.

Here, I believe, were represented — not, as the
shallow would say, two temperaments, but two differ-
ent standards of aesthetic value, so different that they
implied two different conceptions of God.

This judgement has nothing whatever to do with
controversies between Romanist and Protestant. It is
an aesthetic judgement, and implies that the love of
beauty is part of virtue, and that we ought to bring
of all our best to our religious ceremonial. As a child
I was sometimes taken into Roman Catholic churches.
In that part of the world, and at that time, the altars,
of which there were many in each large church, were
usually decked with paper flowers. Sometimes they
were dressed with white paper cut into marvellous
patterns, or with cheap muslin not over clean; and
images of the Virgin were very often dolls dressed in
cheap white satin and lace, with glass jewellery. It
was bad taste, but I am sure that a dear old char-
woman, who often used to spend a day's wages on
candles and paper flowers, was as commendable as the
widow who threw her mites into the treasury of the
temple. But my point is that there is objective beauty,
just as there is objective truth and goodness. God
alone knows these in their perfection, but if we would
keep our ceremonial pure, we must be ever approximat-

268 THE SPIRIT vn

ing as nearly as we can to beauty in church edifice and
ritual. To keep what is tawdry, cumbrous, and ar-
tificial merely because it is traditional is a sin.

It must be admitted that in our towns many people
do desire, on entering a church, to be transported into
a dream-world in which nothing reminds them of the
ugly, jarring world of home or factory. But what is
wrong is always the jar and ugliness of the slum or
suburb, and in that wrong God is suffering. To
emphasise the distinction between the house of God
and the homes of men is surely to build on sand. The
paraphernalia of a mystery-religion may be a necessary
relief from a hideous world, but at the best it can only
be a temporary expedient, suffered until Christianity
is vital enough to transform the work-a-day world.
Surely no soul that has access to nature fails to find
in the simplest things in life — in the depth of the sky,
or the sigh of the wind in the trees, or in the homes of
men — a depth of mystery which makes them fitting
symbols of the mystery of godliness. If we want
darkened windows and air foggy with incense in order
to testify that the things of God are too great for us
to understand, it is surely because we have never con-
sidered the lilies, never really seen one blade of grass.

It is small wonder that the plain man does not find
our churches homelike, and that our rites and cere-
monies usually express so little to him. The one
strong, purely aesthetic passion which is evident in the
masses of our people is the love of flowers, which sug-
gests that they would respond to natural beauty in our
churches if we could once get rid of all ugliness, as
well as of such beauty as belongs only to a ritual which
is like a dead language, no longer spoken spontaneously
but as matter of scholastic attainment. Tf the work-
man's home were beautiful he could bring the very best
of the same sort of beauty and make a church in which
he and his fellows could find a corporate home. That
must be for the future ! At present we have the choice

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 269

between entire simplicity and the best we can supply of
gorgeous traditional reproductions in which, in an en-
vironment of Byzantine colouring, our celebrating
priests are arrayed like Solomon in all his glory.
What said our Lord? That one aesthetic judgement
of His might have more weight than it has with us in
our choice of church furniture and vestments.

Again, as to ritual, our language of action must rep-
resent the aspirations and deepest desires of our hearts.
If in any cathedral we watch in particular the gestures
of officiating priests, do we feel that to-day they ex-
press what we believe to be the truth concerning the
relation of the human soul to God in its moments of
adoration, contrition, and humble approach? We get
the attitude of the celebrant in elevating the offering
to God, and we get another attitude, appropriate to
real prayer, when, as a suppliant, he kneels, with head
bowed and face covered, for some appreciable time.
We get, also, constant passing genuflexions, and the
bobbings and bowings of assistants and acolytes, step-
ping backwards and sideways to avoid turning the back
to the altar.

If we can take away from the ceremonial of the
Mass what comes to us from a lower and more primi-
tive idea of God, the attitudes of the officiating priest
are expressive. The bending of the knees is an atti-
tude entirely suitable and expressive when the head is
bowed and the face covered and time is given for prayer
and meditation. It expresses the privacy of the soul,
the withdrawal of the attention from all that is ex-
ternal, the humble deference of the mind of man when
inwardly laying the burden of his own life or of the
world before God. Given time and quiet, this atti-
tude is as noble as hasty genuflexions are ignoble and
absurd.

Further, when the priest, standing before the altar,
elevates his offering toward heaven, every line of his
attitude appears beautiful and expressive. To raise

270 THE SPIRIT vn

the arms, to look upward, is Indicative of humble aspi-
ration. Nothing could be finer than this attitude.
There is perhaps no gesture so native to adoration and
prayer as that of holding up empty hands while raising
the face heavenward. It would be gracious for con-
gregation as well as for celebrant; but as yet we have
no congregational observance so expressive.

We also get the frequent genuflexions which are in-
tended to express humility and adoration, and imply a
sense of reverence for a superior. If, however, we no
longer believe that the God we adore is pleased with
grovelling genuflexions, such attitudes no longer ex-
press for us either adoration or humility. The ideas
of glory and power, founded upon compulsion and
terror of the arbitrary caprice of Eastern potentates,
made grovelling attitudes suitable in their courts. It
was in such courts, when they represented the world's
greatest wealth, that the etiquette of " falling down
before the footstool " of the sovereign culminated.
The idea which then gathered world-wide prestige has
since slowly waned, only lingering now in the tradition
of ancient courts and their conventional ceremonies;
but it is a conception of reverence which no longer exists
in the open sunshine of work-a-day life. It is scarcely
two centuries — if we may trust our novels of manners
— since men went down upon their knees to their
superiors if they wished to ask forgiveness for a fault
or to entreat a boon; but we do not now feel that a
fellow-creature worthy of respect would be pleased with
such behaviour. We no longer think that true dignity
in sovereign or father or benefactor can in any way be
enhanced by anything that belittles the personality of
others; and attitudes that are undignified and ungainly
express such bclittlement. We think of God ns a good
father who can only fnd his own dignity in the dignity
of his sons and daughters, or of a good king whose
glory is in the dignity and friendship of his subjects.

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 271

Summary

We have found that language is necessary to the
growth and development of human life, and that when
verbal language fails, as it always must somewhere, the
language of action must be used, because talk is a
function of vitality, and wherever means of communi-
cation fail between men and between men and God,
there is also a failure of something that is essential to
human life. We have seen that the healthy soul neces-
sarily uses the language of action when it would give
expression to thoughts and emotions which it cannot yet
analyse, because they ascend from the subconscious
region where our instincts have their common source,
so that by association the consciousness of any one in-
stinct brings with it inexpressible hints and suggestions
of them all. What rises in the consciousness is un-
utterable, for we cannot say " it is this and it is not
that," for it is in reality the outflow of a living organism
toward all that can enrich its existence, and the recep-
tiveness of that organism toward the source of all en-
richment. Yet, while it remains true that aspirations
and appetites imply common associations, and that
aspirations of affection, of love, of friendship, of the
search for truth, of admiration, and of the desire for
beauty and the worship of the Source of all, cannot be
analysed because they imply one another, it is also true
that we can analyse the language of action which has
been used to express this unanalysable outflow, and we
have endeavoured to explain its natural potency to re-
lieve the soul and thus render it receptive to an inflow
from its divine environment. God works through the
power of suggestion, which we have seen to mean a
method of bringing conviction to the whole mind, con-
scious and subconscious.

To some of us this explanation of the power of a
Christian ceremony will, I fear, seem irreligious. But
if so, let us ask ourselves whether our Lord's reiterated

272 THE SPIRIT vii

explanation, " Your own faith has saved you," de-
tracted from His teaching that it was by " the power
of God," " the finger of God," " the will of God," that
salvation of soul and body was wrought. It is quite
clear from His whole teaching that He regarded the
power to heal and reform as of God, and as coming
upon man in definite times and places from the trans-
cendent Spirit of God. Yet He no less implies that
the gift or power waited upon something that hap-
pened in the minds of men — upon the act of faith,
which is the conviction of the whole mind, conscious and
subconscious.

In an age when all other men looked to religious
magic for relief from personal disabilities, it displayed
marvellous insight to declare that faith — that is, an
attitude of the soul — could reform conduct, heal the
body, and cure mental insanities. There is no more
striking evidence of the way in which the mind of
Jesus transcended the minds of His contemporaries,
including His followers, than His insight into the
potency of the inward attitude to heal and reform.
When all the world believed that the power to heal
body or soul resided in the magician or prophet, He
saw — what science has now laboriously learned —
that God works through a power of newness of life
which arises within the needy soul. To those who
brought to Him the mentally helpless He said that
their own conviction that the cure would be wrought
was necessary in order to accomplish it in the patient.
He cast out no obsessions in Nazareth because of the
unbelief of the populace.1 To the father of the boy
subject to convulsions He said, " If thou canst be-
lieve." Any one who has tended the mentally feeble
knows how much they are affected by the mental atti-
tude of those who surround them. To the poor
woman who touched His garment expecting a magical
cure He said, " Daughter, your faith has healed

1 Matt. xiii. 58. i M.irk ix. 23.

vii THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL 273

you." ] To the blind man He said, " What do you
want me to do? Go, your faith has made you
whole." 2 To the converted courtesan He explained
that the chain of evil habit was broken: " Your faith
has saved you; go in peace." :;

The ecclesiastical mind is constantly turning back,
thinking to find the Lord in the dim atmosphere of
Church history. The Christian too often thinks of
Jesus Christ as in the past. He is not there. He has
risen and gone before us into the future. Again and
again in Christian ages the reformer has found Him in
the farthest vista of his own advancing path; and we,
entering an era of psychological discovery, find Him in
front, awaiting us at the gate of a new day.

1 Mark v. 34.

2 Mark x. 52.

3 Luke vii. 50.

VIII
SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

A. CLUTTON-BROCK

ANALYSIS

The two kinds of experience, one scientific, the other aesthetic.

The aesthetic always the sense of the personal.

So myth always expresses the personal.

Art implies that beauty is personal.

The belief in the personal in nature expresses our experience.

But we are afraid of this personal in nature.

The fairy angel we try to ignore.

We confuse her with actual women or with abstractions.

And she is ignored in our religion.

But not in pagan religion.

The Christian refusal.

But there is an orthodoxy which does not refuse.

It is the orthodoxy of Christ.

It brings the fairy angel close to us.

The certainty of spiritual experience.

Our desire to communicate it.

Worship an effort to share it, art to communicate it.

An example.

The need of self-surrender in spiritual experience.
The nature of the knowledge it gives us.
The need to act upon it.

VIII

SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

Men, so long as they have been men, seem to have
experienced each other, and all that is not human, in
two different ways. The one kind of experience they
express in knowledge and in theories built on knowl-
edge, the other in art or myth. The one kind we call
scientific, the other aesthetic, though the words are
vague and do not clearly express the difference between
the two kinds of experience. For the difference is this,
that in the second or aesthetic kind of experience we
are aware, or think we are aware, of something per-
sonal; that is to say, of something like ourselves, as we
know ourselves inwardly, in all that is not ourselves.
Nowadays, because of knowledge obtained by the
other, the scientific kind of experience, it is commonly
supposed that this sense of the personal in all that is
not human is illusion, is itself but the theorising of
primitive man, the error of his imperfect knowledge.
In myths, we are told, primitive man expressed his
theories of the behaviour of the sun and the moon and
the seasons, or what not. He made stories of these
theories, because he had not yet learned that a theory
has its own form of expression. Afterwards he forgot
why he had made the story, and came to believe it as a
matter of fact. Hence religion. It is assumed that
modern civilised man does not make myths but only
theories. It is not understood that myths and theories
are, and always have been, different things, the result
of different kinds of experience, and that we still make
myths no less than theories. Myths always have been,
and still are, made to express the sense of the personal

277

278 THE SPIRIT vm

in all things. If ever they come to be believed as
matters of fact, it is by dull men, who are always with
us, and who have never experienced what they express,
or have denied their own experience.

Some years ago I was in the Maritime Alps in June,
and I came to a spring in the shade of a sweet-chestnut
tree on the southern slope of the mountain. Then I
knew suddenly how southern peoples had come by their
myth of the water-nymph. Standing myself in the
blazing sunshine, I almost saw a water nymph among
the waters of that shade. Water-nymphs had always
seemed to me frigid, unreal fancies; but now the spring,
in its shadowed beauty and contrast with the parched
heat of the mountain side, became alive, became almost
a person. It was not the legend of the water-nymph
that brought her to my mind; it was the life and beauty
of the stream that almost brought her to my eyes.
The stream seemed so clearly to be occupied with a
lovely, friendly business of its own that I almost saw a
lovely, friendly creature doing it. Then, for a mo-
ment, I knew what Paganism meant and why it was
believed. I was a pagan myself, and saw what faith
and beauty we have lost with it; and I knew too why
poets have always made and still make myths. The
moment they experience nature intensely enough to
make poetry about it, they also make myths about it.
So Shelley made a myth about the Cloud, not frigidly
or ingeniously or because other poets had made them,
but because he could not otherwise express what he had
experienced:

I am the daughter of earth and water,

And the nursling of the sky ;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;

I change, but 1 cannot die.
For after the rain, when with never a stain

The pavilion of heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams

Build up the blue dome of air,

viii SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 279

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,

And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,

I rise and unbuild it again.

He did not believe all this as a matter of fact, nor was
it allegory to him; it happened to his mind and was
the expression of his intense experience of clouds. And
always, if we experience them intensely enough, they
become personal to us and seem to be occupied with
their own business. Coleridge has, consciously, ex-
pressed this feeling in a gloss to The Ancient Mariner;
and he says that the experience came to the Mariner
when he was wrought up to a certain intensity:

" In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards
the journeying moon, and the stars that still sojourn
yet still move onward. And everywhere the blue sky
belongs to them, and is their appointed rest and their
native country and their own natural home which they
enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected,
and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival."

Yet modern writers often try to describe natural
beauty without what they would call metaphor. The
effort is vain; the beauty so described is not beauty to
us. Metaphor is but the beginning of myth; it is the
means by which poets communicate their sense of the
personal in all beauty, even the beauty of nature, a
sense which must be expressed in personal terms.
Even a direct, simple sentence like " The silence that
is in the starry sky " moves us because it is to us the
silence of that which could speak.

So in poetry and all art there is an implied dogma
that all beauty is personal. The artist affirms that in
his art, even if he would deny it in his creed; and our
joy in his art is a joy in that sense of the personal every-
where which he communicates to us. It is not his own
person that he tries to express to us, but the personal
in that which is not himself. That likeness of which
we are aware in all art, even music, and which we call

28o THE SPIRIT vm

truth, is a likeness to the personal which the artist has
seen or felt and which he communicates to us, whether
in speech or lines or music. If he has not seen or felt
it, he cannot draw its likeness; but when he can and
does, then we recognise it. The truth of art is not a
likeness to things as we see them, when we do not feel
the personal in them. The artist is not concerned with
impersonal or scientific facts at all; he is concerned only
with the personal that he becomes aware of at a cer-
tain point of intensity. And often this personal ousts
from a picture all impersonal fact so completely that
the stupid are perplexed. They say it is not like at
all, because it is not like those impersonal facts of
which alone they are aware. But in music art escapes
from all facts that can be seen or stated in words or
paint. It is concerned with the personal altogether,
not with that in which the personal is manifested. It
is myth become a pure voice, sounds that are utterly
human, no matter how great their variety and com-
plexity. We are aware of the personal in the flight of
birds; but the musician ceases in his music to be aware
of the birds. He gives us their motion and fellowship,
with all that is personal in it and nothing else. So we
often feel nature in music because the musician has
given us that personal in it which he has felt in nature.
He makes no reference to nature; but we know the per-
sonal which he expresses, that it is of nature; we hear
the very voice of the water-nymph that he has almost
seen.

This implied dogma of the personal, a dogma not
stated but proved in the work of art, is necessary to the
mind of man. We cannot be content with the generic
impersonal world of things, functions, and processes
that science presents to us, because it is not the whole
of reality as we experience it. It is not that the one
kind of experience contradicts the other; the personal
experience might itself be matter for science, and
should be. We are always passing swiftly and uncon-

viii SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

281

sciously from one plane of experience to another; as
soon as we see beauty and experience it intensely, we
pass to the sense of the personal, and there seems to be
person outside us answering to person in ourselves.
But there is nowadays a sharp conflict between art and
science, because science, trespassing beyond its proper
business of seeing things generically in classes and cate-
gories, putting on the airs of philosophy in fact, often
affirms that to see them so is to see the only reality in
them. The artistic activity, it says, is mere trifling,
however pretty its products. And artists themselves
are apt to believe this; they have lost faith in the
reality of that experience which makes their art, and
they have lost faith in art as an expression of reality
not to be otherwise expressed. So they fall into frigid
imitations of the convinced art of the past, like those
eighteenth-century poets who talked about nymphs in
whom they had no belief; or else they turn to realism,
to an attempt to describe things as they are seen
scientifically, generically, with no sense of the personal
in them. The result in one case is imitation art; in
the other not art at all, but a kind of science without
its validity or good faith. Until artists can regain
their faith in their own experience of the personal, art
will remain frivolous and half-hearted, or falsely
scientific.

But why is it that we have so general a desire to deny
our sense of the personal in nature? Why do we wish
science thus to trespass beyond its proper function and
deny philosophically that there is a personal in nature?
Why do we misunderstand myths and talk so much
nonsense about them? It is always fear that makes
men unscientific, and the modern world is afraid of its
own experiencing power. There is something intoxi-
cating, bewildering, almost terrifying in this sense of
the personal in nature, something that drags us out of
our routine selves and makes us wretched and hungry

282 THE SPIRIT

VIII

when we sink back into them. " Thou hast touched
me and I am on fire for thy peace," says Augustine;
and we are afraid thus to be touched and fired by a
reality not ourselves. It seems to us incompatible with
the other reality of use and wont, and of things classi-
fied so that we may use and understand them. Poets
themselves have cried out against the beauty which be-
came personal to them and allured them like an en-
chantress that could never be possessed. Keats's belle
dame sans merci is that beauty; to be in thrall to her is
to fall asleep and wake on the cold hillside and never
forget the dream of her. If she is loved, it is for ever
with mere desire; and Euripides expresses the cruelty
and peril of her in the Bacchae. Dionysus is la belle
dame sans merci; he is that personal in nature which
leads men and women into the hills and makes them
destroy what they love most; and then they wake and
see what they have destroyed. In the Bacchae is ex-
pressed all the conflict in the nature of man between his
two planes of experience. Euripides makes a tragedy
of it; but we try to escape from the tragedy by denying
that one plane is anything but mere illusion; and we do
so, not because we are scientific, but because we are
afraid.

We have locked up in the cupboard of the world,
not a skeleton, but a fairy angel. We sit round the
fire and talk of politics or religion or duty or the
weather, and pretend not to hear when that winged
creature flutters her wings and sings; we stuff our ears
against her as if she were a siren. That old story of
the sirens is about her, and so is the story of the Lorelei
and all such enchantresses. They express the fear of
an earlier time, which it was not ashamed to confess.
But we hope to rid ourselves of it by not confessing it,
by denying the existence of the enchantress. The
stories, we say, are not about her, but about the sun or
the moon or the seasons. As for the Bacchae, we
pretend not to know what it means. There is no fairy

viii SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 283

in the cupboard; if there is anything, it is a skeleton,
but most of us say there is nothing. We have only one
kind of experience of reality, and that is the scientific.
The other is all make-believe.

Yet, when the poets and musicians tell of the fairy
angel we cannot help listening to them, for her beauty
is in their speech and song:

Lamp of Earth ! where'er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,

And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,

Till they fail, as I am failing,

Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing.

You see, Shelley himself says that she is dangerous,
though he has let her out of the cupboard; but he says
it with her music. We try to enjoy the music, while
we say that he is talking beautiful nonsense, but non-
sense cannot be beautiful. And then, when the musi-
cians make their tunes about the fairy angel, tunes half
triumphant, half despairing because they can last only
a moment, we pretend that those tunes are about some
woman. Biographers tell us that this or that sym-
phony of Beethoven was written when he was in love
with a Boche princess; but he was always in love with
the fairy angel. There are even those who say that la
belle dame sans merc'i was Fanny Brawne, and the
Bacchae a political pamphlet. Perhaps Keats did try
to persuade himself that Fanny Brawne was la belle
dame. Shelley was always trying to persuade himself
of such things. Mary, Emilia Viviani, Jane Williams,
all in turn were Lamps of Earth to him. As it has
been said, " The married life of geniuses is often un-
fortunate; and the same is true of their wives;" they
cannot be married to the fairy angel. And that is why
most of us deny her existence. The fairy angel is
there, but if we allowed ourselves to believe in her she
would put us out of conceit with our other plane of

284 THE SPIRIT

VIII

experience; and we cannot always be aware of her.
She comes and goes and leaves us on the cold hillside;
so we say that she neither comes nor goes, but is a myth
about something else. Or else we give her abstract
names like beauty, talk about it with a pretence of
scientific jargon, and say that beauty is truth, truth
beauty. Keats said that — "him even." All the
philosophers break their minds on beauty in their
anxiety to escape from the perilous desires and illusions
of the poets. The philosophers know, at least, that
beauty is not Jane or Mary or Emily; and then mali-
cious men of science say that she is, that she is a mere
illusion of the sexual instinct. That is the language
they use about the fairy angel in their anxiety not to
believe in her. And then the theologians obtrude
themselves; there is no fairy angel, they say, but only
God. The mystics believe that the fairy angel is God,
but the theologians will not have it that God is any-
thing like a fairy angel. They talk about Him drily
and with analysis, as the philosophers talk about
beauty. So both try to keep the fact and its allure-
ment at arm's length; they ^uff their ears with wax
against the siren's song. And the devout try to drown
it with Hymns Ancient and Modern, the modern more
fusty than the ancient; but the fairy angel continues to
sing songs that are both old and new — everlasting
songs. And in spite of our efforts to ignore her, to
explain the origin of her myths, she is still there; her
origin is in herself, and she remains as alluring and as
dangerous as ever she was.

Our religion ignores her, and that is why the poets
will have none of it. A religion, to satisfy them, would
have the fairy angel singing at the heart of it. Canon
Scott Holland once wrote a piece about the Isle of
Innisfree — how the tune of it would come into his
mind in the most incongruous places, at committee
meetings or in church, and how he would have a sudden
desire to say, " I will arise and go now to the Isle of

vin SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 285

Innisfree," and lead all the committee-men and sides-
men in a dance after him. The Isle of Innisfree is the
home of the fairy angel, and the song about it has in it
her music, which we recognise as soon as we hear it;
but it is not often heard in church. It is not the voice
of God as we conceive Him; but if God does not and
cannot sing like that, then He is not inspired like
Schubert or Keats — which is absurd. If He exists at
all, the uttermost beauty, the most extreme enchant-
ment, must be His; He cannot have left it to a
dangerous fairy or to obviously sinful artists.

The pagans did believe that this enchantment was
of God, or of many gods; they were so much aware of
the personal in nature that they saw gods everywhere,
not moral gods concerned to make men good, but wilful
and alluring, having only the goodness of the artist, the
gift of beauty, and also the vanity of the artist; being
very apt to destroy men like Pentheus, who were too
dull to see their charms. But we have denied all these
gods, and we say that there is one God, in whom we see
nothing of Dionysus or Apollo or Pan. In fact, most
of us see nothing in Him or of Him. But the pagans
had this advantage over us, that they did almost see
their gods. In that personal quality of nature that
we have schooled ourselves to deny, their gods were
glimmering and whispering:

The wind in the reeds and the rushes,

The bees on the bells of thyme,
The birds on the myrtle bushes,

The cicale above in the lime,
And the lizards below in the grass.

These were the music of Pan, half heard, and it taught
man to make the music that is sweetest to himself, a
music not human, but the speech of nature become per-
sonal, as nymphs are not human but the beauty of
nature become personal. In both there is a beauty
that never satisfies the desire it provokes. We think

286 THE SPIRIT vm

we are more religious than the pagans, but most of us
are less, because out of fear we deny this personal
quality in nature and impoverish our own concept of
God. All the passion for the fairy angel we try to
divert into the passion of human love; that is the one
romance for us that is left. So that the young may
not be tempted by the fairy angel, we encourage them
to believe that they have found her in Emily or Jane.
We sigh heavily to ourselves in middle age — " I, too,
thought that once; and how beautiful it was to believe
that a fairy angel existed; how sad to know that she
does not." But we lie to ourselves; for we know,
though we will not confess it, that she does exist,
though she is not Jane or Emily. Better any infatua-
tion about them than the peril of believing in her.

Certainly the poets who have believed in her have
been sad, if not bad or mad. Keats could never forget
those

Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.

For him they are cut off from reality, or he is made
forlorn by being cut off from their reality. The word
is like a knell to toll him back again to his sole self and
to the loneliness of the other plane of experience. But
it is the aim of religion to free us from that loneliness,
to make us aware of a universe in which there are not
merely things and processes and functions, but every-
where person answering to ourselves; and our religion
fails to do that more and more because the fairy angel
is left out of it, left to the poets, who therefore are not
religious. And because the fairy angel is not in our
religion it loses more and more the power of expres-
sion, and more and more she begins to call men away
from it. How can we achieve a reconcilement?
Some poets say there is none possible:

Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean ? But these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms, and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs
in the brake;

vin SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 287

Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremhle with tenderer

breath ;
And all the wings of the loves; and all the joy before death ;
All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,
Dropped and deep in the flowers with strings that nicker like fire.
More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these

things?

It is supposed that the Galilean teaches us how to
escape from the peril of them by mere refusal. The
early Church said that all the pagan gods were fiends;
Apollo became Apollyon; but we have never quite
forced ourselves to believe that, and Satan himself has
for us some of the splendour of a pagan god. In fact,
though we pretend to believe in a Trinity, we have
split up the full idea of God into two, because we
despair and are afraid of the uttermost beauty and
delight. There is our God, and Lucifer; and Lucifer
is the alluring half of God that we fear and deny and
call the fallen angel. He is the beauty that seems to
tempt us away from duty — Tintoret painted Christ
Himself as tempted by him; he is, we think, incom-
patible with our life; he is the lovely danger at the
heart of the universe. Milton makes him say, Evil,
be thou my good; but it is rather we that say, Good,
be thou my evil; because this ultimate beauty seems
to us incompatible with our life, and is a good we
despair of. Augustine speaks of a beauty old as new
that he learnt to love too late; and that beauty is to
him God. The theologians and the philosophers have
split up that beauty also, from their fear of experienc-
ing it. The theologians make a God of it, too per-
sonal in a narrow, ugly way; the philosophers make an
Absolute, empty and arid. And between them the
beauty old as new, the fairy angel, is vanished; and we
are left with nothing to believe in that we can love
with the whole of us. There is still the music of the
poets, still the Isle of Innisfree, outside our religion,
and so seeming mischievous, capricious, malign. Be-

288 THE SPIRIT vin

yond God, beyond the Absolute, and still more real
than both, there is this actual beauty in the sunset, so
tender but not to us; in the spring, so gay but not with
us; the beauty of the earth, that loves into the void.
We call the earth a mother, but not ours. Nature is
omnipotent, but she will not gather us into her peace;
she makes a transcendent paradise of the universe, but
leaves us outside it in exile.

So we feel towards the personal beauty of nature,
and we feel so more and more the longer we deny it
to be personal. It pains us, and the modern poet fills
his song with that pain. There is to him a God in this
nature but an unacknowledged God, unlike the other
God whom some men worship and he cannot. Science
tells us, dully and confidently, that this personal is not.
The religious believe it, and in that belief are blind to
the divine which was seen by the heathen in his blind-
ness, and are left with a dull divine of their own, cut
off from nature and immediate experience like a dried
plant. It cannot have been so when men built the
great cathedrals, which have the diversity, the swarm-
ing and dangerous beauty, of nature herself. They
were built as shrines of the beauty, old as new, which
was almost imprisoned in them. But now we build tin
tabernacles and imitation Gothic churches, with the
fairy angel laughing outside them; and we spend marble
and gilding on eating-houses, trying to make another
paradise with the fairy angel still left outside. We
have utterly separated spirit and sense; but that fairy
angel is both, with a double allurement so strong that
we fear it. So we are Manichees at heart; for the
Manichaean heresy is but the conscious, deliberate
statement of a fear, and the assertion that it is wisdom
and truth. The fear is latent in all men, and the facts
of life seem to justify it. Spirit and flesh are manage-
able if we separate them, but fused together they sweep
us away. So we are always trying to separate them,
and to conceive of the universe itself as not one but

vin SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 289

two, the one all and the other nothing, the one real, the
other unreal, the one pure and cold and the other warm
and foul. And, whether we are devout or sceptical, we
are afraid of the reality in which matter and spirit are
fused, and which the pagan saw and worshipped. We
dare not even ask ourselves that besetting question, Is
there something malign in the very heart of the uni-
verse? Is the uttermost beauty, delight, excellence
hostile to us, incompatible with our well-being, derisive
of our native mediocrity? Are we but moths to its
flame, moths for whom the only wisdom is to fly away
into the darkness and cold?

That question is put again and again in poetry; it
sounds in all the pleading of music — the desire of the
moth for the star; it sounds even in the prayers of the
saints. But the sensible man of the world says,
" What nonsense. There is no star, and I am not a
moth," and all the while he knows in his heart that he
lies. He is a moth and there is a star; and he is not
content to have refused his desire for it. The best he
can do is not to think about it, and attend to business;
but in that successful inattention of his no one loves
him. We love those who cannot forget the star and
who express their love of it in music. We call their
music divine, even though we may smile at those who
make it; and we remember them through the ages while
we forget the men of business.

But with this Manichaeism, with this split between
the two gods and between men into mediocrities and
wild poets, there still persists faintly a great orthodox
tradition between two heresies. To that tradition
Christ is not the pale Galilean, the denier and for-
bidder ; He is not one who would make us safe from the
flame, nor is He the wild rebel who rushes like a moth
into it and then weeps for his scorched wings. Cer-
tainly, Christ never denounces the fairy angel; and
there is something of her in His Kingdom of Heaven,

29o THE SPIRIT vin

something that we have left out of it. If she is beauti-
ful, so is His Kingdom; and the music which the poets,
have learnt from her is also in His speech: "Con-
sider the lilies of the field, how they toil not neither do
they spin; yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his
glory was not arrayed like one of these." There at
least is the personal in nature felt and expressed; and,
He tells us, if we see it, we shall not mistake riches for
beauty. And some of the great Christian visionaries
have spoken of God as if He were the fairy angel:
" With Thy calling and shouting my deafness was
broken; with Thy glittering and shining my blindness
was put to flight. At the scent of Thee I drew in my
breath, and I pant for Thee. I have tasted, and I
hunger and thirst; Thou hast touched me, and I am on
fire for Thy peace."

In Christ's Kingdom of Heaven there is allurement;
a man who sees it will give up all for it; and He said
that men must desert all duties for it, must leave father
and mother; He was exasperated with those who would
not leave their duties for it. It was to Him an en-
chantment, but not malign; for at the heart of it He
saw, not la belle dame sans merci, but our Father which
is in Heaven. Yet, because to us our Father which is
in Heaven means the God whom in our timidity we
have emptied of all enchantment, we do not see Christ
among the poets and music-makers, His peers, but
among the preachers and edifiers. We place Him
among His own commentators as if He commented on
life. He did not; He made music about it, He spoke
of it like a poet, but with an audacity beyond theirs.
They have seen the fairy angel and desired her, but
despaired; He said, Live for her and forget everything
else; for she is God. Her beauty is not incompatible
with life; to see it is to know eternal life. The uni-
verse is not malign, tempting you with siren songs. Its
music does not come and go, but sounds for ever if you
will hear it. Nor is it only far away among the

viii SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 291

mountains and stars. There is the same wild beauty
in the voices of children, for of such is the Kingdom
of Heaven; and in the light of a cottage window, and
in any mother with her child. Chaucer says :

In reverence of Heaven's Queen
We ought to worship all women that been.

Christ puts it the other way. In all women that be
we ought to worship Heaven's Queen.

Implied in the Christian faith, but not yet clearly
expressed, is the doctrine that we must discipline our-
selves to find beauty if it is not to lead us and lose us
in the wilderness. In Swinburne's lines about the Pale
Galilean, which I have quoted, we can almost see the
beauty of the earth coming to life before our eyes and
in our ears. It is not merely women or flowers, or
man's music separate from the sounds of nature; there
is the glimmer and whisper and scent of spiritual be-
ings, refusing the last friendship with us, giving passion
and unappeasable desire to the delight of the senses.
And the poets say that only through that delight can
we know what spirit is; while the preachers say that we
must ignore that delight if we would know what spirit
is; and those who call Christ the pale Galilean thin!;
that He was one of the preachers. They think that
He superseded Paganism; He said that He superseded
the Pharisees. He never said a word against the
laurel, the palms, and the paean, the breasts of the
nymphs in the brake ; and He was with the poets in
this at least, that He told men to give up their routine
for something wonderful, beautiful and incompatible
with routine. " Blessed are they which hunger and
thirst after righteousness; for they shall be satisfied."
It is only in the last words that He differs from the
poets; they lament that they are for ever unsatisfied;
He tells us that, if we hunger and thirst enough, we
shall be satisfied. And what does He mean by this
righteousness, this Kingdom of Heaven, this seeing

292 THE SPIRIT vin

God, of which He is always speaking? One thing we
know for certain; He means the utter yielding to a
desire which at first seems unappeasable. He tells us
to have the courage of that desire; and He denounces
most those who have not the courage of it. He did
not denounce Paganism, but that which is common to
all exhausted religions, the stupid rules and ceremonies
and sacrifices, the boredom which thinks it acquires
merit by being bored, the stuffiness that shuts out from
the tin tabernacle all the lovely danger at the heart of
the universe, the stained-glass effigies of Himself that
obscure what might be magic casements opening on the
foam of perilous seas. He certainly looked out on the
foam of perilous seas, and said that in the end they
were less perilous than our safety. But He does im-
pose a discipline on the hunger and thirst for beauty.
We are to seek it and seek it until we find it in things
that we have despised. It is not in its nature proud
and distant, but humble and near, and we come closer
to it, not by impatience but by patience. We can un-
derstand la belle dame only if we see her beauty also in
the women and the children around us; and then she
will not be without pity for us, nor will she leave us to
wake on the cold hillside. But we must see this beauty
close at hand, we must see that children are of the
Kingdom of Heaven, if we are to fill our religion with
the wild beauty which it lacks, with the music of the
Isle of Innisfree. St. Francis tried to bring that music
into our religion; but we think him quaint, odd, even a
little mad. There was a time when the dance began
to steal into our worship; but it has been expelled, and
now we only bow and kneel as if we were at Court.

A Church paper lately said that I took a merely
human view of Christ; but Christ Himself, and it was
the essence of His doctrine, did not take a merely
human view of any man. Now the despairing poets,
no less than the men of business and the preachers, do
take a merely human view of men. They say that we

viii SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 293

are cut off from this personal that is at the heart of all
beauty by our own mediocrity; but they cry for it even
in their despair; while the men of the world, and even
the preachers, say that, if we tell ourselves firmly it
does not exist, it will cease to exist for us. They
would cut us off from all actual spiritual experience;
or, at best, they tell us that spiritual experience is what
it is not, that it consists in seeing the goodness of God
in a sunset, and a text in the starry sky. But the poets
at least know better than that; they do give us the
beauty of the sunset and not a moral drawn from it.
Christ tells us something different from both. He
tells us that if we dare everything, sacrifice everything,
we shall see His Kingdom of Heaven and be of it. He
does not say that stout, comfortable men in black coats
can tell us all about it. To be aware of it is a
dangerous business; but, when you are utterly aware of
it, then you will see, not la belle dame sans merci, but
God Himself at the heart of it. Whether He speaks
the truth or not is not for me to say, nor for any of
us, least of all for the stout, comfortable men; but
we may assume without superstition that He Himself
saw what He took to be God, and the Father of us all,
at the heart of it. The power of Christ over genera-
tion after generation is not so much in the doctrine
supposed to be His, which is constantly perverted and
provokes revolt against its innumerable perversions, as
in the intensity of His spiritual experience which all
men still can recognise in the beauty of His speech.
What He really says is always this — that He sees
God in His Kingdom of Heaven and that we can see
Him too. And He convinces us that he has seen God;
no one ever had such a power of convincing. Thou-
sands of those who refuse to call themselves Christians
are unknowingly charged with His faith that there is a
Kingdom of Heaven, so that His power of seeing it is
not His alone but an inheritance for all mankind. We
may begin with Paul: " I am utterly persuaded that

294 THE SPIRIT vm

neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities
nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor
height nor depth, no, nor any other creature, shall be
able to separate us from the love of God, which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord." And we may end with these
words of William Morris :

Ye know not how void is your hope and your living;
Depart with your helping lest ye undo me.
Ye know not that at nightfall she draweth near to me,
There is soft speech between us and words of forgiving
Till at dead of the midnight her kisses thrill through me;
Pass by me and harken and waken me not.

In these passages, and many like them might be
quoted from all the centuries, there is the orthodoxy of
those who have found not merely la belle dame sans
merci in all beauty, who are not frightened by their
spiritual experience but assured by it. Indeed, the
mark of all full spiritual experience, whether it be of
beauty or of righteousness or of truth, is always cer-
tainty.

Here is the house of fulfilment of craving,

Here is the cup with the roses around it,

The world's wound well healed and the balm that hath bound it

Cry out for one heedeth and leadeth you home.

Christ speaks of seeing God; that is the most ex-
treme expression of certainty; Paul also of the Love of
God which is in Christ Jesus. The language of
Morris is different; but the images of sex which he
uses are an under rather than an over-statement of the
warmth, closeness, certainty of a passion which for
him, as for all the religious, is mutual. And it is this
certainty that gives to their words the convincing power
of beauty. But there is not one of them who says
exactly what he is certain of. The theologians have
worked upon the words of Christ and tried to turn
them into literal dogmas; but in themselves they are
poetry, the expression of triumphant certainty rather

viii SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 295

than of that about which He is certain. " The words
that I speak unto you I speak not of myself." That
which He has seen speaks in him; it is the very spiritual
experience that speaks in Him, and for all men, and to
all men; and it is not merely Himself who says them.
By this we may know the expression of full spiritual
experience, its certainty, and the sense of a universal
voice speaking in it. And we too, when we hear it,
are certain and do n'ot ask what we are certain of.
For that universal voice is ours also; it lives in us long
after the man who uttered it has gone from us. " Yet
a little while and the world seeth me no more; but ye
see me; because I live, ye shall live also." That is
true of all those who have expressed spiritual experi-
ence for us, no matter in what form. They are gone;
but we see them still and share in their life and their
certainty. When we hear Mozart's Ave Verum, it is
ours no less than his; we pass beyond time and change
and out of the prison of self into the freedom of that
common certainty; we are no longer troubled with the
desire of the moth for the star, nor are we ourselves
incompatible with that which we experience.

But there is no division so deep as that between those
who recognise and value this experience and those who
do not.

When you have once experienced the Choral Sym-
phony, then, if some one tells you that he prefers the
Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, you are not
troubled — except for him. You know that he has
not experienced the symphony; if he had, he would not
say what he does say. The gap between you is of the
same kind as the gap between one who has seen with
the eyes and one who has not. Or rather it is even
greater; it is the gap between the blind and the seeing,
between those who see and those who deny that there is
anything to be seen. It is a gap that cannot be over-
come by argument. Yet those who see can never be
content to leave the blind in their blindness; for spir-

296 THE SPIRIT vin

itual experience is of such a nature that it is not con-
summated until it is shared. It is part of the affirma-
tion produced by it, that all men can share it if they
will; and it is not complete for any man, and does not
produce the happiness of utter certainty, until all men
do share it, until the words — Quod semper, quod
ubique, quod ab omnibus — come true at last. That
would be the Millennium of which poets have dreamed
— this certainty coming suddenly to all men, like music
in the night. So it was Shelley saw the Millennium in
Prometheus Unbound.

A sentinel was sleeping at the gate

When there was heard a sound, so loud it shook

The towers amid the moonlight . . .

A long, long sound as it would never end ;

And all the inhabitants leaped suddenly

Out of their rest, and gathered in the streets,

Looking in wonder up to heaven, while yet

The music pealed along.

At the height of spiritual experience we always look
in wonder up to heaven while the music peals; and it
seems to us that all must hear it. It is not for our
private ear; if it were, it would not be the music of
heaven which speaks to the whole listening earth; and
why are not all men listening? Those who will not
listen seem to deny themselves the fellowship of that
music; they refuse the Millennium and frustrate it
with their refusal; they prefer their own bray to the
song of celestial nightingales. Perhaps that was what
Creighton meant when he said, " You may let the ape
and tiger die; but you still have to deal with the
donkey." The human donkey, a libel on a charming
animal, is sceptical where he should be certain, sceptical
from mere insensibility and bemuse he cannot hear
music for the noise of his own bray. He will listen to
nothing but another braver, and that only on condition
that the brayer shall listen to him in turn. But we
must not think that the donkey is extinct in ourselves

vin SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 297

and supreme in others; he is intermittent in all of us.
A woman sitting next to you at a concert, who fans
herself, munches chocolates, and looks at her nose in a
bag mirror may hear the music at some other time
when you are deaf to it; then you will be the donkey to
her. So we are estranged from each other and filled
with thoughts of murder; but they will not help us to
communicate our spiritual experience.

The chief purpose of worship is to draw us into the
fellowship of spiritual experience; and it is a useful rule
of decorum that people should not fan themselves in
church or eat chocolates or look at their noses in a
bag-mirror. They know that in church such behaviour
would prevent the fellowship of spiritual experience.
But unfortunately there is another, more servile motive
for decorum in church. We must behave ourselves
there lest God should be offended; and so churchgoers
put up with much in their services that cannot produce
any spiritual experience, because they think they acquire
merit by being bored. It is as if they were listening to
a dull play at Court. One does not criticise the drama
as it is performed at Windsor; one acquires merit by
being there. We must get rid of this notion of ac-
quiring merit by going to church if we are to keep the
services alive. We must apply this test to them : Do
they produce in us a common spiritual experience?
Not always, for the failure may be in ourselves, but at
least sometimes. Otherwise we are on the way to the
prayer wheels of Tibet, or to the miner who wrote up
his prayers over his bed and every night jerked his
thumb towards them and said, " My sentiments."

But worship does keep us aware of the need for the
fellowship of spiritual experience, and there can be no
complete worship without art. For art exists because
of men's desire to communicate their spiritual experi-
ence to each other, and so to consummate it. That
desire accomplished is what we mean by expression.
Expression comes of the desire to make spiritual ex-

298 THE SPIRIT vm

perience complete by making it common. " This has
happened to me, but not fully until it has also hap-
pened to you." The artist has the eagerness of the
child who tells you all about it; if he has not, he is only
a proud, dull virtuoso. But, while the child speaks to
one listener, the artist speaks to all mankind; and he
does not merely tell us about his spiritual experience;
he makes it happen to us. That is where he differs
from the bore who tells us about his spiritual experience
as something we must envy but cannot share. And
that is where the artist is like Heaven, where there is
more joy over one sinner that repenteth than over
ninety-and-nine just men. For the sinner who repents
is drawn into the fellowship of spiritual experience and
makes it more complete for Heaven itself.

So, when we affirm the supreme value of a work of
art, we affirm the supreme value of the artist's experi-
ence, which he has made ours. All art is the present-
ment in some form or other of that which, in reality,
has produced spiritual experience; and it is possible for
art to exist because the same things will produce the
same spiritual experience in all men, if only they can be
rid of the obstructions to it in themselves. The artist
by his power does rid us of these obstructions better
than we can rid ourselves of them. We might meet a
woman like Cordelia and see nothing in her; she might
be only a saucy miss to us; but Shakespeare makes us
experience her as he did. It does not matter that he
may never have met just that woman; she is for him a
concentration of his spiritual experience of many
women, without which he could not have drawn her.
And she, with that beauty of character displayed in
action and speech which is 1'ke the beauty of music,
makes us cry " I believe " like a tune and like an actual
human being whom we ourselves experience spiritually.

There is no difference in effect between the spiritual
experience of art and the spiritual experience of reality;
only art communicates to us a spiritual experience of

vni SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 299

reality which most of us cannot get from it as surely
and intensely as the great artist. The value of art
consists in this that, by its technique, pl*ot, structure,
composition — whatever the art may be — it does lead
us into spiritual experience with a certainty lacking to
the events of real life; and the proper aim of all
technique and all method is so to lead us into spiritual
experience, not because the artist wishes to do us good,
but because the desire to communicate his experience
is a part of the experience itself. And in the certainty
with which we are led into spiritual experience, and the
sense of certainty induced from the very start, lies the
cumulative power of art. We know that we are being
led, in King Lear or the Choral Symphony, from the
first words, from the first notes. They are full of sur-
prises for us, but not of disappointments; what they
promise, that they perform, though in ways we never
expect, since they are not borrowed ways.

I know no better example of the nature of spiritual
experience, and of the unexpected manner in which art
may communicate it, than the end of the Marriage of
Figaro. It is based on Beaumarchais' play, and the
libretto seems to leave most of the point of that play
out. For the play, being satire, gives us negative
spiritual experience. It shows us a society without the
values that are implied in Beaumarchais' reductio ad
absurdum of it. But that is not Mozart's game; he
cannot breathe in the negative world of satire for long;
his music must be positive. So the libretto, seeking
opportunities for Mozart's genius, leaves most of the
satire out; it is mere intrigue without the point of
Beaumarchais' deadly bland demonstration. Mozart
was not deadly or bland, and fools have thought that
in this music he was content to trifle. But with the
waywardness of the artist he has his divine inevitable
surprise for those who can hear it. It is an absurd
world and an absurd libretto that he accepts, as a child
will accept any story; and he carries us along with

300 THE SPIRIT vm

him as if he were just a charming child to whom wc
listen, smiling in our superior wisdom. And then sud-
denly at the end he lifts us into the scene of general
forgiveness; and we, if we can hear the beauty of his
music, know that this is reality, more real than all the
logical tortures of Ibsen. Of course, all these people
are absurd and some of them worse; the music has
made fun of them and of all mankind. But when at
last they kneel down and forgive each other, the music
transforms them and all mankind by a miracle that we
must believe in. They are ourselves no less than them-
selves, and, because we forgive them with the inspired
tenderness of Mozart, we forgive ourselves also.
There is a sudden relenting of the whole universe; it is
the parable of the prodigal son made universal in that
music; and at the moment of common confession and
forgiveness all faces are turned upwards to feel the rain
of the divine love. There is a sudden inrush of reality,
undreamed of before; but now we know that all the
trifling has led up to it. It is not merely these people,
but all mankind seen in a new way, made divine out of
their very absurdity and part of a divine universe, and
it is their recognition of their absurdity that makes
them divine and turns our happy laughter to happy
tears. Their confession of weakness lifts them to this
heaven, more real than any heaven could be without a
past of folly and error; and then we know that nothing
in the world is so beautiful as weakness made strong
through confession of itself, as sin turned into holiness
because it knows itself to be sin, as the ridiculous step-
ping into the sublime through self-ridicule. And that
this is reality, this is truth, Mozart convinces us, by
making it happen with the surprise and the convincing
power of life itself.

But for all spiritual experience, whether of art or
of life, we need a self-surrender, a willing removal of
obstructions in our own minds, a sacrifice of the ob-

vin SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 301

vious, of what is called common sense. We must for-
get what the ego habitually says to us, so that we may
hear something else speak; we need to deny ourselves
and follow. For spiritual experience is always sur-
prising; it is not what our other kind of experience
leads us to expect. Just as the man of science must
give up his theories before facts, so we must rid our-
selves of all the inhibitions of habit that seems to us
wisdom, when spiritual experience offers itself to us.
Just because it is spiritual, it is always utterly new, and
tells us that we have been fools. That we must con-
fess if we are to receive it, and confess with joy.
There is an irony in all sudden revelation of truth, a
redactio ad absurdam of the whole of worldly wisdom,
a revolutionary overthrow of all our traditions and
precedents, that we must consent to if it is to be a
revelation to us. That is why beauty is terrible as an
army with banners — it is terrible to the old self —
and why any lovely action humiliates us when we see
its loveliness. It is not what we should have done,
and yet it is utterly right. But how do we know that
it is utterly right? Not by calculating its results, but
because we experience it; and we cannot experience it
unless we are prepared to be proved wrong by it. We
must have the habit of scepticism about all the posses-
sions of our own minds if we are to let truth happen
to us; we must utterly rid ourselves of the desire to
be proved right.

But the donkey in us hinders us from doing this, and
at the last moment we are cut off from spiritual ex-
perience by that self-assertion which is fear of the un-
known splendour. We are not the souls in Shelley's
poem who walk upon the winds with lightness; we re-
serve judgement and beg leave to differ. " That is not
my idea of a horse," people say when they look at
Tintoret's " Crucifixion," forgetting that it is his idea
of a horse. If they meet a St. Francis they say,
" That is not my idea of seemly conduct." Of Mozart

302 THE SPIRIT vm

they complain that he is too tuny; of Christ Himself
that He has a devil. And the reason always is, either
that they do not believe at all in a Kingdom of Heaven,
or that they think they know already just what it is.
So they do not recognise the true Kingdom of Heaven,
the reality compared with which they themselves are
unreal. But if we are to see it we must be ready to
recognise it in any form or shape and in the most un-
likely people. Think how unlikely Christ was to a
learned Pharisee. We must never say: Can any
good thing come out of Germany, or the Royal
Academy, or the middle classes, or any body or any
thing that we happen to dislike? It is not our achieve-
ments or wisdom that matter, but the Kingdom of
Heaven; and we matter only so far as we are aware
of it. To know that is to be humble, but not with the
'umbleness of Uriah Heep. The great men possessed
by spiritual experience are not humble to those who
deny it; they thunder, knowing that it is not their own
thunder. They let the power of God play through
them, and they are angry with those who deny it, be-
cause it is not theirs, but God's. They could not be so
sure but for their humility.

There is a joy in this humility like the joy in a lover's
submission, and a pride like a soldier's pride in dis-
cipline. But there is no rivalry with any other regi-
ment, no other army that we wish to overcome. We
are filled with esprit de corps, but the corps is the uni-
verse itself; and to be of the universe and proud of it,
to surrender your identity to it, and then to have it
given back a thousand times enriched, that is a happi-
ness compared with which all other is counterfeit. To
know yourself nothing, and then to find yourself
charged with all the power of that to which you have
yielded, that is the highest power man can attain to.
It comes, not with the will to power, but with the
sudden, irresistible confession of weakness forced
from us not against our will, but with it. For this

vin SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 303

confession is made not merely for the self, but for all
mankind. It confesses that we are all absurd infuriat-
ing creatures, and laughs in the very confession, and it
can hear Heaven laughing with it as well as at it.
And then it knows that, absurd and infuriating as we
are, we rise above the angels in our confession and for-
giveness of each other. They could not reach that
subtle joy of tears and laughter; those who have never
borne the burden of their own follies cannot know what
it is to let it slip from their shoulders. At the height
of spiritual experience we are like the bandit who was
imprisoned for years in a loathsome dungeon, until
one day it occurred to him to open the door and walk
out.

And at the height of it we have a certainty, if only
in a glimpse, of the design of God. We know that
sorrow has led to its own joy, folly to its own wisdom,
sin even to its own holiness. Voltaire jibed at Leib-
nitz's doctrine that this is the best of all possible
worlds; but at the height of spiritual experience we
know what he meant, or ought to have meant. Reality
is the only reality; our substitutes for it are figments
of our minds, and not one of them could possibly be so
good as what is. But this we know only when we see
what is in spiritual experience, when we see it, not as a
series of events, one pleasant and another painful, but
rather as a piece of music in which all the notes have
their place, both consecutive and simultaneous. One
leads up to another and could not be what it is if it
were not so leading up. And the self at one moment
leads up to the self at another; and the whole universe
at one moment leads up to the whole universe at an-
other; and there is a oneness in both only seen at the
height of spiritual experience. Then we rid ourselves
even of the sense of waste, which at other times always
intimidates and baffles us.

So there is nothing but spiritual experience that can
give us belief, the full belief on which men act; and

304 THE SPIRIT vm

all that scepticism which is deep enough to hinder or
pervert action comes of the lack of spiritual experience,
or the refusal to acknowledge its supreme authority
and value. No man is utterly without it; and our
nightmare theories of the meaninglessness of all things
come, not from the complete lack of it, but from think-
ing of ourselves as we are with all the spiritual experi-
ence of the past, but with all that experience proved
to be false; as if we had become what we are, soulless
with the passion of immortal souls, through facts that
are not. It is the bewilderment that has fallen away
from spiritual experience and denied it, which turns
the brain sick and makes men rush into blasphemy and
savagery for relief. But all this is merely pathologi-
cal, like those states of mind in which our identity seems
to be divided and we are unreal to ourselves, since
there is no self to be real to. Thinking about such a
state is no cure for it; you must think about something
else, and then it passes. So the only cure for night-
mares of scepticism is spiritual experience. Seeing is
believing; and only spiritual seeing can make us believe
in spirit and its supremacy. A lover overwrought may,
by thinking too much about love, persuade himself that
he does not love, or even that there is no such thing as
love. But when he sees the woman he loves, he knows
that his thinking was all at the mercy of his nerves.

Yet the belief that comes with spiritual experience
can be maintained only if it is acted upon. If we " see
God," we must do what we have seen, otherwise
spiritual experience itself turns to bitterness. And
that, I think, is the real reason why men have feared
the fairy angel so much and seen in her la belle dame
sans merci. Either they have not connected the ex-
perience of beauty with their own actions, or they have
made a false or base connection. They have seen a
wild, distant, unattainable beauty in nature that allured
them but to no end; they have heard a voice that led
them nowhere. On that beauty, seen so, they could not

viii SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 305

satisfy their desires. But the doctrine of Christ, and
of all the great visionaries, is that we can attain to the
same beauty in ourselves, in our feelings, thoughts, and
actions; we can be at one, not with nature in the
scientist's sense, but with that personal in it which we
see in spiritual experience. We can become like the
lilies of the field as Christ saw them; and, when we
do, they will not be to us flowers in the hair of the
fairy angel, but, like ourselves, creatures and children
of God.

SPIRIT AND MATTER

A. CLUTTON-BROCK

ANALYSIS

The Universal and the Particular.
What sense tells us.

The knowledge we acquire not with the senses.
Truth, beauty, and righteousness.
Is there only matter, or only spirit?
Either alone does not express our full experience.
The particular and universal imply each other.
But we are always thinking of them apart.

The Real and the Useful.

Illusions produced by the relation of use.

The origin of language.

We are aware of the universal when we escape from the relation

of use.
The sense of beauty the earliest sense of the universal.
Without it both thought and conduct are misled.
The idea of causation arises in the relation of use.
So we are misled by it.
The conflict in our conceptions of reality.
We seldom rise to a full experience of reality.
In the relation of use the universe is to us nonsense.
The natural sciences do not by themselves make sense of it.

The Meaning of Evolution.

The evolution of full perception.

Functional and expressive beauty.

An analogy with virtue.

Is there truth in the myths of the savage?

The error of the modern theory of universal becoming.

The true doctrine of evolution.

What is Nature?

The effort of life to master matter.

The real hope of evolution.

The escape from the relation of use to God.

IX
SPIRIT AND MATTER

The Universal and the Particular

Spirit is a name given to something the very existence
of which is often denied; and those who believe in its
existence often give an incredible account of it. It is
my object to give an account of it not incredible and
based on the common experience of mankind.

We are aware of matter with our senses; and, if we
are aware of spirit at all, it is not with our senses.
The first question is, then, Are we aware of anything
not with our senses? Of ourselves, perhaps; but those
who believe that matter is the sole reality must believe
also that self-consciousness is an illusion. For them
there is no self but merely matter in certain formal
arrangements functioning, as they say; and self-con-
sciousness is but an effect of that functioning. They
insist that we have no knowledge of anything except
with our senses, and that this knowledge is all knowl-
edge by matter of matter.

Yet all the senses in combination applied to some
one particular object could not produce any conclusion
about that object, could not even tell us that it was an
object. Smell by itself does not tell me that what I
smell is also that which I touch and see; nor do simul-
taneous smell, sight, and touch tell me that. A crea-
ture with only sense-perceptions could not go beyond
them; there would be nothing in it to conclude that it
was smelling, touching, and seeing the same object.
It would in fact consist only of sense-perceptions and
would have no notion of external reality at all; and
it may be that there are creatures which do consist only
of sense-perceptions and have no notion of external

309

310 THE SPIRIT ix

reality. But man is not one of them; he is aware of
an object over and above his sense-perceptions of it;
and he calls that which is aware the self.

But still the question remains whether this self can
be aware of anything but matter. Assuming, as we
must, that the self is not merely a combination of sense-
perceptions, is it still only matter, by some means which
we cannot yet understand, aware of the existence of
other matter? Now the man who believes this be-
lieves also something more, namely, that it is the truth
about matter. For him, therefore, besides matter
there exists the truth about matter, which itself clearly
is not matter and is not perceived with the senses. He
may say that the truth about matter is a product of
that matter which is his own mind, and exists only in
his mind. But, if the truth is that and merely that, it
is not the truth to him, and he cannot believe it. Truth
means to us, not a product of our minds, but that
which exists independently of them, that which would
exist if we were not. The very word truth implies its
independent existence; the value for truth, to which
we all appeal when we use the word, implies its inde-
pendent existence. If we could believe that we made
truth ourselves, we should no longer value it, and it
would not be truth to us. When we speak of a bitter
truth, an unwelcome truth, we imply that it exists inde-
pendently of us and compels our recognition of its
existence. If it did not, why should we not make for
ourselves truths only comforting to ourselves? The
answer is that we could not believe them. Belief im-
plies that what we believe in exists independently of
our minds. So the truth about external reality exists
independently of our minds; it is not matter, though it
be about matter, nor is it perceived with our senses.

Since metaphysics are concerned with the nature of
ultimate reality, it is impossible to prove any meta-
physical statement. The aim of metaphysics is not to
prove any such statement, but to discover what other

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 311

beliefs are implied in any metaphysical belief. If a
man holds a certain metaphysical belief, you cannot
prove to him that it is false. But you may be able to
prove to him that other beliefs of his are inconsistent
with it, so that he will have to renounce either those
other beliefs or the metaphysical belief. So, to one
who says that he believes only in the existence of
matter, one may put it that that belief is inconsistent
with his other belief that he has attained to the truth
about matter, is indeed inconsistent with belief of any
kind, and so even with itself. For if only matter
exists, the truth about matter does not exist for us;
it is merely an effect produced by matter upon matter;
belief is an effect produced by matter upon matter.
But he who believes that cannot believe anything else,
or even that.

Turn now from truth to something which can be
much more easily confused with matter; something
which most people suppose they perceive with their
senses, namely beauty. To us the truth about objects
is not the objects themselves; but we may suppose that
the beauty of an object is the object itself, and that we
perceive it with our sense of sight or hearing. The
beauty of a tune is the tune; and we hear that beauty.
Yet it is possible to hear the notes without hearing the
tune and so the beauty. The beauty of the tune does
not consist merely of the pleasant sound of the in-
dividual notes. Play the same notes in another order
and there is no tune and no beauty of the tune. The
tune is something we cannot perceive without the sense
of hearing; but that which perceives it, and the beauty
of it, is not the sense of hearing. And, though the
notes are themselves merely sounds and material, the
tune is not material; it is something beyond matter and
informing it. It is that relation of material things
which we call beauty, and which, though it consists of
material things, is itself not matter nor perceived with
the senses.

3i2 THE SPIRIT ix

And the perception of truth and beauty is a percep-
tion of — what? not particular objects perceived with
the senses, but universal relations not perceived with
the senses, although we can be aware of them only
through the medium of the senses. And spirit is the
name given to that in us which is aware of these uni-
versal; and they themselves, since they are not
matter, though always perceived in or to matter,
are said to be spiritual. The word spirit is an
acknowledgment of their existence, and of the existence
of something in ourselves, not sense, which perceives
and values them. And there is another universal, an-
other relation, in our own actions, which is spiritual
and perceived by spirit, not by sense — that relation
which is called righteousness. We are aware of it
only in men and in their conduct; yet it also is to us a
universal relation like truth and beauty. It does not
consist merely in particular actions or speech as we per-
ceive these in others, nor in particular thoughts of our
own as we are aware of them. It consists in the rela-
tion of action, speech, or thought to circumstance.
Righteousness, in fact, is a certain arrangement of ac-
tions or speech or thoughts, like the arrangement of
notes which makes a tune; and we are aware of the
righteousness as a universal relation, over and above
the action, speech, or thought, though we cannot be
aware of it apart from these. So we say that
righteousness also is spiritual, and that spirit is aware
of it. There is this difference between it and beauty
or truth, that it is a universal we are aware of only in
human beings, and perhaps sometimes in animals. We
are not aware of it in mere phenomena or in inanimate
objects. But of this difference I will speak later. So
there seem to us to be two kinds of reality, a reality of
matter, of particulars, perceived by the senses; and a
reality of spirit, of universals, perceived through the
senses but by spirit. But the mind of man refuses to
believe in two kinds of reality; the very phrase is a

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 313

contradiction of itself; for reality means that in terms
of which all else can be explained, and there cannot be
two kinds of reality each unable to explain the other.
If there are, neither is to us quite real; and we look
for a further reality behind them, in terms of which
both can be explained away. In despair of that fur-
ther reality, some have said that there is no matter but
only spirit; and others that there is no spirit but only
matter; and, ever since men began to think at all, a
pretty quarrel has raged between them, particularly
over man himself. He is all spirit or all flesh; but to
himself, when he does not think too hard about him-
self, he remains both. To convince him that he is all
one or the other makes him uncomfortable; makes him
feel that the universe, including himself, is fraudulent.
It is clearly fraudulent if he is all matter; if life, con-
sciousness, anything else you please, is, as they say, only
a function of matter. For then the self, the very heart
of reality to all of us, does not exist. On the other
hand, if there is no matter but only spirit, why is this
spirit so urgently aware of matter, so much in pleasure
or pain over it? Why can I do nothing, perceive noth-
ing, value nothing, without it? I am living in a uni-
verse of phantoms, and the very agonies of Christ on
the Cross were unreal. In fact the docetic heresy is
true, not only of him, but of all men and things. Let
us then cut our throats so that we may rush out of this
phantasmagoria the nearest way. Those who affirm
the existence of spirit alone are insensibly led to think
of it as a kind of invisible matter. It is to them spirit
pretending to be matter and imitating it to the life,
imitating it so that it deceives even the pure spirit
which is ourselves. Spirit, to begin with, means to us
that which is not matter, it does not mean spirit pre-
tending to be matter; and our own perception of spirit
is to us the perception of something beyond matter,
though manifested in or through it. We cannot be
content if we are told that we do not perceive matter

3i4 THE SPIRIT ix

at all but only spirit pretending to be it. We might as
well believe at once that spirit is all matter, if matter
is all spirit. In either case an incessant trick is played
on us by reality; and reality itself is not to be trusted.

As for those who affirm the existence of matter
alone, they are led insensibly to think of it as a kind
of visible spirit. They cry that this matter is more
than we ever dreamed of, is in fact the best possible
substitute for that spirit which does not exist. We,
for instance, are all matter; and what fine creatures
we are. It is a mistake to think of us as mere flesh.
We are electrons or ions or what not, all incessantly
whirling about; and this whirling is itself far more
glorious than any spirit could be, if there were such a
thing. Let us sing our hymns no longer to a God who
doesn't exist, but to the eternal whirl of which we also
are a part. It must be good in itself if it can whirl
into us; and, if it whirls out again, what does that
matter? We fade into the infinite azure of the past;
but the whirling goes on for ever, and the result of it
is — just everything. Why therefore should we sulk?
Let us join the dance mentally as we do materially.
The very mental refusal to do so is itself all part of
the whirl. It is electrons at their highest state of
eternally voluptuous excitement — a beautiful thought.

No! we shall not be satisfied if we are told that
reality is all spirit or all matter. Either way, half the
content of reality is left out so as to make the rest
easier to think about. But we may see the way towards
a solution, through an analogy from art. In art there
seems to be the same difficulty about the universal and
the particular. In art, we are told, there are always
two things to be aimed at — unity of purpose or design,
and richness of content; and, so long as we merely
think about these, it seems that one is to be obtained
only at the expense of the other. But if an artist tries
to get one at the expense of the other, he is sure to fail
in his art. Design without content is not design at

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 315

all; and content without design is not content. It is
only the presence of each that makes the other what it
is; and the great artist attains to both, not by aiming
at one at the expense of the other, but by aiming at
both with equal intensity. The greater the work of
art the more there is of both in it. It is the passion
for both that actually produces a fusion of them, in
which they become one. And we think of them as
two, only for purposes of thought. Success in art is
the sameness of them; it is only because we are so used
to failure that they seem to us different.

So, we may conjecture, it is with reality. It seems
to us to consist of matter and spirit, and we seem to
ourselves to be matter and spirit, because we so seldom
attain to any fulness of perception of it. For the most
part we are aware only of particulars, which we call
matter; and the whole of us is not aware of them.
The senses are aware of different aspects of them, and
the self combines those sense-impressions into a percep-
tion of independent material reality. Then sometimes
we attain also to a perception of the universal in these
particulars; but often, when we are aware of it, we
forget the particulars; we think away from them to
the relation in which we have perceived them; we pass
out of the immediate warm perception of the whole
reality, universal and particular, matter and spirit, to
a purely intellectual concern with the universal, which
perhaps seems to us then to be the whole reality, or at
least the higher, more significant, reality. But the
moment we separate it from the particular, we are
losing our perception of it; it becomes to us far off
and faint and abstract, like a picture in which the artist
has aimed at unity of purpose without richness of con-
tent. When we are aware of both with equal inten-
sity they become one to us. Beauty is the beautiful
thing; Truth is objects or phenomena behaving in a
certain way. There is in all truth and all beauty a
character, an identity, a precision, which they get only

316 THE SPIRIT ix

from the particulars that are related in them. So this
fulness of perception is always a matter of degree for
us, and always we fall short of completeness. That
is why we make our division of spirit and matter, a
division not in reality itself, but only in our frag-
mentary perception of it.

The Real and the Useful

Our difficulty is increased by the fact that we have
a past of ages in which we have conceived of things in
a relation of use to ourselves. Sense-perception indeed
does incite us instantly to sense-value. It is actually
a means of knowing what gives us pleasure or pain,
what helps us to live or hinders us from living. To
most animals perhaps the vision of an object has no
meaning beyond that of use, it suggests merely security
or danger, pleasure or pain; and that is not concerned
with the object as an independent reality. But man
has gradually acquired a sense of the independent
reality of objects and has been able to contemplate
them apart from their use for him. We have language
itself because we have this power of disinterested con-
templation. It has been said that animals have lan-
guage, since they can make sounds expressing their
desire for things. But that is not language, for it
expresses only the desire for a thing, never the thing
itself. A cat can mew for cat's-meat, as Samuel Butler
has said, when he hears the cat's-meat man; but he
cannot say cat's-meat; he can only say, I want cat's-
meat, or rather only, I want. He can make the sound
of desire; he cannot make sounds purified of his desire,
as he cannot think of things apart from his desire; and
his desire, sounding in all his noises, prevents that
delicate differentiation of sound which is possible to
man because he can think and speak of a thing apart
from his own desire for it. That is how man has the
power of making nouns. The animal, unable to think
of things apart from his own use of them, never attains

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 317

to nouns at all and has no true language. So there is
latent in the first human speech, the artist, the philoso-
pher, the saint; and it is by means of this very speech,
and the power of detachment which it implies, that man
has progressed, even in matters of use, so far beyond
other creatures.

And yet man is always being pulled back into think-
ing in terms of the relation of use. He can never
escape from it utterly, as he can never escape from the
struggle for life. It is a condition of his being. Like
other animals, he cannot help seeing objects in a rela-
tion of use to himself; but while he sees them so he
cannot be aware of their full reality. For they do not
exist so that they may be of use to us; the use is our
way of looking at them; it is what the senses suggest
to us. But this always gives us merely the particular;
and so long as we see things only or mainly in a rela-
tion of use to ourselves, we are not fully aware of the
universal in them which is a part of their reality.

But in so far as we can and do escape from the rela-
tion of use — and there is a constant effort of the spirit
to escape from it — we pass beyond mere sense-percep-
tion and sense-values to a perception and value of the
universal. Our escape is positive, not negative; for we
cannot rise from the relation of use to no relation at
all, from one kind of perception and value into no per-
ception and value. Beyond the relation of use we
instantly become aware of another relation, which, as
soon as we are aware of it, we value above the relation
of use. And in this new relation the object of per-
ception becomes more, not less, real to us, because it is
related not merely to us through our use for it, but to
the sum total of things. Its identity is not lost but
heightened in that new relation, as the identity of notes
is heightened when they are to us part of a tune. Be-
cause it is part of a whole it is also far more itself than
it was when it was merely an item to be made use of.
Thus to a greedy boy a plum is merely something good

318 THE SPIRIT ix

to eat, it is a member of the genus plum which, he
knows, is good to eat, and is distinguished from other
members of the genus only by looking more or less
good to eat than they do. That is the one point of
distinction he notices in it, because he sees it only in
relation to his own appetite. But an artist sees a plum
in another relation, the relation of beauty; and because
he sees it in that relation it is not to him a member of
the genus plum which is good to eat, but is itself with
all its particular character and beauty. It is one note
in the music of beauty that he perceives, and it could
not be any other note. So he tries to paint its particular
character and beauty at one particular moment and
in certain particular circumstances. Yet the beauty of
which it is a part is also universal; it is something that
he and not merely his eye perceives; and his eye per-
ceives more of the plum because he himself perceives
the beauty of the plum. The very senses tell us little
in mere sense-perception. It is only when they are en-
forced by spiritual perception that they tell us much.
It is only when we see things in some relation to each
other and not to ourselves that we see them fully.

Now the first spiritual perception, in order of time,
is the perception of beauty. It is not higher than any
other spiritual perception, but it must precede the
others if we are to understand the connection between
spirit and sense, and so between spirit and matter.
The sense of beauty, as we call it — thus insisting upon
the close relation between the universal beauty and its
particulars — is necessary to us if we are to grasp the
relation between other universals and their particulars.
In beauty we cannot separate the universal from the
particular, spirit from sense, or spirit from matter.
But those who pass on to the other universals, to
philosophy or morals, without an intense experience
and value of beauty, are always apt to think of the
universal with which they concern themselves as utterly
distinct from, or even as opposed to, the particular.

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 319

For them there is an opposition between spirit and
sense, and so between spirit and matter. They pass
from the actual experience of the universal in the par-
ticular to mere thinking about the universal or to mere
acting upon it, upon what they call principle; and so
they fall into error about the relation between matter
and spirit, about the very nature of reality. Hence
that Manichaean heresy which constantly infests both
thought and morals. It is, in all its different forms
and degrees of intensity, whether it be intellectualism
or asceticism, the result of the lack of actual spiritual
experience in its simplest and most immediate form,
the experience of beauty. But we are much more
aware of it in its effect upon morals than in its effect
upon thought.

It affects thought in a curious and unexpected way.
For man, knowing that he has the power of being
aware of objects out of the relation of use to himself,
and having a great desire to be so aware of them, is
apt to suppose that he can be so aware of them by
means of the pure intellect, that he can at any moment
switch off the animal in himself and switch on the
philosopher. He can no more do that than he can
switch off the animal and switch on the artist or the
saint. It has often been believed by philosophers in
the past that man is more capable of pure contempla-
tion than of any other spiritual activity in its purity.
Their glorification of the reason is based on this belief;
and the result of that glorification has been an immense
discouragement, since the pure reason by itself has done
for us far less than was expected of it. It has not dis-
covered for us any certain truths about the nature of
reality, nor has it preserved us from obvious errors in
conduct. Mankind is impatient of philosophers and
of what seems their barren intellectual game, just be-
cause of their glorification of that reason which has
done so little. Their error has been to trust in the
reason and in thinking about spiritual experience, with-

320 THE SPIRIT ix

out having first enriched themselves with actual spirit-
ual experience in its simplest and most direct form,
that is to say, with the experience of beauty. They
have been, for the most part, mills grinding without
any corn between them; they have trusted in the
machinery without providing it with material; and all
the while it is not machinery at all but a living part
of themselves, subject to error like all the rest of them.
Now the error of the reason, acting without enrich-
ment, is to see the universal as altogether separate
from the particular, and so to doubt the existence either
of the particular or of the universal; and the reason
falls into this error because it believes itself to be pure
and yet is, like all the rest of the self, continually falling
back into the relation of use. We believe what we
wish to believe, as we see what we wish to see and do
what we wish to do; and the errors of the reason are
not merely individual but generic, like all our other
errors. The doctrine of evolution, so much misap-
plied, might warn us that in all things we have the
habits of our own animal past, and that we escape from
them no more when we think than when we feel or act.
In fact, we need now to apply that doctrine not only
in our philosophy but to it. So at last we shall make
a conduit-pipe between science and philosophy by means
of psychology, a psychology based on our awareness
of our own animal past. Kant gave us a Kritik of pure
reason; what we need now is a Kritik of impure reason,
based on the knowledge that our reason, like all the
rest of us, is infested with habits acquired in the rela-
tion of use. That Kritik will not make us despair of
reason, any more than the same kind of Kritik so long
applied to morals has made us despair of them. Just
as our righteousness is always the effort to be right-
eousness, so our reason must be always the effort to be
reason, to attain to a power of pure contemplation it
never has attained to. It is not a machinery that
works perfectly when we can separate it from the rest

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 321

of ourselves; it is a part of ourselves that we must
always be purifying, and we cannot purify it except
through actual spiritual experience, which, as I have
said, begins with the sense of beauty. In that we are
first aware of the universal; and we see it indissolubly
linked with the particular.

So, if we are to believe in spirit and to understand
its nature, we must continue in our intellectual and
moral activities still to see the universal thus indis-
solubly linked with the particular; we must never fall
into conceiving of them as separate or opposed. The
world of particulars, as perceived by the senses, is not
illusion, nor is the world of universals as conceived by
the mind; but each by itself is imperfect and mislead-
ing. The one is the notes without the tune, the other
the tune without the sounds; the one is chaos, nonsense,
the other a mere pattern. Our business is not merely
with the reason but with all the faculties, with the
whole self, to be aware of both content and design, for
we cannot be fully aware of one without being aware
of the other.

Unfortunately it is possible for us to contemplate
with the intelligence a world which still we conceive of
as entirely in the relation of use to ourselves, and with
the intelligence to take our conceptions of use entirely
seriously. Where this happens the result is a barren
and empty universal of the mere intelligence, and one
that in its barrenness and emptiness appals us. We are
apt to believe, for instance, that our notion of causa-
tion is itself a product of the pure intelligence, and a
modern one. We argue about it as if it were itself
necessarily, mathematically true; but with all our argu-
ing we are unable to state it even in a form satisfactory
to ourselves. For it is not really a product of the pure
or the modern intelligence, but a tool rather of the
mind and one fashioned first by the primitive mind
when it saw the whole universe in a relation of use to
itself. A savage acquires the notion of causation

322 THE SPIRIT ix

when he discovered that, if he puts his finger in the
fire, he will always suffer pain. And the savage is
always making use of this law of causation, as we call
it, in his struggle for life. It is to him, and still to us,
a means of carrying on that struggle. We have
through ages learnt to use the fact which we call causa-
tion for our own purposes, and still we see it and
conceive it in relation to those purposes. Still it is to
us a means, if not of using things, of discovering facts.
It is the law of the universe, as we make use of the
universe. We have acquired knowledge of causes and
effects; this knowledge has meant to us making use;
and we have flown to the further conclusion that where
we can make use we know. But all we do know about
causation is this, that in practice we can count upon
certain things happening where certain other things
have happened before. Mill said that the cause of
anything is the total assemblage of the conditions that
precede its appearance. But this definition has always
been felt to be untrue, because it makes " the law of
causation " useless to us. We never do know the total
assemblage of the conditions, and yet we can observe
causation and make use of it. So a different definition
has been found, namely, that cause is a conception we
find useful in our dealings with nature, that among the
conditions of an event we find some from which, as a
matter of fact, we are able to foretell the event.
Those we call its cause or causes. In that definition it
is frankly confessed that causation is a conception we
make use of; but it is still one so vague that it is use-
ful to us rather because it gives us a kind of faith than
because it helps us practically to discover or to make
use of anything. It gives us faith that we shall dis-
cover and shall make use, faith in a universal uni-
formity. And from this faith comes a sense of power;
it convinces us that we are able to constrain that which
is not ourselves to our own purpose. The saying
" knowledge is power " is an expression of it. And

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 323

since we, through the action of causation, seem to be
able to exercise a compulsion on things, we come to
believe that causation itself is a compulsion exercised
upon all things, ourselves included, from outside. It
is the universal seen as compulsion, and seen so because
we see it in the relation of use. So we get the notion
of a compulsory universe, in which everything compels
everything else to do what it does not want to do,
and is itself compelled by this law of causation; and
further, of a universe in which everything is made for
some use: once a use to men, then a use to God, and
now a use to an abstraction called Nature. Nature
wishes us and all things to survive or to attain to some
kind of perfection through the struggle for survival;
and so we and all things are related to each other only
in terms of that struggle, whether we like it or not.
This relation is imposed on all things and we conceive
of all things, ourselves included, as passive under it, as
things seem passive under us when we make use of
them. All things are tied and bound to each other by
the chain of this relation; all things are trying to make
use of each other, and cannot do anything but try to
make use of each other. Things appear to be passive
to us when we make use of them, and so we think of all
things, ourselves included, as passive under the uni-
versal compulsion.

But a cabbage is not purely passive to us when we
grow it for the table. We use it, but we do not compel
it to grow. We can apply certain conditions of our
own choice to it; but it answers to them in its own way
and according to its own nature. It has at least the
power of turning the nourishment we give it into itself;
and the law of causation means to us that we can count
upon its turning that nourishment into itself and not
into something else. Nourishment becomes something
different in the cabbage from what it becomes in me,
because the cabbage is a cabbage and I am I. What-
ever happens to every living creature becomes in that

324 THE SPIRIT ix

creature something different from what it would be-
come if it happened to any other creature. There is
in all that lives an active contribution to every effect
produced on itself, which means that the effect is not
merely effect. It means that all that lives is a fount
of original causation, or rather the words " cause and
effect," if we mean anything by them at all, will not
describe what happens to and in living creatures. The
whole conception of causation is a conception of things
not living but dead; and it has grown up in our minds
because things, when we make use of them, are to us
not living but dead. We see them only in a relation
of use to ourselves; that is to say, as existing for us
and utterly dependent on us. But no living thing exists
for us or is utterly dependent on us; we may exercise
compulsion on it, but we cannot exercise compulsion on
its nature. Yet our notion of causation is a notion of
everything exercising compulsion on the nature of
everything else. From it is left out the nature, the
life, the identity of all things, that which in ourselves
we call freedom. And since this obvious fact is left
out of our notion of causation, we are unable to state
the law of causation in a manner satisfactory to our-
selves. We call it a law, but it remains merely a faith
that things will continue to behave with a uniformity
which enables us to make use of them.

It is a significant fact that mathematics, the science
which is most free from the relation of use, the science
in which man does not deal with things of use to him
but with pure concepts or abstractions, is not concerned
with causes and effects but with properties. The prop-
erties of a circle are not caused by any external or pre-
ceding conditions; they are not caused by any other
properties of the circle itself. They are the circle it-
self; they are that which makes it a circle. We may
discover them one after another; and we may discover
one because we have discovered another; but they exist
simultaneously and do not cause one another any more

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 325

than we cause them by discovering them. The circle is
what it is by the law of its own being and not by the
pressure of circumstances. We know this about the
circle because we are able to contemplate it purely and
not as an object of use to ourselves; and mathematics
is the type of all sciences because, dealing as it does with
pure concepts, it is freed from the relation of use.
From mathematics man first learned what pure science
is. He had to find a world purely of his own thought,
before he could understand how it was necessary to
contemplate the real world if he was to see it as it is.
Mathematics are to man a prophecy of reality, because
in them he can escape entirely out of the relation of
use. But, the moment we come to deal with actual
things, there is the pull of the relation of use upon our
reason itself, a pull as incessant as that of the attrac-
tion of gravity upon our bodies. It is not merely a
pull upon particular processes of reasoning; it enters
into our very conceptions of reality, those conceptions
that seem to us to belong not to our minds but to
reality itself.

Thus there is a perpetual incongruity in our concep-
tions of reality. We assume them to be single and
concordant, whereas there is a duality and conflict in
them, because we are always seeing things in two dif-
ferent relations, namely, the relation of use to ourselves
which will tell us nothing about reality, and that other
relation of which we become aware when we rise out
of the relation of use, the relation, as it were, of notes
in a tune. Of this relation we are most intensely
aware in ourselves. There are times when we become
to ourselves, not things making use and being made use
of, but notes in a universal tune, of which we are a
part, not by any compulsion, but because it is our own
nature to be a part of it. Only in becoming a part of
it do we find our nature, our identity; then we act in a
certain way, not because circumstances compel us, but
because we are what we are, and because all other

326 THE SPIRIT ix

things are what they are. Then, too, we are aware of
utter freedom, the freedom of the circle, which is
what it is, and no external circumstances can make it
otherwise. But we differ from the circle in this, that,
being actual living creatures, and necessarily in some
kind of relation with all other actual things, our task
is not only to be what we are, but also to act what we
are. In our relation with external reality doing is a
part of being, as it is not with the circle. So we have
to achieve that relation in which we are fully ourselves,
and that is true of all actual things; they are not, like
mathematical concepts, merely in a relation of being,
they are in a relation of action, which may be one of
use or one of reality, one in which they attain to the
freedom of being completely themselves. For us, at
least, there are times, however rare, when the whole
self seems to act in accordance with its own being, when
our actions are our properties, when we know that we
are not machines nor yet mere concepts, but notes in a
tune finding their identity because they are in the tune.

A great piece of music has the mathematical quality;
but it has also passion aroused by a relation with ex-
ternal reality. Yet the external reality has not caused
the passion so much as given it a subject matter through
which it can express itself. So we in our supreme
moments seem to get from external reality a subject
matter through which we express ourselves. A circle
has no subject matter; it does not express itself but
merely is itself. We at our highest are ourselves and
express ourselves in action.

But we are ourselves and express ourselves only
when we rise into a full perception of external reality
and into a full relation with it, by escaping from the
relation of use. We cannot pass out of the relation of
use into no relation at all, into a higher and lonely
egotism. Egotism is always the result of the tyranny
of the relation of use over the mind. The egotist
does not merely act, but also thinks and feels, in terms

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 327

of that relation. The higher egotist sees even his
dreams, his ideals, his moral effort, in terms of it;
and so, even in them, he never escapes from himself.
He has them hecause others who were not egotists have
had them; he is imitative, parasitic upon the spiritual
achievements of others; but these achievements he sees
always in terms of use to himself, and so misunder-
stands and misuses them. Thus, in extreme cases, a
lunatic imagines himself to be God. He has got the
idea of God from others, but it means to him only his
own eminence, his own tyranny over all things. He is
unable to make terms with a God who is not himself,
because he sees God only in the relation of use; there-
fore he must himself be God if he is to believe in a
God at all. He attains to an imaginary tyranny over
all things because he cannot escape from the tyranny of
the relation of use over his own mind; he is so much at
the mercy of circumstance, seeing it only in the rela-
tion of use, that life would be intolerable to him if he
did not persuade himself that he was the lord and
master of circumstance. And in all egotism, especially
the egotism of religion, there is this desire to be lord
and master of circumstance. Men believe in God that
they may be masters of circumstance, and imagine a
God who will give them mastery; they make him a
tyrant over themselves, that he may delegate some of
his tyranny to them.

But if we can rise out of the relation of use into
another relation, the relation of value, we are no longer
at the mercy of things, nor do we wish to be their
master. Rather we are more intensely ourselves, and
they to us are more intensely themselves, in this new
relation not of slavery or dominance but of value.
Our reality is heightened by our perception of an ex-
ternal reality, of which we see the true nature because
we do not see it in a relation of use to ourselves. The
perception and the value are simultaneous, are indeed
one.

328 THE SPIRIT ix

When this reality is altogether hidden from us by
the relation of use, the universe is to us a nonsense uni-
verse. We are aware only of particulars in it, per-
ceived by the senses and to be made use of. And, since
many of these are useless or harmful to us, much of the
universe has no meaning to us or an evil meaning. It
is all something we would make use of if we could; but
the chain of necessity that binds it, and through which
we are able to make use of it, also limits its use to us,
and even gives to it that tyranny over us which we
desire to exercise over it. We are then related to all
things as we should be to each other, if we had no aim
except to make use of each other. We know that in
human relations we must escape from use to value, if
we are to know each other or to enjoy each other at all.
A man who sees other men only in the relation of use
is a criminal and has to be treated as such. So the
universe treats us, if we see it only in a relation of use
to ourselves; and it is as meaningless to us as civilised
society is to the criminal. It punishes us, as society
punishes the criminal, with the sense of its tyranny; it
is to us a prison.

It is also what music would be to a man who looked
to it for useful information. He would listen to the
sounds, expecting them to tell him something of advan-
tage to himself, and they would be mere noises to him
in no relation with each other; for their relation with
each other is not one of use to him, but of beauty.
When that is not perceived they are nonsense, a chaos
of noise. All art is both spirit and matter, and we
cannot distinguish the one from the other in it. The
spirit is the arrangement of the matter; in that arrange-
ment the world is utterly become flesh. The matter is
what it is because of the spirit; and unless we perceive
the spirit in it, the universal informing the particular,
it is nonsense to us. So it is with the universe.

Now the natural sciences by themselves reveal to us
a certain material coherence in external reality; but, so

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 329

long as it is merely material, it is to us like a geometri-
cal pattern in which there is neither beauty nor mean-
ing, nor even consistent use to ourselves. If we look
for use to ourselves in it we find that it is part useful
and part harmful. So we think of it as half friendly,
half hostile, and we cannot see why it should be one,
if also the other. So still it is nonsense; and we, while
we live in terms of use, are nonsense to ourselves, mere
matter also forced by some external compulsion into
the pattern; and we think that this pattern, meaning-
less, unbeautiful, half useful, half harmful, is reality,
and we ourselves are but as the rest of it.

In fact, the natural sciences by themselves give a
coherence to reality which is self-contradictory; for it is
meaningless to us, yet coherence implies meaning. It
is as if we found a grammatical structure in sounds
without sense, or a machine which worked incessantly
yet which had been made for no purpose. It is this
coherence without meaning that appals the modern
mind, so long as it seems the whole of reality. But the
contradiction is in the mind itself, not in reality, in the
mind that believes there can be a mechanical coherence,
one to be perceived by the pure intellect alone, without
also a spiritual coherence and meaning to be perceived
by all the spiritual powers of the mind. The material
coherence is but the beginning, the first hint or proph-
ecy, of the spiritual coherence. But the mind gets no
further towards seeing it if, from age-long habit, it
looks for the meaning of the material coherence in use
to itself. It has, in the mere discovery of fact, escaped
from that atavism; it no longer sees things merely as it
wishes to see them, so that it may make itself comfort-
able among them. It makes theories which it tests in-
cessantly by the facts. But still in its values the old
atavism prevails, and it asks, What use is this coherence
to me?

So long as it asks that question, the coherence, estab-
lished and proved as it is, has no meaning for it. The

330 THE SPIRIT ix

value for truth by itself will not avail to discover the
truth. It will show us the coherence but not its mean-
ing. For the full perception of reality we need the full
sense of the universal, as beauty and righteousness, as
well as truth. And it is only by means of these three
perceptions, all working together and throwing light on
each other, that we can even advance towards a full
perception.

The value for truth by itself will enable us to escape
from the relation of use in the discovery of material
facts; but, with the value for truth alone, we shall still
remain in the relation of use in our valuing of those
facts. We may try to rise out of it heroically; but
truth alone will not show us any other relation to rise
into. It will give us mere stoicism, in which we shall
set our teeth and say that, though mere matter in a
universe of matter, we will behave as spirit would be-
have if there were any spirit; though meaningless parts
of a meaningless process, we will act as if we and it
had meaning. Though faith, hope, and charity are
virtues created by the illusions of man, yet we will make
them our virtues. I can never believe that this stoicism
is as hopeless and faithless as it pretends to itself to be.

For the fact that the pattern is meaningless to us
does seem to imply always that it must have a meaning.
Mere chaos could not suggest even that it ought to
have a meaning; and if we were part of a chaos we
should not be looking for one. We are not satisfied
with a merely material meaning, with an explanation
of all things in terms of the struggle for life, because
that is not a meaning to us at all. It is not the mean-
ing of our own spiritual perceptions, even of our value
for truth. But this unhappy stage which we reach
when we see a material coherence in things and no other
— what is it but a phase in our evolution, that is to say,
in our struggle towards fulness of perception. The
doctrine of evolution can warn us of this — that our
perception of reality is always a matter of degree.

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 331

We are not sharply separated from the beasts merely
because we are reasoning animals; our very reason is
still subject to animal habits. Nor can we escape sud-
denly from the perception of a merely material world
to the perception of a reality that is not material at all.
For that is a phantom of the mind. The beginnings of
the perception of reality in the lowest animals are to
be found in sensations, by means of which they are
aware not even of objects but merely that they them-
selves feel; or rather they are not even aware of them-
selves as feeling, but only of their feelings. Self-con-
sciousness comes gradually and only with fuller percep-
tion of that which is not self. Man is aware of self, of
his own identity, more and more as he becomes aware
of not-self. But even we have only fragmentary
glimpses of reality and, in them, are but fragments of
ourselves. So we cannot attain to complete self-con-
sciousness by ignoring external reality; but only by
being more and more fully aware of it, of the universal
in the particular, of matter and spirit as one. Then
we become to ourselves one, like the tune in the notes,
like the sense in the words; and the universe becomes
one to us also.

The Meaning of Evolution

It is strange that the doctrine of evolution has so
often led men to unhappy notions of the nature of
reality, seeing in it at best but a merely artistic process
with millions of experiments and failures for one even-
tual masterpiece. That is Nietzsche's idea, the idea of
a man with a passionate sense of beauty, who tries to
see reality only, in the light of that sense. Beauty by
itself will not satisfy the values of man; no excellence
by itself, seen merely as excellence, will do that; there
is still something cruel in mere triumphant excellence.
It is like the mere virtuosity of art, the mere skill of
Mozart. If a man sees only that in Mozart's music,
he does not know why Mozart made his music; and it

332 THE SPIRIT ix

is to him a game which may please him in his hours of
ease but will not answer the questions of his sorrow.
If there is nothing but virtuosity in Nature, nothing but
the effort to produce masterpieces, then Nature is a
brainless artist not knowing why masterpieces should be
produced. And there is this contradiction of the
brainless artist, who produces masterpieces without
knowing why, in all the talk about Nature when she is
thought of as a mere blind process and yet called she;
when she is praised for a loveliness she did not mean to
produce, and all the while there is no she producing it
but merely things being produced. The struggle for
life does produce not merely life but masterpieces;
which, if there is nothing but a struggle for life, is
absurd.

We shall see our way to sense only if we take our
sense of the masterpiece to be a sense of reality itself,
if that sense is not merely a freak or by-product of evo-
lution, but both the end and the means in the process.
In that process we never escape from the struggle for
life; but the struggle itself, with all the relation of use
it imposes on us, yet makes us aware of another rela-
tion; and our effort is to be aware of that relation more
and more. As we make use of particulars, in our very
use of them we become aware of universals. Indeed,
we ourselves, making particulars to be of use to our-
selves, do also make universals. The mere craftsman,
making things of use for the sake of their use, in that
rises from the craftsman to the artist; in his own work
he may see an image of what he can attain to in his per-
ception of reality.

A man makes a pot or builds a house for use. Clay,
stone, are to him as yet only material to be made use of.
But if he makes the pot or builds the house of good
material and good workmanship, and if above all he
designs it fitly for its purpose, then the pot or the house
has, without his intention, a beauty that comes of its
fitness for its purpose. This beauty, which I will call

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 333

functional, is like the beauty of natural things as we
perceive it without any sense of spiritual meaning in it.
It is like the beauty of a pine growing in a rock and fit-
ting itself by the design of its growth to its position.
But the craftsman, when he sees this beauty, sees it as
beauty, not merely as use; he values it, as beauty, be-
yond use. And this perception of functional beauty
as beauty, this value for it as beauty, leads him in his
next work to emphasise the functional beauty as beauty,
and so to turn it into expressive or artistic beauty, with
a quality of his own self in it. He gives a more deli-
cate curve to the pot and then a curve more and more
delicate, until, in an age passionate for beauty, he at-
tains to the masterpieces of the Sung pottery. But al-
ways the expression could not begin unless the work-
man were aware of functional beauty as beauty, not as
mere use. That functional beauty is, as it were, given
away to him with a pound of tea. It comes to him in
his struggle for life; but if he sees it as something not
merely useful to him in that struggle, if he values it for
its own sake, then he is led on to expressive art; then
from an intelligent animal he becomes a God, or at
least an angel.

And it is the same in morals. Those virtues most
valued by Christ Himself, love, self-sacrifice, fellow-
ship, are, to begin with, instincts most valuable in the
struggle for life, valuable to the herd at least, if not to
the individual. The type of all love is the love of a
mother for her child; and that is an animal instinct
without which the race could not survive. But man has
the divine faculty of recognising it to be a virtue in
itself and not merely a useful instinct. It has a value
for him that is not its survival value; and because it is
virtue to him, as functional beauty is beauty to the
craftsman, he aims at it for its own sake and becomes
morally expressive as the craftsman becomes aesthetic-
ally expressive. He extends it, from the particular re-
lation of the mother with her child, to all other human

334 THE SPIRIT ix

relations, not because it is use but because it is virtue.
And so it is with fellowship and self-sacrifice, both to
begin with herd instincts. They too are recognised
and valued as virtue, not as mere use, and are prac-
tised, not so that the herd may survive — often they
are practised in defiance of the herd — but because they
are virtues. All these virtues are wild virtues; and
when Christianity sets up the statue of the mother and
her child for worship, it affirms that the universe is not
unkind or unmeaning to the values of man; that the
highest virtues are to begin with wild virtues, spring-
ing out of nature herself and not imposed by the ar-
bitrary will of God. In the mother, spirit and sense
are one, and the divine beauty we see in her is one to
our spirit and sense. It has its use; and it stirs the
heart and brings tears to the eyes, as no mere thing of
use would do.

We can fancy what stirrings of the spirit there were
in our distant forefathers when they saw their wives
with the babe at the breast; how they wished to share
in that love; how fiercely they would fight for the
mother and child; and how they worshipped the divine
principle of generation that gave so much holiness and
beauty to the world. And we can fancy them too look-
ing at the pots they had turned, wondering at their
beauty and then heightening it. We know that is how
they became artists and how the passion for righteous-
ness grew in them. But still to us nature, when it is
merely nature, is an unknowing artist; and the beauty
of the visible world leaves us sad and baffled. It seems
to speak, but not to us; to pour out its beauty, but not
with any desire for fellowship. And so that beauty is
to us not expression but an accident of phenomena, as
the shapes made by hoar frost on the window have a
chance resemblance to fern leaves. And men say that
the beauty of nature has no existence outside their own
perception of it, for they see in nature no will and no
virtue. She, unlike the artist, sings about nothing.

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 335

There is no experience of her own expressed in her
own beauty, no value for anything, even for her own
beauty. How therefore can there be beauty except in
our perception of it. If there is no artist how can
there be art?

Yet the savage made for himself myths of an artist,
because he saw what he took to be art; without knowing
it he answered in those myths a philosophic question we
still put to ourselves and cannot answer. Because
modern man sees both beauty and virtue in the works
of man, and only beauty in nature, he is not assured of
the presence of spirit in nature, and so comes to be
doubtful of it in himself. But he will never be satisfied
to see only beauty in nature; for beauty by itself makes
no answer to his own spirit, nor can his spirit make
answer happily to it. Only if he could find virtue as
well as beauty and truth in reality outside himself could
he see in it the promise of a final and complete fellow-
ship with himself. Spirit is not spirit unless all the uni-
versal are manifested in it. All of them, however im-
perfectly, are manifested in man, but not outside him.
So he remains lonely and hungry in a universe that
seems occupied with its own business but will not speak
to him; and he is always trying to accommodate himself
to it, to assert its value and rightness, as he sees it;
always telling himself that the desire of his own heart
is foolishness that leads him astray. Yet still he can-
not content himself with the truth that science offers
him when it denies him the hope of fellowship; and he
still looks back to the old myths of an artist who has
expressed himself in the beauty of nature, or the later
more moving myth of a God who is lover as well as ar-
tist. If those were made only by the heart of man,
what was it that gave man the heart to make them?
They are his answer to the nature of things ; what in the
nature of things caused him to make that answer?

A modern philosophy based on the doctrine of evo-
lution has offered us a bright and cheerful substitute

336 THE SPIRIT ix

for the desire of man's heart. It is the very best mar-
garine; if you had never tasted butter you might think
it was butter. It tells us that the whole of reality,. our-
selves included, is evolving, and to what? The goal it-
self is in the future and not merely the attainment of it.
It may be that there will be spirit in us and outside us.
That hunger we feel for it is the very process of evolu-
tion working in us. We are hungry for the future of
the human race, perhaps of the universe; we smell a
dinner that is not yet cooked. The glory of life con-
sists in this that we live in a universe of change; and
there is nothing, not even the goal of all change, fixed
and stable. We make our hopes of the goal, our con-
ception of it, and so the goal itself, as we go. Every-
thing solvitar ambulando. Our very values are subject
to change with everything else. They too are for
something altogether in the future. If we say God, we
mean the future. He himself may evolve with our
conceptions of him; He and our values are notions that
further the process of evolution in us; they are means
to an end; and what we really value and worship is our
own progress, or at best the progress of the universe.
All good is but the scent of our own future. The sav-
age had the scent of ourselves before him; we have the
scent of other men far in the future; and they will have
the scent of yet others. So, it may be, their values will
be utterly different from ours with the incessant process
of change. The very notion of a present, eternal, and
absolute perfection has vanished from this way of
thinking. It is sanguine, but in a political way, like a
minister making a speech about our prospects in the
war. It is entirely opportunist and so contrary to the
deepest faith of man, which cannot value its own values
if they are only means to an end. We value them be-
cause they themselves are for universals existing here
and now. Happiness for us means belief in those uni-
versals, belief that they are both in us and outside us.
Our happiness is the answer within us to them outside

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 337

us; it is the sense of a fellowship of the absolute to
which we belong. If we explain our values away in
terms of something else, even of the progress of man-
kind, they cease to be our values; for it is by means of
them alone that we know what progress is. The whole
creation groans and travails, but only creation; and it
groans and travails not towards its own future but to-
wards something not itself, existing now, which gives
it the very hope of the future. It has a future because
it is aware of this something not itself, existing now
and for ever, not subject to time and change. Just as
Alice could not be satisfied with jam yesterday and jam
to-morrow, but never jam to-day, so we cannot be sat-
isfied with God yesterday and God to-morrow, but
never God to-day.

Yet, if we could get the doctrine of evolution right,
it might satisfy the desire of our hearts, instead of
offering us a vain substitute for that desire. We are
troubled and thwarted because we cannot find the whole
of our desire in nature; so we think of nature as having
no likeness to ourselves. We look to it to help us, and
find no help in it that we can count on. But this look-
ing for help is but seeing it in the relation of use and
so failing to see the reality of it. If we look to Nature
for help, we think of it, or Her, as something more
powerful than ourselves; the stars in their courses
fought against Sisera. But of course they did nothing
of the kind; and Nature does not fight with us or
against us. There is no Nature in this sense, no power
omnipotent, unintelligible, indifferent to us and our de-
sires and values. All the talk about Nature as red in
tooth and claw, or as superior to us in her calm or her
justice, is mere myth-making, and a myth made out of
our fears. If men pray to an idol, they get no answer
rom it, and Nature is an idol we have made because we
see things in the relation of use to ourselves. Thii
idol, seeking help from it, we see as superior to us in
power, inferior in that it lacks our values; it is there-

338 THE SPIRIT ix

fore a God that we worship but cannot value, like the
heathen gods of the past. But evolution, though it
can tell us nothing about God, can tell us this about Na-
ture, that it is not God but less God than we are our-
selves, more blindly groaning and travailing. It is not
a vast, heartless, omnipotent process, imposing itself
upon us against our wills, but a number of things with
less will than we have, less consciousness, less sense of
direction. Evolution has introduced us to our own
poor relations; and we are so generically snobbish that
we are dashed to find ourselves thus related to all liv-
ing things, perhaps even to things not living. Since the
matter of ourselves is of the same kind as other matter
we think that we are only matter. After all, we say,
we are not what we thought ourselves, a little lower
than the angels; the spirit in us, does not separate us in
kind from all other things; therefore there is no spirit
in us. Science has told us the truth about our geneal-
ogy; we are not angels that have seen better days, but
animals still in the making. So we are dashed as if
we had been the aristocrats of a world that has sud-
denly become a democracy. But aristocrats can share
in the joy of a democracy if only they will accept it;
and there is a joy, an immense hope, in the doctrine of
evolution, if we will accept it and utterly relinquish our
old generic snobbery.

For what is the process of evolution but the effort of
life to master completely all lifeless matter? That
matter exists to be the medium of expression for life;
and life itself becomes more intense, becomes more
completely life, as it masters matter and more and
more makes it the medium of expression. Life, as we
see it, is spirit expressing itself and becoming itself
through the mastery of matter. The difference be-
tween ourselves and the lowest forms of life is one of
degree, one of intensity of life. Consciousness is a
greater intensity of life than sensation, reason than in-
stinct, because it is a greater mastery over matter.

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 339

And the aim of evolution is always more and more mas-
tery, more and more intensity of life. The perfected
universe would be one in which there was no matter not
mastered by intensity of life, none that was not the
medium of expression, conscious, willed, and so per-
sonal. What troubles and thwarts us in the universe,
as we know it, is the vast mass of matter not mastered,
or only imperfectly mastered, by life; because it is un-
mastered matter, less conscious, less will-full, less per-
sonal than we are, it seems to us alien and often hostile.
We wish to make use of it, and fail, and often it seems
to make use of us for some obscure, unvalued purpose
of its own. We should know by this time that it is
masterless, not master, and so less powerful than we
are ourselves. We seek for a fellowship with it, but
for a fellowship of use to ourselves; and, failing to
achieve that, we despair of that fellowship of the fu-
ture, prophesied to us in all the visions of heaven, that
fellowship in which all things will be matter mastered
by life and so mastered by our values, in which there
will be no division at all between matter and spirit but
everywhere and in all things expression, form, love, a
beauty that makes answer to beauty, a choir of voices
in a universal tune.

But this doctrine is impossible to us still, if there is
nothing for us but a universal becoming. The effort of
life to master matter is a blind effort, unless there is
also somewhere in the universe a life that is master, a
spirit to which all other spirit makes answer, and in
making answer becomes more and more itself. For
that very self which spirit desires to be must have an
existing model. Prophecy, if there be any truth at all
in it, is a prophecy for us of a destiny which already ex-
ists in that which is not us. The prophet foresees be-
cause he sees what is. And the " prophetic soul of the
wide world dreaming on things to come," that universal
soul of which we are more or less dimly aware, exists
and is universal because of a universal to which it makes

340

THE SPIRIT ix

answer. The life everywhere striving to master mat-
ter, and to become more fully life through the mastery,
could not strive, could not have a goal of its striving,
if there were no master life to inspire it. It is that
master life that we mean when we use the word God;
and as the most intense life we know, the life in our-
selves, is more personal than all other life, so God is
more personal because more intense life than we are
ourselves. As St. John affirmed that God is love, so
must we affirm that God is life; and the word is is as
much part of the affirmation as the words God and life.
We are not yet fully life as we are not fully love; but
God is fully life as He is fully love. That is meant by
the words " God is a Spirit "; and we know dimly and
prophetically what life is, what spirit is, because it ex-
ists already and fully in God.

Those who do not believe that personality is real, do
not believe that life is real. For them it is merely an
accident of matter, and there are for them no degrees
of life, and so no values. For, as life is not real to
them, so it is not good; and lacking a standard of
values they lack also a standard of reality — they seek
for one and cannot find it. Because spirit is not real to
them, matter is not real either. What can be real to
beings for whom their own life, their own selves, is illu-
sion? The very mental process by which they discover
the illusion of their own life and personality cuts them
off from all power of discovering reality, for it is itself
part of the illusion. They are imprisoned within
themselves, those selves that do not exist. At best
there is, for them, a perpetual becoming of nothing to
no purpose, which sometimes, with a pathetic incon-
sistency, they call progress.

But if you affirm progress, you affirm values and
their reality, not only for yourself but for the universe;
and if you affirm values you affirm spirit, incomplete in
yourself, but, outside you and somewhere, complete.
Your values are the answer, the effort, of your incom-

ix SPIRIT AND MATTER 341

pleteness to that completeness; they are the life in you
striving to become fully life, to master the matter
through which it must express itself. It will not be
subservient to that matter, for in subservience it is not
fully life. Life is mastery of matter, not so that it
may continue to exist — for the very anxiety to con-
tinue proves that it is not master — but so that it may
express itself utterly in a full relation with all other
life. For expression, as art tells us, is also communica-
tion, it is a relation between one spirit and other spirits.
The very effort at expression is an effort at communica-
tion. What has happened to me is not complete until
I have made it happen also to others. My experience
is not utterly mine until it is shared, nor am I utterly
myself until I am one with other selves in a relation like
that of notes in a tune. The advance to that relation
is progress.

The doctrine of evolution, rightly held, makes us
aware that the advance, or the desire for it, is universal.
In all things there is life groaning and travailing to
become more life, first in mere sensation, then in con-
sciousness; life hardly differentiated in plants, in ani-
mals differentiated, in man personal. And we suffer
from our loneliness in the universe because all things
that we see have less life than we ourselves; that is the
penalty of our precedence, of our greater consciousness
of what life is. We demand more life, a closer rela-
tion with ourselves in all things than they can achieve;
but we also suffer because of the incompleteness of our
life; matter not fully mastered drags us back into the
relation of use. The life in us seems insecure, and we
see all things as means of securing it. But seeing them
so we misunderstand them. For they are not in their
reality means of securing life to us; they are like our-
selves, life trying to be more life, and, even more than
ourselves, troubled with the sense of insecurity. It is
that trouble which makes them seem hostile to us, as we
to them. Their loneliness is really greater than ours.

342 THE SPIRIT ix

But there is no conspiracy of them against us, or of
nature against us and our values. For there is no such
thing as nature, but only life everywhere trying to
master matter and be more life. We ourselves are
part of nature in that our life and our mastery of mat-
ter is imperfect; but all nature is more than nature, in
so far as there is the divinity of life, of spirit, in it.
We must accept the truth of our genealogy if we are to
share in the immeasurable hope which it offers to us;
we must rid our minds of those orders of precedence
which once seemed a part of our very religion. God
did not make the sun to be our candle; He did not make
dogs to be our pets, or midges so that we might learn
not to blaspheme when they bite us; He made all things
not for us but to Himself, so that they might more
and more attain to that life which is Himself. So long
as we see the universe in the relation of use to our-
selves, it remains cold, indifferent, meaningless to us;
but when we see it in relation to God, sharing the life
which is God, but sharing it even more imperfectly than
ourselves, then the process of nature is no longer a
meaningless, intimidating mechanism, but pathetic and
forgiveable to us even as we are to ourselves. Rest-
less are the hearts of all things until they rest in Thee.

CHRIST THE CONSTRUCTIVE
REVOLUTIONARY

B. HILLMAN STREETER, MA., Hon. D.D. Edin.

FELLOW OF QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD

CANON RESIDENTIARY OF HEREFORD

EDITOR OF " FOUNDATION," " CONCERNING PRAYER,"

" IMMORTALITY," " GOD AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE,"

AUTHOR OF " RESTATEMENT AND REUNION "

ANALYSIS

Christ the portrait of the Spirit.
The conservatism of the Church.
Christ the critic of tradition.
Christ as constructive thinker.
Christ and the Church of His day.

CHRIST THE CONSTRUCTIVE
REVOLUTIONARY l

Christ the Portrait of the Spirit

The idea of Christ as " the portrait of the invisible
God " 2 is central to the New Testament. It is, in-
deed, the climax of man's philosophy of God. Round
about the throne of God, transcendent, illimitable, mys-
terious, clouds and darkness must for ever hang. " No
man hath seen God at any time " ; no man can ever hope
to comprehend the incomprehensible. But in the per-
sonality of the Ideal Man we have an expression of
Ultimate Being which we can understand. Moreover,
we attain here to the highest and richest kind of under-
standing of which man is capable; for, to understand
anything, it is not enough to look at it from without,
we must have at least glimmerings of a knowledge
from within; and in proportion as we rise in the scale
of life, we can the better, by intuitive sympathy, under-
stand the Ideal Man from within.

But the individual is the child of his time, the prod-
uct of his family, his school, his country, or his church;
his insight is limited by the interests and values of
his environment. Hence the capacity even to under-
stand, much less to follow, the highest is one which
varies with the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic achieve-
ment of the community. Granted, then, that Christ is
the Ideal Man, it follows that we cannot yet have com-
pletely understood Him; granted that in the Ideal Man
we see God, there must still be much to learn about the
character of God. If we believe that we find in Christ
a unique revelation of the Divine, it follows from that

1 Certain portions of this Essay are reprinted, with considerable modifica-
tions, from an article by the author in The Constructive Quarterly.

2 Col. i. 15.

345

346 THE SPIRIT x

very fact that the Christian revelation is necessarily af
progressive one, and that Christianity in proportion1
as it ceases to be progressive ceases to be Christian.
Theology has commonly ignored this inference, but
History supports it.

" He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." If
so, it must be no less true to say, " He that hath
seen Me hath seen the Holy Ghost." The Divine
which is immanent in man, which speaks to us in
the watches of the night — " from whom all holy de-
sires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed "
— is not other than the Divine which creates and
sustains the universe; it is not other than the Divine re-
vealed in Jesus Christ. Orthodox theology, no doubt,
would not only admit, but vehemently assert this; but
popular Christianity is Tritheism with reservations.
The average Christian does not in the first place
think of Christ as the " portrait of the Father," still
less often does he think of Him as the portrait of the
Spirit also. Yet if the fundamental question for re-
ligion is, What is God like? and if we are right in
affirming that He is like Christ, then we must face all
the implications of the statement, and we must apply
it to our conception, not only of the Transcendent
Divine which traditional theology has styled " the
Father," but of the Immament Divine who has been
named the Holy Ghost.

To work out the full implications of the idea of
Christ as the portrait of the Spirit would require a
volume, or rather several volumes. In this Essay I
select a single problem, definite and strictly limited. I
ask myself the question, What was the attitude of the
historic Jesus to the ideals and institutions, and, in par-
ticular, the religious ideals and institutions, of His
time? That is primarily an historical, even an aca-
demic, question; but I ask it in the conviction that if I
can read the answer to it rightly I shall have found
the answer to another question, no longer historical or

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 347

academic, " What saith the Spirit unto the Churches —
now:

Europe of recent years has seen, facing one another
in the realms both of thought and practice, two tenden-
cies violently opposed. On the one side has been the
spirit of autocracy and authority, clinging tenaciously
to the methods and ideals of the past; on the other is
the spirit of a purely negative and destructive revolu-
tionism, moral and political. Wherever either tendency
has secured even a temporary predominance, disaster
national and international has ensued. The only hope
of humanity would seem to lie in the possibility of
a middle course being found. Change is necessary,
change political, social, economic, moral, and religious;
change in church as well as state; change far-reaching
and revolutionary. But a great danger arises from the
fact that, goaded to passionate reaction by timid con-
servatism, by lack of sympathetic understanding, or by
something worse than this, on the part of the powers
that be, the forces which make for change may express
themselves in wild, unreasoning destruction. Construc-

' tion is what the world most wants, but it must be con-
structive revolution; and what the Church too requires

lis constructive revolution. To forestall my main
conclusion — if I investigate the attitude of Christ
towards the ideals and institutions of His day, I find
an outlook and approach strangely appropriate to the
present situation. Christ was no iconoclast, no lover
of destruction for its own sake. If half that is said
of Bolshevism is true, He would not have been a
§ Bolshevist; but He was a revolutionary. If He said
that He " came not to destroy but to fulfil," He
quickly added, " It was said to them of old . . . but
I say unto you — something very different." He saw
clearly that, without drastic change, fulfilment was
impossible. His interest was in the creative and con-
structive; but He knew, and was prepared to pay, the
price. If, then, I call Him a constructive revolution-

348 THE SPIRIT x

ary, I put the emphasis upon the adjective, but with no
intent to weaken the meaning of the noun.

The Conservatism of the Church

If the first three Gospels are read without traditional
preconceptions, the truth of this characterisation will,
as I propose shortly to argue, become evident. But the
whole habit of thought in the Churches is so conserva-
tive that it seems necessary, before doing this, to pause.
Throughout Europe organised Christianity is regarded
by reformers as the champion of the obsolete, whether
politically, socially, or intellectually. In France, Italy,!
and Austria the Roman Church has been the bulwark
of reaction, whether in politics or in education. In
Russia, Orthodoxy and Autocracy were the twin pillars
of the old regime. In Prussia, Christianity was openly
claimed by the Kaiser as his ally against democracy.
And in England, not the most enthusiastic sons and
daughters of the Church of which, in spite of all its
failures, I am proud to call myself a member can claim
that it is usually to be found in the van of progress.

All large and ancient institutions have a tendency to
settle down into well-worn grooves. But for the per-
sistent association of the name of Christ with the Spirit
of reaction — so paradoxical to the reader of the
Gospels — this explanation taken alone will not suffice.
Other and deeper causes must be sought. History
suggests two. First, the emphasis on the value of tra-
dition due to reaction against Gnosticism and other
pagan influences in the first four centuries A.D., which
were the formative period of Christian doctrine. Sec-
ondly, the position of authority and the role of con-
server of the past which the Church was called upon
to assume in the reconstruction of European civilisa-
tion after the Germanic invasions which in the fifth
century crushed the western half of the Roman Empire.

In the New Testament the main emphasis is on the
future; everywhere there is life and growth. The

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 349

Spirit is thought of as ever revealing something fresh,
as continually guiding into all truth. But in the third
century1 the traditionalist outlook triumphs. Why?
It was a sound instinct of the organism (may we not
say it was for that time the guidance of the Spirit?)
that had gradually convinced that heterogeneous, half-
educated community that its only hope lay in clinging
to the tradition of a creative past. We shall never
understand the Early Church, we shall never see the
reason either of its successes or its failures, unless we
clearly grasp that it was a Missionary Church — but
one which, after the first generation, was cut off from
its " home base." The Jewish nation, with a tradition
of centuries of sublime ethical monotheism, and that
burnt into its inmost life by heroic sustainment of exile
and persecution, ought to have been that " home base."
Had the Jews accepted Christ they would have become
to the Graeco-Roman Empire what the Christian na-
tions of Europe and America have been to the heathen
world in recent times. Generation after generation of
missionaries, nurtured in the traditions of the higher
religion, would have gone forth to guide the newly
founded Church. But the Jew rejected Christ. Thus
the position of the Gentile Churches in the Roman
Empire was precisely similar to that in which Christian
missions in India or China would have found themselves
had they been completely cut off from the European
and American Churches within thirty years of their
first foundation and left entirely to native leaders.
Converts of the first generation, however able, zealous,
and self-sacrificing they may be, can never free them-
selves entirely from the associations and ideas of the
pagan environment. Home, school, and national cus-
toms and literature necessarily leave marks of old re-
ligious outlook and usage which conversion to a new
faith, however sincere, cannot at once obliterate. Just

1 In " the faith once delivered to the saints " of Jude, and " the form of
sound words " of the Epistles (probably not genuinely Pauline) to Timothy,
we get, even within the New Testament, the beginnings of the new attitude.

350 THE SPIRIT x

as relics of heathen customs and superstitions crop up
in Christen communities in India, Africa, or China,
so the history of the growth of Christian doctrines
and instructions during the first six centuries is largely
the history of the gradual infiltration of Greek, Roman,
and Oriental ways of thought. Nor was the process,
as some too hastily assume, one entirely to be regretted.
From Roman statesman, Greek philosopher, and Ori-
ental mystic the Church learnt much that was worth
learning as well as much that had better have been un-
learnt. But from the third century, A.d. the Graeco-
Roman civilisation was consciously decadent. Science
was dead, education declining, art and literature all but
stagnant. Look about for growth and you will find
it — in the spirit of superstition and despair. In such
an age it was the salvation of the Church that, while
adventurous in practical experiment, it was conserva-
tive in things of the mind. As it was, alike in doctrine,
ethics, and devotion, Christianity absorbed too much
from its environment. It was preserved from a quite
fatal dilution by always looking back.

Consider again the situation that arose when, in and
after the fifth century, fresh relays of barbarians kept
pouring over the Alps and the Rhine, and the civilisa-
tion of Western Europe was in ruins. Whatever was
saved from the ruins was saved by the Church. Slowly
and painfully a new civilisation took its place. What
was built up new among the ruins was built up under
the protection and guidance of the Church. That is
the central fact of European history. But in that age
the Church could only rebuild by pointing men to the
past. In undertaking this work of reconstruction the
iChurch was true to the spirit of Jesus. To save and to
inspire, to restore and to create, is to carry on the work
of Christ. But — and this is the essential point — at
that date, and under the special circumstances of that
period, construction necessarily entailed a moral and
intellectual attitude towards the past which, in so far

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 351

as it has lasted on beyond those special circumstances,
is alien to the real genius of Christianity.

First and foremost, what the wild barbarian then
needed was discipline, the habit of obedience to author-
ity and law. Europe, like Israel, had need of the Law
before it could appreciate the Gospel. The Church,
therefore, was right in standing predominantly for
Authority and Law — right, that is, at that period —
but in so doing it lost sight of what St. Paul found to ;
be the deepest thing in Christianity: " where the spirit |
of the Lord is there is liberty."

Again, so long as the Church was the main conserver
of the broken fragments of a great civilisation, so long
as the general level of education, science, art, and
literature was far below that of the old Roman Em-
pire, just so long it seemed the function of the builder
to preserve, to imitate, to reproduce the past. So long
as the Golden Age was really in the past, the cause
of progress itself demanded an attitude of looking
backwards. But Christ taught that the Kingdom of
Heaven l was yet to come.

In the great period of the Middle Ages, the essen-
tially pioneering and creative spirit of Christianity
begins to find fuller expression — and that not alone in
art and architecture. A St. Francis essays a revolu-
tion in Christian ethics; and the line of thinkers from
Anselm to Aquinas dare a " New Theology." Few
but students realise what innovators these were. In-
deed, they did not realise it themselves.

The Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries reinforced in a new way the backward look of
Europe. The Church, to its credit, was to the fore in
the revival of learning. But learning meant the study
of the Humanities, that is, of the great writers of the
classical period of Greece and Rome; and the study of
the Humanities again implies a Golden Age in a dis-

1 1 hold that, to our Lord, the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven included the
corporate regeneration of society on earth as well as a life in the world to
come. The evidence is, to my mind, conclusive against the view of some
recent scholars that it included the latter only.

352 THE SPIRIT x

tant past. Down to very recent times, European edu-
cation in general had been, and clerical education still
is, mainly on Renaissance lines. It has tended to sug-'
gest, as the ideal of intellectual attainment, acceptance
and imitation rather than invention and experiment.

But to-day, outside the Church, men are looking for-
wards for the Golden Age. The really live intellectual
activity of the present age is not so much conservative
as adventurous. Its motto is not learning but research,
not acceptance but criticism, not imitation but inven-
tion. Experiment and fresh construction are the dom-
inating ideas, not only in natural science and engineer-
ing, but in economics, in art, in philosophy, and in politi-
cal and ethical ideals. Outside organised Christianity
the motto of the idealist in every department of life is,
" Behold I make all things new." What does this
mean but that the Spirit of Christ is often to be seen
in what is called " the World " more clearly than in
any of those societies which claim to be His " Church."

The fact is one which may be explained by past
history, which may be excused by human infirmity. It
is not one to be acquiesced in.

Christ the Critic of Tradition

Christ was essentially a critic of tradition, but espe-
cially of religious tradition — whether on its theolog-
ical, moral, or ecclesiastical side. No small part of
His recorded utterances is in criticsim of contemporary
conceptions of the character of God, of current notions
of right conduct, or of that ecclesiastical tradition by
which the word of God was made of none effect.
And it is important to notice that of the Church He
was a severer critic than of " the World." He has
much to say against the Pharisees, very little against
Herod or the Roman government — though He cer-
tainly did not admire them.1 What He most deplored
was the failure of the religious — both in regard to

l Luke xiii. 1-2, 32.

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 353

teaching and to practice. Taking the commandment,
" Love God, love your neighbour," as the criterion of
true religion, He found that the theologies, the moral-
ities, the ecclesiastical ordinances of His time tended
to disguise and overlay, or even to make impossible,
the weightier matters of the law.

But what Pharisaism did for the Law and the
Prophets, traditional theology has done to Christ.
Starting from the assumption that His revelation of
the 'Divine was final, it has looked for the finality not
in the spirit but in the letter. It has failed to see that
if Christ was the critic of tradition, then in all ages the
spirit of Christ must impel men to criticise contempo-
rary tradition. His followers have turned Christ
Himself into a tradition, and those who in His spirit
have criticised that tradition have been cast out. The
living prophets they have stoned while rearing the
sepulchres of the dead — thus witnessing to themselves
that they are the true sons of those that slew the
prophets.

The supreme moral activities of the modern world
have been two — the humanitarian movement, i.e. the
effort to realise in practice the brotherhood of man;
and the scientific passion of truth for truth's sake.
Consider the precept, " Love God and love thy neigh-
bour," and, if I mistake not, it will appear that in these
two movements the best elements in the modern world
outside the Churches have come much nearer than most
of those within towards realising its implications, and
therefore in applying the spirit of Christ to the actual
conditions of the day.

The greatest blot on the history of the Church in
modern times is the fact that, with the glorious excep-
tion of the campaign to abolish slavery, the leaders in
the social, political, and humanitarian reforms of the
last century and a half in Europe have rarely been
professing Christians; while the authorised representa-
tives of organised Christianity have, as often as not,

354 THE SPIRIT x

been on the wrong side. This indictment, however,
is a commonplace; and, at any rate so far as words go,
its justice is readily admitted by the leaders of all the
Churches to-day.

It is conceded ' that the Churches have been back-
ward to adapt the new conditions the commandment,
"Love thy neighbour." It is less commonly recognised
that they have failed even more conspicuously in regard
to the commandment, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God." If God is the source of righteousness, beauty,
and truth, only he can love God who is also a lover of
these. The Churches have, it must be admitted, never
tired in urging the love of righteousness — though they
have often taught that to be righteous which manifestly
is not. Some of them in fame and rite and hymn have
trained men to love beauty, but in ways narrow and
restricted, and, as time has passed, progressively more
conventional. But where do they stand in regard to
the love of truth? Few men have the capacity to be
discoverers in the realm of knowledge, and of these
who have the capacity some may properly put first
the claims of other duties. But all men can be taught
to value truth, to see ignorance, error, and supersti-
tion, even though they share them, as a misfortune of
the soul; and on the most important things of all to
decline to be put off with shams. Here certainly the
Church has failed. I may have been unfortunate, but
it is certainly the fact that I have never heard a single
sermon devoted to emphasising the all-important fact
that the love of truth is a fundamental element in the
love of God.

The Churches have, it may be readily conceded,
never wanted persons convinced that they hold the
truth, and prepared if necessary to die for it. The
fatal mistake has been to take for granted that the
individual, or his own section of the Church, already
apprehends all truth, or at least all that can be known

l Cf., for instance, the recent Report of the Archbishop'l Committee on the
Church and Labour.

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 355

of truth. And this is not an intellectual but a moral
failure. In the Middle Ages such a position was in-
telligible. At that time science and philosophy, equally
with theology, were matters of tradition, to be ac-
cepted on authority. When in one sphere of knowl-
edge a question could be decided by a word of Aristotle
or Galen, it was reasonable in another sphere to take
as final a text of St. Augustine or St. Paul. Only the
greatness of antiquity was realised, not its limitations.
The indefinite possibility of acquiring new knowledge,
and the fact that truth is not won by blind acceptance of
tradition, but is the reward of diligent and courageous
search, had not yet been demonstrated to the world.
Nor did the spectacle then obtrude itself at every turn
of men of good will differing on vital beliefs; such men
in general accepted without demur the rulings of a
Church whose intellectual even more than its moral
prestige was virtually unchallenged. But for us it is
a mockery to call that a love of truth which is not
also a love of the search for truth, which does not
include the hope that more of truth may be discovered.
In the intellectual as much as in the moral sphere,
" I count not myself yet to have apprehended " is the
fitting attitude of the truly religious mind. To take
up any other to-day implies some element of moral
weakness.

Sometimes the claim to have an exclusive monopoly
of truth reflects a native arrogance in the individual
claimant; more often it expresses the corporate arro-
gance of a Church. But arrogance, as the world has
learnt of late in the sphere of world politics, is only the
more harmful if it takes the form of a claim by a group
rather than by an individual to be in an exclusive sense
the chosen people. Religious controversialists do not
realise how phrases like " Catholic truth " or " Protes-
tant truth " — as if truth, like sardines, was something
of which you can have different brands — strike the
outsider as the supreme desecration of the word truth.

356 THE SPIRIT x

But in most cases apparent arrogance is really doubt
disguised. It results from a timidity which dares not
face facts for fear these facts should be unpleasant —
a timidity rooted at bottom in unfaith, in an apprehen-
sion, unconfessed even to the man himself, that science
or criticism may after all have disproved some cher-
ished tenet of religion, or even religion itself. It can
be justified only on the theory, explicit or implicit, that
human reason is a trap set by God for man — a theory
degrading to our conception both of God and man.
The dogmatist is own brother to the sceptic, and there
is a deep pathos in the inner life of many of the most
blatant defenders of tradition. The very vehemence
of their affirmation is the measure of their secret
doubts — " The lady protests too much methinks."

To love God is to hate delusion and to long to know
that which really is. It is to know that reality is more
than we, or our friends, can ever grasp completely, but
never to rest content with what we have as yet attained.
The love of truth is perhaps that aspect of the love of
God which is the most completely disinterested. "The
philosopher," says Samuel Butler, "must be one who
has left all, even Christ Himself, for Christ's sake."
And those who are prepared, if necessary, to give up
Christ Himself for truth's sake will get back more of
Christ than they gave up — if not in name or in form,
at least in the appropriation and inspiration of His
spirit. Those many thousands who have given up, not
only the things of this world but the hopes of a world
to come, for the sake of what seemed to them to be the
truth, have that spirit. They show a love of God more
real than those who dare not put their beliefs to the
test of inquiry — and that even though the actual con-
clusions held by these worshippers of truth may in the
long run turn out to be false and those held by the
others to be true. " Whosoever would save his life
shall lose it " applies especially to religion just because
that is the very soul of life.

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 357

But while the world — or rather its best men —
have been seeking truth, the Church has been interested
in defending tradition, with the result that the intel-
lectual leadership, which in the Middle Ages belonged
to the Church, has passed to the scientist. And the
scientist, once outside the boundaries of his own subject
and in the sphere of philosophy and ethics, has not
infrequently led men wrong, to their no small hurt.
Yet for this hurt too the Church is more than half
responsible, for it has been the attitude of the Church
towards the search for truth that has, quite unneces-
sarily, made science the traditional enemy, and thereby
prejudiced its devotees against an impartial considera-
tion of the truth for which religion stands.

I am far from asserting that we ought lightly to sur-
render a formula or a legend which has been closely
bound up with sacred beliefs. I am far from saying
that a man is not often justified in clinging to moral
principles or fundamental beliefs which he may not be
able intellectually to defend. The intuitions of the
race and the inherited beliefs of the past often rest on a
diffused experience and a basis in reason which eludes
the grasp of the science or philosophy of the day. It
is not by the Church's tenacious hold on these, it is not
by her fond clinging to hallowed associations, that the
conscience of Europe has been shocked; that attitude
men respect, even when they do not share it. But it
has been and is shocked by the failure of the Church to
appreciate the supreme moral value of truth and of the
search for truth; and by the arrogance, both real and
seeming, of the dogmatic temper, which it contrasts
with the humility of the great scientists. The world
knows, what the Church has forgotten, that of a gen-
uine love of truth there is only one test — a readiness
to admit on sufficient proof that an opinion previously
held may be wrong.

Apologists often point out that when a conflict has
arisen between traditional views and modern hypoth-

358 THE SPIRIT x

eses, whether of science or criticism or history, it has
not infrequently happened that the traditionalist has
ultimately been found in point of fact to be the nearer
to the truth. This may be so, but it is irrelevant.
The Church's attitude to truth has been a moral, not an
intellectual, failure. To be mistaken about a matter
of fact, or to entertain for a time a false hypothesis,
is to be guilty of an error which time and further in-
quiry will correct. Absolute devotion to truth and
making mistakes about the truth are quite compatible.
Science often makes mistakes. But not to be interested
in discovering truth, to make a virtue of the fact under
the name of " faith," worst of all, deliberately to sup-
press one's interest, under the name of " the sacrifice
of the reason " or " the asceticism of the intellect," is
(for those who have the requisite mental capacity and
training) openly to renounce obedience to the com-
mandment, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy mind." Nothing is nobler than the impulse
which moves man to offer up his best and dearest to his
God, nothing more pathetic than the delusion that he
must first slay the thing he offers — whether it be his
first-born in the flames of Moloch or his reason at the
altar of Christ.

To a God really worthy of man's worship only that
sacrifice of the reason can be pleasing which consists,
not in its stultification, but in its devotion to the eluci-
dation of truth. And this will often be a painful
sacrifice. To pass out from the cosy fireside of a dog-
matic faith into the cold blasts of criticism and science;
to put to the test of real inquiry beliefs without which
life does not seem worth living; to apply the knife
where one suspects a tumour even if it touch the heart
— this is the " asceticism of the intellect " that is re-
quired of our age; this for us is the strait gate and nar-
row way which leadeth unto life. " You have learnt
something," says Bernard Shaw, " that always feels at
first as if you had lost something." But in the end

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 359

there is gain — gain for the seeker, gain for the
Church.

During the last half-century there has been real
advance among the leaders of the Churches in the
recognition of the moral and religious value of the
scientific temper. But these gains have been largely
forfeited through lack of courage in many of those who
do realise the need for change, but hesitate to apply
their knowledge in popular religious teaching. Plain
speaking, they fear, might upset old people; it might
unsettle young people ; it might offend the rich ; it might
disturb the poor. But granted an element of risk,
granted that tact, discretion, and moderation are vir-
tues, and even characteristically Christian virtues, still
they are not the only virtues. From the way many
people talk one might suppose that the injunction
against offending the weaker brother was the one which
is styled " the first and great commandment." When
I read the Gospels and recollect that the Pharisees were
" the religious public " of the day, I am often surprised
to find how little careful Christ seems to have been
about shocking what a lady, writing to The Challenge
lately, called " the just susceptibilities of religious peo-
ple." Indeed, I must frankly admit that the one ob-
jection to the belief that He was morally perfect which
I have found it difficult to meet, is derived from the
apparently exaggerated severity of His language to
and about the Pharisees, who, with all their limitations,
undoubtedly stood, as a body, for religious earnestness
and self-sacrifice. Recent research has made it evi-
dent that — whatever the shortcomings of individuals
— the Pharisees as a whole were conspicuous for re-
ligious zeal and earnestness. It may be that in the
Gospel tradition our Lord's antipathy towards them
has been exaggerated; personally I think it has been,
but it cannot have been altogether invented. It is at
least evident that the " humbug " of which He accused
them lay, not so much in the insincerity, as in the futil-

360 THE SPIRIT x

ity of their beliefs. Not otherwise Plato deemed the
unconscious " lie in the soul," that inability to recog-
nise the good and true which misleads the man himself,
worse than the conscious verbal lie which is meant to
mislead others. Truly a hard saying; but Christ and
Plato here seem to concur that, not sins committed, but
false values and ideals are the worst peril of the soul.

A fruit tree will bear no fruit unless it be occasionally
pruned, and progress is impossible without a painful
disturbance of cherished and accepted customs, institu-J
tions, and beliefs. That is why the age-long passion of
India for religion has produced results so dispropor-
tionate to its longing. Prophet after prophet there
has seen high visions, but there has been lacking the
Elijah and Josiah to make a clean sweep of evil custom
and ancient superstition. The Reformation, with all
its crimes and limitations, did that for Europe; but in
India the good seed has been choked by the thorns
among which it has been sown. Half-truths are a
stage on the road to truths, good laws a stage on the
road to better; but once that stage is past, half-truths
become deadly errors, and the good is the worst enemy
of the best. Christ had the courage to recognise, the
courage to proclaim, this fact. " Destroy this temple,
and in three days I will raise it up." " Ye have heard
that it was said of them of old . . . but I say unto
you. . . ." Think what the Temple meant to a Jew,
think what the Law, and you will realise — or rather
you may dimly guess, no one born out of Jerusalem
could fully realise — the revolutionary, the iconoclastic
ring which sayings like these had for His contempora-
ries. By the side of them the programmes of our mod-
ern leaders seem tinkering timidities.

Christ as Constructive Thinker

The amount of concentrated constructive thinking *„
that lies behind the sayings of our Lord is commonly

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 361

overlooked. Their brevity, their simplicity, their lu- -^~
cidity, and the fact that most of them read like obiter
dicta, disguise the hard thinking they imply from unre-
flective readers — but only from the unreflective.
Many folk are impressed by obscurity and elaboration,
but these are really either a substitute for thought or
an evidence that the matter treated has not been
thought right out. Where the matter does not admit "
of exact expression the real thinker knows it. He
ceases to define and tries rather to suggest a meaning;
so Plato in his myths, and all the poets. Of course
where trivialities only are concerned, or where deep
things are dealt with in superficial ways, a cheap epi-
gram is easy. But wherever the thought is admittedly
: profound, terseness and lucidity of expression are a test
of intensity and clearness of thinking. No really val-
uable idea can be " put into a nutshell " unless the mat- 1 /,
ter it deals with has been the subject of prolonged med- ;
itation. He knew what he was talking about who said,
" I wrote a long book because I hadn't time to write a
short one."

Consider, again, the relation of Christ's teaching to
earlier Hebrew thought. In Jewish religious tradition
we can distinguish, in the main, five different strains.
There is the Law — at its best in Deuteronomy, where
law becomes less code than a call to personal service.
There are the Prophets, with their passion for social
righteousness, their indifference to ritual requirement,
their conviction of man's responsibility to God, and
their concentration on His moral attributes. There is
the Wisdom literature, with its sober, practical idealism
directed towards the problems of everyday life. There
is the intense personal religion of the Psalms, with their
note of absolute trust in the goodness of God and His
power to heal and save. Latest of all — most of it,
except for the book of Daniel, too late to be included
in the canon — is Apocalyptic, in form fantastic, in
spirit inferior to the direct ethical simplicity of the old

362 THE SPIRIT x

prophecy, but enriched with the new vision of the resur-
rection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
Each of these made its distinctive and characteristic
contribution to religion.

From the study of these turn to the sayings of Christ,
and note the appropriation of all that is best in each,
combined with a rejection of whatever in any of them is
of inferior value. He shows not only the courage to
reject tradition when it is wrong, but the insight to re-
affirm it when it is right. Yet His teaching is not a
kind of florilegium of the Old Testament; it is no mere
collection of undigested tit-bits; it is a fresh creative
synthesis. Like the wise scribe that He spoke of, He
brings out of His treasury things new and old. But
they are not just brought out, and left at that; they are
fused into a new and coherent philosophy of life,
thought out from first principles, clearly grasped and
thoroughly applied. They form a positive and con-
structive statement of religious and ethical outlook
unique in the history of human thought.

It is worth while to point the contrast between this
thorough and thought-out method of approaching tra-
ditional ideas and two elements in our contemporary
acceptation of Christianity.

( i ) Good intentions, or the uncriticised dictates of
the individual conscience, are commonly held to dis-
pense with the need of thought on moral issues. So
long as a person i<s striving vigorously to live up to the
accepted ideal which in his own particular coterie or set
is labelled Christian, he is supposed to be dispensed
from asking the previous question whether or not this
ideal really is in accordance with the mind of Christ.
Some one once said to a friend, " So-and-so is a very
good man but very narrow." His friend replied, " If
goodness means in the last resort God-likeness, can a
person be narrow and also good?" It is often sup-
posed that, provided you work hard and are sincere, it

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 363

does not matter whether the cause you work for is the
best; and that if you are prepared to sacrifice yourself
for an ideal, it does not matter much how distorted the
ideal. Bishops may be heard deploring the narrow-
minded fanaticism of some incumbent, but excusing or
even commending him on the ground that " he is such a
good worker." I wonder if it ever occurs to them to
ask whether such men existed in our Lord's time and
what He thought about them. The blind guides who
held up false ideals, but conscientious traditionalists
who took away the key of the Kingdom of Heaven,
were not excused by Him because they acted in accord-
ance with their conscience or because they were ani-
mated by the best intentions. And the results of the
heroic efforts of some " who compassed sea and land
to make one proselyte " are characterised by Him in
language which suggests that it is not always a suffi-
ciently extenuating circumstance to be " one of the hard-
est workers in the diocese."

(2) At the present time there is nothing which is
more needed than a body of sane, clear-headed idealists
to think out and offer to the world a constructive lead
on the moral, social, and political problems of the day.
For example, everybody feels that the industrial revo-
lution and the elaborate State organisation of the mod-
ern world has presented the problem of the relation of
rich, and poor, and of employer and employed, in a
wholly new form. The Churches, to their credit be it
said, have never forgotten the claims of the sick and
needy. They have worked, they have prayed, they
have paid; they have done everything but think — but
maybe that was the one thing needful. Methods of
dealing with poverty or sickness which were most ap-
propriate in Palestine or Greece two thousand years
ago are not likely to be adequate to-day. But, with
some conspicuous but relatively few exceptions, the
Church has left it to organisations like the Fabian So-
ciety to do their thinking for them, and, if not to find

364 THE SPIRIT x

solutions, at any rate to be foremost in the search for
them.

Take, again, the various problems relating to sex
— the position of women in general, the control of the
birth-rate, prostitution, venereal disease. Not only
the present but the future welfare of humanity depends
on looking these questions squarely in the face; on first
finding and then applying the right solutions. Here,
if anywhere, is a field where the Churches might have
been expected to give a lead. If sexual relations are
outside their province, there is not much left inside.
Here, again, it is not " good intentions " but intelli-
gence that is to seek. Immense and undoubtedly well-
meaning effort has been put into a blind defence of
ecclesiastical tradition, to preclude any reconsideration
of the conditions of divorce or to prevent marriage
with a deceased wife's sister. To the solution of the
really burning problems the one outstanding contribu-
tion which what is known as specifically Christian public
opinion has made, has been an organised conspiracy to
ignore their existence. In religious circles thorough
and constructive discussion of them has been boycotted
in the name of decency; and this attitude, more than
anything else, has retarded the possibility of discover-
ing the right solutions. " To the pure all things are
pure." Plain speaking need not be coarse speaking —
indeed, a really Christian outlook naturally expresses
itself with simplicity and good taste. It is subterfuge
and innuendo, not direct speaking, that implies and en-
courages the prurient mind. In recent years much has
been done to break down this conspiracy of silence,
and to force public opinion to face these questions.
But this has been mainly accomplished, in spite
of the shocked opposition of the religious,1 by free
lances like Mrs. Josephine Butler, or, more recently*
by acutely unecclesiastical writers like Mr. Bernard
Shaw.

l Cf. Life of Josephine Butler, p. 55.

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 365

Christ and the Church of His Day

Our Lord's attitude towards the religious body of
which He was a member will become clearer if we re-
mind ourselves that the Jewish people at that date was
a community approximating more nearly to what we
now call a Church than to what we call a State. As the
result, partly of the Exile, but still more of the subse-
quent city-building of the successors of Alexander the
Great, the Jews had ceased to have an independent na-
tional existence, but had become something like an in-
ternational brotherhood having branches in every im-
portant city in the Roman and Parthian Empires.
They no longer even spoke one common language, and
were held together by a bond which, though nominally
racial, was actually religious, since in every generation
any who ceased to believe or practise the religion be-
came assimilated to the surrounding peoples, while nu-
merous proselytes, attracted by the religion, became in-
corporated as members of the chosen people. Hence,
though still based mainly upon race, the community had
become in essence and idea less of a nation than a
Church.

What, then, was our Lord's attitude towards this
Church?

A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard ; and he
came and sought fruit thereon, and found none. Then said he
unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I
come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down;
why cumbereth it the ground ? And he answering said unto
him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it,
and dung it. And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after
that thou shalt cut it down.2

The axe is laid unto the root of the tree. Time —
but only a short time — will be given for amendment.
At present " it cumbereth the ground," but there is still
hope.

2 Luke xiii. 6-9.

366 THE SPIRIT x

This was His judgment. But it was one to which
He had come, not willingly, but with infinite regret.

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept
over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in
this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now
they are hid from thine eyes.1

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and
stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have
gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood
under her wings, and ye would not! 2

And what other view can the Spirit of Christ suggest
to us to-day? We, too, can look back with pride and
affection on a great inheritance, on a past which is elo-
quent to us, through religious monuments like our great
Cathedrals, or the Book of Common Prayer, or in that
tradition of civil and religious liberty and pure family
life to which Puritanism has contributed so much. Yet
only the purblind can fail to see that, while we have
been pondering on a mighty past, the present has been
slipping away from us, and the Kingdom is passing
away from the Church, as of old it passed from the
Jews to " a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof."

What, then, should be our attitude towards the His-
toric Church? The axe is laid at the root of the tree;
the year is given to dig and to tend. There are many
of the younger generation who think that the sentence
of final condemnation has been already spoken, that
men of good will had best leave the organised Churches
to perish gently of senile decay, while they themselves
seek ampler opportunity to carry on the Master's work
outside. My own judgment is otherwise. I hope and
believe that Jerusalem, even in this her hour, will recog-
nise the things which belong to her peace, and that the
Christian Church to-day, unlike the Jewish Church of
old, may have the insight and the courage to face that
Constructive Revolution — in theology, in forms of

1 Luke xix. 41-42. 2 Luke xiii. 34.

x CONSTRUCTIVE REVOLUTION 367

worship, in organisation, in practical activity —
through which alone it can realise its destiny in the up-
lifting of mankind.

There has come upon the world a supreme crisis, a
crisis clamorous with the need for reconstruction — re-
construction all along the line, political, social, moral,
religious. The world is looking for guidance; but the'
guide must be one who has the courage to discard what
is obsolete and the insight to create what is new. It is
looking for the guidance of the Constructive Revolu-
tionary. I have tried to show that this is precisely the
kind of guidance given by our Lord. The Church
claims to be a body inspired by the Holy Spirit. What
is this Holy Spirit? It is no other than the spirit man-
ifested in the life of Christ. If Christ, I reiterate, is
our portrait of the Father, He is no less our portrait
of the Holy Ghost. We have seen how the character-
istic expression of the Spirit as seen in His life is con-
structive thought and creative effort. The idea is not
new, but it has never been worked out. Creator Spir-
itus is no modern title, but it answers to a most modern
need. Man and his civilisations have always needed
re-creation, but other ages have been barely conscious
of their lack. We know our need. That is a new fact
in human history. To-day every one is crying out for
reconstruction: some in hope, others in despair; all are
crying out for the creative spirit. And this, if only we
will see it, is the spirit manifested in the life of Christ.
Veni Creator Spiritus.

INDEX

Absolute, the, 288

Absolution, Confession and, 258, 263

Action. See also Language

action when words fail, 232

art the language of action, 233
Agape —

the best gift of the Spirit, 127

the Agape, 139
Animals, 312

without language, 316
Anthropomorphism, 117
Antichrist, 251
Apostles, the, 121
Apostolic Succession, the, 168
Archbishop's Committee, 354 ft.
Arianism, 9

in popular Christianity, 10
Art, 233, 316

conflict between art and science, 281

supreme value of a work of art, 298
Articles, the Thirty-nine — ■

Article XIII., 173. 181
Atheism, 53
Atonement, the —

forensic theories of, 11

fear of belittling, 245
Authority —

external infallible authority, 211

Baptism, 171, 246, 252-258

the Baptism of Jesus, 123 n.

a baptism described, 252

infant baptism, 255, 257
Baptists, 258
Beauty, 311

religion of beauty, 6

the personal beauty of nature, 288

beauty terrible, 301

functional, 332
Benediction —

the Apostolic, 135
Body, the —

always a transient vehicle of spirit,

245
Business, men of, 292

Calculators, boy calculators, 202
Causation, 321, 322
causation the universal seen as com-
pulsion, 323

369

Ceremonial —

Christian ceremonial, 246, 257, 265

of the Latin Mass, 248, 269

Roman Catholic, 267
Christ —

Birth and Resurrection of, 29, 33

Christ and the mystery of the
Kingdom, 64

inspiration in, 216

His teaching on faith, 272

not in the past but in the future,
273

the Galilaean, 287, 288

rejection of, 301

the portrait of the Spirit, 345

a revolutionary, 347

the critic of tradition, 352

Christ and Bolshevism, 347

See also Jesus, Church, Kingdom
of Heaven, Eucharist
Christianity —

must be progressive, 346

contemporary Christianity and
Christ, 352

popular Christianity, 10
Church, the —

inspiration of, 59

birth of, 115

at Pentecost, 129

not at first an institution, 130

its organisation, 148, 149

church buildings, 266

Conservatism of, 348

Christ and the Church of His day,
365
Coherence, 329
Communion, Holy, 162

Communion service, 263
Communion —

with God, 210, 215

with a higher power, 209
Community, the, 212

small community of select souls,
231
Concepts, mathematical, 326
Concursus dei, 15
Confession, 258-262
Congiarium, 191
Continuity —

of grace, 178

370

INDEX

Conversion, 177, 178

psychological analysis of, 203
Creation —

meaning of, 16, 17
Criminal, the, 328
Criterion —

of revelation, 202

of truth, 202

Deism, 5
Discovery —

discovery or revelation, 119, 197,

199
distinguished from revelation by

Hamilton, 198
discovery of Jesus, 63
Docetic heresy, 313

Egotism —

extreme form of, 327
Esprit de corps, 302
Eucharist, the, 162, 188, 262, 245

institution of, 165
Evolution, 320, 331, 337
Experience —
religious, 6, 209

supernatural or miraculous reli-
gious experience, 26
religious experience as natural, 33
psychological aspect of, 34, 35
as evidence of God's action in the

world, 49
of God, 215

two kinds of experience, 277
spiritual experience, 295, 296, 303,

3°4
spiritual experience of the bore,
298
Explanation —

psychological explanation, 187, 213
248
Expression, 297

expression necessary to the devel-
opment of the soul, 226
in religion, 235

Fairy angel, 282, 283

Christ and the, 289
Faith —

Christ's teaching on, 272
Fall, the. See Grace
Fatigue —

nerve fatigue, 68, 69

causes of, 74

forms of, 79-82
Fellowship, the, 133

fellowship with God, 179

Fellowship (contd.) —

with the Spirit, 213

Christian ideal of, 226

See also Solitude, Koinonia
frirst Cause, 12
Flags, 237
Freedom —

and problem of creation, 18
Free-will —

and grace, 181

Glossolalia, 123, 124
God —

difference between Jewish and
Christian doctrine of, 8

" the second God," 9

the Wisdom of God in Apocrypha, 9

as ground of the Universe, 13

and the world, 15, 33, 50

action of, 28, 117

holiness of, 117

in the order of nature, 215

communion with, 230

as Judge, 261

the God of the poet, 288

lunatic supposing himself to be
God, 327

lover as well as artist, 335
Good —

good the scent of our own future,
336
Gothic architecture, 266

imitation Gothic, 288
Grace —

analogies of, 157, 158, 176, 195

grace personal, 160

artificial ideas of, 160

regarded as sui generis, 160, 182

doctrine of grace (Roman Cath-
olic), 160 n., 182*1., 184 n.

thought of as a special force, 169,
186

uniqueness of, 174

grace and nature, 175

withdrawn at the Fall, 177

catastrophic element in, 178, 180

continuity of, 178, 180

and free-will, 181

as the undeserved favour of God,
183

kinds of, 181

legalistic view of, 786

meaning of grace in the New Tes-
tament, 189, 190

Hymns, Ancient and Modern, 284
Hypnosis, 69, 74, 250

INDEX

37i

Illusion. See Scepticism, also 321
Immanence, 1

in Stoic philosophy and Athana-
sius, 10

of the Creative Spirit, 19

and transcendence, 21

Divine immanence in Nature, 108
Immortality —

belief in, 201
Incarnation, the, 6, 10
India, 360

Infallibility, verbal, 197
Inspiration, 36, 44

of the Church, 60

in Old Testament, 118

of persons, not books, 195

criterion of, 197, 211

in Christ, 216, 217

in the ordinary man, 218, 219

unexplained factor in, 213, 214
Instincts, the, 85-92

the conflict of, 92-94

conversion of, 94-100
Intelligence, 321. See also Reason

Jesus —

the historic, 346

the Baptism of, 123 *».

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