Presented to the
LIBRARY of the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
by
R. W. ROGERS
THE COMMON LIFE.
THE COMMON LIFE
BY
J. BRIERLEY, B.A.
<"J. B.")
Author of "Ourselves and the Universe t " "Studies of the Soul,
" From Philistia : Essays on Church and World,"
"Problems of Living," <fe.
London
JAMES CLARKE & CO., 13 & 14, FLEET STREET
1904
Preface.
IN these Essays I have followed up a number
of the varying phases of our common life in
search of their verdicts. The religious thinker
of to-day, in search of truth for himself and of
a message for his fellows, can no longer, with
his predecessors of earlier times, satisfy either
himself or his audience by the quotation
of ecclesiastical authorities. Those ancient
findings have everywhere to be revised. The
facts from which the old interpretations were
drawn were neither so numerous nor so well
authenticated as those we now know. And
new and old alike have to be built into a
larger synthesis. What I have here attempted
is to rehandle the religious raw material as
contained in the daily human experience.
To pass by the accidents and to look into
what is common to humanity ; to catch, out
of its myriad dialects the accents of a universal
speech, and to note what that speech actually
signifies, is what I have here endeavoured after.
Ours is perhaps not an age for building.
vi PREFACE.
It is one rather for gathering and testing.
But we know where the material is to be found.
It is out of the facts of the common life, out
of what the history and consciousness of
man really contain, that the religious thought
structure of the future will rise,
But any view of life which is to be of
value must include its highest levels. A
singular philosophy has had its vogue
among us which has sought to deal with
everything human in terms of its origins.
But the human problem can never be solved
by a mere looking backward. An oak can
not be adequately studied in an acorn. The
best proof of man s spiritual inheritance
is that it exists. Its presence and work hi
man form an actuality which no criticism
or inquiry into origins can really invalidate.
These pages are written in the conviction that
the common life, impartially and compre
hensively studied, will yield to our children, as
it did to our fathers, an irresistible argument
for faith, hope and love.
J. B.
Contents.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. -Life s Positives . . . . V 1
II. Life s Unities . . . , . . 10
III. Life s Confusions > . . , 19
IV. The Religious Affections ^ * .28
V. Of the Exceptional . ... .37
VI. Masters and Disciples . . . 46
VII. Religion as Power . . . .54
VIII. Religion as Experience ... 63
IX. What of Sunday ? . . . . 72
X. Mystery . ... . . . 80
XI. Office and the Man .... 89
XII. The World s Happiness . . . 98
XIII. Summits . . . . . > 107
XIV. The Ethics of Desire . . . .116
XV. The Larger Reference. . , . 125
XVI. The World s Memory . . . . 133
XVII. Society and Solitude . . . .142
XVIII. On Being Spiritual . ... .150
XIX. The Feast of Faces . . . .158
XX. On Points of View * . . .167
XXL Life s By-Products , . . . 174
XXII. Going on Pilgrimage . . . .183
XXIII Rest and Unrest . . .192
XXIV. Our Reading Life . . . .200
XXV. Of Pulpit Silences . . . . 208
Tii
viii CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGB
XXVI. Science and Conversion . . , 217
XXVII. Interpreters of Christ . . .226
XXVIII. The New Incarnation . . . .234
XXIX. The Prophet in Man . . . 243
XXX. The Teaching of Emerson . . . 252
XXXI. Vicarious Consecration . . .261
XXXII. The Touch of Tragedy . . .269
XXXIII. The Soul s Atmosphere .. . . . 278
XXXIV. Of Self-Assertion . . . .287
XXXV. The Soul s Athletics ... . .296
XXXVI. The Human Paradise . . . .304
THE COMMON LIFE.
i.
Life s Positives.
THEKE are times when most of us are inclined
to cry out against the positive. There seems
too much of it. Our neighbour carries a
whole cargo of opinions which he is anxious
to unload upon us. Every street corner has
its church or chapel which shouts its affirma
tion at us a whole string of affirmations.
We travel to the ends of the earth, only to
find the same thing. The present writer
remembers the sensation with which, on
sailing up the Dardanelles, he caught sight
for the first time of the Mohammedan minarets
which proclaimed him a Giaour, an infidel.
It was with a similar consciousness that,
in standing at the tomb of the apostles in
St. Peter s, he suddenly called to mind that
the church he was in, like the Turkish mosque,
disposed in the most uncompromising manner
THE COMMON LIFE,
of his future. We are all damned at least
half-a-dozen times by the faiths we do not
accept. Pondering these things the feeling,
we say, comes over us that the thing has been
a little overdone, and we are disposed to ask
whether humanity might not, to the general
advantage, stay its lust of affirmation and
give its infallibility a rest. In such moods
we fall in love with the undefined, and are
disposed to say with Chamfort, " II faut agir
da vantage, penser moins, et ne pas se regarder
vivre." " Let us do more, think less, and not
peer too closely into the business of living."
But is this really the conclusion of the
matter ? A nearer look into things shows us
that, on the contrary, it is only a mood, an
idea to be caressed a moment, and then put
aside for what it is worth. While talk of this
kind has a certain ground, it amounts neither
to the condemnation of the positive, nor to
the suggestion of a substitute for it. Granted
that man has here pushed matters to excess,
that his creeds are often a burden rather than
a help, that his propositions are continually
having to be revised or withdrawn ; this does
not prevent us from realising, on a deeper
view, that in following this line he has, after
all, not been mistaken, that his positive is
really founded upon the general scheme of
things.
Man makes his proposition, for one thing, by
LIFE S POSITIVES.
a necessity of his nature, and, for another,
because he finds that Nature, before him, has
already made hers. Life itself is crammed with
the positive. Thoreau, in decrying the creeds,
says somewhere that " the perfect God in His
revelations of Himself has never got to the
length of one such proposition as you His
prophets state." We say, in reply, that the
nature of things has made propositions and
of a most startling kind. Is not the universe
itself, as we find it, really a most extraordinary
proposition ? Whoever antecedently would
have imagined a thing like this ? That the
cosmos should be so and no other is a puzzle
beyond words. Mr. Picton, in his book, " The
Religion of the Universe," tells of a little girl
who asked what he describes as the most
comprehensive question ever addressed to
him : " Sir, please tell me why there was ever
anything at all? " Exactly. That there is
anything at all, and that the thing is such as
we see, is, we repeat, the most tremendous
of declarations. Here have you a rever
berating, full - throated " yes," against
which all the " noes " and negatives fight
in vain.
And the cosmos, in its entirety so immense
a positive, carries the element into every
detail. There is a profound remark of
Schopenhauer to the effect that what we call
the quality of an object is as great a mystery
THE COMMON LIFE.
as the soul of a man. Even a perfume is an
affirmation. That it should be this one thing
out of all the million possibles, that it should
be cut off by being just this from being all
other, is in itself a wonder and a parable. Its
assertion, like our own, is a limited one ;
it becomes narrowed down to almost nothing
in making it ; and yet life would be so much
less rich without it ! You too, my brother, in
standing for some one thing, are cut off from
that dozen other things you might be. Yet
your " one " is wanted, and the cosmos were
incomplete were it not there.
But the " nature of things " carries us
much further than this in its insistance on the
positive. It will not have our undefined at
any price. It insists on committing us to this
or that. Take a girl who has received an
offer of marriage. In the tumult of her emo
tions she asks herself whether what she feels
is really love or only a semblance. There are
doubts, and who shall resolve them ? She
finds there is no supernatural revelation to
her on the subject ; her friends cannot inform
her ; she possesses no psychological code
that can furnish authoritatively the answer.
In these circumstances surely the proper thing
is to remain uncommitted ! " Let us live on
our doubt and do nothing ! " But the world,
our maiden discovers, has not been built that
way. By the sheer force of life s fact there
LIFE S POSITIVES.
before her, she is compelled to make up her
mind. Her doubt will not serve. There
must be here, sooner or later, a " yes " or
" no," with all her fate hanging upon it. A
thousand similar illustrations from practical
life tell the same story. Nature insists that
we shall be positive. She screws out of us our
affirmation whether we will or no.
As we look further we discover how the law
of man s moral progress compels him in the
same direction. He must lay down his scheme
in order that his soul may live. His doctrine
precedes his life and is formative of it. It is
as if a climber should throw a rope with a
grappling iron to the crag above him and
mount by that. Out of his innermost self
man is ever projecting a something, a doctrine,
an ideal, beyond his present level, which then
becomes the goal of his striving. His religions
are his ideal life beyond his actual, yet help
ing to the final attainment. Wernle has a
suggestive passage on this point in relation
to early Christianity. Says he : " From the
very first there was a sharp distinction between
the Christianity that was actually lived in
the Churches, and the Christianity which
the teachers of the Church postulated in their
writings. That which is called worldliness
did not make its way into Christianity through
decay from some high level of excellence. It
came through the mission itself, as each new
THE COMMON LIFE.
convert brought in a portion of the world
along with him."
Another of Nature s hints here is in the
authority and life-giving force with which
she endows the expounders of the positive.
A mysterious magnetism belongs to the man
who with conviction affirms something. You
may state negations in the most elegant and
classic style. You state them and nothing
happens. But let our prophet come, with
a new mandate for the soul upon his lips, and
though his word be in the dialect of a Galilean
peasant, the whole world is changed. Here,
indeed, is Nature s grandest positive, her man
with a message. Men bow before Christ s
religious imperative, because they feel that
the Infinite is behind and in it. When He
offers redemption, forgiveness, peace, joy,
Divine empowerment, as gifts from His own
spiritual wealth, they see that these things
do actually belong to the inner universe, that
they are attainable in the consciousness even
as they formed part of Christ s own conscious
ness. Christianity is thus the highest positive
of the spiritual life.
But where are we now ? Does this line
of argument lead us then to the din of the
sects as its necessary consequence ? Are we,
in the name of the positive, to accept all the
old creeds and all the new ones ; to fall down,
then, before the latest theological adventurer
LIFE S POSITIVES.
who has a novelty to offer ? Modern inquiry,
looking with clarified eyes back on the long
history of the past, is finding the answer to
these questions. Nature, we find, will have
her positive, even though the quality of it
to begin with be of the poorest. She makes
her man say " yes," even when his " yes "
is half-full of error. But she never stops with
that. Speedily to that too narrow affirmative
comes the opposing negative, and the two
wrestle with each other, till out of the conflict
emerges, not destruction, but a new affirmative
wider than that old one, wider also than its
negative, containing in itself the truth of
both. Man must, we say, have his positive, but
he is on the way to ever better and richer ones.
Note as illustration of this what we are now
learning about the true position of Christianity
as a world teaching. When this new positive
appeared the cultured classes opposed it as the
example of all that was narrow, vulgar and,
in the worst sense, exclusive. We remember
the " exitiabilis super stitio " of Tacitus, the
sneers of a Lucian and a Julian. And there
have not been lacking Christian exponents
of a later date whose interpretation offers
abundant ground for these criticisms. But we
are beginning to realise now how the Christian
faith, properly viewed, justifies its position
as a natural, inevitable part of the world s
order. It is the culmination of a spiritual
8 THE COMMON LIFE.
evolution, which has been as sure in its opera
tion as that which works in a nebula or in a
coal bed. It is most noteworthy here how
the early Christian writers had glimpses of
this, denied to many later ones. They saw
how the Gospel fitted into the wider revelation
of which all were partakers. Justin Martyr
recalls the teaching of Empedocles, Pythagoras,
Plato and Socrates as illustrating the Christian
Eschatology ; while Lactantius opens his
" Institutes " with the argument that a belief
in Divine Providence was the common property
of all religions. The Alexandrian fathers were
full of this doctrine ; it is continually emerging,
indeed, in the great Christian literature.
What we now realise is that the Christian
consciousness is, with an important reserva
tion, part of the universal human religious
consciousness. With a reservation, we say.
For this universal is also a particular. As
Sabatier has finely put it : " The Christian
consciousness is not merely an accidental
form or part of the general religious conscious
ness. It is a necessary and dominant part
of it. . . . It is with the first term of
this ideal as with the summit of a mountain.
The summit is a part of the mountain, but it
dominates all the other parts in their ascending
stages from the depths of the valley to itself,
and by that fact it embraces them all and
assigns to each its place and rank in the whole."
LIFE S POSITIVES. 9
A grasp of this theme should help the
modern man through many perplexities. It
should enable him for one thing to sympathise
with his neighbour s positive, though it be at
present repugnant to his own. Do not despise
that other assertion, church, institution that
seems opposed to yours ! It also is needed to
complete the final positive. The topic here
becomes almost rudely personal. To that final
you, too, my brother, have to make your con
tribution. Life expects your vote also. You
are to stand for something.
The hours as they glide by seem at once
an offer and an expectation. Time is in
itself formless, in order that we may make
of it everything or nothing. To a deep soul
there is naught so awe-inspiring as this speech
less appeal. All the past, its heroisms, its
sacrifices, its crimes, its victories, are the
positives that our fellows have created in
response to this same offer. And here is
to-day, silently waiting for us ! It is ready to
take all we have our imagination, our in
dustry, our learning, our love, our prayer
and weave it upon its loom. Or we may hand
it nothing and let it pass, formless as it came.
That we have this day, out of all the eternities,
to make or mar by our positive or negative,
is the most portentous present fact in the
universe for you and me.
II.
Life s Unities.
WE are governed by ideas, and chiefly by
those which we know not how to put into
words. The full-fledged ones, the formulas
that is, are, by the very fact of being full-
fledged, already on the way to decay. We
see them yielding up their sceptre to those
others, looming behind, which we cannot
describe, but which we know to be greater
than they. And of these the one which more
and more compels us, which, while not fully
recognised, we yet all feel to the marrow of
our bones, is that of the essential unity of
life and the world. That we are parts of a
whole, that our personality is a tiny segment
of a reality immeasurably greater than our
selves, this is the thought that in our time
is illuminating history, that is opening new
vistas to science, that forms the note of phil
osophy, that excites the enthusiasm of the
social reformer, that is reshaping religion.
Not that the idea is the special property of our
generation. In a way it is as old as thinking
10
LIFE S UNITIES. 11
man. Philosophy and poetry have said and
resaid it, in language we could hardly improve
on. Pope has made it a common-place with
his
All are but parts of one stupendous whole
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
And Thoreau has put the whole of mysticism
into this one sentence : "I see, smell, taste,
hear, feel that everlasting Something to which
we are allied, at once our Maker, our abode, our
destiny, our very selves."
And yet between our thought and that of the
past, even of our immediate predecessors,
there is a difference. Ours is after all a new
perception, for fresh elements have entered
into it. The unity we know is a closer one
than that of a generation ago. A number of
what seemed to our fathers great dividing lines
have disappeared. What was two has become
one. Where they talked of our separate
personality we are asking whether we know
where our personality begins or ends ? What
is, and what is not even our body, from
one moment to another, is beyond our reckon
ing. Where and when does the air that
plays on our lungs become part of us ? In
every breath I draw the " not me " becomes
" me," and at each exhalation the " me "
becomes " not me." And as it is with the
physical so with the mental and moral. Our
12 THE COMMON LIFE.
life is a perpetual commerce with the universe,
a mysterious and incessant participation.
Even that vast antithesis between matter and
mind which philosophy hitherto has been so
sure of, wears to-day another aspect. Mole
cular research is compelling the question
whether what we have called matter is not
in itself a form of life ?
It is, however, in the directly human
sphere that the sense of solidarity, to use
the modern term, has in our time most asserted
itself, and with which we wish here specially
to deal. There are aspects of it which
by their very familiarity are apt to escape
our attention, but which when studied yield
wonderful results. We talk, for instance,
of Socialism gingerly some of us, as though
it were a dangerous theme. But has it occurred
to us that over whole regions of life, and some
of those the most important, an absolute
Socialism already reigns ? It is in the region
of the spirit fact in itself infinitely notable and
suggestive that man has already realised
in its fullness the common life. In the king
dom of ideas there is a universal participation.
Language is a commerce in which there are no
restrictions. Society is held together by those
thought-signals we call words, and which are
every man s property alike.
There are special occasions when this
essential community of the human spirit is very
LIFE S UNITIES. 13
wonderfully shown. When, for instance, an
orator is in full possession of an audience
we witness an extraordinary transfusion. At
the beginning the assembly is a collection of
units. A thousand minds are there occupied
each with its separate interests. But when this
speaker, charged with his theme, opens his own
soul upon them, he breaks down the dividing
walls. The units coalesce. The audience be
comes one sentient being which thinks, laughs,
weeps together. And note here the spiritual
miracle that is being wrought. The one
loaf feeds the five thousand. The one discourse
passes undiminished, undivided at the same
moment into all these minds. That the hun
dred souls on this side are fully feasted takes
not one crumb from the banquet enjoyed by
the others. Is it not sufficiently significant,
prophetic of the infinity that veils itself behind
the human, that here in our familiar life we
have, on our spiritual side, the operation of a
force that indeed " spreads undiminished,
operates unspent " ?
There are other directions also in which
life presents itself as a vast unformulated
socialism. Man has laboured with a huge
and often misdirected industry to build him
self off from his fellow, but his walls are not
high enough for the business. What are the
differences between prince and peasant com
pared with the unities of their life ? What are
14 THE COMMON LIFE.
the dividing lines of station and income
as compared with the fact that you and I are
born on the same planet, shone on by the same
sun, are carried in the same movement from
youth up to manhood, from manhood to old
age ; that around us is the same infinite
and before us the same mystery of death
and the beyond ? It is, indeed, only as we enter
into the common life of humanity that we
become properly human. It is that which is
given us as part of the universal lot the common
sunshine, the common joys and strengths and
sorrows that forms the spirit s really nourish
ing food. Tolstoy, after exhausting all that
fashionable society could offer him, and find
ing there no solace, says it was " in entering
into the real life of humanity I became con
vinced that despair cannot be the destiny of
man."
One does not wonder that, urged by these
hints from nature, and by the deep instincts of
his soul, man should have dreamed of, and at
times fiercely fought for, the realisation of a
more definite social unity. Scheme after scheme
has been formulated, from the Republic of
Plato to the Utopia of Sir Thomas More,
from the phalanstery of Charles Fourier to
the socialism of Karl Marx and Ferdinand
Lassalle. The attempts so far have been
failures, but the failures carry in them the
suggestion of something great yet to come.
LIFE S UNITIES. 15
The adventurers so far in these spheres have
had a plan of the edifice but no materials with
which to build it. They have sought to gain
by politics and electioneering what can only be
secured by a spiritual evolution. Fourier s
phalanstery came to grief because he failed
to reckon with the human passions. A perfect
social system can only arise in a generation
that is spiritually trained. It is here that the
subject of the common life brings us in
evitably to the question of religion.
A true society, we have said, will come,
not from sudden political or economical
readjustments, but from a heightening of
the type of the individual man. To effect
that heightening is what religion is here
for. And it is precisely here, in religion
properly conceived, that we get the common
life at once in its purest and its profoundest
form. Schopenhauer, who, despite his ex
travagance, exhibits at times an insight which
is almost weird, has put the whole matter in-
his pregnant remark that " the true inner
most being subsists in every living thing
just as really as in my own consciousness."
Religion really rests on this, the recognition
of the innermost Highest Being in each soul
of us. So is it that Christ is the true eternal
Prophet of the common life. He appeals to
the universal soul. As a modern theologian
puts it : "In relation to the Law, He elimi-
16 THE COMMON LIFE.
nated the Jewish and retained the human.
The sum of His commandments is addressed
to the man in the Jew, and to man in the
general." True Christianity recognises that
all religions are the dialects of one common
speech. It holds its place as the crown
and summit of the human consciousness,
at the top of all the faiths, yet vitally and ori
ginally related to all. It sees its own begin
nings in the dim aspirations of far-off times,
and of what we once thought were alien cults.
The early Church historian Socrates has put
this in a memorable word, where, speaking of
heathen literature, he says : " Wherever any
thing excellent is found it is the property of the
truth." Abelard expresses this universality
when, in his " Introduction to Theology," he
daringly asks," Quis enim nesciat et in Moyse, et
in prophetarum voluminibus qusedam assumpti
de gentilium libris ? " (" For who does not
know that both in Moses and in the writings
of the prophets certain things have been
taken from the books of the heathen ? ")
In this spirit Christ would certainly have
recognised as a true though unperfected
daughter in the faith that Egyptian lady
who, ages before His day, wrote of herself :
" My heart inclined me to the right when
I was still a child, not yet instructed as to
the Right and Good. And what my heart
dictated I failed not to perform. And God
LIFE S UNITIES. 17
rewarded me for this, rejoicing me with the
happiness which He hath granted me for
walking after His way."
It was eminently natural that a religion
which, in its pure form, proclaimed as its vital
principle the essential unity and brotherhood
of humanity should, from the beginning,
have striven to express this unity in a concrete
way. That was the meaning of the community
of goods in the apostolic age, of the monastic
institutions, whose ideal, though fallen away
from so grievously in later days, was originally
so noble, of those mediaeval brotherhoods,
such as Gerard Groote s " Brotherhood of the
Free Spirit " in the fifteenth century, and
innumerable similar fellowships, which united
asceticism of living with a communism of
property. The spirit which wrought these
developments in earlier times is to-day mov
ing in the Churches as a mighty yet undefined
force for a better organisation of society at
large. We are as yet only at the beginnings
of that movement, but along its dimly-outlined
road man will march to his earthly paradise.
The human future lies in this, that whenever
a soul reaches a higher realisation, a new gift of
the Spirit, its irresistible impulse is to share the
boon . Come and taste what I have tasted, take
your portion of the new Divine satisfactions
that I have found," is the cry of every great
prophet, the impulse of every spiritual revival.
18 THE COMMON LIFE.
The truth of the common life reaches be
yond our ken. Man on this earth is surrounded
by invisible powers and personalities, and par
ticipates, in a thousand unknown ways, in
the mightier life they have to communicate.
And the mystery of death is doubtless the
mystery of a larger participation. The ques
tion is continually asked to-day : " What,
in that vast dissolving, will become of our
separate personality ? " It is the question
we might imagine would be asked by the life of
a separate germ cell when it is caught up to form
the millionth part of some organic whole.
It is there still, living and working, but part-
now of a vaster unity. Who can say into what
roomier life we shall by-and-by be merged ?
Who can trace the limits of an infinite pro
gression ? Sufficient that we are on the
road upward. Sufficient that every spiritual
advance makes us surer of God and of
eternal life.
III.
Life s Confusions.
THE title of this chapter may seem in con
tradiction to the one that precedes. But if
in this we are not following the order of logic,
we are certainly following that of life. In
our universe so wide and so complex is it
we can never put down a thesis but we find
lying close by its antithesis. In the last
chapter we spoke of a growing sense of life s
unity. But it is equally true to say that we
are at the same time acutely conscious of
life s confusions. In a number of directions
we see a disorganisation which assumes ever
greater and more bewildering dimensions. In
these regions men have lost the sense of pro
portion, the sense of unity in their thoughts,
feelings and actions. Their impelling motives
start from quite different and apparently
opposing centres. A man goes to church to
satisfy his religious need. When he wants
amusement he seeks a theatre. But the two,
while appealing to what seem integral parts
of his nature, have no common basis. They
19
20 THE COMMON LIFE.
work independently and often opposedly.
And their total effect upon our individual is a
confusing one. He is unable himself to see,
nor do these institutions help him to see, how
these two separate things, which instincts
common to his nature have sent him in search
of, can relate themselves harmoniously to each
other and to the ultimate end of his existence.
This illustration of what we mean is only
one out of a thousand. From every side
comes evidence of the tangle in which we find
ourselves. Numbers of people to-day feel
as though their inward nature were cut in
two. They are like Jacobi, of whom it was
said that " he was with his whole understand
ing a heathen, with his whole heart a Christian."
The schism of vital order has, perhaps, reached
its height in France, where a vast multitude
of cultivated men are in a position so pathe
tically revealed in a recent letter of M. Jaures,
the eminent Socialist, in which he defends
himself for allowing his daughters to have a
religious education on the ground that, while
himself a Freethinker, his wife is a Catholic,
whose convictions he felt bound to respect.
Here is an appalling chasm, going down not
only to the deeps of personal feeling, but to
the roots of family life ! Yet what dis
harmonies, what breakdowns of every logical
principle meet us on all hands in England !
On Sundays we go to church, and pass a dozen
LIFE S CONFUSIONS. 21
public-houses on the way. The two insti
tutions are integral parts of our national life,
but how do they stand towards each other ?
Do we imagine that if as Christians we keep
out of the public-house, or perhaps violently
denounce it, that we have thereby contributed
anything worth mentioning to the settlement
of its question ?
One could add endlessly to these examples.
We have, in our religious standards, a sup
posed basis of life, but what do they amount
to in the social organism of the time ? How
far is it true to say with Bagehot that " even
in the present time few cultivated persons
willingly think on the special dogmas of
distinct theology. They do not deny them,
but they live apart from them." Men at
present make their life radiate from the
queerest centres. With the younger genera
tion the cricket or football club will often
represent what they mainly know of social
organism, of enthusiasm, of training and dis
cipline. Animal appetites, the pursuit of
wealth, sport, a horde of indiscriminate sen
sations, following on without any regulation,
make up, with multitudes of people, the thing
they call their life.
The condition of things here sketched,
perturbing as it seems, would be much more
so if we were unfurnished with any key to it.
But we have a key. Our difficulties are,
THE COMMON LIFE.
after all, the penalties of progress. History
reveals to us humanity as perpetually moving
from lower to higher unities, and in the process
as having to face recurring periods of confusion.
There have been times when both man as
an individual and the social organism of
which he formed part were alike harmonious.
Amongst savage tribes to-day a man s religion,
his passions, his amusements, his warrings,
form together a complete whole which works
without any jarrings of his inner conscious
ness. It is the inrush, to men in this con
dition, of new and higher elements that breaks
the unity and puts them at issue with them
selves. When a man, after years in which he
has been satisfied with walking, begins learn
ing to ride, he passes from the earlier harmony
to an experience of blundering and awkward
ness. That is humanity s story as well.
Upward and upward it climbs, but floundering
always with each new ledge it reaches. The
world s robust health shows itself in the way
it gets through these times of transition.
When the Roman Empire broke up it seemed
as though everything had come to an end.
The interval between the downfall of paganism
and the establishment of Christian belief
was one of inconceivable inner and outer
chaos. The Reformation was the breach of
an old-established unity, and one that seemed
to have brought ruin in its train. If anyone
LIFE S CONFUSIONS. 23
would understand the welter that immediately
followed it, let him study the state of things
in England during the Somerset protectorate,
or the Peasants War in Germany, or the later
doings in France in Montaigne s time, or the
Thirty Years War of the following century.
Yet in all these instances order came out of
the chaos, and inestimable new elements were
added to the world s treasure-store.
So, we do not doubt, will it be in the coming
stage of the human future. But the encourage
ment which history here offers us is no reason
why we should rest content with our own
special hurly-burly, or why we should not
endeavour after the establishment of some
sort of social and religious coherency. We
feel instinctively that the old tribal unity,
where a man found no conscious breach
between one part of his life and any other
part, is the thing to be sought after, though
on an infinitely higher level. The entire
training of the modern man sets him on the
stretch after harmony. It is a fundamental
idea not only of his religion, but also of his
science and of his art. Any failure to attain
a complete rhythmic movement both of his
inner and outer world reveals, he feels sure,
a disease somewhere. What, however, we
have to beware of are the ill-instructed attempts
at the reorganisation of life that force the
pace, that try short cuts, and that end by
24 THE COMMON LIFE.
leaving out of their scheme the very things
that most need to be included in it.
What, then, should the scheme contain ?
It is mere common sense to say, at the begin
ning, that the highest place should be given
to what in man is highest. The basis of
society must be a spiritual basis, from the
mere fact that man, when we get really at
him, is spiritual. " God, Immortality, Virtue,"
says Jean Paul Richter, " are the three pillars
on which the universe rests." Without them
none of us can stand upright. Man is only
truly himself when he is consciously in tune
with the Infinite. On this the best thought
of our time may be said now to be agreed.
The late John Addington Symonds is strictly
within the truth when, reviewing the progress
of thought during the last fifty years, he says,
" the great feature of it has been to restore
the spiritual view of man and of the universe,"
and when, in the same article, he goes on to
express the view that "it is the destiny of
the scientific spirit to bring these factors, God,
Law, Christian Morals, into a new and vital
combination which will contribute to the
durability and growth of rational religion."
And here the Church, in whatever degree it
enters into the new reconstruction, must put
its first emphasis. It must, with all its might,
evangelise, and for the reason that no lasting
unity can be reached until the spiritual in
LIFE S CONFUSIONS. 25
each individual, on which that unity alone
can rest, has been reached and. squared to use.
That this must be the centre all religious
minds are agreed. Where they so disastrously
differ is as to the width and inclusiveness of
the circle that is to be struck from it. With
some, the social problem is solved by ex
communicating the major portion of society.
A small circle of " church interests " is suffi
cient to fill their minds, and all outside is
taboo. Some of the greatest religious thinkers
on this point offer us stones for bread. Augus
tine, in his " City of God," constructs the
human scheme on the idea of an eternal and
unbridgeable chasm between two classes of
mankind, the elect and the non-elect.
Bossuet s theory of the drama and its pur
veyors is given us in that terrible sentence
of his upon Moliere : " // passa des plaisan-
teries du theatre, parmi lesquelles il rendit presque
le dernier soupir, au tribunal de celui qui dit :
Malheur a vous qui riez, car vous pleurerez.
This assuredly is not reconstruction, nor
unity, but war to the knife. It is, for certain
temperaments, the easiest of solutions to
proclaim the world, with its art, its indus
tries, its amusements, as wicked and hopeless,
and to secure, as they imagine, their own
salvation by a general repudiation. But this
leaves the wicked world just where it was.
It is not salvation but desertion.
26 THE COMMON LIFE.
If Christ came to London, what would He do
with it ? Would He put down its theatres
and close all its public-houses ? We do not
think so. It was not His way. The way of
the Master was to begin with things where He
found them, and to develop them up toward
His own level. He found, for instance, the
Jewish people possessed by a Messianic dea
which, as they held it, was of the lowest and
coarsest description. But instead of crying
" Away with it," He linked Himself to it,
expanded, refined it, until the notion of a
Jewish King who was to annihilate his foes
became the doctrine of a Redeemer who should
save the world. And the Christ that is to be,
the Christ whose mission the Church is en
trusted with, will deal on the same lines with
the national life and the national prepos
sessions of our own land and time. The
spiritual mind of the nation, working toward
the long-lost unity, will have to annex and
include in its sympathies all that belongs to
the nation s life. That side of it especially
which some religionists have dealt with by
the mere brute force of repudiation will have
henceforth to be taken in hand with under
standing and sympathy. Christianity comes
not to destroy, but to save. If the public-
house and the theatre represent genuine
aspects, and meet felt wants, of human nature,
then they are a part of religion. As low a
LIFE S CONFUSIONS. 27
part, may be, as the crude Messianic idea, but
a part that can be entered into and lifted up
by the all-purifying Spirit.
Meantime, let us take courage. The present
confusions are an inevitable part of the vast-
ness of the human scheme. And they are
working toward a higher order, which is
already beginning to appear. We need not
worry as though we were the architects. We
are only the day-labourers. Behind the
scenes incessantly works One who from the
slime has lifted us to our present height,
and who has yet to show us " greater things
than these."
IV.
The Religious Affections.
THE treatise of Jonathan Edwards " Con
cerning the Religious Affections " is, we
suppose, little read to-day. Yet perhaps only
in Augustine should we find mingled in the
same proportions the spiritual intensity and
the metaphysical acuteness of this work of
the great American divine. But the modern
writer would treat the subject differently
from Edwards. The theme is still as vital
as when he wrote of it. But the outlook
both upon it and from it is quite other. We
approach it from new standpoints ; fresh
factors are seen to belong to it ; its implica
tions, as seen in the light of modern research,
are infinitely wider. The topic is specially
worth our study, in view of the modern
attack upon religion in general and Christianity
in particular.
Perhaps the most wonderful thing in man,
a thing which physiology and psychology
have combined to reveal to us, is the re
duplication in him of lower and higher forms,
THE RELIGIOUS AFFECTIONS. 29
both of organism and of consciousness. Mor
phology shows us how the human structure,
in all its details, is patterned on the lower
animal structures, but always with something
added. Our hand is the forefoot of the quad
ruped, with a special twist which the Artist
has given it. Psychology is showing us the
same thing in the mental interior. Our intel
lectual and moral qualities have resemblances
which reveal their close kinship with the mental
ity of the lower animals. But these qualities in
us are on another plane. They have been
lifted, retouched, made to operate in a new
and wider sphere. In the light of all this
the study of what we call the religious affec
tions assumes an aspect of quite fresh signi
ficance. We find in man a set of emotions,
of appetencies, of what we may call passions,
which, while intimately akin to similar things
lower down in him, have here a new touch
upon them and a different reference. We
know a love, a fear, a hate, a gladness which
belong to our animal nature, and which operate
upon that plane. But along with these we
are conscious of a reduplication higher up.
We are so fully aware of their kinship with
the lower, that we give these feelings the
same names. They are still " love, hate,
fear, gladness." But while akin, their quality
is different, and so is their action and their
outlook.
30 THE COMMON LIFE.
An initial difficulty in arguing thus from
the religious affections is the fact that they
exist in men in such widely-differing degrees,
and that in large numbers of minds, and these
not the least educated, they seem to have no
existence at all. We may agree with Lecky,
" that the religious instincts are as truly
a part of our nature as are our appetites and
our nerves is a fact which all history estab
lishes, and which forms one of the strongest
proofs of the reality of that unseen world
to which the soul of man continually tends,"
but we have to agree with a reservation.
There are people, and their numbers seem on
the increase, who appear to have no religious
sense. They interpret the universe without
it. The awe, the faith, the reverence, the
passionate love which religion calls forth have
for them no objects, for there is no God to
reverence, no moral perfection to aspire after,
no unseen mysteries for faith to work upon.
But while this is so, and has to be taken into
account, what is equally certain is that human
nature in immense numbers of instances,
and in its highest types, does contain these
faculties ; and that their operation is so
powerful as to shape the entire character
and outlook upon life.
And here the argument surely must be
from the positive fact ; from the thing that
is there, and not from the negation of it that
THE RELIGIOUS AFFECTIONS. 31
is now and then to be met with. It is with
the religious sense as with other mental
furniture. There are people who have no
ear for music, and others who are without the
colour sense. But with those who have these
things, there is not the slightest doubt that
the gift within represents an objective reality
outside. And according to the vividness of
the sense within will be the certitude of the
answering fact. As Bagehot has it, " the
criterion of true beauty is with those they
are not many who have a sense of true beauty ;
. . . and the criterion of true religion
is with those who have a sense of true
religion."
Let us, then, contemplate this fact that there
exists and has existed in numberless souls,
the passions of love, of desire, of fear, of hope,
so familiar to us all on the lower plane, trans
ferred to another set of objects, and trans
formed into a new quality. In this new form
the feelings may be described as a passion
for an invisible Holiness, for a Divine Per
fection ; " that hunger for Eternity " which
Lamb spoke of as in Coleridge ; the swelling
of a great love, fed by unseen contacts ; hopes
based on the unrealised ; an eagerness to serve,
to suffer, if need be, for the advancement of a
spiritual kingdom. Augustine has put the
thing for us in immortal words : " Where there
shineth into my soul what space cannot contain
32 THE COMMON LIFE.
and there soundeth what time beareth not
away, and there exhaleth what breathing
disperseth not ; and there tasteth what eating
diminisheth not, and there cleaveth what
satiety dissolveth not, this is what I love
when I love my God." Those who make little
of this sense and its implications speak of it
as vague, indeterminate, mystical. And it
is all that. But to us the fact that it is so adds
to the argument. The religious sense in man
is vague and indeterminate, just as a nebula
is vague and indeterminate. It is so because
it is the beginning. The nebula is only a
mist, but the mist is the beginning of a
world.
What, then, is this " mist " in the soul,
and what does it portend ? Is not this
also the beginning of a world ? The Haeckel
school have their explanation of religion,
an explanation which invariably argues back
wards. Evolutionists in all other directions,
eager there to note how out of the lower comes
ever something higher, they oddly reverse
their method when it comes to this weightiest
of all the judgments upon life. They
determine the nature of religion, not by the
immanent possibilities of that nebula floating
in the mind s uppermost realm, but by what
they find in the mud under their feet. It
is the fetich, the worship of a Mumbo Jumbo,
and not the love of a St. Francis, the sacrifice
THE RELIGIOUS AFFECTIONS. 33
of a Henry Martyn, which they take as their
measuring line. It is a singular perversity,
as contrary to true science and philosophy as
it is to the soul s deepest instinct. It is the
nebula yonder, and not the dust-heap below,
that counts in this business. What now
exists as aspiration will condense in time
into new organs and new powers. The
desire to fly will transform itself presently
into wings.
But when we speak of the religious affections,
as we know them to-day, we have to be specific,
We perforce bring Christianity into the refer
ence, for it is Christianity that has developed
them into a form and a quality not recognisable
elsewhere. Ritschl is unquestionably right
in his contention that what we know as the
Christian experience is a new and distinctive
development, answering to a new and unique
factor that Christ introduced to the human
consciousness. It is, indeed, this addition
to the world s inner life, this new power of
being and feeling, with all it implies, that con-
stiutes the one claim to-day of the Christian
Gospel. We say that this element is unique.
We know what had existed before it, and
outside. We know the heights to which a
Bhagavad Gita rises in the East, and to which
a Seneca and an Epictetus attained in the
West. The level they reached was perhaps
never better expressed than in the utter-
3
34 THE COMMON LIFE.
ance which Antoninus Pius, on the night he
died, gave to the tribune who asked him for
the password, " ^Equanimitas."
When from these regions of thought and
feeling, worthy as they were, we come to the
New Testament, we are in a new world.
A fresh vocabulary has to be coined to
express the style of inner life which has now
commenced. A phase of being, dropped as
it seemed out of the heavens, had settled into
human souls, a phase which the recipients
described as "love, joy, peace, gentleness, meek
ness, temperance, faith." The new state gave
birth to new acts. Operari sequitur esse.
" Doing follows being." There was a wonder
in heaven and upon earth. Men began to love
each other. As Augustine says of St. John,
" Much has he said, but it is almost all about
love." It is these new soul-states of which
it gives account that makes the early Christian
literature such good reading. How well we
understand Gregory Thaumaturgus, when,
speaking of his fellowship with Origen, he
declared, " And, to speak in brief, he was
Paradise to us." Out of the realm of the
Christian affections what deeds also have come,
what sacrifices, what heroisms, what suffering
for the common good ! The story of an old
saint who, seeing his Lord in a vision, asking
what reward he desired, replied, " Lord, that I
might suffer most," has been again and again
THE RELIGIOUS AFFECTIONS. 35
repeated. One wonders, indeed, from where,
with this force of the religious affections
eliminated from man, the future great deeds
would come. With their disappearance the
heroic age would cease. The human story
would become too sordid to be told.
It is in this sphere, we repeat, that the
true credentials of the Gospel are to be sought.
When science and criticism have said their
last word the powers vibrating in man s upper
most realm, that derive historically from
Christ, will remain as His sufficient witness.
More. It is in the existence of these
powers and affections that we find the surest
argument for a life beyond. Who shall
say that these spiritual forces are not weavers,
and that what they weave is not our spiritual
body ? At least, as surely as the organ of
vision in us points to an answering visible
outside, so, according to all analogy, do these
finer organs demand also their answering reality.
There is a wonderful passage in Walter Pater s
"Appreciations," where, speaking of Sir Thomas
Browne s famous " Letter to a Friend," he
deals with his account of the dissolution of a
deeply spiritual man of his acquaintance.
Says he : " The spiritual body had antici
pated the formal moment of death ; the alert
soul, in that tardy decay, changing its vesture
gradually, and as if piece by piece. The
infinite future had invaded this life perceptibly
36 THE COMMON LIFE.
to the senses, like the ocean felt far inland
up a tidal river." Truly in this uppermost
sphere of us are wonderful things contained,
worthy of all our investigation. This nebulous
cloud that floats in our sky is the portent of
a heavenly world.
V.
Of the Exceptional.
WE have all heard of Babbage s arithmetical
machine, one of whose functions was to produce,
at rare intervals, after a long succession of
even numbers, an odd number. He used it as
an illustration of the possibility of what we
call the miraculous. The machine worked
strictly according to law, yet its continuity
of result was every now and then broken
in upon by what seemed to outside observa
tion something contradictory and inexplicable.
On the line of things here opened our age seems
to have something of its own to contribute.
It fights shy, indeed, of the miraculous,
but we are not bound to that term. The
word might well have a rest. It has been for
years in bad company, allied with all manner
of superstitions, frauds and ignorances. The
religious thought of to-day could get on
excellently well without it. In its stead
we will use here a term that is strictly scientific,
that has no sinister associations, and yet which,
properly looked into, seems to contain all
37
38 THE COMMON LIFE.
of really vital that belonged to the other.
We will study a little the implications of
" the exceptional."
The cosmic scheme, so far as we can make it
out, contains in all its departments two
orders of movement, what we may call the or
dinary and the extraordinary. When we study
the life of an island or a continent we see,
going on through ages so vast that they
seem to constitute an absolute permanence,
the operation of the ordinary. Day follows
day in ordered sequence ; century after cen
tury the hills and valleys offer substantially
the same appearance ; changes there are,
but of the most gradual and imperceptible
character. The lands are being steadily worn
down by the action of rains and frosts, by the
movements of glaciers, by the wash of rivers
carrying enormous masses of deposit to the
sea. But all is so quiet and ordered that men
think of their country, as they see it, as prac
tically eternal. And then in a moment all may
be changed. The odd number turns up in the
machine. Geology offers us the history of
convulsions that in a day have created moun
tain ranges, turned plains into inland seas,
and wiped out the old configuration as though
it had never been. On a smaller scale we
have seen these things accomplished in our own
time.
When we lift our eyes to the heavens we
OF THE EXCEPTIONAL. 39
seem to discern a similar condition on a vaster
scale. Astronomers report to us ever and
anon the phenomenon of a star, known to
them aforetime as, perhaps, of the twelfth
magnitude, suddenly augmenting in its bril
liancy, until for a time it shines as of the
first magnitude, and then by-and-by dwindles
back to visual insignificance. What has oc
curred ? Is this a world a solar system on
fire ? We have no telegraphic communication
as yet with our universe. We can only vaguely
guess at some tremendous happening. Far
away yonder in those stellar depths, after
measureless ages of the ordinary, the machine
has again produced the odd number, and all is
changed. What has happened there may
happen elsewhere. Who knows to what bourn
our sun is rushing, in that tremendous move
ment in which he is carrying ourselves and the
rest of the planets with him ? The temperature
at his surface is to-day something like three
million degrees, or fourteen thousand times
more than that of boiling water. We all live
to-day and go about our daily work because our
heating apparatus registers that amazing figure.
But do we suppose that will go on for ever ?
In every field of observation we choose
the same rule presents itself. We look at the
sea rolling in upon the beach. One wave follows
another of the same height and substance,
and then " a ninth wave," a giant which
40 THE COMMON LIFE.
towers above and seems to swallow up the
rest. The principle asserts itself in our
careers. This week is very much like last,
and the steady humdrum has continued maybe
for years. But an event is waiting for us
behind the corner yonder which will give our
world a new aspect. The commonest mortal
of us, with a birth at one end and a death
at the other of his history, finds that, with his
average experience, a significant enough ex
ceptional is mingled.
Now, that the heavens and the earth, the
movement of suns and of our own lives tell
everywhere the same story is surely a broad
cosmic hint which it behoves us to examine
and to riddle out if we may ! It is intensely
interesting to note how man has dealt with it.
His way to truth has been generally a zigzag
to extremes on this side and on that, the dis
covery of the said extremes aiding him finally
to strike the middle and right course. It has
been so here. In the religious solution which
he sought of his problem, man began by making
the exceptional the chief feature. He ex
aggerated it beyond all bounds. God could
only be properly apprehended through the
marvellous. Men could only be sure of Him
when they found Him apparently contradicting
His own laws ! In mediaeval times the miracu
lous was the only profitable reading. St.
Francis is to us beautiful and inspiring for his
OF THE EXCEPTIONAL. 41
spiritual character, his self-sacrifice, his lovable-
ness. But his biographers, to ensure his re
putation as a saint, must stuff their accounts
with marvels. Bonaventura s narrative is a
tissue of wildest fables. The monks gave cir
cumstantial accounts of the resurrection of
Francis, and of the miraculous preservation
of his body. There is a story of him seeing the
Saviour with the Virgin Mary, while the latter,
addressing her Son as " Altissime omnipotens
Deus," begs Him to be mindful of the saint s
prayers.
It was entirely natural that, from this
attitude towards the exceptional, people should
fly off later to the opposite extreme. We have
accordingly had the spectacle of educated men
accepting a view of things which makes a
clean sweep, not only of stories of this char
acter, but of all departures whatever from
what they deem the established order. Thus
in the eighteenth century we see Condorcet
affirming " there is not a religion that does not
rest on ignorance of natural laws," while, in
the nineteenth, one at least of the evolutionary
schools declares that their doctrine of develop
ment spells the ruin of supernatural Chris
tianity.
We are recovering somewhat in our day
from this too easy cocksureness. We have
found out that evolution, instead of explaining
everything, explains very little ; is, indeed,
42 THE COMMON LIFE.
in itself sorely in need of explanation. It
offers us no light on beginnings or endings.
Darwin himself was incessantly telling people
that his discovery offered no information
on the ultimate mystery of variation. Tyndall
confessed there was in it no bridge across the
gulf between the physical and the mental.
At its utmost it has something to say simply
on the "How." As to the "Why," the
"Whence" and the "Whither," it has no
word.
To the history of religion we are bringing
to-day a method of study different alike
from the credulity of the Middle Age and from
the barren negativism of the encyclopaedists . It
is a method which, on strictly scientific grounds,
recognises the " ninth wave " and the " odd
number." Man s religion, we see, is primarily
a matter of psychology, and the facts in this
sphere facts of the present day, and not
merely those recorded of millenniums ago are
many of them, in their wonder and mystery,
beyond all our present attempts at scientific
systematisation. A book like that of F. W. H.
Myers, on the " Human Personality and its
Survival of Physical Death," offers evidence
enough on that head. It is when we approach
Christianity through this psychological avenue
that we begin to understand the new Testa
ment its story, its phraseology and its point
of view. Wernle has put all this for us in
OF THE EXCEPTIONAL. 43
a striking sentence. Speaking of the early
Christians, he says : " They have experienced
something altogether abnormal in Jesus, but
in order to express it their own words fail
them. So they turn to the Jewish categories
nearest at hand, and attempt to confine
the indefinable within these definitions."
In this view, Christianity is seen as harmon
ising with the general system of things, as we
see it in every department of life. Christ is
the exceptional in history as the burning of a
star is the exceptional in astronomy. Strange
would it have been indeed if, in the sphere of
the soul that highest thing which the uni
verse has so far disclosed there should have
been no wonder, no break in upon the average
from the inner depths, such as are offered us on
the inferior planes of stars and continents !
Men have been occupied ever since in trying
to put into language what the break was and
meant. The language was, of course, always the
language of the time. It was, perhaps, in
evitable that it should come finally to a
Trinitarian formula, for that formula was one
of the oldest in the world, and is found not only
in almost every religion, but in almost every
philosophy, from Neo-Platonism to Hegel.
The point for us is that, however related to
human language, the wonder was there.
In Jesus, as Marheinecke has magnificently
put it, " God knew Himself man, and man
44 THE COMMON LIFE.
knew himself God." In Christ humanity
finds its " ninth wave," and it was to this
height that it rose.
If the world history, including Christianity?
offers us on this scale its doctrine of the ex
ceptional, it is surely for more than a merely
speculative purpose. Its hint is that if we
be wise we shall, in shaping our own lives,
take seriously into account the exceptional
as well as the ordinary. We shall give each
its due place, the place they take in the cosmic
scheme. We cannot afford to be merely
ordinary. The Universe we live in is not built
and not run in that way. We are in a scene
where the commonplace has been continually
broken up by the vast happenings. When
all has seemed at a stand, from the Unseen a
fresh note has been struck and a new era
opened. The whole suggestion is of events,
resources, possibilities, waiting to be disclosed
that are more wonderful still.
In such a world we cannot, we repeat,
afford to be merely parochial. You and I
are related not only to what happened yester
day, but also to the beginning and the finish of
things. Our story is to be not a mere bread-
and-butter history, a weaving, a bartering,
an amusement history, but one of spiritual
culminations, according to the scale on which
we are built and on which the universe is built.
But who knows what the scale is, either of the
OF THE EXCEPTIONAL. 45
one or the other ? One thing is certain that
the purer our aim in life the more constantly
shall we be met with the surprises of spiritual
riches that open to us. To us will come many
a time and oft experiences such as that which
James Russell Lowell describes when, to quote
his words, " I never before so clearly felt the
Spirit of God in me and around me. The
whole room seemed to me full of God." At
such times we obtain glimpses of the ultimate
meaning of things. May we not say that the
exceptional visible in the universe, in history
and in our own lives is one combined prophet
utterance speaking to us of final destinies
such as eye hath not seen nor ear heard nor
hath entered the heart of man to conceive?
VI.
Masters and Disciples.
IN the long, wonderful history of the human
spirit there is, perhaps, nothing more worthy
of study than the relation, perpetually re
newed within it, of the leader and the follower.
One finds there the whole story of religion.
The ceaseless recurrence of this relation, in
every age and amongst every form of the in
ward life, marks it as one of the elemental
laws of the soul. The mass of men live spirit
ually on what a few elect natures have seen and
felt. To these last has it been given to rescue
something from the viewless realm of universal
life, and to make it visible as a treasure
embodied in their own personality. To their
fellows they teach the secret of this con
quest. Explorers of the immeasurable king
dom of the Unseen, they light on its richest
spots, and show the way to them. It is an
illustration of the essential loyalty of humanity
to the highest that every teacher with some
thing genuine in this kind to communicate
finds always his band of disciples. And that
46
MASTEES AND DISCIPLES. 47
new teachers continually arise and that new
groups form ever around them is, to the discern
ing, an evidence at once of the hunger of the
human heart for inner good, and of the in
exhaustible treasures of it that are yet to be
disclosed.
But in this matter of leading and following
a number of questions arise which, for our
well-being as individuals and as communities,
need to be carefully thought through. Half
the confusions and animosities of the ecclesi
astical world have arisen from the fact that
on these subjects people, including often
enough the leaders themselves, have not got
down to the bottom principles involved.
What is our call to be a leader or a follower,
and to what extent are we to lead or to follow,
and for what end ? Be it observed at the be
ginning that the answer to these questions
is not the same in the sphere of religion as
in that of external affairs. In military opera
tions, for example, the end to be gained re
quires a large suppression of individuality.
When an army has the happiness to be com
manded by a man who knows his business, every
body under him realises that the one thing
required is to obey orders. The subordinate
feels here the truth of Horace Walpole s
mot in speaking of Cromwell, " And to be sure
if we must be ridden tis some satisfaction
when the man knows how to ride, Even in
48 THE COMMON LIFE.
religion, in what concerns its external adminis
tration, the question of leading and following
has no great complications. The mass of
men will be safe in yielding themselves to the
man who sees best and quickest what is wanted.
The German reformers followed a true instinct
in rallying in these matters to Luther because,
as Melancthon said of him, " in the midst of
uncertainties he alone saw what was to be
done."
It is when we come from matters external
to matters internal, to religion s inward and
vital side, that the complications begin.
Problems the most puzzling spring themselves
upon us from all sides, and it becomes the
easiest thing possible to lose our way. In
this sphere, for instance, the ethics of the
leader seem at some important points to
contradict those of the follower. A devout
Methodist, for example, in asking himself in
what way he is a disciple of Wesley will,
if given to analysis, find himself knee-deep in
difficulties. Should he follow his orders or
his spirit ? One of the early injunctions of
the society was, " do not mend our rules,
but keep them." But did the leader become
what he was by keeping other people s rules ?
Was it not in breaking through rules and con
ventions, in obedience to an irresistible
inward pressure, that he gave a revived
religious life to his time ? A man who
MASTERS AND DISCIPLES. 49
is laboriously following out the details of
a life-scheme laid down by a master may be
doing as well as it is in him to do, but precisely
in proportion to the slavishness with which he
follows is he alien from the real spirit of him
who leads. The one is initiative, the other is
mechanism. The disciple has his eye fixed
on a man, his ear takes in articulately-uttered
instructions, his courage is maintained by the
crowd who are with him in his observance.
The master, alone in front, has nothing before
him but an Infinite across which he has to find
the track, nought to guide but a formless,
voiceless inspiration, whose dim, awful meaning
he strives ceaselessly to spell out and under
stand. It seems at first sight impossible
to escape the paradox here presented ; im
possible to avoid the conclusion that the
more strictly we follow a man the further are
we really away from him.
When, however, we look more closely
into the matter the confusion disappears.
It is only by a misapprehension of the end
which religion is working towards by its
relation of master and disciple that our
seemingly hopeless contradictions arise. There
is no impassable gulf fixed between the mental
and moral states of leader and follower,
for the simple reason that, in a proper and
healthy spiritual evolution, the conditions
are temporary and are continually being
4
50 THE COMMON LIFE.
transposed. It is here we have to recognise
the essential difference between the ends
sought in a religious community and those of an
external organisation such as an army. While
the latter seeks an object outside itself, the
former seeks one within itself, namely, the
moral freedom and inner development of its
members. And from this it follows that
the relation of master and disciple must be
partial and temporary ; often, in fact, rever
sible. It is with the true teacher as with the
mother who leads her child in its first steps.
She leads in order that the child may by-and-by
dispense with leading. The master who is of
any use to us is he who shows us how to find
ourselves. He helps us, not by cutting steps
in each of which we must place our feet,
but in training us to cut our own. Wesley,
to cite our illustration once more, will have
his best followers in those who, like him,
have the insight to discover the religious needs
of the age they live in, and the courage to
use its spirit and its materials in supplying
them.
In the ideal spiritual community each
member will combine in himself the functions
of master and of disciple. He will be a master,
for if he has developed the inner possibilities
of his nature as God meant him, he will have
won from life and have garnered into his per
sonality a something of Infinite made visible in
MASTERS AND DISCIPLES. 51
his finite, which all who behold may study, and
delight in, and learn from. And for this some
thing which every true disciple gains, the
greatest will sit at the feet of the humblest,
and each will learn from every other. It is
here we find humanity s true and only priest
hood. In that one tiny sphere which each
true learner has made his own by possession
and experience, he is a priest to his fellow ;
from it he communicates to him of mysteries
whereof God has made him special custodian.
Whatever our ecclesiastical position or pre
tensions, it is only as we stand in this one
spot of spiritual territory where God has
specially met and dealt with us that we can
exercise any effective priesthood.
It is wonderfully instructive here to note how
in life these relations of master and disciple
interchange. Often is it that while we are
at the farthest remove from a man s thought
we are the heartiest disciples of his feeling.
The late Dr. Martineau assured the present
writer that he had gained much of his richest
spiritual nutriment from the old Evangelical
teachers. It was a discipleship of feeling
rather than of opinion which led M. Taine,
himself a Positivist, to place his children under
the care of a Protestant pastor. The loftiest
form of mastership is, indeed, always of char
acter. There is no supremacy comparable to
that of holiness. The remarkable saying of
52 THE COMMON LIFE.
Aristotle that "it is the characteristic of the
good neither to commit faults themselves nor
to suffer their friends to commit them,"
translated into Christian language expresses
the moral compulsion of the saint. What a
superb illustration of this have we in that
visit of Catherine of Siena to Gregory XI.
at Avignon, when she, the dyer s daughter,
clothed with no authority but that of her
sanctity, made the Pope and his corrupt
Court tremble at her words, and caused the
spiritual autocrat of Christendom to humbly
follow her to Rome to attempt there a
reformation !
It is to be observed, also, that every true
leading is, on its upper side, always a following.
The iconoclast in breaking through conventions
and authorities that are visible, does so at a
bidding more imperative within. There is a
look on the faces of the great spiritual leaders
which tells that of all men they are most under
orders. Only the orders are such as have never
yet been written on the world s statute-books.
When Luther declared at the Leipsic Disputa
tions : " I will give myself into the hands of no
authority, be it that of a Council, or the
Emperor, or the Universities, or the Pope,"
the words seemed to those whom he opposed
as the very madness of intellectual libertinism.
What they really expressed was the inner pres
sure upon a spirit in which was struggling
MASTERS AND DISCIPLES. 53
a sense of truth and life to which none of these
authorities had yet arrived.
To lead is often the saint s duty, but his
truest joy is in following. It will be his atti
tude for ever. Always in his upward pro
gress will there be a sense of something yet
to be developed, of a good that still waits to
be disclosed. It is his happiness to realise
that however far he gets there is always some
thing above him. As Goethe said to Ecker-
mann, " We are not freed by refusing to
recognise anything higher than ourselves,
but rather by reverencing something that is
above us. For in reverencing it we brng
to light the consciousness that we ourselves
bear the possibility of this Higher in us."
It was this Higher made visible to men in
the life of Jesus that gave the world the
grandest exhibition of discipleship it has yet
seen. Nothing in history, so far, has been
comparable to that Divine compulsion of love
which has glowed generation after generation
in human hearts, and which finds fitting
expression in the words of the Church s first
historian : " We who are converted to Him
know Him not only with the voice and sound
of words, but with all the affections of the
mind ; so that we prefer giving a testimony
to Him even to the preservation of our own
lives."
VII.
Religion as Power,
WHAT may be called the Whitsuntide or
Pentecost theology comes to our generation
with a special significance. And this because
it is that side of Christianity which connects
it with psychology. For it is precisely along
this line that thinkers of all schools are
investigating religion. The story at the
beginning of Acts, and the passages relating
to it which we find in the Epistles, supply us
with the data from which we can study the
dynamic element in Early Christian history.
Here have we a doctrine of forces. The
suggestion is of Christianity as above all
things a reservoir of powers that strangely
stirred human souls. Men are inquiring now
with a new eagerness what those powers were,
and how they stand related to the whole
religious question of to-day.
And it is well the inquiry should take this
turn, for, if we mistake not, it is just here
that the vindication of Christianity, and its
continuance and extension as a system of
54
RELIGION AS POWER. 55
religious faith, will find place during the
stormy years that are coming. Stormy years,
we say, for those who study the signs of the
times see clearly that the Church is about to
witness an attack upon the fundamental
Christian positions to which previous history
furnishes no parallel. That conflict will effect
enormous changes, not so much in the faith
itself as in the forms it will take, and the
reasons in men s minds for holding it.
On the Continent this campaign is already
in full career. In France, a scientific writer
expresses the mind of many of his compatriots
in the phrase, " Uhypothese Dieu s elimine."
Pere Hyacinthe tersely sums the French
situation in the sentence : "In France the
Jesuits are masters of the Church and the
Atheists are masters of the Republic." The
Chretien Franqais some time ago sketched a
scene at the Trocadero, where, on a wet Sunday
which had emptied the churches, the vast hall,
with a seating accommodation of five thousand,
was packed to the doors, the occasion being
an atheistic demonstration in which the
speakers poured scorn on " the dead God on
whom the priests live," while saluting justice,
the moral idea and the social order.
We have not yet reached that point in
England, but a set of influences, starting
from far removed sources, are converging
towards it. There is a new propaganda of
56 THE COMMON LIFE.
Agnosticism, with money behind it, amongst
the working classes. In cultured circles,
criticism, as much within the Church as
outside it, is riddling almost every one of the
earlier theological conceptions. Alongside the
New Testament records of the supernatural is
placed that vast accumulation which modern
research has unearthed of similar stories
belonging to the other early world faiths.
We have a philosophy of the myth and of the
religious legend. We are reminded how the
biographers of St. Francis, within a generation
or so of his death, as in the Fioretti, and the
Life of Bonaventura, crowded their record
with miracles. The legend of Gautama is
unearthed from the Buddhist literature, with
its miraculous birth, its temptation in the
wilderness, where angels afterwards ministered,
and its ascension. We are bidden remember
how Plato, in the generation immediately
following his death, was credited with birth
from a virgin. Our own generation is called
in as witness on this theme. The Babists,
the followers of the young Persian religious
leader, who was executed within the lifetime
of many of us, are quoted as relating of him
endless marvels, including a transfiguration.
In short, the religious annals of the world are
ransacked to exhibit to us the fact that the
characteristics of Christianity as a supernatural
religion are precisely paralleled in almost
RELIGION AS POWER. 57
every one of the rival faiths that have claimed
the allegiance of mankind. In this view,
Christ s miracles are developments, according
to a well-known mythopceic law, of simple
occurrences ; the resurrection faith was the
result of neurotic trance states in the minds of
Peter and Paul ; and the whole theology,
built on this history, compounded as it is of
utterly unscientific conceptions of the universe^
falls inevitably to the ground.
That is where, according to a host of largely
accredited teachers, we are at present. And
when all this has been said, what ? For many
the logical sequel is that Christianity is on
the point of extinction. Said a man of letters
the other day to the present writer : "In
fifty years your Christianity will have died
out." The odd thing is that this same pre
diction has been made with equal confidence
generation after generation, and somehow
never gets itself fulfilled. Butler, in his
Analogy, tells us how the fashionable society
of his time were convinced that the Gospel
was dead, and that they would now take their
revenge on it for having so long interfered
with the pleasures of the world. But the
corpse turned out to be a remarkably lively
one. Directly after Butler wrote, there arose
in England, under Whitefield and Wesley, one
of the greatest and most far-reaching religious
revivals Christendom has seen. And to those
58 THE COMMON LIFE.
who look beneath the surface of things it
would, despite present appearances, come as
no surprise if a similar revival, on a yet greater
scale, were to burst on the world of to-day.
For the writers who, from the considerations
just sketched, argue the approaching downfall
of the Christian Church, overlook the capital
circumstance of the situation. What, indeed,
are those considerations in themselves ? Is
it a blow to faith to learn that peoples outside
Christianity have reached their religion along
parallel roads ; that they too have divinised
their great teachers, and lifted their careers to
the plane of miracle ? Some of us see quite
other than an agnostic argument in the dis
covery that men, the world over, have traversed
similar paths in their spiritual ascent ; that
the soul everywhere in its climb has found the
same kind of supports the kind adapted
to its stage of development ; that, as it put
forth its tendrils, here at hand was always
some natural stock ready, round which they
could entwine themselves ; that, finally, the
soul, everywhere assured of a Divine imman
ence of which it partook, recognised most
plainly that Divine in the great Masters
in whom the Eternal Spiritual was so clearly
revealed.
Moreover, this whole side of things, argued
to its utmost extent, is, after all, a huge
irrelevance* It leaves, as we have said, the
RELIGION AS POWER. 59
capital point untouched. Christianity does
not stand or fall by this or that conception
of miracle, by this or that theory as to the
way in which God manifested Himself in
Christ. The essential theory in the Gospel
is that it is a dynamic. It offered itself to
the first age, as it offers itself now,
as a power to change men s characters for the
better. The apostles preached Christ as a
power of God to salvation, and they pointed
to results as a proof of the fact.
It is precisely here that the whole question
hinges. The central problem for people on
this planet is not an affair of criticism or of
definitions, but of how to realise the best life.
" How can I secure the highest states of the
soul ? What is the way to the noblest feeling
and character ? How shall I fill my nature
with the energies of love, of justice, of purity,
of self-sacrifice ? How shall I reach the finer
realms of the spiritual, of the heavenly, the
fair world of devotion and of immortal hope ?
How can I attain to a character which I can
myself respect, and offer as an example to
my neighbours, and to my children after me ? "
This is the issue. There is a modern thinking
which meets it with a simple answer. In the
name of philosophic materialism it denies the
possibility of human moral improvability.
Says Schopenhauer, voicing here a widespread
opinion : " The wicked man is born with his
60 THE COMMON LIFE.
wickedness as much as the serpent is with his
poison fangs and glands ; nor can the former
change his nature a whit more than the latter."
If that were true then indeed would religion
have received its death blow. It would have lost
its every credential, and its very reason for
being. But if there is one thing certain in
this world it is that the Schopenhauer dictum
is a false one. It supposes a man s structure
is the whole, whereas it is only the half. The
other half is the sum of forces that are playing
on him. It is here that religion comes in,
as representing the whole upper range of
powers that are incessantly shaping our race
towards finer issues. We read in California
of a new force generator, of which the prime
motor is the sun. The solar rays, collected upon
a vast reflecting surface, produce an energy
which is to be used on a great scale in industries
and manufactures. Religion, in its purer
forms, might also be expressed as a sun
generator, operating on a finer reflecting
surface. Related to that Sun which is behind
the sun it pours upon the soul energies whose
source and whose results are alike spiritual.
When we open our New Testament, we are
conscious of something other than the questions,
numerous enough, which lend themselves to
criticism. Beneath and beyond all, there is
the evidence of the work of our sun generator.
Here is an immense energy, producing in the
RELIGION AS POWER. 61
far-off time which it records, and producing
to-day, precisely those inner soul states of
which we are in search. Out of these pages
leap on us powers that generate love, devotion,
self-sacrifice, purity, hope, and trust. Nowhere
else do we get the like in such profusion, in
such fineness of quality. The people who
live by this rule become the core of a nation s
private and civic life. They reach the best
working philosophy of living. They find
strength to live and strength to die. When
Bishop Westcott lay on his death-bed, on his
last day on earth, the nurse, stealing quietly
in, heard him repeating to himself the hundred
and third Psalm, " Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and all that is within me, bless His holy name."
It says something after all for a philosophy
of life which enables a man, at the very end,
to sum up his experience in those words of
rapturous joy and of adoring gratitude.
The Christian Church, as we said at the
beginning, has stormy days in front. It will
in those days be searched and tried as by fire.
It will come through all victoriously precisely
as it realises itself as a power, a force of spiritual
renovation. Christ by His earthly career and
work helped men to be good. He has been
helping men ever since to be good. The
Gospel is essentially an affair of character-
building, and in that role nothing can destroy
it or stay its progress. The force that worked
62 THE COMMON LIFE.
at Pentecost came out of those heavens which
contain still the immeasurable treasures that
await man s future. Immense changes are
before us, but man s spiritual heritage is beyond
assault. Faith falls but to a greater rising.
I lay in dust life s glory dead
And from the dust there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.
VIII.
Religion as Experience.
THE phrase " religious difference " is one
with which we in England are all too familiar.
But our definition of it is commonly a surface
definition. As we use the term the picture
before our minds is of the clash of theologies,
the quarrels of the rival churches, the dispute
between the believer and the man who does
not believe. All this, however, while real
enough in its way, is not the root of the matter.
The deepest religious difference lies elsewhere.
We are nearer the central fact when we ask,
" Why is it that religion should be to some
of us the greatest conceivable weariness, the
utmost extremity of boredom, while to others
it means a veritable ecstasy ? Why is it
that one man finds religion a galling yoke, an
endless series of restrictions upon liberty,
while another knows it as a glorious freedom,
a sense of limitless expansion ? " It is here
we strike the real " religious difference." The
question lands us on the high watershed, the
" great divide," both of religion itself and of
man as the subject of it.
64 THE COMMON LIFE.
For it is at this point we discover that
the word " religion " covers two quite different
things. It stands at the same time for a
reality, and also for a report of that reality.
And when we talk of religion as spelling a
conscious expansion, the soul s innermost
thrill, it is, we find, always of the first of these
definitions we are speaking, while the sense
of boredom and irksome restraint belongs
always to the second. The two things may
be otherwise classed as religion at first-hand
and religion at second-hand, or, again, as the
religion of experience versus that of tradition.
We are most of us so immersed in the second
hand product, that we have the greatest diffi
culty in looking beyond it. And yet, unless
we comprehend that first-hand that lies
behind our second-hand, we shall never reach
sure ground, either for mind or heart.
Whatever may be its after fortunes, religion
has its rise always as a free movement of the
soul. Its starting-point is an experience. All
the religion at present in sight, that contained
in Bible, in Church institutions, in theology,
began here. The grittiest formularies are
the petrifactions of what was once volatile
and flowing ; they are visibles congealed from
an invisible breath. Religion comes first to
great souls as an obsession, an answering
thrill to the call of the Infinite. Theology
is the oft-repeated, manifold attempt to put
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 65
this primitive thrill into words. It is the
endeavour to translate into forms of the in
tellect the mind s emotion as it opens to that
spiritual world of which it finds itself a part.
The Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is the
stratified formation, rising layer upon layer,
of these deposits from the unseen. Or, to put
it differently, its contents are the harvests
from that all-surrounding ocean of the spiritual,
whose tides beat incessantly on this islet of our
human life.
The tides from the Infinite flow in first
upon selected and prepared souls. These do
their best to mediate to others of what they
have received. But it is only a partial trans
mission. What has really passed in the minds
of the spiritual leaders is always their own
secret. They could not reveal it if they
would, because there are no words available.
What has determined them to their great
choices has been rarely a process of argument.
Our logic mills make their noisy revolutions
in everybody s sight and hearing, but the
soul s decisive operations take place deeper
down. We talk, for instance, of the " Chris
tian religion," but does the phrase help us to
understand what religion was in the bosom
of Christ Himself ? We know His words and
deeds, and the forces He set going in the
world ; but who will ever fathom the mystery
of His own interior self-consciousness ?
66 THE COMMON LIFE.
The great leaders, we say, have always
themselves been affected, in the first place,
in a way beyond argument. Their career
began in an experience which they could never
fully interpret to others. It was of various
kinds. An event, waiting for them from all
eternity on life s highway, was with some the
evangelist. Or it was a dream, or a trance,
or a voice sounding in the ear. An Augustine
hears the tolle lege, a Paul is overwhelmed by
a vision of the Crucified. With some a new
faculty seems to have suddenly opened.
Al Ghazzali, a Persian Sufi of the eleventh
century, discourses thus of prophetism : "As
there are men endowed only with the sensitive
faculty, who reject what is offered them in the
way of objects of the pure understanding,
so there are intellectual men who reject now
the things perceived by the prophetic faculty."
He argues that for men to deny the perceptions
of this faculty is the same as for the blind to
deny the visible world. In a line with this
mediaeval Mohammedan is the Catholic Madame
Guy on, who says of her sojourn at Grenoble :
" I felt myself on a sudden invested with the
apostolic state, and discerned the conditions
of the souls of such persons as spoke to me."
With some there is a sudden inrush of what
is felt to be Divine. Jacob Behmen thus
describes his experience at Gorlitz : " There
came a blessed peace or Sabbath of the soul
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 67
that lasted seven days, during which I was,
as it were, inwardly surrounded by a Divine
light. The triumph that was then in my soul
I can neither tell nor describe."
It is the fashion in certain circles to-day to
disparage such experiences in the name of
pathological science. We have a medical
materialism which will describe you St. Paul s
vision on the Damascus road as " a discharg
ing lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an
epileptic " ; will dismiss St. Teresa as a case
of hysteria, and Francis of Assisi as a " heredi
tary degenerate." But all this is too amusingly
superficial. It is on a line with Lombroso s
definition of genius as a form of disease. If
we granted him his definition would it in the
least diminish our obligations to genius, or
the value of its products ? The things which
genius perceives in art, or music, or science,
are they the less real because of the physical
disabilities of the seer ? A Mozart surely
does not the less truly open for us the world
of music because a pathologist proves to us
that he was a neurotic ? And in religion, as
in art or science, we judge by the quality of
the products, by their " worth for Kfe," and
not by the physical qualities of the transmitter.
Were we to accept the data of these modern
brain-sifters we should by-and-by have no
realities to report at all, for does not all our
knowledge come through the brain, and is
68 THE COMMON LIFE.
there a brain in the world of which some
imperfection may not be reported ?
These first-hand experiences then, borne
in on the consciousness of elect souls, are for
the world the origin of its religious life. But
from the very beginning they commence to
take on new forms. Working on the first
recipients with an extraordinary energy, they
issue from them as winged words, as mysterious
influences, as startling activities. Sympathetic
natures are drawn together who feel the reflex
of the new power, and begin to work as its
instruments. When the founders of the move-
ment have died a secondary stage begins.
It is the stage, not so much of the reality, as
of report of the reality. We are here again at
the " great divide " between life and tradition.
In Christianity we have the turning-point
clearly marked close on to the apostolic age.
Gospels are being produced, in which is
treasured every word and deed that reflected
the marvellous Life. Men are living on memo
ries. We have a Papias who feeds on the
recollections of survivors of the first circle.
"I do not know," says he, " that I
derived so much benefit from books as from
the living voices of those that are still sur
viving." The process has reached a further
stage when, at the close of the second century,
we have Tertullian resting everything upon
the apostolic tradition and succession. " Let
RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 69
them," says he, as a complete refutation of
heretics, " produce the original records of
their churches ; let them unfold the roll of
their bishops running down in due succession
from the beginning in such a manner that their
first bishop shall be able to show for his
ordainer and predecessor one of the apostles
or apostolic men."
What now of this secondary religion ?
Are we to condemn a Tertullian s conservatism
for the tradition, for the exact succession of
doctrine and institution, as something con
trary to the free spirit of the first experience ?
That would be a hasty procedure. For these
gleaners and custodians, who so eagerly
gathered and so religiously guarded all that
had come down to them from the great creative
age, showed, at any rate, by their zeal, their
sense of the priceless value for mankind of
those first original experiences. They saw,
in what the apostolic time had to offer, an
incoming to the human sphere of Divine
treasures of fact, thought and life which it
would be high treason to the race to let slip.
They were " the honest brokers " of the
spiritual, and have laid us under eternal
obligation by what they have transmitted.
And the best men of those ages never forgot
that, in faithfully handing down what they
had received, they were most effectively helping
succeeding generations to a first-hand religious
70 THE COMMON LIFE.
consciousness of their own. In the words of
Christ and of His apostles they recognised
the spiritual laws, by obeying which the soul
became sensitised for the reception of new
light and power. It is while on the roads
marked out by the ancient leaders that the
modern pilgrim gets his vision. It is on this
account that the Scriptures remain the eternal
treasure-house of the soul. So often in study
ing them has the illumination corne which,
for the reader, for ever transformed his world.
We have here, then, the true relation be
tween first-hand and second-hand religion.
The one is the record of the other, and the
road to it. But the second is of no use with
out the first. There is no divorce so tragic as
the one between these two. Corruptio optimi
pessima. No disgust equals that of a good thing
gone bad. The world s immense yawn over the
conventional service is Nature s verdict upon
a violation of her highest law. The Church of
to-day loses the whole lesson of its past if it
fails to find in tradition its own leaping-point
to the upper sources.
A favourite theme of romance is the find
ing of buried treasures. But none of these
stories equals, for intensity of feeling and the
sense of boundless wealth, the history of men
who, to-day as yesterday, reach, on the ways
of common life, their moments of revelation.
The whole world has become their treasure.
RELIGION AS EXPEBIENCE. 71
Men talk of the evils inflicted by a misguided
religionism. But oh ! the happiness of the
real thing ! No one has given us that story,
for it cannot be put into words the moment
when men have seen clearly the Eternal Love
shining upon them, and when what before
was an outlook on poverty and failure and
utter despair has been changed into the bliss
of a Divine assurance ! There are humble
people to-day, weaving at the loom, working
in pits, on death-beds, who, because they
have that experience, are happier than kings.
When preachers carry this experience to their
pulpit the churches thrive. They cannot
tell all they know, but the sight of them
handling this treasure, and calling their
brethren to share it, is in itself an irresistible
appeal.
IX.
What of Sunday?
THE winds of criticism are beating upon all
our institutions to-day. An American writer
has just been asking Anglo-Saxondom what
it candidly thinks of the English Monarchy.
In like manner we are asked to revalue
that ancient asset the English Sunday. The
Church by various signs shows it is not en
tirely satisfied with it, and the world is in a
not less critical mood. A large and, as it
seems, increasing section of the population
has frankly given the religious tradition of
it the go by. To foreigners our Sunday is
an astonishment. A Parisian some years ago
said that London on Sunday was about as
lively as the bottom of a well. But while one
side regards the day as too Sabbatical, the other
finds it not Sabbatical enough. Religion has
in almost every age deplored its too feeble
hold upon the day. We hear Chrysostom,
in language that might be of yesterday,
lamenting the sparse attendance at church
as compared with the crowding at popular
72
WHAT OF SUNDAY ? 73
entertainments. It is a curious echo of this to
hear Sir Nicholas Bacon in 1572, in opening
Parliament, asking : "Why the common people
in this country universally come so seldom
to Common Prayer and Divine Service ? "
Whatever our standpoint, the topic here
raised is one to be looked into candidly and
carefully. Few questions touch weightier
issues, or come closer home to us all, than this :
What has our Sunday to say for itself, in
view of the national consciousness of the time ?
Our own generation is, of course, not the first
to raise that question. At the time of the
French Revolution Sunday was one of the first
objects of the attack. It was abolished by
the National Convention, and in its place
a public holiday decreed every tenth day.
But it was not quite so easily to be got rid
of, not even in free-thinking France. The
new calendar did not work. The ten day
arrangement, after a few years of existence,
dropped out and for a century France has had
again her seventh day and shows no disposi
tion to part with it.
The incident is significant as showing
the deep roots which the day and its obser
vances have struck into the life of the world.
There are things that are bred in the blood,
and this is one of them. Sunday is one of the
oldest things that man brings with him.
We do not know how old it is. The statements
74 THE COMMON LIFE.
of Philo and Josephus may be exaggerated
as to its universal diffusion amongst the
ancient peoples, but it does goes back a long
way. We find seven to be a sacred number
everywhere and everywhere has it an applica
tion to the week. More than a thousand years
before Abraham s time there was Sabbatical
observance in the Babylonian plains, and in
connection with religious services of a
peculiarly elevated character. With all the
Semitic peoples it has been from the dawn of
history an unbroken tradition. Humanity
has, in fact, been brought up on the idea
of devoting a day, at regular and shortly-
recurring intervals, for the cessation of labour,
for the recovery by each individual of his
personal freedom, and for the consideration
of his relation with the unseen. If the doings
of humanity could be chronicled by the in
habitant of some outside planet he would find in
them probably nothing more striking than this.
Christianity, on its appearance, took over
this great religious asset. It changed the date
of Sunday in the week, and gave to its obser
vances a flavour of its own. It is, indeed,
precisely in connection with these observances
that the whole modern question of Sunday
comes up. The early Christian services were
not popular. There was nothing spectacular
about them. How different the gatherings
which Justin Martyr pictures for us, or those
WHAT OF SUNDAY ? 75
which Pliny describes in his letter to Trajan,
from the gorgeous religious festivals which
paganism was familiar with ! Culture has
always been struck with the difference here.
It has been expressed for us in imperishable
words in that immortal sonnet in which
Keats dedicated his poems to Leigh Hunt :
Glory and loveliness have passed away ;
For if we wander out in early morn,
No wreathed incense do we see upborne
Into the East to meet the smiling day ;
No crowd of nymphs, soft-voiced and young and gay,
In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,
Roses and pinks and violets to adorn
The shrine of Flora in her early May.
Christianity was indeed in this respect the
most daring of innovations. Religion, which
in that old pagan time had been associated
with everything that was gay and voluptuous,
had now to the popular mind become the
mentor who scathed the world with its con
demnation, while robbing it of its cherished
delights. The Church itself later began to
ask whether those early enthusiasts had not,
in their zeal, put, in this matter, too great a
strain upon average humanity. We witness
next accordingly an interesting evolution.
In numberless places the old heathen festivals
reappeared, baptized into Christian forms.
Names of saints took the place of the classic
divinities. The Catholic cult of the Virgin,
76 THE COMMON LIFE.
there is abundant evidence to show, was a
direct carrying over to the Church of the
old worship of Astarte, the Queen of Heaven.
It seemed, we suppose, to the theologians of
those times, that the gold of the Gospel needed,
for its proper working, to be mixed with some
alloy of humanism.
The same thing has occurred later. Puritanism
was the endeavour to get back the primitive
Christian feeling and the primitive Christian
life. Its leaders had tasted the indescrib
able joy which, to the souls who find it,
lies treasured in the Gospel. They realised,
as the first Christians did, that in all the world
there was nothing like it, or to be compared
with it. Here lay the key to life s enigma,
the satisfaction of the heart s deepest thirst,
the dignifying to an immeasurable degree of
the human status, work and outlook. At all
costs must this treasure be preserved pure and
undiluted. The vessels that held it must be
secured against leakage. One of these was
the Sabbath, and the Sabbath was accord
ingly to be rigorously safeguarded. It was
devoted wholly to religion, and to a certain
form of it. The services were denuded of
the sensuous, and supercharged with the
spiritual. We read of diets of worship which
lasted, with little intermission, from nine in the
morning till five in the evening. And the
worshippers could stand it. A robust and
WHAT OF SUNDAY ? 77
slow-moving people, bred in the open-air,
unfed by nervous excitement, remote from the
age of railways, of telegraphs, of the half
penny press, they found in the Sunday wor
ship the one great stimulus of the week.
The church was temple, theatre, lecture-hall,
press and literature in one.
Yet the Puritan had not reckoned entirely
with human nature. The world at large was
a wider one than his. The attempt to starve
the eye and the ear in the interests of pure
spiritual perception was not well founded. Eye
and ear, he might have remembered, are
God s creation as much as the innermost
soul furniture, and not to be neglected with
impunity. What a significant remark is that
quoted in the Anglican Homily on " The Place
and Time of Prayer," made by a woman to
her neighbour : " Alas ! gossip, what shall
we now do at church, since all the saints are
taken away, since all the goodly sights we
were wont to have are gone, since we cannot
hear the like piping, singing, chanting and
playing upon the organs that we had before ! "
The Puritan, in short, did not in his calcula
tion strike the human average, and his system
suffered accordingly. His own children re
volted. Some of the greatest reprobates of
the Restoration period were bred in Puritan
households.
With all this history behind us we are con-
78 THE COMMON LIFE.
fronted to-day with the problem as it affects
our time. And that history furnishes, surely,
some hints for the solution. For one thing
it yields the conviction that the spiritual aspect
of Sunday is a treasure which, equally with the
Puritan, we are bound to safeguard. The
greatest thing in humanity to-day, and the
pledge of the greatest things to come, is the
spiritual consciousness which the Church
possesses, and which, when its worship is real,
comes then to its greatest height. Evolution,
in its age-long working, has produced
nothing else comparable to this. To bring
men universally into the possession of it is to
confer the greatest boon that life offers.
But in the meantime the Church must im
prove on Puritanism by learning to attach itself
to average human nature. It is of no use for
the engine to start off at fifty miles an hour
if the coupling has not been made between it
and the carriages. It is the business of the
religious teacher and worker to master the
conditions of the time and to plan his cam
paign accordingly. And he may do it with
good heart. For when all is said and done
in other departments, there is nowhere else
such a power of appeal and fascination as
the Gospel offers. When drama, literature,
science, music, sport have done their best,
Christianity can offer a joy and an uplift
which still transcends them all. What the
WHAT OF SUNDAY ? 79
Church needs is a new faith in itself, in the mes
sage it has to offer, in the Divine forces en
trusted to it. As Schleiermacher says in the
" Reden," speaking of Christianity : " The
living spirit of it, indeed, slumbers oft and
long . . . but it ever awakens again
as soon as the season in the spiritual world
is favourable for its renewal, and sets its
sap in motion.
In its renewal ifc only needs to catch the
spirit of the time. Its Sunday must, first of
all, be a democratic Sunday, a people s day.
Its institutions and services must be an
appeal to every healthy human instinct.
It should offer art and music for eye and ear,
and the joys of fellowship for the social
nature ; it should let loose amongst the poor
and disinherited all its play of kindness and
brotherly love. It has to popularise the Chris
tian Sunday by flooding it with sunshine.
May we not, bringing fresh aids and know
ledge to the task, seek again to realise the
ideal of holy George Herbert, and make Sunday
a time of which we can say :
Thou art a day of mirth !
And where the week-days travel on ground,
Thy flight is higher as thy birth !
O let me take thee at the bound !
Leaping with thee from seven to seven,
Till that we both (being tossed from earth)
Fly, hand in hand, to heaven !
X.
Mystery.
PERHAPS the deepest thing in human life
is its mystery. The sense of it is our chief
result so far. It is at once our torment and our
joy. How much of life s fascination comes
from the puzzles that are wrought into its
texture ? Mystery haunts every step of our
journey. It begins with the children, who
love and dread it. How greedily do they
swallow the ghost story which is to keep them
shuddering hours after in the dark ! In the
glare of later life the sense of it is apt to
become blunted. But we have only to think
ourselves away a moment from the provincial
ism of our accustomed surroundings, to find
again all our wonder-faculty alert. There is
the same crowd to-day in London, but yonder,
just as actual as Fleet-street, are the desert
solitudes of the moon, where no foot has trod
and no voice been heard for a million years.
The temperature in this room is about sixty
degrees. But at this identical moment the
temperature on the sun s surface is about three
80
MYSTERY. 81
million degrees, a heat 14,000 times that of
boiling water. And that fiery tempest is a
genuine part of to-day s business ! I am doing
at this moment something I call thinking,
yet without knowing anything essentially
of the process. The psychologist tells me
that every phase and moment of it witnesses
thousands of groupings and regroupings of
the primordial mind-stuff, in which the con
scious " I " takes no part. Am I, then, the
thinker or they ? And so at each step a new
wonder.
It was out of the world s mystery that the
religions grew. Each was an attempt, in its
own way, to explain the riddle of the uni
verse. But the riddle remained always the
master. And so the religions, which were to
explain the mystery, became themselves a
mystery. In their later developments the
old world faiths drew on this element as one of
their chief attractions. In India, in Persia, in
Greece and Rome, in Scandinavia, and amongst
the Western Celts, in almost every tribe of man,
in fact, we see arising behind the popular
ceremonies a secret cult, open only to the
initiates, in which a closer approach was
supposed to be made to the ultimate secret
of things. The Eleusinian and Thesmophorean
" mysteries " in Greece, those of Mithras in
Persia, of Zeus in Crete, of the Druids in our
own land, all showed the same features,.
6
82 THE COMMON LIFE.
and rested on the same instinct. Their
processions, lustrations, sacrificial offerings,
mystic formulas, " Deiknumena," " Dromena,"
and what not, were alike a play on the human
appetite for the unknown. As Kant in his
" Anthropologische Didaktik " observes, " It
is this field of the dimmer, undefined ideas
(dunkler Vorstellungen) that is the greatest
province in man."
Amongst the religions the relation of Chris
tianity to mystery is noteworthy. It takes
full account of it, and, indeed, plants itself
broadly in this realm. So far from attempting
to explain away life s riddles it boldly adds to
them, itself being the greatest riddle of all.
The New Testament is par excellence the
mystery book. It baffles us at every turn.
That it contains so much, and yet so little ;
that it raises such enormous questions, which
it never attempts to answer ; that it offers us
so transcendent a central Figure, who Himself
nevertheless writes us no single word, and
whose coming and going are alike unknown ;
that it gives us the loftiest teaching set in a
framework whose crudity confounds the modern
mind ; that it puts in operation enormous
spiritual forces of which it vouchsafes no
scientific account ; that this epoch-making
book itself, of such priceless value to humanity,
should have been exposed to all the hazards
of literary fortune, flung on the world in scat-
MYSTERY. 83
tered pieces, the gathering and preservation
of which is left to a mere instinct all this
and a thousand other things meet and con
found us in our attempted solutions. There
was no need for the Church to elaborate any
" mystery " of its own, as in later ages it was
so fond of doing. The bare facts of the
recital offer us, in this line, more than on this
side the veil we shall ever be able to digest.
A curious development of religious think
ing in our time has taken a view of the Christian
" mysteries " which one may notice in passing.
Modern Theosophy, in its rechauffe of the old
Oriental philosophies, has sought to give
them vogue by representing the early Christian
teaching as full of these very dogmas. Within
the mass of the Church s adherents, they tell
us, was an inner circle of "initiates" to whom
this secret doctrine, which formed the essence
of the Gospel, was imparted. Do not the
epistles again and again speak of " the mys
tery " ? This, the occult, esoteric teaching
they say, was the mystery, and the reason
it has not been preserved as the true doctrine
of Christianity lay in the ruthless suppression
of it later by the Christian Fathers, and the
careful destruction of the literature which
contained it. It is really very funny that in
telligent people should believe and propagate
such ideas, and this with the actual facts
so easily accessible. Irenaeus, who wrote
84 THE COMMON LIFE.
from the very midst of this period, might have
had a prophetic foresight of the modern
Theosophic statement when he penned these
remarkable words : " For if the apostles
had known hidden mysteries, which they
were in the habit of imparting to the perfect,
apart and privily from the rest, they would
have delivered them specially to those to whom
they were also committing the Churches
themselves." Precisely. Who should be the
guardians of the " inner doctrine " but the
appointed heads of the Churches themselves ?
But we know what their doctrine was, and what
their " mystery." It was precisely the con
trary of what, from this quarter, has of late
been offered as the genuine " innermost "
of the early Christian teaching.
To come back, however, to our main theme.
It is strange to note the periodical rebellions
against the mysterious in life, and the en
deavours to show that the whole affair is com
monplace and quite easily seen through.
But the attempts invariably break down.
Gaps yawn in the new system which is to
explain everything, peering through which
we find ourselves again confronting the old
unfathomable. The oddest venture in this
line of our day is that of Haeckel in his " Riddle
of the Universe," a work which, were it not
for its deplorable effects upon the ignorant ,
might surely be classed as one of the most
MYSTERY. 85
amusing books this generation has seen.
Its dogmatism is so entirely naive ! Pro
fessor Haeckel has found everything out.
He has exploded the old mystery, and found
it a bag stuffed with sawdust. There is
nothing to wonder at in suns and systems.
They are just matter and force, and there an
end. Haeckel regards himself as, in philosophy,
a disciple of Spinoza. One wonders what
Spinoza, were he alive, would have thought
of his pupil ?
The book, we say, is so amusing. Its
logic ! When the talk in it is of Spinoza,
we have again and again expounded and ex
tolled the Dutch-Jew philosopher s doctrine
of the " eternal substance," the ultimate which
expresses itself throughout the universe in
the two forms of extension and thought.
But when the book comes to physiology,
we have chapter after chapter working up
to the thesis that soul, consciousness, thought,
is purely an affair of the brain. So many con
volutions, so many cells, so much complexity
of cellular combination, and just so will the
thought be. So much development of brain,
so much intellect. The disease, decay and
extinction of the one is the disease, decay,
and extinction of the other. It is all so
simple. But is this, then, the explanation ?
Our Beethoven is seated at his piano and plays.
A wire breaks, and his music becomes de-
86 THE COMMON LIFE.
fective. All the wires break, and the music
ceases. Ah ! then, there was no Beethoven at
the piano. The piano played itself. Beeth
oven was a myth which science has exploded.
Shade of Spinoza ! To imagine that his doc
trine of the eternal substance, expressing itself
throughout infinity as extension and thought,
should be translated into the idea that the only
thought, the only consciousness possible to
the universe, was through a brain exactly like
ours ! Haeckel is continually reproaching
Christianity with its anthropomorphism, but
the wildest preacher of its doctrine never ven
tured on such anthropomorphism as this.
Indeed, our materialist prophet is a warn
ing to all such as step beyond their metier.
His attempt at criticism of the Gospels shows
to what absurdities a man may be reduced
when he goes beyond the region he knows
and Haeckel knows his own realm as few do
to judge the things outside it. Many of our
readers have doubtless noted his extraordinary
statement about the Gospels and the Council of
Nicaea. " The entire list of Gospels num
bered forty. The canonical list contains four.
As the contending and mutually abusing bishops
could not agree about the choice, they deter
mined to leave the selection to a miracle."
And then he tells the absurd story of the differ
ent Gospels being placed under the altar and
the inspired ones leaping out upon it. He
MYSTERY. 87
gives the story as though it were the accepted
Christian account of the admission of the
four Gospels to the canon. It is difficult to
characterise this statement. Is it " humour,"
or ignorance, or what ? Has our Haeckel
ever read any early Christian history ? Has he
heard even of Tatian s Diatessaron, a work
which in the early part of the second century,
over a century and a-half earlier than the
Nicene Council, attempted a harmony of our
four Gospels ? Has he ever looked into
Irenaeus, who, at the same period, in his work
" Against Heresies," speaks of the four Gospels
as a predetermined number, comparing them
to the four zones, to the four winds, &c.?
Does he know nothing of the multitudes
of references of the same period which show that
generations before Nicsea our present Gospels
were the everywhere recognised ones, held and
treasured as separate, and apart from all
competitors ?
Our Haeckel has added to the " Riddle of
the Universe " instead of solving it. It is a
mystery in itself that so able a man should,
on the ultimate phases of his problem, get so
far astray. His philosophy is as crude as his
history. Even Schopenhauer, whom he quotes
so fondly, might have taught him better.
" Against the assertion that I am a mere modifi
cation of matter, this must be insisted on
that all exists merely in my idea." And
88 THE COMMON LIFE.
had he duly pondered another sentence of
his master Spinoza, he would have seen that it
shattered his own position to atoms. " Things
must exist not only in the manner in which
they are manifested to us, but in every manner
which infinite understanding can conceive."
Yes. Here speaks the philosopher and
not the sciolist. The modern materialist
invites us to take the sense-verdict of a con
sciousness that has only begun to be developed
a mere glance upon the surface of things
as the ultimate thing to be said. Man will
never be satisfied with such an answer. His
religion may be limited in its expression,
but it has reached a deeper grasp of reality
than this. Its doctrine of miracle, of the super
natural, may be, as to its form, somewhat wide
of the mark. But in so far as it is a recognition
of the wonder of the universe, especially of the
wonder of its moral and spiritual life, it touches
the centre. Its life of faith is, when all is said,
the only true attitude in face of the mingled
light and shadow upon the world. Against the
scoff of Haeckel we can put the word of a
greater scientist than himself. " My supreme
desire," said Kepler, "is to find the God in
myself whom I find everywhere outside."
XL
Office and the Man,
THERE is perhaps no subtler nor more sug
gestive psychological study than that of the
interaction between a man and his office. It
is a wonderful play between opposites ; be
tween fixed and fluid, between past and present,
between a sensitive soul and an iron system.
And there is no better position for observing
it than an old country such as our own.
English life is from end to end seamed with
officialism. In whatever direction we turn we
see the enormous power it exerts in the mould
ing of thought and action. At first view the
whole social structure, in this aspect of it,
would appear to be an elaborate scheme for
the prevention or suppression of originality.
The population is run into ruts, which are so
deep that there is no climbing out. It is the
rarest thing to find a free and uncommitted
biped. Before he has really found himself our
man has become clerk, or cleric, or trader, or
fighter, and is taking on as quickly as may be
the shape and colour of his line of things.
89
90 THE COMMON LIFE.
It is curious to watch the action here of some
position that is great and ancient. It is a
sinister action. One might picture the office as
a kind of ogre that feeds on the individuality,
on the innermost life, of every fresh holder.
Take, for instance, the English Episcopate.
What a hard-and-fast mould into which to
cram a live soul of to-day ! How much is left
of the actual man in an archbishop ? By the
very terms he must cease as thinker and inno
vator. He is the embodiment of a tradition.
The tradition chooses his garments, his beliefs,
his very gestures. A thousand conventions,
written and unwritten, hem him in. The
office is a giant, a thousand years old, com
pacted of a myriad influences, deeds, experi
ences of the past, a giant too strong for any
separate individual who thinks to wrestle with
him. And so " Aftmrath to Amurath suc
ceeds." The English Episcopate is made up
of men well above the average in character and
ability. But their office is always stronger
than they. The Episcopate continues, but the
man dwindles under it. We never look in that
direction for great reforms, great movements
of human thought. There has been no
English bishop since Atterbury who has really
risked anything. In the sphere of religion,
what was accomplished by the whole bench
in the eighteenth century as compared with
the work of Wesley ? We doubt if the average
OFFICE AND THE MAN. 91
Englishman remembers the name of a single
Church dignitary of the period except Butler.
In France one Voltaire in the same century
outweighed, as a teacher of his countrymen,
the whole clerical host. In the nineteenth
century, did the Episcopal order, by its entire
collective intellectual utterance count as a.
feather in the scale when compared with the
word of one layman, Charles Darwin ?
The office system, indeed, on this view of it,
seems to have worked badly, and one is in
clined to ask why society, in its arrangements,
should have permitted so tremendous a handi
cap on the enterprise of some of its best
members. The question is already being
answered in the loosening of that ancient
grip. As Matthew Arnold says : " Dis
solvents of the old European system of domi
nant ideas and facts we must all be, all of us
who have any power of working ; what we
have to study is that we may not be acrid dis
solvents of it." We shall escape this last
danger, in the matter before us, by remember
ing how office, as related to the individual, has.
gained its strength, and what its power has
really meant in the world. For there is some
thing to be said for office and its power. It
is worth noting here, to begin with, that the
authority of the office, as such, is, in its original
idea, strange as it may seem, a piece of demo
cracy as opposed to despotism. It is the
92 THE COMMON LIFE.
embodiment of Burke s view that " while the
multitude for the moment may be foolish, the
species is wise, and when time is given to it,
as a species it almost always acts right." The
office, in its limitations on the holder s liberty,
is really the experience of the world, operating,
it may be, over an age-long period, as to what
the holder of this office should be and do. It
is the view of the community as opposed to
the caprice of an individual. His position is
a trust for the carrying out of what masses of
men, thinking and working through long
periods of time, have agreed upon as the best
to be done and said for certain objects.
Still more noteworthy is it that whenever a
personality of the first class has entered upon
an office he has invariably enlarged its scope,
brought new elements into it, stamped his
own character upon it as henceforth entering
into its conception. We see, for instance, how
in Catholicism the popedom acquired continu
ally new features with each great man that
passed its chair. The Roman See was not the
same thing after a Gregory the Great had held
it, or a Hildebrand, or an Innocent III. So,
in the simpler idea of the Protestant pastorate,
what an enrichment has come to it from the
labours of an Oberlin, who showed how a
country minister might lift the standard of
life of a whole population ; or of a Von Bodels-
chwingh of our time, whose labour-colonies in
OFFICE AND THE MAN. 93
Germany have revolutionised the whole ques
tion of vagrancy and of the unemployed !
Indeed, there are few things more impressive
in history than the sight of a great man wedded
to a great office. He uses it rather than allow
ing it to use him. When the Roman imperium
links with a Marcus Aurelius, when an English
kinghood finds an Alfred the Great, it is as
when a great soul inhabits a mighty body.
Yet it remains, so seems the verdict of the
years, that for the very greatest work in this
world, the existing offices, whatever their uses
or history, seem inadequate and generally an
impediment. Times arrive when the formulas
for which they stand are worn out, and when
humanity asks for a fresh start. It is then
that personality asserts itself over office. That
idea of a perfectly clean slate, of the abolition
of the rut order of going, of deliverance into a
gloriously new, unfettered scheme of things,
has been caressed by all the thinkers. Des
cartes handled it in philosophy, Rousseau
prophesied of it in the social world. Emerson
preached to his Americans that theirs was the
time and the land for it. But really the only
originality possible here is the originality of a
new, great soul. And such when they come
are outside office. They are the office. Jesus
presented Himself to his countrymen as a
laymen, " the carpenter s son." His doctrine
had no sacerdotal, no Levitical sanction. It
94 THE COMMON LIFE.
held from Himself. As Tertullian so finely
says, Dominus nosier veritatem se, non con-
suetudinem cognominavit. " Our Lord said,
4 1 am the truth, not I am the custom. " It
was as when George Fox cut out for himself
his suit of leather and of his own inspiration
set forth to preach to England. To-day we
see all the myriad ecclesiastics of Christendom
through nigh twenty centuries founding them
selves upon the unofficed Galilean layman.
It is so, we say, almost always with the
teachers and workers who go to the roots of
things. No existing position fits exactly to
these new births of time. And that because
they are new, and are here to create the new.
In Russia to-day we see on one side a vast
hierarchy, innumerable in its members, wealthy,
hoary with age ; on the other a Tolstoy, who
has flung away what officialism he had, and
speaks from the plain ground. What, to
Europe, is the message of Russian ecclesiasti-
cism as compared with this man s solitary
word ? It is the same everywhere. When the
great poet comes, he comes not into the office
of a bishop, but into the immeasurably wider
office of a man. He is here to express not a
past, but a present and future ; not a depart
ment, but the whole sum of things, and in
terms of his own time. We have no offices,
we say, for the really great callings. They are
here by an invisible consecration and empower-
OFFICE AND THE MAN. 95
merit. What succession, for instance, is there
to the order of sainthood ? Yet when it comes
it is the most potent thing in the world. How
significant in this regard, as exhibiting the in
herent rank of saintliness among the world
values, is that quaint story of St. Martin of
Tours, in which the chronicler relates how,
being sent for by the fierce Emperor Maximus
to hear him talk, " the saint spoke of nothing
but religion, duty, heavenly blessedness, while
the Empress hung on his words, and at last
insisted on waiting on him at a meal, arranging
the chair and table, bringing water for his
hands, standing beside him in motionless
observance, and collecting the very fragments
of bread from his plate at the conclusion of
the supper, as if such relics were preferable
to an imperial banquet."
This age-long story of office and the man
has left some puzzling problems for our own
time. The great offices are there, with all their
stiffness of tradition, their rigidity of outline,
their colouring, ready to dye to their own hue
the men who take them. Many of the world s
greatest posts are hereditary, and it is here the
tragedy of office is oftenest played. Think of
the Tsardom, with its tradition of barbarian
absolutism, of slaughters, of Siberia, of corrup
tion and serfdom, and then of a soul born
into that fatal line with a poet s refinement,
with a patriot s ardour for liberty ! More
THE COMMON LIFE.
often, however, the high offices have been a
lure. They appear never to have lacked candi
dates. They appeal to so much in human
nature. They seem to add so materially to a
man s natural stature. Office is a splendid tree
for a short-legged Zaccheus. If only, however,
our man of five feet four, as he climbs to his
elevation, would remember that the perch he
has reached advertises, not so much his eleva
tion, as the fact that he is exactly five feet
four ! This side of the comedy promises to
be played indefinitely. Plus ga change, plus
c est la meme chose.
At present the men of real consequence
seem in increasing numbers to stand outside
the more restrictive offices. The investigators,
the original writers, the men who are social
forces work in their own names and from their
individual standpoint. Their office, if they
have one, is usually self-created. A " General "
Booth has his title in inverted commas, but it
carries more power than a bushel of generals
whose titles are orthodox and without commas.
Yet the world cannot get on without its
offices, no, nor without its traditions. The
lesson which emerges from a study of this kind
is not to cast aside the past, but to use it in
a more rational way. What we are learning
to-day is the new use of old forces. Niagara,
which has thundered for ages and done nothing
but thunder, is now manufacturing electricity.
OFFICE AND THE MAN. 97
The peer, the ecclesiastic, the monarch have
also age-old forces behind them. It is their
golden opportunity to do with them what has
been done with Niagara ; let them harness
the old power to new ideas, to fit the needs of a
new time.
English society is to-day stuffed with titles.
They crowd us. It is as in New York at the
end of the Civil War, when, as was once
elegantly observed, " You could not spit out
of a window without hitting a colonel." But
when all is said, is there a better title than this,
which Sir Nathaniel, in Love s Labour Lost,
gives to schoolmaster Holof ernes : " You are a
good member of the Commonwealth " ? Shall
we ever get back in England the days when her
greatest offices were filled by her greatest men
when it can be said again of her Prime Minis
ters, for instance, what Bunsen said of one of
them : " Gladstone is the first man in England
as to intellectal power, and he has heard
higher tones than anyone else in the land " ?
The true relation between office and the man,
whether in Church or State, has surely never
been better put than in that sketch of the
government of the Primitive Church which a
Christian Father has left us : " The tried men
of our elders preside over us, obtaining that
honour not by purchase, but by established
character."
XII.
The World s Happiness.
THE greatest human assets are precisely those
which it is impossible to put into figures.
You may reckon up a nation s military forces,
but how will you gauge its morale ? The
census will give you the number of people
in England on a given night, but where is the
census of its thought-power ? The true riches
of humanity are ever unseen. Its real king
dom is always not of this world. The
dominant spiritual quality of life is never
more present to us than when we look into
a theme like this, of the world s happiness.
Here is something which all men believe in,
for which all are thirsting. Happiness is a
religion on which no one turns his back. And
yet on this theme, so vitally and universally
interesting, what do we know ? What sta
tistics are at present available ? We can
find out how much wheat or cotton there is
in the market to-day. The men who deal in
corners can inform you. But how much
happiness is there ? Is the output increasing ?
98
THE WOBLD S HAPPINESS. 99
Is there a likelihood of its deposits being used
up, or are there any as yet untouched sources
of supply ? It is when we ask questions of
this kind that we begin to discover what
raw, untrained hands we are as yet at the
whole business of living.
The modern world is built, so we all say,
on commercialism. Everything is under the
rule of give and take, of barter and exchange,
of so much for so much. And yet that world
which man at his deepest habitually lives in
knows nothing at all of this, and goes by
another set of laws altogether. Happiness is
outside commercialism. Yesterday s sun
shine and spring beauty filled us all with delight,
and not one of us paid a penny for it. The
millionaire s entertainment, on the other hand,
on which he had lavished thousands, pro
duced all manner of results, duly chronicled,
but not this. That is the odd part of it. We
make elaborate preparations to capture what
is as common as the air, and miss it ! For
the reason why we are not happy is certainly
not because of any lack in the original supply.
The universe is doubtless too big an affair
to have had our little human joy as "its prime
object. But certainly it seems to have been
one of its objects. For it has been joined to
everything we do, and laid along every foot
of the ground we traverse. There is no
function of a healthy life that does not yield
100 THE COMMON LIFE.
its pleasure. In working and in resting, in
sleeping and in waking, in society and in soli
tude, in youth, manhood, old age ; in the play of
our muscle, in the activity of our brain ; in
anticipation, in realisation, in reminiscence ; in
the view of the actual and in the mind s
sweep over the unseen ; in the ardour of con
flict and in the hush of contemplation, we
find this inmost treasure of life waiting to
yield itself.
The sense of the infinite resources here
available grows on us as we study the world s
history. Happiness is not a deposit like a
coal bed, which, after being drawn upon for
years, shows signs of giving out. The experi
ence is rather of an immeasurable supply
which only awaits a growing capacity to use
it. Man at his lowest doubtless found life
pleasurable enough, but his history has been
that of a gradual rise in the quality of his
pleasure. The saint will be ill employed if,
from the height of his spiritual endowment,
he scoffs at animal gratification. It will be
the rich man scorning the poor man. In the
early human beginnings these rough satis
factions were all there were to be had, and we
may rejoice that in so rude a time those poor
relations of ours were as merry as they were.
But the miracle of man is in his constant
new becoming. This feeble biped carries in
him the potency of a seemingly infinite
THE WORLD S HAPPINESS. 101
development. And as he grows, from one
stage into another, always comes he into
contact with subtler and more refined delights.
" The soul," says a mediaeval saint, " can
never have rest in things that are beneath
itself." " Beneath itself " ! Humanity en
joyed those " things beneath " so long as
there was nothing higher. But the universe
has, to this child of promise, unfolded since
some of its more intimate secrets ; it has
hinted of joy sources hidden aforetime, and
so have we man discontented with the animal
in him, and training his spirit for the newer
paradise.
This joy world, as it emerges into its higher
forms, shows itself as something entirely
spiritual. How remote it is from that of
commercial calculation is seen when we
examine the way in which happiness comes,
grows, and distributes itself. Were there no
other evidence to go by we might from this
one standpoint argue for man as an ethereal
being. Happiness is the outflow of life, the
communication of it from one soul to another.
It is the rhythmic movement of a spirit s
peace and joy which, by a beautiful law, pro
pagates itself and impinges upon other spirits.
And the movement here partakes of infinity
in its exhaustless energy. When, for instance,
a great nature has poured its inner history
into a book, the store of refreshment, after
102 THE COMMON LIFE.
having ministered to countless other natures,
is there still, with its overflow of benefaction
no whit diminished, waiting to rejoice all later
generations. Think of the treasure of hap
piness shut up in the world s great books !
Here the select spirits wait to give us of their
best. Erasmus is eloquent of this preserved
delight. Says he : I give myself up to the
society of my friends, with whom I enjoy the
most delightful intercourse. I turn aside
with them into some quiet nook, far from
the madding crowd, and either whisper gently
into their ears, or give heed to their sweet
words, communing with them as with my
very soul. Is not this the purest of joys ?
. . . They speak when spoken to, when
not addressed they keep silence. . . . They
give steadiness to the successful, and comfort
to the troubled, and are always the same."
It is in this matter of quality in happiness,
both of that which we enjoy and that which
we communicate, that the chief problem lies.
Here is the region of the noble and the ignoble
choices. To be content with animal satisfac
tions is to take prehistoric man as our type
and to deny ourselves fellowship with that
diviner man that is to be. The men of the
plain, lured by the " Sirenum voces et Circcea
pocula" who prefer Sodom and Gomorrah to
climbing the mountain hard by, are people
whose taste has been uneducated. The strange
THE WORLD S HAPPINESS. 103
taste in joys ! We suppose that Roman lady
whom Juvenal describes, who to satisfy a
momentary caprice ordered one of her slaves
to be crucified, took a real pleasure in the
scene, and that the Emperor Galerius " who
never supped without blood " enjoyed his
meal.
But the Power that is working in man, and
ever lifting him forward, makes it impossible
that he should rest in such levels as these.
He knows too much. While he lurks in the
lowlands he is disturbed by the far-off hail of
the spiritual elite who, " epris des hauteurs"
have climbed the heights and discovered there
a new human possession. It is the infinite
betterness of this good that makes the lower
pleasure by comparison to be evil. Man s
long training in the suppression of the lower
for the sake of the higher has been really a
lesson in the static and dynamic of happiness.
He has found that temperance and chastity
are the keys and passwords to new kingdoms.
Happiness is a secret of living, and so the
world s immeasurably greatest benefactors
have been those who have caught that secret
and imparted it to others. The Church s
communion at its purest has ever been the
gathering together of souls who have a secret
to impart. There is no joy comparable to
that which thrills upon us from contact with
some highest soul. That was why men gave
104 THE COMMON LIFE.
up all and followed Jesus. It was what led
gay young knights to break off from court
and camp and follow Bernard into the
wilderness. How true to all this is that word
of Peter the Venerable in his letter to
Bernard ! " If it were permitted to me, my
dear Bernard, and if God willed it, I should
prefer to live near you and be attached to you
by an indissoluble tie, than to be first among
mortals and to sit upon a throne ; for must not
one prefer to every living thing the happiness
of living with you ? " It is precisely the same
experience which lives in that utterance of
Gregory Thaumaturgus who, in a yet earlier
age, found heaven in the company of Origen.
Speaking of the first day of meeting him he
says, " That day was in truth the first day to
me, and the most precious of all days, if I
may so speak, since then for the first time the
true sun began to rise upon me."
As we watch these high souls, shedding their
exquisite gift upon others, the question
inevitably arises, " Whence did they get it ? "
For certainly they did not themselves make
what they have ; they found it. The theme
leads us here to the Unseen Personalities.
Happiness for us is an affair of person and
person. The soul cannot make its own music.
The touch must come from another. And
our topmost human personalities have gained
their happiness from that touch. There is a
THE WORLD S HAPPINESS. 105
philosophy to-day which dismisses personality
from the heart of things, and will not allow
man to speak of a Heavenly Father. It is
a philosophy which to us misreads the ultimate
facts of the soul. Our highest consciousness
could only have been awakened by a Con
sciousness, our love and joy by a Love and
Joy behind. That this Consciousness is
beyond all our thought, granted. But it
contains it all and more.
In the highest spheres it is, we say, the
personal that gives us our joy, and all along
the line it is in this same personal that we find
it. The best gift we can offer our friends is
the best in ourselves. Is it not worth thinking
of, the extent to which by our simple being
and doing we can increase the world s happi
ness ? We can add definitely to this treasure
every day. Scientists speak of matter and
force in the universe as being a constant, the
amount being never added to nor diminished.
But herein the spiritual transcends the material.
Here is a value that can incessantly grow.
Whatever our station may be, our gifts or lack
of them, we can, by willing it, add continu
ously to the sum of human joy. And this,
after all, is the world s best possession. As
Westcott says, " The most precious things are
the commonest, and they are to be gained
(for others as well as for ourselves) not by
large fortunes but by large souls."
106 THE COMMON
Perhaps our greatest debt is to those brave
spirits who, striking the rock of hardest fate,
have found living waters to gush out even
from its flinty wall. When men can sing
in a dungeon they advertise the essential
soundness of the universe. Was there ever
a better advertisement of it than Sir Thomas
More, who in his " Utopia " talks of the
" merry death " of good men, and illustrated
his doctrine by his own cheerfulness, as of a
child at play, when he himself went to the
scaffold ! But he had learned in a good
school. The school of Christ has been a
school of triumphant dying. " Our people
die well," said John Wesley. It is a good
test of a philosophy of life. They learned
their secret of happiness from Him who, faced
by the cross, made in that tremendous hour
a legacy to His disciples of His own peace and
of His own overflowing joy.
XIII.
Summits.
How the memory lingers over the elect
moments we can count them on our fingers
when we have topped our mountain ! The
start an hour before midnight, the long
grind through the darkness, the wrestle up
wards on the rock face, the tramp over ice and
snow, the skirting of the dread abyss, the
danger, the enormous fatigue, have at last
culminated in this ! We are at the top of the
world, with all its pomp beneath us. Where
else such a sensation, a prospect so magnificent,
such a feeling of ethereality, of remoteness from
the common place, of vast exhilaration ?
But it is a fleeting moment. This utmost
eminence is not a place to rest in. Its air
is chill and the wind smites with a force
unknown in the valleys. Half-an-hour of its
pitiless exposure and we are glad to descend.
And when, from far down we look back on our
peak yonder, its awful loneliness, redoubled
as it seems since our brief visit broke for a
moment on its eternal silence, appals and
haunts the spirit.
107
108 THE COMMON LIFE.
But the world could not get on without
its heights. It is strange that the old dwellers
of the Swiss valleys spoke of the mountains as
" the evil country." They did not know
how much to these bare, forbidding realms,
the world owes its fertility ! Without them
no streams to run, no vital air currents to cir
culate, no fresh soil to enrich the fields ; the
earth would be a stagnant marsh. The
wealth of our planet as well as its beauty
comes from its irregularities. It is the moun
tains that feed at once our bodies and our
imagination. The system of upper and under
which gives us our noblest prospects, is the one
which enriches our fields, and fills our garners.
One cannot contemplate the grand mountain
architecture of our planet without noting its
close analogy with human life. Here, too, have
we upper and under, the peaks and the valleys.
From the dawn of time men have been dis
cussing levelling processes, and have made
the strangest experiments in the interests of
equality. But humanity shows to-day, as
conspicuously as in the time of the Pharaohs,
its lowlands and its highlands, its greater
lifting themselves over its lesser, and will
doubtless continue to do so to the end of things.
It would be easy to show how, in the social
realm, just as much as in the continents
with their Alps and Andes, the slopes, the
elevations, the towering altitudes which there
SUMMITS. 109
discover themselves are the sources not only
of the variety and interest of the world s
life, but also largely of its fruitfulness and
prosperity. We are not built for dead levels.
We want an outlook upwards as well as
downwards. Abolish the human distinctions
to-morrow and they would be back again the
day after. The names might be changed, but
the things themselves would be there, for they
are in human nature.
But these human summits form a singular
study. The struggles to attain them, and the
experience of those who get there, offer the
mirthfullest of comedies, the mournfullest
of tragedies. Every department of life, be it
remembered, has its summit. There is some
where, doubtless, the premier chimney-sweep,
and the first among boot-blacks. We hear of
men challenging supremacy in the swallowing
of so much beefsteak at a sitting. There are
tastes, it appears, in summits ! Men reach
them in the strangest way. Our mountain
peaks have been thrown up, many of them,
by gigantic convulsions, enormous pressures
from beneath which have flung this crown
of slate or granite to its topmost place. That,
too, is how thrones and empires have been
made. When a social eruption breaks out
like that of the Commonwealth in England,
or of the Revolution in France, the boiling
cauldron beneath vomits forth a leader,
110 THE COMMON LIFE.
and we see a Cromwell, a Napoleon, the coun
try s strongest man, shot up to the top.
And what a position it is ! All the winds meet
here. On it the fiercest light beats. The
peak has that diabolical peculiarity of being a
point from which you cannot take a step with
out going down ! And it is the loneliest spot
in the world. A king has no friends. Said
Tennyson of one of his last interviews with
Queen Victoria : " She is so lonely on that
height : it is terrible ! " Dr. Arbuthnot
remarked of Queen Anne at her end, " I
believe sleep was never more welcome to a
weary traveller than death was to her."
But there is a grace which mingles with
every human condition, and the pain of the
summit has its alleviations. One of the mercies
connected with pre-eminence is that no man
possesses it entire and complete. There is,
luckily for him, always a valley in which
to retire, the valley, that is, of his various in
feriorities. He, too, who looks down on so
much, has the comfort of looking up. We
step off our own little line of things, and
find that outside it we are nobodies. And
to an honest soul there is no healthier realisa
tion. A man has been elected president
of something or other, and cannot sleep at nights
for thinking of his dignity. Let him for his
comfort look round a little. He may soon
persuade himself that his celebrity is not for-
SUMMITS. Ill
midable. He has no need to ask whether
he can paint like Sargent, or sing with Patti,
or bowl like Rhodes, or play like Joachim,
or draw a cheque with Rothschild. He may
walk down Fleet Street, and discover that every
single man he meets can do a dozen things
better than he can. Is it making shoes,
or fitting a coat, or grooming a horse, or
thatching a hayrick ? These unnoted who
crowd the road, in their department are as
far above him as Matterhorn is above Zermatt.
It is by this mixture in the same man, of high
and low, that the world is kept sane. The
stage " strong man " knows that the weak
figure of five feet six before him has a lineage
from the Conquest, or is a giant of science,
and that it will accordingly be ridiculous
to vaunt too much his mere muscle before him.
The weak " intellectual " on the other hand,
knows that, in comparison with a Sandow,
he does not hold all the points, and is modest
accordingly.
We shall not, if we are wise, ever give our
selves to summit-hunting as a profession.
The great men find themselves there while
seeking another thing, and without suspect
ing whither their path was leading. They hold
the position when reached, as a post where
God has stationed them, to guard as best they
may till the appointed time. In this connec
tion Bishop Creighton has a striking passage
112 THE COMMON LIFE.
concerning the great monk-Popes of mediseval-
ism. Speaking of Hildebrand, who became
afterwards Gregory VII., he says : " He knew
well that only that monk will help to sub
jugate the world who shuns it and strives to
free himself from it. Renunciation of the
world in the service of a world-ruling Church,
such is the amazing problem that Gregory
solved for the next century and a-half." It
was a saying of Cromwell, born doubtless
out of his own experience, that " the men who
go farthest are those who know not where they
are going." They move to their destiny
pressed by a divine obsession. " Ich kann
nicht anders" Luther s great word at Worms,
is their common note.
Lower men, in their foolish envy, often
forget how much of this pre-eminence is a
martyrdom. The social height is as windy
and exposed as the Alpine one. There are
great sensations there, but the occupants
long unspeakably at times for the safe shelter
and the homely comfort of the valley belowr
And, as a mere matter of enjoyment, to look
up to a height above is so vastly preferable
to the perpetual look from above down
wards ! To lose one s faculty of admiring, of
awe and reverence in presence of something
greater than ourselves, is indeed an impover
ishment. Aristotle paints his " magnanimous
man " as " not apt to admire, for nothing is
SUMMITS. 113
great to him." He has our sincere pity.
Ruskin has a healthier view when he declares
that people living in a modest house who enjoy
and admire Warwick Castle are so much
better off than he who, living in Warwick
Castle, has nothing to admire !
One of the strangest things in history
has been the blindness of men to the real
altitudes. A dirt heap immediately in front
will shut an Alp from our view. One writhes
in thinking of the way the great souls have
been treated. Think of a sublime Mozart,
with that immortal music in him, visiting
a Duchess de Chabot (who remembers her
now ?), who keeps him waiting in a cold room
till his fingers are frozen, then bids him play,
while she and her company are loudly talking
all the time ! An Archbishop of Salzburg
takes this Mozart in his retinue and lets him
dine with his cooks. When this genius dies
he is put with others in a common grave,
nobody to this hour knows exactly where.
A Palestrina, also, whose ethereal heavenly
strain reveals to us to-day the exquisite tex
ture of his soul, fares exactly the same. His
patrons treat and pay him as they do their
cooks and footmen. Odd world, which lets
Homer go begging, claps Bunyan in gaol,
and pays its jockeys ten thousand a year !
Perhaps the strangest part of it all is that
the men themselves on summits are often
8
114 THE COMMON LIFE.
unaware of the fact, and are looking out all
the time on some other height which they
conceive it is their proper destiny to climb.
Caesar seeks to be known as a great engineer
rather than as a great captain. When Vol
taire visits Congreve the dramatist poses as a
country gentleman and disparages his literary
work. " Had I not heard of you as a writer,"
is the Frenchman s retort, " I should certainly
not have visited you as a squire." We have a
Goethe priding himself, not on his " Faust,"
but on his dabblings in science, and a Scott
making everything of Abbotsford and
nothing of " Waverley." We, to-day, can
readjust these values. We know our im
mortals, and what work it was that made them
immortal.
In this talk on summits we have left a thou
sand things untouched. What a world of
ideas, for instance, is suggested by that
saying of Le Play : " La verite etant un sommet,
tout chemin qui monte y conduit " (" Truth
being a summit every road that mounts
leads towards it "). Yes, truly ! Amid all
our present confusions we have this for re
assurance. The road on this side the moun
tain strikes exactly the opposite direction
from the road on that. But they meet at the
top. To-day science may seem to lead here,
and religion there. Great is the clamour of
the contending hosts. But let each follow
SUMMITS. 115
its light and move upwards. At the summit
waits the ultimate truth with its great recon
ciliation.
There are summits, too, of experience,
coming to all of us in our separate lives.
What stories the world holds, could we reach
them, of men s greatest joy, deepest grief,
vastest realisation ! But the grandest summit
humanity knows is Pisgah, whence it gets its
view of the Promised Land. The view changes
with every generation. But ever that moun
tain rises in the midst, and from its height
the prophets get their vision. Hid in mists,
shrouded often in utter darkness, yet always
gleaming again through its obscurations, shines
there upon man, as his guide and inspiration,
the mystic, celestial light of the City of God.
XIV*
The Ethics of Desire.
AMID the myriad subtle movements which
belong to the springtime, the subtlest and
deepest is that of the awakening of desire.
In the commonest minds and in the highest
there is felt at this time mysterious yearnings,
stirrings of the blood, wild impulses towards
one knows not what. It is a universal experi
ence, which has been recognised everywhere
in literature. Tennyson s line immediately
comes to mind :
In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished
dove ;
In the spring a young man s fancy lightly turns to
thoughts of love.
Pierre Loti, in his " Roman d un Spahi,"
makes this a theme of realistic description.
Amiel, in his Journal Intime, takes note of the
fact in his own way. Speaking of the spring
time, he says : "II fait tressaillir le moine
dans P ombre de son couvent, la vierge derriere
116
THE ETHICS OF DESIRE. 117
les rideaux de sa chambrette." It is the time,
in dough s vivid words :
To feel the sap of existence
Circulate up through their roots from the far-away
centre of all things,
Circulate up from the depths to the bud on the twig
that is topmost.
And so it is that spring presents us with one
of the most formidable of the Sphinx riddles
of life a riddle presented to us all, with
answer demanded under penalties. What is
the function of desire in the economy of exist
ence ; what place shall we accord it in our
thought and action ; is it a blessing or a curse ;
should we seek for its annihilation or its
fruition ? These are the questions that have
been asked for ages, and they are being raised
to-day as though the theme were still new.
When we think of the wild confusion of answers
we are reminded of the remark about the
Sorbonne. " This," a visitor was told, " is
the hall where the Doctors of Divinity have
disputed for five hundred years." " Indeed ! "
was the reply, " and pray what have they
settled "
Amid the bewilderment of response there
seems one clear dividing line. In this matter
the East has been against the West. It is
most striking to note the almost unanimity
with which the philosophers of the early
Orient have taken their stand against the
118 THE COMMON LIFE.
whole range of human impulse which we know
as desire. To them it is the soul s enemy,
to be fought to the death. Says the Bha-
gavad Gita : " Know that it is the enemy
lust or passion, offspring of a carnal principle,
insatiable and full of sin, by which this world
is covered as the flame by the smoke, as the
mirror by rust." This, indeed, is the keynote
of the whole Vedanta philosophy, which
regards the visible world as merely pheno
menal, and says the only way in which we
can gain reality is by surrendering all that
appeals to the outward. And Buddhism joins
here with Brahmanism. With Gautama the
aim of existence was the extinction of desire.
The human progression, through a succession
of births, was towards a Nirvana of divine
indifference. By the amount of a man s
desire could be measured his distance from
true blessedness. Only as that fire died out
could he reach his peace.
It was this tradition of the " immemorial
East " which, flowing into the early Church,
produced there the asceticism of the anchorites
and hermits of the Libyan desert, and which
has been present sporadically throughout
Catholicism ever since. It is represented by
that saying of St. John of the Cross, that
whatever seemed pleasant to the senses was
to be by the saint instantly turned away
from, while everything repugnant was to be
THE ETHICS or DESIRE. 119
embraced. The monastic vows and the celi
bacy of the priesthood are forms of it. We see
it in the physical duress to which a Bernard
and a St. Francis subjected themselves ; and
in the quaint word of a Brother Juniper,
one of the early Franciscans : " When carnal
desires come, I occupy myself in holy medi
tations and holy desires, and so when carnal
suggestion knocks at the heart I answer,
Begone, for the house is already full, and
can hold no more guests.
But this method of settling the great ques
tion, while continually proposed by the East
to the West, has never found any great accept
ance there. Heroic spirits have felt its fascina
tions, but not the commonalty. The eccle
siastical imposition of asceticism has proved
a disastrous failure. Its effect on morals
is shown by the revelations of the Black Book
of the English monasteries after Thomas
Cromwell s visitation, and by the declaration
of Zwingli, who, speaking of his own ex
perience of the Catholic priesthood, says that
" scarce one in a thousand was chaste."
The Renaissance was, amongst other things,
a huge revolt of the flesh, in which literature
and art joined hands. Rabelais with his
pen, and Rubens and Titian with the brush,
delivered to the world an apologia of the
passions. The note they struck has been
reverberating ever since. It fills the world
120 THE COMMON LIFE.
to-day. Our modern " Decadents " are every
whit as voluptuous as the " Parnasse Saty-
rique," and a good deal more unwholesome.
Nothing is more discouraging than the present
cult of this diseased literature, from the far
north to the uttermost south of the Con
tinent. Norway has a whole group of lady
novelists whose theme is the grossest sexual-
ism, while Germany, catching the disease
from France, gives us, in her Schnitzlers and
Dormanns, poets whose stock-in-trade is a
ghastly combination of pessimism and erotic
dunghilldoin. Can anything be imagined more
despicable as a view of life than this from the
last named ?
Doch einer Laune will ich noch geniigen,
Eh ich verlasse diesen alten Bau :
Ich will mich noch an einer hiibschen Frau
Beilaufig zehn Minuten lang vergniigen.
The gist of which is that despairing of life
he will end it, but before leaving the world will
have yet one more bout of voluptuous pleasure.
It is Tibullus and Anacreon over again.
Nietzsche has put this stuff for us into a
philosophy, in which he declares all restraint
to be a sin against nature, and bids us make
war against all the old ideals, against all that
is hostile to the senses and the primary in
stincts.
THE ETHICS OF DESIBE. 121
But the question remains, Is there no middle
term between the Eastern verdict on desire
and this mad exploitation of it ? Either of
them seems a dehumanising of ourselves, a
cutting off, at one end or the other, of some
great and seemingly integral portion of our
proper life. That pleasurable sensation, and
the desire for it, within limits, is not in itself
an evil, is nowhere, to our knowledge, better
put than by Sir Thomas More in his
" Utopia " : " For a joyful life that is, a
pleasant life is either evil, and if it be so,
then thou shouldest not only help no man
thereto, but rather, as much as in thee lieth,
withdraw all men from it as noisome and
hurtful ; or else, if thou not only mayest but
also of duty bound ought to procure it to
others, then why not chiefly to thyself ? "
In other words, the very precept to give bread
to the hungry, viewed in all its aspects, is an
argument which overthrows asceticism.
Let us assure ourselves on this point. Desire
is no mistake of the human constitution.
It is nature s motor power. Mysterious, ele
mental, of all forces within us the most for
midable, yet there as part of the good of
human life. It is the explosive, the dynamite
in our economy, and, like dynamite, needing
to be housed with care, and handled with
utmost discretion. It cannot be safely used
alone. Thus taken it is brutal and not human.
122 THE COMMON LIFE.
It can only be healthily part of ourselves as
a combination with all highest things that
are within us.
Indeed, in the new, vaster view of life that
is opening upon us to-day, we are beginning
to see what the ancients never did, the bridge
across the great antithesis ; or, better, we
are discovering there is no antithesis. There
is here no irreconcilable duality, but rather a
unity. For all desire is substantially one.
It is a function of our highest life as well as of
our lowest. To declaim against desire is to
kick down the ladder by which we have
ascended. There is subtlest wisdom in the
saying of Spinoza that " the human passions
are not defects. . . . We have not so
much an appetite for what is good, as that we
deem a thing good because we have for it an
appetite."
What constitutes the real human advance
here is not the Buddhistic notion of the elimi
nation of desire, but the Christian one of its
elevation and purifying, of the direction of it
upon ever nobler objects. In this evolution
what once was a fiery ungoverned impulse
becomes reined and curbed, and made to draw
in the harness of reason, conscience and the
spiritual affections. It is one of the beautiful
features of the Divine education of our race
that in this way the powers of the animal
nature are duplicated in the higher, and work
THE ETHICS OF DESIRE. 123
there in a sublimated form. Man, beginning
thus as raw material, ends as a kind of radium,
the glorious force which, drawing into itself
the subtlest essence of all manner of lower
substances, lifts it to use on an immeasurably
loftier plane. The passions under this dis
cipline become the instruments of the soul.
The primal heats, caught up and deftly com
bined, form the summer temperature of its
higher chambers.
But the one imperative note which comes
from a study of this kind, and which we so
specially need to-day, is that in a true human
life the passions may never be in any other
than a subordinate place. Desire, in its lower
forms, may not be at the helm. Whenever
the reins are snatched by it from the hands
of conscience and the higher affections we have
the " carnal mind which is death." Passion,
we repeat, is an explosive, and in a properly
safeguarded community explosives are iso
lated, with a waterfilled moat around them.
In the life of to-day, specially of the cities,
these explosives are being far too freely
handled. The gunpowder lies in all direc
tions, exposed on the highways, and there
are people, meanwhile, who make it their
business to fling about lighted matches. Things
are better with us in these matters than
on the Continent, but there is in our midst a
" literature," so called, being produced to-day,
124 THE COMMON LIFE.
with huge profits to authors and publishers,
which is a disgrace to all concerned. Those
who aim at the best in life will leave this
ordure alone. They cannot afford to link
themselves with the down-drawing forces.
They will desire with their soul rather than
with their body. To do otherwise is to turn
life s feast, meant to be a banquet of im
mortals, into an orgie from which there is
ever a ghastly awakening.
XV.
The Larger Reference.
IN that child nature, the study of which of
late years has become so supreme an interest
to both science and philosophy, there is
perhaps nothing more instructive than its
attitude in presence of a disappointment.
Our youngster has perhaps broken or lost his
toy, and is in consequence entirely miserable.
As we contemplate him we think of all the
blessings he is possessed of. He is at the
beginning, with all life before him. He is
entirely healthy, with every limb and every
organ perfect. He is, we will say, the member
of a prosperous home, the object of father and
mother love, and with the best prospects for
his future career. He belongs to a free
country, to a foremost race, is an intelligent
soul in a boundless universe. One could,
indeed, go on without end enumerating these
advantages. But they are all lost on our
youngster. He has broken his penny trumpet,
and is in despair. His whole being is con
centrated on that one point. There is every
thing else for him, if only he could see it.
125
126 THE COMMON LIFE.
but he does not see it. His happiness for
the time is wrecked, and for lack of his penny
trumpet. And yet, as we can see, that is not his
actual need. His real want is a larger reference.
When from the child we come to the study
of ourselves, we discover how close our kinship
is in this matter. There is no point in which
we have more need of education than in
this of the larger reference. We are continu
ally repeating the tragedy of the boy and his
penny trumpet. As we walk along the street
how many downcast faces we encounter !
How few that reflect the genius of the morning !
What are these people brooding ? Ten
to one it is an affair of penny trumpets.
There has been here a quarrel between mistress
and maid ; there a set-back in business ;
so-and-so has missed a society introduction ;
there is the remembrance of a snub, or the
presence of a finger-ache ; and the whole
horizon is clouded. It would be an immense
statistical operation to calculate how much of
average lives are spent in glooms created by these
single circumstances that are allowed to occupy
the foreground. With many poor wretches
there is scarcely an emergence from them.
They plunge from one into another. Their inner
climate is of Newfoundland, a perpetual fog.
We hardly realise how much of the art of
living is contained in our attitude on this one
point. The annoying circumstance, in one or
THE LARGER REFERENCE. 127
other of its innumerable forms, is part of the
daily programme, and the whole question is,
what are we going to do with it ? Shall this
be the dominant feature in our consciousness
to-day ? Are we then so small that this tiny
thing must overshadow us ? A moment s
resolute thinking, still more of resolute willing,
and we laugh at the Liliputian tyranny.
We have only to set it against our whole
relation to life to discover its insignificant
proportions. I was disappointed yesterday ;
or some one insulted me ; or I was overlooked
in the recent distribution of favours. What
then ? To-day the sun is shining ; I have my
sight and hearing ; my limbs swing freely ; the
air of the spring morning, the song of the lark,
the rhythm and beauty of the universe are all
for me ; all the grounds of my spiritual hopes
are here ; there is no slump in these values.
The disappointment ! It is the sum of one
farthing struck off my immense account with
life, which it would be absurd even to include
in the reckoning. Shall these items in the
pence column stop me from being joyous
to-day ? It is one of the days of my life.
It would be too great a folly to disparage it,
with all its immense wealth of being and doing,
because a fly buzzed in my ear.
The man who uses habitually the larger
reference will find in it, we say, a great daily
deliverance. But two things are required
128 THE COMMON LIFE.
to its exercise. One is the sense in him of the
higher interests, and the other a resolute
inward effort in relation to them. The penny
trumpet tyranny establishes itself because the
thing is there, visibly before our eyes. The
subjects of the larger reference, on the con
trary, are not so immediately present. They
have to be summoned into the consciousness
by an effort of the will. The whole secret
here is in the going forth of the inner spirit to
meet life and conquer it ; nay, rather to create
it. For, as Madame Swetchine says, life is
everywhere and always what we put into it.
It is supremely interesting to note how the
great souls, in the different ways, have won
their victory by the larger reference. They
have not all been equally favoured in the width
of the outlook to which they could attach
themselves. The Stoics found, in their relation
to the universe, ground for mental serenity,
if not for any great hope. Amiel is continually
harping on the same string. In face of daily
disappointments his word ever is, " Rentrer
dans Fordre, accepter, se soumettre, et faire ce
qu on pent." We read of George Eliot that
as life advanced her attitude was more and
more that of simple resignation. It was the
Stoic frame. Often in the men of action we
discern an outlook, limited in itself, but nobly
detached from their immediate personal
fortunes. When Wolfe, shot in the breast,
THE LARGER. KEFERENCE. 129
lay dying at the Heights of Abraham, he
heard an officer cry, " They run ; I protest
they run." " Who ? " " The French."
" Then," he murmured, "I die happy."
Indeed, one could find abundant examples
of men whose outlook was not what, in the
Christian sense, would be called spiritual, who
nevertheless refused to take their view of life
from its immediate circumstances. Anaxarchus
crying out while being beaten to death, " Beat
on at the case of Anaxarchus ; no stroke falls on
Anaxarchus himself," was undoubtedly a dis
ciple of the wider reference. It has been the
fashion of late to decry other-worldliness, but,
despite extravagances here and there, it has a
noble tradition as the protest of human nature
against a provincialism of outlook. When the
Indian Bhagavad Gita bids a man depend on
the inner treasure of the mind, " which having
obtained he respecteth no other acquisition so
great as it; in which depending he is not
moved by the severest pain," we realise what
a great note has been struck. Those early
Eastern thinkers, " dreaming on things to
come," refused, in the name of the soul within
them, to estimate life its wealth and its
happiness in terms of the seen and temporal.
It is precisely here that modern materialism,
as expounded by the Haeckels and the
Biichners, has struck so false a note. They
have too limited a reference. They take
9
130 THE COMMON LIFE.
the backward look of life. They interpret
things by their past. They seek for their
secret in origins and primitive forms. But
no one who had not seen an oak could guess
the oak from an acorn. Yet that were as wise
a procedure as to construct the issues and
possibilities of religion from early fetichism
and ghost-worship ! The question here is not
what we have come from, but what we may
grow to. It is not in the animalisms and
barbarisms of the past, but in the aspirations,
instincts and prophet glimpses that now play
through the loftiest part of us that the secret
of human destiny is to be sought. It is, as
Goethe was fond of saying, our unexpressed
that is the highest part of us ; our wishes
and presentiments are the prophets of what
is to be. The world which the materialists
picture is a world which ignores that latest
emerged in us, the whole sphere and action of
the religious affections. Man s sense of awe,
of veneration, of faith, of heavenly love, of
inner ecstasy in presence of the unseen, forms
the most essential part of him, and its entire
sphere of action requires a reference that the
materialist s world is unable to furnish. That
is a crawler s world offered to beings who are
furnished with wings.
It is from considerations of this land that
we learn to appreciate the transcendentalism
of the Gospel, The New Testament is the
THE LARGER REFERENCE. 131
book of the larger reference. Its persistent
message is that man has a lodgment and a
stake elsewhere than in the sphere of the
senses. It educates man out of his parochial
ism, and shows him his citizenship in a roomier
universe. To Voltaire s question, which has
been the question of humanity, " Que suis-je,
oil suis-je, ou vais je, et d ou suis je tire," it
gives the highest of answers. " We come
from God and we go to God." And there is no
other answer that so fills the empty space in
the human soul. The Christian teaching and
example in all ages has been an application
of the larger reference. It was to this
Augustine appealed when, with the Roman
world falling in pieces around him, and the
barbarian hordes battering the walls of his
episcopal city, he wrote his " City of God."
It was this which made St. Bernard confident
that nothing could hurt him except himself.
It was this larger outlook that made the
Anchoress Julian, that sweet soul of the
fourteenth century, utter the prophetic word,
" Our soul may never have rest in things that
are beneath itself." The materialism which
seeks, in its view of life, to ignore this phase
of human thought and feeling, is like an
astronomy that would do without the stars.
Yet religion itself, the sphere of the wider
outlook, needs, in a multitude of its professors,
an enlargement of the reference, Most of the
132 THE COMMON LIFE.
outside criticism of the Church has been
a deserved criticism. Religion has been
cowardly where it should have been brave,
and its utterances sectarian where it should
have been universal. When shall we have
enlarged our religious thought until, with
Schleiermacher, we can declare it to mean
" the seeking and finding of the Universal
Being in all that lives and moves, in all be
coming and change, in all action and suffering ;
the having and knowing in immediate feeling,
of life itself as the infinite and eternal life " ?
When shall we have reached the courage of
Milton, and hold with him that " truth is
strong next to the Almighty ; she needs no
policies or stratagems or licensings to make
her victorious. These are the shifts and the
defences that error uses against her power " ?
But, after all, the final lesson of this theme
is, as we began by saying, in its application to
our personal life. We cannot afford that any
one of our brief days shall be less than a
triumph. And that result can only be achieved
by an incessant import of the great into the
little. The moment s affairs must be set
ever against the greater background. There
is a discipline here which in the end will make
us ashamed of our joylessness.
Wo sind die Sorge nun und Noth
Die mich noch gestern wollt erschaffen ?
Ich sckam mich dess im Morgen-roth.
XVI.
The World s Memory.
THE world s memory is generally taken
to be a bad one. Cicero tells a good story
against himself of how, after a mission to a
distant province, where he had accomplished
what he considered to be great things, he
returned to the capital, thinking he would find
everybody talking of him, to discover that
no one even appeared to know that he had been
absent. When disposed to be vain we may
profitably ask ourselves for how long we should
probably be talked of if we disappeared to
morrow. What space in the public mind is
occupied at this moment by the personalities
of the first rank who passed away a year
ago ? One might as well ask with the old
French poet, " But where are the snows of
yesteryear ? " If this is the fate of the greatest,
what of the lesser ? We gain our little emin
ences, accomplish some small popularisings
here and there, make a momentary stir.
Then we drop out ; the tide of new life sweeps
over the spot we stood on, and the world goes
its way as though we had never been.
133
134 THE COMMON LIFE.
There are many to whom this view repre
sents the entire reality. So broken and
spiritless are they that they find even their
greatest consolation in the coming nothing
ness. Here, in the final negation of thought
and life, they will take
Their fill of deep and liquid rest,
Forgetful of all ill.
It was thus that a great Roman comforted
his friend on the death of his daughter :
" Why bemoan the death of a girl when she
and all of us together, with cities and em
pires, are passing down the throat of ever
lasting oblivion ? " To some moderns it
is not cities and empires only, but worlds and
systems that are rushing to this universal
neant. In his " Foundations of Belief " Mr.
Balfour thus eloquently states their dismal
conclusion : " After a period, long compared
with the individual life, but short indeed
compared with the dimensions of time open
to our investigation, the energies of our system
will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed,
and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer
tolerate the race which has for a moment
disturbed its solitude. . . . The uneasy
consciousness which in this obscure corner
has for a brief space broken the contented
silence of the universe will be at rest."
But is this, after all, the true and final
THE WORLD S MEMORY. 135
view of things ? It is the one, undoubtedly,
that first strikes the senses one that in certain
moods makes an almost irresistible appeal.
But the moment we begin to investigate
we begin to suspect its validity, and before
we are far on in the process we are convinced
that it is illusion. Whether we like it or not,
this is not the way the universe is built ;
the background and end of conscious life is,
at least, something other than oblivion.
We alter our standpoint to discover for the
first thing that the world, instead of having a
short memory, has a very long one. It
seems, indeed, to forget nothing. The whole
of its apparatus would appear to be constructed
with a view not merely to produce, but always
to reproduce. It repeats its performances,
lets nothing slip again that has once come to
birth. For memory, be it remembered, is
not an affair of brains only. Its essential,
the element of repetition and reproduction,
is wrought into the very structure of things.
The light rays by which the original spectators
at Whitehall saw the execution of Charles I.
two and a-half centuries ago are still travelling,
charged with their vision of the tragedy, and
might conceivably at this moment be reproduc
ing it on the retina of beings at the other end
of the universe as a present fact. The shower
of rain of countless ages ago that indented the
shore with its falling drops is there recorded
136 THE COMMON LIFE.
for our geologist, who studies to-day his block
of newly- unearthed sandstone.
When we come to the sphere of living beings
we realise afresh with what tenacity and with
what accuracy the world remembers. Evolu
tion acts like a university professor who re
capitulates always the earlier lessons before
going on to the next theme. The science of
embryology is, for instance, one long, marvel
lous story of world-memory. The unborn
child, in its progress from the earliest germ-
cell to the completed form, repeats successively
all the forms of animal existence protozoon,
fish, reptile, mammal through which organic
existence has worked its onward way from
earliest beginning to its crown in humanity.
It is not enough, we see, that the story should
once have been lived. It must be incessantly
repeated. The very make of things is, in
fact, a provision for memory. When a volition
stirs the grey matter of a brain it creates a
channel of its own there. The fact that the
channel, or beginnings of one, is there makes
it easier for the next nerve-current to run
along it. That is the physical side of what,
on the inner and mental side, we call the form
ing of a habit. Instinct seems to be nothing
else than this bodily memory. Into the
nerve system of bird and beast the channels
have been dug deep by far-off generations
of ancestors, until what was once a volition
THE WORLD S MEMORY. 137
is now an involuntary movement. The young
bird does what the old bird did before it,
because all the roads along which its nerve
force will flow are already cut for it deep into
the system.
This marvellous world-memory, which most
of us have hardly thought of as memory,
repeats itself still more wonderfully when
we come within the sphere of human life.
Our muscular and nervous systems are one
vast remembrancer. When our consciousness
entirely forgets, they recollect for us. How
often do we wash and dress ourselves in the
morning, with our thoughts entirely away
from the process ! But our muscles do not
forget. They pass from one step to the next,
taking each detail in its proper order. When
we walk to our business it is the same. In
the course of the day we shall have made
uncounted thousands of movements, and
without a mistake, because each nerve and
tendon, each fibre and brain-cell has learned
its lesson and can repeat it without con
sulting us.
So much for the material and physical side.
Had we this only to argue from, it would still
appear that the world tended to something
other than nothingness ; that it worked not
only to produce, but to preserve and repro
duce, its results. But the argument moves
with accumulating force when we step from
138 THE COMMON LIFE.
the world without to the world within. It
is the mind-stuff, the things that relate to
personality that, as we began by saying,
seem most perishable. But that is not really
so. Not a single element of any man s thought
or deed is ever lost or forgotten. It goes,
with all its mixture of quality, to vivify or
burden the soul-atmosphere which the future
has to breathe. It will work itself into the
instincts and dispositions of every coming
generation. If Nature seems careless of our
name she preserves our fact. We are living
by the unknowns whose work she treasures.
Nobody knows who wrote the " Theologia
Germanica," but it helped no whit the less
to make Luther and the Reformation. Our
world is a haunted world. As we lay our
ear to the din of the present we find its under
tone to be the immeasurable murmur of the
past.
But a true study of memory takes us
far deeper than this. For it links us not
only with the remotest time, but with that
which is beyond time altogether. For the
soul s real life, the life of which it becomes
conscious when it awakes to its actual self,
is primarily a memory, a memory of its home
and origin. There is a side of us turned
away from the world, even as that face of the
moon which no one has seen from the world s
beginning. It is the side of our transcendental
THE WORLD S MEMORY. 139
relations ; that outlook upon the infinite
of which Mrs. Browning sings :
. . . I had not so far loft the coasts of life
As not to hear that murmur of the outer infinite
Which unweaned babies smile at hi their sleep,
When wondered at for smiling.
There is a part both of our thought and our
feeling which can only be explained by this
transcendental memory, the soul s conscious
ness of our spiritual origin. It is thus, and
thus only, that we can understand the mind s
rapture at the perception of truth ; thus only
that the emotions produced by great deeds
or great music become possible. How could
any mere combination of sounds cause these
exquisite mental results ? These melodies are
a memory. Their ravishment lies in the appeal
they make to something that is at once in
and back of the mind. In these tranced
moments it sees its relation to a harmony that
was before the worlds.
For a similar reason we can speak of re
ligion itself as, in its essence, a memory.
That seems a very daring statement of Augus
tine s in his " Retractations " : " That which
is now called the Christian religion existed
among the ancients, and, in fact, was with
the human race from the beginning." And
yet it is plain what he means. It is the faith
of Origen and the Greek fathers that the
Logos, " the light that lighteth every man,"
110 THE COMMON LIFE.
was in the world from the first, guiding man
upward from point to point of his spiritual
career. Mr. Andrew Lang is one of many
researchers who to-day declare that the savage
tribes of every part of the world give evidence
that behind their often horrible and cruel
superstitions lie the fragments of an original
belief in a Deity wholly beneficent. The Christ
whose presence made holy the fields of Galilee
spoke to the human memory when he declared
the heavenly kingdom, the Divine father
hood and the soul s destiny. The soul leaped
at the message because it round in it an echo
of the Primal Voice.
In the Apocalyptic Vision of the Last
Things we read that " the books were opened
. . and the dead were judged out of
those things that were written in the books."
That is a parable which science, as we have
just been reading it, seems to endorse. The
world is itself a great book, written within and
without, carrying in itself the whole record of
life. It is a faithful history. No detail in
it has been missed. And the world-history
carries, of necessity, the world- judgment.
Evolution, with its small beginnings and its
steady movement, is the surest witness to
great coming consummations. And the world-
system which has been so careful of deeds
will not, let us be sure, be less careful of the
persons who did them. Its whole method,
THE WORLD S MEMORY. 141
as we have seen, is to hold what it has once
produced. It is not likely that personality,
the greatest of its results, should be the one
exception to that rule.
It is well to be on good terms with memory.
We are shaping it now into an angel of
inspiration, or into a worm that dies not. A
good memory is not necessarily the retentive
one. That might easily turn out the worst of
all. It is the one whose tablet bears the record
of the soul s conflict and victory. For, as
Maeterlinck has it, " There is one thing that
can never turn into suffering, and that is
the good we have done."
XVII.
Society and Solitude.
WE are the product of both, and it would be
difficult to say which has had most to do
with the making of us. At first, and for a
good way on in life, we are of the general
lump, and barely distinguishable from it.
Infants are some time before they realise
their own separateness. According to Holfding
children, toward the end of their second year,
have been seen to offer a biscuit to their
own foot, as if they thought it an independent
being. Indeed, where we begin, and where
we end, both in body and soul, is a question
which may puzzle philosophers as well as
children. Our view of what we owe to society
should be helped by a glance backward.
Have we ever thought of the number of people
in the past who contributed to our existence ?
To trace back our ancestors, collateral and
successive, to the Conquest would be to wrestle
with numbers beyond computation. What a
vision, could it be revealed to us, this army
of our unknown forebears, this innumerable
host of separate lives each with its human
story, that have gone to the making of you
and me ! And we shall stand related in the same
U2
SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 143
bewildering position to generations to come. As
Burke somewhere puts it : " Society is a part
nership, not only between those who are living,
but between those who are living and those who
are dead, and those who are to be born."
A thousand things link us, we say, to the
mass. There is already among us, apart
from theory, an enormous Communism. We
are talkers, and even thinkers, by virtue of a
language which is equally the property of my
neighbour and myself. It is the feeder of our
most secret life, and yet derives all its use and
power from the fact that it dwells, on the same
terms, in a million minds beside our own.
It is society, the community, that has im
posed on us our daily habits. Rousseau
puts the matter in his forcible way when he
says : " As soon as he is born man is wrapped
in swaddling clothes ; when he is dead he is
sewed up in a shroud. All his life long he
is pinioned by laws, manners and customs,
decorums and professional obligations." We
most of us get our religion in this way. We
are Hindoos, Christians or Mohammedans ac
cording to the latitude in which we were born.
Nine-tenths of us seem to be tribal. And
we catch the contagions of the tribe. We
take immense precautions against physical
infections, but our mental surface is exposed
at every hour to the subtler ones which in
cessantly flash through the human crowd,
144 THE COMMON LIFE.
The day s politics, its art enthusiasms,
its literary and ecclesiastical controversies
are all epidemics. We receive them and pass
them on because we are wedged in the throng
and cannot escape its contacts. Take him
where you will, at his work or his play, in his
greatness or his littleness, man is inevitably
social. He is knit to the community as
closely as the corpuscles of his blood are knit to
the structure of his body.
Yet, when all this is said, man remains
the great solitary. He is so both collectively
and individually. Humanity, as a whole,
is surely the most lonely of created things.
Whether we look up or look down we seem alone.
An immeasurable gulf separates us from
the animal forms that share the planet with
us ; but this is nothing to the void that opens
above. Through all the ages man has been on
his watch-tower, straining eye and ear upward
for some sign that should be given him out of
that immensity. But the universe keeps its
secret. Man hears no voice but his own.
Are there, then, no relatives of his yonder ?
Must he in this resplendent creation hear for
ever nothing beyond the sound of his own
footsteps ? Where man, weary of his long vigil,
falls back upon this view, his spiritual fortunes
reach their nadir. There seem recurrent
periods in history when that awful chill
smites the soul. It was so in the later days of
SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 145
the Roman republic, when despair of any
high relationship amid the worlds turned
men inward and downward to their lowest
self as the only resource. What an awful
cry is this of Proper tius !
Dum nos fata sinunt, oculos satiemus amore :
Nox tibi longa venit, nee reditura dies
(" While the fates permit, let us satiate our
eyes with lust ; for thee the long night is coming,
to which there shall be no returning day.")
There is a precisely similar despair abroad in
Europe to-day, with similar moral results.
But that is not and can never be a per
manent attitude with man. It is a temporary
faintness which at times seizes this star-led
traveller, as, on his incessant way upwards,
he breaks upon the new, awesome prospects
and breathes the too-rarified air. By-and-by
he takes heart again and still moves on.
For despite the dogged silence outside, he
discerns movements in his own soul, events
in his history, appearances amongst his kind,
which assure him of an unseen kinship some
where in those upper spheres. His utmost
desert has a habit of blossoming suddenly
as the rose. Hard by his Slough of Despond
stands always his Delectable Mountain. On
the wail of a Propertius comes the advent of a
Christ. And what has happened before will
happen again. The twentieth century, as
the first, may look for its Avatar when the
10
146 THE COMMON LIFE.
upper solitudes shall again be peopled, and
Divine voices heard. Again men will say,
with Pascal s entire conviction : Voila ce que
c est que la foi parfaite : Dieu sensible, au cceur.
Herein do we discern the whole mystery
of man the solitary. It is along this desert
path, so hard and terrible, so bewildering in
its silence, that he comes to the possession
of himself. For, mark, we have two solitudes.
We are part of a lonely humanity, but we
are also ourselves alone. Spite of our utmost
oneness with society, speaking its language,
breathing its thought-atmosphere, under sway
of its custom, moulded by it as clay by the
potter, we nevertheless, in its very midst
and centre, find ourselves separate and apart.
Society presses us on every side, but it is a
surface pressure, and beneath there are un-
f athomed depths . Language often conceals our
thought, it never fully expresses it. When I
say, " I am well ! " " I am happy ! " what
have I told ? My neighbour hears, and
attaches some meaning to the words, but the
actuality of consciousness they stand for is so
far beyond him ! Surrounded by our nearest
and our dearest, we live alone, think alone,
feel alone, and will die alone.
This we say is the mystery of man the
solitary, and there should surely be some
solution of it. We refuse to believe that it
is either a sordid or a tragic one. In every age
SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 147
exultant souls have testified to the contrary.
The isolation, they discover, is an insulation,
and that for the transmission of a message. We
are shut off from everything else that we may
hear it. The message is the whisper of a hidden
way. The voicelessness of the material universe
means that man has to look elsewhere for his
spiritual society. The path heavenward lies
not along these tracks, but through states of
the soul. " The kingdom of God is within you."
When a man understands the meaning of faith,
of love, of sacrifice, of prayer, he ceases to feel
lonely. The upper spaces become populated.
He has discovered his kindred.
His kindred, and it is a noble one. The
unseen society which gathers round seekers
of this order is august. There is, to begin with,
a companionship which is not even personal,
but is nevertheless full of all strength and
upholding. Leigh Hunt, speaking of the later
days of Napoleon, says, " no great principle
stood by him." It is a revealing word. Alas
for the man who has lost the society of the great
principles ! It is precisely their fellowship
which nourishes the hero-souls. Exposed to
the scoffs of baser men, these elect ones
find here an all-sufficing compensation ;
One self -approving hour whole years outweighs
Of stupid starers and of loud huzzas,
And more true joy Marcellus exiled feels
Than Caesar with a senate at his heels.
148 THE COMMON LIFE.
But man cannot keep habitually in this region
without realising sooner or later that to have
contact with great principles means to have
contact with something that is yet higher be-
behind. Socrates felt inspired with his daimon ;
Cicero taught the inspiration of all great and
good men. In the New Testament all this
flames into the splendid truth of the witnessing
in the human spirit of the Spirit of God.
In proportion as we tread this way shall
we be less and less afraid of what men call
solitude. It is one of the great tests of a
man to note how he endures his own company.
Said Pascal : " The man who lives only
for himself hates nothing so much as being
alone with himself." On the other hand,
it is precisely in solitude that the disciplined
soul finds the best company. For there he
discovers his truest self. In the crowd we have
been a dozen different people ; every fresh
comer sees us in his own light. But as the
compass needle, drawn hither and thither,
by opposite influences, trembles back, when
these are removed, to its mystic pointing
to the Pole, so does an attuned nature, after
the tossings of the throng, resume in solitude
its attitude to the Infinite.
The great writers, the great thinkers must
be alone. The prophets are ever men of
the desert. It is among the mountains, aloof
from his fellows, that the Elijah of to-day,
SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 149
as of centuries ago, hears the still small voice.
In his Irish exile at lonely Kilcolman, Spenser
sees the visions of the " Faerie Queen." When
cut off from his home, his friends, his city,
a wanderer in Europe, Dante writes the poem
" on which both heaven and earth had laid
their hands." The leader is alone because he
is a leader. The mass who follow are not
on the same plane of thinking or feeling
as this pioneer who treads in front, with
only the stars and the inner voices to guide him.
It is assuredly one of the great secrets of
living to know how to be alone. On the
man who has learned it the crowd, once so
imperious and dominating, has ceased to impose.
Its voices, whether of threatening or applause,
interest and perhaps amuse, but never coerce
him. He does his duty by his fellow, and
feels all the weight of obligation which binds
him to society. But his actions are no longer
regulated by this cry or that. For the great
moments, for the critical decisions he retires
from the throng, that in silence he may
hear the verdict of his inmost soul. He
listens with awe and submission, for he has
learned to recognise beneath that whisper
a note august and central, which seems to him
Divine.
XVIII.
On Being Spiritual,
OUR age is busily occupied in revising the
earlier moral and religious verdicts. It is
conscious of having a word of its own to say
upon matters which previous generations
had regarded as finally settled. And in no
direction is it more vividly aware of this
than in the range of questions which are in
cluded in the word " spiritual." St. Paul s
ringing word, " to be carnally minded is death,
but to be spiritually minded is life and peace,"
is one of those sentences that, once uttered,
can never be forgotten. It has burned itself
indelibly into the human consciousness. In
stinctively men recognised that a great dis
tinction had here been struck, a view
opened upon a fundamental human reality.
But what is it to be spiritual ? The Pauline
sentence has, in the intervening centuries,
produced innumerable interpretations. To
elucidate it all manner of experiments have
been carried through, and to us, at this latest
day, is given the supreme privilege of watch-
160
ON BEING SPIRITUAL. 151
ing the results, and forming our judgment
thereon.
This judgment, as it shapes itself in the
mind, is, we discover, in many respects different
from that of our fathers. For one thing
our outlook is wider. Comparative research
has put a final end to parochialism in religion.
St. Paul was not the first to whom the revela
tion of the spiritual mind was made. To
millions of our fellows it was known long before
the Christian era. The old Indian philosophy,
which regarded the world of sense as a fleeting
shadow, and the invisible behind as the only
reality, had, in its own way, taught this truth
for ages. And as we turn the pages of the
Egyptian " Book of the Dead," with its mystic
formulae and its vivid sense of the world to
come, we realise how these earnest worshippers
of six thousand years ago, with their eyes
fixed upon the Unseen, had precisely that
set and attitude of the soul which the apostle s
word implies, and to which it appeals.
To get to the meaning of this word for our
age we have, moreover, to work through and
to set aside the strange misconceptions that
have gathered round it. No word in our
vocabulary has probably suffered more from
misuse. Caricatures so grotesque and so re
pellent have been exhibited of the spiritual
in character as at times to disgust the world
with the whole idea, and to bring about
152 THE COMMON LIFE.
appalling moral reactions. It has been
regarded as synonymous with ignorance.
Erasmus, in his indictment of the monks,
declared that it was a sign of holiness among
them not to be able to read. Men have
earned the reputation, and still earn it, by
the acceptance and glib utterance of certain
doctrinal shibboleths, a procedure which has
cost them no single mental strain, and no
single inner or outer sacrifice. An appear
ance, a pose of the features, a style of dress,
a tear in the voice, a nasal twang, have, in
their day, been enough to win the title.
Men have persuaded themselves that they
were spiritual on the strength of a certain
persuasion, especially when accompanied by a
capacity for ecstatic feeling. And this when
permitting themselves the most extraordinary
licence of action. Benvenuto Cellini, when shut
up in the Castle of St. Angelo, comments with
an angelic fervour and appreciation on the
Pauline epistles ; and when he is let out
gives himself with an equal gusto to his amours
and his murders. Sir John Hawkins, carrying
a cargo of negro slaves stolen from Africa
to sell in the Spanish Settlements, after escap
ing a storm, remarks : " But God would not
suffer His elect to perish."
To be spiritual has been interpreted by
others as involving a refusal of, and seclusion
from, certain large sides of human life. Under
SPIRITUAL. 153
this persuasion the early Anchorites fled to
the desert ; celibacy was regarded as the only
way to perfectness ; the arts and sciences were
tabooed as godless secularities, and psalm-
singing, supplication, and religious reading
and meditation as the only saintly employ
ments. Think of the waste of time of the
people in monasteries repeating the Psalms
year after year at Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext,
Nones and Compline, as well as at Matins and
Vespers, each day witnessing this same incessant
stream of words. What good to God or
man ? How weary heaven must be, if earth
is not, of this everlasting repetition ! If
this were the genuine spirituality, the world,
with the best intentions, could certainly not
afford to be spiritual at the price.
In this connection one s thoughts turn in
evitably to Puritanism, amongst ourselves
the progenitor of what is most influential in
religion to-day. How stood Puritanism
in its interpretation of the spiritual ? Un
doubtedly there was, in the intensity of its
apprehension, a tendency to separatism and
exclusiveness. Yet not so much among its
highest representatives. Milton grasped the
whole world of learning, and none of his
age had a more exquisite perception of the
beautiful. Colonel Hutchinson, purest and
loftiest of characters, the portraiture of whom
by his wife is one of the treasures of biography,
154 THE COMMON LIFE.
is pictured for us there as fond of hawking,
dancing and fence ; and we have lovingly
dwelt upon also " his hair of brown, very thick
set in his youth, softer than the finest silk,
curling with loose great rings at the end."
The Puritan had no notion either of shutting
himself up in monasteries or contenting himself
with psalm-singing. As Green has it : "It
was the Puritan who went forth to fight
the Spaniard in France or in the Netherlands.
It was the Puritan who burst into the Spanish
Main and who singed Philip s beard at
Cadiz."
Nevertheless, with the rank and file we dis
cern a limitation of view and of practice,
which, while meant to be spiritual, was not so,
being in no sense founded on the Divine
mind as we now discern it. The jests at the
Roundhead of a Randolph, a Dryden, a Butler
and a Cowley, were in some degree justified.
The Puritan tendency in the seventeenth
century was to see God only in one phase of
things and only on one side of life. These
men seem never to have realised that the unseen
contained a sense of humour. The broad
humanity of the Roman poet, " humani
nihil a me alienum puto," was foreign to their
mind. And the lesson of this narrowness
is given us in the reaction that followed.
We wonder immeasurably that the Restora
tion morals should have succeeded the Crom-
ON BEING SPIRITUAL. 155
wellian age. How could such a change come,
and so quickly ?
Psychology gives us the answer. The parents
had over-driven themselves ; had used up in
abnormal efforts their spiritual force, and so
had little or none left for their children. It
was here we have the solution of the otherwise
amazing facts that the children of the Puritans
stood aloof from Puritanism, that we read of
Cromwell s sons having little pretension to
religion ; of Milton s nephews, brought up in
his house, writing satires on Puritanism
and publishing filthy songs ; and of the
daughters of great preachers figuring on the
infamous stage of the Restoration. When
man tries to run one part of his nature to the
utter exclusion of the rest, the result, as ages
of experiment should now have assured us,
is never a success.
With all this experience behind us, what,
then, is it to be spiritual ? In brief, spirituality
is two things a perception and a performance.
It is for one thing to realise God as everywhere
in His world ; to accept with reverent gladness
every variety of its phenomena and every
phase of its experience as a new manifestation
of Himself. The spiritual man is he who in a
sunset on the Alps, or in a sonata of Beethoven,
or a problem of mathematics ; in the age
long drama of history, in the laughter of little
children, in the events of his life, in the ques-
156 THE COMMON LIFE.
tions and answers of his experience, in his
highest aspirations, sees everywhere, now the
hiding and now the manifestation of that
ultimate Reality, which his soul s voice tells
him is Holiness and Love, and to be united
with which is the one final craving and cry
of his heart.
And with this perception comes a per
formance. Knowing the universe as spiritual,
its law as holy, the spiritual man seeks as his
dearest aim, to conform his action and char
acter to that law. The law is exceeding
broad. All knowledge, all science, all skill are
included in it. A Mozart s perfection in
music is of affinity with the perfection that
is spiritual. All hold of the one principle.
And so the spiritual man is the broadest
and not the narrowest of his fellows. He
seeks the best in everything, for the best is
God.
A topic like this illustrates, among a thousand
other things, the beautiful solidarity of hu
manity. For, in this direction, all are not
gifted in the same degree. There is a vicarious
principle luminously evident, by which the
seer helps the man who does not see. Does
God love less the practical man who builds
bridges and houses, but has no such percep
tions as our prophet yonder, with his wireless
messages from the unseen ? And yet the pro
phet leans on the practical man as much as he
ON BEING SPIRITUAL. 157
on the prophet, and the world could do as
little without the one as without the other.
There is no fear, despite surface appear
ances to the contrary, that spiritual-minded-
ness will cease out of our world. It cannot,
because the spiritual is always there. Go
far enough in any honest pursuit and you
inevitably run up against it. Gregory Thau-
ma turgus speaks somewhere of " the sacred
mathematics." He spoke out of a true per
ception, for all knowledge opens the way to
the one shrine. No man is great apart
from this greatness. Christ is here our Chief
because His whole nature answered to the
spiritual and thrilled to the sense of God.
The finest thing Mr. Bryce has to say in his
appreciation of Gladstone is that " he led
a third life also, the secret life of the soul.
Religion was of all things that which had
the strongest hold upon his thoughts and feel
ings." That is the hall-mark of manhood.
As we rise out of the slough of the animal,
and become more completely human, the more
clearly does the world appear to us as spiritual ;
the more do we feel
Through all our fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
XIX.
The Feast of Faces.
THEKE is no such portrait gallery in the
world as a London street. At every moment
we have a fresh masterpiece of form and
expression. The greatest pictures, as Ruskin
has reminded us, are those of the human face,
and there is nothing on canvas that for realism
and suggestiveness can compare with what
the street offers us. And the gallery is being
incessantly refilled. It is a wonderful thing
to ponder, that along these great thorough
fares there has been moving a steady stream
of human life for over a thousand years.
Think of the changes that in that time have
come ; in religion, in government, in dress,
in language, in ideas ! Along the Strand
and up Ludgate Hill men have tramped in
chain mail, in doublet and hose, in the long,
pointed shoes of the fourteenth century, in
the love-locks and Vandyke hats of the
Cavaliers, in the bag wigs of the time of
Steele and Johnson. And during these long
centuries of change the footsteps on the
158
THE FEAST OF FACES. 159
pavement have never ceased. Always has
Thames ebbed and flowed through the years,
and so also has this other stream. It is fuller
to-day than ever, and each face we encounter
is a picture beyond the compass of a Reynolds,
a book deeper than our Homers and Shake-
spear es.
There is nothing in the world of form, so
far as we know it on this planet, to compare
with the human face. We have only to look
away to what answers to it in the animal
kingdom to realise the difference. What
aeons of time, what infinitude of varied process
has Nature occupied in fashioning this outline ?
What planning, what unearthly dexterity
to mould, out of bone and muscle and nerve
fibre, this finished organ of a soul s expression !
We are reminded of Huxley s marvellous
description of ovarian evolution as viewed
through the microscope : " . .... So that
after watching the process hour by hour one
is almost involuntarily pursued by the notion
that some more subtle aid to the vision than
the microscope would show the hidden artist,
with his plan before him, striving with skilful
manipulation to perfect his work." The evolu
tion of the face has been the work, not of hours,
but of measureless ages, yet " the notion of
the hidden artist, with his plan before him,"
not the less haunts us. And the mystery
does not end there. In the face we have the
160 THE COMMON LIFE.
matchless organ, the Marconi instrument
that vibrates to the touch of the infinite,
but whence come the ideas which fill and use
it ? The instrument, after all, is not the
music. The soul thrills through and suffuses
the feature outline, and yet the one does not
yield us the other. Here, indeed, have we
the door slammed in our face. The greatest
rebuff, surely, that science has ever received,
in its attempt to penetrate the mystery of
mind, was in the discovery that its great
doctrine of the transmutation of force breaks
down utterly in this realm. If consciousness
were simply a form of material energy, then,
in the same way that heat disappears by its
conversion into motion, would nerve force
disappear in the production of feeling. But
there is no such equivalent. The investigator,
at this point, reaches a blank wall. In the
face, then, two worlds meet, with two sets of
laws. It is this which gives us its wonder
and fascination. Fashioned by reason and
lighted by soul, it shines in its every feature
with the supernatural. It is matter so pene
trated by spirit that the one seems here visibly
to melt into the other.
But there are faces and faces. Aside from
what is common to humanity there is, to the
careful observer, exhaustless interest in typal
and individual variation. In the moulding
of them it seems as though the inner and outer
THEJFEAST OF FACES. 161
causes were in perpetual struggle as to which
should predominate. The physical, for one
thing, is always at work. Atmosphere, sun
shine, occupation, a thousand material differ
ences are all feature artists. We see their
results in a few generations. The American
face is already at a far remove from the
English. There are descendants of early
Portuguese settlers in Africa who are almost
black. It is curious how national types assert
themselves. Amongst a cosmopolitan crowd
you can almost invariably and with absolute
accuracy pick out the Englishman. The
language a man speaks is one of the hundred
subtle face moulders. To be perpetually
using certain muscles for the production of
given shades of sound tells ultimately upon
the entire expressional result.
But our truest feast of faces comes in our
individual studies. And here it is not what
the circumstances of climate or nationality
have wrought that whets our interest. It is
the marks laid there by the central mystery
of life. What a sheer delight it is to look upon
a child s face ! The children seem to have
been growing more beautiful in these later
years. The marvel is that they seem so
entirely content with the world they have
come into. There is something astonishing
at the coolness, the absolute equanimity with
which they accept the idea of being born
11
162 THE COMMON LITE.
into such a universe as this. And yet, why
not ? The pessimist should consider well this
fact, that the first thing that meets a child
on its entrance here is the heaven of love in
a mother s eye. Whatever it encounters
after, here is pure love for the beginning.
And may we not believe that, in whatsoever
other spheres and states we may come into,
this same rule will hold ? Why shiver at the
strangeness of another world ? The children
are, from the first day of arrival, perfectly
at home in this. And in that fresh birth
which lies for us beyond death, may we not
believe that again love will be the first to
greet us, and that our entrance will be to the
centre of a home ?
The children s faces yield us much, but they
do not yield us all. The greatest treasure
of the street is a later development. The faces
we ponder most are those that carry a history
in them. Into some, as we look, we realise
at once that here the great choices, the
great decisions have been made. Here has
been inner victory. The soul within has
fronted life, the tug of its lower desires, the
impact of its strange fortunes, and has emerged
triumphant. That victory, we feel, has been
won for us all. We share in it as we glance
at the clear eye and at the lighted features.
There are utter strangers whom we long to
address. A beautiful soul we feel is passing
THE FEAST OF FACES. 163
by. We take toll of it as it passes. Mar
vellous power of goodness, that even as,
wordless, it moves along the street, it gives
itself forth ! " Wheresoever the river goeth
there is life." One thinks of an Arthur
Hallam, of whom his father said, " He seemed
to tread the earth as a spirit from a better
world " ; of a Vincent de Paul, who covered
France with charitable institutions, whose
homely peasant features were, we read,
transfigured by the exquisite beauty of the
soul within. Of all varieties strong and
honest, tender and refined, flashing with
victorious eagerness, worn with patiently-
endured sorrow these schonen Seden pass
us by, and the brief instant of our speechless
contact has left us the better. The lighted
features have shown us how goodness is
winning its kingdom.
But our portrait gallery is not always
yielding us these results. The realism of
the street is at times more terrific than
Vereschagin. There are doom faces that
haunt us for days. There is no theology so
lurid in its " doctrine of last things " as that
which is written on some features. The
tragedy reaches its deepest when the story
of utmost loss and degradation is visible on
the face of the young. There are girls in their
teens whose eye offers a glimpse into Acheron.
One asks, in despair, what our humanity,
164 THE COMMON LIFE.
with its religions, its churches, has been
about to permit these souls, at life s begin
ning, to break through all the safeguards,
and to drop plumb down into such depths as
these ?
But it is not the bad faces only that oppress
us with a sense of social wrong. What of those
that, as they pass, tell of defeat, of hunger,
of grinding poverty ? The worst evil our
great cities have wrought is that they have
cut our tie to our neighbour. Inside our
door the ache of the youngest and weakest
receives fullest attention. We step into the
street, and the brother s trouble that waits
there is nothing to us. The worst is that he
finds in himself no right even to speak of it.
He will sleep to-night under an arch and we
in our comfortable beds, and we permit the
system to go on as though for this the heavens
and the earth were made. We talk of mercy
and we have not yet begun with justice. The
slave owner recognised his obligation to feed
and clothe his people, but we have not yet
reached that level. Surely the coming prophet
voices, that bring the Gospel of to-morrow,
will begin by thundering in our ears till our
dead social conscience is once more awaked !
We shall then confess that our damning sin
has been, not in accepting or rejecting this
or that speculative doctrine, but that we used
our strength to exploit and exult over our
THE FEAST OF FACES. 165
weaker brother, instead of bearing his burden
and pouring oil into his wounds.
When those who have, accomplish their
full duty by those who have not, when the
possessors render justice to the disinherited,
the common face in the street will take on a
new aspect. Meanwhile we have a duty to
our own. We are all under an obligation to
the picture gallery, to offer it as noble a
contribution as we can. How strange, though,
the notions people have of facial comeliness !
It is an affair for them of the chemist, the
artist, of dyes and paints and cosmetics.
Montaigne gives an entertaining description
of the feminine appliances of his time for
the enhancing of beauty. Centuries earlier
we have Alexandrian Clement discoursing thus
on the same theme : " At the dawn of day,
mangling, racking and plastering themselves
over with certain compositions, they chill the
skin, furrow the flesh with poisons and with
curiously prepared washes, thus blighting
their own beauty. Wherefore they are seen
to be yellow from the use of cosmetics, and
susceptible to disease ; their flesh, which has
been shaded with poisons, being now in a
melting state. So they dishonour the Creator,
as if the beauty given by Him were nothing
worth."
The truth of the last sentence of the Greek
father, obvious as it is, has not yet penetrated
166 THE COMMON LIFE.
our civilisation. Yet Plato had already said
it in the " Republic " in his question : " Is
anything more noble than a man whose beauty
of soul is combined with outward beauty of
form, the latter corresponding to and har
monising with the former ? " The two legiti
mate facial artists are Nature without and
the Soul within. From the fresh air and the
honest sunlight does Nature extract her
colouring, and there is no artificial compound
that compares with it. But the finer touches,
those that divinise a countenance, come
from within. We have only begun to realise
the artistic possibility of character. The vision
of heaven in the Apocalypse opens the inmost
truth of things in exhibiting, as history s
final consummation, a state in which
the soul s perfect purity shall clothe itself in a
form and an environment of unimaginable
beauty.
XX.
On Points of View.
SIR ROBERT PEEL once startled the House
of Commons with the question, " What is a
pound ? " It would, we imagine, be a still
greater poser to ask, " What is a fact ? "
One of the wonders of human nature is that
it should have arrived at convictions on any
subject, considering the ground it has to go
upon. The simplest and solidest things, when
we begin to look steadily at them, have a
faculty of dissolving into mist. A mountaineer
makes the acquaintance of an Alp. He sees
it at first seventy miles away, and it is a
cloud on the horizon. He gets nearer, and
the cloud has turned into a well-framed
picture of glacier, crag and snowfield. He
climbs it to find both the earlier impressions
vanished, and in their place a series of quite
new ones, which change every hour as the
ascent proceeds. Which of these effects is
the mountain ? Do any, or all of them put
together, bring us to the actual fact ? What
here is reality, and what our own sensation ?
We do not know. Our belief in the moun
tain and the external world generally is, at
167
168 THE COMMON LIFE.
bottom, an act of faith. We believe in the
concurrent testimony of our own and our
neighbours perceptions, backed as these are
by the conviction, arrived at on other grounds,
that this is a reasonable universe, whose
Author has not constructed our senses with
a view to their making fools of us.
We know, in fact, the spiritual world, the
world of thought and feeling, a great deal
better than that material one with which,
strangely enough, people imagine themselves
so familiar. But here again we have abundant
grounds for intellectual humility. In this
region also the prospect is so dependent upon
the point of view, that one is apt to wonder,
with the pilgrim in Lucian s Hermotimus,
where the kingdom of truth really lies, and
whether there is any road to it open to mortals.
Shall we ever reach that for which earnest
souls so yearn, a universal agreement upon
all the great questions of life ? If so, it will
not be yet. What we have to consider in our
day is the immense effect of the individual
standpoint in determining inward conviction.
As we look at the way in which heredity,
temperament, circumstance, geographical con
ditions, anything and everything rather than
the unbiassed intellect, determine the way we
look at things, we realise with Arnold that
Limits we did not set
Condition all we do ;
ON POINTS OF VIEW. 169
and that man at present is not so much him
self a reasonable being as the hodman and day
labourer of a higher Reason which uses him
thus.
Consider, to begin with, the varying stand
points of temperament. How is man to
arrive at any similarity of view on, say,
theological or social questions so long as there
is the present disparity in the functioning of
the human liver ? There will be optimist
and pessimist philosophies so long as there are
healthy and unhealthy philosophers. A bilious
temperament like that of Schopenhauer formed
the atmosphere through which he saw facts.
The pessimistic stomach orders the brain to
produce a theory which shall fit its indigestion.
Argument would no more avail against a view
thus formed than it would against rheumatism.
A similar inability to discover that they belong
to the same universe is found in the relative
temperaments of the scientist and the poet.
A Darwin complains that he cannot appre
ciate Shakespeare. A Keats replies that the
world is spoiled by the investigator.
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy ?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven :
We know her woof, her texture ; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Who can say that the world in which these
two live is the same ? Better to admit with
170 THE COMMON LIFE.
Jean Paul that a new universe is created every
time a child is born.
The small extent to which man, in his
judgments, is governed by unbiassed intelli
gence is even more strikingly illustrated
by observing the effect produced on him
by his geographical standpoints. When we
find every Turk a Mohammedan and almost
every Russian a Greek Catholic, we have a
state of things which is clearly not a result
of individual reasoning. What a curious
illustration, too, of racial standpoints is to
be found in national self-estimates ! A
Frenchman believes his country to be at the
head of civilisation, and is astonished to find
the coldness with which the proposition is
received by the Englishman, the German,
and the American. But these, in their turn,
have a similar national cult, rejected in the same
way by their neighbours. A common-sense
and approximately correct international appre
ciation seems likely to be one of the last
things the world will learn.
There are, however, matters more vital than
national self-esteem, and it is curious to note
how, in some of the most important of these,
the geographical standpoint has had its share.
One wonders, for instance, what would have
happened to the Oxford Movement, and to
religious thought generally in England, had
Pusey, when a young man, remained a few
ON POINTS OF VIEW. 171
years longer in Germany instead of returning
to Oxford when he did ! To-day how odd
it is to think of the unbending champion of
Oxford orthodoxy as once an enthusiastic
adherent of the new critical movement in the
Fatherland, and as publishing a book whose
liberalism drew on it the grave censure of a
High Church divine ! If we ask the reason
for the transformation, there seems in the
final resort to have been no other than the
change of longitude. The distance between
Pusey s earlier and later points of view was
the distance between Bonn and Oxford.
So far we seem to have been chronicling
nothing but confusions collecting evidence,
as some might suggest, in the interests of a
general Pyrrhonism. The confusion is, how
ever, more apparent than real, and the evidence,
rightly studied, will be found after all to be on
the side of faith and progress. When we
look at the course of history, and at what
is happening to-day, we observe in this region
a law at work whose operations are becoming
ever more distinctly visible. We recognise
that while individual experience and individual
idiosyncrasy die with the individual, there is
gradually accumulating a vast collective experi
ence which is destined to become the basis of
a universal conviction. In the light of that
collective experience the earlier and partial
human standpoints will disappear* We see
172 THE COMMON LIFE.
the process going on. Geography and race,
powerful as they still are, do not count as
they did fifty years ago in the formation of
opinion. The best men of every clime are
beginning, across the political and theological
barriers, to clasp hands, and where the leaders
go the rest will ultimately follow.
And the new common standpoints are not
only powerful to unite, but also powerful to
inspire. What a difference, for instance,
between the world theory which viewed man
as in a state of ruin and under a curse and that
now replacing it, which regards him as advanc
ing from humblest origins to an ever higher
level ; which, instead of despairing over his
wickedness, points to the wonder of the good
he has attained, and which sees in his history
the sure evolution of a spiritual kingdom and
the ever clearer revelation of a Divine Helper
and King !
A study of this topic should teach us at
least two lessons. One is the absurdity of
erecting correct theological opinion into a
sine qua non of salvation. In these things
we are beginning to discover that we know
very little and that our fathers knew less.
Men see in these matters according to their
standpoint, and in nine cases out of ten their
standpoint is not of their own choosing. The
other lesson is that of sympathy. Before we
abuse or think hardly of the man who dis-
ON POINTS OF VIEW, 173
agrees with us, let us first of all try to under
stand him. " Put yourself in his place," was
Charles Reade s motto for the solution of all
social disagreements, and it is an excellent
one. We might, indeed, almost accept Madame
de StaeTs daring dictum, "If we knew all
we should forgive all."
XXI.
Life s By- Products.
ONE of the features of our manufacturing
processes is the accumulation of material
left over from the main article produced, and
which in earlier times was thrown away as
waste. It is the characteristic of our modern
methods to turn all this to profit. At the
gasworks, in the starch factory and in a
score of other industries, the by-products,
scientifically treated, figure prominently in
the assets of the concern. There are instances,
indeed, where the once neglected by-product
has become the chief element of manufacture.
Waste, we are beginning to recognise, is
simply another name for our own ignorance.
The object which we insult by the epithet
is something whose true value and uses we
have as yet failed to comprehend.
When we turn from specific processes of
this kind to the phenomena of life as
exhibited on our own planet, it is impossible not
to be struck with the wide range of analogy
which is here opened. The modern man is
LIFE S BY-PRODUCTS. 175
studying this theme with a certain uneasiness.
He sees in it a disagreeable reference to him
self. It is an illustration of the bewilderment
which the vast extension of the horizon has
produced in the human spirit, that science is
asking whether, after all, man himself is not a
mere by-product of the cosmic process ;
whether the vast movement of life towards
its completer expression has not thrown him
up as a mere experiment, a bridge on the way
towards something better ! The argument
here that a Nietzsche had long ago presented
to Germany, a Bernard Shaw and a Mr. H. G.
Wells are now seriously offering to the English
mind. The bare suspicion is one that gives a
sharp knock to our self-complacency. But,
after all, this is not the main question. What
we have come from and what we are going to
are largely hidden from us . We are perpetually
in the making. Man is the loom on which the
past and the future are being woven together.
The chief problem for us is to secure that, at
this meeting-point of the eternities which
constitutes our life, our own bit of weaving
shall be of the best we know.
But it is precisely here that the subject of
by-products, as related to our chief out
put, comes in. When we contemplate human
life as a whole, we are arrested by the ques
tion, " Who is the chief manufacturer here ? "
Is it our own consciousness, or is it a conscious-
176 THE COMMON LIFE.
ness beyond our own that is using us for ends
we do not see ? The horse in the shafts
yonder has, doubtless, ideas of some sort
as to what he is doing and why he is doing it.
And there is a certain accuracy about his
ideas, within limits. But the driver behind
him has views also, which go beyond those of
the driven quadruped. He cannot explain
them to his horse, and this absence of explana
tion is very likely one of the standing per
plexities of equine existence. We, too, are
in the shafts. We have notions as to where we
are going and what we ought to do. But at
every point we are puzzled. Our life results
are not what we looked for. The outcome of
our energies seems so often a pure w r aste.
The question is, " Are we the proper judges,
or is there another eye, that of a driver, upon
the business ? "
We are sorely in need of an assurance
on the point, because the vast proportion of
human endeavour seems, so far as we can see,
to have been a by-product, for which we can
discern no proper use. Think of the enormous
amount of energy given off by our race in
its long history, of which we know nothing !
Take its blunders and follies ; the frightful
story of its superstitions and the sufferings
thereby entailed ! Read the story of the
Inquisition, or of witchcraft, where countless
thousands of helpless women were put to the
LIFE S BY-PRODUCTS. 177
most horrible tortures, simply because men
had taken into their heads a wrong idea !
In the human story every step of progress
has been preceded by a hundred miles of
wandering from the track. Why this
wandering, and blundering, and suffering ?
To our view it is so fearful a waste. Side by
side with his products of truth, life, beauty, and
happiness, are these mountains of slag, these
amorphous rubbish heaps, these red pools of
blood.
What is the meaning of all this, or is there a
meaning ? Is evil a necessary by-product
in the manufacture of life ? We know how
the philosophers have toiled over that
problem. No one of the earlier thinkers has,
we suppose, gone deeper into it than Leibnitz.
His "Theodicee" in which he labours the
question of evil as related necessarily to
finiteness, the limitation of being forming
in itself a privation, as being without the beati
tude of the Divine ; while free will, and the
opening of an infinite number of causes in a
created universe, made the other forms of
evil to be in a way inevitable is perhaps the
best bit of reasoning on these lines the world
has seen or is likely to see. But Leibnitz,
with his " best of all possible worlds," does
not somehow satisfy us. It is only when we
reach the later conception of the by-product
and its uses the conviction that our actions,
12
178 THE COMMON LIFE.
limitations and sufferings are, apart from the
consequences visible to ourselves, working out
an infinite number of other results known to
the great Producer ; that there is here abso
lutely no waste, but that every thrill of human
emotion, every effort and pang that seemed
so fruitless are being wrought up by the in
visible cosmic chemistry into finished products
of measureless value that our shaken faith
is once more re-established. When Dryden
sings
Fool d with hope men favour the deceit,
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay;
To-morrow s falser than the former day,
Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possesst .
Strange cozenage I
we have no means of meeting his note of despair
except by the faith that the disappointments,
the seeming wastes of hope and desire, are in
themselves the raw material of a new great
manufacture that is at present hidden from us.
But we have stayed, perhaps, too long on
the more purely speculative aspects of our
theme. It has abundant practical sides. Our
modern social system has, for instance, been
constructed largely on the principle of certain
leading products with a residuum of waste.
Our city life, under the present conditions,
throws into its gutters a mass of debased
and criminal existence, which we accept and
LIFE S BY-PEODTJCTS. 179
acquiesce in as if it were a normal and
inevitable part of the social process. The State
makes provision for this material by the erec
tion of gaols. Theology recognises it by a
doctrine of total depravity. The private
citizen is every now and then waked up
to its presence by a robbery or a murder.
Meanwhile, it is beginning to occur to some of
us to ask whether these bodies, minds and souls
now swelling the rubbish heap might not be
treated a little more scientifically ? Whether
the experiments that have been tried on the
other rubbish heaps might not be tried on
this ? Whether human nature is not as sus
ceptible of treatment as the refuse of coal
gas ? And whether, while brilliant colours
are being extracted from the one, some
thing brilliant also, it only brains and heart are
brought to the task, may not be obtained from
the other ? Our prisons, our police-courts,
our criminal law proclaim that we are yet in
the rubbish-heap stage of manufacture. But
that stage cannot last. The human waste
product of to-day will be one of the brightest
assets of the future.
Another side of the theme is opened when
we discuss the by-products of our separate
lives. With many men it has been a diffi
culty to discover what was their real life-task,
and what the mere parerga. In some there has
been such a splendour and variety of gift, that
180 THE COMMON LIFEJ
we are left to wonder where their chief interest
really lay. Think of a Leonardo da Vinci,
master of half-a-dozen first-class departments,
in each of which he shone supreme ! What
shall we call him civil engineer, architect,
poet, scientific discoverer, sculptor, or painter ?
There have been men of such exuberance
of life that the achievements by which men
now remember them were thrown off as the
merest by-play. We read of Charles James
Fox making a magnificent speech in the
House of Commons, for which, in lieu of pre
paration, Horace Walpole tells us that " he
was just arrived from Newmarket, had sat
up drinking all night and had not been in
bed." There have been men of prodigious
industry in what they regarded as their chief
employment, but who are only known now by
what they regarded as their by-play. Bishop
Ken was a most learned prelate, and produced
a vast quantity of literary matter. To-day he
is remembered by two hymns. One wonders
how Paul compared his epistles with the other
output of his life ! How small an output
these letters, dashed off in the heat of con
troversy, amid the hurry and distractions
of travel and of his other work, compared with
all else he had said and done ! And yet it was
by these his name was to live ; it was these
scraps from his pen that were to build up
doctrine, to fill libraries with reverent com-
LIFE S BY-PRODUCTS. 181
mentary, to furnish the world s pulpits with
texts for now nigh two thousand years.
Indeed, we do not know what part of our
life, what of the things we have done or shall
do, will tell most upon the sum of things.
It is often when we are doing the thing
we least understand, when on a track that
seems a blind one, that the issues will be
greatest. Yet no man does a thing by mere
hazard. In practical chemistry the by-pro
ducts, though far enough removed in appear
ance and quality from the chief manufacture,
are related to it in a way that shows no varia
tion. And the side results of a man s life,
its trivialities, its amusements, will all have an
intimate and unbreakable connection with the
main thing in him. Said Goethe of Schiller ;
" I have never heard from him an insignificant
word." It could be said of every man of
value. His laugh rings with the same note
as his deepest aspiration. His footstep, the
poise of his head, the light in his eye, tell one
story.
For manners are not idle, but the fruit
Of loyal nature and of noble mind.
The man who would get most out of his life
will take care that the by-products add to
its general sum. He will have no room for
waste. His amusements, his seeming idleness,
all will be healthily related to the main thing.
He cannot afford to have divided interests.
182 THE COMMON LIFE,
For the finger-tips of him are thrilling with the
same life as the central brain. In a collection
of early Christian Syriac documents, in a piece
entitled " The Teaching of Addaeus the
Apostle," there are these remarkable lines :
" At the consummation of creation will be a
resuscitation of all men, and at that time their
course of conduct will be portrayed in their
persons, and their bodies will be so many
volumes for the writings of j ustice . " A wonder
ful word, and in its way a true. For the sum
total of our life, its main and its by-product,
what is it all but a secret writing, a cryptic
inscription, engraved upon every part of body
and mind, and that may start into wondrous
visibility when the light of eternity has
fallen upon it ?
XXII.
Going on Pilgrimage.
IN the summer time the modern man finds
reviving in him a mysterious instinct of
vagabondage. He is become as migratory as
the swallow. He wanders and wanders, even
if, as is sometimes the case, he is miserable
over the business. It was Madame de StaeTs
view that " whatever may be said to the con
trary, travelling is one of the saddest pleasures
of life ; when you really feel at ease in some
strange town, it is because you are beginning
to make it a home." Most travellers have had
times when they shared that sentiment, but
it is not the average experience. There is
exhilaration in movement. Dr. Johnson
thought he reached life s highest expression
in being whirled along a pleasant country
road in a postchaise. We understand his
feeling. And the break with the accustomed
and the familiar which travel brings is cer
tainly at times a sensation to be tasted. Its
fullest flavour is perhaps reached when we
journey alone. We can enter then into
183
184 THE COMMON LIFE.
Hazlitt s idea of being " lord of oneself un-
cumbered with a name." We revel for a while
in being able, as he puts it, " to shake off the
world, lose our importunate everlasting iden
tity, become the creature of the moment to
hold to the universe only by a dish of sweet
bread, known by no other title than the
gentleman in the parlour. " With most of
us, however, a little of this goes a long way.
It requires generally a rare and peculiarly
trained spirit to cut all its communications
with society and yet find itself entirely at
home.
Travel has been enormously developed in
these later years, yet it would be a delusion
to suppose that our generation has here any
thing like a monopoly. Nothing, indeed, is
more remarkable, especially when we con
sider the almost utter lack of facilities, than
the enormous human movements of the
earlier ages. Men had neither roads, nor
railways, nor steamers, but somehow they
got about. We in these islands are a branch
of the same race we now rule in India. Our
fathers found their way here from Central Asia.
In those days they travelled in nations.
Think of the descent of the Huns upon Africa,
of the Goths upon Southern Europe, of the
movement of the Calmuck Tartars across
Siberia ! How amazing the cool hardihood
which permitted the Helvetii, as Caesar de-
GOING ON PILGRIMAGE. 185
scribes, to vacate their old territories in
Switzerland, burning their homes behind them,
and staking their existence as a people on
a vast trek westward ! In those days people
did not travel for pleasure. It was business
all the time. The human movement was as
that of a glacier, inevitable, pressed on by
resistless forces behind.
And, apart from these vast primitive migra
tions, we note how universal and continuous
has been the individual pilgriming. The
scholars and teachers have ever been a wan
dering tribe. The Greek philosopher never
considered himself finished unless he had had
a journey to Egypt, and the writings of many
of them, of Plato especially, show how great
must have been the commerce of ideas between
Greece and the far East. In the Middle
Ages and later men incessantly trafficked to
and fro on the errands of religion and learning.
Erasmus in his letters gives us graphic pictures
of the hardships of travel, of the abominable
condition of the inns and of the roads. But
despite that the scholar found his way from
Rome to Cologne, from Cologne to Paris, from
Paris to Cambridge. He was free of the whole
Western world. Mr. Cook will to-day book
you to Jerusalem, and you will journey there
almost as easily as to Margate. Ignatius
Loyola begged his way on foot, so far as the
land journey was concerned, and had on the
186 THE COMMON LIFE.
road constant hairbreadth escapes from death.
Altogether a wonderful story. Perhaps the
greatest human history is the history of man
the traveller.
Amid the almost infinite diversities of
travel there is one form which stands out with
peculiar interest. It is that of the pilgrimage.
We should not know man, some of his deepest
things would be hidden from us, did we not
study him as pilgrim. Of pilgrimages there
is the widest variety. Says Mark Pattison,
" Patriotism, poetry, philanthropy, all the
arts and all the finer feelings have their pil
grimages, their hallowed spots of intense
interest, their haunts of fancy and of in
spiration." But while the varieties are many,
it is very significant to note the limitations.
People make pilgrimages to Canterbury, to
Lourdes, to Weimar, to the grave of Burns.
Do they ever make pilgrimages to Chicago ?
It is worth while to ask the question, because
the answer is so full of meaning. Men build
their cities of to-day, crowd them with the
apparatus of money-making and of money-
spending. And all this, we say, is honourable,
laudable, the spirit of the age, the mark of
progress. Singular, though, that to all the
splendour and profit of this movement the
pilgrim spirit in man makes absolutely no
response. Here is a mystery worth inves
tigating.
GOING ON PILGRIMAGE. 187
The secret, when we look for it, is easily
discovered. The world s business marts, its
pleasure centres, are everywhere. The next
dust-heap would become one to-morrow were
gold found under it. But a shrine can never
be made that way. A place becomes a
pilgrim centre only by its connection with the
higher energies of the human spirit. It is
thus even that the beauty spots of our planet
become sacred to us. There are mountain
scenes of the Andes or of the Selkirks of
incomparable natural grandeur, but they affect
us in no way as do far homelier views where
some great spirit has brooded. Cornwall is
a different place to us after the Idylls. We
wander through the Scott country as in an
enchanted land. Yes, it is always man at
his deepest that really moves us. He has
then the faculty of leaving his very essence
behind him, and it lingers there, losing no
whit of its potent charm through all the waste
of years. It was the privilege once of the
present writer to assist at the unearthing of
an ancient tumulus in the West Country, and
never will he forget the thrill which passed
through the explorers when, after long toil
with pick and spade, the last stroke brought
to view a bronze implement and some withered
leaves, the fragments of an oak chaplet. For
here, across long ages, they were face to face
with their brother man, with his art, his
188 THE COMMON LITE.
religion, his hope and aspiration in the presence
of death.
The shrine, we say, whether of poet or
patriot or martyr, is always a testimony to
the higher qualities in man, to his essence as
spiritual. The modern millionaire is supposed
to be master of most things. He can, if he
choose, build himself the most splendid of
mausoleums. But his utmost wit and wealth
can never turn it into a shrine. We go to
the spots to which pilgrimages are made
without any inquiries as to banking accounts.
Have our readers ever seen the cottage at
Chalfont where Milton lived ? It would not
be good enough nearly for the lodge at the
gate of our merchant prince. But nobody
will visit the merchant s palace in the mood
that holds us as we stand here at gaze. It is
a money-making age, but the soul even to-day
exacts its terms.
It were well for our holiday-makers if,
more often than they do, they turned their
excursions into pilgrimages. That would be
at the same time to cultivate health of
body and enlargement of the mind. But
to get what these places can offer there must
always be some previous interior preparation.
What we take from them depends on the
size of the vessel we bring. What is the
good of visiting Assisi unless we are on
terms with " Frater Franciscus " ? The
GOING ON PILGRIMAGE. 189
present writer, looking once from the ^Egean
at Salamis and Marathon, was accosted by
a functionary of the vessel he was on with
the remark that " he could not for the life
of him understand what people saw to make
a fuss about in these rocks and tumble
down ruins." And there seemed no answer
except that " to him that hath shall be
given."
We cannot, however, all be pilgrims in
this sense. Some of us are home-bound.
But to the most circumscribed, who have
never left their parish, there is open a miracu
lous journey, with grander scenery and more
wondrous adventure than belong to any
other wandering on this planet. There has
never yet been a pilgrimage to surpass that of
John Bunyan, and he made it without step
ping outside the boundaries of his prison
cell. Some day a genius of the highest class
may be given us who shall write a new " Pil
grim s Progress," setting forth, with some
thing of the Bedford dreamer s vividness, a
soul s movement in the time that now is.
Its outlook would be different in many re
spects from that of the seventeenth century.
There are points, doubtless, in which Bunyan
might be improved upon. There is one,
however, in which he can never be surpassed.
It is in his sublime conception of the inward
life as, under the Christian inspiration, a
190 THE COMMON LIFE.
continual ascent, where the end immeasurably
transcends the beginning,
Humanity having once secured, will never
again let go the view of lif e which, commencing
with the City of Destruction and the Slough
of Despond, works ever upward to the De
lectable Mountains, to the Land of Beulah,
and to the heavenly city. That is the invin
cible optimism of the Christian Gospel, to
which there has been nothing comparable
before or since. Contrast this with the life-
scheme of the old Greek poet : " When once
the appointed time of youth is past it is
better to die forthwith than to live " ; or
with that of the despairing modern science
which speaks in a sentence like this : we
quote from a letter of Huxley to John Morley :
" It flashes across me at all sorts of times
with a sort of horror that in 1900 I shall
probably know no more of what is going on
than I did in 1800. I would sooner be in
hell a good deal at any rate in one of the
upper circles. ... I wonder if you are
plagued in this way ? "
Clearly no way has been discovered of
making the life- journey an upward and vic
torious one except the New Testament way.
Were that light darkened, our utmost science
would shed no ray upon the path. But how
joyous has that illumination made the pil
grimage for innumerable souls ! How cheery,
GOING ON PILGRIMAGE. 191
as compared with Huxley s view, is that of
Baxter, of whom Calamy says : " He talked
about another world like one that had been
there, and was come as a sort of express
from thence to make a report concerning it."
Every age in fact through the Christian
centuries has had the like report. The Chris
tian souls here are wonderfully akin. Here,
for instance, is Clement of Alexandria, who,
long centuries before, is able to lay down the
very ground plan of Bunyan s story : " But
the elect man dwells as a sojourner. The
body, too, as one sent on a distant pilgrimage
uses inns and dwellings by the way, having
care of the things of the world, of the places
where he halts, but leaving his dwelling-
place and property without excessive emotion ;
. . . giving thanks for his sojourn, and
blessing God for his departure, embracing the
mansion that is in heaven ! "
Truly there seems only one conclusion to
the matter. When all has been said and
done ; when wealth and science and philo
sophy have given their uttermost, they leave
the life problem to the Christian solution.
There is no way of getting the best from the
world except that pilgrim way which gives
us, as we move, that perpetual song of the
heart : " For here have we no continuing
city, but we seek one to come ? "
XXIII.
Rest and Unrest.
THERE is no idea which the modern man,
especially in his tired moments, caresses more
tenderly than that of rest. He builds his
future heaven out of it ; and it is the goal
of all his earthly toil. And yet there is no
idea about which there seems more general
confusion. It is of all states the least under
stood. One of the needs of the civilised world
to-day is a proper philosophy of rest. A clear
vision here should alter our thinkings and
our doings in more directions than one.
What, to begin with, is Nature s teaching ?
A glance at her order dispels a first illusion,
that rest is a quiescence, a negating of action.
Her greatest apparent quietudes are, in
reality, the vastest activities. We sit seem
ingly motionless on a seemingly motionless
earth. As a matter of fact, we are whirling
eastwards at a thousand miles an hour by
her rotary movement, and westward at 67,000
miles per hour by her orbital rush, while at
the same moment, as part of the Solar system,
192
REST AND UNREST. 193
we are sweeping on at an inconceivable velocity
in a direction neither east nor west towards
a point in the constellation Hercules. We
think of sleep as representing most completely
the idea of repose. But sleep, again, is an
unremitting activity. In its hours the great
forces of reparation are busy. The whole of
the tissues are undergoing a process of nutritive
recuperation. Every thread and fibre of us
is drinking in power. That is what happens to
the body. What the soul is doing during
sleep is more than science at present can say.
What is certain is, that it is not quiescent.
The seeming stillnesses everywhere are only
on the surface. A Matterhorn, a Mont Blanc,
are quivering with energy. Magnetic currents
are incessantly sweeping through their masses,
and each particle of them, however closely
they seem packed, is really separated from its
neighbour by a pulsing ether which is a reservoir
of force. In all her vast dominions Nature
shows us no single spot which is at rest.
When we come to our conscious life the same
fact meets us. A large part of our bodily
organism takes no holiday whatever. Day
and night the heart keeps on its ceaseless
systole-diastole, the lungs go on weaving air
into vitality, the watchers over digestion and
secretion keep ward at their posts. No cry
of weariness escapes them, no truce is called
to their labour. It is only a fraction of our
13
194 THE COMMON LITE.
organism that knows what we call fatigue,
and to which we minister with what we call
rest. And this, as we have already seen, is
in itself the reverse of a quiescence. Our
repose is simply the bringing into play of
other forces. Sleep is the coming on the scene
of a fresh shift of labourers. The traffic is
partially suspended in order that Nature s
navvies may put the line in order.
In this quest, then, we find ourselves shut
out from one after another of Nature s terri
tories. Through the whole universe of matter
there is no moment s cessation of activity ;
nor is there any in our physical organisation.
Plainly, if we are to discover some semblance
of reality in our idea of rest, we must seek
it elsewhere. Where ? The answer is in the
inner realm of the mind. But here our first
discovery is that within, as well as outside,
there is no such thing as an inactive rest.
Let anyone " descend into himself " and he
will find that it is not in movement, in action,
but in the opposite of it, that his soul is farthest
from peace. The trying moment for the
regiment is not in the charge, but before,
when lying down and waiting the order to
advance. Many great public speakers mix
Gethsemane with every speech. But that
comes not in delivery, but the time that
preceded. When actually on their feet, with
mind and body in highest activity, the soul
REST AND UNREST. 195
is entirely at rest. It is not the employed,
but the unemployed, in whom we find the
completest mental chaos, the furthest remove
from tranquillity.
Our research, then, so far, seems to yield
but one result. Rest consists nowhere, either
in nature or in the mind of man, in a mere
motionless inactivity. In both it must be,
if it exists at all, a concomitant of action.
We can, indeed, go further now and say that
it is not only consistent with, but a result
and product of, action. In mind and matter
alike what we call rest is an equipoise, the
resultant of a balanced interplay of forces.
A keystone is dropped into an arch, and the
structure stands. It is there for years,
centuries maybe, the image of calm stability.
Yet its rest is, for every succeeding moment,
the outcome of a contact of powers, thrusting
this way, that way, and giving us equilibrium
as the result. As Nature climbs higher in
her achievements, the more delicate is the
balancing by which her rest states are obtained.
It is a magnificent result, surely, of her engin
eering which secures that a planet like our
own, the centre of such stupendous forces,
should have everything within and without
so exquisitely adjusted that while careering
in space at lightning speed over half a dozen
courses at once, it should appear to its inhabit
ants as absolutely still.
196 THE COMMON LITE.
We can now apply this detailed and, we
fear, somewhat dry exposition to some inner
and more human interests. It should, for
instance, dissipate for ever the notion of
giving up toil and achievement as a condition
of tranquillity. It is the idler, not the worker,
who is remote from rest. A man who is
truly himself is like a great wheel in motion :
on the circumference the sweep of a mighty
movement ; at the centre of it, peace. The
Methodist village carpenter in " Adam Bede,"
with his feet in dry shavings, his face turned
to the fair country visible through the open
window, his strong arm plying the plane
while his voice rang out in hearty song, is an
image of full activity, and one also of as perfect
peace as is to be had in this world. It is
always when a man begins to act that his
boding anxieties and fears, the enemies to
his rest, take their flight. Strange that with
such simple first lessons as these before us we
can fall into the mistake of sighing for idle
ness as our paradise. If that were bliss,
God surely had never immersed Himself in so
workaday a world as this ! The social system
which produces masses of rich or poor idlers
is on the wrong lines. In America every man,
whatever his position, is expected to work.
It ought to be a universal prescription. The
lounger is out of the world s order. He should
be shunned as a centre of social disease.
REST AND UNREST. 197
But the proviso of work as an element of
our rest-philosophy is only a beginning. For
rest, we next discover, is of all grades. We
spoke a moment ago of the delicate balancings
by which Nature achieves her higher forms of
equilibrium. All this is reproduced and sur
passed in the soul. It is absurd to talk of
peace as though it were a single product.
There are as many forms of peace as there are
of men, and you may judge a man by the
kind of peace he achieves. There need, for
instance, no great forces to produce the " rest "
of dough s jesting lines :
Let me, contented and mute, with the beasts of the
field, my brothers,
Tranquilly, happily lie and eat grass like Nebuchad
nezzar !
Our grass-eating peace-achievers have legion
to their name. They are in evidence in all
ages and literatures :
" Oh, he s drunk, Sir Toby, an hour agone ; his eyea
were set at eight i the morning."
Judging from appearances, the type has a
long enough career yet before it. But its
achievement is not one to boast of.
Above this lies the rest of philosophic
indifference. It has some famous watchwords.
There is Plato s dictum that "nothing in
human affairs is worth any great anxiety " ;
and Ovid s " non est tanti " " it is not worth
198 THE COMMON LIFE.
so much trouble " ; and Lord Melbourne s
" Why can t you let it alone ? " A closely
allied frame of mind is that which compounds
with fate and lets things take their course.
Brunetiere, amongst moderns, sings the*praises
of accepting the inevitable. We remember
Amiel s constant cry to " rentrer dans Vordre "
"to enter into, to conform oneself to the
universal order." All this brings undoubtedly
a peace of a sort. But it is a wintry peace,
with snow on the ground and the streams
frozen. The forces which produce its equili
brium are distinctly not the highest.
What then is the highest peace ? We have
worked along this long line of illustration
in order to reach a point from which at last
we may view it. The greatest achievement of
life, so far as we know it, is the production
in souls of what the world s greatest book calls
" the peace of God which passeth all under
standing." Greatest, because it is the highest
product of the highest forces, acting at their
highest level. We get our vision of this
supernatural splendour by studying the souls
who have caught most of it into themselves,
whose faces have been most persistently
turned in its direction. These lives have been
full of labour, full of burdens, of opposings,
of pains. Here it is a St. Francis, who took
poverty as his bride and made jests at his
suffering body ; there, a Pascal whose constant
REST AND UNREST. 199
ill-health, as his sister tells, " was taken
always as a means of spiritual perfection " ;
there, again, a Tyndale who gave up everything,
his country, his liberty, and, finally, his life,
out of " the pity and compassion which I had,
and yet have, on the darkness of my brethren,
and to bring them to the knowledge of Christ."
What an equilibrium of forces is here ! On
one side the pressure of immense burdens,
the knowledge of imminent looming dangers,
the sense of bodily weakness, the onset at
times of the human passions. On the other
side, meeting all this, checking, guiding,
mastering all, a flow from above of ineffable
Power, Below conquered by Above, and for
result the soul in the very vortex of the
maelstrom knowing itself at rest !
There is, we say, nothing in the world or
in history to compare with this. We talk of
the Peace of Utrecht or of the Treaty of Paris.
They are trivialities compared with the peace
God creates in consecrated souls. Nature s
whole scheme is a parable of this highest
result. The world spinning in vacuo, its
enormous burden upheld by a power invisible,
is her visible sign of this crowning wonder.
Peace in the battle, rest in the whirlwind
this is the miracle of the ages, the miracle
wrought by Christ s Gospel in the hearts of
men.
XXIV.
Our Reading Life.
FROM the beginning the human race has
been a race of readers. Not, however, by
any means one of book readers. Of the vast
majority it might be said, as of Sir Nathaniel
in Love s Labour s Lost :
Sir, he hath never fed of dainties that are bred in a book;
He hath not eat paper as it were ; he hath not drunk ink.
Of the countless millions that in succession
have trodden this planet, it is the merest
fringe that have studied letters. Printing is
an affair of yesterday. For ages manuscripts
and the study of them were the secret of a
class ; for an immeasurably longer period
there were no manuscripts at all. So far,
the great mass of our fellows have got through,
and, as it seems, with considerable satisfaction
to themselves, without scent of ink.
Yet, as we have said, they have all been
readers. The savage, blazing the trees on his
way through the trackless forest, was a writer.
The man who followed and who steered
200
OUR READING LIFE. 201
his way by these marks was a reader. The
reading that is outside of books is the occupa
tion at once of the highest and of the most
primitive forms of intelligence. The Red
Indian finds in the clouds, the running river,
the obscure signs of prairie and forest, a library
which he cons with marvellous insight. A
William Wordsworth, as he goes up into the
hills, carries there another kind of insight and
obtains another kind of result. But the
library is the same. The first thing a child
reads is human feature. It differentiates
accurately between a smile and a frown.
A Darwin, bringing his trained intelligence
to its last and highest exercise, takes up the
same study. That is a wonderful account of
education without books which Plato gives
as the training of the Persian princes. At first
the main care was for the developing of their
bodies. Then they were taught to ride and
hunt. At the age of fourteen they were
handed over to the care of four wise men,
of whom the first taught the youth religion,
the second taught him to be ever upright
and true, the third to be master of his own
desires, and the fourth to fear nothing.
The Persian had learned what it is essential
we should all know, that a first-hand acquaint
ance with things is far better than any know
ledge that is second-hand. The highest kind
of reader is the man who interrogates Nature
202 THE COMMON LIFE.
for himself. Geordie Stephenson was the
reverse of a bookman, but his steady following
up of a single idea, of one stray hint that
Nature flung him, did more for himself and
his fellows than the swallowing of whole
libraries. In the literary sphere itself it
might seem that the only way for the modern
man to obtain originality is to abstain from
books. To peruse them will be to beget that
uncomfortable suspicion, which Goethe has
somewhere expressed, that all the things to
say have been already said. The complaint,
indeed, is older. Two thousand years ago
the Latins were afflicted with the same para
lysing idea. " Pereant isti qui ante nos nostra
dixerunt " is their distressful cry. " Confound
the fellows who have said our good things
before us."
Yet when we have made all the deductions,
and ranged in line all the objections, it remains
that reading, in this narrower book sense of
the term, stands as, perhaps, the most wonder
ful feature in the long, manifold education
of the human spirit. Has it ever occurred to
us to realise what is involved in the scanning of
a single line in a printed page ? Think of the
ages of evolution that went into the formation
of an alphabet ; what it meant to arrive at
the fixing of a given sound as signifying, for
all who heard it, a certain perception ; and
then the translation of the sounds into forms
OUR READING LIFE. 203
recognisable by the eye, and the arranging of
them into the complex of forms and ideas
contained in the simplest sentence !
The process by which we get our book has
been, then, we see, sufficiently wonderful.
The result is even more so. A great book is,
if we come to think of it, one of the most entirely
spiritual of our possessions. It suggests, as
perhaps nothing else does, the human share in
immortality and infinity. Leigh Hunt catches
part of its significance in that fine passage of
his on Homer : "To a shape like this, so
small, yet so comprehensive, so slight, yet so
lasting, so insignificant, yet so venerable,
turns the mighty activity of Homer, and so
turning is able to live and warm us for ever."
Books are the very essence of souls. On
to his page a man distils his most ethereal
part, and there it remains, living, speaking,
persuading, ages after his own frame has
mouldered into dust. The thing partakes,
we say, of infinity. After innumerable souls
have drunk of this fountain it springs for
ever fresh, the supply no whib diminished.
Fifteen centuries have rolled since Augustine
penned the volume I am reading, but its
intellect, its hope, its faith, show no sign of
the years. Its argument is of immortality,
but itself is, perhaps, the greatest argument.
How to spend our reading life is a question
belonging to that "Ethic of the Intellect"
204 THE COMMON LIFE.
of which most people think so little. Those
who are eager for life s Best will, however,
in this department, take a very clearly marked
line. They make a simple calculation. The
world, they find, has produced a certain number
of first-class minds that have left themselves
on record. Their work is mental and moral
society of the highest kind, to which we are
freely invited. Why should we, whose time
is short, and who have a thousand other things
to do, waste its hours by lingering in the
ranks of the third or twelfth raters when these
elite are calling to us ? They lie scattered over
all the ages and over all the languages. It
is worth studying a language to reach one
great book in it. Robert Hall learned Italian
to get at Dante, and it was worth while.
Robertson of Brighton said of certain volumes
that read, and re-read, they had entered into
his composition like the iron atoms of the
blood. A certain splendour from these great
spirits casts its glow upon all who come into
their circle. However modest our own dimen
sions, the swing and momentum from these
force-centres will inevitably make itself felt
in our character and action. To the world s
first-class literature we may apply the words
used by Madame Roland of Plutarch. It is
" the pasture of great souls."
There are, indeed, few moments so big with
the inner destinies as those in which a receptive
OUR READING LIFE. 205
mind happens for the first time on a great
book. The business of opening it is in itself
so simple. Poking a fire or putting on one s
hat is, physically considered, probably more
complex. But for how many a man has this
turning of a page been the remaking of his
world ! The reading of William Law s " Serious
Call " opened for the young Oxonian, John
Wesley, the track which made him the greatest
of English evangelists. A gay young Spanish
cavalier, wounded at the siege of Pampeluna,
beguiles the tedium of his sick-room by scanning
a volume of the " Lives of the Saints." The
result is that Ignatius Loyola, the erstwhile
knight and courtier, becomes the ascetic, the
beggar monk, the founder of world-encom
passing Jesuitry.
To earnest men another most fateful hour
of their reading life is when, passing from the
literature of " Yea," they for the first time
make acquaintance with the literature of
" Nay." It is a very easy piece of moral and
mental gymnastic, and one much recommended
by certain schools, to read only on one side.
And there are men those whose service lies
in the direction of action rather than of thought
who seem to prosper best on this kind of
fare. A man must eat according to his
faculty of digestion. For those, however, who
are in search of convictions in place of opinions,
who interpret in any high sense their mission
206 THE COMMON LIFE.
of teacher and guide, no such terms are possible.
Such are never easy about their message till
they have faced all there is on the other side.
They get their truth as the result of a fight in
which they sweat blood at every pore. The
man who has wandered in the great and terrible
wilderness, after having had his early home of
traditional belief sent crashing about his ears ;
who, after wearying and agonised quest,
discerns at last the guiding light, and with
tottering feet reaches at length the Promised
Land, will have a note of his own as teacher
and prophet to his fellows.
The sum of all this is that our reading life,
in any true conception of it, will be a constant
effort in the direction of a higher being and
doing. In the homely words of an early
writer, it is " a manuring of the soul." To
take in for the mere purpose of accumulation
is an ignoble business. The word, of whatever
sort, is not life s ultimate. Montaigne s scorn
of Cicero and Pliny for seeking glory by mere
writing and speaking is somewhat strained,
but his assertion that " if the acts of Xenophon
or Caesar had not by much exceeded their
eloquence I cannot believe they would ever
have written them," has all our sympathy.
Whether we read what others have written,
or write what others may read, the same end
should be in view character and action.
When Germany rose from under the yoke of
OUR READING LIFE. 207
Napoleon, its young poet Korner stirred it with
noble song and then leaped into the field and
died fighting for freedom. A Tyndale read
his Bible and forthwith braved dungeon and
stake in the endeavour to open the Book to his
fellows.
Since Christianity began there has accumu
lated round it a literature so vast that no
scholar, however omnivorous or long-lived,
could ever hope to overtake it. Yet such an
achievement were, in the Christian sense,
child s play compared with that of reading
the first dozen verses of Matthew s fifth chapter,
and translating their whole meaning into life.
When the Church and the world begin to read
the Christian record in that fashion the eastern
sky will be red with the millennial dawn.
XXV.
Of Pulpit Silences.
THE difficulty, in a subject like this, is to
choose among the hundred different ways of
approaching it. To many the title s first
suggestion would be of the great pulpit voices
they once listened to that are gone for ever
silent. The departure of a true spiritual
teacher is to multitudes the keenest of personal
bereavements. When a Spurgeon, a Beecher,
a Phillips Brooks passed away, the world to
them seemed to have lost its noblest music.
And yet these successive silencings of the
great leaders are, strange though it seem, a
necessary part of our spiritual evolution.
The eternal unfolding needs new agents for
its each successive phase. Were Augustine,
or St. Francis, or Luther, or Wesley to be
given back to the Church to-day, they would
be only a bewilderment and a failure. To be
of any use they would require either a recon
stituted mind or a reconstituted world. Each
age must breed its own leaders, seek its
own spiritual nourishment, work out its
own salvation.
OF PULPIT SILENCES. 209
It is not, however, of the dead but of the
living we would here speak. One of the
clamant needs of the Church to-day is an
adequate theory and practice of pulpit silences.
Says R. L. Stevenson in one of his letters :
"Oh, if I knew how to omit, I would ask
no other knowledge. A man who knew how
to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper."
The preacher is, perhaps, more badly in want
of this art than even the litterateur or the
journalist. The need has been recognised
in all religions. Among Greeks, Romans,
Egyptians ; in Buddhism, Hinduism, and in
fact every considerable system, down to the
cult of the most savage tribes, we find an
external, public utterance carefully guarded
by silences. Behind the exoteric teaching
lay an inner core of " mysteries " to which
only the initiate were introduced. The ab
origines of Central Australia to-day have secret
rites and doctrines revealed only to the males
of the tribe after passing the manhood tests,
and rigidly concealed, not only from the outside
world, but from their own women and children.
It is noteworthy that early Christianity
proceeded on lines not entirely dissimilar.
The Church fathers are insistent in pointing
out that Christ spoke to outsiders in parables,
the inner meaning of which He disclosed
only to His disciples ; that Paul, in addressing
Felix, dealt with the first principles merely of
14
210 THE COMMON LIFE.
righteousness, temperance and judgment, and
in his sermon at Athens confined himself to
common religious truths . Following this order,
we find in the early centuries a general pulpit
instruction for the multitude, a further Chris
tian indoctrination for the catechumens, and
a still more developed disciplina arcani for
the baptized. Cyril of Alexandria sums up
the position in the statement : " All may hear
the Gospel, but the glory of the Gospel is set
apart for the true disciples of Christ. To all
who could hear the Lord spoke, but in parables :
to His disciples He privately explained them."
It is, to say the least of it, a singular revolu
tion of method which has brought us to the
pulpit instruction of to-day. At the period of
which we have just spoken the system of
reserve was applied to what were considered
the special doctrines of Christianity, such as
those of the Trinity, of the Atonement, the
Incarnation and the Holy Spirit. These were
for the baptized communicants . At the present
time, on the contrary, it is the fullest proclama
tion of these doctrines from the pulpit to all
and sundry that in orthodox circles is regarded
as the pulpit s primal duty. Newman never
made a more daring assertion, or one that
cut more clean counter to evangelical Protest
ant feeling, than where, in his " Arians," he
declares that, " No one sanction can be adduced
from Scripture, whether of precept or of
OF PULPIT SILENCES. 211
example, in behalf of the practice of stimulating
the affections (i.e., gratitude or remorse) by
means of the doctrine of the Atonement, in
order to the conversion of the hearers." The
statement is, of course, entirely disputable,
but that it could be made, and by so influential
a theologian, shows the strangely different
conceptions that still obtain as to what
constitutes the true idea of pulpit teaching.
What, then, in such teaching, should be
found and what omitted ? The question is
far too wide for any proper answer here. The
utmost we can do is to offer some suggestions.
And the first is to note the example of Christ.
There are remarkable silences in His preaching,
some of which have been made the subject of
bitter complaint. It is, for instance, suffi
ciently significant that there should be no
reference in it to human origins or to the
doctrine of the Fall. But there are other gaps
not less striking. Strauss, in " Der alte und
der neue Glaube" gives full and caustic ex
pression to a widespread feeling in his com
plaint that Christ s Gospel has no word for
culture or for progress. Science, art, industry,
the marvellous developments along these lines
which have transformed the world, have ap
parently, he urges, no place in Christ s ideas
or sympathies. It seems on the surface a
formidable objection. But a deeper insight
shows that the gap here, instead of being a
212 THE COMMON LIFE.
defect, is one of the most significant of the
Christian evidences. As Harnack has pointed
out, there is no final gospel to be delivered
on the subject of art, science or industrial
development. Their history is one of per
petually succeeding phases, which change with
the generations. Christ s message was to the
permanent in man. It recognised that while
men everywhere differ, man is always the
same. And his highest ultimate need is, in
all circumstances, the same need. It is
precisely because the message is outside of
time developments that it becomes a universal
message. What the Roman slave of the first
century and the prosperous, cultured citizen
of the twentieth alike require as the condition
of successful living is a mental, spiritual state
that puts them in true relation to God, them
selves and their environment. And it is
precisely on this line that Christ and His
message meet them.
This consideration should help us greatly
in the solution of some other urgent pulpit
problems of to-day. How far should there
be speech and how far silence on matters of
immediate national interest ? To what extent
is the Christianity preached to be an applied
Christianity ? In what way and to what
extent are the social, the economical and the
political questions of the hour to be dealt
with by the preacher Apostolic Christianity
OF PULPIT SILENCES. 213
offers an answer which it were well if our
own day would carefully re-study. We find
in the primitive Church a complete absence of
what may be called the ordinary social,
economical and political propaganda. The
conditions in these respects were in all con
science bad enough, but they did not form
the subject of Christ s or the apostles preach
ing. Slavery existed and in the most cruel
form, but no anti-slavery crusade was set
afoot. Judsea was a crushed nationality,
but these Jewish exhorters had nothing to
say about a political redemption. One saw
everywhere the extremest poverty, but the
apostles never interested themselves in the
principles of "The Wealth of Nations."
Why was this ? The lesson has been strangely
misunderstood, and by more than one side.
In some quarters the facts are used to show
the utter impracticability of Christianity as a
system of life ; in others to show that the only
true follower of Christ is the world-renouncing
monk.
Both are wrong. The reason why primitive
Christianity had no specific anti-slavery, anti-
poverty, anti-despotism propaganda lay in no
sense in the fact that it acquiesced in slavery,
or poverty, or despotism. Actually it was
the enemy of them all, and hi the end will be
fatal to them all. The primitive " silence "
on these matters lay in the fact to which we
214 THE COMMON LIFE.
need to-day to give our fullest attention, that
the new thing Christianity had brought in
was of infinitely more value to life than all
these, and its propagation accordingly of far
more importance. If only the pulpit would
believe it ! When the preacher has become
merely political it is because he has lost grip
of religion. As long as this last is vital in
him he cannot help seeing that it is of infinitely
more political and social and economical
value than any politics, or socialisms, or
economics. To Paul it was so much more
worth while to make a slave a Christian than
to agitate for his freedom ! There will always
be enough and to spare of politicians ; what
the world really wants is men who have news
from the land of the ideal, who have God s
life within them, who open afresh the springs
of living water that quench the thirst of the
soul. When the Church is alive it makes
religion the most interesting thing in the
land, whatever else is happening. It is worth
while here remembering the conditions in
this country a century ago. Politics were
exciting enough then. Our grandfathers were
facing Peninsular campaigns, threatened French
invasions, and Consols down to somewhere
near fifty. And yet there were voices in the
pulpit that made all these things seem little.
For this time of external confusion was the
time of the great Evangelical revival, of the
OF PULPIT SILENCES. 215
great Methodist expansion, of the missionary
era, when the societies were founded which now
cover the world with their operations. Politics
were great, and so were wealth and commerce,
but the Church succeeded in convincing men
that the affairs of the soul were greater still.
Is this to say that Christianity has been,
or can ever be, indifferent to political or social
progress ? Let anyone who is inclined to
think so read such a book as Loring Brace s
" Gesta Christi." It will be strange if he does
not reach the author s conclusion, that
" Christianity has floated everything else in
history Governments, philosophies, rational
isms, like straws on its stream thus far. It
is an eternity of sympathy and benevolence and
purity." It wins offhand the lower things by
aiming perpetually at the higher.
That the Church is the representative of the
eternal in the midst of time does not, however,
absolve it from a heavy responsibility in rela
tion to the things of time. Its message will
have these continually within its scope, but
ever to bring them under its own light, to
view them sub specie ceternitatis* The pulpit
cannot be silent on sins, whether national or
individual, that are destroying spiritual life ;
no, not though it suffers as did a Chrysostom
at Constantinople and a Savonarola at Florence.
But when men speak on these themes they
must have a call. The true prophet knows that
216 THE COMMON LIFE.
his message has been given to him and that
it must be spoken at all hazards. The question
of pulpit speech or silence on a given theme
depends so much on who is in the pulpit. No
man should speak on disputed points who has
not first earned the right to speak ; a right
centred in the trust and esteem of his hearers
and gained as the wage of character and service.
The history of a preacher s pulpit silences
is the story of his soul. As he progresses in
life, how many statements, at the beginning so
glibly uttered, have become impossible ; how
many truths once ignored, but burnt in by
after experience, flame now at the very front !
The disciplina arcani here is often one of
suffering. "It s maest o t tinsel wark," said
a village critic of Brown of Haddington s
sermons when in his youth. Hearing him
later, after a great spiritual experience had
reached the preacher, the same critic said,
" It s a gowd noo."
XXVI.
Science and Conversion.
THE historian of the future will probably
point to our time as one in which theology
entered on a new phase. It is that of the appli
cation of the strictly scientific method. What
has happened to our generation is that, almost
without knowing it, we are bringing to these
questions an entirely fresh mind. Instead
of studying religion from the standpoint of a
dogma, we are investigating it as a manifesta
tion of life. We begin with psychology.
" Here," we say, " are certain remarkable
and widespread facts of human experience.
What do we make of them ? " As the new
method establishes itself it will work a whole
some change in theological expression. Some
venerable words, too hard- worked in past ages,
will be seen to have earned their right to retire.
We shall hear less and less of orthodoxy and
heterodoxy, and more and more of accuracy
and inaccuracy. In a word, religion will
have become in the true sense scientific.
Timid souls may find in this movement occa-
217
218 THE COMMON LIFE.
sion for alarm, as though the great spiritual
interests were endangered. Those who see
farther will only rejoice, for they recognise
that along this road man is about to reach
a new religious interest and a new certitude.
Amongst the phenomena on which modern
science has to pronounce, a central group, of
highest interest and vital importance, is that
connected with " conversion," or " the new
birth." Neither the phenomena nor the
phraseology are, let us remark, confined to
any one faith. The phrase, or its equivalents,
are in the vocabulary of all the great religions.
They all have their category of " the twice
born." But it is in primitive Christianity,
and in those religious conditions of after
times that have been most nearly in accord,
that we see the experience in its clearest
form. What precisely is there in such testi
monies as those of St. Paul, when he declares
of himself and his brethren that they were
" new creatures," that with them " old things
had passed away and all things had become
new " ; or in the recitals, say, of eighteenth
century Methodism, which show us the savage
Kingswood colliers or the wreckers of the
Cornish coast, changed as to their habits,
their language, their whole attitude to the
world and life, to a degree almost beyond
recognition ? Here, surely, is a human phe
nomenon, with interests not only for the
SCIENCE AND CONVERSION. 219
historian or the scientist, but for every sane
man and woman.
For these statements, if founded in fact,
are inevitably of a more than local reference.
Their bearing is upon humanity as a whole,
and they shed upon it the light of an immense
hope. We see around us everywhere imper
fect, defective, deeply diseased characters,
and here is a whisper that, under certain
conditions, they can be remade. The inner
machine so desperately out of order is, we are
told, reparable ! The word goes that amongst
Roman slaves in one century, and among
English working people in another, without
any amelioration of temporal conditions, there
appeared a fresh enthusiasm for life, and the
rise within them of an immense new moral
force. The compelling interest of such state
ments lies here, that they relate to the actual
life we are all of us living. Their reference
is not to a supposed other world or future
life, about which there are doubts and differ
ences, but to the definite career we are now
marking out for ourselves. The question raised
is whether there is a force available by which
we can morally recreate ourselves, and so
make life doubly and trebly worth living ?
If there be such a force, it is time some of
us knew of it, for we badly need its uplift.
We are in an age of decadents, if not of de
cadence. We see around us a second and
220 THE COMMON LIFE.
third generation, descended from rich, fruit
ful, religious characters, but who themselves
are desiccated, inwardly withered, with no
internal spring of moral vitality. There are
hordes of the outwardly well-to-do who are
spiritually destitute. They have no home
of the soul. The poor wretches, rich in
worldly goods, are, as to central matters,
absolutely without resource. Their dissipa
tions are the desperate attempt to forget
themselves and their inner misery. Bankrupt
of happiness, they are like the winter vagrants
of the Thames Embankment, who, with the
light of homes and of palaces shining to right
and left, are themselves shivering out there
in the cold.
Are these normal conditions, or is there a
chance of getting a change ? That is the
matter at stake in the doctrine of conversion,
and the stake is a big one. The point now
to examine is whether the doctrine has reasons
under it that are tenable in the court of
science. Are the cases that are cited a freak
of temperament, or do they rest on a universal
law 3 Let us ask one or two questions.
The first is, whether, in the moral sphere,
there may not be available for man vast
forces that lie outside himself ? Upon this
we may say, to begin with, that if our world
is all of a piece, that is precisely what science
would lead us to expect. In the physical
SCIENCE AND CONVERSION. 221
plane man s whole progress has resulted from
the linking of his resources to outside reinforce
ments. Himself of puny physique, vastly
inferior to a dozen fellow inhabitants of the
planet, he is to-day master of his world,
strong with the strength of its winds, its
tides, its earth-currents, its roaring Niagaras,
of all its accumulated forces. The earth is
one vast power region which he is claiming
as his own. And this because he has learned
how to unite his inner force with this outer
one. Now, that there should also be a spiri
tual power region, whose resources have the
same relation to man s highest faculties as
steam or earth-currents have to his physical
system, is what to-day the whole analogy of
life would lead us to believe.
The next question is, whether we may
not affirm the outside moral energy as per
sonal, and as acting on the individual by a
kind of " possession " ? Here again we are
in a region of well-established fact. The
phenomena of hypnotism have multiplied
before us instances where one personality,
by the projection of its will-power, penetrates
the boundaries of another personality, and
uses the patient s faculties and limbs as the
organs of its own volition. But in these two
affirmations we have contained all that is
essential in the doctrine of conversion. What
religion here affirms, on the one side, is, that
222 THE COMMON LIFE.
just as the human subject quadruples his
powers by outside linkings with the ascertained
cosmic powers, so, by an act of will, he can
ally himself with that sum of moral energy
which he discerns to be working in the world,
that " Power for Righteousness," whose opera
tion is visibly clarifying humanity of its
grosser elements, and evolving a new kingdom
of holiness and love. On the other side it
affirms the coming in to such a man of this
moral energy as a form of life. It is a bio
genesis on the highest scale. This is con
version. It is a giving of oneself to God, and
a receiving of God into oneself. The original
Quaker affirmation, " that Christians are now
led inwardly and immediately by the Spirit
of God, even in the same manner, though it
befall not many to be led in the same measure,
as the saints were of old," is a rendering into
the language of piety of what some day will
be accepted as a formula of science.
But the teaching of this great experience,
to have its proper weight, will have to be
presented in terms of the modern mind. It
will have to be dissociated from much that
in earlier days has been regarded as of
its essence. Excellent men who have passed
through it have grievously bungled their
account of the business. They have offered
us the history of their mental limitations,
of their ignorances, their prejudices, their
SCIENCE AND CONVERSION. 223
morbidities, as of the matter itself. In so
doing, how grievously have they clogged the
way for other inquirers ! How they have
clouded the real issue ! Each man who
travels this way must journey in his own
fashion ; but let him not dictate the going
of his neighbour. How many have taken
a Bunyan s hypochondriacs as a kind of strait
gate for themselves ! In earlier days the
starting-point for the doctrine of conversion
was the dogma of human total depravity.
To-day the starting-point will be the affir
mation of man s immense spiritual possi
bilities. And instead of being proclaimed
as the privilege of a few it will be offered to
humanity as its common and glorious heritage.
A point here to be carefully noted is the
place of this teaching as a creator of life
values. We have to-day a new measure
of doctrines and institutions, in their " value
for life." " How does the thing work ? "
And here the doctrine of conversion stands
as of the first importance. For it is the very
essence of individuality. M. Demolins, the
eminent French writer, has, in a succession
of books, exhibited to his countrymen the
causes of Anglo-Saxon superiority as con
sisting in its development of private initiative,
and of the worth of the individual. And it
is precisely here that the Christian conversion
has wrought with such immense force. It
224 THE COMMON LIFE.
is for one thing the apotheosis of democracy.
The " twice born " of other religions have
commonly been an elite, a privileged aristo
cratic few. Christianity opened its spiritual
paradise to the beggar and the slave. And
wherever it has been corrupted, one of the
first results has been the withdrawal of its
democratic energy. To get a vivid sense
of the contrast here one cannot do better
than turn from the New Testament Epistles,
where the deepest mysteries and highest
privileges are opened to the poor and most
obscure, to the religious position of, say,
Montaigne in the sixteenth century. In his
essay on " Prayers and Orisons," he offers
us a perfect view of the aristocratic, Latin
idea. It were better, he argues, that the
vulgar should be kept in ignorance than be
in a position to discuss these mysteries. It
is " a shame to suffer the same to be profaned
in the mouths of ignorant and popular people."
The result of this idea upon the common
morals is seen when in the same essay he
speaks of soldiers, when about to engage on
the most infamous adventures, invoking the
Divine assistance for their crimes.
This doctrine will have to be the note of
the new preaching as it was the note
of the old. The strength of the Evangelical
communities has lain, not in this or that
variety of doctrine or institution, but in the
SCIENCE AND CONVERSION. 225
development of strong individualities. And
they secured this by driving it into men that,
side by side with their weakness, lay im
measurable sources of power, which they could
appropriate by an act of faith and of will.
The great religious leaders by a sure instinct
have fixed always upon this point. The
Luthers, the Wesleys, the Spurgeons despised
other objects in preaching as compared with
this central one. And if the Christianity of
to-day is to renew its strength and to hold
its own it must regain that mood. It is
nothing less than tragical to note how, with
so magnificent a work at their hand, and
human souls sick and perishing for want
of it, men in pulpits will talk on any other
subject than this. And yet we see the reason.
" Conversion " is a word that is tophampered
with outworn tradition. It has been made
sinister by narrow and morbid association.
The work of to-day is to bring the word out
of local and sectarian byways into the broad
open of the world. Conversion is a scientific
fact as much as is magnetism. It represents
the law of human moral recovery. The force
available for it is within everybody s reach.
The next great spiritual revival will date from
the time when the Church, in all its sections,
has once more opened its eyes to this elemen
tary truth.
15
XXVII.
Interpreters of Christ.
WHAT is the relation between a mountain and
the man who sees it, and reports of it to us who
have not seen ? How different the two things !
And yet the man, to us who listen, stands for
all we know of the mountain, and consequently
our view is imperfect with his imperfections.
As we hear him discourse the question arises,
" How much is he giving us of the fact and
how much of himself ? " For what the man
is interpreting is not simply the sublime object
yonder, but himself also, his faculty of per
ception and emotion, his limitations, his point
of view. The artist stands for so much in
the picture. The mountain he sketches con
tains on its every face the image of himself.
The illustration may help us to understand
what is one of the great fascinations and one
of the great difficulties of the Christian his
tory. For nigh upon twenty centuries there
has loomed in the human imagination a height
as of a mountain, with its roots in the earth
and its head in the heavens. It is the per
sonality of Christ. We look up to this
with wonder and awe. Before or since there
226
INTERPRETERS OF CHRIST. 227
has been nothing like it in the world. A
stream of spiritual energy that through all
these years has been sweeping through the
earth with ever-accumulating force and volume
has here its origin. In this personality we
find powers which amaze us. Here is a man
moving familiarly amongst men, as one of them,
and yet offering them redemption, forgiveness,
peace, as things that were elements of His own
spiritual consciousness, inner treasures that
were His to impart. And doing and being
all this He is so entirely at home with Himself.
He feels it never in the least strange to be
or do this, any more than you do to be a doctor
or a draper ! Millions of men who have
read this story have felt in it the thrill of the
Divine, and realised that in this personality
God had in very deed visited His people.
But here begins our mystery. For Christ
is to us an interpretation. And, as we began by
saying, what is the relation between the thing
in itself and the report of it ? Is our outside
reality the sum of the statements made to us
concerning it ? If not that, how near are they
to the actual truth ? We remember the
story of Sir Walter Raleigh, who, on hearing
endless opposite accounts of an incident that
occurred under his own windows, laughed
at the idea of his writing a " History of
the World." How much of our Christ is report
of this sort ? For the remarkable thing about
228 THE COMMON LIFE.
Him is that He has left us so little that can be
called self -interpretation. His greatest apostle
wrote voluminous letters, in whose burning
words are revealed every phase of his own inner
consciousness. But Christ, with one doubtful
exception, wrote no letters that have come
down to us. He attempted no autobiography.
He published no book. And so, on this side at
least, our Christ is always an interpretation.
We open the New Testament to discover at
once, even in these our earliest sources, how
different the interpretations are. We pass
from the ministry in Galilee and the Sermon
on the Mount of the Gospels, to the Pauline
Epistles and are struck at once with the
difference of atmosphere. At a yet greater
remove is the world of the Apocalypse. Is
it the same Christ that is being talked of ?
Undoubtedly. But the light in each case has
fallen evidently on a different reflector with
a consequent variety hi the image. We see
that even those first disciples, who stood around
the Master, and took the word direct from
His lips, were most imperfect transmitters.
We get more of themselves than of Him.
And when we come to the next generation we
find its Christ interpretation a singular jumble
of Eastern philosophy and of Jewish tradition.
Jew and Greek are here busy painting their
own images upon the central figure. How
natural for the Jew to bring in sacerdotalism !
INTERPRETERS or CHRIST. 229
It was inevitable, for his own mind, his lan
guage, the blood in his veins, were full of the
sacerdotal ideas. And as for the Greeks,
we may accept Wernle s dictum that " they
obtained Christ s teaching as Greeks, and cor
rupted it to the best of their ability."
And then the story of this interpretation,
as it has gone on since through the genera
tions ! It began in simple talk, dictated by
loving reminiscence. How one lingers over
the picture drawn by Irenseus of Polycarp
and his hearers. " I can tell also the very place
where the blessed Polycarp was accustomed
to sit and discourse ; and also his entrances,
his walks, the complexion of his life, and the
form of his body, and his conversations with
the people, and his familiar intercourse with
John, as he was accustomed to tell, as also
his familiarity with those that had seen the
Lord." There are we at the beginnings of
all we know historically of Jesus. From such
reminiscences as these the Gospels grew ;
out of them was developed the Church s
creed. As, from this starting point, we study
the Christian literature of each succeeding
age, we find always a different shade of render
ing. On all these myriad souls the one light
has flashed, showing us dimly enough the source
of illumination, but revealing with sunbright
clearness the scenery of these souls themselves.
That is one of the marvels of the Christian
230 THE COMMON LIFE.
interpretation. While its attempt to define
Christ is so halting and confused, it is a perfect
delineation of the artists. It is the most sug
gestive of studies to watch the interior of these
stragglers, when the new power that is upon
them wrestles with the old limitations.
The failures in the rendering are almost as
instructive as the successes. There have
been times when the light was so dim that
scarcely any distinct image of the source is
discernible. And this often in a period of
the greatest theological pretension. What a
picture is that which history offers us of
the fourth century ! Says Harnack : " The
saints took the place of the old Pagan deities ;
their festivals of the old provincial services of
the gods. The cultus of the Emperor
threatened to obtrude itself into the Church.
Philostorgius relates that " Christians pre
sented offerings to the picture of Constantine,
and honoured it with lanterns and incense. . . >
The Christian religion threatened to become
a new paganism. What a story, too, is that of
the " heretic " renderings of Christ ! How we
would like to get to the inwardness of these
variations from the common opinion ; to have
had a talk with Marcion, or with Montanus,
or even with that " Theodotus the tanner,"
whom Irenaeus anathematises as " the leader
and father of this God-denying apostasy
(the heresy of Artemon), who first affirmed
INTERPRETERS OF CHRIST. 231
that Christ was a mere man " ! One has a
feeling that we should understand these
men so much better than did their accusers,
and that Christ Himself would have under
stood them so much better than we !
But it is precisely in the ages when the
doctrinal and official apprehension seems
dullest, and at the furthest remove from
truth that we get often the most exquisite
presentations of the Master. The current
theology of Bernard s time is in many respects
repugnant to us, but what purer emotion
has ever dwelt in human breast than the
passion for Christ which he expresses in his
letters and hymns ? In the fourteenth cen
tury, the time when Chaucer was revealing, in
inimitable verse, the vices, extortions, and turpi
tude of the clergy, we have, from the heart of the
Catholic system, messages like the " Revela
tions of Divine Love" of the Anchoress Julian,
concerning which she has this beautiful word :
"Wouldst thou learn thy Lord s meaning in
this thing ? Learn it well. Love was His mean
ing. Who showed it thee ? Love. What
showed he thee ? Love. Wherefore showed it
thee ? For Love. . . . And thou shalt
never know nor learn other thing without end."
It is, indeed, at this point that the chief
lesson of a study of this kind emerges. The
line we have taken may appear to some to have
been so far simply bewildering. " If all this
232 THE COMMON LIFE.
means anything," says the reader, " surely
it means that our Christianity rests after all
on an unknown quantity. Our information
of its central fact is, you say, from imperfect
and variable sources, from each of which
comes a different tale. Where, then, is our
religious certainty ? And the answer is that
Christianity neither gives us nor was in
tended to give us a certainty that can be proved
at all points to the intellect. The cosmic
scheme under which we live does not contem
plate at any point an intellectual salvation.
For ages men lived by the sun s light and
heat without any proper conception of what
the sun was. To-day, indeed, we are still at
guesswork in the matter. But the sun shines,
and man lives thereby. And in like manner,
imperfectly translated to the reason, given to
us through a thousand distorted images,
shining into all manner of varying mental
atmospheres, His word twisted continually
by variations of languages, by the presup
positions fixed in human brains, the Christ has
through all gone on shining upon our race,
and ever, where men have failed mentally
to grasp the mystery, they have nevertheless
felt the warmth and the light. It is by the
heart more than by the head that men have
known Jesus. The greatest interpreter of Him
is human life itself. The deed we perform, the
event that meets us on life s way, the sorrow we
INTERPRETERS OF CHRIST. 233
endure, the inner struggle of the mind these
are the things that open to us one by one the
doorways to this Treasure-House of the soul.
And still the interpretation of Christ goes
on. The mountain has, as yet, only begun
to be explored. Theology has tried its best and
succeeded only indifferent well. As the human
capacity widens new measuring lines will be
brought and greater results obtained. The
scientist is to-day in this matter, in a negative
mood, but man never did and never can
live by negations, and science will come by-and-
by to a new temper. Some of the greatest
spiritual testimonies are already from this
side. What, in the humility of devotion,
can surpass the inscription on the grave of
Copernicus ! " Not that grace which Paul
received crave I, not that favour with which
Thou didst pardon Peter ; that which Thou
didst grant the malefactor, that alone crave I."
And where have we a more heart-felt breathing
of discipleship than in the hymn of Leibnitz :
Jesu, dessen Tod und Leiden
Unsre Freud und Leben 1st !
The science of to-morrow, with a deeper
apprehension of the soul s mystery and need
than it now possesses, will regain that note,
with something added of its own. With a
mightier sweep of vision, it will be the great
interpreter of Christ.
XXVIII.
The New Incarnation.
THERE is, perhaps, no Christian belief
upon which theology has oftener come to
blows with outside thinking than the doctrine
of Incarnation. And, indeed, the forms in
which it has been offered to the world have
been sufficiently provocative. Both as a
theory and as a statement of historical fact
it has offered a broad enough surface to the
shafts of the enemy. The whole conception
of it has undergone enormous revision in the
modern mind. But the revision has been also
a reacceptance. Incarnation has taken a
new hold upon the thought of to-day. Science
has cast upon it fresh lights, and the philosophy
of history is beginning to regard it as containing
the secret of the world.
When the German idealists began, from
their standpoint, to work on the problem of
existence ; when Fichte depicted the human
mind as related to the Divine mind as branches
are to the vine ; when Schelling saw the
external world as another expression of the
234
THE NEW INCARNATION. 235
life that is writ in our consciousness, and the
eternal spirit as coming to itself in man ;
and when Hegel offered his doctrine of the world
and human history as exhibiting successive
forms of one Divine idea, philosophy was,
almost unconsciously, opening the way to a
fresh concept of Incarnation. At the same
time, from a totally opposite starting point,
that of physical science, a mass of new obser
vations and conclusions were being developed,
which, to the astonishment of thinkers, were
found to point in the same direction. The
central idea of evolution, of the development
of life from lower to higher forms, when pursued
to its implications, revealed itself as, if not a
direct evidence of, yet in mysterious and won
derful harmony with, the belief in Divine In
carnation. Here Hegel and Schelling on one
side, and Darwin and Spencer on the other,
showed, without seeming to know it, as inter
preters of the New Testament.
When to-day we read in the Christian
Gospel, of Christ as the Word, as the image of
the Father, our mind turns instinctively
to the latest result of philosophy, of the Divine
thought as realising itself, finding its vehicle
and expression, so far as this world is con
cerned, in man. We turn to science, and
take its renderings of the world-development as
part of this process. We see Divinity burying
itself, as it were, at the beginning, in the very
236 THE COMMON LIFE.
roots of things, working up through one phase of
existence to another, shaping animal forms
as successive lowly expressions and adumbra
tions of what was coming, until, in man,
and the soul, it reaches a clear consciousness
of itself. It is the heavens coming up through
the earth. It is the Highest taking on the form
of a servant. Ultimately, on the plane of his
tory, and as part of and indissolubly related
to the whole movement, emerges a soul in
which the whole secret of the Divine char
acter is manifested. As Theodore of Mop-
suestia puts it ; " The human spirit of Jesus
so perfectly appropriated the Divine as to
become entirely one with it." Ritschl is on
exactly the same line in his declaration that
" the essence of God, as it is spirit, and will,
and especially love, can, and has, become opera
tive in a human life." And so Christ has for
us the religious value of God. In Him God
has expressed Himself, shown us His character.
In the broad, sweeping thought of one of
the earliest Christian writers, Justin Martyr,
"He is the Word of whom every race of
men are partakers, and those who live reason
ably are Christians, even though they have been
thought atheists ; as among the Greeks,
Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them."
But the Christ of the Gospels was an his
torical figure, who disappeared from the world
nearly nineteen centuries ago. Disappeared ;
THE NEW INCARNATION. 237
but the vanishing, and what followed are the
most wonderful part of the story. However
we interpret what followed, no one, including
the veriest sceptic, can deny that it was after
His death that Christ s greatest work began.
Lamartine was not exaggerating when he said
that " Christ s tomb was the grave of the old
world and the cradle of the new." One of the
Master s most pregnant words, that He would
give to the world a spirit, a Paraclete, who
after his departure should work amongst men
as His representative, is now interpreted
for us by the history of all the succeeding ages;
The spirit of Christ, abiding for a brief space in
a mortal frame, after the emancipation of
death, has expanded in its august operations,
until it promises to take the whole of human
society, the entire circle of human living,
as the body that it shall henceforth inhabit.
" He that descended," says a great apostolic
word, " is the same that ascended . . . that
He might fill all things." In other words,
the post-mortem history of Jesus is the history
of a series of reincarnations, in which His
spirit has been ever seeking and framing for
itself a body through which it might work His
work upon the world.
In tracing that great story, we find ourselves
in front of some of the greatest problems of
Christian belief and in possession of what
seems a key to their solution. In every age of
238 THE COMMON LIFE.
its existence the Christian Church, following a
New Testament dictum, has called itself " the
body of Christ." The definition contained
much more than was suspected by most
of those who used it. However we describe
the Church ; whether, with Origen, we speak
of it " as the assembly of all the Faithful,"
or with Augustine as " the people of God
throughout all ages," or with Cyril as " the
most holy multitude of the pious," or with
Bede as " the congregation of all saints,"
we find that, as it appears in history, it is
ever a body with a soul inside it. And the
body is one that grows, comes to its culmina
tion, then decays and perishes. It is, besides,
a most imperfect body, made out of the
materials which each age furnished, and ex
pressing, in the rudest way, the ethereal
element within.
An illustration of what we mean is seen in the
Catholicism of the mediaeval age. Here is a
system which for centuries represented what
there was of Christianity. It boasted of
possessing in its dogma the whole truth of
things, in its organisation the entire discipline
of life. But no sooner had it reached its
height of power than its decay began. Huge
crevices began to yawn in its intellectual
system ; moral diseases infested it. At the
very middle of its reign we have Bernard of
Cluny declaring of Rome that " the Pontiff,
THE NEW INCARNATION. 239
or rather the King of this odious Babylon,
tramples under foot the Gospel of Christ,
and makes himself adored as a God."
As the years roll on the signs of decrepitude
increase. The Reformation breaks the body
in twain. The world s new thought, turned
upon this great theological system as it is
depicted in a Dante, or in the " Summa "
of an Aquinas, pronounces it to be old and
ready to vanish away.
But Protestantism, which proclaimed itself
also a Church, and as being in its turn the
body of Christ, has shown similar character
istics. From its appearance in the sixteenth
century to the present day it has exhibited all
the features of a mortal body. Lutheranism and
Calvinism, as the men of Charles the Fifth s
time knew them, have had their stages of
early growth, of culmination and of decay.
To-day their doctrinal systems are riddled
by criticism, their old watchwords are with
out significance ; their programmes fail to
meet the modern aspiration.
What is the meaning of this ? Does it
spell the defeat of religion, the overthrow
of Christ ? Surely by this time we should have
read our history better ! What has happened
here in the theologic and ecclesiastical systems
is what has been happening through all the ages
of which evolution speaks. It is the eternal
story of the one spirit creating successive bodies,
240 THE COMMON LIFE.
making what was possible of them, but
all the time, and especially during their decay,
weaving ceaselessly the new body that was to
take their place. We may say that each age
of the Church has had the body that was possible
to it. The shortcomings of the Church in
each age, its limitations, ignorances, super
stitions, show us, not the mind of Christ,
nor the possibilities of uplift that are in it for
humanity, but simply the level to which
under that uplift, each particular generation
had arrived. It was this view of Christianity
that led Schiller in a letter to Goethe to
exclaim, " I find in the Christian religion
virtually the foundation of the highest and
noblest ; and the various manifestations of the
same in life appear to me, therefore, so repug
nant and insipid because they are failed
representations of the highest."
It is along this line of thought surely that
we arrive at a proper comprehension of what
is happening around us to-day. Here again
in Church life are visible on all hands the signs
of decay. A vast quantity of our religious
apparatus is obsolete. A mass of the tra
ditional religious statement and ceremonial
fails to touch the modern mind. Men in
consequence are writing about " the coming
irreligion " and the approaching extinction of
Christianity. What is really taking place
around us is a series of vast preparations
THE NEW INCARNATION. 241
for yet a new incarnation of the Christ. Mar
vellous and awe-inspiring, to one whose
eyes are open, are the stages of the august
process. The very dissatisfaction with
the existing forms is a part of it. Carlyle has
put into unforgettable words the spirit of the
time : " The religious principle, driven out
of most churches, either lies unseen in the
hearts of good men, looking and longing
and silently working towards some new realisa
tion ; or else wanders homeless over the
world, like the disembodied soul seeking its
terrestrial organism."
That new organism is already looming
into sight. The fresh incarnation is visibly
preparing. In the twentieth century also
shall the Christ find His body. And it will be
a higher, nobler structure than any that has
preceded it. A thousand things that belonged
to earlier forms will be missing in this. The
old proscriptions, the old narrowness, the sus
picions against knowledge and reason, the
claims of priesthoods, of blind authority,
will be missing here. This body will have a
brain stored with all the world has of knowable,
but its soul will be the soul of Christ. In
this incarnation we shall see Christianity
in its essence as the Spirit of Heavenly Love,
binding human society together in a brother
hood of service, in a holy, happy fellowship
of the spirit. Nothing can prevent that coming.
16
242 THE COMMON LIFE.
All history points this way. Here shall be
fulfilled the aspiration, echoed by a myriad
loyal hearts, which our great Puritan poet
has put into imperishable words : " Come forth
out of thy royal chambers, Prince of all the
Kings of the earth ! Put on the visible robes
of Thy imperial majesty, take up that un
limited sceptre which Thy Almighty Father
hath bequeathed Thee ; for now the voice of
Thy bride calls Thee, and all creatures sigh
to be renewed."
XXIX
The Prophet in Man.
RELIGIOUS prophecy, as commonly under
stood, seems just now to be somewhat at a
discount. Biblical critics, working over what
were once regarded as supernatural predic
tions, have shed upon them a new and com
moner light. The foretelling supposed to be
centuries before the fact turns out to be a
vaticinium ex eventu ; the significance of the
prophet is declared to be a significance for his
own rather than for future times. And the
grotesque performances of a belated Biblical
school of our own day, who, undeterred by
the thousand failures of like-minded pre
decessors, go on constructing out of Daniel and
the Apocalypse lurid pictures of impossible
cataclysms, have tended, with a large portion
of the educated public, to bring all efforts of
this kind into discredit. The role of prophet
has shifted from the religious to the scientific
teacher. Upon the astronomer who can pre
dict the exact moment of an eclipse a hundred
thousand years hence ; upon the physicist
248
244 THE COMMON LITE,
who announces the date of exhaustion of
our coal supply, or who figures out the
period during which the sun s heat will keep
the earth habitable, the mantle has now
fallen. Modern literature is full of " Antici
pations, but they do not profess to be
religious.
And yet this is, after all, merely on the
surface. For religious prophecy is as much
alive to-day as ever, and will become the more
potent as its real significance is better under
stood. With a changed nomenclature, and
with a wider, deeper outlook it will resume
its old authority, and much more. For in
the end it will be recognised, not merely by
a class, by a religious nature here and there,
but by the common intelligence of the world.
It will be seen that the Bible is true to humanity
in being full of religious prophecy. And that
because humanity at its root is itself full of
it. The prophets d elite, the Isaiahs, the
Pauls, are such, first of all, because all men
are prophets. The prophetic word draws from
a common element. It would have no
significance and find no echo did it not re
present something which underlies the whole
basis of human life. Man himself is the
prophet, because he is himself the mystery,
the one in whom, far beyond his own knowing,
is wrapped up the secret of the universe.
His history is a spiritual drama, the unfolding
THE PROPHET IN MAN. 245
of which becomes ever more wondrous, and
from whose past a mystic finger points towards
a something greater yet to come.
Before, however, going further on this line,
a word may be needed as against a possible
objection. The awakened interest in philo
sophical studies in this country seems
to have had for a first effect the bemuddling
of many eager minds. We have, for instance,
the doctrine of spiritual evolution attacked
on grounds of high metaphysic. Spinoza is
flung at us as having disposed for ever of the
notion of " end " and " purpose " in God
and His universe. Is not, it is asked, the
idea of a something better towards which God
works the very negation of that All Perfect
which, by its very definition, must be as all
perfect now as then ? Reasoning of this
kind reaches its ultimate, surely, in the position
of an American philosophical writer, who
derides the notion of final causes and speaks
of the apparent movements in the universe
as simply " variations of the cosmical weather " !
But all this is simply the philosophy of pre
supposition, of which by this time we ought
to have become decently rid. When we touch
the Infinite we can frame any number of a
priori contradictions. The Greek philosophers
amused themselves that way ages ago. It
is the old fallacy of supposing that the think
able is always the same as the actual. When
246 THE COMMON
with a little more wisdom we condescend to
the sphere we really know, we find the universe
full of what in our language at least, are
" ends " and " purposes," though in heaven s
vocabulary the words may be translated
quite differently. And of these purposes,
the chiefest we discern is that of the evolution
of the human spirit.
In piecing together for us the story of
evolution science is giving us a new Scripture
whose religious and prophetic interest holds
us spell-bound. One of its first lessons is
that man is the one and final object towards
which the whole movement of the planet has
been straining. There will be in this world
no animal organism that can transcend his
own. That result was provided for long ages
ago, when evolution, which hitherto had worked
through physical variations, began, in our
remotest ancestor amongst the mammalian
primates, to work by increments of mental
power. Henceforward in the struggle mind
was for ever to outweigh body, and man the
mind-possessor to be, in the kingdom both
of animals and of all natural forces, alone and
supreme.
But that point was settled only as prepara
tory to another. For out of man the animal
was to be evolved in due course man the
spiritual. Science and the Bible have here
each their Book of Genesis, and the two sub-
THE PROPHET IN MAN. 247
stantially tally. Man rose morally by falling.
The history of each human child is, in this
respect, the history of the race. In the infant,
born without moral consciousness, and rising
gradually to the sense of this sphere by ex
periments and stumbles and failures, we have
the Eden story for ever repeated. The way
in which Nature has nursed man towards a
spiritual end is the miracle open before our
eyes to-day. In prehistoric times, in the long
infancy accorded the human animal, an infancy
which developed the germs of altruism and
self-sacrifice in the parents, we see the first
start in the great process. Later, we have
man emerging upon the sphere of contempla
tion, of a consciousness of the universe as
related to him in a mystical manner. Religion
takes shape in crudest forms, yet always
cognisant of the fact that man contains in
himself a mystery too deep to be uttered. In
every land and of every faith prophets appear
who try to put this secret into words. The
movement is gradual, interspersed with epochs
of sudden variation. As someone has said,
" If Nature does not take leaps, she at times
makes great strides." To-day we are trying
to translate into terms of evolution the im
mense stride known as Christianity. And it
is in this way we are at last getting a true
understanding of it. As Lamennais, with
prophetic insight, long ago said : " Christianity
248 THE COMMON LIFE.
can only continue its evolution by entering
into the circle of the natural laws of man. It
is now entering on this new era, one of those
solemn moments in which everything seems
to be perishing, but in which everything is
being reborn." And the latest verdict of the
evolutional philosophy of to-day is that the
ethical and spiritual forces which the new
Testament Christianity set working in
humanity will, as the next stage of human
development, inevitably dominate the world.
From this glance along the line some obser
vations as to our special theme can now be
made. And the first is that the human
values of to-day derive their chief worth from
the fact that they are prophetic values. The
interest of our life is intensified tenfold when
we realise that it is a perpetual Becoming.
To-day carries a greater to-morrow. Even
Nietzsche, that scoffer par excellence, who
enjoyed nothing so much as turning every
thing in doctrine and morals upside down,
cannot keep back a certain awe at the spectacle
which cosmic history unrolls. Says he, " Man
awakens for himself an interest, a response,
a hope, almost a confidence that something
important is about to happen, that something
is in preparation, that man . . . is an
interact, a bridge, a great promise."
But the spectacle gives us more than this.
Surely a prophecy of much lies in this single
THE PROPHET IN MAN. 249
factTthat everything so far in human history
has proved greater than man had originally
imagined. Doubtless there were pessimists
in the paleolithic days, ancestors of our club
vaticinator, who predicted nothing but disaster
and decay. Could they have seen what the race
has reached since ! Is it nothing to us as a
prediction, or at least a hint, that the universe
on all the sides of it we are learning to know is
proving to be on so broader a scale than an
earlier time had imagined ? May we not
argue from this fact to another ? If the
Cosmos open to-day to our physical vision is
so immeasurably grander than the older
reckonings allowed for, may we not conclude
that its spiritual side, when we read it better,
will show a similar scale ; that its dimensions
in love, in moral beauty, in perfectness and
joy, will in like manner prove not less but
immeasurably greater than our present con
ceptions make them ? Was not that saying
of Goethe s a true prophet word : " Our wishes
are presentiments of the capabilities which
lie within us, and harbingers of that which
we shall be in a condition to perform " ?
And this carries us on to that final prophecy
in man, his sense of immortality* The assur
ance here, be it observed, does not come from
man s senses, nor from his logic. It does not
rest on syllogisms. Science, it is true, is
groping towards some synthesis on this theme.
250 THE COMMON LIFE.
Its doctrine of the persistence of force ; its
new-found certitude that nothing is wasted
or lost in the universe visible to it, open new
applications to the sphere of the invisible.
But it is not from this source that the main
strength of the feeling for immortal life derives.
Numbers of men who dabble in science to
day have no assurance at all of the matter,
but the contrary. Where it exists in strength
its sources are deeper. They lie on man s
spiritual side. The assurance is a product
and an accompaniment of the higher living.
Love is greater than knowledge, and the
fruits and assurances of the heart are greater
than those of the brain. It is thus that the
saints partake beforehand of the rest that
remaineth. Men in the secret of Christ know
themselves the conquerors of death.
To sum up. The prophets who from age
to age utter their word of fire hold their brief
from the common element of prophecy which
inheres in all humanity. That element is
the greatest of our possessions. There is that
in man deeper than his present word, and
that will take all Eternity to utter. All in
our life is good, because all co-operates to the
one end. And all is burdened with the
prophecy of that end. The history of the past
teaches us that the highest in our aspirations
is nearest in fact to what is to be. It is not
the future which doubt or despair pictures,
THE PROPHET IN MAN. 251
but that of hope at its highest that history,
science and religion to-day bid us expect :
There shall never be one lost good ; what was shall live
as before.
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ;
What was good shall be good, with for evil so much
good more,
On the earth the broken arcs ; in heaven a perfect
round.
XXX.
The Teaching of Emerson.
AMONG modern teachers of the common
life Emerson has gained a place which seems
secure. It is well, for this high, sweet nature
had a message for the world of which the
rolling years seem to have increased rather
than diminished the significance. There are
literary men who are far more than makers
of books. Anyone, for instance, who has
studied French literature, from the Renais
sance downwards, finds its key in Rabelais.
Here was a man who may be said to have
created an atmosphere a mental climate for
a whole people. At a time when Europe
was convulsed with the ultimate questions of
life and religion, this man struck in with his
note. It was not Luther s note, nor Calvin s.
Far otherwise ; but it set the tune to French
thinking for centuries afterwards. Genera
tion after generation the Gallic mind has
seen things in this man s light, and the in
fluence is as strong to-day as ever.
Would it do to say that as Rabelais stood
252
THE TEACHING OF EMERSON. 253
for the essentially French view of life, so
Emerson represents the American view ? The
statement would have to be taken with large
reservations. The Concord philosopher stood
outside the religious movements which com
manded the deepest feeling of his country
men. The Unitarianism in which he was
born found him too broad for its definitions ;
while from the orthodox Churches his views on
Christianity placed him at a seemingly im
measurable remove. Nevertheless, Emerson
is typically American. It was only America
that could have produced him, and he offered
his country in return more than he took from
it. He, too, has created an atmosphere in
which his fellows have seen things. It was not
simply the Boston Transcendental] sts to whom
he gave eyes. In men of the most opposed
theologic and literary camps we trace his
manner, his glance. When Quaker Whittier
sings ;
I feel the earth move sunward,
I join the great march onward ;
when Walt Whitman from his boathouse writes,
" My notion is, I am myself just as much evil
as good, and I say there is, in fact, no evil,
or, if there is, I say it is just as important to
you, to the land, or to me, as anything else,"
we have echoes from the same voice. And
the boundless optimism which was not afraid
to say that even evil itself is good in the
254 THE COMMON LIFE.
making, and that " all s well with the world,"
has become an inheritance of American think
ing. A Beecher, a Phillips Brooks, and the
whole school of preachers that follow them,
have shared the optimism, though taking their
own way of expressing it.
We have said that only America could have
produced Emerson. Buckle might, indeed,
have found in him an illustration of his favour
ite doctrine of environment as the moulder
of men. In religion and philosophy, where
he habitually dwelt, Emerson was simply the
American idea carried to the farthest point.
A man of the new republic, of a community
which had broken politically with the Old
World, and started everything afresh, he carried
the evolution into the field of thought, and
asked his countrymen what hindered them,
having gone so far in the minor arrangements
of life, from striking out routes for them
selves in the matters that were principal ?
" We have begun to govern afresh and trade
afresh ; why not begin to think afresh ?
Why should we not hold an original relation
to the universe ? We have shaken off the old
world and the old past politically ; why should
we be their bond slaves internally and religi
ously ? The cosmos is just as much ours to
possess, to receive revelations from, to frame
conceptions of, as it was to the prophets, the
religious leaders and law-givers, from whom
THE TEACHING OF EMERSON* 255
men for ages have been taking their opinions.
We are in a better position to form an opinion
than they were. Let us claim our liberty ! "
That, in substance, was Emerson s message,
and it was a greater Declaration of Independ
ence than the one that Jefferson penned.
A daring assertion this, we say, such as only
a young country, intoxicated with freedom and
success, could have produced. Men, it is
true, had dreamed the same thing before.
Descartes had set himself to arrive at truth
by thinking away every prepossession, every
thing traceable to authority, until he reached
a primal, incontrovertible proposition from
which he might start. But neither in the Old
World nor the New is it so easy in these matters
to " clean the slate." Descartes " cogito
ergo sum," his new logical starting-point,
turns out to be not even original ; an Augustine
had said the same thing, in almost the same
words, a thousand years before. And our
American, in his turn, we discover, has not
accomplished the feat of jumping off his own
shadow. For the past will not be shaken off.
We may burn the parchments, destroy the in
stitutions, pull down the Churches. And the
past laughs at our efforts, for it is entrenched
in our blood, in the fibre of our brains.
Yet, with all reservations taken, there
was a note here that the world will never again
forget. True, we cannot break with our
256 THE COMMON LIFE.
past, any more than a tree can break from its
root and live. We cannot, for the past is an
integral part of our present. Nevertheless,
when Emerson affirmed the sovereignty of to
day over yesterday ; when he declared that
the soul of a living man is the miracle of the
ages, has in it now all the Gospels, all the
divinities, all the revelations that the world
has ever known, and that it holds potencies
such as shall yield higher revealings in the future
than any history records, his word struck on the
general mind as in itself a revelation, and has
been a common property of thinking ever
since.
Connected with his independence was his
optimism, and this, again, was a distinctive
American product. It is that of a man who,
for one thing, lived in a sunny clime, whose
air exalts and intoxicates. A French writer
has maintained that the sterner religious
faiths, and the melancholic temperaments,
are a product of the northern fogs. Give a
man sun enough and he will create for you a
happy philosophy of life. Emerson might
have been cited in proof. Carlyle and he held
similar opinions on many central points ;
but the character of the one had been com
pacted of countless Novembers, fogs, and
north-easters, while the other was embodied
sunshine. Not that the optimist s view was
here always the sound one. There was a cer-
THE TEACHING OF EMERSON. 257
tain provincialism in it. Emerson belonged not
only to a sunny, but also to a well-to-do,
continent. The America of his day knew
scarcely anything of abject poverty. Our
prophet s Zion was marvellously at ease.
And in taking these surroundings as the
measure of existence in general, he made a
mistake that carried him in many directions,
far astray. He had no eyes for the sterner
aspect. He grew impatient when men spoke
of it. He records with a kind of petulance
how Carlyle, on his first visit to him at Craig-
enputtock, " still returned to English pauper
ism, the crowded country, the selfish abdica
tion by public men of all the duties that public
men should perform."
One feels, indeed, that his is too dainty
a touch for such a world as ours. His doc
trine is for a state of ideal perfection, not for
one where all the work is yet to do. Our phy
sician of souls is here like those modern
curers who tell people airily that there is noth
ing the matter with them if they would only
think so. Meanwhile our hospitals are full,
and the patients cast curious eyes on the visitor
who assures them that all is well. A doctrine
which proclaims that " the less we have to do
with our sins the better" ; " no man can afford
to waste his moments on compunctions,"
gives us, with the world as it is, and men
as they are, a strange sense of inadequacy.
17
258 THE COMMON LIFE.
It is holiday-making on the battlefield. The
man who never felt anything the matter with
him, nor has never made a study of disease,
may do excellently as the leader of a picnic,
but he leaves wide space for someone who will
" bear our infirmities and carry our sicknesses."
To wave away the Cross as a Jewish business
with which the modern man has no concern,
is to trifle with the facts of life. As Lamen-
nais said, the world carries the Cross in its
heart. Redemption, sacrifice these, after all,
have made the soul.
For all the blood that ever was shed
Runs through the streams of that countrie.
Emerson s defect, indeed, seems to have
been to have anticipated Paradise before we
have got there. He loves the saints, but he
offers no process for making them. His
gospel is sweetness and light, but it lacks driv
ing power. He speaks of Wesley and his
fellow-workers as outgrown, but we cannot dis
cover in his methods anything that would have
converted the Kingswood colliers or the
Cornish wreckers of the evangelist s day into
God-fearing people. We are glad of our philo
sopher and his word, but the world s main
stream of healing has risen otherwhere than
at Concord.
It is when we have in this way assigned
him his place, knowing him as, like the rest
THE TEACHING OF EMERSON. 259
of us, standing for a part and not the whole,
that we can most unreservedly yield ourselves
up to the enjoyment of our thinker. He is the
modern Plato, and, like Plato, a born in-
tuitionist, if ever there was one. His very
style proclaims the type of his mind. Never
did a man more justify Buffon s word, " Le
style tfest Vhomme meme" His truth comes to
him in flashes, and he offers it us so. You
shall read him from end to end, and find no
two consecutive sentences of deductive reason
ing. His utterances are aphorisms. He opens
his mouth and pearls drop out. He throws
out his thought, illustrates it, turns it round,
makes it flash with its myriad facets in the
sunlight, and there an end. There is no pro
gression. You can never tell why the theme
should begin in this way or finish in that.
And yet the effect is vast. Wherever he takes
us he plunges us into immensity. An opening
word, and we are on some farthest cape,
contemplating " the unsounded purple sea
of marching billows."
Like Plato, also, of whom he was so fond,
he was, in the strangest manner, a mingling
of East and West. He found a wondrous at
traction in the Eastern philosophy. With
Schopenhauer and with Thoreau, he had
pored over the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and
the Zend A vesta. He accepted with them
the world as phenomena, as illusion, and spirit
260 THE COMMON LIFE.
as the only reality. Yet withal he had, as
Plato had, a strong objective side. The mystic
was also the Yankee business man. He
was a philosopher with a banking account,
and with full appreciation of a good dinner.
He never lost his head. He rallies, with his
subtlest irony, the enthusiasts of Brook Farm,
and the Transcendentalists who, in the name of
the ideal, took to camping out in the woods.
And who shall say that his was not the saner,
and the better, part ?
For the rest, while gladly taking him as one
of the greatest of the modern witnesses for
the Unseen ; as a teacher who, in a commercial
and materialistic age employed an unsurpassed
insight, power, and beauty of expression
in proclaiming the supremacy of the moral
values, in affirming the rights and the essential
majesty of the human soul, yet Emerson re
mains to us the writer, the literary man,
rather than the prophet. He was not dis
tinctly a religious force. There were notes
here that he did not touch, depths he did not
sound. We bathe ourselves in his sunshine ;
we rejoice in the illimitable prospect he un
folds, but when we seek strength for the
daily battle, consolation in defeat, courage for
the dark and cloudy day, it is not to Concord
that we go, but still to Calvary.
XXXI,
Vicarious Consecration.
ATJGUSTE SABATIER, in an essay on the
Atonement, lays it down as a first principle
that no doctrine of it could be acceptable to
the modern consciousness which did not
satisfy at every point the universal moral law.
In particular he shows how the element of
the vicarious, of which the Cross is the special
manifestation, founds itself in the very nature
of man as a moral being ; that vicarious
suffering is a law of the spiritual universe,
and keeps the world alive. We propose here
to carry the argument a step further, and to
point out how the vicarious, the " for others "
idea, belongs essentially, not only to the
higher sufferings and endurances, but also
to the higher strivings, to all true and sane
endeavours after perfectness. The passage in
the Fourth Gospel reported as a saying of
Christ, " For their sakes I sanctify Myself,"
is one of those utterances which, as we gaze
into it, is seen to penetrate to the utmost
roots of things. It is a statement of the
261
262 THE COMMON LIFE.
altruism of holiness, a doctrine denied in some
quarters, feebly apprehended, if not misunder
stood in others, but which, when fairly
grasped, exerts on every mind that is honest a
constant and irresistible upward pressure.
Goethe was a man of many moods, some
of them very Pagan moods. Perhaps he
never showed more clearly the side of his
character which made Heine dub him " der
grosse Heide " than in his statement that
" the man who has life in him feels himself
to be here for his own sake, not for the
public." It is a heathen sentiment and not
a Christian. The man who partakes of the
world s highest life may begin for himself, but
he can never end there. In religion he will,
at the earlier stage, and very legitimately,
want to find his own soul saved ; in business
he will have to look after himself, if only to
save other people the worry of looking after
him. But as the horizon expands he finds
these personal issues swallowed up in a sense
of something greater. The same thing happens
in his pursuit of mental and moral culture.
The first enthusiasms here centre largely upon
oneself. The delight of knowing, being and
doing the best is experienced as the highest
of all sensations. But in any true progress
there emerges in time another feeling, with a
flavour all its own. It is the sense of an
overpowering moral indebtedness. The con-
VICARIOUS CONSECRATION. 263
sciousness here is quite unique. The debt
which presses is different from any of those
with which the business or the legal world
make us familiar. It is not anything that our
fellow-men have done for us or paid to us
which creates the obligation. It is something
rooted in the vaster relations of Being. It is
the feeling that a contribution is asked of us
to the invisible interests of the Universe.
We are here to add something to the world s
spiritual assets.
The new obligation of which we become
conscious is to increase the sum of goodness.
One of the most significant, as well as one
of the most pathetic, things in history has
been men s ceaseless quest after the good.
So eager has been their search for saints and
sainthood that where they could not find
what they sought they have invented it.
The hagiologies, the Lives of the Saints,
with their supernatural embellishments, their
impossible idealisings what are they but the
expression of the world s impatient expecta
tion of a Diviner light that is to break upon
it out of human character ? When men find
such a gleam, how eagerly they follow it !
What a revelation of human possibility, if
only we would see it, is afforded by stories
such as that of the crowd of young aristocrats
who gave up their gaieties to follow their
beloved Bernard into the Clairvaux wilderness,
264 THE COMMON LIFE.
or of the English nobles who, when they felt
the sainthood of Wycliffe, in the language of
Thorpe, his early biographer, " were devotedly
attached to him and kept a record of what
he said, and guided themselves after his
manner of life ! How the common human heart
vibrates to that saying of the Italian peasant
to Francis of Assisi, " Art thou brother Francis
of Assisi ? " "Yes!" "Try, then, to be as
good as all think thee to be, because many
have great faith in thee, and therefore I
admonish thee to be nothing less than people
hope of thee." Such a person is, in fact, felt
to be the possessor and free distributor of
immeasurable wealth. He is the discoverer of
a new paradise, and men flock to breathe its
celestial air.
Our point is that as our inward development
goes on we find ourselves laid hold of by a
secret imperious demand to this higher help
fulness. " For their sakes " we, too, are " to
sanctify ourselves." Humanity has a claim
upon us to be and do our very best, that we
also may add to the sum of the invisible Good.
By our value we increase the value of all man
kind. The noble motto, " Non inferior a secutus "
is not fully realised till we have learned not
only to follow the higher things, but to follow
them from more than a personal motive.
And this vicarious perfecting must have
the widest range. Few things have done
VlCAEIOUS CONSECEATION. 265
more harm to religion than the narrow, con
ventional ideas of holiness that have so largely
obtained. According to notions prevalent in
some circles a " saint " is a more or less feeble,
microcephalous person, attired in black, to
whom half the world s knowledge and practice
is taboo. It is an idea descended from the
dark ages, when religious professors counted
it a virtue not to wash themselves, and when,
as Erasmus has it, a man reckoned himself
holy on the strength of not being able to read.
In our own day the type of character bred
upon these views is vividly set forth in a
description given by Phillips Brooks of some
of his companions at college. He attended
a prayer meeting which they conducted.
"Never," says he, "shall I lose the impression
of the devoutness with which these men prayed
and exhorted each other. Their whole souls
seemed exalted and their natures were on fire.
. . . On the next day I met some of these
men at a Greek recitation. It would be little
to say of some of the devoutest of them they
had not learned their lessons. Their whole
way showed that they never learned their
lessons, that they had not got hold of the first
principles of hard, conscientious study."
It would have been well for these men to
have learned a little more not only of the Greek
language, but also of the Greek idea which
identified virtue with knowledge. The argu-
266 THE COMMON LIFE.
ment of Socrates, that as a man is a good
horseman by knowing horsemanship and a
good smith in proportion as he knows his
handicraft, so a man is good in all other
departments of his nature by the appropriate
knowledge, requires balancing by other con
siderations, but it has point. We want to
get rid of the " sainthood " which has been
the scoff of strong men, and substitute for its
outworn formulas the idea which is alone
worthy of the word, of a human perfectness,
that is, of body, intellect and soul. Plato
touched the inwardness of the matter in his
question, " Is anything more excellent than
a man whose beauty of soul is combined with
outward beauty of form, the latter correspond
ing to and harmonising with the former ?
Humanity has suffered a horrible waste of
time hitherto from lack of this wider definition.
It cannot afford to waste any more. When
religious men have come to full recognition
of the fact that holiness means wholeness,
that sainthood is sanity ; that not only the
discipline of the soul, but the training of the
body, and the acquirement of knowledge in
its every department, are parts of sanctifica-
tion, the long-lagging world will at last begin
to march. But ever as we toil onwards along
any or all of these routes the discipline will
lose its finest edge unless all be wrought to the
music of this great refrain, " For their sakes
VICARIOUS CONSECRATION. 267
I sanctify myself." Our work will fail of
sanctity unless it be done in the thought
that in its every department we are appren
ticed to the Best, in the service of All.
The sense of vicarious consecration is one
of those great formative ideas which hover
like guardian angels over humanity and assure
its inward progress. To have it clearly
established within us is a supreme guarantee
against whatsoever is base and unworthy.
Under this leadership a man can climb without
pride ; his successes leave him humble. When
we dare not do other than our best because
our brother needs all the worth that we can
win, our progress is a sheer good all round.
This master-thought also kills hypocrisy and
the whole miserable art of religious subterfuge.
It is death to the notion of salvation by
creed, by Church, or by the juggling transfer
of theological " merit." The sanctity which
is to be of any use to others must be a reality
of fact and character. It clears out the
pretenders. Said Casaubon of Muretus, " If
he only believed in the existence of God as
well as he can talk about it he would be an
excellent Christian." The talkers have indeed
flourished wonderfully on the older notions.
But when holiness is studied as the science of
human life, and related accurately to the great
laws which underlie the moral world, the reign
of cant will be over.
268 THE COMMON LIFE.
Vicarious consecration should be a watch
word for us all. Fathers and mothers are
the moral trustees of the family. Failure of
character defrauds their children of the best
part of their heritage. The pastor and religi
ous teacher is a trustee on a yet larger scale.
For such a man to fail of the highest is a
public misfortune, while an actual fall is
worse than if the bank had broken. The
malversation of funds is greater, and in a
specie that cannot be replaced. We do not,
indeed, know the full limits of our trusteeship.
We trace some of its outlines in our earthly
relations, but these are not the only ones.
A wider reach is suggested in those awesome
lines of Tennyson :
Do we indeed desire the dead
Should still be near us at our side ?
Is there no baseness we would hide,
No inner vileness that we dread ?
Whether we look up or down, it is plain
there is no room for us anywhere except in
goodness,
XXXII.
The Touch of Tragedy.
THE story of a war impresses us to an almost
exaggerated degree with the tragic element of
life. It brings to a focus and exposes to the
full glare of publicity all the most sinister
happenings that are possible to humanity.
The separations, bereavements, heartbreaks
at home, the wounds and deaths on the field,
the commercial derangements, the financial
ruin that attend the progress of a campaign, are
the subject daily of columns of print, and offer
a theme on which the whole world s attention
is fixed. Our preoccupation here is apt, in
deed, to make us forget that war has no mono
poly of tragedy. We have to make our account
with the fact that the tragic, in one form or
another, is a normal condition, an inevitable
element in every single human life . Whether we
die in our beds or by the stab of a bayonet, we
shall not escape it. It may come clad in
purple and fine linen, or in respectable broad
cloth or undisguised and with nothing to hide
its grim outlines ; but come it will, and we
270 THE COMMON LIFE.
shall each feel its touch. The topic should
occupy a place in every sane man s thinking,
the more so as, with the lights we have upon it,
he may think of it with entire cheerfulness.
What at the outset seems perfectly clear
is that we were, of aforethought, predestined
to this experience. That we should have come
into being as such extraordinary compounds
of strength and weakness points to this.
Possessed of soft and delicate frames, which
quiver with a thousand sensibilities, we find
ourselves hi a universe of stupendous and
ferocious forces in a world where fires burn,
and earthquakes yawn, and waters drown, and
storms destroy, and where myriad minute
foes, invisible but not less fatal, mine the vitals.
And these physical possibilities are only the
beginning. All over the realms of thought,
of affectional relation, of conscience and the
moral life are sown the possibilities of tragedy.
To mention one of these innumerable forms,
what a new forlornness has the modern scien
tific imagination introduced ! Isolated on his
tiny world, man gazes across the infinities
which the telescope reveals, and shudders.
Astronomy has made him realise his terrible
loneliness. The
Taciturna noctia
Signa
which Horace speaks of impress us in a new
way now that science has made us understand
THE TOUCH OF TRAGEDY. 271
better the vastnesses they represent. Pascal s
terror at " the eternal silence of the infinite
spaces " has bitten deep into our generation.
The " pitiless, passionless eyes " of the far-off
stars seem from their cold depths to burn too
deeply " his nothingness into man."
That is the tragic of the imagination. But
to whatever conceivable side of human life
we turn we find the road simply blocked with
similar illustrations. Disraeli talks somewhere
of " the hell of failure," and what proportion
of us is it that has not passed through the
smoke of that inferno ? It seems, to say the
least, an odd arrangement which ordains that
for one who succeeds so many should break
down ; that wherever one stands strong and
upright so many helpless are leaning on him.
To enlarge here would be to repeat common
places. It is more to the purpose to inquire
whether we have ever fairly considered the
tragic element in success ? It is the people
who reach the heights, even more than those
whose fate keeps them below, who know most
of that grim experience. The height is not
terrible at first. Great abilities and the
position they win intoxicate youth with a
glorious sense of power and freedom, but the
bill for all this has to be paid, and it is a heavy
one. It is when the later years arrive, and
the world which to a newcomer seemed a con
quered world is going indifferently on its way,
272 THE COMMON LIFE.
listening to new voices and forgetting its
ancient charmer, that the tug comes. This
tragedy of success is felt in all spheres. Says
a great singer :
We poets begin our life in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end satiety and madness.
We are, in truth, all, greatest as well as least,
dead failures when compared with our hope,
and expectation. Think of Swift in his last
years, brooding in his Irish deanery, as he put
it, " like a poisoned rat in a hole ! " How
sombre the later time to Luther, with a
Peasants War, defections here and wild
heresies there as the apparent results of his
work ; and to Melancthon, who " welcomed
death as an escape from the rage of the theo
logians " ; and to Calvin crying, " The future
appals me ; I dare not think of it. Unless
the Lord descends from heaven barbarism will
engulf us ! " The world is, indeed, too strong
at the last for the strongest of us. "I am
trying," said a retired but once popular
London minister, " to accustom myself to
being forgotten." The aftermath of popu
larity, a lesson in the art of being forgotten !
This knack of forgetting, on the part of the
world outside, is indeed a hard thing for
sufferers to bear. It is a strange arrangement.
In the first shock of a bereavement the one
left behind is almost overwhelmed with the
THE TOUCH OF TRAGEDY. 273
sympathy and affection evoked from a multi
tude of friends. The table is loaded with letters
of condolence. The loved one is buried and
great lamentation made over him. And then
well, then the weeks roll on and with the
excitement over and the dull, dead grief sink
ing ever deeper, the stricken heart, now in its
sorest need, discovers that the world has quite
forgotten to sympathise, being occupied with
more pressing affairs.
Plainly life, in one view of it at least, is
tragic. It was meant to be so, for the element
was mixed with its very essence. What are
we to make of it ? Men have made of it all
kinds of things, according to their tempera
ment and their faith. With some it has
been the occasion for pessimism and even
blasphemy. The world has been pictured
as a place where men " sit and hear each
other groan." Of old, Lucretius pictured a
new-born child as akin to a shipwrecked
mariner cast on a barren shore, its wail being
fitting to a being with so much trouble to
go through. What a weary world is his !
Jamque adeo fracta est aetas
Effsstaque tellus !
But our moderns for strength and bitterness
of arraignment can vie with him. Nietszche
applies to the Deity the language in which
Charles the Bold apostrophised Louis XL,
18
274 THE COMMON LIFE.
" Je combats 1 universelle Arraignee."
Schopenhauer gives a characteristic touch
to the picture when he says : " Knock at the
graves and ask the dead whether they would
rise again ; they will shake their heads."
Is this a sensible or a just view ? To our
thinking, far otherwise. It is to take one
feature out of life, to exaggerate it beyond
all proportion, and at the same time to refuse
the light which solves its mystery. It is, in
the first place, to exaggerate. Life, as we
have seen, has in it indubitably the touch
of the tragic, but when viewed in its whole
ness, the element will be found, after all, to
be not more than a touch, and that from a
hand that lifts rather than beats down. In
estimating its proportion to the general
experience we have to remember, for one thing,
that a vast mass of it exists more in outward
seeming than in inner reality. Many of
us have faced the expectation of an imme
diate and violent death, and have found
it very tolerable. Livingstone has recounted
his seizure by a lion, and the lulling sensation
it gave him. Whymper, dropping from point
to point down a precipice, found himself
occupied in calmly counting the bumps and in
wondering which would finish him. To drop
a thousand feet from a cliff and be dashed
in pieces at the bottom is a horrifying sight
to the spectator. To the victim it offers in
THE TOUCH OF TRAGEDY. 275
the way of positive sensation probably little
more than that of going to sleep in a feather
bed. And when we compare life s quiet days
with its days of uprooting, its myriads joys
with its pains, our year will be found, after
all, to have had a spring, summer and autumn
as against one winter, and that the winter
also has had its attractions.
But the question recurs, Why is there the
winter ; why this residuum of the tragic ?
Why should such terrors have been let loose
to prowl in the close neighbourhood of spirits
that are so timid ? There seems but one
answer. Human nature has been deliberately
exposed to them because it has been planned
and framed for the heroic. The school to
which we have been introduced, the instructors
that wait on us there, argue an education
such as befits only the highest destinies. It
is the tragic in their life that stamps every
common man and woman, the unnoted
dwellers in mean streets as well as the
occupants of palaces, with the hall-mark
of an eternal distinction. A discipline so
tremendous argues an output that corresponds.
Were we here only to amuse ourselves, the
arrangements had been different. As it is,
the awful universe over which his gaze wanders,
the losses and disappointments that smite
him, the pains that rack him and the death
and eternity that await him, all salute our
276 THE COMMON LIFE.
pallid mortal and proclaim his greatness.
A being on whom such forces are employed can
never be ignoble, can never be less than royal.
This is the Christian view, and it is the
view that alone seems to reach the level
of the facts. Stoicism took the situation
bravely according to its lights. To build
manhood up to the height of a Marcus Aurelius,
a height which bids us " part with life cheer
fully, and like a ripe nut when you drop out
of the husk, be sure to speak well of the
season and make your acknowledgments to
the tree that bore you " ; or to that of a
Zeno, with whom life, death, honour, dis
honour, pain, pleasure, riches, poverty,
disease, health were things indifferent, were
in itself a sufficiently wonderful achievement.
But in the Gospel human education has
reached a yet loftier stage, a stage in which
the soul not only accepts the tragic, but takes
it as the ground of immortal hope. Epictetus
asked in despair to be shown a man who was
sick, or in danger, or dying and yet happy.
Christianity could show him multitudes. " Our
people die well," said Wesley. They have
faced, as did Ignatius and many a one after
him, the most hideous tortures, and yet
were happy. That the tragic, as all else in
life is indeed a concealed Beneficence, working
on us for the highest ends, comes out in that
individual conviction which, as Ritschl finely
THE TOUCH OF TRAGEDY. 277
puts it, " founds its belief in Providence not
so much from the study of the fortunes of
others as from the study of our own." To
Ritschl on this point echoes R. L. Stevenson,
and we cannot better conclude than with his
testimony : " If I from my spy-hole looking
with purblind eyes upon the least part of a
fraction of the Universe, yet perceive in my
own life s destiny some broken evidences
of a plan, and some signals of an overruling
goodness, shall I then be so mad as to complain
that all cannot be deciphered ? "
XXXIII.
The Soul s Atmosphere.
IN these later ages the world has developed
a new sense, that of climate. We have
become mightily fastidious in breathing.
There are new medical cures which stake
everything on the air. In the late autumn
increasing hosts of our well-to-do people
preen their wings and follow the migratory
birds. They are in search of a temperature.
Colonists settle for the winter on the keen
heights of Davos, or pursue the sun south
wards to San Remo or Algiers. We pay any
price for an atmosphere. In the sights it
flashes on the retina, in the fragrances with
which it intoxicates, in the secret vigours
it conveys, we find some of life s choicest
gifts.
And atmosphere, now so centrally important
to the health and pleasure seeker, has become,
in other ways, a new thing to our generation.
It has been transformed by science. We not
only know its chemical constituents, but are
obtaining glimpses of the tremendous forces
278
THE SOUL S ATMOSPHEEE. 279
that incessantly play through it. We are
investigating the mystery of that luminiferous
ether of which it has been strikingly said that
" a shock in any part of it causes a tremor
which is felt on the surface of countless
worlds." The scientist is trying to measure
those " shivers of undulation " in it which
express themselves successively as heat, or
light, or magnetism, or electricity. We stand
awestruck at the stupendous energy which is
represented in the conveyance to us of the
light of a star. We try to grasp what is meant
by the statement that one faint star ray
falling on our retina represents a wave
movement carried on through long years at a
rate of six hundred millions of millions per
second.
But when we speak of atmosphere, in the
language either of the pleasure-seeker of the
physicist, we are far from having exhausted
the term s significance. The universe con
sists of something more than of solid planets
and siderial systems, and of the swift tele
graphy of luminiferous ether between the inter
stellar spaces. Behind that universe lies
another and a bigger. It is the world of
consciousness, the invisible realm of souls.
That we belong to both is to us all self-evident,
though how the one is related to the other
remains the unpenetrated and seemingly
impenetrable mystery. And it is this chasm
280 THE COMMON LIFE.
between matter and mind which makes it so
difficult for us to think accurately from one to
the other. As we discuss the problems of
our spiritual nature our terms, borrowed
from the world outside, are the very rudest
of implements. At best they permit us to
speak only in parables. And yet we speak
" not as uncertainly." For while the mind
holds secrets of its own which can never be
interpreted by the physical, an instinct
within, which is the unconscious ground of
all our reasoning, assures us of an underlying
unity binding these twain together ; a unity
which makes everywhere the truth of the
outer to be a projection and a plain hint of
the truth of the inner.
It is under this persuasion that we speak
here of the Soul s Atmosphere. Our study is
of a climate not mentioned in Baedeker, and
yet as real as the sunshine of Nice or the pine
scent of Arcachon. For as certainly as does
our physical organism, so certainly does our
spiritual self, live by the air it breathes.
Bub the analysis of the one atmosphere is
not nearly so easy as that of the other. When
we talk of oxygen and hydrogen, carbon and
nitrogen, of the atomic theory and of the law
of combining proportions, we are in the sphere
of weights and measures, of the accurately
calculable. It is a more dimly-lighted region
we enter when we reach this other side, and
THE SOUL S ATMOSPHERE. 281
our measuring instruments are all to seek.
We are stumbling up against dim perceptions r
adumbrations of truths which, while they
impress with their grandeur, leave us only a
vague sense of their outline and content.
The sphere of the highest in man will never
be mapped, because it loses itself in the
Infinite.
And yet we can make some affirmations.
As our planet is immersed in a deep, dense
sea of air, that plays incessantly through our
organism and carries in itself mysterious
potencies which we are just beginning to
discern, so is our thought-world to-day sur
rounded by its ether, not less pervasive and
potent. We cannot tell its whole content,
or the whole method of its operation. It
consists, partly at least, of ideas and of
influences that have for ages been accumu
lating. It is, for one thing, a vast exhalation
of the souls of the past. The law of the
physical world that no atom of matter, no
unit of force, is ever lost repeats itself, we
may well believe, in the realm within. If
we ask what has become of the whole inner
movement of the past generations, of the
forces let loose by the words they uttered,
the knowledge they acquired, the volitions
they passed into action, the ideals they
formed, the answer is that it is all here pulsing
around us to-day. Some of this is stored in
282 THE COMMON LIFE.
books, is preserved for us as what we call
knowledge. A Galileo, a Newton, has in this
sense been the light of our seeing. But the
exact knowledge which our race has inherited
forms only a small part of its thought-
atmosphere. The whole past life of humanity,
the soul s immeasurable movement, is in it,
in forms we cannot guess. These hidden
elements are incessantly moving and inces
santly changing. The seemingly fixed is not
fixed. We look, for instance, into ancient
doctrinal systems which, in their precision
and their assertiveness, appear the very
images of the immovable. They are nothing
of the kind. All they mean to us is the atmo
sphere they exhale, the element they offer to
the reception of the modern consciousness.
And that element is a quite different thing
from the thought of the old system-builders
themselves.
But we should be giving a wretchedly
inadequate account of the soul s atmosphere
if we spoke of it as merely so much stored up
world-thought. We might as well speak of
our planet s atmosphere as simply an affair
of a few gases. Neither the one nor the other
is quite so parochial. The air our body
breathes gets most of its vitality from beyond
its own sphere. It quivers with forces that
stream through it from the farthest stars.
It is lighted and warmed from without. It
THE SOUL S ATMOSPHEEE. 283
would become poisonous to us were it not for
a central sun which, by the magic of its
shining, turns a deadly gas into food for the
plant- world and into vitalising oxygen for our
human lungs. And it is something, assuredly,
more than an analogy, an assurance " deep
seated in our mystic frame," wilich points to
our physical sphere as in all this a pattern
of the world within. What is known to
science forms the smallest half of the mystic
forces that surround and incessantly beat
upon our soul s life. If the farthest stars
send on quivers which register them
selves on our earth s surface, who can
say what influences permeate our spiritual
envelope, and work in ways unnoted upon
our consciousness ?
And this inner atmosphere, accessible from
all worlds, has also its sun. The soul s system
has its centre as surely as the planetary.
The history of religion is the history of the
soul s gravitation to the centre, its aspiration
for its birthplace. The saints have put
this aspiration into every language. Jacob
Behmen s words on the new birth stand as a
type of the whole human movement here.
His account of the soul as a light originating
in the Father s essence, lumen de lumine,
imprisoned in darkness, feeling " a fire of
anguish," until its longing for the light is
satisfied by God s witness in it, when there
284 THE COMMON LIFE.
arises within " a sweetness of rest and peace, *
is the common story from Plato and St. John
to George Fox and to William Law. A
Catholic mediaeval mystic recounts the experi
ence in words which one of Wesley s evangelists
might have used in an experience meeting :
" And then do we all come unto our Lord,
ourself clearly knowing and God fully having.
. . . Him verily seeing and fully feeling ;
Him spiritually hearing and Him delectably
inbreathing, and of Him sweetly drinking."
To have moved into this climate is to have
lighted on life s best. Michelet, in his fascinat
ing book " Le Montagne," speaks of a certain
hill-elevation where the human organism
breathes freest and reaches its height of
exhilaration. The soul knows that height
better than the body. The luxury of climate
is missed often by the deep-pursed traveller
who roams from China to Peru, while enjoyed
to the full by some humble artificer or patient
woman whose physical boundary is a workshop
or a cottage.
The question of the soul s atmosphere has,
however, another side. So far we have
discussed it as something which works upon
us and from which we incessantly draw. But
we do not merely draw from it. We also
contribute to it, and it is here that perhaps
the chief significance of our life exhibits
itself. If we knew it, a bigger thing than our
THE SOUL S ATMOSPHERE. 285
arts and manufactures is the making of
atmospheres in which souls can thrive.
When from the centre of us leaps out
thought, desire, or volition towards friend
or foe we cannot measure what we are
effecting here in the eternal world of souls.
We are pouring out powers that create or
destroy. If waves of force, flowing from
physical centres, flash, as we know they
do, through atmospheres, and penetrate
every form of matter, who shall estimate
the effect of the forces emanating from our
spirit centres, that beat upon our brother s
thought and will ?
It is from this point of view that we best
study the significance of prayer. When a
mother wrestles in spirit for her child, or a
friend for his friend, we have at work the
highest and the purest force the world knows.
And the results ? We may not see them.
But unless all the discoveries both of the
physical and spiritual universe are in a con
spiracy to deceive us, nothing is more certain
than the certainty of these results. The forces
here unlocked may have a circuit as wide aa
that of a comet, but they will not waste
themselves nor fail of their goal. From this
standpoint, too, we could best discuss the whole
life of the Church. Its business is to create
an atmosphere. More than its assertion of
dogma, more than the perfecting of its ritual,
286 THE COMMON LIFE.
is its function of filling the area of its influ
ence with an air which the poor, poisoned
soul of humanity, as it inhales the oxygen
and warms to the sunshine, shall realise as
the Divine it has panted for, the very breath
of God.
XXXIV.
Of Self=Assertion.
FOE the man who keeps a conscience the life
of to-day is singularly full of puzzles. Our
very knowledge is our confusion. Its voices
are so many, and from such opposite quarters,
that it is at times with the extremest difficulty
we can make out, amid the babel, what are
the real sailing directions. As an illustration,
let us investigate a little how the modern man
finds himself when he discusses the question
of self-assertion versus self-repression, as rival
maxims for the conduct of life. From what
quarter shall he, on this matter, derive his
mandate ? Shall it be from science, or from
religion, or from the lessons of his practical
experience ? Or is there any co-ordination
between these authorities, a common element
discernible from which our rule may be ob
tained ?
When we interrogate science it seems at
first sight all on the side of self-assertion.
Evolution, as commonly interpreted, is a doc
trine of brute force, where the strong wins
287
288 THE COMMON LIFE.
and Diabolus takes the hindmost. It offers
us the spectacle of a gigantic struggle, in which,
whether it be among the grasses in the field,
or the different tribes of ants in the hedgerow,
or the speculators in a Chicago wheat pit, the
victor is ever the grass, or the ant, or the
speculator that shows most of sheer individual
assertion. The experience, too, of daily life
seems to carry very much the same verdict.
Men are hourly conscious that they are in a
battle. They are continually measuring them
selves in comparison with each other. They
examine and re-examine their position as re
lated to rivals and competitors. How far have
they gained on this one, or dropped behind
that other ? Here
Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his life s set prize, be it what it will,
seems to be, amongst every class, the accepted
motto.
And even when we study religion we seem to
find so much in the same direction. If there
is one thing which more than another distin
guishes Christianity, it is the exaltation of the
individual. Its message to men is the message
of their own importance. It offered the slaves
and slum-dwellers of Rome and Ephesus a title
and an inheritance which put the pomp of
emperors to scorn. Never before or since have
human values been lifted to such a level. The
OF SELF-ASSERTION. 289
religious feeling, too, may be presented as a
form of self-assertion. " What must I do to
be saved ? " is individualism forced to the
very front. Then, too, if we observe the
leaders of religious movements, the August ines,
the Luthers, the Wesleys, what, in the final
analysis, does their position mean but the
sheer force of a personality that thrust inferior
men aside, and reached the top because there
was no one strong enough to compete with
them ? And the very eagerness with which
men hail the leader when he appears, is it not
the human testimony to the universality and
essential Tightness of the law of self-assertion ?
But where are we now ? Surely this is an
impossible conclusion ? Has not Christianity
taught from the beginning the crucifixion of
self ? Is not egotism the most hateful of
vices ? Do not good manners consist essen
tially in self -repression ? Are not ethics a
constant war against our primitive impulses,
our unrestrained individualism ? Has humility
then ceased to be a virtue ? Were the Phari
sees right in sounding their trumpet before
them, and to be chided, if at all, for not
blowing it a little harder ? Each one of these
questions, mark, is distinctly to the point.
Each one is based on an established truth of
things. Unless our self-assertion can justify
itself against them, it is proved a naughtiness
and a falsity.
19
290 THE COMMON LIFE.
But it is precisely at this point that a ques
tion emerges which changes the whole com
plexion of the inquiry. What do we mean by
self-assertion ? What, in any given instance
of it, is the self that is asserted ? What part
of the man is at the front ? Here is the crux
of the whole problem, and the way also to its
solution. For in a man s life-struggle the
fight is not only with the outside competitors,
but is also against an opposing confederacy
within. There is here a perpetual collision
in which some part is bound to go under.
It is thus at the point of his highest self-asser
tion that a man s self -repression is often most
conspicuous. As the hero stands there in the
firing line, outwardly so cool and collected,
the picture of a masterful, determined man,
how much of him has had, in the first place, to
be fought down ! What a crowd of fears, of
primitive instincts, of prudential calculations
have been first met in that interior and over
thrown ! On the other hand, when yonder
miser sweats his workman or circumvents his
neighbour there has been a preliminary self-
repression of a quite other kind. It is now
the moral consciousness, the instinct of fair
play that is under.
The whole problem, we repeat, is here.
In our self-assertion the entire question is,
What self ? As a man marches to his battle,
what end of him is uppermost ? All training
OF SELF-ASSERTION. 291
is an assertion of something and a repression
of something else. The athlete works down
his fat and develops his muscle. It is a pro
digious advantage that he can watch the pro
cess and its results. If only we could do the
like with our spiritual conditions ! Could we
only visualise our souls ! It would be so
enormously instructive to see the relative
growths of our different sides. If, as we
eagerly rush after this or that unworthiness,
we could see the monstrous swelling of the
corresponding inner disease ! It was along
this line Jerome was thinking when he asked,
" What is the good of starving one s body by
abstinence if the soul stuffs itself with pride ?
What virtue is there in not drinking wine
when one gets intoxicated with hatred and
wrath ? " The greatest revolution in ethics
the world has seen will come about when we
get an X-ray that will throw our exact spiritual
self upon the screen.
This study of the " what," in our self-asser
tion, should dispose of a good many fallacies
that have been current of late, with disastrous
results, in our European morals. A school of
atheistic libertinism has sprung up on the
Continent, and has been extensively repre
sented in England, that regards any self-
repression as a kind of disease. It argues that
men and women are free to exercise all their
physical faculties without restraint, and that
292 THE COMMON LIFE.
consequently continence and chastity are a
kind of sin against Nature. Nietzsche argues
that conscience is merely an unhealthy intro
version. It was developed by some weak race
that had been conquered by a stronger, and
which, hindered thus from a full outward ex
pression, sought refuge in an artificial inter-
nalisation. It thus produced religion, which
was a new and bad form of self-assertion, an
ascetic and revengeful stamping upon the best
part of life !
A whiff of clear thinking should be enough
to blow away these unclean and miasma-bred
fallacies. As we have already seen, there is
no possible life scheme that does not mean re
pression of one part and assertion of some other
within us. The whole question is which ? If
we accept ourselves as merely animals, and
take all the spiritual powers that are moving
within as a negligible quantity, or a nuisance
to be got rid of, there is no more to be said.
Our philosophy will be that of atheistic Feuer-
bach, " to develop a healthy sensuality."
The experiment has often been tried, but some
how it does not turn out well. It is so old a
story that one wonders men are naive enough
to revive it. For the assertion of the spiritual,
and of its right to rule, is not dependent upon
any book, sacred or secular. Humanity s
Bibles here are simply the record and output
of the eternal instinct. Egypt and India had
OF SELF-ASSERTION. 293
learned this lesson centuries before our New
Testament was written. When the Hindoo
Bhagavad Gita declares that the spiritual man
" becomes acquainted with that boundless
pleasure which is far more worthy of the under
standing than that which ariseth from the
senses," it is simply uttering a truth which
for ages has been a common property of the
world.
All progress of every kind has come by a
self -repression. A sure instinct tells us what
within us is lower and what higher ; the one
to be held back that the other may be furthered.
Whether it be a branch of learning or a physical
excellence that we are striving for, we put for
the time being nine-tenths of us under hatches
to let this one thing get its chance. And in the
sphere of morals, let the sensuous philosophy
rave as it may, the common-sense of mankind
recognises instinctively that the winning of
all that makes life dignified and beautiful,
the prizes of love, reverence, faith, of inner
harmony and loftiest self-realisation, are by
repression of what is felt to be lower and
the assertion and free play of the higher.
It is along this line that the problems which
opened before us at the beginning resolve
themselves. The question of leadership, in
this light, is no longer a difficulty. Every
leader, in religion as elsewhere, is undoubtedly
where he is by dint of a force that is greater
294 THE COMMON LIFE.
than that of his fellow. But in the spiritual
sphere everything is contained in the question,
" What is guiding the force ? " If a man s
assertion here comes merely out of his egotism,
if it is an affair of miserable aims that end in
self," to use George Eliot s phrase, his leader
ship is ipso facto a negation of the Gospel.
In this sphere it is only in proportion as a man
feels himself led, dominated by a principle
and a Power that are using him for ends quite
beyond himself, that he can at once be leader
and Christian. " Why should a nothing seek
to be anything ? " said St. John of the Cross,
and every true follower of the Master knows
the feeling.
Caring ever less about himself, the true
leader becomes absorbed more and more in
the cause he holds sacred. He can take with
a laughing humour the accidents that happen
to his personality. But in defence of his prin
ciple he is the most assertive of men. One of
the most noteworthy features of Mr. Gladstone,
than whom in his private capacity was none
more courteous, was the almost Titanic wrath
that flamed in him when attack was made on
the rights of which he conceived himself the
guardian. To be yoked to great principles
keeps one eternally young. The egotist ages
quickly. When Napoleon was twenty-nine he
declared, " Glory itself is insipid. I have
exhausted everything." It was the Nemesis
OF SELF-ASSERTION. 295
of self. It is, on the contrary, the bliss of
being enlisted in the service of the Highest,
that at the end of life we have exhausted
nothing. We feel we are just beginning.
Having linked our fortunes with the best and
made it a part of ourselves, our self-assertion
is simply the expression of a Divine in us that
can never perish.
XXXV.
The Soul s Athletics.
ENGLAND has no longer a monopoly of
athleticism, but for generations it has been
regarded as the centre and very Mecca of
the cult. Abroad the madness of Englishmen
used to be demonstrated by their insistence
on the morning tub, and the imperilling of
their necks in impossible Alpine situations.
To-day, not only in our own land, but in all
civilised countries, physical training has become
a science. Our schools are gymnasia. The
middle-aged citizen has his elaborate apparatus
for the increase of his chest measurement.
Amongst the masses sport is the one pre
occupation. There is no call for a too critical
attitude towards these tendencies. If, as
Herbert Spencer has somewhere said, " one
of the first conditions of success in life is to
be a good animal," we must not quarrel with
Nature s effort to produce him. When our
people lose their love of exercise and of the
open air, it will be the beginning of doom.
Yet, when Ignatius wrote to Poly carp,
296
THE SOUL S ATHLETICS. 297
" Watch, as God s athlete," it was not of
football or of mountaineering he was thinking.
The Greeks of Asia Minor were adepts at
physical training, but Ignatius had in view
a quite other line of discipline. It is a line
that is much neglected to-day. Our age is
one of amazing activities in a hundred direc
tions, but not in this. Men are educated to
the careers that offer wealth and distinction.
There are intellectual and artistic enthu
siasms. The universities turn out regularly
a certain percentage of Mark Pattisons, who
make an all-round intellectual culture their
chief aim. But the evidence to-day of an
earnest, systematic culture of that side of
life, which, where it appears, sheds on history
its finest light is, alas ! very much to seek.
Man is covering the other acres of his territory
with sumptuous buildings, but here there is
a mere hoarding. Religion is a convention.
Of spiritual exercises men know next to
nothing.
They eat and drink, and scheme and plod,
They go to church on Sunday,
And many are afraid of God,
And more of Mrs. Grundy.
The satire is the simple truth. To multi
tudes it seems never to have occurred that
behind their body, and behind their
intellect, lie a mass of powers whose de
velopment of all others is the most fascinat-
298 THE COMMON LIFE.
ing, and whose results are of all others the
most wonderful.
The present condition is the more strange
when we remember with what ardour this
culture has been pursued by the nobler men
of all races and religions. There were Greek
philosophic sects that could give points in
this matter to the members of most Christian
Churches. We lift our hands at the word
" Epicurean," but Epicurus, with his diet of
bread and fruit, would have been astonished
at the ways of our orthodox deacons and
presbyters. The wildest aberrations even of
ancient wrestlers in this arena are worth
our attention. When we read the stories of
Indian fakirs, or of those Egyptian ascetics
of whom Harnack says : " One man starved
himself to death, a second ranged to and fro
like a beast of the desert, a third plunged
into the mud of the Nile and let himself be
tortured by insects ; a fourth, half-naked,
the sport of wind and weather, spent years in
silence on a pillar," something else may
emerge from the study than the mere sense of
our superiority. Might it not be a feeling
of the wonder of that inner life which made
these men satisfied to yield all else if only
they might explore this deepest of them
selves and unchain its hidden powers ?
But extravagances of this kind are not
likely to be repeated, at least among the
THE SOUL S ATHLETICS. 299
Western nations. What, however, we have
to consider is whether the ruling motive of
athletics, the delight, that is, in the difficult,
might not, for most of us, with immense
advantage, be transferred to this other sphere.
In our mountaineering it is precisely the
arduous, the painful, the perilous that draws
and fascinates. Men find the Alps too easy
and are in search of Himalayas. But this
sort of climbing is costly, and open only to
a few. There is mountaineering closer at
hand, within the general reach, that has
greater ascents and finer views. If we are
in quest of adventures there lies in each of us
a region that will furnish enough. It is
possible, in this separate realm of our inner
invisible, to make a history immeasurably
greater than what the newspapers are record
ing. And this without stepping an inch out
of the routine of our ordinary life. The
whole business is inward, in the gymnasium
of the soul.
For illustration let us take one or two of
the more obvious feats. There is, for instance,
the mastery of the disagreeable. To-day the
masses and the classes alike sacrifice to the
great god Comfort. We want a life with all
the corners rubbed oflc, and find a deadly
dulness as the result. When our ease is
broken we howl, or perhaps blaspheme.
Marcus Aurelius from his pagan philosophy
300 THE COMMON LIFE.
could teach us so much better than that. And
our natural instinct revolts in its innermost
self against the hog paradise.
Nor for thy neighbours, nor for thee,
Be sure was life designed to be
A draught of dull complacency.
How magnificent, in comparison, have been
the performances here of God s athletes ! It
should surely be good news for us, in this
stormy world, to know of a discipline that can
make men buffet-proof, a secret which, when
learned, sends them unhurt and exultant
through the worst that comes ! That it is so
is plain history. When John Woolman went
to preach the Gospel to a tribe of hostile
Indians, he tells us that one night, far from
tent or habitation, unable to kindle a fire
because of the heavy rain that was falling,
he sat under a bush during the long hours,
and " found his soul filled with comfort as he
meditated upon God." We may put his
story by that of another plain man, John
Nelson, one of Wesley s first helpers, who,
pressed by his enemies for a soldier, and
thrust for the night into a horrible dungeon,
thus describes his experience (his English
is startlingly to the point) : " When I came
into the dungeon, that stank worse than a
hog-sty by reason of the blood and filth that
ran into it from the butchers who killed over
THE SOUL S ATHLETICS. 301
it, my soul was so filled with the love of God
that it was a paradise to me." This was
neither poetry nor romance, but the sheer
experience of honest men who had found
a secret. They were in the war, but carried
a charm. Their comfort was not the kind
yielded by padding. It flowed from the
action of the loftiest spiritual energy. Surely,
in such a world, theirs is a secret worth
knowing.
But this is only one conquest out of a
hundred. The man who has found the fas
cination of inner athleticism will want to
climb every peak there is. His New Testa
ment opens them, range upon range. To
learn how to forgive his enemy ; ho\v to
cease from evil speaking and evil thinking ;
to pick up that marvellous habit of living
without care for the morrow ; to know how
to laugh with the joyous and to weep with
the sorrowing ; to find out how to make
one s word, one s presence, and one s secret
influence a constant potency for good these
are exercises he will mark down in his note
book as part of each day s inner business.
But the athlete who begins on this track
will not stop at the lower altitudes. His
appetite will grow by what it feeds on. From
Alps he will pass to Himalayas. The region
he has entered he will discover to be illimit
able, and its wonders ever more astonishing.
302 THE COMMON LIFE.
The superficiality of our age has made these
higher ranges invisible and almost incredible to
it. We have forgotten how to meditate and
how to pray. The Church s devotional lite
rature of all ages is almost a sealed book.
Yet what marvels does it contain ! Let any
one turn over the Devotions of Bishop An
dre wes. They are written in Greek and Latin,
yet through those dead tongues we feel in
every line the mighty movement of a soul at
its highest energy. The results of such energy,
upon both outer and inner life, are hardly
to speak of here. They are the secret of the
saints. Yet some day the world will recognise
that of all the forces moving in this universe,
that which operates along these uppermost
surfaces of the spirit, while most subtle is
also the most powerful.
From such a study follow all manner of
deductions, but we will hint only at one
in closing. The power of the religious teacher,
whatever his Church or his position in it, will
be strictly in accordance with his proficiency
in the soul s athletics. Men talk of originality
in the pulpit make often grotesque and
frantic efforts to acquire it. The only origi
nality worth the name is that of a growing
soul. There is no preacher worth his salt
whose greatest daily work is not here. It is
the training of his own spirit that constantly
freshens and enlarges him. The hearer is
THE SOUL S ATHLETICS. 303
thrilled by something undefinable. It is the
new power evolved from a soul s ascent.
Unless this process is going on, a man were
better dumb. Think of Christ s couple of
years or so of ministry, and thirty previous
years of silent inwardness ! In their libraries
men may find new facts and new arguments ;
but these will be useless unless in the deeps
of their own spirit they seek for new powers.
Any one, layman or cleric, who sets forth
on this quest, will come speedily to a point
where we may here leave him. He will find
that his own solitary strength is nothing.
For in the spiritual world, as in the natural,
a man becomes strong only as he links him
self to the great outside powers. Science
makes him mighty by harnessing his person
ality to the cosmic forces. Faith makes him
mightier yet by linking his feebleness to
Divine Omnipotence.
XXXVI.
The Human Paradise.
ONE could fill a moderately-sized library
with the literature on Eden. What a collec
tion it would be ! Geography, anthropology,
natural history, theology, criticism, poetry of
sorts, in endless volumes. And the pile
accumulates. New men continually approach
the theme with new enthusiasms. Quite
recently there have been learned discussions
as to the site of the Hebrew Paradise, some
writers deciding for Mesopotamia, a spot
between the Tigris and the Euphrates ; while
one explorer, in a volume enriched with
maps and minute topographical details,
declares for a site discovered by himself in
the heart of Africa.
What we have here to say, however, does
not deal with questions of topography. The
topic is so much wider. The Eden story, men
now say, is a legend. But in thus speaking
it is well to remember the dictum of Victor
Hugo : " History has its truth. Legend has
hers. Legendary truth is invention that has
304
THE HUMAN PARADISE. 305
reality for a result." When we have dis
counted to the full the Genesis narrative,
does it not remain a thing of wonderful signifi
cance that its tradition forms one of innumer
able testimonies, cherished and handed down
amongst all different families of mankind, to
a golden age at the beginning of human
history, when the gods communed with men,
and the gates of intercourse with heaven were
wide open ! Whatever of substance these
beliefs may have contained, there is no doubt
they have been generally held. Mr. Andrew
Lang s investigations into the primitive faiths
of savage tribes the world over, while they
may not point to so absolute a conclusion
as he suggests, are nevertheless a marvellous
body of evidence. Man has put his start
everywhere in a paradise. He holds that he
began with God.
And the modern science of human origins,
with its doctrine of evolution, in nowise
militates against this belief. It only modifies
its form. To say that we have reached our
present stage through a long development
would be simply to give an added detail to
the statement in Genesis that God created
man out of the dust of the ground and breathed
into him a living soul. It is in any case a
union of above and beneath, of dust and
spirit. How long the process may have been
of fitting the one to the other, and the precise
20
306 THE COMMON LIFE.
methods of the operation, are, we say, a
detail. The soul at least has no sordid origin.
Whatever ways of lowliness it has traveDed
in its earth history, it carries in its conscious
ness the secret of its birth. Of the race as a
whole may we not say what Wordsworth
said of the child :
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home.
But human belief has not been content with
a paradise behind it. It ever creates one in
front. The most wonderful thing in the
history of literature surely is this, that the
Bible, whose materials are the deposit of
millenniums, a slow evolving literature of ages,
drawn from the widest sources, with no
" able editor " to co-ordinate the materials
and give them unity, should yet come to us
in its completed form with a paradise at each
end ! Prodigious coincidence, to say the
least of it ! And the marvel is that what
lies here in so strangely related a fashion in
the Book, is precisely what, through all the
world and through all time, has been lying
in the human heart. Man has carried every
where in him these two things, his Paradise
Lost and his Paradise Regained. There is a
greater thing than the world we look upon.
THE HUMAN PARADISE. 307
It is the hidden picture man carries in
the depths of his soul of a world that is
to be.
One of the most pathetic and yet hopeful
of studies is that of the short cuts men have
tried to make in search of their paradise.
The pioneers have been constructing their
Utopias in every generation. The New
Jerusalem has shone in the eyes of every
dreamer. What a different world that which
a Sir Thomas More has pictured for us as
compared with the one he lived in, and from
which he was to make his exit by the
block ! And Condorcet, with his dream and
scheme of human perfectibility, ends similarly,
Charles Fourier, too, with his phalanstery,
which is to plant every human being in Eden
straightway, but whose theory when put to
experiment turns into such hideous failure ;
and Comte, who predicts that in thirty-three
years after the date of writing the religion of
Humanity is to be universally established
with what expectations do they come, and
how poorly they seem to end ! They died,
" not having received the promise." To-day
we have our apocalyptic seers, who give us
figures concocted from Daniel, which indicate
to a year and a day the date of the millennial
dawn. The prophecies are all wrong, and yet
there is something in the prophets that is
not wrong. Ever between his two paradises,
308 THE COMMON LIFE.
the one behind and the one in front, man the
pilgrim continues his march. His failures
daunt him no whit. His wild schemes are
being built into a scheme that is not wild.
They are all helps to the realisation that is
yet to be.
When Alexander the Great set out from
Macedon the lavish presents he made to his
friends caused one of them to say, " But what
are you leaving for yourself ? " The reply
was " My hopes." And his hopes still remain
man s greatest asset. But while this is so,
it is well to remember that the human paradise
is by no means all in front. It is good to
think of the sheer human happiness that is
being enjoyed at this moment. Paradise is
yonder, but it is here also. That the world
has greater things in store should not close
our eyes to what it already offers. What
multitudes there are of us, not high in station,
not specially favoured, who work for a liveli
hood, who have little leisure, who are of the
rank and file, who expect soon to pass away
and be forgotten, but to whom each new
day as it comes is so utterly beautiful, so
richly dowered with benefactions that we
are amazed at our good fortune in being
permitted to taste its moments ! We have
found that, as Mr. Gladstone put it, " life is a
great and noble calling. . . ; an elevated
and lofty destiny." There wakes in us from
THE HUMAN PARADISE. 309
time to time that surprise of delight which
old Traherne so quaintly puts :
Long time before
I in my mother s womb was born,
A God preparing did this glorious store,
The world, for me adorne.
Into this Eden, so divine and fair,
So wide and bright, I come, His son and heir.;
For let us take note that the world itself as
God made it is a paradise. It is so to the
man whose soul is in tune, though he may
never have gone beyond the boundaries of
his own parish. Many of us have taken the
same daily walk for years, and find each
morning a new rapture in looking upon the
sun, the trees and the green fields. We say
with Cowper :
Scenes must be beautiful which daily viewed
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.
But the wider range has only deepened that
sense of the world s loveliness. If man would
only behave decently to his fellow, ours would
be the planet an angel might choose ! Take
Nature where you will and it is the same
story. England, as we know, is full of beauty.
How pleasant is sunny France ! Italy
bewitches us. The Alps ! What hours of
trance have we enjoyed looking on those
shining peaks, those eternal snows ! In
310 THE COMMON LIFE.
Turkey, which has been made a hell by
human barbarity, are scenes innumerable
which lie in the memory as images of the
very plains of heaven. Surely, on his journey
to the Celestial City, our pilgrim has been
royally lodged hi this " Interpreter s House "
of a world !
We have been doing our best to sully our
paradise, to turn its beauty into ugliness,
but there are signs now of a better mind.
England is in parts a combination of slag
mountains and of cinder heaps, an astonish
ment and a hissing to the artistic soul. Our
social system in too many particulars matches
this deformity. We have not learned the
true art of living and working together. But
the defects are at last becoming visible to us,
and we are making experiments. It is good
to hear men talk of garden cities ; of places
where people may do their work and yet see
trees grow. And More s Utopia, where no
man was unemployed, and where none wanted
for food, clothing, or education, is already,
so far as these things are concerned, coming
steadily into view. The Anglo-Saxon race,
more indeed in its new territories than in
the old, has largely, through all its ranks,
conquered for itself the means of decent
living, and the world outside is folio whig in
its track. And who knows what science has
yet in store for the human welfare ? Its
THE HUMAN PARADISE. 311
every discovery brings our paradise nearer.
It is the great philanthropist. Endless vistas
open before its triumphal march. Men talk
of the complete extirpation of disease ; of
the use of water as the great heat producer
of the future ; of the tides, of gravitation and
a dozen other forces as taking the place of
human drudgery. The world is yet in the
raw material stage. Man will some day
have manufactured it into a finished article.
And yet, when all this is done, will that
be paradise ? The question brings us back
to the point we started from. The German
poet, Grabowsky, in his poem, " Sehnsucht,"
bids us
Nicht auf der Erde sucht das Eden
Sucht das Eden in euch !
In ourselves, he continues in some exquisite
lines, not in the outer world, are, after all,
the golden fruits, the smiling harvests, the
glowing skies, the snowy heights, always in
ourselves. It is a true word. The outer
exists for the inner. First the natural, then
the spiritual. Never shall there be so fair
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spirit that dwells in it. There is no heaven
outside of goodness. Where that is, the earth
gains a new beauty, quite other than that of
rock and hill. Says Martineau : " Palestine
312 THE COMMON LIFE.
was a piece of plain geography till One came
who transfigured it with the inner light of
His own sanctity and made it a holy land."
The enlightened soul in search of the Best will
turn willingly, if need be, from the grandest
scenery, from the world s utmost luxury, to
join the society, however humble, where Christ s
secret of love and purity have been learned.
It is when the human spirit has been educated
to this level, has in this atmosphere opened
its inner powers, and unfurled its wings of
ethereal texture, that Paradise lost will be
regained. This is the New Jerusalem which,
is to come down out of heaven from God.
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THE MESSAGES OF THE BIBLE.
Edited by FRANK KNIGHT SANDERS, Ph.D., Woolsey Pro
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CATALOGUE OF BOOKS.
27
Index of Titles.
Abbey Mill, The ...
Adrift on the Black Wild Tide
America in the East .
Amy Wilton ....
Ancient Musical Instruments
Angels of God, The .
Apostles, The Messages of the
Art of Living Alone, The
Atonement in Modern Thought, The
Aunt Agatha Ann
Awe of the New Century, The
Backward Glance, A
Baptist Handbook, The
Barbone Parliament, The
Barrow, Henry, Separatist .
Beads of Tasmar, The .
Between Two Loves .
Bible Definition of Religion, The .
Bible Story, The : Retold for Young F
Bible, The : For Home and School
Birthday Books
Bishop and the Caterpillar, The .
Black Familiars, The .
Border Shepherdess, A
Bow of Orange Ribbon, The
Brudenells of Brude, The .
Burning Questions . .
Canonbury Holt ....
Cartoons of St. Mark .
Changing Creeds and Social Struggles
Character through Inspiration
Child and the Kingdom, The
Children s Pace, The .
Christ of the Heart, The
Christ that is To Be, The .
Christ Within, The
Christian Life, The .
Christian World, The .
Christian World Pulpit, The
Christianity and Social Problems .
Christianity in Common Speech .
Chrystabel
Church and the Kingdom, The
Church, Ministry and Sacraments in the
Cinderella ....
Common Life, The
Commonsense Christianity .
Conquered World, The
eople
New
Testament
PAGE
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28 JAMES CLARKE AND CO. S
PAGE
Daily Text Books 24
Daughter of Fife, A 11
Divine Satisfaction, The ....... 24
Dutch in the Medway, The . . . . . . .10
Early Pupils of the Spirit, and What of Samuel . . .17
Earlier Prophets, The Messages of the . . . . .11
Earliest Christian Hymn, The . . . . . .16
Emilia s Inheritance . . . . . . . .12
England s Danger ........ 25
Episcopacy ......... 13
Epistle to the Galatians, The 15
Esther Wynne 12
Ezeldel, The Book of 2
Faith for To-day, A 5
Faith the Beginning, Self-Surrender the Fulfilment, of the
Spiritual Life . . . . . . . .19
Family Prayers for Morning Use ...... 9
Father Fabian 17
Feet of Clay 11
Fiower-o -the-Corn ........ 4
Fortune s Favourite . . . . . . . .12
Fortunes of Cyril Denham, The . . . . . 12, 17
Friend Olivia ......... 4
From Philistia ......... 12
Funny Animals and Stories about Them . . . .21
Gain or Loss ?..... . ... 15
Gloria Patri : Talks about the Trinity 10
Glorious Company of the Apostles, The . . . .16
God s Greater Britain 10
Gospel for To-Day, The 16
Grey and Gold 12, 17
Grey House at Endlestone . . , . . . .12
Growing Revelation, The ....... 7
Haromi : A New Zealand Story ...... 4
Harvest Gleanings . . . . . . . .14
Health and Home Nursing . . . . . . .21
Heartsease in the Family . . . . . . .13
Heirs of Errington, The . . . . . . .17
Helen Bury " 13
Helping Hand to Mothers ....... 25
Helps to Health and Beauty 21
Higher on the Hill 9
His Next of Kin 12, 17
His Rustic Wife 10
History of the United States, A 3
Holy Christian Empire ....... 25
Household of MacNeil, The 11
House of Bondage, The 17
How Much is Left of the Old Doctrines ..... 8
How to Become Like Christ . . . . . .19
How to Read the Bible 23
Husbands and Wives ........ 12
Ideals for Girls ... 16
Incarnation of the Lord, The 7
CATALOGUE OF BOOKS.
29
PAGE
Industrial Explorings in and around London . . . .10
Inf oldings and Unf oldings of the Divine Genius in Nature and Man 20
Inspiration in Common Life .... .18
Israel s Law Givers, The Messages of . . .11
Jan Vedder s Wife ...... .17
Jealousy of God, The ...... 20
Jesus according to the Synoptists, The Messages of
Joan Carisbroke ..... 12, 17
Joshua, The Book of .
Judges, The Book of .
Kingdom of the Lord Jesus, The .... ,20
Kit Kennedy : Country Boy .... .4
Lady Clarissa ....... .17
Last of the MacAllisters, The ....
Later Prophets, The Messages of th-3 ... .11
Leaves for Quiet Hours ....
Let Us Pray ......
Leviticus, The Book of ....
Life and Letters of Paul the Apostle, The
Life and Literature of the Ancient Hebrews, The
Literary World, The .....
Louis Wain s Baby s Picture Book
Loves of Miss Anne, The .
Lynch, Rev, T. T. : A Memoir
Making of an Apostle, The .
Margaret Torrington .
Married Life
Martineau s Study of Religion
Maud Bolingbroke
Max Hereford s Dream
Messages of the Bible, The .
Method of Prayer, A .
Millicent Kendrick
Miss Devereux, Spinster
Model Prayer, The .
More Tasty Dishes
Morning; Noon, and Night .
Mornington Lecture, The
Mr. Montmorency s Money .
My Baptism
New Mrs. Lascelles, The
New Points to Old Texts ,
New Testament in Modern Speech
Nineteen Hundred ? .
Nobly Born
Nonconformist Church Buildings
Oath in Heaven, An .
Old Pictures in Modern Frames
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Westwood
Ordeal of Faith, The .
Our Girls Cookery
Our New House .
Ourselves and the Universe
The
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30
JAMES CLARKE AND CO. S
Overdale .....
Paul and Christina
Paul, The Messages of .
Paxton Hood : Poet and Preacher
Poems. By Mme. Guyon .
Polychrome Bible, The
Popular History of the Free Churches,
Practical Points in Popular Proverbs
Prayer .....
Preaching to the Times
Pride of the Family, The .
Principles and Practices of the Baptists
Problems of Living ....
Prophetical and Priestly Historians, The
Prophet Isaiah, The Book of
Psalmists, The Messages of the
Psalms, The Book of .
Quickening of Caliban, The
Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers
Race and Religion
Reasonable View of Life, A
Reconsiderations and Reinforcements
Religion of Jesus, The .
Religion that will Wear, A .
Rights of Man, The .
Robert Wreford s Daughter.
Rogers, J. Guinness .
Rome from the Inside
Rosebud, The ....
Rosebud Annual, The
Rose of a Hundred Leaves, A
Ruling Ideas of the Present Age .
School Hymns . ...
School of Life, The
Sceptre Without a Sword, The
Scourge of God, The .
Seven Puzzling Bible Books.
Ship of the Soul, The .
She Loved a Sailor . . .
Short Devotional Services .
Singlehurst Manor
Sissie .....
Sister to Esau, A ...
Small Books on Great Subjects .
Social Salvation.
Social Worship an Everlasting Necessity
Spirit Christlike, The .
Squire of Sandal Side, The .
St. Beetha s ....
Story of Penelope, The
Studies of the Soul .
Sunday Afternoon Song Book
Sunday Morning Talks with Boys and Girls
Sunday School Times, The ....
oi
PAGE
12, 17
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2, 6
3, 14
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2
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CATALOGUE OF BOOKS.
31
PAGE
Sunny Memories of Australasia .
. 18
Supreme Argument for Christianity, The
. 20
Tale of a Telephone, A ...
. 22
Talks to Little Folks ....
. 21
Taste of Death and the Life of Grace, The
. 19
Tasty Dishes .....
. 22
Tasty Dishes and More Tasty Dishes
. 16
Ten Commandments, The .
. 14
Theology of an Evolutionist, The .
7
Theophilus Trinal, Memorials of .
5
Thornycroft Hall ....
12, 17
Through Science to Faith .
4
Tommy, and Other Poems .
. 22
Tools and the Man ....
8
Twisted Threads ....
. 22
Types of Christian Life
. 19
Unique Class Chart and Register .
. 25
Unity of Isaiah, A Popular Argument for the
Unknown to Herself
15
. 17
Violet Vaughan
12, 17
Vital Virtues, The
. 17
Wanderer, The . ...
. 9
Warleigh s Trust
. 12
Way of Life, The
. 20
Wayside Angels
. 21
Wife as Lover and Friend, The .
. 16
Witnesses of the Light
8
Woman s Patience, A ...
. 12
Women and their Saviour .
. 21
Words by the Wayside
., 19
Woven of Love and Glory .
. 11
Index of Authors.
PAGE
Abbot, C. L. . . .9
Abbott, Lyman . .5,7
Adeney, W. F. . . 15, 23
Aitchison, George . .18
Aked,C. F. ... 9
Allin, Thomas . . .18
Andom, R. . . .10
Armstrong, Richard A. . 20
Bainton, George
Barr, Amelia E.
Barrett, G. S.
Bartlett, E. T. .
Bennett, Rev. W,
Benvie, Andrew
. 16
. 4, 11, 17
. 16
3
H, . ,6, 15
9
PAGE
Blake, J. M. . . . 18
Bloundelle-Burton, J. . 17
Bradford, Amory H. . 7, 20
Briorley, Rev. J. . 3, 12, 23
Briggs, Prof. C. A. .7
Brock, W. . . .14
Brooke, Stopford A. . . 20
Burford, W. K. . .21
Campbell, Rev. R. J,. 5, 19
Car Hie, Rev. J. C. . .21
Cheyne, T. K. . . .2
Clifford, Dr. . . 10, 19
Crockett, S. R. . . . 4
Cubitt, James . 16
32
JAMES CLARKE AND CO. S CATALOGUE.
PAGE
PA.GB
Cuff, W 18
Macfarland, C. S.
14
Darlow, F. H. . . .18
Dods, Marcus . . .19
Driver, S. R< . . .6
Macfarlane, Charles .
Mackennal, Alexander
Manners, Mary E.
Martineau, James
10
20
22
19
Ellieott, Minnie 25
Mather, Lessela
21
O "
Mather, Z.
7
Farningham, Marianne 10, 14, 21
Fisher, F. H. . . .22
Matheson, George . 9, 19,
Maver, J. S.
23
18
Fiske, J . .3
Meade, L. T. .
17
Forsyth, Rev. Principal 19, 25
Moore, G. F. .
6
Fraser, J. . . .13
Funcke, O. . . .13
Morgan, Rev. G. Campbell .
Mountain, J. .
14
17
Furness, H. H. . . . 2
Munger, T. T. .
20
Garvie, A. E. . . .16
Peters, J. P.
3
Gibbon, J. Morgan . .15
Giberne, Agnes. . .17
Pharmaceutical Chemist, A
Picton, J. Allanson .
21
17
Gladden, Washington 7, 8, 9, 18
Glass, Henry Alexander . 5
Powicko, F. J. .
Pulsford, John .
3
20
Greenhough, J. G, . .19
Griffith- Jones, E. . 19
Rees, F. A.
14
Griffis, William Elliot . 5
Gunn, E. H. Mayo . 13, 25
Rickett, J. Compton . 10,
Ridette, J. H. .
24
25
Guy on, Madame . .13
Ridley, A. E. .
7
Haweis, H. R. . . .16
Haycraft, Mrs. . . .10
Heddle, E. F. . . .17
Robarts, F. H. .
Rogers, Dr. Guinness
Ryce, John
14
3
3
Henson, Canon Hensley . 10
Sanders, Frank Knight
11
Hood, Paxton . . .10
Scottish Presbyterian, A .
15
Horder, W. Garrett . .20
Sinclair, Archdeacon .
20
Home, C. Silvester 3, 14, 1 5, 1 7, 1 8
Srnyth, Dr. Newman.
4
Horton, Dr. R. F. 7, 19, 21
Snell, Bernard J.
15
23,25
Stone, H. E.
22
Hunter, John . . .19
Thomas, H. Arnold .
20
"J. B." of The Christian
Toy, Rev. C. H.
2
World . . . .23
Jefferson, C. E. . .13
Wain, Louis
21
Jones, J. D. . . .16
Walford, L. B. .
3
Watkinson, W. L.
18
Kane, James J. . .17
Watson, W.
18
Kaye, Bannerman . . 4
Wellhausen, J. .
2
Kennedy, H. A. . 24, 25
Weymouth, R. F.
14
Kennedy, John . .16
White, H. A.
6
Kent, Charles Foster. . 11
White, William
5
Whitley, W. T.
7
Lansfeldt, L. . . .17
Whiton, J. M. . 10, 17, 20,
24
Lyall, Edna . . .25
Williams, C. .
14
Lynch, T. T< . . .5
Williams, T. R.
19
Lynd, William . . 18 Worboise, Emma J. .12,13,
17
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