THE
JEMNANT
BY RUFUS M. JONES
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA
SAN DIEGO
THE REMNANT
\
THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION SERIFS
VOLUME VIII.
THE REMNANT
BY
RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt.
Author of Studiet in Myttical Religion j Sfiritual Reformers, etc.
LONDON
THE SWARTHMORE PRESS LTD.
72, OXFORD STREET, W.i.
First published in 1920
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE REMNANT - 9
II. THE REMNANT IDEA IN ISAIAH - 15
III. THE REMNANT IN THE NEW TESTAMENT - 25
IV. THE LITTLE CHURCH OF THE SPIRIT
THE MONTANISTS - "34
V. A FOURTH CENTURY REMNANT THE
DONATISTS ----- 47
VII. " THE RELIGIOUS " 56
VII. THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS - 64
VIII. A REMNANT OF THE TWELFTH AND
THIRTEENTH CENTURIES 75
IX. A REMNANT IN THE RHINE VALLEY 84
X. THE COMMON MAN'S ATTEMPT AT REFORM-
ATION - 94
XI. THE EXPERIMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL
REFORMERS - - 113
XII. THE QUAKER " SEED " - 129
XIII. THE FUNCTION OF THE REMNANT - - 146
XIV. THE MISSION AND SERVICE OF A REMNANT 155
PREFACE
THIS little book, written in the crowded days
of a busy life and in one of the supreme
crises of history, is an attempt to interpret
in an untechnical style and manner the
idea of the " remnant " and its function and
mission in the history of reforms. I have gone
back first to Isaiah and Plato, the early
advocates of hope in the " remnant " ; then
I have reviewed, with much restraint and
brevity, some of the famous " remnant "
experiments ; finally I have considered,
again in the most compact compass, the
historical significance of the remnant idea
and its value as a method of achieving social
and spiritual gains.
It would perhaps have been an advantage
to some readers if I had expanded the study
and worked out the historical movements in
more detail and with fuller historical refer-
ences. I felt, however, that the one definite
idea which my book was written to interpret
could best be driven home in this direct, un-
complicated way. Those who wish for more
historical details will find them given in my
two earlier books, Studies in Mystical Religion
8 PREFACE
and Spiritual Reformers of the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries. In the present volume
I have seized and presented the essential
features of each experiment so that the reader
might quickly see the spiritual value of the
venture. I hope the little book will increase
the reader's faith in the results of brave,
sincere human effort and will enable him to
unite with one of the fine spirits of the last
century :
" Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not nor faileth
And as things have been they remain."
Haverford College,
Haverford, Pennsylvania.
I
THE REMNANT
" THERE is," Plato says, " but a very small
remnant of those who follow wisdom and who
have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession
it is." His account of the general multi-
tude as contrasted with his remnant is
pessimistic and saturated with despair. They
are, he thinks, too mad and too untamed to
offer any aid to any good causes. The wise
man cannot expect to find the masses his
allies in any noble undertaking. He is for-
tunate if they do not destroy the fruit of all
his efforts, and finally kill him for stinging
them awake and disturbing their ease. We
do not need to accept Plato's aristocratic
judgment of the multitude. He belonged
to the patrician class, he looked down from
above with the usual bias and prejudices of
his isolated class and he was unable to be a
sound judge of human nature as it actually
is in the best democracies. But after all,
he is right in centering his hopes upon " the
small remnant." It was not an accident that
the two greatest prophets of the ancient
world Plato and Isaiah made so much
of the " remnant " in the formulation of
their hope for the better world of the future.*
Even if the multitude were vastly better in
* I shall deal with Isaiah's " remnant" doctrine in the next
chapter.
io THE REMNANT
quality than Plato thought and better in
fact than they actually are, the function of
the " remnant " would still remain distinct,
important and essential.
By " the remnant " used in the historical
sense, we" mean the small, outstanding group
of persons who have vision of the true line
of march for their age and people, clear
insight into the underlying principle of
life and action, and a faith that ventures
everything to achieve what ought to be. It
is the small circle of those who give their
mind to the things that are true and elevated
and just and pure and lovely and of good
report*. A few a rare and chosen few
travel on ahead of the rest. They are willing
to pay the price, in agony and suffering, which
is always involved in spiritual advances.
They are hyper-acute and sensitive to currents
and forces which the others around them
fail to observe and they are bolder than
their neighbours in risking the seen for the
unseen. They reverse the proverb about the
birds in the bush, insisting that the two that
are uncaught are better than the one poor
thing fluttering in the hand !
Not all dreamers by any means make
good remnants. There have been plenty of
"visionaries" and "zealots" who have led
their confiding followers astray, whose new
Jerusalems were delusions and who, by
* Philippians iv. 8. See Matthew Arnold's study of the
" Remnant " in his essay entitled Numbers.
THE REMNANT n
following iridescent rainbows, have lost the
path of real progress for the race. It is not
easy to indicate the marks by which one
can discriminate in advance the sound
remnant from the disordered one, the wise
prophet from the fanatic who is on a blind
trail. The most convincing test of course
is the pragmatic one. The sound remnant
scores an advance, the wayward remnant
terminates at a mirage and arrives nowhere.
History holds the answer. Hindsight settles
what foresight cannot solve. The dreamer
who cannot translate his dream into some
visible fabric which persists in permanent
form must take his place with the failures
while the dreamer who can make the world
become malleable to the moulding power of
his ideal and can build it into lasting shape
takes rank among the successes. It is,
however, inconvenient to wait for the testi-
mony of history. One must act before the
long experiment of the testing process has
been tried out. The decision of the con-
temporary must be made before " the
returns " are all in. How can we tell reality
from illusion, how can we know the wise
idealist from the misguided pursuer of
mirages ? There is no sure, infallible sign.
We search in vain for the " sterling " label
stamped indelibly upon the genuine article.
And yet there are some hints and clues which
can be safely followed. It is not quite a
blind guess, a fifty-fifty hazard.
12 THE REMNANT
The safe guide, the true prophet, the
constructive remnant, builds on ahead of
the experience of the multitude but along
lines already revealed and indicated by the
tested experience of men. The new pattern
has been suggested by the inherent demands
of the existing situation somewhat as the
artist sees how to finish his creation so that
the new part shall harmoniously fulfil and
complete the part already fashioned. The
remnant that is to advance the hope of the
world differs from the abortive one in that
the former has a gift for apprehending the
higher normal traits of life, trusts them and
brings them into operation, while the other
is very apt to be caught in the swirls of the
abnormal and to reveal the intensity and at
the same time the eccentricity and wayward-
ness of hysteria. Wherever the forces of
life come into play, attended by social
upheaval and individual enthusiasm, there
will no doubt be some evidences of hysteria,
but if a movement is to carry groups of
people to a higher moral and spiritual level
the leaders of it must be unlike their fellows
only in that they approach more nearly than
usual to the norm and standard of full,
complete personality, and can make use of
powers not always available for human
action.
A remnant of the historical type is what
biologists would call a mutation, a marked
and successful variation from the habitual
THE REMNANT 13
order of life. It breaks away from the fixed
and repeatable species and exhibits novelty.
It brings a surprise, and makes a new start.
Generally, though not always, it forms about
a magnetic leader and is integrated by the
creative power of his personality or by
the dynamic force of the idea of which he is
the exponent. The little group, organised
and fused by its leader and possessed by its
live idea, becomes a kind of experiment
station or social laboratory for testing the
value of the " truth " that has dawned upon
them. This truth is likely at first to be over-
stated and to raise the little band of advocates
to the white-hot state, but if it is some really
constructive discovery which the world
needs it will prove its worth in the original
circle and will slowly gather significance and
meaning through successive interpretations
and through the corporate life which it
produces and maintains in the group. In
most cases, too, the value of the new idea can
be judged and estimated by the reactions
which it effects upon the parent-body from
which the remnant broke away. A remnant
has not performed its legitimate service if
it does not mature and ripen its idea and
finally carry it into the life of the wider circle
out of which it came.
Unity is such a precious thing and catho-
licity is so desirable that many persons cannot
pardon what seems to them the sin of schism.
They are sure to pre-condemn the rebel
14 THE REMNANT
attitude which is apt to characterise a
remnant. It is always better, they insist,
to reform any body from within itself, and to
do it by quiet, gradual processes, rather than
by cataclysmic and disruptive methods. In
the abstract these persuaders to unity are
right and it would be well if the world could
move steadily upward by an unbroken pro-
gressive process ; but unfortunately there
are times in the life of institutions when every
attempt at reform from within is suppressed
and when nothing but a moral earthquake
is effective. The spiritual " rebel " who
cares more for truth than he does for unity
has played an important role in history and
his mission is perhaps not ended yet. Not
all remnant groups have been definitely
revolutionary and of the rebel type, but for
the most part they have in the long run felt
themselves forced to sacrifice unity for the
sake of preserving the fulness of the light
which seemed to be revealed to them. They
have sometimes been rash and sometimes
narrow, but they have on the whole per-
formed a service which deserves our careful
study and our sincere appreciation.
Not the least of the services that the
remnant groups have rendered is the dis-
covery which they have made and proclaimed
of the august authority of conscience. They
have repeatedly reminded a heedless world
that Sinai is not in Arabia but in the heart
of man.
II
THE REMNANT IDEA IN ISAIAH
THE remnant doctrine first appears in the
writings of Isaiah. It had its ground and
origin in a semi-pessimism a despair of the
race as a whole. It assumed that the vast
majority of the people had gone hopelessly
astray a position which Plato also held.
They hear indeed but understand not, and
see indeed but perceive not. Their hearts
are " fat," their ears are heavy, their eyes are
shut they will not turn and be healed.*
They are incurably diseased with sin and
stupidity. There is, however, the doctrine
maintains, a small " remnant," a holy seed,
that can be gathered out of the godless mass,
the immense refuse, the great harvest of
weeds for burning. While from one point of
view the remnant doctrine seems a counsel
of despair, like the " survival " theory of
Nature " of fifty seeds she often brings but
one to bear " from another point of view
it has had very great historical importance,
and over and over again the remnant groups
have discovered, preserved, and passed on, as
we shall see, some of the most precious
truths and ideals of our noblest faith of
to-day,
* Isaiah vi. 9-104
16 THE REMNANT
W. Robertson Smith has pointed out in
his Prophets of Israel, the important service
which Isaiah the foremost Hebrew exponent
of the doctrine rendered when he gathered
round himself a band of faithful disciples who
accepted his spiritual leadership, who dedi-
cated themselves to his ideals for the reali-
sation of a holy nation, and who, holding
aloof from the course and policy of the mis-
guided nation waited in patience for God
to demonstrate the verity of the vision of
their prophet. ' The circle that gathered
round Isaiah and his household in these
evil days," he says, " holding themselves apart
from their countrymen, treasuring the words
of revelation, and waiting for Jehovah, were
indeed, as Isaiah describes them, signs and
tokens in Israel from Jehovah of hosts that
dwelleth in Mount Zion." "The formation
of this little community was a new thing
in the history of religion. Till then no
one had dreamed of a fellowship of faith dis-
sociated from all national forms, maintained
without the exercise of ritual services, bound
together by faith in the divine word alone.
It was the birth of a new era in the Old Testa-
ment religion, for it was the birth of the
conception of the Church, the first step in the
emancipation of spiritual religion from the
forms of political life a step not less sig-
nificant that all its consequences were not
seen till centuries had passed away. The
community of true religion and the political
REMNANT IDEA IN ISAIAH 17
community of Israel had never before been
separated even in thought ; now they stood
side by side, conscious of their mutual
antagonism, and never again fully to fall back
into their old identity."* Most historical
scholars to-day would hardly agree with
W. Robertson Smith that " the formation
of this little community was a new thing in
the history of religion," but in any case this
was, up to that time, the most outstanding
instance of such a remnant, and when once
the spiritual group, holding a definite faith
and possessed of intense hopes, was thus
differentiated, it became, as he suggests, a
permanent feature of spiritual religion.
The ideals of this early remnant, as they
are set forth in the message of Isaiah, present
many similarities to the ideals that have
directed the aspirations of later spiritual
groups. There is, first of all, an intense
moral emphasis a call to make life and
practice correspond with faith and profession.
Ceremonial drops almost out of sight as an
empty thing. " Tramping the temple "
is Isaiah's vivid ironical phrase for hollow
performances which are supposed to be
religious but which are utterly vain in
themselves. No one in the long historical
line of protestors against formalism has said
sterner things : " What unto me is the
multitude of your sacrifices ? saith Jehovah :
I have had enough of the burnt offerings^of
* Op. cit. pp. 274-5.
i8 THE REMNANT
rams and the fat of fed beasts ; and I delight
not in the blood of bullocks, or of he-goats.
WJien ye come to appear before me, who hath
required this at your hand, to tramp my
courts ? Bring no more vain oblations ;
incense is an abomination unto me ; new
moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies,
I cannot away with . . . Wash you,
make you clean ; put away the evil of your
doings from before mine eyes ; cease to do
evil; learn to do well; seek justice, relieve
the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead
for the widow."*
This same social and ethical emphasis
appears throughout all the messages of this
radical reformer of existing religion. God
looked for grapes and His vineyard is bring-
ing forth only wild grapes. He looked for
justice but behold oppression ; for righteous-
ness but behold a cry from those who suffer
through unrighteousness, f What use is
there in " professing religion "if at the
same time you are drawing iniquity with a
cord and sin with a cart rope ? What effect
will " temple performances " have if one at
the same time calls evil good and good evil ;
if one puts darkness for light and light for
darkness. J
The trouble with the nation, Isaiah insists,
is downright stupidity, denseness of soul.
"My people will not think', Israel will not
* Isaiah i. 11-17. f Isaiah v. 1-7. \ Isaiah v. 18-20.
REMNANT IDEA IN ISAIAH 19
look at plain moral facts."* "Except the
Lord had left unto us a very small remnant
we should have been as Sodom and we
should have been like unto Gomorrah." f
The prophet and his remnant do think, they
look straight at moral facts, and they see
what the inevitable sequence must be. There
is " a plummet of righteousness " in the
universe, a law of moral gravitation, which
nobody can escape. Covenants with death
and agreements with hell may seem to
promise success but they " shall not stand "
when the test comes, they are " annulled "
by the eternal nature of things. J In one of
the prophet's immortal pictures, as brief
as it is vivid, he describes a man caught in a
state of spiritual nakedness, in the cold and
pitiless storm of moral consequences, and
trying in vain to cover himself with his con-
tracted and shrunken " religion " : " The
bed is shorter than a man can stretch him-
self on it and the covering narrower than he
can wrap himself in it ! " But discouraging
as the nation appears to an awakened soul
and helpless as is the task of changing the
fat-hearted masses of the people, there is,
nevertheless, a remnant which bears within
itself a seed of promise. A tenth not a
submerged tenth, but a superior tenth
shall save the cause and carry forward the
mission of Israel, even though the nation
* Isaiah i. 3. f Isaiah i. 9.
J Isaiah xxviii. 17-18. xxviii, jo.
20 THE REMNANT
itself as a whole " proves recreant." As a
terebinth tree and as an oak, whose vital
substance is within, may be cut down and
yet sprout up again, so this living tenth shall
be * a holy seed.' "*
This remnant group that gathered around
Isaiah was bent upon a complete and positive
reform of individual moral life, of social
customs, and of national ideals. Drunken-
ness is portrayed in all its plain bestial
tendencies and in its unescapable deadly
effects. " A tempest of hail, a destroying
storm, as a tempest of mighty waters over-
flowing " shall cast down to the earth those
reeling, staggering, stammering drunkards
and the nation that is guided by such foolish
stupid, blind guides who in the hour of
crisis will go and fall backward " and be
broken and snared and taken." f The
prophet's pictures of drunkenness are no
more powerful in their grim humour than are
the descriptions of the decadent fashions
of the time. It would be difficult to match
this picture in the writings of any later
puritan moralists. " Moreover, Jehovah
said, Because the daughters of Zion are
haughty, and walk with outstretched necks
and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as
they go, and making a tinkling with their
feet ; therefore the Lord will smite with a scab
the crown of the head of the daughters of
* vi. 13.
f See especially chap, xxviii, and v. 11-15, 22-25.
REMNANT IDEA IN ISAIAH 21
Zion, and Jehovah will lay bare their secret
parts. In that day the Lord will take away
the beauty of their anklets, and the cauls
and the crescents ; the pendants and the
bracelets and the mufflers ; the headtires
and the anklechains, and the sashes and the
perfume boxes, and the amulets ; the rings
and the nose jewels ; the festival robes and
the mantles, and the shawls, and the satchels ;
the hand-mirrors and the fine linen, and the
turbans, and the veils. And it shall come to
pass that instead of sweet spices there shall
be rottenness ; and instead of a girdle, a
rope ; and instead of well-set hair, baldness ;
and instead of a robe a girding of sackcloth ;
branding instead of beauty. Thy men shall
fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the
war."*
There is, furthermore, at the heart of this
prophetic remnant a moral horror of war and
a clear faith here uttered for the first timq
that war is eventually to be eliminated by the
spread of the spiritual, ethical religion, for
which the remnant stands. " It shall come
to pass in the latter days," this prophet
declares, that the remnant of spiritual people
shall become numerous and powerful enough
to dominate the nation and through it to
influence the world, and the peoples every-
where, by the dispersion of light and the
spread of righteousness, shall " beat their
swords into plowshares and their spears
* iii. 16-26.
22 THE REMNANT
into pruning-hooks ; nation shall not lift
up sword against nation, neither shall they
learn war any more."* In one of Isaiah's
most familiar passages, the old order yields
place to a new one and the warrior is
supplanted by a wholly new type of hero ;
"all the armour of the armed man in the
tumult, and the garments rolled in blood,
shall be for burning, for fuel of fire ; for unto
us a child is born, unto us a son is given ;
and the government shall be upon his
shoulders ; and his name shall be called
* Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Ever-
lasting Father, Prince of Peace.' Of the
increase of his government and peace there
shall be no end. f
The transformations of the world which
this idealist sees coming in the future, " in
the latter time," are no doubt in his view
to be wrought by " the zeal of the Lord," by
direct divine operation, by forces not yet
in evidence anywhere, but it is nevertheless to
be recognised that they are to come through
the " remnant " and as a result of its faith-
fulness. This remnant is always the starting-
point, always the ground of hope, always
the nucleus of the new world of righteousness
and peace. Every ideal picture which the
prophet gives when " the earth shall be
full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters
cover the sea " presupposes a spiritual
* Isaiah ii. 4. As this is found in a great passage in Micah
(iv. 1-7) it would appear to have been a spiritual ideal not of a
single prophet but of a group. f ix. 5-7.
REMNANT IDEA IN ISAIAH 23
remnant, gathered about an ideal leader,
imbued with the spirit of \\ isdom and counsel
and having righteousness for the girdle of his
loins. By the expansion and spread of this
spirit, by the triumph of this way of life
:< justice shall dwell in the wilderness ; and
righteousness shall abide in the fruitful field ;
and the work of righteousness shall be peace
and the effect of righteousness quietness and
confidence for ever ; and my people shall
abide in a peaceful habitation and in safe
dwellings and in quiet resting places."*
But great as is the mission of the remnant,
as expressed in the writings of Isaiah, greater
still is its mission as conceived by the un-
known prophet of the exile whose writings
are preserved in the latter half of the Book of
Isaiah chapters XL. LXVI. Here the
hopes and ideals of the spiritual leaders of
the nation, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel,
all of whom adopted the remnant doctrine,
are raised to their full glory. It had already
been seen by these prophets, especially by
Jeremiah, that suffering does not necessarily
mean punishment inflicted by the wrath of
God, it may mean discipline, purification and
preparation for future service. The sufferer,
the spiritual remnant afflicted for its faith
and vision, may in the end redeem the nation,
and save the people. This idea, I say,
reaches its culmination in the wonderful
* xxxii. 16-18. The Prophet's two great pictures of ideal
world-conditions are xi. i-io and xxxii,
24 THE REMNANT
passages which portray " the suffering
servant."
Some regard the suffering servant as a single
individual, to be identified of course with
Christ ; others believe that the whole nation
is meant. It seems much more probable,
however, that the devout, God-fearing, loyal,
spiritual portion of the nation is here
described as a personified community, acting
essentially as one, and suffering to redeem the
whole nation and to prepare it for a wider
world service in the future. Manifestly
there is still in the nation a vast section that
does not see, that has not heard or learned.
It is not yet perfected as an instrument of the
Lord. But within it there is a holy residue,
a suffering seed, a faithful remnant, that
voluntarily will suffer for the redemption of
the rest of the nation and vicariously bear
the sin of the whole people. In this way the
true Israel is to become the prophet-people
of the Lord, to endure and suffer for others, to
travail for the spiritual birth of the nation
and to become a mighty redemptive force
for the perfection of the greater Israel and
eventually of the wider world of humanity.*
* For the delineation of " the suffering servant " see especially
chapters lii.-liii. for the world-influence, see chapter Ix.
Ill
THE REMNANT IN THE NEW
TESTAMENT
THE Pharisaic ideal was obviously a remnant
ideal. The party of the Pharisees, or the
" sect," as St. Paul named it, as it first
appeared, and as in ideal it always remained,
was a high-minded and serious endeavour
to form a true Israel within the larger Israel,
a holy seed, prophetic of the real nation.
This intense and devoted band of the faith-
ful proposed to keep, to the jot and tittle,
the whole teaching of God, the perfect Torah
which He had committed to His people.
Others might perform some of its commands
and live by the word of God at times and
seasons, but they, the elect and separate, set
apart to be the ecclesiola in ecclesia, were
to transmit pure and uncontaminated the
full revelation of the divine will, and they
in the midst of "a crooked and perverse
people " were to be the perfect doers of it.
Another interesting, but totally different,
remnant in New Testament times is to be
found in the little group or groups indicated
but not described in the early chapters of
Luke's Gospel. These seem to have been
tiny spiritual groups of persons who did not
feel religion to be a burden or a yoke but rather
25
26 THE REMNANT
a joy and inspiration. They formed their
piety on the Psalms instead of upon the legal
sections of the Old Testament. They lived
in hope and expectation, and cultivated,
while they were waiting for a better world, a
beautiful spirit of faith and confidence in
God, and they practised a method of love and
good- will towards men. They are variously
called " the quiet ones in the land " ; " the
poor in spirit " ; or " the poor " ; " the
humble." They constituted the prepared
circle to which Jesus came, in which He grew
up, and to which His message was first
given. It was " a little flock " all ready in
advance for the message of the kingdom and
inwardly responsive to the good news.
But in a wider and much more significant
way the primitive Church, which emerged
after the Resurrection, was the real New
Testament " remnant," the seed or first-fruit
of the expected divine harvest. The first
Christians, who in the early chapters of
Luke's second book, The Acts, are called
" those of the way," felt themselves, even
more emphatically than had any other inner
circle of the Jewish nation, to be "a peculiar
people," a " remnant," " a true Israel "
within Israel. The first epistle of Peter
makes this idea, which is implicit in most
New Testament literature, definitely explicit.
This writer declares : "Ye [who compose the
Church of Christ] are an elect race, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 27
own possession [a peculiar people A.V.]
. . . who in time past were no people
but now are the people of God."* The wider
group of the Jewish people have rejected
the elect and sure cornerstone for the true
Zion ; they have " stumbled " at the word
of revelation and have proved to be " dis-
obedient " to the truth, but the smaller inner
circle, " begotten of the incorruptible Seed
of God," forms the nucleus of the holy nation,
a remnant of God's own people. This same
idea is further conveyed in this Epistle by the
figure of Noah's Ark. This Ark saved a few
chosen souls out of all the world and now
symbolises in " a true likeness " the Church
in which an elect and chosen group are being
saved, f The same explicit conception is
expressed again in the Epistle to Titus.
Christ our Saviour, according to the writer
of this Epistle, " gave Himself for us that He
might redeem us from all iniquity and purify
unto Himself a people for His own possession
[a peculiar people A.V.]" J But this idea that
those of Christ's way are a remnant, a chosen
seed, does not rest on sporadic texts, in late
New Testament books, it is implied every-
where, and it is embedded in the very
structure of the primitive Church as we know
it. This is true whether we look for our
data in Acts and the synoptic Gospels, which
came in the main out of Jewish circles, or
whether we turn for our material to the
* i Peter ii. 9-10. t Titus ii. 14. t i Peter iii. 20-21.
28 THE REMNANT
Pauline Epistles and the early apostolic
Fathers. There are wide variations, of
course, in these different interpretations of
the " beloved community," as my revered
teacher, Josiah Royce, has called the
apostolic Church, but they all agree in one
particular, namely, that this inner, intimate,
beloved community is a spiritual remnant,
living and fulfilling its mission within a wider
world of men unillumined and unsaved.
This inner circle of " believers," " dis-
ciples," or " saints " is called from a very
early date the Ecclesia, or congregation, of
Christ, or sometimes the Ecclesia in Christ.
Its members are " elect," chosen out of the
greater body of Israel, or of the world, as the
case may be. They form, as St. Paul says,
at the present time and in the present world,
" a remnant according to the election of
grace," and, he continues, those of the election
have obtained the rest, which those who are
hardened in heart and dull of soul have
missed.* A notable saying of Jesus also
contains the remnant idea : " Many are called
but few are chosen." f The spiritual fellow-
ship, " the little flock," is declared to be
smaller than the total number of those who
hear the message.
The most characteristic thing about this
" beloved community," whether it be the
Jerusalem group or the Pauline congre-
gations, is that the members of it are
* Romans xi. 5-7. t Matthew xxii. 14.
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 29
recipients, and the community as a whole is a
recipient, of an extraordinary experience of
the Spirit, who is thought of in the main
as the continued invisible presence of Christ.
The world knows nothing of this experience,
and, in the thought of these writers, the
wider circle of the Jewish nation knows
nothing of it, but every " saint " has " the
demonstration of the Spirit " and every
congregation has it. If any man have not
the Spirit of Christ he is none of His he
belongs neither to Him nor to His congre-
gation.* This Spirit bears witness with the
believers' spirits that they are children of
God ; it is thus that the cry of " Abba,"
Father, bursts forth in the soul.f By this
same Spirit " the beloved community " is
" baptised into one living body and made to
drink of one Spirit." { A baptism of the
Spirit had come upon them, cleansing like
fire and like a kindling flame, making the
recipients of it burning and shining lights in
a world of darkness. Everybody could see
that a new force was revealed in their lives,
a new dynamic was at work within them, and,
though few in number and of mean origin,
they were irresistible conveyers of a new
order.
These spiritual groups, or circles, of the new
fellowship, composing the local churches
existing as " tiny islands " in a vast sea^of
unbelievers, were possessed of intense and
* Romans viii. 9. t Romans viii. 16. t i Cor. xii. 13.
30 THE REMNANT
propulsive faith. The resurrection of Christ,
demonstrated to them in experience, was as
certain to them as was any fact which their
eyes saw. Their faith in the resurrection
underlay all their other faiths. It was this
central faith that had turned their seemingly
overwhelming defeat at Calvary into a victory
by which at once they became more than
conquerors. By this event they were con-
vinced that Jesus, though crucified, was now
declared to be Messiah and Lord. They now
had a future assured. Their ascended Lord
who still seemed with them as a spiritual
presence, when they broke their bread and
gathered in their upper room, or in their
house-churches for worship, would soon
visibly return and become the living Head of
His Kingdom and would fulfil the age-long
hopes of the great prophets. Whether the
interim were to be long or short, they were
already His, sealed with His Spirit, endued
with powers from Him, chosen to be His
witnesses to the unbelieving world and com-
missioned to enlarge the circle of the faithful
and to prepare for the near return of the
Lord.
There can be no doubt that this vivid
expectation of " near return " gave the
primitive church a peculiar intensity. It was,
on the whole, a fortunate and providential
illusion. One trembles at what would have
happened if the bald truth which history
has revealed had been thrust upon the
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 31
consciousness of this little remnant then,
and if their fervid hopes had been suddenly
damped by a sight of the actual facts. They
did their work and they held their ground
under the great inspiration of a consummation,
near at hand and coming by miracle. They
could " die daily " because their kingdom
was pledged and assured. What would have
happened if they had been forced to face the
truth that the world, with its sin and sorrow,
was to zigzag on for long centuries and that
Christ's kingdom was to " come " so slowly
that each new generation would hardly
discover any gain over the preceding one !
What would thay have felt if they had
realised that the prophetic hopes of " a Day
of the Lord " meant only that every day is a
Day of the Lord, in short, that God's kingdom
comes through the sifting processes and the
slow march of history !
Where there was one person who could
appreciate St. Paul's spiritual discovery that
Christ was already here, forever born anew
in theh earts of saints, reliving His life in
true belieVers, producing a new creation
within the soul, and so making here and now
a kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy,
there were thousands who responded to
cruder conceptions and keyed themselves
up with apocalyptic hopes. Where there was
one who could rise to the lofty message of
the Fourth Gospel that a Spirit of Truth, mov-
ing as an invisible breeze from man to man,
32 THE REMNANT
would spread through the world and guide
men eventually into all the truth, there were
multitudes who trembled as they thought of
a judgment near at hand and who accepted the
Church as an Ark of Safety in the impending
storm of destruction.
But the immense fact after all which was
established by this Christian remnant in the
first century was the actual emergence into
history of a new type of life, a new order of
society. It is a useless labour to try to
prove that Christ founded a Church and
established an ecclesiastical system that was
equipped with infallible authority to transmit
the truth and to mediate salvation. It is
equally impossible to trace back to the
Galilean Master the vast theological system
that later was supposed to be a necessity
for human salvation. But there can be no
serious question that, as St. John says,
grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.* A new
and joyous discovery of God was made
through Him. It was not a definition of Him,
not a new metaphysical account of the
Absolute, but a wholly new experience of
God as a loving, forgiving Father. Those
who fully caught this idea and the little
remnant surely did were profoundly trans-
formed by it. It expelled at once from the
soul a whole army of fears. The yoke of
daily work and toil, with fear and worry
banished, became easy and its burden light.
* John i. 17.
IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 33
A new dimension opened upward toward God
for the soul and a new principle of relation-
ship, of love and brotherhood between men,
was established within their lives.
In spite of intense hopes and illusory
expectations that a new world was coming
by miracle, nevertheless the members of this
early remnant already were putting into
actual operation the moral and spiritual
forces by which alone a Kingdom of God
could come in a world like ours. They had
found a living faith in a living God ; they were
proving the unparalleled power of affection
for a great Personality who had loved them
and given His life for them ; they were carried
onward by an undivided faith that God's
reign was to be established in the world ;
they knew that their lives must even now
exhibit the moral and spiritual traits of the
expected kingdom, and they accepted as their
method of warfare the new way which their
Master had introduced the conquest of evil
by goodness, of hate and violence by patience
and love, of error and darkness by light and
truth, and the empire of the world by the
sacrifice of self through love.
IV
THE LITTLE CHURCH OF THE SPIRIT
-THE MONTANISTS
THE Early Christians always cherished the
ideal of a Church composed of " saints."
With their outward eyes they saw that the
Church had " spots and wrinkles," and they
recognised that not only " gold, silver and
precious stones " were builded into it, but
also " hay, wood and stubble." Tares grew
among the wheat even from the very first.
And yet the early builders of the Church
hoped all things, believed all things and
expected the growing structure to be " a
habitation of God in the Spirit." That
boldest of all New Testament prophecies,
the one recorded in the Fourth Gospel :* " He
that believeth on me, the works that I do
shall he do, and greater works than these shall
he do," kindled vivid expectation and became
a glorious hope. Unfortunately, more and
more as time went on, " the spots and
wrinkles" increased, " the hay, wood and
stubble " became evident. St. Paul's hopeful
word, " saint," used in his Epistles for any
member of the Church, came to be reserved
* John xiv. 12.
34
THE MONTANISTS 35
for the rare spiritual specimen that stood out
in contrast to the ordinary believers.
The most marked and notable change
which the first century revealed in the life
of the Church was the change from a free,
creative, spontaneous, enthusiastic, demo-
cratic society to an ordered, organised,
systematised Church, governed and directed
by ordained officials. With this outward
change came also a corresponding inward
change, namely from faith as *a personal
trust and confidence in the God and Father
whom Christ had shown them to belief in a
body of sacred doctrines, accepted on authority
and held as essential to salvation ; and at the
same time a change from sporadic, inspired,
congregational ministry, which depended on
the endowment of divine " gifts " granted
to individual members of the body, to a fixed
system of service, in the hands of the local
bishop, or presbyter, who was both governor
and teacher of the Church over which he was
overseer.
It is not possible now to discover the
definite steps which marked these profound
changes in the methods and character of the
primitive Church, nor to designate the person
or persons who inaugurated and guided the
stages of the great transformation. It is
probable that no one consciously introduced
the new order. It was a gradual process
rather than a novel leap or a sharp break with
the past. St. Paul's letters show plainly
36 THE REMNANT
that he is pushing all the time in the direction
of order, stability and efficiency. His aim
is always to weed out exercises which do not
" edify " and to encourage those persons
who have constructive capacity. The
writers of the various " Pastoral Epistles "
had a tremendous influence in the work of
stabilising the Church of the second century.
It is doubtful whether any other single person
did more to determine the changes now under
consideration than did the remarkable writer
who produced the three documents known as
First and Second Timothy and Titus.* They
were written to further the episcopal organi-
sation of the Church and to establish sound
doctrine. We are in another w r orld from the
one familiar to us in St. Paul's correspondence.
The most interesting of all the great
organisers of the early time was Ignatius of
Antioch, who suffered martyrdom about no
A.D. He was apostolic in spirit and a man
of real constructive genius. On his way from
Antioch in Syria to the amphitheatre in
Rome where he was to face the beasts he
wrote his impassioned epistles to the Churches
of the districts through which his travels
took him. They all emphasise the need of
an authoritative organisation to give the
Churches stability, efficiency and power.
"Do nothing," he enjoins, "without your
bishop." " Reverence your bishop as though
* It seems likely that they contain fragments of genuine
letters written by St. Paul, though in their present form they
are evidently second century compositions.
THE MONTANISTS 37
he were Jesus Christ," is his message. He
sees no future for a Church which has a loose
and mobile organisation and an uncertain
and shifting teaching. If the Church is to
be a body at all it must have a Head, a real
Head, a visible Head, who speaks with an
authority that no one can question or doubt.
This was the direction in which the second
century was travelling. The tendency of the
age was towards centralised organisation.
The fear of " heresy " and of " false teach-
ing " made the Church turn to those who were
believed to be empowered by ordination to
speak infallibly for the rest, while the growing
belief in the magical efficacy of the two
sacraments vastly heightened the importance
of the persons who were ordained to ad-
minister them. The country neighbour-
hoods and the old-fashioned members were
not as resigned to these changes as were the
city congregations and those who emphasised
progress and efficiency. A protest, if it were
to be made, would most naturally be made in
the rural districts, and such a protest, in fact
amounting to a revolt, did come and came
largely from the country sections.
The movement was initiated by Montanus,
a Phrygian, about the middle of the second
century.* Montanus was subject to unusual
psychic experiences and felt himself to be the
chosen instrument of the Holy Spirit, the
Paraclete. It seemed to him, on the greater
* It first came to the attention of the Bishop of Rome in 177.
38 THE REMNANT
occasions of divine incursion, as though his
own personality were obliterated and as
though the Spirit completely possessed him
and made him the passive medium of
revelation. The scanty accounts of the
ecstasies of Montanus indicate that he "pro-
phesied " in a manner quite like that of
the ecstatic speakers in the primitive Church,
as St. Paul describes them in the Corinthian
Epistles. He was soon followed in this type
of " prophetic " ministry by two women
prophetesses named Priscilla, or Prisca, and
Maximilla. They were greatly revered by
the simple Phrygian people and their revel-
ations were believed as infallible oracles of
truth. It seemed to these " prophets," and
it seemed no less to the people who listened
to them, that a new dispensation had come.
The " greater things " that had been promised
were now to be realised, they believed, because
the Spirit had come and was speaking directly
to them and through them.
They assumed at once that God intended
to create a spiritual Church of prophets in
place of the systematised Church, officially
governed and directed by bishops, and they
announced the progressive character of
revelation in contrast to the static form that
was accepted as final in the Great Church.
They declared that revelation had always been
progressive and marked by advancing stages :
a legal stage of discipline for the infant
world ; a second stage for the world in the
THE MONTANISTS 39
period of its youth ; a stage of parables and
commandments, when the great Teacher said
to his immature listeners : " I have many
things to declare unto you but ye are not ready
for them yet ; " and finally a stage in which
revelation is first-hand, and comes to its
culmination and complete glory. This last
stage had now arrived, the new prophets
proclaimed, and God speaks henceforth
directly with His people. The Church is now
to be a " Church of the Spirit."
This enthusiastic faith was very contagious
and spread with amazing rapidity. Whole
districts were swept with the fervour. The
greatest churchman of the age, Tertullian
(born about 145 died 220) was won to its
support and he became the foremost exponent
of its ideals. He, too, declared that truth
is progressive and that revelation " advances."
" Nothing is without stages, and the Holy
Spirit is ever advancing towards better
things."* He had been one of the greatest
organising geniuses in the Church. He had
brought the finest legal gifts of the age to
bear on the formulation of the ecclesiastical
system and now he threw himself with all the
intensity of his Carthaginian nature into the
movement to create a Church of the Spirit
which would supplant the Church of priests
and bishops. The Great Church, however,
kept on its way unconvinced and the " new
prophecy " never succeeded in becoming
* On the Veiling of Virgins, chap. i.
40 THE REMNANT
more than a " remnant " a Little Church
of the Spirit, or of the Spirituals, as the
Montanists called themselves.
This special remnant stood for some very
important truths and principles. They
maintained, as we have seen, that revelation
is continuous and progressive. They in-
sisted upon the equality of the sexes in all
religious matters. Their " prophets " were
women as well as men and they allowed their
spiritual women to baptise and to administer
the Eucharist. They endeavoured to in-
augurate a Church wholly composed of
spiritual persons in direct communion with
God. They were eager to check the growing
tendency towards secularisation and they
determined to maintain purity of heart and
life from the contaminations of the world, and
a rigid standard of moral restraint. Their
aloofness from the world made it natural
for them to emphasise the wickedness of war,
as remnant movements have generally done,
and one finds in Tertullian's writings some of
the most famous of the early testimonies
against war.
The most powerful testimony against war
which he wrote is found in his treatise called
De Corona Militis, written in 211 A.D. in
defence of a Christian soldier who had refused
to wear a garland on the Emperor's birth-
day. This treatise was written after Ter-
tullian had allied himself with the Montanists,
but it must be remembered that he was
THE MONTANISTS 41
strongly opposed to war even in his pre-
Montanist period, and he frequently quotes
the words of Isaiah about beating swords
into ploughs and spears into sickles. The
passage to which I have referred above is
as follows :
" And in fact, in order that I may approach
the real issue of the military garland, I think
it has first to be investigated whether military
service is suitable for Christians at all.
Besides, what sort of proceeding is it, to
deal with incidentals, when the real fault
lies with what has preceded them ? Do we
believe that the human ' sacramentum '
may lawfully be added to the divine and that
a Christian may give a promise in answer to
another master after Christ, and abjure
father and mother and every kinsman, whom
even the Law commanded to be honoured
and loved next to God, and whom the Gospel
also thus honoured, putting them above all
save Christ only ? Will it be lawful for him
to occupy himself with the sword, when the
Lord declares that he who uses the sword
shall perish by the sword ? And shall the Son
of Peace, for whom it will be unfitting even
to go to Law, be engaged in a battle ? And
shall he, who is not the avenger even of his
own wrongs, administer chains and imprison-
ment and tortures and executions ? Shall
he now go on guard for another more than for
Christ, or shall he do it on the Lord's Day,
when he does not do it even for Christ ? And
42 THE REMNANT
shall he keep watch before temples, which he
has renounced ? and take a meal there where
the Apostle has forbidden it ?* And those
whom he has put to flight by exorcisms in
the daytime, shall he defend them at night,
leaning and resting upon the pilum with which
Christ's side was pierced ? And shall he carry
a flag, too, that is a rival to Christ ? And
shall he ask for a watchword from his chief,
when he has already received one from God ?
And when he is dead, shall he be disturbed by
the bugler's trumpet he who expects to be
roused by the trumpet of the angel ? And
shall the Christian, who is not allowed to
burn incense, to whom Christ has remitted
the punishment of fire, be burned according
to the discipline of the camp ? And how
many other sins can be seen to belong to the
functions of camp life sins which must be
explained as a transgression of God's law.
The very transference of one's name from the
camp of light to the camp of darkness is a
transgression. Of course the case is different,
if the faith comes subsequently to any who
are already occupied in military service, as
was, for instance, the case with those whom
John admitted to baptism, and with the most
believing centurions whom Christ approves
and whom Peter instructs : all the same,
when faith has been accepted and signed,
either the service must be left at once, as
has been done by many, or else recourse must
* An allusion to i Cor. viii. 10.
THE MONTANISTS 43
be had to all sorts of cavilling, lest any-
thing be committed against God any, that
is, of the things which are not allowed to
Christians outside the army, or lastly that
which the faith of Christian civilians has
fairly determined upon must be endured for
God. For military service will not promise
impunity for sins or immunity from martyr-
dom. The Christian is nowhere anything
else than a Christian. . . . With Him,
i.e., Christ, the civilian believer is as much a
soldier as the believing soldier is a civilian.
The state of faith does not admit necessities.
No necessity of sinning have they, whose
one necessity is that of not sinning. . . .
For otherwise even inclination can be pleaded
as a necessity, having of course an element of
compulsion in it."
In the following chapter he asks : " Is
the laurel of triumph made up of leaves, or
of corpses ? is it decorated with ribbons, or
tombs ? is it besmeared with ointments, or
with the tears of wives and mothers, perhaps
those of some men even who are Christians
for Christ is among the barbarians as well ? "
Maximilian, who was martyred at Teveste
in Numidia (North Africa) in 295 for refusing
to enrol as a soldier, has often been cited as
a Montanist conscientious objector. There is
no certain evidence that he was a Montanist,
and the fact that he was canonised as a saint
* These passages are taken from Cadoux The Early Christian
Attitude to War (London, 1919) pp. 110-113.
44 THE REMNANT
would positively indicate that the Church did
not consider him a member of the hated sect.
But he lived in a Montanist region and his
attitude toward war strongly reflects that
of Tertullian.
When he was twenty-one he was brought
before the pro-consul to be initiated into
military service. He refused to accept the
soldier's badge. The pro-consul endeavoured
to change his mind and to remove his scruples,
but without effect. " I cannot serve as a
soldier," the young man declared, " I cannot
do evil ; I am a Christian." The pro-
consul, in the usual persuasive fashion, told
him there were many Christian soldiers in the
army and named the names of some of them.
" They know what is fitting for them,"
Maximilian replied, " but I am a Christian,
and I cannot do evil." " What evil do they
do who serve as soldiers ? " asked the pro-
consul. " Thou knowest what they do," was
the sufficient answer of the unmoved youth,
who thereupon was sentenced to death for
his faith.
Montanism as a movement, was not
altogether an " advance." There were many
imperfections inherent in it. It never suc-
ceeded in producing any great prophets who
could expound in a powerful fashion the
essential principles and ideals of spiritual
religion. Its " prophecy " was of the trance
and ecstatic types. The man went out for
the Spirit to come in. It fell easily into an
THE MONTANISTS 45
intense expectation of a millenial age, and
some of its prophets actually saw the " new
Jerusalem " hovering in the air, about to
descend to the earth. It took an excessive
bent towards asceticism, considering marriage
unsuitable for saints and glorying in the stern
conquest of normal appetites. Its range was
too narrow and contracted for its leaders to
have builded a spiritual Church for the cen-
turies to come. But it uttered an important
protest against stiffness and formality in the
Church. It made a strong challenge to the
alarming growth of ecclesiasticism and
secularisation and it boldly announced the
reality of the living, speaking, revealing
Spirit. However else they may have failed
they stood the test of martyrdom with a fear-
lessness never surpassed by the members
of any other remnant. Their books were
destroyed ; they themselves were thrown to
the beasts or were burned up in their houses
and meeting-places ; they were exterminated
as though they had been dangerous pests.
Their story has come down to us almost
entirely in the writings of their enemies and
traducers. One narrative of martyrdom, told
by a sympathiser and friend of these " brave
and blessed martyrs," a story still fragrant
with the ardour of holy lives, has come down
to us, and reveals to our generation their con-
stancy in suffering and their faith in continuous
revelation. The Passion of St. Perpetua*
* The Acts of the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas.
46 THE REMNANT
The Montanists have often been called
" Second Century Quakers." The}' were and
they were not. They testified to the fact
of the presence of the Spirit of God in the souls
of men, they called for a life that answered
to profession, they championed the equality
of women with men and they undertook to
build a spiritual Church, but they show the
limitations of their time and age, the false
hopes and expectations of chiliastic dreamers
and the erratic traits of most ecstatics. They
could hardly have disciplined and spiritualised
the new pagan races which were overrunning
the world, they lacked the necessary con-
structive power to be sure transmitters of
the torch of truth. Their mission was a
mission of protest and challenge and they
performed it. They died, but they brought
once more to consciousness the essential
truth that God is Spirit, ever present, ever
living, ever revealing, ever teaching, and the
source of all spiritual authority and power.
This truth many times waned and grew dim ,
but it never wholly died away again and was
revived repeatedly by the spiritual successors
of the Little Church of the Spirit.
V
A FOURTH CENTURY REMNANT THE
DONATISTS
IN Donatism we shall study an interesting
attempt, repeated many times in later history,
to resist the secularisation of Christianity,
and, on its positive side, to secure a holy
Church, a Church of saints. The leaders
of the movement were convinced that the
pure seed of truth and life, planted in the
world by Christ, was in danger of being lost
through the growing tendency in the Church
to make compromises with the world and to
adjust to the encroachments of the State.
They represented an attitude of rigour, a
puritanic spirit, a determination not to level
down the ideals of the Church, even if their
position of protest involved a division of
Christendom into two types of Churches.
The deeper issues were not well defined at
first, but they became clarified as the im-
plications of the two opposing parties were
thought out and debated, until with the
course of time the fundamental nature of
the Church itself became the real issue. The
controversy began over the status of Christian
officials who had failed to stand the test
of persecution the persecution under Dio-
cletian (Emperor from 284 to 305). The
47
48 THE REMNANT
strict party, later called Donatists, insisted
that a surrender of faith under persecution
indicated an original weakness of faith. The
Diocletian persecutors demanded the officials
of the Churches to deliver up their sacred
books and writings. If they yielded and con-
formed to the demand they escaped un-
harmed ; if they refused to yield they were
tortured, mutilated and, in some cases,
killed. Those who yielded were called
traditors, and it was against these traditors
that the strict party opened its fight. These
early puritans glorified martyrdom ; they
welcomed the sifting tests which showed
who was true Christian and who was sham
Christian ; they claimed that the real Church
must be limited to those who could stand the
uttermost tests and that no others should be
counted as belonging in the circle of the
faithful.
There was much that was petty and
personal in the century of controversy and
we shall not find one side wholly right and
the other side wholly wrong, nor one party
magnanimous and spiritual while the other
was essentially mean and crude. Both sides
were partly right and partly wrong ; both
raised half-truths to the height of eternal
realities, and the contest was attended with
much tragedy and havoc ; but in spite of
this the aims of this particular " remnant "
are quite worth the attention of the modern
world and will repay our study.
THE DONATISTS 49
The controversy arose in the first instance
over the consecration of a bishop to succeed
Mensurius, bishop of Carthage, whc\ died
in 311. Caecilianus was elected to the
vacant see. He was " consecrated " for
his office by Felix, bishop of Aptunga.
Caecilianus had many opponents who were
determined that he should not become
bishop. They forthwith attacked the validity
of his consecration on the ground that the
bishop of Aptunga who consecrated him was
a traditor, and therefore no true bishop.
It was further rightly or wrongly asserted
that Caecilianus himself was a traditor. In
any case the opponents proceeded to
pronounce the see of Carthage still vacant
and they elected Marjorinus bishop and
had him forthwith consecrated. Thus the
conflict opened. The details of the contro-
versy may be left to slumber and we shall not
need here to discuss at length the minor
personalities who figure in the schismatic
struggle. It is enough for our purpose that
Donatus, often called by his sympathisers,
" the great," was the leader of the " remnant "
party. He succeeded Marjorinus as Donatist
bishop of Carthage in 315 and gave his name
to the movement. Augustine of Hippo
stands out as the great opponent of the
" remnant " towards the end of the struggle
nearly a century later.
North Africa throughout the conflict was
the centre of the controversy, though
50 THE REMNANT
Donatism was never closely confined to one
area. It became, with the development of
issues, a widespread demand and a rallying
movement for a Church separated from the
influences and contaminations of the world.
The conversion of Constantine, which for
the time ended persecution, seemed at first
a great providential event. The conversion
of the famous warrior was quickly glorified
by legends and to the vivid imagination of
the time he seems to have been met, as St.
Paul had been, and turned from the old
course of his life into a divinely chosen path.
However the conversion may be explained
it worked a major revolution in Christian
history. It opened the door at once for the
greatest " expansion " of Christianity that
had ever occurred. The imperial head of the
world was now himself a Christian instead of
an opponent. He not only proclaimed the
toleration of Christianity, he further indi-
cated that acceptance of " the faith " was the
sure road to secular promotion. Multitudes
flocked in short order to the Christian
standard. The old gods were abandoned
and the God of the Christians was adopted
with the ease of a popular election. The
only trouble was that the transfer was too
easy and too superficial. Many of the new
converts had only a thin veneer of Christi-
anity, beneath the covering they were as
pagan as before the change which was hardly
more than a change of name. Old gods and
THE DONATISTS 51
goddesses became new saints. Old pagan
festivals were celebrated much as before,
but with new phrases and terminology.
There was occasion enough for protest
against compromise with the world and with
the customs of the empire. It was certainly
a time to call for vigilance, and there was real
need to challenge the drift of the age. It
was well to have somebody stand vigorously
for a pure Church and for a holy community
of the faith, in the period of slackness of
standards and of adjustment to the world.
The Donatists began with a protest against
traditors who saved themselves in a hard
crisis by yielding to the demands of the world,
and they went forward gradually to the radical
position that no religious services in the
Church can be efficacious unless they are
performed by spiritual persons. And that
the measure of the spiritual power of the
Church is to be found in the spiritual
quality of the membership, especially of
its ministry.
They emphasised the importance of the
personal, the subjective side, in all religious
matters. They dwelt upon the interior
state. A man might save himself by a sur-
render of his soul's faith and afterwards he
might rise to a great height as an admin-
istrator of church affairs. They could not
forget the blemish which marked the soul of
the man, while others thought only of the
outward success which had marked his career.
52 THE REMNANT
It was understood that great leaders in
the Church were often morally unsound
persons. It was the growing custom to
make little of the weaknesses and failings of
individual men on the theory that ordination
carried with it an objective power, a kind of
magic, which made the sacraments effective
and the sacerdotal performances efficacious
regardless of the real character of the person
who performed the acts. The Donatists
were the persistent enemies of that theory.
They were against the entire system of
objective effects, which was transforming the
Church into a great mechanism for mediating
grace.
St. Augustine, the most determined oppo-
nent of the Donatists, in his powerful assaults
upon their position, became the advocate and
defender of the Catholic Church as the in-
dispensable instrument of salvation and the
mediator of grace to the lost world. There
is, he argued, only one Church, the august
and authoritative ecclesia which Christ came
to found and which, by uninterrupted
succession through ordination, can be traced
back to the apostles as the first bishops.
No one can possess Jesus Christ the Head of
the Church, nor participate in His grace,
unless he belongs to Christ's Body, which is
the Church. The sacraments of the Church,
he contended, belonged inseparably to this
mysterious body and through them grace is
mediated to men. They are efficacious
THE DONATISTS 53
through the magical power bestowed upon
the priestly celebrant by his ordination and
they work independently of the subjective
disposition, either of the recipient or the
celebrant. They are " holy " in themselves,
when they are rightly performed by the
ordained mediator.
This is the objective theory in its naked
simplicity. It is presented and defended
in Augustine's famous books against the
Donatists : On Baptism ; Answers to Petilian
(a contemporary Donatist) and On the Cor-
rection of the Donatists.
In this view the " holiness " of the Church
is superior to and independent of the holiness
of character in the actual lives of the
membership of the Church. The Church,
spelled with a capital, is an indescribable
entity, above the empirical church, a super-
man affair, which has an efficacy all its own,
unhampered by the blunders and moral
weaknesses of its human ministrants.
It was against this objective construction
that the Donatists were arrayed. Holiness
for them was actual holiness of character. It
was something concrete and incarnate in a
living person. They were calling, however
feebly, for a religion of life for moral effects.
They proclaimed the necessity of becoming
another man a new and heavenly-minded
man if one expected to exert spiritual power
and influence upon others. The ordained
person, according to them, is not made a
54 THE REMNANT
superman by his ordination. He is raised
higher than himself only through moral and
spiritual agencies. He is what his moral
character makes him. The efficacy of his
ministry is settled by what he is. The Church
can be holy only if the members are. The
whole is equal to the sum of the actual parts.
Its stock of grace is not an objective deposit
to be mysteriously drawn upon and medi-
ated ; it is measured by the dynamic quality
of life in the organic fellowship which
constitutes the Church. The Donatists often
grasped their central idea inadequately and
they were like most " puritans " more con-
cerned with negations than with affirmations,
but they were trying to be the champions of
a living Church of transformed and spirit-
ualised men and women, who have become
children of God and recipients of the Holy
Spirit.
They often lacked consistency. They were
opposed to all dependence on the secular
state and yet they eagerly appealed to
Constantine to secure his support and
induce him to validify their claim. They
held a very lofty theory of holiness of life
but they did not always preserve it in their
difficult relations with men. They found it
very hard work to love their opponents and
they sometimes used methods of persuasion of
an unspiritual type. They endeavoured to
eliminate the spurious supplements to spiritual
religion and to return to the pure word of life
THE DONATISTS 55
and to the convincing force of actual good-
ness. In theory they elevated the Sermon on
the Mount and called upon men to live and to
love like the pattern Figure, Jesus Christ.
But the fourth century in Carthaginian Africa
was a difficult epoch in which to build a literal
kingdom of God, and even Donatists some-
times forgot then* lofty ideals in the stern
conflict with the actual and the practical.
It was worth something to have a clear voice
raised, in this crisis of compromise and
secularisation, against the danger of taking the
line of least resistance ; and we owe a debt
of gratitude to those hard-pressed Donatists
for their endeavour to preserve in the world
at least a remnant of Christians who under-
took to make religion consist of purity of heart
and of the moral power of life.
VI
" THE RELIGIOUS "
THE separatist movements which we
have been following in the two previous
chapters were both protests against the
secularization of Christianity. The tendency
to conform to the standards of the world, to
adjust by compromise to the prevailing
ways of life, to translate Christianity through
Greek philosophy and Roman organisation,
began earlier than most persons usually
suppose and, though Christianity never
levelled all the way down, the conforming
tendency carried the Church very far away
from its primitive ideals. Outwardly the
Church grew stronger and more potent each
year ; inwardly its conquests were not so
evident. The experience of God as the
surest of possessions, the consciousness of
Christ's presence as the life of the fellowship
had waned. The demonstration of the Spirit
was not felt as it formerly had been. Instead
of aiming to have these glowing experiences
men were content to get on with substitutes.
An intellectual theory about the Trinity
slipped into the place which had once been
filled by the warm and intimate knowledge
of God manifested in experience. The grow-
ing emphasis upon intellectual formulation
56
' THE RELIGIOUS " 57
of Dogma steadily pushed direct experience
into the background and " thinking " rose
to a place distinctly superior to inward com-
munion and worship . The Church even in the
second and third centuries had discovered
the immense possibilities of expansion and
it had already acquired imperial ambitions.
If it were to carry its gospel of salvation to
all men and to all lands, it must use the
languages of the world and the culture of the
world, and consequently it must take as well
as give. The Montanists and the Donatists
had suddenly awakened to what was happen-
ing. They saw the original purity of life
vanishing. They saw the Church steadily
approaching the ways of the world. They
were convinced that Christians were to be
holy, were to live like Christ, were to practise
the ideals of the Gospel, but they were
equally convinced that it was not being done.
They tried, but they tried in vain, to stem
the waxing tide of worldliness. They made
their valiant venture to restore the Church of
the living God and to keep it separate from
the soilure, the corruption and the con-
tamination of the empire.
We shall now consider another venture of
a wholly different type the attempt of the
hermits and monks to create a spiritual
remnant within the Church. They proposed
to remain in it but not to be like it in spiritual
quality. Without separating from the com-
munion and fellowship of the Church they
58 THE REMNANT
would make a convincing demonstration of
what Christ means a Christian to be
they would be par excellence " the religious,"
the peculiar people of God. They resolved
to flee utterly from the world, to renounce it,
to have done with it and with all its ways.
They would know nothing, aspire to nothing
which earth could give. They would live
without home and family. They would not
marry nor give in marriage. They would
obliterate natural instincts. They would
forego the blessedness of human love and the
joy and intimacy of family ties. They
would turn all their powers Godward. They
would live as though only God besides them-
selves were real in the universe. He should
have them wholly and utterly and they
would have Him as their only treasure. They
would maintain in all its undimmed lustre
the saintly quality of the Christ-directed
life which had been the passion of the first
followers. They would live not to eat nor
to make gains, nor to accumulate even
knowledge, nor to govern others, but to adore
and contemplate God. They would flee not
only from the world but they would flee even
from the visible Church with its compromises.
They would be God's men alone and they
would keep holiness alive on earth, in their
lonely cells, though it might vanish every-
where else. It is impossible not to feel a
thrill over the heroism of this experiment.
Self -crucifixion could go no further. This
' THE RELIGIOUS " 59
was the climax of renunciation. This was
the limit of what the volition of man could do
to exhibit the fact that Christ expected His
followers to be unlike other people.
This world-flight, for the love of God, was
at first a feature of Eastern Christianity. It
had its beginnings in Egypt, where pre-
Christian sects had tried the same experi-
ment even before the Church was born. It
was, however, probably not an imitative
movement. It was a spontaneous attempt
on the part of devoted souls to achieve the
religious ideal, which under the degenerating
influences of the period of Constantine was
in grave danger of being utterly lost. The
fourth century, with its fierce Arian contro-
versy and its fusion and amalgamation with
paganism, was a time to send serious souls
into desperate action. We know few details
about the origin of this great withdrawal and
retreat from the world ; we do not possess
with any certainty the names of the first
leaders, who went out not knowing whither
they went. We do, however, know that early
in the fourth century a vast host of volun-
teers had gone out into solitude to live in
poverty, in silence and in chastity as they
believed Christ meant men to live. There
was always a strain of fanaticism in oriental
hermit life. Its votaries tried the impossible.
Some of them endeavoured like Mogli to
live among the wild creatures of the forest and
to sever all contact and fellowship with human
60 THE REMNANT
kind. Some lived, or tried to live, on high
pillars, raised far above contact with earth,
exposed to sun and storm. Others formed
communities in which they practised obedi-
ence to stern rules of discipline and under-
took to create a holy fellowship, as a model
for a better age.
In the West the world-flight movement
began much later and was always of a different
type from the Eastern forms. It was more
thoroughly organised and much more organi-
cally bound up with the life and development
of the Church than was the case in the East.
St. Benedict of Nursia in Italy in the sixth
century was one of the great creators of
monasticism in the West. He saw the
dangers attaching to the hermit life, to iso-
lation, solitude and absence of occupation.
He linked together inseparably worship and
labour. He provided for ideal communities,
organised under the severest discipline, in
which men should divide their time between
work in the fields and quiet contemplation of
God. As the movement developed and made
its appeal to men some of the finest spirits
in Europe turned to this method of life.
These early monks, in the days when high
faith and sincerity characterised the fellow-
ships, cleared forests, drained marshes, con-
quered stubborn mountain sides and turned
waste stretches of country into beautiful
fields and arable soil. They also learned to
cultivate other kinds of soil. They created
' THE RELIGIOUS " 61
schools, preserved ancient literature, kept
Greek learning alive, nourished a love of poetry
and song, and were the purveyors of what-
ever culture there was in the Dark Ages.
The Western monastery almost from the
first became the nursery of the greatest
leaders of the Church. It was never a thing
apart, after the manner of the Eastern
hermits. It was an ecclesiola in ecclesia, a
little Church within the Church, feeding its
intensified life into the larger body. Many
of the greatest Popes formed their religious
ideals in the monastery. Many of the most
powerful administrators in the Church
gained their skill and insight and con-
structive power in these quiet communities
of worship, labour and discipline.
Unfortunately this close and intimate
affiliation with the world-church tended to
secularise the monastery itself. Ambition
invaded its sacred enclosure. The traits
of life that marked the great community
gradually crept in and revealed themselves
in the little community. It was not possible
to make monastery walls impervious.
Furthermbre, human nature is a very
virile thing. It is difficult indeed to kill it out
without actually killing the body. It kept
asserting itself in these little remnant groups.
Appetites that were supposed to be obliter-
ated reasserted themselves. It was hard to
keep keyed up continually to the height of the
pure ideal.
62 THE REMNANT
The sag of nature was an ominous fact, so
real that sometimes it seemed as though
diabolical forces were added to the native
downward pull. There were periods when
a universal degeneracy seemed to affect
the world, leaving no centres quite free and
threatening the complete failure of the
Christian experiment. But again and again
reforms were inaugurated in the monastic
groups. Devoted leaders appeared in hours
of crisis, called for new ventures of renun-
ciation, led their little bands of selected
volunteers farther into the wilderness for
severer discipline and for more heroic efforts
of dedication to God.
It was the true remnant method which
they tried. They aimed to cultivate a little
band of purer quality, that would build a
specimen Zion in the fastnesses of their
retreat, and then endeavour to carry their
stricter life and purer ideals back into the
looser monasteries and into the secularised
Church. The long story is full of light and
shade. We are apt to think of monks as
fat, lazy, useless beings. We turn from the
whole experiment and suppose it to have been
a vast moral failure. No doubt it was an
attempt to do the impossible. It was always
hampered by ignorance of psychological and
sociological laws of life and it pursued a
mistaken conception of holiness, but it is
one of the bravest ventures of the race, and
it was never wholly failure. More than once
"THE RELIGIOUS" 63
the monastery proved to be the garrison and
sanctuary of the most precious ideals of the
faith. It gave the Church not only its purest
saints, but also its wisest leaders, and it did
in some fashion at least what should be
expected of a remnant. It raised the spiritual
level of the wider community for which it
lived and prayed.
VII
THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS
THE genius and inspiration of Francis of
Assisi created a marvellous new type of
remnant, both like and unlike that of the
monastery. No other attempt to reproduce
primitive apostolic Christianity, with its
grace, its charm, its radiance, its joy, its
abandon, its dedication, its unlimited sacri-
fice, its sense of God and its absolute confi-
dence in the conquering power of love, has
come quite so close to the original model as
did this Franciscan experiment of the
thirteenth century. It is true, of course,
that Francis was, like everybody else in his
century, devoid of historical sense and un-
able to reconstruct the actual scenery and
circumstance of the primitive group. He
carried in his mind the picture of the Galilean
circle which tradition and mediaeval ideals
had fashioned. There was in it a tinge of
asceticism and a glorification of poverty,
which did not essentially belong to the
Christianity of the Gospels, but the heart of
the Franciscan venture is always to be felt
in its restoration of love, sacrifice and joy to
the first place in religion. " O Lord, my
Saviour," Francis prayed, " I ask two favours
before I die. Let me feel in my soul, in my
THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 65
body even, all the bitter pains which thou
hast felt. And in my heart let me feel that
immeasurable love which made Thee, Son
of God, endure such sufferings for us poor
sinners."
Like so many other things in the world,
thfe Franciscan movement was, or at least
soon became, a mixture, a compromise, a
fusion. One of the great struggles in the
life of John Wyclif was his unending fight
against the Friars, and every student of
history and literature knows that something
marred and spoiled the beautiful creation
which Francis made. It is a long and com-
plicated tragedy. We can deal here only
with the Franciscan ideal found in its purity
in the spirit of Francis himself and carried
on with mingled success and failure by
spiritual successors who tried to preserve
the precious creation of the founder.
What Francis tried to do was to restore,
to reproduce, original Christianity, to make
it live again in the actual world of thirteenth
century Italy. He saw, as all the prophets
throughout the Christian era have seen,
that the existing Church was an inadequate
system. It failed to minister vitally and
in refreshing, recreative ways to the life of
the vast masses of humanity. It too often
gave a stone for bread. It substituted fear
for joy. It had lost its sense of mission as the
builder of a kingdom of God in this world
of men, here, and it was occupied instead
66 THE REMNANT
with its mission as the bearer of the keys to
the world beyond. With all its grandeur
and imperial authority the Church was
not carrying on nor fulfilling the work of
love and redemption which Christ had
inaugurated, and Francis' sensitive soul
discovered that inner fact, and he flung
himself unreservedly into the task of filling
up what was behind of the sufferings of Christ
for men and of rediscovering and recharting
the trail of life which led back home to God.
His story is an indivisible blend of fact
and legend, of biography and poetry, of
history and imagination. Nobody can ever
completely disentangle the threads which
have been woven together, and decide with
certainty between the warp of historical
fact and the woof of poetic fancy. The
Francis whom we know and love, the " real "
St. Francis for us, is the charming person-
ality which poetry and art, legend and
literature have passed on to us. He was
born in 1182, the son of a rich merchant
of Assisi. He lived a gay, joyous life as
boy and youth. He loved and fought like
the other rich young men of his time. He
had a round of triumphs and successes and he
also had his taste of adversity, having endured
a year of captivity as a prisoner of war in
Perugia. Then came a great upheaval in his
inner life, strange and mysterious, as such
religious shifts of level always are. " I am
thinking of taking a bride, richer and nobler
THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 67
and fairer than ye have ever seen," is the
way this young troubadour of divine love
expresses his dedication to the call of religion.
In the little Church of St. Damian, where
he was praying before the crucifix one day
he suddenly found that he could not take his
eyes away from the eyes of Jesus. They
seemed to look through him and to hold
him fixed. At the same time the figure on
the cross seemed to be bending forward and
speaking to him, and to be asking for the
consecration of his life. Somewhat later,
after he had renounced his human father,
Pietro Bernadone, in order to belong wholly
to his heavenly Father, and was at work
as a labourer repairing the church of the
Portiuncula in the outskirts of Assisi, he
heard the priest at Mass read for the gospel
lesson the passage : " Wherever ye go,
preach saying, ' the Kingdom of God is at
hand.' Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers,
cast out devils. Freely ye have received,
freely give. Provide neither silver nor gold
nor brass in your purses, neither scrip, nor
two coats, nor shoes, nor staff, for the labourer
is worthy of his meat." It seemed as though
Christ stood there in the place of the priest
and spoke these words directly to him. He
had heard his " call." He had found his
" bride."
Henceforth he practised poverty as his way
of life. He became God's " poor little
brother," possessing nothing which he could
68 THE REMNANT
call his own, wearing a rough coarse garment
tied with a rope girdle and going forth like
the apostles to preach the good news of
salvation. The multitudes flocked to hear
this new and wonderful preacher, who spoke
to their hearts and who made the love of
God absolutely real. His own conviction
awakened conviction in others and men from
the city and country began to join him in the
practice of poverty.
About the year 1210 the Pope granted
permission for him to form an Order of Poor
Brothers, with one simple rule, namely,
that they should lead " the apostolic lile."
They were to form a remnant within the
Church, consisting of those who were ready
to live like the first apostles and be done for
ever with ambition, rivalry and the pursuit
of self-interests.
A second Order followed, a very few years
later, composed of women, who chose a
similar life to that of the " brothers." They
were called " Clarisses," after the name of
Clara, the noble woman whose life had been
reached by Francis, and who had dedicated
herself to the same kind of life as that upon
which he had entered. Still later a third
Franciscan Order was formed unlike the
other two in this, that the members of it
might live at home, pursue the normal course
of daily occupations and " follow Christ "
without tearing up the roots of their life from
the soil in which they were growing. It was
THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 69
a serious attempt to carry religion literally
into everyday life. These " Tertiaries," as
they were called, were of both sexes. They
were not asked to give up houses and lands,
home and family. They were asked rather
to penetrate all life with the fragrant spirit
of love and to practise renunciation and self-
sacrifice in the midst of occupations. Its
members were forbidden to bear arms in
offensive warfare, and until the rule was
altered by a later Pope they might not
engage in any kind of war. Even after the
alteration was made in the rules a vassal
Tertiary could still always refuse to render
military service to his suzerain. The move-
ment cultivated a beautiful group spirit,
bound the artisans and working men together
into brotherhood guilds and tended to dis-
integrate the feudal system.
The spirit of St. Francis was utterly
opposed to enmity and hate. It was a spirit
which removed the seeds of war and did away
with the occasion for it. Instead of leading
a crusade against the Mohammedans and
killing multitudes of them in order to recover
the sepulchre of Christ from the infidels, he
went unarmed among them as a Christian
missionary and absolutely trusted to the
protecting power of love. It was one of the
greatest " miracles " of the saint's life that
he could reverse the entire practice of Europe,
and the whole conception of the Church
toward these pagan peoples and could go out,
70 THE REMNANT
and did go out, in the immense faith that love
would work among them as well as he had
discovered that it did work in his own Italy.
What he thought of love as a method of
life is beautifully told in one of the stories
of The Little Flowers the one on " perfect
joy." It tells how he and Brother Leo were
travelling on a bitterly cold day in early spring
to the little church of St. Mary of the Angels,
and as they walked Francis was telling his
friend that they could not expect to find
perfect joy where most people tried to find it.
Finally, in answer to his insistent question,
' Wherein then does perfect joy consist " ?
Francis said :
" When we come to St. Mary of the Angels,
all soaked as we are with rain and numbed
with cold and besmeared with mud and
tormented with hunger, and the porter comes
in anger and says, ' Who are Ye ? ' and we say,
' We are two of your brethren,' and he says,
' Ye be no true men ; nay, ye be two rogues
that gad about deceiving the world and
robbing the alms of the poor ; get ye gone,'
and thereat he shuts the door, and makes us
stand without in the snow and the rain, cold
and hungered, till night-fall ; if there withal
we patiently endure such wrong and such
cruelty, without being disquieted, and with
patience and charity Oh, Brother Leo, write
that herein is perfect joy. And if we, still
constrained by hunger, cold, and night, knock
yet again and pray him with much weeping
THE SPIRITUAL FRANCISCANS 71
for the love of God that he will open and let
us in, and he yet more enraged should say :
' These be importunate knaves, I will pay
them well as they deserve/ and should rush
out with a knotty stick and throw us upon the
ground, and beat us with all the knots of that
stick : if with patience and gladness we suffer
all these things, thinking on the pains of the
blessed Christ Oh, Brother Leo, write that
herein is perfect joy ! Above all graces and
gifts that Christ giveth to His beloved, is the
grace and gift willingly for His love to endure
pains and insults and shame and want.
In the cross of tribulation and affliction we
may boast since this is ours ; and, therefore
saith the apostle, I would not that I should
glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus
Christ."
The great tragedy of Francis' life was the
gradual transformation of his Order to make
it fit the schemes and policies of the Church.
He had agreed when the Order was first
founded that it should always submit to the
Church as its supreme authority. But " the
poor little man " had never suspected what
lay involved in that seemingly harmless
promise. With a sudden start he awoke
to discover that his beloved Order was no
longer free. It could be " apostolic " only
according to the papal interpretation of
apostolic, and this interpretation was quite
different from his inspired vision of apostolic
life. His own little band became divided,
72 THE REMNANT
some of them eager to follow their leader even
to death for the pure way of love and poverty
and some determined to adjust to the demands
of the secularised Church. The last part of
Francis' life with its pains and illnesses, its
passion and suffering, its inward crucifixion,
and outward stigmata, can be understood only
in the light of his bitter experiences of stress
and strain. He held the order together during
his life and avoided a " break " ; but even
before his death in 1226 the Order was
seriously altered from the ideal of Francis'
youthful dream, and the conquest of it for
worldly ends and for ecclesiastical aims and
purposes went steadily on.
There existed, however, a staunch and
determined party within the Order which was
resolved at all costs to preserve the apostolic
purity of the movement. Brother Leo, a
beautiful character like Francis himself, was
the leading figure in this party of the
" Spirituals," or " the Spiritual Franciscans."
This devoted band stood for strict
observance of the original rule of poverty
and simplicity and apostolic life, while
on the other hand the larger body was
for accepting the " softer way," the easier
course, proposed by papal dispensations. It
was an intense struggle for supremacy, a
rivalry of ideals, a struggle which is always
implicitly in evidence in the early Franciscan
literature. The forces of the Church were on
the side of the party of adjustment and the
73
" Spirituals " were, of course, doomed to a
life of suffering and outward defeat, but there
can be little doubt that Francis himself would
have taken his place with those who were
the champions of the ideal of poverty.*
There were many branches and types of
" the Spirituals," differentiated by the
leaders or by the conditions of the country
where they " flourished." The most famous
branch of them in the history of heresy was
perhaps the group known as " the Fraticelli,"
or " Little Brothers," who were originally
Tuscan " Spirituals " and who were treated
by the church as recalcitrant heretics.
Another famous group revived the hopes of
Joachim of Flora and proclaimed an " Eternal
Gospel." In one form or another, sometimes
in isolation and sometimes merged with other
rebel movements, they persisted down into
Reformation times. Their position varied
with the varying attitudes of the successive
Popes, and with the changing ideals of the
generalates within the Order. For a brief
season " the Spirituals " enjoyed a triumph
under Pope Celestin V. (1294), a pious monk
who was unfitted for the storms of the world
and who quickly abdicated the papacy and
returned to the quiet of his cell ; and they
had an earlier period of outward success
while John of Palma a man " full of power,
wisdom and God's grace " was master-
The Mirror of Perfection was written to expound the ideals
of the " Spirituals."
74 THE REMNANT
general of the Franciscan Order, from 1247 to
1257, an( i wno endeavoured to bring the
Order back to the spiritual glory of its first
love.
With the exception of these two brief
periods, " the Spirituals " were hunted as
though they had been venemous beasts, and
subjected to a persecution amounting to a
reign of terror. " I had rather receive and
shelter a band of fornicators than these men,"
is the comment of one ecclesiastic in reference
to two of these devoted followers of the
Franciscan ideal. To refuse to drift with
the tide and to decline to accept the softer
standards of life proposed by the papal
authority, and to stand out for the apostolic
way adopted by Francis, ensured everywhere
hate, persecution, suffering and death. This
hard course the little remnant of spiritual
Franciscans took with conscientious bravery,
and in doing so they endeavoured to keep
alive the spirit and the ideals of God's poor
little man of Assisi, whose call and mission
had been to " restore Christianity " and to
exhibit the apostolic life.
VIII
A REMNANT OF THE TWELFTH AND
THIRTEENTH CENTURIES
THOSE who are eager for the unification of all
Christendom into one undivided body, and
who assume that forthwith the Church will
become the mighty spiritual power of their
hopes will be somewhat disillusioned if they
will study with historical insight the nature
and character of the Church in the period
of its greatest unification. It is true, no
doubt, that the world has learned much about
the essentials of spiritual religion during the
long centuries of division and that a unification
now would be vastly different from the
massive, imperial, authoritative unification
in the twelfth century. But in any case
unification by itself is no solution. So long as
Christianity is thought of in terms of doctrine,
or in terms of sacraments, or in terms of
sacerdotal authority, or as a sacred and un-
alterable scheme for securing salvation in a
world beyond the stars, unification is practi-
cally impossible and would be a misfortune
if accomplished. As fast on the other hand
as we realise that Christianity is a way of
living a full, complete spiritual life in corre-
spondence with the life of God, and as rich in
75
76 THE REMNANT
variety as life everywhere always is, we become
unconcerned about unification, or at least
we become much more concerned about
something else. Uniformity would under
all circumstances be a calamity, while unity
is seen to be an inherent feature of genuine
normal spiritual life under the inspiration
of Christ and the guidance of the Spirit.
The Church seemed at the opening of the
twelfth century to hold the future in its hand.
Its authority was unchallenged. Its grandeur
and splendour impressed every beholder. Its
centralised power surpassed that of any other
imperial organisation the world has ever seen.
It controlled the destiny of every man and
woman. It held the keys to the world beyond.
It assumed that it could open or shut the gates
to heaven or hell. It claimed to be the sole
mediator of celestial grace. But its structure
was not ethically based. Its power was not
a moral and spiritual power. It was not
grounded in the eternal nature of things.
Its promises were not backed and guaranteed
by the unalterable laws of the moral universe.
Its ecclesiastical hierarchy, which claimed
and possessed unparalleled authority, was
morally weak and decrepit. Immorality,
either flagrant or subtly concealed, was
honey-combing the celibate priesthood. The
sin of simony was eating out its heart and life.
The unethical use of indulgences as a source
of wealth was working and was bound to
work moral havoc. Sooner or later the
THE 12TH AND 13TH CENTURIES 77
Church would be forced to reckon with the
native hunger of the human soul and would
have to square up its accounts with the
unescapable moral forces of the world.
These deeper issues began to show them-
selves at the very moment when the outward
authority of the Church seemed supreme and
forever safe. Men began to ask whether this
imperial organisation was really ministering
in a genuine way to the inmost needs of the
soul. They were conscious of something
stirring within themselves of which the Church
took little account and they were aware of
strivings of heart to which the ordained
priest could not adequately speak. Gradually
these serious honest people began to seek their
salvation in their own way. They ventured
forth on lonely quests for truth, risking not
only their soul's welfare, but taking their
life in their hands as well. They were the
" heretics " of these two wonderful centuries.
They appeared under many names, they took
many forms of revolt, they exhibited a great
variety of solutions to the world-old problem,
but in one way or another they were all trying
to revive and restore apostolic religion. There
has ever since been an unending battle with
" heresy," and there never can be again an
" undisturbed " Church until there is a
genuinely spiritual one.
I have already spoken of the Franciscan
attempt to restore the Christian ideal. I
dealt with it somewhat out of the order of
78 THE REMNANT
historical sequence, first because it fitted
so closely in with the monastic movement
treated in the chapter before, and secondly
because it did not rise to the degree of a
revolt until it reached its later stage when
the " Fracticelli " and other rebel branches
of " the Spiritual Franciscans " emerged.
Our present chapter will consider a move-
ment which was essentially anti-sacerdotal
and fundamentally rebel in its attitude toward
the ecclesiastical Church the Vaudois, or
Waldensian " remnant." The ancient tra-
dition that the people grouped under the
name Vaudois or Waldenses had had an
unbroken history back to apostolic days, and
that in the retreats of the Alpine valleys
they had preserved the original gospel uncon-
taminated and uncorrupted has little support
except in the sphere of creative imagination.
It was in fact only at a later time that the
members of this remnant found their homes
in the Alpine valleys of the Vaudois. It does,
however, seem probable that the spirit and
attitude which found expression in the
Donatist movement a spirit of strong protest
against a secularised Church more or less
fused with the State never actually died
out. It was constantly recurring and making
itself felt now in one form of protest and now
in another. The Paulicians, the Cathari, the
Albigenses, with their numerous variants,
connected with the far past and were all
movements which rallied their adherents to
THE 12TH AND 13TH CENTURIES 79
stricter ways of life and to determined
opposition to the immorality of the clergy,
and to the sacerdotalism and secularity of the
Church. And while they do not explain the
origin of the Waldenses they nevertheless
exerted a positive influence upon their
development and upon their aims and ideals.
The movement as a definite and unique
religious venture owed its origin to a rich
merchant of Lyons on the Rhone, named
Peter Waldo. About the year 1173, Waldo
passed through a great religious crisis which
altered the whole outlook of his life. The
spiritual advisers with whom he took counsel
turned his thoughts to " poverty " as the
divine way to bring the Church out of the evils
of the world into purity and perfection. It
was the spiritual panacea of the age. Waldo
accepted the advice, took literally the words
of Jesus : "If thou wilt be perfect, sell all
thou hast and give to the poor, and come and
follow me," and made forthwith the great
renunciation. He was, however, not as gentle
and obedient as was his successor in the way of
poverty, Francis of Assisi. He was deeply
impressed with the failure of the Church and
he possessed in high degree the reforming
attitude and temper. He saturated his mind
with the teachings of the Gospels and with the
words of Jesus. He caught the primitive
attitude toward the poor, the common people,
and he became filled with pity and com-
passion for the great neglected masses. A
8o THE REMNANT
genuine social spirit was born in him and he
resolved to carry the message of life, the good
news of divine love, to the people who laboured
and were heavy laden. Convinced as he was
that_ordination worked no moral or spiritual
miracle in any priest's life, he decided to go out
as an unordained layman, and to make the
experiment of telling what he knew out of the
Gospels and out of his own experiences. He
used some of his consecrated wealth to pay for
having parts of the Bible translated into the
vernacular speech, and instead of giving
only bread to the poor he gave them copies of
the Gospels where they could find the Bread
of Life, and he went about himself interpreting
the gospel-message in its native simplicity.
He gathered a little band of helpers, composed
of those who shared his point of view and who
were ready to throw in their lot with him, and
these " poor men of Lyons " undertook to
inaugurate a new era of apostolic life and of
lay preaching to men and women who toiled
with their hands.
They came almost at once into collision
with the officials of the Church. They were
informed that they were usurping functions
which did not belong to them. They were
told that they must confine their labours to
secular tasks and not cast pearls before swine,
as they were doing. Waldo appealed to his
copy of the precious Gospels for his authority,
but all in vain. He was forbidden to preach,
and his " poor men " were warned to desist.
THE 12TH AND 13TH CENTURIES 81
With great boldness Waldo quoted the
apostolic words : " We must obey God rather
than men," and applied them to their own
case. This, of course, meant a break with
the existing order and from this time onward
" the poor men of Lyons " were " outcasts "
in the eyes of the Church, and had to take the
hazards and penalties of being " heretics."
The opposition and persecution which
attached to their position steadily forced
them into a more critical attitude toward the
hierarchy, carried them farther in their
hostility to the entire " system " and even-
tually differentiated them into a separate
" remnant Church," consisting of those who
made the Gospels the basis of their way of
living.
They perfected a very simple organisation
of their own, with almost no distinction
between clergy and laity. A certain number
of them devoted all their time to the pro-
pagation of the gospel, and these more
' perfect " members naturally had greater
authority and influence. They received no
human ordination and they supported them-
selves by simple occupations, such as cobbling,
tinkering, peddling and the simple doctoring
which prevailed in this century. These
occupations enabled them to obtain an en-
trance into homes without exciting suspicion,
and after they had secured the entree they
used the opportunity to propagate their
religion. By such means and methods they
82 THE REMNANT
spread rapidly, especially in the rural districts,
and soon became a real menace to the unity
and authority of the Church.
They levelled their main attacks against the
unethical aspects of the Church. They
challenged especially the theory that the
ordained priest could work the miracle of
trans-substantiation by the gift of a magical
power conferred upon him by his ordination.
They insisted, on the contrary, that all
spiritual gifts and all power of ministry attach
to moral and spiritual qualities in the life of the
person himself. A priest is effective in his
ministrations in exact proportion to the purity
and moral power of his life. If he is living in
sin no ordination can enable him to mediate
divine grace. In short the Church is the
Church of the living God only in so far as its
members, both clergy and laity, live the life
that fits the teaching of its Founder. They
also stoutly attacked indulgences as a wicked
invention for securing money from the poor
for no return. They further declared that
purgatory and prayers and offerings to saints
are vain and expensive superstitions. They
would have none of them and they aroused the
common people to an attitude of revolt against
these invented schemes for exploiting the
simple.
But the most characteristic feature of this
intense remnant was its emphasis upon a
life in conformity with the Gospels. They
were Tolstoyan in their interpretations of the
THE 12TH AND 13TH CENTURIES 83
primitive teachings. They took them literally
and proposed to practise them as though they
were meant to affect daily life. " Thou shalt
not swear/' " thou shalt not lie," " thou shalt
not kill," became for them absolute commands*
For the first time on a large scale the
Waldenses formed a Christian Society a
remnant Church the first condition of which
was strict obedience to the law of life set
forth in the New Testament, especially in the
Sermon on the Mount. No threats, no
torture, no form of death would induce a
" perfected Poor Man " to take an oath or to
take a human life or to engage in war. The
heresy hunters learned to recognise them as
heretics by the moral purity of their lives
and by their strict conformity to their lofty
standard. To avoid oaths, lies and fraud
exposed one to suspicion ! The Waldenses
were the main influence in introducing into
religious circles in Europe an intense con-
scientiousness respecting oaths, manner of
dress and speech, and the taking of life for any
purpose. The current once set flowing has
never stopped. It disappears only to re-
appear. It has been a feature of most of the
small, strictly moral sects in Reformation
times, and it almost certainly is a contribution
from this remnant of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries.
IX
A REMNANT IN THE RHINE VALLEY
THIS chapter will be devoted to the groups or
societies of mystics which were formed in the
Rhine Valley in the fourteenth century, and
were known as " Friends of God."
Mysticism as such is not a " remnant "
movement. It is a more or less universal
aspect of religion. It is religion in its
intensified and dynamic state as an immediate
experience of the Divine Presence revealing
itself to the individual soul. Sometimes the
mystical experience seems like a sudden
invasion of consciousness. Energies and
forces of life not usually felt come flooding in
as do tides of the sea into the inlets of the
coast. The whole personality seems to be
fused, charged and vitalised through imme-
diate contact with the central Life of the
universe. These experiences are frequently
attended with striking psychological effects.
The person may feel himself enveloped in
light, or he may hear a voice communicating
with him or he may reveal remarkable
automatic activities of a variety of types.
Or, on the other hand, there may be no unusual
phenomena, only a sense of calm, of forti-
fication and of complete certainty of God.
A REMNANT IN THE RHINE VALLEY 85
Sometimes the mystical experience is not
sudden ; it is rather the normal effect of faith
and trust and confidence, rising to a stage of
fellowship, intercourse and correspondence
with God. One may hardly know when the
personal relationship began ; one may only
know that it is really operating now. In fact
many times the coming of God into the life
is discovered in retrospect rather than as a
present reality, as God said to Moses : " Thou
shalt see me after I have passed by." The
heart burns with an unwanted glow while the
person himself hardly knows why he is so
moved until the secret declares itself in some
later experience.
" Hearts that are fainting
Grow full to o'erflowing
And they that behold it
Marvel and know not
That God has been raining
Far off at their fountains."
In all ages and among almost all peoples
this vital, acute and intense type of religious
experience has appeared in higher or lower
degrees. It is religion in its first intention,
and the continual recurrence of it has kept
religion alive and progressive through all the
fluctuations and the disasters of human
history. So important and so wonderful has
this mystical experience this first hand
consciousness of God seemed in different
periods of history that religious experts have
sometimes endeavoured to indicate definite
86 THE REMNANT
methods of attaining it. They have given
directions by which faithful and obedient souls
might pass from the lower levels of religious
life and power to the higher levels, or even to
the highest level of union and absorption in
God. These expert directions constitute the
so-called " mystic way " with its upward steps
or rounds, by which the soul may mount from
knowledge about God to knowledge of intimate
acquaintance with Him. From the period of
St. Augustine in the fourth century an
immense amount of attention was given to
this phase of religion by the great spiritual
leaders of Christian life and thought. There
was an almost unbroken line of mystical
prophets in real apostolic succession.
" Dionysius," John Scotus Erigena, Richard
of St. Victor, Hugh of St. Victor, Bernard of
Clairvaux, Amaury of Bene, St. Thomas
Aquinas, Meister Eckhart and many others
contributed out of the mighty stream of
their personal experience to the clearer
knowledge of God and of the mystic way. In
the fourteenth century mysticism had come
to be recognised as an indispensable feature of
living Christianity. Dominicans and Fran-
ciscans agreed upon this. The followers of St.
Thomas and the followers of Duns Scotus,
who were opposed upon a multitude of points,
were united in the view that the soul of man
could and should come into a personal exper-
ience of God. The real essentials of the faith
were felt to be not the conclusions of Councils,
A 'REMNANT IN THE RHINE VALLEY 87
nor the decisions of the Pope, nor the secular
policy of the Vatican, but the immediate
experiences of God which came to the indi-
vidual souls who constituted the true,
invisible Church of the living God.
Out of the vague longings and strivings of
the people who heard the great mystic
teachers and read their books and sermons
there gradually emerged a somewhat concrete
and definite mystical " movement " with a
well-defined aim and purpose to reform the
Church. All through the latter part of the
thirteenth century there had been forming
small groups of mystically-minded men and
women. They bore a variety of names, for
example : Beghards, Beguines, Brothers of
the Free Spirit, and Flagellants, and they
exhibited varying degrees of sanity and
spiritual service. But they in any case
suggested to the lay people of the period the
value of group-life and the possibility of
propagating mystical religion through concen-
trated effort in intensified societies. The
powerful popular preaching of Eckhart (1260-
1327) one of the greatest interpreters of
mysticism that ever lived, was another influ-
ence in the same direction. The grave
catastrophes and disasters of the period, the
Black Death, the civil war over the imperial
succession, " the Babylonish Captivity " of
the Church, tended to put sensitively organ-
ised persons into unstable equilibrium and to
make them ready to respond in an unusual
88 THE REMNANT
way to the suggestions of forceful leaders.
The rapid spread of flagellation through the
cities and towns of Europe, caught up like a
contagion, reveals the psychological condition
which prevailed in the middle-period of the
century. In this atmosphere the societies of
the " Friends of God " were born along the
Rhine Valley from the Swiss overland to the
sea. They were loosely organised groups of
persons gathered about some strong leader who
directed the spiritual culture and develop-
ment of the little band. The leaders were of
both sexes, and there were " sisterhood
groups " as well as " brotherhood groups."
Margaret and Christina Ebner, of Bavaria,
were two of the most remarkable leaders of
this intense spiritual revival, and it would seem
that " prophetesses " were fully as influential
as " prophets." The ideals of the scattered
groups can be discovered now only through the
fragmentary correspondence which has sur-
vived, and through a peculiar form of liter-
ature which the leaders of the little societies
created. The books are semifictitious, the
situations being partly real and partly
imagined and being always freely handled,
often with considerable genius, so as to set
forth and illustrate the ideals and aspirations
of the " Friends of God." It is plainly a
layman's movement. These " Friends of
God " had not " broken " with the Church,
but they had lost hope and expectation that
any great spiritual results were likely to come
A REMNANT IN THE RHINE VALLEY 89
to the world through the hierarchy or through
its consecrated channels of grace. They did
not give up using the existing " channels "
but they constantly speak of them as less
important than the direct way to God which
they have discovered in their own souls, and
occasionally they approach the Protestant
attitude and temper of mind. The recurrent
note in their letters and writings is the testi-
mony which they bear to the spiritual service
that can be rendered by lay persons when once
they have found God, and have become
organs of His Spirit. Without intending to
dispense with the historical system, they
practically treated it as a kind of loop-line
which could be left on one side since the
desired goal could be attained by a shorter
cut across. The widely known, but much
misunderstood, treatise, entitled The Book of
the Master, one of the most successful of their
writings, was written to expound the potential
spiritual service which can be rendered
to the Church by the enlightened layman.
The " Master " was long supposed to be John
Tauler, and this document was used as a basis
for the biography of this great Strasbourg
preacher. It is almost certainly a piece of
imaginative literature and gives nobody's
actual biography, but it does tell in powerful
fashion what might be done by an un-
ordained Christian man who brings his soul
into parallelism with divine currents, and lets
the life of God go out through him. " The
go THE REMNANT
Holy Spirit," this layman declares to the
Master of Scripture, " has the same power
to-day as ever." " Men can still hear in their
own souls what they are to speak." There
is a " lower school " of external, or letter
knowledge, and a " higher school," or
" upper school," in which men are directly
taught by the Holy Spirit.
A good illustration of the difference between
the two methods is given in The Book of the
Two Men, another example of tendency-
writing from some Friend of God :
" If two men gave thee a description of the
City of Rome, one by mere hearsay, and the
other by experience after he had been there,
thou wouldst give thy attention mainly to the
second. So also, if a man \\ho has been
touched inwardly by divine grace hears the
preaching of a doctor who still loves himself,
he feels that the preaching of such a doctor
does not come from pure and unadulterated
love of God. The soul that is filled with divine
love is not touched by such a sermon. Such
a preacher is speaking only by hearsay of the
heavenly Rome, and of the roads which lead
to it. He knows only what he has learned
from Scripture. But if the same man hears
the preaching of a master who knows both
from Scripture and through his own spiritual
experience, a master who has renounced all
self-love and self-advantage, who knows the
heavenly Rome, not only by hearsay, but
because he has travelled the road to it, and
A REMNANT IN THE RHINE VALLEY 91
because he has seen the form of its building,
he rejoices to hear his message, because it
proceeds from the Divine Love itself."
One of the most impressive of all the inter-
pretations of religion which the " Friends of
God " have left us, is that given in the Book of
the Nine Rocks. It insists in vivid style that
God is still a living God, and can now as of
old send the fresh waters of divine grace
through men. " That man is not a Christian,"
the writer declares, " who does not believe
that the divine power remains the same
throughout the centuries." The main
channels are, however, not those to which
men have been accustomed to turn. " Popes
are no longer sainted ; they become ambitious
for worldly goods," this reforming spirit
announces, and " God has now conferred His
grace on other men, whom He has endowed
with spiritual gifts." ' They are these
other men few in number," he adds, " but if
they wholly disappeared from the world,
Christianity would utterly come to an end."
In his mind the " Friends of God," thus form
" the saving remnant." If " a Friend of
God," raised to power through direct experi-
ence of God, were put at the head of Christ-
ianity, the Book of the Nine Rocks says, he
would forthwith " transform it because he
would have the counsel of the Holy Spirit to
guide Him." Every city in the world, too,
would be changed, if a " Friend of God "
had the management of affairs, for he would
92 THE REMNANT
direct the city into God's way. How near
this fourteenth century layman came to a
religion of the Spirit can perhaps be seen in a
striking passage which insists that God can
save men in many ways besides the way
tradition has sanctioned as unique. He says :
" If a Jew or Mohammedan fears God from
the depth of his heart, and leads a good and
simple life ; if he does not know any better
religion than the one in which he was born ;
if he is ready to obey God in case He reveals to
him a better faith than his own, why should
not such a man be dearer to God than wicked
and impious ' Christians ' who though having
received baptism, wilfully disobey the com-
mands of God ? When God finds a good
Jew or Mohammedan of pure life He feels a
thrill of love and infinite pity for him, no
matter in what part of the earth he lives, and
God will find some way of saving him unknown
to us / " " If baptism cannot be conferred
upon him, though he has a desire for it, God
can baptize Mm in the holy desire of his will,
and there are in the eternal world many good
pagans who have been received in this way."
John Tauler, Jan Ruysbroeck, and the
unknown author of a little book, called
Theologia Germanica, are the profoundest
interpreters of the spiritual religion which
" the Friends of God " endeavoured to
express and practise. These three writers lay
excessive emphasis on the way of abstraction
and negation. They had inherited from their
A REMNANT IN THE RHINE VALLEY 93
literary progenitors a form of thought which
conceived of God as the " Hidden Dark " i.e.
as an indeterminate Absolute, devoid of all
concrete attributes, an Infinite withdrawn
from all finites, a Reality apart from and
above all particulars. No revelation could
reveal Him, no description could express His
being, no word about Him could be a true
account of His nature. This strain, which
holds an immense place in most mystical
literature, does not fit our present way of
conceiving God, and it makes the books and
sermons of these earlier prophets of the
spiritual life, with their insistent stress upon
asceticism and withdrawal, somewhat of a
burden to the modern reader.
There is, however, another strain in these
great books which speaks straight .to the
sincere modern heart. These men are done
with the hollow performances of " religion "
and have found a direct way to the living
God and to life itself. They were trying, as
valiantly as they could, to inaugurate a new
epoch, to build a new kind of Church, resting
for its power not on Dogma, or orders, or
sacraments, or authority of ordination, but on
the Life and Love of God revealed in and
through their human lives. They formed a
true " remnant " in the difficult world of their
age, and they exerted one of the supreme
influences upon the inner life of the Reforma-
tion two centuries later, for which they had
done much to prepare the way.
X
THE COMMON MAN'S ATTEMPT AT
REFORMATION
*
PARALLEL with the main current of the
Protestant Reformation there ran from the
very beginning another powerful current
which has always received far less consider-
ation from historians than it deserves. Some
have supposed it to be an abortive, if not
monstrous, undertaking. Others have con-
sidered it one more among the many " lost
causes " of which history is more or less silent.
Neither one of these positions is, however,
quite tenable. It was, like " Bunker Hill "
in the American Revolution, "a battle lost,
but a cause won," since nearly everything
which these minor reformers aimed at has
since been achieved or is on the way to
achievement.
The leaders of this parallel movement were
ruthlessly martyred, their followers were
exterminated, their books and tracts were
suppressed, their aims were slanderously
misinterpreted, their brave efforts were as
rapidly as possible overwhelmed with oblivion,
but, strangely enough, their ideas have
triumphed. Their truths though they them-
94
MAN'S ATTEMPT AT REFORMATION 95
selves are dead are marching on, like John
Brown's spirit. Their vision of what Christ-
ianity should be is much closer to the heart
of our own religion to-day in England and
America, than is either the theology of Luther
or the dogmatic system of Calvin. There is
no occasion to belittle the service of the great
reformers, the reformers of folio size, like
Luther, Calvin and Zwingli. They did a
monumental piece of work ; they changed
the course of history decidedly for the better,
and they have been given, and rightly so,
their place with the immortals. There is,
nevertheless, much lumber, -sheer dead wood,
in their semi-mediaeval systems. They carried
on many aspects of pre-relormation Christ-
ianity which might profitably have been
sloughed off, and they loaded human minds
and hearts with some tragic burdens which
they might well have been spared ; and they
failed to feel or to sympathise with the
liberating social aspirations which the minor
reformers felt. It is no doubt easier to see
these facts to-day than it was to see them four
hundred years ago, and we ought not to
expect at the beginning of a period the
critical insight that comes through the cumu-
lative experience of the years.
These neglected reformers of the quarto or
octavo size, perhaps did see on the spot then,
that much of the w^ood in the new systems was
already dead, that many of the tragic burdens
which the reformers were loading on human
96 THE REMNANT
shoulders were too heavy to be borne and
were, in any case, unnecessary. They wanted
a " root and branch " reformation, a thorough-
going reformation, a radical purification and
re- organisation. Though they belonged to the
scholarly class and came, almost without
exception, from the universities, they were
in deep sympathy with the people. They
thought and spoke for toilers and peasants.
They had entered into the meaning of the
social struggle, and had come under the burden
of human suffering ; they intensely felt the
social wrongs of the world, and they came
forth as the champions of the reformation
which the common man needed and demanded.
They failed in their day to carry through their
programme, but it was in the main a noble
aspiration, much of it was wisely conceived,
historical experience has confirmed many of
the aims embodied in it, and it deserves
patient and impartial, if not sympathetic,
study. One of the most interesting historical
questions is that concerned with the spiritual
pedigree of the movement, or more properly
of the movements, for it was not ever as we
shall see, well unified into any single system.
There must obviously have been some pre-
reformation preparation for it, since it burst
forth almost simultaneously at many widely
sundered places, in many lands, and it
accumulated at once an immense popular
volume and momentum. Wherever, it
appeared it took on, with all its particular
MAN'S ATTEMPT AT REFORMATION 97
variations, striking similarities at least in its
central purpose and in its fundamental princi-
ples. The leaders plainly had a large stock
of ideas and ideals in common. There must
have been some back-ground explanation.
Unfortunately it is not possible yet to pro-
duce definite documentary evidence to prove
beyond question that these new groups which
formed at the beginning of the Reformation
were the direct product of earlier groups of
mystics, Waldenses, Wyclifites, Hussites,
;< Brothers of the Common Life," or " Spiritual
Franciscans."* And yet it is an unmistak-
able fact that there did exist in unbroken
succession, especially through the Rhine val-
ley and in Switzerland, hidden groups of
" heretics " and mystics. The puritan-minded
Waldenses were never suppressed on the
continent, as the Lollards never were in
England. The writings of the mystics of the
fourteenth, and especially the writings of
the great " Brother of the Common Life,"
Thomas a Kempis of the fifteenth century,
were widely circulated and devotedly read.
These books, as we know exercised a pro-
found influence on Luther, and there is
much to indicate that they exerted a still
more profound influence upon the popular
leaders with whom we are now concerned.
The essential reason for thinking so is that the
* Ludwig Keller was convinced that his researches established
this point, but other scholars, including Troeltsch, do not
endorse his claim. See especially Keller's Ein Apostel der
Wiertaiifer.
98 THE REMNANT
body of ideas in the new movement are uni-
formly so harmonious and consonant with the
teaching and aspirations of these mystics and
with the heretical groups which had already
suggested the lines of reformation that were
needed to restore real Christianity.
Two events woke the quiet, long-suffering
successors of the mystics and heretical groups
from mere dumb hope to eager, vivid expec-
tation the powerful teaching of the human-
ists and the dynamic message of Luther.
It is impossible to miss or ignore the direct
influence of the humanists upon the leaders of
this common-man's reformation. It is most
apparent in the new social and ethical
emphasis. They one and all show a revolt
from the old theology. It has lost both its
interest and its reality for them. Something
else more real and more appealing has come
into the foreground of their consciousness.
They have drawn much closer to the Jesus of
the Gospels than had anybody else since
St. Francis. They are more attracted to Him
and to His wonderful words than to the
elaborate metaphysical accounts of His being
and nature. They turn eagerly to the
positive teachings of this great Master of
life as they find them revealed in the New
Testament, which the humanists had helped
them discover. They learned, too, from
these^same humanists how vastly different
the Church of their time was from the Church
in its pristine apostolic purity and power.
MAN'S ATTEMPT AT REFORMATION 99
Then came Luther's electrifying message of
faith and freedom, shaking them entirely
awake. They almost all refer to his quick
and powerful word. They rose at once to
meet it. They thought he was to lead them
into a new epoch and be their leader in the
work of building a new Church. " The
Liberty of a Christian Man " and the " Baby-
lonian Captivity of the Church " as they read
them in 1520, seemed like a new revelation
from God. They felt that the hour had struck
and that the new heaven and the new earth
were within hail.
Two pretty clearly marked tendencies
appear in this general effort of the period to
secure the type of reformation which the
common man was striving for, though it
must be recognised that the entire undertaking
always remained throughout somewhat fluid,
uncompact and unorganised. The two typical
tendencies were : (i) in the direction of what
is historically denominated " Anabaptism,"
and (2) a serious aim to work out a truly
spiritual Christianity, winnowed of the accu-
mulations of paganism, superstition, theology,
and secularism. We may, therefore, loosely
divide the leaders of the popular movement
into " Anabaptists " and " Spiritual Re-
formers," though the division is not a sharp
one and some leaders do not easily come under
either label, while others seem to come under
both labels. The Anabaptists numerically
bulk much larger than the second group,
ioo THE REMNANT
though in historical influence the former are
not more important than the latter.*
The first group of Anabaptists to differ-
entiate, and to formulate and express its
principles was the Swiss group, in and about
Zurich and St. Gall. The leaders were young
scholars and priests whose hearts, " under the
cross," had been made one with the common
people. They were genuine shepherds of the
flock. The most important men who led
this movement were Conrad Grebel, Felix
Manz, William Roublin, Simon Stumpff, and
Ludwig Hetzer. They had all been power-
fully affected by their reading and study of the
Bible, now for the first time truly a book of
the people. They began to preach a fresh
message drawn from the prophets and the
gospel to their flocks. The popular response
was immediate, and they found them-
selves, without intending it, the champions
of a new cause. As Zwingli moved forward
to secure a reformation of the Swiss Churches,
these men gladly joined and were content
to follow his leading. They soon discovered,
however, that he was moving toward a
reformation which was far too restrained
and limited to suit their conception of what
the times demanded. They engaged in
public discussions with him and found that
he was voicing the reforming aims of the
nobles and upper classes but was unrespon-
* In this chapter I shall consider the "Anabaptists," and the
next chapter will be devoted to the " Spiritual Reformers."
MAN'S ATTEMPT AT REFORMATION 101
sive to the deep needs of the masses whom
they represented. Gradually they felt com-
pelled to deviate from the course which Zwingli
was steering and to proclaim a more radical
programme. They came across the writings
of the " new prophets " of the people,
Thomas Miinzer and Carlstadt, and they
deeply sympathised with the aspirations for
a more inward religion which these men
voiced, but they thoroughly disapproved of
Miinzer's support of popular insurrection and
his passionate appeal to the oppressed to
use the sword. They declined to employ the
world's way to success and trusted wholly
to the inherent power of ideals and to the
invisible help of God. They felt from the
first that they were to be a " remnant " of
the true Church. What they demanded as
the most urgent need of the times was the
complete reformation of the Church to make
it fit the New Testament. They insisted
first of all that the Church of Christ must be
" a congregation of believers." Only those,
they claimed, who have hearts of faith,
spiritual insight, obedient wills and real
religious experience can compose a Christian
Church. A mixed multitude of good and
bad, of saints and sinners, cannot make a true
Church. The historical compromise with the
world, the scaling of the Christian standards,
down to the level of the nominal, secular
membership seemed to them to be the
greatest source of the " apostacy " of the
102 THE REMNANT
Church. They now proposed to wipe the
slate clean, to make a new start and to
form a Church consisting only of Christians,
only of the faithful. It seemed to them that
the custom of baptizing infants, who from the
nature of the case could not exercise faith,
was one fertile cause of the degeneracy. It
stood in their eyes as the mark of apostacy
from Apostolic Christianity, somewhat as
circumcision stood out, for St. Paul in the
Galatian controversy, as the peculiar mark
of Judaistic legalism. If the Church were
henceforth to be pure and Christian, then it
must have no rites and practices which did
not attach directly to personal faith, and it
must have no members who had not positively
experienced in their own souls a living faith.
They had little primary interest in sacraments
at best, since their main concern was for a
strongly ethical and social Christianity, but
they believed that the primitive Christians
practised baptism as an outward sign of an
inward experience and as a testimony of
fellowship in a visible Church. They pro-
posed therefore to restore baptism to this
primitive, apostolic function. In 1525 Grebel
baptized Blaurock, a devoted Christian
man and one of the band of preachers who
had accepted the radical attitude.
Blaurock thereupon, " in deep fear of God,"
baptized many others and a community of
" brothers," as they liked to call themselves,
began to grow and to differentiate from the
MAN'S ATTEMPT AT REFORMATION 103
main Zwinglian reformation. These dis-
senters were given the nickname of " Ana-
baptists," which means rebaptizers, and the
name stuck to them and widened out to
include almost all types of persons who
dissented from the Roman and Reformed
churches. It was the opprobrious label for
the entire effort of the common man for
a reformation. The Swiss dissenters them-
selves refused to accept the name or to admit
its implication. They declared that they
were not " rebaptizers." The baptism _which
they had received as infants, they claimed,
was no baptism at all, since baptism cannot
take place without positive personal faith
on the part of the recipient. Adult bap-
tism taken in faith as a sign of fellowship
in the pure Church of Christ was, in their
view, the one and only baptism not a
" second baptism."
As their aims grew defined, the Ana-
baptists endeavoured: (i) To construct a
Church entirely on the model of the New
Testament, in every particular a copy of the
apostolic pattern. (2) This was to be a
visible Church, composed only of believers,
a community of saints, winnowed and separ-
ated from the unbelieving and unspiritual.
(3) This state of purity in the Church was to
be preserved by a rigorous use of discipline.
Those who fall below the Christian standard
and become corrupt or contaminated by the
world, or who compromise with the world,
104 THE REMNANT
must be excluded by ban from membership
in the Church, i.e., there must be a con-
tinuous use of the winnowing fan. (4) The
Church must be completely severed from all
entangling alliance with the State. The
Church and State have officially nothing in
common. Membership in the former is a
free act. There must be no kind of com-
pulsion in spiritual matters. Through faith
and experience the Church lives and grows
and enlarges its fellowship. It influences
the character of those who form the State
but its authority is indirect, not direct. In
the sphere of religion the State has no
authority ; conscience in its relation with God
is to be absolutely free and untrammelled.
(5) All Christians have the same fundamental
rights as the clergy have. There are no
classes, no orders, no fixed distinctions.
The only differences are differences of gift
and function. (6) The movement tended,
though more or less unconsciously, to treat
the Gospel as " a new law," to be literally
followed and obeyed, very much as was done
in the earlier groups of Waldenses and
Lollards. Under this influence most branches
of the Anabaptists refused to take oaths,
set themselves absolutely against war, and
denied that a Christian is allowed under any
circumstances to take human life, even in
self-defence. With this rigorous literalism
they also joined a moral strictness of life
more extreme than that which marked any
MAN'S ATTEMPT AT REFORMATION 105
other section of the Reformation, even that
of the Calvinistic Churches. (7) They not
only proclaimed freedom of conscience, they
bore a powerful testimony to the august
authority of conscience. They arrived at
the conviction that conscience is an inner
sanctuary or shechinah of God Himself, and
here as nowhere else they believed the voice
of the living God is heard. With this
exalted sense of an inner connection with
the divine, they suffered and died for what
seemed to them eternal truth and everlasting
righteousness, and in doing so they gave a
new note of emphasis to the moral worth of
conscience.
Two very powerful leaders, of German
origin and education, soon threw in their lot
with the Swiss dissenters and stood out at
once as the prophets of the new movement,
Balthazar Hiibmaier, born near Augsburg in
1480, and Hans Denck, a Bavarian, born
about 1495. Hiibmaier was a doctor of
theology, one of the best scholars of his time,
a humanist, a mystic, a powerful preacher, a
high-minded, pure-hearted, brave man, and
finally, in 1528, a martyr. His watchword
used on the title-page of his little books, was
" Truth is immortal," and he maintained,
even in the face of death, that truth ulti-
mately wins in any contest. He accepted in
full measure Luther's claim that faith
the soul's attitude of trust and confidence
in God is the fundamental basis of
106 THE REMNANT
Christianity. Only he went farther with the
principle than Luther did and carried it out
more consistently. Nothing in the sphere of
religion can be accomplished, he held, without
insight, faith, obedience, effort, conformity of
heart and will with God. Religion must be
from first to last a spiritual affair. Rites,
ceremonies, magical or sacerdotal perform-
ances cannot alter the ethical and inherent
facts of life. " God," he declared in his
Apology, " will have none of our Baal-cries."
With this central position fixed, Hubmaier
laboured valiantly to secure a reformation of
the Church consonant with the spiritual
character of apostolic Christianity. " I
believe," he wrote, " and confess a holy
catholic Church, which is a communion of
saints, a brotherhood of devout and believing
men."* Very large numbers were convinced
by Hubmaier's preaching and when his lips
were sealed by the faggots in Vienna he had
already carried his interpretation of religion
into many lives in Swiss and Austrian towns, f
Denck belongs very definitely among " the
spiritual reformers," but he was for a time
identified with the Anabaptists and he un-
doubtedly exerted a very strong influence
upon the movement in its early stage, though
as his insight deepened and his views matured
his interpretation of Christianity took a
* Hubmaier's Twelve Articles of Faith.
t It is estimated that 6,000 persons became Anabaptists in and
around Nikolsburg where Hubmaier preached.
MAN'S ATTEMPT AT REFORMATION 107
broader outlook and a more universal aspect
than most Anabaptists were ready for. For
nearly a year September, 1525 to October,
1526 Denck was in Augsburg endeavouring
to organise and direct the popular movement
toward reform, striving to check fanatical
tendencies, opposing literalists and ex-
tremists and putting forth strenuous efforts
to deepen and spiritualise the throngs of
enthusiastic seekers.
Before the Anabaptist leaders had any
opportunity to clarify their aims or to form-
ulate their principles, the world took fright
at the potential dangers of the movement and
began suppressing the prominent exponents
of it and endeavouring to obliterate it utterly.
The uprising of the German peasants in
1525, in the hope of securing for themselves
a measure of economic and social justice,
gave the ruling class and the nobles a vivid
sense of what might happen if these sub-
merged people awakened, found themselves
and became an organised and directed force.*
Luther had thrown all the power of his pen,
voice and personality against the cause of the
peasants. He wrote : ' Whoever can should
knock down, strangle and stab insurgents,
privately or publicly, and think nothing so
venomous, pernicious and devilish as an
insurgent." He declared that those who
died fighting against the peasants were " true
* The peasant leaders did not of course share the non-
resistant views of the Anabaptists.
io8 THE REMNANT
martyrs before God," and that those who
perish on the peasant side are " everlasting
hell-brands."* The long-suffering peasants,
driven to the limit of endurance by their
intolerable condition and inspired by the
hope which the dawning reformation gave
them, made their assault against the im-
movable wall of German authority and
failed. Miinzer, the spiritual champion of
their aspirations, went to death with them.
The early Anabaptist leaders, most of
whom owed much to the dynamic, if not
wisely directed, zeal of Miinzer, disapproved
of the appeal to force and set themselves
against insurrection. The Zurich society of
" brothers " wrote to Miinzer in September,
1524, urging him not to resort to violence.
For them the gospel was a gospel of peace and
love. They say : " The Gospel and its
followers should not be guarded by the sword,
neither shall they so guard themselves, as, by
what we hear from the Brethren, ye assume
and pretend to be right. Truly believing
Christians are sheep in the midst of wolves,
sheep ready for the slaughter ; they must be
baptized in fear and in need, in tribulation and
death, that they may be tried to the last, and
enter the fatherhood of eternal peace, not with
carnal but with spiritual weapons. They
use neither the sword nor war."t In spite
* Luther's Tract, Wider die Morderischen und Rauberischen
Rotten der Bauern.
t Letter written by Grebel to Miinzer.
MAN'S ATTEMPT AT REFORMATION 109
of this gentle attitude, which beyond ques-
tion characterised the main current of the
popular reformation, all existing authorities
both of Church and State, were seized with
intense antipathy toward these spiritual
strivings of the common man, rose in might
and stamped them out in blood and fire.
All the early leaders were either killed out-
right or so severely treated that death over-
took them prematurely. The members of
the group of " brothers " were dealt with as
pests and outcasts, harried, imprisoned,
banished, forced to live like beasts in dens
and caves of the earth. It is impossible to
tell what would have been the social and
spiritual effect of this popular movement
which apparently, judging from its enthusi-
astic beginnings, would have swept in the
common people of all countries if it had
been allowed to develop and realise its aims.*
Its first leaders were honest, sincere, un-
selfish men. They had no hostile intent.
They sought no personal power or aggran-
disement. They had no spirit of hate. They
were fired with no class animus. They
wanted to be a remnant of the true Church
and to restore Christianity to its original
place of power as a way of life and love.
One of Denck's disciples, Hans Langenmantel,
* Even in the face of the terrific persecution that came down
upon it as soon as it began, there were many thousands of Ana-
baptists in Middle-Europe, and it has been estimated that
30,000 were put to death in Holland alone, though the figures
are^probably too large.
no THE REMNANT
said : " The highest command of God is
love : c Love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself.' '
They denied that it is right to try to gain
spiritual ends by violence and sword. They
trusted everything to the immortal power of
truth, to the transforming force of ideas.
They meant to inaugurate a Church which
would expand and finally become the
Kingdom of God on earth. They found a
Golgotha instead.
The fury of the persecution, the appalling
method of answering their dumb aspirations,
produced at once a new type of leader and
drove many of the Anabaptists toward
fanaticism. Melchior Hoffman of Stras-
bourg and his disciples are a different type
from those whom I have so far considered.
Always inclined to literalism, the movement
now focussed upon a fervid expectation of
the fulfilment of millennial hopes. Hoffman
became the prophet of an intense chiliasm
and even proclaimed that the sword might
be used to hasten the expected Kingdom of
God. His Dutch disciples, Jan Matthys and
Jan Brockelson, pushed the fanaticism of the
radical wing to its wildest limit and gave
to the world by the spectacle of the Munster
kingdom a reason for the feeling of horror
towards Anabaptism and an excuse, after the
fact, for its method of thorough extermination.*
* Hans Hut, a disciple of Mxinzer, also preached apocalyptic
hopes, though, unlike Hoffman, he remained non-resistant.
MAN'S ATTEMPT AT REFORMATION in
A remnant of the original stock survived
the double tragedy of persecution and
fanaticism. The followers of Jacob Huter,
a Tyrolese Anabaptist, who worked out a very
interesting type of communistic society,
succeeded in escaping from the annihilating
persecutions of the Tyrol and migrated into
Moravia. Eventually Huter was martyred.
His last despairing cry is touching : " We
know that it is not allowable to forbid the
earth to us for the earth is the Heavenly
Father's." Huter's communities were driven
from place to place and reduced in
numbers, but they were never wholly eradi-
cated or suppressed. The Mennonites form
another group of survivors. They owe their
name and many of their characteristics to
Menno Simon, born in West Friesland about
1496. He set himself to winnowing out the
follies and fanaticisms of the Dutch Ana-
baptists and he succeeded in organising a
strong branch of the movement which has
survived to the present time. He carried a
puritan spirit into his group of followers,
a determination to take the commands of
Christ literally and a tendency to form " a
peculiar people," distinguished by dress,
manners, separation from public affairs, and
absence of ordained or salaried ministry.
Sporadic individuals and even groups of
Anabaptists escaped the violent protestant
and catholic persecutions in most of the
Continental countries and a large number,
H2 THE REMNANT
in one way or another, got into England.
They merged with the Lollards and in some
cases managed to escape the fires of Smith-
field. They helped to form the numerous
groups of heretics and dissenters which
swarmed during the freer time of the English
Commonwealth. They formed also the early
nucleus of the famous Baptist Societies out
of which the Baptists sprang.
XL
THE EXPERIMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL
REFORMERS.
THE other fundamental tendency, which in
the former chapter I have called the aim at a
" spiritual reformation," was even more
viscous, or fluid, than was the Anabaptist
movement, less compact and unified. One
reason for the lack of organisation and solidi-
fication is to be found in the strong mystical
aspect of this reforming movement. Its
leaders were hostile to systems. They were
in revolt against dogmas and they were
equally opposed to the tyranny of authori-
tative, state-controlled ecclesiastical insti-
tutions. They wanted to escape alike from
a Hellenised and a Romanised Christianity.
They saw no way to solve the problem
without a complete shift of emphasis from the
outward to the inward. The visible Church
had tightened itself around the human spirit
until no free area or independent sphere of
activity seemed left for man's soul in its own
right. These minor prophets of the Refor-
mation were primarily prophets of the soul,
champions of the free spirit. They had no
architectonic genius. They felt no interest
in rearing either structures of logic or insti-
H4 THE REMNANT
tutional structures. Like Copernicus, they pro-
posed a new centre, and their new centre was
man's soul. They were always thinking and
writing about the Church, but it was from
first to last an invisible Church about which
they were concerned, not the visible and
empirical one. It is in this point that they
differ most from the Anabaptists with whom
they had close sympathy and often warm
fellowship. The Anabaptists were eager to
create a new visible Church and they took
the written word of Scripture as their charter
for it. The " spiritual reformers " accepted
neither of these attitudes. They found the
ultimate basis of religion in the Word of God,
the Light of God, revealed in the interior life
of man, and they thought of the Church
as a spiritual organism of illuminated and
inwardly guided persons. They were deeply
read in the books of the German and Flemish
mystics Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbroeck,
Theologia Germanica, the writings of " the
Friends of God " and The Imitation of
Christ, but they were almost as much
influenced by the Humanists, especially by
Erasmus. They shared his faith in human
freedom, his strong emphasis on the ethical
aspect of the true Christian life, his dislike of
theological dogma and his appreciation of
the pure and simple " gospel." They were
mystics but they were distinctly a new type
of mystic. Through their dislike for theo-
logy and metaphysics they allowed the
THE SPIRITUAL REFORMERS 115
speculative element, which is so large a
feature of fourteenth century mysticism,
to fall away and they consequently made the
positive, affirmative way of relationship with
God much more prominent than the via
negativa of the earlier mystics. In short,
they were more interested in direct experience
than they were in logic.
So far as one can locate any " originator "
of the movement which after all stands out
very much like Melchizedek, without histori-
cal "father or mother" Thomas Miinzer
was the first person in the Reformation period
to make the living Voice or Word of God in
the soul the basis of religion. The interior
Teacher seemed to him the source of truth and
the guide of life. He was, unfortunately,
a loosely organised individual, lacking in
balance and capable of being stirred to
fanaticism. But he planted his idea in the
heart of Ludwig Hetzer, translator of the
Hebrew prophets, and Hans Denck, the
humanist school-master of St. Sebald School
in Nuremberg, and it came to resurrection,
life and power in sounder and saner men.
Denck, though he is often reckoned an
Anabaptist, and though for a period he
endeavoured to shape the development of the
Anabaptists in the direction of his own ideals,
belongs more distinctly in this second group.
Johann Biinderlin, born in Linz, a town of
Upper Austria about 1495, Christian Entf elder
who first appears as pastor of a flock in
n6 THE REMNANT
Moravia in 1527, and Sebastian Franck,
born at Donauworth in Schwabia in 1499, are
other early exponents of the spiritual ideals.
Caspar Schwenckfeld, born at Liegnitz in
Lower Silesia in 1489, was more distinctly
interested than these other leaders were in
the formation of a visible society those of
" the middle way," as he called his " rem-
nant " and he created a brotherhood that
has survived to the present time, but his
ideas and ideals were of the general type
which I am calling the aim at a " spiritual
reform." Sebastian Castellio, a French
humanist and opponent of Calvin, born near
Geneva in 1515, and Dirck Coornhert, a
prominent Dutch scholar, born in Amsterdam
in 1522, are two of the noblest interpreters of
these spiritual ideals and aspirations.
They were all strongly individualistic and
they felt too little the importance of the help
of a visible community. They had a naive,
uncritical and unquestioning faith in inner
divine guidance and personal revelation.
" The Kingdom of God," Denck says, " is
in you and he who searches for it outside
himself will never find it, for apart from God
no one can either seek or find God, but he
who seeks God already in truth has Him " ;
and again : " He who does not know God
from God Himself does not ever know Him."*
Franck is a still more confident apostle
* From Denck's two tracts, Was geredet sey, etc. and Vom
Geseiz Qottes.
THE SPIRITUAL REFORMERS 117
of the inner way. Many, he says, know and
teach only what they have picked up and
gathered in "without having experienced it
in the deeps of themselves." Hearing people
read and talk about God is "all a dead
thing." The real Christian " must go inside
and have the experience for himself."*
But in spite of the fact that they seem so
individualistic and concerned with personal
experience in their own souls, they are
emphatically social in their sympathies.
Like the Anabaptists they are interested in
the common man. They all alike make
love, actual human love, the mark of fellow-
ship with Christ. They show a fresh interest
in man for his own sake. They all, with the
exception of Schwenckfeld, deny the de-
pravity of man and they refuse utterly to
accept the dogma of " unfree will." They
realise that human life is a frail and tragic
affair, but it is, nevertheless, big with
spiritual possibilities, and the most splendid
fruit of life is love. " To HATE EVERYTHING
THAT HINDERS LOVE," is Denck's ideal of
life, f Castellio declares that Christ's way
always means love. " You [meaning Calvin]
may return to Moses if you will, but for us
others Christ has come."J Love, he con-
stantly insists, is the supreme badge of any
true Christianity, the traits of the beatitudes
* Franck's Paradoxa, Vorrede, sec. 13. and passim.
f Vom Gesetz Gottes, p. 12.
J Castellio's Contra Libellum Calvini.
n8 THE REMNANT
in a person's life are surer evidence that he
belongs to Christ's family than is the
fact that he holds orthodox opinions on
obscure questions of belief. " To burn a
man," he cried out, " is not to prove a truth,
it is to burn a man ! ' ! This emphasis upon
love was with them not a literary device.
They talked and wrote much about it because
it was the central feature of the gospel
which they had re-discovered. They prac-
tised love in the hard and difficult world
of their time. They would not even hope for
divine judgment upon their enemies and
opposers, because they would not attribute
to God traits of character which they counted
unethical and unspiritual in themselves..
p Franck has expressed as well as any of the
group, the way they felt about the invisible
Church : " The true Church is not a separate
mass of people, not a particular sect to be
pointed out with the ringer, not confined to
one time or place ; it is rather a spiritual
and invisible body of all the members of
Christ, born of God, of one mind, spirit and
faith, but not gathered in any one external
city or place. It is a Fellowship, seen with
the spiritual eye and by the inner man. It
is the assembly and communion of all truly
God-fearing, good-hearted, new-born persons
in all the world, bound together by the Holy
Spirit in the peace of God and the bonds of
love a Communion outside of which there
is no salvation, no Christ, no God, no compre-
THE SPIRITUAL REFORMERS 119
hension of Scripture, no Holy Spirit and
no Gospel. I belong to this Fellowship. I
believe in the Communion of Saints, and I
am in this Church, let me be where I may, and
therefore I no longer look for Christ in lo
heres or lo theres."* This Church, which the
Spirit is building through the ages and in all
lands, is, once more, like the experience of an
individual Christian, entirely an inward affair.
" Love is the one mark and badge of fellow-
ship in it."f No outward forms of any sort
seem to him necessary for membership in this
true Church. External gifts and offices
make no Christian, and just as little does the
standing of the person, or locality, or time,
or dress, or food, or anything external. " The
Kingdom of God is neither prince nor peasant,
food nor drink, hat nor coat, here or there,
yesterday nor to-morrow, baptism nor cir-
cumcision, nor anything whatever that is
external, but peace and joy in the Holy
Spirit, unalloyed love out of a pure heart
and good conscience, and an unfeigned
faith." t
The Kingdom of God, as they hold, is a King-
dom of experience, and they want every
feature and detail of the religious life to
spring out of experience and to assist its
enlargement. " As often," Schwenckfeld
writes, *' as a new warrior comes to the
* Paradoxa, Vorrede, Sec. 8.
t Ibid. Sec. 9.
I Ibid. Sec. 45.
120 THE REMNANT
heavenly army, as often as a poor sinner
repents, the body of Christ becomes larger, the
King more splendid, His kingdom stronger,
His might more perfect."*
All these men have but the slenderest
interest in sacraments. Sacraments have
become for them what circumcision was for
St. Paul when he wrote : " neither circum-
cision availeth anything nor uncircumcision,
but a new creation." Schwenckfeld treats
this matter more profoundly than any of the
others. He meditated long and deeply upon
the question, studying the New Testament
both broadly and minutely, while at the same
time he gave much thought to the funda-
mental nature of the religious life. He took
Judas as his test case. He argued that if
baptism and the supper were efficacious
in themselves then Judas, who received the
supper from the Lord Himself, would have
been saved by it. If the bread and wine were
changed into actual body and blood of Christ
then he must have eaten of Christ and par-
taken of His divine Nature, but no corres-
ponding change of spirit appears in him.
He came out from the supper and immedi-
ately revealed an evil spirit. Schwenckfeld
finds the key to Christ's teaching on spiritual
life in the Johannine account of eating
Christ's flesh and drinking His blood. This
assimilation of Christ is for him not a figure,
not a symbol, but a central fact. The risen
* Schwenckf eld's Schriften, ii. p. 290.
THE SPIRITUAL REFORMERS 121
and glorified Christ, the incorruptible life-
giving substance of the God-Man, is the
essential, necessary source of spiritual life
for men. He must become the actual food
of the soul. Not on rare occasions, but
continually, the true nature of Christ must be
received and assimilated into the inner sub-
stance of our human spirits. No symbol
can be a substitute for that actual experience.
" God must himself, apart from all external
means, through Christ touch the soul, speak
in it, work in it, if we are to experience sal-
vation."* The Church which these " reform-
ers " were endeavouring to create was thought
of as a communion or fellowship of persons
who were drawn together and united by their
intimate spiritual relation with the living
Christ. It was a Church after the Spirit and
not an imperial institution, possessed of
magical authority, employing mysterious
sacraments or holding a final deposit of
infallible doctrine. It was to be an organism
rather than an organisation. " No outward
unity, or uniformity," Schwenckfeld wrote,
" either in doctrine or ceremonies, or rules
or sacraments, can make a Christian Church ;
but inner unity of Spirit, of heart, soul and
conscience in Christ, and in the knowledge of
Him, a unity in love and faith, does make a
Church of Christ." f
* Schwenckf eld's Schriften, i. p. 768b.
f Schriften i, p. 785.
122 THE REMNANT
Jacob Boehme, born in Silesia in 1575,
more completely than any other single
continental interpreter, gave a many-sided
expression to the faith and aspiration of these
spiritual leaders.* He is the culmination of
the movement . There are many other strands
of influence in Boehme, especially the theo-
sophical and alchemic ideas derived from
Agrippa of Nettesheim, Paracelsus and
Weigel. This latter stock of inheritance
proved a heavy weight to this great tragic,
but surely divinely inspired, mystic. The
barbarous terminology, the baffling symbol-
isms, and the literary limitations of this
Silesian prophet were always a tremendous
handicap, but in spite of all the obstacles,
difficulties and hindrances a real heavenly
vision and a living message break through
and get revealed in Boehme's books. His
most important permanent contribution to
Christianity is to be found in his interpre-
tation of what he calls the process of salvation
as a way of life. Here he is unmistakably
" a spiritual reformer." He will not put up
with schemes or notions. He sets himself as
strongly against the substitution of doctrines
of salvation for an experienced process of
salvation as Luther did against the substi-
tution of works for faith. " Thou thyself,"
he says, " must go through Christ's whole
journey, and enter wholly into His process. "f
* The influence of Schwenckfeld is most marked in Boehme.
| True Repentance.
THE SPIRITUAL REFORMERS 123
He opposes the protestant tendency to make
the Bible the basis of reformed religion he
calls that another form of " Babel-building/'
which does not reach all the way to God.
The written letter-word is no true substi-
tute for the living Word of God in a man's
soul. Theological " opinions " are only
" mental idols." The " immortal seed of
God" must come to birth in the soul and
Christ must live and operate within. Boehme
was thoroughly consistent in his application
of the way of love to all the affairs of life. He
believed that the Gospel of Christ would
work in practice. War seemed to him one of
the greatest marks of the apostacy of the
Church. He takes a similar position to that
taken by Erasmus, namely, that war and
Christianity are utterly and forever incom-
patible. Boehme once more, like his pre-
decessors, is a builder of the invisible Church.
He makes nothing of sacraments. He turns
inward rather than outward. He separates
religion wholly from state connection. He
wants a Christianity of prophets instead of one
of priests and he calls men away from logical
systems to personal experience.
The writings of nearly all these men reached
England and were read by kindred spirits
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
John Everard is the first scholar of im-
portance who shows a familiarity with the
body of ideas and the type of Church set forth
in the little books of the spiritual reformers on
124 THE REMNANT
the continent. He was born in 1575, the year
Boehme was born ; he was a master of arts
and doctor of divinity from Clare College,
Cambridge. He was a student of the great
mystics and later in life after he was fifty-
he translated tracts by Sebastian Franck and
Hans Denck and Castellio's edition of " The
Golden Book of German Divinitie."
Everard's later sermons, printed in The Gospel
Treasury Opened give the same general
interpretation of Christianity which his Con-
tinental forerunners gave. He was, before
everything else, a good man. He was, too,
a man of undoubted depth and power, and
he shows both style and humour. Though
so often imprisoned that King James I.
suggested that his name should be changed
from Everard [Everout] to " Dr. Never-
out," yet his influence was great and he is
almost certainly the first man in England to
hold and teach in any impressive way the
views of the spiritual reformers. He had
important disciples and many successors.
The most noted of the disciples was Giles
Randall, another translator of spiritual and
mystical books. Francis Rous, Peter Sterry,
John Saltmarsh and William Dell are good
examples of the kind of successors whom
Everard had.
Meantime other developments were under
way which carried the ideas of the spiritual
reformers forward into the popular con-
sciousness more extensively than did the books
THE SPIRITUAL REFORMERS 125
and sermons of these Cambridge and Oxford
scholars. Groups of the common people
formed into little societies and worked out
in practice, in quiet, out-of-the-way places,
the ideals of these teachers. Attempts of
this sort were often made in Germany, where
they were generally soon suppressed. In
Holland they were much more successful and
in that country, where a semi-freedom of
conscience was allowed, small sects flourished.
The most important of these independent
sects were the societies of the Collegiants,
who held the fundamental ideas of the
spiritual reformers, with the added belief
that the present existing Church is only an
interim-church and that God will soon send
a new apostle, supernaturally endowed and
equipped, to be the beginner, the founder,
of the true Church of Christ. For this event
they looked and waited and thus were called
" Seekers." They held that no one had the
efficacious authority to administer sacraments
or to be the bearer of an authoritative
ministry-message. They therefore met in
silence and waited for the Spirit to direct
them. They looked after their own poor,
watched carefully over the moral life the
" walk and conversation " of their member-
ship. They were socially-minded and made
love and fellowship the marks of their com-
munion. They were opposed to oaths, and
to the taking of human life for any reason,
and in other ways they showed their con-
126 THE REMNANT
nection with the common man's reformation
in the sixteenth century. During the period
of the English Commonwealth numerous
groups of similar sects appeared in England.
They had strong, substantial members and
their leaders, for they had unordained leaders,
were able men and excellent guides. Many
other sects swarmed as the degree of free-
dom increased. There were groups of " the
Family of Love," ^ho were followers of the
mystic, Henry Nicholas, born in Westphalia
in 1501. There were Ranters who were
pantheists and frequently were morally loose
and antinomian. In the years between
1646 and 1661 all the writings of Jacob
Boehme were translated into English and now
became a positive and powerful force, pro-
foundly influencing such intellectual men as
Sir Isaac Newton and John Milton,* and
forming the basic religious conceptions of
many less noted persons. All these lines,
including the group of Anabaptists, converge
and receive their consummate expression in
the Society of Friends, which, under the
leadership of George Fox, spread throughout
the English counties between 1648 and 1691,
the latter date being the year of George Fox's
death.
More important, however, than the form-
ation of any religious organisation was the
silent propagation of truths and ideas which
spread across the world as winged seeds fly
* See Bailey's Milton and Jacob Boehme (New York, 1914).
THE SPIRITUAL REFORMERS 127
abroad in the autumn. The contagion of
thought from mind to mind, from person to
person, \\ithout any visible organisation,
carried these ideals broadcast. They became
winnowed of chaff as time sifted them and
they gained in weight and value as they lost
their capricious and erratic aspects. They
heightened as they received interpretation at
the hands of wise and balanced thinkers and
gradually they won the standing which their
discoverers could never succeed in giving them.
Philosophical movements unconsciously co-
operated towards a preparation of groups of
people of similar ideals to those of the
spiritual reformers. Social and political forces
also became their allies. The religious and
political experiments in the American
colonies assisted greatly in shaping thought
in the same direction, and in the revolutions
carried through by the people in America and
in France helped immensely to establish the
principle of free conscience, separation of
the Church and State, the inalienable right
of man to be religious in his own way ; while
the unorganised but irresistible forces of litera-
ture in Europe and America, especially from
Wordsworth's time onwards, worked silently
and powerfully to emphasise inward religion
the religion of the Spirit and to make dogma
and ecclesiasticism less important. We find
ourselves at last in a world wholly changed
from that which the great reformers,
major reformers, endeavoured to make. Their
128 THE REMNANT
ideals are not our ideals. Their conception
of the Church is largely dead or dying. We
are, it must be admitted, not in the world
of the spiritual reformers, but at the same time
their ideals are much more nearly our ideals,
their spirit is kindred with ours and, if they
could return to life again they would feel at
home with those who are now endeavouring to
build the Kingdom of God, and would join
heartily in spiritual communion and fellow-
ship with those who are trying to carry the
ideals of Christ into the actual life of the
Church and the world.
XII
THE QUAKER " SEED "
GEORGE Fox (1624-1691) and the other
propagators of Quakerism in the seventeenth
century always thought of their movement as
the " seed " of the true Church and a
living " seed " of the Kingdom of God.
They used the word " seed " in two senses
in their abundant writings. It meant
primarily something of God implanted in the
soul of man and was often called by them
" Light," or " Light Within." No less often
they applied to this divine bestowment in the
hidden centre of a man's being the word
" Seed," or " immortal Seed," or " invisible
Seed," or "Seed of God," and they attri-
buted to this gift of grace all the spiritual
processes and attainments which come to
adorn and equip the full-grown Christian
life.
In its other and secondary use the word
" seed " (spelled with a small initial letter)
refers to that vital germ or nucleus of the true
Church of Christ which already exists in the
world though only in its incipient and
potential stage, but being seed, it is full of
promise and carries in itself the hope of the
129 9
130 THE REMNANT
final triumph of the spiritual forces of the
world. Fox did not conceive of himself
as the founder of something new, the inaug-
urator of one more novel protestant sect.
He thought of himself as the gatherer of the
spiritual seed, already quick and vital, but,
scattered over the world and unorganised,
an invisible Church without outward form.
In the early period of his ministry (1652)
Fox had a remarkable vision on Pendle Hill,
in the eastern edge of Lancashire, when he
says : " the Lord let me see a great people
to be gathered," which later he calls " a
great people in white raiment." These
" white raiment " people waiting to be
gathered had been " seekers " but were now
to be the " seed " not merely of the Society
of Friends, but the " seed " of the true
Church and kingdom of God, which should
some day, Fox believed, be as wide as the
human race.
When he first rode into Scotland in his
work of gathering the " seed," George Fox
had a very clear inward sense that there were
some prepared souls there waiting to be
brought in. " When I first set my horse's
feet upon Scottish ground," he says, " I
felt the seed of God to sparkle about me, like
innumerable sparks of fire." " There is,"
he adds, " abundance of thick cloddy earth of
hypocrisy and falseness above, and a briery,
brambly nature which is to be burnt with
God's word, and ploughed up with his spiritual
THE QUAKER " SEED " 131
plough, before God's Seed brings forth
heavenly and spiritual fruit to His glory.
But the husbandman is to wait in patience."
When the ship Woodhouse, with its band of
Quaker missionaries bound for the New
World, landed in Rhode Island in 1657,
one of the enthusiastic group prophesied " by
the irresistible Word of God " that " the seed
in America shall be as the sands of the sea
in number," i.e., the " seed " of the future
spiritual Church and society of the Kingdom.
When George Fox came to America in 1672
he spoke of his mission as a visit to the " seed
in America," and the same phrase is applied
to his missionary visits to the continent of
Europe, where he went to gather in the
" seed " in Holland and Germany. Here,
then, we have the true remnant-idea, the
formation of a small prepared group of
persons awakened, quickened, vitalised and
and so made the bearers of spiritual life to the
wider world, the " seed " of an immense
harvest.
Recent historical research has demon-
strated the fact that the Quaker movement
was the legitimate inheritor of many lines
of previous spiritual labour and effort. Fox's
Pendle Hill vision of " a great people wait-
ing to be gathered" was literally true.
There were large groups of " Seekers " in
Yorkshire, Lancashire and Westmorland, as
he soon discovered, and there were expectant
groups in many other parts of England as
132 THE REMNANT
well. They were cherishing the hope that
God would send someone in true apostolic
power to gather together into one living whole
the members of Christ's Church and to
restore Christianity to its original power as a
way of life. This aspiration was very wide-
spread and intense. It was not confined to
groups which bore the name of " Seekers."
It was shared, too, by the best of the
Anabaptists, by the Lollard groups who had
formed and nourished their lives upon the
Gospels, by the mystical brotherhoods who
bore the name of " Family of Love," by the
devoted English disciples of Jacob Boehme
(Behmen) and by the men who had come
under the influence of the writings of Denck,
Franck and Castellio, and had translated
them into current English thought men
like John Everard, Francis Rous, John
Saltmarsh, William Dell and Gerrard Win-
stanley. Both in England and America there
really was a great " seed " to be gathered
and the Quaker " Publishers of Truth,"
as these early propagators were called, knew
how to gather this " seed " effectively.
The essential ideas which appeared in the
early Quaker writings emphatically appear
also in the books of these remnant fore-
runners. The same fundamental strivings
move both the earlier and the later groups.
The same determination to restore primitive
Christianity is in evidence. The same ethical
ideals, even the same peculiarities and
THE QUAKER " SEED " 133
scruples of conscience come to light again.
The same elemental conception of man and
the same aspiration for a reorganised and
purified social order dominate both the
spiritual predecessors and the Quaker " seed "
as it was gathered in by Fox and his helpers.
We have in early Quakerism the convergence
of many lines of spiritual travail, the absorp-
tion of many movements looking toward the
Kingdom of God. It was one more positive
attempt to produce a remnant or " seed "
of the true society which God intends to
create here in His world.
Let us now* endeavour to gather up and
review the essential characteristics of this
" Quaker seed," this seventeenth century
' * remnant . " It was undoubtedly the primary
concern of George Fox to restore the Church
and raise it to its destined place in the spirit-
ual life of the world. His supreme interest
lay in the sphere of religion. He possessed
a peculiarly sensitive organisation and he
belonged to the psychological type of persons
from which mystics and prophets come. He
could not satisfy his soul with the usual
secondhand knowledge about God. The
pious phrases which he heard from the pulpit
seemed to him hollow, empty and unreal.
He was determined to attain to another kind
of knowledge. He longed to have a warm
and intimate personal acquaintance with God.
The story of his long quest for reality makes
the early pages of his Journal an unusually
134 THE REMNANT
interesting human document. What he so
eagerly sought he finally found, and to his
unspeakable joy it became luminously clear
to him that God is not off somewhere at the
far end of the long ladders which men have
laboriously set up in order to reach Him, but
that He is a God very near at hand, at the
very gate and threshold of man's own inner
life. " I knew God experimentally," he
declares in the rapture of his discovery. " I
was," he adds, " as one who has a key and
doth open."
It is always like the finding of a master-
key to all mysteries when one discovers that
God is not to be thought of as a distant being
at the end of a chain of causes, at the con-
clusion of a syllogism, above the sky or in
behind the phenomena of nature, as the
Judge of the Assizes at the end of time, a
being to be " accepted " by a tour de force on
the authority of a dogma or priest ; that
He is rather the very flame of moral passion in
our souls, revealed in some measure where-
ever conscience condemns a low selfish aim
and pushes one of us up the slope towards a
common " good " which can be shared with
many. It was here within that the young
weaver of the English Commonwealth found
Him as a living God, forever creative, co-
operative, loving and redemptive. It at
once seemed to him the most important
mission of his life to help other people to get
this experience of God and to live sensitively
THE QUAKER " SEED " 135
responsive to the God working immediately
within, where personal life bursts into
consciousness and where the calls to duty and
righteousness voice themselves. Only out of
such awakened and quickened persons, he
believed, could a real Church be made.
But religion with George Fox was never
an affair of another world than this one.
Every truth of religion was a practical truth
and must make a difference in life and action.
The essential problems for Fox were not
theological problems ; they were problems
in the practical sphere of personal and social
life. He strove to bring religion from heaven
to earth, i.e., to declare it to men as an
inspiration and energy by which the full life
of man could be lived and the potential
promise of society could be realised. There
is a very fine illustration of this attitude in a
tract which Fox wrote to magistrates in
1657. Here is a striking passage from it :
" How are you in the pure religion .
when both blind and sick and halt and lame
lie up and down, cry up and down, in every
corner of the city ; and men and women
are so decked with gold and silver in their
delicate state, that they cannot tell how to
go ? Surely, surely, you know that you are
all of one mould and blood that dwell upon
the face of the earth. Would not a little
out of your abundance and superfluity main-
tain these poor children, halt, lame and blind,
or set them at work that can work ; and
136 THE REMNANT
they that cannot, find a place of relief for
them ; would not that be a grace to you ? "
He was extraordinarily sensitive to human
suffering but he was even more sensitive to
feel the tragedy of the unrealised possibility
of life. Wherever life was being made futile
and abortive he felt a commission to challenge
the hampering and constrictive conditions.
Social habits, such as drinking of intoxicants
in taverns, fighting and quarreling, cozening
and cheating, lying and dissembling, stirred
him deeply because he saw the real life of
man being lost where these habits prevailed,
and when people professed to be Christians
and to belong to the Church and still did
these things the ' ; profession " seemed to
him vain and hollow. The luxury which
he saw being practised by rich church-
members while multitudes of people were
living in want, suffering and privation,
" struck at his life," to use his forcible phrase,
and presented an unendurable situation to
him. Extravagant fashions and artificial
forms of etiquette seemed to him intolerable,
because they loaded life with unnecessary
burdens, and tended to make men and women
insincere, unnatural and hypocritical. They
entailed the use of words and phrases which
were not true, which the users did not mean
and which were servile and flattering. Class
distinctions appeared to him even more
oppressive to the true life of man.
He proposed to cut straight through this
THE QUAKER " SEED " 137
tangle of show and formalism and to have
completely done with it. He would restore
life to its rightful honesty, purity and sim-
plicity. He highly esteemed a proper grace
of manner and due reverence and honour to
manhood and womanhood, but he felt that
truth was the supreme quality of the soul, and
therefore life must be so ordered that truth
should be honoured and maintained. He
would not take an oath because he would not
admit that there were two standards of
truth-telling one for law-courts and one
for ordinary everyday life. He would not
say " you " to one person, because he felt
that the plural form of address had been intro-
duced to give distinction to the upper class,
while " thou " was used for the poor and
lowly. He would admit no practices in
religion which discriminated against women,
and the religious movement which he in-
augurated was a powerful effort to give
woman " her place of equal comradeship
with man."
Fox had always an intense sympathy for
the man who for any reason was down.
The prisoners in the awful jails of the period
peculiarly touched him. The undeveloped
races, especially the Negroes and Indians,
were frequently on his mind, and he always
maintained that " something of God "
a divine potentiality lay hidden within
these people who had not yet had their
chance.
138 THE REMNANT
On similar ground he took the absolutist
position towards war and every form
of human life-taking. Nothing, he felt,
could justify the annihilation of personal life
with its divine possibilities. There was,
to his mind, no limit to the transforming
power of love, no frontier where it should
cease to operate. One of Fox's humble
disciples wrote in 1661 : " There is nothing
stronger than love ; it makes an easy passage
and drives that back which stands in the way
. . . for in the strength of love one
chases a thousand and the army of royalty
marches forward and takes possession." If
the God of all patience hoped and believed
forever in the divine destiny of men, His
children of the Light, who formed the seed
of the true Church, they felt, should practice
the same unending faith and limitless love
in all human relationships. The original
Quaker position is finely expressed in a
document written by George Fox and Richard
Hubberthorne in the early days of the English
Restoration (1660). It says in part :
" Our principle is and our practices have
always been to seek peace and ensue it ; to
follow after righteousness and the knowledge
of God, seeking the good and welfare and
doing that which tends to the peace of all.
We know that wars and fightings proceed from
the lusts of men, as James iv. 1-3, out of
which lusts the Lord hath redeemed us and
so out of the occasion of war. All
139
bloody principles and practices we as to
our own particular do utterly deny, with
all outward wars and strife and fightings with
outward weapons for any end or under any
pretence whatsoever ; and this is our testi-
mony to the whole world. . . The
Spirit of Christ, by which we are guided, is
not changeable, so as once to command us
from a thing as evil and again to move unto
it ; as we do certainly know and so testify to
the world that the Spirit of Christ which
leads us into all truth, will never move us to
fight and war against any man with outward
weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ
nor for the kingdoms of this world."
Fox and his friends realised fully that
this idealist position of theirs was only a
venture of faith. It was, they knew, not
accepted by the existing historical Churches.
They could maintain their faith and hope in
the organised world, where war was thought
of as an essential part of any national scheme,
only by a continual process of suffering for
it, until the "truth" should win its way and
penetrate the heart of the world. It seemed
to them that they were to be planted in
hard, brambly, unploughed soil of the world,
as the " seed " of God's true kingdom. They
were to be " the remnant people " exhibit-
ing through pain and suffering and death the
way of love and life and truth. Others would
no doubt go on fighting for their causes until
Christ's idea of life should come to birth in
140 THE REMNANT
them and they should learn to trust and to
practise the higher way, the wisdom of love
which is better than weapons of war. This
remnant conception is well expressed in two
seventeenth century passages, one by Isaac
Penington and one by Robert Barclay.
Penington advocating a mission of the
faithful and righteous " seed " says :
" I speak not this against any magistrates
or peoples defending themselves against
foreign invasions ; or making use of the
sword to suppress the violent and evil-doers
within their borders for this the present
state of things may and doth require, and
a great blessing will attend the sword where
it is borne uprightly to that end and its use
will be honourable ; and, while there is need
of a sword, the Lord will not suffer that
Government, or those governors to want
fitting instruments under them for the
managing thereof, who wait on Him in His
fear to have the edge of it rightly directed
but yet there is a better state, which the Lord
hath already brought some into, and which
nations are to expect and travel towards.
Yea, it is far better to know the Lord to be
the Defender, and to wait on Him daily, and
see the need of His strength, wisdom and
preservation, than to be never so strong and
skilful in weapons of war."
In much the same strain Barclay declares
that the present rulers of the Christian world
have not learned the full scope of patience and
THE QUAKER " SEED " 141
love and have not arrived at the pure
dispensation of the Gospel.
- . " . . . and, therefore, while they are in
that condition, we shall not say that war,
undertaken upon a just occasion, is alto-
gether unlawful to them. For, even as cir-
cumcision and the other ceremonies were for
a season permitted to the Jews . . .
because that spirit was not yet raised up in
them whereby they could be delivered from
such rudiments ; so the present confessors
of the Christian name, who are yet in the
mixture and not in the patient, suffering
spirit, are not yet fitted for this form of
Christianity and therefore cannot be unde-
fending themselves, until they attain that
perfection. But, for such whom Christ has
brought hither, it is not lawful to defend
themselves by arms, but they ought over
all to trust to the Lord."*
It takes immense faith to swing out thus
from the main social current of the world on a
unique venture like that and to make an
experiment in the practice of love, when
everybody else insists that nothing will work
but force. It means flying in the face of
hard facts. It is a course of action which
" common sense " at once refuses. It in-
volves putting into practice the laws of the
Kingdom of God before that Kingdom has
really come. It is a method which " passes
* These two passages are quoted from W. C. Braithwaite's
Second Period of Quakerism, pp. 611-12.
142 THE REMNANT
understanding " and more or less defies the
long established habits of the race. These
Friends, however were absolutely convinced
that God had opened to them the true way of
life His divine way and had called them to
be the pioneers of it in the modern world.
They realised only too clearly that the king-
dom of God had not come, but they had an
inward sense that it never would come until
somebody believed in its principles enough to
try them out in actual operation. They
resolved to go forward then and make the
experimental trial and take the consequences.
They assumed without further debate that
truth can always be trusted to conquer with
its own invincible forces, that righteousness
has a might of its own that can be matched
without fear against the weapons of brass
and iron, and that the patient, suffering spirit
by which Christ accomplished the redemp-
tion of the world is as practical a power as is
the explosive force of gunpowder.
They knew, of course, that the world would
turn and rend them for their refusal to con-
form to its ancient ways and customs, but
they possessed the undaunted spirit of
pioneers and they decided to go forward
and see what would come as the result of their
faith. More and more clearly, as time went
on, they perceived that they formed only a
" remnant." The world turned upon them
fiercely and tried to cure them of their " folly."
They became only the more convinced by the
THE QUAKER " SEED " 143
fierce cruelty that force could not settle the
validity of truth nor determine which way
of life was eternally the right way. They
stoutly maintained that the State had no
warrant to invade conscience or to compel the
soul. They complained that truth still
remained true even after the man who
witnessed it had been buried alive in a
dungeon or done to death on gallows.
Harder to bear than persecution, however,
was the test of normal life which came with
toleration after persecution had failed to
break or defeat their venture. Every spirit-
ual movement meets sooner or later the
inevitable tendency to become adjusted, sec-
ularised, levelled down to the order of life
prevailing around it. The Friends engaged
in occupations in the business world where
economic laws rather than the laws of the
Kingdom of God operated. They lived in the
midst of a society which constantly ignored
their principles of life and love, and it proved
very easy for them to slide unconsciously
into the world's way of dealing and doing.
They guarded as much as they could against
this insidious tendency by adopting a
peculiar garb, a special mode of speech, a
manner of life, which isolated them, hedged
them around and made them " a peculiar
people," and they undertook to guard their
spiritual citadel by expelling from member-
ship all who deviated from the sacred cus-
toms of their group. They determined at
144 THE REMNANT
all costs to preserve the "remnant," even if
it were only a remnant of a remnant ! In the
nineteenth century a wave of evangelicalism
swept over the Society of Friends and pro-
foundly changed its basis of thought, bringing
its members into much closer accord with
the evangelical churches. Their " peculiari-
ties " gradually disappeared. Their exclu-
siveness vanished. They came out from
behind their hedges and took up the public
tasks of corporate life. They entered politics.
They worked for common causes. They came
into intimate fellowship with other Christian
bodies. But deep within the heart of the
membership the old fidelity to the principle
of peace still remained and in the times of
testing Friends continued to show a central
loyalty to Christ's way of life. In all the
wars of the last hundred years Friends have
officially declared themselves to be dedi-
cated to peace. Where the national appeal
for individual loyalty has been peculiarly
strong some Friends have always been found
in the military forces of their country, but
there has always at the same time been a
large Quaker remnant ready to suffer to any
limit in behalf of " the testimony to truth,"
as Friends love to call it. And in the times
of peace this same remnant has seriously
endeavoured to practise a way of life which
would obliterate the seeds of war and take
away the occasion for it. The group of the
faithful has been all too small, its insight too
THE QUAKER " SEED " 145
feeble and its range of constructive effort
too narrow, but its sincerity has been fine, its
spirit brave, and it has inspired others to take
up a similar loyalty to truth. In fact, it has
been and continues to be a " seed."
XIII
THE FUNCTION OF THE REMNANT
I HAVE very briefly reviewed a few of the
outstanding remnant movements in history.
Those which I have chosen are all selected
from the purview of the Christian Church, and
they are only typical specimens of the
remnant-idea, not an exhaustive list of the
attempts to attain and realise the ideals of
early Christianity. They exhibit, as I said
in the opening chapter, two general types
(i) the rebel type and (2) the type which
aims at reform from within the body. The
former breaks away from the main body,
gives up hope of arriving at the goal by
slowly raising the spiritual level of the
original group by efforts from within. It
" swarms out " from the parent hive, organ-
ises on its own independent lines, becomes
a propagandist of the truth, makes disciples
wherever it can effectively carry its appeal
and builds up a rival body, alongside the body
from which it went out. The other method
is gentler, more patient, though generally
not as intense, rigoristic or uncompromising.
Those who form the second type go some-
what beyond the general level of the group
THE FUNCTION OF THE REMNANT 147
to which they belong. They see farther or
with clearer vision than the rest. They
possess consciences that are more acute than
those of their fellows. They are more
detached from the world and more ready
than most people to forego the advantages of
a successful career and the rewards which
go with conformity to prevailing customs,
in order to champion the cause of truth and
light, and to work for what ought to be. But
while they see farther and intend to go farther
than the mass of those who constitute their
fellowship they do not propose to rebel
from it (except as a last resort). They
preserve a fundamental faith in the conquer-
ing power of truth, and they believe all things,
hope all things and are ready to endure all
things, in the great business of making others
see what they see.
Both these types have made important
contributions to progress. They have both
furthered truth and light. And the question
as to which of the two methods is the more
commendable way must always be deter-
mined by the historical situation to be met :
the reasonableness of the main group, their
receptivity toward new ideas, their general
malleability, i.e., capability of being re-
forged and reformed under heat and pressure,
and on the other hand the temperament of the
leader of the advanced wing, his readiness to
move patiently forward, to put up with a part
of the achievement at which he aims and his
148 THE REMNANT
willingness to compromise where compro-
mise is possible without the surrender of the
central principle. Some emergencies make
the second way futile and impossible and
some conditions make it the only wise and
effective course.
In any case the formation of a " remnant,"
of one or the other of these types, seems to be
historically the most approved method of
securing an advancement of the truth. It is
devoutly to be hoped that in some happy
future time there will exist methods and
systems of education which will enable the
new-born arrivals to discover what the past
has been about, where it has blundered and
where it has achieved, and which will
direct the instincts, emotions and senti-
ments of the growing youth, as well as in-
form their minds, so that they can discover
not merely in solitary instances, but almost
uniformly, how to fulfil their potential
capacities and to realise " the mighty hopes
that make us men." Our educational
methods are still in an immature stage. We
succeed with a few and fail with the many.
While we are waiting for the transformation
and transfiguration of education we must
count, as of old, upon the leadership of
prepared groups, or " remnants," the pro-
pagation of truth through a concentrated and
more or less " charged " and dynamised
fellowship, devoted to the forward movement.
Why not be satisfied, someone will ask,
THE FUNCTION OF THE REMNANT 149
to rely upon the propagation of ideas through
books and articles or by public addresses ?
Why form a remnant ? Well, books and
articles and public addresses, except in the
rare cases where they come from the pen or
lips of a genius, leave the great world I had
almost said the dull stagnant world pretty
much unmoved and undisturbed. A very
few people read the propagandist book, or
go to hear the propagandist speech, and those
who do read or listen are for the most part
already in sympathy with the new ideas, or at
least open-minded enough to expose them-
selves to the danger of conviction. It is
extremely easy to leave a book unread or to
read it and remain unkindled. It is easier
still to let the lecturer talk to empty benches
while we follow the pursuits of our busy,
occupied life. These things can be ignored
and left on one side. They may give us
pin-pricks and occasionally jog us half awake,
but they do not force us to take sides. They
do not compel us to choose which cause we
will henceforth serve.
The formation of a remnant, on the other
hand, brings a vigorous challenge. It puts
the issue sharply. It breaks the existing
lethargy. It disturbs the even tenor of
life. It is hard to ignore a large, militant
social group, kindled into white heat by the
power of a live idea. Whether one wants to
read and listen or not, it becomes exceedingly
difficult to close down the shutters of the
150 THE REMNANT
mind and remain undisturbed when the truth
has passed from a single champion into a
large social group dedicated to the task of
making the larger world see it.
A truth gathers validity, weight and
momentum every time it wins a new adherent.
We cannot call any fact or idea " truth "
so long as only one mind testifies to it, so long
as it rests only on the insight of one person.
It may be truth, but we cannot say yet that it
must be true. Truth involves an aspect of
necessity and universality. If the thing our
soul discovers is essentially true, we shall be
able in time to rally converts to it and to
build up a body of believers in it. In fact, the
only way by which we can try out and test
a fresh idea is in and through a social group.
Sometimes a new faith or a new truth sweeps
like a Pentecost over the world and possesses
a vast multitude of peoples as though they
had been waiting expectantly for it to arrive.
It finds men as soon as it is announced. It
establishes itself at once as a truth for which
the soul seems to have been fashioned in
advance. Most truths, however, have not
been of that type. They appear first as a
conviction in some single soul. The indi-
vidual discoverer trusts his insight enough
to proclaim it. It is both believed and
doubted by the hearers of it. It is both
affirmed and denied. It has to make its
way ; it must run the gauntlet. He must
gradually learn how to defend it, how to
THE FUNCTION OF THE REMNANT 151
present it better, how to meet criticism and
objection, how to work out its further impli-
cations and to link it up and correlate it with
truth already established. It will be pretty
sure to come into conflict with habits and
prejudices. It will sooner or later touch and
affect interests, either commercial, political
or professional. If this " truth " spreads it
will mean loss to some people. Those whose
interests are concerned are likely to form a
solid body of opposition and to compel the new
prophet, or the propagandist, if we are not
ready to use the grander word to go down
deeper and to found his truth on the most
broad and solid base possible.
Under these conditions, and they are the
usual conditions confronting any new truths,
there is no way forward except the way of the
" remnant." The truth must now be matured
and tested in a group of persons who accept
it with conviction and are ready to suffer for
it or stake life on it. So long as it has no
backing except the mere affirmation of the
individual who asserts it and writes it in his
book or tract, it may be only mere words, some
peculiar subjective seeming of an erratic
mind no eternal truth at all. But when it
carries conviction to the minds of those who
hear it, when it organises them and fuses
them together, when it enables them to
readjust and reconstruct their way and
manner of life to fit the new truth, and when
it stands the moral strain of holding many
152 THE REMNANT
lives together, of rebuilding their system of
thought and action and of enabling them to
meet the stern collisions of those who are
determined to put down their " truth," we
have gained some right to ask whether the
eternal nature of things is not in it and
backing it.
Of course, it is not a question of votes or of
majorities. We cannot make the easy
assumption that a thing is true because many
persons believe it to be true. Under some
psychological conditions almost any un-
substantial delusion or belief will float and
get millions of supporters. The fact that
a vast number of " voters " say " aye " to
it does not prove that it is therefore true. We
cannot be quick pragmatists and fall in M ith
the theory that the voice of the people is
ipso facto the voice of God. But the slow,
historical testing out of truth through the
social relationships of a loyal group, which
we may well call a remnant, does offer a
valuable method of examining its real
validity. History is one of the surest of the
judgment seats in the universe. The " Judg-
ment Day " of which the ancient prophets
spoke still remains a mystery about which
we have no further light than their words give
us. But the judgment days of history are
as certain and verifiable as the multipli-
cation table. Ideas and ideals are sifted and
sorted by an unescapable " doom." In the
long run the processes of the universe weed
THE FUNCTION OF THE REMNANT 153
out that which does not fit the moral nature
and destiny of the race. The remnant thus
furnishes on a larger or smaller scale a
laboratory experiment for testing the value
of an idea, a faith, a truth. There can be no
remnant at all until an idea has come to life,
dynamic enough to build a coherent group.
Then this coherent group, if it is to persist
and prevail, must inevitably stand the uni-
verse. It cannot retreat to some other world ;
it must live and work in this one. It must
face the laws of the outside and inside world.
It can live for a little while on an iridescent
dream, but if it is to have any wide scope
and long duration it must weather the dis-
integrating forces which try every " society."
It must have substance enough to feed
thought in a large variety of minds and to
refashion emotions and reform sentiments.
It must furnish staying power and supply
those inward forces that make one able to
endure hatred, reproach, ostracism, perse-
cution in its many-headed forms and to
prefer death itself to disloyalty to the truth
or the group.
After all, there is of course no infallible
proof to be found here or anywhere that an
inward discovery is true. This social world
of ours is not a world of infallibilities. The
sphere of absolute certainty is a very re-
stricted sphere. We can attain here only to
high degrees of probability and to immense
confidence in our venture. Every remnant
154 THE REMNANT
reviewed in the preceding chapters has stood
out for some phase of truth and spiritual life
which was doubted, questioned and defied
by large numbers of contemporaries, but
which has since in the winnowings of time
become adopted by multitudes of people,
confirmed by wide experience and has finally
been builded into the conscious or un-
conscious structure of the moral and religious
life of the world. Some other features which
once seemed important and even vital and
essential to the remnant groups have been
suppressed and are lost in the limbo of the dead
years. So it will always be with spiritual
movements. The immediate judgment of a
remnant group is partial, one-sided and
incapable of seeing its precious faith in the
perspective of a distant futurity. Some
points of emphasis are likely to be far too
great and others perhaps too feeble. As the
movement expands and its implications come
into full view, as the social effects stand
clearly revealed, and as the forces of history
test and winnow it its truth and its weaknesses
are unveiled. The truths become known for
what they really are. They are no longer the
faith of a mere remnant ; they are the
possession of the whole race.
XIV
THE MISSION AND SERVICE OF A
REMNANT
ONE of the greatest of all our practical
problems of life is that concerned with our
obligation to organised society and to its
historical institutions. The most impressive
forms of organised society that have called for
obligation from the individual during the
period of historical civilisation are the Church
and the State. The Family is of course an
over-individual group of fundamental im-
portance for the formation of personality and
for the social and moral life of the individual ;
but in its true nature and character it is an
organism rather than an organisation, the
relationship between the members being a
vital relationship, not one of law and external
authority. In ideal no doubt the same can be
said of Church and State. There are times
when neither is thought of as having external
authority but as being the conjunct and in-
clusive self into which the tiny individual life
is merged and fused as a co-operant member
in a vital organism. There is then no
problem of authority. Obedience is un-
calculating and unconscious. The question
155
156 THE REMNANT
of obligation is no more raised in that
situation than it is raised in the operations
of the organs of the living body.
That is, however, an ideal situation, while
under normal conditions the individual finds
himself viewing both Church and State as
vast organisations, external to him and yet
imposing certain duties upon him, proposing
certain unalterable principles or laws to which
he must conform, speaking with an authority
that is not to be mistaken, laying definite
obligations upon him and expecting from him
an undivided loyalty.
We can hardly overestimate the ethical
importance of these two formative forces
of the world, in their two spheres of influence.
Nobody can attain to the full stature of per-
sonality except in a society so organised that
both the authority of law and the authority of
truth make their obligations felt upon his
individual life. He must be a citizen of a
state with its historical ideals, its inherited
traditions, its forward-looking aspirations,
its insistence upon obedience to law, its
determination to exhibit the consequences
of wrong doing. Hardly less essential for
the development of full personality is member-
ship in an organised body devoted to the
transmission of the spiritual experience of the
past, to the formulation of ideals of life and
to the interpretation of truth.
We may call the two great formative and
stabilising forces by different names and we
MISSION AND SERVICE 157
shall expect that they will become embodied
in varying forms in different epochs of history,
but in some form or other both influences
are necessary for rich, rightly fashioned
personality. The individual must take over
into his own self-consciousness the gains of
past ages. He must gather up through his
relationships the lessons of history. He
must overcome his erratic traits and tenden-
cies by learning submission to larger and wiser
groups. He must cease to be self-willed and
stubborn. He must discover the dangers of
being, what the Greeks called, an " idiot "
(idiotes), a private, peculiar, isolated, un-
organised individual, at the mercy of his own
particular seemings and desires. Diogenes,
that enfant terrible of Grecian society, is a
typical " idiot " of this unformed and un-
civilised sort. He is, on his own assumption,
the only " man " existing. No lantern is
luminous enough to reveal in the world around
him any person whom he can recognise as a
" man," all except himself being " spoiled "
by conformity to social conditions and
requirements !
Here, then, in the deep and essential
relationships of social, conjunct, organic life,
our sense of obligation is born. It reaches its
most august character in affairs which concern
the Family, State, and the Church, i.e. in
the appeal of love, of law and righteousness,
and of truth. These visible institutions in
each case are the temporary organs or instru-
158 THE REMNANT
ments of invisible and eternal realities to
which we can hardly rise without the help of
the visible interpretation. Our momentous
problem, as I said in the opening of this
chapter, is where to draw the boundary and
limits of obligation to the visible institutions
which serve us in a multitude of ways towards
the formation and preservation of all that
constitutes our higher life. The individual
possesses very little indeed which he has not
" received " from the over-individual groups
and bodies that have ministered to him from
the day of his arrival here as a new " unit."
He is no " self-made " person. He owes
vast debts, which he cannot hope to pay, to
visible and invisible bearers of light and love
and truth. Every institution which assists
him to make his gradual advances rests for
its life and power upon the heroic deeds and
efforts and sacrifices of men and women who
out of a distant past transmitted this precious
gift to him as well as upon the brave and loyal
contributions of the present generation that
was toiling for him when he arrived.
Not lightly certainly can he "go back on "
all that has been done for him without him,
as the theologians put it. He begins life
under heavy obligations. Unborn gener-
ations, too, will be profoundly affected by the
way in which he passes on the torch, by the
way in which he treats the immense accumu-
lation of gains that have fallen upon him
without any cost to him. Obligation is one of
MISSION AND SERVICE 159
the weightiest words in human language.
Not to feel its deep call, not to respond to its
summons, is not to be in any proper sense a
person. But that must not mean that the
individual is bound under all circum-
stances to do what the Church and the State
and the other institutions of society tell him
to do. He is not, and he must not be con-
sidered, a mere tool of the social organi-
sations. He is not a cog in a vast mechanism,
compelled to move to fit the general grind of
the immense machine. He is a person, with
a certain sphere of " power on his own act,"
with an area of initiative within himself,
with a unique destiny to achieve and his own
peculiar ends of goodness to express. He
cannot merely tick off and register the
verdicts of society. He cannot serve as a
mere instrument to maintain and record the
status quo which others before him have
secured. He has his own creative work to
do and he has his spiritual additions to
make to the score of truth and life. He
must, above everything else and as a sacred
duty, insist upon his personal freedom as a
man, whom God has made in His own image
and likeness. When the question of obli-
gation is deeply considered it always appears
that the individual owes a supreme, an
unescapable obligation to the ideals which
have come to birth in his own soul and to
those visions of advance which seem to him
to come from his inward relationship with
160 THE REMNANT
infinite and eternal reality. There are occa-
sions when an individual can serve society best
and most fittingly, not by yielding to its
conventions nor to its historic customs and
estimates nor to its requirements of what is
necessary for the preservation of the status
quo, but by standing out under the com-
pulsion of some vision of advance in the
championship of an ideal which ought to
prevail but does not yet prevail. If there is
vitality to this vision of advance and if it is
grounded in eternal reality, it will awaken a
response in the souls of others and gather a
group of loyal supporters, and thus produce
a remnant. We must not say perhaps that
the vision of one lone individual who just
" cries in the wilderness " and gets no fol-
lowers, is a misguided and abortive vision,
pointing towards a blind alley. But there
are at least grounds for " suspecting " the
validity of a cause which does not kindle
response in any soul except that of the
pioneer of it. I have discussed already in the
previous chapter the function of the remnant
in testing out the social valuation of a vision
or an ideal, and we may safely neglect any
" prophesying " which does not succeed in
rallying and organising any social group of
champions. That would be a case, if there
ever is one, of a " truth," if it turned out
to be true, proclaimed " ahead of its time."
When on the other hand, a vision of advance
does get its group of apostles and does organ-
MISSION AND SERVICE 161
ise a remnant it would seem clear that the
highest call of obligation in the souls of those
who constitute the dedicated group must
be to the proclamation and realisation of the
vision or the ideal that points forward to a
goal beyond the previous achievements of
society even though society itself in the form
of its organised institutions endeavours to
block and prevent the advance. This is the
well-known situation which raises what has
been called " a rivalry of loyalties/' when
there is almost sure to be a difference of judg-
ment in respect to the line where the highest
obligation lies. Many are ready to follow
the vision until it leads into conflict
with the existing organised institutions
and involves a refusal to obey the authority
of the body which voices the will of the
majority.
It is here that the hardest choice of life
lies, and no one on the outside can ever pro-
pose any fixed rule by which a given indi-
vidual must act in a given case. All one can
say is that it may be right, and often has been,
and it may be wise, and often has been,
in cases of rivalry of loyalties, to stand by the
vision of advance and go with the remnant.
It may in the long run serve society far better,
than unquestioning obedience to its con-
servative authority would have served it.
Sometimes nothing can count so much as a
practical exhibition of utter fidelity to what
ought to be. It is generally a poor excuse for
162 THE REMNANT
action along the line of least resistance to
say in a crisis that ideal conditions do not
exist yet, the Kingdom of God has not come,
the world is on a lower level of practice and
method and therefore we must surrender
to the demands of its old ways and customs
and requirements. It is just that course
which forever postpones the kingdom of the
ideal and banishes it to some other world,
off somewhere in the valley of Avilion.
It is the real mission and service of the
remnant to go forward with a venture of faith
and to put its vision of advance, its ideals of
what ought to be, into practice here and now.
It often means moving along the line of
greatest resistance. It involves generally a
transvaluation of values. It carries with it
under most circumstances a collision with old
standards and authorities. And it is likely
to entail much suffering. It is a path which
goes over Golgotha and it will sort out and
leave behind those who have an eye to ease and
and quick " success." But it is a way on the
whole of promoting truth, of advancing the
highest interests of humanity, and of carry-
ing forward the divine work of creation of
making man and of bringing in the true social
order. Its way, however, must be one of
modesty, humility and meekness not of
boasting and violence. Its way does not
admit of claims to infallibility or of bold
assertion that no other course is right. Its
way is the way of love, the way of light, the
MISSION AND SERVICE 163
way of truth and the way of life. It takes
its kingdom by persuasion, not by force, and
it triumphs by convicting the heart, con-
vincing the mind and moving the will, not
by fulminating its " authority." It wins,
if it wins at all, because it discovers and
champions what fits the deepest nature of
man's essential life and finally proves it to be
so in the sphere of practice and of moral
effects.
HEAO-EY S'31., ASMrOtO, KENT. * OCYONRHim
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