The untried door; an attempt to discover the mind of Jesus for to-day

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UNTRIED DOOR

RICHARD ROBERTS

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Roberts, Richard, 1874-1945

The untried door

THE UNTRIED DOOR

Hastf«H

THE

UNTRIED DOOR

An Attempt to Discover the Mind
OF Jesus for To-day

BY /

RICHARD llOBERTS ^

*/ am the door; by me if any man enter in, he shall be
saved, and shall go in and go out, and shall find pasture."

NEW YORK

THE WOMANS PRESS
1921

Copyright, 1921, by

Thb National Board of the Yoxtng Womens Christian Associations

or the United States of America

New York

Press of

J. J. Little & Ives Co.

New York

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED

(as it should be)

TO

A. C. R.

WHOSE SHAEE IN WHATEVER

GOOD IT CONTAINS IS

THE BETTER HALF

PREFACE

rriHIS hook is meant to he of the nature of a
m challenge. We are heing told hy many voices
that the only hope of the world lies in following
Jesus. But we are not told with any explicitness what
"following Jesus'' means. Here an endeavor is made
to discover the mind of Jesus and to see how far it
shows us a way out of the intolerahle confusion into
which life has fallen.

The hook does not pretend to cover all the ground
except in hroad outline; least of all does it pretend
to he a theological interpretation of Jesus and his
work in the world. Its purpose is a much simpler one.
It tries to ask what Jesus actually thought and whether
his thought has real applicahility to the life of to-day.
Had he a coherent and self -consistent philosophy of
life; and if so can we translate it into life? It serves
no purpose to call him Lord, if we do not or cannot
do the things he com^manded.

An inquiry of this kind has little value except it he
frank and unafraid. The writer has tried to read the
Gospels ''with unveiled face" and has tried to speak
the truth as he has seen it. It is probable that the
positions he has reached may seem to some unduly
timid and to others undidy radical. But we shall iind

vii

PREFACE

the truth only by bringing what we see to the test of
discussion. The Womans Press has been moved to
publish it by its conviction that it owes it to the king-
dom of God and to the future to give currency to a pre-
sumably honest interpretation of the mind of Jesus in
the hope that it may provoke discussion and that in
a fellowship of thought we may discover the truth that
shall make us free.

It will be observed that in the following pages little
appeal is made to the Fourth Gospel. The writer be-
lieves that in the Fourth Gospel historical accuracy has
been subordhmted to the expository intention of its
author. It is an interpretation rather than a chronicle.
It is not for this less valuable a part of the Christian
inheritance; for it is as needfid for our understanding
of the Gospel that we shoidd have interpretation as
it is that we should have history. The Synoptic Gospels
the writer regards as giving us adequate and trust-
worthy material for a true estimate of the life and
mind of Jesus. They are no doubt colored to some
extent by the influences and tendencies of the time at
which they were written; and a comparative study re-
veals the introduction into the text of a certain amount
of material which seems not to be consistent with the
general drift of the story. The writer has endeavored
to exercise his best judgment in these matters; and
if at any point he has felt uncertainty, he has frankly
admitted it.

The substance of Chapters III, IV, V {first part)
viii

PREFACE

and VI constituted the material of a course of lectures
given on the Earl Foundation, in connection with the
Pacific School of Religion, at Berkeley, California, in

November ip20.

RICHARD ROBERTS

Postscript. — In reading over the proofs of this
volume, it has appeared to me that the material might
have been arranged somewhat differently with perhaps
a little gain in coherency of treatment. In this re-
arrangement, the first part of Chapter V would im^
mediately follow Chapter II, closing with a sharper
definition of Jesus' principle of criticism. This prin-
ciple, as I see it, is two-fold. It asks concerning an
institution, a doctrine, or a course of conduct two
questions: Does it make for the increase of life?
Does it make for the unity of life? Then with very
slight change. Chapter III could be taken as expound-
ing the application of the first part of this criterion;
and Chapter IV as expounding the second part.

IX

CONTENTS

PAGE

Preface vii

By Way of Prologue: "He could not he hid." i

CHAPTER

I. The World as Jesus Saw It 8

Top-dogs and Under-dogs — Roman and Jew
—The Source of the Trouble— The Moral
Revolution — The Rule of God — The Jew
and the World.

II. The Roots of the New Life 24

The Quickening of Hope — The Nature of
the New Life — Jesus' Attitude to the
World— The Curse of Externality— The
Child-mind — Prayer — Meditation — The
Mountain Top and the Valley.

III. Life and Things 42

Life and Things — The Principle of Inward-
ness— Work and Business — Humanism —
Property — The State — Politics — Legalism
— Dogma — The World Re-valued — The
Holy Family.

IV. Right and Wrong . 82

The Moral Order — Offences and Forgiveness
— Love and Holiness — The Popular Idea
of Justice — Jesus' Doctrine of Right — The
Art of Fellowship — The Nemesis of Pride
— The New Sense of Collective Responsi-

xi

CONTENTS

JAPTER PAGE

bility — The Law of the Moral Average —
"Judge Not" — Figs and Thistles — Nations
and Classes — The Ultimate Society.

V. Yesterday and To-morrow 120

"Ancient Good" — Radicals, Liberals, Con-
servatives— The Attitude of Jesus — The
Meaning of History — Jesus' Appeal to
History — The Great Omission — "The End
of the Age" — The Apocalyptic Hope — Its
Final Meaning — Progress.

VL The Son of Man 141

Jesus' Self-knowledge — Propaganda — Per-
sonal Contacts — Public Work — The First
Crisis — The Galilean Ministry and Its
Abandonment — The Birth of the New So-
ciety— Carrying the Challenge to Jerusalem
— The Cross and the Moral Tragedy of the
World — The Everlasting Mercy.

By Way of Epilogue: The Wingless Victory 165

Xlt

THE UNTRIED DOOR

THE UNTRIED DOOR

BY WAY OF PROLOGUE
"He could not he hid.''

7i "YO US avons cJmsse ce J esus-Ch/rist , said a French
/ V politician in the days — not so long ago — when the
French Senate was disestablishing the Roman
Catholic Church in France, doing the right thing for the
wrong reason. "We have driven out this Jesus Christ,"
said he, as others had said much the same thing often
before. But it never happens; or if it does, it is never
for long. If you drive him away from this place to-
day, you are apt to hear about him in some other place
tomorrow. Round about the time when the French
politicians were — or supposed they were — exiling him
from France, the British and Foreign Bible Society re-
ported, I remember, that the Gospel of Mark had been
translated into the Chinook jargon. You may suppress
him, crucify him, bury him in your Jerusalem, but you
will hear of him by and by in some distant Galilee where
there are eager minds and simple hearts ready to receive
him. "He could not be hid.'* The other day I read in
a periodical a passage quoted from a letter written by
Mr, Bernard Shaw to another writer : "How do you ex-

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

plain that you and George Moore and I are now occu-
pying ourselves with Jesus?" And Mr. Shaw has told
us (in the preface to "Androcles and the Lion") that
he sees no way out of the world's misery except "that
which would have been found by Christ's will if he had
undertaken the work of a modern practical statesman."
Mr. Bertrand Russell has told us that if men had the
courage to live the life that is written of in the Gospels,
the world of our dreams would come of itself, and we
should not need to trouble ourselves about political and
economic changes. There are others who are saying the
same thing. Did not the Prime Ministers of the Brit-
ish Empire write a letter the other day to the people of
the Empire saying that the peace and happiness of man-
kind depends upon a deep and sincere Christian prac-
tice? It looks indeed as though Jesus were coming
back.

There can be no doubt about the revived interest in
him, though it is by no means sure that those who have,
as it were, newly discovered him understand what it is
they have discovered. Some for instance appear to sup-
pose that the Gospels are the source of the conventions
of Anglo-American middle-class piety and that these to-
gether with a little mild encouragement to goodwill and
mutual service constitute the spirit of Jesus. But
whether Jesus is understood or not, it is certain that he
is more and more talked about. His name crops up in
all sorts of unexpected places. Statesmen have taken
to alluding to him; journalists quote him; politicians re-
fer to him. That means something, surely. And does
it not mean that the old way of running the world has

2

THE UNTRIED DOOR

proved itself bankrupt, that the professionals of politics
and statecraft have grown sceptical of the virtue of
their machinery? And well, indeed, they might. Mark
Twain once said that he would like to meet the devil,
for, said he, "a person who has for untold centuries
maintained his imposing position of spiritual head of
four-fifths of the human race, and political head of the
whole of it must be granted the possession of executive
abilities of the highest order/' Allow for the Twain
touch, and then dispute, if you can, the essential truth
of the saying. Thomas Carlyle after vainly trying to
convince Emerson of the personality of the devil, is
said to have taken him, as a last resort, to a sitting of
the British House of Commons. This is not to say that
there have not been great and good men concerned in
the conduct of public affairs from the beginning of time;
but clearly there is something deeply wrong somewhere.
You need only look on the world as it is to-day, this wild
inferno of greed, hunger, passion, fear and death, this
sorrowful harvest of blood and fire and shame, to know
what manner of things we and our fathers have sown.
And out of this grim hole, who shall dig us? Our
politicians, our statesmen? But can they who digged
the hole, by the same methods dig us out of it? I trow
not. They are far more likely to bury us deeper in it,
as they are doing to-day. And what is more, they are
beginning to see it. They know in their hearts that the
old game of power is up and that the world must find
some other way. That is why some of them are turning
preacher.

Perhaps (God send it!) this new interest in Jesus is

3

THE UNTRIED DOOR

the shadow cast by the coming event. Can it mean
that he is coming back? But if he come, he will come
not as a super-politician to rule us with a rod of iron,
to discipline us to our senses, but to our hearts and lives
to win us back to simplicity and lowliness, to help us
build our house of life with stones of love and truth
and beauty. The old policies are working themselves
out in this chaotic and heaving aftermath of war; the
old order passeth before our eyes. The confused noises
of to-day are its death-rattle ; revolutions, strikes, famine,
disease, — these things are the death-sweat upon its face.
The old order is dying in this night of delirium and
despair. And then . . . ? O God, what then? Must
it be the old, old story of building on rotten foundations,
of labor laden with fated mortality, the same old round
on a larger scale sowing a still vaster harvest of death?
Must it be so? Or is there another way? We are at
last beginning to see it dimly, afar oif. It is slowly
dawning on us, but ah! so slowly, that it might be well
to try the way of Jesus.

I once heard a friend tell this reminiscence of his
boyhood. He lived in a quiet village on a river-side,
half girdled with hills, far from the madding crowd.
But once a year a fair was held in the village ; and early
in the day the horses and cattle and sheep were driven
in from the surrounding country-side. And with them,
came pedlars and hucksters with strange wares, gipsies
and tinkers, horse-dealers and cheap jacks — a motley,

4

THE UNTRIED DOOR

noisy crew. And along came the showmen with their
circuses, their Aimt Sallies and their merry-go-rounds.
While the day was yet young, the quiet old-world vil-
lage had been turned into a drunken, roaring hell. The
narrow, cobbled streets were strewn with the untidy,
filthy litter that a fair always brings with it, and the
beauty was turned into ashes. But as the day wore on
to evening, the trafficking and the bargaining drew to
an end, and the invaders began to pack up their traps
and leave. The showmen pulled down their tents, and
the pedlars put up their wares and began to drift away.
The noise slowly died down; the village emptied itself
of the unaccustomed riffraff that had invaded it. By
sundown, the whole mob was going or gone, — and the
villagers stood in their street and watched them go,
one after another . . . until the last caravan of the last
showman dropped out of sight over the bend of the hill;
and the village returned to its own peace.

So, said my friend, the true world of life has been
invaded by a show, a Vanity Fair that has turned its
peace into tumult, its beauty into squalor, its joy into
pain. A false and illusory doctrine has imposed itself
on the truth of life, and we are living in a world of un-
reality and mistaking it for the real. There is the peep-
show of politics, with its armies of little men, ignorant,
thoughtless, dull, making tremendous gestures and play-
ing with issues of life and death ; there is the great show
of statecraft, with "Big Fours" or "Big Fives" sitting
around a green table prescribing the destinies of nations,
to suit their formulae or their fears; the tragic show of

5

THE UNTRIED DOOR

war, with its madness and bloodlust and hate and its
strange splendid heroisms, — and its still more tragic
aftermath, —

The many men, so beautiful !

And they all dead did He:

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I

and you and all of us who were not worthy of so great
devotion; the godless show of empire with its tawdry
trappings and pomps and boastings, with its oppressions
and tyrannies and its contempt of subject peoples; the
ghastly show of commercialised pleasure with its har-
lotry, its drinking-hells, its gambling-dens and its cor-
ruption of art ; the frenzied show of money-getting with
its thousand perversions of mind and heart, the mutual
exploitation, the scalp-hunting, the striking, the heresy-
hunting ... oh, but what a mad, mad world it is!

But this carnival of all the follies will work itself
out, exhausting itself by its own excess; and the dance
of death will begin to pall and lose its zest. The tumult
will die away, and the showmen will find that the hour
has come to pack up their traps and go. . . . One by
one they will vanish from the landscape ; and not we, but
perhaps our children's children will see the last caravan
of the last showman disappear in the distance over the
bend of the hill . . . and life will be left to its appointed
peace. And there will be left with us perchance an
Isaiah to speak to us of God, and a Francis to teach us
simplicity and purity of heart, and a Lincoln to keep
us in the ways of sanity, — yes, and when the pall of

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illusion is wholly lifted, JESUS, where (had we but
known it) he has always been, standing in the midst.

But though it be a far cry to this last act in the drama
of the world, it need be no far cry to its last act in
your spirit. The shadow of the City of Destruction
with its carnival of tragic folly is upon our souls: the
passing show with its "magic shadow-shapes that come
and go," Vanity Fair with its mad, bad, sad illusions, —
well, but we may quit them whensoever we will. We
may bid the tumult and the shouting die; we may bid
the showmen 2.nd the cheap] acks pack up their wares
and go their way. And at our bidding they will go, one
after another . . . until the last wagon of the show van-
ishes in the cool of the evening over the crest of the hill.
Then you open your eyes and find yourself in Galilee,
that country of the mind whither the Lord of Life has
gone before you and is waiting for you, to give you life
and health and peace. And you will know that all the
rest is illusion and delirium, that to be with Jesus in
Galilee is alone reality and life. When you have turned
your back on the City of Death, when its vain dreams
are gone up in smoke, its noisy pretensions and its hollow
little triumphs but a stack of pitiful dust, then life in
all its splendor and wonder dawns and calls you — with
Jesus the glory in the midst of it.

And this is, I think, the beginning of what Jesus
meant by the Kingdom of God.

CHAPTER ONE

THE WORLD AS JESUS SAW IT

(Mt 9*35-36; 10:5-7; Mk. 4:12-17; Lk. 4:42-44)*

'When he beheld the multitudes, he was moved with
compassion for them, because they were distressed
and scattered as sheep having no shepherd."

''And other sheep I have, which are not of this
fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my
voice."

THE outward conditions of life in the society into
which Jesus was born have been so often de-
scribed that we do not need to rehearse them
in detail here. At bottom, however, the life of Pales-
tine, as Jesus saw it, was not essentially different from
the common life of human society in every age and
in every land. It was not an industrial society as we
understand the term. It was not vexed with what we

*A reading of the passages indicated at the beginning of
each chapter will furnish the Scriptural background of the en-
suing discussion.

8

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call capitalism. But it was a competitive society; and
the competitive system had wrought in it its character-
istic result.

To state it very summarily, this result is the divi-
sion of society into two broad classes. Disraeli once
spoke of the "two nations" that inhabited England, —
the ruling classes and the rest. But every known so-
ciety has had its ''two nations." "The poor," said
Mt. 26:11 Jesus, "yc have always with you"; and
with the poor, their masters. In human society, you
always have the top-dog and the under-dog. On one
hand, tyrannies, feudalisms, oligarchies, plutocracies;
on the other, chattel slavery, serfdom, villenage,
"wagery," — this schism has been the ancient curse of
our race.

In Palestine, there was a double cleavage. Neither
was economic as the great modern cleavage is, though
both had definite economic consequences. For both
made heavy inroads upon the none too abundant re-
sources of the peasantry. The first cleavage was asso-
ciated with religion. There a privileged class lorded
it over the souls of men, caring little for the common
folk save only as they provided a pedestal for their
own eminence and a source of income for the temple
and its officers. But this particular cleavage was a
purely domestic affair; and the burden that it imposed
provoked no such resentment as did the foreign political
yoke which the people were compelled to bear. The
Jews were a subject people; and being a proud people,

9

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with a long and notable history, they hated their
Roman masters with an unrelenting bitterness.* And
to bitterness was added despair ; for the Roman power
seemed unassailable. Again and again the Jews had
tried to throw off this alien yoke, but always with the
same disastrous result. The yoke was fastened on
more firmly than ever. Their own great men, who in
their hearts desired to see the overthrow of the Roman
power, yet cared too much for their own security and
position to take any of the risks involved in the task
of emancipation. t No wonder the multitudes seemed
to Jesus to be leaderless and disorganised. And in this
tragedy, he found the problem of his life.

"He asked them, What were ye reasoning in the
way? But they held their peace: for they had dis-
puted with one another in the way, who was the great-

Just as it appears to many people to-day that the only
remedy for our social confusion is the speedy destruc-

* Historically, it would appear that the Jews had less to com-
plain of their imperial masters than some other subject nations
have had. By and large, the Roman was a tolerant ruler ; and
he was, as a rule, unusually tolerant in his dealings with the
Jews. But this did not alter the -fact that he was an alien in-
vader ; and the misbehaviour of some of his agents — political
and fiscal — did not help to reconcile the Jew to his dominion.

t The Herods, however, consistently maintained a family
tradition of apparently genuine loyalty to the Empire.

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

tion of the capitalist system, so it seemed to many in
Jesus' day that the plain way out of the national dis-
tress was the swift and violent overthrow of the Roman
power. Now and again, some patriotic soul would
raise the standard of revolt in the hill-country, and
many would rally to it in the desperate hope of driving
the oppressive foreigner out of the land. But there
was a strategic reason why the Romans would not
countenance an independent Palestine, and they sup-
pressed these risings with vigour and dispatch.* Jesus
from the first seems to have perceived the futility of
the policy of his fellow-countrymen, and he saw that
the real trouble was too deep-seated to be disposed of
merely by substituting one political system for an-
other. When he traced the trouble to its roots, he saw
that it was a distemper from which the Jew suffered
no less than the Roman. So inveterate was this dis-
order that it was continually putting out its head even
among Jesus' closest friends. It was the source of
the Pharisees' pride ; it was the foundation upon which
the imperial pride of Rome was reared. This radical

* It might not be amiss to cite a modern parallel by way of
illustration. It is a "strategic" reason that stands in the way
of British recognition of Irish independence. The Jews had
also their Sinn Fein party — the Zealots — though it is prob-
able that they were not known by that name in the lifetime
of Jesus. The description of Simon in the Gospels as "the
Zealot" was probably due to his association with some party
that had affinities with and may have been a precursor of the
Zealots who according to Josephus were not known by that
name before 66 A. D. On the Zealots see Foakes Jackson and
Kirsopp Lake, "The Beginnings of Christianity," Vol. i. Ap-
pendix I, p. 421.

II

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disorder was that self-love which was a denial of the
law that bade men love God and their neighbours.
The impulse of self-love sets the strong man on the
throne and the weak man under his feet. Not that
the weak man has any less self-love, but having less
capacity, in the scramble for the prizes of self-love,
he goes under and the strong man rides him.

It is hard to say which of these two conditions is
the more demoralising. The top-dog becomes hardened
and brutalised ; the under-dog is crushed and dehuman-
ised. The tyrant grows more tyrannous, the serf more
servile. The despot tightens the bands of coercion,
the helot counters it with cunning. Power, pride, ar-
rogance breed a moral insensibility hardly curable ; op-
pression and fear lead to habits of deceit and the meaner
tactics of self-preservation. It is a historical com-
monplace that long continued oppression breaks the
moral backbone of a class or a people; and the disin-
herited reproduce among themselves the predatory
habits of the privileged. "One could not be deaf or
blind," says Lord Morley in his Reminiscences, "to
the obvious fact that the bitterest complaints on the
lips of the Irish tenants were constantly found not
to be directed against the landlord, but either against
his father for dividing the farm, or his brother for
marrying, or his neighbour for bidding against him.
The efforts of the League (the Irish Land League)
have been as much directed against the covetousness
of tenants in face of one another as against the covet-

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ousness of landlords and agents." One may hear echoes
of a like social disintegration in the Gospels.

Lord Morley, in another place, speaks of "that hor-
rid burden and impediment upon the soul which the
Churches call Sin, and which by whatever name you
call it, is a real catastrophe in the moral nature of
man." The theologian may call it sin, but the name
is immaterial. The thing itself is simply and only
self-love. And from this our whole human tragedy
springs. "When," says the Theologia Germanica, an
invaluable little book of devotion which has come down
to us from the Middle Ages, "the creature claimeth for
its own anything good such as Substance, Knowledge,
Life, Power, and in short, everything that we should
call good, as if it were that or possessed that ... as
often as this cometh to pass, the creature goeth astray.
What did the Devil do else, or what was his going
astray but that he claimed for himself to be also some-
what and would have it that somewhat was his and
something was due to him? This setting up of a claim,
and his I and Me and Mine, these were his going
astray and his Fall. And so it is to this day." There
as simply as possible is the central mystery of sin.
It is unsocial or anti-social conduct ; but whatever is
anti-social is anti-social toward God no less than to-
ward man. Sin is self-assertion as against both God
and man. It is at once a wronging of man and re-
bellion against God.

And because this self-love is in the saddle, it pro-

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duces a world of strife. "Sin being a principle of
egoism and isolation," said tliat great French priest
and lover of freedom, Lamennais, "it forces each to
lose himself in his own individuality. The insatiable
Ego breathes in all that lies around it ; it swells itself,
develops, grows steadily and absorbs all that is weaker
into it . . . and it can be stopped in its progress only
by another tyrant equal to it or superior to it. There
is a struggle, bloody, pitiless; and the hideous society
which is composed of these things is but the seething
mass of hungry combatants who come together only
to devour one another. . . . This is the state of which
sin has made us members."

Here is a social diagnosis which is true of all time,
true of the time of Jesus as of ours. When Newman
looked out upon the world, he saw (as he says in his
Apologia pro Vita Stia) "a heart-piercing, reason-be-
wildering spectacle." Had he been living today, one
wonders what language he would have used to describe
the world upon which we are looking. The essential
problem of man has never changed. It is to find a
remedy for his self-love.

3

''Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

It cannot be too clearly understood in these days
when so much talk about revolution is abroad, and

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Jesus is sometimes claimed as a proletarian leader,
that there is nothing in his story — whether word or
deed — that can be quoted in support of what is popu-
larly called revolution. He saw that even if the Romans
could be driven out, it would only leave the petty
princes, the courtiers and the ecclesiastics a freer hand.
And it almost seems as though Jesus disliked the
Romans less than he disliked the native grandees. Cer-
tainly we have no record of his having spoken a harsh
word concerning the Romans, while his language about
the Pharisees never lacks vigour; and that profligate
Luie 13:32 princcHng, the Herod of his day, he called
a fox. A successful revolution against the Romans
would not remove the leprosy that was eating up so-
ciety ; it would only redistribute it. Nevertheless Jesus
saw that nothing short of a revolution was called for
by the state of the case. But the revolution that he
saw necessary would move on a deeper level and would
deal with the disease itself and not with its symptoms.
And it was such a revolution that he preached.

We have heard latterly a good deal about the need
of a change of heart as the first condition of a "new
w^orld." It is true that few people have paid serious
heed to w^hat they have heard, supposing that, after
all, political schemes, economic changes and the like are
much shorter roads to that new world of justice and
peace towards which men's eyes looked so eagerly dur-
ing the Great War. But to anyone that looks out on
this world of men and things with any measure of

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moral insight, it should be plain beyond need of proof
that we shall have no manner of new world with-
out a moral revolution, which is another way of speak-
ing of a change of heart. This was precisely what
Jesus believed in his own day; and the first thing
he did in his public ministry was to call for such a
moral revolution. His first word was Repent.

When we speak of repentance we are commonly
apt to think of it as penitence. Penitence is sorrow
for sin, but repentance means turning away from sin.
Penitence is an emotion, repentance is an act of will.
And while it is true that there can be no repentance
without a measure of penitence, yet it is the fact that
the deepest penitence is that which follows repentance.
Literally the word as it is used in the Gospels means
a "change of mind,'* but its plain meaning upon the
lips of Jesus is the will to live a different kind of
life. When Jesus said, Repent, he meant, Turn around,
and it was a turning away from that self-love which
set a man in opposition both to God and to his neigh-
bour. It was a single act with a double reaction. It
would set a man right with God and with his fellow,
not set him right with one by setting him right w^ith
the other, but set him right with both at one stroke
by giving him a change of heart.

But Jesus did not stop at that point. Repentance
is after all a negative thing, and men are too apt to
be content with negative achievement. Again and
again in history men have supposed that if they could

i6

THE UNTRIED DOOR

break down some exclusive privilege or remove some
public evil, the golden age would follow as a matter
of course. But it has never done so; on the con-
trary, it has often opened the door to greater evils.
The French Revolution opened the door to Napoleon
and then to the untempered competition of our modern
industrial civilisation. Jesus, in a vivid little parable,
warns us against merely negative reformations. **The
unclean spirit, when he is gone out of the man, pass-
eth through waterless places, seeking rest and findeth
it not. Then he saith, T will return unto my house
Mt. 12:43-45 whence I came out,' and when he is come
he findeth it empty, swept and garnished. Then goeth
he and taketh seven other spirits more evil than him-
self; and they enter in and dwell there." The great
tragedy of revolution is that the destructive impulse
is so rarely accompanied by a definite alternative to the
past. If the repentance was not to prove futile and
pointless there must go with it a new rule and plan
of life.

''My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom
were of this world, then would my servants iight . . .
hut now is my kingdom not from hence."

"Repent," said Jesus, "for the kingdom of heaven
is at hand." It was a bold thing on Jesus' part to take

17

THE UNTRIED DOOR

this word, "the kingdom of heaven" or, as some
scholars have translated it, the ''realm of heaven" or
the ''rule of God" to describe that new rule and plan
of life to which he was calling his fellow-countrymen.
The idea was in common circulation; and the phrase
itself in some Aramaic equivalent was probably upon
the lips of the people at the time. But it would be a
very considerable error to suppose that Jesus gave to
it the same connotation as that of the popular use of
it. Indeed, it is one of the dangers of the critical study
of the Gospels that the inquiry into the contemporary
sources of the phrases and expressions which are to
be found in the body of Jesus' teaching tends to as-
sume overmuch that the previous and contemporary
signification of these terms fixes their meaning in
Jesus' use of them. It is one of the assumptions of
this present study, based upon a careful examination
of the point, that Jesus, while he adopted for his own
purposes certain words and phrases which were cur-
rent in his time and which possessed a certain tech-
nical meaning in the contemporary use, nevertheless
added so much to them or so changed the emphasis in
them that they became in his hands virtually new terms ;
and their ultimate meaning must be found not in their
history but in a comparative study of Jesus' use of
them. One such transfigured term is the "kingdom of
heaven" or "the kingdom of God."

When Jesus used this term, his hearers were un-
doubtedly familiar with it. But the image it evoked

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in their minds was not that which Jesus had in his
mind. For them, the "kingdom" was chiefly a poHtical
thing, an external order of Hfe in which they would
be free and happy. As we have seen, these people
were very unhappy and not at all free. For the most
part they laid their troubles down to the Roman oc-
cupation. And they were looking forward to a "good
time'* in which their troubles would be ended. They
did not all look for it to come in the same way. Their
Sinn Feiners, who afterwards came to be known as
the Zealots, believed that the only way to hasten the
good time was through the violent overthrow of the
Roman power. But it would appear that the people
as a whole despaired of its coming by any human
agency. They had come to believe that one of these
days God would take the matter in hand himself,
sweep the Romans into the sea and establish his people
in a proud independence. But however it came, the one
thing they were all looking for was to see the last of
the Romans, and then they were all going to live
happily ever afterwards.

But the kingdom which Jesus preached to them
was not of that order. This good time that you are
expecting, he seems to have said to them, this "rule
of God" of which you speak so much and which you
understand so little, is at hand, here by you and round
about you; and you can have it whensoever you will.
It is not something that is waiting for you round the
corner when the Romans have packed their traps and

19

THE UNTRIED DOOR

gone home, not something that is going to break out
of the blue, to-morrow or some other day. The king-
dom of God is at hand, among you, even in you. Rise
to your feet and possess it.*

Let it not be supposed however that the kingdom
was a mere gospel of consolation, a sort of refuge
from the harsh demands of life, an anodyne for the
contemporary distress. Jesus was not offering to men
a plan for making life endurable under the hardships
that they suffered. He was deliberately calling men
to a way of life which would presently undermine the
existing political and ecclesiastical order. It might
on the face of it seem a long and tedious way of ac-
complishing that end; and we can well imagine that
the zealot would be impatient with the impracticability
of it. But Jesus saw that violence, whatever promise
of swift redress it might appear to contain, was no
solution for what was after all a moral problem. We
heard a little time ago in connection with a certain
labor dispute, of a policy of "boring from within," and
it was this, in a deeper and more subtle sense, that

* There are passages in the Gospels in which the kingdom
is spoken of as something in the future. But this involves
no real difficulty; the future kingdom is the perfect consum-
mation of the kingdom which is at present realised only in
part. A question of more difficulty is whether the Gospels
identify the future kingdom with the "world (or the age)
to come" or with the kingdom of the expected Messiah. This
is however chiefly a problem for the critic ; what is of mo-
ment to us is to work out the implications for ourselves of
<he undoubted spiritual and inward content which was Jesus'
ixindamental thought concerning the kingdom.

20

THE UNTRIED DOOR

Jesus was bent on doing. He knew that his business
lay at a deeper level than that of the politician or the
rebel, whether in church or state. He was seeking to
evoke a new life which would function independently
of the existing institutions and would destroy them
by making them functionless. In the parable of the
Mt. 9:17 wine-skins he pleads that the old wine-skins

be left undamaged. The new task was that of making
a new vintage and new wine-skins for it. In the process
of time the old wine w^ould settle on its lees, and the
old wine-skins would be discarded for want of use.
So Jesus saw the political and ecclesiastical institutions
of his time dying of inanition because the real life
of the people had come to function outside of them,
and had created its own institutions for its own needs.

If, so far, this account of the matter makes Jesus
seem too preoccupied with a merely local and national
situation, there is a twofold answer.

First, Jesus saw in the national problem an epitome
of the world problem. Israel was a parable of man-
kind. While it is true that he made but one brief
sojourn beyond the frontiers of Palestine, the outside
world had crossed those frontiers often enough to show
any person of insight what its real quality was. Jesus
knew perfectly well what went on in the great world
luke 22:25 without. *'The kings of the Gentiles lord
it over them and they that have authority over them
are called Benefactors." This last is a touch of irony,
not yet out of date, for we have lived to hear imperial-

21

THE UNTRIED DOOR

ists talk of bringing the ''blessings of civilisation" to
the ''lesser breeds without the law," covering exploita-
tion with a cloak of philanthropy. The kingdoms of
this world have their own kiiltur and their own tech-
nique; and Palestine had had long and bitter experience
of them. An intelligent Jew had no need of foreign
travel to know the way of the world, if he knew the
history of his own people. He might not perhaps per-
ceive that the way of the world was not materially
different from the way of his own people, but Jesus
with his clear sense of moral distinctions saw that
between the Jew and the Gentile, there was (as Paul
said later on) no difference. In dealing with the dis-
temper of his own people, he was dealing with the dis-
temper of the race.

Second, it is clear that Jesus, certainly in the early
stages of his ministry, and in all probability through-
out, based his hope of the redemption of the world
upon the redemption of his own people. They had had
a long and varied discipline which marked them out
for a peculiar function in the plan of God. Some
of the later Hebrew prophets saw a vision of Israel
invested with a role of spiritual leadership among the
nations of the earth, and Jesus, who had sprung from
the little remnant of "devout" folk who waited for the
"consolation of Israel," and who clung to the old
prophetic tradition, seems to have cherished the same
hope for his people. The first period of his public
ministry was spent in preaching in the synagogues of

22

THE UNTRIED DOOR

Galilee, in the hope that there might be a spiritual
renewal within the existing reHgious institutions. This
hope had to be abandoned; but apart from the period
which was spent in a journey with the disciples in the
country north of Palestine, the whole public ministry
of Jesus was exercised in relation to his own people,
even though it had ceased to move within the tradi-
tional institutions. From first to last, his plan was to
redeem Israel, in the faith that a redeemed Israel would
mean at last a redeemed world.

23

CHAPTER TWO
THE ROOTS OF THE NEW LIFE

(Matt. 5:1-9; 6:1-5, 9-13; 7-25-34; 17:1-8; Mk.
10:13-25)

"If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts
unto your children, how much more shall your Father
which is in heaven give good things to them that ask
him?"

BACK of everything in the mind of Jesus was a
simple unwavering confidence in the friendH-
ness of God. He was not the first to call God
a Father, but none ever called him by that name so
consistently or accepted the logic of the name with so
great completeness. In the Parable of the Average
Mt. 7:9-11 Father he frankly accepts human father-
hood as a faint image of the divine fatherhood; and
he habitually uses language which describes God as
being in an attitude of intimate fatherly solicitude
Mt.6:8 toward men. ''Your heavenly Father know-

24

THE UNTRIED DOOR

eth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him."
Mt. 10:29-31 ''Are not two sparrows sold for a farth-
ing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground
without your Father : but the very hairs of your head
are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; ye are of
more value than many sparrows." Men needed to
realise that God was on their side. It was not an easy
lesson for those people to learn. Between the states-
man and the churchman they lived a thin and precari-
ous life, and of the security of life that all men crave
for they had little or none. The Roman was no friend
of theirs. Neither was the Pharisee. How then
should God who seemed to allow these people to pros-
per be the peasant's friend ? Yet Jesus went on affirm-
ing that God was their father. He saw that the first
thing that his people needed was courage to live. They
were crushed between the upper and nether millstones,
they had lost heart, were ''distressed and scattered."
Despair had overtaken them; they lived their daily
lives on the basis of their fears, and their hope of the
Good Time did little to comfort them through their
miserable days. They were will-less and demoralised.
And for this condition there is but one antidote, —
faith, which is the will to face life on the assumption
that God is love.

One of the strangest criticisms that has been passed
on Christianity is that it puts a premium upon weak-
ness, and that its main gift to man is a grace that
enables him to endure evil conditions that he cannot

25

THE UNTRIED DOOR

remove or remedy. It is certainly true that Christian-
ity does bring such a gift to men, but it is a curious
and indeed an inexcusable misreading of the Gospels
to suppose that this is the supreme gift of Christ.
There are — and until mankind has achieved mastery
over nature and its own passions, there always will
be — times and seasons when our chief need is patience.
But the word ''faith" as used in the gospels implies
something much greater than a grace of submission.
It is rather a kind of invincible energy. It is not a
power by which life can be made tolerable under evil
conditions so much as a power to transform those
conditions. It is not a means by which one may thread
a precarious path through the wilderness of this world,
but a might whereby we may conquer the wilderness
and make it to blossom as the rose. "If ye have faith
Mt. 17:20 as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say
unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place;
and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible
unto you" — which is only a vivid way of saying that
there need not be within the whole area of our life any
such thing as an insoluble problem, or an insuperable
difficulty or an unrealisable ideal. Strange doctrine to
preach to a hopeless and impotent peasantry; yet it
was only the simple and inevitable logic of the great
assumption with which Jesus set out. *'If God is
Rom. 8:31 for US," as St. Paul said in later days,
*Svho is against us?"

26

THE UNTRIED DOOR

"I came that they may haxve life, and may have it
abundantly"

But the quickening of hope was for Jesus but the
beginning of things. He had indeed to stir the people
out of their apathetic acquiescence in things as they
were before he could do anything else for them. He
had to make them believe that their distresses were
not incurable, that things could be different from what
they were. But the "good news" which he preached
to the poor was not a promise of a vague "good time
coming." It was indeed not what the people expected
— for, as we have seen, they darkly looked for some
political deliverance — that Jesus promised to them. He
brought to them an offer of life.

For Jesus the greater and better part of life was
out of sight. But he found men living the mere rind
of life, wading in its shallows, dwelling on the outside
of things, — some spending their days in a ceaseless
round of toil to provide for themselves and their
families the bare necessaries of life, and others in a
greedy gathering of more material good than they
needed; but both alike missing the real point of life.
Mt. 6:31-33 "Be uot auxious," he said to the former,
"about your food and drink and clothing. Your
heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these
things. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His

27

THE UNTRIED DOOR

righteousness." And of the latter he said, ''A man's
Luke 12:15 life consisteth not in the abundance of the
things he possesseth," and ''How hardly shall they
Mark 10:23 that have riches enter the kingdom of
heaven!" And one man of this class he called a fool.
He summed the whole matter up when he met his first
temptation with an old saying: ''Man shall not live
Mt.4:4 by bread alone, but by every word that pro-
ceedeth out of the mouth of God."

By this, Jesus meant that just as there is a natural
craving which is satisfied by bread, so there is another
craving no less natural which requires for its satis-
faction what Jesus calls the "word of God," by which
he means a conscious vitalising vision of God and
fellowhip with Him. It was of this same longing that
Saint Augustine was speaking. "Thou hast made us
for thyself and our heart is never at rest until it rest
in Thee." William Blake once said that the body was
that part of the soul that we can see; and it does not
appear that Jesus was much concerned with that antith-
esis between body and soul of which we make so
much. He was not primarily concerned with the soul
and its salvation as we conceive of these things; and
the Revised Version of the Bible rightly uses the word
"life" in certain places where the Authorised had
"soul." Jesus thought rather in terms of life. He saw
men living "at a poor dying rate," living a mere frac-
tion of their possible life. Did they but know it, there
were within them unfathomable depths of life which

28

THE UNTRIED DOOR

were available for them whensoever they had the wit
and the will to call them up. It is true that he did
not despise the body or the physical life, — his whole
story is replete with instances of a distinctively physical
ministry. Nor (we may presume) was this ministry
only a work of compassion. He knew that physical
disorders had their echoes in the soul and militated
against fullness of life. They diverted the mind from
the main pursuit. So he healed men's bodies; but he
told them that their true life depended upon the ''word
that cometh from the mouth of God."

In the middle of the last century a famous London
minister wrote a book which he called ''How to Make
the Best of Both Worlds,'' That was the way they
looked upon it in those days. Here are two worlds,
the world that now is, and the world to come, each
with its own characteristic prizes; and the problem of
life was how to make the best of both worlds, — how
to get on prosperously in this world and how to get
safely into the next. But Jesus did not see the matter
in this light. For him the problem of life was hozv to
live in the two worlds at the same time. This is what
is called "eternal life" in the Fourth Gospel, and when
Jesus said that he came that men might have life, this
is the life of which he was thinking.

There are in the main three attitudes that men have
taken to this world. First is the view that the world
of sense is the only world there is and that it is our
business to exploit it as sedulously as we may for our

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

own aggrandisement and pleasure. The second is the
extreme opposite view, taken by some philosophers and
mystics, that this world of sense is appearance and illu-
sion, and that the only reality is the invisible world.
The third is the view held by some ascetics and certain
evangelical sects, that this world is all too real and
altogether evil, and that we should have as little to do
with it as we can. That is to say, men have looked
upon the world as something to be either exploited,
or denied, or despised. But neither of these attitudes
did Jesus take. He did not exploit or deny or despise
the world. He took the world for granted as a part
of the universe of God. Just as William Blake, when
he said that the body is the part of the soul that you
can see might have gone on to say that the world is
that part of the universe that you can see, so Jesus
might have said that the world is that fragment of
the Father's House that is exposed to human sense.
But the greater part is out of sight and is visible only
to the eye of faith.

This unseen world was as real to Jesus as the world
of sense is real to the ordinary man; and he would
have it become as real to other men as it was to him.
It would have been unthinkable to him that men should
ever come seriously to believe that their life was wholly
contained within this tangible visible world; and that
their only organs of perception were the senses and
the reasoning faculty. In this region, he would have
said. You are only on the threshold of life; and even

30

THE UNTRIED DOOR

then you cannot perceive this concrete sense-world
aright unless you see in it and through it a good deal
more than your eyes can see. Live the life of sense,
"by bread alone," and you will live only in this world
of things, and things will be your masters; but live
the life of faith, and you will live in the two worlds
at once, for you will be living in the whole of God's
universe all the time.

The nature and quality of this life it is not easy to
describe. Even Jesus, who lived it in its fullness, did
not find it easy to tell about it. This was due partly
to the dullness and the apathy of the people with whom
he had to do; so dull and inert were they that he had
to startle them by using large and staggering images
Mt i7'2o ^^ moving mountains and uprooting syc-
luteiTie amore trees. That was however not the
chief reason. The difficulty in describing this life lies
in the subject-matter and in the limitations of language.

Speech is an instrument which has been fashioned
by life in the process of its unfolding for the purpose
of human fellowship. But the materials out of which
speech has been evolved belong to the world of time
and space. This can be seen plainly from the words
which have been minted to describe that part of life
that men have always dimly felt to lie beyond what
they can see. We speak of it as supernatural, or supra-
sensible, or infinite; and when we speak of it as eternal
we mean that it is either timeless or endless. We
describe the hidden universe by saying what it is not.

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

We have as yet no glossary for the unseen. So that
when Jesus or any one who has the necessary spiritual
insight states a proposition that is true to the whole of
life, — life, that is, which is lived in the seen and in the
unseen at once, he has to do it in paradox. A paradox
is a truth stated in the form of a verbal contradiction ;
and the teaching of Jesus is full of paradoxes. "He
Mt 10-39 ^^^^ loseth his life shall find it." "To him
Mt. 13:12 ^\^^^ It^^^i^ s\\2i\\ bc givcn, and from him that
hath not even that which he hath shall be taken away."
Mt. 5:5 "Blessed are the meek : for they shall inherit

the earth." It is a twisting of language, a bending of
words back upon themselves to say the unsayable. Of
all this the moral is tolerably plain. We shall have the
clue to the words of Jesus when we have the life of
which he speaks.

It may be added in this connection that we have
here the clue to what are called the "hard sayings" of
Jesus. In some of his sayings, he imposes upon us
conduct that seems utterly beyond our capacity, — turn-
Mt. 5:39 ^^^ ^^^^ other cheek, forgiving unto seventy

Mt 18:22 times seven, and the like. The thing, we
say, is impossible ; and Jesus does not mean us to take
it literally. But it is impossible simply because we
do not possess the life to which that sort of conduct
comes naturally, and to which nothing is impossible.
The life to which Jesus called men is of a scale and
power beyond anything that we can conceive in the
light of nature.

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

^'Except ye turn and become as little children, ye
shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven/'

To enter this new life, there must be, as we have
seen, repentance, a break with the past. The custom-
ary motions of Hfe have to be reversed. A new tech-
nique of Hfe has to be acquired. The accepted valua-
tions of life must be superseded. And the first thing
that has to go is externality. For externality is a
categorical denial of the unseen.

Jesus and the people had before their eyes a com-
pany of persons who were apt in all the arts of
externality. They cared little hovz foul the inside
of the cup might be so long as the outside was
Mt.6:i clean. These were the people who "did their
Mt,6:5 righteousness before men, to be seen of
them," who "stood praying in the synagogues and on
the street-corners," addressing their prayers to a gal-
lery of their fellowmen. Here, says Jesus, is the pre-
cise antithesis of what you should be. For to him
these men were virtually atheists, w^ho denied "the
Mt.6:6 Father which seeth in secret." And even
worse, they exploited the things of God in the interests
of their own self-esteem. That was why Jesus called
Mt.6:3 them hypocrites, "play-actors," men who
were playing a part. In the kingdom of heaven, men

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

must have what the Psahnist called ''truth in the in-
Mt.5:8 ward parts." ''Blessed," said Jesus, "are
the pure in heart, the sincere, the single-minded; for
they shall see God."

And with sincerity, there must go an unaffected
simplicity of mind. We must, says Jesus, become as
little children. This, for sensitive souls, is the hardest
of all Jesus' hard sayings. For our minds have so
long and so sadly parted with their virginity ; they are
contaminated and clogged by that ponderous (but oh!
so futile) worldly wisdom which we suppose ourselves
to have gathered with the years. We have acquired
what men call practicality, hard-headedness, savoir
faire, — a sophistication which is in the end but a hard-
ening of the tissues of the soul. But to reverse all the
acquired habits of the years and begin all over again!
Yet so it must be if we are to gain the kingdom of
heaven and the reality of life. For the simplicity of the
child is a sensibility to the unseen. Is it not written
Luke 10:21 that God rcvcals to babes what He hides
from the wise and prudent, — those things that are so
much greater than anything we can say about them?
President Eliot once said that if a dog or a child, after
looking you in the face, refuses for any reason other
than timidity to come to you, you had better go home
and examine yourself. This is a true and luminous
saying. The child has its own "wireless," which brings
it information that is denied to the wise and prudent.

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy" ; and that is

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more than a piece of pretty sentimentality. The thing
is so, only we have become too case-hardened and
opaque-minded to recognise it.

The drift of pinions, would we hearken
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

"Know you," asks the poet who sang these lines, the
blessed Francis Thompson, "know you what it is to
be a child? It is to be something very different from
the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet stream-
ing from the waters of baptism ; it is to believe in love,
to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be
so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your
ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into
horses, and nothing into everything; for each child
has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live
in a nutshell and count yourself the king of infinite
space; it is

To see a world in a grain of sand.

And heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour."

Maxk 10:14 And "of such is the kingdom of heaven."
Of course, we cannot acquire the child-spirit on the
spot, nor indeed in many days. It will take us long
to unswathe our minds from the thick blinding folds
of our sophistications. But with patience it can be

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

done. What is more, if we want life, it must be done.
John 3:3 ''Exccpt a man be born anew, he cannot

see the kingdom of God."

''Ask and it shall he given you; seek, and ye shall
find; knock, and it shall he opened unto you.''

But what are we to do with this child-mind when
we have it ? The answer is surely in the question ; for
what should the child-mind do but seek the parent-
mind?

Prayer occupies a very considerable place in the
teaching of Jesus, and a still more considerable place
in his life. He does not argue about it save only by
one or two analogies from human behaviour to show
how inevitable a thing it is that God should attend to
his children's prayers. For the rest he takes it for
granted, much as he takes eating and breathing for
granted, — something that men did because it was
natural for them to do it, once they had found them-
selves.

This is not the place to discuss the doctrine and
practice of prayer in general. It is however material
to our purpose to observe that prayer in its perfect
expression seemed to Jesus to be an act whereby a man
brings himself Into harmony with the will of God. We
are sometimes apt to think of it as something that

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

bends the will of God to our purposes and desires. The
present writer once lived on the top of a hill, and he
became accustomed to the sight of bicycles which were
fitted with a little motor attachment in order to help
the rider up the hill. And that is pretty much what
prayer means to most people. It is a sort of motor
attachment to life by which we are able to ride uphill,
to do things that we should otherwise be unable to do
for ourselves. But prayer is not a special exercise
for emergencies, a means of getting us out of tight
corners, or to enable us to overcome difficulties. It is
rather an act in which we gather up and express our
own longing to be brought into unity with the will of
God. Nor is it to be expressed in terms of mere sub-
mission to the will of God. When Jesus teaches us
to pray and what to pray for, the things that he puts on
our lips to pray for are things that commit us to a
kind of cooperation with God. When we say what is
called the "Lord's Prayer," we ask for nothing which
we ourselves are not required to aid in accomplishing.
But prayer reaches a still higher plane when it is
assiduously continued in. That plane is when petition
ceases and only communion remains. On several oc-
Mt. 14:23 casions Jesus, we are told, went up into the
i.uke9:28 mountain and to desert places to pray; and

Mark 1-35 , , • i . ,,^

Luke 5:16 oucc he Spent the night m prayer. We
are not told anything of the mysterious commerce
that went on between Jesus and his Father; but we
may not doubt that those solitary communings were

37

THE UNTRIED DOOR

the very springs of his hfe and power. And equally
we may not doubt that in such sustained and secret
communion with God do the springs of our true life
lie. It would be hard to single out a need more plain
and more importunate to-day than the recovery of the
practice of meditation. It is not an art easy to acquire,
and we have first to overcome the enormous handicap
of our fear of being alone. We moderns have lived
so constantly in public that there is nothing we are
so much afraid of as solitude. And even then, when
we have conquered our aversion to solitude, we have
to begin our self-training in the art of purposeful
meditation. Nowadays, we are indisposed to turn to
the old masters of the art for instruction — the saints
of the Middle Ages. But some day we shall rediscover
the neglected wealth that is stored in the great classics
of mediaeval devotion. Meantime we must stumble
along as best we can. For we are not habituated to
the ether of the unseen and cannot see in its strange
light. Here is the testimony of a modern who has
made the great experiment, George Russell (A. E.),
the Irish poet : "I felt as one who steps out of day into
the colourless night of a cavern, and that was because I
had suddenly reversed the habitual motions of life.
We live normally seeing through the eyes, hearing
through the ears, stirred by the senses, moved by bodily
powers, and receiving only such spiritual knowledge
as may pass through a momentary purity of our being.
On the mystic path we create our own light, and at

38

THE UNTRIED DOOR

first we struggle blind and baffled, seeing nothing, hear-
ing nothing, unable to think, unable to imagine. We
seem deserted, by dream, vision or inspiration, and
our meditation barren altogether. But let us persist
through weeks or months, and sooner or later that
stupor disappears. Our faculties readjust themselves
and do the work we will them to do. Never did they
do their work so well. The dark caverns of the brain
begin to grow luminous. We are creating our own
light. By heat of will and aspiration we are trans-
muting what is gross in the subtle ethers through
which the mind works. As the dark bar of metal be-
gins to glow at first redly, and then at white heat, or
as ice melts and is alternately fluid, vapor, gas, and
at last a radiant energy, so do these ethers become
purified and alchemically changed into luminous es-
sences, and they make a new vesture for the soul and
link us to mid-world or heavenward, where they too
have their true home. How quick the mind is ! How
vivid is the imagination! We are lifted above the
tumult of the body. The heat of the blood disappears
below us. We draw nigher to ourselves. The heart
longs for the hour of meditation and hurries to it.
And when it comes we rise within ourselves as a diver
too long under water rises to breathe the air, to see
the light."

It is just like learning to swim. You go into the
water and make the swimming motions. Nothing hap-
pens,— ^you might as well be lead. But one day it

39

THE UNTRIED DOOR

happens, and you never can tell just how it has hap-
pened, that you swim a stroke or two. After that it
is simply a matter of practice; and the day comes when
you feel at home in the water and can do in it what
you will. So it is here. For a time nothing happens ;
but if we persist we come to feel at home in this new
medium, to be able to breathe its air, to see in its
strange light ; and at last, to see and share that abiding
reality which is greater than anything that can be told
about it, which awes us into silence but transfigures
us into life.

Nevertheless, we should be greatly in error if we
supposed that this is all that matters, or that this ex-
perience is the whole of life. When we become familiar
with this inner world we are apt like Peter to say, —
when in an unexpected moment he had caught a
Mt.i7:4 glimpse of its wonder, — "It is good for
us to be here; let us build tabernacles." But the Lord
of life would not have us tabernacle in the secret place
away from the fret and trouble of common life. And
so Peter had, and so have we all, to foot it down into
the valley where all the old intractable problems are
still abroad. This is the orbit of this life, — the path
that lies between the mountain-tops which are visited
by angels and the valleys which are infested by devils.
And as you grow familiar with this mountain-path it
shrinks, the mountain-top and the valley draw nearer
to each other, ever nearer, until at last you find your-
self standing on the mountain-top and in the valley

40

THE UNTRIED DOOR

at the same time. Then you can see heaven and earth
in a blessed comminghng, and behold, with Francis
Thompson,

The traffic of Jacob's ladder

Pitched between heaven and Charing Cross,

and

Christ walking on the waters.
Not of Gennesaret but Thames.

And it does not stop there. One finds a world
transformed. Things are not what once they seemed.
You will find yourself loving what once you hated and
hating what once you loved. You will see men play-
ing the old games in the market place, being burnt up
by the ancient fires of greed and gold, and you will
wonder what on earth they are doing it for. But
best of all you see a strange glory in the faces of
men and women, and a new loveliness in the faces
of the little children. And you will say to yourself?
"I never saw the face of a man before, nor yet the
smile of a little child. But whereas I once was blind,
now I see. The name of this street is Bethel, the house
of God, the gate of heaven." You will go about God's
world and see the shekinah gleaming on the breast of
every common man and every common face aflame
with God.

41

CHAPTER THREE
LIFE AND THINGS

(Matt. 6:19-21 ; 7:13-24; 9:16-17; 20:1-16; 22:15-22.
Mk. 2:23-28; Luke 10:38-42; 18:1-8; 19:41-44)

''Narrow is the gate, and straitened tlie way that
leadeth unto life"

WE have in recent years grown familiar with
the use of the word values to describe the
things that a man thinks worth Hving for;
and his "scale of values" will be an arrangement of
those things in the order of their desirability to him. Of
such values we may say that they are broadly of two
kinds: "temporal" or "material" and "spiritual." In
Jesus' day there were plenty of people whose lives
were governed by material values, — fame, power,
wealth and the like; and these same people are with
us still. Their name is legion; and with a few excep-
tions, they are all of us. Here and there you may find
an oddity who orders his life on the basis of spiritual

42

THE UNTRIED DOOR

values, and it is characteristic of our age that such a
man is regarded as a sort of idiot.

The distinction between spiritual and material values
may be roughly described in this way — whether a man
thinks that the things worth living for are within him
or outside of him, whether he finds them in his own
soul or in the world round about him. There can be
no question at all as to the class of values that Jesus
accepted and pursued. We have his word for it that
a man's life does not consist in the abundance of the
ink© 10-41 things that he possesses. "Few things are
(B-v-nW.) needful," as he told Martha. One does
not need many things for the realisation of life. It is
not so much the amount of things that one may ac-
quire but the mind that one brings to the things one
has that makes for fullness of life. A modern writer
has said that "life is a number of little things acutely
realised," and it is precisely in this power of realisation
that the modern world is tragically poor. So poor are
we that we can conceive of no way of getting the most
out of life save by spreading the stuff of life out over
a large number of things; and one needs only to look
out upon the world to-day to realise where this leads.
We taste many things lightly and nothing deeply. And
so we are for ever compelled to extend the range over
which we search out those things that are strong
enough in taste to satisfy our blase and exacting
palates. The result is that in food, dress, and recrea-
tion we have almost become specialists in the gro-

43

THE UNTRIED DOOR

tesque, the bizarre and the prurient. What we bring
with us to the enjoyment of Hfe is but an appetite,
and in consequence we end with an appetite. That
endowment of imagination, insight, interpretation,
spiritual possession, which we should bring with us to
the experience of life and which could fill our life with
the most exquisite joy in the appreciation of a few
simple near-by things, that we lack. Jesus did not
have to look far afield in his own day for an instance
of this same poverty. The Pharisee was greedy of
the praise of the town, because he had no resources
within.*

It comes to this: If a man has little within, he
seeks much without. If he has much within, he looks
for little without. From Jesus' point of view, we are
classified by what we are in ourselves; and we shall
inevitably show without what we are within. This
is a very trite reflection ; yet it is not useless to remind
oneself of it in an age when the principle of classifica-
tion is not what a man is but what he has.

When Jesus said to Martha that ''few things were
needful or one thing," it was no occasional utterance,
but sprang from his whole attitude to life. Too many
things were, as he had frequently observed, an en-

*It should perhaps be said that while this book inevitably
reflects the unfavourable view which the gospels seem to hold
of the Pharisees, there is other evidence which justifies a more
generous judgment of them as a class. And in the gospels Aye
encounter some Pharisees who seem undeserving of the se-
vere strictures passed upon the sect.

44

THE UNTRIED DOOR

cumbrance, a handicap to real living. When he bade
Mt- 19:21 the rich young ruler sell his possessions
and give them away, he was not putting his good faith
to the proof. He meant what he said literally, for he
saw that the youth could make little headway in the
pursuit of eternal life while he was carrying so much
heavy baggage. The rich may enter the kingdom of
heaven, but only with difficulty. It is of the nature
of a miracle if they get there. Their riches stand in
the way. St. Francis was essentially right when he
preached the doctrine of poverty to his followers. The
task of attaining eternal life requires so much of a
man's attention that he simply cannot afford the dis-
tracting care of property. Nor can he without court-
ing failure spread his life out over too many things.
Mt. 7:13-14 There is a broad road, says Jesus, that
leads to destruction; it is a narrow way that leads to
life. When Jesus uses the words hroad and narrow
he does not mean them to be taken merely as synonyms
for vicious and virtuous. He is simply warning men
against spreading out life too thin and calling them
to concentration. There is a narrowness which is
death; there is no less a narrowness which is life. We
may spend life to excess even upon things in themselves
legitimate and even good; and if such priceless things
Mt 5:29-30 as a hand or an eye stand in the way of our
quest of life, we do well to get rid of them rather
than to miss life altogether. In a word, the life to

45

THE UNTRIED DOOR

which Jesus calls us cannot be realised without a rigor-
ous simplicity of habit.

Not that such a simplicity is valuable in itself. Its
value lies in the fact that it enables us to give our-
selves without distraction to the "one thing needful."
Martha was in her hospitable way all fuss and business,
and Mary was in her eyes just then an idle hussy who
should be taken to task for wasting her time. It does
(we may as well confess it) upset our modern notions
Luke 10:38-42 of propriety that Jesus should take
Mary's part against Martha : and we give the story a
rather forced theological interpretation that misses the
point of it in order to save Jesus from the imputation
of encouraging laziness. Yet what Jesus meant was that
Martha was troubling her soul with an excess of busi-
ness and that she was wasting her time in doing so.
Mary had chosen the good part simply in being quiet
and unpreoccupied so that she might listen and hear
things that are not to be heard by people who live all
the time amid the clatter of dishes. Mary was doing
what would enable her to feel her soul. Many of us
have not heard from our souls this many a day; we
have had no word out of the unseen ; for we have been
living too intimately and deeply in the clamor of the
street, amid the strident noises of this world of sense.
We too are troubled about many things. Indeed, as
Emerson said long ago, ''things are in the saddle and
ride us."

46

THE UNTRIED DOOR

''Do men gather grapes of thorns or Hgs of thistles?"

One need only recall the frequency with which Jesus
uses the word heart to remember how consistent was
the emphasis which he laid upon the hidden and in-
ward aspect of life. "Out of the abundance of the
Mt. 12:34-35 heart the mouth speaketh. The good man
out of his good treasure bringeth forth good things,
and the evil man out of his evil treasure bringeth forth
evil things.'* This principle of inwardness governed
the thought of Jesus throughout. It was the principle
by which he judged conduct, institutions, and the whole
varied human scene. It was his "acid test" for the
acceptances and conventions on which the civilisation
of his day rested.

For instance, the customary moral judgment was
passed upon a man's performance. He was "righteous"
in the degree that he did certain things. There was a
certain number of obligations which he was required
to discharge, and if he discharged them au pied de la
lettre, he stood morally irreproachable. But one of the
plainest facts of Jesus' observation was that men might
fully discharge the recognised moral obligations and
yet be guilty of gross inhumanity, as for instance.
Mart 12:40 devouring widows' houses. He saw that
it was possible to keep the letter of the law and at the
same time to deny its spirit, indeed to deny the spirit

47

THE UNTRIED DOOR

by the very exactness with which one observed the
letter. A man might harbor a lascivious thought, but
if he abstained from the lewd act he was still within
the law. Yet from any thoroughgoing and realistic
moral standpoint, the evil thought is as evil as the
Mt.5:28 evil act, and the principle that forbade the
act logically forbade the thought. Similarly the inner
Mt. 5:2i-a2 principle which forbids murder also for-
bids the anger that leads to the murder and the offence
that provokes the anger. Jesus' way was to track the
evil deed to its lair in the evil heart. "Out of the heart
Mt. 15:19 come forth evil thoughts, murders, adul-
teries, fornications, thefts, false witness, railings."
The thing that mattered for moral judgment was what
a man was in his heart, not what he did or failed to
do, but what in his heart he would do, — the clean heart
rather than the washed hand, the right spirit rather
than the right conduct.

The logic of this, Jesus carries out with character-
Mt. 20:1-16 istic thorouglincss. In the parable of the
unemployed, the workmen who went into the vineyard
at the eleventh hour received the same pay as those
who had been at work all day. This might perhaps
be adduced as good authority for the principle of the
standard minimum wage, but the real point of the story
is that the men were paid for the work they would
have done if they had it to do. Their willingness to
work was counted as work. ''Why stand ye here all
the day idle? Because no man hath hired us." The

48

THE UNTRIED DOOR

moral once more is that the ultimate moral judgment
is passed on the spirit rather than on the achievement.
This is the essential meaning of what is called Justi-
fication by Faith. Justification means being declared
to be right with God, and therefore being treated by
God as actually being right with him. But this follows
upon the act of faith, which is (to add another defini-
tion, this time Dr. W. P. du Bose's) *'the disposition
of our entire selves Godward.'' We are set right with
God not by the tale of our performances but by a
right disposition towards Him. The same principle
is laid down by Jesus from another angle in another
— one of the most beautiful — of his sayings: "He
Mt. 10:41 that receiveth a prophet in the name of a
prophet shall receive a prophet's reward; and he that
receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous
man shall receive a righteous man's reward." To
receive a prophet or a good man in the name of a
prophet or a good man is to receive him simply be-
cause he is a prophet or a good man and for no other
reason. The man who does that does a very revealing
thing. He shows the company he likes to keep, the
store which he sets upon goodness, the thing that is
in his heart, what he himself would be. He may lack
the prophet's vision and his flaming utterance, yet if
he give bed and board to a prophet just because he
is a prophet, then he is accounted as belonging to that
same company. He classifies himself, and God ac-

49

THE UNTRIED DOOR

cepts the classification. '' 'Tis not what man Does
that exalts him, but what man Would do," says Brown-
ing in Saul; and more fully in Rabbi Ben Ezra, —

Not on the vulgar mass
Called "work," must sentence pass.
Things done, that took the eye and had the
price ;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value
in a trice:

But all, the world's coarse thumb

And finger failed to plumb.
So passed in making up the main account;

All instincts immature.

All purposes unsure.
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled
the man's amount:

Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act.
Fancies that broke through language and
escaped ;
All I could never be.
All, men ignored in me.
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the
pitcher shaped.

SO

THE UNTRIED DOOR

And on this showing our very failures become, as
the same poet says, "the triumph's evidence for the
fullness of days/'

"Work not for the meat which perisheth, but for
the meat which abideth unto eternal life/'

A little hymn once popular at evangelistic meetings
used to tell us that

Doing is a deadly thing.
Doing ends in death;

and the refrain went on:

Cast thy deadly doing down,
Down at Jesus' feet;
Stand in Him, in Him alone,
Gloriously complete.

The hymn speaks a theological idiom which is now
dead ; yet its purpose was to warn us against the fallacy
that salvation was a matter of performance. The
hymn no longer appeals to us, not alone because its
theology is obsolete but because we cannot understand
the contempt for "doing" that it expresses. This is a
generation which has spent itself in doing. We have
enthroned the deed and the act. "The higher man of
to-day," said Sir Oliver Lodge some years ago, "is

51

THE UNTRIED DOOR

not worrying about his sins. His business is to be
up and doing." This is the modern doctrine of right-
eousness. The busier a man is, the hoHer he is. The
more he does, the more righteous he becomes. In-
dustry and efficiency have become the hall-marks of
holiness.

It would take us too far afield to inquire how this
has come about. It has to do with our particular type
of civilisation, and especially with our modern doctrine
of business. The modern world has been deeply im-
mersed in the exploitation of its natural resources and
by reason of the great development of mechanical in-
vention has done this to an extent and on a scale
hitherto unknown. Its entire aim and its main inter-
est have been in the direction of energy to production.
The result is that business has gained an unquestioned
ascendancy over life. And we have developed a doc-
trine of the sanctity of work of which it would be
difficult to find a trace in the teaching of Jesus.

Work is simply human activity directed to the busi-
ness of sustaining life; and commerce is at bottom
simply an organisation of the processes whereby so-
ciety is provided with food, clothing, shelter, heat and
light. That is tO' say Labor and Commerce have to
do with the material or ''economic" aspect of life. The
modern trouble is that the economic interest is en-
throned over life; nations are even governed in the
interest of their commerce. But commerce was
made for man and not man for commerce. Nor was

52

THE UNTRIED DOOR

it made for man in the sense of being an opportunity
for self -aggrandisement, for making money. It was
ordained to be a cooperation in the service of life. But
to-day it is on the throne. The man is lost in the
merchant or in the merchandise. Yet the relation of
the economic end of life to the rest of life is no more
than the relation of the kitchen to the rest of the
home. It is essential, necessary, yet strictly subordinate.
We reach the real business of life when we are
through with the business of making and eating bread.
This does not imply contempt of the kitchen. Properly
understood, the kitchen is holy ground, full (as Brother
Lawrence found it) of intimations of God. But our
trouble is that we live in the kitchen all the time.
We never get away from it. The clatter of dishes
follows us into our sleep. It is business, business, with-
out remission. And then the kitchen ceases to be holy
ground; for what holiness it has derives from the
service it was meant to render to the rest of life. Its
concern is for the physical frame-work of life; it i^
therefore an integral part of the scheme of life. But
it becomes a thieves' kitchen when it sets up to be the
whole of life or asserts an ascendancy over the rest
of life. Money and merchandise are holy things when
they minister to life: they are wholly evil things when
they become masters of life.

The modern demand for a shorter working day
springs from a root far deeper than a mere disinclina-
tion to work. It is a genuine even if ill-expressed

53

THE UNTRIED DOOR

craving for time to live, an endeavor to set work in
a truer relation to the business of life as a whole. It
is a revolt from the doctrine that man lives for pro-
duction first. And while it is true that Jesus would
not sympathise with the tone in which the demand for
a shorter working day is made, or with the method by
which it is sometimes proposed to secure it, it is no
less true that he would sympathise with the essence
of the demand. One may even deduce from his de-
joim 10-12 scription of the ''hireling" that he would
Mt. 20:1-16 consider the wage-system demoralising;
and from the Parable of the Unemployed that he did
not believe in payment by time or by piece-work. But
while we hear from Jesus no echo of the old Hebrew
idea that work was a curse, neither do we hear any-
thing about the "dignity" or the "sanctity" of labor.
Jesus seems to take work, as he takes many other
things, for granted, simply as a part of the day's busi-
ness; and if we may judge from the story of Mary and
Martha, a part of the day's business to be got over as
soon as possible. There were other things of more
moment to attend to.

Concerning these other things it will be enough
for our immediate purpose to note that they were not
commodities for the market. They were rather things
in which life expressed itself because it must, without
thought for their use or their value. Nor did they
consist in that "charity" to which our vestigial social
sense bids us turn when we desist awhile from the

54

THE UNTRIED DOOR

production of wealth. Indeed for such "charity" as
this Jesus had Httle use, — a pity defiled by pride, a
compassion muddied by contempt. And to our test
of value, — What is the use of it? or, Does it pay? —
Jesus was an entire stranger. His test was ''What is
it the expression of?" and whatever it was, if it was
the expression of a beautiful thought or of a loving
heart, it was worth doing for its own sake, without
any after-thought. When the woman poured her "ex-
Mt. 26:6-13 ceeding precious ointment" on Jesus in the
house of Simon the leper, the disciples were scandal-
ised by the waste. The ointment, they said, might
be sold for much and given to the poor. But Jesus
turns their indignation aside with a gentle humorous
word, intending them to understand that the woman
had done a deed of love which had its virtue in itself.
She had done a beautiful thing which was worth doing
for what it was. There is room for beauty as well
as for use in life. Jesus at least was no utilitarian.

William Morris, pleading for the redemption of
modern industry from the dullness and the squalor
which degrades it, said that men should be set to mak-
ing things which would be ''a joy to the maker and
the user"; and the saying is fully in line with the
thought of Jesus. There are two kinds of work to be
done in the world, the work we do because we must
if we are to go on living, and the work we do, as Rud-
yard Kipling says, "for the joy of the working." For
a few people, — the artist, the preacher, the doctor, —

55

THE UNTRIED DOOR

the two kinds of work may happily coincide. But
tliere are few indeed nowadays who work "for the
joy of the working." The monotony of the highly
specialised machine industry cannot make for joy, and
the general conditions of industry are notoriously joy-
less. The problem involved in all this is less easy of
solution than it would have been in Jesus' day. Then
the social organisation was relatively simple : but this
is what Mr. Graham Wallas would call the day of the
"Great Society" in which the organisation is both
vaster and more complex. And it would appear, if we
are to reach what it is fair to infer would be Jesus'
view of the matter, that all men should be required as
a matter of course to take their share in the necessary
toil of society, in the production and the distribution
of vital necessities and in the removal of waste, and
then under such conditions of production for use (not
for profit) men would be able and have time to turn
also to those activities in which they would find their
peculiar joy, to their vocations, the things they do be-
cause they delight to do them, in which they express
themselves and are therefore creative.

But we shall look in vain for such an order of life
so long as we consent to the view that wealth is the
measure of life. While we continue to believe that
a man's life consists in the number of the things he
possesses and that a nation's prosperity is to be
measured by its invested capital and its rates of in-
terest, we shall not live in any real sense. W^e sliall

S6

THE UNTRIED DOOR

go on sacrificing the whole to the part, the best of life
to the least thing in life. For this there is no remedy
except that the material values shall be expelled from
men's hearts by the coming of that inward kingdom
Rom. 14:17 of God which is, as St. Paul says, "not
eating and drinking but righteousness and peace and
joy in the Holy Ghost."

*'The Sabbath was made for maUj and not man for
the Sabbath/'

Life first, — this then was the view of Jesus. We
may take it that he regarded life as an integral thing,
continuous and indivisible, reaching its supreme em-
bodiment in man, who in his turn perfectly realises
himself in that way of life that Jesus calls the king-
dom of heaven. But man has an inveterate tendency
to subordinate life to institutions; and one of the chief
elements in Jesus' teaching and action was his con-
sistent protest against this reversal of values. Men
for instance rated the sanctity of the Sabbath above
human need; and in the face of this perversity Jesus
laid down a principle with applications far wider than
the specific case which evoked it. 'The Sabbath was
made for man, and not man for the Sabbath."

Jesus has been called the greatest of the humanists;
by which is meant that he is the greatest of those who

57

THE UNTRIED DOOR

in all the ages have affirmed the sovereignty of the
essential man over institutions and systems. The his-
tory of humanism has yet to be written; but when it
is written it will be a great story. It will tell us for
instance of that great humanist Daniel who proclaimed
the doom of those brute imperialisms of the ancient
world that crushed manhood and subordinated it to
their own purposes. It will recall the humanists in
the period before the Reformation who protested
against the subjection of the human reason to the arid
doctrinal system and method of the mediaeval School-
men. Lately the word emerged — for a moment — as a
philosophical protest against the exaltation of reason,
(which is but one among the faculties with which
men are endowed), in the accepted philosophies of the
time. The note that is common to humanism in what-
ever age we encounter it is that it emphasizes the in-
tegrity and sovereignty of human personality and
protests against its subordination to either a part of
itself or to anything that it has itself made, against the
rule of the institution, whether it be church or state,
a creed or a law or a custom. The gospel of the
humanist is the application of the principle which
Jesus laid down with reference to the Sabbath to every
institution, religious or political, to evei*y system, ethi-
cal, economic or intellectual, to every movement or
organization in the whole world : Life first.

We, in our time, have heard and are hearing a good
deal about the rights of property. But Jesus would

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

have said that property had no more precedence than
the Sabbath over humanity. But the popular doc-
trine of property rights gives to them a sacrosanctity
and an absoluteness which is alleged to render them
immune from interference by any authority. But
the doctrine of the sanctity of property does not de-
rive from Sinai, still less from eternity. It is indeed
a comparatively modern doctrine. But one might
reasonably gather from certain recent discussions that
the doctrine of property-rights was the divinely ap-
pointed rock of the social order, and that it is our
great and sacred business to conserve it at all costs.
"The value of our investments," said Mr. Roger
Babson, in his Report (January, 1920) ''depends not
upon the strength of our banks as upon the strength
of our churches. . . . The religion of the community
is the bulwark of our investments." Religion should
of course make men peaceable and honest: it should
produce communities in which the decencies and liber-
ties of life are respected. But it is a novel and start-
ling doctrine that religion, the life of the soul, should
be encouraged because it secures investments. The
one incident in the Gospels which appears to have
a bearing upon the subject is the story of the young
Mt. 19:21 man who was advised to sell out his invest-
ments and to give the proceeds to the poor. The
business of religion is not to secure a man's invest-
ments, but to secure the man himself, and if necessary
to secure him against his investments. At any rate it

59

THE UNTRIED DOOR

is not much of a religion that a man has if the security
of his investments keeps him awake o' nights.

This, however, does not mean that Jesus would con-
demn property in itself. It appears to be essential to
a man's freedom and growth that he should own, that
is, have absolute control over a certain number of
things. But a point comes when possession becomes
an obsession and riches an encumbrance. The care
of them involves an expenditure of life, and what
was meant to minister to life imposes a toll upon life.
That which should be a source of freedom becomes a
fetter, and the fear of loss becomes a tyrannous and
wasteful torture. That is why Jesus speaks so doubt-
fully of the rich man's chances of the kingdom of
heaven.

But to-day the evil of property does not lie in its
excess alone. To this must be added certain other con-
siderations. We have already referred to the view that
is held by some people that property is in some sort to
be regarded as a sanctity the maintenance of which is
a kind of charge upon religion. But in addition to
this is the fact that to-day property is chiefly held in
the form of invested capital, and from this there re-
sults two grave conditions. The first is that it invests
the property-owner with a certain power over the
life and labor of other men. Capital means, when
the matter is reduced to its lowest terms, the owner-
ship of tools ; and it is plain that as, especially in these
days of large-scale machine production, the ownership

60

THE UNTRIED DOOR

of the tools is possible only where there are large ag-
gregations of wealth, capital and they who hold it are
in a position of advantage over those who have noth-
ing of their own save the labor of which they are
capable. Property as capital does invest the possessor
with an undoubted power and authority over other men ;
and as it is a commonplace that wealth is largely con-
centrated in comparatively few hands there has been
evolved in our days a sort of informal economic oli-
garchy the power of which has not yet been regulated
consistently with the democratic ideal. Moreover, the
practice of investment in companies and corporations
has extended the distribution of capital to a large
number of people, who have as a rule no sense of re-
sponsibility for the undertaking in which they are
sharers, and who are content to receive their dividends
without acknowledging any personal obligation to
acquaint themselves with the processes and conditions
which produce those dividends. Property is disbur-
dened of responsibility.

But further, property has come to be in our time the
principle of social classification. We are divided be-
tween the Haves and the Have-nots; and though it
would be impossible to draw a hard and fast frontier-
line between the two classes, there can be no doubt of
the general character of the stratification. And quite
apart from the fact that this implies that the labors of
the one class are largely subordinated to the main-
tenance and enrichment of the other, property has be-

6i

THE UNTRIED DOOR

come the main occasion of the social schism of our time
and the chief obstacle in the way of that solidarity
which we shall presently see was so essential an aim
in the mind of Jesus.

In a word, property has gained an unquestionable
ascendancy over life. The true position has been re-
versed. For property, after all, was made for man
and not man for property.

In Jesus' day, however, the institution of property
raised none of the acute problems that it raises today.
But there were other institutions that raised problems
of their own. The political order under which the Jew
lived was an alien thing imposed from without, and
he only respected it under the compulsion of fear. He
longed and was continually planning for its overthrow.
For the Pharisee the problem was not so simple as it
was for the ordinary Jew. The Pharisee was con-
cerned for another institution, the religious institution ;
and his problem was that of threading a way between
his hatred for the Roman and his desire for the over-
throw of the empire on the one hand and his fear
for the church on the other. Hitherto the Romans
had taken up an attitude of toleration toward the reli-
gious institution; but they were ruthless masters when
they were thwarted. An unsuccessful revolt counte-
nanced by the religious leaders might lead to rough
handling of the church. So that the question which
Mt. 22:17-21 the Pharisccs once propounded to Jesus
was a familiar one to themselves. They had often

62

THE UNTRIED DOOR

asked themselves whether it was right to pay taxes to
their heathen lords; and they had answered that it
was expedient to pay the taxes in the interests of a
quiet life. But they did not expect that Jesus would
take up so compromised a position, for they did not
imagine that he being a Jew would love the Roman any
more than they did; and moreover he had no special
interests to consider.

Jesus, however, looked at the matter from an un-
expected angle. He asked for a piece of current coin,
and when some person in the company produced a
Roman denarius from the folds of his garment, Jesus
asked whose imprint it bore. The answer was of course
inevitable. Very well then, says Jesus in effect, the
position is that if you accept Caesar's currency with
its symbols of Caesar's authority, you should pay
Caesar what you thereby acknowledge to be his due.
But you should also give to God what you acknowl-
edge is due to God. This placed the Pharisees in a
dilemma; for they no doubt believed that the emanci-
pation of the Chosen People of God from an alien
thraldom was a religious duty. In fact, Jesus simply
restated their own problem to them and convicted them
of compromise. But in stating the matter as he did
Jesus was laying down a principle which is of uni-
versal application. They that acknowledge Caesar
have a duty to Caesar, but one's duty to Caesar is not
necessarily one's duty to God. This is the distinction
well expressed in Lowell's lines,

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Better rot beneath the sod,

Than be true to Church and State,

While we are doubly false to God.

In recent times, the state, which is the community
organised for the purposes of government, has come
to be regarded as a divine institution possessing an
inexpugnable right to dispose of the persons of its in-
dividual members, and "Give to Caesar what is
Caesar's'* is quoted in support of the doctrine. We
cannot here undertake a discussion of the nature and
the authority of the state : nor are we interested at the
moment in anything but what Jesus would probably
have said to the modern claim of the state. Once
more we can safely infer his attitude. The state, he
would say, exists for man, and not man for the state.
The state was made not in order to lord it over life
but to serve the ends of life; and its title to respect
and obedience rests upon the adequacy with which it
Bom. 13:1-4 fulfils this officc. St. Paul tells us that the
civil magistrate holds his commission from God; but
he was a Roman citizen and for the most part he
found the Empire a help rather than a hindrance.
Moreover, in those days the Empire practised a sort
of religious toleration, — the era of Cresar-worship
had not yet fully arrived. But the writer of the Book
of Revelation did not share Paul's respect for the state.
Bev.i7:6 To him it was the ''scarlet woman" who
was ''drunken with the blood of the saints and the

64

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blood of the martyrs of Jesus." It is sometimes said
that it is the business of government to preserve order,
— yet it is only so to preserve order as to give the
largest margin of freedom for the expression of life.
And that is the test by which its title to the respect
of its members stands or falls.

It does not appear that Jesus found the Roman gov-
ernment much in his way. Certainly he does not say
so. Yet it cannot be doubted that it represented to
him an order which must pass away, one, so to speak,
of the old wine-skins. But he did not see it passing
away by the method which some of his countrymen
favored. Indeed, he foresaw that to fight the Romans
with their own weapons meant destruction and death.
Mt. 26:52 ^'He that takes the sword shall perish by
the sword." He saw that the logic of his country-
men's policy would lead to what it ultimately did lead,
the destruction of Jerusalem and the final extinction
of what remained of the Jewish state. It was for this
iuke 19:42 reason that he wept over the city that did
not *'know the things that belonged to its peace." And
in that moment when the Jews rejected Jesus and
chose Barabbas, the rebel leader who for "insurrection"
luke 23:25 had been cast into prison, they made their
final and fatal choice. The attempt to overthrow politi-
cal institutions by violence seemed to him to be tragic
folly.

Mt. 9:16-17 Jesus was tender to old garments and
old wine-skins. He would not have a worse rent made

THE UNTRIED DOOR

in the old garment by patching it with a piece of un-
dressed cloth; nor would he have the old wine-skins
perish by putting new wine into them. He would leave
them alone in their decay; time would do the rest. It
was his business to quicken a new life which would
flow outside the old channels, leaving the old chan-
nels to dry up and crumble away. The new life was
to function outside the old institutions, and the old
institutions, having no function left, would by and
by perish of atrophy. Yet while it was wasteful to
put the new wine in the old wine-skins, it was equally
wasteful to have no wine-skins at all. The new life
must have its own organ, its own channel. So when
Jesus abandoned his hope of carrying out his mission
through the existing religious institutions, he formed
a new society in wHich the new life could function in-
dependently of both the political and the ecclesiastical
systems. As a matter of history, the original society
of twelve grew, in spite of opposition and persecution,
until it became necessary for the empire to come to
terms with it. But the agreement which the church
made with the empire was a capital blunder from which
it has never recovered. It was of course a departure
from the plan of Jesus. The new life was mated with
the old way of the world, and the church was untrue
to its own genius when it made its compromise with
Constantine (about A. D. 325). True, the new life
must have degenerated a good deal before it could even
consider such a compromise : yet sufficient virtue still

66

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remained in it to make it the most considerable fact
in the world at the time.

It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that
Jesus was indifferent to politics, — that is, to politics in
its larger sense of the organisation and economy of the
common life. And it would be another mistake to sup-
pose that Christianity has nothing to do with politics.
The growth of the modern democratic ideal may not
have originated with Jesus, but it has undoubtedly re-
ceived its most powerful endorsement from Jesus' doc-
trine of the infinite and therefore equal value of every
living soul. For democracy ideally enthrones the es-
sential man, not a particular man, or a particular group
of men. But it does not follow that we have achieved
democracy when we have established a universal fran-
chise, representative government and majority rule.
In practice such a form of government may be as a
recent writer has said, "government of the people by
the prosperous for the prosperous," * which, whatever
else it may be, is certainly not democracy. Democracy
is, after all, something more than a political form. It
must cover the whole of life. Its logic must, for in-
stance, be carried through into the economic region.
But even then democracy cannot live except it be sus-
tained by whatever is contained in the saying that we
are members one of another, and in the acceptance and
practice of its law of mutual service. It is not a politi-
cal doctrine so much as a way of life. But the final
"* Metropolitan, Editorial, August, 1920.

^7

THE UNTRIED DOOR

test of a political system, whether it be called demo-
cratic or by whatever other name, is whether it min-
isters to the freedom and abundance of life. And
it would be difficult to find a government in the world
that could stand this test. The best we can say is that
some are not so bad as others.

5

''Ye leave the commandment of God, and hold fast
the tradition of men . . . making the word of God
void by your tradition/'

It was chiefly in the religious sphere that Jesus found
the institution most securely enthroned over the life
that it was intended to serve.

We have already observed that Jesus originally de-
signed to usher in the new order of life on the crest of
a religious revival within the existing religious insti-
tutions. But his synagogue ministry met with con-
siderable opposition which after a time came to a
climax over the healing of the man with the withered
hand on the sabbath day. The scribes and Pharisees
» ^ ^ ,, were ''filled with madness." And Jesus
Mark 3:5 looked upou them with anger, ''being
grieved at the hardening of their heart." He saw that
it was an impossible situation; and on that day he left
the synagogue never (except upon one doubtful occa-
sion) to enter it any more. Henceforth his work
would lie outside and the next stage of his ministry

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was chiefly spent in laying down the foundations of
the new society in and through which the new life was
to function and grow into that single order of life
which would supersede both the state and the church
that then were.

The trouble that had overtaken the ecclesiastical sys-
tem of the Jews is recurrent in the history of religious
institutions, — the hardening of religious life into a
rigid system of belief and conduct. Jewish religion
gathered around the Law, and the observance of the
Law was the whole duty of man. But unless the mean-
ing of law is kept steadily in mind, fidelity in the ob-
servance of it may become an arrest of life. Law is of
course the endeavour to define right conduct, but it is
never more than a definition of the minimum of moral
obligation. Yet our tendency is to regard it as stating
the total of human obligation, and whatever is beyond
law is a work of supererogation, a work of extra merit,
so to speak; and whatever the law does not forbid
comes to be counted as permissible. It was therefore
possible to observe the letter of the law and yet be
guilty of gross breaches of its spirit. It was with this
that Jesus charged the Pharisees and the scribes: "Ye
Mt. 23:23 tithe mint and anise and cummin, and have
left undone the weightier matters of the law, judgment,
and mercy and faith." It was out of this temper that
the controversy about the sabbath grew. The current
Mt. 12:11-12 legalism exalted the sabbath over human
need. Whereupon Jesus answered them: "What man

69

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shall there be of you that shall have one sheep, and if
this fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay
hold on it, and lift it out? How much more then is a
man of more value than a sheep? Wherefore it is law-
ful to do good on the sabbath day."

We can see, therefore, why Jesus said to his dis-
Mt. 5:20 ciples : "Except your righteousness shall ex-
ceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Phari-
sees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of
heaven." Jesus had no quarrel with the law, only with
the official interpretation of it. He declared that he
had indeed come to fulfil the Law. For the Law was
good so far as it went. But no law will ever succeed
in being so extensive and so detailed that it can cover all
the contingencies that arise in life. Jesus, with his
consistent emphasis upon the inward, showed how the
spirit of the Law as it was expressed in certain com-
mandments went far beyond the scope of the com-
mandments. This is what he does in the Fifth Chap-
ter of Matthew. He takes one after another of the
specific legal injunctions with which his hearers were
familiar and shows how the spirit that was embodied in
the injunction went out far beyond the injunction.
Mt.5:27 The spirit which forbade the adulterous
thought forbade the adulterous act. The spirit which
imposed a limit upon revenge led logically to a for-
bidding of retaliation, and carried to its natural con-
clusion, required that the injured person should seek
to reconcile the offender by rendering him service along

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the very line of his offence. "Whosoever shall compel
Mt. 5:38-41 thee to go with him one mile'* — that is, it
a Roman officer commandeers you to carry his baggage
for a mile, — "go with him twain.'*

Right conduct is the expression of a right spirit.
And if one has this spirit, says Jesus, there is no
limit that can be assigned to his well-doing. In such
conduct there is a creative quality. By being true to
itself through everything, it is forever outdoing its
own best. And the final objection to legalism — this
insistence upon the letter of the law — is that it kills
the original and creative quality in goodness. It re-
duces goodness to a rule. Both to the good and the
evil it says, Thus far shalt thou go. And it looks
with equal hostility both upon him who transgresses
the law and upon him who transcends it.

With dogma as we know it, Jesus was not apparently
troubled. But that was because the Jew had not been
a thinker like the Greek. It is true that he had exer-
cised a good deal of ingenuity in the interpretation and
application of the Law; and a great body of legal lore
had grown in the course of the years. And to this sup-
plementary matter the scribe and the Pharisee attached
as much importance as to the Law itself. It was to this
accretion to the text of the Law that Jesus was allud-
ing when he spoke of "the tradition of men"; and the
attitude to it was in its own sphere precisely that which
in the region of religious truth we call dogmatism. The

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result of both is the same. And indeed the objection
to both is the same. It is that they ascribe a quahty of
absoluteness and finality to a definition of something
that cannot from the nature of the case be fully defined,
and least of all can be finally defined. A definition,
whether it be a doctrine, a creed, what you will, is not
in itself objectionable. It may, properly used, be a
fruitful instrument for the guiding and the unfolding
of the religious life. When it is regarded as a point
to set out from and not to stop at, a starting place
and not a terminal, then it has its uses. But we tend
to regard it as final, as a line which every man must
toe. But religious experience cannot be captured into
a phrase and held within a doctrinal system : it is con-
tinually outstripping the definition. When it does not
do so, it is either stagnant or shrinking. If it is a
growing thing, it ''breaks through language and es-
capes." As Coventry Patmore has said:

"In divinity and love
What's best worth saying can't be said."

The living truth is always greater than anything that
we can say about it. Dogma is a fingerpost which in-
dicates the way in which religious experience is travel-
ling ; but it becomes a prison for the soul and an arrest
of life when it is assumed to be the final truth of things.

7»

THE UNTRIED DOOR
6

"Thy kingdom come on earth . . . as in heaven"

Let it not be supposed that because Jesus emphasised
the kingdom within that he despised the world without
and that he was in any sense separating himself from
it. One may live outside the conventional institutions
without forsaking the world of men, as Jesus did.
What the vision of the kingdom does for us is to give
us a revaluation of the world. Take money, for
instance. The modern world has loved money without
respecting it. Money is a symbol of value ; and value
is created by the expenditure of the priceless stuff of
life. A coin is so much minted life, a holy thing, not
to be handled lightly or irreverently. It is a sacramental
thing, like the bread and wine of the Communion, the
outward and visible sign of life fruitfully expended.
That is why a bank should be as a temple and the
banker a priest, a man who handles holy things. The
storekeeper's merchandise is sacramental stuff, con-
gealed life. His store should be a temple, and the man
who sells shoddy goods defiles the temple as much as
did the hucksters and moneychangers in the Temple in
Jerusalem long ago. To the man in whom the King-
dom has come, the world and all that's in it is sacra-
mental. Not only does he find "sermons in stones and
books in the running brooks," not only does he see
"every common bush aflame with God," but he will go

73

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to the commonest affair of daily business as to an act
of worship; he will go to the marketplace as to the
Holiest of All, he will tread every familiar spot with
unshod feet, and he will look in the deep of men's eyes
and see God there.

Nor will this be all. With it will go a new percep-
tion of the possibilities of the world. William Blake
is most widely known through the stanza in which he
says:

I will not cease from mental strife,
Nor shall my sword rust in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.

That same passion of creation and redemption comes
to every man who has seen the kingdom of God. Mr.
G. K. Chesterton says somewhere that if we want to
save Pimlico, we must hate Pimlico and love Pimlico
at the same time — hate it for the ugliness that it is,
love it for the loveliness that it may be. And ever
beneath the crust of ugliness there is a hidden beauty
waiting to be revealed. St. Paul speaks of the crea-
tion waiting for the revealing of the sons of God,
waiting to be delivered from the bondage of corrup-
tion into what the sons of God see that it may be.
The redeeming of the world halts because we do not
see it with the eyes of the sons of God; the passion
for souls is dead within us because we do not see in
the faces of the sons of men the face of the Son of

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Man. But this will be no longer so when we have
gained that inner illumination which enables us to see
through the husk to the kernel, through the outward to
the inward, through the flesh to the spirit. We shall
discover in the men round about us that imperishable
image of God, which, broken and defiled though it be,
is yet the loveliest thing on earth to him who has the
eyes to see it. Then will come a great tide of com-
passion and longing for the gathering in, the mending,
and the cleansing of this broken and disordered beauty,
that thrill of love which gives us no peace until we
become the bondsmen of God for the redeeming of this
world of man. We shall know something of the great
passion which Frederic Myers has rightly read into St.
Paul:

Only as souls I see the folk thereunder,

Bound who should conquer, slaves who should be
kings,
Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder,

Sadly contented with a show of things. . . .

Then with a thrill the intolerable craving
Shivers through me like a trumpet call, —

O to save these, to perish for their saving,
Die for their life, be offered for them all!

7

"A certain woman lifted up her voice and said unto
him: Blessed is the womb that hare thee, and the

7S

THE UNTRIED DOOR

breasts which thou didst suck! But he said: Yea
rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God and
keep it,''

Jesus' relations with his family were apparently
somewhat difficult. They did not understand him
Mark 3:21 and even went so far as to doubt his sanity.
But it would be to go beyond the facts to say that there
was any resentment in Jesus' attitude to them. What
had happened was that Jesus had entered upon a new
kind of relation that transcended the old. The relation
of physical kinship was superseded by one of spiritual
Mt. 12:49-50 kinship. "He stretched forth his hands
toward his disciples and said, Behold my mother and
my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of my
Father which is in heaven, he is my brother and sister
and mother."

Upon the priority of the new relation in the king-
dom Jesus was emphatic. The man who wanted to go
Mt.8:22 home to bury his father was told to "let
the dead bury the dead; but go thou and preach the
Luke 9:62 kingdom." And the other man who de-
sired to "bid farewell to them that are at home in my
house" was told that "no man having put his hand to
the plough and looking back is fit for the kingdom of
God." The saying: "If any man cometh unto me and
hateth not his own father and mother and wife and
children and brethren and sisters and his own life also,
he cannot be my disciple," is not so harsh as it sounds.

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The word hate renders an Aramaic word which is rela-
tive. If A loves B better than he loves C he may be
said in Aramaic to hate C. Jesus is not asking that
men should discard their kinsfolk, but he quite definite-
ly claims for himself and for the kingdom a priority
over them.

There is of course nothing very shocking in this.
We agree that a man's nation under certain conditions
comes before his family, and Jesus is only insisting that
there are relations between men higher than those of
the home. Indeed, all relationships that have a purely
physical basis, — family, nation, locality, race, — he re-
gards as inferior and less authoritative than the new
relation established between them *'that hear the word
of God and keep it." The bonds of the kingdom take
precedence over all other bonds whatsoever. Jesus was
creating a new family on the basis of a spiritual kin-
ship which rendered all other kinships secondary.

We shall see later how large a part the sense of
human solidarity played in the mind of Jesus. The
physical solidarity of the race is already a fact; but
just because it was physical — and only physical — it
was disrupted in all sorts of ways. Family feuds,
tribal wars, national disputes, — the world has been
always full of these things, although God had, as St.
Paul said, "made of one blood all nations of men.'*
Men tend to group themselves in small units, based
upon proximity of physical relation, and to assert their
group-consciousness against each other. And all the

77

THE UNTRIED DOOR

promise that was implied in the physical solidarity of
man was being frustrated by spiritual disintegration
and moral disharmony. But in the kingdom of God,
a spiritual and moral content was to be added to this
solidarity. It was to be transformed from a physical
to a spiritual and moral fact. The local and sectional
affections and affinities of men were to be enlarged into
a relation which would be generous enough to embrace
all men. The family, the tribe, the nation, — all were
to be displaced by the kingdom of God; and within
the kingdom men would stand in a relation to one
another deeper, more intimate, more exacting than any
other human relation could be.

But it does not at all follow that the new relation
abrogates the old ones. On the contrary, Jesus cared
for his mother to the end. The apparently harsh word
that he spoke to her at the Cana marriage is behind the
translation only a mode of speech and implies no feel-
ing of any kind. He had a thought for his mother in
his deepest anguish. The truth is that we do not know
the possibilities of our human affection until they are
baptised into the kingdom. None of us love each other
as we might until we love the kingdom of God more.
And there is no friendship like that of those who are
first friends of Jesus. It is a matter of realisation once
more. We do not realise the wealth and the beauty
of our human affections until they have been brought
within the kingdom of God.

"Lord," said Peter one day, "we have left all and

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followed thee. What shall we therefore have?" Jesus'
Mt. 19:29 answer was, ''Every one that hath left
houses or brethren or sisters or fathers or mother or
children or lands for my name's sake shall receive a
hundredfold and inherit eternal life." Which means
that the relations of men within the kingdom are a
sort of communism of affection, and seemingly also of
goods. Here we are all each other's fathers and
mothers and children; and we are free of each other's
homes and lands. It is significant that the disciples,
when they faced the business of life after Jesus had
left them, should have had "all things in common" ;
and that periods of spiritual quickening have been ac-
companied by communistic experiments. But it springs
from the new sense of unity and togetherness which is
born of a vision, however faint, of the kingdom ; and
the communism of goods is an attempt to give a sacra-
mental expression to the communism of affection. It
is well to remeinber that the kingdom of God is a
world-wide communism of the spirit; and when we
have reached that point we shall discover that we have
also a communism of everything else.

We observe here what we shall have occasion to
observe again that Jesus identifies a relation to him-
self as identical with a relation to the kingdom. What
this implies for our understanding of Jesus himself we
shall have to consider at a later point. But it is prob-
able that Jesus was partly acting upon the feeling that
he was dealing with people for whom the idea of the

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kingdom was too abstract and inapprehensible, and for
whom it had to be translated into terms of a personal
relation. Jesus looked upon himself as the sacra-
ment of the kingdom, and his "Come unto me" was a
simplified and more concrete form of an invitation to
enter the kingdom of God. He was dealing with
minds for whom truth had to be ''embodied in a tale"
and the spirit conveyed through a symbol. And he
himself was the symbol of the kingdom. But this
suggests something more. In outward expression and
practice, the kingdom is an affair of personal rela-
tionships. And our relations to each other are to be
fashioned upon our fundamental relationship to Jesus.
Mt. 25:40 ''Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the
least of these ye have done it unto me." We are to
treat each other as we would treat Jesus. We are
far from perceiving that the entire problem of
the common life is a matter of personal relations.
What we call the social problem is all involved in the
problem between you and me. Everything begins
there. I had some years ago to pay occasional visits
to a home in which all the members were of a some-
what bitter and critical habit of speech and usually
they exercised this temper upon each other. But there
was one thing upon which they were all agreed, — thcv
all hated the people next door. And so it is that our
personal dislikes are enlarged into group antagonisms
and our group antagonisms sharpen into all kinds
of conflict and war. And over against this disruptive

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temper Jesus calls for a new type and quality of mutual
relation between men. But this new relation is not
something one may put on at will as one might put on
a different garment. It is something that comes of
itself when men have seen the true good of life in a
vision of the kingdom. Not that it comes at once in
all its perfection. It has to grow by practice and ex-
pression; and it has a stiff fight against our residual
self-love. But it is the natural first fruits of the king-
dom in a man's life, as it is also the only hope of the
world.

8i

CHAPTER FOUR

RIGHT AND WRONG

(Matt. 5:14-15; 18:21-35; 21:33-44; 25:21-46; Luke
10:25-37; 12:13-15; 13:1-5; 15:11-32; 22:24-27)

"The stone which the builders rejected, the same
was made head of the corner . . . and he that falleth
upon this stone shall he broken to pieces; but on whom-
soever it shall fall it shall scatter him as dust."

THE man who first saw that "honesty is the best
poHcy" had made a great discovery. He had
not merely formulated a safe maxim of con-
duct; he had discovered that he lived in a moral uni-
verse, a universe so made that it does not pay to be
dishonest in it. No doubt the man had had his fingers
burned in a piece of crooked business, but that takes
nothing away from the greatness of his discovery. It
is also true that he had not found out all there was to
be found out about the moral basis of the universe.
Still it was a considerable thing to have found that it
had a moral character at all.

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In a sense, mankind has been making that same
discovery all through its history. Human nature is so
constituted that its growth and happiness depend upon
its acting in a certain way, and in the course of the
ages men have discovered some of the things that con-
stitute that way. The discovery has been made in
the business of living and through the experience of
living together. Men saw that if they were to make
the best of themselves and of each other, there were
certain things that they had to agree to do, and other
things that they had to agree to abstain from doing.
These were their mores, which is the Latin word for
customs. And these mores were in the course of time
collected and systematised in codes of law, like those of
Hammurabi and Moses. It was, however, evident that
these mores were not all on the same footing of au-
thority and importance, and little by little men saw that
among the mass of mores there was a small core
which carried with it an authority of a different quality
from the rest. It had a seemingly absolute and uni-
versal character, and the word mores came to be asso-
ciated with this body of absolute and uncontingent obli-
gations. So that when we speak of morality it is of
these obligations that we are thinking as contrasted
with those things that are merely customary and per-
missive.

Now it is perfectly true that amid the complexities
of human life men may differ in their view of the appli-
cation of these obligations to particular cases, and the

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borderline between right and wrong is apt to be blurred.
Yet, however men may differ about the rightness or
wrongness of particular acts, the faculty which distin-
guishes between the quality of rightness and the quality
of wrongness is a universal thing. This is something
original, inherent, instinctive in human nature. It may
be crude and may want much education. But it is there,
a something within us, which speaks in the imperative
mood with an accent not our own.

Rightly or wrongly men have supposed this to be
the voice of God within them. Even though those
people be right who hold that conscience is a product of
evolution, it does not necessarily follow that it is any
less the voice of God on that account. However we
came by it, we have learnt from experience that it is the
reflection within us of the moral order of the universe
of which we are part. And the religious interpreta-
tion of this moral order and of its counterpart within
the soul is that it is an expression of the moral nature
of God.

Now, whatever view we may take of the person of
Jesus, we may at least go so far as to say that he lived
in so great an intimacy with God, and therefore pre-
sumably in so close moral harmony with God, that
whatever he has to say upon this particular subject
is entitled to be heard with respect. And, indeed, there
are few people who would dispute that what he was
even more than what he said furnishes us with the
surest clue to the moral order of the universe. The

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plain inference from the passage which introduces this
section is that he regarded himself as an embodiment
of the moral order: and this claim which would be
presumptuous in another has been seriously challenged
by few; and those few are people like Nietzsche, who
deny the truth and the validity of the whole Christian
view of the world. But if one accepts, as most people
do, the kind of thing that Jesus stands for as true and
valid for life in this world, then it is not to be denied
that he is the best embodiment of his own precept and
therefore of the moral order as a whole. In point of
fact, the moral nature of Jesus is — whether willingly
or unwillingly — endorsed by the conscience of the
average man.

But the tragedy of the world is that while men have
paid lip-service to the way of Jesus, they have not
taken that way themselves; and all through their his-
tory they have paid the price of their default. For
Gal 6-7 there is in the universe not only a moral

Hei).2:2 order but a principle of continuity which

secures that a man shall reap what he sows, that every
transgression and disobedience shall receive due recom-
pense of reward. The punishment of sin is inherent in
the sin itself as the harvest is in the seed. It carries
the certainty of its own nemesis in itself. Men have
ignored the moral order and have gone their own way,
and the moral order has gone its way and crushed them.

It is of some consequence therefore that we should
seek out the mind of Jesus upon this matter of the

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

moral order, and of what is fundamental to it — namely
upon what principle Jesus distinguished between right
and wrong. If we can discover this we shall find
out the moral basis upon which Hfe rests and by their
attitude to which men and nations rise and fall.

''For if ye forgive not men their trespasses neither
mill your Father forgive you your trespasses/'

Mt.7:i2 **A11 things therefore whatsoever ye would
that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto
them." This saying we call the Golden Rule and in a
somewhat uncritical way we call it the whole duty of
man. But as a matter of fact it is nothing of the sort
and Jesus did not mean it to be taken as the ultimate
principle of conduct. Indeed, how could he? For it
raises moral obligation no higher than the plane of our
own desires. Taken in a generous sense, it is a good
rough rule of conduct for the man in the street. Observe
what Jesus says concerning it, — ''for this is the law
and the prophets." That is to say, it represents the
highest point yet reached in ethical perception. And
Jesus lays down another rule which goes beyond it, —
not "Do unto others as ye would that they should do
to you," but "Do unto others as God has done unto
you." God is our pattern; we are, as St. Paul says (in
Eph. 5:1 Moffatt's translation), to "copy God."

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Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to do good to
Mt. 5:44-45 them that despitef ully use us "that ye may
be the children of your Father," who loves men in this
undiscriminating v^ay. St. Paul sees this and lays it
Bph.4:32 down categorically, "Be kind to one an-
other, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God
in Christ hath forgiven you/' So also St. John, "//
ijoim4-ii ^^^ ^^ loved us we also ought to love one
Mt, 5:48 another/' And it was Jesus who laid down

the principle that the heavenly Father's perfection was
to be the goal of ours.

What then does Jesus tell us about the moral nature
of God? The saying "God is love" does not come to
us from Jesus, but it easily might have done so. For
in no other terms can we define the impression that
Jesus gives us of the Father. But at this point it may
be as well to deal with a misconception about this mat-
ter which is quite common, namely that when we speak
of the moral nature of God we have to speak of his
holiness as well as of his love, as though they were in
some sense different and even antithetical qualities.

The word holiness is used relative to man as well
as to God; and every religion has its doctrine of per-
sonal holiness. Originally the word was used in a
ritual sense, to denote things and persons set apart to
the service of God. But with the growing recognition
of the unity and the moral character of God the word
acquired an ethical content; and in a rough generalisa-

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tion the doctrine of holiness is that it consists in the
acquisition by the behever of the moral character of
his deity. But when it is used of the Christian God
it is to signify an aspect of his character which cannot
presumably be included in the term ''love." Popularly,
holiness is regarded as covering the ''righteousness," the
"justice," of God, and is generally associated with the
stern and austere attributes of the Deity. But this is
both to misconceive the meaning and activity of love,
and to accept traditional ideas without sufficient analy-
sis. God is love, and love only ; and when we say that
God is holy, we mean that his love is perfect, absolute,
invariable, true to itself through everything. We mean
that God will never go back upon Himself. It is not
that He is "justice" as well as "love," if we use the
word justice in the popular sense. Indeed, it would be
difficult to associate popular justice with a God who
visits the sins of the fathers upon the children even to
the third and fourth generations and who sends his rain
on the just and the unjust and makes his sun to shine
on the good and the evil alike. But this dualism per-
sists in men's thought of God chiefly because they do
not think of love in the same way as the New Testa-
ment writers do.

We may perhaps approach this subject in detail by
observing how much the mind of Jesus was engaged
with the question of injuries and their forgiveness.
Mt 18-22 ^^ ^^^' ^^ says, to "forgive seven times in
i.Tikei7'4 ^ <iay/' ^^^ even "unto seventy times

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seven." In teaching his disciples to pray he attaches to
Mt. 6:12 the petition for forgiveness the words, "as

we also forgive our debtors." And in a sort of foot-
note to the prayer he singles out the point for special
mention. Only the forgiving are forgiven. The un-
forgiving go unforgiven. It is an indication of the
place that the subject occupies in his mind that this is
the only point in the prayer that receives this empha-
sis. Jesus was but carrying out the logic of his own
precept when he said on the Cross : "Father, forgive
luke 23:34 them, for they know not what they do."

But forgiveness as Jesus thought of it was some-
thing more than the remitting and the forgetting of
an injury, merely letting bygones be bygones. Few
of us indeed go even that distance. In one of his
Luke 7:41 parables Jesus likens sin to a bad debt and
the forgiving of sin to the writing-off of a bad debt.
But he would not have regarded this as a complete
description of what he meant by forgiveness. It is
not merely to write off the bad debt but to resume busi-
ness with the defaulter on the old terms. In a word,
it is reconciliation. Forgiveness is the healing of a
broken fellowship, the restoration of interrupted friend-
ship. It is the re-establishment of right personal rela-
tionships.

But is one to forgive without the offender's repent-
Lute i7:3 ance? Apparently not. "If he repent,
thou shalt forgive him." But there is after all some-
thing greater and better than the duty of forgiveness,

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namely the grace of forgiveness. And the character-
istic of what I call the grace of forgiveness is that it
does not wait for the offender's repentance, but goes out
to provoke it. The greater forgiveness is that which
anticipates the repentance and by anticipating it calls
it forth. Here we have the essential meaning of the
Mt. 5:39-42 **hard sayings" about the other cheek and
the second mile. When one is struck, one's impulse
is to retaliate, to pay the offender back in his own
coin. But that achieves nothing but multiplied bit-
terness. It makes the man sorry for himself, not for
his sin. What we have to do is not to break the fel-
low's head, but that tremendous and fundamental
thing, to break his hem't. It is what St. Paul means:
Bom. 12:20 "If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he
thirst, give him to drink: for in so doing thou shalt
heap coals of fire upon his head," or, as Dr. Moffatt
translates it, "thou shalt make him feel a burning
sense of shame."

It is worth observing here that this is what God
Bom. 5:8-10 docs, according to St. Paul. "God com-
mendeth his love toward us in this that while we were
yet sinners Christ died for us." ''While we were yet
enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of
his Son." God did not wait for our repentance: He
did all in His power to provoke it. He bore greatly and
gently with sinners, — as the Psalmist said, "These
Bom. 3:25 things thou didst and I kept silence," —
"overlooking the sins that were done aforetime," as

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St. Paul says, — that men might take his forbearance
as an invitation to repentance. And as Jesus said, he
sent them his servants, the prophets, and at last sent
Mt. 21:33-39 thcc His Sou. He left no deed of love
undone that man might be moved to repentance.

"If therefore thou art offering thy gift at the altar,
and there rememherest that thy brother hath aught
against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar and
go thy way. First he reconciled to thy brother, and
then come and offer thy gift"

"The Spirit of Jesus," says William Blake, ''is con-
tinual forgiveness of sins." And again, he says, 'The
glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness."
The disciple of Jesus is called upon to forgive utterly
and unconditionally, to forgive not on repentance,
but to forgive in order to provoke repentance. But
it is not a matter of forgiveness for its own sake,
but in order to restore a broken unity, a severed rela-
tion. This is the point intended in the emphasis upon
restitution in the saying quoted at the beginning of
this paragraph.

We are undoubtedly here on the trail of the funda-
mental principle of the ethics of Jesus. We shall
probably best pursue the matter by contrasting Jesus'
prescription for the treatment of offenders with the
popular conception of justice.

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What do we mean by "justice"? We can answer
the question most satisfactorily by taking one or two
instances of the operation of justice. Two brothers
have a dispute about the division of their father's
estate, and the controversy is brought for settlement
to court. In that case, justice requires that the estate
shall be divided "equitably," that is to say, consistently
with a due regard to the claims and rights of both
parties. A worker in a factory loses a finger owing
to some defect in the machinery. He sues his em-
ployer for compensation on account of the loss.* If
it can be proved that the accident was due to the em-
ployer's negligence, then the worker is conceded to
have a claim against the employer and a right to the
compensation which he claims. A man steals an-
other man's pocketbook, and he is proved guilty; he
receives a punishment which is supposed to be in some
way the equivalent of the crime.

Justice then is conceived as lying in the equitable
adjustment of conflicting claims, in the suitable redress
of injury, in the due punishment of offences. It is to
be observed, first, that there runs throughout the whole
administration of justice the idea of striking a balance.
And it is worth recalling that the symbolic figure of
Justice is a blindfolded woman who holds a pair of
scales in her hand. We sometimes speak in serious-
ness words that were written in jest, of "making the
punishment fit the crime." We punish murder with

* That is, if there is a Compensation Law in operation !

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death. And though we no longer say, **An eye for an
eye," yet when a man loses an eye through the offence
or the negligence of another, we fix a money equiva-
lent of the loss and award it as ''damages." We even
find courts venturing to assess a cash valuation of a
broken heart! And where no question of offence or
injury arises we think of justice as a process of equity,
the due adjustment of conflicting claims or rights.

But observe also that this all rests upon a doctrine of
''rights," rights of the individual or of the group.
And justice has to do with the assertion and vindica-
tion of these ^'rights" in the event of any invasion
or violation of them. The "rights" of the worker are
vindicated against the employer to whose negligence
was due the loss of his finger. The "rights" of a lega-
tee under the terms of a will are asserted against a
person who endeavours to violate them. The "rights"
of society are vindicated against the criminal.

So that our reception of Justice, and therefore our
Doctrine of Right, ^ start from a view of the integrity
and inviolability of certain "rights." Law is the defi-
nition and codification of these "rights," and the
processes of justice have come into being because
these "rights" are liable to be disregarded or to be

* It may be observed that in this discussion the difference
between Right and Rights can best be grasped by remembering
that the antithesis of Right is Wrong, while the antithesis of
Rights is Duties. It should perhaps be also pointed out that
the word equity is used here in its plain dictionary sense and
not in the technical sense that it has in law.

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in conflict with one another. And the findings of
justice are enforced by a machinery of injunctions and
retributive penalties.

Jesus was once asked to settle a dispute between two
Luke 12:13-15 brothers about a dead man's estate. The
equities of the case had been badly violated; and the
rights of one party grievously disregarded. But Jesus
summarily refused to have anything at all to do with
the matter. What he said about it was : ''Beware of
covetousness." The Right as Jesus saw it was so
little vindicated by a more equitable division of the
property that he would not touch the dispute. It re-
quired something deeper than adjusting the outward
equities of the case : it could be satisfied with nothing
less than the reconciliation of the parties. And for that
it was necessary to remove the covetousness which was
at the root of the quarrel. The equities would in that
event take handsome care of themselves. But the covet-
ousness stood in the way, and however fairly the estate
might be divided, the old self-love would still remain
in possession.

Jesus was little concerned with people's "rights," for
he saw that their rights were forever involving them
in conflict. His concern was for their real interests;
and these he believed to be always identical. More-
over, men would not quarrel about them, if they once
saw them, nor indeed would they be disposed to quar-
rel about anything else. For these interests are of a

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kind that do not provoke covetousness or conflict.
Rather do they stimulate cooperation and fellowship.
Jesus* whole attitude rested upon the fact of the under-
lying solidarity of men and the consequent continuity,
mutuality and identity of their essential interests. Here
is the root of Jesus' ethics. It derives from the circum-
stance of human solidarity, and for him the principle
that distinguished between the rightness and wrong-
ness of conduct was its bearing upon this solidarity.
Did it reinforce it or disrupt it? Our common life to-
day is ordered, justice is administered, our whole view
of human relations is defined, in accordance with a
doctrine of human rights tJmt are self-re gar ding and
are therefore potentially always in conflict. The ulti-
mate Right as Jesus saw it was based upon a doctrine
of human interests that are always in fact identical.
The common view starts from the individual as an in-
dividual : the doctrine of Jesus starts from a view of the
individual as a social being whose life and growth are
organically bound up with those of his fellows. The
one regards man as being social only in spite of him-
self, and as having to be constrained into social con-
duct. The other regards man as instinctively social
and, when he is allowed to be true to himself, swing-
ing naturally to the pole of fellowship. It is likely that
Jesus' contempt for popular notions of justice sprang
from the fact that they assumed and therefore perpet-
uated that individualism which was the denial of the

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

solidarity upon the realisation and deepening of which
all human good depended.*

For Jesus, right conduct consisted of those things
that make for human unity. That is why he lays so
much stress upon forgiveness and restitution, and why
he has so little room in his mind for doctrines of pun-
ishment and retaliation which perpetuate human dis-
union. Right conduct is that which creates, fosters,
enriches, restores fellowship; wrong conduct is that
which denies, destroys, hinders fellowship. At last
morality is the art of fellowship. The emphasis of the
gospels is steadily upon the society-making graces.
They know no distinction between ''social" and ''indi-
vidual" ethics. On the contrary, they teach what
we may call an "organic" ethics, which identifies social
and private duty. Even that peculiarly individual vir-
tue of veracity is urged upon the Ephesian Christians
Epii.4:25 by St. Paul, because "we are members one
of another." It is particularly to the point that on
the one occasion that Jesus gives us the materials for
Luke 19:1-9 a definition of salvation — the conversion
of Zacchaeus — he should describe it as a social expe-
rience. Zacchseus was made a member of a family, —

* Since the above was written, the general drift of the argu-
ment has been confirmed in my mind by an article in The At-
lantic Monthly (Sept., 1920) by Mr. Louis Bartlet on *'The
Newer Justice," in which he points out how certain new de-
velopments in the Administration of Justice (Courts of Do-
mestic Relations, Children's Courts, etc.) express a "social"
conception of justice. Here the emphasis is upon conciliation
and reclamation in contradistinction to the "individualistic" bias
toward retribution and penalty.

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''forasmuch as he also is a son of Abraham." And it
was so that Zacchseus himself felt it, for he imme-
diately began to act as a member of a family should.
"Half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have
exacted anything wrongfully, I restore it fourfold."
He began to perform those social acts that were there
and then within his power.

We are, however, not to suppose that because Jesus
treats fellowship as the touch-stone of right and wrong,
that fellowship is an end in itself. Fellowship is im-
portant because human nature is so made that it only
finds itself and grows in fellowship. Fellowship can
and may be prostituted to perverse uses. Men can asso-
ciate for wrong and vicious purposes, just as there
may be honour among thieves. Fellowship is good
only when it is devoted to its own appointed end of
enriching life and helps men to rise above themselves
to higher things. Nor is this exaltation of fellowship
to be interpreted as meaning that Jesus subordinated
the individual to the society. On the contrary, Jesus
was jealous for the individual, and his thought was
for men rather than for society; but he knew that a
man could only find himself as he made common cause
with his brethren and identified himself with them.
Indeed, it may be said that for him the whole duty of
man consisted in self -identification with the other man,
Mt. 10:39 as it was also the path to self-realisation. "He
that loseth his life . . . shall find it."

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''But when they continued asking him, he lifted
up himself, and said unto them. He that is with-
out sin among you, let him cast the first stone. And
again he stooped down and with his finger wrote upon
the ground. And they, when they heard it, went out
one by one . . . and Jesus was left alone, and the
woman where she was, in the midst. And Jesus lifted
up himself and said unto her. Woman, where are they?
Did no man condemn thee? And she said. No man.
Lord. And Jesus said. Neither do I condemn thee;
go and sin no more.*'

Professor Rauschenbusch has defined love as "the
energy of a steadfast will, bent upon creating fellow-
ship/' It is time that in the interests of clear thinking
and sound speech, some effort should be made to deliver
the word love from the slough of sugary sentimentality
— and worse — into which it has fallen. It is properly
used of the sum of those attitudes and activities which
make for fellowship. It is the source of the manifold
energy of social attraction and cohesion. It is, more-
over, a power of redemption, converting enemies into
friends and expelling the self-love which destroys the
unity of mankind.

But Jesus was too uncompromising a realist to sup-
pose that human love even at its best was infallible in
its effects. *'With God,'* indeed, "all things are pos-

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sible." But with men? Generally, he would say; but
there are exceptions. There are men so entrenched in
their self-love and their pride that they cannot be
Mt. 18:15-17 reached by any human good-will. "If thy
brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault be-
tween thee and him alone: if he hear thee, thou hast
gained thy brother. But if he hear thee not, take
with thee one or two more, that at the mouth of two
witnesses or three every word may be established. And
if he refuse to hear them, tell it unto the church also,
and if he refuse to hear the church, let him be unto
thee as the gentile and the publican." * With such
people there is nothing to do but to leave them to
themselves — and to the mercy of God. The same idea
Luke 13:6-9 finds cxprcssiou in the parable of the Fruit-
less Figtree, where it is made plain that contumacy
may be carried to a point to which love is powerless
to follow it. The self-love of the Pharisee had led
him on the way to the unpardonable sin, to the moral
blindness which calls black white, f the sin that can-
not be repented of. And Jesus says that the branch

* This passage undoubtedly suggests a closer organisation of
the Christian society and of its discipline than had been reached
in the lifetime of Jesus. Moreover the use of the words gen-
tile and publican is of a kind that falls awkwardly from the
lips of Jesus. It is hard to accept the passage in its present form
as coming directly from Jesus. It is probably a later elabo-
ration of the original saying of Jesus, but there is no reason
to suppose that its general sense misinterprets the mind of
Jesus.

t He could not distinguish between the Holy Spirit and the
Prince of Demons.

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of the tree which does not bear fruit is cut off. When
a man persists in remaining outside the fellowship or
in conduct which denies or despises the fellowship, his
self -exclusion must be accepted and he be left to pay
the price of his pride and self-love.

But such persons as these are extreme and exceptional
cases. Men, as a rule, are amenable to love, which
means that they can be redeemed. This task of re-
deeming men from the anarchism of self-love is one
of the primary obligations of a Christian society. As
things are, what we have for the moral anarchist is
retribution ; it is at last beginning to dawn dimly upon
us that our task with him is his redemption. The
traditional treatment of crime secures for society at
a given time a certain immunity from the activities of
a number of criminally disposed persons. At the best,
it may have deterred a few poor spirits from criminal
adventure. The one thing it is incapable of doing is to
solve the moral problem which crime embodies. For
what by our present methods we do is either to harden
the criminal or to turn him into a shuffling parasite by
breaking him. So far from solving the moral prob-
lem, we have only aggravated it.

No society can afford to leave a dangerous criminal
at large. It must put him under restraint. But, having
put him under restraint, a Christian society would not
be concerned with punishing him for his crime so much
as with curing him of his criminality. Indeed, one of
the first things that a really Christian society would do

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

is to establish a new diagnosis of the social misfit,
whether he be pauper or criminal. It would treat moral
anarchy not as a danger to be suppressed so much as a
disease to be cured. And when the criminal, especially
the young criminal, is put in conditions which en-
courage the growth of the sense of social responsibility,
as a rule he responds to the treatment. Samuel Butler
was not far wrong when he suggested that a liar might
be a case for a hospital.

Moreover, it is to a great extent true that we owe
this treatment to the criminal. When we realise how
much crime is due to mental deficiency and how much
mental deficiency in its turn is due to evil social con-
ditions that our fathers before us and we who have
come after them have tolerated, we cannot repudiate a
certain share in the guilt of the criminal. While we
hold that he is responsible for his act, the fact remains
that we are to some extent responsible for him. And
in consequence, it becomes our obligation to redeem
him.

This matter of social or collective responsibility car-
ries us, however, a good deal farther. In the days
before the railroad the moral responsibilities of the
individual were relatively simple. Those of the ordi-
nary man hardly crossed the parish bounds. But the
railroad and all that has come after it have created a
social integration far more complex and far more ex-
tended than anything that our fathers knew. No man
can now trace the moral consequences of his own acts

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

or gauge the measure of his complicity in wrongful
acts, whether personal or public. The ramifications of
modern business, the vast network of international
credit, the endless specialisations of the machine in-
dustry— all this makes for a labyrinthine tangle of
moral responsibility through which the individual can-
not hope to thread a way. A man may, quite inno-
cently, buy a share in some commercial enterprise, but
he cannot trace that investment through all its adven-
tures until it returns to him in the shape of dividend.
He does not know what atrocity it may have aided or
abetted in some distant Putumayo, or in what cruelty it
may have cooperated in a Nigerian tin-mine. Not the
most meticulous care can secure me from wearing or
eating something that has been produced by underpaid
labour, and from being therefore involved in com-
plicity in "sweating." All the rudiments of this modern
complexity were present in the simplest societies of the
past, and men have always been guilty of each other's
sins. But the coming of what has been called the "great
society" has produced an extent and an intensity of col-
lective moral responsibility which is different from
anything that the world has ever hitherto seen. The
one thing that is clearly no longer possible (even if it
ever was) is for a man to try to "cut out" of this
welter and save his own soul. He cannot so lightly
escape the vast common collective guilt. Never was it
so plain that if we would be saved, we must be saved
together. Personal salvation and social salvation be-

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

long indissolubly to one another. It will be character-
istic of a Christian society that it will not leave the
great tasks of forgiveness and restitution to its indi-
vidual members. It will express its own soul in great
collective acts of atonement. This will serve to show
how far a cry it is even at this late day to anything
that might be called a Christian society.

5

"There were some present . . . who told him of
the Galilee ans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with
their sacrifices. And he answered and said unto them,
Think ye that these Galilceans were sinners above
all the Galilceans, because they have suffered these
things? . . . Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower
in Siloam fell, and killed them, think ye that they were
offenders above all the men that dwell in Jerusalem?
I tell you. Nay; but except ye repent, ye shall all like-
wise perish.'^

It was said on a previous page that justice in our
sense and use of the word could hardly be attributed
to a God who treats the good and the evil alike, and who
visits the sins of the fathers upon the children. The
consequences of sin appear for the most part to fall
elsewhere than where the guilt lies. The children who
suffered in the European War were paying the price
of the sins and the negligences of their elders. And
whatever may be said about the moral order in which

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

this kind of thing may happen, it can hardly be de-
scribed as just, if we interpret justice in the traditional
sense.

There are large and baffling questions in this region
which in the present state of our knowledge admit of
no quite wholly satisfactory answer. But when we
think of these things it is well to remember one or two
general facts. We have already seen that there is a
principle of moral continuity in the worfd which binds
our deeds to their fruits with an infrangible certainty.
We have also insisted upon the fact of human solidari-
ty, the circumstance that we are bound to one another
by a thousand indissoluble ties. No man lives to
himself alone. The thing he is and the thing he
does affects the whole of life. We are — ^as it were —
ganglia in a nervous system as wide as the world and
as enduring as time. But both these principles of
solidarity and continuity are in themselves morally
colorless. They belong to the economy of the uni-
verse, like the law of gravitation, and tell us nothing of
the moral nature of God. And each is capable of bad
use and good. They secure that evil will work out its
own consequences to the end; but equally do they
secure the same kind of march and circulation for the
good. The order that provides that we suffer for the
evil deeds of others provides no less that we shall profit
by their good deeds. It does not compromise the love
of God that men in the exercise of their freedom

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should choose to use for evil what God has provided to
minister to their good.

There was a time when it was commonly supposed
that if a great misfortune befell a man, it was evidence
of the man's having committed some unusual sin. So
the people with whom Jesus had to do interpreted the
calamity that befell the Galilseans who had been massa-
cred by Pilate, and the victims of the fallen tower at
Siloam. Of this view Jesus makes short work. These
men were not greater sinners than the common run
of men, and once it is realised how much is involved
in the principle of solidarity and moral continuity,
Jesus' view needs no defence. The Galilsean massacre,
the accident at Siloam — each was the result of proc-
esses for which the victims were not more responsible
than other men. There is — as the consequence of our
solidarity — ^a law of moral averages in human society.
Like every law, it has its exceptions, but it is unques-
tionably true that the morality of a human society is
very much of a piece. You may have your saint and
your criminal, but they are marginal persons. The
rest of us are very much alike, neither wholly black
not wholly white, but clad in various shades of grey.

Hence the common sense of Jesus' w^arning against
Mt.7:i censoriousness, — ''Judge not that ye be not
judged." There is, as someone has said, ''so much good
in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us,
that it does not become any of us to say anything about
the rest of us." Censoriousness impHes a claim of

THE UNTRIED DOOR

moral superiority, a claim which is always doubtful.
That is why Jesus has so much to say in favor of
humility, and is so insistent in his warning to ''him
, ^ ,^ ,, that exalteth himself." We have neither

IiUke 14:11

Luke 18:14 ^j^^ grouud in ourselves nor the knowledge
of others that gives us a title to pass moral judgments
upon them. We are, all the same, very ready to pass
moral judgments, and with great presumption to pass
very summary and sweeping judgments. But the differ-
ence between us all is never other than the difference
between more grey and less grey. The shading is so
fine that it requires an "eye that is single" to detect the
differences. And none of us have that particular qual-
ity of eye. We are all in the region of the moral aver-
age, and it is the strange paradox of this matter that
the more one rises above that plane, the more inextric-
ably does one feel oneself tied to it. And the truth
about us all is that "except ye repent, ye shall all
Hkewise perish."

And what is true about individuals in a society is
true of societies among themselves. There also soli-
darity works out its moral average in precisely the same
way. And in modern times when the intercourse of
nations has become so close and intense, this is more
true than it ever was, especially among those nations
that are called civilized. It is one of the peculiarities
of a state of war that it destroys our power of moral
discrimination. And in supremely critical moments
when we should aim at the severest moral realism, we

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

yield to the worst form of sentimentality. The enemy
is coal-black, and we are angels of light, all of us,
whoever our allies may be. But a little dispassionate
reflection should serve to show that some of the Allied
nations are to-day showing unmistakable symptoms of
the moral distemper which they condemned so ve-
hemently in their enemies. Here, as elsewhere, we
have shades of grey. And whatever the final judg-
ment may be on the relative culpabilities of the belliger-
ents it is perfectly sure that the nations involved in
the late war stood as a moral unity before God, reap-
ing together what they sowed together.

And here our argument brings us up once more to
the need of mutual forgiveness. After all, we are in
the same boat. "Except ye repent, ye shall all like-
wise perish." What is there for us to do, who are
guilty of each other's sins and have to pay together
for each other's sins, but to cease from mutual judg-
ment and to practice the grace of generous mutual for-
giveness? 'Then his lord said to him. Thou wicked
Mt. 18:32-33 Servant, I forgave thee all thy debt, because
thou besoughtest me. Shouldest thou not also have
mercy upon thy fellow-servant, even as I had mercy
upon thee?" And as William Blake asks,

Why should punishment weave the veil with iron

wheels of war.
When forgiveness might weave it with wings of

cherubim ?

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

"Ye call me Teacher and Lord, and ye say well;
for so I am. If /, then, the Lord and the Teacher
have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one
another's feet."

"/ am in the midst of you as he that serveth."

One of the most common illusions that men harbour
is that they can solve a problem by fighting about it.
We are indeed all soaked in the idealogy of conflict.
But we should by now have learnt that a conflict which
ends in the victory of one party and the defeat of
the other has not been settled. The problem is shelved
and not solved, and it will come up for solution another
day when solution will be less easy. The War of 1870
laid the train of the War of 191 4. The Homestead
Strike had its inevitable sequel in the Steel strike of
1 919. There are no terminal facilities along that
line.

We heard a great deal about ''the moral aims" of the
World W^ar; and many people sincerely believed that
the war would achieve a high moral purpose. They
spoke of its ''righteousness" and undoubtedly there was
a question of political "righteousness" involved. The
public law of Europe had been violated, and it had to be
vindicated. Now we can here raise no question con-
cerning war as a political measure for achieving politi-
cal ends. But the question still remains whether war

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can achieve ends which are moral in a Christian sense.
The answer to those who looked for some great moral
achievement as the result of the war is simply —
Circumspice, look around. The plain truth is that you
may go to war to achieve moral ends, but you will
no more achieve moral ends through war than you will
gather figs of thistles. You may have political justifi-
cation for war, according to traditional political stan-
dards, but you can in no wise moralise its processes.
And the brave attempts to moralise the processes of wai:
through the Hague Convention went for next to
nothing at all in the actual business of the late war.
However fervently you may pray for figs, your harvest
will be thistles. It is useless to say that the end justi-
fies the means until you are sure that the means can
accomplish the . ends. In the present case, the moral
end was associated with the defeat of the Central
Powers. The Central Powers were defeated, but the
moral end of extirpating militarism and imperialism is
not yet accomplished, and it appears farther from ac-
complishment than it was in 19 14. The thistle bush
has been true to itself — it has grown more thistles. Of
course if the defeat of the Central Powers is deemed to
be in itself a sufficient return for the cost of the war,
well and good. But we are speaking now of the ''moral
aims" of the war.

Casuistic arguments about the use of force are not
relevant, for force of whatever kind, physical or
spiritual, is a gift of God and has its legitimate uses.

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War is not merely an exercise of force. It is the use
of force under conditions which for one thing imply
deceit and a doctrine of calculated and systematic per-
version and obscuration of truth. And even worse,
the conditions imply a contempt of personality which
is a concrete rejection of the law of solidarity and the
principle of fellowship. It is a constructive denial (if
the phrase be permitted) of the Christian principle of
righteousness. When men spoke of the righteousness
of the war they were working on a conception of
righteousness that was based upon the sanctity of
rights that are always potentially and for the most part
actually in conflict, and on a theory of justice which
requires the violent vindication of violated rights. But
it is intellectual confusion to call this righteousness
Christian. It is Judaic, Roman, individualistic, any-
thing but Christian, if we are to take the New Testa-
ment as the authority upon Christianity.

The world to-day is a seething welter of hate, bitter-
ness and resentment, and so far from having ended war,
war has multiplied wars. And so long as those tempers
exist, we are living in a fools' paradise if we suppose
that we are not all the time on the brink of more war.
Moreover we have no guarantee of the diminution of
these tempers except as the nations abandon the doc-
trine of particularist rights for a doctrine of common
and identical interests. The Peace Treaty was wrought
out apparently on the assumption that while the Allies
had certain common interests, they had none in which

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

the Central Powers had any share. For that reason,
it is a treaty of anything but peace. There can never
be anything which can appropriately be described as
peace until the nations abandon their particularist aims
and claims. They must learn to order their lives on the
basis of that solidarity which determines the law of
human life and the moral order of the universe; and
which makes it forever impossible that the misfortune
or the decline of one nation can be advantageous to
another nation. This is a revolution of thought that
will take a long time to accomplish ; and it will have to
begin in the schools by (among other things) laying
the stress in the teaching of history upon those influ-
ences that have made for human unity rather than as is
now the case upon those things which have made for
division and disunion; and by insisting in the teach-
ing of geography that a frontier is a point at
which people meet and not a barrier by which they are
separated, a rendezvous and not a party-wall.

But this principle holds in other regions as well. We
are to-day in the midst of a devastating class-antago-
nism, and it is as sure as anything can well be that there
is no deliverance to be had from ''class-war" by "fight-
ing it out." For that will only multiply bitterness and
cause life to be governed for an indefinite time by the
politics of resentment. It is frequently being said by
well-meaning people that the interests of capital and
labor are identical, and the saying has a fine Chris-
tian sound. But while industry is dominated by the

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

profit-system, and labor is subject to the wage-system,
it is difficult to see how the interests of capital and labor
are identical. Of course the idtimate interests of both
are identical in their character as groups of men, but
these are not the interests under discussion. The
human interests of both classes and the material inter-
ests of the working class suffer equally under the
present industrial order; and it should be plain that
there can be no peace or fellowship in industry until
industry is organised upon a basis other than the profit-
and-wage system which at present prevails. Can this
hindrance to fellowship be removed without denying
fellowship in the act? Short-sighted capitalists may
suppose that they can resist the drift of change and
short-sighted workers may imagine that they can hasten
the change by fighting it out. But that is pure illusion.
If the possessing classes were wise in their generation,
they would act upon the advice of Jesus, — "Agree with
3at.5!25 thine adversary quickly while thou art with
him in the way," and make large voluntary progressive
renunciations of wealth and power; then we might
thread a way out of the present tangle. But the re-
nunciations of the possessing classes must be responded
to by the good will of the workers. And in an atmos-
phere of reason and good-will (the antithesis of Ver-
sailles), Capital and Labor might work out something
deeper than industrial peace, — a living creative fellow-
ship in the interests of the community. When the em-

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

ployer and the worker shall say each for himself out of
Luke 22:27 a pure heart, ''I am among you as he that
serveth," then is the Kingdom of God come among us.
But will it so come?

It is clear that if the basis of our common life is to
be shifted from the present doctrine of particularist
rights to a doctrine of common interests, there must
be something like what Nietzsche called "a transvalua-
tion of values." And speaking roughly, the transla-
tion must be from the material to the spiritual valua-
tion of life. Men will never see that their interests are
identical so long as those interests are conceived in
terms of money-values as they are to-day. If it is
to my interest to get as large a portion of the cake
as possible, then by no showing can my interest be
identical with my neighbour who also wants the larg-
est possible share of the cake. For the cake is after
all at any particular moment definite and limited in
size. Men's interests are identical only under condi-
tions in which every man can obtain all that he has
capacity for, without impoverishing any other man,
and those conditions obtain only in respect of the things
that we may broadly call spiritual. And when a man
finds a sufficiency of these things, he inevitably rele-
gates to a subordinate place the material goods in the
acquisition of which the good of life is to-day supposed
to lie. The ascendancy of the economic motive provokes
and perpetuates conflict ; and it is only as men perceive
the sovereignty of spiritual values and the promise they

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hold of fullness of life that the economic motive and
the competitive system will disappear. And the sov-
ereignty of the spiritual values implies practically two
things : first, that the acquisitive life is supplanted by
the creative and redemptive life, and that the chief
end of life is seen to lie in the doing of works of love
and beauty; and second, that the priority of life is es-
tablished over every institution, political or religious,
every dogma, theological or economic, every system
whether of business or of government. It is a recogni-
tion of the centrality of the soul for thought and action,
and a refusal to subordinate the human spirit to the
requirements of Church or State or Market.

"And other sheep I have which are not of this fold;
them also T must bring . . . and they shall become
one Hock, one shepherd/'

The logic of the ideal of fellowship cannot reach a
conclusion until it has embraced the whole of mankind.

Mr. H. G. Wells has told us that mankind is for-
ever "pursuing the boundary of its possible com-
munity." What we see in the history of man, so far
as we know it, is a constant impulse to broaden the
geographical basis of fellowship. First the family,
then the tribe, then the nation, and now vast aggrega-

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

tions of people within the same political unity, such as
the United States of America and the British Empire.
It is held by some that the expansion of the social
unit has reached its term in what we call the nation
and that nationality is a permanent principle in the life
of the world. In a sense that is true; for nationality
represents in the realm of human life the variation of
type which is common to all life. But to say that the
expansion of a man's social grasp stops with the nation
is to talk nonsense. For the nation is simply a stage
in the providential order by which the cave-man is to
grow at last into a citizen of the world.

It may, however, be true that the world of men will
always be organized upon the basis of nationality. But
it is also true that the nations which have a definite
existence to-day have no fixity of tenure. The national
being is a fluid affair, always subject to modification
and change of many kinds. Nations are not made by
a community of race or of language or of faith, but by
a community of tradition and memory. There are to-
day no "thoroughbred" nations, or monoglot nations
or nations holding a common faith. What gives unity
to the national mind is the memory and tradition of
great things done together. The national qualities
have been produced by the processes of the common life,
and there is no guarantee that any of them are per-
manent and unchangeable. It is a mistake to suppose
that a nation has any necessary fixity of character or
of characteristic. And nationality is in no wise to be

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regarded as an absolute principle for the determination
of conduct.

The disrepute of the national principle is due to the
fact that it has worked in the world as a principle of
division and a root of conflict. It has represented too
often nothing but the massed egoism of a community.
But there is no reason to suppose that it need be a
divisive influence in perpetuity. On the contrary, the
current discussion of a League of Nations proves that
already the social grasp of man is faintly embracing
the whole world. That we speak gravely of a League
of Nations is a fact of much greater importance than
the prospects of a particular league, for it means that
there has been a very large and general extension of
the social vision of the average man.

But we shall look in vain for any living League of
Nations until the nations agree to discard their self-
regarding policies and sincerely accept the doctrine and
practice of international reciprocity. The "hard-shell"
nationalist will probably say that it is the business of
the nation to defend and to pursue its own interests
regardless of other interests, and that the code of per-
sonal morals does not apply to the nation. This, how-
ever, involves us in a moral dualism of a peculiarly
destructive kind and which is indeed hardly dis-
tinguishable from a kind of atheism. There are on
this view two moral orders, contradictory and mutually
exclusive, in the universe; so that the universe is a
house divided against itself, an equation which cancels

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

out, landing you in a moral nihilism. And you are
left with a yea-and-nay Deity, a God who "faces North
by South." This simply will not do. We have to ac-
cept the view that there is one and only one moral order
for men and nations alike. And the law of fellow-
ship is as binding on nations as it is on persons.

A League of Nations is not necessarily the world
fellowship of mankind. The League may work rather
as an organ of equilibration than as an organ of co-
operation, as a means of settling disputes than as an
organ of mutual service. And so long as self-regard
reigns in the world of nations the best the League can
do is to preserve a precarious peace for a season. Soon
or late, its constituents will fly asunder under the pres-
sure of their centrifugal egoism. It is only as an organ
of positive and planned cooperation in the service of
life that any League of Nations is entitled to cherish
an expectation of life for itself.

Long ago, Adam Smith saw that at bottom the
economic interests of the nations were identical. He
saw that every nation had been fitted to produce cer-
tain commodities and that the wealth of nations was
best served by the unhampered circulation of the com-
modities that they produced. He therefore advocated
the removal of all barriers to the exchange of com-
modities and became the father of ''free trade." But
free trade was hard hit by competitive trade and never
acquired that character of free and balanced reciprocity
which Adam Smith had in mind. Nor will it, until

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tariff walls are pulled down and there is a League of
Nations which is (among other things) a clearing
house for the free and emancipated trade of the world.
Then shall come to pass the dream of William Blake :

In my exchanges every land

Shall walk ; and mine in every land,

Mutual shall build Jerusalem,

Both heart in heart and hand in hand.

When Jerusalem was about to be rebuilt after the
exile, Zechariah insisted that it should be built without
walls. This is a great and precious parable. In this
world there are broadly two types of mind, one that
builds walls and another that pulls them down. There
are those people who build tariff-walls in order to keep
the foreign merchant out; there are others who build
walls of steel in order to warn any possible enemy to
keep his distance; still others build credal walls, to
keep the unbeliever out of the holy place; and there
are those who build caste walls in order to keep the
"lower classes" in their place. But there are those also
who live to break down these walls and to broaden out
the basis of human fellowship. Of these the greatest
is Jesus. He raised no wall around himself, nor did
he fence his church around against any man. Con-
i.nke9:5o sider his tolerance : **He that is not against
you is for you." Consider his catholicity : "I have not
Mt 8-10 found so great faith, no, not in Israel." Con-
luke 23:34 gj^j^j- j^jg charity : "Father, forgive them for

ii8

THE UNTRIED DOOR

they know not what they do/* His love had no fron-
tiers. St. Paul says that he broke down the middle wall
Epii.2:i4 of partition between the Jew and the Greek
and in so doing he broke down every party-wall in
the world. When he saw the multitudes, distressed
and scattered, as sheep not having a shepherd, he surely
saw also away beyond the generations another day
when not only the lost sheep of the House of Israel,
but the other sheep which were not of. that fold, should
John 10:16 be gathered in "and they shall become one
flock, one shepherd."

119

CHAPTER FIVE
YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW

(Matt. 5:17-20; Mark 11:15-18; 17:24-27; Luke 22
14-23 ; Luke 24)

''Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time
. . . hut I say unto you . . ."

TO respect tradition, as Mr. G. K. Chesterton
says somewhere, is but to extend the vote to
our ancestors. On the other hand, James Rus-
sell Lowell said in one of his poems that ''time makes
ancient good uncouth." These statements apparently
contradict one another. But they are contradictory
only if we *'lump" all the past into one undifferentiated
whole. The human past like every human thing is
mingled good and evil. There are things that we can
learn from our forefathers but we should be foolish
to suppose that they can teach us everything or that
nothing is worth learning except what they can teach
us. For they were no more omniscient or infallible
than their descendants are. Moreover, life is not a

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static thing. It is forever growing out of last year's
clothes. The ancient good does sometimes go out of
date.

Men sort themselves out on various principles, and
one of these is their attitude to the past. Here they
range from a rigid conservatism through various shades
of liberalism to a thorough-going radicalism. The
word radical is derived from the Latin word radix,
which means a root. And so a radical is a person who
is concerned with roots, generally with a view to pull-
ing them up. There are doubtless some radicals who
look upon all roots with equal dislike and want nothing
so much as to dig them all out. For them the past
contains no promise, and the only thing to do with
it is to break with it utterly and to start out afresh.
But that type of radicalism ignores the continuity of
life, and whatever we may think of our inheritance
from the past the one thing that we cannot do with it
is to wipe it out. We may upset a few institutions,
but the greater part of what we have inherited from
the past, whether for good or evil, is within us. The
past has written itself into our very lives, and we all
carry it about with us. And outside of us, life is so
intricately organized and so bound up with institutions
that we cannot destroy one institution — not to speak
of a clean sweep of institutions — without involving
life in much confusion.

But there is a real sense in which every man should
be a radical. We should all be concerned about the

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roots of things. And the roots of things are not all
good or all bad. Some roots are good and some are
bad. Some are partly good and partly bad. The right
type of radicalism is that which wants to pull up the
bad roots. But the very reason for pulling up the bad
roots is precisely the reason for preserving the good
roots. So that the true radical is also the true con-
servative.

The true conservative, observe. For just as there
is a radicalism that discredits itself by its excess, so
there is a conservatism that defeats itself by its own
blind rigidity. Things as they are, it says, are as they
should be; the great Bad is change. Of course some
conservatism is pure selfishness. It resists change be-
cause it would interfere with its comfort. But we need
not seriously discuss that kind of conservatism, for it
is only contemptible. We are thinking now of honest
conservatism which believes that the world as it is
needs no improvement. It is a curious frame of mind.
If life stood still in a perfect world, something might
be said for it. But as the world is palpably far from
perfect, and as life does not stand still, the conservatism
that resists change in the end hastens it by its very
resistance.

Beside the radical and the conservative, we have the
liberal always with us. He is the progressive person,
the reformer, who accepts the existing framework of
life as a whole but sees that it is capable of improve-
ment. He aims to make it better, to humanise, to

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reform it. He sees that the privileged classes have
more power and a richer life than the common people,
and he is therefore on the side of the common people
as against the privileged. He works for education,
for industrial reform, for ''uplift." But always within
the existing order. The conservative wants to preserve
the existing order, the liberal wants to improve it, the
radical wants to change it.

What men really need is a critical and discriminating
attitude to life, which can be conservative, liberal, or
radical as the occasion requires, which does not love
change for the sake of change, yet is "not afraid of
what is called for by the instinct of mankind." This
attitude is indeed attended by the danger of becoming
a sort of judicial apathy, just as the extremes of radi-
calism and conservatism tend to self-defeating violence.
But if the will is harnessed to the judgment, this
attitude of criticism and discrimination is the best
guarantee and influence for a right and fruitful order-
ing of Hfe. As things are, life has to ''muddle through,"
and when one considers what a slough of partisan cries
and labels, of prejudices and outworn tranditions it
has to muddle through, there is reason to be grateful
that things are as well with it as they are.

It would be utter foolishness to attach any of these
conventional labels to Jesus. The only thing we can
do is to attach none of them or all of them. For Jesus
was conservative, liberal, radical, all the time. He had

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no respect for an institution merely because it was old ;
Mark 11:15-17 yet the cleansing of the Temple was an
act of the finest and purest conservatism. He was
conservative enough to believe in the permanent validity
Mt.5:i8 of the Law — *Till heaven and earth shall

pass away, one jot or one tittle shall not pass away
from the law. . . ." Yet his attitude to the Law was
very much like the attitude of the modern theological
Luke 17:14 liberal to the creeds. He was conservative
Mt.i7|24-27 g^Q^gj^ tQ p^y tl^g Temple tax — the half-
shekel — and to bid cleansed lepers go show themselves
to the priest ; but he was too radical to continue within
the existing religious institutions and deliberately set
out on a course which he believed would presently leave
them derelict. He was indeed so radical that the re-
ligious conservatives of his day put him to death.

It is clear that to the mind of Jesus the human in-
heritance from the past was a mingling of good and
bad. But the good was never quite good enough and
the bad was often but the good perverted by wicked
or stupid people. His own great inheritance from
the past like that of every Jew was the law. But good
and great as the Law was, it was not good enough
or great enough for the entire business of life.
Moreover in the hands of the Scribes and the Pharisees
it became a positive evil and defeated those humane
ends which it had been intended to serve. So far from
abrogating the Law he declared that he had come to
fulfil it ; but he gave no quarter to the official interpre-

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tation of it. This official interpretation of it was what
Mark 7:3 is Called in the Gospels "the traditions of
the elders." To this, the attitude of Jesus was one of
the purest radicalism. He would destroy it root and
branch. For it was no heritage but an incubus, *'bind-
Mt.23:4 ing upon men burdens heavy and grievous

to be borne." Jesus always "distinguished between
things that differed." He was in all things a realist,
always on guard against conventional and traditional
valuations that had been falsified by time. He chal-
lenged all things to declare themselves, to show what
they were not in appearance but in reality. He brought
everything to his own consistent test, — Does this thing
make for life, for fellowship? Nothing was either
good or bad merely because it was old; it was good
or bad according as it made for the increase or the
arrest of life and love.

It would be interesting to speculate what would
happen if by some miracle the inhabitants of a country
were in a short space of time to acquire this critical
and discriminating attitude of Jesus. Some things are
pretty certain. The existing political parties would
disappear. The present religious sectarianism would
also vanish. Men would make haste to discard those
partisan labels in which they have to-day so na'ive and
pathetic a faith. Radicalism would make an entente
cordiale with conservatism, not by a colorless com-
promise but by a rational synthesis. The mere passion
for change would be as rare as the mere aversion to

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change, yet there would be changes both vast and deep.
Men would order life not by party conflict but by
common counsel; they would seek truth not in con-
troversy but in fellowship. They would no longer
confound truth with tradition, or faith with creed,
or society with institutions, or life with its forms.
John 8:32 They would see the truth, and the truth
would make them free.

"They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear
them"

But institutions, traditions, forms, creeds, — these are
after all the lesser part of what yesterday has be-
queathed to us. Greater than any or all of these is
the rich treasury of human experience which is em-
bodied in history. The past is the quarry out of which
we draw the raw material of knowledge which thought
turns into wisdom for the guidance of life. So at
least it ought to be. As a matter of fact, however, the
story of the human past is a closed book to most
people, and most of those who have some historical
knowledge do not know the vital side of it. For the
history which we learn at school or college is merely
the shell of history. We read about the outer course
of events, but we hear little about the hidden influences
— the ideas, the feelings, the aspirations — which have

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determined the drift of human affairs. We become
more or less familiar with a chronicle, but we are left
without the interpretation of it. Least of all have we
come to regard history as the record of humanity at
school, proving a very slow pupil, but gleaning here
and there a morsel of wisdom.

Human nature is always and everywhere very much
the same. The natural differences between men are
rarely more than skin deep. And the world changes
but slowly. So that life in this world has always pro-
duced the same general kinds of experience. That
is why so much ancient literature is Hving still. It is
a record of men's experience of life and wherever men
have been able to tell about it with truth and power,
they have told an undying story. We still read, for
instance, the Book of Psalms because it is for the
greater part an apt, powerful and sometimes very beau-
tiful transcript of what a number of men found in
their own souls as they went their way in the world.
And in the same way, for the man who has insight
enough to read between its lines, the record of human
history is full of suggestion for the conduct of life to-
day. For all through history, the same causes have
produced the same effects. History is a mine of wis-
dom which yesterday has bequeathed to to-day for the
good of to-day and to-morrow. It is full of analogies,
comparisons, parallels, illustrations, that can be used
for warning or for inspiration or for illumination. It
embodies certain general principles and tendencies

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which have produced their characteristic results all
through the ages and are valid still for the manage-
ment of life. History is one of the most fruitful
words of God to men.

Jesus was well versed in the history of his own
people; and he is constantly appealing to it. In the
Gospel of Luke alone, he alludes to Elijah and the
widow of Sarepta, to Elisha and Naaman the Syrian,
to David and the shewbread, to Sodom, Tyre and
Sidon, to Jonah and the Ninevites, to Solomon and
the Queen of Sheba, to Abel and a certain Zachariah,
to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah, Lot and his wife.
It is easy to see how full of meaning for the present
he found the past. Time does indeed make much an-
cient good uncouth. But the experience of man is
never stale or obsolete to the understanding mind. And
when Jesus was confronted with a triple temptation,
he met it with words that had come down long ages
and had stood the test of the spiritual conflicts of
many generations. And when he formulated his own
program, he did it not in words of his own, but in
i.uke4:i8 the words of an old prophetic vision. "The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me; for he hath anointed
me to preach good tidings to the poor. He hath sent
me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering
of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are
bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

A good deal of our human trouble — perhaps most —
might be averted if we took pains to know and under-

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stand our common history, and came to it with an
open mind. History may be so interpreted as to serve
a merely private or partisan purpose, in which case
its Hght is turned to darkness. But if the eye be single,
the whole past is full of light. Yet we are strangely
slow to learn from history or indeed from our own
experience "the things that belong to our peace." When
the disciples had one day fallen into a stupid bewilder-
ment, because Jesus had bidden them "beware of the
leaven of the Pharisees," and they fell to saying among
themselves that he had said the thing because they
had no bread with them, Jesus reproved them: "Do
Mark 8:14-21 yc uot yet Understand?" After all they
had seen they had not learned enough to know a little
parable when they saw it. And that is indeed a sort
of epitome of our human story. Long before this
Isaiah had complained, — "Israel doth not know, my
people doth not consider." And so it is to this day.
Consider, for instance, this. If there is one thing about
which the witness of history is clear, it is that you
cannot destroy a dissenting opinion by coercion. Not
only so, but an opinion persecuted is an opinion es-
tablished. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of
the Church." We see the mistakes that our fathers
made in this matter and we know that they were
mistakes. Yet when our turn comes, we go on and
Mt. 23:29 make the same mistake. We "build the
tombs of the prophets" that our fathers put to death,
and we kill others whom our children will honor

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as heroes and saints. In point of fact, dissent has
always been the growing point of society, and a so-
ciety which is mindful of its own peace and growth
will at least practice toleration, which is a grace of
spirit as well as a good policy. But toleration comes
hard to most societies. We do not yet understand.
And so history repeats itself. But there is no fatality
about this. We can prevent history from repeating
itself if we choose. But we shall first have to know
the history of the race and to ponder it before we
shall have either the wit or the will to prevent it from
repeating itself.

There is one very remarkable omission in Jesus'
references to the past. The prophets almost without
exception return again and again to the story of the
deliverance from Egypt. But so far as the gospels
tell us, Jesus never once alluded to it. The silence is
as significant as if, say, Abraham Lincoln had never
referred to the war of the Revolution. The omission
must have been deliberate; but concerning the reason
of it, we can only speculate. The Jew saw in the
episode the beginning of the history of his people as
a nation and every year he celebrated the anniversary
of it with great solemnity. In this celebration Jesus
did indeed join, and this makes his neglect of it in his
teaching still more significant. Yet perhaps we may
see the clue to Jesus' silence concerning the event in
the fact that after his last celebration of it, he seems
inke 22:14-23 to havc deliberately superseded the pass-

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over by another rite, the memorial supper which he
instituted in the upper room. He undoubtedly saw
that the Hfe of his nation was moving toward a climax
of tragedy. He mourned that Jerusalem did not know
the things that belonged to its peace; and the time
was coming when its house would be left desolate.
That period which had begun with the deliverance and
Moses was ending in disaster and miscarriage. That
spiritual ministry to which God has called this people
had been swamped by a narrow national and political
purpose, which was being pursued by methods of vio-
lence and intrigue, and which was, we may not doubt,
encouraged by a patriotic appeal to the story of the
deliverance. And now that stage was coming to an
end. What would it profit to speak of a beginning
when that which had begun was so near to ending,
especially when the story of the beginning was used
to inspire conduct which would only hasten the end-
ing? And already, a new period was at the door.
Jesus regarded himself as the symbol and the begin-
ning of a new stage in human affairs. He was not
forgetful of much that was great and abiding in the
past of his people, and of how deeply his own roots ran
Luke 24:27 into the past, ''beginning with Moses and
the prophets"; but his face was turned to the future.

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''The Kingdom of heaven cometh not with observa-
tion: neither shall they say, Lo, here! or There! for
lo! the kingdom of God is within you.''

About his own personal future, Jesus seems after
Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi to have been in
no doubt. The significance of this prevision we shall
discuss in the next chapter. And so far as individuals
are concerned, his counsel to them was that they should
not trouble themselves overmuch about the future.
Mt.6:34 "Be not anxious for the morrow." Live

one day at a time and leave the rest to your heavenly
Father. Mark Rutherford in the preface to the sec-
ond edition of his Autobiography encourages his
readers to cultivate ''the good habit of not looking
round the corner." And that might serve as a sum-
mary of what Jesus had to say on the matter to or-
dinary folk. This is not, however, to be taken as a
justification for a reckless improvidence. Only they
who seek first the kingdom of God and his righteous-
ness can afford not to be anxious for the morrow.

It has been held by some scholars that the teaching
of Jesus is deeply colored by the expectation of a
sudden end of the age. The world as men knew it
was coming to an end, and when the new world took
its place, life would be on an entirely new basis. And
the teaching of Jesus is therefore held to deal with the

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way men should carry themselves in the short period
before the world should reach its end. He taught,
as these scholars say, an interim-ethic. He did not
mean his teaching to be taken as a rule for ordinary
times ; it was a special rule for that particular moment
of time.

This is a very convenient way of shelving the pe-
culiar difficulty of living out the precept of Jesus in
one's own time. But it rests upon the assumption that
it is certain that Jesus expected the end of the age
to come as many of his own fellow-countrymen un-
doubtedly did at that time. They expected the re-
moval of the external framework of life in a moment,
in the twinkling of an eye, and the immediate institu-
tion of a new external order in which the old positions
would be reversed. The Jews, hitherto a subject
people, would be established in independence and power
under the direct hand of God. That was a common
belief in those days. And while we may be sure that
Jesus was not very much concerned with the political
prospects of his people, we can easily see that there
is much in his teaching that may be made to give color
to the view that he expected a great and swift reversal
of the normal ways of the world.

But the chief difficulty in the way of this view is
the virtual impossibility of reconciling Jesus' em-
phasis upon the inwardness of the kingdom with the
identification of the kingdom with an external world-
order. While the current expectation of the coming

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of the kingdom was as of a very spectacular affair,
Jesus categorically declares that the kingdom cometh
not with observation, — that is, you cannot see it com-
ing. It is indeed true that some late utterances are
attributed to Jesus which seem to contradict this
latter saying. And we have either to assume that
Jesus changed his mind entirely about the coming of
the kingdom in the last week of his life, or to believe
that some utterances which are ascribed to him did not
fall from his lips, at least in the form in which we
have them. Then we have to make up our minds if we
accept both as authentic words of Jesus, which of them
represented his real mind.

In what are called the "eschatologlcal" passages
in the teaching of Jesus, the end of the world is asso-
ciated with the return of the Son of Man in power
and great glory. And as this subject has latterly been
widely canvassed it might be as well to examine it with
a little care.

The term "eschatological" describes a teaching about
the last things, about the end. There is another word
used in these discussions which describes a view of
how the end will come. That is the word "apocalyp-
tic." Now apocalyptic comes from a Greek verb
which signifies to unveil, and it refers specially to the
unveiling of future events. But it is used more nar-
rowly with reference to the end of the age or of the
world. The Jews have been the greatest exponents

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of apocalyptic* But its springs are in universal human
nature and it always makes its appearance in times
of distress. It originates in the inveterate hopefulness
of the human spirit, and generally it is the answer of
faith to political pessimism. Not a very convincing an-
swer perhaps, yet embodying a very real faith in the
friendliness of God in the teeth of all appearances.
When the heavens are as brass, when oppression is bit-
ter and unyielding, and there is no relief in sight, then
hope skips a generation or two and faith thinks that
it can see beyond the darkness of the present the light
of a great deliverance and the promise of happier
things. It was inevitable that a stage should come
in the course of the European war when the apocalyp-
tic temper would reappear once more, as we know
it did.

The Jewish prophets as a rule expected the deliver-
ance of their people to come through the normal
processes of history. They were in no sense apoca-
lyptic. They were content to wait for God's mills
to grind out slowly the issues of human affairs. But
the long-drawn-out period of alien domination, the
distress which went with it, the frustrated throws for
freedom, and the deepening sense of utter political
impotency induced in the Jewish mind a despair to
which the slow processes of history promised .no
relief. But hope would not die. And since there was
no Hght on the plane of historical happening, men

* Probably having first learned it from the Persians.

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began to look beyond history to the immediate inter-
ference of the hand of God. So in the period between
the two Testaments the apocalyptic hope shaped itself
definitely as an expectation of a deliverance from
above, a sudden close of the current dispensation in
a colossal setting of sign and portent and political
convulsion. And with all this the inauguration of
a new order in which the chosen people would at last*
come into their kingdom. At the time of Jesus' birth
as for a century before, this had doubtless been the
habitual idiom of many Jews. Certainly the apoca-
lyptic hope created a considerable body of literature
and it was the most conspicuous element in the popu-
lar religion. There can be no doubt that Jesus was
perfectly familiar with it, and it would be unreason-
able to suppose that he remained unaffected by it. But
I have no doubt that he was himself wholly emanci-
pated from it, certainly in its popular form. Nor
can I understand anyone reaching any other conclu-
sion from the study of the gospels. Contrast the tone
and atmosphere of the Parable of the Prodigal Son
with those of the twenty-fourth chapter of St.
Luke's Gospel. It is hardly credible that the two ut-
terances should have fallen from the same lips, and
one is forced to suppose that much of the latter chapter
has crept in somehow from a contemporary source
other than Jesus or from a later source. Moreover
the great emphasis upon ''the power and the great
glory" of the returning Son of Man is in singular

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contrast to the studied lowliness of the entry into
Jerusalem. There is here a quite obvious contradiction,
if we are to take the apocalyptic language literally.
It must be remembered, however, that while we may
doubt the authenticity of some of the apocalyptic
language ascribed to Jesus, there yet remains a good
deal which represents the genuine mind of Jesus. And
the question that we have to ask is how we are to read
these passages. When we read the parables we do
not regard them as stories of real happenings. We
know that they are dramatisations of certain truths.
May we not in the same way assume that the apocalyp-
tic passages of Jesus are likewise dramatisations of
certain truths in another idiom? Are we not to treat
them in a frankly symbolical way? For this we have
justification in the example of Jesus himself. "And
Mt. 17:10-12 his disciples asked him saying. Why then
say the scribes that Elijah must first come? And he
said, Elijah indeed cometh and shall restore all things ;
but I say unto you that EHjah is come already, and
they knew him not and did unto him whatsoever they
would." And speaking of John Baptist, he said, ''And
Mt. 11:14 if ye are willing to receive it, this is
EHjah which is to come." Jesus evidently takes the
return of Elijah in no literal sense. To his mind
Elijah always comes in every prophet whom God sends.
Elijah is a symbol for the spirit of prophecy. May
not Jesus intend us to take his prediction of his own
return in a similar symbolical sense?

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In this connection it is significant that Jesus never
speaks of his return in the first person. It is the
kingdom, or the Son of Man that is to come. When
we recall the clear connection of these terms with
Daniel's vision, it is not inconceivable that Jesus was
using them to symbolise that divine order which is yet
to be and which is the true predestined order for
human life. Using the popular religious idiom of his
day, he dramatised in the picture of his own return a
process which is inherent and permanent in human
affairs. May we not suppose that in every human hap-
pening which has brought the divine order nearer,
however little, and however partially, there has been
a real coming of the Son of Man?

But this is not all. We have been so indoctrinated
with the idea of evolution that Ave suppose that history
must unfold itself in a slow and orderly fashion, tak-
ing its own time about it. But the apocalyptic em-
phasis brings the necessary protest against this view
of history. It is not necessary to wait upon the slow
movement of history. We can hustle history, if we
will. For the essence of apocalyptic is, as Dr. Oman
has finely and finally said, that "the divine order is
always ready to break into the world when men are
ready to let it break into their hearts."

We who have lived through the great war do not
need to have it proved to us that there is a "catastro-
phic" element in history. But it would be a mistake to
suppose that because history has its catastrophic mo-

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merits it is not evolutionary all the time. For the
"catastrophe," whether it be light or darkness or both,
is after all only the final convergence of streams of
influence that have been slowly moving and maturing
for a long time. And Jesus foresaw both slow proc-
esses of growth and swift portentous movements in
the future course of the new order. The kingdom
comes, not with observations; for the most part, you
cannot see it coming. It is a seed growing secretly.
But one day your eyes are opened, and you will see
it ''in power and great glory." But not, indeed, power
and glory of the worldly kind. When the Son of
Man comes in his glory, you need not be surprised to
find that his glory consists in a suit of working-man's
overalls. It certainly will have nothing in common
with the trappings of secular royalty which he too
often wears in the minds of those who, with a faith
having more devotion than discernment, would per-
suade us that Jesus in his very person is even now
at the door, to inaugurate, as they say, his personal
reign.

When one speaks of history as evolutionary one is
thinking of it merely as working out what is within
itself whether for good or for evil. But the idea of
evolutipn has been applied to human affairs in a way
which suggests that there is in human nature a cer-
tain principle of inevitable advance, a fated growth
from worse to better and at last to perfection. This
is what at its best we mean when we speak of "prog-

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ress." Of course, some, people when they speak of
progress think of pullman cars and flying machines;
and that kind of thing is indeed a sort of progress.
But we are now thinking of real progress, progress
toward perfection in character and the realisation of
life. We cannot discuss so large a question here, but
it belongs to our purpose to observe that you will
search in vain in the teaching of Jesus for anything
that supports a doctrine of inevitable and predestined
progress. Jesus believed in human perfectibility but
not in the certainty of human perfection. Indeed, there
were moments when he looked upon the human future
i.ukei8:8 with misgiving. "When the Son of Man
Cometh, shall he find faith upon the earth?" This,
however, must not be taken to mean that human per-
fection is unattainable, but simply that it is not in-
evitable. There is no irresistible force from behind
pushing us onward to the City of God. We are the
masters of our fate and we do not make progress in
spite of ourselves. We shall grow from good to better
and on to perfection if we will to have it so, and not
otherwise.

140

CHAPTER SIX

THE SON OF MAN

(Matt. 4:1-11; 9:9-13; 11:25-30; 13:31-33; Mark
3 :i-i9; Mark 8:27-31 ; Mark 15:1-41)

''Is not this the carpente/s son? Is not his mother
called Mary? And his brethren . . . and his sisters,
are they not all with usf Whence then hath this man
these things?''

IT is impossible to say at what point in his life
Jesus became aware of his calling. His realisa-
tion of the task to which he was appointed grew
through a number of years and a series of experiences.
That he had some kind of ''soul's awakening" in his
twelfth year appears from the story; and it is toler-
ably safe to assume that from this point onward to
his formal entry upon a public ministry at the time
of his baptism, his sense of a divine mission grew in
intensity and clearness until it became an unwavering
certainty. He took the religious revival which had
been quickened by his kinsman John as the signal for

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his own appearance, and when he emerges into pub-
Hcity, he is aUogether sure of himself and of his
commission.

The Gospel records are much too scanty to enable
us to trace with any assurance the development of
Jesus' thought and feeling about himself. Was he
aware of himself as ''the Christ of God" at the time of
his baptism, or did it become clear to him at the time
of Peter's confession? The question cannot be an-
swered and need not be argued. The one thing that we
may be sure of is that, however he may have inter-
preted himself, he was altogether sure of himself from
the very beginning of his ministry; and his self-assur-
ance seems never to have deserted him, — unless one
is to interpret the Agony in Gethsemane and the Cry
of Dereliction as symptoms of self -doubting. Other-
wise he was never unsure of himself. There were
other things about which he was not so sure and about
which he changed his mind. But he never lost con-
fidence in himself — until perhaps (as has been said) in
the last tense and heart-breaking hours of his life.

He spoke, according to those who heard him, "as
Mt.7:29 one having authority." The scribes ap-

pealed to authority outside themselves, but Jesus had
his authority in himself. The prophets began their
preaching with the formula: "Thus saith the Lord,"
but Jesus said: 'T say unto you." With the phenome-
non of egoism we are familiar enough; and we know
it when we see it. We know, moreover, that it is not

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the same thing as this self-assurance of Jesus. We
detect a man's egoism in his tone of voice, in his ges-
ture, by a score of self -betraying signs. We suspect
that the man's excess of emphasis upon himself is at
bottom a mere affectation of authority and power. He
is never quite so sure of himself as he sounds. But
when Jesus says '1" or "Me," it is in a simple, spon-
taneous, unaffected way. There is no assumption of
an authority which cannot make itself good, no self-
esteem, no gesture of pity for meaner minds, no desire
to dominate, — none of the symptoms of a vulgar ego-
ism. Yet there is no hesitation in the use of the first
Mt 11-28 personal pronoun: "Come unto me, . . .
Mt. 17:17 and I will give you rest." "Bring him
hither to me." It is all perfectly natural, unpretentious,
and uncalculated. There is a spontaneity and a sim-
plicity about it which makes it a thing by itself. No
other man could speak about himself in quite this way
and Jesus is perhaps the only person who could say
Mt. 11:29 of himself, "I am meek and lowly of
heart," without showing in his face that he was telling
a lie. If we ever heard any other man say it, we
should at once think of Uriah Heep.

Only once, so far as we know, did Jesus depart from
this simple unstudied habit of speech and bearing.
Mt. 21:1-11 That was the occasion of the Entry into
Jerusalem, when Jesus, having spoken many parables,
acted a parable in which he was the leading figure.
But he assumed that unusual role in order to dramatise

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and make graphic that doctrine of sovereignty which
his people so persistently repudiated — the sovereignty
of force being then, as it is still, the only kind that
people believed in. He actualised the terms of an
old vision — the king riding upon an ass — in order to
preach the kingliness of loveliness and the royalty of
service.

Yet note that he assumes for himself the character
of a king. But kingliness was a wholly new thing
Luke 22:25-26 upon his shouldcrs. "The kings of the
Gentiles have lordship over them . . . But ye shall
not be so: but he that is the greater among you, let
him become as the younger, and he that is chief, as
he that doth serve." He was turning the old con-
ventions upside down. But there is no doubt that
there was something symbolical in his whole habit of
regarding himself. In much of his speech concerning
himself there is a strangely impersonal quality. He
called himself the "Son of Man" ; and whatever may
have been the origins of the name, and whatever
eschatological associations the name may have had,
there can be no doubt that in Jesus' use of it, it stood
for the typical, essential, representative man, the em-
bodiment of essential manhood. "The sabbath was
Mark 2:27-28 made fof man, and not man for the sab-
bath. Therefore the Son of Man is lord even of the
sabbath." The Son of Man is not a man so much as
he is all men.

Now this is a very singular claim to make. How
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Jesus reached this point of self -identification is some-
thing that the gospels do not explain or afford the
materials for explaining. It is to be observed further
that as Son of Man he claims a prerogative which
had hitherto been ascribed to God alone. *'The Son
Act. 9:6 of Man hath power to forgive sins.'* He

took it upon himself to say : "Thy sins are forgiven."
Of course if we go outside the gospels the easy ex-
planation of this is that Jesus, being the Incarnation
of God, was entitled to remit sins; but this does not
touch the fact that it was as Son of Man that he
claimed the power to forgive sins. But we are now
raising difficult questions which are not germane to
our immediate purpose. We are not immediately con-
cerned with the theological interpretation of Jesus but
with what he appeared to be to himself in the gospels.
The upshot of all this is that Jesus as a man makes
certain claims which we could not hear another man
make without thinking him either a madman or a
charlatan; but the fact that we still take Jesus seri-
ously after so long a time shows that there was no
incongruity between himself and his claims. But this
brings us face to face with the paradox that Jesus
as a man makes claims which seem to put him in a
class apart from the ordinary man. It does not help
us to say that the difference is that between the morally
perfect and the imperfect. This is not a question of
character. What man is there who could (for in-
Mt. 18:20 stance) say as Jesus said: *'Where two

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or three are gathered together in my name, there
am I in the midst of them" ? What we have here is
not a sense of moral perfection but a unique quaUty
of self-consciousness, a peculiar sense of self-hood,
of personality. It is in this connection not irrelevant
to point out that Jesus does not appear to have ever
prayed with his disciples. The only time he ever
said "Our Father" was when he was teaching his
disciples to say it. For the rest it was always "My
Father" and "Your Father." The gospel account cer-
tainly leaves upon us an impression that Jesus stood
in a unique relation to life, to the universe, to God.
The nature of that relation is a matter we shall leave
to theologians to expound, asking of them only that
they shall offer us no explanation which leaves us a
Jesus with a compromised manhood.* For after all,
Mt. 11:19 "the Son of Man came eating and drink-
ing ... a friend of publicans and sinners."

* Jesus himself does not give us any light upon this relation,
nor does he say whether it is a relation which other men can
ever attain to. But the New Testament writers have appar-
ently their own view upon the matter. St. Paul looks to a
Bom. 8'29 ^^^^ when "the only begotten son of God" shall

be "the first-born among many brethren," — primus
inter pares. The writer of the Apocalypse puts upon the lips
Rev 3-21 °^ Jesus the words, "He that overcometh, I will

give to him to sit down with me in my throne, as
I also overcame and sat down with my Father in his throne."
And in that great interpretation of the heart of Jesus, the sev-
enteenth chapter of the Fourth Gospel, we have the prayer
John 17 '22-23 "that they all may be one, I in them and Thou
in me." This matter also is for the theologian.
Theology has yet to make up its mind about the problem of
personality — in man and in God.

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It is not clear from the gospels, as is frequently
assumed, that Jesus identified himself with the ex-
pected Messiah. Peter's description of him as "the
Christ of God" and Jesus' consent to the description
does not necessarily imply that he claimed the Mes-
siahship. The word Christ may at first have been no
more than a translation of an Aramaic word meaning
"anointed" ; and may have signified simply that Jesus
was invested with a special divine commission. It
is to be noticed in this connection that he warned his
Bttt. 16:20 disciples that "they should tell no man
that he was the Christ." In any event, his use of the
title is marked by the same detachment as we have
observed in his use of the term "Son of Man"; and
his unwillingness to be known as the Messiah is easily
explained by the incongruity between his conception
of his own work in the world and the current popular
idea of what the Messiah was coming to do.

''The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that
which was lost"

What Jesus conceived his mission to be we have al-
ready seen. He had been called to establish a new
order of life in the world, the kingdom of heaven.
But it would be a misapprehension to suppose that he
had come to "start a movement," as we say. He cer-

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tainly was altogether innocent of any knowledge of
the technique of starting a movement, if he had any-
thing of the sort in his mind. He had no organisa-
tion save a loosely-bound following with a small inner
circle of disciples whom he was training for a special
task. He had no office, no organs of publicity, no
endorsing lists of high-sounding names — and they
knew the value of that kind of thing in those days
as well as we do to-day. It would be truer to say
that Jesus was starting a ferment rather than a move-
ment. His business was to set afoot a contagion of
life. And while he could not escape a good deal of
publicity — ''He could not be hid" — and did arouse a
great amount of popular excitement whenever he ap-
peared, it came unsought, and as a rule Jesus seems
to have felt it an embarrassment. He was afraid of
Mark 1:45 what wc should Call ''the psychology of
the crowd," and while there were times when he could
not avoid it, he was far from exploiting it as the
modern revivalist method does. Jesus trusted to the
self -propagating virtue of the new life. The man in
whom it was kindled could be trusted to kindle it in
others.

This does not mean that Jesus did not believe in
propaganda.* He did indeed believe in it very pro-
foundly, and was actively engaged in it most of the

* It is a pity that this word "propaganda" should tend to be
used exclusively for the official dissemination of half-truths and
lies by governments.

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time. Moreover, he sent out his disciples on missions
of propaganda on two occasions. This was what he
Mark 4:14 Called "sowing the seed." But it was a
propaganda of life rather than of ideas. And for
this, preaching was of less value than personal con-
tact. A friend of mine — a minister of many years
standing — said not long ago in my hearing: "If I
had my ministry over again, I would spend three
quarters of the time I have spent in making sermons
in making friends." Allow for the natural over-em-
phasis of the epigram, and you have here essentially
a true principle, the principle of Jesus. He took
every opportunity of making a friend, and to make
a friend was to make a convert to the kingdom.
While this personal and immediate ministry of Jesus
was not the only method which he adopted, it is well
to remember that it was the foundation of everything
else and he never desisted from it throughout his pub-
lic life. It had first claim upon him. When Matthew
was resigning from his office as tax-collector, he gave
a farewell feast to his former colleagues and asso-
ciates. They made a very dubious party, but Jesus
accepted Matthew's invitation without hesitation, — to
Mt. 9:10-11 the great scandal of the Pharisees, who
thought it bad form and bad religion to be mixed up
with that sort of person. Our trouble to-day is not
that we should think it bad form, but that most of
us would be too busy with the church organisation to
have any time for mixing with outsiders of that par-

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ticular type. The card-indexes must be kept in order,
the plans for the fall have to be attended to, the ma-
chine has to be overhauled and kept well oiled. And
of course, if one is at the head of a great religious
organisation, one has a vast business correspondence
to see to, office details to look after, and committees —
scores of them — to attend that keep us too busy to
dine with publicans and sinners. But with Jesus, the
ituco 19:10 publicans and sinners came first. *'I came
to seek and to save the lost," and he went straight
to the point. No considerations of propriety or
thought of what others would say interfered with his
approach to this person or that, if the road was in
any wise open. It was folk that mattered to him;
and he had time and leisure for all the folk who came
and went. He did not have to hurry off to keep an-
other appointment in the middle of an interview. His
primary method was that of friendship and fellow-
ship, and when he told his disciples that they were ''the
Mt.5;i3 salt of the earth," he was suggesting to

them that they had to keep close to people if their
antiseptic virtue was to keep life sweet and clean.
And what Jesus gave to the people was himself, the
iuie8:46 vcry stuff of his life. "I perceived that
power had gone forth from me," he said one day
after a sick woman had touched him; and virtue was
going out of him all the time, now to a publican of
notorious and unpleasant reputation, now to a woman
of doubtful past, again to a perplexed "ruler of the

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Jews." He had something to give and he never with-
held it. At its best, fellowship, friendship, — ^what is
it but a hidden commerce, a mystic market-place where
we barter life for life in a communion of love, wherein
we become part of each other? And this it was in
Jesus, only the bargain was overwhelmingly on the
other side, for they had little to give, while he gave
everything, even life itself.

And so he went about among men, touching this
man and that into life. But he did this not because
his thought excluded every method of working but a
purely private and personal ministry. On the con-
trary, he looked for a new order of life, a kingdom.
He saw a vision not of a scattering of quickened in-
dividuals, but of a society of re-made men living to-
gether. And it was because his view of his mission
contained this larger hope that his threefold tempta-
tion at the beginning of his ministry caused him so
great heart-searching. He knew that a public min-
istry lay ahead of him, that he had to assume a task
of public leadership; his light had to be placed in a
candlestick. And the inwardness of these temptations
lay precisely in the speciousness of the methods that
they proposed to him for his public work.

The temptations contained three separate sugges-
tions. The first was that he should become a uni-
versal provider of bread to the multitude. Feed the
crowd and it will follow you. It was plainly a tempta-
tion to use bribery, in order to gather a following.

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After all, it was a good thing to feed the people —
for they were always underfed; and having won them
by charity, why then, they would receive the word.
This is a common enough artifice, popular among
politicians who are avid of power, though they hand
out less bread than they do fragile piecrust of prom-
ises. But even churches have been known to do some-
thing very like it. The doles of charity which have
been intended to recommend religion to the needy may
be genuinely well-meaning; but they have had another
effect than was hoped for. Jesus saw that there would
be no reality in a spiritual ministry which made its
first appeal to people's stomachs.

The second temptation was that he should play a
spectacular part and establish himself as a prodigy.
The crowd is usually as curious as it is hungry, and
Jesus could have gathered a large following by gain-
ing a reputation as a wonder-worker. It was the
temptation to a policy of sensationalism. We can see
how deeply the fear of anything of this kind had en-
tered into the soul of Jesus from his reluctance to
allow the reports of his healings to get abroad. For
it would divert men's attentions from what he was
chiefly eager to pass on to them. He saw that the
policy suggested in the temptation would compromise
his ministry from the very start. He knew that his
message would never get past his reputation; and a
reputation for sensationalism is probably the most diffi-
cult thing in the world to live down. This is surely

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a severe commentary upon many of the methods that
churches and churchmen have used in recent years to
further the Gospel. There is nothing in the program
of Jesus that is helped by noise and display, and it
is the one thing on earth of which it can be said with
entire assurance that it cannot be ''promoted."

The third temptation was a temptation to com-
promise, to come to terms with evil, to accept the
second best in lieu of the best, to take the line of least
resistance. But to have accepted any compromise
would have been at once deadly. For it would have
betrayed a lack of confidence in the inherent power
of the message to win through. He might by toning
down the message to the taste of his hearers have
gathered a great following, and there might be some
sort of private satisfaction in that. But Jesus' real-
ism never forsook him. He saw that any compromise
would from the nature of the case cut the nerve of his
hope and his mission; and that a great popular fol-
lowing is not the same thing as the Kingdom of God.

It was the voice of worldly wisdom that spoke in
these temptations. Take the short cut, it said. Fol-
low the line of least resistance. Appeal to the stomachs
of men, to their love of the spectacular and the sen-
sational; suit the word to the popular taste. But
Jesus saw that to do any of these things was to estab-
lish the new order on an illusory and hollow founda-
tion. The first requirement was moral and spiritual
reality, and he knew that he had to wait for that,

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

however long it might take. It might seem to be the
longest way round, but it was the only way to the goal.
Jesus had no faith in the easy by-path. The alternative
was a long road, a hard road, but it was the only road
that did not belie its own promise from the start.
He would choose the way of faith and quiet rationality
and utter truth, for there was no other way to the
goal which he sought. And so he would go among
men, seeking their soul, their reason, their conscience;
and if this meant long waiting, endless patience, in-
vincible endurance, very well, so be it. For it was
the only way. It was "the way of God's rule in how-
ever few and the patient endurance of love however
long."

So that was settled for good and all. Jesus dis-
missed all the expedients of worldly wisdom and fol-
lowed his own road. His task was to set afoot a
contagion of life, and his way was to get into touch
with men. He was encumbered with no nice or in-
tricate questions of statecraft or public policy. His
strategy was perfectly simple. The one thing that
he had to do was to seek out the people, this man and
that man, and small companies of them in their syna-
gogues and tell them "the good news"; and let "the
good news" work out its own consequences.

IS4

THE UNTRIED DOOR

3

''The Son of Man goeth as it is written of Mm"

It was natural that Jesus should turn to the villages
and synagogues of Galilee. Jerusalem, even Judaea,
was not promising ground for a start. The nearer
one was to the Temple, the more one felt the embar-
rassment and the pressure of the past, of tradition,
of the "dead hand.*' The air became clearer as one
drew away from the metropolis. And in Galilee, re-
ligion was less "official," less sophisticated, less hard-
ened, than it was in the capital. Jesus went about
the village synagogues and preached in them, as any
laymen might have done who felt he had anything
to say; and it is plain that before very long his name
began to be noised abroad as a man with "a new
Mart 1:27-28 teaching," — and upon that, Jesus' troubles
began. It led to the abandonment of one part of his
original plan, and at last constrained him to another
momentous line of action.

Jesus, like everyone before and after him who has
preached a "new doctrine," proposed to do so and re-
main within the existing religious institutions. And
it seems more than probable that Jesus hoped that the
new order of life would be ushered in (as has al-
ready been pointed out) on the crest of a spiritual
awakening within Judaism itself. This accounts for

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the systematic preaching in the Galilaean synagogues.
And after all, why should not Judaism blossom once
more as the rose, wilderness though just then it might
be? Jesus would have avowed that his own faith went
back to "Moses and the prophets," and that there was
nothing alien to the prophetic religion in his message.
Rather was it the fulfilment of what the prophets had
spoken, the unrealised logic of their faith. It was
the natural place for Jesus to begin, and he had good
ground for his hope that Judaism might flower forth
into new life. There is, indeed, no knowing what
might have happened if there had been no interference
from without. But no sooner did the Temple authori-
ties hear of this innovator in the north than they dis-
patched a number of their secret service men, agents-
provocateurs, and the like to watch him and to report.
They also sent some of their pundits to ^'heckle" him
and to dispute with him. It was not difficult to dis-
cover subjects of controversy; and indeed one subject
alone proved so fruitful in occasions of debate that
no other was needed. That of course was the subject
of sabbath observance.

We need not go over the story of the controversy,
Mark 3:1-6 savc Only to recall that it came to a climax
with the healing of the man with the withered hand
on the sabbath day in the synagogue. That day, as
we have seen, Jesus left the synagogue, — and except
on one doubtful occasion did not thereafter enter the

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

synagogue at all.* It was the end of his hope of a
religious efflorescence within Judaism. The wine-skin
had grown too old and brittle. The fire could not
be rekindled upon the old hearthstone. The syna-
gogue had proved a blind alley.

In the midst of the domestic confusion of France
in the twenties of the last century, Lamennais, look-
ing out upon it with the eye of a prophet, wrote about
it: "It is necessary to lay in advance the founda-
tions of a new society . . . the old is rotten, it is
dead and cannot be revived again. . . . Our work
lies in the creation of peoples." This might well serve
as a description of Jesus' feeling after the breach with
the synagogue. It is very significant that almost im-
mediately after, we find him selecting a small com-
pany from among his followers and attaching them
Marfc 3:13-19 to his pcrsou, ''that they might be with
him." He saw that his work lay in the creation of a
people, and of this people the twelve were the nucleus.
He was ''laying in advance the foundations of a new
society." And we are reminded how, many years
after, when the disciples of Jesus had greatly multi-
plied, they were described as "a new race." The selec-
tion of the twelve was the first step in the creation
of the new society in and through which the new life
was to function.

* Matthew and Mark record a visit to the synagogue in Naza-
reth after this incident; but in Luke's account this visit appears
to have been paid before this time.

^57

THE UNTRIED DOOR

Shortly after, Jesus spent some months in retire-
ment with the twelve. During this time, largely spent
outside the confines of Palestine, the twelve were
trained for the great office that Jesus had in mind
for them. But the greater part of the training was
the fellowship with Jesus ; and the sign of their gradu-
ation was the fact that they had acquired the spiritual
insight which was able to identify him. When Peter
Mark 8:27-30 Said that he was ''the Christ of God," Jesus
knew that their eyes had been opened. They had fol-
lowed him first as a man eager for light might follow
a teacher. But they found in the teacher a messenger
of God whose business was to do rather than to teach,
whose task lay not in a round of local preaching or in
the establishment of a new sect, but in some large
way on the plane of the public life of the nation. All
this was very vague and dim in their minds, no doubt;
but it was clear enough to prepare them for the next
stage of the ministry of their master.

At this point comes another significant circumstance.
Mark 8:31 *'He began to teach them that the Son of
Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the
elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be
killed." The period spent in retirement was not spent
entirely in the education of the twelve. During that
time, Jesus had his own personal problem to think
about. His personal and private ministry he could
carry on as the occasion offered; and occasions did
not fail. But his public ministry in the synagogues

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

had been frustrated. And in the interval between the
incident in the synagogue and his retirement into
Syrophoenicia, and during one or two brief excursions
subsequently into Galilee, it became perfectly clear
that the tireless attentions of the Pharisees and their
intrigues with the Herodians would make quite im-
possible a preaching ministry in the country at large.
What then was he to do? Was he to be content with
a purely private and (as it were) underground propa-
ganda? There was too much at stake to allow Jesus
to be satisfied with this solution, for he was not pur-
suing an affair of his own. His sense of himself as
the symbol of a new order of life, the organ of the
kingdom of God, called for action more positive and
drastic than a subterranean diffusion of "the good
news.'' Moreover, the obstruction which had been put
in his way and which hindered the kingdom was a
public affair, a circumstance to be met publicly, and
as Jesus clearly saw, to be met in its stronghold. It
Mt. 16:21 grew on him that he "must go up to Jeru-
salem." For in Jerusalem was focussed the strength
of this sinister thing that thwarted him. It was the
home of Anti-Christ. And he, the Christ, the Son
of Man, was under necessity to go up to Jerusalem
to proclaim in his own person the challenge of the
kingdom, — there where were gathered together all the
forces that hindered the kingdom. There were the
traditionalists, the politicians, the nationalists, all those
who worshipped "this world's unspiritual God." There

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

were the ecclesiastics, who suffered the Temple to be
defiled for the emoluments it brought to them, and who
foresaw their own undoing in the spread of Jesus'
influence. There were also blind but honest tories
who were (as Walter Bagehot might have said) ''cross
with the agony of a new idea." Jerusalem was the
metropolis of reaction and corruption. And thither,
plainly, Jesus, being what he was, had to go. So
Luke 9:51 "he sct his face steadfastly to go to Jeru-
salem."

He went with his eyes open, knowing what awaited
him. He had, indeed, plenty of precedents upon which
to go in his prevision of what lay before him. He
had the experience of the prophets, and he cannot have
failed to recall the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. For
he expected to "suffer many things." But all other
roads were blocked. There was nothing left for him
to do but to show to his brethren the nature of their
moral trouble, the whole black thing that w^as wrong
with the world, by standing over against it and letting
it work out its utmost consequences upon his own
person before the eyes of all men. And so it came
to pass.

''The Son of Man came not to he ministered unto,
hut to minister and to give his life a ransom for
many."

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

Anatole France in one of his stories describes
Pontius Pilate, grown old and taking a summer cure
at a Roman watering place, and in a conversation only
vaguely recalling the trial and death of Jesus. That
was the measure of the affair to the official mind, a
mere incident of daily politics. And even now when
we think of the matter with a little detachment, it
seems singular that what on the face of it appears to
be no more than the rather squalid and contemptible
end of an obscure peasant in an obscure corner should
have become the master- fact of history.

The truth is that ''the instinct of mankind" has al-
ways felt in the story the presence of certain elements
which are not to be measured by the common foot-
rule of historical judgment. We seem to move here
in the region of something like absolute moral con-
trasts, where circumstances of publicity or obscurity,
of size and numbers, of time and place, sink into com-
parative unimportance. The event is historical; but
it is also superhistoric. It moves on a plane of time-
lessness. The first thing, but certainly the least thing,
that we say about the Cross is that it happened on
a certain day at a certain place. The date of the Cross
is not a particular day but all time; the site of the
Cross is not Jerusalem but the whole earth. The Cross
is the moral crisis of the whole race, the epitome and
symbol of its moral tragedy and of its hope.

What happened to Jesus had in kind happened be-
fore. It had happened to Jeremiah, it happens when-

i6i

THE UNTRIED DOOR

ever a prophet is stoned or burnt or shot. But the
Cross has its own uniqueness. Moral judgments upon
human sin in history, — such as the late war — are seen
through the haze of human imperfection, in a twi-
light of mingled motives of good and evil, and the
innocent suffer with the guilty. But when the power
of human evil broke upon Jesus, it was seen in its
own true color, darkness against light, black against
white, with no blurred edges and no twilight zone
. . . and the innocent alone suffered. It is this which
invests the Cross with its superhistoric quality. It
is felt to be a revelation of absolute moral distinctions.

The death of Jesus was the natural outworking of
human self-love. In the death of the Son of Man,
symbol at once of the kingdom of God and of essen-
tial humanity, we have the abiding apocalypse of sin,
the revelation of its anti-social nature and conse-
quences. The crucifixion of Jesus remains the supreme
instance and embodiment of that contempt of person-
ality which is the firstfruits of our self-love and the
undoing of our human soHdarity. The Cross is the
whole wide tragedy of mankind focussed down to one
point of utter darkness.

But the Cross reveals much more than the truth
about sin. Above the confusion of Calvary, through
the tumult and clamor, a voice was heard saying:
i^nice 23:34 "Father, forgivc them for they know not
what they do." Above the noise of hell was heard
the voice of the everlasting mercy, the last word of

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THE UNTRIED DOOR

God over against the worst deed of man. *'The love
of enemies," says Dr. P. T. Forsyth, "is love being
true to itself through everything." Here it is — love
without a limit. There is a note of the ultimate in this
prayer to which men's hearts have never failed to re-
spond, recognising in it a depth and a reach of charity
essentially divine. 'Truly," said the centurion, "this
Mart 15:39 man was the son of God." The prayer
has come down the ages as the most godlike word that
ever fell on human hearing. For all the infamy, the
lust, the blindness that broke upon the Son of Man
and which is for ever laying waste this fair earth of
our inheritance, God has this final word of mercy.
When sin has done its worst and its utmost, mercy
holds the field. The Cross is the everlasting mercy,
focussed down to one glorious word of life.

It matters little here whether we think of God as
immanent or incarnate in Jesus ; the point of the Cross
is the same. It reveals the moral order of the world
because it reveals the moral nature of God. Someone
has finely said that "the Cross is the ground plan of
the universe." It means that love is the principle of
life, a love that is true to itself to the end and is suffi-
cient in itself for the need of man. Sin is rebellion;
love meets it with reconciliation. God opposes to sin
the gift of forgiveness freely and royally given, with-
out money and without price. God's revenge is for-
giveness, God's punishment is pardon. This is the
unbearable retribution of love.

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A noted English preacher once said that ''when on
earth Jesus was never off the Cross." Certainly the
Cross gathered up his life into perfect completeness,
and what he says on the Cross he said throughout his
life. The will to love, the will to forgive, the will to
serve, the will to give one's life a ransom for many,
these are the things by which it is appointed that men
shall live; and not otherwise. It is these things that
the Cross proclaims, as the deepest truth of the life
of God and, by that token, the final law of the life
of man.

164

BY WAY OF EPILOGUE

THE WINGLESS VICTORY

ON the Acropolis at Athens stand the ruins of a
beautiful little temple dedicated (so the story
goes) to Nike Apteros, the Wingless Victory.
The legend has it that the statue of Victory was chis-
elled without wings in order to symbolise the hope and
the confidence of the Athenians that victory would
thereafter never desert their city. To-day the temple is
a battle-scarred ruin, symbol of the fickleness of what-
ever gods there be that dispense the fortunes of war.
The victory it celebrated is an old forgotten story. But
despite its scars, its beauty still remains.

Here is a parable as full of meaning as an tgg is of
meat. We speak of *'the glory that was Greece." But
what do we mean when we say the words? We are
not thinking of the victories of Greece or of its em-
pire, though these were notable in their day. An
incident here and there in its history, the story of
Thermopylae for instance, still warms our blood. But
there is little in the external history of Greece to dis-
tinguish it from the history of any other country. The
glory of the Greek lay in other things. He was the

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pathfinder of the intellect; for human thought still
travels along the trails that he blazed. His vision of
beauty raised life to a new plane of worth and wonder ;
and the loveliness he created has become the price-
less inheritance of the race. His poets and dramatists
still speak a living word, for they uttered ultimate
things that never grow old. The true Wingless Vic-
tory of Athens was not in its triumph upon any field
of battle or in the invincibility of its armies at any
time, for all that passed away; but in the expression
of its inner life in a great pioneering search for truth
and in enduring works of beauty.

A few days' journey from Athens will bring you to
another historic hill. Upon that hill was raised one day
not a temple but a cross, a criminal's gibbet. On the
face of it what happened that day seemed to be little
more than an ordinary incident of daily imperial poli-
tics. The civil magistrate had done his duty to the
empire; and if the case had been a little unusual and
the law had been unduly strained, — well, you never
know where that kind of thing might end, and now,
thank goodness, it was over and done with. And
Pilate turned in his frigid official way to the next
piece of imperial business that required attention. The
high ecclesiastics of Jerusalem saw only a mischievous
fanatic, who threatened their authority and endangered
the integrity of the church, put safely out of the way.
The event was a triumph for the combined forces of
church and state. To the political official as well as to

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the churchman it was a closed incident, a wingless vic-
tory. At least so it looked at the time. We know
how it looks to-day.

Here, surely, is something that can bear a good
deal of thinking about. Most of our human troubles,
the deepest and vastest of our human tragedies spring
at last from this — that men have never seriously sat
down to think what is involved in this great and per-
sistent historical paradox. It is the surest clue to the
kind of world that we live in, and to the kind of people
that we should be. The Athenian Victory is (as I
liave said) an old forgotten story, hardly to be dis-
cerned through the mists of time. To-day it simply
does not matter. But the beauty which commemorated
it still remains, a joy for ever. Pilate and Caiaphas,
who wrought so satisfying and final a work on Calvary,
are to-day remembered as a couple of common hang-
men. Both in Athens and Jerusalem the tables were
turned. In Athens, it was Beauty and not Might that
won the wingless victory. In Jerusalem the wingless
victory went not to empire or to organised religion, but
to the love which was incarnate in the person of Jesus.

Yet it is the sad and strange fact that after so long a
time and in the teeth of all his experience, man has
set his heart upon the victory that deserts him and
upon the achievement that perishes. Not yet does he
understand that the wingless victory belongs to the
things that spring from his hidden life, to the beauty

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that he creates, to the love that clothes life with love-
liness. He still supposes that this world that he sees
is the only world that matters, and that the things that
count are those that can be counted. If he does at
all acknowledge that there is an unseen world and
a part of life that is out of sight, it is as a sort of sen-
timental and romantic fringe that may be attended to
when there is no more serious business on hand. And
the serious things are the external things, wealth,
power, empire. This is the frame of mind that we
sometimes call materialism; we have lately learnt to
call it real-politik, when it turns to public affairs.
When it carries out its own logic, it frowns on all
idealisms and enthusiasms as dangerous foolishness
which threatens the state and interferes with business.
It tramples underfoot the instances of religion and the
scruples of conscience; it rides rough-shod over all
principles and sentiments that withstand its purposes.
Its tests of prosperity are territory, markets, bank-bal-
ances, social prestige: and its law (unavowed, of
course) is the law of the jungle. Yet what history
has to say about these things is not to be mistaken. It
tells of the transitory and perishable character of these
material goods. They bear upon them the very image
and superscription of death. Empires rise, fall and dis-
appear; and

Great Caesar, dead and turned to clay.
May stop a hole to keep the wind away.
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Institutions flourish and perish, and moth and rust
corrupt the treasure that we so painfully gather.
Civilisations that were the glory of their day and
seemed to have upon them the very sign of immor-
tality have vanished; and to-day we gather their for-
gotten history from the debris and the sandheaps that
were once their prosperous cities.

They say the lion and the lizard keep
The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep,
And Bahram, that great hunter, the wild ass
Stamps o'er his head but cannot break his sleep.

It is something more than a morbid poetic fancy
that sees us living in the valley of the shadow of
death. But must the sign of mortality be for ever upon
the handiwork of man? xA^re we doomed to labor for-
ever in making things that are predestined to decay
and ruin? Is mankind condemned to an eternity of
these labors of Sisyphus, building empires and civilisa-
tions only to pull them down again? Must his victo-
ries always have wings?

The truth about man is that, so far, he has never
lived more than a fraction of his possible life, and by
far the greater part of human nature is unexplored
and unrealised. Here and there along the centuries
there have been great outgoings of light and fire from
these hidden depths, evidence of energies and capaci-

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ties of which the ordinary man is unaware. Yet the
materials are buried in us which might raise the whole
of life to dimensions of splendor and glory that would
make the best of the past seem but the flicker of a
rushlight. Some hints of what this life might be we
can gather from the beauty of the Parthenon and the
temple of the Wingless Victory, from the vision of
prophets and poets who have descried afar off the
grandeur of the human promise. You may see it all
within the compass of a single life in Jesus of Naza-
reth. It is no idle dream that sees the whole level of
life raised to the height of the high peaks of the past.
For the materials of it are here, and God has not yet
deserted his world. There is away ''beyond the bound
of the waste," a city of God awaiting its builders, a
city whose dwellers shall be poets and prophets and
seers, having the mind of Christ, a city of supermen
and superwomen who spend their lives in works of
love and beauty, and whose city reflects the light of
their own loveliness. And that city shall not be left
desolate, nor shall time wear down its youth or despoil
it of its fairness. It is our task to build that city, —
and what is more, we can.

But not one stone of that city shall we lay upon
another until the city be building in our own souls.
The Kingdom within alone can create the Kingdom
without. And if the Kingdom be within us, we can-
not but create the Kingdom without. It is the para-

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dox of this new wine that it makes its own wine-skins ;
the new Hfe begets organs and an environment that
befit it. The new order will grow spontaneously out
of the new life.

This new life has its own characteristic ways of
working, and there are three things that it does for
us.

First, it turns upon matter with a vision of beauty
and transfigures it into a vehicle for that beauty. Wil-
liam Blake says in one place: "A Poet, a Painter, a
Musician, an Architect, the man or woman who is
not one of these is not a Christian." This is a hard
saying for some of us, but we may for our comfort
remember that though we be artists in desire and ap-
preciation only, we have good title to claim a place in
Blake's Christian company. But what he means by
this saying is that Art is the kingdom of God ex-
pressing itself in the medium of material things. The
beauty of the Nike Apteros is a spiritual vision trans-
lated into stone; and so men may translate into sound
and color the loveliness that is revealed to the spirit.
This Hfe is the mother of a living art.

Second, this life gives to the mind the key of truth,
not the whole truth or the ultimate truth, but the way
into such truth as a man needs to live by. Man has
been from the beginning of days searching for truth;
but he has gone by the way of speculation along the
highroad of logic; and he has returned from all his
searching, bringing back the question with which he

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started: What is truth, and where is it to be found?
But when the kingdom is come in a man, he has the
key of truth in it; and he has it as a criterion of
knowledge and an interpretation of Hfe. This man
starts out where the philosopher wistfully hopes one
day to arrive ; and when he passes on to men the truth
that he sees, it is not in the formal treatise of the
schools, but in some flaming prophetic word, or sung
in a sonnet, or dramatised in a tale, — ^as Jesus passed
on the truth that was in him to men.

Third, it turns upon men with love and by loving
them redeems them. In our blind folly we have sup-
posed that the anarchy and waywardness of human
nature is to be overcome by coercions and restraints,
by pains and penalties : and in our blindness we have
but multiplied crime and misery. God sets out to
win us from our rebellion by unyielding love, and of
that love Jesus is the very embodiment and incarna-
tion. The story of Jesus is "the instance of love
without a limit," the love that will not let me go
or give me up, that flings down party-walls and over-
leaps frontiers, flings wide the gate of friendship to
the enemy; the impulse and the energy that creates
the sovereign loveliness, the loveliness of a living
society of men, purged of enmities and discords and
hatreds, living out its manifold and abundant life in the
unbroken harmony of unreserving fellowship.

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"Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and
John 12:24 die it abideth alone : but if it die, it beareth
much fruit." That is the cost of life. It finds itself only
by losing itself. It creates beauty only by pouring itself
out. ''Without the shedding of blood," said the
old word, ''there is no remission of sins," no, nor any-
thing else worth having, no freedom, no beauty, no art,
no life. Life is realised by pouring itself out without
stint.

Love's strength standeth in love's sacrifice.

So there was One who poured out his life in death
for the love that He bare us, that He might bring us to
God and to one another. "Every kindness," says Will-
iam Blake, "is a little death in the divine image." For
all real kindness, even the least, is a self -giving, an out-
going of life. The Cross is the abiding symbol of
that self -giving that the love which creates and re-
deems has always to pay.

But after the Cross, the Resurrection. And just as
the Cross is the symbol of life poured forth, so the
Resurrection is the symbol of life regained, life en-
larged. It is the sacrament of the survival of the life
spent in the creation of beauty, in the revelation of
truth, in the redeeming of men, these imperishable
things that defy change and time and death. A little
temple on a hill, a story told by the wayside, a cross
of wood, here are the undying, unfading things,
that survive the changes and accidents of time while

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all other things are laden with mortality. For these
are the out-workings of the divine life in the soul of
man as he passes through a world of sense. The Resur-
rection is our assurance that this life not only has im-
mortality in itself but sets the seal of immortality upon
all that it touches, whether it be sound or stone, pig-
ment or word, or, best of all, a human soul. It
creates and redeems for eternity. And hereto, and
only hereto, to this life to which the Son of Man calls
us, belongs the Wingless Victory.

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