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 Creed of Christ. 
 
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 3 1924 029 307 118 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029307118 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Crown 8vo. Price 5s. net. 
 
 SOME PRESS OPINIONS. 
 
 The Rev. R. J. Campbell in the DaUy Chronick : " I 
 should be glad to have written this book . . . almost as 
 remarkable in its way as was 'Ecce Homo' a generation 
 or more ago. . . . To this unknown writer is due the 
 credit of possessing a spiritual insight and a clear and 
 forceful style which few possess, and which have equipped 
 him for the task of showing others what they already 
 think." 
 
 Literary World : " A fresh and masterly analysis of 
 Pharisaism ; a vividly effective contrast of the conception 
 of God as lawgiver and Father, and a frequently sure 
 penetration into the heart of Christ's teaching. ... A 
 book by all means to be read." 
 
 Spectator : " A really remarkable and original book." 
 
 Times : " The book deserves the attention of religious 
 thinkers." 
 
 Mr. E. F. Bettany in the Sumiay Special: "A remark- 
 able book . . . bids fair to attract as much attention — 
 and deservedly so — as did ' Ecce Homo ' forty years ago." 
 
 Mr. Henry Murray in the Sunciay Sun : " Perhaps the 
 most remarkable, and the most fascinating, book that has 
 appeared on its own lines since Ernest Renan issued to an 
 
 JOHN LANE, Publisher, LONDON & NEW YORK 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Crown 8vo, Price }s. net. 
 
 SOME PRESS OPINIONS {continued). 
 
 astonished world 'La Vie de Jesus' . . . the outcome of 
 an intelligence at once vigorous and acute ; it is written 
 in clear, tense English, and it moves from the first page to 
 the last on a lofty level of thought and emotion . . . the 
 entire book is admirably written." 
 
 Methodist Recorder : " A brilliant and original pre- 
 sentation of certain aspects of the attitude and teaching of 
 our Lord . . . full of suggestive discussions, and fruitful 
 of real thought. Particularly striking is the chapter in 
 which is set out our Lord's revolt against the very spirit 
 of Pharisaism, and His continuous assertion of the spiritu- 
 ality of life." 
 
 Christian World : " A remarkable book ... a live 
 contribution to a vital topic ... its anonymous author 
 writes with extraordinary insight." 
 
 Glasgow Herald : " Many suggestive passages . . . the 
 author holds high ethical standards." 
 
 Dundee Advertiser : " This very remarkable book." 
 
 Aberdeen Free Press : " There is much in the book 
 that is suggestive and edifying." 
 
 Leeds Mercury : " The book is written in a pleasing 
 literary style, and will repay reading." 
 
 JOHN LANE, Publisher, LONDON & NEW YORK 
 
THE CREED OF CHRIST 
 
THE CREED 
 OF CHRIST 
 
 JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD 
 LONDON £:? NEW YORK . MDCCCCV 
 
THE CREED 
 OF CHRIST 
 
 Chapter I — The Sayings of Christ 
 
 WHAT did Christ believe about the 
 world in which he found him- 
 self ? What conception did he 
 form of its origin, its meaning, 
 its destiny ? To which of its, .aspects did he 
 ascribe supreme reality, to which of its forces 
 supreme power, to which of its interests supreme 
 importance, to which of its ends supreme worth ? 
 In other words, what solution did he give of 
 the master problem which confronted him as it 
 confronts each one of us— the eternal riddle of 
 the Sphinx — a problem the solution of which, 
 whatever outward form it may assume, always 
 descends, in its attempts to win vital expression for 
 itself, into the minutest details of human action ? 
 Or, to speak more generally, what were the 
 fundamental ideas that dominated Christ's 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 thought, that influenced his will, and that 
 shaped his life ? 
 
 It is time that we who call ourselves Chris- 
 tians should begin to ask ourselves these 
 questions. For nineteen centuries we have 
 steadily averted our eyes from them. What 
 has interested us hithisrto has been not what 
 Christ -believed about God and Man and the 
 Universe, but what we ought to believe about 
 the personal relation of Christ to God and 
 Man and the Universe; Yet until the former 
 problem has received a provisional solution, 
 what meaning can we see in the latter ? For 
 how can we dissociate the personality of Christ 
 from what must needs have been of the very 
 essence of it,^ — his philosophy and his creed .'' 
 Perhaps it is because we have either neg- 
 lected ' to study Christ's beliefs, or else 
 studied theni within the narrow and arbitrary 
 limits prescribed by dogmatic theology, that 
 our speculations as to his personality have 
 beeh so fantastic and so futile. For not 
 only have we confined our study of Christ's 
 personality, largely if not wholly, to an 
 elaborate scrutiny of what is intrinsically in- 
 scrutable, but even in that illusive field of 
 
 2 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 inquiry we have accepted as final conclusions 
 which were formulated by the over-subtle 
 Greek intellect (prone even in its prime 
 to mistake words for things) in the darkest 
 days of its protracted decadence, and have 
 subordinated to those conclusions our own 
 speculative efforts in the same and in kindred 
 regions of thought. Lulled into fatal apathy 
 by the narcotic of that pseudo-scientific teaching, 
 the Western World has paid a superstitious 
 reverence to the letter of what Christ is re- 
 ported to have said, and has made no sustained 
 attempt to interpret its spirit. It has accepted 
 Christ as its guide and leader, and has opened 
 its heart to the influence of his winning and 
 commanding personality : but because it has 
 persistently ignored his ideas, its acquaintance 
 with his personality has been shallow and one- 
 sided i and great as has been its devotion to his 
 person, it has but seldom held intercourse with 
 his soul. 
 
 Before we can attempt to determine what 
 Christ believed, we must ascertain, as far as may 
 be possible, what he said. How is this to be 
 done ? In the Gospels we find many sayings 
 
 3 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 which are attributed to Christ. Which of these 
 are genuine, and which spurious ? This is a 
 question which concerns the "layman" even 
 more than the professional scholar. Textual 
 criticism may indeed be able to tell us when 
 and by whom the Gospels were written, and 
 whether all the contents of a given Gospel 
 are genuine, in the sense of really belonging 
 to that Gospel, or not. But in order to 
 distinguish, within the limits of what textual 
 criticism has stamped as trustworthy,, the real 
 from the spurious sayings of Christ, we need 
 a preliminary acquaintance with the mind and 
 soul of Christ, — an acquaintance which scholar- 
 ship cannot give us, but which it is open to 
 any one who will free his mind from prejudices 
 and foregone conclusions to endeavour to 
 acquire. We need more than this ; we need 
 what scholarship, in the sense of historical re- 
 search, can give us, — an insight into the nature 
 of Christ's surroundings ; but we need this first 
 and foremost. Unless we can commune with 
 Christ's soul, unless we can form a preliminary 
 conception of the master ideas that inspired 
 him, we cannot begin to handle the problem 
 that confronts us and that bars the way, until 
 
 4 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 we have succeeded in solving it, to further 
 intercourse with Christ. 
 
 The problem is not so desperate as it may at 
 first sight seem to be. Perhaps I have over- 
 stated its difficulty. For even if it be con- 
 tended that a large majority of the reported 
 sayings of Christ are of doubtful authenticity, 
 and that one's estimate of these must needs be 
 determined by the conception that one has 
 formed (or inherited) of Christ's mind and 
 character, it will surely be admitted that there 
 is a residuum of sayings, the genuineness of 
 which is virtually beyond dispute. 
 
 In the first place, there are the " unorthodox " 
 sayings, those which are or seem to be sub- 
 versive of the established beliefs about Christ. 
 Nothing but the intrinsic genuineness of such 
 sayings could have procured them admission 
 into a narrative in which their presence must 
 have been highly inconvenient for those who 
 edited the narrative, — edited it (whether con- 
 sciously or unconsciously matters little) by the 
 light of the theological assumptions which their 
 general interpretation of it had helped to 
 generate. Sayings of this kind are, as might 
 be expected, few and brief. Among the most 
 
 S 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 important of them are Christ's rebuke of the 
 lawyer who had addressed him as " Good 
 Master " : " Why callest thou me good ? none 
 is good save one, even God," and the cry on 
 the cross : " My God, my God, why hast thou 
 forsaken me ? " 
 
 In the second place, there are the sayings that 
 are antagonistic to the general trend of belief 
 and thought in Christ's own time. That such 
 sayings should have been invented by those 
 who told the story of Christ's life is m the 
 highest degree unlikely. For the followers of 
 a great reformer are always much nearer than 
 their master to the spiritual standpoint of the 
 age in which they live ; besides, on their own 
 showing, the disciples of Christ were strongly 
 Jewish in their beliefs and hopes. Among the 
 most important of the sayings of this class are 
 the denunciations of the Pharisees, which fill so 
 many pages in the synoptic Gospels, Pharisaism 
 being, as we cannot too often remind ourselves, 
 the high-water mark of the religious tendencies 
 of post-exilian Judaism. 
 
 In the third place, there are the sayings which 
 were obviously unintelligible, either whoUy or 
 in part, to the authors of the Gospels. That 
 
 6 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 the pupil should find it difficult to rise to the 
 level of the Master's teaching, and should again 
 and again fall far below it, is what we have 
 every reason to expect. And so, when we find 
 sayings recorded in the Gospels, the meaning of 
 which, on the naive admission of those who 
 recorded them, was too wide and deep for their 
 minds to grasp, we may fairly assume- that those 
 sayings embody the actual teaching of Christ; 
 Such are the many utterances, never clearly 
 comprehended by Christ's disciples, and in more 
 than one case flagrantly misunderstood by them, 
 about the " Kingdom of Heaven " and the 
 "Kingdom of God." 
 
 If we accept these three classes of sayings 
 as genuine, we shall provide ourselves with a 
 " base " for our further advance into the un- 
 known country which we seek to explore. For 
 there are certain facts about Christ which shine 
 out from the Gospel narratives (when every 
 doubtful passage has been provisionally elimi- 
 nated), and which are as clear to the most 
 sceptical of critics as to the most orthodox of 
 believers. 
 
 It is quite clear that Christ was a " prophet," 
 in the widest sense of the word ; that he was 
 
 7 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 possessed with large and far-reaching ideas of a 
 more or less revolutionary character, and that 
 he was therefore, speaking generally, in revolt 
 against the tendencies of the age in which, and 
 the people among whom, he lived. 
 
 It is also quite clear that he lived in an 
 intensely religious age and among an intensely 
 religious people. The air that he breathed 
 was heavily charged with religious beliefs, — 
 beliefs as to man's duty towards God and his 
 destiny at the hands of God, beliefs which were 
 primarily national, but had also a wider scope 
 and bearing, and which were held with extreme 
 ardour and extreme tenacity. Those beliefs 
 Christ did not share ; oh the contrary, they 
 were entirely repugnant to him. 
 
 For, again, it is clear, perhaps clearer than 
 anything else, that the religious consciousness 
 of the Jews in that age found its fullest, truest, 
 and most logical expression in Pharisaism, and 
 that hatred of Pharisaism was one of the master 
 passions of Christ's life. 
 
 Finally, and above all, it is clear that Christ 
 believed with whole-hearted conviction in what 
 he called the Kingdom of God, and that he 
 meant by this something inward, spiritual, 
 
 8 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 natural, and eternal, something diametrically 
 opposite to that Messianic kingdom to the 
 advent of which his contemporaries looked for- 
 ward, — a kingdom which was conceived of as 
 outward, visible, supernatural, and temporal. 
 - With these facts to fall back upon, we shall 
 be able to attempt the difficult task of criticizing 
 and sifting the doubtful sayings of Christ. We 
 already know enough about Christ and his 
 contemporaries to be able to hazard conjectures 
 as to the origin of some at least of the sayings 
 which are recorded in the Gospels. The work 
 of developing and elaborating one's conception 
 of Christ will, of course, go hand-in-hand with 
 the work of criticizing the Gospel narratives, 
 each process in turn reacting upon and helping 
 to limit and shape the other. Indeed, if we 
 were disposed to be hypercritical, we might say 
 that for a final estimate' of the authenticity of 
 the various Xo'yia XpurTou we must wait until 
 we have formed a final estimate of the creed 
 and character of Christ. In other words, we 
 must wait for a day which will never come. 
 Meanwhile — and, after all, it is with the initial 
 and not with the final estimate of Christ and of 
 the Gospels that we aire now concerned— certain 
 
 9 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 rough-and-ready rules for distinguishing- the 
 genuine from the spurious sayings of Christ 
 are suggested to us by the condusions which 
 our brief study of the undoubtedly genuine 
 sayings has enabled us to reach. 
 
 Whenever Christ is represented as giving his 
 sanction, directly or indirectly, to beliefs with 
 which the general trend of his teaching shows 
 that he had no sympathy, it is but right, to 
 say the least, that our suspicions should be 
 awakened. For the earnest and enthusiastic, 
 but unimaginative, men who revered Christ as 
 their Master were the very men in whose hearts 
 the religious beliefs from which Christ had 
 turned away — beliefs which appealed strongly- 
 to all earnest and enthusiastic Jews in the post- 
 exilian er3, — would be likely to find their most 
 congenial soil. The story of the claim made 
 by the sons of Zebedee to pre-eminence in 
 Christ's kingdom shows clearly how incapable 
 even the nearest and dearest of Christ's, friends 
 were of rising above the level of the prevailing^ 
 "Messianic hope." What wonder then that 
 such men, when recording (whether orally or 
 in writing) the sayings of Christ, should have 
 made him the exponent of their own dreams 
 
 10 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 and fancies, or, at any rate, should have coloured 
 his teaching with the very conceptions from 
 which he was striving to liberate their 
 minds ? 
 
 Yet we are not to assume oiFhand that every 
 saying which seems to fall below the level of 
 Christ's highest convictions is necessarily spuri- 
 ous. Just because Christ was a prophet, the 
 words that he used must never be taken 
 literally. He who habitually " taught in 
 parables " is the very last man to whom we are 
 to go for " theological information " or any 
 teaching of that kind. Every prophet is at 
 heart half a poet ; and poetry always expresses 
 itself in metaphors and other figures of speech, 
 lending its sanction to these just so far as they 
 serve to communicate to the listener's mind 
 some flash or gleam of its own inner meaning, 
 but declining to guarantee their truth for any 
 other purpose or in any other sense of the 
 word. 
 
 Also, as the raison d'itre of the prophet is to 
 deliver to the world new and revolutionary 
 ideas, and as for these there is no fitting medium 
 of expression ready to his hand, there is nothing 
 for him to do but to make use of current 
 
 II 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 conceptions and current modes of thought, of 
 beliefs which he has renounced in his heart, of 
 arguments which he regards as futile, that 
 through these he may meet his fellow men on 
 ground of their own choosing, and there com- 
 municate to them the new ideas by which their 
 cherished " orthodoxy " will eventually be dis- 
 credited and overthrown. In doing this he 
 runs the risk of seeming to countenance the 
 very conceptions which he has come into the 
 world to destroy. But the risk is worth taking ; 
 and the dishonesty of his action is entirely on 
 the surface. For just so far as the conceptions 
 which he seeks to undermine are, as so often 
 happens, perversions or misinterpretations of a 
 vital truth, in making them subordinate to a 
 new idea which is, in part at least, a reaffir- 
 mation of that vital truth, his mission is " not 
 to destroy, but to fulfil ; " or, rather, in the very 
 act of destroying he restores the erroneous con- 
 ception to its pristine purity, he reveals it as it 
 really is. 
 
 Then, again, it is quite conceivable that, 
 though in his heart of hearts the prophet 
 disowns the doctrines which his contemporaries 
 regard as orthodox, on the surface of his mind 
 
 12 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 he still retains some measure of respect for 
 them. Every man must needs come under 
 the influence of the beliefs, prejudices, and 
 assumptions of the age in which he lives. The 
 process of breaking with these is a more or less 
 gradual one, and is perhaps never fuUy con- 
 summated. There is an epoch in the man's 
 life during which he half accepts, half rejects 
 them. Then one may witness the singular 
 spectacle of current beliefs being used, in 
 perfect good faith, as the means of expressing 
 revolutionary ideas, — ^the very ideas by which 
 the beliefs in question are doomedj sooner or 
 later, to be either subverted or transformed. 
 
 We may say, then, that when words are put 
 into Christ's mouth which express the exact 
 opposite of what he truly believed^ and which 
 end, as it were, in themselves, the reporter has, 
 wittingly or unwittingly, made Christ the 
 mouthpiece of his own convictions ; and we 
 may assume that the words in question were 
 never really spoken. But when the words, 
 however foreign their literal meaning may be 
 to Christ's way of looking at things, are made 
 subservient to the purpose of communicating 
 spiritual truth, we may at least admit the 
 
 13 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 possibility of their having been used as they 
 stand ; and we may be quite sure that the 
 deeper truth which is behind them and burns 
 through them was in some form or other 
 communicated by Christ to his disciples. 
 
 Let us test these rules by applying them to 
 one or two specific cases. In the 13 th chapter 
 of St. Mark's Gospel we read that certain of 
 the disciples went privately to Christ and asked 
 him when the Messianic Kingdom would come, 
 and what would be the signs of its advent. In 
 reply, Christ is reported to have said that, after 
 sundry physical signs and wonders had taken 
 place, the Son of Man would be seen coming 
 in clouds with great power and glory. " And 
 then shall he send forth the angels, and shall 
 gather together his elect from the four winds, 
 from the uttermost part of the earth to the 
 uttermost part of heaven. . . . Verily I say 
 unto you, this generation shall not pass away 
 until all these things be accomplished." Did 
 Christ really believe that in the lifetime of 
 those to whom he was speaking he would come 
 back to earth in great glory and reign over the 
 elect? I am quite certain that he believed 
 
 14 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 nothing of the kind. Again and again we see 
 him trying to spiritualize, to dematerialize the 
 current belief in the advent of the Kingdom of 
 God ; trying to take the Kingdom out of time 
 and out of space, to make men realize that it 
 was inward and spiritual, that it was among 
 them and within them. To proclaim, not the 
 advent, but the eternal presence of the inward 
 kingdom was his self-imposed mission. How, 
 then, could he have allowed himself to sink to 
 the level of this materialistic prophecy ? The 
 truth is that the words which are here attributed 
 to Christ might have been uttered by any 
 fervent sharer in the prevailing " Messianic 
 hope." They express a national dream which 
 Christ was so far from countenancing that he 
 strove unceasingly to wean men from it, not 
 indeed by openly disavowing it, but by giving 
 it a new meaning, a new atmosphere, and a new 
 direction. It is worthy of note that this fore- 
 cast of the Second Advent is not one of the 
 public sayings of Christ. It is the private 
 reply to a private question, — a fact which 
 inclines one to surmise that the writer of the 
 Gospel, determined at all costs to invest the 
 prevailing belief with the high authority of 
 
 15 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Christ, and knowing that there was no evidence 
 of his having openly countenanced it, repre- 
 sented him as having done so in a private 
 interview. But be that as it may. The fact 
 that in this passage Christ is reported to have 
 accepted and ratified a prophetic belief which 
 had long prevailed, which was widely spread 
 and ardendy and tenaciously held, but with 
 which he had no sympathy, — to have accepted 
 it and given materialistic expression to it, 
 when it was the very aim of his life to 
 spiritualize it till it should be changed beyond 
 recognition ; — this and the further fact that the 
 passage ends in itself, and is not made sub- 
 servient to the communication of spiritual truth, 
 makes it impossible for me to regard it as 
 genuine. 
 
 The same prophecy is repeated, in almost 
 identical words, in the 24th chapter of St. 
 Matthew, but in the next chapter there is a 
 most important addition to it. When the Son 
 of Man returns to earth he sits in judgment on 
 the throne of glory ; all the nations are gathered 
 before him ; the sheep are separated from the 
 goats ; the righteous, those who have loved and 
 served their fellow men^ go into eternal life ; the 
 
 16 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 wicked, those who have neither loved nor served 
 their fellow men^ go into eternal punishmerit. 
 Was this wonderful and beautiful passage reaUy 
 spoken by Christ ? It' is supposed to be a 
 valuable mine of " theological information ; " 
 but " theological information " is the very last 
 thing that a poet-prophet is likely to give us. 
 The description of the Last Judgment occurs in 
 one only of the three Gospels in which the 
 Second Advent prophecy is recorded. This 
 shows that it is not a vital part of that prophecy. 
 How, then, did it get into the First Gospel ? 
 That it embodies a real recollection of Christ's 
 teaching cannot be doubted. The splendid 
 glorification of love — the love of man for man 
 — which burns through the clouds of Messianic 
 phantasmagoria, came straight from the soul of 
 Christ. For the rest, all is uncertain. It is 
 conceivable that Christ, weary of being identified 
 by his disciples with the Messiah of their 
 temporal kingdom, and invested by them with 
 the Messianic titles of King and Judge, — it is 
 conceivable that Christ, who said "Judge not 
 that ye be not judged," turned upon his 
 disciples and said to them (or, rather, to himself) : 
 " Well, if you will make me judge mankind on 
 
 17 c 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 your imaginary last day, this is how I shall 
 judge them." It is also conceivable that some 
 disciple who had heard Christ identify love with 
 righteousness and life, and the lack of love 
 with wickedness and death, embodied this 
 teaching in the dramatic story of a Final Judg- 
 ment. Other conjectures might be hazarded, 
 but they would profit us nothing. What is 
 important for us to note is that in this passage 
 the form is nothing, the spirit is everything. 
 Of " theological information," in the theological 
 sense of the phrase, there is not one grain. 
 Not a word in the passage is to be taken 
 literally. The story does not end in itself. 
 On the contrary, it is made wholly subservient 
 to one spiritual purpose — the communication of 
 the divine truth that love is life. This inner 
 truth is hidden from those who insist on 
 deifying its outward form. To lay equal stress 
 on the letter and on the spirit of a prophet's 
 teaching is, in the nature of things, impossible. 
 Blindness to the spirit is the penalty that waits 
 on subservience to the letter. The orthodox 
 theologian seriously believes that on the " last 
 day" Christ will appear in glory and judge 
 mankind, that all men will be either lost or 
 
 i8 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 saved, that there will be an eternity of bliss for 
 the righteous and an eternity of woe for the 
 wicked. He does not believe what all these 
 details were meant to lead up to and (in a 
 sense) to make manifest ; he does not believe 
 — for he has formed an entirely different 
 conception of the conditions of salvation — that 
 the way of salvation is the way of brotherly 
 love. 
 
 In conclusion. The story of the Last 
 Judgment is certainly genuine as regards 
 the spirit of its teaching, and may possibly 
 be genuine as regards the letter. If it is 
 genuine in both respects, it is a striking 
 example of a popular belief being transformed, 
 and even transfigured, by being made the 
 vehicle for the communication of a spiritual 
 idea. The fate that it has suffered at the hands 
 of theology is striking and suggestive. There 
 is no passage in the Bible in which love — the 
 love of man for man — is so greatly exalted as in 
 this. There is also no passage in the Bible — so 
 strange is the irony of Fate — which has done so 
 much as this to foster hatred and strife among 
 men and, speaking generally, to make human 
 life dark, desperate, and miserable. One 
 
 19 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 shudders to think of the amount of mental 
 torture which men have inflicted upon them- 
 selves, of the amount of physical and mental 
 torture which they have inflicted upon their 
 fellow men, owing to their having regarded this 
 prophetic story as a mine of "theological 
 information " instead of as a well-spring of 
 spiritual truth. If we wish to know how the 
 sayings of Christ ought not to be interpreted, 
 we cannot do better than study the attitude of 
 theology towards this particular saying, the 
 " orthodox " interpretation of which has been 
 written on the scroll of history in letters of 
 blood and flame. 
 
 Of the many reputed sayings of Christ there 
 is one large class which seems to stand entirely 
 alone, and which, therefore, calls for special 
 consideration, — the sayings that are recorded in 
 the Fourth Gospel. In the first three Gospels 
 the environing atmosphere is entirely Jewish. 
 The accepted standard of right and wrong is 
 essentially legal. The hopes and desires and 
 aspirations of those who surrounded Christ, 
 including his own disciples, are essentially 
 Messianic. Dark clouds of legal formalism 
 
 20 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 and Messianic materialism obscure the light of 
 Christ's teaching. The clouds are made darker 
 by the light which they veil, but their edges 
 burn with an almost superhuman splendour, 
 and whenever they part, there is an outburst of 
 unclouded sunshine, — the apocalypse of the soul 
 of Christ. In the Fourth Gospel there is over- 
 whelming evidence of a new element in the 
 atmosphere, — that of Greek thought. The 
 distinctively Jewish element has in large 
 measure disappeared, but with it has also dis- 
 appeared much of what is distinctively Christian 
 We hear but litde of the Pharisees, and still 
 less of those denunciations of Pharisaism which 
 are of the essence of Christ's teaching on its 
 negative side. We hear but little of the 
 Messianic hope, and still less of that pro- 
 clamation of an inward and spiritual kingdom 
 which is of the essence of Christ's teaching on 
 its positive side. The dark clouds have dis- 
 appeared, but the sun no longer shines out in 
 occasional bursts of cloudless splendour. For 
 a haze of metaphysical thought now per- 
 vades the atmosphere, and obscures, without 
 ever wholly hiding, the spiritual influence of 
 Christ. 
 
 21 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 In the three synoptic Gospels the sayings 
 attributed to Christ fall, as we have seen, under 
 three principal heads ; — those which are funda- 
 mentally anti-Jewish, and therefore obviously 
 genuine ; those which are fundamentally Jewish, 
 and therefore obviously spurious ; and those 
 which are doubtful, but probably (for the most 
 part) genuine, the notation being Jewish, whUe 
 the ideas are Christ's own. In the Fourth 
 Gospel we have only one class of sayings, — 
 reminiscences of Christ's teaching, passing 
 through the refracting medium of a mystically 
 metaphysical mind. The writers of the synoptic 
 Gospels were materialists in their religious ideas 
 and general mental outlook : at any rate, they 
 were unable to rise above the semi-materialistic 
 level of the " Messianic hope ; " but they had 
 no definite system of thought into which to fit 
 the sayings of Christ. Hence they either 
 reported him faithfully, naively recording 
 sayings which were really subversive of their 
 own dreams and ideals, but the full meaning 
 and ultimate import of which they were too 
 simple to understand ; or, when their memory 
 failed them, they reported him, in perfect good 
 faith, as saying things which he did not believe, 
 
 22 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 but which they did. (They held those beliefs 
 so firmly that they could not but assume that 
 they were shared by their Master,) The author 
 of the Fourth Gospel was a thinker, with a quasi- 
 philosophical system of his own, — a spiritual 
 and, in some respects, beautiful system, but 
 far inferior in depth and breadth to the philo- 
 sophy of Christ. Into that system he tried to 
 fit the teaching of Christ. The result is that, 
 as a revealer of Christ's ideas, he is, I think, 
 far less trustworthy than the authors of the 
 synoptic Gospels. The best biographers are 
 those who have a strain of naivete^ bordering 
 on stupidity, in their mental composition. 
 Cleverer men will take care not to let their hero 
 contradict himself; but this merit is more than 
 outweighed by their tendency to obtrude their 
 own theories between the mind of their hero 
 and the minds of their readers, — to obtrude 
 them semi-consciously, and therefore systemati- 
 cally. If the author of the Fourth Gospel 
 never makes Christ say the exact opposite of 
 what he believed, he never, or very seldom, 
 makes him give utterance to the beliefs that 
 really ruled his heart. It may be doubted if 
 any of the sayings which are recorded in 
 
 23 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 the Fourth Gospel is entirely genuine. The 
 most Christ-like passage in the Gospel is the 
 apocryphal story of the woman taken in adultery. 
 One can imagine Christ expressing his ideas, 
 to earnest and enthusiastic Jews, in the notation 
 of Judaism. One cannot imagine Christ, whose 
 philosophy was all poetry, expressing his ideas 
 in the notation of a Graeco- Judaic metaphysical 
 theory. Also, the Christ of the synoptic 
 Gospels was incapable of the Self-glorification 
 in which the author of the Fourth Gospel, with 
 his mind possessed by the theory of the Logos 
 (a kind of metaphysical Messiah), makes his 
 Christ habitually indulge. Even the passages 
 in which love is exalted and inculcated — passages 
 which have done so much to win for this Gospel 
 the esteem and affection of devout minds — do 
 not, as I read them, after steeping my mind in 
 the study of the synoptic Gospels, ring quite 
 true. The disciples are to love one another, 
 not because they are fellow men, children of 
 the All-Father, but because they are disciples 
 of Christ. In the story of the Last Judgment 
 the "saved" are those who have loved and 
 served their feUow-men without having ever 
 known or even heard of Christ. There is no 
 24 
 
The Sayings of Christ 
 
 passage in the Fourth Gospel that strikes so 
 grand or so deep a note as this. 
 
 I have divided the reputed sayings of Christ 
 into four chief classes. There is not a single 
 passage with regard to which I have not asked 
 myself, Were those words really spoken by 
 Christ ? There are many passages with regard 
 to which I have asked this question many times, 
 and am still waiting for the answer. But I need 
 not go further into detail. My general attitude 
 towards this fascinating but complicated pro- 
 blem has, I hope, by this time been adequately 
 defined. In the three synoptic Gospels there 
 are many sayings, the genuineness of which may 
 be regarded as beyond dispute. Out of these, 
 as I study them, emerges the figure of Christ, 
 — the figure of one who hated the intolerance, 
 the literalism, and the formalism of the Pharisees, 
 and who was ever striving to spiritualize the 
 semi-materialistic conception of the Kingdom 
 of God, which had expressed itself in the pre- 
 vailing dream of an approaching iVIessianic 
 reign ; — the figure of one who was the ardent 
 and whole-hearted antagonist of materialism, of 
 dogmatism, and of mechanism, and the ardent 
 
 25 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 and whole-hearted champion of spirituality, of 
 freedom, and of life. Whatever in the recorded 
 sayings of Christ seems to blur or distort this 
 figure, I regard with suspicion ; whatever obli- 
 terates it, I regard as false. 
 
 On the ground which I have cleared by this 
 preliminary attempt to interpret the mind of 
 Christ, I will now try to construct his creed. 
 
 26 
 
Chapter II — Pharisaism 
 
 THERE are two things about Christ 
 which seem to be quite clear. The 
 first is that he hated Pharisaism. 
 The second is that he believed in 
 the « Kingdom of God." 
 
 Let us make the former fact our starting- 
 point. Who were the Pharisees, and why was 
 their teaching and general mental attitude so 
 repugnant to Christ ? Let us first rid our 
 minds of the idea that the Pharisees were 
 exceptionally wicked men. The Pharisees 
 were not wicked men. On the contrary, they 
 were excellent men according to their lights ; 
 and their lights were those of their age and 
 their nation. The accepted beliefs about God 
 and man ; the accepted ideals — national, social, 
 and moral ; the accepted principles of action ; 
 the accepted standards of right and wrong ; — all 
 these they applied with pitiless consistency, 
 with scrupulous exactness, and with fanatical 
 zeal to all the details of human life. In striking 
 at them, Christ struck at the beliefs, principles, 
 
 27 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 ideals, and standards of post-exilian Judaism. 
 To expose the shortcomings of the wicked is 
 not the work of a prophet. Had the Pharisees 
 been sinners in the ordinary sense of the word, 
 Christ would have either compassionated or 
 ignored them. It is when goodness^or what 
 passes for such — rests on a hollow foundation, 
 it is when the master-principle of a nation's life 
 has become corrupt, that the time is ripe for a 
 prophet to appear and enter the lists against the 
 " orthodoxy " of his age. 
 
 What the Puritans have been to Protestantism, 
 what the Jesuits have been and still are to Roman- 
 ism, what the Ritualists are to Anglicanism, that 
 the Pharisees were to latter-day Judaism, the 
 Judaism that had prevailed since prophecy died. 
 They were more logical, more consistent, 
 more zealous, more conscientious, more self- 
 sacrificing, more righteous than the rest of the 
 community, more fanatically Jewish than the 
 fanatical Jews by whom they were surrounded. 
 In the words of Professor Emil Schiirer, 
 " Pharisaism was the legitimate and classic 
 representative of post - exilian Judaism in 
 general. It did but carry out with relentless 
 energy the consequences of its principle." 
 
 28 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 Thus, in striking at Pharisaism, Christ struck 
 at Judaism, at lattfer-day Judaism in the first 
 instance, but also (as we shall presently see) at 
 Judaism as such. 
 
 Now, the essence of Judaism was devotion to 
 a divinely given law. For many centuries the 
 tendency, inevitable in all such cases, to deify 
 the letter of the Law and ignore its spirit, was 
 held in check by the spiritual vitality of the 
 nation, manifesting itself, as spiritual vitality 
 always does, in poetry, — the poetry of psalmist 
 and prophet. After the Exile, when, with the 
 gradual decadence of the nation, the insight of 
 the prophet grew dim, and the fire of poetic 
 inspiration burned low, the letter of the Law 
 established itself at the expense of the spirit, 
 and the legal conception of life achieved a final 
 and lasting triumph. 
 
 Let us ask ourselves what this meant and 
 what it involved. The idea on which the 
 legalism of the Jews was grounded was that 
 God had entered into a covenant with His 
 chosen people Israel ; that He had delivered to 
 His people a law or system of rules for the 
 regulation of their lives ; that obedience to this 
 law would be rewarded, and disobedience to it 
 
 29 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 punished, both in this life and (according to the 
 belief of post-exilian Judaism) in the life to 
 come ; that national obedience or disobedience 
 would be requited by national weal or woe, 
 and that in like manner the individual would 
 be rewarded for his good deeds and punished 
 for his transgressions, the reward or the punish- 
 ment (whether national or individual) being in 
 every case exactly proportioned to the merits 
 or demerits of those whose deeds had been 
 weighed in the balance of God's justice. The 
 letter of the Law was regarded as divine. 
 Every detail in it, every regulation, however 
 seemingly trivial, had come from God ; and 
 obedience was therefore as obligatory in the 
 case of the most minute and vexatious of civil 
 or ceremonial enactments as in the case of the 
 weightiest matter of the Law. But though the 
 letter of the Law had been given to Israel 
 by God, and might therefore be regarded as 
 complete in itself, to the multiplication of its 
 rules there was, in the nature of things, no 
 end ; for as cases were continually occurring 
 which the letter of the Law had not provided 
 for, it became necessary for fresh rules, each of 
 these being an application or extension of some 
 
 30 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 emsting rule, to be continually formulated ; 
 and that this work might be the more eiFectuaUy 
 accomplished, it became necessary for certain 
 persons to devote themselves to the systematic 
 study of the Law, with a view to qualifying 
 themselves to deal with doubtful cases. These 
 Scribes, as they were called, were not merely 
 diligent students of the Law, but critical 
 observers of the lives of their fellow-men. 
 Every action that was not obviously correct 
 had to be weighed in the scales of their legal 
 knowledge, so that wrong-doing might, if 
 necessary, be reproved, and that rules might 
 be framed for the treatment of similar or 
 analogous cases In the future. Thus obedience 
 to the letter of a formulated law became the 
 whole duty of man ; and as the Law became 
 more and more complicated, and descended 
 deeper and deeper into the details of human 
 life, the burden laid upon the individual became 
 ever more oppressive, and the despotism under 
 which he lived more rigid and more exacting. 
 Nor was it only constraint from within — the 
 pressure of the Law on his stupefied and 
 enfeebled conscience — from which he suffered. 
 His whole life (for he had been taught to 
 
 31 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 identify life with outward action) was lived 
 under surveillance. The eyes of the legal expert 
 were upon him, and everything that he did 
 was liable to be criticized by men who estimated 
 the worth of actions, not by reference to the 
 motives that were behind them or to the con- 
 sequences that they might be expected to 
 produce, but solely by reference to their 
 conformity to the letter of the Law. 
 
 What fruits was such a conception of life 
 likely to bear ? Let us look at the life of the 
 individual from three points of view, — from 
 the point of view of his relation to God, 
 of his own character, and of his relation to 
 his fellow-men. These three points of view — 
 the religious, the moral, and the social — have 
 much, perhaps everything, in common,, and 
 my only object in keeping them distinct is to 
 introduce some element of order into my own 
 thoughts. 
 
 The idea of a covenant between God and 
 Man, when kept (as poetry keeps it) in the 
 region of natural law, is sternly grand and 
 fundamentally true ; but when the vitalizing 
 influence of poetry ceases to be felt, and the 
 32 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 letter of the Law which God is supposed to 
 have given to Man comes to be regarded as 
 divine, the idea degenerates into the most soul- 
 less of all conceptions, that of a commercial 
 bargain, drawn up with legal accuracy and 
 acuteness, and formally binding on both parties 
 to the transaction. It was thus that Israel, in 
 his post-exilian days, had learned to conceive 
 of God. For as a man conceives of life and 
 duty, so will he conceive of God ; and as he 
 conceives of God, so will he conceive of life 
 and duty. The two conceptions act and react 
 on one another unceasingly, each modifying 
 the other and both converging on a common 
 goal. That complete externalization of religion 
 and morality which was characteristic of latter- 
 day Judaism had its parallel, in Jewish thought, 
 in a complete externalization and quasi-material- 
 , ization of God. God had always been regarded 
 by Israel as an omnipotent potentate, whose 
 existence, apart from and above His subject- 
 people, was as certain and as actual (one might 
 almost say) as that of an Eastern monarch, and 
 whose chief function was to dispense from with- 
 out semi-material rewards and penalties to those 
 who kept or broke His Law. But the germs 
 
 33 D 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 of degeneration which lurked in this conception 
 developed in post-exilian days with terrible 
 rapidity. From Prophecy to Scribism the 
 descent is abrupt and unfathomable. The 
 Scribe, like the Prophet, undertook to interpret 
 the wiU of God to his fellow men. And what 
 was the vision of God that inspired him ? The 
 vision of. a man like himself; the vision of a 
 hair-splitting sophist ; of a quibbling lawyer ; 
 of one who could insist on the literal fulfilment 
 of the most vexatious of his legal enactments, , 
 and yet wink at evasion of the spirit of his 
 law ; of one who held men guilty if they kept 
 their food warm for the Sabbath in manure or 
 sand, but guiltless if they kept it warm in 
 feathers or tow ; of one who was content that 
 men should pay tithe of mint and cumin and 
 anise, and omit the weightier offerings of mercy, 
 justice, and truth. 
 
 As is the God whom one worships, so is the 
 ideal which one pursues. The complete de- 
 spiritualization of God, which accompanied the 
 triumph of legalism, was itself accompanied by 
 the complete de-spiritualization of man's ideal. 
 But an ideal which has been de-spiritualized 
 has ceased to exist. The conception of God as 
 
 34 
 
Phari 
 
 isaism 
 
 the far-ofF goal of spiritual perfection, the conse- 
 quent desire to " grow in grace," the vision of 
 heavenly beauty, the aspiration which never 
 counts itself to have apprehended, — these had 
 no meaning and no existence for him who lived 
 under the Law. So complete was the loss of 
 the ideal that a finite conception of righteous- 
 ness was deliberately adopted. If a man could 
 so order his life as to steer clear of doubtful 
 cases and obey all the rules of the Law, perfect 
 righteousness would be attained, and the full 
 and final reward of righteousness would be 
 earned. It is true that, with the inevitable 
 development of casuistical science, fresh rules 
 were for ever being added to the Law, and 
 that to this process of fissiparationr there could 
 be no assignable limits. But in spite of 
 this the legal conception of righteousness 
 remained essentially finite. The task which 
 casuistry was compelled to set itself proved to- 
 be infinite ; but its infinitude was, in the first 
 place, an unforeseen and unwelcome addition to> 
 the presumably finite burden of legal obligation, 
 and, in the second place, it was the infinitude of 
 a descending " series," an infinitude within finite 
 limits, — not a spiritual ascent towards an ideal 
 
 35 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 type, but a quasi-mathematical descent into the 
 sordid, the trivial, and the infinitesimal. 
 
 Such a misconception of the ideal and the 
 divine is bound to act disastrously on the 
 character of those who entertain it. The loss 
 of the ideal in the region of desire must needs 
 have its counterpart in the region of conduct in 
 the loss of the inward standard. In the eyes 
 of those who see things as they are, actions are 
 right or wrong according as the inner source 
 from which they spring is pure or polluted ; 
 according as they react for good or evil on the 
 character of the doer ; and according as their 
 consequences are beneficial or the reverse, on the 
 whole and in the long run, not merely to those 
 who are directly and obviously affected by them, 
 but to humanity at large. This triune standard 
 was wholly ignored by legalism. For those 
 who lived under the Law, actions were good or 
 bad according as they complied or failed to 
 comply with the letter of the Law's enactments. 
 No other standard was recognized ; no other 
 consideration carried weight. *' Is it so com- 
 manded ? " was the only question that had to 
 be asked. And with the loss of the inward 
 
 36 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 standard came, as might have been expected, 
 the loss of the sense of moral proportion. 
 Whether the commandment that was kept or 
 broken was weighty or trivial, moral (in the 
 true sense gf the word) or merely ceremonial, 
 spiritual or material, of infinite or of infini- 
 tesimal importance, mattered nothing. Obedi- 
 ence to the Law was always righteous and 
 worthy of reward. Disobedience was always 
 sinful and worthy of punishment. In the 
 sphere of human action (which, for legalism, 
 was co-terminous with the sphere of human life) 
 two colours, and two only, were visible, — black 
 and white. All intermediate shades were ignored. 
 A kind of spiritual colour-blindness had taken 
 possession of men's minds ; and, as a conse- 
 quence of this, a deadly dualism, — fatal alike to 
 the infinity and to the continuity of Nature — 
 dominated their thought. 
 
 The results of this systematic externalization 
 of the inner life of man were disastrous and far- 
 reaching. Three vital attributes of the human 
 spirit withered and well-nigh perished in the 
 atmosphere of the Law, — Freedom, Conscience, 
 and Imagination. That legalism is the nega- 
 tion of freedom is self-evident. A wide and 
 
 37 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 ever-widening range of movement is impera- 
 tively demanded by freedom. Systematic restric- 
 tion of choice is as antithetical to her being as 
 death is to life. Now the triumph of legalism 
 was signalized by the restriction of human 
 freedom to a single narrow channel of choice. 
 Freedom to choose between obedience and dis- 
 obedience to the Law was admitted and even 
 insisted upon. For the rest, man was regarded 
 as an automaton, as something even lower 
 and more soulless than a slave. Freedom to 
 map out one's life, to pursue an ideal, to look 
 l»efore and after, to discern good from evil, to 
 distinguish between law and law, to weigh con- 
 flicting motives, to forecast the consequences of 
 action — freedom to desire, to judge, to plan 
 — had entirely ceased to be. Every,thing 
 was settled for the votary of the Law down 
 to the minutest detail of his outward life. 
 In Schiirer's words, " Nothing was left to free 
 personality, everything was placed under the 
 bondage of the letter. At every step, at the 
 work of his calling, at prayer, at meals, at home 
 and abroad, from early morning till late in the 
 evening, from youth to old age, the dead, the 
 deadening formula awaited him." To destroy 
 
 38 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 freedom is to cut ofF the supply of life at its 
 fountain-head. For freedom is no mere nega- 
 tion. To confuse it, as is so often done, with 
 the absence of constraint, is to admit by impli- 
 cation the validity of the legal conception of life 
 and duty. The life of man is never exempt 
 from the pressure of Nature's forces. If 
 systematic pressure is withdrawn from it, random 
 pressure must needs take its place. The soul 
 is free, not when it is at the mercy of every 
 random impulse, but when it is acted upon by 
 congenial forces, when it is exposed to spiritual 
 pressure, to constraint from within itself. In 
 other words, it is free when it is self-constrained, 
 when the true self, the divine element in man, 
 is making its influence felt. The difference 
 between freedom and bondage is the difference 
 between compulsion from within and com- 
 pulsion from without. The weakness that 
 places the soul at the mercy of every random 
 impulse is very near of kin to the weakness 
 that places it at the mercy of mechanical 
 restrictions, of the letter of a lifeless law. 
 When freedom is reduced to a minimum — 
 whether by rampant licence or by rampant 
 legalism matters little — the growth of the soul 
 
 39 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 is arrested, and the process of degeneration 
 has begun. 
 
 From freedom to conscience there is but a 
 single step. Indeed, conscience is but another 
 aspect of freedom, — freedom to know as dis- 
 tinguished from freedom to do. The saying, 
 so characteristic of the Old Testament, that " it 
 is not in man that walketh to direct his steps," 
 is profoundly true, but only in the sense that 
 impulse and guidance must come to a man from 
 a deeper source than his ordinary self. Legalism 
 appealed for sanction to this and to similar 
 sayings ; but in the act of interpreting them it 
 undermined their authority by emptying them 
 of their poetry and their inner meaning. For 
 legalism, wherever or whenever it may have 
 prevailed, has ever based itself on the assump- 
 tion that man is spiritually blind ; and having 
 started with this assumption, it has ever striven 
 to justify it, by making it impossible for 
 its votary to use his " inward eye," and by 
 thus atrophying, and at last destroying, his 
 inward sight. That man is radically and in- 
 herently incapable of distinguishing right from 
 wrong, that his path must be pointed out to 
 him at every turn, or rather, that his hand must 
 40 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 be held at every step, is the one overmastering 
 conviction which gave purpose and impetus to 
 the zeal of the Pharisee and the industry of 
 the Scribe. In practice, as we have just seen, 
 legalism has always deprived men of freedom, 
 but in theory it has never done so. On the 
 contrary, it has impressed upon him that, within 
 the narrow and ever-narrowing limits which it 
 has prescribed for him, his will is free and his 
 power of choice unimpaired. But deliberately 
 and with clear consciousness it has insisted that 
 he is blind. 
 
 With the decay of conscience, with the loss 
 of the moral intuition, conscientiousness de- 
 generated, as might have been expected, into a 
 moral disease, into a hair-splitting, sophistical, 
 self-torturing' casuistry ; which, far from con- 
 cerning itself with the larger issues of life, 
 descended deeper and ever deeper into the 
 ever-narrowing vortex of the infinitesimal. And 
 even this perverted form of conscientiousness 
 was not to be indulged in by the ordinary man. 
 " Life was indeed " (to quote Schiirer's words) "a 
 continual torment to the earnest man, who felt at 
 every moment that he was in danger of trans- 
 gressing the Law ; and when so much depended 
 
 41 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 on the external form, he was often left in 
 uncertainty whether he had really fulfilled its 
 requirements." But though he was free to 
 torture himself with doubts and perplexities, he 
 was not free to solve the problems that perplexed 
 him. This, like everything else, had to be 
 done for him. If the letter, the formula, failed 
 to give him the guidance that he needed, he 
 must appeal to those who were learned in the 
 Law. The blindness of the natural, the un- 
 instructed man, was the first and last dogma of 
 the psychology of legalism. 
 
 When conscience is at work, " the vision and 
 the faculty divine" is exercising itself in the 
 sphere of human conduct. When imagination 
 is at work, the same faculty is exercising itself 
 in a wider and more impersonal sphere. In 
 each case vision generates desire ; but whereas 
 in the lesser sphere the object of desire— ideal 
 good — is, ex hypothesis to be won, or at any rate 
 pursued, through the medium of moral action, 
 and is, in that sense and to that extent, within 
 the reach of every man, in the larger sphere the 
 media through which the ideal is to be pursued 
 are those of poetry and art, media in which 
 only exceptionally gifted natures are able to 
 
 42 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 live and work. Hence it is that conscience is 
 an impulse — an impulse to action to which few 
 men are wholly insensible — ^as well as a guiding 
 light ; whereas in the play of imagination (in 
 the wider sense of the word), though desire in 
 some form or other is always present, and 
 though in some cases the pressure which it 
 exerts is irresistible, for most men its motive 
 force is weakened by the very rarity of the air 
 that has to be breathed and the very bound- 
 lessness of the sphere that has to be explored. 
 But this does not alter the fact that the sphere 
 of imagination includes the sphere of conscience, 
 and that imagination enters largely into the 
 composition of conscience — nay, that it is the 
 very fire of which conscience is the guiding 
 light. 
 
 I need not take pains to prove that the 
 atmosphere of the Law was necessarily fatal to 
 imagination. The wings of the soul are given 
 to it by imagination ; and as the Law restricted 
 at every turn the free movement of the human 
 spirit, as it would not allow it to take a single 
 step without guidance, it followed a fortiori that 
 it would never suffer it to soar. The loftiest 
 problems that imagination aspires to handle are 
 
 43 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 those that relate to the nature and will of God. 
 To assume, with legalism, that the will of God, 
 which must needs be the outcome and expression 
 of His nature, has been communicated to man, 
 and is so fully and accurately known by him 
 that he has been able to set it forth as a 
 formulated code of law, is to debar imagination 
 from undertaking that last and highest enterprise, 
 the attractive force of which is the secret of its 
 restless activity and the ultimate source of all 
 its lesser energies. " Philosophy begins " — 
 eternally begins — " in wonder." So does poetry. 
 So does art. So does science. To quench with 
 cold jets of legal "doctrine" the flame that 
 wonder has kindled is to arrest the outgrowth 
 of man's higher life. For the various energies 
 of imagination are so vitally interconnected that 
 it is impossible for one of them to be weakened 
 without the rest being in some measure impaired. 
 And when the one that is weakened happens 
 to be the highest of all, the injury that is done 
 to the rest makes itself felt on every plane of 
 man's being. I have said that the sphere of 
 imagination includes the sphere of moral action. 
 As insight into the heart of things is of the 
 essence of imagination, and as sympathy is at 
 44 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 once the source and the product of insight, it 
 stands to reason that imagination is as much 
 at home in the field of moral action as in that 
 of artistic emotion or speculative thought. It 
 is indeed scarcely an exaggeration to say that 
 it is the largest and loftiest of all moral faculties, 
 and that the lack of it, involving as it does the 
 lack of human sympathy and the unrestricted 
 outgrowth of an aU-absorbing egotism, is the 
 gravest of all moral defects. , 
 
 When freedom, conscience, and iniagination — 
 each a vital aspect of man's inner life — are 
 dying of starvation, the soul is being brought 
 within measurable distance of death. This is 
 what happened under the Law. The effort to 
 grow was abandoned, and a systematic attempt 
 to be " saved " by automatic action took its 
 place. But in the spiritual world, as in every 
 other sphere of Nature's energy, the one master- 
 law holds good, — wherever there is life there 
 is growth, and the entire cessation of growth is 
 the first symptom of incipient decay. Disguise 
 it from ourselves as we may, the fact remains 
 that the first and last duty of man is to " grow 
 in grace," to expand and develop his soul. 
 It was, as we shall presently see, spiritual 
 
 45 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 indolence, reluctance to undertake the serious 
 and onerous work of growing, reluctance to use 
 and cultivate the divine gifts of will-power, of 
 moral intuition, and of imagination, that gene- 
 rated legalism ; and legalism ministered to the 
 weakness to which it owed its being, by doing 
 its best to make spiritual growth impossible. 
 The real importance of moral action lies in its 
 reaction on the character of the doer, conduct 
 being the medium in which, for ordinary men, 
 the process of growth has to be carried on, and 
 virtue tending to expand and elevate the soul 
 as surely as vice tends to contract and degrade 
 it. Looked at from this point of view, the 
 Law, though non-moral (for the most part) In 
 its details, is seen to be profoundly Immoral in 
 its general scope and tendency. We are re- 
 warded for being good and doing good by 
 becoming better. This conception of duty and 
 the reward of duty was wholly lost sight of by 
 legalism. Righteousness, in the legal sense of 
 the word, consisted in the performance of actions 
 which were, with few exceptions, out of relation 
 to the character of the agent ; and the reward 
 of righteousness was supposed to come from 
 without, not from within. In teaching men to 
 
 46 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 regard non-moral trifles as sacred duties, the 
 due discharge of which woiald enable them to 
 have tangible rewards weighed out to them by 
 God ; in telling men that this mechanical work 
 and this quasi-material recompense were the 
 main, if not the sole, concerns of life, — ^legalism 
 led them into the broad and easy road — broad 
 and easy, however tiresome and vexatious it may 
 have been, as compared with the steep and 
 narrow path of spiritual effort — into the well- 
 trodden road of lifeless routine, a road which 
 ends at last in spiritual death. The incessant 
 repetition of meaningless acts for no other 
 reason than that they have been "commanded" 
 by one who can and will reward obedience, is 
 worse than a narcotic to the soul ; it inoculates 
 it at last with the deadliest of all maladies, with 
 a kind of spiritual "sleeping-sickness," from 
 which, if it be not arrested in its earlier stages, 
 there is no awaking. 
 
 We can reach the same conclusion by a slightly 
 different line of thought. The loss of the ideal, 
 which we have seen to be characteristic of life 
 under the Law, is equivalent to the abandon- 
 ment of the effort to grow. For wherever there 
 is growth there is movement towards an ideal 
 
 47 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 type, the perfect form of the thing that grows. 
 This ideal type is in the thing that grows, in all 
 the stages of its development from germination 
 to maturity ; and the pursuit of it is therefore 
 an essentially inward movement, a struggle to 
 go deeper and deeper into one's own true 
 nature, to get nearer and nearer to one's own 
 true self. This effort of the ideal to realize 
 itself in the inner life of man generates freedom 
 when the influence of the ideal manifests itself 
 as forcBj conscience when it manifests itself as 
 lights imagination when it manifests itself as jfre; 
 and these three — fire, light, and force — are not 
 three but one. It follows that the loss of the 
 "ideal means the loss of freedom, of conscience, 
 and of imagination ; means the cessation of the 
 effort to grow in grace ; means, in the last 
 resort, the death of the soul. 
 
 The final result of the loss of the ideal, and 
 the final proof of the morbid degeneration of 
 the soul, is the outgrowth of spiritual pride. 
 The man who pursues an ideal has nothing to 
 be proud of except that his goal is unattainable ; 
 and this knowledge humiliates him in the very 
 act of exalting him. Such a man is proud, not 
 of what he is, but of what he is not ; not of what 
 
 48 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 he has done, but of what he can never hope to 
 do. The legalist, on the contrary, regarded 
 each act of obedience as a good thing, as some- 
 thing achieved, something to be proud of, some- 
 thing that entitled him to a reward. That he 
 could feel pride in his achievements shows how 
 low his standard had fallen, how finite his ideal 
 had become. In the eyes of the idealist achieve- 
 ment is only redeemed from total failure by 
 being allowed to rank as partial failure, by being 
 regarded as the vantage ground for a fresh 
 upward movement. In the eyes of the legalist 
 each achievement was a thing complete in itself, 
 a thing which could never be improved upon. 
 In other words (though, of course, he did not 
 realize this), it was something " finished and 
 finite," a seed that would never germinate, a bud 
 that would never blow. To say of the Law 
 that it generated spiritual pride is to bring 
 against it the gravest and most comprehensive 
 of all charges. The pride of the Pharisee who 
 recounted his good deeds in the Temple, and 
 thanked God that he was not like the Publican, 
 measured the depth of his spiritual degradation. 
 
 Whatever unfits a man for doing his duty 
 49 E 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 to God and to himself, unfits him in an equal 
 degree for doing his duty to his fellow men. 
 Of all ethical codes the Law, as interpreted by 
 the Scribes and practised by the Pharisees, was 
 the most entirely non-human. The duties that 
 it prescribed were for the most part purely 
 ceremonial. By the side of these it placed a 
 certain number of moral duties ; but its own 
 fundamental assumption forbade it to exalt the 
 latter above the former. For as the letter of 
 the Law was regarded as divine, it followed that 
 every enactment, however weighty or however 
 trivial it might seem to be, had behind it the 
 sanction and authority of the God of Israel, and 
 that therefore all enactments were equally binding 
 on the devout Jew. In Schiirer's words, "Merely 
 conventional demeanour in outward matters 
 and ceremonies was of the same value as the 
 fulfilment of the highest religious and moral 
 duties." Now, it is a comparatively easy matter 
 to discharge ceremonial obligations, to perform 
 the ablutions which the Law requires, to eat the 
 food which the Law prescribes, to give tithe ot 
 mint and cumin and anise, and the rest ; whereas 
 it is a very difficult matter to control one's 
 appetite and one's temper, and to be just, 
 
 SO 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 merciful, and unselfish in one's dealings with 
 others. It is true that, owing to the intricacy 
 and ambiguity of the Law, the path of him 
 who tried to obey all its ceremonial ordinances 
 was beset with difficulty ; but the difficulty 
 was immeasurably lighter, and belonged to an 
 immeasurably lower level of life than that which 
 beset the path of him who tried to do his duty 
 to his fellow men. And so, under the stress 
 and pressure of one of Nature's inexorable laws, 
 the baser coinage began to drive the sterling 
 gold out of circulation ; the non-moral duties 
 began to establish themselves at the expense of 
 the moral ; ceremonial punctilio at the expense 
 of mercy, justice, and truth. 
 
 It was indeed but natural that the strict 
 legalist should begin to think lightly of his duty 
 to his neighbour. In dealings between man 
 and man the motives and the consequences of 
 action are matters of supreme importance : but 
 legalism knows of only two motives to action, 
 the hope of outward reward and the fear of 
 outward punishment; and it knows of only 
 two classes of consequences, the rewards that 
 are prepared for the righteous (in the strictly 
 legal sense of the word) and the punishments 
 
 51 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 that wait on sin. Hence it was that what I 
 may call a non-moral way of looking at moral 
 duties began to prevail. The legalist who 
 honoured his father and his mother, or who 
 abstained from murdering his neighbour, did 
 so not because his better nature prompted him 
 to do so, but because it was so commanded ; 
 while the legalist who stole from his neighbour, 
 or who committed adultery with his neighbour's 
 wife, thought little of the injury that he had 
 done to his fellow man, but much of the penalty 
 that he had earned by breaking the Law. 
 The result of this was that morality, in the 
 human and social sense of the word, withered 
 under the blighting influence of the Law, lost 
 its distinctive character, lost the very property 
 which constitutes its essence and its life. And 
 when, thus slighted and weakened, it was 
 assailed by the strong natural forces — by the 
 lusts and passions — which are ever warring 
 against it, it found but little support in that 
 natural goodness of heart which is, after all, the 
 most powerful of all incentives to moral action. 
 We have seen that insight and imagination 
 were starved and stunted in the atmosphere of 
 the Law. It was inevitable that sympathy — the 
 
 52 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 third person of this inward and spiritual trinity 
 — should share their fate. And as sympathy 
 dwindled, the one unfailing source of natural 
 goodness began to dry up. Nor did morality, 
 in its hour of need, find support in the hopes 
 and fears that deterred men from breaking the 
 ceremonial enactments of the Law. On the 
 contrary, it found that these hopes and fears 
 were the very instruments of its overthrow. 
 For the legalist, prompted by his baser impulses 
 to break this or that moral commandment, and 
 anxious to avoid the penal consequences of his 
 sin, found means to prove that it was no sin, 
 found means, while violating the spirit of the 
 commandment, to satisfy the letter. As Schiirer 
 has truly said, " When once the question was 
 started, ' What have I to do to fulfil the Law ? ' 
 the temptation was obvious, that composition 
 with the letter would be chiefly aimed at, at 
 the cost of the real demands of morality, nay, of 
 the proper intention of the Law itself." So long 
 as the casuist confined himself to the ceremonial 
 side of the Law, the chief result of his labour 
 was to make ceremonialism more and more 
 ridiculous. But there were graver problems 
 which casuistry was all too ready to handle. 
 
 S3 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 The commandments which the " natural man " 
 found most inconvenient were those which 
 directed him to control his lusts and passions 
 in the interests of his fellow men. As these 
 commandments were for the most part purely 
 negative, and, owing to their covering a wide 
 field of action, were of necessity vaguely worded, 
 they were more easily evaded than the preciser 
 and less important formulae of the Law. In 
 morality the spirit of the commandment is 
 everything, and therefore the opportunities 
 for sacrificing the spirit to the letter, the 
 opportunities for casuistical evasion are innu- 
 merable. In all ages the casuist's client has 
 been one who hesitates between two courses 
 of action, of which one is manifestly right, 
 while the other, which is more agreeable to 
 him, seems at first sight to be wrong, though 
 it may possibly prove to be lawful. Such a 
 man can have but one motive in consulting a 
 Doctor or a Priest. If his sole concern were 
 for righteousness, he would, without hesitation, 
 do what is manifestly right. As he finds it 
 necessary to seek advice, we must conclude that 
 he desires legal sanction for the less righteous 
 but more attractive course of action. In the 
 
 54 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 very act of submitting his case to an expert 
 he has intimated pretty plainly how he wishes 
 it to be dealt with. His adviser has to ask 
 himself which solution of the moral problem is 
 the more likely to make his client return to 
 him for guidance. To this question there can 
 be but one answer. He must allow his client 
 to do what his unsophisticated moral sense had 
 made him shrink from doing. But he must 
 throw over his conduct the veil of legality. 
 He must affiliate the immoral action to the 
 moral law. And, strange as it may seem, it 
 wiU be possible for him to do this without 
 offering deliberate violence to his own con- 
 science. For the interpreter of a law which 
 has been supernaturally delivered is as care- 
 less of consequences, whether outward or 
 inward,^ as of motives, his sole concern being 
 to see that the action which he is called upon 
 to criticize squares with the formal require- 
 ments of his tabulated code. That com- 
 pliance with the letter of the Law is the sole 
 criterion of moral worth may well become the 
 
 ' By the outward consequences of an action, I mean its effect 
 upon the happiness of one's neighbours. By the inward conse- 
 quences, I mean its reaction upon the character of the doer, 
 
 55 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 settled conviction of those who are accustomed 
 to look at life from the legal point of view. 
 The casuist who has fortified himself in this 
 conclusion will be able and willing to give to 
 any problem that may be submitted to him 
 the solution that is desired by his client. 
 In other words, he will have mastered the 
 science of excuses and evasions and become 
 a professional pander to vice. Of the ravages 
 which casuistry had wrought in the field of 
 moral action, when Christ came into collision 
 with the Law, I need not speak at length. The 
 words of fierce indignation in which Christ 
 denounced the Doctors of his day for tampering 
 with the sanctity of the oath, of the marriage 
 tie, and of filial duty, are still ringing in our 
 ears. 
 
 The very idea in which legalism was rooted — 
 the idea of a special revelation of God's will-^ 
 is anti-human in its tendency. The covenant 
 between God and His chosen people was made 
 for their benefit only. All who were outside 
 the pale of Judaism were beyond the reach of 
 God's grace and favour. The heathen, the 
 " nations," neither knew God nor were known 
 of Him. In a society which was dominated by 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 such an assumption, the most profoundly moral 
 of all sentiments — the love of man as man — 
 could not flourish, could not even exist. A 
 spirit of exclusiveness (akin to that of the rigid 
 Catholic in his dealings with the non-Catholic 
 world), an intolerant contempt of those who did 
 not know the God of Israel, became a prominent 
 characteristic of every zealous Jew. This feel- 
 ing was the counterpart of that sentiment of 
 spiritual pride of which I have already spoken, 
 and which, when fully developed, marks the 
 lowest depth of spiritual degradation. As 
 spiritual pride is the very negation of spiritual 
 aspiration, and therefore of spiritual life, so is 
 separatism the very negation of brotherly love, 
 and therefore of aU that is human and social in 
 morality. 
 
 If the attitude of the Jew towards the Gentile 
 was one of spiritual aloofness, of shrinking from 
 contact with an unclean thing, his attitude 
 towards his brother Jew was one of inquisitorial 
 interference with his daily life. Whichever 
 of his many duties to his neighbour he might 
 shirk or minimize, there was one which he 
 neither shirked nor minimized, — that of super- 
 vising his neighbour's conduct. When the 
 
 57 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 moral standard is inward and spiritual, criticism 
 of one's neighbour's conduct becomes both 
 impertinent and impossible ; for as neither the 
 inward motives to nor the inward consequences 
 of an action can be known to any one but the 
 actor, and as it is on these that the moral worth 
 of the action is felt to depend, the futility of 
 sitting in judgment on one's neighbour becomes 
 apparent, and the critic finds it easier and more 
 profitable to sit in judgment on himself. But 
 when the standard is outward and mechanical, 
 as it was under the Law, criticism of the doings 
 of others becomes an easy task (for the measure 
 of moral worth is ready to every man's hand), 
 and it may even come to be regarded as a 
 solemn duty. That it was so regarded by the 
 stricter Jews in the time of Christ is abundantly 
 clear. There was nothing in the bearing of the 
 Pharisees that incensed Christ so strongly as 
 their intolerant dogmatism, their censorious 
 attitude towards their fellow men. And it was 
 because they were dogmatic and censorious on 
 principle and not of malice prepense — it was 
 because in this as in other matters they were not 
 unconscientious but ultra-conscientious — that 
 Christ launched against them the arrows of his 
 
 58 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 wrathful scorn. Christ's lifelong struggle with 
 the Pharisees was a battle against principles, not 
 against men. It was the system, the scheme 
 of life, that had become corrupt. According to 
 the current belief, the disobedient drew down 
 penalties on the nation as well as on themselves, 
 while the righteous earned rewards for the 
 nation as well as for themselves ; and, that 
 being so, it is not to be wondered at that the 
 Jews, whose patriotism was as intense as it was 
 narrow and exclusive, watched one another's 
 doings with a vigilantly critical eye, and that, 
 speaking generally, their censoriousness was 
 proportioned to their conscientiousness and 
 their zed for the Law. The merciless criticism 
 to which the legalist subjected his neighbours 
 and was subjected himself, was in fact the last, 
 and in some respects the worst, cf the fruits of 
 the Law. Externalization of all that is inward 
 and spiritual is of the very essence of legalism ; 
 and when, as in the days of Christ, the life of 
 moral action was lived, in its entirety, in the 
 fierce light of a perverted public opinion, when 
 responsibility to opinion had taken the place of 
 responsibility to conscience, when the inquisi- 
 torial despotism of opinion had extinguished 
 
 59 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 the last spark of personal freedom, the external- 
 izing process had evidently reached its final 
 term, and the triumph of machinery over life 
 was complete. Under such conditions the 
 foundations of morality were necessarily under- 
 mined by the very efforts that were made to 
 support them ; for while vice, rendered subtle 
 and insidious by casuistry, found immunity 
 from criticism behind the mask of hypocrisy, 
 virtue itself became the foster-mother of the 
 deadliest of all moral evils, — uncharitableness 
 and spiritual pride. 
 
 In painting this dark picture of life under the 
 Law, I have been thinking less of legalism in 
 general than of that special development of it 
 which was called Pharisaism. For the Pharisees 
 did in practice what I have tried to do in theory : 
 they followed the principles of legalism into all 
 their logical consequences. Pharisaism was, in 
 fact, the inner citadel of Judaism, separated 
 indeed, as the name suggests, from normal 
 Judaism, but separated from it from within, not 
 from without. As the Jews separated themselves 
 from the Gentiles who had not the Law, so the 
 Pharisees separated themselves from the Jews 
 
 60 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 who had the Law, but did not scrupulously obey 
 it. Inheritors of a false conception of life and 
 duty — that of salvation by obedience — they 
 devoted themselves to its service with a loyalty 
 and an ardour which were worthy of a better 
 cause. Fearlessly, pitilessly, consistently, they 
 applied the dominant ideas of legalism to all 
 the details of man's daily life. Firmly be- 
 lieving that they were doing God's will and 
 keeping His commandments, they waged a 
 truceless war against freedom, against conscience, 
 against imagination, against all the higher attri- 
 butes of man's nature, against the very life of 
 the soul. In their zeal for God they degraded 
 Him to the level of a task-master and a 
 bargainer. In their zeal for religion they de- 
 graded it to the level of commercial obligation. 
 In their zeal for righteousness they degraded it 
 to the level of a barren ceremonialism. In their 
 zeal for the Law they degraded it to the level 
 of a network of vexatious and meaningless 
 rules. Duty to God, duty to self, duty to 
 one's fellow men, — all these they subordinated 
 to and at last absorbed into the most demoral- 
 izing of all duties — duty to the letter of the 
 Law. The result of this was that their very 
 
 6i 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 conscientiousness taught them the art of evasion, 
 and the very rigour of their virtue made them 
 pander to vice. Finally, and above all, the more 
 they "grew in grace," the more anti-human 
 they were doomed to become. Proud, self- 
 righteous, exclusive, intolerant, despotic, inquisi- 
 torial, censorious, uncharitable, they violated 
 in their every deed and word and thought, they 
 violated deliberately and with the best of inten- 
 tions, the law in which all laws are summed up 
 and held in solution, the law of brotherly love. 
 Such was Pharisaism, the most strenuous 
 and sustained effort that the human spirit has 
 ever made to win salvation by mechanical 
 obedience ; in other words, to fetter its own 
 freedom, to arrest its own growth, to stifle its 
 own life. The triumph of routine over spiritual 
 freedom has often been witnessed, and has 
 generally been due to a nation or a Church 
 forgetting its ideals and sinking into a state of 
 mental lassitude and moral torpor. But what 
 is most characteristic of Pharisaism is that in it 
 the loss of an ideal — the loss, one might almost 
 say, of aU spiritual ideals — was accepted as a 
 new ideal, and pursued with untiring industry 
 and fanatical zeal. The desire to be " saved " 
 
 62 
 
Pharisaism 
 
 by machinery has its ultimate source in spiritual 
 indolence ; but it sometimes happens that 
 spiritual indolence on one plane of life generates 
 intense spiritual (or quasi-spiritual) activity on a 
 lower plane ; and this is what happened in the 
 case of Pharisaism. 
 
 The danger from which Christ delivered the 
 Western World was imminent and great. Long 
 before Judaism had been transfigured (in some 
 measure) by the charm of his personality, the 
 stern monotheism of the Jews, and their strong, 
 though perverted, sense of moral obligation 
 had fascinated a world in which the ideals of 
 polytheism had exhausted their influence and 
 had begun to generate (as so often happens in 
 such cases) widespread moral corruption. One 
 trembles to think what might have happened if 
 Christ had not appeared on the scene. Even 
 as it was, Pharisaism won a partial triumph. 
 For it may perhaps be said that in Christianity, 
 as it was accepted by the world, the ideas of 
 Pharisaism entered into combination with the in- 
 fluence (unhappily divorced from the philosophy) 
 of Christ. Had that influence not been there 
 to serve as a secret antidote to the poison 
 of Pharisaism, had Christ not been there to 
 
 63 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 inoculate Pharisaism with the germs of his own 
 ideas, and so prepare the way for its ultimate 
 destruction, Jerusalem would have given to the 
 West, not Christianity in any sense of the word, 
 but the Gospel of spiritual death. 
 
 Let us now study the genesis of Pharisaism, 
 that, in following it up to its fountain-head, we 
 may at the same time trace Christ's hostility 
 to it back to the fundamental ideas that ruled 
 his soul. 
 
 64 
 
Chapter III — God the Lawgiver 
 
 BEHIND the Law stands the Law- 
 giver. If the Law was, as Israel 
 believed, literally divine, it must 
 have been given to him by God 
 Himself. In other words, God must have held 
 direct intercourse with Israel, talked to him, 
 revealed Himself to him. That all this had 
 happened Israel was firmly convinced, and the 
 contagion of his conviction is still a living 
 force. 
 
 There is a " child within us " which, in the 
 extremity of its weakness and self-distrust, is 
 ever ready to cry out, " Tell me what to believe, 
 and I will believe it. Tell me what to do, and 
 I will do it." The weakness of this child was 
 and still is the strength of Judaism. The 
 settled air of assurance that pervades the Old 
 Testament, the calm, matter-of-fact way in 
 which its writers tell us that God said this 
 thing and did that, has impressed the average 
 man — the man who cannot or will not outgrow 
 the " child within him " — with the belief that 
 
 6s F 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 there was one people at least who really did 
 know about God, and that in the Sacred 
 Writings of that people is enshrined the know- 
 ledge which all men are in search of. To 
 know about God, to know about His ways and 
 works, clearly, precisely, prosaically, as one 
 knows about the visible things that lie around 
 one, is the end and aim of the average man's 
 spiritual desire ; ^ and it is because Israel, 
 whose own hpart was wholly possessed by that 
 desire, has ministered to it as no other people 
 has ever done, that the average man in all ages 
 and in all parts of the Western World has 
 accepted him as an authoritative teacher and an; 
 entirely trustworthy guide. 
 
 But is it possible for man to know about 
 God ; and, if so, under what conditions, and in 
 what sense of the word knowledge ? This 
 question is, for obvious reasons, unanswerable ; 
 but when once it has been asked, it becomes 
 incumbent upon us to attempt to answer it. It 
 was scientific knowledge, certain and accurate 
 knowledge about God, which Israel professed to 
 deliver to mankind, and which Christendom 
 
 ^ So far as his spiritual desire is consciously realized. The 
 real desire of his heart lies deeper and goes deeper than this. 
 
 66 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 believes itself to have received at his hands. 
 There is one field, and one only, in which the 
 phenomenon of scientific knowledge can at 
 present be studied with profit, — the physical 
 plane of existence, the world which is revealed 
 to us by our bodily senses. Now we know the 
 physical plane of existence because we belong 
 to it ; because we are in it and on it ; because 
 our bodies are part of it ; because we discern 
 its phenomena by means of appropriate senses ; 
 because we knew it instinctively, subconsciously, 
 and practically long before we acquired that 
 systematized, theoretical knowledge of it which 
 goes by the name of science. And we know 
 about the physical plane of existence because, 
 even while we are in it and on it, we are able, 
 in virtue of some higher principle which lifts 
 us above it, to stand apart from it, to look at 
 it calmly, clearly, and dispassionately, and to 
 become disinterested students of its facts and 
 laws. It does not follow that aU men are 
 equally well acquainted with the world in which 
 they live. In this, as in other matters, special- 
 ization of functions is an ever-growing necessity. 
 The scientific knowledge of the average man 
 has but an embryonic existence as compared 
 
 67 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 with that of the trained physicist. Yet there 
 is nothing that the latter knows which might 
 not conceivably be communicated to the former ; 
 for the difference between their respective 
 reasoning facilities is a difference of degree, not 
 of kind, and the bodily senses of the average 
 man are as fiiUy developed as those of the 
 physicist, and are in all probability quite as 
 healthy and trustworthy. In other words, the 
 average man, though not in possession of much 
 scientific knowledge of physical phenomena, is 
 in a position to receive and assimilate it. 
 
 Is he in a position to receive and assimilate 
 scientific knowledge of God ? Scientific know- 
 ledge of what is, ex hypothesis supreme and 
 ultimate is, in the nature of things, unattainable 
 by any type of mind. For " vere scire est per 
 causas scire" We know what is palpable 
 through the medium of what is impalpable, 
 what is isolated and on the surface through the 
 medium of what is wide and deep ; we know 
 the effect through the cause, the phenomenon 
 through the law, the lesser through the larger 
 truth. But when we get to what is supreme 
 and ultimate, we have obviously come to the 
 end of our quest of cause and law. So one 
 
 68 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 feels constrained to reason ; but let us for the 
 moment assume that this dream of knowing 
 about God is not to be dismissed on a priori 
 grounds as wholly vain and illusory. In 
 that case, arguing from what seems to be our 
 only available analogy, we must surely say that 
 if man is to know about God, he must be in 
 living contact with what I may call the divine 
 plane of existence, he must have matured the 
 senses that enable him to discern its realities, 
 and he must have long possessed an intuitive 
 and subconscious knowledge of God analogous 
 to that which on the physical plane prepared 
 the way for the outgrowth of physical science. 
 Also, if the analogy of physical science is to be 
 further followed, while he is on the divine pkne 
 of existence he must be able in some sort to lift 
 himself above it, and to study its phenomena 
 with a clear, unclouded vision, with a calm, 
 dispassionate mind, and with a disinterested 
 desire for abstract truth. Let us waive the latter 
 condition, the fulfilment of which is obviously 
 impossible, and let us ask ourselves what is 
 involved in the former. We mean by God, if 
 we mean anything, that last term in life's 
 ascending series which at once sums up and 
 
 69 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 transcends all other terms ; we mean the ideal 
 of the soul's loftiest aspiration ; we mean, to 
 use simpler language, whatever is highest and 
 best. It follows that, If man is to know about 
 God, he must be living, he must long have been 
 living, to his own highest and best self; he 
 must have gone far in the direction of his 
 inward ideal ; he must have far outgrown the 
 average level of human life. In other words, 
 he must have done the very thing which the 
 average man is most reluctant to do, the very 
 thing which he expects theology to relieve him 
 from the hateful necessity of doing, — he must 
 have made abundant spiritual growth. 
 
 This, then, is the average man's dilemma. 
 He desires to know about God, but his chief 
 reason for desiring this is that it will render it 
 unnecessary for him, as he fondly imagines, to 
 make that inward and spiritual effort which (as 
 it happens) alone can qualify him to assimilate 
 the knowledge of God. The desire to know 
 about God is so fundamentally fallacious that, 
 even if it could, by some inconceivable miracle, 
 be gratified, the food of revealed truth would 
 turn at last into a deadly poison, owing to the in- 
 ability of the soul that asked for it to transmute 
 
 70 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 it into the substance of its own being and 
 the fuel of its own life. For, however pure 
 and spiritual might be the creed which was 
 delivered to the average man, from whatever 
 height of poetry or prophecy it might have 
 come down to him, he would be sure, sooner 
 or later, to degrade it to the level of the "child 
 within him," the level of his own unexpanded 
 and undeveloped soul. Nay, if God Himself 
 spoke or tried to speak to one who was not 
 ready to anticipate and interpret His message 
 by a life of Godward effort, the message would 
 of necessity remain unspoken ; for in the 
 atmosphere of commonplace thought and feeling 
 even the largest and loftiest words become unfit, 
 as unfit as are the symbols of mathematics, for 
 the transmission of divine truth. 
 
 When we say that the desire to know about 
 God is of all desires the most fallacious and 
 futile, we imply that the religion and philosophy 
 of Israel were tainted at their very fountain- 
 head. For it was the struggle of this desire to 
 fulfil itself that controlled the destiny of Israel, 
 that gave him (through the medium of the 
 Law) his individuality as a nation and his 
 extraordinary tenacity of national life, and that 
 
 71 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 made him, for good or for evil, the power 
 that he has long been and still is in the world 
 of religious life and thought- 
 Let us trace, from its inception in this desire, 
 the development of his creed and his scheme 
 of life. To know about God, as one knows 
 about a stone or a plant, was the master desire 
 of his heart. If we are to know about a thing, 
 it is essential that we should be able to separate 
 it from ourselves. It follows that Israel 
 debarred himself at the outset from seeking for 
 God in his own soul. This, as it happens, is 
 precisely what he intended to do ; for the 
 presence of God in the heart must needs be a 
 source of spiritual enlightenment, and it was to 
 Israel's interest to assume that he was spiritually 
 blind. Had he, oblivious of his own first 
 principles, sought for God In himself; the 
 search, from his own point of view^ would have 
 been futile. For even now, after all these 
 centuries of scientific effort and achievement, 
 there is no science of the inner life. Where, 
 then, was God to be • found ? Poetry can 
 discern the presence of God in and through 
 and beyond the outward and visible world. 
 
 72 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 Theology can not. For theology is the outcome 
 of the desire to know about God ; and what can 
 we know about the outward world except its 
 phenomena and its laws ? But it was in an 
 instinctive protest against the apparent reality 
 of physical phenomena and the apparent 
 supremacy of physical law that Israel's quest of 
 God, like every other quest of God, had its 
 origin. Neither in the outer world, nor in the 
 inner life of man, was the God of whom Israel 
 dreamed to be sought for. "Where, then, was 
 His dwelling-place ? Not in Nature, as Israel 
 would have understood the word if he had ever 
 thought of using it ; but in the world above 
 Nature, in the world to which Christian theo- 
 logy has given the name Supernatural. 
 
 Thus the first-fruit of the desire to know 
 about God is dualism. The Universe (to use 
 the most comprehensive of all words) is riven 
 asunder. Here we have Nature — inward and 
 outward — the world of which man has experi- 
 ence. There we have the Supernatural, the 
 world of which man can have no experience, 
 and which therefore lies beyond the horizon of 
 his thought. Between these two a great gulf, 
 unfathomable and impassable, is fixed. Nothing 
 
 73 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 less than this could keep the two worlds apart. 
 If there were natural intercourse between them, 
 Nature would have overflowed into the Super- 
 natural, and the two worlds would be in danger 
 of becoming one. Nature is entirely divorced 
 from the Supernatural, and entirely bereft of 
 God's presence. But why has God withdrawn 
 Himself from Nature } Really, because Israel, 
 who dreaded nothing so much as the burden of 
 his own potential divinity, found it needful, 
 for his peace of mind, that God should retire 
 to another world. But, nominally, because in 
 the beginning of thii^gs Nature, in the person 
 of man, disobeyed God and forfeited His favour. 
 The consequence of this primal act of dis- 
 obedience is that Nature is now under a curse. 
 Inward Nature — the heart of man — is full of 
 wickedness. Outward Nature — the visible world 
 — is full of labour and misery. And God, all 
 the while, is in Heaven, in the supernatural 
 world. What remedy is there for this state of 
 things ? Man cannot climb up into Heaven, 
 but God, who is presumably aU-powerful, can, 
 of His own good pleasure, come down to earth. 
 But what will be the signs of His advent ? 
 The world that centres in His being is, ex 
 
 74 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 hypothesis supernatural ; and as Nature has 
 nothing in common with the Supernatural, it is 
 clear that what we call " the course of Nature " 
 is not the expression of the Divine Will. But 
 if there is nothing divine in the normal flow 
 of Nature, must we not conclude that God 
 wiU announce His coming by causing the 
 waters of Nature to depart from their wonted 
 channel, — in other words, by thwarting the 
 tendencies of Nature and suspending the 
 operation of her laws ? 
 
 This general idea of miraculous intervention 
 will express itself in various ways. Revelation 
 will be conceived of as a definite act ; inspira- 
 tion as a quasi-material process. A particular 
 nation — Israel himself — will be singled out as 
 God's chosen people. Special men and special 
 orders of men — lawgivers, priests, "doctors," 
 and the like— will be set apart to receive and 
 guard the secrets which have been supernaturally 
 communicated by God to man, to dole out the 
 Divine grace, to formulate and interpret the 
 Divine will. For the special revelation which 
 Israel conceived of must needs take a practical 
 form. Submission to God's will is the first 
 and last duty of man. But what is God's 
 
 75 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 will, and who will declare it unto man ? The 
 will of God is not written in man's heart. 
 This essentially atheistic postulate is of the 
 essence of Judaism. There is nothing in 
 human nature that responds to God's message. 
 The heart of man, ruined by the Fall, is 
 " desperately wicked ; " and wickedness blinds 
 the inward eye. It does not belong to man 
 either to discern God's will or to desire to do 
 it. The will of God must be communicated by 
 God Himself to a chosen lawgiver, who will 
 write it down as it is dictated to him, and 
 deliver it — not to mankind at large, but to the 
 chosen people — ^as a series of detailed enact- 
 ments, as a formiJated code of law. And 
 inasmuch as the Law, though the expression of 
 God's will, is not, according to the postulate of 
 supernaturalism, intrinsically attractive, as there 
 is no message in it which the heart instinctively 
 hails as divine, the chosen people must be 
 alternately bribed and coerced into obeying 
 it. Their hopes and their fears must be alter- 
 nately appealed to. External rewards must be 
 promised to the obedient, and external punish- 
 ments to those who rebel or forget to obey. 
 It was through the medium of the Law, and in 
 
 76 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 no other way, that Israel, the rank and file of 
 the nation, came into contact with God. It 
 was through the same medium, and in no other 
 way, that, speaking generally, access to God 
 was to be had. The path of obedience — of 
 literal and mechanical obedience — to a multi- 
 tude of positive enactments, nine-tenths of 
 which were entirely non-moral, was the only 
 road to Heaven. And the secret of this path 
 was in the keeping of Israel. The rest of the 
 inhabited world, " the nations that had not the 
 Law," were beyond the pale of salvation. God 
 had not revealed Himself to them, but had left 
 them, for reasons of His own, in the darkness 
 of their misery and sin. There might be poets 
 and prophets among the Gentiles ; there might 
 be heroes and sages ; there might be righteous 
 men, as the unsophisticated heart judges of 
 righteousness. But all that counted for nothing. 
 The broad fact remained that the Gentiles had 
 not the Law, and that therefore the light of 
 God's countenance was entirely withdrawn from 
 them. 
 
 This, then, was Israel's solution of the 
 problem that he set himself. The knowledge 
 of God that he sought was to be had, but not 
 
 71 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 for the seeking. It was to be given, not won ; 
 given as a free gift by God Himself from 
 beyond the limits of Nature. It was not to be 
 won, it was not even to be' sought, by inward 
 and spiritual effort. That he might the more 
 effectually justify himself in his own eyes for 
 not making that dreaded effort, for not follow- 
 ing the steep and narrow path of aspiration and 
 soul-growth, Israel laid down, as a general 
 principle, that the path could not, in the nature 
 of things, be followed, that the effort could not 
 be made. The very play of his imagination 
 was dominated by this assumption. Myths, 
 such as those of the Creation and the Fallj 
 grew up in response to the demand that it made 
 upon his mental resources. With desperate 
 tenacity he clung, as for the dear life, to 
 the belief that Nature in general, and human 
 nature in particular, was fallen, ruined, godless, 
 accursed ; that the heart was both blinded and 
 paralyzed by its inborn sinfulness ; that far 
 from being able to desire God or to seek for 
 Him, man — the natural man — was in his very 
 essence an outcast from God's presence and a 
 rebel against God's will. 
 
 A dark and dismal doctrine this ; but Israel 
 78 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 found consolation in it. It justified to the 
 fixll his spiritual indolence, his reluctance to 
 exercise the divine gift of freedom, and to 
 undertake the serious business of growing in 
 grace. Twenty centuries of dogmatic teaching 
 have generated a prejudice in favour of Israel's 
 cherished' postulate, which is not easily eradi- 
 cated. But, when once the prejudice has been 
 eradicated, when once one has recovered the 
 power of criticizing the philosophy of Israel as 
 freely and unreservedly as one criticizes the 
 philosophies of Hellas or of the Far East, 
 one cannot but feel that of aU philosophical 
 assumptions the doctrine of the inherent cor- 
 ruption of human nature is one of the most 
 demoralizing and degrading. Because Israel 
 -=- the representative and spokesman for all time 
 of those who shirk the burden of soul-life — 
 found it extremely inconvenient to exercise the 
 higher gifts of his own nature, his will-power, 
 his moral intuition, and his imagination, he 
 must needs persuade himself and others that 
 these gifts were vital attributes of man's corrupt 
 and fallen nature, and that they neither had come 
 from God nor bore witness to His presence. I 
 say nothing as to the insult to man that is 
 
 79 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 involved in this conception. Israel insulted 
 human nature on principle, and gloried in doing 
 so. But what of the insult to God ? God has 
 presumably created Nature ; but His handi- 
 work, as Israel conceived of it, was a failure 
 from the outset, and when it went astray He 
 withdrew Himself from it and left it to its 
 own devices. If Israel's estimate of its present 
 condition is correct, the only fruit of God's 
 creative energy is a world of darkness, misery, 
 and sin. And now that God has retired from 
 Nature, what kingdom remains for Him to 
 govern ? Human nature, up to its highest 
 developments and manifestations, is bereft of 
 His presence. So is the macrocosm, the 
 wonderful and beautiful world in the midst of 
 which man finds himself. There remains the 
 supernatural Heaven, But what conception 
 did Israel form of that shadowy world ? If 
 human love and human wisdom are, in no 
 sense of the word, divine ; if the infinite energy, 
 the inexhaustible life and the unfathomable 
 beauty of the outward world do not declare the 
 glory of God ; Heaven must be a world in 
 which these vital attributes of " Nature " have 
 no place, — a world which, being unimaginable, in 
 
 80 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 any sense of that many-sided word, is therefore, 
 humanly speaking, non-existent. Israel himself 
 knew nothing of the supernatural world which 
 his lack of imagination had created, except that 
 its Lord and Ruler had chosen him for Himself 
 as a peculiar people, and that from it had issued 
 the elaborate code of laws by which he professed 
 to regulate his life, A world which gives no 
 indications of its nature but these, a world 
 which is in no way symbolized by the things 
 that man instinctively regards as highest and 
 best, is surely not the dwelling-place of the 
 Most High God. But apart from that dream- 
 world there is no realm for God to rule over 
 except the land of the Chosen People. There, 
 in Jerusalem, the Holy City, is the Shechinah, 
 or Real Presence of the eternal God. The 
 Cosmos knows nothing of God. The laws of 
 universal Nature are not the expression of His 
 will. But Jerusalem is His dwelling-place, and 
 the letter of the Jewish Law is divine. 
 
 It was to these petty limits that Israel nar- 
 rowed the " kingdom of God." Yet the 
 kingdom, narrow though it was, was not un- 
 worthy of its Ruler. That false humility which 
 seeks to glorify God by abasing man defeats its 
 
 8i G 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 own object. The failure of man involves the 
 failure of God ; and the degradation of man, 
 who was made in God's image, is accompanied, 
 step by step, by the degradation of his Maker. 
 Whenever Israel's logic got the better of his 
 poetry, the God whom he worshipped shrank 
 to the dimensions of a "non-natural man," 
 Throughout the pages of the Old Testament 
 narrative God moves as a man among men : an 
 Oriental despot, a tribal code-maker, an exacting 
 bargainer, jealous, irascible, vengeful, arbitrary, — 
 nothing but invisibility and miraculous power 
 differentiated Him from the leaders of the 
 people to whom He declared His will. And 
 though Nature was supposed to be divorced 
 from God, it was inevitably narrowed and de- 
 based by the processes of thought which had 
 generated so petty and sordid a conception of 
 Deity. A geocentric Universe, a world centring 
 in Jerusalem (which was eventually to evange- 
 lize " the Nations " and make them obedient to 
 the Law),— this was the Cosmos, as Israel con- 
 ceived of it. A corresponding shrinkage took 
 place in the soul of man. The low estimate 
 which Israel found it convenient to form of 
 human nature gave him a spiritual standard to 
 
 82 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 which he consistendy lived down.. The god- 
 like qualities which make for the growth of the 
 soul, the qualities that thrive in the atmosphere 
 of freedom — qualities which Israel, as we have 
 seen, had always refused to exercise — were 
 either banned as rebellious or ignored (with 
 good reason) as non-existent. Obedience to 
 the letter of an elaborate Law was the beginning 
 and end of righteousness ; and instead of 
 ascending towards the ideal, the soul descended 
 into what I have called the ever-narrowing 
 vortex of the infinitesimal. The refusal to 
 grow, which was so characteristic of Israel, was 
 producing its natural result. To cease to grow 
 is, in the last resort, to cease to live. The 
 ** living soul " was becoming an automaton, — a 
 puppet which would dance, when Israel's dream 
 was fully realized, as the Master wire-puller 
 ordered its goings. 
 
 Let us, however, do justice to Israel. The 
 ascendancy which his sacred writings have exer- 
 cised over the hearts of so many generations is 
 due to something more than their capacity to 
 minister to an ignoble desire, — the desire to be 
 " saved " by obedience instead of by growth. 
 
 83 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Had Israel preached the gospel of " works " in 
 all its nakedness it would not have won its way 
 among men. The motives of the heart are 
 always mixed and complicated, and one's better 
 self is always at hand, ready to redeem and 
 elevate the lower. The desire to be saved by 
 obedience hides itself behind and even wears 
 the disguise of one of the noblest of all desires, 
 —the desire to devote oneself to the service 
 of God. There is a mighty spiritual poetry in 
 the Old Testament which inflames our hearts 
 and predisposes them to accept and assimilate 
 its formal teaching. If we trace that stream of 
 poetry back to its fountain-head we shall 
 assuredly come to a large and living idea, for 
 it is on the lonely heights of spiritual thought 
 that every master-stream of poetry takes its rise. 
 The greatness of Israel lies in this, that he 
 glorified as no people has ever done, the idea 
 of submission to the Divine Will, and that by 
 conceiving of the Most High as " One God " 
 he gathered all the sub-currents and cross- 
 currents of divine purpose into a single channel 
 of irresistible movement. There are two great 
 strains of poetry in the Old Testament, and 
 they both originate in this one master idea. 
 
 84 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 There is the poetry that glorifies the Most 
 High God, and that glorifies obedience to the 
 Law, — not to the Law as such, but to the Law 
 as the expression of the Divine Will. And 
 there is the poetry of revolt, the poetry that 
 dissociates the Law, or, at any rate, the later 
 developments of legalism, from the Divine 
 Will, and that protests against the fruits of the 
 Law in the very name of the righteous God. 
 So long as the idea of submission to the Divine 
 Will was interpreted through the medium of 
 the poetry that it had generated, it was a great 
 and life-giving influence : but it is the descent 
 from poetry to prose and practice that tests the 
 worth of a creed ; and the rapid deterioration 
 that the central idea of Judaism underwent 
 when prosaically handled shows that, even in 
 its poetic prime, it must have been charged 
 with the germs of decay. 
 
 That there was an epoch in Israel's life when 
 the Law had a real need to meet and a real 
 function to fulfil, can scarcely be doubted. 
 For Israel, as for every other nation, it was 
 necessary that in his early youth he should be 
 subjected to the strict discipline of a quasi- 
 divine " Law." What differentiates him from 
 
 85 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 other nations is that he deified the Law of 
 Moses, not relatively but absolutely, that he 
 conceived of it as the actual work — and, the 
 only work of its kind — of the Si^preme and 
 Eternal God ; and that, as a necessary deduc- 
 tion from this conception, he regarded it as 
 binding upon himself and his posterity for 
 ever, and also as binding upon all men who 
 desired to know and obey God's will. For what 
 is most characteristic of Israel as a thinker is 
 that he conceived of God as one and universal 
 and yet as individual and national. The gods 
 of the Gentiles were for the most part frankly 
 local ; but Israel, while proclaiming God as the 
 Lord of the Univerise, yet claimed Him as 
 exclusively his own. He undertook to reveal 
 to men the King of Heaven and earth ; and 
 when men went to him, as all Christendom has 
 done, to learn his secret, the figure that he 
 unveiled to them was that of the over-lord of 
 a petty state. According as the poetry or the 
 prose of the national life was in the ascendant, 
 so the universal or the national conception of 
 God got the upper hand. After the Exile, 
 with the death of the nation's poetry, the 
 narrower creed won a final triumph. It then 
 
 86 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 became possible for the zealous Jew to believe, 
 in all seriousness, that to him alone were com- 
 mitted the oracles of the universal God, and 
 that within the limitless limits of Nature his 
 sacred city was the only dwelling-place of the 
 Most High. Philosophical materialism empties 
 the Universe of God's presence ; but its reason 
 for doing so is that it does not believe in God. 
 To believe in God and yet to withdraw His life 
 and His light from the entire realm of Nature, 
 with the exception of one petty spot on the 
 surface of one of the least of the innumerable 
 stars, is surely a darker and a deadlier atheism. 
 It was to little purpose that Israel preached sub- 
 mission to the Divine Will, when the will to 
 which he would have men submit was confined 
 within the limits of a national code of laws, and 
 incapable of development except in the direction 
 of the infinitesimal. God does not formulate 
 His wiU (which is ever flowing and " becoming," 
 and therefore incapable of formulation) in a 
 written code of law. He leaves it to us to 
 find out what His will is, by studying the only 
 symbols in which it has ever expressed or will 
 ever express itself, — the central tendencies and 
 paramount laws of Nature ; for He knows that 
 
 87 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 the eternal effort to discover the master-law of 
 existence, involving as it needs must do the 
 continuous exercise, on an ever -expanding 
 scale, of will-power, of moral insight, and of 
 creative imagination, will be the chief instru- 
 ment of man's spiritual growth. 
 
 To nationalize or otherwise localize the 
 universal God is to make spiritual intolerance 
 — the most anti-human of all moods, for it 
 poisons the very head-springs of brotherly 
 love — a lofty virtue and a solemn duty. 
 Among the Gentiles, whose gods, as I have 
 said, were in the main frankly local, tolerance 
 of the creeds of others was quite compatible 
 with devotion to one's own. But the nation 
 or the institution that believes itself to be in 
 exclusive possession of the oracles of God, 
 must needs regard it as its duty to communicate 
 to the rest of mankind the truth that has been 
 committed to it ; and, that being so, we cannot 
 wonder if, when other nations refuse to respond 
 to its teaching, it tries to spread the knowledge 
 of God by fire and sword. There are two great 
 religions whose history has been indelibly 
 stained by wars and persecutions, — Christianity 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 and Mohammedanism ; and it is a significant 
 fact that each of these claims to have been 
 supernaturally revealed to man by the one and 
 only God, and that both are offshoots from the 
 parent stem of Judaism. And though Israel 
 himself, in his dealings with other nations, has 
 been doomed to suffer rather than inflict per- 
 secution, the passive and essentially selfish 
 intolerance which has always made him shrink 
 from contact with the Gentiles, as one shrinks 
 from the touch of an unclean thing, is not less 
 odious than the active intolerance (born of 
 evangelizing zeal) of the Christian or the 
 Moslem. The truth is, that intolerance, 
 whether active or passive, is of the very 
 essence of dogmatism, and that dogmatism 
 is one of the fatal legacies that Israel be- 
 queathed to mankind. 
 
 Another and a not less fatal legacy is 
 materialism^ — the externalization of the inward 
 life, the substitution of mechanical for vital 
 action. The war that Israel, as the champion 
 of the dogmatic principle, waged, or was ready 
 to wage, against freedom of thought, was the 
 outcome and counterpart of a war which he 
 waged in his own inner life. The reason why 
 
 89 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 the average man does not wish other persons to 
 think freely is that he does not wish to think 
 freely himself, the effort and the responsibility 
 of doing so being too great for him. It was 
 reluctance to use his own freedom that made 
 Israel first banish from Nature, and then localize 
 (within the limits of Nature), the universal God ; 
 and his vision of God reacted on and intensified 
 the feeling that gave birth to it. For it is by 
 means of a special revelation from beyond the 
 limits of Nature that the universal God is 
 localized in Nature ; and a special revelation, 
 involving as it does an authoritative declaration 
 of what man is to believe and to do, is obviously 
 incompatible with freedom, whether of thought 
 or of action. Now, the difference between free- 
 dom and necessity (in the sphere of human life) 
 is the difference between spiritual and material 
 compulsion, between compulsion from within 
 and compulsion from without. When Israel 
 decided to forego his freedom, he decided to 
 place himself under the control of external and 
 quasi-material forces : in other words, he decided 
 to externalize his own inner life and to materialize 
 or quasi-materialize the Power or Powers which 
 he recognized as supreme. The freedom of 
 90 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 man is entirely compatible with the paramount 
 and all-pervading control of God, so long as 
 God is conceived of as (under one of His 
 manifestations) the spirit that dwells in man's 
 heart : for in the light of that conception, 
 constraint by the Divine Will is seen to be 
 equivalent to constraint by one's own higher 
 and better self; and to be self-constrained is, 
 obviously, to be free. The presence of God in 
 the inner life and the pressure of God on the 
 soul are realized by him who experiences them, 
 not as irresistible and quasi-physical compulsion, 
 but as spontaneous spiritual energy — in other 
 words, as free-will and free-thought. But the 
 tremendous demands upon one's mental and 
 spiritual resources which this theory of God 
 and man involves is one to which Israel was 
 unwilling to respond. The price that he had 
 to pay for evading the burdensome prerogative 
 of freedom — the materialization of himself and 
 of God — was a heavy one, but he paid it with 
 fanatical joy. His weakness, as he yielded to 
 it, became a sacred principle, and his loss of 
 faiihy a solemn creed ; both creed and principle 
 being worked out by him with characteristic 
 thoroughness into their last and most fatal 
 
 91 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 consequences. That nothing might be left to 
 his own initiative he conceived of himself as 
 clay in the hands of the Potter ; and that he 
 might complete the circle of his materialism 
 he fashioned the Potter in the image of himself. 
 Thus there were at least two main directions 
 in which Israel's conception of a God who was 
 at once universal and local was predestined to 
 develop. The first was that of dogmatic intoler- 
 ance, which is the negation of brotherly love. 
 The second was that of materialism, which is 
 the negation of spiritual life. The confluence 
 of these two streams of tendency gives us 
 Pharisaism. This fact is the full and final 
 condemnation of the philosophy of Israel. If 
 a tree is to be judged by its fruits, then it must 
 have been an evil tree which bore, when fully 
 developed, so poisonous a fruit as the Pharisaic 
 scheme of life. We have seen that Christ, 
 whose heart overflowed with love, and who 
 looked on moral transgression with pity rather 
 than anger, hated Pharisaism with a stern and 
 unswerving hatred ; and we can now under- 
 stand why he did so. He hated it, not because 
 of the vices that it deliberately fostered or the 
 immorality that it indirectly countenanced, but 
 
 92 
 
God the Lawgiver 
 
 because it was the elaboration in theory and 
 the embodiment in practice of a corrupt 
 principle ; because it was the natural and in- 
 evitable outcome of a radically false concep- 
 tion of God, of Nature, and of Man. (ftdeiperai 
 V °-P)CI' ^° sterner sentence of condemnation 
 can be pronounced than this. And though the 
 words, as Aristotle uses them, express complete 
 demoralization, there is no scheme of life to 
 which they apply so fully as to the strict morality 
 of the Pharisees. 
 
 9Z 
 
Chapter IV — God the Father 
 
 PHARISAISM was the poisonous fruit 
 of an evil tree. The branch system 
 of that tree was, in a word, legalism ; 
 the stem, supernaturalism ; the root 
 system, the spiritual indolence of the average 
 man. 
 
 The paramount desire of the average man is 
 to be " saved," in defiance of Nature's deepest 
 and widest law, by obedience instead of by 
 growth. He wishes to gain God's favour by 
 obeying, literally and mechanically. His formu- 
 lated commandments instead of by fulfilling 
 his own spiritual destiny, or, in other words, by 
 growing towards the perfection of which he is 
 capable, — growing in response to the persistent 
 stress of inward and spiritual forces analogous 
 to those which transmute the seed into the 
 sapling, and the sapling into the tree. Out of 
 this desire springs another, — the desire to attain 
 to knowledge of God's nature and will, not by 
 growing into living contact with that supreme 
 truth which is but another name for supreme 
 
 94 
 
God the Father 
 
 reality, but by having theological and ethical 
 "information" communicated to him from 
 without. In response to this dual desire creeds 
 and codes are provided for him ; and sincere 
 and uncompromising devotion to creeds and 
 codes leads at last to Pharisaism, and to no 
 other goal. 
 
 Christ denounced Pharisaism with uncom- 
 promising vehemence ; but he did so, not 
 merely for the pleasure of attacking a glaring 
 evil, but also in order that a high ideal, the 
 vision of which inspired his own heart, might 
 shine out from behind the dark clouds of 
 Pharisaic dogmatism and formalism and pour 
 its light into the hearts of men. The true 
 prophet is never a mere iconoclast. His mission 
 is to build up as well as to destroy. Christ had 
 no system to oiFer as an alternative for Pharisaism. 
 He had but litde faith in systems, which, as he 
 saw clearly, are incompatible with freedom and 
 life. But he had an alternative to offer for the 
 false idea — the false conception of God — from 
 which Pharisaism had sprung. That conception 
 was compounded of three elements — dogmatism, 
 supematuralism, and pessimism. To the dogma- 
 tism of Israel's philosophy Christ opposed, in 
 
 95 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 the region of thought a wise agnosticism, in the 
 region of emotion a living ^/V,4. To its super- 
 naturalism he opposed the higher pantheism. To 
 its pessimism the optimism of serene peace and 
 radiant joy. 
 
 The connexion between dogmatism and 
 supernaturalism is so close and vital that the 
 two may be regarded, for all practical purposes, 
 as constituting one master-tendency of thought. 
 Israel desired to know all that was to be known 
 about God, not from loving interest in the 
 divine nature, not from imaginative curiosity, 
 but solely in order that he might find out, at 
 the least possible expenditure of spiritual energy, 
 what God wished him to believe and to do. 
 This desire led him to banish God from his 
 own heart, so that God's message might come 
 to him from beyond the horizon of his own 
 life ; might come to him, clear, precise, intel- 
 ligible, authoritative, as a truth which he could 
 not discern for himself, as a law which had to 
 be imposed upon him from without. But in 
 banishing God from his own heart Israel 
 banished Him also from Nature (the horizon 
 of which coincides, when viewed from man's 
 standpoint, with the ideal horizon of human 
 
 96 
 
God the Father 
 
 life), so that the message for which he waited 
 had to come to him at last from a quarter 
 which, as he fondly imagined, must needs dis- 
 arm criticism and compel conviction, — from the 
 supernatural world. 
 
 Equally close and equally vital is the con- 
 nexion between the higher agnosticism and the 
 higher pantheism. Agnosticism is too often 
 confounded with dogmatic denial and contrasted 
 •with faith. In reality it has as little in common 
 with dogmatic denial as with dogmatic affirma- 
 tion, and it is so far from being antithetical to 
 faith that its very function is to protect faith 
 from the ravaging encroaches of dogmatism. 
 By faith I mean, not the acceptance on " autho- 
 rity" of dogmatic teaching, but the living 
 response made by the soul — by each individual 
 soul — to the living presence of God. As such 
 it must needs vary from soul to soul. If all 
 souls gave exactly the same response to the 
 message that comes to them from within, we 
 should know that it was not their own, that it 
 was not the outcome and expression of their 
 inner lives. The dogmatist wishes all souls to 
 give the same response to God's silent message, 
 — to give the response, whatever it may be, that 
 
 97 H 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 \ 
 
 . ., . . . I 
 
 happens to commend itself to him. He is 
 intolerant of other faiths, nominally because he 
 is zealous for what he calls " the Truth," but 
 really because dissentient opinion makes him 
 distrust himself He says to his fellow-men, 
 " I know all that is to be known about God. 
 If you do not believe what I tell you, you do 
 not believe in God." He thus interposes him- 
 self, so far as he wins acceptance, between the 
 soul and God ; and by cutting off the soul, 
 first on the plane of its more conscious life, and 
 then (through the reaction of consciousness on 
 the sub-conscious self) in its hidden depths, 
 from personal intercourse with God, he starves 
 its inner life and so blights and deadens its 
 faith. Agnosticism is, in its essence, a protest 
 against dogmatism as such. The protest may 
 be dialectical : it may take the form of a 
 reasoned disprdof of the dogmatic position ; 
 but in that case the agnostic will run a serious 
 risk of becoming a dogmatist — a negative 
 dogmatist — himself. The higher agnosticism 
 is one of temper rather than of theory. Dis- 
 daining to break a lance against this or that 
 dogma, or even against dogmatism as such, it 
 turns its back upon all dogmas, surrounding 
 
 98 
 
God the Father 
 
 the faith that it guards with the strongest of 
 all ramparts, — with an atmosphere of poetic 
 thought. 
 
 In this, the truest sense of the word, Christ, 
 like his great predecessor, the founder of 
 Buddhism, was a consistent agnostic. Though 
 he lived, one might almost say, in the very 
 light of God's presence, and though religious 
 meditation was the very breath of his being, 
 he never allowed himself to dogmatize or even 
 to talk with any approach to precision about 
 God. Knowing that his thoughts about God 
 would not suffer themselves to be translated 
 into speech, he contented himself with express- 
 ing his' sense of the divine presence in the 
 language of a simple and beautifiil poetry, that 
 through that medium some glow of his radiant 
 faith might communicate itself to other hearts. 
 That he spoke with emphasis and conviction 
 is undeniable. But every genuine poet does 
 the same. What constitutes the differentia of 
 dogmatism is, not its self-assertion, but its 
 claim to have imprisoned truth (in the case of 
 religious dogmatism, divine truth) in formulae; 
 which are true as they stand, however they may 
 be interpreted by those who hear them. The 
 
 99 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 attitude of poetry towards its audience is the 
 exact opposite of this. Though the poet, if 
 sincere, always speaks with an air of inspired 
 conviction, he is content to deliver to men just 
 so much truth as each man in turn is able to 
 assimilate from his teaching, — just so much and 
 no more. In other words, dogmatism, whether 
 scientific or pseudo-scientific, is always, on 
 principle, one and the same thing to all men ; 
 whereas it belongs to the essence of poetry to 
 be all things to all men, and yet to give to each 
 man no more than he can claim as his own. 
 
 But the poetic agnosticism which was so 
 characteristic of Christ's teaching was in itself 
 the expression of a distinct though indefinable 
 conception of God. Christ did not disprove, 
 he did not even make a formal protest against, 
 dogmatism, but he made it impossible, — im- 
 possible for himself, and impossible for all who 
 felt as he did. For he so conceived of God as 
 to flood Nature in general, and the soul of man 
 in particular, with the light of God's presence, — 
 a light which gives life to all on whom it shines, 
 but which blinds the eye that attempts to meet 
 its gaze. Possessed by God's grace and dazzled 
 by God's glory, man cannot study Him with 
 
 lOO 
 
God the Father 
 
 quasi-scientific interest, cannot contemplate Him 
 with quasi-scientific curiosity, cannot even speak 
 about Him except in the agnostic language of 
 inspiration, of prophecy, of poetry. But the 
 philosophy that floods Nature with God's 
 presence coincides in the last resort with the 
 philosophy that deifies Nature as the living 
 Whole. In other words, the higher agnosticism 
 and the higher pantheism are one. 
 
 We are coming nearer than we have yet 
 done to the creed of Christ. What was 
 negative in that creed had its counterpart 
 in a supreme afllirmation ; what was vague 
 in the stress of an overwhelming faith. For 
 Christ, as for his brother agnostic, the founder 
 of Buddhism,^ God was the all-enfolding, all- 
 pervading, all-sustaining, all-inspiring life, in 
 which we and all other things live and move 
 and have our being. The desire to know about 
 that universal life (as a chemist knows about 
 
 1 The founder of Buddhism said little or nothing about God, 
 but he believed in the Divine Life. To enter Nirvana (the 
 Buddhist " Kingdom of Heaven ") is to become conscious, 
 really and fully, of one's iundamental oneness with the universal 
 ife. Christ's sense of oneness with the All-Father was essentially 
 Nirvanic, 
 
 lOI 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 the elements of material things) had led men 
 to separate it, first from themselves, that their 
 minds might become conscious of it, and then 
 from Nature ; had led them to drive it into the 
 splendid exile of a supernatural heaven, leaving 
 the world of Nature darkened and blighted by 
 its absence ; had led them, in the selfish despair 
 of their hearts, to call God back to earth, but 
 through a supernatural channel which could not 
 be used by the natural man ; had led them to 
 conceive of a special revelation, of a special cove- 
 nant, of a chosen people, of a chosen priesthood, 
 of a divinely formulated law ; had led them 
 into that jungle of dogmatism, where grow 
 all the parasitic plants (twining round the stem 
 of religion and exhausting its life) which Christ 
 hated so fiercely, — sacerdotalism, formalism, 
 materialism, literalism, casuistical evasion, 
 separatism, intolerance, uncharitableness, cant, 
 hypocrisy, spiritual pride ; had led them at last 
 to drive bargains with their imaginary God, to 
 buy salvation in the cheapest market, to get 
 their religion done for them by contract, to 
 substitute mechanical obedience for aspiration, 
 legal obligation for love, the "lowest tender" 
 for the highest ideal, bondage to the letter for 
 
 I02 
 
God the Father 
 
 i 
 
 root ; 
 Natu* 
 divifi 
 soon 
 Ir 
 to r 
 cone 
 Fa« 
 
 freedom in the spirit, automatism for initiative, 
 machinery for life. Seeing that all this was the 
 inevitable outcome of the desire to know about 
 God, Christ determined that knowledge of 
 the divine nature should be subordinated to 
 communion with the divine soul. Christ saw 
 that God must at all costs be brought back to 
 Nature, but he saw also that He must first of 
 all be brought back to his own and to every 
 other human heart. Let God be conceived of 
 as the true self of Man, as the eternal source 
 of the light that lightens, and the life that 
 inspires him from within ; and two things will 
 happen. Dogmatism will become both need- 
 less and impious ; for the dogmatic attitude 
 implies separation from God, and separation 
 from the true self is the beginning and end of 
 
 will wither at its 
 
 Omega of 
 
 understands the worc[)^id the 
 
 'e light that glows through his beii%<::^U 
 
 :r or later irradiate every existent thing. 
 
 order to bring God back to Nature and 
 
 an Christ had recourse to two correlated 
 
 eptions, the conception of God as the 
 
 er, and the conception of God as the 
 
 103 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 indwelling Spirit. The conception of God as 
 the Father is as profound as it is simple, and 
 as true as it is beautiful. Handled as Christ 
 handled it, it affords convincing proof that 
 poetry is more philosophical than philosophy 
 itself. Two things are of the essence of father- 
 hood, — the communication of life, and the out- 
 pouring of love. In the case of an earthly 
 father the life is communicated to a few 
 children, and the love is poured out for a few 
 fleeting years. But God is the All-Father and 
 the eternal Father ; and the outflow of His life 
 and of His love knows no bounds and no 
 breaks. It follows that the inwardness, the 
 immanence of God is the very counterpart and 
 correlate of His fatherhood. He who at all 
 times and in all places is pouring out life and 
 love in "steady and limitless floods" must 
 needs be one, fundamentally one, with all 
 existent things. For as the outflow of life and 
 love wjiich makes the world what it is, and 
 all things in it what they are, is of the very 
 essence of the Divine Being, it may surely be 
 said that God is in all things, and that all 
 things live in Him. At any rate, this was the 
 view of God's presence which was taken by 
 104 
 
God the Father 
 
 Christ. The Creator who could call the 
 world into being, endow it with self-renewing 
 materials and energies, and then leave it to its 
 own devices, did not exist for him. He was 
 conscious, and he wished all men to become 
 conscious, of oneness with the Father ; and he 
 saw the same divine life in all outward things. 
 There is nothing so lowly, nothing so trivial, 
 but it is near and dear to God. Two sparrows 
 are sold for a farthing, but they do not fall to 
 the ground without God's knowledge. The 
 very hairs of our head are numbered. It 
 follows, a fortiori, that the beauty of the visible 
 world is of God, nay, that it is the very glow of 
 the divine life and the divine love suffusing the 
 veil of outward things. The lilies toil not, 
 neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all 
 his glory|was not arrayed like one of these. 
 From what is outermost in outward Nature to 
 what is innermost in the soul of Man, whatever 
 is pleasant, whatever is beautiful, whatever is 
 good is a thrill of the one life and a gleam of 
 the one light : — 
 
 «'I am the fresh taste of the water ; I 
 The silver of the moon, the gold of the sun. 
 105 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 ... I am the good sweet smell 
 
 Of the moistened earth. I am the fire's red light, 
 
 The vital air moving in all what moves, 
 
 The holiness of hallowed souls, the root 
 
 Undying, whence hath sprung whatever is ; 
 
 The wisdom of the wise, the intellect 
 
 Of the informed, the greatness of the great, 
 
 The splendour of the splendid . . . 
 
 These am I, free from passion and desire ; 
 
 Yet am I right desire in all who yearn." 
 
 A strong and persistent vein of pantheism 
 runs through this conception of the fatherhood 
 of God. But it is the higher pantheism, not 
 the lower. The materialism which professes 
 to deify Nature, but which means by Nature 
 nothing more than the physical plane, the out- 
 ward aspect of existence, and which therefore 
 regards all visible things as fully and equally 
 divine, was very far removed from CV"'- ' - 
 thought. The conception of Gc' ^.xrist s 
 was balanced in his min'^ , , jd as the Father 
 sort elucidated — b' .«-^balanced and in some 
 the indwelling' jy the conception of God as 
 as seen b^ Spirit. It is not jhe Universe 
 the U*-y^an's bodily eye that is divine, but 
 see? jiverse seen as it really is, seen as God 
 i it, seen, in the unity and totality of its 
 io6 
 
God the Father 
 
 all-pervading life, by the all-seeing eye of the 
 all-sustaining Soul, It is not until we can see 
 the Universe as it really is that we are free to 
 identify it with God. But if we are to see the 
 Universe as it really is we must look within. 
 The highest and best thing that Man knows of 
 is his own ideal self. Primarily, then, and also 
 finally, man must seek for God in his own 
 soul. If and so far as he can find God there 
 he will find Him elsewhere ; and the nearer he 
 grows, by the expansion and evolution of his 
 own inner life, to the God within, the wider 
 is the world that he sees to be illuminated by 
 God's presence. When the unattainable goal 
 has been reached, when man has become what 
 he really is, has found his true self, then and 
 not till then is he free to say, " I am one with 
 the All-Father, and therefore at last I am I " ; 
 and then, and not till then, is he able to realize 
 that the Universe, the AU of Being, is divine. 
 For if God the Father is the true life of Nature, 
 God the indwelling Spirit is the true self of 
 man ; and as the Father and the indwelling 
 Spirit are one ^ God, so are the true life of 
 Nature and the true self of man one life and 
 one self. 
 
 107 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Such was the conception of God that Christ 
 opposed to the supernaturalism of Israel. It 
 revealed God to man under an entirely new 
 aspect. For Israel God was, in His essence, 
 a God of wrath, an omnipotent despot who 
 looked with vindictive disfavour on the whole 
 human race, with the exception of one petty 
 nation, and even to that nation dispensed, not 
 spontaneous love but " covenanted mercies," — 
 rewards which had been duly earned by fidelity 
 to the terms of a quasi-mercantile bargain. 
 For Christ God was, in His essence, the God 
 of love. In restoring God to Nature, in con- 
 ceiving of Him as the life and soul of the 
 universe, as the vital stream that thrills and 
 vibrates through the universal frame, Christ 
 revealed Him to man as the eternal fountain- 
 head of love. For what do we know of love 
 except that it is, first, the response of the heart 
 to attractive force, and then a counter-attractive 
 force which draws the Beloved into the Lover's 
 arms ? What do we know of love except that 
 it is the force, at once active and passive, by 
 which all things attract one another, by which 
 each thing is drawn out of itself into oneness 
 with other things, by which all things are drawn 
 1 08 
 
God the Father 
 
 out of themselves into oneness, first with one 
 another, and then with the living Whole ? And 
 if love is indeed the unifying, the centripetal 
 principle in Nature, shall we not say of Him 
 who makes all things one, whose one life is in 
 all things, whose immanent presence transmutes 
 what else were a chaotic aggregate into an 
 organic whole, — shall we not say of the God 
 whom Christ revealed to us that love is of His 
 essence, that love is His life ? Christ was 
 conscious that through love, through the eternal 
 reciprocity of love, he was one with the Father ; 
 and he instinctively argued from this that love 
 was the bond which linked all things to God, 
 that love was the force which made the Universe 
 divine. 
 
 In restoring God to Nature, in flooding 
 Nature with the light of love, Christ lifted from 
 the world the curse which supernaturalism had 
 laid upon it. Supernaturalism expected the 
 world to be perfect because God — who is pre- 
 sumably a perfect being — had created it, made 
 it what it is ; and finding that it was imperfect, 
 came to the superficially logical conclusion that 
 it had fallen from its high estate through some 
 fault of its own, and was lying under a curse. 
 109 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 The philosophy of Israel was, as we have seen, 
 profoundly pessimistic. It was not merely as 
 a logical inference from the premises of super- 
 naturalism, but as a welcome relief from the 
 burden of his own spiritual obligation, that he 
 accepted the doctrine of the Fall. That he 
 might feel fully convinced of his own spiritual 
 helplessness, he conceived of himself as by birth 
 and inheritance " desperately wicked," and that 
 he might the more effectually safeguard this 
 cherished conception, he made all Humanity 
 and all Nature share in his ruin and his shame. 
 To withdraw God, who is presumably the one 
 eternal source of truth, of beauty, of goodness, 
 of joy, from the entire realm of inward and 
 outward Nature, is to sound the lowest imagin- 
 able depth of pessimism. Looking, from the 
 standpoint of his own soulless egotism, on the 
 bright and beautiful world that surrounded him 
 — on the majesty and splendour of Nature, on 
 the virtue and heroism of Man — Israel could 
 see nothing but darkness and evil, nothing but 
 the cankering blight of God's curse, nothing 
 but the lurid menace of His wrath. Christ 
 saw that the imperfection of the world was due 
 to its immaturity, to its being still but partially 
 no 
 
God the Father 
 
 developed (the process of its evolution being 
 eternal), and that all its evils and miseries were 
 quite compatible with the immanence of the 
 Divine Spirit and the eternal efflux (and influx) 
 of the divine life and love. Hence his im- 
 mense and overmastering optimism. Sin and 
 sorrow abound in the world, but God's love 
 abounds in the world also, and will sooner or 
 later overcome sin and sorrow by absorbing 
 them into itself. For sin and sorrow, as Man 
 has experience of them, are the outcome of his 
 partial separation from God, and this again is 
 due to his immaturity, to the undeveloped 
 state of his soul, ^ons may pass before the 
 soul of this man or of that can expand to the 
 stature of Christ's, and become conscious of 
 its oneness with the Father ; but the steady 
 attractive force of the divine love will sooner 
 or later bear down all opposition, and draw all 
 souls into the vortex of the divine life. 
 
 It was his clear perception of the temporal 
 and provisional character of evil that made 
 Christ so tolerant of sin and so free from mis- 
 giving in the presence of sorrow and pain. 
 Israel had committed the fatal mistake of re- 
 garding evil, which is essentially a negation, as 
 III 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 a positive reality, in fact, as the only thing 
 that is real in Nature. Christ saw that behind 
 the dark clouds of evil there is the sunshine, 
 and between them the blue sky ; and he saw 
 that whereas the clouds are petty and perishable, 
 mere fleeting exhalations from the surface of the 
 earth, the blue sky is boundless and unfathom- 
 able, and the sunshine an emanation from the 
 very head-springs of light and life. He saw, 
 in other words, that there is goodness in the 
 corrupt heart of man, beauty in fallen Nature, 
 happiness in the suffering world ; and that these 
 things — goodness, happiness, and beauty — are 
 positive and real, things to cling to and trust 
 in and live for, whereas 
 
 " the evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound." 
 
 If Israel saw no trace of God in the Universe, 
 Christ, on the contrary, saw (in the last resort) 
 nothing but God in it ; for in his eyes whatever 
 was not of God was unreal, accidental, pro- 
 visional, and would sooner or later pass away 
 like a forgotten dream. With a daring optimism, 
 compounded in equal degrees of imagination, 
 faith, and joy, he conceived of the entire " course 
 of things," both in its general movement and 
 
 112 
 
God the Father 
 
 in all its details, as under the control and care 
 of One whose whole being radiated love. 
 Familiarity with this conception — 2. familiarity 
 which is quite compatible with inability to 
 realize its meaning — has blinded us both to its 
 originality and to its grandeur. The change 
 from the midnight gloom of Israel's pessimism 
 to the cloudless sunshine of Christ's optimistic 
 faith is perhaps the greatest revolution in human 
 thought that a single mind has ever achieved. 
 Or, if there is a greater, it is the revolution of 
 which this was at once a vital aspect and a 
 necessary result, — the restoration by the same 
 master-mind of the Divine Presence to the heart 
 of Nature and to the soul of Man. 
 
 "3 
 
Chapter V — The Kingdom of God 
 
 DEVOTION to the service of God 
 the Lawgiver was to be rewarded, 
 in the last resort, by the establish- 
 ment of the " Kingdom of God," 
 or " Kingdom of Heaven," among men. 
 
 It was a dark and desolate world that met 
 the gaze of the pious Jew in the ages that 
 preceded the birth of Christ. Beyond the 
 frontiers of his own nation there was no one, 
 to speak broadly, who had any knowledge of 
 God. And though his own nation had in the 
 main been loyal to the Divine Lawgiver,^ it had 
 not reaped the reward of its obedience. The 
 days of its glory were no more. Its power, its 
 wealth, its freedom had departed ; and, as the 
 crown of its sorrow, it was ruled and oppressed 
 by a heathen state. With nothing to console 
 him in the present, it was but natural that Israel, 
 stiU trusting in the supposed promises of God, 
 should look forward with eager expectation to 
 the future. A grandiose dream, which took 
 
 * At any rate, since the return from exile. 
 114 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 innumerable forms, but preserved its identity 
 through them all, had long been in possession 
 of his soul. On some future day, perhaps not 
 far distant, the reign of Satan on earth would 
 come to an end, and the Messiah, a divinely 
 commissioned ruler of superhuman wisdom and 
 power, would establish the Kingdom of Heaven 
 among men. A new Jerusalem would take the 
 place of the old, and the " nations " would be 
 ruled by Israel and taught by him to know and 
 obey God. When that " great day " came the 
 faithfid who had died would rise from the 
 grave and live again in bodily form on earth, 
 and there receive at God's hands the rewards 
 which they had earned by obedience to the 
 Law. Thus the Kingdom of Heaven was for 
 Israel a supernatural order of things which 
 would descend upon earth on some future day, 
 and the establishment of which would involve 
 the sudden and complete abolition of the natural 
 order. The leading feature of the new order 
 would be a carnival of legality. The Law 
 would be known to and obeyed by all men, 
 and the reward of this world-wide obedience 
 would be the cessation of pain and sorrow, and 
 the triumph of happiness and peace. 
 
 115 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 In this dream the spiritual egotism of Israel 
 touched high-water mark, and his audacious 
 attempt to nationalize the Universal God 
 achieved its last and most characteristic result. 
 So entirely had he (as he arrogantly imagined) 
 monopolized the divine favour, that his down- 
 fall as a nation could be accounted for only on 
 the theory that God, for purposes of His own, 
 had allowed the Prince of Darkness to rule over 
 the earth. And so impossible was it for God 
 to hold intercourse with man through any 
 channel but the national life of the Chosen 
 People, that only by means of the apotheosis 
 of Israel could the Kingdom of Heaven be 
 established among men. This selfish ' and vain- 
 glorious dream has, as might have been expected, 
 
 ' Not wholly or even mainly selfish, so long as Israel was able 
 to believe that the rest of mankind could be saved through his 
 agency. But the spiritual egotism, which was of the essence of 
 the Messianic dream, easily degenerated into selfishness of the 
 most pronounced type. The writer of the Apocalypse is well con- 
 tent to believe that only a small remnant of faithful Jews will be 
 saved, and that the rest of mankind will be irretrievably lost ; 
 and there are Christian Sects, even in our own day, in which this 
 inhuman attitude towards God and Man is faithfully reproduced. 
 How much more Christlike is the aspiration of the Chinese 
 Sage : " Never will I enter into final peace alone, but always 
 and everywhere will I sufifer and strive until all enter with 
 me"! 
 
 ii6 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 been the delight and solace of all on whom the 
 mantle of Israel's spiritual egotism has fallen. 
 From the Church of Rome down to the least of 
 the Protestant communities, each section and 
 sub-section of Christendom has entered into the 
 spirit of the dream, with the result that each in 
 turn is ready to believe that through its agency, 
 and in no other way, will the redemption of 
 Mankind be effected. The individualist in 
 religion goes even further than this. For him 
 the letter of Messianic prophecy is of more 
 importance than the spirit. The fantastic details 
 in which the decadent imagination of Israel ran 
 riot all minister to his spiritual self-esteem. He 
 is ready to enroll himself in the limited company 
 of the " elect," and even to invest himself with 
 high office in the coming Messianic reign. 
 
 For Christy as for Israel, devotion to the 
 service of God was to be rewarded by the 
 establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven 
 among men. But the kingdom of which he 
 dreamed had as litde in common with the out- 
 ward, visible, temporal, and supernatural king- 
 dom of which Israel dreamed as God the Father 
 had in common with God the Lawgiver. 
 117 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Nothing shows more clearly how spiritually 
 unintelligent were the followers of Christ than 
 their utter inability to explain to us what their 
 Master meant by the " Kingdom of God." 
 That he himself distrusted their spiritual 
 understanding and their intellectual sympathy 
 is proved by the fact that he wrapped up his 
 teaching on this subject in parables of a 
 peculiarly cryptic type. If these parables are 
 to yield up their inner meaning, we must 
 interpret them by the light of the general 
 conception that we have formed of Christ's 
 aims and ideals. The Messianic dream was 
 the direct and inevitable outcome of the same 
 tendencies of thought and feeling which had 
 produced the Pharisaic scheme of life. In 
 Pharisaism the national ideal found practical, in 
 the Messianic dream imaginative, expression. 
 Also, it was by Pharisaic strictness of life that 
 the right to share in the resurrection of the dead 
 and to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven was 
 to be earned. As Pharisaism was the one and 
 only thing that Christ actively hated, we may 
 be sure that the Messianic idea was entirely re- 
 pugnant to his way of thinking, and that his King- 
 dom of Heaven was fundamentally antithetical 
 ii8 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 to the kingdom of which Israel dreamed. 
 But in this, as in certain other matters, Christ 
 thought it wiser to utilize existing forces than 
 to dissipate their energy and his own in the 
 shock of a direct collision. Accepting what 
 was good in the Messianic dream — the desire 
 for and faith in the advent of better and happier 
 times — Christ sought to divert this desire and 
 this faith into another channel. The Messianic 
 dream was the outcome of a struggle between 
 Israel's literal trust in the promises of his 
 supernatural God and his atheistical distrust 
 of Nature. The world, as he saw it, was 
 bereft of God's presence, and, except for a 
 miracle, was irredeemably evil. But that state 
 of things covdd not last for ever. Sooner or 
 later, if God's promises were to be ftdfiUed, 
 the reign of Satan would be ended, and the 
 Kingdom of God would come upon earth. 
 The premises from which Christ started were 
 the very negation of those from which Israel 
 had evolved his fantastic hope. The world, 
 as Christ saw it, was under the rule, not of 
 Satan, but of God ; while Nature, both inward 
 and outward, far from being irredeemably evil, 
 was animated and illuminated by the Divine 
 119 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Presence, and was therefore "very good." 
 That being so, to look forward to the advent 
 of the Kingdom of God as to a future event 
 was a waste of hope and a misuse of faith. 
 The Kingdom was already in our midst ; and 
 all that men needed to do in order to hasten its 
 advent was to realize its presence. The estab- 
 lishment of the Kingdom among men was 
 indeed to be brought about by the restoration 
 of God to Nature. On that point Christ was 
 in accord with Israel. But the restoration of 
 God to Nature was to take place, not, as Israel 
 imagined, on some future day and as a visible 
 pageant, but now and for ever in the timeless 
 and spaceless region of imaginative thought. 
 Nor was it to be effected by the de-naturali- 
 zation — the phantasmagorical transformation — 
 of Nature, but by the recognition of God's 
 immanent presence as the only source of 
 Nature's light and life. 
 
 "When once we have grasped this conception 
 the parables will begin to disclose their meaning, 
 and the outlines of the Kingdom wiU emerge 
 from the darkness in which Christ found it 
 needful to shroud them. 
 
 The Kingdom of God is, in the first place, 
 
 I20 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 the kingdom of soul-life, the kingdom of the 
 realized presence of God in the soul of man. 
 It has no limits, either temporal or spatial. 
 It is here, if anywhere. It is now, if it shall 
 ever be. Not the new Jerusalem is its capital, 
 but the regenerate heart of man. We do not 
 wait for its advent. It " cometh not by obser- 
 vation." It is " within us " (or " in the midst 
 of us "). When we pray, as Christ taught us to 
 pray, that it may " come," we are praying that we 
 may realize, each for himself, its hidden presence. 
 Again, the Kingdom of God is the kingdom 
 of intrinsic reality. The final criterion, the 
 final standard, the final measure of reality 
 belongs to it, and to it alone. By reference 
 to its hidden treasure all other ends, all other 
 prizes, all other joys, are as shadows and 
 dreams. When a man has found its pearl of 
 great price, he will sell all that he has in order 
 that he may acquire that inward prize. What 
 shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world 
 and lose — that is, fail to find — his own soul ? 
 The Kingdom of God immingles itself with 
 the kingdom of the world.^ It is always in the 
 
 1 By " the world " Christ always means the superficial life of 
 man. 
 
 121 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 midst of it, always interpenetrating it, always 
 judging it. Things are what they are. Appear- 
 ances count for nothing. " Quantum unusquis- 
 que est in oculis Tuis tantum est et non 
 amplius." The tares may for a time be indis- 
 tinguishable from the wheat. But in the day 
 of judgment, the timeless day when reality 
 is tested and measured, the tares will be known 
 as tares, and the wheat as wheat. For in that 
 day the despotism of custom will be overthrown 
 and the hollowness of opinion will be exposed. 
 It will be vain ,for the man who is judged to 
 plead his position, his reputation, his influence, 
 his authority. Even his " good works " will 
 be resolved into their inward and spiritual 
 elements, and estimated in terms of these. One 
 question only will be asked, of the man, one 
 question only is eternally asked of every man. 
 What measure of growth, of Godward move- 
 ment, has his soiU made ? 
 
 For, above all, the Kingdom of God is the 
 kingdom of soul-growth. Mighty and mys- 
 terious forces are at work in it, forces akin to 
 those that leaven the measure of meal or that 
 expand the seed into the branching tree, — forces 
 that are transforming each individual soul by a 
 
 122 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 process of natural evolution into its own true 
 self, into oneness with the indwelling spirit of 
 God. And not the individual soul only, but 
 also the general soul of man. The law of 
 growth is the master law of Nature's being, and 
 therefore the master law of human life. To 
 grow in grace, to realize the divine potencies of 
 one's nature, to become the God that one really 
 is (though now " in the germ "), to earn the 
 right to say, "I and my Father are one," — 
 this is the Kingdom of God, and this is the 
 whole duty of man. 
 
 Lastly, the Kingdom of God is open to all 
 men. The least and lowliest of us is a ray of 
 the divine light. The chosen people is not 
 Israel but Humanity. God is the All-Father, 
 " the light that lightgth every man that cometh 
 into the world." Within the illimitable limits 
 of the inward kingdom "there is neither Jew 
 nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free ; " 
 for God "is all and in all." 
 
 Thus, whereas for Israel the Kingdom of 
 God was outward, visible, supernatviral, and 
 temporal, for Christ it was inward, spiritual, 
 natural, and eternal. And whereas the Messianic 
 dream was Israel's materialistic antidote to the 
 
 123 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 pessimism of his faithless creed, Christ's dream 
 of the Kingdom of God on earth was and is the 
 spontaneous outwelling in his heart, and in the 
 hearts of all who respond to his message, of a 
 secret fountain of triumphant faith. It was 
 this, and more than this. It was the actual 
 sense of the Divine Presence. It was the very 
 glow of the Divine Love. 
 
 Let us now ask ourselves how Christ's con- 
 ception of God and of the Kingdom of God 
 would be likely to express itself in the notation 
 of human conduct. The practical expression of 
 that " theory of things " which gave birth to 
 the Messianic dream was, as we have seen, 
 Pharisaism. "What kind of life would man 
 lead if he were to dream Christ's dream of an 
 inward and spiritual Heaven, — in other words, if 
 he were to realize that his true self is divine ? 
 In the first place, what conception of duty 
 would he form ? The answer to this question 
 is not far to seek. God is the ideal self of 
 man because He is the ideal end, the t^Xos 
 TeXeiorarov of Nature's infinite and eternal 
 movement. Now the sense of duty is the sense 
 of the constraining influence exercised by the 
 124 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 central laws and forces of Nature upon the life 
 and character of each individual man ; for what 
 is destiny for all becomes duty for each^ the 
 " is " of universal Nature changing itself, as it 
 passes through the refracting medium of con- 
 sciousness, into the " ought " of the individual 
 life. It follows from these premises that the 
 duty of man is to find his higher self, to grow 
 towards the spiritual perfection of which his 
 nature is capable, to become one spirit with 
 God. 
 
 It is easy to see that this conception of duty 
 wiU profoundly affect morality. Righteousness 
 as Israel conceived of it, is an entirely unnatural 
 and even anti-natural mode of life, which has to 
 be imposed upon man from without by the 
 desipotic action of the supernatural God. Right- 
 eousness, as Christ conceived of it, is no veneer 
 laid by a skilful artificer upon the base substance 
 of man's heart, but an end which is as entirely 
 congenial to man's nature as is the flavour of 
 a peach to the nature of a peach-tree or the 
 perfume of a full-blown rose to the nature of 
 a rose-bush. (An end, and a process. The 
 strength of Christ's theory of life is that the 
 end at which he would have us aim is simply 
 125 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 the natural consummation of the process by 
 which it is to be realized ; or rather the end is 
 the process — summed up in and justified by 
 the last term in its infinite " series.") By thus 
 substituting a natural for a supernatural motive, 
 Christ frees man from a hateful bondage (for 
 the Law is, ex hypothesis repugnant to his nature), 
 and presses all his higher energies into the 
 service of right. The Law appeals to his 
 individual selfishness, and it is not to be blamed 
 for doing so ; but it taps it in a stratum which 
 lies below the level of morality, — the stratum 
 of mundane hopes and carnal fears. Christ 
 teaches man that his interest coincides, in the 
 last resort, with his duty ; that he is to be good 
 in order that he may become good, — goodness, 
 or the fiilfilment of the master law of one's 
 nature, being as obviously the supreme source 
 of happiness in man as in every other living 
 thing. He thus appeals to motives which are 
 at once disinterested and self-regarding — in 
 other words, which are at once pure and strong ; 
 and the outcome of his appeal, in those who 
 respond to it, is that the self-seeking instincts of 
 man's nature, instincts which must be appealed 
 to if he is to be stimulated to action, are induced 
 126 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 to forswear the service of the lower self and 
 enlist under the banner of God. 
 
 This is th& first service that Christ renders to 
 morality. The second is not less important. 
 As Christ sets before man a new end of action, 
 so he sets before him a new way of acting. As 
 he transforms his motive, so he transforms his 
 method. The glory of God, which is pre- 
 sumably the end of all action, is but another 
 name for the ideal perfection of man. In order 
 to reach this end, one must raise continuously 
 the plane of one's life ; one must move forward 
 from point to point the centre of one's interests 
 and affections ; one must go on from self to 
 self, from stepping-stone to stepping-stone, 
 from strength to strength ; one must submit, 
 not once only, but again and again, to be born 
 anew ; in fine, one must die to the lower self — 
 die to it perpetually, for the series of its phases 
 is infinite — and live to the higher self and to 
 God. Thus soul-growth or spiritual develop- 
 ment holds under the Gospel the place which 
 mechanical obedience held under the Law. 
 And to soul-growth there are two sides, — self- 
 sacrifice which is attended with pain, the pain of 
 suppressing the lower self and denying it the 
 
 127 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 fruit of its desires ; and soul-expansion, which 
 is attended with joy, the joy of breathing a 
 purer air and energizing on a higher plane and 
 on a larger scale. 
 
 The difference between the method of the 
 Law and the method of the Gospel is too deep 
 to be fathomed. Obedience presupposes 
 guidance from without. Except this be given 
 to it, except a code of commandments — peremp- 
 tory, definitive, authoritative — be set before it, 
 it avails us nothing ; it is, as it were, a door 
 to which there is no key. For the path of 
 spiritual development, on the other hand, no 
 guidance is required except what comes from 
 within, — the guidance of Nature, which is given 
 to all of us in proportion as we ask for it, 
 accept it, use it. All that is needed for the 
 effective application of this method is to be able 
 to distinguish between higher and lower ; and 
 the knowledge of this distinction, like the 
 distinction itself, is objectively present, in all its 
 variety and subtlety, in the being of man. In 
 other words, man has the rule of right and 
 wrong in his own breast. In himself, in his 
 inner life, the higher self is superior to the 
 lower, and is ever ready to assert itself as such 
 128 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 if he will but listen to its voice. Its effort to 
 assert itself puts a pressure upon his nature 
 which is realized by him as the constraining 
 influence of conscience, and which as certainly 
 makes for righteousness as every process of 
 growth in plant or animal makes for the weU- 
 being and well-doing of the thing that grows.* 
 
 The weakness, then, of the Jewish morality 
 is that in it the method of righteousness and 
 the power to use the method — the door of 
 salvation and the key that unlocks the door — 
 are not necessarily conjoined. Knowledge of 
 God's will cannot of itself generate obedience 
 except on the supposition that the ends which 
 it sets before men are objects of natural desire, 
 — a supposition which manifestly contradicts 
 the doctrine of man's congenital depravity and 
 undermines the idea of a law supernaturally 
 
 • What is needed for the proper treatment of a moral pro- 
 blem is, first and foremost, a knowledge of one's own motives 
 and spiritual circumstances, a knowledge which must be close, 
 subtle, and continuous, if it is to be adequate to its subject- 
 matter, and which is therefore almost as incommunicable and 
 unformulable as the physiological knowledge which enables a 
 man to make a proper use of his nerves and muscles and limbs. 
 Ethical knowledge of this kind is objectively present in the heart 
 and mind ; and if it be wanting, there is nothing that can take its 
 place. 
 
 129 K 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 delivered and despotically enforced. Nor can 
 obedience generate a knowledge which, accord- 
 ing to the primary postulate of legalism, comes 
 to man only from without, and comes to him, 
 not as instinct and inspiration, but as a network 
 of formulated rules. 
 
 It is otherwise with the morality of the 
 Gospel. In this the method, as we have seen, 
 is that of self-development ; and self-develop- 
 ment has its counterpart in self-sacrifice or the 
 surrendering of a lower good in order to gain 
 a higher. Now the higher good, being pre- 
 sumably an object of natural desire, must be 
 regarded as the source both of knowledge and 
 impulse. It reveals itself to man as being what 
 it is, the nobler end of action, the worthier 
 object of choice ; and in the act of doing so, it 
 sets his desires in motion and diverts his 
 energies from its rival to itself. The impulse 
 that is thus communicated reacts on the know- 
 ledge that helped to generate it, the desirability 
 of the higher good becoming more apparent as 
 we approach it ; and is itself as speedily reacted 
 upon, the clearer perception of the object 
 aimed at becoming in its turn a stronger 
 attractive force. Thus there is a ceaseless 
 130 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 interaction between the two sides of the moral 
 process, what is given as stimulus being received 
 back as knowledge, and what is given as know- 
 ledge being received back as stimulus. In 
 other words, the development of the higher self 
 and the illumination of conscience are two 
 aspects of the same inward movement. The 
 door of salvation locks and unlocks itself. The 
 " method " and the " secret " are one. 
 
 The third service that Christ renders to 
 morality is the extension of its inward scope. 
 The morality that comes from within is 
 governed by living principles. The morality 
 that comes from without is under the despotism 
 of isolated rules. In passing from rules to 
 principles, Christ makes the sphere of moral 
 activity commensurate with the sphere of 
 human life. For whereas a principle can be 
 interpreted, a rule can only be applied ; and 
 whereas a principle covers a variety of typical 
 cases, a rule covers only one. Thus the scheme 
 of life that is governed by principles is prepared 
 for any and every case that may arise, whereas 
 the Lawgiver may count himself fortunate if no 
 more than nine cases out of ten escape through 
 the meshes of his network of rules. There is 
 131 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 a further reason why the morality of Christ 
 should do what that of Israel wrecked itself in 
 a vain attempt to do, — descend into all the 
 details of life. If man be by nature incapable 
 of good, it must surely follow that only that 
 region of his life which admits of being 
 regulated by positive commandments delivered 
 from a supernatural source is amenable to the 
 authority of the moral law. Beyond the 
 boundary of what is dogmatically prescribed, 
 man ceases to be a moral agent, for he does not 
 and cannot know right from wrong. But if 
 morality be naturalized, as it was when Christ 
 recalled God to earth, its limits become co- 
 incident, ideally if not actually, with those of 
 Nature herself Not indeed that, in thus 
 enlarging its dominions, it allows itself to lean 
 with equal weight on all the incidents of life 
 and opportunities of action. On !the contrary, 
 it follows the guidance of Nature, who arranges 
 these details, as she arranges all things that 
 belong to her, in the order of their intrinsic 
 dignity and worth. Herein it differs from the 
 old morality, which assumes that all its enact- 
 ments have equal authority, being all equally 
 divine, and in the strength of this assumption 
 132 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 "binds heavy burdens and grievous to be 
 borne," laying as much stress on the most 
 trivial matter of ceremonial punctilio as on the 
 weightiest matter of the moral law. But 
 though the morality of Nature discriminates 
 between detail and detail, it claims supremacy 
 over all. Nothing is common or unclean. 
 The least thing that is done by man tends 
 either to make or to mar the doer ; and the 
 difference between these alternatives is the 
 difference between right and wrong. " Whether 
 therefore ye eat or drink or whatever ye do, 
 do all to the glory of God." 
 
 But this is not all. When the last and 
 lowliest detail of life has been brought under 
 the law of right and wrong, a new world begins 
 to disclose itself to the eyes of the moralist. 
 Were it not so, the descent into the details 
 of human conduct would be, as it was under 
 the Law, an ignominious and soul-destroying 
 descent into the infinitesimal. Doing is, after 
 all, only one of the many modes of spiritual 
 activity. Behind and beyond a man's deeds are 
 the inward sources of his action, — his thoughts, 
 his feelings, his desires. These too, which were 
 for obvious reasons ignored by legalism, come 
 
 133 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 under the authority of the morality of Nature. 
 Inward and ever inward, as it follows the action 
 back to its fountain-head, the new morality 
 advances, step by step, till it comes in sight of 
 that state or aspect of the man to which alone 
 the words good and bad are finally applicable, — 
 the condition of his soul. It was not for its 
 own sake that Christ was interested in human 
 action, but for the sake of the soul, in which 
 (descending through the channels of thought 
 and feeling) our deeds originate, and on which 
 (transmitting their influence through the media 
 of thought and feeling) our deeds react. In 
 the eyes of the legalist, morality begins and ends 
 in outward action. In the eyes of Christ, it 
 begins and ends in the inner life of the soul. 
 
 The fourth service that Christ renders to 
 morality is the extension of its outward field. The 
 conception of a natural, as opposed to a super- 
 natural God, gives birth to the idea of Humanity. 
 It does not create the idea. The materials are 
 already in existence. What it does is to gather 
 them together from difi^erent quarters and give 
 them cohesion, structure, and life. In this, as 
 in other respects, the teaching of Christ had 
 been to some extent anticipated. The idea of 
 134 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 Humanity was . in the air that he breathed. 
 Circumstances were in its favour. The Roman 
 Empire was calling it into existence. Philo- 
 sophy, driven inwards by the decay of political 
 life, was beginning to contemplate it. The 
 sentiment of brotherhood, diverted from the 
 channel of patriotism by the march of the 
 Roman legions, was moving in its direction. 
 But Christ, whose work, like that of all great 
 Reformers, was in large measure mautiCy 
 brought the idea, which had long been nascent, 
 to the birth. By transforming the corresponding 
 theory into a belief, and the corresponding 
 sentiment into a passion, he carried it home to 
 men's hearts. And this he did because he 
 reached it by an inference from the central 
 dogma of his creed. 
 
 It is easy to show that his logic was not at 
 fault. Both in theory and in practice the idea 
 of universal brotherhood is a necessary deduc- 
 tion from the doctrines of a natural theology. 
 The supernatural God is essentially local in His 
 action. His revelations of Himself are essen- 
 tially partial and spasmodic, given at particular 
 times and places, designed for the benefit of 
 particular peoples, and entrusted to the keeping 
 
 135 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 of particular persons. Miracles, which are pre- 
 sumably exceptional and isolated occurrences, 
 are the recognized signs of His presence. He 
 reveals His will on one of many mountains. 
 His Holy of Holies is on one of many hills. 
 The sphere of His dominion is also the sphere 
 of man's duty. The worship of a common God 
 determines the limits of morality. The duties 
 of the Jew are towards those who go up to 
 Jerusalem. The duties of the Athenian are 
 towards his fellow-citizens, towards those who 
 worship with him at the altars of the civic gods. 
 The Jew distinguishes between his fellow- 
 countrymen and the heathens who have not 
 known Jehovah. If the Athenian, besides dis- 
 tinguishing between citizens and strangers, can 
 also conceive of the Greek as such, and dis- 
 tinguish between him and the Barbarian, that is 
 only because the shrine of Apollo at Delphi is 
 the focus of a quasi-national life. The senti- 
 ment of nationality is, in fact, the widest of all 
 the motive forces which the ethics of the super- 
 natural admit of ; and if that sentiment should 
 be weakened, either from within or from with- 
 out, religion and morality alike would be in 
 danger of falling into decay. Rome, animated 
 136 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 as no people has ever been, by the sense of 
 duty to the commonwealth, conquered city 
 after city and nation after nation, destroying 
 the patriotism of her subjects and gradually 
 diluting her own. In so doing she proved 
 how essentially local — tribal, civic, or national, 
 as the case might be — were the religion and 
 morality of the ages before Christ ; for she 
 demoralized the world which she governed, 
 and she filled her Pantheon with dead and 
 dying gods. 
 
 It is not until we pass, as Christ did, from 
 a supernatural to a natural conception of God, 
 that universal religion becomes possible, and 
 that the limits of morality become coincident 
 with the limits of the world. The God who 
 dwells beyond the skies rules over a nation or 
 a city or a tribe. The God who sits on the 
 throne of Nature rules over the Universe. 
 Nor does the latter need, what is indispensable 
 to the former, the intervention of miracles 
 (in the supernatural sense of the word) between 
 Himself and the hearts of His children. 
 His revelation of Himself is, in the first place, 
 continuous and universal, the gradual unfolding 
 of His being in and through the evolution of 
 137 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Nature and of Man. The means, whatever they 
 may be, by which the education of the human 
 race is being carried on — Art and Science, Poetry 
 and Philosophy, Society and Government — are 
 the true channels of His grace. The sounds 
 that stir us, the words that move us, are the 
 accents of His voice. Beauty, whether inward 
 or outward, is the light of His countenance. 
 The plastic stress of circumstances is the pres- 
 sure of His hand. His revelation of Himself 
 is, in the second place, individualized in each 
 human breast. As He is the soul of Universal 
 Nature, so He is the true self of each individual 
 man. For each, as for all, the path of self- 
 development, the path of ascent towards the 
 soul's ideal, is the path that leads to God. Thus 
 there are two means of communication between 
 Earth and Heaven. The first is open to all men. 
 The second is open to any man. The first is 
 a road which cannot be avoided. The second 
 is a road which cannot be missed. It is clear, 
 from either point of view, that the God of 
 Nature is also the God of the whole human 
 race. " There is no difference between the Jew 
 and the Greek : for the same Lord over all is 
 rich unto all that call upon Him." Even the 
 138 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 distinction between those who consciously wor- 
 ship Him and those who have not called upon 
 His name is one which He refuses to respect. 
 " I was found of those that sought me not. I 
 was made manifest unto them that asked not 
 after me." Thus His Church is catholic and 
 oecumenical in the true sense of those misused 
 words. The believer in the supernatural can 
 never get far beyond the proud boast of 
 Judaism : " The Lord hath chosen thee to be a 
 peculiar people unto Himself, above all the 
 nations that are upon the earth." The believer 
 in the God of Nature can say, with the greatest 
 of Christ's apostles, — " By one spirit are we all 
 baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or 
 Gentiles, whether we be bond or free." 
 
 The relation between man and God deter- 
 mines the relation between man and man. We 
 pass, at a single step, from a universal religion 
 to a universal morality. "The spirit itself 
 beareth witness with our spirit that we are the 
 children of God." But the children of God 
 must needs be the brothers of their fellow men. 
 In other words, the conception of the Father- 
 hood of God postulates the conception of the 
 brotherhood of Humanity. "Who is my 
 
 139 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 neighbour ? " is a vital question for each one 
 of us ; for duty to one's neighbour is, as it 
 were, the application and embodiment of duty 
 to one's God. The religion of Nature answers 
 the question, as Christ answered it in the 
 parable of the Good Samaritan, — " Your neigh- 
 bour is your fellow man." This answer uni- 
 versalizes the scope of morality. It tells us 
 that we are members of a community wider 
 than the family, wider than the tribe, wider 
 than the city, wider than the nation, wider than 
 the empire of Rome, — the community of the 
 human race. If God may be conceived of as 
 the ideal of Humanity, then duty to God must 
 be identified with duty to Man as Man. For 
 to love and worship the ideal is to love and 
 reverence even the least and lowest of those 
 " seeds and weak beginnings " in which it " lies 
 intreasurfed." It is here, in this eternal pro- 
 cession of philanthropy, or brotherly affection, 
 from the worship of the All-Father, that 
 morality and religion, each of which is in 
 truth the good genius of the other, meet and 
 mingle and flow from henceforth in a single 
 stream. 
 
 The fifth service that Christ renders to 
 140 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 morality is the elevation of its ideal. By- 
 resolving morality into the inward and spiritual 
 effort which it involves, Christ raises it, as it 
 were, to an infinite power. The man who has 
 to obey the commandments of a formulated 
 code may conceivably "count himself to have 
 apprehended." Each act of obedience is a 
 good thing, perfect as far as it goes ; and its 
 doer has the satisfaction of knowing that so 
 much merit stands in perpetuity to the credit 
 of his moral account. To keep all the com- 
 mandments of the Law is to do all that is 
 required of one ; and the man whose conscience 
 is wholly void of offence may fairly claim to 
 have attained to moral perfection. But the man 
 who strives to attain to inward and spiritual 
 perfection knows that he will never reach his 
 goal. Outward performance counts for nothing, 
 when viewed from the inward standpoint, except 
 so far as it reveals and reacts upon the character 
 of the doer. The aim, the aspiration, the effort, 
 — these are the things that the God of Nature 
 regards and values ; and to the movement of 
 these there can be no limits, for the force that 
 generates them is an unapproachable and un- 
 imaginable ideal. Thus the Religion of Nature 
 
 141 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 wages a truceless war against Pharisaic self- 
 satisfaction ; and in so doing, it both safeguards 
 morality on the lowly plane of everyday duty' 
 (where confidence is the sure precursor of care- 
 lessness), and by lifting it on to higher and still 
 higher planes of action saves it from under- 
 going that process of degeneration which is the 
 necessary consequence of arrested growth. 
 
 The sixth and not the least of the services 
 that Christ renders to morality is to invest it 
 with an atmosphere of freedom. The morality 
 that is based on obedience, though suitable for 
 children and for childlike souls, is fatal to soul- 
 growth in its higher stages. For the growth of 
 the soul carries with it the expansion of the 
 self, and therefore the progressive enlargement 
 of the sphere of human freedom. I am free 
 when and just so far as my action originates in 
 my soul or true self, and in doing so escapes 
 from the control of material or quasi-material 
 forces and laws. The more I expand my soul, 
 the more do I tend to bring my life and my 
 conduct under the control of my self. But 
 freedom, like every other spiritual faculty, is 
 strengthened by use and weakened by neglect. 
 In other words, the more my life, on all 
 142 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 its planes — speculative, imaginative, emotional, 
 practical — is swayed and directed by my true 
 self, the more fully will my true self unfold 
 and the greater will be its power of swaying 
 and directing my life. Hence the use of the 
 sacred gift of freedom, the cultivation of 
 spontaneity and initiative on all the planes 
 of man's inner life, is one of the most solemn 
 of duties. Freedom cannot be limited, as super- 
 naturalism tries to limit it, to a single channel 
 of choice, — the choice between obedience and 
 disobedience to the commandments of a formu- 
 lated law. That is the freedom of a child, 
 not of a man. To treat a growing youth as 
 an irresponsible child, and subject him to a 
 rigime of blind and strict obedience, were to 
 arrest the development of his character. In 
 like manner, to tell the soul that salvation is to 
 be won by obedience, and by no other means, is 
 to invite it to give up the business of growing, 
 and if of growing, then of living, for " whatever 
 has life is characterized by growth, so that in no 
 respect to grow is to cease to live." The truth 
 is that to prepare the way for the rigime of 
 freedom is the very function of the rigime of 
 obedience, and to regard the latter as an end in 
 143 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Itself is to empty it of its meaning and its pur- 
 pose, and invalidate its claim to our allegiance. 
 There is a certain school of thought which 
 wages war against human freedom in the, 
 interest of material laws and forces. Israel, 
 on the contrary, waged war against it in the 
 name and for the honour of the supernatural 
 God. As an instinctive repugnance to use his 
 own spiritual freedom led him to relegate God 
 to a world beyond the confines of Nature, so, 
 with a fearless logic which has been reproduced 
 and re-emphasized by Calvinism, he deduced 
 from the primary postulate of supernaturalism 
 his own spiritual helplessness, conceiving of 
 himself not as a living soul divinely inspired, 
 but as passive clay in the potter's hand. If we 
 grant Israel's premises, we must accept his con- 
 clusions ; but the cogency of his logic must not 
 blind us to the fundamental immorality of his 
 theory of life. Christ, who saw in Pharisaism 
 the last term in the practical exposition of that 
 theory, went back to the fountain-head of 
 Israel's philosophy in order to find out where 
 he had gone astray. If the action of God is 
 incompatible with the freedom of man, morality 
 is obviously a delusion and right indistinguishable 
 144 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 from wrong. Confronted by a web of so- 
 phistical reasoning, Christ rent it asunder and 
 laid bare the baseness, or at least the weakness, 
 of sovil, out of which and by which it had been 
 spun and woven. His own solution of the 
 great problem is simplicity itself. God is at 
 the heart of Nature, and is therefore the true 
 self of man. It follows that the presence of 
 the divine will is the very source of pian's 
 freedom. I am free when / — the true self — 
 am the author and originator of my own action ; 
 but I am not / — the true self — until "I and 
 my Father are one." In other words, I am 
 never so free as when I am constrained by the 
 grace of God. 
 
 A profound philosophy underlies this far- 
 reaching conception. If freedom implies the 
 absence of external constraint, then it is certain 
 that one thing, and one only, is absolutely free. 
 That one thing is the totality of things, the 
 living whole. Each detailed thing in Nature 
 acts under the stress and pressure of the whole ; 
 but the whole itself — Nature in the unity and 
 totality of her being — is obviously free. Now 
 we mean by Nature what is real in Nature ; 
 we mean her true self; we mean the positive 
 
 145 L 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 pole of her being ; we mean the all-inclusive 
 synthesis ; we mean the World-soul, or in- 
 dwelling Spirit of God. God, the true self 
 of Nature and the true self of man, is the only 
 fountain of freedom ; and the more fully man 
 realizes his destiny, the more completely he 
 brings his individual will into harmony with 
 the Universal Will, the more abundantly he 
 "grows in grace," the greater is his spiritual 
 freedom and the more thorough his mastery 
 of circumstance and of fate. Conversely, the 
 more sedulously he cultivates the divine gift 
 of freedom, the more strenuously he exercises 
 his initiative, not only in the sphere of conduct 
 (in the narrower sense of the word), but also 
 and more especially in the regions of high 
 thinking and deep feeling, the nearer does he 
 get to the ideal goal of his being, the goal of 
 submission to the Divine Will and of oneness 
 with the Divine Soul. Looked at from this 
 point of view, the' legal conception of morality 
 is seen to be profoundly immoral. But the 
 point of view is one which Israel was at all 
 times unwilling to take and became at last 
 incapable of taking. So far as I am trying to 
 disprove his theory of things, I am arguing, 
 
 146 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 as I know well, in a circle. I am assuming 
 that soul-growth is the true destiny of man ; 
 but the assumption is one which Israel cannot 
 and 'win not concede. The plain truth is that 
 legalism knows nothing about soul-growth and 
 cares less. It takes for granted that man, at 
 his highest and best, is a naughty child, who 
 can only be saved from destruction by being 
 alternately bribed and coerced into obedience 
 to a divinely given law ; and it infers from 
 this that obedience is the ideal end of his being, 
 as well as the only path in which it is safe for 
 him to walk. That it takes this view of man, 
 that it ignores by anticipation the great idea 
 of evolution — the idea which is slowly dawning, 
 through clouds of materialistic prejudice, on 
 the inner vision of man — is, as it seems to me 
 (but here again I am begging the question), its 
 gravest defect. The greatness of Christ as a 
 thinker shows itself in nothing so clearly as 
 in this, that, instinctively and in virtue of a 
 spiritual "second sight," he kept open his 
 communications with the future, and sowed in 
 the minds of men the seeds of ideas which 
 would fructify, not wither, in the expanding 
 light of human thought. 
 147 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 The seventh and last service that Christ 
 renders to morality — the last and the first, for 
 it at once summarizes and explains all the rest 
 — is to base it upon faith and to resolve it 
 into love. For Christ, as for Israel, the life 
 of man, as a moral agent, is to be based upon 
 faith ; but whereas Israel meant by faith trust 
 in the formulated threats and promises of the 
 supernatural God, Christ meant by it trust in 
 Nature, trust in the order of things in which 
 we find ourselves, trust — since God is at the 
 heart of Nature, and since the real order of 
 things is the expression of His will — trust in 
 the power and wisdom and goodness of God. 
 The actual faith of a man is his actual attitude 
 towards the realities that environ him. It is 
 because this attitude, not merely in man, but 
 in all living things, is in the main one of trust 
 that I have applied the word faith to it. But 
 behind and beyond all actual faith is ideal 
 faith, the ideal attitude of the soul towards 
 the realities that environ it, the attitude which 
 each soul in turn ought to adopt if it is to 
 bear itself aright as it journeys through life. 
 For Christ ideal faith is an attitude of implicit 
 and unswerving trust, not of trust in this 
 148 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 teacher or that, in this creed or that, in this 
 institution or that, but simply of trust, — a feel- 
 ing which exists and energizes before it becomes 
 aware of its object, but which gradually realizes 
 that it is directing itself towards the real order 
 of things, towards an all-sustaining Power and 
 an all-embracing Love. Christ has told us 
 that if we had faith, in the true sense of the 
 word, we could move mountains. This saying, 
 like others that are ascribed to Christ, has been 
 misinterpreted in the interest of supernaturalism. 
 If Nature had not meant far more to Christ 
 than to most men he would not have deified 
 her, he would not have placed God at the 
 heart of her. He knew, better than most 
 men, how vast and varied are her resources. 
 He realized, we may well believe, that there 
 are planes of existence other and higher than 
 that which we call physical, that there are 
 latent forces and latent modes of being in 
 Nature and latent powers and latent senses in 
 man. This, I think, is the real connection 
 between his miracles and his creed. His 
 boundless trust in Nature had given him 
 supernormal insight into her laws and possi- 
 bilities, and in the strength of this insight he 
 149 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 was able to wield supernormal powers, to con- 
 trol supernormal forces, to produce supernormal 
 results. But this is by the way. What interests 
 me in Christ's miracles is that they bear witness 
 (if his own explanation of them may be accepted) 
 to the strength of his faith — to the complete- 
 ness of his trust in the resources of Nature 
 and in the goodwill of God. He based his 
 own life on this feeling, and he wished men 
 to realize that, both actually and ideally, it is 
 the only permanent basis of life. 
 
 Now the life that is based on faith must 
 needs be regulated by one master-law, that 
 of love. Implicit trust is, indeed, scarcely to 
 be distinguished from love, being, in fact, the 
 first stage, as love is the last (and the first), in 
 the surrender of the soul to the attractive force 
 of realities which announce themselves as worthy 
 of our devotion. To meet the world, to meet 
 life, to meet destiny, to meet the whirl and 
 rush of events, to meet the frowns and smiles 
 of Fortune with unwavering trust, is to take 
 for granted that light, not darkness — the light 
 of God's wisdom and goodness — is at the heart 
 of Nature ; and to believe in that light is to 
 love it (for its attractive force — once it has been 
 150 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 discerned, however dimly — is irresistible), and 
 to love it is to love all things for its sake. In 
 the Christ-like life there is, in the last resort, 
 but one motive to action, — love. Sweeping 
 aside as frivolous, inquisitorial, and impertinent, 
 the ever-increasing multitude of rules which 
 complicated the life and burdened the conscience 
 of the zealous Jew, Christ gave us instead of 
 these two cardinal commandments which are 
 really one : "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
 with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
 with all thy mind, and with all thy strength," 
 and "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy- 
 self." In these words the doom of the old 
 dispensation — the dispensation of salvation 
 through mechanical obedience — is pronounced, 
 and the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven — the 
 Kingdom of freedom and love — are thrown 
 open to all men. 
 
 But before man can be initiated into the new 
 order of things, he must have settled his 
 account with the old. The burden of legal 
 obligation must be left behind, at the entrance 
 to the Kingdom of Heaven, if the initiate is to 
 breathe freely in the new atmosphere of faith 
 
 151 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 and peace and joy. In other words, he must 
 realize that his " sins have been forgiven him." 
 With a splendid audacity, due to the inspiration 
 of spiritual genius, Christ took upon himself 
 to forgive sin. What did he mean by this ? 
 The Pharisees were scandalized by his conduct, 
 and accused him of claiming equality with God ; 
 and this charge, brought against him in the first 
 instance by his bitterest enemies, has been 
 endorsed by his followers in all ages. But the 
 charge is without foundation ; and the fact that 
 it is still made (though, of course, " orthodoxy " 
 believes that it is glorifying Christ in making 
 it) proves nothing except that the ideas of 
 Judaism are still, unhappily, in the ascendant. 
 We shall not even begin to understand what 
 Christ meant by " forgiveness of sin " until we 
 have accustomed ourselves to look at sin from 
 his standpoint, from the standpoint of his 
 hatred of Pharisaism. Sin cannot be forgiven 
 (in the theological sense of the word) except on 
 the assumption that the Pharisaical conception 
 of sin as illegality, or rather as a breach of 
 legal contract, is correct. In that case sin can 
 be forgiven by him who has been sinned 
 against ; in other words (I speak as a Pharisee), 
 152 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 by God. If one of two contracting parties, A 
 (in this case, man), fails to fulfil his side of a 
 bargain, the other party, B (in this case, God), 
 may, if he pleases, forgive him his breach of 
 contract. This means that B will fulfil his side 
 of the bargain, just as if the contract had not 
 been broken by A, just as if the sin had not 
 been committed. In other words, he will wipe 
 out the transgression, as one writes off a bad 
 debt, he will cancel the sin, regard it as non- 
 existent. Thus, from the Pharisaical point of 
 view, sin could be forgiven, but by God alone. 
 As the conception of sin as breach of contract 
 was utterly repugnant to Christ, we may be 
 quite sure that in taking upon himself to for- 
 give sin, he neither meant to sanction the Phari- 
 saical view of morality nor to claim equality 
 with God. What he did mean was to teU us 
 that sin, just so far as it is illegality, and nothing 
 more^ is not sin at all. He said to men who 
 were groaning under the yoke of the Law : 
 "These peccadilloes, these breaches of petty 
 and meaningless regulations, which weigh so 
 heavily on your conscience, are not sinful in 
 any respect or degree, except so far as the com- 
 mission of them has reacted injuriously on your 
 153 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 soul. Whether it has done this or not is known 
 to you and to no one else. If it has not done 
 this, you are innocent of sin." Thus in pro- 
 claiming forgiveness of sin, Christ was really 
 changing our conception of sin : he was 
 abrogating the legal standard and sending men 
 back to an inward and spiritual standard. 
 
 But, be it carefully observed, Christ saw 
 quite clearly that, when judged by the inward 
 and spiritual standard, sin is, or, at any rate, 
 may be, unforgivable. In a remarkable passage, 
 which has sorely puzzled the commentators, he 
 tells men that there is a sin of which there is no 
 forgiveness, — the sin against the Holy Spirit. 
 By this he meant, as it seems to me, two 
 things. He meant that of sin which is really 
 sin, sin which is the outcome of a corrupt heart 
 and fraught with injury to the soul — the 
 dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit — there can 
 be no forgiveness, either in the legal sense of 
 the word or in his own anti-legal sense ; he 
 meant that moral iniquity is both too real to be 
 cancelled and too serious to be ignored. No 
 one, not even God, can come between sin of 
 that sort and its natural consequences, the most 
 momentous of which is the injury that it does 
 154 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 to the soul of the sinner. The sin may be 
 lived down and outgrown, but it can never be 
 forgiven ; it can never be made as though it 
 had not been. 
 
 This is one thing that Christ meant when 
 he spoke of the unforgivable sin. But he dlso 
 meant something deeper than this. He meant 
 that, even if the idea of forgiving sin be entirely 
 transformed, even if the standpoint of legality 
 be finally abandoned, there remains a class of 
 sins which neither merits nor seeks forgiveness. 
 And, first of all, he meant, in transforming our 
 conception of sin, to transform our conception 
 of forgiveness of sin. He has told us more 
 than once to forgive sins — sins that have been 
 committed against us — even as God forgives us 
 our sins. These passages make it clear what 
 Christ meant by God forgiving sins, and how 
 far he had travelled from the Pharisaical con- 
 ception of God as a creditor who cancelled debts 
 or as a contracting party who condoned breaches 
 of contract. When a man forgives another man 
 who has sinned against him, he does not blot 
 the man's sin out of existence, he does not 
 make it as though it had never been. No ; but 
 he overlooks the sin and tries to forget it, and 
 
 155 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 goes on loving the sinner in spite of it. And 
 this is what God does to us. He loves us in 
 spite of our sins, and will draw us to Himself 
 in disregard of them, so long as we are capable 
 of loving our fellow men and of showing our 
 love by forgiving them their sins against us. 
 If we retain our power of loving we shall be 
 able to outgrow and live down our sins, we 
 shall be able to prove that our sins were no sins, 
 in that they did us no lasting moral harm.^ We 
 shall also be able, since love is the soul's 
 response to love, to open our hearts to the 
 sunshine of God's presence. The intimate, the 
 vital connexion which exists in Christ's mind 
 between God forgiving man his trespasses and 
 man forgiving his fellow men, makes it clear 
 what Christ finally meant by the sin of which 
 there is no forgiveness. That sin is hatred^ the 
 sin of sins against man, the sin of sins against 
 the Holy Spirit of God. For God is ever 
 drawing us to Himself by the magnetic might 
 of love ; and the hatred which makes a man 
 incapable of loving his brother and forgiving 
 him his trespasses, makes him also incapable of 
 
 ' Compare, " Her sins which are many are forgiven ; for she 
 loved much." — S. Luke vii. 47. 
 
 156 
 
The Kingdom of God 
 
 yielding to the attractive force of God's love, 
 and of receiving at His hands that boon of 
 forgiveness which is but another name for the 
 patience and the long-suffering of love. 
 
 It is worthy of note that in the apocryphal but 
 beautiful and eminently characteristic story of the 
 woman taken in adultery, Christ did not forgive 
 the sinner. He said to her : " Neither do I con- 
 demn thee : go thy way ; from henceforth sin no 
 more." The meaning of this is plain. Christ 
 could not forgive the woman as he forgave those 
 who had sinned against that ceremonial law which 
 the Pharisees loved so well, for adultery is a 
 sin against the soul. Nor could he forgive her 
 in the deeper, diviner, more personal sense of 
 the word, for she had not sinned against him. 
 But he refused to condemn her. The truth is 
 that in giving us an inward instead of an out- 
 ward standard of moral worth, he withdrew 
 from us in large measure the right to constitute 
 ourselves judges of our neighbour's conduct. 
 Vexatious inquisitorial interference with one's 
 neighbour's life and conduct is of the very 
 essence of Pharisaism. But Christ, who saw 
 that both the real motives and the real con- 
 sequences of moral action are inward and 
 
 157 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 spiritual, and therefore known only to the 
 actor, or, at any rate, known far more fully to 
 him than to any one else, said to us, " Judge 
 not, that ye be not judged." We are to forgive 
 those, and those only, who have sinned against us. 
 Others we are not to presume even to judge. 
 
 Free from the burden of sin (in the legal 
 sense of the word) man is invited to enter the 
 Kingdom. If he responds to that invitation 
 he will have, henceforth, to breathe the air of 
 freedom ; and in that stimulating air he will 
 have to put away childish things, he will have 
 to rise to the level of his spiritual manhood, he 
 will have to work out his own salvation by 
 exercising freely and fearlessly all the spiritual 
 gifts — imaginative, intellectual, artistic, emo- 
 tional, moral — with which Nature has endowed 
 him. In other words, instead of being content 
 to be borne along by external forces and con- 
 trolled by external influences, he must himself 
 direct and carry on the process of his spiritual 
 development, he must take his higher life into 
 his own hands. 
 
 With this prospect before him, what response 
 will he make to Christ's call ? 
 158 
 
Chapter VI — Apparent Failure 
 
 WHEN I was a child I was taught 
 that Christ bore the burden of 
 our sins for us, and that every 
 sin that I had committed, or was 
 destined to commit, added something to the 
 anguish that he endured when he hung for our 
 sakes on the cross. Those who taught me this 
 were under the influence of that legal conception 
 of life from which Christ laboured unceasingly 
 to deliver OS. The burden of man's sin had 
 always pressed lightly upon Christ, and I cannot 
 think that it pressed heavily upon him when 
 the approach of death was giving supernormal 
 clearness to his inward vision. If he had never 
 before understood what he of all men under- 
 stood best, the place that " sin " holds in the 
 cosmic scheme of things, he understood it then. 
 No ; if there was any spiritual burden that he 
 had to bear during those hours of physical 
 anguish, it was the burden, not of the sins of 
 others, but of his own apparent failure. Those 
 who were nearest and dearest to him had failed 
 
 159 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 to assimilate his revolutionary ideas. What 
 hope was there that his teaching would make 
 headway among " the nations," in whose minds 
 the seeds of it were destined to be sown ? It 
 was to the Graeco-Roman world that his message 
 was about to be delivered. From his own 
 nation he had nothing to hope. He had 
 renounced and denounced its most cherished 
 ideas, and he must have known that it would 
 reject his. But would that wider world in 
 which Judaea was a province and the Jews a 
 sect, be able to receive and interpret his 
 teaching ? It is possible that Christ knew 
 enough about that world to feel sure that it 
 would not. It is more probable that he was 
 content to make his personal experience the 
 basis of his expectations and his hopes. He 
 knew that he was capable of inspiring personal 
 devotion ; and he had seen, in the case of his 
 own disciples, that personal devotion to a great 
 teacher does not necessarily give insight into 
 the Master's mind. If he allowed himself to 
 look into the future he may have foreseen that 
 his disciples, in the ardour of their devotion to 
 his person, would transmit his influence in ever- 
 widening circles through the Graeco-Roman 
 1 60 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 world. But if he foresaw this he must 
 also have foreseen that, with their enthusiastic 
 love of their Master, they would transmit to 
 "the nations" their inabihty to interpret his 
 thought. 
 
 These are idle speculations ; but for us who 
 can look back to the days to which Christ may 
 have looked forward, it is easy to see that the 
 early fructification of his dominant ideas was 
 in the nature of things impossible. Had those 
 ideas won immediate acceptance, their premature 
 success would have been their final condem- 
 nation. Great ideas have to pass through long 
 periods of germination, and therefore of apparent 
 sterility ; and that Christ's ideas are now, after 
 nineteen centuries, waiting for their prophets 
 and their interpreters proves nothing except 
 that they are grandly revolutionary, and that, 
 when they do win acceptance, their influence 
 will be far-reaching and the scale of their 
 activity large. But, apart from these general 
 considerations, there were special reasons why 
 Christ's message to man should fall at first on 
 deaf or unwilling ears. The Graeco-Roman 
 world in which Christ lived and worked, and 
 which was destined to be the medium for 
 i6i M 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 transmitting his influence to mankind, had fallen 
 into a state of spiritual decadence. Its three 
 leading peoples — the Greek, the Roman, and 
 the Jewish — had all outlived their spiritual 
 prime. Their outbursts of expansive energy 
 were over. Their literatures had receded some 
 distance from the high-water mark of inspired 
 poetry, and were still steadily ebbing. Unable 
 and unwilling to make fresh spiritual growth, 
 they desii^ed to be " saved," as the spiritually 
 decadent have ever done and will ever do, 
 by machinery, by a rSgime of unintelligent 
 obedience, by a life of soulless routine. Their 
 own religions were dying. If a new religion 
 was to be given to them, it must come to them 
 as a system, as a law, as a formulated creed. 
 When the religion for which they had been 
 waiting did come to them, they made it 
 what they wished it to be. That its nominal 
 founder was the sworn enemy of machinery, 
 of routine, of blind obedience, of everything 
 that they held most dear, mattered nothing. 
 Devotion to his person was at first and for 
 many generations a living force which more 
 than counterbalanced the spiritual indolence of 
 their decadent souls. But as that force began 
 162 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 to expend itself, as its outflow of volcanic 
 energy began to cool down and harden, the 
 devotion of the Christian to Christ became the 
 very pivot and centre of the formal system which 
 was gradually elaborating itself in response to 
 the secret demands of his spiritual weakness and 
 his lack of living faith. 
 
 It is easy to trace the steps by which the 
 change from faith in Christ to belief about 
 Christ was effected. So long as personal 
 devotion was the life and soul of Christianity, 
 the desire to be drugged with dogmatic teach- 
 ing remained, for the most part, in abeyance. 
 But, weakened by the lapse of time and un- 
 sustained by intellectual sympathy with the 
 Master's soul, the magnetic influence of Christ's 
 personality slowly lost its power ; and as it 
 declined, the mental lassitude of the decadent 
 world that centred in Rome began to assert 
 itself, and the demand for those mental narcotics 
 which theology provides so liberally — creeds, 
 codes, systems, and the like — began to make 
 itself felt. As Christianity had come to the 
 Graeco-Roman world from a Jewish source, and 
 through a Jewish medium, it was but natural 
 163 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 that Christendom should turn to the Jewish 
 Scriptures for instruction and guidance. The 
 fact that Christ had quoted those Scriptures 
 and appealed to them seemed to invest them 
 with supreme authority. It was of course 
 inevitable that Christ's attitude towards the 
 Old Testament should be misunderstood by 
 men who were constitutionally incapable of 
 placing themselves at his spiritual standpoint. 
 In point of fact, there are at least four obvious 
 reasons why Christ, whose environment was 
 almost whoUy Jewish, should have appealed to 
 the Jewish Scriptures, both when he taught his 
 disciples and when he denounced and con- 
 troverted his opponents. In the first place, he 
 was in entire agreement with the fundamental 
 idea of the Old Testament, the idea of sub- 
 ordinating the individual to the Universal Will. 
 In the second place, he was in deep sympathy 
 with the poets and prophets of the Old Testa- 
 ment, of whom indeed he was himself the 
 greatest and the last. In the third place, he 
 naturally wished to meet his opponents on 
 ground of their own choosing. In the fourth 
 place, he wished to make men realize how far 
 the national life had receded from what was 
 164 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 highest and best in its own ideal. These 
 reasons make the " orthodox " hypothesis, that 
 Christ accepted the theology of the Old Testa- 
 ment, wholly superfluous. But the decadent 
 mind, the mind that has fallen below the level 
 of poetic life, always prefers the letter to the 
 spirit of what is said or written. Christ had 
 appealed to the Jewish Scriptures. Whatever 
 might be the reasons for his having done so, 
 the fact that he did so remained. And this 
 literal fact, dissociated from and unexplained by 
 reference to the general tenour of Christ's 
 teaching, is the flimsy foundation on which 
 the whole structure of Christian theology has 
 been reared. The Western mind accepted 
 and still accepts Judaism, chiefly (as it pro- 
 fesses, and no doubt sincerely believes) for 
 Christ's sake. Strange irony of fate 1 Literal- 
 ists that we are, because Christ expressed his 
 ideas in the notation of Judaism, we think that 
 he gave his sanction to the whole Judaic scheme 
 of thought. We accept the notation that Christ 
 used, and we reject the ideas (all intensely anti- 
 Judaic) that he used it to express. 
 
 But the real reason for the acceptance of 
 Judaism by the Graeco-Roman world lies deeper 
 
 165 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 than the plummet of theological thought can 
 sound. Men found, as it happened, in the 
 Jewish Scriptures the very thing which they 
 were in search of, — a cut-and-dried ** theory of 
 things," a definite and coherent account of 
 God's ways and works. Elaborated as it had 
 been by minds which preferred machinery to 
 life, this theory of things was readily assimilated 
 by a world in which mental decadence — with 
 its concomitant loss of energy and initiative — 
 had been generated by the widespread decay 
 of national life. Not indeed that the Jewish 
 system of thought was accepted in its entirety. 
 To do so would have made Christ's mission 
 meaningless, would have stultified his anta- 
 gonism to legalism, and would have imposed 
 upon the "Western world the heavy burden 
 of obedience to the Jewish law. Israel's 
 "theory of things " and Israel's way of looking 
 at things — his dualism, his dogmatism, even 
 the materialism of his Messianic hope — were 
 unreservedly accepted ; but the Law, with the 
 exception of the Ten Commandments, was 
 informally rejected. In other words, the 
 Graeco-Roman world adopted Israel's philo- 
 sophy, but turned away from his rigid and 
 i66 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 oppressive scheme of life. The change of 
 direction which was thus given to the Judai- 
 zing tendencies of Christian thought had 
 momentous consequences. Forbidden by cir- 
 cumstances to drink of the waters of legalism 
 (in the strict sense of the word), the desire 
 to obey and to earn salvation by obedience 
 must needs slake itself at some other spring. 
 And while it was seeking what it needed, the 
 sister desire — the desire for " theological infor- 
 mation," the desire for definite instruction 
 " sur les objets m6me ou toute precision est 
 erreur " — was gradually constructing an un- 
 failing reservoir of "authority" from which 
 both desires might drink as often and as deeply 
 as they pleased. 
 
 To conciliate devotion to the spirit of the 
 Old Testament with devotion to the person 
 of Christ was the problem which the thinkers 
 of Christendom found themselves called upon 
 to solve. Their solution of it was, as might 
 have been expected, in keeping with that 
 general attitude — mental and spiritual — which 
 had sent them, in their search for a philosophy, 
 to Israel instead of to Christ.<^Orhe verbal 
 ingenuity of the degenerate Greek intellect, 
 167 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 working on materials furnished by Judaism, 
 found a place in the Old Testament scheme 
 of things for the personality of the adored 
 Christ and for the drama of his life and death. 
 That Christ should be identified with the 
 Messiah by men who at once revered him 
 as their Lord and Master, and accepted the 
 ideas of Judaism, was indeed inevitable ; and 
 that, having been identified with the Messiah, 
 he should be invested with divine rank, was 
 scarcely less certain, for in the feverish phases 
 of the Messianic dream there were moments 
 when the Messiah was conceived of as some- 
 thing higher than a divinely appointed com- 
 missioner, as the very incarnation of the 
 eternal God. With the deification of Christ 
 a new fountain of authoritative teaching was 
 unsealed. The penalty that one pays for 
 deifying a great teacher is to dwell with super- 
 stitious reverence on the mere letter of his 
 teaching. But the penalty was- one which 
 Christendom gladly paid when it deified Christ. 
 As the Jew banished God to a world beyond 
 Nature in order that from that region — beyond 
 the limits of knowledge, and therefore of 
 criticism — an authoritative message might come 
 i68 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 to him, telling him what to believe and to do, 
 so the Christian made his Lord and Master 
 ascend to the same supernatural Heaven in 
 order that all his recorded sayings might become 
 weighty and conclusive as the words of God 
 Himself. If Christ was divine (in the super- 
 natural sense of the word) every word that 
 he spoke must have been divinely true. That 
 being so, the task of interpreting the spirit of 
 his teaching, a task for which the Graeco-Roman 
 mind was wholly unfit, had become superfluous. 
 The letter was sufficient for man's needs. 
 Each sentence that Christ had uttered was 
 a storehouse of " theological information," the 
 key to which was in the keeping, not of 
 spiritual insight and sympathy, but of logical 
 acumen. And so, out of the words (genuine or 
 spurious), as distinguished from the thoughts of 
 Christ, was built by Greek sophistry, on the 
 basis of Jewish philosophy, what the Grseco- 
 Roman world was in secret need of, — a creed, 
 an authoritative statement of what man was to 
 believe about God. 
 
 By whom was this creed constructed ? By 
 whom was it to be guarded, interpreted, and (if 
 the need should arise) still further elaborated ? 
 169 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Above all, by whom was the believer to be 
 taughtj now that the Law had been abrogate;d, 
 what he was to do ? The Roman genius for 
 organization gave a practical answer to these 
 questions. Though the Law had been abrogated, 
 the desire to be " saved " by obedience remained. 
 The counterpart of obedience is authority. A 
 written Law, interpreted by the labours of 
 scribes, might suffice for the needs of Israel, 
 though even within the narrow limits of the 
 Jewish world the lack of a central authority 
 had been sorely felt. But in the vast and 
 complicated Graeco-Roman world, authority, if 
 it was to be effective, must be thoroughly 
 organized. The Roman capacity for govern- 
 ment, matured and developed by centuries of 
 experience, had carried the organization of 
 secular authority to a high degree of perfection. 
 It was inevitable that Christianity should make 
 Rome its headquarters ; and it was inevitable 
 that, when it had done so, it should give to 
 Christendon the organization which it needed, 
 and which alone could save it from anarchy, and 
 so make it possible for the faithful to enter, 
 without misgiving, the path of obedience 
 and routine. So strong was the genius loci 
 170 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 that, when Rome became the headquarters of 
 Christianity, a well-spring of spiritual authority, 
 abundant and unfailing, gushed forth spon- 
 taneously (one might almost say) on Roman 
 soil. 
 
 To trace the growth of the Christian Church 
 is beside my purpose and beyond my power. 
 What it concerns us to notice is that, by the 
 time the Church had been fully organized, the 
 whole diameter of thought separated Christianity 
 from the mind of Christ. Everything that 
 Christ valued most, with the exception of such 
 sentiments and rules of life as devotion to 
 his person had forced upon the conscience of 
 Christendom, had either been ignored or pro- 
 scribed. Everything that Christ hated most 
 had been accepted, systematized, and authorita- 
 tively taught. All the ideas of the Old Testa- 
 ment, the ideas that had led men to Pharisaism, 
 had been formally adopted. The central idea 
 of Israel's creed, that of salvation by machinery, 
 had won a complete and apparently final triumph 
 over the central idea of Christ's creed, that of 
 salvation by spiritual growth. The false dualism 
 of the Old Testament — its total separation of 
 the supernatural from Nature, of Heaven from 
 171 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 earth, of God from man — had become the basis 
 of the philosophy of Christendom. The funda- 
 mental postulate of dogmatism — that it is 
 possible to know about God as one knows about 
 material things, and that therefore knowledge 
 of God can be received in the form of a series 
 of propositions, instead of being secretly assimi- 
 lated, as light and life, by the growing and 
 expanding soul, — this fatal postulate, with all 
 that it implied, had become the very corner- 
 stone of the edifice of the Church. The ex- 
 ternalism, the ceremonialism, the literalism, 
 the materialism, the pessimism, the false asceti- 
 cism, the exclusiveness, the uncharitableness of 
 the Jews had entered into the life-blood of 
 Christianity. The audacious claim of Israel to 
 be God's chosen people had been matched and 
 even out-rivalled by the claim of the Church to 
 have inherited a complete monopoly of the 
 grace and favour of God. The Messianic idea, 
 an idea which polluted the eschatology of the 
 Church at its very fountain-head, had been 
 welcomed with enthusiasm and applied to the 
 person of Christ. The doctrine of the Incar- 
 nation — a doctrine which, rightly interpreted, 
 is in itself the antidote to all the poison of 
 172 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 Judaism — had been Judaized, set forth in the 
 notation of the supernatural, brought into line 
 with the stories of the Creation and the Fall. 
 Except so far as the personal influence of Christ 
 — the Christ of Gospel story — liberated men 
 from and lifted them above the formal con- 
 ceptions of their creed, the relapse into Judaism 
 was complete. The war that Judaism had waged 
 against freedom — the inward freedom which is 
 the counterpart of spiritual life — had been re- 
 newed by Christianity, and was being carried 
 on with deeper skill, with ampler resources, and 
 on an immeasurably larger scale. If in the 
 sphere of conduct the yoke of the Church was 
 less heavy than the yoke of the Law, in the 
 sphere of belief it was incomparably heavier. 
 Indeed, it is because the Church has always 
 cared more for belief than for conduct, that it 
 has been, and still is, the most implacable enemy 
 of freedom that the world has ever known. 
 To tell men that they are to believe such and 
 such things about God and Nature and Man, 
 that these things are " the Truth," that to 
 question them is to run the risk of spiritual 
 death ; to feed the soul with rations of " doc- 
 trine " which it cannot assimilate, and which it 
 173 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 is not even asked to digest, and to forbid to it 
 all other spiritual food ; — is to starve all those 
 vital faculties and energies — the higher reason, 
 the higher imagination, prophetic insight, poetic 
 emotion — by which, and through which, the 
 spiritual development of mankind is carried on. 
 It is this, and it is more than this. It is to 
 undermine the faith of the soul in its higher 
 self, and therefore in the indwelling spirit of 
 God ; it is to deny it personal access to the 
 one unfailing fountain of life and light. Of the 
 sacramental system of the Church — that elaborate 
 machinery for monopolizing and exploiting the 
 Divine Grace — I need not speak at length. 
 That the Church, as a living organism, should 
 have chosen that way of interposing itself 
 between the soul and God, was as inevitable as 
 that the Law, being a written code, should have 
 taken the path of Pharisaical intolerance in its 
 attempt to reach the same goal. 
 
 If the message of Christ to mankind was a 
 message of spiritual life, the progress of 
 Christendom under the guidance of the Church 
 must have been in the direction of spiritual 
 death. It is true that Christianity has, from 
 the beginning of things, had one good angel, 
 174 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 by whose beneficent influence it has again and 
 again been saved from itself, — the incomparable 
 personality of Christ. But personal influence, 
 however potent it may be, cannot operate 
 effectively except through a sympathetic medium; 
 and as the creed of the Church became more 
 and more antagonistic to the creed of Christ, 
 the response of Christendom to the magnetic 
 charm of the Gospel story became proportion- 
 ately weaker. Great as was the advantage that 
 the early Christian Church possessed in its 
 comparative nearness to the life of Christ on 
 earth, there is reason to believe that, as the 
 religion of the Graeco-Roman world, Chris- 
 tianity would have died of its own inherent 
 corruption — so radically false was its philosophy 
 — had not a fortunate accident * enabled it at once 
 to enlarge its borders and to renew its youth. 
 That accident was the overthrow of the Roman 
 Empire by the semi-barbarous races from the 
 North and East. In Asia and Africa, where 
 there was no strong influx of young-hearted 
 conquerors, Christianity, though it had pro- 
 duced a noble army of saints and martyrs, died 
 
 ^ I am, of course, using the word accident in its primary, not 
 in its secondary sense. 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 them " the Truth " (though both she and they 
 fondly imagined that she did) mattered little. 
 What she did for them was to transmit to 
 them, through a medium which their own 
 childlike faith had helped to clarify, the life- 
 giving influence of Christ's gracious personality; 
 and the natural, trustful obedience which they 
 willingly gave to him and to her (for his sake) 
 was an infinitely better and healthier thing — 
 healthier as a symptom, and healthier in its 
 reaction on the character of the giver — than the 
 artificial obedience of worldly and decadent 
 souls.^ 
 
 But men cannot remain children for ever. 
 As the stress of Nature's expansive forces 
 carries them from childhood towards adoles- 
 cence, the time comes when childlike obedi- 
 ence ceases to be possible, and the choice has 
 
 ' What the Teutonic races did to the Latin Church the 
 Sclavonic did to the Greek. But the life of the Greek Church, 
 when she evangelized the Sclavonic world, had become far more 
 mechanical and unspiritual than that of the Latin Church when 
 the Teutonic races came under her sway. Also, and partly as a 
 result of this, the awakening of the Sclavonic mind came far later 
 than that of the Teutonic. Indeed, it is scarcely an exaggeration 
 to say that the struggle of the Sclavonic races for freedom — 
 spiritual as well as political — has only just begun. 
 178 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 to be made between machinery and life. Six 
 centuries ago, more or less, the Western 
 world began to chafe against its bonds, and 
 a struggle began, — a struggle on the part of 
 the growing soul of "Western Christendom to 
 free itself from the despotism of the Church 
 and (after the Reformation) of the other ex- 
 ponents of dogmatism.' That struggle is still 
 in progress, and the end of it is probably far 
 distant. For many centuries free-thinking — 
 and what is thought if it be not free ? — was 
 prohibited by the Church except within narrow 
 limits prescribed by herself. The expanding 
 Teutonic consciousness fought for freedom on 
 all the planes of thought, and won it on the 
 physical plane. For this there were two reasons: 
 the errors of Church-teaching were more easily 
 exposed on the physical plane than elsewhere ; 
 and the right to lay down the law about physical 
 phenomena was, for obvious reasons, less valued 
 by the Church than the right to dictate to men 
 about spiritual things. On the other planes 
 the victory won for freedom was, on the whole, 
 more nominal than real. The right to profess 
 unorthodox beliefs, without being burned for 
 them, was indeed won by Protestantism after 
 
 179 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 two centuries of bloody strife. But though 
 Protestantism repudiated the authority of Rome 
 and much of her formal teaching, it found it 
 needful to meet the dogmatism of the Roman 
 Church with a counter-dogmatism of its own. 
 It is not to be blamed for this. Men were 
 not yet ripe for spiritual freedom : the iron of 
 Judaism had gone too deep into their souls. 
 That freedom has not yet triumphed on the 
 higher planes of thought is proved by the fact 
 that even in this age, which regards itself with 
 good reason as exceptionally emancipated and 
 enlightened, free-thinking on the planes of 
 moral conduct and religious belief is strongly 
 discountenanced by public opinion ; the word 
 free-thinker being used by the man of average 
 piety and respectability as equivalent to anarchist 
 (on the ethical plane) or to atheist (on the 
 spiritual). 
 
 The consequences of this virtual proscription 
 of " high-thinking " have been disastrous. De- 
 barred — de facto if not dejure — from energizing 
 on the higher planes of thought, the Western 
 mind has energized on the physical plane with 
 extraordinary skill and success. One result of 
 this is that it has got to regard the physical 
 1 80 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 plane, first as the only plane worth exploring, 
 and then as the only plane really existing. In 
 other words, it has begun to lose its way in the 
 " Serbonian Bog " of materialism. " Ortho- 
 doxy " deplores this tendency, for which, how- 
 ever, it is itself in large measure responsible. 
 High-thinking has so long been denounced as 
 impiety that the corresponding organ or organs 
 of the human spirit have become atrophied by 
 disuse. Moreover, the general tendency of all 
 these centuries of dogmatic teaching has been 
 to give a materialistic bias to human thought. 
 The belief, deeply ingrained in the Western 
 mind, and operative even when it is formally 
 repudiated, that the material aspect of Nature is 
 the only aspect, is the exact analogue and 
 perhaps also the lineal descendant of the Jewish 
 belief — inherited and ratified by Christianity — 
 that Nature is godless, soulless, a "body of 
 death." To regard Nature as divorced from 
 God is to disbelieve in the reality, the natural 
 reality, of what is spiritual. So complete is 
 the confusion between the supernatural and 
 the spiritual that, in ceasing to believe in the 
 former, the thinkers of Europe and America 
 are becoming sceptical as to the very existence 
 
 i8i 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 of the latter. It is not only the bewildered 
 priest who cries out that the criticism which 
 discredits the story of the " Virgin Birth " is 
 " robbing him of his God." The enlightened 
 materialist says the same thing in other words. 
 The estrangement, in religious thought, of 
 God from Nature is indeed so thorough and 
 far-reaching, and has gone on for so long, that 
 the power of seeing God in Nature has been 
 largely if not wholly lost. But the loss of this 
 power, though it may send men to the churches 
 and sects for consolation and guidance, and so 
 come to be regarded as the vestibule of faith, 
 is in reality worthier of the name of atheism 
 than any merely formal denial of the existence 
 of God. The man who cannot believe in God 
 — cannot believe that light and love are at the 
 heart of the universe — unless he may also 
 believe in the virgin birth and bodily resurrec- 
 tion of Christ ; the man who cannot discern 
 God's presence for himself, and is therefore 
 dependent on dogmatic teaching for his belief 
 in God's existence ; — is an atheist in the inner 
 recesses of his soul, even though he be the 
 devoutest of saints. 
 
 In this way, and to this extent, Christianity 
 182 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 has estranged Christian thought from Christ. 
 But there is always a practical side to human 
 thought, and it is in the sphere of practical 
 life that the estrangement is most pronounced. 
 Christendom shows its disloyalty to Christ in 
 nothing so much as in the materialization of 
 its ideals, aims, and pursuits. For Christ the 
 drama of the soul's evolution is the real move- 
 ment of Nature. All other movements are 
 subordinate to this, and have their meaning by 
 reference to it. The migration of races ; the 
 struggles between nations ; the rise and fall of 
 empires ; the development of various types of 
 civilization ; the pursuit of political and social, 
 of ethical and religious ideals ; the quest of 
 wealth, of position, of influence, of fame ; the 
 exploits of warriors and rulers ; the enterprises 
 of adventurous men ; the labours of students 
 and investigators ; the achievements of poets 
 and artists ; the toils and trials of daily life ; 
 " the trivial round, the common task ; " — these 
 things, which seem to the superficial observer 
 to constitute the whole panorama of man's 
 existence, are in reality mere by-products of his 
 creative energy, mere accessories of his life. 
 For Christendom the drama of soul-life is of 
 183 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 very small importance. By most men it is 
 wholly ignored. With our eyes riveted on the 
 ever-changing by-play, we are blind to what is 
 really being enacted, — the evolution of the spirit 
 of man. Or, if we do catch a fleeting glimpse 
 of that world-wide movement, we do our best 
 to forget what we have seen. Indeed, it is 
 scarcely an exaggeration to say that we 
 Christians value our religion chiefly because it 
 •enables us to forget that the inward drama is 
 the main business of life. The mystery of the 
 soul's destiny is imperious in the demands that 
 it makes upon us, however intermittent these 
 may be. The average man says to Religion, 
 " Solve this mystery for me (charging me a 
 reasonable price for your services), and leave me 
 free to give my whole mind to secular pursuits." 
 In our own day the materialization of human 
 life — both national and individual — seems to be 
 making rapid progress. The national ideal is 
 to open up, by war or diplomacy, new markets 
 for trade. The ideal of the average man is to 
 make money, and to enjoy all the pleasures that 
 money can buy. To explore the physical 
 secrets of Nature, to extend man's mastery over 
 her material forces, to develop the natural 
 184 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 resources of the earth, is for the moment the 
 highest and most disinterested of human 
 aims. 
 
 That all this should come to pass was in- 
 evitable. The exclusion of the Western mind 
 from the higher planes of thought caused it, as 
 we have seen, when once it had won complete 
 freedom on the physical plane, to devote itself 
 to the exploration of that plane with great 
 energy and with ever-increasing skill and 
 success. But Physical Science has a practical 
 side to it. Each new discovery prepares the 
 way for new inventions and new industries. 
 The more we know about the physical world the 
 more use we are able to make of it. Indus- 
 trialism and commercialism march in the wake 
 of science, and exploit the lands which scientific 
 research has discovered and won. In an age 
 like ours, in which discovery follows discovery 
 with startling rapidity, industrialism and com- 
 mercialism make feverish progress, and, as a 
 necessary consequence of this, the power of 
 money and the value which public opinion 
 attaches to money become enormously enhanced. 
 
 There is another point of view from which 
 the descent of the human spirit into practical 
 185 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 materialism is seen to be due, In part at least, 
 to Christianity having lost touch with the mind 
 of Christ. Christianity, as a religion which 
 claimed universal dominion, carried on the work 
 which Republican and Imperial Rome had more 
 than half completed, — the work of delivering 
 men from communal pressure, from the rigid 
 and exacting despotism (at once religious, ethical, 
 and social) of the family, the clan, and the city. 
 Nay, there were occasions when, as the cult of 
 the one and only God, Christianity claimed the 
 right to absolve men from allegiance to the 
 State as such. It thus helped to prepare the way 
 for the ri^me of social individualism, the rigime 
 under which — with the derivative rigime of 
 competitive industrialism — we are at present 
 living. Now there is a serious and obvious 
 danger that, if men are given social freedom 
 before they are ripe for spiritual freedom, their 
 innate selfishness — unrestrained by communal 
 pressure and untransfigured by spiritual growth 
 — will tend to " make human life a hell." And 
 so the religion which has on the one hand 
 fostered social individualism, and on the other 
 hand done all that lay in its power to suppress 
 spiritual freedom, and therefore to arrest 
 i86 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 spiritual growth, must be held to have betrayed 
 its trust. The horrors and miseries of com- 
 petitive industrialism are the products of many 
 causes. One of these, and not the least potent, 
 is that man's ambition, like his imaginative 
 reason, though thwarted by official Christianity 
 in all its spiritual enterprises, has been left free, 
 and has even been indirectly encouraged, to 
 pursue material ends. 
 
 There is yet another reason for the pro- 
 gressive materialization of the ideals of 
 Christendom. The belief that the material 
 aspect of Nature is the only aspect has its 
 counterpart in the belief that the earthly life of 
 the sovJ is the only life. This belief, though 
 formally discountenanced by Christianity, flour- 
 ishes with extraordinary vigour in the soil of 
 Christian thought. For in this, as in other 
 matters, Christianity has followed the lead of 
 Israel rather than of Christ. The reticence 
 of Christ with regard to the destiny of the soul 
 after death is remarkable, and is doubdess due 
 to his having despaired of communicating to 
 minds obsessed with the materialism of the 
 Messianic dream his own faith in the reality 
 and eternity of the soul. But the argument 
 
 187 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 which he used to confute the enlightened and 
 sceptical Sadducees, who had come to believe 
 that death is the end of life, shows how 
 very far he was from accepting the current 
 belief in the resurrection of the dead. God is 
 the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob ; 
 and He is the God of the living, not of the 
 dead. Therefore Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob 
 are living, and have never really died. In 
 other words, death is an illusion. That which 
 is near and dear to God — the soul, the true self 
 — shares in the eternity of the divine source of 
 its life. 
 
 " All that is, at all, 
 Lasts ever past recall ; 
 Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure : 
 What entered into thee, 
 That was, is, and shall be : " 
 
 For Christ, then, immortality comes in the 
 order — the real order — of Nature. The soul 
 goes on living in virtue of its own inherent 
 momentum, in virtue of its having come from 
 God, who draws back to Himself by the divine 
 might of love what He sends forth from 
 Himself by the divine energy of will. 
 
 i88 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 Christianity, on the other hand, borrowed 
 from Judaism its unhappy Messianic belief in 
 the resurrection of the body, — a belief which at 
 once materializes and de-naturalizes (for the 
 raising of the dead body is obviously a miracle) 
 the idea of immortality. The general tendency 
 of Christian teaching has been to foster the 
 belief that men are immortal, not by grace of 
 Nature, but by grace of the supernatural, the 
 miracle-working God. What wonder, then, 
 that men who are beginning to disbelieve in 
 miracles should turn away from the hypothesis 
 of survival as from something which is not 
 merely unproved and unprovable, but also 
 incredible on (t priori grounds ? Then, again, 
 the deplorable eschatology of Christendom ; — its 
 cruel and irrational assumption that a single 
 brief earth-life can determine for all eternity 
 the destiny of the departed spirit ; its funda- 
 mental ignorance of Nature's paramount law, 
 — that of spiritual evolution ; the fatal dualism 
 (inherited from Israel) which makes it offer us 
 our choice in the after-life between a quasi- 
 material Hell and a quasi-material Heaven, 
 between immeasurable misery and immeasurable 
 ennui ; — all this has tended to make men 
 189 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 dismiss the idea of immortality from their 
 minds as unworthy of serious attention, and 
 has confirmed them in the belief which the 
 materialistic bias of their thought had already 
 engendered, that beyond the grave there is 
 nothing for man — 
 
 " Only the sleep eternal 
 In an eternal night." 
 
 In conclusion. When one conipares the 
 world as it now presents itself to human 
 thought with the world as it has revealed itself, 
 again and again, in the vision of the Poet or 
 the dream of the Sage, one cannot but feel that 
 an immense shrinkage has taken place in man's 
 conception of reality, a shrinkage ' which has 
 narrowed the Universe — the totality of things 
 — down to a single aspect of its being, to a 
 single plane of existence, and by a parallel 
 process contracted the eternity of the soul to 
 the petty duration of a single earth-life ; which 
 has given us, as the limit of man's mental 
 effort, the freezing negations of materialism 
 
 ' On the physical plane the expansion in the range of man's 
 mental vision has been immense. But this gain is far more 
 than outweighed by the growing tendency to regard the physical 
 plane as the only plane. 
 
 190 
 
Apparent Failure 
 
 instead of the " flaming walls " of imaginative 
 thought, and, as the limit of man's moral effort, 
 the sordid ends and aims of commercialism in- 
 stead of the ideal of spiritual perfection which 
 discloses itself to the aspiring soul. And this 
 shrinkage in man's conception of reality is 
 largely due to his having accepted as divinely 
 inspired the narrow, rigid, unimaginative philo- 
 sophy of Israel, and in particular to his having, 
 in all seriousness, identified the God of Israel 
 with the God of the Universe.^ 
 
 It is to this pass that Christianity — the 
 Christianity of the theologians — ^has brought 
 Christendom. 
 
 1 The cramping effect on the human mind of the Judaic 
 assumptions of Christian " orthodoxy " — the assumption that 
 the God of Israel is the God of the Universe, that the Bible is 
 the "Word of God," that Christ is "the only-begotten Son of 
 God," that this life on earth is the only temporal life, and so 
 forth — is difficult for us to estimate, for the reason that we are 
 still, unhappily, under its baneful influence. The injury done to 
 the imaginative thought of the West by Christendom's meek 
 acceptance of those anti-Christian conceptions makes itself felt 
 on every plane of man's mental activity, and tends to narrow the 
 outlook of even the most enlightened and most emancipated of 
 minds. Nay, the very sceptic, who repudiates with scorn the 
 teaching of official Christianity, suffers both in the quality of his 
 scepticism and in the scope of his counter-faith from the secret 
 pressure of the soul-constricting doctrines which he has con- 
 sciously disowned. 
 
 191 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 I know of nothing in history more tragic 
 or more pathetic than the betrayal of Christ — 
 the open renunciation of all the " sovereign 
 dogmas " of his creed — by Christendom as 
 such, and more especially by those earnest and 
 devout Christians who profess to regulate their 
 lives by his precepts, and are ready to die for 
 his cause. But what deepens the gloom of 
 the tragedy and intensifies its pathos is that 
 the central figure in the supernatural drama 
 which Judaism and Christian " orthodoxy " 
 have combined to construct, and by using 
 which as the fulcrum of its spiritual influence 
 Christianity has undermined the philosophy of 
 Christ, stultified his teaching, and re-imposed 
 upon the human mind the very conceptions 
 from which Christ had lived and died to deliver 
 it, — is the figure of Christ himself. 
 
 192 
 
Chapter VII — Final Triumph 
 
 IT is possible, I think, that Christ, as he 
 hung upon the cross, looked far into the 
 future and saw that all these things would 
 happen ; saw that the soul-redeeming 
 ideas which he had championed would be 
 trampled underfoot by his professed disciples ; 
 saw that the soul-destroying system of thought 
 from which he had striven to emancipate our 
 minds would be re-established among men, 
 re-established on a wider and firmer basis, and 
 as a sterner and more stringent despotism — 
 in Ms name. It is possible, I think, that some 
 such flash of terrible prescience troubled for a 
 moment the serenity of his inmost soul, and 
 wrung from him in his anguish the mysterious 
 cry, " My God, My God, why hast thou for- 
 saken me ? " But insight is the only source of 
 foresight ; and if Christ's insight enabled him 
 to see so far into the future as to forecast the 
 abandonment and proscription of his creed by 
 those who hailed him as their Lord and Master, 
 it enabled him, I feel sure, to see further than 
 1,93 o 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 this, — to see, beyond the gloom of apparent 
 failure, the dawning light of final triumph. 
 He had always believed in his own ideas, not 
 merely with the faith of the enthusiastic devotee, 
 but also with an imperturbable serenity of con- 
 viction which far transcended the utmost limits 
 of enthusiastic devotion. If on the cross that 
 marvellous faith faltered for an instant, we may 
 be sure that it speedily regained its serenity, 
 and with its serenity its unconquerable force. 
 
 Let that be as it may. One thing at least 
 is clear, that if Christ did see light in the 
 distant future, it was no mirage of a dying 
 brain that met his gaze, but the glow of a great 
 dawn. The glow of that dawn is beginning to 
 be visible now. We who are able to pass in 
 review the centuries that have come and gone 
 since Christ died, can see that things are work- 
 ing for the emergence of his ideas, and for 
 their eventual triumph. We have seen that 
 Christianity had two good angels in the past, — 
 the magnetic personality of Christ and the 
 mental and spiritual youthfulness of the Teu- 
 tonic and Sclavonic races. These good angels 
 still watch over it, and it may safely be pre- 
 dicted that they will continue to protect it, in 
 194 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 the sense of saving it from itself, and that in 
 the end they will transform it into the genuine 
 creed of Christ. The Teutonic and Sclavonic 
 struggle for freedom — a struggle which is a 
 vital aspect of the soul's spontaneous effort 
 to grow, and as such is characteristic of the 
 adolescence of every vigorous race — ^will be 
 waged on higher planes of thought than the 
 physical, and will at last be crowned by the 
 acquisition of that spiritual freedom which 
 Christ set before men as an ideal ; and while 
 this movement is taking place, the ideas which 
 Christ advocated will emerge froi^ the seed and 
 the soil in which they have long lain hidden, 
 — from the personal influence of the historic 
 Christ. 
 
 Owing to free-thought having been proscribed 
 on every plane but the physical, the Western 
 mind — in its progressive search for freedom — 
 will have to work its way from the physical 
 plane upwards. That circumstances are now 
 favourable for the initiation of such an upward 
 movement can scarcely be doubted. The 
 present generation may seem to be sunk deep 
 in materialism ; but there are indications that the 
 Western mind is beginning, if not to wake from 
 
 195 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 its slumber, at least to become aware that it is 
 moving in a dream. The very trend of its more 
 recent scientific discoveries is to emancipate it 
 from the assumption which has long fettered 
 its higher energies, the assumption that things 
 are in themselves what they seem to be to 
 our bodily senses.* The solidity, the concrete 
 reality, the self-sufficiency of the outward world 
 are beginning, as Science contemplates them 
 with her steady and penetrative gaze, to pass 
 slowly away. That crude atomism, which 
 has long been the key to the fortress of 
 materialistic thought, is already an exploded 
 theory. Matter itself is melting before our 
 eyes into mysterious and impalpable forces, 
 which seem to be scarcely more substantial 
 
 I An entirely baseless assumption. " Our sensory perception " 
 (as Science herself reminds us) "is limited to five modes, or 
 channels, each of these embracing only a small part of an in&iite 
 scale of vibrating motions." It is to the widespread belief in the 
 fundamental reality of physical matter, and of it alone, that the 
 name materialism properly belongs. The higher materialism 
 vfhich, while admitting that matter may exist in forms im- 
 measurably subtler than that which we call physical, contends 
 that spirit and matter are the face and obverse of the same 
 reality, has much to say for itself, and may well develop, under 
 the stress of its own inherent momentum, into a sane idealism, 
 far removed from the false dualism and the equally false 
 monism of popular thought. 
 
 196 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 in their texture than our own feelings and 
 thoughts. By degrees, as we begin to realize 
 that perceptibility by the bodily senses is not 
 of the essence of matter, the idea that the 
 physical plane of existence is not the only 
 plane, and that there may perhaps be other 
 and higher planes of quasi-objective being, 
 will begin to dawn upon our minds. With 
 the advent of this luminous idea, a gradual 
 but potentially infinite expansion will take place 
 in our conception of the inner life of man. 
 For as it is conceivable that in the quasi- 
 objective world there is plane behind and 
 within and beyond plane, so it is conceivable 
 that in the inner life there is self behind and 
 within and beyond self, and that, though these 
 hidden selves are at present submerged in the 
 darkness of the " buried life," the evolution of 
 the human spirit will gradually call them forth 
 into the light of conscious activity and conscious 
 thought. "When this conception has become 
 familiar to the human mind, the ideas that 
 are implicit in it will begin to make their 
 presence felt. We shall begin to dream, not 
 without reason and not without hope, of new 
 powers in man, of new forces in Nature, of 
 197 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 new perceptive faculties, of new developments 
 of reason, of new orders of phenomena, of 
 new sciences, of new ideals and new standards 
 of truth. I can do no more than indicate the 
 marvellous vista which Physical Science, as the 
 reward of its loyalty to its own conception of 
 truth, is being allowed to open up to imagina- 
 tive thought. In the light of these dawning 
 ideas, the rigid and gloomy philosophy which 
 Christian orthodoxy inherited from Judaism 
 will become so utterly discredited that there 
 will be no need for it to be formally disproved. 
 The "Western mind, forgetting that it was once 
 in bondage to those barren dogmas, will turn 
 away from them, not with disgust or conte'mpt, 
 but with the serenity of complete indifference, 
 and pursue its upward way. For there is one 
 lesson which its scientific researches on the 
 physical plane will have taught it, and which 
 it will carry with it as it ascends to higher 
 and wider spheres of work. Its long training 
 in a field in which verification of hypotheses is 
 both possible and necessary will make it im- 
 patient of all dogmatism which has not a 
 genuinely scientific basis, and will lead it, 
 when it has to deal with matters which are 
 198 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 at present beyond the reach of Science, to 
 rely for inspiration and guidance on high 
 imagination, on prophetic insight, on spiritual 
 emotion, on the " common sense " of the soul, 
 on all those faculties which find expression for 
 themselves in poetryy rather than on a pseudo- 
 science which mistakes words for realities, and 
 esteems the dead logic of the syllogism above 
 the living logic of spiritual growth. 
 
 "When these emancipative influences have had 
 time to do their work, the conditions wUl be 
 favourable for the ideas that ruled Christ's mind 
 to emerge from the obscurity to which the 
 providence of Nature had consigned them, and 
 to make a direct appeal to human thought. 
 During the ages of mental expansion to which 
 I have looked forward, the master idea of 
 Christ's philosophy will be met and welcomed 
 by the master idea of modern science. The 
 idea of evolution, re-discovered and elaborated 
 by Physical Science, will gradually ascend to 
 higher planes of existence, and will at last be 
 applied to the world to which it essentially 
 belongs, — to the world of the soul's inner life. 
 As the application of the idea becomes more 
 
 199 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 and more spiritual, the mind of Christendom 
 (if the West still bears that name) will come 
 nearer and nearer to the mind of Christ ; for 
 the idea of spiritual evolution, of soul-growth, 
 was in very truth the paramount idea — at once 
 supreme and central — of his esoteric creed. In 
 this, as in other matters, Christ showed that he 
 was a prophet, in the higher sense of that 
 much-abused word. The prophet is one whose 
 insight into things is so true and deep that it 
 brings him near to their essential and eternal 
 principles, with the result that he is able to 
 keep open his communications with the remotest 
 future, and that what he says — in his seasons of 
 inspiration — is said for all time. In this sense 
 of the word Christ was the greatest of all 
 prophets ; and he showed his prophetic power 
 in nothing so much as in this, that he not 
 merely anticipated the great architectonic idea 
 which the present generation regards as 
 peculiarly its own, but went deeper into its 
 essence than any modern thinker has yet 
 attempted to do. For whereas modern 
 thought, though familiar with the general 
 idea of evolution, can form no conception 
 of what is really being evolved, Christ saw 
 200 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 that the evolution of the soul is the central 
 movement of Nature, and constitutes the in- 
 most meaning of existence, the drama of 
 soul-life — and therefore of soul-growth — being 
 for him (as I have already suggested) the only 
 drama that is really being enacted on the stage 
 of the Universe. Science, as it ascends from 
 the physical world towards higher planes, will 
 gradually spiritualize its view of evolution, and 
 will at last convince itself that the final out- 
 come of evolution is not "individualism," or 
 " communism," or any other social by-product 
 of the soul's expansive energy, but the soul 
 itself, the soul ripened and expanded till its 
 conscious life has become divine. "When 
 Science has learned this truth, it will find 
 itself face to face with the long-forgotten 
 creed of Christ. 
 
 Great ideas, such as those which ruled Christ's 
 mind, are in the nature of things imperishable. 
 Systems come and go. Theories change and 
 pass. But a living idea is for ever. Proscribed 
 in one epoch, forgotten in another, it lives on 
 through aeons of apparent sterility, till at last, 
 in the *• fulness of time," the winter of its 
 oblivion and neglect comes to an end, and its 
 
 20I 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 shoots push forth into the light of conscious 
 thought. When the time comes for Christ's 
 paramount ideas to assert themselves and win 
 acceptance, men will ask in what secret hiding- 
 place has their "buried life" been carried on 
 through all the centuries that have passed since 
 Christ died. To this question there will be 
 two answers. The ideas for which Christ lived 
 and died have lain hidden, first, in the per- 
 sonality of the historic Christ, and then, through 
 the influence of that personality, in the hearts 
 of men. Of the debt which Christendom owes 
 to the personality of Christ — the Christ of 
 Gospfel story — I need not attempt to speak. 
 Suffice it to say that from highest to lowest, 
 from the most heroic to the most homely, all 
 the good desires and good deeds of Christian 
 men and women have been due (so far as 
 their origin has been distinctively Christian) to 
 the personal influence of the historic Christ, — 
 in other words, to affection for and trust in 
 the friend and guide and master whom the 
 Gospel stories taught men, and still teach men, 
 to know and love. It is true that in many 
 cases this personal influence has been transmitted 
 (to its own great detriment) through the medium 
 202 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 of a theory or system of thought ; but though 
 the theory or the system has been consciously 
 accepted as " the Truth," it is not from it, but 
 from the influences which it has been the 
 means of transmitting, that the inspiration, the 
 magnetic force has come. Now the personality 
 of a man is always the embodiment of his 
 ideas ; and it therefore follows that in holding 
 intercourse, through the medium of love and 
 trust, with Christ's personality, men have held 
 intercourse, dimly and gropingly, with the ideas 
 which that personality subconsciously expressed. 
 But the penalty that Christendom has paid 
 for ignoring Christ's ideas in the region of con- 
 scious thought is that its intercourse with his 
 personality has been unduly one-sided, and 
 therefore far less illuminating and far less health- 
 giving than it might otherwise have been. The 
 speculative, imaginative side of a man is a part, 
 and in some respects the highest part, of the 
 man's inner being ; and it is at best but a 
 maimed, truncated personality to which one has 
 access so long as the ideas of the • man can 
 neither attract one's sympathy nor influence 
 one's thought. Now to hold one-sided inter- 
 course with Christ, whatever form that 
 203 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 intercourse may take, is to miss what is most 
 vital and essential in his character ; for the most 
 distinctive feature of his personality is its many- 
 sidedness, its having no one feature which 
 dwarfed or overshadowed the rest. The writers 
 of the Gospels failed, as we have seen, to do 
 justice to Christ's ideas, with which, indeed, 
 they had no sympathy ; but, in spite of them- 
 selves, they have done some measure of justice 
 to his character. For the sayings and incidents 
 which they have recorded, and allowed to tell 
 their own story, leave on us the impression of 
 a man of extraordinary range and flexibility of 
 character ; of one who combined the natural- 
 ness and all-embracing sympathy of a Whitman 
 with the high-souled purity of a Fra Angelico, — 
 the radiant, love-begotten joyfulness of a Francis 
 with the intense inwardness of a Hindoo saint ; 
 of one in whom the balance between sympathy 
 and aspiration was more perfectly maintained 
 than in any other man whom history has made 
 known to us. The eTj-ieuceia, or " sweet reason- 
 ableness " of Christ, to which one of the most 
 gifted of modern critics has called our attention, 
 pervaded all the strata of his being, and is in 
 a sense the secret of his many-sidedness, for 
 204 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 it enabled each of the noble qualities of his 
 nature to reach its maximum of development 
 without interfering in any way with the develop- 
 ment of any of the others, — each in turn being 
 so gracious (one might almost say) that, however 
 vigorous might be its own growth, it could not 
 allow itself to oyershadow its neighbours or 
 otherwise aggrandize itself at their expense. It 
 is owing to the all-pervading presence of this 
 subtle virtue that in Christ, alone among men, 
 we have faith without dogmatism, enthusiasm 
 without fanaticism, strength without violence, 
 idealism without visionariness, naturalness with- 
 out materialism, freedom without license, self- 
 sacrifice without asceticism,- purity without 
 austerity, saintliness without morbidity, a light 
 which was too strong to dazzle, a fire which was 
 too intense to flame. The inward harmony of 
 his nature was, in fine, perfect : the various 
 tendencies held each other in check, and yet 
 all energized freely, happily, and fully. But the 
 quality which made this inward harmony pos- 
 sible, the " sweet reasonableness " which, as we 
 have seen, descended through all the strata of 
 his being — showing itself in one as serenity of 
 soul, in another as lofty common sense — was 
 205 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 itself an outflow from the purest of all fountains, 
 from the springs of imaginative thought. It 
 was Christ's grand idea that Nature in general, 
 and human nature in particular, is potentially- 
 divine ; it was this idea embodying itself, as 
 it were, in his personality, which made that 
 personality so fundamentally charitable, and 
 therefore so sympathetic, so many-sided, so 
 harmonious, so " sweetly reasonable," so trans- 
 cendently serene. It follows that the man who 
 cannot assimilate that central idea cannot really 
 converse with Christ. The quality which gave 
 tone and character to all the other qualities, the 
 spiritual atmosphere of Christ's personality, is 
 hidden from him, and the qualities that he can 
 see — the innocence of the helpless Babe, the 
 meekness, the patience, the self-sacrifice of the 
 Thorn-crowned Man — are seen amiss, owing to 
 their not being seen in their true proportions 
 and their true light. The Babe and the Thorn- 
 crowned Man, much as they have done for 
 Humanity, have by no means counter-balanced 
 the demoralizing influence of the materialistic 
 ideas which Christendom borrowed from Israel 
 when it rejected (all unconsciously) the spiritual 
 ideas of Christ. 
 
 206 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 But however inadequate and one-sided has 
 been the intercourse which we Christians have 
 held with the personality of Christ, the fact 
 remains that we have been deeply influenced by 
 it, and that through its medium the germs of 
 Christ's ideas have found their way into our 
 hearts. When our thoughts, pursuing their 
 own independent path, have brought us face to 
 face with Christ's dominant ideas, the germs 
 which are slumbering in our hearts will begin 
 to evolve their own hidden life. Then a great 
 and salutary change will come over our relations 
 to Christ. For as we become able to commune, 
 more or less consciously, with his mind, our 
 subconscious intercourse with his personality 
 will become clearer, freer, wider, more con- 
 sistent, and more harmonious ; and this, again, 
 will react upon our intercourse with his mind, 
 making it more comprehensive, more subtle, 
 and more sympathetic than before. 
 
 What can we of the present generation do to 
 hasten the coming of that happier day ? One 
 thing, at least. We can lift from the face of 
 Christ the mask of supernatural divinity with 
 which theology has invested it. To believe 
 207 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 that Christ is supernaturally divine is to assume 
 by implication that every word which he spoke 
 was divinely true. This assumption necessarily 
 diverts our attention from the spirit to the letter 
 of Christ's teaching — the sympathetic interpre- 
 tation of the former being, for obvious reasons, 
 incomparably more difficult than the quasi- 
 logical treatment of the latter — and so makes it 
 impossible for us to hold conscious intercourse 
 with his mind. The unhappy belief that the 
 words of Christ, taken sentence by sentence, 
 are a storehouse of " theological information," 
 instead of being, in their general tenour, a 
 perennial source of spiritual inspiration and 
 guidance, has interposed itself as an impene- 
 trable barrier between the thought of Christ- 
 endom and the thought of Christ. 
 
 Let us go back a little, and see how this 
 belief came to establish itself among us and 
 obsess our minds. 
 
 The Western world owes to Israel one incal- 
 culable debt. He stamped on its thought and 
 conscience the grand idea that to subordinate 
 the individual to the Universal Will is the 
 first duty of man. A truly grand idea ; but 
 how miserably did Israel himself interpret it ! 
 208 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 We shall never measure to the full the harm 
 that Israel has done to the thought and conduct 
 of the "West by his audacious assumption that 
 the Universal Will found adequate expression — 
 at any rate so far as it bore on human life — in 
 the Law of Moses. Christ came into the world 
 to redress this wrong, to call us back to the 
 high-road into which Israel had led us, and 
 from which he had then led us astray. Christ 
 taught us to identify the Universal Will with 
 the general course of Nature — not of physical 
 Nature only, though that, too, is within its limits 
 divine — but of Nature on all its planes and in 
 all its powers and dimensions. He taught us 
 this ; and he taught us, more especially, that 
 what is real and central in human nature is the 
 expression of the Divine Will ; that the Law 
 of God — the All-Father — is written in promise 
 and potency in man's heart ; that to find the 
 true self and follow its guidance is both to obey 
 the voice of God and to make that voice our 
 own. Christ taught us these things, and we 
 felt that he taught with authority. What 
 response did we make to his teaching ? In the 
 doctrine of the Incarnation — the cardinal 
 doctrine of Christian theology — the current of 
 209 P 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 Western thought touched for a moment the 
 truth of things, as Christ had revealed it, 
 touched it, lingered near it, eddied round it, — 
 and then swept far away from it. What Israel 
 did to the idea of submission to the Divine 
 Will, Christendom did to the idea of the im- 
 manence of the Divine Will in Nature. In 
 each case a great spiritual idea was localized, 
 particularized, materialized, de-naturalized, 
 degraded, in response to the average man's 
 instinctive requirements ; degraded to the 
 level of the vulgarity of his thought, the 
 timidity of his desire, and the infirmity of 
 his will. 
 
 So long as it is allowed to remain in the 
 atmosphere of poetic thought and feeling,, the 
 idea of the Incarnation (with the derivative 
 idea of the indwelling Spirit) thrills and glows 
 with spiritual truth, being, in fact, but one 
 aspect of Christ's master idea that God is the 
 life and soul of Nature. That man has seen 
 Divinity in Christ ; that generation after gene- 
 ration has looked into those eyes of transparent 
 purity and radiant love, and has felt that they 
 were and are divine ; — is an argument to which, 
 if it were advanced with a due sense of its 
 
 2IO 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 limitations, there would be no effective reply. 
 For, has man's insight deceived him ? Is his 
 feeling false to fact ? We cannot answer these 
 questions. We cannot weigh things without 
 scales, or measure them without a rule. The 
 fact, the phenomenon of man's faith in Christ, 
 is a legitimate starting-point, and one from 
 which insight and imaginatiori might travel far 
 in the direction of a just conception of God 
 and Man. But the argument is one which, 
 for obvious reasons, theology is afraid to 
 employ. To admit that man, the natural man, 
 is able to discern Divinity when he sees it ; to 
 admit that purity and love, through whatever 
 eyes they may glow, are " notes " of the 
 Divine ; — were to undermine the very founda- 
 tions of supernaturalism. And so theology 
 has withdrawn the idea from the realm of 
 poetry, and has turned its wisdom into foolish- 
 ness by affiliating it to the aridly prosaic 
 philosophy of Israel, and enshrouding it in a 
 fog of pseudo-scientific thoughts and words. 
 The "great dilemma" — that Christ was either 
 an impostor or the "Only begotten Son of 
 God" — with which theologians try to disarm 
 their opponents, is one of the fruits of that 
 
 211 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 fatal dualism which has riven the world into 
 Nature and the Supernatural. As a serious 
 argument it is not worth discussing, for it 
 obviously "begs" all the questions which are 
 really (though not ostensibly) in dispute ; in 
 other words, it bases itself on assumptions 
 which no one who was not already " orthodox " 
 would dream of granting. It is possible for 
 us to determine whether the primrose does 
 or does not belong to the order of Rosacea ; 
 for we know that the Rosacea possess certain 
 typical characteristics, and we can easily see 
 whether the primrose possesses these or not. 
 In other words, we can apply the general idea 
 of the RosacecB to the specific case of the 
 primrose. But we cannot deal similarly with 
 God and Christ. We cannot apply the general 
 idea of Deity to the specific case of Christ's 
 personality ; for, apart from our inability to 
 penetrate the depths of Christ's inner life, it 
 is obvious that we do not know — that, in 
 the nature of things, we can never hope to 
 know — what are the typical characteristics 
 of God. Dilemmas, in the logical sense 
 of the word, are unknown in the region of 
 poetic truth. To disconnect this or that 
 
 211 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 saying of a poet-prophet from the general 
 tenor of his teaching, to limit it when thus 
 isolated to one only of its many meanings, 
 and on the basis of this de-vitalized form of 
 words to construct an elaborate system of 
 quasi-philosophical thought, is surely the most 
 uncritical and unsympathetic of all attempts 
 to interpret a great man's mind. The dream 
 of arriving at ideal truth by such a method 
 is of all dreams the vainest. One might as 
 well try to convert a gleam of sunshine into 
 a formula, or to build a syllogism on the sweep 
 of the winds or the roll of the sea. 
 
 But the real, the final reason why the idea 
 of the Incarnation has been de-naturalized and 
 de-spiritualized by the interpreters of popular 
 thought, is that the demand which the idea 
 makes upon the soul that accepts it is one to 
 which the average man is too timid and too 
 indolent to respond. Theology teaches us that 
 Christ bore the burden of our sins for us when 
 he hung upon the cross, and that we are ever 
 adding, retrospectively, to the weight of guilt 
 that oppressed him. In this, as in most 
 matters, theology has led us astray. The 
 real burden which we Christians have laid, and 
 213 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 still lay, upon Christ, is not the burden of our 
 sins, but of our potential divinity. Christ 
 came into the world to tell us that we are all 
 sons of the all-loving Father, and therefore of 
 the same royal line as God Himself. The 
 response of Christendom to this message has 
 been the renunciation in favour of Christ and 
 on behalf of Humanity of man's title to the 
 divine throne. "Ye are children of God," 
 said Christ. "Bear yourselves accordingly. 
 Become what ye are — divine." " We are men, 
 and intend to remain men," is the reply which 
 those who call themselves Christians have ever 
 given to this summons from on high. " You 
 and you only are divine. Do for us what we 
 cannot and will not do for ourselves. Take 
 our sins away from us ; open the door of 
 Heaven to us, and save us, in spite of ourselves, 
 from without^'' 
 
 The supernatural world is doomed. The 
 floods have risen and are already beating 
 against it. Inward, outward, from deep to 
 deep, from height to height, from plane, to 
 plane, from world to world, Nature expands 
 unceasingly before our eyes ; and we need not 
 be gifted with prophetic vision to see that, 
 214 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 sooner or later, her limits will become com- 
 mensurate with those of the Universe. There 
 was a time when every operation of Nature was 
 attributed to the direct action of a supernatural 
 deity .^ Beliefs of this order belong to the 
 remote past, and the modern votary of the 
 Supernatural can afford to smile at them. But 
 the ground on which he himself stands is 
 crumbling beneath his feet. There are many 
 phenomena — earthquakes, eruptions, storms, 
 floods, droughts, famines, pestilences, diseases, 
 and the like — which were ascribed, even in, 
 recent years, to supernatural agency, but which 
 are now admitted to come under the control of 
 Nature's laws. To this progressive extension 
 of the frontiers of Nature and progressive reces- 
 sion of the frontiers of the Supernatural, there 
 is no imaginable limit. Like an enchanter's 
 palace, like the cloud-mountains of a summer 
 
 I It may well be that there are mighty spiritual beings in 
 existence, as much in advance of us, in the present stage of our 
 development, as we are of the least and lowliest of the " beasts 
 that perish ; " and it may well be that these august personalities 
 play a vital part, undreamed of and unimaginable by us, in the 
 direction of the af&irs of the Universe. But they do so (we 
 may rest assured) as children of Nature ; and the laws that they 
 administer and obey are to the full as natural as those under 
 which we live. 
 
 215 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 day, the whole supernatural world is fading 
 away before our eyes into the " formless void " 
 of non-existence. And as it is with Nature — 
 the macrocosm — so it is with that which is " at 
 once its witness and its counterpart," the being 
 of man. We are at last beginning to realize 
 that the range of human nature is illimitable, 
 that the depths of the " buried life " are un- 
 fathomable, that the possibilities of man's 
 development are infinite. Nor will the expan- 
 sion of Nature in the life of man carry with it 
 any change in her identity. The process of 
 growth, far from making the thing that grows 
 unworthy of the name that it bears, does but 
 bring it nearer to its true self, to what it really 
 is. If it is Nature that makes us hunger and 
 thirst after meat and drink, it is Nature also — 
 a higher development of Nature, and as such 
 more worthy of the name — that makes us hunger 
 and thirst after righteousness, that inspires the 
 Poet and the Prophet, that gives high courage to 
 the Hero, and singleness of heart to the Saint. 
 If this is not so, one can but ask whereabouts 
 in man's complex nature is the " great gulf 
 fixed " which separates Nature from the Super- 
 natural. 
 
 216 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 There are two ways, and two only, by which 
 man may hope to possess himself of the inmost 
 truth of things. He may wait for a message to 
 come to him from beyond the limits of Nature. 
 He has waited long for such a message, but to 
 no purpose ; for every sound that seems to 
 come to him from the other world is really the 
 echo of his own cry for help and guidance. Or 
 he may strive to penetrate the deeper secrets 
 of Nature by the use of those higher faculties — 
 some awake and active, others as yet latent and 
 quiescent — ^which are truly divine because they 
 are essentially human. The hour is approaching 
 when he will realize, once and for all, that 
 the " truth of things " is at the heart of Nature, 
 and is therefore to be won, not by passive 
 expectation, not by indolent submission to self- 
 constituted authority, but by the stress of 
 spiritual effort, by living up to truth's high 
 ideal, by secretly assimilating its subde essence, 
 by growing into oneness with its hidden life, — 
 for the "truth of things" is God Himself. 
 When that "great day" comes, Christ, the 
 thinker and the prophet, will have entered 
 into possession of his Kingdom ; the idea of 
 the Incarnation will have fuUy disclosed its 
 217 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 inner meaning ; and the restoration of God to 
 Nature will be complete. 
 
 It is conceivable that a hundred thousand 
 . years hence (more or less) the inhabitants of 
 this planet will know as little about our 
 religion as we know about the religions of 
 the dwellers in Atlantis (let us say) or 
 any other submerged land. It is conceivable 
 that the very name of Christianity, that the 
 very name of Christ, will have passed away. 
 But the world, one may well believe, will be 
 more Christian then than it is now. For 
 through all those years the stream of Christ's 
 spiritual influence will have continued to deepen 
 and widen. Or, to use one of his own 
 metaphors, the seed which he sowed, and which 
 is still buried in the soil, will have expanded 
 into a branching tree. I have elsewhere allowed 
 myself to wonder whether Christ, as he hung 
 upon the Cross, looked forward, beyond the 
 centuries of apparent failure, to the ultimate 
 triumph of his ideas. I cannot but think that 
 he did. His faith in the ideas for which he 
 lived and died must have inspired him with 
 the conviction that they would never pass away ; 
 218 
 
Final Triumph 
 
 and his firm grasp of the great law of spiritual 
 evolution must have made him realize that only 
 by growing and expanding can an idea continue 
 to exist. But if he did look forward to the 
 eventual fulfilment of his cherished dream, how 
 great must have been his consolation ! Fame 
 means nothing to those who take an inward 
 view of life, for they see that at best it is 
 but the symbol of intrinsic worth. The pros- 
 pect of being worshipped as a supernatural 
 Deity would have shocked and distressed one 
 who had devoted his life to undermining 
 the foundations of supernaturalism. But the 
 prospect of adding his personal influence to 
 the great natural forces which are making for 
 the evolution of the human spirit would surely 
 have thrilled his heart with a wave of sacred 
 
 joy- 
 There are deeper and truer records than any 
 
 that history (as we understand the word) can 
 
 decipher or preserve, — inward and spiritual 
 
 records which are implicit in the soul-life of 
 
 Humanity, and which unfold themselves from 
 
 epoch to epoch as the spirit of man evolves 
 
 and expands. In this, the only Book of Life, 
 
 the only scroll which immortalizes those who 
 
 219 
 
The Creed of Christ 
 
 are enrolled on it, the name of Christ, 
 whether it be remembered or forgotten by our 
 descendants in the far-off future, will be written 
 for ever in letters of living light. 
 
 THE END 
 
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 Vol. I. THE LOVE POEMS OF SHELLEY. 
 
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