President White Library, Cornell UNivERSiTY. Cornell University Library arV16446 Broad church or. What is comlni 3 1924 031 425 048 olin,anx The original of tliis bool< 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/cu31924031425048 THE BROAD CHURCH OR J WHAT IS COMING Rev. H. R. HAWEIS, M.A. AUTHOR OK "POETS IN THE PULPIT," " MUSIC AND MORALS,' " THOUGHTS FOR THE TIMES," ETC., ETC. LONDON SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON Lhnited Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, E.C. 1891 THE ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY. PRESS. CONTENTS. Forewords on Robert Elsmere . ... I. ARE THE BROAD CHURCH DISHONEST ? " NO ! " I. Men of Intelligence do not attend Church z. The Spirit of Religion survives . 3. The feeling is without reason — the form incongruous 4. An Intellectual Reform required .... 5. The Broad Church .... . . 6. The Broad Church Method 7. What was, what is, what is no longer true 8. Tenderness with the Past . g. The Broad Church claim Jesus 10. And also St. Paul .... 11. And also Luther 12. Reform, not Revolt 13. What Revolution has cost 14. The Mechanism of Reform 15. The Thirty-nine Articles are Broad Church 16. What has been accomplished 17. Reform possible is. An Honest Method .... 19. Diversities of Form, the same Spirit . 20. The Witness of Law and Politics 21. The Broad Church Defence threefold 22. Fealty to Terms of Subscription 23. Fealty to Church Law impossible 24. Fealty to Administration strictly observed 25. Fealty to Truth — The Broad Church Triumph — What to do with Dogma .... 26. Papal Infallibility — True — No longer true 27. Gathering up the Fragments — Bidding the Dead Letter Live PAGE I 23 24 24 25 26 27 28 28 29 29 30 30 31 31 32 32 33 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 41 Contents. II. ARE THE CREEDS CREDIBLE? "YES AND NO!" PACE 28. Yes or No — A Forensic Device — Yes and No 45 2g. The Creeds — Spirit and Form . ... 46 30. Forms of Sound Words — The Apostles' Creed . . 47 31. The Nicene Creed — Arius and Athanasius ... 47 32. The Athanasian Creed — Athanasius and Anastasius . 50 33. Credibility, not Credulity 50 34. Religious Faith and Intellectual Belief .... 51 35. The Gospel appeals to Credibility, not to Credulity . 53 36. The Reformers appeal to Credibility, not Credulity . . 54 37. The Doctrine of the Unity in the Athanasian Creed and the Articles .... . . 38. In the Essence and the Spirit . . . . 57 59 III. IS GOD OMNIPOTENT? " YES AND NO ! " 39. Contact between God and Man — Homogeneity of Mind 63 40. Two Ways of apprehending God— from Without and from Within 41. Five Central Points in Man's apprehension of God 42. Two Propositions admitted by John Stuart Mill 43. God in a sense not Omnipotent 44. Certain obvious limitations to all power 45. Progressive Moral Development 46. God Omnipotent after all, ultimately and for ever 47. Our share in the Divine Scheme 63 65 66 66 67 69 70 71 ly. WAS JESUS_GOD INCARNATE ? " YES AND NO ! " 48. The Doctrine of the Incarnation needs restatement . 49. How can it be done ? 50. Why must it be done? Our Conception of God has changed ^g 77 78 Contents. 51. Complete Human Enclosure in Flesh, or Incarnation im- possible for God 79 52. The Problem— God being as we apprehend Him^How the Incarnation is to be redefined ..... 81 53. The Incarnation not to be Abolished or Denied . . 82 54. The Story of the Three Synoptics . , . . . .82 55. The Story of St. John . .... 83 56. Two Theories current of old, Post-natal Transfusion and Pre-natal Infusion 84 57. The Question settled under Constantine . . 85 58. Which Theory is True ? . . . . . 85 59. Neither Can be Denied or Affirmed . . .86 60. The Fre-Nicene position best . . .86 61. Jesus' account of Himself ... 87 62. Spiritual, not Logical — Religious, not Formal . . 8g 63. The Essential Doctrine ... . go 64. The Doctrine of Athanasius . ... go 65. The Doctrine of the Broad Church . . • gi V. IS THE IMITATION OF CHRIST POSSIBLE? "NO AND YES I" 66. Literal Imitation becomes undesirable . . 95 67. Literal Imitation of Christ impossible . . . 96 68. Modern arguments disposed of — Tolstoi unsound . 97 6g. The Fallacy in such books as Joshua Davidson . g7 70. Early Christian social institutions of necessity transitory gg 71. The sweet reasonableness of Jesus and the unreason of caricatures gg 72. The real Imitatio Christi ....... 100 73. The Christ Ideal — Does it still endure ? . . . . loi 74. Yes, for it is the Sole Basis of Human Society . . . loi 75. It works in our Law Courts . . ... 103 76. And in our Parliaments ....... 103 77. And in our Current Maxims ...... 104 78. And in our Manners ........ 104 79. Capital and Labour and Christianity .... 105 80. Christianity and the Sexes ...... 105 81. Christ and Marriage ... ... 106 vi Contents. PAGE 82. Christ and Divorce 106 83. Christ's Panacea 107 84. Christ and Avarice 108 85. Christ and the Poor . . . \ 108 VI. IS THE HOLY GHOST A REALITY? ''YES I" 86. The Holy Ghost and the Trinity in 87. Grounds for Belief in God ' ...... 112 88. How God and Man hold Communion . . . 113 89. The Reality of Spirit 1 14 90. The All-importance of IVIind . . . . . • 1 15 91. Spirit Triumphs over Matter ...... 116 92. Mind acts on Mind — The Dawn of a new Era . . .116 93. The difference between Past and Present Phenomena . 118 94. This development non-moral intrinsically . . . 119 95. But it needs a Divine Controlling Influence . . . 121 96. The Divine Communion — Its Secret unknown . .122 97. Its Method explained ....... 122 98. The Laws of Holy Influences 123 99. Attainable Mental Attributes 123 100. God's Special Instruments 124 VII. IS THE CHURCH A FIGMENT? "NO!" loi. Is the Church a Figment ? 127 102. Are its Aims illusory ?....... 127 103. Reasons, no Reason 128 104. The Church still radiates Influence 129 105. The Church Universal ....... 130 106. The Two Key-notes 130 107. Belief in the Divine Power 130 108. The Institution which embodies the Belief . . . 130 109. The Christian Church's Foundation 131 no. Three Realities 131 in. Divine Authority 131 112. The Reasons . 132 Contents. PAGE 113. Persistent Form 132 114. Regenerating Power 133 115. The Holy Catholic Church 138 VIII. "ARE THE CLERGY OBSOLETE?" "NO!'" 116. Are the Clergy Obsolete ? 141 117. A Common-sense Reply 141 118. Five Questions 142 119. The Power of the Priesthood 142 120. The Church and the Family 143 121. Patriarch v. Priest T43 122. Routine .......... 144 123. The Weakness of the Priesthood . . . . 144 124. The Prophet 145 125. The Hireling 146 126. The Ideal Priest 147 127. The Priest's Ideal 148 128. The Popular Sphere of the Priest 149 129. John Baptist and the People ...... 149 130. Things fit for the Pulpit 150 131. Preaching the Gospel 150 132. The Priest a Representative 151 133. From Moses to St. John 151 134. Absolution . 152 135. All Priests unto God 152 136. The Priestly Sphere of the People 153 IX. "ARE THE SAINTS INTELLIGIBLE?" " YES ! " 137. The Common Notion of Saint 155 138. The True Saint . .156 139. Two Keys 157 140. Three Characteristics 157 141. The Test of History ........ 159 142. St. Simeon Stylites 159 143. A Noble Reaction — Not a Rule of Life . . . .161 144. St. Cuthbert 163 Contents. PAGE 145. St. Bernard 165 146. St. Francis d' Assissi 167 147. St. Francis de Sales 169 148. The Saintly Vocation, the Saintly Spirit . . . -173 X. " IS THE GREAT HEREAFTER A DREAM ? " " NO ! " 149. What Next ? . . . . 150. Shall we be there ? 151. I'he Spiritual Instinct 152. The Inevitable . 153. Unreal Immortality 154. Personal Immortality 155. Oppositions of Science 156. Scientific Agnosticism 157. A Divine Sensibility 158. A Rational Hypothesis 159. A Rational Assumption 160. Rational Witnesses 161. Subject Matter for Materialists 162. The Past 163. The Poet's Testimony 164. Stored-up Energies . i6g. The Spiritual Self 166. Conscious Continuity 167. The Assurance of Jesus 168. The Individual Consciousness . 169. The Orderly Arrangement of Facts 170. The Unproved Truth 171. The Multitude of Witnesses 172. Direct Evidence 173. Echoes of the Past 174. God is Just 175. This is Life Eternal . 179 179 180 181 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 i8g 190 191 192 192 193 195 195 195 195 196 ig6 196 196 197 THREE SERMONS. I. On Prayer II. Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism III. John Stuart Mill's Religion . 207 221 245 FOREWORDS ON ROBERT ELSMERE. I HOPE an adequate reply to Robert Elsmere will be found in this book by all who think it worth while to peruse it. With Robert Elsmere's object (whatever we may think of his intellect) many of us will deeply sympathise. He seeks to reformulate Religion, and I was only one of many who welcomed this latest attempt to reconstruct a working Christianity out of the ashes of exploded sects and sleepy dogmas. In these days when the " Gospel according to Don't Know " is being preached far and wide, and people seem rather proud of being sure about nothing connected with religion in this world or the next ; anyone who proposes to teach something definite will easily get a hear- ing, especially if he is understood to have mastered and discarded the various current religions and philosophies. Robert Elsmere is a young Oxford man pre- sumably of some twenty or twenty-five years The Broad Church. ago, living in the mid-current of the neo- Anglican or ritualistic movement, which flowed side by side with the rising but only partially developed Broad Churchism of that epoch. Whilst credited with uncommon learning, intelli- gence, and earnestness, he seems to have had a singular faculty for keeping his eyes shut to what was going on around him, and an extra- ordinary inability to face facts when forced upon his notice. He is the close friend of a man — one Mr. Langham — who (Vol. i., p. 102) seems to have held Christianity "an open question ". For three years Robert listens with rapture to a certain Mr. Grey, whose enthusiasms are built up entirely outside the Christian fold, and for four years he figures as an Oxford tutor. We suppose he must, in the course of this time, have heard of the Essays and Reviews, if not of Colenso on the Pentateuch; Strauss and Renan may not have been entirely unknown to him ; at all events his own friends spoke freely of Christi- anity as "an exquisite fairy tale, which with- ered at the first honest challenge of the critical sense," and the sceptics about him, whilst treating him tenderly enough, do not seem to have had much reticence. Robert Elsmere next plunges into Holy Orders and takes a living Forewords on Robert Elsmere. in the English Church, as yet apparently quite unconscious of those acknowledged difficulties about Bible Inspiration and the dogmas of the Christian faith as commonly taught, especially the Divinity of Christ, and the miracles gene- rally, — -points which now-a-days, at least, arrest the attention of almost every school-boy, and even in those days were matters of the common- est talk. After being for some time in the Church, it suddenly occurs to Robert that, to use his own extraordinary words, it would " be well to introduce a little order into his notions of the Old Testament " ! Soon after that, he is com- pletely floored by perusing a certain learned squire's book called Idols of the Market Place. But what were the arguments in that re- doubtable volume, nobody knows, since the contents of Squire Wendover's Idols of the Market Place are nowhere recorded, and will forever remain wrapt in the same mystery as Father Caxton's famous History of Human Error. Soon after this Robert makes the discovery that the book of Daniel is of late date, and other like common-places of liberal theology seem now to burst upon him for the first time, such as, inaccurate history in The Broad Church. Exodus and Numbers, rudimentary morality in Leviticus, imperfect science in Genesis, un- fulfilled prophecies in the Old Testament, and discrepancies in the New. In fact, he becomes aware of a general need for redefining old standards, coupled with a general impossibility of accepting without some explanation dogmas like the Incarnation and phenomena like the miracles, all which things he conceives himself, as a clergyman, bound to hold and to teach literally. So feeling he can do this no longer, he jumps at once to the conclusion that he must give up his orders in the Church of England. And he at once proceeds to do so. He has not a word to say in answer to the Idols of the Market Place, he does not even make a fight for it ; nor has he a word of reply to what is not improperly called "a few ragged gleanings " from the squire's equally appalling work on the Value of Testimony ; nor can our Robert meet his own doubts about the Church dogmas as currently defined. It never occurs to him for a moment that it is possible with quite "elementary frankness" to take up each of the old dogmas, and after mastering their intent and purpose, so rehandle and restate them, as to rescue the essential truths aimed at in each. It nowhere dawns upon him that this is the Foreivords on Robert Els mere. A B C of liberal theology and the special function of the Broad Churchman ; and that it is quite as sane and legitimate a policy for the Broad Church to attempt the reconstruction of the Church of England's Philosophy, as it was for the High Church to remodel its Ritual. — No. If the old statements are now seen to be defective, Robert Elsmere, the honest man — the man who shouts with the Philistine claque, is for doing away with all of them ; as who should say " because the Copernican system is not correct according to our present ideas, therefore, there is no truth at all in it ". Pray, what would have become of Newton and all other astronomers if, on becoming aware of the errors of Copernicus, they had set aside the substantial truths he taught ? But Robert Elsmere starts as the new broom and promises to do wonders for us. No longer hampered with flimsy and dishonest Broad Church attempts to fit the dogmas of Christianity into his new system, he sets forth to reconstruct his theory. His Gospel comes forth at last, but hampered, strange to say, with two unexpected but incurable defects. The defect of Over-state- ment and the defect of Self- contradiction. Exactly the defects which we might have The Broad Church. expected to find in a Gospel made up in a panic by a man who for years refused even to see the enemy, and the moment he sees him turns tail and flies. Robert Elsmere's over-statement and self-contradiction might have been avoided if he had taken time, or had had the brains to grasp the real Broad Church position, or perceived how to formulate the Broad Church creed as the key-note of that coming Anglican restate- ment which will be to the theology of the Reformation what Newton was to Copernicus. First, in the new-born sceptical ardour of his attack on the preternatural, culminating with the naive Elsmerian dogma "Miracles do not happen" Robert is evidently suffering from that return swing of the pendulum which is a mental characteristic of the age. Because there have been many false miracles and many impostors and dupes in all times — therefore now we must dismiss with contempt everything that happens "contrary to known causes, or without apparent cause " (Mr. Gladstone's definition of a miracle). But, as Professor Tait tardily admits: " Recent advances of physi- c al science prove (on one or more occasions at least) that an ' intervention of creative power has taken place ' " : which constitutes what we Forewords on Robert Ehinere. mean by a miracle — so even Professor Huxley has at last given up saying that miracles are impossible, and has fallen back on the altogether modest statement that their occurrence or non- occurrence is simply "a question of evidence," but a Robert Elsmere rushes in with his rash over-statement where a , Huxley fears to tread. ''Miracles do not happen" he shouts aloud to a room full of applauding artisans. There is no attempt at analysing any evidence for alleged supernatural occurrences past or present. The immense mass of reliable modern evidence that has now been so laboriously and carefully collected and sifted is simply treated contemp- tuously — as non-existent. " Miracles do not happen,"— you may take Robert Elsmere's word for it. He thought they did once, but he has changed his mind now, so you must change yours — " Miracles do not happen " — voita ! Second over-statement: "The miraculous Christian story rests on a tissue of mistakes ". This is another of those half truths with which the book abounds, and which amount to an almost cynical neglect of facts. Simply because a verbal inspiration and infallibility have been claimed for the Bible, which it nowhere claims for itself, its narratives are treated with a The Broad Church. degree of distrust by an Elsmere, which, in the case of a Mommsen or a Niebuhr, on Livy or Herodotus, would be deemed extravagant and prejudiced. Because the Gospels have been uncritically accepted, therefore everything mira- culous in them is "a tissue of mistakes" — second over-statement. The third over-statement is one with which the whole book rings : that there was nothing special about the revelation of God in Christ — that He was a good man, perhaps a uniquely great religious teacher, but that the spirit of God dwelt in Him, only as it dwells in every good man, and that the difference between any of us and Christ was a difference of degree, and not of kind, and so forth. This again, is the reactionary swing of the pendulum in face of the dogma "Jesus Christ was identical in all points with the Almighty God". Because that state- ment, like almost every other dogma of the Church, requires rehandling and resetting, — therefore the special divinity of Jesus, giving to His message a special and divine authority, must be swept away by the bald statement that ''Jesus was a mere man". This to the true Broad Churchman is the crowning Elsmerian over-statement, Forewords on Robert Elsmere. Well, then, a clean sweep has now been made of miracles as impossible ; of the Gospel narratives as a tissue of mistakes; of Jesus Christ as in any special manner divine or authorita- tive ; and then ? Then instead of some new and orderly system rising like the structures of Comtism on the ruins of the old Religions, we come upon those amazing self-contradictions, which exhibit most glaringly the other great defect in Robert Elsmere's mind. With an amiable inconsistency which does infinite credit to Robert's heart, but sadly at the expense of his head, we find him bringing back under the thinnest of disguises everyone of those obnoxious conceptions which he has so hotly denounced and dogmatically rejected. It really reminds us of nothing so much as the suicidal tactics of some modern doctors, who, after denouncing Mesmer and all his works, proceed to swallow the same phenomena under the name of " Hypnotism," or, like those scientists, who after assuring us that design in Nature is a product of "unconscious force," discover after all that "the equivalent to intention has to be imported into Nature ". They will admit any- thing, in fact, rather than use the old word, God Almighty ! Precisely in like manner does Robert Elsmere give himself away, The Broad Church. intellectually committing the happy dispatch as follows : Elsmere's earnest object, as Mr. Gladstone points out, is to " expel the preter- natural element" (Very Good! That was Comte's great object), but when pushed to it, he declares (vol. iii., p. 201) "■ my friends, the man who addresses yoti believes in God (I)" That is quite fatal, for God is the Great Preternatural dogma. Comte saw this clearly enough, and the whole strain of his philosophy is therefore bent upon destroying the conception of God, He feels, and feels rightly, that he cannot start his mechanical system of Nature until he has (to his own satisfaction) completely got rid of the Creator out of the Universe ; so must every clear- headed man do who rejects the preternatural. But then, Robert Elsmere, though an excellent fellow, is essentially muddle-headed. Again, " Miracles do not happen ; " very well, but the great Miracle, real Prayer, understood as Communion between a human and Divine Spirit — "a thing without apparent cause, and contrary to known cause," — Prayer is des- perately clung to, and observe, prayer must not be a mere emotional trick, such as Comte countenanced, played off by the soul on itself — not even a blind recognition of the Unknow- Forewords on Robert Elsinere. able, but it must be something addressed to the Reahty behind all Phenomena (vol. iii., p. 356). It is the ^'pressure of His Spirit on ours" ; it is, in fact, rank supernaturalism. Thus, after blowing the trumpet blast of denial, God, who is " without apparent cause," and Praver, which is certainly "contrary to" all causes which the scientist would call "known," are both taken back to Robert Elsmere's heart, "aye to his heart of hearts ! " But the most surprising recantation remains to be noticed. It is that in which Robert Elsmere, after having reduced Jesus Christ to a mere man, proceeds to speak of Him in language which is calculated to satisfy even orthodox believers in the Divinity of our Lord J esus Christ. " H e is the symbol of the heavenly and the abiding." "He has spoken most audibly to .us of God : He is the symbol of the Divine." He is in so many words, in fact, none other than "■Otir Lord Jesus Christ" (sic). So after three volumes of agonized fretting over a rupture with the Religion of Christ, as it is or may be held in the Church of England, Robert Elsmere lands himself in a position which, if he had only understood the aims and objects of the Broad Church teaching, would The Broad Church. have made the fretting and the rupture alike superfluous. But, to say the truth, Robert, having begun by only half mastering his sceptic's brief, has never got up his Broad Church brief at all. The distressing consequences are, that the amiable and accomplished authoress of this popular theological Romance has unintentionally been guilty of an amazing libel and an amusing caricature in that light-hearted and almost jaunty sketch which she perpetrates of a Broad Church vicar. It is a great deal too good to pass over, and I cannot deny myself the luxury of quoting it verbatim : — " Mr. Vernon was a Broad Churchman — belonged to the Church Reform movement, and thought it absolutely neces- sary to keep the Church going : and, by a policy of prudent silence and gradual expansion from within, to save the great plant of the establishment from falling wholesale into the hands of High Churchmen. In consequence, he was involved in endless contradictions and practical falseness of speech and action. His large church was attended by a handful of some fifty to a hundred persons. Vernon could not preach what he did believe, and would not preach more than was absolutely necessary of what he did not believe. His whole life was one long waste of power, simply from lack of an elementary frankness. He begged Elsmere to be- ware of any direct religious teaching ; talked in warm praise of a ' policy of omissions,' and in equally warm denuncia- tion of anything like a ' policy of attack,' etc," Forewords on Robert Elsmere. 13 After this we are not surprised to read that the " Broad Church has done but Httle " — we should be surprised to hear that it had done anything at all. The only excuse for dealing with such a description is on account of the one thing which lends it colour, viz., the unautho- rized assumption that any large or' increas- ing number of Broad Churchmen resemble Elsmere as well as the Vicar in worshipping God, whilst denying the supernatural, or reject the Divinity of Jesus in any real sense what- ever, whilst addressing Him in language which implies the allegiance of the heart and the adoration of the soul. Let us confess plainly that the Broad Church- ism of such books as the Kernel and the Hitsk seems to us completely sterile and impossible. Even the Kernel and the Husk men do not resemble the Elsmere Broad Church vicar — they have at least the courage of their opinions, though they seem to us like Elsmere, puzzle- headed in rejecting the supernatural, whilst accepting God and God communion. But the Broad Churchman of the future will not resemble them or the Elsmerean vicar ; he will stand on facts and not fancies, and his theories will hang together, and not destroy one another. He 14 Th£ Broad Church. will deal in assertions, not denials. He will appeal to history and ~ experience. Super- naturalism always has been, is, and always will be, the secret force of all religion : there are no religious people without it. Not in the denial of the supernatural, but in its rehabilitation will lie the pith and marrow of the Religion of the Future. Spiritualism, hypnotism, occultism, past and. present, if they can teach nothing else, should teach our philosophers and theologians so much as this. Not the rejection of all abnor- mal facts or phenomena, but what abnormal facts and phenomena to accept and what to reject, is the question for the Broad Churchman — not the denial of anything which lies at the root of any Church dogma, but how best to rescue the undying truth which that dogma aimed at, and represent it for our modern acceptance in a new, improved, and reasonable form. Not to throw up our "Holy orders" in a panic, but to justify them by patient recon- struction, prayer, and meditation — not to break up the Church of England, but to enlarge, vitalise, and reform it — not to denounce or flout its theological standards, but to understand and rehabilitate them. Such are the chief functions of the Broad Church clergy, and in their exercise, they are prepared to give the lie direct Forewords on Robert Elsmere. 15 to every characteristic of the Broad Church vicar (as he is sketched) according to Robert Elsmere. As to "prudent silence"! liberal theologians have been so wanting in prudence, as well as so outspoken, that some of them have been turned out of the Church — others perse- cuted, and all withheld from honour (if church promotion is honour). Their "practical falsities of speech and action " are only such as fall to the lot of all men who use the Educational, Par- liamentary, Legal, or Ecclesiastical forms of the past in conducting present affairs, and serve time-bound institutions until better formulas or amended rules are agreed upon. At least, the Broad Church use words in avowed, if in non- literal senses, and with no mental reservations ; as who should say I mean by " the sun rises," that it "appears to rise," and by the resurrection of the body, I mean " the immortality of the soul in such material form as shall be needful to its identity and proper functions ". "His large church was attended by fifty or a hundred per- sons." Our Broad Church edifices are just as crammed or as empty as any other churches. " He could not preach what he did believe," — we can, and we do. " He lacked elementary frankness," — we begin with elementary frank- ness, defining our position distinctly as 1 6 The Broad Church. Reformers, but not Revolutionists. We have no "direct religious teaching," — our teaching is direct and positive. "Policy of omission" — our omissions are notorious and open. "A policy of attack denounced." Our attacks are repeated and sustained, and so effective that what we have attacked for years is fast crumbling away, and our irresistible methods are being adopted by our High Church brethren. We are sometimes twitted with, "the Broad Church have no Party". That is our glory and our strength. Principles, not Parties, should be written on the Broad Church Banner. The love of Truth belongs to no Party ; the study of history is monopolised by no sect. When the truths which were advocated by Broad Church Divines twenty years ago are being ever so feebly whispered as new contributions to Theology (!) in the heart of Pusey's camp, we can well dispense with any special organisa- tion. Ltix Mundi preaches our Gospel for us. Why should we fight the High Church when there is treason in their own camp ? Rather we would say to them, like Paul : " Ye are our Epistle" ; "go on and prosper " — the very words which John Bright said to Disraeli when that wily tactician turned the Liberals out of office, Forewords on Robert Ehmere. 17 and then came in and passed their measures for them. We say to our High Church brethren, the writers of Lux Mundi : " You won't let us say these things ; well, say them yourselves. We shall not oppose you ; only, go on. Don't be afraid of superannuated criticism. We wish you could get on a little faster ; but you are doing very well. I f you were more brave, you could do better. Your book will probably not rank with the cele- brated Essays and Reviews but, from the Broad Church point of view, this Lux Mundi, with all its half-hearted recantations and its singular attempts to get down on both sides of the fence, is a great step in the right direction." Better late than never ; and, indeed, the book is not the less effective and pathetic because of the trans- parent alarm of the writers, who, whilst they send forth new and strange arrows, evidently feathered with the Broad Church plumes, and tipped with Broad Church steel, are persuaded that they have not been near the Broad Church camp nor borrowed their arrows from the enemy. The High Church view of the Broad Church seems to be that they are Unitarians or Infidels thinly disguised. This is because the High know as little really about the Broad as the Low Church know about the High. Yet, oddly 1 8 The Broad Church. enough, the High Church animus is not nearly so bitter against the Broad Church as it is against the Low Church ; and, whilst lamenting Broad Church latitudinarianism, the High have been known to speak and write civilly enough about the liberal free-shooters of the Anglican fold. The Broad Church, on the other hand, whilst re- gretting the special mediaevalism which makes Ritualism un-English, and the narrow concentra- tion of Grace almost upon a single sacrament, to which much of the gross materialism of Rome has been restored, — nevertheless view the High Church with a sort of brotherly feeling. To the enlightened Broad Churchmen, the honest and earnest Ritualist is not far from the kingdom of heaven. He stands firm, at least, for two vital principles, which the Broad Churchman who knows his business ought to be quick to recognise. The first is .^stheticism, which, now that the Roman bugbear, is lifted, resumes its natural sway. The second is Supernaturalism as reflected in the mystic miracle of the Real Presence, which, now that abnormal phenomena are reacknowledged, gives voice to the mystic sense, which lies at the root of all religion. If now the High Church, instead of cooking history and falsifying experience, will boldly go on further to add to ^stheticism and Super- Forewords oti Robert Elsmere. 19 naturalism, a little modern intelligence and love for truth : if now the Broad Church, ceasing to cringe to the sceptical scientists, with a like cour- age and perspicuity, will embody super-natural- ism, and submit patiently to ecclesiastical order, there is really no reason why the Broad and High should not draw much closer together in heart and work than has hitherto seemed at all likely or possible. As long as the Evangelicals remain essentially unhistorical and ignorant, they must be left out in the cold. The spread of know- ledge is too rapid for them to make much way, but on the other hand, we must remember that unless both High and Broad contrive to embody the emotional and inward ardour of the Evan- gelicals with their preachments and revival move- ments, their own . methods, however admirable, must end in sterility and formalism. In the following pages it will be evident that what I have aimed at is to force Broad Churchism out of that indefinite and somewhat hazy atmos- phere characteristic of the early Broad Church leaders, into something like a distinct formulation of its position in the English Church, and its rela- tion to the Christian creeds. I have made the creeds the basis of that formulation, not that Re- statement begins and ends there. Every dogma 20 The Broad Church. that stiir has, or ever has had, power to express or control the reHgious aspirations of man, calls for restatement and justification, and the Broad Churchman, as an apostle of Truth and a student of H istory, has his work cut out for him. H is path is quite clear and his trumpet need give no un- certain sound. It is the number of letters which I annually receive from young men who desire, but hesitate to enter the Christian Ministry, from per- plexed clergymen of all denominations and in all parts of the world, who are groping about for a new platform as Christian teachers — which has moved me to embody in a book the words which I have spoken from time to time to my own congre- gation, especially during the last six months. I have no desire, nor have I any power or ambition to pose as the spokesman of any party, or even section of a party, in the English Church; my only care has been honestly to define my own posi- tion, and perhaps to help others to define theirs, and to indicate the direction (ending in the union of Science with so-called Supernaturalism) in which I believe religious thought and opinion in the establishment must travel for the next hundred years at least, — if the Church of Eng- land is to be in any true sense the National Church of the present, or the Catholic Church of the Future. I. ARE THE BROAD CHURCH DISHONEST ? ''NO I" I. Men of intelligence do not attend Church. 2. The Spirit of Religion survives. 3. The feeling is without reason — the form incongruous. 4. An Intellectual Reform required. 5. The Broad Church. 6. The Broad Church Method. 7. What was, what is, what is no longer true. 8. Tenderness with the Past, g. The Broad Church claim Jesus. 10. And also St. Paul. 11. And also Luther. .12. Reform, not Revolt. 13. What Revolu- tion has cost. 14. The Mechanism of Reform. 15. The Thirty- nine Articles are Broad Church. 16. What has been accomplished. 17. Reform possible. 18. An Honest method, ig. Diversities of Form, the same Spirit. 20. The Witness of Law and Politics. 21. The Broad Church Defence threefold. 22. Fealty to Terms of Subscription. 23. Fealty to Church Law impossible. 24. Fealty to Administration strictly observed. 25. Fealty to Truth — The Broad Church triumph — What to do with Dogma. 26. Papal infallibility — True — No longer true. 27. Gathering up the Fragments — Bidding the Dead Letter Live. I. ARE THE BROAD CHURCH DISHONEST? "NO I" 1. Here are two facts : Intelligent men constantly refuse to take Holy Orders. Intelligent men con- stantly refuse to attend church. The reasons are obvious and related. They stare one in the face and they dovetail. Intelligent men won't sit in the pew because intelligent men won't stand in the pulpit. " I will not take Holy Orders," says the clever, con- scientious, even religious-minded man, " because the formularies as they stand do not express my religious convictions. I doubt my power of being able to bring them into any kind of harmony with these convictions. If I could, I doubt whether I should be allowed to do so- in the Church of England ; meanwhile, I should have to say what I don't believe, and therefore I won't go into the Church." " I don't sit in the pew," says the intelligent layman, "because what I hear in Church is obsolete, trivial — often to my mind sense- less ; the pulpit is frequently occupied by a man who would not get sixpence a day in any other pro- fession, and whom no one would think of listening to out of church, although, by the way, he often talks more sense on his own hearthrug than in the pulpit ; 24 The Spirit of Religion Survives. the prayers sound, some of them, antiquated and ex- aggerated, the expression of doctrines unreal or unintelligible ; the Bible reading is ill-chosen or in- audible ; therefore, on the whole, 1 don't go to church." 2. If, now, some men still go to church, it is in spite of the obsolete doctrine and the (thank God, with ex- ceptions) incompetent clergy. The greatest tribute to the necessity of religion is, that it survives its outworn forms ; the greatest proof of the essential truth of Christianity is, that in spite of the twaddle talked every Sunday throughout England in the name of Christ, Christianity is still alive. Pithily said the old verger, " I've been listening to ser- mons twice every Sunday for nigh forty year come Michaelmas, and, thank God, I'm a Christian still ". Alas ! the faith of all sermon -hearers is not so robust. 3. Will intellect and eloquence ever return to the pulpits of the Church of England? Will intelligent men ever to. any noticeable extent re-occupy her pews ? That will entirely depend upon whether the Liberal or Broad Church party can reorganize the religious thought of the Church as fearlessly and successfully as the Low Church reorganized its emo- tional piety and the High Church reorganized its sacramental and dramatic ritual. It is the thought of the age far more than the feeling or the taste of the age that is alienated from the Church. Feeling is still there, and form is still there — an occasional orator, like Liddon, or the Bishop of Peterborough, is the result — An Intellectual Reform Required. 25 r but both feeling and form are in danger of paralysis, because Church feeling is without intelligence, and Church form is without congruity to the age. 4. The Low Church have done well, but they have had their day ; they have leavened the laity. The High Church have done well ; they have made religion fashionable, but they have not leavened the laity. Pusey never got hold of the masses like Wesley. The reason of that is that Puseyism was Italian, Wesleyanism was English ; but neither was intellectual, and the reform now needed in the Church is essentially an intellectual reform. In this respect the age is more like the age of Constantine and Athanasius than the age of Luther and Henry VIII. We want a form of sound words which will ring true in nineteenth-century ears. The creeds and articles are now " like sweet bells jangled out of tune ". Neither Low Church nor High Church have any remedy to propose for this. When the Low Church are asked what's to be done, they quote texts ; when the High Church are asked for a remedy, they say the Catechism or mutter the Mass. But this won't do for ever. That is why the Broad Church who can supply a new intellectual basis should not be slow to come in at this crisis and make their contribution to the National Church. Whether under the strain of this reform the Anglican Church as such will go to pieces, as the Jewish Church went to pieces before Chris- tianity, depends upon whether the Church knows or does not know in this her day the things which belong to her peace ; but nothing short of a frank and radical 26 The Broad Church. re-formulation of doctrine — at least as radical as the English Reformation — is required ; and neither High Church (witness the Lux Mundi apologetics !) nor the Evangelical Prophets (witness Mr. Spurgeon on the "Apostasy of these Latter Days ") seem to be alive to that obvious fact. They hear the shouting of the foe, and they bury their heads deeper in the sand ; but in polemics the ostrich policy never answers. And now to the point, or rather the four points, {a) What are the Broad Church ? {b) What is their method ? {c) Is that method possible? (d) Is that method honest ? Answer these questions straightforwardly, and not after the fashion of Lux Mimdi, and a new Reformation will have dawned. Intellect will no longer shun the church pulpit. Thinking men will no longer shun the church pew. 5. («) What are the Broad Church ? I will give a descriptive analysis rather than a definition of Broad Churchism. Firstly : The Broad Church are those who love the High Church, because they perceive that High Churchism bears witness to the sacramental character of forms and ceremonies. We need such outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual graces. The Broad Church are those who love the Low Church, because they perceive that Low Churchism bears witness to spiritual freedom. The soul must have this too ; it will not be bound by that it uses ; we need forms and ceremonies ; we need spiritual freedom. The High Church would cast out the Low Church, and the Low Church the High, and both would cast out the Broad ; but the' Broad desires to The Broad Church Method. 27 retain both, — it is Comprehensive. Secondly : The Broad Church feels the need of bringing the praying and the preaching of the Anglican Church into har- mony with nineteenth-century thought and feeling. It does not believe that the theology of Constantine in the fourth century was any more final than the settlement of Henry VIII. in the sixteenth century. It desires to bring doctrine to the test of living thought, re-stating its substance in terms of present knowledge, — it is Radical. Thirdly : It uses Dog- matic Theology as a basis of Action, and the Formularies of the National Church as a Mechanism of Ritual, — it is Cotiscrvative. The three descriptive adjectives of the Broad Church are \hesQ— Comprehen- sive, Radical, Conservative. 6. {b) What is the Broad Church Method? — Reform from within. There are two ways of reforming a system or a person. You can go outside and attack — that means Revolution, it is the Destructive Method. It tramples upon good and bad together, like the silly Christian missionary who began the conversion of the Mohammedan by sitting on the Koran. The other way is to mould and modify from within, getting gradually rid of the false or the obsolete, qnd develop- ing new life around all such true and living germs as can be found in every dogma and in every creed. That is Reform — it is the Constructive Method ; it is the way of Life ; it is the Secret of Nature. It is suitable to religion because religion is a living, grow- ing thing. Religion is not mechanical but organic. It is not like a building which can be patched and 28 What was, what is, ivhat is no longer true. altered and tinkered up at will ; it must grow ; it must live or die, but whilst it lives it must grow, and growing change. Learn a parable from the acorn : You plant it, the husk rots slowly, you don't strip it off, it sur- rounds and protects the new living germ to the last, and only sinks into the mould when its work is done. Every dogmatic expression, every form or ceremony becomes even as the husk of the acorn in time ; but you must not strip it off too soon ; it is there to pro- tect the living germ of the new oak ; it will drop away of itself, it has its use ; let it alone. 7. Over every creed and formulary is written this motto : " It was true — It is true — It is no longer true,'' which being interpreted is, " Once such and such a dogma — The Trinity, or the Incarnation, a verbally Inspired Bible, an Infallible Church — once such dogmas were the best attainable expressions of certain truths''. " It was true." Now we can discern the essential truth that lies at the root of each one of the old puzzling statements ; that essential something is destined to last on in a changed form — transformed — '' It is true" . But we may find better ways of expressing it — the form of sound words once so helpful and adequate is now obsolete or seen to be erroneous, as who should say " the sun rises," a perfectly correct statement of what appears to take place— but — " but it is no longer true ". 8. The true reformer is tender with the Past, patient with Dogma, respectful to Forms. He knows their value. The greatest reformers have always tried to The Broad Church claim St. Paul. 29 retain and use what they found. They have usually been defeated and driven into opposition, but resist- ance to reform from within has compelled revolution or attack from without. Revolution has brought disaster, and the destruction of much that was valu- able, and which might have been kept, and has got to be painfully brought back. 9. The policy of the Broad Church, the policy of reform from within, is called dishonest, but it was nevertheless the policy of Jesus. He was the greatest spiritual Reformer whom the world had ever seen : but He used the synagogue — it was " His custom " to go there on the Sabbath. He did not approve of everything there, but He used what He found. He said : Moses says this, but I tell you something different, yet I come not to destroy but to fulfil. He foretold the results of putting the new wine into the old bottles, but He poured it in Himself till they burst. He used the old rites with new meanings. To Nico- demus, His view of baptism seemed quite non-natural and so strained that that ruler of the Jews could not understand it. 10. Paul was also for carrying reform from within. He did not believe in circumcision, but he circumcised Timothy ; nor in meats offered to idols, but he was willing to abstain ; nor in vows, but he shaved his head, "having a vow at Cenchrea " ; and so eager was he not to break with the old established Church of his brethren that he used up the whole of the old sacrificial language until the religion of Christ through 30 The Broad Church claim Luther. his epistles became quite intolerably weighted with the theology of the Jewish shambles, and through him Christianity is so weighted down to the present day. 11. Luther tried hard to reform from within. He would have given worlds not to break with the Pope. He stretched many a point; he did not even quite des- troy Transubstantiation, he called it Consubstantia- tion ; he was even for retaining the externals of the Mass, and half the old ceremonies intact. " Alter as little as possible the externals of religion," was his constant advice, until the situation became desperate. The policy of the Broad Church is therefore of Divine authority, for it is the policy of Jesus, — and of historical p7'ecedent, for it is the policy of Paul, Luther, Savona- rola, and many others. 12. And why are we thus Conservative? Because Reformation is better than Revolution. We ought to learn this much from the past, for surely the evils of Revolution have been written on the page of history in characters of blood and fire for our instruction. Christianity became a Revolution when the world put it in opposition — and the consequence ? Art, Letters, and Science perished for centuries ; slowly something was recovered, Letters revived, Art was rediscovered, but a good deal was lost for ever. We must remember that those old books of magic were also burnt (Acts xix. 19), and thus accumulations of occult Science were destroyed as well as the Greek statues and the classic MSS. The Mechanism of Reform. 31 13. The Luther movement became a Revolution ; England separated from Rome, because Rome would not allow a Reform from within — the consequences? External decencies of worship trampled upon, number- less aids to religion, helps, manuals, organisations for charity ruthlessly swept away, stained-glass smashed, Gothic treasures ruined, the belief in a Divine Presence with the Church enfeebled, half-killed by blows dealt at the Supernatural, which is, fence as we will, the life of Religion in all its various forms ; and only just now are we slowly bringing back Art to the Sanctuary, and the sense of supernatural Principalities and Powers to the world. The High Church stands for Order and Art ; and Modern Spiritualism in its many and mixed forms bears witness, cloudy but constant, to the Super- natural ; but the old Church in the midst of all its corruption conserved both Art and Spiritualism. It might have done without a Revolution, had it faced the strain of Reform from within, mended its Morals, restated its Dogmas, and written its Supernaturalism up to date ; but it would not or it could not ; at any rate it did not, and one-half of Roman Catholicism was swept away. The Broad Church teachers see all this. For them history has not been written in vain. 14. The principle of Reform from within is immense and far reaching ; that is why the Broad Church as- sume dogmatic Christianity as a Basis, and the formu- laries of the National Church as a Mechanism, and propose to mould the one and to modify the other, as Dogmas and Formularies have been moulded and modified before, until the Church prayers and the 32 The Thirty-nine Articles are Broad Church. Church preaching get into living touch with nine- teenth-century thought and feeling. 15. (c) Can it be done ? — Is it possible ? To the Church of the Reformation everything is possible. Colani said years ago at Strasburg : " Protestantism is not the last note of the Reformed Church, it is the first note — it shows the direction in which the Church intends to travel ". Articles IX. and XXXIV. {vide Thirty-Nine Articles) are the two famous Broad Church Articles, since they provide for every conceiv- able kind of reform from within. Article IX. pro- claims that all churches up to the Reformation had erred — so why not all churches after it ? — and Article XXXIV. declares that national churches have power to alter or ordain Rites and Ceremonies ; and there- fore Doctrines, for what are Rites but embodied Doc- trines (at least according to the Ritualists) ? At all events the Church of the Reformation dealt with both Doctrine and Ritual once, and is capable of dealing with both again. 16. But why beat about the bush, when this possibility of internal reform is no longer a dream but an accomplished fact, and within the memory of man, too. In my time the Gunpowder Plot and Charles the Martyr services have been dropped out of the Prayer-book. The service commemorative of the Restoration of Charles II. has also disappeared. A few years ago a revised translation of the Bible was authorised by the bishops, striking a death-blow at that idolatry of the English letter at one time in An Honest Method. 33 favour with the Bible Christian. In 1865, what Dean Stanley used to call a rag-and-tatter subscription for the clergy was substituted for the old hard-and-fast document. We, the clergy of the Anglican Church, have now a liberty -in doctrine and ritual unknown to any other Church in Christendom. Is it too much to expect that a Church that can do so much out of deference to modern opinions, and carry so rapidly such reforms from within, will some day follow Dr. Hussey's suggestion {Bampton Lectures on Sunday) and give us simple alternative forms for the Sacra- ments — may I add, an expurgated Bible, selected Psalms, one Creedal statement, simpler and briefer, additional qualifying and liberating rubrics, sanction- ing a more elastic conduct of the services, and, lastly, a total repeal of the Act of Uniformity, an oppressive document unknown to the early Church, and already, under the Act of 1865, become almost a dead letter. 17. The answer to this third question. Is reform in- side the Church of England possible? amounts simply to this. Such reform is provided for by two of the Thirty-nine Articles, and it is already an accomplished fact in half-a-dozen crucial cases. Let us go on and prosper. 18. ((/.) And lastly, Is the method of the Broad Church honest ? — a question which presses heavily on good Mr. Spurgeon, who thinks us all "villains"; but then that excellent man admits that he " does not understand Broad Church ethics ". Why, of course not ; what would his sheep say if he did ? To stay 3 34 Divinities of Form, the same Spirit. in a Church which you see needs reform, to use formu- laries and start with statements of doctrine which you cannot agree with as they stand, but desire to amend — is this honest ? Well, every living party in the Church has been charged with dishonesty just so long as it was a reforming party. The Low Church were called dishonest because they leaned to Nonconfor- mity and its irregular ways ; but the Low Church got itself accepted, and has long since been dubbed ortho- dox. Indeed, Lord Palmerston, under Lord Shaftes- bury's dictation, would have nothing but Low Church bishops. The High Church was called dishonest because it leaned towards Rome, but that, too, got itself accepted, and now it is better to be rather High Church than otherwise (whether Gladstone or Salis- bury be in power) if you want to be a bishop ; and so the Broad Church, who are the latest reformers, are naturally denounced as dishonest because they want to remould the doctrine and the ritual of the Church into accord with nineteenth-century thought and feel- ing. 19. When people attack the Broad Church with — " Do you believe the doctrines of the Church ? Do you approve of the formularies of the Church ? " it is sufficient answer to say : The Church of England Doctrine is believed, and the Church Liturgy is used and preached in the High and Low Churches, but it does not sound quite the same in both, and it cer- tainly does not look at all the same ; why expect more from the Broad Church ? We believe and preach the doctrines and we use the forms in our TTie Witness of Law and Politics. 35 way, they in theirs. Condemn us all, or acquit us all ; we are all guilty, or we are all innocent. The Low Church had at one time such a contempt for ecclesiastical form that they could hardly abide the bishops, or bear the trammels of the liturgy at all. Wesley, who died a clergyman of the Church of England, arrogated to himself Episcopal functions ; and the Lady Huntingdon connection fairly stept across the border : yet Lady Huntingdon's first chap- lain and trustee, Dr. Thomas Haweis (my grandfather), lived and died Rector of Aldwinkle in the Church of England. The High Church openly detest the word Protestant, and denounce the Reformation as a curse. Their doctrine of the Real Presence in the Sacraments is closely akin to the gross materialism of the Mass, but the High Church have stood their ground as honest men for a' that. The Broad Church call for Re-statement. They are for dropping what is obso- lete, but not all at once. They would go on printing the prayer-book with alternative forms and additions. They are for re-covering and re-setting the essential truth which lies at the bottom of every dogma, corre- lating the new knowledge with current religious thought, and re-adapting the Church functions to the needs and the intellectual, social, and aesthetic in- stincts of the age ; and the Broad Church presume to call themselves honest men for a' that. 20. You don't call your M.P.'s, Mr. John Morley or Mr. Bryce, dishonest, because they admire Repub- lican opinions, and yet take the oath of allegiance to Her Majesty. People have almost left off calling 36 The Broad Church Defence threefold. Mr.. Parnell dishonest because he, Hke many others, continues to be an M.P. and a Home Ruler as well. Our judges are not thought dishonest because they take the oaths, and are content to preside over a mass of laws, some obsolete, some contradictory, some sorely in need of re-statement, and not a few which call for interpretation in strained and non- natural senses. But what are the difficulties of the British Constitution, and what is the confused and heterogeneous mass of the English law — what is the mixed position of the M.P. or the judge compared to the confusion, the jumble of things old and new in religion with which the clergyman of the Church of England has got to deal ? And what should he do under the circumstances ? Why should his principle be other than that which governs judge or M.P. ? Put the question, "what becomes of the country if the House never passes a Reform Bill {reform from within) ; what becomes of justice if there is never a Law Amendment Act, never an attempt to reconcile law and equity, and write law up to date (a// reforms from within)}" And what becomes of the religion of the National Church if every attempt to reform, restate, and write up to date is burked, is denounced as treachery and dishonour? {again reform from within). 21. We declare then that the Broad Church clergy, adopting the method of Jesus, and maintaining historic continuity with St. Paul and Luther, are justified in stopping where they are ; in pleading for, and in working for, and in hoping for Reform instead Fealty to Terms of Subscription. 37 of Revolution ; and they may fairly plead the example of Jesus the Master, Paul the disciple, and Luther the monk, and charge those with ignorance who accuse them of dishonesty. In fact, the Broad Church clergyman has only to satisfy himself on three points, and the argument for his defence against all the Robert Elsmeres, Stopford Brookes, and Voyseys, and even Spurgeons, is practically closed : — ie) He owes fealty to the terms of Subscription, {f) To the Administration, {g) To the essential Truths underlying the Dogmas of the Church. 22. {e) Fealty to the Terms of Subscription. — The Broad Church clergyman is often asked : " Does not your teaching violate the terms of your clerical Subscription ? You undertook to believe and teach certain Doctrines which you now call in question." The answer to this is brief. The old Subscription was much more hard and fast, binding us, the clergy, to the Thirty-nine Articles and other things. All that is over ; the burden is lifted, we are free. The relaxed Subscription of 1865 is, as the late Dean of Westminster pointed out, a mere " rag and tatter of Subscription ". It simply binds us to an administra- tive Assent, and to belief in a Fact which, as we shall see, is of no doctrinal importance whatever. (The form is quoted in the footnote.*) Is it possible to conceive of anything more free and flimsy than this ? * " I assent to the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, and to the Book of Common Prayer, and to the ordering of bishops, priests, and deacons. I believe the doctrine of the United Church of England and Ireland, as there set forth, to be agreeable to the word of God. I will use the form in the same book prescribed," etc. 38 Fealty to Church Law impossible. Now to assent to a formulary is not to give adherence of belief to all its statements any more than an M.P.'s assent to the British Constitution implies his agree- ment with all its parts. We do not even profess a belief in any doctrine or doctrines whatever ; we merely declare that we believe the doctrines of the Church are agreeable to the Word of God. By the Word of God most clergy and laity would, I suppose, understand the Bible. Well, it is a very light matter to believe that the doctrines of the Church can be proved by Scripture texts if that is all that is wanted, since every Christian sect in and outside the Church can do as much as that — for notoriously all claim Scripture texts in favour of their peculiar tenets, orthodox and unorthodox. After Bishop Harold Browne, the present (1890) Bishop of Winchester, " on the Thirty-nine Articles," or Pearson " on the Creed," it is difficult to conceive of any theological proposition that could not be proved to be agreeable to the Word of God, with a little " vigour and rigour," such as is commonly practised by professional theologians when they have some Dogma to prove. Fealty to such a Subscription is, indeed, a simple matter, and the Subscription is truly, a mere "rag and tatter Subscription ". 23. (/) Fealty to the Administration. And here the Broad Church clergy compare very favourably with their High Church brethren, who are always worrying their bishops about other "rags and tatters". The Ritualists obey their bishops so long as their bishops obey them, but what a life they led Arch- Fealty to Administration strictly observed. 39 bishop Tait ! The Broad Church always obey their bishops. " You don't keep the law of the Church " is a common, but an idle taunt ; the reply is : " Of course we don't — who does?" Not the Low Church, few of whom read the morning and evening prayer through daily, or say, " Peace be to this house " on visiting the sick, or inquire into the character of all who present themselves for the Sacrament at the altar rails, as they are bound to do by the Rubric. Even the High Church do not dare to do this : if they did they would soon be had up for libel. How many clergymen now omit the Athanasian Creed, or refuse to read the Commination service ; how many illegally curtail the church services in all sorts of ways and don't keep the saints' days ; how often is the long exhortation to attend the Lord's Supper read ; how seldom is the denunciatory one ever heard, although in many churches the number of communicants is notoriously small ? All parties, therefore, freely and unrebukedly neglect or break the law of the Church. Fealty to that is no longer possible. 24. The rule, therefore, must now be — Fealty to tlie Administration. Not what is illegal, but what is enforced or authoritatively enjoined in each particular case — tltat we are bound to obey— and only that. In a word we bow to the administration of the Church. If we can do this conscientiously, we, as Broad Church clergy, remain in the Church ; if we cannot, we must go. But, in all cases, we lay the onus of turning us out upon the Administration ; we are not 40 Fealty to Truth — The Broad Church Triumph. going out as long as we are allowed to work for Church Reform from within. If we are tolerated, ■why the High and the Low are no more and no less, and we claim our common liberties along with them. And we propose to stay in the Church and work out our policy till the times change and we come into power, even as they have stayed in and successfully worked out theirs, until they came into power and got themselves generally accepted. And our time is not far off now. 25. (^) But when we come to Fealty to Truth, the Broad Church can triumph easily over both High and Low. The High Church do not like the Low Church Dogma, and the Low Church object to the High ritual and Dogma ; but the Broad Church declare, with one far-reaching and sweeping accept- ance, the value and necessity of holding tight every Dogma that the Church has ever taught. They are, indeed, for turning it out of dead Dogma into living Doctrine. They wrestle with it as Jacob wrestled with the angel. They will know its name and nature, nor will they let it depart until it has yielded up its secret and blessed them. They are for re-stating — in other words, rescuing and resetting — the Truth which any special Dogma once held ; Truth which the Dogma is now in danger of wounding, even as the angel touched the sinew of the Patriarch's thigh, and it shrank. But nothing in the way of Dogma comes amiss to the Broad Church ; they are positively hungry for it. They delight in it ; they use it as a very Siloam pool of suggestion and healing. Dogma Gathering up the Fragments, Bidding the Dead Letter Live. 41 is to them the only secure basis upon which every new and living Truth has to be built up. At worst, Dogma is but as an over-faithful, weather-beaten sentinel, from whose iron and icy grip some time- worn treasure has to be deHvered. 26. Give a Broad Churchman even the Dogma of the Infallibility of the Pope, and he will be delighted to handle it sympathetically and tenderly. He will tell you that this apparently monstrous notion was as nearly true as any could be, when the most en- lightened Church in Christendom was the Roman Church, and the Pope in Council, as its Representa- tive, summed up the verdict of the most enlightened Christian Conscience. The ideal verdict of the en- lightened Christian Conscience in every age is the nearest approach to Infallibility we shall ever get on this earth, and the assumption and widely undisputed assumption of that glory once belonged to Rome ; the Dogma was true. It is true (in so far as it serves to remind us of an almost self-evident truth). — It is no longer true. 27. And if the Broad Churchman can do so much, and can glory in doing so much for an exploded Roman dogma, gathering up the fragments that nothing be lost, it will be a light thing for him to take up the dogmas of the Reformed Church, In- spiration of the Bible, Justification by faith. Sacra- mental Grace, Original Sin, Eternal Punishment, the Trinity, and the Divinity of the Lord Jesus, and show his fealty to the essential Truths which lie embedded 42 Gathering up the Fragments, Bidding the Dead Letter Live. in every one of these Dogmas. When this is done, and it becomes perfectly clear to me, that this can be done, and honestly done, in the Church of England, — intelligent men will no longer refuse to take Holy Orders, and intelligent men will no longer refuse to attend Church. Let us now face the main positions of the creeds and see how the Broad Church method in its latest development works out. You will observe that the remainder of this book is entirely built upon the Dogmas of the Christian Creeds. II. ARE THE CREEDS CREDIBLE? "YES AND NO!" II. 28. Yes or No — A Forensic Device — Yes and No. 29. The Creeds — Spirit and Form. 30. Forms of Sound Words — The Apostle's Creed. 31. The Nicene Creed — Arius and Athanasius. 32. The Athanasian Creed — Athanasius and Anastasius. 33. Credibility, not Credulity. 34. Religious Faith and Intellectual Belief. 35. The Gospel appeals to Credibility, not to Credulity. 36. The Reformers appeal to Credibility, not Credulity. 37. The Doctrine of the Unity in the Athanasian Creed and the Articles. 38. In the Essence and the Spirit. II. ARE THE CREEDS CREDIBLE? " YES AND NO!" 28. Are the creeds credible ? Yes or no ! All questions cannot be answered by yes or no, and this is one. A common old Bailey device is to get a nervous witness in the box and say : " Now Sir — do you mean that such and such are your opinions or that you implied so and so by such and such words — yes or no ! " * " Well but— really— that's not quite " stammers the witness. " Yes or no ! " roars the examining counsel. " Now, sir, be careful and stick to the point — answer me yes or no ! " and the witness dumb-foundered, naturally wriggles, prevaricates or perjures himself in his perplexity. " Is the British Constitution a good thing?" Yes or no? No such answer is admissible. The British Constitution is a very mixed affair. It is good here, and we are all proud of it ; it is bad there, and we desire to amend * I regret to see this unworthy device resorted to by a respectable writer like the author of The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma in Lux Mundi. He writes, "the Incarnation is either a fact or a fiction. If it is not true it is false. Is He God or is He not ? " This very question is faced .in our section following p. 77 "Was fesus God Incarnate : Yes and No " . 46 The Creeds — Spirit and Form. it The answer should be not yes or no, but yes and no. Flippant people in like manner come to the clergy with " Is the Bible true — yes or no ? " And the right answer is again yes and no. The Bible contains the record of those divine precepts and those eternal truths which bind human society, dominate the ages, and purify the world. So far it is true, j/gj; but the Bible being a progressive revelation records imperfect stages, and being a record composed by men, contains inaccurate science, and unreliable history, and rudimentary, often even contradictory morality. So the real answer to " Is the Bible true ? " is yes and no. 29. And now to the creeds of the Church. Are they true? The creeds are so many attempts to state certain things which are undoubtedly true, but whilst the spirit of each creedal clause, that which its expression or dogma aims at, may be true, the letter or the form of expression of any creedal clause may be imperfect or untrue. For instance take the creedal clause : " / believe in the resurrection of the body''. The essence or spirit of that clause is a belief in the survival of the soul under fitting conditions of self manifestation or even incar- nation. That is the essence which gave the words " / believe in the resurrection of the body" their value and that is true ; but the sort of physical resurrection, which those who wrote these words dreamed of, and such as Giotto and Luca Signorelli painted, — the rising of the bodies out of the coffins whilst an angel blew a horn, that is not true. And so the answer in The Nicene Creed — Arius and Athanasius. 47 this and some other cases concerning the creeds, to the question are their statements true, is not "yes or no," but "yes and no". 30. What are the creeds? The creeds may be described as a form of sound words defining Chris- tian Doctrine as understood at the time. The nucleus of the Christian creed is found in the last chapter of Matthew : " Go ye and teach all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost ; " those written words may date about 85 A.D. The Apostle's creed, or the substance of it, was used by Irenaeus about 150 A.D. It existed probably much earlier. It was traditionally attributed to the Apostles by Tertullian. Concerning some such form of sound words Irenaeus the disciple of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna (who was himself a disciple of St. John), writes, " the Church dispersed throughout the whole world received this creed from the Apostles ". 31. The Nicene creed next emerges 325 A.D. It was thought necessary to define more precisely several matters in dispute, especially questions concerning the exact nature of Christ's Divinity, and His relation to the Father and the Holy Ghost, who were now for the first time being conceived of as separate "Persons". Theophilus, of Antioch, had invented the word Trinity, towards the close of the second century, and as Mosheim truly says, " the Church has had very little reason to be grate- ful to him for his discovery". So also speaks the 48 The Nicene Creed — Arius and Athanasius. wise and acute Dean Milman : " Alas ! that the subtlety and exquisite distinctness of the Greek language should ever have been applied to religious opinions of oriental origin ". Still no doubt the Church was in a great state of confusion ; on the one hand the Jewish converts, with their strong monotheistic instinct not to identify any human or visible form, however, exalted with the one God, made them averse to calling Jesus anything more than a Son of God, or at most the " Messiah," or a Divinely appointed National Deliverer ; on the other hand the Gentile converts, accustomed to all sorts of human gods, who it seems frequently came down from Olympus and walked and talked with men, naturally could not bear that their beloved Jesus should be thought of lower dignity than the Jupiter, Mars, or Apollo, whom they had formerly worshipped, and so the Gentile or Pauline Christians insisted upon it that Jesus was quite a true God, as true, and indeed truer, than any of the Gods of the nations. But, then again, some shrank from saying he was identical with the Invisible and Eternal Great God Almighty. Perhaps, they specu- lated, he was an emanation, created and sent forth {sic Arius) ; not one who had always been {sic Athanasius), but one who began to be a true God, no doubt, shar- ing deity with the Almighty, yet nevertheless one who had a beginning, and therefore along with all his human attributes might have an end. But this again in the sensitive and irritable ears of 4th century Church doctors seemed like saying there were two Gods, and so the horror of slipping back into Polytheism The Nicene Creed — Arius and Athanasius. 49 and rank idolatry, which so many had suffered mar- tyrdom to escape from, gave exceeding point and sweetness to the doctrine of Athanasius that there never was but one God, and that Christ began not to be but was merely the Human in God which had always been co-eval and co-eternal, and one with God Almighty, although manifested once in time. The fury with which these questions were debated, even in the low pot-houses, baths, and market places throughout the East, is something inconceivable. The whole Christian community was convulsed. The Emperor's personal attention was directed to the scandal. It was quite intolerable that mobs shouting for the Yiovaoiousxon or that Christ was only of a like nature with God, should parade the streets of Alexandria, breaking the heads of other mobs who were shouting for the Hom(?ousion, or that Christ was of the sam£ nature with God. Constantine determined to put a stop to this. He would have uniformity of belief one way or the other, he did not much care which, although personally inclined to Arius. But the Church had become necessary to the Empire, and internal peace was necessary to the efficiency of the Church. Con- stantine was shrewd enough to see this. The Council of Nicaea met on the shores of the Ascanian lake in Bithynia. Three hundred and eighteen Bishops came from all parts of Christendom. There were ninety-one Inns in those days between Bor- deaux and Nicsea. The royal posts were placed at the disposal of the Holy men, and at last in open Council ; the Veteran Arius, aged sixty-five, who 4 5© Credibility, not Credulity. stood for the Homoiousios, confronted the novice Athanasius, aged twenty-five, who stood for the Homoousious, and the victory remaining by a narrow majority with ATHANASIUS, the creed of Nicaea emphasising his doctrine became the creed of Chris- tendom. 32. The " Athanasian (so called) creed " remains to be dealt with. It was called after ATHANASIUS, but was certainly never written by him. Some attribute it to Hilary, Bishop of Aries in the gth Century — but perhaps the best account of it is, that it was composed by one VICTRICIUS, an obscure Bishop of Gaul in the 4th century, who had been accused of being unsound on the Trinitarian dogma, and who had recited this hard and fast confession in the presence of Bishop Anastasius ; the description of this Trini- tarian Confession made before ANASTASIUS soon became (probably through the ignorance and blunder- ing of copyists) "The creed of St. Athanasius" — and so the ' creed ' passed with some difficulty into several of the church liturgies. It is thus seen to be of no great authority, as no one really knows who wrote it, and we perhaps need not trouble ourselves further with its dubious history, and still more dubious theology. It is interesting as an arrogant blast of primitive polemics, and may still be heard echoing like a discordant war-cry of the past in some of our churches. Now we have answered briefly the great question, " What are the Creeds ? " 33. Let us now ask what do the creeds aim at ? Religious Faith and Intellectual Belief. 51 Answer Credibility not Credulity. This is a point almost completely ignored by modern apologists, Lux Mundi people, and such like elaborate and obsolete controversialists. The creeds ruled once in their present form, not because they made demands upon belief, but because they seemed for the time being the most credible of all things. If they have ceased to commend themselves to intelligent people, it is simply because the form of words, credible once, as being in harmony with a past age and a past- method of thought — is unsuited to our own age and our present methods of thought — but we may take it as an axiom that the intention of all creeds is the same — they intend to sound credible — they are popu- lar in proportion as they are seen to be intelligible and definitely expressed. This is the very opposite theory to the one commonly forced upon us by our religious teachers. " It is a virtue to profess what it is difficult to believe, and perhaps impossible to under- stand " — that is preached every Sunday, and that is a most disheartening and pernicious error. In other words religious truth is not the bread of life and the water of life, and the wine of consolation — but nasty physic — you may gild the pill — but a pill it is, you may disguise the wretched powder in jam, but a nauseous drug it remains — you may drench the stuff with syrup, but you must taste a little anyhow, and gulp it down as best you can. 34. All this is absolutely pernicious teaching, it makes men infidels, it keeps men infidels. Separate once for all between Religious Faith and Intellec- 52 Religious Faith and Intellectual Belief. TUAL BELIEF. There is that in the creeds which was intended to appeal to both, but Faith is one thing, Belief is another. The creeds contain central ideas or essences which invite the Faith or loving trust of the heart no doubt — that is their spirit— hwt the letter of the creeds is simply a proposition about truth addressed to the head — the letter aims at the intellect not the heart. You believe simply what sounds believable ; you may have belief without Faith, for there may be nothing in what you believe calculated to call forth your loving trust — but you can't have Faith without Belief — your Faith includes some sort of Belief That is why I define Faith as "a loving trust founded on a reasonable belief". What we have a right to demand of our creeds is that they should explain or define intelligibly or credibly the objects of our Faith or loving trust. Religion, intellectually appre- hended, passes up through reasonable belief into loving trust. If teachers of religion cannot make us feel this through the creeds, or show us why the creeds once seemed reasonable, and how they may be re- handled so as to seem reasonable again — they may up give preaching — writing their Lux Mundis — or whining feebly about the scepticism of the age, for all such well meaning efforts, in spite of a certain flavour of liberalism, ignore the A B C of the great modern controversy between the Church and the world, the pith of which is summed up in these words : " Creeds never were and never ought to hi an appeal to credulity, but always an appeal to credibility ". No teacher that fails to grasp this cardinal point is of very much use in the 19th century. He maybe learned — he may be The Gospel appeals to Credibility, not to Credulity. 53 earnest and devout — he may be a very good school- master, a very accurate scholar, and a very dull writer — but with all these weighty qualities he is obsolete. Professor Jowett noticed long ago with a little gentle cynicism all his own, how all the resources and ingenuity of learning might be used to prop up a system of thought and opinions which was doomed to decay because not true. 35. Let no man henceforth plague himself to swallow the Incredible, or believe the Impossible in the name of Religion, least of all in the name of Christ's Religion. The Prince of the devils has been persuading Christians to do this a great deal too long — and from his point of view with excellent results — for the spread of Infidelity has been the immediate consequence. " But can we understand everything ? " Certainly not. There is mystery everywhere — granted ; there are difficulties and doubts and ap- parent contradictions in the universe of mind and matter — granted ; but when it comes to religious belief depend upon it, nothing is vital, nothing is strong, nothing is holy until it has been put into some form in which, though mysterious and baffling, and possibly but half explained, it seems, neverthe- less, likely, or at least credible. It is, for instance, not easy to understand the existence of disembodied intelligences, but a good many considerations make that belief reasonable. " I believe in ministering spirits," is far from being an appeal to credulity, it is an appeal to credibility. The sooner we get out of credulity in religion into credibility, the sooner w« 54 The Reformers appeal to Credibility, not Credulity. get reasons which sound and seem reasonable, the sooner he shall have a Faith which, like that of St. Paul, will ^^ commend itself to every man's conscience in the sight of God". Observe the method of the divine teacher. The Gospel which Jesus preached was believed not because the people had to gasp and strain and do violence to their intelligence over its propositions, but because it was so simple and con- vincing. If ye love Me, keep My Commandments. Personal allegiance to Jesus was so easy ; He was irresistibly attractive. " Ye believe in God, believe also in me — believe for the very work's sake:" The evidences that His word and work were good and divine were so plain that he who ran might read. The orthodox dogmatists of the Talmud, with their hair-splitting distinctions and subtilties, were in a moment out of court before the simplicity which was in Jesus, " See ye" they said, " how we prevail nothing — the whole world is gone after Him,'' and " the people were very attentive to hear Him" because all he said, with the exception of here and there a paradox with a purpose, seemed to them so easy to believe. Unless we can claim as much for our presentation of the gospel we had better leave off preaching. But St. Paul is very bold, he says : If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost I How so? Simply because the gospel being simply the good life and good work of Jesus, anyone looking at that and calling it evil, or failing to see its beauty and truth, must .surely have had, so Paul thought, " a conscience seared with a hot iron ". 36. Luther, in his turn, had a new living presenta- The Reformers appeal to Credibility, not Credulity. 55 tion to make, but it was not a hard theological pro- position appealing to credulity, and to be swallowed whole without asking questions, as the Lux Mundi doctors would have us take their Christian physic. " With infinite- heavings and strugglings and every conceivable ex- pedient of evasion it (the mind) strains to avoid the immense conclusion which challenges it, catching eagerly at every refinement ; if so be, it may be possible to stop short of full acceptance of a truth so stagger- ing as that the man Jesus was Himself the Eternal God. The first great wonder once grasped," etc. — Luic Mundi, p. 240, 241. Luther's doctrine seemed so self-evident that all the common people understood it at once — all the rough soldiers and the poor wayfaring men and women. It seems so simple to believe that souls after all could not jump out of Purgatory, simply because money rattled in Tetzel's box, so reasonable to believe that real righteousness must turn upon some inward state and was not anything which could be bought from a priest for money ; that justification must be by Faith, not by such works as Rome prescribed. The new doctrine seemed self-evident. Luther was quite con- vinced (until bitter experience taught him the reverse) that if the Pope could only be got to listen to the new views, he must acquiesce in what was so very simple and obvious as the need of a spiritual change within, and a moral reform without. Indeed, all re- formers who have had any success, have taken their stand on the essential simplicity and credibility of their message. The first essay by Dr. Temple, now Bishop of London, in Essays and Reviews, is a good example of this — its whole theory and argument is essentially credible, connected, and satisfactory. There is nothing in the Lux Mundi approaching to it in S6 The Reformers appeal to Credibility, not Credulity. cogency or ability. A tardy and timid adhesion to evolution and a practical rejection of verbal Inspira- tion are the nearest approaches ; but the book, as a whole, has unhappily missed what must ever be the chief point of every Doctrinal Reform, viz., the making Religious Truth easy to hold, because self-evident. This, and it should be proclaimed from the house-tops, is the one end of the three creeds — the Nicene Creed was accepted because it was a popular amplification and simplification of the Apostles' Creed. The Doc- trine of Athanasius was accepted because it was quite intelligible to his own age, the points of difference be- tween him and Arius were discussed with the hottest interest, and clearest supposed understanding in the streets of Alexandria — just as Home Rule or Dis- establishment are discussed now in the .penny papers. Athanasius prevailed because what he said sounded true in the ears of the majority. Truer than what Arius said — his appeal throughout was to credibility alone. The Athanasian Creed, in so far as it was popular, was so because it was thought to add a fine dogmatic emphasis to what Athanasius had said, and to damn everybody who did not believe what was true, and nothing could be more congenial to the age than such stout sentiments. The meaning and force of every Church Council and every confession since has been precisely the same — each appealing by interminable arguments to what seemed most credible. Had it not been found needful to change the forms of appeal forthis purpose, we should have had one creed, not three creeds ; one confession, not at least five important and differently characteristic ones, e.g., the Council Unity in the Athanasian Creed and Articles. 57 of Trent, the Lutheran, the Calvinistic, the Anglican (or Thirty-nine Articles), the Puritan or Westminster Confession of Faith, and each at the time was accepted and got its vogue not because it riveted on the faith- ful things hard to believe, a sort of " swallow or die ! " doctrine, but because it embodied what, at the time, seemed most probably true about religion. And until our Lux Mundi doctors can do as much, they will find that " of making of books there is indeed no end, " whilst their readers will be liable to discover "that much study is a weariness to the flesh". 37. Before closing this section I will speak of the cardinal doctrine of the Trinity which underlies all the creeds and is the keynote of the Christian Religion. Is the doctrine of the Trinity true ? and to this the answer is according to our present method — " Yes and No ". First let us take the No. The Athanasian Creed, for instance let us say, is abso- lutely unconvincing, or unintelligible in its propositions, and preposterous in its denunciations ; so does it seem now to the average lay mind — and to the average lay mind must creeds and confessions be addressed or they are valueless as general confessions of Faith. Once it all seemed quite simple, but it is far from seeming quite simple now. To say that the Father is incom- prehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible, uncreated and eternal, to say that as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every person by himself to be God and Lord, so are we forbidden by the Catholic Religion to say there be three Gods or three Lords. 5 8 Unity in the Athanasian Creed and Articles. To say that each incomprehensible and uncreated Person is by Himself — and yet somehow He does not count for One, but that only all Three together count for One — to say, concerning such a proposition, that it conveys, in our translation, any intelligible meaning whatever to the average Englishman, is simply to trifle with experience, but to say that everyone who does not keep whole and undefiled the letter of such a Faith shall be damned for ever is simply to qualify oneself for a lunatic asylum. We don't say it need have been so once, any more than it seemed cruel once to skin people alive for not believing in the Virgin, or to fry them slowly for not believing in Transubstantiation, but the Athanasian Creed sounds as senseless now to average human ears as the methods of the Holy Roman Inquisition now seem cruel to average human hearts. Put the doctrine of the Trinity so, and ask, " Is it true ? " and we say No ! Now turn to the Thirty-nine Articles. Article number one. Here we get rather a smoother statement, something not quite so repugnant to taste and honourably free from the inhuman barbarity of the Dark Ages, but hardly more intelligible ; — A God " the Maker of all things, without body, parts, or pas- sions," and though without passions or emotional forces, yet capable of love and wisdom — yea, the source of both (see my Thoughts for the Times, i6th ed., p. 178), and so on at each step in the analysis the Western mind plunges deeper and deeper into the fog of late Greek metaphysics, translated, and perhaps but imperfectly grasped, by late western theologians. Ask concerning the doctrine of the Trinity even as it In the Essence and the Spirit. 59 comes before us in the XXXIX. Articles, Is it true? and again the answer seems to be " No ! " 38. But if, whilst repudiating the present fitness of such past expressional letters — which have once been alive but are now dead — we ask, is the doctrine of the Trinity in its essence and spirit true ? we answer, Yes. Of the Athanasian Creed and of the first Article it may be written, These were true, they are no longer true — concerning the verity which both strive to formulate^ it must be written " It is True ". I cannot do better than quote succinctly words in which I have sought so to re-state this doctrine as to make it seem not only credible, but necessary to all clear thinking about God. The conception of variety in Unity, the Many and the One, pervades all life and nature, and is pre- sented to us in man in a trinity of Body, Mind, and Spirit. So Trinity in Unity is in God a diversity of manifestation, or function, combined with a unity of life and purpose. We can hardly think of the Almighty in any other way. It is the normal order of thought metaphysically. Let us see. First, our conception of God is vague and indefinite, Creative Force pervading, correlating, co-ordinating all things everywhere. This is the All-Father, the First Person. But the instant we think more closely, our only definite conception proves insensibly anthropo- morphic. All power, wisdom, intelligence, love, is, in some sort, human, manifested and transferred to God, but still human in nature and thought ; and thus the Ideal Man, the God under the limitations of humanity, steps forth. This would be so in the 6o In the Essence and the Spirit. order of thought were there no figure of Jesus in history. We cannot but — we always have made God in our own image, God the Son, or the Second Person. But in prayer and worship He is appre- hended as a Spirit only, in communion, in sympathy with ours ; then He is God the Holy Ghost, or the Third Person. God the Vague, God the Definite, God the Immanent, that is the inexorable order of thought, and that is the eternal doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. If now it is thought that I have laid myself open to the charge of teaching that there is but one person under three separate manifestations (Sabellianism), it would not be difficult, with Ward Beecher, to identify Manifestation with Personality, for though the beings we know of in this world possess Unity without diverse Personality, this need not exhaust all possible modes of being, and in the Divine Being there may be some such agglomeration oi faculties, into ontological concepts so that as our faculties are grouped only into a Unity of Person — in God, Personalities may be grouped into some higher and diviner Unity. The Christian Creeds, then, aim at eternal verities. They are not verbally inspired, but their truth may be spiritually discerned by us now. They are true not always in the letter that killeth, but always in the spirit that-giveth life. What more do you want ? III. IS GOD OMNIPOTENT? "YES AND NO". III. 39. Contact between God and Man — Homogeneity of Mind. 40. Two ways of apprehending God — from Without and firom Within. 41. Five Central Points in Man's apprehension of God. 42. Two Propositions admitted by John Stuart Mill. 43. God in a sense not Omnipotent. 44. Certain obvious limitations to all power. 45. Progressive Moral Development. 46. God Omnipotent after all, ultimately and for ever. 47. Our share in the Divine Scheme. III. IS GOD OMNIPOTENT? " YES AND NO!" 39. But can we contemplate Him at all, is He in any sense knowable or realizable ? Some say He is not. Lie on your back and look up into the starry night. Think of those huge globes rolled in space. Think of the Power that rolls them. What can such a minute speck of dust as you be to Him or He to you ? The answer is that I can think these thoughts about Him. That is enough. Matter and immensity cannot crush one thought or be weighed against it. Mind is Homogeneous, of the same kind everywhere. There is mind in me. There is mind manifested in the universe, mind is the ground of fellowship between God and man, mind is the point of contact — tov •yap Kol 761/09 eajMev wrote the Greek poet quoted by St, Paul, " we too are His offspring ". He may be the High and Holy one inhabiting eternity. But He dwells also with those that are of a humble and con- trite heart, therefore I am worthy to contemplate Him, I am able relatively to comprehend Him, I am fitted affectionally to adore Him. 40. Now there are two ways of apprehending what 64 Two Ways of apprehending God. some have called the Unknown and Eternal One. He is manifest in phenomena without us, " The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made". — Rom. i. He is mirrored in the soul within, " Eye hath not seen nor ear heard the good things which God hath prepared for tJtem that love Him, but God hath revealed them unto us by His spirit" . — i Cor. ii. 9. Now what does this double deliverance of Himself to man come to? What has the double world of nature and human nature to say concerning the nature of God, and our relation to Him ? What is the verdict of the ages? What in the struggle for existence amongst beliefs remains as the survival of the fittest — an optimist or a pessimist God ? I say unhesita- tingly Optimism survives. In many early and in all debased religions, there is a declared dash of pessi- mism — but it gets worked out of the spiritual systems of the world — ^just as poison gets worked out of a vigorous healthy body. There were in idolatrous systems Lords many and Gods many. Good and bad. In the worst systems like the Baal and Moloch cults and the cults of many savage tribes at the pre- sent day the bad alone seemed to prevail, but this is never the case in any of the higher religions which have ruled the civilisation of the ages. A latent mono- theism has been at the root of all these ; even in the religions of Greece and Rome there was one God sovereign over the rest,' the controlling Zeus or Jupiter. In Zoroastrianism the religion of Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good and evil spirits, the dualism is more apparent than real ; at bottom it was after all a Five Central Points in AIa?i's apprehetuion of God. 65 monotheistic optimism latent, since Ormuzd was surely to prevail finally over Ahriman. The one Good Will went forward ever conquering and to conquer. 41. What then are the five central points in connec- tion with the Deity which emerge as creedal survivals of the fittest in the religious evolution of the ages ? First : God is Mind governing Matter. This is alike the centre of Indo-Iranian and Egyptian, and the derived Greek and Latin religions — it is the heart of Judaism. " TIte spirit of God moved on the face of the waters ' ' and brought order out of Chaos. It was mind govern- ing matter. Secondly : God is a Law of Righteousness impressed on human society. This is confessed more or less distinctly by all the higher religions, but it is the glory of Judaism to have given the Moral Law a first place. Moses even made morals and religion (separated in many idolatrous religions) inseparable. The pecu- liar and solemn emphasis in the name of one central Will of the "Thou shalt, Thou shalt not," of Sinai is the Jew's immortal contribution to the religions of the world. Thirdly: That God means well toman. " The Father Himself loveth you." Fourthly: T/rnt God manifests Himself to man. Divine nature being apprehended through human nature, as Jesus said: "He who Iiath seen me hath seen the Father". Fifthly : That God enters into communion with man. All rituals of approach mean this — " Spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost," on the ground of reciprocal conditions as Jesus says : " If a man love me my Fatfier will love Him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him." S 66 Two Propositions admitted by John Stuart Mill. 42. Now these five deliverances concerning the Deity, arrived at partly through the mirror of the soul, and partly through the contemplation of nature, may be called the Fittest spiritual survivals. They ring from age to age through the brain and heart of man, they seem, whether scientifically proved or not, to be such as can rationally be believed, because they belong to a certain deep-seated generic consciousness of the race, and seem to be involved in the very consti- tution of human nature. That I suppose is why they are inextinguishable. But I can narrow the ground still further, and roll the five points into two propositions, which will suffice for my present purpose. I will therefore assume for the sake of argument as certain, the two propositions about God which J. S. Mill con- siders probable, after all the severest logical deduc- tions have been made. First : The universe is governed by a unity of will — a sovereign intelligence. Secondly : The intelligence has man's ultimate welfare as one end, if not the only end in view ; and this is perhaps why He has permitted that Sovereign Good^that one thing which makes life worth living — the embodiment of in- telligence outside Himself. 43. Are we at last to start fair then with a solid belief in an All Powerful, All Wise, and All Good Deity. No sooner are we out on these deep waters, than we find ourselves suddenly on the rocks of Doubt. If He is All Powerful, He cannot be All Good or why does He permit evil ? If He is All Good, He can- not be All wise, or He would have devised a universe without pain. If He is All Wise and All Good, He Certain obvious limitations to all power. 67 cannot be All Powerful, and that is now the ques- tion which we have to face frankly. I agree with John Stuart Mill — God may be All good, He may be All wise, but His goodness and wisdom can only be saved by some inscrutable and mysterious limitation of His poiver. This is not the best conceivable world, but it may be the best possible world, the child's question : '■' If God is good why does not God kill the Devil," can only be answered in this way, " The Devil, or if you will the Evil principle in Nature, that which " lets and hinders," cannot be all at once put away out of- the universe. The event of the struggle may not be doubtful, but it must be delayed. There is a sense in which the answer to the question. Is God omnipotent? seems thus to be "No ". 44. After all why should any Thing or any One be omnipotent in the literal and absolute sense of the word ? That such a thing as absolute omnipotence exists is at best (however widespread and popular) a highly fanciful and arbitrary assumption and it is cer- tainly directly opposed to facts. In this absolute sense clearly God cannot be omnipotent. He cannot accom- plish that which involves a contradiction in terms. He cannot make a thing to be and not to be at the same time, therefore there is an ontological \{m\t3L.t\or\ to His power. God cannot cause two and two to make five, or two parallel lines to enclose a space, or two sides of a triangle to be less than the third side, therefore there is a mathematical \\m\X.3Xion to His power. God if He be All wise and All good cannot do wrong, therefore there is a moral limitation to His povver. 68 Certain obvious limitations to all power. God if He delegates life to His creatures robs Him- self of just so much control over that life as He gives to them — (delegated gifts mean limitation) — God Himself thus places a creative limitation to His own power. God, if He dowers His intelligent creatures with Freewill, admits a further self-limitation— an evolutionary or developmental limitation. Then if omnipotence must be qualified by all these necessary or admitted limitations, viz., mathematical, ontological, moral, creative, evolutionary, and developmental — why not one more mysterious limitation the reason for which and the nature of which may transcend our present faculties of comprehension ; — why not assume as a hypothesis which explains more facts than any other, and at once saves the Goodness and Wisdom of God — why not assume that in matter and force and the eternal constitution of things there is a something intractable which refuses to yield all at once to Wis- dom and Goodness — or put it thus : The necessary law of progress from lower to higher, involves in its earlier stages at least a conflict with Evil and Pain, from which in its higher stages it tends to work itself free. Here is the training grqund. We are put here to start with human responsibility. We could not be developed were not our choice free (else should we be mere dummies)— and if free, free to choose evil as well as good. In this conflict we meet with pain, and we propagate misery and disease, but we shall come through and win. Yonder we shall work out our deliverance, however inseparable moral and physical evil may be from this rudimentary stage. Progressive Moral Development. 69 45. You may ask, " How do you know it will ever be otherwise ? will not freedom of choice always be before us, and therefore the wrong choice or sin ever possible, and the door ever open to moral eyil ? " I answer " Yes and No ". Certainly we may be at the end of this stage, and in all more forward stages of development, y^^e to choose, but ifi proportion to our progress, less and less likely to choose wrong, in that sentient universe of morally constituted beings passing on and up from Glory to Glory. The " lets and hindrances" with their dire consequences will increasingly fall off, sin will be to us increasingly less and less probable, less and less alluring, and at last it may become next to impossible. A Bank clerk, by dint of practice and habit, acquires an accuracy almost instinctive — his brain has become like the memory of an actor, automatic, and it is almost as impossible to an actor to make a mistake in his part as for the Bank clerk to add up a column wrong. It is easy to admit that it is next to impossible to imag- ine a skilled Bank clerk making a mistake in simple addition, he has got beyond that — but it is quite impossible to imagina Cardinal Manning or the Archbishop of Canterbury coming out to dine and pocketing your silver spoons. They are known to have entirely passed out of that rudimentary stage of moral development in which such things are done. Just so, we can imagine a state in which, though it might be still open to us to choose amiss, it would be next to impossible for us to do so, and moral evil and sin and its punishment will then have practically disappeared from our universe. God Almighty says 70 God Omnipotent after all, ultimately and for ever. to you : " Come, let us reason together" and you say, " How shall I know of a surety that I shall be delivered from this painful struggle with the world, the flesh, and the devil, and that Thy service will become per- fect freedom ? " And then, perhaps, into your mind, flashes the vision of a school boy who hates his Latin grammar, and has to be caned for his carelessness, and with many tears toils through the drudgery of school, but the master points onward to the tripos. A few years more the boy has learned — he holds Virgil and Sophocles in his hand for pleasure, his toilsome study has ended in joyful achievement, his triumph was gradual through pain and weary effort and many a stumble, but his triumph was not doubt- ful. So we may anticipate a future state in which all gross evil has vanished, and our exhilarating effort and energy is in the direction of joyful achievement — so works the accomplished artist, so works the finished musician, so will work forever and ever God's Elect in the land of Eternity, who are now but poor toiling students in the dayschool of Time. 46. Is God then not after all omnipotent? (Yes and No.) Yes, although in one way, and in an impossible manner " No ". In the most conclusive sense " Yes," since he is omnipotent for ultimate victory. His action is steadily in the direction of assured victory, and limitation of power applies only to the method adopted, not the end accomplished, and such limita- tion — necessary, and often most intelligible, is recog- nised by us all in every department of life, whenever we use the phrase " means to ends ". " Delayed (or as Our share in the Divine Scheme. 71 the Scientists would say evolutionary) not defeated," is written over the grand Divine purposes glowing like suns with radiant Goodness and Love through earth's murky and distorting atmospheres — " Though the mills of God grind slowly, Yet they grind exceeding small "- His purpose shall not fail. Nothing cuts clear and deep like water, but the Niagara river effects a cleavage of only a few inches in an age ; yet the mighty cleavage of the American cataract attests its irresistible power. You may watch a bowler at cricket : the moment you see the ball in his hand you know he means business, but the ball flies not all at once. There is a pause, a delay between purpose and execution, cor- relation of brain and muscle, calculation, and then an elaborate focusing of physical and mental energies of eye, and brain, and hand, and the ball at last shoots straight for the mark. God's bolts fly straight and sure, but they take time. Is He less for all practical purposes the God of omnipotence, because He is the God of gradual method, the God- of Evolu- tion ? The answer then to the question : Is God omni- potent ? is " Yes and No ". " Is He all powerful all at once ? " " No." " Is He all powerful ultimately and forever?" "Yes." 47. The sum and substance of what has now been said is this : — First : We are by the constitution of our nature worthy to contemplate, able to compre- hend, and fitted to adore the Deity. Secondly : The central points of God's nature and His purposes toward us as imaged in the Universe, and mirrored in the 72 Our share in the Divine Scheme. soul are Mind governing matter — manifested as a Law 4tiat makes for Righteousness. We further gather that He means us well, that He reveals Himself under the limitations of Humanity, by which we understand that there is something analogous to Human Mind in the Divine Mind. That He seeks to enter into com- munion with us, and enables us to hold communion with Him — a fact which is the rationale of all Rituals of approach in all ages and in all climes. Thirdly : The central crux or difficulty of God's nature and His purposes toward us is the existence of so much evil and wrong and misery under His rule, and conse- quently the extreme difficulty of holding that He is all powerful as well as all good and all wise. Fourthly : This difficulty was solved when we answered the question: "Is God omnipotent?" by "Yes and No". And now, lastly, I ask: "What is our share in that solution?" God is now appre- hended as working to subdue all things unto Himself His hosts of intelligent and morally con- stituted creatures, dowered with personality, free will, and responsibility, are engaged along with Him in this mighty cosmic struggle. In the lower stages of the struggle, pain and evil and wrong have to be wrestled with and overthrown. In the higher regions, by an inevitable law of spiritual evolution, all these " lets and hindrances " will have reached a vanishing point — the point where Struggle is Joy, Work is Achievement, Service is Rest, and Obedience is Blessedness. But now the battle is set in array: the serried ranks press on, and every one is called upon to take his place in the great army of God, or declare Our share in the Divine Schetne. 73 himself an open enemy. What ! God needs us in His struggle with evil ? Even so hath he appointed. We are "fellow-workers with Him ". We dare not say that all that has to be done in such a warfare as this could not have been done by Him otherwise, or without us. We affirm, as a fact, it has not so been done. We are the chosen soldiers and allies— in un- known millions of worlds there may be unknown millions more similarly engaged. Each one is an element of victory in the great army of the Lord the multitude of whom no man can number. God's ulti- mate omnipotence at all events in the only sphere we are connected with is closely bound up with man's struggle against evil. And the end is not doubtful, " for He must reign until He has subdued all things under Him ". What dignity, what definiteness of aim, what hopefulness does this impart to our earthly strivings — even the least of them. We seem to see of the travail of our soul, and are satisfied. The pro- gressive victory is within. The progressive victory is also without. Every development in Wisdom, Love, Usefulness, in spiritual experience is a blow struck against malefic influences. Every thought fights, and every word fights, and every deed done in the body builds up the spiritual state which awaits you when you lay aside the burden of the flesh. O joy, to have got past the lessons, to do with ease and pleasure what once seemed so hard, to rejoice in activities the exercise of which was once felt as gal- ling drudgery ! The fight of faith is also the building up of the house not made with hands eternal in the heavens ; every thought is a brick, every word a 74 Our share in the Divine Scheme. corner-stone, every deed a pillar, and the impulses of a loving heart are the fair adornments, and its aspira- tions are the crown and pinnacle of that house, that spiritual temple set in the golden City of God, the New Jerusalem of the soul. IV. WAS JESUS GOD INCARNATE? "YES AND NO!" IV. 48. The Doctrine of the Incarnation needs restatement. 49. How can it be done ? 50. Why must it be done ? Our Conception of God has changed. 51. Complete Human Enclosure in Flesh, or Incarnation impossible for God. 52. The Problem — God being as we apprehend Him — How the Incarnation is to be redefined. 53. The Incarnation not to be Abolished or Denied. 54. The Story of the Three Synoptics. 55. The Story of St. John. 56. Two Theories current of old, Post-natal Transfusion and Pre-natal Infusion. 57. The Question settled under Con- stantine. 58. Which Theory is True ? 59. Neither Can be Denied or Affirmed. 60. The Pre-Nicene position best. 61. Jesus' account of Himself. 62. Spiritual, not Logical — Religious, not Formal. 63. The Essential Doctrine. 64. The Doctrine of Athanasius. 65. The Doctrine of the Broad Church. IV. WAS JESUS GOD INCARNATE? " YES AND NO!" 48. A writer in the "Review of Reviews" after reading carefully through " Lux Mundi" which deals with the religion of the Incarnation, observes that one thing is clear, viz., the desirability of redefining or restating the Divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ ; most thoughtful persons will agree with him. " Do you be- lieve," it is commonly asked, " that Jesus Christ was God ? " The answer to that question is notyes or no, but yes and no. " I believe that in some full and efficient sense Jesus Christ was a botia fide representation, and an essential Incarnation of God — yes'' " Do you believe that the Great God Almighty — the Creator of the ends of the earth — the High and Holy One that inhabiteth Eternity — came down and was born of a woman about 2000 years ago — that He walked about Galilee — that no one took much notice of Him for 30 years, that He then got into difficulties with the local police at Jerusalem. That the Roman soldiers — so many mere invisible specks of dust on the surface of our small globe — caught none other than the Great God Almighty Himself, beat Him cruelly with rods, spat upon Him, and at last crucified Him on Calvary, do you believe this ? " 78 How can it be done? 49. Instinctively at these words a murmur of " No ! No! — surely not quite that!" would run through any congregation in the 19th century. Some indeed rtiight be restrained by orthodox opinion which states substantially and only a little less baldly, that some such monstrous sounding statement as I have just made is simply the true Faith on the subject of the Incarnation. Still when it is put plainly as I have just put it, people have a sense of being unfairly handled. How then shall we handle them fairly ? — in what way shall we state or redefine the Divinity of Jesus, so as to make it seem as credible and reasonable now as it was once when stated in the old Nicene form ? 50, First : I must ask why does the " Great Al- mighty-God-made-man dogma? seem unreasonable now, and why did it seem reasonable once ? The reason why (has it never yet occurred to 19th century theologians ?) lies in a nut shell. It is self-evident when once called attention to. The old way of stating the Divinity of Jesus now seems unreason- able and out of harmony with the age, because tve have changed our conception of GoD, without changing our conception of Christ. Naturally mental confusion is the result. For if you change one term of a proposition you must change every related term or your proposition won't hang together. Now our view of God is different from the Greek and Roman views held in the ist century, or even the Mediaeval Christian view. God was in those days even as He was in Genesis, a magnified man up in some Olympus, and later on a magnified man up in the Complete Human Enc/osui-e in Flesh. 79 Christian clouds. He came, or they came down sometimes. They had not far to come. Besides it seemed a simple matter — the entire God being conceived of as a limited Personality ; the entire God could be easily transferred from one place to another. Apollo and Mercury thus paid a domiciliary visit to that exemplary old couple Philemon and Baucis. Pluto came up and stole Persephone, and Jupiter, incarnate in a bull, captured Europa. Apollo thought it \\'orth while to shoot all Niobe's girls one by one. So common an affair was it for the Gods to peram- bulate the world that when Paul and Barnabas arrived at Lystra and worked a miracle of healing, " The Gods are come dozun ! " they all cried, and Barnabas they called Jupiter, and Paul Mercurius, because lie was the chief speaker^' and out came the priests with the usual paraphernalia of sacrificial victims as a matter of course. 51. The Medisevals were intellectually very little better, for they painted God as an old man up in the Heavens with a long flowing white beard, and the Son, a young man, standing at His right hand, whilst the Spirit was incarnate in the swift dove proceeding from the Father and the Son. Such a presentation of the Holy Trinity would be intolerable now. Why ? Because we have changed our conception of Almighty God, although we still retain primitive or mediaeval verbal descriptions of Him. It ceases to be possible to transfer Him in His entirety to a human form. A perfect manifestation of Him as possessed of moral affectional, in a word, Human attributes — that is still 8o Complete Human Enclosure in Flesh. conceivable, for there is nothing outrageous in saying " Divine mind brought face to face with self-conscious intelligent creatures reveals itself in a Person as moral, order, afifectional sympathy and all other true spiritual attributes of human nature, these being qualities which spring interactivity in the Divine Mind — or rather being eternally latent in the very conception of mind to be revealed whenever the occasion makes it possible or calls for their manifestation. And this we may reverently affirm is so, owing to a certain pro- perty or character which is an essential of Divine Being. Therefore I say a perfect and personal mani- festation of Him as possessed of moral and affectional i.e. human attributes is still conceivable, but that such a manifestation can be ontologically a complete en- closure (the old idea of Incarnation) of the entire Deity — No, simply because we have changed our idea of God. To us the Unseen Divinity is in nature " a Stream of Tendency by which all things fulfil the law of their own being". He is in Human Nature "a Moral Law which makes for righteousness " (Matthew Arnold). Contemplate we the miracle of minute insect life, or the galaxy of suns and planets rolled in space, or the fleeting generations of men upon the surface of the globe, or the Divine thoughts materialized in crystal — flashed on humming bird wings, or painted on flower — petal or sea shell — or surprise we glimpses of this moral mystic and affectional Being, mirrored in that Divine microcosm, the Human Soul. In any case to us God Almighty must be from henceforth and for ever on a scale beyond all human conception, Mindgoverning Matter and evolving Love. V^e\\,that\s The Problem — God being as we apprehend Him. 8i our God, and being that I repeat that He maybe reason- ably capable of Divitie manifestation under the limita- tion of Humanity, but not of complete Human enclosure, and we must so restate the Divinity of Jesus as to make this evident before the doctrine of His Divinity will be again as generally received in the nineteenth century as The-God-Almighty-made-man Dogma was generally received in the Greek and Roman world of the third century. 52. Now let us thoroughly grasp this root prin- ciple : change one term of a proposition and you must cliange all its related terms. Change your conception of a sovereign as composed of twenty shillings, make it worth twenty-five shillings instead, and you must change your conception of a shilling, if you still insist upon twenty shillings making a sovereign. Change your idea of locomotion from a stage-coach to a steam engine, and you must change the stage-coach driver for the engine-driver, and the horses for boiling water and coal. Nor must you leave any horse at all behind. Nor can you make room for any horse in your new locomotive. His occupation is gone, so is the coachman's. You must change all your terms together. And when you change your God conception : you must also change your Christ con- ception. Change your idea of the First Person in the Trinity — ^you must change your idea of the second too. The Incarnation or Divinity of Christ was reason- able in such and such a way, when God Almighty was supposed to be so and so, and the question for nine- teenth-century Christians is: in what way is His 6 82 The Incarnation not to be Abolished or Denied. Incarnation to be reasonably defined now when we perceive God Almighty to be thus and thus ? That is, in a word, how the problem poses itself — if we read between the lines in the Review of Reviews — and rightly interpret the critic of Lux Mundi, who sighs for a redefinition of the Incarnation. 53. Let us now for comfort and edification settle it in our minds that the re-definition of Christ's Divinity consists neither in its abolition nor denial. It will draw its very life-blood from the heart of the Athana- sian doctrine — it will be essentially Nicene. But above all, in order to satisfy Christian requirements, it must be formulated by the words of Jesus Christ Himself. Now, with the answers to the following three questions,- the required re-definition of the Divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ wifl emerge. These are the three reconstructive questions. First : What say the four Evangelists about the birth or origin of Jesus Christ ? Secondly : What says Jesus Christ about Himself? Thirdly : What said the Church about Him at the Council of Nicaea — what, in other words, has the true Athanasian Doctrine of the Incar- nation extracted of imperishable material from the four Evangelists, and especially from the words of Jesus Christ about Himself. 54. First : What say the four Evangelists about the birth and origin of Jesus Christ? Mark is the earliest of the four, 70-5 A.D. In Mark there is no genealogy of the parents, no childhood, no miraculous The Story of St. John. 83 conception. As to the mode of the Incarnation, Mark is silent or Agnostic. Matthew in 80-90 A.D. The descent of Joseph is given out of deference to the first and earliest tradition that Joseph was the Father of Jesus (" as was supposed ") but side by side with the early tradition now appears the other account of the miraculous conception. Matthew therefore records both the early and the later tradition (favouring the later). Firstly : that He was the Son of Joseph. Secondly, that He was miraculously conceived. Thirdly : Luke repeats the entirely irrelevant genea- logy of Joseph, who, now that the later tradition had taken deep root, was assumed to have no part or lot in the parentage of Jesus, but the Joseph genealogy being earliest was too firmly fixed to be uprooted, Luke how- ever the companion of Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, also emphasises the miraculous conception. This mode of Incarnation, so repugnant to the Jew, was very acceptable to the Gentile, for whom Luke wrote. The two traditions in Luke also stand side by side. The first indicated by the retained genealogy of Joseph — the second emphasized by a detailed and well- rounded account of the miraculous birth. 55. Lastly. St. John, 100 A.D., or even later, is silent about the miraculous birth and childhood, but strikes the very key-note of the Athanasian doctrine. "In the beginning was the Word" {sic). There we have the co-eternity and consubstantiality with God of that essential Human nature (seat of moral and affec- tional attributes) which came forth in time Incarnate in Jesus Christ. 84 Post-natal Transfusion and Pre-natal Infusion. 56. Now from these statements in the four Evan- gelists I infer that in the first century there werfe two distinct theories current concerning the origin of Jesus — both theories admitted that He was Divine — but one to which Marie seems to lean, the early and the only one which the Jewish Christian was inclined to accept was that Jesus was the Son of Joseph and Mary, but still the Divine Jewish Messiah, but Divine by post- natal transfusion of Deity. The other, a doctrine easily accepted by the Gentiles, who were well accus- tomed to the varied commerce of Gods with human beings, declared that Jesus was divine by pre-natal infusion, Joseph being nothing but the reputed or supposed father. This doctrine was accepted as naturally by the Gentile Christian, to whom through Paul the future of Christianity belonged, as it was rejected absolutely by the Jewish Christian, who re- presented the infected and moribund Christian stock; for the Gentile could as" little hold that the Divine claims of Jesus were less than those of the Gods he had recently worshipped, as the Jewish Christian could admit that Jesus was co-equal with God Him- self, or in fact anything more than the Jewish Messiah, and the proof of this position is that when the Christian Church decided in the fourth century to define the Divinity of Jesus in the sense which sounded like polytheism to the monotheistic Jew, there was an end to Judaic Christianity. It simply died out and left the Gentile in possession of the field until Mohammed arose and fought the same battle over again on the same ground, and it must be owned to a great extent won it at the expense of what Which Theory is True? 85 seemed to many the polytheism of the Christian Trinity. For obviously Mohammed defeated Trini- tarian doctrine as effectually in Asia as Athanasius established it in Europe. 57. Now it is instructive to notice that up to the Council of Nicaea people were allowed to think very much as they pleased about the divinity of Jesus. They all agreed that he was divine, but Jew and Gentile defined the divinity each in his own way. There was no fixed Incarnation dogma until the days of Constantine. He it was who decided that for the peace and unity of the Church there should be hence- forth but one doctrine on that subject. Suddenly the Church became certain that what had not been surely known, was now known to Athanasius and the small majority of Bishops in the Nicene Council who sided with him and carried the day. The tradition — the later, and not the earlier tradition, was thus to be fixed. ]esViS\Ma.sd\w'mQhY Prenatal Infusion. That was the dogma against which may possiblybe some day written as against other dogmas : " It was true ; it is true ; it is no longer true ". 58. Now as to the Prenatal Infusion and the Post- natal Transfusion theories in themselves — which is the most credible of the two ? I can personally sympathise with those who say "/ really don't know". "O," but you reply, " they knew ; the people of Nicaea knew." "Some of them knew," I rejoin, "but granting they knew, I don't know how they knew. Nobody could have known unless the Virgin told them, and we 86 Neither can be denied or affirmed. know the Virgin kept many things in her heart — this may have been amongst them. She may have kept this a long time. How could it have been commonly known in 70 A.D. when she was almost certainly dead ? Yet it is hardly conceivable that Mark, writing the first biographical notice about that time, should have said nothing at all about it if he had known any- thing about it, and he belonged apparently to quite the inner circle of the immediate friends of the Virgin.'' 59. I have simply the two traditions placed before me by two out of the four Evangelists. To some the Postnatal Transfusion as the earlier tradition has always seemed more acceptable perhaps because it is the more reverent doctrine. Nor can I see why God should not be as perfectly manifested in that way as in the other ; but I would not have the presumption to deny the Prenatal Theory, any more than I would have the presumption to affirm the Postnatal Trans- fusion positively. 60. Now the essence and real value of the Atha- nasian doctrine as we shall presently see lies behind any special dogma postnatal or prenatal Meanwhile Christians might with advantage go at the back of the Nicene Council and plead the Nicene liberty, the .evangelical right to be as uninformed as Mark, as divided as Matthew, as inconclusive as Luke, and as silent as John on the question of the miraculous conception. " Haud scio an " would be in this case a bit of Christian Agnosticism, which I for one would not object to, for I really don't exactly know. Jesus ' account of Himself. 87 and I cannot imagine how anyone should know the exact mode of the Incarnation, and still, with Jew and ^Gentile, long before the Council of Nicaea, I am ready to declare Jesus Christ to be God under the limitations of Humanity, and I will now apply to Him direct for the true meaning of that declaration. 61. Now come we to the words of Jesus about Him- self What was His own teaching concerning His own Incarnation and Divinity ? Four times He describes Himself as Son of God, and eighty times as Son of man. The exact meaning which He attached, and which His immediate followers attached to the words Son of God, has given rise to endless controversy ; but that is only because men have loved doctrines about Jesus more than Jesus. But what saith Jesus Himself? Although He was the Son of God, yet He said "My Father is greater than I" i.e., God in His entirety never could suffer complete enclosure in human nature. There were infinite ranges, 'un- imaginable spheres of Divine Being that lay outside humanity, and never could be expressed or revealed to man even in the Personality of Jesus Christ. " My Fatlier is greater than I." There was also a sense in which His Father was endowed with excellences beyond those which the Son could claim, for when someone called Him good, He said, " Call no man good. There is none good but one, that is God. In some sense, according to the words of Jesus Himself, and they have some meaning or no meaning, God was described as transcending Jesus by certain degrees, and kinds of majesty and excellence which Jesus' account of Himself. in some way lay outside the range of human nature. Then, although He was the Son of God, Jesus was not omniscient. " For of that day and hour knoweth no inan — no not even the Son." * Neither was He so self-sufficing as to be beyond the need of human comfort — " Watch with me whilst I go and pray yonder". "He was tempted" — yes, "in all points like as we are ". " He tasted death " — yes, " for every man " ; though He was not holden by death even as we shall not be holden by death. In all these points He teaches us His true manhood. The doctrine of His Divine Nature is expressed characteristically with oriental vagueness, but is not the less suffi- ciently definite and intelligible to the spiritually minded. To Philip, He says, "He who hath seen Me hath seen the Father". Yet in another place, "No man hath seen the Father" {sic). There was then that in Almighty God which could be expressed and seen — His human side ; and that which could not — i.e., all that lay outside and beyond Htimanity in God. God, in His Humanity, could be seen — God in His entirety could not be seen. Again, Christ was " in the Father,'' but " the Father was also in Christ". Why surely this is what theo- * Has it not occurred to the convocation critics of "Lux Mundi," who object to it being assumed that Jesus may have been Umited or inaccurate in knowledge, when He ascribed a Post-Davidian Psalm to David, that He Himself gives up His claim to omniscience in this passage, and the Evangelist who relates that ' ' He grew in wisdom {i.e., that He knew less at one time than at another ") gives it up for Him in another passage ? What is this misguided zeal which claims for the Son of God, under human limitations, what both He and the Evangelist expressly renounced of their own accord ? spiritual, not Logical — Religious, not Formal. 89 logians would call deplorably loose sort of definition, and when we come to what might seem to be a statement of the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, the utterances of Jesus seem in almost flagrant opposition to the letter of the Athanasian creed ; for Jesus appears plainly to do what Athanasius is repre- sented as denouncing — "He confounded the Persons" . " /," says Jesus (the second person), " will pray the Father (the first person) to send the COMFORTER (the third person)," and then a little further on, He (the second person) declares that " He will not leave tliem comfortless , but will Himself be to them the comforter" that is the Third Person ! whom He, the Second Person, had just now prayed the FATHER to send ! J-esus thus confounded the Persons since He here promises to be Himself the COMFORTER or the Third Person ! 62. But the doctrine of Christ's Divinity as ex- pressed by Himself is essentially vague and elastic ; it appeals to the heart, to the spiritual sense more than to the intellect. To the spiritual man it pre- sents no difficulty. To the carnally minded logician, every conceivable difficulty. As representing God to man, Christ was the Father in the Son. " Thou in Me" as presenting the ideal Humanity before God, He was the Son in the Father ; " / in Theel' as the divine love and influence brought into close contact with man, He was the One who would " not leave us comfortless" a Holy Influence or Spirit. All this is admirable in its appeal to the religious sense, and it is spiritually apprehended as divinely true, but it is 9° Tlie Essential Doctrine. amazingly unlike the Athanasian Creed in the precise detail of that alarming formulary. 63. And now I come to the actually recoverable Truth concerning the Divinity of Jesus embedded in the Nicene Creed ; in other words, the Church's com- ment on the doctrine of the Incarnation, extracted from the Evangelists, and the words of Jesus about Himself. I affirm the Broad Church restatement of the divinity of Jesus is essentially Athanasian, based not on the clauses of the so-called Athanasian Creed, but on the central doctrine in the heart of Athanasius at the council of Nicaea, which is capable of trans- cending any number of such definitions and dogmas such as we find in the Athanasian Creed, or, for the matter of that, in the Nicene Creed either. The essential doctrine of the creeds is one thing, dogma, which is doctrine fixed in a special form, is another. The essential doctrine, living and always recoverable, is what we are about to disinter ; it is none other than the true Athanasian doctrine concerning the divinity of Jesus Christ. Let us now clearly under- stand this true doctrine of Athanasius. 64, Athanasius held the Homoousion (Jesus of the same natiire as God) in opposition to Arius, who held the Homoiousion doctrine (or Jesus of a like nature with God). Over these two words raged the battle at Nicsea. The heresy of Arius was not the denial that Christ was God. His heresy was that He, the Person Christ, was God — only another God. There was a time, said Arius, when Christ was not. God, the The Doctrine of the Broad Church. 91 Father, caused Him to be. That moment it seemed to the Nicene Fathers that there were two Gods ; and, if two, why not more ? This, as it seemed to them, perilous approach to the Polytheism, or the many Gods of the heathen, is what set the Council in a flame. The Christian world had but too lately emerged from the curse of the " Gods many and Lords many". Then stood forth Athanasius with the very balm required : the reconciling, the eternal Truth of the " Homoousion" ] the assertion that the Son was not of a like nature, but of the same nature with God. It was, therefore, Essential Deity which came forth in Jesus. There never was a time when that which then came forth was not. jESUS CHRIST; the WoRD was eternally begotten, which means, the human attri- butes — moral, affectional, intelligent and self-con- scious, in a word. Humanity — belong to the inmost and Primal nature of the Deity. It was no after- thought or after-creation. " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Athanasius had succeeded. He had so stated the Divinity of Christ that to the ears of Alexandrine and Greek metaphysicians it seemed not incompatible with the Unity of God. 65. Such is the doctrine for which Athanasius fought ; such is the doctrine which has had such surprising vitality, and which the Church has gone through so much to protect. The Athanasian doctrine rightly construed is also the Broad Church doctrine concerning the Divinity of the Lord Jesus. We believe that Jesus Christ was God under' the 92 The Doctrine of the Broad Church. limitations of Humanity. That sometliing which always had been in God came forth in Christ, was manifested. He was not all God, but true God, even as a cup of sea water is not the whole ocean, yet is true ocean. We believe that a special use was made of Human nature (when He was born of a woman, the Word becoming flesh) at a special crisis in human history (the fulness of time) for a special purpose : in order to seek and to save that which was lost, and so win us back to God by showing us plainly of the Father ; by making us like Himself, and becoming actually Christ rn us, the hope of glory ; and so, by His perfect obedience and sacrifice, and His perfect union with God and man, reconciling us to God, setting God and man at one — or, more theologically speaking, making an At-one-ment for us. And we believe that all that could be expressed of God, His moral and affec- tional nature. His essential, eternally-begotten Human Side, — that verily was expressed, did struggle up into self-conscious revelation under human conditions in Jesus Christ, who grew and developed in wisdom and in knowledge and in favour both with God and man, and became our divine Friend and Saviour. Whether this was effected by pre-natal infusion or post-natal transfusion is to Broad Churchmen immaterial, since they believe the Divine Power could work out its manifestation in one way just as well as in the other. High Church and Low, following the later tradition in Matthew and Luke, may reply : "Well, we don't". Broad Church reply, following earlier tradition in Mark : " Well, we do ". We believe, further, that the Divinely Human, having found self-expression in The Doctrine of the Broad Church. 93 Jesus for our sakes, because He was divine and came forth from God, was able to deliver not merely a speculatively hopeful message like any other good man or highly spiritual teacher, but an authoritative message concerning the good will of God to man, and that he revealed God's power to bless and His will to save us. We believe that He lived the true life out amongst men, and died for us all, in our service and for our sakes and by our sins ; going, as it were, in amongst " the disordered wheels of this world's moral machinery in order to set them right," and allowing Himself, as a necessary consequence (for Christ needs must have suffered), to be bruised and crushed and torn by them, thus laying down His life for His friends. And this, also, we believe : that our human destiny is somehow inextricably bound up with God's own nature, and our struggle against evil with His struggle against evil. " The Word was made Flesh" and henceforth forever it stands clearly revealed that our human nature is none other than Divine, or actually akin to something in God's own nature ; and that, although we struggle up in development through sin and imperfection, we shall be yet found '' complete in Him," so that we all shall come, " in the unity of the Faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a per- fect man, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ". This is the Broad Church Faith expressed in these words : " And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord," which, except a man believe wholly, he shall not, without doubt, perish everlastingly ; but which, if a man believe, it shall surely be as " a well of water within him, springing up into eternal life ". V. IS THE IMITATION OF CHRIST POSSIBLE? " NO AND YES ! " 66. Literal Imitation becomes undesirable. 67. Literal Imitation of Christ impossible. 68. Modern arguments disposed of — Tolstoi unsound. 69. The Fallacy in such books as Joshua Davidson. 70. Early Christian social institutions of necessity transitory. 71. The sweet reasonableness of Jesus and the unreason of caricatures. 72. The real Imitatio Christi. 73. The Christ Ideal — Does it still endure ? 74. Yes, for it is the Sole Basis of Human Society. 75. It works in our Law Courts. 76. And in our Parliaments. 77. And in our Current Maxims. 78. And in our Manners. 79. Capital and Labour and Christianity. 80. Christianity and the Sexes. 81. Christ and Marriage. 82. Christ and Divorce. 83. Christ's Panacea. 84. Christ and Avarice. 86. Christ and the Poor. V. IS THE IMITATION OF CHRIST POSSIBLE? "NO AND YESl" 66. "Is the imitation of Christ possible in the nine- teenth century ?" No and Yes. Imitation may have two meanings — you may copy acts or you may assimi- late character. A personal imitation of Christ is neither possible nor desirable. Young men at Oxford imi- tated the late Cardinal Newman's peculiar and reverential stoop, but that did not make them like the great Tractarian. Many of Liszt's admirers aped his habit — of tossing back the head and flourishing the right hand- before striking a note — but that did not make them play like Liszt. The negro dresses up like the European and affects our ways, but he only makes himself absurd, and you may dress up in a monk's costume without bringing back the spirit or reviving the functions of monasticism, and so you may copy Christ literally, and only make yourself ridiculous. By obeying to the letter some of Christ's precepts, you may actually break the spirit of His life. Dress like Jesus, put on the garb of the East, lie down at meat, speak in parables and paradoxes, and your well meant imitation or copy would seem merely irreverent and absurd. Nay, if all men lived un- 96 • Literal Imitation of Christ impossible. married like Jesu^ the population of the world would have been extinct for about 1800 years! And the poet's tremendous vision in which — Ships were drifting with the dead, To shores where all was dumb — would have been long since realised. Deal with the poor as Christ dealt and fittingly dealt with them in His day, and you would vastly increase instead of diminish- ing pauperism. Again, obey Jesus literally: "hate father and mother," according to the letter of his instructions, — would that be really Christlike? All this copy-book Christianity is a caricature, all this unintelligent literal obedience is a mistake. The letter may actually kill. The other day I heard of a sister of mercy in charge of a sick person, with in- structions to give stimulant every half-hour only, she measured the time and she measured the dose, and although the patient was in a deadly syncope five minutes before the time, yet she refused to administer the restorative, and at the half-hour it was too late. The patient was beyond help, the letter of the instruc- tion, the spirit of it not having been grasped, had actually killed. 67. Can you imitate Christ in the nineteenth cen- tury? I answer, iViji. A servile copy ? No. An unintelli- gent and literal obedience ? No. Jesus was humanly speaking an Oriental — we are Westerns. His religion was once in opposition ; it is now nominally the religion of the civilised world. His environments were not like ours, personally and locally in many Modern Arguments disposed of- — Tolstoi unsound. 97 ways you cannot imitate Him without running counter to His own " sweet reasonableness," to the very spirit of His Hfe and work. No, you must not copy Him. 68. All the Arguments therefore against the possi- bility of being a Christian in the nineteenth century, based on the ridiculous assumption that to be a Christian is to copy Christ, fall to the ground. The spice of unreason in Count Tolstoi's system lies there — the fallacy of such books as Joshua Davidson lies there. 69. A word about Joshua Davidson. That book professes to describe a man who exactly imitated Jesus. As Joshua Davidson was persecuted and finally killed in consequence of his absurdities, the moral is : " If you live like Jesus now, although the world is nominally Christian, you will be persecuted and killed — therefore Christianity in your Christian world is practically impossible, has failed to justify itself to modern civilisation, or to conquer the world — -it has been tried and has failed. Jesus was naturally a martyr. He was fighting a new cause. Granted, but if nineteen centuries after Christ, all who really follow Him are also to be martyrs, Jesus and His religion have failed. You must grant that — witness the fate of Joshua Davidson ! " The real answer to this is, first, "Joshua Davidson did not live like Christ nor act like Christ. He was not even the literal and exact copy he was meant to be." I pause over that point. Joshua Davidson lived in the same house with a woman of bad repute, and an open burglar. These 7 9 8 The Fallacy in such books as Joshua Davidson. were his chosen and intimate associates. Jesus never did anything of the kind. His chosen friends were as far as I can gather, extremely respectable ; there was nothing against Peter and James and John. Judas was the only traitor, but he passed for an honest man, or he would not have been treasurer, and been allowed to carry the bag. Matthew the publican was not loved by the Jews, no doubt, but that was because he was a Roman official ; still he was quite respectable. Mary Magdalene was a hanger-on of the group, but she was avowedly a converted and reformed woman, but I never read that Jesus lived in the same house with her. He frequented the house of Martha and Mary and Lazarus, but they were highly respectable. The worst that was said of Jesus was that He was the friend of publicans and sinners and that He was fond of good living ; but this was only said by His enemies, and even they did not confound Him with the criminals He pitied and was kind to. Jesus was never confounded with the criminal population till quite in the last days, when He came into conflict with the Roman Authorities at Jerusalem who had no time for fine distinctions between people who were charged with breaking the law, but even to the last, Pilate the chief magistrate refused to class Jesus with the other criminals, and .would have let Him off if he could have done so without danger to himself Again, Joshua Davidson at last dies in a street scuffle, whilst fighting with the Paris Commune against the consti- tuted authorities. Jesus never opposed the constituted authorities. The money changers in the Temple courts were no better than unlicensed hawkers. " His Christian social institutions of necessity transitory. 99 Kingdom," He said, " was not of this world, else would his disciples fight." Bad as Csesar was — and he was very bad — being such an one as the Emperor Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Jesus still said, " Render unto CcBsar the things which are Ccesar's and unto God the things which are God's". There is no greater mistake than to suppose that had Jesus lived now, He would have been a Politician — -Communist or what not. That was not His, or His Father's business. His kingdom was not of this world. 70. A great deal has been made of the communism of the early Christians, but that was no essential part of Christianity. It was a detail, an accident, a method suitable to a small and originally close community. They could not well do anything else but have "all things in common ". The form of early Christian life, like early Christian government, was in its very nature local and transitory. The expansion of Christianity necessarily involved changes in both. A return to either is not Christianity, any more than a return to bows and arrows would be war. It would be what Joshua Davidson exemplified — folly on one side and slaughter on the other. The conduct of Joshua Davidson, then, in living with bad people, and in opposing the civil and military authorities, was exactly opposed to the conduct and policy of Christ, who avoided both these fatuous mistakes. 71. Matthew Arnold has pointed out very forcibly, that what impressed all impartial observers about Jesus Christ was His " sweet reasonableness," a quality in which Joshua Davidson was again conspicuously The real Imitatio Christi. deficient. This foolish person never saw when it was reasonable and when unreasonable to apply Christ's words and copy Christ's acts. He was not even sensible enough to know what was and what was not a literal copy of Christ's life. People were as much struck by the good sense of Jesus as they might well be ap- palled by the nonsense spoken by Joshua Davidson in the name of Jesus. And, therefore, we read that the people were " very attentive " to hear Jesus, but that they would not listen to Joshua. " Tkey wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of Christ's mouth; " but, as for Davidson, they only wondered how he could make such a fool of himself. The lawyer was struck by the force of Christ's replies ; but the clever people soon gave Joshua up as hopeless. So exquisite was the fine rapier thrust of the Divine Master's good sense and spiritual subtlety, that at last no man durst ask Him any more questions. They left off question- ing Joshua, because his replies failed to impress them. In a word, Joshua is a caricature of Christ's person, a parody of Christ's teaching, and a misrepresentation of Christ's acts. Thecases of Jesus and Joshua, then, are in no respect parallel. Jesus in spite of his sweet reasonable moderation and divine good sense, was hunted in Sarharia and crucified at Jerusalem. Joshua Davidson, in consequence of his unreason and well meant folly, was persecuted in London, and trampled to death in the streets of Paris. Joshua Davidson, in a word, is not even what he professes to be : a copy of Jesus in the nineteenth century. 72. But my contention is that if he had been a The Christ Ideal — Does it still endure 1 loi true copy, the argument that Joshua Davidson's failure proves that Christianity was unfit for the nineteenth century, would amount to nothing, for real Chris- tianity is not a servile copy of Jesus or a literal conformity to all His words ; but the absorption of His Spirit and the assimilation of His life. That is the only Imitatio Christi of any use, and that is the only reasonable Christianity now. 73. It may be interesting to speculate exactly how Jesus would act now and here, if He came amongst us ; but this is the only thing which it vitally concerns us to ask " Is Christianity played out ? — has it become practically inoperative? or can we still meet life in His Temper, can we deal with human beings in His Spirit, can we reform the world with His Gospel, i.e., with the proclamation of the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Man, and the actual presence in the world of a Divine Spirit of goodness and love working in us, with us, through us. Is the Christ Ideal played out, or is it still the only perfect, flexible and ultimate statement of human excellence and moral endeavour? And what do we understand by the Christ life ? The life of Energy ; " My Father worketh and I work" — CONTKOL ; ''Christ pleased not Himself" — LoVE ; " He loved His own tinto the end" — ASPIRATION ; the eye, ever uplifted to " His Father and our Father, His God and our God". Is that life in its essence imit- able ? We answer confidently " Yes ". 74, The reason is obvious. Such essential Chris- tianity as this can never grow out of date (however I02 Yes, for it is the Sole Basis of Human Society. muddled or mistaken our presentation of it may be at certain epochs). For such Christianity is simply the proclamation of the only conditions under which human society holds together, develops, and thrives. You can't get at the back of such principles as Christ stands for : they are positively ultimate and funda- mental. The Brotherhood of Man is the one thing which binds human society together-— which prevents it falling like dissociated atoms into chaos. The Fatherhood of God, revealed in a spiritual Presence within, and in an Emmanuel or present God without — stands in one form or another for all that lifts up life and purifies the world. Christianity so interpreted means the essential cement and purifica- tion of our human world. It not only aims at that, in spite of all the pessimism of such books as the Service of Man and Joshua Davidson — it actually accomplishes in an ever-ascending scale of successful endeavour what it aims at. " The offence of the cross " may not have ceased, neither has the victory of the Cross. The world of Victoria, let pessimists rave as they will, is not so bad as the world of Nero and Caligula. Nineteen centuries of Christianity have not done as much as could be wished ; but they have done something, and whilst rejoicing in the secular knowledge which "grows from more to more," we need no fresh Gospel, no new principles of action, the leaven is working in the lump, the light is shining in the darkness, we need no other leaven, we call for no other light than "that which lighteth every man which Cometh into the world". The Christianity of Christ, in spite of Joshua Davidson, is not only // works in our Law Courts. 103 possible, it is the only possible influence which will ever set to rights, and is setting to rights the dis- ordered machinery of this world. Let us see how the case actually stands. 75. Our Law Courts are Christian. You may call them corrupt, but go to Tangier or observe what is going on throughout the East where Judges are bribed and witnesses are black with perjury, and our law courts show up pure as the stain- less snow. Listen to any sitting magistrate in London for an hour, and how much of the Christ-like spirit insensibly filters through his utterances. He listens, forbears, he advises, conciliates, avoids extremi- ties, recommends conciliation, often refuses to push matters to a painful conclusion. A good magistrate, and there are many, is a sort of Christ to the people of our great cities. And see how attentive they are to hear him. 76. Our Parliament is Christian. The proof? You shall with difficulty pass a measure which seems opposed to Christian conscience, or charity, or justice. What is the history of the contagious diseases Acts ? Their principle was held to compromise Christian purity. There was a bitter fight. At last they passed and became law, but an influential section of the community still held that they were opposed to Christian conscience, purity, and justice, and they had to be repealed. Those Acts in this Utilitarian nineteenth century could not stand up against what was understood to be the Christian I04 It Works in our Maxims. verdict. The same force of Christian opinion abolished slavery throughout the British Empire almost within the memory of man, passed laws for the protection of women and children, and has for nineteen centuries continued to found innumerable Hospitals, Asylums, Homes, and Orphanages. 77. Our current Maxims are Christian. The stage sentiments most popular with the gods in the gallery are always highly Christian. The triumph of innocence, the vindication of goodness, noble forbear- ance, disinterested forgiveness, resistance to tempta- tion against fearful odds, the reclamation of the fallen, virtue and generosity crowned, Apollyon put to flight. The title Christian Young Men's Association is the stamp put upon centres of culture and know- ledge of all kinds throughout the land, and it is at least as frequent as Mechanics' Institute or Lyceum. The very name The Good Fellows, is an echo of those brotherly bonds which knit the human family together, is Christian. 78. Our Manners are Christian. If you pass to the highest ranks of society you will observe that the best manners are stamped with the image and superscription at least of the noblest and sweetest Christianity. Unfortunately it is too often but a veneer, but if the "best people"— as Thackeray calls the " Upper Ten " — were always what they seem to be, full of sensitive consideration for others, longing to serve them— to avoid friction, to pro- mote their comfort and ease, to postpone them- selves and forget themselves in their desire to be all Capital and Labour and Chrislianiiy. 105 things to all men, — why, what a little heaven below this earth would be. This exquisite affectation of sweetness and kindness which characterises fine man- ners is after all only a tribute to the Christian Ideal. Would that it were more often "an endeavour after the Christian life". 79. But in truth, is there a problem of the present day with which Christianity is unfit to cope ? I know not one. Take, the difficulties between Capital and Labour. What is to bridge over the great chasm between rich and poor ? What is to heal the bitter- ness and soreness between class and class, and restore amity, together with wellbeing ? Not strikes, com- binations, and conferences alone ; these are but the ways and means of thrashing out questions, getting at facts and increasing knowledge. They will avail nothing apart from the spirit of brotherhood which is born of Christian love, and the sense of duty which is born of allegiance to something above both master and man, a Power and a Spirit lifting both into a sphere beyond avarice and greed, and constraining men to do right. The panacea for the quarrel between Capital and Labour is said to be Combination, Co-operation, and Profit sharing; and so it is, but were these three things, or any one of them, ever accomplished without some of the sweet reasonableness of Christ amongst the men, and a measure of the love and sacrifice of Christ amongst the masters ? 80. Or take the difficulties between the sexes. What has Christ got to say to them ? In all ages and countries there has been rnuch irregularity in the io6 Christ and Divorce. relations between the sexes and much unhappiness in consequence of that irregularity. There is much irregularity and much unhappiness now. 81. Has Christ got any panacea? He never meddled with the marriage laws. He assumed, I suppose, that the definition of marriage would differ in different ages and climates. He never expressed any opinion about the three kinds of marriage per- mitted by the Roman law. He never even interfered with Jewish Polygamy. The tendency of civilisation, and especially Christian civilisation, has been towards monogamy, but monogamy is a derived — not a direct — Christian, or even apostolical rule. Jesus dealt in detail with but one point in the mosaic marriage law. He declared it unlawful for a man, married or un- married, to take a married woman. He does not touch the case of an unmarried woman, nor could He have argued it adversely without condemning a practice allowed by the law of Moses as well as by the Roman law,, and He was careful never to collide with the civil law. The last collision was enforced by the Jewish authorities. 82. Again with regard to divorce, Jesus is con- stantly cited as being dead against divorce under all conceivable circumstances, save one. This is quite a mistake', and theologians have owing to their precon- ceived notions and prejudices been oddly blind to the qualifications Jesus Himself makes to His own sweep- ing statement about the unlawfulness of divorce. I know it will be answered Christ's utterances (Matt. Chris fs Panacea. 107 xix. .6-9, and Mark x. 9-1 1 — I venture to quote from Winged Words) — are decisive against divorce. " 'Tis plain, who puts away his wife except for one cause sins, and causes her to sin, who marries after such divorce sins, and causes another to sin. Is that final against the universal divorce practices of Heathendom and Christendom ? for even the Catholic Church has its dispensations and reservations. Is Christ's Veto on divorce final ? I think not. Avoid building a universal rule on an isolated sentence. Christ often spoke decisively, and then explained and modified. His proposition or text arrested attention ; His sermon or explanation applied or modified the sense and apparent meaning of the text. You often have the text without the sermon ; the paradox without the explanation. But sometimes the modification is recorded. The gloss or the difficulty of the rich man going into heaven lay in the explanatory words, " They that trust in riches," the gloss on "^'e must he horn again," lay in " horn of water and the spirit ". And, although theologians seem to have missed it, the gloss on ' those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,' is just hinted at in the words, ' all cannot receive this ; he that can receive it let him receive it,' which is as though He said, ' I tell you what is best, I give you the counsel of perfection ; you are not all equal to this heroic strain ; I set before you the divine intention ; what the human endeavour should aim at " he that is able to receive it, let him receive it ' A very different thing firom the supposed indissolubility of mar- riage." 83. But the panacea Jesus gives for the troubles and regulations of the sexes, just because it is not a rule but a principle, is capable of universal application. Whatever may be the definition of marriage, the Master lays down the principle that restraint in thought is the only thing which will enable people to conform to the marriage law or legal restraint on the sexes whatever that may happen to be in any special age or country. " It is the looking on a woman to lust after her that must be checked," in all cases where she is not to be obtained, because belonging to some one else. io8 Christ and the Poor. Jesus dealt not with legislation, but He did deal with those inward and spiritual principles and motives and impulses, which alone can make our laws binding. Once allow yourself to long, and to go on longing to break a law, and sooner or later you will be sure to break it. If you don't mean to j?«, you must not /Mi'A When the stone has begun to roll, it will be hard to stop it — it must be checked at the start. Has ever anything sounder than that been said about the right way to avoid irregularities between the sexes ? So there too Christ still has the last word. 84. He deals with avarice and the lust of gold in precisely the same way. He points to a region of feeling which would make the lust of gold an impos- sible desire, just as He recommends a diversion of thought which would indispose the mind for the other form of lust. A man asks Him to remonstrate with his brother about some property that he wants to get his share of. Jesus refuses to mix Himself up with the rights of the question, but says : "A maris life consisteth not in the abundance of things he possesseth ". If both litigants could feel that, the particular diffi- culty would disappear. If both saw that brotherhood was better than gain, and amity than gold, and that not the quantity of money but the quality of heart, not what you had got but what you were, signified here and hereafter, — the money question would soon settle itself And so, I think, in this greedy, money grubbing age, Jesus again has the last word. 85. There is one point, however, in which Science is said to be wiser than Jesus : it is in His method of deal- Christ and the Poor. 109 ing with the diseased and wretched. Science strikes clear through that compassion and tenderness which is certainly the very tap-root of the Gospel. " It is not fair to the race," says Science, " it is not wise to keep alive the unhealthy, the idiotic, or for the matter of that, the criminal or the too aged. The sooner they die out the better. This Christian compassion of yours is most mischievous." Well, Christ takes the whole responsibility of that. He had, He still has, ^"■compassion on the multitude" and to each one who imitates Hira in this He still says : " In so much as you have done it unto one of t/ie least of these my brethren, you Itave done it unto m.e ". And this is the justification of Christian compassion. First; to aid and abet the survival of the physically fitted only is not necessarily best for the race, for how much does the world owe to those who have had noble or acute minds in suffering bodies ? It is not for us to judge what mind and body is to be kept going, we cannot. We are bound to do the best for all. Even in ex- treme cases, compassion and its related character is itself to be tenderly nursed, as most useful and happi- ness-giving to the world — we dare not crush it or discourage it : it is at best a tender plant. There is not too much compassion in the world after nineteen centuries of Christian cultivation. But, lastly, and this is the crowning argument in favour of our Christian methods, compassion, kindness to the suffering, the support of the weak and aged, care even for insane and idiotic beings, belongs inseparably to that type of character by whose power alone human frailties and miseries will be gradually diminished and the race will be lifted above them. VI. IS THE HOLY GHOST A REALITY? " YES !" 86. The Holy Ghost and the Trinity. 87. Grounds for Belief in God. 88. How God and Man hold Communion. 8g. The Reality of Spirit, go. The All-importance of Mind. gi. Spirit Triumphs over Matter. g2. Mind acts on Mind — The Dawn of a new Era. g3. The diiference between Past and Present Phenomena. g4. This development non-moral intrinsically. g5. But it needs a Divine Controlling Influence. 96. The Divine Communion — Its Secret unknown. 97. Its Method ex- plained. g8. The Laws of Holy Influences, gg. Attainable Mental Attributes. 100. God's Special Instruments. VI. IS THE HOLY GHOST A REALITY ? " YES!" 86. For Holy Ghost read HOLY SPIRIT, or MiND, or I/o/j Influence. But we are speaking of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. We need flot, however, for our present purpose discuss that doctrine, it is sufficient to say the Trinity expresses the natural order of thought in which God unfolds himself to the human mind. The All-source from which all things flow is indeed the All- Father. As that vague concep- tion becomes a more definite object of thought, and therefore takes on attributes, we discover God under human limitations, and when we seek to enter into communion with Him, Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost, He reveals Himself as God, the Holy Influence — Spirit or Ghost. With the Trinitarian controversy I shall not here further deal. It may or may not be difficult to avoid what the Nicene Council would have called heresy. It is doubtful whether St. John or our Lord Himself would have been considered -quite orthodox by that fourth century assembly. I have personally always had a good deal of sympathy with the excellent Bishop at that memorable conclave, who in his anxiety to avoid Sabellianism fell into Patri- Grounds for Belief in God. passionism, and that other who, in his eagerness to stand clearofPatripassionism, drifted into Sabellianism. The reality of a Divine Influence is what I desire to realise now, but I must be first satisfied of the reality of a Divine Being before I can entertain even a thought about His influence. The ontological ques- tion precedes the functional one. Is there a God ? 87. First the ground for a belief in the existence of a God. (a) John Stuart Mill tells us there is a probability in favour of the universe being ruled over by a Sovereign Intellect, and self-conscious Being. We are glad the critic of the pure reason will carry us so far. {b) Next I find that the scien- tific world has retired from the raw materialism which a few years ago was going to help us to account for the world without Mind, and for man without Spirit. It now seems it could not be done ; it always turns out to be " matter andforce + x " and the Unknown, the Eternal and other equally vague but significant words began to appear and do duty for God, just as hypnotism now does duty for mes- merism, (c) When I find myself and a good many others constituted like me, looking to the pheno- mena of religion in all ages of the world, I find that we are not constituted to believe that the World, and Human Nature, exists without a God, i.e., some supreme self-conscious and intelligent source. The law of my mind impels me to that hypothesis as the one which best arranges and accounts for a large number of otherwise incoherent and hetero- geneous facts. (s for all, so that there may be a sense in which whatsoever we do, whether we eat or whether we drink, we may do it unto the Lord. Every part of every life needs testing and bracing by the characteristics of Sainthood. Are we open in our measure to these blessed influences ? do we always ask " Is it right ? " have we the passion for morals ? do we ask " Is it kind? " Have we the enthusiasm of humanity ? Do we always remember that God is above us and about us — that He can and will enter into communion with us, and make Himself known to us — that the world is " bound with golden cords about the feet of God " — that in Him alone we live and move and have our being — have we in a word at any times or seasons, and in any measure, the all-purify- ing passion of God ? If the saint sees Him " face to face," do we ever see Him even " through a glass darkly," and do we look at the open vision of a Francis or an Augustine, and sigh to see Him as they saw Him " face to face " ? If we do, then to us the resplendent muster roll of God's Saints on earth will not only be intelligible, but the Saints will be variously imitable by us as He was imitable by them — imitable in the sense of assimilating His life, and absorbing His divine spirit, leading our faltering steps to Calvary, arid lifting our fainting hearts into the Heavenly Rest. «B»-^*^<^ X. "IS THE GREAT HEREAFTER A DREAM?" "NO!" 12 149- What Next? 150. Shall we be there? 151. The Spiritual Instinct. 152. The Inevitable. 153. Unreal Immortality. 154. Personal Immortality. 155. Oppositions of Science. 156. Scientific Agnosticism. 157. A Divine Sensibility. 158. A Rational Hypothesis. 159. A Rational Assumption. 160. Ra- tional Witnesses. 161. Subject Matter for Materialists. 162. The Past. 163. The Poet's Testimony. 164. Stored-up Energies. 165^ The Spiritual Self. 165. Conscious Continuity. 167. The Assurance of Jesus. 168. The Individual Conscious- ness. 169. The Orderly Arrangement of Facts. 170. The Unproved Truth. 171. The Multitude of Witnesses. 172. Direct Evidence. 173. Echoes of the Past. 174. God is Just. 175. This is Life Eternal. X. "IS THE GREAT HEREAFTER A DREAM ? " "NO!" 149. Sooner or later the question, " What next ? " will become an all-absorbing one. It does not always press. Youth and health do not believe in death, but death stands at the door of each — " the bearded grain is reaped at a breath and the flowers that grow be- tween ". And when all is very nearly over, the sympathies dulled, sometimes worn out, the senses irresponsive, together with that awful dismal feeling that we are not much required and it is getting time to go, then the question, "What next?" seems to peal louder and louder in our ears with its own importunate thunder. 150. " Is there any hereafter ? " Of course there is. Something must keep going on somehow, somewhere, somewhen — but the question for us is rather " Shall we be there ? " " Is there any survival beyond the grave for us ? " And here the preacher is met with a chill damper in some quarters. It is just now fashionable to pretend that it does not much signify. So long as we are happy and tolerably comfortable here, what does it matter? " I," says the successful swindler ; " I," says the successful business man • i8o The Spiritual Instinct. " I," says the man of pleasure ; " I," says the woman of fashion ; " I," says the young man just breaking into the sweets of life ; " I am for a long life of satisfaction here, or if not, at least, for a short life and a merry one, and after me the deluge ! I have no craving for anything beyond." 151. Undoubtedly we have heard this talk. Un- doubtedly it is not all aiifectation. It stands for a certain truth of experience. What shall we say to people who don't care for the Immortality of the Soul? Shall we accept their apathy as a sort of evidence against the belief? On the contrary, we will say that their apathy is no evidence at all against immortality. Are not some persons callous to art, and some insensible to the charms of music ? Others care nothing for books — many would rather not trouble to read or write, and most people, as John Stuart Mill points out, by nature hate to be clean, but the civilized world holds ineradicable convictions about the reality and importance of art, music, literature, and cleanliness, and puts aside or coerces the indifferentists. You have no spiritual instincts? nothing that speaks to you of immortality within ? Well, all the higher appetites are matters of cultiva- tion and development. Each one lies in the rock, in " the hard granite of God's first idea ". It has to be discovered and acquired. You are not alive to any spiritual natlire here or now ? No matter. Nature is, still inexorable. You do not alter its constitution. You are spiritually constituted. History and Ex- perience bears witness to that extraordinary fact. Unreal Immortality. i8i 152. Evolution is upwards — it is towards immor- tality. Sooner or later the dumb cord must vibrate even in you. You are born into a universe of spiritual affinities, the great ocean of spirit is about you ; in it you "live and move and have your being," whether you will or no. The time must come, sooner or later, when you will have to reckon with the spiritual sphere which seems to you now so visionary and unreal, but which will then be seen to be the only real one — all Matter mere shadow and mist which has served its time, and in form after form more or less gross, has been used up, and is only to be cast aside that you may be clothed with some more subtle form — it may be still of matter — appropriate to sublimated conditions. You will not face Immortality now? Wait- — by-and-by — this night — to-morrow — next year — Immortality will face you ! 153. Now, clearly note what we mean by Im- mortality, and have done once for all with the fashionable substitutes for it. Do not believe them. They are not to the point. They do not cover the whole ground. First, there is the Immortality of the Race! Forsooth! There is no such thing. This earth will either be smashed to atoms or frozen to an icicle — and what then becomes of the race with all its accumulated stores of know- ledge, its high evolutions and manifold developments ? Then there is the Immortality of Thought — that, too, must end with the race — so must the Immortality of Action in its far-reaching results — so must the Im- mortality of Matter, so far as I am concerned. I am Personal Immortality. made up into beans and cabbages, or go to build up the bodies of other organised creatures as ephemeral as myself. Meanwhile, I dance my giddy rounds above the abysses like those clouds of ephemeral gnats that rise and fall at sunset. I strut for an hour upon the tawdry stage of life» I fume and pant, and get hot, and the curtain drops suddenly, and all is over. Puppets similar to myself may benefit by my words, thoughts, and actions, or otherwise — but I shall not be there. I shall have no part or lot in these pasteboard Immortalities which are so freely offered by scientists, positivists, Comtists et id genus omne, and are so cheap. 154. No ! I want to feel that I myself shall survive, that though particles, conditions, associations, even affections and affinities, may be changed or modified, the result of my commerce with all these has wrought out an entity which is /, myself, and that no such breach of continuity shall take place in my passage from this world through the darkness and dissolution of the grave as will avail to destroy my personality or impair my moral responsibility. The voice of that sublime and god-like egoism, without which a man is not a man — the intense and noble perception of the unspeakable gift of life, eternal life, the acknowledge- ment of this KTrifia 6? aii of the soul comes forth even from the finest spirit in that pure " cry of the Human," " I, I myself — I who love and aspire — I who bless the Infinite Power for giving me the grace to exist, the ecstacy to know, to love, to dream, to adore — I myself shall be in the Great Hereafter the same, and yet oppositions of Science. 183 changed from glory to glory ! That is the Pearl-belief, the Pearl of Great Price. That is the real doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul ! 155. You have seen a piece of red-hot iron suddenly plunged into a pail of cold water. The effect has been startling, but decisive, a violent fizzing spasm, and then all was dead, and the heated iron is drawn out cold and black and hard as before. Now, suppose these immense immortality aspirations of ours are plunged suddenly into the icy water of science, and meet with a similar fate, and there remains nothing but black, hard, cold, negation after the process. What then ? Why we should have to submit. We should have to say, " The wish was father to the belief; but it is all a mistake. Science proves it is clearly not so. We die like dogs, and all our thoughts perish." Science proves no such thing. It is a matter quite notorious that science has lately climbed down from that rostrum where for fifty years past she has perched, screaming out " Impossible ! " Her gospel of negation has been followed by a far more modest gospel. It is the gospel according to " Don't know". In Religion, Science is notoriously — for the most part Agnostic. Supreme in her own department, she has left off dogmatising positively about spheres she has not explored and phenomena for which she has at present no tests, and to which she has not the least clue, but which rest on evidence as good as any which she can produce for her own beliefs and alleged facts. Then the High Priests of Science have had such very hard raps (spirit raps amongst them) in this last 184 Scientific Agnosticism. • century of triumphant physical discovery and me- chanical inventions, that, like the circus lion who knows that the innocent-looking switch in the hand of his keeper conceals a steel rod, the scientific dogmatist withdraws a little, and wonders whether it be worth while to risk lightly these saucy and reckless springs and snarls of negation. 156, It must be whispered low that rash and dogmatic as are the Parsons, the Men of Science have fairly outdone them in reckless assertion ; and the worst of it is that whereas it is often difficult to prove that some absurd religious dogma is untrue it is the easiest thing in the world to show up a scientific fallacy. And this is why scientists have left off saying "No!" and have become Agnostics or "Don't Know- ists " ! We have all heard of the astronomer who refused to look through the telescope because he declined to see a planet which he had declared non- existent. I can hear you exclaim, " / know that astronomer'' . Or the geographer who declared non-existent the lakes, rivers, and territories which Mr. Stanley has actually visited. Mr. Stanley ''knows that geographer" . A few of us may recollect how the proposal to light our streets with gas was scouted even in scientific quarters — how the steam-engine was derided, the electric telegraph shown to be im- possible, and within the last few years I am told that even a very high scientific authority was guilty of deriding Edison's phonograph as another American mare's nest. In the last few months (1890) half the medical world has openly swallowed under the word A Divine Sensibility. 185 '^Hypnotism" precisely the facts which they have de- rided for a century under the name of " Mesmerism',' and they may yet be wrong — if not quite wrong, yet very wrong — about Spiritualism. For all \\hich reasons it is prudent and most politic to say when you don't know, that you don't know. Scientific negation has therefore been most wisely and oppor- tunely lifted from the doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul. Few are now bold enough to say they are " quite sure " death ends all. On the other hand they admit with Biichner that mind is not the same as matter, but that the phenomena of mind are expressed by matter and force -1- x, whilst they allow with Bain that mind might exist apart from brain and nervous system in some way hard to imagine, because we have no experience of it ; from which of course it follows with the consent of the most eminent material- ists of the day that mind being not identical with matter, nor at all in pari materia, may very well exist apart from brain and nervous system as at present constituted. 157. Thus much has been, after years of haggling, wrungunwillingly.but triumphantly, from the scientific materialists, and we are not again likely to make them a present of so admirable a strategic position. Every- one is left perfectly free now to ask : " Why do we believe in a future life ? " and to reply, " Because Jesus Christ says : ' I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish,' I rest upon His d'ivine promise ". " Well, so do I." " Then why seek for a confirmation of this belief in modern thought and 1 86 A Rational Hypothesis. science as if you distrusted Jesus ? " I answer, " It is not for the honour of Jesus, but rather for the honour of modern thought and science, to show that its sanest and most recent thinking hangs together with those words of Jesus to the effect that ' we have eternal life, and that we shall never perish ' ". Quite apart from the words of Jesus, I ask you again : " Why do you believe in a future life ? " " Because I have a consciousness of Immortality ! " " Nay ! that you cannot have. You can have a remembrance of the Past and a hope for the Future, but you can only be conscious of the Present moment. You may be conscious of a certain divine sensibility which may lead you to infer that _yoM are something which cannot die. Such a consciousness may indeed be yours ; and when you find that this feeling is not confined to you, but has been common to millions ever since the world began you may fairly say : 'The divine sensibility which leads me to infer something spiritual and permanent in man which cannot die seems almost to amount to a generic consciousness in the race! That counts no doubt for something.' " 158. Again, " Why do you believe in a future life ? " " Because it is an hypothesis which arranges for me more of the human facts which cry out for explana- tion than any other. Look at the broken lives, the incomplete purposes, the injustice, the discords unre- solved, the senseless, aimless striving, the moral chaos which this world presents, if there be no completion or solution beyond ! What chaos is here ? Behold A Rational Assumption. 187 everywhere marvellous order, subtlety, traces of pur- pose, and infinite design — but, in the highest range of earthly being, the realm of Human Nature, nothing but blind alleys, broken achievement, truncated lives, accumulated knowledge wasted, disciplined power wrecked ; in a word, the world of Human Nature is irrationally constituted if there be no future life ; " and, as Mr. Henry Sidgwick says : " We are so made that we refuse to believe in a world irrationally constituted ". Such a notion does not hang together with our other thinking, and, therefore, we cannot feel it to be true. It collides with so many other facts we know to be true, therefore, till better advised, we reject it, and we assume a future life, because it harmonises with more facts, collides with fewer, and explains or responds to its deepest needs, and arranges our experiences, both mental and physical, better than any other known hypothesis. It, therefore, must count for something. 159. Why do 1 believe in a future life? Not because it is scientifically proved, but because it is often rational to believe what cannot be scientifically proved. The severest philosophers and logicians will tell you that it is impossible to prove the existence of an External World. All we are, or can be conscious of, is mental impressions and sensations, but we can- not prove the existence of anything beyond the thing which perceives or cognises. Yet we believe in the reality of matter, simply because it harmonises all our thinkings, and we are practically not constituted to believe otherwise. We cannot prove the Persistence of Force. There is absolutely no scientific proof that 1 88 Rational Witnesses. the sun will rise to-morrow, or that the course of nature (nothing but sequences hitherto invariable as far as we know) will remain the same. We believe it will. We act on the belief If we did not, no kind of orderly action could go on, and human society would be at a standstill. The belief again seems in- volved in our mental constitution. So it appears that science herself can't start without making these enormous demands on faith. She can build nothing without such colossal assumptions as the Reality of Matter external to the mind, and the Persistence of Force unfolded in the invariability of Natural Law. By the side of such scientific assumptions which deal, by the way, largely with the future, the theologian's assumption of a Future Life for man — man being what he is — ought not to appear either alarming or irrational since it squares with our present constitu- tion, and arranges our mental and physical facts better than any other proposed assumption. 160. Why do I believe in a future life ? Because, of late days, there has been a large increase of alleged evidence in its favour, of an altogether direct kind. There are, at this moment, millions of civilised people who believe that, in spite of the manifold impostures covered by the name of " Spiritualism," we have in our midst phenomena connected with that much-abused word which prove, beyond a doubt, the existence and activity of intelligence or mind outside the brain and nervous system. Of these millions of believers, thousands are educated, cultivated, and sane person- ages. Of these thousands, hundreds are well-known Subject Matter for Materialists. 189 and widely esteemed in art, literature, and science, and supposed to be as sane as Huxley or Tyndall on other matters. And amongst these representative believers in one or the other form of modern spiritualism, I note such names as Fichte, the German philosopher ; Professor de Morgan, the great mathe- matician ; Dr. Robert Chambers, the publisher ; Pro- fessor Hare, Professor of Chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania ; Professor Challis, Cambridge Astronomer ; Lord Brougham ; Varley, the electri- cian ; Professor Flammarion, the French astronomer ; Professor Crookes, the discoverer of the Radiometer, analytical chemist and gold medallist of the Royal Society ; Alfred Russell Wallace, the naturalist, and co-discoverer with Darwin of Evolution ; Nassau Senior ; Dr. Lockhart Robertson, etc., etc. Most of the above, though not all, are of opinion that we have evidence that the intelligence which manifests itself is human, and some are convinced that there is distinct evidence for the manifestations being identi- fied with people who have passed away. If there is such evidence, and it challenges enquiry, the contro- versy (as it is already for millions) is at an end, and there is certainly a future life. 161. Modern Spiritualism presents us at any rate with subject matter to be reckoned with. It cannot be silenced. Every attempt to stifle it or sneer it down has collapsed. Every device of enraged Materialism has failed. We are almost sorry for the confident sceptics — especially the doctors — they are having such a rough time of it just now. There are twenty-three I go The Past. well-known publications devoted to Spiritualism in different parts of the world. The leading one in England is certainly Light, conducted by an ex- clergyman, a man of extraordinary firmness and in- telligence, a classical Professor at University College, and an Oxford graduate. These journals are widely read, and are all pledged to maintain the existence of disembodied spirits and their possible intercourse with spirits in the flesh ; and they set themselves to record and verify alleged phenomena connected with the evidence for a future life. The only reason why we hear so little in favour of this huge accumulation of evidence, and so much against it, is, because the believers are mostly silent, whilst the sceptics are mostly noisy; but the alleged evidence is there. It will emerge. It will have to be reckoned with ; and it will certainly count for something. 162. Why do I believe in a future life ? Because such a belief is full of the echoes of the past. Past philosophies, past religions, past human hopes and fears and aspirations — -stripped, it may be, of some superstition and a variety of impossible trappings, yet essentially the same — come back to us, and join our own spiritual strivings. And along with the pro- phecy comes a strange complementary doctrine out of the past. " If," people are now saying, " we shall live hereafter, why may we not have lived before?" Indeed, the ancients held that all incarnate spirit has lived before. The great drama of spiritual develop- ment from this neo-Antique platform unfolds itself as a continuous and eternal working-out of spiritual The Poet's Testimony. 191 individuality through matter, broken only by a sleep and a forgetting — such a sleep comes before birth, such a sleep after this life ; then, through the grave and gate of death, we break into the life of the Great Hereafter. We are born into this world variously weighted or endowed. Our life-germ is the resultant of the previous life. We start here with the faculties ■ acquired elsewhere to work on through another stage of the infinite progress. We awake after death simi- larly, to find ourselves the concentrated result of this life's work, discipline or environment. We pass on and up through new — probably more subtle or higher — forms of matter, to the great Beyond of human life. 163. Thus, to the prophetic, the poetic eye of faith, this stage of existence on earth is robbed alike of its terror, its harrowing mystery, and its cruel aimless- ness. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the sweet American poet, with the poet's true instinct of the living thoughts and convictions dearest to his age, has beautifully expressed the Past, Present and Future of the Human Destiny: — Immortality Before and After. I vex me not with brooding on the years That were ere I drew breath : why should I then Distrust the darkness that may fall again When life is done ? Perchance in other spheres — Dead planets — I once tasted mortal tears. And walked as now. among a throng of men, Pondering things that lay beyond my ken, Questioning death, and solacing my fears. 192 Storedrtip Energies. Who knows ? Oft-times strange sense have I of this, Vague memories that hold me with a spell, Touches of unseen lips upon my brow. Breathing some incommunicable bliss ! In years foregone, O Soul, was all not well ? Still lovelier life awaits thee. Fear not thou ! — -Thomas Bailey Aldrich, in the Century. 164. So then, now you are making your next world. Professors Balfour Stewart and Tait have told us how the sun's light and heat and power go out into space, and are only partially accounted for. Yet they maintain that as nothing can be lost, so all these prodigious forces are being stored up in the unseen universe. This is a parable, for similarly your thoughts, words, and acts do not pass. They have an immediate function here and noiv, but their unexpen- ded, unexhausted energy passes into an inner realm — the realm of your spirit, moulds and builds up that spirit life within which will, 3yi?-««^-^«, be found like the butterfly within the chrysalis, just what those thoughts, dispositions, words, actions have made it. T}w result of all you do, and are, remains. 165. This is your spiritual self, Tlje life stock-in- trade, for good and evil, for better, for worse, with which you will have to start after life's fitful fever, after death's sleep. This is old philosophy, but it is also modern doctrine with which the poets, the teachers, the thinkers of our own age are beginning to rehabilitate the outworn dogmas and superannuated theology of the middle ages. " He that hath ears to hear, let him hear'' Conscious Continuity. 193 166. "But," you sa}-, "you speak of my immor- tality — my entering into a future life equipped with all the resultant influences of this one. You speak of Birth as a sleep and a forgetting, of death, as a sleep and a forgetting. If this be so, in what sense can }-ou promise me a personal conscious continuity, if I have no recollection of a previous state, or only one so dim as the poet describes in such words as : — The soul that rises with us — our life's star — Hath had elsewhere its setting: Not in entire forgetftilness, Not in utter nakedness ; But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home. I answer, " You see there is at any rate an alleged faint memory of a former stage ; }-ou will find people with a vague sense of having lived before. No doubt religions have incorporated that sense, and moralities have been based on the theory of pre-existence. Yet is the memory of it all too faint to help us to any consciousness of a continuous moral development stretching out before birth, or reaching forward beyond death,^ grant you that. The man before this life, the man after this life, seem hopelessly severed in present consciousness from the man in this life. How then is the future life, his future ; the life eternal, kis ? The objection is cogent, can it be met ? Admit with Pythagoras, or \\ ordsworth, or Aldrich, that the faintest connecting memorial consciousness does bind us to a previous existence, but that nevertheless, our spiritual quality and point of depar- 13 194 Conscious Continuity. ture here is the exact result of what happened in a previous state ; then it may be one of the necessary conditions of the efficient working-out of the present life phase — that the past should be thus almost completely vezled^ust as a man cannot apply himself steadily to present work unless he for the time forgets every- thing except what he is about. As that is a voluntary forgetting, so this other may be an automatic, organic forgetting. Or it may be that, owing to the grossness of the matter which composes our present bodies and which gives us the molecular instrument of memory and adapts us generally for earth life, — the things inscribed on the pages of pre-natal memory cannot be so sensitised as to be made decipherable in this life — ^just as lemon-juice on white paper is in- visible without the application of subtle heat, or as a negative may lie undeveloped until the right chemicals be applied. Still as even here in our grossly material state we seem to have certain blurred pre-natal memories, when the spirit has taken to itself a rarer and subtler form of matter in its next stage, a complete memory of this life may ac- company a subtler state of matter, and in the stage following after a third sleep and forgetting, a memory of the two previous stages or even more than two may come out, there being an improvement at each life-stage until all the previous stages at last adequately sensitised stand out and (to change the figure) we look back like a traveller who has been passing through an unknown land, yet ever upward and onward, — the stages of his journey being hid from his eyes. But gradually they become visible as he The Unproved Truth. 195 looks back from succeeding elevations, until, standing at last, on the mountain summit, his life drama " orbs into the perfect whole he saw not when he moved therein '' . Such a moment God may have in store for each one of us. His ways will be justified. " We shall see as we are seen and know as we are known." Memory will be no longer a blurred vision or as a land seen " through a gl8iss darkly," or not seen at all, but face to face with our past lives we shall stand in the white light of Eternity, the Judgment will be set and the Books opened. If this speculation is an hypothesis which restores continuity to the Past, Present, and Future of Human Life ; if it brings back our interest in the Future, and restores to us the feeling of Moral Continuity and Vital Responsibility, it should not be lightly set aside, for it must at least count for something ! And now to close. 167. The negation of science and philosophy, having, let us hope, been finally lifted, my belief in a Future Life may rest on the authoritative assurance of Jesus. 168. On an individual consciousness of a spiritual nature, a divine sensibility not only in me, but re- inforced by a deep-seated consciousness to. the race. 169. On the thoughts that a Future Life arranges in some kind of order the otherwise chaotic facts of this world. 170. On the thought that a Future Life is only one 196 The Multitude of Witnesses. of the many things which it is rational to believe with- out scientific proof. 171. On the great and notable increase within the last half century of alleged evidence showing the possibility of Mind existing apart from its ordinary concomitants — a brain and a nervous system. 172. On further direct alleged evidence of the existence now of those whom we call dead. 173. On the echoes of past religions and philoso- phies, which seem in their essence indestructible and which have maintained that all Spirit is working out, up into 6'gi^-consciousness through Matter, and that this life is only a stage following pre-natal life and to be followed by a life after death. But if you, as a congregation, ask me, as your minister, why I believe in a Future life, I will tell you plainly that 'whilst I take comfort from the manifold voices of earth which join the celestial choirs in reiterating the triumphant song of the Life Eternal, I believe in the soul's im- mortality because I believe in GOD. My future is bound up with His existence, with His character, and affinities such as by the inmost constitution of my nature I am Compelled to believe them to be. 174. If there is (as John Stuart Mill thinks logically probable) a Sovereign Will at the foundation of the universe, if He means well to the creatures He has made (and that He means them ill, is to me unthink- able, and that He is indifferent to them seems This is Life Eternal. 197 irrational) — then He, being what I am forced to believe He is, good, wise, powerful, having made me what I know I am, capable of achievement and co-operation with Him in moral purpose and love, filled also with an insatiable longing to live, to know, to enjoy, to develop (for all which implanted qualities He and He alone is responsible), then I maintain, and ever must maintain, that He will not leave me in the dust. Dare I say, cannot leave me in the dust ? Have I not mind ? Am I not a living spirit ? Am I not His offspring? Are not mind in man and mind in God forever necessarily homogeneous, of the same kind? Are not both divine? If so, He cannot destroy me without destroying part of Himself, a part of Himself with which He has endowed me. But still the inextinguishable divine spark is there. It must live and grow and shine on. It cannot die. As Jesus said : " As thou. Father, art in Me and I in Tliee, that they also may be one in Us". 175. And so at length our place and our part and lot in the " Great Hereafter " becomes intelligible. The future life is assured because of the essential quality of human life here, the discovery of that quality is the Revelation made in Christ. " This is life eternal, to know Thee the only true God, and fesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. Nothing but present assurance (this is life eternal) will ever make you certain about a life after death. "Beloved" says the Disciple whom Jesus loved, "' now are we the sons of God." That was the ground, and that being so, it little mattered to St. John how, and when, and where the future life would 198 This is Life Eternal. take on form. " It doth not yet appear" and it does not matter (note the sublime indifference of the Apostle), " what we shall be!' He was sure GOD would provider-was he not a son now ? Could he ever be less ? In years foregone, O Soul, was all not well ? Still lovelier life awaits thee. Fear not thou ! THREE SERMONS. NOTE TO THE THREE SERMONS. A GREAT desire having been expressed for the re- publication of three verbatim reports of these three sermons, I reprint them without further revision. The Sermon on Prayer appeared in the "Christian World Pulpit ". It contains little which I have not said before, but much which I shall continue to say, I hope, with increasing force and clearness as long as I am permitted to preach. Prayer is the life-breath of Religion, and any thoughts or arguments which en- courage people to pray by disclosing the rationale of Prayer, or by removing intellectual doubts and diffi- culties which hinder the joyous freedom and earnest- ness of devout Prayer, must tend to increase in us true religion and to nourish us with all goodness. The Sermon on Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism, appeared in the columns of " Light ". It was reprinted in the following week as a special supplement, the Editor appending the following notice : — " The demand for copies of ^ Light' of July 2yth containing the sermon recently delivered on ' Mes- merism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism^ having been very largely in excess of the num.ber printed, we readily accede to a request which has reached us from different 202 The Broad Church. quarters to reproduce the discourse in the form of a supplement to the present issue". About the same time an American paper reproduced the sermon, and I also gave permission for its issue in pamphlet form. These facts best explain my further willingness to reissue a sermon, the substance of which has already been preached and printed by me in different forms for some years past. In the study of this Border- land will be found the ultimate reconciliation between Religion and Science, the key to the so-called miraculous and the interpretation of all the Religions of the World, including Christianity. The orthodox churches at present seem strangely blind to this, but the scales must sooner or later fall from their eyes. If " sooner," they may still take the lead in Religion instead of, as now, following afar off; if "later," they will awaken, but too late, only to find themselves forsaken, and their vineyard taken away and given to others. The third Sermon on John Stuart Mill's religion aims at showing the inadequacy of the intellect alone to grapple with the facts of our spiritual consciousness whilst indicating the comfort and even necessity of an intellectual basis such as John Stuart Mill indicates for religious thinkers. The frank acceptance of the Supernatural, not in the sense of a belief in that which is contrary to Nature, but in the sense of a belief in that side of Nature which, whilst abundantly manifested, still defies analysis and explanation — this is the indispensable complement which can alone add Note to the Three Sermons. 203 to religious speculation, that reasonable and loving trust which we call Faith. The reiteration of the argument concerning the mysteriously limited char- acter of the Sovereign Will which controls the visible universe seemed to me sufficiently novel to leave in its place, although the argument occurs in the earlier pages of the book under the title " Is God Omnipo- tent?" To have eliminated it would further have completely destroyed the sermon on John Stuart Mill's religion, which I have been urged to reprint. I._ON PRAYER. ON PRAYER. Preached in St. James's Church, Marylebone, November, 1889. By God's grace we will say a few words about Praj'er. I spoke this morning about it, and I said it was the foundation of all religion. I said that the foundation of religion did not really shift, although there was much shifting in the outward forms of religion. Similarly that prayer was not an uncertain thing, although there were a great many different kinds of prayer. The recurrent Viotes of our religious life go sound- ing on through the ages : they refute our scepticism ; they are stronger than the individual whim and vagary ; they are part of the universal consciousness of humanity. I think it is Herbert Spencer who says that the only way we have of distinguishing between what is real and what is merely apparent, is by the persistence of our consciousness. If there was ever a persistent consciousness, it is certainly the conscious- ness of prayer that we notice running through the asres. From the earliest dawn of civilisation down 2o8 The Broad Church. through the history of the world you will find the same tribute to the persistence of prayer. Do not be taken in about the true nature of prayer. Do not suppose it is a mental exercise where you play off one part of the brain against the other part. Some- times people will ask : " Is there any one listening to my prayer ? " Was Jesus deceived when He uttered His prayers to His Father? Was Paul deceived when he thought in answer to his prayer there stood a strong angel comforting him ? Have all the servants of God been fooled by a theory, that out of weakness they were made strong, that in themselves they could do nothing, but in Christ they could do all things ? Are your private- prayers, your public prayers, a delusion ? Do you know how difficult it is to gather people together in this great city of London ? They do not come together for nothing. They insist upon there being something real. Think of the congrega- tions throughout all this land, of what are they com- posed ? Are they all fools and drivelling idots ? Are they so many slaves, tyrannised over and driven in hordes to Church by a tyrannical clergy ? No, they are sensible men and women. Is there any truth in this sentence : " O thou that hearest prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come " ? Yes, there is the recurrent con- sciousness that we are not praying to ourselves when we pray, but that the cry of distress, or the paean of aspiration, or the expression of our deep unfathomable needs, sometimes in words, and sometimes only in sighs, and sometimes in silent thoughts finds its way from the earth up to the golden throne of God. This is the reality of prayer ; this has existed in On Prayer. 209 the past, pervades the present, and will reach through the illimitable ages of eternity — the intense reality of the human spirit crying aloud to the Great Spirit. Then comes a dark difficulty on the threshold of prayer— man's insignificance in the midst of the immensity of creation. Is it possible to conceive that the Creator cares for such insignificant beings as we are ? You are cheated by what appears, not by what is real. It is true that as far as physical signs go we are but little atoms on the face of the earth, but it is not quantity but quality that tells. You are not clay, you are not dust ; but you are immortal spirits, you are mind, you belong to the eternal kingdom of mind because you have an immortal spirit, because you can think, because you can feel, because you can aspire and adore. Therefore you must not be crushed by matter. You use matter, matter does not use you. Your mind, your spirit, that is what delivers you from the tyranny of the senses. As physical things we are insignificant, but as fragments, of the great eternal kingdom of mind you are infinitely important. The great kingdom of mind is ruled over by God Himself. He is mind. He is will. He is spirit ; and you have that mind, and will, and spirit and love in common with Him. Therefore, whilst on the one side physically you are infinitely small and insignificant, on the other side you are immeasurably great, important, eternal, by reason of your union with the Divine. That is what makes it possible for us to believe in prayer. Man is mind, God is mind. When the mind of man or any kind of mind comes face to face with the mind 14 The Broad Church. of God, there arises an attraction or repulsion, love or hate. One of the attributes of mind is, that out of sym- pathy grows love, out of love grows communion, out of communion grows helpfulness of the weak by the strong. Therefore, if you have mind, you know also that you have sympathies, powers of communion, and passions of love. Because there is mind, there must be sympathy kindled, love kindled, and helpfulness divine brought down to bear upon the weakness which is human. How is it possible to conceive of spiritual com- munion? You cannot conceive of it, but you know that it exists. There are a great many things that you cannot explain, but you know that they are. How does one mind communicate with another? In these days we have had some very strange ex- periments in connection with thought transference. We are told that in some inexplicable manner one human mind is able to impress another human mind, not only with thoughts, but to inspire will and pur- pose. Scientific men have this peculiarity : that every new fact is denied by them for a certain time, and after a few years, when the new fact cannot be gain- said, they change the name, and then accept the new fact. That was the way with mesmerism. As long as it was called mesmerism, all the scientific men said, "It is all rubbish"; but when they found the facts were undoubtedly true, they changed the name and called it hypnotism, and swallowed the facts. Now, one of the most remarkable facts is this : that one mind can transfer silently, without words, On Prayer. 211 its thoughts and its will to another mind, and the most horrible consequences may result ; so that, if this power is abused, and legislation is not speedily brought to bear upon the exercise of it, I know not what chaos will result. It seems that, in the course of these experiments, the hypnotiser can resolve in his own mind that the subject of his experiment shall commit a crime at a particular hour of a par- ticular day, and then the mind of the unfortunate person is irresistibly pressed to go and commit that crime. In one case, when a particular hour came, the patient was seen to secrete what he conceived to be a knife — happily, only a paper-knife was within his reach — and, coming up to his intended victim in the most affable manner, he suddenly raised his hand to stab. Of course the crime was prevented ; but, be- yond all doubt, the fact that the brain of that person had been impressed, and that he was acting by a power beyond his own, was confirmed. What is this power ? If minds affect one another, how can you deny the possibility of mind outside the body im- pressing mind within the body? If there is such a thing as an intelligent spirit that thus silently and mysteriously impresses thoughts and feelings, how can you deny that a Divine Being impresses the brain of His creatures? I said this morning there were also other links in that chain ; that all God's work was intermediate ; that He never works directly; that He always chooses intermediate means. So, in prayer, the easiest way to conceive of a Divine Being in communion with His creature is, that He uses the appropriate means, 212 The Broad Church. whereby He inspires the imagination, kindles the thoughts and feelings ; and that, through the mystic chain of appropriate intermediate agencies. He reaches His ends. This being so, does it not throw some light upon what we may expect to get through prayer, and what we have a right to pray for ? The highest form of prayer is not to get what you want exactly, but to bring our minds into communion with God, whether we get what we want or not. But apart from that highest function, it is an eternally interesting question to us, what may we expect to get, what may we reasonably, ask for in prayer, and then I say in the most uncompromising manner, ask for just what you want. That is the best way. That is the beginning. God alone knows the end. You may reasonably ask for others' sake that others may be influenced by you, or that you may be influenced by others. If you by prayer set in motion a spiritual mechanism, is not it very possible that our prayers for others may be very efficacious in ways we little dream of? Hence through this theory of Divine control by intermediary agencies, can I not say to many a mother here> " Mother, you may pray for your son ; husband, you may pray for your wife ; wife, you may pray for your husband ; parents, you may pray for your children, when you see them way- ward, unwise, uncontrolled. You, by your prayers, may set in motion a chain of spiritual agency which may bring them the very aids they most need. May I not say, too, that you may pray in all cases of sickness. " Oh ! " you say, " will the fever be stayed On Prayer. 213 by prayer ? Will a miracle be wrought in answer to prayer?" No, I never said that, or rneant that. What I claim for prayer is this, not introducing chaos into an orderly world, not setting aside the laws of nature, but giving you the control over them. If your mind may be controlled by a higher wisdom, and you are sick, may you not pray that you rnay be guided to the man who has an intuition with regard to your sickness ? May not you pray that you may have will power to follow him, in so far as he is wise ? May you not believe that you have the power of placing yourself in relation with the higher wisdom in ques- tions of sickness, and be guided to the people most able to cure you. Some one will say : " God knows, after all, what is best for you ; God will give what is good for you without )'pu asking Him ". No, I do not say that. I might as well say, " Do you, when in debt and want- ing money, v.-ait until the Almighty happens to send you a £^ note ? " No ; when a man wants money you say, " Let him work for it, use the usual means ; use his intelligence ; use his knowledge of the world, and so supply the defect in the exchequer". If a man wants a thing he asks for it, and if he does not ask for it he does not get it as a rule, and very often he does not get it when he asks for it. Why should you cast off your common sense and common logic the instant you enter the religious sphere ? The petitioner does not get anything unless he nerves himself to formulate his petition, and so, in the other sphere, may it not be a part of the condition of your getting what you want that you shall enter into, com- 214 The Broad Church. munion with One who knows your petitions before you ask, and your ignorance in asking, but One also who makes your petition the necessary link in the chain of causation which is to give you what you want, and then, only then, do for you "exceeding abun- dantly" above what you are able to ask or even to think? Now, a few closing words on the manner of prayer. I want to show you what will be the manner of effec- tive prayer. You may say your prayers in any sort of way or no sort of way ; you may come into church, and the words of the Litany may rattle through your brain : but if the prayer has not been prayed, who will say " Amen " ? If you come to the end of the Lord's Prayer, and have not realised a single word of its meaning, stop short, and do not say " Amen ". There are all kinds of prayers. What is the kind of prayer which gets what it wants? What is the kind of prayer which takes heaven by storm ? "Pray without ceasing',' says the Apostle ; and Jesus said that "men ought always to pray, and not to faint". That does not mean that you are always to be on your knees, or always to be in church. Take the services as you would your food. Go where and when you think you are likely to get nourishment. Use the services of God intelligently. " Always pray." You cannot always be praying ; you must be some- times working ; you must sometimes be taking the , recreations and pleasures of life which will fit you for work. I do not say that sometimes the truest and noblest enjoyment is not found in prayer. I trust On Prayer. 215 that more than one thrill of exhilarating joy has bounded through your being to-day, when you have assembled in God's house. What does " always praying" mean ? It means, never be in such a condition that you cannot resort in prayer to God. Be able at any moment to go into that inner chamber of your mind and be alone with your Father. There ought to be no scene or recreation which makes it impossible for a man to be in prayer when the hour of prayer comes. The second way of prayer is this — earnestness. Supposing a person wants a thing very much, and goes and says to another, " Give me this," in such a low voice that the other cannot hear it, or says it in such an indifferent tone that the person does not notice him. Will the person believe that he is in earnest ? No. He must say : " I beg you to give it me; I long for it; I agonise for it". Then we are convinced of his sincerity. So, what does the Apostle tell us? He says: "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much ". If you want what you pray for, the prayer must be earnest. If you cannot get anything out of a man unless he is convinced that you are in earnest, so God says you shall get nothing unless you are in earnest. You will say : " That is very hard on the side of God ". No ; I do not think so. I think it is in the way of cause and effect ; I think it is in the way of what is expected between beings who are in sympathy with one another. It seems to me altogether natural that a man should not get his prayer answered -unless he is earnest about it. 2i6 The Broad Church. " The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." And, lastly, there must be sincerity. You must be sincere in your prayers. If, when you bring your gift to the altar, you remember that your brother hath aught against you, go your way, first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. If I incline mine ear to wickedness Thou, Lord, wilt not hear me. Cleanse your hearts, you sinners ; wash you and make you clean. Go to One who can wash you and make you whiter than snow. Aspire to please God, trying to do His will, and try to root out of your hearts all that is a barrier between you and the Divine love. In that spirit come. The Apostle Paul said : " Not as though I had attained," but come in the power of aspiration, and by all means let it be in the power of sincerity. Come as far as your mind and purpose go with clean hands ; come with a guileless intent. Now you have not only the ground of prayer unfolded to you in the homogeneity of mind and matter, but also the mechanism of prayer in the form of intermediate agencies, which supplies a kind of rationale of the way in which God sways the brain and the nervous system ; and you have also- those three secrets which make prayer effectual, enabling you to enter into close communion and to get what you want when you ask it. Prayer must be constant. "I will that men pray always, and not faint." Prayer is earnest. The violent take heaven by storm ; " the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much ". And prayer is On Prayer. 217 sincere. D9 not come with evil thoughts in your heart ; do not come with a He in your right hand to God, but come in sincerity of purpose, knowing your frailty it may be, but also repudiating that frailty in the power of a higher aspiration. Con- stancy, insistency, sincerity — there you have the three points of effectual prayer. II.— MESMERISM, SPIRITUALISM, AND HYPNOTISM. II. MESMERISM, SPIRITUALISM, AND HYPNOTISM. Preached at St. James's, Westmoreland Street, Marykbone. July, i88g. A WISE man says that there is a time to speak and a time to keep silence. The best time to speak is when people are inclined to listen to you. Everyone has to wait for what he calls a favourable opportunity. I think that the time to speak about Mesmerism, Hypnotism, and Spiritualism has come. It is a strange thing as we look back over the history of opinion to remember that some fifteen or twenty years ago nobody could open his mouth publicly upon these questions without either being called a fool or a liar. But things have very much changed, because there must be so very many fools, and so very many liars, who have in every other respect been considered sane, intelligent, and trustworthy people. Experiences have been spread abroad, and men are now wanting to know what are the real facts and what are the reliable premises, in order that they may come to The Broad Church. something like sound conclusions. Then there is a great interest taken in these mystical subjects just now. It is a kind of reaction wave against the hard Materialism and raw Atheism that have been about. Men have had a taste of raw Atheism and they do not like it. They have had a taste of Materialism, and after all they find that it will not explain every- thing ; and then they come back to those ancient and recurrent beliefs and hopes that are full of immortality; and they ask themselves, as they peer wistfully into the darkness whether it is all a dream, whether the old landmarks have been rooted up, never more to be planted, whether there is a way of re-instating and re- stating those truths which have been encrusted with superstition and overlaid with the growth of many ages, and whether we may not rescue something that is at the bottom of such things as occur to the mind, when I mention these three words — Mesmerism, Hypnotism, and Spiritualism. These are not old, they are recurrent truths, and the hopes to which they bear witness are inscribed upon the earliest pages of human tradition. I read that " God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul". By that I under- stand a belief that is ineradicable. It has gone through the ages under different forms, namely, that we are not mere dust and ashes although we may be formed out of earth, cunningly devised materially, but that there is something in us which has matured during this struggle through life, a something in us which will not die, and that the ancient poet's words non omnis mortar — I shall not all of me die — I shall not entirely Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 223 die — admit of a wholly spiritual application for those who believe in the survival of the Ego, and in the possibility of life beyond the grave, apart from the present bodily organism. Now, first I should like to say what Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism are. People ask what is the difference between Mesmerism and Hypnotism. There is not much difference. Hypnotism is a new word, because scientific people who had rejected Mesmerism did not like to accept the facts of Mesmer- ism without giving them a new name ; so they called them Hypnotism. I am not saying that there are not phenomena included under Hypnotism which are some- what different from those of mesmerism, but sub- stantially Mesmerism and Hypnotism "both deal with the mystical and imperfectly explored side of our nature, that transcendental and unexplained portion of human nature which seems constantly to make itself felt and sometimes to make itself manifest to the bodily senses. Hypnotism and Mesmerism deal with these abnormal conditions of human nature. Then what is Spiritualism ? Spiritualism lays hold of this side of human nature, this unexplained side of human nature, and builds upon it the doctrine — what I may call almost a new doctrine — of immortality ; it proclaims that our intelligence survives death, and that by-and- bye we shall have pursuits and interests very similar to those that now engage our attention. And it further teaches that the communion between these spheres, the visible and the invisible sphere, under abnormal conditions and states may be actually made manifest during this present life. That is a brief and, 2 24 The Broad Church. of course, a very rough definition of Mesmerism, Hypnotism, and Spiritualism. This morning I am going to ask what is the de- finition of Mesmerism and Hypnotism, and what are the evidence of Mesmerism and Hypnotism ? And then I am going to ask what is the definition of Spiritualism, and further, what are the evidences of Spiritualism ? First, I will deal with Mesmerism and Hypnotism. I am going to avoid, as far as I can, stories and anec- dotes—some of you will be sorry to hear that — and I am going to avoid personal experiences. I do it advisedly, because I want only to exhibit what may be fairly considered as evidence by reasonably-minded people in a mixed congregation. I therefore avoid stories because I cannot prove my stories as I go along, however good the evidence may be ; I avoid also per- sonal experiences because you cannot cross-question me from the pew. Therefore I cannot give the proofs and grounds on which any personal experiences of mine may rest. What I want to do is to present the definition and explanation of these things and then to evidence them, and what I want to point out is the contact between Mesmerism and Spiritualism ; and lastly, the nature of the momentous hope and also momentous responsibilities which rest upon us if we believe even in a nucleus of the truth which lies at the bottom of these expressions. Now, roughly speaking, what is the kind of thing that we mean when we speak of Mesmerism ? What kind of definition should we use ? I have said that Mesmerism and Hypnotism and Somnambulism are all Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 225 descriptive of a certain mystical side of our nature, which becomes manifest under peculiar conditions. What is the nature of these manifestations ? You all know when persons are mesmerised that their minds are impressed by the mesmeriser ; they take on the thoughts which are passing through the head of the man who mesmerises. Then there is an intensification of their own faculties, so that it is alleged people become what is called clairvoyant and clairaudient : that is, they see more than they can see with their bodily eyes, and they hear more than they can hear with their bodily ears. Then, when the person passes into a deep sleep, there takes place what is called a trance-speaking. They seem to wake up to a con- sciousness of things which we know nothing about, and give utterance sometimes in foreign languages to words and to thoughts which in their natural state they are incapable of appreciating. Then the mes- meriser seems to lay hold of the body, move it, and walk it about ; and then it is what is called somnam- bulism. Then he seems to lay hold of the muscles of the body, and make them abnormally rigid, so that a person stretched stiff between two chairs can bear enormous weights, which he could not bear without suffering, or perhaps not at all, in his natural state : there is a great accession of muscular strength. Mes- merism seems to lay hold of the nervous system, and to paralyse the nerves of sensation, so that when a person is mesmerised he may actually undergo pain- lessly operations, which would cause acute suffering when he was awake. These are the alleged facts which give you a better description, perhaps, than any formal IS 226 The Broad Church. definition of what is meant by Mesmerism, Hypnotism, and Spiritualism. I need not explain them any further, because these phenomena are now so spread abroad and so many people practise them privately that one or more of these facts may have come before the attention of almost everybody in this congregation. Now, how shall we evidence these facts ? Shall I tell you a number of stories ? No. Shall I tell you what I have seen ? No. I shall ask you, however, whilst I speak, to remember carefully the number of stories you have heard, and I shall ask you to remember also any experiences which you have had yourselves in connection with Mesmerism, Hypnotism, and Somnam- bulism. But I shall evidence this thing more histori- cally. I think that is the most satisfactory way of dealing with a mixed congregation. I will call your attention, for instance, to the fact that, putting aside the traditions of past ages, the new version, the new life of Mesmerism, dates from about the end of the last century. In all ages and in all countries these pheno- mena have been known and practised ; but what I may call the science or practice of Mesmerism dates from about 1770 or 1780, as connected with the name of Mesmer. Mesmer lived at the time of the French Revolution. People were very sceptical then, and although Mesmer convinced many that he could send people to sleep and do operations, and that when asleep they were capable of things which they were utterly incapable of in their normal conditions, yet his name was covered with a certain amount of distrust owing to the extremely sceptical age in which he lived, and the radical upheaval of all political, social. Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 227 and religious ideas at that period. Then about '1825 France sets her Academy of Medicine to expose the phenomena of Mesmerism. The most eminent French doctors then sat in conclave and examined mesmeric cases, and they came to the conclusion that there was a great deal at the bottom of Mesmerism, and that the phenomena of Mesmerism, so far from being fradulent, were actual and real. They appended their names to a very remarkable statement of belief about Mesmerism, and it was signed by MM. Itard, Fouquier, and Bourdois de la Motte, and many other leading physicians of Paris at that time, between 1825 and 1 83 1. Then Dr. Elliotson in London took up Mes- merism and he treated patients successfully. There was for some time a mesmeric hospital in the Maryle- bone-road, where treatment was carried on, and where operations were painlessly performed — not always painlessly, however. Then came in chloroform, and that killed the therapeutic power of Mesmerism : chloroform is certain in operations and Mesmerism is extremely uncertain, and it is also difficult to get the right conditions realised. Dr. Elliotson being a great physician in large practice lost nearly the whole of it because he said he believed in Mesmerism. If he had only thought twice he would have said that he believed in therapeutic Magnetism or P.sychopathy, or some new word : he would have been all right if he had not used the word " Mesmer '' . He said what he meant ; he used terms which he did not know he was going to be ruined by. In these days, Dr. Tuckey, of Green Street, Grosvenor Square, publishes a book, and calls it Hypnotism, or something of the sort, and nobody 2 28 The Broad Church. finds fault with it ; it is a new development of science, and at this moment the doctors in Paris, though they will not use the name "Mesmer," use the word Hypnotism, and at La Salpetriere they are carrying out remarkable experiments which bear witness to the general truths of the facts of Mesmerism, namely, that one mind can impress another, that powers are in- tensified, that you can become cognisant and capable of things in Mesmerism that you cannot be cognisant of when you are in the natural state. All these pheno- mena are vouched for now by some of the first scienti- fic men in France, only they call it by a different name. I think this is a much more serious question than some people think. I have attended the con- juring performance of M. Verbeck, Kennedy, and others. I saw them, bona fide, magnetise, or mesmerise, or impress people in the audience. I think it is a serious question if these things are real, if one human being has the power thus to affect another, to impress his mind, perhaps at a distance, so that you can bring a person with whom you are en rapport to you by the power of your will so that he will come into the room, rushing dazed into the room, not knowing why he comes, but feeling an irresistible impulse to come, and being absolutely at your disposal and under your in- fluence and dominion. I think this is a very awful power, and I think such exhibitions as that of M. Verbeck (a very clever man) ought not to be allowed. I do not think these experiments in electro-Biology ought to be allowed. They are only allowed because people say it is all stuff and nonsense. But if scien- tific people come to the conclusion that mind can Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 229 influence mind and control others in that way, I think it is a most serious thing. Let me say that in other countries these things are acknowledged and con- trolled by law. A great deal of this kind of thing was going on in the Mosaic times ; it was sometimes called witchcraft and all sorts of things, but it had to be controlled. Why ? Because it. was real. Call it what you will and explain it how you may, there was the' fact that one' mind could control another mind if you gave the opportunity. Then Hypno- tism, Braidism, or Narcotism, et id genus omne, should be very carefully controlled. It creeps in under what is called therapeutic Magnetism. That is a very valuable thing. I think that a great many of our doctors are coming to that conclusion, and that a great many more who have not the courage to say it have also come to that conclusion. But therapeutic Magnetism may open the door to a great deal of immorality and danger ; and nobody ought to be allowed the facility in an abnormal manner of obtaining control over the brain and the will power of other human beings in order to paralyse their responsibility and bring them under the dominion of any moral law or any moral control save that which is vested in the individual himself. I merely say this to show you that the subject is very important and that it has points of contact with the moral life and with the conduct of the right relations that ought to exist between human beings and society at large. Now let me ask with reference to Spiritualism what it is, and again what are the evidences of Spiritualism ? Spiritualism seizes on this unknown and unexplored 230 The Broad Church. side of our nature with all its wonderful possibilities, the borderland, as I may say, between body and mind, and it builds upon these facts of our nature or these alleged facts of our nature, its own system, supporting the hope that is full of immortality and the life beyond the grave. The phenomena, or alleged phenomena, of Spiritualism are tolerably familiar to you. They are motions under peculiar conditions, motions of furniture, sounds heard in the room, cold winds blow- ing over people, or supposed to ; and then there come appearances, different appearances, sometimes a wholly developed figure, and sometimes a mere light, depend- ing upon the susceptibilities, so it is said, of people present. Then there come messages through writing, then there is automatic writing and psychography when the hand of the human being is used. At other times, pencils may be shut up in desks and writings appear on paper. And then it is said that informa- tion is conveyed at these meetings which nobody in the meeting knows anything about or can know any- thing about ; and it is alleged that discoveries have been made, and so forth. You know tolerably well what I mean by the phenomena of Spiritualism. Then when we speak of evidences of Spiritualism we will adopt the same method as in speaking of the evidences of Mesmerism. We went back and showed that although a modern thing from one point of view it was an ancient thing from another point of view, and we showed the steps in modern history which brought men into something like a consensus about the reality of Mesmerism. So we will now deal with Spiritualism. We might go back to the Hindoos, and show that the Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 231 whole Hindoo philosophy was saturated with the belief of Spiritualistic phenomena. We might come to the days of the Alexandrine philosophy later on, about the third century, when Greece was most sceptical, and show you something like Spiritualism was formulated in the schools of Alexandria. We might take up the Bible and show how from the first page to the end, mixed up, perhaps, with the super- stition of the age, mixed up with credulity and perhaps misunderstanding, there is a steady string of evidence, or alleged evidence, in connection with the phenomena of Spiritualism. There is not a single phenomenon which now takes place at so-called Spiritualistic meetings which cannot be matched in its character in the Old Testament and the New. The phenomena repeat themselves from age to age ; they are always more or less of the same kind ; there is the blowing of the wind— sometimes it is called " a rushing mighty wind " ; sometimes there is the appearance of light or tongues of fire, the shaking and quaking of furniture, and the shaking of the room ; and then there is speaking with tongues. There is also the phenomenon of levita- tion, when this or that person is said to be caught up or suspended in mid-air, and what not. All these things repeat themselves, and it is extraordinary to find after a lapse of five hundred or a thousand years in different countries and different nations whollyunconnected with each other the same kind of phenomena which we are now trying to investigate in connection with Spiritual- ism. The same kind of phenomena have constantly reappeared, and been recurrent. Take up the New Testament and you may found a little philosophy up- 232 The Broad Church. on the therapeutic magnetism as to how the early apostles went and anointed the sick with oil, and they recovered ; how the touch of some people was found to be magnetic ; how healing came through prayer ; and the intensification of those abnormal conditions in which those great blessings seem to ilow from some people to other people. All these are alleged facts, and they are thought and supposed to be miracles and confined to the Bible. If you read Greek history and Roman history and middle age history, and ancient history, you will find that precisely the same kind of things have always been going on, and naturally have always been mixed up with a very vast amount of superstition, and im- posture and credulity, and, I am sorry to say, great knavery. If you pass on from the early days of Christianity in the Bible to the middle ages, you will find the same things occurring in the writings of Paracelsus, Von Hohenheim, and others. Then when you come to Kant, the modern German philosopher, you will find him saying that phenomena of this kind are quite possible in a universe constituted as ours is ; and when you come to Swedenborg, of course you come to a life which is perfectly saturated with the belief, and, perhaps, a well-founded belief, in the nature of some of these phenomena. Then when you come to our own country, about 1840, for it is more instructive to deal with things near our own time than to dive into the mists of antiquity, you find Lord Brougham, Lord Houghton, and Lord Dunraven; later on, Mr. Crookes, Mr. Cox, Dr. Wallace, and Dale Owen of America, and a Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 233 number of other people very much interested in Spiritualistic phenomena, and ending by all bearing their testimony that there is a substantial nucleus of truth at the bottom of it. Lord Brougham very early, when poor Elliotson was suffering under the stigma of superstition and imposture, used these remarkable words : — " I perceive that in the cloudless sky of scepticism there is a rain-cloud not bigger than a man's hand, and that cloud is modern Spiritualism ". It shows the great foresight and courage of Lord Brougham at that time, when such an expression would naturally be received with ridicule, to have spoken such words as those'. There are at this moment at least four newspapers in England that are entirely devoted to the explanation and advocacy of Spiritualism. In Germany there is a most rabid and dead-set against Spiritualism, yet there are some of the most famous German scientific names on the side of Spiritualistic phenomena. They do not commit themselves always, or explain it by Spiritualistic theosophy or philosophy, but they give a tribute to the phenomena of Spirifcualism. Many of them also go so far as to say that it is absolutely certain that through these phenomena is evidenced the presence of intelligences outside the body. You have such names as those of Weber, ZoUner, and others, all men who had attained great distinction in their several depart- ments before they went in at all for what is called Spiritualism. When clever men say they believe in the phenomena of Spiritualism, the man of the world, and very often the scientific man, says, " Oh, yes, clever men, you know, have constantly these bees in 234 The Broad Church. their bonnets ; you constantly find a very clever man has some sort of delusion ; he is mad, really mad, on one point ". It is all very well, but there are such a number of them mad, that is the difficulty. It is so difficult to believe that Lord Brougham was mad, that Mr. Crookes was mad, that the late Lord Houghton, Monckton Milnes, was mad, and that Mr. Wallace was mad. And I am mad, perhaps, if I believe in it at all. I am not committing myself this morning. I am merely what I call evidencing Spiritualism. Then the man of the world constantly says, " Society is divided into three classes, men, women, and clergy- men " ; and they place the clergymen in their credulity and superstition a little lower than the angels — I mean the women ; and therefore the evidence of clergymen on Spiritualism would not be considered as of much value. But it is a strange thing how few clergymen do say that they think anything of Spiritualism at all ; they want to confine it entirely to the sacred volume and to Christianity, they do not take the larger and more philosophic grasp ; they do not even open their eyes to the fact that these phenomena or some things of the same kind have been going on through human history. But it is not on the clergy that the onus rests. The evidence of Spiritualism, such historical evidence as I bring this morning, the evidence for the substantial phenomena of Spiritualism, and very largely, too, let me say, for the explanation of those phenomena as connected with active intelligences, external to ourselves, is this, that at this moment, although many scientific people, like ostriches, bury Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 235 their heads in the sand and assure us that no one now believes in miracles who has any sense, and no one now believes in the phenomena of Spiritualism, and that all phenomena of Mesmerism can be explained quite simply — although this is constantly said, yet now in the latter part of the nineteenth century, so far from the belief in these things being extinct, there are millions of human beings throughout the civilised world who believe in them. Of these millions, there are some tens of thousands whose names are pretty well known ; there are some thousands whose names are very well known ; there are some hundreds whose names are known everywhere as illustrious, sane, and eminent persons ; and there are some tens who are amongst the greater thinkers and greatest discoverers of the age. That is the kind of evidence which we should ponder if we feel inclined to dismiss the subject of Spiritualism as a thing wholly connected with imposture, or, if true, not worthy the consideration of a sensible man. I am merely stating these things in a mixed congregation because they are a kind of statement which you can bring forward upon a subject of this kind without making people anxious to cross-question you from the pew immediately. Now the whole subject of imposture and credulity and the miserable inadequacy of the messages con- veyed at Spiritualistic seances — all that I put aside, because it is beside the point. What we want to find out is whether these things actually do occur, and we want to find out whether they can be explained with- out recourse to that belief in an intelligence outside 236 The Broad Church. the circle. If you can have evidence of the existence of mind apart from the brain and the nervous system, if you can have evidence of facts conveyed at a seance, for instance, not known, and which could not be known to anybody present, if you can get clues which can be followed up and verified of a very ex- traordinary and complex nature, then I say if there is evidence of intelligence at work apart from the ordinary know laws of matter you annihilate the materialistic argument which destroys the immortality of the soul. It does not follow that you will survive, but it follows that there is no impossibility of your surviving if you can produce a mind actually operating outside the laws and the conditions of the present brain and the nervous system. That is why religious people ought to be very keen in trying to find out whether the evidence exists of the operation of mind outside the limits of the bodily framework. Now what is the theory underlying Mesmerism and Spiritualism ? What is the theory which professes to place these things upon a reasonable basis and to ex- plain facts ? Supposing you admit for the sake of argument, the main facts of Mesmerism and the main facts of Spiritualism, let me state, if I can make it clear to 3'ou, the kind of theory of body and soul which goes along with, and explains and arranges these facts. That theory is best summed up in the words of St. Paul when he says : " There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body ". The philosophy of your body and soul, I may call it. a tripartite philosophy or theory, and it is this. You have a body ; then you have a spiritual body within that Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 237 body ; then you have got a something you call mind which is in immediate connection with that spiritual body, and this, as I understand it, is what the Spiri- tualists believe, this is their philosophy. We are tripartite. There is the natural body, there is the spiritual body which floods it as ink will flood blotting paper, or magnetism will flood iron, or oil will flood any substance which absorbs it entirely. It is a body within a body. It is born with every natural body — the spiritual body. But it is rudi- mentary. The spiritual body is developed by the play of forces going on all through life, which we call mind, dealing with the material environment so that the spiritual body which is born germinally in you, existing faintly, is through all life, as you go along gradually precipitated or cryhtallised or built up by the action of the mind. We are tripartite. There is the physical body and the spiritual body, and then the mind at the back of the spiritual body. The mind, the theory is, has a great immediate grip over this body, but the grip the mind has over it is over the spiritual body. The mind is engaged in building up the spiritual body and the spiritual body is the thing which has a grip over the physical body. That is what I understand the theory to be. The spiritual body goes on growing, a life within a life, all through your life, and the nature and the character of it depend upon the action of your mind upon it. The reason why the body is so marvellously affected by the mind is that the mind moulds and uses this spiritual body, which has in its turn a great grip on the material body and moulds it to its will. If, then, 238 The Broad Church. you can intensify the powers of the mind, you control and grip in that sense the spiritual body which is within you, growing and developing. If you can control the spiritual body you control that which im- mediately controls the physical body. And that is why such extraordinary effects are produced upon the physical body through the spiritual body. It has a tendency to become whatever the spiritual, body is. That is what I believe to be a brief summary of the philosophy of the matter. Now the point is, does this explain facts? If you believe that there is this spiritual body within you, and if you believe that at death when the shock comes and separates or disengages the spiritual body which is closely in connection with the mind, that is your- self, you may allow your physical body to crumble away, and you will say non omnis moriar — I shall emerge. That thing which the play of the forces of the mind upon me has been building up within me is that thing with which I am going to proceed into the new realm. I can leave the husk here ; I can leave that which served my purpose and which was moulded to a certain extent by the spiritual body, I can leave that behind me and go on. Does this explain alleged phenomena and recurrent experiences ? Yes. First, it explains the phantasms of the living ; then it ex- plains the phantasms of the dead. It explains the phantasms of the living, that is to say, the appearance of a person at a distance before death when he is in a living state. There was a vast amount of evidence for this — I mean the stories such as you connect with Swedenborg, as when he went into a dead trance and Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 239 then appeared at a distance to somebody else. That was the commonest thing in the Hfe of Swedenborg. If you have looked into the history of the matter you will find that the evidence for the phantasms of the living is very widespread, but still greater is the evidence for the phantasms of the dead ; that is to say that at the moment of death when the shock comes and the spiritual body is disengaged, not by trance or sleep but by death, that spiritual body which has been built up by mind, the wraith, as we call it, appears at a distant place. The evidence for that is very widespread indeed, and it can hardly be dismissed. I suppose that you in this church, when you begin to tell what are called ghost stories round a table, however small the circle, there is not one person who has not got a good ghost story to tell, and sometimes you will find that when the story is traced back it rests upon tolerably good evidence. I say upon the hypothesis of there being a body within a body, which under abnormal circumstances may be disengaged for a short time, but at death is disengaged finally — if that is true it explains the phantasms of the living and the phantasms of the dead. Then if you believe that mind controls and impresses the spiritual body, that it causes it to assume an appear- ance, you have the explanation of the reason why these appearances are sometimes clothed, and why they sometimes appear to wear the ornaments peculiar with them, such as hats and bonnets, and clothes and anything else. The reason is this : that the mind uses the spiritual body to impress some one else at a distance, and naturally invests the spiritual body with 240 Ttie Broad Church. the symbols which would be recognised. You see it is the operation of the mind as much as of the spiritual body, and the mind having close grip over the spiritual body builds up the spiritual body for the occasion in such a manner as shall bring in the individuality of the person before the person who is to be interviewed or visited. Then you have the explanation of what is called mind-cures. If you think that the mind grips the spiritual body tight, and then that the spiritual body grips the mind tight, and both are in grip with the body of this death — your natural body, you have then a philosophic kind of mind-cure. For what does Mr. Tuckey say in his book on psycho-therapeutics ? He says undoubtedly the imagination in connection with a concentration of consciousness produces a structural change in the body. If you look to the story of the Stigmata, where saints in praying at last found themselves actually signed with the stigmata of the nail prints, all these facts are brought out by a large number of well accredited experiments in this book on psycho- therapeutics lately published, where the doctor says that if you can actually impress a mind very strongly you can actually impress the body. Make a person believe that he is going to get well and that moulds the inner body, and that other body in immediate contact with the natural body has a powerful action upon the physical frame. A number of recondite facts in connection with mind cures are to a very great extent explained by this tripartite theory. Then, my friends, to conclude, do you see how we have if only a clue, how, if only there is a rudiment of Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 241 truth in the phenomena of Mesmerism and Spiri- tuah'sm we have a kind of restoration of a belief which was gradually gliding away from us — the possibility of our own emergence, and our own survival ? It is the hope full of immortality reformulated. You can go to men and women and say. If you are satisfied about Mesmerism and about the rudimentary alleged facts of Spiritualism you may take back to yourself the truth that you are tripartite ; that your body may die, but that there is that within you being built up which cannot die, because it is built up by mind itself in the shock and in the confluence of your environment. Then a meaning seems to come to old words which many of us may have been using, words out of the Bible, words out of ancient philosophy, words out of human experience, and a new light seems to come upon our own sense of thoughts and upon our own puzzled meditations, when we say that there is a natural body and a spiritual body. And a new responsibility comes to us; we say to ourselves, " Yes, day by day, I am building up that kind of body which is to represent myself by-and-bye. I am preparing for myself, through the action of my mind upon my spiritual body, the kind of life which I am to lead. I am preparing the sort of appetites, the sort of desires, the sort of feelings, the sort of aspirations, the sort of capacities, which will land me in another world, and which will go- on to develop in another strange and unknown sphere." It adds an awful responsibility to your daily life, it adds a great and glowing significance to those words of Paul : "There is a natural body and there is a spiritual 16 242 The Broad Church. body. And so it is written, the first man Adam was made a living soul ; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which was spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual." You learn to seek how you can actually work out your own salvation with fear and trembling ; you attribute an importance where importance ought to be attributed to thoughts, and to words and actions, because you see these are building up the spiritual nature, they are actually creating that which is to survive the shock of death ; you work out your own salvation with the hope that God " is work- ing in you both to will and to do His good pleasure ". " Christ in you the hope of glory " becomes no more a figure, the ideal man in you is really to be wrought out ; it is the hope of glory, it is the chrysalis which is being matured and by-and-bye that chrysalis, when the time comes, shall burst its shell and leave the shell to decay and break into the empyrean splendours of the unknown life. These are the kind of thoughts which make it not unfruitful to take into the pulpit subjects like Mesmerism and Spiritualism, if only to direct your thoughts towards them. I cannot exhaust them in one sermon ; if you like to go to No. 2 Duke Street, Adelphi, you will find there an immense library under the mgis of the London Spiritualist Alliance ; you will find there an immense library where there are the stories and the evidences which I have not been able to bring before you to-day. If you like to read a book by "M.A. (Oxon.)," called Spirit Identity, you will find the sort of evidence which actually does exist for spirit identity. If you Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Hypnotism. 243 like to read another book called Psychography by " M.A. (Oxon.) " you will also see the enormous amount of evidence there is for automatic writing, and for what is called spirit-writing. These things cannot be dealt with otherwise than by referring you to these books from the pulpit. But I may say that upon myself the result of considering these evidences, whilst I am very doubtful about a great many of the explanations, is a tolerably fixed idea in my mind that we have evidence for the existence of mind acting outside our body, and if that is so, I know no theory so satisfactory, and which explains so many of the alleged facts of modern times and ancient history, as the theory of the tripartite nature of man, which is a very ancient theory indeed, and which means that we have a natural body, and a spiritual body which is being built up slowly all through life, and a mind behind in close grip with the spiritual body, which in its turn immediately affects structurally even the physical body. Therefore take home any comfort you can from these new experiences and this some- what perhaps novel exposition, and comfort one another when you look at' the rage there is for Materialism, and at the crude and horrible negation of God's Holy Spirit and your own immortality — comfort one another with these words. III.— JOHN STUART MILL'S RELIGION. III. JOHN STUART MILL'S RELIGION. Preached at St. James's, Westmoreland Street, Maryle- bone. March, 1890. This is an age of unsettled religious opinion. You may be vaguely satisfied that there is One above and beyond us Who knows what is best — that we are all being dealt with and disciplined and led on by a Divine purpose — and yet you may feel your religious opinions and those of the age unsettled. If you think of the people whom you know personally, if you read the current books and magazines, or if you consider the very diversity of Church and Chapel teaching, you will have to admit that theological opinion is unsettled. Well, the world as regards religion may be divided into three sections. Those who think a little, those who think a great deal, and those who accept what- ever they have been taught and do not think at all about their religion — and the largest number of even so-called religious people belong to the last class ; they seem content with their creed and catechism, and are very much surprised that others who think 248 The Broad Church. more or less about religion should ever have any religious difficulties at all. I have had many religious difficulties ; I do not mean to say that I have cleared them all up, I do not suppose that any of us will ever be able to do that, but in all my earthly strivings after truth I have observed one principle, and that is not to be particular as to where I get my help from. It does not matter to me where flashes of truth and gleams of peace come from as long as they come. And I notice now, without surprise, that very often I do not get truth and peace from the accredited religious teachers and from the current religious books and sermons, but sometimes out of a newspaper article, and sometimes out of a new book, or the sayings of some philosophical writer with whom I may not altogether agree in other matters. What is the mint to me if the metal rings true? — nothing; and I find — Christ and the Bible excepted — on the whole I have gained most religious help and comfort from the writings and sayings of those with whom I have most radical and manifold differences. Now, these remarks occurred to me when I thought of speaking to you concerning John Stuart Mill and his religious opinions. John Stuart Mill some years ago was a name in all mouths. Many people did not know much about him, vast numbers had never read a line of his writings ; at the same time, his name was • a word to conjure with, because everyone felt, in that indescribable manner in which the presence of a great thinker and a pure spirit is felt throughout the land, that he was a man of profound thought, vast know- John Stuart Mill's Religion. 249 ledge and reading, keen powers of observation, and incorruptible integrity. He lived the life very much of a hermit and a philosopher ; he wrote to himself, as it were, and he thought to himself, but he always wrote and thought in the presence of an immense, intelligent, and sympathetic public, the public gathered out of all nations, and climates, and ages, who love the truth because they believe that the truth alone can make them free. Latterly he entered more into public life in England, and even had for a short time a seat in Parliament ; he wrote on politics and on political economy, upon logic, upon utilitarianism ; and he wrote two very remarkable little books, which are very cheap and are now in everybody's hands, or may be, on Liberty and on Representative Government. So strong was the feeling about this man, his wisdom, and his intellectual power, that he was forced from the seclusion of the study in the last years of his life and returned as member of Parliament for West- minster, at. a time when the large number of electors knew nothing whatever about him or his special opinions. He was merely a name, and he was re- turned on the strength of certain clever young men, who kept telling the people that John Stuart Mill was a great and good man, and a mighty thinker. But there was that about Mill which, when you saw him, and many of you may have seen him, impressed you with the sense of a man who lived very much above the usual prejudices of the age. He won confidence by his mild, his firm inflexibility, his deep feeling, and imperturbable temperance of thought, and yet everyone was aware of a mighty underlj-ing 250 The Broad Church. strength. The House of Commons was not a sphere altogether congenial to Mill any more than the hustings ; but he went to the hustings and he went to the House because he felt that, when summoned, it was his duty to go. All his life he had been an ardent advocate of social and political reform, and he served the people with sincerity. His eye was single and his whole body full of light. Mr. Gladstone always said of Mill that he was " the saint of the Liberal party". I am not going further into this man's character to-night ; time would fail me. I have chosen one of his least read, but most interest- ing, works for discussion this evening. The three Essays on Religion are very remarkable. I do not agree with them. There is much that is suggestive, and much that I do agree with ; but they are remarkable and useful for my purpose to-night, because we have in them what can be said about the great problems of human life and religion by a keen logical thinker like Mill. Now, this is an age in which we are all asking what can be said by science and reason for religion, for God, for the soul, for Christ, for revelation, for miracles. We desire once for all to hold up our beliefs in the clear, dry light of Reason, because we feel quite sure that in the long run no religion will stand which is not agreeable to human reason and in accord with' true science ; for science discovers, and reason arranges and explains those facts which God has permitted to be true in nature, and which, therefore, can never really be at variance with any other kind of truth, either in Reason or Religion. It was because the religion of John Stuart Mill's Religion. 251 Jesus Christ appeared so completely agreeable to human nature and human reason that it was ac- cepted, it is because the religion of Christ has been more or less distorted and not represented as it ought to be in a manner congenial to the wants of the succeeding ages that it has come into disrepute ; it is not Christ that has come into disrepute, it is those who have not known what to do with that infinitely flexible adaptive Divine life and teaching. Alas ! forever and forever Jesus Christ is being wounded in the house of His friends. Now, there are three great heads I thought of to-night, upon which I would speak to you. First, What is this Universe? Here you are in this mighty world, with all the stars above you, and the human soul is always asking, WHAT IS THIS Uni- ^■ERSE? Where does it come from? We do not want mere fancies ; we want to be told what may be known. Then, secondly. What is God ? We do not want dreams, but what can be said by Reason for the existence of an Intelligent and All-wise, All-power- ful, All-loving God. We want to know, thirdly, what we poor creatures are intended for — we who are crawling like infinite- simal mites in a cheese on the surface of the globe. What are we ? What are our duties ? What is our destiny ? What is our place in the universe ? What is our duty to man, and what is our relation to God, if there be a God ? Now, these three questions are dealt with in this book. Essays on Religion, which deals with Nature, 252 The Broad Church. with Utility, with Theism, and the argument from design. You cannot say that these are uninteresting or unimportant questions; you cannot say that the Christian pulpit is commonly prepared to deal with them as it ought or does deal with them. The pulpit of to-day generally glides over all difficulties, contents itself with repeating eternally goody-goody truisms, or repeating what has been taught by autho- rity, often words which once were living, but now are dying or dead, upholding forms and doctrines which once were helpful to the human spirit, but which now have to be made alive again or relegated to the limbo of things useless and forgotten. " Our creeds," says Mill in one place, " do nothing for us but stand over the soul like sentinels to keep it empty." The great thoughts of God, and the Soul, and Immortality, and Duty all have to be re-stated, the great problems all have to be re-discussed ; but the pulpit, as far as I have observed, is commonly the pulpit of Gallic, and cares for none of these things, simply repeating parrot-like the kind of things which were wanted in the year 1500 or 1700, but quite forgetting to notice or originate the kind of state- ments which are wanted by the men of 1890. This is why I take up a book like John Stuart Mill's, and I ask what it has to say in answer to this first ques- tion. What is the Universe ? Now, what is the usual answer to that question ? The usual answer is this. All this. Universe or Nature, the sum total of phenomena and their causes — our world including man — was made by John Stuart Mill's Religion. 253 God Almighty out of nothing. Now, is that satis- factory? Does it convey any meaning to your mind? It does not convey any meaning at all to my mind. It is unthinkable that all this should have been made out of nothing ; because then you have to ask, Who then, made the maker, God Almighty ? The answer to that is. No one made God Almighty ; He was self-created. But, if He did not exist before He created Himself, how could He have come into existence? How could He, being in existence, make anything at all out of nothing ? You see these are unthinkable thoughts. You cannot attach any meaning to them ; they are as Hamlet says, " words, words, words ". Now, what does John Stuart Mill say ? He says, look with reason and science upon this universe. We are obliged to say that there is no evidence that God Almighty made all this out of nothing. The only solid ground is this : that whilst a beginning is just as unthinkable as no beginning, yet here we have as a fact matter and force; and that these always, so far as we can make out, remain the same. There is the same quantity of matter and force in the universe : that is one of the solid facts which science has given us. There is no evidence that this ever was otherwise than it is ; therefore, though the how and the why be unthinkable, yet we are driven upon the assumption that matter and force have always been. Yet we cannot imagine either as having been created out of nothing. Here is the most solid and palpable of things : which as far as thought can travel always was. Secondly, there is a system working in matter. Force travels one way : matter obeys laws instead of 254 The Broad Church. being lawless ; so we get order instead of chaos. Result — the higher is developed out of the lozuer. You get an ascending scale of life, you get senseless things gradually rising in the scale of being. There is a gradual progressive plan in nature. You have not only matter and force, but you have a certain con- ception impressed upon matter and force ; they operate within what looks like a preconceived frame- work, the higher rises out of the lower, and as this wonderful creation goes on worlds are evolved, then covered with vegetation, then with reptile life, then you get the seas teeming with fishes, and then animals thronging the woods and lands, and afterwards rising in the scale of creation until they culminate in the crowned animal, man. No doubt that is solid fact ; we know that, and can rest upon it. Now, we go on to mental facts. At last there comes what is called mind. Is mind, thought, the brain power, when you come to the high animal, man, de- veloped out of the lower forms ? Is mind cerebrated? just as food is assimilated to build up tissue. Science shies a little at that ; the philosophers do not quite see their way to saying mind is a form of matter. Mill does not see his way to declare positively that mind is actually produced by matter through a series of unconscious processes. He says that all we know of mind is that it occurs in connection with matter as far as our observation goes, but there is nothing to prove that it came from matter, or cannot exist apart from matter, or will be at death dispersed and resolved into matter ; there is nothing to prove that it is not John Stuart Mill's Religion. 255 dissoluble, but then there is nothing to prove that it is. You have to deal then with thfs fact of mind. Well, in this universe what do you find ? You find a plan, a plan impressed upon matter and force, what you call the plan of nature, no doubt. That is a solid fact, and from that solid fact you certainly get a hint of mind, not man's mind, but something like mind which preceded man, which lies not at the top of creation — taking man to be at the top — but at the root and foundation of all creation. It is not certain that the plan of nature, so Mill tells us, means that there is a sovereign will at the foundation, and so that intelligence is involved in the laws of nature. It is not certain ; but what he says is this : "That there is a large balance, on purely logical and scientific grounds, oi probability in favour of the universe being governed by a sovereign will ". Now, we have answered, according to our pulpit limits and so far as is needful for our purpose to-night, the first question, WHAT IS THE UNIVERSE ? Look- ing at it from the authoritative point of view. Revela- tion, Inspiration, or Divine authority, tradition may have something to say, no doubt ; but Mill's view is to take the facts as they come before us, and deal with them from the standpoint of reason and science ; and the solid ground is that the universe is matter and force, and that in its operations a plan is revealed evolving higher out of lower, and that when we con- template that plan we find a hint and a possibility, and even " a balance of probability " in favour of that plan betraying a sovereign will in the universe. So far, then, I think you may rest upon this conclu- 256 The Broad Church. sion because it is Mill's, and if Mill is anything he is a severe logician. Now, secondly, What is God ? Does He exist ? Does any sovereign will exist? According to the reason shall we ask it humbly and reverently as seekers after truth? Well, what is the usual answer to the question, What is God ? This : GoD IS THE Almighty Creator, God is the sovereign will and origin and foundation of all the correlated phenomena, and the causes of nature ; GoD IS Omnipotent, or all-powerful ; GOD, this All-wise, All-knowing God, this sovereign will, this mysterious Personality, is all goodness and all love. That is the usual answer to the question, What is God ? Again, what does Mill say from the standpoint of Reason and Science? He says. You cannot from Reason or Science prove that there is a God, i.e., prove the existence of such a sovereign will as you affirm. He may exist ; there is a probability from the reason pure and simple that He does exist ; there is further a possibility, even a high probability, when you notice the traces, though short of conclusive traces exist, of design in nature, adaptation in nature, drawn out in the argument from design — there is a \^\^ probability \}Ka.\. He Whom you call the Almighty One is also Intelligent, the fountain of intelligence ; but it is not proved. Mill denies that by contemplating nature you can logically prove the existence of an Intelligent Being. He says, merely, there is scientifically a high proba- bility. Then as to His being All- wise. Questions will arise : John Stuart Mill's Religion. 257 Why did He not make this human body to last a little longer ? Why does it get so soon out of order ? Could it not have been made better by an All-wise Being ? Are there not hints in nature of grave deficiencies ? Why has development and amelioration been so long and painful ? Why so slow if all is ordered by an All- wise Being ? These are questions which come into the mind and force themselves upon even children when we speak of an All-wise Being. Lastly, with reference to the goodness of God. Mill says, How do you reconcile the goodness and the love of God with the injustice and cruelties that exist, involved in the very laws of nature ? Look at the world, and then tell me that this world was designed, and made, and organised by a good and loving, as well as an All-powerful and All-wise God. Look at human society — nay, we will not look at human society. You may say that man is to blame for all the evils of human society. It is not so — but were it ever so — still there are evil, pain, wretchedness, awful misery, injustice, and horror in nature itself I think one of the most appalling indictments of nature, which makes it so hard for us to believe that this world is made by a good and loving, as well as an all-powerful, God, is the summing up of the evidence- on the other side in these terrible words of Mill : — " In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature's every-day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognised by human laws, nature does once to every being that lives ; and in a large propor- 17 258 The Broad Church. tion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow creatures. "Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyrs, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Doipitian never surpassed. All this nature does with the most supercilious dis- regard, both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst ; upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequences of the noblest acts ; and it might also be imagined as a punishment for them. " A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season ; a flight of locusts or an inundation desolates a district ; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people. The waves of the sea, like banditti, seize and appropriate the wealth of the rich and the little all of the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding, and killing as their human anti- types. Everything, in short, which the worst men commit, either against life or property, is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has Noyades more fatal than those of Carrier ; her ex- John Stuart Mill's Religion. 259 plosions of firedamp are as destructive as human artillery ; her plague and cholera far surpass the poison cups of the Borgias. Even the love of ' order,' which is thought to be a following of the ways of nature, is, in fact, a contradiction of them. All which people are accustomed to deprecate as ' disorder ' and its consequences is precisely a counterpart of nature's ways. Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are over- matched in injustice, ruin, and death by a hurricane and a pestilence." * And so on. Now, what has Mill to add to that ? Let us say our Credo, / believe in God as All-good, All pozverful. All-wise. But how can we possibly believe that He is a good and loving God, when nature is constituted in such a manner as we well know it is, and as Mill has described ? And what is Mill's suggestive reply ? He says, the only admissible way in face of facts, of holding that God is all-loving and all-good, and that He means the happiness and welfare of His creatures, is to suppose that there is something in matter and force in its very nature, or in the material with which He has to deal, something which is intractable, and which the good God has yet to work with, because matter and force are eternal facts, and the only possible way of harmonising the goodness and the love of God with the horrible constitution of nature is to -assume that in the nature of things it was not possible for goodness at once to overcome all that * Essays on Religion, pp. 20-30. 26o The Broad Church. was horrible and bad in matter and force, that it was an intractable material which might be dealt with and brought under by degrees and by processes, but not all at once. There must, in other words, be some mysterious limitation to the omnipotence, the all-power of the good and loving God. Now, do you think this is any derogation from the dignity of the good and loving God ? Put it in this way (I am not condensing Mill now — the comments are mine) : — You say it is blasphemy to affirm that God is not all-powerful. He can will, or cause to be, anything, anyhow, anywhere. Well, now, can you imagine that God, however desirable it would be, could make two and two make five ? Could Omnipotence do that ? Why not ? Because it is in the nature of things, i.e., of numbers, that two and two should make four. Put the case. It might conceivably be an absolute calamity that two and two should only make four. Supposing there were five men on a desert island, and that two of these had two loaves, barely suffi- cient, and two others had two loaves, also barely sufficient, and these four loaves were barely sufficient for the four men, it would be love and mercy for Omnipotence to cause that two and two should make five loaves all of the same size. But it could not be done. Why? There is a limit, and that limit is involved in the very law of numbers, in the very constitution of mind. Or, supposing the whole of Europe was i-uled over by a mighty potentate who had not only power over the laws of the land, but John Stuart Mill's Religion. 261 also had great powers, though not absolute, over the laws of nature ; but supposing there were influences connected with the Gulf Stream and the Polar regions which acted at times very prejudicially upon the coasts of Europe, and supposing these influences were outside the range of this great and good Governor, would you consider it contrary to, or derogatory to, his goodness and his love, or any reason why we should cease to believe in, and to love, and to worship him — especially if there were signs that even the Gulf Stream was beginning to yield to his influence, although he could not all at once control certain forces involved in the present constitution of nature ? Similarly, what Mill assumes is this, that there is something intractable about nature, something mys- terious, a certain law of necessity analogous to the law of numbers, or to a rule of imperfect subjection which makes it impossible for the Almighty to do at once certain things which we might imagine it to be better could they possibly be done. These are not new thoughts, they are old world thoughts — Attic Greek thoughts. Gnostic Greek thoughts. Apostolic Pauline thoughts, as well as Mill's, or mine, or yours. The Athenian meant this when he spoke of an Anangke or necessity above the gods ; the Gnostic when he ascribed the creation of this world to One All-powerful in comparison with anything we can conceive of in power, but not absolutely all-powerful at present and all at once ; and Paul recognised the law of imperfect subjection for which Mill would contend when he says : " He must reign till he has 262 The Broad Church. put all things under Him —but this corruption must put on incorruption, and mortality must put on immortality before that which is written can come to pass — Death is swallowed up in victory ". Note, by the way, this theology is quite distinct from the Ahriman and Orm'uzd theology, the dual good and evil wills struggling. We admit but one Intelligent, All-wise, All-good will in the universe — yet some- thing short of an impossible All-power — something, as Paul says, " lets and hinders " the Divine purpose. And this, says Mill, this limitation is the only thing which enables us to believe in the perfect wisdom and the perfect goodness of God. It is what Leibnitz, that great philosopher and thinker, means when he says that this is not the best imaginable world, but we believe it is the hest possible world. Give reins to the imagination, and you might easily set to rights a great deal of nature ; you might with a sweep abolish the cruelties and horrors involved in those laws by which animals devour and torture one another, fearful hurricanes rage, reckless of life, and property, and happiness, fire-damp explodes inopportunely, etc. ; you might make imaginably a better world, but pethaps this is the best possible world under the circumstances. Slowly better is being evolved from the worst ; slowly the evil is being put to flight ; slowly the intractable laws of matter, moral evil, and physical evil are being got under, or rather set to counteract each other ; there is One mightier Who is striving with opposing elements and Who will subdue them. John Stuart Mill's Religion. 263 Who is subduing them. But all at once, and in a moment ? No. That cannot be. Hence we emerge into something like light and sunshine again. The cruelties of nature are not to be attributed to God ; the injustice of nature, and all those things in nature which, if we imitate her, we should be monstrous criminals — all those things are no parts of God's system, and they exist only on account of this strange, mysterious limitation which prevents goodness from triumphing all at once, but cannot finally prevent it. But we need place no limitation to the Wisdom and Love which are dealing with this strange and mixed and confused conglomeration of physical and moral forces. Now to the last question, WHAT IS man's PLACE ? What his duty and his destiny ? You may have often heard the phrase, " Living according to nature" that it is right to live according to nature, to imitate nature. Now, what does Mill say to that ? He says it is -wrong to live according to nature, to imitate nature. If you begin to imitate nature you will very soon be hanged by the neck until you be dead. If you begin to imitate nature you will do acts of monstrous injustice and cruelty, and you will soon be locked up in prison. If you begin to imitate nature you will speedily be ostracised as a monster in human form. What do we mean by a monster ? We mean nature. Monsters are to be found in nature, and when a man acts as natural monsters act we know that he' is very soon suppressed or cancelled. There- fore you must not live according to nature. 264 The Broad Church. " But," you say, perhaps, with Butler in the three sermons on Human Nature, " there is a higher nature and a lower nature." Just so ; but it is still true that you must not imitate nature. God could never have intended you to go to nature to learn your lessons of life. No ; you have to live according to grace, not according to nature. If you like to call grace the higher nature — if you take the words " higher nature " to mean that ideal of moral goodness which you have written in the fleshly tablets of your heart, which you reflect from the image of Christ Jesus, which you attribute to God in His perfection of wisdom, and goodness, and love — if you like to call that nature, very well. But it is a misnomer. It is not nature ; it is just what is contrary to nature, even to human nature. All man's goodness comes not by imitating nature, but by taking heed to nature, studying nature, deciding what he will do with nature, selecting what he will imitate, what he will improve, and what he will abolish or suppress. And as man's moral idea which he gets from the spirit, from the mind, if you will, from God Himself prevails, as he rises in the scale of being and well- being, nature herself begins to assume a very different form. See what man will do with nature when he takes a wilderness and plants it over with fair flowers and fruitful trees. He does not transcend the laws of nature, but just prevents nature from doing what she would if she were left to herself, growing all over with brambles for snakes and poisonous things to live in and things unfruitful for man. He does what God John Stuart Mill's Religion. 265 Himself is said to do when He interposes. He uses the various sides of nature, taking heed by the study of them to control one part by another. He does it by a higher intelligential and moral law. What is man's place in nature ? Great, noble, in- spiring is his place. He must look to the Divine operation, and he must imitate t/iat. His mission is to co-operate with the good in sub- duing nature, within and without himself, in controlling and mending nature, and in building up something better than what he finds there. You are put into the world, then, not to imitate nature and the beasts, or be led by your instincts, but to command nature's forces, and not allow her forces to command you ; to command your instincts, not to allow your instincts to command or run away with you. Your destiny is to be a fellow worker with God. Xow, for a moment substitute for Mill's probability, certainty that there is a God, Who is intelligent, wise, and good, and then it is clear what your plain duty and glorious destiny is — you are called upon to struggle with Him side by side, to put down the evil that is in the world, physical, mental, and moral. That would, indeed, be a satisfactory answer to the question, WHAT IS MAN, WHAT IS HIS DUTY, HIS DESTINY, HIS PLACE IN NATURE ? But, my friends, behold how sad, after all, is the Gospel according to John Stuart Mill. You see at a glance how valuable and how solid it is in places ; and yet you see how sad it is, because over all Mill writes " perhaps," he writes " possible," " probable," " not proven " All that is solid and proven is that there is 266 The Broad Church. matter and force and a plan in it. It i_s not scienti- fically proved that this plan indicates a really intelli- gent sovereign ruler. , It is not proved that He is wise or that He is good. It is not certain, therefore, that man can be a fellow worker with one who may possibly not even exist. It is a possibility, it is a probability, and it may be a devout hope. But Mill leaves us here. Just two steps further in this direction. What has Mill to say about miracles ? About Divine interposi- tions and the evidences of a spiritual world, he leaves us just in the same position. Define your term miracle. Of course if by miracle you mean something which cgmes from no cause whatever, I do not acknowledge such a thing as possible in any way. By miracle we usually mean that which happens without apparent cause, or con- trary to known causes. We do not say that a miracle is that which has no efificient cause ; we say it is that which has no apparent cause. We do not say that a miracle is that which happens contrary to all laws ; but only contrary to known laws. There may be laws that we have no knowledge of, which, control such things as miracles. An abnormal phenomenon may really arise from laws at work which are not apparent to us. And so with miraculous phenomena, visions, apparitions, prophetic dreams of all kinds, miraculous healings — these things, if they ever occur, may be due to unknown laws, but still to divinely natural laws. What does Mill say about it ? He says something comforting when you consider that it is the deliverance of a severe logician. He says there is nothing un- John Stuart Mill's Religion. 267 scientific in a miracle in thatsenseof the word, because it really means that God controls one law by another law. You may not know how He does it ; you may not know what law it is which acts upon another law. This book by a natural law falls, but by another law I interpose my hand and arrest its fall. The natural thing is for the book to fall, but I counteract the natural order of events by merely bringing in one law to arrest another. It' is no miracle at all, because we are acquainted with both processes — one law and the other law which suspends it. And if v\e knew more of the laws of nature we should see that abnor- mal phenomena and strange things which really happen, but which we are inclined to deny, might be of a similar nature. So Mill says if we could prove miracles of that kind — if you could prove miraculous cures, the appearance of the dead, messages from another world, divine interposition, there is nothing scientifically impossible in miracles — it is merely a matter of evidence. But discouragement comes in here : he says there is no evidence for these things at all. There I am in direct conflict with him, and hundreds and thousands of people who are not complete fools are also in direct conflict with him. At the same time Mill has a right to his own opinions and he says in this sweeping way : " You never had a proof of anything of this kind, therefore miracles have never as far as we know of happened at all ". But he admits if you could prove the event there is nothing unscientific in miracles, in interpositions. For just as a man inter- poses and controls one law of nature by another, so a •sovereign will in the universe might control one law 268 The Broad Church. of nature by another and produce very remarkable results. Then what has Mill to say about the IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL — SURVIVAL? Very much the same kind of thing. He says there is no proof. You may say : " All things in nature die ; why not the soul of man ? " But Mill, with his singular candour, adds : " Yes, it is perfectly true that all things in nature die : the leaf dies, the body dies, all things change and pass away, therefore you may say. Why should not the soul die ? But then why should it die ? Particularly when it is so utterly different, from all these things which you say die. It is not of the same kind. The mind, thought, is quite different from the material forms which always decay. Therefore it is just as forcible to say, ' Why should the soul die .? ' as ' Why should it not die ? ' " So, then, there is nothing, says Mill, unscientific in the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, but neither is that proved. Lastly, as to revelation — the revelation concern- ing God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The same line is adopted. If you could prove, says Mill, that there had been such a revelation there is nothing in it impossible, or improbable, or unscientific. If you assume that God is, that He is good, that He is loving, that He means good to man, all which things are not impossible, and there is nothing unscientific at all in supposing that He has made a special manifestation and revela- tion of Himself and His purposes to man. And then occurs one of these characteristic passages about John Stuart Mill's Religion. 269 Jesus Christ which betray the innate tenderness and piety of John Stuart Mill, his deep spiritual sensibility as well as his morbid fear of giving any undue weight to feeling, or mere intuition, tradition or authority. This is what Mill says about Jesus Christ : — " About the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality, combined with profundity of in- sight, which, if we abandon the idle expectation of find- ing scientific precision where something very different was aimed at, must place the prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in His inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed upon earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity ; nor, even now, would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endea- vour so to live that Christ would approve of our life. " It is the God Incarnate, more than the God of the Jews or of nature, Who, being idealised, has taken so great and salutary a hold on the modern mind. And whatever else is taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left, a unique figure, not more unlike all His precursors than all His followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his personal teaching. It is of no use to say that Christ as ex- 2 7° The Broad Church. hibited in the Gospels is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable, has been superadded by the tradition of His followers. The tradition of followers suffices to insert any number of marvels, and may haye inserted all the miracles which He is reputed to have wrought. But who among His disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels ? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee, or certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort ; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher source. " To this we add that, to the conception of the rational sceptic, it remains a possibility that Christ actually was, what He supposed Himself to be, man — charged with a special, express, and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue."* Dear friends, I do not want you to leave this church to-night with any feeble grasp upon those fundamental truths, which we sum up in the words, God, Immor- tality, Revelation through Christ, the Soul of man. All these central and recurrent beliefs which ring through the ages may still be yours and mine. I do not want you to leave this church to-night with the *Essays on Religion, p. 255. John Stuart Mill's Religion. 271 paralysing "perhaps " written above them all ! I want to point out in a few words why I think you may translate this probability into a working certainty, this devout hope into a living faith. Religion must rest on a working certainty. It is not only the hope that is full of immortality, but it is the " substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen ". Faith, not hope, is your light : it is intended to be by the constitution of your nature your guiding star through the labyrinthine difificulties of this world. I define faith thus. It is not an imbecile credulity, a childish belief in whatever is told you — a belief without evidence or without reason ; but a cogent reliance on proper evidence " commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God," says Paul ; be infinitely reasonable ; " be ready to give a reason to the faith that is in you to everyone that asks you ". Be sure that the faith which Christ in- spired, commended itself as a certain thing to those who heard Him. So it was with Paul. I define faith thus : " Faith is a loving trust founded upon a reasonable belief, tvhich, taken in connection zoith the constitution of human nature and the experience of life, amounts to a working certainty " Let us sum up. I have shown you what John Stuart Mill considers solid matter and force out of which arise forms of successively higher development. He considers it possible and probable that there is a God, that He is all-wise and loving, although not omnipotent in the literal sense. He considers that since all this is probable it is also probable that we 272 The Broad Church. are His fellow-workers, and are expected to act like Him in struggling with intractable evil in man, in matter, in spirit, in nature. Further, we have seen that Mill thinks miracles and Divine interpositions ^re not unscientific, but simply not proven. That the immortality of the soul and the revelation of God in Christ are not in themselves unscientific, but also not proven. And now let me tell you why I think we may for ourselves translate those devout hopes, these inspiring probabilities, into something like moral certainties, and instead of going through the world with hope, we may also go through the world with religious faith. Here is the first reason. You may, and you must, rationally believe a good many things that you cannot scientifically prove. I have often said in this pulpit that there exists commonly a belief in an outward world of which there is no scientific proof whatever. All that you can prove is that you have certain ideas and impressions ; you have no proof whatever that there is an outward world except that you cannot help believing it. And there are a number of other things in nature and human nature, like the persistence of force, the moral scale, etc., which you must believe, although you cannot scientifically prove. And why must you believe these things? What is the test of a truth which you cannot scientifically prove ? This is the test, that when you accept it, it arranges all the other facts that you know. The thing is true if it coincides with all the other things which you John Stuart Mill's Religion. know to be true. I will put it more cautiously. An hypothesis or a supposition is true which best arranges the largest number of facts and conflicts with the fewest. And the reason why humanity has believed in God, has believed that He is good, and wise, and intelligent ; the reason why humanity has believed that man has a soul, that he is able to communicate with God through that soul, mind to mind, spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost ; the reason why man believes that God has made a special manifestation of Himself in Jesus Christ, giving us the ideal of a human life by unveiling the moral attributes of Deity under the limitations of humanity, is because when he believes these things they arrange the constitution of nature for him, they explain to him his own being, they help him to progress, they help him to win the battle of good over evil; they draw him nigh to something above and beyond himself, which is, nevertheless, not very far from any one of us, which is about our path and about our bed, spying out all our ways. That is the reason why you may believe in God, although He is not proved ; in the soul, although it is not proved ; in Christ as the manifestation of the Deity, although it is not proved ; the immortality of the soul, although it is not proved ; simply because when you believe these things they arrange for you a large number of human facts, reconcile the facts of your nature, and explain your best thoughts and noblest aspirations better than anything else. That brings me to my last point. I will not now dwell upon my own convictions as against Mill's that we have many sure evidences of the existence of a i8 274 The Broad Church. spiritual world, of the existence of something like Divine interposition, of the existence of abnormal and miraculous phenomena running through all secular and sacred history. But I will say that what draws me most closely to the belief in an invisible world and enables me to have such a strong measure of faith as I own to in God and the soul, and sustains me in fighting the battle of truth against lies and of good against evil, is this, and that I believe that not the mind working upon the facts of physical nature, or even its power of analysing itself — but that mind in conscious communion with other mind should be our talisman in religion. For I hold that mind in nature can only be discerned by mind in man. I believe if God ever speaks to man His speech can only be interpreted by the soul of man. Only soul reads soul, only soul interprets soul. You know that is so between you and your fellow creatures. Only those who are in sympathy can understand each other. And if that is true as between man and man, it is true as between God and man. God is a spirit, and when He speaks only the spiritual ear of man can hear His voice ; and, believe me, the reason why people go on believing in religion at all in one form or another — the rationale of all your churches and chapels — is this, that such a belief is deeply involved in the constitution of man's nature, and that nothing will ever be any real substitute for it. You may put in its place the lovfe of your country, or the love of humanity, or any other ideal object, like the pursuit and adoration of science and art, and so forth ; but in the long run the heart and the flesh will John Stuart MilPs Religion. 275 end by crying out for the living God, the sovereign lover and ruler of the universe, if not the absolutely and literally Omnipotent, yet the All-good, the All- wise, the All-loving. And belief in this remains, and ever must remain, the great revelation from the mighty Over-soul to the travailing soul of man. It is ever thus in prayer and in the highest com- munion, the Alone to the alone ; and no one comes between — in the last analysis there is always open vision. God is His own interpreter, And He will make it plain. Whilst we are here all kinds of mists will arise, all kinds of confusion will result from the varieties in the human mind, and forms of religion will change and alter accordingly. You may not have the religion that you had when you were a young man ; the religion of the young man is not the same as the religion of a little child ; the religion of one age is not the same as the religion of another as far as forms go. But the central verities variously aimed at and apprehended remain constant. Just as the sun in Heaven looks very different on different days and to different eyes. Sometimes clouds are between us ; sometimes there appears no sun at all ; and sometimes it is dark, deep night. But wait a little, and the glow will stream over the eastern hills ; the clouds shall roll away and we shall see that behind the clouds the sun is still shining. That is what I believe concerning God and our apprehension of Him. 276 The Broad Church. We change, but He does not change. " In Him is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." It is to that God, All-wise, All-good, All-loving, Who comes forth Himself to justify Himself to you, to me, to every man, even the Light which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world ; it is to that God Who holds all things in the hollow of His hand, and Who gives to the spirits of all flesh a measure of His own life as each is able to receive it, that I commend you to-night, telling you that your reason and your science may lead you some way in the direction of a living faith, such a way as shall be sufficient to show you that these, the glorious truths of the life eternal, are neither absurd, nor impossible, nor improbable, but that certainty alone can conie to you through the revelation of God Himself to your inmost soul, giving you the spirit of a son whereby you cry : Abba, Father ! WORKS BY THE Rev. H. R. H AWE IS, M.A. THEOLOGICAL. I. Thoughts for the Times, 14th edition. II. Speech in Season, 6th edition. III. Current Coin, 5th edition. IV. 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