§mmll ^nivmit^ pilratg THE GIFT OF A..^...:M .^£W.XA^.. Ar...7..3..6...57) ^M^./.t^- Cornell University Library arV15200 Prayer-meeting theoioi .. 3 1924 031 258 894 olin.anx Cornell University jbrary The original of tliis book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 924031 258894 PRAYER-MEETING THEOLOGY a Dialogue E. J. MORRIS AUTHOR OF *' PREJUDICED INQUIRIES* G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK LONDON 27 West Twenty-third St. 24 Bedford St., Strand Sfet Jnitktrbochet jpttss 1892 Copyright, 1892 BY E. J. MORRIS Printed and Bound by Ube 1knict?erbocher press, Dew l^oxh G P. Putnam's Sons PRAYER-MEETING THEOLOGY. PRAYER-MEETING THEOLOGY. I. A LITTLE Congregational church in a se- questered Welsh settlement in Pennsylvania has kept up its weekly prayer-meeting without intermission, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, for more than half a century. The attendance is never large ; and the long series of meetings has been maintained unbroken mainly through the remarkable tenacity of a very few of the members in successive generations. There are three brethren now living who have not missed a prayer-meeting in twenty years. They have been there all by themselves more than once. They have often in busy times gone to meeting from the fields, sup- perless, without change of garments, and with unwashed hands. They have hurried home from distant points with much difficulty, through snow-drifts and blinding storms, in order to be found in their places at the ap- 2 Prayer- Meeting Theology. pointed hour. The worldly wisdom of the neighborhood pronounces such zeal intemper- ate and fanatical; and a great deal of spark- Hng wit has from time to time been expended upon the spiritual pride and hypocrisy and inconsistency of these pillars of the church. But pillars they are after all ; and the prayer- meeting, if not the church, plainly owes its continuous life under God to their exemplary steadfastness. At a recent meeting there were just a dozen persons present all told ; and the majority of these were children, who huddled together into one roomy pew at a chilling distance from the adult worshippers. There was no sweet singer to lead the psalmody, and no one to play on the little instrument which often keeps the musi- cal part of the service from collapsing. Brother A read a favorite chapter from the Epistle to the Romans, and made a prayer full of scrip- ture and sound doctrine. He was followed in prayer by B and C. Then after the three brethren had spoken a few words by way of exhortation, the meeting broke up with a pain- ful rendering of Old Hundred. The chil- dren hurried out as fast as good manners would Prayer- Meeting Theology. 3 allow ; and the sweet chime of merry voices going up the road furnished an after-piece in curious contrast to the service just ended. As it was still early, the meeting having been un- usually short, the men remained in their places to " visit " a little after the rest of the congre- gation had dispersed. The conversation, hav- ing lightly touched a number of every-day topics, came round to religious matters ; and they discussed for the thousandth time a ques- tion which always interests and always bafBes them and their brethren throughout all Chris- tendom : What is the matter with the prayer- meeting ? The discussion, when fairly under way, took something like the following form. A. Of course we may receive a blessing our- selves in every meeting if our hearts are sincere. Still you must see that our meetings are not what they should be. What is it that keeps the people away ? B. That I cannot tell. Some are sick per- haps, and some are aged and infirm. Some are pressed with many cares ; and possibly some stay away because others do, never imagining that the good Lord can do anything for them without the aid of a crowd. For my- 4 Prayer- Meeting Theology. self I scarcely ever stop to think whether we are few or many here. In truth I come here to get away from a crowd rather than to look for one. The thoughts which distract a man all day even in solitude make an hour of quiet worship exceedingly grateful whether the com- pany be great or small. I thought the other day that I should even like to come in here all alone sometimes. I was passing the Catholic church in the village when a poor lame wash- erwoman laid down her basket at the door and went in. Being at leisure I also stepped in from mere curiosity. At first I could see no one. The building seemed entirely deserted. But on advancing I found the woman on her knees, clasping her hands in prayer, regardless of the presence of an intruder, mindful only of the Adorable Presence before which she bowed. In the empty church she was with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. C. That was all as it should be. The Lord is always to be found in a Catholic church and in a Protestant church likewise. But so also may He be found wherever we earnestly seek Him, in our homes, or in the fields and the woods where we ply our daily tasks. J heartily be- Prayer-Meeting Theology. 5 lieve in public worship, not on account of any sacredness attaching to houses made with hands for the Most High, but on account of the sacredness of human souls, on account of the blessedness of the communion of saints. The true temple of God is built of living stones. We are His temple. His presence is made manifest in the life and fellowship of His people rather than in any consecrated places or forms of worship. I should be dis- posed to say that the people stay away from church because we, who are always here and who are responsible for the proceedings, fail to make full proof of our ministry ; because we are so stiff, so inert, so inhospitable and bar- ren. Perhaps the very furniture of the house deemed so sacred, perhaps the order of ser- vice deemed more sacred still, may to some ex- tent defeat the true purpose of our meetings. A gathering with such an origin and such a purpose as ours, one would think, should be, first of all, an actual meeting, an open, free, general, unconstrained, real meeting of man with man. I almost think that the in- formal meetings of Christian men at the cor- ner store and at the post-office every evening 6 Prayer- Meeting Theology. copy the methods of the upper chamber in Jerusalem more closely than we do. Our meetings are too formal. We have a set per- formance which is always the same or nearly so. We are altogether too solemn, too little human. We want the frank question, the homely story, the smile, and the harmless laugh of real life. Or rather we want the freedom and actual contact of mind with mind, of which these are some of the commonest signs and accom- paniments. It may require a peculiar tempera- ment or a special training not possible for all Christian people, to find strength and joy in the solitary church-going of the Catholic wash- erwoman, or even in our own awkward and stereotyped services. A. I confess that our meetings are not ex- actly amusing, and not quite so free" and easy as the nightly palaver at the corner store. But why should they be ? Cannot reasonable crea- tures afford to meet for a single hour in the week to worship God together in all seriou.s- ness ? The trouble is much deeper than any dryness or meagreness in our services. Chris- tians have in other times found delight and profit in meetings very much longer and Prayer- Meeting Theology. 7 drearier than ours. The people nowadays stay- away from the prayer-meeting because they are more or less tainted with the pestilent scepti- cism which is spreading through the land. They are losing their interest in Christian ordinances quite naturally because they have already in a great measure lost their faith in Christian truth. There are members of this church not a few whose delight is in unchris- tian speculation, and who meditate in the liter- ature of unbelief day and night. You know that the blasphemer who lectured in the hall the other evening on what he called Mother-Goose Religion, made more ot a stir among the peo- ple than our good pastor has been able to make for many a year by the faithful preaching of Gospel truth. B. I am afraid you are hitting at me now. I listened to that lecture with a good deal of interest, and I must confess that I am often slow of heart to believe what our good minis- ter has to set before us. I agree with you that the prevailing uncertainty about Christian truth is drying the blood of our Christian life. I regret it most sincerely. But I can throw no stones at the doubters. I have felt the poison 8 Prayer- Meeting Theology. in my own soul, and I feel it more and more every day. I try to hold the faith as the spider taketh hold of her house with her hands. But some invisible current carries it away from me bit by bit. We have fallen upon evil days. Our age seems to be, by some dire necessity, an age of doubt and unbelief. C. There is unbelief enough now and always. But our age is no worse than other ages. The distinction is frequently made, I know, between ages of faith and ages of doubt or unbelief. But faith and doubt are not sandwiched sepa- rately among the generations. They exist side by side in every age, and side by side frequently in the mind of the same indi- vidual. If the Son of Man should come now. He would probably find as much faith on the earth as He could have found at any former time. Much of what is stigmatized as doubt in our day is not doubt in any evil sense, being simply the natural movement of the mind tow- ards truth not yet attained. And much of what was called faith in former days was not faith in any good sense, but a superstitious prostration of the mind before some external authority, or a sheer withdrawal of its active Prayer- Meeting Theology. § powers from religious questions. The unbelief of our time is more loquacious than that of some former ages. But this is a gain. Unbe- lief will have some evil issue. Is it not well that it should spend itself in talk, though the talk be blasphemous, as it necessarily must be ? You can at least reply to infidel arguments, and see clearly what they lead to. But what can you do with infidel souls which go on breeding sin and death in silence, disdaining to put forth any theoretical justification of themselves ? Even if the age seems to you an age of doubt, beware of assuming that it is such by any real necessity. Chal- lenge the necessity boldly, and explore the dark stream which is washing away your foundations. B. Your counsel is admirable. I particularly desire to do as you bid me. And if, with your general exhortation, you can furnish specific directions how to proceed, you will find me a ready and grateful pupil. A. I can give you specific directions. Leave those heretical books and papers alone for a season, and don't go tagging after the vain Jack-of-the-lantern doctors who have already to Prayer- Meeting Theology. lured you too far into the wilderness. Don't go near your advanced thinkers ; and if they come to you, put your fingers in your ears and let them prophesy to the winds of heaven. Don't be standing on tiptoe and stretching your neck over the fences to pry into fields which it is not intended, and not at all necessary, that you should know just yet. Recognize your limitations. Acknowledge also that your inheritance is rich and fair. "Learn to lie down thankful and contented in green pastures and beside still waters. B. I can appreciate all that. But I presume Brother C has another widely divergent course marked out for me in his mind. C. I should not express myself precisely as A does, but the course which I should recom- mend to you may perhaps not be "another" after all. I acknowledge a man's right and duty under certain circumstances to close his ears and his eyes too, not only against error and vanity but against what may be good and true enough in its proper place and order. We shut out foreign goods, though confessedly excellent, from our markets, because we wish to build up our home industries. It may be Prayer- Meeting Theology. 1 1 necessary likewise to exclude from our minds much excellent foreign thought in order to pro- tect and develop our own. Our senses are the doors of the mind, and doors are made to shut as well as to open, to exclude as well as to admit. I observe in some quarters a disposi- tion to take the doors off their hinges and throw them away in rapturous hospitality ; and, when more room still is demanded, to tear down the walls also, that all the world may come in like a flood without let or hindrance. But when this is done, all house-keeping and all human living are at an end. Extravagant hospitality has ruined many a family, and too many new, vigorous, exacting ideas will devour your substance as fast as too many guests of any other description. The writer of the Fourth Gospel would not crowd his brethren's little world even with the sayings and doings of the Lord Jesus. He wished to leave them room to turn round and to do their proper work in their own world. And we certainly ought to claim the same privilege for ourselves against the greatest men and their very great- est thoughts. We must not suffer ourselves to be choked with knowledge, or to be driven 12 Prayer- Meeting Theology^ to distraction by too much learning. I agree with A also in his high estimate of our actual condition. Knowing not fully what we shall be, it seems to me a very great thing to have become what we now are. Our present life appears to me so well worth living that it seems a pity, as well as a folly, to withdraw our thoughts and strength from it and burn them up in the attempt to scale the flaming walls of the world. We can well afford to eat our bread in gladness and singleness of heart, for threescore years and ten, right here, with all our limitations. But while rejoicing in our inheritance, and accepting our limitations, we need not put up artificial limitations for our- selves. Let us by all means keep contented within the fence. But is it a virtue to confine ourselves wilfully to a little corner of our own spacious field ? I believe that the doubts which trouble us and multitudes besides us at the present day are not promptings of the enemy urging us to flee into the wilderness, but natural and honest cravings for the fresh woods and pastures new which we have left unvisited though fairly within our borders. There is surely much that is unsound, and very Prayer- Meeting Theology. 13 much that is immature, in our views of Chris- tian truth and of the life of man. Doubt, in such circumstances, need not come from the Evil One. It may well come to us by the grace of God, which will not suffer us to remain for ever in our infancy. See to it that in repress- ing your doubts you do not resist the Spirit of Truth and refuse to entertain angels. Repress no honest doubts. Give them a fair hearing. Bring them with you sometimes to the prayer- meeting which you love so well. They may stir up gifts of life which lie dormant within us all. They may even help to make the prayer-meeting as interesting to the people as the corner-store conferences. B. My doubts accompany me to the prayer- meeting and to other meetings altogether too often. But I do with them just as I do with old Shabby, my dog, when he follows me to church. I turn them back at the door if I can ; and if they baffle my efforts and slip in with me, I keep them as quiet as possible. Indeed I have little trouble with them after the service is fairly begun. They shrink away at the sound of prayer and praise ; nor can they abide the accents of the divine word. 14 Prayer- Meeting Theology. And I would rather be the witch of Endor than think of calling up their miserable appari- tions in the house of God. You are not serious in recommending it, are you ? C. Perhaps I was too hasty. If you find so great a discord between thoughts which are familiar to you out-of-doors and the regular exercises of the prayer-meeting, probably some others might feel it still more. But it may be that our prayer-meetings, and our other reli- gious services, have settled down on too narrow a basis. Perhaps they allow but a part of our nature to worship God, while they call the other parts common and unclean, and shut them out with the dogs. Perhaps, while our spirit prayeth, our understanding is unfruitful. But that is wrong, by the apostolic rule : " I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also." Our meetings, I believe, would be better in every respect if we brought with us all our laboring thoughts, suppressing none. But if this be more than some of us can bear, I certainly think that Christian peo- ple ought, at some suitable time and place, to consider the truths with which they have so much to do in relation to the requirements of Prayer- Meeting Theology. 15 the intellect as well as in their relation to pious emotion and active duty. A. So you would turn the Church of Christ into a debating society, or into a school of phi- losophy ! You might as well shut it up at once, and bring back old heathendom in full force. Did not St. Paul renounce the wisdom of this world, and did not our Saviour say that we must become as little children if we would enter into the kingdom of God ? C. But St. Paul and our Saviour also reasoned carefully and powerfully in their own ministry ; and much of their work consisted in liberating men from the yoke of tradition, and in estab- lishing great principles so that they were com- mended to men's minds and consciences in the sight of God. A. Exactly. And why can we not rest in the principles which they established so firmly ? What is established needs no further debating. Do you doubt the great truths which, through the blessed labors of Christ and His apostles have been commended to every man's con- science in the sight of God? C. Some of those great truths have been ob- scured and overladen with conflicting specula- 1 6 Prayer- Meeting Theology. tions before our time. If there were but one statement of Christian truth, we might receive it without discussion. But a thousand con- tradictory voices, all professing to teach the truth as it is in Jesus, call for something of a debating society or even of a school of philos- ophy, to separate the precious from the vile, the true from the false. Even supposing the pure sifted truth is before us, our minds must still be allowed to take hold of it before they can be nourished by it ; and the mind takes hold of truth, not by passive assent, but by an ac- tive process in which a measure of doubt and speculation may be legitimate and even neces- sary. The attitude of some of your grim de- fenders of the faith towards Christian truth reminds one of the miser who, once for all, bought a piece of cheese for his dinner, and put it in a glass bottle to keep, and for ever after at meal time licked the bottle and saved the cheese. You protect the truth of the Gos- pel too much, turning the minds of men away from it, and so making it of none effect. Be- sides, our Lord had many things to say to His disciples which He did not say because the disciples were not prepared to receive them. Prayer- Meeting Theology. 17 What He did not say unto them He may by His Spirit make known unto us if so be that we refuse not His communications through distrust and fear, or through a stolid dispar- agement of all truth but that to which we have already attained. If we are prepared to welcome new truth, we must be prepared to revise and restate old doctrines, so that the old and the new may be joined together in har- monious and vital unity. It is my firm con- viction as to all the great Christian doctrines that the half has not been told concerning them ; that the progress of thought will mani- fest their glory and their fruitfulness more and more throughout all the time to come ; that honest doubt and the freest inquiry are there- fore to be regarded as means of grace by which we may humbly consult the Master and receive from time to time His latest word. B. I am glad to hear you put the matter so, and I trust that you may be right. But I have often felt that to call any accepted religious doctrines in question publicly, even with a view to restatement merely, brings doubt upon the whole system of Christian truth in the minds of many ; and I have sometimes thought 1 8 Prayer- Meeting Theology. that it may be better to subscribe to the whole mass of received opinion, with the inevitable mental reservations, than to run the risk of undermining the faith of any, and of bringing the truth itself into jeopardy with the error which we would disown. C. It is a poor faith that can be undermined by the truth, or by any earnest and reverent seeker after truth. And it is a poor precarious truth that cannot be stated as correctly as possible by its friends without being put in jeopardy by their painstaking loyalty. You fear a remote and doubtful evil. To avoid that you propose to walk meekly into a hurt- ful snare here present. Perish the thought ! If you have positive convictions at variance with those of others, be true to your own, and have no fear. Shake boldly the things that can be shaken by the highest, purest form of truth which you can attain to. The things which cannot be shaken will come more distinctly into view ; and they alone are worth caring about seriously. B. I have thought so many times, and I have often begun to survey my position in order to make an honest statement. But I have been Prayer- Meeting Theology. 19 frightened by my own thoughts every time. Let us go over the ground together before we mention our difficulties in the prayer-meeting or in any public place. A. I cannot understand what you would be at. The Christian faith seems to me so simple. And when you depart from the simplicity of the Gospel, you embark on a trackless and im- measurable sea. What do you look for as the fruit of your labors, — a new Gospel ? C. Perhaps nothing new. Perhaps a clearer understanding and a firmer grasp of the old. A. But is the Christian faith, in any sense, to be put on trial ? Is everything to be regarded as merely provisional until you have finished your inquiries and declared the result ? And, as coming ages will hardly accept your finding as authoritative and final, are the souls of men to be fed for ever upon inquiries instead of truth ? Is the Lord and Redeemer of men come, or do you look for another, or don't you know whether you look for another or not ? I should like to know where you are going to stand while you try the old foundations. C. The patent facts of human life and history are not to be questioned. The place of Chris- 20 Prayer- Meeting Theology. tianity at the head of the spiritual progress of mankind is a simple matter of fact. Christianity has no serious competitor on the face of the earth. The thought of displacing it cannot enter a human head which is not either blind or greatly bewildered. Christianity is obviously the dispensation of the fulness of times. Our difficulty is to distinguish between the essential and the accidental in what has been handed down to us as Christianity. I feelat liberty to discuss without reserve pvery question of detail, because I am fully persuaded that the central question of the place and future of Christianity is for ever beyond discussion, except for men who are prepared to destroy the temple of history and to raise it up again from the foundations without the actual materials. But if our manner of approaching the subject seems to you to recognize and tolerate doubt too much, there is another way of proceeding which will suit us just as well, and perhaps be more free from offence to you. Instead of examin- ing our doubts, let us make a confession of our faith. Let us see what we do believe without wavering. A. That certainly can be done without Prayer-Meeting Theology. 21 offence : and, so far as I am concerned, it is done quickly. My faith is the simple faith of my fathers ; and I seek no better form of con- fession than the old creed — " I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord." If you will say this creed with me, we can confess our faith together with little ado : if you cannot, then I certainly shall not care to follow you in quest of any other faith. B. I also am quite prepared to say that, if we cannot retain this faith, I care little about any other. But it is a wonder to me that you find it so easy to mount the lofty stairs of that glorious creed. It does not seem right that you should find it quite so easy. It appears to me that keeping the faith should require some high endeavor, some earnest wrestling; and that he who keeps it to the end may well say that he has fought a good fight. A. You are quite right. Keeping the faith is a great duty. But it is to be done by stead- fastness, not by argumentation. And by stead- fastness, please God, I will keep it to the end. Thomas said, " I will not believe" ; and many still say the same without rebuke. Why should 2 2 Prayer-Meeting Theology. not I also be wilful in a better cause ? If there are two sides, as there surely must be, I will take the side of faith, and there abide. C. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed ! We will not ask you to be a partner to our doubts in any wise. But do not give us up. Watch us, and when we seem to you more erratic than usual, lift up your warn- ing voice. The steady resistance of a friend's unquestioning faith is a great safeguard in religious speculation. B. We can hardly do any kind of justice to the subject to-night. Can we not meet some day soon and devote a few quiet hours to this matter? I have often given entire days to mat- ters which interested me far less. C. My eldest boy celebrates his thirteenth birthday to-morrow. He expects the children of both of you to spend the day with him. If you two will also come and bring your wives with you, it will make the celebration quite imposing, and we can doubtless make room for a little theology in the course of the day. B. That will suit me perfectly. Brother A, you also can spare the time, can you not ? A. I should like to honor the boy's birthday ; Prayer- Meeting Theology. 23 but I have already heard more than I can carry of your theology. After some further talk, not bearing directly on the subject of these papers, the friends parted for the night, without a clear under- standing whether A would join the party on the morrow or not. II. When B arrived at C's house, he was afraid that he had come too early for the conveni- ence of the family ; and it was with no small relief that he found A and C waiting for him in the little reading-room upstairs, a room memorable to C as the scene of many hot de- bates with principalities and powers as well as with himself. A had been there an hour or more. B laughed as he entered, and, just bow- ing to his host, he shook hands playfully with A, and the conversation began and proceeded nearly as follows : B. I am glad to see that you are eager for bat- tle. I was somewhat afraid that C and I would have to set our faces against each other and fight a tedious duel all day, or patch up a peace and devote the day to relaxation and feasting. A. My wife wanted to come with the chil- dren ; and I thought that I might as well come and hear what you have to say. But I 24 Prayer- Meeting Theology. 25 am not eager for battle. You can have your tedious duel yet. I shall sit here at my ease and watch the fray. And, judging from your drift last night and on many former occasions, I think I shall be quite willing to see you mangle and maul one another as barbarously as possible. I pray that each of you may have the victory, and that neither may show any mercy. Raze each other's strongholds to the ground. Plough up their foundations, and sprinkle them with salt. C. We have apparently every preparation for a great struggle excepting the first and most essential of all, a just cause of war. We have no real quarrel to settle. We live in the same world, with the same faculties, and the same hopes and fears. The facts of human life and history are the same for us all, and the thoughts of our hearts are the same. The questions between us are simply, whether we shall turn and look at our own thoughts or not, and, if we do, which of those thoughts shall preoccupy the mind and govern the order of all the rest. As it seems to me, we have not come to a battle-field at all, but to a sort of singing-school, to see if we cannot sound a 26 Prayer- Meeting Theology. common keynote and sing together harmoni- ously the divine old song which we all love best of any. But let us begin. " I believe in God," is the first article of our creed. Can we all say that together without any discord ? B. We can say it together doubtless ; but I am not sure that we should all mean the same by it. What we desire, I presume, is not to find vague words which we can all say together, every one attaching to them his own private interpretation, but to find for our familiar words a definite meaning in which we can all heartily unite. A. And, pray, what will be the good of uniting in your meaning, if it is a meaning which you must hunt for, and a meaning which you seek for the express purpose of uniting irreconcilables ? The creed of the church of Christ has not been waiting all this while for a meaning. It has a mean- ing. And if you cannot accept the creed in its natural and well-known intention, the next best thing that you can do is to leave it alone. The Christian world will always use the creed in its old sense ; and if you unite with them in words, but with some new sense Prayer- Meeting Theology. 27 of your own, it is a kind of Ananias and Sap- phira business that I have no wish to be mixed up with. B. Bear with me. I do not wish to depart from the received meaning. I only wish to see clearly what it is, and why it is received ; that we may, if possible, all receive it together. And you are the very man to help me. You believe in God. If I ask for the grounds of your belief, you will refer me, after the manner of our manuals, to the works of creation, the conscience of man, the history of the world, and the Holy Scriptures. Do these various witnesses testify precisely the same in matter and in amount ? Or do they supplement, as well as confirm, one another? Assuming the latter, would you say that God is not revealed in the works of nature, or in the conscience of man, or in the history of the world, or in the Holy Scriptures, separately, but only in all of these together? A. God is partly revealed in every one of the ways you have mentioned, but not wholly revealed in any of them, or in all of them to- gether. He cannot be wholly made known to our finite capacity. 28 Prayer- Meeting Theology. B. The revelation of God to us, then, is con- ditioned or measured by the various means of revealing Him and by our capacity to receive revelation. Both this capacity and the means of revelation vary greatly with times and with individuals. A patriarch's belief in God, then, would differ from the belief of an apostle, and the belief of an aged Christian ripe for glory is far other than the belief of a child still in the nursery. Yet you will doubtless maintain that they might all unite without hesitation in say- ing " I believe in God." A. You are confounding belief in God with knowledge of God. Knowledge is variable, and should grow from more to more ; but the same belief may attend every stage of knowledge. I have believed in your existence these thirty years. I believed as strongly thirty years ago as I do now. Then, I knew next to nothing about you ; now, I know about all there is to know perhaps. Just so your patriarchs and your apostles, your Christians of four and of fourscore years, differ greatly in their knowledge of God, but they agree in their belief in His existence. B. Your distinction between knowledge and belief is very fine. Splitting a hair is nothing Prayer- Meeting Theology. 29 to it. So far as I can see, your belief in my existence thirty years ago was simply the knowledge (little it might be) which you had of me then ; and your exhaustive knowledge of me to-day is simply your belief in my exist- ence as I now appear to you. My question about the first article of the creed is just this : does it profess a belief in God as God is revealed by all available means to confirmed Christians ? If it does, many among us are necessarily debarred from the use of it. If it does not require so much, how much does it re- quire ? Is there a fixed definable minimum of belief or knowledge that will satisfy it? None of us have the full idea of God. None of us, therefore, can believe in Him fully. For how can we believe in Him except so far as we have heard or conceived of Him ? How much of the idea of God must we apprehend and believe in before we can say with the Christian church that we believe in God ? Then, further, the strength of belief varies as much as its sub- stance. Supposing your own idea of God and mine to be precisely the same, your belief in God, as we both conceive of Him, may be a lively unhesitating triumphant assurance ; mine 30 Prayer- Meeting Theology. may be a timid wavering acquiescence only just above the line of actual disbelief. Have I a right to stand by your side and say with you " I believe in God" ? A. You have a right to believe, and then to say that you believe. You would hardly desire the right to say " I believe," before you do believe, or before you know whether you believe or not. And yet you seem to be anxious to prepare the way to introduce the loose agnostic rabble into the household of faith, and so to take away all meaning from religious belief. C. I should like to see the household of faith increase and multiply, but not so as to be re- duced to meanness and beggary thereby. Your rule seems to leave open no way of increase except by special creation of mature believers. You cannot consistently teach your creed to your children, and you dare not invite the multitude to worship with you. A man who should say, " I believe. Lord, help my unbelief," would seem to you a loose agnostic trespasser ; and even the prayer, " Increase our faith," might awaken suspicion. If creeds are good for anything, they ought to be good for educa- tional purposes, and the Church, sure that they Prayer- Meeting Theology. 31 express truth which is true for all men and with which all men's better nature must be in secret sympathy, should not guard the use of them too strictly, but should encourage all who are at all so disposed to throw themselves upon them for expression and for confirmation and guidance. If this be done, many will say, " I believe in God," while, intellectually, belief and unbelief are almost evenly balanced in their minds, and many too, whose idea of God* is utterly incapable of definition. The humble and meek will confess their faith in God from very humility, the young from reverence for parents and teachers and the great past. Their belief in God is an inheritance ; and, if analyzed, will be found to have little clearness of thought and little strength of conviction, but much natural piety. Shall we recognize such a belief, or must we insist on something clearer and stronger ? A. We are not called upon to judge the faith of others, or to determine the mini- mum of faith that can be called Christian. Neither are we to be hampered in the work of Christian instruction and training by scruples and speculations concerning the beginnings of 32 Prayer- Meeting Theology. faith. All beginnings involve mysteries past finding out, the beginnings of faith no less than any others. We may not forbid little children to confess their Lord, though they should con- fess Him from filial reverence alone ; and we must rejoice when others approach Him though they approach Him with doubt and difficulty. But you cannot plead the privileges of infancy in behalf of men and women of all ages ; and it is trifling to cite the indistinctness and feeble- ness of faith at its first awakening in justifica- tion of a faith which goes stumbling and falling all the way to old age and the bed of death. The child is not to be a child for ever. And Christian believers must not tarry too long at the birth. By the sure impulse of our new life we must ever seek not the minimum but the maximum of faith. We must move, not backward to the rudiments, but onward to perfection. We have no interest in defining a minimum. The full Christian faith is what is set forth, and what we profess to believe, in the creed : not that we have fathomed its depths or measured all its fulness, but that we are persuaded that it is, throughout, worthy of all acceptation, and that we press forward Prayer- Meeting Theology. 33 sincerely to a perfect faith. Regarding the creed thus as including the whole Christian faith, we all have need to breathe, with each pregnant article, the deep prayer, " Help my unbelief ! " C. But we are straying very far from the question before us. We proposed to ascertain the definite sense of the first article of the creed ; and here we are discussing nothing less than the whole creed and the entire Christian faith. Do you intend to say that when a man declares his faith in God, he either actually means or necessarily ought to mean, that he accepts the whole Christian faith ? A. We were not talking about a man at large declaring merely his faith in God. I could not venture to guess what such a man might mean by his declaration. We were speaking of Christians and of the Apostles' Creed, and, first of all if so it please you, of the first article of the creed. Now, no Christian believer ever thinks of the first article as if it stood alone. The Christian's belief in God the Father implies his belief in the only-begotten Son. It is through the Son that he comes to the Father. It is through believing in Christ 34 Prayer- Meeting Theology. that he believes in God in the Christian sense, which surely is the proper sense of the creed. The first article of the creed, therefore, though it may be spoken alone, cannot be believed alone. C. If we should take that view of the matter, our whole inquiry would be greatly modified. But let us fall back on what we all admit, that we have not fathomed the depths or measured all the fulness of the idea of God ; that much of the real truth concerning Him must be left out in all our discussions ; that as a matter of fact there is a very great difference in the actual thoughts of those who sincerely seek Him. Admitting this, let us turn to the various witnesses which have been mentioned, and see what and how much belief in God they will respectively help us to. A. These witnesses have been testifying since the world began. Their separate testi- monies, hard to be grasped in the brief bust- ling life of the individual and even in the longer life and wider experience of nations, have coalesced and penetrated slowly into the mind and heart of mankind ; but that, as Christians believe, not without the aid of the great mysteries of the Incarnation and the Res- Prayer- Meeting Theology. 35 urrection, and the Coming of the Holy Ghost. You propose to set aside this long result, this greatest birth, of time, and do over again, bare- handed in a couple of hours, the most serious work of God and man through all ages. Com- pared with the shocking presumption and con- summate absurdity of such an undertaking, it would be reasonableness itself for you one of these long summer days to fall a calculating and to re-discover the law of gravitation ; and then, after refreshing your exhausted powers by a pleasant trip in Europe, to fit up a crazy old-fashioned little fleet and re-open the history of our hemisphere by discovering America. It is easy to pretend to go back to the beginning and hear the witnesses for yourselves. No doubt you have the whole mass of evidence summed up after some choice fashion in your own heads already ; and this going back is a happy contrivance to furnish momentum for your adopted views, whatever they may be. You cannot truly go back to the beginning, or anywhere near the beginning. And if you could, you would not get as far on your way again in your whole lifetime as you propose to go this morning at an easy canter. 36 Prayer- Meeting Theology. C. I admit very readily that hearing the witnesses and summing up the evidence is the slow work of ages. But when you have both the original evidence and the long-prepared summary before you, you may verify and weigh rapidly. If you had studied mathe- matics as long as you have been reading the- ology, you could follow the argument of the Principia with all becoming modesty ; and there is nothing very presumptuous in tracing the voyages of Columbus on the map whether you have ever tasted salt water or not. Our proposed task is of the like humble character. Let us turn to the first witness, the material universe. What does it say of ■ God ? What have the ages made of its teaching ? And how much of it can we receive ? A. You will have your own way of course. But I cannot help feeling that it is child's play of the vainest sort. The witnesses for God are many. But God Himself is not a bundle of parts to be verified separately and then put together. God is one : and He must be known as One before we can appreciate the contributions of the several witnesses. The testimony of external nature cannot be got at Prayer-Meeting Theology. 37 by itself. He that hath the knowledge of God will receive more and more from nature at every turn. But he that looks for God in nature alone will not find Him. I have heard of a place in the mountains where great echoes will answer every voice and reverberate in tones of thunder all round the sky. But those great peaks, endowed as they are with Titanic voices, will not utter a sound for one who merely stands still to listen. The traveller, with his own voice, must furnish the theme and waken the music. In like manner your faith in God must waken nature's hymn of praise, must kindle the true light of nature, which in turn will declare the glory of God to you and mightily confirm and increase your faith. Let me add that the great witnesses of God not only testify together, but also speak for the most part in a still small voice to the inner man, to the inmost man of all ; and that, not chiefly in hours of speculation and study, but in the ordinary course and experi- ence of life, and without cross-examination on our part. When, in our self-sufificiency, we turn upon the witnesses and examine them magisterially, we really turn a deaf ear to their 38 Prayer-Meeting Theology. teaching and drown their great message in our own clamor. B. I have at times been disposed to think that the testimony of nature was overestimated in divinity. But I may have to champion nature after all if you reduce her testimony to an inarticulate mumbling which must have a sense imposed upon it rather than derived from it. You make nature very much such a witness as Tony Lumpkin, well capable of swearing to anything in the evidence of others, but too stupid to furnish independent testi- mony. If all the other witnesses are as help- less as this one, what will become of them ? Must they sit together in eternal silence wait- ing for one another to begin ? Or can they work a miracle, and, by contributing nothing apiece, make up together a glorious and con- vincing array of evidence ? We may as well let nature alone if all she can give is but the echo of our own thoughts. To be of any account, she ought to be independent of our moods. She ought to give her testimony un- ceasingly both when we wake and when we sleep. And, depend upon it, nature will give independent evidence on the one side or on Prayer-Meeting Theology. 39 the other. Your moderation or caution, or whatever it may be, will only serve to hand the witness over to the other side. Then, again, I must protest against your inner and inmost revelations. I fully acknowledge the limitations of our understanding, and also the high and sacred character of the revelations made to man in divers ways. But we must try the spirits and cross-examine the witnesses ; we must think and speak of all these things in the best way we can, or confess that our reli- gious life is an ordinance of fate and not a reasonable service at all. A. I did not intend to say that nature gives no independent testimony, but that her testi- mony makes complete sense to us only in con- nection with what is revealed in other ways. She furnishes what is not furnished elsewhere : but what she furnishes will only astonish and perplex and even mislead, if taken alone. There is, however, no need of taking it alone. We are not sent empty and naked into the presence of external nature ; and it is insolent presumption to go naked and empty-handed into her presence unsent. You say that the enemy will use nature for his evil purpose. I 40 Prayer-Meeting Theology. doubt it not. It will be easy for him to do so. I shall not dispute with him about the bare works of nature, and the awful desolation of their silence or the duplicity of their speech. I say we must seek the key to nature else- where than in nature herself. The telescope is not the ultimate key to the heavens, nor the hammer to the rocks, nor the dredging-net to the deep sea. God must be known before His works can be understood. When you know Him, nature will teach you more about Him every day. He will appear to you on every mount, under every tree stand visible, and talk with you familiarly at every fountain. B. How comfortably you hover in the thin Miltonic air ! I can but envy you, as a creep- ing thing might envy a bird. Brother C, can you say anything to bring natural theology a little nearer to one who must rest his clumsy feet on ground that can be touched ? C. I would not say that nature reveals God to us as a being wholly outside of herself, but that God reveals Himself in nature by His actual presence therein. Nature is not so much a proof of the being of God as a direct, though very imperfect, manifestation of God Prayer- Meeting Theology. 41 Himself. I do not, from what I see, infer that there is a God somewhere ; but I see, I feel, I believe that God is here. I do not conclude that there is a being corresponding to a name and a thought which I had before ; but I feel that the being which I find everywhere fills and overflows all the highest names ever fashioned and the highest thoughts ever conceived, and urges the soul to new thoughts and to ever- growing adoration. I do not merely believe that God is ; I believe that what most truly is, what is original and substantial and abiding, is God. I would seek, not to ascertain whether a cer- tain indefinable problematical entity is or is not, but to know better day by day that which certainly and obviously is, that which besets me behind and before, that from which I can- not flee though I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea and though I seek every covering of darkness, that whereby all things stand and in which I myself live and move and have my being. I would start not with what I seek but with what I find. It is true that we have the idea and the name of God taught us very early ; but we have the reality before us, more or less truly known and more or less deeply felt, 42 Prayer- Meeting Theology. earlier still. We are cast upon Him from the womb. A. I understand you to say that nature is God ; and I expect to see you presently fall down and worship the sun and the moon, the heavens and the earth and the sea, and all that therein is. C. The term nature is frequently used by distinguished men in a sense which might almost justify the statement that nature is God. But we are plain people, and we must not renounce our every-day language, even when we presume to talk theology. With this un- derstanding I say : No, I did not intend to say that nature is God. But I meant to say that we do not have to go through a double pro- cess, first examining nature, and then reaching the conclusion that there is a God. We do not have to go through nature up to nature's God on the farther side. God is as near as nature. He is on this side of nature as well as on the other. Nature is but a visible token of the actual presence and operation of the in- visible God. And this partly accounts for the confusion in the use of the term nature. We all perceive the forms and movements of the Prayer-Meeting Theology. 43 material world, and we often call them nature. But we are just as truly and just as directly aware of the unseen power working in and through these forms and movements as we are of the forms and movements themselves ; and we frequently include this unseen power with the familiar phenomena under the one term, nature. Now this power, of which we are all aware in nature, is not an argument for the being of God ; it is God Himself. Nature will conduct you to no other, will prove the being of no other. Of course you can prompt nature if you wish, and make her seem to say what- ever you choose. But nature needs no prompt- ing to reveal the ever-living, ever-present God. Her own voice is God's voice. Her power is Himself. Even her silent visible forms bring Him distinctly face to face with our spirits. It is not to the dread and sovran Blanc alone that we might say : " I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought : entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone." The Invisible comes to us thus directly in all visible things. Even in darkness He passes 44 Prayer- Meeting Theology. solemnly before us, and He looks forth upon our awe-struck souls from what seem the void desert spaces of the universe. We must desire to know much more of God than is thus revealed in nature ; and when we come to know more, nature will not contradict our new knowledge, but, being entirely in harmony with it, will seem to contain it. Meanwhile, there is that which all men must more or less distinctly know of God, even His eternal power and Godhead. God in nature, though veiled, is face to face with all His reasonable creatures. He is not testified to merely, but He it is that speaketh unto us and unto all. A. I thought we were coming to this, to a God known and believed in by unbelievers. A little while ago we labored hard and could scarcely say clearly that we believed in God. It required wrestling, it was a good fight, to keep the faith. But now no one can help believing. No fighting or squirming will avail to rid any one of his faith. My friend B, you must be very tired, clinging so desperately and so long to your faith while the cruel flood was tearing it away from you bit by bit. But you may rest now and be comforted. The wicked Prayer- Meeting Theology. 45 flood has turned round. It will restore your stolen faith to you with interest, and perhaps dash it in your face if you are not careful. Faith will no longer be scarce on the earth. It will hardly be scarce enough to be precious. The returning flood will deposit it all over the land thicker than the river of Egypt deposits mud. Henceforth no one can fall short of blessedness through unbelief ! C. The directness of the revelation does not make unbelief impossible ; but it helps to make it inexcusable. The presence of God in nature is necessarily felt by all men, but it is not neces- sarily welcomed and heeded. Faith is not the mere perception or feeling of what is offered to the spirit of man in nature, but the frank and hearty recognition and acceptance of it. There are revelations of God besides that in external nature, and every one of them affords opportunities for deadly unbelief. But with every form of revelation, the great trial of faith is not in the question of fact, whether there be a God or not, but in the practical question, whether, brought face to face with God, we shall glorify the known and felt reality as God and acknowledge Him in all our ways, while a 46 Prayer-Meeting Theology. chorus of siren voices would seduce us to turn away from Him and to worship and serve the creature more than the Creator. UnbeHef in this practical sense is much more inexcusable if the being of God be not a matter of argu- ment but of immediate manifestation, as I take it to be in nature. With your great fear of consorting with unbelievers I have no sympathy. I am glad to have some religious ground in common with all mankind. The foundation of our theology ought to be so broad and sure that none but " the fool " can dispute its validity. If you only find an argument for the being of God in nature, and much more if you find nothing of God except what you bring with you, you will find yourself the unbeliever in a large and earnest household of faith. Students of nature and the general mass of men will accept what they find face to face with them in nature as unquestionably divine. This will be their God, and will receive divine honors of some kind. If you insist that the actual power in nature is only an argument for the being of God, all that can be said is that the argument, like Prospero's brother, has been allowed to oc- cupy so large a place in the eyes of the people Prayer-Meeting Theology. 47 that the people can hardly be blamed for assign- ing to it the chief dignity. If God is not to be found here directly, then that which is to be found can hardly be dispossessed of the faith and reverence of mankind. Men will not believe that the mighty presence of which they are aware is not that of the Highest. And if you dissent, your remaining task will be, not so much to prove the being of your God as to find room and work for Him in the world and in the minds of men. B. But you could easily make room for Him and for a dozen more, as you seem to have no objection to unlimited Polytheism. For the God which you so readily find at hand without any process of thought is, to say the least, a very heathenish God, a Pantheon in Himself, with the most diverse forms and the most mixed attributes, and without any name by which He can be approached. He is not only Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, but Briareus or Typhon, Osiris, Isis, Orus, The One, The All, Anything, Every- thing under the sun. Is it any gain to be able to find God directly in nature if the God you find has no distinct character, but repeats, in his awful multifarious self, all the varying and 48 Prayer-Meeting Theology. perplexing aspects of natural phenomena, not only the sublime and the beautiful and the beneficent, but also the foul, the deformed, and the horrible? The power in nature is a de- stroyer as well as a creator, a power of death and darkness as well as of light and life. C. Nature has perplexing aspects. But these aspects trouble us only when we lose sight of her ineffable greatness, when we fasten on sin- gle features or acts and ignore the expression and movement of the whole. Nature is so great and so glorious that what seems most hor- rible in her work fails to mar her beauty or to disturb our deep, confiding affection for her. Even when we fret ourselves the most because of her stern work, we turn to her instinctively for consolation, and we find it. She quiets our plaints and subdues our murmurings, she soothes and awes us into content, without changing or explaining her course. Her per- plexing aspects, without disappearing, are over- shadowed by her majesty. And if this is true of nature, it is also true of Him who is her life. He is too great not to be adored and trusted, though He slay us. " O Lord my God, thou art very great ; thou art clothed with Prayer-Meeting Theology. 49 honor and majesty. Bless the Lord, O my soul." It is a satisfaction to find God directly in nature, though to our immature and guilty minds He should at first appear multifarious and heathenish and terrible. It is better to find Him, though He seem fiercer than ten furies, than to find no reality at all, but only mysteri- ous hints and indefinite probabilities. Once we meet the living God, we know that He is the First and the Last, in whose power we are, and with whom now and for ever we have to do ; in the knowledge of whom, if He will deign to reveal Himself more fully unto us, we may find the light of life ; and in humble submission to whom, at all events, must lie our only hope. But a vague abstraction, vouched for by mere arguments, would be as deaf and unapproach- able as Baal, and of no value even to the moles and the bats. B. But are you sure that all men, that stu- dents of the physical sciences especially, do really find in nature this power, or life, which you would identify with the God of the creed ? I had an impression that scientific inquiry tended strongly to resolve the whole universe into mere material atoms and modes of motion. 50 Prayer-Meeting Theology. and that blank atheism was really " the religion of all men of science." C. We did not start out to-day to be our brother's keepers, or to provide a faith for all the world, though I should rejoice if such a faith were found. We wished rather to ponder the path of our own feet through the abyss of religious speculation, which sometimes threatens to swallow us up. I am sure that I find in nature very much more than forms and movements. I am sure also that to ordinary people round about me the unseen power is as real, as obvious, and as impressive as to myself. My acquaintance with scientific men is not ex- tensive. But I have an impression that, on the whole, they are, in this respect, much like other people. I have indeed known some of them who rejected the Christian faith, and professed that they did not believe in God. But they were pious votaries of nature, and they trans- ferred to her without stint the attributes and functions of the discredited Deity. If there be others, who, in their fundamental thought, ut- terly and consistently repudiate all belief in God, what of it ? Their denial of God is not to be accounted for by their superior knowledge ; Prayer-Meeting Theology. 51 for no one can pretend that they know any more than their fellow-students, who continue either to worship God in nature or to glorify nature as God. And even if all competent students of the physical sciences agreed in declaring that there is nothing at all in existence but material forms and modes of motion, would there be any reason why any sane layman should believe them, when they go so recklessly beyond their depth ? Because a man has spent his life in turning some particular products of nature in- side out, or in brewing and boiling strange con- coctions, must we all humbly consult him about the general significance of the universe? And must we despair if he swears by his cauldron that there is nothing in being which he has not boiled and baked at his pleasure ? Have we not ourselves lived in close converse with nature all our days, playing with her in childhood, and working with her incessantly through our adult years ? We have beheld her with the naked eye more than through telescopes and microscopes, it is true ; and we have looked in her face much more than into her entrails. But why should any microscopic divination with her inward parts be supposed to furnish true knowledge of 52 Prayer-Meeting Theology. her ultimate significance if the most intimate communion with her face to face for a lifetime be wholly illusory? No doubt there is very much to learn by special studies of nature. But is not the mass of scientific knowledge open to all the world ? Are the decisive results of sci- entific investigation locked up in the possession of the investigators alone ? While we delight to honor great specialists in their own proper departments, we need not regard them as infal- lible popes in the more general interpretation of nature. Their particular aptitudes and their special labors may be a disqualification rather than an advantage in the more open field. A little child shall often lead the wisest of them. And the great poets will ever speak for nature to mankind with more authority than all the scientific schools together, because the poets speak for the mind and heart of man as well as for the bare facts of the external world. B. But, granting the manifest existence of some vast power in nature, does not the doctrine of evolution, now generally accepted, reduce it to a formless, purposeless, mindless monstrosity, altogether unlike any of the greater gods, not to speak of the holy name on which we call ? Prayer-Meeting Theology. 53 C. Just now we wish to deal only with the actually present, with the known, with the certain. The manifest power in nature belongs to this category ; and I find nothing in it un- worthy of the supreme and ever-blessed God. Your theory of evolution goes on a dark jour- ney "into the far backward and abyss of time," through probable, possible, improbable, and perchance impossible things. It is well to ex- plore those remote and shadowy regions with all the resources of keen conjecture and daring hypothesis. But many of us have no vocation to join the explorers or even to estimate their achievements. I, at least, must dwell at home, while others face the dangers and divide the spoils of the great enterprise. I shall always welcome any clear and certain tidings which may reach us from the heroes of the expedition. But no possible tidings from them can be of much practical consequence to me, who am myself every moment face to face with the ever-living, ever-present God, with whom I have to do, and by whose grace my path in life is made sufificiently plain before me. When bold navigators sail for the northern seas, we heartily bid them God-speed ; we admire their 54 Prayer-Meeting Theology. courage and their seamanship ; and we look eagerly for news from them. But our interest in them and their work, though genuine enough, yields to the slightest call of commonplace du- ties at home. We lay down the volume contain- ing the thrilling account of their adventures when it is time to milk our cows or to feed our pigs. We live on in our old ways. We neither wind up our business nor sell our homesteads nor betray any premonition of great coming changes, whatever the news from the North. We are not going to live at the north pole whatever the heroes may find there ; and the north pole is not going to come any nearer to us than it was of yore. We honor heroic adventure, and we have a measure of curiosity about the well-guarded extremity of our planet and the picturesque approaches thereto ; but, when all is said, our cows and our pigs are more to us than all the wonders of the ice-fields. In due time, also, if it please God, the explorers themselves will return glutted with the arctic cold, to end their days in the humdrum pur- suits of the temperate zone. To me, your thoroughgoing theory of evolution, with its highly endowed eternal matter and its appall- Prayer-Meeting Theology. 55 ing rhythms and its all-embracing abstraction, has great interest of this remote, impractical, arctic-exploration kind, refreshing the mind and stimulating the imagination, but leaving the serious truth and work of life and the grand significance of nature precisely where they were before. B. Are those well considered words ? Can you afford to make light of the progressive order in nature ? And is it becoming to go out of your way, with far-fetched, long-drawn-out fig- ures, to disparage the greatest achievement of modern thought? C. I beg your pardon, I disparage nothing of the kind. If I disparage anything, it is that theory of evolution which you described as re- ducing the power in nature to a state unworthy of the reverence of mankind. And I do not disparage that as a speculation, or by any means ignore the wealth of knowledge and in- tellectual power which is expended upon it. But if you thrust it upon me as a practical doctrine, which I must seriously consider and which I must live by, I am simply stunned and cannot conceive which way my new doc- trine would have me go. If evolution, what- 56 Prayer-Meeting Theology. ever it be, has brought all things, ourselves included, to their present state, then evolution has made man rational and religious, a wor- shipper of God, of a God found ever active in all nature. Is this same evolution now going to end like the famous king of France, who, "With four thousand men, Marched up the hill, and then marched down again " ? Having taught us to believe in God, will it now straightway teach us to deny Him ? That is a rhythm which will be broken whatever forces are engaged to carry it out. As to the progressive order in nature, we have no reason or inclination to disbelieve in it. We rejoice in the manifestation of it in the great scientific movement of the day. We be- lieve heartily in the doctrine of evolution when it is not carried beyond all bounds of science to serve the preconceived notions of a particu- lar school of thought. Some of the devoutest Christian philosophers of the past distinctly enunciated the idea of evolution before it be- came the dominant idea in the world's thought ; and the Christian philosophers of to-day teach it as impressively as any others. Our oldest Prayer-Meeting Theology. 57 and soundest theology implies evolution, the growing fulfilment of God's purpose in the world : and we are indebted to every theory which emphasizes and illustrates this great thought. To us, the thought, that " the pres- ent is big with the future," is most practical as well as most true. It is the spring of faith- ful work, and the support of lively and patient hope, as well as the wonder and delight of con- templation. Evolution, to us, makes nature declare the glory of God not less but more. Far from superseding God in nature, it is itself a manifestation of His all-pervading energy. In saying this I am not taking imper- tinent liberties with a scientific term and a scientific doctrine, of which I have no great right to speak. The ablest expounders and ad- vocates of the doctrine of evolution, Mr. Spencer in England and Mr. Fiske in our own country, certainly give us the right to regard the doc- trine, in its essential character and final out- come, as distinctly religious. Both of them represent it as more religious than our current Christian theism, — in fact, as the religious position, to which all others are but approxi- mations. We accept the doctrine as compati- 58 Prayer-Meeting Theology. ble with an earnest belief in God. When it is loaded with additions which make it, to our minds, utterly incompatible with such belief, we part with it : and we are profoundly con- vinced that the strictest science parts with it at the same point. A. I agree with you as to polar expeditions and the overloaded variety of evolution. But I fail to perceive wherein this great enterprise of ours to-day differs from them unless it be in not having even a remote scientific or specu- lative interest. For the goal of our inquiry seems to be the barren conviction that what is exists, and that what is absolutely certain is entirely incontrovertible. C. No, that is not our goal, but it is a truth well worth remembering. The goal is to de- termine some of the great truths that are certain, and to see how certain they are. We find in the bare contemplation of nature that something exists in or with all nature besides what the senses perceive; and that this some- thing is most august and worshipful, and of great power over the spirit of man from first to last. This may seem meagre as the direct con- tribution of nature to theology. But it is a Prayer- Meeting Theology. 59 sure starting-point, and it leaves the way open for further advance. Nature, in the sense in which we have spoken of it, is but a small part of all that is, and it cannot be regarded as the most important part. It is but the stage and apparatus, not the persons and the drama. Yet we already find the chief actor on the stage, though his character and purposes are in a large measure left to be unveiled as the play goes on. Nature leaves ample room for more truth than she discovers ; she points signifi- cantly to sueh further truth ; and she will con- firm and illustrate it when it is revealed. A. I have no doubt but you mean well. But you leave God and nature in a sad tangle. You seem willing to make a distinction ; but no one can tell what the distinction is to be, or where nature ends and God begins. You see the chief actor on the stage. Why do you not say that you see him in the stage, in every part of it, in the very shape of it, in the very space which surrounds it? That would agree better with your recent talk about God in nature. C. 1 have no objection to say so if confused rhetoric seems to you more persuasive than the 6o Prayer-Meeting Theology. simpler kind. The form of expression is of minor importance. The truth which I would emphasize is that God reveals Himself directly to us in nature, though the knowledge of Him which we receive through nature is very lim- ited. We find Him with us in nature some- what as a child finds his mother present with him in his infancy. What does the little one actually find ? He finds a gentle and skilful hand ministering to him. He finds a soft, warm bosom to lie in. He hears cheery notes and sweet words. He sees a tall, mysterious figure with a beaming face bending over him. Are these his mother? Are these the whole of her motherhood ? These are about all he knows, and even these he knows dimly and confusedly. But he knows his mother in reality though not by name. He does not infer his mother from these things. He knows her truly and directly, but very imperfectly, in these things. The mother puts her thought and her love and all the treasure of a mother's heart in a kind look and in a tender touch. But how little of it all does the child know, though it is all there ? He must learn in many ways long thereafter how much more than he knew was round about him Prayer-Meeting Theology. 6i in his infancy. In like manner God puts His whole self in the face and voice of nature for His children. The children find something of Him there, but not all that is there present. They must learn in other ways, with advancing life and experience, to recognize His holiness and His love. And when they have done so, they may well say : Did not our hearts burn within us while He looked upon us and spoke unto us in our childhood through the common sights and sounds of the world ? A. I should like to hear what you have to say of the great arguments for the being of God from the necessity of a first cause, and from the indications of design in nature. C. Can it be that you desire to snare us and put us to confusion ? You thought we were incapable of any profitable discussion of the general question of the being of God. And now you invite us to commit ourselves on special lines of discussion, and those lines on which advanced thinkers of the day boast that they have routed the stoutest champions of the old faith. You would have us try our apprentice hands at arguments which have, in the opinion of many, become a by-word and a derision in 62 Prayer-Meeting Theology. the hands of Samuel Clarke and William Paley. I am free to say, however, that though I am familiar with the knowing and lofty contempt of Clarke and Paley so common in our day, I have never yet seen the refutation of their argu- ments. I have seen the statement that refuta- tion is not necessary ; that the progress of thought and knowledge has relegated the old arguments to a limbo so dark and so far away that it would be waste of time to refute them. But the smart air of such a statement does not save it from being exceedingly insignificant. The metaphysical necessity of a first cause or ground of existence, and the marvellous adjust- ments in nature which suggest design on the part of the first cause, are simple facts, as fresh and perennial as nature herself. The argument from these facts is simply the clear, strong, pointed statement of the facts themselves. The only possible refutation of the argument is the abolition of the facts. And the compassing of that refutation will surely waste all the time that is devoted to it. But if we feel and ac- knowledge the actual presence of the first cause in nature, we need not dwell at length, for our own benefit, on the metaphysical necessity of Prayer-Meeting Theology. 63 it. The proof of design we must sometime con- sider, in part at least, because it consists in tracing the power, the thought, the will, the motive, in nature, in which we have her revela- tion of the attributes of her first cause. But we shall never get through the creed at this rate. The morning is passing, and we are leisurely playing around the first article. B. I already despair of getting much further than the first article to-day. But let us call the next witness. What contribution is made to our belief in God by the mind and life of man ? We have spoken of the mind of man as a wit- ness in addition to nature. But we can scarcely allow such language to be heard in Gath. The Philistines would mock at it. " What is the mind of man," they would ask, "but a part of nature ? " I know that we are plain people, and that we must use the greatest plainness of speech. But is not the mind of man, by many around us, triumphantly made out to be but a portion of nature, even in the narrowest sense in which the every-day language can speak of nature ? The mind of man, then, has nothing of its own to give. And of what account are even its impressions of the outward world ? One 64 Prayer-Meeting Theology. portion of nature makes an impression upon another portion ; that is all. One combination of atoms hits and thrills and kindles another combination. What can it signify? And what is there to save our highest possessions and our most aspiring hopes from being carried away to chaos by some unexpected unaccountable impulse? A. If that is the case, be content to gaze at the great show while it lasts. Or, if you are weary of it, turn away ; think no more about it ; let the atoms whirl. But you are a " com- bination " yourself forsooth, and you are cast helpless into the thick of the play. Your part is to take a vain show to heart, and vex your fortuitous soul about passing shadows. It is all an aimless, senseless phantasmagoria, man, and here you are, thinking and sorrowing and praying, as if life was real and as if we might live it in earnest ! I have heard with my ears about these atoms, and so have you ; but we have never seen them or known anything at all about them. Our thoughts we know, and they are far more real and fundamental than the atoms they are supposed to be made of. And be these thoughts made of whirling atoms or Prayer-Meeting Theology. 65 be they the spiritual furniture and inheritance of heaven-born immortal souls, they are our chief concern. They are our truth. They are the. real world we live in. C. And as to man's mind being a part of nature, it must at least be admitted that it is as good a part as any other. The sun gives light, the trees bear fruit, the mind of man yields thought. The light of the sun, the fruit of the trees, all genuine natural products, are related to the whole system of nature and honored and blessed therein. Are the thoughts and imag- inations of man spurious illegitimate abortions brought forth to perish ? Roots go down into the earth, and, searching in the dark, find the nourishment which they seek. Branches and leaves spread themselves out in their need, and find the air and the gladdening light for which they pant. Helpless little birds open their mouths wide, and they are filled. Natural tendencies and instincts are honored through- out the known world. Their guidance is sure, and the provision for them is ample and fit. Is the thought of man, if a natural product, the only one to be isolated and dishonored ? Or is it honored and prospered greatly in its lower 66 Prayer-Meeting Theology. activities, to be dishonored utterly in its loftiest and most earnest flights ? I never felt disposed to quarrel with the people who insist on find- ing a place for man in nature. He would be a waif and estray indeed if no place were found for him there. The more surely his place there is made out, the more certain will it appear that his mind must correspond to reality in its religious impressions and cravings as well as in its other activities. If a mere shadow, or a wandering voice, syllabled God's name " on sands and shores and desert wildernesses," it might be of no account. But if man, rising un- doubtedly from the depths of nature, with her sure marks on his body and mind alike,— if he, as his most characteristic, most earnest and persistent act, lifts up his eyes to heaven and cries out for the living God, then room must surely be found in nature for God as well as for man. B. Then nature is not God, but contains God. Does the lesser contain the greater, or how is it ? I am afraid we have ceased to be plain people speaking their simple unsophis- ticated vernacular. A. Never mind that : we have stuck to it Prayer-Meeting Theology. 67 pretty well. If we sometimes slip into the freer idiom of our betters, I think we shall still be able to understand one another. B. Nay, if you two are going to be friends, what shall we not come to ? But you are build- ing too well for this low sphere. You leave no room in your world for vice and folly. And a mortal world without accommodations for them is but a castle in the air. Consider what some of our thoughts and tendencies are like ; and imagine a world in which all the thoughts and all the tendencies of all mankind find answering reality ! Many natural tendencies, so-called, are wholly unnatural ; and many swelling thoughts are utterly irrational and vain. If we are to attain truth, we must patiently bring our thoughts into agreement with reality rather than assume peremptorily that reality must correspond with our thoughts. We must hew the timber to the line, and not bend the line to the timber. C. We have idle, vagrant, lying thoughts, it is true ; and we have vicious, grovelling tend- encies. But the serious, sifted, enlightened, settled thought of man is true, is all the truth we can attain to; and the essential, abiding 68 Prayer-Meeting Theology. tendencies of the human mind must point to reality, or the system of nature, which we know to be sound at the base, is rotten at the top. The universal mind of man will have the power in nature to be divine, and will bow before it in awe and worship. There is plenty of room for difference, for error and superstition, in conceiving the character and attributes of God and the manner and spirit of the worship which should be offered to Him. But amid all such differences there remains the settled disposition to worship, to acknowledge dependence, and to seek grace. Individuals may protest against the worship which others offer, and may seem to direct their protest against all worship and all objects of worship. But in the very earn- estness of their protest there is already the promise of a higher faith and a nobler service. Those who would dethrone Jupiter would inaugurate a purer reign and institute a more spiritual worship. They would destroy the existing temple, but the spirit that is in them would, in three days, raise it up again higher and more glorious. If there are others whose protest is real and final against all worship and all faith, who say in their hearts with measured Prayer-Meeting Theology. 69 emphasis, " There is no God," we must ask who they are that they should set themselves against the hosts of their brethren. Are they the natural heads and leaders of the human race, and clearly entitled to subvert the faith of the millions by the weight of their personal authority? Far otherwise. In the disposition to worship, the unanimity of mankind has been so great, and the very strongest and loftiest minds have been so forward and hearty in it, that any individuals or classes standing aloof may well be presumed to be exceptional char- acters, defective in some true human quality, rather than examples of what human nature properly is. Brilliant gifts they may possess ; but they are the maimed, the halt, the blind, the crazy, nevertheless. They may do much good service in many ways ; but they are of no account in estimating the spiritual character of the race. Upon every reasonable estimate, man is found a worshipper. He does not wait to have the existence of God proved or explained to him. He falls down and worships at once. And after all the proving and explaining, he worships still. Yea, he sometimes worships after he has proved to himself that there is no /o Prayer-Meeting Theology. God. Worship is an essential and abiding ten- dency in the mind of the race ; and this fairly warrants the belief that the pervading power manifest in all nature is divine and worthy of man's true worship. B. I know not what opportunities you have had to observe universal man. But I am sur- prised at the confidence with which you pro- nounce him to be a worshipper. Have you considered the cannibals and all the low savages of the world ? But you have a place ready for them. You will not hesitate to lump all their millions together as the halt and the maimed, the exceptions, which are of no account. That seems high-handed. Yet I am not prepared myself to set up the cannibals, in opposition to the great religious nations, as examples of human nature pure and simple. So, let us allow what you say, and go on. There is a divine power in nature ; and the mind of man feels its presence and worships. But the mind of man is a part of nature, and the noblest part of it that we know. Is the divine power, mani- fest everywhere else in nature, manifest also in the mind of man? And can the mind perceive the divine presence in itself? If God is in Prayer-Meeting Theology. 71 nature, He can hardly be confined to her lower parts. But if He is in the mind of man, is not that a better place to meet Him, and to know and worship Him, than among the trees of Eden or in the burning bush of the desert, or in any external phenomena ? C. It is good to meet Him everywhere. We may certainly meet Him within the mind. But we cannot, for that reason, dispense with the revelations which come from without. The gai'den and the bush, the heavens and the earth, act an indispensable part in the religious life of mankind. The mind needs outward expressions and diagrams to aid it in mastering its own thoughts ; and the revelation of God within would probably only overwhelm us in an abyss of mysticism without a corresponding external revelation. But God is present in the human mind, and man is aware of His presence there. Our consciousness of what we can dis- tinctly call our own mind is a mere point, if I may so speak. But we are aware of something present with us at that point, scarcely to be distinguished from ourselves there, but passing beyond us and commanding heights and depths of power and riches which are certainly not in 72 Prayer-Meeting Theology. us or of us. The very life of our minds is their contact and communion with this something which reaches beyond them and unites them with the universe of things actual and possible. We often have a sense of personal helplessness united with a confident reliance on invincible strength within. We are humble and yet highly exalted. When we are weak then we are strong. The poet, feeling his inability to treat his great theme worthily, invokes the aid of the heavenly muse. This is not always a poetical mannerism or a relic of heathen myth- ology. It sincerely betokens the consciousness which man has of a power within him, which is not himself, but to which he can call for aid, and by whose aid he may soar to unwonted heights. In meditation our minds, though active, are still and expectant, listening for the voice of the greater mind within. This greater mind within us, very manifest in our higher intellectual life, is still more manifest in our moral life ; more manifest because there it comes not into contrast merely, but into direct opposition to our meaner selves. We have inclinations and purposes and plans which are definite and strong and clearly our own. Yet Prayer-Meeting Theology. 73 in our minds and hearts we are face to face with a higher purpose which awes and commands us, a purpose against which we struggle with violence and with guile, and from which we desperately seek to hide or escape, but which will not let us go, and in contrite and sincere submission to which we find our highest life. This commanding purpose within us cannot be the result of any pressure from without, such as the force of circumstances or the demands of society, for it sets us in sharp and perpetual conflict with circumstances, and it goes far beyond all outward requirements. It demands truth in the inward parts. It is a demand not from without but from within. Yet it is higher and purer than anything which we can call our- selves. It is the power present in all nature, present also here in the mind and heart of man. B. With light shadows must come. But this last light of yours seems to bring total eclipse. We had heard before that there is a divine power in nature, its glory and its very life, with- out which, if it could exist at all, nature would be a caput moriuum, fit only for burial. But now we find the presence of this divine power 74 Prayer-Meeting. Theology. in the mind of man especially manifested by the presence there of another power in opposi- tion to it. Here then is something more than a corpse, and yet not God, and not even friendly to God. Here is life, here is power, independ- ent of God, and in actual conflict with Him. God is in us, but we ourselves resist Him. Whence have we the power to resist Him who is the life and power of all nature? Is God divided against Himself? You wish to reduce that which we can distinctly call our own mind to a mere point that you may enlarge the sphere of the divine energy. But beyond the point of self-consciousness in us there are heights and depths of power for evil as well as for good. The possibilities of evil are as un- fathomable as the possibilities of good, and as far removed from our present consciousness. Why should we call the better part God, and the worser ourselves ? We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Our mental and moral nature is a dark continent almost wholly unex- plored. If you say that our better nature is not ourselves but God, another may say, with equal plausibility, that our evil nature is not our own but Satan's. Then there is nothing Prayer-Meeting Theology, 75 left of our moral nature but the tiny point of consciousness wedged in between the hostile principalities. In like manner our intellectual being also is nullified. Our second thoughts are not our thoughts at all. Our better judgment is not our judgment. Meditation is consulting a hidden oracle. Calm reason and penetrating insight are divine inspiration. And all because we are not directly conscious of these subtle movements as originating wholly in our proper selves ; or, in other words, because we do not fully comprehend the mystery of our own being. The same reasoning will take our mem- ory from us, and place it in the keeping of some trustee or other. And so with our other faculties. The mind is to have no force of its own in reserve, and no stored wealth. It must live from hand to mouth a life of absolute de- pendence. Our moral and intellectual nature gone, the rest will speedily follow. What have we to do with our physical life ? It is the blood and the vital organs that do the business in their own way. In mind and body alike we are not ourselves at all, but mere pensioners and witnesses of the mystic powers which live our life and think our thoughts for us. 76 Prayer-Meeting Theology. C. Questions rise here, and all along our path, which belong to all ages, and which we may ask but cannot answer. But you overstate the dif- ficulty when you speak of a power independent of God and hostile to Him. Our resisting God is quite conceivable though there be but one power, and that His own, in the whole universe. Power may be lent and abused. Nothing is more common. As to the good and the evil inwardly present with us, I should not say that all the evil is our own any more than all the good. Neither have I any wish to reduce our human nature to a vanishing point. Our nature is vast enough, and capable of much good and evil of its own. But there is good present with us which is not related to us in the same way as the evil, whether the evil be wholly our own or the suggestion of an enemy. If the evil of the enemy dwells with us, it finds in us something congenial to which it attaches itself. We harbor it. We consent to it. We partake in it and become responsible for it. But the good abides with us when we violently oppose it. And when we consent to it and follow it, we can only follow afar off. It is ever with us, but it is never ours. It is in us, but it is not of Prayer-Meeting Theology. yy us. It is above us, and above all that we know or can conceive. It is the Highest. It is God. There is no reason why the presence of God within us, and our dependence upon Him, should be regarded as the nullification of any part of our being. As you have truly said, our physical life depends directly on much that is in no proper sense ourselves. Our individual nature has the most intimate relations with the great physical nature outside of us. The com- mon air is our breath of life. The fruit of the earth is our sustenance. Even our bodies are our own rather than ourselves. They are mere nature, only united with us by the wondrous bond of life. When life is withdrawn, the bodies are nature still, but ours no longer. We live physically, then, by the presence and operation of that which is not ourselves, by the presence and operation of common nature and her divine principle. This is a fact almost too obvious to mention. But who ever supposed that we are the less ourselves physically because we live by that which is not ourselves ? And why should it be deemed other than most reasona- ble to suppose that, as we live our physical life by a mysterious union with nature in which 78 Prayer- Meeting Theology. God lives and works, so we live our spiritual life by a still more close and mysterious union with God Himself? A. I will confisss that I have heard some of your speculations with less aversion than I an- ticipated. But you seem to me too perversely bent on reducing all theology to the very low- est terms. You seem afraid to say what you appear to mean, and oft times afraid to mean what you appear to say. You speak of a living power, and you call it God. But, lest you should be taken at your word, you hasten to re-baptize it simply a power. Sometimes it suddenly appears as He ; but, to show that the change signifies nothing. He becomes it again immediately. Can you not decide firmly whether the facts of nature, without and within the mind, do or do not warrant a distinct avowal of belief in a living and personal God, separate from nature and from man, though manifested in them? If you cannot, you really only de- clare, with a great deal of unnecessary empha- sis, that you believe in nature and in man. C. If I reduce theology to its lowest terms, I admit that they are lowest terms, and that far higher terms would still be much below the Prayer-Meeting Theology. 79 truth. I have avoided saying anything about a personal God, not because I would sacrifice that for which the doctrine of the personality of God is deemed so important, but because I feared to introduce this very difificult subject prematurely, and also somewhat doubted the wisdom of introducing the term, personality, at all. But if you will furnish a definition of the divine personality which will be clearly con- sistent with the good orthodox doctrines of the Infinity, and the Omnipresence of God, we shall neither hesitate nor halt in finding personality in the universal power in nature, without and within the mind of man. By a person, I think, we commonly mean a living being possessed of intelligence and freedom. It is hard to conceive of such a being as diffused all over the universe, and as present in the minds of all reasonable beings through all worlds. But it, is just as hard, on the other hand, to believe that the source and ground of all nature, of all mind as well as of all matter, is other than intelligent or other than free. Man is instinctively led to reverence and worship the power which is both hidden and revealed in nature. Now, man is a person ; 8o Prayer-Meeting Theology. and a person can never truly worship a thing. In the free spontaneous worship of the power in nature we instinctively confess its person- ality. Or we may say, with many thoughtful men, in order to avoid all appearance of undue anthropomorphism, that we must confess in nature, not exactly personality, but something akin to personality, only far higher and greater. A. Deliver us from such scrupulous precision and such adulation of the divine ! It is the kiss of betrayal. It is kicking the power in nature upstairs out of the way. The personality of God may well be described as infinitely higher and greater than ours, and as entirely free from the limitations which hedge in our human personality. But it must still be personality, or something, to our minds, not higher, but lower. There is nothing akin to intelligence but intelligence ; there is nothing like freedom but freedom. More intelligence is intelligence still ; and greater freedom is still freedom. Omniscience is free from human limitations ; but omniscience is intelligence. Absolute uni- versal sovereignty is not unduly anthropo- morphic ; but it is freedom. God must needs be either intelligent or ignorant. He must Prayer-Meeting Theology. 8i needs be free or not free. There is nothing devoid of personaUty that we can think or dream about which can possibly be higher than personality. And there is nothing like personality but personality itself. B. I also think that we should refrain from speaking of that which is greater and higher than personality until we can do so understand- ing what we say and whereof we affirm. Per- sonality, if not itself absolutely the highest, is at least an essential condition of all that is high- est within the limits both of what we actually know and of what we at present have any power to conceive. Personality, and intelli- gence, and freedom may be poor words for our purpose. They may convey an impression that we seek a God made altogether in our own image, and not One infinitely exalted above all and in whose image we ourselves are made. We shall be glad to provide all safeguards possible against such an impression. But, our own nature being what it is, we cannot confess that God is other than personal without feeling that we are placing Him below personal beings, and making Him a thing, — an immense thing, it is true, and most mysterious and indispensable, 6 82 Prayer-Meeting Theology. but still a thing, which, as you rightly say, we can never love or adore. If man is to worship the power in nature, that power should be per- sonal. So much I see clearly. But you assume without proof that man must be right in wor- shipping ; that his worship is a rational or spir- itual act, and not the confused self-prostration of a creature overwhelmed and awe-struck. You find the justification of the worship in the worship itself, and not in any previous proof of the being of a God worthy of worship. You find your personal God, not directly in nature, but, by implication, in the attitude of the human mind towards the unseen. C. Yes, I find the personal God implied in the spontaneous attitude of man towards the unseen ; that is, I find Him implied in my own spontaneous attitude. In other words, the un- seen power in nature is such as necessarily leads me to recognize it as worthy of my devout adoration. This seems to me very direct. I must withhold worship or acknowledge person- ality. Withhold worship I cannot. Therefore acknowledge personality I clearly must. I suggested that we should speak of the power in nature not as personal but as higher Prayer- Meeting Theology. 83 and greater than any personal being, because I was anxious to go as far as possible to meet the views of candid men who find it more difficult than you do to entertain the thought of the personality of God. To many, personality seems an essentially human form of being ; and its attributes, intelligence and freedom, seem essentially finite attributes. Now, we certainly do not wish to prove that God's being is essen- tially human, or that His highest attributes are essentially finite. If, to avoid disputing about words, we concede to those who differ from us their view of personality as essentially finite, we must then be as emphatic as they are in repudiating the thought of the personality of God. And if they believe, as they undoubtedly do, in a being infinitely higher and greater and more adorable than any personal being can be, that is precisely what we believe in too when we have conceded to them their view of the limitations of personality. But you do not share in their view of such limitations. You do not regard intelligence as necessarily limited to " certain circumscribed modes of psychical activity in man and some other animals " any more than you regard space as certain circum- 84 Prayer-Meeting Theology. scribed measures of extension in houses and some other buildings. Omniscience is to you no more of an absurdity than infinite space or duration without beginning and without end. Even an " Infinite Person " is to you an infinite mystery, like every other infinite, but not a contradiction in terms, not a " circular tri- angle." Conceding to you your view, as I conceded to the others theirs, I am free to say with you that I believe in a personal God, as I said with them that I believe in a God higher and greater than personal. What I mean in each case is that I believe in a God who is un- questionably worthy of our highest adoration. The difficulty with you is to make out the compatibility of personality with infinity. The difficulty with the others is to give adequate security that the being, who is declared to be too great and too adorable to be personal or intelligent or free, really is so great and so adorable, without giving any inkling of his great qualities or any assurance that he has or can have any qualities at all, and without stat- ing how he is to be adored or what he is to be adored for. Your difficulty, though assuredly great enough, is perhaps the less desperate Prayer-Meeting Theology. 85 of the two, especially as the others will help you much more than you can help them. Those who reject the idea of God's personality declare at the same time that a degree of anthropo- morphism is necessary in thinking and speak- ing of the universal power in nature. There they open a door for you which no man can shut. If you can prove that the degree of anthropomorphism involved in your faith is necessary for the full development and free activity of man's nature, you have as much right to that degree as they have to any degree at all. Compatibility with the infinity, or with a proper faith in the infinity, of God is not endangered in the one case any more than in the other. Those who deny the personality of God admit further that there is a scale, or an ascending order, in the manifestations of the eternal power in nature. Mr. Fiske says that " our new knowedge enlarges ten-fold the significance of human life, and makes it seem more than ever the chief object of Divine care, the consummate fruition of that creative energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe " [Destiny of Man, p. 107). In human life itself also there is an ascending order, Mr. 86 Prayer-Meeting Theology. Fiske says : " Henceforth the life of the nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily life became subordinated to it " {lb., p. 30). The candor of this admirable writer is so great that I should be extremely sorry to press a single word of his beyond its intended meaning. But in his great work, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, he seems to me to intimate that this higher element in man, though of course it does not make known the unknowable, at least points more truly than anything else known unto us to the proper and essential nature of God. I quote his words: "If now we proceed to the outermost verge of admis- sible speculation, and inquire for a moment what may perhaps be the nature of that In- scrutable Existence of which the universe of phenomena is the multiform manifestation, we shall find that its intimate essence may con- ceivably be identifiable with the intimate essence of what we know as Mind " [C. P., ii., 446). After making an extended quotation from Mr. Spencer's Principles of Psychology, he says : " From this masterly statement it appears that while the Inscrutable Power manifested in the world of phenomena cannot possibly be re- Prayer-Meeting Theology. 87 garded as quasi-material in its nature, it may nevertheless be possibly regarded as quasi- psychical. . . . Whichever set of terms we use, we are using symbols, the values of which are determined by our experiences of con- ditioned existence, and which must therefore be totally inadequate to express the charac- teristics of unconditioned existence. Neverthe- less, in so far as the exigencies of finite thinking require us to symbolize the Infinite Power manifested in the world of phenomena, we are clearly bound to symbolize it as quasi-psychical rather than as quasi-material " {C. P., ii., 448, 449). Here is another short passage from the same writer : " The greatest philosopher of modern times, the master and teacher of all who shall study the process of evolution for many a day to come, holds that the conscious soul is not the product of a collocation of mate- rial particles, but is in the deepest sense a divine effluence" {Destiny of Man, p. 117). In what immediately follows, Mr. Fiske himself calls the soul, " this divine spark." As I said before, I have no wish to press all this further than it will go. But to my thinking, the primacy here given to the mind of man among 88 Prayer- Meeting Theology. the phenomena of nature, and the emphatic concession of its exceptionally close relation to the Divine nature, point most significantly to the great mystery of the personality of God. And here let me just mention the good old argument from the indications of design in nature. It would serve little purpose to enu- merate instances of the exquisite adaptation of means to ends and of far-seeing, far-reaching combinations of adjustments in nature. These are patent to all ; and as great and marvellous facts they are universally acknowledged. Those who reject them as proofs of creative design, reject them, as Paley says, on the ground, " not only that the present order of nature is insufficient to prove the existence of an intelligent Creator, but that no imaginable order would be sufiScient to prove it ; that no contrivance, were it ever so mechanical, ever so precise, ever so clear, ever so perfectly like those which we ourselves employ, would sup- port this conclusion." We, who cannot pre- tend to take that lofty ground, can by no means evade the force of the argument from the actual facts of nature. To us these facts bear obvious marks of forethought or design, marks Prayer- Meeting Theology. 89 which no manipulation can efface. To-day it is quite customary to assert that the doctrine of evolution has destroyed the old proof of design in nature. But there could not be a greater mistake. If evolution is a true account of nature, then evolution must bear in its own body all the marks of design which we find in nature. Indications of design are just as perceptible and just as significant in a process as in a result. Trace nature back through evolution, through all manner of supposed laws and necessities, through whatever pro- cesses, through whatever machinery you please ; you must find her origin at last either in design or in no design, either in a divine mind that saw the end from the beginning or in a blind chance that saw nothing at all. As to the bearing of evolution on the argument, I only need once more to quote a few words from one of the foremost evolutionists of our time: "... the doctrine of evolution shows us distinctly for the first time how the creation and the perfecting of Man is the goal toward which Nature's work has been tending from the first " (Fiske, Destiny of Man, p. 107). " But on the face of our own planet, where go Prayer- Meeting Theology. alone we are able to survey the process of evolution in its higher and more complex details, we do find distinct indications of a dramatic tendency, though doubtless not of purpose in the limited human sense. The Darwinian theory, properly understood, re- places as much teleology as it destroys. From the first dawning of life we see all things working together toward one mighty goal, the evolution of the most exalted spiritual quali- ties which characterize humanity" (/^., p. 113). Nobody is concerned to discover traces in nature of " purpose in the limited human sense." But there does seem to be a true necessity of regarding the power in nature as a being who has what must be called thoughts and ways of his own, though they are higher than our ways and our thoughts as the heavens are higher than the earth. If we cannot re- concile this necessity with his infinity, then, to meet the necessity, we must set aside our ordinary notions of infinity, just as, according to Prof. Jevons and Mr. Fiske, we must set aside our ordinary notions of matter to meet the apparent necessity of believing in the lumi- niferous ether, which is forced upon our minds Prayer- Meeting Theology. 91 by irresistible evidence, though its compati- bility with the known properties of matter can no more be made out than the compati- bility of God's personality with His infinity. B. So here is the philosopher's stone at last. Here is the golden key to every difficulty, the reconciliation of all obstinate contradictions. Now everything will be compatible with every- thing else without any trouble. And how simple it is after all ! Only " set aside your ordinary notions" ; set aside common sense ; set aside first principles; set aside whatever is in the way ; and there you are ! Setting aside our ordinary notions of infinity, we shall have a finite infinity, which we ought to be able to manage very nicely. But do you really think that this is the way to settle the great question of the personality of the God of nature? C. We can scarcely afford the time to re-open the whole question now. If we seem to you to have failed to discover a personal God directly in outward nature, turn once more to the manifestation of God within the mind. There at least you have the personality first and fore- most of all. The power present within us is 92 Prayer- Meeting Theology. known directly as of a higher wisdom, and of a purer purpose than our own ; that is, as sur- passing us in the very elements of personality, and as being the strength and support of our own personal life. The power within us, which leads us and instructs us, which gives us great spiritual commandments and insists on our free and full obedience, which judges us in righteous- ness and yet absolves us in mercy day by day, the awakener, the director, the comforter, the judge, of our own personal life, can be no other than personal in the deepest, largest sense possible. B. Then you find a personal God dimly revealed in external nature. And you find a personal God in the mind revealed more clearly and fully. But if what is revealed in outward nature is so unlike what is revealed in the mind, how can you be sure that you have not stumbled upon two gods in your search for one ? By what means do you identify the ob- scurely personal God in outward nature with the unmistakably personal God in the mind ? C. External nature cannot break away utterly from the mind of man. They are under the same supreme law. No bounds Prayer-Meeting Theology. 93 without can be set to Him who reigns within. The Lord of the soul will dominate the uni- verse. Knowing and worshipping Him within, you can have no other gods before Him. There- fore, if outward nature perplexes you too much, leave her alone awhile. She will speak to you the more plainly the less you urge her. And you will understand her perfectly when you know yourself better. " Mind not the stars, mind thou thy mind and God." A. You are not far from the faith ^nd phil- osophy of the thrifty idolater of whom Isaiah speaks. " He -planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it. Then shall it be for a man to burn ; he burneth part thereof in the fire ; with part thereof he eateth flesh ; he roasteth a roast, and is satisfied ; yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm ; I have seen the fire : and the residue thereof he maketh a God, even his graven image : he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it and saith. Deliver me : for thou art my God ! " You take a man instead of a tree. And there is no burning or baking. But with part of your man you make a plain citizen, a voter, a tax-payer. 94 Prayer -Meeting Theology. a consumer of the fruit of the earth ; with part you will have to make a sinner or perhaps a saint ; there are various uses for other parts : and the residue of the same man you make a God. Following your lead, we might well find in every man not only God but Legion. For we are all full of conflicting thoughts and strong impulses which draw us and drive us their various ways. Why should that which you call God in man be thought other than a part of the man himself, though much the better part, and though surely receiving strength from God most High ? One part of the ash-tree was doubtless better fitted for a graven image than some other parts. But the image was still a piece of wood and not God. Some parts of man are more godlike than other parts. But is any part at all for that reason very God ? I, for one, find no part of my own mind divine. When I pray, I do not turn with one part of my mind to another part of the same. I must turn not unto myself but away from myself. I must look up, and say. Our Father, who art in heaven. C. Our Father is in heaven, it is true ; and it is right and helpful for us to look up and Prayer- Meeting Theology. 95 lift up our hearts unto Him, and think of Him as the Most High. But the heaven of heavens cannot contain him. He is exalted far above all the heavens. And at the same time He condescends to the least and the lowest of His creatures. He is at hand to hear the call of the young ravens when they cry to Him for food, and to receive the expiring breath of the sparrow that falls to the ground. And He is not far from any one of us. He compasseth our path and our lying down, and He is acquainted with all our ways. He dwells within us. He is the light of our minds and the strength of our hearts. In His light do we see light. He does not lift up His voice; He does not disturb or displace our thoughts to make room for himself. He dwells gently in the midst of them, the infinite in the midst of the finite, breathing upon them and making them His ministers. That is the reason why it seems to you so difficult to distinguish any divine presence in the multitude of your own thoughts. B. And what if it be not only difficult but impossible ? What if there be nothing manifest and nothing present in man but man himself, a 96 Prayer- Meeting Theology. divided man, a higher and a lower in perpetual conflict, but still man and nothing more ? The higher element in man is often crowded and crushed by the lower. Could the indwelling God be imprisoned and imperilled, be starved, and have his eyes put out, and be made to grind in the mill of depraved lusts ? The rela- tive position of what we call higher and lower is often reversed in the thoughts of men. Many walk now, as of old, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame. C. There is truth in what you say ; but it is not the whole truth. The most depraved men, those who have done their utmost to turn their moral nature upside down, are still aware of something within them which they have not dragged into the mire. They would overturn it if they could. They mock at it and spite- fully entreat it. They are infuriated at its inviolate majesty : ' ' Highly they rage Against the highest, and fierce with grasped arms, Clash on their sounding shields the din of war." This raging zeal of the ungodly betrays their consciousness that God is with them still, and Prayer-Meeting Theology. 97 that He has by no means taken the millstones to grind for them. Whether in mockery and rage and defiance or in humility and faith, all men acknowledge a Higher than themselves in the midst of all their thoughts. The experi- ence of one or of a few may leave that Higher in great obscurity. But He becomes more clearly known as we consult the common ex- perience of mankind. And this, as well as the proposed order of our conversation and the speeding away of the hours at our disposal, bids us now consider what help to believe in God we may derive from the history of the world. B. It has often seemed to me that it is pre- cisely the history of the world which weakens and threatens our faith most of all. In spite of difficulties, my personal experience, taken alone, would perhaps eventually sustain much of what you have said about our perceiving a divine power in nature. But the pages of his- tory, so blurred with evil and with sorrow from the beginning until now, stagger me. How could such a God as we should at all care to believe in allow generation after genera- tion of His children to live and die in this 98 Prayer-Meeting Theology. misery ? What though a divine goodness seem to look forth graciously upon me both from without and from within? I must ask, Why wilt thou manifest thyself unto me and not unto the world? And the feeling is strong upon me that a divinity which fails to reach and bless the world at large must be a baseless vision in the clouds, displaying riches and glo- ries impalpable and unabiding. I am not better than my brethren, and in spite of fair visions and dreams I must share the fate of my kind, a fate of which the sorrowful history of the world bodes little good. C. And yet I doubt not but your faith has received much of its strongest support from the history of the world. The good which we receive is easily forgotten if we also receive or seem to receive evil. There are pages of his- tory which must seem disheartening if perused alone. And desultory, capricious, frivolous reading may well make universal history a com- pact Book of Lamentations. Too much of the history which we read is made up on the plan of the sensational newspapers, which carefully skip everything that is not more or less calcu- lated to harrow up our souls. All hurricanes Prayer-Meeting Theology. 99 and earthquakes, all devastations on land and sea, all plagues and famines, all the atrocities of massacre and battle, all the crime and filth of the round world, and all the infirmities and pains of man and beast and bird and creeping thing, are heaped together and presented to us as the concentrated essence of history. Of this monstrous history we are required to fur- nish a complete justification at a moment's notice and at the peril of our faith. And be- fore we can make any reply, a loud Babel of blasphemous, unbelieving, hopeless solutions is thrust upon us with the problem itself. We must carry the aggregate burden of all the world upon our backs, and have the vicious world itself jump upon us and assault us at the same time. This is the kind of history which is such a trial to your faith. It is a picked and packed history, picked and packed with demo- niacal ingenuity in the interest of despair. You have known sin and sorrow in your own life, and you know that you cannot escape the last act of the solemn tragedy. After a life of tribulation you must be stretched on the rack and have your soul and body torn asunder. But you can tranquilly believe in God though lOO Prayer- Meeting Theology. He slay you. For you the extremity of suffer- ing is also the limit of suffering. Mortal pains can kill your body, but after that they can do nothing more. And even in their hour and power they cannot separate you from the love of God. They are but His ministers conduct- ing you to His more glorious presence. In like manner you can witness the sufferings and the dissolution of those whom you love best, not only without loss, but with a positive in- crease, of faith. As you watch by their bedside, powerless to help, though willing to give your life for them, the world may grow dim and unreal to you, but heaven is nearer and God is more your hope and your portion than ever before. By His grace you can bear your own particular burden and help to bear the burdens of your kindred and friends. But you are confounded and crushed by the burden of the wide world. It is the vastness of the aggre- gate, not the actual pressure upon any particu- lar soul, that overwhelms you. But it is a per- verse study of history that has left you to shoulder this stupendous mass all alone. Such a mass in truth exists nowhere. The good and the evil in the world are distributed. Every Prayer- Meeting Theology. loi heart knoweth its own sorrow, and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy. You may have been favored in the distribution. But men who were not favored have been enabled to bear their burdens as cheerfully as you can bear yours. Men have lived in the worst and darkest times, and have borne all the evil that misfortune can bring, and all that injustice and cruelty can devise, and yet have believed in God the Father Almighty to the end, their faith growing stronger the more it was tried. It is not to you alone that God is a very present help in trouble. He waits on every sufferer in all the world. If you can believe in Him in view of the evil in your own life and lot, there is nothing in history to disturb your faith, but very much to confirm it. B. My reading of history has been desultory enough no doubt. But if the history itself is " picked and packed," I cannot help that. It is the only history within my reach. There is no use in talking about history as it should be, or as we should like to find it. Our only con- cern is with history as it is. And this unques- tionably is stained with cruelty and wrong and helpless misery on every page. What you say I02 Prayer-Meeting Theology. of the distribution of evil, and of the concur- rent distribution of unseen help and consola- tion, of the limit of suffering, and of the prospect of a solution of the mystery of sorrow hereafter, has some significance as regards the human race ; though, in consoling ourselves thus, we seem to be taking God for granted, to compensate the evil of history, rather than finding God in the actual process of history itself. But a long chapter in the history of the world must be given to our dumb fellow-creatures, whose life is possibly more instructive, because less ambiguous, than our own. And I wonder if the history of the animal kingdom below mankind has been " picked and packed " too ! What shall be said of countless races of living creatures com- ing into the world thirsting for blood and armed for slaughter ? Is not relentless cruelty the fundamental law of their being? And what shall be said of their innumerable victims ? Have you any consolation for them here or hereafter ? The history of the world, rational and irrational, in all its generations, is the his- tory of carnage, the history of the violence of the strong and the torture and destruction of Prayer- Meeting Theology. 103 the weak. This terrible history is capable of some sort of vindication as it concerns man- kind. But what vindication is conceivable in the case of the myriad generations of whole races brought into being for violence, or for agony, and for nothing further ? Is not the question of the being of God concerned with the unmitigated uncompensated butchery in the animal world, as well as with the more hopeful trials of humanity ? And if the being of God is utterly disproved by the savage story of the brute creation, does not the more toler- able story of mankind come too late to retrieve the disaster? C. It is well to hear the other side, if there be another side, after the most plausible argu- ment in the world. Our ill-balanced minds are too easily carried away by a first attack, whoever delivers it. Very flimsy rhetoric suf- fices to make the worse appear the better reason to the uninstructed. Arguments seem to be unanswerable, which, when we know a little more, astonish or amuse us by their blundering simplicity. It would be a very serious mistake to ponder the history of the brute and refuse to contemplate your own. I04 Prayer- Meeting Theology. There are revelations in the actual history of mankind which no interpretation of the life of the lower races can gainsay. The lower must be interpreted by the higher, not the higher by the lower. If the story of mankind proves the being of God, the story of the brute creation is not incapable of being reconciled with the devoutest faith in Him. It is our ignorance rather than our knowledge of brute life which furnishes weapons for unbelief; and it is blind presumption rather than reasoning which wields them. Our commiseration of the brute is entirely gratuitous. He hath meat to eat that we know not of. He has resources to which we are strangers. There is a rounded completeness in his life, and in its adaptation to the world he lives in, which should waken our admiration rather than our pity. The life of a bat is worth living. The life of the smallest insect, though it last but a single day, is a won- drous gift to a particle of dust. We should not complain of the Giver that He gives no more, but praise Him that He gives so much. The life of the higher animals which range through field and forest, and of the birds which navigate the air at their pleasure, has a freedom and a fresh- Prayer- Meeting Theology. 105 ness, and a largeness and closeness of relation to nature, which almost excite our envy. The pains of animal life, being wholly natural, need no spiritual consolation ; and they are prob- ably provided with more natural relief than we are aware of. As to the struggle for existence between the various races, who knows but it may be the spice, rather than the bitterness, of their life ? With all our humanity and all our civilization, we cannot dispense with hunting and fishing for sport as well as for prey ; and if there be extreme peril of life and limb, the sport is all the better. We court rather than shun danger; and if we cannot find enough of it hunting the buffalo on the prairie and the tiger in the jungle, we seek the full gaudia certaminis in mortal conflict with our fellow-men on blood-red battle-fields. And if deadly struggle excites savage joy in our human and domesticated breasts, what a triumph must battle itself be to the brute nature free from scruple and care and foreboding ! It may well be that the argument against the being of God from the struggle for existence in the brute creation, if all the facts were understood, would appear as unreasonable as a similar argument io6 Prayer- Meeting Theology. based on the struggle of the southwest wind with the Icarian waves. If this view of the brute seems to add insult to injury, there is another view open which gives him, or rather gives his friends on his behalf, a hope approximating that which is the great consolation of mankind. You have assumed that the brutes perish for ever ; that they are brought forth for slaughter and for nothing further. But that is certainly more than we know. The most cautious of English divines, Bishop Butler, saw no insuperable difificulty in the supposition that brutes should be immortal and capable of everlasting happiness. He saw no difficulty in supposing that they may " arrive at great attainments, and become rational and moral agents ; . . . since we know not what latent powers and capacities they may be endued with. There was once, prior to experience, as great presumption against human creatures as there is against the brute creatures, arriving at that degree of understanding which we have in mature age. For we can trace up our own existence to the same original with theirs. And we find it to be a general law of nature, that creatures Prayer- Meeting Theology. 107 endued with capacities of virtue and religion should be placed in a condition of being, in which they are altogether without the use of them, for a considerable length of their dura- tion ; as in infancy and childhood. And great part of the human species go out of the present world, before they come to the exercise of these capacities in any degree at all " {Analogy, part i., chap. i.). The thought of the possible exaltation of the brutes from their low estate to immortal life is not only held to be theoreti- cally legitimate by great orthodox theologians, but is also practically cherished as a more or less reasonable hope by men and women of Christian faith who have found affectionate and interesting companionship in the animal world. The late Miss Charlotte Williams Wynn, a lady of high social distinction and of unusual attainments in theology, the friend of Maurice and Bunsen, seriously regarded her dog, " Poor little Moey," not only as more loving than a great-uncle and more edifying than many a clergyman, but as a desirable and hopeful candidate for life in the world to come. " My belief is fixed — " she writes ; " All that loving faculty, that io8 Prayer- Meeting Theology. devotedness, will, in some way, continue in existence." This thought of the future advancement of the brute, not unreasonable in itself, and not repulsive to many people of the noblest nature and of the highest culture, finds support in the conjectures of scientific men as to the original relations of man to the other animals. And it finds still stronger support in some of the most interesting speculations of theologians in regard to the remote future. Dr. Edward Beecher, after noticing pregnant hints of Scripture and current thoughts of Christian men in regard to the Church of God and especially in regard to its position and work in the eternity to come, gives great prominence to " one simple idea." " It is this : that the work of creating and training intelligent beings to know and love and serve God is but just begun, and that the main increase and exten- sion of the universe is yet to come ; and that by the redemption of the church the universe of God will be brought to such a state that that increase can be made without any hazard of any new entrance of moral evil, and be con- tinued for ever, — and especially that the Prayer- Meeting Theology. 109 church, owing to the manner of her redemp- tion, and her peculiar training, will be prepared to preside over and to train the successive generations of new created minds as no others can ; and that, for this end, and also as the resting-place of his own highest and most peculiar affections, she will be united to God, and exalted to reign with Him in the manner that has been described. Also, that the rela- tion of this union between the church and God to this increase, is the reason why it is called a marriage. Viewed in this light, the redemption of the church, as set forth in the preceding statements, derived from the Word of God, loses its aspect of an insulated, exag- gerated, and incredible transaction. It is at once placed in the centre of the system, as a simple and rational means for the attainment of ends so definite, so vast, so momentous, so deeply affecting, that they at once fill and satisfy the mind as worthy of God. . . . We see the importance to God, and to the whole universe, of the redemption of the church. It fully justifies the use of such means as the incarnation and the atonement. It shows why God created and governs all I lo Prayer-Meeting Theology. things with reference to this end. It shows why the advent of the day of the final union of God and the church is an occurrence of such deep interest to Him and to His holy kingdom. It shows why it is such a crisis in the history of the universe, — why to it all things have tended from the beginning, and why from it all things will for ever diverge, after the great work shall be finally completed " {Conflict of Ages, pp. 500, 501). If the creation of intelligent beings is but just begun, if it will be but just beginning in earnest when the present drama of human history has reached its conclusion and the increase of the human race is at an end, where are the number- less hosts of new-created minds to come from ? The great Creator no doubt could at once call them forth from nothingness by the word of His power. But it is more natural to suppose that He will utilize existing material and carry to higher perfection work already begun, gath- ering up all the fragments that nothing be lost, than that He will suffer His old creation and the travail of immeasurable time to go to waste, and begin again at void nothingness. In fact, if this great new creation is to take place, we Prayer- Meeting Theology. 1 1 1 have every reason to believe that it will consist in promoting the tribes of the older creation from the bondage of nature to the freedom of reason and spirit. Holy Scripture was given for the comfort artd edification of man, but it glances significantly at the dumb animals in some of its deepest passages. It explicitly represents them as interested in the mystery of our salvation, and as waiting with us for the great day of the Lord. " For the earnest ex- pectation of the creature waiteth for the mani- festation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now " (Rom. viii., 19-22). The whole animal king- dom is represented before the heavenly throne in the Revelation of St. John. " In the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had 1 1 2 Prayer-Meeting Theology. a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle " (Rev. iv., 6, 7). These forms are interpreted, by some of the most highly esteemed commentators as well as by the plain- est readers, as " representatives of animated nature — of God's sentient creation." And there, in heaven, representing the whole sen- tient creation, they not only unite in the anthem of praise to the Creator for the power and glory manifested in all His works, but also fall down, with the four and twenty elders, before the Lamb, and glorify Him for His great re- demption. And even as the heavenly hosts respond with a loud voice, saying, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, so also the lowly con- stituencies of the four living creatures confirm their representative adoration and repeat their hymn of praise. " And every creature which is in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the spa, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever" (Rev. v., 13). The representatives of all animated nature not only worship the Redeemer, with the saints and the angels, but Prayer- Meeting Theology. 113 they are as eager for the full triumph of His glorious cause as the souls of the martyrs under the altar. They look and long for His victori- ous appearance. And even as the Spirit and the Bride say, Come ; and as the blessed soul who beheld the vision says, Come, Lord Jesus ; even so, when the seals are opened and signs and wonders announce the approach of the great consummation, the four living creatures, with equal ardor, in behalf of all sentient na- ture, say, Come ! This seems to imply that, when the book of God's eternal purpose is at last unfolded, ani- mated nature, instead of perishing, is to be translated to a higher life and to be included in the great gathering together in one of all things which are in heaven and which are in earth. What a compensation this would be for any grievances of the brute races ! To arrive at the spiritual state just as that state is placed for ever beyond the hazard of another fall, by the complete redemption of the Church and the glorious manifestation therein of the righteousness and holy love of God, which to know aright is eternal life to all spiritual beings ! So that the delay of their deliver- 114 Prayer- Meeting Theology. ance is their safety; and man's dominion over them is well earned by his dire conflict with moral evil, waged no less on their behalf than on his own ; and the thousands of their num- bers which, in all ages, have been sacrificed on altars erected by man did not suffer for man alone, but for man representing their own mul- titudes in spiritual conflict, even as they repre- sented him upon the bleeding altars ! Not to dogmatize on so mysterious a subject, I will only say that this view is quite as legiti- mate as the assumption that all the brutes perish ; and that, in any case, our ignorance is a sufficient answer to all atheistic inferences from the condition of the brutes. B. To save time, I will allow that your apology for the history of the world is sufficient. But in making the apology, you have had to take God and immortality — that is, you have had to take everything — for granted. It is great boldness, it is almost reckless violence, to assume without proof the solemnly debated, ardently desired future life of man. But this costly pearl, which is scarcely within reach of the human race, you must cast before all the swinish, wolfish herds of creation, if they or Prayer- Meeting Theology. 115 their friends fail to appreciate your rose-colored view of their miserable and bloody existence. It remains to be seen how a history which has to enlist the most miraculously extravagant faith in its own defence can do anything to strengthen our simple faith in the being of God. C. History will need no defence if you give it a fair and full hearing. I assume God and immortality, not as undoubted realities to undo the evil of a justly condemned history, but as open questions, the very questions in debate, to bespeak for the great, complicate, much-abused, little-understood, still-unfinished history of the world a patient and candid examination. Of history as a witness for the being of God I may perhaps say, as one of us said of nature, that it gives much of its testimony in subtle ways which answer the purpose but defy analysis. But it also furnishes much weighty evidence which we can easily handle and esti- mate. In the first place, it multiplies examples, in every form and under all varieties of circum- stances, of the great direct proof with which we are familiar in our individual experience, the perception of the Divine both in external ii6 Prayer -Meeting Theology. nature and within the soul. When we touched this point before, you wondered how I knew so much about universal man, and whether I re- membered " the cannibals and all the low savages of the world," when I expressed my belief that man is everywhere a worshipper. Your opportunities and mine have been as nearly as possible the same. We have both alike observed " universal man " through the printed page at our own fireside. But I am as well satisfied as if I had explored Tierra del • Fuego for myself, and boarded around among the Eskimos and the Hottentots. I know that there are savages who are very poor worship- pers, — so poor that great men, from Herodotus to Hegel and our own time, have refused them the name of worshippers and have called them sorcerers and magicians and other names meaner still. Instead of humbly confessing their de- pendence upon the power which gives rain from heaven and fruitful seasons and other blessings which even savages need, they absurd- ly claim all authority for themselves and give peremptory orders to the deity. They locate him in a stone, or in a stick, or in anything handy that comes in their way, that they may Prayer- Meeting Theology. 1 1 7 have him completely in their power, to be whipped and kicked when he is unpropitious. But there he is after all, even when he with- holds rain or victory, and even when he is vicariously whipped in the poor fetich ! He is still acknowledged as a power that might have done good and actually has done evil ! The sorcery, the magic, even the impotent rage and the whipping, must be regarded as modes of worship, though of the lowest description. Humility or reverence or wisdom there is none : but the direct pressure of the unseen, of the infinite, of God, upon the dark, obtuse, anarchic soul is involuntarily confessed. There are other savages, so-called, whose perception of the divine in nature is singularly clear, and whose worship is not unimpressive. But, after all, we have little to do with savages in history. Whether the savage state be considered as the primitive condition or as the corruption and decline of human society, it is not man's normal state. And we must study humanity, like other organisms, not in the germ or in decay and corruption, but in the maturest and most perfect forms to be found. We do not go to savages to learn what the human intellect is 1 1 8 Prayer-Meeting Theology. like, or what man as " a political animal " amounts to. Nor should we go to them to form our estimate of man as a spiritual being. We must study man in the great cultivated historical nations. And in them we shall find his faith in the Divine Unseen as real and as conspicuous as any other element of his higher nature. Like other characteristics, it varies in strength and in modes of manifestation among different nations. But differences in modes of manifestation under varying conditions only emphasize the reality and the identity of the faith itself everywhere. This is the first point in the testimony of history, that belief in the being of God is universal in normally developed human nature. In the second place, history shows that this religious belief, which in some form or other is universal among men, is also everywhere fruit- ful, not a dreamy shadowy thought or sentiment out of all relation to real life, but a powerful factor in every department of man's spiritual activity. Sometimes it works evil, monstrous evil on an enormous scale. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum is an appropriate motto for many a long chapter in the history of Prayer- Meeting Theology. 119 religion. But to apply it to the history of religion as a whole would be exactly like offer- ing doleful stories of floods and conflagrations as a full account of the action and use of the great elements of fire and water upon the earth. " Religion," says Dr. Hedge, " builds by turns, and fires the world, — in its pureness the ornament and strength of society, in its perversion the scandal and scourge of nations." Its perversions and the evils which they occasion are accidental'and temporary. Its contributions to the " ornament and strength of society "are its proper fruit ; and they endure, and bid fair to cover all the earth. We distinguish nowa- days between the religious and the secular ; and the secular, so distinguished, seems fair and strong. But history teaches distinctly that religion built up and preserved what is fairest and strongest in our so-called secular life. Science was cradled in a temple. Art was nurtured by religion from its birth to its fullest maturity. The moral discipline of the heart, and the inner principles of social morality, have always found their best support in religious feeling and faith. The great secular institu- tions of humanity, the family, and the school. I20 Prayer-Meeting Theology. and the nation, have never been secular in the narrow sense of the word. The history of their development is a part of the history of religion ; and their strength on the earth to-day is demonstrably the strength of faith. But history proves the reality of the Object of faith, not only by showing the universality and the constructive power of the faith itself, but also, more directly, by showing the converg- ing lines which connect all human movements and constrain them to fulfil a Divine plan and purpose. The life of the human race is not a mere aggregate and succession of individual lives. There is an order in the whole which is not derived from the parts. There is the foreordained subordination of individuals and nations to a world-wide ever-maturing spiritual purpose. This purpose is not the purpose of men. Men resist it and often ignore it while helping it forward. And, at best, when they voluntarily consecrate themselves to its advance- ment, they are only partakers of it ; they are but its ministers. The purpose is still far in advance of them. It is not the purpose of men, though it takes hold of men and inspires them. It is the purpose of One who is within us all Prayer-Meeting Theology. 121 and above us all. It is the purpose of God ; and its gradual realization is the growing man- ifestation of God in history. B. I think it requires a special faculty not given unto all of us to detect the " converging lines " of a spiritual purpose in all human movements. What is called the progress of the race is, properly speaking, the progress of but a portion, less than one half, of the race. And that progress, such as it is, is easily explained, without Divine intervention, by the doctrine of evolution. I am con- strained to say that the doctrine of evolu- tion offers abetter explanation, an explanation more in accordance with the obvious facts, than the nobler doctrine of a divine purpose. The tedious, devious, laboring, halting journey of poor Humanity from Chaos to the present Anarchy is just what you might expect from evolution, and not at all what one would have looked for from an intelligent and loving pur- pose armed with Omnipotent power. C. I never feel equal to the task of discussing evolution when it is brought in abruptly in the heat of an argument. I can never tell just what or just how much is meant by it. 122 Prayer- Meeting Theology. If the doctrine be merely a statement of the order and method of progress observed in his- tory as well as in nature, I have no serious quarrel with it. But if it be itself the single and final explanation of progress and of all things besides, then I grow dizzy over it and fail to get hold of the explanation at all. It hardly seems quite complete even as a state- ment of the method of progress. There are gaps and chasms in the observable line of human history which, after all such explanation, throw us back upon the depths and the riches of a Divine purpose and a Divine energy.- B. Who ever heard of such rampant ortho- doxy ! You make everything bend or break to give glory to God. Even gaps and blem- ishes must magnify Him, dragons and all deeps praise Him. If there had been steady progress, increasing good everywhere, it might be evolu- tion. But,- because we have black unfathomable chasms yawning horribly between the fairer tracts of our history, there must be a Divine purpose in it all ! C. The Divine purpose and presence would have been a much better final explanation than mere evolution even if there had been uniform Prayer-Meeting Theology. 123 progress visible everywhere. For evolution alone gives a bare method, and no power to work the method, a tolerable road to travel but no propelling force. Still, with all things steadily prospering, evolution, such as it is, might cover the whole field. It would explain nothing finally. But it might stretch over all the ground, and be as good in one place as in another. But now evolution cannot even cover the ground. It sinks out of sight and dies a thousand deaths in the " black chasms." B. That is where you make your great mis- take. Evolution need not perish in any chasm. The chasm itself may be a necessary stage in its advance, and the cliff on the other side the next stage. Good may be the goal of evil, and evil again the goal of good, and so on without end. Thus mere evolution, though it may not suit man's aspiring hopes and longings as well as a Divine purpose would, seems to fit the actual facts of the world much better. There is no natural antagonism between it and the evil that is in the world. It need have no scruples at all. It requires no vindications or apologies of any sort. Its tortuous ways need not be justified to gods or men. It has no 124 Prayer-Meeting Theology. character either of wisdom or of holiness to be maintained. And therefore it can afford to plunge into the deepest pits and to wade leis- urely through the filthiest quagmires of nature and of history much better than an intelligent and moral purpose can. A. Really there is more in evolution than I thought. It seems to be a sort of ubiquitous and everlasting salamander. It is at home in all the elements, in fire and in water, in good and in evil, in life and growth and in perdition. Nothing can come amiss to it. Its only fault seems to be its appalling tameness. Though at home everywhere, it is everywhere the same flat, slow, spiritless incubus, powerless to move a step freely, dragged along hither and thither by fate. Even its superiority to moral consid- erations is a " good dulness," if good at all. It is as irrational as it is immoral. And as it creeps along from good to evil and from evil to good with its eternal indifference, one gets tired of it and wishes that it were hot or cold. Of course it explains, in its own way, all ascer- tained facts, and many that are not ascertained ; and, without a doubt, it would explain the facts just as well if they were all the very re- Prayer- Meeting Theology. 125 verse of what they are. But if any guess that seems to fit the more obtrusive facts of history is what we are after, what need have we of this sluggish salamander? We can fit the facts as well and better with another beast of older re- nown and not a whit more fabulous. Say that the world is a dependency of the bottomless pit, and that the will of Satan is the origin of all things and the end of history. He chooses and loves evil for its own sake. Hence all the evil that is in the world. But there is nothing tame about him. He is a keen sportsman ; and he knows how to preserve his game as well as how to snare and destroy it. He raises up good men upon the earth. He makes wide provinces tributary to righteousness. He builds churches and supports missionaries. He promises a millennium of holiness and peace on earth, and a heaven of everlasting rest to crown all. He excites spiritual longings and encourages blessed hopes in the minds of men that he may exult and revel in greater havoc at the last. Any temporary triumphs of evil are rehearsals for his great day ; and any apparent victories of grace are preparations for the same. Death must have life to feed on. Evil must 126 Prayer- Meeting Theology. have good to mock and destroy. There is, happily, no positive support for this detestable philosophy of history. But we only desire to fit the more clamorous facts of the world : and this grotesque hypothesis fits them better than bare evolution, because it suppHes motive power in the diabolic will. B. There is, alas ! altogether too much posi- tive support for the diabolic view of history. In truth the evidence for it is, in quaHty and in strength, very much like the evidence for a divine purpose. That is the most perplexing fact in the whole case. Just as you may say: There is much good visible in history ; there- fore goodness is supreme, there is a God who rules and who will bring forth judgment ; so another may reply : The evil in history is as conspicuous as the good, therefore evil is the origin and the ground and the end of all, there is no God, Satan is the prince of this world ! But evolution can use the good and the evil alike. All is grist that comes to its mill. The theory is irrational, of course. But that is its strength. It gives up the rational account of the world for lack of sufificient proof, and sub- stitutes for it an account which is all but self- Prayer- Meeting Theology. 127 evident, being in fact neither more nor less than a generalized statement of the process of the world as actually observed. C. You say that an evolution indifferent to moral good and evil fits the facts of history though it may not suit the aspiring hopes and longings of men. But the hopes and aspira- tions of men are facts of history, and facts of supreme importance. A doctrine which pro- vides adequately for them, though it should involve the recognition of incomprehensible mysteries, must be nearer the truth than one which eludes difficulties by an immoral and in- human attitude towards good and evil. Moral good is a supreme end for man as man. It cannot cease to be so. Any indications of the existence of a moral purpose in history over and above that in our individual lives are not to be suspected as, in the nature of things, likely to be misleading. They are not to be given up hastily in view of serious difficulties. They are just what we should look for and welcome and cling to as long as possible, as most likely to be true. Such indications are) in fact, numerous and strong. The persistent moral guidance in history is even more unmis- 128 Prayer-Meeting Theology. takable than the moral purpose in individual lives. In the individual life the moral pur- pose maybe arrested and defeated. In history it rises unharmed after every apparent fall and reigns secure in the midst of enmity and con- tradiction. It puts its enemies under its feet, and out of all their evil still finds means of good. B. A certain moral tendency there undoubt- edly is in all history, and likewise a most fla- grant and irrepressible immoral tendency. The immoral tendency is as vigorous to-day as it was before the deluge. It is easy to assert that the moral purpose reigns secure in the midst of its enemies. And it is just as easy to assert, on the other hand, that the moral purpose in history (if purpose it must be called) is a total failure, being opposed and baffled in every age and in all parts of the world unto this day. In- stead of accomplishing a great moral purpose or reaching any definite issue, history as a whole seems to be always opening out into new complications and never coming to any point at all. C. But it always appears to feel the check and control of an unchanging moral Being. Prayer-Meeting Theology. 129 The very failure ever perpetuated perpetuates also the sense of that of which we fail or fall short. The failures of men through all gener- ations emphasize the abiding presence of God and the persistence of His purpose, which, though opposed, is not annulled. There is also a limit to moral evil upon earth, as to physical suffering. History goes on, and moral evil may seem to go on with it, from age to age without a break. But the evil agents are arrested and sent to their account at the end of threescore years and ten. If history never comes entirely to a point here, that is because its culminating point is in another world. The very failure of a final issue upon earth only points to the solemn issue beyond the veil. B. But let the moral tendency in history be ever so secure, by what light is the tendency made out to be a purpose, the purpose of a personal God ? C. Let us not dispute about words. Let us drop both tendency and purpose if you like, and look the facts of history squarely in the face. We find at once that there is order in them, an order which we recognize as akin to the moral order of our own thoughts and lives, 9 130 Prayer- Meeting Theology. and yet obviously an order which does not flow from the will of man. It is an order to which men are subject rather than an order which they establish. Yet it is a moral order, and it pervades all history. There is that in it which awes us and commands us, and that which attracts and inspires us, that also which searches the thoughts of our hearts and brings us to judgment. In other words, there is that in it which we must worship and serve, and in which we must put our trust or live without hope. God is in it from age to age, face to face with every man and with everj' people. But while God thus offers Himself to our worship directly in all history, there are special movements in history which reveal more clearly the life and character of the Divinity whose pres- ence is felt everywhere. What is specially called revelation is a part of history : but it is a part which well deserves the distinction conferred by the emphatic name of revelation. It openly declares unto us the God whose nature is but obscurely discovered elsewhere. A. You really are ready then at last to open your Bibles ! You have all this while deliber- Prayer-Meeting Theology. 131 ately kept the lamp under a bushel that you might enjoy the fine luxury of groping in the dark. For my part, I have always been con- tent to be a plain Bible Christian. I adore the Creator and Upholder of nature, the God in whom men live and move and have their being; but I am indebted for my knowledge of Him and for my belief in Him to the revela- tion of Himself which He has given us in the Holy Scriptures. Without this, nature would be dark and history would be dumb to me. C. I commend your love and reverence for the Scriptures. But you who protested against separating the witnesses and dividing the evi- dence must be on your guard here. You must not draw your lines too hard and fast between the Scriptures and the history of which we have been speaking. The Bible is history, an essential portion of universal history ; and it is a revelation of God unto us in virtue of that very fact. A. The Bible is history to be sure, and it has momentous bearings upon all history. Yet to me it seems a history by itself. It certainly reveals God unto men most gloriously by that in which it is most distinct from all other history. 132 Prayer- Meeting Theology. C. The pre-eminence of Scripture as a part of human history, and as a key to the whole, is not to be questioned. But its separation from all other history would be fatal to its claims as a revelation unto us. If it be a real part of our proper history, it unveils the controlling power in that history, and it interprets the facts of to-day as well as those of former times. If it be, on the other hand, a history all by itself, it is out of our sphere. Its interest to us is that of a romantic legend. It deals with other worlds than ours. It cannot reveal God unto us though it speak of Him on every page. It cannot prove to us thal^ there is a God, though it may declare that once upon a time, for a certain peculiar people, there was One. It does not deal with our world or our time or our life. It has no serious or practical meaning to us at all. But all this only shows the utter absurdity of the supposition. For the Bible is the most serious and practical book we have. It touches and searches our life in all its rela- tions as no other book does. It is the most broadly and distinctively human history ever written. The great elements of man's history are all there. Let us turn to it and see how it Prayer- Meeting Theology. 133 will help us in the question before us. What evidence does the Bible furnish to prove the being of God, to prove the being of such a God as it speaks of throughout ? B. There you touch the sore place. The Bible does not attempt to prove the being of the God it speaks of. It begs or assumes the whole question from the first. It begins at once to talk about God as if all men knew Him familiarly and saw Him every day. Its positivenoss and verisimilitude, or perhaps I should say its divine power and authority, keep us a long time from asking for any proofs. But when we do ask, we are told by our spiritual guides that there is a God, because the Bible says so ; and that the Bible is to be believed because there is a God who has inspired it : or that there is a God because none but God could work the Bible miracles, and that the Bible record of miracles is per- fectly credible because there exists an om- nipotent and benevolent God to work such miracles for the benefit of mankind. C. That is an awkward statement. But the circle is less vicious than it looks. We believe that there is a God because the 134 Prayer-Meeting Theology. Bible says so ; and we believe the Bible because it is the Word of God. That is sub- stantially what we have already found in nature and in history. We believe that there is a God because God Himself says there is — that is to say, because God is revealing Him- self unto us. That is not so unreasonable. B. Far be it from me to say that it is unreason- able. Yet I would fain see its reasonableness more clearly. I believe in God, and in the Bible revelation of God, because I am captured and spell-bound rather than because I am taught to ground my faith warily on solid proofs. And believing under a spell, all the while knowing that you are under a spell, is like dreaming when you are awake and know that you are dreaming. My spell-bound faith is often bold and strong ; but it keeps the viper brood of doubts always warm in its own bosom. A. There is no help for you. To convince you is not enough. You must see how it is done all the way through. And it must be done in a manner to suit your delicate fancy. If you received the very proofs which you demand, you would still cry out for proofs of the proofs in an infinite series. Why will you Prayer- Meeting Theology. 135 not see that there must be a beginning some- where, that everything that is most real to us must be traced at last to a " spell " ? All knowl- edge is a spell which we can neither account for nor break. Our very life is an intangible, unapproachable dream-island in the midst of our waking thoughts. We are " captured and spell-bound " and made to live and think, we know not how, even as you are made to feel the truth of the revelation of God in the Bible. As you consent to live without solving the mystery of life, and to think without unravel- ling the process of thought, so yield to the Divine spell by which God would fix your atten- tion to His living presence in His word. Yield to it without reserve, and you will need no further proof of the being of God. Refuse to yield, turn away from His presence to look for new proofs of His being, and no proofs will avail. You reject the face of God which is gra- ciously turned to you, and you seek to get into the thick darkness behind His back. You will not have Him as He mercifully condescends to visit you ; you must mount up to His seat and take Him by storm in your own way. B. Have I not said that I should be glad to 136 Prayer-Meeting Theology. yield to the spell by which I find God in the Bible ? And have you not said that there are plenty of other spells which it is vain to resist ? If the spell which makes the Scriptures seem to be God's own voice were all, I should be at per- fect peace. But I am under another spell which compels me to think that the question of the being of God, when once proposed to the mind, is a question which the mind cannot refer back to any dim instincts or feelings how- ever deep, but must determine within itself and on its own rational grounds. And I must con- fess again that I do not find in the Bible the help which I need to demonstrate to myself that such a God as is therein spoken of with overpowering force and beauty really does exist. The Bible takes this for granted. The being of God is not the conclusion but the starting- point of the Bible. How can I follow the great book in its glorious course if I cannot start with it ? And how can I get up so high and make the start ? How does the Bible help me to make once for all its own mighty assump- tion ? C. A says that there is no help for you ; and perhaps he is right. Perhaps you ask too much. Prayer-Meeting Theology. 137 more than even the Bible can give. Perhaps you seek not faith in God but actual sight of the Invisible. That, of course, is not to be ob- tained in the Bible or elsewhere. The existence of God is betokened unto us on every hand in and out of Scripture. The appeal, however, is not to the eye, or to the bare understanding, but to the heart as well, to the conscience also, to the whole man in his fullest life. The dim sense of God's awful presence we have without seeking. If we are to know Him further, it must be by a deeper, fuller, more personal act than the drawing of a necessary conclusion from formal premises. It must be by an act of ac- ceptance or consent or submission, by an act of serious acknowledgment and trust and self- committal, — in a word, by faith. You seem to demand such proofs as would dispense with faith rather than justify and confirm it. You would apparently superannuate faith and install scientific knowledge in its place. If that be your aim and desire, you will find neither help nor countenance in the Scriptures. The Bible offers no substitute for personal faith in God, and will hear of no substitute. But, taken as a whole, it is itself a complete vindication of the 138 Prayer-Meeting Theology. reasonableness of faith. It leads you up to the high mount of speculation from which faith can best rise to its solitary flight. A. Now you confess the futility of your long babbling. In the end we must commit our- selves in pure trust to the revelation of God, which is offered not to the understanding alone but to our moral nature as well, not to the wise and prudent only but also unto babes. We cannot see God, look for Him where we will. Whatever we may see, whatever we may know, we must believe in God, as a moral Being, by a moral act, by a voluntary, energetic, spiritual advance beyond all bare evidence and beyond all merely intellectual use of evidence. We are not to search for faith. We must have faith. We must ourselves believe. Believing in God is a moral and religious duty in our actual state of knowledge, not the acquisition of new knowledge. Keeping the faith is cling- ing resolutely to it, wrestling with it, not by subtlety but by main force, saying unto it, " I will not let thee go till thou bless me." But pardon me for keeping you so long from the Bible after you have compassed sea and land to get to it. After your open confession, I Prayer-Meeting Theology. 139 am curious to know what sort of proofs of the being of God you will still find in the old book. C. I will confess again, if you like, that we do not find in Holy Scripture a scientific dem- onstration of the being of God to take the place of a spiritual faith in Him. But as every- where else, and far more than elsewhere, we find solemn signs of God's presence ; we find fit opportunity and due encouragement for a free, personal, perpetual act of faith. B. Will you let us hear just what you do find ? We shall then know better how much encouragement we have for faith. C. First of all, do not forget, there is that " spell " of which you have spoken. It has prevailed from the beginning until now. It held minds of every order in the darkest ages. It holds them still in all the splendor of our enlightenment. It never quailed before the gigantic violence of the old scoffers. It takes no notice when our own polished prophets calmly summon it to surrender. It simply holds its way, through evil report and good report, subduing the strong, and taking the wise in their own craftiness, and turning the 140 Prayer-Meeting Theology. learned counsel of unbelievers into foolishness. And, whilst it humbles the proud, it lifts up them that are cast down and exalts the poor to the princely freedom of the life of faith. You have yourself acknowledged its power. It does not satisfy you as evidence, because it looks like power usurping the place of evidence. Yet it must be considered even as evidence. For whence comes this mighty spell ? And what is it if not the involuntary response of the human spirit to the self-revealing God ? This it may well be. This to many it has clearly appeared to be. And, until this inter- pretation of it is precluded, it must remain a strong presumptive proof that it is the living God Himself who speaks to mankind through the Scriptures with an authority befitting His Majesty. Then again, as the Bible is a part of history, it proves the being of God as history in general does. It multiplies and diversifies instances of belief in Him. It unfolds the effects of the belief and its profound relations to all the life of man. And it reveals the unity of purpose in history both by its own wondrous unity and by the freedom and mastery with which it Prayer-Meeting Theology. 141 assumes a central position in the history and progress of the world. A. All that is very true. The Bible is one, though it is a collection of fragments in various tongues gathered together as if by accident in different parts of the world through a period of many centuries. Without unity of form, or of style, or of matter, or of immediate purpose, it still has a spiritual unity, which is felt by the plainest reader and acknowledged with awe and wonder by the profoundest, and which cannot be conjured away by any pedantry or arrogance of criticism. In the words and the thoughts of many men, we have here doubtless the Word and the Spirit of the living God, calling to the entire human race. The Bible is at home in every land and in the tongue and heart of every people. It is the proclamation and the proof of the unity of history. It marks the converging lines of the divine purpose amidst the raging of the heathen and the tumult of the people. The Bible instances of faith and its victories are also good evidence of the being of God. But is it not more to our purpose to ask how these men came to believe in God, than even what fruit their faith. bore? If we find how 142 Prayer-Meeting Theology. they came to believe, will not that give us the real ground which the Bible furnishes for faith ? C. Well, then, how came they to believe in God? They believed in Him surely because He revealed Himself unto them. But how did He reveal Himself unto them ? Even as He reveals Himself unto all men, through the works of nature, through the operations of their own minds and consciences, through the various relationships of life, through duties and trials, through judgments and deliverances and all the course of His providence. A. Through all these things doubtless. But the divine handling of these things for their benefit must have been most signal. C. Yes, and it is most signal for our benefit also. But they accepted the sign, and we ask for a greater. A. Yet surely there was more than nature and events and their own thoughts to teach them. There was the direct inspiration of God. C. Certainly. Otherwise, nature and events would have been to them signs signifying nothing. Nature and events do not speak. It is God who breathes and speaks through them. Prayer-Meeting Theology. 143 The good men of old were taught by the in- spiration of God ; and so are we, through whatsoever instrumentality He may choose. A. Yes, I see your drift. The inspiration of the holy men who worked miracles and wrote the Scriptures differed only in degree from the inspiration of those who are mighty in com- merce and politics, and science and literature in our time! C. So far as I can see, there is not necessarily a difference even in degree. The difference is in modes of operation, in the particular ends in view, and accordingly in results. A. So that contemporary inspiration is pro- ducing new Bibles all the time, and it matters little which of them one reads and lives by ! C. By no means. Every man is inspired for his own life and work. The Bible is not to be written at this time of day. Hence none are inspired to write new Bibles any more than to write new Iliads. The work of Christians to-day is very different. But it is not less arduous or less sacred. And those who will set themselves with all their hearts to fulfil their heaven-appointed course may look for the very highest inspiration, the inspiration of the 144 Prayer-Meeting Theology. one living and true God, to guide and support them in thought and in action. There are diversities of operation, but one Spirit. A. You put it plausibly, in approved Scripture phrase ; but I am afraid that you are taking the very ground of the worst enemies of the Christian faith. C. And why should I not, if the ground be solid? Why should a foot of good ground be abandoned to the infidel ? This, I am sure, is good ground : that God is teaching men to-day by His Spirit through many instrumentalities; and that He taught the men of old in great measure through the same instrumentalities and altogether by the same Spirit. B. That is plain and weighty so far as it goes ; but it does not go very far towards a right estimate of the word of God. You occupy hostile territory with a right loyal in- tention. But do you not necessarily fall into the enemy's power, and are you not naturally pressed into the enemy's service, on such ground, after all ? Do you not in effect re- duce the Bible to the level of other good books, and divest its teaching of all special authority ? Prayer-Meeting Theology. 145 C. The Bible was made long ago. It is not given unto us to make or unmake it. We need not trouble ourselves to separate it from other books. It is separate enough. We need not go beyond our depth to explain its unique- ness or to sustain its authority. Its uniqueness is apparent to all. Its authority is like that of heaven itself. It may be set aside, but it can- not be questioned. If we had to support and de- fend the Bible, it would be a millstone about our necks instead of a lamp for our feet. Instead of helping us, it would increase our difficulties a hundred-fold. We have need of its help, but it has no need of ours. Let us have done with patronizing and protecting the Scriptures, and let us set ourselves to learn what they have to teach us concerning the being and nature of God. B. But, pray, do let us know what you mean. Do you mean to say that it is impertinent to make sure of the trustworthiness of a teacher before we place ourselves implicitly under his guidance ? Or do you privately mean that with regard to the Bible it is impossible to obtain any such assurance, and that, therefore, we must listen to what it says, and make of it whatever we can, and ask no questions? 146 Prayer- Meeting Theology. C. You cannot answer all manner of prelimi- nary questions about the Bible before you let the Bible speak for itself. And if you study it seriously and devoutly first of all, you may find what you most need at once, and be able to postpone the preliminary questions indefinitely. B. But answer me this. Is the truth or falsehood of the Bible a light and irrelevant question which may be postponed indefinitely without affecting the practical value of the book? C. Certainly not. It is a vital question. But it is a question which can never trouble any serious reader. The answer is known before the question can be asked. The Bible is a true book on the face of it. It is too great, too serious, too searching and far-reaching, too vital and fruitful, too inspiring, to be anything but true. You cannot look it in the face and question its truth. To speak ill or to think ill of it, you must close the book and avert your eyes and harden your heart. B. But you shall not thus escape me. An- swer once more. Are all the historical and other statements of the Bible absolutely and infallibly correct ? Are they, or are they not ? Prayer- Meeting Theology. i/\.'/ C. What is the matter with you? How can I tell ? I have never thought of setting myself to consider such a question. And I am not competent to do it. There is no way to prove the absolute infallible correctness of Scripture without verifying all its statements one by one from the first to the last. B. Yes, there is a totally different way. But you are plainly giving up the truth of the Bible after all your panegyrics. You are ready to lay down the arms of the Christian Church meekly without waiting for the enemy to come and take them. You admit that the Bible is inaccurate in its statements. C. Pardon me, I made no such admission. I never looked for inaccuracies in the Bible. If any one else chooses to look for them, and if he finds them or thinks that he finds them, he can take them for his pains and enjoy them unmolested by me. B. And you will still calmly maintain that the Bible is a true book, I suppose. C. Certainly. Have you never known any true books ? If you know any true history for instance, will you vouch for its strict accuracy in every detail ? If you discover a single error 148 . Prayer-Meeting Theology. in it, must you pronounce the book false and untrustworthy? The trustworthiness and prac- tical value of a book do not depend on infallible accuracy. I see no sound reason why we should look for such infallibility in the Bible anymore than in other great books. I am aware of no important purpose to be served by it if it be a fact. And I see no way in the world to prove the fact if fact it be. The only way would be to verify every single statement in the whole Bible ; and it is plain that no one will under- take to do that. B. As I said before, there is a totally differ- ent way. Christian people generally satisfy themselves that the Bible is Divinely inspired ; and its Divine inspiration is to them a guarantee of its infallibility. Your view of the inspiration of Scripture, I believe, is the view of the enemy, and is compatible with error as to facts, and most probably as to doctrine also. C. If the enemy believe in God, and believe that the Bible writers were truly inspired by Him, I am glad to know it, and I heartily agree with them. And if " Christian people generally " assume that the inspiration of the Scriptures guarantees their historical and Prayer- Meeting Theology. 149 scientific infallibility, I cannot see how they will make good their assumption unless they are prepared to assert that the Almighty can- not inspire a man at all without making him in every respect infallible, or that His purpose in giving us the Scriptures must have been one which could not be attained without making them infallibly accurate in all their details. I cannot presume to make either of those asser- tions. I believe that God inspires thousands whom He does not make infallible ; and I be- lieve that the purpose of the Bible, the purpose which it is actually answering on a grand scale, — the revelation of God as a God of salvation to mankind, does not depend in any degree on the kind of infallibility so much insisted on. I do not take it upon me to deny this infallibility to be a fact ; but, whether it be a fact or not, I deny the necessity of assuming it apart from its proper evidence, and I deplore the singular indiscretion of those good Christians who, on this doubtful and impracticable point, would stake all the authority of Holy Writ. B. But what is revelation good for if it is not infallible ? And if it is not infallible in all its parts, how can we trust it in any ? 150 Prayer-Meeting Theology. C. What are your eyes and your ears good for if they are not infallible? And if they ever mislead you in any particular, how can you trust them again in anything at all? Since your eyes have made a myth of the starry heavens will they not be sure to make a comedy of errors, if not a tragedy, of your domestic life? In reference to the universe at large, our vision is limited and imperfect, and must be supplemented and corrected by the ever-growing resources of science. But our eyes answer a great purpose nevertheless ; and few have ever deemed them unworthy of an all-wise Creator. If God, then, without detri- ment to our happiness or to His own glory, could give us a fallible representation of the remote in space, why should we. expect Him to give us an infallible account of the remote in time? The Holy Scriptures, infallible or not in the disputed sense, answer their own pur- pose perfectly. In the sense of sufficiency for their proper purpose they are strictly infallible. The word of God shall not return unto Him void. A. I know that it is useless for me to meddle with the stream of your disputation, which is Prayer-Meeting Theology. 151 running its appointed course, and which noth- ing in the world can turn aside. But there is something astonishing to me in the ease with which you make out that God revealed Him- self to the sacred writers in ordinary ways just as He reveals Himself unto us in nature and providence. If that be really so, can the ques- tion of the accuracy of the Bible be limited to minute unimportant details ? Must it not be raised in reference to the general tenor of the main narrative ? To me the Bible seems to speak chiefly of a miraculous revelation of God to men. Have the miracles disappeared from the sacred text as you read it ? Or, with- out disappearing, have they lost all their significance ? If the miraculous history is false, can the Bible be true ? If the miraculous his- tory is true, have we not therein a mode of revelation which itself constitutes new and telling evidence of the being of God ? Are not the miracles, in fact, the very substance of the Scripture revelation, and the very evidence which you went forth to seek? C. I have not lost sight of the miracles of Scripture or of their great significance. There was a time when these miracles could be ap- 152 Prayer-Meeting Theology. pealed to as direct evidence of the being and operation of God. But to-day the belief in God is more necessary to support belief in miracles than the belief in miracles to support belief in God. The miracles still prove and teach much when we can assume the being of God. But when we seek evidence of the exist- ence of God, the miracles of long ago are now for the most part unavailable. B. Alas ! my brother and companion in tribulation, your great fortitude and cheerful- ness leave the situation still very depressing. The miracles are supposed to be facts, well- attested, and all on our side. They are sup- posed to shut every unbelieving mouth and end all controversy. They are the boast and glory of the faithful. But you are anxious to keep them entirely out of sight for the present. For the time being, you wish to silence your own chief witnesses. Are you sure that a more convenient season to hear them will ever come? Would it not be a relief to you to be, " like the nations round," without the help or the hin- drance of any miracles at all ? With all your admirable composure, are you not really panic- stricken before the modern sages who have Prayer-Meeting Theology. 153 authoritatively declared that miracles are in- credible or even impossible ? C. The authority of to-day's sages is no greater than that of yesterday's ; and in their pronouncements I see no occasion for fortitude or for panic. The opposition to the great Bible miracles is always on the same ultimate ground. The argument against them, however tersely or strikingly or brilliantly stated, is always childish in substance. Here are a few samples, as robust as I could find : 1. The story of the miracles is not true, be- cause miracles are impossible. 2. The story, true or false, must be reckoned false, because the spread of false reports is more probable than the occurrence of real miracles. 3. Say what you will, the story is of no account, because the scientific spirit of the age will not listen to it. A miracle is indeed improbable and incredi- ble and even impossible, if there is no one to work it. But if there is a God who can work miracles when He chooses, how can miracles be impossible ? If there is a God who, under the given circumstances, would not be unlikely to 154 Prayer-Meeting Theology. work the greatest miracles of Holy Writ, why are these particular miracles not perfectly credible ? If the proof in favor of the greatest Scripture miracles seems very strong to those who believe in God, why should the levity and self-conceit, or the worldly one-sided culture, or the radical infidelity of the so-called spirit of the age be allowed to invalidate it ? In con- sidering the question of the being of God before and apart from the Scripture miracles, we neither abandon nor depreciate the miracu- lous history. We do but follow the true order for our own time. It is right and necessary to begin with that which is nearest to us, with that which we can best get hold of. And the childish argument against miracles on the ground of their impossibility or incredibility is the snare in which those are justly caught who take things by the wrong end and will have miracles first and God last. B. You promise, then, that you will return to the miracles again? C. Why should you insist on that? Our inquiry is about the being of God. If we find reason to believe in the God of the Bible, there will be no difficulty about the miracles. Prayer-Meeting Theology, 155 B. Then tell us what you find in the Bible to help you to believe in the being of God. You have already noticed such proofs as the Bible furnishes in common with other history. Now set forth the evidence which goes beyond com- mon history and is peculiar to the Bible. C. You have pulled me about so much be- tween you that I have lost some links of the train of thought which I had in view ; and there is no time to recover them now. I hear noises down below which intimate to the practised ear that we may at any moment be invaded and carried away captive to wholly untheological regions downstairs. But I may say this. I find in the men of the Bible not only an assured conviction of the being of God but also a full persuasion of what John Howe calls " God's conversableness with men." In fact their belief in Him was not the tranquil acceptance of a traditional doctrine or of a reasoned conclusion. It was the awful, unmis- takable, ever-burning impression of the actual contact and communion of their souls with the Eternal Spirit. When they speak of God they do not string together a cento of opinions or a chain of arguments ; they speak in all sim- 156 Prayer-Meeting Theology. plicity out of the fulness of a real experience. They give us literature rather than dogma inasmuch as they speak with freedom and fer- vor rather than with labored precision. But they give us dogma also inasmuch as their freedom and their fervor were inspired not by play of the imagination but by actual personal communion with the Holy One. The dogmatic theology implied in their utterances is a substantial token of the objective reality of their com- munion with God, as their life-long labor of love and obedience is a token of their personal sin- cerity. This theology, so bold that it often seems reckless and about to fall into the pit of Aber- glaube, is so bold because it carries, in such vessels as human speech affords, a treasure of divine knowledge, which has been gained in living converse with God, and which may be put to the proof day by day as long as the world stands. The Bible saints were not merely believers in God ; they were servants and friends of God. And they took not this honor upon themselves lightly. They were servants and friends of God by a serious and definite covenant, in which they relinquished all self- will and accepted the Divine loving-kindness as Prayer- Meeting Theology. 157 better than life itself. They proclaimed to the world the growing revelation of God's covenant with them and with mankind. They declared His Name, and the service which He required, and the promises which He made. They raised among their people a great expectation of a fuller manifestation of God and His will. They strengthened and quickened this hope from age to age amidst the greatest discouragements from without. They gave a wonderfully close and correct forecast of the coming blessing. And at last they pointed out the fulfilment of God's great promise in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. They called upon all men everywhere to accept God's covenant now fully revealed, and to taste and see the riches of his power and grace. From that time unto this, all the world over, those who obey the call have access unto God ; and the reality of the Divine Object of their faith is a matter of personal experience. Thus the Bible offers in evidence of the being of God : first, the witness of many generations of good men who lived in the light of the Unseen ; and who, from the ful- ness of the revelation vouchsafed unto them, 158 Prayer- Meeting Theology. have given to the world in brief occasional fragments the great, coherent, and vital body of theology, which all the schools have but trimmed and draped without adding one cubit to its stature, and which to-day is everywhere spoken against and everywhere widening its sway and deepening its hold upon the minds of men : secondly, the fulfilment in the Christian dispensation, both at its beginning and in its progress, of the great prophecy of which the older dispensation in all its parts was a con- tinual embodiment : thirdly, and above all, the opportunity to make personal trial of the great matter. " God is here," the Bible says, " He reveals Himself thus. Thus will He be inquired after. Prove Him now." The full weight of the Scripture evidence for the being of God is felt not in Scripture alone but in Scripture as attested and illustrated in all Christian history. And it can be properly estimated in.no other way than by the humble and serious personal proof so urgently recom- mended and so uniformly found satisfactory. Men will see round a corner and through a solid stone wall with the bodily eyes sooner than they will perceive the solemn realities Prayer-Meeting Theology. 159 of Scripture without the contrite, earnest, obedient heart to which the grace of faith is given. B. This leads us to speak of Jesus Christ. As everything really depends on Him, perhaps we may now leave all besides and devote what time we have remaining to speak of Him. I should not have quarrelled with your view of the Scriptures if I did not greatly fear its bear- ing upon Him of whom we are told that Moses and all the prophets did write. Harassed and wearied by the strife which fills our days, I grow more and more indifferent to much that I once held to be all-important. But if a stand is to be made anywhere, if we are to keep the faith at all, we must hold our ground without compromise in reference to the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ. On the in- tegrity of our faith in Him will depend hence- forth our faith in God. If we believe in the Son, we shall believe in the Father also. But if our faith in Christ as the' Eternal Son of God fails in the worldly turmoil around us, all real faith in God will be at an end. Men believed in God more or less firmly before Christ came, it is true. But they believed in hope, looking i6o Prayer- Meeting Theology. for a fuller justification of their faith. When Christ came, He certainly came either to fulfil or to destroy this hope. Since the advent of Christ, it has become impossible to look for another to come after Him with a diviner mis- sion, or to look for any other justification of our faith in God. If we cannot look forward for another Christ, we certainly cannot go back and live on the old types, which once prophesied good things to come, but which were either fulfilled or discredited for ever in Jesus of Nazareth. He is the author and finisher and also the object of our faith, or in the coming time there is no faith to be. Feeling thus the gravity of the question about the person of Christ, I cannot but fear lest any doubts concerning the infallibility of Scripture should let in doubt upon the centre of our faitl;, the Incarnation of the Son of God. I appreciate the difficulty of maintaining the strict infalli- bility of the Scriptures in all details. I cannot maintain it to any purpose myself. But I shudder at the thought of giving it up because I feel that the Scriptures and the Christ of whom they testify must, in our minds, stand or fall together. Prayer-Meeting Theology. i6i C. Christ and the Scriptures are intimately- connected. They bear witness of Him. And herein, in their true sphere and at their proper task, they are infalHble ; that is, they are suffi- cient, they serve the purpose effectively as wit- nesses. Men and women believe in Christ through their witness every day. But their witness to Him does not consist in microscopic details and subtle infinitesimal points. It is writ plain and large, in elemental characters ; and there is no evading or gainsaying it. It asks no favor of the New Criticism. It needs not the protection of the Old. It depends on no disputed authorship, or controverted date, or doubtful principle of interpretation. In the way of criticism, all it asks us to believe is, that the Old Testament is older than the New ; that the prophets preceded the apostles ; that the Law was before the Gospel ; that Jesus Christ Himself is the chief corner-stone bind- ing the old and the new together. In the most perilous times yet to come there will hardly arise a school of history or of criti- cism to dispute these statements. Yet these simple statements involve for Jesus Christ a position such as never any other man occupied 1 62 Prayer- Meeting Theology. or approached. Christ's place in history is absolutely unique and secure, so secure and so exalted that it is hard to conceive what more you could gain or seek for Him through any historical or scientific or other infallibility of Scripture. B. I know that Jesus Christ must for ever occupy an incomparable, unapproachable place in the history and in the thoughts of men. But the strict infallibility of Scripture would add definiteness to the supremacy of His posi- tion, making it, for me at least, as unmistak- able as the Nicene formula itself makes it. The full authority of literal infallibility being assumed, the great statements of Scripture concerning Christ, such as His birth of a virgin. His taking away the sin of the world, His send- ing of the Holy Ghost, His commission to be the judge of all men, give Him, not only the fore- most place among men, but the Divine place accorded to Him by the adoring faith of His people. They once for all define His position and establish His Divinity beyond question or cavil. C. Do you think so? And do you think that any specially certified statements are necessary Prayer-Meeting Theology. 163 to establish His position and His Divinity? On the other hand, I feel that we are on the wrong track when we talk of establishing His Divinity at all. We thereby give countenance to the notion that His Divinity is something separate from Himself; and that we may know Him and miss the knowledge of His Divinity. The Divinity of Christ is that which is actually manifested in Him, and not some occult quality or relation to be attributed to Him and proved. It is through knowing Christ that we know most fully what Divinity is. Divinity is that which shines forth in Him. He is the ex- press image of the invisible God. He is God with us. They who have seen Him have seen the Father. His very human nature, far from eclipsing His Divinity, is itself mediato- rial, bringing us to God. His body is the temple of God. God meets us there. B. But, assuming that Christ was God mani- fested in the flesh, how acceptable would infal- lible testimony still be to deliver unto us with full accuracy and certainty that which was actually manifested in Him ! C. Nay, that manifestation was not a lightning flash, seen once for a brief season, and forever 164 Prayer-Meeting Theology. after known only by report and tradition. The light which came into the world through Jesus Christ came to stay. The Divinity of Christ is even now manifest in Him, not only as we read of Him in the Gospels, but also as we find Him still present in the world through His Spirit, the strength and joy of His people, the light and life of men, the only hope of all the world. B. There is a certain gracious influence in the world to-day it is true. You assume that it is the personal influence of the Lord Jesus, ever present with men through the Holy Spirit. But should we not be saying all we really know if we called it an unexplored "stream of tendency" ? Or if we speak of persons, may we not connect the " Divinity now manifest in the world " with many other names. Christian and Heathen, as well as with the name of Jesus ? C. The truth and grace which abound in Him are reflected in His people, and have been adumbrated from the earliest times in the natural life of mankind. There are many names to be held in everlasting remembrance, many memories to be for ever blessed. And there is much good in the world to-day which Prayer- Meeting Theology. 165 represents the love and toil of holy men and women whose very names are lost from all earthly records. But there is no danger that Jesus Christ and His work shall be lost or mis- taken in this saintly throng. Sooner shall men fail to distinguish between the morning star and the rising sun. Christ in the world to-day is as separate as He was in the days of His humiliation. Much of His work on earth to-day is as directly connected with His name, and as plainly His, as that which Simon Peter ascribed to Him with convincing power on the day of Pentecost, and on another occasion at the tem- ple in Solomon's porch. His presence in the world through the Spirit is now felt by myriads, felt and known as the personal presence of the Son of God as clearly and as certainly as it was ever known to His twelve disciples. If you say that we do not now see Him with the bodily eye, that we do not with our ears hear His voice, that our hands can no longer handle His gracious person, all that is confessedly true enough. But all that, far from being a dififi- culty in the way of faith, is plain Christian doctrine from the beginning. Our Lord has told us Himself, and his apostles have told us. 1 66 Prayer- Meeting Theology. that He is to be present with us and to be known unto us henceforth, not according to the flesh, but through the Spirit. If we deny the possibility of a personal presence being revealed otherwise than in a material form vis- ible and palpable to our bodily organs, our discussion is at an end, and ought never to have begun. But if we admit that possibility, I know not what conceivable element of the required evidence is wanting to prove the real presence of Christ in the world, clearly distinct from the world, and yet closely related to all the life and work of men. His peculiar work is going on over all the earth in the hearts of men. Dead souls are quickened in His name. To those who believe in Him all things are made new. His presence is recognized by His people ; and, as they act upon that recognition, it is verified more and more in a fruitful and blessed and ever-growing communion. B. I am not disposed to be flippant in such a matter as this. But I must say that you seem to have ceased arguing and to be giving us your religious experience. C. And has our religious experience no place in the argument? Do you expect to prove Prayer-Meeting Theology. 167 divine realities by a course of reasoning which studiously avoids contact with them ? Do you expect to prove them true by arguing for ever on the assumption that they are false, or that they can never be practically proved true? B. Religious experience has a place in the argument, but not the place of a tyrant. It must persuade by showing itself reasonable, and not coerce by its intensity and vehemence. I should not expect to prove the truth of Christian doctrines by arguing for ever on the assumption that they are false. But neither can I prove them true by the mere assumption that they are true, though the assumption may seem to be supported by my own religious ex- perience. For the experience, though real enough, may be capable of another explanation than that furnished by our traditional doctrines. It is this possibility that perplexes and torments me. I think I have long known what you call the personal presence of Christ ; and I endeavor to trust that it really is His blessed presence. But I know not whence you derive your posi- tive assurance that it can be nothing else. If we had the doctrine of the Supreme Divinity of Christ proved beforehand by infallible 1 68 Prayer- Meeting Theology, authority, I could rest well assured that the guidance and strength and comfort which we daily receive, and the advancement of Christian influence in the world, are tokens of the Lord's promised presence with His people. But, as you teach, we have no such proof of the Divinity of our Lord. His Divinity, you say, is that which was manifest in Him to His apostles, and that which is still manifest to their followers. AH I can make of that is, that the Divinity of Christ is not His Eternal One- ness with God the Father, but merely that gracious and inspiring virtue which His dis- ciples witnessed in Him, and which is still operative in the world. In outward appear- ance Jesus Christ was a man. His manifest Divinity, then, was apparently the virtue of a man, — eminent, unparalleled, most fruitful virtue, but still the virtue of a great and glori- ous man only. He manifests, then, the very crown and glory of humanity, and no more. And this, for lack of more precise language, you call His Divinity. By the Divinity of Christ you simply mean the sudden bursting forth of Humanity in Him into a glory of flower and fruit never equalled before or since. Prayer-Meeting Theology. 1 69 The faith of the Christian Church has ever been in a Divine Person, uncreated, eternal, by whom all things were made, who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. You seem to think, with the late Dean Stanley and, alas ! with many more, that all this is irrelevant ; that the Catholic creeds " miss the point " al- together because they do not boldly identify the Divine Nature with the manifest character of Christ ; and that Bishop Pearson, in laboring to prove the Divinity of Christ in the Nicene sense instead of enlarging on His ethical excel- lence, shows himself less of a Christian theolo- gian than Voltaire and Rousseau, and Mill and Renan, who make the ethical excellence all in all. The truth is, where the Catholic doctrine of the Person of Christ is seriously held. His ethical excellence is a matter of course and has its full effect. And where the Catholic doctrine is rejected, though the marvellous character of Jesus is nervously clutched as the sole relic from the wreck of the Gospel, its excellence is impaired and its power to save completely gone. In the orthodox theology, as in the 1 70 Prayer- Meeting Theology. New Testament, the crowning grace as well as the saving power of the character of Christ appears in the fact that, though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor ; that, though He was equal with God, He voluntarily became man, and toiled and suffered and died for our redemption. Give up the Catholic doctrine of the Divinity of Christ, and this crowning grace of His character is lost. The human tender- ness and faithfulness remain ; but the Divine condescension and self-sacrifice for man's salva- tion have vanished. We may perhaps still say that " in Jesus was condensed all that is good and elevated in our nature " ; and that " the origin of Christianity forms the most heroic episode of the history of humanity." But are we to be saved by an episode of our own sad history, or by the revelation of even the best and rarest in our own helpless nature ? If Christ was but a man, the uniqueness of His character and the solitariness of His person separate Him from us instead of uniting Him with us. And they separate Him from us, not measurably in amplitude of development, but radically in type of character, making Him, among men, not a rare genius but a prodigy. Prayer- Meeting Theology. 171 unsuitable as an example and disqualified as a teacher. A real faith in Christ as our great example and our great teacher implies faith in Him as the Son of God with power to trans- form as well as to teach. Our hope is in God alone. The real question about Jesus Christ is, not what manner of man He was, or how strong and persistent His influence on mankind may- be, but who He was and is, whether a man merely, of whatsoever character and influence, or also the Only-begotten Son of God, Him- self God, able to save to the uttermost all who come to Him. As to this fundamen- tal question, you seem to have little or nothing to say. And little or nothing can be said about it unless we can receive fully the witness of the inspiration and the miracles of Scripture. C. Then why do you not receive their wit- ness and be at rest ? You desire to do so, I know ; and the more you desire to do so all the greater are your misgivings. There are many who share both your earnest wish to be- lieve and your sense of failure in the attempt to do so. Neither you nor they can add one jot or tittle to the formal evidence of Christ's 172 Prayer- Meeting Theology. divinity, and you cannot be entirely convinced by it as it is. I by no nneans give up or dis- parage that evidence. I think it is very strong. But trying to ground our faith on it alone is like trying to stand on our heads. I do not try to stand on my head, because it is much easier to stand on my feet, and because, stand- ing on my feet, I enjoy the right and natural use of my head also. In like manner I have given up trying to stand on the mere formal evidence of the Christian faith, because I could never get beyond trying, and because I have found that standing on present real experience both removes my sense of insecurity and enables me to view the general evidence itself with far more advantage and satisfaction. Be- sides, your restless seeking of rest in the far- away historical beginnings of the Gospel seems to me little less than a denial of the Gospel itself. The Gospel promised us a Lord and Saviour to be with us always to the end of the world. If that promise fails, the Gospel fails. If there be no present living Christ to whom we can turn for support, what is the use of seeking Him among the dead centuries? But recognize Him here, and you will find Him Prayer- Meeting Theology. i 'jj, there without any trouble. He is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. B. You do not meet my difficulty at all. According to the Scripture record, Jesus Christ is a Divine Person, the Son of God. If we can but receive that record without reserve, every- thing is settled. We have a personal God and a Divine Saviour. But if we cannot stand im- movable on the strict letter of the record, our personal God and Saviour is still to seek. You say you find Him in the world now and always. I ask by what token you know Him, and you only reply that you assuredly do know Him. You recognize Him in the guidance and strength which come to you and to others every day. But these comforts come to you obscurely in the multitude of your thoughts. And may they not be your own thoughts after all, derived, like your other thoughts, from the unexplored sum of your natural conditions ? I cannot see the steps by which you identify the spiritual influence of which you have ex- perience with the living and personal Christ. C. You must bear in mind that I have never repudiated the testimony of the evangelists and the apostles or that of the law and the 174 Prayer-Meeting Theology. prophets. I could not rest my faith on the letter of their testimony without a correspond- ing experience of my own. But the whole volume of Scripture is open for me, and I can use it freely as a key to my own experience if I find that it fits. It does fit perfectly ; and by means of it I can interpret that in myself and in the world which otherwise would have re- mained inscrutable. My faith does not rest on the Book alone, or on my personal experience alone. It rests on Scripture as confirmed by experience, and on experience as interpreted and guided by Scripture. It is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, as witnessed to by all the Scriptures and by the spiritual experience of mankind, my own included. The Christ of the New Testament manifests, not in words only but also in life and action, that which still stands present to the apprehension of men, but had never before been so openly disclosed, a Spirit of awful elevation and authority, terrible in righteousness and holy zeal, separate from the sinful world, full of grace and truth, yet voluntarily united with us men, bearing our griefs, and in merciful kindness through infinite self-sacrifice bringing us salvation, taking away Prayer- Meeting Theology. 175 our sins and quickening us to live in the Spirit. If you ask whether this is Divine, the obvious answer is : If anything is Divine this is. It is the Divinest, the most certainly Divine, of all that it has been given unto us to know. And it is clearly " missing the point " altogether to turn from the actual presence and power of Divinity itself to inquire whence it came and how it came and who vouches for it. But it is revealed in a man ! Is it no wider and no higher than the temporal life of this man? Did it kindle into being with his birth to go out again when he died ? It did not go out when he died. It is in the world to-day, a mighty power lifting up the souls of men and trans- forming them into its own likeness. Nor was it kindled into being when he was born. It had been felt throughout all the world, and its fuller revelation had been foretold and prepared for by the law and the prophets and all the manifold experience of mankind. It was no sudden, transient, meteoric flash. It was the disclosure of that which was, and which is, and which is to be. That divine and holy nature of which we feel the power over our own spirits is no other than that which was dimly felt and 176 Prayer-Meeting Theology. sought after by the men of ancient times, and which was made gloriously manifest in Jesus Christ. It was personal in the earthly life of Jesus, and it used His human mind and body as its organs. It is personal still ; but now, under the Dispensation of the Spirit, it employs all the resources of God's creation as its instru- ments, even as the Lord foretold: " He shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you. All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you." This vast multiplicity of instruments or organs does not affect the personality of the Divine Nature. The Divine Christ can work with " all things that the Father hath " as well as with hands and feet. In all discussion of this subject we must regard the essential nature of personality and not the accidental or actual limitations which beset it among men. And when we find all signs of personality excepting such as belong to its human limitations, we must hold the personality for proved, or drop the subject. Now, the in- fluence which accompanies the Gospel of Christ wherever it is proclaimed, and especially where it is believed and obeyed, is in all respects a Prayer- Meeting Theology. 177 personal influence of the very highest character. You have yourself acknowledged this. You said that if you could receive the statements of Scripture concerning the Divinity of Christ without reserve, you could rest well assured that what you now actually experience is the presence and work of our blessed Lord graciously bestowed upon you according to the promise in the Gospel. What you now enjoy you would in that case acknowledge as a true and worthy fulfilment of the promise. But the promised grace was the personal care and communion of our Lord. What you actually enjoy, then, is in itself, by your own admission, not distinguishable from the fellow- ship and assistance of a Divine person. And you are hight. We have Jesus Christ Himself present with us through the Spirit. And in His presence all that is most personal in ourselves is .searched, and stimulated, and supported, and otherwise affected, to a far greater extent than in our most intimate personal intercourse with one another. The unseen Christ is not less but more personal than our fellow-men. He comes nearer to us than father or mother or wife or child. He is nearer to us than our own lyS Prayer- Meeting Theology. thoughts. He meets us at the core of our being where our thoughts spring up. And through all our activities of thought and life He remains with us, guiding and restraining and encouraging and supporting us to the end. What meets our personal life thus vitally and fully must be personal, and a personality with such profound understanding of us and with such lofty authority over us must be Divine. All is explained in the Scriptures. Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the life and light of men, the Saviour of all and especially of them that believe. A. You seem so near to one another that I can see no reason why you should not come nearer still and arrive at a good understanding. One of you wants historical assurance of the Divinity of Christ to start with, and, that being found, would easily find a present experience corresponding thereto. The other insists on the present reality first, and then apparently finds little diiificulty in going back to what seems fair historical assurance of the validity of the Gospel revelation. Since neither of you would have any difficulty with the present if certain statements of Scripture about the past Prayer-Meeting Theology. 179 were placed entirely beyond dispute, why do you not take a decisive test, why not take the most decisive test of all, the resurrection of our Lord, and settle that fundamental question for ever? B. You are quite right. The resurrection is the true test. It is sufificiently decisive. Dis- believe this and you disbelieve all. But beheve this truly and there will be no serious difificulty about anything else. And this is much easier to approach than many other questions. It is not, like the miraculous conception, dependent on a few texts and incapable of other proof. The resurrection of Christ was the staple of apostolic preaching. The very vocation of the apostles was to bear witness of the Lord's res- urrection. This was their great argument in support of the whole Christian faith. And it was a fair argument. It is a fair argument still. It challenged examination then. It challenges examination now. If the Gospel of the Resur- rection be true, it ought to be capable of demonstration. If false, it ought to bear unmis- takable marks of falsehood about it. The Res- urrection is in every respect the critical and decisive point. Yet, alas ! right here is my i8o Prayer-Meeting Theology. difficulty of difficulties, before which I am cast about like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. I never can deny or wholly disbelieve the resurrection of Christ. The cool assurance of those who declare to the world that He is sleeping His eternal sleep under the Syrian stars is to me revolting beyond all en- durance. And yet I am afraid that I can never fully and firmly believe that He is risen. A. Such wavering is imbecile ; and you ought to put an end to it promptly. You certainly need heroic treatment ; and there is no one to administer it but yourself ; and this is the place and this the ripe moment to do it. You must make up your mind, and you must keep it made up. The evidence of the resurrection of Christ is much stronger than the evidence on which we believe half of what we do believe most firmly about remote ages. And there is nothing offered in disproof excepting the mirac- ulous character of the event supposed ; and to accept that as disproof is clearly a miserable begging of the whole question. B. The evidence is strong I admit. Taken by itself, it is overpowering. In childhood, when it came to me by itself, it satisfied me entirely. Prayer- Meeting Theology. i8i It seemed to me then utterly unreasonable and even wicked for any one to fail to be convinced by it. But since I have been led to consider more particularly the stupendous character of the miracle, and the common credulity of ancient times, and the innumerable marvels then received without question ; since I have become aware of the great uncertainty with regard to the matter which is avowed by many professing Christians, and of the still greater uncertainty which betrays itself in the lives of many more, wherein the power of the resurrec- tion seems entirely lacking ; since I have be- come accustomed to see the doctrine emphati- cally rejected by men who know the record as well as we do and better, and who appear to be men of serious and pious minds, I also have lost my simple unquestioning faith in this car- dinal doctrine of the Gospel, and I know not what to say or think about it. Sometimes I am inclined to cry out, " Lord, I believe ; help my unbelief." At other times I dare not say even that. I will say to }'ou here what I never thought of mentioning to any one. I have not got over my youthful feeling that it is wicked to doubt a truth so great, so blessed 1 82 Prayer-Meeting Theology. and so well attested. For such doubt I have done harder penance in soul-crushing dreams than St. Jerome ever did for being a Cicero- nian, or John Bunyan for a ruder profanity. Their sins might be wiped away, as they had not denied the living Saviour. But I had doubted and discredited the great charter of the hope of mankind ; and my penance was not for correction, but for the vengeance of heaven and earth and for my utter ruin. You may smile at my simplicity, but you may well be- lieve that I have tried the heroic treatment. I have said, like yourself, " I will believe ! I will doubt no more ! " But I have felt afterwards that my wilful faith was impious and degrading ; that I sought to hold Christian doctrine not because I was convinced of its truth, but be- cause I wished it true and feared to doubt. Then I was ashamed of my insincerity, and I resolved to seek the simple truth at all hazards. But when I addressed myself to the inquiry, I never made any progress. The evidence for the faith seemed immense. But the difficulties were immense also. And I was paralyzed be- tween them till I took alarm again and bestirred myself to begin the fruitless round once more. Prayer-Meeting Theology. 183 C. All that only convinces me the more that, for us whose lot is cast in the present time, it is presumptuous and dangerous to reverse the order of Providence and lean over to find our life in the remote past. Do not imagine that I am disposed to deny the resurrection of our Lord, or to discredit its historical evidence. I believe in the resurrection, and I think that the historical evidence of it has never been shaken. Still, I do not believe in the resurrec- tion because of the historical evidence. That evidence, irrefragable as it is, would fail to con- vince me in the face of an unbelieving world and a wavering church and the motions of un- belief in my own evil heart, if there had not been that in my personal experience and in the history of the modern world which cannot be denied or doubted, and which welcomes the fact of the resurrection as its proper antecedfent and explanation. B. You ought to have been with Israel in Egypt to show them how to make bricks with- out any straw and perhaps without any mate- rials at all. The evidence of the resurrection would fail to convince you, but you can believe without the evidence ! They that be saved 184 Prayer- Meeting Theology. must be few indeed if such subtlety be a con- dition of Christian faith. Strait was the gate from the beginning; but now it is entirely closed against plain people and hardly open to the preternaturally acute. C. On the other hand, I have nothing to do with subtlety or acuteness. From the assur- ance of Christ's personal presence in the world to-day, which is a matter of experience, it is easy to go back to the fact of the resurrection, whether we know much or little of the evidence in support of the historical character of the Gospels which report the fact to us. But it would take great learning and astuteness to ex- amine and weigh the whole of that evidence and to regulate our belief in strict accordance with it. We might as well try to " drink up the sea " for our refreshment. A! We are not qualified, it is true, to deal with such evidence as lies buried in dusty old libraries and in dead languages. But in our pulpits and seminaries we have plenty of ac- complished scholars who know all about that, and who assure us that it is all right. C. And there are plenty of other scholars quite as thorough who profess to have weighed Prayer- Meeting Theology. 185 the same evidence and to have found it want- ing. Why should we trust one school rather than another if the great question really de- pends on out-of-the-way evidence ? I am satis- fied myself to abide by the plain statements of the English New Testament. I accept the Gospel story of the resurrection of Christ, be- cause I believe in the living Lord, and am therefore sure that, even if this particular ac- count in the New Testament were not entirely true, still something like this, not a whit less marvellous and glorious, must be true. B. Scripture has little weight with you, or I might at least appeal to the example of the apostles against this substitution of your own experience, as you call it, for the great external fact, on the truth and acceptance of which all Christian experience, properly so called, must depend. The apostles regarded the fact of the resurrection of the Lord as a matter so funda- mental that without it all preaching and all be- lieving would be vain. They were called to be witnesses of the resurrection ; and they never swerved from the declaration of the historical fact to proclaim, as a substitute, some inward ups and downs of their own. 1 86 Prayer- Meeting Theology. C. Now at last I trust we shall understand one another. You appeal to the example of the apostles. To the example of the apostles above all would I appeal also. They believed that Christ was risen from the dead. They regarded His resurrection as an essential and principal part of the Christian faith ; and they fulfilled their ministry as witnesses of its truth. But our controversy is not as to the fact of the resurrection, or as to the importance of believ- ing it, but as to the true ground on which the belief must rest. On what grounds, then, did the apostles believe that the Lord was risen ? Did they believe on historical evidence ? The very best historical evidence they summarily rejected. It is notorious that Thomas dis- dained to believe on the testimony of his fellow-apostles, though no testimony could be better. It is equally true that to the other apostles the words of the faithful women, who were the earliest witnesses, were as idle tales. The eleven believed in the resurrection when the risen Lord showed Himself unto them, not before. And all the witnessing of the eleven and of them that were with them was utterly lost on one who was to be not a whit behind the very Prayer-Meeting Theology. 187 chiefest apostles. Saul of Tarsus never be- lieved until the Lord Himself appeared unto him on the way to Damascus. None of the apostles really believed on the testimony of other apostles, or on any historical evidence whatsoever. They believed because the Lord showed Himself alive unto them after His pas- sion. If the apostles could not believe on his- torical evidence when it was direct and simple and as strong as such evidence can ever be, how can it satisfy simple souls nowadays when it is remote and broken and complicated in the highest degree ? Happily we are not left to depend on it alone. Though born, as it might seem, out of due time for so high a privilege, we may yet know our blessed Lord directly, and ground our belief in His resurrection on actual communion with Him through the Spirit. And that this is really what takes place in every Christian life any one may see by ex- amining the confessions and prayers and hymns of the saints in all ages. Or if these be deemed too formal and perfunctory to prove the point, we may see the proof of it, where there is no room for formality, in the words of Christian people when their flesh and their heart fail. 1 88 Prayer-Meeting Theology. and the world grows dim, and Jesus Christ is still with them, their strength and joy in the hour of dissolution. Only the other day, as the papers reported, Dr. Howard Crosby, with his dying hand, wrote the message to his chil- dren : " My heart is resting sweetly with Jesus, and my hand is in His." I will add that this is what any one might expect who reads the Gospels. Christ promised not only that He would rise from the dead the third day, but also that He would not leave His people com- fortless, but would come unto them and abide with them for ever. We can easily believe that He is risen when we have felt the glorious power and grace of His presence. But if the promise of His continual presence is broken, what documents, what monuments, what histo- ries, what testimonies, are going to prove unto us that He is risen, — risen to break His word, and to disappoint the hopes of them that looked to Him for salvation ? B. Your vehemence carries you away, and makes you inaccurate even in your Scripture history. Some of the apostles did believe in the resurrection of their Lord on the testimony of an honored fellow-apostle ; otherwise, what Prayer- Meeting Theology. 189 means the saying, "The Lord is risen indeed and hath appeared unto Simon"? And one apostle, we are expressly told, believed on ob- serving the order of the deserted sepulchre. Besides, as you have just said, the apostles were called to be witnesses of the resurrection among the nations. But what need could there be of witnesses, or of what use could it be to send forth witnesses, if belief in the resurrection could rest on nothing less than the actual pres- ence and manifestation of the Lord Himself? And what can be the use of all the Christian testifying and teaching in the modern world if never a soul can believe on the testimony of others? Your theories seem to nullify not only Christian history but all intelligible Christian life and work, leaving only a certain mystical ecstasy, which a few may experience, but which is far too ethereal for ordinary human- nature's daily food. I should like to be able to attain the degree of certainty which you enjoy. But I should dread rather than covet your kind of certainty. What I need and desire, though I am as far as ever from securing it, is a firm possession of the faith which " cometh by hearing." I am afraid of the faith which I go Prayer- Meeting Theology. Cometh by brooding and dreaming and com- promising. C. I am prepared to renounce uncondition- ally every theory which nullifies Christian his- tory and Christian fellowship and the means of grace. But 1 wish I could make it clear to you that I have no such theory to renounce. Some- thing was said here about incipient belief and mature belief, the faith of the child and the faith of the grown-up man. That distinction perhaps will suggest the explanation of our dif- ferences and the way to a complete understand- ing between us. In your childhood you were more than satisfied with the evidence of the resurrection. When childhood was passed you wavered and hesitated in full view of the very same evidence. The child believed on obvious grounds. The man could not retain his belief without new and deeper grounds. "The Lord is risen indeed and hath appeared unto Simon," said the apostles, eager excited novices as yet in the great and glorious faith. How long would they have continued to believe if their faith had been left to subsist on the testimony of Simon ? How long, and to what purpose, would "that other disciple" have believed if his faith Prayer- Meeting Theology. 191 had nothing to feed on but what he saw in the holy sepulchre ? I think I am justified in say- ing that not one of the apostles could have beHeved permanently on the testimony of others or on any historical evidence whatsoever, and that their real, abiding, effective belief in the resurrection, though prepared for by testi- mony, rested on their actual communion with the risen Lord. As to the ministry of the apostles, faith came " by hearing " wherever they proclaimed the glad tidings. But a stable, fruitful, victorious faith never came merely by hearing even apostolic preaching. The Spirit from on high was given to those who received the word, and the work begun by the apostles was perfected by the indwelling Christ. And so it is with all Christian preaching and teach- ing, whether by the apostles, or by the woman of Samaria, or by the faithful workers of our own time. People will be impressed by a seri- ous and faithful ministry. They will believe the earnest words of holy men and women whose lives attest their message. But if their faith is to abide and bear fruit, they must, as time goes on, learn to believe, not because of the word of man or woman, but because they 192 Prayer-Meeting Theology. have themselves known Him that liveth and was dead, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. This is the ultimate ground of faith. All faith is insecure until it rests here. The authority of believing parents and friends, and the authority of Christendom with its great his- tory and its saints and martyrs, are legitimate and impressive ; but they will only sustain a provisional faith. In the last resort, to the awakened, earnest, maturing soul, no authority is sufficient save the voice of the Good Shep- herd Himself. And, my dear brother, you have heard that voice long ago, heard it and followed Him. You have the communion with Him which is the ultimate ground of faith. You have the true faith itself, we all know. The inordinate craving which disturbs your peace is intellectual, not spiritual. You walk by faith day by day. You would fain walk the same path by sight also. You would have faith and sight go hand in hand to the divine*presence. You know God in Christ according to the Spirit. You would also know Him according to the flesh. But it cannot be. C would have said more, but the warnings of approaching revolution which had for some Prayer- Meeting Theology. 193 time been heard at intervals were now justified. A tumult of voices and hurrying footsteps was heard on the stairs, and three or four of the smaller children broke into the room, and, frightened at their own boldness, scarcely plucked up courage enough to fulfil their mis- sion and announce that dinner was all ready. " There," said A, " I suppose you are sorry. The dinner-horn is not unwelcome when heard out in the corn-fields. But here it sounds an inglorious retreat before the battle is lost or won." " No, we need not be sorry," replied C ; " I think these interruptions are as much for our good in our speculations as in our other labors. They find stopping-places for us when we cannot find them ourselves. And often when we have ceased our searching, we find, as by a gracious inspiration, the solution of difficulties which had baffled all our toil." '\What a pity then," retorted A, " that they did not blow the horn two or three hours sooner ! " " No," answered C, as he picked up one of the chubby heralds and led his friends down-stairs, " a pause after you have done nothing and attempted nothing is a continuation of nothing. But an enforced pause after you have done your best is 194 Prayer-Meeting Theology. often God's chosen opportunity to help. So He giveth His beloved sleep, and, in their sleep, riches, which, awake, they could in no way compass. III. At the foot of the stairs the theologians were met by the main body of the holiday-makers, and young and old marched in some disorder to the table, which seemed so unfamiliar in position and general appearance that C needed a pilot in his own house. When all had found their places, the novelty of the situation and the difificulty of serving so many together with- out the aid of trained waiters went far toward supplying the place of any sustained conversa- tion. The younger children, however, were unwilling that so great an occasion should pass without the dignity of common discourse, and they made several brave attempts to introduce attractive topics. Their efforts, and their haps and mishaps, were not undeserving of a chroni- cler ; but they would lead us too far from our present purpose. When they were almost ready to leave the table, a child of the house ventured to ask : " Where were you, and Mr. 195 196 Prayer-Meeting Theology. A and Mr. B, all the morning, Papa ? " " We stayed in the house to have a good talk together," was the answer. " Was it a very good talk ? " murmured the little questioner, evidently trying to master the precise force of the adjective. " And may I be so bold," said one of the ladies, " as to ask what this very good talk was all about ? " The men looked at one another in dumb consultation as to the proper answer ; but the answer was not forth- coming. The ladies laughed, and one of them remarked : " A solid half-day of talk, and noth- ing to tell ! Something beyond our compre- hension, I have no doubt. But would it not be well to educate us and fit us for high communings with our husbands?" The men, however, were not to be enticed to retail their morning talk. They rose from the table, and walked with little ceremony out-of-doors, osten- sibly to examine the appointments of the yards and barns and to exchange thoughts on sundry points of good husbandry. But they were in no mood for such work, and B broke out : " Let us not be entangled with the affairs of this life to-day. Farming will have us body and soul to-morrow. But now we are doctors Prayer -Meeting Theology. 197 and bishops of the Church hesitant. Where did we leave our theology ? " The council being thus abruptly called to order, the con- versation took something like the following form, the speakers standing at first and then one by one assuming such postures of greater ease as the place allowed. A. If you have any more debating to do, you must do it quickly. And it seems to me that you have much more to do now than you had when you began. You might then well enough have left things alone. But now that you have torn in pieces the whole body of di- vinity and scattered its parts all about in such a sad litter, you ought to gather the dishonored limbs together and lay them out in some decent order before you leave them. C. I took a larger part than my proper share in the conversation of this morning ; and I sup- pose I am mainly responsible for the " litter " you speak of. I hardly feel equal to the task of restoring order just now. It will, in fact, take years of devout living as well as thinking to get all the factors of our religious system into their proper places and uses. But just to gather the " litter " into one little heap, I should like to 198 Prayer-Meeting Theology. refer once more to the main point for which I have wished to contend. What I have desired to emphasize is, that our faith does not depend, either for its inception or for its full confirma- tion, on difficult logical processes or on remote historical investigations, though such processes are quite legitimate and even necessary in the fully developed intellectual life of man ; that, simply as Christians, we have no need to launch on the treacherous sea of critical and historical controversy, but may witness its storms and its shipwrecks from the safe shore ; that illiterate people and young children may know enough to believe in Christ with good reason, and that when they do believe in Him their faith is met by the spiritual realities which it recognized afar off, and is thereby lifted out of the region of controversy and placed on a rock, on which it thenceforth rests securely, whatsoever winds of doctrine blow around it. B. You are anxious to distinguish between faith and knowledge because you perceive that knowledge will fail you. You wish to provide that when knowledge does utterly fail, and when, one would suppose, ignorance or uncer- tainty must follow, then you may spurn the Prayer- Meeting Theology. 199 vulgar earth and rest in the certainty of faith, that is, in certainty without knowledge, a kind of certainty very hard to distinguish from wilful assumption or superstition. As Christians, you say, we may, from a place of safety, view the tempest passing by and the wrecks strewing the shore. But as men we cannot keep from the path of the tempest. Its elements are the forces of our own nature. Its victims are our fellow-men. And, whether as men or as Chris- tians, we ought surely to desire a haven into which we can pilot the fleet, not a proud rock from which we may witness its dispersion and ruin. On such a rock you and I have long stood, but not in perfect peace. I should be content if I could but tell rationally how I found the lofty asylum, and how my brethren may reach it. But I can point to no steps and to no landing. The rock frowns upon the perishing wretches steep and inhospitable. We found footing upon it in a dream, we know not how. In other words, whatever personal assur- ance with regard to religious truth you and I may at times have possessed or may possess now, we cannot satisfactorily connect it with verifiable facts, and therefore we cannot com- 200 Prayer-Meeting Theology. municate or justify it to any one. How then can we really justify it to ourselves, or be truly satisfied with it ? How shall we meet the charge that our faith is a violent assumption ? C. I have no objection to say that our faith, in its earlier stages, is an assumption. It is an assumption, not wilful or violent, but earnest, deliberate, reverent, and dutiful. It is an as- sumption which we have the best reasons for making. And I believe you may yet show unto others the landing and the steps which led you to it long ago. In childhood you were satisfied with the evidence offered to you in favor of the Christian faith. Now, what was that evidence which satisfied you ? Mainly it was the character of the faith itself; and its adaptation to the need and craving of your soul ; and the natural and moral authority of those who delivered this faith unto you as their own most precious possession, valued increas- ingly with increasing trial, the life of their life. Authority is theoretically under a cloud in our time. But practically it is as real and power- ful as ever. It has been said, I think, by the accomplished author of The Influence of Author- ity in Matters of Opinion, that " one of the main Prayer- Meeting Theology. 201 elements of civilization is well-placed confi- dence." And if civilization endures and ad- vances through confidence in worthy authorities even more than through independent inquiry, so certainly does the Christian faith also. You and I believed the Gospel in the first instance, not on scientific demonstration of its truth, but on the authority, the legitimate spiritual au- thority, of Christian people, who testified in word and in deed that they had experienced its power and proved its truth. When we have thus believed on the testimony of the witnessing Church, and when we have been confirmed in the faith by our own experience of the Chris- tian life, we are not without the means to lead others to the truth so far as men may be said to lead one another to the truth of God. We have no reason to distrust or to depart from the procedure by which the Church reached us. We must bear witness to the truth with the whole Church of God : and our testimony, being supported by our lives, will help to do for others what the faithful testimony of our elders did for us. The truth is maintained and propagated in the world by personal, not by merely logical, testimony. And in the end, 202 Prayer- Meeting Theology. strictly speaking, the truth is not made effective by us at all, but by the Holy Spirit acting through us and with us : and He can act through our concrete personal life as well as through our abstract reasonings and formal conclusions. B. One might take you for a good Catholic from the unction with which you speak of au- thority and the Church. The Church indeed ! Where is your Church, my dear man? We have churches enough and to spare, it is true. But churches are not a Church. Or if we have a Church, it is a Church of our own making, and a Church which with the least provocation we will pull down and make over again to suit our altered taste. We make the creed, we make the ritual, we make the discipline, we make the minister, we make everything, inside and out. The whole Church is the work of our own hands. And what authority, pray, can such a Church have for us or for anybody ? We are ourselves before it and above it. I can under- stand a Catholic's appeal to the authority of his Church. But we have fled for our life from Rome, and from every Church making any serious pretensions to authority, as from Anti- Pray er- Meeting Theology. 203 Christ. You dare not look back that way. Remember Lot's wife ! C. Lot's wife looked back towards Sodom, not towards a great and honored Christian Church. We have fled from Rome, it is true ; and the flight was doubtless necessary. Per- haps it was even necessary to flee, as we did, with precipitation, like the man on the house- top who durst not enter his own house to carry anything away with him. Still, we ought to remember, the fire of God did not consume the house which we forsook ; nor was the house even left desolate. The Protestant Reforma- tion was Providential, of course. But so also was the preservation of the Catholic Church throughout a great part of Europe. Puri- tanism and Nonconformity in England have been abundantly justified. But the Anglican Church also is justified none the less. While we need not lament our flight from Rome, or from the Church of England, we may with ad- vantage in these peaceful times go back and look at the old homes of our forefathers, and recover some of the treasures which we aban- doned in the great panic, bestowing also, if it be possible, some good gift out of the abun- 204 Prayer- Meeting Theology. dance of our new homes. And if some of our friends are smitten with the love of the older homes, and desire to end their days within their sacred precincts, God bless them, and give them the faith and the graces of their saintliest fore-fathers! I never could mourn over Non- conformists in England and Wales who hon- estly change their minds and conform with the old Church. Nor have I a syllable of re- gret or blame for the distinguished Anglicans who went all the way to Rome, and went to stay. I am glad that they went, and proved that the way is still open and safe for the chil- dren of God from one communion to the other, and that souls nurtured on Thomas Scott's theology and Milner's Church History could still find the bread of life in the Roman Church. There is a longing in all sects, from Rome downward, for greater union among Christians. The passing of individuals to and fro from one communion to another will help to tear down the fences. And the wistful climbing of the fences on the inside, by uncanonical ex- change of pulpits and unlicensed liberty of prophesying and other irregularities of daily occurrence, will not strengthen them. This Prayer- Meeting Theology. 205 longing for a visible union between all Chris- tians, and this groping for it so comnion on all sides, whether they will ever bring forth any good fruit or not, at least plainly betoken, what is to my mind an established fact, that, below the surface, the churches are a Church after all, divided in opinions and methods, but one in aim and faith, and therefore one in influence and authority on behalf of the Gos- pel. The fact which you have in your mind when you say that we make our churches at our pleasure only comes to this : that we rec- ognize the authority of the Church with some personal freedom ; that the truth handed down unto us in substance takes definite form in our minds according to our respective capacities ; that we get a personal hold of the truth and repr'bduce it in vital relations to our own life and thought, instead of repeating it in fixed forms and phrases like parrots. Authority with us is as real and as great as in the Roman Catholic Church, perhaps even greater because more inward and spiritual. B. You are surely thinking, not of the au- thority of the Church, but of the authority of what, for the time being, commends itself to 2o6 Prayer- Meeting Theology. our individual minds as truth — that is, of the authority of our own shifting opinions. This is the authority to which we all bow in the end. And it is this that breaks up the old Churches and the new, and, by discrediting Church after Church founded in love and good faith, makes the very idea of a Church among us almost a mockery. If the Churches could agree in their teachings, their authority would be of weight and of use. But, disagreeing as they do always and everywhere, if they have any authority at all it can only be authority to cancel one another's influence, and to throw every man back on the precarious guidance of his own private judgment. C. We cannot desire any authority to keep us in perpetual childhood, or to make our faith for ever rest on the wisdom of men and not on the power of God. But we certainly have in the Christian Church, divided though it be, an effective authority reaching far beyond our own reasonings and sufficing for our needs. We make far too much of tlie so-called divi- sions of the Christian Church. They are mere lines on the surface, not clefts in the body. The Church of Rome still has authority for Prayer- Meeting Theology. 207 Protestants. Her saints and her theologians, when they bear witness of Christ, are ours as well as hers. Cardinal Newman says with great tenderness and beauty that, while yet in the Anglican Church, he seemed to himself an out- cast when he took down from the shelves of his library the volumes of St. Athanasius or St. Basil, and set himself to study them ; but that, on the contrary, when at length he was brought into Catholic communion, he kissed them with delight, with a feeling that in them he had more than all that he had lost ; and, as though directly addressing the glorious saints who bequeathed them to the Church, he said to the inanimate pages : "You are now mine, and I am now yours, beyond any mistake." We may well herein be bolder than Newman, and say that the great Fathers were his before, beyond any mistake, and that they are ours also. And we may claim not only the Fathers of the early undivided Church but even the very latest saints and doctors of the Church of Rome, and Newman himself among them. He is an excellent example of the insignificance of the " divisions " in the Church of Christ, re- minding us that frequently they are not only 2o8 Prayer- Meeting Theology. lines on the surface but imaginary lines at that. There was doubtless a Providential pur- pose served in his conversion to Rome. His Letters and Correspondence show that it was the proper ending of the captivating poem of his earlier life. But, for all that, in the true Cath- olic Church, the fact and the date of his conver- sion to Rome may be safely forgotten. The other conversion, his conversion to God at the age of fifteen, of which all through his life he was more certain than that he had hands and feet, brought him into the true Church in which he lived and died. The Parochial Sermons of the Anglican, and the Discourses to Mixed Congregations of the Roman Catholic, are alike the utterances of a sincere and earnest disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, .and alike they swell the mighty voice of the Christian Church testifying of her Lord. The various divisions of the Church have much to distin- guish them from one another if we regard matters of secondary importance ; but on the great articles of the common faith they speak with marvellous unanimity. We still have One Church, and really but one. B. The Invisible Church, I suppose, which Prayer-Meeting Theology. 209 is also inaudible, and plainly of no account upon earth. C. The Church has an invisible side, its heavenward side. Its life is hidden. Its citi- zenship is in heaven. And the various sections of the Church are invisibly united by their common inward faith and love toward God and by the presence of Christ through the Spirit with them all alike. But the Church which is invisible on its heavenward side may still be visible on earth ; and though its unity rests on and consists in what is invisible, yet that unity may be manifested not only by political or quasi-political articulation but by the fruits of the One Spirit, by Christian pro- fession and worship, and by the observance of Christian ordinances. The Church of Rome calls itself visible ; so does the Church of Eng- land. How can that Church be invisible which includes these conspicuous bodies and many more ? B. Then all who profess and call themselves Christians are to be counted in the One Church whose witness is of such authority in the mat- ter of faith ? C. Most assuredly, though we do not pre- 2IO Prayer -Meeting Theology. sume to judge the hearts or to vouch for the sin- cerity of any. We call a wheat field a wheat field without stopping to count the tares ; and we may call a Church a Church without stopping to weed out the hypocrites. B. But a house divided against itself cannot stand. What if some of these bodies which profess and call themselves Christians should uphold and teach doctrines which are at war with Christianity and subversive of all religion ? What then would become of their authority ? Would it be for or against the Gospel ? C. Why should you borrow needless trouble ? Of answering hypothetical questions and pro- viding for remote contingencies there is no end. When people cease to believe in Jesus Christ they will in due time cease to profess behef in Him. B. But in the meantime, before they cease to profess faith in Him, are they authorities for the truth of the Gospel, making up One Church with us though they distinctly contradict what is to us the very essence of the Christian faith ? My question is not merely hypothetical. The case stated is not a contingency at all, but a standing and familiar matter of fact. Take, for Prayer-Meeting Theology. 21 I instance, the Unitarians. I mention them with no lack of love or courtesy, you must well know. I have been drawn too much into their way of thinking to have any right or inchnation to speak harshly of them. And the honored names on their roll, and their wide and generous cul- ture, and their many works of piety and love, make it impossible for any one to speak harshly of them. Yet I must say that, though they pro- fess themselves Christians and though their lives often would adorn any profession, their teach- ing, as it seems to me, denies the Christian faith utterly. And so it seems to all Catholic and all Evangelical Christendom. And so it seems also to those who openly reject Christianity. With Unitarianism they have no serious quarrel. When Jesus is regarded as merely a man, then is the offence of the cross ceased. In regard to the Unitarians, then, for example, which is the more serious fact, and which carries the greater authority, their sentimental adherence to the Christian name or their emphatic rejection of the fundamental article of the Christian faith? C. I should say that their faith is more weighty than their opinions ; and that their earnest profession of the faith which their opin- 212 Prayer-Meeting Theology. ions seem to deny is a distinct confirmation of the faith of the orthodox Churches. If none beheved in Christ but those who fully accept the Nicene creed, there might be some ground for saying that Christianity is a religion for minds of a single type and habit. But when powerful and cultured bodies which reject our formula still trust and love our Lord and Saviour, they certainly add to the volume of Church authority in favor of the Gospel. B. I should rejoice in so large and respect- able an addition if it did not involve fearful de- traction also. They profess faith in our Lord, it is true. But they first seek to divest Him of that for which alone we deem Him worthy of the worship and confidence of mankind. How then can we attach any weight to their faith without repudiating our own? C. We need not identify the Christian faith absolutely with our own interpretation of it. Our precise view of Christian doctrine is surely not infallible or essential. The apostles were long without it if they ever came to it at all. It took Christian scholars many ages to formulate the doctrine of the Person of Christ as we are supposed to hold it. The mass of orthodox Prayer-Meeting Theology. 213 Christians throughout the world cannot even now be supposed to hold it with any great clear- ness or firmness. Our own wives and children have but the slightest hold upon it, being ready to confess it in words without ever confronting the full difficulty of the sense or of the proof. But we trust they have the one thing needful, because they have personal affection, submis- sion, devotion, to the Saviour, personal trust in Him, and the all-embracing gift of His Spirit. And it is certain that those who receive Christ as little children, and receive grace and spiritual power through Him, bear witness of Him in His Church as effectively as the acutest and most correct theologians. The witness of the Church is in the main the witness of humble souls who have never fathomed the Arian con- troversy but who have known the love of Christ. B. Those who have never raised the great question, and who fall short of full belief by defect of thought, do not contradict our faith, and may reasonably be supposed to be at heart in sympathy with it and ready to receive it in its strictest form when it can in such form be properly presented and brought home to them. But those who have squarely faced the ques- 214 Prayer- Meeting Theology. tion of the Divinity of Christ, and have dis- tinctly decided it against the teaching of the Catholic creeds, do deny and reject what to us is the very essence of the Christian faith. C. Yet, supposing them to have the same personal affection, submission, devotion, to the Saviour, and the same personal trust in Him, which the mass of unspeculative Christians have, they differ from that mass only in having greater mental activity directed to religious questions ; and they differ from pious orthodox thinkers only in having to think without the endowment, or the bias, or the training, or the environment, or whatever else it is, that insures orthodox conclusions. If men will think at all, they must think as they are able with all the limitations of their native powers and of their education. If we think, we must run the risk of falling into error. Will you say that those who do not think about religious questions may be good Christians, but that those who do think may find it impossible to be Christians at all ? B. The question is not as to the possibility of being Christians. We are no judges in that matter. Unitarians may be Christians if Christ Prayer-Meeting Theology. 215 will accept them. Our question is whether the weight of their authority among men is cast on the side of the Christian faith. C. To that I have already answered that in as far as they confess their faith in Christ and live by that faith, in as far as they practically commend the Lord Jesus Christ to the love and obedience and confidence of their fellow-men, their authority is as clearly on the side of the Gospel and as effectual in its behalf as that of other Christians. B. But how can they commend the Lord Jesus Christ to the love and obedience and confidence of their fellow-men ? They cannot commit themselves even so far as to call Him " Lord and Master." Their differentia among professing Christians is " to have no differentia " excepting this, that they honor Christ, not as they honor the Father, but as they honor Moses and Plato and Paul and Goethe and Abraham Lincoln. Christ needs no Church to commend Him to the confidence of mankind in this mod- erate degree. And a Church which makes it its business so to commend Him is more likely to obscure than to increase the glory of His Name, more likely to cause His followers to stumble 2i6 Prayer- Meeting Theology. and go astray than to bring strangers under His yoke. Cultivated and charitable, and even religious, as the Unitarians undoubtedly are, to recognize them as Christians witnessing for the true faith is to commend to our children and to all the world as Christianity what to ourselves is a denial of the Lord who bought us. C. You are unjust to your friends after all. Unitarians who profess themselves Christians do not class the man Christ Jesus with other great men. To them, as to the rest of us, He stands alone as the spiritual Head of the race. Nor do they withhold from Him any honor which they can consider real. They reverence Him if they have missed the true doctrine of His person. And if they do not give Him all His rightful titles, it is from misunder- standing and from no churlishness. They do Him greater honor than any title can confer in seeking under His guidance to do the will of the Father which sent Him. Our children are pretty well drilled in the orthodox dogmas, but they clearly lack something yet. Who knows but they need lessons in the actual service of Christ from the practical Unitarians? And, besides, if you could protect your chil- Prayer- Meeting Theology. 217 dren against them by a mere anathema, they could in like manner protect their own chil- dren against you. To guard your children from the risk of imbibing incorrect opinions, would you renounce the right to aid other children in gaining the full truth ? Would you shut all children up for ever in close confinement with the opinions of their parents, whatever those may be ? No, let the conflicting opinions have a fair field. Fortify your children with the truth, and welcome all who love Christ into full communion, that, if so be, you may have the blessed privilege of teaching some of them the way of God more perfectly. But, in fact, you cannot protect right thinking within your own household otherwise than by the clear and ener- getic manifestation of the truth in doctrine and in life. Error has full scope in society, in litera- ture, in all the world. Suppress it in the Church, silence it in the home ; you will still meet it in the street, in the reading-room, and in the homes of your friends. Nay, without any suggestion from without, the errors which we condemn and lament in others rise like apparitions in our own minds. They follow our truer thoughts as if they were their shadows. It sometimes 2 1 8 Prayer-Meeting Theology. seems to me that all the heresies are little more than the hardening of thoughts which lurk within us all into definite, abiding, and aggres- sive forms. B. That does not justify the heretics or en- courage us to consort with them. If we must encounter doubt and misbelief in the privacy of our own thoughts, we should simply be re- inforcing the enemy against ourselves by asso- ciating freely as Christian brethren with those in whom the lurking misbelief has triumphed openly. C. Yet it is hard to condemn those whose only fault is that they are to a greater degree than ourselves the victims of tendencies from which none of us are free. To welcome them into full Christian fellowship would not be reinforcing the enemy against ourselves, but reinforcing the truth in the magainst the en- emy. I do not believe that we can ever in this life get rid of the thoughts and misgivings which in their isolated and hardened forms are called heresies. I believe they are even factors in the proper life and thought of the Church in this immature world. True doctrines are not adequately grasped until Prayer- Meeting Theology. 219 they have been opposed. Neither is the truth which has been reached maintained in all its fulness and life without the stimulus of the opposite thought. A too rigid orthodoxy in the long run becomes dry and barren. It paralyzes thought and life. Then the rise of a great heresy is felt to be a blessing, and the steadiest and devoutest Christians glorify God for it and embrace it with joy. Be hospitable and brotherly to heretical believers, and they will always be a minority in the Church. They will be very useful too. They will keep the currents of religious thought fresh. They will be of incalculable service on the frontier of unbelief-, succoring the outcasts who are seeking the way of light and rallying the fugitives who are making for the desert. On the other hand, if you withhold from them the recognition which is their due, if you try to put them out- side the Christian pale, they must suspend their useful labors and abandon their proper places and turn their hands against their blundering brethren ; and in this false position they will increase and multiply unnaturally and fill the Church and the world with horrid clamor and .commotion. 2 20 Prayer-Meeting Theology. A. You speak like yourself. You love her- etics. You have much in common with them. You are an incipient heretic yourself. So you have said, and I verily believe you. But you should speak for yourself alone, and not for our wives and children and the mass of ortho- dox Christians and the very apostles of the Lamb. If the Nicene creed adds to the doc- trine of the apostles, its additions are of no account for our children or for ourselves. But if the good old creed faithfully states and care- fully guards the apostolic doctrine, as it un- doubtedly does, it fairly earns our love and respect. The Nicene faith is neither more nor less than the faith of the baptismal formula and the apostolic benediction. And in this divine faith the wise and prudent have no particular advantage over the common family of devout believers. I utterly deny your allegation that Unitarians only carry a little farther thoughts and tendencies which are present in the minds of orthodox believers. You and the like of you live too far from the orthodox believer to know much about his state of mind. I, for one, have never felt anything but horror and aversion for the whole Unitarian system, root Prayer-Meeting Theology. 221 and branch. Its ideas do not lurk in my mind. I do not find them necessary for the maturing or for the maintenance of my faith. I have no use in the world for them. And I have no more sympathy with Unitarians than I have with the Jews who persecuted our blessed Lord because He, being a man, made Himself equal with God. C. Take that back for shame ! The Jews hated the Lord and hounded Him to the death. The Unitarians love Him and serve Him as sincerely as any of His disciples. And even as to their doctrine, you would have more sym- pathy with them if you were to sit down and develop your own Trinitarianism in detail and in the plain language of living men. A. That may be. But I have no wish to make the experiment. I believe in the Trinity, but I cannot presume to explain it. It cannot be explained. C. Just so. You and the Unitarians differ about what you do not understand. And you differ because they try to understand it and you do not. I say it not to blame you or them. I understand it as little as either of you. I hold on to the Nicene creed as to an anchor. 2 22 Prayer- Meeting Theology. because I know it is a tried and safe statement, and not because I realize fully what it means or believe its precise terms essential to the integrity of the Christian faith. Whilst using it faithfully as an anchor, I cannot deny myself a length of cable which ofttimes allows me to be carried very near the Unita-rians. Their her- esy is only a concentration of what lies diffused in our own thoughts. It is an expression of difficulty rather than of unbelief. Our minds swing far out towards the difficulty, and then swing back again. The Unitarian mind has stood at a point where orthodox belief is im- possible. But our swinging to and fro and their standing still are matters of speculation merely. In practical devotion to the Saviour, and in the love and service of souls, we may walk hand in hand. A. Can two walk together except they be agreed ? C. Two ? Yes, millions. Barbarians, Scythi- ans, bond and free, all sorts and conditions of men, with their inharmonious medley of opinions, can walk together, or can learn to walk together, if they are led by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Those who do walk together Prayer- Meeting Theology. 223 most harmoniously do not always " agree " in matters of opinion. But they walk together with all lowliness and meekness, with long- suffering, forbearing one another in love, en- deavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. I do not believe that members of the same communions always agree in opin- ions, even on the most momentous questions, any more than members of different com- munions. A. That is, you are willing to tax members of all Christian communions with gross insin- cerity. Members of the same communion pro- fess to be of the same opinions on great questions. If any of them change their opin- ions, they should also change their confession and go to their own place. Many do so at great cost. And it is not fair to assume that it is a common thing among Christians to carry a flag to which they have ceased to be loyal. C. On the other hand, I think it is neither fair nor wise to expect all Christian people to carry any flag at all to indicate mere opinions. As opinions are not hereditary and immutable, and as opposite opinions frequently thrive under the same teaching, uniformity of opin- 224 Prayer-Meeting Theology. ions will not be found in any denomination unless very stringent measures are taken to secure it. And any thorough method of en- forcing uniformity would reveal at once the unchristian and inhuman character of the at- tempt. Just now I can think of only two methods which would have any chance of suc- cess. The first is suggested by a marvellous fragment of natural history which I learned one rainy day in my early childhood from a juvenile professor in the swamp near the Long Pond. This young naturalist, who possibly evolved his science out of his own conscious- ness, told me that the " polliwogs," or tadpoles, replenish from their own numbers the two distinct tribes of frogs and lizards. The frog- mother, so he explained, if she is willing to let her polliwogs become lizards, has only to let them alone, and lizards they become by dint of natural perversity. But if she wishes to keep them in the frog family, she must cut off their tails ; and when this severe discipli- nary operation is faithfully performed, frogs they are and frogs they must remain as long as they can crawl. In like manner, to keep the young members of any communion safe in the Prayer- Meeting Theology. 225 family opinions for ever, some such mutila- tion, not indeed of the body but of the mind, may be resorted to. Let them think, and you cannot tell what opinions they may adopt. But cut off the root of thought, and you may label their opinions without fear. They will never change. This is the simplest and surest way. But it is cruel and costly. It is a loss to the world, a deep injury to the victims, and a reproach to their Maker. The other way is to pick the members over and pigeon-hole them properly among the various denominations once a week or oftener. This way is a very laborious one, and almost as cruel as the other. It involves the turning of a child out of his congenial home to dwell with strangers with whom, perhaps, he has no bond of union but some miserable opinion. For versatile minds not steadied by experience it involves changes so sweeping and so frequent as to make it impossible for them to strike roots or to acquire experience of anything but change and unrest. And it will turn a large class out-of-doors, without a home to go to even for a time, because their minds are hospi- table to many views but sworn adherents of 226 Prayer- Meeting Theology. none. Such men are not necessarily indifferent or lukewarm. They are often faithful and ef- fective witnesses for the saving Christian truth which underlies the varying opinions of Chris- tians. None of us could ever defend the use of these barbarous methods to protect the most admirable opinions in the world. But what methods less objectionable would answer the purpose ? As regards both the actual lack of uniformity and the difiSculty of securing it by any tolera- ble means, in our respective Christian commun- ions, perhaps the question of future retribution is a better illustration for us than the one which we have been considering. It is a question greatly agitated in our time, and a question on which good men in all denominations are di- vided. We ourselves have plenty of excellent men who reject more or less completely the view generally held among us on this solemn question. Yet they have no desire to leave us ; and they would not be likely to find a more congenial home if they tried every sect under the sun. What shall we do with them ? They are content to work with us as brethren. They seek the ends which we seek. They use the Prayer-Meeting Theology. 227 means which we use. They are one with us in spirit. Their only fault (if a fault) is that they feel more keenly than the rest of us the diffi- culties which perplex us all with regard to the eternal future of those who die impenitent. Most of us believe sorrowfully that the impen- itent go away in death to endless, hopeless, intolerable, irremediable woe. But the more vividly we conceive this, the harder it is to believe firmly. It is scarcely too much to say that those of us who believe it most strongly believe more than others in just about the proportion in which we repre- sent the matter to ourselves less clearly and fully than the others do. The faith of the sturdiest of us on this point is shocked and strained when we are made to feel profoundly what it means, as, for instance, in losing chil- dren by death in a state of apparent impeni- tence. It is easier to believe that Cain and Judas are in eternal torments than to believe the same of a beloved child or of a brother or sister. But all impenitent souls have lived in the bosom of some family ; all have had fathers and mothers and friends. To believe in eternal torments without flinching we must forget the 2 28 Prayer-Meeting Theology. faces and the voices and the human hearts of those who loved us though they loved not Christ. A. You are unjust to the sternest believers in everlasting punishment. They hold the terrible doctrine in continual sorrow and heaviness. They hold it without wavering, not because they are reckless of souls, but because they read it plainly in the word of God. They hold it true not of others only but of themselves also unless they repent and believe the Gospel. And no man can be expected to show a tenderness for others which he dare not indulge towards his own soul. C. They hold the doctrine, to be sure. I hold it too, though I shrink from the very name of it. I hold it because I cannot get rid of the conviction that Jesus Christ teaches it firmly though with divine sadness. I hold it because I know that my only hope of salvation is God's sovereign mercy, and I cannot dispute the eter- nity of perdition without putting forth a claim which is incompatible with the entire sincerity of a prayer for mercy. I hold it because, in view of God's unspeakable gift, in view of the humiliation and agony of the Eternal Son who Prayer-Meeting Theology. 229 loved me and gave Himself for me, I cannot pretend to say that any punishment is too sore, or that there can possibly remain any way of escape, for me, when I have trodden under foot the Son of God, and have counted the blood of the covenant wherewith I was sanctified an unholy thing, and have done despite unto the Spirit of Grace. But, while it is impossible for me to reject this awful doctrine of eternal punishment, it is the very next thing to impos- sible for me to believe it. The difficulty is great when we think of the countless multitudes of men like ourselves who are to be in torment for ever and ever. But it is greater far when we think of the doctrine in its relation to God and His glorious attributes. Think, first, of His love. God is love. He is the Father of the spirits of all men. He loves the world. Even the sins of men do not turn away His lovingkindness from them. He commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He seeks that which is lost. But those whom He has loved and sought with infinite tenderness all the days of their life He abandons for ever in their greatest need in the bitter hour of death. He laughs 230 Prayer- Meeting Theology. at their calamity. His love to them is turned to bitter hate. In His hot displeasure He puts them away from Himself for ever. He has no more desire to the work of His hands. He consents to their utter ruin. Think, again, of His power. He is the Almighty Maker, the Supreme Ruler, of all things. He has solemnly declared that His counsel shall stand, and that He will do all His pleasure. But He consents freely to an eternal partition of His empire. Having long striven to destroy the works of the devil and to expel evil from human life. He at last gives up the glorious struggle, and virtually says unto evil, Divide et impera. Think of His holiness, that essential attribute of God which might afford some hope to those who have no claim on His love. By His very na- ture He abhors evil. He hates it with invinci- ble, everlasting hatred. But He will not utterly abolish it. He will cease striving to abolish it, and content Himself with wreaking his ven- geance upon it for ever. He will endure it through all eternity though He cannot abide it. Think, once more, of His blessedness, and of the blessedness of His saints, when Christ's mediatorial work is done, when all His enemies Prayer-Meeting Theology. 231 are put under His feet, when He shall see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied, when God shall be all in all. Blessed saints, re- deemed and glorified, enjoying fulness of life and pleasures for evermore at the right hand of God, in sight of the impassable gulf which holds in eternal sorrow their brothers and their sisters and their own children ! The blessed God, all in all, with the smoke of the torment of the infernal prison-house and the hopeless lamentations of lost souls, the work of His own hands, rising up before His face for ever and ever Such thoughts, thoughts which can hardly be expressed without fear of blasphemy, distract the mind in view of the doctrine of eternal punishment. Still I believe this doctrine, which cannot be fully stated without a hardihood almost impious. I cannot disbelieve it. This life is not given unto us without a purpose. If we throw our life away regardless of the pur- pose for which it was given, we must suffer loss, a loss great in proportion to the worth of life and its opportunities; and the loss is obvi- ously irreparable. We can live this life but once. If we win the prize, it is eternal gain. 232 Prayer- Meeting Theology. If we miss it, we miss it for ever. The issues of opportunities which are not to be repeated are necessarily final. It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. Death ends our earthly life and all its possi- bilities. And the judgment which follows turns upon the things done in the body. After the judgment, we only read of eternal life and eternal punishment. That is the last word of Christ on the subject. Can we go beyond His final word? "Shall we pretend to know more than the all-knowing, or question out of pity that which the perfect love declares ? " I must believe this doctrine, shocking and terrible as it is. But I believe it with exceeding great in- firmity. And I maintain that all who seriously believe it must believe with more or less diffi- culty. Now, if all who believe it at all must believe it with misgivings, the misgivings may well be stronger in some minds than in others. And those who embrace the hope that all sin- ful souls will be restored to God, or the hope that a second probation will be given in another world to some of those who die impenitent, are only carried a little farther than the rest of us, and detained longer, in a region of thought in Prayer- Meeting Theology. 233 which we are all driven about and tossed more or less. A. Your difficulties in this as in other mat- ters are of your own making. What can you expect but difficulties without end when you allow yourself to speak of God in a manner which is both unscriptural and contrary to all sound reason ? God is immutable ; and you might spare yourself the idle thinking which ignores that. The teaching of Scripture as to the Divine decrees annihilates your main diffi- culty as to endless retribution. There is no change in the Divine Mind in relation to evil or in relation to man at any point from eternity to eternity. " God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass." But we are not going into these high matters now. You took up this question of retribution as an illustration. You wished to show, I believe, that Christians may differ almost to any extent in their doctrinal views without crippling their usefulness ; that error in doctrine does not greatly affect the authority of disciples witnessing for the Chris- tian faith. Your illustration is most unfortu- 2 34 Prayer- Meeting Theology. nate for your purpose, but a happy one for the interest of truth. Whatever the steps may be which lead men's minds to uncertainty as to the duration of punishment in the world to come, the effect of such uncertainty is always and necessarily the same, — a relaxation of anxiety and effort with regard to the great end of life. If any professing Christians openly question the express declaration of Scripture and the com- mon belief of the churches, that the wicked will be sent away to everlasting punishment, their authority, be it great or small, will all tell in favor of indifference and delay and half- heartedness in the great concern of the soul and eternity. Therefore it is right and neces- sary that those who care for souls and believe the simple and solemn teaching of Scripture should repudiate as false brethren and destroy- ers of men any and all such as profess them- selves Christians, and yet give an uncertain sound on this fateful question. C. You are hard on brethren whose error at the worst is simply infirmity of thought. It is unquestionably possible for men who cherish the so-called "larger hope " for mankind still to live and labor in the fear of God and in the Prayer- Meeting Theology. 235 faith of Jesus Christ. And it is the life of faith and obedience that unites us with the witness- ing Church and gives us power with God and with men. Even if a probation after death and the final restoration of all souls could be proved to demonstration (which is impossible), I should not dare to let such proof have any relaxing influence on my life here. We are now in a state of stupendous spiritual conflict ; and we want to secure a decisive victory here and now, rather than let the enemy retire beyond the rivev" of death, to meet us hereafter in an unknown world, and perchance to hunt and harass our souls " o'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp," for untold seons. It would be insanity to post- pone the battle even if we knew that in the world to come we shall find a battle-field and not an eternal prison-house. Besides, we have our gracious Lord's positive command to be always ready for His coming; and as Christians we must bend all our energies to obey His word, whatever we may believe or conjecture about the future life. And it is only fair that we acknowledge that hosts of brethren, eminent in the work of Christ, have avowed their doubt of the eternity of hell-torments 236 Prayer- Meeting Theology. without suffering such doubt to lessen their devotion to their Master's will or their zeal for the present salvation of souls. The great mo- tive with men after all is not fear but love. And while some brethren, without rebuke, lift up incessantly their warning voice, denouncing hell and damnation to the wicked, what if some others give themselves wholly to the Gospel of the Grace of God ? Many, who would never repent, like the men of Nineveh, to escape im- pending destruction, will still come, like the Queen of Sheba, from the uttermost parts of the earth to behold the wisdom and grace of One who is greater than Solomon. I am astonished that you should refer me for a solution of my difficulties to your stern doc- trine of the Divine decrees. The difficulties besetting the question of retribution are not lessened by the statement that eternal damna- tion is not an after-thought necessitated by man's rejection of Divine grace, but a part of the original purpose and plan of God before man rejected His grace, or committed sin, or had any being at all. But since you have mentioned the doctrine of the decrees, let it be our final test as to the prevalence of uniformity Prayer-Meeting Theology. 237 of opinions in the same religious communions, and as to the possibility of agreeing heartily in faith while differing radically and irreconcilably in opinions. Can you name a Calvinistic body in which there are not plenty of individuals, men and women and children, honored and beloved, who are diametrically opposed to the Calvinistic creed on the question of Predes- tination ? Or can you find an Arminian body in which the Arminian doctrine is held stead- fastly by all the members, young and old? Such a thing is no longer expected or greatly cared for. Calvinistic and Arminian denomi- nations have learned to recognize one another as bodies of true believers and living branches of the true Church of Christ. Dr. Shedd, than whom a worthier representative of the intellect and faith of Calvinism is not to be found, makes this admission in favor of the Armin- ians. But Calvinists and Arminians were not always thus friendly. There was a time when they openly denounced one another as guilty of doing the Devil's work in the name of the Lord. And their differences in opinion are really as wide and serious as such differences can well be. To the Arminian, Calvinistic 238 Prayer- Meeting Theology. teaching, logically followed out, leads to fatal- ism ; which is as bad as Universalism, to say the very least. To the Calvinist, on the other hand, Arminian teaching, pressed to its proper conclusion, denies the sovereignty of God — that is, denies the divinity of God, which again is at least as bad as Unitarianism, which you charge with denying the proper divinity of Christ. But Arminians have learned that they have no right to make Calvinists more logical than they wish to be. And Calvinists forbear to push Arminians along the Arminian road farther than they choose to travel. They have learned fairness and kindness towards one an- other, not by the light of nature or by the logic of controversy, but by the open and abundant blessing of Almighty God on both sides alike. It would be ridiculous to say that men of Jon- athan Edwards' persuasion cannot belong to the true Church, and it would be no less pre- posterous to refuse the right hand of fellowship to men of the persuasion of John Wesley. Calvinists and Arminians are alike confessedly Christian, one in faith and in the defence and propagation of the faith, though, on the high- est questions, they hold opinions which are Prayer-Meeting Theology. 239 utterly contradictory, and which, as viewed respectively from the opposite sides, subvert not only the Christian faith but the very founda- tions of natural religion. Why should we insist on deducing all the possible evil consequences from one-sided or erroneous theories of the person of Christ or of the final destiny of the human race, while we have agreed that the equally pernicious logical consequences of de- fective theories of the sovereignty of God and the freedom of man may remain inoperative and leave the theories themselves not only harmless but beneficent ? For it is generally admitted that both Calvinism and Arminianism, as systems of thought, serve a good purpose, and that by means of the very theories which divide them asunder and for which the one is branded as immoral and the other as im- pious. If we look for proof of God's blessing, if we look for the fruits of the Spirit, we shall not fail to find them in any of the Churches which profess to love Christ and to look to Him for salvation, whatever imperfect views they may entertain of His Divine person or of the life of the world to come. And if we con- sider the matter calmly, we may have reason to 240 Prayer- Meeting Theology. acknowledge that some of those who seem to us to deny our Lord's divinity have come nearer than ourselves to the man Christ Jesus who is the only Mediator, and have helped us to know Him better, and to work more hopefully for the race which He has redeemed ; and we may be brought to see that some of those who, to our mind, have erred dangerously on the solemn question of future retribution have yet been enabled to help a whole generation of Christians to a deeper and fuller faith in the Fatherly love of God, and in the matchless grace of Him who is mighty to save ; we may learn that in this dark world none of us can see very clearly more than a small portion of the truth, and that those who are most blind to what we see often need our loving sympathy most and can best reward it ; we may learn, and we ought to learn, that if there be risks for ourselves and for the truth in the exercise of candor and sympathy and ac- tive charity towards the weak and the wayward among Christ's disciples, there are risks also in narrow, distrustful, self-regarding, self-sufficing exclusiveness ; and that, in the former far more than in the latter, we may look for protection Prayer-Meeting Theology. 241 and blessing to the Father of all and the Saviour of ail. A. Candor and charity and sympathy are all admirable; and it would be very delightful to live on terms of Christian brotherhood with all mankind. But Christian brotherhood implies a real substantial Christianity, and we must maintain the integrity of our Christianity what- ever becomes of the brotherhood. We must contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints. And we cannot contend very earnestly for it unless we both know what it is and are prepared, for its sake, to sacrifice the friendship and the good opinion of all those, disciples or not, who are wayward enough to cancel its most obvious and most characteristic doctrines before they will honor it with their acceptance. Sinful men can get along without our sympathy and charity better than without the saving truth of the Gospel ; and it is better for us to be unconciliatory and unmannerly, but true, to our fellow-men, than to be tender to their feelings and treacherous to their souls. B. Certainly. And we have our own souls to look out for too. We ourselves, if we reject 242 Prayer- Meeting Theology. the Gospel, must perish. And how can we retain it for ourselves if we make light of it for others ? Unless we are very careful, the " candor and sympathy and active charity," which are so popular in the churches nowadays, will wreck our own faith and land us all in the bare Agnosticism, which is becoming more and more the settled faith of men of the world. " Agnos- ticism, professing and calling itself Christian ! " how will that do as a description of your witnessing Church ? C. It will not do at all as a description of the whole Church. Even if candor and charity led as necessarily as you suppose they do to Agnosticism, we still have bigotry and brutality enough to insure our dogmatism for a thousand years. But candor and firmness are not incom- patible. Those Christian believers who are immovably fixed in their own convictions have most reason to deal fairly and tenderly with those who differ from them. Still, your descrip- tion will apply to a large and very interesting class in the Church of Christ. There are Agnostics who profess and call themselves Christians. We have no reason to question their sincerity. And we have but slight cause Prayer- Meeting Theology. 243 and but small means to attack their position. The great apologist, Bishop Butler, in the interest of the Christian faith, strongly empha- sized the ignorance of man. And the great practical theologian, Dr.Owen, labored intensely to mortify sin in believers by pressing home to them their " unacquaintedness " with God, and their inability to " look into the abyss of eternity, and to bear the rays of His glorious being." The vain conceit of knowledge in the midst of darkness and confusion is as common to-day as ever, and as demoralizing for mind and heart alike. But if we of this generation are to know our ignorance, and to feel our unacquaintedness with God, we shall probably owe more to the Agnostics than to Butler and Owen together. Nor do I know where to look at the present time for a more impressive testi- mony to the person and work of Jesus Christ than is found in the confession of these men that, with all their philosophical prejudice against the Gospel, and with their all but entire absorption in secular studies, they still have need of Him. B. It is well to sober our minds with reflec- tions on the ignorance of man, and to abase the 244 Prayer- Meeting Theology. pride and vain confidence of our hearts by con- templating the depths of our unacquaintedness with God. But it is another thing altogether to let such contemplations clip the wings of our spirits and drive us to perpetual exile from God. I remember the passage in Owen's Mortification of Sin quite well. After saying that we cannot bear the rays of God's glorious being, he adds that this consideration is of great use in walking with God, so far as it may be consistent with that filial boldness which is given us in Jesus Christ to draw nigh to the throne of grace. Do your Agnostic confessors use their views of man's ignorance as helps to closer walking with God ? Do they have much filial boldness and access to God through Jesus Christ ? Are they less Agnostic since they be- came Christians than they were before ? Have they received the Holy Ghost since they be- lieved ? Does Jesus Christ declare the Father to them, or does He honor Himself? Is He to them really a Mediator, bringing them to God, or only a human Consoler and Companion, a substitute for God, and the final proof that God is for them inaccessible and unneces- sary? Prayer- Meeting Theology. 245 C. Jesus Christ is a Mediator for all who truly come to Him. His nature is, by its very constitution as well as by the will of the Father, mediatorial. If we truly come to Him, we necessarily come to God through Him. Contact with Him is contact with God ; for God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. Therefore, if men. Agnostics or others, are attracted to Jesus Christ, and are not offended in Him, but love Him and honor Him, and find rest for their souls in Him, we need not trouble them or worry ourselves with the ques- tion whether they receive Him as a Mediator or only as a man. They receive Him as He is. They receive Him as a man because He is a man. They receive Him as a Mediator because the man is the Mediator. His friends. His servants, need not ask Him to show them the Father. They who have seen Him have seen the Father ; and following Him is walking with God. But those who have been long with Him and have loved Him truly may still, like Philip, ask Agnostic questions and be embar- rassed with Agnostic difficulties, not realizing what trea'sures of wisdom and knowledge they virtually received when they believed in Him. 246 Prayer- Meeting Theology. B. Philip was rebuked for his ignorance of his Lord's higher nature, though he lacked the illumination of those great events which sub- sequently declared Jesus to be the Son of God. Can cultivated believers in Christ now live in such ignorance of their Lord as was blame- worthy in a disciple even before Jesus was glorified? You speak of coming to Him, and receiving Him. Where is He to be found? How does faith reach Him ? Is He to be found to-day in disguises which veil His proper glory? His first disciples saw Him through the thick veil of flesh and humiliation ; and their faith was naturally accompanied by carnal and unworthy thoughts of the Lord till the fuller revelation came. In later times many have found Christ through His official repre- sentatives in the Church. They have com- mitted the keeping of their souls and their consciences to the priest, whose directions they follow and in whose blessing they rest. Faith can doubtless live in this way ; and it may well be a very imperfect faith and associated with crass ignorance and misapprehension. But our Agnostics are not the men to live by such a faith. If they find Christ at all, they will Prayer- Meeting Theology. 247 find Him in the Scriptures, with all the light of all the dispensations shining around Him. If, finding Him thus, they receive Him as He is, and find rest for their souls in Him, the days of their Agnosticism are over. Their faith is not a blind clinging to the hem of a garment, or to a person practically unknown. Such faith is for babes and illiterates. Mature thinkers, acquainted with the Scriptures and with the world, if they come to Christ at all, will come to the unity of the faith and knowledge of the Son of God. And this consideration, to my mind, makes Agnostic Christianity a very transparent delusion. To the genuine Agnos- tic, New Testament Christianity is mythology. To the genuine New Testament Christian, Agnosticism is the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity. C. There are Agnostics to whom Christianity is mythology, no doubt ; and there are Chris- tians to whom Agnosticism is the gall of bitter- ness. But such extremists are no more " genu- ine" than their more moderate brethren on either side. Agnosticism, if the term means anything in particular, stands for that system of thought which maintains that phenomena 248 Prayer- Meeting Theology. alone are objects of knowledge ; and that, ac- cordingly, God is unknowable, excepting so far as He may manifest Himself through the phe- nomena of the universe. Christianity is not beyond the reach of this philosophical agnosti- cism. For Christianity is emphatically a reve- lation of the Invisible God through the phe- nomena of the world. This is its peculiarity, its distinguishing characteristic. The great mystery of godliness in the Gospel is God man- ifest in the flesh. The long and wonderful series of events by which the Christian revela- tion was prepared for and ushered into the world ; the life of the Lord Jesus Christ who is Himself the sum of the revelation ; the other long and wonderful series of events which marks the continuous operation and the growing as- cendancy of this revelation in the world ; — these are all conspicuous phenomena of the universe, and as proper objects of knowledge as the for- mation of the crust of the earth or the develop- ment of the solar system. Then, our own thoughts and feelings, our reverence, our fear our contrition, our trust, our hope, our love, our joy, our growing strength, and the whole spiritual character which is formed in us under Prayer- Meeting Theology. 249 the influence of the Christian revelation, are phenomena as real and as discernible to our- selves as any other phenomena whatsoever. Not only so, but the relations of these spiritual phenomena of our inward life to the phenomena of the Christian revelation of God are as capable of being investigated by personal observations and experiments of our own as are the relations of the phenomena of our animal life to the phe- nomena of the material world around us. The "soul-experiments" of Richard Baxter, to which he makes reference at the close of the narrative of his own life, were as serious, and as scientific, and yielded results as certain, as the physical experiments of Davy and Faraday ; and they may be tried over again by any one who has the heart to endure travail so vast and so pro- longed and so spiritual. There is no reason why the philosophical Agnostic should not be- lieve in Christ as He stands in the perfect light ; and there is no reason why he should not reach the most advanced stage of Christian experi- ence. There are sure stepping-stones of palpa- ble phenomena to support mind and heart all the way through. But it is a mistake to suppose that Agnostics 250 Prayer- Meeting Theology. always learn what they know of Christ in Scrip- ture, where " all the light of all the dispensa- tions " shines around Him. Many of them get their best knowledge of Him from the faint reflection of His glory in sonic of the most im- perfect of His followers. They see Him in a far dimmer twilight than that of His own hu- miliation. Others obtain their knowledge of Him from the fragments of Gospel which are lightly tossed about in the currents of a frivo- lous literature and in the discussions and decla- mations of unbelievers. They would fare bet- ter in the hands of a Coptic or an Abyssinian priest. There are many more, who are tolerably familiar with the books of Scripture, but who are so bewildered by the various comments and conjectures and theories, constructive and de- structive, of old and new interpreters, that Scripture, to them, has scarcely any decipher- able meaning or intelligible use at all. It would be strange indeed if Agnostics, laboring under such disadvantages, should come directly to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God. But it would be stranger still if these difficulties in the way of a clear knowledge of Christ should also prove to be insuperable bar- Prayer- Meeting Theology. 251 riers in the way of faith. If men had to find Him wholly by their own seeking, they might fail because of the darkness. But if the blessed Lord Himself is seeking men, many may get hold of Him in the dark, if it be but by the hem of His garment ; and they may cling to Him for life though they scarcely know Him at all. The Lord has always worn large and loosely flowing garments, some of the folds of which touch the hands of every man that is born into the world. The life of faith was possible and acceptable to God before the incarnation. And the glorious Gospel of the blessed God was not given to contract the sphere of the Divine mercy. It was given to make more perfect knowledge of God, and more abundant life in Him, possible to men, and not to take away the hope of the benighted and perplexed. The life of faith is possible to-day among the untaught heathen. Much more is it possible in the most backward Churches of Christendom, and possible likewise in the most advanced, where multitudes are in the dark through excess of light, dazzled to blindness by the fierce glare of unwonted illumination. It is possible for the Agnos- tic embarrassed by his wisdom, as well as 252 Prayer- Meeting Theology. for the barbarian overwhelmed with gross darkness. B. But the Agnostic is not embarrassed by his wisdom or by anything else. He is the calmest, most collected, most imperturbable of all men living. He knows the utmost boundaries of things. You will never sur- prise or betray him into anything, and least of all into the Christian faith. He knows defi- nitely what he is about and what he never can be about. He knows that he never can be a believer in the Christian God. He knows that the Christian God is an impossibility. When you say that Agnosticism is the system of thought which maintains that God is unknow- able excepting so far as He may manifest Him- self through the phenomena of the universe, you make it thoroughly orthodox. You make its philosophy a truism. Everybody believes that God is, to us, unknowable, excepting so far as He may manifest Himself unto us through the only means we have of knowing anything at all. The Agnostic goes a long stride beyond that, and maintains that God is not knowable at all ; that whatever is knowable unto us by our only means of knowing, is, for that very rea- Prayer- Meeting Theology. 253 son, not God, and not to be likened unto God ; that the only possible God of Christians, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, just because He is known as personal and strong and wise and true and holy and merciful, is not God at all, but a gigantic phantom made in the image of man, a conception wholly anthropo- morphic, a monstrosity, an impossibility. Who- soever does not verily believe and maintain all this, is no Agnostic, and whosoever does main- tain it, is no Christian. C. Your men, it seems, are to have but one idea at a time. The idea may be very crude, but it must be vigorous and bold ; and it must offer to every other idea the Mohammedan al- ternative of submission or the sword. An Ag- nostic who is nothing but an Agnostic, and a Christian who is nothing but a Christian, should keep out of each other's way, and avoid all human society, for which they are totally unfit. A Christian is entitled to all the truth in the world. An Agnostic will scarcely be satisfied with less. They will both come to their own the sooner by understanding and appropriating each other's fundamental ideas. And this is by no means impossible. The Christian, while 2 54 Prayer-Meeting Theology. rejoicing in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the love of God, has every reason to join in the Agnostic protest against gross an- thropomorphism. The Bible is full of protests against it. The Agnostics make apter and more telling quotations from the Bible than from any other source. The revelation of God in Jesus Christ is in no way inconsistent with such protests. This revelation, though by a great mystery it is made in the flesh and through the phenomena of life, is made to faith ; and, far from being fully comprehended, it leads the soul to communion, in reverence and godly fear, with One who seeth in secret, unseen, and who loveth, but with a love that passeth knowledge. It gives us access to God for guid- ance, for comfort, for salvation ; but it gives us no comprehension of the Divine nature. Though, by grace, we have communion with God through the Spirit, none can know better than we do that His thoughts are not our thoughts, and that our ways are not His ways. And here, accepting the Christian revelation without reserve and not unacquainted with the Christian life, we are yet very near the funda- mental thought of Agnosticism. Nor will Ag- Prayer- Meeting Theology. 255 nostics find it impossible to approach the Christian view. They of course realize, even more than other men, the difficulty of regarding God as personal without disregarding His infin- ity and falling prone into anthropomorphism. But they also feel, even if somewhat less keenly than most other men, the force of the motives which constrain so many of us to believe in the personality and moral attributes of God at all risks. They feel that God ought to be the ob- ject of man's highest reverence and adoration. And they know that it would be very awkward and inconvenient to adore the Inscrutable merely for being inscrutable ; to worship we know not what just because it is we know not what ; in a word, to adopt the old saw, omne ignotum pro magnifico, as our religion. They resent the insinuation of plain Christians that a God who is not personal must be " blind " " brute " force. They insist that God is not blind though He cannot see ; that He is not brutish though He has no intelligence. They suggest that there may be a mode of existence available for God as far higher than a righteous and holy personality, as a righteous and all-holy personality is higher than the life of the creep- 256 Prayer- Meeting Theology. ing thing. At the same time, they admit that there is that in man which is worthier than any- thing else we know to serve as some faint hint of what God may be. They declare boldly that " the intimate essence " of the Inscrutable Existence " may conceivably be identifiable with the intimate essence of what we know as Mind," that " in so far as the exigencies of finite thinking require us to symbolize the In- finite Power manifested in the world of phe- nomena, we are clearly bound to symbolize it as quasi-psychical rather than as quasi-material " ; that, " provided we bear in mind the symbolic character of our words, we may say that ' God is Spirit,' though we may not say, in the materi- alistic sense, that God is force " ; and that the belief in an immortal soul and in a personal God " are beliefs concerning which a scientific man, in his scientific capacity, ought to refrain from making assertions because science knows noth- ing whatever about the subject " {supra p. 86, and Popular Science Monthly, Sept., 1891, p. 594). When Agnostics talk thus, they are so near Christian Theism that it is hardly worth a Christian man's while to quarrel with them, so near that it is not at all worth their own while Prayer-Meeting Theology. 257 to let their science or their philosophy stand in the way of their acceptance of Christianity as a practical religion. They concede that a certain measure of anthropomorphism is indis- pensable even for the purposes of a philoso- pher. It is easy to perceive that a larger measure is necessary for the purposes of prac- tical religion. There is no reason in the world why they should admit just enough for the speculations of the philosopher and not admit enough for the practical uses of the spiritual life of mankind. And the truth is, the spirit- ual life of Agnostics quietly helps itself to as much anthropomorphism as it may find neces- sary, precisely as their philosophers help them- selves to the smaller quantity which sufifices for their intellectual need. Accordingly, there are multitudes of those who feel the force of the Agnostic reasoning, and whose reading and thinking lie for the most part in the Agnostic cycle, who, at the same time, feel the com- manding and saving power of Jesus Christ. Without shifting their intellectual standpoint — that is, without renouncing their Agnosticism, they betake themselves to the Son of God to satisfy their hunger and thirst after righteous- 258 Prayer-Meeting Theology. ness. They are Agnostics, and they are Chris- tians : and their testimony to Christ and Chris- tianity, if not stronger, is certainly not weaker, than the testimony of orthodox behevers who never knew any perplexity at all. A. Say not another word. Your work is done. There is nothing more to be destroyed. The Scriptures, and the Church, and the faith once delivered to the saints, are all gone. Un- believers are now Christians, and Christians are unbelievers. It is all one. There is nothing of any consequence left to be believed. And yet next week we shall probably go to the prayer-meeting as usual. And we shall go through the solemn service with grave faces. And perhaps we shall wonder why all our neighbors do not care to unite with us until we recollect that we have not taken any pains to amuse those who have occasionally dropped in. We are old friends and companions, and we have been in that little church together all our lives. We cannot distrust or misunder- stand one another. But what have we got to say to those that are without ? How can we give any reason for the hope that is in us? And what can we do for these children ? Shall Prayer- Meeting Theology. 259 we teach them the creed which we dare not prescribe to all Christians, and at which we have stumbled so hard ourselves? Having brought our speculations to a definite conclu- sion, we must call another council to mature a plan to continue Christian work without any common basis of Christian faith. C. I agree with you that we have talked long enough for the present. But I do not think that anything has been said to make our Chris- tian work more difficult or less hopeful. The fact that Agnostics become Christians without abandoning their own philosophy or accepting what seems to us the proper intellectual sys- tem of Christianity raises new difficulties only for those whose contention is against the faith. It gives them notice that Christianity is some- thing more than " a religion founded on argu- ment " ; and that, even if they should live to batter down its last prop in the way of argu- ment, they will still have to reckon with it as a spiritual reality, whose subtle power may turn all their wisdom into folly. What defers the hope of the enemies of the faith can only bring comfort and help to its friends. That Christianity is a divine reality 26o Prayer- Meeting Theology. and not a mere system of thought, and that it can attract and master men through their spiritual nature, not only without arguments but in defiance of them, are facts which should give us courage and confidence in greater trials than we have yet seen. There is surely no occasion for alarm as to our children. We may fail to bring them up in our own notions. They will be steeped in the notions of their own generation. And they will doubtless regard as utterly unten- able some of the views which have materially helped to determine our whole theory of the Gospel. But our aim must be, not to lodge our own views permanently in their minds, but to use Christian truth, as we understand it, to prepare their hearts to welcome and obey the Divine Spirit, whereby they may be made par- takers of the life of God and members of Christ. The earnest assertion of the objective reality of Christianity as a spiritual kingdom of God ever open to those who will press in may seem to set aside the Scriptures and the Church and make every man his own pastor and pope. But in fact it emphasizes the true unity of the Prayer-Meeting Theology. 261 children of God and the proper authority of the Church and the Scriptures. The unity of a patriotic army may outlast its military for- mation and win a national triumph through the brave confusion of a " soldier's battle." In like manner, the unity of the Church, far from depending on this or that ecclesiastical " for- mation," rests on the real communion of indi- vidual believers with God through the Holy Spirit. Had it not been for this tried reality, the Scriptures and the Church would have lost every shred of authority long ago. Their authority is maintained by the continual veri- fication of their testimony in the spiritual realm ; and it is thus made secure for all time, whatever shocks and surprises our learned pro- fessors and lecturers may still have in store for us. But all authority is limited by that for which it exists. The Scriptures and the organ- ized Churches are but means of grace ; and they must neither contend nor compete with the fulness of grace to which they are to lead the saints. No letter of Scripture, no article of a creed, or canon of a Church, can be rightly urged against those who have reached the end of every commandment in walking hum- 262 Prayer-Meeting Theology. bly before God and in the loving service of their fellow-men. Let the articles and the canons say what they will, these are they who have the word of God and keep it, these are they who follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth. B. One thing, one thing only, grows very clear to me : The doubts, which are supposed to restrain our prayers, must teach us to pray without ceasing. They leave us just light enough to discover the urgency of our needs and our utter lack of resource other than out of the depths to cry unto the Lord. They bafifle our minds, they overwhelm our hearts, they obscure the light of the Church of Christ, they blur the very pages of Holy Writ, leaving us barely the name of the Lord and the remembrance of His mercy, without any assur- ance that Hewillhearusor help us. We prayed before, in spite of doubt, because we had a little faith. But that little faith can never inspire the fervent, persevering, agonizing prayer, which alone is commensurate with our need. Doubt itself must for us supply the place of faith. We must pray, because of doubt, not in spite of it. Our prayer must be Prayer-Meeting Theology.. 263 no longer a feeble, partial, doubtful victory over doubt. It must be the desperate clinging of the utterly helpless to what doubt itself points out and presses upon us as our only possible hope. Seeing we cannot in a fair way get rid of doubt, we must utilize it and make it auxiliary to the means of grace. We must take it to the house of prayer and to our closet to goad us to more and more earnest importunity. We must bear it on our hearts night and day to incite us to greater and greater constancy. Our prayer of doubt must have all the humility and earnestness and persistence of the happy Christian's prayer of faith. It must have more ; for it must meet all the diiificulties, without any of the encouragements, of the prayer of faith, — without renewal of strength, without the joy of acceptance, without the hope of salvation. THE END.