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CHRISTIANITY 
 AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
Works by the Rev. G. Tyrrell. 
 
 NOVA ET VETERA : Informal Meditations. 
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 THROUGH SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS ; 
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CHRISTIANITY 
 AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE TYRRELL 
 
 AUTHOR OF "LEX CREDENDI," ETC. 
 
 THIRD IMPRESSION 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 
 
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 All rights reserved 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION .... vii 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 PART I 
 CHRISTIANITY AND CATHOLICISM 
 
 I. MODERNISM AND TRADITION . 
 
 II. VARIOUS FORMS OF MODERNISM 
 
 III. THE OLD ORTHODOXY 
 
 IV. THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 V. NEWMAN'S THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 VI. FIRST RESULTS OF NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM 35 
 
 VII. THE CHRIST OF LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM 
 
 VIII. THE CHRIST OF ESCHATOLOGY 
 
 IX. THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 
 
 X. THE ABIDING VALUE OF THE APOCALYPTIC 
 IDEA 
 
 XI. THE TRUTH-VALUE OF VISIONS 
 
 3 
 6 
 
 14 
 21 
 29 
 
 39 
 
 46 
 62 
 
 91 
 105 
 
contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XII. THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST . . 1 14 
 
 a. THE TRANSCENDENCY OF THE KINGDOM 114 
 
 6. IMMORTALITY 127 
 
 C. RESURRECTION I3 8 
 
 d. THE IMMEDIACY OF THE KINGDOM . 157 
 
 e. THE SON OF MAN 171 
 
 f. GOD AND SATAN I9 1 
 
 g. THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT . . -199 
 h. THE PHENOMENAL AND THE SPIRITUAL 202 
 
 XIII. THE APOCALYPTIC VISION AND THE CATHOLIC 
 
 CHURCH 2IO 
 
 PART II 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND RELIGION 
 
 I. EXCLUSIVENESS AND INTOLERANCE . . 223 
 
 II. THE UNIFICATION OF RELIGION . . . 229 
 
 III. THE SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS . . . .245 
 
 IV. CHARACTER OF AN UNIVERSAL RELIGION . 252 
 V. THE RELIGION AND PERSONALITY OF JESUS . 261 
 
 VI. THE CHURCH AND ITS FUTURE . 274 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 " \ T THEN the work is finished labour ceases, 
 " * weary man enters into his rest." These 
 words are in the book that lies before us, and the 
 manuscript of that book lay open on his desk, and 
 was receiving its last touches, when the worker 
 was laid low, and the words were fulfilled. For 
 some days, while the struggle between life and 
 death was carried on in the little adjoining room, 
 one did not even dream of moving the pages from 
 where they rested. One thought at any moment to 
 see him rise, as he had so often done after periods 
 of pain and prostration, and go straight back to 
 the unfinished task, as though to live and to work 
 were, for him, but different names for the same 
 thing. As long ago as November nth, 1901, he 
 said in a letter : " I am always hurried to get 
 things in before death overtakes me, and am 
 restless while anything is unfinished that I have 
 once begun. Could I feel secure of a year . . . but I 
 always think it may be in a week " ; and this dis- 
 position never altered. It was as though his work 
 were his fate; as though he were ever driven for- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 be the Christ of our religious aspirations ; not the 
 Christ of humanitarianism and philanthropy, but 
 the Christ of a transcendent kingdom. 
 
 There are souls to whom the idea of God pre- 
 sents itself chiefly under its metaphysical and 
 mystical aspect; there are others, of whom, I 
 think, Father Tyrrell was one, who are eminently 
 Christ-lovers and Christ-worshippers. 
 
 " The faith," he writes in this book, " in His own 
 Christhood that Jesus, by the power of His per- 
 sonality, was able to plant in His Apostles, has been 
 continually reinforced by the experience of those 
 who have found Him, in effect, their Redeemer, 
 the Lord and Master of their souls, their Hope, 
 their Love, their Rest — in short, all that they 
 mean by God." 
 
 To the lover of Christ the Christological prob- 
 lem is more painful and arduous than is the 
 ecclesiastical problem to the lover of the Church. 
 Father Tyrrell faced them both, and in this book 
 we have his last — I will not say it was necessarily 
 his final — treatment of the double problem. His 
 answer was, as he believed, not likely to please any 
 party — but parties matter little; it was to the 
 single mind and soul and to humanity at large 
 that, with a truly Catholic instinct, he ever ad- 
 dressed himself. 
 
 He deals first with the relation of Christ to the 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Catholic Church; next with the relation of the 
 religion of Christ to religion in general. He 
 finds that the Catholic Church has, on the whole, 
 preserved the message of Christ more faithfully 
 than any other ; and he believes that in Chris- 
 tianity is to be found the germ of that future 
 universal religion for which we all look. The 
 Church has fulfilled her end, because she has kept 
 for us the Christ of the Gospels ; not a modernised 
 Christ, made up to meet the latest requirements, 
 but the Christ who spoke in the categories of 
 His place and time, while His message was for 
 men of all places and all times. And in that 
 message is the seed of future religion — a religion 
 whose need is more and more pressingly apparent ; 
 a religion for which all humanity is crying, weary of 
 petty divisions and disputes, yearning for a truth 
 that shall be the possession of all. But it is not 
 an entirely new religion that can fulfil this de- 
 mand ; the future must grow from the present as 
 the present has grown from the past. 
 
 This is not the kind of apology to satisfy the 
 majority of Catholics, who ask for blind, not 
 open-eyed, adherence. But why should they read 
 this work at all ? Why should they not live on — 
 as the writer himself would have urged them 
 to do — in the peace of their own undisturbed 
 convictions ? 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 But for those Catholics who must love the 
 Church in another way, or not at all, the book 
 before us has a message of hope and consola- 
 tion. For here is no faithfulness grounded on the 
 habits of a spiritual home — the writer had learned 
 to live homeless ; nor is there a mere clinging to 
 those sacramental graces which the Church can 
 offer us — since of those graces he had been de- 
 prived ; but here is faith in the Church as having 
 guarded, amidst all her imperfections, the treasure 
 committed to her by Jesus Christ. 
 
 A still further problem will suggest itself here 
 to those who have faced anything of the per- 
 plexities of Gospel criticism, a problem which 
 most certainly presented itself to the author of 
 this book. He saw quite clearly that there are 
 elements in the Gospel which seem to find their 
 development in just those characteristics of 
 ecclesiastical policy most repugnant to a more 
 spiritual conception of religion and Christianity. 
 His final answer to that difficulty he has not 
 been able to give — but the book before us surely 
 suggests, at least, the lines on which that answer 
 might have been framed. No evasion of diffi- 
 culties would ever have been his solution — of 
 that one may at least be certain. He would 
 have drained to the dregs that cup of bitter know- 
 ledge which truth so often offers us; he would 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 have driven on, to their fullest conclusion, the 
 hard premisses which study and research lay bare. 
 But the mystic would not have been slain by the 
 critic ; the believer by the objector. Through 
 the letter to the spirit ; through the human to the 
 divine ; through the Church to Christ ; through 
 Christ to God ; the way might have been perilous 
 and terrible, but it would not have been forsaken 
 for any easier path. And the victory would have 
 been such as can only be gained by those who 
 have shrunk from no hardship of the campaign. 
 
 NOTE 
 
 We may take this work as having been, sub- 
 stantially, finished before the writer's death. But 
 it had not been revised, and the second part 
 even suggests the possibility of some further 
 additions. Also, he had but partially indicated 
 the divisions and titles of chapters. For any im- 
 perfections, therefore, in the execution of these 
 details of form, the executor has to crave the 
 indulgence of readers, while also thanking Mr. 
 A. R. Waller for his kind help in the revision 
 
 of proofs. 
 
 M. D. PETRE. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE hope of a synthesis between the essentials 
 of Christianity and the assured results of 
 criticism is very widespread nowadays, and those 
 who share it are commonly called Modernists or 
 Liberals. There is a marked division of Modern- 
 ists according as their tendency is to consider that 
 alone to be essential to Christianity which agrees 
 with their idea of the assured results of criticism, 
 or to consider as the only assured results of criti- 
 cism those that fit in with their conception of the 
 essentials of Christianity. Both tendencies are 
 vicious and, if unchecked, destroy the very idea 
 of Modernism, which professes to consider each 
 interest impartially, without respect to the other, 
 in the belief and hope that the results will prove 
 harmonious. Religion cannot be the criterion of 
 scientific truth, nor science of religious truth. 
 Each must be criticised by its own principles. 
 
 It is extremely hard for a Christian to look 
 straight at his religion without regarding science 
 out of the corner of his eye, or to face science with- 
 out a similar side-glance at religion. But the effort 
 
xvi PREFACE 
 
 must be made. In these pages I have asked my- 
 self frankly what I should consider the essence of 
 Christianity were I not acquainted with the results 
 of criticism ; and how much of criticism I should 
 admit if I cared nothing for Christianity. It does 
 not seem to me that the results are very harmoni- 
 ous, but I should be sorry to say they were 
 hopelessly irreconcilable. Indeed, the discord is 
 much less than I had expected. To guard against 
 bias I have inclined to the more extreme position 
 on both sides. If I have overstated the difficulty 
 so much the better. 
 
 But the purpose of these pages is in no wise to 
 make an apology for Christianity and Catholicism ; 
 nor yet to defend Modernism from the attacks of 
 its prejudiced enemies ; nor to defend it at all ; 
 but rather to save it from its friends — from those 
 amiable Liberal critics, who welcome it for precisely 
 the same mistaken reason as those for which 
 ultramontanism condemns it. It seems ungrateful 
 and ungracious to criticise those who proffer sym- 
 pathy where so little is to be had. Yet it is not 
 quite honest to accept a gift intended for another 
 address. So precious is praise that, if we do not 
 deserve it, we are tempted to accept it with 
 the intention of deserving it, and of becoming 
 what we are supposed already to be. Every 
 student of nature recognises the value of prepay- 
 
PREFACE xvii 
 
 ments of merit. But he who would guard his 
 liberty will be shy of incurring such debts of 
 honour, and will decline what he knows to be 
 unmerited praise. Would that all Modernists 
 did so, and had declined to sacrifice the 
 originality, distinction and solitude of their posi- 
 tion to their desire for approbation ; with the 
 result of seeming to make much ado about nothing, 
 and of arriving laboriously at a banal and facile 
 solution, of which the world is well-nigh weary. 
 
 Between the Modernism of these, and that of 
 L'Evangile et VEglise, there is scarcely a thought 
 in common. Even if the illustrious author of 
 that classical work has ceased to regard its position 
 as practicable in view of the subsequent action of 
 the Roman Church, that is no reason for giving its 
 name to a precisely contrary position — to the 
 Liberal Protestantism against which it was a pro- 
 test. Hope is largely subjective, neither kindled 
 nor killed by objective reasoning. If we have no 
 hope in the Modernist position let us say so and 
 adopt some other, or none at all, and cease to call 
 ourselves by its name. Clear naming is essential 
 to clear thinking ; a spade is not a shovel. 
 
 If I find fault with some of the mistakenly 
 sympathetic critics of Modernism, I admit that 
 they are not without excuse, and that the blame 
 lies partly with those Catholics who, simply be- 
 
xviii PREFACE 
 
 cause they are modern, call themselves Modernists. 
 I own, however, to intense irritation in reading 
 some of these well-meaning critiques. Their line 
 of argument is almost stereotyped. They begin by 
 dilating on the lethal stagnation and immobility 
 of Rome. They then announce the astounding 
 discovery of a little Goshen of enlightenment amid 
 the waste of Egyptian darkness ; of a group of 
 Roman Catholics who, in spite of the Index and 
 the vigilance of the terrible Inquisition, have dared 
 to read and think for themselves, with the inevit- 
 able result of developing strong protestant and 
 rationalistic sympathies. Next follow some quota- 
 tions of the critical and liberal admissions of 
 noted Modernists, in crude isolation from the 
 context of the whole position. Then those 
 Modernists are told that, though they are on the 
 right track, they have not read history, or have 
 read it to little purpose ; that they cannot see the 
 Papacy as it is seen by the clear impartial eye of 
 a total outsider; that the Pope claims to be in- 
 fallible and that it is idle to hope that he will 
 ever accept and define the truth of Modernism. 
 They will surely be excommunicated and the bark 
 of Peter will pursue its even course towards the 
 rocks as before. Let them give up their childish 
 dreams, and courageously push on to the only 
 possible conclusion, which the whole world dis- 
 
PREFACE xix 
 
 covered centuries ago. Then, with a pat on the 
 head and a final benediction, they are good- 
 naturedly dismissed. 
 
 Now this might be an excellent criticism of that 
 Liberal Catholicism which is associated with the 
 names of Lamennais, Lacordaire, Montalembert 
 and, later, with that of Newman, and of those who 
 followed his aims rather than his methods. But as 
 a criticism of the former position of M. Loisy and 
 of those who still adhere to it, it is entirely beside 
 the mark. The former undoubtedly believed and 
 hoped that the categories of existing Catholicism 
 were elastic enough to accommodate themselves to 
 the latest results of historical and critical research 
 and to the requirements of modern life — ethical, 
 economical and social. What they urged was, 
 not a criticism, but an energetic development of 
 those categories along the old lines without any 
 change of direction. They did indeed entertain 
 the hope (which no sane Modernist entertains for 
 a moment) that some spiritual-minded Pope might 
 one day, in spite of the bureaucracy that exploits 
 his primacy as a political asset, approve and give 
 force to their ideas. Any sort of revolution 
 seemed to them incompatible with substantial 
 continuity. 
 
 To the Modernist it does not seem so. Whether 
 in the history of nations, or in the world of organic 
 
xx PREFACE 
 
 life, he recognises that such revolutions often 
 belong to the normal course of development ; that 
 the larval life runs its course evenly, up to a certain 
 point, only to prepare the way for a perfectly 
 normal reconstitution. He is convinced that 
 Catholic Christianity cannot live much longer on 
 the old lines ; that it has already reached a stone 
 wall which it must surmount unless it be content 
 to dwindle away as it is even now doing. The 
 time has come, he thinks, for a criticism of cate- 
 gories — of the very ideas of religion, of revelation, 
 of institutionalism, of sacramentalism, of theology, 
 of authority, etc. He believes that the current 
 expression of these ideas is only provisional, and 
 is inadequate to their true values. He thinks that 
 the Catholic Christian Idea contains, within itself, 
 the power continually to revise its categories, and to 
 shape its embodiment to its growth, and that such 
 a transformation or revolution would be within the 
 orderly process of its life — merely a step forward 
 to a fuller and better self-consciousness from a 
 confused and instinctive self-consciousness. 
 
 To suppose, then, that such Modernism is a 
 movement away from the Church and is converg- 
 ing towards Liberal Protestantism is to betray a 
 complete ignorance of its meaning — as complete 
 as that of the Encyclical Pascendi. With all its 
 accretions and perversions Catholicism is, for the 
 
PREFACE xxi 
 
 Modernist, the only authentic Christianity. What- 
 ever Jesus was, He was in no sense a Liberal 
 Protestant. All that makes Catholicism most re- 
 pugnant to present modes of thought derives from 
 Him. The difficulty is, not Catholicism, but Christ 
 and Christianity. So far as other Christian bodies 
 are true to Christ, they are faced by the same 
 problems as are Modernists. If they escape them, 
 it is because, in defiance of history, they have 
 shaped Christ to their own image, and see in him 
 no more than the Moslem sees in Mohammed. 
 
 The wisest men may be wrong, not only in 
 detail, but in their whole scheme of things ; yet 
 they are not therefore fools. The Modernist's 
 confidence in Christianity may be misplaced, but 
 it cannot be despatched in a smart article or en- 
 cyclical. We may be sure that religion, the deep- 
 est and most universal exigency of man's nature, 
 will survive. We cannot be so sure that any par- 
 ticular expression of the religious idea will survive. 
 Nay, we may be sure that all must perish, that 
 none can ever be perpetual and universal save that 
 which shall at last recognise and conform to the 
 laws of the religious process, as they come to be 
 established by reflection on wider experience. 
 Should Christianity be unable, or unwilling, to 
 conform to these laws, it must perish, like every 
 other abortive attempt to discover an universal 
 
xxii PREFACE 
 
 religion as catholic as science. Religion, however, 
 will profit and learn by the failure. Fragments of 
 the ruin will be built into some new construction 
 raised on the old site— just as the ethics of Jesus 
 have been built into the structure of Liberal Pro- 
 testantism. 
 
 But the Modernist hopes for better things and 
 thinks that he sees the principles of a true Catholi- 
 cism in Christ and Christianity. Theoretically, it 
 may be so. The difficulties, however, are mainly 
 of the practical order, and men will differ in their 
 estimate of their magnitude. 
 
 G. TYRRELL. 
 
 June 29, 1909. 
 
PART I 
 CHRISTIANITY AND CATHOLICISM 
 
CHRISTIANITY 
 AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 i 
 
 MODERNISM AND TRADITION 
 
 THE term " Modernism " is rapidly growing 
 ambiguous. It was first applied, with hostile 
 intent, to that group of Roman Catholics whose 
 position was more or less travestied in the no- 
 torious Encyclical Pascendi. Next it was ap- 
 propriated, rather reluctantly, by that same group, 
 to stand, not for the travesty, but for the truth of 
 their position. Then it was extended, quite legiti- 
 mately, to like groups in the Church of England 
 and other Churches, whose attitude towards tradi- 
 tion and modernity was analogous. In the ears 
 of the public at large, which cares little about 
 these controversies, it means what it sounds — 
 modernity in religious thought ; detachment from 
 tradition ; a new religion ; a new theology ; a new 
 everything. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Of the avowed adherents or admirers of 
 Modernism a large proportion understand it in 
 this loose sense. They believe in modernity. 
 Now a Modernist believes in modernity, but he 
 also believes in tradition. If he criticises tradition, 
 he also criticises modernity. In neither case is his 
 faith blind. Of the two, his belief in tradition has 
 a certain priority. It is his primary interest. A 
 mere philosopher might be equally interested in 
 showing that a properly criticised traditionalism 
 is in harmony with a properly criticised modernity. 
 But he could not therefore be called a Modernist. 
 He might just as well be called an Antiquarian or 
 Traditionalist. His interest is in the synthesis, 
 but not in one more than in another of its terms. 
 But, paradoxical though it sound, the dominant 
 interest of the Modernist is in tradition. This 
 paradox is due to the fact that Modernism has 
 been christened by the ultra-Traditionalists, not by 
 the ultra-Liberals. Newman was a reactionary for 
 the Noetics, a progressive for the Ultramontanes. 
 Of the two the Noetics were nearer the mark. 
 
 So, I would say, the attitude of the Modernist, 
 however critical, is one of attachment to, not of 
 detachment from, the Church's tradition. His 
 attitude towards modernity, however open-minded 
 and sincere, is one of detachment rather than 
 attachment. So far as his affections are concerned 
 
MODERNISM AND TRADITION 
 
 he leans towards tradition ; his concessions to 
 modernity are reluctant. 
 
 I am dealing, then, with the Modernism of the 
 Modernists, not with that of their adversaries on 
 the right and left ; nor with that of their undis- 
 cerning partisans and mistaken admirers. By a 
 Modernist, I mean a churchman, of any sort, who 
 believes in the possibility of a synthesis between 
 the essential truth of his religion and the essential 
 truth of modernity. 
 
II 
 
 VARIOUS FORMS OF MODERNISM 
 
 THERE is obviously a practical and a specu- 
 lative side to this problem, according as we 
 consider the institutions or the teachings of the 
 Churches on the one hand and those of the 
 modern world on the other. Roughly speaking, 
 it is a battle between Authority and Liberty ; be- 
 tween Dogma and Science. 
 
 The practical problem is undoubtedly the more 
 acute, complex and difficult. Under its pressure, 
 both here and abroad, many have been led to 
 abandon the Modernist hope and to turn away 
 from the Churches to preach a new secular religion 
 of life and progress to the alienated multitudes. 
 They argue that, to be vital and effectual, a re- 
 ligion must express, while idealising, those moral 
 and social aspirations of the people from which it 
 originally sprang. All religions, they contend, 
 originated in this way by the agency of priests 
 or prophets, in whose minds moral and social 
 ideals received a mystical interpretation and super- 
 natural sanction, and became practically the law, 
 
 6 
 
VARIOUS FORMS OF MODERNISM , 7 
 
 the will of God. Even where a religion has been 
 imposed from outside, by conquest or otherwise, 
 it has taken root only so far as it could explain 
 and sanction life as lived by the people in question, 
 and thereby assist in the development of that life. 
 Thus it was that Christianity obtained a footing, 
 first among Jews, of whose life it was the product ; 
 then among Greeks, Romans and Barbarians, to 
 whose life it was, in great measure, adaptable. 
 They hold that, by a process of petrifaction and 
 arrest, by the canonisation of the past, the ethical 
 and social ideas of Christianity have ceased to be 
 those of the new people, who have outgrown and 
 departed from it ; that the Churches and the Age 
 differ even more profoundly and hopelessly in 
 their conception and valuation of life than in their 
 conception of truth ; that a mental revolution were 
 not nearly so impossible as a moral revolution. 
 Believing that the Churches have thus lost all vital 
 and vitalising power, all grip on the living and 
 actual interests of the new world, all leverage for 
 its movement, these thinkers would leave religion 
 aside for the present, and preach all that is best, 
 most ideal, most truly essential in the spirit of the 
 age, trusting that, in course of time, its implicit 
 religion will become explicit in obedience to man's 
 imperious need of a religion. 
 
 To this highly philosophical scheme, I suppose, 
 
8 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 a Modernist would reply that the disparity be- 
 tween the Christian conception of life and the 
 modern conception, which has, after all, grown out 
 of it, cannot be quite complete and absolute; 
 that the new conception is by no means divine 
 and needs criticism as much as the old ; that the 
 result of this double criticism would be to reveal 
 a fundamental unity. He would allow the impo- 
 tence of the Church, the irreceptivity of the age, 
 but would ascribe them to accidental, not to essen- 
 tial, perversions. 
 
 But if it be hard to reconcile these opposites in 
 thought, it is still harder to reconcile them in fact ; 
 and all that the Modernist has to urge against the 
 more desperate and impatient solution is hope 
 and patience. No two men will quite agree as to 
 the precise moment when a case becomes des- 
 perate. It is a judgment that depends on differ- 
 ences of experience and temperament, and each 
 must be left to the liberty of his opinion. 
 
 It is, however, with the doctrinal rather than with 
 the practical Modernism that I propose to deal. 
 Allowing that life and action, involving as they do 
 a confused consciousness of the truths they imply, 
 are more important than the analysis and state- 
 ment of those truths in doctrinal form, yet a slow 
 reaction of doctrine upon life and action cannot 
 be denied. If the root affects the branches, power- 
 
VARIOUS FORMS OF MODERNISM 9 
 
 fully and directly, the branches may affect the 
 root, slowly and indirectly, but not less really. If 
 our feelings govern our thoughts in a great measure, 
 our thoughts, in a little measure, may gradually 
 modify our feelings. 
 
 Moreover it is chiefly with Roman Catholic 
 Modernism that I propose to deal, not merely 
 because I know more about it, but because it is 
 Modernism par excellence, the first to bear the 
 name and pass it on to analogous movements. 
 
 In the Roman Church the problem attains its 
 clearest statement, its greatest urgency. For, in 
 the first place, her doctrinal positions, being far 
 more numerous and daring than those of any other 
 Church, offer a wider target to the shafts of criti- 
 cism. Secondly, scholastic logic has bound these 
 positions into a system so compact as to obliterate 
 any distinction between fundamental and contin- 
 gent elements. They all stand or fall together, 
 for they are all attached to the one root of ecclesi- 
 astical inerrancy. Other systems, more loosely 
 organised, could survive the amputation of this or 
 that member ; Rome would bleed to death if she 
 sacrificed her little finger. Finally, this system, in 
 its rigid unity, is tied fast, as none other, to certain 
 fundamental presuppositions, which are assailed 
 to-day by a philosophy based on the comparative 
 study of religions, past and present. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Hence the opposition between old and new is 
 more precise and acute in the Roman Church than 
 in any other. There the question is put more 
 clearly and exactly than elsewhere. But the 
 answer must interest, and eventually decide, the 
 fate of every other Church that shares any measure 
 of the same dogmatic system and rests on the 
 same ultimate presuppositions. If Rome dies, 
 other churches may order their coffins. 
 
 Indeed, it is its preoccupation with these ulti- 
 mate presuppositions that makes Modernism to 
 be, in the words of Pius X, " the compendium of 
 all heresies." Former heresies have questioned 
 this or that dogma, this or that ecclesiastical insti- 
 tution. Modernism criticises the very idea of 
 dogma, of ecclesiasticism, of revelation, of faith, of 
 heresy, of theology, of sacramentalism. 
 
 Heretofore, as Mr. A. Leslie Lilley somewhere 
 remarks, Christendom has been broken up by 
 vertical sections. Now it is threatened with a 
 horizontal cleavage, passing through all those sec- 
 tions impartially. There are not only Modernist 
 Roman Catholics, but Modernist Anglicans and 
 Nonconformists — nay, Modernist Jews and Mus- 
 sulmans. Common to them all is the belief or 
 hope that their respective Churches are not out- 
 worn, are not dead but sleeping ; that the wine of 
 Modernism is not so new as it seems, or else that 
 
VARIOUS FORMS OF MODERNISM II 
 
 the ecclesiastical bottles are not so old as they 
 seem. 
 
 This criticism of religious categories and ulti- 
 mate ideas has been slowly forced into existence 
 by the detailed criticism of the results that have 
 been deduced from those ideas. The need of 
 reconciling these results with those of historical 
 and scientific criticism has gradually driven apolo- 
 gists back to the very roots of religion, in their 
 search for the exact point of divergence. Naturally, 
 it is in the Church of Rome that the divergence 
 has been most keenly felt and the search for its 
 origin most eagerly prosecuted. 
 
 What is common to all Roman Catholic Modern- 
 ists is the belief in a possible reconciliation of their 
 Catholicism with the results of historical criticism. 
 They differ widely as to what those results are, 
 and as to the means of reconciliation. This re- 
 conciliation practically consists in a re-reading or 
 reinterpretation of their Catholicism so as to find 
 room in it for accepted facts ; and also in an 
 effort to control, and even resist, the destructive 
 tendencies of criticism. Plainly this implies philo- 
 sophising — a philosophy of Catholicism and a 
 philosophy of criticism ; and, as regards their 
 philosophy, their reading of Catholicism, their 
 reading of criticism, Modernists are of all possible 
 varieties, shades and grades. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 There are, as there always have been, men in the 
 the Roman Church whose conflict with official or- 
 thodoxy springs, not from their historical, but from 
 their philosophical convictions. One need only 
 think of Pascal, Descartes, Malebranche, Lamen- 
 nais, Gioberti in the past, as well as of Dom 
 Romolo Murri, and of the Christian Democrats 
 and Sillonists in the present, who are fighting 
 for ethical, economical and political convictions, 
 while repudiating all connection with theological 
 Modernists and their historical problems. As the 
 Church claims infallibility in morals as well as in 
 faith, their orthodoxy is only partial at the best, 
 and their conflict with her doctrinal authority is 
 not less real because it concerns matters of conduct 
 rather than matters of theology. 
 
 One must add to these another Category of 
 Modernism, condemned by Pius X under the 
 names of " Laicism " and " Presbyterianism," which 
 consists in a protest against that progressive 
 centralisation of the Roman Church, by which 
 first the laity, then the priests, and finally the 
 bishops, have been deprived of all active share in 
 Church life and government ; which demands 
 constitutional guarantees for the liberty of the 
 subject against the caprices of authority ; and 
 which is inspired by the idea of democracy as well 
 as by a knowledge of the original constitution of 
 
VARIOUS FORMS OF MODERNISM 13 
 
 the Church. This is the most widespread of all 
 forms of Modernism, and is shared by thousands 
 who would cordially anathematise Dom Romolo 
 Murri as well as M. Loisy. 
 
 I must, however, confine my attention to theo- 
 logical Modernists and their historical problems. 
 
 Where there are so many shades and grades it 
 will be well to take the problem in its most 
 extreme and aggravated form. If a case can be 
 made out for that form, the milder forms will 
 be defensible a fortiori. If not, they may still be 
 defensible on other grounds. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE OLD ORTHODOXY 
 
 THE historical objections raised against official 
 orthodoxy are drawn, first of all, from the 
 study of the origin and development of eccle- 
 siastical institutions and dogmas as excluding the 
 traditional notion of immutability. Secondly, 
 from the criticism of the Old and New Testaments 
 — more especially of the Gospels, as conflicting 
 with the Christological and various other affirma- 
 tions of present orthodoxy. Thirdly, from the 
 comparative study of religions as threatening the 
 claim of Christianity to be the sole and absolute 
 religion. 
 
 To estimate justly the measure of the difficulty 
 we must be clear about the terminus a quo of 
 Modernist criticism — about the claims of official 
 orthodoxy. This is the more necessary as an 
 illegitimate use of the category of development 
 has been slowly introduced by way of a new patch 
 to hide the rent in the old garment — and with the 
 usual disastrous result. According to the orthodox 
 theory, as defended by Bossuet, as assumed by the 
 
 14 
 
THE OLD ORTHODOXY 15 
 
 Councils and the Fathers, the doctrines and essen- 
 tial institutions of the Catholic Church have been 
 always and identically the same. The whole dog- 
 matic, sacramental and hierarchic system, as it 
 now stands, was delivered in detail by Christ to 
 His Apostles and by them to their successors. 
 He proclaimed, not the very words, but the very 
 substance in all detail of the doctrines of Trent 
 and the Vatican. He instituted the papacy, the 
 episcopate, the seven sacraments. The Immaculate 
 Conception of Mary was familiar, if not to the 
 Patriarchs, as Pius X has taught us in one of his 
 encyclicals, at least to the Apostles and the earliest 
 Christians. 
 
 The Church is the infallible guardian of this 
 system as delivered to her keeping by the Apostles 
 — not to develop dialectically, but to preserve intact 
 without addition or subtraction. " Keep the de- 
 posit," "keep the form of sound words" — that 
 is her commission. It was an infallibility, not of 
 new revelation or of further deduction and de- 
 velopment, but of memory — of her collective 
 memory. The Holy Ghost was to teach and 
 bring to her remembrance all that Christ had said 
 to her while on earth — nothing more. Hence in 
 the early Church the appeal is always to the Past, 
 not to the Future ; the golden age of dogmatic 
 truth lies behind, not before. Apostolicity, de- 
 
16 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 rivation from the Apostles through the Apostolic 
 Sees, is the criterion of orthodoxy. It was not -a 
 question of what, logically, the Apostles ought to 
 have held but did not hold ; but of what they 
 actually held. Novelty was the very definition of 
 heresy. Deductions, which the Apostles had not 
 imposed with the authority of revelation, could 
 not be imposed merely on that of reason. Heresy 
 was any departure from the actual and universal 
 belief of the faithful. When such novelties arose 
 and spread, bishops met in Council, not to de- 
 bate an open theological question and impose 
 their vote on the faithful, but to bear witness as 
 to the actual faith of their flocks ; not to decide 
 what their flocks should believe for the future, but 
 to declare what they did believe at present and 
 had always believed ; not to make the innovation 
 heretical, but to declare that it was so already, as 
 being a departure from the actual and morally 
 universal belief of the faithful ; not to define an 
 open question, but to define that it never was 
 open. They did not make the truth to be de fide 
 but de fide definita — they defined that it was 
 already de fide. In this view of unchanging tradi- 
 tion there was no real, but only a verbal, difference 
 between the actual Christology of the Nicene and 
 the ante-Nicene Church. The faithful may pre- 
 viously have said homoiousios, "of similar sub- 
 
THE OLD ORTHODOXY 17 
 
 stance," but they meant homousios, '' of identical 
 substance " — all except a few heretical innovators. 
 Against these the Council selected a term more 
 accurately expressive of the universal and un- 
 broken apostolic tradition. It did not make a 
 new article of universal belief. 
 
 So too Pius IX did not decide the open question 
 as to whether Mary's conception was or was not 
 immaculate, as though it had not been always de 
 fide and universally held. He only declared, 
 against innovators, that the faithful with the ex- 
 ception of an insignificant minority had always, as 
 well as everywhere, believed in the Immaculate 
 Conception. If there were saints in this minority, 
 such as Augustine, Bernard, Thomas Aquinas and 
 Anselm, they were heretics in good faith, but none 
 the less heretics, in opposition to the general belief 
 of their contemporaries. 
 
 The Vincentian Canon sums up this view, in its 
 criterion of faith, as that which is believed by 
 everybody everywhere, and has always been so 
 believed. Nor must we be misled by Vincent's 
 apparent concession to development. For, in his 
 physiology, the difference between the boy and the 
 man is only that of implicit and explicit ; not that 
 of potential and actual. It is, like the evolution 
 allowed at the Council of Florence, the difference 
 between a cloak that is folded up and the same 
 c 
 
1 8 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 spread out. All that is revealed when it is spread 
 out was there from the first, not potentially, but 
 actually. 1 
 
 Plainly this view of unchangeableness soon 
 encountered difficulties, even in times to which 
 the Past was sealed and its divergence from the 
 Present almost wholly unsuspected. The way in 
 which those difficulties were met supposes a con- 
 ception of tradition wherein development could 
 have no place. The only semblance under whieh 
 later theologians have sought to shelter their theory 
 of development is the distinction just mentioned 
 between implicit and explicit belief; between the 
 cloak folded and the cloak outspread. Because a 
 deduced conclusion is " implied " in its premisses, 
 no less than those premisses in the conclusion, 
 later theologians have quietly interpreted implicit 
 
 1 Driesch, in his Gifford Lectures, 1907 (p. 46), notes that, 
 until the triumph of ' ' epigenesis " in the eighteenth century, 
 "evolution" meant in biology an actual, not merely a potential, 
 pre-formation of the mature organism in its germ. Each part was 
 there in microscopic proportions. But "true epigenesis in the 
 descriptive sense of the term does exist. One thing is formed 
 after the other ; there is not a mere ' unfolding ' of what exists 
 already, though in a smaller form ; there is no evolutio in the old 
 meaning of the word." Under this confusion between evolution as 
 an unfolding of actual packed-up parts, and evolution as epigenesis 
 or growth of new parts contained virtually in a germ, recent theo- 
 logians have claimed the authority of S. Vincent of Lerins and of 
 the Council of Florence for an entirely new conception of doctrinal 
 evolution, in flat contradiction to the ancient idea of doctrinal 
 identity. 
 
THE OLD ORTHODOXY 19 
 
 as meaning potential belief; whereas it had always 
 stood for actual though not stated belief; for a 
 belief too obvious to need statement ; something 
 taken for granted and never challenged. 
 
 If I say that I attended a friend's funeral it is not 
 necessary to say that he is dead. That is stated 
 implicitly. Yet it is not my potential, but my 
 actual, belief; my actual belief in his death is 
 implied in my actual belief in his burial. There 
 are many more or less remote consequences of his 
 death which I could, but do not, infer. These I 
 believe potentially but not actually — i.e. I do not 
 believe them. I may even deny them. They are 
 implied, but my belief in them is not implied by 
 my assertion of his death. 
 
 Against historical difficulties, drawn from the 
 silence of earlier ages as to current beliefs, appeal 
 was made, not to the potential, but to the actual, 
 though implicit and unstated, beliefs of those ages. 
 They were not mentioned because no one had 
 challenged them ; but had the man in the street 
 been questioned he would have answered as the 
 Church of to-day. 
 
 Another appeal, quite inconsistent with any 
 theory of development, was to the Disciplina 
 Arcani and to all that Christ taught the Apostles 
 during those forty days after His resurrection. 
 This was not written down, but was confided to 
 
20 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 the rulers of the Church to be dispensed according 
 as exigencies might demand. All apparent addi- 
 tions to the Creed were, from the first, known 
 explicitly to a favoured but undefined few, who 
 transmitted them to the episcopate or to the Pope. 
 How much more these know only the future can 
 tell. This is hardly consistent with quod ubique, 
 quod ab omnibus, though it saves the quod semper. 
 As a weapon of apologetic it has been laid on the 
 shelf and its place has been taken by development 
 — a weapon which simply murders the system it 
 would defend. 
 
IV 
 THE NEW ORTHODOXY 
 
 THIS new weapon fitted well to hands that 
 had been trained in the disputations and 
 debates of the schools, where a man who held 
 certain premisses might be forced, even against 
 his will, to admit the conclusion that followed 
 from them. He seemed to be thus convicted of 
 holding what he did not hold or even denied — as 
 though it had been buried and lost in his subcon- 
 sciousness. At this rate earlier generations, who 
 had admitted the premisses while denying the 
 conclusions of later theologians, might be said to 
 have admitted those conclusions by implication ; 
 and thus modern doctrines, in the face of such 
 manifest and explicit denial in the past, might 
 claim to have been held semper, ubique, ab omnibus. 
 Thus S. Augustine, S. Anselm, S. Bernard, S. 
 Thomas, while explicitly denying, implicitly be- 
 lieved the Immaculate Conception of Mary. 
 
 But it is one thing to say that the truth (or 
 objective belief) was implied in their admissions ; 
 another to say that their belief in the truth was 
 
22 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 so implied. An implied potential belief is not 
 the same as an implied actual belief. Under this 
 ambiguity of the word " implicit " a new concep- 
 tion of tradition has been quietly substituted for 
 the old. If a man is said to believe and admit, 
 in spite of his explicit denial, all that is objectively 
 implied by his data, then every avowed atheist is 
 a theist, and every heretic orthodox. If S. Thomas 
 was not a heretic for denying the Immaculate 
 Conception, neither was Arius a heretic for deny- 
 ing the Godhead of Christ. It is irrelevant to say 
 that the former dogma was not yet defide definita, 
 for it could not have been defined unless it had 
 always been de fide, always accepted by the faith- 
 ful at large. All we can say is that, in default of 
 public definition, S. Thomas may not have known 
 that he was an innovator and a heretic. 
 
 In this view, the whole character and meaning 
 of an ecumenical council is changed. It becomes 
 a theological debate. Bishops do not meet to 
 bear witness to the constant and universal belief of 
 their flocks, against some unheard-of innovation, 
 and to prove it a heresy simply by showing it to 
 be contrary to the actual universal faith. No ; 
 someone has started a new opinion which has 
 gradually spread and divided the Church into two 
 camps. So far it is an open question ; the faithful 
 are at perfect liberty to choose this side or that. 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 23 
 
 Those who choose the wrong side are not heretics, 
 for there has been no definition. They are justified 
 by their willingness to accept whatever a council 
 may decide. In that willingness all orthodoxy is 
 implied. In virtue of that willingness S. Bernard, 
 while denying, really believed in the Immacu- 
 late Conception. When union and charity are 
 threatened by the dispute, and the faithful are at 
 their wits' end and do not know what to think, 
 bishops meet for an ecumenical debate. They 
 do not come to apply the criterion of universal 
 and constant belief; for the opinion is new and 
 the faithful are at sixes and sevens on the subject. 
 They do not come to declare what is and always 
 has been de fide, but to make something de fide 
 for the future that was not so before and might be 
 denied inculpably. They debate the question on 
 its own merits and then impose their decision on 
 the faithful as a law of belief, which is not new 
 only because it lay potentially in the admissions 
 of former generations, just as the first book of 
 Euclid lies potentially in the axioms, postulates 
 and definitions. It was always and universally 
 believed by the faithful even when they denied it- 
 In the old view revelation was guarded by the 
 infallible memory of the faithful collectively. To 
 know what was of faith was not a question of 
 speculation and argument, but of observation. 
 
24 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 When communication was more difficult than now, 
 it was possible to mistake local for universal 
 beliefs. The point was decided by reference to 
 the Apostolic Sees ; especially to Rome, where 
 Christians from all quarters came together ; or else 
 to a general council of bishops, who came to wit- 
 ness to the constant and universal belief of their 
 several dioceses. 
 
 In the newer view revelation is guarded by the 
 infallible understanding of the episcopate in ecu- 
 menical debate — infallible in deducing the logical 
 consequences of the faith of past generations, and 
 adding them to the ever-growing body of explicit 
 and actual beliefs. 
 
 In the older view the body of actual beliefs was 
 a constant quantity ; in the newer it is susceptible 
 of indefinite increase. It is frankly allowed to be 
 far larger now than in the days of S. Bernard ; far 
 larger then than in the ante-Nicene Church. And 
 yet it was always the same — not actually, but 
 potentially, like the faith of an atheist who, from 
 a potential, has become an actual believer. We 
 are referred at every turn to acorns and oaks and 
 grains of mustard-seed. The Disciplina Arcani is 
 heard of no more. 
 
 As a means of explaining the ever-multiplying 
 difficulties of history — its strange silences, its em- 
 barrassing affirmations — Development is a more 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 25 
 
 elastic hypothesis than the Disciplina Arcani. We 
 need not be astonished that earlier generations 
 had not drawn out all the consequences of their 
 admissions, or at times flatly denied those con- 
 sequences ; that they did not believe actually what 
 they believed potentially. It was much harder to 
 maintain that they were merely silent because the 
 beliefs in question were too obvious to need men- 
 tion ; or because they were too sacred to be uttered 
 publicly. 
 
 But this relief is purchased too dearly. 
 
 The fact that potential belief can consist with 
 actual denial ; that it levels all distinction between 
 believers and unbelievers — since all are potentially 
 believers — shows that it is not belief at all, any 
 more than potential health is real health. 
 
 If this was what the Fathers and Councils 
 meant by identity and immutability of doctrine, 
 by semper, ubique, ab omnibus, why did they never 
 recur to so obvious and easy an explanation, for 
 surely the idea of dialectical development is as old 
 as civilisation ? It was not discovered by Darwin 
 or Newman. No ; the identity they taught was 
 that of actual belief — of a constant body of doc- 
 trine from which nothing could be taken, to which 
 nothing could be added ; which was apostolic 
 because it had been delivered whole and entire by 
 the Apostles, not to the intellectual analysis, but 
 
26 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 to the unfailing memory or tradition of the whole 
 Church. Their appeal was to the past, and not to 
 the future, as the period of fullest enlighten- 
 ment — an appeal inconceivable on the hypothesis 
 of a development of Faith. All growth is from a 
 formless germ to a plenitude of expansion ; from 
 the dimness of dawn to the light of perfect day. 
 Its golden age is before it and not behind it ; its 
 criterion is its end, not its beginning. What 
 would S. Paul, who lived in daily expectation of 
 the Parousia, have thought had he been told that 
 the light of Christian truth was but at its dawn ; 
 that he was living in the Church's darkest age ; 
 that even the nineteenth century would not see the 
 sun at its height ? What would the Christians of 
 the first ages, with their faces towards the past, 
 have thought had they been told that the fulness 
 of revelation lay before and not behind ? 
 
 This was too fundamental a point of tradition 
 to be denied, and so we find the development 
 theory clumsily tacked on to it. It is conceded 
 that the Apostles knew fully and explicitly by 
 revelation all that has been, or shall ever come to 
 be, believed actually by the Church. But the sub- 
 Apostolic age was not fit for this fulness of truth : 
 only through long centuries could the Church be 
 prepared to receive it. It was delivered to the 
 sub-Apostolic age wrapped up in certain pregnant 
 
THE NEW ORTHODOXY 27 
 
 and central dogmas, whose potentiality has been 
 unfolded by the divinely assisted dialectic of 
 Christian thought. Thus dogmatic truth is slowly 
 returning to that original fulness and explicitness 
 which it possessed in the Apostolic mind. The 
 process begins, as it ends, in a period of maximum 
 illumination. From an initial maximum of evolu- 
 tion it passes immediately to a maximum of in- 
 volution, and thence moves slowly and laboriously 
 towards its original condition. 
 
 But if this fulness of Apostolic illumination was 
 not communicable or communicated to the Church, 
 how can we appeal to it ? Of what use is it as a cri- 
 terion if we are only to rediscover it at the end of 
 time? The backward appeal can only be to the 
 sub- Apostolic age — the age of maximum involution 
 and darkness. And let us remember that the 
 classical appeal was not merely to the Apostles, 
 but to the earlier ages as nearer the plenitude of 
 light, and therefore more enlightened. 
 
 Let us also remember that the Church claims to be 
 the infallible guardian of that deposit of faith com- 
 mitted to her by the Apostles. Yet this hybrid 
 theory of development implies that the casket of 
 dogmatic jewels at once dropped from her weak 
 and incompetent hands, and that she is infallible, 
 not in keeping what she received, but in slowly 
 recovering what she has lost. 
 
28 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 But if such a theory of development is in flagrant 
 contradiction with the patristic idea of doctrinal 
 immutability, this patristic idea has long since 
 crumbled to dust in the light of history. To find 
 our present theological system in the first century 
 is as hopeless as to find our present civilisation 
 there. No one attempts it any longer. It was 
 possible only for those early generations, whose 
 divergences from the Apostolic age were com- 
 paratively slight, or for those later generations, 
 from whom their palpable divergences from Apos- 
 tolicity were hidden by their ignorance of the past. 
 No Ultramontane pretends that the Immaculate 
 Conception was actually and explicitly believed 
 always and everywhere by everybody. They have 
 transferred their cargo to the new vessel of develop- 
 ment, whose unseaworthiness we have just noted. 
 
 Not that development can do more than post- 
 pone their shipwreck on the rocks of history. Even 
 to show that the present doctrinal system was 
 contained logically in the admissions of the first 
 centuries means a torturing of texts and documents 
 incompatible with any sort of historical sincerity. 
 No historical probability, taken alone, is coercive, 
 but the cumulus of probabilities is irresistible for 
 all but the wilful sceptic ; and under the weight of 
 such a cumulus even the developmental view of 
 doctrinal immutability falls to the ground. 
 
V 
 NEWMAN'S THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 THIS idea of dialectical development had long 
 superseded the old apologetic of actual 
 identity and unchangeableness when Newman 
 appeared on the scene with the theory of doctrinal 
 development associated with his name. The facts 
 that it is thus associated with his name, and that 
 it was vehemently opposed by the scholastic sup- 
 porters of dialectical development, ought to be 
 enough to prove that it is a radically different and 
 irreconcilable system. That those who have con- 
 demned this system in the Encyclical Pascendi 
 should try to show that Newman never held it, 
 and that he was at one with scholastics in their 
 purely dialectical idea of development, may be put 
 down partly to tactics, and partly to ignorance and 
 the tendency of the ill-read to read their own ideas 
 into everything. The fact that Newman spoke of 
 Christianity as the development of an " idea " easily 
 misled those for whom " ideas " mean intellectual 
 concepts, universals, definitions, from which a doctri- 
 nal system could be deduced syllogistically. More- 
 
 29 
 
3 o CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 over his Essay on the Development of Christian 
 Doctrine was undoubtedly written with one eye 
 fixed on his scholastic critics, and with a view to 
 dissemble the difference between their conception 
 and his own as much as possible. His own con- 
 ception, undistorted by any such synthetic effort, 
 is to be found in his Oxford Lectures. It is one 
 of biological, rather than of dialectical, develop- 
 ment ; organic, rather than architectural. 
 
 If a man is to be judged by what he is funda- 
 mentally, and in his dominant aims and sym- 
 pathies, it is absurd to speak of Newman as a 
 Modernist in any degree. It is equally absurd 
 to speak of him as an Ultramontane ; though it 
 will be always possible for Ultramontanes to say 
 that he was one until we have a sincere and 
 integral publication of his correspondence. But 
 if he was not an Ultramontane, it was because 
 he was more, and not less, conservative than that 
 a priori school which evolves history out of general 
 ideas, and holds documents in abhorrence. The 
 whole aim of his apologetic was the integrity 
 of the Catholic tradition of the Roman Church ; 
 its preservation against the corrosive atmosphere 
 of rationalism and liberalism. Yet the whole 
 character and temper of his mind was adverse 
 to the merely dialectical apologetic of scholastics 
 and Ultramontanes, while his knowledge of early 
 
NEWMAN'S THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT 31 
 
 Church history convinced him of the inadequacy 
 of their attempt to reconcile primitive with pre- 
 sent-day Catholic theology. He saw clearly that 
 modern adversaries had to be met on their own 
 grounds with their own weapons ; that crossbows 
 and bludgeons were helpless against long-range 
 rifles. 
 
 What he did not see, perhaps, was the intimate 
 connection between methods and their results; 
 that the new could not defend the old, nor the 
 old the new; that to give his adversaries the 
 choice of weapons was to give them the victory. 
 Here the instinct or intuition of the Roman 
 Church, insisting on scholasticism as the only 
 proper weapon of orthodox apologetic, is wiser. 
 So far, and it is now very far, as the Roman 
 system has been created by scholasticism, it can 
 only be maintained and defended by scholas- 
 ticism. 
 
 His Essay on Development is an argumentum 
 ad hominem, addressed to the Tractarians. He 
 uses his favourite method, derived from Butler : 
 If you come so far, you must either come 
 further or go back. If you are a Deist, you 
 must become a Christian or a Rationalist ; if you 
 are a Christian, you must become a Catholic or 
 a Deist. In short, if you are not a Roman 
 Catholic, you must become a sceptic. So, too, 
 
33 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 if the Tractarians reject the later developments 
 of Roman theology, why not also those of the 
 Fathers and early Councils? If they can recon- 
 cile the latter with the Vincentian canon, why 
 not also the former ? In no case can the rigid 
 and literal identity of the later and earlier theology 
 with the Depositum Fidei be maintained. Develop- 
 ment of some sort must be admitted. The original 
 " deposit " must be conceived as in some sense 
 a germ. To conceive it as a body of theological 
 premisses, susceptible of indefinite dialectical 
 development, would be obviously inconsistent 
 with the appeal to the Apostolic age as the 
 most spiritually enlightened. Theology and 
 Revelation must be distinguished. The content 
 of Revelation is not a statement, but an "idea" 
 — embodied, perhaps, in certain statements and 
 institutions, but not exhausted by them. This 
 embodiment is susceptible of development ; but 
 the animating " idea " is the same under all the 
 variety and progress of its manifestations and 
 embodiments. There is a development of insti- 
 tutions and formulas but not of the revealed 
 "idea," not of the Faith. Thus the advantage 
 of later over earlier ages is merely secondary 
 and protective — a compensation for their growing 
 disadvantage. As time goes on the preservation 
 of the original " idea " needs more complex 
 
NEWMAN'S THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT 33 
 
 defences against oblivion and distortion. As the 
 initial force lessens, it needs to be husbanded more 
 carefully. 
 
 In this notion of an " idea " as a spiritual force 
 or impetus, not as an intellectual concept, New- 
 man identifies himself with the modern, and 
 separates himself from the scholastic, mind. It 
 is the weapon that Modernists have taken from 
 him and turned against much of that system 
 in whose defence he had framed it. He himself 
 must have owned that it was as far from the 
 mind of the Fathers as from that of the 
 scholastics ; that when the Fathers spoke of the 
 unbroken identity of the Faith, they were not 
 thinking of an "idea" but of a dogmatic system, 
 which neither had been nor could be developed 
 — which had come down unchanged from the 
 hands of the Apostles. 
 
 Dealing with Tractarians, he is more con- 
 cerned about the "idea" of the Catholic Church 
 than about that of Christianity. He assumes 
 their identity as admitted by his opponents. 
 He has merely to show that the " idea " of early 
 and present-day Roman Catholicism is the same. 
 He has to show that they are governed by the 
 same ends, the same methods, the same temper 
 — not always a very pleasant one — and therefore 
 presumably embody the same idea of which even 
 
34 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 these unpleasantnesses are the characteristic, 
 though morbid, manifestations. 
 
 As an argumentum ad hominem it is un- 
 doubtedly strong. But, for one whom it will 
 drive forward, it will drive a hundred backward 
 to reconsider the admissions that lead to such 
 consequences. In virtue of his method Newman 
 did as much for unbelief as for belief. Between 
 himself and the sceptical issue stood the barrier 
 of his own subjective and incommunicable religious 
 experiences, and so his method carried him for- 
 wards and not backwards. Others may not share 
 his religious experiences, or, if they do, may seek 
 their explanation in psychology rather than in 
 divinity ; and for these his method is a two-edged 
 sword. 
 
VI 
 
 FIRST RESULTS OF NEW TESTAMENT 
 CRITICISM 
 
 BUT the problem to which Modernists have 
 to apply Newman's theory of Development 
 is one which he saw only in vague outline, as a 
 cloud on the distant horizon. He was contem- 
 porary with that application of historical criticism 
 to Christian origins and to the New Testament 
 which occupied so many German scholars in the 
 nineteenth century. But Germany was further 
 from Oxford in his day than at present, and he did 
 not even read German. It was generally assumed, 
 and comfortably believed, that this criticism, as the 
 work of German rationalists and infidels, could 
 offer no immediate danger to the belief of sensible 
 people in this country ; that the critics were all at 
 sixes and sevens, so that any of their assertions 
 could be met with counter-assertions from their 
 own fraternity ; that there was nothing but endless 
 oscillation, no real progress, no established results ; 
 that at any rate the dispute was confined to the 
 study and could never reach the street. 
 
 35 
 
36 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 As a matter of fact it has reached the street and 
 the railway bookstall, to a great extent here, to a 
 far greater extent in Germany and elsewhere. 
 Like every new subject of scientific inquiry, that 
 of Christian origins gave rise at first to a whole 
 chaos of conflicting opinions and hypotheses, but, 
 as time went on, the number of issues was 
 narrowed down steadily, and an amount of general 
 agreement reached that seemed to justify the 
 diffusion of such results in a popular form. 
 
 The problem of present-day Catholicism is, not 
 to reconcile itself with that of the earlier centuries, 
 to find in both a common " idea " of ecclesiasticism, 
 but to find ecclesiasticism of any sort in Jesus 
 Christ as He is given to us by historical criticism ; 
 to find in the earliest Catholicism a true develop- 
 ment of the " idea " of Christ. So far as Newman's 
 narrower problem is concerned his contentions 
 have, in many ways, gained rather than lost at 
 the hands of historical criticism. The antiquity 
 of the leading features and principles of Catholi- 
 cism has been pushed further and further back, 
 till its beginnings are found in the New Testa- 
 ment itself. The hierarchy is felt in the Pastoral 
 Epistles ; sacramentalism in S. Paul ; theology 
 in the Johannine writings; ecclesiasticism in 
 S. Matthew ; the Petrine ascendency in S. Matthew 
 and the Acts 
 
FIRST RESULTS OF NE W TESTAMENT CRITICISM 37 
 
 Taking their idea of Christianity from Ger- 
 man Protestantism and Pietism, critics are not 
 concerned to distinguish between the claims of 
 Tractarianism and Roman Catholicism, or to de- 
 fend the purity of the first six centuries against 
 the impurity of the subsequent thirteen. They 
 agree with Newman as to the continuity of " idea " 
 governing the Catholic tradition from S. Paul to 
 Pius X. I say " with Newman " — not with the 
 scholastic or pre-scholastic view of continuity of 
 the dogmatic and institutional system. Of these 
 views their method is entirely destructive. It 
 shows equally that there has been a continual 
 process of growth, and that that growth has 
 not been dialectical ; but, like that of civilisation, 
 unified by its end, its idea, its spirit. For them 
 the problem is the transition from Christ to 
 Catholicism. And here we have two schools — 
 one affirming, the other denying, continuity of 
 idea. The former is at once the older and the 
 newer ; and this for a reason that points to its 
 permanence. 
 
 The Eschatological view, as it is called, was 
 first formulated in a spirit hostile to Christianity, 
 as known under the form of German Protestantism. 
 The intention of this school was to represent 
 Christ's central inspiration as an illusion, and 
 Christianity as the outcome of a fanatical dream ; 
 
38 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 to show that what was of universal and permanent 
 value in His ethical teaching was not, and did not 
 claim to be, His own ; that what was His own was 
 not of permanent value since it was coloured 
 through and through with His illusion as to the 
 immediate end of this world and the coming of a 
 new miraculous world, in which sin would be im- 
 possible and where ethics would have no scope. 
 In a word, they wished to show that the German 
 Protestant Christ never existed any more than the 
 Roman Catholic Christ. 
 
 Against the haste and crudeness of this first 
 formulation of the eschatological view, subse- 
 quent critics waged, for many years, a steady 
 warfare in favour of what we may call the Liberal 
 Protestant Christ. " Liberal," because the rejection 
 of the miraculous and, to a very great extent, of 
 the transcendent, Jenseits, was common to them 
 with their opponents. 
 
VII 
 THE CHRIST OF LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM 
 
 THE Jesus of the school of critics represented 
 to-day by Harnack and Bousset, was a Divine 
 Man because He was full of the Spirit of God ; 
 full of Righteousness. He came (it is assumed 
 rather than proved) at a time when the Jews were 
 full of apocalyptic expectations as to the coming 
 of the Messiah, who was to avenge them of their 
 enemies and establish a more or less miraculous and 
 material Kingdom of God upon earth. He Himself 
 seems to have shared this view in a spiritual form, 
 translating it from material to ethical terms. As 
 destined by a Divine vocation to inaugurate a 
 reign of Righteousness, a Kingship of God over 
 men's hearts and consciences, He felt Himself to 
 be the true, because the spiritual, Messiah. With 
 difficulty He trained a few of His followers to this 
 conception of the Kingdom and the Christ. He 
 went about doing good (even working cures which 
 He supposed to be miraculous) and teaching 
 goodness. The essence of His Gospel was the 
 Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man ; 
 
 39 
 
40 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 or else the two great Commandments of the law 
 — the love of God and of one's neighbour ; or 
 else the Kingdom of God that is within us. True, 
 these were platitudes of contemporary Jewish 
 piety, and even of pagan philosophy. But Jesus 
 drove them home to the heart by the force of 
 personal example and greatness of character — 
 above all, by dying for His friends and for these 
 ethical principles. Of course He was, to some 
 extent, of His time. He believed in miracles, in 
 diabolic possession ; above all, He believed in the 
 immediate end of the world ; and a great deal of 
 His ethics, coloured by that belief, was the ethics 
 of a crisis. But these were but accidents of His cen- 
 tral idea and interest, in regard to which we may 
 say He was essentially modern, so far as our re- 
 discovery of the equation Religion = Righteousness 
 is modern, not to say Western and Teutonic. 
 
 For this almost miraculous modernity the first 
 century was not prepared. No sooner was the 
 Light of the World kindled than it was put under 
 a bushel. The Pearl of Great Price fell into the 
 dustheap of Catholicism, not without the wise 
 permission of Providence, desirous to preserve it 
 till the day when Germany should rediscover it 
 and separate it from its useful;[but deplorable 
 accretions. Thus between Christ and early 
 Catholicism there is not a bridge but a chasm. 
 
THE CHRIST OF LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM 41 
 
 Christianity did not cross the bridge ; it fell into 
 the chasm and remained there, stunned, for nine- 
 teen centuries. The explanation of this sudden 
 fall — more sudden because they have pushed 
 Catholicism back to the threshold of the Apos- 
 tolic age — is the crux of Liberal Protestant critics. 
 The only analogy I can think of is the sudden 
 appearance of Irvingite Catholicism in the bosom 
 of Presbyterianism. 
 
 The theory is curiously akin to that of the 
 neo-Roman theologians. In both Revelation is 
 suddenly eclipsed with the Apostolic age, to regain 
 its primitive brilliance only after the lapse of 
 centuries. Here it is the Immaculate Conception 
 that is rediscovered ; there it is the Fatherhood of 
 God and the first principles of morality. 
 
 It was to the credit of their hearts, if to the preju- 
 dice of their scientific indifference, that these critics 
 were more or less avowedly actuated by apologetic 
 interests. They desired to strip Jesus of His 
 medieval regalia, and to make Him acceptable to 
 a generation that had lost faith in the miraculous 
 and in any conception of another life that was not 
 merely a complement, sanction and justification 
 of this life. They wanted to bring Jesus into the 
 nineteenth century as the Incarnation of its ideal 
 of Divine Righteousness, i.e. of all the highest 
 principles and aspirations that ensure the healthy 
 
42 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 progress of civilisation. They wanted to acquit 
 Him of that exclusive and earth-scorning other- 
 worldliness, which had led men to look on His 
 religion as the foe of progress and energy, and 
 which came from confusing the accidental form 
 with the essential substance of His Gospel. With 
 eyes thus preoccupied they could only find the 
 German in the Jew ; a moralist in a visionary ; 
 a professor in a prophet ; the nineteenth century 
 in the first ; the natural in the supernatural. 
 Christ was the ideal man ; the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, the ideal humanity. As the rationalistic 
 presupposition had strained out, as spurious, the 
 miraculous elements of the Gospel, so the moral- 
 istic presupposition strained out everything but 
 modern morality. That alone was the substance, 
 the essence, of Christianity — das Wesen des Chris- 
 tentums. If God remained, it was only the God 
 of moralism and rationalism — the correlative of 
 the Brotherhood of man ; not the God of Moses, 
 of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ; of David and the 
 prophets. 
 
 Now it is clear that every scientific inquiry 
 must be impelled by a motive and guided by 
 a hypothesis. A method is in itself a dead tool 
 without force or direction. Were truth not advan- 
 tageous, the will could not seek it. The question 
 is whether we are thinking of some particular, 
 
THE CHRIST OF LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM 43 
 
 personal or party advantage or the advantage of 
 human life as a whole; whether our desire is in- 
 dividual or universalistic in its interest — a desire 
 of the separate or of the spiritual self. The weight 
 of a given planet has no immediate bearing on 
 practical politics, but only on the completeness of 
 the human understanding, which is a co-factor of 
 human life in general. Truth for truth's sake 
 means truth for life's sake, it only excludes an 
 eye to any less universal advantage. What we 
 call " idle curiosity " is often a healthy instinct — a 
 desire to integrate our general view of the world 
 in which we have to live. 
 
 True, scientific inquiry cannot be coldly dis- 
 interested, but any other interest than the integra- 
 tion of knowledge distorts its vision. Here the 
 Liberal Protestant critics failed no less than the 
 positively anti-Christian critics. Their hypothesis 
 was an article of faith, not an instrument of 
 inquiry. If they have been beaten off the field 
 we need not, perhaps, set it down to the severer 
 detachment of their conquerors, but to the stricter 
 application of that critical method which they 
 invoked 
 
 It is by that method that Johannes Weiss and 
 his followers have been forced back, very un- 
 willingly in most cases, to the eschatological and 
 apocalyptic interpretation of the Gospel. Very 
 
44 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 unwillingly, because it destroys the hope of 
 smoothing away the friction between Christianity 
 and the present age; because, in closing the chasm 
 between the Gospel and early Catholicism, it 
 makes the Christianity of Christ, in all essentials, 
 as unacceptable as that of Catholicism. 
 
 Of this state of things Loisy was not slow 
 to take advantage in LEvangile et VEglise, 
 directed against the Liberal Protestantism of 
 Harnack's Wesen des Ckristentums. The Christ 
 that Harnack sees, looking back through nine- 
 teen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the 
 reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at 
 the bottom of a deep well. Applying Newman's 
 notion of development to a broader and deeper 
 problem than Newman's, Loisy contends that the 
 "idea" of Christ, in its substance and character, 
 is identical with that of Catholic Christianity 
 and opposed at nearly all points to that of Liberal 
 Protestantism. 
 
 Rome (profoundly ignorant of the critical move- 
 ment, its currents and tendencies) thought that 
 even a victory over the Protestant might be pur- 
 chased at too great a cost, and repudiated a 
 notion of development different from that of 
 her theological dialecticians, and disastrous to 
 their idea of orthodoxy. Her hostility to the 
 book and its author have created a general im- 
 
THE CHRIST OF LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM 45 
 
 pression that it is a defence of Liberal Protestant 
 against Roman Catholic positions, and that 
 " Modernism " is simply a protestantising and 
 rationalising movement. This confusion is wide- 
 spread within and without the Roman Church, 
 and many who account themselves Modernists are 
 disciples of Harnack rather than of Loisy. 
 
VIII 
 THE CHRIST OF ESCHATOLOGY 
 
 1ET us consider for a moment the figure of the 
 -/ historical Jesus as it slowly emerges from 
 the hands of criticism. We can only see it in 
 dim outline, for it is incomplete in many a detail. 
 But as it stands in the rough it is enough for our 
 purpose. If the material is supplied by S. Mark, 
 we cannot complete the image without assistance 
 from S. Matthew and, to some extent, from the 
 other evangelists. 
 
 There is no evidence to show that the Baptist 
 and Jesus appeared at a time of high Messianic 
 expectations and were, so to say, creations of their 
 surroundings. Both seem to have been mystics 
 and seers, the creators rather than the creatures 
 of an epoch. Indeed, the whole attempt to write 
 the Gospel story in the light of natural psycho- 
 logical laws, working in given social conditions, is 
 doomed to failure. For the supernatural beliefs 
 and intuitions of Jesus played the chief part in 
 that story and interfered with the concatenation 
 of natural causes. His Messianic consciousness 
 
 4 6 
 
THE CHRIST OF ESCHATOLOGY 47 
 
 was the main determinant of His action and utter- 
 ance. Of th£ . consciousness we do not know the 
 source, presumably it was derived from some 
 sort of vision or revelation. Inferences and in- 
 ductions are not wont to be so tyrannically strong 
 and irresistible. His Christhood was the secret, 
 the mystery of His life. He revealed it reluctantly 
 and cautiously to His disciples ; He confessed it 
 at His trial in order to induce His death ; but 
 otherwise and even from the Baptist He hid it 
 away. Of anything like a development of His 
 Christ-consciousness there is no evidence that will 
 stand criticism. His eschatology was just that of 
 the Jewish apocalyptics, with the difference that 
 He Himself was destined to be the Son of Man. 
 The Son of Man was a superhuman heavenly 
 being, the ruler of a supernatural Kingdom of 
 God, that was to descend upon earth and take the 
 place of the present order of things. He was not 
 the Messiah of the prophets, who was to secure 
 the temporal supremacy of Israel on earth and 
 reign on the throne of David. The decay of that 
 prophetic hope had introduced the more radical 
 apocalyptic hope. The Kingdom of God was not 
 to be realised by any gradual development of the 
 present order, but by an irruption of the super- 
 natural order. While on earth Jesus was, in some 
 sense, the Son of Man only by destiny. He had 
 
48 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 to wait for His glorification and manifestation. 
 In what way He was to put on that higher nature 
 is not clear. But the "possession" of human 
 beings by superhuman beings, by the spirit of 
 God or by evil spirits, was a familiar idea in those 
 days. There is reason to think that He mingled 
 certain elements of the prophetic Messianic ex- 
 pectation with the apocalyptic idea. His concep- 
 tion of the righteousness preparatory to entrance 
 into the Kingdom was inward and spiritual, not 
 legal and external. Probably He regarded Him- 
 self, in His earthly state, as the promised Son of 
 David, 1 and the " suffering servant " who was to 
 be glorified eventually as the Son of Man. Of 
 the nearness of the final catastrophe He was 
 convinced, His own advent into the world was 
 guarantee for that. So far, and as far as He had 
 already seen Satan falling from Heaven and the 
 
 1 There is no reason to question His Davidic origin. The 
 apologetic anxiety of Matthew and Luke, with their incompatible 
 stories of His birth in Bethlehem, neither disproves the possibility 
 that He was born there, nor that He was of Davidic stock. S. 
 Matthew, as usual, is preoccupied about the fulfilment of a sup- 
 posed prophecy as to the locality of His birth, not as to His 
 descent. Had the claim (which was a very early one) to Davidic 
 origin been mythical, it could easily have been refuted by reference 
 to James and his other surviving kinsmen. When He asks how 
 the Son of David can also be David's Lord, seated at God's right 
 hand, He seems to hint at His own secret of the mysterious identi- 
 fication of the prophetic Son of David with the apocalyptic Son 
 of Man — a veritable union of two natures in one personality. 
 
THE CHRIST OF ESCHATOLOGY 49 
 
 demoniacs quailing before Him, He could speak 
 of the Kingdom as already on earth — "even at 
 the doors." It might burst forth in a year; it 
 could not delay beyond a generation. His work 
 on earth was to prepare and hasten the Kingdom 
 — to close the last chapter of human history. He 
 was here avowedly in the rdle of a prophet — the 
 prophet from Nazareth; and being destined to 
 shine forth as the Son of Man He was here 
 incognito. He was here, not to preach His own 
 glory — that, the Father would reveal in due time 
 — but the coming of the Kingdom — His Father's 
 business. From the days of the Baptist, and 
 thenceforth, the Kingdom of Heaven was to be 
 stormed and hurried on by prayer and repentance. 
 Repent, He cried, for the Kingdom of Heaven is 
 at hand. None but the righteous could enter in, 
 or pass unconsumed through the fiery tribulations 
 that were imminent — the wrath that was to come 
 — or stand before the Son of Man in the approach- 
 ing judgment. 
 
 Yet righteousness was not the substance of the 
 Kingdom ; eternal life was not the moral life. In 
 the Kingdom men were to be as the angels of 
 God ; the moral struggle with all its conditions 
 and occasions would be over, it would be rewarded 
 by rest in glory, not by the glory of going on. 
 Men would enter into the joy of their Lord, the 
 
 E 
 
So CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Son of Man — a superhuman, not a human, state. 
 There is no hint in all this of a Kingdom of Christ, 
 a reign of morality here upon earth to be brought 
 about by the gradual spread of Christ's teaching 
 and example. The parables of the mustard seed 
 and the leaven, adduced in its favour, are irrelevant. 
 They merely contrast the slightness of the cause 
 with the greatness of the effect ; man's natural 
 efforts with God's supernatural response. Jesus 
 did not come to reveal a new ethics of this life, 
 but the speedy advent of a new world in which 
 ethics would be superseded. Nor was His secret 
 the fact that the expected temporal Messiah and 
 Kingdom of Israel were parables of moral values. 
 He thought of the Messiah and the Kingdom as 
 did His contemporaries ; neither as temporal, nor 
 yet as moral, but as transcendental and super- 
 natural. Men were to be transformed and glori- 
 fied ; heaven and earth were to be transfigured ; 
 the just were to eat the same spiritual meat and 
 drink the same spiritual drink at the heavenly 
 banquet with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ; there 
 was to be no more death or sorrow or sin or 
 temptation, for the former things were to pass 
 away. The poor, the meek, the peacemakers, the 
 merciful, the pure, the mourners, the hungerers 
 after justice, the persecuted would be so no more ; 
 and their virtues would cease with their occasions. 
 
THE CHRIST OF ESCHATOLOGY 51 
 
 The morality of Jesus was for this life, not for the 
 next — the passing condition, not the abiding sub- 
 stance of blessedness. Nothing is original in the 
 righteousness preached by Jesus. All is to be 
 found in the prophets, psalmists and saints of the 
 Jewish people, not to speak of the pagan moralists 
 and saints. It represents but the highest dictates 
 of man's purified heart and conscience. Much, 
 however, is coloured by the immediate expectation 
 of the end and is applicable only to such an emer- 
 gency. In such a crisis it was not worth while 
 to assert a thousand just claims that, in normal 
 circumstances, could not be inculpably neglected. 
 There was only time to seek the Kingdom of God 
 in which all such losses would be made good. 
 
 Involved in the apocalyptic idea of the im- 
 mediate advent of the Kingdom were three of its 
 necessary preludes — the coming of Elias ; the out- 
 pouring of the Spirit ; the fiery tribulation through 
 which the just were to pass to their glorification. 
 
 That the Baptist did not consider or announce 
 himself as Elias is clear; not only from silence, 
 but from his question to Jesus : " Art thou He 
 that cometh ? " — a term that referred to " that 
 prophet " and not to the Son of Man, who was to 
 appear in the clouds and was not expected first 
 in human form. " Elias indeed cometh and 
 shall restore all things"; here, as upon another 
 
52 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 occasion, Jesus reveals, in the form of a mystery 
 or secret, that, in John the Baptist, Elias has 
 already come — a secret connected with and de- 
 pendent on that of His own Christhood. The 
 Baptism of John was unto repentance and a new 
 life. It was not a merely symbolic and ritual act, 
 as we Modernists take for granted. The idea of 
 sacraments or effectual symbols was as familiar to 
 the Jewish as to the Hellenic mind of that day. 
 It was dominant in the apocalyptic scheme, under 
 the form of sealings and tokens. The Eucharist, 
 as celebrated by Jesus, was not merely a figure but 
 an effectual pledge of a participation in the Messi- 
 anic banquet of the coming Kingdom. If Hellenic 
 influences accentuated the sacramental idea later, 
 it was none the less truly in the mind of Jesus. 
 So too the Baptism of John was an effectual cause 
 of the righteousness and repentance that entailed 
 the subsequent baptism of the Holy Spirit, and 
 the consequent transfiguration of the body in the 
 Kingdom of God. The Christian Church carried 
 on this baptism, with the difference that the 
 Spirit, already poured out on earth, is at once 
 given to the recipient of John's baptism. 
 
 The outpouring of the Holy Spirit, foretold by 
 Joel as the immediate prelude of the Day of 
 Judgment, had for its end the introduction of the 
 new world and a transfigured humanity. Those 
 
THE CHRIS7 OF ESCHATOLOGY 53 
 
 who were " possessed " by God's Spirit were trans- 
 formed essentially into Sons of God and new 
 creatures ; they were proved so by superhuman 
 works, by dominion over devils and demoniacs, as 
 much as by moral gifts and graces. Like those 
 who were possessed, they spoke with strange 
 tongues — the tongues of angels, not of devils. 
 They were endowed with a preternatural wis- 
 dom that none could withstand and that no 
 premeditation could assist : " For it is not ye 
 that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that 
 speaketh in you." It seems clear that Jesus 
 considered Himself as " possessed " with the pleni- 
 tude of this " Power from on high " from the 
 moment of His baptism by John. For Him no 
 intermediary stage of " repentance " was necessary. 
 It was this Spirit that forthwith drove Him into a 
 conflict with the Spirit of Evil in the desert. This 
 was no mere moral parable, but a visionary 
 experience ; and visions in those days were not 
 hallucinations but revelations of hidden realities. 
 From this story we learn that Satan had usurped 
 the dominion of the whole world, which was now 
 to be wrested from him by a despoiler stronger 
 than he. The fact that Jesus and His disciples 
 cast out devils by the power of the Holy Ghost 
 was a sign that the Kingdom of Heaven was at 
 hand and the Kingdom of Satan overthrown. 
 
54 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 It was probably not from the Heaven of the 
 Blessed (where he is placed in the Book of Job) 
 that Jesus saw Satan fall like lightning, but from 
 the throne of the Prince of the Air, of the Ruler 
 of the Darkness of this world, who boasted that 
 he would set his throne above that of God. The 
 whole battle was between the Kingdom of Satan 
 and the Kingdom of God. The visible conflict in 
 this world was, according to apocalyptic thought, 
 the shadow or double of an angelic conflict 
 between the hosts of Lucifer and Michael in the 
 upper and spiritual world. After the final struggle 
 and the overthrow of Satan, the just were to be 
 gathered with the angels into the Kingdom of 
 God, to which they were predestined from the 
 foundation of the world ; the unjust were to be 
 gathered with the Devil into that everlasting fire 
 and outer darkness to which they and the devils 
 had been likewise predestined. Predestination is 
 no innovation of the Pauline and Johannine 
 writings, but belongs to the thought of Jesus. 
 
 The third prelude of the End was the last 
 desperate and unparalleled struggle of Satan for 
 the retention of his Kingdom ; the uprising of 
 all the powers of evil against Jesus and His 
 saints ; the great " peirasmos " or temptation ; 
 the " fiery tribulation " ; the " wrath to come," 
 through which the just were to pass and from 
 
THE CHRIST OF ESCHATOLOGY 55 
 
 which they were to pray to be delivered : " Bring 
 us not into temptation, but deliver us from the 
 Evil One " ; " Pray that ye enter not into tempta- 
 tion." It behoved Him, it behoved all His saints, 
 to suffer these things, and so to enter into their 
 glory. 
 
 If the Lord's Prayer admits of a moral inter- 
 pretation, its first sense is eschatological. It is the 
 prayer of and for the Kingdom. " Thy Kingdom 
 come " is its governing clause. " Thy will be done 
 on earth as it is in heaven " has reference, not to 
 the present, but to the new earth, where there will 
 be no sin or possibility of sin, and where ethics will 
 be superseded. Their daily bread is enough for 
 those who, in view of the immediate end, have no 
 reason to hoard for a distant future ; whose first 
 care is to seek the Kingdom, through repentance 
 and forgiveness, and to persevere to the end through 
 the coming temptation or trial. 
 
 When He sent forth His disciples it was in the 
 belief (Matt. X., 23) that, before they had preached 
 to all the cities of Israel and returned to Him, He 
 would come in the clouds as the Son of Man. 
 Whether He was to have passed to His glory 
 through death and resurrection, or to have been 
 caught up into the air and transfigured like Elias, 
 is not clear. But S. Paul (1 Thess. IV., 13-17; 
 1 Cor. XV., 50-3) shows that the alternative was 
 
56 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 recognised in apocalytic thought. In His dis- 
 course He does not treat the disciples as mission- 
 ary teachers, but as heralds of the End. He 
 promises them the gift of the Spirit, which shall 
 make them wiser than all their adversaries and 
 triumphant over the power of the Devil. He 
 foretells them that tribulations, temptations and 
 persecutions will come, of which there was no 
 indication in existing natural conditions, but which 
 were entailed in His belief in the immediacy of 
 the End, and, therefore, of its necessary preludes. 
 
 Except their dominion over the possessed, 
 none of these predictions were fulfilled when the 
 Apostles returned. For Jesus this was an indica- 
 tion that the Kingdom had to be stormed yet 
 more violently. He would go forth and raise the 
 Powers of Darkness against Himself and thus, 
 by His own death, hasten the issue, and deliver 
 from temptation those whose spirit was willing 
 but whose flesh was weak. He would suffer in 
 their place and give His life as a ransom for 
 many. He would go up to Jerusalem and pro- 
 voke the ministers of Evil to a final assault. 
 Henceforth His life is a quest of that death which 
 was to open the Kingdom of Heaven to all 
 believers. Such a death would necessarily be 
 the death of the cross, with all its concomitant 
 ignominies. His predictions of it were founded 
 
THE CHRIST OF ESCHATOLOGY 57 
 
 on His resolve ; that of His subsequent resurrec- 
 tion was founded on His Messianic self-conscious- 
 ness. It behoved Him to suffer and so to enter 
 into His glory. But His Christhood was still a 
 secret, shared only by His disciples. It was to 
 be revealed to the world only when He should 
 have come in the clouds, vindicated by the Father, 
 whose glory, and not His own, was the end of 
 His earthly mission : " I have glorified Thee on 
 the earth . . . and now glorify Thou Me, O Father." 
 It seems probable that the Apostles' vision of 
 the Transfiguration preceded rather than followed 
 the confession of Peter, and is alluded to in the 
 words: "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto 
 thee ; but My Father." It was by no induction or 
 inference that Peter had divined His Christhood ; 
 but by a supernatural vision. All that could be 
 divined otherwise was that Jesus was a wonder- 
 working prophet — possibly Elias ; possibly, even, 
 the promised Son of David. But these were 
 human personalities ; whereas the Son of Man 
 was (in common acceptance) a heavenly and a 
 supernatural being. His destined identification 
 with that being was the secret of Jesus ; a matter 
 of revelation, not of inference. There is no con- 
 vincing reason to question the authenticity of 
 Matthew XVI., 17-19; since the word "Church'' 
 there may well stand, not for an ecclesiastical in- 
 
58 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 stitution, but for the body of the elect or pre- 
 destined which, in the Apocalypse of S. John, is 
 compared to a building founded on the twelve 
 Apostles ; while the keys of the Kingdom, with 
 their power of binding and loosing, are in char- 
 acter with the apocalyptic conception of the 
 Apostles, as sharing the judicial function of the 
 Son of Man at the last day, seated " upon twelve 
 thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel." 
 
 If Jesus plans the details of His triumphal 
 entry into Jerusalem, in accordance with His 
 Messianic secret, it is not as the Son of Man but, 
 at most, as Elias, or as the Son of David, that He 
 is greeted by the crowd. 
 
 In Jerusalem His work is one of provocation 
 rather than of teaching. He openly assails the 
 Pharisees and priests ; He cleanses the Temple 
 with an assumption of authority that is a challenge 
 to theirs. The challenge is taken up and His 
 death resolved upon. It was as the agents of the 
 Powers of Darkness that the Jews crucified the - 
 Lord of Glory. It was Satan who put it into 
 the heart of Judas to betray Him. All was pre- 
 destined and predetermined. Most probably the 
 subject of Judas's betrayal was the Messianic 
 secret, which Jesus shared only with His Apostles 
 — His claim to be the Son of Man, Who was to 
 appear in the clouds. No two witnesses could be 
 
THE CHRIST OF ESCHATOLOGY 59 
 
 adduced against Jesus in support of such a pre- 
 tension. One was not sufficient. Hence He is at 
 last adjured and proclaims Himself to be the Son 
 of Man. The very claim was blasphemy and 
 merited death. As a prophet, or even as Elias, 
 the crowd next day would have rescued Jesus ; 
 but when the priests went among them and re- 
 vealed His secret they simply howled for the 
 death of the blasphemer. So far as the Apostles 
 entered into that secret, and were not shaken in 
 their faith by the outcry of priests and people, 
 they must have expected the resurrection and 
 glorification of the Son of Man, which was part 
 of the Messianic scheme. There is no reason to 
 doubt that Jesus had predicted it to them or that 
 they so understood His words : " I will not drink 
 henceforth of this fruit of the vine until that 
 day when I drink it new with you in my Father's 
 Kingdom." There is no reason to doubt that they 
 had visions of the risen Jesus. 
 
 Such then, roughly, is the figure of Jesus as it 
 leaves the hands of a scientific criticism, unbiassed 
 by the prepossessions of Liberal Protestantism. 
 Of the Jesus Who came forward openly as the 
 Messiah in a spiritual (i.e. a moral) sense, Who 
 preached and exemplified the righteousness of 
 the inward Kingdom of God, Who founded the 
 Kingdom on earth in the form of a school of 
 
6o CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 imitators and Who died solely as a martyr of 
 morality, there is not left a single shred. He did 
 not oppose a moral to a worldly interpretation of 
 the Kingdom. He took the current interpreta- 
 tion as He found it, which was not worldly but 
 other-worldly — spiritual, in the sense of meta- 
 physical and transcendent, not in the immanental 
 moral sense. 
 
 I am not in a position to criticise and judge 
 between these two readings of the Gospel. But 
 if the value of a hypothesis is to be rated by the 
 number of phenomena that it unifies and puts in 
 their place, it does not seem to me that there is 
 much choice left, or that the prolonged battle of 
 Liberal Protestantism against the eschatological 
 interpretation has done more than establish the 
 superiority of the latter. There is, of course, a 
 residue of difficulties, but they are few and small 
 compared with those of the other hypothesis. 
 Moreover, they are easily accounted for by the 
 same tendency on the part of the redactors of 
 the synoptics that gave birth to the ethico-spiritual 
 Gospel of S. John. As the Kingdom tarried, it 
 became more necessary to dwell upon the pre- 
 paratory righteousness than on the Kingdom 
 itself; to consider the expectant Church on 
 earth as a Kingdom of Righteousness. It is, 
 on the other hand, impossible to understand the 
 
THE CHRIST OF ESCHATOLOGY 61 
 
 introduction of the apocalyptical conception if 
 such a Kingdom of Righteousness on earth had 
 been the central interest of Christ's mission. 
 Moreover, as a fact, this inward righteousness, 
 which, though not original, was systematised by 
 Jesus and enforced by the whole impetus of His in- 
 spiration, is the only sensible result of the Gospel. 
 It has leavened and transformed humanity, slowly 
 perhaps and partially, yet far more rapidly and 
 fully than it could have done had it not been 
 associated with a great religion. It is not then 
 wonderful that, even in the Churches, while the 
 once central interest of the coming judgment has 
 dropped into the background, if not altogether ^ 
 into oblivion, the incidental moralism of the 
 Gospel should stand out as its principal value, 
 and the central apocalypticism be overlooked as 
 a troublesome accident. And this tendency, in 
 an age that repudiates the miraculous and dis- 
 trusts the transcendent, can only be accentuated 
 by those whose aim is to secure the sanction of 
 Christianity for the best ideals of the time ; to 
 alleviate the friction between religion and reason 
 as much as possible ; to transform what was at 
 most an ethical religion into a religious ethic. 
 
 * 
 
 * 
 
IX 
 THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 
 
 WE must now try to get hold of the " idea " 
 embodied in the apocalypticism of the 
 Gospel and compare it with that embodied in 
 Catholic Christianity, to see whether they are 
 merely different embodiments of the same, and 
 whether the latter can be considered as a develop- 
 ment of the former. 
 
 Plainly we must distinguish between the sub- 
 stance or content and the form or expression of an 
 " idea." As we use the word here an " idea " is a 
 concrete end, whose realisation is the term of a 
 process of action and endeavour. It is akin to that 
 Augustinian notio (or ratio) seminalis, with which 
 every living germ seems to be animated, and which 
 works itself out to full expression through a process 
 of growth and development. It does not change in 
 itself, but is the cause of change in its embodiment. 
 Transferred from the realm of organic life to that of 
 human activity, an " idea " is still a good or end to 
 be realised and brought to perfect, expression. But 
 it is rather a volition than a concept. Every 
 
 62 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 63 
 
 volition, however blind and instinctive, is directed 
 by the idea of an end to be reached. That idea is 
 implied in the volition, but it is not necessarily 
 given to the clear consciousness of the person who 
 wills. Animals obey instincts without any know- 
 ledge of the ends with which they are pregnant. 
 The meaning of many of man's spiritual and 
 rational instincts is revealed to him only gradually, 
 as he follows them step by step. In most cases 
 their full meaning will never be clear to him. Thus 
 civilisation, education, society, liberty, justice, are 
 spiritual instincts with man. He does not start 
 with a clear conception of what he wants ; but his 
 conceptions grow clearer, more explicit, more 
 complex, more organised, as he moves along. In 
 the embodiment or expression of the idea we 
 must, then, include its intellectual expression or 
 form. 
 
 Thus man's religious idea is first felt as a vague 
 need of adjusting his action to that whole, of which 
 all but a little part is hidden from him ; of coming 
 to terms with an invisible and mysterious world. 
 This " idea " is the soul of the lowest and of the 
 highest forms of religion. But the conception of 
 the invisible world and its denizens, of its relation 
 to man and the visible order, of the conduct by 
 which the adjustment is to be effected, belongs to 
 the embodiment or expression of the idea. It is 
 
64 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 determined by the idea and its environment — the 
 intellectual, moral and social conditions of man. 
 Its only criterion and corrective is the idea itself, 
 which is no practical corrective since man only 
 apprehends it in the very form that needs correction. 
 His measure is at fault and cannot be tested by 
 itself. But the idea, like Nature, eventually heals 
 itself and asserts itself triumphantly over all ob- 
 stacles. Thus, too, men long for liberty, but their 
 very conception of liberty sends them on the wrong 
 track till, coming up against a blind wall, they are 
 forced back to the point whence they went astray. 
 Hence we may not press the analogy between 
 organic development and that of an idea so closely 
 as to imply that the whole series of its embodiments 
 is predetermined, like the stages of an organic pro- 
 cess, of which each is required by or requires the 
 next. Nor even where we do get an unbroken series 
 of ever fuller expressions of the same idea does this 
 exclude the possibility or actuality of other quite 
 different series. Thus the idea of liberty, in 
 different times and places, has been productive of 
 various processes of self-embodiment, with nothing 
 in common but their many-sided and inexhaustible 
 idea. The same is true of man's religious need 
 and of the religious idea, which branches out in a 
 thousand directions, in search of an essentially 
 unattainable completeness of expression. 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 65 
 
 By the " idea '' of Jesus I mean, then, the reli- 
 gious idea in a certain stage of development, along 
 a particular line. I ask myself : Is Catholic Chris- 
 tianity on the same line, or, as Liberal Protestants 
 suppose, on an entirely different line ? Is it the 
 outgrowth of the same branch, or did it fork off in 
 the first century? Is it simply a Hellenic process, 
 violently grafted into the Liberal Protestantism of 
 Jesus — the latter being interrupted at that point 
 until the graft was broken off by criticism ? 
 
 Now so far as we find an actual identity of form 
 and category we are plainly justified in supposing 
 the same idea to be at work on the same line. No 
 doubt the expression or form is more ample and 
 complex in Catholicism than in the Gospel, but its 
 main and central features are the same. 
 
 Transcendentalism, or other-worldliness, belongs 
 to the idea of religion as such, but in varying 
 degrees. The whole tendency of Liberal Protest- 
 antism is to minimise the transcendence by estab- 
 lishing a sort of identity of form between this life 
 and the other. So far as man's life is moral, it is 
 an eternal life. The moral life has mystical and 
 transcendental roots. It postulates a spiritual 
 principle and end in Nature which we may call 
 God. Heaven and the Kingdom of Heaven are 
 in our midst ; they are the spiritual or moral side 
 of life. 
 
66 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Without this concession to transcendentalism, 
 Liberal Protestantism would not be a religion at all. 
 As it is, it is rather a system of religious ethics than 
 a religion. It merely insists that morality is religion 
 and adjusts our life and action to that spiritual 
 and invisible side of the world which is an object 
 of faith, a necessary postulate of morality. No 
 doubt this is a truth of Christianity ; but not its 
 whole truth. Emphasis is laid on it in the Fourth 
 Gospel ; in the synoptics it is implicit rather than 
 emphatic. Christ had not come to emphasise the 
 religion and the revelation implied in righteous- 
 ness that were within the reach of man's reason. 
 His emphasis was on the other-worldly, supermoral 
 life of the coming Kingdom. How could it be 
 otherwise on the very brink of the destruction of 
 the present order? What need of a new ethics 
 for expiring humanity? His whole emphasis, 
 therefore, was on the other world, and on the con- 
 ditions by which men might attain it and flee from 
 the wrath to come. Of these, repentance and true 
 inward righteousness were the chief. But men did 
 not so much need to be told what, righteousness 
 was, as to be called back to it or converted to it. 
 And this Jesus did by giving the will a motive : 
 " Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at 
 hand." 
 
 If, then, the religion of Jesus was not exclusively 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 67 
 
 transcendental, its emphasis was almost entirely on 
 the other world — the world that is least present to 
 man's mind and most easily forgotten. And this 
 excessive transcendentalism is the great reproach 
 made against Catholicism by the Liberal Protes- 
 tant, as well as by the Positivist. It is true that 
 the immediacy of the End very soon dropped out 
 of Catholic consciousness, and so restored the 
 depressed value and importance of the present 
 life. But the belief in the End ; in the eventual 
 appearance of the Son of Man in the clouds ; in 
 the general Judgment and its preceding tribula- 
 tions ; in the destruction of the present order ; in 
 a transcendental and eternal Heaven and Hell, 
 figures as the final and, in a sense, dominant 
 article of her creed. 
 
 In her Advent liturgy one finds even the note 
 of immediacy ; though naturally it evokes no re- 
 sponse in her consciousness. The contention that 
 this immediacy was not essential to the idea of 
 Jesus is not without plausibility. The words " Of 
 that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even 
 the Son," although consistent with a certainty that 
 the End would be very soon, and within a gener- 
 ation, at least disclaim any sort of revelation on 
 the point, and imply that any prediction can be 
 no more than a private conjecture. The fore- 
 shortening of time in the prophet's mind does not 
 
68 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 affect the substance of the situation. The sup- 
 posed near approach of death will often make a 
 man reorder his life, as he ought to have reordered 
 it in any case, in view of the certainty of eventual 
 death. The scare has not given him a new reason 
 but a new stimulus. It has made him attend to 
 what he should have always seen. The public 
 scare at the thought of the immediacy of the 
 Kingdom, that all expected eventually, acted simi- 
 larly. The Kingdom, not the immediacy of the 
 Kingdom, was the reason for repentance, detach- 
 ment and righteousness ; the immediacy was but 
 a stimulus to rouse the sluggish imagination — to 
 change a " notional " into a " real " assent. Hence 
 it may be said that the conception of immediacy 
 was no part of the idea of Jesus ; it was a sup- 
 posed circumstance of the situation in which that 
 idea was applied. 
 
 If Jesus Himself, as seems likely, experienced 
 one or more disappointments in the matter, we 
 cannot say that the further disappointments of 
 His Church were for Him outside the range of 
 possibility. Still those who now expect the End 
 at all no longer expect it immediately, and have 
 given up speaking of " those last days." Only 
 now and then is there a recrudescence of apocalyp- 
 tic panic in times of earthquakes, comets, wars 
 and pestilences. 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 69 
 
 Christianity is, perhaps, the better and not the 
 worse for the loss of this stimulus, to which it 
 owes its birth. For the violent detachment, 
 justified by such an expectancy, is hurtful to 
 the duties and lawful interests of social life. No 
 man who believes he has but a day to live will 
 make proper provision for his future years. The 
 scare may be useful to make him amend his ways. 
 But a sustained scare would paralyse his energies. 
 This evil was soon felt by the early Church in a 
 certain anarchy and neglect of plain social duties. 
 It was not worth while to assert the claims 
 of justice, to establish and provide for a family. 
 Men pooled their wealth and lived in the clouds 
 and in idleness. "If any will not work neither 
 let him eat" was a rebuke levelled against this 
 state of things. 
 
 Yet this contempt of the world preached by 
 Jesus was not Buddhistic in its motive. It was 
 a contempt of a lower and transitory form of 
 existence in favour of a higher — a proximate 
 pessimism but an ultimate optimism. That the 
 world was thought to be in its death-agony made 
 it doubly contemptible. But when this thought 
 was dropped by the Church, the world still 
 remained contemptible. It was but a preparation 
 and purgatory ; the ante-chamber of Heaven ; 
 the theatre of the great conflict between the 
 
70 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 forces of good and evil — a conflict that could 
 be decided in favour of Good only by the Coming 
 of the Son of Man. It was a world in which 
 the Christian was but a stranger and a pilgrim, 
 looking for a City whose builder is God. The 
 notion that Good was to triumph by an immanent 
 process of evolution never entered into the "idea" 
 of Jesus or of the Church. 
 
 But the impression of the first days remained 
 with the Church long after the immediate ex- 
 pectation of the End had ceased : what Christ 
 had said, what the early Christians had done 
 in view of that immediacy, has lingered on as 
 a rule of life, in diminishing measure, even to 
 the present day. It was this excessive other- 
 worldliness, which enters largely into the monastic 
 and ascetic idea of Catholicism, that provoked 
 that revulsion, which began with Luther and 
 ended with the purely ethical Christianity of the 
 Liberal Protestant, for whom the Kingdom of 
 Heaven is but the ideal term of the moral evolu- 
 tion of man on earth. 
 
 To this ethical idea of the Kingdom some 
 colour is given by the early tendency to view 
 the Church as the Kingdom of God upon earth 
 in a certain anticipatory sense — a tendency that 
 appeared when men had ceased to look on the 
 Heavenly Kingdom as imminent. Nor was it 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 71 
 
 without warrant from Christ, who considered that, 
 in Himself and in the Baptist, and in the victory 
 of God's Spirit over the Devil, the Kingdom had 
 already begun to touch earth. This conception 
 of the Church, as the Kingdom in fieri, prepared 
 the way for that of a moral humanity as the 
 Kingdom. But the conceptions are radically 
 distinct. Here a natural evolution is to complete 
 the work ; there, a supernatural cataclysm. 
 
 Again, the emphatic Persian dualism of Good 
 and Evil, of the Kingdom of God and of that of 
 Satan, is common to the idea of Jesus and the 
 idea of Catholicism. The Devil is essential to 
 the Catholic scheme. Renunciation of the Devil 
 and his retinue (pompa) is the preliminary of that 
 Baptism which enlists a man in the service of the 
 Kingdom. Till then he is possessed by Satan, 
 in virtue of his natural birth. This is the 
 teaching of Jesus no less than of S. Paul or 
 S. Augustine. Satan is exorcised to make room 
 for the Holy Spirit. Every priest is an ordained 
 exorcist, and exorcism has its prescribed ritual. 
 A host of mental, moral and physical evils, 
 which science now deals with, not to speak of 
 storms, plagues and other destructive phenomena 
 of nature, have, till quite recent times, been 
 ascribed to the Devil by the Church, and treated 
 by prayer and exorcism. Even so modern a 
 
72 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Pope as Leo XIII accepted the fables of Leo 
 Taxil and his mythical Diana Vaughan, and 
 exorcised Rome daily; and the prevailing mind 
 of uncritical Catholics is still quick to explain 
 all the evils of the time by the Devil and his 
 human agents — Jews, Freemasons, Protestants 
 and Modernists. The Devil introduced sin and 
 mortality, with all their attendant evils, into the 
 world. 
 
 On the other hand, with Christ came the fulness 
 of the Holy Ghost poured out on all the baptised. 
 Possessed by this Divine Spirit, the baptised be- 
 comes " a new creature " by an inward transforma- 
 tion of his nature. Ethical perfection is the 
 congruous fruit but not the substance of that 
 change. He is not divine because he is moral, but 
 moral because he has become divine. So, too, the 
 main fruit of all the sacraments of Catholicism is 
 not the moral life of the present, but the super- 
 moral life of the future. They, as it were, store up 
 potential glory in the soul, which shall be liberated 
 by death. Hence the contention that a life of very 
 average morality, with frequent sacraments, is more 
 pleasing to God than a life of heroic morality, 
 without sacraments. It is only the sacraments 
 that make us sons of God. Morality can never 
 do so. It is but the congruous natural condition 
 of grace, and gets all its lustre and merit from 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 73 
 
 grace. Thus the baptised infant, incapable as yet 
 of moral life, is made a divine creature by the 
 expulsion of the Devil and the introduction of the 
 Holy Ghost. In virtue of this new nature man is 
 made immortal by a quasi-natural necessity. If 
 he dies before the End he will rise in a spiritual- 
 ised body ; if he lives to the End he will be trans- 
 formed and caught up in the clouds. As the 
 Fourth Gospel says, he has eternal life in him 
 already. Like Christ on earth he is only waiting 
 for the eventual manifestation of the glory that is 
 in him. Grace is the germ of glory. As little as 
 the natural world could grow into the transcen- 
 dental Kingdom of God, so little could the natural 
 man, by a process of moral development, grow into 
 a son of God, a spiritual immortal being. In both 
 cases the change — a veritable transubstantiation — 
 is effected by an irruption of the transcendental 
 into the natural order ; by a triumph of the Spirit 
 of God over Satan. It is not a work of nature, 
 but of unmerited grace. 
 
 Uncongenial as this dualism is to our modern 
 minds, is it possible to deny that it is common to 
 Jesus and Catholicism? It is not between Jesus 
 and Catholicism, but between Jesus and Liberal 
 Protestantism that no bridge, but only a great 
 gulf, is fixed. 
 
 It is, however, a dualism between spirit and 
 
74 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 spirit rather than between matter and spirit. This 
 latter dualism came from the further East, and, 
 through Hellenic philosophy, has left its traces in 
 the Paulo-Johannine writings. But it was no part 
 of the Jewish and synoptic tradition. Here, too, 
 the Church has been faithful to the idea of Jesus 
 in opposition to Gnostic and Docetan tendencies. 
 For her, as for Him, the body is, by nature and by 
 original destiny, the servant and not the foe of the 
 spirit. Both were to be glorified. The new body 
 and new world were to be made out of the old 
 by a process of miraculous transfiguration. The 
 mortality of the Son of David was to put on the 
 immortality of the Son of Man. And so, through- 
 out, the material was to be made the instrument, 
 the sacrament or effectual symbol of the spiritual 
 and transcendent. 
 
 For Catholicism as for Jesus baptism is no idle 
 symbol, but an effectual cause of the new life of the 
 spirit, and of that Divine Sonship which gives right 
 of entrance into the transcendent world. As for 
 the Church, so also for Jesus, the bread of blessing 
 is the bread of eternal life, the antidote of death, 
 the food of the angelic nature. Sacramentalism 
 was a principle of Jewish as of all ancient religions, 
 to which the miraculous was no scandal, since 
 they knew nothing of a mechanically determined 
 nature. In the absence of all proof of sacra- 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 75 
 
 mentalism in the thought of Jesus, we should need 
 positive and convincing proof that He did not 
 share that idea with His religious surroundings. 
 
 And so as to externality and ritual in worship. 
 Liberal Protestants are satisfied that He swept it 
 away for a ''worship in spirit and in truth" — as 
 though there were an incompatibility between the 
 two. They assure us that, were Jesus to come on 
 earth, He would be quite at home at a prayer 
 meeting, and quite at sea at a high mass. This is 
 profoundly uncritical and unhistorical. He might 
 say, perhaps, " This is your synagogue ; now show 
 me your temple " ; or, " This is your temple ; 
 have you no synagogues?" From first to last 
 Jesus revered and practised the religion of His 
 fathers. As to the Divine authority of its moral 
 and ceremonial law, even to the last jot and tittle 
 He is at one with the Pharisees. He differed 
 from them in emphasis ; in the stress laid on the 
 spirit as opposed to the letter, on the end as 
 controlling the means. In this He had no con- 
 sciousness of attacking but of defending the true 
 tradition. He never hints at the idea that His fol- 
 lowers are destined to break away from Israel : nor 
 did they ever do so by any definite act of separa- 
 tion. During His life they were in the Jewish 
 Church as the Wesleyans were once in the Church 
 of England — a school of pietists, whose aim was 
 
76 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 to purify, not to abandon, their Church. Naturally 
 we do not hear much in the synoptics of what is 
 taken for granted — of His scrupulous observance 
 of the Jewish religion ; but only of the new piety 
 and its practices. But it is preposterous to sup- 
 pose that His insistence on inwardness meant a 
 repudiation of outwardness, or a puritanical sense 
 of opposition between them. By nature and by 
 original destiny the bodily was for the service 
 of the spiritual, however easily sin and Satan 
 might pervert it from its end. Even the tran- 
 scendent world of the Kingdom was not purely 
 spiritual in the Hellenic sense. It was embodied, 
 as glorified humanity was embodied. However 
 refined and etherealised, it was sensible and 
 phenomenal ; nor was the Messianic banquet a 
 mere parable of moral values. He did not say 
 that He would destroy the Temple, but that, were 
 it destroyed, He would raise it up again. When 
 He purged it, He did not rend the veil or throw 
 down the altar and its ornaments, saying : " Take 
 these things hence." He drove forth those whose 
 traffic dishonoured the sanctity of what He recog- 
 nised as a house of prayer for all nations. 
 
 When, by the course of events, His followers 
 were driven forth from the Jewish Church, it is 
 not to be supposed that they ceased to recognise 
 the need of a Church and of public worship, or 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 77 
 
 were content with informal piety. If the Temple- 
 worship entered into the religion of Jesus, a 
 similar idea of worship belonged to the early 
 Church, and was gradually realised by borrowings 
 from Jewish and Hellenic sources. While the 
 End was still felt to be imminent this externalism 
 was but rudimentary and incoherent ; later it 
 became what it remains to this day. Naturally 
 the worship at S. Peter's is not the worship of the 
 Temple ; but it is of the same type and belongs 
 to the same idea, which was that of Jesus and His 
 Apostles. In this respect, too, the Catholic Church 
 is identical and continuous with the Apostolic 
 band that Jesus gathered round Him. Its later 
 independent organisation and externalism were 
 contained in the idea of Jesus. There is no 
 chasm; no need for a bridge. The temporary 
 disorganisation of Apostolic Christianity, conse- 
 quent on its separation from Judaism, was an 
 abnormal state of affairs. The " idea " was bound 
 to reassert itself as it did. Of that reassertion 
 Liberal Protestants speak as of a deplorable re- 
 lapse into the legalism from which Christ had 
 made us free. What Christ freed us from was not 
 externalism, but its abuse; not the letter, but 
 its oppression of the spirit ; not the priesthood, 
 but sacerdotalism ; not ritual, but ritualism ; not 
 the Altar, but the exploitation of the Altar. Here 
 
78 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 there has indeed been a relapse, but not more 
 scandalous than the general relapse from righteous- 
 ness and inward spirituality, due to the loss of 
 belief in the immediacy of the End. When the 
 Lord delays His coming His servants wax wanton 
 or slumber. 
 
 Again, in the conception of Eternal Life as a 
 supermoral life, as a state of rest after labour, of 
 ecstatic contemplation of the face of God, Catholi- 
 cism is true to the idea of Jesus and of the 
 Apocalypse, as already stated. Liberal Protestant- 
 ism is more anthropomorphic. So far as it admits 
 another life at all, it is the strenuous life of the 
 moral hero continued to all eternity — although in 
 conditions that rob every known human virtue of 
 its occasion and subject-matter. It seeks only 
 "the glory of going on and still to be." For 
 Jesus the moral is not the highest life but its 
 condition. Eternal life is, undoubtedly, the reward 
 or wages of righteousness, as Hell and Death are 
 the wages of sin. This too has always been the 
 Catholic idea ; though the reward is only for those 
 who are truly righteous, i.e. who love righteousness 
 for itself and independently of the reward. In a 
 word, it must be an inward righteousness of the 
 heart, not only an outward righteousness of the 
 hand. Neither the fasting nor the almsgiving 
 of the Pharisees were condemned, but their 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 79 
 
 self-complacency and consciousness of merited 
 reward. 
 
 To regard the Communion of Saints as an 
 exclusively pagan importation is again gratuitous. 
 For Jesus, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses, 
 Elias and David, were not of the dead past but 
 of the living present. The blood of all the just, 
 from Abel onward, who had been martyred by 
 Satan's emissaries in the cause of God, was ever 
 crying aloud for that vindication which was to be 
 effected at the coming of the Son of Man. The 
 tribulations of the Saints were to hasten that day 
 and take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm, and 
 this in union with and through the merits of His 
 own blood. And in the Kingdom it was with 
 Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that the redeemed 
 were to sit at meat. Whatever the extension, 
 ramification and superstition of Catholic saint- 
 worship, it is idle to deny that it pertains to the 
 " idea " of Jesus. 
 
 Nor can it be contended that, whatever explicit- 
 ness it may owe to S. Paul, the sacrificial aspect 
 of the Eucharist is alien to the thought of Jesus. 
 If it be true that it was with the purpose of 
 hastening the coming of the Kingdom that Jesus, 
 after the return of the Apostles, went forth to 
 provoke His death at Jerusalem, that death was 
 in His mind a sacrifice for the benefit of the elect, 
 
80 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 and a ransoming of many from the thraldom of 
 Satan. Even if the words : " This is My Body ; 
 this is My blood " were but a Pauline amplification 
 of His thought, suggesting a parallelism with the 
 pagan sacrifices, they were a justified amplifica- 
 tion. If the bread and wine were truly sacra- 
 mental tokens or sealings, effectual symbols and 
 pledges of a participation in the future banquet 
 of the Kingdom, every repetition of the rite must 
 have been a commemoration and pleading of that 
 death, which was to hasten the Kingdom with all 
 its attendant benefits for the redeemed. It must 
 have been viewed as a hastening of the day when 
 they were to celebrate it with Jesus in the King- 
 dom of God ; as a showing or pleading of His death 
 till He should come. If this be so, then the 
 centrality of the Eucharist in Catholic worship is 
 true to the " idea " of Jesus. It is something far 
 more than a mere reminder to the communicants 
 of their Teacher martyred in the past, or a pure 
 symbol of moral fellowship with Him and His 
 true disciples. What the Liberal Protestant calls 
 the " magical " conception of that sacrament belongs 
 to the " idea " of Jesus. 
 
 Finally, when we turn to the personality and 
 nature of Jesus Himself, we find that His own 
 idea and the Catholic idea are at least closely 
 akin, while that of Liberal Protestantism is another 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 
 
 idea altogether. We find two natures — that of 
 the earthly Son of David and that of the Heavenly 
 Son of Man — mysteriously united in one person- 
 ality. We find an earthly period, in which only 
 one nature is manifest, opposed to a period of 
 glory in which both are to be manifest. It would 
 be at least hard to show that, whatever Catholic 
 theology may mean by the doctrine of a hypo- 
 static union from the very first of these two 
 natures, that doctrine is excluded by the notion 
 that Jesus was made the Christ only by His 
 glorification after death. For Christhood may 
 have meant the state of manifestation; and in 
 this sense Jesus may have considered Himself as 
 but destined to be " made " or declared the Son 
 of Man through death. For Jewish thought the 
 union would be conceived as a sort of " possession " 
 of the lower by the higher nature. The dis- 
 tinction of ousia and hypostasis would have had 
 no meaning. 
 
 As the just already possessed eternal life 
 virtually at their baptism, so Jesus may well have 
 considered Himself in a like virtual possession 
 of His Christhood before it was actually made 
 manifest — to have been thus virtually the Son 
 of Man from the very first. This the more, 
 as predestination was no mere purpose in the 
 Divine mind, but something stamped in the very 
 G 
 
82 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 nature of the predestined. It was a seal, a token, 
 imprinted on the soul. 
 
 It was certainly not in a moral and adoptive 
 sense, but in a natural and metaphysical sense 
 that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God by the 
 fact that He claimed to be the Heavenly Son of 
 Man. He was conscious of differing, not only in 
 degree but in kind, from even the greatest of 
 prophets. If the redeemed were His brethren, it 
 was in virtue, not of their moral, but of their 
 supernatural life, which they derived from and 
 through Him, who had given them power to be 
 made the sons of God. This power was the 
 spirit — the seed of eternal life sown in baptism 
 and blossoming in the Kingdom. Righteousness 
 was the condition of its reception and retention, 
 but was not the substance of Divine Sonship. 
 
 The position of Jesus in humanity is unique in 
 kind. Not only is He the giver of participated 
 sonship to others. He has come as God's pleni- 
 potentiary and vicegerent, at the end of time, to 
 bring the world to an end, to judge the living and 
 the dead, to separate light from darkness, tares 
 from wheat, and gather the fruits of time into the 
 garner of eternity. In virtue of His double nature 
 He stands mediatorial between God and man. He 
 is the Gate, the Way, the Truth, the Life, through 
 which alone men can have access to the Father. 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 83 
 
 If, in her endeavour to fix the relation of Christ's 
 heavenly nature to that of the Eternal Father, the 
 Church may seem to have exaggerated the known 
 claims of Jesus, this cannot be said of the Johan- 
 nine and Pauline Christology, in which those claims 
 are rather amplified than heightened. 
 
 Altogether it must be owned that, between 
 Christ's idea of Himself and the Catholic idea of 
 Him, there is no practical or substantial difference. 
 
 On the other hand, to maintain that it was only 
 as a righteous man that He claimed to be the Son 
 of God in a pre-eminent degree ; that the Hellenic 
 mind misunderstood this Hebraism and leaped at 
 a bound to a belief in His Godhead, is almost 
 grotesquely uncritical. Such convulsions of thought 
 do not take place in silence or in one night. If 
 the claim of even the best of men to be of a 
 heavenly nature was blasphemy in the ears of the 
 High Priest, and of the crowd that turned against 
 Jesus when they heard of it, it would have been 
 blasphemy in the ears of the early Church had it 
 been an innovation. The supposition of such a 
 chasm between the Paulo-Johannine Christology 
 and that of the Synoptics is not credible. 
 
 Closely connected with the mediatorial nature 
 and function of the earthly heavenly Jesus, Son 
 of David and Son of God, is the doctrine of the 
 Atonement wrought by His death — a doctrine 
 
84 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 which Liberal Protestantism attributes to S. Paul. 
 Yet it is really inseparable from the apocalyptic idea 
 of the Kingdom of God. The long battle between 
 Satan and Heaven for the possession of the world 
 and man was to culminate in a final and unparal- 
 leled outburst of the Powers of Evil and Death 
 against the saints of God, through whose sufferings 
 and perseverance God would be provoked to arise 
 and scatter His enemies and establish His King- 
 dom. Jesus speaks of the blood of the just, from 
 Abel onwards, pleading for vindication. In the 
 Apocalypse of S. John the martyrs cry : " How 
 long, O Master, the holy and true, dost Thou not 
 judge and avenge our blood ? " But the culmina- 
 ting crime of Satan, the crowning merit of suffering 
 Righteousness, was the death of the destined Son 
 of Man. This filled up the measure of Satan's 
 iniquity and paid the full price of God's grace 
 and mercy. Through the blood and suffering of 
 Jesus the blood and suffering of the just be- 
 came effectual to make atonement. Satan was 
 bought out, his rights over the world forfeited, 
 his slaves set free. So great was the crime, 
 so great the merit of the death of Christ, that 
 this alone would have sufficed to bring the 
 Kingdom of God from Heaven to earth. The 
 sufferings of the saints became, in a way, supere- 
 rogatory. The great persecution could be short- 
 
7 HE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 85 
 
 ened and mitigated for the sake of the elect. 
 Hence, in every sense, His death was an atonement, 
 a ransom for many ; His blood was shed for many 
 for the remission of sins. Thus we find a sub- 
 stantial agreement between the apocalyptic doc- 
 trine of Jesus and the theological doctrine of 
 Catholicism. When we remember that Purgatory 
 is only a displacement of the fiery trial that was 
 to purify the saints, the shortening of Purgatory, 
 through the supererogatory sufferings of martyrs 
 and confessors, is not at all out of harmony with 
 the idea of Jesus. 
 
 As to miracles, it is fairly evident that Jesus 
 repudiated their apologetic value : " A faithless 
 and perverse generation seek after a sign " ; "If 
 they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither 
 will they be persuaded if one rise from the dead " ; 
 "Blessed are they that have not seen and yet 
 have believed." These and other texts express 
 the early tradition as to His mind on the subject. 
 But to suppose that he did not believe in miracles, 
 or did not believe that His cures and exorcisms 
 were miraculous, is to suppose a miracle, namely 
 the existence of a nineteenth-century mind in 
 the first century. Doubtless it was not the 
 miracle of our modern apologists and their 
 assailants — a violation of the mechanical order 
 of nature, of a system of rigid uniformities. No 
 
86 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 such system was dreamt of by the religious mind 
 of those days. Miracles were not supernatural — 
 for nature strictly did not exist — but superhuman. 
 They were the natural works of a superhuman 
 spirit, by which the wonder-worker was "possessed." 
 Even such " possession " was not supernatural, but 
 only unusual. At most miracles were evidence of 
 "possession," but left the good or evil character 
 of the spirit undecided. Hence a moral test had 
 eventually to be applied to discern diabolic from 
 divine miracles. The mere extent of the marvel 
 was of no use. Jesus seems to have discarded the 
 marvel as apologetically worthless, and to have 
 appealed directly to the moral test — to the sign 
 of preaching and prophecy. Allowing, then, for 
 the change that modern science has gradually 
 effected in the conception of miracle, it is plain 
 that the tenacity with which Catholicism defends 
 the miraculous is not out of harmony with the 
 idea of Jesus, and is in no sense a relapse. 
 
 One prominent feature of Catholicism we miss 
 in the Christianity of Jesus — namely, any sort of 
 formal theology. 
 
 This marriage of revelation with Greek phil- 
 osophy could only take place on Hellenic soil at 
 a later stage. It was from visions and revelations 
 alone that Jesus drew His knowledge of Heavenly 
 things — from the prophetic and apocalyptic writ- 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 87 
 
 ings and from His own mystical experiences. 
 The casuistry and rationalism of the Scribes and 
 Doctors were profoundly repugnant to Him. What 
 was gathered by such inferences was revealed by 
 "flesh and blood," and not by the Father — vain 
 traditions of men making void the word of God. 
 In form, His revelations were not conceptual and 
 abstract, but imaginative and imaginable. For 
 Him spirit is not the negation but the refinement 
 of matter. It still possesses imaginable content. 
 Later, in her endeavour to philosophise His 
 revelation, the Church had to translate it into 
 conceptual form, and began to draw logical in- 
 ferences from these concepts and so to build up 
 the whole system of Catholic theology. It is un- 
 doubtedly not more easy to recognise the doctrine 
 of Jesus in this form than to recognise nature in 
 the presentments of physical science ; and Liberal 
 Protestantism seizes on this difference of form in 
 order to deny that the Church's doctrine was that 
 of Jesus, or that He taught more than an ethic 
 of inward righteousness. As " dogma " usually 
 stands for some defined point of theology, im- 
 posed by ecclesiastical authority, it is affirmed 
 confidently that Jesus was not dogmatic. But it 
 is vain to deny that Jesus imposed, with the 
 authority of Divine revelation, and as a matter 
 of life and death, that vision of the transcendental 
 
88 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 world which the Church has clothed in a theo- 
 logical form. If He did not impose philosophical 
 formulas He imposed the revelation, the imagina- 
 tive vision, which they formulate. Nor, in theory, 
 does the Church impose the formula except as 
 safeguarding the vision, which it translates into 
 intellectual terms. The authority to which we bow 
 in accepting the formula is not that of theology, 
 but of Christ's revelation as thus formulated. 
 Thus where the difference seems most great it is 
 apparent rather than real. 
 
 All said, if the Jesus of Liberal Protestantism is 
 not a pure myth, a shadow of the present darken- 
 ing the Past, it is only that, having eliminated 
 what was principal in the Gospel, they have re- 
 tained and segregated what was but secondary 
 and subordinate — the moral element ; that which 
 alone can have value for those who have no 
 patience either with the miraculous or the tran- 
 scendent. For such, Christianity is but the morality 
 of Christ ; the Kingdom of Heaven is but the term 
 of moral evolution on earth. God is the law of 
 Righteousness and Jesus the Son of that Law. 
 His life was significant as that of a moral teacher 
 and pattern ; His death, as an example of devotion 
 to Righteousness. He has risen in the triumph and 
 spread of His moral teaching, and ascended to 
 God's right hand in the estimation of mankind. 
 
THE CHRIST OF CATHOLICISM 89 
 
 His doctrine is an abiding judgment of the world. 
 His second coming will be at the ideal and un- 
 attainable term of man's moral evolution, when all 
 shall be saints and the Kingdom of God realised 
 in its full development on earth. All this is true 
 in a sense, and is ever implied in Christianity. It 
 is an implication that was brought out by a revolt 
 against an excessive transcendentalism under 
 which it had been long stifled. But in vindictively 
 stifling transcendentalism, it has stifled the Jesus 
 of history. 
 
 Liberal Protestant Christianity may claim Jesus, 
 if not as the founder, yet as the Great Teacher of 
 its morality. But the morality of Jesus was not 
 the substance of His revelation, any more than was 
 the reason of Jesus. It was not new. It is given 
 by an immanent process to all men in the measure 
 that they use their reason and follow their con- 
 science. The religious idea of Liberal Protestant- 
 ism is not especially Christian ; it is not the " idea" 
 of Jesus. The chasm that Liberal Protestantism 
 finds between Jesus and the earliest Catholicism is 
 of its own creation ; the work of prepossession. 
 
 In Catholicism we find, amid many accretions no 
 doubt, but in a scarcely altered form, all the lead- 
 ing ideas of Jesus as determined by the steady 
 progress of criticism towards impartial objectivity. 
 Had this criticism any sort of apologetic bias it 
 
90 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 would certainly not be in favour of Catholicism. 
 Such minor alterations of form as we find are still 
 in harmony with the governing "idea" of the 
 Kingdom of God, and are the result of its pro- 
 tracted delay. Thus the lost stimulus of the 
 immediacy of the End for all was replaced by an 
 insistence on its immediacy for each, on the un- 
 certain certainty of death which was to be followed 
 at once by a private and particular judgment and 
 an entrance of the disembodied soul into Hell or 
 Heaven or Purgatory. The General Judgment 
 was thus reduced in importance and was viewed 
 rather as a solemn pageant of justice already done. 
 The bodily resurrection ceased to be the necessary 
 condition of other-world existence and served only 
 to integrate the joys of Heaven and pains of Hell. 
 The purifying fire of tribulation, through which 
 the just of the generation of Jesus were to pass 
 into Glory, was supplied by Purgatory — a doctrine 
 which is still supported by texts referring to the 
 Peirasmos — the fire that is to try every man's 
 work. But plainly these rearrangements of the 
 apocalyptic vision do not seriously affect its sub- 
 stance — the idea of the Church is the idea of Jesus. 
 
X 
 
 THE ABIDING VALUE OF THE 
 APOCALYPTIC IDEA 
 
 IT is, however, one thing to recognise that, 
 stripped of its theological form, the doctrine 
 of Catholicism is the same as that of Jesus ; it is 
 another to contend that, either in its apocalyptic 
 or in its theological form, it can be accepted by 
 the modern mind. If, against Liberal Protestantism, 
 we can vindicate Catholicism as the true Chris- 
 tianity of Christ, do we not seem to bring the 
 Christianity of Christ into peril, and to render the 
 task of the apologist well-nigh impossible? Do 
 we not make it all rest on apocalyptic visions, 
 like those ascribed to Ezechiel, Enoch, John and 
 Baruch ? 
 
 Christianity, as we have seen, is subordinately 
 and inclusively a religion of righteousness. As, in 
 the progress of thought, faith in the miraculous 
 and transcendent grew weaker, and men's interest 
 was no longer centred on the End by the belief in 
 its imminence, this subordinate value came into 
 prominence. In Protestantism the apocalyptic 
 
 91 
 
92 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 doctrine has gradually been dropped altogether, or 
 interpreted as symbolic of ethical doctrine. Even 
 in Catholicism emphasis has been laid progres- 
 sively on the moral element (especially by modern 
 apologists) ; and symbolism has softened the more 
 repellent features of apocalyptic teachings. 
 
 This moralising tendency is no new thing in the 
 Church. It has been long tolerated and encour- 
 aged with a view to commend Catholicism on 
 account of its social and political utilities, and 
 to connect religion with the life and interests of a 
 world that shows no sign of disruption. But the 
 Church has felt instinctively that to make Right- 
 eousness everything, to treat the Apocalypse as 
 mere moral symbolism, is to introduce a new 
 religion under the old form. She has rightly seen 
 in recent " moralisings " of this kind an encroach- 
 ment of Liberal Protestantism on Catholic terri- 
 tory. It is an instinct of self-preservation that 
 has roused her to a condemnation of this sort of 
 Modernism. If her rulers are unable to see a 
 distinction between Liberal Catholic and Liberal 
 Protestant Modernism, it is a confusion they share, 
 not only with the unthinking world at large, but 
 with a great number of the Modernists themselves. 
 Although Loisy's LEvangile et VEglise — the 
 classical exposition of Catholic Modernism — was 
 fired straight at the heart of Protestant Modernism, 
 
VALUE OF THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA 93 
 
 not only the Vatican, but half the world beside, 
 missed its main thesis and saw in it no more than 
 a concession to criticism ; and, for the many-headed, 
 that is the sum-total of Modernism. If Catholic 
 Modernists are not yet Protestants they are sup- 
 posed to be moving towards Protestantism. It is 
 a difference of degree and not of kind. Hence 
 Protestants smile on the movement ; and on a 
 good number of its nominal adherents they have 
 a right to smile — on all who accept the Christ of 
 Liberal Protestant criticism, who have not faced 
 the Christ of unbiassed criticism. 
 
 It is because Catholic Modernism recognises 
 the identity of the "idea" in Jesus and Catholi- 
 cism ; because it acknowledges that the apocalyptic 
 elements of Christianity are essential and not 
 accidental, the moral elements subordinate and 
 not principal, that, as I have said, it faces the 
 conflict between Christian and modern thought in 
 its purest and acutest form. Were it possible to 
 maintain that the apocalyptic imagery of Jesus 
 was but an ethical parable, taken too grossly in 
 ruder ages and needing only to be restored to its 
 original value, the task would be an easy one. 
 But, since this is impossible, the problem arises as 
 to what value such apocalyptic visions can have 
 for modern religious thought. Compared with this 
 problem, that of the development of present 
 
94 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Catholicism out of the Christianity of Jesus is 
 of slight importance, as soon as we have got rid 
 of the supposed chasm between the Gospel and 
 early Catholicism. This latter was certainly not 
 the dialectical development of theological proposi- 
 tions revealed by Christ. His revelation was 
 imaginative, not conceptual ; concrete, not abstract. 
 In substance, and stripped of its theological form, 
 it has lived on in Catholic tradition, especially in 
 the minds of the faithful, whose religious appre- 
 hension is imaginative, not conceptual; who have 
 to retranslate theology into vision before it can 
 move their feeling and govern their conduct. 
 
 If the revelation of Christ has suffered certain 
 alterations, additions and subtractions, legitimate 
 or illegitimate, it is due to the attempt to har- 
 monise it with changing thought and changing 
 circumstances ; to preserve it, not to destroy it. 
 To contend that the Church's theology has been 
 always the same is preposterous. Only those who 
 have confounded revelation with its theological 
 presentment could be interested in such a hopeless 
 contention, or could be driven to the expedient of 
 treating potential belief as actual. That confu- 
 sion dates from the earliest times. But to 
 contend that her revelation has been always the 
 same, that the " idea " of Jesus has been faithfully 
 transmitted, is to contend for a plain truth. The 
 
VALUE OF THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA 95 
 
 difficulty, for us, lies in the fact that this " idea " 
 has been transmitted too faithfully, in form and not 
 merely in substance; that this apocalyptic imagery 
 has been given a literal fact-value which our minds 
 have slowly become incapable of accepting, and 
 that we are accordingly tempted to explain it 
 away as a mere parable of the moral life. Yet in 
 this the Church is but true to her Founder, for a 
 Founder He was, when once we abandon the 
 relapse-theory of Liberal Protestantism and re- 
 cognise the Church as continuous with the " little 
 flock," awaiting and preparing for the Kingdom. 
 For Jesus, what we call His apocalyptic "imagery" 
 was no mere imagery but literal fact. But for us 
 it can be so no longer. We can no longer believe 
 in the little local Heaven above the flat earth, from 
 which Jesus is to appear in the clouds; nor in all 
 the details of the vision governed by this concep- 
 tion. To do so would be to reduce our minds to 
 chaos and scepticism and make us incapable of faith 
 of any sort. Criticism, on the other hand, forbids 
 us to believe that He was making mysteries and 
 puzzles of plain moral truths that He elsewhere 
 expressed plainly, or to deny that He was 
 giving a revelation of the transcendental world 
 of religion. He belonged to the apocalyptics in 
 His religious conceptions, as He did to the 
 prophets in His ethical. Except the identification 
 
96 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 of Himself with the Son of Man and of the 
 Baptist with Elias, there is nothing original in the 
 form of His revelation. Nowhere does He in- 
 dicate that these apocalyptic conceptions of the 
 Kingdom were not perfectly familiar to His 
 hearers. He builds on foundations already 
 laid. 
 
 What then ? Does Christianity rest on the 
 visions of one of a whole school of apocalyptics ? 
 Is it worth defending at all? Certainly the great 
 work it has done in the world points to more than 
 this. But may not this be ascribed to moral 
 and prophetic elements, to which its apocalyptic 
 elements gave all the sanctions and reinforcements 
 of religion, thus popularising what else had been a 
 mere school of ethics ? 
 
 That men believed in the Apocalypse of Jesus 
 as they believed in no other can only be explained 
 by the influence of His extraordinary personality 
 and moral character. No mere wonder-working 
 could have won Him such faith. Wonders were 
 less wonderful then than now ; more common ; 
 less evidential and unambiguous. Nor did He 
 appeal to them as to apologetic arguments. All 
 they could prove was the presence of a super- 
 human agency, diabolic or divine, in the wonder- 
 worker. Any evidence of the Divine Spirit in 
 Himself was a " miracle," in the sense that the 
 
VALUE OF THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA 97 
 
 word miracle bore for Jesus and the Scripture. 
 And it was not on physical, but moral, evidence 
 that He relied with such effect. It was because 
 they trusted Him and believed in Him that the 
 people trusted and believed His revelation. His 
 was not merely the power of righteousness, which 
 may repel rather than draw, but the power of love, 
 of deep and universal sympathy with the in- 
 dividual soul ; the power of speaking straight to 
 the heart and conscience as God only can speak ; 
 of drawing men after Him by a spell they could 
 not understand ; of compelling them by an autho- 
 rity which they felt but could not explain. They 
 could not help trusting and believing in Him 
 absolutely : " Whither thou goest I will go : thy 
 people shall be my people, and thy God my God : 
 Where thou diest will I die and there will I be 
 buried." 
 
 There is thus some basis for the tendency of a 
 rationalising and moralising Christianity to find the 
 revelation of Jesus in His moral personality and 
 character, in His concrete exemplification or em- 
 bodiment of the so-called new Righteousness ; to 
 attach as little importance to His religious imagery 
 as to His scientific or historic ideas — which were 
 those of His time. But it may be questioned 
 whether a great deal of the faith that He com- 
 manded was not the fruit of His faith in Himself as 
 
 H 
 
98 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 the Son of Man, the vicegerent and plenipoten- 
 tiary of God ; whether the authority with which He 
 spoke and convinced was not inspired by His 
 Messianic secret. Did He speak merely as a prophet, 
 in the name of morals and with the authority of 
 conscience and not also in the name of the Son of 
 Man ? Had the sense of the supernatural nothing 
 to do with His mysterious power over men ? the 
 sense that God was with Him and He with God, in 
 some undefinable manner ? If it had, we must 
 then allow that His power flowed from His sense 
 of being, not merely moral but superhuman ; 
 that His apocalyptic idea entered into and formed 
 His personality ; that, without it, His influence is 
 not adequately explained. 
 
 And I think this may be extended to the moral 
 influence of Christianity in the world. Had it 
 been merely moral, and not also transcendental, 
 could it have done what it has done ? When it is 
 purged of all transcendental meaning and value, 
 will Righteousness be able to hold its own ? 
 
 Can we then bow down before the moral pre- 
 eminence of such a personality and, at the same 
 time, regard its religious ideas as illusory and 
 negligible? However different in the abstract, 
 morality and religion are fused together in the living 
 spirit. Moral purity of heart purifies our intuition 
 of the Divine, Is it credible that the purest of all 
 
VALUE OF THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA 99 
 
 hearts should not have seen God ; that it should 
 have been the prey to a sort of religious delirium ? 
 Is it possible to trust the moral, and distrust the 
 religious, intuitions of Jesus ? 
 
 Must we not rather think that, however untenable 
 in form, the " idea " of Jesus and of Catholic Chris- 
 tianity stands for a conception of religion answering, 
 in elevation and dignity, to the morality with which 
 it was fused in His mind ? that the Heaven to which 
 this righteousness was subordinate cannot have 
 been that of a lower plane of spirituality ? 
 
 We spoke, some time back, of the "religious 
 idea " as governing man's need to adjust himself to 
 the invisible world which lies beyond the range of 
 his sensible experience. The religion of the in- 
 dividual consists of certain images (or even con- 
 cepts) of that world and its relation to man ; of 
 certain feelings, emotions and desires, determined 
 by those images ; of certain observances and actions 
 adjusting man to that life beyond. As such, 
 religion has to do with the transcendent — with the 
 other world, not with this. Only when man has 
 risen to the idea of a moral God, and of Righteous- 
 ness as the will and service of God, are morality 
 and religion closely connected. Of itself morality 
 is occupied with our duty towards our neighbour. 
 Not till we get to an ethical religion is our duty 
 towards our neighbour seen as also a duty towards 
 
ioo CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 God, as the highest form of worship. It takes on 
 a transcendent or religious aspect. But religion, as 
 such, deals entirely with the transcendent. Its 
 " idea " unfolds itself and comes into clearer con- 
 sciousness in an infinity of directions and degrees, 
 dependent on its mental, moral and social environ- 
 ment — on the materials out of which it has to weave 
 an embodiment for itself. But, from the nature 
 of the case, its presentment of the transcendent 
 order, and of the present order in its relation to the 
 transcendent, can never be more than symbolic. And 
 this, not because the transcendent is absolutely un- 
 knowable in such sort that we have no term of com- 
 parison at all. To such a world there could be no 
 need to relate ourselves. It could not touch us, nor 
 we it. For us it were simply non-existent. But 
 whatever little fraction of experience mankind 
 possesses can never be more than a symbol of the 
 totality of possible experience that lies beyond. 
 A man is not absolutely unknowable for a mouse, 
 but the mouse's knowledge of him can only be in 
 terms of mouse-life. Man's highest God will be 
 man writ large. By no process of abstraction or 
 magnification or subtraction can the human be 
 purged out of our concepts of God, or of anything 
 else above or below us. 
 
 Yet our symbolisms of the transcendent vary in 
 value and truth. Like scientific hypotheses, those 
 
VALUE OF THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA 101 
 
 are the best that bring our life most fully into 
 harmony with the world they symbolise; which 
 best satisfy our needs, deepen our experiences, 
 answer to our faith. It is not too much to say 
 that mankind feels its way to these symbols and 
 hypotheses as a blind man feels his way to the 
 fire. Man is uneasy ; he seeks rest for his soul ; 
 he gropes about and follows the direction that 
 is confirmed by his religious and moral experience. 
 That he gives absolute, instead of hypothetic, value 
 to his constructions is perhaps a misfortune, in that 
 it leads him to do violence to later and fuller 
 experience. But so far as a hypothesis gives 
 a correct anticipation and control of experience 
 it is true. 
 
 To pretend that Jesus regarded His apocalyptic 
 portrayal of the transcendent as symbolic is to 
 pretend that His mind belonged to the nineteenth 
 century. It was for Him no more a figure of the 
 transcendent than it was a figure of the moral 
 life. And the same must be said of Catholicism, 
 which has been true, not merely to the religious 
 "' idea " of Jesus, but to its very form. That form, 
 as we have said, has lost all literal truth for us. 
 It can no longer produce in us the fruits it pro- 
 duced in simpler ages. It belonged to a world 
 that was but six thousand years old and had no 
 future before it ; to a petty universe of which that 
 
102 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 world was the sole and central preoccupation. It 
 had not even behind it the prestige of the whole 
 religious history of Israel. The apocalyptic 
 literature was an exotic, a late introduction into 
 the religion of Israel. And yet the fact remains 
 that it was in the forms of apocalyptic thought 
 that the religious " idea " of Jesus embodied itself, 
 and exercised the most potent religious influence 
 that the world has yet known. It is idle to 
 pretend that His influence has been purely ethical. 
 He has satisfied, not only the moral, but the 
 mystical, needs of millions for centuries, and His 
 moral influence has been largely dependent on His 
 mystical influence. We cannot even say that we 
 owe the apocalyptic form to Jesus, that it was 
 the creation of His spirit. He found it to hand. It 
 was the religious language of His surroundings. 
 He had not first to invent and teach a new 
 language before He could communicate with His 
 people. He took the existing language as the 
 medium, not only of His speech, but of His 
 thought. His own place in the apocalyptic 
 scheme was the substance of His personal revela- 
 tion. For the rest He adopted the revelations 
 of others. 
 
 It would seem, then, an obvious duty to abandon 
 the apocalyptic form and retain what it stands 
 for and embodies. This would be easy if it 
 
VALUE OF THE APOCALYPTIC IDEA 103 
 
 stood for ethical principles. The symbolic pre- 
 sentment of what can be expressed properly is 
 inexcusable. But the transcendental can never 
 be expressed properly. Translated into the terms 
 of our present philosophy, the " idea " of Jesus 
 remains symbolic. To whatever degree we de- 
 materialise our symbols of the spiritual, material 
 they must remain. Our own symbolism would 
 be as unacceptable for a later age as the apoca- 
 lyptic symbolism is for us. The only remedy 
 lies in a frank admission of the principle of 
 symbolism. With this admission we have no 
 need to abolish the Apocalypse, which, as the 
 form in which Jesus embodied His religious " idea," 
 is classical and normative for all subsequent 
 interpretations of the same. In the long series 
 of translations the original sense may be easily 
 perverted if the original text be lost. What each 
 age has to do is to interpret the apocalyptic sym- 
 bolism into terms of its own symbolism. 
 
 How, then, should we express the religious 
 "idea" of Jesus in our own age? What, for us, 
 are the values underlying the apocalyptic revela- 
 tion? How, had He belonged to our own day, 
 and had His mind been stored with our historical, 
 scientific, philosophical, moral and religious beliefs, 
 would His religious "idea" have clothed itself, 
 and remained the same " idea " ? 
 
104 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 It is "the same," in so far as it produces the 
 same level and degree of spiritual life and experi- 
 ence. The same relation may be described, the 
 same direction given, in endless ways. The truth 
 of all these ways is the same if they yield the 
 same control over experience. To say they are 
 but symbolic of the transcendent is not agnosti- 
 cism ; since symbols may be representative. Nor 
 is it pure pragmatism, since the degree of their 
 practical utility is just that of their correspondence 
 to reality. Were nature not in some way like a 
 mechanism, the determinist hypothesis of science 
 would be fruitless. Because the likeness is im- 
 perfect, the fruitfulness is imperfect. Taken as the 
 whole account of nature, the hypothesis starves 
 the better half of man's soul. 
 
 Any construction of the transcendent that yields 
 the same fruits as the apocalyptic construction is 
 true to the "idea" of Jesus. We have not to com- 
 pare symbol with symbol, or theology with the- 
 ology, or to show that one can be deduced from 
 the other. We have to compare life with life ; 
 feeling with feeling ; action with action. 
 
XI 
 THE TRUTH-VALUE OF VISIONS 
 
 THE word "visionary" is too widely associated 
 with illusion not to inspire a profound dis- 
 trust. In an age of psychological ignorance the 
 easy credit accorded to the visionary was open to 
 great abuse. Even fairly truthful men are not so 
 scrupulously accurate about their statements when 
 these cannot be checked. When few travelled, a 
 "traveller's tale" meant a fiction, and a sailor's 
 " yarn " was not taken seriously. Authority is 
 always abused in the absence of safeguards, and 
 the authority of knowledge follows the rule. In 
 days of larger credit and credulity an impostor 
 could pretend to visions, and the true visionary 
 re-edit his visions to suit his desires. 
 
 Another element of illusion was the " objectifi- 
 cation" of visions. Obvious as it is to us, the 
 distinction between subjective and objective ap- 
 pearances is a slow acquisition of mental develop- 
 ment, and by no means completed even yet. It 
 is not one of " vividness " ; for our dreams, and 
 even our waking imaginations, are often more 
 i°S 
 
106 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 vivid than our true perceptions. Both systems of 
 appearances are, in some sense, our own creation. 
 But the latter is common to all men, and is deter- 
 mined by some principle of regular sequence and 
 grouping which evades our control. This is a 
 difference that can only be learnt gradually by 
 experience. The range of the objective grows 
 with human experience : just as life teaches us that 
 many things, which, as children, we thought peculiar 
 to ourselves, belong to human nature as such. 
 An appearance is illusory only when we place it in 
 the wrong series and are led into consequent errors 
 of anticipation — as when we mistake our dreams 
 for facts and calculate accordingly. An acciden- 
 tal vividness of imagination and weakness of 
 perception and vitality may project a dream into 
 space and history ; and only by its irrelevance to 
 the objective series can the hallucination be de- 
 tected. A vision is a hallucination so far as it 
 seems to belong to, and come from, the objective 
 series, and this because it is not seen to belong to 
 the subjective series. This error of psychological 
 interpretation has something to do with the dis- 
 trust of visionaries in these days. 
 
 Connected with this error of " objectification " 
 is the tendency to attach a literal, and not merely 
 a symbolic, value to their content, when they are 
 accepted as revelations of transcendental realities ; 
 
THE TRUTH-VALUE OF VISIONS 107 
 
 and to be amazed, for example, at the divergen- 
 cies between the Sacred Passion according to S. 
 Bridget and the same according to Sister Catherine 
 Emmerich. 
 
 All this does not exclude the fact that visions 
 are a perfectly normal phenomenon of the human 
 mind, and possess a certain sort of truth-value. 
 Every movement of consciousness is from the 
 implicit and vague to the explicit and distinct. 
 It unfolds itself in more definite feelings, impulses, 
 images and even concepts. When the movement 
 is sudden and strong, the image is sudden and 
 strong. Its abruptness and force seem to detach 
 it from the subjective series and so to throw it 
 into the objective. Yet this accidental illusion in 
 no way affects the value of its content, except so 
 far as, to those who are under sway of the illusion, 
 it may seem to give this content a divine and 
 miraculous authority. It may, however, have divine 
 authority on a different title — namely, so far as 
 the inward movement from which it springs is 
 divine. 
 
 The sense of an absolute opposed to his rela- 
 tivity, an infinite to his finitude, a permanent to 
 his evanescence, an actual to his potentiality, a 
 repose to his restlessness, is the groundwork and 
 canvas on which man's rational life is broidered. 
 Because it is permanent, like the burden of a 
 
io8 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 melody, it is not an object of distinct advertence 
 any more than the air we breathe or the space we 
 move in. We adjust ourselves to it in many ways 
 as unconsciously as we do to the laws of life or 
 thought. It needs some effort of reflection to 
 separate the religious from the other factors of 
 our spirit-life ; to study and develop them apart. 
 We do not need to prove religion to men, but to 
 show them that they are religious. That religion 
 which we "prove" is not the substance, but a 
 particular form and interpretation of religious 
 experience — not the divine, but some particular 
 image, symbol or conception of the divine. What 
 we experience (be our creed or non-creed what it 
 may) is a Power that makes for Righteousness, 
 i.e. that subjects us to an universal, super- 
 individual, super-social end, of which we have no 
 distinct conception, and which we can only figure 
 to ourselves in symbols and images, whether 
 spontaneously or by a deliberate effort of thought. 
 That we can feel and suffer from our relativity, 
 finitude and evanescence, means an under-con- 
 sciousness of an Absolute, Infinite and Unchanging, 
 that we must for ever try to express in our thought 
 and action as in terms of another order of being. 
 The energy, constancy and sincerity with which 
 we pursue this task is the measure of our spiritual 
 life. Only when we are so perfect as to pursue it 
 
THE TRUTH-VALUE OF VISIONS 109 
 
 without let or hindrance, shall we have found such 
 rest as the finite spirit is capable of. 
 
 This need of harmony between himself and the 
 transcendent is, as we have said, the essence of 
 the religious " idea." Man's need of righteous- 
 ness is but subordinate to it. His aesthetic 
 and intellectual needs belong to it just as truly. 
 In all three he seeks the unattainable absolute 
 and is ever dissatisfied with his best attain- 
 ments. 
 
 When it is objected that inward experience 
 does not give us God, this must be admitted if 
 by " God " we mean some particular image, symbol 
 or idea. Such symbols are always the spontaneous 
 or deliberate representation of the transcendent 
 cause or source of the experience. They are 
 " mysteries," objects of faith. But to object that 
 the cause or source is not revealed to us in the 
 experience is to mistake the very idea of a real 
 cause. In the modern scientific sense a cause is 
 merely a group of antecedent phenomena. And 
 God is not such a cause. But a real cause or 
 agent is only revealable in, through and with its 
 effects or appearances — as affecting us in some 
 way. In this sense God can be revealed to us in 
 experiences, just as our fellow-men are. He is an 
 object of that faith which enters into our simplest 
 judgments — the faith by which we believe in an 
 
Ho CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 objective world, or in minds other than our own. 
 I do not find my fellow-man in, but through my 
 experience ; by a work of spontaneous interpreta- 
 tion. If my idea of him be not merely a symbol, 
 it is because I have an adequate measure of him 
 in myself; whereas God does not belong to the 
 world of external sense, nor is His nature ex- 
 pressible properly in terms of my own. The first 
 instinct of thought is to treat everything as 
 another self — to exalt what is below us, to abase 
 what is above us, to that level. Differentiation is 
 the slow work of experience and reflection — a 
 work which can never be complete. Of the abso- 
 lutely diverse we could have no conception, no 
 desire, no need. Our first notion of God, natur- 
 ally, is human. We gradually dehumanise it to the 
 idea of an infinite human spirit. If we go further 
 and cancel the last feature of humanity, we are 
 left with something absolute, unrelated and simply 
 diverse, that does not exist for us. We cannot 
 adjust our life to what does not touch us or enter 
 into our environment. Only so far as the absolute 
 is also immanent, and mingles with the world's 
 process, can religion have an object. 
 
 This process of man's self-adjustment to the 
 immanent-transcendent implies action and re- 
 action. The Divine is no dead and passive 
 environment, but a living, active, social environ- 
 
THE TRUTH-VALUE OF VISIONS in 
 
 merit. God gives and man receives ; God leads 
 and man follows. By his inward experiences of 
 felt harmony or discord with the transcendent, 
 man can test the value of his religious notions 
 and of the conduct they dictate. It is in those 
 experiences that God guides him directly. There 
 is no other language between the soul and God. 
 The spontaneous or deliberate symbols, in which 
 those experiences take mental shape, serve 
 directly to embody and retain the experience ; 
 to make it in some way communicable ; to fix 
 the direction of life, the tone of feeling, suggested 
 by it. Like the hypotheses of science, they serve 
 to co-ordinate and control phenomena, and in the 
 measure that they do so they are founded in and 
 represent reality — albeit symbolically. When we 
 realise how purely symbolic even our best and 
 most fruitful scientific hypotheses must be, on 
 how infinitesimal an experience of the whole 
 they are founded, we can see that revelation 
 involves no violation of the usual processes 
 of thought, nor calls for any sort of special 
 faculty. 
 
 Thus there is no more reason for an indis- 
 criminate contempt of revelation than for a like 
 contempt of other means of knowledge — and we 
 cannot exclude from the realm of " knowledge " 
 the record and classification of any department 
 
ii2 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 of experience, however incapable of exact ex- 
 pression. Tradition, induction, deduction, observa- 
 tion can be, and have been, as widely abused. 
 Their laws and criteria have been slowly deter- 
 mined. Empirical gave place to scientific medicine, 
 as soon as analysis and induction had estab- 
 lished the true chains of antecedents and con- 
 sequents. Religion is still in the empirical stage 
 in many respects. It has no clear method of 
 distinguishing sham from reality and of justifying 
 the values it has learnt by experience. 
 
 As things are, the only test of revelation is the 
 test of life — not merely of moral, but of spiritual, 
 fruitfulness in the deepest sense. It must at once 
 satisfy and intensify man's mystical and moral 
 need. It must bring the transcendent nearer to 
 his thoughts, feelings and desires. It must deepen 
 his consciousness of union with God. This, as we 
 have said, was the "evidence" to which Jesus 
 appealed in proof of His "possession" by God's 
 spirit — the evidence of His control over man's 
 mystical life. His revelation was the secret of 
 that control ; of the fire that He was and the fire 
 that He came to spread. Such, too, is the evidence 
 of Christianity as a personal religion — its power 
 over souls that are already Christian in sympathy 
 and capacity; the soul-compelling power of the 
 spirit of Christ. Any other " sign," be it miracle 
 
THE TRUTH-VALUE OF VISIONS 113 
 
 or argument, will appeal only to the faithless and 
 perverse. It may puzzle them, but it will never 
 convince them ; it may convert them to the 
 Church, but it cannot convert them to God ; it 
 may change their theology — it cannot change 
 their hearts. 
 
XII 
 THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 
 (a) THE TRANSCENDENCY OF THE KINGDOM 
 
 HOW, then, must we, here and now, under- 
 stand the apocalyptic and transcendental 
 revelation of Jesus, so as to shape our spiritual 
 life, feeling and action in harmony with His ? 
 How must we re-embody the same " idea " if it is 
 to live for us ? 
 
 First of all we must recognise that morality is 
 not our highest life, but only a particular mani- 
 festation of it under certain contingencies. So 
 far as morality is the will of God, it unites man 
 dynamically with God. But it is not conscious 
 union until the moral experience receives a re- 
 ligious and transcendent interpretation — until the 
 absolute peremptoriness of right over all personal, 
 social or racial interests is more or less recognised 
 as that of a Will, whose object is universal and 
 eternal Right, and in subjection to which our wills 
 find their true life and expansion. It is just the 
 conscious aiming at this union with the transcen- 
 dent, through the moral life, that raises morality 
 114 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 115 
 
 to religion — to a conscious self-adjustment to the 
 realities of the transcendent world. 
 
 But besides the "ought" of conduct there is 
 the " ought " of thinking and the " ought " of 
 feeling — the duty of a complete and ever com- 
 pleter harmony of the whole spirit — mind, heart, 
 will and action — with what we necessarily con- 
 ceive as a perfect Spirit, without limitations. How- 
 ever obscure and rudimentary, the need of this 
 harmony becomes explicit in the love and exercise 
 of any sort of Tightness — moral, intellectual or 
 aesthetic — for its own sake. Man's need of har- 
 mony with the Divine is as natural as his need of 
 bread. If this harmony be an ideal or end "in 
 process of becoming," it supposes, as its other 
 term, the Divine, as something actual and given. 
 The moral life, therefore, is potentially, and may 
 become actually, religious ; it may help to satisfy 
 man's mystical need of conscious union with the 
 transcendent ; but it can never be the whole of 
 religion, and need not be religious at all. 
 
 To maintain that religion is man's highest life, 
 it seems to me that we must deny a vital con- 
 tinuity between the lowest and the highest forms 
 of religion. The former, I cannot but think, belong 
 strictly to the category of magic, or rudimentary 
 natural science. In the interests of his non-moral 
 life the savage desires to control the invisible 
 
u6 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 powers that govern the sequence of phenomena — 
 powers usually conceived as personal. His gods 
 are as much part of the order of nature as are 
 our hypothetical " forces " and " laws." He wants 
 to be friends with his god, because it is the best 
 way to control that " force " to his own temporal 
 advantage. But union with his god is not, for the 
 savage, an end in itself, or the satisfaction of a 
 spiritual need. Only so far as he has some rudi- 
 mentary moral sense, some love of Tightness for 
 its own sake, does he possess a sort of virtual re- 
 ligion. Not till he images God as a moral being, 
 and recognises morality as the Will of the Highest, 
 as the sovereign and universal Good ; not till union 
 with such a God becomes for him an end in itself, 
 and his own ultimate perfection, does he pass 
 from magic to religion. 
 
 The continuity of religion is one of form and 
 expression, rather than of substance and content. 
 A new god takes over the regalia of the old — his 
 names, his temples, his rites. We thus find the 
 surviving forms of the earliest religion in the 
 latest, and this in virtue of the laws of the human 
 mind. But there is no continuity of substance 
 between magical and moral religion. The latter 
 is the development of a non-religious morality 
 that co-existed side by side with non-moral magi- 
 cal religion, till the day when morality took over 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 117 
 
 the regalia of religion. The religion of magic, 
 being wholly subordinate to man's physical and 
 temporal interests, belongs to man's lower and 
 individual life. As such it is far beneath his moral 
 and universal life in dignity. But the religion 
 that grew out of morality is something higher 
 and fuller than morality. " Higher and fuller," 
 because, with it, man becomes consciously and 
 actively the organ of an universal and eternal life, 
 the instrument of an universal and eternal end ; 
 because, with it, his physical selfhood is transcended 
 and subordinated to his spiritual selfhood or person- 
 ality. Religion deepens and is deepened by his 
 profound and divine discontent. With every de- 
 velopment of his spiritual faculties his rebellion 
 against his own relativity, finitude and evanes- 
 cence increases. He feels that no mere extension 
 of his individual life could satisfy him ; nay, by 
 experience he learns that such extensions leave him 
 less, and not more, content. He wants to pass its 
 ct'XXo yeVoy; and the want implies an unsatisfied 
 capacity for so doing. There is that in him which 
 nothing can satisfy but some sort of union with 
 and appropriation of the infinite and eternal. In 
 the measure that he tries to live widely, deeply 
 and nobly he is bound to become a pessimist. If 
 optimism is usually associated with the youth and 
 pessimism with the age of persons or peoples, it 
 
n8 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 is because pessimism is the verdict of experience. 
 Whether in himself, or in the world, if a man has 
 ideals for both, he is bound to find not only failure, 
 but an iron law of inevitable failure, of progress 
 thwarted and frustrated even by its multiplicity 
 and fecundity — its waves dashed to futile spray by 
 their very force and volume. From such a world 
 and such a life he must seek refuge in an abiding 
 City, that hath foundations whose builder and 
 maker is God. Only so established can he have 
 patience, courage and hope to join in the struggle 
 between the Divine Will and the forces of evil in 
 himself and in the world, not asking to see the 
 meaning and issue of it all, but working blindly 
 along with Him Who sees. 
 
 Born of a felt contrast between the actual and 
 man's wakening spiritual ideals, combined with the 
 gradual recognition of the schism as inevitable and 
 unconquerable, this pessimism is the presupposi- 
 tion of that optimism of blind faith by which it is 
 overcome. They are two stages in the same pro- 
 cess of spiritual growth — a process that we find 
 arrested in Buddhism. If it be not arrested, it is 
 strangely perverted in what may be called Modern 
 Christianity, whose optimism is begotten of faith 
 in this world, not of faith in the other ; whose 
 courage and hope is maintained by the belief that 
 the schism between the ideal and the actual will 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 119 
 
 eventually be healed through an inherent vis 
 medicatrix Natures, that the Kingdom of God 
 is the natural term of a process of moral and social 
 development. 
 
 Nothing is more evident than that Jesus had no 
 such faith or hope. The revelation of the apo- 
 calyptic Kingdom of Heaven was a Gospel or 
 Good News for those who despaired of the world. 
 It supplanted and reinterpreted, in a transcen- 
 dental sense, the earlier prophetic Gospel of the 
 temporal triumph of Israel and the reign of moral 
 and legal righteousness on earth — a Gospel that 
 experience of the law of failure had discredited. 
 The mere fact that he expected the Kingdom to- 
 morrow proves that the faith and hope of Jesus 
 was not in progress or evolution. What sort of 
 Gospel had it been for the poor, the sorrowful, the 
 persecuted, the oppressed, to know that, not they, 
 but their class, would be relieved in some remote 
 age by the advance of civilisation and morality? 
 Had it not been to satisfy their hunger with stones 
 and their thirst with gall and vinegar ? 
 
 The verdict of the deeper spiritual intuition on 
 this life is always pessimistic, and it is a verdict 
 that is only confirmed by experience and reflection. 
 It is evident that there are vital and progressive 
 forces at work everywhere, but it is equally plain 
 that there are destructive forces, that life is 
 
120 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 strangled by its own fertility, that it is faced by 
 the insoluble problem of finding room for its 
 expansion in every direction, that the utmost its 
 ingenuity can do is to defer the inevitable day of 
 defeat and to prolong its periods of uninterrupted 
 progress. The world is the arena of a conflict 
 between a multitude of irreconcilable ends. The 
 belief that they are ordained to an eventual 
 harmony, however useful as a stimulus to combat, 
 falls to pieces on closer inspection, which reveals 
 an inherent fault or rift in nature. All life is 
 under the sway of sad mortality. 
 
 To-day we are so enamoured of our scientific 
 and material progress that we have no eyes for our 
 many decadences, even though we are face to face 
 with social and moral chaos. We believe, with 
 childish simplicity, that we are making straight for 
 the millennium. We forget that every new comfort 
 is a new necessity, a new source of discontent and 
 unhappiness, and leaves the relative proportion of 
 happiness and misery unaffected. Thrust out at 
 one place the tide of sorrow breaks in at another : 
 expellas furca tamen usque recurret. If medicine 
 cures diseases, it enables the diseased to increase 
 and multiply and re-establish the average of un- 
 healthiness. Shall progress ever wipe away the 
 tears from all eyes ? Shall it ever extinguish love 
 and pride and ambition and all the griefs attendant 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 121 
 
 in their train ? Is it enough to give a man bread 
 for his belly and instruction for his brain ? Pro- 
 long life as it will, can progress conquer death, 
 with its terrors for the dying, its tears for the 
 surviving? Can it ever control the earthquake, 
 the tempest, the lightning, the cruelties of a nature 
 indifferent to the lot of man? And even, given 
 the attainment of its facile dreams, can progress 
 postpone the day when mankind shall be blotted 
 off the face of a universe, that will go its way as 
 though he had never been ? 
 
 The root of this fallacy of progress is the un- 
 criticised and indefensible assumption that the race 
 and the whole world, like the individual organism, 
 are inherently predetermined to pass through a 
 series of stages ending in a definite final perfec- 
 tion. That sort of development belongs only to 
 the individual organism. That of the species or 
 race is determined casually from without, not pre- 
 determined from within. It is a result rather than 
 an end — the result of conflict with accidental and 
 incalculable difficulties ; a result that no insight 
 into present conditions could predict. Progress 
 makes for no preordained goal. The race is pre- 
 determined to live on indefinitely, and to do so it 
 must learn to overcome the obstacles it encounters 
 in its expansion. Its course is no more planned 
 than the course of a river. It runs on and 
 
122 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 expands, because it must, and how it must. Differ- 
 ent obstructions would have called forth different 
 arts, skills and inventions ; so the present course of 
 progress is only one out of thousands that might 
 have been. Altogether the dream of a possible 
 earthly paradise, in which the travail of nature is 
 to culminate, has no other basis than a false 
 analogy between progress and organic life. So far 
 as the moral struggle is explained and justified by 
 this imaginary and impossible end, it is a mere 
 beating of the air. Only an eternal and universal 
 end can explain the imperative and absolute 
 character of Right ; and humanity is neither eternal 
 nor universal. The Right must be worth doing 
 even were the world to vanish the next moment. 
 But that universal and eternal end is necessarily 
 unimaginable for the human mind, limited to a 
 brief moment of duration and to a mere point in 
 the range of possible experience. Yet we are fain 
 to give some figure, some content, to the idea of 
 that universal end ; and prone to forget the sym- 
 bolic character of that figure. We have none 
 better, perhaps, than the image of a perfectly 
 happy world, produced by a steady process of 
 moral development. Only when we realise the 
 inherent contradictions of such a concept, do we 
 see that we have mistaken a symbol for reality. 
 The apocalyptic Kingdom of Heaven is not 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 123 
 
 more of a dream and unreality ; but there is far 
 less danger of our overlooking its symbolic char- 
 acter. It is presented to us as an object of faith 
 and revelation, not as an object of rational fore- 
 sight. It is a bliss given by God, not wrought out 
 by man ; a bliss into which all may enter and not 
 merely a favoured and final generation in a remote 
 future. It is the fruit and reward of the moral 
 life, but is a supermoral life — the continuation of 
 that divine and spiritual life which, under present 
 contingencies, manifests itself principally in mor- 
 ality, in Tightness of conduct, though also in Tight- 
 ness of thought and feeling and, above all, in 
 religion and conscious union with God. But thece 
 the contingencies, that now call for the moral 
 struggle with all its pain and suffering, shall be 
 done away. It is the rest that remains for the 
 people of God, Here there is for the just a fore- 
 taste of that rest in the midst of their labours 
 and tribulations ; for to have God is to have rest. 
 But till they have Him fully and undividedly their 
 rest is broken with restlessness. Rest is the motive 
 and end of the soul's struggle with the waves that 
 would bear it from the Rock to which it clings. 
 So closely are the struggle and the rest associated 
 in our experience that the saints seem almost to 
 love the struggle for its own sake, and to shrink 
 from the idea of an eternal and unbroken rest. 
 
124 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Yet the Peirasmos, or Temptation, is none the less 
 an evil. Christ did not say " Lead us " but " Lead 
 us not into the Peirasmos." But action is not 
 opposed to rest. And union with God is union 
 with the Divine Life and Action, with the undis- 
 turbed centre of the cyclone. 
 
 In the tangle and contradiction of the world of 
 our present experience goodness, beauty, truth 
 and happiness are at discord. Against this dis- 
 cord our whole spiritual nature revolts. It strives, 
 and is bound to strive, to overcome this violation 
 of order. And yet it can do no more than mitigate 
 an inevitable and perpetual evil. No conceivable 
 degree of progress could ever satisfy this deepest 
 demand of our nature. And even if it could, the 
 vision would not be for our eyes but for those of a 
 final, and immeasurably distant, generation. The 
 whole idea of the subordination of past and 
 present humanity to the interests of a remote 
 futurity, as means to an end, belongs to the false 
 comparison of the life of the race to that of an 
 individual organism. We live for our own sakes 
 and not for a posterity that never comes. We 
 have equal rights with any generation of the future. 
 The truth is that neither we nor they shall find 
 goodness, happiness, truth and beauty united in 
 this life. 
 
 As man progresses mentally and morally, he is 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 125 
 
 likely to find the discord increased rather than 
 diminished. The deepest demand of his nature 
 is the last to rise to the surface of explicit con- 
 sciousness. As he grows spiritually, he asks more 
 and not less, and seems to receive less and not 
 more. And to this his revolt against earlier and 
 inadequate expressions of the religious idea is 
 due in a great measure. Taken literally, and not 
 symbolically, they do not meet his need. And as 
 long as he demands to picture to himself distinctly 
 the term and satisfaction of that need he is doomed 
 to doubt, for his picturings will necessarily be 
 drawn from the world of his present experience. 
 Not till he resigns the desire to see what is 
 hopelessly beyond the range of his present vision, 
 is his faith pure and unshaken. Faith believes 
 that this need relates to another order of experi- 
 ence ; that the present order serves only to evoke, 
 exercise and strengthen it, but can never satisfy it. 
 This implies that, in his deepest being, man belongs 
 already to that other order. He has a power, 
 whose meaning and purpose are hid from him 
 through lack of a proper object for their exercise. 
 A cage-born bird, he wonders what his wings are 
 for. He tries to make a heaven out of earth, as it 
 were ropes out of sand. He was made for some- 
 thing else — he does not know what. Like the 
 domesticated beaver he builds his dams across the 
 
126 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 floor ; he cannot tell why. Not till he is in his 
 native river will he understand his restless instinct ; 
 and the river is beyond all his present experience 
 and imagination — a missing link in his mind. 
 
 As far, then, as the apocalyptic Kingdom of 
 Heaven stands for an order of transcendental 
 experience, in which sorrow, pain, temptation and 
 sin shall be done away ; in which the moral 
 struggle shall be explained, justified and brought 
 to eternal rest ; in which the spiritual discords of 
 our present experience shall be harmonised; in 
 which man shall understand the meaning of 
 those deepest needs, to which the present order 
 is educational and preparatory ; as far as it 
 stands for that which is the gift of God and 
 not the result of development — so far it seems 
 to me to express symbolically the religious idea, 
 brought to an advanced stage of explicitness. 
 Treated as symbolic, not of transcendent life but 
 of man's moral experience in the present life, it 
 ceases to be that Gospel or Good News which 
 alone makes life bearable for those to whom instinct, 
 experience and reflection have revealed the shallow- 
 ness of the Gospel of progress and the promise 
 of salvation by development. Doubtless these 
 despairing idealists are a minority, but they are 
 what all men tend to become in the measure of 
 their spiritual development. And, after all, five 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 127 
 
 hundred millions of Buddhists share their pes- 
 simism, though not the hope that alleviates it. 
 None should be so ripe for the Gospel ; though not 
 for the Gospel of Liberal Protestantism, with its 
 bland faith and hope in the present order, its 
 refusal to face the incurable tragedy of human 
 life — a tragedy that grows deeper as man rises 
 from the hand-to-mouth simplicity of mere animal 
 existence, extends his knowledge and control of 
 experience and wakes ever more fully to the sense 
 of his insatiable exigencies. The more truly he is 
 man, the more truly he is miserable. If he have 
 no hope beyond earth, he can do no better than 
 contract his desires to the point of extinction, 
 unless his humanity be sufficiently latent to let 
 him live like a gnat in a sunbeam. 
 
 (4) IMMORTALITY 
 
 The apocalyptic Kingdom of Heaven assumes 
 a life after death, a continuation, expansion and 
 revelation of the life of the spirit as lived even 
 now by the righteous. The belief in immortality 
 is not essential to magical religions, in which 
 gods are dealt with as powers of nature, to be 
 controlled in man's temporal interests ; in which 
 their friendship is not an end, but a utility. Thus 
 the early religion of Israel had no hope beyond 
 
128 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 the grave. In many such primitive peoples there 
 prevails a belief in some dreamland, whither the 
 soul (a shade of the body) wanders in sleep or 
 after death ; but this belief is not necessarily 
 religious. At most there is a hope that, so far as 
 this life is continued at low pressure in Hades, the 
 gods who have been propitious here may extend 
 their favour to that land of shadows and memories. 
 But it is a poorer, not a richer and fuller, existence 
 than the present. The least upon earth is better 
 than the greatest under the earth; whereas, for 
 Christianity, the greatest born of woman is less 
 than the least in the Kingdom of Heaven. Be- 
 tween these conceptions of immortality there is 
 no continuity of substance, but only of form. 
 The terms and images of the earlier belief have, 
 to some extent, been appropriated by the later, 
 somewhat to the prejudice of truth. 
 
 As true spiritual religion is a development, not 
 of magical religion, but of the moral life, so also 
 belief in spiritual immortality has not sprung 
 from belief in ghosts and shades, but from the 
 same root as spiritual religion. Whether recog- 
 nised or only implicit, it is a postulate of the 
 moral life. I cannot desire what is not in some 
 sense my own good, my own end ; and yet I 
 desire the right, i.e. what is good irrespectively 
 of my own individual and temporal interests and 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 129 
 
 of those of all humanity. Fiat justitia ruat ccelum, 
 is the dictate of the moral conscience. Every- 
 thing temporal must be sacrificed to this absolute 
 and imperative good. When we say that right- 
 eousness must be disinterested, we only exclude 
 these temporal interests. Were it not our own 
 interest in some sense, it could not be an object 
 of will at all. It is therefore my own interest, 
 because I am a spiritual, super-temporal and 
 super-individual being; because, as such, my 
 interest is identified with that of an eternal and 
 universal Will. Hence I feel that what matters 
 for me absolutely, matters for me eternally. This 
 I could not feel were I convinced that, when the 
 human race is wiped out of the physical world, 
 it will not matter whether I have lived well 
 or ill. 
 
 Men have lived, and do live, moral lives without 
 any implicit recognition of such a postulate. But 
 even if they explicitly deny it with their reason, it 
 is affirmed by their instinct and their conduct. 
 Connecting the doctrine of immortality, in its 
 popular materialistic setting, with a hope of 
 temporal reward, deferred in this life, to be be- 
 stowed in a continuation of a similar order of 
 experience, they rightly feel it a nobler thing to 
 love justice for its own sake, and not for the sake 
 of a lower happiness. To say that this love or 
 
130 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 satisfaction is, in itself, a reward, and that such 
 men are, therefore, self-interested, is a mere quibble. 
 The self-interest that spoils moral purity is the 
 interest of the individual organic self, not that 
 of the universal and spiritual self; it is that which 
 belongs to our consciousness of being separate 
 from all, not to our consciousness of being identi- 
 fied with all. The desire of an immortality, which 
 means the persistence and expansion of that very 
 love of justice, cannot sully the purity of the 
 heart. It is objectively inseparable from such 
 a love, which implies the desire to be with God, 
 and therefore to be with Him always. 
 
 As we have said before, the transcendent and 
 universal end, that justifies the imperative and 
 absolute character of Right, is hopelessly un- 
 imaginable for us who command but a moment 
 of duration and a point of immensity. We can 
 only present it to ourselves under symbols drawn 
 from our present experience. So, too, our symbols 
 of the life immortal, drawn largely from animistic 
 and magical religions, imperil the spirituality of the 
 belief, and propose it to us as an object of vision 
 rather than of faith. And this not less but more, 
 when, discarding the symbols of the imagination, 
 we have recourse to those of the understanding 
 and try to conceive the when, where and how 
 of life eternal. 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 131 
 
 Philosophy can neither give us that faith nor 
 take it from us. It is given us in the moral 
 instinct, which we can no more repress than we 
 can repress our belief in personalities other than 
 our own. The sceptic who denies it may be un- 
 answerable, but he convinces neither us nor him- 
 self. His very denial implies his sense that truth 
 matters absolutely and eternally. All that philo- 
 sophy can do is to criticise our attempted state- 
 ments and interpretation of the instinct. These, 
 being necessarily in terms of temporal experience 
 and life, may conflict with that experience if they 
 be taken as more than symbolic of the transcen- 
 dent and unimaginable. Such criticism is as 
 irrelevant as if it were applied to the apocalyptic 
 Kingdom of Heaven. We only know our spiritual 
 life in relation to, and in conflict with, certain con- 
 ditions — conditions which hinder and limit its full 
 manifestations : in which it can never realise itself 
 and come to rest. Any ideal condition we can 
 imagine must be of the same kind in some new 
 and inherently impossible arrangement, e.g. a 
 world of perfectly moral men in which morality 
 would be ipso facto impossible ; a world of goods 
 without their essentially correlative evils ; in 
 short, a world of hills without valleys. Yet these 
 imaginings are the necessary symbol of that un- 
 imaginable reality which answers to our spiritual 
 
132 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 need — they are " mysteries " ; objects of faith ; 
 signs of an unseen. 
 
 And what can any philosophy do for or against 
 our faith in that unseen? Can it ever even tell 
 us what matter is, or what spirit is ; whether they 
 be two, or but two aspects of one; and, if two, 
 how they are related ? Are not all our relations, 
 such as twoness and oneness, borrowed from the 
 spatial and temporal, and therefore senseless out- 
 side that realm? Can it even tell us what we 
 ourselves, makers of space and time, are ? Is the 
 mystery of the Trinity more full of insoluble con- 
 tradictions than that of our own selfhood ? I may 
 know everything more easily than what " I " the 
 knower am. Can I know my thinking self apart 
 from the objects of my thought of which that self 
 is co-factor ? When I try to think of it I at once 
 distort it into some object — usually my body — 
 which is but its symbol. And if I cannot know 
 the relation between the perceived object, that I 
 call my body, and myself, for which it is object, 
 am I likely to know the relation between myself 
 and God? When I conceive it as identity or 
 diversity my eyes are full of dust, my thought is 
 charged with materialism. I am dealing with a 
 symbol of myself and with a symbol of God, as 
 with two spatial objects. Only my spiritual ex- 
 perience, my moral exigencies, compel me to think 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 133 
 
 and act alternately as though there were at once 
 identity and diversity. Of the transcendent basis 
 of that instinct I know (Newman would say) as 
 much as any man, and that is absolutely nothing. 
 All I know is a hunger that I can mitigate with 
 dust and bran, but whose plenary satisfaction I 
 cannot imagine, however I try to heap incom- 
 patibles together. 
 
 The desire for this spiritual immortality is, then, 
 totally distinct from that desire for a perpetuation 
 of the present life which fits in with magical re- 
 ligion, and has for its object, not eternal life but 
 an endless prolongation of temporal life. To a 
 great extent these desires vary inversely. To the 
 young, vigorous, fortunate and inexperienced, the 
 thought of death is as intolerable as the thought 
 of sleep to an active man in the bright freshness 
 of morning. But night brings a change and a 
 desire for rest and unconsciousness. Men live 
 their fill and want no more of this life. Its end- 
 less prolongation would be hell. But in the 
 measure that they have seen through the illusions 
 of this outward experience they are more likely 
 to wake to the need of another sort of experience. 
 As the eternal life that is in them asserts itself, 
 the thought of its extinction grows more intoler- 
 able and the faith in its perpetuity more im- 
 perative. The immortality that spiritualism strives 
 
134 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 to establish experimentally is simply a prolonga- 
 tion of this temporal life, in the absence of that 
 environment out of which it is utterly meaningless 
 and positively inconceivable. Moreover the quest 
 is vitiated by the animistic conception of the soul, 
 as a sprite that enters the body at birth and leaves 
 it at death — i.e. as something spatial and material, 
 a shade of the body. Of spiritual immortality 
 there is not, and cannot be, any sort of experi- 
 mental or philosophical demonstration. Like our 
 belief in God or in other personalities, it is a 
 matter of faith ; an inevitable, though not logically 
 inevitable, interpretation of spiritual experience. 
 
 That this faith comes late in the history of 
 religion is no more surprising than that a purer 
 morality and more spiritual religion should be 
 similarly delayed. It is none the less natural, for 
 man's nature unfolds its potentialities gradually, 
 the deepest and most fundamental being the last 
 to appear. 
 
 In early Israel the future life was but the sad 
 ghost of the present — " They that go down into 
 the pit cannot hope for Thy truth : The living, the 
 living, he shall praise Thee." Earth, and not 
 She61, was the place of divine rewards and punish- 
 ments. The people were one corporate personality, 
 in which all were responsible for the actions of 
 each, and were punished or rewarded accordingly. 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 135 
 
 Before God, Israel was everything ; the individual 
 only a member of Israel. And Israel had the im- 
 mortal duration of a people, wherein to suffer or 
 gain by the deeds of its members. Not till the 
 personality and sole responsibility of the individual 
 came to be recognised, did the problem of Job and 
 Ecclesiastes become pressing. Experience showed 
 that God did not serve individual men in this life 
 according to their works. As yet there was no 
 thought of an adjustment in a future life. In Shedl 
 all were equal in their misery and darkness. The 
 schism between duty and happiness was viewed 
 as permanent — as a mystery to be accepted in 
 silence and faith, or else as a justification of moral 
 and religious scepticism. Later came the prophetic 
 hope of the triumph of Israel, captive and op- 
 pressed, over the Gentiles, and a reign of moral 
 and legal righteousness on earth. Here, then, 
 was the solution. The just of past ages would 
 rise in their bodies and enter into that Kingdom, 
 while the wicked would be left in the gloom and 
 misery of Sheol. 
 
 In all this we must recognise the gradual com- 
 ing to consciousness of the moral sense with its 
 postulate of immortality ; its tendency to shape 
 the world of its desire out of the world that is, by 
 some impossible rearrangement of life and history. 
 The prophet's dream was an attempted interpre- 
 
136 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 tation of the exigencies of his moral and religious 
 instinct; a seeking for a transcendent reality in 
 the lower plane of the present. And the stronger 
 and deeper his instinct, so much the bolder and 
 grander his vision and so much the closer does its 
 fulfilment appear. The belief that its ideals must 
 be fulfilled, and fulfilled soon, is inseparable from 
 spiritual intensity and ardour. Thus prophet after 
 prophet proclaimed the triumph of Israel on the 
 morrow, and time after time it proved that the end 
 was not yet ; that the vision was but symbolic of 
 a reality beyond vision and beyond time. 
 
 As hope in the coming theocracy failed under 
 the repeated blows of disappointment, a new 
 generation of prophets left the world to its fate, 
 as incurably given over to the powers of evil. 
 Nothing was to be hoped for from the course 
 of events ; they believed no longer in any organised 
 plan that was working mysteriously, in spite of 
 its seeming crookedness, for the triumph of Israel. 
 For the later apocalyptic seers the kingdoms of 
 this world had been usurped by Satan. They 
 could be redeemed to God only through the con- 
 quest of Satan and his angels by the Son of Man 
 and His angels. God's Kingdom was not to grow 
 out of the earth but to descend upon it from above, 
 ready-made and complete. 
 
 This conception marks a further advance in the 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 137 
 
 interpretation of man's spiritual exigencies. It 
 recognises that they cannot be satisfied in the 
 natural order, but only in a transcendent world and 
 by an entirely new kind of experience. No doubt that 
 transcendent experience is figured in terms of our 
 present experience. It cannot be otherwise if we 
 figure it at all ; and yet the unseeable object of our 
 faith must be figured if it is to appeal to our imag- 
 ination and govern our feeling and conduct. We 
 cannot adapt our conduct to a world that is wholly 
 unknown ; it must be known at least in symbol ; 
 in some fiction founded in fact and experience. 
 So far as we have mistaken this fiction for fact, 
 this symbol for the transcendent reality, we, too, 
 have been disappointed, like the prophets of old. 
 
 The first Christians expected the Son of Man to 
 appear in the clouds within a few days. After 
 repeated disappointments, they remembered that 
 God's days were a thousand years. In the year 
 one thousand the old hope kindled again, but now 
 we have practically abandoned all hope. Yet we 
 have learnt something, namely, that any imagin- 
 able vision of the transcendent can be no more than 
 symbolic. For this reason we are content with that 
 in which Christ incorporated His religious " idea." 
 We are less likely to take it literally than any new 
 rendering of our own ; more likely to understand it 
 as a mystery of faith and not as historical foresight. 
 
138 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 (c) RESURRECTION 
 
 The belief in spiritual immortality is, then, in- 
 separable from spiritual religion ; though, like 
 such religion, it will clothe itself in the visible 
 and imaginable forms of our present experience. 
 If in some sense it is Christ who "brought life 
 and incorruption to light," yet immortality, or 
 resurrection (for they were not then distinguished) 
 was already implied in the apocalyptic conception 
 of the Kingdom of Heaven. It was the belief 
 of the Pharisees, as opposed to the philosophical 
 scepticism of the Sadducees. It had permeated 
 the uncritical multitude. Jesus did not reveal 
 it, but almost took it for granted. Men, who 
 were not His disciples, were ready to believe 
 that He Himself might be John the Baptist, or 
 Elias, or Jeremiah, or one of the great prophets 
 risen from the dead. It was not from Him 
 that they had learnt this doctrine. According to 
 the Gospel He Himself was not the first to rise. 
 He and the prophets before Him had raised the 
 dead, and at the moment of His own death, 
 before He had risen, we are told that the graves 
 were opened and that the bodies of the just arose. 
 If S. Paul speaks of Him as the first-fruits of the 
 dead he means first in dignity and causality, not 
 first in time. Our modern apologists, with their 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 139 
 
 idea of natural law and of miracle as a conquest 
 of the power of nature by a Higher Power, by 
 which conquest the existence of that Higher 
 Power is proved, miss the meaning which Christ's 
 resurrection had for those who had no idea of 
 natural law or of any other power in nature 
 than that of God. They speak as though the 
 Apostles had doubted whether God could break 
 through the determinism of nature and raise 
 the dead, and as though their faith had been 
 re-established by finding there was a power 
 stronger than that of nature. This is to read later 
 ideas into an earlier age. 
 
 In the first place, where there is no conception 
 of nature as a rigid autonomous system of uni- 
 formities, there can be no conception of the 
 preternatural. God was the sole mover of the 
 physical world, which had no power of its own 
 to oppose to His. He moved the sun or stayed 
 it ; He raised the storm or stilled it, as a man 
 moves or stays what is within his strength and 
 grasp. Order and uniformity were the self- 
 imposed rule of His own action, and not the 
 result of a necessity inherent in things. When 
 God departed from His usual course He had 
 no law or obstacle to overcome. The stilling 
 of the sun was not more a divine action than its 
 motion ; no more an evidence of the existence 
 
140 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 of God. Departures from His usual habits were, 
 of course, signs and wonders, but, in our modern 
 sense, they were not miracles. 
 
 The Apostles had no doubt as to the resurrec- 
 tion of the body at the last day — a belief that 
 they had not derived from Jesus. They did not 
 regard it as a miracle in any sense, but, like 
 every regular sequence in nature, a rule of Divine 
 action, a part of God's freely chosen plan. In 
 that plan death followed upon sin as regularly 
 as, but not more necessarily than, night followed 
 upon day. With the same regularity resurrec- 
 tion followed upon righteousness. It was only 
 because righteousness came through the conquest 
 of Satan, and the gift of the Spirit by the Son 
 of Man, that S. Paul speaks of Christ as the 
 cause and first-fruits of the Resurrection : " For 
 since by man came death, by man came also 
 resurrection of the dead," etc. 
 
 For the Apostles, the resurrection of Jesus 
 meant that He who had claimed to be the 
 destined Son of Man had been approved, justi- 
 fied and glorified by the Father, according to 
 the rule by which resurrection is the established 
 and almost natural consequence and proof of 
 justice. What they had doubted was His claim 
 to be the Christ ; not the possibility of His 
 resurrection. When He rose, their trust in Him, 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 141 
 
 in their own redemption with and through Him, 
 in His whole Gospel of the coming Kingdom 
 and His own place in it, was confirmed and 
 verified, not by an exceptional, but by a regular 
 occurrence. Resurrection is the fruit of righteous- 
 ness, and a tree is known by its fruit. 
 
 Thus S. Paul argues : " If there is no resurrection 
 of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised." He 
 assumes that only the just rise ; he has to prove 
 that Christ has been so justified by God. If the 
 general law of resurrection be denied the premiss 
 of his proof is gone. "If Christ hath not been 
 raised then is our preaching vain, your faith 
 also is vain " ; there is no reason to believe that 
 Jesus was what He claimed to be. By His resur- 
 rection He had been proved and made the Christ. 
 Had He not risen, their faith in the coming King- 
 dom, the Son of Man and the resurrection of the 
 just, would have remained intact ; for it was not 
 derived from Jesus. Only their faith in His Gospel 
 of the nearness of the Kingdom and of His own 
 identification with the promised Son of Man would 
 have perished. 
 
 Yet it remains true that Christ brought eternal 
 life and immortality to light, not as a new doctrine, 
 but as a new fact. He brought it near, pressed it 
 home, made it tangible and spiritually effectual, just 
 as our unquestioning belief in our own mortality is 
 
142 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 made effectual by the death of those near to us, or 
 by some proximate peril of death, and, from a 
 mere assent of the mind, becomes an element in 
 our character and conduct. For the Apostles the 
 resurrection of Jesus was not merely that of one 
 most near and dear ; but of one through friendship 
 with whom their own resurrection was secured. As 
 such, it transfused their whole character with a 
 hope that no temporal sorrow could trouble, and 
 robbed death of all its terrors. It was this realisa- 
 tion of immortality that filled the early Church with 
 a joy and enthusiasm that conquered the world and 
 sent martyrs rejoicing to death and torment. 
 
 This, then, was the significance of the resurrec- 
 tion of Jesus for the Apostles. They had no doubt 
 about God, or the possibility of superhuman won- 
 ders, or the coming of the Kingdom, or the resur- 
 rection of the dead, but only about the Messianic 
 claim of Jesus ; and this doubt was slain as soon 
 as God approved Him in the established and uni- 
 versal way, i.e. by raising Him up. 
 
 And what are we to think of this alleged resur- 
 rection, which was undoubtedly the whole inspi- 
 ration and strength of early Christianity, especially 
 as it was considered a guarantee for the speedy end 
 of all ? The harvest had begun ; the sickle was 
 thrust in ; the risen Christ was the first-fruits of the 
 general resurrection. 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 143 
 
 Here we are on difficult ground. But it is a 
 poor faith that dare not look difficulties straight in 
 the face. If the Apostles were mistaken as to the 
 immediacy of the End (and, of course, they were 
 so in some sense) may they not have been mistaken 
 as to the Christhood of Jesus, on which alone that 
 expectancy was founded ; and also as to His resur- 
 rection, on which their belief in His Christhood 
 was founded ? Might it not be put thus ? If He 
 has risen, He is the Christ ; if He be the Christ, the 
 end is near ; but the end is not near, therefore He 
 is not the Christ ; therefore He has not risen. We 
 have two interdependent facts — the resurrection of 
 Jesus and the immediacy of the End. It is only 
 by the sort of quibble that has made epochs out of 
 six evenings and mornings of creation that we can 
 pretend that the second of these facts has not been 
 disproved by universal experience. Is the proof 
 of the first anything like as strong as the disproof 
 of the second ? 
 
 The prophetic mind, as we have said, not only 
 embodies its spiritual exigencies and desires in 
 terms of present experience, in some glorified image 
 of the visible world, but expresses the impatience 
 and intensity of its desire in a foreshortening of 
 time. It translates its felt spiritual nearness to the 
 transcendental and eternal object of its faith into 
 the image of things visible. So far as the prophet 
 
144 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 confounds the image with the transcendent that it 
 symbolises, he is doomed to disappointment. The 
 whole apocalyptic imagery of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven ; of the Son of Man ; of the coming in 
 the clouds ; of the resurrection of the dead ; of 
 the Judgment in the valley of Jehoshaphat ; of the 
 immediacy of these events, is but imagery of the 
 transcendent and unimaginable ; of infinitely 
 deeper realities. It is an attempt to figure our 
 spiritual requirements in material form ; to give 
 them a language in which we can think of them 
 and speak of them. For an embodied spirit they 
 need embodiment if they are to be brought to bear 
 on our present experience. It is the future moth 
 trying to make itself intelligible to the present 
 grub, in which it is dimly self-conscious and 
 preparing for its coming life and environment. 
 
 The only manner in which the Christian Apoca- 
 lypse can claim a greater finality and security 
 than the repeatedly disappointed visions of the 
 earlier prophets is in recognising the symbolic 
 and inadequate character of all such visions. And 
 this recognition advanced towards explicitness 
 when the temporal interpretation of God's King- 
 dom gave place to the apocalyptic and quasi- 
 transcendent. It advanced still further with 
 Christ's insistence on the spiritual as the sole 
 eternal reality. It only needed a gradual cleansing 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 145 
 
 of the idea of spirit to complete the distinction 
 between the imagery and the reality of the tran- 
 scendent. 
 
 Now if we agree with Liberal Protestantism in 
 taking symbolically what the early Church took 
 literally, we differ in taking it all as symbolic of 
 transcendental values and not of the moral order 
 in this life. In so doing we only go more deeply 
 into the original thought and get under its en- 
 veloping imagery ; we do not go off on another 
 line that is merely analogous. We hold to the 
 transcendent Kingdom, and, while not discarding 
 the imagery, we recognise that it is an envelope 
 and not the substance. Hence we claim to be 
 true to the " idea " of original Christianity. To 
 this discrimination between substance and envelope 
 we have been forced by the advance of human 
 thought ; by the progressive delimitation between 
 the territories of subjective and objective, between 
 vision and fact. 
 
 We need have no doubt that S. Stephen saw 
 " the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing 
 at the right hand of God." We have none as to the 
 reality of such phenomena. We only ask : were 
 they determined from without or from within ; 
 did they belong to that series of regular sequences 
 which exists for all, or to that which exists for one 
 alone ? Did they reveal what we call the external 
 
 L 
 
146 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 world, or the spirit and faith of the beholder? 
 were they true to an outward or to an inward 
 reality ? 
 
 When the mechanism of thought, on the one 
 hand, and of physical nature on the other, was 
 less understood, it was inevitable that the phe- 
 nomena of the former series should be frequently 
 intercalated in the latter. To attribute our own 
 psychological nicety to the first century is an 
 anachronism. 
 
 There can be no doubt as to the appearances of 
 Jesus to His Apostles after death. Without them 
 the faith, hope and enthusiasm of the early 
 Church are inexplicable. It is plain that the 
 Apostles intercalated the phenomena into those 
 of the physical series, yet not without some sense 
 of their otherness. He appeared and vanished 
 like creatures of imagination; He passed through 
 closed doors and rose in the air. S. Paul 
 says : " Have I not seen Jesus our Lord ? " yet 
 describes that vision as existing for himself and 
 not for those round him, as belonging to the sub- 
 jective series of phenomena. His whole doctrine 
 of the spiritual body shows the same con- 
 sciousness. It is not the body that is sown 
 and destroyed, it is not the body of flesh, it is 
 a transcendental body, though figured in terms 
 of the phenomenal world. He figures it as, in 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 147 
 
 some way, growing out of the fleshly body, like 
 corn from the perishing seed — as related to it in 
 the same way that the transcendent order is re- 
 lated to the present order. And in all this he 
 was answering the question : " How do the dead 
 arise ? with what bodies do they come ? " He was 
 answering those who mistakenly supposed that 
 the resurrection phenomena had to be fitted in 
 with the physical series. He tells them, in effect, 
 that they do not belong to that series ; that they 
 proceed from an inward, not an outward, reality. 
 Yet, however subjective may be the imaginative 
 clothing of that reality, the reality itself is not 
 necessarily subjective and private. The principles 
 of truth and morality are inward, but not sub- 
 jective ; they are valid for all and not for one 
 alone. God's Spirit works in every conscience, 
 and, if our various pictures of its workings are 
 subjective, they are pictures of something within 
 us that is independent of us and is the same 
 for all. 
 
 Shall we then be very far from S. Paul's thought 
 if we say that the spiritual body is the imaginative 
 embodiment of the spirit, the expression of the 
 transcendent in terms of natural experience ; just 
 as the material or fleshly body is that which ex- 
 presses itself in the phenomena of the physical 
 sequence ? 
 
148 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Among those images that exist for the subject 
 alone we find the same difference as among those 
 that exist for all and constitute the external world. 
 There are some whose sequence and grouping 
 answer to no observed regularity and evade our 
 calculation and understanding. Thus it is with 
 nearly all external phenomena for children and 
 savages ; and, to a great extent, for ourselves also. 
 Thus, too, our dreams and a large part of our 
 waking imaginations follow no intelligible order, 
 and serve no end visible to our eyes. 
 
 And then there are other phenomena, of both 
 series, that have meaning and purpose for us. 
 Thus, between a mere dream and a vision, there 
 is all the difference that exists between the casual 
 and the purposeful. The subjective imaginings of 
 the poet and painter are unified embodiments of 
 active aesthetic needs. They are the work of the 
 spirit, selecting its materials from the psycho- 
 logical stream of incoherent images, and ordering 
 them in view of an end. The spirit is seeking its 
 spiritual body, an expression of its transcendental 
 end in terms of sensible experience. So, too, the 
 images in which the religious idea incorporates 
 itself are purposeful and not casual. They are 
 twice removed from the subjectivity of dreams; 
 first, as symbols relating to a reality; then, as 
 relating to a reality which, though inward, is in no 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 149 
 
 sense subjective, but even more objective than 
 what we call the external world. 
 
 Yet if poetic or prophetic vision be purposeful, 
 the purpose is not necessarily explicit and calcu- 
 lated. The strongest inspiration dispenses alto- 
 gether with the assistance of reason and reflection, 
 and embodies itself so spontaneously that the 
 vision seems something given and imposed, and, 
 as such, is all the more liable to be ascribed to the 
 series of outward phenomena. A Dante often 
 seems to describe what he saw, though, at other 
 times, we feel that he is constructing something 
 for us to see. And between pure spontaneity 
 and pure elaboration there are all degrees of an 
 elaboration of the spontaneous. 
 
 The resurrection of the just is an integral part 
 of the apocalyptic scheme. We cannot treat the 
 two apart ; they enjoy just the same kind of truth 
 and reality — either the same literalism or the same 
 symbolic value, be it moral or transcendent. For 
 the Liberal Protestant the resurrection is a symbol 
 of the victorious survival of the morality of Jesus 
 in the Church and the World. For the Liberal 
 Catholic it is a symbol of the survival of the 
 spiritual personality of Jesus in that transcen- 
 dental world which pervades the visible order. 
 
 Those who accept it as a merely physical event 
 in this lower plane of phenomenal reality must, 
 
ijo CHRISTIAXITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 in consistency, accept the rest of the apocalyptic 
 vision in the same sense — must accept the advent 
 in the clouds, the great assize in the valley of 
 Jehoshaphat, as they were accepted by the Apostles 
 and the early Church. What they actually saw 
 could only confirm them in their literalism — they 
 saw Jesus risen in physical form ; they saw Him 
 ascend to the physical heavens ; they saw those 
 heavens opened, like an awning, and Jesus stand- 
 ing at the right hand of the visible Father. 
 
 Now we may ask ourselves what spiritual signifi- 
 cance and value could these phenomenal happenings 
 possibly have for faith ? Apart from some truly 
 transcendental reality which they figure, and which 
 alone is the object that explains and satisfies our 
 spiritual unrest, what interest can physical pheno- 
 mena and marvels have for religion ? The physical 
 resurrection and ascension could, at most, be signs 
 and symbols of Christ's spiritual transformation, 
 of the fulness of His eternal and transcendent 
 life; they could never be its substance. Is it in 
 physical radiance and power and subtlety and 
 swiftness that our spiritual nature will find its 
 explanation and satisfaction ? Is it in the bric-a- 
 brac, rococo Heaven of the Apocalypse of S. John 
 that our souls are to find rest ? 
 
 Even, then, though the Apostles regarded the 
 resurrection phenomena as quasi-physical ; even 
 
r.vjT jiy\\<irrT7c rrs.wv cf cjrxssr 151 
 
 though they grasped the envelope and it? content 
 in the same hand ; yet the substance vr.i< given to 
 them by faith alone. What their bodily eyes 
 beheld was but a symbol of a transcendent resur- 
 rection, visible only to the eye of fa:th. The 
 inward experience, that thus expressed itself, was 
 the recognition that the Divine Personality- of 
 Jesus — the Spirit that He was — cannot die; that 
 it dwells in us all as something distinct from 
 ourselves, ever claiming oar absolute worship and 
 obedience. In His mortality He had revealed the 
 humanity and loving-kindness of that Spirit : He 
 had clothed it in visible and fleshly form; He had 
 given it a human voice- Henceforth, in the inward 
 dictates of that Spirit, they recognised the " I say 
 unto you " of the voice of Jesus of Narareth ; and 
 the mysterious i.-f.uence bore His human form 
 and features. Plainly the symbol was accommo- 
 dated to their apocalyptic ideas, to their belief 
 in a quasi-physical Kingdom cf Heaven, a cuasi- 
 physical resurrection of the ;ust. 
 
 They had no doubt that the just would rise 
 from their graves. There is no valid critical reason 
 for denying that Jesus had predicted His resur- 
 recticin as the pendent to His self-sought atoning 
 death All the trust and faith with which He had 
 inspired them bade them expect that resurrection, 
 which was to ustifv Him and His claim to be the 
 
1 52 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Son of Man. Their faith in His resurrection was 
 kindled from His own. Moreover, it was fortified 
 by the Scriptures. Even had He not appeared to 
 them at all they ought to have, and might have, 
 believed. This is the meaning of " Blessed are 
 they that have not seen and yet have believed," 
 and " O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in 
 all that the prophets have spoken." The appear- 
 ances seem to be viewed rather as a reward of faith 
 than as a proof of the resurrection ; to be a conse- 
 quence, not an antecedent, of faith, in accordance 
 with Christ's whole attitude towards miracles. 
 While they doubted they did not see Him ; their 
 eyes were held. As soon as they believed they 
 saw Him. 
 
 Have we not, then, every reason to believe that 
 what they saw was a vision, the spontaneous self- 
 embodiment, in familiar apocalyptic imagery, of 
 their faith in His spiritual triumph and resurrec- 
 tion, in the transcendental and eternal order — a 
 vision that was externalised by the very intensity 
 of their faith, that seemed something given from 
 outside ; a vision that was purposive and symbolical 
 of a reality which, though inwardly apprehended, 
 was in no sense subjective; a vision that was 
 divine, just because the faith that produced it was 
 divine ? 
 
 Of course criticism will not accept all the details 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 153 
 
 of these appearances ; but it cannot deny their 
 possibility and likelihood in relation to the men- 
 tality of the time and place ; and it must admit 
 enough to account for the birth of Christianity. 
 Moreover, we may not look for consistency of 
 detail between subjective expressions of tran- 
 scendent facts, as between accounts of the same 
 physical fact. Visions, besides, change even in the 
 first telling ; still more in the second and third. 
 But they can remain true to the inward fact they 
 symbolise. 
 
 Thus, as visions, the resurrection phenomena 
 take their proper place in the Apocalypse of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. The alternative is to give 
 physical value to the whole Apocalypse. The 
 Resurrection thus becomes a visionary present- 
 ment of the truth of spiritual immortality ; of the 
 eternity and plenary expansion of that super- 
 individual life that lies hid in the depths of our 
 being ; that strives vainly to express itself in 
 terms of our psychic and organic life ; that is the 
 root of our discontent, not only with all that the 
 world gives, but with all that it could ever con- 
 ceivably give. 
 
 In the measure that a man is himself spiritual, 
 his faith in eternal life is more irresistible. The 
 faith of the Apostles in the resurrection of Jesus 
 was the product of their own spirituality and of 
 
154 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 their estimate of the spirituality of Him who had 
 opened their spiritual eyes and ears ; of Him 
 whom it was impossible that death should hold : 
 " Thou wilt not give Thy Holy One to see cor- 
 ruption." 
 
 Christianity is then, pre-eminently, the Gospel 
 of immortality and eternal life ; not of a shadowy 
 survival in Hades ; not of a prolongation of a 
 kind of existence that could never conceivably 
 satisfy our deepest spiritual need ; but of that 
 spirit-life itself in its full self-consciousness. It 
 brought home to men, as a felt and effectual 
 reality, the notion of another life, which robbed this 
 of all value except as related to it and illuminated 
 by its nearness. It tempered and neutralised the 
 proximate pessimism of the despairing spirit with 
 an alternate optimism. It sweetened life's bitter 
 waters with the wood of the Cross. It was a 
 Gospel for the afflicted in soul and body, to whom 
 it promised no temporal alleviation, no social 
 paradise after an unending process of develop- 
 ment, but eternal rest for their souls in the bosom 
 of God. To thrust immortality into the back- 
 ground, as a dim possibility that has not much 
 to do with our Christianity; to make the reign 
 of morality on earth, in ourselves and in society, 
 the whole meaning of the Kingdom of God and 
 of eternal life, is to abandon, not religion, but the 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 155 
 
 religion of Christ ; it is to substitute a religious 
 morality for a moral religion ; to make what is 
 conditional, principal ; what is principal, subsi- 
 diary; it is to insist on what unites us to God 
 rather than on union with God, whereof morality 
 is but one of many conditions. The emphasis of 
 Christianity is on the whole life of the Spirit, 
 viewed as a divine and eternal life, to be fully 
 revealed only in its proper transcendental environ- 
 ment. 
 
 If this truth did not originate with Christ, yet it 
 was He who quickened it to active life and brought 
 it home to humanity. Of this quickening His own 
 realisation and vision of eternal life was the 
 principal cause. To this was then added that 
 realisation of it which, through the power of His 
 personality, He communicated to His Apostles, 
 issuing in their conviction as to His resurrection, 
 and in the visions that were at once the effect and 
 the confirmation of that conviction. Then, too, 
 the tidings of the nearness of the Kingdom 
 could not fail to bring a vivid realisation of 
 the truth to a generation that had lost all faith 
 in the present life ; that had no belief in the 
 panacea of progress ; that viewed the world as 
 given over to the Devil's dominion, to some iron 
 law of failure and disappointment ; that looked 
 for remedy only in an " act of God " that should 
 
IJ6 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 sweep away the old order at a stroke and bring in 
 the new. This pessimism was the richest soil in 
 which the hope of immortality could take root ; and 
 it was the concurrence of such despair of this life 
 with such faith in the next that gave Christianity 
 its initial impetus. 
 
 If, however, the attitude of the minority, who 
 live deeply and fully, towards the present order is 
 one of despair, the general mind is subject to 
 periodic waves of elation and depression. At 
 present the world that is heard and seen in public, 
 elated with the success of science and the triumphs 
 of invention, confident that what has done so 
 much will do everything, is blind to the appalling 
 residue of human misery and to the insoluble 
 problems that are coming up slowly like storm- 
 clouds on the horizon. Once more we are told 
 that life will work out the cure of its own evils 
 and change the world into Paradise; that progress 
 will now run its course uninterruptedly, and will 
 not, as ever in the past, be thrown back in spray, 
 like a wave from an opposing cliff. Such a period 
 is not one in which the Gospel of a transcen- 
 dent life will meet with enthusiastic faith. Re- 
 ligion itself is apt to come to terms with the 
 temper of the day. Immortality is thrust into 
 the background. Christian civilisation takes the 
 place of the Kingdom of God ; and morality, that 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 157 
 
 of eternal life. The Churches chatter progress, 
 and the secular and clerical arm are linked 
 together in the interests of a sanctified world- 
 liness. 
 
 (d) THE IMMEDIACY OF THE KINGDOM 
 
 For the Apostles the resurrection of Jesus was a 
 new pledge of the immediacy of the End — of the 
 day when He who had risen and ascended should 
 come in the clouds to proclaim His resurrection 
 and Christhood to the whole world, and bring 
 human history to an end. And it was this sense 
 of immediacy, more than anything else, that 
 changed the belief in eternal life from mere assent 
 to an effectual motive, productive of a new senti- 
 ment and a new manner of living. 
 
 That the world passes away for each and for all 
 — not only for man but for all humanity — is the 
 motive for that Christian detachment which sets 
 its affections on things above and not on things of 
 earth. As a truth of reason and experience we do 
 not doubt it. But only in rare moments, when 
 we realise it, does it exercise its due influence on 
 our affections and conduct, and show us life's true 
 values and its illusions in a flash of light. Many 
 a change in our character dates from such moments 
 and is sustained by their repetition. Apart from 
 
158 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 them, we are tangled in dreams and throw our 
 whole interest into them ; and, if there be no tran- 
 scendent life, we do well, for we are then but 
 dreams ourselves. If we look to a waking ; if we 
 take our dreams with a question and a reserve, we 
 shall spoil the little that we have. Let us rather 
 try to believe that our race is eternal, and that its 
 final beatitude on earth is the justification of all 
 our moral endeavour — that conscience is no more 
 than the specific instinct which compels us to work 
 for the survival of the species Homo sapiens. 
 
 It was, then, the conviction that the Kingdom 
 was at hand, even at the very door, that the har- 
 vest was ripe, the first-fruits already gathered in, 
 that brought the multitude of believers face to face 
 with the illusions of time and the realities of 
 eternity, and transformed their whole outlook and 
 sentiment. 
 
 And was it all no more than a providential 
 mistake, to which Christianity owes the impulse 
 that still carries it along ? 
 
 Yes, so far as this temporal nearness of the 
 visible " parousia " was confounded with the spiri- 
 tual reality of which it was the symbol ; so far as 
 the apocalyptic vision was referred to the series of 
 outward phenomena. But such visions are the 
 creations of an inward reality that faith seizes 
 through them. " All truth," says Isaac Pennington, 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 159 
 
 " is a shadow except the last — except the utmost ; 
 yet every truth is true in its kind. It is substance 
 in its own place, though it be but a shadow in 
 another place — for it is but a shadow from an 
 intenser substance — and the shadow is a true 
 shadow, as the substance is a true substance." 
 This we might well say of the successive efforts of 
 religion to picture the transcendent. Each pre- 
 sentment is more substantial than its predecessor, 
 but the last alone is substance, and this, man can 
 never picture while he lives and thinks among 
 shadows. 
 
 It is by dimness that the painter gives the im- 
 pression of distance ; what is clear seems near. 
 The clearness of the prophet's insight, the keen- 
 ness of his desire, make him feel that his ideals and 
 visions are on the point of realisation. What he 
 thus translates from spiritual into external values 
 is his own nearness to the transcendent in the state 
 of exaltation and inward tension. He feels 
 Heaven pressing upon him. He gathers up time 
 into the present Now of eternity. Hence the eye 
 of his reason is magnetised by his interest. He 
 can only see the signs of the end ; earthquakes, 
 wars, pestilences, social confusion and chaos — and 
 when are they not to be seen in a world like this ? 
 while he is blind to everything else — to the 
 forces of life that are ever in conflict with those of 
 
160 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 death. But the truth that he struggles with is the 
 brevity, the comparative nothingness of human 
 duration ; the need to live as though death were 
 knocking at the door. A clear intuition of the 
 magnitude of the eternal and transcendent trans- 
 lates itself imaginatively into an unending tract of 
 centuries, contrasted with one dying day ; and 
 practically into a certain detachment of the soul 
 from things transitory. 
 
 Now this practical expression is subject to 
 illusions, like to, and in part dependent on, those 
 of the imaginative expression ; and these illusions 
 are answerable for a not unfounded prejudice 
 against transcendental, other-worldly religion of 
 every kind. 
 
 The conviction of the nearness of death will 
 affect men differently. The purely unspiritual 
 man may either be reduced to a state of sullen 
 apathy, or, as has been observed in times of pesti- 
 lence, driven to snatch the last crumbs of pleasure 
 and excitement that life has to offer. The man of 
 principle, whose religion is simply implicit and 
 who looks to no life hereafter, will fulfil his duties 
 perhaps more punctiliously than ever, with the 
 exception of that of providing for his future years. 
 Should the conviction prove mistaken his temporal 
 career may suffer to some extent, but, on the 
 other hand, the experience may have been a source 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 161 
 
 of moral insight and strength well worth the tem- 
 poral loss. If, however, he believes in and realises 
 the life to come, there is always some danger lest 
 his contempt of the world lead him to think too 
 lightly of its duties. And this danger besets him 
 in a lesser degree at all times. Whence a certain 
 de facto contrast between the moral and the reli- 
 gious temperament. Neither scepticism nor faith 
 takes the world seriously enough. 
 
 Now it cannot be taken too seriously if the 
 seriousness be grounded on truth. But it is pos- 
 sible that a good deal of moral seriousness rests on 
 illusion, just as does the immoral seriousness of the 
 frivolous. It rests on the tacit assumption that 
 this life is everything and an end in itself — a 
 coherent self-explanatory whole ; that it is work- 
 ing by a process of necessary development towards 
 a perfect harmony ; that the human race is eternal, 
 and absolutely significant apart from the transcen- 
 dent. This is, no doubt, a useful and fertile illusion 
 and has produced genuine moral fruit in abun- 
 dance. The moral, like the religious, sense must 
 have some Weltanschauung, some imaginative 
 scheme of things, if its energies are to have 
 definite direction. And, plainly, we should live 
 to some extent as though this illusion were truth. 
 In the conflict between life and death, progress 
 and decay, our energies should be wholly on the 
 
 M 
 
162 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 side of life. Not, however, because we believe that 
 life in this order can ever be finally victorious over 
 almighty death and oblivion, or that our noblest 
 efforts are not doomed to eventual defeat, and to 
 utter sterility for remoter epochs ; but only because 
 every moral effort has a transcendent and absolute 
 value apart from its success or failure, and one 
 that the certainty of eventual failure enhances 
 rather than diminishes. A moral act faces in- 
 wards and outwards ; it belongs to the transcen- 
 dent world and to the visible ; it has a soul and a 
 body ; an imperishable and a perishable value. 
 So far as it is the latter that moves and stimulates 
 us to exertion, it is an illusory motive. Its effect 
 is to attach us to the transitory ; to immerse us 
 wholly in progress ; to make earth our heaven, 
 and humanity our God. The inward spring of all 
 this heroism and effort is, no doubt, spiritual and 
 transcendent; but it is not thus interpreted and felt. 
 The eye is fixed on a dream of progress brought 
 to perfection at the end of some final century. 
 Hence a curious leadenness and solemnity, that 
 often spoils moralism of this description ; especially 
 when it goes hand in hand with a deterministic 
 view of the world, a rigid exclusion of every sort 
 of contingency. 
 
 Against this sort of seriousness the sceptic rises 
 in revolt. He cannot contemplate the withering 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 163 
 
 immensities of stellar time and space ; he cannot 
 read the ominous testimony of the rocks ; he can- 
 not study the records of dead religions and civilisa- 
 tions ; he cannot ponder the chaotic conditions of 
 the present, and yet take the dream of triumphant 
 progress seriously, or see more than the struggles 
 of a drowning crew, trying to keep afloat as long 
 as possible, before yielding themselves to the deep 
 of oblivion. At most, morality may be the best 
 way to keep afloat. If the sceptical view be hope- 
 less, in default of faith, at least it preserves a 
 sense of proportion, and holds an element of truth. 
 If it favour a far lower worldliness than that of 
 the moralist, it is relieved by a certain contempt of 
 the world it embraces. It can better afford to 
 look at life with both eyes and pronounce it very 
 bad and not likely to be better. It has not to 
 imagine a harmony where there is nothing but 
 discord ; or to look for a single aim, uniting a 
 chaos of conflicting and independent ends. 
 
 And this modern and Western scepticism is only 
 a return to the grey wisdom of the world-weary 
 East. Five centuries before Christ it had learnt 
 that the world's miseries were incurable, that its 
 blessings were illusions, that its process was no 
 progress, that the best cure was to die to it with- 
 out fear of any resurrection. Immortality — the 
 endless prolongation of this experience — is the 
 
164 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Buddhist's hell. Of any better experience he has 
 no explicit hope, though it is impossible not to 
 interpret his Nirvana as an attempt to express 
 the transcendental life by way of negation — and, so 
 far, rightly. Unlike ours, his morality and asceti- 
 cism are inspired by the conviction that life is evil 
 and not good. He seeks not to live more fully, 
 but to die more fully ; not to keep afloat, but to 
 sink once and for all to the very bottom. His 
 terror is lest, through his senses, he should 
 become attached to the torture -wheel of life. 
 He dare not die with a single attachment that 
 would draw him back to earth again and be a seed 
 of resurrection in his soul. Small wonder that the 
 passive Buddha sits gazing with quiet amazement 
 at our ant-like turmoil and activity, our hopes, our 
 dreams, our moral strugglings with the impossible, 
 our terrible seriousness about shadows : " Are ye 
 still without understanding ? " 
 
 If Buddhism be not explicitly a religion — for 
 its very gods and heavens belong to the world of 
 illusions and are still under the curse of existence 
 — its scorn of the world implies something in 
 man that the world can never satisfy; a hunger 
 that can find no food ; an ideal of truth and 
 reality that revolts against illusion. Reason has 
 brought it to the edge of a chasm that faith fears 
 to leap. Hence its pessimism is final and not 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 165 
 
 merely provisional. It can find no justification for 
 the effort of progress ; nothing but condemnation. 
 It is the Christian faith in spiritual immortality 
 that changes this ultimately into a provisional 
 pessimism, and balances an absolute detachment 
 from the interests of the world by a provisional 
 attachment to them. A provisional pessimism is 
 the foundation of the Christian type of religious 
 character. It is the soil in which the seed of the 
 Gospel takes root and flourishes. Despair of 
 this life is the counterfoil of our hope in another. 
 It was no Buddhist, but the profoundly Christian 
 Michael Angelo, who wrote — 
 
 Fain would I sleep ; fainer be dead as stone, 
 While Wrong and Shame on every side abound ; 
 Stark, sightless, senseless ! God, what a boon ! 
 Then wake, oh wake me not. Hush ! Not a sound ! 
 
 And the same note is struck by every great Catho- 
 lic saint or hero whose pessimism, like that of the 
 stern sculptor, reveals itself, not so much in con- 
 temptuous aversion from the world, as in a vigorous 
 losing fight against the overwhelming forces of 
 evil. In deference to the optimistic Gospel of 
 progress, Christians are disposed in these days to 
 modulate or silence this strident note of pessimism ; 
 to feel it as something excessive and mistaken, 
 excusable in disorderly and catastrophic periods. 
 But it is vain to deny that this note is as true to 
 
1 66 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 the Gospel of Christ as a cheerful belief in the 
 world is discordant from it. For Christ the world 
 was as good as finished and its final state was one 
 of universal failure and illusion, not one of a 
 proximate perfection that was all but Paradise. 
 Well for the poor, the afflicted, the oppressed, 
 who had lost all hope in it! Woe to the easy, 
 the prosperous, the optimistic, who believed in it 
 because they had themselves found it a soft place! 
 From these the truth about it had been hidden ; 
 to those it had been revealed. The sharp dis- 
 cipline of bitter experience had taught the ignorant 
 multitudes what the deepest philosophy learns only 
 after much thought and labour. Hence it was the 
 poor who were ready for the Gospel of another 
 life — not for the Gospel of social development. 
 
 It is equally clear that the joy and hope of the 
 early community rested on a basis of pessimism 
 as to this world and its prospects. It was just 
 tottering to its ruin, and, in the hope of a near 
 eternity, its light and momentary tribulations were 
 borne cheerfully and gladly; its gravest events 
 and concerns were not taken seriously, nor as 
 laden with all that importance attached to them 
 by the moralist, whose faith is in life, whose hope 
 is in development. In this sort of lightness of 
 touch, which may easily be excessive, the Christian 
 had something of the sceptic's unseriousness. It 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 167 
 
 enters as an ingredient into that sort of charity 
 which seems too easy-going in the eyes of the 
 Pharisaical rigorist — bearing, believing, hoping, 
 enduring, all things ; into that improvidence about 
 temporal concerns, that indifference to injuries, 
 that contempt of good or ill report, that Jesus 
 commended both by word and example. What 
 else could result from a conviction of the badness 
 of the present life, combined with a vivid faith in 
 the nearness of a better ? Men will take a ghost 
 seriously only till they find it is but a shadow. 
 
 Yet this emphasis on the other world, however 
 necessary as a corrective, needed to be checked 
 and balanced by a just estimate of the meaning 
 and value of time in relation to eternity. He 
 who said "Blessed are the poor, the hungry, the 
 suffering," spent His life in relieving their needs ; 
 He who said "The night cometh," gave it as a 
 motive for working while it was yet day ; He who 
 said " The Kingdom is at hand," was urging men 
 to repentance and righteousness. At the Judg- 
 ment the reward is not for those who have success- 
 fully turned earth into paradise and accomplished 
 the impossible, but for those who have striven to 
 alleviate its miseries; who have fought a despair- 
 ing battle against the overwhelming forces of evil. 
 It is not so much the actively evil, as the slack 
 and apathetic, that are excluded from the King- 
 
168 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 dom. Life, therefore,, gains a new importance as 
 the arena of the great " temptation " — of the con- 
 flict between the forces of Darkness and Light, 
 Death and Life, Earth and Heaven ; a conflict 
 where Satan must first be victorious in the present 
 order before God shall arise to scatter His enemies 
 and establish His Kingdom. It is not so much 
 by their efforts, as by their consequent failures and 
 sufferings, that the saints are to hasten God's final 
 intervention. In a way they are indifferent to 
 success or failure, so long as they have striven 
 with all their might. In that striving their spiritual 
 personality is created and deepened ; their union 
 with God strengthened ; their place in the tran- 
 scendent order determined. 
 
 Far, then, from relaxing moral effort for the 
 alleviation of earth's misery, the Christian faith, 
 rightly apprehended, intensifies and purifies it. 
 Those who fight only for victory grow slack when 
 victory is hopeless. Those who fight for hate or 
 for love will fight till they drop. Such has been 
 the desperate energy with which typical Chris- 
 tian saints have combated life's evils, moral and 
 physical — the energy of those who are masters 
 and not slaves of their purpose ; whose provisional 
 attachment to life's interests is subordinate to an 
 ultimate detachment ; who use the world as not 
 using it ; who strain for success and smile when 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 169 
 
 they fail. Like Christ they serve ; like Him they 
 are lords and masters of what they serve. They 
 are not immersed in the clay which they are 
 moulding but stand well outside it and above it. 
 
 But this faith has not always been rightly 
 apprehended. In the early Church, if the tem- 
 poral nearness of the End was a stimulus to the 
 wise, it was, to the foolish, a plea for apathy and 
 idleness — to those, namely, who looked on success 
 and victory as the sole justification of labour and 
 conflict, and who would waste no care on a 
 vanishing world. Even the wise, so far as 
 they grasped the symbol and the truth in 
 the same act of faith, and confounded the tem- 
 poral with the transcendental and absolute near- 
 ness of the Kingdom, justifiably neglected provision 
 for a future that would never come. They did not 
 occupy themselves in far-reaching social and 
 ecclesiastical schemes, with a view to cutting the 
 roots of evils to come in later centuries. Suffi- 
 cient for the day was the evil thereof. The chance 
 of a morrow was slight. And even when the 
 thought of temporal immediacy had lost its influ- 
 ence, through delays and disappointments, the 
 realisation of an eternity, near for the individual, 
 was too often misapplied to the prejudice of 
 energy, and the approach of night taken as a 
 reason for wasting the last hours of the day. 
 
170 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 But this sort of abuse and misapprehension is 
 heartily condemned, not only by Christ Himself, 
 but by the saints of all ages, who have been 
 characterised by a burning activity and zeal in 
 well-doing. To the pure moralist, engrossed in 
 conduct and progress, a good deal of their activity 
 may seem misplaced. But in spite of many orien- 
 talisms and ascetical fallacies in its application, 
 the principle of Christian action makes for the 
 fullest expansion of man's transcendental and 
 spiritual nature in every direction. It recognises 
 the Divine, not only in conduct and in relation to 
 man's moral progress, but also in thought and in 
 feeling; it lives for the aesthetic and intellectual 
 as well as for the ethical " ought " and ideal. It 
 is the foe of falsehood and ugliness as well as of 
 wickedness ; it sees in all of them the principle of 
 evil, death and decay. It turns in despair from 
 this world to the transcendent in search of the 
 synthesis, not only of duty and happiness, but of 
 truth and loveliness, and of goodness with both. 
 It is through religion that it unites these interests 
 and finds courage to struggle for their harmony, 
 though it can only succeed in diminishing their 
 discord. 
 
 The truth, then, that Christianity symbolises, 
 under the temporal nearness of the End, is a fun- 
 damental principle of the best spiritual life — the 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 171 
 
 principle of an attachment to the world's highest 
 interest, at once strengthened and subdued by an 
 attachment to an eternal and transcendent life, 
 symbolised by the Kingdom of Heaven. The 
 abuse of this truth, to the prejudice not only of 
 the rights of this life but of the proper develop- 
 ment of spiritual personality, is answerable for a 
 complete inversion of view as to the relation of 
 religion to the world. So far as religious ethic 
 identifies our duties in life with the Will of God, it 
 asserts a neglected principle of Christianity. But 
 so far as it identifies the moral with the religious 
 life and the Kingdom of Heaven with the ideal 
 term of an endless social and moral process, it is 
 a flat contradiction of the Gospel of Christ. Far 
 from freeing us, it ties us hand and foot with the 
 iron bands of duty, to that which sooner or later 
 must follow the law of mortality. Humanity is 
 as mortal as any son of Adam. Be it a hell or a 
 Paradise, the world shall pass away like a dream 
 or a cloud, or the track of a ship in the waters. 
 
 (e) THE SON OF MAN 
 
 The Kingdom of Heaven ; His own Christ- 
 hood ; the temporal immediacy of the End, were 
 the three organic constituents of the Apocalypse 
 of Jesus. Of these the last was in some sense 
 
172 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 principal in point of motive power and inspiration, 
 though His Messianic secret was undoubtedly 
 the central and solely original factor. The first 
 belonged to the apocalyptic tradition ; the last, 
 to the preaching of the Baptist. 
 
 Now this view of the immediacy of the King- 
 dom cannot be accepted as of literal and phe- 
 nomenal value, but as a vision symbolic of a 
 transcendental reality that does not admit of 
 literal expression ; and we must accord the same 
 kind of truth and reality to the organic whole 
 as to each of its parts. We know, experimentally, 
 that, in the year 30, the End was not nearer in 
 time than was the first advent in the year 1879 
 B.C. If "near" stood for 1879 years, it was not 
 used in its literal sense. And though it does 
 not admit of the same sort of experimental 
 evidence, we are equally clear that the apocalyptic 
 delineation of the Kingdom of Heaven is but a 
 symbol and vision of the transcendent. We 
 cannot possibly stop short and suppose that the 
 image of the Son of Man belongs to the order 
 of literal and phenomenal values, any more than 
 does the Great Dragon or the other mysterious 
 beings that figure in the same vision. 
 
 It is well to reflect that the same must be said 
 of "the Heavenly Father" and of all our ideas 
 and images of God which do not, like our ideas 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 173 
 
 of things within experience, correspond to some- 
 thing within that order of experience. They 
 are to all intents and purposes " visions " of that 
 transcendent reality which alone answers to our 
 spiritual needs and instincts. If truth be the 
 correct anticipation of a possible experience, it 
 is our spiritual needs that are true to God, not 
 the ideas and images in which we try to explain 
 those needs in terms of present experience, and 
 by a heaping together of incompatibles. Yet if 
 the anticipation of phenomenal experiences, im- 
 plied by a literal acceptance of these images, be 
 incorrect; if, so taken, they are illusory; they 
 have none the less a certain practical truth, in 
 that they enable us to anticipate and control 
 spiritual experiences and to adjust our conduct 
 to the transcendent world. They are not arbitrary 
 but natural symbols ; as effects are symbols of 
 their causes and parts of their wholes. However 
 assisted or impeded by art and reflection, it is 
 the transcendent that shapes its own symbol and 
 image in the human mind. Spontaneously every 
 spiritual need and movement pictures its own 
 object and cause in the terms of imagination. 
 Were they arbitrary signs like x and y, one would 
 be as good as another. But the Father of Jesus 
 is a far richer and truer symbol of God than the 
 War-God of early Israel. It is the result of 
 
174 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 progressive self-revelation on the part of the 
 transcendent. As the spirit grows in man his 
 symbolism grows truer and more spiritual. "Truer," 
 because it gives a fuller anticipation and control 
 of spiritual experience. But truer also because, 
 though unlike in kind, it is, in another kind, more 
 analogous to God — as a symphony might resemble 
 a picture either more or less. 
 
 So with the hypotheses of physical science, 
 which are fictions founded in fact. Not one 
 of them is absolutely true as resting on a com- 
 plete comprehension of the whole universe. But 
 one is truer than another as yielding a wider 
 anticipation and control of experience ; and that 
 it does so means that it is, in some greater degree, 
 like nature — not merely analogous, since the 
 fiction and fact are in the same order. Aided 
 by art and reflection, they are suggested, criticised 
 and improved by experience. They are self- 
 revelations of physical nature ; to which science 
 is related as is theology to Divine revelation. 
 
 It is not merely that in acting as if God were 
 our father we shall gain certain beneficial results, 
 but that God has revealed Himself to us under 
 this figure, whose analogous truth is the explana- 
 tion of those results. Nature is not actually a 
 machine nor an organism, but, were she not so 
 inclusively or equivalently, those fictions could 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 175 
 
 not yield such fruitful results. They must at least 
 be founded in fact. And so with all our symbols 
 of the Divine, as far as they are spiritually fruitful. 
 
 Moreover, as regards the transcendental, we are 
 not as blind men trying to build up the colour- 
 world in terms of music. We have a dim sense 
 of light and darkness whose purpose we do not 
 rightly understand, whose potentialities we cannot 
 imagine. In our spiritual life we have the rudi- 
 ments of a transcendent experience. We know 
 at least the sort of stuff that Heaven is built 
 out of, as music is built out of sound. We can 
 say : As a symphony is to a sound, so is the 
 unknown world of colour to this dim sensation 
 of light. We can say : As nature is to a clod, 
 so is the spiritual world to our own spirit. We 
 have three terms for our analogy. Else religion 
 would have no raison d'etre. We do not need, 
 we cannot desire, to adjust ourselves to the 
 absolutely diverse — to what cannot affect us in 
 any way. If there be not a Divine element in 
 us, the Divine does not concern us. 
 
 For those that reflect, it is no doubt advisable 
 that they should recognise the symbolic character 
 of their conceptions and images of the Divine, 
 lest, finding them discordant with the natural 
 understanding, they should reject them as void 
 of all value. But the vast majority take the 
 
176 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 symbol and reality indistinctly as one thing, with- 
 out any prejudice to their spiritual life. Even 
 fairly educated believers accept, not only their 
 symbol of God, but nearly all the apocalyptic 
 imagery of the Christian faith, as so much literal 
 fact. It is so indistinguishably associated with 
 their religious life and experience, that they cling 
 to it with the same faith, and put it on the same 
 plane of reality. For them it is revealed pheno- 
 menal fact. Only here and there, where the 
 imagery has come into patent conflict with know- 
 ledge, is it discarded — along with the transcendent 
 truth it symbolises. People who no longer believe 
 in devils go on believing in angels ; they deny 
 Hell but they accept Heaven. The literal accept- 
 ance of the former offends their rational or ethical 
 sense. They are sure about God ; but not so 
 sure about the Trinity. This transitional state 
 between consistent literalism and consistent sym- 
 bolism is distressing and dangerous. What retards 
 the process of liberation is just the fear of losing 
 the experience and guidance so long associated 
 with simple literalism. But only when the libera- 
 tion is completed will it be possible to go back 
 with safety and profit to the integrity of the 
 Christian revelation, and realise its truth as a 
 guide to spiritual experience and a vehicle of 
 transcendental meanings. 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 177 
 
 Refine and purify our conception how we will, 
 we think of even our own spiritual self under 
 the analogy of an individual bodily thing, a plexus 
 of sensible phenomena. Strive how we will, we 
 think of God in terms of our own spirit so con- 
 ceived. And we think of the relation between 
 them under the analogy of some relation that 
 obtains in the world of space alone. Identity or 
 diversity are but figures and visions as applied 
 to the transcendent. Their truth or falsehood is 
 practical. We must act and feel, in some respects, 
 as if there were an identity ; in others, as if there 
 were a diversity. Till we see what corresponds 
 to our symbols, we have no idea of what answers 
 to the relation of those symbols to one another. 
 
 And so when we come to the relation between 
 Jesus and the Son of Man ; between the Son of 
 Man and God. Of these three terms, two are 
 symbols of the transcendent. 
 
 The necessity of finding in Jesus a German 
 Liberal Protestant, guided entirely by the light of 
 a sweet, nineteenth-century reasonableness, requires 
 us to ignore everything in the Gospel that suggests 
 the visionary or the ecstatic, even though to do so 
 make the narrative incoherent and unintelligible. 
 When He called Himself the Son of Man, we are 
 told it was because He felt Himself so entirely 
 human — the Man par excellence. When He called 
 
178 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Himself the Son of God, it was because all men 
 were sons of the common Father ; and the Man 
 par excellence was, therefore, the Son of God par 
 excellence. A more drastic and objective criticism 
 has shattered the beautiful simplicity of this tidy 
 little system, obtained by a liberal use of the 
 pruning-hook. 
 
 We do not need the Johannine and Pauline 
 writings, we need only to read the Synoptics in 
 the light of contemporary apocalyptic conceptions, 
 to learn that Jesus considered Himself as of a 
 superhuman nature, and as differing in kind from 
 other men. It was a secret He eventually shared 
 with His Apostles ; it was the secret of His ascend- 
 ency over them ; it was a faith with which He 
 inspired them. If the least in the Kingdom was 
 above the greatest born of women, above the chief 
 of prophets and saints and martyrs, He Who knew 
 Himself to be the greatest in the Kingdom could 
 hardly regard Himself as a mere prophet — a man 
 among men. 
 
 The " Son of Man " was a heavenly being, 
 mediatorial between God and man. He was the 
 Power of God, by which Satan's power was to be 
 broken and the Kingdom of Heaven to be estab- 
 lished on earth. To Him all judgment was 
 committed by nature. Like the Spirit of God, 
 He was conceived vaguely, and, without prejudice 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 179 
 
 to the Divine unity, as an emanation from God ; 
 the Arm of the Lord. What trouble later 
 theology had with these emanations is testified by 
 the Athanasian Creed — which attempts to satisfy 
 reason while preserving the apocalyptic vision in 
 its integrity, and which presents no difficulty 
 when we remember that our rational concepts of 
 the Divine are not less symbolic than our imagin- 
 ative visions. 
 
 Jesus believed that He was destined to be re- 
 vealed to all the world in the clouds of heaven, as 
 the Son of Man. Probably, if not certainly, He 
 understood this destination as more than moral 
 or decretorial, as an inherent potentiality of His 
 spirit. Already He spoke and acted as God's 
 plenipotentiary. He forgave sins, because He 
 knew Himself to be the " Son of Man " to whom 
 all judgment had been committed ; He judged the 
 sacred Law ; He called men to Himself; He bade 
 them imitate Him ; all this points to a sense of 
 present, and not merely of prospective, super- 
 human dignity. Not till He was glorified, how- 
 ever, would He be technically the Christ and 
 assume the full functions of the Son of Man. 
 
 Now it is idle to contend that this was some- 
 thing secondary in the self-consciousness of Jesus ; 
 a little touch of the megalomania so frequently 
 attendant on genius and on the realisation of 
 
180 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 unusual influence and power ; a fiery tongue of 
 fanaticism, shooting up from the pure flame 
 of faith. He does not begin as an ethical teacher 
 or a prophet, and then warm up to new and as- 
 tounding pretensions. His attitude is the same 
 throughout, and is just such as consists with the 
 secret consciousness of His Messianic dignity. 
 That consciousness is the cause, and not the effect, 
 of His soul-compelling power. His belief in Him- 
 self makes others believe in Him. The saint, 
 the prophet, is ever self-obliterating. His strength 
 is God's, not his own. He draws men to God, not 
 to himself. He says " Thus saith the Lord," and 
 not " But I say unto you." He claims to be only 
 the servant of all, not also their Lord and Master. 
 If Jesus believed Himself but man, He was no 
 saint. But He felt He was more. And even 
 those who did not share His Messianic secret felt 
 and yielded to the authority with which He spoke. 
 They asked themselves : " What manner of man 
 is this ? " What won their love and affection was 
 the lowliness and gentleness of one whom they 
 felt, through an irrepressible emanation of His 
 own self-consciousness, to be mysteriously great 
 and strong and holy. 
 
 We must recognise, then, that Jesus was con- 
 scious of Himself as in some way mediatorial be- 
 tween the transcendent world and the souls of 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 181 
 
 men ; that He felt, not merely His own union 
 with God, but the power of uniting other souls to 
 Himself, and, through Himself, with God ; that 
 this mission was imposed on Him from above ; 
 that He was set as a magnet for souls, which, 
 magnetised through Him, should draw and magne- 
 tise others, till the whole of redeemable humanity, 
 in Him, with Him, through Him, should be drawn 
 back to God. This was the nature of His spiritual 
 exigency, the bread for which He hungered — to 
 accomplish the great atonement ; to overthrow sin 
 and Satan ; to establish the Kingdom of Heaven ; 
 to banish the night of time ; to bring in the day 
 of eternity. No doubt this desire to redeem, this 
 power to draw and to magnetise, belong to the 
 spiritual nature as such, and to every man in the 
 measure that his spiritual life has become explicit. 
 Its source is the Divine nature itself. But no 
 ordinary man, however possessed by the Divine 
 Spirit, could feel himself to be the sole redeemer, 
 mediator and source of redemption and mediation, 
 in no need himself of redemption and atone- 
 ment. Of this inward experience of Jesus, in 
 which He felt Himself identified immediately with 
 the Divine Source of Redemption, we can say 
 nothing. We may rest satisfied that, when He 
 claimed to be one with the Father, it was in no 
 merely moral sense of accordant wills ; but had 
 
182 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 reference to some mystical experience, some in- 
 tuition of sameness in otherness. 
 
 Every such spiritual experience tends to trans- 
 late itself into symbolic ideas and images, and, 
 where strong and intense, to invest these images 
 with the objectivity ascribed to dreams and visions. 
 And the nature of the vision, as is proved by a 
 thousand examples, depends on the religious ideas 
 and images already to hand. These make the 
 religious language of the seer ; the words in which 
 he must embody his experience for himself and for 
 others. The current religious language in which 
 Jesus thought and spoke was that of the prophets 
 and apocalypses. The Kingdom of Heaven ; the 
 Son of Man, the Messiah ; the Kingdom of Satan ; 
 the final catastrophe — these were the categories, 
 under which His spiritual experience had to be 
 ranged. Hence His sense of universal and supreme 
 mediatorship between God and Man, of identifica- 
 tion by love and sympathy with each of the terms 
 to be united, could find no apter symbol than that 
 of the prophetic Son of David, united to and 
 " possessed " by the Heavenly Son of Man, or Son 
 of God. 
 
 To transfer to the transcendental order the 
 relations that obtain between the imaginative 
 symbols of spiritual experience, is the same sort of 
 fallacy that projects our scientific hypotheses into 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 183 
 
 the physical world ; or gives a real existence to 
 our abstractions and general ideas. All we can 
 say of such fictions is that they are founded in 
 fact and reality. But where that reality is tran- 
 scendent and spiritual, our fictions have only the 
 truth of analogy — of parallels in another order of 
 reality. Hence all our theology of the Incarnation 
 deals, not with transcendent realities, but with the 
 visions or revelations in which they are symbolised. 
 Its purpose is to preserve the original force and 
 usefulness of that symbolism ; to secure its correct 
 rendering for other ages and peoples ; to make it 
 coherent with itself and with the equally symbolic 
 ideas of rational theology. We simply do not 
 know what our own spirit is, or what the tran- 
 scendent world is to which it aspires, or its relation 
 to that world and to other spirits. What we 
 do know is the impress they leave on a mind 
 adapted to the world of physical phenomena. 
 
 The value of all these symbols and hypotheses 
 is in the extent to which they anticipate and 
 control that order of experiences on which they 
 are founded ; and every new success deepens that 
 foundation and strengthens our faith. The faith 
 in His own Christhood that Jesus, by the power of 
 His personality, was able to plant in His Apostles, 
 has been continually reinforced by the experience 
 of those who have found Him, in effect, their 
 
184 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Redeemer, the Lord and Master of their souls, 
 their Hope, their Love, their Rest — in short, all 
 that they mean by God. For them He has be- 
 come the effectual symbol or sacrament of the 
 transcendent, through which they can apprehend 
 the inapprehensible — the Eternal Spirit in human 
 form. 
 
 The Messiahship of Jesus is, then, the symbolic 
 expression, in terms of apocalyptic imagery, of 
 certain transcendent realities — of the spiritual ex- 
 perience of Jesus as to His own relation to God 
 and to men ; and of the experiences of Christians 
 as to their own relations to God and to Jesus. It 
 is a visionary presentment of a transcendental 
 truth, which we can present to ourselves in no 
 other way ; which we see per speculum et in csnig- 
 mate, but not facie adfaciem. 
 
 Theology is right in trying to make our symbol- 
 ism coherent with itself and to preserve it from 
 corruption. But when it strives to make it coherent 
 with rational knowledge and outward experience, 
 it forgets its symbolic character, and tends to per- 
 vert either revelation or knowledge, or both, in 
 the interests of an impossible synthesis. In the 
 orthodox and metaphysical formula of the God- 
 head of Christ we find, at most, a negative intel- 
 lectual value combined with a positive pragmatic 
 value. According to the latter, we are to bear 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 185 
 
 ourselves towards Christ as towards a person pos- 
 sessed at once of a perfect human and a perfect 
 Divine nature. According to the former, we are 
 not to think of Him as two persons in only moral 
 agreement ; nor as a human person with extra- 
 ordinary supernatural endowments; nor as a Divine 
 person under the illusory appearances of humanity; 
 nor as the Divinity substituted for a human soul 
 in a human body. In short, the formula excludes 
 every previous attempt to find a positive concep- 
 tion of the relationship of human and Divine in 
 Jesus and to justify, intellectually, the Christian 
 sentiment and attitude in regard to Him. There 
 is little doubt but that those previous formulas, 
 with all their incoherency and inadequacy, were 
 attempts to justify Christian experience and feel- 
 ing. It is plain that the disciples felt the strange 
 and superhuman in Jesus as well as the human ; 
 that they feared as well as loved ; that they found 
 Him irresistible in His authority and power over 
 their souls ; that they reverenced Him as an in- 
 carnation of conscience, as a source of conversion 
 and spiritual strength ; that He possessed and 
 governed them as a lover is possessed by the 
 beloved. 
 
 It was some experience of this sort that the 
 early Church strove to understand and explain. 
 But the finally accepted formula is rather a state- 
 
i86 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 ment of the problem than a solution. It insists 
 on factors that the earlier formulas had neglected, 
 and shows their insufficiency. But its solution, by 
 way of a distinction between Nature and an un- 
 known something called Personality, to which we 
 can give no more positive content than to an 
 algebraic x, simply leaves the metaphysical prob- 
 lem open and forbids further useless discussion. 
 It prescribes a way of speaking and a way of acting 
 in accordance with traditional sentiment and 
 practice. 
 
 It is, however, possible to get some more positive 
 idea of the "Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus" 
 from the psychological side. The metaphysical 
 categories of ousia and hypostasis were far from the 
 Jewish mind. The psychological category of "pos- 
 session" was familiar, and has, in our own days, re- 
 ceived a coherent interpretation. The prophet was, 
 for the time being, " possessed " by the Holy Spirit ; 
 the demoniac by the Evil Spirit. For the moment his 
 psychological personality was submerged, and its 
 place taken by a foreign personality, that governed 
 his speech and action, and used his organism for its 
 own purposes. We have come to understand the ex- 
 perience thus interpreted and to bring it under law. 
 Normally we are solicited, prior to every free action, 
 by various inclinations, motives and passions, and, 
 amongst them, by the moral or religious motive, that 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 187 
 
 is, by the voice of conscience. At this stage they are, 
 as it were, outside us — objects of possible volition. 
 They inhibit one another's actuation by their in- 
 compatibility. To choose one of the proposed 
 actions means to allow it to absorb the central and 
 greater part of the field of consciousness ; to push 
 its competitors to or over the margin of conscious- 
 ness; to throw away our liberty as regards this 
 particular attraction or impulse and yield ourselves 
 to its force. In short, we allow it to possess us and 
 actuate itself through us. Yet, in so doing, we are 
 free ; we have not been captured but have yielded 
 ourselves ; we can undo what we have done and 
 release ourselves from the force that, for the 
 moment, is incarnate in us. It is but a moment 
 in the history of our personality, colouring and 
 coloured by all that has gone before and that is 
 still confusedly present in the background. 
 
 But there are abnormal states, where we are 
 carried away by the violence and vividness of some 
 strong desire or passion, to the utter exclusion of 
 every other consideration, and to the complete 
 obliteration of our whole past. We forget who we 
 are and where we are ; we are reckless, if not mad, 
 for the moment ; we are literally possessed, and 
 beside ourselves, with anger, or fear, or enthusiasm, 
 and become incarnations of those passions. The 
 psychological " I," that speaks and acts, is not the 
 
1 88 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 " I " that was, but is personified anger or fear. 
 Thus the fanatic is one who is carried by his fiery 
 zeal to a contempt and oblivion of every rational 
 and moral consideration. His state is morbid, 
 because the religion that absorbs his personality is 
 not a pure religion, and often because the absorp- 
 tion is not due so much to the strength of the 
 object as to the mental weakness of the subject — 
 to his inability to hold out against perfectly normal 
 solicitations. There are, however, solicitations of 
 such strength as to overcome the resistance of the 
 strongest and best-balanced mind. If it be an evil 
 solicitation, it is the sufferer's misfortune but not 
 his fault. If it be a good one, it is a grace but not 
 a merit. In either case the normal psychological 
 personality is extruded and the " I," which speaks 
 and acts, is that of a good or evil spirit incarnate 
 — to use the Jewish category. 
 
 The perfection man aims at, but never attains, is 
 to yield himself freely, at all times, to the solicita- 
 tions of conscience and of the Spirit of God, so 
 that his motives and interests shall be subject and 
 serviceable to the Divine and universal interest. 
 This subjection may become habitual, but it is 
 always free and revokable. The solicitation may 
 be strong to the point of enthusiasm, but it is not 
 overwhelming and destructive of his psychological 
 personality. He is one thing; his conscience 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 189 
 
 another. He may confidently say, " Thus saith 
 the Lord," but he will not say, " / say unto you." 
 That could be the utterance only of one whose 
 normal psychological personality had been ex- 
 truded by the overwhelming strength of the Spirit; 
 of one who was literally God-possessed or con- 
 science-possessed ; in whom the " 1 " that speaks is 
 simply conscience incarnate. To say that such a 
 person is not free is to forget that he does not even 
 exist ; that the only personality there, is a divine 
 personality, in possession of a human nature, and 
 realising its unattainable divine ideal. That per- 
 sonality is free with the freedom of God and within 
 the limits of conscience. Outside those limits it 
 cannot go. 
 
 This, perhaps, gives us some little clue to the 
 Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus ; to His 
 strange spiritual power over the souls of men; to 
 His claim to be a revelation of the " humanity and 
 benignity of God," which men would not believe 
 in till they saw and felt it ; to His claim to forgive 
 sins, to give eternal life, to call men to Himself as 
 if to God, to be their Lord and Master as well as 
 their servant. And, if this be so, is not the breach 
 between the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel more 
 apparent than real? is not the latter merely the 
 substitution of Hellenic for Jewish categories in 
 order to explain the same unique — we cannot say 
 
190 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 inconceivable — experience ? Could not the Spirit 
 incarnate in Jesus say : " I and the Father are one," 
 " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," " I 
 am the Truth and the Life," " He that hath the Son 
 hath the Life " ? Could not an apostle have hailed 
 Him " My Lord and my God " ? 
 
 Thus when we freely yield ourselves to the 
 solicitations of the Spirit, we yield ourselves to 
 the Personality that was incarnate as Jesus, 
 whose humanity and benignity are revealed to us 
 through that Incarnation, and, making ourselves 
 members of Jesus, we lend our humanity, soul 
 and body, to the service of that Personality. 
 
 We know that He did not escape the charge 
 of fanaticism on the part of His nearest and 
 dearest ; still less, no doubt, on that of the 
 sceptical Sadducees or of the more or less 
 fanatical Pharisees. It is renewed by many of 
 our modern Gospel-critics. But it is a charge 
 universally levelled against any man who is 
 enthusiastic and intransigent in the cause of 
 truth and justice. In such a charge, however, 
 we have evidence that He showed symptoms of 
 that monoideism which is good or evil according 
 to the idea or spirit in question, and according as 
 the will yields to an irresistible or a normally 
 resistible solicitation. The strongest man may 
 be possessed and driven by the Spirit of God, 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 191 
 
 but between him and the fanatic there is nothing 
 in common, for the rule of the Spirit is the per- 
 fection, not the destruction, of rational life. 
 
 (/) GOD AND SATAN 
 
 If the nearness of the Kingdom and the Messiah- 
 ship of Jesus are the substance and centre of the 
 Christian revelation, various other subsidiary 
 apocalyptic ideas need interpretation. We are 
 confronted by an acute dualism of God and 
 Satan in the quasi-physical other-world that 
 does duty for the transcendent order. The con- 
 flict of Good and Evil in the present order is but 
 the reverberation of a battle, raging in the in- 
 visible world, between the hosts of the Lord and 
 those of Satan. When Jesus saw Satan fall as 
 lightning from Heaven, it was a sign that the 
 power of Evil on earth was practically killed in 
 its root. The remnant of Satan's army still 
 lingered in hiding. But they knew that their 
 hour was come and that the Kingdom of God 
 was upon them. They fled in terror at the word 
 of Jesus, knowing that He was the Christ, the 
 Heavenly Son of God. In this view Satan was 
 the cause of sin ; sin, the cause of mortality ; 
 mortality, the cause of sickness, sorrow and suffer- 
 ing. Opposed to Satan and his ministers was 
 
192 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 God's Holy Spirit and His angels. As sin was 
 a "possession" by Satan, so righteousness was a 
 " possession " by the Holy Ghost. Man was free 
 to yield his members as servants either to Sin or 
 to Righteousness. He could not be his own ; he 
 must yield to one " possession " or the other. 
 Thus man and the world are regarded as a terri- 
 tory for whose possession the invisible powers 
 are struggling. Jesus beheld all the kingdoms of 
 the earth usurped by Satan; all men born his 
 possession, as being the children of those who had 
 yielded up their liberty to him. He saw a world 
 that was tied hand and foot and incapable of 
 delivering itself; He saw men the slaves of sin, 
 longing in vain to be free. Such was the pessimism 
 of the Apocalypse. 
 
 Yet the struggle was not over. There was an 
 ever dwindling band of just men, possessed by 
 the Divine Spirit, free servants of God, who, in 
 blind faith and trust, flung themselves desperately 
 against the victorious forces of Evil, confident 
 that, sooner or later, God, moved by their suffer- 
 ings in His cause, would arise to scatter His 
 enemies and establish His Kingdom. Here was 
 the optimism of the Apocalypse. 
 
 The conflict has, therefore, a visible and an in- 
 visible side — as it were, a body and a soul. At 
 root it was one between the Spirit of Evil, 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 193 
 
 manifest in sin, death and sorrow, and the Spirit 
 of Holiness, manifest in righteousness, immortality 
 and joy. At the final crisis God, moved by the 
 sufferings of His Saints (and of His Messiah) 
 would pour forth the fulness of His Spirit on all 
 flesh, before whose power the Spirit of Evil, after 
 a final and desperate struggle, would fall. The 
 Son of Man would gather the children of the 
 Spirit into the Kingdom and drive the children 
 of Satan into Hell ; and thus the kingdoms of 
 this world would become the Kingdom of God 
 and His Christ, and be delivered from the usurpa- 
 tion of Satan. 
 
 So far is this Weltanschauung removed from our 
 modern way of taking things that, though it is 
 written broad over the face of the New Testament, 
 the present-day Christian does not see it there as 
 a whole, and is simply perplexed by the several 
 fragments as he comes across them. All this 
 casting-out of devils he could dispense with, as 
 with something irrelevant and intrusive. We no 
 longer regard a man's sickness as the fruit of 
 some sin, by which he has become possessed 
 of the Devil. Nor, if it be a congenital ailment, 
 do we ascribe it to the sin of his parents, or some 
 foreseen sin of his own. We seek physical causes 
 for physical effects. We have recourse to the 
 doctor and not to the exorcist. We do not 
 o 
 
194 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 believe that man is naturally immortal, and mortal 
 only through sin ; we do not believe that physical 
 immortality and resurrection are the due and 
 quasi-natural consequences of righteousness. 
 
 And yet is our arrangement of the Whole any 
 the less a fiction because it is a better one, 
 because it unifies a greater extent of experience ? 
 Have we got, or shall we ever get, to more than 
 a symbolic explanation of the great world drama 
 — the conflict of Good and Evil? As compared 
 with the Babylonian myth of Marduk and Tiamat 
 and earlier legends, the apocalyptic view is in- 
 spired by a far deeper moral and religious sense, 
 and its true values are to be looked for in the 
 depth of the human spirit and not in the under- 
 standing. Take it as sober phenomenal reality 
 and it must prove, as it has so largely proved, an 
 obstacle to intelligence and to a true comprehen- 
 sion and use of the natural order. Take it as an 
 effort of the spiritual life to express itself in the 
 imagery of a certain place and time, and it still 
 serves its purpose of registering that spiritual 
 attitude, of fixing a direction of will, a character 
 of sentiment — an entire "psychosis." 
 
 That good men cling to its literal truth, as they 
 still do to some extent, is due to the fact that it is 
 so intimately bound up with such a psychosis ; 
 with those deep spiritual experiences that they 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 195 
 
 cannot imagine incorporated in any other form. 
 To admit that their God, their Satan and their 
 Heaven are symbols is, for them, to deny the 
 reality of their spiritual life — the firmest reality 
 they know. 
 
 Imagine it how we will, life is a struggle between 
 good and evil influences. Within ourselves we 
 find a disinterested, forceful love of truth, good- 
 ness and beauty and their synthesis, that is 
 thwarted and opposed by other forces within and 
 around us. In the measure that we are spiritual, 
 we realise that this love is doomed to disappoint- 
 ment and starvation in the present order ; that 
 it is overwhelmed by anti-spiritual forces. We are 
 ourselves dominated by a strong anti-spiritual, 
 individualist, self-centred tendency, the foe of 
 order and universal love. We see this selfish, 
 narrow, grasping temper wrecking the happiness 
 of mankind at large and making hell all round 
 it. Something in our spirit — its very craving for 
 truth and justice — tells us that the prevailing 
 divorce between inward and outward happiness is 
 a flaw and disorder in life; that the suffering of the 
 innocent is an evil, and that the whole world is 
 drowned in an ocean of such injustice. We cry 
 out for the triumph of the spirit ; for deliverance 
 from this body of death ; for the end of this 
 conflict, the conquest of this dualism ; for the 
 
196 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Kingdom of God. And in our very despair we 
 fight more vehemently, confident that, somehow 
 or other, spirit must win ; and that our efforts 
 unite us more closely with the transcendent, where 
 we shall find what we have here sought in vain, 
 and in the measure that we sought it. Little 
 as we know of the transcendent, beyond our 
 own dim spiritual experience and its imaginative 
 symbols, we feel that the world and its history 
 come from, and return to, that hidden realm, 
 and get their ultimate significance thence; that, 
 so far as the conflict between Good and Evil is 
 moral, and not merely phenomenal, it refers to 
 an absolute, eternal and, therefore, transcendent 
 order. 
 
 If the ultimate good, that determines moral 
 right and wrong, were merely the eventual 
 blessedness of our race upon earth, we should 
 have no reason to feel that life's drama had its 
 transcendent side. But the absolute, imperative, 
 superhuman, super-temporal interest, to which the 
 dictate of conscience (ethical, intellectual or 
 aesthetic) points, translates itself inevitably into 
 the picture of a battle in Heaven for the souls 
 of men. 
 
 Dependent on the sense of the transcendent 
 and universal significance of our free acts, is the 
 sense of sin. No doubt it has been perverted by 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 197 
 
 unworthy, non-moral, or even immoral, conceptions 
 of God as arbitrary, vindictive, ambitious and 
 cruel. Against these perversions a remedy has 
 been sought in a purely rational and wholly in- 
 adequate interpretation of the experience of guilt. 
 The view of sin as merely a trespass against our 
 own higher interest and that of society, and, still 
 more, the view of it as a mistaken judgment, not 
 as a free self-determination, have weakened the 
 sense of sin and left a real element of our inward 
 experience without expression or explanation. 
 
 In apocalyptic thought, sin was an act by which 
 a man yielded himself to the possession of Satan ; 
 sided with all the forces of Evil against the forces 
 of Good ; became an enemy of God and ex- 
 posed himself to the destruction that would at last 
 overwhelm the hosts of darkness. The signifi- 
 cance of the act lay far less in the injury that 
 might result to the doer and to society — results 
 difficult to calculate and realise, and often im- 
 perceptibly minute — than in its absolute value as 
 a defiance of the spiritual and transcendent, an 
 act of hostility to God and of solidarity with 
 Satan. 
 
 I do not think it can be denied that this view 
 recognises an experience which belongs to religion 
 even in its cruder forms, and which grows stronger 
 and purer as man rises morally and spiritually. If 
 
ig8 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 religion adjusts him to the transcendent, sin is the 
 essence of irreligion, and the forgiveness of sin 
 the central aim of religion. Sin belongs to religion, 
 not to morality. It is a severance of wills — Divine 
 and human — a breach of union. Morality is but 
 the subject-matter of the quarrel. Similarly, 
 Righteousness, in the sense of Justification, ac- 
 ceptance by God, is a religious transcendental value, 
 of which morality is but a condition or occasion, 
 and Divine grace or mercy the cause. 
 
 By a loss of the sense of sin man's whole 
 spiritual tone is impoverished, the significance of 
 his life and conduct loses all relation to eternity, 
 it bears only on the relative and transitory, on 
 that which ultimately does not matter. He no 
 longer lives in the transcendent but is wholly im- 
 mersed in himself and in humanity. It was a gain 
 to recognise morality as the will of God and to 
 bring the two interests together ; to purify and 
 moralise religion ; to supernaturalise and sanctify 
 morality. But to substitute morality for religion 
 was to fall back to earth again, after having 
 essayed the sky ;• it was to rob morality of all the 
 reinforcement it derived from the religious motive, 
 from faith, hope and love ; to leave its idealisms an 
 easy prey to utilitarian criticism ; to destroy the 
 only motive that will make men fight, not less but 
 more eagerly, in the face of ultimately inevitable 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 199 
 
 defeat. That motive is faith in the transcendent 
 value and significance of our moral efforts, inde- 
 pendently of their success or failure. 
 
 ^) THE IDEA OF ATONEMENT 
 
 That the sufferings and persecutions of the 
 saints were " precious in the sight of the Lord," 
 that they moved Him to arise in their defence and 
 overthrow the Kingdom of Satan, is a dominant 
 idea of the Apocalypse. Yet it seemed as though 
 some mysterious law of justice demanded an over- 
 balancing of the demerits of the wicked by the 
 merits of the saints, before God could intervene. 
 The hour of that intervention was hastened by 
 works of repentance, by deeds of righteousness, 
 by sufferings for justice' sake. It was retarded by 
 new sins and offences. Thus the various post- 
 ponements of the great Day were ascribed to sin 
 and laxity. The repentance preached by the 
 Baptist and by Jesus was not merely to prepare 
 for, but to hasten, the Kingdom — to take it by 
 storm. 
 
 But if the unmerited sufferings of all the just 
 had a certain atoning value, those of Jesus were 
 not merely those of the most just of men, but 
 those of the Messiah — of the Heavenly Son of 
 Man incarnate in the Son of David. He was to 
 
200 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 the just as a shepherd to his sheep. Like a good 
 shepherd, He gave Himself to be torn by the wolf 
 that they might escape : "If therefore ye seek 
 Me, let these go their way." His death filled up 
 the cup of Satan's iniquity and moved God to 
 pour forth His Spirit for the final destruction of 
 the works of darkness, preparatory to the End. 
 It was a weight thrown into the balance that the 
 sufferings of the saints could never have turned. 
 It was only through the blood of Jesus that the 
 cry of Abel's blood was heard. 
 
 Now were sin but a moral disorder, bringing 
 no sense of guilt or estrangement from the Divine 
 Will, the remedy would be largely in our own 
 power. It would be a mistake to go on crying 
 over our past moral failures. What is past is 
 irreparable. The only sensible sort of repentance 
 would be a new life. But, in the light of religious 
 experience, sin is an estrangement of spirit from 
 spirit, the breach of a mutual bond. It is not 
 enough to stretch forth our hand, we need an 
 assurance that it will be grasped. We may long 
 to be on God's side again, but till we are accepted 
 we feel cut off from the organism of the spiritual 
 world, the mystical bojdy; we feel ourselves 
 identified with, and under the doom of, the forces 
 of Evil. Hence the idea of atonement has passed 
 over from the lower or magical to the moral and 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 201 
 
 spiritual religions. In both, man feels guilt and 
 sin, and needs a means of recovering the lost 
 friendship of the gods ; or of being restored to 
 the communion of the spiritual order. 
 
 Atonement belongs to spirit as such. The 
 Spirit's purpose and aim is universal and not 
 private. Its present life is a war against the 
 internal discords of the world ; against sin and 
 sorrow ; against the inevitable limitations of the 
 finite and transitory. It is in the world as a 
 healing, harmonising power. All who yield them- 
 selves to it are, so far, one and the same ; they live 
 a common life and serve a common end. They 
 are members of one mystical body, manifesta- 
 tions of one transcendental life. The Spirit seeks 
 to draw all men to itself; it invites their voluntary 
 adhesion ; it is ever soliciting them through their 
 conscience. But when, by sin, they tear themselves 
 from the Eternal to cling to the transitory and 
 corruptible, they become spiritually dead and un- 
 able to respond to the inward voice, which grows 
 feebler with every moment of alienation. It is 
 impossible not to feel that those who are nearer 
 to the Spirit acquire some authority and power in 
 the transcendental order : " Whose soever sins ye 
 forgive they are forgiven unto them " was said of the 
 Apostles when they received the Spirit that Jesus 
 had, so to say, earned for them by His death and 
 
202 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 blood. The Spirit can quicken the Spirit dormant 
 in the sinner, can stimulate the will to a new 
 act of adhesion, can make its reconciliation a 
 matter of experimental certainty. In this sense 
 the sufferings of all the just, united with the 
 central sufferings of One Who, in His own ex- 
 perience and in the faith of Christianity was so 
 closely identified with God, are naturally con- 
 sidered to have an atoning value. Jesus has 
 the plenitude of that magnetism which draws 
 sinners back to God and magnetises them in their 
 turn. 
 
 The idea of atonement is a corollary of that of 
 spiritual solidarity; of the mystical body whose 
 members serve one another ; of the " communion 
 of saints." The spirit-life is essentially a life of 
 all in each and of each in all. Union with God 
 means union with all that are God's — whether 
 actually or potentially. 
 
 Life is a poor and narrow thing if we lose sight 
 of the great principle revealed to us in the doctrine 
 of Christ's atonement. 
 
 (k) THE PHENOMENAL AND THE SPIRITUAL 
 
 If there is, in apocalyptic thought, a sharp 
 dualism between Good and Evil, God and Satan, 
 the Spirit of Light and the Spirit of Darkness, 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 203 
 
 that between Spirit and Matter is far less sharp 
 than in Greek thought or in the Pauline-Johannine 
 writings. The notion of God as the subsistent 
 idea of Being ; of the transcendent world as built 
 up of subsistent class notions purified of all content 
 that would determine them to time or place ; the 
 conception of spirit as the subject and cause of 
 our abstractions and generalisations and, therefore, 
 as itself something indifferent to matter, time 
 and space — all this metaphysic was as far removed 
 from apocalyptic thought as it is from our own. 
 It belongs to that so-called realism, which were 
 better called idealism in that it regards ideas and 
 abstractions as the ultimate act and reality, as the 
 cause of the concrete, contingent, illusory and 
 potential. 
 
 Finding general ideas immutable and indiffer- 
 ent to time and place and content, it endows 
 them with a mysterious eternity and ubiquity, and 
 bids man despise the particular and concrete in 
 his quest of truth and beatitude. It forgets that 
 the divisions and headings, under which the library 
 of our experience is unified and catalogued, are 
 entirely subordinate and ministerial to a know- 
 ledge of the contents of the books it contains. 
 These it despises as contingent and mutable ; and 
 finds the only worthy object of knowledge in the 
 headings of the catalogue. The categories of the 
 
204 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 understanding are the reflex of the transcendent 
 and eternal world in the flowing waters of the 
 contingent and material. 
 
 The extent to which this conception of the tran- 
 scendent has influenced later Christian Mysticism, 
 through Alexandrine and Scholastic philosophy, is 
 notorious. As a symbolism of the transcendent 
 order it had, no doubt, some advantages over the 
 simple imaginative visions of the Apocalypse, and 
 was in many ways morally and spiritually fruitful. 
 But in its contempt of the particular and material, 
 in its violent antithesis of matter and spirit, and 
 in the moral corollaries of that antithesis, it was 
 altogether unfortunate. It was in no sense an 
 hypothesis suggested and moulded by spiritual 
 experience, but a thought-out system, imposed 
 upon it. It affected to be a translation of re- 
 vealed divinity into terms of current philosophy, 
 and to possess actual, and not merely symbolic, 
 truth ; while, in fact, it was a translation of one 
 symbolism into another. 
 
 Apocalyptic thought knew nothing of these 
 hypostatised abstractions, these animated class- 
 notions. It knew of earthly bodies and spiritual 
 bodies ; bodies of flesh and bodies of glory. Its 
 heaven, its angels, its very God, were clothed in 
 bodies of light. Of a disembodied immortality it 
 had no notion. The two orders were not wholly 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 205 
 
 discontinuous ; far less were they violently opposed. 
 One language fitted them both. 
 
 Here an important truth is safeguarded that 
 is imperilled by the Alexandrine and pseudo- 
 Dionysian symbolism. As M. Le Roy has pointed 
 out, analogy needs three terms in order to arrive 
 at a fourth. If we have no experience whatever 
 of the transcendent, analogy cannot help us. If 
 I had no experience whatever of light, I could 
 learn nothing from the analogy. As a symphony 
 is to a sound, so is a painting to light ; I must at 
 least have the rudiments of vision. So, too, I must 
 have the rudiments of the transcendent life in 
 myself if I am to desire an integral knowledge and 
 enjoyment of it, and to figure it to myself in 
 analogies drawn from other orders of experience. 
 
 Of this rudimentary transcendence, the light 
 and glory of the apocalyptic vision are a symbol. 
 This world and the other belong to one system, 
 one self-explanatory whole ; as do body and soul. 
 They act and re-act. They have a common 
 history to some extent. The visible is patterned 
 in the invisible ; the battle on earth is the double 
 of a battle in the skies. 
 
 All this symbolism preserves the importance of 
 the interests of the present life and their bearing 
 on eternity; and condemns the aloofness and 
 apathy of abstract spirituality and of that ultimate 
 
206 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 pessimism which is favoured by a contempt of the 
 material and concrete. It preserves the motive for 
 struggling to make this world what we know it 
 can never be. It assures us (to use a hackneyed 
 quotation) that " life is real, life is earnest,'' just 
 because " the grave is not its goal." 
 
 It is in and through what we call the material 
 order, the world of sensible phenomena, that the 
 spiritual element of our being is brought to con- 
 sciousness and tries vainly to know and realise 
 itself. It acts on, and is affected by, the sensible. 
 Nor can we conceive it as conscious, out of all 
 relation to the sensible. Have we a right to con- 
 clude that, because it is strangled and blinded 
 by its present medium of self-expression, it can 
 express itself without any medium at all ? Were 
 not this to fall into the fallacy of abstract and 
 negative spirituality again ? We know that each 
 sense opens up to us a new phenomenal order that 
 else had been non-existent for us, and that by it 
 our spirit has been liberated indefinitely. What 
 had it been without the world of colour or of 
 music? What might it not be were other 
 worlds opened to its consciousness? And what 
 probability is there that we are not blind and deaf 
 to a thousand worlds around us? If, then, the 
 only transcendent life we know is thus related 
 to the phenomenal, what right have we to assume 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 207 
 
 that the satisfaction it seeks means a release from, 
 and not a fuller embodiment in, the phenomenal ; 
 or that the transcendent order involves the nega- 
 tion, and not the completion, of the phenomenal ? 
 Empty spirit of all relation to the phenomenal, 
 and what is left but a word ? And does not the 
 phenomenal enter, however vaguely, into the 
 essence of that life whose rudiments we experi- 
 ence now, but whose expansion and satisfaction 
 we know is impossible within the limited potential- 
 ities of that fraction of the phenomenal world which 
 is revealed to us by our five poor senses? I own 
 that I cannot find in myself any longing to escape 
 from all that is beautiful and wonderful in physical 
 nature, or in human life and interests, but rather a 
 desire to enjoy a great deal more of the same with- 
 out its now inevitable limitations ; nor could I be 
 consoled by the contemplation of subsistent class- 
 notions, ranged harmoniously under that of all- 
 embracing entity. I feel sure that the apocalyptic 
 Heaven, with all its colour and music, and light 
 and happiness, is a truer symbol of man's spiritual 
 aspirations than the cold constructions of intellect- 
 ualism, in that it escapes a false antithesis of the 
 spiritual and the phenomenal, and recognises the 
 one as an inseparable correlative of the other. The 
 transcendent is not the spiritual as opposed to the 
 phenomenal ; but the whole as opposed to an infini- 
 
208 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 tesimal fraction of possible spiritualexperience. Our 
 spirit-life, our disinterested love of the universal 
 Good, our unqualified worship of the Right in con- 
 duct, thought and feeling, is just the life of the 
 Whole that is immanent in every part ; that seeks its 
 own universal end primarily and that of the part 
 inclusively ; that can never be satisfied by what is 
 an end only relatively to the part, but clamours 
 for the universal and eternal Good. Our mind is 
 the mind of a part, not of the Whole. It is 
 built for the service of our temporal life and im- 
 mediate ends, and can never comprehend the 
 spirit and its universal end ; yet it possesses a 
 fractional knowledge of the transcendent, which 
 it can perfect by analogies derived from its own 
 narrow field of phenomena. 
 
 Incarnation, embodied immortality, sacraments, 
 external worship, a visible Church ; all are founded 
 on this correlativity of the spiritual and pheno- 
 menal ; on the idea that the spiritual utters itself in, 
 and is addressed through, the phenomenal ; that 
 they are as inseparable as subject and object; 
 that pure spirit is a pure abstraction. As our 
 mind is tied for its categories to that small part 
 of the phenomenal field to which our bodies 
 belong, it has no proper idea of the transcendent 
 Whole and its relations, nor can it determine how 
 the spirit in each of us is related to the univer- 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION OF CHRIST 209 
 
 sality of Spirit. But judged by the test of life 
 and fruitfulness, the symbolism of apocalyptic 
 imagery is truer to our spiritual needs than that 
 of Hellenic intellectualism. 
 
XIII 
 
 THE APOCALYPTIC VISION AND THE 
 CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 ENOUGH has been said, then, to show that 
 the religious "idea" of Jesus, embodied in 
 apocalyptic imagery, possesses an abiding value, 
 in no way dependent on the literal worth of that 
 imagery. A true revelation of the whole in terms 
 of an infinitesimal part, of the transcendent in 
 terms of present experience, is not possible. Yet 
 the Whole, the spiritual, lives in us and moves 
 us toward a universal End or Good, that exists 
 for the consciousness of the Whole and not for 
 that of the part. So far as we are freely to accept 
 and co-operate with the instinct of the Spirit, we 
 must have, at least, some symbolic notion of its 
 nature and end ; some fiction explanatory of the 
 movements that we experience within ourselves — 
 a fiction suggested by them ; verified and criticised 
 by its success in intensifying and enriching our 
 spirituality. Such visions and revelations com- 
 mand our faith by their liberating appeal to our 
 spiritual need, spirit answering to spirit. They 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION AND THE CHURCH 211 
 
 explain us to ourselves ; they set free the springs 
 of life. Such was and such is the power of the 
 Gospel of Jesus. It was a vision of the tran- 
 scendent that fixed a manner of feeling and living 
 whose fruitfulness was simply a matter of ex- 
 perience. It was a schema, a way of taking things, 
 as true to ultimate reality as any expression of 
 the Whole in terms of so small a part can be. It 
 had the practical truth of a correct guide to our 
 present religious experience ; and, as the sponta- 
 neous creation of His own experience, working 
 with the religious language and categories of His 
 time and tradition, it had the representative value 
 of an analogy. 
 
 Obviously there is no universal language, and 
 the Gospel Idea had to incarnate itself in that 
 of a particular time and place. But concrete 
 imagery is of more universal significance than 
 conceptual language; the doctrine of repentance 
 is less generally understandable than the story 
 of the prodigal son. For universal and abiding 
 symbolism an apocalyptic vision is far less cor- 
 ruptible than a theology. Moreover, the Idea 
 symbolised is one of universal validity and within 
 the spiritual experience of all. For these rea- 
 sons the contingency and particularity of Gospel 
 language and imagery detract but slightly from 
 its permanent and universal value for humanity. 
 
212 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 It embodies and evokes a development of the 
 religious Idea that cannot be outgrown till men 
 have outgrown Christ. 
 
 It is a Gospel for the poor and afflicted, who, 
 under the discipline of experience, have ceased to 
 place their hopes in the present life ; and for those 
 to whom reflection and observation have revealed 
 the iron law of failure and mortality, which dissi- 
 pates the dream of salvation by progress. It 
 stands or falls with faith in another life, in which 
 the stifled spirit can realise itself in another order 
 of experience. It is religion primarily and ex- 
 plicitly ; it is morality inclusively, because morality 
 is an exercise of the spiritual life under contin- 
 gencies peculiar to our present partial experience. 
 "But when that which is perfect is come, that 
 which is in part shall be done away." When the 
 work is finished, labour ceases ; weary man enters 
 into his rest. 
 
 By faith man walks consciously in the light of 
 eternity, and sees earth and its burden as from a 
 distant planet — a speck in immensity. And yet 
 he labours for the alleviation of its sorrows as 
 they can never labour who need the assurance of 
 success. The dulness of the most ordinary toil, 
 the bitterness of the hardest lot, is illuminated by 
 the consciousness of its transcendent significance. 
 Translate the Gospel vision into merely ethical 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION AND THE CHURCH 213 
 
 values ; tell us that eternal life is moral life, 
 and the Kingdom of Heaven the eventual triumph 
 of social reform ; and lo ! the gourd whose leaves 
 have so long shaded mankind from the sickening 
 heat of the desert is withered down to the roots. 
 
 When we compare the religious idea of Jesus, 
 as it emerges from the most drastic and impartial 
 criticism of the Gospels, with that of the Catholic 
 Church ; when we consider the type of spirituality 
 exhibited in her saints, canonised or uncanonised ; 
 when we listen to her classical preachers and study 
 her ascetical tradition; it is impossible to deny 
 that she has been true, not only to the religious 
 idea of her Founder, but to the very form of its 
 expression. Nay, her fidelity to the letter ; her 
 unwillingness to tamper with what has been the 
 vehicle and sacrament of much spiritual life 
 and experience ; her refusal to admit the symbolic 
 character of the apocalyptic vision ; her deter- 
 mination to treat it as revealed truth of the 
 phenomenal order and make it a criterion of his- 
 tory and science — all this has gradually weakened 
 her influence and brought her into conflict with 
 the modern mind. 
 
 Yet, in this again, she is only blindly faithful to 
 the past. The distinction she ignores is one that 
 has slowly been forced upon us by our growing 
 knowledge of the laws of the human mind. 
 
ai4 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Its recognition in earlier centuries would have been 
 miraculous. To refuse any longer to recognise 
 it, is to imperil the Christian religion ; and this 
 perhaps is the main contention of the Catholic 
 Modernist. He certainly does not desire to sub- 
 stitute any conceptual translation of that vision 
 for the vision itself. He knows that any transla- 
 tion of the kind would still be a symbolism. He 
 feels that the original self-embodiment of Christ's 
 Idea is a work of Divine inspiration, and preserves 
 it for us more truthfully than can any rendering of 
 it. But he would have its symbolic character ex- 
 plicitly recognised, and its meaning rendered by 
 each age in its own terms. 
 
 From all that has been said it is easy to see the 
 difference between the real development of an idea 
 and the logical development of premisses. An 
 idea, like Religion or Christianity, presents itself 
 to consciousness first as a dull craving, or a blind 
 instinct making for an end, that is yet unknown, 
 but is progressively revealed as the instinct tries 
 to understand and realise itself. Thus the idea 
 of the End, to which instinct drives us, comes 
 gradually to consciousness by a process of develop- 
 ment. In all stages of its embodiment it is the 
 same idea that is manifested under some aspect 
 or another. The criterion of these developments 
 cannot be the idea itself, which is only slowly 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION AND THE CHURCH 215 
 
 coming to consciousness and can never be appre- 
 hended exhaustively. It can only be the satisfac- 
 tion or dissatisfaction of that need to which the 
 idea corresponds. Thus we do not criticise a 
 civilisation by some celestial archetype, but by the 
 expansion and enrichment of life ; not by its near- 
 ness to the unknown End at which it aims, but 
 by its distance from its point of departure. 
 
 Hence, in regard to whatever additions or sub- 
 tractions the revelation of Jesus may have under- 
 gone in the course of time, the pertinent point is 
 whether they have corrupted, or have preserved, or 
 even integrated the Idea of the Gospel. Avowedly 
 the aim of the Church's dogmatic labour has been 
 to preserve the original sense of revelation incor- 
 rupt. It is to the collective memory of the whole 
 body that its guardianship has been committed. 
 But memory needs criticism and correction, and 
 this it receives from the understanding. In the 
 measure that symbols were taken literally theology 
 was at war with reason when reason, excluding the 
 literal acceptance of apocalyptic imagery, seemed 
 hostile to faith. In the defence of positions that 
 were rationally impossible, and yet were confirmed 
 by religious experience as revealed truth, many 
 untenable conclusions must have seemed bound 
 up with the faith. The story of the conflict 
 between Scripture and science abounds with 
 
216 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 instances. It seemed a conflict between internal 
 and external experience; between fact and fact. 
 We blame the Church of the seventeenth century 
 for not possessing the criticism of the twentieth. 
 We might more justly blame the Church of the 
 twentieth for abiding by that of the seventeenth. 
 Errors of this kind were the result, not of a 
 departure from, but of an ill-judged fidelity to 
 revelation. The light of truth shone through the 
 distorting medium of a perverse understanding. 
 Besides these protective errors there were various 
 protective truths which, without belonging to the 
 original revelation, were necessary to secure the 
 freshness of its features and colours against the 
 smoke and dust of time ; and these can in no 
 sense be regarded as corruptions any more than 
 the explanatory ritual that surrounds the simple 
 essential rite of baptism, and is merely a develop- 
 ment of the idea of baptism. 
 
 Finally, it is the very nature of the human mind 
 to integrate, in the language of fiction and imagina- 
 tion, the ideas and ideals that are suggested to it 
 in the language of fact. These fictions are not true 
 to the fact on which they are founded, but are 
 true to the idea suggested by those facts — truer 
 than fact, in their deeper sense. There have been, 
 no doubt, many such spontaneous and unconscious 
 integrations of the apocalyptic presentment of the 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION AND THE CHURCH 217 
 
 transcendent order, and, like^the Apocalypse itself, 
 they have been inserted in the series of external 
 phenomena. But the sole pertinent question is, 
 not their phenomenal, but their spiritual, truth, 
 except where it can be shown that their spiritual 
 value depends, as it sometimes does, on their 
 historicity. In other cases they belong to the 
 category of visions embodying inward experiences, 
 and reconstructing the world and history accord- 
 ing to the exigencies of the spirit. 
 
 Notwithstanding, and partly because of, these 
 developments and alterations, it is impossible to 
 deny that the revelation of the Catholic religion 
 and that of Jesus are the same, not only in sub- 
 stance but largely in form. I must go further and 
 say that, far from feeling more at home to-day 
 among Liberal Protestants than among orthodox 
 Roman Catholics, the Jesus of the first century 
 would be in sympathy with just those elements 
 of Catholicism that are least congenial to the 
 modern mind — not to say the mind of Modernists 
 — not only with the transcendental, but with the 
 literal, value of the Catholic presentment of the 
 transcendental ; with sacraments, temples, priests 
 and altars ; with miracles, diabolic possessions 
 and exorcisms ; with devils and angels and all the 
 supernaturalism of His own age and tradition. 
 For all these things He had no word, no thought 
 
218 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 of censure ; but only for their abuse and exploita- 
 tion ; for their perversion to unspiritual and 
 immoral ends by priests and people. Against 
 superstition as an error of the intellect He has 
 little, if anything, to say in the way of warning. 
 His zeal is not against the letter but against a 
 literalism that destroys the spirit to which it should 
 minister ; that forgets the end in the means ; that 
 substitutes outward observance for moral and 
 spiritual sacrifice. He does not condemn the 
 lighter matters of the law, but the neglect of 
 the weightier. He repudiates the traditions of men 
 only so far as they make vain the tradition of 
 Moses, and, for Him, that tradition justified the 
 substance of the Jewish religion. It was in the 
 forms of such a tradition that He necessarily 
 embodied His Gospel, and the Catholic Church 
 has preserved the earthen vessel with its heavenly 
 treasure ; while those who have broken and cast 
 away the vessel seem to have lost much of the 
 treasure. Ought we not still to keep it while 
 carefully distinguishing it from its content? 
 
 In all this I am thinking of the Catholic religion, 
 not as a theological system on paper, nor as an 
 institution governed by a hierarchy in other than 
 spiritual interests ; but as a personal religion lived 
 
THE APOCALYPTIC VISION AND THE CHURCH 219 
 
 by what must always be a small minority of 
 professed Catholics. I am thinking of what it 
 does and has done for the souls of those who not 
 merely profess it, but believe in it, and use it. 
 I am thinking of the bird free on the wing, not 
 crushed and crumpled in the grip of the hawk ; 
 of the Church living, not of the Church dying and 
 dead. Religion has ever been exploited by priests 
 and politicians, who see in it a means of gripping 
 men by what is deepest in them — their conscience ; 
 and so controlling their lives, their services, their 
 fortunes, to their own selfish and ambitious ends. 
 They run it as business men, void of all artistic 
 sympathy, might run a theatre, employing the best 
 actors or the worst as may prove more profitable. 
 In religion itself they have no sort of interest — 
 only in its serviceableness to their own non-religious 
 interests. They favour laxity or sanctity accord- 
 ing to their market value, and, as a rule, it pays 
 better to cater for the groundlings than for the 
 elect few. No religion of any duration or influence 
 has escaped this degradation and corruption. Few 
 have had the misfortune to be exploited on so 
 large a scale by their own guardians. Yet, in spite 
 of this misfortune, the Roman Catholic religion 
 still lives in the grip of the hawk. 
 
 Whether it has strength enough to escape, who 
 can tell? Dead or alive, its claim to be the 
 
220 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 authentic tradition of Christianity seems to me to 
 be incontestable. Judge, then, what truth there 
 is in the popular idea that Modernism is a Protes- 
 tantising movement in the Roman Church, con- 
 verging to the same point as Liberal Protestantism. 
 But a larger problem is suggested by the com- 
 parative study of religions. If Catholicism be 
 authentic Christianity, how does Christianity stand 
 in relation to other religions ? 
 
PART II 
 CHRISTIANITY AND RELIGION 
 
EXCLUSIVENESS AND INTOLERANCE 
 
 IN earlier stages of civilisation the rivalry and 
 mutual exclusiveness of religions was more 
 frankly a form of esprit de corps. It did not cover 
 itself under the pretext of the unity of God, of 
 Truth, of Righteousness. It was little more than 
 another aspect of the rivalry of clans, tribes and 
 peoples. Israel's God was a God above all 
 gods. The gods of her neighbours were devils. 
 The enmities of earth had their counterparts in 
 heaven. The egotism, exclusiveness and ambition 
 of the people were embodied in and sanctified by 
 its god or gods. When neighbours were peaceful 
 and allied, they easily practised more than one 
 religion. It was well to be at peace with as many 
 gods as possible. 
 
 But this liberalism was usually discouraged by 
 priests, who had no wish to divide the honours and 
 emoluments of their profession and, therefore, pre- 
 sented their own god as a jealous god. They 
 dared not say " There is no other god," but only 
 " Thou shalt have no other god." They preached 
 
 223 
 
224 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 monolatry, but not monotheism. The idea of a 
 supreme God, of a Father and great King above 
 all gods, was not far ; and the denial of godhead 
 to all the rest, who then became angels or devils, 
 was bound to follow. Yet even such a God was 
 rather a power in nature, a principal part, than 
 something above and before all worlds. He was a 
 postulate of man's practical needs, rather than of 
 his philosophical search for a first and universal 
 cause. 
 
 Not till religion passed from its magical stage ; 
 not till its regalia were transferred to the worship 
 of spirit and truth and righteousness, was 
 monotheism firmly established on its proper basis. 
 Truth is one, absolute, exclusive. To worship 
 any other god is not merely rebellion and de- 
 sertion ; it is folly, immorality, falsehood. There 
 can be but one religion and one only; all the 
 rest are false. There can be no toleration for 
 falsehood and immorality ; exclusiveness is a 
 duty. 
 
 The rivalries of monotheistic and spiritual re- 
 ligions are not concerned with what we shall wor- 
 ship, but with how — whether at Jerusalem or in 
 this mountain. Each stands for certain ideas of 
 truth and goodness ; certain conceptions of God 
 and His Will. If these are right, all others must 
 be wrong ; for truth is one. Intolerance and ex- 
 
EXCLUSIVENESS AND INTOLERANCE 225 
 
 clusiveness are thus deepened. They pass from 
 the surface affections down to the very roots of 
 conscience. 
 
 It cannot be otherwise if the truth about God 
 and His Will be as ascertainable and as certain as, 
 or more certain than, the truth about the laws of 
 physical phenomena. What is more exclusive 
 than science? what more intolerant than geometry? 
 And seeing how intimate is the bearing of truth 
 on life and happiness, is not the liberty of dis- 
 seminating a false religion far more reprehensible 
 than that of vending and advertising deleterious 
 foods or medicines ? Hence every religion that 
 believes itself to possess the truth about God and 
 His Will must be exclusive and intolerant. What 
 underlies this intolerance is the conviction that 
 truth is one and that religious truth is supremely im- 
 portant ; and, with this, the more doubtful assump- 
 tion that we'possess it and others do not. Given 
 this assumption, tolerance is simply immorality. 
 It has been][the assumption of Jew, Moslem and 
 Christian, and is the^secret of their exclusiveness. 
 It is the assumption of every sect of Christianity as 
 against every other sect. In the measure that the 
 Christian Apocalypse has been translated from 
 imaginative into intellectual language — into con- 
 cepts and theological statements — and has been 
 brought into one body with the whole of our 
 Q 
 
226 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 systematised knowledge, intolerance itself has be- 
 come more systematic. 
 
 We notice this tendency even in the Johannine 
 and Pauline writings, with their theological pre- 
 occupations. But it would be a mistake to view 
 this intolerance as a pure accretion and not as, in 
 some sense, a development of the synoptic teach- 
 ing. Christ did not impose theological dogmas 
 under pain of eternal damnation ; but He im- 
 posed the Apocalypse of the Kingdom of Heaven, 
 of which theology is the intellectual render- 
 ing, under pain of that condemnation. Of 
 the Gospel in its apocalyptical form He says : 
 " He that believeth not shall be damned." He 
 only shall be saved who, believing that the End is 
 near, is baptised unto repentance and a new life. 
 The text is dubious ; but it epitomises the whole 
 of the synoptic teaching. For Jesus, salvation was 
 of the Jews. If many should come from the East 
 and the West, it was to Jewry they were to come ; 
 it was with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob they were 
 to sit at meat in the Kingdom. If He preferred 
 many a Gentile and Samaritan to many a soulless 
 Jew, He did not prefer their religion, but their 
 greater worthiness of the Jew's neglected privileges 
 and graces. His was the attitude of the reason- 
 able Roman Catholic to the heretic in good faith 
 - and " invincible ignorance." 
 
EXCLUSIVENESS AND INTOLERANCE 227 
 
 What He looked to was the ingathering of all 
 these into the one fold of Israel, under Himself as 
 the universal Shepherd. His immediate mission, 
 however, was only to the lost sheep of the house 
 of Israel. Ere the Apostles had preached the 
 Kingdom in all the cities of Israel, the End would 
 come and Gentiles in good faith would be 
 gathered in by the angels from the four quarters of 
 the earth, to be saved in union with the elect 01 
 Israel. If we have here the seed of Pauline uni- 
 versalism, we have it in a form consistent with the 
 Catholic tradition of exclusiveness. " Catholic" and 
 "exclusive," far from contradicting, complement 
 one another. Science is catholic and exclusive for 
 the same reason — its objective truth. Because 
 Catholicism is the one and only religion it is the 
 religion for all. If the outsider " in good faith " is 
 saved, it is only because he is on his way to the 
 Church. 
 
 When Judaism refused to accept Jesus as the 
 Messiah, we may be sure that the Christian Jews 
 did not regard themselves as seceders ; but as the 
 authentic remnant from which the main body had 
 apostatised. What did numbers matter? Had 
 they not Christ the Head? Those who excom- 
 municated the Head had but excommunicated 
 themselves. Christian Israel was the one true 
 Israel, out of which there was no salvation. 
 
228 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Thus, when the smaller West separated from the 
 then far larger East, the West, as possessing the 
 head (i.e. Rome), considered the East schismatic. 
 
 Subsequently, when S. Paul found the formalities 
 of the law an obstacle to the ingathering of the 
 Gentiles, he saw that the Gospel and the Spirit 
 were alone essential; that form and observance 
 were free ; that the true Israel could accommodate 
 itself in such matters to the habits and customs of 
 its proselytes ; could change its outward expression 
 and embodiment of religion to any extent. Yet 
 this widening of the borders did not abolish 
 borders, nor abolish the principle of exclusiveness 
 in any way. 
 
 And the same exclusiveness has been the mark 
 of Catholic Christianity at all times : " Outside 
 the Church there is no salvation." An exception 
 has always been made for cases of " good faith," 
 even by the most bigoted, who are loth to admit 
 the frequency of such cases. 
 
 But this is no real exception ; for the man in 
 good faith is one who is groping his way to the 
 Church. Never is it allowed that he can be saved 
 by his religion, bit only in spite of it. Every 
 religion but one is the work of the devil, a snare, 
 an imposture, a spurious imitation, a greater lie in 
 that it embodies and perverts a greater measure 
 of truth. A heretic is worse than an infidel. 
 
II 
 
 THE UNIFICATION OF RELIGION 
 
 DETESTABLE as this exclusiveness has 
 been in its historical manifestations, we 
 must respect its assertion of the unity and 
 sovereign claims of truth. The sects and heresies 
 of earlier times were as exclusive as the great 
 Church, as willing to persecute when they were 
 able. We are too apt to consider that the 
 oppressed are opposed to the principle of oppres- 
 sion. The comparatively modern toleration of 
 other religions is, to a large extent, due to- the 
 scepticism suggested by the multiplication of sects, 
 each claiming to be the one authentic Christianity ; 
 and by an increased experience of other religions 
 making the same claims as the Christian Church. 
 This scepticism has been systematically deepened 
 by the comparative study of religion, and by all 
 the causes that have brought dogma into dis- 
 repute. Truth may be intolerant, but opinion has 
 no business to be so ; and religion is felt more and 
 more to be a matter of opinion. 
 
 This sort of indifferentism is, however, governed 
 229 
 
2 3 o CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 by the old theological idea of religious truth. 
 Diverse symbolisms, like diverse rituals, might 
 stand for the same sense and meaning and be 
 no more than differences of language. But it 
 religions are identical with their theological ex- 
 pression, it is plain that not more than one can 
 be true ; and it is infinitely probable that all are 
 more or less false. Hence a tendency to search 
 for some one or two truths in which all religions 
 agree, and to make this the essence of religion, 
 regarding all the rest, not as development, but as 
 mere accretion ; and to seek a sort of negative 
 Catholicism by levelling down all these differences, 
 and by emptying the religious idea of all but its 
 vaguest and most rudimentary content. Christians 
 are to unite on the basis of the Fatherhood of 
 God and the Brotherhood of man. All religions 
 agree that there is a transcendent to which we 
 should adjust our lives. The nature of that 
 transcendent, and of our adjustment to it, is 
 a matter of opinion. 
 
 This, of course, is to go back to |the germ and 
 to deny all truth-value to its developments; to 
 declare the historical religious process mere waste. 
 It is Rousseau's remedy of a return to savagery, 
 to the peace of the desert. Indeed, it is not 
 possible to void the religious form or idea of all 
 content and determination. About even the 
 
THE UNIFICATION OF RELIGION 231 
 
 simplest formula and most universal affirmation, 
 agreement can be only verbal. All we can 
 arrive at is a minimum of disagreement. Father- 
 hood and brotherhood are not abstract mathe- 
 matical conceptions. The rights, duties and 
 sentiments of paternity are endlessly disputable. 
 The transcendent does not consist merely of 
 transcendence, which is but a relation and attri- 
 bute of something whose nature is, likewise, end- 
 lessly disputable. The term " religiosity," which 
 is coming into vogue to express the "one thing 
 needful " that remains when religions have been 
 purified of all doctrinal and institutional accre- 
 tions, stands for a mere sentiment, for the sense 
 of an unsatisfied need. Religion is thus reduced 
 to the religious need. Every response to that 
 need is an impertinence. We are to ask, seek and 
 knock, but never to find, receive or enter. We 
 are to feel the significance of life ; we must not 
 dare to say what it signifies. Thus the religious 
 idea is condemned to sterility. It is to produce 
 nothing. The moment a green shoot appears, it 
 is to be shorn close to the ground. 
 
 Yet this conclusion is almost inevitable if the 
 expression of religion be taken as literal and 
 scientific truth. When it is taken otherwise, 
 namely as symbolic and analogical truth, we are 
 met by another sort of indifferentism. One re- 
 
232 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 ligion is as good, instead of as bad, as another. 
 Each says the same thing in its own way — the 
 way best suited for its time and place. But this 
 view, again, denies any sort of variation and devel- 
 opment of the religious idea corresponding to these 
 varieties of its expression. We might as well say 
 that, because the idea of life is expressed in every 
 living species, one species is as good as another, 
 and that man has no advantage over a mush- 
 room ; or that, because the idea of civilisation is 
 expressed in the lowest as in the highest forms, 
 these have no advantage over those. Plainly the 
 idea and its embodiment act and re-act. It is, 
 doubtless, the whole idea of life that seeks ex- 
 pression in each species; but its success is only 
 fractional, and limited by the material it works in. 
 It is revealed far more fully in some forms 
 than in others ; in all, than in any one. We call 
 man a microcosm, for he reveals life more fully 
 and variously than any one creature we know. 
 But he is a poor compendium of the total mani- 
 festation of life given us in the living world. And, 
 similarly, the religious idea reveals itself more 
 fully in some religions than in others ; but in all, 
 more than in any one. 
 
 When this is recognised we are naturally 
 tempted to a sort of syncretic Catholicism, em- 
 bracing all religions as one integral expression of 
 
THE UNIFICATION OF RELIGION 233 
 
 the religious idea. We might as well try to live 
 the life of all living species at once. A logical 
 union of genus or species is not a real union. As 
 the branches of the tree of life bifurcate and 
 diverge, they grow more characterised and unlike 
 one another. So of the varieties of the religious 
 idea. They do not converge towards, but diverge 
 from, a point of sameness. Schism is their very 
 law. So far as they are alive and vigorous, each 
 pushes forward in its own direction and away 
 from others ; reunion becomes less and less 
 possible. The tendency towards reunion among 
 the Christian sects of to-day is the result of 
 weariness and decay ; of scepticism as to the 
 value of their several systems. The withered 
 branches break off at their point of bifurcation. 
 Union is restored by going backwards to an 
 original state of indetermination. 
 
 If the laws of life are any guide to the laws of re- 
 ligion, we must expect to find that, in spite of their 
 parentage or cousinship, the relation between differ- 
 ent religions is that of rivalry and hostility, and that 
 there is more reason for such rivalry in the more 
 nearly allied branches of the family. I speak of 
 spiritual religions, each with its implicit or explicit 
 claim to be the one and only religion, intolerant of 
 all the rest. Among them the law of competition 
 prevails and stimulates development. The victory 
 
234 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 is plainly with the most elastic and pliable ; with 
 the most catholic. An ideally catholic religion 
 would eliminate all rivals. As it is, we have, side 
 by side with legions of short-lived sects and cults 
 that come and go like leaves, a few which are catho- 
 lic enough to have held millions of men together 
 for many centuries. It was to its extraordinary 
 plasticity that Christianity owed its conquest over 
 the senile and ossified religions of its day ; and 
 the same holds good of all the great religions. 
 If a truly catholic religion is ever to be realised, 
 it will not be by a sinking of differences and an 
 insistence on the sole importance of the generic 
 idea or starting-point of all divergences ; nor by 
 an impossible unification of essentially incom- 
 patible systems, as though they were members of 
 one organism. For each system is whole and 
 rounded off; each is an attempt to express the 
 whole idea and not merely a part of it ; none 
 demands another as its complement and expla- 
 nation. 
 
 It is, however, abstractly conceivable that some 
 one system should be related to the rest as is man 
 to other terrestrial species ; that it should com- 
 prehend nearly all their principal advantages and 
 surpass them in other respects beyond compari- 
 son ; that it should be so evidently a deeper and 
 fuller expression of religion as to become, first, 
 
THE UNIFICATION OF RELIGION 235 
 
 the principal, and, at last, the only religion in the 
 world. And this might happen either by the rise 
 of a new religion or by the development of an 
 old one. Such a Catholicism would, therefore, be 
 the result, not of any sort of reunion, or cessation 
 of inevitable rivalry, but of a world-old conflict, 
 ending in the survival of the fittest. 
 
 Looking back on the history of religion, nothing 
 is more improbable. If induction be worth any- 
 thing, we may be sure that things will be as they 
 have always been, and that dissension will ever be 
 the law of the religious world. 
 
 Yet we cannot deny that new factors, new situ- 
 ations, may interfere to modify the uniformities of 
 the past. All our laws suppose constant con- 
 ditions ; but we live now under many conditions 
 that did not obtain in earlier times. Nations, 
 continents and the whole world are drawn closer 
 together than ever before by commerce, by means 
 of communication, by scientific truth. All former 
 civilisations perished ; but ours can hardly perish. 
 It is too widespread, too amply and deeply re- 
 corded, to be more than locally obliterated. Its 
 utilities are too manifold and evident to be aban- 
 doned. If it perished in Europe it would live on 
 in America, and spread thence over the whole 
 world. No former civilisation had any such 
 position of vantage. It is abstractly conceivable 
 
236 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 that the history of religions might have a similar 
 ending; that some one religion might at last 
 prevail and abide. 
 
 What has given our civilisation its advantage 
 and promise of duration is its grasp of the laws 
 of nature and of life. Our control of nature 
 depends upon our understanding of her uniform- 
 ities, on our ability to anticipate experience, to be 
 prepared against surprise. Truth is just the 
 correct anticipation of experience. In every 
 civilisation man seeks a passage to a wide ocean 
 of free untrammelled life for all. But heretofore 
 his way has ever been blocked at the last. Now 
 he seems to have found the main. Heaven knows 
 he has not found bliss; but, at most, freedom 
 to search for alleviations of his misery. Dis- 
 coveries, like speech, writing, printing, steam, 
 electricity, are acquisitions for everywhere and 
 for ever ; and our civilisation rests on a whole 
 multitude of these discoveries. Man's life, his 
 pleasures and pains, are, henceforth and for ever, 
 on a larger and swiftly growing scale — one that 
 bids fair to exhaust his nervous capacity and 
 hasten his extinction, since he cannot turn back. 
 
 May we not then conjecture that a relatively 
 universal and permanent religion would be one 
 that rested on a knowledge of the laws and 
 uniformities revealed by a comparative study of 
 
THE UNIFICATION OF RELIGION 237 
 
 religions and a study of religious psychology? 
 that it would be, in some reserved sense, a scien- 
 tific religion? Catholicism is the characteristic 
 of science as it is of truth. Science is not local 
 but cosmopolitan — the same for the American, the 
 Hindu, the Hottentot. 
 
 Now we know that the eighteenth century 
 witnessed an attempt to rationalise religion and 
 render it independent of faith and revelation ; to 
 substitute so-called natural for supernatural the- 
 ology; to show that the existence of one God and 
 the immortality of the soul were dictates of human 
 reason and, as such, formed the substance of 
 universal religion. This idea was, no doubt, a 
 legacy of scholastic theology, purified of its re- 
 vealed elements. It took no account of the 
 history of religions; made no study of specific- 
 ally religious experience. It was the a priori 
 construction of a philosophical intellectualism, 
 that is now practically obsolete. If "scientific" 
 means suggested and controlled by experience, 
 nothing could be less " scientific " than the religion 
 of the Encyclopaedists ; nothing less Catholic than 
 the philosophy on which it was built. It was just 
 scholastic theodicy with the supernatural omitted. 
 Hence its marble coldness, its inability to make 
 any sort of appeal to religious feeling. It had 
 not sprung from the heart and could not speak to 
 
238 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 the heart. In England it produced an Evangelical 
 and Catholic reaction ; from rational theology and 
 rational ethics men sought warmth and colour and 
 life in sentimentalism, mysticism, sacramentalism. 
 
 It is easy for us now to see how this ration- 
 alising attempt failed and must have failed ; but 
 we should respect its attempt to discover a religion 
 that should be Catholic and true for all men 
 alike and at all times. The attempt failed be- 
 cause it was thoroughly unscientific, based on a 
 metaphysic spun out of an analysis of concepts, 
 and not suggested and controlled at every step by 
 experience. It took no account of any religion 
 but Christianity, and it treated Christianity as a 
 theology not as a life. 
 
 Since then the historical and comparative 
 method has asserted and proved its value, and, 
 together with a practically new psychology, has 
 rendered possible a true science of religious 
 phenomena. Enough has been done to assure us 
 that much more can be done to understand the 
 uniformities that control this department of in- 
 dividual and collective life, and to determine 
 what is normal and what abnormal, what is 
 progressive and what decadent. If an analogous 
 knowledge enables us to diagnose and cure the 
 ailments of the body or the ills of society, may we 
 not hope to remedy those of religion ? We can no 
 
THE UNIFICATION OF RELIGION 239 
 
 more create religion than we can create life, or by- 
 taking thought add one cubit to our stature. But 
 we can condition the creation, growth and health 
 of the body, and, in other matters than religion, 
 we can condition the growth of the soul — in both 
 cases through a better and more scientific under- 
 standing of nature's uniformities. Why, then, 
 should it be a profanity to suggest that science 
 may, in like manner, come to the aid of religion ? 
 Is not science from God and for God ? 
 
 If we trace from its origin the history of certain 
 tracts and departments of human experience that 
 are now fertilised and regulated by their corre- 
 sponding sciences, we shall find that, after long 
 centuries of confusion and groping, they have, at 
 last, been rationalised by some discovery or fertilis- 
 ing hypothesis, which has given them objective and 
 universal validity. In their chaotic, pre-scientific 
 stage their characteristics have been just those 
 of religion, as we see it now all round us. 
 
 Though it is yet far from exactitude and universal 
 validity, the art and science of Medicine offers the 
 closest parallel to religion in many ways, as dealing 
 with a general and permanent need of humanity. In 
 its pre-scientific stage it is absolutely chaotic in 
 its diagnoses and prescriptions — a wilderness of 
 fables and superstitions, as various as the vagaries 
 of the human imagination. There is at most the 
 
2 4 o CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 unity, so to speak, of its idea. It looks to that 
 adjustment which we call health ; it seeks the 
 causes and cures of disease ; it professes to pro- 
 ceed experimentally or empirically; it justifies 
 itself by its fruitfulness. But it has no idea of 
 what experiment really means, or of the con- 
 ditions of a valid induction. It imputes ailments 
 to mystical or purely fanciful causes, on the 
 grounds of some merely subjective association 
 of ideas. In the same way it devises fanciful 
 cures, that may often cure by mere suggestion. 
 Herbs that resemble a part of the body are good 
 for that part. A disease is a devil that must be 
 exorcised ; an emetic throws him out, and, if the 
 emetic be beneficial, it is because the devil has 
 departed. Obviously this sort of aetiology will 
 not hold good for any two tribes, let alone for the 
 . whole world. The progress of thought consists in 
 gradually separating the series of objective, and 
 universally valid, from that of subjective, experi- 
 ences. In the measure that their confusion pre- 
 vails, man is, to all intents and purposes, mad ; and 
 it is this note of insanity that characterises 
 medicine and religion in their early stages. 
 Dreams and reality are mixed up; subjective 
 connections are objectified. 
 
 For the simple needs of an almost animal life 
 imaginative associations are practically enough, 
 
THE UNIFICATION OF RELIGION 241 
 
 without any attempt at systematic understanding 
 and logical inference. But understanding is there, 
 untrained and unskilled, interfering with purely 
 animal psychology, and producing the wildest con- 
 fusion in its clumsy quest of order, as we see in 
 the whole history of magic, tokens and taboos. It 
 is already beginning to separate subjective from 
 objective, and to search for that truth of which the 
 animal imagination has no need. Not till man 
 seeks to distinguish subjective from objective, 
 does he fall into the madness of confounding one 
 with the other. Yet it is from this ever-flowing 
 stream of wild hypotheses and conjectures that 
 useful, and objectively valid, discoveries are 
 selected. 
 
 In Psyche's Task J. G. Frazer shows how govern- 
 ment, marriage and the right of property were 
 products of delirium, justified later by their un- 
 suspected social utility. Chance has had much to 
 do with our greatest inventions. The inventive 
 man is one with a rich imagination and active 
 intelligence, who makes ten thousand hypotheses, 
 of which some one or two are bound to be 
 fruitful. 
 
 If, then, mental progress consists in the cultiva- 
 tion of tracts of reason in a boundless wilderness 
 of delirium, it need not surprise us that man's 
 earlier efforts, compared with our own attain- 
 
 R 
 
242 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 ments, should seem capricious, fanciful and in- 
 coherent. Even to-day the diversities of medical 
 opinion and practice are enough to show that the 
 science is yet far removed from unification and 
 general validity. But we now recognise the need 
 and possibility of this unification, and we know 
 the methods by which it can be continually ap- 
 proached. The complexity of the subject-matter, 
 together with the conservatism of patients and 
 practitioners, offer an obstruction from which 
 astronomy, chemistry, electricity and such sciences 
 are free. But already Medicine has passed from 
 its chaotic and subjective to its objective and 
 rational stage ; and its Catholicism is in view. 
 
 Again, in early Medicine, personal authority 
 exercises an exaggerated influence and takes the 
 place of intrinsic arguments. Schools centre 
 round names rather than round systems or theo- 
 ries. Even so late as in Burton's Anatomy of 
 Melancholy we see the enormous part played by 
 faith, by the authority of great names. A dogma 
 is just the ipse dixit of a great teacher; it is 
 imposed in the name of his prestige. To question 
 it were insolence. No one questions the educa- 
 tional and manuductory value of such dogmatism 
 within due limits. Pass those limits and it be- 
 comes a hindrance. The arrogance of doctors 
 and teachers has been one of the greatest obstacles 
 
THE UNIFICATION OF RELIGION 243 
 
 to human progress ; few men can withstand the 
 corrupting influence of unlimited trust. Credu- 
 lity in the listeners breeds untruthfulness in the 
 speaker. A good deal of our truthfulness is due 
 to the fear of being found out and losing our credit. 
 When travelling was rare, a traveller's tale or a 
 sailor's yarn was synonymous with a tissue of 
 exaggerations and inventions. The teacher who 
 professes to draw his information from sources 
 inaccessible to his public, such as private revela- 
 tions or special faculties of divination, or from 
 regions visited by himself alone, will be more than 
 human if he do not grow indifferent to truth ; if 
 he do not state as probable what is only possible, 
 and as certain what is only probable ; if he do not 
 bolster up loose with still looser assertions. There 
 is something worse than deliberate lying, and that 
 is the habit of gratuitous assertion ; of saying, not 
 what we know to be untrue, but what we do not 
 know to be true. Nine-tenths of our untruthful- 
 ness is of this sort ; and it is fostered by the cre- 
 dulity or the indifference of our hearers. 
 
 Both truth and truthfulness are late social 
 developments, and suppose a clear idea of the 
 difference between the subjective and the objective 
 series of phenomena. Primitive men, like very 
 young children, are hardly capable of formal and 
 conscious lying. They give out, as of equal value, 
 
244 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 what they have seen and what they have imagined. 
 And in some measure the savage survives in us all. 
 
 When men are trusted without limit, when they 
 profess to draw their knowledge from esoteric 
 sources, when their inaccuracies cannot be checked 
 or their information verified, when, in short, they 
 are placed in primitive conditions, their primitive 
 nature comes out, and the whole weight of their 
 authority is lent to the obstruction of truth and 
 the multiplication of error. 
 
 Not till men are drawn together from all quarters 
 to compare notes is their trust in personal authority 
 shaken by the hopeless inconsistency of its utter- 
 ances. Not till medicine and other sciences passed 
 from the sway of personal authority, and began to 
 draw their knowledge from sources accessible to 
 all ; not till their professors were exposed to criti- 
 cism and detection, did those sciences become 
 unified, objective and catholic. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS 
 
 OUR experience in the realm of profane 
 science has given us an ideal of unification 
 and Catholicism. We cannot help desiring that 
 religion should be redeemed from chaos to order ; 
 that so universal a need should be met with an 
 universally valid response. In medicine we do 
 not look for a panacea for all diseases, each 
 disease has its own remedy. But we look for a 
 science that shall govern the diagnosis and remedy 
 of every disease ; and that science must be one 
 and universal. In the same way we feel that 
 religion should be one, but we have not got 
 beyond the desire for unity. Religion is still 
 multitudinous, chaotic and capricious ; still mainly 
 under the sway of personal authority. We are 
 only gathering the materials for an induction, and 
 hazarding vague and premature hypotheses. The 
 subject-matter is complex, not only on account 
 of its vastness but by reason of its subtlety. We 
 can get at the structure and workings of the body 
 with our senses and instruments; not at those of 
 245 
 
246 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 the soul. What is deepest in our nature is last to 
 be unearthed. Psychology and metaphysic are 
 the most backward of sciences ; man has ever 
 been curious about them, but his curiosity has 
 been futile. Again, man's affections and interests 
 interfere with freedom of religious inquiry as with 
 no other matter. Religion usually claims super- 
 natural authority. Its gods are jealous gods ; its 
 priests, jealous priests. It is rooted in the customs, 
 traditions, fears and hopes of the people. In its 
 spiritual and moral phase it becomes exclusive on 
 principle, and each form claims the universality and 
 perpetuity of truth and justice. Moreover, those 
 whose personal religious experiences have been 
 associated with a given system cling to that 
 system en bloc, neither distinguishing occasions 
 from causes, nor the causative element from other 
 elements of the system. If a mixture A.B.C.D. 
 has cured them, they will have nothing to do with 
 D.E.F.G., though D. may have been just the one 
 element that mattered. Hence they cling to the 
 whole system in the name of conscience and 
 personal religious experience. It is not wonder- 
 ful, then, that the unification of religion should 
 seem the remotest and least probable of con- 
 tingencies. 
 
 Yet what brings it within the field of the pos- 
 sible is the growing recognition of the universality 
 
THE SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS 247 
 
 and perpetuity of man's religious need and of 
 his effort to satisfy it ; of an important tract of 
 normal experience that has not yet been brought 
 into order with the rest of man's experience and 
 that, in its wild state, is as fruitful of evil as, were 
 it cultivated, it might be of good. 
 
 The notion that religion is a disease of man's 
 intellectual childhood, something that he throws 
 off with his bibs and tuckers, is being rapidly 
 discredited. It still governs some of the leaders 
 in the new science of religions, who are hasty 
 to generalise, instead of collecting the materials 
 and perfecting the methods of a successful in- 
 duction. According to them, the end of such a 
 science is to prove religions a delusion. It is 
 rather a history of follies and fallacies, whose 
 practical end is to deliver us from so disastrous a 
 superstition. This view is, no doubt, favoured by 
 the obvious aspect of primitive religions, and by 
 the survival of their forms and categories in later 
 religions, down to the present time. It was 
 ghost-worship at the beginning, it must be a dis- 
 guised ghost-worship at the end. The stream 
 cannot rise above its source. 
 
 This might be more plausible did we not dis- 
 tinguish between magical religion on the one 
 hand and moral and spiritual religion on the 
 other. What is continuous, is the form, not the 
 
248 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 substance. Magical religion is the ancestor of 
 science ; shall we say, therefore, that science is but 
 disguised magic? Man's earliest gods were but 
 the powers of nature conceived personally, 
 which man strove to manage in the interests of 
 his temporal life, and sometimes of its prolonga- 
 tion in the post-mortem world of dreams. The 
 ancestry of spiritual religion is to be sought in 
 the beginnings of man's moral sense. When he 
 comes to recognise Righteousness as the supreme 
 power and law of the universe and of his own 
 life, he strips his idols bare, and transfers the para- 
 phernalia of religious worship to that supreme 
 spiritual power. On the other hand, his growing 
 interpretation of nature dispenses gradually with 
 personified agencies, and science emerges from its 
 religious wrappings. Thus the two streams of 
 development cross one another and, at the point 
 of intersection, morality steps into the clothes of 
 magical religion and science steps out of them. 
 This, of course, is a logical schematisation but, 
 in the rough, it corresponds to history. 
 
 Religion then, in its magical stage, stood for 
 the beginnings of man's scientific effort, his search 
 for the knowledge and control of the phenomena 
 of nature. In its spiritual stage it stands for a 
 development of his moral effort and an expansion 
 of his whole spiritual interest — moral, intellectual 
 
THE SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS 249 
 
 and affective, — of his supra-individual and universal 
 selfhood. The study of religions is, therefore, not 
 a study of illusions, but of the process by which 
 truth struggles through darkness into light. No 
 doubt magical religion belongs to man's childhood 
 and must be discarded in his maturity. But we 
 do ill to treat it as delirium. It was the lowly 
 beginning of something great. The embryo of 
 a man is grotesque and at first not distinguishable 
 outwardly from that of a rabbit, but, judged by 
 what comes out of it, it has an immeasurable 
 interest and worth. 
 
 Again, spiritual religion, far from being out- 
 grown like a toy, becomes more and more of an 
 exigency with the deepening of man's moral and 
 spiritual life and of his inevitable discontent with 
 what this life offers or can ever possibly offer. 
 He wants something different in kind, an imperish- 
 able bread. This want is dulled by his engross- 
 ment in the rush of material progress; but obtrudes 
 itself with the growth of his moral ideals and his 
 sense of their unattainableness. Man's spiritual 
 and moral growth leads straight to a pessimism 
 that only religion can cure. Spiritual religion is 
 a demand of his age and grey hairs, not of his 
 babyhood. 
 
 The science of religion, therefore, has for its 
 object, not ravings and rubbish, but the highest 
 
2S0 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 life of man's soul ; his quest for the true, the 
 good and the fair, and for God Who is their 
 synthesis. It can no more create such life than 
 medicine can create that of the body; but it 
 can determine its laws, condition its fertility, and 
 criticise its developments to a great extent. It 
 can discover the unity that underlies its multiplicity. 
 We are far from such a consummation, but we 
 have no reason to despair of it. 
 
 Now the unity and catholicity of the science 
 of religions is a very different thing from the 
 unity and catholicity of religion. This, as we 
 have ventured to suggest, can only result from the 
 survival of some one form in virtue of its over- 
 whelming advantages ; not from a levelling-down 
 process, nor from a return to a common point of 
 divergence with a cancelling of all the labours 
 of development. If our civilisation has become 
 cosmopolitan and perpetual through its knowledge 
 of the laws of life and nature, a like knowledge 
 of the laws of religious life, social and individual, 
 might give the same overwhelming advantage to 
 some one religion. This would not mean finality, 
 but the right direction of the course of develop- 
 ment ; the discovery of a free and open road, 
 after many vain excursions up blind alleys. It 
 ought to be possible, from a study of the origin, 
 growth and decay of various religions, to deter- 
 
THE SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS 251 
 
 mine the laws of religion in general, to find a 
 criterion and a method by which its life may be 
 indefinitely prolonged and expanded. 
 
 Should such a science, in the course of time, 
 shape itself out of the present historical and 
 psychological study of existing and bygone re- 
 ligions, it could not fail to exert a powerful in- 
 fluence on the various living embodiments of the 
 religious idea; of which none could long survive 
 which was known to defy the laws of its life. 
 Civilisations that were unable to adapt themselves 
 to the light of history and science have yielded 
 before those systems that are more intelligent and 
 adaptable, and that tend to become catholic and 
 perpetual. And so with any idea as it comes to 
 be, no longer merely felt and gropingly followed, 
 but clearly understood. The first attempts to 
 understand it result in a half-understanding or 
 misunderstanding, which is often obstructive of its 
 spontaneous and instinctive self-unfolding. Yet 
 this immediate loss prepares an eventual gain. 
 False political and economic theories have led the 
 way to truth, at the cost of much evil that instinct 
 and common sense would have avoided. Bad 
 theologies have checked the spontaneous growth 
 of religions ; but the theological attempt must fail 
 and do harm, before it can succeed and do good. 
 
IV 
 CHARACTER OF AN UNIVERSAL RELIGION 
 
 NOW by the science of mechanics we can 
 create machines ; but by a science of re- 
 ligion we could no more create a religion than we 
 could create life by the science of biology. Yet 
 what we cannot create, we can condition ; and so 
 far the science of religion may have immense 
 practical value. There have been and may yet be 
 new religious institutions ; but there has not been 
 and never can be a new religion, any more than a 
 new language. Each is a bifurcation of some 
 branch that is itself a bifurcation ; and all can 
 trace their origin to a common stem that has 
 grown out of a root-idea — the idea of religion. 
 However strange the new differentiating ele- 
 ments may be, yet they are united under cate- 
 gories inherited from the past and belong to the 
 general process. We cannot, then, expect a new 
 religion, but only a religion renovated and trans- 
 formed by knowledge and understanding. And 
 that renovation will be easiest for the system 
 which has spontaneously and empirically realised 
 252 
 
CHARACTER OF AN UNIVERSAL RELIGION 253 
 
 most of the conditions of a true Catholicism. For 
 others it will be more difficult or even quite 
 impossible. 
 
 We have already rejected the notion of any sort 
 of organic unity between the various forms of 
 religion, as though they complemented one another, 
 and constituted, when taken together, one full and 
 connected expression of the religious idea. It is 
 true that some are rich where others are poor ; 
 that we gain from all a fuller idea of religion than 
 from any one, just as we gain a fuller idea of life 
 from the whole animal kingdom than from man 
 alone — microcosm though he be. Yet their unity 
 is only logical. They are exclusive and hostile, 
 rather than complementary. In each, religion 
 strives to realise, not a part but the whole of her 
 nature, within the given conditions of possibility. 
 But in some few she succeeds far more amply ; 
 and these, in a limited sense, are her microcosms, 
 embracing in a higher synthesis the advantages of 
 many others, though not of all. 
 
 Now it is these microcosmic religions, which 
 have already attained a certain relative catholicity, 
 that are most capable of assimilating and profit- 
 ing by the laws of religion, should these ever be- 
 established by historical and psychological science. 
 It is easier to lop off excrescences and spurious 
 developments than to take on characteristics that 
 
254 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 are real only when they have grown out of a 
 remote past, and that may be excluded by the 
 very constitution of the religion in question. Thus 
 Lutheranism is a development, not of Catholicism 
 from which it is a departure, but of certain 
 elements of Catholicism ; Liberal Protestantism 
 is a development of certain elements of Luther- 
 anism. At the first rending, when the wound 
 was raw, the rejected elements might have been 
 reassumed. But when the accepted elements were 
 developed apart from the others and became a 
 completed organism, rounded off and exclusive, 
 no such restoration as this was possible. So, by 
 their very formation and history, many religions 
 exclude the possibility of Catholicity. They have 
 cut off too much and cannot take it on again. 
 
 It seems to me, then, that true Catholicism 
 is more likely to be realised in one of the older, 
 wider, more chaotic, more spontaneous religions, 
 than in any of those more plausible simplifi- 
 cations, which are shaped by a premature and 
 somewhat a priori conception of what religion is 
 and ought to be. Its chaos may contain more than 
 is needed for the cosmos of law and order, but it 
 is less likely to run short of the required elements. 
 
 Especially does this seem to be the case with 
 Catholic Christianity, which is more nearly a mi- 
 crocosm of the world of religions than any other 
 
CHARACTER OF AN UNIVERSAL RELIGION 255 
 
 known form ; where we find nearly every form 
 of religious expression, from the lowest to the 
 highest, pressed together and straining towards 
 unification and coherence ; where the ideal of 
 universal and perpetual validity has ever been an 
 explicit aim ; where, moreover, this ideal is 
 clothed in a form that cannot possibly endure the 
 test of history and science and must undergo 
 some transformation. 
 
 Now the reasons for this hope I have already 
 given, in outline, in the opening chapters of 
 Through Scylla and Charybdis, and it is not 
 necessary to enlarge upon them here. Moreover, 
 in the earlier part of this volume, I have given my 
 reasons for believing that Catholicism is in sub- 
 stance, and to a large extent even in form, true to 
 the idea of Jesus ; that it develops the whole of 
 that idea, and not merely certain elements of it. 
 Catholicism preserves not only the ethical teaching 
 of Jesus and His insistence on inwardness, but 
 likewise His outwardness, His supernaturalism, 
 His belief and hope in the other world, His sacra- 
 mentalism and so forth. I do not say that all is 
 development and that nothing is mere accretion or 
 impurity ; I say only that no essential element has 
 been dropped. Other forms of religion have taken 
 some of these elements and have developed them 
 apart. This has not been without advantage for the 
 
256 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 elements in question which, in Catholicism, have 
 had to wait on the growth of the whole idea to 
 which they belong. It is easy to show that the 
 sects have a better appreciation of this or that 
 feature of Christianity than has the Church. But 
 perhaps they have it at the cost of a false simplifica- 
 tion and an impoverishment of the Christian idea. 
 
 I need only indicate here what seem to me to be 
 quite objective and impersonal reasons for regarding 
 Christianity as the highest spontaneous develop- 
 ment of the religious Idea and, therefore, the 
 religion most capable of reflective development, in 
 the light of a science of religion gleaned from 
 historical and psychological investigation, i.e. most 
 capable of becoming as catholic and perpetual as 
 that science. 1 
 
 We have defined religion as being, practically, 
 the adjustment of our conduct to a transcendent 
 world. Such adjustment supposes that the tran- 
 scendent is, in some way, revealed and felt as inter- 
 fering with ordinary experience. The crooked 
 tree, the oddly shaped stone, the thunderstorm, the 
 earthquake, prior to any sort of reflection, created 
 a feeling of wonder and fear, which suggested the 
 thought of an unseen, incalculable and, possibly, 
 
 1 In this I am following, with certain modifications, the line of 
 thought suggested by Th. Steinmann's admirable work, Die geistige 
 Offenbarung Gottes in der geschichtlichen Person Jesu (Vanden- 
 hoech and Ruprecht, Gottingen, 1903). 
 
CHARACTER OF AN UNIVERSAL RELIGION 257 
 
 malign, power, to be appeased and propitiated. 
 The first notions of the transcendent, its self- 
 revelation and its propitiation, are materialistic, 
 gross, entirely unethical and unspiritual. Man 
 ignorantly worships the powers of nature, not a 
 power above nature. If, at this stage, he also 
 ignorantly worships the true God, it is in so far 
 as he renders disinterested homage to the first 
 whispers of his undeveloped conscience. His 
 religion is but the servant of his temporal 
 necessities ; a means not an end. Such religions 
 are formless and multitudinous. 
 
 Later, when he is civilised, we encounter tribal 
 and state religions, whose gods are practically in 
 the service of the collectivity. They sanction, with 
 rewards and penalties, the customs and laws of the 
 tribe, they go forth with its armies, they watch over 
 all its temporal interests ; all this in return for 
 certain sacrifices and services. In the measure that 
 the gods are exalted and that laws and customs 
 are held to have been revealed by them and to be 
 the expression of their will, religion begins to 
 claim a certain independence and superiority over 
 the people. They are God's people, if not actually 
 His sons and descendants. They serve His will, 
 rather than He theirs. If they offend Him He will 
 cast them off. His attitude towards them is re- 
 vealed in their prosperity or calamity. Ii things 
 
258 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 go wrong, someone has sinned and must suffer. 
 As laws and customs become less arbitrary, more 
 just and reasonable, God's will is what is just and 
 reasonable ; He is a God of Righteousness. Ethics 
 take over the paraphernalia of religion, which 
 becomes a service of the righteous and true God 
 by righteousness and truth. 
 
 At this stage religion sits in judgment on the 
 state itself. We must obey God rather than men. 
 But God is still an outside Power revealed in out- 
 side wonders, in rewards and chastisements, and 
 served by external deeds and abstentions. He is 
 the just Ruler and Judge of all the earth, but not 
 yet a ruler of hearts and thoughts and desires. 
 This comes with a further deepening of the moral 
 sense ; with the perception that inward principles 
 and virtues are more important than those out- 
 ward fruits, which can be imitated, that God 
 searches the heart and the reins, that Goodness 
 and Righteousness, in a word, are inward and not 
 outward. 
 
 But even so God is an external, though heart- 
 reading, Judge and reveals Himself by external 
 interferences ; by a miraculous book, by spoken 
 oracles, by inspired teachers and law-givers. The 
 principles of righteousness are imparted from with- 
 out and accepted by faith in, and obedience to, an 
 external teacher. The believer is in a state of 
 
CHARACTER OF AN UNIVERSAL RELIGION 259 
 
 tutelage, as an art student whose work is still 
 imitative, and not creative or original ; who is 
 acquiring the spirit through obedience to the 
 letter. 
 
 Through such an obedience, such an application 
 of principles taken on trust, the spirit of art or 
 of morality or of religion, which precedes all rules 
 and principles as their source, is wakened to self- 
 consciousness, and recognises its kinship with that 
 spirit which is striving to express itself in the 
 historical process of art, science, morality and 
 religion. It recognises that the whole process is 
 due to the same spirit, striving to realise itself in 
 each individual through the medium of human 
 society and tradition ; striving to make the life of 
 each man a divine and universal life, governed by 
 a sympathy with the Divine Will and work in the 
 whole process of history ; in such sort that each 
 shall become an instrument or organ of the Divine 
 action, and take the whole world into himself as 
 his own concern. Man is then no longer a servant 
 or imitator of the Divine Will, but a son of God, 
 a free and original co-operator in the Divine work. 
 He is not the slave, but the master of the letter, 
 which he respects so far as it is the utterance of 
 the spirit by which he is governed. Now it is no 
 longer from without, but from within, that God 
 reveals Himself as a mysterious, transcendent 
 
26o CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 force, counteracting and interfering with the 
 natural order of events, overcoming the forces of 
 egoism and individualism, and, through the action 
 of spiritual personalities, interfering with the course 
 of history as shaped by natural, self-centred man. 
 
 In the first stirrings of primitive conscience man 
 is already solicited, as by an unknown God, to 
 embrace the life of the spirit ; to live for an uni- 
 versal and disinterested Good. At the end of the 
 religious process he explicitly recognises this in- 
 ward principle as the Divine Spirit, the condition 
 and foundation of his personality. For what is 
 personality if not that which is divine in man, 
 that which makes him master of the determinism of 
 nature of which he is at first the slave ? — " Thou 
 hast made him but little lower than God. Thou 
 hast put all things under his feet." And to the 
 fulness of this personality he can only attain by 
 identifying himself with that indwelling Spirit 
 which is transcendent over nature. 
 
THE RELIGION AND PERSONALITY OF 
 JESUS 
 
 THERE is a lower mysticism that is content 
 to wrest the soul from the tyranny of the 
 external by ascetical self-isolation, by forgetting 
 the world and the historical process, in which the 
 Divine Will reveals itself; that lives for rare 
 moments of almost sensible contact with the in- 
 dwelling Divinity. However. narrowly indifferent 
 to ethics, science and history, this mysticism 
 emphasises one-sidedly the great truth that con- 
 scious union with God is the fullest realisation of 
 humanity, the secret of that personality which sets 
 man above nature. But it fails to recognise that 
 this means union with a Will that is at work in 
 the whole process of history and in every human 
 soul. It is, as it were, a form without content. 
 
 Not such was the mysticism of Jesus that, in 
 embracing God, embraced the whole world and all 
 its spiritual interests— -truth of feeling, truth of 
 conduct, truth of knowledge ; that forced Him into 
 conflict with evil, reckless of reward or success, by 
 the mere impetus, the imperative necessity of the 
 
 261 
 
262 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Divine Nature — " driven by the Spirit." " A new 
 creature," a spirit, a personality, a Son of God — 
 this is the full fruit of Christian Mysticism. 
 
 Jesus did not despise or turn away from the 
 law of God, or the temple of God, in putting 
 above both the Spirit that had created them and 
 had revealed itself through them — as it were 
 through sacraments and beggarly elements. At 
 most He desired to supplement and fulfil the 
 necessarily ever-imperfect expressions of the spirit ; 
 to push the letter down to its proper place of sub- 
 ordination and instrumentality; to carry religion 
 to its final phase ; to deny the static immutability 
 and perpetuity of the external embodiment of the 
 spirit, and to make it a living and growing organism. 
 
 When He opposes " But I say unto you," to 
 " Moses said unto you," it is plain that He regards 
 Himself as the Spirit incarnate, possessed of a 
 human frame and soul, and uttering itself within 
 all the natural limitations of local thought and 
 language. It was through Him that Moses had 
 spoken ; what Moses had, He was. S. Paul is 
 a true interpreter when he identifies Christ with 
 the Spirit; when he speaks of the indwelling 
 of the Spirit as the indwelling of Christ. So 
 mastered and enslaved by the Spirit was Jesus, 
 that His life was simply the life of the Spirit ; His 
 words the words of the Spirit. Against the Spirit 
 
RELIGION AND PERSONALITY OF JESUS 263 
 
 He had no freedom, but only within the limits of 
 the Spirit. If He could not sin it was because the 
 Spirit cannot sin. 
 
 In this sense we can deny Him a human person- 
 ality. Man can progressively subject himself to 
 the Spirit, but with the liberty of rebellion. He is 
 not overmastered by it in spite of himself. But 
 the personality, the " I," that speaks and acts in 
 Jesus,is the Spirit, though it speaks and acts through 
 the limitations of a human organism. It is the 
 Spirit made man. The Word which enlightens 
 every man is made flesh ; what works within us 
 stands before us, to be seen and heard and handled. 
 In Him we have seen the Father — not in His 
 fulness, but so far as God is inclusively the ideal 
 image of man ; so far as God reveals man to him- 
 self in a Divine Humanity. He comes, so to say, 
 and lives our life Himself. 
 
 Thus it was that, for Christianity, Jesus and the 
 Spirit became interchangeable terms ; that the 
 birth of the Spirit in man's soul became a birth 
 and indwelling of Jesus. The inevitable anthro- 
 pomorphism of man's conceptions of the Divine 
 received a sanction : 
 
 "So, through the thunder, comes a human voice, 
 Saying : O heart I made, a Heart beats here." 
 
 " My little children," says Paul, '' of whom I am 
 again in travail until Christ be born in you" — all the 
 
264 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 instructions, precepts and exhortations of the Chris- 
 tian religion fall short of their purpose if they but 
 make a man an obedient imitator of Christ, as it 
 were of the first founder and example of a new 
 religious system ; if they do not evoke that Spirit 
 which was incarnate in Jesus, and therefore is 
 Jesus. Jesus was not merely a revealed ideal of 
 human personality, but a forceful, living, self- 
 communicating ideal ; a fire spreading itself from 
 soul to soul. It is only personality that works on 
 personality. We can take precepts and instruc- 
 tion impersonally ; we can obey and follow them 
 and build them into the structure of our mental 
 and moral habits. But we can sometimes appre- 
 hend the whole spirit and personality of a man 
 through his words and acts and manner. We 
 can feel him as an overwhelming personal influ- 
 ence ; we can catch the concrete living spirit from 
 the broken letters and words in which it utters 
 itself. We can feel him living in us as a master- 
 ful force. We know his way and his will in a 
 manner that no instruction could ever impart. 
 
 This it is that distinguishes Christianity from 
 the following of a teacher or prophet. It teaches 
 the precepts of Christ as a means to a birth of 
 Christ in the soul — to the constitution of a divine 
 personality within us ; of a spirit that shall super- 
 sede all law and precept, as itself the source and 
 
RELIGION AND PERSONALITY OF JESUS 265 
 
 the end of all law. Jesus Himself was the great 
 sacrament and effectual symbol of the Divine 
 Life and Spirit. He worked on His disciples, not 
 doctrinally as a teacher of the understanding, but 
 with all the force of a divine and mysterious 
 personal ascendency, transmitted through every 
 word and gesture. He was not a prophet speaking 
 in the name of the Spirit, but the Spirit itself in 
 human form. He spoke as only conscience can 
 speak. Men heard and obeyed, they knew not 
 why. He entered into their souls and possessed 
 them and shaped them to His own image and 
 likeness. When He left them externally, He was 
 still with them internally. Conscience took shape 
 and it was the shape of Jesus. Struck down by 
 conscience Paul cries : " Who art thou, Lord ? " 
 and the revealing answer comes : " I am Jesus, 
 whom thou persecutest." To this he refers when 
 he says it was the good pleasure of God " to reveal 
 His Son in me; I live, and yet no longer I, but 
 Christ liveth in me!' In what other religion do men 
 so speak of their founder, however loved and revered 
 and followed ? Personality is the end, and personal- 
 ity, mediated no doubt through external signs and 
 symbols, is the means. Fire is kindled from fire. 
 The Spirit of Jesus uttered in the Church, in the 
 Gospel, in the sacraments, is apprehended by 
 His followers, not as a doctrine but as a personal 
 
266 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 influence, fashioning the soul to its own divine 
 nature. 
 
 It is impossible for spirit or personality to find 
 adequate expression in terms of another order of 
 experience. It is by a sort of internal sympathy 
 that we read the personality of another out of the 
 meagre shorthand of words and acts and gestures, 
 and only so far as we are latently capable of 
 realising a similar personality in ourselves. The 
 vehicles and sacramental symbols, through which 
 the Spirit communicates itself, are no part of the 
 Spirit. The human frame and mind of Jesus, 
 His local and temporal limitations of thought 
 and knowledge, were but the sacramental elements 
 through which the influence of His Divine Spirit 
 was mediated. To our age He would have spoken 
 differently, but the spirit would have been the 
 same. A great artist, who makes the most of the 
 poor materials and methods to hand, can reveal his 
 spirit to a sympathetic apprehension as well as in 
 a richer language ; it is the spirit that quickens, 
 the flesh profiteth nothing. The material imita- 
 tion of the historical Christ tends to extinguish 
 His Spirit. In us Christ, the Spirit, lives and 
 utters Himself in the ever-changing forms of 
 thought and language. In this sense S. Paul says 
 that, if we have known Christ after the flesh, we 
 shall know Him so no longer, but only after the 
 
RELIGION AND PERSONALITY OF JESUS 267 
 
 spirit as the Heavenly Adam, the Son of Man, 
 the Spirit of God. We have long since out- 
 grown those apocalyptic forms of religious thought 
 in which the Spirit of Jesus first uttered itself as 
 the Son of Man — the Jewish Messiah. But the 
 spirit itself we have not outgrown, and in us it 
 seeks ever new forms wherein to clothe the same 
 revelation. 
 
 This, then, is the special characteristic of Chris- 
 tianity. It does not look back upon Jesus, as a 
 Franciscan might look back on S. Francis, or a 
 Moslem on Mohammed, as being the founder of 
 the society to which he belongs and the first ex- 
 ample of that system of spirituality which has been 
 handed down to him. It looks back on Jesus as 
 being the Divine Spirit revealing itself in human 
 form ; as Himself the revelation of God ; as com- 
 municating, not His ideas or His doctrines, but 
 His very self, His spirit and personality to the soul, 
 through the sacramental power of the Gospel and 
 the Church ; as constituting the salvation of the 
 soul, its communion with God, its eternal life, by 
 His personal indwelling. To be, as it were, 
 " possessed " by Jesus is to be possessed by the 
 Spirit of God. Those who lay hold of Him, 
 who cluster round Him like swarming bees round 
 their queen, become His very members, quickened 
 by that Spirit which He was ; they in Christ and 
 
268 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Christ in them, Christ in God and God in Christ, 
 " that they may be perfected into One." 
 
 This is what we find from cover to cover of the 
 New Testament. If it be more explicit in the 
 Paulo-Johannine writings, it is fully implicit and 
 partly explicit in the synoptic Gospels. This is 
 what we find in the great Christo-Catholic tradi- 
 tion — " Christ in you, the hope of glory " — a quick- 
 ening Spirit, an overwhelming personal influence, 
 killing self and sin by a filial and self-sacrificing 
 love of God, and of all the world as in God and 
 from God and for God. This, too, is what we find 
 in those Protestant bodies that, in breaking with 
 the integrity of the Catholic tradition, have retained 
 its central value, and for whom the name of Jesus 
 is not merely that of a founder and teacher, but of 
 a sacramental, self-communicating personality, to 
 be laid hold of and appropriated ; of One Who 
 reveals Himself in each several soul as He did in 
 the soul of S. Paul ; of One through Whose inter- 
 mediating humanity the soul is united to God. 
 
 This is what we do not find in that Liberal 
 Christianity for which Jesus is to the Christian only 
 what Mohammed is to the Moslem — the founder 
 and teacher of a society, revealing and exemplify- 
 ing a doctrine and method. Hence a philosophic 
 chill, which increases in the measure that criticism 
 puts Jesus back in His own century and surround- 
 
RELIGION AND PERSONALITY OF JESUS 269 
 
 ings, and forbids us to read into His human mind 
 the ideas and presuppositions of our own day, or 
 to see in Him a practicable example of what we 
 now mean by life. 
 
 Those for whom He is a living indwelling spirit, 
 a fire kindling from soul to soul down the long 
 centuries, who see the expression of that spirit, 
 not merely in the mortal life and thoughts of the 
 Galilean carpenter, but in those of His followers 
 who have been possessed by the spiritual and 
 eternal personality of Jesus, have no such trouble 
 in the face of criticism. It is no more to them 
 that He was a first-century Jew in His mental 
 outlook than that He was a man and a carpenter. 
 What they live by is not His human mind but His 
 divine spirit and personality, revealed in conflict 
 with His human limitations and with ours, and 
 with those of all generations to come. Had He 
 spoken the language of the twentieth century, 
 would He be intelligible to the fortieth, were it 
 His language and not His personality that He had 
 to communicate and reveal ? 
 
 Is it any depreciation of the great military 
 geniuses of the past to say that, if suddenly 
 plunged into the midst of a modern engagement, 
 they would be worse than worthless ; that, with- 
 out the requisite knowledge and experience, their 
 genius would be useless ? Yet do we not desider- 
 
270 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 ate that same genius for our own leaders, without 
 which all their knowledge and experience is of no 
 avail? What are the categories and concepts of 
 Jesus to us ? Are we to frame our minds to that 
 of a first-century Jewish carpenter, for whom more 
 than half the world and nearly the whole of its 
 history did not exist ; to whom the stellar universe 
 was unknown ; who cared nothing for art or science 
 or history or politics or nine-tenths of the interests 
 of humanity, but solely for the Kingdom of God 
 and His righteousness? And even in regard to 
 this supreme interest is it His religious ideas, His 
 apocalyptic imagery, that we are to take over, and 
 not rather the spirit of which they were the inade- 
 quate embodiment — the best possible just for that 
 time and place and no other ? Would the military 
 genius of the past tie us down to his weapons and 
 methods of warfare ? Would he not have desired 
 and hoped that every generation should, while 
 retaining his spirit, improve on his methods? 
 And would not such improvements be the work 
 of his own spirit ? 
 
 To demand that Jesus should have had all the 
 knowledge of Solomon is on a par with demand- 
 ing that He should have had all the earthly riches 
 and glory of Solomon. The note of the Gospel is 
 that God has not chosen the great things of this 
 world, but the small ; not the rich, but the poor ; 
 
RELIGION AND PERSONALITY OF JESUS 271 
 
 not the learned, but the simple. The elect of the 
 world are not the elect of the Spirit ; Solomon in 
 all his glory was not arrayed as one of these. 
 Why, if God did not disdain the role of a poor 
 man and a tempted man, should He disdain that 
 of an ignorant man, wherein to reveal the Spirit 
 victorious over the very commonest human limita- 
 tions? It is not from the human mind that He 
 had, but from the Divine Spirit that He was, that 
 man has drawn strength to conquer ignorance and 
 weakness, energy to fight against darkness and 
 wickedness, however costly, however interminable 
 the conflict. To fill us with this Spirit was the 
 mission of Jesus ; not to teach us metaphysics or 
 science or history or ethics or economics. The 
 love of truth, the spirit of truthfulness, is the 
 living root of all mental progress. This the most 
 ignorant man may have and communicate. 
 
 This idea of Jesus as the Divine indwelling and 
 saving Spirit seems to me the very essence of 
 Christianity. Faith in Christ never meant merely 
 faith in a teacher and his doctrine, but an appre- 
 hension of His personality as revealing itself 
 within us. 
 
 There is no special difficulty in admitting that 
 the dawn of a new epoch should be associated with 
 the name of some individual who, however much 
 the product of his time and sensitive to its spirit 
 
272 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 and needs, creates a new synthesis of all he has 
 received, with some new and original contribution 
 of his own. That, after all, is the law of spiritual 
 development. Each spirit is evoked and shaped 
 by the collective spirit of the day and shapes it in 
 turn; as a rule imperceptibly, because in the 
 straight line of its actual development. 
 
 But there come periods when a change of direc- 
 tion or of level is the condition of progress, and 
 such new epochs are associated, whether in art, 
 science, invention, politics or religion, with the 
 name of some individual who, conscious of the 
 impasse, discovers a way out and draws the whole 
 world after him. It is no scandal to us that 
 only those who come within the sphere of that 
 man's influence enjoy the advantages thereof. 
 But it seems intolerable that only those who 
 have heard the name and the teaching of Jesus 
 of Nazareth should attain eternal life ; that two- 
 thirds of present humanity, and nine-tenths or far 
 more of past humanity, should fail of salvation. 
 
 Yet this would follow were the personality that 
 spoke in Jesus that of a man, and not that of the 
 Spirit which speaks to every man in the mysterious 
 whisperings of conscience ; were Jesus not simply 
 the incarnation of conscience, the manifestation of 
 that ideal humanity which conscience is striving 
 to reveal to, and realise in, every human soul. So 
 
RELIGION AND PERSONALITY OF JESUS 273 
 
 He is interpreted in the Paulo- Johannine writings 
 and in Catholic tradition. Because He did not 
 merely possess, but was personally the true Light 
 that enlightens every man, the indwelling Logos 
 or Word of God, He could say : " I am the Way 
 and the Truth and the Life, no one cometh unto 
 the Father but by Me " ; " He that hath the Son 
 hath the life." 
 
 Hence all who are saved are saved through 
 Christ, whose personality is that of the indwelling 
 Spirit. Christianity has but brought the universal 
 principle of salvation to its highest degree of force 
 and explicitness. Conscience, that is first dimly 
 felt as a mysterious influence interfering with 
 and transcending the natural self and its laws, 
 is revealed at last as the Spirit or Personality 
 incarnate in Jesus. 
 
VI 
 THE CHURCH AND ITS FUTURE 
 
 IF Christ be more than a teacher, the Church 
 is more than a school ; if He be more than a 
 founder, the Church is more than an institution — 
 though it is both one and the other. It is not 
 merely related to Him as the Franciscan or Jesuit 
 orders are to S. Francis and S. Ignatius, or the 
 Wesleyans to John Wesley. This difference is 
 well marked in the Pauline writings and belongs 
 to the Catholic tradition. The Franciscan order is 
 not the " mystical body " of S. Francis, however it 
 seek to be imbued with his spirit, by way of imita- 
 tion and by the following of its founder and teacher. 
 It is only by a strained metaphor that S. Francis 
 can be said to live in his true followers. The 
 spirit that lives in them is that which was incarnate 
 in Christ and which dwelt in S. Francis. S. Francis 
 but taught his followers a way to Christ. His 
 work was the work of a prophet. 
 
 But the Church of S. Paul is the mystical body 
 of Christ — an extension of that human frame 
 through which His spirit and personality com- 
 274 
 
THE CHURCH AND ITS FUTURE 275 
 
 municated itself to His disciples, as it were 
 sacramentally, i.e. in the way that a personality 
 makes itself felt, as opposed to the way in which 
 a teacher imparts a doctrine. In both cases signs 
 are necessary ; but in the latter thought speaks 
 to thought, in the former spirit to spirit; in the 
 latter an idea, in the former a force is transmitted. 
 Through the mystical body, animated by the 
 Spirit, we are brought into immediate contact with 
 the ever present Christ. We hear Him in its 
 Gospel, we touch and handle Him in its sacra- 
 ments. He lives on in the Church, not metaphori- 
 cally but actually. He finds a growing medium of 
 self-utterance, ever complementing and correcting 
 that of His mortal individuality. Thus it is 
 through the instrumentality of the Church and its 
 sacraments that His personality is renewed and 
 strengthened in us ; that the force of His spirit is 
 transmitted and felt. The Church is not merely a 
 society or school, but a mystery and sacrament ; 
 like the humanity of Christ of which it is an 
 extension. 
 
 It is just this view of the Church that stands or 
 falls with the Catholic conception of Jesus, as the 
 name of the Divine Spirit acting the role of a 
 man ; and not merely as the name of a man, con- 
 forming himself to the inspirations of that spirit as 
 to those of another personality. Where this belief 
 
276 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 has failed the Church is but a society of the 
 disciples of a bygone prophet, a teacher who 
 taught an age and a mentality that are almost 
 entirely obsolete, whose personality and example 
 grow less and less intelligible and illuminating as 
 he recedes into a remoter past. 
 
 Explain it how we will, it is this conception of 
 the spirit and personality of Jesus as an abiding 
 presence in the Church ; as coming in contact with 
 the soul through her and her sacraments, above all 
 in the mystery of the Holy Communion, which is 
 explicitly the communication of His personality 
 and eternal life — it is this conception that, for the 
 Catholic Christian, makes the Church a sacrament 
 rather than a society ; a sacrament not invalidated 
 by the meanness of the " beggarly elements " 
 through which the Spirit is communicated. 
 
 Illusion though it be to some, it is a great thought, 
 a stimulating belief, that breaks down the barriers 
 of time and place ; makes Jesus present to every 
 soul, not only imaginatively but effectively ; lends 
 His human form and face and voice and name to 
 " the Light which lighteth every man," to the Spirit 
 that reveals itself in the first glimmerings of con- 
 science. Take away this faith in Christ, and 
 Catholicism ceases to be Christian, even though 
 it still reverence Him as a founder, guide and 
 example. Given this faith in Christ, and we have 
 
THE CHURCH AND ITS FUTURE 277 
 
 Christianity even where the integral Catholic tradi- 
 tion is lacking : as in the uncritical Gospel-Chris- 
 tianity of so many of the sects. 
 
 As for so-called Liberal Protestantism, it is hard 
 to see in what sense it can be called Christian. 
 For in no sense was Jesus the originator of that 
 conception of theistic righteousness which He 
 adopted. He was at most an eminent disciple of 
 the best rabbinical piety of His day. He brought 
 it into His teaching and passed it on to His 
 Church. If this doctrine of righteousness consti- 
 tute the sole value to be sifted out of Catholicism, 
 we have a system, not founded, but only trans- 
 mitted, by Christ. It may be an excellent religion 
 but it is not Christianity, either in its end or in its 
 means. It could come to terms more easily with 
 Islam than with Catholic Christianity, and belongs 
 to the same stage of the religious Idea — to the 
 prophetic stage. 
 
 But a religion to be truly Catholic, to be educa- 
 tive of all sorts and conditions of men and of every 
 stage of man's religious progress, must represent 
 every phase of the religious Idea, from the lowest 
 to the highest, and not the highest alone. The 
 process of the race repeats itself in the individual. 
 Man does not begin, but ends by being spiritual 
 and personal ; first that which is earthly, after- 
 wards that which is heavenly ; milk for babes, 
 t 2 
 
278 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 meat for the strong. The law is but a pedagogue 
 to lead us to Christ, though the fruit is implicit in 
 the seed and Christ in the first whisperings of 
 conscience. A Catholic religion will lead the soul 
 through externalism to internalism. Ideally, the 
 value of the lower is absorbed into and saved by 
 the higher. Practically, in existing Catholicism, it 
 is not so. We find these different sorts of religion 
 ranged side by side, each subsisting with its own 
 alloy — the religion of fear, the religion of hope ; 
 the religion of external and of internal obedience; 
 the religion of abstract and exclusive mysticism, 
 and that of inclusive and world-embracing mysti- 
 cism. In his Mystical Element of Religion Baron 
 F. Von Hiigel has shown that, if the ideal syn- 
 thesis of the institutional, rational and mystical 
 elements be unattainable, owing to a sort of 
 natural antipathy between them, yet the perpetual 
 struggle after that ideal is essential ; that the 
 health of a religion consists in the balancing 
 and holding together of principles that tend 
 to fly asunder and become independent and 
 exclusive. 
 
 So it is that, in existing Catholicism, the various 
 phases of the religious Idea, each with its particu- 
 lar alloy and limitation, are somewhat violently 
 held together by a continual synthetic effort, so as 
 to constitute a manuductory system, by which the 
 
THE CHURCH AND ITS FUTURE 279 
 
 growing soul is brought to the perfect stature 
 of the Christ-possessed personality. This has 
 been the work of instinct and experience, rather 
 than of design directed by a recognition of the 
 laws of religion. It has all the imperfection 
 and clumsiness of tentative gropings. But it 
 gives us good reason to think that Catholic 
 Christianity is more capable of conforming itself 
 to the exigencies of a historical science of 
 religion than any of those forms that have 
 narrowed themselves to the development of some 
 particular element of Catholicism, even though 
 it be the highest. In fact, the science of religion 
 would, in some sense, be a science of Catholicism 
 of a microcosm in which the whole religious 
 process of the world is represented. 
 
 Modernists are not such Utopian dreamers as to 
 imagine that those, whose temporal interests are 
 vested in existing Catholicism and its worst cor- 
 ruptions, will ever open their arms to welcome 
 such a science. Which of the sciences have they 
 not persecuted ? Much more will they persecute 
 that which deals with religion itself, their peculiar 
 field of exploitation. The control of men's con- 
 sciences, and, thereby, of their conduct and re- 
 sources, is too valuable a weapon of aggrandisement 
 not to be grasped at by the secular power, be it 
 that of Czar or King or Republic; of papal 
 
280 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 monarchy or the bureaucracy that works for its 
 restoration. 
 
 It is not of Catholicism in the grip of the ex- 
 ploiter, but of Catholicism as a living and lived 
 religion, as a school of souls, that Modernists are 
 thinking. Opposed tooth and nail by the ex- 
 ploiters of religion, science after science has made 
 its way and found harbourage in the general mind, 
 even of Catholicism — the most exploited because 
 the most widely influential of all religions and the 
 most dangerously independent in its principles. 
 Hence the exploiter has ever striven to subject 
 the consciences and personalities of its members 
 to the divine right arrogated to himself. 
 
 What tyranny ever voted its own destruction 
 or admitted a truth fatal to its interests? Will 
 the Roman bureaucracy, that exploits even the 
 Papacy, ever resign their revenues and their 
 ascendency ? Modernists do not believe it for a 
 moment. Their whole hope is in the irresistible 
 tide of truth and knowledge, which must at last 
 surround and overmount the barriers of ignorance, 
 buttressed up by untruthfulness ; and, above all, 
 in such inward and living Christianity as may still 
 be left in a rapidly dying Church. Is it not the 
 very growth of the spirit that is straining the old 
 categories and forms and seeking a better em- 
 bodiment — and this more especially in Catholicism, 
 
THE CHURCH AND ITS FUTURE 281 
 
 where the strain is most acutely felt and the pre- 
 tensions of the exploiter are revealed by their 
 growing shamelessness ? 
 
 While such hopes, be they ever so delusive, 
 live in him, why should the Modernist leave his 
 Church? Where else will he find the true 
 Catholicism of which he dreams? In this or 
 that body he may find some neglected principle 
 of Catholicism, emphasised and developed, but 
 in isolation from the rest and at the cost of 
 integral Christianity. He would find a religion 
 as little, or less, Catholic in fact, and far less in 
 potentiality. 
 
 An idealist is not necessarily a fool. He sees 
 further, though more dimly, than the practical man, 
 who calculates on inductions from the past, and 
 on the presumption that no new factor will inter- 
 vene. Yet what he sees may be true. The 
 Modernist knows, not only as much of the difficul- 
 ties of his ideal, but a great deal more than the 
 Protestant or free-thinking critic, who sums him 
 up in a smart article, whether encouraging or 
 discouraging ; and, accordingly, he is neither en- 
 couraged nor discouraged. 
 
 The reason why, fronted by the same data, one 
 man hopes and another despairs, is just a differ- 
 ence of personality, temperament and experience. 
 Hence even those who see eye to eye with the 
 
282 CHRISTIANITY AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Modernist may not, and in most cases will not, 
 agree with him. But they will respect the hope 
 which they do not share, while those who despise 
 this hope cannot truly understand it. 
 
 It is the spirit of Christ that has again and 
 again saved the Church from the hands of her 
 worldly oppressors within and without ; for where 
 that spirit is, there is liberty. Deliverance comes 
 from below, from those who are bound, not from 
 those who bind. It is easy to quench a glimmer- 
 ing light caught by the eyes of a few ; but not 
 the light of the noonday sun — of knowledge that 
 has become objective and valid for all. It is 
 through knowledge of this kind that God has 
 inaugurated a new epoch in man's intellectual life 
 and extended his lordship over Nature. Shall He 
 do less for man's spiritual life when the times are 
 ripe? and are they not ripening? Are we not 
 hastening to an impasse — to one of those ex- 
 tremities which are God's opportunities ? 
 
 WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. 
 HUNTERS, PLYMOUTH 
 
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