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 Problem of theology in modern life and t 
 
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THE PEOBLEM OF THEOLOGY IN 
 MODERN LIFE AND THOUGHT 
 
" The friends left the church, and looking up 
 from the exterior at the window which they had 
 just been contemplating within, nothing was 
 visible but the merest outline of dusky shapes. 
 Neither the individual likeness of saint, angel, 
 nor Saviour, and far less the combined scheme 
 and purport of the picture, could anywise be 
 made out. That miracle of radiant art, thus 
 viewed, was nothing better than an incompre- 
 hensible obscurity, without a gleam of beauty to 
 induce the beholder to attempt unravelling it. 
 
 *" All this,' thought the sculptor, 'is a most 
 forcible emblem of the different aspect of religious 
 truth and sacred story, as viewed from the warm 
 interior of beUef or from its cold and dreary 
 outside. Christian faith is a grand cathedral with 
 divinely pictured windows. Standing without, 
 you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any ; 
 standing within, every ray of Ught reveals a 
 harmony of unspeakable splendours.' " 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne's 
 
 Transformation, chap, xxxiii. 
 
THE PROBLEM 
 OF THEOLOGY 
 IN MODERN LIFE 
 AND THOUGHT 
 
 BY 
 
 ANDREW MILLER, M.A. 
 
 MINISTER OF BLUEVALE PARISH, GLASGOW 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE ECCLESIOLOGICAL SOCIETY 
 
 OF SCOTLAND 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 LONDON MCMIX 
 
TO 
 THE MEMOEY OF 
 
 PRINCIPAL TULLOCH 
 
 THE GREATEST CONSTBUCTIVE THEOLOGIAN OF HIS TIME 
 
 TO WHOSE INSPIRATION IS OWING ANYTHING 
 
 OF VALUE THESE LECTURES 
 
 MAY CONTAIN 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE Rev. Alexander Robertson, a pro- 
 bationer of the Free Churcli of Scotland, 
 who died at Glasgow on August 3, 1899, 
 left the residue of his estate, amounting to 
 £2,500, to the University of Glasgow, for the 
 endowment of a lectureship in defence of the 
 Christian Religion. The lectures contained in 
 this volume were delivered on the Alexander 
 Robertson foundation. The lecturer trusts that 
 the intention of the founder has been carried 
 out. It is, however, a characteristic of modern 
 theology that Apologetics as a separate discip- 
 line has practically disappeared. The Christian 
 Religion requires no defence. One may as well 
 talk about defending the sun in the heavens. 
 All that is needed is that it be understood and 
 its central doctrines brought into the line of 
 vision of each successive epoch. " We needs 
 must love the highest when we see it." 
 The following quatrain by one who knew 
 
vi PKEFACE 
 
 Mr. Robertson well may fittingly serve as a 
 tribute to the founder of the lectureship, whose 
 generosity has enabled the writer to give per- 
 manent shape to ideas which have long formed 
 the background of his life-work : — 
 
 He loved his Church, his college, and his city. 
 
 Yet hope deferred dimmed youth's dear dream of fame ; 
 
 Too proud to ask of life for praise or pity. 
 
 He passed — but left a message and his name. 
 
 Mrs. Marion Buckcman, 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTEODUCTION . . . . . .1 
 
 Synopsis. —The Christian Beligion has a threefold 
 aspect. It is a phenomenon in history, a metaphysical 
 theory of the universe, and a psychical experience. The 
 characteristic of the new philosophy is that it attaches 
 an importance to spiritual experience as a medium of 
 intellectual approach to the Absolute and a criterion of 
 Reality which the historical schools of metaphysics 
 have not hitherto regarded as legitimate. It is scarcely 
 sufficiently recognised that this is simply getting back 
 to the Christian standpoint, and these lectures are an 
 attempt to show that the Christian Church has never 
 made any other claim for Christian doctrine than that 
 it is the metaphysical statement of the implications of 
 Christian experience, and that, therefore, the way out 
 of our present difficulties lies rather in a clearer con- 
 ception of the function of the Church than in an 
 academic attempt to formulate a creed which can only 
 be a true creed in so far as its relation to the highest 
 activities of modern life is vital and close-fitting, 
 vii 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE I 
 THE THEISTIC BASIS . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 15 
 
 Synopsis. — God is an experience. The Theistic argu- 
 ment has never been a demonstration leading to an 
 irresistible conviction as in mathematical reasoning. 
 Were that so, God once proved would be proved for all 
 time. It has simply been the unfolding of the impli- 
 cation of a conception intuitively realised. Hence it 
 changes its ground from age to age to meet the changing 
 demands of an evolving human consciousness. The 
 characteristic of our age is the donxinance of the pre- 
 sent, the demand of life for an immediate satisfaction, 
 and the problem of Theism, therefore, to-day is to show 
 that only through God can the Here and Now be 
 adeq^uately realised, and life be lived in its fullest 
 possible intensity. 
 
 LECTURE n 
 
 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION . . .51 
 
 Synopsis. — If God be an experience, Revelation must 
 always be personal. There have been three theories of 
 the medium of Revelation to humanity — an Infallible 
 Church, an Inspired Book, the Spiritual Intuition of 
 the individual soul. In the form in which these are 
 usually held, the modern consciousness finds them un- 
 satisfactory. And yet if the religious experience is 
 real, it must be as possible to build up a theory of the 
 
CONTENTS ix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 spiritual realm as it is to build up a theory of the 
 natural world from the facta of sense perception. The 
 methods of Thecdogy and Natural Science must be 
 identical and their results equally valid. 
 
 LECTURE III 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OP CHBISTIAN DOCTRINE . . 91 
 
 Synopsis. — Theology is the reasoned account of our 
 spiritual experiences, just as Natural Science is the 
 intellectual inference from our sensible experiences. It 
 is now widely admitted that our spiritual apprehension 
 testifies to reality, but what is in dispute is the nature 
 and detail of that reality. The test of the truth of 
 the great doctrines of Christianity must lie in their 
 capacity to give a full and exhaustive account of the 
 spiritual experiences they profess to explain. They are 
 susceptible of no other proof, but if they stand this 
 test, then they are as valid a branch of human know- 
 ledge as any other. An investigation as to their origin 
 and their ethical content as correlated to a unique 
 ethical experience is necessary. 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH .... 133 
 
 Synopsis. — The difference between Romanism and 
 Protestantism has lain largely in the definition of the 
 Church. The Romanist believes in the Church as a 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGB 
 
 visible Institution, while the Protestant, despairing of 
 finding any visible Institution that answers to his ideal, 
 has fallen back upon the theory of an invisible Church. 
 But an invisible Church is a contradiction in terms, 
 inasmuch as the Church is the Body of Christ — the 
 Eternal Spirit of the Universe externalising Himself in 
 an Institution through which the Divine decrees are to 
 be realised. A consideration of the function of the 
 Church is of more importance than discussion of its 
 external marks, as in the processes of nature It is 
 function that determines the visible form of any mani- 
 festation of life. The Christian Institution that is 
 fulfilling the function of giving visibility to the Christian 
 idea is instinctively tending to that ideal unity which 
 is the ultimate aim of every branch of the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 THE DOCTRINAL IMPLICATIONS OP CHRISTIAN ETHICS 177 
 
 Synopsis. — If the great doctrines of Christianity be 
 simply the metaphysical basis of the Christian life, then 
 they must be the inevitable postulates from which all 
 that is noble in that life have their origin. This is 
 true in every phase of life, but most notably in ethics. 
 A man's ethos must in the long run be determined by 
 his outlook upon the universe. Every typical philosophy 
 has its own peculiar ethos to which it logically tends. 
 The Christian life evolved the metaphysic of Christianity, 
 which in its turn reacts upon the ethos giving it mean- 
 
CONTENTS xi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ing and sanction. The prevalent idea that it is possible 
 to take over the ethics of the Gospel, and drop the 
 metaphysics which alone make it intelligible, is a mere 
 dream which a consideration, not only of logical pro- 
 cesses, but of the most patent facts of history, ought to 
 dispel. 
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 to-day's challenge to the church . . 221 
 
 Synopsis, — A living creed is always the metaphysical 
 implication of the practical activities of an age, and an 
 age that is in hopeless confusion as to the very meaning 
 of life can have no real creed. We must determine the 
 function of the Church before we tackle the problem of 
 the creed, and for that purpose we must work along 
 historic lines. The Church must have a definite aim, a. 
 definite theory as to how that aim is to be realised, 
 and a unity capable of embracing a diversity as wide 
 as human nature. We cannot let go those historical 
 dogmas ratified by Christian experience without which 
 the Christian Church ceases to have a distinctive basis. 
 We must grasp their ethicdd implications and employ 
 them for the solution of those social evils which are 
 paralysing the spiritual life of the community. Only 
 in this way can our theology be made vital and our 
 spiritual experience receive an enrichment which will 
 open the way for a metaphysic which, while including 
 the heritage of the past, shall bear the stamp of a 
 distinctive epoch in the history of humanity. 
 
xii CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE VII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OP THE CHUECH IN MODERN 
 
 LIFE ...... 265 
 
 SyncJipsis, — To imagine that the Church should .hecome 
 a socialistic institution is to seek its development on 
 entirely wrong lines, for modern socialism is merely a 
 partisan method of securing a better distribution of 
 wealth. This is undoubtedly the economic problem of 
 the day, and is an end desired by all statesmen, but the 
 function of the Church is something infinitely larger and 
 wider. Moreover, the methods of politics are not the 
 methods of the Church. The Church must maintain 
 and enforce in the community the ideals of Christian 
 ethics, but how this is to be done consistently with the 
 maintenance of her own essential spirituality will always 
 make demands upon the resources of ecclesiastical states- 
 manship. There are two problems of the first magnitude 
 calling to-day for solution. These are the ethical 
 instruction of her children and the care of those who, 
 through physical, moral, or economic defects, cannot 
 take care of themselves. These are problems alike of 
 Church and State, and demand a wise consideration of 
 their respective spheres in their solution. 
 
 NOTES . ..... 305 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THESE lectures come out of the heart of a 
 busy life that has been necessarily devoted 
 to the solution of the practical problems of 
 religion rather than to the consideration of 
 its theological background. But the writer has 
 faced these problems with a metaphysical bias 
 acquired in early youth, and with the ineradi- 
 cable conviction that theory and practice can 
 never be disjoined. What is right theoretically 
 must work out rightly in practice. And what 
 in practice proves itself to be right must have 
 a metaphysical basis must, be rooted in those 
 supersensuous forces which make the universe 
 a cosmos. 
 
 The Christian Eeligion has to us a threefold 
 aspect. It is a phenomenon in history. It 
 emerged upon the world in time, on a definite 
 spot of the earth's surface, as the culmination 
 of a historical process stretching far back to 
 a dim antiquity. It is subject therefore to 
 
 Problem of Theology 2 ^ 
 
2 INTEODUCTION 
 
 the laws of evidence that govern historical 
 inquiry. The scientific investigator of Christian 
 origins must apply to the recorded incidents 
 the same strict scrutiny as he gives to the 
 pages of Thucydides, Livy, or Tacitus. Historical 
 incidents in themselves can never be a matter 
 of intuition or, in the strict sense, of revelation. 
 Again, the Christian Religion presents itself 
 to us as a metaphysical system of the universe. 
 It postulates God, not as a creation of the 
 imagination necessary to wreathe human life 
 with an aureole of sentiment, but as a spiritual 
 metaphysical Being, not only supremely real 
 but the ground of all Reality. In its leading 
 doctrines it offers a theory of the inner nature 
 of God, of man, and of human destiny which is 
 not siraply, like the myths of Plato, an allegory 
 invented to illustrate certain features of human 
 life or to adumbrate probable solutions of life's 
 difficult problems, but a true theory, essen- 
 tially real — as real as it is possible for the 
 infinite Reality to be apprehended by the finite 
 mind. As metaphysics this theory is subject 
 to the laws of metaphysical reasoning. It 
 must vindicate its rationality to the human 
 intellect. It may have within it unsolved but 
 not insoluble mysteries. The postulate of the 
 metaphysician is that the universe is intelligible. 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 The moment we acquiesce in the unknowable 
 the agnostic has us on the hip, and alike 
 metaphysician and theologian are banished 
 from the field of practical activities. 
 
 Were these two features all that we have 
 in the Christian Religion, then it would be for 
 us simply a subject of curious study. We 
 could approach it with the aloofness with 
 which we interest ourselves in the wars of 
 the Aztecs or the probable inhabitants of 
 Mars. The problems it presents would be as 
 intellectually abstract as the propositions of 
 Euclid. 
 
 But there is more. The Christian Religion 
 is a spiritual experience. The historical inci- 
 dents, recorded in their setting, and the meta- 
 physical Creed which gathers up the essence 
 and meaning of these incidents, stir in the 
 human soul convulsive emotions and rouse 
 dormant energies which transform a man's whole 
 nature and give him a changed outlook upon life's 
 values, I do not like the term " supernatural," 
 because all that comes from God is of the 
 nature of God and must be natural, but if 
 we understand by nature merely the ordinary 
 sequence of events un^er the action of those 
 forces known to science and with which science 
 is continually dealing, then the appeal of the 
 
i INTRODUCTION 
 
 Christian Religion when it conies to the soul 
 introduces it into a supernatural world, a 
 spiritual realm, where the soul is touched with 
 new and strange experiences which seem un- 
 intelligible to the merely natural man, and 
 which not unfrequently the scientist has con- 
 sidered to be purely pathological. Christianity 
 has had this effect from the beginning, and the 
 marvellous thing is that after nineteen hundred 
 years it has not spent its force, but is to-day 
 as potent an energy in transforming the natural 
 into the spiritual man as it was in the first 
 transports of ecstatic enthusiasm amid which it 
 was born. 
 
 Now it is quite evident that this vital fact 
 must change our whole method of approach 
 alike to the historical and the metaphysical 
 aspect of our Christian faith. The history is 
 not now a series of incidents in which we have 
 a mere objective interest, whose credibility in 
 each isolated case must be vindicated to the in- 
 tellect, and which must one and all conform 
 to those laws of natural development which 
 are the province of science. It belongs to a 
 supernatural process of which we are our- 
 selves a part, and the recorded incidents must 
 be viewed in the light of this process. Criti- 
 cism still claims the right of adjusting the 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 facts to the evidence and of separating between 
 the essential and the irrelevant. But the facts 
 are now not facts of yesterday but of to-day, 
 and a line of argument large enough to include 
 both must be adopted. The assigned cause 
 must be adequate to the effect. An inquiry 
 into Christian origins which ignores the whole 
 subsequent history of the Christian Church 
 and the rich spiritual treasures of Christian 
 experience, and investigates the veracity of 
 the Gospel record much in the same way and 
 by the same canons of evidence as a detective 
 would employ in inquiring into an act of petty 
 larceny, can never be very illuminating. The 
 true critic approaches the problem with the 
 absolute knowledge that he is here at a critical 
 period of human evolution, that God is 
 working through these incidents with unusual 
 intensity and precision, and that therefore 
 nothing is impossible or even improbable that 
 is relevant to the main issue. 
 
 Now, these lectures do not touch the histori- 
 cal problem, and I merely make this explanation 
 to indicate the bearing they have upon it, and 
 to dissociate my line of argument from that 
 of those writers who treat the historical aspect 
 of Christianity with indifference, so long as the 
 ideal truth, which is of its essence, is retained. 
 
6 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The Abb^ Loisy, from the point of view of 
 the Church, seems impatient with historical 
 facts and ready to grasp at the most advanced 
 views of the most advanced critics as scientifi- 
 cally verified truths. To him the Church is 
 the historical repository of spiritual truth, the 
 teacher of spiritual doctrine and the guide 
 to devotional living. Historical records have 
 value only as recording the stage of spiritual 
 evolution which their writers had reached. 
 Sabatier from the philosophic point of view 
 comes to much the same conclusion. But 
 this is to cut off our Christian experience from 
 its root in the life of the human race and to 
 give it an appearance of unreality it does not 
 really possess. Man cannot ignore his human 
 origin. He must have the solid earth as his 
 spring-board even when he attempts to leap 
 into the azure heights above him. 
 
 It is the metaphysical problem that is here 
 discussed, with its bearings upon the practical 
 issues of our modern life. It is very evident 
 that if approaching the historical aspect of 
 Christianity from the viewpoint of Christian 
 experience must influence our critical methods 
 of treating it, the same viewpoint must have a 
 still more vital bearing upon its metaphysical 
 implications. The science of metaphysics aims 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 at grasping the Reality that lies behind the 
 phenoraena of the natural world. I perceive 
 an object. What is this "Ego" that per- 
 ceives ? What is the object perceived ? What 
 is the nexus between them ? These are the 
 questions metaphysics has been trying all 
 through the centuries to answer. It has as 
 its starting-point the data of sense impres- 
 sions upon the cognitive faculty. It seeks to 
 understand their implications and their rela- 
 tion to an Absolute that exists in and for 
 itself. It is therefore an attempt to arrive 
 at an adequate theory of sense-experience. 
 It has indeed at times sought to widen its 
 basis and include experiences that are appa- 
 rently not primarily those of sense-perception 
 — involuntary judgments we pronounce ethical, 
 but by a whole school of metaphysics these 
 have been ruled out of court as not primary 
 but derivative experiences ultimately resolv- 
 able into sense-impressions. While, however, 
 ethical judgments have been included in the 
 scope of metaphysical inquiry, either as 
 primary or derivative, a class of immediate 
 experiences as widespread as human nature 
 has been largely overlooked. These are the 
 intuitions of the religious consciousness, with 
 the concomitant emotions they produce. No 
 
8 INTRODUCTION 
 
 doubt these have had a philosophy of their own, 
 but this mystical philosophy does not lie in 
 the direct line of the historical metaphysical 
 schools. It has been regarded as an intel- 
 lectual aberration, not reducible to rule or 
 system, not subject to those canons of 
 criticism that are applied to rational meta- 
 physical hypotheses. The mystic has been 
 considered interesting as a pathological study, 
 but he brings no contribution to the accumu- 
 lating store of verifiable scientific knowledge. 
 
 Now, it is the peculiarity of the present 
 day that it has dawned upon the scientific 
 mind that religious experience is as primary 
 a fact of human life as is the fact of sense- 
 perception. It is not something to be ex- 
 plained away, but something to be explained. 
 It belongs to the primary data for which 
 it is the province of metaphysics to account. 
 It is a normal experience, for it has its root 
 in human nature as such, and can be 
 quickened in all into a less or greater degree 
 of intensity. As an experience it has its 
 metaphysical implications and is a real avenue 
 of approach to the Absolute. 
 
 It is along this line that the modern philo- 
 sopher is working in his eternal quest after 
 a solution of the mystery of the universe. 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 In Grermany and America especially there 
 has developed what one may call a historico- 
 psychological school whose aim is a thoroughly 
 scientific analysis of the religious conscious- 
 ness alike in its modern development and 
 throughout the whole range of its recorded 
 history. Now there is an orthodoxy in science 
 and metaphysics as well as in religion, and 
 the invariable peculiarity of orthodoxy is that 
 it will never admit that anybody has trodden 
 its own special field before it, or has anti- 
 cipated discoveries that belong to the natural 
 evolutionary process with which it is ac- 
 quainted. This school of philosophy to which 
 I refer acknowledges that the religious con- 
 sciousness, so persistent in its manifestations 
 and so consistent in its main lines of experi- 
 ence, bears undoubted testimony to the exist- 
 ence of a super-sensible Reality. But its 
 exponents one and all hesitate to fill in the 
 dim outline of this Reality with definite 
 detail as to its nature and to bring it into 
 living, throbbing contact with this mortal life 
 of man. 
 
 It is the object of these lectures to show 
 that what these philosophers are doing to-day 
 has been done long ago by the great Chris- 
 tian theologians, and as they started long 
 
10 INTRODUCTION 
 
 before them, they are naturally now much 
 ahead of them. They began with religious 
 experience, and with religious experience, 
 owing to a peculiar collocation of events, 
 quickened to the fullest and richest intensity. 
 And working upon this experience they at- 
 tained to a conception not only of the 
 Absolute as a vague undefinable Reality, but 
 as a Triune Personality, throbbing with 
 intense life. Who in His very essence became 
 man for us men and for our salvation. It 
 is a conception that has two outstanding 
 merits. The first is that the effort to appre- 
 hend the depth of meaning that is in it 
 affords scope for the noblest flights of human 
 intellect. The second is that it can be taught 
 in its concrete simplicity to the child at his 
 mother's knee. 
 
 It is a conception, moreover, that covers aU 
 the facts and is adequate to account for them. 
 It was reached empirically. It can be applied 
 deductively as a rational guide to the conduct 
 of human life in all its complex phases. It 
 furnishes an ideal alike for the individual 
 life and for that larger life we designate the 
 social organism. It constitutes a perfect unity 
 — a theory that never fails in practice, a 
 practice that at every point finds its sanctiqn 
 
INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 in theory. Ifc consequently unifies human life, 
 gathering up its complex faculties into a 
 whole of co-related parts. It stimulates the 
 intellect to the utmost pitch of its capacity, 
 while it lays down as the condition of all 
 higher knowledge that the ethical life be 
 lived up to the knowledge we already possess. 
 Its bearing upon the practical problems of 
 our modern civilisation is therefore of the 
 closest and most intimate kind, and in my 
 two concluding lectures I point out that if 
 we are to make theology live and breathe 
 with the palpitating life it once possessed, we 
 must seek our clue as to its meaning not 
 in the philosopher's study, but in the field of 
 active social effort and in the spiritual enrich- 
 ment of our common life. 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 GOD is a postulate of experience. A dawn- 
 ing conception of the eternal mystery we 
 name "God" is an integral element in human 
 consciousness. The idea of God, therefore, is 
 intuitive and not ratiocinative.* I do not mean 
 to consider the objections that have been urged 
 against intuition as the method of grasping the 
 Great Reality, as these seem to lie in a defini- 
 tion of the word that divorces it from our 
 intellectual faculties. I am not concerned here 
 with a philosophic theory of knowledge. It is 
 enough if I make my position plain. We know 
 God as a psychical experience — the root and 
 ground of a series of experiences, the pro- 
 foundest, the most deeply cherished, and the 
 most real of which human nature is capable. 
 We do not reach the idea of God as the final 
 * See Note A, " The Intuition of God." 
 
 15 
 
16 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 and irrefragable result of a long chain of 
 syllogistic reasoning. Neither do we find God 
 vindicated to the intellect as the crown of a 
 slow and patient induction from data given to 
 us in consciousness.* No doubt the apprehension 
 of God is an intellectual act, but it is an intellec- 
 tual act that is saturated with emotion. The 
 rapture of the saint at the beatific vision is 
 something different from the quiet satisfaction 
 of the student, who, after long musing, works 
 out his problem to a logical conclusion, and in 
 every genuine apprehension of God, however 
 faint and feeble it may be, a touch of this 
 mystic quahty is present : God comes to the 
 soul as a living experience appealing to intellect 
 and heart alike when He approaches the soul 
 at all. 
 
 If this be so, has the theistic argument no 
 meaning or validity ? Is there any use holding 
 up a lighted taper to see the sun or wasting 
 one's energies in proving axioms ? Certainly, 
 if the sole value of the long search after God 
 by the processes of the logical understanding 
 lay in its demonstrated result, one would 
 be inclined to say that it had all been lost 
 labour and remained simply a tremendous 
 monument of misdirected intellectual force. It 
 '•= See Note B, *' The Cumulative Arguments." 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 17 
 
 is very doubtful whether a single individual has 
 ever found God as the sequence of a syllogistic 
 process. To-day the agnostic points out hope- 
 less flaws in the argument, and the vast 
 majority of intellectual believers ground their 
 faith on a totally different basis. But though 
 we cease to hold these arguments as demonstra- 
 tions of God's existence they are still essential 
 elements in enriching our knowledge of God. 
 Rightly apprehended, they have an all-important 
 place in the communion of the soul with God, 
 and in strengthening those tendrils of faith 
 with which the human spirit grasps the Divine. 
 For when we analyse all the leading lines of 
 thought along which the human understanding 
 has sought to rise from the finite to the infinite, 
 we find that, while they fall short of demonstra- 
 tion, they undoubtedly fulfil a threefold pur- 
 pose. (1) They serve to vindicate the reason- 
 ableness of a conviction otherwise induced. 
 Grant the hypothesis of God and the universe 
 becomes rational. It conforms itself to the 
 categories of our human faculties. We can 
 understand and investigate the " why " of things, 
 because the processes we see around us are 
 similar to those which a rational will sets in 
 operation to attain desired ends. (2) They 
 unfold the inner nature of God, They enable 
 
 ProUem of Theology 3 
 
18 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 us to realise the attributes of the DiVine Being 
 who is the source of all that is. From our 
 finite experience of the processes of intellect, 
 will, and emotion in humanity and of utility 
 and beauty in nature we can enter into the 
 inmost soul of God, who is the light and life 
 of His created universe. And (3) they help to 
 explain the perplexities and anomalies that 
 cloud the intuitive vision of God. They are 
 invaluable as a Theodicy vindicating the ways 
 of God to men, throwing light on the problem 
 of evil, penetrating beneath the surface of 
 things, and grasping the increasing purpose 
 that is being slowly unfolded amid the apparent 
 chaos of conflicting elements that bewilders the 
 awakening human intellect. 
 
 It may be said, "If God is an intuition, an 
 illumination, a primary instinct of human 
 nature, why is all this elaborate process of 
 reasoning necessary to vindicate our conviction 
 of His existence, to unfold His nature, and to 
 account for His ways ? Must He not be as 
 inevitable to human existence as all other 
 instincts, and will He not simply vindicate Him- 
 self inevitably in the ordinary processes of life ? 
 What is the use of an intuition that is so very 
 dim and uncertain, that requires so much 
 clearing up, so many buttresses from arguments 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 19 
 
 that are never quite convincing and are con- 
 tinually changing their ground?" 
 
 It is an old objection — the objection of the 
 rationalist at every stage of philosophic think- 
 ing, and it must be met on his own lines. When 
 we say that God is an intuition, an experience, 
 or, rather, the postulate of all rational experi- 
 ence, we do not mean that God reveals Himself 
 to every human soul in all the riches of His 
 inexhaustible nature and so impresses His 
 existence upon the mind that it becomes hence- 
 forth an inevitable intellectual conviction. This 
 is absurd, and yet it is practically the position to 
 which the opponents of the intuitional theory 
 would seek to tie us down. All that can possibly 
 be meant is that every human soul that emerges 
 upon the sphere of time is accompanied with a 
 sense of the mystery of the infinite, and that 
 this is as essential a part of his consciousness as 
 any other. But just as consciousness of the 
 outer world in its organic unity grows and 
 develops, so does this consciousness of the 
 infinite assume depth and reality. When human 
 nature advances along the lines of a natural 
 and rational evolution the idea of God lies at 
 the basis of all intellectual progress. The purer 
 and higher the idea of God the richer and more 
 varied is the intellectual life, the more brilliant 
 
20 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 its efflorescence in all those spheres of mental 
 activity which show the marvellous possibilities 
 of human nature. And equally so is it with the 
 moral progress of humanity. The nobler the 
 soul's conception of God, the keener will be its 
 insight into the implications of conduct, the 
 stronger its appreciation of the meaning and 
 value of the great heroisms of life. The nearer 
 the human spirit in its eternal quest attains to 
 a pure notion of the infinite reality, on so much 
 higher a level will life itself actually be lived. 
 But to assert that the idea of God is a gradual 
 evolution of the spiritual faculty of man is not 
 to say that the soul evolves its own God, which 
 must remain, therefore, to the end a mere sub- 
 jective ideal. God is an objective fact, the 
 Absolute Reality, but the human spirit at any 
 stage of its progress can only absorb so much of 
 Reality as its nature is capable of assimilating. 
 The evolution of the human spirit is not God in 
 the making,* as some aspects of modern philo- 
 sophy would have it. It is the human soul that 
 is in the making, and God, its Creator, is its 
 moulder and fashioner. 
 
 Now, a consideration of the place the ratio- 
 cinative process holds in this development of 
 the idea of God will explain much that would 
 * See Note C, " God in the Making." 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 21 
 
 otherwise be perplexing. It explains, e.gr., why 
 the theistic argument is so continually changing 
 its ground, and why proofs that seem perfectly 
 valid to one generation lose all their appeal 
 with a change in the intellectual atmosphere. 
 If the existence of Grod were the reasoned 
 result of a logical process, whether arrived at 
 inductively or deductively, then God once 
 proved would be for the normal intellect proved 
 for all time. We do not question the proposi- 
 tions of Euclid after his lucid reasoning has 
 commended them to our intellect. We accept 
 without a murmur the inductions of science. 
 We believe in the existence of such a remote 
 corner of the globe as Patagonia on human 
 testimony, though we have never been there 
 nor are ever likely to be. But not only is it 
 the case that in spite of all arguments the 
 existence of God in every age remains to many 
 an unproved hypothesis, but the problem has 
 this further peculiarity, that with every change 
 in the spirit of the time the old arguments, 
 even to the most God-intoxicated souls, seem 
 outworn and. invalid and require to be wholly 
 recast. Any other strong conviction of the 
 human intellect that depended upon arguments 
 so shifting, upon evidence that with the lapse 
 of time was continually crumbling into the 
 
22 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 dust, would very soon be erased from the 
 human consciousness and cast into the lumber 
 of discarded superstitions. But who can say- 
 even in this inquiring and sceptical age that 
 there is the slightest danger of faith in God 
 being thus treated ? On the contrary, God still 
 remains the moving impulse of the highest and 
 noblest minds in our generation ; the clearest 
 thinkers, the men of the greatest imagina- 
 tive genius, the most statesmanlike intellects 
 have all been interpenetrated with the idea 
 of God, and the failure of the old arguments 
 has rather confirmed than shaken their faith. 
 For at bottom faith is not reached by argu- 
 ment, and the failure of an argument that has 
 outlived its usefulness frequently serves but 
 to throw the soul more entirely back upon 
 itself and to enable it to trust its own experi- 
 ence. In this region an argument that has 
 become merely conventional, so far from being 
 a buttress of faith, is an obstacle to faith. 
 For in the spiritual realm reason must be 
 charged with emotion before it produces its 
 desired result in quickening and strengthening 
 faith. 
 
 The existence of God as the Supreme Creator, 
 e.g., seemed inevitable to men who never 
 questioned their intuitive belief in causation. 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 23 
 
 Every effect was the product of a cause, and 
 however far the intellect might trace back the 
 series of secondary causes, it was supposed to be 
 brought up by the very exigencies of thought to 
 the conception of a Great First Cause, The 
 argument seemed irrefragable and to the devout 
 mind brought assured conviction. But when 
 the very idea of causation was thrown into the 
 melting-pot, when there seemed to be no reason 
 for stopping the process of infinite sequence, 
 or of assuming an element of causality in 
 things apart from the human mind, the argu- 
 ment lost its force. After all, why should we 
 assume that human reason is the measure of 
 all things, or that the only force is intelligent 
 will ? God is simply an assumption, not a 
 logical induction. And may we not as reason- 
 ably assume no God, or at least withdraw from 
 the problem altogether and leave it in the realm 
 of inscrutable mystery? Are we bound to 
 fathom the depths of the infinite? Is it not 
 wiser and more modest to own the truth that 
 we do not know, and that with our present 
 faculties we cannot know ? 
 
 Again, when a first study of nature brought 
 to light those marvellous adaptations that main- 
 tain the harmony of material existence, the feel- 
 ing that here we were in presence of a Supreme 
 
24 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 Contriver of subtle intelligence and striking 
 inventive skill was instinctive and immediate. 
 Men knew of no other method whereby means 
 could be adapted to ends than by direct con- 
 trivance. All the minute parts of a watch 
 were fixed together by human intelligence in 
 order to regulate the motion necessary to indi- 
 cate the hour, and the intricacy of the delicate 
 machinery so perfectly adapted to do its work 
 evoked involuntary admiration of the genius 
 of its maker. It was a triumph of intellectual 
 ability. And were not triumphs quite similar 
 in kind but wonderfully greater in degree 
 visible throughout the whole created universe ? 
 The vast sweep of the law of gravitation that 
 governed the apparently complex motions of 
 the heavenly bodies and poised the habitable 
 globe just in its right position in the deep 
 abyss of space ; the intricacy of organic struc- 
 ture that fitted every living creature to its 
 environments with such procuracy of adaptation 
 that a little less or a little more would have 
 upset the balance of nature ; the procession of 
 the seasons, each fulfilling its own part in the 
 development of the full-throbbing life that 
 springs from the womb of Mother Earth — 
 could there be more striking evidence of a 
 supreme intelligent Will directing and control- 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 25 
 
 ling this living, breathing, pulsating universe 
 and guiding it to a divine far-off event ? What 
 normal intelligence could resist the argument ? 
 Nay, indeed, the devout investigator into the 
 secrets of nature, as one after another there rose 
 before his mind fresh instances of ingenious 
 methods w^hereby the organism might take full 
 advantage of its environment, could only lift up 
 to heaven the voice of praise and adoration and 
 exclaim, " Lord, how manifold are Thy works ! 
 in wisdom hast Thou made them all ; the 
 earth is full of Thy riches." * 
 
 But when a closer search revealed the fact 
 that the wonderful adaptations of nature were 
 not the product of direct contrivance at all, 
 that the universe did not come into existence 
 as we know it, was not launched into empty 
 space by the fiat of Omnipotence, but that 
 material things are as they are to-day as the 
 result of a long, slow process extending through 
 periods of time that bafSe the imagination to 
 conceive, and by an extravagant and wasteful 
 process of evolution that sacrifices millions of 
 individual organisms to the elaboration of some 
 slight physical advantage in a single type, then 
 it could not but be recognised that the old teleo- 
 logical argument had lost the inevitableness of 
 * Psalm civ. 24. 
 
26 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 its appeal. For under the new conception the 
 loving, divine tendance that produced the sweet 
 harmony of nature and even tempered the wind 
 to the shorn lamb and clothed the earth with 
 beauty entirely disappeared. One heard no 
 more the full-throated melody of the birds 
 carolling in the exuberance of joyous life, or 
 responded to the fresh vitality of the bursting 
 springtime. Earth bathed in the summer sun- 
 shine was no longer a Paradise of God where 
 living was a pure delight and each created 
 organism rejoiced in the simple bliss of being. 
 The deep abyss of heaven was not now studded 
 with golden glory to illumine the soul in its 
 pathway to higher realms. The view of nature 
 presented to the modern imagination is that of 
 a sanguinary battlefield, where war is waged 
 without remorse or pity by each organic struc- 
 ture against every other, where the strongest 
 torture and kill the weak, where thousands die 
 by the slow process of starvation that a few 
 who have been either lucky enough to develop 
 a capacity for greater endurance, or skilful 
 enough to hit upon a new method of susten- 
 ance, may survive in order to evolve a higher 
 and more complex type. And even the orderly 
 procession of the heavens, which filled the soul 
 with awe at the Divine Majesty and with a sense 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 27 
 
 of security under His protecting care — what is 
 it but a swinging of vast masses of molten 
 matter through an unfathomable abyss, an 
 occasional chance collocation of innumerable 
 atoms so as to form, for a time, a habitable 
 globe on which the curious creature man may 
 indulge his strange aspirations and his illusory 
 dreams, until the hurtling masses dash once 
 more into collision and put a summary end 
 to the fretful fever he calls life? Verily, to 
 the modern man breathing the atmosphere of 
 our new methods of scientific research, the 
 simplicity of the old teleological argument only 
 creates a smile. He tells us that in his mental 
 reconstruction of the order of nature he has 
 no room for the hypothesis of God. 
 
 And if these direct arguments serve no longer, 
 the old Theodicy has equally broken down. It 
 has always been recognised that the existence 
 of evil in a world created by a Supreme God, 
 absolute in His intelligence, in His will, and in 
 His love, was a serious difficulty, demanding 
 the strongest powers of human intellect to 
 solve. The Apostle certainly does not overstate 
 the case when he says that the whole creation 
 groaneth and travaileth in pain. Nature seems 
 infinitely cruel to her children. The agony 
 through which living sentient organisms are 
 
28 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 continually reproduced, and their tendency to 
 indefinite increase kept in check, appears to be 
 not only wasteful but absolutely savage. The 
 Creator would seem to be reckless of the pain 
 He inflicts. Where there is room for one life 
 He sows a thousand, and He reduces the number 
 to the required limit by torture the most callous- 
 hearted would shrink from inflicting. The 
 briefest survey of the history of the human 
 race makes one shudder at the brutal cruelties 
 through which men have advanced even to the 
 incipient stage of civilisation we have reached. 
 The low moan of human pain that runs through 
 the centuries, the despairing shrieks of tortured 
 humanity, haunt one like a nightmare. Is it 
 only thus that the higher life of man can be 
 evolved ? Can the destiny of the human race 
 be achieved only through Sicilian Vespers, 
 Spanish Furies, St. Bartholomew massacres, and 
 the nameless horrors which have characterised 
 the attitude of man to his brother man, under 
 every form of governraent, with the sanction 
 of every shade of religion in which humanity 
 has sought a shelter? What are we to make 
 of the vast discrepancy between hunxan ideals 
 and human actions ? If God, the Supreme 
 Creator, is good, and goodness to the human 
 soul is joy, why should evil so persistently dog 
 
THE THEISTIO BASIS 29 
 
 our footsteps, why should our spirits be so 
 continually tormented with the horrid doubt 
 that good and evil are but names that corre- 
 spond to no real facts in the universe? 
 
 Now the Theodicies — the vindications of the 
 ways of God to man — that have had the most 
 powerful appeal in the past have gone upon 
 the lines that evil is but good in the making. 
 Evil is the element through which good realises 
 itself. The shame of the sinner is the material 
 that provides sustenance for the glory of the 
 saint.* Pain is disciplinary. Taken in the right 
 spirit, it purifies the soul and develops the 
 rarest and the choicest virtues. Besides, we 
 must take a long view of life if we would see 
 its meaning. The world is the training school 
 of the soul. If we accept God's teaching, if 
 we but use our opportunities and our advan- 
 tages aright, if we learn the lessons of experi- 
 ence, then will the human spirit advance from 
 strength to strength, triumphing over every 
 obstacle, till at last it reaches the true end of 
 life and realises 
 
 " That perfect presence of God's face, 
 Which we for want of words call heaven/* f 
 
 * " The vices of some men make the virtues of others, as 
 corruption's the parent of fertility." — Walter Savage La/ndor* 
 t " The Palsy of the Heart," Lord Houghton. 
 
30 THE THBISTIC BASIS 
 
 This consideration of the nature and meaning 
 of evil weighed greatly with George John 
 Romanes, who lost his faith so completely only 
 to receive it back again charged with a richer 
 content. " If Christianity be truthful in re- 
 presenting this world as a school of moral 
 probation, we cannot conceive a system better 
 adapted to this end than is the world or a 
 better schoolmaster than Christianity."* Brown- 
 ing is full of the same theme. His poems are 
 the clearest exposition of the theological optim- 
 ism that was a striking characteristic of much 
 of the higher literature of the Victorian Age. 
 
 "Then welcome each rebuff 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go 1 
 Be our joys three parts pain t 
 Strive and hold cheap the strain, 
 
 Learn, nor account the pang : dare, never grudge the throe." f 
 
 But here again it is singular how far the 
 dominant note of to-day has departed from 
 this cheery optimism. It is true indeed, and 
 absolutely obvious, that in the moral and 
 intellectual world difficulties instead of being 
 hindrances are often helps to attainment. It 
 
 * *' Thoughts on Beligion," George John Bomanes. 
 f " Babbi Ben Ezra," Bobert Browning. 
 
THE THBISTIC BASIS 31 
 
 is further true that pain is a valuable discipline 
 and in many cases begets in the soul a largeness 
 of character and a depth of sympathy that 
 raise it in the scale of being. But here also 
 we find that prodigal waste that characterises 
 nature in the physical field. Evil does not 
 always bring forth good. Straitened means, 
 hardship, disappointment in the early years of 
 life, may be to a Richter * or a Carlyle a most 
 salutary discipline, may enter into the very 
 fibre of their being and so strengthen their 
 nature as raarvellously to quicken their insight 
 into human life, and to sharpen and vivify 
 their powers of expression. But these were 
 special cases, great souls, capable of triumph- 
 ing over every difficulty. Alas ! how many 
 thousands of aspiring spirits who might have 
 enriched the world by adding to the sum of 
 vigorous, cultured personalities have had their 
 existence soured and embittered and their 
 budding powers rudely blighted by adversity 
 they were not strong enough to overcome. 
 In the stern pressure of circumstances the 
 
 "^^ *' The poor historical professor would not for much money 
 have had much money in his youth. Fate does with poets 
 as we do with birds — it darkens the warbler's cage until he has 
 caught the oft-played air he is to sing." — BicMer'a Auto- 
 hiogrcuphy. 
 
32 THE THEISTIO BASIS 
 
 promise of their lives found no fruition, their 
 songs remained unsung, they died with all 
 their music in them. Poverty, utter and 
 absolute — a poverty so complete as to own 
 nothing save, from day to day, the barest 
 raeans of sustenance — may work out the 
 beautiful soul of a St. Francis of Assisi, living 
 in an ideal world, untrammelled by the flesh, 
 the life of flawless love to men, a life more- 
 over suffused with the rapture of the open 
 vision of God. But this again is a rare experi- 
 ence. Such poverty produces in countless 
 millions only an abject degradation, a whining 
 mendicancy, an impoverishment of faculty, a 
 hardness of heart and callous cruelty of nature, 
 that sicken us at the loathsomeness of 
 humanity. Pain — quivering, intense — the agony 
 of lacerated nerves, may indeed be the birth- 
 throes of higher, nobler forms of existence. 
 The hero who purchases his country's freedom 
 with the anguish of his life attains to a 
 greatness of soul that may be accounted 
 worth the sacrifice and vindicates the ration- 
 ality of the evolutionary process. The martyr 
 who opens to the soul of man the beatific 
 vision even through the tortures of the rack, 
 the wheel, and the faggot, has asserted the 
 triumph of the spirit over the flesh and 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 33 
 
 indefinitely raised the ideal of human life. 
 Suffering such as theirs can at least be made 
 intelligible. But what of the nameless millions 
 who by the cruelty of nature or the more 
 refined cruelty of man have " trod the way 
 to dusty death " through torture that had 
 no balm in it, no purifying influence what- 
 soever? What of nature's misfits and abor- 
 tions, whose diseased or imperfect organs have 
 doomed them to a slow and agonising process 
 of extinction ? What of the myriads who have 
 been swept away by the great scourges of 
 humankind, famine, plague, and war, with all 
 the possibilities of their lives undeveloped, 
 simply that man might learn the most ele- 
 mentary rules that govern his mere physical 
 well-being ? The old Theodicies to-day seem 
 to leave the mystery untouched, nay, even to 
 excite a feeling of revolt and repulsion against 
 a theoretical optimism that has never gone 
 down to the depths of the abyss. As a writer in 
 the Hihhert Journal says, " There is some excuse 
 for a human vivisector. He is choosing between 
 two forms of suffering, a lesser and a greater, 
 and he chooses the lesser. But to Omnipotence 
 vivisection is a luxury, an amusement, a crime. 
 No Jesuit who ever stepped would adopt such 
 infernal means, no matter how great the end. 
 
 ^Problem of Theology 4 
 
34 THE THEISTIO BASIS 
 
 It were far better to acknowledge no God at 
 all than to bow down to such an embodiment 
 of evil, such injustice made carnate." * 
 
 Now in the old theistic arguments and 
 Theodicies which seemed, on the whole, so 
 satisfactory to the religious mind, it must be 
 admitted that such considerations as have 
 been adduced were never altogether absent. 
 An element of mystery in the divine nature, 
 of inscrutability in the ways of God to man, 
 was freely granted. But a solution of the 
 difficulty was sought by an insistence on the 
 permanence of the higher life of man. If 
 humanity advanced from stage to stage in its 
 progress through a mortal agony that recked 
 little of individual suffering, still the advance 
 was there. The individual perished, but the 
 race endured, reaching upwards to higher 
 intellectual heights, sounding deeper depths of 
 spiritual emotion. If individual lives were 
 rudely blighted, if the soul had barely room 
 on earth for its faculties to bud, the blossom- 
 ing and fruition went on unhampered by the 
 decay of the mere tabernacle of flesh. The 
 vindication of God, therefore, did not necessarily 
 mean an explanation of His existence or of 
 
 * '* An Agnostic's Consolation," by Mrs. F. Peterson, Hihbert 
 Jov/rnali April, 1908. 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 35 
 
 His providence that dispelled the perplexities 
 of this earthly life or cleared up all its 
 anomalies. It was enough that it indicated a 
 rational process running through the seeming 
 chaos of the yeasty ferment of humanity, that 
 it opened up lines of thought through which 
 it was conceivable that in the end the purpose 
 of creation might be justified. 
 
 But here again it must be recognised that 
 this is a point of view from which the modern 
 mind is drifting. It is not freely granted 
 that the end of a perfected humanity justifies 
 the means through which it is attained, even 
 if such an end were within the limits of 
 conceivability. Men are no longer satisfied 
 with the prospect of joining 
 
 " The choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In lives made better by their presence." 
 
 They are living now, thinking emotional beings, 
 an interpenetration of spirit and flesh, and 
 they will no longer, willingly, lose the joy of 
 life, that their children's children may ascend 
 to higher heights than they dream of. And 
 as for the immortal life of the pure Christ- 
 loving soul, granted that the doctrine be true, 
 what solace is that to human misery? Such 
 
36 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 an immortality can only be for the choice 
 spirits of earth. It has absolutely no mean- 
 ing for the degraded millions whose souls 
 have been crushed out of them by the sordid 
 cares and anxieties of a pinched and starveling 
 existence. Td the modern mind the glory of 
 immortality is dimmed. It is not that it is 
 denied. On the contrary, the fascination of the 
 problem is probably greater than ever it was. 
 But simply because men are reasoning about it, 
 they have ceased to feel it. It is no longer a 
 living factor in their thoughts, a faith, certain 
 and sure, as of their own existence. 
 
 Such then seems to be the temper of the 
 age to which the modern theologian makes 
 his appeal. In presence of such an attitude 
 to the great problems of life he has to vindi- 
 cate the utility of his existence. He has to 
 assert himself as an economic factor that dare 
 not be left out in the construction of human 
 society. He has to restate his position in such 
 a way that it will fall in with the lines of 
 argumentation that alone appeal to the modern 
 intellect. He is indeed in a somewhat peculiar 
 position. He has no longer to combat the 
 cool, scathing intellectual criticism which was 
 dominant even a generation ago, or to meet 
 the passionate energy of debate which is the 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 37 
 
 characteristic of all discussions that vitally 
 touch the core of human life. He is too often 
 regarded rather as an effete force who can 
 safely be ignored. He is talking of matters 
 in which men are not interested and which 
 seem to have no pressing application to the 
 details of their ordinary existence. To argue 
 with him is a mere waste of time. To deny 
 his propositions is as futile as to affirm them. 
 It is many years since Matthew Arnold set 
 this fashion of criticism in his " Literature and 
 Dogma," summing it up in his famous dictum 
 that "Miracles do not happen." The attitude 
 to-day is well expressed in the following 
 words : — " The facts of life (the hideous cruel- 
 ties and degradations of our modern civilisation) 
 invincibly prove religion a nullity. Man will 
 not give religion two thousand centuries or 
 twenty centuries more to try itself and waste 
 human time. Its time is up, its probation 
 is ended : its own record ends it. Mankind 
 has not seons and eternities to spare for trying 
 out discredited systems."* 
 
 Now what is the dominant note of the 
 modern attitude towards the great problems 
 of life with which the theologian has to 
 
 * " Human Submission," Morrison J. Swift, quoted from 
 Professor James's " Pragmatism," p. 31. 
 
38 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 reckon? How can we characterise the changed 
 intellectual atmosphere we find pervading 
 alike the speculations of the thinker and the 
 vague inarticulate movements of the great 
 masses of the people ? Is it not simply the 
 increasing intensity of the assertion of the 
 rights of the present? It cannot be denied 
 that throughout the Christian centuries the 
 stress has always been laid in the past and 
 in the future. Man has been defined as a 
 being who looks before and after. The defi- 
 nition is a just one. But the charge that is 
 brought against him to-day is that in the 
 intensity of his gaze into the remote past and 
 the keenness of his speculation to limn the 
 outlines of the dim and distant future he has 
 neglected the miraculous Now which is his 
 only real possession. He has gone back 
 through the ages of history and has even 
 tried to span the inconceivable tracks of geo- 
 logic time to catch a glimpse of the Great 
 First Cause, and has forgotten that the only 
 God who has any real meaning for him is 
 the God of the Here and Now. He has 
 exhausted his imagination in painting the 
 glories of the future abode of bliss, he has 
 strained his intellectual faculties to their 
 utmost limit to trace the details of that evolu- 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 39 
 
 tionary process through which life is rising 
 on an ever ascending «cale to the fulness of 
 perfect being, while his heart has been har- 
 dened to the present cruelties through which 
 the end is being effected and he has missed 
 all the opportunities that have offered 
 him of tasting the true joy of living. But 
 the heart of humanity is revolting against 
 such an attitude towards life. It is wholly 
 irrational. After all, to-day is the only Eeality. 
 Eternity must be cognised by us under the 
 form of Time. Human life is not a mere pas- 
 sage from mystery to mystery, to be entirely 
 taken up in vain gropings into the inscruta- 
 bilities behind and the inscrutabilities before. 
 Human life is the only real thing we know. 
 It comes bringing to us duties we must do 
 and do at once, problems we must solve on 
 the spot or perish, pleasures we may enjoy, 
 but which are forever lost if we refuse to 
 taste them. And the strength of the agnostic 
 position so widely prevalent lies in the fact 
 that it keenly realises and interprets this 
 inarticulate craving of the human soul, while 
 its weakness consists in its utter inability to 
 give that fulness of satisfaction which the heart 
 of man desires. 
 
 This insistence upon the rights of the pre- 
 
40 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 sent is the dynamic of every vital movement 
 in life and thought to-day. We see it in poli- 
 tics, where the popular orator no longer appeals 
 to the heroic deeds of the past or paints in 
 glowing colours the future of Empire, but 
 takes his stand upon the slums and protests 
 against any nation, however great, advancing 
 to higher heights of glory upon the massacre 
 of little children or the starved bodies and 
 souls of a submerged tenth. We see it in the 
 woman movement, still a puzzle to so many, 
 which is based upon the ineradicable moral 
 instinct that every human being has an inherent 
 right to the development of all the faculties of 
 his or her nature, independent of sex, and to the 
 full pleasure of existence that comes from such 
 development. We see it in art, where the grand 
 style is at a discount, and the artist whose 
 appeal is widest seeks his subjects neither in the 
 historic glories of the past nor in mystic visions 
 of the future, but in humble cottage interiors, 
 in the stern stress of the toiler's life, or in 
 endeavouring to convey the impression which 
 the colour and harmony of nature make upon 
 his actual vision. We see it in literature, 
 where the books that have the widest circula- 
 tion are those that show the one half of the 
 world how the other half lives, that strip life 
 
THE THEISTIO BASIS 41 
 
 of its romance and idealism, and strive, for 
 good or evil, to get down to the fierce struggle 
 of the elemental passions. The crudest real- 
 ism finds a ready response, but poetry has no 
 public. Everywhere convention is cast aside 
 and men are intently gazing upon the living 
 present. And we see it also in philosophy, 
 where alike the lofty speculations of the idealist 
 and the hard reasoning of the materialist are 
 being superseded by a hand-to-mouth pragma- 
 tism which holds that truth is what works and 
 that the ideas which lift the soul above the 
 cares and perplexities of life and suffuse it 
 with a present ecstasy are true just in propor- 
 tion to their efficacy. 
 
 Everywhere we are confronted by this atti- 
 tude, and it is to this attitude the theologian 
 must appeal in laying firm and sure, for this 
 generation, the basis of his Theistic faith. 
 We cannot be surprised that one ethical ten- 
 dency of the modern spirit is towards a 
 revival of the cultured Paganism of ancient 
 Greece. The characteristic of the old Greek 
 life, in its sunny joyousness, resting on a 
 dark background of cruelty and vice, was un- 
 doubtedly, to use the phrase of Benjamin Kidd, 
 the " Ascendency of the Present.'' Christianity 
 broke up this life completely and for ever by 
 
42 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 subordinating the present to the future, by 
 teaching that duty was higher than pleasure, 
 and by claiming for every soul of man, and 
 not merely for the few, the whole fulness of 
 emotional and intellectual life. And although 
 with our loss of the keen vision of the future 
 the Ascendency of the Present returns, it can- 
 not Ignore the centuries that have been. The 
 renascence of Paganism to-day, undoubted fact 
 of our time though it be, is, therefore, a mere 
 transient phenomenon whose roots are not deep 
 enough to make it a force requiring to be intel- 
 lectually grappled with. The rights of the 
 present which are claimed to-day are the rights 
 to the whole rich inheritance of the past, the 
 spoils of Time which have been handed down 
 through the ages, and which must be free to 
 every human being according to his capacity 
 of assimilating them. The varied and inex- 
 haustible treasures of the Christian centuries 
 are not to be thrown aside as mere useless 
 lumber. Humanity has won them by a more 
 than mortal agony, and is not likely to let 
 them go. 
 
 Here, as at every critical period of the 
 worlds history, it is Jesus Christ and His 
 teaching that must come to the rescue. 
 There is no doubt that in ages of a different 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 43 
 
 intellectual temper from this the theologian 
 has laid the stress of his reasoning on the 
 past and on the future. He has sought his 
 Supreme Creator and his Sublime Artificer 
 far back in the eternity that existed before 
 time began. He has devoted endless labour to 
 a study of the records of Holy Writ in order 
 to prove their genuineness and to establish 
 their veracity. He has piled up whole libraries 
 of eschatological speculation to give a local 
 habitation and a name to his aspirations after 
 a perfect felicity or his dread of a long 
 despair. With eager intellectual pertinacity he 
 has sought for God everywhere save where he 
 was most likely to find Him — in the recesses 
 of his own soul. 
 
 I am speaking of the intellectual search. It 
 is the province of theology with which we are 
 dealing here. I do not mean to say that in 
 the Christian centuries there ever has been a 
 time when man has failed to find God in his 
 inmost heart, or when God has failed to talk 
 face to face with His chosen ones as a man 
 talketh with his friend. The whole rich record 
 of Christian experience affords abundant tes- 
 timony to the joy of the religious life, to the 
 ecstasy that has wrapt the soul that has felt 
 the immediate presence of its God. " Thou 
 
U THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 hast called from on high," says St. Augustine, 
 " with a voice loud and clear, to the inner ear 
 of my heart, and Thou hast triumphed over 
 my deafness and I have listened to Thine 
 accents : Thou hast enlightened my blindness 
 and I have seen Thy light, and have learned 
 that Thou art my God. But there was a time 
 when I knew Thee not ! Alas for the time 
 when I did not know Thee ! Alas for the 
 days of blindness when I did not see Thee ! 
 Alas for the hours of deafness when I did 
 not hear Thee ! I have loved Thee only too 
 late, O Beauty, living and eternal ! Alas for 
 the time when I did not love Thee ! " * This 
 is the language of religion which has run in 
 continuous stream all through the centuries. 
 But it cannot be denied that this living 
 experience has sought its sanction and its 
 objective validity not in itself, not in its im- 
 mediate cognisance of God, but in arguments 
 based on data that were wholly outwith 
 experience. And for this reason it is, to-day, 
 too often looked upon merely as a delusive 
 dream that has no practical relation to the 
 real life of humanity. 
 
 Neither do I deny the utility of the theologi- 
 
 * St. Augustine, *' Soliloquies," quoted from •* Exposition de 
 la Morale Catholique," par E, Janvier, vol. i. " La Beatitude." 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 45 
 
 cal arguments that have sought for God behind 
 and before, in the heavens above and in the 
 depths beneath. In their own time and place, 
 and taking them for what they were worth, 
 they were and are invaluable to the Christian 
 soul. Metaphysical speculation, in every age, 
 has at least done much to vindicate the objective 
 reality of God, and to strengthen the souFs in- 
 tuitive conviction that the tendrils it threw out 
 to the divine are not grasping mere vacuity. 
 The labours of Christian scholarship have 
 cleared the lineaments of Jesus, the Saviour, 
 and brought us face to face with the eternal 
 Human in the midst of Time. And eschato- 
 logical speculations have kept alive in the 
 heart of man the reality of that life and 
 immortality which was brought to light by our 
 blessed Lord, 
 
 But our theology to-day must be permeated 
 with the spirit of the age, and must join in 
 this emphatic assertion of the rights of the 
 present which is its dominant characteristic. 
 And for this purpose it is not enough to appeal 
 to the fact that religion lifts the soul above the 
 cares and troubles of earth and floods it with 
 joyful experiences. Christian experience is not 
 all joyful. It can sound the depth of despair 
 as well as rise to the height of felicity. And 
 
46 THE THEISTIC BASIS 
 
 if its felicity be based on mere illusions what 
 better are we? There is joy enough often in 
 the hallucinations of the insane, but that is not 
 the joy that has any appeal to the living 
 rational soul of man. Human life must be 
 based on Reality. And the task of theology 
 to-day is to vindicate this Reality. Theology 
 must face the fact that the only Reality possible 
 to the human soul is the Reality that comes 
 through experience, that the only God the soul 
 can grasp is the God of the Here and Now, that 
 the only affirmations regarding God that have 
 any meaning for the reason of man are those 
 that find their verification in his own expe- 
 rience, that a living theology, in short, can 
 only be the sublimated essence of the racial 
 experience of God claiming the allegiance of 
 the individual soul because it is but the ideal 
 of his higher self appealing to his own best 
 instincts. Is not this the meaning of the 
 sublime declaration that God created man in 
 His own image? And this living theology 
 must react on the whole life of man. It must 
 be shown to cover the whole field of human 
 activities. It must be the master-light of all 
 his seeing, the motive-spring of all his doing, 
 A really living theology can never possibly be 
 a mere department of science. Theology was 
 
THE THEISTIC BASIS 47 
 
 well called the Queen of the sciences, and 
 though in these days she has been dethroned 
 from her lofty altitude, she still claims it de 
 jure. For the object of theology is to show 
 that God is the God of the living — not the 
 dead, that all the satisfaction of scientific 
 investigation is but the joy of the human 
 mind thinking God's thoughts after Him, that 
 the pleasures of art are but the instinctive 
 striving of the spirit to express life in terms 
 of the ideal beauty, and the passion of ethics 
 is but the infinite longing of the human soul 
 to be joined for its own enrichment in a cor- 
 porate unity with every other. The message 
 of theology to-day to the great bewildered, 
 struggling mass of humanity, longing for a 
 happiness it feels to belong to it of right, but 
 which it can in no wise grasp, is that God is 
 the God of the living — not the dead, that life 
 can only be lived in its fulness by those who 
 see all things in God, whose joy is the God- 
 inspired joy of universal being, whose souls 
 touch life at every point, and therefore expe- 
 rience the thrill of that eternal vitality which 
 we name — God. 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
II 
 
 INSPIRATION AND EEVBLATION 
 
 GOD is an experience. A clear grasp of 
 this point of view must of necessity 
 determine our attitude towards the vexed 
 questions of Inspiration and Revelation. God 
 can be known only in so far as He comes in 
 contact with the human spirit, and His Revela- 
 tion of Himself must always be a personal 
 revelation to the individual soul. No other 
 revelation is even conceivable. The beauty 
 of colour, the sjrmmetry, harmony, and grace 
 which characterise nature, are personal reve- 
 lations to individual men. To the blind, to 
 whom they do not thus come as personal 
 experiences, they are unimaginable. What does 
 not in some way or other touch our experience 
 is for us simply unmeaning. What, by its 
 very definition, is incapable of touching our 
 experience is, so far as we are concerned, non- 
 
 Frohlem of Theology 51 
 
52 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 existent, and may safely be left out of our 
 calculations. 
 
 But this does not exhaust the matter. After 
 all, God is a racial experience as well as an 
 individual experience. And this forces us to 
 consider the question of Revelation under two 
 aspects. What is the revelation God has made 
 of Himself to humanity? What is His reve- 
 lation to me as an individual ? The content of 
 the two revelations must inevitably be very 
 different. The grasp of God made by the total 
 sum of finite spiritual being cannot fail to be 
 immeasurably greater than that made by a 
 mere infinitesimal portion of such being. Let 
 it be granted that I have certain spiritual 
 convictions that are part of my very nature. 
 I believe in God as I believe in my own exist- 
 ence. I know there are certain deeds I ought 
 to do, and others I ought to avoid at the peril 
 of my soul. There is a life I must live or be 
 for ever disgraced in my own eyes. Now I 
 may stop here, and if I do, I may say that this 
 is meantime the sum of God's revelation to 
 me. But I dare not say that this is the sum 
 of God's revelation to the race. Nay, with so 
 many voices telling me of spiritual heights to 
 which I have not attained, of spiritual visions 
 X have not seen, of spiritual raptures I have 
 
INSPIEATION AND REVELATION 53 
 
 not experienced, I should be false to my own 
 conviction of the truth of my personal reve- 
 lation were I to doubt that God has taught 
 others truths that are not yet mine, that 
 He has brought others to an inner shrine 
 of His Temple which my feet have not been 
 permitted to tread. On the basis, then, of ex- 
 perience as the ground of all genuine revela- 
 tion, the individual soul is bound logically to 
 acknowledge that there is, for him, an objective 
 content of revelation somewhere in humanity 
 to which he must pay reverence, and which it 
 is possible for him to realise. 
 
 Where is it, then, this objective content of 
 Revelation, and what is its organ? Now, I 
 wish to premise that no spiritual faith that 
 has ever claimed and held the allegiance of 
 large masses of men, and has been a real 
 factor in human development, can be properly 
 characterised as false. Neither is it right to 
 speak of such beliefs as containing more or 
 less of the truth. Truth is truth, and when 
 once we have a grasp of a true principle we 
 are getting a glimpse of the Absolute Being of 
 God, and we may hold to it with assured convic- 
 tion amid all the fluctuations of human opinion. 
 But a true principle 'may be wrongly applied. 
 Men are so applying them every day, both in 
 
54 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 philosophy and science, and are learning by 
 their failures the real meaning, scope, and appli- 
 cation of the principle they have got hold of. It 
 is the way of experiment, the only way by which 
 genuine progress can be made. And nowhere 
 is this method practised on a wider scale than 
 in the large movements of human history. 
 
 The great Christian thinkers, e.gr.j have always 
 recognised that as there is undoubtedly an 
 objective content of Revelation of which they 
 were continually catching glimpses in their 
 own experience of life, and whose deeper 
 truths were revealing themselves to their 
 souls in their silent hours of meditation and 
 thought, that content must lie in the spiritual 
 experience of the race, and especially in the 
 experience of those men and women whose 
 souls were touched to fine issues, and who 
 were able to give authoritative expression to 
 the weltering turmoil of longings, desires, 
 insights, joys, raptures, and satisfactions of 
 the spiritual life. And it was easy to pass 
 from that to the conception of a Church 
 which embodied all the highest men had 
 thought of God, all the profoundest men had 
 known of His working with the human soul — 
 the whole racial experience, indeed, of spiritual 
 emotion, with its magnificent heroisms, its 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 55 
 
 intense raptures and its awful dread, the 
 sum total of the mighty upheaval of the 
 spirit of man to meet the infinite mystery of 
 God. Nor are we surprised to find that as 
 thought on the subject grew clearer it was 
 recognised that such a Church must be an 
 Infallible Church, must be able to speak to 
 the soul of man, groping after the ray of 
 illumination that penetrated his environing 
 darkness, with one voice, distinct, unhesitating,* 
 I venture to say that such a Church — a Church 
 that was simply the incarnation of the total 
 sum of spiritual truth attained by man at any 
 stage of his development — would be to the indi- 
 vidual an infallible guide. He who had the 
 gathered result of all human experience to 
 direct his steps, and was willing to obey its 
 dictates, could not possibly go wrong. The 
 principle is sound enough. It is its applica- 
 tion that has invariably been defective. And 
 the beautiful logic of Romish writers at their 
 best, so convincing in its lucidity — for it is 
 based on this conception of the Church — results 
 simply from the fact that they are reasoning 
 in an ideal world concerning an ideal Church, 
 which never had any existence in this per- 
 plexing world of ours, whose anomalies con- 
 * See Note D, "The Catholic Church." 
 
56 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 tinually tear to pieces all our syllogisms. The 
 Catholic ideal is one thing ; the claim of the 
 Church of Rome to Catholicity is quite another. 
 And what is frequently overlooked is the fact 
 that the attraction of Rome, which to certain 
 souls of a fine temper is undoubtedly very 
 great, results largely from the substitution of 
 the one for the other. It is simply treason to 
 the human intellect to recognise the claim of 
 the Church of Rome to be the depository of 
 the content of Revelation or to acknowledge 
 its infallibility in any sense in which the word 
 has an intelligible meaning. Nay, further, it 
 is treason to the only idea on which the claim 
 can rationally be made. A Church can never 
 be Catholic which ignores the spiritual expe- 
 riences of a vast portion of the human race, 
 and the claim of Catholicity in such a Church 
 is the source of infinite mischief to itself. A 
 true principle wrongly applied is bound to do 
 harm rather than good. A force that works 
 smoothly and sweetly in a huge and compU- 
 cated mechanical structure, because the force 
 is nicely adapted to all the intricate details 
 of the machinery, might rend to pieces, if 
 unmodified, a mere portion of the mighty 
 fabric. The law of gravitation which holds 
 in stately poise all the symmetrical parts of 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 57 
 
 a great Gothic cathedral, because grace and 
 beauty in every lordly column, springing arch, 
 buttress, nauUion, and finial, are carefully cal- 
 culated to withstand the force of superin- 
 cumbent weight and thrust, would bring the 
 whole magnificent building to the dust if even 
 a leading corner-stone were removed from its 
 place. It is the symmetry of the whole that 
 lends to each part alike strength and dignity. 
 And it has been the right conception of what 
 constitutes the Catholic Church, sectarianly 
 applied, which has resulted in all the errors 
 that have corrupted the Church of Rome, and 
 has dethroned her from her supremacy over 
 the spirit of humanity. Her infallibility has 
 been shipwrecked on the rock of fact and 
 history. Her " Index Expurgatorius " is the 
 monument of her failure to interpret the 
 spiritual experience of the human race. Her 
 intolerance, which has banished from her com- 
 munion some of the noblest of God's sons and 
 daughters in order to maintain a mere sec- 
 tional theology, has for ever deprived her of 
 the shadow of a claim to Catholicity. 
 
 But, again. Protestantism, thrusting the idea 
 of Catholicity into the background, has sought 
 to find the objective content of Revelation in an 
 Inspired Book. Holy Scripture is undoubtedly, 
 
58 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 and must remain, in a peculiar sense, the Word 
 of God. In this Protestantism has hold of an 
 indubitable fact. I am endeavouring to make 
 no theological presuppositions that are anta- 
 gonistic to my fundamental thesis that God is 
 an experience and revelation is always personal. 
 And therefore I wish only to accord to Scripture 
 the place that the universal religious conscious- 
 ness of humankind has assigned to it. But 
 Protestantism in its historic manifestation has 
 given it a different position — in its own estima- 
 tion a higher, certainly a narrower. Holy 
 Scripture has been regarded not only as con- 
 taining the objective content of Revelation, but 
 as summing it up in its totality, as being at once 
 the first and the last word of the revelation 
 of God to His children. The Bible, instead of 
 being looked upon as a medium through which 
 a revelation can come to the soul, has been 
 taken as the revelation itself. Its pages were 
 dictated by the Holy Ghost and committed to 
 writing by inspired penmen. It is consequently 
 authoritative not only in those matters that 
 can be grasped by the human spirit and verified 
 through experience of life, but also on points 
 that fall outwith all possible experience or are 
 subject to quite a different kind of verification. 
 The Bible is inerrant in its details, literal in its 
 
60 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 and yet he knew that in his main contention — 
 that the Word of God was contained in Holy- 
 Scripture — he was undoubtedly right. He knew 
 it simply from the fact that God through Holy 
 Scripture had made a revelation to his own 
 soul. The objective content of Revelation 
 appealed to his spiritual instinct and verified 
 itself in his religious experience. And so we 
 find that in all the great Confessions of the 
 Reformation the authority of Holy Scripture 
 was placed on an absolutely sound basis. 
 Nothing can surpass the clearness and majesty 
 of our Westminster Confession on this impor- 
 tant subject. " We may be moved and induced 
 by the testimony of the Church to a high and 
 reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture ; and the 
 heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the 
 doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent 
 of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which 
 is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it 
 makes of the only way of man's salvation, the 
 many other incomparable excellences and the 
 entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby 
 it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the 
 word of God ; yet notwithstanding, our full 
 persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth 
 and divine authority thereof, is from the inward 
 work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 61 
 
 with the Word in our hearts." Yes, this is the 
 impregnable rock on which rests the authority 
 of Holy Scripture, and it brings us back from 
 all our theorising to the fundamental thesis of 
 religious truth. God is an experience. Revela- 
 tion must be personal. "The Word of God" 
 enshrined in Scripture "is quick and powerful 
 and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing 
 even to the dividing asunder of the soul and 
 spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a 
 discerner of the thoughts and intents of the 
 heart."* But it is a long leap from such a 
 position as this to maintain that a man must 
 without doubt perish everlastingly unless he 
 believes that nine-and-twenty knives, neither 
 more nor less, were carried from Babylon by 
 the returning exiles, or that eight hundred 
 thousand valiant men followed David to the 
 field. The two orders of facts are not in the 
 same plane, and the testimony of the Holy 
 Spirit, which convinces of sin and reveals Jesus, 
 the Eternal Son, as the only Saviour, cannot 
 possibly give us infallible assurance of historical 
 events or scientific truths. Even supposing the 
 science of criticism, of which our Reformers 
 were profoundly ignorant, had only served to 
 prove to the hilt the traditional authorship and 
 * Hebrews iv, 12. 
 
62 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 origin of the books of Scripture, and abundant 
 contemporary evidence could be adduced for 
 every historical event they narrate, from their 
 own point of view the mechanical theory of 
 inspiration was untenable. Their real theory, 
 as stated in their Confessions, was absolutely 
 sound, and if only succeeding generations had 
 had the courage to carry it to its logical issue, 
 historical Protestantism might have been saved 
 from many a false position. For with the 
 liberation of the intellect from the shackles of 
 a spiritual despotism the process of criticism 
 of the Scripture record was inevitable. It was 
 inherent in the very conception that constituted 
 the essence of the movement of Reform, viz., 
 that God alone was Lord of the conscience. 
 To hold this truth as a watchword of our life 
 means that we must of necessity submit to 
 searching criticism any institution that claims 
 to be divinely ordained, any documents that 
 profess to contain God's Word, The Christian 
 who accepts this fundamental principle of the 
 Reformation owes a supreme loyalty to truth 
 alone, and must above all things be faithful to 
 the revelation God makes to his own soul. It 
 is a doctrine that shatters Bibliolatry at its base. 
 And a consciousness of the inadequacy alike 
 of any Visible Church or of the Bible to be the 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 63 
 
 organ of an objective Divine Revelation has led 
 the modern theologian almost universally to 
 place the ultimate authority for divine truth in 
 spiritual intuition. It is recognised that God 
 is an imperative need of the human soul, and 
 that those spiritual experiences that are 
 common to the human race and are always 
 deepest and richest in the finest souls of the 
 race cannot be dismissed as merely the hallu- 
 cinations of morbid natures or as passing phases 
 in the development of humanity to higher 
 rational levels. They must mean something 
 and must be reckoned with in our psychological 
 analysis. And yet, while here again the modern 
 theologian undoubtedly grasps a truth of vital 
 importance, is it not the case that, for the most 
 part, he leaves the searching soul dissatisfied? 
 Nay, is it not the case that his appeal is, to the 
 great mass of the people, essentially weak, that 
 he preaches a gospel that has little converting 
 or compelling power ? For it is a notable fact 
 that raodern theology has not been able to 
 break away from its inherent subjectivism and 
 to step boldly forward into the realm of definite 
 reality. Its tendency has been to dissolve 
 religion into a vague sentimentality. It has 
 fostered a pious emotion that has no real 
 strength in it, because it has no living concrete 
 
64 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 Personality to draw it forth or has developed a 
 pretentious sestheticism which seeks to clothe 
 itself with the charm and beauty of a living 
 faith to which it has no claim and which it 
 cannot really comprehend. The religion of the 
 spirit in its modern phase is a reaction against 
 a religion of authority which had gradually 
 forgotten the true basis on which alone its 
 authority could rest, and the reaction has 
 resulted in the loss of the idea of authority 
 altogether as an essential element in religious 
 truth. The whole conception of an objective 
 content of Revelation has been dropping out of 
 sight. Spiritual truth is considered to be only 
 what commends itself to the individual soul, 
 and the steadying influence of the results of the 
 experience of past centuries of religious life and 
 thought is rejected as a mere spiritual tyranny. 
 The name of Ritschl is very closely identified 
 with this whole school of theology,* if that 
 can be called a theology whose central charac- 
 teristic is the rejection of metaphysic. It is 
 to him undoubtedly that directly or indirectly 
 much of our modern theology owes its inspira- 
 tion, and to Ritschl and his school must be 
 assigned the honour of reviving theology from 
 the neglect and even contempt into which it 
 * Cf. Garvie, " The BUschlian Theology." 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 65 
 
 had been sinking in the minds of philosophic 
 thinkers, and of pointing out the method by 
 which alone its results could be vindicated and 
 could take their place in the catena of scientific 
 truths. But Ritschlianism as it is commonly- 
 understood, and especially that shallow Ritsch- 
 lianism which forms the backbone of the popu- 
 lar theology which floods the religious press 
 at the present day, is fatally tainted with a 
 subjectivism from which it finds no way of 
 escape. It is undoubtedly true that there can 
 be no knowledge of God, and no saving com- 
 prehension of the divine nature and the divine 
 method of salvation, that is not a living 
 experience of the individual human soul. This 
 is not only true, it is a truism. But if the 
 authority of the Church and the Bible be 
 rejected, the individual experience cannot be 
 regarded as the final authority for facts so 
 transcendent as God's existence and the reality 
 of the Christian theology through which this 
 experience is gained. The soul may indeed 
 have a vivid consciousness of an overmaster- 
 ing Personality, a deep sense of imperfection, 
 aspirations after a fuller and nobler life which 
 find their ideal in Jesus Christ, but after all 
 these may be merely hallucinations, patholo- 
 gical experiences, to be cured by a deeper 
 
 ProUem of Theology 6 
 
66 INSPIRATION AND EEVELATION 
 
 immersion in the business and pleasure of the 
 world. The soul must indubitably trust in the 
 reality of its own experiences. It can do no 
 other. They are given data calling for inter- 
 pretation. But the soul that trusts merely 
 in its own experiences cannot get out of itself, 
 lacks the key by which its experiences are to 
 be interpreted. It has no assurance that these 
 experiences connect it with a realm of genuine 
 reality. To say with Ritschl and his school 
 that this assurance is not needed, that the 
 spiritual judgments of the human soul are 
 judgments that have worth for itself inasmuch 
 as they give it internal peace and a conscious- 
 ness of a higher dignity, while at the same 
 time maintaining an agnostic attitude to the 
 transcendental doctrines of theology and only 
 a wavering belief in the very existence of God 
 Himself, is simply to misinterpret the meaning 
 of that divine craving of the human spirit 
 on which his whole theory rests. What I, 
 as an individual, wish to know, is not my 
 subjective experience of an infinitely varied 
 spiritual emotion. That I know already, and 
 I know further that it will not leave me in 
 peace, so long as I am determined to live on 
 the higher levels of life, until I am assured 
 that it is an emotion responding to a divine 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 67 
 
 stimulus. I want to be certain that God is, 
 and is the rewarder of those that diligently 
 seek Him. I want to be thoroughly satisfied 
 that this genuine longing after the true, the 
 beautiful, and the good, which I pursue in 
 spite of terrible obstacles and strong tempta- 
 tions that are ever dragging me down to 
 lower levels on which life would be so much 
 easier, is a longing that is worth indulging 
 and has within it a guarantee of ultimate 
 success. No theory of life that puts these 
 experiences simply on the level of mere 
 wishes and desires, no theory of life that does 
 not regard the spiritual experiences of human- 
 kind as the correlate of objective metaphysical 
 realities, will ever satisfy the religious instinct. 
 So then even the most elaborately reasoned 
 out attempt to vindicate the rationality of 
 our spiritual experiences while divorcing them 
 from any metaphysical basis cannot be said 
 to have succeeded. A spiritual intuition which 
 consists in mere value- judgments valid only 
 for the individual cannot get out of itself and 
 embrace the great Reality — and no conception 
 of religion that is not rooted in reality can 
 ever lay hold of the spirit of man. Indeed, to 
 the average intellect it is simply unintelligible. 
 The very idea of such a mere subjective religion 
 
68 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 rests on definitions which only a philosophically- 
 trained mind can grasp, and which such a 
 mind must ultimately reject as sophisms. And 
 experience abundantly proves that it has no 
 real strength in it, no compelling power to 
 lay hold of the soul o£ man struggling amid 
 manifold temptations and force it to higher 
 levels of life. The religion that speaks effec- 
 tually to the average man must speak in a 
 tone of authority. True, it must be a reason- 
 able authority — an authority to which his 
 conscience responds. But it must be at the 
 same time an authority far greater and higher 
 than his own undeveloped religious instincts 
 can admit or even understand. It must be an 
 authority, moreover, enunciating truths, clear- 
 cut and well-defined, truths which, though 
 they involve ideas far beyond his comprehen- 
 sion, yet overshadow him with the vague 
 consciousness of a Presence to whom his 
 inmost soul knows by a mysterious instinct 
 he ought to yield himself. Religion, in short, 
 if it is to produce its characteristic results, 
 must come to the soul as a revelation from 
 God having a definite content which the indi- 
 vidual soul could never have evolved from 
 itself, and which therefore comes as objective 
 Reality, while at the same time it strikes 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 69 
 
 chords in the soul to which it instinctively 
 responds. God meets the soul from without, 
 and the awakened spirit humbles itself at His 
 Holy Presence. 
 
 Is there then such a revelation, and if so, 
 where is it? Is there such an authority in 
 religion, and to whom or to what institution 
 has it been confided? Every religious man 
 knows there is such a revelation and such an 
 authority, and yet every definite answer to 
 the question must at best be imperfect and, in 
 our day at least, tentative. The religious man 
 knows because of his own experience. His 
 faith is always far larger than he can give 
 a rational account of. Whenever he tries to 
 state his reasons for his creed, they seem 
 strangely inadequate to explain the sublime 
 conceptions that exalt his soul. And yet if 
 his creed is to be other than a mere supersti- 
 tion, he must go on stating his reasons for it, 
 he must continually seek for it an intellectual 
 vindication, he must be always endeavouring 
 to co-ordinate it with those rational concep- 
 tions which regulate his thinking and form 
 a practical guide to his daily life. 
 
 We fall back again then upon the basal 
 fact that God is an experience. God reveals 
 Himself to the individual soul. The spiritual 
 
70 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 experiences of the individual are as real as any- 
 other experiences. They are as real, e.gr., as 
 our perception of the outer world of sense. 
 They are as real as our consciousness of our 
 individual existence. Professor James, in his 
 analysis of the varieties of religious experience 
 among men, has, at least, vindicated this fact, 
 that the religious consciousness cannot be dis- 
 missed as merely pathological.* It is not simply 
 a morbid mental state to be treated by the 
 expert in mental diseases. True enough, as 
 his critics remark, he need not have gone so 
 far to prove his case. The normal conscious- 
 ness even of healthy-minded individuals as 
 truly bears witness to a realm of mystery in 
 which the soul of man resides as the abnormal 
 and exceptional. But, even so, it strengthens 
 the argument to find that the impartial in- 
 quirer is forced to the conclusion that the 
 mystic raptures of souls specially sensitive to 
 spiritual impressions are inherent elements of 
 human nature, calling as imperatively for inter- 
 pretation as the sense-perception and elemental 
 consciousness of ordinary individuals. The 
 religious sense is as genuine as any other 
 sense. 
 
 * Professor James, '* Varieties of Religious Experience. A 
 Study in Human Nature." 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 71 
 
 If this be so, are we to rest content with 
 taking our spiritual experiences as mere sub- 
 jective emotions ? Are we to say that they 
 are valuable in so far as they give us a thrill 
 of spiritual joy, as they console us in our 
 times of trial, as they stimulate us to work 
 for the larger good of humanity ; but they 
 are mere emotions, created by a vivid imagina- 
 tion, pointing to no objective Reality ? God 
 is a figment of the imagination. The story 
 of the Eternal Son and His wonderful love 
 for sinners and the supreme agony through 
 which He wrought out the salvation of man 
 is one of those vivid myths in which the 
 struggling, suffering soul of humankind reads 
 a deeper meaning into its personal anguish 
 than it really contains. It is evident that if 
 this is all the value we are giving our reli- 
 gious intuitions and experiences, we are 
 placing them on a distinctively lower level 
 than those other subjective impressions 
 through which our self-consciousness is real- 
 ised. If we accept the trend of modern 
 psychology in assigning a real place to reli- 
 gious experience as a factor in normal human 
 existence, then, surely, we can only maintain 
 their pure subjectivity by a thoroughgoing 
 agnosticism of a type that has been extremely 
 
72 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 rare. If we shut ourselves up within our 
 own personal consciousness, if we maintain 
 either that there is no reality at all, or that 
 there is no possibility of knowing reality, if 
 we hold that our sense-perceptions reveal to 
 us no objective world, but only a series of 
 disconnected impressions, if, in short, we fall 
 back upon the primitive scepticism of Hume, 
 and regard the Ego itself as merely a bundle 
 of fortuitous impressions and ideas, then we 
 may, logically, consider the religious sense as 
 equally subjective with the other senses and 
 look upon it as pointing to no reality out- 
 side of itself. But that is a position that 
 has long since been discarded as untenable,* 
 And the moment we get out of our own 
 personal consciousness, the moment we recog- 
 nise that our sense-impressions bear witness 
 to a reality that is not ourselves, and that 
 our self-consciousness involves the real exist- 
 ence of an Ego, that moment our spiritual 
 experiences clamour at the closed gate of the 
 awakening soul and demand their legitimate 
 outlet. We cannot say that our experience 
 of a material world is a real experience, and 
 
 * The most thoroughgoing modern attempt to work out a 
 logical Agnosticism is to be fotmd in Karl Pearson's " Grammar 
 of Science " (Contemporary Science Series). 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 73 
 
 our experience of a spiritual realm merely a 
 delusion of the imagination. We dare not say 
 I am I, an individual being having a personal 
 identity, but that mysterious Presence through 
 which the "I" reaches a deeper consciousness 
 of its marvellous capacities is a nothing, an 
 empty phantasm, a mere shadow cast by 
 itself. Nay, if subjective experience is to 
 have any validity at all, we must take experi- 
 ence as a whole, analysing all its parts, giving 
 to each its natural value and endeavouring 
 to find the objective reality to which each 
 part testifies. 
 
 And if we do, is it not possible to build 
 up on the data given by spiritual experience 
 a knowledge of divine realities which shall 
 at least be as valid as any other branch of 
 human knowledge? From the data given by 
 the senses the scientist has constructed a 
 theory of the material world which gains 
 universal acceptance — an acceptance that is 
 universal because he is building on data that 
 are universally experienced. He has dis- 
 covered the forces that work in that objective 
 reality we call the material universe, and he 
 is able to apply these forces to meet the 
 material needs of human beings. Why should 
 it be impossible then for the theologian to 
 
74 INSPIRATION AND EEVELATION 
 
 do what he has done? He, too, has his data. 
 The spiritual experiences of the human soul are, 
 if infinitely varied in degree, practically uni- 
 versal. Wherever the experience is deep and 
 well-defined it unites itself with other experi- 
 ences as being similar in nature, proving 
 that the spiritual realm inhabited by human 
 souls is a unity. The theologian has pre- 
 cisely the same elements to work upon as 
 the scientist, and there seems no a priori 
 reason why his results should not be quite as 
 satisfactory. 
 
 But if he is to be successful he must pro- 
 ceed on the lines that regulate all scientific 
 research. He must begin by a careful analysis 
 of the spiritual consciousness. All the great 
 theologians have ever done so. What can be 
 finer or more soul-satisfying than the masterly 
 analysis of the great Apostle of the Gentiles 
 carried on through his marvellous epistles 
 with such rigorous scientific precision? It is 
 almost universally recognised that St. Paul's 
 theology is a psychology. We are well aware 
 that the permanent discoveries of science are 
 all based on a long catena of inductive reason- 
 ing. It is not sufficiently recognised, and yet 
 it is as absolutely true, that the formulae of 
 theology which have the characteristics of 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 75 
 
 permanence — of Catholicity — are based on a 
 similar foundation. The theologians who have 
 exercised the widest influence are those who 
 have probed the spirit of man to its depth, 
 and the doctrines that have most profoundly 
 touched the human heart have been those 
 that have been wrought out, under divine 
 guidance, through the agonies of struggling, 
 despairing, aspiring souls. 
 
 The theologian must therefore proceed by a 
 careful examination of his data, by a rigid 
 scrutiny of the facts of religious experience. 
 Of course, he must have had a profound reli- 
 gious experience himself. Pectus facit theo- 
 logum. But just there he must be very 
 cautious. I have already dwelt upon the 
 inherent subjectivity of the present day sys- 
 tems that work from the standpoint of 
 spiritual intuition as the seat of religious 
 authority. The reason is that the thought 
 uppermost in the minds of their exponents 
 is the spiritual intuition of the individual. It 
 is the individual consciousness that is to be 
 the test of truth. There is no truth that is 
 above the individual consciousness and which 
 must therefore be received on authority veiled 
 in a halo of mystery. Hence the difficulty of 
 these systems in breaking away from a mere 
 
76 INSPIEATION AND REVELATION 
 
 personal subjectivity and getting into the 
 realm of objective reality. 
 
 But the analysis of the religious conscious- 
 ness means an analysis of the religious con- 
 sciousness of the race. It is an analysis that 
 can only be effected by one who is of the 
 race, by one who is in sympathy with all 
 forms of religious thought and feeling, by 
 one to whom all religious experience is 
 possible, in so far, at least, as it comes 
 within the limits of his own personal capacity. 
 That is to say, it must be intelligible as being 
 in the line of his own experience. There 
 may be, in the data on which he works, 
 heights of spiritual rapture into which he 
 feels he can never soar, there may be depths 
 of spiritual despair he cannot personally 
 fathom, there may be a clearness and definite- 
 ness of spiritual insight to which he can 
 never attain. For he has to deal with the 
 expression of spiritual emotion as it comes 
 full charged with meaning from the lips of 
 those great religious natures in whom the 
 life of the universe has throbbed with the 
 most intense vitality. He has to take account 
 of the visions of those clear-souled mystics 
 who have reflected with the most definite 
 outline the essential being of the Eternal. 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 77 
 
 He has to accustom himself to tread those 
 higher levels of existence on which the very- 
 few who have brought God close to the beat- 
 ing heart of humanity have found their 
 natural dwelling-place. And in his research 
 among those higher spiritual spheres he will 
 undoubtedly find much, very much, that is 
 beyond the capacity of his own experience, 
 much that transcends his own comprehension. 
 But he will find nothing, in so far as he is 
 dealing with genuine data of experience, i.e., 
 with the emotions and ideas that have been 
 living personal experiences of the consciousness 
 of individuals similar to himself — nothing to 
 which he does not feel himself somehow per- 
 sonally related, nothing which does not respond 
 to some chord, faint, deep-hidden, in his own 
 nature. He is dealing, in short, with the 
 totality of spiritual experience, with spiritual 
 experience as it embraces aU the emotions and 
 ideas that the great soul of humanity has 
 ever felt or known, and it is simply because 
 he is part of humanity that he is able to 
 pursue his quest, and, again, it is because he 
 is only a part of humanity that his personal 
 experience lacks the wholeness that can alone 
 make experience the authoritative organ of 
 spiritual truth. 
 
78 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 For what assures us of metaphysical reality- 
 is not our personal experience. It is the uni- 
 versal experience as ratified by our own per- 
 sonal consciousness. This material world with 
 all its marvellous forces as apprehended by 
 myself may be a pure delusion. I have as 
 vivid an impression often in my dreams of a 
 wholly different world which I judge to be a 
 pure delusion. But when I know that the 
 matter and force which I regard as outside 
 of me and as something different from my 
 own consciousness are so regarded by all human 
 beings having a nature similar to my own, and 
 that the impression they make on me is 
 identical with that they make on them, I at 
 once pronounce them to be real. They become 
 workable entities, super-phenomenal realities. 
 And so must it be in the spiritual world. My 
 spiritual experiences are merely subjective so 
 long as I regard them as merely my own. But 
 when I find they are shared by others, nay, 
 when I find that in their leading features they 
 are common to the race, then at once I pro- 
 nounce them to have an objective basis, to in- 
 dicate a spiritual reality as worthy of research 
 as is this material universe, a knowledge of 
 which comes to me in precisely similar fashion. 
 
 And further, if I wish to gain a rational con- 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 79 
 
 ception of what is meant by matter and force, 
 to whom do I go ? I do not merely question 
 my own crude immediate perceptions. Neither 
 am I satisfied with the confused conceptions of 
 men and women who have never even tried to 
 develop their intellectual capacities. I study 
 the works of the scientist who has probed 
 nature to the bottom, who has isolated and 
 analysed its phenomena, who has clarified 
 his immediate perceptions by straining them 
 through the fine sieve of a rigorous logic. 
 Shall I proceed otherwise in my search after 
 spiritual truth? I must not rely upon my 
 own crude and imperfect religious conceptions. 
 Neither is it sufficient to study the dim religious 
 groping of the great heart of humanity, even 
 though that is sufficient to satisfy me of the 
 objective reality of that of which I am in 
 search. I must appeal to the great masters 
 of religion, to those who knew by intimate 
 union with the immanent Reality what I can 
 only know by myself in a dim, far-off, uncertain 
 way. 
 
 And if I do so, am I not brought up at 
 once by the overshadowing Personality of 
 Jesus Christ, by universal consent the Divine 
 Man, that is to say, stating it in the lowest 
 terms, the Man who had the greatest fulness 
 
80 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 of divinity in Him, in short, the most religious 
 Man who ever lived on earth ? The theologian 
 who would know God, the Eternal Substance, 
 the Supreme Reality underlying all phenomena, 
 must begin by analysing the consciousness of 
 Jesus Christ. If we want to know anything 
 of natural science we go to the scientific 
 expert — to the man who to a strong natural 
 bent for scientific research has added the 
 labour of a life in the way of study and ex- 
 periment. If we want to know anything about 
 religion we must go to the religious expert, to 
 the clear-souled man who has seen God, has 
 lived through his own convictions and has 
 found them thoroughly satisfactory. And at 
 the head of all such stands Jesus, alone in 
 His kingly majesty, the one Being who felt 
 Himself in such intimate union with the 
 Eternal that He dared to say, " I and the Father 
 are one," and who spoke with such living power 
 on the duty and destiny of man that it is per- 
 fectly safe to assert no one who has ever 
 honestly and with all his heart and soul and 
 mind tried to live up to His ideal has ever 
 looked upon his life as a failure. Jesus stands 
 in the front rank of those whose experience 
 is normative in the spiritual world. 
 
 But Jesus does not stand alone, and is not to 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 81 
 
 be studied as an isolated phenomenon.* There 
 is a latent fallacy in the cry, " Back to Christ," 
 and in the attempt to secure an Absolute 
 Religion by investigating the consciousness of 
 a single individual while ignoring its develop- 
 ments in history or treating these as mere 
 mental aberrations. Jesus was an elemental 
 force, and it is impossible to study a force apart 
 from its manifestations in the world of nature 
 and of life. Life is not static. It is dynamic. 
 It evolves. The essential energy that forms 
 its substratum is in continual movement and 
 is continually revealing itself phenomenally 
 under new forms, which open up new avenues 
 of insight into eternal realities. Jesus, as an 
 elemental force, exercised the most remarkable 
 influence on His spiritual environment of any 
 personality of which history knows the exist- 
 ence, and an intimate and sympathetic study 
 of that influence is as essential to an under- 
 standing of the meaning of His Personality as 
 an analysis of His own sayings. In the souls 
 of His immediate followers He induced beliefs 
 and excited emotions which have no parallel 
 in the spiritual records of the human race. He 
 created an experience among them, unique, 
 soul-satisfying, so perfectly assured of its own 
 
 * See Note E, ** Hamack and the Abbe Loisy." 
 ProhUm of Theology 7 
 
82 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 content that it changed their whole way of 
 living, was impervious to the argument of its 
 opponents, and made them willing to face 
 torture and death rather than deny its veracity. 
 Nay, not only was this the characteristic of 
 the impression made by Jesus on His own 
 immediate followers, the force He brought 
 into the world increased in intensity with 
 advancing years, and wherever it was felt it 
 excited the same emotions, induced the same 
 fundamental beliefs, opened up to the soul 
 the most wonderful visions of the spiritual 
 realm, which were apprehended with the vivid- 
 ness of reality. It was an apprehension of 
 reality that stood every test that could be 
 applied to it. It was an experience that stirred 
 the spirit to its depth. It was a common ex- 
 perience apprehended practically in the same 
 way by all who came under the influence that 
 stimulated it. I say, practically in the same 
 way, because the variations were no more than 
 are characteristic of all human experience. The 
 note of human experience of reality, in any of 
 its phases, is that, while there is always some- 
 thing personal in it, personal even to peculiarity, 
 it is, in its general features, fundamentally the 
 same. And was this not just the characteristic 
 of that insight into the mysteries of the spiritual 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 83 
 
 world that was gained in the early ages of 
 Christianity, when the followers of Jesus, 
 shaken loose from the world of sense by bitter 
 persecution, were forced to live for the spiritual 
 world alone, and thus felt the full energising 
 of the Spirit of their Master ? Surely, next to 
 the close study of the consciousness of Jesus 
 Himself, there can be nothing that will help 
 us more to determine the objective content of 
 that spiritual universe to which experience 
 testifies than a careful consideration of the 
 religious experiences with their correlative 
 beliefs of the generations to whom the breath 
 of the new spirit came in its first vividness 
 and intensity. 
 
 It will be said that there have been other 
 great spiritual teachers who stand in the front 
 rank of the world's religious leaders whose 
 experience must have a validity as great even 
 as that of Jesus Christ. If we are to measure 
 the greatness of men by the intensity and 
 diffusion of their influence, and if the measure 
 of their greatness must be for us lesser men 
 the norm of spiritual truth, will not Sakya- 
 muni, Confucius — nay, even Mohammed — have 
 as much to say in determining the validity of 
 our spiritual emotions and the objective con- 
 tent of our experience as Jesus Christ Himself ? 
 
84 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 I admit at once that these great authorities 
 may not be omitted in our search after the 
 Great ReaUty. The experience realised by them 
 is a factor of the utmost importance. We 
 are in search of the Great Revelation given 
 by God of His ways to the children of men, 
 and that Revelation must consist of the sum- 
 total of the human soul's experience of God. 
 It must be the gathered result of the insight 
 into the divine mysteries of all high-souled 
 men whose hearts God has touched and who 
 have willingly responded to the divine call. 
 And therefore the science of Comparative 
 Religion must be an integral element in every 
 theological discipline, and is bound to shed a 
 fuller light on any definite results that are 
 attained. But into this region I have neither 
 time nor ability to enter. And for my purpose 
 there is the less need, inasmuch as even a slight 
 knowledge of the great world-religions outside 
 of Christendom shows that they in no way 
 contradict the fundamental principles of Chris- 
 tian experience. Nay, indeed, so striking often 
 are the analogies that they have frequently 
 been adduced as evidences against the claim 
 of Christianity to be the unique Revelation of 
 God and His supreme will with men, as if 
 the uniqueness of Christianity consisted in its 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 85 
 
 entire diflPerence from all other religions, in- 
 stead of its capacity to subsume them all 
 under its own categories.* 
 
 I repeat, then, that in our search after the 
 universal or Catholic element in the spiritual 
 experience of humankind which forms the 
 objective content of Revelation as distinct 
 from the individual's personal apprehension 
 of truth, which must at best be partial and 
 fragmentary, our first resort must be to those 
 great souls who scaled the heights of spiritual 
 experience and plunged into its fathomless 
 depths. But supposing we were successful in 
 eliminating the transient and accidental from 
 their experience and gathering up its results 
 into a common formula, am I bound to accept 
 it without appeal as a statement of objective 
 truth ? By no means. The humblest individual 
 has his rights as an entity in the sum-total 
 of spiritual being. There can, indeed, be no 
 gathered result of human experience that does 
 not include his experience. From the very fact 
 that he is a spiritual existence he is related to 
 all spiritual experience, even the highest. But 
 this fact, while it gives him the right of trying 
 and testing the spiritual truth that appeals to 
 his consciousness, gives him no right to reject 
 * See Note F, '* The Value of Eeligious Experience." 
 
86 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 all that does not immediately respond to the 
 test. Nay, inasmuch as vast tracts of the 
 spiritual domain which he has not entered, 
 and of whose reality therefore he cannot 
 personally judge, are vouched for by others 
 whose veracity is undoubted and has at the 
 same time a certain vital relation to his own 
 experience, he is bound to give a provisional 
 assent to their assurance and to accept their 
 statements by an exercise of faith. Is there 
 anything unreasonable in this ? Is it not 
 the universal method of attaining know- 
 ledge ? Why should I be expected to accept 
 the conclusions of a Newton or a Kelvin 
 regarding the great laws that govern the 
 material universe — conclusions I have not veri- 
 fied, conclusions, it may be, whose rigorous 
 scientific verification I may not even have the 
 capacity of understanding — on the penalty of 
 having my sanity doubted, while if I accept 
 the statements of Jesus Christ, or even of 
 Athanasius, as to this spiritual realm of which 
 I know myself to be an integral part, I am 
 to be looked upon as a devotee of an outworn 
 Creed ? I accept the one on precisely the same 
 grounds as I accept the other. I accept the 
 results of scientific research when they are 
 vouched for by men of eminent scientific 
 
INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 87 
 
 authority, who have proved them to their own 
 satisfaction, and who submit the proof to all 
 who are of a scientific bent of mind for their 
 ratification, and because, moreover, these results 
 fit into the practical world with which I am 
 acquainted, explaining anomalies and furnishing 
 a workable guide to practical action. And I 
 accept the results of spiritual thinking on the 
 data of Christian experience because they, too, 
 are vouched for by experts of unquestionable 
 authority in the spiritual order of the universe, 
 who also point out the methods by which the 
 knowledge they impart can be attained, methods 
 which have never really failed when adopted 
 by men of genuine religious instincts, and, 
 furthermore, because they explain the per- 
 plexities of this bewildering hurnan life and 
 bring to the soul a stimulus and a joy that 
 nothing else can induce. Let it be remembered 
 that all great truths are subject to a scientific 
 and a practical verification. The scientific is 
 only for those who have the necessary quali- 
 fications for working it out. No profound 
 generalisation affecting human life is intel- 
 lectually verified by any but an infinitesimally 
 small number of those whose whole working 
 practice is modified by it. All the world accepts 
 the law of gravitation, A few mathematicians 
 
88 INSPIRATION AND REVELATION 
 
 have mastered Newton's "Principia." And it is 
 the practical verification that is the authorita- 
 tive, the verification that conies from dis- 
 covering that the new principle works, that 
 it passes the experimental test. It is not 
 otherwise in our quest after the objective 
 content of Revelation. Our insight into the 
 spiritual world must be attained in a manner 
 similar to that by which we gain our acquain- 
 tance with nature's laws. It is the inspired 
 consciousness of the higher spiritual natures 
 to which authoritative systems owe their origin. 
 But these, in turn, can never exercise their 
 full authority until they are absorbed into the 
 processes of human life and ratified by the 
 individual experience. 
 
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHRISTIAN 
 DOCTRINE 
 
Ill 
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CHEISTIAN 
 DOCTRINE 
 
 "T" HAVE insisted on the fact that our spiritual 
 -^ experience has the validity of all other 
 human experience — neither more nor less. If 
 we are to maintain that perception brings us 
 into contact with an objective reality which we 
 call the material world, then we must equally 
 assert that the intuitions of the religious 
 faculty, common to the human race, assure us 
 of the reality of the spiritual realm. I have 
 further tried to point out that just as all 
 natural science is but the analysis of our 
 common sensible experiences and the inferences 
 that can be drawn from such analysis, so 
 theology is but the reasoned statement of the 
 implications of the spiritual experience of 
 humankind. All are agreed that scientific 
 research has done much to reveal to us the 
 
 91 
 
92 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 wonders of the natural world and to explain 
 the meaning and method of the forces that 
 govern it. No one doubts the objective validity 
 of its formulae. No one denies the influence of 
 those elemental forces which act upon his 
 physical structure or hesitates to take advantage 
 of those clever inventions which a knowledge 
 of natural law has placed within our reach. 
 But theological research has given us no such 
 universally accepted results. It is not that 
 in the spiritual sphere there has been any lack 
 of personal experiences, pf irresistible forces, or 
 of clear-cut, definite conceptions to account for 
 them. But these spiritual forces have not been 
 universally recognised, neither, when recog- 
 nised, have they received an explanation that 
 has been accepted as universally valid. 
 
 Indeed, it is a matter for which the theologian 
 has to be thankful that the tendency of the 
 present time is to admit that he has a certain, 
 if somewhat precarious, standing in the scien- 
 tific world. It is not so long ago since there 
 seemed a real danger that all the rich content 
 of the spiritual experience of humanity, with 
 its glowing visions of a supreme beatitude, its 
 sublime despair in the consciousness of its 
 imperfections, and its hymns of rapture or of 
 agony at the various stages of the upward 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 93 
 
 struggle— a real danger that all that seemed to 
 represent the most precious treasures of human 
 history should be cast aside as useless lumber. 
 For, of course, if this experience have no 
 objective validity, then it must be a mere 
 hallucination, a waking dream, and the study 
 of religion can be nothing more than a branch 
 of pathology. It can only come in as a sub- 
 section of mental disease. But to-day it is being 
 more and more clearly realised in all inde- 
 pendent research that Reality is spiritual 
 rather than material, that the Force behind 
 nature is not an Unknowable we can safely 
 leave out of our calculations, but genuine Being, 
 in some sense Personal, who has a real corre- 
 spondence with our intuitive moral instincts. 
 This is one of the results of the focussing of 
 life upon the present to which I alluded as 
 a striking characteristic of our times. The 
 rationalist looks before and after. His 
 premises are in the past. His conclusions 
 are in the future. And thus, by neglecting 
 the miraculous present, he may get rid of God. 
 But the mystic, the experimentalist, who sees 
 God, always comes to his own when the minds 
 of men are wholly occupied with the Eternal 
 Now. 
 But even those philosophers who admit the 
 
94 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 objective validity of our spiritual experience, 
 and are willing to allow us to rejoice in the 
 presence of God, are most resolute in preventing 
 us advancing a step further. There is a spiritual 
 realm to which our consciousness testifies, but 
 it is a realm of mystery into which no human 
 soul can penetrate. There is a Personal Will in 
 the universe, but of that will we can predicate 
 nothing except that it is on the side of the True, 
 the Beautiful, the Good. "We cannot interpret 
 God in terms intelligible to the human mind 
 without adopting the language of parable or 
 allegory, language which does not convey any 
 permanent truth regarding the Infinite, but 
 which changes from age to age and from race 
 to race. All religions, in so far as they make 
 definite statements regarding God and His ways 
 with men, are but hazarding guesses. Religious 
 doctrines are but figments of the imagination, 
 and this is as true of the great doctrines of 
 Christianity as of any other. These are merely 
 symbols, useful for the unlearned, as a means 
 of raising them to the divine, but never the 
 assertion of universally valid truths. In short, 
 religion is genuine, its Supreme Object is real, 
 but our apprehension of the divine has no 
 definite content. It remains a sentiment, a 
 mystery, to be cultivated by the higher spirits 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 95 
 
 as one of the graces of life, and to be tolerated 
 in whatever form it shows itself. The position 
 cannot be better put than in the words of Royce 
 in his "Philosophy of Loyalty": — "Religion, 
 therefore, precisely in so far as it attempts to 
 conceive th^e universe as a conscious and per- 
 sonal life of superhuman meaning, and as a life 
 that is in close touch with our own, is eternally 
 true. But it is just this general view of the 
 universe as a rational order that is indeed open 
 to our rational knowledge. No part of such a 
 doctrine gives us the present right as human 
 beings to determine with any certainty the 
 details of the world-life, except so far as they 
 come within the scope of our scientific and of 
 our social inquiries.* Hence, when religion in- 
 terprets the world-life to us with symbolic 
 detail, it gives us merely symbols of the eternal 
 truth. . . . But the parables, the symbols, the 
 historical incidents that the religious imagina- 
 tion uses in its portrayals — these are the more 
 or less sacred and transient accidents in which 
 the ' Real Presence ' of the divine at once 
 shows itself to us and hides the detail of its 
 
 =^ But this last clause begs the whole question. The claim 
 of Christian doctrine has always been that it is a scientific 
 inference from certain experiences of individual and social life. 
 Theology has no other conceivable basis. 
 
96 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 inner life from us. These accidents of the re- 
 ligious imagination endure through many ages ; 
 but they also vary from place to place, and from 
 one nation or race of men to another, and they 
 ought to do so." * I quote these words because I 
 think they are representative of a school of 
 philosophy that has wide currency at the 
 present day. They sum up the attitude to- 
 wards religion of a large number of thoughtful 
 and highly-cultured men. And, indeed, it is a 
 matter of gratification to note that in this 
 attitude we have a striking advance from the 
 agnosticism of the last generation. God is 
 acknowledged as a Reality — the validity of 
 spiritual experience is admitted. There is a 
 divine, a supernatural basis for ethics. But 
 while we may know the fact of God, that is all 
 we may really know. " The detail of His inner 
 life is hidden from us." The tragic struggle 
 of the soul for a definite Creed which forms the 
 background of human history has been but the 
 substitution of one myth for another, the effort 
 to depict in ever clearer outline the features of 
 an allegoric fairy-tale. 
 
 But, in all fairness, having got so far as to 
 admit God as an interpretation of human ex- 
 
 * Eoyce, " Philosophy of Loyalty,*' p. 397, See Note G, 
 " Professor James.*' 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 97 
 
 perience, is it possible for the intellect to stop 
 there? The road that has led us to this point 
 seems at the first blush to lead us a good deal 
 further. The knowledge of God is recognised as 
 the inevitable inference from experience. It is 
 Gofl alone who unifies experience and makes it 
 intelligible. God, in short, is the postulate of 
 experience. But experience claims to know a 
 good deal more about God than the fact that He 
 is. Experience claims to have come in contact 
 with some, at least, of the "details of that 
 inner life " which in their totality are veiled in 
 mystery. Jesus knew more of God than this, 
 and, as I have maintained, the experience of 
 One so supreme in the spiritual realm must 
 have for us an authority of the very highest 
 order, Jesus knew that God was the Father of 
 all human creatures, that God " loved humanity 
 into life," that though men persisted in rejecting 
 His paternal love and following to their own 
 destruction the allurement of sin, yet whenever 
 with penitent and contrite heart and true hatred 
 of their sin they turn to the Father, whose love 
 has been overshadowing them all through their 
 v^ ayward course, the Father joyfully welcomes 
 them and receives them back into the Home they 
 had despised. Is this conception of the nature of 
 God, then, simply *' part of the accidents of the 
 
 Problem of Theology 8 
 
100 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 of the nature of God and His relation to man 
 given to the human soul by Jesus Christ. One 
 single glimpse into the nature of Divine Being 
 that perceives something definite suggests that 
 deeper insight may gain still higher truths. 
 The enlargement of the soul's experience 
 demands wider intellectual categories to cover 
 it. In the spiritual life of beings so richly 
 dowered as man is, experience and knowledge 
 must go hand in hand — nay, they must be in- 
 extricably interwoven with each other, knit 
 together in a union so close that it is hard to 
 tell where the one ends and the other begins. 
 
 Now this is just what happened in the history 
 of the Christian Revelation — that elemental 
 force which came into the world with Jesus 
 Christ and caught up the souls of men into such 
 sublime heights of life and thought. Gradually 
 in the course of the centuries the ideas of men 
 regarding the origin, the nature, and the purpose 
 of this force found definite intellectual expression, 
 and left us in possession of that Christian Creed 
 which, in its leading features, has been accepted 
 by all the most highly civilised races of the 
 world as an explanation of the mystery of God 
 and man, in so far as the mystery is explicable 
 to finite minds. The Creed of Christendom 
 simply forms the intellectual background of 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 101 
 
 Christian experience. It is the rationale of 
 that intense spiritual life which has throbbed 
 in the souls of those who have come under the 
 influence of Jesus Christ throughout all the 
 centuries during which that influence has been 
 the most vital force in humanity. It comes to 
 us, therefore, as the objective content of Revela- 
 tion, appealing to that instinct for the divine 
 that is an essential feature of our nature. It 
 contains truths that are above our immediate 
 apprehension, truths which are not at once 
 verifiable by our consciousness, and which are 
 therefore objective and apart from our individu- 
 ality. They can only be guaranteed to us by 
 the concurrent testimony of souls similar to our 
 own who have wrought them out through their 
 experience. But while the Christian Creed is 
 thus objective and outside of our immediate 
 experience in its first appeal, it links itself on to 
 our consciousness by quickening emotions that 
 verify the immediate appeal it makes. The soul 
 awakened to the appeal of Jesus may not be 
 able to grasp the whole Christo-centric system 
 of the universe contained in the Creed, but it 
 does grasp that particular point of the system 
 that concerns itself. And it is because the 
 portion that is apprehended is an integral part 
 of the whole, and the spirit that apprehends is 
 
102 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 part of that totality of spiritual being which 
 has lived through and intellectually grasped the 
 whole, that the authority is complete. It is 
 the whole wealth of the spiritual experience of 
 humanity that guarantees the fragment of the 
 treasure that enriches the individual soul. 
 
 And, here, let it be understood that when I 
 speak of the Christian Creed I refer to the 
 three great truths that constitute Christianity 
 an intellectual system — the Trinity, the Incar- 
 nation, the Atonement. No doubt Christendom 
 is rich in experiences that testify to a wider and 
 deeper knowledge of divine mysteries than the 
 bare apprehension of these basal metaphysical 
 facts regarding God. But these great verities, 
 viz., that God is a triune Personality, that the 
 second Person of the Trinity was Incarnate in 
 Jesus Christ, that He became Incarnate in order 
 to undo the effects of sin and to bind God 
 and man in an intimate spiritual union — these 
 three great verities constitute the metaphysical 
 background of Christianity and have been ac- 
 cepted as of the very essence of the Christian 
 religion wherever specifically Christian experi- 
 ences have agitated the souls of men. The 
 statement may be disputed. There are many 
 to-day, there have been some at various periods 
 of history, who claim and have claimed the 
 
CHEISTIAN DOCTEINB 103 
 
 name of Christian while denying these meta- 
 physical bases of the Christian faith. There 
 are many, indeed, who make this claim simply 
 because of a general approval of Christian 
 ethics. But in a matter of nomenclature the 
 appeal must always be to the common usage 
 of the great mass of humankind, which is 
 always based on correct general principles. 
 However great the number of Churches, sects, 
 and parties into which Christendom is split, 
 all who remain distinctively Christian hold 
 fast by these fundamental verities. And I 
 think it may safely be maintained that the 
 whole process of religious history shows that 
 if you eliminate these articles from the Creed 
 you have nothing left but a vague sentimen- 
 talism which has no grip over the mind or 
 conscience of the great mass of the people. 
 And, again, it must equally be admitted that, 
 accepting these as a philosophical account of 
 the problem of being and the historical pro- 
 cess of human life, while intellectual difficulties 
 are by no means dispelled, we have at least 
 a theology which reduces to system the per- 
 plexing phenomena of human life and throws 
 a flashlight on the mysteries and paradoxes of 
 human activity. 
 If, then, we would understand the Christian 
 
104 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 Creed and realise the claim it xnakes upon 
 our allegiance, we must approach it from 
 within and grasp the only lines along which 
 its verification is to be found. We are so 
 far away in time from the period when its 
 articles were promulgated, and the outward 
 conditions of our religious life are so different 
 from those that environed the tumultuous up- 
 heaval of spiritual emotion which formed the 
 irresistible motive power behind their formu- 
 lation, that we are apt to lose sight of the 
 manner in which its conclusions were reached. 
 Moreover, it is of the nature of spiritual ideas 
 to become crystallised, and thus to lose the 
 throbbing life that constituted their truth. 
 "Truth is an ethical concept," Royce tells us,* 
 and this is just one of the remarkable redis- 
 coveries of the present age. When spiritual 
 truth loses its ethical content it ceases to be 
 truth and becomes falsehood. In spiritual con- 
 ceptions knowledge and experience are inex- 
 tricably woven. When the experience ceases 
 the knowledge is void. If we take the meta- 
 physical conceptions involved in the Nicene 
 Creed, e.g., as being an objective Revelation 
 of the Divine Nature having no relation to 
 our human experience, they become unintel- 
 * " Philosophy of Loyalty," p. 327, 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 105 
 
 Hgible, and we are lost in amazement that 
 the finest spirits and acutest intellects of 
 their time should have thought them worthy 
 of such passionate discussion. Or, again, if 
 we look upon Scripture as an inspired collec- 
 tion of oracles from which the truth regard- 
 ing God and His revelation to the universe is 
 to be gathered by a collation of passages, we 
 shall be equally at fault. For Scripture — the 
 literature of an ancient people — does not readily 
 lend itself to such treatment, and the ideas of 
 its various writers, living at such different 
 periods in history, are not easily brought 
 under the rigorous definitions of a consistent 
 Creed. But we are not thus to approach the 
 Creed, because it was not really thus it was 
 formulated. Its articles were living truths 
 thrown up by the great heart of humanity, 
 labouring under an influence unique in human 
 history and charged with emotions to which it 
 sought to give expression in intelligible words. 
 They were never mere logical inferences from 
 external data to be apprehended and verified 
 in the dry light of reason. They were forged 
 in the white heat of a passionate fervour by 
 men and women who felt their truth so keenly 
 that they were willing to submit to any tor- 
 ture rather than disown them. Their claim 
 
106 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 therefore is, not that they are ideas regarding 
 the mystery of Being authoritatively revealed 
 to us by men whose credentials are supported 
 by external evidence, but that they are truths 
 of the divine nature and of the relation of 
 God to humanity so vitally interwoven with 
 the tissue of existence that they naturally 
 emerge from an exhaustive analysis of the 
 sum-total of human experience. That is their 
 undoubted claim. They are the ultimate truths 
 of Being — the postulates of the highest, purest, 
 most soul-satisfying experiences to which the 
 human soul can attain. 
 
 Let us trace the historical process more in 
 detail, Jesus Christ made His advent into the 
 world as a link in a chain of human experi- 
 ences that reach back into the dim dawn of 
 history. The religious consciousness of the 
 Hebrew race, while in essence akin to the con- 
 sciousness of all other great races of humanity, 
 has this note of uniqueness, that it attains to 
 a measure of self-consciousness which was 
 strange to them. What was implicit in their 
 religious ideas becomes explicit in the Hebrew 
 interpretation of the universe, which therefore 
 furnishes a philosophy of the historical process 
 that has comm.ended itself to the judgment of 
 civilised mankind. It is admitted that the 
 
OHEISTIAN DOCTRINE 107 
 
 fundamental ideas of Hebraism are true, that 
 the Hebrew had a genius for religion, as the 
 Greek had for art and the Roman for law. 
 In this long process, then, during which the 
 Hebrew race was living through its conception 
 of God, and attaining to ever clearer ideas of 
 His nature and His purpose in the develop- 
 ment of humanity, Jesus has His distinctive 
 place. It is a place of unique importance. It 
 marks an epoch alike in the external, the 
 spiritual, and the intellectual history of human- 
 kind. "With Jesus the history of the Hebrew 
 nation as a living influence in the development 
 of world-history comes to an end. Jerusalem 
 falls within a few years after His death, and 
 the children of the patriarchs cease to have a 
 local habitation. With Jesus, too, the religious 
 ideas of Hebraism reach their climax. There 
 is no further development. Jesus represents 
 the full fruition of those religious conceptions 
 towards which the prophets had been, often 
 unconsciously, striving. 
 
 And at the same remarkable period of human 
 history the great creative philosophical systems 
 of Greece, which seemed always trenabling on 
 the brink of a wonderful discovery, had run 
 their course and were waiting for a full 
 flowing tide of Reality to flush their empty 
 
108 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 categories. The thought of the Orient had 
 exhausted its explanation of the mystery of 
 life and was seeking, by contact with Western 
 civilisation, to enrich its experience. 
 
 It was just then that Jesus started humanity 
 on a new line of intellectual speculation. How 
 did He do it? By the propulsion within the 
 human spirit of a new spiritual force. An 
 experience, startling, supernatural, inasmuch 
 as it was outside of all that had hitherto 
 been regarded as natural, threw the human 
 spirit into a tumultuous emotion, and while 
 revealing the depth of baseness to which 
 the soul might sink, opened up visions of 
 supernal glory to which it was capable of 
 rising. It was no teaching that produced this 
 result; it was no thrilling oratory of prophet 
 or philosopher ; it was no mystic initiation into 
 the occult. It was the fascination of a Person. 
 It was the Presence of One who, when he 
 lived with His immediate disciples as a Man 
 among men, made existence luminous for them, 
 made them feel that life had no difficulties, 
 that earth had no sorrow, that pain and heart- 
 sickness were dream-like reminiscences of an 
 evil past : One moreover, who, though His 
 bodily Presence had vanished away, could still 
 by His spiritual Presence produce the same 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 109 
 
 results, excite the same emotions, wreathe the 
 soul in a halo o£ blissfulness so intense that 
 it became insusceptible of bodily torture, and 
 could change the gloomy portal of death into 
 a radiant gateway leading to immortal glory. 
 
 We are dealing with literal facts, I do not 
 think it is possible for us to realise what Jesus 
 was until we have absorbed the spirit of the 
 heroic age of Christianity. I confess I never 
 felt how intensely real the presence of the 
 God in Christ was in the Titanic struggle of 
 the primitive Church as when I stood in the 
 catacombs of Rome surrounded by the touch- 
 ing symbols of exalted faith and cruel martyr- 
 dom. If it be the case that "truth is an 
 ethical concept," and that Reality is to be as 
 legitimately apprehended by the emotions as 
 by the intellect, we may not hope to get at 
 the truth of the Christian faith by lifting it 
 out of its natural atmosphere of emotion and 
 transferring it to the dry rarified air of reason. 
 We must take our stand rather on the bed- 
 rock of fact, and when we are dealing with 
 facts the passion of the saint is of as vital 
 importance as the syllogism of the logician. 
 
 The Christian Religion made its first appear- 
 ance in the world then as life, not doctrine, as 
 vitalising energy and not as an intellectual 
 
no THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 system of the universe. It was a rapture, an 
 ecstasy, in which men felt that the dream of the 
 perfect life was realised, that by a sudden leap 
 human existence had burst into full fruition, 
 and its meaning, hitherto dark and dim, was 
 now clear and explicit. For Jesus in His ethical 
 teaching furnished a practical guide to the 
 blessed life, and in the mystery of His Person 
 a sanction and a motive-spring that made His 
 teaching luminous and its hardest precepts a 
 delight. The old ethics, whether among Jews 
 or Gentiles, had become stiff and formal. The 
 way to the higher life had been hedged in by 
 thorny precepts hard to obey, and a course of 
 discipline that drew the soul ever further away 
 from all that was simple and natural into a 
 complicated intellectual maze. Moreover, there 
 was little in it to inspire the courage of the 
 searcher after truth, to still his doubts, or to 
 console him in his frequent disappointments. 
 But to the soul that had fallen under the 
 glamour of Jesus all was different. The teach- 
 ing that fell froni His lips was as simple and 
 lucid as the air of heaven or the light of the 
 sun. It was as if the human spirit had been led 
 from a foetid and polluted atmosphere to a clear 
 mountain top, as if scales had fallen from blinded 
 eyes and the panorama of God's world had been 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 111 
 
 gloriously transfigured. It was not that His 
 teaching was accepted because of any precon- 
 ceptions they had formed as to His nature or 
 the source of His authority. It was simply that 
 His words had such a living power in them that 
 they seemed to lift from the soul an oppressive 
 load that had been choking its life, and straight- 
 way that life burst forth, rich, spontaneous, in 
 the full joy of conscious being. They were 
 children of God, and the God-life was the 
 essence of their existence. They were heirs of 
 immortal glory, though long enthralled by the 
 power of the Evil One. That explained all. 
 That was why they recognised Jesus as the Son 
 of the Living God. That was why they beheld 
 His glory as of the only begotten of the Father. 
 That was why they loved Him so, and why to 
 submit to Him and live out His precepts was 
 the most blessed experience in all the World. 
 And this life of God was inherent in humanity 
 — ^it pulsed, however faintly and feebly, in every 
 human being, and therefore their hearts must 
 be drawn forth in love to all men. It was all 
 perfectly simple and natural in the lofty alti- 
 tudes to which Jesus raised their spirits. The 
 life of hatred and malice and enyy and 
 lasciviousness and drunkenness — this was the 
 unnatural life. It was the life of misery, the 
 
112 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 life of those who were slaves to the Devil and 
 the enemies of God. Those who lived this life 
 were the poor, wretched, pitiable prodigals who 
 had spurned their Father's home, and were 
 feeding on husks only fit for swine. They 
 were to be followed with tears and entreaties. 
 They were to be loved by those who had realised 
 the better way, even when they spurned their 
 love ; they were to be forgiven, prayed for, sur- 
 sounded with kindly tendance, for the Christ- 
 loving soul must love aU, must be eternally 
 lapped in a luxury of love. 
 
 It was on a common rapture like this that the 
 first Christian community was formed. It was 
 an ecstasy that sought expression alike in deeds 
 and in words. But its first deeds of brotherly 
 love resulted in an impossible communism that 
 almost shipwrecked the infant community,* and 
 its first words were mere mystic ravings, the 
 spasmodic efforts of a soul trying to utter the 
 unutterable, t Nevertheless, the force that lay 
 behind the rapture was too real to evaporate 
 in mere exuberant ejffervescence. It only re- 
 quired time and experience to consolidate itself 
 and to find adequate expression alike as an 
 ethical code and an intellectual system. It was 
 in the very nature of things that the ethical 
 * Acts iv. 34. f 1 Cor. xiv. 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 113 
 
 interest predominated. That was the primal 
 impulse, the core, the essence of the whole 
 movement. The Christian community was a 
 brotherhood, based on the principles that all 
 human gifts were of divine origin and were 
 bestowed not for the enrichment of the indi- 
 vidual who received them, but for the benefit 
 of the whole community. The individual gave 
 of his best to enrich the common treasury, and 
 from it he received, not what he had given, but 
 the united sum of the powers and talents of all 
 the brethren. He lost his narrow solitary life 
 in the great flood of spiritual vitality that 
 emanated from Christ, and he found it again 
 reinforced by the full-flowing current of this 
 throbbing life. All this had to be reduced to 
 system, A community had to be built up on 
 the basis of love, with all those practical 
 philanthropic institutions which were the out- 
 come of the Spirit of Christ. This was the 
 first work of the Church. The Church adopted 
 as its programme the words of our Lord in 
 the wonderful vision of judgment recorded in 
 St. Matthew and proceeded to give it effect. 
 " I was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat : I 
 was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink : I was a 
 stranger, and ye took Me in : naked, and ye 
 clothed Me : I was sick, and ye visited Me : I 
 
 FroJ>lem of Theology Q 
 
114 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 was in prison, and ye came unto Me. Inas- 
 much as ye have done it unto one of the least 
 of these My brethren, ye have done it unto 
 Me." * The Christian community was not at 
 first known by the heathen as a new philosophic 
 school, having specific ideas on those great specu- 
 lative mysteries of Being that agitated the 
 minds of the intellectual classes of the time. It 
 was known, when it was really known, and 
 not disfigured by calumnies, as a community 
 of men and women who lived a life of 
 simplicity and love, and who were utterly 
 loyal to each other, even amid torture and 
 death. Their simple faith in one another, 
 their devotion to their friends in distress, their 
 ecstatic visions of the unseen world, were the 
 features that attracted attention. In Lucian's 
 "Feregrinus" we seem to be looking at the 
 Christians from the outside, with the eye of 
 a man of the world who was not without 
 sympathy with their aspirations, but who 
 regarded their dreams of the perfect life of 
 love with the cynical sadness of one who knew 
 his world too well to be carried away with such 
 childlike enthusiasms. 
 
 The glow of spiritual experience excited first 
 by personal intercourse with Jesus, and after- 
 * St. Matthew xxv. 35. 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 115 
 
 wards by the new spirit that animated His 
 followers — the burning enthusiasm that 
 prompted to philanthropic exertion — the delight 
 in carrying out the details and perfecting the 
 administration of a community based on a 
 love that emanated from its great Head and 
 enveloped all its members — these were the vital 
 elements of primitive Christianity. The intel- 
 lectual impulse came later. Of course, it is 
 impossible accurately to difPerentiate such 
 psychological stages in time. There was an 
 intellectual element in Christianity from the 
 very jSrst, and the intellectual and practical to 
 a large extent developed side by side and 
 mutually reacted on each other. But psycho- 
 logically always the practical came first. It 
 was first the experience and then the explana- 
 tion of the experience. It was first the practical 
 life of love and then the metaphysical category 
 that caught it up and made it rational. For 
 Christianity was bound sooner or later to face 
 the task of vindicating its position in the world 
 of thought. It was forced by the very nature 
 of things to become a philosophy, to link itself 
 on to some theory of the universe. It is a naif 
 idea that it is possible to have a religion that 
 does not trouble itself with the hidden mysteries 
 of existence, and to formulate a living Creed 
 
116 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 that is simply emotional or ethical or both, but 
 makes no attempt at an intellectual grasp of 
 the Reality that excites emotion and sanctions 
 ethics. The Church that worshipped Jesus 
 Christ as God was compelled to ask itself what 
 it meant by calling Jesus God, and to find an 
 answer to the question that was suflScient to 
 explain its existence, its spiritual experience, 
 its manifold activities, its sublime aspirations. 
 It is just the question we are forced to ask 
 ourselves to-day, the challenge which the 
 historic Personality of Jesus throws down to 
 the world. And it is a proof of the uniqueness 
 of that Personality that even yet, in every 
 sincere answer that is given to that question, 
 there is something of a transcendental element, 
 an inevitable halo of mystery that the most 
 rationalistic treatment cannot altogether dispel. 
 And the Church of the primitive age, suffused 
 with the emotion of His Presence — a Church 
 which in very truth had, for His sake, renounced 
 the world, the devil, and the flesh — approached 
 the problem of the Person of Jesus from the 
 inside. It was not a problem of Being to be 
 thought over and syllogistically solved. It was 
 an experience to be explained and fitted in to 
 the context of their intellectual system of the 
 universe. And hence it was that no explana- 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 117 
 
 tion that seemed to them inadequate to cover 
 the experience would serve the purpose. Their 
 new faith must Hnk itself on to the old, but 
 whereas the old, while genuine and by all 
 means to be retained, was cold and dead in 
 comparison with the glowing fervour of the 
 new, it must be brought to that white heat in 
 which old and new would coalesce. 
 
 Jesus was to those to whom He revealed Him- 
 self the Power of God unto salvation. Of that 
 there could be no doubt. They were as certain 
 as any Ritschlian that Jesus was for them the 
 Revelation of God, that Jesus had for them the 
 value of God. But the acuter minds among 
 them, in an age of speculation, saw clearly 
 enough that to make such an assertion as this 
 was to remain on the very threshold of the 
 realm of Eternal Reality. This primitive and 
 naif conception of God was not merely intel- 
 lectually unsatisfactory; it did not really 
 correspond to the intensity of Christian experi- 
 ence. Jesus really was God, proved to be God 
 by exercising the power of God, for it was a 
 divine impulse that was throbbing through 
 humanity and turning the world upside down. 
 And if Jesus really was God, how did the fact 
 fit in with either the Hebrew conception of 
 the magnificent isolation of Jehovah or the 
 
118 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 Absolute, changeless Being that formed the 
 divine substance of Greek philosophy? Was 
 Jesus to be reckoned simply as one of the angels 
 or archangels that surrounded the throne of 
 God, or as one of the principalities or powers 
 that emanated from the abyss of the Absolute ? 
 Instinctively the Church turned away from all 
 solutions of the problem that would have in- 
 volved her in a mythology or angelology created 
 by the religious imagination or a view of Jesus 
 that would have made Him a Being inter- 
 mediate between God and man, but different 
 from either. She did so because she judged 
 with the heart as well as the head, because 
 her experience guided her intellectual concepts, 
 and because there was one thing of which she 
 was very certain, and that was that no definition 
 of the Person of Christ would satisfy her that 
 did not place Him supreme on the throne of 
 the universe. 
 
 It is in the last degree interesting to trace 
 the various phases through which the definition 
 of the Person of Christ passed in the first four 
 CEcumenical Councils.* Outwardly the history 
 is one of passion and strife, of unworthy 
 intrigues, of boundless ambition and of fierce 
 persecution. Looked at from the inside, how- 
 
 * ** The Ecumenical Councils,*' by William P. Du Boss. 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 119 
 
 ever, the struggle assumes a different aspect. 
 Men spoke and acted strongly because they felt 
 deeply. If their attitude towards each other 
 in these disputes shows often a striking lack 
 of that Christian charity which forms the 
 essence of the teaching of Jesus, let us re- 
 member that to them the issue at stake was 
 not personal, and that the very last refining 
 grace that religion brings to the soul is the 
 capability of combining an intense religious 
 fervour with a loving tolerance of those who 
 seem to be doing despite to all the soul most 
 deeply cherishes. It was the honour of the 
 Master that was at stake. It was the conser- 
 vation of the truth that God had indeed visited 
 man with such reality and power as to reveal 
 the essentially divine nature of humanity and 
 the human nature of the Godhead. Jesus was 
 God — of that there could be no doubt. Jesus 
 was also very Man. But if Jesus was God only 
 in the sense that His humanity was perfect, and 
 all perfection is of the essence of God, He still 
 remains on the same plane with ourselves, for 
 this is a Godhead to which, conceivably, a mere 
 man may rise. Such a view merges God in 
 humanity and loses the very idea of a Supreme 
 Divine Personality. And, again, if Jesus were 
 God in a sense that obscured His true humanity. 
 
120 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 if He were God as possessing an essential nature 
 that was in nowise ours, then the divine and the 
 human did not meet and mingle, and God was 
 removed toto ccelo from all real sympathy with 
 the weakness and frailty of human nature. 
 Adopt either solution of the problem and 
 Christianity as a distinctive religion disap- 
 pears. The facts of Christian experience are 
 unaccounted for. There remains only either 
 the old pantheistic or deistic theory of the 
 universe. Jesus Christ is but a man among 
 men — a star of the first magnitude in the 
 spiritual firmament, but still shining with the 
 same lustre and subject to the same limitations 
 as other great leaders of mankind — or He dis- 
 appears in the clouds of heaven and we lose 
 Him from our sight. Hence that tremulous 
 anxiety of definition that characterised the 
 Conciliar period. No doubt it was sufficient 
 for the human heart to worship Jesus as God 
 and to feel the reality of His mystical presence 
 in the hour of rapt devotion. But when the 
 intellect took the matter in hand this was not 
 sufficient. It was above all things necessary 
 to avoid every expression that either derogated 
 from the genuineness of His Deity or from the 
 reality of His humanity. It was necessary be- 
 cause, although such expressions may have been 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 121 
 
 used by men who had no intention of impairing 
 the Orthodox Creed, yet there is a certain logical 
 process of thought that is as sure as the opera- 
 tion of the processes of nature. When the 
 spiritual supremacy of Jesus as Lord of the 
 Universe and the Primal Font of life is in the 
 least degree assailed, or any view is adopted 
 that would exempt Him from the pains and 
 pangs of frail mortality, it is only a matter 
 of time till His value for the soul of man ceases 
 and the true Jesus vanishes in the complicated 
 meshes of rationalistic systems. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that the Conciliar 
 definitions were ever regarded as being finally 
 authoritative. To adopt this position would be 
 simply to fall back on an external seat of 
 authority in religion, and such a theory can 
 have no validity for thought. Neither was 
 this ever the theory of the living Church. The 
 Conciliar decision was only valid in so far as 
 it expressed the mind of the Church in inter- 
 preting its own experience. There were Councils 
 that failed to do so, and their decisions lost all 
 their validity. In the technical language of 
 the Church, that only was the orthodox faith 
 which had been held implicitly from the first, 
 which was held by the whole Christian 
 world, which interpreted the experience of 
 
122 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 every believer — "quod semper, quod ubique, 
 quod ab omnibus." Surely the Church in this 
 respect was on sound scientific lines. It was 
 here as in all intellectual research. The scien- 
 tific explorer into the secrets of nature creates 
 nothing new. He only discovers and tells what 
 is and has been from the beginning of time. 
 And his discoveries have no weight, and indeed, 
 absolutely no meaning, till they are found to be 
 of universal experience. The test of the truth 
 of his ideas, in short, is that they work and 
 that they are the only ideas that can be trusted 
 always to work, invariably to produce satis- 
 factory results. The work of the Councils in 
 elaborating the Christian Creed was to explain 
 from the data at their disposal the phenomena 
 of the Christian life. They assumed no infallible 
 authority. They raerely asserted their deter- 
 mination to define what had been held implicitly 
 from the beginning, what was held wherever 
 the influence of Jesus had penetrated, and 
 what alone gave reality to Christian experi- 
 ence. Whatever their ostensible method of 
 procedure was, their real method was not 
 that of collating texts, examining documents, 
 receiving overtures. It is the eagle eye of 
 genius that first perceives the truth. It is 
 the keen spiritual insight of the true mystic 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 123 
 
 which alone can explain the human heart to 
 itself. In the details of the spiritual life the 
 average man does not know what he believes. 
 He must be told. And even then he sometimes 
 denies, honestly enough, his own ineradicable 
 Creed. The divine truth promulgated by the 
 divine man, by the prophet, by the saint, by 
 the council of eager searchers into the deep 
 things of God, must go forth into the world 
 to receive its ratification, must trust to time 
 to verify its powers of working. It can only 
 be recognised as the infallible truth when it is 
 found by all competent judges to be part of 
 the essential constitution of God's universe, 
 when it is discovered to be applicable to the 
 human heart wherever humanity finds a lodg- 
 ment in the planet, when it explains and begets 
 similar experiences in the souls of all who come 
 under its influence. " Semper, ubique, ab omni- 
 bus." "Securus judicat orbis terrarum." That 
 is the only authority the living Church has ever 
 claimed for her dogmas. But that authority 
 she claims to be infallible. 
 
 But is the test not more ideal than practical ? 
 Is it possible so to unify spiritual experience as 
 to find it converge upon any metaphysical doc- 
 trine ? Can it be truly said, in face of the vast 
 variety of beliefs even within the Christian 
 
124 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 sphere, that this experience converges upon 
 the specific dogmas of the Church? 
 
 It is to be remembered that all our judgments 
 regarding transcendental truths are partial. 
 There is a relativity in all human knowledge 
 that must be recognised. In this respect our 
 theological judgments do not differ from those 
 other judgments regarding our environments 
 we are compelled to make in order to live as 
 rational beings. Our knowledge of the tran- 
 scendental is genuine knowledge so far as it 
 goes — i.e., knowledge that will never require 
 to be overturned, knowledge of Reality, but 
 not of the whole of Reality. Only the Absolute 
 can know absolute truth. Only the Eternal 
 can embrace the totality of spiritual experience. 
 The Church has always recognised this in speak- 
 ing of her dogmas as Mysteries of the Faith. 
 
 And in proof of the reality of Christian 
 dogma we can point to the wonderful per- 
 sistence of those central ideas which articulate 
 the Christian Faith into a system and offer a 
 rational explanation of the universe. The in- 
 sight of spiritual genius has been ratified by 
 the Christian consciousness and verified by the 
 course of history. May it not be truly said 
 that the Deity of man and the humanity of 
 God are of the essence of the highest specula- 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 125 
 
 tive thought of all time? The message of the 
 Gospel has an appeal for every heart, and 
 obtains a genuine foothold in every race of 
 humanity. Christian experience in its essential 
 features is a unity, and the language of the 
 spiritual life when uttered in its purity is 
 intelligible to all souls who have felt the life- 
 giving influence of that Holy Spirit who pro- 
 ceedeth from the Father and the Son, And 
 it is the theological presentation of Gospel 
 truth that produces the distinctive phenomena 
 of Christian experience. The Christian con- 
 sciousness will be satisfied with nothing less 
 than a faith in Jesus Christ, the only-begotten 
 Son of God, very God of very God, who for 
 us men and for our salvation became Incarnate 
 and was made man. Trace the fascinating and 
 thrilling record of Christian history from the 
 day when the Holy Ghost descended upon the 
 infant Church at Pentecost, and amid the 
 vagaries of speculative thought, the welter of 
 conflicting opinions, the stammering efforts of 
 the human heart to give audible expression 
 to the emotions with which it was charged, 
 do we not find that the only conceptions that 
 had enduring vitality in them were those that 
 were essential to the creed that God was 
 Incarnate in Jesus Christ? 
 
126 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 " So the All-Great were the All-Loving too — 
 So through the thunder comes a human voice 
 Saying, * O heart I made, a heart beats here I 
 Face my hands fashioned, see it in Myself I 
 Thou hast no power, nor mayst conceive of Mine, 
 But love I gave thee, with Myself to love, 
 And thou must love Me who have died for thee.' " * 
 
 It is the deliberate verdict of the Christian 
 consciousness. Heresies there have been in- 
 numerable, fascinating theories that, suffused 
 with a glow of mysticism, have made a powerful 
 appeal to the imagination, philosophical systems 
 that have fitted Jesus, as a Man among men, 
 into His place in the development of world- 
 history, daring incursions into the mysteries 
 of eternity that have cast a temporary glamour 
 over isolated sections of humankind, but all 
 have had their day and their vogue, and have 
 passed into the limbo of forgotten things. 
 This central truth has alone emerged as the 
 common possession of Christendom, that God 
 was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself 
 — that Jesus was God manifest in the flesh. 
 Taking the words as applying to the general 
 tendency of human history, and keeping in 
 view the relativity of all human knowledge, 
 the "semper, ubique et ab omnibus" justify a 
 * Browning, " Epistle of Karshish," 
 
CHEISTIAN DOCTEINE 127 
 
 whole-hearted belief in the essential doctrines 
 of the Christian Faith. 
 
 But what of those sincere and earnest seekers 
 after God who have been unable to accept the 
 Christian Creed ? Is their testimony to be of 
 no avail? Are their spiritual experiences not 
 to count in the general summing-up ? Certainly 
 they must. All vital experience in this sphere 
 is relevant. But the difficulty disappears when 
 we remember that the test is the totality of 
 experience and that the isolated experience has 
 value only in so far as it merges itself into 
 the general experience. Some spiritual experi- 
 ences are so rich and deep that they are able 
 to mould the whole trend of spiritual thought 
 and emotion. Others are so shallow that they 
 only acquire vitality by contact with it. And, 
 moreover, while claiming that the Christian 
 Creed is the postulate of the richest, fullest, 
 and therefore the truest life, the life Eternal, 
 the life that is in perfect harmony with the 
 constitution of God*s universe, it is only for a 
 vitalised Creed that the claim can be made, 
 only for a Creed that is a metaphysical category 
 giving essential unity to a life's activity. There 
 is a fides implicita as well as a fides explicita. 
 There have been times in the Church's history 
 when the Creed was a mere crystallised petri- 
 
128 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 
 faction. The vitality had departed from it, and 
 therefore it was not truth, but falsehood, for 
 "truth is an ethical concept." At such times 
 the true believer was the man who rejected 
 all Creeds, in whose soul the fides implicita was 
 so strong that he refused to accept a Creed 
 which to him was the symbol, not of life but 
 of death, not of purity but impurity, not of 
 good but of evil. As he valued his own soul 
 there was nothing for him but to fall back 
 upon the throbbing life of the universe, to 
 investigate his own experience, to question 
 the God who is the inarticulate substratum 
 of every human existence. Without the shelter 
 for his naked soul that pious hands had wrought, 
 he had to work with the material out of which 
 such shelters are constructed. He had to fashion 
 his own Creed in what was practically a creed- 
 less world. Little wonder that such Creeds 
 have been imperfect, mere temporary make- 
 shifts to cover the souls nakedness. But the 
 imperfection of these Creeds has only been in 
 their articulate expression. The fides implicita 
 has been all the stronger for its lack of outward 
 support, and the strenuous struggles, the deep 
 experiences — nay, the marvellous insight into 
 the deeper workings of the human heart — of 
 men of genius thus thrown upon their own 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTEINE 129 
 
 resources, rank high among the spiritual and 
 intellectual treasures of the Christian Church. 
 The Church of Christ bans none who in their 
 inmost soul are struggling after the vision of 
 God. Her claim is that she possesses the Light 
 of God, that the experience of her saints, in 
 all ages and in every land, gives her the prac- 
 tical assurance, which in this world is all we 
 can ever have, that this Light is genuine and 
 efficacious, and that no soul of man who honestly 
 seeks the Light will, in God's good time, fail 
 to reach the inner mystery which is the essence 
 of her existence. 
 
 Problem of TMology 10 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHUECH 
 
IV 
 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 WHAT then is the organ of this « Semper, 
 ubique, et ab omnibus " ? How do we 
 practically get at this objective content of 
 Revelation which is the sum-total of the 
 spiritual experience of humanity ? And, having 
 got it, how are we to apply it for the further 
 enrichment of spiritual experience and for 
 the development of humankind in its pro- 
 gress towards an ideal perfection? What, in 
 short, is the meaning and function of the 
 Church ? 
 
 We must first consider current conceptions. 
 The Church, according to one group of theo- 
 logians, is a divine institution, founded by 
 Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God, who 
 became Man "for us men and for our salvation," 
 and who, therefore, by reason of His twofold 
 nature, sums up in His Person the totality of 
 
 133 
 
134 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 all possible spiritual experience. The notes of 
 this divine institution, the Church, are aposto- 
 licity, unity, catholicity, and sanctity. Jesus 
 imparted His Holy Spirit to the Apostles, who 
 were the first overseers of the Church, and 
 from whom therefore all doctrine and all 
 authority proceed. The Church is one and in- 
 divisible — one in Creed, one in government. 
 The Church is Catholic as uniting in one 
 visible institution all who directly feel the 
 Spirit's influence, and as possessing actually or 
 potentially the treasure-stores of the spiritual 
 experience of all the saints of God. And, 
 moreover, the Church is holy, as being the 
 exclusive channel of the Spirit's direct influence, 
 and thus alone holding the means of grace 
 through which sanctity is attained, and as in 
 actual fact having alone produced the saintly 
 character in its distinctive manifestations. The 
 Church is, therefore, by its very conception, an 
 inspired body, the only infallible authority in 
 doctrine, the only infallible guide in conduct. 
 It is the body of which Christ is the Head, and 
 through every member of which the Spirit of 
 Christ is working. And this visible Church, 
 thus defined, is what is known to the world as 
 the Church of Rome, over which the Pope 
 presides as the Vicar of Christ on earth, and 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 135 
 
 to which alone the historical succession can be 
 clearly shown to belong. 
 
 But the impossibility of recognising the 
 Church of Rome as the Visible Catholic Church 
 has driven another group of theologians to 
 take refuge in the conception of an Invisible 
 Church, to which the promises of Christ were 
 meant to apply.* There are organised bodies of 
 Christians on earth, but the Church of Christ 
 is confined to none of them. The Church of 
 Christ consists of all true believers throughout 
 the world and is known to none save God. 
 The Church of Christ has no definite material 
 limitations of Creed or government. It is a 
 spiritual body functioning in a spiritual world, 
 and the infiuence of the Holy Spirit is a purely 
 personal infiuence upon individuals, wholly 
 independent of, nay, frequently ignoring, all 
 materialistic channels whatsoever. 
 
 Such, then, are the two rival theories. I have 
 stated them in their extreme forms as logical 
 opposites, though it need scarcely be said that 
 practically they are held with many modifica- 
 tions. But we cannot reason about them 
 without some attempt at accurate definition. 
 We must get down to the definite principle on 
 which they are based. And when we do so 
 
 * See Note H, *• Westminster Confession on the Church." 
 
136 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 we find that we are siraply face to face with 
 the antinomy, that runs through all life, of 
 Collectivism and Individualism. 
 
 What are we to say then to the conception 
 of the Visible Church on earth? In the first 
 place we must repudiate the claim of Rome 
 to the title. The Church of Rome has not an 
 exclusive possession of the four notes by which 
 she herself defines that Church which is the 
 body of Christ. Only by subtle logical refine- 
 ments can she even present a plausible case 
 for herself. And yet it must be acknowledged 
 that she stands in the direct line of the suc- 
 cession. She has had a marvellous development. 
 The Church of the catacombs and the Church 
 of the Vatican present few signs of identity 
 to the outward observer. But the development 
 has been a slow and gradual one, broken by 
 no cataclysm sufficiently great seriously to 
 interrupt the continuity of the process by 
 changing the very nature of the institution. 
 If we are not to find the Visible Catholic Church 
 founded by the Apostles in Rome, we shall have 
 some difficulty in finding it elsewhere. 
 
 Must we then hold by the theory of an 
 Invisible Church ? But that is to drop the idea 
 of a Church altogether. An Invisible Church 
 is a contradiction in terms. The Church, by 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHUECH 137 
 
 its apostolic definition, is the body of Christ, 
 and an invisible body is an absurdity. Nay, 
 further, an Invisible Church, consisting of men 
 and women, individually under the Spirit's 
 influence, but unknown, it may be, even to 
 each other, lacks the very element which we 
 conceive to be an essential characteristic of a 
 Church, and is powerless to fulfil the function 
 for which a Church exists. It has no inherent 
 unity. It has no collective power. It furnishes 
 the Holy Spirit with no effective instrument 
 through which His energy can be directed 
 against the evil that is in the world. 
 
 Now, in this dilemma the modern standpoint 
 may help us, as it is to the modern world we 
 appeal. Life is not static. It is a process — a 
 continual movement — in which the ideal and 
 the real are inextricably intermingled. The 
 ideal is not only the goal to be aimed at, it is 
 also the instrument by means of which the real 
 is moulded to its ends, but in thus moulding it, 
 it has to lose the completeness of its ideality 
 and to be coloured by the material with which 
 it works. It is a failure to distinguish between 
 these two elements of human life that results 
 in the interminable clash of warring forces 
 through which humanity slowly progresses to 
 the " one divine far-off event." One man takes 
 
138 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 his stand upon the real and insists upon the 
 recognition of facts. Another man has an in- 
 spired vision of the ideal, and in his impatience 
 to clutch it refuses to see the stern barrier of 
 fact that impedes his progress. And in the 
 ordinary struggle of thoughts and ideas that 
 constitute the political and religious atmosphere 
 of an age, these two men are keenly opposed 
 to each other, while as a matter of fact they 
 are mutually complementary, and are simply 
 part of Nature's dialectic through which she 
 reaches her conclusions. 
 
 We must be careful not to lose the ideal of 
 the Church as it was undoubtedly held by the 
 Apostles. " There is one body and one Spirit, 
 even as ye are called in one hope of your calling, 
 one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and 
 Father of all, who is above all and through all 
 and in you all. But unto every one of you is 
 given grace according to the measure of the 
 gift of Christ." * That the Apostle Paul meant 
 by the Church one great institution essentially 
 governed from one central authority, but em- 
 bracing every variety of spiritual temperament, 
 every phase of faith, every gift of intellect and 
 emotion, every shade of religious experience, 
 all dominated by a common principle, is a 
 * Eph. iv. 4-7. 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 139 
 
 fact that surely cannot be doubted. And in so 
 far therefore as our Christianity falls short of 
 this ideal we must acknowledge its imperfection, 
 and we are bound to believe that on account 
 of this failure of unity the Spirit's influence 
 is restrained, and God is withholding rich 
 blessings from us which otherwise would be 
 ours. If the sin of the Church of Rome is that 
 of blindly asserting a Catholicity to which she 
 has no claim, the besetting sin of Protestantism 
 has always been that of acquiescing in a divided 
 state which is clearly contrary to the spirit of 
 the Gospel and to the apostolic ideal. 
 
 We must maintain the ideal, but at the same 
 time we must be true to the facts of life. The 
 Church of Christ is not a visible Catholic unity, 
 but in so far as it is true to its function it is 
 ever striving, consciously or unconsciously, to 
 reach forward to this consummation as the very 
 essence and the true end of its existence. The 
 Church of Christ is not as yet the Christ incar- 
 nate in a material organisation, but it is a 
 continual process of incarnation. It is the 
 Spirit of Christ — the Logos — striving amid in- 
 congruous elements to visualise Himself, and 
 each of the disjecta meinhra of the body of 
 Christ, in so far as it has in itself the Spirit's 
 life, has an inherent impulse towards that 
 
140 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 symmetrical form which will yet enshrine the 
 One Spirit in one glorious body. This body of 
 Christ is not an artificial thing that can be con- 
 sciously constructed by an intellectual piecing 
 of its several parts together. It is not a world- 
 wide institution that is to be realised by the 
 action of Synods and Councils, however (Ecu- 
 menical, thinking out theological creeds, draw- 
 ing up articles of agreement, making rules and 
 decreeing forms of government. It is a living 
 body, and its development must follow the laws 
 of life. It is a spirit continually externalising 
 itself, and the external form under the pressure 
 of its environment must assume that appear- 
 ance by which the spirit can best be interpreted 
 to the world in which it lives. 
 
 And in this material world it is function that 
 determines the form through which life is mani- 
 fested. The evolutionary process consists in the 
 adaptation of the primal energy to the peculiar 
 functions of the specific organism. It is not 
 otherwise with the Church. The development 
 alike of its constitution and of its Creed was 
 originally determined by its function. The 
 Church as an institution was called into exist- 
 ence through the necessity of furnishing an 
 outlet for Christian activity, and its Creed was 
 fashioned by the necessity of interpreting 
 
GONGEPTION OF THE CHURCH 141 
 
 Christian experience. Neither constitution nor 
 Creed, therefore, can be regarded as fixed, 
 formed, and final, so long as the Church is a 
 living body, pulsing with a full vitality. Crys- 
 tallisation is a phenomenon of the inorganic 
 world. Every living organism is in a state of 
 continual change. It develops itself according 
 to the law of its own existence, absorbing 
 alien elements and transmuting them by the 
 dominant principle that governs its growth, 
 enlarging and even transforming its structure, 
 to embrace and control all the rich variety of 
 life it can assimilate with its own nature. But 
 in so doing it never loses its identity. Its cen- 
 tral principle is always the same. It is always 
 a manifestation of the same life. It functions 
 towards the realisation of the same end. And 
 so must it be with that complex organism we 
 call the Church. If it is really a living body, 
 a vital organism, controlling the spiritual ex- 
 perience of an evolving humanity, it must be 
 always in a state of flux. Its similitude is not 
 that of a beautiful piece of statuary, carved 
 by the deft hand of a consummate artist, em- 
 bodying the perfect ideal of spiritual and 
 physical beauty. It is rather that of the in- 
 dividual man, entering this tumultuous and 
 perplexing world as a tiny infant, gradually de- 
 
142 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 veloping all his powers and capacities, through 
 the storm and stress of a rich and varied ex- 
 perience, till he attains to the full stature of 
 manhood, and realises the ideal which was 
 implicit within the feeble organism which first 
 saw the light of day. 
 
 It may be said : " Does not such a view of the 
 Church as this strike at the root of the very 
 principle for which we are searching ? We 
 are looking for the seat of authority in religion. 
 It is the voice of God we would hear telling 
 us what we are to believe and do if we would 
 fulfil the purpose of our existence. And how 
 can a Church that is thus continually changing, 
 and to the development alike of whose Creed 
 and constitution no final limits can be set, 
 assume this tone of authority? Are we not 
 safer, on the whole, to fall back upon our in- 
 dividual spiritual intuition, the witness of the 
 Holy Ghost within our own hearts, than to 
 trust ourselves to such a vague authority as 
 the apparently shifting and contradictory dicta 
 that proceed from organised Christianity, which 
 must, on the whole, under this theory, be identi- 
 fied with the Christian Church ? " The difficulty 
 is not to be lightly dismissed. But it is to be 
 remarked that a developing Church is not by 
 any means a shifting or capricious Church. We 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 143 
 
 are speaking of the Church as a living organism, 
 whose constitution and whose Creed must con- 
 tinually develop if it is to correspond to the 
 needs of a developing humanity. But develop- 
 ment does not mean radical change. It does not 
 mean that what is truth at one time ceases to 
 be truth at another. It does not mean that one 
 doctrine which suited its own generation and 
 served as a working hypothesis to solve the 
 difficulties of its time is dismissed for another 
 which happens to fall in with the predominant 
 tastes and passions of a new age. That is not 
 evolution . In the development of life and 
 thought, one solid fact realised is realised for 
 ever ; one spiritual truth clearly apprehended is 
 never lost. But in the passage from age to age 
 newly discovered facts must be fitted in to the old, 
 so as to secure the due proportion and harmony 
 of truth, and because spiritual truth is infinite, 
 that portion of reality which humanity has in- 
 wrought with its very constitution serves only 
 to enlarge its capacity for the absorption of 
 still greater and sublimer truths. We progress 
 not by rejecting but by accepting the highest 
 results of the thought and e2q)erience of the 
 past, and it is safe to say that no man can 
 reveal to us any new spiritual truth which will 
 be a KTrifia ad for humanity who has not ab- 
 
144 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 sorbed the very spirit and essence of the whole 
 doctrine of that Christian Church which in its 
 Creed and constitution has been ever struggUng 
 to give adequate interpretation to the Christian 
 consciousness. To hold by the theory of a pro- 
 gressive Church, instinctively adapting itself to 
 its environment and eagerly welcoming all new 
 light, is not, by any means, to be indefinite in 
 one's theological beliefs, or to lack that strength 
 of conviction which is needful for prompt and 
 effective action. 
 
 But let the principle be always kept in view 
 that it is function that determines form. For 
 the question at once leaps to the lips : "What, in 
 the present divided state of Christendom, are 
 we to accept as the gathered results of spiritual 
 experience as embodied in the Christian Church? 
 Amid the vast multiplicity of beliefs claiming 
 to be Christian, and the great variety of con- 
 stitutions through which Christian activity is 
 exercised, which are to be reckoned as in the 
 legitimate line of evolution, and as therefore 
 fitted to furnish a standpoint from which 
 further permanent advance is to be made ? " To 
 the question as thus put there is no quite satis- 
 factory answer. All the great divisions of 
 Christendom, and many of the minor ones, 
 have their historical justification. The student 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 145 
 
 of history sees that in the given circumstances 
 they were inevitable, and were for the time the 
 only method by which certain vital elements, 
 the loss of which would have permanently 
 stunted Christian life, could have been pre- 
 served. True, there was always another way 
 out of the dilemma. There was a higher syn- 
 thesis that would have reconciled conflicting 
 antinomies, and bound the two divergent sec- 
 tions of the Church in a richer, fuller life. But 
 it is given to mortals only to be wise after 
 the event. We must adapt ourselves to God's 
 methods of working out His own decrees, and 
 if we would hasten the coming of His kingdom, 
 we can only do so by a patient study of these 
 methods, so that the final synthesis may be 
 reached by quicker and milder processes. 
 
 If, then, we would follow God s way of evolu- 
 tion, the question we will first ask ourselves is 
 not "Which is the true Church?" or "What 
 beliefs are we to accept as the metaphysical 
 basis of our religion?" It is rather, "What 
 is the function of the Church, and how can 
 she best fulfil that function ? " The whole point 
 of my contention is that the Church is not 
 something blindly imposed upon man from 
 without or from above, claiming to control 
 his belief and to direct his conduct. The 
 
 Problem of Theology J J 
 
146 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 Church springs from within as an inherent 
 necessity of human nature. What, then, is 
 that necessity ? Why does the spiritual nature 
 of man create this ecclesiastical environment? 
 What called it into being, and what function 
 has it to fulfil in the economy of human life? 
 Clearly these are the questions that clamour 
 for answer. To discuss the Creed and con- 
 stitution of a great organisation without the 
 clearest possible conception of the purpose for 
 which it exists must, in the very nature of 
 things, lead only to confusion. 
 
 The function of the Church can only be 
 understood in the light of its history. The 
 Church is an organic growth, each successive 
 phase of its manifestation containing essen- 
 tially all of permanent value that preceded 
 that phase. It is not for us to-day to assign 
 a function to the Church it never had before, 
 and so to cut ourselves adrift from the stream 
 of influence that has made us what we are. 
 We cannot begin the life of humanity anew 
 and create institutions which are to embody 
 conceptions which are out of all relation with 
 what men have previously believed. Attempts 
 to do something like this have been made 
 over and over again, but they have uniformly 
 come to nothing. The stream of tendency that 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 147 
 
 constitutes the central principle of history has 
 moved on its majestic course, has smoothed 
 over the rough places of revolution, and simply 
 absorbed any element of vitality it possessed 
 into the great process of evolution which the 
 theologian designates the eternal decree of 
 Almighty God, If, then, we are to get a true 
 notion of the function of the Church, we must 
 consider the idea to which it owes its origin, 
 the lines along which it has developed, and the 
 end it has always proposed to itself. 
 
 We come back, then, to the idea of the Body 
 of Christ, the materialised energy of God work- 
 ing through His Spirit, in the world of men. 
 "Lo, I am with you alway," said Jesus to His 
 disciples, and the fact became to them a living 
 reality. The inherent necessity of human 
 nature of which the Church is the visible 
 result, is the influence of the Spirit upon the 
 souls of men, stirring them into activity, and 
 forcing them to realise all the best that is in 
 their nature. It is only in community that 
 this end can be realised, because the individual 
 apart from the community is an inconceivable 
 entity. The individual draws his life from the 
 community, to whose life he contributes his 
 own share. The larger, fuller, more varied is 
 the life of the community, the richer does the 
 
148 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 individual life become. For the common life 
 is the life of God, manifested through His 
 Spirit, and only restricted in the fulness of 
 its flow by the creature's limitations of 
 capacity for absorbing it. The Church, there- 
 fore, must represent the spiritual energy of 
 humanity, organised for eflFective service. No 
 doubt, we dare not deny, that there is much 
 spiritual energy in the world apart from 
 organised Christianity. But, in so far as it 
 is inorganic, it is vague, inchoate, ineffective. 
 It is, so to speak, the raw material, to be 
 absorbed into the Church in the process of 
 evolution, to be modified and transformed by 
 the law of its developing life, and thus forced 
 to yield its contribution to the spiritual effec- 
 tiveness of the organic body. 
 
 The Church, as thus conceived, must embrace 
 all the higher life of man. It is the home of 
 the spirit. It is the centre to which all spiritual 
 experience tends, and from whence all spiritual 
 energy proceeds. In the Church, as an ideal 
 organism, the subtlest and most perplexing 
 spiritual emotions are understood, sympathised 
 with, and interpreted. The deep despair of 
 the soul in its failure to realise the visions 
 of perfection that torment it, its remorse, its 
 penitence, for the injuries inflicted upon its 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 149 
 
 own ideals, its sublime aspirations after a 
 good it can only vaguely conceive, but which 
 it feels it must grasp if life is to have any 
 meaning — these must find their explanation in 
 the light of that Revelation of Eternal Reality 
 of which the Church, as possessing the totality 
 of spiritual experience, ought always to be the 
 custodian. Those spiritual emotions that alone 
 give life its value, the love that joins heart to 
 heart in mystic union, the thirst for knowledge 
 in and for itself, the craving simply to under- 
 stand the meaning of this marvellous universe, 
 the intense desire to mingle with and lose one- 
 self in the beauty and harmony that flood the 
 soul through the avenues of eye and ear — these 
 all seek their final satisfaction in the Church, 
 for all these emotions are but spirit striving 
 to realise itself and to enter into communion 
 with that full, throbbing, spiritual vitality 
 which is the universe of God. 
 
 And not only is it the case that this totality 
 of spiritual emotion constitutes the Church, 
 builds up its fabric, but the Church, thus 
 constituted, evolves, stimulates, and controls 
 the manifestation of this emotional life in 
 humanity. The Church not merely organises 
 the spontaneous manifestation of spiritual 
 emotion, using the term in its widest sense. 
 
150 CONCEPTION OF THE CHUKCH 
 
 It reacts upon that humanity through which 
 the Spirit of God has built it up, and calls 
 forth its latent possibilities. It is the source 
 of spiritual energy. If its receptive function 
 is to gather up and systematise spiritual ex- 
 perience, its active function is to create it. 
 It acts as a constant stimulus to evolve the 
 higher life of humanity. It fights against the 
 mysterious evil that dogs the footsteps of 
 men, paralysing their spiritual energies, per- 
 verting their religious instincts, polluting God's 
 noblest gifts by turning them to vile and soul- 
 destroying purposes. For, however we may 
 theorise upon the subject, there is no deny- 
 ing the fact that the paths to heaven and 
 to hell lie very close together. The noblest 
 attributes of human nature are closely inter- 
 twined with the basest. The love of life, 
 e.g,, an inevitable and primary instinct in 
 every organised being, the root from which 
 the noblest and most heroic ideals of humanity 
 must grow, and which, therefore, should be 
 as strong as a belief in the necessary Being 
 of God, is perverted to a mere hard selfish- 
 ness which can slaughter, without remorse of 
 conscience, hecatombs of victims to maintain 
 a gross carnal and sensual existence, which is 
 not at all life. The love of man and woman, 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 151 
 
 a mystic passion even stronger than the love of 
 life, for it is a passion meant to perpetuate 
 the race of man upon the earth, is degraded 
 into a brutalising lust which destroys the 
 very capacity of emotion. The longing for the 
 ideal beauty which finds expression in litera- 
 ture, art, music, architecture — harmonious forms 
 through which the soul instinctively strives 
 to enter into the larger harmony of the uni- 
 verse — is used to evoke the vilest passions and 
 to minister to the lowest tastes. Even the 
 thirst for knowledge can be similarly per- 
 verted, and an acuteness of intellect that can 
 read Nature's secrets like an open book used 
 merely to secure selfish gain and to advance 
 personal ambition. 
 
 The Church, then, in the fulfilment of its 
 active function, claims a creative and regula- 
 tive influence on the whole of human life in 
 its higher or spiritual aspect. It brings to 
 bear upon the life of man those divine truths 
 which have been evolved through the action 
 of the Holy Spirit upon the spirit of man, 
 which have been wrought out and systematised 
 through the spiritual struggles and experiences 
 of humanity. It claims to offer a theory of 
 man's place in the universe, sufficient to 
 enlighten him as to his origin, to explain the 
 
152 CONCEPTION OF THE CHUECH 
 
 significance of his spiritual struggles, to satisfy 
 his legitimate aspirations, and to determine his 
 future destiny. 
 
 It is not a theory that at any stage can 
 be regarded as final and complete, for as it 
 is the outcome of spiritual experience it must 
 remain imperfect until the spiritual experi- 
 ence of humanity upon this planet is rounded 
 off and ended. It is not a theory that can 
 be expressed in rigorous scientific terms, for 
 finite human reason by its very nature is 
 incapable of grasping the infinite and reduc- 
 ing it to an exhaustive formula. It is not a 
 theory that explains all difficulties, for n o 
 sooner has the spiritual insight of man 
 seemed to penetrate one mystery, and to 
 have seen along the lines in which it works 
 itself out to intelligibility, than the unfathom- 
 able mystery of existence presents some fresh 
 inexplicable phase. But it is a true theory, 
 nevertheless — a theory that corresponds with 
 reality and has received the verification of 
 the intensest spiritual natures. It is a theory 
 that works, nay, the only theory that on a large 
 scale has ever been found to work. The basis 
 of the theory is that man is an emanation 
 of Deity — a child of God, possessing within 
 himself something of the infinite nature of 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 153 
 
 Grod. Man is the manifold of which God is 
 the unity, yet so that neither Creator nor 
 creature loses any essential element of 
 personality. The happiness of man consists 
 in realising and expressing his unity with 
 Grod. But the unity of spiritual beings must 
 be unity realised in freedom. It is a unity 
 of kindred natures seeking each other by an 
 inherent law of their natures, not a unity 
 that is forced on either by any external com- 
 pulsion. Freedom must therefore involve in 
 man an alternative, and the wrong alterna- 
 tive, yielded to, is sin. Man yields to tempta- 
 tion and thus severs himself from God, but 
 not so that the spiritual link between them 
 is altogether broken, the divine image in the 
 soul completely erased. This would be to 
 make a severance between Spirit and spirit 
 that in the nature of things is impossible. 
 God, the Absolute and Eternal, still works in 
 humanity through the operation of His Spirit, 
 and the whole tragedy of human life, its 
 futile aspirations and its lamentable perform- 
 ances, are simply the perpetual struggle of 
 the Eternal Spirit of God with the estranged 
 will of man. And because the tendency of 
 evil is always to grow worse, because the will 
 once estranged tends ever to a wider cleav- 
 
154 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 age, God intervened in the world of humanity 
 to strengthen the spiritual bond between 
 Creator and creation, and to startle His chil- 
 dren into a loving submission, by showing the 
 limitlessness of the law of sacrifice which is 
 the law of the higher life. He became Incar- 
 nate in Jesus Christ. The Eternal Spirit of 
 the Universe was made manifest in human 
 form. The Highest Spiritual Being entered 
 into the experiences of the lowest, that He 
 might link all spiritual being in one golden 
 chain, that He might show at once the unity 
 of humanity and the higher unity of God 
 and man. It was the enhancement of the 
 Spirit's influence that had been working in 
 the world since the creation. It was the 
 inrush of a flood of spiritual life that per- 
 manently raised humanity to a nobler level. 
 As we have seen, men received the new 
 impetus as an intoxication of the spirit. The 
 flood of new experiences threw their souls 
 into so violent an emotion that it required 
 time to think out their full implications and 
 their value for the thought and life of com- 
 ing generations. But it was done, and the 
 great truths of the Triune God, the Incarna- 
 tion of the Son of God, and the reconciliation 
 between God and man effected through His 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 155 
 
 sacrifice, became the eternal possession of 
 humanity. 
 
 It is to these primary truths the Church, 
 which in these days we can only take as 
 meaning organised Christianity, bears witness. 
 These truths are the permanent theological 
 gain she has reached through the soul 
 struggles of the Christian centuries. I do 
 not say the only permanent theological gain, 
 but I would go so far as to assert the only 
 indisputable gain, for whatever may be the 
 ideas of individual men, the Church of Jesus 
 Christ in all her severed branches, wherever 
 she exists as an organised community, bears 
 these truths on her forefront. The impotence 
 of the sti'uggle of Unitarianism to maintain 
 a place in the legitimate succession, notwith- 
 standing the great names that have lent 
 lustre to its annals, is the best proof of my 
 assertion. Unitarianism has never been a 
 Church except when it approached so nearly 
 to Trinitarianism as to be indistinguishable 
 from it. At its best it has only been a 
 semi-philosophical club. 
 
 These truths, then, must form the basis of 
 all the higher life of man. The development 
 of human faculty in all the rich variety of 
 its expression must be simply the evolution 
 
156 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 of the Christian idea, as formulated in the 
 great dogmas of the Christian Church, through 
 the medium of human personahties. It is 
 not sufficient to say that the highest possible 
 spiritual and intellectual life is quite com- 
 patible with a simple faith in the Christian 
 Creed, as if the Christian Creed lay outside 
 of a large field of legitimate human energy 
 and was taken up as a mere by-product of 
 human life. This is a tone that in current 
 literature, and even in current apologetics, is 
 very common. It is remarked that a man 
 may be a great artist and yet for all that 
 a sincere believer in Jesus Christ the Son of 
 God. He may stand in the very front rank 
 of scientists and yet remain a humble Chris- 
 tian. He may be a master of literary art 
 and yet not find it necessary to renounce 
 his faith. Christianity is not antagonistic to 
 the arts and sciences, but may flourish along- 
 side of them in all the dignity of its pure 
 simplicity. We are all familiar with this 
 method of argumentation, but surely when 
 we think it over we must admit that it shows 
 a lamentable lack of appreciation of the 
 Christian idea. Either that idea is one that 
 involves the whole of human life or it has 
 no meaning at all. 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 157 
 
 The Christian verities constitute a philo- 
 sophy of human existence. The claim of 
 Christian dogma must logically be that it is 
 a category exhausting all possible life-giving 
 experience, and that human life can only be 
 lived at its highest and best when it is 
 evolving its implicit significance. The ascetic 
 life so often identified with Christianity had 
 at least a logical basis. The ascetic defines 
 life in terms of a self-negation that excludes 
 all pleasurable emotions that are dependent 
 upon the material world. To him, literature, 
 art, and science are not of the essence of 
 life. They are temptations of the Evil One, 
 attributes of that crude, inchoate, corrupt 
 matter which it is the work of the spirit to 
 subdue and annihilate. He lives his life there- 
 fore as a unity, introducing into it a rational 
 principle. But the Christian who regards his 
 religion as a thing by itself, a part of life 
 which he is to keep separate from other 
 parts, who considers business, art, literature, 
 science, as quite legitimate pursuits, but in 
 no way trenching upon his religious life, is 
 irrational. His life is governed by no 
 coherent principle. He is dominated by no 
 one ideal sublimating his whole existence. 
 Such phrases as " Business is business," " Art 
 
158 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 for art's sake," "Literature is non-moral," 
 " Science is the investigation of truth," have 
 no meaning to the true thinker. Life is not 
 a multiplicity of ends having no interconnec- 
 tion with each other. Human activities can- 
 not go on their own way, each seeking its 
 own end independently of every other, with- 
 out defeating their own purpose. This 
 pluralistic vision of life leads not only to 
 irrelevancy and confusion in thought, but it 
 has in practice in our day produced some of 
 the most lop-sided individuals of whom history 
 has any record. It has given us a Haeckel, 
 who from the analysis of the laboratory has 
 considered himself qualified to dogmatise on 
 the raptures of the saints, and a Darwin, 
 whose great intellect could spend whole days 
 watching the motions of earthworms, while a 
 play of Shakespeare became to him an utter 
 weariness and a sonata of Beethoven as 
 euphonious as a coalman's cry. 
 
 The Church therefore, if it is to be logical 
 and consistent with its own ideals, must 
 claim to dominate the whole of life. Its 
 dogmas are the categories which indicate the 
 lines along which alone spiritual excellence in 
 all its various phases can be attained. The 
 arts, the sciences, the emotions, the ethics of 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 159 
 
 life, are only on right lines of development, 
 and only reach their natural culmination, when 
 based on the postulates of the Christian faith. 
 For the Church is the human spirit striving 
 to attain to the measure of the stature of 
 the perfect man in Christ Jesus. The Church 
 is the continuous effort of the Eternal Spirit 
 of God to create in this material world a 
 visible home for the spirit of man. 
 
 No doubt it is only the persistent striving 
 of the Holy Spirit of God that is visible to 
 human eyes. The Church is an ideal. When 
 we descend to actual life we are bound to 
 be envisaged with perplexities and anomalies 
 in carrying out the ideal. But it must be 
 remembered that we are only on right lines 
 of development when the ideal is implicit in 
 the real, and we can only discern the reality 
 of our ideal when we note the tendencies of 
 the human spirit in its evolution to its far- 
 off goal. 
 
 Have we any right to say, then, that all 
 that concerns the higher life of man only 
 finds its true realisation when it is working 
 itself out along the lines of the Christian 
 conception of existence ? Do the doctrines of 
 the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atone- 
 ment so interweave themselves with the 
 
160 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 whole of life that literature, art, science and 
 ethics, when they are at their best, when 
 they are most fully expressive of the mystery 
 of existence and touch the deepest springs of 
 human vitality, are only the unfolding of 
 their implications ? Some might say that the 
 very opposite is the case, that the arts and 
 sciences have only really flourished when they 
 have thrown off the domination of the Church 
 and have divorced themselves from its narrow 
 conceptions of life. The whole history of 
 the Church, indeed, so far from being the 
 history of the orderly evolution of human 
 faculty, has been the history of the human 
 spirit struggling for freedom of expression 
 against the tyranny of ecclesiastical power. 
 It is only at rare intervals that originality 
 of thinking or expression has been fostered 
 or even tolerated by the Church. The record 
 of human progress is the story of the martyrs 
 whose broken bones or whitened ashes have 
 fertilised the soil that afterwards produced 
 the richest and loveliest flowers of the human 
 spirit. 
 
 There is an element of truth in this con- 
 tention. The Church by its very nature is 
 a conservative body, i.e., it exists to conserve 
 the gathered results of human experience and 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHUECH 161 
 
 to prevent them being scattered to the winds 
 by any rash adventurer whose individuality 
 is stronger than his wisdom. And yet such 
 adventurers into the realms of the spirit have 
 often been the very men who have wonder- 
 fully enriched this experience and added to 
 the accumulating stores of spiritual wealth 
 which the Church so jealously guards. The 
 living visible Church is not an ideal institu- 
 tion. It is a militant body struggling forward 
 to final victory, and in the hard campaign it 
 is bound to make many mistakes and to 
 expiate its sins by suffering grievous loss. 
 The visible Church may at times be untrue 
 to her principles, untrue to some at least of 
 the conceptions on which her life is based, 
 and may frequently give to principles that 
 are perfectly right and just a wrong applica- 
 tion. And when this is so it is the duty of 
 those of her members who see her faults to 
 endeavour to correct them, to recall her to 
 a sense of her true function, to be the instru- 
 ments through which the Eternal Spirit seeks 
 to widen His influence and to diffuse His 
 power. 
 
 The question is not whether the Church as 
 a visible body has never made mistakes, has 
 failed to recognise her friends, has even at times 
 
 Problem of Theology 12 
 
162 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 retarded instead of fostering the growth of 
 human faculty. It is rather, are the principles 
 on which the Church is based the principles 
 that make for human progress and enlighten- 
 ment? Is the Church in its essence a pro- 
 gressive or an obscurantist body? Does the 
 Church from its very nature, and in the best 
 of its realised results, fall in line with the 
 root idea of human development? 
 
 To answer such questions properly would be 
 to trace the growth and development of the 
 central thought enshrined in Christian doctrine 
 through the whole history of the world, and 
 then to determine its value in the education 
 of the race. That we cannot do here ; but 
 surely there is material enough lying on the 
 surface to show that such an investigation 
 could have but one result. It is scarcely 
 possible to overestimate, e.g., the value of the 
 Christian idea in the enrichment of literature. 
 Literature is the artistic expression of life in 
 language, and literature attains its noblest 
 heights when it gives utterance to the deepest 
 passions, the subtlest emotions, and the most 
 soaring aspirations of strong natures, wrest- 
 ling amid alien environments and antagonistic 
 elemental forces for that unity with the 
 Eternal Spirit of the Universe which alone 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 163 
 
 secures the peace that passeth understand- 
 ing.* 
 
 There are literatures other than Christian, 
 but their greatness is just in proportion to 
 their approach to the Christian solution of 
 the riddle of the universe. It is this that 
 gives to Greek literature that marvellous 
 excellence and inherent vitality that have 
 borne it through all the cataclysms of history, 
 and constitute it still a living force in the 
 spiritual unfolding of the modern world. 
 Indeed, it may truly be said that Christianity 
 is as much Greek as Hebrew. The two deepest 
 and most vital streams of human experience 
 and thought met and mingled in the early 
 Church and moulded the whole course of 
 modern civilisation. Hence comes our appre- 
 ciation of the literature of those races whose 
 spiritual life was the soul from which the 
 Church grew. 
 
 And what a noble stream of literature has 
 enriched the realm of thought from the days 
 when the Synoptists penned their matchless 
 portraiture of a perfect life in the pages of 
 the Gospel ! For centuries almost the only 
 literature that had real artistic excellence was 
 
 * Or maintaining their defiance when Omnipotence would 
 crush their personal will. 
 
164 CONCEPTION OF THE CHUECH 
 
 that directly produced by the Church. And 
 when in course of time literature sought a 
 wider field and probed the human spirit with 
 other than merely theological issues in view, 
 it was still so interpenetrated with Christian 
 ideas and Christian conceptions of life as to 
 be unintelligible apart from them. Take away 
 the Christian atmosphere from the noblest of 
 modern literature, find have you not removed 
 from it all that is vital?* Where would the 
 tragedy of Macbeth be, had Macbeth been a 
 mere savage warrior whose lawless lusts and 
 wild ambitions were his only law ? The 
 tragedy simply lies in this, that Shakespeare 
 imports into Macbeth and his entourage the 
 Christian ideal of life, and shows us their 
 lawless lusts and wild ambitions struggling 
 with those conceptions of the majesty of 
 divine law, of sin, retribution, and expiation, 
 which, inherent in the human soul, have been 
 brought out and enshrined in the Christian 
 Creed for the guidance of the human race. 
 There is no tragedy in human life apart from 
 the Christian ideal. Though the whole brute 
 creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, it 
 scarcely evokes a tear from the human eye or 
 
 * Cf. Prof. 0. C. Bradley*s Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 
 p. 88. 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 165 
 
 a sigh from the human heart. Were man but 
 a curious organism thrown up by mysterious 
 nature in the marvellous fecundity of her 
 organic forms, doomed only to blossom and 
 die like the leaves on the trees, his deepest 
 anguish would hardly be worth a serious 
 thought, for the scratch of a bare bodkin 
 would end it. It is in the difference between 
 the ideal and the real that the tragedy of life 
 consists. It is the tragedy of immortal souls 
 weltering in the mud and mire that would 
 engulf them, and, were it possible, choke the 
 very life out of them, that alone touches the 
 deepest springs of emotion in the human 
 heart. So truly is this the case that modern 
 literature, with an intuitive grasp of what is 
 necessary for its own sustenance, draws its 
 most powerful effects from the artistic pre- 
 sentation of the clashing of Christian ideals 
 with the natural corruption of the human 
 heart. Even imaginative writers like George 
 Eliot, who have thrown off their allegiance 
 to the Christian Creed, cannot do without it 
 in their art. Only when they are touching 
 the primal verities of which Christian doctrine 
 is the eternal witness do they produce any- 
 thing that is vital and likely to be of 
 permanent value. 
 
166 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 And if literature attains to the summit of 
 excellence only when it is permeated by the 
 Christian idea, what shall we say of the arts 
 of painting, sculpture, and architecture ? It 
 has been said that art (using the term in its 
 narrower sense) is the handmaid of religion. 
 Art is very much more. Art is the shrine of 
 religion. Art is the temple of the living God. 
 Art everywhere owes its origin to the reli- 
 gious instinct. It is the attempt of the soul 
 to express itself in terms of the loveliness 
 and harmony of God s universe. Will any one 
 deny that art has gained its greatest triumphs 
 where it has simply been the medium for 
 giving utterance to the soul's religious aspira- 
 tions ? The beauty of Greek architecture lies 
 in its temples to the gods, the glory of Greek 
 sculpture in its pure delineation of god-like 
 forms, or in its efforts to depict the Nemesis 
 that awaits the impious man and the evil- 
 doer. Take from the art of the Christian 
 centuries the Christian ideals, and have we 
 anything left at all? The agony of the God- 
 man, the glory of maternity in its noblest 
 historic manifestation, the struggles of the 
 soul with sin, the calm peacefulness of the 
 saintly life, the great crises of life when the soul 
 of man stands out in defiance of material power. 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 167 
 
 asserting its divinity against the onrush of an 
 overwhelming fate — it is in depicting such sub- 
 jects as these that art has reached the height 
 of its glory. And what meaning has archi- 
 tecture for us apart from the Church? Is it 
 possible to understand how the Christian reli- 
 gion touched the mediaeval heart, soul, and 
 mind without the study of mediaeval archi- 
 tecture? Was ever a religion more nobly 
 shrined? Who can stand in a great Gothic 
 cathedral, with its marvellous combination of 
 sublimity, dignity, harmony, loveliness, and 
 grace, enfolding a mystery that seems to touch 
 and yet elude our comprehension, charming 
 the soul by its subtle suggestiveness and still- 
 ing it with the peace of eternity, without 
 feeling that here art is fulfilling its perfect 
 work in providing a fitting shrine for the 
 worship of the Eternal Spirit? And yet, though 
 as a matter of historic fact art reached its 
 apex in interpreting Christian ideas, we are 
 told that art has nothing to do with reli- 
 gion. Art is an end in itself. Art must be 
 pursued for its own sake. What is the mean- 
 ing of the phrase? If it means that art has 
 laws of its own which must be obeyed before 
 it becomes a material embodiment of spiritual 
 ideas, then the assertion is a mere truism. 
 
168 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 If this be all that is meant, we may as well 
 say that literature exists for the sake of 
 grammar and the alphabet. But if it means 
 that it is the expression alone that has value 
 for art, then the aphorism is entirely untrue. 
 The subject glorifies the expression, makes it 
 plastic to its touch. The realistic representa- 
 tion of the wagon of coals tumbled out on 
 the road before my window may be excel- 
 lently done, and may conform to all the rules 
 of drawing and painting, but it is not art. 
 At best it is only a letter of the alphabet of 
 art. Art only begins when it is a tentative 
 expression of the mystery of life, and it 
 reaches its culmination when it endeavours to 
 clothe with the garb of God's beauty the 
 struggles and aspirations of the human soul 
 towards the infinite perfection of its Maker. 
 
 Are we to maintain, then, that science — 
 using the word in the narrower sense, as 
 meaning the investigation of the laws that 
 determine the material universe — is essentially 
 religious ? Must we hazard the bold state- 
 ment that scientific research can only attain 
 successful results when it accepts as axioms 
 the dogmas of the Christian Church? Absurd. 
 Surely this is the very height of obscurantism, 
 and is to fly in the face of the most obvious 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 169 
 
 facts of history. Is the story of scientific 
 research not simply the story of an age-long 
 contest between science and religion, a contest 
 in which the latter has in the long run been 
 invariably worsted ? Has not the Church ob- 
 structed every attempt to investigate natural 
 law, and launched against the luckless in- 
 vestigator her supernatural terrors ? Have 
 not all those discoveries that have widened 
 men's knowledge of the world in which they 
 lived and improved their material condition 
 been made in defiance of the Church, and 
 mainly by men whom, the Church has sus- 
 pected, calumniated, and persecuted? And is 
 not the extraordinary modern development of 
 scientific discovery simply owing to the fact 
 that, through the fuller enlightenment of 
 humankind, the power of the Church has 
 waned and her supernatural authority is no 
 longer respected? 
 
 Let us think this matter out. If religion 
 and science be irreconcilably divorced, the fault 
 must be in the definition of terms. If truth 
 and religion be not synonymous, then religion 
 must go by the board. But the whole force 
 of my contention throughout these lectures is 
 that religion is a fact, a genuine experience, 
 and that the theological formulse in which 
 
170 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 this experience has been enshrined are guaran- 
 teed by the consciousness of those whose 
 experience they interpret. It is the part of 
 the Church jealously to guard this deposit of 
 truth, and in doing so we can scarcely wonder 
 that she looks with suspicion upon theories 
 and hypotheses that seem to conflict with it. 
 I am holding a brief for no Infallible Church. 
 It is not necessary for my position to main- 
 tain that the Church has never made any 
 mistakes. She has had to hold the inner 
 citadel of the Christian faith, and in doing so 
 she has frequently entrenched herself by esta- 
 blishing outposts for the purpose of warding 
 off attacks. In defending these outposts she 
 has sometimes been defeated, as sometimes 
 she has gained the day. But let it be remem- 
 bered she has had to fight a real enemy — 
 the real enemy not being science, but the un- 
 warrantable intrusions of scientific adventurers. 
 She has had her own body of doctrine to main- 
 tain, which she holds to be quite as scientific 
 in the larger sense of the word, and to be 
 based on principles as indefeasible, as the 
 results even of the most exhaustive scrutiny 
 of material phenomena. It is true she has 
 fought with the weapons of her time — wea- 
 pons sometimes crude and clumsy — and her 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 171 
 
 errors have always reacted disastrously on her 
 own life. But in this respect she has been 
 in no wise singular. The intolerance of an 
 agnostic or atheistic philosophy would be hard 
 to outrival. The point is, she has fought for 
 a cause worth maintaining, for the preserva- 
 tion of an inestimable treasure fraught with 
 unspeakable blessings to humanity. She has 
 carried through centuries of barbarism, igno- 
 rance, and interminable strife, through periods 
 of moral corruption, a false conceit of know- 
 ledge, and a perverse criticism, that sublime 
 theory of life from which all the higher virtues 
 spring which we owe to the teaching of Jesus 
 Christ and those devoted disciples who, in the 
 early centuries of our era, first felt the onrush 
 of the Spirit's influence. And she is having 
 her reward. The tendency of the best think- 
 ing of the present day is not to relegate her 
 mysteries to the limbo of forgotten supersti- 
 tions, but to recognise their profundity, to do 
 justice to the great names that have been 
 associated with them, to interpret their inner 
 meaning and to recognise their overwhelming 
 value in giving to individuals and to nations 
 that moral uplift and spiritual outlook which 
 exalt them in the scale of being. It is pos- 
 sible we may have to translate the ideas 
 
172 CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 enshrined in the Christian creed from the lan- 
 guage of Greek philosophy to that of the 
 common tongue, but who that studies modern 
 literature and philosophy can fail to recog- 
 nise the fact that their inherent vitality is 
 dawning upon the human intellect with fresh 
 force and vividness ? They are the axioms of 
 the spiritual life, and as such must lie at the 
 basis of all life, and any scientific generalisa- 
 tion must be vitiated that fails to take account 
 of them. 
 
 I must reserve the discussion of the relation 
 between Christian ethics and dogmatics for 
 fuller treatment than a paragraph at the end 
 of a lecture. Meanwhile, let me briefly sum up. 
 The Church, in its ideal, is a visible body, 
 united and organic, the incarnation of the Spirit 
 of Christ in a material world. The Church in 
 its actuality, in the process of evolution, has 
 become severed into sections, but in each vital 
 section the Spirit is working, and each section, 
 in so far as it is true to its function, retains 
 the implicit ideal, and is striving, consciously 
 or unconsciously, after that ultimate unity 
 which alone can secure the fulness of the 
 divine blessing. The function of the Church 
 is the evolution of the spiritual man, which 
 can only be done in community, for the indi- 
 
CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH 173 
 
 vidual, severed from the community, is cut off 
 from the influence of the Spirit, Who alone 
 giveth life. The truths through which the 
 Church evolves and trains spiritual faculty are 
 those great doctrines, wrought out through the 
 spiritual struggles of the early centuries, which 
 are accepted by every one of its severed sections 
 and have stood the test of time and experience, 
 and these doctrines lie at the basis of the 
 highest man has attained, or can attain, in 
 every phase of the rich variety of his spiritual 
 activity. 
 
THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 
 
THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 
 
 T HAVE tried to show that the postulates 
 -^ of the Christian faith which form the back- 
 bone of the Creed of Christendom constitute the 
 root of the highest spiritual excellence in every 
 sphere of the spirit's activity. This is inevitable 
 if these postulates are true. The Christian 
 Creed is an intellectual theory of the universe, 
 and if it be true it must not only harmonise 
 with the facts of life, but it must indicate the 
 only lines along which the soul of man can 
 attain the full fruition of his essential being. 
 I am aware that in speaking of the spiritual 
 activity of humankind as manifested in litera- 
 ture, art, and science, I have merely touched 
 on their relation to Christian doctrine and 
 pointed out the possibilities of a more exhaustive 
 study. In dealing with ethics something more 
 Problem of Theology X3 
 
178 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 than this must be done, for right living must 
 always be the basis of the individual's practical 
 activity. Matthew Arnold calculated that 
 morality covers three-fourths of life, and, 
 from his own point of view, everyone will 
 admit that he was perfectly right. But, indeed, 
 from the principles I am trying to unfold, this 
 method of dividing life into compartments is 
 a wholly erroneous one. Life ought to be a 
 unity. The discordant life is an imperfect life, 
 is an evil life. Life's various activities do not 
 lie side by side unrelated. They grow out of 
 one another, or they develop from the same 
 stem. They are harmonised by a common vital 
 bond. And if we are to speak of morality 
 covering by far the greater part of human life, 
 we merely mean that we are dealing in 
 humanity with a phase of the one vital force 
 that has a preponderant influence in deter- 
 mining the whole tone of the individual life. 
 
 My thesis, then, is that ethics is dependent 
 for its noblest manifestations on the Christian 
 Creed. Or, to put it more concretely, that no 
 man can attain to the fairest flower of ethical 
 living without being consciously influenced by 
 the Christian theory of life. The Christian, 
 when genuine to the heart's core of him, is the 
 finest product of humanity, and is the natural 
 
CHEISTIAN DOCTRINE 179 
 
 product of the metaphysical stem from whence 
 he draws his essential life. 
 
 Now, the fact that there is any vital con- 
 nection between ethics and theology is very 
 frequently denied. Nay, even the more obvious 
 relation between ethics and religion is often 
 hotly contested. No less an authority than 
 Newman Smyth says : " It would be idle now to 
 think of forcing ethics back under the control 
 of dogmatic theology."* And yet that is just 
 what I propose to do, nay, what I feel I must 
 do, if I am to be true to my own Christian 
 convictions. But let us, for clearness of 
 thinking, define our terms. Let us be sure 
 we understand the meaning of these three 
 words, ethics, religion, theology, Ethics — from 
 the Greek ethos — means no more than a man's 
 manner of living — the manner of living he 
 deliberately chooses. Religion is the appeal 
 the universe makes to his emotional nature. 
 Theology is the account given by the intellect 
 of the meaning of that appeal. Is it possible, 
 then, that there is no vital relation between 
 these things? A man's ethics — if he be a 
 rational creature, no matter how low his 
 manner of living — must depend upon his im- 
 plicit or explicit theory of life. The drunkard 
 * See Note I, " The Belatiou between Ethics and Dogmatics." 
 
180 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 who reels along the street with the far-off 
 mystic gleam in his eye and the staggering gait 
 that heeds no material barriers to its progress 
 has his theory of life. He has his religion and 
 he has his theology. The universe comes to 
 him as an appeal to get away from the dark 
 drudgery of a soulless life to the illimitable 
 realm of the dimly descried ideal. But he 
 knows that he is hemmed and pressed in by 
 an inexorable fate, and there is only one narrow 
 outlet through which he may enter for a time 
 into the glorious realm of the gods. His ethos, 
 therefore, is the passage through this particular 
 aperture. His life is severely logical. Theology, 
 religion, and ethics form one complete whole. 
 He may never personally have worked his 
 system out, but it has been worked out and 
 enshrined in imperishable verse from Anacreon 
 to Omar Khayyam.* His system is so complete 
 that he is impervious to your attacks unless 
 you can approach him on metaphysical lines 
 and convince him that you have a theology 
 purer and nobler than his. You must, in short, 
 change his theory of life if you would effectually 
 change his practice. 
 
 As, then, there are different theories of life, 
 so there are different codes of ethics. Atheism, 
 * See Note J, « Hedonism," 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 181 
 
 pantheism, deism, Christianity, each has a 
 different outlook upon life, and there is a 
 logical ethos attached to each. Were men 
 logical and were their practice strictly dependent 
 upon their theory, it would be possible always 
 to determine their religion and their theology 
 from their manner of living. But men are 
 never consistent. As a matter of fact we 
 acquire our ethical standards experimentally. 
 We act before we form theories of acting, and 
 our actions, in the first instance, are rarely the 
 result of conscious theories. They proceed from 
 a vast variety of motives, from an intermingling 
 of metaphysical theories, from a continual play 
 of rival forces impinging upon the will. We 
 are dependent in our main tendencies upon that 
 essential nature we acquire through heredity, 
 which is the result of the accumulated energies 
 of a long line of ancestors. We are the creatures 
 of circumstance and environment, which create 
 for us a conventional morality to which we 
 almost unconsciously adhere. But we are not 
 to take for granted this ethical life of conven- 
 tion as the true ethos. We are not rationally 
 permitted to take things as they are and ethical 
 standards as they happen to exist in our own 
 particular environment, and lay down these 
 as the moral law to which others are to con- 
 
182 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 form and into which we are to train our 
 children. To do so is to strike at the very root 
 of any idea of an absolute in morality. If we 
 take our moral code merely empirically, the 
 drunkard and the sensualist have as much a 
 right to their ethical ideas as has the pious 
 Christian. The moment we get out of ourselves 
 and ask why we are to persuade another man 
 to act as we are doing, and why we are to 
 educate our youth into our own conventional 
 ideas of morality — that moment we are forced 
 to pause and consider, in order to discover some 
 sanction that will prove our ethical ideas right. 
 Hence the imperative need for a philosophy of 
 morals, for a theory of life. We require this 
 philosophy of morals in the first place to justify 
 our own conduct, and when we have found and 
 accepted it, we find it inevitably reacts on our 
 own conduct and goes a long way to determine 
 our future practice. We acquire a stable basis 
 of morals, and an objective standard according 
 to which we assume the right of judging of the 
 actions of others. 
 
 This account of the historical relation be- 
 tween the philosophy and practice of morals 
 explains the frequent anomalies we find in 
 the ethical realm. It is sometimes observed 
 that a man's practice is better than his Creed. 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 183 
 
 Naturally, because a man acts before he thinks ; 
 his actions are the result of his primitive in- 
 stincts modifying and being modified by his 
 environments. But man has become a highly 
 civilised being, performing a vast variety of 
 complex actions under the influence of many 
 motives, before he dreams of consciously putting 
 to himself the question as to why he deems 
 certain actions right and others wrong. And 
 when he does ask the question and rises to 
 same kind of ethical metaphysical theory, his 
 tteory may be narrower than his conduct and 
 may not cover all the actions he instinctively 
 performs. And yet, the theory being his own, 
 he has a natural love for it, and he simply 
 takes for granted that were it adequately in- 
 vestigated it would be sufficient for its purpose. 
 There is nothing more common, e.g,, in ethical 
 discu&sion than to assume certain ethical ideas 
 which have been ratified by the human con- 
 sciousness as pure and noble, and which must 
 therefore be accepted, to be the gradual evolu- 
 tion oi principles of action that could not 
 possibly have produced them. Even the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount, the most intensely theo- 
 logical 08 all ethical codes, has been claimed 
 as the natural and inevitable product of 
 agnosticism. 
 
184 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 We may adopt a purely naturalistic outlook 
 upon the universe. Matter and physical force 
 are the only realities. Spirit is a mere illusion, 
 an intangible something which is nothing at 
 all, as a more searching analysis can always 
 construe it in terms of material energy. The 
 life of the universe is a mere blind force, work- 
 ing itself out in accordance with determinate 
 laws, and throwing up in the seething ferment 
 a vast variety of organic forms, which live their 
 little day only to be once more absorbed in the 
 general mass, to form the crude substance from 
 which still other and more complex organisms 
 are to be evolved. Man as he is to-day upon 
 this planet, with all his marvellous complexity 
 of body, soul, and spirit, is simply the higlest 
 and most intricate structure which Natuie in 
 her blind evolution has as yet produced, but 
 in his purposelessness and in his evaneseence 
 he differs in no respect from other oiganic 
 bodies. 
 
 What, according to this theory, mvBt his 
 ethics be ? True, in strict logic, he can have 
 no ethics, for he has no free-will, no choice. 
 He is simply a link in Nature's chain. He is 
 simply the result of Nature's forces sveaving 
 and unweaving the web of material being, 
 and he has no more say in the pattern that 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 185 
 
 is to be woven than the thread that con- 
 stitutes the warp and woof of the cloth. But 
 passing over the initial illogicality of ascribing 
 ethical relationships to such a being, and taking, 
 as is usually done, the illusion of free-will for 
 the thing itself, how shall we define the ethics 
 that such a theory of existence must produce? 
 Clearly the ethos of such an organic structure 
 as man is here described to be must be simply 
 a materialistic utilitarianism. He fulfils the 
 law of his nature when he gives a free rein 
 to his most clamant impulses. He is at one 
 with his universe when he allows the natural 
 forces that are working in his personality to 
 have absolute scope and then falls back when 
 they are exhausted to permit the material 
 atoms of which his body is composed to fer- 
 tilise the soil from whence he sprang. Spirit 
 being a mere illusion, all those higher ideals 
 of life and duty which can only have signifi- 
 cance if spirit be real, must be dreams and 
 phantoms in which no sane man would care 
 to dwell. The ethics of naturalism can never 
 be aught else than a continuous striving after 
 the crudest sensual enjoyment. 
 
 And yet a naturalistic utilitarianism has been 
 and is the ethical theory of many men of high 
 moral tone who have sought to find a logical 
 
186 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 vindication for their position. They have 
 argued that, although in the first instance, no 
 doubt, man was merely an impulsive savage, 
 knowing no higher law than the gratification 
 of his five senses, yet a little experience soon 
 convinced him that without the exercise of 
 some self-control he could not even attain to 
 this gratification. Living in a world of other 
 personalities each eager to give scope to his 
 sensual appetites, some compromise had to be 
 made before, in the general confiict that was 
 bound to ensue, the whole race of man was 
 swept from the face of the earth. Self-control, 
 essential for the life of the community, was 
 thus forced upon the individual, and, inwoven 
 with the tissue of each generation, gradually 
 became a habit. Men learned to take long 
 views and to sacrifice a lesser pleasure in order 
 to secure a greater. In this way qualitative 
 standards took the place of quantitative, and 
 those actions which were of service to the 
 community rather than to the individual had 
 a moral value assigned to them and were made 
 the object of praise. 
 
 But, surely, it is evident that the element of 
 quality is introduced here by an illicit process. 
 Utilitarianism has a materialistic background. 
 The utility that is made the standard of morals 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 187 
 
 is merely the utility of personal advantage. In 
 the last resort it reduces itself to the best 
 method of gratifying a man's natural appetites. 
 We are not permitted to construe the world 
 in terms of materialism and to banish God 
 from the universe, and then take a surreptitious 
 and quite illegitimate leap into the spiritual 
 realm. Materialism leaves no logical ground 
 for disinterestedness, for heroism, for sacrificing 
 oneself to the good of the community. You 
 may, from the naturalistic point of view, con- 
 vince a man that he cannot attain to the ideal 
 of the natural life without the exercise of con- 
 siderable self-control, that it is an exceedingly 
 foolish thing to be a gross sensualist or a 
 depraved drunkard, though even this must be 
 allowed to remain a matter of opinion. Still, 
 it is possible to raise a man from these lower 
 levels of pleasure to that refined Epicureanism 
 where the senses are sublimated and their con- 
 centrated essence gives a rich and rare flavour 
 to a life of culture. Higher than that you 
 can never raise him. He begins as a sensualist 
 and as a sensualist, logically, he ends, and not 
 all the straining of this gross matter, which 
 alone he acknowledges as real, through logical 
 sieves, will produce that essential nobility of 
 life which can only be vindicated on a totally 
 
188 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OP 
 
 different theory. If utility, in this material 
 sense, be the origin, basis, and sanction of 
 morals, it must remain its criterion to the 
 end, and you cannot possibly convince a man, 
 who sees his way to a personal advantage 
 which he strongly desires through means which 
 the moral instincts of his fellow-men condemn, 
 that he is wrong in using these means simply 
 because his action would be injurious to his 
 neighbour. He listens to your appeal, if he 
 listens at all, because he has within his own 
 heart an implicit standard of conduct which 
 came from quite another source. The Creed 
 of the naaterialist has been thus summed up 
 by one of the characters of a popular novelist, 
 and it would be difficult to shake the logicality 
 of his position : " I believe that life is a mess. 
 It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that may 
 move for a minute, an hour, a year or a 
 hundred years, but that in the end will 
 cease to move. The big eat the little that 
 they may continue to move, the strongest 
 the weak, that they may retain their strength. 
 The lucky eat the most and move the longest, 
 that is all. . . . Life, bah ! It has no value. Of 
 cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere 
 it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a 
 lavish hand. Where there is room for one 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 189 
 
 life she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eat 
 life, till the strongest and most piggish life 
 is left." * 
 
 Again, we may adopt a spiritualistic outlook 
 upon the universe. We may define the totality 
 of existence in terms of spirit rather than of 
 matter and force. It is spirit of which alone we 
 are immediately conscious. This gross matter 
 which seems to press and hem us in on every 
 side is merely an inference from the fact of con- 
 sciousness — a fact of which matter can give no 
 rational account. It is matter that is the illusion 
 therefore and spirit that is the reality. The 
 universe is spiritual. Absolute Being is God, 
 the One and Eternal. Of this Absolute Being, 
 however, we can predicate nothing that is 
 strictly intelligible to our finite faculties. Per- 
 sonality is too low a category for this sum-total 
 of existence, and personality, as a permanent 
 fact, is too large an ideal for that infinitesimal 
 portion of infinite being which is included in a 
 human individuality. This seems to be the 
 pantheistic attitude which has such a hold on 
 so many genuinely spiritual natures. It has 
 something sublime and attractive in it, but also 
 something so illusive and intangible that it is 
 difficult to grasp it as a definite Creed. It 
 ^'' " The Sea-wolf," by Jack London. 
 
190 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 shrinks from making affirmations about the 
 Absolute which appeal to us as distinctly per- 
 sonal beings to whom the not-ourselves can only- 
 he intelligible when strained through our per- 
 sonality. It dissolves the individual, swallowing 
 up his personality in one vast spiritual sub- 
 stance. This spiritual substance is, indeed, vital, 
 manifesting itself continually in finite forms, 
 pouring out the richness of its essential nature 
 not only in the beauty of organic structures, 
 but in the highest products of the human mind. 
 It is working to some great ideal. The tenden- 
 cies that point out the direction in which it is 
 moving are clear and distinct. But it works out 
 the inner purpose of its being through all those 
 discords and jarring dissonances which consti- 
 tute the pain and sorrow and sin of humanity. 
 And yet these are parts of itself, necessary 
 movements in the divine life, for God is all, 
 and there is nothing in the universe that is 
 unrelated to the Absolute Being. 
 
 Now what shall we say of the influence on 
 ethics of such a theory as this ? To what ethos 
 does it logically lead ? It has undoubtedly this 
 merit, that it affords a logical basis for all those 
 qualities of human nature which we are con- 
 strained by an inner necessity to believe are of 
 the higher and nobler order. Spirit is real, and 
 
CHEISTIAN DOCTRINE 191 
 
 the attributes of spirit are no mere illusions. 
 We can be certain that we are only living out 
 our lives when we are giving scope to those 
 disinterested emotions which excite the admira- 
 tion and prompt the emulation of humankind. 
 Pantheism finds room for, and supplies a vindi- 
 cation of, all the great heroisms of life, the duty 
 nobly done, the evil stoutly resisted, the burden 
 patiently borne, the love that is stronger than 
 death. All are but manifestations of that one 
 substance which is God, whose essential nature 
 is ineffable and subject to no finite affirmations, 
 but of which the thoughts and actions of men 
 are the phenomenal sparkle and froth that 
 bubble up from inmost depths to the surface. 
 
 But if this can be said of those manifestations 
 of the divine life in humanity which we in- 
 stinctively praise and regard as good, must not 
 the same be affirmed of those we blame and 
 stigmatise as evil? What are we, mere transient 
 bubbles welling up from the unfathomable abyss 
 of Being, that we should criticise any of the 
 methods by which Being issues into the realm 
 of the phenomenal ? God is all. The seen and 
 temporal is but the outer garb with which He 
 or It clothes HimseK or Itself. Nature is but 
 the fringe of His raiment. Humanity is of the 
 texture of the stuff. It is not for us to quarrel 
 
192 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 with the pattern, but rather to take it with aU 
 its manifold hues in its picturesque beauty. The 
 sweet sylvan scene, the broad river flowing 
 through the rich champaign in silent majesty, 
 the fertile fields yellow with their luxuriant 
 harvest, the stately trees whose foliage droops 
 to the earth in graceful curves — this is God 
 manifest to the seeing eye and understanding 
 soul, God providing for the needs of His 
 children, filling their hearts with food and 
 gladness. But the wild tempestuous sea on 
 the dangerous reef, the storm-wind shattering 
 the vessel, freighted with precious human lives, 
 against the breakers, the life-boat manned by 
 heroic devotion speeding to their rescue and 
 tip-tilted by the mere fluff of the spray of a 
 mighty billow, the broken hearts of toiling 
 women, the despair of starving children — this 
 also is God, making the winds His chariots 
 and the flaming flre His messengers. The 
 saint, pure of soul, his heart one passion of 
 love for sinning, sorrowing humanity, toiling 
 day after day amid sorrow, disease, and fllth, if 
 only he might bring one ray of the heavenly 
 light into the dark abyss of human degradation, 
 and dying at his post with the ecstasy of the 
 beatific vision illumining his eyes — this is God, 
 bursting into phenomenal life from the inner 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 193 
 
 recesses of His being. But the sinner, corrupt 
 of heart, brutal in his crude self-seeking, haunt- 
 ing, through an unholy love of them, the dens 
 of infamy and vice — this also is God, for God is 
 All and the universe is one, and the manifold of 
 the phenomenal is embraced in the one Absolute 
 Existence. In short, Jesus of Nazareth, dying 
 on the cross a death of lingering agony in 
 expiation of the sins of humanity, and thus 
 revealing the infinite possibilities of a limitless 
 love, is truly God. The whole fulness of the 
 Godhead pours through this manifestation of 
 the divine essence.* But Nero, on the throne of 
 the Caesars, an Incarnation of the Spirit of Evil, 
 devoting the whole force of his vitality to 
 fathom the unfathomable possibilities of cruelty 
 and vice — he also is God, for he is quite as real 
 and even typical a manifestation of the manifold 
 fact of the universe. 
 
 Now it must be apparent that such a theory 
 of life cannot fail to blur the outlines of moral 
 distinctions. It leaves no room for personality, 
 a personal will, the sense of responsibility, the 
 conviction of sin. It undoubtedly tends to 
 create a wide and general sympathy alike with 
 
 * " The whole fulness of the Godhead." We must always 
 beware of orthodox phrases when they are merely meant to 
 cover a pantheistic philosophy. 
 
 Problem of Theology 14 
 
194 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 nature and human life, and this is an element of 
 good that is in it, because any theory that is sound 
 must bring the isolated individual into oneness 
 with universal being. It is this sympathetic 
 insight into the facts of existence that com- 
 mends the pantheistic attitude to the literary 
 artist. As a sentiment rather than a reasoned- 
 out theory it forms the background of much of 
 the imaginative literature of the day. And this 
 is just one of the reasons why our current 
 literature never rises into greatness. The truly 
 great artists have always been men who have 
 so interpreted human nature as to show us 
 man, by the force of his inherent personality, 
 rebelling against and breaking through the 
 meshes of heredity and environment that would 
 swallow him up, and asserting himself as an 
 initial force in the universe. But the literature 
 of to-day is struck in a minor key because it is 
 entangled in the fatalism of materialistic or 
 pantheistic theories. For if materialism has no 
 real uplifting power, pantheism has very little. 
 It justifies the saint indeed, but it leaves him 
 severely alone. If the eternal Substance chooses 
 to manifest itself in deeds of heroism and devo- 
 tion, in a pure literature and a noble art, we 
 can look on and admire. There is in such mani- 
 festations a picturesque beauty that appeals to 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 195 
 
 the soul. But if it manifests itself in deeds of 
 infamy and horrid cruelty, we can still look on 
 and shudder. There is a certain fascination in 
 the horrible to which our instincts respond. 
 And this large tolerance of all forms of vital 
 manifestation dulls the edge of conscience. 
 After all, if we have not a clear-cut conception 
 of the persistence of personality, the aesthetic 
 interest of life must dominate the moral. If 
 God be not a definite Personality our oneness 
 with the universe can never be a strong 
 emotion. It must be at best what Spinoza 
 calls " an intellectual love," which is a very 
 platonic affection indeed. And if man's per- 
 sonality be a mere illusion having in it no 
 element of permanence or initiative, how is it 
 possible to work up any enthusiasm for great 
 causes or any passionate love for one's fellow- 
 creatures ? How am I, in a mere transient and 
 phenomenal world, to discriminate between 
 great and small causes, and why should I do 
 anything to promote either the one or the 
 other? Let the God who is All, the cause of 
 Himself as of all else, look after His own 
 causes. Why should I make myself unhappy 
 over the woes of others ? What are blighted 
 lives, broken hearts, mortal agonies to me? I 
 surely cannot be expected to sentimentalise 
 
196 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 very much over them, when I know that a 
 small dose of laudanum would heal them all — 
 heal them much more effectually than any 
 self-devotion of mine could do, by bursting 
 the phenomenal bubble and sending back its 
 elements to the abyss of Being, If the essential 
 Substance, in the mystery of its working, has 
 cleared my eyes from the mists of passion and 
 superstition, initiated me into its inner secrets, 
 and made me a conscious spectator of the thrill- 
 ing but illusive drama of life, let me lean back 
 upon my fauteuil, adjust my opera-glasses, and 
 take an aesthetic delight in the complicated 
 mechanism of the play. Ah ! the curtain falls. 
 I step out into the vast beyond. Once more I 
 am in the abyss of Being. I cease to be a 
 person, and what matters anything to me? 
 
 But, again, we may have a deistical outlook 
 upon the universe. There is a God — a Personal 
 Being — who acts, thinks, and loves. There are 
 immaterial souls, and there is a material or- 
 ganic system of things which He has created. 
 God has existed from all eternity. Creation 
 has come into being in time. God rules the 
 material order by fixed laws which He has 
 imposed upon creation as an inventor regu- 
 lates the machine he has constructed. God 
 governs the realm of angels and of men by 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 197 
 
 precepts and ordinances which they must obey 
 at their peril. God and His material creation 
 are not one thing, but two. God transcends 
 His creation, and communicates with it by 
 means of messengers whom He sends to make 
 known His will. These messengers may be 
 either the select souls of the race to whom 
 has been given the faculty of reading God's 
 will in His works, or they may be men to 
 whom He has made a special revelation, which 
 has been authenticated by signs and miracles. 
 
 The deistic attitude towards the problem of 
 the universe, as a reasoned-out and quasi- 
 philosophical system, is practically a thing of 
 the past. The Unitarian of to-day dwells more 
 upon the immanence than the transcendence 
 of God, and is inclined to pantheism rather 
 than deism. But the deistic attitude still 
 dominates much of our orthodox belief. To 
 the man in the strept — that powerful individual 
 who has emerged in our day from an unmerited 
 obscurity — God is still the " big non-natural 
 man in the next street," who lives, in lonely 
 majesty, apart from His own creation. It is 
 this God Who is the object of the attack of 
 popular infidelity. The anti-Christian contro- 
 versialist, when he has disposed of Him to 
 his own satisfaction, finds it difficult to under- 
 
198 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 stand why Christians should still hold by their 
 Creed, except through sheer stupid perversity. 
 And it is just this difference of standpoint 
 that makes it so difficult to-day for the cul- 
 tured preacher to make a clear appeal to 
 many of those whom he is addressing. He 
 has been educated to conceive God and to 
 interpret the Christian Creed in terms of a 
 spiritualistic philosophy, while his hearers are 
 still under the dominion of a deistic theology 
 which isolates God from the human soul and 
 apprehends the leading ideas of Christian 
 doctrine as an opus operatum instead of an 
 opus operantem, God stands apart from the 
 human soul. The Trinity is a curious arith- 
 metic puzzle located somewhere far away in 
 the abyss of space. The Atonement was a 
 deed done once for all, the handing over to a 
 scrupulous Master the mathematically exact 
 equivalent for the ransom of human souls. 
 Christian doctrine, in short, consists of a few 
 irrational propositions which are to be appre- 
 hended by simple faith if they are apprehended 
 at all. 
 
 Now, the essence of this whole attitude to 
 the universe lies in its outwardness. Life is 
 a period of probation, and human beings, in 
 their passage from the cradle to the grave, 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 199 
 
 are under the guidance of a probation officer. 
 Rewards and punishments will be meted out 
 to every soul of man when the judgment day- 
 arrives, in the same arbitrary method as they 
 are by human judges on earth. It matters 
 not whether those who adopt this outlook 
 upon life are heterodox or orthodox, whether 
 they are Unitarian or Trinitarian, their 
 essential Creed is practically the same, and 
 the ethos that springs from it is identical. It 
 is an ethos inspired by hope of reward and 
 fear of punishment. The reward of the good 
 life, the punishment of the evil life, both lie 
 in the far future. The Atonement, when it 
 does come as a modifying influence upon con 
 duct, remains a mere episode. It is a mechanical 
 contrivance for lifting from the soul of man 
 a grievous and intolerable burden which pre- 
 vented him entering the lists with any hope 
 of success. It gives him a new start and 
 makes it possible for him, under better guid- 
 ance, to achieve the reward of victory. 
 
 But it is evident that such an ethos as this 
 can never raise men to the higher levels of 
 life. It has this merit, that it keeps moral 
 distinctions clear. It has a definite code of 
 acts that are right and acts that are wrong, 
 and it begets and incvdcates in the soul a 
 
200 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 lively sense of their wise and foolish nature 
 inasmuch as they lead respectively to joyful 
 or painful experiences. As a method of moral 
 education it has sometimes its uses, but it 
 affords no rational basis for ethical living. 
 Morality must always remain an arbitrary 
 thing, not a natural outgrowth of the essential 
 being of man. Good and evil are qualities 
 imposed on actions by the fiat of Omnipotence, 
 not qualities inherent in their nature. The 
 moral code becomes a legal code, and we learn 
 goodness by a careful study of the documents, 
 and the measure of our merit is the closeness 
 of our approximation to an outward standard. 
 But such a conception of ethics as this can 
 give us nothing but a hard, dry, and Pharisaic 
 life. It can take no account of those inner 
 springs of motive that constitute the psychical 
 man. It judges the act, not the source of the 
 act. It tends to ignore alike that curious 
 complexity of inward impulses and variety of 
 outward environments that impinge upon the 
 will. It leaves no room for those finer shades 
 of sympathy and emotion that characterise 
 the same act, diminishing or enhancing its 
 ethical significance. At best it can only culti- 
 vate the sterner virtues of life, those that are 
 most patent and obvious. It is fatal to the 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 201 
 
 delicate tints of that rich bloom into which 
 the ethical life is meant to blossom, for it has 
 always the hard lines and crude colouring of 
 an artificial product, and never the elastic 
 strength and soft loveliness of a full-throbbing 
 hfe. 
 
 But now what of the Christian ethos? As 
 a matter of historical fact few to-day would 
 venture to deny its peerless supremacy. We 
 find it in the Gospels, not only enshrined in 
 precepts that are perfect gems of limpid 
 thought and expression, but actually lived out 
 in the wonderful life of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 There are few who would arraign the beauty of 
 the Sermon on the Mount or deny that a life 
 lived on the spiritual plane from whence it 
 proceeds would be the life of a perfect human 
 being. We are content to have it held up as 
 the standard of ethical living. It is the ideal 
 towards which men and women ought to be 
 ever approaching. It lays down the principles 
 that must underHe all ethical teaching. 
 
 This is almost * universally admitted. But it 
 is frequently said, " The Gospel is ethical, not 
 metaphysical. The Sermon on the Mount is a 
 beautiful code of morals, not a theory of the 
 universe. And the Church has chosen to lose 
 
 * We cannot quite overlook Nietzsche and his Superman, 
 
202 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 herself in the mist of metaphysics instead of 
 cleaving to the pure morality of Jesus of 
 Nazareth. She has constructed an elaborate 
 theology full of confusing and conflicting 
 statements, which has served no other pur- 
 pose than that of hardening men's hearts and 
 blinding their vision to the simple loveliness 
 of the ethic of Jesus, to which the soul of man 
 instinctively responds. We are too heavily 
 freighted with the lumber of obsolete meta- 
 physical systems. They are obscuring the 
 beatific vision. Let us throw them overboard 
 and unite simply on the ethical basis of the 
 Sermon on the Mount." 
 
 Is this a just criticism? Have we here an 
 ethos that has no metaphysical basis, no 
 rationale, no root in a distinct conception of 
 the universe? If this be so, then I say em- 
 phatically, however beautiful it may be, it is 
 but "the baseless fabric of a vision," a dream 
 of the night which must fade away the 
 moment we awaken to the stern reality of 
 life. It may do well enough for you as an 
 individual if you choose to live in the land of 
 visions, but you have no moral right what- 
 ever to impose it upon me, who would live 
 in the realm of reality. But it is not so. 
 
 The metaphysical implications of Gospel ethics 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 203 
 
 are not difficult to discern, and, as a matter of 
 fact, they began to be evolved so soon as the 
 Church found it necessary to give an intellectual 
 statement of its position. The central feature 
 of the teaching of Jesus is that it admits of no 
 compromise. It is an absolute morality. Its 
 very essence is stated in the words " Be ye there- 
 fore perfect, even as your Father in heaven 
 is perfect." Is this ethics or metaphysics? It 
 is both, and both are so closely intertwined as 
 to be inseparable. Why should we hold this 
 ideal of perfection before ourselves? After all, 
 is there not a sense in which it can be said that 
 we are already perfect and there is therefore 
 no use for further striving? We are a part 
 of God's universe, carrying out God's perfect 
 will by an inherent necessity of our nature. 
 Whatever is, is right. It is just in that place 
 where it needs to be if there is any harmony 
 or purpose in the universe at all. Why should 
 we try to be other than we are ? Why should 
 we aim at what Jesus means by perfection ? 
 Because, Jesus says, your Father in heaven is 
 perfect. But here is a profoundly metaphysical 
 statement and also a most satisfactory reason for 
 our striving after perfection. It is a personal 
 perfection we are actively to work for, not 
 merely the unconscious perfection of a part in 
 
204 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 a symmetrical whole in which we must acquiesce. 
 God is a Person — the Father in heaven — and our 
 perfection is to be like His, the perfection of 
 a self-conscious, reasoning, emotional, willing 
 being. We must therefore, if we are to accept 
 the ethic of Jesus, discard all materialistic and 
 pantheistic theories. These can give us no 
 reason for striving after perfection. These 
 logically involve us in a will-less fatalism. But 
 the theory of Jesus can. God is a perfect 
 Being — perfect as we conceive perfection — and 
 our perfection is to be similar to the perfection 
 of God. Nay, further, the relation of God to 
 us is not the relation of a Sovereign Lawgiver 
 to His subjects. And this strikes at the root 
 of the deistic position. It is that of a Father 
 to His children. It is, therefore, quite true, 
 as the pantheist says, that we are part of God. 
 We inherit His nature. We are of the sub- 
 stance of the Eternal Spirit. But our per- 
 sonality is never merged in the universal being. 
 It remains clear and distinct. The perfection 
 after which we are to strive is an attribute 
 of our personality, just as the perfection of God 
 is an attribute of His Personality. The category 
 of Personality is higher than the attribute of 
 perfection. Our perfection does not make us 
 God, does not make us lose our individual being 
 
CHEISTIAN DOCTRINE 205 
 
 in the being of God. Indeed, the more perfect 
 we become, the more intense grows our per- 
 sonality. For we grow liker God in all the 
 characteristics of spiritual being. 
 
 So, then, taking only one precept from the 
 Sermon on the Mount, we find that so far 
 from being simply ethical it is intensely meta- 
 physical, and that apart fronx metaphysics it 
 has absolutely no meaning. Were we to take 
 the beatitudes in detail, we should find in them 
 the whole of mystical theology. 
 
 The striking feature of Christian morality, 
 I repeat, is its absoluteness. It admits of no 
 compromise. Every spiritual being ought to 
 strive after perfection. But " perfection " is 
 an empty word till we give it ethical content. 
 What, then, is the ethical perfection after which 
 we, as spiritual beings, should strive ? That 
 must be determined by our essential nature. 
 What is the nature of spirit, human or divine, 
 as a vital force? In the ethic of the Gospel 
 we are taught that spirit ought to be con- 
 tinually going out of itself, losing itself, in 
 order to enrich itself. The totality of spiritual 
 Being is not an impersonal, unconscious sub- 
 stance which bursts forth into diseased per- 
 sonal units of consciousness like the pustules 
 on a small-pox patient, disappearing with re- 
 
206 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 turning health. The totality of Being is con- 
 tained in the consciousness of a Personal God, 
 the All-embracing, the All-sustaining. Nothing 
 exists of which there is no consciousness, for 
 God is conscious of Himself. Each finite per- 
 sonality derives its existence from God and 
 has in God a vital connection with every other. 
 Its life consists in enlarging the boundaries of 
 its personality so as to embrace the widest 
 range of life-giving experience. Hence its ethos 
 lies in a universal sympathy, in a love for all 
 life, in a willingness to range through the whole 
 realm of individual experiences that it may 
 return to itself enriched with the spoils of its 
 ventures. The life of narrow self-isolation is 
 the death of the spiritual life. The life of 
 self-abnegation for the sake of others results 
 in a fulness of experience and an enrichment 
 of faculty which is an ample reward for the 
 immediate sacrifice. Hence the ethical precepts 
 of the Gospel logically follow. We are to do 
 to others as we would have others do to us, 
 for only thus will their hearts open to us and 
 admit us to the inner sanctuary of their 
 experience. "Whosoever will be great among 
 you, let him be your servant."* So Jesus says, 
 because the largest service rendered to our 
 * St. Matt. XX. 27. 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 207 
 
 fellow-creatures brings them into the closest 
 sympathetic union with ourselves. The only- 
 joy for a human being is the joy of fellowship, 
 and the wider the fellowship the more intense 
 is the resultant blessedness. There is no such 
 thing as an individual joy, an unshared joy. 
 The joy emerges with spiritual contact. Hence 
 the virtues of the Christian life are all social 
 virtues. Not one of them is conceivable for 
 a self-centred individuality. Virtue consists in 
 losing oneself in the life of others, blessedness 
 in sharing the life of God, which is the spiri- 
 tual substratum of each individual existence. 
 "Blessed is he who loveth Thee, O Lord, and 
 his friend in Thee and his enemy for Thee. 
 For he alone loses none dear to him, to whom 
 all are dear in Him who cannot be lost." * 
 
 And this going forth from itself which is the 
 life of the finite spirit, and in which it finds 
 its true ethos, is a characteristic of spirit per 
 se. It is a characteristic of the Infinite Spirit 
 as well as the finite, of God as well as of man. 
 The crux of all theistic systems has invariably 
 lain in the difficulty of passing from the Infinite 
 to the finite, from the One to the many. The 
 Absolute must dwell in unconscious majesty 
 so long as nothing exists but itself, for self- 
 * St. Augustine, " Confessions," bk. iv. par. 9. 
 
208 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 consciousness only arises when the Other comes 
 into being. But in the Christian theology God 
 is not a simple but a complex Being, and that 
 complexity has marked His inner essence from 
 all eternity. God did not begin to be a Father 
 when finite human beings first emerged upon 
 the field of time. Fatherhood is of the essence 
 of His nature, and so also, therefore, is Sonship. 
 The Eternal Father has as its implication the 
 Eternal Son. And that going forth from itself 
 which is the very life of spirit and in which 
 spirit finds its blessedness must also be an 
 eternal process. But it is more than a process. 
 Spirit not only goes forth, but remains. It is 
 not lost or merged in other existences. It loses 
 itself to find itself. God, therefore, can only 
 realise Himself in a threefold manifestation. 
 But these three manifestations, while being 
 Himself, must in a certain sense be other than 
 Himself. They must have a separate per- 
 sonality: otherwise God's self-consciousness can 
 only be an uneasy dream. The doctrine of the 
 Trinity is a metaphysical conception, but it is 
 a metaphysic that is essentially ethical. It is 
 a metaphysic that is necessary to account for 
 the ethical process, to give absoluteness to the 
 ethics of the Gospel. If right, truth, harmony, 
 love, sympathy be eternal realities inwoven 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 209 
 
 with the very nature of existence, then they 
 must be in God just what they are in man, 
 and God from all eternity must have had scope 
 for exercising them. God must have loved the 
 Son from eternity with a limitless love, and 
 the Holy Spirit must have proceeded from the 
 Father and the Son to enfold the Blessed Three 
 in the highest and most perfect union. This 
 is the solution offered by the Church of the 
 central problem of metaphysics. It is essen- 
 tially an ethical solution, and moreover it has 
 never been offered as a final and exhaustive 
 explanation of the riddle of the universe, but 
 simply as an adumbration of the metaphysical 
 basis which alone will give sanction to the 
 Gospel ethic. It remains the Mystery of the 
 Holy Trinity. 
 
 But the fact of the Trinity must embrace all 
 spiritual being. The essence of spirit is that 
 while it retains its individual personality it goes 
 forth on a mission of limitless love to enrich 
 itself with the experiences of all spiritual 
 existences. The eternal love must be mani- 
 fested in space and time that it may embrace 
 those whose self-consciousness realises itself 
 under material conditions. Hence the story of 
 Calvary. " God so loved the world, that He 
 gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever 
 
 Froblem of Theology 15 
 
210 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 believeth on Him should not perish, but have 
 everlasting life." * It is self-abnegation carried 
 to its utmost conceivable limit in order to obtain 
 the fullest spiritual enrichment. The central 
 fact of the Gospel loses its entire interest and 
 meaning for religion if Jesus be not " He in 
 whom the whole fulness of the Godhead 
 dwells." t The Cross is the ethical Absolute con- 
 strued in temporal and spatial terms. It is 
 the meaning of the Trinity translated to suit 
 the conditions of finite spiritual beings strug- 
 gling in a world oppressed with the mystery 
 of evil. The evil is self, the good is selflessness. 
 The loss is the indulgence of carnal appetite, 
 the gain is the outflowing of the spirit into 
 spirits of similar texture, the sorrow is the 
 desolation of a spirit that has no helper, the 
 joy is the fuller life that comes from an all- 
 embracing sympathy. 
 
 Thus, then, the Christian theory of the 
 universe has its own distinctive ethos. Meta- 
 physic and ethic are interwoven into one 
 symmetrical whole. The ethic is the implicit 
 metaphysic. The metaphysic is the explicit 
 ethic. It is a well-recognised fact that Christi- 
 anity discovered the individual, but it is scarcely 
 sufficiently realised how very profound is this 
 * St. John iii. 16. t Col. ii. 9. 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 211 
 
 truth. Insistence upon personality is the key- 
 note of the Christian system. Personality is 
 the fundamental basis of life. All true living 
 results from the contact of personalities. Even 
 in the economy of the Godhead, God only 
 realises Himself through His threefold Person- 
 ality. But personality is not isolation. Self- 
 abnegation is not the abandonment of self but 
 its enrichment. The wider the range of personal 
 experience the individual can incorporate with 
 his own, the fuller and the more intense does 
 his personality become. There is not one single 
 precept of Christian ethics that does not result 
 from its central principle and does not find its 
 only sanction in its metaphysical basis. 
 
 In face, then, of my main contention in this 
 lecture, what are we to say of the persistent 
 attempt that is being made nowadays to 
 divorce ethics from metaphysics, ^.e., to divorce 
 morality from all positive religion whatever? 
 Surely it is the most extraordinary dream that 
 ever entered the mind of thinking man. Surely 
 it must be evident that a man's manner of 
 living must depend upon his theory of life, and 
 his theory of life is his theology. It is no more 
 possible to teach ethics without religion than 
 to teach practical engineering without impart- 
 ing a thorough grounding in statics and 
 
212 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 dynamics. But, it is said, the rules of ethical 
 living are acquired empirically. They have 
 been beaten out by the hard and bitter 
 experience of untold centuries of human ex- 
 perience. There are certain great principles 
 on which all serious-minded men are agreed 
 as being good for the happiness of the individual 
 and for the welfare of the community. Let us 
 be careful to teach these to our children at an 
 impressible period of their life. Let us be care- 
 ful in our dealings with our fellow-men to 
 practise them ourselves. I have already said 
 that ethical rules are first acquired empirically. 
 All practice is an art before it rises to the 
 dignity of a science. But the scientific principles 
 are there from the very first, and even at an 
 early stage some glimpse of them is perceived. 
 Ethical rules throughout the whole process of 
 their evolution are not acquired empirically. 
 They are acquired by the action and reaction 
 of theory and practice. Sometimes practice out- 
 runs theory and sometimes theory is a long way 
 ahead of practice. Different theories produce 
 different types of practice, and practice that is 
 found agreeable frequently influences the theory 
 that is adduced to support it. A confusion of 
 theories produces a confusion of practice and 
 leads to the frequent spectacle of some of the 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 213 
 
 noblest virtues existing side by side witb debas- 
 ing vices. And further, it is true that high- 
 souled men and women, who are the product 
 of generations of sublime theorists and beauti- 
 ful lives, wearied with theological speculations 
 they have never taken the trouble to under- 
 stand, throw the metaphysical problem 
 altogether overboard and continue to live on 
 the accumulated spiritual capital of their 
 ancestors. 
 
 But things have a way of straightening them- 
 selves out. Theory and practice are ever striv- 
 ing, by an inner compulsion, to an indissoluble 
 union. Each theory of life tends, in the logical 
 process of events, to produce its own peculiar 
 ethos. Thought is free, and a man may, in the 
 region of speculation, work out his system into 
 what seems to him a perfect and complete 
 whole. But action is not free. It is circum- 
 scribed by environment. It is continually 
 modified by the action and influence of others. 
 Degrading theories of life tend to produce 
 degraded lives, but they do not always produce 
 their full effect because of the restraining 
 influences both from without and within that 
 regulate conduct. And very noble theories of 
 life fail to secure their natural high standard 
 of living for a similar reason. Nay, further, the 
 
214 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 moral instinct that is inwrought with the very- 
 constitution of human nature often rises in 
 rebellion against inadequate theories that would 
 seek to trammel it. Still the tendency is always 
 there, and, given time, it will inevitably bear 
 down all opposition and insist upon the unity 
 of thought and action. The whole course of 
 history proves that this is so. The decay or 
 dissolution of the religious sanction of morals 
 on a large scale has always resulted in a moral 
 cataclysm. When no valid reason has been 
 given for the assertion of the spiritual nature 
 of man, his lawless passions have raged un- 
 checked and no purely ethical appeal has availed 
 to control them. And again, when there has 
 been a great outburst of ethical activity, it has 
 inevitably followed a great religious awakening. 
 This was so with all the historic empires and 
 kingdoms of antiquity. They emerge into 
 history with the advent of epoch-making 
 religious thinkers. They sink back into oblivion 
 when the force of such heroic souls is spent. 
 And the process of Christian development gives 
 further striking evidence of this universal 
 principle. What did Stoicism — which is mainly 
 a system of pure ethics — do for the purification 
 of the Boman Empire? Very little. Its practical 
 influence among the people is hard to trace. 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 215 
 
 But Jesus Christ came, and He implanted in 
 the hearts of His followers what were really 
 metaphysical convictions about God and Himself 
 and the Holy Spirit and the destiny of man. 
 And then was seen the difference between a 
 vital force rooted in the nature of the universe 
 and a mere superficial platitudinising that had 
 no root in reality. Run down the whole course 
 of Christian history and think of the names that 
 are associated with those leading epochs when 
 an influx of moral energy gave new hfe to a 
 materialised social organism. St. Boniface, 
 Hildebrand, St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. 
 Dominic, John Hus, John Wycliffe, Luther, 
 Knox, Calvin, Wesley — what was the lead- 
 ing motive of their lives ? Were these men 
 secretaries of ethical societies, who drew up in 
 their studies lists of unconnected duties to be 
 learned by rote by boys and girls on the school 
 benches? Nothing of the kind. They were 
 elemental forces, whose souls drew their 
 inspiration from the Great Reality, and who 
 knew that life had no value save in so far as 
 it was rooted in the God and Father of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ. I confess that there is 
 nothing more curious to me in much of our 
 modern literature than the homage that is paid 
 to such great souls in the past by men who 
 
216 THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 recognise their ethical pre-eminence and the 
 magnificence of their idealism, but who dismiss 
 the religious element in them, the vital pulse 
 of their whole being, as merely the superstition 
 of their age and of no significance for the philo- 
 sopher. Why, it is to misread the most patent 
 facts of history to fail to recognise that it is 
 a positive religion rooted in a metaphysical 
 ground that has been the parent of every 
 ethical movement that has achieved any great 
 measure of success. The pathetic failures of 
 history have bepn the men who, with a large- 
 hearted but weak-minded benevolence, have 
 thought to ethicise the community while 
 ignoring the one mighty lever that can alone 
 rouse into passionate enthusiasm the whole 
 spiritual nature of man. * 
 
 The lesson for to-day is obvious. The Church 
 is sometimes in danger, with the best intentions 
 in the world, of lowering its fiag. It is in danger, 
 in order to secure a reputation for tolerance and 
 broadmindedness, of treating its Creed as a mere 
 private possession, a kind of luxury to those who 
 believe it, as affording them a stimulus to action, 
 a comfort in trial, a stay in temptation, and a 
 great hope, that brightens the dark places of 
 this earthly life. It is in danger of admitting 
 * Is not Robert Owen a striking instance ? 
 
CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 217 
 
 that a man may be a high-souled altruist and yet 
 deliberately reject every article of the Christian 
 Creed, and that the pressing ethical problems of 
 the social organism can be solved apart from 
 religion. It is a fatal mistake. If the Christian 
 Creed be essentially a true theory of the uni- 
 verse, it must be the source of all life's noblest 
 manifestations, and there can be no such mani- 
 festations apart from it. Of course, we must 
 admit the very palpable fact that there are 
 many men who are not Christian who are faith- 
 ful to their moral duties and are doing excellent 
 work for humanity. We can only account for 
 their illogical lives on the ground that, in the 
 excursions and alarms of this confused and per- 
 plexing world, it is sometimes difficult just to 
 see the flag under which we are fighting, and 
 that such men are under a temporary obscura- 
 tion of their intellectual vision. For we must 
 hold that they have only to straighten out their 
 lives and to trace their highest thoughts and 
 their noblest actions to their proper source in 
 order to find that they come from the inspira- 
 tion of the Triune God, whose limitless love 
 for humanity was manifested in the sacrifice of 
 the Eternal Son on the cross of Calvary. And, 
 further, we must also maintain that, pure as are 
 their motives and generous as are their actions, 
 
218 ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS 
 
 until they recognise their rightful Lord and 
 fight consciously under His banner, their service 
 is tainted with a fatal flaw that will ultimately 
 mar its efficiency. 
 
TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE TO THE CHUECH 
 
VI 
 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE TO THE CHUECH 
 
 WE come now to consider the result of the 
 previous reasoning upon the Church as 
 we know her to-day. It is a mere truism to 
 assert that the condition of the Christian 
 Church in all her branches is one of unrest 
 and confusion. Everywhere there are signs of 
 dubiety and perplexity. Not only is this so 
 in our Protestant Churches, where we are 
 accustomed to a freedom that restrains the 
 province of authority within tolerably narrow 
 limits, but the Modernist movement in the 
 Church of Rome shows that even there symp- 
 toms of the general disquietude cannot be 
 suppressed. It is not that men have lost 
 interest in the Christian Church or ceased to 
 regard her as a powerful religious and social 
 force. But the conviction is growing in in- 
 tensity that the Church is not now giving 
 
 221 
 
222 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 expression to the most deeply cherished con- 
 victions of the strongest thinkers of the time 
 and is not truly interpreting the spiritual ex- 
 periences of the most devout souls. Neither is 
 she, in the exercise of her function, tackling 
 effectively those social sores which spring from 
 the selfishness of human nature, or imposing 
 her ethical standards upon the souls of men 
 with that supernatural authority which enforces 
 obedience. In short, what is demanded from 
 the Church to-day by the spiritual consciousness 
 of humanity is a clear and definite Creed that 
 will fulfil the purpose of a Creed and an accu- 
 rate statement of function that will enable the 
 Church to settle to her God-appointed task with 
 resolute decision. 
 
 But how are we to reach such a Creed? 
 Creeds are not made any more than national 
 constitutions. They grow. They are the ex- 
 pression of an organic developing life. In the 
 great Creed-making ages the Church was in- 
 tensely alive, and the passion for Creeds was 
 the result of a passion for life. The life of the 
 Church during the Conciliar period was lived 
 among the masses of the people, where devoted 
 men and women were endeavouring to bring 
 the light of heaven into the souls of the poor, 
 the enslaved, the oppressed, and where only 
 
TO THE CHURCH 223 
 
 that definition of the Person of Christ found 
 favour which served to explain the super- 
 natural ecstasy that maintained their souls. 
 And it is by no means a mere coincidence that 
 only those definitions which were the expres- 
 sion of the life of the Church so long as she 
 remained Catholic still retain the note of 
 Catholicity. The Christian Creed must be the 
 subliraated essence of the spiritual experience 
 of Christendom. It must be a formula large 
 enough to embrace every genuine emotion of 
 the human soul under the influence of the 
 Eternal Spirit of God. And so it is we find 
 that the Catholic Creed which lies at the basis 
 of the Christian life was wrought into definite 
 form when the Church, still retaining her unity 
 amid the incessant clash of strong divergent 
 personalities, was throbbing with a vigorous 
 and even passionate life which absorbed all 
 their spiritual faculties. 
 
 There have been other Creed-making ages, 
 notably the period of the Reformation. The 
 sixteenth century again found men forced by 
 an inner compulsion to give definite expression 
 to their spiritual emotions. And again the 
 impulse came from the necessities of practical 
 life. Men by whom life was accepted as a 
 terrible responsibility stood face to face with 
 
224 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 tremendous moral evils, with religious formulae 
 from which the vitality had departed, with an 
 overwhelming weight of alien despotism that 
 threatened to deprive the soul of its natural 
 freedom of development. It was not enough 
 for them to oppose the evils of their time by 
 a mere negative — to assert that they could not 
 believe what for them had no meaning, that 
 they could not acquiesce in a tyranny which 
 bound humanity, body and soul, in a degrading 
 thraldom. They demanded freedom to work 
 out their destiny, but they were forced to 
 assert in the clearest terms what they con- 
 ceived their destiny to be, and along what 
 lines their freedom was to be exercised. And, 
 again, we find one dominant note running 
 through their Creeds, forced on them by the 
 actualities of their situation. It is the Sove- 
 reignty of Grod. The forces of the world ranged 
 against them loomed so large in their eyes, and 
 they were individually so weak and helpless, 
 that they were nerved to the contest only by 
 the burning conviction that God's sovereign 
 power was irresistible and that they were 
 simply the instruments of Omnipotence in 
 carrying out His eternal decrees. 
 
 But the Reformation Creeds were sectional. 
 They were true in so far as they represented 
 
TO THE CHURCH 225 
 
 genuine spiritual emotions and convictions. 
 All Creeds that liave been beaten out of the 
 hearts of men asserting their God-given rights 
 as against the tyranny of an alien environ- 
 ment are in their essence true. But the only 
 doctrines that can be incorporated in a Catholic 
 Creed of Christendom must have passed through 
 the alembic of the universal Christian conscious- 
 ness and have touched the spiritual life of man 
 at every point. It is really their one-sidedness, 
 their lack of universality, that is the root of 
 the objection to the Reformation Creeds. They 
 were the outcome of a protest, and a protest can 
 never be a religion. Their tenets are no doubt 
 positive enough, but their tenets are stated as 
 against other forms of belief which are not 
 altogether dissimilar, instead of being stated 
 in such a way as to include the genuinely 
 religious element contained in all forms of 
 religious belief. 
 
 But if dissatisfaction with the Creed of the 
 Church is a characteristic of the age, there 
 is as great dubiety and searching of heart 
 as to her function. The Church is the home 
 of the spirit. The Church exists to satisfy 
 the spiritual instincts and to direct the spiri- 
 tual energies of men. Her function, stated in 
 the most general terms, is the salvation of 
 
 Problem of Theology 16 
 
226 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 souls. But what does that involve? We 
 have no experience of souls except as they 
 act through mortal bodies, and soul and body 
 are so inter-related, and maintain themselves 
 in being by such a close process of inter- 
 action, that it is difficult to see how one can 
 work on souls with any advantage and yet 
 pay no heed to the bodies in which they 
 are incarnated. To say that the Church exists 
 merely for the salvation of souls, in the 
 popular sense of the phrase, is a statement 
 that does not carry us very far, and is one 
 with which large sections of the Church are 
 becoming growingly dissatisfied. 
 
 Surely, here again history must come to 
 our help. How did the Church interpret her 
 function when she first began to be? How 
 has the Church interpreted her function 
 throughout the Christian centuries ? There is 
 no doubt she has taken the largest possible 
 view of her sphere, that she has considered 
 everything that bears upon the welfare of 
 man as a rational being, with faculties to be 
 developed for an immortal life, as under her 
 controlling influence. Her struggle through- 
 out history, indeed, has been to assert herself 
 as the dominant factor in moulding the des- 
 tinies of humanity. The Church, in every age 
 
TO THE CHUECH 227 
 
 and in every country, when the pulse of a 
 genuine vitality has throbbed within her, 
 instinctively, even in her smallest branches, 
 has perilled her very life in the assertion 
 that she claimed supreme authority over the 
 whole man. It is only in quite recent years 
 that she has been partially driven to acquiesce 
 in a divided allegiance. 
 
 And the acquiescence has been the result 
 of a chain of causes that sprang from the 
 Church's defection from her own ideal. For 
 many centuries it can truly be said that the 
 Church, in spite of all defects and blemishes, 
 was yet the home of the spirit. The Church 
 was the centre of all the spiritual activities 
 of humanity. From the Church emerged the 
 rich variety of discipline that moulded the 
 modern civilised man, whose ideal is to be 
 versed in all learning, adorned with all the 
 gifts and graces of the Christian character. 
 The Church, in the Christian centuries, was 
 the source of philanthropy, art, music, litera- 
 ture, science, every branch of culture that 
 made for the orderly evolution of the whole 
 man. The Church assumed the charge of 
 fostering and developing the spiritual energies 
 of humanity by natural right, simply as part 
 of her inherent function. And so long as 
 
228 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 she wisely exercised her authority and gave 
 to the spirit of man free scope for its reason- 
 able exercise, her right remained unquestioned, 
 and the venerable Mother received from her 
 children the deference that was her due. 
 
 But, in the providence of God, the orderly 
 development of the Church's function was not 
 to be. The Church failed to realise her ideal 
 and to maintain that balance of all her 
 parts that constitutes the healthy organism. 
 She lost her moral purity, she blurred her 
 own ethical standards, she stiffened her 
 formulae till they no longer throbbed with 
 the spiritual life of her children. She used 
 her power tyrannically to repress the legiti- 
 mate aspirations of her thinkers. She became 
 to some of her noblest sons and daughters 
 no longer a venerable Mother, but a cruel 
 stepmother against whom they were forced 
 to rebel. The children stood over against 
 the parent, divided from one another and in 
 deadly antagonism to the Mother who bore 
 them. 
 
 And then gradually the Church of Christ 
 suffered in all her branches. One by one 
 her prerogatives were taken from her. Art 
 went its own way, throwing o£P its allegiance 
 to the Church, acknowledging only the laws 
 
TO THE OHUECH 229 
 
 of form and colour which regulate the special 
 medium of its expression. Literature took 
 an independent course, and was oftener 
 antagonistic than friendly to the Church, 
 Philosophy, despising the experience of the 
 past, sought to think out the universe afresh 
 for itself. Science, provoked by unwise interfer- 
 ence, assumed an aggressively hostile attitude to 
 all religion whatsoever. Bit by bit philan- 
 thropy was dissociated from the Church and 
 handed over to secular hands. Not without 
 a struggle, indeed, but still as surely, has the 
 discipline of the young been forced from her, 
 and she is being obliged more and more to 
 look on helplessly at an ideal of education 
 which is a mere imparting of information 
 instead of that all-round training of the 
 whole man as a citizen of the universe which 
 can only rest upon a theologico-ethical basis. 
 Her doctrines, emptied of their ethical con- 
 tent, have become mere metaphysical puzzles 
 or verbal contradictions, tacitly assumed or 
 openly asserted to be the crude guesses of 
 an ignorant and pre-scientific age. 
 
 Is not this the condition into which the 
 Christian Church has fallen to-day ? The 
 Church which moulded our modern civilisa- 
 tion has not only ceased to be the dominant 
 
230 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 force in the evolution of human society, but 
 even where her influence is recognised it is 
 scarcely thought desirable that she should be. 
 All those practical activities in which the 
 spirit of man finds expression, and articulates 
 itself in institutions, are largely outside and 
 independent of the Church, which has become 
 a mere voice, proclaiming even the funda- 
 mental verities with a somewhat wavering 
 and uncertain tone. The Church, as a matter 
 of fact, is simply tolerated even by many of 
 her own members, and is only tolerated when 
 she realises her own impotence and gives as 
 little trouble as possible. Is it any wonder 
 that in such a state she should be all at sea 
 both as to her creed and her function ? If, 
 as it has been my aim to show, function and 
 creed are causally inter-related, a Church 
 truncated of all the activities which naturally 
 developed from her pristine faith must have 
 some difficulty in understanding the meta- 
 physical root from which she sprang. A 
 .supernatural life demands a supernatural 
 creed, but where the life is slow, sleepy, 
 humdrum, and uneventful, the supernatural 
 creed fades away and becomes even impossible 
 of conception. When the Church is able once 
 more to give sight to the blind and hearing 
 
TO THE CHURCH 231 
 
 to the deaf, to raise the dead to life, to make 
 the wicked in high places tremble as at the 
 presence of the Lord, to preach with fervency 
 and power to the poor lost souls in the Hades 
 of slumdom what shall be really glad tidings 
 of great joy, and to clothe the earth with the 
 beauty of holiness, then the supernatural 
 Creed will come back again and men will 
 wonder they ever missed it. 
 
 And how is this to be done ? How is the 
 Church to rise to the height of her calling 
 and to assert herself as the power of God 
 unto salvation ? — the only power that can teach 
 men the art of living and rescue human 
 society from chaos and the abyss. Is this tre- 
 mendous task to be accomplished by a creed- 
 less Church — a Church which cannot find in 
 the accumulated spiritual experiences of the 
 past centuries one single definite conviction 
 that roots her activities in Reality ? Is it to 
 be done by a Church that has no clear 
 grasp of her function, but goes blundering on, 
 groping her way in the darkness, trying social 
 experiments that touch the outermost fringe 
 of our social evils, fearful even here lest she 
 pollute her spiritual garments by too gross 
 a contact with earth ? Is it to be done by 
 a Church torn with internecine feuds — a 
 
232 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 Church spKt into fragments, each separate 
 fragment capable of being roused into real 
 enthusiasm only when it is a question of 
 tearing out her sister's eyes or bespattering 
 her raiment with mud ? 
 
 Never. If the Church of Christ is really to 
 face the present situation, and to become the 
 predominant influence in moulding the future 
 course of human history, she must show her- 
 self capable of rising above all petty sectional 
 strife, and of viewing the forces at work in the 
 modern world with large, statesmanlike vision. 
 She must move with a definite aim, under a 
 banner with a clear device, presenting a united 
 front. 
 
 She must move with a definite aim. What 
 is the function the Church proposes to fulfil? 
 Let us start with the popular definition that 
 the Church exists to save souls. Only let us 
 take the phrase with its Gospel meaning. 
 " Whosoever will save his \pvxn shall lose it, 
 and whosoever will lose his ^pvxn for My 
 sake, shall save it." * To Jesus, then, to save 
 one's soul was to live one's life. There must 
 be no narrowing of the Gospel definition. The 
 Church of Jesus Christ exists to enable men 
 to live out their lives. Salvation is the right 
 * St. Matthew xvi 25. 
 
TO THE CHURCH 233 
 
 reaction of the human spirit with its divinely 
 gifted energies upon its material environments. 
 It is the absorption into and assimilation with 
 its life of all created elements in a divinely 
 ordered universe. It is, in short, the maxi- 
 mum of life-giving experience, the fulness of 
 life itself. Jesus came that men might have 
 life, and that they might have it more 
 abundantly. The function of the Church, 
 then, is to teach men the art of living, and 
 to supply them with those spiritual resources 
 which will enable their lives to develop to the full 
 height of their essential powers and capacities. 
 
 Under a banner with a clear device. The 
 Church's creed is the intellectual symbol of 
 the influence that is to beget and develop, in 
 the individual, this full human life. Her creed 
 embodies the stored wisdom of the past. It 
 is the quintessence of the spiritual experience 
 of millions of human souls who have attained 
 the higher levels of life and have blessed life 
 altogether. The truth that " God was in Christ 
 reconciling the world to Himself"* must be 
 blazoned on her banners so that every eye 
 may see it. " Ah ! surely," say some, "but shall 
 we not stop here ? • God truly was in Christ, 
 just as God is in me, and in the loftier 
 * 2 Cor. V. 19. 
 
234 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 reaches of spiritual thinking and devoted 
 living I can touch hands with Him across 
 the centuries and hail him as a brother. But 
 I can climb no higher. In those metaphysical 
 altitudes to which you would drag me I grow 
 faint and giddy, and my breath is taken quite 
 away." Yes ; but then the Church exists to 
 take man's breath away, to be higher than 
 the highest of man's achievenaent, nobler than 
 the noblest of man's conception. " Grod was in 
 Christ," nay, Christ was the very and eternal 
 Son of God, Incarnate for man's redemption. 
 It is the experience of the great souls of 
 humanity. It is the enraptured cry of the 
 saints and mystics who, following in His 
 steps, have gone down to the depths of 
 human degradation, and have seen His 
 miracles and have enjoyed the glory of His 
 Presence. It is too high for you, you say. 
 You want a creed that is to be as narrow as 
 your own experience, a creed you can measure 
 with the foot-rule of your feeble intellect. 
 Nay, but the Church's Creed is not the lowest 
 that her children can conceive of God. It is 
 the highest. It is the experience of her noblest 
 souls in that pure, rarified atmosphere where 
 God has spoken face to face with them as a 
 man talketh with his friends. 
 
TO THE CHURCH 235 
 
 Presenting a united front. The wider the 
 spiritual circle touched by the individual soul, 
 the more fully beats the pulse of its vitality. 
 The friendships that conduce most to the 
 enrichment of life are always between souls 
 of dissimilar temperament, attracted by a 
 mutual admiration which is cemented by the 
 mystic seal of love. When men of similar 
 temperaments and identical aims get together, 
 their friendship degenerates into a hard and 
 narrow thing dividing them from the rest of 
 the world, upon which they look with cold 
 suspicion and dislike. Now, this is a principle 
 that lies in the nature of this mysterious 
 universe, and it was a principle which was 
 stated in the clearest ternas from the very 
 first to be involved in the conception of the 
 Christian Church. "There are diversities of 
 gifts, but the same Spirit."* The ideal of the 
 Church was conceived to be the harmonious 
 co-working of the rich variety of tempera- 
 ments and capacities with which God in the 
 infinity of His power had endowed His 
 children, under the influence of a common 
 spirit, towards the building up of a City of 
 God in which there should be no sameness, 
 but always a perfect artistic symmetry. The 
 * 1 Gor. xii. 4. 
 
236 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 life of the individual within the spiritual con- 
 fines of the Church was to be a forthgoing 
 of all his powers and faculties to meet and 
 mingle with a similar forthgoing of the 
 powers and faculties of other souls, so as 
 to produce a blending of opposites, a hearing 
 with each other's ears, a seeing with each 
 other's eyes, a feeling with each other's 
 hearts, a rich, living, palpitating stream of 
 variegated life, where experience brought 
 ever-fresh discoveries, ever newer and in- 
 tenser delights, where monotony, satiety, 
 ennui, the bane of the isolated life, were 
 impossible conceptions. 
 
 This is the Scriptural ideal of the Church, 
 but what of the reality? We do find, as a 
 matter of fact, this vast variety of spiritual 
 temperament within which lie such magnifi- 
 cent possibilities for the life of the soul. But 
 instead of drawing men closer together in the 
 religious life, it only serves to widen the gulf 
 that separates them. And this results simply 
 because of the inveterate habit of clinging 
 to that self -isolation which it is the avowed 
 aim of the Gospel to break up, which, indeed, 
 is the Gospel definition of sin. The attitude 
 of the different fragments of the Church 
 to-day is, at bottom, in spite of friendly 
 
TO THE CHURCH 237 
 
 overtures, one of suspicion, almost a mutual 
 determination to misunderstand each other. 
 I have said already, and I repeat, that there 
 are none of the great divisions of Christendom 
 that have not their historical justification. 
 They spring from a clash of ideals, from a 
 warring of diverse temperaments. It is quite 
 true that they were merely antitheses which 
 might have been embraced in a higher syn- 
 thesis, that they represented points of view, 
 basic principles, which a noble magnanimity 
 might have united in mutual harmony. But 
 the synthesis is not yet apparent, and all 
 attempts at union on the lower platform 
 that produced the division are foredoomed 
 to failure. The task of the present hour, 
 then, is not to force an artificial and pre- 
 mature union, but rather to strive after a 
 mutual understanding of different ideals and 
 temperaments, such as comes naturally, to their 
 glorious gain, to friends who love each other. 
 Who can deny that we are still very far from 
 that? I venture to say that it is well-nigh 
 impossible to find a Low Churchman who 
 could give a clear, intellectual statement of 
 the essential aims and ideals of his High 
 Church brother, while the High Churchman 
 has an equal difficidty of understanding what 
 
238 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 his Low Church brother stands for, I have 
 found few convinced Voluntaries who really 
 comprehend what we mean by " national 
 religion," none who in controversy ever state 
 our position correctly, while, I must confess, 
 we have sadly failed in imbuing our own 
 members with the undoubted truth for which 
 Voluntaryism in religion stands. What is called 
 Broad Churchism is frequently simply a lack of 
 imagination and a coldness of temperament 
 that cannot enter into the fervour of evan- 
 gelical zeal, while Evangelicalism, on account of 
 its narrow intellectual outlook, generally looks 
 with suspicion and distrust upon attempts to 
 place its own position on a sound metaphysical 
 basis. All these various phases of thought and 
 feeling are in our day mutually antagonistic 
 to each other. They are represented by dif- 
 ferent parties or different sections of the 
 Church, who deem it the first of duties to 
 be loyal to their own rehgious principles by 
 attacking all others, and imagine every petty 
 triumph of their cause to be a victory gained 
 for Grod and truth and righteousness. And 
 yet a large historical survey of the religious 
 field clearly shows that the differences are as 
 inevitable as human nature, and that a suc- 
 cessful attempt to suppress or destroy any 
 
TO THE CHURCH 239 
 
 genuine phase of religious faith would be 
 to undo the work of the Creator and to 
 impoverish the spiritual treasury of this 
 miraculous human life. 
 
 Nevertheless, the united front is necessary if 
 we are to secure a common creed and a definite 
 aim. How, then, is the Church to get the 
 full value, alike in her intellectual and prac- 
 tical activities, of this infinite variety of human 
 temperament, this exhaustless endowment of 
 human souls ? How is the City of God to be 
 reared — its fabric coruscating with the bril- 
 liance of innumerable facets, each refiecting 
 according to its own nature the rays of the 
 Sun of Righteousness ? Are we simply to aim 
 at reducing all differences of belief to a com- 
 mon, colourless formula, and setting definite 
 limits in ritual and government beyond which 
 no one is to be allowed to transgress? Are 
 we to say to the High Churchman, insatiable 
 of doctrine, " You must reduce your doctrine to 
 a common denomination and restrain your 
 ritual within limits your Low Church brother 
 can tolerate"? Are we to tell the Low Church- 
 man that he must submit to a certain amount 
 of ritual for the sake of uniformity? Are we 
 to implore the Broad Churchman to keep his 
 speculations within the limits of prudence for 
 
240 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 fear of offending his weaker brother, and the 
 Evangelical to moderate his transports and 
 restrain his excitement ? Are we to assure the 
 Voluntary that we are quite at one with him 
 in his main contention, and exhort the ad- 
 herents of a national religion to resign their 
 privileges and hold their most cherished con- 
 victions in solution in order to give the Church 
 an outward semblance of union ? The very 
 statement of such a method of securing unity 
 reveals its absurdity. The Christian religion 
 is not a religion of limits, but of infinity. It 
 is not a loosening of conviction, but a strength- 
 ening. It is not a system of restraints, but 
 an impulsive outflowing of all one's nature 
 towards an ever receding ideal. If we believe 
 at all, our belief is worth nothing unless we 
 believe with our whole heart. I have nothing 
 whatever to give you except my own convic- 
 tions — convictions I have made my own by 
 hard thinking and active doing. You have 
 nothing to give me that I am in the slightest 
 degree interested in except conviction simi- 
 larly obtained. I can learn something from the 
 High Churchman who has perilled his soul for 
 the truth of doctrines which he devotes all his 
 energies in translating into life. I can learn 
 nothing from his pale, ineffectual brother who 
 
TO THE CHUECH 241 
 
 so little understands his own position that he 
 is willing to waive the very keystone of his 
 system in order to earn a reputation for 
 large-mindedness by adopting the methods of 
 men whose religious attitude is antagonistic 
 to his own. If the Evangelical is to add any- 
 thing to the common treasury, it is the red- 
 hot Evangelical who alone has anything worth 
 giving, the man who has been shaken over the 
 mouth of hell, has felt the awful terror of 
 the wrath of God against sin, and can transfix 
 his audience with the spell of the super- 
 natural. Better leave things as they are than 
 have a union that will only damp enthusiasm 
 and stifle conviction. The only union that can 
 ever be effectual is the union that plucks from 
 each sect or party the glowing embers that 
 constitute its life, and throws them into a 
 common heap to blaze to heaven in one 
 mighty bonfire that will consume all the base 
 passions and mean ambitions that fill the earth 
 with sin and misery. 
 
 No, we must make up our minds that union 
 is not to be secured by a cold, calculating 
 search for ambiguous terms, or a prudent 
 restraint in administration and ritual which 
 will satisfy the lukewarm within the Church 
 pale. But suppose we turn to ask ourselves 
 
 Problem of Theology 17 
 
242 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 how, taking things as they are, the Church is 
 fulfilling her function ? The Church exists to 
 save souls. Well, is she saving souls in the 
 Scriptural meaning of the term? Is she really- 
 enabling men to live out their lives, to de- 
 velop all their capacities, to take out of this 
 present human existence the full possibilities 
 of spiritual being? Is she infusing into the 
 hearts and souls and intellects of those who 
 are under her influence the true meaning of 
 the age they live in, enabling them to absorb 
 all its higher tendencies and to reject all its 
 debasing influences? And is she making con- 
 tinual inroads upon the domain of darkness, 
 rescuing souls from the abyss of misery and 
 sin, and opening blinded eyes to the pure 
 light of heaven? In every age of Christian 
 history when the Church was a living reality 
 she produced the typical men of the age, the 
 men who summed up its highest character- 
 istics and were recognised as the true leaders 
 of life and thought. In ages of the Church's 
 decadence and of moral collapse, such men 
 were without the Church, and were often 
 mere masses of ill-regulated passion and power. 
 
 Is the Church thus holding the lead to-day? 
 What is the foe against which in every age 
 
 the Church of Jesus Christ has to fight? It 
 
TO THE CHURCH 243 
 
 is the carnal man that is at enraity with God. 
 It is the dominance of the material that always 
 threatens spiritual insight and moral vigour. 
 Now, there are two phenomena of our time that 
 the most casual observer cannot fail to mark. 
 
 The first is the enormous extension of irre- 
 sponsible wealth. Remember that in the civi- 
 lisation created by the Christian Church there 
 was intended to be no such thing as irre- 
 sponsible wealth. The feudal system, e.g,^ 
 which is so intimately associated with the 
 Mediaeval Church, was in its essence a social- 
 istic system. It regarded human society as an 
 organic whole, in which privileges and respon- 
 sibilities were strictly correlated. It is very 
 easy to point to the failures of feudalism, to 
 draw a lurid picture of its brutalities, its 
 tyrannies, its incessant wars. But we must 
 remember the human material with which the 
 Church's ideal had to work, and we must also 
 remember that it is the dark side of the pic- 
 ture that history inevitably records. The con- 
 vergence of independent testimony undoubtedly 
 goes to prove that for many centuries feu- 
 dalism worked well, produced order out of 
 chaos, and gave to human life an ideality and 
 picturesqueness it sadly lacks to-day.* 
 
 * See Note K, " The Church in the Middle Ages," 
 
244 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 The point, however, to be insisted on, is 
 that in Mediaeval Europe the responsibility of 
 wealth, power, and place was inherent in the 
 very conception of the social organism. Even 
 when the rise of cities saw the dawning of 
 a new order, and wealth was divorced from 
 landed possessions and became more personal, 
 this conception was taken over by the new 
 men who rose to power. Wealth was not 
 used for mere personal ostentation. It was, 
 for the most part, sought and employed for 
 civic adornment. The city became the nursery 
 of art, learning, and philanthropy, and its citi- 
 zens vied with each other in the lavishness of 
 their expenditure on stately public buildings, 
 hospitals, and noble churches. No doubt the 
 ideal was not universal. No doubt there were 
 many who wasted their means in riotous 
 living, and in mere personal and selfish ex- 
 travagance. But the ideal was there, a living 
 thing ; and those who did not try to live up 
 to it were conscious of defect. They knew 
 they were doing wrong, were committing sin. 
 The first sign of contrition in a wealthy sinner 
 was to return to the great civic ideal and, for 
 the salvation of his soul, to devote his wealth 
 to the promotion of the common weal. 
 
 But all this has passed away. The Church 
 
TO THE CHURCH 245 
 
 has lost her power of enforcing the respon- 
 sibility of wealth. The very idea belongs to 
 an ancient world and a fabric of society that 
 no longer exists. The doctrines of economic 
 science were fatal to it. According to these 
 doctrines, the best thing you can do for a man 
 is to leave him alone to Jfight his way through 
 the world for himself. Society will settle its 
 complicated system of adjustments with beau- 
 tiful simplicity, if only each man keeps an 
 enlightened eye upon his own personal advan- 
 tage. The Church failed to master and adapt 
 herself to the new environment, and as, more- 
 over, she gradually let slip from her all those 
 practical activities of philanthropy, education, 
 art, and the higher culture of the soul which 
 she had hitherto regarded as her special func- 
 tion, not only did she fail to impress upon 
 men, who had wealth far beyond their power 
 of successful administration, their responsi- 
 bility to God for the talent He had given, but 
 she failed to furnish an adequate outlet that 
 might appeal to their piety or stir their 
 imagination. The Church cannot get the 
 means to fulfil her function because she is 
 not able to convince the men who have it 
 that she can use it wisely. She leaves them 
 embarrassed with their useless hoards. In 
 
246 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 their painful perplexity we are told they have 
 forgotten how to smile.* 
 
 And the consequence of this impotence of 
 the Church is a prodigal, wasteful, and osten- 
 tatious private expenditure which has no 
 meaning in it, no touch of artistic feeling, no 
 sense of the occasions when princely display is 
 right as adding to the richness and picturesque- 
 ness of life. The ideal is shifted. Wealth 
 clings to its irresponsibility. Granted there 
 are noble exceptions, for my words must 
 be taken simply as indicating a general 
 tendency, even men of genuine civic spirit and 
 religious zeal seem incapable of rising to the 
 old conceptions that ennobled mercantile enter- 
 prise and gave it a touch of romance. They 
 dole out their benefactions as charities, works 
 of supererogation to which they are in no wise 
 bound, and which bear no real relation to the 
 abundance of their resources. Their gifts have 
 no note of largeness of spirit, of magnanimity, 
 as of men who reckon it a privilege worth a 
 long life's strenuous endeavour to be able to 
 do something for the land that gave them birth, 
 for the Church that ensouled them, for the 
 people whose labours have accorded them a 
 coveted pre-eminence. The art of giving has 
 * " Millionaires never smile," says Andrew Carnegie, 
 
TO THE CHURCH 247 
 
 become a lost art. The spirit is gone that 
 enriched those mediaeval cities and clothed them 
 with so glorious a beauty that the" very sight 
 of them, even in their mouldering decay, by 
 those who have not yet lost the use of their 
 eyes, makes the heart leap and seems to quicken 
 dim memories of forgotten possibilities of joy. 
 And if this is so even with many of the best 
 of those who rise to wealth, what of the worst ? 
 Has there ever been, since the days of the later 
 Roman Empire, such a deliberate degradation of 
 life's ideals ? To be rich, or if that is impossible 
 to appear rich, is the one ambition of great 
 masses of our people to-day. To spend life in 
 a giddy round of dissipation so colourless, 
 monotonous, and inane to the intellectual vision 
 that one wonders how it continues to be 
 tolerated by sane men and women, to exhaust 
 imagination in devising new forms of pleasure, 
 to sound the depths of vulgarity in order to 
 discover fresh methods of ostentatious display 
 — that is all that very many who have the 
 treasures of seven thousand years of human 
 civilisation at their feet can make of this won- 
 derful human life. In the weary monotony of 
 their luxurious mansions no touch of religious 
 emotion ever stirs their withered souls, no real 
 perception of the beauty of earth and sea and 
 
248 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 sky ever makes their pulses throb ; their intel- 
 lectual vacuity shuts them out from all that 
 scientist, philosopher, and poet have revealed of 
 the wonders of the universe. Alas ! it is one 
 of the tragedies of modern times. And the 
 most tragic note of all is that the Church is 
 powerless to excite one pang of conviction of 
 sin, one sigh of penitence, one real intense 
 desire to emerge into the light, in this mass 
 of gross materialistic worldliness. The Church 
 has lost her own ideals and has ceased to be 
 taken seriously. 
 
 And there is another picture. Packed in 
 their teeming millions in their dreary tenement 
 houses are the manual toilers whose labour is 
 indispensable to the production of the wealth 
 that is so foolishly and extravagantly wasted. 
 I am not going to indulge in any rhetorical 
 exaggeration as to the miseries of the great 
 mass of the artisan classes in our cities. In 
 many respects theirs is a nobler and better life 
 — a life richer in ideals — than that of the foolish 
 and ill-educated rich whose wealth has increased 
 without any increase in intellectual and moral 
 culture. In its higher aspects, too, it is a life 
 with a rich vitality in it, a life growing in 
 sympathy with the true ideals of the Church. 
 It is among this class that the Church is doing 
 
TO THE CHUECH 249 
 
 its best work to-day, and from which it is 
 still recruiting its strongest and most intel- 
 ligent adherents. To such the Church means 
 something, affording an outlet to their energies 
 and a guidance in their higher aspirations to 
 which they eagerly respond. And yet, while 
 it would be wrong to lose sight of the support 
 the Church is receiving from the artisan class, 
 it cannot be denied that large masses of the 
 workers are out of touch with the Church. 
 They have no particular quarrel with religion, 
 and they are perfectly willing that Church 
 agencies should undertake the guidance of 
 their children, but their ideals are materialised, 
 and the Church fails to inspire them with any 
 living interest in her eternal message. 
 
 Penetrate deeper and the picture grows 
 lurid with fateful suggestiveness. Below the 
 self-respecting artisan class — the general body 
 of genuine workers, taking the term in 
 its widest sense — there is a mass of poverty, 
 misery, drunkenness, and vice, that is 
 threatening the stability of our modern 
 civilisation. It is not true to say that the 
 cleavage between rich and poor is growing 
 greater in our times. That is not what is 
 happening. It is rather that the industrial 
 machinery of the social organism, while still 
 
250 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 producing a continuous steady output of men 
 and women (the majority) who are in the happy 
 state that they have neither poverty nor riches, 
 is throwing off as waste material the useless, 
 foolish, and extravagant rich, and the degraded 
 poor who have sunk into such a state of misery, 
 moral torpor, and inefficiency that life on the 
 terms they alone can live seems scarcely worth 
 having. Their labour is casual and at best of 
 little value. They live in houses which no sani- 
 tary legislation can make fit habitations for 
 human beings. Drink is the only solace of 
 their misery, their only emergence into the 
 world of their dreams. They marry when mere 
 boys and girls, and go on steadily producing 
 children of a low physical vitality to pass their 
 lives amid the same wretched surroundings 
 with the same dreary purposelessness. They 
 fill our gaols with habitual drunkards and 
 criminals of the low, brutal, and stupid type. 
 They crowd our poor-houses. At the first 
 wave of trade depression the futile labour* of 
 even the best of them is dispensed with, and 
 
 * *' It may not be too much to say that ii the whole of class 
 B were swept out of existence, all the work they do could be 
 done, together with their own work, by classes C and D ; that 
 these classes, and especially class C, would be immensely 
 better off, while no class, nor any industry, would suffer 
 the least." — Booth's " Labour and Life of the People." 
 
TO THE CHURCH 251 
 
 they are maintained in being by a costly and 
 demoralising charity. They are a menace to 
 society because they are a drag on the wheels 
 of industry. They create a seething abyss 
 which has a fatal fascination for those imme- 
 diately above them, and they deaden the 
 national conscience by accustoming it to 
 scenes of misery and vice. 
 
 This soulless mass, alike of ignorant wealth 
 and degrading poverty, is the crude material 
 which it is the primary function of the Church 
 to ensoul, to regenerate. The Church must 
 approach her task with a creed, for she must 
 believe, at least, in the possibility of exer- 
 cising her own function. She must believe 
 in the remission of sins. She must believe 
 in the feasibihty of redemption. She must 
 beUeve in man, and for that reason she must 
 believe in God. She must believe that the 
 Spirit of God is capable even of making these 
 dry bones live. It is a tremendous leap of 
 faith. When one believes that, miracles cease 
 to be impossible. 
 
 How is the Church to show her faith in 
 this wonderful transformation, to assert her 
 belief that she is the predestined instrument 
 in God's hands for the regeneration of society? 
 Faith without works is dead. Faith is the 
 
252 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 driving power of human activity, and when 
 our religious faith has ceased to drive, then 
 it has become unfaith — rank atheism. How 
 are we, then, on the one hand, to create a 
 living conscience as to the responsibility of 
 wealth ? How are we, on the other, to bring 
 a living Gospel to bear upon the miserable 
 children of the abyss, that their starved 
 souls shall find nourishment, and the more 
 abundant life shall flush their hearts with 
 joy? How is the Church, in short, to teach 
 men the true art of living and to enable 
 them to get out of this human life its full 
 possibility of happiness ? 
 
 Just as she has faced similar difficulties 
 before and proved herself the saviour of 
 society at each critical period of the world's 
 history. I venture to propound a paradox 
 which, I believe, a survey of the historical 
 process of Christianity will justify. When 
 the Church has attempted small things in a 
 small way she has invariably failed. Church 
 history, even in its great and stirring epochs, 
 is full of petty peddling details which sadden 
 the heart, perplex the conscience, and fill the 
 pious Christian with shame and humiliation. 
 And in its seasons of aridity the faint effer- 
 vescences of spiritual life have bubbled up 
 
TO THE CHURCH 253 
 
 and died away, and seemingly left no trace 
 behind. But, again, take a large view of the 
 process of the centuries and you will find 
 that when the Church has attempted great 
 things in a great way she has always suc- 
 ceeded. When she has struck the grand note 
 the symphony has been loud, clear, sonorous. 
 When, e.gr., the spirit of man was touched in 
 mediaeval times with the mystery of the In- 
 carnation, and the prevailing thought was to 
 furnish the God-man with a shrine suited to 
 the magnificence of the religious conception 
 of Incarnate Deity that lay at the core of 
 the social organism, the aesthetic faculty was 
 so strikingly quickened that all Europe was 
 clothed with beauty, and art reached the 
 culmination of its power. When, again, the 
 city began to arise with its attendant evils, 
 and the vices and miseries of slumdom to 
 threaten civilisation, the figure of Jesus, the 
 All-loving, the Friend of the lost and the 
 degraded, appeared to great souls like St. 
 Francis with such sweet fascination, and 
 inspired such utter devotion, that the move- 
 ment of the friars sent shafts of light 
 through the darkness and disease of decaying 
 feudalism.* And this truth is clearly evidenced 
 "f^ See Note L, '* The Franciscans." 
 
254 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 in the whole confused period of the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries. The Reformation 
 was successful up to the truth that was in 
 it. So long as the great Reformers were men 
 of vision, who saw straight into the heart of 
 things, who took their stand upon eternal 
 verities and enlisted the conscience of man- 
 kind, the Reformation was an elemental force, 
 purifying the moral atmosphere and raising 
 men to higher levels of life and thought. 
 But when it became petty and opinionative, 
 mere political strife animated with partisan 
 rancour, its power faded away and it ceased 
 to exercise even its legitimate influence in the 
 development of the modern world. There is 
 no need to multiply instances. There is a 
 note to which, when struck, the human heart 
 will instinctively respond, while it listens, list- 
 less and amused, to " the feeble pipings of an 
 empty day."* 
 
 Boldly, then, the Church must return to 
 those inherent ideas of her function which 
 are inwrought with her very constitution. 
 She must believe that she is more than a 
 mere preaching institution, called into being 
 simply to indulge in oratorical pyrotechnics to 
 interest and excite those who are willing to 
 * William Morris, *' The Earthly Paradise." 
 
TO THE CHURCH 255 
 
 attend her weekly ministrations. She must 
 believe, as the Primitive Church believed, that 
 the charge of Jesus Christ was given to His 
 organic body, " I was an hungred, and ye 
 gave Me meat : I was thirsty, and ye gave 
 me drink : I was a stranger, and ye took Me 
 in : naked, and ye clothed me : I was sick, 
 and ye visited Me : I was in prison, and ye 
 came unto Me. Inasmuch as ye have done it 
 unto the least of these My brethren, ye have 
 done it unto Me." * She must, moreover, have 
 her own views on education, art, science, 
 business, and all human activities, and must 
 use her own means to propagate and enforce 
 them. She must maintain that the basis of 
 society is ethical, that the ethical system on 
 which our civilisation was originally moulded 
 is Christian, and that she alone inherits 
 the Christian tradition and understands the 
 methods by which Christian ethics are to be 
 enforced. She must never be afraid to speak 
 out on all great questions that involve moral 
 issues, from her own ethical standpoint, 
 clearly disentangling the moral issue from all 
 mere party or partisan methods of translating 
 it into practice. 
 
 Suppose we take this one question of slum- 
 * St. Matthew xxv. 35 seq. 
 
256 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 dom and ask what our Churches in Scotland 
 would do if they rose to this historic view 
 of the function of the Christian Church. We 
 shall get at the answer better by trying to 
 imagine that there was nobody meddling and 
 muddling in the matter, and that the field 
 was clear for the Church of Jesus Christ 
 attempting to apply the precepts of the 
 Gospel in face of the hideous degradation of 
 our great cities. There are undoubtedly two 
 aspects of the problem with which she would 
 immediately concern herself. 
 
 Let us remember that the historic Church 
 has never believed in the divine right of 
 ignorance, nor in a spiritual illumination that 
 superseded hard work and patient intellectual 
 study. Such an attitude has been left to the 
 sectaries. The Church has found her leaders 
 in the great souls of the race, has fostered 
 genius, and has developed statesmanship. She 
 has aimed at imbuing her official representa- 
 tives with the whole culture of the age in 
 which they lived, in order to give them a 
 wider outlook and a truer apprehension of 
 their mission. And confronted then, as I 
 have imagined, with this festering mass of 
 degraded humanity, which, she believed with 
 strong conviction, she alone had power to 
 
TO THE CHURCH 257 
 
 ensoul, would she not, while not intermitting 
 continuous practical efforts to uplift it, devote 
 her intellectual energies to a clear understand- 
 ing of the meaning of it all ? The Church has 
 never despised culture, but she has over and 
 over again forgotten that the culture of one 
 age is not the culture of another. The 
 cultured man to-day is not the man who can 
 write Latin verses or construe a difficult 
 passage in Thucydides. It is well if he can 
 add these accomplishments to his other ac- 
 quirements, but his culture is sadly defective 
 if he has not studied the philosophy of the 
 State, if he is not familiar with the ethical 
 and economic processes that determine the 
 rise and fall of nations. A clear and compre- 
 hensive knowledge of the environment of 
 those to whom he addresses the Gospel mes- 
 sage ought to lie in the background of the 
 mind of every minister of Christ. It is his 
 one and only duty, no doubt, to infuse into 
 the souls of those upon whom he is working 
 the spirit of the Gospel of Christ, but he will 
 do so with little effect unless he understands 
 the nature of the influences that are baffling 
 his best efforts. This seems to be so obvious 
 a truth that the singular apathy of all our 
 Churches towards it can only be explained 
 
 Problem of Theology 1 8 
 
258 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 by the fact that slumdom is not yet lying 
 as a burden upon their consciences. They 
 imagine it to be a problem that has been 
 handed over to other agencies, and that their 
 members can rest at peace in their cushioned 
 pews. 
 
 But, further, if our Churches really felt the 
 weight of this horrid nightmare, felt that they 
 were traitors to the cause of Christ if they 
 dared to hand over the souls and bodies of a 
 submerged tenth to ignorant enthusiasts or 
 the red-tapeism of State control, would there 
 not be such an overwhelming determination 
 to come into line as would sweep away all 
 difficulties to union? Mark, this is the one 
 subject at the present day that excites passion, 
 that stirs the soul to that glow of white heat 
 that makes welding possible. Here alone, if 
 anywhere, shall we find the synthesis that 
 makes our differences intelligible and lifts us 
 to that nobler unity that embraces opposites. 
 
 For, to take but one instance, one cannot 
 cross the threshold of the social problem with- 
 out being confronted with the riddle of Church 
 and State. But somehow it seems to have put 
 on a new phase. In the controversies of the 
 political world it is a question of privilege. 
 Shall the State throw the segis of its protection 
 
TO THE CHURCH 259 
 
 over one Church out of many, and endow it 
 with certain privileges which other Churches 
 cannot conscientiously take? Shall the State 
 sanction its creed, safeguard its property, and 
 call for its services when these are required? 
 This, it would appear, is, to many, the sole 
 issue that is involved in the historic quarrel 
 as to the relationship between Church and 
 State. But suppose we were in earnest about 
 this social question, suppose we realised that 
 it was a primary duty of the Church to feed 
 the hungry, to minister to the sick in body 
 and in soul, to leave the respectable squares 
 of our great cities and to go into the mean 
 streets and filthy backlands, breathing the 
 foetid atmosphere where ignorance, vice, and 
 crime fester in rank luxurious growth, is it 
 not, at least, possible that the problem of 
 Church and State might assume a different 
 form ? Might we not see that here was a 
 problem of the greatest intricacy as of the 
 most fascinating interest? — a problem for the 
 successful solution of which it was absolutely 
 necessary to understand the principles that 
 lie at the basis of Church and State, in order 
 to delimit their spheres and combine their in- 
 fluence. Might we not find that the ideal of 
 a National Church is not privilege but duty. 
 
260 TO-DAY'S CHALLENGE 
 
 that all a living Church can possibly ask from 
 the State is freedom to fulfil its function, 
 and that such freedom can only be obtained 
 by a close working alliance that assigns to 
 each its task and secures for each its rightful 
 authority ? 
 
 And then, too, we might consider this ques- 
 tion of creed, which causes such searchings 
 of heart. Is it not just possible that if we 
 were to flush our creeds with that ethical 
 vitality in which they had their origin, and 
 which made them dearer than life itself to 
 men who saw through them the eternal 
 majesty of God and the winsomeness of a 
 Saviour's love, they would assume a new 
 meaning in our eyes? The great historic 
 creeds are landmarks in history. They repre- 
 sent the floodtide of spiritual experience at 
 epochal periods of human development. Let 
 them remain as they are and be recognised 
 for what they are. What they need is not 
 revision, but explanation, the separation of 
 the eternal spirit from the local and temporal 
 wrappings that enclose it. And if we find, 
 as undoubtedly we shall, that no sectional 
 creed altogether covers our new experience, 
 while that new experience is not yet clear, 
 full, and rich enough to be capable of credal 
 
TO THE CHURCH 261 
 
 expression, might we not meanwhile unite 
 on that ancient creed of Nicea which is the 
 root from whence all others spring, which 
 has implicitly within it the whole fulness of 
 Christian experience, and which, moreover, is 
 acknowledged to-day by every great branch of 
 the historic Church of Jesus Christ ? 
 
THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE 
 CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 
 
VII 
 
 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE 
 CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 I HAVE been told that I am dreaming 
 dreams and seeing visions, that I am 
 dwelling in the past and trying to put back 
 the hands of the clock. The Church never 
 can be again what she has been in bygone 
 centuries. She never can be the visible centre 
 of the spiritual activities of mankind. The 
 Church has played her part in the evolution 
 of the social organism. She has largely con- 
 tributed to the creation of the modern State, 
 and having created it, she has wisely devolved 
 upon the State those duties which, in a more 
 primitive society, naturally fell to her. Educa- 
 tion and philanthropy on a national scale are 
 the work of the State. As for art, literature, 
 and science, these depend upon the initiative 
 of individuals, and the Church will be wise if 
 
 26S 
 
266 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 she leaves them severely alone. The Church's 
 function to-day is simply to permeate indi- 
 viduals with the spirit of the Gospel, to diffuse 
 an atmosphere of altruism, and inspire men to 
 works of charity and thoughts of love. 
 
 But, surely, the very idea of going back is 
 at variance with the whole course of my argu- 
 ment. The Church, like every living body, 
 is continually evolving, adapting herself to 
 new environments, manifesting the one eternal 
 Spirit under changed conditions. History never 
 repeats itself. We study history not for the 
 purpose of imitating the past, but of under- 
 standing the nature of the forces, both good 
 and evil, that have made the past, that we 
 may direct them to shape the future according 
 to our highest ideals. These forces remain 
 the same. The spirit that is the source of 
 phenomena never changes in essence, though 
 its manifestations may vary with the condi- 
 tions under which it works. The Church can- 
 not change in her essential nature without 
 losing her inherent vitality. She must still, as 
 heretofore, claim supremacy over the whole 
 man, though the manner in which she asserts 
 this claim will depend very greatly upon the 
 state of the society in which she exercises her 
 activity. It may freely be granted that the 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODBEN LIFE 267 
 
 Church can never have the visible organisation 
 of the Middle Ages, without necessarily acqui- 
 escing in the idea that she must remain the 
 futile spiritual force she is to-day ; and the 
 taunt of medisevalism is no very powerful 
 argument against those who point to what 
 she has been in the past as an indication of 
 what a living Church based on the spiritual 
 consciousness of all that is highest and best 
 in humanity may yet be in the future- 
 It is further objected that many of the most 
 crying evils of our time are not ethical but 
 economic. The extremes of wealth and poverty 
 are to be remedied by economic and political 
 methods. Now, Religion cannot leave her own 
 sphere and intrude on the sphere of politics 
 without suffering serious detriment. Man's 
 material welfare belongs to the political sphere 
 of action. No doubt the highest national ideal 
 is that of a State in which there shall be no 
 grinding poverty and in which every individual 
 shall be free to develop the best that is in 
 him under favourable conditions. But it is 
 the function of the State to secure the outward 
 environment that conduces to this end. This 
 can only be brought about by wise legislation 
 based on a sound economic science. It is the 
 sphere of politics, and of all sciences politics is 
 
268 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 the most difficult. The xnoment we enter the 
 domain of politics we are in a region of strife. 
 We encounter the war of clashing opinions, the 
 struggle of rival factions. Men, equal in moral 
 earnestness and in intellectual ability, may be 
 thoroughly agreed in their endeavour to remedy 
 social evils, while they differ diametrically as 
 to what the true remedy is. The Church which 
 identifies herself with any particular theory of 
 political action is courting a new source of 
 division which is not legitimately hers and 
 which can only increase her difficulties. She 
 will gradually be absorbed in a party organisa- 
 tion and become a mere political caucus. The 
 Church, therefore, that has the idea of catho- 
 licity even as a dim ideal must shun politics. 
 Let her content herself by bringing her influ- 
 ence to bear on the individual and winning 
 him in his public and private conduct to the 
 ethics of the Gospel. Let her endeavour to 
 make good citizens, and then leave them alone 
 to work out their own legislative and institu- 
 tional ideals for the welfare of the nation. 
 
 While this language is freely used by many 
 and the Church well warned against crossing 
 the barrier that confines her within her own 
 sphere, we have to-day a large and growing 
 party that would break down all barriers and 
 
THE CHUECH IN MODERN LIFE 269 
 
 obliterate the distinction between politics and 
 religion. Mr. R. J. Campbell, in his " Christianity 
 and the Social Order," practically identifies the 
 historic Church of Christ with modern socialism, 
 and he has struck a note to which there 'has 
 been a very considerable response both in 
 Britain and America. The Church, if she is 
 to fulfil her historic function and to attack 
 the hideous evils of our modern civilisation at 
 their very root, must range herself on the side 
 of those who advocate the nationalisation of 
 all the means of production. Only thus can 
 poverty be abolished and the foolish and soul- 
 destroying extravagance of the idle rich be 
 made impossible. The mere preaching of the 
 Gospel is no remedy for a state of matters 
 which at bottom is not ethical, but is the 
 result of a diseased social organism. Character 
 cannot be built up till it is placed in a setting 
 that will tend naturally to its true development. 
 Doubtless, in the last resort the Church's one 
 and only interest is the development of the 
 spiritual faculties of man ; but, as we know man, 
 soul and body are not two things but one, and 
 man's spiritual faculties can only be developed 
 on a sound physical basis. Socialism is the 
 practical application to human affairs of the 
 golden rule, lu socialism, therefore, lies the 
 
270 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 only hope for an environment that will pro- 
 duce the Christian ethos, and the Church, if 
 she is to be true to her history, must plunge 
 forthwith into a political, socialistic propa- 
 gandum. 
 
 We must examine carefully this position. It 
 has an air of plausibility about it that is very 
 alluring to many generous spirits to-day who 
 are sick at heart over the impotence of the 
 Church in face of the social miseries with 
 which they are confronted in the exercise of 
 their daily calling, and who resent with all 
 the force of profoundly religious natures the 
 pious platitudes with which they are told that 
 the function of the Church is only to save 
 souls and to permeate the community with 
 altruistic sentiments. 
 
 It is necessary to understand clearly what 
 we are talking about. Socialism, to-day, is a 
 word of the vaguest meaning. It is sur- 
 rounded with a halo of mystery as profound 
 as ever encircled the abstrusest dogma of the 
 Christian Church. It calls up before the 
 mental vision a curious amalgam of intricate 
 economic reasoning and popular economic fal- 
 lacies, of the loftiest Christian ethics and the 
 crude impulses of naturalism, of lives of noble 
 self-devotion and lives of wanton self-indul- 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 271 
 
 gence. As we gaze at it through the dim 
 haze of history we seem to see passing before 
 us as in a phantasmagoria the whole range of 
 human character, from the sweet saintliness 
 of a St. Francis to the murderous insanity of 
 a dog-leech Marat. 
 
 " Stop ! " says the socialist. " We hear this kind 
 of talk ad nauseam. We mean by socialism 
 something very clear and definite ; something, 
 moreover, that is the natural development of 
 orthodox economics, and is but the intelligent 
 hastening of a process that is already going 
 on in the natural evolution of society." Ex- 
 actly; but no enthusiastic and rhetorical 
 socialist sticks to this meaning. Socialism has 
 a wider and a narrower signification. It is 
 an ideal and it is a practical policy. The 
 word is often used merely to denote the 
 theory that the social organism is a unity, 
 that every community lives by reciprocal ser- 
 vice, that each man and woman has a definite 
 function to fulfil in order to maintain the 
 common weal, and has a right to demand that 
 protection and those privileges that will secure 
 to him and to her the due development of 
 their specific individuality, so long as they 
 fulfil this function. In this wider sense of the 
 word socialism is the creed of every thinking 
 
272 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 man. It is the ideal of the State. The prob- 
 lem of statecraft is simply to approach as 
 near as possible to its realisation. 
 
 And in this sense of the word the Christian 
 religion is the most emphatic assertion of 
 socialism that has ever been made. It roots 
 the socialistic ideal in the very nature of 
 things, in the very conception of the God- 
 head. Is it possible to find anything more 
 magnificent as a statement of a true social- 
 istic ideal than the Apostle Paul's definition of 
 the Church ? — " The Head, even Christ, from 
 whom the whole body, fitly joined together 
 and compacted by that which every joint sup- 
 plieth, maketh increase of the body to the 
 edifying of itself in love." * The general principle 
 that in a perfect society each individual gives 
 to the community of the fulness of his capacity 
 and receives from the community all that he 
 needs in order to secure the harmonious de- 
 velopment of all his God-given powers, is just 
 a restatement of the root idea of Gospel ethics 
 as enunciated by Jesus — "He that saveth his 
 life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for 
 My sake shall find it." + 
 
 But then, socialism has been narrowed down 
 to-day to mean the latest economic expedient 
 * Eph. iv. 15, 16. f St. Matthew xvi. 25. 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 273 
 
 for the better distribution of wealth. This has 
 always been one of the naain problems of 
 economic science, and it is undoubtedly now 
 the most pressing problem in modern politics. 
 But, like all political problems, it is one of 
 the very greatest difficulty. There are so 
 many factors to be taken into account, and 
 the historic failures in its solution furnish so 
 many terrible warnings. The volume of pro- 
 duction must be maintained, the distribution 
 of wealth must be automatic and not arti- 
 ficial, industry must be encouraged and idle- 
 ness repressed, every stimulus must be applied 
 to human energies so that society may get 
 out of every one the best that is in him, the 
 complex machinery of the social organism 
 must be so delicately handled that no cata- 
 clysm similar to those that have brought the 
 proudest State to destruction may lay waste 
 the Empire. The scientific socialist, indeed, 
 tells us that he has considered all these things 
 and has overwhelmingly proved that his method 
 will effect the maximum of good with the 
 minimum of disturbance. But he cannot shut 
 his eyes to the fact that there are men who 
 conscientiously differ from him. Men who are 
 willing to make as great sacrifices for the 
 welfare of society as he is are honestly of 
 
 Problem of Theology JQ 
 
274 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 opinion, after hstving studied his arguments, 
 that his remedy would only result in wide- 
 spread corruption and general poverty. The 
 socialist, therefore, must realise that he is 
 merely a politician, working in the arena of 
 politics, having the rights that are accorded 
 in a free country to all who have definite 
 political convictions, of ventilating his ideas 
 and pushing them forward by every legiti- 
 mate means. His is the political and economic 
 and not the religious problem, and he has no 
 right whatever, in advancing his economic 
 theory, to the adventitious aid that religipn 
 may give. He represents a party in the State, 
 among several parties, all, it is to be pre- 
 sumed, honestly striving for the national wel- 
 fare. It is simply a confusion of ideas that 
 makes him identify his cause with the cause 
 of religion, and imagine, when he is merely 
 advocating, e.g,, the nationalisation of railways, 
 that he is effecting a religious revolution. 
 
 We must be perfectly clear on this point if 
 the Church is to wield her due influence and 
 to fill her proper sphere. No doubt there is a 
 sense in which the aims of religion and the 
 higher politics are identical, and in which 
 Church and State may be regarded as simply 
 different aspects of the same communal life. 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 275 
 
 But in the modern sense of the term politics 
 is identified with party politics, that partisan 
 strife through which the legislative needs of 
 a nation are kept abreast of its moral and 
 intellectual culture. It may be impossible to 
 draw a hard and fast line separating the 
 sphere of religion from this party warfare ; 
 but it is safe to say that it is only on very 
 exceptional occasions, when great moral issues 
 are clearly involved, that she will find it con- 
 ducive to her own high aims to enter the 
 political arena. The claim of mere political 
 socialism to occupy a higher moral platform 
 than that taken up by any other party cannot 
 be admitted. In the enumeration and denun- 
 ciation of our social evils all good men and 
 women are agreed, and we must by no means 
 identify the vivid eloquence that powerfully 
 impresses them upon the national conscience 
 with the legislative and administrative capacity 
 that is able to remove them. 
 
 However intense, therefore, our sympathy with 
 the suffering poor, however strong our feeling 
 that the Church is not facing our crying 
 social evils with that intensity of purpose and 
 religious enthusiasm which ought to characterise 
 her, we must beware of identifying the Church's 
 organisation with any mere partisan ruethods 
 
276 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 of social amelioration that lie outside of her 
 proper sphere. Socialism and religion are 
 essentially different things. The socialism of 
 to-day is merely an economic device for the 
 better distribution of wealth — one among 
 several suggested by economists, politicians, 
 and statesmen for the solution of a most 
 difficult and intricate problem. Its place is in 
 the political arena, where it has a right to 
 vindicate its claims by argument through 
 press and platform. Religion is a spirit touch- 
 ing the deepest springs of human emotion and 
 passion, urging men to live nobler lives, to 
 think more generous thoughts, to spend their 
 talents and their faculties in the service of 
 their fellow-creatures, and to aspire to a 
 habitual communion with the Great Spirit of 
 the Universe. Socialism, as a political system, 
 aims merely at providing for the material 
 needs of men. It supplies no machinery for 
 cultivating the higher spiritual side of human 
 nature. Religion teaches that man is the 
 child of God, an immortal soul, dowered with 
 spiritual, emotional, and intellectual faculties, 
 in the exercise of which alone can true happi- 
 ness ever be found — that the satisfaction of his 
 material wants even to their fullest capacity 
 would leave him a poor, miserable, discontented 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 277 
 
 creature if the cravings of his soul were un- 
 cared for. And, then, there is this further 
 and profound difference. Socialism seeks its 
 end by legislation, the ultimate sanction of 
 which is force. Religion seeks to transform 
 the heart of man, so that he shall seek 
 those things that are true, honest, just, pure, 
 lovely, and of good report, by the inner con- 
 straint of his nature. It is as foolish, there- 
 fore, to identify socialism with religion as it 
 is to speak of their natural antagonism. And 
 in the prevalent confusion of ideas we find 
 men continually doing both. 
 
 But while insisting upon the Church keeping 
 herself free from political entanglements, are 
 we to interpret this as meaning that the Church 
 is to acquiesce in the idea that she must remain 
 a mere preaching institution, taking no direct 
 part in the practical activities of human life ? 
 Surely not ; this would be to misinterpret her 
 whole function. It would be to create an 
 entirely new institution, cut off from the rich 
 traditions of nineteen centuries of Christian 
 effort. Nay, further, a Church divorced from 
 the practical activities of life could never be 
 even an effective preaching institution. You 
 cannot in this way separate practice from 
 theory. A theology that is not continually 
 
278 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 revivifying itself by a close practical contact 
 with life in all its multitudinous phases would 
 soon melt away into the impalpable ether of 
 fine-drawn metaphysical speculation, and would 
 be shouldered out of being by the thronging 
 actualities of the complex duties and pressing 
 difficulties of our daily existence. 
 
 The Church must be ever in the thick of the 
 fight, but she must function along the lines of 
 her inherent nature and in accordance with her 
 fundamental principles. This does not mean 
 that her task will be a simple one, or that it 
 will be always easy to determine in any 
 particular difficulty that arises what her duty 
 is. The Church never had greater problems to 
 solve than those with w^hich she is confronted 
 to-day. Never was there a greater call for 
 clear spiritual insight, for wise statesmanship, 
 for power to discern the true point of attack 
 against the social evils that are threatening 
 the stability of our modern civilisation. And 
 yet never was the call more imperative. If 
 the Church to-day cannot re-assert her old 
 supremacy as a civilising agent, then the case 
 against her will go by default and she must 
 submit to a long period of impotence in human 
 affairs. 
 
 Now, there are two problems at the present 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 279 
 
 time that are absorbing the attention of all 
 true statesmen and philanthropists. These are 
 (1) the education of the young, and (2) the pro- 
 tection of the weak, physically, economically, 
 or morally — i.e., the care of the defective, the 
 dependent, and the delinquent classes. These 
 two problems lie at the very root of the welfare 
 of the body politic. And the striking thing 
 about them is that up to within quite recent 
 years they have been regarded as peculiarly 
 within the sphere of the Church's activity, 
 while it is the characteristic of modern times 
 that they are now the chief problems of the 
 State. 
 
 As such they must remain. These are 
 national problems, and a nation is not now in 
 religion a homogeneous unity. We cannot 
 forget, however, that the Church has a great 
 record in both of these departments of human 
 activity ; has produced as profound thinkers and 
 eminent scholars as are ever likely to appear 
 under a different system; has, in Scotland, at 
 least, educated a nation that led the van of 
 human thought, and has formed the character 
 of a prudent and thrifty race that feared the 
 taint of pauperism as a disease.* But times 
 have changed. The diversity of religious ideas 
 * See Note M, " What Scotland owes to the Church." 
 
280 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 in every European nation, the growth of 
 secularism, the mingling of races, have made 
 it imperative that, for all public purposes 
 where unity of administration is required, the 
 State and not the Church must be the centre 
 of authority. 
 
 We have now had a fairly long experience of 
 national education conducted by the State. It 
 has not been conspicuously successful. We are 
 still, after a long period of experiment, in the 
 throes of Education Acts, and those who have 
 to do with the rising generation are frequently 
 loud in their complaints that our boys and girls 
 are not as efficiently trained in those branches 
 that are to fit them for the duties of industrial 
 life as one would have expected from the 
 am.ount of thought, labour, and money expended 
 on the task. But there is a still deeper com- 
 plaint. The ethical training of the children is 
 defective. A generation is rising up with little 
 reverence for great ideals, with no strong sense 
 of duty, no deep-seated regard for moral 
 principle. Parental control is lessened. In the 
 lower ranks, roughness, want of discipline, 
 hooliganism, are on the increase. Juvenile 
 crime is advancing in every country in Europe * 
 
 * See Morrison's '* JuTenQe Crime," and *' Moral Instruction 
 and Training in Schools : Report of an International Inquiry." 
 
THE OHUECH IN MODERN LIFE 281 
 
 with rapid strides, in spite of all measures, 
 coercive and philanthropic, that are taken to 
 stem it. In other classes of society the same 
 laxness of moral tone is evident. The pursuit 
 of pleasure is with many the great aim of life. 
 There is a lack of civic spirit among those who 
 ought to be born into it, and civic offices are 
 not sought by men who through education 
 and opportunity ought to be best fitted to hold 
 them. 
 
 That the failure of our educational methods 
 to produce the best results is causing serious 
 concern to the thoughtful is clearly evidenced 
 by the quickening of interest in the ethical 
 training of the young. More and more is it 
 being realised that education must have an 
 ethical basis if it is to produce men and women 
 who will carry on the best traditions of the 
 human race and consciously advance the up- 
 ward movement of civilisation. The two large 
 volumes on " Moral Instruction and Training 
 in Schools," published by the strong Commis- 
 sion which made an exhaustive international 
 inquiry into the subject, furnish food for serious 
 thought. And the International Conference 
 held recently in the University of London is 
 a further significant sign of the times. Two 
 facts stand out clear enough as a result of the 
 
282 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OP 
 
 focussing of intelligent opinion on the matter. 
 The first is that ethical instruction and training 
 is an integral part of a sound education, And 
 the second is that men are divided into two 
 camps as to how that instruction and training 
 can best be conveyed. It is well we should 
 clearly understand where we stand on this 
 matter and what are the issues at stake. That 
 can only be done by taking a wide survey of 
 the field and by coming in contact with minds 
 that clearly grasp their own position and are 
 prepared to follow their principles to their 
 logical results. When we do so we find that 
 the problem of religious teaching in schools is 
 not a mere petty squabbling of rival sects to 
 have their peculiar ecclesiastical and theological 
 ideas instilled into the children, so as to secure 
 the predominance of their own faction, but is 
 at bottom the clash of irreconcilable ideals as 
 to the whole aim and scope of the educational 
 process. 
 
 Now, the Church has her own theory of educa- 
 tion, which she must assert, maintain, and fight 
 for to the end. The Church holds that the 
 Christian theory of life lies at the basis of all 
 right living ; that education is the development 
 of the whole man in all the complexity of his 
 powers ; that this development, if it is to secure 
 
THE CHUECH IN MODERN LIFE 283 
 
 that harmony which will make life a unity, 
 must be ethical throughout ; that the special 
 ethos which is to be cultivated is that of which 
 the Cross is the symbol and the Christian Creed 
 the intellectual postulate. This aim is not to be 
 effected merely by setting apart a portion of the 
 school-day for instruction in Scripture history 
 or in Christian doctrine. Religious training is 
 an influence that must permeate the whole 
 system of education from bottom to top. It is 
 a continual working towards Christian ideals, 
 a daily appeal to Christian sanctions. Not that 
 these ideals and sanctions are always to be con- 
 sciously or ever obtrusively set forth, but that 
 they are to be the implicit standards by which 
 life values are to be judged and intellectual 
 acquirements directed to practical uses. 
 
 Opposed to this theory is the idea that ethics 
 and religion have no necessary connection. 
 Ethical instruction must be conveyed on a 
 strictly non-theological basis. It is not merely 
 that the diversity of rehgious opinions in a 
 nation makes this necessary in all schools of a 
 public character, but in itself it is highly desir- 
 able. To indoctrinate children with religious 
 dogmas is merely to confuse the infant mind 
 with metaphysical subtleties that obscure 
 practical moral issues. Let the primary moral 
 
284 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 distinctions and the virtues and graces of life 
 be taught to the children in school by precept 
 and example, and leave it to the parents to give 
 them what religious or non-religious direction 
 they may see fit. 
 
 Now, it must be confessed that any reaction 
 against religious teaching in schools has some 
 basis in reason. Religious instruction has not 
 always been wisely given. To store the mind 
 of the growing boy or girl with an elaborate 
 compendium of Calvinistic or any other theology, 
 as has been done in the past, is not sound 
 religious training. No doubt this method did 
 not do so much harm as is often supposed, and 
 in very many cases produced excellent results. 
 The reason is simple enough. The compendium 
 was universally accepted in the child's environ- 
 ments as a true theory of the universe. The 
 child absorbed only so much of it as his moral 
 and intellectual digestion could assimilate, and 
 the rest glided harmlessly from the soul. The 
 important point is that it did not bring the 
 child into dissonance with his environments. It 
 did not raise within his mind unanswerable 
 questions or introduce him into a realm of con- 
 troversy calculated to shake the foundations of 
 his religious belief. We must now, however, 
 recognise that the intellectual atmosphere has 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 285 
 
 changed, and that the methods of past genera- 
 tions wiU not suit the present emergency. To 
 attempt to teach a system that cannot be taught 
 whole-heartedly and with a distinct apprecia- 
 tion of its details, is to put ourselves out of the 
 trend of the best modern educational methods 
 and can result only in failure. Religious train- 
 ing does not mean a rigorous grounding in 
 points of controversial divinity. 
 
 In religious teaching our methods must be as 
 well thought-out and scientific as in any other 
 aspect of education. Religion must come to 
 the child as it came to the race. The Christian 
 revelation must appeal to the soul as it did in 
 the history of the infant Church. At a very 
 early stage of his development the child realises 
 that his outstretched arm cannot grasp the 
 moon. He cries bitterly at the consciousness 
 of his own impotence. The awe and wonder 
 of the universe have fallen upon him, and when 
 he is told of God, God is as real and concrete 
 a Personality as his own mother. Moreover, 
 the relation that subsists between him and God 
 does not come to him as a metaphysical subtlety. 
 It comes to him as a story — a true story, the 
 various incidents of which rise concretely before 
 his mind. The story is told by those who 
 believe it, by those who are conscious of its 
 
286 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 truth. It becomes an integral part of his 
 essential being, it covers his whole outlook upon 
 the universe. As intelligence grows and the 
 moral sense develops, the implications of the 
 story of Jesus unfold themselves, the vague 
 instinctive distinction between right and wrong 
 is filled with definite content, the Gospel ethos 
 becomes an outward standard and an inner 
 compulsion, unfolding in the child that implicit 
 ideal of his life with which, in a purposeful 
 world, he has been created. But the ethos is 
 inseparably entwined round its sanction. His 
 innate rationality responds to it. If he has been 
 thus made, and his relation to the Eternal 
 Father is as he has been taught, then there is 
 a life he ought to live, and if he refuses to live 
 it he is a rebel against his Maker, he is an 
 undutiful son, he is defeating the purpose of 
 his existence. 
 
 Now, any attempt at a non-theological treat- 
 ment of ethics to a child who has been thus 
 religiously trained must introduce into the 
 child's mind that very confusion which the 
 non - theological instructor deprecates. His 
 teacher changes the sanction to the personal, 
 or the civic, for a mere list of unconnected 
 duties without any sanction is meaningless. 
 All true teaching is simply answering the child's 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 287 
 
 questions, telling him the "why" of things. 
 If the personal or civic sanction grows out 
 of the religious sanction, all is well. Our 
 teaching is rooted in reality. We are merely 
 showing the child that what Jesus has told him 
 to do is in accordance with the nature of things 
 and corresponds with the facts of life. But 
 in a non-theological system, if it is to satisfy 
 all parties having an interest, the theological 
 sanction must be superseded. The non-religious 
 parent will not allow the teacher to appeal 
 to the Cross, if by the Cross is meant what 
 the religiously instructed child has in his mind, 
 while the religious parent will, distinctly and 
 properly, put his veto on any ethical teaching 
 that would make Jesus only one of the martyrs 
 of humanity. The ethical teacher, then, in any 
 school where Christian theology is not allowed 
 to enter, must discard the Christian religion 
 altogether. He cannot teach the Christian 
 ethos, which is saturated with theology. His 
 ethos must either be of the most conventional 
 type or must spring from some naturalistic 
 sanction which may lead far away from the 
 ethos of the Gospel.* 
 
 Now, this is just what the Church, if she is 
 to be true to her mission, cannot permit. She 
 * The experience of France is instructive on this point. 
 
288 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 must retain her hold upon the education of 
 the young. And no one who watches the signs 
 of the times can question that in the near 
 future she will have to fight very hard for 
 her inherent rights. The varieties of religious 
 opinion among men, the perpetual rivalries and 
 disputes among Christian sects on this matter 
 of education, and the indifference of large 
 numbers of lukewarm Christian people to the 
 true inwardness of the issue at stake, are 
 strengthening the hands of an already strong 
 party, who demand that all national education 
 shall be secular. No Churchman who under- 
 stands his position can contemplate such a 
 result with complacency. Even in the interests 
 of education, in the lower sense of the term, 
 it would be disastrous. For it can scarcely be 
 doubted that a wise religious teaching forms 
 a basis of culture and conscientiousness pecu- 
 liarly favourable to the training of faculty and 
 the acquisition of knowledge. 
 
 Here, then, is the sphere and the opportunity 
 of the Church. Let me be clearly understood. 
 The Church is not called merely to make con- 
 tinual futile efforts to maintain the status quo, 
 to stem the flowing tide, and to sink into com- 
 placent acquiescence when she is submerged. 
 The Church must rise to the idea that we are 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 289 
 
 at a critical period in the history of education, 
 and must do her thinking on the same high 
 level as those educational experts who are 
 confronting the present situation. It is the 
 conception of the meaning of education that 
 is just now in the melting-pot. The whole 
 problem is being discussed with the keenest 
 interest and the most marked ability. Old 
 methods of stimulating faculty, inculcating 
 principles, inspiring energy, and acquiring 
 knowledge are being discarded for new. The 
 physical basis of intelligence is the subject of 
 much anxious thought, and the hygienic 
 development of the child is recognised as 
 falling within the educational sphere. The 
 ethical element is admitted to be indispensable. 
 And in the general reconstruction of our 
 educational system the Church must see that 
 she is in no wise left out. Her interest in the 
 question is paramount, for it is inherent in 
 her Creed and constitution that she alone can 
 train the human organism along the lines 
 that develop the perfect man. The problem 
 before her, no doubt, is a difficult one, for in 
 the complexity of raodern affairs she must 
 secure a right co-ordination of all her forces 
 and determine the relation that is to subsist 
 between Church and school. It is for this 
 
 Problem of Theology 20 
 
290 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 reason that the call for union is growing every 
 day more imperative. It is simply disastrous 
 that the all-important subject of the religious 
 and moral training of the young in our national 
 schools should be matter of acrimonious dis- 
 cussion and fierce partisan rivalry. All who 
 believe in the fundamental doctrines of the 
 Ciiristian religion, and who hold, moreover, 
 that the teaching of ethics can never be divorced 
 from religion, and that no teaching that is not 
 truly ethical is worth the name, should unite 
 as one man to settle the lines along which that 
 teaching is to be conveyed, to determine the 
 methods by which it is to be imparted, and 
 to secure for their own children that large, sane 
 development of body, soul, and spirit which is 
 the Christian ideal. I am far from under- 
 valuing the great work the Church is actually 
 doing in all her branches for the religious 
 teaching of children. But who that knows the 
 amount of thought and energy and money that 
 is being expended on every other aspect of 
 the educational problem will venture to say 
 that we are tackling our part of it with suffi- 
 cient seriousness or with a full realisation of 
 its importance? 
 
 The relation of the Church to the vast chronic 
 mass of dire poverty that disgraces our civilisa- 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 291 
 
 tion, to the multitudes who are either trembling 
 on the verge of the poverty line or sinking 
 below it to swell the rising ferment of paupers, 
 incapables, and criminals, is a problem of 
 great complexity which the Church must reso- 
 lutely face. I am fully aware of the marvellous 
 quickening of the conscience of the Church 
 within recent years as to her direct responsi- 
 bility for the terrible evils of chronic poverty 
 and the degradation of slumdom. I speak not 
 from the outside, but from the inside of the 
 problem, and with an intimate knowledge of 
 all the various agencies that are zealously 
 working in this field. And it is from a large 
 experience that I deliberately record my con- 
 viction that the problem is insoluble by State 
 action alone, and that it is equally insoluble 
 by the haphazard methods and ignorant 
 enthusiasms of the rival philanthropic and 
 ecclesiastical associations that are at present 
 devoting so much energy and self-denying 
 labours to remove this incubus from the 
 national conscience. 
 
 It is an ethical problem and can, therefore, 
 only be solved by the Church. I do not mean 
 by the Church as we know it to-day — a number 
 of warring sects, each striving for its own 
 ascendancy and for the humiliation of its rivals. 
 
292 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 I mean a Church as we might well have it, 
 based on a definite creed which safeguards the 
 fundamental ideas of Christendom, but allows 
 a large toleration for differences of religious 
 temperament and a wide elasticity as to 
 practical methods. Only by such a Church 
 could the necessary unity of action be secured 
 and a complex, but thoroughly organised 
 machinery be elaborated. 
 
 It is not an ethical problem alone. It is an 
 economic problem. This is an admission of 
 the first importance made by the social experts 
 who are responsible for the Report of the 
 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws. Destitu- 
 tion is not always the fault even of an able- 
 bodied workman. It is not always possible 
 for the man who is able and willing to work 
 to secure employment. It ought to be. Leaving 
 all theories out of account as to the limita- 
 tions under which the right to work is to be 
 admitted, the abstract principle is part of our 
 religious faith. If he that will not work is 
 not to be permitted to eat, a Christian State 
 must furnish to every man the means of vin- 
 dicating his existence and his manhood. 
 
 Because the problem is both ethical and 
 economic we can only approach its solution 
 through the harmonious eo-working of Church 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 293 
 
 and State, It is for the State wisely to remove 
 all insurmountable obstacles that hinder the 
 development of the individual and to free the 
 field from the intractable material with which 
 the Church by her ethical methods finds it 
 impossible to deal. In other words, wherever 
 the element of compulsion is required in dealing 
 with men the State finds its natural sphere. 
 Where it is necessary to enforce an ethical 
 standard in eoonomic or industrial methods 
 corresponding to the general conscience of the 
 nation, the State steps in and by legislation 
 brings the laggards up to the line. Or where, 
 again, it is needful for the common good to 
 deprive certain individuals of the liberty of 
 preying upon society, the State asserts its 
 function. But when the task is to deliver nien 
 from the tyranny of sin, from the enslavement 
 of an evil will, to ethicise them up to their 
 opportunities and possibilities of right action, 
 this can only be done by the exercise of that 
 spiritual power of which the Church is or 
 ought to be the custodian. 
 
 The admitted failure of our Poor Law system 
 is the result of the lack of a clear perception 
 of the ethical and economic principles involved 
 in the problem. That system is based on sound 
 theoretic economic reasoning. It goes upon the 
 
294 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 principle that you must not make the condition 
 of the recipient of relief more favourable than 
 that of the lowest and worst paid independent 
 worker. It is frankly recognised that if you 
 do, then you will have the whole body of the 
 labouring class upon the rates, and a burden 
 laid upon the nation it would be impossible to 
 bear. It is to be noticed that the recipient 
 of relief is here treated as a thing — a will-less 
 creature — without the slightest spark of ambi- 
 tion to rise above the mere maintenance of 
 existence upon the lowest possible terms. He 
 is impinged upon merely by natural forces. 
 The element of charity — even of assistance — 
 is wholly eliminated. Public relief is so sur- 
 rounded with deterrents that only the starving 
 can storm its citadel. 
 
 Still, the principle might have effected some- 
 thing in squeezing up a desperate energy to 
 maintain one's independence rather than accept 
 help on humiliating conditions, had it been 
 possible accurately to apply it. But as the 
 worst-paid labour is already down to a mere 
 subsistence wage, or even lower, you cannot 
 reduce the pauper further without sending 
 him out of existence altogether. When you 
 really take him in hand and feed him up to 
 a standard that will satisfy medical require- 
 
THE CHUECH IN MODERN LIFE 295 
 
 ments, you find you are maintaining him 
 at a rate higher than the average wage of 
 a labourer can afford for the maintenance 
 of himself, his wife, and family. If, then, 
 the standard of maintenance be that of 
 physical efficiency, there are far more possible 
 applicants for poor relief than are or can be 
 relieved. As it is only something below the 
 worst paid labourer the relief is never efficient, 
 except in cases where daily contact and medical 
 supervision secure a higher level. Poor relief, 
 therefore, becomes a dole to be supplemented 
 from the outside, to be fought for, by the 
 surging mass of destitute, vicious, and degraded 
 creatures who form the residuum of our popula- 
 tion, in a dreary struggle whose tendency is to 
 deteriorate all who have to engage in it and 
 to make it extremely difficult for those who 
 are legitimate objects of State relief to receive 
 the consideration that is their due. 
 
 Thus the Poor Law never really did tackle 
 the problem of poverty. By making destitu- 
 tion the condition of relief, it was precluded 
 from assisting those who are merely drifting 
 to destitution and who by wise and timely 
 assistance could be prevented from sinking to 
 this last extreme. This phase of poverty has 
 always been left for voluntary charity to aid, 
 
296 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 Now, the Poor Law had at least one merit. 
 It had distinctive principles which it sought 
 to carry out. It was alive to the economic 
 disturbance that might be caused by a lavish 
 and indiscriminate subsidy to those who 
 depended for their maintenance on the lowest 
 form of manual labour. But voluntary charity 
 was purely emotional. The heart was melted 
 at the sight of misery and poured forth its 
 largesse without thinking what the after- 
 results would be. And, further, the State 
 having taken over the care of the destitute, 
 the national conscience was so far soothed 
 that the best minds in the Church deemed it 
 no longer necessary to give that close and 
 accurate attention to the economics of charity 
 which, in other circumstances, would have been 
 forced upon them. The prevalent idea in the 
 minds of most men up till quite recently was 
 that our Poor Law system was dealing with 
 poverty in a quite effectual manner, and that 
 any decrease in the statistics of pauperism 
 was a sign of increasing prosperity among 
 the class from which paupers were recruited. 
 No doubt charity was needed to supplement 
 the work of regular relief, to provide addi- 
 tional comforts for deserving cases, and to 
 tide those over temporary difficulties who 
 
THE CHUECH IN MODEEN LIFE 297 
 
 needed an assistance that could not come 
 from the rates. And the charity was always 
 forthcoming. Every Church had its system 
 of doles. New institutions rose to administer 
 charitable funds. New methods of relieving 
 poverty found ardent supporters. Large lega- 
 cies were left by pious and philanthropic indi- 
 viduals for special classes in whose straitened 
 circumstances they were interested. All the 
 poorer districts in our great cities were covered 
 with a perfect network of religious and charit- 
 able agencies, whose workers were tireless in 
 their efforts to stem the still flowing tide of 
 poverty and degradation. 
 
 And yet a still flowing tide it is. This vast 
 mass of degraded life is still with us. The 
 weary struggle for bread goes on as before. 
 The impression made upon the loathsome 
 abodes of poverty, squalor, drunkenness, and 
 vice seems scarcely visible to the ordinary 
 vision. I would not be understood to say that 
 the vast amount of Christian love and energy 
 that have been devoted to the problems of 
 slumdom have been wasted, or that the money 
 spent in charity has not, in many individual 
 cases, produced an amelioration of the condi- 
 tions of life among the poor. Far from it. 
 No one who has worked among the very poor 
 
298 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 has failed of his reward in seeing sad lives 
 brightened, evildoers turned from the ways of 
 sin, children rescued from degrading environ- 
 ments, and in securing a personal loyalty and 
 gratitude far beyond anything his labours have 
 merited. Nay, further, it is largely through 
 the efforts of the devoted men and women of 
 high moral tone and intellectual calibre who, 
 in recent years, have given their lives to the 
 service of the poor that their cause is winning 
 that recognition and support which is full of 
 hope for the future. But, making all allow- 
 ances, when we look at the problem in the 
 mass and think of the huddled misery of our 
 congested areas, we must admit that all that 
 has yet been done has been merely to gain 
 some understanding of the facts and also of 
 the methods through which the problem will 
 never be solved. 
 
 The economic method has failed completely. 
 You cannot abolish poverty by simply making 
 it a degrading thing to accept public relief, 
 and forcing men, in order to retain their 
 self-respect, to put forth all their energy to 
 secure an independent existence. 
 
 The method of voluntary charity has failed 
 quite as conspicuously. You cannot cure the 
 evils of poverty by pious and well-m,eant 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 299 
 
 platitudes, and by letting loose upon an 
 already demoralised population a number of 
 well-intentioned philanthropists and religious 
 enthusiasts to stop the gaping wounds of the 
 social system by a steady flow of gold. 
 
 If any real, permanent good is to be effected, 
 the two forces — religious and economic — must 
 work together in the most perfect harmony. 
 Church and State must effectually combine 
 and must be perfectly sure of each other's 
 sphere. It is for the Church to bring to 
 bear upon the individual a steady pressure 
 of moral influence that will enable him to 
 make the very best of his position, that will 
 force him to an assertion of his manhood 
 by an inner and not an outer compulsion. 
 So long as the problem is ethical the Church 
 must take it up. In the struggle of the 
 individual to maintain a sound economic foot- 
 ing in the industrial sphere, or to regain this 
 footing when it has been lost, the Church must 
 step in with continual sympathy, with an ever 
 ready and gracious help. The saddest feature 
 of our modern religious life is that it is 
 just here the Church most conspicuously fails — 
 that it is doing least for those who, in unto- 
 ward circumstances, are doing their very best 
 for themselves, that it is undoubtedly most in 
 
300 THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF 
 
 evidence among the moderately well-to-do, and 
 in its futile missions among the very poor. 
 It is not only that the Church should help thfe 
 struggling poor by sympathy and advice, and 
 by bringing them under a spiritual influence 
 that will idealise their lives and inspire their 
 hearts with courage, but all agencies and 
 institutions that are of a preventive, restora- 
 tive, or remedial nature should be part of 
 the Church's organisation. Wherever the 
 appeal is to a man's higher nature and to 
 that alone, it is the voice of Jesus that is 
 to be heard ; and whatever institutions are 
 purely and directly the outcome of the reli- 
 gious spirit can only attain to their full 
 efficiency if they are under the control of 
 that divine instrument which He has ordained 
 for the world's salvation. If this were so, the 
 Church would be continually face to face with 
 her real work, and would be forced to study 
 those social environments which determine the 
 influences that so largely mould character 
 and ennoble or deteriorate the spiritual life. 
 Her students, passing through such an 
 economic and psychological discipline, would 
 approach the problem of theology from within 
 and make it once more a living science. 
 And the State comes in either where legis- 
 
THE CHURCH IN MODERN LIFE 301 
 
 lation is required to ease the pressure of 
 hard economic forces or to detain by com- 
 pulsion those who will not submit to any- 
 remedial process. We are far from the days 
 when economic tendencies were supposed to 
 be beneficent natural laws, which, if only 
 acquiesced in, would work out a material 
 tei'restrial paradise. We recognise now that 
 they are often baneful forces, springing from 
 the natural selfishness of the human heart, 
 whose evil efPects it is the duty of a wise 
 statesmanship to counteract. But they can 
 only be counteracted by understanding them, 
 and setting into operation other forces which 
 will track them to their subtlest lair and by 
 a natural process destroy their power to hurt. 
 The legislation of past years has been very 
 largely destructive. It has been engaged in 
 removing old restraints, many of them use- 
 ful in their day and generation, which had 
 become too narrow to confine the full- 
 throbbing vitality of a new era. Legislation 
 is becoming more and more constructive, 
 building up a new fabric of society which 
 shall correspond to modern needs. We look 
 to the State now for enactments that shall 
 soften the struggle for bare existence, shall 
 give the soul room to breathe, and space for 
 
302 SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 the Church to exercise its idealising force. 
 We look to the State to reduce temptations 
 to drunkenness and vice, which is all it ever 
 can do, for only the Church can attack at 
 its source the corrupt human heart from 
 which these evils spring. We look to the 
 State to exercise a wise compulsion in restrain- 
 ing those whose liberty is lawlessness and 
 putting them under a rational discipline which 
 will make their lives not wholly useless and 
 corrupting. We look to the State to decree 
 righteousness and execute justice, to secure 
 for each his own, to furnish a broad, un- 
 hampered field for the growth of the virtues 
 and graces of human life. 
 
 Such, then, are the respective spheres of 
 Church and State in the pressing social 
 problems of the present hour. The Church 
 is living in a critical time and has before 
 her a complex and difficult task. Will she 
 recognise the day of her visitation, rise, as 
 she has done before, in her God-given strength 
 and prove her adequacy for the burden God 
 has laid upon her ? Undoubtedly the signs 
 are hopeful, but only the future can tell 
 whether she has grasped the true nature of 
 her problem. 
 
NOTES 
 
NOTES 
 
 NOTE A 
 
 {Page 15) 
 The Intuition of God 
 
 I HOLD with Schleiermacher that " if man does not 
 become one with the Eternal in the immediate 
 unity of his intuitive feelings, he remains for ever 
 separated from it in the derived unity of conscious- 
 ness." Professor Flint's " Theism " is the ablest modern 
 statement of the theistic argument on the old scholas- 
 tic lines. He repudiates the idea of intuition being 
 the source of our knowledge of God, and seems to 
 hold that a true knowledge of God can only be reached 
 by a consideration of the cumulative effect of the 
 arguments adduced in favour of the divine existence. 
 But Professor Flint cannot maintain that no man can 
 rationally believe in God till he has mastered the 
 contents of his Theism. Nor does he. "The great 
 idea of God — the most sublime and important of all 
 ideas — has come to us in a wondrous manner through 
 the' minds and hearts of countless generations which it 
 has exercised and sustained, which it has guided in 
 
 Problem of Theology 21 305 
 
306 NOTES 
 
 darkness, strengthened in danger, and consoled in 
 affliction." The idea of God comes therefore to 
 the soul, and is accepted by the soul, before argu- 
 ment is ever thought of. It is accepted unques- 
 tioningly and is lived through empirically. It is 
 even in its dim dawning an immediate apprehension, a 
 revelation, the content of which is enlarged by contact 
 with other souls and by the record of the experiences 
 of great religious natures. An argument whose con- 
 clusion comes before its premisses is a somewhat 
 singular one. The place of argument here is not to 
 prove the objective reality of God, but to vindicate the 
 rationality of our immediate apprehension of Him. The 
 theistic argument is quite sufficient to demonstrate 
 that the conception of God is a profoundly rational 
 one, but it can never advance from the rational to the 
 real. The idea of God comes first in the immediacy of 
 the soul's unity with the Eternal, which gives it a 
 reality as undoubted as that of the Ego itself. It is 
 the province of reasoning to evolve the content of this 
 conception. 
 
 NOTE B 
 
 {Page 16) 
 
 The Cumulative Argument 
 
 It is maintained that though no single line of 
 argumentation can absolutely prove the existence of 
 God, yet the effect of all the various arguments con- 
 verging to the same point is to reach a conclusion that 
 ought to be practically convincing to every rational 
 
NOTES 307 
 
 mind. But this line of reasoning overlooks a peculi- 
 arity in the theistic proof. Pascal long ago pointed 
 out that "All the principles of sceptics, stoics, and 
 atheists are true, but their conclusions are false, be- 
 cause the opposite principles are also true." We simply 
 land ourselves in unresolvable antinomies when we 
 attempt to reach transcendental conclusions by merely 
 rationalistic processes. The cumulative argument 
 works both ways. If you marshal all the con- 
 siderations that make it extremely probable that the 
 universe is the creation of a self-existing Being who 
 thinks, and feels, and wills, you undoubtedly present a 
 strong case. But if, on the other hand, you elaborate 
 the evidence that tells against this position, your 
 case is also very strong. You are on the horns of a 
 dilemma from which there is no rational escape. The 
 religious man makes what Newman calls the " venture 
 of faith." He takes the risk of believing, just as 
 the sceptic takes the risk of disbelieving. But to 
 the innate rationality of the human mind this is 
 always a most unsatisfactory position. When we 
 frankly recognise that God is a conception given in 
 consciousness, however rudimentary the conception 
 may be, then the weight of the scale is thrown so 
 decidedly on the one side that we cannot evade the 
 result. Neither in doing so are we acting irrationally. 
 We are only doing what in all other departments of 
 life and thought we cannot help doing — making our 
 most deeply rooted instincts the starting-point for life's 
 activity. By intuition in this connection is not meant 
 a mere feeling that has no intellectual element in it. 
 Intuition of the Infinite and Eternal is an intellectual 
 act, but it is the intellectual act by which we appre- 
 
308 NOTES 
 
 bend axioms, not the syllogistic process by wbicb we 
 reason from them. 
 
 NOTE C 
 
 {Page 20) 
 
 " God in the Making " 
 
 IngersoU's flippant parody on Pope and Burns, " An 
 honest God's the noblest work of man," puts this 
 theory tersely. It will not bear thinking out. It may 
 as well be said that the scientific knowledge of men in 
 its gradual development has created the marvellous 
 forces of nature, as that the evolution of the religious 
 consciousness has created God. Knowledge can only 
 be of what is. Knowledge and reality are not ad- 
 vancing pari passu. 
 
 NOTE D 
 
 {Page 55) 
 
 The Catholic Church 
 
 This is the theory of the Catholic Church main- 
 tained by the best theologians of the Church of Rome. 
 " Lastly comes the Authority of the Christian Church, 
 which, resting upon the revelations of conscience and 
 its development by Christ, may fairly be held to 
 embody the highest spiritual perceptions known to 
 
NOTES 309 
 
 man. And not only so, but it iB the custodian of the 
 conceptions elaborated by Christian theologians from 
 conscience and revelation. Thus it contains at once 
 the highest intuitions and the most comprehensive 
 conceptions of Christendom, while the blending of 
 spiritual perception and rational analysis is secured 
 by the rulers who preserve the organic unity of the 
 Church, protect the revelation from rationalistic 
 assaults, and seek to keep theology spiritual as well as 
 rational." — See " The Philosophical Basis of Reli- 
 gion," by John Watson, LL.D., p. 27. 
 
 NOTE E 
 
 {Page 81) 
 
 Haknack and the Abbe Loisy 
 
 The criticism of Harnack's "Wesen des Christen- 
 thums " by the Abbe Loisy in his " Gospel and the 
 Church " is incisive and convincing. Harnack's 
 method is fundamentally wrong. If we wish truly to 
 understand Jesus, it will not do to consider merely 
 what He thought of Himself or to detach His sayings 
 from their effect upon His environment. It is of even 
 more importance to consider what His disciples 
 thought of Him, what the whole result of His Per- 
 sonality was upon the generation to which He appealed. 
 The Abbe Loisy says, " Herr Harnack does not conceive 
 Christianity as a seed, at first a plant in potentiality, 
 then a real plant, identical from the beginning of its 
 evolution to the final limit and from the root to the 
 
310 NOTES 
 
 summit of the stem, but as a fruit, ripe, or rather over- 
 ripe, that must be peeled to reach the incorruptible kernel, 
 andHerr Harnack peels his fruit with such perseverance, 
 that the question rises if anything will remain at the end. 
 This method of dismembering a subject does not be- 
 long to history, which is a science of observation of 
 the living, not of dissection of the dead. Historical 
 analysis notices and distinguishes, it does not destroy 
 what it touches, nor think all movement digression, 
 and all growth deformity." * Contrast with this 
 Harnack's own words : " The conservative position of 
 Jesus towards the religious traditions of His people 
 had the necessary result, that His preaching and His 
 Person were placed by believers in the framework of 
 this tradition, which was thereby very soon greatly 
 expanded. But though this way of understanding the 
 Gospel was certainly at first the only possible way, 
 and though the Gospel itself could only be preserved 
 by such means, yet it cannot be mistaken that a dis- 
 placement in the conception of the Person and preach- 
 ing of Jesus, and a burdening of religious faith, could 
 not but forthwith set in, from which developments 
 followed, the premisses of which would be vainly 
 sought for in the words of the Lord." t If we trans- 
 late this into simple language, it means that the 
 Christian religion survived because the disciples of 
 Jesus misunderstood Him from the beginning. Nay, 
 further, this is the only possible way in which it could 
 have survived. The stem and fruit of the plant have 
 no relation to the seed. If we wish to understand 
 
 * " The Gospel and the Church," p. 19. 
 
 t Harnack, "History of Dogma," vol. i., p. 73. (Theological 
 Translation Library.) 
 
NOTES 311 
 
 what the seed contained, the best way is to dig down 
 to the roots and try to reconstruct it from the decaying 
 and useless matter it has thrown off. Surely this is 
 a curiously unscientific method of studying vital 
 historical movements. Science, what illogicalities 
 have been committed in thy name ! 
 
 NOTE F 
 
 {Page 85) 
 
 The Value of Religious Experience 
 
 The totality of spiritual experience is not gained by 
 a numerical reckoning of the adherents of any special 
 faith. From the point of view indicated in these 
 pages quality is of much more importance than 
 quantity in determining the nature of the objective 
 reality to which spiritual experience testifies. I am 
 obliged to take for granted that Christian experience in 
 its profoundest and most characteristic phases is the 
 experience most in consonance with the spiritual con- 
 stitution of the universe. I am forced to do so 
 because, living under Christian influences, I must make 
 Christian experience my starting-point. But the fact 
 that Jesus is accorded a clear pre-eminence as a 
 spiritual teacher by so wide a range of concurrent 
 testimony strengthens my belief that I am on the right 
 lines in making Him the norm by which to judge of 
 other teachers and to test the experience of those who 
 have not fallen under His direct personal influence. 
 
312 NOTES 
 
 NOTE G 
 
 {Page 96) 
 
 Professor Jambs 
 
 Professor James does not take us any further. He 
 sees very clearly that it is only the positive religious 
 belief that produces religious phenomena. Comment- 
 ing on the words from a religious paper — " Perhaps 
 the best thing we can say of God is that He is the 
 inevitable inference " — he says very truly, " Would 
 martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, 
 however inevitable it might be ? " Yet, summing up 
 the results of his induction from the widest possible 
 range of religious experiences, all he can say is this: — 
 " Disregarding the overbelief s, and confining ourselves 
 to what is common and generic, we have in the fact 
 that the conscious person is continuous with a wider 
 self through which saving experiences come, a positive 
 content of religious experience which, it seems to me, 
 is literally and objectively true as far as it goes^ This 
 is a very large admission, and a scientific analysis of it 
 is bound to lead us very far. It is simply incompre- 
 hensible that, as the phenomena of religious experience 
 are only produced by definite and concrete religious 
 beliefs, it should be for ever impossible to get any 
 more than the very vaguest knowledge of the super- 
 sensible Reality. Granted that spiritual truth may 
 often be clothed with material illusion, that form of 
 truth which produces the highest and most ideal life 
 
NOTES 313 
 
 must in its concreteness be nearest to the Absolute 
 Truth. 
 
 NOTE H 
 
 {Page 135) 
 
 Westminster Confession on the Church 
 
 The Westminster Confession of Faith maintains 
 the doctrine of a Visible Catholic Church, but its 
 definition is so loose as to make it of little practical 
 value. " The Visible Church, which is also Catholic 
 or universal under the Gospel (not confined to one 
 nation as before under the Law), consists of all those 
 throughout the world that profess the true religion, 
 together with their children, and is the kingdom of 
 the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, 
 out of which there is no ordinary possibility of 
 salvation." If we take " the true religion " to mean 
 the Confession of Faith and the Presbyterian polity, 
 this definition is certainly narrow and definite enough, 
 and probably in this sense it was originally intended. 
 But the impossibility of holding such a doctrine has 
 resulted, in those modern Churches that still maintain 
 the Confession as their Creed, in a gradual falling 
 away from the Church ideal and resting upon the 
 conception of an Invisible Church — a conception 
 which, in its larger sense, is common to all Christian 
 Churches. 
 
314 NOTES 
 
 NOTE I 
 
 {Page 179) 
 
 The Relation between Ethics and Dogmatics 
 
 No doubt there is no fundamental difference be- 
 tween the position of Newman Smyth and that here 
 maintained. It is a difference of emphasis. " In 
 the Gospels we observe that the teaching of Jesus 
 is ethical and religious rather than metaphysical and 
 theological. His teaching involves, it is true, a divine 
 metaphysics, but it is directly ethical and religious 
 rather than theological or systematic. Dogmas may 
 logically be derived from many of Jesus's words ; but 
 immediately, as He spake them, they were spirit and 
 they were life. ... It is to be noticed that the more 
 distinctively theological truths, such as the Lord's 
 unique relation to the Father, and man's relations to 
 God and knowledge of Him, are approached in Jesus' 
 teaching on the moral rather than the metaphysical 
 side, are expressed in the language of moral experience 
 and measured in terms of ethical value." Through all 
 this method of treating the subject there is an implicit 
 idea that you can approach the metaphysic of Christian- 
 ity otherwise than through the moral element, that the 
 two parts of Christian teaching can be disjoined. It is 
 this divorce between dogmatics and ethics that has 
 proved disastrous to the former and has weakened the 
 sanction of the latter. It has begotten in the minds of 
 many Christian people an idea that belief is a matter 
 of little consequence in the formation of character, 
 that religious belief and right conduct have no neces- 
 
NOTES 315 
 
 sary connection. And it has further weakened the 
 intellectual hold of many upon Christian doctrine by 
 failing to present to them sufficiently strongly thte 
 ethical value of Christian conceptions. 
 
 NOTE J 
 
 {Page 180) 
 
 Hedonism 
 
 It is impossible to put it more clearly and tersely 
 than in the immortal lines of Burns : — 
 
 Kings may be blefit, but Tarn was glorious, 
 O'er a' the ills o' life victorious I 
 
 For the moment the " summum bonum " was his. 
 He had overcome the world. He had reached the 
 apex of existence. 
 
 NOTE K 
 
 {Page 243) 
 
 The Chuech in the Middle Ages 
 
 " No inquiry into the economical history of England 
 would be complete which did not give some account of 
 the clergy. During a long time they were the most 
 powerful factors in the progress of civilisation, were 
 the principal instruments by which the very memory 
 of ancient literature was preserved, and some of its 
 
316 NOTES 
 
 relics treasured ; were the only historians of the age, 
 the only educators of the people, the only refuge from 
 tyranny and violence, the asylum of the past, the hope 
 of the future. At one time the national and secular 
 clergy performed, to the best of their power, these high 
 functions ; at another time, the protection of society 
 becomes the business of monasteries, though often 
 unconsciously ; at another, the Papacy is the ark of 
 refuge ; at another, the hierarchy of different European 
 States was compelled to save the Corporate Church from 
 the ambition, the vices, the incapacity of its chief ; at 
 another, the authors of schisms within the order were 
 the agents in working out the higher destinies of man- 
 kind. As they preserved the relics of culture, of order, 
 of law, of obedience to a common purpose ; as they main- 
 tained a bold front against the degrading and debasing 
 selfishness of a turbulent aristocracy, the common foe of 
 the administration, of trade, of religion, of morality, of 
 every national and every private interest, so they were 
 the principal cause why England became thoroughly 
 settled and occupied, that agriculture was safely and, 
 for the times, successfully carried on, and that the 
 husbandman was not utterly trodden down and im- 
 poverished." — Thorold Rogers, " Six Centuries of Work 
 and Wages," chap. xiii. Thorold Rogers has no par- 
 ticular bias in favour of the clergy, and in many cases 
 is distinctly unfair to the Church, but the statements 
 he makes here are incontrovertible. The Church was 
 the soul of feudalism, which, apart from her influence 
 tended to become an insupportable tyranny. The work 
 of the Church in mediaeval times was to enforce the 
 responsibility of power, and in her best days she suc- 
 ceeded fairly well. 
 
NOTES 317 
 
 NOTE L 
 
 {Page 253) 
 
 The Franciscans 
 
 " The Franciscan is the missionary of the town ; he 
 has nothing whatever to do with the country. He 
 belongs to the rising community of the town. He is 
 their representative in many particulars as well as their 
 teacher. Like them he assumes different characters ; 
 he appears under different forms, unlike the monk, 
 who is stable and uniform. If he departs from the 
 primitive institution of his founder it is so because 
 he is raised with the population among whom his 
 lot is cast. With their wealth he must in some 
 measure grow wealthy also. Still he is the poor 
 missionary preaching to the poor, dependent entirely 
 upon their sympathies, disappearing when those 
 sympathies are withdrawn. Never a landowner, 
 never so far removed from his primitive condition 
 as to cease to be a mendicant. Out of this depen- 
 dence sprung his strength and his errors. He is the 
 genuine product of the voluntary system." — "Monu- 
 menta Franciscana " (Eolls Series), edited by J. G. 
 Brewer, M.A., vol. i., p. xix. 
 
 NOTE M 
 
 {Page 279) 
 
 What Scotland owes to the Chukch 
 
 There is nothing more striking than to contrast the 
 state of Scotland at the time of the Union of the Parlia- 
 
318 NOTES 
 
 ments in 1707 and its condition in the latter part of 
 the century, and to trace the forces that were at 
 work producing the marvellous change. So far as 
 the material condition of the people was concerned, 
 Fletcher of Saltoun considered that the best thing 
 that could be done for two hundred thousand out of 
 a population of less than a million would be to reduce 
 them to slavery, as only thus could they be reclaimed 
 from a condition of primitive savagery and maintained 
 at a standard of physical efficiency. Even among the 
 rest of the people the poverty was appalling. The 
 country had emerged from a century and a half of 
 incessant strife and misgovernment and was bleeding 
 at every pore. The intellectual barrenness of the land 
 was no less striking. For the first quarter of a century 
 no name of outstanding merit can be mentioned. Not 
 till Hume published his " Treatise on Human Nature " 
 in 1739, which fell stillborn from the press, was there 
 any sign that Scotland had not lost the capacity of pro- 
 ducing men of original genius. With the middle of 
 the century the change begins to be apparent. The 
 forces initiated by the Revolution Settlement have 
 begun to produce their natural effect, and Scotland, 
 emerging from her temporary obscuration, is in the 
 van of the nations. Agricultural improvements are 
 transforming the whole face of the country and giving 
 Scotland a pre-eminence in scientific agriculture she 
 has not yet lost. Manufactures and commerce begin 
 to flourish and wealth is increasing. The condition of 
 the people steadily advances, though there is no com- 
 pulsory Poor Law. In every department of thought 
 and activity Scotsmen are gradually taking the lead. 
 The brothers Hunter are revolutionising medicine. 
 
NOTES 319 
 
 James Watt is creating the modern world by apply- 
 ing steam as a motive force. Thomas Reid, following 
 upon Hume, is laying the foundation of modern philo- 
 sophy. Adam Smith is discovering the principles that 
 determine the wealth of nations and marking an epoch 
 in human development. On Principal Robertson falls 
 the mantle of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Livy and 
 Tacitus, Robert Burns produces those flawless gems 
 of lyric poetry that place him in the front rank of the 
 world's singers. Such a wonderful intellectual out- 
 burst could only spring from a nation that was intel- 
 lectually intensely alive. And it must not be forgotten 
 that during all this period the dominant influence in 
 Scotland was ecclesiastical. According to Buckle, Scot- 
 land was, next to Spain, the most priest-ridden country 
 in Europe, Education from top to bottom was in the 
 hands of the Church, and the consequence was that 
 every peasant was an educated man, capable of dis- 
 cussing the profoundest problems of philosophy and 
 religion. The Church took care of the poor, aided in 
 the cities by the pious benefactions of wealthy donors, 
 and fulfilled the task so judiciously that, while there 
 may have been much poverty, there was no pauperism. 
 Dr. Chalmers has in these latter days received the 
 recognition that was his due as a sociologist, but it 
 must be remembered that he owed his position simply 
 to the fact that he held fast by the old Scottish tradition 
 and struggled for the old ideal of Churchmanship, which 
 was fast disappearing in the clash of modern forces, 
 whose meaning and tendency were in his day but im- 
 perfectly understood. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Absolute in ethics, 182 
 
 Agnostic position, 39 
 
 Anacreon, 180 
 
 Analysis of religious conscious- 
 ness necessary, 76 
 
 Architecture and religion, 167 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 37, 178 
 
 " Art for art's sake " criticised, 
 158; the shrine of religion, 
 166 
 
 Ascendency of the present, 41 
 
 Ascetic life logical, 157 
 
 Athanasius, St., 88 
 
 Augustine, St., 44, 207 
 
 Authority, essential to religion, 
 64; in religion and science 
 similar, 87 ; of ConciMar de- 
 cisions, 121 
 
 "Back to Christ" criticised, 
 
 81 
 Beethoven, 158 
 Bibliolatry, 62 
 
 Campbell, B. J., 269 
 Catholicity, 56, 57 
 
 Prohlem of TTieology 22 
 
 Christian ethics, its absolute 
 ness, 203; its key-note per- 
 sonaHty, 211 
 
 Christian origins, 5; first em- 
 pirical, then doctrinal, 108 
 
 Christian perfection, 203 
 
 Church, as repository of Chris- 
 tian experience, 55 ; of Rome 
 not Catholic, 57 ; notes of, as 
 a Divine Institution, 134 ; In- 
 visible, 135; outward form 
 determined by its function, 
 139 ; function, 146 ; an or- 
 ganic growth, 147 ; the truths 
 to which it witnesses, 155; 
 in what sense a conservative 
 institution, 160 ; present con- 
 dition of, 229; relation to 
 artisan class, 248; to sub- 
 merged, 249 ; place in history, 
 226; union, 225; relation to 
 politics, 267 ; to sociaHsm, 
 270 ; to education, 279 ; to 
 the poor, 291; theory of in 
 Westminster Confession, 313 ; 
 mediasval, 315 : in Scotland, 
 317 
 
 321 
 
322 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Cosmological argument, 22 
 
 Commtmion, early Christian, 112 
 
 Confucius, 83 
 
 Conscience, God alone Lord of, 
 62 
 
 Councils, (Ecumenical, their 
 meaning, 118 
 
 Creed, Christian, essentials of, 
 102 ; how reached and veri- 
 fied, 104 
 
 Creeds, their origin, 222 ; neces- 
 sity for, 223 
 
 Darwin, 158 
 Deism, ethics of, 196 
 Divisions in Church historically 
 justified, 144, 237 
 
 Eliot, George, 165 
 
 Ethics, definition of, 179 ; 
 theory and practice, their re- 
 lation, 181 ; Christian, 201 
 
 Evil, problem of, 34 
 
 Experience, spiritual, basis of 
 rehgious doctrine, 73 ; value 
 of non-Christian, 83, 311 
 
 Fatherhood of God, meta- 
 physical implications of, 99 
 
 Feudalism, a socialistic system, 
 243 
 
 Fides implicita, explicita, 128 
 
 Flint, Professor, 306 
 
 Francis, St. of Assisi, 32 
 
 Franciscans, 317 
 
 God, a postulate of experience, 
 16; as First Cause, 22; as 
 
 Designer, 22 ; as Providence, 
 27; as Trinity, 102; know- 
 ledge of, intuitive, 306 
 
 Haeckel, 158 
 Hamack, 309 
 
 History, Church in, 146, 315, 
 317 
 
 Hume, 72 
 
 Ideal and Beal, their relations, 
 137 
 
 Immortality, 36, 45 
 
 Incarnate , the Church the 
 Christ, 139 
 
 Incarnation, 102 
 
 Index Expurgatorius, 57 
 
 Infallible Church, 55 
 
 Issue at stake in doctrinal 
 definitions, 119 
 
 Inspiration, mechanical theory 
 of, 59 
 
 Intolerance, not peculiarly ec- 
 clesiastical, 171 
 
 Intuition, meaning of, 19, 306 
 
 James, Professor, 70, 312 
 Jesus Christ, the norm of reli- 
 gious truth, 80; His know- 
 ledge of God, 97 ; His im- 
 naediate influence, 110 
 
 KiDD, Benjamin, 41 
 
 Life, a unity, 178 
 
 Literature , Christian idea in , 
 
 168 
 Logos, in the Church, 139 
 
INDEX 
 
 323 
 
 Loisy, 81, 309 
 
 Lucian's " Peregriuus," 114 
 
 Macbeth, tragic element in, 164 
 Man's place in the universe, 151 
 Metaphysics, object of, 6 
 Mohammed, 83 
 Multiplicity of Christian beliefs, 
 
 144 
 Mystical philosophy, 8 
 
 Naturalism, ethics of, 184 
 Newman Smyth, 179, 314 
 Newton, 86, 88 
 Nicene Creed, 104, 261 
 Notes of the Church, 179, 314 
 
 Omar Khayyam, 180 
 
 Paganism, revival of, 41 
 Pantheism, ethics of, 189 
 Perfection, aim of Christian 
 
 ethics, 203 
 Persistence of Christian doc- 
 trine, 125 
 Person of Christ, its definition 
 
 in the Early Church, 118 
 Philosophy of ethics, essential, 
 
 182 
 *' PhUosophy of Loyalty," 95 
 Present the, dominance of, in 
 modern thought, 37 ; in Greek 
 Paganism, 41 
 
 Eeality, criterion of, 78 ; 
 
 spiritual not material, 93 
 Beformation, 223 ; its creeds 
 
 sectional, 224 
 
 Relativity of human knowledge, 
 124 
 
 Religion defined, 179 ; its con- 
 tent not merely symbolic, 97 
 
 Religious sense, 70 
 
 Revelation, always personal, 51 ; 
 to the race, 52 
 
 Rights of the individual experi- 
 ence, 85 
 
 Ritschl, value-judgments, 64 
 
 Rogers, Thorold, 315 
 
 Royce, 95, 104 
 
 Sabatier, 6 
 
 Sakya-muni, 83 
 
 Science and religion, 168 
 
 Scripture, Holy, Protestant view 
 of, 58 ; Westminster Confes- 
 sion on, 60 
 
 Seat of authority in reHgion, 
 122 
 
 " Semper, ubique, ab omnibus," 
 122, 123, 126, 134 
 
 Sermon on the Mount, meta- 
 physical, 201 
 
 Spirit, religion of the, 61 
 
 Spiritual experience, value of, 
 83, 311 
 
 Telbologigal argument criti- 
 cised, 23 
 
 Theistic proofs, their value, 17 ; 
 cumidative, 306 
 
 Theodicies, 27ff 
 
 Theologian, an economic factor, 
 36 ; his qualifications, 76 
 
 Theology defined, 179 ; com- 
 parative, 83 
 
324 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Trinitarian dogma involved in 
 Christian ethical theory, 207 
 
 Truth, an ethical concept, 104, 
 109, 128 
 
 Unitarianism, 155 
 Unity of the Church, 138 
 
 Validity of spiritual experience 
 
 admitted, 93 
 Vatican, Church of, 136 
 Vicar of Christ, 134 
 
 Wealth, irresponsible, 243 
 
 UNWIN BBOTHEBS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PEESS, WOKING AND LONDON. 
 

 
 
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